I guess my point is that Apple's does takes things that already exist, makes them ridiculously easy, but then takes the credit for the entire "artform" to begin with. With the influence they pull, people often blindly agree with those statements.
Actually, Apple doesn't do this - people writing about Apple do this. So, your comment should be directed at human nature, and not Apple. A lot of people think that Henry Ford invented the car, too.
Now, while they did develop 1394, they didn't market it until quite a bit later... allowing others time to develop further and put the technology to use first. (in my case, Adobe and Radius for DV on my PC... both of whom used to be major Apple-focused developers, too, oddly). But the Radius DV card, and the simple Iomega Buz or Pinnacle cards before then weren't rocket science, they just didn't have the marketing $$ to fly to the forefront of the public eye.
Apple was part of the Firewire Consortium, all of whom developed Firewire.
Design, Digital Imaging, Video, Audio, Music... all of which are preached as being "made accessible" by Apple. To some extent, that is true, but it's more that those things are made accessible to people who didn't know they wanted to do those things until they saw the commercial and thought it was neat.
I don't know about music, but in the realms of design and desktop publishing, the combination of the Mac, the Laserwriter and Postscript was a quantum leap in the industry and the technology. Things which were quote literally impossible before became very easy to do: I remember when we got our hands on Photoshop 1.0 and were literally blown away by what was no possible. In 1990 my college paper produced a full-color, full broadsheet, 50 page weekly newspaper which rivaled major newspapers in quality on a budget of $30,000. This was would have been, quite literally, impossible before the Mac came along.
The thing that especially bugs me is that if only Jackson had bothered to read any of Tolkien's writings outside of LOTR, I doubt that he would ever have butchered the story like he did--TTT, especially, isn't even in the spirit of Tolkien. How hard would it have been for him to read Tolkien's Of Fairy Stories which sets out what he believes are the important elements of a fairy story--elements that Jackson totally left out. Further, Jackson should have read some of Tolkien's writings on Anglo-Saxon literature, and should have read some Anglo-Saxon literature himself, so that he could have had an understanding of the type of literature that influenced Tolkien--if he had done that, he wouldn't have totally screwed up the people of Rohan, for one.
If you would watch the director's commentary footage on the LOTR DVD, you will find that Jackson and the two other writers have thoroughly read the Tolkein cannon for many, many years and, in fact, are very well versed in Middle Earth. What many of the people who are bitching about the movies don't realize is that a movie is a very, very different beast than a book, and making a movie requires a very different type of storytelling.
There are four main issues which require major changes when going from book to movie, and on issue specific to LOTR:
1) Time. Most people have a hard time sitting through a movie longer than three hours, which translates into about 180 script pages. On a movie the size of LOTR, a unit is lucky to shoot about half a script page a day, and, when the scene involves stunts, one minute of screen time can take three weeks of shooting time. A movie which translated all of the events in the books to the screen would be, literally, too long to film, and much too long to sit through. Cuts had to be made.
2) Story-telling paradigm: Books are (duh) a verbal medium, which means that, in many ways, novelists can be very lazy story tellers. Readers will forgive pages of interior monologue, long descriptive scenes, and characters who have relatively minor roles being given large chunks of attention for short periods of time - as the reader visualizes the story in his/her head, there are no time limits necessary. Film is a visual medium, which means that something has to be happening on the screen at all times in order to keep viewers interested, and, because of point 1) stories need to be streamlined so that the storytelling never bogs down. Tolkein's writing has a habit of taking grand digressions: at many points in the story Gandalf or Elrond or whomever will completely stop the action and retell some part of Middle Earth history, which, while it throws some light on the story, would absolutely completely kill the momentum in a movie. Because much of the intricacy of Middle Earth comes from these digressions, these had to be cut or reinterpreted.
