There is nothing in the Libertarian Party platform that says child pornography will be tolerated. The true crime of child pornography is not the lustful satisfaction of the pedophile, but the kidnapping and abuse of children.
Having said that, though, drawing a picture of a naked child (even without a live model) can get you jail time in many countries, and the US is heading there, too. In a libertarian society, you could think and draw and say what you want, but you could not force children into fake sex acts, whether you sell pictures or movies of it or not.
> Without income tax...
> the United States as a world power will
> just be a memory looming in the back of our minds.
The US is a "world power" because a) the US is the best hunk of land in the world, bar none (look at a map that includes glaciers and farmable land and you'll see what I mean), and b) it has traditionally been very free, and that attracts smart and/or hard-working people like flowers attract bees. Einstein left Europe and came to America to avoid Hitler, y'know?
So, all these smart and/or hard-working people, living in the Land of Milk and Honey as they do, did amazing things like create the personal computer, which in turn made everybody around them that much smarter and hard-working. Now, we hit the start of the 21st century and as all these smart and/or hard-working people take stock of where we are as a society, we are beginning to notice that a small group of politicians have been forcibly taking a huge chunk of the dividends of all this smartness and hard work and have been using that money to censor and imprison the politically unpopular domestically and abroad, to fight and export a senseless war on non-patentable drugs, and to basically kill and make enemies of a lot of mostly brown-skinned people all around the world. What's more, they spent the projected income tax take from our children and grandchildren, too.
What should be done about this? Should we all just go back to our hard work and hope that somehow, in some way, this small group of (mostly old, mostly rich, mostly white) people will eventually be able to find it in themselves to properly spend half the nation's money? Or do we tell them all to get real jobs? Do we say to George W. Bush, "you are not smart or hard-working, and we're not going to let you pretend to be"? He made his fortune selling a baseball stadium that was built by taxpayers to private investors. He is your Lord and Master by birthright, and he may soon be your King.
We have more prisoners than any other country in the world. We kill more foreigners than any other country in the world. Think about those two things. Is that the America you learned about in school? Thomas Jefferson once said "this freedom of writing and speaking one's mind... I fear it shall not come to pass in my lifetime". He obviously had hoped at one time that it would come to pass in his lifetime. Here we are 200 years later, with the ability to send a letter across the world in the blink of an eye for almost-free, and the United States gov't is one of the leaders in the mission to censor the Internet. This is astounding and sad.
Our grandfathers made a deal with the gov't: we will give you half of our money if you will eradicate poverty, suffering, moral bankrupcy, and intoxication. Did the experiment work? Now is the time for us to really ask that question, at the beginning of this new century. Personally, I don't think it has. I don't think the gov't of the United States is a very good representative of its people at all. We paid a King's ransom over the last 90 years, and all it bought us was Kings. It's time to go back to the Constitution and leave power with the people, where it rightly rests, where it belongs. It does not belong with a succession of George Bush's and Al Gore's, smiling and waving their hands like crown princes while their politician fathers look on.
What's the user fee for things in the public good, such as missile defence?
We don't have a missile defense. That's one of the big Libertarian points. The gov't spends its defense bugdet on offense. The military is killing brown-skinned people the world over instead of defending America. In fact, it is also pissing off a lot of brown-skinned people that it hasn't killed, who now want to kill Americans, therefore making us even less than neutrally safe.
Actual, real, defense against foreign threats would be one of the few things that a Libertarian Federal gov't would spend money on. It doesn't make sense for the states to do that individually.
The US was able to survive without income tax because they owned an extrememly large piece of real estate: all the land west of civilization. You'll notice that once the land dried up, that's when they implemented income tax.
The Federal gov't still owns something like 47% of the western states.
> Any state which profitted as people killed
> themselves with cocaine or heroine would not be
> looked at favorably by the rest of the world.
As opposed to how we're looked at now? We are the laughing stock of the world when it comes to "illicit" drugs. Former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey has traveled all around the world telling lies, buying complicity from other gov'ts, and threatening the Netherlands. This is true missionary stuff... this is missionaries with lots of money and guns. We are feared and derided the world over because of the Drug War. There are people dying of terminal illnesses the world over who can't get pain relief because opium and cannabis are internationally outlawed (thanks to us), and that was all they had. There are places where people can't afford an aspirin, but they could have grown their own cannabis, or it grew wild, except that the US gov't sprayed their town with pesticides that kill cannabis. The newest thing to come out of the DEA is a fungus that kills the hemp plant. I guess it will be good for Pfizer.
The only reason people die from cocaine or heroin in the first place is that it's hard to get proper doses from a guy on the street, so it's easy to OD. Pharmaceutical companies are forbidden (by the gov't) from manufacturing safe, labeled, quality controlled doses of these drugs, so people die. Doctors are forbidden (by the gov't) to prescribe heroin for a heroin addict, even though the addict needs heroin as much as a diabetic needs insulin. A small, but regular, dose is all the person needs to live a normal life. If they miss a few days, then they need a big dose, which gets them high and stops them from functioning at work, etc., so they lose their jobs and houses and families and end up in the street. The number of heroin and cocaine users is completely insignificant, though, which is why cannabis is still illegal. You need to round out the numbers so you can spend $50,000,000,000 per year on cops.
Whatever ways there are to create revenue for the gov't besides income tax, there are surely better ways for the gov't to spend $50,000,000,000 per year than hiring cops to harrass doctors, patients, drug addicts, drug users (only a small percentage of cocaine and heroin users are addicts, unlike caffeine or nicotine), and everybody else who gets in their way.
> Ayn Rand advocated a voluntary contribution
> system (which, of course, is unworkable for
> items of public good
People are happy to pay when you give them something in return. People are happy to give to charities when they a) have a little extra to give, b) know there is a true need, and c) have confidence that the people they are giving money to will actually use it to help someone. If you map charitable giving on a graph against tax rates, you will see that they are exactly opposite. After income tax and the New Deal, people started giving much of their income to the gov't, and stopped giving money to charities and churches. I mean, wasn't that the idea? The gov't was going to take that money and eradicate poverty and human suffering. Also, intoxication... they were also going to eradicate that.
However, when the gov't takes half of someone's money, they are not going to have a sympathetic ear when you come around for some money for a real purpose. This distortion -- the fact that you think people won't give money to charity unless they're forced, as they are now -- is another tragedy of this kind of size of gov't. I already "gave at the office", right? Unfortunately, my money is being used to hunt down pot smokers and ruin their lives, or to kill peasants in the coco fields in Columbia, or to shoot migrant farm workers who cross the US-Mexican border. These people have been following the harvest for centuries, but it's only since the Federal gov't started taking income tax that they could afford to put people on the border so they could shoot all the brown-skinned people they see. These people are picking avacadoes for a ridiculously small amount of money so our food prices stay cheap. I'm not saying that's right, either, but is shooting them right?
Fact is, charitable organizations that are actually on the street, doing the real work, would almost kill for just a tiny fraction of what the Federal gov't wastes by its very existence. Actual man-years that just go down the toilet all the time. That 20 year-old college kid that just got busted for LSD and put in jail for 15 years could have been the next John Lennon, or the next Einstein, but we'll never know. North and South America could be completely at peace, but the US gov't just can't stop shooting people who live to the south of us. They are always willing to send the military thousands of miles to kill brown-skinned people. Why aren't those soldiers at home with their families? Because the military surely doesn't want a smaller cut of the income tax pie next year than they had this year, and they killed X number of brown-skinned people last year, so they need to kill X+5% if they want a 5% budget increase this year.
