I don't know/why/ you'd want to run Linux on a P1, but whatever turns your crank I guess. The misery of dropped BIOS & ethernet card support finally did me in. Plus none of it ever works slighly as well as W98SE.
The later Pentium chips, the MMX variants, on a decent chipset (i430VX or i430TX), were rock-solid and very usable under almost any operating system. I still have one somewhere with Windows NT 4 Workstation (still one of the best operating systems I've ever used, especially for MJPEG video editing with a miroVideo DC30pro), Windows 98SE (for gaming), and IIRC RedHat 6.2 with IceWM. RedHat was for the PHP/MySQL stuff I was doing at the time, plus systems programming in C, plus technically reviewing Wrox books, etc.
I have an old Sony VAIO PCG-Z505R somewhere, too, with 98SE and RedHat 6.2, IceWM, etc.; it's a PII-366MHz with IIRC 192MB RAM and a 6GB internal hard drive. I'm not likely to ever boot it into Windows, but on the Linux side, WordPerfect, X client, etc., stuff it's still very usable for.
Not everything requires gigaflop power and gobs of RAM...
How can Android look like a cheap copy of the iOS experience when Android is infinitely more customizable and feature-filled than iProducts?
Oh, I don't know... Little things like the friggin' Android Market not working on 2.x era devices with large displays (1024 vertical) without rotating the device to landscape and back again, because until the screen filled up with options (which would never happen in portrait mode), you couldn't flip to the next 'page' of results... Little fit-and-finish things like that let you know Google didn't pump nearly as much time and effort into QA as Apple did.
The iOS experience is unflaggingly smooth and responsive, and the apps, as a general rule, look better (higher level of "fit and finish"). For instance, compare GoodReader with ezPDF or anything else in the Android ecosystem...
Let's not beat around the bush here. iOS offers a very watered-down featureset so non-tech saavy people don't have trouble with it. That's fine for people like you, but I wouldn't ever call Android a copy of iOS in any way when Android simply does more than iOS does.
Filesystems. I hate the way iOS blocks applications from accessing each other's files (it's up to each app developer to 'announce' (via the API) what files it can accept, and equally up to the other apps to support the 'Open in...' functionality), but, I get it. Android, I hate the way files are scattered everywhere, with no rhyme or reason (I know there are (now?) guidelines, but they're not enforced, and often when apps *cough*dropbox*cough* try to be(come) 'good citizens,' it breaks functionality others relied on). I have some apps that refuse to see the non-standard SD card mount point on the rooted PRS-T1 (/extsd instead of/sdcard, which Sony inexplicably uses to refer to a portion of the built-in flash), or to see any files not on an SD card even if the device has gigabytes of built-in storage...
Six of one, half-dozen of the other. iOS is like a gated community, Android is more like Bartertown. Both can be a PITA to deal with, for different reasons. But since I'm using a tablet to actually Get Things Done, I'd rather have the smooth, predictable, curated experience of an iOS device than the essentially lawless "hope this is gonna work!" chaos of the current Android ecosystem.
But just because the Android stack is more 'open' doesn't mean it's more 'innovative,' so my original question stands. In what way(s) can Android be described as 'innovative'?
As for innovation Android itself is innovative, and even on very low end tablets all the features work. Much of the software that makes tablets useful doesn't even run on the tablet anyway, it runs on a server somewhere over the net.
In what ways is Android innovative? I've owned several Android devices, from rooted e-readers (PRS-T1 (2.2), Nook Simple Touch (2.1), Nook Color (Cyanogen 7.1 (2.3)) to full-on tablets (waiting for my Nexus 7; the most recent I've used was a Samsung Tab 7 running Gingerbread), in addition to my iOS devices (1st and 3rd generation iPad; 2x Apple TV (2nd gen); iPhone 4S; iPod Touch (3rd gen)). Android has always felt like a lacks-polish rushed-to-market cheap copy of the iOS experience... I still like it, for some things (in much the same way I love Linux for some things), but if I'm grabbing just one device to take with me, it's always going to be the iPad.
[C]umulative sales of around 85 million gives the iPad credibility in the eye on potential buyers. 'So the problem with the Kindle Fire — and the Nexus 7 — is the same problem that's plagued the PC industry . ..
