I don't know why people are so eager to jump in bed with one monopolist when they clearly hate another.. Is it because Apple somehow redeemed itself? Apple still sells software for its own systems that it refuses to port to other systems. They refuse to open their architecture.
The reason is plain and simple: Apple is not a monopoly. Apple's marketshare is way smaller than Microsoft's for the desktop computing market. Their marketshare for hardware is basically the same percentage. What most people falsely claim is that Apple has a "monopoly" on the Apple brand computer market or something, to which about the only response is "Umm, duh." That would be like saying Ford has a monopoly on making Ford brand automobiles.
Is it because Apple somehow redeemed itself?
While many of the Mac faithful never left the community, those who did during the bad years and the new-to-Mac crowd seem to think (at least a lot do) that Apple has "redeemed" itself with OS X. Unix on the desktop with a good balance between the benefits of both open source and proprietary development can do wonders for a companies reputation.
Apple still sells software for its own systems that it refuses to port to other systems.
Wow, who would have ever thought that a company that sells an integrated hardware and OS package would want to write software for it? If common sense makes Apple evil, then I guess you are right. Also, why would Apple want to take the time to port its software, much of which is freeware, to other operating systems when Apple is a company that makes 90%+ of its revenue from hardware sales, hardware that is tied very closely to the OS.
They refuse to open their architecture.
FUD, plain and simple. USB, IEEE 1394, 802.11b and 802.11g, AGP, ATA, SCSI, SDRAM, and the list goes on. About the only thing that isn't open is the mobo, but this all goes back to Apple being a hardware company as far as revenues go. And if the hardware using lots of common standards isn't enough, how about the OS being open sourced, based on an open source kernel, and using a combination of open source userlands.
I don't know if you are trolling, bitter, or just plain ignorant, but please stop spreading FUD about Apple.
Gorvernment officials banning something they don't understand? Shocker.
Slashdot anti-government troll posting without thinking? Shocker.
The Segway is much more comparable to a bicycle than it is to a pedestrian as it travels much faster than a pedestrian, it weighs much more than just a pedestrian, and would hurt someone more than if they were run into by a pedestrian. Assuming they make a provision allowing for the Segways to be used in the bike lane or something similiar (I didn't see this in the article), there is really no reason to criticize the SF government.
I would hardly call the OS X market virgin anymore. If you look at the games most played on GameRanger (by far the biggest online gaming service for Macs), all of them besides Rogue Spear have OS X native versions. While there aren't as many games from big publishers on OS X, there is still a very hefty number. The games on that list are all ports of games made by big companies. Very few small companies have been able to put out fun, exciting, original titles. One notable exception is Ambrosia who puts out, among other things, the classic Escape Velocity series. Other Mac games from small, independent developers that I can think of that gained moderate notoriety are Airburst and Netfungus.
The common theme of these games is that they focus on the gameplay while using relatively simple looking graphics. It's unrealistic to expect a small company to put out a modern FPS given the complexity that such a project requires. However, a game with simple and fun gameplay can do well even if it doesn't have all the latest bells and whistles to wow the user superficially.
In Andrew Tanenbaum's Computer Networking, he outlined the idea of a "flying LAN" as early as 1996.
Yeah, and next thing you know we will be seeing posts on a newsgroup that 802.11b is obsolete compared to the WLAN that Tannenbaum proposed back in '96.
Appleworks is a good word processing replacement. For 99% of the people, it will provide the word processing features they need. However, the biggest problem with it is that it does not handle converting M$ Word documents well. And let's face it, pretty much no matter where you go, you will need to interact with M$ Word documents.
From the people I know who use Excel extensively, Appleworks does not cut it as a spreadsheet app. Excel apparently far outdoes it in features. I don't know about how well it handles conversions, but if it is anything like the word processing side of Appleworks, I don't think it will be pretty.
I think Apple realizes the niche that Appleworks fills. It is a nice, cheap office suite for students and some non-advanced consumers. I use Appleworks to type all my papers for college, and it fits that need very well. When I need something a little more powerful, I bust out OpenOffice.