This unchecked, drunk-on-its-own-power Federal gov't has been a very bad ambassador for the US. In the history of the world, there has never been a bigger, more powerful, answer-to-nobody organization than what we've created by just blindly giving over so much money to the few people who really run the gov't. The only thing to rival our gov't's power are the drug cartels that have become so rich by taking advantage of the world's biggest unregulated recreational drug market: the United States. When you can sell $1 worth of cocaine for $1000, you are not looking for things to change anytime soon. Pfizer wishes it had it so good, but then again, Pfizer doesn't want to Valium(tm) to have to compete with cannabis(no tm), either.
Just brilliant Mr. Browne. Only one question: Then why the heck are you in politics?
If you look into the Libertarian Party, you'll see that its history is full of people who run for an office, get elected, and then either shut down that office, or greatly reduce its size and tax intake. The other classic thing is to find one Libertarian on a city council, dissenting on every tax increase.
Mr. Browne doesn't even take the gov't funds he's "entitled" to in order to fund his campaign. He's very clear that he is in politics to restore the Constitution of the United States of America, which provides for a small Federal government with very limited powers. It does not grant the Federal gov't the power to create agencies like the IRS, the ATF, the DEA, and the INS. He just said on this very Slashdot page that the first thing he will do as President would be to free political prisoners. I mean, the man is fighting for freedom. Before you snicker at that, please take some time to answer these questions for yourself (use the Internet... it will be a wild, and educational ride):
How many wars has the US gov't fought in the last ten years? (Declared or undeclared.)
How many people has the US gov't killed, both domestically and abroad, in the last decade? How many were civilians?
I have to pause here to say RIP, my friend, Peter McWilliams. Read Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do (free online, or also available at your bookstore), and think about the fact that its author died because the gov't stood between him and his doctor.
How many political prisoners has the US gov't taken in the last decade while the prison population doubled? (If Harry Browne would free them and Al Gore wouldn't, they are political prisoners. Amnesty International considers them so.)
How much property has the US gov't seized without due process in the past decade? In how many of those cases were criminal charges made?
This shit is enlightening, and painful, and shocking. It demands action. It's hard to open your eyes (red pill or blue pill, etc), but you have to sometime. If you're a White American, you are standing idly by while the gov't harasses, imprisons, and kills Black and Hispanic Americans for political points every day. They are doing this. It is a fact. People are dying. Families are being destroyed wholesale. Try and get used to it and then decide what you are going to do about it, if anything.
This is the perfect election to vote Libertarian. George W. Bush and Al Gore are such interchangeable bozos, it just doesn't make a difference if you "waste your vote" and we get one instead of the other. What counts is to send a message of protest, to show that there can be political change in the US, so that the 2004 election campaigns will be about real issues. Harry Browne is the candidate for President for America's third largest political party, and he said right here on Slashdot that he had a question that he'd really like to ask Al Gore and George Bush. He has not had the opportunity. A substantial Libertarian vote this November might lead to Mr. Browne or his successor being involved in the 2004 Presidential debates. By then, the media may have adjusted for all of its current infotainment leanings and we may have more actual journalism (why did David Letterman ask G.W. Bush the toughest questions he's faced so far?). You can make your vote actually count this November by voting Libertarian.
Either you have freedom of religion, or you don't. Freedom to choose between government-approved or majority-approved religions is not freedom. Why is it any of your business whether 1 person, or 100 people, or 100,000 people in the world satisfy their religious desires with Wicca? Why do you care? How do you propose to stop them? Why does it impress you that Dubya denounces a small and politically powerless group of people?
Einstein was an atheist, but he believed that humans have a common religious feeling, as if there were a "religion gland". He "saw god" through his work studying the universe itself. Other people see god in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the music of John Coltrane, or the rituals that are passed on to them by their parents. But where people see god and what they choose to do about it is their business, as long as they don't harm the person or property of another person.
Or, we could just send in the FBI or ATF with tanks and grenade launchers. How those people sleep with themselves at night is beyond me. It seems like you blame Koresh for Waco, though. Bizarre. Why was the ATF even there in the first place? They said Koresh was a Drug Lord with a meth lab and a stockpile of automatic weapons. Once it came out that there was no lab and no drugs, Koresh was recast as a Cult Leader. As long as he's a Menace to Society, I guess it's OK to roll up a tank and kill him.
> It's nothing more than a cult based around a
> liberal interpretation of witchcraft.
What do you call raising the dead, healing the sick with a touch, being conceived without intercourse, and having armies of winged helpers at your beck and call? Or parting the Red Sea, flaming hailstorms, and solor eclipses on command? That is some magical shit. You can piss on Christianity or Judaism with the same line you used on Wicca.
25% of citizens 18-24 cannot name both major party presidential candidates and 70% cannot name their running mates.
People say this kind of thing with a shake of the head and a cluck of the tongue. But why should people give a fuck who these guys are? The government will be stealing your money and fucking you over next year no matter which golden boy of the Democratic Republican Party gets the big chair and all the photo-ops. People have other things to worry about in life, like how to make the rent from their after-tax income, or how they're going to find the time and money to regularly travel the 500 miles to visit their sister who's in Federal prison for the next 20 years because her boyfriend sold some pot to a friend of hers or something. Life is going on while G.W. Bush and Al Gore have their asses kissed by the media everywhere they go.
These fuckers are tyrants, and we're supposed to read up on their activities and even give a shit? No way. They spent almost every minute of their "debates" basically saying 'I agree with him, but I'll spend more of any future surplus on this issue than he will'.
By the way, if you have a non-violent friend or loved one in prison in the US right now (60% of the over 2 million incarcerated), keep in mind that Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party said that he would pardon those people on his first day in office. If they are actually addicted to a drug (most are not), they will get treatment, because a Libertarian government won't get between you and your doctor, even if your medical treatment requires that you take a maintenance dose of a "recreational" drug for the rest of your life.
Re:That's NOT a 15-pin midi d-sub.
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There is a VGA port and an ADC port on the video cards that ship in Cube and tower Macs. If you buy the retail (boxed) version of the same two ATI cards you can get from Apple, they have a VGA and a plain DVI on them. I have yet to see a display card with a digital output that didn't also have a VGA on it. At least not in the last couple of years.
The ADC is actually one of the standard DVI connectors. It is the same as the plain DVI connector, except that it has a few more pins on the end that carry VGA, USB and power. It is better than the plain DVI plug (since all digital flat panel displays also need USB and power as well as DVI), but it is not cheaper. Hence, it is not used by manufacturers of commodity PC's.
I know it's natural to go "oh no, not another connector", but the reason that adapters to split ADC into plain DVI / USB / VGA / power are cheap because all those things are within the ADC. The signals are the same. You're not converting anything, just re-cabling. It's only an issue of three cables between two devices, or one cable between two devices, not a competing technology.
