A fair number of people are posting to say "Whah? That's not an upgrade, they're just using the case" or to point out that the thing's a hoax -- but adamant opposition? You want adamance? Stridency incoming:
This strangely violent opposition is why most people are turned off by mac users. "PENTIUM IN MAC IS EVIL!!!11" Get over yourselves.
I didn't see a single post about the evils of Pentiums. Violent?
Pretty sure I played "Radar Rat Race" as a cartridge plugged into the back of our Vic-20. The music had the most maddeningly flat note at the end of the (endlessly repeated) first line...
So, your garage sale purchase included backward compatibility! Totally forward thinking. This "Commodore" company really understands the course it's charting. Invest now.
(Though personally, I think consoles will always make more sense for gaming. You'd want an Intellivision for the games.)
Not using apple at the moment, I'm entirely unqualified to respond, but I'll never let such a trivial problem stop me.
That alone justifies the moderation, here, being so unusually "insightful" for a/. posting. Nobody else seems to recognize when they're unqualified. Or maybe we all just take that as a given.
Spotlight does essentially offer both the scope of searches you describe and significantly more "depth" in terms of the metadata than anything else I've seen. I've got "Smart Folders" set up using date windows for my kids' IDs, and the idea doesn't throw the 11-year-old demographic in my house anyway. They're notoriously sloppy about where they save stuff.
No kidding. Complete ignorance along with an analogy that doesn't work in any case.
In other Does Not Compute news: Let's see, in order to make that "encourages third party development" comparison work, we'd need to be comparing IBM to Apple, not Microsoft... Microsoft was the third party that developed for the PC, after all. How'd that all work out for Big Blue, again? Oh.
The thread that runs through all the points you make is that Quark, as a company, just plain shows no signs of putting itself in its customers' shoes. It's motivated maybe by petulance toward standards like PDF, or maybe by RIAA-style control freak ideas to do with validation and licensing. Those motives may have their place -- but there's no process checking to see if X decision will just plain annoy users to no end.
I used to think my own experience was from the POV of a smaller shop, and that I'd maybe "get" the Quark mindset if I was producing catalogs for Marshall Fields or something... but judging by the market, no.
The stark contrast with Jobs, speaking of him, is instructive. When Steve stepped on stage and talked about what the P2P scene was like for users, it was completely clear to me as a user that he did really understand that experience. iTunes was made to hit a sweet spot that got at all the frustrations in P2P. Generalissimo Jobs has the whole cult of personality thing going on, but he's a control freak who genuinely seems to "get" the way the user perceives things. "Insanely great" and all that.
Quark has more in common with the RIAA's vision of its market. So, the user is a potential criminal who needs to be kept in line. And so on.
Even when Dvorak's right about something, it's just the proverbial broken clock that's right twice a day.
My main criterion for reading a columnist is, the person has to be capable of surprising me. That rules out a lot of the political dreck; I know basically what Cal Thomas is going to say about X issue, because Mr. Thomas is a completely predictable social conservative.
Dvorak is a weird case in which a business columnist has a lot of the same authoritarian leanings that right-wing columnists show on the Op Ed pages. The guy will always "side" with the bully on the block, and show disdain toward anything that doesn't fit the world view of guys with power ties. And he's predictable; for all that his opinion on any given subject is a troll, it's a predictable one.
Sure, that's a pretty good set of debunkings linked to at the end of the posting. I'd even go with something like the guess at the end -- seems like Jobs wouldn't just be announcing "We're on the intel bandwagon, hook link and sinker," for all the reasons people usually mention. (What would it do to the existing sales base? I mean, my God, who would buy a G5 iMac right now knowing that in a year it'd be a cut-off technical backwater for the company?)
But, you know, we have at least five or ten years of people debunking this particular rumor. Describing this list as the best ever is jumping the gun a little. Maybe we'll have another five years of the same, and then we can judge better.
Headphones while driving are illegal, but there's already apparently some sort of enormous version of the technology you describe.
