And uh, dual-core CPUs are very much real. Dual-core G5s may be a myth.
He said 'the dual-core CPUs are a myth'. Which is to say, the particular dual core CPUs which were mentioned in the grandparent were myth. I think it's safe to say that everyone here, including the person you so hotly refute, knows that dual-core CPUs do exist.
As for Apple being self-aggrandizing... I suppose instead they should just release new hardware without mentioning it? Every company blows their own horns, as hard as they safely can. Check out Intel's press releases every time they squeeze another 5% performance boost out of a chip. It sounds like what you're sore at Apple about is that they're so good at it.
Yes, and declaring that you are the direct representative of God on earth is arrogant too. I bet if I thought about it, I could even find OTHER examples of arrogance!
Which does not mean that the grandparent wasn't quite right, and these people are basically arrogant dickheads.
Or perhaps you are arguing that BECAUSE the USA is sometimes sickeningly arrogant, companies based in the USA should get no protections for their copyrights? If so, it is certainly a novel argument.
It's not that I don't believe you, but I have to chip in my own experience here.
I have a server at home running AFP that I'm connected to most of the time. I frequently close my laptop at home (a 192.168.1.X network, but the server is outside of it, on a fixed IP) and bring it to work (a 192.168.1.X network) and plug it in. The server stays mounted, although occasionally the dialog that says ' was not able to connect to the server... try again?' If I hit yes, it will eventually reconnect.
A couple weeks ago, I was copying a ~10 gig file up onto the server (yes, a single file, an encrypted disk image) and absentmindedly closed the laptop and carried it to work. When I reopened the laptop, the copy just continued like nothing had happened... except, of course, a lot slower.
Also, now, I occasionally mount the server, then mount that disk image on my laptop. I can close the laptop, bring it home/to work, open it again, and be off and running again on the disk image.
One thing I haven't tried is mounting a server that has a different IP address from home than it does from work... for example, if foo.bar.com resolved to 192.168.1.11 on my work network but resolved to 64.201.99.37 from home, and I entered foo.bar.com, is the machine smart enough to do another DNS lookup if 192.168.1.11 no longer responds? But by and large, everything just works, and just works a lot better than I would have expected, given the change in local IP addresses.
I can't remember for sure... the time when I was doing the copy, I may well have been plugged into 100-base-T, too, whereas when I'm at work I stay on the wireless network most of the time, so I can tell when it goes down BEFORE people start screaming.
Call it what you like. The fact that you made the suggestion is absurd, dumb, and stupid.
Before I comment on this, just for clarity, let me inform you that I am not the original poster.
Now, that said, if your posts are any indication, it is my considered opinion that you have had any trace of a sense of humor, or indeed a recognition of sarcasm or irony, completely surgically removed at birth.
Additionally, from all evidence, it appears you are sorely limited in the vocabulary department, since you do not appear to have the slightest idea what facetious means, nor did you even bother to take the time to look it up.
In short, it appears that you are dumber than a hat full of assholes and have all the grace and politeness of a rhino with a terminal case of hemorrhoids.
'...because Apple is a big company that sometimes does lousy things that all other big companies do (but that nobody really notices because they aren't Apple) it is awful and we hate it.'
Apple laptops are notorious for quality control problems because people expect more of Apple than they do of other manufacturers. When Apple had the Aluminum 15" white-spot-screen-problem, people screamed bloody murder about it. It's awful! My god, nearly half of the AlBooks had it for the first three months of shipping!
Well, I've seen that problem before. Every single one of our Dell Latitude x200 laptops have gone in for it at least once, and several of them more than once, over the three years that we have had the model. It had something to do with the case design, because the floating white cloud effect was generally in a perfect ring around a spot in the center of the screen that corresponded with the placement of the Dell logo on the back of the screen, plus in a few other apparently-random places.
