This isn't strictly on-topic, but it's amusing nonetheless. King Gillette (that was his name, not his title; he was not a monarch) was a lifelong socialist who despised the idea of personal wealth. In the late 1800's, shaving was a pretty serious chore. Most men had to go to barbershops where they were given a shave with a straight razor. In 1895, Gillette invented the safety razor with the intent of freeing the common man from the burden of having to buy a professionally administered shave.
The US Army immediately ordered thousands upon thousands of safety razors for their troops. Gillette's invention was a monumental success.
Almost immediately, Gillette, lifelong socialist and despiser of wealth, found himself one of the richest men in the country.
That's an absurd definition. All advertising is unsolicited. Those commercials I sat through when I watched CSI tonight? Unsolicited. The ads I see when I read my newspaper every morning? Unsolicited. The (gasp!) ads (gasp!) on Slashdot (gasp) that I don't see because I use a filtering proxy (yay)? Unsolicited.
You should come up with a better definition of spam, methinks.
This statement (and others in the post supporting this position) is so far from reality, it makes it difficult to know where to start.
Well, you could start by finding any source, any citation, that indicates that I'm wrong. Find me evidence that copyright law does, in fact, place a mandate on copyright holders to enable the general public to make fair use of their works.
There are very few places where the Copyright law gives positive rights to people on the other side of the copyright bargain
If by "very few" you mean "none at all," I'm in complete agreement.
But your statement implies that copyright law completely prohibits people (without the copyright holder?s permission) from making a copy.
Nonsense. I made no such implication. Copyright law places the absolute authority or controlling copying and distribution in the hands of copyright holders. It defines certain narrow exceptions, acts with would otherwise be infringement, and declares them to be non-infringing. This is what people are talking about when they say "fair use."
Copyright law neither mandates nor prohibits anything directly. It puts the matter of determining what is and what is not allowed in the hands of the copyright holder.
Rhetorically speaking, where did you get the idea that copyright holders have complete control and rights over their work?
The law. It says, basically, "Copyright holders have complete control and rights over their works for the duration of the copyright, except for the following exceptions."
the biggest key is to stop confusing copyrights with property ownership
Unless you're an appellate court justice, please keep your interpretations out of the discussion and stick to the law and to the body of relevant case law. The fact that you disagree with the law's interpretation of the situation amounts to a hill of beans.
The retroactive increasing of copyright terms by 20 years essentially steals from the public domain
Oh, what a crock. All works will end up in the public domain sooner or later. All works, without exception. This is mandated by the Constitution, because it says that Congress may only grant exclusive monopolies temporarily. So unless Congress somehow finds a way to keep a work out of the public domain forever and ever, the phrase "steals from the public domain" is just so much hogwash.
I?d suggest reading the briefs from the Eldritch case for depth on this subject.
Um. The Eldritch case was decided in favor of the status quo. Briefs in the Eldritch case arguing against copyright extensions were judged by the Supreme Court to amount to a hill of beans.
The radical expansion of ?derivative works? is a more insidious method that copyright laws have stolen from us (citizenry and the culture).
I just love how you keep talking about how not getting access to other people's work amounts to theft. That's the postwar culture of entitlement for you.
A good example was the lawsuit against ?The Wind Done Gone?. This is clearly a very original work, although it uses characters and even dialogue from ?Gone with the Wind?.
Friend, if you use "characters and even dialogue" from somebody else's work, then your own work is not original. I think you might be well served by keeping a dictionary by your computer for moments like these.
In that case, as you correctly point out, the fact that the work is not even remotely original was deemed to be irrelevant, because that particular form of non-originality is an exception under the copyright act. See? The system works.
How can we say copyright is promoting the arts when someone can be successfully sued for using a 3 note-rift in a song that is also used in another song?
Get out there and come up with your own 3-note riff and then sue people for using it without your permission. How's that for an incentive?
Unless you think the creation of copyrighted work occurs in a vacuum, the removal of ?ideas? from culture for life+75 years is not good for society!
Um. We're talking about copyright, right? You know, that legal construct that protects expressions of ideas, not ideas themselves, right? The fact that a work is protected by copyright does nothing at all to impede you, or even discourage you, from creating your own works inspired by that work.
real example: can?t back-up child?s favorite tape with post-DMCA VCR, so I had buy another one when it was worn out a year later
I wrecked my car. The car company, to my everlasting amazement, refuses to give me another one. They say I have to buy another one. Pretty unfair, huh?
You can only get away with calling it an "entitlement" if you can prove the activities now prohibited by the DMCA anti-circumvention loophole were illegal in the first place, otherwise it is clearly a case of a new law taking away legal (and useful) activities.
Well, shit, dude. Every new law makes stuff that was previous not illegal illegal. So fucking what? "Waa, waa. I want to be able to do stuff that the law says I can't do! This is so unfair! Waa!"
Deal with it, okay? The DMCA is, so far, constitutional. It is a legal law. Just like you have to obey the speed limit and pay your taxes, you have to obey the DMCA. The fact that you personally don't like it because... I don't know, something about not taking care of your videotapes... earns you absolutely no sympathy from me whatsoever.
Let me turn around the challenge: show me a federal law that prohibits fair-use activities like ?the first sale doctrine?, ?time-shifting?, or ?making back-up copies?.
There are none. Those things are legal, and you're free to do them as you please. (Although the "making back-up copies" thing is complete and utter bullshit, and we all know it. But it's not illegal, so that's fine.) But since I know where you're going with this, I can cut right to the chase. If a copyright holder releases a work that is protected by encryption or another access-control mechanism, and you circumvent that mechanism for any purpose whatsoever that is not covered by one of the exceptions listed in the statute-- in other words, if you're not a public library, basically-- then you have broken the law, and can be brought up for both civil and criminal remedies.
If you don't like it, lobby your representatives to get it changed. But you'll still have to obey it until that happens. But don't try to argue that it somehow amounts to theft or whatever. You have no rights here. You are not entitled to do whatever you want with works that are protected by copyright. Okay? Got it?
Re:They're just not saying, 'cause...
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Baked Apple
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while... it's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article "a dildo," never "your dildo."
Re:Where's the surprize ?
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Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
If a scientist can't prove it, that doesn't make it false.
Tell that to the UN. Weapons inspectors are not detectives, guys!
The Apple Store on the web is always there, of course, but you're not going to find the $7XX iMac there, either, unless you can pull an educational ID out and look in the right place.
Uhh... it's right there on the front page. Look on the bottom. "iMac from $799. Great value on a classic design."
I know 5 people who use SunRay 100's at home (basically a dumb terminal)
Wrong, dude. Remember, we're talking about serial consoles here. Don't give me any of this "network computer" crap, or this "basically a dumb terminal" crap. The whole point of this discussion is that nobody, but nobody, uses a serial console on their home computer.
