This is changing - apps like that one are now required to offer both options, with the in-app option going via Apple's servers and them taking a cut. Either way, you still own your own hardware.
Who's talking about subscriptions (that do go through Apple's servers if you buy via the in-app system)? We're talking about the hardware, which you claim "you do not own" because of the way Apple chooses to manage its own servers and storefronts, that your hardware has access to.
It wouldn't matter if Apple charged for subscription content in magic beans, it would not change the fact that you own the hardware that you purchased. Whether you can access servers that belong to Apple and buy things from them in a store owned by Apple is a different matter.
It's hyperbole like this that is making slashdot look foolish. It comes up any time a managed ecosystem like this comes up (PSN, Xbox Live, App Store, Tivo EPG etc) that the company in question merely "leased" the device to you and that you "don't own your own hardware".
It's nonsense, and it degrades the argument. Buying a PS3, or an Xbox, or an iPhone, or a Tivo is one thing. Having access to the services that those devices have available is entirely another.
If Sony cuts you off from the PSN for violating the ToS it is *not* analogous at all to "the device belonging to Sony".
If the arguments against closed systems like PSN or the App Store etc begin with such false statements, how can anyone take the genuine parts of the argument seriously? You're shooting yourself in the foot.
Who says you can't be skeptical about AGW? That's never been the argument.
The reason it appears so is because there is a vast imbalance in the two "sides" of the AGW debate regarding scientific knowledge and understanding of the way science works. On the one side you have actual scientists, on the other side you have people (often high profile TV and radio hosts) where the level of scepticism is on the order of "well, look at all that record snowfall we had last night! so much for this so-called "global warming" eh?!"
There's a difference calling out that sort of "contra evidence" as rubbish and pointing at the large propaganda machines that fund the anti-AGW movements. The weight of politics in the debate is far, far swung to the one side (but it clearly not absent from the other side). A large number of skeptics are asking to be weighted at an equal level to that of professional scientists when they really have no business or expertise in that field. It's all very well "offering the other side's point of view" - just because these non-science detractors, or those who haven't even looked at the evidence but still argue against it on "common sense" arguments (like 'the earth is so big, there's no way we could be affecting its climate') or who demonstrate their knowledge of science is shaky at best (the moon! you can't explain that!).
Science is all about listening to skeptics. Challenging your model is the way you make it better so that we *can* explain those gaps, or look at areas we didn't understand before with fresh eyes and different ideas. That has never been in dispute, and actual climate scientists (and others who work closely in the field like physical chemists and spectroscopy experts whose areas of study are not just confined to the Earth's atmosphere or atmospheres in general) have never worked from a platform of "you're not allowed to criticise us". In that respect it is no different from any other area of science. The only difference is that it has a serious amount of political and commercial baggage attached to it, with a large number of special interest groups who are not pleased that the science seems to be telling them things that are not profitable or politically convenient to hear.
If you (the general you) have any scientific criticism of the models used in the AGW and climate change in general, then scientists want to know - it's an area of interest that has been refined over decades, and is getting better all the time. You (again, the general you) might want to start from the generally accepted model that increased CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs IR, and that the mean average temperature has gone up, and if you fill a greenhouse with steadily higher partial pressures of CO2 and measure the effect on the temperature the results are clear. Add to that the fact that the CO2 concentration has jumped far, far above the highest level it has ever been in 600,000 years and you have to conclude that humans are *likely* to be responsible for that. If there is another model that explains it that can stand up to scientific review then they are open to hearing it.
The trouble is, much of the criticism is aimed at the scientists themselves, or just doesn't understand the data that is presented - science has always had an image problem, especially in conveying results to ley people, and this weakness has been expertly exploited by those with an agenda to push.
There's currently (as far as I am aware) no way to send that sort of data to and from the iPhone via the dock connector. If they added more to the data interface then possibly - right now it's pretty much only an avenue into the iPod sections of the device - database of tracks and playlists and all metadata and ability to control and search and then the actual music data itself (when the head unit is in control it copies/streams the music over the USB interface and decodes it in its own hardware) - although the dock connector has line-out pins, they are not often used in this context.