Now, that's 100% of over 40 laptops. But nobody really noticed, because nobody pays attention to any particular model of Dell laptop, but when Apple goofs it's big news. Remember the 5300, which in theory could have caught on fire so they had to recall it? But none of them actually ever caught on fire. Same year, three Dells of a particular model DID catch on fire. Who suffered more from the bad press? Well, which one do you remember?
We never really noticed how bad the white-spot problem was for our x200s either... because we have also replaced all of the hard drives at least once (we've replaced each on average 1.4 times) and about half of the motherboards have gone out... some ethernet problems, some firewire or USB bus power problems, and some Just Not Booting. White spots don't look so important when you have just lost all your data, especially if you are a total yutz who doesn't follow company backup policy.
If you look at Consumer Reports, which IMO is simply the best place to look for non-biased reporting of issues of this type, you'll see that Apple has the lowest rate of 'Repairs and Serious Problems' for both their laptops and their desktops. (16%, for laptops. Toshiba and Sony are both around 17%. Dell is 21%). I'd send you a link, but since CR is customer-funded and not ad-driven, they require you to pay to see their content.
BTW, I can't imagine what we're doing wrong. We're a company of 40-45 people, with a sustained failure rate of more than one laptop a week. That's more than 100% per year. I can't imagine that we are that much harder on them than average, though we do leave them on more than most people probably do, and the people who don't leave them on all night every night are traveling a lot with them. Still, something's strange.
Parts kit has always been between $1000 and $1200.
And the parts kit contains basically anything that's going to go bad in that machine except the hard drive. (Well, okay, so we have an xServe with a bad firewire connector board, but the Apple xServe rep had never even heard of one of those going bad before. And anyway it doesn't keep the machine from working, so...)
A spare xServe is fine too, don't get me wrong. (In fact, get one used...) But the parts kit is a perfectly good thing to have around if you have, say, three or more xServes.
We're a small business -- less than 100 employees in all, but we have to run a number of servers, some for customers but most for various different employee functions.
We found that the Macs were great for a couple of things: one, they have hot-swappable IDE (older models) and SATA (newer models) hard drives, which is great for backups... set up a mirrored array and then just pop one of the drives out and pop a blank one in, then carry the first one off-site. Or, in another case, when it's the dedicated backup server, we have four IDE drives in there, each one with a different backup from a different day of the week, and then we pop Saturday's one out once a month so we have a monthly offsite. Dell et al had the same thing with SCSI, which costs twice as much. (This was a couple years back, I'm sure Dell is getting to SATA by this time... right?)
Also, we have a server that we were concerned about going down for more than an hour or so, but it's not a big problem if it's down for an hour. We can't really afford redundant servers for EVERYTHING.
So we got the next best thing: we have it set up on an xServe, but all the software, incloding the OS, is on an external firewire hardware RAID box. The xServe started acting up one day (turned out to be a bad power outlet on the power manager, of all things) and I walked in, unplugged it, carried it into our test lab, plugged it into our iMac, and rebooted. Sha-zaam... the iMac is now the server. And it would have worked with any Mac made in the last, oh, five years or so. Well, any Mac with firewire or USB2 that had 256 megs of RAM or more. If necessary, I could have extracted one of the drives from the FW RAID and put it into any of the Macs that didn't have firewire, in an extra 10 minutes or so.
And that server, from soup to nuts, took less than a day to set up.
There really are some things you can do with the xServes that have significant advantages. Sometimes it's just doing things a little easier... sometimes it's doing things you never even thought of. Like a thoroughly portable server. (Heck, I could take that hard drive down to our colo site, attach it to our backup server down there, switch over the IP address, switch the IP address in our DNS, and we'd be up and running in under an hour, even if our HQ were without connectivity or power for days. Of course, I could do that with our main corporate file server, too, but that's just because we happen to have a machine down at the colo site that is the exact same model.)
This is, broadly speaking, true. I only found one in-circuit emulator for the Mac, and, after committing to a Mac version of their embedded tools, Metrowerks abruptly did a 180 and ditched the product when it was in beta, and they were the only ones doing an embedded compiler.
