No, this is Apple choosing not to sell something in the store that it owns, runs, hosts, pays for and controls.
A business can choose to sell what it likes (or choose not to sell things it doesn't like). You as a consumer are free to not patronise said store. You as a consumer are also free to not buy an iPod/iPhone/iPad knowing well ahead of time that the App Store is your only source of software (without jailbreaking).
It depends where your files are. You don't have to have iTunes in auto mode; you can turn it off and it behaves like other jukebox software with references to files but no actual automatic management.
For someone who wouldn't even begin to fathom what a mount point is, or a network share, or who just doesn't have more than one machine then it works very well.
With a little trickery you can make it work with network shares just as seamlessly as if it was on a permanently attached drive (including automounting a volume if it's not already up) but it's much more prone to falling over. It just wasn't designed with someone who manually shares their music across multiple machines from a server - that's what Airtunes is for (for those who couldn't do it themselves).
The biggest single limitation with iTunes as it stands is that you can't have different accounts (ie, different copies of iTunes) accessing the same library - it just confuses it. So keeping your library on a remote server is problematic if you have more than one computer accessing it. In that instance you need some sort of managing software on the server itself (or a copy of iTunes running locally that shares the music out that way).
It's one of the downsides of simplifying the software for the average user - you have to compromise somewhere.
Apple's i5 and i7 laptops were released in April 2010, so also early 2010. They very likely use the same chip as the Z11 - it was the first time you could put an i5 or i7 into a laptop without using a desktop chip and compromising.
It sounds like a nice machine, and for $2000 I would expect it to be. It clearly makes some compromises compared to the Macbook Pro, and beats it in other areas - the Macbook's battery lasts twice as long, for example, but it doesn't have a bluray drive (OS X lacks the DRM/HDCP pathway thing needed for the decrypting of BD movies, so shipping with a BD drive is a bit pointless at the moment), and while it has the same GPU, it has only 256Mb on there. The 13" MBP is also a lot less than $2000 (unless you start bulking it up with an SSD, extra horsepower etc).
The Z11 is a decent ultraportable that is comparable to a Macbook Pro - they're both hitting in the above average weight class (as opposed to some $400 piece of junk built to cost), but they're not all that different; just slightly different design/spec decisions made creating two distinct products that perform similarly (give or take a bit here and there).
So when I want to play Halo 3 on my Linux based computer you'll have some argument about how "easy to use and freedom in software choice" means not having to play the games I want to play?
The MPEG2 I used to shuffle around Final Cut Pro didn't seem to make it "BARF". Used to spend many an hour with old DVDs from clients wanting specific bits pulled off old disks they had to be included in various training vids/demo stuff. The Mac(s) - used more than one - didn't seem to care at all that it was MPEG2, often touched by intermediate sources.
It even handles Sony's slightly modified HD format that the XDCAM units record onto modified BD cassettes/cartridge disks (remember those old school CDROM caddies? they're back!).
I hesitate to say this to a Certified Solaris Admin (ooh), since you *clearly* know what you're doing, but did you have the right codecs installed?
If the Apple store have done everything in their power already then they have changed the RAM, reinstalled the OS and checked for obvious damage. If it has been sent away by the Apple store, they may have done everything up to replacing the entire logic board.
If it's 18 months old she can buy Apple care (can be bought at any time after purchase to extend the 1 year Applecare to 3 years from date of purchase) and have it sent off. If it is sent in for Applecare repair 3 times for the same fault and still reproduces it, they will issue her a new laptop instead.
If it is having a kernel panic more than once every 2 years or so then I suspect it is a lemon with a manufacturing defect in it somewhere. They happen from time to time.
I have 3 personal Macs, look after 8 others in the immediate family, 3 more with close friends, and another 12 or so in a company setting that I haven't seen in some time but spent a couple of years with.
The only time I have seen kernel panics on any of them has been due to RAM issues. Swap out the stick, problem solved.
So, "from what I can gather", it's not at all common in the Mac world.
Your anecdote vs mine.
(In reality, they are computers like any others, and can have all sorts of gremlins. A kernel panic on OS X is a sign of a very severe gremlin - if you see one, you don't just shrug it off like a windows crash, it's normally indicative of something serious happening).
