You would be right if there were more than two major applications that only run on Macintosh. Even a graphic designer, the Mac's core market, can easily get a Wintel machine and run all the same tools. Whole graphic design shops changed all their machines over in 1996 and 97, once Windows got mature enough to make that an option. That's competition. If you take market share from somebody, you are their competitor. Apple almost went under, and as a result, they've emerged as a much, much, much better company today.
The only reason to use a Mac is because you like the computer better. Lots of people are buying their first Apple machines lately, but they're running all the same apps that they did on Windows.
As for the overpriced thing, that's already been done to death here on Slashdot. Compare Apple's prices to similar machines from other first-tier computer makers such as IBM, Compaq and Dell. It's a draw these days.
This debate is so fucking boring. Don't you have anything better to do than make anti-Apple rants? Aren't you too busy enjoying your own choice of computing technology to look around and piss on other people's choices? I am.
> I rather doubt GNU/Linux will be relagated > to a "niche market". Considering the > development model and its growing support, > there's nothing it could not theoretically > accomplish. However, it's becoming less of a > "theory" every day.. What will actually > happen is anybody's guess, but I seriously > doubt GNU/Linux will incur the intense > beating Java did after the hype settled down.
This kind of arrogance is exactly what this article is about. It used to be the sole province of the Mac user, but the torch has been passed. Mac users, and Apple themselves, are through trying to take over the world and are happy to play well with others and just improve and use the tools and let their merits speak for themselves. The hype gets in the way of a realistic assessment of weaknesses and strengths.
You may really dig Linux, say, for technical reasons, but you may not have predicted that for every user the technology wins over, the GPL drives ten away. I'm not saying it does, but it's a possibility. There may be ten more such possibilities that you haven't considered.
Personally, I think the Linux backlash is already underway. People are getting that Microsoftian bad taste in their mouths when they hear some of the rhetoric. You hear that you should use Linux even if it's not the best technical solution, because it's the wave of the future. Shit, that's Windows. That's the whole reason, the only reason, for using Windows.
Linux is already successful, though... why say that it's not? We may look back ten years from now and Linux might not even be in wide use, but we could look up from our various Unix desktops and be thankful that Linux poked a hole in Windows and showed that the Emporer had no clothes. What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with 10-20% of the market? Windows doesn't have 80% of desktops because it sucks so badly, it sucks so badly because it has 80% of desktops. The current Mac community are about as happy a group of computer users as you could find. 10% is really, really good.
Yeah, but which one is better in a reception area, or in a POS install? You see a lot of iMacs in those places because they're small, attractive, are easily networked, and most of all they're easy for newbies to use. Firewire, DVD and video mirroring, makes it a great machine for running multimedia presentations, and its looks will count in that respect as well. Hot plug a Firewire hard drive and you're ready to do a presentation.
Nobody's suggesting that businesses worldwide are going to replace all their beige boxes with graphite iMacs, but businesses are using this "home" computer more and more already, so a fully-loaded graphite one seems like Apple just responding to their needs.
The G3 laptops already make the (slow) mobile Pentium chips look really bad. You can argue the desktops, but Apple has owned the portable market for a long time.
>>What is the primary nature of many drug laws? >Not as much to protect them from there (sic) >stupidity as there (sic) ignorance. But also >to protect the state.
Honest citizens who take drugs like Valium(tm), Prozac(tm), Budweisser(tm) and Viagra(tm) will be rewarded. They will be allowed to keep half of their weekly salary. They will be secure in the knowledge that they are helping our great country's corporations in their quest to patent, manufacture and market EVERYTHING the consumer requires.
Dishonest Citizens who take drugs made from non-patentable plants such as cannabis, heroin, cocaine and LSD will be punished accordingly. They will be assigned numbers and sent to one of our nations many new prisons (manufactured by our great prison-building corporations) where they will be raped and tortured indiscriminately. Their names will be available in perpetuity to curious Honest Citizens through government Web sites. Their children will be sent to caring foster homes run by Honest Citizens. Their property will be forfeited to the state, who will auction it off for low prices to Honest Citizens. The state will use the money to outfit government police forces with more guns, body armor and surveillance equipment (purchased from more of America's great corporations).