3) Character is handled very differently in the two mediums. The first rule in any storytelling is to have characters the audience wants to watch and wants to care about. As already stated, books have the luxury of time and tropes not available to film: Gandalf can spend three pages telling us of the plight of the Dwarves and, from this, we can have a deeper understanding of their motives. In film you don't have this luxury, and you really have only three ways to develop a character: dialog, action and visual symbolism.
Many people have complained about the enlargement of Arwen's character and role in the movies. This was necessary because of the constraint of film. In the books Arwen doesn't actually have that much face time - much of the information and emotional impact of Arwen and Aragorn's relationship comes from Tolkein's historical digressions and knowledge of the past of Middle Earth, specifically the story of Beren and Luthien. There was absolutely no way to fit this information in the films while maintaining a watchable narrative flow: the action would have to be stopped to explain the plight of Elves versus men, the Doom of the Val
For those born after me, these are an ancient storage media which consist of pieces of paper, on which images have been permeneantly inscribed, bound together in bundles. They are unique in that they require no electricity, no networking, do not crash, may comfortably be rested on one's lap when one is in the bathroom thinking, and contain absolutely no DRM
I know, I know - what's the fun in that. You can't even make 'em run Linux.
I imagine he/she means high end system. 24" Monitor, 4x180GB HDs, etc. I can easily get the price over 7k
Well, that's kind of silly. You could make that argument for anything: I priced a Dell and it was over $15,000! (once you include the multi-terabyte RAID. ..)
Lessee, I just went to store.apple.com and priced a dual 1.42 GHz G4 with 20 inch monitor and got $3998, before shipping. From where are you getting the extra $3000?
Actually, the Right is usually the one interested in taking rights away - look at the decade-long erosion of Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights with the War on Some Drugs, an initiative pushed by conservative politicians and judiciary and resisted by liberal politicians and judiciary. One can also look at the Patriot Act, which is the largest wholesale rollback of civil liberties since, well, forever.
You should heed an old Army saying: Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.
I can see how someone might not consider it "noticable" if they are used to the general unresponsiveness of OS X's GUI
I have been using various windowing systems since the original Mac appeared in my middle school in 1984, and have used much shit in between, from various Mac OSes to various versions of X windows to various versions of Windows blah blah blah, so it is safe to say I am used to more than OS X. With all of that experience, I still find the lag on dropping windows to be barely noticeable most of the time. Perhaps it is a difference between you and I - different things bother us.
Is the OS X GUI less responsive than the OS 9 GUI on my machine? Yes. However, as it's a three year old machine, I don't mind. I played with my brother's new 12 inch Powerbook this weekend and found the GUI to be nice and snappy, pointing to the fact that Quartz Extreme works. I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
It's still a tiny icon. Either that or the Dock is wasting valuable screen space. It'd be hard to make the icon on the Dock anwhere near as big as the average tab without wasting heaps of screen space on the Dock.
I have 31 items in my Dock, on a 14.1 inch screen, before adding any additional windows or apps, and I do not find the icons to be too small. I also have my Dock set to autohide. Once again, I would guess things that bother you don't bother me, and vice versa.
For sake of argument, I have never found the taskbar to be very useful to me. It's lack or organization and its hapahzard way of throwing every window into the taskbar made it feel like an organizational afterthought to me.
You're probably just not someone who would really benefit from tabs - ie don't regularly have lots of web pages open and wants to switch between them often. For the same reason, you probably aren't suffering as much from the delay in the right-click Dock menu
I have, at a minimum, three browser windows open at all times. I open others when necessary. Furthermore, I rarely ever find any lag when right clicking, and I just did it a coupla times to check it out. I just clicked around on my tabs and found the responsiveness to be fine for me.
Yes, the ~1 second delay (which is present on every Mac I've used up to a dual 1Ghz G4, so it must be hardwired, like the slow scrolling) before the menu actually becomes accessible.
On my 500 MHz G3, the delay is barely noticeable unless I am really stressing the system.
Having to hit a tiny, moving icon as opposed to a fairly wide tab
Turn off magnification and pin the Dock.