Hmm. “50% of people with a tablet have an iPad. That doesn't sound so bad until you consider that previously that number had been more like 72%. The slack was taken up by Amazon's Kindle Fire, which has jumped from zero to a 22% share of the market since it launced in fall 2011 . . . "We expect to see the iPad as the leader, but with the Surface, Kindle Fire, and Nexus as three solid competitors with significant market share..."” iPad losing tablet market share (July 31, 2012).
I have never understood why prisoners should be forbidden from using an *offline* computer.
Actually, they're not, at least in California. I personally know several inmates who are taking college courses "behind bars." The computers aren't Internet-connected, and the instructor collects the flash drives they store their work on between classes, but they have access to computers for educational purposes. Some inmate clerks also have access to computers (non-networked) for typing and other clerical tasks.
In the federal system, they're even experimenting with the very limited and locked down TRULINCS email system for inmates...
What's not accurate is the summary's claim that "prison regulations forbid any contact with the outside world." Inmates routinely contact the outside world through telephone calls, letters, and contact and/or non-contact (and in California and New York, for most inmates, the possibility of "family" a/k/a "trailer" a/k/a/ "conjugal") visits...
On a related topic, anyone remember the Wired article on Roy Wahlberg? "Roy Wahlberg hacked a man to death, then hacked his way into a million-dollar software business behind bars."
then they'll sue for the legal fees needed to recover the $4 mil, then for the fees for that latter action, etc.
As Zeno of Elea would've pointed out, there is no end to money that Oracle will have to pay Google.
Actually, this is an application (usually made to a clerk) to tax costs, it doesn't include legal fees (which are usually discretionary, if available to the prevailing party at all, and usually only awarded in "exceptional" cases).
What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...
Not that surprising. I haven't gone through the PACER docket for this case to check, but I'd be extremely surprised if a stipulated protective order wasn't in place, one that permitted document production to be designated 'Attorney's Eyes Only' for commercially sensitive (etc.) documents. Google themselves wouldn't be able to handle the search and digitization of any such material; their lawyers would have had to have outsourced that (or done it internally, much more expensive)...
Shortly after we loaded Microsoft's Command Navigation Program hotfix, we were out cruising in our Battlestar when, poof, all our systems went offline and, a few seconds later, in came the nukes...
Oracle's PL/SQL is an extension of SQL which, would be copyrighted by someone from the long long ago.
Actually, probably, Oracle. Oracle started when Larry Ellison took ideas embodied in an IBM whitepaper (the "R" DBMS) and implemented them; Oracle v2 (there was no v1) was the first commercial implementation of SQL anywhere. (IBM internally had a version called SEQUEL that differed in many respects from Oracle (then "Relational")'s SQL, and though I'm not certain, I'm pretty sure IBM's internal use didn't constitute "publication" required for copyright protection at the time).
However, given that a computer programming language is, by definition, a definition of a system of instruction -- the definition of a functional process, if you will -- which seems to me like it would implicate Lotus v. Borland and thus be not copyrightable. That is, a clean-room implementation of a compiler that used the language's syntax, but none of the protectable (assuming for the purpose of laziness an Altai Abstraction/Filtration/Comparison test) code from the author's compiler implementation, would seem to me to be A-Okay. (Though I have not researched it in any depth. This is not legal advise, yada yada.)
All far too dense for an 11 year old, and all pretty much require more background knowledge than an 11 year old is likely to have. I'm not sure there really is an answer to the OP's question though, at that age, even a very bright kid is almost certainly going to lack the prerequisite knowledge to learn to program from just a book.
Say what?! I was programming at age 11, self-taught, using 'just books.' (Unless you count some early -- and very rudimentary -- Logo exposure in grade school; later scholastic use of the computer was, IIRC, limited to Oregon Trail, though once you got to high school you could take a class that taught Pascal...)
These days, I have to imagine it would be both easier (every API you need to get started is quickly available online, often with excellent accompanying tutorials and/or with user-contributed sample code snippets), and perhaps more intimidating (as the complexity of our systems has increased precipitously). (On the flip side, much, much easier to get a GUI working under Java than back in the day when you had to hand-code memory bank switching and deal with the bizarre "but it saved a chip!" oddities of Apple II graphics programming...)
Mind you, I wasn't a very good programmer, and honestly wouldn't be until I was finally exposed to proper procedural programming (C), then OOP (C++, and when it was released, Java), in college. But I had fun with it, and my stuff worked. Wasn't terribly robust or full-featured, but, it worked. (My database was a flat-file, not relational, and, um, written in BASIC...;))
Okay, all that said, it might be worth checking out the Head First books. Head First Programming uses Python and is supposed to be a general introduction to programming. There's also Head First Java. No direct experience with either, but people rave about 'em.
