This to Apple is a bad thing(TM). It destroys the homogeneity if they have to write "Does not work on Ipad/OSX" on the box, I mean that just doesn't work.
Amazingly, most Windows games I know don't have "not compatible with Windows Mobile" on the box. Probably because no sane person would get the idea that regular PC software runs on a smartphone or PDA. Don't you think that Apple might get away with having their differently named OSes incompatible with each other?
Yes, iPhone OS is a OS X derivative but it's not compatible, Apple doesn't pretend it is and they deliberately changed its name to indicate that it isn't.
The first netbooks would be the obvious example (Compaq LTE).
FTFY
Seriously, netbooks aren't some kind of brand new idea, they're just the ages-old concept of "let's make a really small notebook" with a fancy new name. Besides putting in better hardware and making them even smaller nothing much happened.
Apple could ship a Mac using touch and without a mouse, and the media (and all the Apple fans here) will be going on and on about how revolutionary it is, and yet another Apple first.
You are aware that they already do? It's called the iPad. Sure, the iPad isn't designed to operate in the same market as their PC offerings but neither is their touch UI.
It's unlikely they'd do that. For instance, this would immediately make Macs unsuitable for universities and similar institutes - while a university may be able to afford a Mac lab with twenty iMacs, a Mac lab with twenty Mac Pros is decidedly less likely. Similarly MacBooks are much more popular with lecturers and students than MBPs and it's unlikely for that market to spontaneously switch to the more expensive model instead of just getting Lenovos.
Also, locking down desktop OS X would be a PR nightmare which would cost Apple a lot of developer mindshare. They can get away with it on the iPhone because there never was a freely hackable iPhone (not to mention that smartphones aren't desktop computers) but on the PC market they'd just scare away the userbase they've built up over the last few years.
It's not a factor of the Apple fanbase getting nastier, it's a factor of the Apple fanbase getting bigger. People who have recently adopted something tend to be zealous about it, whether it's a religion, a sexual orientation (well, after the coming-out) or just an operating system.
Of course there's also the fanboys who stay that way but those are fairly rare... although their number still grows along with the total number of users.
In short, it's to be expected that the Apple fanbase gets more annoying - there's just more of them.
Well, if you'd call "a notebook guaranteed to run *nix" a luxury product that doesn't do anything a cheaper alternative wouldn't do... yes. When I got my first notebook (having "known to be fuly supported by some *nix variant" as a basic requirement) Apple's offering was the cheapest one with the competition consisting entirely of a ThinkPad with inferior specs and a higher price. You could argue that *nix is always a luxury product and that everyone's needs can be fulfilled with Windows but I'd disagree.
Apple's products can become obscenely expensive for what they do. You can get a new car for the price of two Mac Pros with all options installed. But both their entry-level and entry-high-level offerings are often quite price-competitive, especially if you have requirements not covered by hardware specs or ones pertaining to exotic features like FireWie 800.
Essentially you're arguing that everyone can use a Camry for every usage scenario, whether it's driving to the mall or transporting ten people. Anyone who buys a van does so because he likes to spend money; you can always stuff people into the trunk, after all.
The GP complains about having been burned by a bad decision. He says he bought a Power Mac in 2006. That's the year the Power Macintosh line has been discontinued after Apple has announced its Intel transition in 2005. Granted, Apple took their time replacing the Power Mac with the Mac Pro but the writing was on the wall and all other product lines had already transitioned to Intel.
Either the GP really needed a workstation running OS X right then or they decided that the series' end of life would be the perfect time to snatch one up. Either way, they bought a device with a known-obsolete processor architecture.
Look at 10.5 which forbids an install on machines below 800 megahertz. Apple should not have forbade people with 700 or 600 MHz machines from upgrading if they so desired. Microsoft doesn't. If you want to run Win7 on a slow machine, you can - no restriction.
Remember that this very thing has been instrumental in completely ruining one of their Windows versions. Instead of giving hard limits as to where Vista can reasonably run and where it can't they gave two sets of system specs: One where the OS actually works and one where it can merely boot up. The latter one was called "Vista Capable" and lead to a lot of bad PR.
Had Microsoft declared from the start that Vista requires a 1 GHz CPU, 1 GiB or RAM and a 128 MiB GPU in order to perform adequately people would have complained about the high requirements but there wouldn't have been a media spectacle about how Vista doesn't work on machines following Microsoft's specs.
Apple doesn't do "kinda sorta works if you don't run any demanding programs", they only do "works" and "doesn't work". While this does lock people out of upgrades, it also protects Apple from exactly the kind of PR fiasco Microsoft had.
