There's nothing "draconian" about paying someone for their work. Paying someone for their efforts isn't just a business model, it's common sense, fairness, and the keystone of economics.
YOUR post is full of bullshit. In fact, it's full of very tired arguments. You're a stooge, dude.
You offer an uncited anecdote that artists who release their music for free find increased sales. Not to mention that it doesn't matter, because if an artist DOESN'T want to release their music for free, that doesn't still give you the right to pirate it (bands like Type O Negative, Tool, etc.).
You also cite just one study, when there have been others that found the opposite conclusion.
The only reason the music industry is afraid of P2P is because it threatens their business model.
And then you trot out the extremely tired Slashdot cliche of the "obsolete business model." People aren't "trying music for free," they're pirating the whole album so that they never have to pay for it. You see, piracy is nothing more than freeloading so that you don't have to pay the human beings who wrote the music, slaved away in a studio, mixed it, and distributed it. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but come on, that's why people pirate music. They just don't want to have to pay for something they know they can get for free. It's simple human nature.
This chokehold is the the last remaining reason that artists agree to contract terms that can only charitably be described as "indentured servitude."
Then you trot out the "artist contracts are bad" routine, ignoring that artists willingly sign their contracts and continue to do so to this day. Must not be so bad.
RIAA members aren't terrified of piracy, they're terrified of competition.
ROFL. Competition? What about the artists? Do you give a shit about them not ever getting compensated for their work? Should John Carmack never get paid for his years of work on Doom 3?
Articles like this (and posts like yours) serve an agenda in order to do one thing--paint the RIAA as an evil bad guy in order to justify piracy. That way, people don't feel guilty when they pirate an artist's music. "The RIAA is so evil, I'm sticking it to them!" Notice the artist isn't in that equation anywhere.
It's much easier to scapegoat some faceless group and proclaim "The RIAA made me do it!" rather than simply admit the truth that you are pirating another human being's music and ensuring System of a Down doesn't get paid today. Freeloaders always get bitter when the free ride is taken away, and many ideologies have been invented to stroke that guilty ego (your post is full of those cliches), but it will never change the simple truth. There's a big difference between free as in beer and free as in loading.
Hell, the ATMs in my city running embedded versions of Windows bluescreen all the time. Even Microsoft's X-Box crashed at the 2005 CES. This isn't a company known for its stable platform.
Truly to say that the Graphic Engine in OSX and Vista are the same shows a complete lack of understanding. OSX graphics = WindowsXP with GDI+. The only exception is the Offscreen Bitmap Compose that OSX uses.
100% wrong. OS X uses a technology called Quartz, which is a totally different world above Windows XP's GDI+. It's vector-based and resolution-independent, and has been since its introduction six years ago. The same instructions used to draw to a printer are used to draw to the screen.
Vista has a full round trip Vector based Composer than does things OSX couldn't dream of like real, from Vector acceleration techniques (round trip) to GPU sharing and GPU RAM virtualization, stuff that has pushed NVidia and ATI to rethink the multi-tasking and Memory aspects of the GPU market. Yet MS is pulling this off with the current generation of Video cards.
Quartz is a vector-based layer, and Quartz 2D Extreme in Tiger/Leopard accelerates all GUI drawing operations via the GPU.
When I say that OSX is WindowsXP/GDI+ with only the addition of a Bitmap Composer, I am being serious.
No, you're being ignorant. Quartz is not Windows XP/GDI+ with "only the addition of a Bitmap Composer." You seem to know little about the Quartz Compositor layer in OS X.
OSX has no further graphic abilities than WindowsXP
Wow, so all those anti-aliased Quartz vector operations I've been doing are available in Windows XP? I can print the contents of any view to a printer automatically like I can with Quartz?
Please put down the MSDN marketing brochure before posting.
It is true. If you only download formats that your mac can play then it's not true for you. I have video that cannot be played on a mac.
