Aside from the fact that "while the rest of the world continues to work" is blatantly untrue - I've found the Winboys are far bigger cheerleaders and blinkered than the Mac fanboys. (Article of evidence No. 1: Paul Thurrott. Case closed.)
I'm not defending zealotry, but sometimes those with a minority voice HAVE to speak a bit louder in order to be heard:
Many work environments force a system on you, and if you've got an IT Manager who has the attitude "No Macs ever, over my dead body, I hate them and everyone who uses them" then it's hardly surprising the little Mac'ites get a bit vocal!
On a similar theme, I get annoyed when there are 2 buttons: "Agree" or "Disagree" but not a button saying "I believe both have valid arguments and don't want to take sides."
Really hampers my productivity, being forced to agonize over that decision!
I agree with your point though: "people are most productive in whatever they're used to, and whatever suits them." I hope that's the theme that emerges from this Slashdot discussion.
I don't get involved in the whole DEFEND YOUR OS nonsense, my motto is USE WHAT WORKS FOR YOU, and for me, thats Mac OS X.
True, but only if you get a choice...
Many work environments force a system on you, and if you've got an IT Manager who has the attitude "No Macs ever, over my dead body, I hate them and everyone who uses them" then it's hardly surprising the little Mac'ites get a bit vocal!
You make an interesting point, but it sounds to me like you have a fixed idea of how an interface should behave and are going to roundly criticize anything that doesn't conform to that.
Personally, I wouldn't like my Panther system to have ANY of the features you regard as critical:
I find a common, fixed position, always there menubar is a great feature.
Apps that need fullscreen can go fullscreen - PowerPoint, Keynote, VLC, DivX player, etc, etc. Having windows lose their title bars is available through 3rd party shareware programs. I don't agree that Apple should make it standard - I don't want it, neither do I suspect do most users.
Firefox could do what these above apps do if they really wanted, but it's simply not a "Macintosh thing to do" to have windows entirely take over the screen. To their credit, Firefox tends to follow GUI conventions on each of the platforms they support.
I find case-insensitive filenames make much more sense when dealing with publishing media, eg large numbers of images which may be sourced from digital cameras / emails from clients / FTP sites / etc. Their filenames all have a habit of flipflopping case. I DO NOT WANT THEM TO BECOME DIFFERENT FILES.
Get used to it, XML storage is the way of the future,.
Treating these choices as "utterly asinine" and "engineers have a track record of making really stupid decisions" really just demonstrates your own point of view.
If you want that flexibility, that's really one of the great strengths of LInux. I think you've answered the Slashdot topic's question!
Who cares what OS you use?
It seems to me that most users choose their applications first and then find an OS that supports them, not the other way around.
Well, that would apply if the user never had to manage files, locate windows on the screen, use menubars, connect devices, drag and drop content, use popup menus/other GUI elements, install and find fonts, print, etc, etc.
All these things differ from OS to OS. Even if you spend all day in one platform-equivalent program like Photoshop, it is still quite a different experience going from XP to OS X. And most people do in fact spread their workflow over several programs with the same data, eg,: digital photo -> file storage -> image editing program -> page layout program -> PDF generator -> printer.
Or even if you're a command line user, actions such as OS X's path dragging into and between terminal windows differs from Linux/KDE.
The differences are more than subtle, and they are widespread, even with the same apps.
This is not correct. Apple, and its bitten rainbow apple logo of old were tribute to Alan Turing whose personal problems that mostly stemmed out of being gay drove him to commit suicide by biting a cyanide-laced apple in 1954.
That's completely untrue as the other posters have said, but I also heard that story on the tour around Bletchley Park - the center of the British code-breaking people of WWII.
When I heard it, I found it funny that their own history contradicts that very tenuous link: when Apple was named, the code-breaking efforts of the Bletchley Park geniuses were still mostly secret, and the story of Alan Turing was very unlikely to be known by a couple of Atari employees in California.
(If they had, "Colossus" - the world's first codebreaking computer - would have been a great name for the original Mac!)
I think the misinformation stems from the amateur historians desperate to somehow get Bletchley linked to the wider world. It's an amusing anecdote, but a bit silly.
By the way, if you're in Britain, pay a visit to the place. It's pretty interesting.
I'll see your chain of US Sci-fi and raise you British Sci-fi:
Doctor Who > Blake's 7 > Red Dwarf > all the takes-itself-too-seriously-American crap
(Am actually a fan of the TITSAC so don't burn me too badly. Also haven't seen the new Doctor Who yet, which may suck relative to Tom Baker, so will have to wait and see.)
they wanted the family geek's advice on what kind of computer to get to replace it.
Yes, I think that's how most people decide to buy computers - word of mouth from trusted friends & family.
Lucky for her (and Apple), you're obviously a Mac enthusiast, but 97% of the market is not, and will continue to advise people to get what THEY know.