Think about it, though: the ADC carries everything any display could possibly need in one cable, whether the display is analog (VGA) or digital (DVI). That's why all of Apple's displays (2 digital LCD's and one analog CRT) all use the ADC connector. If every computer had one of these connectors, hooking up a display to a computer would be as simple as plugging in the cable from the display into the computer and that's it, without having to know or worry about whether it's an analog or digital display. We ought to applaud Apple for going down this road. Why switch from the VGA connector to the plain DVI connector (as an industry) and not get a little more than just the plain analog to digital switch? The ADC also carries VGA, so you have a way to adapt an existing VGA monitor design to an ADC connector easily. The signal is still there. The ADC is a good "universal" display connector, wheras the rest of the industry is going with having both VGA and plain DVI on everything from now until probably forever, along with instructions not to hook up a display to both at once, and the requirement that you have a vague knowledge of which display is analog and which is digital. Billions of people hooking up billions of displays over the coming years will also have to run a separate power and USB cable. Why would you voluntarily have three cables going between two devices? So you can knock $20 off the price of the computer. Not worth it. If you use Compaq or Dell or whatever brand of machine, you ought to be on them to get with this program. Think about it next time you're hooking up three cables between two devices.
If only the G4 cubes didn't have hairline cracks in their clear plastic casings (I don't care whether they're cracks or just flashings from molding, those blemishes don't belong!).
Yawn. They apparently fell a little short of crafting an absolutely seamless and perfect Cube out of transparent plastic. "If I had known that my Cube wasn't going to be geometrically perfect, I would have got a Compaq". Right.
If only the G4 cube had a fan so it wouldn't overheat like a toaster.
What are you talking about? Whose Cube overheated?
If only it had capacity for a true RAID cage (not yet another über-clocked serial interface stretched to the limits).
If you want a Cube with big storage, either 1) hook up two FireWire drives and turn them into a RAID with SoftRAID, or 2) hook up an actual hardware FireWire RAID, or 3) pay $200 extra for your Cube and get Gigabit Ethernet and hook up to an Ethernet storage device. Are you really stretching your FireWire bus to its limits? What are you doing that causes that? Lucky for you, the 800mbs version is almost ready.
If only the G4 cube had an SVGA connector so you could connect a decent 21-inch monitor to it instead of Apple's ultra-lucid offerings.
The Cube has an SVGA connector, as well as a standard DVI+ connector, which Apple calls an "Apple Display Connector", same as they call 1394 "FireWire".
* If only it had room for more than 2 DIMMs.
You're breaking my heart. The Cube is 8 inches square and can take a GB of RAM. Boo-hoo.
If only you could put in a less expensive IDE CD-recorder.
You can get a USB model for $200 or less, or a FireWire one for a bit more, and use either on multiple machines. Que makes some really nice looking ones.
If only it didn't look like a giant spider once you finished connecting all the external devices.
That's a weird complaint to make about a machine whose standard cabling goes:
mouse --- keyboard --- display --- Cube --- wall power
all in one long line, and has antennaes built-in for wireless networking. The last time I checked, there weren't any other manufacturers doing anything at all about how cables look on their machines. Apple is the only company I've ever seen who actually shows their products in their advertising with cables attached and showing, such as the iMac ad that shows how to set up an iMac. HP is not going to show you what kind of cables are involved in their machines until after you buy.
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
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Have you seen the $500 CRT? It comes ColorSync calibrated and has a fully flat 16" viewable display area. It has a completely clear casing that's really beautiful. When you plug it into a Mac, all of the display's controls are accessible from within Mac OS, and the display's power switch works for the whole computer. It's also got a couple of USB ports and gets its USB, power and analog video through one cable. An entirely different device than the house 17" CRT you pay $250 for from other vendors. I haven't used a CRT for about a year, but I was still blown away by this display when I saw it.
Re:Did you watch the Mac Expo Europe?
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It's not just a Photoshop benchmark, it's a Photoshop FILTER benchmark. They are:
cross-platform
used in multiple applications (not just Photoshop... for example, Director and FreeHand both support Photoshop filters)
very processor intensive
(most of all) the user sits and stares at a progress bar while they happen.
If you're encoding or compiling, you might start it and go away, maybe even overnight, but if you're applying Photoshop filters, you are going to watch a minute go by here, and two minutes there. The shootout that they do at the Expos is quite convincing in that case.
PC Magazine also recreated those benchmarks. They put a dual 1GHz PC (note the "dual") against a dual 500MHz Mac, and the Mac won 6 of their 8 Photoshop filter tests, and tied a 7th. They also did a bunch of comparisons of 3D rendering and stuff, and the PC only barely beat the Mac in many cases. This is a dual 1GHz PC, and the Mac held its own very, very well, even in non-Altivec stuff. These Macs are fast machines.
Re:Job's business strategy - Focus on Customer
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> He doesn't ship any 6 PCI slot machines.
If you need more than 3, you need more than 6. People who do, use an expansion chassis. The kind of user you're talking about buys their Mac right from Digidesign or Avid, as a small part of an overall $10,000+ system. The expansion chassis is a minor expense. This "issue" with Apple is as much a real issue as the one-button mouse, which 70% of Mac users like better than two.
I've always had at least one slot free on my Blue & White Power Mac. I mean, when you have FireWire and USB, PCI is much less important.
> It's really a market thing. If Apple can create a
> market for MacOS apps, then companies will port.
I'm a Mac user. Can somebody tell me: what are the apps from Windows that I am missing out on? Might as well leave out anything that already runs on Unix, since I'm running Mac OS X.
Some of the major apps I'm running now: Pro Tools, Cubase, Peak, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Director, Flash, FreeHand, Word (under duress), Internet Explorer, Acrobat, BBEdit, QuickTime Pro, VideoShop, ViaVoice, iMovie, RealPlayer, Shockwave, and about 50 smaller apps that do things like play MP3's or batch convert media files or whatever. I mean, what am I missing here?
So far the only occasion I've had to actually have to use Virtual PC for something productive (as opposed to just for geek fun) was Ray Kurzweil's Poet Assistant, which is a small app that runs full speed in Virtual PC. I was sort of interested in Sonic Foundry's ACID for a while, but Bitheadz now has a Mac app called Phrazer that's the same thing.
This is a legitimate question. I don't feel like I'm missing anything, but I'd like to know what these apps are. Never mind about games... I'll get a console if I want those, although I have the Mac OS X version of Quake III.
> Nobody cares as much about apple hardware if it's
> not even slightly compatible with any widely
> accepted software, besides of course what
> Microsoft decides to throw at it.
Most "widely used" software on Windows are ports of Mac and Unix software. Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Director, Pro Tools, QuickTime... these are all Macintosh apps that showed up on Windows around their 3.0 or 4.0 versions. In spite of the fact that Adobe, the second biggest software company in the world, ported their whole product line to Windows, they still make the majority of their money from Mac users.
Internet Explorer on the Mac is probably the only widely used Windows-first app, but the Mac version uses a completely different codebase, UI, and has a standards-compliant rendering engine. Only the name is the same.
I think I read that both ATI and Nvidia (sp?) are going to make ADC versions of their cards. This is the kind of thing that gets thrown out there and sometimes there's no follow-up, although the ATI one is a no-brainer since they make the cards that Apple ships right now.
FWIW, the Cinema Display is the biggest on the market, and it has a truly stunning image. Very, very high contrast. You've got to actually look at these things... if you're dropping $3000-$4000, it's worth doing an audition. Maybe you can still find one with the plain DVI connector as well, in one of the stores that carry them, although the adapter is only $39 or so, which is only an extra 1% on top, and if the ADC thing catches on in the next couple of years, you might be glad you have both on your display. It is also the best-looking display I've personally seen so far, and the way the picture-frame foot works is really nice... the thing just sort of glides to new angles as you gently push or pull on the top of the display.
