Try reading Microsoft's documentation for OOXML. It's 6,000 pages long. Seriously. This is a great Microsoft PR stunt - yes, you've gotten your data in to XML format, but the XML format is so complicated that only the Microsoft programmers who wrote it can actually understand it. Part of the point about XML is interoperability. There's no way that sane people are going to read a 6,000 page Microsoft specification and write an XSLT to convert Microsoft OOXML in to a simpler and saner format. In short, this will not mean any competition with Microsoft. They buy PR in the geek community by saying "Office is going XML! Open data! Whee!" and making an XML format that's so complicated that nobody would ever use it. That's a pretty smart move. And it's a pretty dumb move on the part of ECMA. Congratulations on just giving your dignity away by signing off on a specification that's about nineteen times longer than War and Peace...
No document in living history is ever going to be so complicated that it needs to be in a format that's specification is 6,000 pages long. Part of the point about XML was that we should be setting up simple, domain-specific markup languages and extending already existing markup languages. OOXML is bad because it's needlessly complicated and obscure. Having visited the OOXML website, I'm missing a lot of things I expect. First, I'm missing schema. If these guys are serious about XML, where are the XSD/RNG schema? Secondly, where are the cross-platform translators - ie. XSLs? I'm missing some kind of high-level summary of how I'm supposed to parse the XML. If the only way of doing anything with OOXML is a closed, black-box Microsoft converter, then we still haven't really got anywhere.
Well, I'm breaking the cycle. All my documents are going to be either ASCII or a standard, non-obscure XML format like XHTML. Or something home-brewed and simple that can be easily transformed using XSL and XSL-FO. Screw Microsoft's phony attempt at interoperability. The Internet is interoperable by design. (X)HTML is interoperable by design. Let's prove to them that we mean interoperability by sticking to simple, sensible, semantically-based and scalable principles.
Won't happen. RSS is great if you read more than four websites a day. It helps me efficiently surf through 280 odd blogs in the space of 45 minutes and just get the juicy bits (especially now that aggregators like BlogBridge - kick-ass cross-platform Java aggregator, check it out! - are tracking and reporting attention data). My RSS aggregator even works when I'm on the train and so in. It's great. But it won't appeal to the MySpace demographic because it's not "cool". Flashy graphics, music and MTV videos don't start playing when you read through your RSS reader. You just see the blog entries - the raw content. That means no distraction from the lack of content.
"I'm so depressed I want to cut myself" as an entry in an RSS reader is dull. "I'm so depressed I want to cut myself", when surrounded by pictures and comments by friends and "pimped out" profile pages is perfectly natural.
Yes, all us geeks are going to say that MySpace is GeoCities 2.0 and that we'd prefer to use an RSS aggregator. But MySpace isn't aimed at *us*. Our definition of cool is "technology that makes our lives easier" - it's based in efficiency and intelligent use of resources. That's not a definition of cool that most people agree with, and that's why MySpace isn't aimed at us, it's aimed at them. RSS is to MySpace as a pinstripe suit is to comfortable jeans. There is a cultural divide between efficient and the far more nebulous 'cool'.
We check our sites with validators - they may not always validate (I'm working on it), but we acknowledge that having valid HTML is something important to aim for when possible. The MySpace crowd would look at you like you were crazy if you pointed out that the average MySpace profile has 200-400 validation errors according to the W3C Validator. "I don't care, so long as I can see my friend's latest photos" would be the response.
How quickly this changes depends solely on whether you are willing to help these users transfer to something more standards-compliant. For instance, if you get your friends to use Jabber instead of AIM/MSN, or you get them to use something like Flickr (which has open APIs and RSS) instead of MySpace Pictures or put their videos on blip.tv (again, RSS and a lot of other niceties).
That's where things like SIOC - Semantically Interlinked Online Communities - will hopefully fit in to the picture, since it will be a way of linking together data across a whole bunch of different services including forums, blogs, mailing lists etc. OpenID is good in that regard too since it provides a neat replacement for username/passwords.
USENET is great (proper threading rules), but the spam problem isn't going away.