How the heck is a pack of Salt and Vinegar flavour crisps the easiest thing to use? Why pay all that extra money for ease of use? I can just rustle up some chips myself with a knife and a frying pan, then make the sodium acetate I need in a brainlessly simple reaction using household chemicals. You know the ones, and how to obtain the pure product right, that you can then put on your home made chips?
Why pay for someone to handle that sort of thing for me? I can do it all myself!
Now, I might be able to manage an mp3 player that required me to move binary files around, but it doesn't mean I want to. I love the fact that I can plug in my iPhone and have it handle all that for me (especially with the automatic handling of new music as my moods change with smart playlists keeping track of everything - including what I have played on the iPod since it was last synced).
My mother, on the other hand, is just about getting around the concept of having a Home folder, and a USB memory stick, and attaching files by email. Deeper folder trees (despite their clearly simple extension to the Home folder concept to you and I) are not really intuitive to her. The iPod/iTunes is excellent for her - it keeps track of her music, organises it and syncs and manages the iPod for her. She's a smart person, but computers are a new thing for her, and the iPod gives her access to something that she doesn't have to learn all in one go to get enjoyment out of (the level of ease/competence with a computer would have to be much better for a third party mp3 player).
This is consistently a thing that slashdot does not understand, and that Apple understands *extremely well*. That even if a person can compile their own OS from source, and manage everything by hand, that *they don't always want to*, or in the case of less technical people, just cannot do easily on their own, without vast frustration, regardless of how easy it seems.
Which is one of the reasons why Apple is selling products hand over fist, and a large portion of slashdot is going "huh? but why?" or "this product will fail!" while completely missing its redeeming features for a large portion of the population who aren;t them.
I'm not going to laugh derisively at you, or call you a moron because you can't do a retrosynthetic analysis on the flavour in your curry, and then be able to whip that up from relatively simple starting materials, or laugh when you can't tell me what happens to certain spices if they are overheated. I mean, it's pretty basic functional group chemistry - it's handled just like any other basic organic mechanism. I don't know about you, but that's an easy one!
"We think" is literally just what it implies - "they think it is the best solution/method/etc" that they have at the time.
It's not a manipulation to say that about a product that you believe in (and are actively promoting). They are also constrained by advertising limitations. If Steve said "This is the best phone on the market" about the iPhone during a keynote, people would be *all over it* yelling about lack of proof and unsubstantiated claims.
Saying "We think" neatly sidesteps this issue, and prevents him from having to utter a high speed disclaimer after every paragraph.
They didn't dump a Core-i into a machine when they first appeared because it didn't work for them as a whole - battery life, heat management, cost (to manufacture) were just too high. They did it when they had something that would work for their design brief. In doing so they have consistently put out some of the better laptops on the market to date. Just because they are not putting in bleeding edge chips at every opportunity doesn't mean they should just give up and start selling software only - designing a computer is not an easy task if you want to hit certain criteria. Their marketing has changed - they are no longer advertising the "fastest, prettiest" computer - are you suggesting that because they did that once, they are beholden to it for evermore? If that's the case, what's the number for the Beyer company, I want to buy some heroin.
If one of those criteria is "must have bleeding edge, 2 month-old Core i7" then "battery life" or "weight" or "heatsink size/fan noise" is going to have to suffer.
Those early i7 laptops, I really can't see them being all that good after a few years of use - hot, noisy, with poor battery life.
No, Apple is a hardware company that develops software to ensure hardware brand loyalty. The main reason they sell hardware is because that's the only way they could become a $100 billion company.
Name some Apple hardware that works with third-party software. Now name some Apple software that works with third-party hardware.
I don't dispute that the hardware isn't so special, and that the software inside is what makes it better. But don't jump to the conclusion that they are thus a software company. Be amazed at how they can use custom software to drive sales of expensive, profitable hardware.
Apple hardware that works with third party software?
* Any Mac (PPC or Intel), either on top of OS X, or just by sticking Linux on there. * iPhone/iPad - lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of third party software on the app store *iPod - several pieces of software interface with the iPod. I have one such thing in my car, that controls the iPod directly, displaying track metadata on the display, controlling track/album/artist/playlist selection etc from the head unit, and various other things.