I think Apple realizes that rather than possibly trying futilely to expand Appleworks beyond what it is, they can support different projects or create new ones to fill the needs of office suite users. Keynote looks like one hell of a Powerpoint killer from everything I have seen and heard. Also, I don't think it is coincidence at all that Apple released their version of X11 a day or two before OpenOffice released a new beta. Those releases combined with Safari makes it very clear that Apple is weening itself off its dependence on the beast from Redmond.
I don't know how popular it is in the US, but text messaging is big over here. People chat by text message about all sorts of things too trivial to ring someone about
Don't worry, over here in the States nothing is too trivial to make a cell phone call about, especially when driving it seems.
I don't think it is a matter of holding everyone responsible for any attack that may come from their machine. It is about holding negligent users responsible for their negligent actions.
For exameple, if someone owns a gun but keeps it locked in a safe in their house and stores the ammo somewhere else, yet some master thief manages to steal their gun and use it in a crime, I doubt anyone would say that is the fault of the gun owner. However, if the same gun owner left the gun loaded and laying around on their front lawn and someone came by, picked it up, and shot somebody, they would be sued and/or arrested for their negligence.
The problem is determining at what point is a computer user negligent. Is your average consumer negligent for connecting their Windows box to a high-speed connection and not using any firewall software? Or is it someone who turns on various services like file sharing without knowing full well what they are getting into? Or is it anyone who takes reasonable precautions, but when they get cracked they don't realize it until their box has had a chance to eat up tons of somebody else's bandwidth?
M$ seems to not understand that viewing the source is only one third of the Open Source equation. The other half is being able to modify the code, and distribute those modifications.
Judging by your math, I'm going to say you are related to Yogi Berra somehow.;)
(For the humor impaired, yes I realized what he intended to say.)
Pff, the only reason vim keeps believers in its "religion" is because if you accidentally start it you won't be able to figure out the damn command to quit it!
Also, as an avid emacs user I must correct the FUD in your post. Even the most die hard of my kind know that emacs stands for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.
Does anyone know how this will work for Fink users? Fink depends on most everything being in/sw, and tons of packages depend on X11. I just hope these will work well together because an Apple version of X11 with a nice window manager would be heaven at times.
I have Debian (insert joke about ease of use here - I am used to Fink and wanted to use apt-get for package management) installed on my TiBook. Just to get X to work properly, I had to screw with the refresh rates in xinitrc. I still can't get it to fill the whole screen because the TiBook is wider than normal. I tried a few things that should have worked, but to no avail. I put it on the backburner seeing as how I only installed Linux to try it out, not to replace OS X.
I'll probably try Yellow Dog Linux or Mandrake and see if I'm pleasantly like you say, but I guess I'm hesitant for now.
Linux has big strides to take before you can think about it surpassing Macs as the #2 desktop OS. I don't want to disparage Linux because if I weren't using a Mac I would most likely run Linux, but I see no way Linux will compete as a mass desktop OS until it becomes far easier for the average user. For a geek who loves to mess with his system it is great, but for Joe Blow who wants to check his email, browse the web, an do a little word processing, it is not a very interesting offering. Why spend time in emacs messing with config files just to make stuff work. Instead, you can have all the power of unix and the ease of use of a Mac with OS X.
Linux is great for some people, but OS X has something for pretty much everyone. I'll take my Mac any day of the week.
I think the whole idea of the H1B should be rethought seriously. I guess some people would say we need them to cover a shortage of workers, but especially considering our economic times right now we don't need 200 thousand of these people taking jobs from Americans. The H1B program should be scrapped to almost nothing. Make a provision allowing for a temporary allowance of a limited number of H1B's when unemployment is at a certain low level, but other than that cut them all off. You want to come to America? That's fine, do it like all the other people who immigrate, get green cards, etc. Don't do it by coming over, taking an American's job for a few years, then taking that money back to your homeland when your 3 or 6 years are up.
