The world is full of eccentric people. They are among the homeless, they have stalls at flea markets, they work at the Ford Plant and wait on your table.
You're just citing 'successful' eccentrics, as if there's an objective measure of success. There isn't, in a free society. If someone's idea of a lifestyle is dressing up in midieval garb every weekend, he's a happy SCA member who waits tables to pay the rent. He's as successful as any investment banker, corporate consultant, or college professor.
The university system is a 'haven' of people who decided to never leave school. Some of them are eccentric, but that doesn't explain a lot of them.
The term 'liberal' as used in the phrase 'liberal arts' is far from the term 'liberal' as it's meant in today's usage.
And, a substancial number of rich CEOs tend to be liberal Democrats. I.e. Bill Gates is more of a Democrat than a Republican, though I think he's probably more inclined just to keep his hands out of the messy bullshit that modern politics represents in the U.S.
Apples hardware is STILL overpriced, within it's market segments. Their 'consumer' hardware is priced significantly higher than other 'comsumer' hardware. You never see an Apple machine priced competetively with the cheap boxes at WalMart. They'd never be able to even penetrate the WalMart-level market and maintain their margins.
Similarly, their 'professional' line has to be compared to the more expensive 'professional' lines to be competetive.
They can't compete in the white-box market, and they definitely can't compete in the home-builder geek market. Their only means of competing there is putting on airs of snobbery, etc.
This hasn't changed. Same as it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago, though, they had teams of lawyers actively driving anybody out of their market, i.e. the Apple II cloners. Hell, a few years later they tried to own the whole GUI concept, until they got smacked back to reality in the courtroom.
It's probably not possible for Apple to ever be price competetive. They've just got too expensive a business model. It's too dependent on effete designers and the most expensive marketing agency they can buy.
Similarly, one could say that nothing but Linux can handle the Ext2fs/Ext3fs reliably. So maybe we should all hamstring Linux by running it on FAT partitions using one of the contrived UMSDOS schemes or a loopback filesystem kludge.
Because if you're dual booting W2K or XP and clinging frantically to your FAT partitions so Linux can read them, you're crippling Windows. Makes it easier to slag Microsoft when you do so and eveything is more flakey, though...
It really doesn't matter what 'Joe on the street' thinks Motorola does.
Joe's car has eight or twelve Motorola 6805 processors in it, and almost every appliance in his house has a motorola processor or two. It matters a lot more what the hardware designers think of Motorola, and Motorola is STRONG in that market.
Indeed. Motorola makes a fine line of embedded controllers and other processors and chips. I've worried for some time that trying to compete in the hot-dog contest with the likes of Intel and AMD was seriously damaging the company.
Now maybe they can get back to the 68HC11, '12, '05, '08 parts where they've got a damned fine product line. Let someone else be the megaherz weenies.
Peter Norton has been reduced to a bitmap, owned by Symantec.
They have the Peter Norton bitmaps that they throw on the side of shrinkwrapped boxes at Office Depot and Staples. And of course they have a few big life-sized Peter Norton cardboard standup bitmaps for instances where, say, shareholders or journalists want to see that Peter Norton actually does exist and works for Symantec.
Seriously, Norton Utilities is nothing but a valuable 'brand' at this point in history.
Geez. Come on. DOS is very low level. It's just a little program loader that you can kick out of the way casually and let your own code run the whole show. It doesn't even throw the protected mode switch and lock you out.
One of the things I like best about my wife's computer is that since all she uses it for is the net and gaming, the worst that would happen if it was completely wiped is she'd loose her saved Diablo II games. Other than that it's all disposable, a severe crash might even root out malware I wasn't aware of.
In the era I am talking about, Apple didn't HAVE a 'Pro' line to differentiate. I am talking about back when Apple was hyping, say, a Mac IIci and comparing it to a Compaq Deskpro 386. Both were overpriced salesman-boat-payment boondoogles.
One of the only reasons I still keep a Linux system lying around is to use 'dd' to image other drives. For instance, awhile back I bought an old HP-UX box that had a SCSI hard drive. It had the whole system in place, and it worked fine. But since I didn't have installation media, I pulled the drive and dropped it into a Slackware box to image the whole hard drive as a volume. It doesn't matter wether I have filesystem access to the data, 'dd' just copies it verbatim. I use that particular trick regularly. Linux has to my mind the best 'raw' drive access, so it's useful for things like that. You really don't even need to pull the drive if you can stick another drive along side it in the machine, as you can use a Slackware boot floppy locally on the machine if you're talking about an x86 system. With the easy NFS connectivity of a Slackware boot disk set, you can even not hang another drive in the machine. 1. Boot off your Slack CD/floppies. 2. Mount the NFS share you want to save the image to. 3. Use dd to image over the drives you wanted to backup.