1. Privatise an industry in such a way that it cannot work. 2. Watch it not work. 3. Conclude that privatisation is the problem.
As Hayek put it, capitalism is the untried alternative.
I use the commuter rail services in the south-east and they *have* improved under privatisation. They've done a lot of very silly things with them, but passenger numbers are up and delays are down. A family member spent eight hours in a train sitting 100 yards from the station a few months ago. It is far from a free market though. In fact, I'd almost say it's a "worst of both" system. I cannot complain to the train company, because they'll blame the government. I cannot complain to the government because they'll say it's the train companies fault.
Similarly, British Telecom was privatised back in the 80s as one massive business. And the UK is still lagging behind the rest of Europe in broadband speeds. It's still dramatically better than it was when you would have to wait months in order to get phone lines installed.
I'm still registered as an NHS dentistry patient. I had to have a crown on a wisdom tooth a while back. The NHS charge about £180 for tooth crowning. My dentist managed to undercut the NHS and provide me with treatment for £116. Why? Because the way that my tooth was damaged didn't actually require a crown - one could use a particular type of filling to do the same job. But that treatment wasn't available on the NHS - it doesn't fit the boxes that are laid out in the NHS paperwork. We both win - he doesn't have to pay the NHS fee and then wait to get his payment back from the Department of Health, his secretary doesn't have to fill out so much paperwork, I undergo a less intrusive process, spend less money, spend less time in the dentist's chair and my teeth look nicer (the treatment used natural white rather than metallic inserts). Combined with the fact that I booked an appointment on Tuesday, had a consultation on Wednesday, had the treatment on Thursday and had recovered on Friday (the NHS treatment would have required about a week for them to take an imprint and have the lab process it), I'd say that private health treatment has served me pretty well, to be honest.
And I've sure learned more from my 'private' education (buying and reading books, hacking, surfing the 'net etc.) than I have from my 'public' education. If it weren't for the fact that the US Department of State tends to give Green Cards out to people with Masters degrees more often, I probably wouldn't even bother getting mine - I'd learn just as much buying the books and teaching myself.
If my CD or DVD looks like it's on it's last legs, I can put it in to my computer, make an ISO and burn a fresh one.
If my book looks like it's on it's last legs, I need to OCR it, manually read through the OCR copy to check for mistakes and formatting issues, reformat the data, and then hit print.
Computers are a technology. They have their advantages and they have their disadvantages (storing large volumes of formatted text is something computers do very well - financial pressures aside, I'd rather have my greatest creations traded over BitTorrent, posted on blogs and stored in the Internet Archive than I would have them stored in libraries - instant, redundant, off-site backups are a *lot* cheaper than professional librarians).
Technology has made more social opportunities possible - think meetup.com, think SMS and e-mail as a method for rapid group organisation. It may feel nicer to send out formal invitation on beautiful stationery. A few months ago, a friend of mine put together a Geek Dinner event attended by around 100 people in the space of about three days. Without computers and the Internet, that sort of social organisation would not have been possible.
For a certain sub-set of the "Google generation" (or whatever you want to call them), the Internet has actually been a return to literacy and written communication. Sure, most blogs ain't Shakespeare (and I have no illusions that mine is Shakespeare), but if you compare the twenty year old today with their social equivalent twenty years ago, today's young'un is doing a hell of a lot more written communication. I can tell you from personal experience that what taught me how to write properly wasn't my school's English department, it was a desire to write TV reviews for a friend's online magazine. That is what prompted me to buy a writing manual and sharpen up my skills. That wouldn't have happened twenty years ago - I would have been smoking weed and watching MTV. Now, my generation is smoking weed (or using some fancy 'designer drug'), watching MTV videos on YouTube and engaging in philosophical debate online. There is a key difference there, and it's thanks to technology.
