The difference between a Mac and a Windows PC is about as superficial as the difference between OS X, Windows, and Linux. In other words, not superficial at all.
See he knew how badly a Windows 7 tablet on an Intel core would suck, and deftly marketed a filter that would suck the stench of failure mixed with pure shit right from the very air.
I get more real work done on the Mac than I ever did on Linux or FreeBSD. After all, I no longer have to worry about audio or video issues, everything just works. Same with Bluetooth which was a huge pain in the ass for a while on open source OSs. All I do is come to my desk, open the terminal, hit "screen -r" and I am off and away. Long and short of it, is that I don't have to fuck around with all my shit in order to make it work. I have access to everything a person using Linux or BSD does, and a whole giant pile more.
Some people also do serious scientific work which needs complete end-to-end color calibration, and the Mac laughs at your puny Linux, BSD, or even Windows systems in this realm. Hah.
That's a hell of a screed. You do miss important points, such as the fact that people are willing to pay more for refined products. To entirely blame their success on marketing sleight-of-hand is ridiculous. Apple products cost a bit more, but their life-cycle is longer. They are generally made of higher quality materials and tend to be lighter, have more battery life, or even both.
Apple does not target to commodity market. They are not so much more expensive that they could be classed luxury goods. It is a higher quality product competing on its merits, which also benefits from competent marketing. Its competitors are sadly inept in the art of marketing.
Destroying the pin that your entire argument hinges upon - that Apple achieves success solely through a complicated form of hypnosis and memetic viral STDs of some kind - leaves your post completely deflated. You literally have no points to make.
Here's the reality of the situation. Apple has an application marketplace that consistently attracts developers, the iPad has a higher quality of finish, more battery life, is thinner, and has a better screen than any of its competitors, and it is so easy to use that babies can intuitively learn how to use it. Let the competition come. If anybody could make something halfway as decent even for two-thirds the price, I'd buy it just to try it. Would you like to see what they consist of today? Go to Amazon and search for "tablet computer" and laugh your ass off at all the half-baked bullshit out there. I'd rather have the iPad, than the buggy, creaky, thick and slow Archos.
Phone technology crawls on in the mud, and Google can be proud that their phones aren't lagging too far behind any more.
I find it hard to believe that Google is crowing about voice activated dialing and voice activated "functions" which were present in phones made what, 5-10 years ago now?
"OK, this doesn't count the energy needed to break the rock up, but cut me some slack, this exercise is tuned to the accuracy standards of physicists, i.e., we're happy if we get it within a few orders of magnitude."
I laughed so hard, milk came out my nose, and I wasn't even drinking milk!
Do what I do, and just order your shitty Chinese crap from China. There are plenty of vendors there who are willing to ship individual items. Housewares? How about 50 cents for that steel ladle, not $15. Shipping is not expensive from China either, and is in fact extremely prompt for me. Import duties are now so low as to be inconsequential.
Order a bunch of stuff at once, and cut out the middleman. Having hundreds of thousands of giant stores to display stuff from China is infeasible and I don't pity the businesses who practice this kind of commerce one tiny bit.
Seeing all the American flags that were Made in China last year pushed me over the edge. Local retailers all had them! Fuck those guys.
The base system is open source, but there are a host of proprietary add-ons that you need for basic functionality. The situation is analogous to Apple's OS X / iOS and Darwin, if a bit loosely so.
Google has attacked people before for using Android software without authorization. I believe last year there was a fellow who was providing unofficial firmware update packs who was C&D'd by Google.
This will be the situation with Meego and Maemo, and probably any such projects. You get a big bunch of vendors who team up to craft an integrated windowing system / API / framework / etc which is either a proprietary add-on, or so bare-bones that it would require a lot of work to become any kind of a useful OS, that while large pieces of the system may be Free and the whole system may be open source, the whole itself is proprietary in nature. Linux may be the base OS, but you are running the famous binary blob on top of it.
What is telling is the language used. When considering matters of cyber-spying, you should shut off your "consumer" brain and do your duty as a citizen.
Actually, the grand majority of 80s arcade machines did conform to the JAMMA standard. You could usually pop open a Galaga machine, pop in a newer board with a totally different game on it, and be off and away.
It was quite common to see a machine that was popular get really worn and beat up, and then the next day see that game inside of a machine that has totally different logos for a completely different game, often from another manufacturer.
"And where the hell did anyone propose that? Huh? You think energy star ratings are drastic? You think that putting a date 30 years out to curb our countries carbon emissions is drastic? Do you know what drastic means? Do you know what rationing is? Apparently not."
You really didn't read the proposed bills that caused most of Africa to walk out of the climate conference last fall, did you?
The proposed solution was extremely drastic. They wouldn't be allowed to expel any more CO2, ever, than they are right now. Additionally, once they figured out they were being lied to, the got the fuck out of dodge.
