I was initially very happy when I became a telecommuter - I have a nice house in the suburbs, entirely covered by wireless network, so I can read slashdot even in my bathroom. However, I am also a father of three and to most of my family my work hours are also leisure hours - since daddy is at home, why not go to his room and tell him what a good Dexter's Laboratory episode he just has missed on the Cartoon Network? Soon I discovered I need some way to mentally separate myself from my family just during the work hours - and working with headphones turned out to be the best solution. My family still needs to contact me sometime during my work, but the popping iChat windows with questions like "dad, can I play on PS2 now?" or "honey, what do you think of salmon for dinner?" don't distract me. So yes, we do use IM to chat with each other even when all of us are at home - and I see nothing wrong in that. After 5PM I take off the headphones and I can say the proverbial "honey, I'm home".
If Apple charged the same price as Windows XP Professional (~$250+). I'm sure many people would be happy to choose the Apple OS over Microsoft and Apple would be making a pretty good margin.
It wouldn't. Befere 1997 Apple had authorized clones and the clonemakers paid flat rate of $50 for each Mac-compatible machine sold. It was a bad deal for Apple. It's always better to have a $500 margin selling a single PowerMac (and their margin on G5's is obviously much higher) rather than sell 5 copies of OEM MacOS for $50. They traded their market share (that plummeted) for profitability (that rocketed), but that's a wise choice - commericial companies go for profit, not for market share.
ugh.. I can't stand why the argument that a native language for a nation fabricated out of nowhere in the last century is some kind of news-worthy event. The same program probably doesn't support a zillion other native languages. Why continue to make noise over these few thousand users?
Some languages write from left to right. Some others write from right to left. Microsoft Office for Mac discriminates all the rtl languages.
Of course there isn't a technical reason, it's a COST reason. Office for Mac sold very poorly, let alone relatively little used versions in languages like Hebrew. It would cost them more in development to add it than the sales justify, so why bother?
The whole cost in this case would be an option like "enable right to left writing". That's all - the rest is built-in into the MacOS X.
Given the price of a Mac, is *free* that big of a deal? Open source I understand, but it doesn't seem that anyone who can afford a Mac can't afford an office suite.
Consider the example of lack of Hebrew support in Microsoft Office for Mac. There is no technical reason for it; the Unicode-based MacOS X is ready to support Hebrew out-of-the-box. It's just a political decision of the vendor of this particular office suite trying to force Israeli Mac users to abandon their platform of choice. I think this example is enough for you to understand why *free* (as in speech) office suite is a big deal indeed, after all.
The typical artist/writer/mom-or-dad user can click a couple buttons and have OS X update itself (or even set it to always keep itself updated).
Correction: the typical artist/writer/mom-or-dad user leaves the default settings, so his/her OS X updates itself every week. You don't need to "set it", it's set by default; you have to "click a couple of buttons" to disable it.
Actually, I'm not so sure if it's a good to idea to put it as default - I wonder what will happen if a "typical artist/writer/mom-or-dad user" will be on vacation, connected via roaming/GPRS on cellphone and all of a sudden the machine will start to download 40 megabytes of OS X upgrade...
While some of their points are nice and insightful, some are not:
5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
Riiight... since it will be written by the same guys who designed the Outlook Express security model, just try to imagine the next generation of viruses; you could get infected by simply answering the phone.
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?
I don't know, why you can't; I can do exactly this with my MacOS X + dot Mac. Write a text file, save it as HTML to your desktop, drag'n'drop the icon to the "Sites" folder of your iDisk. Presto.
59 Make anonymous Net use easier
Nice idea - but how do you intend to fight the spammers then?
Wasn't this the cause of all the PowerBook 5300's catching fire and exploding back in '95 when they came out?
Yep.
? Or perhaps that was just a charging issue....
Both, actually. Apple offered a replacement program for all powerbook users - and they exchanged their LiIons to the good old NiMH's, obvious sign that the batteries were also to blame. However, LiIons don't explode just because they are a ticking bomb, they explode only due to overheating; Apple made design mistakes that led to overheating. So it was actually a combination of two factors - unreliable early LiIons and bad design that failed to take into account the difference between two generations of batteries.