I have never come across a WMV file I couldn't play on a Mac. As for DRMed WMV, I suspect that userbase is so small, it's irrelevant, especially if Apple offers movie downloads over iTunes.
You're obviously a "give a man a fish" type - rather than wanting to teach people how to fish. *shrug*
OS X ships with Xcode. Your strawman argument is officially on fire.
I imagine saying "show me the data" makes you feel smart? Try showing me the data for the opposite, or any data concerning third world children & a mass cheap laptop initative. You can't 'cause that data does not exist.
And where is your data that a $100 laptop without source code would be "useless?" This is just Slashdot geek mindset run amock, thinking that ANYONE in a country poor enough to have to resort to a $100 laptop would:
1.) Give a shit that the source code isn't included. 2.) Want to waste hours trying to hack Linux into working properly when they could get OS X and not only have the Darwin source code and free compiler suite that kicks the butt out of anything on Linux, but would also have access to a larger application base that includes Office and Photoshop as well as the OSS alternatives.
You're just an Apple-hater with a handful of tired, decimated arguments.
Thank you for your agreement that Apple competes on quality, not price.
Apple competes on price but doesn't go below a certain level of quality. I don't know why this point is difficult to grasp.
As to your second paragraph, I know you're trolling, but for anyone who thinks you might have a valid point:
Translation: You have no counterargument, so you're going to accuse me of "trolling."
Jobs offered OS X to the one laptop per child program late in the day, knowing that it was unsuitable due to lack of source. It was simply grandstanding on his part.
A complete load of crap. It wouldn't be "unsuitable" due to lack of source, and you don't explain why it would have. Someone buying a $100 laptop doesn't care if they don't get the friggin' source tree to Aqua. Besides, Darwin is open source.
The project simply went with Red Hat, because they made a large donation to the project. We could have had a $100 Mac, and they blew it due to unrealistic ideals that everyone in the world wants source code, when they don't.
Frankly, I can't think of a non-malicious reason for Jobs to make the offer, (why knowingly offer something useless?)
And I'm the one trolling? Again, you have yet to prove out it would be "useless" without source. OS X is quite useful.
Job's crack at the OLPC project wasn't as childish & pathetic as Gate's, but make no mistake - it was similar jealousy that prompted it.
There was no "crack," you made this part up. I suspect the only jealousy here is coming from you.
especially when VC-1/WMV is now a standard on par with Mpeg4 and a part of the High Definition market.
This is just not true at all. VC-1 is not on the level of MPEG-4 in the upcoming HD market, and most content providers are using H.264 (since it beats VC-1's quality and space). And H.264 has been on the rise over the web, catching up to WMV and Real.
Lemme put it this way, I have never seen a movie trailer released in friggin' WMV format. It's all Quicktime H.264 now. MPEG-4 itself uses a container based on the Quicktime format.
HD content providers don't have to support it at all. In fact, most if not all are going to use H.264. You're thinking of the hardware manufacturers, who will support it as part of the spec, but given that H.264 beats VC-1 in quality benchmarks, I suspect Microsoft will be the only one who ever uses it.
Yes, both products can expand what the mac can play, but currently the mac can't play everything that windows can.
I have never found this to be true, and I suspect most of the general public wouldn't either. You're forgetting that most people have iTunes installed, which comes with Quicktime. H.264 on the web has been on the rise, as a Slashdot article recently reported. WMV is not as necessary as you're making it out to be. I still come across.MPG most of the time.
Well, for starters, to avoid the never-ending series of critical vulnerabilities and trojans in Windows. That Sims-playing machine won't be very effective as a zombie PC. Besides, I think machines like the iMac appeal to these "AIM smiley" folks with things like a built-in webcam and (in Leopard) iChat Theater.
How about you try the other way round? Go have a look at Dell's cheapest laptop, then go & find an 'equivilant' Apple notebook.