It does already have video output, but at the moment no way to receive any input from a touch sensor to control the UI as if you were using the phone itself.
That is remarkable. I just spent a little time browsing around Ecko's site, trying to push it to high CPU, jumping between sections, playing the videos.
On Safari 5 on OS X I was barely breaking 39% CPU (2Ghz Core 2 Duo) which is a dramatic difference to the considerably higher loads of other sites (80% while sitting idle on the Diablo 3 page, for example, or 90% CPU while streaming HD content from BBC iPlayer). This is the first flash site I have seen that is actually not a huge resource hog. Why aren't more like that?:/
Both of those points are your opinion, as my points were mine.
As I said, from my own personal standpoint, the iMac was well worth the price I paid for it, and I'm not disputing that you can buy quality PC hardware - but there's just a lot of junk out there, which is typically what is used in these price comparisons. I used to build my own machines before switching, but ultimately decided that I preferred to go the iMac route, but I'm not implying that will work for everyone.
In terms of "completely over specced" I would say in some respects yes - the Mac Pro line, for example, it just a little silly these days. It is extremely expensive and is over specced (server-classed-and-priced CPUs for instance). The consumer lines, however, I would argue are well specced and not too expensive - the Macbook, Macbook Pro and iMac are ideal for people wanting a no-fuss commodity PC that they don't have to build themselves.
They're more expensive than other commodity laptops and desktops, but around the same for machines of similar build quality (they're not trying to compete with Dell and others in a race for who can make a laptop the cheapest). There are nice PC laptops out there - I did a lot of research and digging and hands-on testing when looking for one for my mother (who would have got a MBP, but her school would only pay for a "traditional" windows laptop - it didn't matter the brand, as long as it came with windows on it), so I know decent ones exist. The vast majority of them are substandard compared to Apple's offerings though (purely on a hardware perspective, including the physical case and chassis of the machine) despite the bulk of the commodity parts being the same - RAM, HD, CPU etc.
What's a high end extra that you don't need on the Macbook Pro? (I am willing to concede that the Mac Pro is way over the odds, but it's just not targeted at the consumer)
There's a difference between stating that OS X has a powerful, fully featured BSD core, and that it owes a vast amount of its power and benefits from BSD stuff and claiming that OS X is merely a "skinned" version of BSD, since it is considerably more than that.
Your strawman argument is pretty weak - I think you're on an off day.
That wasn't my point - I know you can run anything on a regular PC, even Apple (and they don't actually care that much if you do - while the licence officially says no, there's no technical restriction stopping you [you modify the install image by removing a text file that says "please don't steal OS X"] -no serials, no DRM, no encrypted images, no deliberately malformed optical media that has data outside the spec so it is hard to copy.
My point was that an Apple machine is also in that boat where you can choose any OS you like, so if you like the hardware but not the software you are not solely restricted to OS X if you don't want to be. My statement also isn't a lie - it's my opinion and I didn't claim it was *the* best, simply one of the best. It's an opinion I put forth from experience. I'm not saying there aren't also excellent non-Apple laptops, or that a MBP will suit everyone, but as a general case, it is up there as one of the top picks for Windows laptops purely on hardware merits.
If you think OS X is merely a "skinned" BSD, you are either enormously clueless or deliberately facetious. Possibly just wilfully ignorant.
Hate it, love it or be ambivalent about it, but your statement is simply inaccurate if it was an attempt to hit a barn door with a shotgun from 5 paces it would have missed. Also known as the "Dick Cheney school of shotgun accuracy".
Especially the part about the marketing department putting it together. That's a good one. Anyone ever told you that you should try standup?
The BBC iPlayer plugin uses the open source libraries that can decode flash video streams and pass them to XBMC (libRTMP), so while not a fully featured flash player, it does exactly what that flash player does when running in a browser, except at a quarter the CPU power. Even with all the added fluff of flash (animation, all the scripting etc), just playing a video stream should be a simple, low resource task.
