As stupid as it seems, one of the biggest reasons to own a Mac was simply because they were the little guy, they stuck it to the Man (usually). You knew that you were supporting a less evil empire and a company that was taking technology and lifestyle forward. Now, that's severly lessened. Intel is not cool and will never be cool. OS X is pretty cool, but anybody who wanted the Mac for aforementioned reasons is going to seriously consider Linux.
Perhaps IBM is bogged down with supporting Xbox and other PPC appliances and can't devote the manufacturing time to Apple. In terms of number of chips sold, I would imagine Apple is at least number 2 or 3 down on the list.
The Windows users building some kind of overcomplicated Molotov-cocktail which ignites with the least effort and causes most of them to get blown up. The balance of Windows users have already by chance attended Molotov-cocktail University and are certified to make the basic explosive.
Mac users, on the other side of the office, order theirs from molotovcocktail.com. Each one comes in box so pretty that few ever remove the contents and those that do, adorn their person with multiple cocktails. Although still heavily outnumbered, they are quite skilled at throwing.
The battle plays itself out to a near draw, given the ratio of Windows users left to the Mac users who can get the cocktail out of the box and through attrition there are only two users left standing.
After that, in walks the Linux user with a mini-nuclear-bomb which he took 20 years to construct in his basement. He rids the office of both Windows and Mac users.
Afterwards, a race of mutant Linuxes grow up to inhabit the Earth.
Motorola is already known to be making an iPod phone. If Gates says the cell phone is going to take the place of the iPod then Apple has already ensured their continued success. Same goes for if he's wrong:-)
Paul's article isn't anything more than an espousing of his opinion of what business should be doing. There is no new trend here and I don't see any reason to think business is going to start looking to 20 year olds for innovation. I was 20, had great ideas and services and I met nothing but brick walls. The point is that 99% of 20 year olds are going to face what I faced. I still persevered and was moderately successful (I'm now 27) but if you start with nothing it's damn near impossible to make exponential gains in such a short time.
If I had some advice it would be to suck it up and go work for a company at a high wage for 4 years. Save every penny and then get to work on your own project when you're 25. It increases the odds of success to be both experienced, wealthy and over 25.
In the recent Ars Technica review of OS X Tiger, John Siracusa goes on and on about how future OSes (and currently Tiger) will render all the 2D windows/screen elements in the graphics card and that often times you need more memory on the card to handle everything on the screen. I bet ATI is just anticipating the need from current Apple hardware and Longhorn if they ever get the same system.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first decade of "reverting technology". Simply, most of the products we have or which have been used before achieve 99% effectiveness. We've been through 20 good years of computer revolution and we've learned that the commercial need for new features or speed has largely been eliminated. What we're going towards is the editing phase in which a group of people (OSS) takes the best ideas from all the things that have come and puts them together in a nice easy free package that is universally used. In a way, we're going back to pick up all the great things we left before and call it a day. It's what happens to an advanced culture, they eventually figure out the best way to do things and then keep doing them for thousands of years. This is explained as the "Banana Leaf Parable" from Charles Eames.
I don't know. The realistic approach is a cool twist, but a pretty big part of the Batman allure is the fact that he's mysterious. I don't really want to know where all his training and powers come from unless it's so freakin' amazing no one could have guessed it. You know, Superman had Kryptonite and all that, but this could so easily turn into the Hulk with Batman having some existential conversation with his shrink half way through the movie.
What I would have really liked to see in a "Batman Begins" is something set in the 1930s, film noir style. Then you could have "realism" and the mystery would be built into the period and the sets etc. Not even too many special effects, just a good simple villain played by someone like Benicio Del Toro. I don't even care about super powers or vats of acid. If you're going to do some realism, just give me a convincing story with some dark actors.
Hate to say it, but selling something for more than you bought it for is the definition of good business, especially if it's exponentially higher. The market place sets the price of goods, regardless of what you can get them for. Most business people just don't like to talk about it because as soon as the secret's out they make less money.
I don't know about you, but if someone wrote a book about me and titled it "iCon" I would be pretty offended. All those people going into the Apple store are immediately going to see Jobs' picture on the front and think he's a con artist. Doesn't exactly mesh with the honest Apple brand no matter what the pages say.
The control panels have always had multiple rows of tabs. Remember all those times you'd click on one and the whole row would seem to reorganize itself as if you had switched to a parallel dimension... same options, but TOTALLY different place. I've been using OS X for a few years now but I'm sure they've still got that million dollar feature.
If you're building a custom house or buying a condo you damn well are going to see what the interior design looks like before you put your money down. You might go in and change it later, but the default design should be rock solid. Remember, we now have computers to plan all these things out in advance.
