I'm sure you thought you were being clever by typesetting your comment as if it were poetry, but I have to confess that I didn't trouble myself to decipher it. I don't have the patience for that kind of nonsense this early in the morning.
Thanks for taking the effort, though. Maybe somebody else will take the time to read your poem and figure out what, if any, meaning it carries.
Most would think a company is a business enterprise of some sort...
I'm not troubled by the idea that most people would get it wrong. That seems to be the rule rather than the exception. A company is a group of people joined together in a common purpose.
we are only endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
No, that's not correct. The enumeration of some rights -- chief among them being life, liberty and either property or the pursuit of happiness, depending on which document you read --does not serve to exclude the others.
But even if it were true, everything we're talking about here falls under "liberty."
Since governments around the world (including ours) are able to abridge these and other rights, your argument is a losing battle.
Why? What does the fact that the law limits our exercise of our natural rights have to do with anything? How is that relevant to our conversation?
Even in the US we had a little something called...what was it...slavery. So much for asolute freedom.
I'm afraid you've lost me here. Once again I have to ask what your point is.
Or, I suppose we can ditch the theory that you were educated & decide you know nothing of ad hominem attacks.
Oh, goody. Another high-school debater. Tell me, is the Internet littered with your peers, or is there just one of you who writes under a vast multitude of different names?
The fact that you're late for school notwithstanding, I still don't understand what any of this has to do with anything. Is the conversation over?
You just have to consider the two as seperate, distinct, modular components
Why? What's the benefit of drawing an arbitrary and artificial line and saying that this part of the computer is separate from that part of the computer?
Thanks, but it was kind of a waste of time. We're not going to be talking about any of those things. Because they're irrelevant, you see. It's all about the software.
You simply cannot purchase nor assemble a similarly priced PPC-based hardware that will compete favorably with the suggested $800 AMD64.
You have that backwards, and a little sideways. You cannot purchase nor assemble a non-Mac computer at any price that can do what a Mac can do for $499. Why? Because of the software.
It is wrong because it vendor-locks you to expensive, proprietary hardware.
Please explain why inexpensive, multi-sourced hardware that can't do anything useful is superior to expensive (at $499), single-sourced hardware that does do useful things.
My bad. I must have been imagining things
No, just failing to understand what you read.
At last I've gotten you to admit the implication that x86 hardware is better suited towards success in a "given environment".
I think it's a little deceptive to say that you've done anything of the kind "at last," because it's never come up before my last message. But of course PCs are better suited toward success in a marketplace where people like to buy cheap, poorly made computers that can't be used for anything useful. This surprises no one.
Careful manipulation such as supporting PC hardware.
I'm lost. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Just like there is a lot of good PC gaming software available.
An absurd comparison, and you know it. You would seriously sit there and put computer software that lets freelancers create beautiful things (my things are merely pretty, but I aspire to beauty someday) and make money like it's going out of style on the same plane as arcade games? Once again, friend, I think you're not understanding the distinction between a tool with practical uses and a glorified Nintendo.
There is some overlap though, in that I rip DVDs
Sigh. Piracy is not a legitimate use of one's time or one's tools.
Give me the specs, and I'll show you an x86 analog that is comparable in terms of hardware
Of course you will not, because others before you have tried and failed. The Xserve RAID is the best storage system in its class, and also happens to be the least expensive.
You want "specs?" I guess your Web browsing finger is broken or something, but let me give you some bullet points to contemplate: Seven 400 GB hard drives in a RAID-5 6+1 configuration, plus seven empty bays for more drives that I haven't needed to fill yet. Dual battery-backed caches. Dual, redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fan modules. Dual, redundant, hot-swappable RAID controllers with 2 Gbps Fibre Channel host-bus interfaces. Dual, redundant out-of-band management coprocessors. Stunningly easy-to-use management software that makes expanding existing RAID sets and setting up new sets a task for mere mortals. And three full years of 24/7 service and support. For a retail price of slightly under $8,000.
I would choose Linux for my servers any day.