This is just something that's never going to change with Apple. They have a standard of quality that makes their brand quite valuable, and that's due to not stooping too low and slapping the Apple logo on a piece of crap. If you get their cheapest Mac, you can still rest assured it will be an awesome machine in its own right. You get the cheapest Dell, and you're just in for a poor experience.
Besides, remember the $100 laptop project? Steve Jobs offered OS X for free to run on those things. The project rejected the offer because they wanted it to be open source, then went with Red Hat (who just so happened to have donated to the project). So because of them, the world missed out on having a $100 Mac. Ugh.
But the exact same placement of the search field in every window, with the same placement of the magnifying glass icon, using the same style of icon (but pointing to the right instead of the left)? Using a magnifying glass is an obvious metaphor for search, but come on. Microsoft could have been a little more original in its implementation, because that's taking an entire Apple design riff. Every Finder window in OS X has that same search field, as does Safari, Mail, iTunes, and more. WebKit even introduced a special search field tag to display it that reverts to a normal text field in non-WebKit browsers.
Core Duo is a great chip. If you're kicking yourself over getting an Intel Mac, don't. This year's Core 2 Duo Macs would be made obsolete next year anyway, when Intel's Santa Rosa platform is released. See here. The summary is that Santa Rosa has a faster FSB, DirectX 10-level graphics, 802.11n, and more, and is designed for the Core 2. The Core 2s being released this year are just an "initial version" put out there to meet the holiday buying cycle, which is why they're socket-compatible with the Core 1. The real Core 2 platform is coming next year.
Quote from the press release:
The next generation of Intel Centrino mobile technology, codenamed Santa Rosa and detailed for the first time in Maloney's keynote, is designed to give users better overall performance and graphics, improved wireless connectivity and improved security and manageability. Santa Rosa is expected to include a more powerful mobile microprocessor, an improved graphics chipset, codenamed Crestline, an IEEE* 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, codenamed Kedron, as well as Intel-optimized advanced management and security solutions. The platform will also include Intel's NAND flash-based platform accelerator, codenamed Robson, which enables much more rapid boot-up time and power savings. Santa Rosa, available in the first half of 2007, will use Intel's next-generation dual-core mobile microprocessor based on Intel's Core(TM) microarchitecture, codenamed Merom, Intel's new foundation for delivering even greater energy-efficient performance. An initial version of Merom will also be available for the current Intel Centrino Duo platform to align with the 2006 holiday buying cycle and will be socket or pin-compatible with the current version of Intel® Core(TM) Duo processors.
You shouldn't be that concerned, since XCode produces Universal Binaries not only for different architectures but for 32-bit and 64-bit. That said, if you're so concerned about upgrading to Core 2 Duo, wait until next year anyway, because Intel will be releasing a new chipset in Q1 2007 codenamed Santa Rosa that will replace the Napa used today on the Core Duo. It will have a faster FSB and other upgraded features that will take advantage of the Core 2's speed. So wait for those Macs.:) I say June of next year.
OS X Leopard will be fully 64-bit, and unlike Windows Vista, will seamlessly support 32-bit device drivers and applications, so going full 64-bit will be as simple as buying a 64-bit Mac.
That said, your implication is correct that 64-bit really isn't as big a deal as it was hyped to be by the likes of AMD (who teamed with CryTek to put out that awful 64-bit version of Far Cry with the higher-resolution textures to trick gamers into thinking having a 64-bit address space had something to do with that and not their GPU). XCode 2.4 supports four-architecture Universal Binaries anyway, so you'll have 32-bit/64-bit PPC/Intel applications. You shouldn't worry about missing out on anything
Besides, getting a Core 2 Duo system now would be silly when you can wait until first quarter of 2007 when Intel's Santa Rosa chipset comes out, replacing the Napa chipset used by the Core Duo. It'll have an 800Mhz bus speed upgrade that will really let the Core 2 take advantage of its power as well as ship with a new WLAN 802.11n chipset.
I have an Intel iMac and an Intel MacBook, but I'm quite happy and waiting for next year's Macs before even thinking of heading to eBay. There's always something better around the corner, especially with Apple.
