Anyone who buys DRM'd music is either an idiot or ignorant...
Generalize much?
In this case, you're paying for a vague not-a-promise that you can probably listen to the music now and if you're really lucky you'll be able to listen in the future.
I bought a few albums from the iTunes store. They were encoded with the fairplay DRM. I bought them because they were a convenient way to get music I wanted, but that did not seem to be making its way into the used CD stores nearby. After downloading them, I burned them to standard CD format (removing the DRM) and I used a program to legally strip off the DRM restrictions using my valid key, and thus not breaking any encryption (no DMCA issues). ow at this point I have the music I want, on CD and AAC, with no DRM, exactly as though I had bought a used CD with no cover art in the the record store.
Explain to me how this means I'll be "lucky" if I'm able to play these songs in the future. Explain to me how this method makes me any more of an idiot than the other.
So the only reason I can buy a CD and turn it into MP3s yet can't buy those MP3s to start with is because some jackass in a skyscraper either doesn't understand his own business or is trying really hard to pretend not to.
No, some jackass in a skyscraper figured out a way to sell the same music multiple times and to sell music via a cheaper medium, that would still result in that music breaking and needing to be repurchased, for the average consumer, the same way the average consumer needs to repurchase CDs as they break or as music players evolve.
Maybe for desktops (I haven't checked), but not for notebooks. Compare the 15.4" MacBook Pro to a customized HP dv6000t
Let me try this again. On average, for the numbers compiled thus far this year, macs are about 5% cheaper than the average, comparable PC hardware. One given machine from one other company at one particular time does not constitute an average for the industry. I'm not going to bother looking at your example to see if it is valid because, frankly, that is beside the point. There are a number of professionally conducted, independent surveys that determine this every year. So far the consensus is that Apple's are slightly cheaper than average, despite the margins on some of them. Now maybe that is mostly because of the mac mini, or maybe it is not. That is not the point. The point is, in general, macs are not more expensive than PCs.
Yeah, but on a Apple's 30" monitor it sucks. When you have a window open and positioned, say, in the lower RH corner and you need to access the menu bar, it is a long drag to move the mouse to the upper LH corner. And often you can accidentally click on the desktop or other window along the way and lose focus of the application's menu bar causing you to go back and repeat the procedure.
Umm, in the system preferences maybe you need to adjust your mouse tracking speed. I always use two monitors and I never have problems getting to the top of the screen. It is instantaneous and because it is always the same place I only have to worry about positioning in a single dimension (cursor hits top of screen and remains there, functionally providing an infinitely large target in that direction). Usability testing has show many times that after ten minutes of practice, users are consistently faster at selecting menus from the top of the screen than from menus attached to a window in the middle. Also, for applications that people use regularly, but which don't have just one maximized window, users are significantly faster at selecting menu items, because the position of those menus never changes. This means muscle memory becomes trained and users can hit a particular menu by reflex, rather than by painstakingly moving the cursor to a different spot every time.
I like OSX but this design feature should be a user's choice.
I don't see a really important reason why this could not be added as an option, but I think anyone who really tries both types of interfaces and compares them impartially will conclude Apple's way is significantly better. Adjust your mouse already.
That is only true if exactly half the cost of the unit is fixed costs. Not very likely.
Margins != cost. The margin is the amount of money Apple is making in profit, after covering their costs. They can cut margins in half without effecting revenue, if the double the number of units they ship. For example, say Apple sells 1 million mac books of some model. After covering the cost of the hardware and support for the machine they get $300 per machine. So they have 300 million in the general fund. Now say they spend 100 million on industrial design and 100 million on paying developers to make OS X. That means they add the remaining 100 million to their bottom line or reinvest it.
Now say they double the number they sell, but cut their margins in half, because macs become more popular. that's 2 million sold and $150 per unit which is still 300 million in the general fund. The cost of industrial design and OS X development does not go up with the number of units shipped, since it is the same amount of work regardless. That means they are still getting 100 million to reinvest, despite having cut the margins on the machine in half.
The previous poster has a point about the ease of migration from mac to mac that I think is somewhat underrated. You also have a point. Sometimes it is a pain to get Linux software running under OS X. Occasionally it is easier because a mac user with a clue made the OS X package nicer than the Linux one, but that is not overly common.
Depending upon your needs, you might want to consider a setup like I'm using. Consolidation for portability is very important to me. To that end, I have a Macbook with a fair bit of RAM, running OS X, with Windows and Linux running in hardware assisted VMs, via Parallels and the Core Duo processor. That way, if the OS X installation and usability is good quality, I just run it in OS X. If something fails to install well or easily on OS X, or if the user experience is poor with Apple's built in X11, I install it in my workstation Linux VM.
With this setup I get one step upgrades for Linux and Windows as well as OSX (the VMs and software are copied seamlessly via firewire). It also means I only have to carry one machine with me. I'm a happy camper. I don't know what kind of work you do, so I don't know is such a setup would work for you, but it is something to consider next time you upgrade.
On an aside, I really do wish Apple would pull in the features of a real application manager, including automated upgrades, multiple repositories and package types, and "clean" uninstalls. I wish they'd specify a location for source in packages and support building a custom binary from that manager. I wish Linux would adopt GNUStep and have portable, self contained, organized packages I can IM to friends and don't have to install to use.