I habitually leave my laptop in the trunk of my car - which is just over the gas tank (duh!) .
Sir, I don't know the make of your laptop, but I'm pretty sure that if you'll read the user's manual that came with it, you'll find a passage like "do not leave it in locations where the temperature can become unpredictable or extreme - like a car trunk". Such a passage is in mine. I'd say that your horror story boils down do "if you habitually neglect the recommendations of your user's manual, bad things can happen".
Look, I have dealt with Apple stuff since 1991. The Apple mentality is tha there is none of your business to be opening their products. That has been true of computers, and peripherals, unsuprisingly it is so with their players.
That's very strange. I think that the family of the Apple Quadra minitowers appeared on the market somewhere around 1991 - and users were actually encouraged to "open these products" in Apple's very own ads. Quadras evolved into the PowerMac 8xxx/9xxx family, which evolved to PowerMac G3, G4 and G5 - all of them ready to be opened by just pressing one large button.
Contrary to what you wrote, it's not "Aple mentality is that there is none of your business to be opening their products". You are encouraged to open some of them; you are discouraged to open some another. You are discouraged if you can easily do yourself some costly damage, because the compact design of the device requires special skills to service it. Like in the case of the iPod.
Winamp 5 does it. IMHO, it does it much better, too - if nothing else, it does it much quicker...
I don't question your words, sir, but I humbly beg you to elaborate. How exactly does the Winamp 5 determine what songs and when do I listen on my portable music player?
Oh puh-leeeeze. It's the most useless measure for portable music players I can imagine. Size does count. Ease of use does count. Weight does count. Measuring by sheer price/GB you will get an old 486DX4 laptop with replacement harddrive as the best portable player!
(Life gets expensive with a house, car, family to support...)
Speaking of which: initially I had to, ahem, persuade my wife to allow me to shell out our cash for an iPod, but now she considers it a good investment. There are many household duties that I really HATED to do, especially lawnmowing - but with an iPod, I started to actually like them and my wife no longer needs to remind me. If you need to persuade your wife... try to tell her this story;)
Smart playlists. When you have few thousands songs in your pocket, organization of this library becomes the main issue - or you have to dig the iPod out of your pocket (backpack etc.) any time you want to change the damned album, as if you'd still use some last-century walkman. It's like the Internet search engine: even if you know that a given information is somewhere on the Web, the main question is can you find it quickly and easily.
iPod has a solution for that: it is able to store and modify many interesting meta-data about the songs and albums. It "knows" that this particular song was last played Thursday on 13:34. As far as I know, no existing software can handle this metadata as good as iTunes. With iTunes, creation of a smart playlist like "the songs whose genre is rock, my rating is at least four star, and they were last played at least a month ago, in random order" is a matter of few clicks. You can't get it manually managing your songs and playlists.
In my case, my iPod is often hidden somewhere under my clothes (e.g. in the internal pocket of my jacket) or even in a special "walkman compartment" of my trunk&co backpack. Taking it out and manual selection of a song is a hassle - I use the remote control to play, skip or change volume, but the actual song seletion is done by a smart playlist created on iTunes, executed by the iPod.
DVD region codes. This will be a huge issue this year, as discussed a few days ago in/. . The world market for digital content distribution will become just that: a world market. I for one am looking forward to getting the latest Coldplay album & singles at the same time as our friends in the UK
What about choir singing of the Coldplay's "We Live In A Beautiful World" of Coldplay fans worldwide via audio-equipped instant messengers, the day the regions die?
You lucky, lucky bastard! I'm 35, I do play computer and console games, and if I want to have a computer game for Christmas, I have to buy it myself (then write my name on it and mix it with gifts for my kids). Actually, "Tomb Raider V: The Chronicles" was the worst gift I ever gave myself for Christmas.