Not to defend Derbyshire, but, what he said (albeit, in much greater obnoxious detail) isn't all that different from what The Rev. Jesse has noted:
Even Jesse Jackson said a few years ago, "There is nothing more painful to me... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
Basically, if it were possible to bring a plane down merely by using a cellphone, it would already have been done by now. Certain groups have an intense interest in doing just that. They haven't, so they can't. Q.E.D.
Toby Ziegler: We're flying in a Lockheed Eagle series L1011. It came off the line 20 months ago. It carries a Sim-5 Transponder tracking system. Are you telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745667/quotes?qt=qt0508645
Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow.
Actually...
(1) A 2400 baud modem would transmit approximately 274 7-bit (ASCII) characters per second (assuming 8N1) on a clean line. However...
(2) In 1983, 300 or (for the big spenders) 1200 baud was a lot more common. As late as 1988, 2400 bps connections commanded a premium (e.g., the GEnie service charged double the per-hour connection fee for dialing into their 2400 baud modem bank -- separate phone numbers -- versus their "up to 1200 baud" pool. 2400 was the fastest supported.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie
The Hayes Smartmodem 300 was introduced in 1981; before that, it was all acoustic couplers for normal folks, even 3l33t ones with high-end IMSAI systems who were intelligent, but under-achievers, alienated from their parents, with few friends (and of course, at the time, such people would have been classic cases for recruitment by the Soviets).
But even at 300 baud, you'd get ~30 characters per second, more if any sort of compression was being used.
IIRC, 1200 baud was about where text trickled in at about the same speed at which I could read it comfortably, and (for me) ushered in the era of the BBS, the original multiplayer shared universes (there was a text-based space trade / exploration / combat game on GEnie I was kind of addicted to, at age 12 -- I think it was Stellar Emperor aka MegaWars III: http://web.archive.org/web/20020607113100/http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/games/space/megawars_iii.html)...
I can't leave Office because I can not guarantee that my resume will look the same on someone elses computer running Office if I make it under LibraOffice.
Complex documents that have to be shared with external entities have this problem generally. For instance, in California (state Superior Courts and federal District Courts) everything's done on pleading paper. I have never found a way to format pleading paper (with the 1-28 numbering in the margins and the vertical lines) that survives going between OpenOffice (or Neo/LibreOffice) (or Pages, or...) and "real" Word. And when you're, e.g., putting together a monstrosity of a Rule 37-2 joint stipulation in federal court where the other side (who dollars-to-donuts is not using an OpenOffice variant, or Pages, or...), well, that's a requirement.
Third party apps aren't fully compatible with the Word file formats, and that compatibility is a must. It's the network effect / tipping point, writ large.
To the exclusion of any other for the most part (Apple doesn't make a high end SLR camera yet, do they?).
Apple used to essentially rebrand other manufacturer's electronics (with some tweaks to make it Apple plug-and-play, of course, like RS-422 support back in the day). The StyleWriter printers were basically Canon BJC printers (Wikipedia tells me they also used some HP DeskJet models as bases, but I never saw me one of them). The QuickTake cameras were Kodak/Fuji. They seem to have stripped out all of that distraction, though; the last of the LaserWriters (which were instrumental in kickstarting "desktop publishing") were released right around the time Jobs returned.
Of course, now that everything's USB or network connected, dedicated hardware for Macs doesn't make sense the way it used to...
(I should also disclaim - I've been an Apple fanboi since a blended family and the addition of a fully loaded Apple IIc made our IIe (later 'enhanced' with the 65c02 / rom upgrade) redundant and a permanent fixture in my childhood bedroom. Then the IIgs, Performa 550 (later motherboard-swapped to a 68LC040 575), PowerBook 180, PowerBook 5300/100. Then a long hiatus, during the Dark Times. During the Empire. Windows NT 4 and 95/98, various Linux distributions (generally Slackware), on hand-cobbled x86 hardware. a VAIO PCG-Z505R dual-booting 98SE and RedHat 6.1. A couple of Suns (SPARCstation 4, Ultra 1/143, Ultra 10/440) and a NextStation mono, for good measure. Eventually, back to Apple, about the time Jaguar made the iBook G3/600 a viable daily driver.)
