Hate to say ditto, but ditto!
I am an Apple fanboy and do not make apologies for it. The iPhone came out after I had recently inked my deal with Alltel....or it certainly would have been on my radar. I have a Razr. It looks okay, works fine, but is slow and clunky at times. A colleague of mine has an iPhone and I have played around with it. If Alltel had the iPhone, I would have it.
I am also perplexed by the printer comment. I have to use Windows at work and in my experience setting up printers for Windows is a freaking nightmare compared to OS X. In fact, I am not sure it could be much easier to set a printer up on OS X....even networked printers. So, I am not sure if they were reaching to try to come up with something and someone--who maybe does not use OS X that much--suggested printers, but I cannot see where the complaint is coming from.
I don't care who borrowed what from whom. I care about functionality. I want my stuff to work, plain and simple. I work in research and use Linux machines, Sun machines, Macs, and Windows machines. The two computers I own are Macs because imho they work the best for me. My PowerBook runs Matlab, Grace, xfig, Gimp, LaTeX, and a bunch of other Unix utilities quite well. I can compile TinyOS code and load it from my PowerBook. I personally like Mail, iCal, and so forth. I can do a lot of things I need to do to make me a better engineer. I can use a windows laptop to do some of these things, but they do not, imho, run things like this quite as well. Matlab has always crashed more on Windows than on the Suns or my Mac...ymmv.
I like the new features that have come with the new OS X's. Spotlight alone made Tiger worth it to me. Having said that, I like the integration of the widgets in Tiger too. I know that those were pretty much taken from someone else, but I don't care. I like that I can hit my f12 button when I am deep in my lab and see what the temp is or that it is raining outside. Could go look out the window, but who has time for that?
I think that this is an article by a guy who loves M$....and more power to him. I am guessing that the article is somewhat a response to Steve J's keynote and somewhat a response to the recent Mac vs. PC commercials. It would not suprise me to find out that this guys nuts ache everytime he sees that pasty faced grown version of Martin Prince representing his beloved PC's in commercials. I'd feel the same way about my computer if someone had that dude representing them as well.....satirical or not.
Point taken.....although I was referring more to software as Apple has much more control over their OS then they do over Motorola. Having said that, I am still using a 1 GHz Powerbook that performs--IMHO--better than most notebooks running Windoze.
This is absolutely true. This is not news. It is not so much that it was reannounced a week back, but Steve Jobs announced it almost a year ago at WWDC 2005. I thought he had, so I checked the video of his keynote to make sure I did not spread incorrect information on/. At about 57.5 minutes into his keynote, he says that they will be telling us about Leopard at WWDC 2006. Now, I understand that some in the Windoze community may be used to being told that something will be ready at a certain time....and then the date is pushed back [cough]Longhorn[cough], but Apple has been pretty much on or ahead of schedule in recent years. And, as an longtime Apple user I can say that the OS has gotten better over time imho. Spotlight alone made Tiger well worth it for me.
I think/. needs to really think about what gets posted as news. This is an obvious "HEY, look at MY site" posting.
I have a 3 yr old PowerBook and a 2+ year old iMac. As many have said here, our skin oils are corrosive as hell. My PowerBook finish has spots exactly where my hands are when I am typing. Maybe I have lower expectations of the finish, but I was not at all surprised when it happened as I use my PowerBook alot--pretty much 5-12 hours every day. The white keyboard on my iMac needs to be cleaned about every other month, but it does not get used quite as much--as it is my wife's computer. I think it would be of interest to know how often the discolored products are used.
Having said that, if it turns out to be a heat issue, as was suggested as a possibility in the article, I think this is an example of Apple's practice of using early adopters as product testers. Personally, I usually wait for a product line--Apple or otherwise--to go through several releases before buying one for just this reason.
I appreciate the feedback. I am not a program or sys admin, so sometimes I may use the terminology incorrectly. I think everyone understands my point with Java. MS took something others were using quite nicely....fiddled with it....and messed up the universality of Java.
I will continue to hold my position wrt Kerberos. Guys like Bruce Schneier hold a lot of sway with me when it comes to security. If he is concerned about Windows Kerberos-Like implementation, so am I.
In an effort to post quickly yesterday and get back to work, I made an error of ommission. I should have gone on to say that they eventually relented and published the information.....but I think you make it sound as if they have always done so. It took a lot of pressure from outside sources. And then when they did put it out there, they created a NDA in the document. In fact, this very website was involved in that process. I continue to maintain that they hijacked a standard--an open source one at that--and because it had a BSD like license rather than a GPL, they tried to hide what they had done.