Then having to actually read what each menu item is to figure out which one you want, because the names are the only thing that differentiates them
This has never bothered me, but perhaps it's just a personal thing.
Porsche is the last independent auto maker left in the world. The confusion results from the fact that the Porsche family and the Piech family (Audi) are related.
FYI, from www.porsche.com:
Despite the ongoing high level of development expenditure, Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, Stuttgart, has boosted pre-tax profits in the 2001/2002 year of business ending on 31 July by 40 per cent. This is the result of the Annual Accounts compiled by the Company's Board of Management and duly audited by Ernst & Young, Deutsche Allgemeine Treuhand AG, Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft, Stuttgart, which will be submitted to the Supervisory Board of Porsche AG in its meeting on 25 October 2002 for examination and approval.
The DVD drive on my Pismo died. I bought one from a guy on MacNN for $50 and installed it myself. Took about five minutes. The DVD drive is not designed to be user-serviceable, and I am not a super techie guy, but I'm not afraid of poking around inside a machine.
Your lack of technical skill doesn't make Macs more expensive.
Same reason Ford was able to win the Manufacturer's Championship in 1966 and Le Mans 66-69: while the Ferraris sure were perty, the Fords, and their V8s, just kept on pulling through the night.
And, yes, the whole argument is pointless.
Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? Is any of this making sense to you?
I understand perfectly.
The evidence I have given you is perfectly acceptable. Were I called on to testify in a court, my 13+ years of experience would more than satisfy any judge's requirements as to my knowledge, as would the last five years I have spent teaching and consulting in production and pre-press.
This said, I do not understand your call for "scientific" evidence, as in all of the Slashdot threads I have read, almost no "scientific" evidence is given. People offer their experience, and that experience is taken at face value. If, in another thread, I say that I have worked with such and such a tool and that it behaves like X and Y, people do not say, "Show me scientific evidence!". They say, "well, when I worked with such and such a tool, if behaved like Y and Z," and so forth.
So, I have no "scientific" evidence, but I will bet $1000 that you don't, either. You have your opinions, which are clear, and, it seems, nothing but your own conviction to back them up. I have my experience, and the experience of others in the thread to show that Macs stay around for a long time and remain useful for a long time. Do they do this more than PCs? I don't know, and it was never part of the argument.
Now, as to your "logic": it was said that :
Ah.... finally someone that understands that Macs end up being CHEAPER than pcs in the long run
to which you responded with a long attack that computers don't get faster as they age. This is undoubtedly true, but has nothing to do with the posters comment, which was talking about utility, not speed.
Then it was said that:
It's not uncommon for a mac to last 7-8 years (being used actively).
To which you replied with another long comment, beginnig with an ad hominem attack on all Mac users, ending with asking for "scientific" evidence, which, as I've already said, is not the standard here at Slashdot.
Then was said:
I was called to fix a person's Mac, to find out that they were still using an Apple ][e as one of their main computers!!
To which you responded with a list of some of your older machines, proceeded to give your own antecdotal reasons for why you wouldn't use them, and then used you subjective judgements as a standard of measure fort the whole world.
Having said all this, the burden of proof is on you. Read on in this thread and you will find a lot of people offering their own experience as to the longevity of Macs. As you have offered neither antecdotal or "scientific" evidence to the contrary, I think the ball's in your court.
My first Mac lasted ten years of daily use before the mobo fried.
My friend's seven year old DuoDock is still going strong. It just went with her to Sundance and performed like a charm.
You have no facts to back that up. Oh sure, you may have some anecdotal claim about your buddies Uncle who is using his Apple II or whatever, but that's hardly scientific proof. I would ask you to provide me with some cold hard scientific facts that show that statement to be true or else I'll assume you to have no credibility.