As a designer, I have to say that there is no value in making important documents look "designed". He simply applied all the mediocre designer's tools to making this document look like all the other pharmaceutical handouts, job quotes or resumes on the planet. He's succeeded in making it look nice and average, safe and bland which completely saps any urgency to actually read it.
The key to designing something that needs to be read is to make it stand out from all the other things you read all day. The problem with the original is simply that there was too much text and not enough white space. As well, the text should have been written with the main concern as the first sentence, i.e. not as a vague assessment of fact but as a personal affirmation that "We believe Bin Laden will attack."
For the design, just print it on a purple piece of paper and use white for everything else. When someone gets a purple memo, they know it's rare and a must-read.
I should have guessed. At some point there's going to have to be a dominant one chosen. When will Linus put his weight behind something like this. Certainly overall it would be a benefit to the developer community. There could still be competing systems vying for the throne, but you've got to start with something.
I've never used Linux past installing it and booting to the desktop so I'm no expert, but if it's as you describe, shouldn't there be a central library manager?
If everyone has different libraries installed in different places, the OS should have a central manager to search for and keep track of what is where. Then, apps should make calls to the manager when they need a library and the manager returns the location and configuration. Developers could then build for redundancy so if library B exists instead of library A it could adapt, download the right library or quit gracefully.
You could still have as many libraries as you want, just as say Quicktime has tons of codecs, it would just be organized so that the middle-app would liaise betwen library and app.
I've always worked from home and most times the work computer was in the living room so no separation between life/work. However, it was dialup and the computer would crash every couple of hours. Sometimes it wasn't even on.
Now that's all different. It's more effort to turn the computer off. All those times during the day when I want a little piece of information like the forecast or when a movie is playing take only 1 second to find out but it encourages you to keep the thing on all the time 24 hours a day. I can be doing the dishes and I'll hear the e-mail "ding". It's pretty hard to ignore that.
In the old days all those little pieces of information came in one package at one time and if you didn't know something you went out to get it to just winged it. Another poster theorized that it's all about the human desire for more control. We're at the point where we can control so many things excessively that control is becoming an activity in itself.
I ran broken code lots of times. Seeing an error occur helps focus the mental process to figure out how to fix it. Just think of when anything breaks. You KNOW it's broken, but if you turn it on a few times again it forces you to sequentially go over each part of the process up until the point where it breaks.
I'm glad you took the time to write the response you did. It is very rare to hear from Americans who dislike the direction their country has taken. Because of the massive amount of words and action from the other 52% of your fellows, it is damn near impossible not to generalize or write-off the whole country.
I'm so sick of people bashing Apple's one button mouse. Next to the PowerMac beige mouse that was standard through the 90s, the new clear optical mouse is the most ergonomic design ever made. You can hold it just about however YOU want, there's no craning to reach the button because the WHOLE THING is a button. All you people who love scroll wheels, and buttons on the side, top and front are going to wake up one day and not be able to move your hand because of carpal tunnel. Take it from me - 10 years as a graphic design power user.
Sure, I can get 10% more productivity with a scroll wheel or multi-button mouse, but I wouldn't be working today PERIOD if I'd used one all along.
They suppress access so they can charge people to use it if they don't own the book. You have to have the patent first before you can make the money... otherwise it's just another free internet-copyable service.
Am I the only one who longs for the day when the PC was "locked down". Everything that was on my computer was something I put on there, I organized it how I wanted and when something was out of place or malfunctioning it was easy to locate and fix. It was like Zen for computing.
Now, I just get the feeling that I'm less productive. I've got documents on multiple computers with different versions of apps on all of them. I tend to save info in empty e-mails as opposed to on sticky notes and my address book is Canada411.com. In short, there's no real designated place for things and most of my time is spent finding things that I used to be forced to organize.
The massive capability of internet resources and web aware apps encourages one to keep things as snippets but there's less and less to tie all this together. The Zen of computing is gone in my opinion and it's only going to get worse when our documents are stored remotely.
I think Apple has the basis of the real next revolution in computing - Universal Smart Sync. All your addresses and info and documents has to be automatically pulled together across all the networks you use and imbued with some kind of physical order. And not "wizard style" fake order, real honest to goodness System 7 physicality.
Ya, this would be perfect if you could somehow hold the controls in your hand, like a remote control for the headphones. That might be hard to do wirelessly, but with a wire it might just work. Then you could switch tracks easily AND adjust the volume without having to take off your headphones!
I get so many auto-dialers and "bank services" calls I don't even answer the phone unless it's one of the few people I want to talk to. On the occasion that I pick up and get caught by some phone salesman, I politely say, "Can you hold on a minute...", then I put the phone down for an hour or so and hopefully they go out of business because of the long distance fees from India.
If OS X was free like Linux and had all the GUI and developer goodness while being able to run on Intel, then we'd have a good Linux. That's essentially what Marcus is saying.