Today, I'm about as Mac-centric as you can get. Finally swapped my camera less BlackBerry 9650 for an iPhone 4S (though I keep the BB around for those places where cameras are verboten, just like I still have ThinkPad X40 for those times I can't lug my MacBook Air). iPad. Apple TV. MacBook (C2D/2.0), MacBook Pro (C2D/2.16), and MacBook Air (C2D/1.86). At the office I have a Mac mini (C2D/2.4). Etc.
The main reason (besides being a UNIX hack from way back, but needing to use Office and Acrobat Pro on a daily basis)? Design. These things are slickly sick in their design. IBM/Lenovo come close, but nothing quite touches Apple.
Samsung, by comparison... A couple of years ago, when I was still lugging a PalmOS device everywhere and smartphones were just on the horizon, I carried a Samsung SPH-A500. ('3G'?!) http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repairing-Samsung-SPH-A500-Speaker/2693/1 Note the display -- it's off-center! By design! I know I'm a little OCD, but, symmetry counts...
Tablets didn't start looking like the iPad until the iPad came out. That really should clue you into the idea that the design comes from Jonathan Ive's design studio and isn't some obvious thing that has been around forever. Of course it seems obvious now, because the iPad is so successful. There's a cognitive bias going on where the thing that succeeded now seems obvious in retrospect even though it didn't before it came into existence.
I may need to draw you a Venn diagram (and then, based on your 8-digit UID, explain, patiently, what a Venn diagram is;)), but, this lawyer is a member of Tau Beta Pi and has personally helped design, assemble, and been a "core team" member on static engine tests and launches of, CALVEIN lifters...
Slashdot Mirror
Isnt this how Netscape died?
According to Joel Spolsky...
I don't know /why/ you'd want to run Linux on a P1, but whatever turns your crank I guess. The misery of dropped BIOS & ethernet card support finally did me in. Plus none of it ever works slighly as well as W98SE.
The later Pentium chips, the MMX variants, on a decent chipset (i430VX or i430TX), were rock-solid and very usable under almost any operating system. I still have one somewhere with Windows NT 4 Workstation (still one of the best operating systems I've ever used, especially for MJPEG video editing with a miroVideo DC30pro), Windows 98SE (for gaming), and IIRC RedHat 6.2 with IceWM. RedHat was for the PHP/MySQL stuff I was doing at the time, plus systems programming in C, plus technically reviewing Wrox books, etc.
I have an old Sony VAIO PCG-Z505R somewhere, too, with 98SE and RedHat 6.2, IceWM, etc.; it's a PII-366MHz with IIRC 192MB RAM and a 6GB internal hard drive. I'm not likely to ever boot it into Windows, but on the Linux side, WordPerfect, X client, etc., stuff it's still very usable for.
Not everything requires gigaflop power and gobs of RAM...
How can Android look like a cheap copy of the iOS experience when Android is infinitely more customizable and feature-filled than iProducts?
Oh, I don't know... Little things like the friggin' Android Market not working on 2.x era devices with large displays (1024 vertical) without rotating the device to landscape and back again, because until the screen filled up with options (which would never happen in portrait mode), you couldn't flip to the next 'page' of results... Little fit-and-finish things like that let you know Google didn't pump nearly as much time and effort into QA as Apple did.
The iOS experience is unflaggingly smooth and responsive, and the apps, as a general rule, look better (higher level of "fit and finish"). For instance, compare GoodReader with ezPDF or anything else in the Android ecosystem...
Let's not beat around the bush here. iOS offers a very watered-down featureset so non-tech saavy people don't have trouble with it. That's fine for people like you, but I wouldn't ever call Android a copy of iOS in any way when Android simply does more than iOS does.
Filesystems. I hate the way iOS blocks applications from accessing each other's files (it's up to each app developer to 'announce' (via the API) what files it can accept, and equally up to the other apps to support the 'Open in...' functionality), but, I get it. Android, I hate the way files are scattered everywhere, with no rhyme or reason (I know there are (now?) guidelines, but they're not enforced, and often when apps *cough*dropbox*cough* try to be(come) 'good citizens,' it breaks functionality others relied on). I have some apps that refuse to see the non-standard SD card mount point on the rooted PRS-T1 (/extsd instead of /sdcard, which Sony inexplicably uses to refer to a portion of the built-in flash), or to see any files not on an SD card even if the device has gigabytes of built-in storage...