I do. Walk into any printing plant, pre-press house or design firm and you will see four, five, six and seven year old Macs hard at use. One plant I worked at in 1997 was using a Quadra 700 (25 MHz 040, disconinued in 1994) as a PDF crunching machine. It sat on the newtork, monitoring a hot folder, and PDF'd any postscript file which appeard there. I went back to visit the place in 1999 and they had finally replaced the Quadra with an original iMac, which they are still using. They were also still using a//ci (built in 1990) to keep an eye on the Fiery ques.
At the job where I just finished a gig, my daily machine was a dual 450 G4, built in 1999. The production people were using various vintages of iMacs (1998 and forward). The scanning station was am original beige, desktop G3, EOL'd in 1999. There was an 8600 in the hallway driving a smaller scanner for quickie jobs for the art directors. I could go on.
Now, my personal favorite: I worked in a small pre-press place. The owner replaced an old AGFA RIP with an 8100/100 (EOL'd 1995!) running a Viper RIP and stuffed full of RAM. That sucker chewed through postscript files which would cause the older RIP to error out and didn't miss a beat. I actually laughed the first time I ran a job to it and watched the progress bar zip across the screen.
That's all from my knowledge of one industry. Check into other industries and I'm sure you will find similar stories.
I am sorry is your hatred of "Mac zealots" requires you to see anyone who would dispute your view of the world as, somehow, delusional. However, your solipsism doesn't count as evidence.
I'm posting this from my Newton, which is running a slimmed down version of 10.2.3. I had to compile my own kernel, but it works now. I have an iPod ducktaped to the back, attached with a home made Firwire-to-SCSi cable, which feeds the SCSI slot I welded (soldering is for wimps!) onto the back of the Newton.
I usethe iPod for storage so the Newton's RAM is free for application space. Word runs like a pig, but I can surf the web, check email and listen to iTunes. At home I have a Beowulf cluster of PDAs which I use to running as a combo firewall/router to my in house network of Apple//s and Performas, which I use to take the signal from my digital cable and stream it through my house.
600+ channels in the bathroom!
Re:Apple Loses Sales Because Laptop Keyboard Unusa
on
Apple Reports Q1 Loss
·
· Score: 1
Most magazines are printed at 2540 dpi/133 lpi. Basic rule of thumb is to scan images at twice the final printed resolution, so that means scans must be done at a minimum of 266 dpi. Better magazines are printed at 150 lpi and art books at 175 lpi, which gives scanning resolutions of 300 dpi/350 dpi.
Slashdot Mirror
Google it.
If you would watch the director's commentary footage on the LOTR DVD, you will find that Jackson and the two other writers have thoroughly read the Tolkein cannon for many, many years and, in fact, are very well versed in Middle Earth. What many of the people who are bitching about the movies don't realize is that a movie is a very, very different beast than a book, and making a movie requires a very different type of storytelling.
There are four main issues which require major changes when going from book to movie, and on issue specific to LOTR:
1) Time. Most people have a hard time sitting through a movie longer than three hours, which translates into about 180 script pages. On a movie the size of LOTR, a unit is lucky to shoot about half a script page a day, and, when the scene involves stunts, one minute of screen time can take three weeks of shooting time. A movie which translated all of the events in the books to the screen would be, literally, too long to film, and much too long to sit through. Cuts had to be made.
2) Story-telling paradigm: Books are (duh) a verbal medium, which means that, in many ways, novelists can be very lazy story tellers. Readers will forgive pages of interior monologue, long descriptive scenes, and characters who have relatively minor roles being given large chunks of attention for short periods of time - as the reader visualizes the story in his/her head, there are no time limits necessary. Film is a visual medium, which means that something has to be happening on the screen at all times in order to keep viewers interested, and, because of point 1) stories need to be streamlined so that the storytelling never bogs down. Tolkein's writing has a habit of taking grand digressions: at many points in the story Gandalf or Elrond or whomever will completely stop the action and retell some part of Middle Earth history, which, while it throws some light on the story, would absolutely completely kill the momentum in a movie. Because much of the intricacy of Middle Earth comes from these digressions, these had to be cut or reinterpreted.