Tryin' to cheat me out of a perfectly good cookie, why I oughta margle fargle...
I don't mean to be insulting, but if you can't understand this you are simply not trying.
Are you speaking to me, or to yourself?;-)
I've already explained my position at great length. Your post basically consists of, "nuh-uh, market share is everything!" This is despite the fact that I've already explained, in insultingly pedandtic detail, why this isn't so. This kind of discussion just doesn't engage me, sorry.
Except when you move your hand to pick up the USB device you want to plug in.;)
Oh, ha ha.;-)
Ok, how about the side of the monitor?
I think the side of the monitor is pretty much the same thing as the back. You still have to get up and lean over your desk, or twist your monitor around, or something like that. The USB port on my keyboard is right there on the side, where I can get to it easily when I want it but it's not staring me in the face all the time. I really think it's the best solution to the port problem.
At least, it's the best one that I know of so far.
But I contend then that including this antenna is useless because no one knows about it
Okay, given that that's demonstrably false, my only response to this point is a resounding "whatever, dude."
Apple's Switch campaign, plus their recent efforts to increase specs and lower prices (at the cost of profit margin) is directly targeted toward increasing market share.
No. Apple's Switch campaign is directly targeted toward selling Macs. See, Macs have traditionally been thought of as computers for people who have never owned computers before. Well the number of people around the world who have never owned a computer before but who are interested in and/or financially capable of buying one is dwindling rapidly. Apple wants to keep selling Macs, and the traditional markets of people who have never owned a computer and people who own Macs and who want to upgrade are getting smaller.
So Apple's trying to open up a new market: people who have PC's, who aren't happy with them, and who are looking for something better. It's not about market share. It's about being able to sustain selling a million units a quarter-- you know, an ungodly sales target-- in the face of a dwindling market.
Same thing with price cuts. (Isn't that what started this thread?) Keep the Macs going out the door. Market share? Piss on it. It's about units, not ratios.
If Apple's market share continues to decline, they are going to have trouble convincing vendors to write apps for their platform.
Also wrong. Because, again, market share doesn't matter. Let's say there are 5 million users of Mac OS X. (I think that number is pretty close to accurate.) A company that's considering writing an application for OS X knows that there are 5 million potential customers out there. That's significant. That's worth going after.
Of course, the final analysis will depend on what kind of a program it is. A personal finance program, a la Quicken? You bet there's a strong market for that; you'll sell millions of copies to Mac owners. A game? Yeah... maybe. Mac users haven't traditionally been big gamers, but companies like Aspyr are making plenty of money porting and selling the best PC games to the Mac platform, so that market is worth going after, too, if your product is good enough. An enterprise-class relational database? Well... you wouldn't think so, but Oracle and Sybase have both released their flagship products for OS X.
See, it's about the size of the potential market, not the ratio of that market to another. As long as the total size of the Mac market is sufficient-- and right now it is-- the ports will be there.
The Mac versions of many popular programs are known to have less features, cost more, come out later, and have more bugs than their Windows counterparts.
If by "many popular programs" you mean QuickBooks, then yes. But for the core Mac apps-- Adobe's, Macromedia's, and so on-- just the opposite is true.
This is true, the total pie of computer owners is getting bigger, but as Mac's share of that pie gets smaller, their relevance declines along with it.
Heh heh. Yeah, people have been talking about how Apple is becoming less and less relevant since the mid-1990's. Funnily enough, though, the PC world is still chasing Apple's lead. Guess they're not quite irrelevant yet, huh?
Everyone price-shops when they buy anything.
Dude, that's just wrong. People who buy Mercedes could get around town just as easily in a Ford Festiva or whatever the hell. They don't, though. They buy the bigger-ticket item. Mac purchasers are, by and large, just exactly the same. They could get by with something cheaper, a laptop from China or a Fry's special PC or something. But they don't. Get it now?
How does Dell make money?
There's an old joke about a used car dealership. The salesman says to the customer, "Our prices are so low, we actually lose money on every car we sell!" The customer asks, "How do you make a profit?" The salesman says, "Volume."
You can either be a volume business or a margin business. Ford is a volume business, just like Dell. Mercedes is a margin business. And Apple is, you guessed it, a margin business.
if Apple makes $20 less per computer they sell, but the machine now has 256 MB of memory, they would end up making more money because at the end of the day they've sold more machines
How do you figure that more people are going to buy a Mac if it comes bundled with $20 worth of RAM? If you're going to buy a Mac, spending an extra $20 on RAM isn't going to stop you. And if you're not going to buy a Mac, the incentive of $20 in free RAM isn't going to change your mind.
I think part of the reason Apple's margin are so high is because they can't afford not to charge those margins because they don't move enough units.
Hey, check it out! He's starting to understand the economics of a margin-driven business model!;-)
Making a profit means they can afford to do this, and they have reported losses the last two quarters.
Yeah, but prior to that they posted at least six consecutive quarters of significant profitability. (The report I've got handy only goes back to Q2FY01.) This past quarter's loss was so small as to be practically a wash-- a net loss of $8 million on net revenues of nearly $1.5 billion, or a net loss of about one half of one percent of net sales. Apple is doing very well in an extremely difficult economy.
There's a funny story that's completely unrelated to but vaguely reminiscent of this. (Let's let the "off-topic" and "interesting" mods fight it out.)
WFAA-TV in Dallas, TX, was one of the first TV stations in the country, if not the first, to turn on its HDTV transmitter. It did this back in 1998.
Dallas is also the home of Parkland Memorial Hospital, a giant hospital complex. Some of you may remember Parkland as the hospital where President Kennedy was pronounced after his assassination in 1963.
Parkland Hospital has a giant cardiac ICU, as one would expect of a giant hospital. In the cardiac ICU they use wireless telemetry systems to monitor patients' hearts. Instead of having a 12-lead EKG monitor by each patient's bed and sending nurses around to check them, they put the leads on each patient and then connect them to a little battery-powered wireless transmitter. The transmitter sends the signals back to the nurse's station where they can be observed by a human being more conveniently and safely.
So back in 1998, WFAA flipped the switch to turn on their HDTV transmitter. And every single wireless cardiac monitor in Parkland went bat-shit.
The long story made short, as it was explained to me, is that the company that made the wireless monitors was, either through negligence or some kind of honest mistake, using the wrong frequency. The frequency they were using was allocated by the FCC for digital television broadcasts. This wasn't a problem at the time, because there were no digital television broadcasts anywhere in the country. Until that day when WFAA turned on their transmitter.