Why would the tool have to have system-level access to the hard drive to recover the data? DOS is a perfect base for this sort of tool, because DOS is just a little whispy program loader that can be gotten out of the way quite easily. The disk being recovered definitely does NOT have to have a DOS partition on it. It's just a big mass of raw data to the recovery program. The drive is dropped into a seperate system where it can be at any arbitrary mount point they want.
Apple has always, consistenly, lined their product up against the most expensive first-line PC Clones. It's the only way they can compare price-wise.
Back in the day, they always compared their prices to those of the pricey Compaq boxes that nobody, anywhere, bought outside the corporate 'office machine' market. Everybody I knew at the time was running high quality (because everybody got to consider and rate each individual component that went into them) white box clones. Most people I know still are. 'Compaq' prices have dropped. So have Apple prices, for that matter. Just like all other prices in computer hardware. End result: Apple boxes are still just as over priced.
I'm typing this on a Power Mac G3 that I got for pennies at auction recently that was surplused from the 'education' market because somebody like you decided it wasn't good enough. I'll say 'thanks' but I'll murmur under my breath about wasted tax dollars scrapping out this new of a machine...
Just an observation: people who say a machine is a 'waste' to use for word processing and productivity apps probably shouldn't cite a video game as a less wasteful use of the machine.
Slashdot Mirror
It's euphemistically called 'human engineering' and it's really how most 'hackers' get around. You thought they were technical wizards??
Yes. Just like if you break a tennis racquet, the tennis racquet manufacturer smiles and sends you another for free.
The world is full of eccentric people. They are among the homeless, they have stalls at flea markets, they work at the Ford Plant and wait on your table.
You're just citing 'successful' eccentrics, as if there's an objective measure of success. There isn't, in a free society. If someone's idea of a lifestyle is dressing up in midieval garb every weekend, he's a happy SCA member who waits tables to pay the rent. He's as successful as any investment banker, corporate consultant, or college professor.
The university system is a 'haven' of people who decided to never leave school. Some of them are eccentric, but that doesn't explain a lot of them.
What makes them more 'fit' to teach?
The term 'liberal' as used in the phrase 'liberal arts' is far from the term 'liberal' as it's meant in today's usage.
And, a substancial number of rich CEOs tend to be liberal Democrats. I.e. Bill Gates is more of a Democrat than a Republican, though I think he's probably more inclined just to keep his hands out of the messy bullshit that modern politics represents in the U.S.
they shifted the look of the box itself from the ugly beige box to the sleek designer models
Some would argue that they 'stole' that idea from SGI. Look at some of the case designs of machines that run Irix from ten years ago.
Not that 'shape and color of case' are really innovative. 'Style' is a matter, significantly, of planned obsolescence in other industries.
Well, part of the real study is setting up the project, posting it to Slashdot, then reading how people respond.
Apples hardware is STILL overpriced, within it's market segments. Their 'consumer' hardware is priced significantly higher than other 'comsumer' hardware. You never see an Apple machine priced competetively with the cheap boxes at WalMart. They'd never be able to even penetrate the WalMart-level market and maintain their margins.
Similarly, their 'professional' line has to be compared to the more expensive 'professional' lines to be competetive.
They can't compete in the white-box market, and they definitely can't compete in the home-builder geek market. Their only means of competing there is putting on airs of snobbery, etc.
This hasn't changed. Same as it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago, though, they had teams of lawyers actively driving anybody out of their market, i.e. the Apple II cloners. Hell, a few years later they tried to own the whole GUI concept, until they got smacked back to reality in the courtroom.
It's probably not possible for Apple to ever be price competetive. They've just got too expensive a business model. It's too dependent on effete designers and the most expensive marketing agency they can buy.
You bought a physical good that contains copyrighted information.
You can use it for whatever you like, just like you can buy a set of Britannicas and use them as the legs on a coffee table if you wish.
You have no right to duplicate the copyrighted material.
Your error was in trying to force it into an either/or proposition in which you define both of the eithers.
One of my computers has no sound card. It has USB speakers. The audio never becomes analog until just before it hits the speaker cones.
Similarly, one could say that nothing but Linux can handle the Ext2fs/Ext3fs reliably. So maybe we should all hamstring Linux by running it on FAT partitions using one of the contrived UMSDOS schemes or a loopback filesystem kludge.
Because if you're dual booting W2K or XP and clinging frantically to your FAT partitions so Linux can read them, you're crippling Windows. Makes it easier to slag Microsoft when you do so and eveything is more flakey, though...