Having experts on each side involved in these bake-offs is the most important thing if you're talking about servers that will have a crew to maintain them, but it would also be interesting to see how a moderately technical user would fare with each system, right out of the box. While that seems like it favors MS at first blush, because the GUI is more advanced, if you were to keep track of the costs involved, you might also see the guy with the MS server having to pay more for support, or keep track of licensing issues and crap like that, or just plain not having as much fun in his work.
Maybe you'd have to do the non-expert bake-off as a 3-6 month test, where two moderately technical users keep a diary of running a small business server. Give both identical Dell hardware, only one gets Windows 2000 and one gets Linux. I imagine the Linux guy would have to learn a little more and do a little more right at the start, but would see that pay off again and again down the road. A big plus on the Linux side might be the fact that the Linux guy just didn't have to be involved with MS. That's the kind of stuff that comes out in a long-term test. How happy are the two guys with their Dell servers, six months down the road? I know there are people who actually like using Windows, but mostly it seems like Windows users hate MS even more than the rest of us, but either they don't have an alternative, or they think that they don't have an alternative.
I agree that the Dock has good points, but there are some kinks to work out, for sure, many of them detailed in John Siracusa's article on Ars Technica. Right now, it feels like a third-party add-on, especially when it hides a window's resize widget. You can't imagine that the same company would make windows you can only resize from the bottom right and then also make a thing that covers the bottom of the display.
Also, I've worked in OS X for a few weeks solid and I still miss the Mac OS 9 Finder. What the Mac OS 9 Finder does, it does very, very, very well. What the Mac OS X "columns" browser does, it does very, very well. Problem is, these are different things. When I'm in Mac OS 9, I miss the columns browser, but when I'm in Mac OS X, I miss the Mac OS 9 Finder even more. The Mac OS 9 Finder is like a close-up of your files, and the file browser in X is like stepping back a foot to get the big picture. I want both views, though.
Mac OS X is still an amazing display of technology, though. It's a big, bad Unix with a friendly face and a lot of promise. A pop song with intelligence, like Sgt Pepper's.
Yeah, but Copland was never much more than a dream. Lots of guys ran around with wings strapped to their backs before the Wright brothers actually got off the ground. If it was so doable years ago, why did Microsoft just release another new DOS version?
I'm running Mac OS X on an iBook right now, and it is exciting. It's fun. The "instant-on" from deep sleep (not Standby) is excellent... you just open the lid on this thing and it's ready to go, close when you're done, charge nightly (it goes 5-6 hours between charges). AirPort keeps it always-connected to the network so it never has any wires coming off it. The reliability and no need to reboot (well, some settings require a reboot in beta) makes a huge difference to the feeling you get using it. Quite an "internet applicance". IE 5 (which is the most standards-compliant shipping browser on any platform), Shockwave, Flash, and QuickTime all work just fine already. For most users, all it's lacking is some more hardware drivers, especially for USB printers. USB input devices and FireWire storage already work.
Having said all that, though, the Desktop/Finder is a mess. I think they purposely sort of left it until last, owing to the fact that they have so much stuff to integrate and the Desktop/Finder is sort of the last point of integration. Plus, it's the thing that Mac users will give the most input on.
> Now if we could just get some good processors...
They're good processors, it's just that Motorola keeps making them smaller and lower-powered instead of faster. Intel will double the size of a chip in no time to gain a few hundred MHz in clock speed. Motorola's brand new G4 chips are the same speed as the old ones, but they're half the size, price, and energy requirements. Apple will just have to keep on using more and more CPU's. Mac OS X is perfectly happy with this.
Look, when he said "Windows", he's talking about DOS-Windows, which is still the Windows-of-choice for 80% of Microsoft's customers. When I say "Mac OS" you think of Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X Server (Apple's equivalent to Windows 2000, which has been available for almost two years). If you say "Mac OS has poor memory protection", I'm not going to shoot back "Hey, let me introduce you to Mac OS X Server!".
Man, my pet peeve is when people take the best features of Windows 2000, add the best features of Windows ME, and then call that a "Windows Spec Sheet". Works fine until you try to plug your "Windows-compatible" peripheral into Windows 2000, or until you rely on the "memory protection" in Windows ME. Microsoft has been trading on this for years (NT4 didn't even support USB!).
If you want to compare Microsoft's and Apple's operating systems, it goes like this:
Server, or power-user desktop OS: Windows 2000, Mac OS X Server.
Consumer OS: Windows ME, Mac OS 9.
Future, "unified", pro and consumer, desktop/server OS: "Whistler" (Windows 2001 or 2002), Mac OS X.
I agree with you when it comes to the OS X Finder... I don't think Apple's customers want it, but Apple has some axe to grind, maybe... to prove that the NeXT interface is better than the Mac interface, which is so often called "the best GUI". If a NeXTish OS X is declared "better Mac than a Mac" then any problem NeXT had can be chalked up to the market, not the technology.
However, having said all that, OS X should rock for music. The audio and MIDI infrastructure in Mac OS X is very modern. Apps can send MIDI to each other with excellent timing, and things like surround sound mixing are supported at low levels. There's no GUI on some of that stuff, yet, so you don't hear about it as much outside of developer circles.
> That's weak. Really weak. For something as simple
> as a startup sound, the user really should be able
> to set a preference if they don't want it.
Oh, come on. You are being ridiculous and you know it.
- "Macs are bad and Apple is arrogant."
- "Why?"
- "There's no preference to get rid of the startup chime."
I'm sure all the Mac users who go from a startup chime to quiet, fanless, worry-free operation are just crying in their beers at the thought of you feeling superior because the only noise you can hear is the whine of the fans in your computer.
Sgt Pepper was the first rock album to include a lyric sheet. This was pissed on and derided by "serious" musicians and music lovers as some kind of lame rock hubris. Like rock lyrics could be worth reading! The idea that a fluffy, for-the-masses rock 'n' roll album would have something in it for the thinking man? Outrageous!
I think the article is right on with the analogy of Mac OS X and Sgt Pepper's. A lot of the criticism of Mac OS X from Slashdotters is of the same variety as the criticism of Sgt Peppers when it came out. "A good GUI does not an OS make." spake one Slashdotter. Well, you just described Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X. Apple is no longer happy with pretty graphics and common key shortcuts, they also want bulletproof reliability, and the BSD terminal and Apache Web server built-in. They want an OS that looks good and plays well for the iMac user, and kicks ass and takes names for the beard-and-suspenders crowd. Same way that the Beatles were no longer happy singing "she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah". They still wanted to write good melodies, but they had other things to express as well, and the balls to take a risk and express them, instead of dishing out more of the same.
Remember, the Beatles are respected as musicians now, but they were not so respected then. They were the Fab Five... they were thought of as candy by the "true music lovers" of the day who were listening to "serious" music, and couldn't see that the fact that Sgt Pepper was good-tasting candy didn't mean it wasn't also "serious" music. The analogy is pretty good.
Look, if I make a pen that can write in any color imagineable and never runs out of ink, can I call it a "new pen"? Or are you going to knock me and complain that it still gives you writer's cramp, and what you'd really like is to have words appear on a page through the sheer force of your will?
There is a lot of missing stuff, period. There is also a lot of stuff missing that's in Mac OS 9, and that is going to take priority. You can't tout voice passwords and built-in file encryption all day long in Mac OS 9 and not have it in Mac OS X.