As for books, well I'll let Cory Doctorow have the last word:
It's true that you can't take an e-book into the tub, and it doesn't smell nice, and all the rest of it, but on the other hand, you can carry around 40,000 of them on a drive the size of credit card. As someone who owns around 20,000 books and who has put them in boxes and moved them more than once, I can tell you that this is a serious advantage. Right? The other thing is that data is easy to back up. I can back up off site, over night, electronically, to a server in Australia that will survive even if the hemisphere goes, whereas backing up books - I mean, books are printed on substrate that is so fragile that it burns when it comes into contact with oxygen. We actually use that substrate to wipe our asses with. This is not robust, archival material. This is the very definition of ephemeral, that literature is a book written on toilet paper.
There's a reason we don't do that in Britain. I go to a college of the University of London. That would be "UL". There's no differentiation between London, Loughborough, Leeds, Leicester, Lincoln, Liverpool, Lancaster, Lampeter and Luton if you reduce them all down to "L". And this is the UK - we can't have more than about 200 universities. The USA has thousands and yet you expect to be able to restrict them all to two and three letter acronyms. Somebody needs to reread the bit in their language reference about how to name variables.
Apparently so. I've been meaning to put together a Google Maps mashup. My plan of action was to Just Google It. It's hardly rocket science, despite all the AJAX buzzword stuff.
MySpace has two important social functions - firstly, you can keep up with your friends in a meaningless and trivial manner. Secondly, it's got lots of amateur T&A.
Beyond that, though, it's a naff message board and blog service for emos combined with lots of obnoxious "punch the monkey" ads. Avoid.
The nice thing about the MySpace ecosystem is that, since they changed their policy the other day, it will cease to exist very soon.
What? How many PC users do you see who fall over when their machine gets a virus or just stop mid-flow when their computer crashes. They are anthropomorphising the computers (they seem to be pretty good at that...). If my PC crashes, I'd shout and swear at it. The guy in the ad just stops. How can you interpret that to be a user? It's a representation of a computer in human form.
Wha-? You've got the same software choice as on Windows which is basically: (a) buy MS Office, (b) steal MS Office, (c) use OOo, (d) use other FOSS bits and pieces. Only you have a few other choices too: (e) buy iWork and (f) steal iWork. Which you do is down to your budget, conscience, technical differences and religious affiliation (choose your God: Gates, Jobs or Stallman). Oh, I forgot (g) use Writely, NumSum and the inevitable Google Office.
Personally, I only write academic documents and blogs, so I either use an outliner or I write LaTeX documents in LyX.
The Mac freeware/shareware/OSS community is flourishing. We've got lots of good software being produced for free (as in beer, as in freedom or as in both) in all of the environments: CLI, native Cocoa and Carbon GUI apps, Universal, Rosetta, Java and X11. Take a look at VersionTracker.com/macosx or macupdate.com. We've got loads of stuff, and lots of it is being developed GPL, freeware or openish licences.
If "the community" is only available to journalists, become one. You're only a BlogSpot account or Wordpress install away from doing so...
That said, my experience with community support has been superb. Linuxquestions.org has a Hardware Compatibility List, a great forum and a pretty useful wiki. Also, some IRC chans give good support - #mandriva on irc.freenode.net was really useful when I was setting up wifi recently.
What about the people who need to use software that is only available for Windows and Mac, and have made the decision against Windows on the basis of bad previous experience... I bet we're in there somewhere, even though we don't step foot in to Starbucks or drink lattes or buy Steve Jobs' faeces on eBay, and have never set foot in Hollywood (and, in some cases, not even the USA*)?
* Subject to change next month due to technical conference or W. invading Europe in a fit of imperialist silliness.
Yes, 4-5% is a small market share when compared with Microsoft's ~90%.
But, as Jobs and the Apple fanboys argue, that's the market share of BMW or Mercedes. It's the market share of IBM or Acer or most of the PC manufacturers. It's stunning considering that Apple are seen as being a lot pricier than their competitors. Apple are a PC manufacturer, and they are doing just fine. Nobody is saying "What about Acer? What's their future?" because Acer's future is clear - make laptops and sell them. Apple's future is pretty damn clear too - make boxes and sell them. Apple have the advantage of an operating system that's (a) not spyware, adware and bug-ridden from the get-go and (b) not delayed until Jan '07 and available in seven different versions like - ahem - Vista.