It really doesn't matter what 'Joe on the street' thinks Motorola does.
Joe's car has eight or twelve Motorola 6805 processors in it, and almost every appliance in his house has a motorola processor or two. It matters a lot more what the hardware designers think of Motorola, and Motorola is STRONG in that market.
Indeed. Motorola makes a fine line of embedded controllers and other processors and chips. I've worried for some time that trying to compete in the hot-dog contest with the likes of Intel and AMD was seriously damaging the company.
Now maybe they can get back to the 68HC11, '12, '05, '08 parts where they've got a damned fine product line. Let someone else be the megaherz weenies.
Peter Norton has been reduced to a bitmap, owned by Symantec.
They have the Peter Norton bitmaps that they throw on the side of shrinkwrapped boxes at Office Depot and Staples. And of course they have a few big life-sized Peter Norton cardboard standup bitmaps for instances where, say, shareholders or journalists want to see that Peter Norton actually does exist and works for Symantec.
Seriously, Norton Utilities is nothing but a valuable 'brand' at this point in history.
Geez. Come on. DOS is very low level. It's just a little program loader that you can kick out of the way casually and let your own code run the whole show. It doesn't even throw the protected mode switch and lock you out.
Everything else you said is spot on, of course.
Why would anybody in their right mind want a FAT partition of such a size? This isn't 1983. Ditch the FAT and it's extension-kludges.
One of the things I like best about my wife's computer is that since all she uses it for is the net and gaming, the worst that would happen if it was completely wiped is she'd loose her saved Diablo II games. Other than that it's all disposable, a severe crash might even root out malware I wasn't aware of.
With a name like 10Ghz you're gonna talk about meaningless MHz?
I was using the term 'MIPS' in a generic sense. Don't get all pedantic.
In the era I am talking about, Apple didn't HAVE a 'Pro' line to differentiate. I am talking about back when Apple was hyping, say, a Mac IIci and comparing it to a Compaq Deskpro 386. Both were overpriced salesman-boat-payment boondoogles.
One of the only reasons I still keep a Linux system lying around is to use 'dd' to image other drives. For instance, awhile back I bought an old HP-UX box that had a SCSI hard drive. It had the whole system in place, and it worked fine. But since I didn't have installation media, I pulled the drive and dropped it into a Slackware box to image the whole hard drive as a volume. It doesn't matter wether I have filesystem access to the data, 'dd' just copies it verbatim. I use that particular trick regularly. Linux has to my mind the best 'raw' drive access, so it's useful for things like that. You really don't even need to pull the drive if you can stick another drive along side it in the machine, as you can use a Slackware boot floppy locally on the machine if you're talking about an x86 system. With the easy NFS connectivity of a Slackware boot disk set, you can even not hang another drive in the machine. 1. Boot off your Slack CD/floppies. 2. Mount the NFS share you want to save the image to. 3. Use dd to image over the drives you wanted to backup.
Why would the tool have to have system-level access to the hard drive to recover the data? DOS is a perfect base for this sort of tool, because DOS is just a little whispy program loader that can be gotten out of the way quite easily. The disk being recovered definitely does NOT have to have a DOS partition on it. It's just a big mass of raw data to the recovery program. The drive is dropped into a seperate system where it can be at any arbitrary mount point they want.
Apple has always, consistenly, lined their product up against the most expensive first-line PC Clones. It's the only way they can compare price-wise.
Back in the day, they always compared their prices to those of the pricey Compaq boxes that nobody, anywhere, bought outside the corporate 'office machine' market. Everybody I knew at the time was running high quality (because everybody got to consider and rate each individual component that went into them) white box clones. Most people I know still are. 'Compaq' prices have dropped. So have Apple prices, for that matter. Just like all other prices in computer hardware. End result: Apple boxes are still just as over priced.
Prince and speed are both valid consierations to make.
Dollar per MIPS, I think the three 266 MHz G3 machines I bought yesterday for $30 each beat a lot of things out there.
I'm typing this on a Power Mac G3 that I got for pennies at auction recently that was surplused from the 'education' market because somebody like you decided it wasn't good enough. I'll say 'thanks' but I'll murmur under my breath about wasted tax dollars scrapping out this new of a machine...
Just an observation: people who say a machine is a 'waste' to use for word processing and productivity apps probably shouldn't cite a video game as a less wasteful use of the machine.
I don't want to sound like a cheerleader,
You don't. You sound like the usual astroturfer.
Has Apple recently start paying a lot more than Microsoft for that kind of thing?