Although I am an dedicated Mac guy, this is not an attempt at a flame of MS....and I hope the following post proves that:
I get a little scared everytime MS gets interested in adopting some standard. So I will be interested to see what they do in terms of XML. The reason is basically due to some of their other forays into standards. The most publicized would be Java. However, some of you may also be aware of MS's use (misuse) of the Kerberos standard. Rather than use the standard, they co-opted it slightly by using fields previously unused in Kerberos. While the jury was still out last time I checked on whether this degraded the security of Kerberos, I just do not understand why they felt the need to change it at all.....especially when they are adamant about not telling anyone what the heck they did exactly so someone--other than MS--can determine if what they did has some potential for holes or cross system interoperability problems.
I tend to agree with Chef here. I fall into that middle category of not really caring if it is Intel or PPC as long as it is the best possible Mac. I use a Mac not because it is cool or elitist or whatever the hell else some people use it for. I use it because it makes me a much more productive engineer. I can write and test code on my Mac, I can run Matlab on it, I can do some pretty nice things with technical plots and figures using xfig and Grace via X11, I have a really nice LaTeX front end, and--when forced--I can use M$ Office X to create Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. I have used a PC before and, in my experience, I am more efficient on my Mac. Maybe that is not quantifiable, but so what. It works for me.
Am I worried about a possible transition to Intel? Hell yes. But I will try and have a little faith in the engineers at Apple and Intel and see what happens. Perhaps I will be one of those buying the last generation of Apple PPC Powerbooks right before the change over and then play wait and see.
Seeing them made me think of saying, "I will take my nanopants off if you put your pants back on." I am just glad none of the ladies had their arms raised. Seems like many of women in these 'cause of the day' protest groups also protest the idea of shaving.
After this past fall semester, the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Nebraska begin setting Firefox as the default browsers in all the teaching labs due to problems with IE. Previously, at the end of each semester, the techs responsible for these labs would spend a lot of time cleaning up the malware coming in via IE. Now that this semester is over, the word is that the switch proved successful in terms of not having much to clean up.
I grew up in a 3M town and had family that worked for them. I was 10 or 11 when they came out and I remember the big deal made about them. There was a 3M exec who worked with the Junior Achievement groups and I would always be hoping and praying that he would bring some Post-It notes in to school so I could get a pad.
It is interesting to note the products of unintended consequences. Just a few: Post-Its, Microwave Ovens, and Vasoline.
I will just say at the beginning of this post that I am a fan of Apple products. I try not to jump in on every Apple story on this site because I think there is enough preaching to the choir on this site. Having said that, I will continue on this thread.
I have used Windows machines for many years in addition to using Apple. The reason why there is no huge uproar, in my opinion, is because I know it wll be fixed soon. I also know that the fix will make the product better (i.e. it will NOT be SP2). It is not so much that we are brain dead followers....I would not just drink some kool aid if Steve asks me to....I think many of us have just had good experiences with their products. I upgraded to Tiger on Monday of this week. I expected some hiccups and there have been a few. However, they are not major hiccups and I do not expect to be dealing with them for long.
Hmmmm, can't use my middle finger. I need to direct it to the M$ users when they come to ask me to help them fix their buggy, virus loaded P.[iece of] C.[rap]
I do not understand what their problem is. D&D players are a productive bunch of people who are driven, goal orientated.........ohhh, I have to finish this later, it is my fighter/wizard/theif's turn to attack the dragon. I use my +5 Sword of....
It is unlikely, IMHO, that these new pictures will satisfy any of those who do not believe that NASA landed men on the moon. It is much easier to doctor photos these days than to create the conspiracy they believe occurred in the 60's and 70's with the moon landings. In fact, I believe that you could take most of these folks, land them on the moon itself, and they would still claim that they were not actually on the moon, but had fallen victim to some form of mind control. Does anyone know if a tin foil hat will fit inside of a NASA space helmet?
No doubt. I tried a link to that site one time doing a little research on something. It was 99% ads, 0.99% whitespace, and 0.01% information--and I use the term information liberally here. Some of the articles themselves are unabashed ads.
I think this alludes to something important. The idea of giving Google and/or MS the power. Their power is in our use. If we chose to use something else, i.e. Linux or Web Crawler, that power is diminished. I would say that MS has done some things in the past (and is likely continuing to do so) to make sure that choice is limited. However, the choice is still there.