Probably this is a prototype, which owing to its size is unable to confine the noise to the user's ear. Instead low frequency sounds escape the car and are, indeed, broadcast to other vehicles. It doesn't seem to rely on any networking technology other than sound waves and plain old air, which is really kind of low-tech cool when you think about it.
Yeah, I did wonder, and scanned down the post looking for what physical traits "e-mail" might have that would either encourage an addiction (clicks like an addicted mouse on a wheel?) or break as a result of an addiction (smoking servers?). Both a total reach, I know. And nothin', nada.
Take a look at the editor who put this up, though. Whatever the original poster chose on the way in, it's the editor who needs to figure out how things fit together. Taco, Taco, Taco.
I love how they seem to totally miss the main points people have when they burn new CDs or rip songs from discs they own. We like to compose our own playlists, mix and match, and so on. And we want to put all our songs into a player -- an iPod or whatever. This method seems to support neither -- though it's not really that clear about "discs" vs. tracks in the article, which is a pretty basic point to be vague about here. Still:
Among the biggest headaches: Secure burning means that iPod users do not have any means of transferring tracks to their device,
To use it with your player, you need to go with the MS DRM. Doink. Try again please.
Meanwhile there's the puritanical language that's sticking out like a sore... uh, thumb, here.
"sterile" burning
to curb "casual" CD burning
"school yard piracy"
Casual burning in the schoolyard needs to be sterilized! People, save your daughters now!! Pirates are coming for them!
Not people who share my perspective on the world, in short, and not ones I'm clamoring to buy from. Which makes kind of a contrast with the iTunes store, where I've paid a fair amount.
Plainly our AC didn't quite grok the digital hub idea from the get go.
The days of assembling a wire warren of a shrine unto your computer are gone for an awful lot of people already. There is no desk. The lamp-style G4 iMac I bought years ago has displaced everything else in the house. All the old CPU boxes are in the storage room except for the work ghetto of PC stuff I have to keep set up in the back corner of the basement for the off late night's server testing. Partly the trusty iMac did that because sits dead center in the kitchen, on a countertop that's narrower than the narrow side of my veal cube here in the office, with space to spare. There, it takes on basically all the work for the adult and the two kids in my household.
And no, a tower wouldn't fit under the counter. That's where the dog's food and water dishes go, and our feet. (They're big dishes: she is a Newfoundland.)
Someday soon here the TV industry will get with it and give us affordable ways to avoid the Entertainment Center Shrine unto our TVs, too. (And a few older folks will be wondering why they can't buy a console TV for the entire wall of their living room any more.)
Try following the link provided in the parent. If you don't go and read the dang link, you're not going to be able to judge "what it comes down to" based on the way you filed the case away based on lame news reports when it first went down.
The way that court case broke was a pretty staggering example of the incompetence of McDonalds' lawyers combined with a long history of similar situations that were very specific to their business. In particular, the cavalier and extremely arrogant attitude of the company toward this woman, and toward a whole bunch of other similar cases, caused the punitive damages to be high -- so that they amounted to the amound Micky D's makes in a couple of days' worth of coffee profit, IIRC.
Like it or not, the kneejerk reaction you had, which everyone else had including me, turns out to have completely failed to convince a jury in a trial. Gee, I wonder if everyone just went crazy, all at once. Or maybe there was more to it than that. DUH.
It would only concern me if key species that humans depend on were dying out.
Please give us an example of a past mass extinction in which the dominant species on earth continued to be so after the extinction occurred. You can define "dominant" fairly loosely and still not find such an event in world history. (If you'd like to get as far as "sharks and turtles are the dominant forms of life on earth," or "bacteria rule the earth," then I guess you'll find this looming new mass extinction reassuring...)
The completely obvious point that heads-in-the-sand "it doesn't concern me" types refuse to hear, despite every environmentalist for the last 30 years making it, is that there is a massive danger to human beings in a drastic reduction of biodiversity. It threatens us, as a species.
