Hardware patent example: A standard plastic zipper on a coat, except it's bigger than usual, so you can zip it while wearing gloves.
Software patent example: An algorithm for accurately locating and identifying the faces of individuals in photographs, in mixed-light conditions, with compensation for noise and motion-blur.
The descriptions in my examples are NOT fabricated. The basis for your argument is garbage.
Yeah, he's trolling. I am one of those iPad-slinging San Franciscans and I can tell you up front that the reason I and my ilk do not often haul the thing out in public is because it is a huge target for thievery, just like the iPod used to be.
Since I'm here I'll tell you another interesting thing: When I do haul it out, it's usually not to do solitary work like a student in a coffee shop, but to do something social, like look up something online with friends at a restaurant. Or share a map, or photos. You would _never_ pass a laptop around a table. But an iPad moves easily and can be laid flat so that everyone at the table can see the same thing.
Oh, you're referring to iTunes on the Mac/PC, Mr. Coward? I figured you were referring to the iTunes app on the phone itself. It's actually easy to get an iPhone without the Mac/PC iTunes. You can do your initial sync with a computer at the apple store, with a salesman standing right there guiding you through it. Same deal with the iPad. Past that, you do not need to use iTunes EVER AGAIN.
If you want to get pathological about it, then configure your email manually, and mail yourself your contacts in.vcf and fill your address book that way. Then get Pandora from the app store and listen to music that way. Then get netflix or hulu for your movie needs.
And I hate to break it to you, pal, but there is no bloatware being installed by the initial sync to iTunes. Those apps are embedded in the firmware. Your premise is invalid.
Personally, I don't consider iTunes "bloatware" because to me, it serves only two purposes: 1. It's a media repository, and 2. It's a method for syncing that media to my phone.
I would consider it bloatware if it also contained, for example, a paint program, a word processor, a punch-the-monkey game, or a social networking "chat service". Hell, you want bloatware? Go to facebook. It's got all of those hogtied together.
I just HATE THAT ICON SO MUCH, sitting there, NOT RUNNING, stuck in the last slot of the last page of my pristine app collection, taking up VALUABLE SPACE in the non-user-accessible partition of my storage media, CURSE YOU Apple this is a DEAL BREAKER!!!
You sure know how to ring that alarm bell, but let's take a closer look at your claim:
If I get 24 hours, I get where you woke up this morning and where you'll go to bed tonight. I almost certainly know where you live, and then I know where you were all day.
Who is this "you" to whom you refer? If you're after ME, the first thing you need is my home address. If you get that, all bets are already off. If you want to find out where I go all day you can simply go to my house and follow me as I exit the front door, old-school style.
If you're a federal agent, again all bets are off... you can hook into the cell network directly and triangulate me with special decoding hardware. This has been so for a decade.
Is it the history you're worried about? Let's assume you get access to all the data ever collected by Apple, and you already know my home address (which, again, if you have, all bets are already off). After a few terabytes of number-crunching, you could assemble a web of probable histories where me and my housemates have gone, and potentially narrow that down further based on destination patterns.
You know what you're gonna get? The places where I logged info into my credit card history. The places where I logged calls into my phone history. The places where I drove my lo-jacked car. If you're looking for damning information, you're not going to find anything you couldn't find through other means. I refer you to Larry Ellison's observation on privacy.
You have enough clout to wrestle proprietary data from Apple's internal stores? Then hiring a private investigator to follow me should be trivial for you. If I wanted to be hard to find, the first thing I'd do would be to not live at my mailing address, and the second thing I would do would be to NOT get a frickin' smartphone.
Furthermore, if I was smart enough to ride my bicycle downtown and pay cash when I enter a strip joint to avoid scandal, I'd be smart enough to TURN OFF the switch in my phone preferences for location services, which according to the document given to congress, which you apparently forgot to read all the way, ENTIRELY DISABLES the upload of identifying information to Apple as well as it's third party developers. The device doesn't even send the MACs of nearby routers in that mode. Remind me again why you're ringing your alarm bell and stocking cans in your fallout shelter.
Collecting the data isn't a service; it doesn't say anywhere that the data is not collected by them if location services is disabled - plus you've explicitly allowed them to do so in the terms.