Err, hello? Surveys of customers is reality when it comes to customer satisfaction. Why would you possibly think otherwise?
I suspect the previous poster was only repeating something he heard, but did not really understand all the issues involved. The truth is consumer reports surveys are often less than ideal in that many of them are self selecting. That is, they mail them about and those who are motivated return them. This tends to result in answers from people who are very happy or very unhappy, since the others don't bother answering.
That said, it is still a lot better than nothing, and when you apply the same methodology across the boards of computer vendors, your error cancels out, to some degree. Also, Consumer Reports uses other methods, including purchasing machines themselves and anonymously testing the support lines. It isn't perfect, but it is a lot better than, "they are worse because I had one bad experience" or "I don't know why I think they're bad, I just do."
I haven't had any issues with a properly-configured Linux desktop setup;
I'm not talking about "problems" as in bugs. I'm not talking about UI effects. I'm talking about missing features. I got a new laptop from work a few weeks back. I rebooted my old laptop into firewire mode, plugged in a cable and turned on the new laptop. It asked me if I wanted to install from the old one and I clicked "yes." Then I walked down to the coffee shop, grabbed a bite and a drink. That was it. All my configurations, settings, files, programs, security certs, user accounts, and everything else was sucked across the firewire cable. With a straight Linux machine it takes me days of configuration to get all those configurations back on new hardware.
The other feature I mentioned is system services. One spellchecker that works in all programs and shares a dictionary I customize. One grammar checker that works in all programs, regardless of if the developers of vi or Adobe InDesign or SubEthaEdit even knew such a feature was available. The same goes for scripts, language translation, online dictionary/thesaurus lookups, automatic bibliography citations, and hundreds more. Because OS X has provided a way for applications to share functionality with one another or from a plug-in I no longer have to copy and paste from my IM application into MS Word to check spelling or grammar. I can translate text from one language to another in any program. It saves me hours every week and I catch spelling errors in my posts and chats and IRC conversations and e-mail and Web mail and everything else, that I would have missed before.
Those are the two examples I listed, but they are not the only ways Linux is behind as a workstation. The thing is, I don't expect Linux to catch up anytime soon because all the people who really care about these things, have moved to OS X on the desktop. I use Linux on the server and I use it on the desktop for testing compatibility and for a few programs that I like better in KDE than in a generic X11 on OS X. But it just does not compare in general.
Until you try different systems for your everyday computer you just don't know what is missing from one or another. Don't mistake not having "problems" for Linux not being inferior in many ways.
If you really want to blend in, send out your Zombie commands via Myspace profiles.:) That'll look like normal web-traffic.
That's crazy, network engineers at a company will block MySpace even if they happen to notice traffic there that isn't botnet control traffic. Use comments from a user here on Slashdot and the network and security guys will leave it open just in case it is one of their scripts they forgot about:)
Actually it is based upon multiple methods of information gathering, including spot checking and anonymous tests.
...think that this thread has, if anything, established that Apple users are more willing than average to forgive and forget their favorite company's flaws.
Wait a second, you take a jab at Consumer Reports' methodology and then you make an assertion like this based upon your views of what you read in a particular forum? Is that supposed to be a joke?
You make a lot of generalizations and assumptions, but the truth is the best data to date indicates Apple's support is better than average and you have no data to refute that claim. If you objectively look at the information, the best guess is the Apple's support is better.
... lots of Unix types got suckered into using a system with lots of proprietary pieces.
Have you ever considered that a lot of UNIX types know exactly what they are doing, but simply have different priorities than you do? Open source, free software is a feature of software, but considering only one feature rather than the whole package is absurd. I use OS X, Windows, Linux, and OpenBSD every day. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. I'd love to have a primary workstation that was completely open source. I'm just not willing to give up all the features of OS X or all the available library of software for Windows to do it. The sad truth is, for a lot of tasks, their is no good Linux solution. For a lot of tasks, Linux itself, regardless of the applications, is inferior. I don't have the time or money to get the features I want added to Linux and it is falling further behind on the desktop, not catching up. When Linux has functional system services I can use and a two step upgrade path to a new machine, via a firewire cable, let me know. Until then, Linus will be on servers and Linux and Windows will both be running in VMs under OS X on the desktop.
I think IE7 is a great browser and really, the only people that wont use it are OS X people and nerds/geeks.
Both of these statements may be true, but it is important that you don't make the mistake of believing they are connected in any way. IE is and for years has been inferior to Firefox. It dominates the market because of MS's illegal actions, which is the same reason they have not bothered to fix such glaring, long standing problems as the one I pointed out.
Fact is that MS now has a good product out now...
Umm, good compared to what? Is there any other browser on the market that is not better than it? They have a product they hope is "good enough" so that people are not motivated enough to look for solutions to the problems IE creates for them.
FF Market Share will drop over the next year.
This is entirely probably, but it is because of MS's criminal actions bypassing the competition, not because IE can beat Firefox in a head to head comparison.
If you compare prices on similar Apple and Dell systems, you will usually find that the prices are higher on the Apple side, but only 10-20%, and that in the high end the margin disappears and your most powerful systems cost about the same either way.