I think a lot of this stuff is missing by design, right now. A lot of things that used to be bolted on to the kernel is Mac OS 9 are just applications in Mac OS X, and with its protected memory, you can add applications to OS X all day and not affect its stability. They can wait until the last minute to show off new applications, as long as they test them internally and through regular beta channels. There will probably be quite a difference between Public Beta and the final release.
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There is nothing in the Libertarian Party platform that says child pornography will be tolerated. The true crime of child pornography is not the lustful satisfaction of the pedophile, but the kidnapping and abuse of children.
Having said that, though, drawing a picture of a naked child (even without a live model) can get you jail time in many countries, and the US is heading there, too. In a libertarian society, you could think and draw and say what you want, but you could not force children into fake sex acts, whether you sell pictures or movies of it or not.
> Without income tax ...
... I fear it shall not come to pass in my lifetime". He obviously had hoped at one time that it would come to pass in his lifetime. Here we are 200 years later, with the ability to send a letter across the world in the blink of an eye for almost-free, and the United States gov't is one of the leaders in the mission to censor the Internet. This is astounding and sad.
> the United States as a world power will
> just be a memory looming in the back of our minds.
The US is a "world power" because a) the US is the best hunk of land in the world, bar none (look at a map that includes glaciers and farmable land and you'll see what I mean), and b) it has traditionally been very free, and that attracts smart and/or hard-working people like flowers attract bees. Einstein left Europe and came to America to avoid Hitler, y'know?
So, all these smart and/or hard-working people, living in the Land of Milk and Honey as they do, did amazing things like create the personal computer, which in turn made everybody around them that much smarter and hard-working. Now, we hit the start of the 21st century and as all these smart and/or hard-working people take stock of where we are as a society, we are beginning to notice that a small group of politicians have been forcibly taking a huge chunk of the dividends of all this smartness and hard work and have been using that money to censor and imprison the politically unpopular domestically and abroad, to fight and export a senseless war on non-patentable drugs, and to basically kill and make enemies of a lot of mostly brown-skinned people all around the world. What's more, they spent the projected income tax take from our children and grandchildren, too.
What should be done about this? Should we all just go back to our hard work and hope that somehow, in some way, this small group of (mostly old, mostly rich, mostly white) people will eventually be able to find it in themselves to properly spend half the nation's money? Or do we tell them all to get real jobs? Do we say to George W. Bush, "you are not smart or hard-working, and we're not going to let you pretend to be"? He made his fortune selling a baseball stadium that was built by taxpayers to private investors. He is your Lord and Master by birthright, and he may soon be your King.
We have more prisoners than any other country in the world. We kill more foreigners than any other country in the world. Think about those two things. Is that the America you learned about in school? Thomas Jefferson once said "this freedom of writing and speaking one's mind
Our grandfathers made a deal with the gov't: we will give you half of our money if you will eradicate poverty, suffering, moral bankrupcy, and intoxication. Did the experiment work? Now is the time for us to really ask that question, at the beginning of this new century. Personally, I don't think it has. I don't think the gov't of the United States is a very good representative of its people at all. We paid a King's ransom over the last 90 years, and all it bought us was Kings. It's time to go back to the Constitution and leave power with the people, where it rightly rests, where it belongs. It does not belong with a succession of George Bush's and Al Gore's, smiling and waving their hands like crown princes while their politician fathers look on.
What's the user fee for things in the public good, such as missile defence?
We don't have a missile defense. That's one of the big Libertarian points. The gov't spends its defense bugdet on offense. The military is killing brown-skinned people the world over instead of defending America. In fact, it is also pissing off a lot of brown-skinned people that it hasn't killed, who now want to kill Americans, therefore making us even less than neutrally safe.
Actual, real, defense against foreign threats would be one of the few things that a Libertarian Federal gov't would spend money on. It doesn't make sense for the states to do that individually.
The US was able to survive without income tax because they owned an extrememly large piece of real estate: all the land west of civilization. You'll notice that once the land dried up, that's when they implemented income tax.
The Federal gov't still owns something like 47% of the western states.
> Any state which profitted as people killed
... this is missionaries with lots of money and guns. We are feared and derided the world over because of the Drug War. There are people dying of terminal illnesses the world over who can't get pain relief because opium and cannabis are internationally outlawed (thanks to us), and that was all they had. There are places where people can't afford an aspirin, but they could have grown their own cannabis, or it grew wild, except that the US gov't sprayed their town with pesticides that kill cannabis. The newest thing to come out of the DEA is a fungus that kills the hemp plant. I guess it will be good for Pfizer.
... they were also going to eradicate that.
> themselves with cocaine or heroine would not be
> looked at favorably by the rest of the world.
As opposed to how we're looked at now? We are the laughing stock of the world when it comes to "illicit" drugs. Former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey has traveled all around the world telling lies, buying complicity from other gov'ts, and threatening the Netherlands. This is true missionary stuff
The only reason people die from cocaine or heroin in the first place is that it's hard to get proper doses from a guy on the street, so it's easy to OD. Pharmaceutical companies are forbidden (by the gov't) from manufacturing safe, labeled, quality controlled doses of these drugs, so people die. Doctors are forbidden (by the gov't) to prescribe heroin for a heroin addict, even though the addict needs heroin as much as a diabetic needs insulin. A small, but regular, dose is all the person needs to live a normal life. If they miss a few days, then they need a big dose, which gets them high and stops them from functioning at work, etc., so they lose their jobs and houses and families and end up in the street. The number of heroin and cocaine users is completely insignificant, though, which is why cannabis is still illegal. You need to round out the numbers so you can spend $50,000,000,000 per year on cops.
Whatever ways there are to create revenue for the gov't besides income tax, there are surely better ways for the gov't to spend $50,000,000,000 per year than hiring cops to harrass doctors, patients, drug addicts, drug users (only a small percentage of cocaine and heroin users are addicts, unlike caffeine or nicotine), and everybody else who gets in their way.
> Ayn Rand advocated a voluntary contribution
> system (which, of course, is unworkable for
> items of public good
People are happy to pay when you give them something in return. People are happy to give to charities when they a) have a little extra to give, b) know there is a true need, and c) have confidence that the people they are giving money to will actually use it to help someone. If you map charitable giving on a graph against tax rates, you will see that they are exactly opposite. After income tax and the New Deal, people started giving much of their income to the gov't, and stopped giving money to charities and churches. I mean, wasn't that the idea? The gov't was going to take that money and eradicate poverty and human suffering. Also, intoxication
However, when the gov't takes half of someone's money, they are not going to have a sympathetic ear when you come around for some money for a real purpose. This distortion -- the fact that you think people won't give money to charity unless they're forced, as they are now -- is another tragedy of this kind of size of gov't. I already "gave at the office", right? Unfortunately, my money is being used to hunt down pot smokers and ruin their lives, or to kill peasants in the coco fields in Columbia, or to shoot migrant farm workers who cross the US-Mexican border. These people have been following the harvest for centuries, but it's only since the Federal gov't started taking income tax that they could afford to put people on the border so they could shoot all the brown-skinned people they see. These people are picking avacadoes for a ridiculously small amount of money so our food prices stay cheap. I'm not saying that's right, either, but is shooting them right?