(Most of my computer using relatives know nothing about Macs, just that they can't stand them because they only have one mouse button, don't have any software, no one uses them at work, and are too expensive, blah, blah, blah. Guess what most of my extended family uses? Windows...)
I guess that's why us Apple fan(atic)s get so annoyingly evangelical: we have to get our 2% voices heard about the 97% louder voices.
At Comdex, Bill Gates stated Halo 2 was a phenomenal success and gave sales figures over the Christmas period which probably exceeded the download figure of ALL the Linux distros put together. All those people would have needed XBoxen, there are a lot of them out there, whether they're sold below cost or not.
How do you measure success?!
It relative terms, it means Halo alone (arguably the only good game the XBox has ever had relative to the better games of the PS2) has got enough people hooked on the XBox to make XBox 2 a real money spinner and hand PlayStation its ass on a plate. Thinks for the long term, does Bill G.
As for me, the XBox with its black and green motif reminds me of the interior of a Borg vessel. Seriously appropriate for Microsoft!
I wonder why anyone would be willing to watch tv on a micro screen.
I tried it for a bit - I ripped a few movies into the appropriate "lite" DivX format and watched them on my iPAQ (a 1GB flash card can hold quite a bit and my model could take both CF and SD cards).
It was okay at the start, but the novelty wore off fairly quickly. I guess I only started doing it "because it was there" and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I suspect most people who get keen on the Portable Media Center are like that. Still, as long as their interest lasts long enough to buy the devices, it's probably worth the manufacturers making them. Why should they care if they start kicking around the junk drawer in a month! Since when does technology HAVE to be used by everyone all the time? I disagree that Portable Media Center is a failure.
As much as generally hate dongles, I actually like the dongle system used to authorize OS X. It's called a Mac, and OS X won't run without it. Best DRM ever.
Funny, I hope you get modded up.
But actually, Apple does try to limit piracy of their stuff a bit:
I recently bought a PowerBook which came with iLife 05. Now, I already had a Power Mac G5 from the previous year. Naturally, I wanted the cool new stuff on the G5.
But you can't install iLife 05 from the PowerBook system disc, nor can you use a PowerBook system to install a PowerMac system (even though Mac OS X itself is one entity). Inevitable conclusion: have to go out and buy iLife 05.
However, there was a workaround: because OS X apps keep their stuff so well packaged, getting iDVD 5.0 from the PowerBook to the G5 was just a drag copy of a single 1.5GB file. GarageBand was a bit harder, but only because the music loops are installed in an Audio folder etc.
(Try any of that that under Windows with its million dependent.dll files hell.)
Ironically, if I'd bought a Mac mini for about a third of the price as the PowerBook, I would have got a dedicated iLife install disc... simply because the factory hadn't had time to pre-install it because the two products were released at the same time. They eventually will though.
[PS Before any of you Mac people put the 'atic' back in 'fan' - I'm damn well not ripping off Apple, I just wanted to use my bundled software on another machine.]
...another case of patent infringement against eSpeed, the US ecstasy dealer. Earlier this month the judge, in an interim decision, made comments favourable to TT's crotch, saying that eSpeed had not raised substantial questions against it's size.
:)
You don't do justice to the .torrents and eDonkeys
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd much rather spend 45 minutes illegally downloading some crap rip that has unnerving commercials for places that don't exist in my area than have a cheap machine do it for me automagically.
I agree with the gist of your post, but actually many of the "bootleg" TV episodes on BitTorrent and eDonkey are exceptionally high quality.
Many are recorded direct from HDTV and carefully encoded by real fans (doing virtually professional work as a labor of love). They have clean edits to remove the commercial breaks and good timing to avoid cut-offs at the end.
I just leave mine on top of a solitary perspex cube in the centre of my living room. I can't turn it on or use it at all (power leads are *so* ugly) but it makes a powerful expression of my place in society and position on the Apple purchasing ladder.
You're joking of course, but a "headless" mini could be used very well without a keyboard or mouse: accessing it via Timbuktu or Remote Desktop.
For the last few years, I've had a Cube with no keyboard or mouse running a "photo wall" (DVI connection to a plasma screen) which I administer purely through its AirPort card using Timbuktu.
As for powering it without a power-cord, you've heard of Power Over Ethernet, maybe it's time for "Power Over WiFi" which consists of a microwave oven with no door... [joking]
An adroit suggestion with just two small flaws. Firstly, that's not the right trailer and secondly, that's not the right trailer. I realise that technically this is just one flaw but I thought it important enough to mention twice.
Adroit quote indeed!
It seems it's possible to track the Red Dwarf DVD release schedule just by reading Slashdot posts.
And don't worry about turning on the safety protocols in case a holodeck creation breaks its programming and gets loose and goes on a rampage over the ship... because, hey, that almost never happens!
