The Amiga 1000 did not have all this in 1984, because it wasn't released until July 1985. Only the Xerox/PARC Alta had a GUI before Apple. Learn your history Amiga-freak.
The clones were also tarnishing Apple and the MacOS's reputation for high quality. Power was notorious for a "fast and cheap at all costs" credo. It resulted in junky unreliable machines. I used to have a PowerTower with a blistering 180MHz 604e... way faster than any Apple at the time. But guess what... it froze and hung incessantly after being used for more than a few hours. They had serious design problems, due to inadequate cooling and shoddy electronics. I would have been much better off with a slower Apple.
I always route my HTTP connection through an anonymous proxy. And the more I hear about BS like this, the gladder I am that I use proxies. You can get a big list of them from stayinvisible.com . If you're on OS X, there's a shareware called NetShade that puts your connection through a proxy, and has an option to cycle between different proxy servers every 5 seconds. There's another program for Windows by Steganos which I haven't tried, but it looks like it does the same thing.
Ther biggest problem you'll face with weather-related signal loss has to do with a dish that isn't solidly mounted. It takes a whole lot of snow, rain, or clouds to obscure the signal. The more common cause of signal loss is a dish that gets blown off its pointing angle, or one that wobbles in the wind. You can be as creative as you want with mounting (mine is tethered to the side of my brick chimney with two nylon ratcheting tie-down straps.) Just give it a firm shake with your hand (stfu) and make sure it's not going to wobble in a strong wind.
As far as satellite vs. cable, satellite all the way. It's better service, better technology, and you'll be dealing with a far less scummy company.
It's immediately obvious that you have never used OS X. Expound on one of your heartbreakingly intelligent points please:
- How is OS X "less than par" in the area of being a powerful os
What you said about the two sperate bootloaders and partitions... that whole festering pile of dung... just makes it 100% obvious that you've no experience with OS X and have no right to be bullshitting about it.
Just because I enjoy wasting my time, I'll explain how it's done. You run the OS X install CD, run the OS 9 CD, and then choose which system you want to boot from via the control panel. I know you'd love for it to be difficult, but it's actually not.
Surprisingly enough iTunes is still a Carbon app, not Cocoa. Until iTunes 4 Apple was keeping backward-compatibility with OS 9, and Cocoa/Obj.C don't even come close to porting back to OS 9. I imagine the new stuff, i.e. Music Store, is pretty Cocoa-heavy, but iTunes is definitely a mix of Carbon and Cocoa, unlike iCal, iPhoto or Keynote which are all straight up Cocoa.
NeXTstep (OpenStep) had cross-platform Cocoa frameworks, which were then called the Application Kit and Foundation Frameworks. If Apple decides to go cross-platform with these again, it will be HUGE. I haven't heard many rumors about this, and there seems to be a surprising lack of interest in the whole thing. But it could explain why Apple hasn't made any efforts to port their Cocoa iApps to Windows, yet they are porting iTunes. If they plan on making Cocoa cross-platform again, they'll be able to port their iApps almost for free, and at will. Seems like the way to go, instead of writing these things from the ground up.
I've found a couple hints in their Developmer tools that suggest they may be planning on going down the cross-platform road. One of the bigger ones is the fact that you can make localized platform variants of the files in your project. It's somewhat hidden, but you get a pull-down menu in Project Builder with these choices:
macos macos_classic windows solaris hpux
I don't know how good it would be from a business standpoint, but as a developer it would be the best thing that ever happened to me.
The daughter of a Sitar Player, Little Miss Shankar is merely a different kind of pre-packaged. Pre-packaged pseudo-intellectual pseudo-meaningful but still overpoweringly commercial music. A step above Britney Spears... but only one step.
All the posts with the drawn-out spec sheets comparing the $1500 PC to the $1500 Mac are a little silly. It's no mystery that you can get more stuff thrown in your PC for less money. Unfortunately, when people see these side-by-side spec sheets with price tags on the bottom, that usually makes their decision for them. And more often than not, it's the wrong decision. As an example, my friend bought some no-name sweatshop-made Intel crapbox a few years ago, because he got an insanely speced-out machine for under a grand. And as months rolled by, everything in it started breaking one by one... not to mention the fact that it would BSOD all day long.
Apple's quality is evident not only in looking at the hardware design, feeling the strength of the assembly, looking at how the inside is layed out, etc... but also in the lifespan of the machines. It's not uncommon to see people using 5 or 6 year old Macs on a daily basis, with little complaint. (Incidentally, this is what often skews the often-published statistics on Mac marketshare. Market research companies often base these numbers on number of computers sold, ignoring the fact that Macs tend to remain in use much longer than PCs.)