The iPod has a 78% market share, and the iTunes store has an 87% market share in digital downloads. In other words, Steve Jobs owns the music industry's future.
Go to a tech conference and look around. Tell me how many ThinkPads you see compared to PowerBooks. Apple have got the geek marketshare, they've got the designer marketshare and they've got the abilities to shoot for the home user marketshare if they get out there and hustle. What's Microsoft going to have left? A few cranks like John Dvorak and the uber-leet haxor gamers. And they don't buy computers, they build them by hand and torrent the XP install discs, so nobody except a few RAM suppliers, ATI and Nvidia care about them.
Seriously, when Google looks like it may be unable to pay it's bills, we can start considering this issue.;->
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
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Going To Boot Camp
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Simple: find a friend in college, get them to log on to the Apple Store website through their college network (alternatively: crack in to a college network and SSH tunnel your HTTP through it or sneak in to a college and use someone's computer). Then order a Mac. You will find the price significantly cheaper in the Apple Higher Education Store than the normal store. With the price difference offered by H.E. discount, there was no price difference for me between buying an MBP or another machine. In fact, it was about £100 cheaper than buying the equivalently-specced Acer machine. Without the discount, Apple are £179 more expensive.
Windows is such an abysmal OS that I'd almost be happy to pay a £179 a year tax to never have to see it. That means nowhere. Not on my desktop, not on my laptop, not at college, not at work, not on public displays, not in shops, nowhere. £179 a year to not have to use or see Windows. I'd make that back in gained productivity and reduced stress in one week. Apple are asking not £179 a year but £179 (or thereabouts) whenver you replace your computer. That's a damn bargain.
Not quite, imho. I'm involved with an open source project (just writing little hacks mostly). The maintainer doesn't need to put all the work in that he does. He can find a hacky way of doing what he needs to do what he needs to do just fine. Releasing the software isn't a zero-sum game. He had to polish it up in order to make it releasable and set up mailing lists and all that other junk. There are many possible reasons why he's released it: to let people experiment, to bootstrap a format and to develop a community. All of these require investment of time and resources, just as would be necessary in releasing shareware or commercial software of the same complexity. It just has the advantage that if the maintaner gets bored with it or whatever, one can take the code and push it further.
The point with AppleCare isn't the intelligence of the people at the other end. It's just that when something goes wrong and you need replacement parts, it's far cheaper to have had AppleCare than to pay them some extravagant fee to fix the problem. And sometimes they fuck up and give you free stuff. I've got an MBP - had it since the start of March - and my AppleCare has paid back half it's cost in a replacement battery (and due to their fuck-up, they didn't pick up the old battery which works, but just turns itself off when it gets to 40%). Result? I've essentially 'bought' a crappy battery. If they have to replace one more part or take it in to repair, I'm quids in.
It's a dishonest way of thinking about it, and I didn't buy it simply to get my money back on it, but since they've got rid of anybody with actual knowledge of the product from answering the phone (they now have these folks in India who hop in a chat room when they don't know what's going on and ask someone - I'm waiting for Apple to cut out the middleman and just set up an IRC server), AppleCare is just who you call once you've spent a few hours online working out what the problem is. The people are simply software running on top of that. Which brings us back to the article...
I wish I could tell you what the deal with my ISP is, but they've changed their website and the I.A. stopped archiving it back in March of last year (before I signed up). It's freedom2surf.net (as I said, I'm on an uncapped deal, which they don't offer anymore - I'm movin' if it gets any worse).
My previous ISP advertised an "unlimited service". When a well-seeded torrent is running at 20K on a 2Mb connection due to their shaping, I'd say that's 'limited'. My current ISP is "uncapped".
The "up to 3mb" bit would be based on your distance. So, for instance, if you are in an area of the country where your phone networks don't support x Mb, you get less bandwidth.
Tell me about it. My previous ISP (the reprehensibly evil PlusNet) cost me about £50 in transfer fees because their traffic shaping crapola made my connection unusable. I lasted four days from setup to requesting my MAC code. My current ISP (F2S) is going the same way (esp. since they got bought by Pipex). Are there any DSL providers in the UK that don't suck total arse?