Ever since hearing that story, I've been a little skeptical about the much-lauded wireless revolution. Imagine if you will that the FCC, some years from now, reallocates the 2.4 GHz band for some other use. All the gear that currently uses that band, from microwave ovens to cordless phones to Bluetooth gadgets to your laptop, these things aren't just going to disappear.
Why is a keyboard so much better than having a dedicated USB hub, or having USB ports on the monitor?
Because the keyboard is right there. The USB port on the keyboard is never more than an inch or two away from your hands. I don't want a dedicated USB hub because that's just another piece of junk to clutter up my desk. And I don't want USB ports on the front of my monitor because they're ugly. Heck, my monitor doesn't even have any moving parts, not even a mechanical on/off switch. The power button is a touch-sensitive spot on the case, nice and clean. And USB ports on the back of the monitor, while far better than those on the back of the computer itself, are not exactly convenient.
For that matter, where do you go when you want to insert a CD?
The closet. Fortunately that's not a particularly common operation for me, but I'll admit that my particular arrangement has a few flaws. I'm happy to make the occasional trip to the closet to pop in a CD, though, rather than having a computer cluttering up my home office study library room thing.;-)
PC hardware has to worry about backwards compatibility much more than Apple because there are multiple suppliers.
Yes, I realize that. It doesn't make sense, but I realize it's true.
This they inherited from previous designs which had whatever ports they used before USB.
ADB, the Apple Desktop Bus. Blissfully consigned to the history books, as PS/2 should be.
I was referring to the $800 CRT iMac. It doesn't come with wireless networking
Yes, it does. You can add the card for $79. The hardware is already built-in.
it doesn't have a flat-panel display
True.
calling it the equivalent of a mid-range PC is just absurd
Okay, it's absurd. Find me a low-end PC that comes with two built-in FireWire 400 buses-- don't give me any of this USB 2.0 crap; only isochronous FireWire works for DV-- an AirPort antenna, and something equivalent to iLife, and I will admit, here in this public forum, that it's absurd.
What makes your opinion any more valid than mine?
I'm not the one who's trying to tell us about everything Apple is doing wrong. I'm telling you to hush up because you obviously don't know any more about running a computer company than the rest of us; if you did, you'd be out there running one. So your criticisms all come from a position of ignorance, making them of questionable value at best.
That's why we're in a period of "grandfathering" in the new technology slowly.
What do I know, but it seems to me that we've been in the period of "grandfathering" in USB for, oh, about five years now. It's time for the period to end.
As for configuring networking gear and rackmount equipment, that, too, will slowly come around and start using new technology for their control interfaces.
Or you can use the USB-serial adapters that are coming in your breakfast cereal now. Well, okay, maybe they're not quite that ubiquitous yet, but I swear I saw them set up as impulse items at the Kwik-E-Mart.
I can forsee 1GB/Second inter-connects and peripherals being as readily available in five years as 12MB/Second are today, and I may be under-estimating.
I think you're underestimating. The new Macs come with FireWire 800, which is 800 Mbps. Not much use for it just yet, but it's in the new high-end machines whether you need it or not. Of course, the rest of the world seems to lag behind Apple's lead in matters like this by five years or so-- is anybody but Apple shipping gigabit Ethernet on their laptops yet?-- so maybe your estimate for widespread adoption isn't that too far off, but I hope it's conservative.
You are justifying the elimination of floppies by stating that they are obsolete because they are being eliminated.
Yawn. The elimination of floppy drives requires no justification. It's a decision that Dell is making on their own, for their own reasons. Any attempt to couch the discussion in adversarial terms-- justification, and so on-- will be ignored.
That said, there is no reason to ship floppy drives in new computers. Apple proved this five years ago, after they shipped their last one. For the one person in, what, a thousand or more who needs a floppy drive for some reason, third-party options are available. For the rest of us, getting rid of the floppy drive reduces cost by a trivial amount, reduces complexity of the machine by a trivial amount, and reduces waste by a non-trivial amount.
But, of course, inevitably people will come along with objections like, "How am I supposed to flash my BIOS!?" The answer is, you're not. If you use a computer that requires you to flash your BIOS, you need to get up out of your chair and come join the rest of us in the 21st century. Mmm-kay?
Wrong. I own the dual G4 PowerMac for $1700 and did not get an AirPort card in it. Not only that, but you don't get AirPort in a PowerBook until you spend at least $2799.99. That is a joke.
AirPort antenna, dude, AirPort antenna. Take any Mac currently available. You can add an AirPort card to it for $79, and it will attach to the built-in antenna that comes inside the computer. Nobody else-- well, somebody must, but not most other computer companies at least-- include a built-in antenna. They force you to use a PC card or PCI card with an external antenna, which (1) gets terrible reception, because it's so stubby, and (2) is awful for laptop users. Ever seen somebody snap their AirPort card in two by putting their laptop into a backpack too carelessly? It's a sad sight.
Every Mac comes with a built-in, internal, invisible AirPort antenna.
this is precisely the reason Apple's market share continues to fall
First, market share is irrelevant. Has been for years. Nobody cares what the ratio is of Macs to PC's in the world. Do you think Mercedes cares what their market share is? The statistic is simply not relevant. It mattered once, when PC's and Macs were incompatible, but Macs drop right in to Windows networks with no problems now, so market share doesn't matter one bit.
Second, and more important, Apple's market share continues to fall because more people buy PC's than Macs. That's all. Apple's total sales figures continue to climb, when normalized for the overall economic environment. Apple is a very healthy, successful company.
That wasn't always the case. Seven years ago or so, the future of Apple was very much in doubt. Not today, though.
Apple's cheapest machine with a DVD burner is $1299. Sony's is $799.
So? No Sony computer will run Mac OS X.
I don't know, maybe you're just not getting it. In terms of hardware alone, Macs are more expensive, all other things being equal, than PC's. People buy them anyway. This demonstrates that people are not price-shopping when they buy Macs. It also demonstrates that people don't buy Macs for the hardware alone. There's more value there than can be expressed in terms of megahertz and megabytes and megabits.
See?
Apple sells computers to consumers with a 20% profit margin.
On average, the number is somewhat higher than that. Which, as a shareholder, makes me very, very happy.
What he was trying to say was instead of offering up low end machines with only 128 MB of memory, why doesn't Apple just take a negligible ($20 I believe was the price quoted) hit on their inflated profit margins and sell the computer with 256 MB of memory.
I can't believe you just asked that. The answer is obvious. High profit margins are the key to corporate health. High margins means Apple can afford to spend money on their OS and their bundled-- and unbundled-- applications, which is the only competitive advantage Apple has. If Apple gave away RAM, they'd be doing themselves and their shareholders a disservice.