Six of one, half-dozen of the other. iOS is like a gated community, Android is more like Bartertown. Both can be a PITA to deal with, for different reasons. But since I'm using a tablet to actually Get Things Done, I'd rather have the smooth, predictable, curated experience of an iOS device than the essentially lawless "hope this is gonna work!" chaos of the current Android ecosystem.
But just because the Android stack is more 'open' doesn't mean it's more 'innovative,' so my original question stands. In what way(s) can Android be described as 'innovative'?
As for innovation Android itself is innovative, and even on very low end tablets all the features work. Much of the software that makes tablets useful doesn't even run on the tablet anyway, it runs on a server somewhere over the net.
In what ways is Android innovative? I've owned several Android devices, from rooted e-readers (PRS-T1 (2.2), Nook Simple Touch (2.1), Nook Color (Cyanogen 7.1 (2.3)) to full-on tablets (waiting for my Nexus 7; the most recent I've used was a Samsung Tab 7 running Gingerbread), in addition to my iOS devices (1st and 3rd generation iPad; 2x Apple TV (2nd gen); iPhone 4S; iPod Touch (3rd gen)). Android has always felt like a lacks-polish rushed-to-market cheap copy of the iOS experience... I still like it, for some things (in much the same way I love Linux for some things), but if I'm grabbing just one device to take with me, it's always going to be the iPad.
The ipad can't even search within a webpage. I presume Nexus 7 and others can?
Say what? Even my first-gen still-on-iOS 4.3 iPad can search within a webpage, in Safari. Since 2010, apparently.
Hmm. “50% of people with a tablet have an iPad. That doesn't sound so bad until you consider that previously that number had been more like 72%. The slack was taken up by Amazon's Kindle Fire, which has jumped from zero to a 22% share of the market since it launced in fall 2011 . . . "We expect to see the iPad as the leader, but with the Surface, Kindle Fire, and Nexus as three solid competitors with significant market share..."” iPad losing tablet market share (July 31, 2012).
Anything Arduino... Make bots / gadgets, automate the home, tinker everywhere... http://www.frys.com/search?search_type=regular&sqxts=1&query_string=Arduino&cat=0&submit.x=23&submit.y=11
+1
Dell start selling PC's [sic] with Linux (although in 2001 Dell Drop[ped] Linux on Desktops and Laptops); also, AFAIK you have always (well, since at least the late 90s) been able to order PowerEdge machines from Dell with Linux pre-loaded (Red Hat Enterprise, natch), and Dell has been pretty good about supporting Linux on their servers (see, e.g., the Dell Linux Engineering Web).
I have never understood why prisoners should be forbidden from using an *offline* computer.
Actually, they're not, at least in California. I personally know several inmates who are taking college courses "behind bars." The computers aren't Internet-connected, and the instructor collects the flash drives they store their work on between classes, but they have access to computers for educational purposes. Some inmate clerks also have access to computers (non-networked) for typing and other clerical tasks.
In the federal system, they're even experimenting with the very limited and locked down TRULINCS email system for inmates...
What's not accurate is the summary's claim that "prison regulations forbid any contact with the outside world." Inmates routinely contact the outside world through telephone calls, letters, and contact and/or non-contact (and in California and New York, for most inmates, the possibility of "family" a/k/a "trailer" a/k/a/ "conjugal") visits...
On a related topic, anyone remember the Wired article on Roy Wahlberg? "Roy Wahlberg hacked a man to death, then hacked his way into a million-dollar software business behind bars."
then they'll sue for the legal fees needed to recover the $4 mil, then for the fees for that latter action, etc.
As Zeno of Elea would've pointed out, there is no end to money that Oracle will have to pay Google.
Actually, this is an application (usually made to a clerk) to tax costs, it doesn't include legal fees (which are usually discretionary, if available to the prevailing party at all, and usually only awarded in "exceptional" cases).
What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...
Not that surprising. I haven't gone through the PACER docket for this case to check, but I'd be extremely surprised if a stipulated protective order wasn't in place, one that permitted document production to be designated 'Attorney's Eyes Only' for commercially sensitive (etc.) documents. Google themselves wouldn't be able to handle the search and digitization of any such material; their lawyers would have had to have outsourced that (or done it internally, much more expensive)...
Shortly after we loaded Microsoft's Command Navigation Program hotfix, we were out cruising in our Battlestar when, poof, all our systems went offline and, a few seconds later, in came the nukes...