It's a pity. Though of course the free tools, pathetic though they are, mostly do compile and work on the Mac.
However, a lot of the hardware is moving away from serial and parallel ports these days, for the excellent reason that a lot of PCs, especially laptops (which are becoming ubiquitous) don't have them either.
Another way? (I am proud of this one, since I wrote it up as a bug/enhancement request and it showed up in the next OS rev).
If the finder is open and the file you're looking for is visible, just drag it into the 'open file' dialog and it will be selected. You can also drag it into a 'save file' dialog if you want to replace it.
The only reference I can find to the rumor about this issue forcing the investment in Apple and the patent swap and the agreement to keep developing Mac software is from here: http://www.mackido.com/History/History_VfW.html However, I saw quite a few references to that rumor in the circles I was traveling in at time, and I know for a fact that there was still a lawsuit that was settled and disappeared without a trace right around that time, so...
As for why QuickTime works so badly now, I can only surmise that one of the following is true:
- Apple has stopped really trying.
- Microsoft succeeded in making it impossible to do within QT's budget.
- Microsoft has gotten a lot better at what they do, and thus make the QT group look worse.
Given how often MS has been convicted of sabotaging rivals, I'd have to say that the second sounds like the most likely. Real has mentioned in a lot of interviews that if they didn't rely on undocumented Windows calls that they reverse-engineered, they wouldn't be able to get their product working acceptably.
Ah, Microsoft... to know you is to know just how much I'm being known by you.
Last I checked, mustard gas could not really be called 'lachrymatory gas', unless one were to stretch the definition enough to say that anything that hurts you an enormous amount is 'lachrymatory'.
Argh, I hate people who abuse that Winston Churchill quote. Taking that one out of context is like quoting the ten commandments as 'Thou shalt... kill'.
The original quote, from WC himself, is an argument that, for example, it might be better to use tear gas on a native group rather than shooting them all. Or, to take some context:
"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas."
Your sentence slots in right after that.
Yeah, yeah, off topic, on topic, who cares, it's an obnoxious sig.
Personally, I'd have to say it's the Apple zealots. There seem to be a lot more of them who have actual senses of humor, anyway.
Not that you can't be funny without a sense of humor, as the grandparent post so amply demonstrates. But that sort of amusement can be... wearing, after a while.
I think they are morally bankrupt, and I think Steve Jobs is destined to go to hell for how he treats people.
Ye gods. Well, first of all only a real dick says something like that of someone, especially with all the implied glee that you seem to be exuding, and ESPECIALLY of someone who you've never even met. (Yes, I have, several times, but not really to talk to.) You're the sort who gives Christians a bad name, and I don't care to share the same religion as you do much myself. "'Judgement is MINE' sayeth the Lord," remember?
And second, you need a little bit of education on the difference between morals and ethics. I won't even undertake to do that here, but here's a pretty decent web site: http://www.scribblers-ink.com/professional_ethics. html
Apple does unethical things upon occasion, as does any other large corporation you can name. Do they do it more often? Are they a thousand times more heavily scrutinized than most other companies their size, and therefore their 'little lapses' are more often found? Is more expected of them, because of their early rhetoric, and therefore are all lapses greatly magnified, sometimes out of proportion?
I'd have to answer those three questions: 'who knows?', 'yes', and 'ohhh yes.'
Try new Anonymous Coward Lite! Opinionated, and low in facts!
Apple has actually spanked MS a number of times in the last ten years, lawsuit-wise. The problem is that as soon as it begins to look like Apple is winning, MS immediately settles. One of the settlement conditions is always that neither of the principals will discuss the settlement, so it takes a little digging to get the information, but there are always some leaks.