Guess what? You can add more with USB-serial converters! Keyspan makes a 4-port model that works just great. I'm not aware of a limit on how many of those devices you can have on your computer at once; you're probably limited by the maximum number of USB devices per bus, and the maximum number of buses you can have on your machine.
In other words, my friend, there's zero reason to have a serial port built in to your computer. One, most people don't need them. Two, there's no reason why, if you do need them, you should be limited to the number of ports that are built in. USB, USB, USB.
And finally, floppies cost less than 25c each. For the $20 that a 16M USB drive would cost, I can buy 115M worth of floppy storage.
Yes... but you'd have to have a floppy drive to use them, which an increasing proportion of computers will not have. So those floppies you got on sale at the Stop-n-Rob will be less and less useful to you as time goes by.
I know the failure rate on the tray-loading CD-ROMs is non-trivial, but are the slot-loading models more reliable overall?
I have no idea, but the tray-loading drives just feel flimsy. Not too long after I got my iBook, it took a slight bump, and after that the CDROM tray never fit right. I'd like to see slot-loaders for that reason alone.
the big gripe about the $7XX iMac was that the retailer margin just wasn't big enough for anybody to bother keeping them in stock.
I didn't know anybody bothered buying Macs through the non-Apple retail channel any more. Apple Stores are all over the place, and the Apple Store on the web is everywhere!
place an easily accessible USB or FireWire port on the front of the chassis.
Front of the... wtf?
Look, when I want to attach a peripheral (temporarily) to my computer, I don't want to go crawling around under my desk or, as in my house, in the closet. USB ports, which are used to attach things like cameras and these little storage gizmos, belong on the keyboard.
I'm gonna ask a serious question now, because I haven't used anything other than my various Macs in nearly six months. Don't all keyboards come with USB ports on them? Serious question, I'm not kidding. Every Mac keyboard for... oh, god, since the first USB Mac keyboard, I think, has come with two USB ports on it. One for the mouse, and one for whatever. Doesn't everybody do it this way?
Now that we live in a post-iPod world, I wouldn't be too surprised if ADC 2.0 carried FireWire 800 as well as USB, video, and power. It's only nine conductors, for cryin' out loud, and a FireWire port embedded discreetly in my monitor would be a nice thing to have.
I'd like to see SuperDrives as standard equipment on PC's.. either that or find some way to incorporate MiniDisc technology
Don't get me wrong, I loves my SuperDrive. Read and write CD's, CD-R's, CD-RW's, DVD's, DVD-R's, and DVD-RW's. Definitely a cool thing.
But I think for trivial applications like you would use a floppy disk for, burning a CD is still a little bit more work than I would prefer to go into. And MiniDisc technology? Pff. It's basically nothing more or less than 3.5" M-O technology, and we all remember how that took off.
No, I think the future of small-scale (sub-gigabyte) portable storage is going to be solid-state. Those little USB devices, the ones that are about the size of your thumb, work just fine. They're cross-platform-- well, PC-to-Mac, anyway; as far as I know, PC's still can't mount Mac filesystems, for reasons that escape me-- and really convenient. Just plug it in, it appears on the desktop as a removeable hard drive. No muss, no fuss, and no moving parts to worry about.
And, of course, as technology continues to improve, these little widgets are going to move from the sub-gigabyte range into the sub-10-gigabytes range, and so on.
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Two hundredths of a percent of the population is 60,000 people in the USA alone. I think you're overestimating by a few orders of magnitude. If you can find me six people in the USA who are using dumb terminals on their home PC's, I'll give you a cookie.
I find my high-res text mode more readable and easier on the eyes than any graphics mode I've seen so far.
The only thing that proves is that you've never-- or won't admit that you've ever-- seen properly rendered anti-aliased text.
they aren't more readable to me. Actually I generally can't tell much difference.
Oh, come on. I can understand willful ignorance-- "if I never look at a modern graphical operating system, I can continue to pretend that my circa-1970 technology is superior"-- but this is just silly. If you seriously can't tell the difference between anti-aliased text and non-anti-aliased text, you've got some kind of serious vision impairment. The difference is obvious! Hell, I'll email you a screen-shot if that's what it will take. Oh, wait, that probably won't do any good. You won't be able to view it unless I render it in ASCII-art form.;-)
To you it is self-evident ("QED!") that having these features is unilaterally better than not having them. To me it's not.
Well, then, offer up some kind of argument for why I'm wrong, instead of just sitting there and going "nuh-uh" over and over again.
Oh - if you're planning to respond - can you please let at least one post go by without the patronising "ok if you don't want to discuss this, that's fine, your prerogative, feel free to keep your closed, illogical mind" line?
Okay, if you don't want to discuss this, that's fine. It's your prerogative. Feel free to keep your closed, illogical mind.;-)
Seriously, I was hoping we could have a constructive argument on this subject. I really, sincerely believe that I'm right and that you're wrong, and I'd love an opportunity to convince you of the fact. But if you'd prefer to stand by statements like "I can't tell the difference," then it's going to be tough for me to win you over. So it's entirely up to you. Fair enough?
So therefore for the purpose of your definitions, my user comfort level is irrelevant.
Boy, are you missing the point.
If you can name some feature or characteristic of your computer that provides you with a demonstrable, objective benefit, do so. For example-- I'm totally making this up, just to explain what I'm talking about-- let's say you're blind, and Linux provides a comprehensive non-visual user interface. Braille, or audio, or whatever. That's a demonstrable, objective benefit. I would be unable to argue with that, and I would humbly admit defeat and shut up.
If, on the other hand, you were to day, "I like pink better than blue, and my computer draws everything in various shades of pink," that would not provide a demonstrable, objective benefit. That would be purely a matter of personal preference. As you so wisely pointed out, arguing about preferences is like counting dancing angels on the head of a pin; it gets you nowhere.
Now do you understand the terms? We're talking about demonstrable, objective benefits. Not preferences. It is not true to say that your "comfort level is irrelevant."
Got it?
But so long as you continue to say "This is obviously always better than that, QED", then I have nothing left to say to you.
Okay. If you don't want to have the discussion, that's fine. But let no one think that I am being anything less that totally fair. I'm trying to get to the objective truth here, and you're not playing along. Which, as I've said many times before, is fine, it's your prerogative, and I'll respect your choice.
Many people would probably be quite happy with the 1600x1200 graphics window I bring up here on occasion. I am not.
Do you have a demonstrable, objective reason for this dissatisfaction, or are we simply in the realm of "I like pink?" Let's separate the objective from the preferential and get down to brass tacks!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's a joke. It does absolutely nothing. In my opinion, not a very funny joke, but I guess different people have different tastes.