... This ain't sci-fi... it's now, folks. Step up and get your barcode (patent pending).
>I think you have spewed too soon yourself, >becuase however much I am a Libertarian, >refusing to consider drug dealers as >criminals creates a worthless state >requireing welfare.
Look up the definition of libertarian: someone who doesn't consider the use of force to be a vaild tool for political or social change. Let me spell it out: it mean no put gun to head of pot-smoker, Linux-user or other heretic. Also check the timelines... the first drug laws were in the late 1800's and welfare didn't start until the mid-1900's. We spend much more on the Drug War and prisons than we do on welfare. Get a grip and a clue.
That's funny in a thread about UNIX diversity, given that Mac OS is becoming another UNIX, or being absorbed by an existing one, however you look at it.
You got all the inside information, but from a more mainstream perspective I can see where the second age is just starting...
Two years ago, they were toast. Nobody thought they were going to make it. They got rid of Amelio and they did not have a direction at all. You could count that as the end of the first age. They went all the way up and then all the way down. Rock bottom.
Steve Jobs steps in as interim CEO and the next two years are the comeback. Change all the product lines over to iMac, PowerMac G3, Bronze PowerBook G3 and iBook. Simpler, more colorful than the past. Lots of much-needed OS revisions, new plans for making the transition to OS X developer-friendly, open sourcing stuff, standard hardware everywhere. The iBook was the last of the four lines to be announced, and it was the first of the four lines that wasn't greeted in the press with "Can this save Apple?". Instead it was Time and Newsweek stories and pictures everywhere and two million iMacs sold in the first year and a lot of people really feeling like the comeback is over. Once the comeback is over, I guess you enter the second age.
When they announced the PowerMac G4, they seemed like they were in a new, less defensive mode. It wasn't like "here's what we've come up with to save the company" it was just "hey, we've got some kickass shit here". The "we've been profitable for seven quarters in a row" speech was greeted with yawns. People didn't need to hear reassurances that Apple was still going to be around, they just wanted to see some new, exciting stuff.
Uh, they compete with a little group called Wintel. They make computers in the same price range as IBM, Compaq, Dell and Gateway, that run the same major applications. They have so much competition, they almost went out of business two years ago. They are gaining BACK market share right now. People who replaced Macs with Compaqs in 1996 are replacing the Compaqs with Macs in 1999.
Just because all the other PC companies choose not to compete against each other on anything but price and add-on features doesn't mean that they're not collectively a tough competitor for Apple.
>I hate the fact the Mac ships with no >development tools. >At least ship a BASIC...:)
AppleScript is a pretty good way for someone to get started with programming, though. It's not hard and you can do a lot of things with it. Saving a script as an application is pretty cool for newbies. I can imagine quite a few moving on from there to Metrowerks Discover Programming or to RealBasic.
I also heard that the G4 firmware block is temporary... to keep people from putting in G4 chips and not being able to boot 8.6.
Wow. You better check yourself. A guy wonders why everybody on Star Trek is straight and suddenly you're talking about "immoral fags spouting their bs philosophy while they blow each other in space"? Get some help, man. I know it's tough to be straight and all, but please!
Go read Nichelle Nicols biography and check out some of the hate mail she received when she was playing Uhura on the original series. That's you, brother. You "watch TV to be entertained", you don't want some "community's agenda" interfering with that. You're part of the "HUGE majority of Americans" who are "normal".
Man, even the fact that the characters in the original series could use technology without wearing glasses and pocket protectors was cutting edge stuff for the time. Where is the challenge in today's Star Trek? The leadership, the vision, the UNEXPECTED? Slashdot's opinion on Star Trek today seems to be "too bland". Your response: make it blander, gimme more of the same. Today's Star Trek has been Fortune 500 approved for saleability and cross-marketability.
And it has to be said: the guy in the dress wasn't necessarily gay, same as women in pants aren't necessarily lesbian. A hundred years ago women couldn't wear pants, but three or four hundred years from now men can't wear skirts?
>How will spacemen in dresses entertain the >majority of the population?