Apple software that works on third party hardware?
* iTunes (on Windows) * Quicktime (on Windows) * OS X itself (and by extension, the Mac versions of iTunes and Quicktime are included in this, so I won't list them again) * the open source calendar/contacts server that Apple wrote, plus pretty much any other open source project Apple has specifically originated and released, and any open source project they have heavily contributed to but not necessarily started themselves (although this is reaching in calling it "Apple software")
The trifecta of falling on your face - calling someone out for being "incorrect", correcting them with an utter misunderstanding of the topic yourself, yet claiming to know what you're talking about, then driving home the point with "your [sic] a moron".
You underestimate the connection between a historically 4 (now 5) channel TV system, episodic soap operas, and electrically powered kettles drawing 2000-3000W each.
The electrical grid in the UK experienes many of these peak loads daily, where millions of people will all turn on 3kW electric kettles at almost the same time. It's a cultural phenomenon that has been well tracked.
It's just never been an issue in the US, since you guys got cable TV much sooner than we did, and even to this day those with cable/satellite in the UK tend to overwhelmingly watch BBC/ITV/Channel 4), and your country is spread across 4 time zones and even nationally shown programs aren't all shown at the same time.
The peak load generated at the end of a soap opera can require bringing an entire power station online at a precise time - often a pumped storage hydroelectric one.
My goodness, your biased frothing is quite amusing.
How could the standard have already been mature, when in the previous paragraph you talk about the PC industry having to "bury" it because of Microsoft's failures - it was either mature or not, you can't switch and change mid post to try and make Apple look bad. (Well, you can, since you seem to have some sort of axe to grind).
You are also completely missing the point - the market for people who had no need of legacy equipment is *exactly* what USB needed to take off - otherwise, why would people buy new if they have something that works already? People are also generally resistant to change, so if they have the option of using the older ports, they continue to do so.
Creating a market of people who need to buy USB equipment by design spawns a market of USB vendors, since someone needs to make it, and Apple didn't make anything except the mouse and keyboard.
Also, not everything for the iMac was translucent plastic. Printers, scanners, disk drives etc were all almost universally battleship grey, as usual. The Iomega Zip drive was blue, with a translucent USB lead, for a splash of colour, and was cross platform with it's new fancy USB connector.
You are so blinded by your need to negate anything Apple has ever done that you are dismissing the release of a computer that sold like hot cakes that only had USB ports, at a time when the USB market had barely taken off at all (due to very poor support in Windows at the time), and trying to assert that it had no effect on the peripheral market at all.
So that whole deal with Apple taking a GPL engine, enhancing it and developing it, and pushing HTML5 and CSS, and striving hard to ensure that Webkit passed the Acid Tests, among other standards compliance...
MS finally pulling its finger out with IE9 development, and decent HTML5 demonstrations, looking like it will at last be on a par with the other browsers for web standards.
That was all just a myth, right?
Google is not the only one promoting the public standards that have made the web.
No, they shipped a computer that had no other low-speed interface ports on it for peripherals other than USB. You may remember it: the iMac.
This created a market for USB devices: mice, keyboard, scanners, printers, card readers etc that just was not taking off before that, since while some PC motherboards shipped with this "new fangled" USB port, it was poorly supported by Win95 (barely at all until late in the release cycle) and they still shipped (and continue to ship) with things like ps/2 ports, other din sockets, RS-232, 25 pin ports etc so people had no reason to specifically seek out USB devices on a bus that barely worked on Windows.
However, if you used an iMac, and many people did - it sold like hot cakes, and then soon after the iBook and other new Mac products you needed USB devices because it was the only peripheral port you had.
Also, I don;t recall Apple themselves actually claiming credit for anything - they just did what they did. I haven't seen any evidence they ever claimed they were taking credit for USB.
Also, if by "piggybacked on the efforts of Intel and the PC industry" you mean "adopted a standard that was designed to be used by hardware manufacturers to create a standard port and protocol for peripherals, ie DID EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR" then I suppose you are correct. Apple adopting USB early in the game could only have been a positive thing for Intel, who developed the thing. What do you think they wanted Apple to do? Not use it? When you Apple haters get going, you just throw logic right out of the window, don't you?