This isn't strictly on-topic, but it's amusing nonetheless. King Gillette (that was his name, not his title; he was not a monarch) was a lifelong socialist who despised the idea of personal wealth. In the late 1800's, shaving was a pretty serious chore. Most men had to go to barbershops where they were given a shave with a straight razor. In 1895, Gillette invented the safety razor with the intent of freeing the common man from the burden of having to buy a professionally administered shave.
;-)
The US Army immediately ordered thousands upon thousands of safety razors for their troops. Gillette's invention was a monumental success.
Almost immediately, Gillette, lifelong socialist and despiser of wealth, found himself one of the richest men in the country.
Ah, sweet irony.
spam is unsolicited advertising
That's an absurd definition. All advertising is unsolicited. Those commercials I sat through when I watched CSI tonight? Unsolicited. The ads I see when I read my newspaper every morning? Unsolicited. The (gasp!) ads (gasp!) on Slashdot (gasp) that I don't see because I use a filtering proxy (yay)? Unsolicited.
You should come up with a better definition of spam, methinks.
This statement (and others in the post supporting this position) is so far from reality, it makes it difficult to know where to start.
Well, you could start by finding any source, any citation, that indicates that I'm wrong. Find me evidence that copyright law does, in fact, place a mandate on copyright holders to enable the general public to make fair use of their works.
There are very few places where the Copyright law gives positive rights to people on the other side of the copyright bargain
If by "very few" you mean "none at all," I'm in complete agreement.
But your statement implies that copyright law completely prohibits people (without the copyright holder?s permission) from making a copy.
Nonsense. I made no such implication. Copyright law places the absolute authority or controlling copying and distribution in the hands of copyright holders. It defines certain narrow exceptions, acts with would otherwise be infringement, and declares them to be non-infringing. This is what people are talking about when they say "fair use."
Copyright law neither mandates nor prohibits anything directly. It puts the matter of determining what is and what is not allowed in the hands of the copyright holder.
Rhetorically speaking, where did you get the idea that copyright holders have complete control and rights over their work?
The law. It says, basically, "Copyright holders have complete control and rights over their works for the duration of the copyright, except for the following exceptions."
the biggest key is to stop confusing copyrights with property ownership
Unless you're an appellate court justice, please keep your interpretations out of the discussion and stick to the law and to the body of relevant case law. The fact that you disagree with the law's interpretation of the situation amounts to a hill of beans.
The retroactive increasing of copyright terms by 20 years essentially steals from the public domain
Oh, what a crock. All works will end up in the public domain sooner or later. All works, without exception. This is mandated by the Constitution, because it says that Congress may only grant exclusive monopolies temporarily. So unless Congress somehow finds a way to keep a work out of the public domain forever and ever, the phrase "steals from the public domain" is just so much hogwash.
I?d suggest reading the briefs from the Eldritch case for depth on this subject.
Um. The Eldritch case was decided in favor of the status quo. Briefs in the Eldritch case arguing against copyright extensions were judged by the Supreme Court to amount to a hill of beans.
The radical expansion of ?derivative works? is a more insidious method that copyright laws have stolen from us (citizenry and the culture).
I just love how you keep talking about how not getting access to other people's work amounts to theft. That's the postwar culture of entitlement for you.
A good example was the lawsuit against ?The Wind Done Gone?. This is clearly a very original work, although it uses characters and even dialogue from ?Gone with the Wind?.
Friend, if you use "characters and even dialogue" from somebody else's work, then your own work is not original. I think you might be well served by keeping a dictionary by your computer for moments like these.
In that case, as you correctly point out, the fact that the work is not even remotely original was deemed to be irrelevant, because that particular form of non-originality is an exception under the copyright act. See? The system works.
How can we say copyright is promoting the arts when someone can be successfully sued for using a 3 note-rift in a song that is also used in another song?
Get out there and come up with your own 3-note riff and then sue people for using it without your permission. How's that for an incentive?
Unless you think the creation of copyrighted work occurs in a vacuum, the removal of ?ideas? from culture for life+75 years is not good for society!
Um. We're talking about copyright, right? You know, that legal construct that protects expressions of ideas, not ideas themselves, right? The fact that a work is protected by copyright does nothing at all to impede you, or even discourage you, from creating your own works inspired by that work.
real example: can?t back-up child?s favorite tape with post-DMCA VCR, so I had buy another one when it was worn out a year later
I wrecked my car. The car company, to my everlasting amazement, refuses to give me another one. They say I have to buy another one. Pretty unfair, huh?
You can only get away with calling it an "entitlement" if you can prove the activities now prohibited by the DMCA anti-circumvention loophole were illegal in the first place, otherwise it is clearly a case of a new law taking away legal (and useful) activities.
Well, shit, dude. Every new law makes stuff that was previous not illegal illegal. So fucking what? "Waa, waa. I want to be able to do stuff that the law says I can't do! This is so unfair! Waa!"
Deal with it, okay? The DMCA is, so far, constitutional. It is a legal law. Just like you have to obey the speed limit and pay your taxes, you have to obey the DMCA. The fact that you personally don't like it because... I don't know, something about not taking care of your videotapes... earns you absolutely no sympathy from me whatsoever.
Let me turn around the challenge: show me a federal law that prohibits fair-use activities like ?the first sale doctrine?, ?time-shifting?, or ?making back-up copies?.
There are none. Those things are legal, and you're free to do them as you please. (Although the "making back-up copies" thing is complete and utter bullshit, and we all know it. But it's not illegal, so that's fine.) But since I know where you're going with this, I can cut right to the chase. If a copyright holder releases a work that is protected by encryption or another access-control mechanism, and you circumvent that mechanism for any purpose whatsoever that is not covered by one of the exceptions listed in the statute-- in other words, if you're not a public library, basically-- then you have broken the law, and can be brought up for both civil and criminal remedies.
If you don't like it, lobby your representatives to get it changed. But you'll still have to obey it until that happens. But don't try to argue that it somehow amounts to theft or whatever. You have no rights here. You are not entitled to do whatever you want with works that are protected by copyright. Okay? Got it?
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while... it's a dildo. Of course it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo... always use the indefinite article "a dildo," never "your dildo."
If a scientist can't prove it, that doesn't make it false.
Tell that to the UN. Weapons inspectors are not detectives, guys!
(Ack. Here come the -1, Troll moderators.)
Uh. I thought the frame in an iBook was made out of magnesium. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, either.
The Apple Store on the web is always there, of course, but you're not going to find the $7XX iMac there, either, unless you can pull an educational ID out and look in the right place.
Uhh... it's right there on the front page. Look on the bottom. "iMac from $799. Great value on a classic design."