The XBMC plugin is here http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayerv2/ - I can watch HD streams using this without frame dropping that results in watching the same streams with Flash (in any of the three browsers I have on this machine), either in fullscreen [slightly better for flash] or windowed [clearly a massive performance hit due to scaling]. There should be no difference, or little difference, but it is *huge*.
The "not exposing the necessary stuff for flash acceleration" is a red herring. There was no h.264 acceleration *at all* on OS X (even for Apple's own software) until the 10.6.3 update added it for certain NVidia GPUs only (and in later releases, most of the modern GPUs shipping in Macs). The comparisons made between different flash versions (across Windows and OS X) also had no hardware acceleration on the Windows side either, and yet showed much better performance.
As far as other hardware acceleration goes, all software on OS X has access to Quartz, and by extension Quartz Extreme (the hardware acceleration portion) - this is transparent to applications and handled by the Quartz framework if your GPU supports it (pretty much any GPU with 64Mb of memory and up) - there was no "denying access" to this stuff.
Safari has been working on their JS engine (or rather, the WebKit team has been, which features a lot of input from Apple, although Nitro is separate from WebKit [as you say, Chrome uses WebKit and VP8), the same team works on it. Safari 5, released in 2010 had a 30% speed up over v4 with the Nitro engine - it hasn't been standing still.
Marketing will only get you so far. You have to back it up with actual product quality too.
After this amount of time, even with sometimes fantastical (some say magical!) marketing, if they were selling polished turds people would stop buying.
(edit after preview: for some reason the comment system is adding a ton of extra carriage returns - I didn't type it this way)
The case is part of the hardware. I want all of that commodity stuff they put inside (it makes obtaining upgrades and repairing easier, and with the same architecture underneath it makes cross platform software development easier offering a larger selection of software for me to use).
What I *don't* want is the shitty, noisy, tacky plastic cases that come with most PCs. I am under no illusions that the hardware *inside* my iMac is much the same as any other PC, but it's the entire package that I bought, not just the internal hardware.
The price premium (about 20% over an equivalent machine at the time I bought it, over 4 years ago) was well worth it. This is typical across the whole range - the physical hardware is rated very highly across the industry, mainly because the bar is set so low by generic PCs with really crappy cases, both laptop and desktop.
The best OS claim is subjective, but the beauty is you can run your choice of OS on an Apple - it's no irony that one of the best Windows laptops is the Macbook Pro.
The "fancy Apply case" is not just for show. It may not be worth it to you, but that doesn't just make it noise in the signal.
I will also add a major disclaimer, to head off the inevitable "but their hardware is crap" posts: the preceding post does not mean I think the hardware is perfect, or that it doesn't have some design issues that I would personally change, for example, the I/O ports on the iMac are on the back because they're right on the logic board, but it makes then annoying to access if you have a USB stick, so you really need a hub so you don;t have to fumble about back there - adding a port on the side [just under where they put the SD card slot on the new iMacs) would be my number one change. There have also been issues with some design features on other products - the mighty mouse with the tiny trackball, for example, and the issues with certain laptop power cables before the redesign.
I'm not even going to address the whole "oh woe is us, the oppressed minority non-liberal media, we're so under attack!" aspect, or that you think those on the "left" don;t have accurate quotes for what hate mongers like Rush, Beck Hannity et al actually say in the era of broadcast TV, radio and the internet where transcripts and multimedia are commonplace. It's not like they can claim to be misquoted (not that it stops Fox News itself from selectively editing clips from the Daily Show to attempt to show liberals in the worst possible light - the Simpsons episode where Homer is accused of sexual harassment and goes on TV to try to explain himself only for the show to edit him [poorly and obviously] to make him look guilty is eerily accurate before its time) but instead the final point:
Another amusing thing is that many people on slashdot already don't trust Google. But when Glenn Beck says it, he is wrong?
That is just a hilarious straw man, and a classic Fox News style counter to criticism.
Many people are mistrusting of Google because of the way it handles search results and collects data/personal information. Glenn Beck's argument is that it is "in bed with the government (where here, "the government" means "Obama and the Democrats") and is thus, evil.