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Try reading Microsoft's documentation for OOXML. It's 6,000 pages long. Seriously. This is a great Microsoft PR stunt - yes, you've gotten your data in to XML format, but the XML format is so complicated that only the Microsoft programmers who wrote it can actually understand it. Part of the point about XML is interoperability. There's no way that sane people are going to read a 6,000 page Microsoft specification and write an XSLT to convert Microsoft OOXML in to a simpler and saner format. In short, this will not mean any competition with Microsoft. They buy PR in the geek community by saying "Office is going XML! Open data! Whee!" and making an XML format that's so complicated that nobody would ever use it. That's a pretty smart move. And it's a pretty dumb move on the part of ECMA. Congratulations on just giving your dignity away by signing off on a specification that's about nineteen times longer than War and Peace...
No document in living history is ever going to be so complicated that it needs to be in a format that's specification is 6,000 pages long. Part of the point about XML was that we should be setting up simple, domain-specific markup languages and extending already existing markup languages. OOXML is bad because it's needlessly complicated and obscure. Having visited the OOXML website, I'm missing a lot of things I expect. First, I'm missing schema. If these guys are serious about XML, where are the XSD/RNG schema? Secondly, where are the cross-platform translators - ie. XSLs? I'm missing some kind of high-level summary of how I'm supposed to parse the XML. If the only way of doing anything with OOXML is a closed, black-box Microsoft converter, then we still haven't really got anywhere.
Well, I'm breaking the cycle. All my documents are going to be either ASCII or a standard, non-obscure XML format like XHTML. Or something home-brewed and simple that can be easily transformed using XSL and XSL-FO. Screw Microsoft's phony attempt at interoperability. The Internet is interoperable by design. (X)HTML is interoperable by design. Let's prove to them that we mean interoperability by sticking to simple, sensible, semantically-based and scalable principles.
Won't happen. RSS is great if you read more than four websites a day. It helps me efficiently surf through 280 odd blogs in the space of 45 minutes and just get the juicy bits (especially now that aggregators like BlogBridge - kick-ass cross-platform Java aggregator, check it out! - are tracking and reporting attention data). My RSS aggregator even works when I'm on the train and so in. It's great. But it won't appeal to the MySpace demographic because it's not "cool". Flashy graphics, music and MTV videos don't start playing when you read through your RSS reader. You just see the blog entries - the raw content. That means no distraction from the lack of content.
"I'm so depressed I want to cut myself" as an entry in an RSS reader is dull. "I'm so depressed I want to cut myself", when surrounded by pictures and comments by friends and "pimped out" profile pages is perfectly natural.
Yes, all us geeks are going to say that MySpace is GeoCities 2.0 and that we'd prefer to use an RSS aggregator. But MySpace isn't aimed at *us*. Our definition of cool is "technology that makes our lives easier" - it's based in efficiency and intelligent use of resources. That's not a definition of cool that most people agree with, and that's why MySpace isn't aimed at us, it's aimed at them. RSS is to MySpace as a pinstripe suit is to comfortable jeans. There is a cultural divide between efficient and the far more nebulous 'cool'.
We check our sites with validators - they may not always validate (I'm working on it), but we acknowledge that having valid HTML is something important to aim for when possible. The MySpace crowd would look at you like you were crazy if you pointed out that the average MySpace profile has 200-400 validation errors according to the W3C Validator. "I don't care, so long as I can see my friend's latest photos" would be the response.
How quickly this changes depends solely on whether you are willing to help these users transfer to something more standards-compliant. For instance, if you get your friends to use Jabber instead of AIM/MSN, or you get them to use something like Flickr (which has open APIs and RSS) instead of MySpace Pictures or put their videos on blip.tv (again, RSS and a lot of other niceties).
"Web forums lack a standard protocol"
That's where things like SIOC - Semantically Interlinked Online Communities - will hopefully fit in to the picture, since it will be a way of linking together data across a whole bunch of different services including forums, blogs, mailing lists etc. OpenID is good in that regard too since it provides a neat replacement for username/passwords.
USENET is great (proper threading rules), but the spam problem isn't going away.