Actually, according to the PDF, data is collected by them only if location services is enabled. It says so right on page 7, and again on page 8. You say you read the document, but apparently you didn't.
Your 20khz math would be fine if we all had just one ear, but humans hear in stereo. Reproduction of stereo sound for humans is not a simple matter of "max audible frequency = upper limit for sampling rate". Humans are able to distinguish much more subtle differences in timing among sounds - and groups of sounds - heard by both ears.
Listen to a properly produced stereo track at 96Khz versus one at 44khz, and if you pay attention to the stereo image, your ability to track individual sounds in 3D space from a mix, and you will quickly perceive an obvious difference. This is what vinyl enthusiasts call "presence" - shortly before they are mocked and ridiculed by kids who have only listened to vinyl cut from bandwidth-starved digital sources in the modern post-production workflow.
This phenomenon is the main reason why you can distinguish someone knocking on a door quite clearly from the loud 44khz music in your open-ear headphones. Those studio guys aren't idiots. Check out some of the recent publications on the evolutionary biology of hearing.
Last weekend at a barbecue, my neighbor, a cop, told me he absolutely hated having to deal with dicks who just wouldn't listen or learn, who would give him attitude and try and chest-pound while he's just trying to politely gather information at the request of his boss and the public.
The only legitimate way to get the the SDK for a Nintendo console is to get it straight from Nintendo - requiring you to have a lot of money and preferably a signed contract with a large game publisher. This is the case with all of the major game consoles, with the possible exception of the Xbox 360 and the XNA framework. Tell me how that isn't tighter control.
Controlling the SDK that way ensures that the hardware manufacturers will get their cut of the profits for any game that's released for their console. Meanwhile, you want to whine that Apple is restricting their toolchain while they're giving the SDK away FOR FREE, to private citizens, with only a couple hundred bucks and an "approval process" between them and millions of customers? I find your lack of perspective disturbing.
I enjoy that music analogy. I'd put it even more starkly:
It's like complaining that "food sucks today" because "all the good food was already made decades ago". It doesn't even make sense.
And now here's Charlie saying PCs are dead because of "the cloud". What this tells me is that Charlie is like most pundits who write about the subject: He doesn't understand how the hell "the cloud" works, or even what it's made of. Here's a clue, Charlie: "The cloud" is made of server boxes, switches,... and endless ranks PCs.
How can it be a "new level" if it's not in the same domain?
Netscape's browser was a multi-platform app that the company intended to eventually form the core of an operating system that would bypass Microsoft entirely and run directly on PC hardware. Microsoft had a monopoly position in the OS market, but was not a PC manufacturer, and had no web browser. So, Microsoft monkeyed with their OS in order to strangle Netscape to the point where they could neither grow their marketshare, nor establish themselves on PC hardware. In summary, Microsoft abused their monopoly in one market (OS for commodity PCs) to achieve dominance in another market (Browser), and to maintain their control over a third market (PC hardware).
By contrast, Apple is making a proprietary device, running proprietary software, for a market that they are not even close to a monopoly in. There is no "commodity iphone hardware" market for them to abuse. And they are not implementing a replacement for Flash, because they are not "strangling" Adobe's presence in the smartphone market, because Adobe doesn't EVEN HAVE a damn presence in the smartphone market.
If that's what you call "taking it to a new level", you must mean, several orders of magnitude less evil.
Either your paraphrasing skills are poor, or the "famous" Jesse Schell is blowing smoke out his ass, or both.
Whether technologies diverge is irrelevant to the question of whether devices and use-cases diverge. The latter question is too large in scope to answer definitively. You and Jesse are indulging in a cherry-picking exercise to make a fatuous point. In your view we must also make a "laptop exception", because modern laptops are a convergence of a textbook, a microphone, a magazine, a typewriter, and a scrabble board. And a "car exception" because they're a convergence of the oxcart, the record player, the horse, the bicycle, and the cigarette lighter. In countless lives, laptops and automobiles have supplanted those technologies for their use-cases, often entirely.
I fully expect the same to occur for the tablet. The average joe considers the computer keyboard to be a nuisance. It's got 109 damn buttons on it. You use it grudgingly, when you need to string letters together. For ALL OTHER PURPOSES it is a GODDAMN HACK.