They wouldn't. But talented, happy, productive characters who also happen to be homosexual might entertain them by opening their minds... showing them something that might be (unfortunately) new to them.
Re:FireWire and USB are not one in the same.
on
Is firewire dying?
·
· Score: 1
The point is that USB always requires a host... one device is boss and the others all plug into it in some way. Firewire is peer-to-peer. There's no hub, and you just daisy-chain devices as required. None of them has to be a computer, or something as sophisticated as a computer. Camcorder to VCR to audio system to TV to hard drive to DVD-ROM and they're all talking. Take any one device away and they're all still talking. With USB, there's always one device the rest are relying upon. Intel is hoping that future communications between electronic devices will always require a (mostly Intel-based) PC.
> The price for a 2GB or a 4GB hard drive that supports FireWire is ridiculous...
You're looking at the little pocket-sized ones (from VST probably) that take their power from the Firewire bus. They'd be expensive no matter what the technology... they're notebook drives in little custom enclosures and they're built to be carried around and roughed up a bit and still work.
You can get an 18GB 7200rpm external Firewire drive for $400 (I just did recently). It's an IBM drive in a MacTell "Firepower" enclosure. That's about the same price as the equivalent SCSI drive but its plug, play and forget. Add another by plugging into the first all the way up to 63. Works NOW, works great.
Everybody here who's mourning the passing of Firewire along with Intel is in great danger of making a fool out of him or herself.
Re:May be dying on the Intel side of things...
on
Is firewire dying?
·
· Score: 1
>Intel leads the market.
Intel doesn't lead anything. You can build all the USB ports you want, but most Windows machines right now don't even have working USB 1.0 software. Only Windows 98 has passable USB support, and it's not even in the same ballpark as what Apple has done in Mac OS. It certainly doesn't give manufacturers the feeling that they can ship devices out the door and not worry too much about tons of support calls.
Go back and read Intel's press release about USB 1.0. It was going to immediately kill the old-style serial and parallel ports and lead to a new age of plug-and-play computing. The only place that happened is on Macs. Last year, for publicity, Intel plugged 111 devices into a PC to set a world record, but many of them didn't work. The next day, Apple employees plugged 127 working devices into a Mac while drunk.
I'm not mentioning this as some sort of Mac vs PC thing. I'm just pointing out the history of the adoption of USB 1.0 and saying that USB 2.0 has a similar road to go down. Wintel + IBM, Compaq, Gateway, Dell, et al is one great big company with competing divisions and it doesn't move quickly. Especially Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Firewire 2.0 is totally alive and totally well... built into all digital camcorders, all high-end digital still cameras, all blue and silver PowerMacs, lots of Sony PC's (they don't call it Firewire, though), other PC's through add-on cards, some PowerBooks and the upcoming iMac revision. Lots of devices available, the software is mature, the hardware is cheap, no hubs required, and Firewire 3.0 will double current performance.
$290 extra is CHEAP to get Firewire, room for 1 gig of RAM, a beautiful and practical enclosure and USB that actually works.
The anti-Mac ranting on Slashdot is so tiresome, especially from Linux users, who should know better. The Mac is EXACTLY as impossible to upgrade as Linux is impossible to install. And Linux is not that hard to install.
And, by the way, Steve Jobs is EXACTLY as weird as Linux Torvalds. Just ask Bill Gates.
If real email clients are so cheap, why have Web-based email? Access from anywhere and ease of entry for the beginning user.
After you've spent an hour or two helping a writer friend get Office installed and patched and running and help him to navigate past the paper clip doing its "Welcome to Word" routine you (and him) really wish he could dial-in to somewhere and have a fully-functional up-to-date office app to run that's administered remotely. There are lots of people right now acting as their own sysadmins because they have to. They'd love an alternative where they get to just use the system.
Plus, even in America, something like half the adult population doesn't even use a computer yet. These people are not going to be screwing around with a Windows PC just to run Office, no matter how cheap the PC is. If they can boot up a terminal that always works and get a word processor that always works, they'll do some word processing. That's a big, untapped market.