If the development of the 970 by IBM is coming along as rumored, there is absolutely no reason why Apple would want to go to the Opteron over the 970. The 970 is also 64 bit, will probably achieve similar clock speeds, and most importantly is still a PPC chip. So rather than create a mess 10x worse than the switch from 68k to PPC by going from PPC to x86-64, Apple would be able to switch to a 64 bit architecture and still maintain backwards compatibility.
No, if they were real CS students, it would be Mountain Dew... with liquid nitrogen cooling of course.
Come on now
on
Broken .Mac?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I really hate to rag on the editors like the trend seems to be sometimes, but is there any way to give a (-1, Editor should have read about this, duh)? While I don't have.Mac myself (being a college student that $50 has been appropriated for food and/or beer), I know many people who do and not once have I heard them complain about it being down or unavailable. In fact, the most I usually hear is about how iDisk is a lot faster than before it was a pay service.
To the cowardly anonymous poster of this article, if you are really unhappy, discontinue your service and send them a nasty letter/email. If you don't want to do this, I would recommend plugging in your phone cord or ethernet cord before you try to go online next time. This usually is a big help in avoiding "downtime."
BTW, my ex-girlfriend's parents own the land where the Wright Brothers had their shop (now a hotel), so I'm practically an expert on the matter.
My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend knows this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass-out at 31 Flavors last night and who's parent's own the patent office that Einstein worked at, so if you have any questions about the theory of relativity I'm practically an expert on the matter.
Who the hell modded the parent up? The grand-parent is at worst an average comment and at best insightful or interesting depending on how you see it. The parent obviously is a troll who didn't read the article. The majority of the article is about the index, not the ads as the parent would like you to believe. It's times like this we need a -1 Hypocrite rating.
However, the goals of the engineer are very clear: envision, design, implement, sell.
Not only do I agree with the parent's view that "use" is more important to an engineer fundamentally than "sell," but I think it is vital to add "make work" after implement. Every engineer will tell you that things don't always come out as planned all the time. One of the most rewarding things about engineering is taking that difficult problem and massaging it, working with it, and sometimes smashing it with a very large blunt object (*Warning* - Only if the two previously mentioned methods failed.) until you can make it work as planned. There is nothing more rewarding than the feeling of standing back and watching something that is the byproduct of your ingenuity go to work.
I nearly shit myself when I saw that these guys were releasing a FAT binary. Hell, I haven't seen one of those in ages. I feel a sudden urge of nostalgia to find a computer running System 7.
I am your stereotypical Mac user who could still negotiate System 6 with his eyes closed yet before OS X knew little to nothing about *nix. Aside from my computer bible (Mac OS X: Unleashed), Fink has been the single most valuable tool for introducing me to the open source community. I tried compiling a few programs by myself before I used Fink, and I must say that it was a daunting task. However, with Fink I have been exposed to a ton of OSS that I never would have tried in the first place because it wouldn't be worth going through the pain of installing something I just wanted to check out.
As great as the software is, I am equally impressed by the community of fink users. I installed Linux on my TiBook just to check it out, yet when I went on IRC for help I was ignored at best and treated with hostility at worst. I went into #fink today asking some questions which I realized were rather newbish later, yet I was still treated kindly and my questions were answered to my full satisfaction and then some.
Congratulations on a job well done to everyone who has helped with Fink. Keep up the good work!
The one on the far left is an iBook. On the far right is a TiBook. The one at the bottom of the screen is a Pismo I believe, but I'm not sure. Can anyone verify this?
Your best bet is trying to find the cold hard facts about the number of violent crimes committed, the rate of gun ownership, and the laws about gun control, and then analyzing this on your own. If you read into someone else's report, you are most likely going to see something that has a bias one way or the other. If you have the data to look at yourself, you can draw conclusions on your own without much bias as long as you have an open mind. Just remember that there are many factors to take into account. Gun control laws aren't the only thing that affects violent crime. A good way might be to find places that have institued major changes in their gun control laws and see how this affected the crime rates.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why people are so eager to jump in bed with one monopolist when they clearly hate another.. Is it because Apple somehow redeemed itself? Apple still sells software for its own systems that it refuses to port to other systems. They refuse to open their architecture.