The magnifying glass came from "Find" in Windows 95 (also in Win95's Start Menu), "Search" in Windows 2000, and "Search" in Windows XP.
No, it didn't. The magnifying glasses in those shots are of a different style and don't appear in a search field in the same way they do in OS X and now in Vista. Only XP is closest, but iTunes was already out by then.
The search field in the upper-right of Vista Explorer windows might have been adopted from Windows Address Book, which has had a search field in that general area since Windows 98. OS X probably adopted it from iTunes.
Microsoft adopted it from iTunes as well. Come on, you and I both know they didn't get the idea for the upper-right search field from friggin' Windows Address Book in Windows 98.
From Xerox Star (1981), where it was called the "Wastebasket." I know, Apple copied Xerox first. But the Wastebasket/Trash/Recycle Bin is not an "Apple-ism," it's a Xerox-ism.
The Waste Basket appeared in Viewpoint in 1985. You're linking to an early design document. An early design did have a waste basket, but it was removed.
Can you be more specific? Which icons? Are the "blatant clones" not obvious choices for what they represent (like a magnifying glass for "Search")? Who had a "tray" first?
Certainly, I can be more specific. OS X uses monochrome icons to represent things like WiFi and volume control. Windows has used a yellow speaker since Windows 95 to represent volume, for instance. OS X uses a sideways speaker with sound waves coming out the right side. In Vista, Microsoft switched to using monochrome system tray icons, and the speaker icon is an exact replica of the OS X volume control icon. In Vista, the battery/plugged-in icon looks and behaves exactly like OS X's. It goes on and on.
However, many people incorrectly give Apple credit for things cloned from other companies (e.g. desktop metaphor).
Apple was the first to market with a consumer GUI desktop with a style of desktop metaphor that everyone else has copied since. Interestingly, a lot of those Xerox Star guys were hired by Apple and ended up working on the Macintosh (something that's never mentioned when this debate comes up). Where did the phrase "cut-and-paste" come from? Apple. Where did "File Edit View Window Help" come from? Apple. And on and on. Microsoft took the Trash can from Apple, along with all the other Apple-isms in Windows, via the infamous technology licensing deal that was originally intended to allow Microsoft to develop a Mac-like interface in Office but was used instead to make Windows. It's not an exaggeration to say that Apple started that revolution, and Microsoft cloned it. You can see the MacOS-isms all over Windows, even to this day. It's so obvious to the objective viewer.
I've been following Thurrott for years, back when I was a Windows user. He likes to trot out the "I'm level-headed, I bash Microsoft myself" card, but then he'll sideswipe you with something crazy like some Mac userbase insult or a claim that XP SP2 was a bigger update than an entire major release of OS X (his reaction to the Arstechnica article on OS X Tiger was to claim that Ars writers are wordy and self-important, as if that's relevant to the facts in the piece).
Best-informed? The guy once argued with me that Spotlight was inferior search technology because it used plugins to read third-party document formats. I kindly pointed out that Microsoft's search tech uses the same damn thing, called IFilters, because search tech isn't psychic and has to know how to read things. He never replied. It was at that moment that I realized he's not a developer and doesn't understand things from that perspective. He's more of a Dvorak. You mention CoreData or CoreAnimation, and it's in one ear and out the other.
It always amazes me when I see people who are incredibly disorganized, have to expend so much effort to find things, who basically are always just one big mistake away from burnout, when they could learn some basic organization skills and work SO much more efficiently.
I could spend the effort to do that, or I could let the computer do the work for me (since that's what they're designed to do) and just keep everything, using search technologies like Spotlight to get what I need.
This topic reminds me of those last few holdovers out there who absolutely insist on manually organizing their entire MP3 collections in a massive hierarchy of folders. I tell them that iTunes will automatically organize the files by folder in a way you specify, but that's just a hook to get them using the app, since iTunes actually makes folders obsolete anyway (which I hope they realize after using it). I shudder at the thought of clicking through folder after folder when all I have to do in iTunes is type the first few letters of the band I want in the search field.