Earth will come through it. Earth has sustained life at much higher temperatures than at present, for example. That doesn't mean global warming wouldn't radically destabilize human civilization. It's a question of whether we would live through those changes. It's self-interest.
And don't miss breakfast. This is why the United States is a nation of fat slobs. Nutritional experts telling everyone they need to eat like an adolescent during his growth spurt. Most people don't need breakfast or lunch either for that matter.
Gee, that's funny, essentially every nutritionist not moaning under a cultish trance over some Atkins variant would say dinner's the one to cut back on, but to get a healthy breakfast above all else. It's a conspiracy of experts, as you say. (Please ignore the obvious fact that Americans have never managed to follow this advice from the nutritionists all that well.)
All that is required is a diet with a reasonable amount of high quality protein.
I understand the appeal of contrarian positions, but you're just an Atkins fanboy. That diet, and all its many corollary marketed materials, exist for nutritionists on the same level that "intelligent design" does for biologists. You've successfully regurgitated your share of the sophisms, so call it a day. Go grill a steak.
Boy, this story's going to tangle some people up. The French? Judicial decisions and their relationship to legislative bodies? P2P file swapping? Criminal punishments for copyright violators?
It's like a sampler of all the usual/. knee-jerk issues, only some of the knee motions will be in contrary directions. If only Taco had posted the thing with a note about how he loved his new OS X machine after all the Windows crashes, we'd have the whole ball of wax.
Anyone who leapt at the chance to say something was boring was on my dad's "list." As I get a little older and see my kids' middle school peers all posing as if innocence and wonder were the opposite of cool, I relate more and more. What an empty pose.
Maybe you should take a look at what science thought about the deep ocean before people actually put down dredges and started pulling stuff up. It, too, was supposed to be completely empty and dull -- almost beneath studying. Take a look at hydrothermal vent communities, and tell me that at least two different ways of life that don't involve photosynthesis are dull. People turned out to be very wrong about that, and they found that out when they looked.
Paraphrasing Montaigne: Ignorance and incuriosity are soft pillows, but only for the hard-headed.
Let's move from core to flake tools?
on
Top Mice Compared
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· Score: 1
Perhaps we can interest you in something along the lines of our new, virtual adze? Comes with a complementary pack of Wooly Rhino skin for those first few butcherings.
Theres no processing limitation on this, just a lack of vision (or marketability)
It's not primarily a vision problem, is it? How many Dvorak layouts and chording keyboards have we seen, just to take that first baby step from the old QWERTY keyboard? Take a look at (pricey) interfaces for people like quadriplegics who can't type; those aren't just letter pickers. On the consumer level, certain markets pretty obviously like tablets. We have "virtual surgery" models that let a Doctor in one country work in another. There are new designs and other ways of doing things being developed, plenty of people have vision. (Not all of them are as big a mess as Tom Cruise's future-reader, either.)
They aren't being adopted, though, and there's a hint of both technical challenge and the weight of existing standards to that. Anyone want to buy my Newton? Anyone want to re-learn how to write every letter of the alphabet in order to use a Palm?
Hate to sound all jargoned up, but I agree -- it seems like there's a paradigmatic shift due here for a while now. The change from core- to flake-based stone age tools would be a good analogy, actually, wouldn't it? But nobody's showing us the sweet spot, the overwhelming advantages to thinking of interfaces 'the other way around.' "Hey, look at these bits of flint we knock off. Let's make the tools out of THOSE instead!"
(Touches monolith. "I'm seeing an orb... An impassive red eye interface.")
As a result they had to keep spending enormous amounts of money to try to "keep up". They eventually drove their economy into the ground.
Which was shortly before our own "military industrial complex" discovered, in ghosts of the cold war like Iraq and Afghanistan, a rationale by which it could continue the colossal spending rates of the past, driving our own economy to the brink of Argentina-style fiscal collapse too.