I admit that that name should've been a hint. Few clueless people casually drop references to politically active landscape painters.
As for the bigotry: It's more of a pessimistic outlook. There are people around who could conceivably confuse two similar-sounding nations and there are enough of them to make such an error plausible.
I wouldn't assume that everyone can't tell a former part of Hungary from a continent but I still saw enough people pull stunts like that to take it at face value when encountered.
The problem is that the joke was too plausible. It's as if you said "I'm ditching cable TV for internet video" - it might be a joke but it's entirely believable that you actually meant it.
And yes, it is perfectly reasonable to assume geographic ineptitude on any English-speaking discussion platform, unfortunately.
Every responsible home computer owner should have no problem spending a few bucks to have a EAL7-certified system with full hard drive encryption built. Everything else is an invitation to hackers and getting sent to prison for having child porn is really your fault if you don't take your security seriously.
Of course that's just to defend from the people who somehow managed to penetrate the meter-thick bunker door to enter your house (superterranean homes are dangerously irresponsible) and evaded the multiply redundant security cameras, IR detectors and tripwires without waking you.
If your home and computer system can't withstand a concerted all-out attack by any combination of any agencies or armies on the planet you really deserve what you get.
Why does this sound to me like the beginning of an Exalted Modern series with the bad guys (and/or protagonists) being an army of Wood-aspected Dragon-Blooded who take over the world's governments in order to Save The Environment. And then proceed to make everything worse because they're Exalts and that's what Exalts do.
Bonus points if Gaia herself shows up and is entirely unconcerned about climate change but still pissed about LCROSS.
That's how it is. The push to codify software patents has failed, however there hasn't been a successful counter-push to have software declared unpatentable. Right now it's a grey zone where software is patentable but the patents are theoretically unenforcable as they have no legal ground to stand on.
No, you're getting it wrong. "unmanned" means no humans whatsoever. I'm fairly certain that we can make passenger airliners a fair bit smaller, lighter and more fuel efficient by losing not only the crew but also the passengers and their luggage.
Imagine: You book a flight in a top-of-the-line unmanned passenger aircraft to the destination of your choice. Then you drive there, taking comfort in the knowledge that you'll be virtually entirely safe from airplane crashes while a state-of-the-art unmanned aircraft is already pulling ahead of you at Mach 3... just for you (and the other passengers, of course).
Also, no more economy class. Because passengers occupy no space, everyone can fly first class at no extra cost.
Unmanned passenger aircraft are truly the wave of the future.
Why would they want to? Internet Explorer and Safari play H.264 just fine so where's the incentive for Microsoft and Apple? Google already has ffmpeg built in and most likely won't want to absorb another codec (interface).
That leaves us with Mozilla and Opera. Even if they agree on an ABI that hardly makes for an industry-wide standard.
Plus, Opera's method of just leveraging codecs the system has does the same without duplicationg data and without requiring the user to figure out which website to trust when downloading codecs.
In fact, that's the biggest problem with your post: It assumes that either every website out there is honest and good or that every user is competent in the field of browser plugin threat analysis. Most users aren't going to know whether it's good or bad to install the h.265 codec girlswithbigtits.cn is offering them.
There are reasons why the Netscape plugin architectore hasn't already been used to deal with this. The fact that trusting random websites to install plugins in my browser (plugins that directly talk to my GPU no less) is a bad idea is one of them.
Actually, the additional regulation I'm thinking of yould be "lift or lower the tariffs on sugar" and "investigate whether subsidies are handed out sensibly and fairly". Existing regulation should be tweaked, not the market directly.
But yeah, the most sensible approach would be to first figure out whether the stuff is reasonably safe or not.
Well, it doesn't seem to be clearly superior and it's only a viable alternative to actual sugar because the corn lobby artificially made sugar expensive. Even if it's exactly equivalent to sugar I think it's problematic to have a distorted market not for the benefit of the people but for the benefit of a certain industry. Since the ubiquity of HFCS requires such distortion I think that ubiquitous HFCS is problematic even if the substance itself isn't.
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This to Apple is a bad thing(TM). It destroys the homogeneity if they have to write "Does not work on Ipad/OSX" on the box, I mean that just doesn't work.
Amazingly, most Windows games I know don't have "not compatible with Windows Mobile" on the box. Probably because no sane person would get the idea that regular PC software runs on a smartphone or PDA. Don't you think that Apple might get away with having their differently named OSes incompatible with each other?