For example, there was the company that MS paid a rather surprising amount of money to get a copy of Apple's QuickTime source code from. At the time, MS's video player was less than half the speed of Apple's, on Windows. So they just appropriated huge chunks of code wholesale from Apple's software. And, when Apple took them to court, they settled out of court. According to the best scuttlebutt available, the large MS investment in Apple in the late 90s, and the agreement to continue developing MS Office for the Mac, were part of the settlement.
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/QuickTime/ id xQuickTimeComponentCreation-date.html
Grab one of the several example files, the most useful of which will be 'audiocodec', which is a complete implementation of the uLaw audio codec for QuickTime. Replace a few subroutines with your own. Test. Ship.
I mean, god, you'd think it was rocket science or something!
Anyway, that doesn't necessarily tell you why you'd want to boot into Linux from an external hard drive, but I bet someone wants it.
I have set up a nice server here on an xServe that doesn't even use an internal drive at all... boots Mac OS X Server off of an external hardware-mirrored firewire case.
If the computer dies, I can unplug the case from that machine, walk around the corner, plug it into the iMac in the test lab, restart, and have the server up again in, literally, less than 2 minutes. (But more than one. I tried it to make sure it would work, natch.) If it fails while I'm at home, I get a buzz on my cell phone, and I head down to the office (lovely) and do the same thing. And, if the internet access goes down at our building (as it did for three days once BEFORE we had this setup in place), I can nab the case, run home, plug the thing into my desktop machine at home, reboot, change the IP address, dink a bit with the nameserver, and the file server is available to the outside world again. No matter that they're all different models of Mac. No screws. No software RAID stuff to dick around with.
This is, of course, also doable with SCSI or USB2. USB2 is way lower performance. And SCSI is way more expensive, plus requires the machine you swap to to have a SCSI card in them. (I'm aware that most PCs don't have firewire, but you can't boot a PC off of this anyway. I have a few ideas about how I could make our server run off of a completely cross-platform external bootable firewire drive, so that you'd get the exact same data whether you used a Mac or a PC, but I don't have enough time to actually IMPLEMENT silliness like that.).
If I weren't doing this on a Mac, I'd certainly want to do it with Linux instead of Windows. And it is hardly beyond my comprehension to think that someone might prefer to do it on Linux using Apple hardware instead of, say, Dell.
So, I hate to just dead-on disagree with anybody, but...
There is a VERY limited set of tasks for which the CLI is dramatically more productive than a GUI. Personally, I wouldn't even include programming (since the GUIs I use do predictive compilation, and a visual debugger is worth a thousand command line pieces of garbage).
But let's go on and take a look at other things. Editing a formatted text document: CLI or GUI? I'm sorry, but while you're playing around with LaTeX I can whip something perfectly good up in TextEdit, for God's sake, and still have time for an hour of sex.
Surfing the web? Making an mpeg clip of the latest company meeting and editing out the guy with the serious droning voice? Maybe adding a soundtrack? Organizing the photos from your last vacation?
Even, say, monitoring server load on your remote server. (I click the app in the corner of my screen and it zooms in and shows me load, processor utilization, hits per second, or any of the other stats, all at a click of the mouse). Hell, something as simple as diffing two source files and then merging them is much easier when you can drag stuff around, copy it and paste it, and so forth.
Now, if what you mean is 'having a GUI with a window open with a tcsh prompt is better than having a GUI without one' you might have a point. I wouldn't know, because I haven't been without one in quite some time. But there are very few tasks that are done on a computer these days that are more efficiently done on a CLI WITHOUT a GUI.
I use them that way all the time. Footnotes (well, endnotes, really) are about all I use the 'end' key for, but I use 'home' for all sorts of stuff.
As for not moving the cursor, all I can say is 'thank God'. Okay, it costs a click if I'm entering an end-note or something like that, but if I'm just looking back at the first few lines of the file, being able to hit the right arrow key and having it go back to where I was a second ago is SO much nicer than having to search through the document for my jumping-off point.
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Hi, Benny. How's the golf game?