Actually, you're out of date. Last year Apple systems were priced at approximately 14% higher than equivalent PCs, not Dells in general. This year, they are actually cheaper by about 5% to equivalent machines. You'll note, I don't say Dells, I say equivalent machines. That is because people conducting real market research soon discover it is hard to find an equivalent machine from Dell.
Apple's customer support is legendarily bad when they think they can get away with it.
Yeah, um, unlike all the other companies out there? Take a look at Consumer Reports for the last 5 years. Apple is one of the best for support, not the worst. You actually have to compare them to what else is out there. Sure, Apple support can really suck an egg, which makes it about twice as good as Dell's customer support that sucks two eggs.
If even -basic- features of CSS didn't render correctly in IE7, then you used a doctype that put IE in quirkmode.
Sigh, I said basic features of XHTML, not of CSS. Try this, following best practices, simply make an HTML page using CSS that matches up to namespaces within your document. That is pretty damned basic and every browser but IE handles it easily. IE does not and according to the developers that is because they did not get around to implementing XHTML pretty much at all.
You'll note, if you're already generating XML with namespaces, from a handful of different sources and tools like I am, simply turning it into valid XHTML is cake. Mapping all of it to individual HTML loses data, making it unable to be "round-tripped" and provides less flexibility with your CSS. Further it takes a lot more work and and at that point is no more functional than latex or something to PDF. Thus, IE fails for this fairly simple task while all other browsers handle it without issue. Since I'm in the wonderful position of not having to support IE, I don't in this case.
That would do it. If you don't use at least XHTML transitional for your doctype, then IE uses the old, broken box model.
You misunderstand. The XHTML transitional doctype causes MS to parse the XHTML as HTML, which is what most people do, but XHTML supports namespaces (sort of the reason for using it) and HTML does not, thus IE renders it as HTML but ignores all the formatting info from the namespaces.
So why did you need to use HTML 4 is beyond me.
XHTML, according to the spec, is backwards compatible with HTML4 for gracefully degrading. IE 6 and 7 both (with the workaround doctype) will parse XHTML as though it was HTML 4. That is as close as IE comes to supporting XHTML. Try it yourself.
This has been discussed to death on various discussion groups and even the IE dev team admits they don't actually support XHTML, only the subset of it that happens to be HTML. When they announced improved XHTML support that is what they meant and they admitted it was misleading.
Gee with increasing volumes large margins are not sustainable because Apple won't get as good of deals from Intel? Yeah that makes sense.. err wait no it doesn't! As volume goes up, Apple will get better deals from component manufacturers, in general, not worse. Maybe Intel will not cut them as nice of deals, but with increasing volumes, Apple does not need to maintain margins. Most of their costs are fixed. OS development, marketing, industrial design, etc. make up most of their costs, but remain fixed no matter how many units they ship. If they ship twice as many, they can cut their margins in half without being affected.
Either the Gartner people are looking to the very short term or they're out of their minds. The only way to free yourself from the influence of a monopoly is to maintain a complete vertical chain of components, including the one they have monopolized, but separate from their market. Apple doesn't sell their OS to Dell for two reasons. One, it would seriously cut into their hardware sales as people went to what they perceive as cheaper machines and were unable to compete with Dell's market outlets. Two, MS will kill Dell if they tried shipping OS X pre-installed. As soon as Dell had to re-negotiate their OEM licenses for Windows, MS would offer them the choice of being the largest supplier of computers in the US, with the cheapest rate for Windows, or being the most expensive supplier of PCs in the US. Assuming Gartner is 100% correct and Dell took all of that market, they'd still only be selling 13% of the machines in the US and they'd lose almost all of their existing 32% of the PC market selling Windows machines. Oh Dell would love that bargaining chip, but it just might kill Apple.
No, now is not the time for such a move. Everyone who has tried to compete in that market has been killed by MS's lock-ins, even though several had superior offerings at the time. Apple needs to maintain their segregation until either the courts actually stop MS's antitrust actions or until they or Linux has grabbed a bigger chunk of the pie.
I originally used the proper doctype, then switched to the transitional, loose HTML 4 work around in order to get it to parse in IE.
The only "basic" feature that tends to give problems is div overflow, even in IE6, assuming you're using an XHTML doctype.
IE6 and IE7 both puke when confronted with any real XHTML, in this case the use of namespaces. If you rely upon XHTMLs features that are identical to HTML 4, IE will render them, but if you use any real features you might as well give up.
Its not like Firefox is 100% compliant either, so the reason your site works in all those browsers, is that (probably by reflex), you only used features that are supported by those.
No one "by reflex" codes for every browser except IE. I just looked at W3C and followed the specs. IE simply does not follow the specs while every other browser does, at least for basic functionality like what I was using.
Obviously, IE7 sucks less than 6, but still sucks, so the odds that you hit something it didn't support were higher, and tada, you hit one.
Yeah, but this was comparing IE6 and IE7 to every other browser I can find. If all the others can manage to implement the standard, why hasn't MS managed? Is it just a coincidence that every feature I tried works in every browser except IE?