3) Character is handled very differently in the two mediums. The first rule in any storytelling is to have characters the audience wants to watch and wants to care about. As already stated, books have the luxury of time and tropes not available to film: Gandalf can spend three pages telling us of the plight of the Dwarves and, from this, we can have a deeper understanding of their motives. In film you don't have this luxury, and you really have only three ways to develop a character: dialog, action and visual symbolism.
Many people have complained about the enlargement of Arwen's character and role in the movies. This was necessary because of the constraint of film. In the books Arwen doesn't actually have that much face time - much of the information and emotional impact of Arwen and Aragorn's relationship comes from Tolkein's historical digressions and knowledge of the past of Middle Earth, specifically the story of Beren and Luthien. There was absolutely no way to fit this information in the films while maintaining a watchable narrative flow: the action would have to be stopped to explain the plight of Elves versus men, the Doom of the Val
I've worked on 4+ GB files.
IBM had publically stated that the 970 is Altivec-compatible.
For those born after me, these are an ancient storage media which consist of pieces of paper, on which images have been permeneantly inscribed, bound together in bundles. They are unique in that they require no electricity, no networking, do not crash, may comfortably be rested on one's lap when one is in the bathroom thinking, and contain absolutely no DRM
I know, I know - what's the fun in that. You can't even make 'em run Linux.
Fortunately for Apple, the printing field is chock full of pre-press nerds.
the world's most bitching Switch ad.
Well, that's kind of silly. You could make that argument for anything: I priced a Dell and it was over $15,000! (once you include the multi-terabyte RAID. . .)
Lessee, I just went to store.apple.com and priced a dual 1.42 GHz G4 with 20 inch monitor and got $3998, before shipping. From where are you getting the extra $3000?
However, in the long run, the extremes do meet.
I have been using various windowing systems since the original Mac appeared in my middle school in 1984, and have used much shit in between, from various Mac OSes to various versions of X windows to various versions of Windows blah blah blah, so it is safe to say I am used to more than OS X. With all of that experience, I still find the lag on dropping windows to be barely noticeable most of the time. Perhaps it is a difference between you and I - different things bother us.
Is the OS X GUI less responsive than the OS 9 GUI on my machine? Yes. However, as it's a three year old machine, I don't mind. I played with my brother's new 12 inch Powerbook this weekend and found the GUI to be nice and snappy, pointing to the fact that Quartz Extreme works. I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
I have 31 items in my Dock, on a 14.1 inch screen, before adding any additional windows or apps, and I do not find the icons to be too small. I also have my Dock set to autohide. Once again, I would guess things that bother you don't bother me, and vice versa.For sake of argument, I have never found the taskbar to be very useful to me. It's lack or organization and its hapahzard way of throwing every window into the taskbar made it feel like an organizational afterthought to me.
I have, at a minimum, three browser windows open at all times. I open others when necessary. Furthermore, I rarely ever find any lag when right clicking, and I just did it a coupla times to check it out. I just clicked around on my tabs and found the responsiveness to be fine for me.On my 500 MHz G3, the delay is barely noticeable unless I am really stressing the system.
Turn off magnification and pin the Dock.
This has never bothered me, but perhaps it's just a personal thing.
FYI, from www.porsche.com:
Your lack of technical skill doesn't make Macs more expensive.
I had a similar problem with my Pismo when I first got it. Had to send it back to Apple for a repair. Took three days and they paid for shipping.
Six.
I see Corvettes all the time. Maybe it's a geographic thing.
Same reason Ford was able to win the Manufacturer's Championship in 1966 and Le Mans 66-69: while the Ferraris sure were perty, the Fords, and their V8s, just kept on pulling through the night. And, yes, the whole argument is pointless.
I understand perfectly.