The keyboard has been around for almost two hundred years. The broader tech and software world has not had a chance to play with portable, responsive, accurate, low-power, full-color touch hardware for even five years so far. Drop another ten years into this tech on larger screens - of which the iPad is the opening round - and you will find yourself surrounded by people who consider the physical keyboard to be an exasperating relic, like the rotary-dial telephone.
In the smaller scope, wait about six months and ask yourself again if "everyone hates the iPad". I find it untrue now and I'm sure you'll find it even more untrue then.
Every time I see that word in a tech context, I immediately think of those full-page magazine ads for the Transwarp Apple II accelerator cards, with the little halftone picture of Steve Wozniak grinning in the corner, and the quote beneath the picture, reading: "I endorse Applied Engineering products wholeheartedly!" Even after 25 years that is wedged in my brain.:/
OS X client version, from 10.0 all the way up to 10.6, does not phone home for ANYTHING, except to query "time.apple.com" to synchronize your clock (and you can change that) and once when you first log in to check for software updates (and you can shut it permanently off after that). No activation. No mandatory updates. No internet connection needed.
If your system is hosed for anything short of a dead hard drive, you can reinstall and your home folder will be imported, along with your apps, and the rest of the system will be paved over and working again. Or if you hooked up a Time Machine volume, you can restore EVERYTHING back the way it was up to a month ago.
Your phone can do "multitasking" -- explain to me what the advantage to this is? I mean, the advantage over the iPhone, that is - since the iPhone is obviously multitasking as it will play music, check your email, run a phone conversation, and allow you to launch any 3rd-party app, all at the same time. I suppose my question is, what real-world advantages have you seen with this "multitasking"?
That is not Window's fault that you can't figure out how to properly use a computer. It's like a guy at work the other day trying to blame Outlook / Exchange because he couldn't figure out how to make an archive properly.
Yes. That's exactly what it's like. Blaming the computer because the computer is hard to use. If you think computers need to be hard to use, then it is YOU with the elitism problem, not Mac users.
The few times my OSX machine crash on me, it self recovers.
Really? When I've had OS X crash on me, it's always been a "the system is so screwed up that you have to hold the power button to turn it off" situation.
Anecdotal evidence cannot invalidate other anecdotal evidence. Quit wasting time.
OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, where as Windows and Linux KEEP PROMPTING ME WITH USELESS STUFF!
With Windows at least, you can turn that off. You claim to be a neuroscientist but you can't take 5 seconds to find out how to turn off UAC?
Again, the answer is Yes. And I claim to be an audio engineer, and I can't be bothered to take thirty damned minutes to figure out how to use the proprietary network driver's stilted crap UI to turn on 802.11, enter a WPA key, set my service order, and turn on DHCP. AFTER I've used the built in Windows Network UI to connect to a wireless network and had it mysteriously fail, twice, because the network driver stubbed out Windows' own API for the hardware when it was installed at the OEM.
You know what it takes to join a new wireless network in OS X? ONE SINGLE DAMNED CLICK, on a menu whose icon LOOKS LIKE AN ANTENNA, then a password if necessary. THAT'S IT.
Stuff like this makes a REAL difference. Take your haughty incredulity and shove it up your ass.
If it takes you more than an afternoon to find out what the best system is, you're doing something horribly wrong, and I think you're beyond help if you spend a whole month looking for the best system.
O RLY? As an avid bicyclist, I can tell you, that if it takes you LESS than an afternoon to purchase a new bicycle, then YOU are doing something horribly wrong; because if the decision is that easy for you, you obviously don't know enough about how to properly fit a bicycle.
Be careful with your analogies.
Just a note for everyone else, I use all OS's and they all have ups and downs. I have nothing against OS X, but I find this particular persons reasons for using Mac's to be pretty bogus.
What constitutes "use" to you? Did you install 10.5 on a hackintosh for an afternoon and diddle around in TextEdit, before declaring yourself an expert on all things OS X?
Did you know that in bash, the default shell for OS X, you can hit "ctrl-A" to move to the beginning of a long command line? Did you know that EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE OS X UI, even including text boxes in Safari, you can hit "ctrl-A" for the exact same behavior?
