EVs are not necessarily cleaner or better because they need batteries. Mining of the rare earth metals required for the batteries is mostly monopolized by China, and is an unregulated ecologically damaging industry. A shift to electric will move the US from a being energy independent with fossil fuels to being dependent on Chinese rare earths. At any point, China could make our lives miserable by cutting off exports of rare earths, making it very expensive to make or buy batteries. The cost to restart rare earth mining in the US is in the tens of billions, and a decade or more away after all the lawsuits by the eco-lobby.
has been on the Mac App Store for years. It trails OpenOffice development a bit, but incorporates lots of Mac specific tech, eg. it was Retina friendly first.
...how to get me to not drink their product. First they killed Diet Pepsi Lime, arguably the BEST SOFTDRINK EVA, but that didn't quite stop me. Now they will screw with the taste of the drink I have enjoyed for 20-odd years. Yep, that'll do it.
Probably my sig, which I have had since I joined/. I love Arthur C. Clarke and the original quote, and it was just a silly thing I came up with that cracked me up. I've never changed it, but I catch shit for it sometimes because fanboy or something.
Let's just dispense with the "Apple does proprietary connectors to charge royalties and profit!" line. Let's ignore for a minute the fact that modern Macs (including the new USB-C sporting MacBook) have zero "proprietary" connectors on them. And let's ignore for a minute that Apple was the greatest early champion of USB, Ethernet, and WiFi. When Apple does do a home-grown connector, say FireWire for example, it is because they have come up with something better than anything that exists in the market. This was even true of Lightning, which arrived years before USB-C, and was so much better then any small form-factor USB connector. Often, as in the case of FireWire and Mini DisplayPort, Apple either made them available for anyone to adopt as standards or added to an existing standard. And let me just throw this in here preemptively, because I know someone will bring it up. Thunderbolt was developed by Intel and adopted by Apple, so it is not proprietary. Any PC maker can adopt Thunderbolt, and it is inexplicable so few have.
Spoke to a friend of mine who is an air traffic controller. He says that laser incidents are primarily reported by helicopter pilots, and rarely by commercial jet pilots. He pointed out that jet aircraft flying at cruising altitude and speed would be nearly impossible to track from the ground with a handheld laser, although there are lasers available with beam ranges that could easily reach them. Tracks with what others said here, helicopters fly lower and slower, and have significantly more glass surrounding the cockpit.
It's just a silly sig, riffing on my favorite Arthur C. Clarke quote and my platform of choice. The truth is, when I discovered the Mac in 1990, it was magic to me. The sig may come off as a fanboi-ish, but I have always said that if anything better than Mac OS comes along, I would switch. Nothing better has come along. BTW, this has been my sig since I joined/.
These lasers are often marketed as "great for sky pointing", and indeed a tour guide used one for that legitimate purpose on my recent trip to Puerto Rico. I am sure there are dumbasses purposely doing this to low-flying aircraft (during take-off, approach and landing), but I wonder if pilots are also reporting lasers that are unintentionally pointed in the vicinity of aircraft during legitimate ground uses. And yes, I will be buying mine before they get banned...
My son got an iPod Touch when he was 4, for the express purpose of FaceTime with me and his grandparents. He doesn't see me daily due to a divorce. I set up the device with favorite contacts and a few games for him. He can't take it to school, and FaceTime requires WiFi, so he pretty much just uses it at home. He brings it in his bag when he travels between my house and my ex-wife's house. He is 7 now, and I can't see that it has affected him adversely. He gets good grades, reads, plays outside, has friends, etc. He probably uses the iPod Touch less than I played Atari when I was his age.
This isn't about patents and conceptual design and innovation. This is about blatant copycat ripoff knockoff cloning, right down the the boxes the products ship in, the 30-pin dock connector, and the identical wall wart. Samsung's infringing products are no better than street corner Gucci knockoff handbags. Samsung has no shame, and neither do consumers who reward Samsung by buying their Apple knockoffs. Because Apple is rich and makes cool stuff, it's best for consumers to let companies who can't or won't invest in their own innovations shortcut the R&D process by merely copying Apple's successful and popular products? I like EFF in general, but was pissed off by their Robin Hood argument that Apple shouldn't be allowed to be the only one to benefit from their inventions, as it would stifle innovation which hurts consumers. Apple doesn't want or need to stifle legitimate innovation and competition, they are big enough, rich enough and smart enough to respond in kind with innovation of their own. Apple wants to stifle clones and knockoffs. Inferior products designed to look just like superior products implies to the consumer there is no difference. Yet the consumer who thinks there is no difference ends up with a fake, imitation product that does not compare to the real thing, and dilutes the value of the copied product. This harms consumers. This verdict puts copiers on notice; design you own stuff, don't use Cupertino like your personal R&D lab.