One is a concern for privacy and the gradual emergence of a company that knows an awful lot about you, the other is an argument that says "this company has association with Obama and must be feared and undermined by any means necessary".
Person A says he dislikes Linux because he can't run his Windows-only on it, and WINE won't work for his specific use cases. Person B says they don't like Linux because it was written by an America-hating Euro commie liberal.
Person A's and Person B's arguments are non-commuting. One can be right while the other is wrong. Your attempt to somehow claim that calling out Glenn Beck on being a raving, wilful liar who spreads FUD for money is somehow hypocritical of slashdot because many of its users happen to distrust Google for other reasons is just silly.
Also nonsense. Do they also block Firefox and Chrome and browsers they do not control? Flash performance is equally is bad in all browsers.
Also, how do they "block access from the browser"? The Safari main process handles input from the keyboard and mouse, but other than that the plugin has access to the same core features of OS X. Safari doesn't "block" anything. Flash performance actually got better when they put it in a separate process of its own.
No, what he's saying is that the comparison that the original thread starter made is that Dell would become like Apple's PC making division - ie, the part of it that designs the laptops, desktops and tower systems.
The part of Apple that designs the phone and iOS product line is irrelevant here, even if it does make more money. It doesn't matter what iOS is doing, Apple's original business is continuing much as it did 5 years ago, even with the switch to Intel.
Not that I necessarily agree that Dell buying AMD makes them like Apple's non-iOS hardware division, but that was the point he was making.
It's clearly not all (if at all) Apple's fault, since the flash players that other people have built for OS X (there's one in XBMC that I use for BBC iPlayer streams, and there was one in On2's video compression app before it went away) that are much better than the actual flash plugin.
There's clearly a problem when the exact same flash stream for iPlayer takes 30-40% CPU in XBMC and 70-100% in Adobe's plugin, or are you suggesting that Apple is "playing nice and giving the OSS developers access" that they are not giving to Adobe? How exactly would they do that?
Flash is a performance nightmare, and not just on OS X (although it is particularly bad on OS X) and it's not Apple's fault, as much as Adobe try to tell you otherwise. It's a pretty hefty performance hog on Windows too - is that also Apple's fault? Correlation != Causation, but in this case, the performance sucks on two different operating systems *and* alternative flash players are better. Mmmmmm, clearly not any fault of Adobe's, oh no!
You try doing it with chemistry terms; you'll search for something like isomerism in conjunction with other terms and it will say "did you mean 'isomers'? here are the results for isomers".
No I bloody didn't! I searched for isomerism, I'm looking for information on the topic, not a list of chemicals that are isomers!
A simple example and in that case the results aren't hugely different (but they are different), but it happens all the time, especially with uncommon terms.
It's not so much "banning" as "your implementation is piss poor, even on Windows, try again later". If Adobe actually grave a crap about flash performance they would work on it and they have made some inroads with 10.1 - it's a world better on OS X, for example, compared to Flash 10.0, but it's still nowhere near good enough for a mobile device that doesn't have a ton of extra CPU to throw at it to make performance acceptable. If there was actually a properly decent flash player for mobiles that could run on iOS then Apple may reconsider - as it does often when it is apparent that it made a choice that didn't work out (3rd party multitasking, cut and paste), but I think even then they have already committed to HTML5 and see no reason to change.
If the XBMC guys (and by extension the people who write code in the projects they use) can make a better flash player than Adobe can, something is wrong with the picture. Not that open source coders contributing code as a hobby would be any less skilled than Adobe, per se, just that it's one of Adobe's core products and you think they'd throw a ton of resources at it to make it better, and it *can* be better than it is - a lot better. It just isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
This is changing - apps like that one are now required to offer both options, with the in-app option going via Apple's servers and them taking a cut. Either way, you still own your own hardware.
Who's talking about subscriptions (that do go through Apple's servers if you buy via the in-app system)? We're talking about the hardware, which you claim "you do not own" because of the way Apple chooses to manage its own servers and storefronts, that your hardware has access to.