"Chicken" is one of those games where you both can lose. Which, getting back to the point, might be a little lesson for Microsoft and Google to consider -- if that's really how they're thinking of these features. (MS does fit the model -- they're the bluffer of all cold war bluffers when it comes to announcing products and feature sets. Just announce there'll be a product, and the market space tends to clear. I don't see Google's mindset that way at all, personally. But maybe that's naive.)
but their defense spending as a percent of the overall budget didn't change much over that time.
And their levels of military spending were unsustainable, would be the point, not that they went up in the five or ten years before the fall.
(The five- or ten-year window thing is more about people who desperately want to give all the credit to Reagan, which is such a waste of airtime that we don't need to bother with it, do we? "Ooh, Ronny's swagger terrified the Russkies." Puerile, politicized dreck.)
Seems to me I've seen (or heard on the radio?) a commercial for AOL in which people describe how much they'd like their kid's baby pictures to just vanish. The point being that you should belong to the oh-so-secure AOL.
I don't see any "PPC is vastly superior posts" -- other than yours, which refutes this seeming non-starter of an argument by scattering a bunch of the usual rumor rationales in the hopes that some of the seeds will take root.
Meanwhile none of your points address the obvious problems pointed out elsewhere: that Apple has denied the rumor (for the umptieth time), that Apple's a hardware shop that might not compete with Dells that could run the same OS, and so on. Breathless arguments on the level of "probably double the value of their shares if not even tripple (sic) them" are even less convincing than a John Dvorak prediction, which is pretty far down the food chain for me.
If this is true, it means Apple has decided to go head to head with MS as an OS shop and make its money that way. That's what people call a "paradigm shift," and a radical one, at a moment when every recent example shows us that Jobs is continuing to do what he does best: sell the hardware by using the OS and interface grace points as a break-even loss leader. (iTunes as loss leader for iPods, iLife suite to sell each new generation of boxes, and so on.)
'Cause it sure isn't "frequently asked questions" any more -- not unless the people asking the questions are the audience panel they use for scoring responses on "The Family Feud."
I feel kind of bad for the poor tech writers who make a living going over stuff like this. It's like they get told to pretend they're morons.
"What happens if I put my tongue across the contacts? Will it feel like a nine-volt?"
Is there any chance that, being from.NL, you're just mad because nothing Euro pulled this trick off first?
In general I'm with you on that reponse. The parent was just being cynical. I'd go as far as the head up the *ss.
But the whole "is it NASA or the Europeans?" jealously thing seems completely one-sided to me. The parochial defensiveness is all coming from the US side of that fence. Where are all the Europeans gloating when something from NASA cracks up? I've never seen anything close to what happened with the Beagle. Speaking as a US citizen, let's let that one drop. We just look like jerks when we bring it up, over and over, as if it wasn't a funhouse mirror of ourselves we were shadowboxing.
-- my reaction was: There isn't strong demand for workers in those fields on the domestic market, so kids aren't going to school for those jobs.
There was a premium on these skills back in the 1990s, and salaries were high. Back then schools were packed. It's not like that got spontaneously forgotten and the economy has to "re-learn" it. The economic situation changed. Kids just understand the writing on the wall.
The supply of domestic graduates is adjusting to the demand for them. (And yeah, the threat is that this job sector won't survive in the US. Welcome to the conversation about outsourcing and multinationals, college professors.)
An interesting philosophical point you make, and very much within the fine relativistic tradition of OS-comparisons. Yes yes, Megahertz scores don't really match, &c. If I was in charge of judging the purity of operating systems, I might accept that.
That doesn't change the practical truth that OS X has consistently, over a number of years and.1 revisions, gotten *faster* on older systems. That's on G3, G4, and G5 models. Ars Technica has commented on how unprecedented that speed gain is, more than once -- in its detailed reviews of the various wildcat OS releases, for example.
Sometimes it's okay to compare Apples to oranges. If you're just trying to figure out which fruit to eat, and one of them tastes better, it's a valid comparison. There is a high-level comparison here that's valid: Apple has put a premium on this sort of performance improvement, showing results, and MS hasn't made that effort or shown similar results. You can say Apple has an "unfair" advantage, or that MS is trying to do something else, but the contrast's still there.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see a single post about the evils of Pentiums. Violent?