I mean, a formative childhood of Buck Rogers / Star Trek / Battlestar Galactica aside, what's so great about space? The real thing is not like that.
It has an enormous impact on the body from the G force, gamma rays, muscle atrophy, and long term consequences. (Doesn't NASA advise astronauts to have children before going into space, due to the impact on reproductive DNA?)
And when you're up there, aren't you just going to see what going to an IMAX theatre could show you, just in rather less comfort?
I don't know, maybe I'm being unadventurous. Pioneering is cool and I wholeheartedly support the professionals going up there, but "space tourism," I'm just not sure I get it.
I'm quite happy for the Neils and Buzzes of our time to do it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the fact that "while the rest of the world continues to work" is blatantly untrue - I've found the Winboys are far bigger cheerleaders and blinkered than the Mac fanboys. (Article of evidence No. 1: Paul Thurrott. Case closed.)
I'm not defending zealotry, but sometimes those with a minority voice HAVE to speak a bit louder in order to be heard:
Many work environments force a system on you, and if you've got an IT Manager who has the attitude "No Macs ever, over my dead body, I hate them and everyone who uses them" then it's hardly surprising the little Mac'ites get a bit vocal!
On a similar theme, I get annoyed when there are 2 buttons: "Agree" or "Disagree" but not a button saying "I believe both have valid arguments and don't want to take sides." Really hampers my productivity, being forced to agonize over that decision!
I suppose you do know you can customize OS X as well, don't you? Everything from WindowShade to Desktop Manager to LaunchBar to Quickeys and a few thousand others!
I agree with your point though: "people are most productive in whatever they're used to, and whatever suits them." I hope that's the theme that emerges from this Slashdot discussion.
True, but only if you get a choice...
Many work environments force a system on you, and if you've got an IT Manager who has the attitude "No Macs ever, over my dead body, I hate them and everyone who uses them" then it's hardly surprising the little Mac'ites get a bit vocal!
You make an interesting point, but it sounds to me like you have a fixed idea of how an interface should behave and are going to roundly criticize anything that doesn't conform to that.
Personally, I wouldn't like my Panther system to have ANY of the features you regard as critical:
Treating these choices as "utterly asinine" and "engineers have a track record of making really stupid decisions" really just demonstrates your own point of view.
If you want that flexibility, that's really one of the great strengths of LInux. I think you've answered the Slashdot topic's question!
Well, that would apply if the user never had to manage files, locate windows on the screen, use menubars, connect devices, drag and drop content, use popup menus/other GUI elements, install and find fonts, print, etc, etc.
All these things differ from OS to OS. Even if you spend all day in one platform-equivalent program like Photoshop, it is still quite a different experience going from XP to OS X. And most people do in fact spread their workflow over several programs with the same data, eg,: digital photo -> file storage -> image editing program -> page layout program -> PDF generator -> printer.
Or even if you're a command line user, actions such as OS X's path dragging into and between terminal windows differs from Linux/KDE.
The differences are more than subtle, and they are widespread, even with the same apps.
Maybe just spell it pC. Let the Winboys correct the capitalization for a change.
That's completely untrue as the other posters have said, but I also heard that story on the tour around Bletchley Park - the center of the British code-breaking people of WWII.
When I heard it, I found it funny that their own history contradicts that very tenuous link: when Apple was named, the code-breaking efforts of the Bletchley Park geniuses were still mostly secret, and the story of Alan Turing was very unlikely to be known by a couple of Atari employees in California.
(If they had, "Colossus" - the world's first codebreaking computer - would have been a great name for the original Mac!)
I think the misinformation stems from the amateur historians desperate to somehow get Bletchley linked to the wider world. It's an amusing anecdote, but a bit silly.
By the way, if you're in Britain, pay a visit to the place. It's pretty interesting.
I'll see your chain of US Sci-fi and raise you British Sci-fi:
Doctor Who > Blake's 7 > Red Dwarf > all the takes-itself-too-seriously-American crap
(Am actually a fan of the TITSAC so don't burn me too badly. Also haven't seen the new Doctor Who yet, which may suck relative to Tom Baker, so will have to wait and see.)
You're right, but the
To paraphrase Blackadder, the ape creatures of the Indus have mastered counting higher than 5.
Unless of course you're an agent of the Temporal Cold War and know something about the next 65 seasons that we don't!
Following your argument, you shouldn't let a son go into IT either.
they wanted the family geek's advice on what kind of computer to get to replace it.
Yes, I think that's how most people decide to buy computers - word of mouth from trusted friends & family.
Lucky for her (and Apple), you're obviously a Mac enthusiast, but 97% of the market is not, and will continue to advise people to get what THEY know.