I know 5 people who use SunRay 100's at home (basically a dumb terminal)
Wrong, dude. Remember, we're talking about serial consoles here. Don't give me any of this "network computer" crap, or this "basically a dumb terminal" crap. The whole point of this discussion is that nobody, but nobody, uses a serial console on their home computer.
Tryin' to cheat me out of a perfectly good cookie, why I oughta margle fargle...
I don't mean to be insulting, but if you can't understand this you are simply not trying.
;-)
Are you speaking to me, or to yourself?
I've already explained my position at great length. Your post basically consists of, "nuh-uh, market share is everything!" This is despite the fact that I've already explained, in insultingly pedandtic detail, why this isn't so. This kind of discussion just doesn't engage me, sorry.
Except when you move your hand to pick up the USB device you want to plug in. ;)
;-)
Oh, ha ha.
Ok, how about the side of the monitor?
I think the side of the monitor is pretty much the same thing as the back. You still have to get up and lean over your desk, or twist your monitor around, or something like that. The USB port on my keyboard is right there on the side, where I can get to it easily when I want it but it's not staring me in the face all the time. I really think it's the best solution to the port problem.
At least, it's the best one that I know of so far.
But I contend then that including this antenna is useless because no one knows about it
;-)
Okay, given that that's demonstrably false, my only response to this point is a resounding "whatever, dude."
Apple's Switch campaign, plus their recent efforts to increase specs and lower prices (at the cost of profit margin) is directly targeted toward increasing market share.
No. Apple's Switch campaign is directly targeted toward selling Macs. See, Macs have traditionally been thought of as computers for people who have never owned computers before. Well the number of people around the world who have never owned a computer before but who are interested in and/or financially capable of buying one is dwindling rapidly. Apple wants to keep selling Macs, and the traditional markets of people who have never owned a computer and people who own Macs and who want to upgrade are getting smaller.
So Apple's trying to open up a new market: people who have PC's, who aren't happy with them, and who are looking for something better. It's not about market share. It's about being able to sustain selling a million units a quarter-- you know, an ungodly sales target-- in the face of a dwindling market.
Same thing with price cuts. (Isn't that what started this thread?) Keep the Macs going out the door. Market share? Piss on it. It's about units, not ratios.
If Apple's market share continues to decline, they are going to have trouble convincing vendors to write apps for their platform.
Also wrong. Because, again, market share doesn't matter. Let's say there are 5 million users of Mac OS X. (I think that number is pretty close to accurate.) A company that's considering writing an application for OS X knows that there are 5 million potential customers out there. That's significant. That's worth going after.
Of course, the final analysis will depend on what kind of a program it is. A personal finance program, a la Quicken? You bet there's a strong market for that; you'll sell millions of copies to Mac owners. A game? Yeah... maybe. Mac users haven't traditionally been big gamers, but companies like Aspyr are making plenty of money porting and selling the best PC games to the Mac platform, so that market is worth going after, too, if your product is good enough. An enterprise-class relational database? Well... you wouldn't think so, but Oracle and Sybase have both released their flagship products for OS X.
See, it's about the size of the potential market, not the ratio of that market to another. As long as the total size of the Mac market is sufficient-- and right now it is-- the ports will be there.
The Mac versions of many popular programs are known to have less features, cost more, come out later, and have more bugs than their Windows counterparts.
If by "many popular programs" you mean QuickBooks, then yes. But for the core Mac apps-- Adobe's, Macromedia's, and so on-- just the opposite is true.
This is true, the total pie of computer owners is getting bigger, but as Mac's share of that pie gets smaller, their relevance declines along with it.
Heh heh. Yeah, people have been talking about how Apple is becoming less and less relevant since the mid-1990's. Funnily enough, though, the PC world is still chasing Apple's lead. Guess they're not quite irrelevant yet, huh?
Everyone price-shops when they buy anything.
Dude, that's just wrong. People who buy Mercedes could get around town just as easily in a Ford Festiva or whatever the hell. They don't, though. They buy the bigger-ticket item. Mac purchasers are, by and large, just exactly the same. They could get by with something cheaper, a laptop from China or a Fry's special PC or something. But they don't. Get it now?
How does Dell make money?
There's an old joke about a used car dealership. The salesman says to the customer, "Our prices are so low, we actually lose money on every car we sell!" The customer asks, "How do you make a profit?" The salesman says, "Volume."
You can either be a volume business or a margin business. Ford is a volume business, just like Dell. Mercedes is a margin business. And Apple is, you guessed it, a margin business.
if Apple makes $20 less per computer they sell, but the machine now has 256 MB of memory, they would end up making more money because at the end of the day they've sold more machines
How do you figure that more people are going to buy a Mac if it comes bundled with $20 worth of RAM? If you're going to buy a Mac, spending an extra $20 on RAM isn't going to stop you. And if you're not going to buy a Mac, the incentive of $20 in free RAM isn't going to change your mind.
I think part of the reason Apple's margin are so high is because they can't afford not to charge those margins because they don't move enough units.
Hey, check it out! He's starting to understand the economics of a margin-driven business model!
Making a profit means they can afford to do this, and they have reported losses the last two quarters.
Yeah, but prior to that they posted at least six consecutive quarters of significant profitability. (The report I've got handy only goes back to Q2FY01.) This past quarter's loss was so small as to be practically a wash-- a net loss of $8 million on net revenues of nearly $1.5 billion, or a net loss of about one half of one percent of net sales. Apple is doing very well in an extremely difficult economy.
There's a funny story that's completely unrelated to but vaguely reminiscent of this. (Let's let the "off-topic" and "interesting" mods fight it out.)
WFAA-TV in Dallas, TX, was one of the first TV stations in the country, if not the first, to turn on its HDTV transmitter. It did this back in 1998.
Dallas is also the home of Parkland Memorial Hospital, a giant hospital complex. Some of you may remember Parkland as the hospital where President Kennedy was pronounced after his assassination in 1963.
Parkland Hospital has a giant cardiac ICU, as one would expect of a giant hospital. In the cardiac ICU they use wireless telemetry systems to monitor patients' hearts. Instead of having a 12-lead EKG monitor by each patient's bed and sending nurses around to check them, they put the leads on each patient and then connect them to a little battery-powered wireless transmitter. The transmitter sends the signals back to the nurse's station where they can be observed by a human being more conveniently and safely.
So back in 1998, WFAA flipped the switch to turn on their HDTV transmitter. And every single wireless cardiac monitor in Parkland went bat-shit.
The long story made short, as it was explained to me, is that the company that made the wireless monitors was, either through negligence or some kind of honest mistake, using the wrong frequency. The frequency they were using was allocated by the FCC for digital television broadcasts. This wasn't a problem at the time, because there were no digital television broadcasts anywhere in the country. Until that day when WFAA turned on their transmitter.