Because...you enjoy pain? My Xserve, which I use as the central automation for an office of about 50 people, is a file server, print server, Open Directory server (which means it stores user account information and home directories), Web server, FTP server, VPN server, database server (though FileMaker Pro) and scheduling server (through Meeting Maker). In its spare time (since, with dual G5 processors, it has lots) it runs Adobe Distiller for rendering the PostScript files my graphics department generates into PDF for our press. I'd love to find more things for it to do, but right at this moment it's doing everything we need it to do.
And I -- not some high-priced IT staff, not some vendor technician, but I myself --had it out of
Well then why am I sure where this "PPC" business came from
And we're defining "PPC" as what, exactly? Is it like "AMD64?"
Mac users are "the few of us".
"Rest" means "remainder," or "that part left over." Which has nothing to do with "many" or "few."
I find myself wondering if you really understand how capitalism works. Do you understand "survival of the fittest" ?
I certainly do. I also know that the first thing has nothing at all to do with the second. See, the cliché "survival of the fittest" presupposed an understanding of the notion of fitness. That is to say, to be fittest is not necessarily to be good by any objective measure, but rather simply to be better suited toward success in a given environment.
Which is why, in a market environment, the popular thing is practically never the best thing. There are exceptions, of course, achieved through careful manipulation of the market to alter its shape to favor a given product -- the iPod, for instance. We all remember how that was received, don't we? It was derided, much as you're deriding the Mac now, for reasons that were utterly irrelevant to its eventual domination of the market. But events transpired in that way because Apple carefully manipulated the market for their product through marketing, branding and, eventually, creating an entirely new business model for content delivery. So it's the exception that proves the rule, see.
How many times has Apple *almost* gone bankrupt.
Zero. The company has always had extremely deep cash reserves, dating back to the industry-defining success of the Apple II. The company has never been anywhere near bankruptcy. Maybe you're thinking of those days in the mid-1990s when Apple's long-term product strategy was a mess and their prospects for growth were shallow. But even then, the company was quite successful.
Didn't they get bailed out by Microsoft on at least one occasion?
No, but I know where you got that idea. Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock from Apple as part of a business deal. The sum was far less than Apple's quarterly earnings at the time, not even a drop in the bucket really. And the shares were long since sold off by Microsoft... for a tidy profit, amusingly enough.
If Apple's products were that great, they wouldn't be having so much trouble.
Apple recently announced that their earnings for the quarter ending 12/25/04 were four times higher than their earnings in the same quarter in 2003. The company's stock is trading above $70, and analysts recently increased their estimates to a share price of $85. The company is wildly outperforming the industry.
Or maybe it's that Apples products are great, they're just too expensive and incompatible to really catch on?
Yes, Macs have traditionally been too expensive to be wildly popular. But if they were not expensive, Apple would not have had big cash reserves to throw at product development, and their products coincidentally would not have been very good. They would have been a Gateway, in other words.
Incompatible? I think maybe you're talking out your ass again. Interoperability has always been one of Apple's biggest selling points.
But they obviously cannot compete when it comes to producing a full desktop machine cheaply.
Four hundred and ninety-nine dollars isn't cheap? That's including $200 worth of top-quality software, too, so the actual price of the computer alone--if you could buy it that way --would be about $300. That's pretty darned cheap by anybody's estimation.
But of course this is a new development. It's only reasonable that you haven't wrapped your head around it yet. Paradigm-changing ideas are hard to absorb all at once. So let's take the Mac mini out of it. Apple is making money hand over fist by selling exceptional products at high prices. Explain to me, please, what's wrong with that bus
What does a business license have to do with being a company?
Freedom is not an absolute.
If there are any words more frequently uttered by people who are trying desperately to take away our rights, I don't know what they are.
News flash, Sparky: Freedoms are absolute. They are unalienable. You may have heard this if you went to school anywhere in the past two hundred years or so. It is our exercise of those freedoms that must be regulated with laws. We have laws, for example, that prohibit people from infringing upon the rights of others. That's an example of a law that abridges our exercise of our God-given, unalienable freedoms.