Oracle's PL/SQL is an extension of SQL which, would be copyrighted by someone from the long long ago.
Actually, probably, Oracle. Oracle started when Larry Ellison took ideas embodied in an IBM whitepaper (the "R" DBMS) and implemented them; Oracle v2 (there was no v1) was the first commercial implementation of SQL anywhere. (IBM internally had a version called SEQUEL that differed in many respects from Oracle (then "Relational")'s SQL, and though I'm not certain, I'm pretty sure IBM's internal use didn't constitute "publication" required for copyright protection at the time).
However, given that a computer programming language is, by definition, a definition of a system of instruction -- the definition of a functional process, if you will -- which seems to me like it would implicate Lotus v. Borland and thus be not copyrightable. That is, a clean-room implementation of a compiler that used the language's syntax, but none of the protectable (assuming for the purpose of laziness an Altai Abstraction/Filtration/Comparison test) code from the author's compiler implementation, would seem to me to be A-Okay. (Though I have not researched it in any depth. This is not legal advise, yada yada.)
All far too dense for an 11 year old, and all pretty much require more background knowledge than an 11 year old is likely to have. I'm not sure there really is an answer to the OP's question though, at that age, even a very bright kid is almost certainly going to lack the prerequisite knowledge to learn to program from just a book.
Say what?! I was programming at age 11, self-taught, using 'just books.' (Unless you count some early -- and very rudimentary -- Logo exposure in grade school; later scholastic use of the computer was, IIRC, limited to Oregon Trail, though once you got to high school you could take a class that taught Pascal...)
I got started hand-keying source code from magazines and books available at local booksellers. As I progressed, I picked up a copy (likely got it as a present) of the AppleSoft Basic Programmer's Reference Manual.
These days, I have to imagine it would be both easier (every API you need to get started is quickly available online, often with excellent accompanying tutorials and/or with user-contributed sample code snippets), and perhaps more intimidating (as the complexity of our systems has increased precipitously). (On the flip side, much, much easier to get a GUI working under Java than back in the day when you had to hand-code memory bank switching and deal with the bizarre "but it saved a chip!" oddities of Apple II graphics programming...)
Mind you, I wasn't a very good programmer, and honestly wouldn't be until I was finally exposed to proper procedural programming (C), then OOP (C++, and when it was released, Java), in college. But I had fun with it, and my stuff worked. Wasn't terribly robust or full-featured, but, it worked. (My database was a flat-file, not relational, and, um, written in BASIC... ;))
Okay, all that said, it might be worth checking out the Head First books. Head First Programming uses Python and is supposed to be a general introduction to programming. There's also Head First Java. No direct experience with either, but people rave about 'em.
Not to defend Derbyshire, but, what he said (albeit, in much greater obnoxious detail) isn't all that different from what The Rev. Jesse has noted:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/960318/archive_010008.htm
Basically, if it were possible to bring a plane down merely by using a cellphone, it would already have been done by now. Certain groups have an intense interest in doing just that. They haven't, so they can't. Q.E.D.
Toby Ziegler: We're flying in a Lockheed Eagle series L1011. It came off the line 20 months ago. It carries a Sim-5 Transponder tracking system. Are you telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745667/quotes?qt=qt0508645
Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow.
Actually...
(1) A 2400 baud modem would transmit approximately 274 7-bit (ASCII) characters per second (assuming 8N1) on a clean line. However...
(2) In 1983, 300 or (for the big spenders) 1200 baud was a lot more common. As late as 1988, 2400 bps connections commanded a premium (e.g., the GEnie service charged double the per-hour connection fee for dialing into their 2400 baud modem bank -- separate phone numbers -- versus their "up to 1200 baud" pool. 2400 was the fastest supported.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie
The Hayes Smartmodem 300 was introduced in 1981; before that, it was all acoustic couplers for normal folks, even 3l33t ones with high-end IMSAI systems who were intelligent, but under-achievers, alienated from their parents, with few friends (and of course, at the time, such people would have been classic cases for recruitment by the Soviets).
But even at 300 baud, you'd get ~30 characters per second, more if any sort of compression was being used.
IIRC, 1200 baud was about where text trickled in at about the same speed at which I could read it comfortably, and (for me) ushered in the era of the BBS, the original multiplayer shared universes (there was a text-based space trade / exploration / combat game on GEnie I was kind of addicted to, at age 12 -- I think it was Stellar Emperor aka MegaWars III: http://web.archive.org/web/20020607113100/http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/games/space/megawars_iii.html)...