Huh?
So, your garage sale purchase included backward compatibility! Totally forward thinking. This "Commodore" company really understands the course it's charting. Invest now.
(Though personally, I think consoles will always make more sense for gaming. You'd want an Intellivision for the games.)
That alone justifies the moderation, here, being so unusually "insightful" for a /. posting. Nobody else seems to recognize when they're unqualified. Or maybe we all just take that as a given.
Spotlight does essentially offer both the scope of searches you describe and significantly more "depth" in terms of the metadata than anything else I've seen. I've got "Smart Folders" set up using date windows for my kids' IDs, and the idea doesn't throw the 11-year-old demographic in my house anyway. They're notoriously sloppy about where they save stuff.
In other Does Not Compute news: Let's see, in order to make that "encourages third party development" comparison work, we'd need to be comparing IBM to Apple, not Microsoft... Microsoft was the third party that developed for the PC, after all. How'd that all work out for Big Blue, again? Oh.
I used to think my own experience was from the POV of a smaller shop, and that I'd maybe "get" the Quark mindset if I was producing catalogs for Marshall Fields or something... but judging by the market, no.
The stark contrast with Jobs, speaking of him, is instructive. When Steve stepped on stage and talked about what the P2P scene was like for users, it was completely clear to me as a user that he did really understand that experience. iTunes was made to hit a sweet spot that got at all the frustrations in P2P. Generalissimo Jobs has the whole cult of personality thing going on, but he's a control freak who genuinely seems to "get" the way the user perceives things. "Insanely great" and all that.
Quark has more in common with the RIAA's vision of its market. So, the user is a potential criminal who needs to be kept in line. And so on.
My main criterion for reading a columnist is, the person has to be capable of surprising me. That rules out a lot of the political dreck; I know basically what Cal Thomas is going to say about X issue, because Mr. Thomas is a completely predictable social conservative.
Dvorak is a weird case in which a business columnist has a lot of the same authoritarian leanings that right-wing columnists show on the Op Ed pages. The guy will always "side" with the bully on the block, and show disdain toward anything that doesn't fit the world view of guys with power ties. And he's predictable; for all that his opinion on any given subject is a troll, it's a predictable one.
But, you know, we have at least five or ten years of people debunking this particular rumor. Describing this list as the best ever is jumping the gun a little. Maybe we'll have another five years of the same, and then we can judge better.
Probably this is a prototype, which owing to its size is unable to confine the noise to the user's ear. Instead low frequency sounds escape the car and are, indeed, broadcast to other vehicles. It doesn't seem to rely on any networking technology other than sound waves and plain old air, which is really kind of low-tech cool when you think about it.
Yeah, I did wonder, and scanned down the post looking for what physical traits "e-mail" might have that would either encourage an addiction (clicks like an addicted mouse on a wheel?) or break as a result of an addiction (smoking servers?). Both a total reach, I know. And nothin', nada.
Take a look at the editor who put this up, though. Whatever the original poster chose on the way in, it's the editor who needs to figure out how things fit together. Taco, Taco, Taco.
To use it with your player, you need to go with the MS DRM. Doink. Try again please.
Meanwhile there's the puritanical language that's sticking out like a sore... uh, thumb, here.
Casual burning in the schoolyard needs to be sterilized! People, save your daughters now!! Pirates are coming for them!
Not people who share my perspective on the world, in short, and not ones I'm clamoring to buy from. Which makes kind of a contrast with the iTunes store, where I've paid a fair amount.
The days of assembling a wire warren of a shrine unto your computer are gone for an awful lot of people already. There is no desk. The lamp-style G4 iMac I bought years ago has displaced everything else in the house. All the old CPU boxes are in the storage room except for the work ghetto of PC stuff I have to keep set up in the back corner of the basement for the off late night's server testing. Partly the trusty iMac did that because sits dead center in the kitchen, on a countertop that's narrower than the narrow side of my veal cube here in the office, with space to spare. There, it takes on basically all the work for the adult and the two kids in my household.