What this has to do with "open source" is beyond me.
Valid does not mean the same thing as "I think it is right."
So... some opinions are okay while others aren't? How is that different from "Your opinion is wrong?"
Free and Open Source Software. Sorry to drop acronyms.
Thank you for defining it for me.
Perhaps the problem is in the phrasing & not in the reading.
You keep going back to that well, but I'm still not buying it. For, you know, obvious reasons.
Sounds like your gripe is with "grep," not with the Mac. A good approach is to avoid using obsolete legacy tools written for obsolete legacy operating systems. Choose modern tools instead, preferably tools that are based on the Mac's built-in "Cocoa" framework. These tools all get the ability to handle various line encodings and character sets as part and parcel of their makeup, as opposed to vintage-1973 tools that were written under the assumption that seven-bit ASCII was the acme of technological innovation.
If "OpenOffice.org" is what the project calls its software, that's the name. Period.
Um, no. The name is what everybody else calls it. And that's "Open Office."
You're just trying to minimize the importance of having the freedom to modify and distribute software.
Two things here.
First, freedoms are not something that can be granted. They emerge from natural rights, and no person has the power to grant them. This is fundamental to our system of political thought.
Second, because nobody can grant the freedom to do something, it's laughable on its face to talk about "having the freedom." It's like talking about having gravity, or having a gender. Because there is no such thing as the absence of that thing, you see.
Consequently, it's correct only to talk about having rights, not having freedom. And to have the right to do something is to be in a circumstance where no law of God or man prohibits it.
Therefore, if you'll pardon a malicious bastardization of the language in the name of a higher purpose, the "most free" (ugh) piece of property is that which has been placed in the public domain, property to which all claims of ownership have been waived. No man owns it, you see, which means there are no laws preventing its use.
So if the "open source" people were really interested in freedom, they'd simply waive their claims of ownership and place their work into the public domain.
But they don't, you see. Rather, they maintain zealous control over their works, going so far as to offer elaborate and draconian terms of use for those works. You may do this, but if you do, you must do this and you must not do that. As opposed to an ordinary software license where you pay your money and you get to use the product.
The "open source" people don't give two shits about freedom, and everyone knows it. They care only about convincing other people to do things their way. They're control freaks, plain and simple.
Which is fine. Because it's a free country. But because it's a free country, I'm also at liberty to call their bullshit when it's repeated by a thoughtless and misled individual such as yourself. See how that works?
Your one supposed experience with one piece of open source software does not provide a basis to judge the open source methodology.
Hm. Maybe you, too, fall into the "shamefully unfamiliar with basic written communication" camp. Are you somehow unclear on the concept of using a specific instance to illustrate a larger point? You seem to have arrived at the conclusion that precisely one event has transpired in my life, and because I have experienced only that one event I am unqualified to hold my opinion. What led you to that conclusion? Please enlighten me that I will know what not to say in future when speaking to people who have yet to master basic thinking and reading skills.
I can't imagine that anyone would believe such an obvious and transparent lie.
Are you suggesting that I lied when I said I didn't know what "Mac troll" meant? I can guess, of course. To call someone a "troll" would be like calling him an ape or a buffoon, I suppose. But I don't know what that has to do with the Macintosh. But hey, if you want to spout nonsense and then imagine that I'm just pretending not to make head or tails of it, be my guest. If I simply ignore the parts of your comments that make no sense at all, it'll save me a lot of time.
No, you provided one data point and tried to say that it indicated a trend.
It sounds an awful lot like you're looking for a technical document with charts and graphs and appendices and page after page of itty-bitty type. So sorry to disappoint. That's not how people usually communicate, you see.
You presented your opinion as though it were fact and that anyone who disagreed was an idiot.
Again, we're going to remove the nonsense from this sentence and
Whatever. "Community." Blah. I am unimpressed by new-age jargon. It's a company.
Software under OSI-approved licenses is more libre than most other software.