The reason is plain and simple: Apple is not a monopoly. Apple's marketshare is way smaller than Microsoft's for the desktop computing market. Their marketshare for hardware is basically the same percentage. What most people falsely claim is that Apple has a "monopoly" on the Apple brand computer market or something, to which about the only response is "Umm, duh." That would be like saying Ford has a monopoly on making Ford brand automobiles.
Is it because Apple somehow redeemed itself?
While many of the Mac faithful never left the community, those who did during the bad years and the new-to-Mac crowd seem to think (at least a lot do) that Apple has "redeemed" itself with OS X. Unix on the desktop with a good balance between the benefits of both open source and proprietary development can do wonders for a companies reputation.
Apple still sells software for its own systems that it refuses to port to other systems.
Wow, who would have ever thought that a company that sells an integrated hardware and OS package would want to write software for it? If common sense makes Apple evil, then I guess you are right. Also, why would Apple want to take the time to port its software, much of which is freeware, to other operating systems when Apple is a company that makes 90%+ of its revenue from hardware sales, hardware that is tied very closely to the OS.
They refuse to open their architecture.
FUD, plain and simple. USB, IEEE 1394, 802.11b and 802.11g, AGP, ATA, SCSI, SDRAM, and the list goes on. About the only thing that isn't open is the mobo, but this all goes back to Apple being a hardware company as far as revenues go. And if the hardware using lots of common standards isn't enough, how about the OS being open sourced, based on an open source kernel, and using a combination of open source userlands.
I don't know if you are trolling, bitter, or just plain ignorant, but please stop spreading FUD about Apple.
Gorvernment officials banning something they don't understand? Shocker.
Slashdot anti-government troll posting without thinking? Shocker.
The Segway is much more comparable to a bicycle than it is to a pedestrian as it travels much faster than a pedestrian, it weighs much more than just a pedestrian, and would hurt someone more than if they were run into by a pedestrian. Assuming they make a provision allowing for the Segways to be used in the bike lane or something similiar (I didn't see this in the article), there is really no reason to criticize the SF government.
I would hardly call the OS X market virgin anymore. If you look at the games most played on GameRanger (by far the biggest online gaming service for Macs), all of them besides Rogue Spear have OS X native versions. While there aren't as many games from big publishers on OS X, there is still a very hefty number. The games on that list are all ports of games made by big companies. Very few small companies have been able to put out fun, exciting, original titles. One notable exception is Ambrosia who puts out, among other things, the classic Escape Velocity series. Other Mac games from small, independent developers that I can think of that gained moderate notoriety are Airburst and Netfungus.
The common theme of these games is that they focus on the gameplay while using relatively simple looking graphics. It's unrealistic to expect a small company to put out a modern FPS given the complexity that such a project requires. However, a game with simple and fun gameplay can do well even if it doesn't have all the latest bells and whistles to wow the user superficially.
In Andrew Tanenbaum's Computer Networking, he outlined the idea of a "flying LAN" as early as 1996.
Yeah, and next thing you know we will be seeing posts on a newsgroup that 802.11b is obsolete compared to the WLAN that Tannenbaum proposed back in '96.
Appleworks is a good word processing replacement. For 99% of the people, it will provide the word processing features they need. However, the biggest problem with it is that it does not handle converting M$ Word documents well. And let's face it, pretty much no matter where you go, you will need to interact with M$ Word documents.
From the people I know who use Excel extensively, Appleworks does not cut it as a spreadsheet app. Excel apparently far outdoes it in features. I don't know about how well it handles conversions, but if it is anything like the word processing side of Appleworks, I don't think it will be pretty.
I think Apple realizes the niche that Appleworks fills. It is a nice, cheap office suite for students and some non-advanced consumers. I use Appleworks to type all my papers for college, and it fits that need very well. When I need something a little more powerful, I bust out OpenOffice.