I came to Macintosh post-Steve in 1990, though my Mac Plus still had his signature inside, I only knew him as the founder that had left. Mine was a world of Scully and Spindler and Amelio. I became a Mac tech support professional during this period, and it has remained my career to this day. When Steve came back in 1997, it was a pivotal time early in that career. My second employer had decided to abandon Macs, but wanted me to stay on as a PC tech, and Apple wasn't doing so hot.. I was intrigued though by the plans to use NeXTstep as the basis of the next Mac OS, so I actually bought a used NeXT Color Turbo Slab with the 21" NeXT Color Monitor and NeXTstep 3.3. The first time I turned on that 5 year old machine, it felt like I had jumped 10 years into the future. I knew then, I would remain a Mac tech. I left that job for one supporting Macs again and never looked back. Over the remaining years, I read everything I could find about Steve and came to appreciate his unique genius. Thank you Steve for making my career and passion possible.
I know AT&T doesn't make the phone, but they were the ones willing to take a chance with Apple. Now, the iPhone has defined what is a smartphone. AT&T had to work with Apple to support visual voicemail. Their Mark the Spot app let's me give them real-time field reports on dropped calls, weak signal, no data, so they can improve the network. As far as competition, Apple has redefined the carrier relationship, taking much of the carriers control from them. I would like to say Android follows this trend, but it doesn't. I think carriers see Android as a way to wrest control back. I am betting my LTE iPhone 5 next year makes carriers interchangeable, and I am betting Android ends up more like Linux than Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows
...the death of Android Wear is Appleâ(TM)s fault.
into the fire...
..."already ran Cat6e everywhere." I suppose you plug into walls for power too. Caveman!
in 3-2-1...
Which Windows laptops can run macOS?
doesn't run OS X.
EVs are not necessarily cleaner or better because they need batteries. Mining of the rare earth metals required for the batteries is mostly monopolized by China, and is an unregulated ecologically damaging industry. A shift to electric will move the US from a being energy independent with fossil fuels to being dependent on Chinese rare earths. At any point, China could make our lives miserable by cutting off exports of rare earths, making it very expensive to make or buy batteries. The cost to restart rare earth mining in the US is in the tens of billions, and a decade or more away after all the lawsuits by the eco-lobby.
has been on the Mac App Store for years. It trails OpenOffice development a bit, but incorporates lots of Mac specific tech, eg. it was Retina friendly first.
is open source and probably runs on a billion devices.
...how to get me to not drink their product. First they killed Diet Pepsi Lime, arguably the BEST SOFTDRINK EVA, but that didn't quite stop me. Now they will screw with the taste of the drink I have enjoyed for 20-odd years. Yep, that'll do it.
"Not sure why you're modded down..."
Probably my sig, which I have had since I joined /. I love Arthur C. Clarke and the original quote, and it was just a silly thing I came up with that cracked me up. I've never changed it, but I catch shit for it sometimes because fanboy or something.
Let's just dispense with the "Apple does proprietary connectors to charge royalties and profit!" line. Let's ignore for a minute the fact that modern Macs (including the new USB-C sporting MacBook) have zero "proprietary" connectors on them. And let's ignore for a minute that Apple was the greatest early champion of USB, Ethernet, and WiFi. When Apple does do a home-grown connector, say FireWire for example, it is because they have come up with something better than anything that exists in the market. This was even true of Lightning, which arrived years before USB-C, and was so much better then any small form-factor USB connector. Often, as in the case of FireWire and Mini DisplayPort, Apple either made them available for anyone to adopt as standards or added to an existing standard. And let me just throw this in here preemptively, because I know someone will bring it up. Thunderbolt was developed by Intel and adopted by Apple, so it is not proprietary. Any PC maker can adopt Thunderbolt, and it is inexplicable so few have.
...much of the growth and most of the profits.
Spoke to a friend of mine who is an air traffic controller. He says that laser incidents are primarily reported by helicopter pilots, and rarely by commercial jet pilots. He pointed out that jet aircraft flying at cruising altitude and speed would be nearly impossible to track from the ground with a handheld laser, although there are lasers available with beam ranges that could easily reach them. Tracks with what others said here, helicopters fly lower and slower, and have significantly more glass surrounding the cockpit.
It's just a silly sig, riffing on my favorite Arthur C. Clarke quote and my platform of choice. The truth is, when I discovered the Mac in 1990, it was magic to me. The sig may come off as a fanboi-ish, but I have always said that if anything better than Mac OS comes along, I would switch. Nothing better has come along. BTW, this has been my sig since I joined /.
These lasers are often marketed as "great for sky pointing", and indeed a tour guide used one for that legitimate purpose on my recent trip to Puerto Rico. I am sure there are dumbasses purposely doing this to low-flying aircraft (during take-off, approach and landing), but I wonder if pilots are also reporting lasers that are unintentionally pointed in the vicinity of aircraft during legitimate ground uses. And yes, I will be buying mine before they get banned...