I don't recognize concepts like "more free." That's like arguing that somebody is "less pregnant." Sure, there's an interpretation you could make that would lead to that conclusion, but it's hardly a useful or interesting one.
You also think your opinion is more valid than anyone else's.
Um. Duh. If I thought some conflicting idea was right, that would be my opinion. That's what "opinion" means.
He's implying that you are only denegrating F/OSS
Who? Is that another company with a silly and deliberately confusing name?
IF it confuses a lot of people (I don't see it, perhaps you need to learn to WRITE English.
After an abomination like that, I'm going to stick with my theory that I'm the literate one between us.
Amusing words from someone who has called people liers
I am upset that you classify all x86 software as "shitty".
Please feel free to try to convince me otherwise. I have never seen a piece of software for the PC --I'm not sure where this "x86" business came from; probably the same place that brought us "AMD64" --that could be classified as anything other than a massive train wreck.
How the hell does ~5% of computer users even begin to qualify as "the rest of us" ?
You're trying to say that you think PCs are good because they're popular? How often, in your experience, is the popular thing also the best thing?
I'd very much like to hear about something productive that you do with your worse-than-useless computers and your terrible software. Thus far all I've heard is "I have this many gigabytes of storage" and "I am going to school to learn to write terrible software of my very own."
You are trying to argue that something can't be both a name and a web address.
Correct. If the Web address is "openoffice.org," the name of the company is "Open Office." If the company that makes Open Office wants to deliberately confuse people by choosing a name that baffles, that's their choice. But it doesn't make it a name. It's still just a Web address.
You are trying to argue that if something has even the slightest restriction then it cannot be free.
No, I'm saying that freedom and "open source" software are not related.
You are arguing that your personal experience with a single software product provides a basis for judging an entire software methodology.
Boiling it down, this sentence reads, "You think your opinion is valid." Yes, that's correct. I do.
It's become clear that you're a Mac troll
I don't know what that expression means.
What you are saying is that you had one bad experience
No, I used one example to illustrate a larger point. This seems to have confused a significant number of people, to my never-ending surprise. I just sort of assumed that people were capable of reading and understanding written English. Silly me.
The entire point of your post was to try to promote the Mac platform by claiming to have found a deficiency in Linux and extending that to all of open source.
The point of my comment was to share my opinion. I didn't realize when I did it that there are people out there who believe that an opinion can be wrong.
I *am* upset over the fact that people like you seem to think OSX is A Divine Gift To All Mankind, whle classifying all x86 software as being "shitty".
Robbed of sarcasm, you said that you are unhappy that I think Mac OS X is good and that other operating systems are bad.
Poor thing.
Apple has no experience in how to write a proper x86 program.
What would be "a proper x86 program?" I haven't the foggiest idea what that expression is intended to mean.
here is a short description of the kind of stuff I do
All I got out of that is that you're a college kid who thinks that the number of hard drives attached to his computer is going to impress somebody. You really are living in your own world. Which is fine and all. It's just kind of a shame that it's about ten years behind the rest of us.
I'm pretty sure nobody was wondering that, but it's ever so nice of you to chip in like that.
I'm sorry that you're so upset over the fact that people care about what their computers can be used for rather than about how many bits can dance on the head of a pin. A computer that does not run useful software has absolutely no practical use, and is of no value to anybody.
Well...except maybe yourself. Maybe you plan to collect them and show them as objects of art or something. You certainly won't be doing anything useful or productive with them.
That's not a name. It's a Web address. When the Web address is "openoffice.org," the name is Open Office. What about this is confounding you?
Illustrative of what?
I'm sorry you had trouble following my anecdote. Next time I'll do my best to write with an audience of short-attentioned mouth-breathers in mind.
For you to claim that open source software doesn't provide licensing freedom is either stupid or dishonest.
But "open source" software has nothing at all to do with freedom. If it had anything to do with freedom, the software would be in the public domain. Since it's not, it's not about freedom. It's a commercial enterprise just like any other.
As for reliability, there are plenty of studies that show the reliability of open source.