It wouldn't matter if Apple charged for subscription content in magic beans, it would not change the fact that you own the hardware that you purchased. Whether you can access servers that belong to Apple and buy things from them in a store owned by Apple is a different matter.
It's hyperbole like this that is making slashdot look foolish. It comes up any time a managed ecosystem like this comes up (PSN, Xbox Live, App Store, Tivo EPG etc) that the company in question merely "leased" the device to you and that you "don't own your own hardware".
It's nonsense, and it degrades the argument. Buying a PS3, or an Xbox, or an iPhone, or a Tivo is one thing. Having access to the services that those devices have available is entirely another.
If Sony cuts you off from the PSN for violating the ToS it is *not* analogous at all to "the device belonging to Sony".
If the arguments against closed systems like PSN or the App Store etc begin with such false statements, how can anyone take the genuine parts of the argument seriously? You're shooting yourself in the foot.
Who says you can't be skeptical about AGW? That's never been the argument.
The reason it appears so is because there is a vast imbalance in the two "sides" of the AGW debate regarding scientific knowledge and understanding of the way science works. On the one side you have actual scientists, on the other side you have people (often high profile TV and radio hosts) where the level of scepticism is on the order of "well, look at all that record snowfall we had last night! so much for this so-called "global warming" eh?!"
There's a difference calling out that sort of "contra evidence" as rubbish and pointing at the large propaganda machines that fund the anti-AGW movements. The weight of politics in the debate is far, far swung to the one side (but it clearly not absent from the other side). A large number of skeptics are asking to be weighted at an equal level to that of professional scientists when they really have no business or expertise in that field. It's all very well "offering the other side's point of view" - just because these non-science detractors, or those who haven't even looked at the evidence but still argue against it on "common sense" arguments (like 'the earth is so big, there's no way we could be affecting its climate') or who demonstrate their knowledge of science is shaky at best (the moon! you can't explain that!).
Science is all about listening to skeptics. Challenging your model is the way you make it better so that we *can* explain those gaps, or look at areas we didn't understand before with fresh eyes and different ideas. That has never been in dispute, and actual climate scientists (and others who work closely in the field like physical chemists and spectroscopy experts whose areas of study are not just confined to the Earth's atmosphere or atmospheres in general) have never worked from a platform of "you're not allowed to criticise us". In that respect it is no different from any other area of science. The only difference is that it has a serious amount of political and commercial baggage attached to it, with a large number of special interest groups who are not pleased that the science seems to be telling them things that are not profitable or politically convenient to hear.
If you (the general you) have any scientific criticism of the models used in the AGW and climate change in general, then scientists want to know - it's an area of interest that has been refined over decades, and is getting better all the time. You (again, the general you) might want to start from the generally accepted model that increased CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs IR, and that the mean average temperature has gone up, and if you fill a greenhouse with steadily higher partial pressures of CO2 and measure the effect on the temperature the results are clear. Add to that the fact that the CO2 concentration has jumped far, far above the highest level it has ever been in 600,000 years and you have to conclude that humans are *likely* to be responsible for that. If there is another model that explains it that can stand up to scientific review then they are open to hearing it.
The trouble is, much of the criticism is aimed at the scientists themselves, or just doesn't understand the data that is presented - science has always had an image problem, especially in conveying results to ley people, and this weakness has been expertly exploited by those with an agenda to push.
Yes you do, you just don't own the App Store or the servers it runs on. They belong to Apple.
As far as the hardware in your hand, that's yours once you've bought it.
There's currently (as far as I am aware) no way to send that sort of data to and from the iPhone via the dock connector. If they added more to the data interface then possibly - right now it's pretty much only an avenue into the iPod sections of the device - database of tracks and playlists and all metadata and ability to control and search and then the actual music data itself (when the head unit is in control it copies/streams the music over the USB interface and decodes it in its own hardware) - although the dock connector has line-out pins, they are not often used in this context.
It does already have video output, but at the moment no way to receive any input from a touch sensor to control the UI as if you were using the phone itself.
That is remarkable. I just spent a little time browsing around Ecko's site, trying to push it to high CPU, jumping between sections, playing the videos.