I'd love a PPC, but Steve Jobs is still making closed, proprietary systems that can never be upgraded.
I have a blue G3 here with two empty PCI slots, 62 empty Firewire spots, 119 empty USB spots, two empty DIMM slots that can each take 256MB to bring me up to 1GB of RAM, three empty hard drive bays and the CPU is in a ZIF and can be swapped for a G4. On top of that, the whole guts of the machine come out onto the desktop when you pull the latch so it's easy to put stuff in and take it out. The last thing I added to it was an external 18GB Firewire hard drive (about the same price as a similar SCSI drive) that hot-plugged in and went right to work with no configuration at all. Are you really telling me this machine can't be upgraded, or is that just something you read in PC Magazine in 1994?
You can't compare the specs of each format as written, you have to compare how they are in the real world of browser support. That's what defines the suitability of something for the Web, and that's where the two formats compete.
Image Swaps GIF: yes PNG: not when viewed with a Plug-in
Right now there are billions of animated GIF banner ads and transparent GIF images that cannot be replaced with PNG. There are billions of JavaScript rollovers that cannot be replaced with PNG without being Windows-only.
The problem is that Web standards are at a standstill at the client level. Microsoft killed the commercial browser market and the free one (as in open, not free as in price) hasn't really started yet. Until then, we have universal support for JPEG, GIF, tables, font tags, JavaScript 1.0 and all the other junk that's left over from when the Web was young. Anything newer is spotty. What Unisys is doing is just exposing that flaw... years after the GIF patent issue came up, PNG support is JUST GETTING STARTED.
Slashdot Mirror
You would be right if there were more than two major applications that only run on Macintosh. Even a graphic designer, the Mac's core market, can easily get a Wintel machine and run all the same tools. Whole graphic design shops changed all their machines over in 1996 and 97, once Windows got mature enough to make that an option. That's competition. If you take market share from somebody, you are their competitor. Apple almost went under, and as a result, they've emerged as a much, much, much better company today.
The only reason to use a Mac is because you like the computer better. Lots of people are buying their first Apple machines lately, but they're running all the same apps that they did on Windows.
As for the overpriced thing, that's already been done to death here on Slashdot. Compare Apple's prices to similar machines from other first-tier computer makers such as IBM, Compaq and Dell. It's a draw these days.
This debate is so fucking boring. Don't you have anything better to do than make anti-Apple rants? Aren't you too busy enjoying your own choice of computing technology to look around and piss on other people's choices? I am.
> I rather doubt GNU/Linux will be relagated
... why say that it's not? We may look back ten years from now and Linux might not even be in wide use, but we could look up from our various Unix desktops and be thankful that Linux poked a hole in Windows and showed that the Emporer had no clothes. What's wrong with that?
> to a "niche market". Considering the
> development model and its growing support,
> there's nothing it could not theoretically
> accomplish. However, it's becoming less of a
> "theory" every day.. What will actually
> happen is anybody's guess, but I seriously
> doubt GNU/Linux will incur the intense
> beating Java did after the hype settled down.
This kind of arrogance is exactly what this article is about. It used to be the sole province of the Mac user, but the torch has been passed. Mac users, and Apple themselves, are through trying to take over the world and are happy to play well with others and just improve and use the tools and let their merits speak for themselves. The hype gets in the way of a realistic assessment of weaknesses and strengths.
You may really dig Linux, say, for technical reasons, but you may not have predicted that for every user the technology wins over, the GPL drives ten away. I'm not saying it does, but it's a possibility. There may be ten more such possibilities that you haven't considered.
Personally, I think the Linux backlash is already underway. People are getting that Microsoftian bad taste in their mouths when they hear some of the rhetoric. You hear that you should use Linux even if it's not the best technical solution, because it's the wave of the future. Shit, that's Windows. That's the whole reason, the only reason, for using Windows.
Linux is already successful, though
What's wrong with 10-20% of the market? Windows doesn't have 80% of desktops because it sucks so badly, it sucks so badly because it has 80% of desktops. The current Mac community are about as happy a group of computer users as you could find. 10% is really, really good.
Apple doesn't have a Unix history? WTF?