I'm really not interested in studies. I'm interested in my own personal experience, which says precisely the opposite. A million articles add up to precisely nothing when my own experience tells me otherwise.
I don't think this will be news to anyone except (perhaps) you but paid support is available for open source software.
Yes, of course it is. As I said, I paid for such support myself, in the form of an in-house, full-time employee whose job it was to install and maintain Linux on our computers. My experience was so incredibly bad that I will not be considering a similar arrangement again. Ever. The fact that support is available does not mean that it's up to acceptable levels of quality.
I mentioned all this before, in that anecdote that so perplexed you. Poor thing.
Your blind assertions do not impress.
Impress whom? I didn't realize we were having a contest.
Actually he's probably referring to the software that is called OpenOffice.org
Pardon me for being insistent, but "openoffice.org" is a Web address, not a name. If the company that makes it doesn't want their customers to call it "Open Office," they should change the name. (They should probably change the name in any case. "Open Office" doesn't exactly stir the soul.)
What makes you think your experience is more typical than his?
Numbers.
So an IT guy that you apparently considered incompetent told you Linux was hard. This is supposed to be compelling?
No, it was supposed to be illustrative. Reading comprehension much?
We use open source software because we like the support, reliability and licensing freedom.
How odd. Because it has none of those three things.
I assume you're referring to Open Office. (I'm not sure what the company's Web site has to do with this.) I don't think you'd be asking the question if you'd ever tried to use Open Office. It's really, really bad software. In particular, parts of its user interface are different from the Office just for the sake of being different. Not better, just different. That's bad, bad.
Or even cheaper proprietary choices--Corel, Lotus, etc.?
Same answer. They're bad because they're different from the standard without being better than the standard. If they were easier to use or more intuitive, that'd be one thing. But they're not. They're just different.
I've found the F/OSS community to be VERY helpful for the most part.
Boy oh boy. You're either lying, or your experiences have not been typical. The last time I ever used Linux for anything was the day the IT guy I'd hired to maintain my small company's computers told me that I should stick to Windows because I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to burn some files to a CD with Linux. I fired the IT guy, used an SBA loan to buy 12" PowerBooks for my entire staff (Apple gave us a great deal on a dozen) and haven't looked back since. Now we don't have any IT problems, and the $86,000 a year I'm saving by not employing a "computer guru" is four times what I paid for new computers.
I'm sorry that so many of you Slashdotters seem to think that being politically correct is reason enough to use bad software. It's not.
Not sure if OSX uses LF or CR, because it's unix, but it's also Mac OS.
The Mac, interestingly, is completely agnostic. It reads and writes 7-bit ASCII, Mac OS Roman, Windows Latin 1 and UTF-8 files with Mac, UNIX and DOS line endings with equal aplomb.
So an episode of The Simpsons (25 minutes) would be about 1.4GB
You do know that we're not talking about a constant bit rate here, right? HD content, just like SD content, is encoded at a continuously variable bit rate in order to get the best program quality for the smallest number of bits.
So it is completely impossible for you to say "this many minutes equals this many bytes."
A full feature will come down to about 7 GB, but that's an average. You can't boil that down to bits-per-second.
How much could be saved by clipping the opening/closing credits (where possible) and converting them to still frames rather than video?
Um. None. I don't know, you know, how much television you watch, but credits are not stills. They move.
Did you not read the parts where I said "only on the Mac?" See, "the Mac" means "computers built by Apple and sold under the brand name 'Macintosh.'" I.e., hardware.
I know you'd love to make this all about transistors and gates and buses and whatever the hell else you think is oh-so-cool. But see, here's the thing: You can't. Not in any meaningful way, anyhow. Because the most elaborate jim-jam ever concocted isn't worth a hill of beans if it doesn't do anything useful.
It's becoming ever more obvious that if a computer doesn't run Mac OS X and Mac software, it doesn't do anything useful.
So while you'd love to argue the various merits of having this many registers on this many pipelines...don't. Because none of it means a single thing.
I'm glad you feel so good about your logic, because apparently grammar and punctuation have eluded you.