I think that in the environment described in the article the main question is not "bang for watt" or "bang for buck", but the general safety. There are many things that can go wrong in your experiment - your power generator might not work at all or not work as good as you planned or cease to work after some time etc. I think you should go for the failsafe option, being obviously a laptop. If your power generator will go down, laptop will quietly start to work on his battery - while a desktop PC would require external UPS, that will never be as much integrated with your machine as a laptop and its battery. For example, you can tell your laptop to preserve power while working on battery (reduce CPU cycling, turn off some eye-candy etc.), and usually it's not THAT simple with an external UPS and a desktop PC. Also, a laptop can quite easily get the power from alternative sources like the car lighter socket in your vehicle (you won't be in this wilderness without a car, will you?). In the worst possible scenario, you can just drive with your laptop to the nearest gas station, order a cup of coffee and plug it into their power socket;-). It won't be THAT easy with a desktop.
I am still thinking of replacing this iBook eventually with another iBook but only when they come up with the model that's at least twice as fast as the 600MHz iBook (actually CPU speed is the only reason I want to upgrade it).
Now, while I would rather recommend holding all iBook/powerbook purchases (I think that major speed progress is intevitable in 2004), you would actually notice huge difference between your iBook and a contemporary one, sometimes even surpassing the "at least twice as fast" condition. Your old iBook uses ATI RAGE 128 with mediocre 8 megabytes of video RAM, the new one is a RADEON 7500 with 32 MB VRAM. If you play games, the difference is huge. But even if you don't, MacOS X GUI heavily relies on the GPU support, so your CPU has to sweat a lot just on calculating all those pretty widgets. And finally, many applications actually take the full advantage of the G4 architecture and they also could have a ~2x boost on a new iBook (a megahertz of G4 is not the same as a megahertz of G3).
The G5 is to the G4 as the Athlon 64 is to the Athlon XP. Apples to oranges (no pun intended).
Or maybe like the PowerPC to the 68k? If yes, then actually Apple has a (bad) record of making crippled machines with PowerPC stuffed into a 68k motherboard like the early performas. Much earlier, they also did put a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit motherboard crippling the LC. Early adopters, beware; especially if you want to go the el cheapo way.
The new iPod is the exact opposite thing you want in engineering. A device that lasts less time on battery power. But this seems to be the general trend at Apple lately.
You seem to assume that engineer has different priorities than the customer (engineers often call "customer" something like "mindless drone" or "Joe Sixpack" etc.). On the short term, it could be true indeed, but on the long term - it's not. An engineer working for a company that does not satisfy its customers will soon be an unemployed engineer. The new iPod is a piece of fine engineering, because the customers queue to buy it. Period.
Seriously, I use a 3rd gen iPod and I am happy with the trade "less weight for less battery life". Wouldn't swap it for the old one (actually, I was buying my machine when both generations of iPods coexisted on the market).
It's even more complex - initially Pixar was supposed to be a computer making company. They tried to sell a sophisticated graphics workstation called Pixar Image Computer for a cool $135,000. Steve Jobs always was a hardware fetishist, but both his "main" project of that day - the NeXT Cube - and Pixar Image Computer were horrible market flops. Among the 120 employers of Pixar in late 1980's, only five were trying to make films; the others were trying to develop, manufacture and market the workstation that nobody wanted to buy. This policy has led Pixar to huge debt of a 50 megabuck magnitude. Only then came the Oscar and the Disney etc.
It seems like the creators of the movie didn't care at all how the movie would look like.
They really had otherthings to worry about. I guess that explains everything, especially the dialogue and plot, obviously written in a hurry by someone completely absent-minded and concentrated on something else.
I've read an interview with Wolfgang Becker - the German director of the "Good Bye, Lenin!" and there was a sentence I find +1 Insightful (with a slight tint of -1 Flamebait). Becker was asked about the CGI used in this film - whose large sequences take part in the pre-1989, communist East Berlin. Becker said that his film actually relies quite heavily on CGI just to remove all the contemporary signs of western capitalism in Berlin. When the journalist said that the CGI in this film is hard to notice, Becker said: "I am proud that the special effects in my film are hard to notice. Only in America the filmmakers are proud of special effects that are easy to notice".
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone still using win9x really ought to upgrade to windows 2k/XP. It will save you a lot of headaches.
...and upgrade the obsolete headaches to modern pain-in-the-asses.