There are even a few CSS2 properties that virtualy no browser supports.
Sure there are, and lots of edge cases, but I'm not talking about weird features and esoteric edge cases. I implemented the basics of a standard that is six years old.
So if you make a web site, and go by the -standards- and nothing else, you're in for a surprise. But you didn't.
Yes, I did. I looked at the standard, and wrote a scripted process to generate that standard. I didn't run into any problems with other browsers not because they are perfect, but because they all made a reasonable attempt at following the standard and MS intentionally avoided doing so.
You could use features supported by Firefox and not by Opera, or vice versa, and you'd end up in the same boat.
Sure I could, if I was trying to do something more than some formatted text, hyperlinks, and graphics, but I wasn't. I was doing something that should have been dead simple and would be except for MS's intentionally broken browsers.
If you made a compliant site before IE7, then it will work fine now that IE7 is out. IE6 was a nightmare, but not nearly the mess it was a year or two ago.
Yawn. I generate some HTML and CSS and XHTML destined for a very specific set of paying customers. I built the system quickly, just following the standards. Then I tested it. Every browser I tested including Opera, Firefox, Safari, Camino, and Konqueror rendered it exactly as expected. IE6 failed to render the XHTML formatting because they are half a decade behind the rest of the industry. Luckily, none of the people who will view this are likely to be using IE, so if someone happens to they can deal with something similar to plain text. When the IE7 beta came out and now that IE7 is out I tried it again. Just like IE6, IE7 fails completely.
MS has more money and developers than pretty much any other company. They did not make IE7 compliant because they don't care to spend the effort. If you want Web compliance you need competition in the space. Since no one stopped MS from illegally bundling IE, the industry pays and most developers have to waste a lot of time working around MS's noncompliance. This should surprise no one (and probably wouldn't except for all the marketing crap MS has spewed to convince people IE7 would be different).
Trees are, you know, alive. A lifeless planet wouldnt have forests to begin with.
That was his point. Without trees, there would be no forest fires, "besmudging" the sky with ugly smoke... unless you can think of a way eliminating life would get rid of lightning and a reason why you'd assume that was his intention.
Are you people trolling, astroturfing, or what? If you code Web pages just by following the WC3 standards for HTML, CSS, etc. your page will not work properly in IE6 or IE7. Anyone who has done Web development trying to use this method has noticed this by now. Generally, you have to code to standards, avoiding the huge subset of the standards that is broken in IE, and then use a few hacks to get things to look okay in IE. Otherwise, you can just code separately for IE and all other browsers and use browser detection to hand IE a page that works around its flaws.
Amazon obviously does not code to the standards because they want their page to work in IE, so they do the same thing I described above (like everyone else).
I try not to narrow down my location too much for reasons of preserving my pseudo-anonymity here and because listing the township would make it obvious to most people what company I work for. It is in a medium sized city in Michigan. Note, it is unclear if they actually disregard your vote if you don't vote a straight party line, but the instructions on the ballot claim they do, which amounts to pretty much the same result.
You are implying that if it is not theft, then it is OK.
The previous poster does no such thing. They state that copyright infringement is not theft. They very strongly imply that the particular action may or may not be a crime depending upon where you are. They do not address the morality of the act at all.
You should really try reading things with an open mind so that you don't make huge assumptions about what others are implying.
Ignorance of the law (or actions) doesn't absolve guilt of said action.
This is wrong. Ignorance of the law does not absolve you of guilt, but a lot of the law takes into account the intent of a person (ignorance of the criminality of a given action). It is the difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, for example, if you're firing a gun in the woods. In the case of copyrights in the US, it is very, very hard to get any sort of damages if the person copying a work had a reasonable expectation that the copy was legal. For example, unless you send a notice to a Web site informing them that some material on it is infringing your copyright and they do not remove it in a reasonable timeframe, it will be a wonder if you get any compensation should you take them to court. You might notice this is why YouTube and Google video are not constantly paying out damages.
Why should you be allowed to vote in more than one party's primary?
I'm not saying I should be able to vote for more than one party's primary candidates, although I'm not sure the US should support an official channel for determining primary candidates for some parties and not others. What I am saying, I should be able to vote for one party's primary candidates and any person I feel like for the real, local election candidates that are on the same ballot. For example, on one ballot I was asked to vote for the mayoral candidate in the local election (not nominate a party candidate vote for them) and nominate a party candidate in the statewide election. According to the info on the ballot, my votes would be discarded if I happen to vote for the libertarian running for mayor and nominate a particular democrat for congress.
That is wrong. Parties should exist outside the government as private organizations, not as part of an official election ballot and there should be no restriction on actually voting for people from different parties, which is what the info on the ballot claimed. (Who is to say if it is accurate or if they even count the votes at all with the electronic machines we had?)
Primary elections are to choose a party's nominee for the general election, you dumb piece of shit. You shouldn't be allowed to select more than one party's nominees.
Primary elections for congress are combined with local elections. Thus, I'm voting for a party's representative for congress and electing a mayor at the same time. According to the instructions on the ballot, I can't vote for a republican or libertarian mayor while at the same time nominating a democratic candidate for congress. If you don't think that is wrong, you're the dumbass.