Ever since hearing that story, I've been a little skeptical about the much-lauded wireless revolution. Imagine if you will that the FCC, some years from now, reallocates the 2.4 GHz band for some other use. All the gear that currently uses that band, from microwave ovens to cordless phones to Bluetooth gadgets to your laptop, these things aren't just going to disappear.
Oh, trouble's a'brewin'.
Why is a keyboard so much better than having a dedicated USB hub, or having USB ports on the monitor?
;-)
Because the keyboard is right there. The USB port on the keyboard is never more than an inch or two away from your hands. I don't want a dedicated USB hub because that's just another piece of junk to clutter up my desk. And I don't want USB ports on the front of my monitor because they're ugly. Heck, my monitor doesn't even have any moving parts, not even a mechanical on/off switch. The power button is a touch-sensitive spot on the case, nice and clean. And USB ports on the back of the monitor, while far better than those on the back of the computer itself, are not exactly convenient.
For that matter, where do you go when you want to insert a CD?
The closet. Fortunately that's not a particularly common operation for me, but I'll admit that my particular arrangement has a few flaws. I'm happy to make the occasional trip to the closet to pop in a CD, though, rather than having a computer cluttering up my home office study library room thing.
PC hardware has to worry about backwards compatibility much more than Apple because there are multiple suppliers.
Yes, I realize that. It doesn't make sense, but I realize it's true.
This they inherited from previous designs which had whatever ports they used before USB.
ADB, the Apple Desktop Bus. Blissfully consigned to the history books, as PS/2 should be.
You, on the other hand, are an apologist.
I don't recall apologizing for anything.
I was referring to the $800 CRT iMac. It doesn't come with wireless networking
Yes, it does. You can add the card for $79. The hardware is already built-in.
it doesn't have a flat-panel display
True.
calling it the equivalent of a mid-range PC is just absurd
Okay, it's absurd. Find me a low-end PC that comes with two built-in FireWire 400 buses-- don't give me any of this USB 2.0 crap; only isochronous FireWire works for DV-- an AirPort antenna, and something equivalent to iLife, and I will admit, here in this public forum, that it's absurd.
What makes your opinion any more valid than mine?
I'm not the one who's trying to tell us about everything Apple is doing wrong. I'm telling you to hush up because you obviously don't know any more about running a computer company than the rest of us; if you did, you'd be out there running one. So your criticisms all come from a position of ignorance, making them of questionable value at best.
That's why we're in a period of "grandfathering" in the new technology slowly.
What do I know, but it seems to me that we've been in the period of "grandfathering" in USB for, oh, about five years now. It's time for the period to end.
As for configuring networking gear and rackmount equipment, that, too, will slowly come around and start using new technology for their control interfaces.
Or you can use the USB-serial adapters that are coming in your breakfast cereal now. Well, okay, maybe they're not quite that ubiquitous yet, but I swear I saw them set up as impulse items at the Kwik-E-Mart.
I can forsee 1GB/Second inter-connects and peripherals being as readily available in five years as 12MB/Second are today, and I may be under-estimating.
I think you're underestimating. The new Macs come with FireWire 800, which is 800 Mbps. Not much use for it just yet, but it's in the new high-end machines whether you need it or not. Of course, the rest of the world seems to lag behind Apple's lead in matters like this by five years or so-- is anybody but Apple shipping gigabit Ethernet on their laptops yet?-- so maybe your estimate for widespread adoption isn't that too far off, but I hope it's conservative.
You are justifying the elimination of floppies by stating that they are obsolete because they are being eliminated.
Yawn. The elimination of floppy drives requires no justification. It's a decision that Dell is making on their own, for their own reasons. Any attempt to couch the discussion in adversarial terms-- justification, and so on-- will be ignored.
That said, there is no reason to ship floppy drives in new computers. Apple proved this five years ago, after they shipped their last one. For the one person in, what, a thousand or more who needs a floppy drive for some reason, third-party options are available. For the rest of us, getting rid of the floppy drive reduces cost by a trivial amount, reduces complexity of the machine by a trivial amount, and reduces waste by a non-trivial amount.
But, of course, inevitably people will come along with objections like, "How am I supposed to flash my BIOS!?" The answer is, you're not. If you use a computer that requires you to flash your BIOS, you need to get up out of your chair and come join the rest of us in the 21st century. Mmm-kay?
Wrong. I own the dual G4 PowerMac for $1700 and did not get an AirPort card in it. Not only that, but you don't get AirPort in a PowerBook until you spend at least $2799.99. That is a joke.
AirPort antenna, dude, AirPort antenna. Take any Mac currently available. You can add an AirPort card to it for $79, and it will attach to the built-in antenna that comes inside the computer. Nobody else-- well, somebody must, but not most other computer companies at least-- include a built-in antenna. They force you to use a PC card or PCI card with an external antenna, which (1) gets terrible reception, because it's so stubby, and (2) is awful for laptop users. Ever seen somebody snap their AirPort card in two by putting their laptop into a backpack too carelessly? It's a sad sight.
Every Mac comes with a built-in, internal, invisible AirPort antenna.
this is precisely the reason Apple's market share continues to fall
First, market share is irrelevant. Has been for years. Nobody cares what the ratio is of Macs to PC's in the world. Do you think Mercedes cares what their market share is? The statistic is simply not relevant. It mattered once, when PC's and Macs were incompatible, but Macs drop right in to Windows networks with no problems now, so market share doesn't matter one bit.
Second, and more important, Apple's market share continues to fall because more people buy PC's than Macs. That's all. Apple's total sales figures continue to climb, when normalized for the overall economic environment. Apple is a very healthy, successful company.
That wasn't always the case. Seven years ago or so, the future of Apple was very much in doubt. Not today, though.
Apple's cheapest machine with a DVD burner is $1299. Sony's is $799.
So? No Sony computer will run Mac OS X.
I don't know, maybe you're just not getting it. In terms of hardware alone, Macs are more expensive, all other things being equal, than PC's. People buy them anyway. This demonstrates that people are not price-shopping when they buy Macs. It also demonstrates that people don't buy Macs for the hardware alone. There's more value there than can be expressed in terms of megahertz and megabytes and megabits.
See?
Apple sells computers to consumers with a 20% profit margin.
On average, the number is somewhat higher than that. Which, as a shareholder, makes me very, very happy.
What he was trying to say was instead of offering up low end machines with only 128 MB of memory, why doesn't Apple just take a negligible ($20 I believe was the price quoted) hit on their inflated profit margins and sell the computer with 256 MB of memory.
I can't believe you just asked that. The answer is obvious. High profit margins are the key to corporate health. High margins means Apple can afford to spend money on their OS and their bundled-- and unbundled-- applications, which is the only competitive advantage Apple has. If Apple gave away RAM, they'd be doing themselves and their shareholders a disservice.