A summary of the NHS privatisation experiments:
1. Privatise an industry in such a way that it cannot work.
2. Watch it not work.
3. Conclude that privatisation is the problem.
As Hayek put it, capitalism is the untried alternative.
I use the commuter rail services in the south-east and they *have* improved under privatisation. They've done a lot of very silly things with them, but passenger numbers are up and delays are down. A family member spent eight hours in a train sitting 100 yards from the station a few months ago. It is far from a free market though. In fact, I'd almost say it's a "worst of both" system. I cannot complain to the train company, because they'll blame the government. I cannot complain to the government because they'll say it's the train companies fault.
Similarly, British Telecom was privatised back in the 80s as one massive business. And the UK is still lagging behind the rest of Europe in broadband speeds. It's still dramatically better than it was when you would have to wait months in order to get phone lines installed.
I'm still registered as an NHS dentistry patient. I had to have a crown on a wisdom tooth a while back. The NHS charge about £180 for tooth crowning. My dentist managed to undercut the NHS and provide me with treatment for £116. Why? Because the way that my tooth was damaged didn't actually require a crown - one could use a particular type of filling to do the same job. But that treatment wasn't available on the NHS - it doesn't fit the boxes that are laid out in the NHS paperwork. We both win - he doesn't have to pay the NHS fee and then wait to get his payment back from the Department of Health, his secretary doesn't have to fill out so much paperwork, I undergo a less intrusive process, spend less money, spend less time in the dentist's chair and my teeth look nicer (the treatment used natural white rather than metallic inserts). Combined with the fact that I booked an appointment on Tuesday, had a consultation on Wednesday, had the treatment on Thursday and had recovered on Friday (the NHS treatment would have required about a week for them to take an imprint and have the lab process it), I'd say that private health treatment has served me pretty well, to be honest.
And I've sure learned more from my 'private' education (buying and reading books, hacking, surfing the 'net etc.) than I have from my 'public' education. If it weren't for the fact that the US Department of State tends to give Green Cards out to people with Masters degrees more often, I probably wouldn't even bother getting mine - I'd learn just as much buying the books and teaching myself.
If my CD or DVD looks like it's on it's last legs, I can put it in to my computer, make an ISO and burn a fresh one.
If my book looks like it's on it's last legs, I need to OCR it, manually read through the OCR copy to check for mistakes and formatting issues, reformat the data, and then hit print.
Computers are a technology. They have their advantages and they have their disadvantages (storing large volumes of formatted text is something computers do very well - financial pressures aside, I'd rather have my greatest creations traded over BitTorrent, posted on blogs and stored in the Internet Archive than I would have them stored in libraries - instant, redundant, off-site backups are a *lot* cheaper than professional librarians).
Technology has made more social opportunities possible - think meetup.com, think SMS and e-mail as a method for rapid group organisation. It may feel nicer to send out formal invitation on beautiful stationery. A few months ago, a friend of mine put together a Geek Dinner event attended by around 100 people in the space of about three days. Without computers and the Internet, that sort of social organisation would not have been possible.
For a certain sub-set of the "Google generation" (or whatever you want to call them), the Internet has actually been a return to literacy and written communication. Sure, most blogs ain't Shakespeare (and I have no illusions that mine is Shakespeare), but if you compare the twenty year old today with their social equivalent twenty years ago, today's young'un is doing a hell of a lot more written communication. I can tell you from personal experience that what taught me how to write properly wasn't my school's English department, it was a desire to write TV reviews for a friend's online magazine. That is what prompted me to buy a writing manual and sharpen up my skills. That wouldn't have happened twenty years ago - I would have been smoking weed and watching MTV. Now, my generation is smoking weed (or using some fancy 'designer drug'), watching MTV videos on YouTube and engaging in philosophical debate online. There is a key difference there, and it's thanks to technology.
As for books, well I'll let Cory Doctorow have the last word:
There's a reason we don't do that in Britain. I go to a college of the University of London. That would be "UL". There's no differentiation between London, Loughborough, Leeds, Leicester, Lincoln, Liverpool, Lancaster, Lampeter and Luton if you reduce them all down to "L". And this is the UK - we can't have more than about 200 universities. The USA has thousands and yet you expect to be able to restrict them all to two and three letter acronyms. Somebody needs to reread the bit in their language reference about how to name variables.