Is it really cheaper? Bear in mind that providing an office environment for employees these days merely involves giving them any computer built in the last 10 years, and attaching them to a network with a very modest server to handle email and calendaring duties. The ongoing cost of such a move is mere power and the occasional hard drive.
If an IT staff is incapable of such mundane tasks they should be made into soylent green.
Part of the problem with college is that you have to suffer through years of BS in order to study what you are interested in. Francis Bacon got his law degree at 14, and he was by no means an exceptional student.
We are retarding our growth by limiting our rate of education. Please explain to me why a Business major needs 4 years of college to learn how to bullshit their way to the top.
You know, just a tip here, but if you hit the space bar while one or more icons are selected in the Finder, if will pop up preview of the document. This works with movies, audio files, PDFs, Word documents, you name it. The architecture it uses for this is pluggable, so developers can write their own previewers for their doc types.
This is it really. When a luser goes to a web site with a PDF, more often than not it says right next to the PDF file: Get the free Adobe Acrobat reader to view this file! In fact, a large majority of store-bought Windows PCs come with a whole pile of junk already installed, including Acrobat.
PDF is a really useful format, fore describing vector lines and bitmap placement on a page or screen. However, Adobe has added so much shit onto the PDF spec that it has halfway turned into Flash already and knowing Adobe this process will only accelerate in time. I think a line needs to be drawn in the sand with PDFs, and just treat them as ways to view or print a document with accuracy, like we should and people are with Flash. The question is, how to do it? Even some offices of the US Government use PDFs for their electronic form delivery process, and often include whizzy features which rarely work with any other PDF software.
I have Reader in a virtual machine, running as its own snapshot as the only thing installed. I have needed this for emergencies, but I do not trust it one tiny bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Vorbis? Surely you are joking.
The difference between a Mac and a Windows PC is about as superficial as the difference between OS X, Windows, and Linux. In other words, not superficial at all.
See he knew how badly a Windows 7 tablet on an Intel core would suck, and deftly marketed a filter that would suck the stench of failure mixed with pure shit right from the very air.
www.filter-supply.com spammer guy, I salute you.
I get more real work done on the Mac than I ever did on Linux or FreeBSD. After all, I no longer have to worry about audio or video issues, everything just works. Same with Bluetooth which was a huge pain in the ass for a while on open source OSs. All I do is come to my desk, open the terminal, hit "screen -r" and I am off and away. Long and short of it, is that I don't have to fuck around with all my shit in order to make it work. I have access to everything a person using Linux or BSD does, and a whole giant pile more.
Some people also do serious scientific work which needs complete end-to-end color calibration, and the Mac laughs at your puny Linux, BSD, or even Windows systems in this realm. Hah.
Your audio files PlayForSure(TM) right?
That's a hell of a screed. You do miss important points, such as the fact that people are willing to pay more for refined products. To entirely blame their success on marketing sleight-of-hand is ridiculous. Apple products cost a bit more, but their life-cycle is longer. They are generally made of higher quality materials and tend to be lighter, have more battery life, or even both.
Apple does not target to commodity market. They are not so much more expensive that they could be classed luxury goods. It is a higher quality product competing on its merits, which also benefits from competent marketing. Its competitors are sadly inept in the art of marketing.
Destroying the pin that your entire argument hinges upon - that Apple achieves success solely through a complicated form of hypnosis and memetic viral STDs of some kind - leaves your post completely deflated. You literally have no points to make.
Here's the reality of the situation. Apple has an application marketplace that consistently attracts developers, the iPad has a higher quality of finish, more battery life, is thinner, and has a better screen than any of its competitors, and it is so easy to use that babies can intuitively learn how to use it. Let the competition come. If anybody could make something halfway as decent even for two-thirds the price, I'd buy it just to try it. Would you like to see what they consist of today? Go to Amazon and search for "tablet computer" and laugh your ass off at all the half-baked bullshit out there. I'd rather have the iPad, than the buggy, creaky, thick and slow Archos.
Actually, a petition to the FCC needs to be signed on paper and delivered on paper. You can not form a valid petition on Facebook.
I'm sure it feels good to rant with a bunch of like minded buddies though.
Phone technology crawls on in the mud, and Google can be proud that their phones aren't lagging too far behind any more.
I find it hard to believe that Google is crowing about voice activated dialing and voice activated "functions" which were present in phones made what, 5-10 years ago now?
"OK, this doesn't count the energy needed to break the rock up, but cut me some slack, this exercise is tuned to the accuracy standards of physicists, i.e., we're happy if we get it within a few orders of magnitude."
I laughed so hard, milk came out my nose, and I wasn't even drinking milk!
Do what I do, and just order your shitty Chinese crap from China. There are plenty of vendors there who are willing to ship individual items. Housewares? How about 50 cents for that steel ladle, not $15. Shipping is not expensive from China either, and is in fact extremely prompt for me. Import duties are now so low as to be inconsequential.
