Hrmm, I see they include the 6800GS and the 6600GT. Where does the 6800GT fit on those AnandTech benchmarks (that is, which card would it be most comparable to)?
OK, let's even assume for a second that this was true. What sort of targeted advertising would you even do with this. Presumably the kinds of things you might be able to easily tell would be that you're in a restaurant/cafe, in an office, in school, at a sporting event, etc.? Even if you come up with something smart enough to tell what sort of location you're at, what sort of useful targeted advertising would an advertiser even want to target to you?
Shouldn't there have been some mention that this story was submitted by bokelley@rightmedia.com? It makes some of their digs at the competition, as well as the attempt to frame RMX Direct as the "Linux" in this "fight", seem like apretty shameless attempt at free advertising and shameless pandering to the Slashdot crowd.
I think your problem is that you bought an eMac, which is notorious as one of Apple's worst products in terms of quality. I don't think one could judge the quality of Apple's product line as a whole based on the eMac.
Either way though, I do not think you'll be buying a Mac anytime soon then, since every one of your demands is something that just isn't going to be happening any time soon (i.e. OS X for generic Intel hardware, 3-5 year warranty standard on all devices and hardware and 1 major free OS upgrade). When you set up an impossible standard (that is, a standard that no PC companies could live up to), you have set yourself up for something where you could never be satisfied.
Not to ruin a good joke, but just for future reference when you're using this kind of joke, "Puma" has already been used (it was the codename for Mac OS X 10.1) - it's just that Apple didn't really promote the "cat" codenames as official product names until 10.2 with Jaguar.
To be fair, from what I've heard at least, the game does sort of let you choose what kind of person to be............ either protecting the weaker kids by taking on the bullies, or choosing to be a bully yourself. There was a story in USA Today about this that seemed to hint at some of the mechanics of the game (i.e. if you beat up some nerds, you'll be seen positively by the bullies, but the nerds will gang up on you, and will use their nerd science on you).
So it sounds like one could play this game as a bullying jerk, but the game will apparently make you suffer the consequences if you do.
Exactly, this is a point I think a lot of people miss.
For example, pretty much everyone "knows" the Apple got a lot of GUI ideas from Xerox. What is probably less understood is how much the original Apple engineers did (I am including people who they hired from Xerox) to improve on the basic ideas they saw. There are a lot of things we take for granted, which the Apple people had to come up with (even basic things like a reliable way to have working overlapping windows, which Xerox didn't really have working).
That's my only problem with the "Oh, but Apple ripped off the GUI from Xerox" defense of Microsoft. There is a significant difference between how Apple and Microsoft approached things. When the Apple guys went to see the stuff at Xerox, it inspired them and they took what they saw and then used it as the basis for a lot of original ideas and enhancements to what had come before. On the other, Bill Gates' big obsession with the Windows guys during its initial development was just to make Windows "work like the Mac". That is, Gates didn't seem to really be pushing his guys to come up with new GUI ideas, etc. or push things forward. He wanted to just replicate the Mac.
That really strikes me as the fundamental difference between Xerox and Apple and Microsoft. Xerox PARC was doing some amazing stuff, but Xerox didn't seem to know what to do with it or have much interest in really bringing it to the masses. Apple was inspired by the Xerox PARC work (Smalltalk in particular), and took it and used it as the foundation to develop a really mainstream GUI concept for the masses. But Microsoft was focused more just on crushing the competition and coming up with a decent enough replica of the existing GUIs.
So, that's my problem with using "But Apple stole it from Xerox" as a defense. It basically makes it sound like there was this single monolithic "GUI" concept that was developed at Xerox, stolen and implemented exactly by Apple, and in turn stolen and implemented by Microsoft. And this just isn't true.
People don't bash Steve Jobs and Apple after failures? Are you joking? There are tons of Apple-haters out there (just like there are tons of MS haters) and they jump on every little chance they get.
As the original poster said though, Apple has genuinely had less of these colossal failures, and when they do, they often are either minor (i.e. some glitch with a particular app or something) or they have backups ready to go so there isn't that terrible awkward time period where nothing is working and the person presenting doesn't have any plan for what to do.