On Safari 5 on OS X I was barely breaking 39% CPU (2Ghz Core 2 Duo) which is a dramatic difference to the considerably higher loads of other sites (80% while sitting idle on the Diablo 3 page, for example, or 90% CPU while streaming HD content from BBC iPlayer). This is the first flash site I have seen that is actually not a huge resource hog. Why aren't more like that? :/
Both of those points are your opinion, as my points were mine.
As I said, from my own personal standpoint, the iMac was well worth the price I paid for it, and I'm not disputing that you can buy quality PC hardware - but there's just a lot of junk out there, which is typically what is used in these price comparisons. I used to build my own machines before switching, but ultimately decided that I preferred to go the iMac route, but I'm not implying that will work for everyone.
In terms of "completely over specced" I would say in some respects yes - the Mac Pro line, for example, it just a little silly these days. It is extremely expensive and is over specced (server-classed-and-priced CPUs for instance). The consumer lines, however, I would argue are well specced and not too expensive - the Macbook, Macbook Pro and iMac are ideal for people wanting a no-fuss commodity PC that they don't have to build themselves.
They're more expensive than other commodity laptops and desktops, but around the same for machines of similar build quality (they're not trying to compete with Dell and others in a race for who can make a laptop the cheapest). There are nice PC laptops out there - I did a lot of research and digging and hands-on testing when looking for one for my mother (who would have got a MBP, but her school would only pay for a "traditional" windows laptop - it didn't matter the brand, as long as it came with windows on it), so I know decent ones exist. The vast majority of them are substandard compared to Apple's offerings though (purely on a hardware perspective, including the physical case and chassis of the machine) despite the bulk of the commodity parts being the same - RAM, HD, CPU etc.
What's a high end extra that you don't need on the Macbook Pro? (I am willing to concede that the Mac Pro is way over the odds, but it's just not targeted at the consumer)
There's a difference between stating that OS X has a powerful, fully featured BSD core, and that it owes a vast amount of its power and benefits from BSD stuff and claiming that OS X is merely a "skinned" version of BSD, since it is considerably more than that.
Your strawman argument is pretty weak - I think you're on an off day.
That wasn't my point - I know you can run anything on a regular PC, even Apple (and they don't actually care that much if you do - while the licence officially says no, there's no technical restriction stopping you [you modify the install image by removing a text file that says "please don't steal OS X"] -no serials, no DRM, no encrypted images, no deliberately malformed optical media that has data outside the spec so it is hard to copy.
My point was that an Apple machine is also in that boat where you can choose any OS you like, so if you like the hardware but not the software you are not solely restricted to OS X if you don't want to be. My statement also isn't a lie - it's my opinion and I didn't claim it was *the* best, simply one of the best. It's an opinion I put forth from experience. I'm not saying there aren't also excellent non-Apple laptops, or that a MBP will suit everyone, but as a general case, it is up there as one of the top picks for Windows laptops purely on hardware merits.
If you think OS X is merely a "skinned" BSD, you are either enormously clueless or deliberately facetious. Possibly just wilfully ignorant.
Hate it, love it or be ambivalent about it, but your statement is simply inaccurate if it was an attempt to hit a barn door with a shotgun from 5 paces it would have missed. Also known as the "Dick Cheney school of shotgun accuracy".
Especially the part about the marketing department putting it together. That's a good one. Anyone ever told you that you should try standup?
The BBC iPlayer plugin uses the open source libraries that can decode flash video streams and pass them to XBMC (libRTMP), so while not a fully featured flash player, it does exactly what that flash player does when running in a browser, except at a quarter the CPU power. Even with all the added fluff of flash (animation, all the scripting etc), just playing a video stream should be a simple, low resource task.
The XBMC plugin is here http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayerv2/ - I can watch HD streams using this without frame dropping that results in watching the same streams with Flash (in any of the three browsers I have on this machine), either in fullscreen [slightly better for flash] or windowed [clearly a massive performance hit due to scaling]. There should be no difference, or little difference, but it is *huge*.