I can't leave Office because I can not guarantee that my resume will look the same on someone elses computer running Office if I make it under LibraOffice.
Complex documents that have to be shared with external entities have this problem generally. For instance, in California (state Superior Courts and federal District Courts) everything's done on pleading paper. I have never found a way to format pleading paper (with the 1-28 numbering in the margins and the vertical lines) that survives going between OpenOffice (or Neo/LibreOffice) (or Pages, or ...) and "real" Word. And when you're, e.g., putting together a monstrosity of a Rule 37-2 joint stipulation in federal court where the other side (who dollars-to-donuts is not using an OpenOffice variant, or Pages, or ...), well, that's a requirement.
Third party apps aren't fully compatible with the Word file formats, and that compatibility is a must. It's the network effect / tipping point, writ large.
As opposed to all the non-fraudulent religious organizations?
They're out there. I have faith that even you, too, shall one day be Touched by His Noodly Appendage.
To the exclusion of any other for the most part (Apple doesn't make a high end SLR camera yet, do they?).
Apple used to essentially rebrand other manufacturer's electronics (with some tweaks to make it Apple plug-and-play, of course, like RS-422 support back in the day). The StyleWriter printers were basically Canon BJC printers (Wikipedia tells me they also used some HP DeskJet models as bases, but I never saw me one of them). The QuickTake cameras were Kodak/Fuji. They seem to have stripped out all of that distraction, though; the last of the LaserWriters (which were instrumental in kickstarting "desktop publishing") were released right around the time Jobs returned.
Of course, now that everything's USB or network connected, dedicated hardware for Macs doesn't make sense the way it used to...
(I should also disclaim - I've been an Apple fanboi since a blended family and the addition of a fully loaded Apple IIc made our IIe (later 'enhanced' with the 65c02 / rom upgrade) redundant and a permanent fixture in my childhood bedroom. Then the IIgs, Performa 550 (later motherboard-swapped to a 68LC040 575), PowerBook 180, PowerBook 5300/100. Then a long hiatus, during the Dark Times. During the Empire. Windows NT 4 and 95/98, various Linux distributions (generally Slackware), on hand-cobbled x86 hardware. a VAIO PCG-Z505R dual-booting 98SE and RedHat 6.1. A couple of Suns (SPARCstation 4, Ultra 1/143, Ultra 10/440) and a NextStation mono, for good measure. Eventually, back to Apple, about the time Jaguar made the iBook G3/600 a viable daily driver.)
Today, I'm about as Mac-centric as you can get. Finally swapped my camera less BlackBerry 9650 for an iPhone 4S (though I keep the BB around for those places where cameras are verboten, just like I still have ThinkPad X40 for those times I can't lug my MacBook Air). iPad. Apple TV. MacBook (C2D/2.0), MacBook Pro (C2D/2.16), and MacBook Air (C2D/1.86). At the office I have a Mac mini (C2D/2.4). Etc.
The main reason (besides being a UNIX hack from way back, but needing to use Office and Acrobat Pro on a daily basis)? Design. These things are slickly sick in their design. IBM/Lenovo come close, but nothing quite touches Apple.
Samsung, by comparison... A couple of years ago, when I was still lugging a PalmOS device everywhere and smartphones were just on the horizon, I carried a Samsung SPH-A500. ('3G'?!) http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repairing-Samsung-SPH-A500-Speaker/2693/1 Note the display -- it's off-center! By design! I know I'm a little OCD, but, symmetry counts...
Tablets didn't start looking like the iPad until the iPad came out. That really should clue you into the idea that the design comes from Jonathan Ive's design studio and isn't some obvious thing that has been around forever. Of course it seems obvious now, because the iPad is so successful. There's a cognitive bias going on where the thing that succeeded now seems obvious in retrospect even though it didn't before it came into existence.
This picture sums it up nicely: http://techviewstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/wpid-samsungvsapple0819111.jpg
a recognition that lawyers are not scientists
I may need to draw you a Venn diagram (and then, based on your 8-digit UID, explain, patiently, what a Venn diagram is ;)), but, this lawyer is a member of Tau Beta Pi and has personally helped design, assemble, and been a "core team" member on static engine tests and launches of, CALVEIN lifters...
If you're in California, call me. :) Mention Slashdot and receive 50% off the initial consultation, normally priced at $0.00 (USD).