Item the first: Mac OS X only runs on Macs. There's no need to go on, because this halts all discussion of other platforms, but because you seem so bafflingly ignorant, I'll keep going.
iMovie HD: only on the Mac.
iPhoto: only on the Mac.
iDVD: only on the Mac.
iChat: only on the Mac.
GarageBand: only on the Mac.
Final Cut Express HD: only on the Mac.
Keynote: only on the Mac.
Pages: only on the Mac.
Creative professional? Final Cut Pro HD, Logic and Motion are also only found on the Mac.
You find me just one non-silly alternative to any of those programs, and I will eat my hat.
You're wasting your time. What ATSC said has practically nothing to do with what's actually broadcast. HDTV = 1080i. The other format, 720p, is a non-starter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you thought you were being clever by typesetting your comment as if it were poetry, but I have to confess that I didn't trouble myself to decipher it. I don't have the patience for that kind of nonsense this early in the morning.
Thanks for taking the effort, though. Maybe somebody else will take the time to read your poem and figure out what, if any, meaning it carries.
Contrary to your claims of being dated, GNU grep (and other implementations) are in active development.
Then why is it broken? Should it not have been fixed long, long ago?
Most would think a company is a business enterprise of some sort...
I'm not troubled by the idea that most people would get it wrong. That seems to be the rule rather than the exception. A company is a group of people joined together in a common purpose.
we are only endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
No, that's not correct. The enumeration of some rights -- chief among them being life, liberty and either property or the pursuit of happiness, depending on which document you read --does not serve to exclude the others.
But even if it were true, everything we're talking about here falls under "liberty."
Since governments around the world (including ours) are able to abridge these and other rights, your argument is a losing battle.
Why? What does the fact that the law limits our exercise of our natural rights have to do with anything? How is that relevant to our conversation?
Even in the US we had a little something called...what was it...slavery. So much for asolute freedom.
I'm afraid you've lost me here. Once again I have to ask what your point is.
Or, I suppose we can ditch the theory that you were educated & decide you know nothing of ad hominem attacks.
Oh, goody. Another high-school debater. Tell me, is the Internet littered with your peers, or is there just one of you who writes under a vast multitude of different names?
The fact that you're late for school notwithstanding, I still don't understand what any of this has to do with anything. Is the conversation over?
Spotlight.
You just have to consider the two as seperate, distinct, modular components
Why? What's the benefit of drawing an arbitrary and artificial line and saying that this part of the computer is separate from that part of the computer?
Lets also clear up architecture nomanclature
...you enjoy pain? My Xserve, which I use as the central automation for an office of about 50 people, is a file server, print server, Open Directory server (which means it stores user account information and home directories), Web server, FTP server, VPN server, database server (though FileMaker Pro) and scheduling server (through Meeting Maker). In its spare time (since, with dual G5 processors, it has lots) it runs Adobe Distiller for rendering the PostScript files my graphics department generates into PDF for our press. I'd love to find more things for it to do, but right at this moment it's doing everything we need it to do.
Thanks, but it was kind of a waste of time. We're not going to be talking about any of those things. Because they're irrelevant, you see. It's all about the software.
You simply cannot purchase nor assemble a similarly priced PPC-based hardware that will compete favorably with the suggested $800 AMD64.
You have that backwards, and a little sideways. You cannot purchase nor assemble a non-Mac computer at any price that can do what a Mac can do for $499. Why? Because of the software.
It is wrong because it vendor-locks you to expensive, proprietary hardware.
Please explain why inexpensive, multi-sourced hardware that can't do anything useful is superior to expensive (at $499), single-sourced hardware that does do useful things.
My bad. I must have been imagining things
No, just failing to understand what you read.
At last I've gotten you to admit the implication that x86 hardware is better suited towards success in a "given environment".
I think it's a little deceptive to say that you've done anything of the kind "at last," because it's never come up before my last message. But of course PCs are better suited toward success in a marketplace where people like to buy cheap, poorly made computers that can't be used for anything useful. This surprises no one.