I might be missing something, but the submitter seems to be the one who inserted the idea that this was a list of the top 25 most INNOVATIVE products. The actual list seems to be based on how influential they are. Based on that, it makes more sense (although I think that I might argue that even on a list of influence, the Macintosh probably should be a fair bit higher than it is, and you might even argue then that Smalltalk and the Xerox Alto should be on there if you want to get into what products were the most influential on where computing is today).
Ahh, didn't know that about some former BeOS people coming back to Apple anyway and working on OS X. That's cool to know.
Seems like BeOS really just petered out and died......... didn't Palm acquire it for around $10 million in the end? I get the feeling like nothing else may ever be done with it (I think I read that Palm had planned to use BeOS technology in a future Palm OS, but I'm not sure if that would still happen now with the Access Linux Platform stuff).
Actually, looking through the Mac OS X Internals PDF, there's a whole section there about Apple's quest for a new OS........ this goes into a lot of detail about all the options Apple considered. This is actually some great reading if you're curious about all of this.
It's not so much that Apple "decided" to stick with the classic Mac OS for so long despite Win95/98 as much as that they were just in a total mess in terms of their next gen OS stuff. Apple spent a lot of the 90's trying to figure out a new Mac OS, and a lot of the future was supposed to be in the original projects codenamed Copland and Gershwin (the original Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9...... what eventually came out as Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 had little to do with this). Copland was originally supposed to be a totally modern OS, and Gershwin would apparently have had even more radically new elements, a lot borrowed from the Taligent collaboration with IBM on an OS codenamed "Pink". But none of this ever panned out, and all Apple could do was release the commercial Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 OS's as stopgaps.
Apple had considered buying BeOS once it became clear that the internal Copland project wasn't working out, and they ultimately ended up buying NeXT. For all intents and purposes, Apple became NeXT, and Mac OS X can be seen in many ways as the ultimate development of NextStep, rather than the classic Mac OS.
I don't get it, do you not like Macs, or do you not like the Core Duo (and Core 2 Duo) processors? Also, how overpriced do you really feel the Intel Macs are? At least from what I've seen, the pricing difference between the MB and MBP and comparably eqipped PC laptops aren't really so far off.
Fair enough. Personally I haven't had a problem with the sound quality of CD's I've made by burning iTMS purchases (for that matter, I haven't had problems with other CD's I've made from my own MP3 and AAC encoded music). But I might just not be very sensitive to it. That at least explains why you needed to buy it all again.
I'm confused, I can understand you making the decision to buy CD's from now on - but why did you buy CDs that you had already purchased through iTMS? Wouldn't it have been easier to burn CD's (which iTunes does let you do) of those purchased tracks, and thus had a physical CD that would be like what you bought again?
This is getting off-topic, but since you brought this up, I have to ask the question. Does anyone know for sure what Alanis had in mind when she wrote that song (I have to assume this has come up in interviews or something at some point)? Because I have always seen two possibilities. One is that she genuinely thought everything in the song was an example of irony, which makes her come across as kind of stupid. However, if she specifically wrote a song called Ironic and intentionally used a bunch of examples that weren't actually irony, that would make her a genius, I think. Does anyone know for sure?
Yes, it does. I have different mail accounts in different places (one at work, one through.mac, one through a hosting plan I have, etc.) and they all have gigs of storage for mail, so it hasn't been an issue.
Why do so many people continue to believe that Apple doesn't make any computers cheaper than $2000, even though that hasn't really been true for a very long time (hell, even in the bad days in the 90's they still made Macs that were in the $1000 price range or cheaper).
I see. I don't know, I keep all of my mail on my server and sync with IMAP. Whatever format Apple keeps it in Mail.app doesn't really matter to me (clearly it matters to this Mark guy though). If it did though, I'm not sure how it would be taken hostage (unless I guess if I used it for local mail storage or something). Anyway though, more power to him if he wants to switch his whole OS because of changes in an application bundles with it (as opposed to switching to using Thunderbird or whatever). I'm just saying I probably wouldn't change OS's based on changes in bundles apps, but that's just me.
Yeah, and I have to say, I don't really get that. I like and use OS X, but don't really care for iPhoto or iCal, and don't use them. I'm not sure why I would be inclined to switch from OS X just because of how iPhoto or iCal operate. Frankly, even if something happened with iTunes (an app I do use) that bugged me, I'd probably just find an alternative mp3 player/library manager, rather than switch platforms.