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Anyone who buys DRM'd music is either an idiot or ignorant...
Generalize much?
In this case, you're paying for a vague not-a-promise that you can probably listen to the music now and if you're really lucky you'll be able to listen in the future.
I bought a few albums from the iTunes store. They were encoded with the fairplay DRM. I bought them because they were a convenient way to get music I wanted, but that did not seem to be making its way into the used CD stores nearby. After downloading them, I burned them to standard CD format (removing the DRM) and I used a program to legally strip off the DRM restrictions using my valid key, and thus not breaking any encryption (no DMCA issues). ow at this point I have the music I want, on CD and AAC, with no DRM, exactly as though I had bought a used CD with no cover art in the the record store.
Explain to me how this means I'll be "lucky" if I'm able to play these songs in the future. Explain to me how this method makes me any more of an idiot than the other.
So the only reason I can buy a CD and turn it into MP3s yet can't buy those MP3s to start with is because some jackass in a skyscraper either doesn't understand his own business or is trying really hard to pretend not to.
No, some jackass in a skyscraper figured out a way to sell the same music multiple times and to sell music via a cheaper medium, that would still result in that music breaking and needing to be repurchased, for the average consumer, the same way the average consumer needs to repurchase CDs as they break or as music players evolve.
Maybe for desktops (I haven't checked), but not for notebooks. Compare the 15.4" MacBook Pro to a customized HP dv6000t
Let me try this again. On average, for the numbers compiled thus far this year, macs are about 5% cheaper than the average, comparable PC hardware. One given machine from one other company at one particular time does not constitute an average for the industry. I'm not going to bother looking at your example to see if it is valid because, frankly, that is beside the point. There are a number of professionally conducted, independent surveys that determine this every year. So far the consensus is that Apple's are slightly cheaper than average, despite the margins on some of them. Now maybe that is mostly because of the mac mini, or maybe it is not. That is not the point. The point is, in general, macs are not more expensive than PCs.
Yeah, but on a Apple's 30" monitor it sucks. When you have a window open and positioned, say, in the lower RH corner and you need to access the menu bar, it is a long drag to move the mouse to the upper LH corner. And often you can accidentally click on the desktop or other window along the way and lose focus of the application's menu bar causing you to go back and repeat the procedure.
Umm, in the system preferences maybe you need to adjust your mouse tracking speed. I always use two monitors and I never have problems getting to the top of the screen. It is instantaneous and because it is always the same place I only have to worry about positioning in a single dimension (cursor hits top of screen and remains there, functionally providing an infinitely large target in that direction). Usability testing has show many times that after ten minutes of practice, users are consistently faster at selecting menus from the top of the screen than from menus attached to a window in the middle. Also, for applications that people use regularly, but which don't have just one maximized window, users are significantly faster at selecting menu items, because the position of those menus never changes. This means muscle memory becomes trained and users can hit a particular menu by reflex, rather than by painstakingly moving the cursor to a different spot every time.
I like OSX but this design feature should be a user's choice.
I don't see a really important reason why this could not be added as an option, but I think anyone who really tries both types of interfaces and compares them impartially will conclude Apple's way is significantly better. Adjust your mouse already.
That is only true if exactly half the cost of the unit is fixed costs. Not very likely.
Margins != cost. The margin is the amount of money Apple is making in profit, after covering their costs. They can cut margins in half without effecting revenue, if the double the number of units they ship. For example, say Apple sells 1 million mac books of some model. After covering the cost of the hardware and support for the machine they get $300 per machine. So they have 300 million in the general fund. Now say they spend 100 million on industrial design and 100 million on paying developers to make OS X. That means they add the remaining 100 million to their bottom line or reinvest it.
Now say they double the number they sell, but cut their margins in half, because macs become more popular. that's 2 million sold and $150 per unit which is still 300 million in the general fund. The cost of industrial design and OS X development does not go up with the number of units shipped, since it is the same amount of work regardless. That means they are still getting 100 million to reinvest, despite having cut the margins on the machine in half.
The previous poster has a point about the ease of migration from mac to mac that I think is somewhat underrated. You also have a point. Sometimes it is a pain to get Linux software running under OS X. Occasionally it is easier because a mac user with a clue made the OS X package nicer than the Linux one, but that is not overly common.
Depending upon your needs, you might want to consider a setup like I'm using. Consolidation for portability is very important to me. To that end, I have a Macbook with a fair bit of RAM, running OS X, with Windows and Linux running in hardware assisted VMs, via Parallels and the Core Duo processor. That way, if the OS X installation and usability is good quality, I just run it in OS X. If something fails to install well or easily on OS X, or if the user experience is poor with Apple's built in X11, I install it in my workstation Linux VM.
With this setup I get one step upgrades for Linux and Windows as well as OSX (the VMs and software are copied seamlessly via firewire). It also means I only have to carry one machine with me. I'm a happy camper. I don't know what kind of work you do, so I don't know is such a setup would work for you, but it is something to consider next time you upgrade.
On an aside, I really do wish Apple would pull in the features of a real application manager, including automated upgrades, multiple repositories and package types, and "clean" uninstalls. I wish they'd specify a location for source in packages and support building a custom binary from that manager. I wish Linux would adopt GNUStep and have portable, self contained, organized packages I can IM to friends and don't have to install to use.