Careful manipulation such as supporting PC hardware.
I'm lost. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Just like there is a lot of good PC gaming software available.
An absurd comparison, and you know it. You would seriously sit there and put computer software that lets freelancers create beautiful things (my things are merely pretty, but I aspire to beauty someday) and make money like it's going out of style on the same plane as arcade games? Once again, friend, I think you're not understanding the distinction between a tool with practical uses and a glorified Nintendo.
There is some overlap though, in that I rip DVDs
Sigh. Piracy is not a legitimate use of one's time or one's tools.
Give me the specs, and I'll show you an x86 analog that is comparable in terms of hardware
Of course you will not, because others before you have tried and failed. The Xserve RAID is the best storage system in its class, and also happens to be the least expensive.
You want "specs?" I guess your Web browsing finger is broken or something, but let me give you some bullet points to contemplate: Seven 400 GB hard drives in a RAID-5 6+1 configuration, plus seven empty bays for more drives that I haven't needed to fill yet. Dual battery-backed caches. Dual, redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fan modules. Dual, redundant, hot-swappable RAID controllers with 2 Gbps Fibre Channel host-bus interfaces. Dual, redundant out-of-band management coprocessors. Stunningly easy-to-use management software that makes expanding existing RAID sets and setting up new sets a task for mere mortals. And three full years of 24/7 service and support. For a retail price of slightly under $8,000.
I would choose Linux for my servers any day.
Because
And I -- not some high-priced IT staff, not some vendor technician, but I myself --had it out of
Well then why am I sure where this "PPC" business came from
... for a tidy profit, amusingly enough.
And we're defining "PPC" as what, exactly? Is it like "AMD64?"
Mac users are "the few of us".
"Rest" means "remainder," or "that part left over." Which has nothing to do with "many" or "few."
I find myself wondering if you really understand how capitalism works. Do you understand "survival of the fittest" ?
I certainly do. I also know that the first thing has nothing at all to do with the second. See, the cliché "survival of the fittest" presupposed an understanding of the notion of fitness. That is to say, to be fittest is not necessarily to be good by any objective measure, but rather simply to be better suited toward success in a given environment.
Which is why, in a market environment, the popular thing is practically never the best thing. There are exceptions, of course, achieved through careful manipulation of the market to alter its shape to favor a given product -- the iPod, for instance. We all remember how that was received, don't we? It was derided, much as you're deriding the Mac now, for reasons that were utterly irrelevant to its eventual domination of the market. But events transpired in that way because Apple carefully manipulated the market for their product through marketing, branding and, eventually, creating an entirely new business model for content delivery. So it's the exception that proves the rule, see.
How many times has Apple *almost* gone bankrupt.
Zero. The company has always had extremely deep cash reserves, dating back to the industry-defining success of the Apple II. The company has never been anywhere near bankruptcy. Maybe you're thinking of those days in the mid-1990s when Apple's long-term product strategy was a mess and their prospects for growth were shallow. But even then, the company was quite successful.
Didn't they get bailed out by Microsoft on at least one occasion?
No, but I know where you got that idea. Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock from Apple as part of a business deal. The sum was far less than Apple's quarterly earnings at the time, not even a drop in the bucket really. And the shares were long since sold off by Microsoft
If Apple's products were that great, they wouldn't be having so much trouble.
Apple recently announced that their earnings for the quarter ending 12/25/04 were four times higher than their earnings in the same quarter in 2003. The company's stock is trading above $70, and analysts recently increased their estimates to a share price of $85. The company is wildly outperforming the industry.
Or maybe it's that Apples products are great, they're just too expensive and incompatible to really catch on?
Yes, Macs have traditionally been too expensive to be wildly popular. But if they were not expensive, Apple would not have had big cash reserves to throw at product development, and their products coincidentally would not have been very good. They would have been a Gateway, in other words.
Incompatible? I think maybe you're talking out your ass again. Interoperability has always been one of Apple's biggest selling points.
But they obviously cannot compete when it comes to producing a full desktop machine cheaply.