No, you didn't.
As I said before, stuff like this makes a real difference.
Part of the problem is that when other companies have something big to announce, they shout it from the rooftops months in advance. (see: Microsoft) News about Apple, by contrast, has to be gathered from elsewhere, sometimes by uncooperative means, like mining access logs and scrutinizing parts orders.
Add to this the usual collection of attention-mongers and black-hats trying to get a good laugh, and the end result is what the phrase "media circus" was invented to describe.
2) In interviews, if you don't know something, never try to bluff. Say you don't know it, and briefly describe how you'd go about finding it out.
You are absolutely 100% right. Candidates who come in here are not used to being interviewed by actual engineers, let alone a whole gauntlet of them, and the engineers have extremely high quality bullshit detectors. Any attempt to conceal technical weakness is taken as direct evidence of how they will behave when cooperating on a team:
Instead of admitting that the load they have been given is too heavy up front, and asking for help, or a different load, they will just jog along in silence until, ten miles down the road, when their work is vital, someone will confront them and discover that they have quietly pitched their backpack into a ditch nine miles ago. And now everyone's screwed.
Google is a very fragmented company, with hundreds of departments working on independent projects that often NEVER come in direct contact with one another. They have also recently (last three years) overhired and are suffering from serious indigestion for it.
You say "this is a very good place to work" like you've worked for all those departments. I can say with complete confidence, without even knowing you, that you have not worked for more than a few, and are probably not even AWARE of many of them.
Those departments all promise the google "work environment" the same way that a collection of frat houses all promise the same "college experience". You can end up in the Tri-Delts or you can end up in the Mus, and it matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardware patent example: A standard plastic zipper on a coat, except it's bigger than usual, so you can zip it while wearing gloves.
Software patent example: An algorithm for accurately locating and identifying the faces of individuals in photographs, in mixed-light conditions, with compensation for noise and motion-blur.
The descriptions in my examples are NOT fabricated.
The basis for your argument is garbage.
Yeah, he's trolling. I am one of those iPad-slinging San Franciscans and I can tell you up front that the reason I and my ilk do not often haul the thing out in public is because it is a huge target for thievery, just like the iPod used to be.
Since I'm here I'll tell you another interesting thing: When I do haul it out, it's usually not to do solitary work like a student in a coffee shop, but to do something social, like look up something online with friends at a restaurant. Or share a map, or photos. You would _never_ pass a laptop around a table. But an iPad moves easily and can be laid flat so that everyone at the table can see the same thing.
Oh, you're referring to iTunes on the Mac/PC, Mr. Coward? I figured you were referring to the iTunes app on the phone itself. It's actually easy to get an iPhone without the Mac/PC iTunes. You can do your initial sync with a computer at the apple store, with a salesman standing right there guiding you through it. Same deal with the iPad. Past that, you do not need to use iTunes EVER AGAIN.
If you want to get pathological about it, then configure your email manually, and mail yourself your contacts in .vcf and fill your address book that way. Then get Pandora from the app store and listen to music that way. Then get netflix or hulu for your movie needs.
And I hate to break it to you, pal, but there is no bloatware being installed by the initial sync to iTunes. Those apps are embedded in the firmware. Your premise is invalid.
Personally, I don't consider iTunes "bloatware" because to me, it serves only two purposes:
1. It's a media repository, and
2. It's a method for syncing that media to my phone.
I would consider it bloatware if it also contained, for example, a paint program, a word processor, a punch-the-monkey game, or a social networking "chat service". Hell, you want bloatware? Go to facebook. It's got all of those hogtied together.
Also, your "fun fact" has no relevance.
I just HATE THAT ICON SO MUCH, sitting there, NOT RUNNING, stuck in the last slot of the last page of my pristine app collection, taking up VALUABLE SPACE in the non-user-accessible partition of my storage media, CURSE YOU Apple this is a DEAL BREAKER!!!
[gunshots, sirens]
"Because with [Linux platform], you can do whatever you want!"
The more appropriate phrase to describe this phenomenon is,
"Because with [Linux platform], you're allowed to do whatever you can!"
Ego, YMMV.