I am indeed - I dual boot Ubuntu and Leopard on it currently, but figured I'd give Kubuntu a go with the LiveCD, mainly to see how easy it would be for a non-computer person to deal with.
Given that it was working wirelessly, and then stopped *on the first update* on a fresh install, I decided to stick with Ubuntu. Other than the window manager being different, I'm not exactly sure why it would fail to work, and messing with the package manager to try and get it going again didn't work.
Also, to be fair to Snow Leopard, Ubuntu isn't officially supported on PPC hardware either, although it at least runs.
I dropped a LiveCD of Kubuntu on my Powerbook, ran an update that was suggested right after doing so, which promptly broke the wireless networking. Still haven't fixed that.
There are just as many maintenance tasks and oddities to mess with on Linux as there are on other systems, but it's much better than it was.
ActiveSync is the protocol, created by MS, that Exchange is based on, but that is used by a couple of other systems, most notably Google's sync. You don't install it, as such, in the same way you don't "install" http or ssh - either your client supports it or it doesn't.
If you have an Android phone, you already have the ability, I believe. I don't think you require a third party app. On iPhone, it is part of the core OS, but you don't have to use it, in the same way that you don;t have to with Google - they offer it as an option, but there's nothing stopping you using IMAP instead, which is how I sync with my gmail accounts.
Of course, this is not unique to iPhone, or to Exchange. It applies to Android and Blackberry too - essentially anything that can use an Exchange server and hands over admin control. It also applies to Google's sync, since they use ActiveSync too, and can remote wipe a phone via admin control.
Don't let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good Apple and MS bash though.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is Apple choosing not to sell something in the store that it owns, runs, hosts, pays for and controls.
A business can choose to sell what it likes (or choose not to sell things it doesn't like). You as a consumer are free to not patronise said store. You as a consumer are also free to not buy an iPod/iPhone/iPad knowing well ahead of time that the App Store is your only source of software (without jailbreaking).
There's no law being broken here.
So, why can't I run my PS3 games on my Xbox 360? Microsoft won't allow it!
Should I be shitting a golden brick? How about an osmium one?
It depends where your files are. You don't have to have iTunes in auto mode; you can turn it off and it behaves like other jukebox software with references to files but no actual automatic management.
For someone who wouldn't even begin to fathom what a mount point is, or a network share, or who just doesn't have more than one machine then it works very well.
With a little trickery you can make it work with network shares just as seamlessly as if it was on a permanently attached drive (including automounting a volume if it's not already up) but it's much more prone to falling over. It just wasn't designed with someone who manually shares their music across multiple machines from a server - that's what Airtunes is for (for those who couldn't do it themselves).
The biggest single limitation with iTunes as it stands is that you can't have different accounts (ie, different copies of iTunes) accessing the same library - it just confuses it. So keeping your library on a remote server is problematic if you have more than one computer accessing it. In that instance you need some sort of managing software on the server itself (or a copy of iTunes running locally that shares the music out that way).
It's one of the downsides of simplifying the software for the average user - you have to compromise somewhere.
Apple's i5 and i7 laptops were released in April 2010, so also early 2010. They very likely use the same chip as the Z11 - it was the first time you could put an i5 or i7 into a laptop without using a desktop chip and compromising.
It sounds like a nice machine, and for $2000 I would expect it to be. It clearly makes some compromises compared to the Macbook Pro, and beats it in other areas - the Macbook's battery lasts twice as long, for example, but it doesn't have a bluray drive (OS X lacks the DRM/HDCP pathway thing needed for the decrypting of BD movies, so shipping with a BD drive is a bit pointless at the moment), and while it has the same GPU, it has only 256Mb on there. The 13" MBP is also a lot less than $2000 (unless you start bulking it up with an SSD, extra horsepower etc).
The Z11 is a decent ultraportable that is comparable to a Macbook Pro - they're both hitting in the above average weight class (as opposed to some $400 piece of junk built to cost), but they're not all that different; just slightly different design/spec decisions made creating two distinct products that perform similarly (give or take a bit here and there).