-fred
As for Apple being self-aggrandizing... I suppose instead they should just release new hardware without mentioning it? Every company blows their own horns, as hard as they safely can. Check out Intel's press releases every time they squeeze another 5% performance boost out of a chip. It sounds like what you're sore at Apple about is that they're so good at it.
-fred
Yes, and declaring that you are the direct representative of God on earth is arrogant too. I bet if I thought about it, I could even find OTHER examples of arrogance!
Which does not mean that the grandparent wasn't quite right, and these people are basically arrogant dickheads.
Or perhaps you are arguing that BECAUSE the USA is sometimes sickeningly arrogant, companies based in the USA should get no protections for their copyrights? If so, it is certainly a novel argument.
-fred
It's not that I don't believe you, but I have to chip in my own experience here.
I have a server at home running AFP that I'm connected to most of the time. I frequently close my laptop at home (a 192.168.1.X network, but the server is outside of it, on a fixed IP) and bring it to work (a 192.168.1.X network) and plug it in. The server stays mounted, although occasionally the dialog that says ' was not able to connect to the server... try again?' If I hit yes, it will eventually reconnect.
A couple weeks ago, I was copying a ~10 gig file up onto the server (yes, a single file, an encrypted disk image) and absentmindedly closed the laptop and carried it to work. When I reopened the laptop, the copy just continued like nothing had happened... except, of course, a lot slower.
Also, now, I occasionally mount the server, then mount that disk image on my laptop. I can close the laptop, bring it home/to work, open it again, and be off and running again on the disk image.
One thing I haven't tried is mounting a server that has a different IP address from home than it does from work... for example, if foo.bar.com resolved to 192.168.1.11 on my work network but resolved to 64.201.99.37 from home, and I entered foo.bar.com, is the machine smart enough to do another DNS lookup if 192.168.1.11 no longer responds? But by and large, everything just works, and just works a lot better than I would have expected, given the change in local IP addresses.
I can't remember for sure... the time when I was doing the copy, I may well have been plugged into 100-base-T, too, whereas when I'm at work I stay on the wireless network most of the time, so I can tell when it goes down BEFORE people start screaming.
-fred
But what's my motivation?
-fred
Now, that said, if your posts are any indication, it is my considered opinion that you have had any trace of a sense of humor, or indeed a recognition of sarcasm or irony, completely surgically removed at birth.
Additionally, from all evidence, it appears you are sorely limited in the vocabulary department, since you do not appear to have the slightest idea what facetious means, nor did you even bother to take the time to look it up.
In short, it appears that you are dumber than a hat full of assholes and have all the grace and politeness of a rhino with a terminal case of hemorrhoids.
And now, it is time for bed.
Cheers!
-fred
Which is to say,
'...because Apple is a big company that sometimes does lousy things that all other big companies do (but that nobody really notices because they aren't Apple) it is awful and we hate it.'
-fred
Apple laptops are notorious for quality control problems because people expect more of Apple than they do of other manufacturers. When Apple had the Aluminum 15" white-spot-screen-problem, people screamed bloody murder about it. It's awful! My god, nearly half of the AlBooks had it for the first three months of shipping!
Well, I've seen that problem before. Every single one of our Dell Latitude x200 laptops have gone in for it at least once, and several of them more than once, over the three years that we have had the model. It had something to do with the case design, because the floating white cloud effect was generally in a perfect ring around a spot in the center of the screen that corresponded with the placement of the Dell logo on the back of the screen, plus in a few other apparently-random places.
Now, that's 100% of over 40 laptops. But nobody really noticed, because nobody pays attention to any particular model of Dell laptop, but when Apple goofs it's big news. Remember the 5300, which in theory could have caught on fire so they had to recall it? But none of them actually ever caught on fire. Same year, three Dells of a particular model DID catch on fire. Who suffered more from the bad press? Well, which one do you remember?