I was initially very happy when I became a telecommuter - I have a nice house in the suburbs, entirely covered by wireless network, so I can read slashdot even in my bathroom. However, I am also a father of three and to most of my family my work hours are also leisure hours - since daddy is at home, why not go to his room and tell him what a good Dexter's Laboratory episode he just has missed on the Cartoon Network? Soon I discovered I need some way to mentally separate myself from my family just during the work hours - and working with headphones turned out to be the best solution. My family still needs to contact me sometime during my work, but the popping iChat windows with questions like "dad, can I play on PS2 now?" or "honey, what do you think of salmon for dinner?" don't distract me. So yes, we do use IM to chat with each other even when all of us are at home - and I see nothing wrong in that. After 5PM I take off the headphones and I can say the proverbial "honey, I'm home".
If Apple charged the same price as Windows XP Professional (~$250+). I'm sure many people would be happy to choose the Apple OS over Microsoft and Apple would be making a pretty good margin.
It wouldn't. Befere 1997 Apple had authorized clones and the clonemakers paid flat rate of $50 for each Mac-compatible machine sold. It was a bad deal for Apple. It's always better to have a $500 margin selling a single PowerMac (and their margin on G5's is obviously much higher) rather than sell 5 copies of OEM MacOS for $50. They traded their market share (that plummeted) for profitability (that rocketed), but that's a wise choice - commericial companies go for profit, not for market share.
ugh.. I can't stand why the argument that a native language for a nation fabricated out of nowhere in the last century is some kind of news-worthy event. The same program probably doesn't support a zillion other native languages. Why continue to make noise over these few thousand users?
Some languages write from left to right. Some others write from right to left. Microsoft Office for Mac discriminates all the rtl languages.
Of course there isn't a technical reason, it's a COST reason. Office for Mac sold very poorly, let alone relatively little used versions in languages like Hebrew. It would cost them more in development to add it than the sales justify, so why bother?
The whole cost in this case would be an option like "enable right to left writing". That's all - the rest is built-in into the MacOS X.
Given the price of a Mac, is *free* that big of a deal? Open source I understand, but it doesn't seem that anyone who can afford a Mac can't afford an office suite.
Consider the example of lack of Hebrew support in Microsoft Office for Mac. There is no technical reason for it; the Unicode-based MacOS X is ready to support Hebrew out-of-the-box. It's just a political decision of the vendor of this particular office suite trying to force Israeli Mac users to abandon their platform of choice. I think this example is enough for you to understand why *free* (as in speech) office suite is a big deal indeed, after all.
The typical artist/writer/mom-or-dad user can click a couple buttons and have OS X update itself (or even set it to always keep itself updated).
Correction: the typical artist/writer/mom-or-dad user leaves the default settings, so his/her OS X updates itself every week. You don't need to "set it", it's set by default; you have to "click a couple of buttons" to disable it.
Actually, I'm not so sure if it's a good to idea to put it as default - I wonder what will happen if a "typical artist/writer/mom-or-dad user" will be on vacation, connected via roaming/GPRS on cellphone and all of a sudden the machine will start to download 40 megabytes of OS X upgrade...
Actually, in just three weeks there will be a real anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh - January 24th, 1984.
While some of their points are nice and insightful, some are not:
5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
Riiight... since it will be written by the same guys who designed the Outlook Express security model, just try to imagine the next generation of viruses; you could get infected by simply answering the phone.
16 Simplify Web publishing Why can't we post files from our desktop to a Web site in one drag-and-drop move?
I don't know, why you can't; I can do exactly this with my MacOS X + dot Mac. Write a text file, save it as HTML to your desktop, drag'n'drop the icon to the "Sites" folder of your iDisk. Presto.
59 Make anonymous Net use easier
Nice idea - but how do you intend to fight the spammers then?
Wasn't this the cause of all the PowerBook 5300's catching fire and exploding back in '95 when they came out?
Yep.
? Or perhaps that was just a charging issue....
Both, actually. Apple offered a replacement program for all powerbook users - and they exchanged their LiIons to the good old NiMH's, obvious sign that the batteries were also to blame. However, LiIons don't explode just because they are a ticking bomb, they explode only due to overheating; Apple made design mistakes that led to overheating. So it was actually a combination of two factors - unreliable early LiIons and bad design that failed to take into account the difference between two generations of batteries.