Fact is, charitable organizations that are actually on the street, doing the real work, would almost kill for just a tiny fraction of what the Federal gov't wastes by its very existence. Actual man-years that just go down the toilet all the time. That 20 year-old college kid that just got busted for LSD and put in jail for 15 years could have been the next John Lennon, or the next Einstein, but we'll never know. North and South America could be completely at peace, but the US gov't just can't stop shooting people who live to the south of us. They are always willing to send the military thousands of miles to kill brown-skinned people. Why aren't those soldiers at home with their families? Because the military surely doesn't want a smaller cut of the income tax pie next year than they had this year, and they killed X number of brown-skinned people last year, so they need to kill X+5% if they want a 5% budget increase this year.
This unchecked, drunk-on-its-own-power Federal gov't has been a very bad ambassador for the US. In the history of the world, there has never been a bigger, more powerful, answer-to-nobody organization than what we've created by just blindly giving over so much money to the few people who really run the gov't. The only thing to rival our gov't's power are the drug cartels that have become so rich by taking advantage of the world's biggest unregulated recreational drug market: the United States. When you can sell $1 worth of cocaine for $1000, you are not looking for things to change anytime soon. Pfizer wishes it had it so good, but then again, Pfizer doesn't want to Valium(tm) to have to compete with cannabis(no tm), either.
Just brilliant Mr. Browne. Only one question: Then why the heck are you in politics?
If you look into the Libertarian Party, you'll see that its history is full of people who run for an office, get elected, and then either shut down that office, or greatly reduce its size and tax intake. The other classic thing is to find one Libertarian on a city council, dissenting on every tax increase.
Mr. Browne doesn't even take the gov't funds he's "entitled" to in order to fund his campaign. He's very clear that he is in politics to restore the Constitution of the United States of America, which provides for a small Federal government with very limited powers. It does not grant the Federal gov't the power to create agencies like the IRS, the ATF, the DEA, and the INS. He just said on this very Slashdot page that the first thing he will do as President would be to free political prisoners. I mean, the man is fighting for freedom. Before you snicker at that, please take some time to answer these questions for yourself (use the Internet ... it will be a wild, and educational ride):
I have to pause here to say RIP, my friend, Peter McWilliams. Read Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do (free online, or also available at your bookstore), and think about the fact that its author died because the gov't stood between him and his doctor.
This shit is enlightening, and painful, and shocking. It demands action. It's hard to open your eyes (red pill or blue pill, etc), but you have to sometime. If you're a White American, you are standing idly by while the gov't harasses, imprisons, and kills Black and Hispanic Americans for political points every day. They are doing this. It is a fact. People are dying. Families are being destroyed wholesale. Try and get used to it and then decide what you are going to do about it, if anything.
This is the perfect election to vote Libertarian. George W. Bush and Al Gore are such interchangeable bozos, it just doesn't make a difference if you "waste your vote" and we get one instead of the other. What counts is to send a message of protest, to show that there can be political change in the US, so that the 2004 election campaigns will be about real issues. Harry Browne is the candidate for President for America's third largest political party, and he said right here on Slashdot that he had a question that he'd really like to ask Al Gore and George Bush. He has not had the opportunity. A substantial Libertarian vote this November might lead to Mr. Browne or his successor being involved in the 2004 Presidential debates. By then, the media may have adjusted for all of its current infotainment leanings and we may have more actual journalism (why did David Letterman ask G.W. Bush the toughest questions he's faced so far?). You can make your vote actually count this November by voting Libertarian.
Either you have freedom of religion, or you don't. Freedom to choose between government-approved or majority-approved religions is not freedom. Why is it any of your business whether 1 person, or 100 people, or 100,000 people in the world satisfy their religious desires with Wicca? Why do you care? How do you propose to stop them? Why does it impress you that Dubya denounces a small and politically powerless group of people?
Einstein was an atheist, but he believed that humans have a common religious feeling, as if there were a "religion gland". He "saw god" through his work studying the universe itself. Other people see god in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the music of John Coltrane, or the rituals that are passed on to them by their parents. But where people see god and what they choose to do about it is their business, as long as they don't harm the person or property of another person.
Or, we could just send in the FBI or ATF with tanks and grenade launchers. How those people sleep with themselves at night is beyond me. It seems like you blame Koresh for Waco, though. Bizarre. Why was the ATF even there in the first place? They said Koresh was a Drug Lord with a meth lab and a stockpile of automatic weapons. Once it came out that there was no lab and no drugs, Koresh was recast as a Cult Leader. As long as he's a Menace to Society, I guess it's OK to roll up a tank and kill him.
> It's nothing more than a cult based around a
> liberal interpretation of witchcraft.
What do you call raising the dead, healing the sick with a touch, being conceived without intercourse, and having armies of winged helpers at your beck and call? Or parting the Red Sea, flaming hailstorms, and solor eclipses on command? That is some magical shit. You can piss on Christianity or Judaism with the same line you used on Wicca.
25% of citizens 18-24 cannot name both major party presidential candidates and 70% cannot name their running mates.
People say this kind of thing with a shake of the head and a cluck of the tongue. But why should people give a fuck who these guys are? The government will be stealing your money and fucking you over next year no matter which golden boy of the Democratic Republican Party gets the big chair and all the photo-ops. People have other things to worry about in life, like how to make the rent from their after-tax income, or how they're going to find the time and money to regularly travel the 500 miles to visit their sister who's in Federal prison for the next 20 years because her boyfriend sold some pot to a friend of hers or something. Life is going on while G.W. Bush and Al Gore have their asses kissed by the media everywhere they go.
These fuckers are tyrants, and we're supposed to read up on their activities and even give a shit? No way. They spent almost every minute of their "debates" basically saying 'I agree with him, but I'll spend more of any future surplus on this issue than he will'.
By the way, if you have a non-violent friend or loved one in prison in the US right now (60% of the over 2 million incarcerated), keep in mind that Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party said that he would pardon those people on his first day in office. If they are actually addicted to a drug (most are not), they will get treatment, because a Libertarian government won't get between you and your doctor, even if your medical treatment requires that you take a maintenance dose of a "recreational" drug for the rest of your life.
There is a VGA port and an ADC port on the video cards that ship in Cube and tower Macs. If you buy the retail (boxed) version of the same two ATI cards you can get from Apple, they have a VGA and a plain DVI on them. I have yet to see a display card with a digital output that didn't also have a VGA on it. At least not in the last couple of years.
The ADC is actually one of the standard DVI connectors. It is the same as the plain DVI connector, except that it has a few more pins on the end that carry VGA, USB and power. It is better than the plain DVI plug (since all digital flat panel displays also need USB and power as well as DVI), but it is not cheaper. Hence, it is not used by manufacturers of commodity PC's.
I know it's natural to go "oh no, not another connector", but the reason that adapters to split ADC into plain DVI / USB / VGA / power are cheap because all those things are within the ADC. The signals are the same. You're not converting anything, just re-cabling. It's only an issue of three cables between two devices, or one cable between two devices, not a competing technology.
Think about it, though: the ADC carries everything any display could possibly need in one cable, whether the display is analog (VGA) or digital (DVI). That's why all of Apple's displays (2 digital LCD's and one analog CRT) all use the ADC connector. If every computer had one of these connectors, hooking up a display to a computer would be as simple as plugging in the cable from the display into the computer and that's it, without having to know or worry about whether it's an analog or digital display. We ought to applaud Apple for going down this road. Why switch from the VGA connector to the plain DVI connector (as an industry) and not get a little more than just the plain analog to digital switch? The ADC also carries VGA, so you have a way to adapt an existing VGA monitor design to an ADC connector easily. The signal is still there. The ADC is a good "universal" display connector, wheras the rest of the industry is going with having both VGA and plain DVI on everything from now until probably forever, along with instructions not to hook up a display to both at once, and the requirement that you have a vague knowledge of which display is analog and which is digital. Billions of people hooking up billions of displays over the coming years will also have to run a separate power and USB cable. Why would you voluntarily have three cables going between two devices? So you can knock $20 off the price of the computer. Not worth it. If you use Compaq or Dell or whatever brand of machine, you ought to be on them to get with this program. Think about it next time you're hooking up three cables between two devices.