You sure know how to ring that alarm bell, but let's take a closer look at your claim:
If I get 24 hours, I get where you woke up this morning and where you'll go to bed tonight. I almost certainly know where you live, and then I know where you were all day.
Who is this "you" to whom you refer? If you're after ME, the first thing you need is my home address. If you get that, all bets are already off. If you want to find out where I go all day you can simply go to my house and follow me as I exit the front door, old-school style.
If you're a federal agent, again all bets are off ... you can hook into the cell network directly and triangulate me with special decoding hardware. This has been so for a decade.
Is it the history you're worried about? Let's assume you get access to all the data ever collected by Apple, and you already know my home address (which, again, if you have, all bets are already off). After a few terabytes of number-crunching, you could assemble a web of probable histories where me and my housemates have gone, and potentially narrow that down further based on destination patterns.
You know what you're gonna get? The places where I logged info into my credit card history. The places where I logged calls into my phone history. The places where I drove my lo-jacked car. If you're looking for damning information, you're not going to find anything you couldn't find through other means. I refer you to Larry Ellison's observation on privacy.
You have enough clout to wrestle proprietary data from Apple's internal stores? Then hiring a private investigator to follow me should be trivial for you. If I wanted to be hard to find, the first thing I'd do would be to not live at my mailing address, and the second thing I would do would be to NOT get a frickin' smartphone.
Furthermore, if I was smart enough to ride my bicycle downtown and pay cash when I enter a strip joint to avoid scandal, I'd be smart enough to TURN OFF the switch in my phone preferences for location services, which according to the document given to congress, which you apparently forgot to read all the way, ENTIRELY DISABLES the upload of identifying information to Apple as well as it's third party developers. The device doesn't even send the MACs of nearby routers in that mode. Remind me again why you're ringing your alarm bell and stocking cans in your fallout shelter.
Collecting the data isn't a service; it doesn't say anywhere that the data is not collected by them if location services is disabled - plus you've explicitly allowed them to do so in the terms.
Actually, according to the PDF, data is collected by them only if location services is enabled. It says so right on page 7, and again on page 8. You say you read the document, but apparently you didn't.
Your 20khz math would be fine if we all had just one ear, but humans hear in stereo. Reproduction of stereo sound for humans is not a simple matter of "max audible frequency = upper limit for sampling rate". Humans are able to distinguish much more subtle differences in timing among sounds - and groups of sounds - heard by both ears.
Listen to a properly produced stereo track at 96Khz versus one at 44khz, and if you pay attention to the stereo image, your ability to track individual sounds in 3D space from a mix, and you will quickly perceive an obvious difference. This is what vinyl enthusiasts call "presence" - shortly before they are mocked and ridiculed by kids who have only listened to vinyl cut from bandwidth-starved digital sources in the modern post-production workflow.
This phenomenon is the main reason why you can distinguish someone knocking on a door quite clearly from the loud 44khz music in your open-ear headphones. Those studio guys aren't idiots. Check out some of the recent publications on the evolutionary biology of hearing.
Last weekend at a barbecue, my neighbor, a cop, told me he absolutely hated having to deal with dicks who just wouldn't listen or learn, who would give him attitude and try and chest-pound while he's just trying to politely gather information at the request of his boss and the public.
So, allow me to pass this on, from him: Fuck you.
The only legitimate way to get the the SDK for a Nintendo console is to get it straight from Nintendo - requiring you to have a lot of money and preferably a signed contract with a large game publisher. This is the case with all of the major game consoles, with the possible exception of the Xbox 360 and the XNA framework. Tell me how that isn't tighter control.
Controlling the SDK that way ensures that the hardware manufacturers will get their cut of the profits for any game that's released for their console. Meanwhile, you want to whine that Apple is restricting their toolchain while they're giving the SDK away FOR FREE, to private citizens, with only a couple hundred bucks and an "approval process" between them and millions of customers? I find your lack of perspective disturbing.
I enjoy that music analogy. I'd put it even more starkly:
It's like complaining that "food sucks today" because "all the good food was already made decades ago". It doesn't even make sense.
And now here's Charlie saying PCs are dead because of "the cloud". What this tells me is that Charlie is like most pundits who write about the subject: He doesn't understand how the hell "the cloud" works, or even what it's made of. Here's a clue, Charlie: "The cloud" is made of server boxes, switches, ... and endless ranks PCs.