Yeah, but which one is better in a reception area, or in a POS install? You see a lot of iMacs in those places because they're small, attractive, are easily networked, and most of all they're easy for newbies to use. Firewire, DVD and video mirroring, makes it a great machine for running multimedia presentations, and its looks will count in that respect as well. Hot plug a Firewire hard drive and you're ready to do a presentation.
Nobody's suggesting that businesses worldwide are going to replace all their beige boxes with graphite iMacs, but businesses are using this "home" computer more and more already, so a fully-loaded graphite one seems like Apple just responding to their needs.
Yeah, and Firewire's dead, right? Ha ha.
The G3 laptops already make the (slow) mobile Pentium chips look really bad. You can argue the desktops, but Apple has owned the portable market for a long time.
And then you go up exponentially from there if you want to apply those real time effects to video, or render massive 3D spaces.
...
Computers aren't fast enough until there are no wait cursors or progress meters
> and that the G4 makes this possible for
> wont of a RTOS.
Isn't Apple's Darwin a Real Time OS? I thought I read that in an article about QuickTime Streaming Server.
>>What is the primary nature of many drug laws?
... it's now, folks. Step up and get your barcode (patent pending).
... the first drug laws were in the late 1800's and welfare didn't start until the mid-1900's. We spend much more on the Drug War and prisons than we do on welfare. Get a grip and a clue.
>Not as much to protect them from there (sic)
>stupidity as there (sic) ignorance. But also
>to protect the state.
Honest citizens who take drugs like Valium(tm), Prozac(tm), Budweisser(tm) and Viagra(tm) will be rewarded. They will be allowed to keep half of their weekly salary. They will be secure in the knowledge that they are helping our great country's corporations in their quest to patent, manufacture and market EVERYTHING the consumer requires.
Dishonest Citizens who take drugs made from non-patentable plants such as cannabis, heroin, cocaine and LSD will be punished accordingly. They will be assigned numbers and sent to one of our nations many new prisons (manufactured by our great prison-building corporations) where they will be raped and tortured indiscriminately. Their names will be available in perpetuity to curious Honest Citizens through government Web sites. Their children will be sent to caring foster homes run by Honest Citizens. Their property will be forfeited to the state, who will auction it off for low prices to Honest Citizens. The state will use the money to outfit government police forces with more guns, body armor and surveillance equipment (purchased from more of America's great corporations).
... This ain't sci-fi
>I think you have spewed too soon yourself,
>becuase however much I am a Libertarian,
>refusing to consider drug dealers as
>criminals creates a worthless state
>requireing welfare.
Look up the definition of libertarian: someone who doesn't consider the use of force to be a vaild tool for political or social change. Let me spell it out: it mean no put gun to head of pot-smoker, Linux-user or other heretic. Also check the timelines
That's funny in a thread about UNIX diversity, given that Mac OS is becoming another UNIX, or being absorbed by an existing one, however you look at it.
You got all the inside information, but from a more mainstream perspective I can see where the second age is just starting ...
Two years ago, they were toast. Nobody thought they were going to make it. They got rid of Amelio and they did not have a direction at all. You could count that as the end of the first age. They went all the way up and then all the way down. Rock bottom.
Steve Jobs steps in as interim CEO and the next two years are the comeback. Change all the product lines over to iMac, PowerMac G3, Bronze PowerBook G3 and iBook. Simpler, more colorful than the past. Lots of much-needed OS revisions, new plans for making the transition to OS X developer-friendly, open sourcing stuff, standard hardware everywhere. The iBook was the last of the four lines to be announced, and it was the first of the four lines that wasn't greeted in the press with "Can this save Apple?". Instead it was Time and Newsweek stories and pictures everywhere and two million iMacs sold in the first year and a lot of people really feeling like the comeback is over. Once the comeback is over, I guess you enter the second age.
When they announced the PowerMac G4, they seemed like they were in a new, less defensive mode. It wasn't like "here's what we've come up with to save the company" it was just "hey, we've got some kickass shit here". The "we've been profitable for seven quarters in a row" speech was greeted with yawns. People didn't need to hear reassurances that Apple was still going to be around, they just wanted to see some new, exciting stuff.