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As stupid as it seems, one of the biggest reasons to own a Mac was simply because they were the little guy, they stuck it to the Man (usually). You knew that you were supporting a less evil empire and a company that was taking technology and lifestyle forward. Now, that's severly lessened. Intel is not cool and will never be cool. OS X is pretty cool, but anybody who wanted the Mac for aforementioned reasons is going to seriously consider Linux.
Perhaps IBM is bogged down with supporting Xbox and other PPC appliances and can't devote the manufacturing time to Apple. In terms of number of chips sold, I would imagine Apple is at least number 2 or 3 down on the list.
Yes, I see it now:
The Windows users building some kind of overcomplicated Molotov-cocktail which ignites with the least effort and causes most of them to get blown up. The balance of Windows users have already by chance attended Molotov-cocktail University and are certified to make the basic explosive.
Mac users, on the other side of the office, order theirs from molotovcocktail.com. Each one comes in box so pretty that few ever remove the contents and those that do, adorn their person with multiple cocktails. Although still heavily outnumbered, they are quite skilled at throwing. The battle plays itself out to a near draw, given the ratio of Windows users left to the Mac users who can get the cocktail out of the box and through attrition there are only two users left standing.
After that, in walks the Linux user with a mini-nuclear-bomb which he took 20 years to construct in his basement. He rids the office of both Windows and Mac users.
Afterwards, a race of mutant Linuxes grow up to inhabit the Earth.
Motorola is already known to be making an iPod phone. If Gates says the cell phone is going to take the place of the iPod then Apple has already ensured their continued success. Same goes for if he's wrong :-)
Paul's article isn't anything more than an espousing of his opinion of what business should be doing. There is no new trend here and I don't see any reason to think business is going to start looking to 20 year olds for innovation. I was 20, had great ideas and services and I met nothing but brick walls. The point is that 99% of 20 year olds are going to face what I faced. I still persevered and was moderately successful (I'm now 27) but if you start with nothing it's damn near impossible to make exponential gains in such a short time.
If I had some advice it would be to suck it up and go work for a company at a high wage for 4 years. Save every penny and then get to work on your own project when you're 25. It increases the odds of success to be both experienced, wealthy and over 25.
In the recent Ars Technica review of OS X Tiger, John Siracusa goes on and on about how future OSes (and currently Tiger) will render all the 2D windows/screen elements in the graphics card and that often times you need more memory on the card to handle everything on the screen. I bet ATI is just anticipating the need from current Apple hardware and Longhorn if they ever get the same system.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first decade of "reverting technology". Simply, most of the products we have or which have been used before achieve 99% effectiveness. We've been through 20 good years of computer revolution and we've learned that the commercial need for new features or speed has largely been eliminated. What we're going towards is the editing phase in which a group of people (OSS) takes the best ideas from all the things that have come and puts them together in a nice easy free package that is universally used. In a way, we're going back to pick up all the great things we left before and call it a day. It's what happens to an advanced culture, they eventually figure out the best way to do things and then keep doing them for thousands of years. This is explained as the "Banana Leaf Parable" from Charles Eames.
I don't know. The realistic approach is a cool twist, but a pretty big part of the Batman allure is the fact that he's mysterious. I don't really want to know where all his training and powers come from unless it's so freakin' amazing no one could have guessed it. You know, Superman had Kryptonite and all that, but this could so easily turn into the Hulk with Batman having some existential conversation with his shrink half way through the movie.
What I would have really liked to see in a "Batman Begins" is something set in the 1930s, film noir style. Then you could have "realism" and the mystery would be built into the period and the sets etc. Not even too many special effects, just a good simple villain played by someone like Benicio Del Toro. I don't even care about super powers or vats of acid. If you're going to do some realism, just give me a convincing story with some dark actors.
One day the gold runs out and the aristocrats lose their heads...
Hate to say it, but selling something for more than you bought it for is the definition of good business, especially if it's exponentially higher. The market place sets the price of goods, regardless of what you can get them for. Most business people just don't like to talk about it because as soon as the secret's out they make less money.
I don't know about you, but if someone wrote a book about me and titled it "iCon" I would be pretty offended. All those people going into the Apple store are immediately going to see Jobs' picture on the front and think he's a con artist. Doesn't exactly mesh with the honest Apple brand no matter what the pages say.
The control panels have always had multiple rows of tabs. Remember all those times you'd click on one and the whole row would seem to reorganize itself as if you had switched to a parallel dimension... same options, but TOTALLY different place. I've been using OS X for a few years now but I'm sure they've still got that million dollar feature.
If you're building a custom house or buying a condo you damn well are going to see what the interior design looks like before you put your money down. You might go in and change it later, but the default design should be rock solid. Remember, we now have computers to plan all these things out in advance.