I think Apple realizes that rather than possibly trying futilely to expand Appleworks beyond what it is, they can support different projects or create new ones to fill the needs of office suite users. Keynote looks like one hell of a Powerpoint killer from everything I have seen and heard. Also, I don't think it is coincidence at all that Apple released their version of X11 a day or two before OpenOffice released a new beta. Those releases combined with Safari makes it very clear that Apple is weening itself off its dependence on the beast from Redmond.
I don't know how popular it is in the US, but text messaging is big over here. People chat by text message about all sorts of things too trivial to ring someone about
Don't worry, over here in the States nothing is too trivial to make a cell phone call about, especially when driving it seems.
I don't think it is a matter of holding everyone responsible for any attack that may come from their machine. It is about holding negligent users responsible for their negligent actions.
For exameple, if someone owns a gun but keeps it locked in a safe in their house and stores the ammo somewhere else, yet some master thief manages to steal their gun and use it in a crime, I doubt anyone would say that is the fault of the gun owner. However, if the same gun owner left the gun loaded and laying around on their front lawn and someone came by, picked it up, and shot somebody, they would be sued and/or arrested for their negligence.
The problem is determining at what point is a computer user negligent. Is your average consumer negligent for connecting their Windows box to a high-speed connection and not using any firewall software? Or is it someone who turns on various services like file sharing without knowing full well what they are getting into? Or is it anyone who takes reasonable precautions, but when they get cracked they don't realize it until their box has had a chance to eat up tons of somebody else's bandwidth?
M$ seems to not understand that viewing the source is only one third of the Open Source equation. The other half is being able to modify the code, and distribute those modifications.
;)
Judging by your math, I'm going to say you are related to Yogi Berra somehow.
(For the humor impaired, yes I realized what he intended to say.)
Pff, the only reason vim keeps believers in its "religion" is because if you accidentally start it you won't be able to figure out the damn command to quit it!
Also, as an avid emacs user I must correct the FUD in your post. Even the most die hard of my kind know that emacs stands for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.
Does anyone know how this will work for Fink users? Fink depends on most everything being in /sw, and tons of packages depend on X11. I just hope these will work well together because an Apple version of X11 with a nice window manager would be heaven at times.
I have Debian (insert joke about ease of use here - I am used to Fink and wanted to use apt-get for package management) installed on my TiBook. Just to get X to work properly, I had to screw with the refresh rates in xinitrc. I still can't get it to fill the whole screen because the TiBook is wider than normal. I tried a few things that should have worked, but to no avail. I put it on the backburner seeing as how I only installed Linux to try it out, not to replace OS X.
I'll probably try Yellow Dog Linux or Mandrake and see if I'm pleasantly like you say, but I guess I'm hesitant for now.
Linux has big strides to take before you can think about it surpassing Macs as the #2 desktop OS. I don't want to disparage Linux because if I weren't using a Mac I would most likely run Linux, but I see no way Linux will compete as a mass desktop OS until it becomes far easier for the average user. For a geek who loves to mess with his system it is great, but for Joe Blow who wants to check his email, browse the web, an do a little word processing, it is not a very interesting offering. Why spend time in emacs messing with config files just to make stuff work. Instead, you can have all the power of unix and the ease of use of a Mac with OS X.
Linux is great for some people, but OS X has something for pretty much everyone. I'll take my Mac any day of the week.
I think the whole idea of the H1B should be rethought seriously. I guess some people would say we need them to cover a shortage of workers, but especially considering our economic times right now we don't need 200 thousand of these people taking jobs from Americans. The H1B program should be scrapped to almost nothing. Make a provision allowing for a temporary allowance of a limited number of H1B's when unemployment is at a certain low level, but other than that cut them all off. You want to come to America? That's fine, do it like all the other people who immigrate, get green cards, etc. Don't do it by coming over, taking an American's job for a few years, then taking that money back to your homeland when your 3 or 6 years are up.
If the development of the 970 by IBM is coming along as rumored, there is absolutely no reason why Apple would want to go to the Opteron over the 970. The 970 is also 64 bit, will probably achieve similar clock speeds, and most importantly is still a PPC chip. So rather than create a mess 10x worse than the switch from 68k to PPC by going from PPC to x86-64, Apple would be able to switch to a 64 bit architecture and still maintain backwards compatibility.