Err, hello? Surveys of customers is reality when it comes to customer satisfaction. Why would you possibly think otherwise?
I suspect the previous poster was only repeating something he heard, but did not really understand all the issues involved. The truth is consumer reports surveys are often less than ideal in that many of them are self selecting. That is, they mail them about and those who are motivated return them. This tends to result in answers from people who are very happy or very unhappy, since the others don't bother answering.
That said, it is still a lot better than nothing, and when you apply the same methodology across the boards of computer vendors, your error cancels out, to some degree. Also, Consumer Reports uses other methods, including purchasing machines themselves and anonymously testing the support lines. It isn't perfect, but it is a lot better than, "they are worse because I had one bad experience" or "I don't know why I think they're bad, I just do."
I haven't had any issues with a properly-configured Linux desktop setup;
I'm not talking about "problems" as in bugs. I'm not talking about UI effects. I'm talking about missing features. I got a new laptop from work a few weeks back. I rebooted my old laptop into firewire mode, plugged in a cable and turned on the new laptop. It asked me if I wanted to install from the old one and I clicked "yes." Then I walked down to the coffee shop, grabbed a bite and a drink. That was it. All my configurations, settings, files, programs, security certs, user accounts, and everything else was sucked across the firewire cable. With a straight Linux machine it takes me days of configuration to get all those configurations back on new hardware.
The other feature I mentioned is system services. One spellchecker that works in all programs and shares a dictionary I customize. One grammar checker that works in all programs, regardless of if the developers of vi or Adobe InDesign or SubEthaEdit even knew such a feature was available. The same goes for scripts, language translation, online dictionary/thesaurus lookups, automatic bibliography citations, and hundreds more. Because OS X has provided a way for applications to share functionality with one another or from a plug-in I no longer have to copy and paste from my IM application into MS Word to check spelling or grammar. I can translate text from one language to another in any program. It saves me hours every week and I catch spelling errors in my posts and chats and IRC conversations and e-mail and Web mail and everything else, that I would have missed before.
Those are the two examples I listed, but they are not the only ways Linux is behind as a workstation. The thing is, I don't expect Linux to catch up anytime soon because all the people who really care about these things, have moved to OS X on the desktop. I use Linux on the server and I use it on the desktop for testing compatibility and for a few programs that I like better in KDE than in a generic X11 on OS X. But it just does not compare in general.
Until you try different systems for your everyday computer you just don't know what is missing from one or another. Don't mistake not having "problems" for Linux not being inferior in many ways.
If you really want to blend in, send out your Zombie commands via Myspace profiles. :) That'll look like normal web-traffic.
That's crazy, network engineers at a company will block MySpace even if they happen to notice traffic there that isn't botnet control traffic. Use comments from a user here on Slashdot and the network and security guys will leave it open just in case it is one of their scripts they forgot about :)
FF Market Share will drop over the next year.
Actually it is based upon multiple methods of information gathering, including spot checking and anonymous tests.
Wait a second, you take a jab at Consumer Reports' methodology and then you make an assertion like this based upon your views of what you read in a particular forum? Is that supposed to be a joke?
You make a lot of generalizations and assumptions, but the truth is the best data to date indicates Apple's support is better than average and you have no data to refute that claim. If you objectively look at the information, the best guess is the Apple's support is better.
Have you ever considered that a lot of UNIX types know exactly what they are doing, but simply have different priorities than you do? Open source, free software is a feature of software, but considering only one feature rather than the whole package is absurd. I use OS X, Windows, Linux, and OpenBSD every day. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. I'd love to have a primary workstation that was completely open source. I'm just not willing to give up all the features of OS X or all the available library of software for Windows to do it. The sad truth is, for a lot of tasks, their is no good Linux solution. For a lot of tasks, Linux itself, regardless of the applications, is inferior. I don't have the time or money to get the features I want added to Linux and it is falling further behind on the desktop, not catching up. When Linux has functional system services I can use and a two step upgrade path to a new machine, via a firewire cable, let me know. Until then, Linus will be on servers and Linux and Windows will both be running in VMs under OS X on the desktop.
I think IE7 is a great browser and really, the only people that wont use it are OS X people and nerds/geeks.
Both of these statements may be true, but it is important that you don't make the mistake of believing they are connected in any way. IE is and for years has been inferior to Firefox. It dominates the market because of MS's illegal actions, which is the same reason they have not bothered to fix such glaring, long standing problems as the one I pointed out.
Fact is that MS now has a good product out now...
Umm, good compared to what? Is there any other browser on the market that is not better than it? They have a product they hope is "good enough" so that people are not motivated enough to look for solutions to the problems IE creates for them.
FF Market Share will drop over the next year.
This is entirely probably, but it is because of MS's criminal actions bypassing the competition, not because IE can beat Firefox in a head to head comparison.
If you compare prices on similar Apple and Dell systems, you will usually find that the prices are higher on the Apple side, but only 10-20%, and that in the high end the margin disappears and your most powerful systems cost about the same either way.