So when I want to play Halo 3 on my Linux based computer you'll have some argument about how "easy to use and freedom in software choice" means not having to play the games I want to play?
The MPEG2 I used to shuffle around Final Cut Pro didn't seem to make it "BARF". Used to spend many an hour with old DVDs from clients wanting specific bits pulled off old disks they had to be included in various training vids/demo stuff. The Mac(s) - used more than one - didn't seem to care at all that it was MPEG2, often touched by intermediate sources.
It even handles Sony's slightly modified HD format that the XDCAM units record onto modified BD cassettes/cartridge disks (remember those old school CDROM caddies? they're back!).
I hesitate to say this to a Certified Solaris Admin (ooh), since you *clearly* know what you're doing, but did you have the right codecs installed?
If the Apple store have done everything in their power already then they have changed the RAM, reinstalled the OS and checked for obvious damage. If it has been sent away by the Apple store, they may have done everything up to replacing the entire logic board.
If it's 18 months old she can buy Apple care (can be bought at any time after purchase to extend the 1 year Applecare to 3 years from date of purchase) and have it sent off. If it is sent in for Applecare repair 3 times for the same fault and still reproduces it, they will issue her a new laptop instead.
If it is having a kernel panic more than once every 2 years or so then I suspect it is a lemon with a manufacturing defect in it somewhere. They happen from time to time.
A kernel panic on OS X?
Hardware failure, probably a dodgy RAM stick.
I have 3 personal Macs, look after 8 others in the immediate family, 3 more with close friends, and another 12 or so in a company setting that I haven't seen in some time but spent a couple of years with.
The only time I have seen kernel panics on any of them has been due to RAM issues. Swap out the stick, problem solved.
So, "from what I can gather", it's not at all common in the Mac world.
Your anecdote vs mine.
(In reality, they are computers like any others, and can have all sorts of gremlins. A kernel panic on OS X is a sign of a very severe gremlin - if you see one, you don't just shrug it off like a windows crash, it's normally indicative of something serious happening).
How the heck is a pack of Salt and Vinegar flavour crisps the easiest thing to use? Why pay all that extra money for ease of use? I can just rustle up some chips myself with a knife and a frying pan, then make the sodium acetate I need in a brainlessly simple reaction using household chemicals. You know the ones, and how to obtain the pure product right, that you can then put on your home made chips?
Why pay for someone to handle that sort of thing for me? I can do it all myself!
Now, I might be able to manage an mp3 player that required me to move binary files around, but it doesn't mean I want to. I love the fact that I can plug in my iPhone and have it handle all that for me (especially with the automatic handling of new music as my moods change with smart playlists keeping track of everything - including what I have played on the iPod since it was last synced).
My mother, on the other hand, is just about getting around the concept of having a Home folder, and a USB memory stick, and attaching files by email. Deeper folder trees (despite their clearly simple extension to the Home folder concept to you and I) are not really intuitive to her. The iPod/iTunes is excellent for her - it keeps track of her music, organises it and syncs and manages the iPod for her. She's a smart person, but computers are a new thing for her, and the iPod gives her access to something that she doesn't have to learn all in one go to get enjoyment out of (the level of ease/competence with a computer would have to be much better for a third party mp3 player).
This is consistently a thing that slashdot does not understand, and that Apple understands *extremely well*. That even if a person can compile their own OS from source, and manage everything by hand, that *they don't always want to*, or in the case of less technical people, just cannot do easily on their own, without vast frustration, regardless of how easy it seems.
Which is one of the reasons why Apple is selling products hand over fist, and a large portion of slashdot is going "huh? but why?" or "this product will fail!" while completely missing its redeeming features for a large portion of the population who aren;t them.
I'm not going to laugh derisively at you, or call you a moron because you can't do a retrosynthetic analysis on the flavour in your curry, and then be able to whip that up from relatively simple starting materials, or laugh when you can't tell me what happens to certain spices if they are overheated. I mean, it's pretty basic functional group chemistry - it's handled just like any other basic organic mechanism. I don't know about you, but that's an easy one!