Yes, iPhone OS is a OS X derivative but it's not compatible, Apple doesn't pretend it is and they deliberately changed its name to indicate that it isn't.
The first netbooks would be the obvious example (Compaq LTE).
FTFY
Seriously, netbooks aren't some kind of brand new idea, they're just the ages-old concept of "let's make a really small notebook" with a fancy new name. Besides putting in better hardware and making them even smaller nothing much happened.
Apple could ship a Mac using touch and without a mouse, and the media (and all the Apple fans here) will be going on and on about how revolutionary it is, and yet another Apple first.
You are aware that they already do? It's called the iPad. Sure, the iPad isn't designed to operate in the same market as their PC offerings but neither is their touch UI.
It's unlikely they'd do that. For instance, this would immediately make Macs unsuitable for universities and similar institutes - while a university may be able to afford a Mac lab with twenty iMacs, a Mac lab with twenty Mac Pros is decidedly less likely. Similarly MacBooks are much more popular with lecturers and students than MBPs and it's unlikely for that market to spontaneously switch to the more expensive model instead of just getting Lenovos.
Also, locking down desktop OS X would be a PR nightmare which would cost Apple a lot of developer mindshare. They can get away with it on the iPhone because there never was a freely hackable iPhone (not to mention that smartphones aren't desktop computers) but on the PC market they'd just scare away the userbase they've built up over the last few years.
My bad. The 2006 Power Mac user was someone else. I must've replied to the wrong post by accident.
It's not a factor of the Apple fanbase getting nastier, it's a factor of the Apple fanbase getting bigger. People who have recently adopted something tend to be zealous about it, whether it's a religion, a sexual orientation (well, after the coming-out) or just an operating system.
Of course there's also the fanboys who stay that way but those are fairly rare... although their number still grows along with the total number of users.
In short, it's to be expected that the Apple fanbase gets more annoying - there's just more of them.
Well, if you'd call "a notebook guaranteed to run *nix" a luxury product that doesn't do anything a cheaper alternative wouldn't do... yes. When I got my first notebook (having "known to be fuly supported by some *nix variant" as a basic requirement) Apple's offering was the cheapest one with the competition consisting entirely of a ThinkPad with inferior specs and a higher price. You could argue that *nix is always a luxury product and that everyone's needs can be fulfilled with Windows but I'd disagree.
Apple's products can become obscenely expensive for what they do. You can get a new car for the price of two Mac Pros with all options installed. But both their entry-level and entry-high-level offerings are often quite price-competitive, especially if you have requirements not covered by hardware specs or ones pertaining to exotic features like FireWie 800.
Essentially you're arguing that everyone can use a Camry for every usage scenario, whether it's driving to the mall or transporting ten people. Anyone who buys a van does so because he likes to spend money; you can always stuff people into the trunk, after all.
The GP complains about having been burned by a bad decision. He says he bought a Power Mac in 2006. That's the year the Power Macintosh line has been discontinued after Apple has announced its Intel transition in 2005. Granted, Apple took their time replacing the Power Mac with the Mac Pro but the writing was on the wall and all other product lines had already transitioned to Intel.
Either the GP really needed a workstation running OS X right then or they decided that the series' end of life would be the perfect time to snatch one up. Either way, they bought a device with a known-obsolete processor architecture.
Look at 10.5 which forbids an install on machines below 800 megahertz. Apple should not have forbade people with 700 or 600 MHz machines from upgrading if they so desired. Microsoft doesn't. If you want to run Win7 on a slow machine, you can - no restriction.
Remember that this very thing has been instrumental in completely ruining one of their Windows versions. Instead of giving hard limits as to where Vista can reasonably run and where it can't they gave two sets of system specs: One where the OS actually works and one where it can merely boot up. The latter one was called "Vista Capable" and lead to a lot of bad PR.
Had Microsoft declared from the start that Vista requires a 1 GHz CPU, 1 GiB or RAM and a 128 MiB GPU in order to perform adequately people would have complained about the high requirements but there wouldn't have been a media spectacle about how Vista doesn't work on machines following Microsoft's specs.
Apple doesn't do "kinda sorta works if you don't run any demanding programs", they only do "works" and "doesn't work". While this does lock people out of upgrades, it also protects Apple from exactly the kind of PR fiasco Microsoft had.
And over here, there is no shortage of stories of Europeans thinking that Halifax is within a reasonable driving distance to Vancouver
Poppycock. Everyone knows that West Yorkshire is thousands of miles from Canada. ;)
Hmm. I wonder is Randall knows about this. Might at least end up in a strip.