Apple could easily compete in the cheap computer market, but they've decided not to. I don't know whether it's a good decision or not, but it's a decision that they've clearly made and are sticking with.
Now the question is, when will we be seeing G5 machines from Apple? When those hit the market, Apple just might have a huge lead in the specs department. And with that lead, maybe they'll unleash Marklar on the world (OSX for Intel hardware). It would make OS X available to everyone, while still retaining a compelling enough hardware edge to get people to shell out the extra cash for Apple computers.
I hope Marklar's more than just a rumor... it would cause the biggest shakeup the industry's seen in years
Microsoft can patch until they're red in the face, and they do. But it doesn't change the fact that they released a server with a very major and potentially viral vulnerability. Not everyone in the world is going to do their patches the second they're released. Granted, security holes like this are inevitable, but it's just a question of "how much is too much?" Microsoft consistently releases vulnerable products. And if you're going to pay so much more to run an M$ platform, there should at least be some payoff in the area of so-called "trustworthy computing".
RedHat's interface is more similar to Windows than OS X's interface, but RedHat picked the wrong interface to copy. The fact that people are used to Windows does not mean that it should be the model. Very contrary to open source ideology, don't you think?
Advocates of Linux on the desktop should realize that their number is up... OS X has made desktop *NIX a reality. Linux is very effective at what it does well, and what it has always done well... serving as a fast and flexible OS for the elite. Talk of Linux for the average n00b grows tiresome. It was time to piss or get off the pot years ago. Nothing's changing, the core flaws are all still there... X11 is glitchy as hell, there's no consistency between any GUI elements in the OS, no two people's Linux boxes look or work even remotely the same, and open-source apps don't cut it for n00b tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.
A message to the Slashdot community at large: Take a few steps back from the feel-good open source cult, and look at what you REALLY have in your hands. An excellent open-source server OS which has effectively stormed the corporate gates, and a slew of very good server and specialized software which is backed by a devout following. That's very impressive, and something that every open-source developer should be very proud of. But know where to draw the line. For the sake of your own dignity, drop the notion of Linux on the desktop. Stop trying to make a backhoe into a Honda... or something like that.
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The Amiga 1000 did not have all this in 1984, because it wasn't released until July 1985. Only the Xerox/PARC Alta had a GUI before Apple. Learn your history Amiga-freak.
The clones were also tarnishing Apple and the MacOS's reputation for high quality. Power was notorious for a "fast and cheap at all costs" credo. It resulted in junky unreliable machines. I used to have a PowerTower with a blistering 180MHz 604e... way faster than any Apple at the time. But guess what... it froze and hung incessantly after being used for more than a few hours. They had serious design problems, due to inadequate cooling and shoddy electronics. I would have been much better off with a slower Apple.
I always route my HTTP connection through an anonymous proxy. And the more I hear about BS like this, the gladder I am that I use proxies. You can get a big list of them from stayinvisible.com . If you're on OS X, there's a shareware called NetShade that puts your connection through a proxy, and has an option to cycle between different proxy servers every 5 seconds. There's another program for Windows by Steganos which I haven't tried, but it looks like it does the same thing.
Ther biggest problem you'll face with weather-related signal loss has to do with a dish that isn't solidly mounted. It takes a whole lot of snow, rain, or clouds to obscure the signal. The more common cause of signal loss is a dish that gets blown off its pointing angle, or one that wobbles in the wind. You can be as creative as you want with mounting (mine is tethered to the side of my brick chimney with two nylon ratcheting tie-down straps.) Just give it a firm shake with your hand (stfu) and make sure it's not going to wobble in a strong wind.
As far as satellite vs. cable, satellite all the way. It's better service, better technology, and you'll be dealing with a far less scummy company.
It's immediately obvious that you have never used OS X. Expound on one of your heartbreakingly intelligent points please:
- How is OS X "less than par" in the area of being a powerful os
What you said about the two sperate bootloaders and partitions... that whole festering pile of dung... just makes it 100% obvious that you've no experience with OS X and have no right to be bullshitting about it.
Just because I enjoy wasting my time, I'll explain how it's done. You run the OS X install CD, run the OS 9 CD, and then choose which system you want to boot from via the control panel. I know you'd love for it to be difficult, but it's actually not.
you fucking communist /. bastards. moderate on quality of someone's point, rather than their opinion.