Probably most slashdotters realize all of this, but Google will continue to grow and embed themselves in the average computer users lives/computers. Rather than seeing the power they are giving up, most of them see it as a cool tool. While they are, in reality, giving up some of their choice in things, they believe they are enhancing their ability to use their computer.
I have to agree that I cannot see these items being made illegal. They are simply too ubiquitous now and they have, like the VCR, legitimate uses. I vaguely remember the ruling on the VCR suit came down to legitimate uses. If the government starting outlawing items that are clear legitimate use items, we would be in trouble. (i.e. Next on the EFF list, the automobile)
I think it is fairly obvious that all of the items you mention above do have legitimate uses. And there is really no way that A/D and D/A chips are going anywhere. In fact, most decent microcontrollers have the A/D built-in because of the benefits of digital signals. More and more we are seeing typically analog devices using digital signalling. I do not think the RIAA and similar organizations have that much power.
Jobs was "buying time" with the Microsoft deal and the original iMac to maintain interest in Apple and its perceived viability while software engineers furiously worked to bring Mac OS X to market, which Jobs saw as Apple's biggest bet on the future.
I am personally glad they made the bet. OS X is what brought me back to Mac after over 10 years. I know some older Mac enthusiasts who swear by the older OS's, but those OS's were losing ground. I had to use PC's for the lack of software. They were great if you did graphical layout or things like that. The problem for me was the unavailability of Matlab. I simply had to be able to use Matlab. I needed the fastest way to do that and throughout the 90's that meant using a PC. Once OS X came in, Apple courted The Mathworks to port it to OS X. From my memory, The Mathworks said no, so Apple did the port themselves using X11. Once I saw that Matlab worked on Macs with OS X via X11--and it was both stable and fast, I immediately began shopping for a Mac....and have never regretted that decision.
So true. Although I do a majority of my writing in LaTeX, I do occassionally have to use Word. My biggest problem with this program is convincing the program that I know what the heck I am doing and to stop changing things for me. I actually have a MS Office Specialist Certificate for Office 2000. It just seems to me that the way things ought to work are often backwards of the way they do work.
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Hate to say ditto, but ditto! I am an Apple fanboy and do not make apologies for it. The iPhone came out after I had recently inked my deal with Alltel....or it certainly would have been on my radar. I have a Razr. It looks okay, works fine, but is slow and clunky at times. A colleague of mine has an iPhone and I have played around with it. If Alltel had the iPhone, I would have it.
I am also perplexed by the printer comment. I have to use Windows at work and in my experience setting up printers for Windows is a freaking nightmare compared to OS X. In fact, I am not sure it could be much easier to set a printer up on OS X....even networked printers. So, I am not sure if they were reaching to try to come up with something and someone--who maybe does not use OS X that much--suggested printers, but I cannot see where the complaint is coming from.
I don't care who borrowed what from whom. I care about functionality. I want my stuff to work, plain and simple. I work in research and use Linux machines, Sun machines, Macs, and Windows machines. The two computers I own are Macs because imho they work the best for me. My PowerBook runs Matlab, Grace, xfig, Gimp, LaTeX, and a bunch of other Unix utilities quite well. I can compile TinyOS code and load it from my PowerBook. I personally like Mail, iCal, and so forth. I can do a lot of things I need to do to make me a better engineer. I can use a windows laptop to do some of these things, but they do not, imho, run things like this quite as well. Matlab has always crashed more on Windows than on the Suns or my Mac...ymmv.
I like the new features that have come with the new OS X's. Spotlight alone made Tiger worth it to me. Having said that, I like the integration of the widgets in Tiger too. I know that those were pretty much taken from someone else, but I don't care. I like that I can hit my f12 button when I am deep in my lab and see what the temp is or that it is raining outside. Could go look out the window, but who has time for that?
I think that this is an article by a guy who loves M$....and more power to him. I am guessing that the article is somewhat a response to Steve J's keynote and somewhat a response to the recent Mac vs. PC commercials. It would not suprise me to find out that this guys nuts ache everytime he sees that pasty faced grown version of Martin Prince representing his beloved PC's in commercials. I'd feel the same way about my computer if someone had that dude representing them as well.....satirical or not.
Point taken.....although I was referring more to software as Apple has much more control over their OS then they do over Motorola. Having said that, I am still using a 1 GHz Powerbook that performs--IMHO--better than most notebooks running Windoze.