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There's nothing "draconian" about paying someone for their work. Paying someone for their efforts isn't just a business model, it's common sense, fairness, and the keystone of economics.
Except if you're Israel.
You offer an uncited anecdote that artists who release their music for free find increased sales. Not to mention that it doesn't matter, because if an artist DOESN'T want to release their music for free, that doesn't still give you the right to pirate it (bands like Type O Negative, Tool, etc.).
You also cite just one study, when there have been others that found the opposite conclusion.
And then you trot out the extremely tired Slashdot cliche of the "obsolete business model." People aren't "trying music for free," they're pirating the whole album so that they never have to pay for it. You see, piracy is nothing more than freeloading so that you don't have to pay the human beings who wrote the music, slaved away in a studio, mixed it, and distributed it. I know it sounds like I'm trolling, but come on, that's why people pirate music. They just don't want to have to pay for something they know they can get for free. It's simple human nature.
Then you trot out the "artist contracts are bad" routine, ignoring that artists willingly sign their contracts and continue to do so to this day. Must not be so bad.
ROFL. Competition? What about the artists? Do you give a shit about them not ever getting compensated for their work? Should John Carmack never get paid for his years of work on Doom 3?
Articles like this (and posts like yours) serve an agenda in order to do one thing--paint the RIAA as an evil bad guy in order to justify piracy. That way, people don't feel guilty when they pirate an artist's music. "The RIAA is so evil, I'm sticking it to them!" Notice the artist isn't in that equation anywhere.
It's much easier to scapegoat some faceless group and proclaim "The RIAA made me do it!" rather than simply admit the truth that you are pirating another human being's music and ensuring System of a Down doesn't get paid today. Freeloaders always get bitter when the free ride is taken away, and many ideologies have been invented to stroke that guilty ego (your post is full of those cliches), but it will never change the simple truth. There's a big difference between free as in beer and free as in loading.
Apple--proudly dying for 30 years.
Quiet! He's "under NDA," remember? ;-) Just another Microsoft shill who didn't read up on OS X's graphics technologies, past and future.
Hell, the ATMs in my city running embedded versions of Windows bluescreen all the time. Even Microsoft's X-Box crashed at the 2005 CES. This isn't a company known for its stable platform.
100% wrong. OS X uses a technology called Quartz, which is a totally different world above Windows XP's GDI+. It's vector-based and resolution-independent, and has been since its introduction six years ago. The same instructions used to draw to a printer are used to draw to the screen.
Quartz is a vector-based layer, and Quartz 2D Extreme in Tiger/Leopard accelerates all GUI drawing operations via the GPU.
No, you're being ignorant. Quartz is not Windows XP/GDI+ with "only the addition of a Bitmap Composer." You seem to know little about the Quartz Compositor layer in OS X.
Wow, so all those anti-aliased Quartz vector operations I've been doing are available in Windows XP? I can print the contents of any view to a printer automatically like I can with Quartz?
Please put down the MSDN marketing brochure before posting.
Thanks! I've never seen an OS X kernel panic or "Spontaneous Restart" in five years, so I was wanting to go to that site and check it out.
I have never come across a WMV file I couldn't play on a Mac. As for DRMed WMV, I suspect that userbase is so small, it's irrelevant, especially if Apple offers movie downloads over iTunes.
OS X ships with Xcode. Your strawman argument is officially on fire.
And where is your data that a $100 laptop without source code would be "useless?" This is just Slashdot geek mindset run amock, thinking that ANYONE in a country poor enough to have to resort to a $100 laptop would:
1.) Give a shit that the source code isn't included.
2.) Want to waste hours trying to hack Linux into working properly when they could get OS X and not only have the Darwin source code and free compiler suite that kicks the butt out of anything on Linux, but would also have access to a larger application base that includes Office and Photoshop as well as the OSS alternatives.