I habitually leave my laptop in the trunk of my car - which is just over the gas tank (duh!) .
Sir, I don't know the make of your laptop, but I'm pretty sure that if you'll read the user's manual that came with it, you'll find a passage like "do not leave it in locations where the temperature can become unpredictable or extreme - like a car trunk". Such a passage is in mine. I'd say that your horror story boils down do "if you habitually neglect the recommendations of your user's manual, bad things can happen".
Look, I have dealt with Apple stuff since 1991. The Apple mentality is tha there is none of your business to be opening their products. That has been true of computers, and peripherals, unsuprisingly it is so with their players.
That's very strange. I think that the family of the Apple Quadra minitowers appeared on the market somewhere around 1991 - and users were actually encouraged to "open these products" in Apple's very own ads. Quadras evolved into the PowerMac 8xxx/9xxx family, which evolved to PowerMac G3, G4 and G5 - all of them ready to be opened by just pressing one large button.
Contrary to what you wrote, it's not "Aple mentality is that there is none of your business to be opening their products". You are encouraged to open some of them; you are discouraged to open some another. You are discouraged if you can easily do yourself some costly damage, because the compact design of the device requires special skills to service it. Like in the case of the iPod.
Winamp 5 does it. IMHO, it does it much better, too - if nothing else, it does it much quicker...
I don't question your words, sir, but I humbly beg you to elaborate. How exactly does the Winamp 5 determine what songs and when do I listen on my portable music player?
if you measure by price/GB
Oh puh-leeeeze. It's the most useless measure for portable music players I can imagine. Size does count. Ease of use does count. Weight does count. Measuring by sheer price/GB you will get an old 486DX4 laptop with replacement harddrive as the best portable player!
(Life gets expensive with a house, car, family to support...)
;)
Speaking of which: initially I had to, ahem, persuade my wife to allow me to shell out our cash for an iPod, but now she considers it a good investment. There are many household duties that I really HATED to do, especially lawnmowing - but with an iPod, I started to actually like them and my wife no longer needs to remind me. If you need to persuade your wife... try to tell her this story
What is so wonderful about iTunes?
Smart playlists. When you have few thousands songs in your pocket, organization of this library becomes the main issue - or you have to dig the iPod out of your pocket (backpack etc.) any time you want to change the damned album, as if you'd still use some last-century walkman. It's like the Internet search engine: even if you know that a given information is somewhere on the Web, the main question is can you find it quickly and easily.
iPod has a solution for that: it is able to store and modify many interesting meta-data about the songs and albums. It "knows" that this particular song was last played Thursday on 13:34. As far as I know, no existing software can handle this metadata as good as iTunes. With iTunes, creation of a smart playlist like "the songs whose genre is rock, my rating is at least four star, and they were last played at least a month ago, in random order" is a matter of few clicks. You can't get it manually managing your songs and playlists.
In my case, my iPod is often hidden somewhere under my clothes (e.g. in the internal pocket of my jacket) or even in a special "walkman compartment" of my trunk&co backpack. Taking it out and manual selection of a song is a hassle - I use the remote control to play, skip or change volume, but the actual song seletion is done by a smart playlist created on iTunes, executed by the iPod.
DVD region codes. This will be a huge issue this year, as discussed a few days ago in /. . The world market for digital content distribution will become just that: a world market. I for one am looking forward to getting the latest Coldplay album & singles at the same time as our friends in the UK
What about choir singing of the Coldplay's "We Live In A Beautiful World" of Coldplay fans worldwide via audio-equipped instant messengers, the day the regions die?
You lucky, lucky bastard! I'm 35, I do play computer and console games, and if I want to have a computer game for Christmas, I have to buy it myself (then write my name on it and mix it with gifts for my kids). Actually, "Tomb Raider V: The Chronicles" was the worst gift I ever gave myself for Christmas.