>Apple has no competitors
Uh, they compete with a little group called Wintel. They make computers in the same price range as IBM, Compaq, Dell and Gateway, that run the same major applications. They have so much competition, they almost went out of business two years ago. They are gaining BACK market share right now. People who replaced Macs with Compaqs in 1996 are replacing the Compaqs with Macs in 1999.
Just because all the other PC companies choose not to compete against each other on anything but price and add-on features doesn't mean that they're not collectively a tough competitor for Apple.
>I hate the fact the Mac ships with no :)
... to keep people from putting in G4 chips and not being able to boot 8.6.
>development tools.
>At least ship a BASIC...
AppleScript is a pretty good way for someone to get started with programming, though. It's not hard and you can do a lot of things with it. Saving a script as an application is pretty cool for newbies. I can imagine quite a few moving on from there to Metrowerks Discover Programming or to RealBasic.
I also heard that the G4 firmware block is temporary
Wow. You better check yourself. A guy wonders why everybody on Star Trek is straight and suddenly you're talking about "immoral fags spouting their bs philosophy while they blow each other in space"? Get some help, man. I know it's tough to be straight and all, but please!
... showing them something that might be (unfortunately) new to them.
Go read Nichelle Nicols biography and check out some of the hate mail she received when she was playing Uhura on the original series. That's you, brother. You "watch TV to be entertained", you don't want some "community's agenda" interfering with that. You're part of the "HUGE majority of Americans" who are "normal".
Man, even the fact that the characters in the original series could use technology without wearing glasses and pocket protectors was cutting edge stuff for the time. Where is the challenge in today's Star Trek? The leadership, the vision, the UNEXPECTED? Slashdot's opinion on Star Trek today seems to be "too bland". Your response: make it blander, gimme more of the same. Today's Star Trek has been Fortune 500 approved for saleability and cross-marketability.
And it has to be said: the guy in the dress wasn't necessarily gay, same as women in pants aren't necessarily lesbian. A hundred years ago women couldn't wear pants, but three or four hundred years from now men can't wear skirts?
>How will spacemen in dresses entertain the
>majority of the population?
They wouldn't. But talented, happy, productive characters who also happen to be homosexual might entertain them by opening their minds
The point is that USB always requires a host ... one device is boss and the others all plug into it in some way. Firewire is peer-to-peer. There's no hub, and you just daisy-chain devices as required. None of them has to be a computer, or something as sophisticated as a computer. Camcorder to VCR to audio system to TV to hard drive to DVD-ROM and they're all talking. Take any one device away and they're all still talking. With USB, there's always one device the rest are relying upon. Intel is hoping that future communications between electronic devices will always require a (mostly Intel-based) PC.
> The price for a 2GB or a 4GB hard drive that supports FireWire is ridiculous ...
... they're notebook drives in little custom enclosures and they're built to be carried around and roughed up a bit and still work.
You're looking at the little pocket-sized ones (from VST probably) that take their power from the Firewire bus. They'd be expensive no matter what the technology
You can get an 18GB 7200rpm external Firewire drive for $400 (I just did recently). It's an IBM drive in a MacTell "Firepower" enclosure. That's about the same price as the equivalent SCSI drive but its plug, play and forget. Add another by plugging into the first all the way up to 63. Works NOW, works great.
Everybody here who's mourning the passing of Firewire along with Intel is in great danger of making a fool out of him or herself.
>Intel leads the market.
... built into all digital camcorders, all high-end digital still cameras, all blue and silver PowerMacs, lots of Sony PC's (they don't call it Firewire, though), other PC's through add-on cards, some PowerBooks and the upcoming iMac revision. Lots of devices available, the software is mature, the hardware is cheap, no hubs required, and Firewire 3.0 will double current performance.
Intel doesn't lead anything. You can build all the USB ports you want, but most Windows machines right now don't even have working USB 1.0 software. Only Windows 98 has passable USB support, and it's not even in the same ballpark as what Apple has done in Mac OS. It certainly doesn't give manufacturers the feeling that they can ship devices out the door and not worry too much about tons of support calls.