"We think" is literally just what it implies - "they think it is the best solution/method/etc" that they have at the time.
It's not a manipulation to say that about a product that you believe in (and are actively promoting). They are also constrained by advertising limitations. If Steve said "This is the best phone on the market" about the iPhone during a keynote, people would be *all over it* yelling about lack of proof and unsubstantiated claims.
Saying "We think" neatly sidesteps this issue, and prevents him from having to utter a high speed disclaimer after every paragraph.
They didn't dump a Core-i into a machine when they first appeared because it didn't work for them as a whole - battery life, heat management, cost (to manufacture) were just too high. They did it when they had something that would work for their design brief. In doing so they have consistently put out some of the better laptops on the market to date. Just because they are not putting in bleeding edge chips at every opportunity doesn't mean they should just give up and start selling software only - designing a computer is not an easy task if you want to hit certain criteria. Their marketing has changed - they are no longer advertising the "fastest, prettiest" computer - are you suggesting that because they did that once, they are beholden to it for evermore? If that's the case, what's the number for the Beyer company, I want to buy some heroin.
If one of those criteria is "must have bleeding edge, 2 month-old Core i7" then "battery life" or "weight" or "heatsink size/fan noise" is going to have to suffer.
Those early i7 laptops, I really can't see them being all that good after a few years of use - hot, noisy, with poor battery life.
No, Apple is a hardware company that develops software to ensure hardware brand loyalty. The main reason they sell hardware is because that's the only way they could become a $100 billion company.
Name some Apple hardware that works with third-party software. Now name some Apple software that works with third-party hardware.
I don't dispute that the hardware isn't so special, and that the software inside is what makes it better. But don't jump to the conclusion that they are thus a software company. Be amazed at how they can use custom software to drive sales of expensive, profitable hardware.
Apple hardware that works with third party software?
* Any Mac (PPC or Intel), either on top of OS X, or just by sticking Linux on there.
* iPhone/iPad - lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of third party software on the app store
*iPod - several pieces of software interface with the iPod. I have one such thing in my car, that controls the iPod directly, displaying track metadata on the display, controlling track/album/artist/playlist selection etc from the head unit, and various other things.
Apple software that works on third party hardware?
* iTunes (on Windows)
* Quicktime (on Windows)
* OS X itself (and by extension, the Mac versions of iTunes and Quicktime are included in this, so I won't list them again)
* the open source calendar/contacts server that Apple wrote, plus pretty much any other open source project Apple has specifically originated and released, and any open source project they have heavily contributed to but not necessarily started themselves (although this is reaching in calling it "Apple software")
The trifecta of falling on your face - calling someone out for being "incorrect", correcting them with an utter misunderstanding of the topic yourself, yet claiming to know what you're talking about, then driving home the point with "your [sic] a moron".
Classic.
You underestimate the connection between a historically 4 (now 5) channel TV system, episodic soap operas, and electrically powered kettles drawing 2000-3000W each.
The electrical grid in the UK experienes many of these peak loads daily, where millions of people will all turn on 3kW electric kettles at almost the same time. It's a cultural phenomenon that has been well tracked.
It's just never been an issue in the US, since you guys got cable TV much sooner than we did, and even to this day those with cable/satellite in the UK tend to overwhelmingly watch BBC/ITV/Channel 4), and your country is spread across 4 time zones and even nationally shown programs aren't all shown at the same time.
The peak load generated at the end of a soap opera can require bringing an entire power station online at a precise time - often a pumped storage hydroelectric one.
Iceland is a Nordic country. It is sometimes included as part of an extended definition, but not strictly.
My goodness, your biased frothing is quite amusing.
How could the standard have already been mature, when in the previous paragraph you talk about the PC industry having to "bury" it because of Microsoft's failures - it was either mature or not, you can't switch and change mid post to try and make Apple look bad. (Well, you can, since you seem to have some sort of axe to grind).
You are also completely missing the point - the market for people who had no need of legacy equipment is *exactly* what USB needed to take off - otherwise, why would people buy new if they have something that works already? People are also generally resistant to change, so if they have the option of using the older ports, they continue to do so.