We never really noticed how bad the white-spot problem was for our x200s either... because we have also replaced all of the hard drives at least once (we've replaced each on average 1.4 times) and about half of the motherboards have gone out... some ethernet problems, some firewire or USB bus power problems, and some Just Not Booting. White spots don't look so important when you have just lost all your data, especially if you are a total yutz who doesn't follow company backup policy.
If you look at Consumer Reports, which IMO is simply the best place to look for non-biased reporting of issues of this type, you'll see that Apple has the lowest rate of 'Repairs and Serious Problems' for both their laptops and their desktops. (16%, for laptops. Toshiba and Sony are both around 17%. Dell is 21%). I'd send you a link, but since CR is customer-funded and not ad-driven, they require you to pay to see their content.
BTW, I can't imagine what we're doing wrong. We're a company of 40-45 people, with a sustained failure rate of more than one laptop a week. That's more than 100% per year. I can't imagine that we are that much harder on them than average, though we do leave them on more than most people probably do, and the people who don't leave them on all night every night are traveling a lot with them. Still, something's strange.
-fred
Parts kit has always been between $1000 and $1200.
And the parts kit contains basically anything that's going to go bad in that machine except the hard drive. (Well, okay, so we have an xServe with a bad firewire connector board, but the Apple xServe rep had never even heard of one of those going bad before. And anyway it doesn't keep the machine from working, so...)
A spare xServe is fine too, don't get me wrong. (In fact, get one used...) But the parts kit is a perfectly good thing to have around if you have, say, three or more xServes.
-fred
We're a small business -- less than 100 employees in all, but we have to run a number of servers, some for customers but most for various different employee functions.
We found that the Macs were great for a couple of things: one, they have hot-swappable IDE (older models) and SATA (newer models) hard drives, which is great for backups... set up a mirrored array and then just pop one of the drives out and pop a blank one in, then carry the first one off-site. Or, in another case, when it's the dedicated backup server, we have four IDE drives in there, each one with a different backup from a different day of the week, and then we pop Saturday's one out once a month so we have a monthly offsite. Dell et al had the same thing with SCSI, which costs twice as much. (This was a couple years back, I'm sure Dell is getting to SATA by this time... right?)
Also, we have a server that we were concerned about going down for more than an hour or so, but it's not a big problem if it's down for an hour. We can't really afford redundant servers for EVERYTHING.
So we got the next best thing: we have it set up on an xServe, but all the software, incloding the OS, is on an external firewire hardware RAID box. The xServe started acting up one day (turned out to be a bad power outlet on the power manager, of all things) and I walked in, unplugged it, carried it into our test lab, plugged it into our iMac, and rebooted. Sha-zaam... the iMac is now the server. And it would have worked with any Mac made in the last, oh, five years or so. Well, any Mac with firewire or USB2 that had 256 megs of RAM or more. If necessary, I could have extracted one of the drives from the FW RAID and put it into any of the Macs that didn't have firewire, in an extra 10 minutes or so.
And that server, from soup to nuts, took less than a day to set up.
There really are some things you can do with the xServes that have significant advantages. Sometimes it's just doing things a little easier... sometimes it's doing things you never even thought of. Like a thoroughly portable server. (Heck, I could take that hard drive down to our colo site, attach it to our backup server down there, switch over the IP address, switch the IP address in our DNS, and we'd be up and running in under an hour, even if our HQ were without connectivity or power for days. Of course, I could do that with our main corporate file server, too, but that's just because we happen to have a machine down at the colo site that is the exact same model.)
-fred
This is, broadly speaking, true. I only found one in-circuit emulator for the Mac, and, after committing to a Mac version of their embedded tools, Metrowerks abruptly did a 180 and ditched the product when it was in beta, and they were the only ones doing an embedded compiler.
It's a pity. Though of course the free tools, pathetic though they are, mostly do compile and work on the Mac.
However, a lot of the hardware is moving away from serial and parallel ports these days, for the excellent reason that a lot of PCs, especially laptops (which are becoming ubiquitous) don't have them either.