Order a bunch of stuff at once, and cut out the middleman. Having hundreds of thousands of giant stores to display stuff from China is infeasible and I don't pity the businesses who practice this kind of commerce one tiny bit.
Seeing all the American flags that were Made in China last year pushed me over the edge. Local retailers all had them! Fuck those guys.
The base system is open source, but there are a host of proprietary add-ons that you need for basic functionality. The situation is analogous to Apple's OS X / iOS and Darwin, if a bit loosely so.
Google has attacked people before for using Android software without authorization. I believe last year there was a fellow who was providing unofficial firmware update packs who was C&D'd by Google.
This will be the situation with Meego and Maemo, and probably any such projects. You get a big bunch of vendors who team up to craft an integrated windowing system / API / framework / etc which is either a proprietary add-on, or so bare-bones that it would require a lot of work to become any kind of a useful OS, that while large pieces of the system may be Free and the whole system may be open source, the whole itself is proprietary in nature. Linux may be the base OS, but you are running the famous binary blob on top of it.
What is telling is the language used. When considering matters of cyber-spying, you should shut off your "consumer" brain and do your duty as a citizen.
Newspeak at work in the real world.
I like how we are merely consumers and no longer Citizens now.
Fuckers.
BTRFS is between alpha and beta. ZFS has been production quality for years.
BTRFS on HURD may not be ready now, but ia year it might be. Right?
Yeah, I'd rather use one proprietary, shitty, worthless viewer than another.
How about putting this together with HTML5? That way nobody has to complain about being tied to an awful crapfest of a viewer.
You hear really good synthesizers all the time. You just don't realize they are synthesizers.
The "really good synth" problem was solved in the late 1970s.
Why not have a look at csound, which is, by any academic measure, a really good synth.
Actually, the grand majority of 80s arcade machines did conform to the JAMMA standard. You could usually pop open a Galaga machine, pop in a newer board with a totally different game on it, and be off and away.
It was quite common to see a machine that was popular get really worn and beat up, and then the next day see that game inside of a machine that has totally different logos for a completely different game, often from another manufacturer.
"And where the hell did anyone propose that? Huh? You think energy star ratings are drastic? You think that putting a date 30 years out to curb our countries carbon emissions is drastic? Do you know what drastic means? Do you know what rationing is? Apparently not."
You really didn't read the proposed bills that caused most of Africa to walk out of the climate conference last fall, did you?
The proposed solution was extremely drastic. They wouldn't be allowed to expel any more CO2, ever, than they are right now. Additionally, once they figured out they were being lied to, the got the fuck out of dodge.
Is it really cheaper? Bear in mind that providing an office environment for employees these days merely involves giving them any computer built in the last 10 years, and attaching them to a network with a very modest server to handle email and calendaring duties. The ongoing cost of such a move is mere power and the occasional hard drive.
If an IT staff is incapable of such mundane tasks they should be made into soylent green.
Part of the problem with college is that you have to suffer through years of BS in order to study what you are interested in. Francis Bacon got his law degree at 14, and he was by no means an exceptional student.
We are retarding our growth by limiting our rate of education. Please explain to me why a Business major needs 4 years of college to learn how to bullshit their way to the top.
What if you just freeze it, so only the water is frozen, then pick the ice out?
This is how some high alcohol wines have been made for thousands of years.
You know, just a tip here, but if you hit the space bar while one or more icons are selected in the Finder, if will pop up preview of the document. This works with movies, audio files, PDFs, Word documents, you name it. The architecture it uses for this is pluggable, so developers can write their own previewers for their doc types.
Try it, you'll like it.
We could just switch back to Postscript, which would fit that need with ease.
This is it really. When a luser goes to a web site with a PDF, more often than not it says right next to the PDF file: Get the free Adobe Acrobat reader to view this file! In fact, a large majority of store-bought Windows PCs come with a whole pile of junk already installed, including Acrobat.
PDF is a really useful format, fore describing vector lines and bitmap placement on a page or screen. However, Adobe has added so much shit onto the PDF spec that it has halfway turned into Flash already and knowing Adobe this process will only accelerate in time. I think a line needs to be drawn in the sand with PDFs, and just treat them as ways to view or print a document with accuracy, like we should and people are with Flash. The question is, how to do it? Even some offices of the US Government use PDFs for their electronic form delivery process, and often include whizzy features which rarely work with any other PDF software.
I have Reader in a virtual machine, running as its own snapshot as the only thing installed. I have needed this for emergencies, but I do not trust it one tiny bit.
We're winding down the big fun space program for a while, so I would imagine a lot of really neat stuff is going to rust away.
Hell, we are so pathetic that we will be riding bitch with the Ruskies into space for a while here.