I think that in the environment described in the article the main question is not "bang for watt" or "bang for buck", but the general safety. There are many things that can go wrong in your experiment - your power generator might not work at all or not work as good as you planned or cease to work after some time etc. I think you should go for the failsafe option, being obviously a laptop. If your power generator will go down, laptop will quietly start to work on his battery - while a desktop PC would require external UPS, that will never be as much integrated with your machine as a laptop and its battery. For example, you can tell your laptop to preserve power while working on battery (reduce CPU cycling, turn off some eye-candy etc.), and usually it's not THAT simple with an external UPS and a desktop PC. Also, a laptop can quite easily get the power from alternative sources like the car lighter socket in your vehicle (you won't be in this wilderness without a car, will you?). In the worst possible scenario, you can just drive with your laptop to the nearest gas station, order a cup of coffee and plug it into their power socket ;-). It won't be THAT easy with a desktop.
I am still thinking of replacing this iBook eventually with another iBook but only when they come up with the model that's at least twice as fast as the 600MHz iBook (actually CPU speed is the only reason I want to upgrade it).
Now, while I would rather recommend holding all iBook/powerbook purchases (I think that major speed progress is intevitable in 2004), you would actually notice huge difference between your iBook and a contemporary one, sometimes even surpassing the "at least twice as fast" condition. Your old iBook uses ATI RAGE 128 with mediocre 8 megabytes of video RAM, the new one is a RADEON 7500 with 32 MB VRAM. If you play games, the difference is huge. But even if you don't, MacOS X GUI heavily relies on the GPU support, so your CPU has to sweat a lot just on calculating all those pretty widgets. And finally, many applications actually take the full advantage of the G4 architecture and they also could have a ~2x boost on a new iBook (a megahertz of G4 is not the same as a megahertz of G3).
The G5 is to the G4 as the Athlon 64 is to the Athlon XP. Apples to oranges (no pun intended).
Or maybe like the PowerPC to the 68k? If yes, then actually Apple has a (bad) record of making crippled machines with PowerPC stuffed into a 68k motherboard like the early performas. Much earlier, they also did put a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit motherboard crippling the LC. Early adopters, beware; especially if you want to go the el cheapo way.
The new iPod is the exact opposite thing you want in engineering. A device that lasts less time on battery power. But this seems to be the general trend at Apple lately.
You seem to assume that engineer has different priorities than the customer (engineers often call "customer" something like "mindless drone" or "Joe Sixpack" etc.). On the short term, it could be true indeed, but on the long term - it's not. An engineer working for a company that does not satisfy its customers will soon be an unemployed engineer. The new iPod is a piece of fine engineering, because the customers queue to buy it. Period.
Seriously, I use a 3rd gen iPod and I am happy with the trade "less weight for less battery life". Wouldn't swap it for the old one (actually, I was buying my machine when both generations of iPods coexisted on the market).
It's even more complex - initially Pixar was supposed to be a computer making company. They tried to sell a sophisticated graphics workstation called Pixar Image Computer for a cool $135,000. Steve Jobs always was a hardware fetishist, but both his "main" project of that day - the NeXT Cube - and Pixar Image Computer were horrible market flops. Among the 120 employers of Pixar in late 1980's, only five were trying to make films; the others were trying to develop, manufacture and market the workstation that nobody wanted to buy. This policy has led Pixar to huge debt of a 50 megabuck magnitude. Only then came the Oscar and the Disney etc.
It seems like the creators of the movie didn't care at all how the movie would look like.
They really had other things to worry about. I guess that explains everything, especially the dialogue and plot, obviously written in a hurry by someone completely absent-minded and concentrated on something else.
I've read an interview with Wolfgang Becker - the German director of the "Good Bye, Lenin!" and there was a sentence I find +1 Insightful (with a slight tint of -1 Flamebait). Becker was asked about the CGI used in this film - whose large sequences take part in the pre-1989, communist East Berlin. Becker said that his film actually relies quite heavily on CGI just to remove all the contemporary signs of western capitalism in Berlin. When the journalist said that the CGI in this film is hard to notice, Becker said: "I am proud that the special effects in my film are hard to notice. Only in America the filmmakers are proud of special effects that are easy to notice".