Creating a market of people who need to buy USB equipment by design spawns a market of USB vendors, since someone needs to make it, and Apple didn't make anything except the mouse and keyboard.
Also, not everything for the iMac was translucent plastic. Printers, scanners, disk drives etc were all almost universally battleship grey, as usual. The Iomega Zip drive was blue, with a translucent USB lead, for a splash of colour, and was cross platform with it's new fancy USB connector.
You are so blinded by your need to negate anything Apple has ever done that you are dismissing the release of a computer that sold like hot cakes that only had USB ports, at a time when the USB market had barely taken off at all (due to very poor support in Windows at the time), and trying to assert that it had no effect on the peripheral market at all.
Hilarious.
So that whole deal with Apple taking a GPL engine, enhancing it and developing it, and pushing HTML5 and CSS, and striving hard to ensure that Webkit passed the Acid Tests, among other standards compliance...
MS finally pulling its finger out with IE9 development, and decent HTML5 demonstrations, looking like it will at last be on a par with the other browsers for web standards.
That was all just a myth, right?
Google is not the only one promoting the public standards that have made the web.
No, if you act like a dick you're a troll.
It's not the argument, it's the way you make it.
You have stupid hair.
No, they shipped a computer that had no other low-speed interface ports on it for peripherals other than USB. You may remember it: the iMac.
This created a market for USB devices: mice, keyboard, scanners, printers, card readers etc that just was not taking off before that, since while some PC motherboards shipped with this "new fangled" USB port, it was poorly supported by Win95 (barely at all until late in the release cycle) and they still shipped (and continue to ship) with things like ps/2 ports, other din sockets, RS-232, 25 pin ports etc so people had no reason to specifically seek out USB devices on a bus that barely worked on Windows.
However, if you used an iMac, and many people did - it sold like hot cakes, and then soon after the iBook and other new Mac products you needed USB devices because it was the only peripheral port you had.
Also, I don;t recall Apple themselves actually claiming credit for anything - they just did what they did. I haven't seen any evidence they ever claimed they were taking credit for USB.
Also, if by "piggybacked on the efforts of Intel and the PC industry" you mean "adopted a standard that was designed to be used by hardware manufacturers to create a standard port and protocol for peripherals, ie DID EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR" then I suppose you are correct. Apple adopting USB early in the game could only have been a positive thing for Intel, who developed the thing. What do you think they wanted Apple to do? Not use it? When you Apple haters get going, you just throw logic right out of the window, don't you?
Facetime was created in 1998, and Apple bought the code.
That was a little bore Facebook came along I think.
I am indeed - I dual boot Ubuntu and Leopard on it currently, but figured I'd give Kubuntu a go with the LiveCD, mainly to see how easy it would be for a non-computer person to deal with.
Given that it was working wirelessly, and then stopped *on the first update* on a fresh install, I decided to stick with Ubuntu. Other than the window manager being different, I'm not exactly sure why it would fail to work, and messing with the package manager to try and get it going again didn't work.
Also, to be fair to Snow Leopard, Ubuntu isn't officially supported on PPC hardware either, although it at least runs.
I dropped a LiveCD of Kubuntu on my Powerbook, ran an update that was suggested right after doing so, which promptly broke the wireless networking. Still haven't fixed that.
There are just as many maintenance tasks and oddities to mess with on Linux as there are on other systems, but it's much better than it was.
"Informative"
What are the mods smoking?
Oh wait, this is slashdot.
ActiveSync is the protocol, created by MS, that Exchange is based on, but that is used by a couple of other systems, most notably Google's sync. You don't install it, as such, in the same way you don't "install" http or ssh - either your client supports it or it doesn't.
If you have an Android phone, you already have the ability, I believe. I don't think you require a third party app. On iPhone, it is part of the core OS, but you don't have to use it, in the same way that you don;t have to with Google - they offer it as an option, but there's nothing stopping you using IMAP instead, which is how I sync with my gmail accounts.
Of course, this is not unique to iPhone, or to Exchange. It applies to Android and Blackberry too - essentially anything that can use an Exchange server and hands over admin control. It also applies to Google's sync, since they use ActiveSync too, and can remote wipe a phone via admin control.
Don't let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good Apple and MS bash though.