And no, a tower wouldn't fit under the counter. That's where the dog's food and water dishes go, and our feet. (They're big dishes: she is a Newfoundland.)
Someday soon here the TV industry will get with it and give us affordable ways to avoid the Entertainment Center Shrine unto our TVs, too. (And a few older folks will be wondering why they can't buy a console TV for the entire wall of their living room any more.)
The way that court case broke was a pretty staggering example of the incompetence of McDonalds' lawyers combined with a long history of similar situations that were very specific to their business. In particular, the cavalier and extremely arrogant attitude of the company toward this woman, and toward a whole bunch of other similar cases, caused the punitive damages to be high -- so that they amounted to the amound Micky D's makes in a couple of days' worth of coffee profit, IIRC.
Like it or not, the kneejerk reaction you had, which everyone else had including me, turns out to have completely failed to convince a jury in a trial. Gee, I wonder if everyone just went crazy, all at once. Or maybe there was more to it than that. DUH.
Please give us an example of a past mass extinction in which the dominant species on earth continued to be so after the extinction occurred. You can define "dominant" fairly loosely and still not find such an event in world history. (If you'd like to get as far as "sharks and turtles are the dominant forms of life on earth," or "bacteria rule the earth," then I guess you'll find this looming new mass extinction reassuring...)
The completely obvious point that heads-in-the-sand "it doesn't concern me" types refuse to hear, despite every environmentalist for the last 30 years making it, is that there is a massive danger to human beings in a drastic reduction of biodiversity. It threatens us, as a species.
Earth will come through it. Earth has sustained life at much higher temperatures than at present, for example. That doesn't mean global warming wouldn't radically destabilize human civilization. It's a question of whether we would live through those changes. It's self-interest.
Gee, that's funny, essentially every nutritionist not moaning under a cultish trance over some Atkins variant would say dinner's the one to cut back on, but to get a healthy breakfast above all else. It's a conspiracy of experts, as you say. (Please ignore the obvious fact that Americans have never managed to follow this advice from the nutritionists all that well.)
All that is required is a diet with a reasonable amount of high quality protein.
I understand the appeal of contrarian positions, but you're just an Atkins fanboy. That diet, and all its many corollary marketed materials, exist for nutritionists on the same level that "intelligent design" does for biologists. You've successfully regurgitated your share of the sophisms, so call it a day. Go grill a steak.
It's like a sampler of all the usual /. knee-jerk issues, only some of the knee motions will be in contrary directions. If only Taco had posted the thing with a note about how he loved his new OS X machine after all the Windows crashes, we'd have the whole ball of wax.
Maybe you should take a look at what science thought about the deep ocean before people actually put down dredges and started pulling stuff up. It, too, was supposed to be completely empty and dull -- almost beneath studying. Take a look at hydrothermal vent communities, and tell me that at least two different ways of life that don't involve photosynthesis are dull. People turned out to be very wrong about that, and they found that out when they looked.
Paraphrasing Montaigne: Ignorance and incuriosity are soft pillows, but only for the hard-headed.
Theres no processing limitation on this, just a lack of vision (or marketability)
It's not primarily a vision problem, is it? How many Dvorak layouts and chording keyboards have we seen, just to take that first baby step from the old QWERTY keyboard? Take a look at (pricey) interfaces for people like quadriplegics who can't type; those aren't just letter pickers. On the consumer level, certain markets pretty obviously like tablets. We have "virtual surgery" models that let a Doctor in one country work in another. There are new designs and other ways of doing things being developed, plenty of people have vision. (Not all of them are as big a mess as Tom Cruise's future-reader, either.)
They aren't being adopted, though, and there's a hint of both technical challenge and the weight of existing standards to that. Anyone want to buy my Newton? Anyone want to re-learn how to write every letter of the alphabet in order to use a Palm?