It seems like a lot of people who have pirated Windows XP just go ahead and use Windows XP Corporate (which doesn't require activation or a license key). How does MS detect a legit copy of XP Corporate vs. someone who is using a pirated copy of it?
Slashdot Mirror
So does that mean that the work of Dr. Seuss isn't art?
Hrmm, I see they include the 6800GS and the 6600GT. Where does the 6800GT fit on those AnandTech benchmarks (that is, which card would it be most comparable to)?
OK, let's even assume for a second that this was true. What sort of targeted advertising would you even do with this. Presumably the kinds of things you might be able to easily tell would be that you're in a restaurant/cafe, in an office, in school, at a sporting event, etc.? Even if you come up with something smart enough to tell what sort of location you're at, what sort of useful targeted advertising would an advertiser even want to target to you?
Shouldn't there have been some mention that this story was submitted by bokelley@rightmedia.com? It makes some of their digs at the competition, as well as the attempt to frame RMX Direct as the "Linux" in this "fight", seem like apretty shameless attempt at free advertising and shameless pandering to the Slashdot crowd.
As a Corolla owner, I don't appreciate the comparison between my car and a Dell...:)
Either way though, I do not think you'll be buying a Mac anytime soon then, since every one of your demands is something that just isn't going to be happening any time soon (i.e. OS X for generic Intel hardware, 3-5 year warranty standard on all devices and hardware and 1 major free OS upgrade). When you set up an impossible standard (that is, a standard that no PC companies could live up to), you have set yourself up for something where you could never be satisfied.
Not to ruin a good joke, but just for future reference when you're using this kind of joke, "Puma" has already been used (it was the codename for Mac OS X 10.1) - it's just that Apple didn't really promote the "cat" codenames as official product names until 10.2 with Jaguar.
So it sounds like one could play this game as a bullying jerk, but the game will apparently make you suffer the consequences if you do.
For example, pretty much everyone "knows" the Apple got a lot of GUI ideas from Xerox. What is probably less understood is how much the original Apple engineers did (I am including people who they hired from Xerox) to improve on the basic ideas they saw. There are a lot of things we take for granted, which the Apple people had to come up with (even basic things like a reliable way to have working overlapping windows, which Xerox didn't really have working).
That's my only problem with the "Oh, but Apple ripped off the GUI from Xerox" defense of Microsoft. There is a significant difference between how Apple and Microsoft approached things. When the Apple guys went to see the stuff at Xerox, it inspired them and they took what they saw and then used it as the basis for a lot of original ideas and enhancements to what had come before. On the other, Bill Gates' big obsession with the Windows guys during its initial development was just to make Windows "work like the Mac". That is, Gates didn't seem to really be pushing his guys to come up with new GUI ideas, etc. or push things forward. He wanted to just replicate the Mac.
That really strikes me as the fundamental difference between Xerox and Apple and Microsoft. Xerox PARC was doing some amazing stuff, but Xerox didn't seem to know what to do with it or have much interest in really bringing it to the masses. Apple was inspired by the Xerox PARC work (Smalltalk in particular), and took it and used it as the foundation to develop a really mainstream GUI concept for the masses. But Microsoft was focused more just on crushing the competition and coming up with a decent enough replica of the existing GUIs.
So, that's my problem with using "But Apple stole it from Xerox" as a defense. It basically makes it sound like there was this single monolithic "GUI" concept that was developed at Xerox, stolen and implemented exactly by Apple, and in turn stolen and implemented by Microsoft. And this just isn't true.
"Things that isn't working"? Sounds like you should add the grammar checker to your list.
Ambrosia Software and Freeverse have both been doing "Mac stuff" for years and are still going strong.
People don't bash Steve Jobs and Apple after failures? Are you joking? There are tons of Apple-haters out there (just like there are tons of MS haters) and they jump on every little chance they get. As the original poster said though, Apple has genuinely had less of these colossal failures, and when they do, they often are either minor (i.e. some glitch with a particular app or something) or they have backups ready to go so there isn't that terrible awkward time period where nothing is working and the person presenting doesn't have any plan for what to do.
I might be missing something, but the submitter seems to be the one who inserted the idea that this was a list of the top 25 most INNOVATIVE products. The actual list seems to be based on how influential they are. Based on that, it makes more sense (although I think that I might argue that even on a list of influence, the Macintosh probably should be a fair bit higher than it is, and you might even argue then that Smalltalk and the Xerox Alto should be on there if you want to get into what products were the most influential on where computing is today).