Me, I'm out of serial ports.
Guess what? You can add more with USB-serial converters! Keyspan makes a 4-port model that works just great. I'm not aware of a limit on how many of those devices you can have on your computer at once; you're probably limited by the maximum number of USB devices per bus, and the maximum number of buses you can have on your machine.
In other words, my friend, there's zero reason to have a serial port built in to your computer. One, most people don't need them. Two, there's no reason why, if you do need them, you should be limited to the number of ports that are built in. USB, USB, USB.
And finally, floppies cost less than 25c each. For the $20 that a 16M USB drive would cost, I can buy 115M worth of floppy storage.
Yes... but you'd have to have a floppy drive to use them, which an increasing proportion of computers will not have. So those floppies you got on sale at the Stop-n-Rob will be less and less useful to you as time goes by.
I know the failure rate on the tray-loading CD-ROMs is non-trivial, but are the slot-loading models more reliable overall?
I have no idea, but the tray-loading drives just feel flimsy. Not too long after I got my iBook, it took a slight bump, and after that the CDROM tray never fit right. I'd like to see slot-loaders for that reason alone.
the big gripe about the $7XX iMac was that the retailer margin just wasn't big enough for anybody to bother keeping them in stock.
I didn't know anybody bothered buying Macs through the non-Apple retail channel any more. Apple Stores are all over the place, and the Apple Store on the web is everywhere!
place an easily accessible USB or FireWire port on the front of the chassis.
Front of the... wtf?
Look, when I want to attach a peripheral (temporarily) to my computer, I don't want to go crawling around under my desk or, as in my house, in the closet. USB ports, which are used to attach things like cameras and these little storage gizmos, belong on the keyboard.
I'm gonna ask a serious question now, because I haven't used anything other than my various Macs in nearly six months. Don't all keyboards come with USB ports on them? Serious question, I'm not kidding. Every Mac keyboard for... oh, god, since the first USB Mac keyboard, I think, has come with two USB ports on it. One for the mouse, and one for whatever. Doesn't everybody do it this way?
Now that we live in a post-iPod world, I wouldn't be too surprised if ADC 2.0 carried FireWire 800 as well as USB, video, and power. It's only nine conductors, for cryin' out loud, and a FireWire port embedded discreetly in my monitor would be a nice thing to have.
I'd like to see SuperDrives as standard equipment on PC's.. either that or find some way to incorporate MiniDisc technology
Don't get me wrong, I loves my SuperDrive. Read and write CD's, CD-R's, CD-RW's, DVD's, DVD-R's, and DVD-RW's. Definitely a cool thing.
But I think for trivial applications like you would use a floppy disk for, burning a CD is still a little bit more work than I would prefer to go into. And MiniDisc technology? Pff. It's basically nothing more or less than 3.5" M-O technology, and we all remember how that took off.
No, I think the future of small-scale (sub-gigabyte) portable storage is going to be solid-state. Those little USB devices, the ones that are about the size of your thumb, work just fine. They're cross-platform-- well, PC-to-Mac, anyway; as far as I know, PC's still can't mount Mac filesystems, for reasons that escape me-- and really convenient. Just plug it in, it appears on the desktop as a removeable hard drive. No muss, no fuss, and no moving parts to worry about.
And, of course, as technology continues to improve, these little widgets are going to move from the sub-gigabyte range into the sub-10-gigabytes range, and so on.
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Two hundredths of a percent of the population is 60,000 people in the USA alone. I think you're overestimating by a few orders of magnitude. If you can find me six people in the USA who are using dumb terminals on their home PC's, I'll give you a cookie.
I find my high-res text mode more readable and easier on the eyes than any graphics mode I've seen so far.
;-)
;-)
The only thing that proves is that you've never-- or won't admit that you've ever-- seen properly rendered anti-aliased text.
they aren't more readable to me. Actually I generally can't tell much difference.
Oh, come on. I can understand willful ignorance-- "if I never look at a modern graphical operating system, I can continue to pretend that my circa-1970 technology is superior"-- but this is just silly. If you seriously can't tell the difference between anti-aliased text and non-anti-aliased text, you've got some kind of serious vision impairment. The difference is obvious! Hell, I'll email you a screen-shot if that's what it will take. Oh, wait, that probably won't do any good. You won't be able to view it unless I render it in ASCII-art form.
To you it is self-evident ("QED!") that having these features is unilaterally better than not having them. To me it's not.
Well, then, offer up some kind of argument for why I'm wrong, instead of just sitting there and going "nuh-uh" over and over again.
Oh - if you're planning to respond - can you please let at least one post go by without the patronising "ok if you don't want to discuss this, that's fine, your prerogative, feel free to keep your closed, illogical mind" line?
Okay, if you don't want to discuss this, that's fine. It's your prerogative. Feel free to keep your closed, illogical mind.
Seriously, I was hoping we could have a constructive argument on this subject. I really, sincerely believe that I'm right and that you're wrong, and I'd love an opportunity to convince you of the fact. But if you'd prefer to stand by statements like "I can't tell the difference," then it's going to be tough for me to win you over. So it's entirely up to you. Fair enough?
So therefore for the purpose of your definitions, my user comfort level is irrelevant.
Boy, are you missing the point.
If you can name some feature or characteristic of your computer that provides you with a demonstrable, objective benefit, do so. For example-- I'm totally making this up, just to explain what I'm talking about-- let's say you're blind, and Linux provides a comprehensive non-visual user interface. Braille, or audio, or whatever. That's a demonstrable, objective benefit. I would be unable to argue with that, and I would humbly admit defeat and shut up.
If, on the other hand, you were to day, "I like pink better than blue, and my computer draws everything in various shades of pink," that would not provide a demonstrable, objective benefit. That would be purely a matter of personal preference. As you so wisely pointed out, arguing about preferences is like counting dancing angels on the head of a pin; it gets you nowhere.
Now do you understand the terms? We're talking about demonstrable, objective benefits. Not preferences. It is not true to say that your "comfort level is irrelevant."
Got it?
But so long as you continue to say "This is obviously always better than that, QED", then I have nothing left to say to you.
Okay. If you don't want to have the discussion, that's fine. But let no one think that I am being anything less that totally fair. I'm trying to get to the objective truth here, and you're not playing along. Which, as I've said many times before, is fine, it's your prerogative, and I'll respect your choice.
Many people would probably be quite happy with the 1600x1200 graphics window I bring up here on occasion. I am not.
Do you have a demonstrable, objective reason for this dissatisfaction, or are we simply in the realm of "I like pink?" Let's separate the objective from the preferential and get down to brass tacks!