This is absolutely true. This is not news. It is not so much that it was reannounced a week back, but Steve Jobs announced it almost a year ago at WWDC 2005. I thought he had, so I checked the video of his keynote to make sure I did not spread incorrect information on /. At about 57.5 minutes into his keynote, he says that they will be telling us about Leopard at WWDC 2006. Now, I understand that some in the Windoze community may be used to being told that something will be ready at a certain time....and then the date is pushed back [cough]Longhorn[cough], but Apple has been pretty much on or ahead of schedule in recent years. And, as an longtime Apple user I can say that the OS has gotten better over time imho. Spotlight alone made Tiger well worth it for me.
I think /. needs to really think about what gets posted as news. This is an obvious "HEY, look at MY site" posting.
I have a 3 yr old PowerBook and a 2+ year old iMac. As many have said here, our skin oils are corrosive as hell. My PowerBook finish has spots exactly where my hands are when I am typing. Maybe I have lower expectations of the finish, but I was not at all surprised when it happened as I use my PowerBook alot--pretty much 5-12 hours every day. The white keyboard on my iMac needs to be cleaned about every other month, but it does not get used quite as much--as it is my wife's computer. I think it would be of interest to know how often the discolored products are used. Having said that, if it turns out to be a heat issue, as was suggested as a possibility in the article, I think this is an example of Apple's practice of using early adopters as product testers. Personally, I usually wait for a product line--Apple or otherwise--to go through several releases before buying one for just this reason.
I appreciate the feedback. I am not a program or sys admin, so sometimes I may use the terminology incorrectly. I think everyone understands my point with Java. MS took something others were using quite nicely....fiddled with it....and messed up the universality of Java.
I will continue to hold my position wrt Kerberos. Guys like Bruce Schneier hold a lot of sway with me when it comes to security. If he is concerned about Windows Kerberos-Like implementation, so am I.
In an effort to post quickly yesterday and get back to work, I made an error of ommission. I should have gone on to say that they eventually relented and published the information.....but I think you make it sound as if they have always done so. It took a lot of pressure from outside sources. And then when they did put it out there, they created a NDA in the document. In fact, this very website was involved in that process. I continue to maintain that they hijacked a standard--an open source one at that--and because it had a BSD like license rather than a GPL, they tried to hide what they had done.
Although I am an dedicated Mac guy, this is not an attempt at a flame of MS....and I hope the following post proves that:
I get a little scared everytime MS gets interested in adopting some standard. So I will be interested to see what they do in terms of XML. The reason is basically due to some of their other forays into standards. The most publicized would be Java. However, some of you may also be aware of MS's use (misuse) of the Kerberos standard. Rather than use the standard, they co-opted it slightly by using fields previously unused in Kerberos. While the jury was still out last time I checked on whether this degraded the security of Kerberos, I just do not understand why they felt the need to change it at all.....especially when they are adamant about not telling anyone what the heck they did exactly so someone--other than MS--can determine if what they did has some potential for holes or cross system interoperability problems.
I tend to agree with Chef here. I fall into that middle category of not really caring if it is Intel or PPC as long as it is the best possible Mac. I use a Mac not because it is cool or elitist or whatever the hell else some people use it for. I use it because it makes me a much more productive engineer. I can write and test code on my Mac, I can run Matlab on it, I can do some pretty nice things with technical plots and figures using xfig and Grace via X11, I have a really nice LaTeX front end, and--when forced--I can use M$ Office X to create Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. I have used a PC before and, in my experience, I am more efficient on my Mac. Maybe that is not quantifiable, but so what. It works for me.
Am I worried about a possible transition to Intel? Hell yes. But I will try and have a little faith in the engineers at Apple and Intel and see what happens. Perhaps I will be one of those buying the last generation of Apple PPC Powerbooks right before the change over and then play wait and see.
Seeing them made me think of saying, "I will take my nanopants off if you put your pants back on." I am just glad none of the ladies had their arms raised. Seems like many of women in these 'cause of the day' protest groups also protest the idea of shaving.
After this past fall semester, the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Nebraska begin setting Firefox as the default browsers in all the teaching labs due to problems with IE. Previously, at the end of each semester, the techs responsible for these labs would spend a lot of time cleaning up the malware coming in via IE. Now that this semester is over, the word is that the switch proved successful in terms of not having much to clean up.
My wife does not seem to think so. Wonder why?
It is what I get for posting replies at 6 am with a little bit of a hangover......
I grew up in a 3M town and had family that worked for them. I was 10 or 11 when they came out and I remember the big deal made about them. There was a 3M exec who worked with the Junior Achievement groups and I would always be hoping and praying that he would bring some Post-It notes in to school so I could get a pad.