As a designer, I have to say that there is no value in making important documents look "designed". He simply applied all the mediocre designer's tools to making this document look like all the other pharmaceutical handouts, job quotes or resumes on the planet. He's succeeded in making it look nice and average, safe and bland which completely saps any urgency to actually read it.
The key to designing something that needs to be read is to make it stand out from all the other things you read all day. The problem with the original is simply that there was too much text and not enough white space. As well, the text should have been written with the main concern as the first sentence, i.e. not as a vague assessment of fact but as a personal affirmation that "We believe Bin Laden will attack."
For the design, just print it on a purple piece of paper and use white for everything else. When someone gets a purple memo, they know it's rare and a must-read.
I should have guessed. At some point there's going to have to be a dominant one chosen. When will Linus put his weight behind something like this. Certainly overall it would be a benefit to the developer community. There could still be competing systems vying for the throne, but you've got to start with something.
I've never used Linux past installing it and booting to the desktop so I'm no expert, but if it's as you describe, shouldn't there be a central library manager?
If everyone has different libraries installed in different places, the OS should have a central manager to search for and keep track of what is where. Then, apps should make calls to the manager when they need a library and the manager returns the location and configuration. Developers could then build for redundancy so if library B exists instead of library A it could adapt, download the right library or quit gracefully.
You could still have as many libraries as you want, just as say Quicktime has tons of codecs, it would just be organized so that the middle-app would liaise betwen library and app.
I've always worked from home and most times the work computer was in the living room so no separation between life/work. However, it was dialup and the computer would crash every couple of hours. Sometimes it wasn't even on.
Now that's all different. It's more effort to turn the computer off. All those times during the day when I want a little piece of information like the forecast or when a movie is playing take only 1 second to find out but it encourages you to keep the thing on all the time 24 hours a day. I can be doing the dishes and I'll hear the e-mail "ding". It's pretty hard to ignore that.
In the old days all those little pieces of information came in one package at one time and if you didn't know something you went out to get it to just winged it. Another poster theorized that it's all about the human desire for more control. We're at the point where we can control so many things excessively that control is becoming an activity in itself.
I ran broken code lots of times. Seeing an error occur helps focus the mental process to figure out how to fix it. Just think of when anything breaks. You KNOW it's broken, but if you turn it on a few times again it forces you to sequentially go over each part of the process up until the point where it breaks.
I'm glad you took the time to write the response you did. It is very rare to hear from Americans who dislike the direction their country has taken. Because of the massive amount of words and action from the other 52% of your fellows, it is damn near impossible not to generalize or write-off the whole country.
I'm so sick of people bashing Apple's one button mouse. Next to the PowerMac beige mouse that was standard through the 90s, the new clear optical mouse is the most ergonomic design ever made. You can hold it just about however YOU want, there's no craning to reach the button because the WHOLE THING is a button. All you people who love scroll wheels, and buttons on the side, top and front are going to wake up one day and not be able to move your hand because of carpal tunnel. Take it from me - 10 years as a graphic design power user.
Sure, I can get 10% more productivity with a scroll wheel or multi-button mouse, but I wouldn't be working today PERIOD if I'd used one all along.
They suppress access so they can charge people to use it if they don't own the book. You have to have the patent first before you can make the money... otherwise it's just another free internet-copyable service.
Am I the only one who longs for the day when the PC was "locked down". Everything that was on my computer was something I put on there, I organized it how I wanted and when something was out of place or malfunctioning it was easy to locate and fix. It was like Zen for computing.
Now, I just get the feeling that I'm less productive. I've got documents on multiple computers with different versions of apps on all of them. I tend to save info in empty e-mails as opposed to on sticky notes and my address book is Canada411.com. In short, there's no real designated place for things and most of my time is spent finding things that I used to be forced to organize.
The massive capability of internet resources and web aware apps encourages one to keep things as snippets but there's less and less to tie all this together. The Zen of computing is gone in my opinion and it's only going to get worse when our documents are stored remotely.
I think Apple has the basis of the real next revolution in computing - Universal Smart Sync. All your addresses and info and documents has to be automatically pulled together across all the networks you use and imbued with some kind of physical order. And not "wizard style" fake order, real honest to goodness System 7 physicality.
Ya, this would be perfect if you could somehow hold the controls in your hand, like a remote control for the headphones. That might be hard to do wirelessly, but with a wire it might just work. Then you could switch tracks easily AND adjust the volume without having to take off your headphones!
I get so many auto-dialers and "bank services" calls I don't even answer the phone unless it's one of the few people I want to talk to. On the occasion that I pick up and get caught by some phone salesman, I politely say, "Can you hold on a minute...", then I put the phone down for an hour or so and hopefully they go out of business because of the long distance fees from India.
If OS X was free like Linux and had all the GUI and developer goodness while being able to run on Intel, then we'd have a good Linux. That's essentially what Marcus is saying.