My son got an iPod Touch when he was 4, for the express purpose of FaceTime with me and his grandparents. He doesn't see me daily due to a divorce. I set up the device with favorite contacts and a few games for him. He can't take it to school, and FaceTime requires WiFi, so he pretty much just uses it at home. He brings it in his bag when he travels between my house and my ex-wife's house. He is 7 now, and I can't see that it has affected him adversely. He gets good grades, reads, plays outside, has friends, etc. He probably uses the iPod Touch less than I played Atari when I was his age.
Samsung's market cap is about $170 billion USD...
This isn't about patents and conceptual design and innovation. This is about blatant copycat ripoff knockoff cloning, right down the the boxes the products ship in, the 30-pin dock connector, and the identical wall wart. Samsung's infringing products are no better than street corner Gucci knockoff handbags. Samsung has no shame, and neither do consumers who reward Samsung by buying their Apple knockoffs. Because Apple is rich and makes cool stuff, it's best for consumers to let companies who can't or won't invest in their own innovations shortcut the R&D process by merely copying Apple's successful and popular products? I like EFF in general, but was pissed off by their Robin Hood argument that Apple shouldn't be allowed to be the only one to benefit from their inventions, as it would stifle innovation which hurts consumers. Apple doesn't want or need to stifle legitimate innovation and competition, they are big enough, rich enough and smart enough to respond in kind with innovation of their own. Apple wants to stifle clones and knockoffs. Inferior products designed to look just like superior products implies to the consumer there is no difference. Yet the consumer who thinks there is no difference ends up with a fake, imitation product that does not compare to the real thing, and dilutes the value of the copied product. This harms consumers. This verdict puts copiers on notice; design you own stuff, don't use Cupertino like your personal R&D lab.
I came to Macintosh post-Steve in 1990, though my Mac Plus still had his signature inside, I only knew him as the founder that had left. Mine was a world of Scully and Spindler and Amelio. I became a Mac tech support professional during this period, and it has remained my career to this day. When Steve came back in 1997, it was a pivotal time early in that career. My second employer had decided to abandon Macs, but wanted me to stay on as a PC tech, and Apple wasn't doing so hot.. I was intrigued though by the plans to use NeXTstep as the basis of the next Mac OS, so I actually bought a used NeXT Color Turbo Slab with the 21" NeXT Color Monitor and NeXTstep 3.3. The first time I turned on that 5 year old machine, it felt like I had jumped 10 years into the future. I knew then, I would remain a Mac tech. I left that job for one supporting Macs again and never looked back. Over the remaining years, I read everything I could find about Steve and came to appreciate his unique genius. Thank you Steve for making my career and passion possible.
from 2002.
*Ring*
Hello? 2002? You want what? Your server-side web optimization catered to a device? Uh huh, ok. Ok, ok, I'll let Amazon know...
I know AT&T doesn't make the phone, but they were the ones willing to take a chance with Apple. Now, the iPhone has defined what is a smartphone. AT&T had to work with Apple to support visual voicemail. Their Mark the Spot app let's me give them real-time field reports on dropped calls, weak signal, no data, so they can improve the network. As far as competition, Apple has redefined the carrier relationship, taking much of the carriers control from them. I would like to say Android follows this trend, but it doesn't. I think carriers see Android as a way to wrest control back. I am betting my LTE iPhone 5 next year makes carriers interchangeable, and I am betting Android ends up more like Linux than Windows.
...that I wrote in 1993, haven't felt this way since Sagan went...
FOR THE STAR HUSTLER, JACK HORKHEIMER
Incandescent night and still
amazing the number
of stars
you may see
in L.A., D.C., New York, N.Y.
Ocean City, Md., on the shore once
again the stars
few yet there
visible through the orange
haze of street light, parking lot.
Just twelve miles from here,
Assateaque, the whole
of the Milky Way
spilt into view—
crystalline, star–bloom.
Drive twelve miles more, find
the radio–array
at Wallops Island
sees stars—in remote
minor galaxies—already nova
in Roman times, a million light–
years won't show
for 998,000
more here, who then
will see a star explode?
Did Edison foresee the death
of night, forgotten stars?
Jack says
no one looks up anymore.
"Keep looking up. Keep looking up!"
Perhaps some day the power out
a whole grid gone down
a city will
reignite that ancient
pinhole nuclear fusion–light
so bright, so brilliant
that despite the ache
in our spines
we crane our necks
to look up, stare, configure.
Scotty speaks into the computer mouse, "Hello computer."
Engineer: "Just use the keyboard."
Scotty: "Keyboard?" *sarcastically* "How quaint."