No, if they were real CS students, it would be Mountain Dew... with liquid nitrogen cooling of course.
I really hate to rag on the editors like the trend seems to be sometimes, but is there any way to give a (-1, Editor should have read about this, duh)? While I don't have .Mac myself (being a college student that $50 has been appropriated for food and/or beer), I know many people who do and not once have I heard them complain about it being down or unavailable. In fact, the most I usually hear is about how iDisk is a lot faster than before it was a pay service.
To the cowardly anonymous poster of this article, if you are really unhappy, discontinue your service and send them a nasty letter/email. If you don't want to do this, I would recommend plugging in your phone cord or ethernet cord before you try to go online next time. This usually is a big help in avoiding "downtime."
And the fact that the new "girl" bot looks a regression of design versus the t1000.
I don't know about you, but if that's a regression, I'm all in favor of them sliding further and further backwards.
BTW, my ex-girlfriend's parents own the land where the Wright Brothers had their shop (now a hotel), so I'm practically an expert on the matter.
My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend knows this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass-out at 31 Flavors last night and who's parent's own the patent office that Einstein worked at, so if you have any questions about the theory of relativity I'm practically an expert on the matter.
Who the hell modded the parent up? The grand-parent is at worst an average comment and at best insightful or interesting depending on how you see it. The parent obviously is a troll who didn't read the article. The majority of the article is about the index, not the ads as the parent would like you to believe. It's times like this we need a -1 Hypocrite rating.
However, the goals of the engineer are very clear: envision, design, implement, sell.
Not only do I agree with the parent's view that "use" is more important to an engineer fundamentally than "sell," but I think it is vital to add "make work" after implement. Every engineer will tell you that things don't always come out as planned all the time. One of the most rewarding things about engineering is taking that difficult problem and massaging it, working with it, and sometimes smashing it with a very large blunt object (*Warning* - Only if the two previously mentioned methods failed.) until you can make it work as planned. There is nothing more rewarding than the feeling of standing back and watching something that is the byproduct of your ingenuity go to work.
I nearly shit myself when I saw that these guys were releasing a FAT binary. Hell, I haven't seen one of those in ages. I feel a sudden urge of nostalgia to find a computer running System 7.
Surely you're not trying to say that 20% comes out to 1 in 7 as a fraction.
I am your stereotypical Mac user who could still negotiate System 6 with his eyes closed yet before OS X knew little to nothing about *nix. Aside from my computer bible (Mac OS X: Unleashed), Fink has been the single most valuable tool for introducing me to the open source community. I tried compiling a few programs by myself before I used Fink, and I must say that it was a daunting task. However, with Fink I have been exposed to a ton of OSS that I never would have tried in the first place because it wouldn't be worth going through the pain of installing something I just wanted to check out.
As great as the software is, I am equally impressed by the community of fink users. I installed Linux on my TiBook just to check it out, yet when I went on IRC for help I was ignored at best and treated with hostility at worst. I went into #fink today asking some questions which I realized were rather newbish later, yet I was still treated kindly and my questions were answered to my full satisfaction and then some.
Congratulations on a job well done to everyone who has helped with Fink. Keep up the good work!
The one on the far left is an iBook. On the far right is a TiBook. The one at the bottom of the screen is a Pismo I believe, but I'm not sure. Can anyone verify this?
Your best bet is trying to find the cold hard facts about the number of violent crimes committed, the rate of gun ownership, and the laws about gun control, and then analyzing this on your own. If you read into someone else's report, you are most likely going to see something that has a bias one way or the other. If you have the data to look at yourself, you can draw conclusions on your own without much bias as long as you have an open mind. Just remember that there are many factors to take into account. Gun control laws aren't the only thing that affects violent crime. A good way might be to find places that have institued major changes in their gun control laws and see how this affected the crime rates.
And just because I love this joke, here it is:
How does the ACLU count to 10?
1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.