Surprisingly enough iTunes is still a Carbon app, not Cocoa. Until iTunes 4 Apple was keeping backward-compatibility with OS 9, and Cocoa/Obj.C don't even come close to porting back to OS 9. I imagine the new stuff, i.e. Music Store, is pretty Cocoa-heavy, but iTunes is definitely a mix of Carbon and Cocoa, unlike iCal, iPhoto or Keynote which are all straight up Cocoa.
NeXTstep (OpenStep) had cross-platform Cocoa frameworks, which were then called the Application Kit and Foundation Frameworks. If Apple decides to go cross-platform with these again, it will be HUGE. I haven't heard many rumors about this, and there seems to be a surprising lack of interest in the whole thing. But it could explain why Apple hasn't made any efforts to port their Cocoa iApps to Windows, yet they are porting iTunes. If they plan on making Cocoa cross-platform again, they'll be able to port their iApps almost for free, and at will. Seems like the way to go, instead of writing these things from the ground up.
I've found a couple hints in their Developmer tools that suggest they may be planning on going down the cross-platform road. One of the bigger ones is the fact that you can make localized platform variants of the files in your project. It's somewhat hidden, but you get a pull-down menu in Project Builder with these choices:
macos
macos_classic
windows
solaris
hpux
I don't know how good it would be from a business standpoint, but as a developer it would be the best thing that ever happened to me.
The daughter of a Sitar Player, Little Miss Shankar is merely a different kind of pre-packaged. Pre-packaged pseudo-intellectual pseudo-meaningful but still overpoweringly commercial music. A step above Britney Spears... but only one step.
Take a look at Timeline's site.
d00d M$ hAx3r3d Th3M!!!!
All the posts with the drawn-out spec sheets comparing the $1500 PC to the $1500 Mac are a little silly. It's no mystery that you can get more stuff thrown in your PC for less money. Unfortunately, when people see these side-by-side spec sheets with price tags on the bottom, that usually makes their decision for them. And more often than not, it's the wrong decision. As an example, my friend bought some no-name sweatshop-made Intel crapbox a few years ago, because he got an insanely speced-out machine for under a grand. And as months rolled by, everything in it started breaking one by one... not to mention the fact that it would BSOD all day long. Apple's quality is evident not only in looking at the hardware design, feeling the strength of the assembly, looking at how the inside is layed out, etc... but also in the lifespan of the machines. It's not uncommon to see people using 5 or 6 year old Macs on a daily basis, with little complaint. (Incidentally, this is what often skews the often-published statistics on Mac marketshare. Market research companies often base these numbers on number of computers sold, ignoring the fact that Macs tend to remain in use much longer than PCs.) Apple could easily compete in the cheap computer market, but they've decided not to. I don't know whether it's a good decision or not, but it's a decision that they've clearly made and are sticking with. Now the question is, when will we be seeing G5 machines from Apple? When those hit the market, Apple just might have a huge lead in the specs department. And with that lead, maybe they'll unleash Marklar on the world (OSX for Intel hardware). It would make OS X available to everyone, while still retaining a compelling enough hardware edge to get people to shell out the extra cash for Apple computers. I hope Marklar's more than just a rumor... it would cause the biggest shakeup the industry's seen in years
Microsoft can patch until they're red in the face, and they do. But it doesn't change the fact that they released a server with a very major and potentially viral vulnerability. Not everyone in the world is going to do their patches the second they're released. Granted, security holes like this are inevitable, but it's just a question of "how much is too much?" Microsoft consistently releases vulnerable products. And if you're going to pay so much more to run an M$ platform, there should at least be some payoff in the area of so-called "trustworthy computing".
RedHat's interface is more similar to Windows than OS X's interface, but RedHat picked the wrong interface to copy. The fact that people are used to Windows does not mean that it should be the model. Very contrary to open source ideology, don't you think?
Advocates of Linux on the desktop should realize that their number is up... OS X has made desktop *NIX a reality. Linux is very effective at what it does well, and what it has always done well... serving as a fast and flexible OS for the elite. Talk of Linux for the average n00b grows tiresome. It was time to piss or get off the pot years ago. Nothing's changing, the core flaws are all still there... X11 is glitchy as hell, there's no consistency between any GUI elements in the OS, no two people's Linux boxes look or work even remotely the same, and open-source apps don't cut it for n00b tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.
A message to the Slashdot community at large: Take a few steps back from the feel-good open source cult, and look at what you REALLY have in your hands. An excellent open-source server OS which has effectively stormed the corporate gates, and a slew of very good server and specialized software which is backed by a devout following. That's very impressive, and something that every open-source developer should be very proud of. But know where to draw the line. For the sake of your own dignity, drop the notion of Linux on the desktop. Stop trying to make a backhoe into a Honda... or something like that.