The "not exposing the necessary stuff for flash acceleration" is a red herring. There was no h.264 acceleration *at all* on OS X (even for Apple's own software) until the 10.6.3 update added it for certain NVidia GPUs only (and in later releases, most of the modern GPUs shipping in Macs). The comparisons made between different flash versions (across Windows and OS X) also had no hardware acceleration on the Windows side either, and yet showed much better performance.
As far as other hardware acceleration goes, all software on OS X has access to Quartz, and by extension Quartz Extreme (the hardware acceleration portion) - this is transparent to applications and handled by the Quartz framework if your GPU supports it (pretty much any GPU with 64Mb of memory and up) - there was no "denying access" to this stuff.
Safari has been working on their JS engine (or rather, the WebKit team has been, which features a lot of input from Apple, although Nitro is separate from WebKit [as you say, Chrome uses WebKit and VP8), the same team works on it. Safari 5, released in 2010 had a 30% speed up over v4 with the Nitro engine - it hasn't been standing still.
What about the salaries of the people looking after those data centres and the App Store itself?
Marketing will only get you so far. You have to back it up with actual product quality too.
After this amount of time, even with sometimes fantastical (some say magical!) marketing, if they were selling polished turds people would stop buying.
(edit after preview: for some reason the comment system is adding a ton of extra carriage returns - I didn't type it this way)
The case is part of the hardware. I want all of that commodity stuff they put inside (it makes obtaining upgrades and repairing easier, and with the same architecture underneath it makes cross platform software development easier offering a larger selection of software for me to use).
What I *don't* want is the shitty, noisy, tacky plastic cases that come with most PCs. I am under no illusions that the hardware *inside* my iMac is much the same as any other PC, but it's the entire package that I bought, not just the internal hardware.
The price premium (about 20% over an equivalent machine at the time I bought it, over 4 years ago) was well worth it. This is typical across the whole range - the physical hardware is rated very highly across the industry, mainly because the bar is set so low by generic PCs with really crappy cases, both laptop and desktop.
The best OS claim is subjective, but the beauty is you can run your choice of OS on an Apple - it's no irony that one of the best Windows laptops is the Macbook Pro.
The "fancy Apply case" is not just for show. It may not be worth it to you, but that doesn't just make it noise in the signal.
I will also add a major disclaimer, to head off the inevitable "but their hardware is crap" posts: the preceding post does not mean I think the hardware is perfect, or that it doesn't have some design issues that I would personally change, for example, the I/O ports on the iMac are on the back because they're right on the logic board, but it makes then annoying to access if you have a USB stick, so you really need a hub so you don;t have to fumble about back there - adding a port on the side [just under where they put the SD card slot on the new iMacs) would be my number one change. There have also been issues with some design features on other products - the mighty mouse with the tiny trackball, for example, and the issues with certain laptop power cables before the redesign.
He't not talking about iOS.
I'm not even going to address the whole "oh woe is us, the oppressed minority non-liberal media, we're so under attack!" aspect, or that you think those on the "left" don;t have accurate quotes for what hate mongers like Rush, Beck Hannity et al actually say in the era of broadcast TV, radio and the internet where transcripts and multimedia are commonplace. It's not like they can claim to be misquoted (not that it stops Fox News itself from selectively editing clips from the Daily Show to attempt to show liberals in the worst possible light - the Simpsons episode where Homer is accused of sexual harassment and goes on TV to try to explain himself only for the show to edit him [poorly and obviously] to make him look guilty is eerily accurate before its time) but instead the final point:
Another amusing thing is that many people on slashdot already don't trust Google. But when Glenn Beck says it, he is wrong?
That is just a hilarious straw man, and a classic Fox News style counter to criticism.
Many people are mistrusting of Google because of the way it handles search results and collects data/personal information. Glenn Beck's argument is that it is "in bed with the government (where here, "the government" means "Obama and the Democrats") and is thus, evil.
One is a concern for privacy and the gradual emergence of a company that knows an awful lot about you, the other is an argument that says "this company has association with Obama and must be feared and undermined by any means necessary".