The evidence I have given you is perfectly acceptable. Were I called on to testify in a court, my 13+ years of experience would more than satisfy any judge's requirements as to my knowledge, as would the last five years I have spent teaching and consulting in production and pre-press.
This said, I do not understand your call for "scientific" evidence, as in all of the Slashdot threads I have read, almost no "scientific" evidence is given. People offer their experience, and that experience is taken at face value. If, in another thread, I say that I have worked with such and such a tool and that it behaves like X and Y, people do not say, "Show me scientific evidence!". They say, "well, when I worked with such and such a tool, if behaved like Y and Z," and so forth.
So, I have no "scientific" evidence, but I will bet $1000 that you don't, either. You have your opinions, which are clear, and, it seems, nothing but your own conviction to back them up. I have my experience, and the experience of others in the thread to show that Macs stay around for a long time and remain useful for a long time. Do they do this more than PCs? I don't know, and it was never part of the argument.
Now, as to your "logic": it was said that :
to which you responded with a long attack that computers don't get faster as they age. This is undoubtedly true, but has nothing to do with the posters comment, which was talking about utility, not speed.
Then it was said that:
To which you replied with another long comment, beginnig with an ad hominem attack on all Mac users, ending with asking for "scientific" evidence, which, as I've already said, is not the standard here at Slashdot.
Then was said:
To which you responded with a list of some of your older machines, proceeded to give your own antecdotal reasons for why you wouldn't use them, and then used you subjective judgements as a standard of measure fort the whole world.
Having said all this, the burden of proof is on you. Read on in this thread and you will find a lot of people offering their own experience as to the longevity of Macs. As you have offered neither antecdotal or "scientific" evidence to the contrary, I think the ball's in your court.
The new G4s have 333MHz RAM. . .
My friend's seven year old DuoDock is still going strong. It just went with her to Sundance and performed like a charm.
I do. Walk into any printing plant, pre-press house or design firm and you will see four, five, six and seven year old Macs hard at use. One plant I worked at in 1997 was using a Quadra 700 (25 MHz 040, disconinued in 1994) as a PDF crunching machine. It sat on the newtork, monitoring a hot folder, and PDF'd any postscript file which appeard there. I went back to visit the place in 1999 and they had finally replaced the Quadra with an original iMac, which they are still using. They were also still using a //ci (built in 1990) to keep an eye on the Fiery ques.
At the job where I just finished a gig, my daily machine was a dual 450 G4, built in 1999. The production people were using various vintages of iMacs (1998 and forward). The scanning station was am original beige, desktop G3, EOL'd in 1999. There was an 8600 in the hallway driving a smaller scanner for quickie jobs for the art directors. I could go on.
Now, my personal favorite: I worked in a small pre-press place. The owner replaced an old AGFA RIP with an 8100/100 (EOL'd 1995!) running a Viper RIP and stuffed full of RAM. That sucker chewed through postscript files which would cause the older RIP to error out and didn't miss a beat. I actually laughed the first time I ran a job to it and watched the progress bar zip across the screen.
That's all from my knowledge of one industry. Check into other industries and I'm sure you will find similar stories.
I am sorry is your hatred of "Mac zealots" requires you to see anyone who would dispute your view of the world as, somehow, delusional. However, your solipsism doesn't count as evidence.
I usethe iPod for storage so the Newton's RAM is free for application space. Word runs like a pig, but I can surf the web, check email and listen to iTunes. At home I have a Beowulf cluster of PDAs which I use to running as a combo firewall/router to my in house network of Apple //s and Performas, which I use to take the signal from my digital cable and stream it through my house.
600+ channels in the bathroom!
That is the saddest thing I have ever read.
Most magazines are printed at 2540 dpi/133 lpi. Basic rule of thumb is to scan images at twice the final printed resolution, so that means scans must be done at a minimum of 266 dpi. Better magazines are printed at 150 lpi and art books at 175 lpi, which gives scanning resolutions of 300 dpi/350 dpi.