(Most of my computer using relatives know nothing about Macs, just that they can't stand them because they only have one mouse button, don't have any software, no one uses them at work, and are too expensive, blah, blah, blah. Guess what most of my extended family uses? Windows...)
I guess that's why us Apple fan(atic)s get so annoyingly evangelical: we have to get our 2% voices heard about the 97% louder voices.
At Comdex, Bill Gates stated Halo 2 was a phenomenal success and gave sales figures over the Christmas period which probably exceeded the download figure of ALL the Linux distros put together. All those people would have needed XBoxen, there are a lot of them out there, whether they're sold below cost or not.
How do you measure success?!
It relative terms, it means Halo alone (arguably the only good game the XBox has ever had relative to the better games of the PS2) has got enough people hooked on the XBox to make XBox 2 a real money spinner and hand PlayStation its ass on a plate. Thinks for the long term, does Bill G.
As for me, the XBox with its black and green motif reminds me of the interior of a Borg vessel. Seriously appropriate for Microsoft!
I tried it for a bit - I ripped a few movies into the appropriate "lite" DivX format and watched them on my iPAQ (a 1GB flash card can hold quite a bit and my model could take both CF and SD cards).
It was okay at the start, but the novelty wore off fairly quickly. I guess I only started doing it "because it was there" and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I suspect most people who get keen on the Portable Media Center are like that. Still, as long as their interest lasts long enough to buy the devices, it's probably worth the manufacturers making them. Why should they care if they start kicking around the junk drawer in a month! Since when does technology HAVE to be used by everyone all the time? I disagree that Portable Media Center is a failure.
Er, you won didn't you? Your republican moron beat their democrat moron, and now someone who can't pronounce "nuclear" is in charge of launching them.
The dead horse would like a rest from the beating.
Funny, I hope you get modded up.
But actually, Apple does try to limit piracy of their stuff a bit:
I recently bought a PowerBook which came with iLife 05. Now, I already had a Power Mac G5 from the previous year. Naturally, I wanted the cool new stuff on the G5.
But you can't install iLife 05 from the PowerBook system disc, nor can you use a PowerBook system to install a PowerMac system (even though Mac OS X itself is one entity). Inevitable conclusion: have to go out and buy iLife 05.
However, there was a workaround: because OS X apps keep their stuff so well packaged, getting iDVD 5.0 from the PowerBook to the G5 was just a drag copy of a single 1.5GB file. GarageBand was a bit harder, but only because the music loops are installed in an Audio folder etc.
(Try any of that that under Windows with its million dependent .dll files hell.)
Ironically, if I'd bought a Mac mini for about a third of the price as the PowerBook, I would have got a dedicated iLife install disc... simply because the factory hadn't had time to pre-install it because the two products were released at the same time. They eventually will though.
[PS Before any of you Mac people put the 'atic' back in 'fan' - I'm damn well not ripping off Apple, I just wanted to use my bundled software on another machine.]
Are you saying Americans break a few stylistic rules here and there? Maybe, maybe.
You forgot:
"Take words that have had a "u" in them for at least five centuries and remove it, colour to color, etc."
I agree with the gist of your post, but actually many of the "bootleg" TV episodes on BitTorrent and eDonkey are exceptionally high quality.
Many are recorded direct from HDTV and carefully encoded by real fans (doing virtually professional work as a labor of love). They have clean edits to remove the commercial breaks and good timing to avoid cut-offs at the end.
You're joking of course, but a "headless" mini could be used very well without a keyboard or mouse: accessing it via Timbuktu or Remote Desktop.
For the last few years, I've had a Cube with no keyboard or mouse running a "photo wall" (DVI connection to a plasma screen) which I administer purely through its AirPort card using Timbuktu.
As for powering it without a power-cord, you've heard of Power Over Ethernet, maybe it's time for "Power Over WiFi" which consists of a microwave oven with no door... [joking]
Adroit quote indeed!
It seems it's possible to track the Red Dwarf DVD release schedule just by reading Slashdot posts.
And obligatory Futurama reference:
... because, hey, that almost never happens!
And don't worry about turning on the safety protocols in case a holodeck creation breaks its programming and gets loose and goes on a rampage over the ship
I mean, a formative childhood of Buck Rogers / Star Trek / Battlestar Galactica aside, what's so great about space? The real thing is not like that.
It has an enormous impact on the body from the G force, gamma rays, muscle atrophy, and long term consequences. (Doesn't NASA advise astronauts to have children before going into space, due to the impact on reproductive DNA?)
And when you're up there, aren't you just going to see what going to an IMAX theatre could show you, just in rather less comfort?
I don't know, maybe I'm being unadventurous. Pioneering is cool and I wholeheartedly support the professionals going up there, but "space tourism," I'm just not sure I get it.
I'm quite happy for the Neils and Buzzes of our time to do it for me.
So, a bit like your sig then.