If only the G4 cubes didn't have hairline cracks in their clear plastic casings (I don't care whether they're cracks or just flashings from molding, those blemishes don't belong!).
Yawn. They apparently fell a little short of crafting an absolutely seamless and perfect Cube out of transparent plastic. "If I had known that my Cube wasn't going to be geometrically perfect, I would have got a Compaq". Right.
If only the G4 cube had a fan so it wouldn't overheat like a toaster.
What are you talking about? Whose Cube overheated?
If only it had capacity for a true RAID cage (not yet another über-clocked serial interface stretched to the limits).
If you want a Cube with big storage, either 1) hook up two FireWire drives and turn them into a RAID with SoftRAID, or 2) hook up an actual hardware FireWire RAID, or 3) pay $200 extra for your Cube and get Gigabit Ethernet and hook up to an Ethernet storage device. Are you really stretching your FireWire bus to its limits? What are you doing that causes that? Lucky for you, the 800mbs version is almost ready.
If only the G4 cube had an SVGA connector so you could connect a decent 21-inch monitor to it instead of Apple's ultra-lucid offerings.
The Cube has an SVGA connector, as well as a standard DVI+ connector, which Apple calls an "Apple Display Connector", same as they call 1394 "FireWire".
* If only it had room for more than 2 DIMMs.
You're breaking my heart. The Cube is 8 inches square and can take a GB of RAM. Boo-hoo.
If only you could put in a less expensive IDE CD-recorder.
You can get a USB model for $200 or less, or a FireWire one for a bit more, and use either on multiple machines. Que makes some really nice looking ones.
If only it didn't look like a giant spider once you finished connecting all the external devices.
That's a weird complaint to make about a machine whose standard cabling goes:
all in one long line, and has antennaes built-in for wireless networking. The last time I checked, there weren't any other manufacturers doing anything at all about how cables look on their machines. Apple is the only company I've ever seen who actually shows their products in their advertising with cables attached and showing, such as the iMac ad that shows how to set up an iMac. HP is not going to show you what kind of cables are involved in their machines until after you buy.
Have you seen the $500 CRT? It comes ColorSync calibrated and has a fully flat 16" viewable display area. It has a completely clear casing that's really beautiful. When you plug it into a Mac, all of the display's controls are accessible from within Mac OS, and the display's power switch works for the whole computer. It's also got a couple of USB ports and gets its USB, power and analog video through one cable. An entirely different device than the house 17" CRT you pay $250 for from other vendors. I haven't used a CRT for about a year, but I was still blown away by this display when I saw it.
It's not just a Photoshop benchmark, it's a Photoshop FILTER benchmark. They are:
... for example, Director and FreeHand both support Photoshop filters)
cross-platform
used in multiple applications (not just Photoshop
very processor intensive
(most of all) the user sits and stares at a progress bar while they happen.
If you're encoding or compiling, you might start it and go away, maybe even overnight, but if you're applying Photoshop filters, you are going to watch a minute go by here, and two minutes there. The shootout that they do at the Expos is quite convincing in that case.
PC Magazine also recreated those benchmarks. They put a dual 1GHz PC (note the "dual") against a dual 500MHz Mac, and the Mac won 6 of their 8 Photoshop filter tests, and tied a 7th. They also did a bunch of comparisons of 3D rendering and stuff, and the PC only barely beat the Mac in many cases. This is a dual 1GHz PC, and the Mac held its own very, very well, even in non-Altivec stuff. These Macs are fast machines.
> He doesn't ship any 6 PCI slot machines.
If you need more than 3, you need more than 6. People who do, use an expansion chassis. The kind of user you're talking about buys their Mac right from Digidesign or Avid, as a small part of an overall $10,000+ system. The expansion chassis is a minor expense. This "issue" with Apple is as much a real issue as the one-button mouse, which 70% of Mac users like better than two.
I've always had at least one slot free on my Blue & White Power Mac. I mean, when you have FireWire and USB, PCI is much less important.
> It's really a market thing. If Apple can create a
... I'll get a console if I want those, although I have the Mac OS X version of Quake III.
> market for MacOS apps, then companies will port.
I'm a Mac user. Can somebody tell me: what are the apps from Windows that I am missing out on? Might as well leave out anything that already runs on Unix, since I'm running Mac OS X.
Some of the major apps I'm running now: Pro Tools, Cubase, Peak, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Director, Flash, FreeHand, Word (under duress), Internet Explorer, Acrobat, BBEdit, QuickTime Pro, VideoShop, ViaVoice, iMovie, RealPlayer, Shockwave, and about 50 smaller apps that do things like play MP3's or batch convert media files or whatever. I mean, what am I missing here?
So far the only occasion I've had to actually have to use Virtual PC for something productive (as opposed to just for geek fun) was Ray Kurzweil's Poet Assistant, which is a small app that runs full speed in Virtual PC. I was sort of interested in Sonic Foundry's ACID for a while, but Bitheadz now has a Mac app called Phrazer that's the same thing.
This is a legitimate question. I don't feel like I'm missing anything, but I'd like to know what these apps are. Never mind about games
> Nobody cares as much about apple hardware if it's
... these are all Macintosh apps that showed up on Windows around their 3.0 or 4.0 versions. In spite of the fact that Adobe, the second biggest software company in the world, ported their whole product line to Windows, they still make the majority of their money from Mac users.
> not even slightly compatible with any widely
> accepted software, besides of course what
> Microsoft decides to throw at it.
Most "widely used" software on Windows are ports of Mac and Unix software. Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Director, Pro Tools, QuickTime
Internet Explorer on the Mac is probably the only widely used Windows-first app, but the Mac version uses a completely different codebase, UI, and has a standards-compliant rendering engine. Only the name is the same.
I think I read that both ATI and Nvidia (sp?) are going to make ADC versions of their cards. This is the kind of thing that gets thrown out there and sometimes there's no follow-up, although the ATI one is a no-brainer since they make the cards that Apple ships right now.
... if you're dropping $3000-$4000, it's worth doing an audition. Maybe you can still find one with the plain DVI connector as well, in one of the stores that carry them, although the adapter is only $39 or so, which is only an extra 1% on top, and if the ADC thing catches on in the next couple of years, you might be glad you have both on your display. It is also the best-looking display I've personally seen so far, and the way the picture-frame foot works is really nice ... the thing just sort of glides to new angles as you gently push or pull on the top of the display.
FWIW, the Cinema Display is the biggest on the market, and it has a truly stunning image. Very, very high contrast. You've got to actually look at these things
Having experts on each side involved in these bake-offs is the most important thing if you're talking about servers that will have a crew to maintain them, but it would also be interesting to see how a moderately technical user would fare with each system, right out of the box. While that seems like it favors MS at first blush, because the GUI is more advanced, if you were to keep track of the costs involved, you might also see the guy with the MS server having to pay more for support, or keep track of licensing issues and crap like that, or just plain not having as much fun in his work.