-fred
Another way? (I am proud of this one, since I wrote it up as a bug/enhancement request and it showed up in the next OS rev).
If the finder is open and the file you're looking for is visible, just drag it into the 'open file' dialog and it will be selected. You can also drag it into a 'save file' dialog if you want to replace it.
-fred
Links? It's really strange, all of the official web sites that I had that showed this stuff seem to have up and vanished.
w ww.macworld.com/pages/may.95/News.705.html (Scroll down some)
, 00.html
Here are some second-source things:
Apple's letters to VfW devopers:
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~hamlin/facts/1stltr.html
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~hamlin/facts/2ndltr.html
A tiny snippet that tells how the case actually came out, courtesy of the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/19970206203623/http://
The only reference I can find to the rumor about this issue forcing the investment in Apple and the patent swap and the agreement to keep developing Mac software is from here:
http://www.mackido.com/History/History_VfW.html
However, I saw quite a few references to that rumor in the circles I was traveling in at time, and I know for a fact that there was still a lawsuit that was settled and disappeared without a trace right around that time, so...
Another one where Apple won one:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,16141
As for why QuickTime works so badly now, I can only surmise that one of the following is true:
- Apple has stopped really trying.
- Microsoft succeeded in making it impossible to do within QT's budget.
- Microsoft has gotten a lot better at what they do, and thus make the QT group look worse.
Given how often MS has been convicted of sabotaging rivals, I'd have to say that the second sounds like the most likely. Real has mentioned in a lot of interviews that if they didn't rely on undocumented Windows calls that they reverse-engineered, they wouldn't be able to get their product working acceptably.
Ah, Microsoft... to know you is to know just how much I'm being known by you.
In the biblical sense, of course.
-fred
Last I checked, mustard gas could not really be called 'lachrymatory gas', unless one were to stretch the definition enough to say that anything that hurts you an enormous amount is 'lachrymatory'.
-fred
Argh, I hate people who abuse that Winston Churchill quote. Taking that one out of context is like quoting the ten commandments as 'Thou shalt ... kill'.
The original quote, from WC himself, is an argument that, for example, it might be better to use tear gas on a native group rather than shooting them all. Or, to take some context:
"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas."
Your sentence slots in right after that.
Yeah, yeah, off topic, on topic, who cares, it's an obnoxious sig.
-fred
Personally, I'd have to say it's the Apple zealots. There seem to be a lot more of them who have actual senses of humor, anyway.
Not that you can't be funny without a sense of humor, as the grandparent post so amply demonstrates. But that sort of amusement can be... wearing, after a while.
-fred
And second, you need a little bit of education on the difference between morals and ethics. I won't even undertake to do that here, but here's a pretty decent web site: http://www.scribblers-ink.com/professional_ethics
Apple does unethical things upon occasion, as does any other large corporation you can name. Do they do it more often? Are they a thousand times more heavily scrutinized than most other companies their size, and therefore their 'little lapses' are more often found? Is more expected of them, because of their early rhetoric, and therefore are all lapses greatly magnified, sometimes out of proportion?
I'd have to answer those three questions: 'who knows?', 'yes', and 'ohhh yes.'
-fred
Try new Anonymous Coward Lite! Opinionated, and low in facts!
Apple has actually spanked MS a number of times in the last ten years, lawsuit-wise. The problem is that as soon as it begins to look like Apple is winning, MS immediately settles. One of the settlement conditions is always that neither of the principals will discuss the settlement, so it takes a little digging to get the information, but there are always some leaks.
For example, there was the company that MS paid a rather surprising amount of money to get a copy of Apple's QuickTime source code from. At the time, MS's video player was less than half the speed of Apple's, on Windows. So they just appropriated huge chunks of code wholesale from Apple's software. And, when Apple took them to court, they settled out of court. According to the best scuttlebutt available, the large MS investment in Apple in the late 90s, and the agreement to continue developing MS Office for the Mac, were part of the settlement.