Go back and read Intel's press release about USB 1.0. It was going to immediately kill the old-style serial and parallel ports and lead to a new age of plug-and-play computing. The only place that happened is on Macs. Last year, for publicity, Intel plugged 111 devices into a PC to set a world record, but many of them didn't work. The next day, Apple employees plugged 127 working devices into a Mac while drunk.
I'm not mentioning this as some sort of Mac vs PC thing. I'm just pointing out the history of the adoption of USB 1.0 and saying that USB 2.0 has a similar road to go down. Wintel + IBM, Compaq, Gateway, Dell, et al is one great big company with competing divisions and it doesn't move quickly. Especially Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Firewire 2.0 is totally alive and totally well
It's on an expansion chassis, isn't it? Only needs one of the machine's slots.
>1499-1209=290
$290 extra is CHEAP to get Firewire, room for 1 gig of RAM, a beautiful and practical enclosure and USB that actually works.
The anti-Mac ranting on Slashdot is so tiresome, especially from Linux users, who should know better. The Mac is EXACTLY as impossible to upgrade as Linux is impossible to install. And Linux is not that hard to install.
And, by the way, Steve Jobs is EXACTLY as weird as Linux Torvalds. Just ask Bill Gates.
If real email clients are so cheap, why have Web-based email? Access from anywhere and ease of entry for the beginning user.
After you've spent an hour or two helping a writer friend get Office installed and patched and running and help him to navigate past the paper clip doing its "Welcome to Word" routine you (and him) really wish he could dial-in to somewhere and have a fully-functional up-to-date office app to run that's administered remotely. There are lots of people right now acting as their own sysadmins because they have to. They'd love an alternative where they get to just use the system.
Plus, even in America, something like half the adult population doesn't even use a computer yet. These people are not going to be screwing around with a Windows PC just to run Office, no matter how cheap the PC is. If they can boot up a terminal that always works and get a word processor that always works, they'll do some word processing. That's a big, untapped market.
These cases are 19" tall without the handles (deliberately so). You unscrew the handles and screw on rack ears from a third-party and you're done.
I'd love a PPC, but Steve Jobs is still making closed, proprietary systems that can never be upgraded.
I have a blue G3 here with two empty PCI slots, 62 empty Firewire spots, 119 empty USB spots, two empty DIMM slots that can each take 256MB to bring me up to 1GB of RAM, three empty hard drive bays and the CPU is in a ZIF and can be swapped for a G4. On top of that, the whole guts of the machine come out onto the desktop when you pull the latch so it's easy to put stuff in and take it out. The last thing I added to it was an external 18GB Firewire hard drive (about the same price as a similar SCSI drive) that hot-plugged in and went right to work with no configuration at all. Are you really telling me this machine can't be upgraded, or is that just something you read in PC Magazine in 1994?
The 500Mhz G4 costs the same as 2Ghz worth of PIII.
You could also say that the 500MHz G4 costs the same as 160MHz of Palm V and it would be just as valid a comparison.
You can't compare the specs of each format as written, you have to compare how they are in the real world of browser support. That's what defines the suitability of something for the Web, and that's where the two formats compete.
... years after the GIF patent issue came up, PNG support is JUST GETTING STARTED.
Alpha Channel
GIF: 1-bit PNG: none
(note: I'm talking browser support)
Animation
GIF: yes PNG: no
Universally Viewable
GIF: yes PNG: no
Image Swaps
GIF: yes PNG: not when viewed with a Plug-in
Right now there are billions of animated GIF banner ads and transparent GIF images that cannot be replaced with PNG. There are billions of JavaScript rollovers that cannot be replaced with PNG without being Windows-only.
The problem is that Web standards are at a standstill at the client level. Microsoft killed the commercial browser market and the free one (as in open, not free as in price) hasn't really started yet. Until then, we have universal support for JPEG, GIF, tables, font tags, JavaScript 1.0 and all the other junk that's left over from when the Web was young. Anything newer is spotty. What Unisys is doing is just exposing that flaw
Got to be <= 256 colors because it's an animated GIF. You can drop in your own in place of it, if you want.