Hate to sound all jargoned up, but I agree -- it seems like there's a paradigmatic shift due here for a while now. The change from core- to flake-based stone age tools would be a good analogy, actually, wouldn't it? But nobody's showing us the sweet spot, the overwhelming advantages to thinking of interfaces 'the other way around.' "Hey, look at these bits of flint we knock off. Let's make the tools out of THOSE instead!"
(Touches monolith. "I'm seeing an orb... An impassive red eye interface.")
Which was shortly before our own "military industrial complex" discovered, in ghosts of the cold war like Iraq and Afghanistan, a rationale by which it could continue the colossal spending rates of the past, driving our own economy to the brink of Argentina-style fiscal collapse too.
"Chicken" is one of those games where you both can lose. Which, getting back to the point, might be a little lesson for Microsoft and Google to consider -- if that's really how they're thinking of these features. (MS does fit the model -- they're the bluffer of all cold war bluffers when it comes to announcing products and feature sets. Just announce there'll be a product, and the market space tends to clear. I don't see Google's mindset that way at all, personally. But maybe that's naive.)
And their levels of military spending were unsustainable, would be the point, not that they went up in the five or ten years before the fall.
(The five- or ten-year window thing is more about people who desperately want to give all the credit to Reagan, which is such a waste of airtime that we don't need to bother with it, do we? "Ooh, Ronny's swagger terrified the Russkies." Puerile, politicized dreck.)
So, the water's already muddy on that one.
Meanwhile none of your points address the obvious problems pointed out elsewhere: that Apple has denied the rumor (for the umptieth time), that Apple's a hardware shop that might not compete with Dells that could run the same OS, and so on. Breathless arguments on the level of "probably double the value of their shares if not even tripple (sic) them" are even less convincing than a John Dvorak prediction, which is pretty far down the food chain for me.
If this is true, it means Apple has decided to go head to head with MS as an OS shop and make its money that way. That's what people call a "paradigm shift," and a radical one, at a moment when every recent example shows us that Jobs is continuing to do what he does best: sell the hardware by using the OS and interface grace points as a break-even loss leader. (iTunes as loss leader for iPods, iLife suite to sell each new generation of boxes, and so on.)
I feel kind of bad for the poor tech writers who make a living going over stuff like this. It's like they get told to pretend they're morons.
"What happens if I put my tongue across the contacts? Will it feel like a nine-volt?"
In general I'm with you on that reponse. The parent was just being cynical. I'd go as far as the head up the *ss.
But the whole "is it NASA or the Europeans?" jealously thing seems completely one-sided to me. The parochial defensiveness is all coming from the US side of that fence. Where are all the Europeans gloating when something from NASA cracks up? I've never seen anything close to what happened with the Beagle. Speaking as a US citizen, let's let that one drop. We just look like jerks when we bring it up, over and over, as if it wasn't a funhouse mirror of ourselves we were shadowboxing.
There was a premium on these skills back in the 1990s, and salaries were high. Back then schools were packed. It's not like that got spontaneously forgotten and the economy has to "re-learn" it. The economic situation changed. Kids just understand the writing on the wall.
The supply of domestic graduates is adjusting to the demand for them. (And yeah, the threat is that this job sector won't survive in the US. Welcome to the conversation about outsourcing and multinationals, college professors.)
That doesn't change the practical truth that OS X has consistently, over a number of years and .1 revisions, gotten *faster* on older systems. That's on G3, G4, and G5 models. Ars Technica has commented on how unprecedented that speed gain is, more than once -- in its detailed reviews of the various wildcat OS releases, for example.
Sometimes it's okay to compare Apples to oranges. If you're just trying to figure out which fruit to eat, and one of them tastes better, it's a valid comparison. There is a high-level comparison here that's valid: Apple has put a premium on this sort of performance improvement, showing results, and MS hasn't made that effort or shown similar results. You can say Apple has an "unfair" advantage, or that MS is trying to do something else, but the contrast's still there.