No. The key words in this case are "just about".
...Except for that whole multi-billion-dollar anti-trust-lawsuit crush-Netscape-Navigator thing...
How can it be a "new level" if it's not in the same domain?
Netscape's browser was a multi-platform app that the company intended to eventually form the core of an operating system that would bypass Microsoft entirely and run directly on PC hardware.
Microsoft had a monopoly position in the OS market, but was not a PC manufacturer, and had no web browser.
So, Microsoft monkeyed with their OS in order to strangle Netscape to the point where they could neither grow their marketshare, nor establish themselves on PC hardware.
In summary, Microsoft abused their monopoly in one market (OS for commodity PCs) to achieve dominance in another market (Browser), and to maintain their control over a third market (PC hardware).
By contrast, Apple is making a proprietary device, running proprietary software, for a market that they are not even close to a monopoly in. There is no "commodity iphone hardware" market for them to abuse. And they are not implementing a replacement for Flash, because they are not "strangling" Adobe's presence in the smartphone market, because Adobe doesn't EVEN HAVE a damn presence in the smartphone market.
If that's what you call "taking it to a new level", you must mean, several orders of magnitude less evil.
Either your paraphrasing skills are poor, or the "famous" Jesse Schell is blowing smoke out his ass, or both.
Whether technologies diverge is irrelevant to the question of whether devices and use-cases diverge. The latter question is too large in scope to answer definitively. You and Jesse are indulging in a cherry-picking exercise to make a fatuous point. In your view we must also make a "laptop exception", because modern laptops are a convergence of a textbook, a microphone, a magazine, a typewriter, and a scrabble board. And a "car exception" because they're a convergence of the oxcart, the record player, the horse, the bicycle, and the cigarette lighter. In countless lives, laptops and automobiles have supplanted those technologies for their use-cases, often entirely.
I fully expect the same to occur for the tablet. The average joe considers the computer keyboard to be a nuisance. It's got 109 damn buttons on it. You use it grudgingly, when you need to string letters together. For ALL OTHER PURPOSES it is a GODDAMN HACK.
The keyboard has been around for almost two hundred years. The broader tech and software world has not had a chance to play with portable, responsive, accurate, low-power, full-color touch hardware for even five years so far. Drop another ten years into this tech on larger screens - of which the iPad is the opening round - and you will find yourself surrounded by people who consider the physical keyboard to be an exasperating relic, like the rotary-dial telephone.
In the smaller scope, wait about six months and ask yourself again if "everyone hates the iPad". I find it untrue now and I'm sure you'll find it even more untrue then.
That's great. Good thing the iPhone has a halfway intelligent notification system, isn't it?
Every time I see that word in a tech context, I immediately think of those full-page magazine ads for the Transwarp Apple II accelerator cards, with the little halftone picture of Steve Wozniak grinning in the corner, and the quote beneath the picture, reading: "I endorse Applied Engineering products wholeheartedly!" :/
Even after 25 years that is wedged in my brain.
No, seriously.
OS X client version, from 10.0 all the way up to 10.6, does not phone home for ANYTHING, except to query "time.apple.com" to synchronize your clock (and you can change that) and once when you first log in to check for software updates (and you can shut it permanently off after that). No activation. No mandatory updates. No internet connection needed.
If your system is hosed for anything short of a dead hard drive, you can reinstall and your home folder will be imported, along with your apps, and the rest of the system will be paved over and working again. Or if you hooked up a Time Machine volume, you can restore EVERYTHING back the way it was up to a month ago.
I'm sure you know - your time is valuable. :D
"trying to break into the Safari monopoly"
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Question 1:
Your phone can do "multitasking" -- explain to me what the advantage to this is? I mean, the advantage over the iPhone, that is - since the iPhone is obviously multitasking as it will play music, check your email, run a phone conversation, and allow you to launch any 3rd-party app, all at the same time. I suppose my question is, what real-world advantages have you seen with this "multitasking"?
Question 2:
Android's total apps will surpass Apple's "pretty soon"? I'm reading 100 thousand versus twenty thousand. What the hell do you mean by "pretty soon"?