It is interesting to note the products of unintended consequences. Just a few: Post-Its, Microwave Ovens, and Vasoline.I will just say at the beginning of this post that I am a fan of Apple products. I try not to jump in on every Apple story on this site because I think there is enough preaching to the choir on this site. Having said that, I will continue on this thread. I have used Windows machines for many years in addition to using Apple. The reason why there is no huge uproar, in my opinion, is because I know it wll be fixed soon. I also know that the fix will make the product better (i.e. it will NOT be SP2). It is not so much that we are brain dead followers....I would not just drink some kool aid if Steve asks me to....I think many of us have just had good experiences with their products. I upgraded to Tiger on Monday of this week. I expected some hiccups and there have been a few. However, they are not major hiccups and I do not expect to be dealing with them for long.
Hmmmm, can't use my middle finger. I need to direct it to the M$ users when they come to ask me to help them fix their buggy, virus loaded P.[iece of] C.[rap]
I do not understand what their problem is. D&D players are a productive bunch of people who are driven, goal orientated.........ohhh, I have to finish this later, it is my fighter/wizard/theif's turn to attack the dragon. I use my +5 Sword of....
It is unlikely, IMHO, that these new pictures will satisfy any of those who do not believe that NASA landed men on the moon. It is much easier to doctor photos these days than to create the conspiracy they believe occurred in the 60's and 70's with the moon landings. In fact, I believe that you could take most of these folks, land them on the moon itself, and they would still claim that they were not actually on the moon, but had fallen victim to some form of mind control. Does anyone know if a tin foil hat will fit inside of a NASA space helmet?
No doubt. I tried a link to that site one time doing a little research on something. It was 99% ads, 0.99% whitespace, and 0.01% information--and I use the term information liberally here. Some of the articles themselves are unabashed ads.
I think this alludes to something important. The idea of giving Google and/or MS the power. Their power is in our use. If we chose to use something else, i.e. Linux or Web Crawler, that power is diminished. I would say that MS has done some things in the past (and is likely continuing to do so) to make sure that choice is limited. However, the choice is still there.
Probably most slashdotters realize all of this, but Google will continue to grow and embed themselves in the average computer users lives/computers. Rather than seeing the power they are giving up, most of them see it as a cool tool. While they are, in reality, giving up some of their choice in things, they believe they are enhancing their ability to use their computer.
I have to agree that I cannot see these items being made illegal. They are simply too ubiquitous now and they have, like the VCR, legitimate uses. I vaguely remember the ruling on the VCR suit came down to legitimate uses. If the government starting outlawing items that are clear legitimate use items, we would be in trouble. (i.e. Next on the EFF list, the automobile) I think it is fairly obvious that all of the items you mention above do have legitimate uses. And there is really no way that A/D and D/A chips are going anywhere. In fact, most decent microcontrollers have the A/D built-in because of the benefits of digital signals. More and more we are seeing typically analog devices using digital signalling. I do not think the RIAA and similar organizations have that much power.
Jobs was "buying time" with the Microsoft deal and the original iMac to maintain interest in Apple and its perceived viability while software engineers furiously worked to bring Mac OS X to market, which Jobs saw as Apple's biggest bet on the future.
I am personally glad they made the bet. OS X is what brought me back to Mac after over 10 years. I know some older Mac enthusiasts who swear by the older OS's, but those OS's were losing ground. I had to use PC's for the lack of software. They were great if you did graphical layout or things like that. The problem for me was the unavailability of Matlab. I simply had to be able to use Matlab. I needed the fastest way to do that and throughout the 90's that meant using a PC. Once OS X came in, Apple courted The Mathworks to port it to OS X. From my memory, The Mathworks said no, so Apple did the port themselves using X11. Once I saw that Matlab worked on Macs with OS X via X11--and it was both stable and fast, I immediately began shopping for a Mac....and have never regretted that decision.
Look, I think it comes down to one simple word: ubiquity.
When you ask the average computer user why they chose Windows the answer tends to fall into one of two categories:
1. It is what came with my machine.
2. It is what I learned in school (or at home).
Man, smittenedkitten is dead? Where the hell am I going to get that Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra now? I am so bummed. Damn mortality anyway.
So true. Although I do a majority of my writing in LaTeX, I do occassionally have to use Word. My biggest problem with this program is convincing the program that I know what the heck I am doing and to stop changing things for me. I actually have a MS Office Specialist Certificate for Office 2000. It just seems to me that the way things ought to work are often backwards of the way they do work.