It 'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.'?
So is it actually open, transparent and collaborative, or does it just convey the appropriate sense?
Apparently so. I've been meaning to put together a Google Maps mashup. My plan of action was to Just Google It. It's hardly rocket science, despite all the AJAX buzzword stuff.
Most UK universities I've seen use some kind of webmail often with either IMAP, POP3 or forwarding as options.
My university is part of the 32%. Sucks. It means that I have to keep PortableFirefox on USB stick.
MySpace has two important social functions - firstly, you can keep up with your friends in a meaningless and trivial manner. Secondly, it's got lots of amateur T&A.
Beyond that, though, it's a naff message board and blog service for emos combined with lots of obnoxious "punch the monkey" ads. Avoid.
The nice thing about the MySpace ecosystem is that, since they changed their policy the other day, it will cease to exist very soon.
What? How many PC users do you see who fall over when their machine gets a virus or just stop mid-flow when their computer crashes. They are anthropomorphising the computers (they seem to be pretty good at that...). If my PC crashes, I'd shout and swear at it. The guy in the ad just stops. How can you interpret that to be a user? It's a representation of a computer in human form.
The more people involved in a project, the more letters in collaboration. So Wikipedia is a colllllllllllllllllllllll*10^20aboration.
Wha-? You've got the same software choice as on Windows which is basically: (a) buy MS Office, (b) steal MS Office, (c) use OOo, (d) use other FOSS bits and pieces. Only you have a few other choices too: (e) buy iWork and (f) steal iWork. Which you do is down to your budget, conscience, technical differences and religious affiliation (choose your God: Gates, Jobs or Stallman). Oh, I forgot (g) use Writely, NumSum and the inevitable Google Office.
Personally, I only write academic documents and blogs, so I either use an outliner or I write LaTeX documents in LyX.
The Mac freeware/shareware/OSS community is flourishing. We've got lots of good software being produced for free (as in beer, as in freedom or as in both) in all of the environments: CLI, native Cocoa and Carbon GUI apps, Universal, Rosetta, Java and X11. Take a look at VersionTracker.com/macosx or macupdate.com. We've got loads of stuff, and lots of it is being developed GPL, freeware or openish licences.
If "the community" is only available to journalists, become one. You're only a BlogSpot account or Wordpress install away from doing so...
That said, my experience with community support has been superb. Linuxquestions.org has a Hardware Compatibility List, a great forum and a pretty useful wiki. Also, some IRC chans give good support - #mandriva on irc.freenode.net was really useful when I was setting up wifi recently.
What about the people who need to use software that is only available for Windows and Mac, and have made the decision against Windows on the basis of bad previous experience... I bet we're in there somewhere, even though we don't step foot in to Starbucks or drink lattes or buy Steve Jobs' faeces on eBay, and have never set foot in Hollywood (and, in some cases, not even the USA*)?
* Subject to change next month due to technical conference or W. invading Europe in a fit of imperialist silliness.
Yes, 4-5% is a small market share when compared with Microsoft's ~90%.
But, as Jobs and the Apple fanboys argue, that's the market share of BMW or Mercedes. It's the market share of IBM or Acer or most of the PC manufacturers. It's stunning considering that Apple are seen as being a lot pricier than their competitors. Apple are a PC manufacturer, and they are doing just fine. Nobody is saying "What about Acer? What's their future?" because Acer's future is clear - make laptops and sell them. Apple's future is pretty damn clear too - make boxes and sell them. Apple have the advantage of an operating system that's (a) not spyware, adware and bug-ridden from the get-go and (b) not delayed until Jan '07 and available in seven different versions like - ahem - Vista.
The iPod has a 78% market share, and the iTunes store has an 87% market share in digital downloads. In other words, Steve Jobs owns the music industry's future.