Actually, you're out of date. Last year Apple systems were priced at approximately 14% higher than equivalent PCs, not Dells in general. This year, they are actually cheaper by about 5% to equivalent machines. You'll note, I don't say Dells, I say equivalent machines. That is because people conducting real market research soon discover it is hard to find an equivalent machine from Dell.
Apple's customer support is legendarily bad when they think they can get away with it.
Yeah, um, unlike all the other companies out there? Take a look at Consumer Reports for the last 5 years. Apple is one of the best for support, not the worst. You actually have to compare them to what else is out there. Sure, Apple support can really suck an egg, which makes it about twice as good as Dell's customer support that sucks two eggs.
If even -basic- features of CSS didn't render correctly in IE7, then you used a doctype that put IE in quirkmode.
Sigh, I said basic features of XHTML, not of CSS. Try this, following best practices, simply make an HTML page using CSS that matches up to namespaces within your document. That is pretty damned basic and every browser but IE handles it easily. IE does not and according to the developers that is because they did not get around to implementing XHTML pretty much at all.
You'll note, if you're already generating XML with namespaces, from a handful of different sources and tools like I am, simply turning it into valid XHTML is cake. Mapping all of it to individual HTML loses data, making it unable to be "round-tripped" and provides less flexibility with your CSS. Further it takes a lot more work and and at that point is no more functional than latex or something to PDF. Thus, IE fails for this fairly simple task while all other browsers handle it without issue. Since I'm in the wonderful position of not having to support IE, I don't in this case.
That would do it. If you don't use at least XHTML transitional for your doctype, then IE uses the old, broken box model.
You misunderstand. The XHTML transitional doctype causes MS to parse the XHTML as HTML, which is what most people do, but XHTML supports namespaces (sort of the reason for using it) and HTML does not, thus IE renders it as HTML but ignores all the formatting info from the namespaces.
So why did you need to use HTML 4 is beyond me.
XHTML, according to the spec, is backwards compatible with HTML4 for gracefully degrading. IE 6 and 7 both (with the workaround doctype) will parse XHTML as though it was HTML 4. That is as close as IE comes to supporting XHTML. Try it yourself.
This has been discussed to death on various discussion groups and even the IE dev team admits they don't actually support XHTML, only the subset of it that happens to be HTML. When they announced improved XHTML support that is what they meant and they admitted it was misleading.
Gee with increasing volumes large margins are not sustainable because Apple won't get as good of deals from Intel? Yeah that makes sense.. err wait no it doesn't! As volume goes up, Apple will get better deals from component manufacturers, in general, not worse. Maybe Intel will not cut them as nice of deals, but with increasing volumes, Apple does not need to maintain margins. Most of their costs are fixed. OS development, marketing, industrial design, etc. make up most of their costs, but remain fixed no matter how many units they ship. If they ship twice as many, they can cut their margins in half without being affected.
Either the Gartner people are looking to the very short term or they're out of their minds. The only way to free yourself from the influence of a monopoly is to maintain a complete vertical chain of components, including the one they have monopolized, but separate from their market. Apple doesn't sell their OS to Dell for two reasons. One, it would seriously cut into their hardware sales as people went to what they perceive as cheaper machines and were unable to compete with Dell's market outlets. Two, MS will kill Dell if they tried shipping OS X pre-installed. As soon as Dell had to re-negotiate their OEM licenses for Windows, MS would offer them the choice of being the largest supplier of computers in the US, with the cheapest rate for Windows, or being the most expensive supplier of PCs in the US. Assuming Gartner is 100% correct and Dell took all of that market, they'd still only be selling 13% of the machines in the US and they'd lose almost all of their existing 32% of the PC market selling Windows machines. Oh Dell would love that bargaining chip, but it just might kill Apple.
No, now is not the time for such a move. Everyone who has tried to compete in that market has been killed by MS's lock-ins, even though several had superior offerings at the time. Apple needs to maintain their segregation until either the courts actually stop MS's antitrust actions or until they or Linux has grabbed a bigger chunk of the pie.
What doctype were you using?
I originally used the proper doctype, then switched to the transitional, loose HTML 4 work around in order to get it to parse in IE.
The only "basic" feature that tends to give problems is div overflow, even in IE6, assuming you're using an XHTML doctype.
IE6 and IE7 both puke when confronted with any real XHTML, in this case the use of namespaces. If you rely upon XHTMLs features that are identical to HTML 4, IE will render them, but if you use any real features you might as well give up.
Its not like Firefox is 100% compliant either, so the reason your site works in all those browsers, is that (probably by reflex), you only used features that are supported by those.
No one "by reflex" codes for every browser except IE. I just looked at W3C and followed the specs. IE simply does not follow the specs while every other browser does, at least for basic functionality like what I was using.
Obviously, IE7 sucks less than 6, but still sucks, so the odds that you hit something it didn't support were higher, and tada, you hit one.
Yeah, but this was comparing IE6 and IE7 to every other browser I can find. If all the others can manage to implement the standard, why hasn't MS managed? Is it just a coincidence that every feature I tried works in every browser except IE?
There are even a few CSS2 properties that virtualy no browser supports.
Sure there are, and lots of edge cases, but I'm not talking about weird features and esoteric edge cases. I implemented the basics of a standard that is six years old.