You're just an Apple-hater with a handful of tired, decimated arguments.
Apple competes on price but doesn't go below a certain level of quality. I don't know why this point is difficult to grasp.
Translation: You have no counterargument, so you're going to accuse me of "trolling."
A complete load of crap. It wouldn't be "unsuitable" due to lack of source, and you don't explain why it would have. Someone buying a $100 laptop doesn't care if they don't get the friggin' source tree to Aqua. Besides, Darwin is open source.
The project simply went with Red Hat, because they made a large donation to the project. We could have had a $100 Mac, and they blew it due to unrealistic ideals that everyone in the world wants source code, when they don't.
And I'm the one trolling? Again, you have yet to prove out it would be "useless" without source. OS X is quite useful.
There was no "crack," you made this part up. I suspect the only jealousy here is coming from you.
Next.
This is just not true at all. VC-1 is not on the level of MPEG-4 in the upcoming HD market, and most content providers are using H.264 (since it beats VC-1's quality and space). And H.264 has been on the rise over the web, catching up to WMV and Real.
Lemme put it this way, I have never seen a movie trailer released in friggin' WMV format. It's all Quicktime H.264 now. MPEG-4 itself uses a container based on the Quicktime format.
HD content providers don't have to support it at all. In fact, most if not all are going to use H.264. You're thinking of the hardware manufacturers, who will support it as part of the spec, but given that H.264 beats VC-1 in quality benchmarks, I suspect Microsoft will be the only one who ever uses it.
I have never found this to be true, and I suspect most of the general public wouldn't either. You're forgetting that most people have iTunes installed, which comes with Quicktime. H.264 on the web has been on the rise, as a Slashdot article recently reported. WMV is not as necessary as you're making it out to be. I still come across
Well, for starters, to avoid the never-ending series of critical vulnerabilities and trojans in Windows. That Sims-playing machine won't be very effective as a zombie PC. Besides, I think machines like the iMac appeal to these "AIM smiley" folks with things like a built-in webcam and (in Leopard) iChat Theater.
This is just something that's never going to change with Apple. They have a standard of quality that makes their brand quite valuable, and that's due to not stooping too low and slapping the Apple logo on a piece of crap. If you get their cheapest Mac, you can still rest assured it will be an awesome machine in its own right. You get the cheapest Dell, and you're just in for a poor experience.
Besides, remember the $100 laptop project? Steve Jobs offered OS X for free to run on those things. The project rejected the offer because they wanted it to be open source, then went with Red Hat (who just so happened to have donated to the project). So because of them, the world missed out on having a $100 Mac. Ugh.
I just wanted to play along with the joke. :(
But the exact same placement of the search field in every window, with the same placement of the magnifying glass icon, using the same style of icon (but pointing to the right instead of the left)? Using a magnifying glass is an obvious metaphor for search, but come on. Microsoft could have been a little more original in its implementation, because that's taking an entire Apple design riff. Every Finder window in OS X has that same search field, as does Safari, Mail, iTunes, and more. WebKit even introduced a special search field tag to display it that reverts to a normal text field in non-WebKit browsers.
At least the search dog is gone.
Quote from the press release:
You shouldn't be that concerned, since XCode produces Universal Binaries not only for different architectures but for 32-bit and 64-bit. That said, if you're so concerned about upgrading to Core 2 Duo, wait until next year anyway, because Intel will be releasing a new chipset in Q1 2007 codenamed Santa Rosa that will replace the Napa used today on the Core Duo. It will have a faster FSB and other upgraded features that will take advantage of the Core 2's speed. So wait for those Macs. :) I say June of next year.
OS X Leopard will be fully 64-bit, and unlike Windows Vista, will seamlessly support 32-bit device drivers and applications, so going full 64-bit will be as simple as buying a 64-bit Mac.