Person A says he dislikes Linux because he can't run his Windows-only on it, and WINE won't work for his specific use cases. Person B says they don't like Linux because it was written by an America-hating Euro commie liberal.
Person A's and Person B's arguments are non-commuting. One can be right while the other is wrong. Your attempt to somehow claim that calling out Glenn Beck on being a raving, wilful liar who spreads FUD for money is somehow hypocritical of slashdot because many of its users happen to distrust Google for other reasons is just silly.
Also nonsense. Do they also block Firefox and Chrome and browsers they do not control? Flash performance is equally is bad in all browsers.
Also, how do they "block access from the browser"? The Safari main process handles input from the keyboard and mouse, but other than that the plugin has access to the same core features of OS X. Safari doesn't "block" anything. Flash performance actually got better when they put it in a separate process of its own.
No, what he's saying is that the comparison that the original thread starter made is that Dell would become like Apple's PC making division - ie, the part of it that designs the laptops, desktops and tower systems.
The part of Apple that designs the phone and iOS product line is irrelevant here, even if it does make more money. It doesn't matter what iOS is doing, Apple's original business is continuing much as it did 5 years ago, even with the switch to Intel.
Not that I necessarily agree that Dell buying AMD makes them like Apple's non-iOS hardware division, but that was the point he was making.
Dick Clark has been complaining about it since the original new year's eve.
That is total rubbish. The core of OS X, including the graphics and windowing subsystems are *extensively* documented and supported, with examples and explanations. The resources are there, and there's no evidence of Apple "restricting access" to resources. You have all the tools that Apple does, and the overview is listed here:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Technology_Overview/GraphicsTechnologies/GraphicsTechnologies.html
Perhaps Adobe should start there?
It's clearly not all (if at all) Apple's fault, since the flash players that other people have built for OS X (there's one in XBMC that I use for BBC iPlayer streams, and there was one in On2's video compression app before it went away) that are much better than the actual flash plugin.
There's clearly a problem when the exact same flash stream for iPlayer takes 30-40% CPU in XBMC and 70-100% in Adobe's plugin, or are you suggesting that Apple is "playing nice and giving the OSS developers access" that they are not giving to Adobe? How exactly would they do that?
Flash is a performance nightmare, and not just on OS X (although it is particularly bad on OS X) and it's not Apple's fault, as much as Adobe try to tell you otherwise. It's a pretty hefty performance hog on Windows too - is that also Apple's fault? Correlation != Causation, but in this case, the performance sucks on two different operating systems *and* alternative flash players are better. Mmmmmm, clearly not any fault of Adobe's, oh no!
You are so right.
You try doing it with chemistry terms; you'll search for something like isomerism in conjunction with other terms and it will say "did you mean 'isomers'? here are the results for isomers".
No I bloody didn't! I searched for isomerism, I'm looking for information on the topic, not a list of chemicals that are isomers!
A simple example and in that case the results aren't hugely different (but they are different), but it happens all the time, especially with uncommon terms.
Jimmy Hoffa.
It's not so much "banning" as "your implementation is piss poor, even on Windows, try again later". If Adobe actually grave a crap about flash performance they would work on it and they have made some inroads with 10.1 - it's a world better on OS X, for example, compared to Flash 10.0, but it's still nowhere near good enough for a mobile device that doesn't have a ton of extra CPU to throw at it to make performance acceptable. If there was actually a properly decent flash player for mobiles that could run on iOS then Apple may reconsider - as it does often when it is apparent that it made a choice that didn't work out (3rd party multitasking, cut and paste), but I think even then they have already committed to HTML5 and see no reason to change.
If the XBMC guys (and by extension the people who write code in the projects they use) can make a better flash player than Adobe can, something is wrong with the picture. Not that open source coders contributing code as a hobby would be any less skilled than Adobe, per se, just that it's one of Adobe's core products and you think they'd throw a ton of resources at it to make it better, and it *can* be better than it is - a lot better. It just isn't.
The is only one problem: entropy, leading to the eventual heat death of the universe.