Ahh, didn't know that about some former BeOS people coming back to Apple anyway and working on OS X. That's cool to know. Seems like BeOS really just petered out and died......... didn't Palm acquire it for around $10 million in the end? I get the feeling like nothing else may ever be done with it (I think I read that Palm had planned to use BeOS technology in a future Palm OS, but I'm not sure if that would still happen now with the Access Linux Platform stuff).
Actually, looking through the Mac OS X Internals PDF, there's a whole section there about Apple's quest for a new OS........ this goes into a lot of detail about all the options Apple considered. This is actually some great reading if you're curious about all of this.
It's not so much that Apple "decided" to stick with the classic Mac OS for so long despite Win95/98 as much as that they were just in a total mess in terms of their next gen OS stuff. Apple spent a lot of the 90's trying to figure out a new Mac OS, and a lot of the future was supposed to be in the original projects codenamed Copland and Gershwin (the original Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9...... what eventually came out as Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 had little to do with this). Copland was originally supposed to be a totally modern OS, and Gershwin would apparently have had even more radically new elements, a lot borrowed from the Taligent collaboration with IBM on an OS codenamed "Pink". But none of this ever panned out, and all Apple could do was release the commercial Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 OS's as stopgaps. Apple had considered buying BeOS once it became clear that the internal Copland project wasn't working out, and they ultimately ended up buying NeXT. For all intents and purposes, Apple became NeXT, and Mac OS X can be seen in many ways as the ultimate development of NextStep, rather than the classic Mac OS.
I don't get it, do you not like Macs, or do you not like the Core Duo (and Core 2 Duo) processors? Also, how overpriced do you really feel the Intel Macs are? At least from what I've seen, the pricing difference between the MB and MBP and comparably eqipped PC laptops aren't really so far off.
Fair enough. Personally I haven't had a problem with the sound quality of CD's I've made by burning iTMS purchases (for that matter, I haven't had problems with other CD's I've made from my own MP3 and AAC encoded music). But I might just not be very sensitive to it. That at least explains why you needed to buy it all again.
I'm confused, I can understand you making the decision to buy CD's from now on - but why did you buy CDs that you had already purchased through iTMS? Wouldn't it have been easier to burn CD's (which iTunes does let you do) of those purchased tracks, and thus had a physical CD that would be like what you bought again?
This is getting off-topic, but since you brought this up, I have to ask the question. Does anyone know for sure what Alanis had in mind when she wrote that song (I have to assume this has come up in interviews or something at some point)? Because I have always seen two possibilities. One is that she genuinely thought everything in the song was an example of irony, which makes her come across as kind of stupid. However, if she specifically wrote a song called Ironic and intentionally used a bunch of examples that weren't actually irony, that would make her a genius, I think. Does anyone know for sure?
Yes, it does. I have different mail accounts in different places (one at work, one through .mac, one through a hosting plan I have, etc.) and they all have gigs of storage for mail, so it hasn't been an issue.
Why do so many people continue to believe that Apple doesn't make any computers cheaper than $2000, even though that hasn't really been true for a very long time (hell, even in the bad days in the 90's they still made Macs that were in the $1000 price range or cheaper).
I see. I don't know, I keep all of my mail on my server and sync with IMAP. Whatever format Apple keeps it in Mail.app doesn't really matter to me (clearly it matters to this Mark guy though). If it did though, I'm not sure how it would be taken hostage (unless I guess if I used it for local mail storage or something). Anyway though, more power to him if he wants to switch his whole OS because of changes in an application bundles with it (as opposed to switching to using Thunderbird or whatever). I'm just saying I probably wouldn't change OS's based on changes in bundles apps, but that's just me.
Yeah, and I have to say, I don't really get that. I like and use OS X, but don't really care for iPhoto or iCal, and don't use them. I'm not sure why I would be inclined to switch from OS X just because of how iPhoto or iCal operate. Frankly, even if something happened with iTunes (an app I do use) that bugged me, I'd probably just find an alternative mp3 player/library manager, rather than switch platforms.
It seems like a lot of people who have pirated Windows XP just go ahead and use Windows XP Corporate (which doesn't require activation or a license key). How does MS detect a legit copy of XP Corporate vs. someone who is using a pirated copy of it?