Go to a tech conference and look around. Tell me how many ThinkPads you see compared to PowerBooks. Apple have got the geek marketshare, they've got the designer marketshare and they've got the abilities to shoot for the home user marketshare if they get out there and hustle. What's Microsoft going to have left? A few cranks like John Dvorak and the uber-leet haxor gamers. And they don't buy computers, they build them by hand and torrent the XP install discs, so nobody except a few RAM suppliers, ATI and Nvidia care about them.
Yes, they're called Linux distros. They have a really cool EULA called the GNU General Public Licence. And that's Stallman, not Zero Wing.
Seriously, when Google looks like it may be unable to pay it's bills, we can start considering this issue. ;->
Simple: find a friend in college, get them to log on to the Apple Store website through their college network (alternatively: crack in to a college network and SSH tunnel your HTTP through it or sneak in to a college and use someone's computer). Then order a Mac. You will find the price significantly cheaper in the Apple Higher Education Store than the normal store. With the price difference offered by H.E. discount, there was no price difference for me between buying an MBP or another machine. In fact, it was about £100 cheaper than buying the equivalently-specced Acer machine. Without the discount, Apple are £179 more expensive.
Windows is such an abysmal OS that I'd almost be happy to pay a £179 a year tax to never have to see it. That means nowhere. Not on my desktop, not on my laptop, not at college, not at work, not on public displays, not in shops, nowhere. £179 a year to not have to use or see Windows. I'd make that back in gained productivity and reduced stress in one week. Apple are asking not £179 a year but £179 (or thereabouts) whenver you replace your computer. That's a damn bargain.
Not quite, imho. I'm involved with an open source project (just writing little hacks mostly). The maintainer doesn't need to put all the work in that he does. He can find a hacky way of doing what he needs to do what he needs to do just fine. Releasing the software isn't a zero-sum game. He had to polish it up in order to make it releasable and set up mailing lists and all that other junk. There are many possible reasons why he's released it: to let people experiment, to bootstrap a format and to develop a community. All of these require investment of time and resources, just as would be necessary in releasing shareware or commercial software of the same complexity. It just has the advantage that if the maintaner gets bored with it or whatever, one can take the code and push it further.
The point with AppleCare isn't the intelligence of the people at the other end. It's just that when something goes wrong and you need replacement parts, it's far cheaper to have had AppleCare than to pay them some extravagant fee to fix the problem. And sometimes they fuck up and give you free stuff. I've got an MBP - had it since the start of March - and my AppleCare has paid back half it's cost in a replacement battery (and due to their fuck-up, they didn't pick up the old battery which works, but just turns itself off when it gets to 40%). Result? I've essentially 'bought' a crappy battery. If they have to replace one more part or take it in to repair, I'm quids in.
It's a dishonest way of thinking about it, and I didn't buy it simply to get my money back on it, but since they've got rid of anybody with actual knowledge of the product from answering the phone (they now have these folks in India who hop in a chat room when they don't know what's going on and ask someone - I'm waiting for Apple to cut out the middleman and just set up an IRC server), AppleCare is just who you call once you've spent a few hours online working out what the problem is. The people are simply software running on top of that. Which brings us back to the article...
I wish I could tell you what the deal with my ISP is, but they've changed their website and the I.A. stopped archiving it back in March of last year (before I signed up). It's freedom2surf.net (as I said, I'm on an uncapped deal, which they don't offer anymore - I'm movin' if it gets any worse).
My previous ISP advertised an "unlimited service". When a well-seeded torrent is running at 20K on a 2Mb connection due to their shaping, I'd say that's 'limited'. My current ISP is "uncapped".
The "up to 3mb" bit would be based on your distance. So, for instance, if you are in an area of the country where your phone networks don't support x Mb, you get less bandwidth.
Cool stuff. I'm out in the sticks and they don't do cable here.
Tell me about it. My previous ISP (the reprehensibly evil PlusNet) cost me about £50 in transfer fees because their traffic shaping crapola made my connection unusable. I lasted four days from setup to requesting my MAC code. My current ISP (F2S) is going the same way (esp. since they got bought by Pipex). Are there any DSL providers in the UK that don't suck total arse?