Maybe you'd have to do the non-expert bake-off as a 3-6 month test, where two moderately technical users keep a diary of running a small business server. Give both identical Dell hardware, only one gets Windows 2000 and one gets Linux. I imagine the Linux guy would have to learn a little more and do a little more right at the start, but would see that pay off again and again down the road. A big plus on the Linux side might be the fact that the Linux guy just didn't have to be involved with MS. That's the kind of stuff that comes out in a long-term test. How happy are the two guys with their Dell servers, six months down the road? I know there are people who actually like using Windows, but mostly it seems like Windows users hate MS even more than the rest of us, but either they don't have an alternative, or they think that they don't have an alternative.
I agree that the Dock has good points, but there are some kinks to work out, for sure, many of them detailed in John Siracusa's article on Ars Technica. Right now, it feels like a third-party add-on, especially when it hides a window's resize widget. You can't imagine that the same company would make windows you can only resize from the bottom right and then also make a thing that covers the bottom of the display.
Also, I've worked in OS X for a few weeks solid and I still miss the Mac OS 9 Finder. What the Mac OS 9 Finder does, it does very, very, very well. What the Mac OS X "columns" browser does, it does very, very well. Problem is, these are different things. When I'm in Mac OS 9, I miss the columns browser, but when I'm in Mac OS X, I miss the Mac OS 9 Finder even more. The Mac OS 9 Finder is like a close-up of your files, and the file browser in X is like stepping back a foot to get the big picture. I want both views, though.
Mac OS X is still an amazing display of technology, though. It's a big, bad Unix with a friendly face and a lot of promise. A pop song with intelligence, like Sgt Pepper's.
Yeah, but Copland was never much more than a dream. Lots of guys ran around with wings strapped to their backs before the Wright brothers actually got off the ground. If it was so doable years ago, why did Microsoft just release another new DOS version?
... you just open the lid on this thing and it's ready to go, close when you're done, charge nightly (it goes 5-6 hours between charges). AirPort keeps it always-connected to the network so it never has any wires coming off it. The reliability and no need to reboot (well, some settings require a reboot in beta) makes a huge difference to the feeling you get using it. Quite an "internet applicance". IE 5 (which is the most standards-compliant shipping browser on any platform), Shockwave, Flash, and QuickTime all work just fine already. For most users, all it's lacking is some more hardware drivers, especially for USB printers. USB input devices and FireWire storage already work.
I'm running Mac OS X on an iBook right now, and it is exciting. It's fun. The "instant-on" from deep sleep (not Standby) is excellent
Having said all that, though, the Desktop/Finder is a mess. I think they purposely sort of left it until last, owing to the fact that they have so much stuff to integrate and the Desktop/Finder is sort of the last point of integration. Plus, it's the thing that Mac users will give the most input on.
> Now if we could just get some good processors...
They're good processors, it's just that Motorola keeps making them smaller and lower-powered instead of faster. Intel will double the size of a chip in no time to gain a few hundred MHz in clock speed. Motorola's brand new G4 chips are the same speed as the old ones, but they're half the size, price, and energy requirements. Apple will just have to keep on using more and more CPU's. Mac OS X is perfectly happy with this.
Look, when he said "Windows", he's talking about DOS-Windows, which is still the Windows-of-choice for 80% of Microsoft's customers. When I say "Mac OS" you think of Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X Server (Apple's equivalent to Windows 2000, which has been available for almost two years). If you say "Mac OS has poor memory protection", I'm not going to shoot back "Hey, let me introduce you to Mac OS X Server!".
Man, my pet peeve is when people take the best features of Windows 2000, add the best features of Windows ME, and then call that a "Windows Spec Sheet". Works fine until you try to plug your "Windows-compatible" peripheral into Windows 2000, or until you rely on the "memory protection" in Windows ME. Microsoft has been trading on this for years (NT4 didn't even support USB!).
If you want to compare Microsoft's and Apple's operating systems, it goes like this:
Server, or power-user desktop OS: Windows 2000, Mac OS X Server.
Consumer OS: Windows ME, Mac OS 9.
Future, "unified", pro and consumer, desktop/server OS: "Whistler" (Windows 2001 or 2002), Mac OS X.
I agree with you when it comes to the OS X Finder ... I don't think Apple's customers want it, but Apple has some axe to grind, maybe ... to prove that the NeXT interface is better than the Mac interface, which is so often called "the best GUI". If a NeXTish OS X is declared "better Mac than a Mac" then any problem NeXT had can be chalked up to the market, not the technology.
However, having said all that, OS X should rock for music. The audio and MIDI infrastructure in Mac OS X is very modern. Apps can send MIDI to each other with excellent timing, and things like surround sound mixing are supported at low levels. There's no GUI on some of that stuff, yet, so you don't hear about it as much outside of developer circles.
> That's weak. Really weak. For something as simple
> as a startup sound, the user really should be able
> to set a preference if they don't want it.
Oh, come on. You are being ridiculous and you know it.
- "Macs are bad and Apple is arrogant."
- "Why?"
- "There's no preference to get rid of the startup chime."
I'm sure all the Mac users who go from a startup chime to quiet, fanless, worry-free operation are just crying in their beers at the thought of you feeling superior because the only noise you can hear is the whine of the fans in your computer.
Sgt Pepper was the first rock album to include a lyric sheet. This was pissed on and derided by "serious" musicians and music lovers as some kind of lame rock hubris. Like rock lyrics could be worth reading! The idea that a fluffy, for-the-masses rock 'n' roll album would have something in it for the thinking man? Outrageous!
I think the article is right on with the analogy of Mac OS X and Sgt Pepper's. A lot of the criticism of Mac OS X from Slashdotters is of the same variety as the criticism of Sgt Peppers when it came out. "A good GUI does not an OS make." spake one Slashdotter. Well, you just described Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X. Apple is no longer happy with pretty graphics and common key shortcuts, they also want bulletproof reliability, and the BSD terminal and Apache Web server built-in. They want an OS that looks good and plays well for the iMac user, and kicks ass and takes names for the beard-and-suspenders crowd. Same way that the Beatles were no longer happy singing "she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah". They still wanted to write good melodies, but they had other things to express as well, and the balls to take a risk and express them, instead of dishing out more of the same.
Remember, the Beatles are respected as musicians now, but they were not so respected then. They were the Fab Five ... they were thought of as candy by the "true music lovers" of the day who were listening to "serious" music, and couldn't see that the fact that Sgt Pepper was good-tasting candy didn't mean it wasn't also "serious" music. The analogy is pretty good.
Look, if I make a pen that can write in any color imagineable and never runs out of ink, can I call it a "new pen"? Or are you going to knock me and complain that it still gives you writer's cramp, and what you'd really like is to have words appear on a page through the sheer force of your will?
There is a lot of missing stuff, period. There is also a lot of stuff missing that's in Mac OS 9, and that is going to take priority. You can't tout voice passwords and built-in file encryption all day long in Mac OS 9 and not have it in Mac OS X.
I think a lot of this stuff is missing by design, right now. A lot of things that used to be bolted on to the kernel is Mac OS 9 are just applications in Mac OS X, and with its protected memory, you can add applications to OS X all day and not affect its stability. They can wait until the last minute to show off new applications, as long as they test them internally and through regular beta channels. There will probably be quite a difference between Public Beta and the final release.