So if you make a web site, and go by the -standards- and nothing else, you're in for a surprise. But you didn't.
Yes, I did. I looked at the standard, and wrote a scripted process to generate that standard. I didn't run into any problems with other browsers not because they are perfect, but because they all made a reasonable attempt at following the standard and MS intentionally avoided doing so.
You could use features supported by Firefox and not by Opera, or vice versa, and you'd end up in the same boat.
Sure I could, if I was trying to do something more than some formatted text, hyperlinks, and graphics, but I wasn't. I was doing something that should have been dead simple and would be except for MS's intentionally broken browsers.
If you made a compliant site before IE7, then it will work fine now that IE7 is out. IE6 was a nightmare, but not nearly the mess it was a year or two ago.
Yawn. I generate some HTML and CSS and XHTML destined for a very specific set of paying customers. I built the system quickly, just following the standards. Then I tested it. Every browser I tested including Opera, Firefox, Safari, Camino, and Konqueror rendered it exactly as expected. IE6 failed to render the XHTML formatting because they are half a decade behind the rest of the industry. Luckily, none of the people who will view this are likely to be using IE, so if someone happens to they can deal with something similar to plain text. When the IE7 beta came out and now that IE7 is out I tried it again. Just like IE6, IE7 fails completely.
MS has more money and developers than pretty much any other company. They did not make IE7 compliant because they don't care to spend the effort. If you want Web compliance you need competition in the space. Since no one stopped MS from illegally bundling IE, the industry pays and most developers have to waste a lot of time working around MS's noncompliance. This should surprise no one (and probably wouldn't except for all the marketing crap MS has spewed to convince people IE7 would be different).
Trees are, you know, alive. A lifeless planet wouldnt have forests to begin with.
That was his point. Without trees, there would be no forest fires, "besmudging" the sky with ugly smoke... unless you can think of a way eliminating life would get rid of lightning and a reason why you'd assume that was his intention.
I don't know about patches, but the first vulnerability in the final version is already out.
Which standard does amazon.com code to then?
Are you people trolling, astroturfing, or what? If you code Web pages just by following the WC3 standards for HTML, CSS, etc. your page will not work properly in IE6 or IE7. Anyone who has done Web development trying to use this method has noticed this by now. Generally, you have to code to standards, avoiding the huge subset of the standards that is broken in IE, and then use a few hacks to get things to look okay in IE. Otherwise, you can just code separately for IE and all other browsers and use browser detection to hand IE a page that works around its flaws.
Amazon obviously does not code to the standards because they want their page to work in IE, so they do the same thing I described above (like everyone else).
That is wrong. Where exactly is this?
I try not to narrow down my location too much for reasons of preserving my pseudo-anonymity here and because listing the township would make it obvious to most people what company I work for. It is in a medium sized city in Michigan. Note, it is unclear if they actually disregard your vote if you don't vote a straight party line, but the instructions on the ballot claim they do, which amounts to pretty much the same result.
You are implying that if it is not theft, then it is OK.
The previous poster does no such thing. They state that copyright infringement is not theft. They very strongly imply that the particular action may or may not be a crime depending upon where you are. They do not address the morality of the act at all.
You should really try reading things with an open mind so that you don't make huge assumptions about what others are implying.
Ignorance of the law (or actions) doesn't absolve guilt of said action.
This is wrong. Ignorance of the law does not absolve you of guilt, but a lot of the law takes into account the intent of a person (ignorance of the criminality of a given action). It is the difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter, for example, if you're firing a gun in the woods. In the case of copyrights in the US, it is very, very hard to get any sort of damages if the person copying a work had a reasonable expectation that the copy was legal. For example, unless you send a notice to a Web site informing them that some material on it is infringing your copyright and they do not remove it in a reasonable timeframe, it will be a wonder if you get any compensation should you take them to court. You might notice this is why YouTube and Google video are not constantly paying out damages.
Why should you be allowed to vote in more than one party's primary?
I'm not saying I should be able to vote for more than one party's primary candidates, although I'm not sure the US should support an official channel for determining primary candidates for some parties and not others. What I am saying, I should be able to vote for one party's primary candidates and any person I feel like for the real, local election candidates that are on the same ballot. For example, on one ballot I was asked to vote for the mayoral candidate in the local election (not nominate a party candidate vote for them) and nominate a party candidate in the statewide election. According to the info on the ballot, my votes would be discarded if I happen to vote for the libertarian running for mayor and nominate a particular democrat for congress.
That is wrong. Parties should exist outside the government as private organizations, not as part of an official election ballot and there should be no restriction on actually voting for people from different parties, which is what the info on the ballot claimed. (Who is to say if it is accurate or if they even count the votes at all with the electronic machines we had?)
Primary elections are to choose a party's nominee for the general election, you dumb piece of shit. You shouldn't be allowed to select more than one party's nominees.
Primary elections for congress are combined with local elections. Thus, I'm voting for a party's representative for congress and electing a mayor at the same time. According to the instructions on the ballot, I can't vote for a republican or libertarian mayor while at the same time nominating a democratic candidate for congress. If you don't think that is wrong, you're the dumbass.