Fascinating. How do you type that on a laptop?
That is not Window's fault that you can't figure out how to properly use a computer. It's like a guy at work the other day trying to blame Outlook / Exchange because he couldn't figure out how to make an archive properly.
Yes. That's exactly what it's like. Blaming the computer because the computer is hard to use. If you think computers need to be hard to use, then it is YOU with the elitism problem, not Mac users.
The few times my OSX machine crash on me, it self recovers.
Really? When I've had OS X crash on me, it's always been a "the system is so screwed up that you have to hold the power button to turn it off" situation.
Anecdotal evidence cannot invalidate other anecdotal evidence. Quit wasting time.
OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, where as Windows and Linux KEEP PROMPTING ME WITH USELESS STUFF!
With Windows at least, you can turn that off. You claim to be a neuroscientist but you can't take 5 seconds to find out how to turn off UAC?
Again, the answer is Yes. And I claim to be an audio engineer, and I can't be bothered to take thirty damned minutes to figure out how to use the proprietary network driver's stilted crap UI to turn on 802.11, enter a WPA key, set my service order, and turn on DHCP. AFTER I've used the built in Windows Network UI to connect to a wireless network and had it mysteriously fail, twice, because the network driver stubbed out Windows' own API for the hardware when it was installed at the OEM.
You know what it takes to join a new wireless network in OS X? ONE SINGLE DAMNED CLICK, on a menu whose icon LOOKS LIKE AN ANTENNA, then a password if necessary. THAT'S IT.
Stuff like this makes a REAL difference. Take your haughty incredulity and shove it up your ass.
If it takes you more than an afternoon to find out what the best system is, you're doing something horribly wrong, and I think you're beyond help if you spend a whole month looking for the best system.
O RLY? As an avid bicyclist, I can tell you, that if it takes you LESS than an afternoon to purchase a new bicycle, then YOU are doing something horribly wrong; because if the decision is that easy for you, you obviously don't know enough about how to properly fit a bicycle.
Be careful with your analogies.
Just a note for everyone else, I use all OS's and they all have ups and downs. I have nothing against OS X, but I find this particular persons reasons for using Mac's to be pretty bogus.
What constitutes "use" to you? Did you install 10.5 on a hackintosh for an afternoon and diddle around in TextEdit, before declaring yourself an expert on all things OS X?
Did you know that in bash, the default shell for OS X, you can hit "ctrl-A" to move to the beginning of a long command line?
Did you know that EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE OS X UI, even including text boxes in Safari, you can hit "ctrl-A" for the exact same behavior?
No, you didn't.
As I said before, stuff like this makes a real difference.
Part of the problem is that when other companies have something big to announce, they shout it from the rooftops months in advance. (see: Microsoft) News about Apple, by contrast, has to be gathered from elsewhere, sometimes by uncooperative means, like mining access logs and scrutinizing parts orders.
Add to this the usual collection of attention-mongers and black-hats trying to get a good laugh, and the end result is what the phrase "media circus" was invented to describe.
2) In interviews, if you don't know something, never try to bluff. Say you don't know it, and briefly describe how you'd go about finding it out.
You are absolutely 100% right. Candidates who come in here are not used to being interviewed by actual engineers, let alone a whole gauntlet of them, and the engineers have extremely high quality bullshit detectors. Any attempt to conceal technical weakness is taken as direct evidence of how they will behave when cooperating on a team:
Instead of admitting that the load they have been given is too heavy up front, and asking for help, or a different load, they will just jog along in silence until, ten miles down the road, when their work is vital, someone will confront them and discover that they have quietly pitched their backpack into a ditch nine miles ago. And now everyone's screwed.
Engineers hate that. HATE IT.
Google is a very fragmented company, with hundreds of departments working on independent projects that often NEVER come in direct contact with one another. They have also recently (last three years) overhired and are suffering from serious indigestion for it.
You say "this is a very good place to work" like you've worked for all those departments. I can say with complete confidence, without even knowing you, that you have not worked for more than a few, and are probably not even AWARE of many of them.
Those departments all promise the google "work environment" the same way that a collection of frat houses all promise the same "college experience". You can end up in the Tri-Delts or you can end up in the Mus, and it matters.