-fred
Want to write a QuickTime audio codec? Go here:
/ id xQuickTimeComponentCreation-date.html
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/QuickTime
Grab one of the several example files, the most useful of which will be 'audiocodec', which is a complete implementation of the uLaw audio codec for QuickTime. Replace a few subroutines with your own. Test. Ship.
I mean, god, you'd think it was rocket science or something!
-fred
It's not particularly difficult.
/ id xQuickTimeComponentCreation-date.html
And there's a lot of sample code, including a complete implementation of an audio codec (uLaw), here:
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/QuickTime
Take it away.
-fred
If the computer dies, I can unplug the case from that machine, walk around the corner, plug it into the iMac in the test lab, restart, and have the server up again in, literally, less than 2 minutes. (But more than one. I tried it to make sure it would work, natch.) If it fails while I'm at home, I get a buzz on my cell phone, and I head down to the office (lovely) and do the same thing. And, if the internet access goes down at our building (as it did for three days once BEFORE we had this setup in place), I can nab the case, run home, plug the thing into my desktop machine at home, reboot, change the IP address, dink a bit with the nameserver, and the file server is available to the outside world again. No matter that they're all different models of Mac. No screws. No software RAID stuff to dick around with.
This is, of course, also doable with SCSI or USB2. USB2 is way lower performance. And SCSI is way more expensive, plus requires the machine you swap to to have a SCSI card in them. (I'm aware that most PCs don't have firewire, but you can't boot a PC off of this anyway. I have a few ideas about how I could make our server run off of a completely cross-platform external bootable firewire drive, so that you'd get the exact same data whether you used a Mac or a PC, but I don't have enough time to actually IMPLEMENT silliness like that.).
If I weren't doing this on a Mac, I'd certainly want to do it with Linux instead of Windows. And it is hardly beyond my comprehension to think that someone might prefer to do it on Linux using Apple hardware instead of, say, Dell.
-fred
So, I hate to just dead-on disagree with anybody, but...
There is a VERY limited set of tasks for which the CLI is dramatically more productive than a GUI. Personally, I wouldn't even include programming (since the GUIs I use do predictive compilation, and a visual debugger is worth a thousand command line pieces of garbage).
But let's go on and take a look at other things. Editing a formatted text document: CLI or GUI? I'm sorry, but while you're playing around with LaTeX I can whip something perfectly good up in TextEdit, for God's sake, and still have time for an hour of sex.
Surfing the web? Making an mpeg clip of the latest company meeting and editing out the guy with the serious droning voice? Maybe adding a soundtrack? Organizing the photos from your last vacation?
Even, say, monitoring server load on your remote server. (I click the app in the corner of my screen and it zooms in and shows me load, processor utilization, hits per second, or any of the other stats, all at a click of the mouse). Hell, something as simple as diffing two source files and then merging them is much easier when you can drag stuff around, copy it and paste it, and so forth.
Now, if what you mean is 'having a GUI with a window open with a tcsh prompt is better than having a GUI without one' you might have a point. I wouldn't know, because I haven't been without one in quite some time. But there are very few tasks that are done on a computer these days that are more efficiently done on a CLI WITHOUT a GUI.
-fred
I loved the first description of Exposé I ever saw.
'...and the windows all skitter towards the sides of the screen like roaches when you turn on a light.'
-fred
Or you could just buy Windows. That's even more Windows-like.
-fred
I use them that way all the time. Footnotes (well, endnotes, really) are about all I use the 'end' key for, but I use 'home' for all sorts of stuff.
As for not moving the cursor, all I can say is 'thank God'. Okay, it costs a click if I'm entering an end-note or something like that, but if I'm just looking back at the first few lines of the file, being able to hit the right arrow key and having it go back to where I was a second ago is SO much nicer than having to search through the document for my jumping-off point.
-fred