I admit that that name should've been a hint. Few clueless people casually drop references to politically active landscape painters.
As for the bigotry: It's more of a pessimistic outlook. There are people around who could conceivably confuse two similar-sounding nations and there are enough of them to make such an error plausible.
I wouldn't assume that everyone can't tell a former part of Hungary from a continent but I still saw enough people pull stunts like that to take it at face value when encountered.
The problem is that the joke was too plausible. It's as if you said "I'm ditching cable TV for internet video" - it might be a joke but it's entirely believable that you actually meant it.
And yes, it is perfectly reasonable to assume geographic ineptitude on any English-speaking discussion platform, unfortunately.
I find it a bit disturbing that he can't differentiate between Austria and Australia.
Every responsible home computer owner should have no problem spending a few bucks to have a EAL7-certified system with full hard drive encryption built. Everything else is an invitation to hackers and getting sent to prison for having child porn is really your fault if you don't take your security seriously.
Of course that's just to defend from the people who somehow managed to penetrate the meter-thick bunker door to enter your house (superterranean homes are dangerously irresponsible) and evaded the multiply redundant security cameras, IR detectors and tripwires without waking you.
If your home and computer system can't withstand a concerted all-out attack by any combination of any agencies or armies on the planet you really deserve what you get.
I also like the Pet Shop Boys reference. That really was my first thought when I saw one of the exits and how to get there.
You uploaded yourself? Just make sure the MCP doesn't notice you.
Replace the Force with a gun and reexamine that statement...
Note that in Germany the 4th dimension is Hip Hop. Consider this if you do hyperspatial experiments with Reggae-calibrated equipment over here.
Why does this sound to me like the beginning of an Exalted Modern series with the bad guys (and/or protagonists) being an army of Wood-aspected Dragon-Blooded who take over the world's governments in order to Save The Environment. And then proceed to make everything worse because they're Exalts and that's what Exalts do.
Bonus points if Gaia herself shows up and is entirely unconcerned about climate change but still pissed about LCROSS.
That's how it is. The push to codify software patents has failed, however there hasn't been a successful counter-push to have software declared unpatentable. Right now it's a grey zone where software is patentable but the patents are theoretically unenforcable as they have no legal ground to stand on.
No, you're getting it wrong. "unmanned" means no humans whatsoever. I'm fairly certain that we can make passenger airliners a fair bit smaller, lighter and more fuel efficient by losing not only the crew but also the passengers and their luggage.
Imagine: You book a flight in a top-of-the-line unmanned passenger aircraft to the destination of your choice. Then you drive there, taking comfort in the knowledge that you'll be virtually entirely safe from airplane crashes while a state-of-the-art unmanned aircraft is already pulling ahead of you at Mach 3... just for you (and the other passengers, of course).
Also, no more economy class. Because passengers occupy no space, everyone can fly first class at no extra cost.
Unmanned passenger aircraft are truly the wave of the future.
Why would they want to? Internet Explorer and Safari play H.264 just fine so where's the incentive for Microsoft and Apple? Google already has ffmpeg built in and most likely won't want to absorb another codec (interface).
That leaves us with Mozilla and Opera. Even if they agree on an ABI that hardly makes for an industry-wide standard.
Plus, Opera's method of just leveraging codecs the system has does the same without duplicationg data and without requiring the user to figure out which website to trust when downloading codecs.
In fact, that's the biggest problem with your post: It assumes that either every website out there is honest and good or that every user is competent in the field of browser plugin threat analysis. Most users aren't going to know whether it's good or bad to install the h.265 codec girlswithbigtits.cn is offering them.
There are reasons why the Netscape plugin architectore hasn't already been used to deal with this. The fact that trusting random websites to install plugins in my browser (plugins that directly talk to my GPU no less) is a bad idea is one of them.
Actually, the additional regulation I'm thinking of yould be "lift or lower the tariffs on sugar" and "investigate whether subsidies are handed out sensibly and fairly". Existing regulation should be tweaked, not the market directly.
But yeah, the most sensible approach would be to first figure out whether the stuff is reasonably safe or not.
Well, it doesn't seem to be clearly superior and it's only a viable alternative to actual sugar because the corn lobby artificially made sugar expensive. Even if it's exactly equivalent to sugar I think it's problematic to have a distorted market not for the benefit of the people but for the benefit of a certain industry. Since the ubiquity of HFCS requires such distortion I think that ubiquitous HFCS is problematic even if the substance itself isn't.