That said, your implication is correct that 64-bit really isn't as big a deal as it was hyped to be by the likes of AMD (who teamed with CryTek to put out that awful 64-bit version of Far Cry with the higher-resolution textures to trick gamers into thinking having a 64-bit address space had something to do with that and not their GPU). XCode 2.4 supports four-architecture Universal Binaries anyway, so you'll have 32-bit/64-bit PPC/Intel applications. You shouldn't worry about missing out on anything
Besides, getting a Core 2 Duo system now would be silly when you can wait until first quarter of 2007 when Intel's Santa Rosa chipset comes out, replacing the Napa chipset used by the Core Duo. It'll have an 800Mhz bus speed upgrade that will really let the Core 2 take advantage of its power as well as ship with a new WLAN 802.11n chipset.
I have an Intel iMac and an Intel MacBook, but I'm quite happy and waiting for next year's Macs before even thinking of heading to eBay. There's always something better around the corner, especially with Apple.
And when you're done playing around, you can upgrade here.
No, it didn't. The magnifying glasses in those shots are of a different style and don't appear in a search field in the same way they do in OS X and now in Vista. Only XP is closest, but iTunes was already out by then.
Microsoft adopted it from iTunes as well. Come on, you and I both know they didn't get the idea for the upper-right search field from friggin' Windows Address Book in Windows 98.
The Waste Basket appeared in Viewpoint in 1985. You're linking to an early design document. An early design did have a waste basket, but it was removed.
Certainly, I can be more specific. OS X uses monochrome icons to represent things like WiFi and volume control. Windows has used a yellow speaker since Windows 95 to represent volume, for instance. OS X uses a sideways speaker with sound waves coming out the right side. In Vista, Microsoft switched to using monochrome system tray icons, and the speaker icon is an exact replica of the OS X volume control icon. In Vista, the battery/plugged-in icon looks and behaves exactly like OS X's. It goes on and on.
Apple was the first to market with a consumer GUI desktop with a style of desktop metaphor that everyone else has copied since. Interestingly, a lot of those Xerox Star guys were hired by Apple and ended up working on the Macintosh (something that's never mentioned when this debate comes up). Where did the phrase "cut-and-paste" come from? Apple. Where did "File Edit View Window Help" come from? Apple. And on and on. Microsoft took the Trash can from Apple, along with all the other Apple-isms in Windows, via the infamous technology licensing deal that was originally intended to allow Microsoft to develop a Mac-like interface in Office but was used instead to make Windows. It's not an exaggeration to say that Apple started that revolution, and Microsoft cloned it. You can see the MacOS-isms all over Windows, even to this day. It's so obvious to the objective viewer.
I've been following Thurrott for years, back when I was a Windows user. He likes to trot out the "I'm level-headed, I bash Microsoft myself" card, but then he'll sideswipe you with something crazy like some Mac userbase insult or a claim that XP SP2 was a bigger update than an entire major release of OS X (his reaction to the Arstechnica article on OS X Tiger was to claim that Ars writers are wordy and self-important, as if that's relevant to the facts in the piece).
Best-informed? The guy once argued with me that Spotlight was inferior search technology because it used plugins to read third-party document formats. I kindly pointed out that Microsoft's search tech uses the same damn thing, called IFilters, because search tech isn't psychic and has to know how to read things. He never replied. It was at that moment that I realized he's not a developer and doesn't understand things from that perspective. He's more of a Dvorak. You mention CoreData or CoreAnimation, and it's in one ear and out the other.
I could spend the effort to do that, or I could let the computer do the work for me (since that's what they're designed to do) and just keep everything, using search technologies like Spotlight to get what I need.
This topic reminds me of those last few holdovers out there who absolutely insist on manually organizing their entire MP3 collections in a massive hierarchy of folders. I tell them that iTunes will automatically organize the files by folder in a way you specify, but that's just a hook to get them using the app, since iTunes actually makes folders obsolete anyway (which I hope they realize after using it). I shudder at the thought of clicking through folder after folder when all I have to do in iTunes is type the first few letters of the band I want in the search field.