Four hundred and ninety-nine dollars isn't cheap? That's including $200 worth of top-quality software, too, so the actual price of the computer alone--if you could buy it that way --would be about $300. That's pretty darned cheap by anybody's estimation.
But of course this is a new development. It's only reasonable that you haven't wrapped your head around it yet. Paradigm-changing ideas are hard to absorb all at once. So let's take the Mac mini out of it. Apple is making money hand over fist by selling exceptional products at high prices. Explain to me, please, what's wrong with that bus
Show me the business license
... some opinions are okay while others aren't? How is that different from "Your opinion is wrong?"
What does a business license have to do with being a company?
Freedom is not an absolute.
If there are any words more frequently uttered by people who are trying desperately to take away our rights, I don't know what they are.
News flash, Sparky: Freedoms are absolute. They are unalienable. You may have heard this if you went to school anywhere in the past two hundred years or so. It is our exercise of those freedoms that must be regulated with laws. We have laws, for example, that prohibit people from infringing upon the rights of others. That's an example of a law that abridges our exercise of our God-given, unalienable freedoms.
What this has to do with "open source" is beyond me.
Valid does not mean the same thing as "I think it is right."
So
Free and Open Source Software. Sorry to drop acronyms.
Thank you for defining it for me.
Perhaps the problem is in the phrasing & not in the reading.
You keep going back to that well, but I'm still not buying it. For, you know, obvious reasons.
Try grep
Sounds like your gripe is with "grep," not with the Mac. A good approach is to avoid using obsolete legacy tools written for obsolete legacy operating systems. Choose modern tools instead, preferably tools that are based on the Mac's built-in "Cocoa" framework. These tools all get the ability to handle various line encodings and character sets as part and parcel of their makeup, as opposed to vintage-1973 tools that were written under the assumption that seven-bit ASCII was the acme of technological innovation.
If "OpenOffice.org" is what the project calls its software, that's the name. Period.
Um, no. The name is what everybody else calls it. And that's "Open Office."
You're just trying to minimize the importance of having the freedom to modify and distribute software.
Two things here.
First, freedoms are not something that can be granted. They emerge from natural rights, and no person has the power to grant them. This is fundamental to our system of political thought.
Second, because nobody can grant the freedom to do something, it's laughable on its face to talk about "having the freedom." It's like talking about having gravity, or having a gender. Because there is no such thing as the absence of that thing, you see.
Consequently, it's correct only to talk about having rights, not having freedom. And to have the right to do something is to be in a circumstance where no law of God or man prohibits it.
Therefore, if you'll pardon a malicious bastardization of the language in the name of a higher purpose, the "most free" (ugh) piece of property is that which has been placed in the public domain, property to which all claims of ownership have been waived. No man owns it, you see, which means there are no laws preventing its use.
So if the "open source" people were really interested in freedom, they'd simply waive their claims of ownership and place their work into the public domain.
But they don't, you see. Rather, they maintain zealous control over their works, going so far as to offer elaborate and draconian terms of use for those works. You may do this, but if you do, you must do this and you must not do that. As opposed to an ordinary software license where you pay your money and you get to use the product.
The "open source" people don't give two shits about freedom, and everyone knows it. They care only about convincing other people to do things their way. They're control freaks, plain and simple.
Which is fine. Because it's a free country. But because it's a free country, I'm also at liberty to call their bullshit when it's repeated by a thoughtless and misled individual such as yourself. See how that works?
Your one supposed experience with one piece of open source software does not provide a basis to judge the open source methodology.
Hm. Maybe you, too, fall into the "shamefully unfamiliar with basic written communication" camp. Are you somehow unclear on the concept of using a specific instance to illustrate a larger point? You seem to have arrived at the conclusion that precisely one event has transpired in my life, and because I have experienced only that one event I am unqualified to hold my opinion. What led you to that conclusion? Please enlighten me that I will know what not to say in future when speaking to people who have yet to master basic thinking and reading skills.
I can't imagine that anyone would believe such an obvious and transparent lie.
Are you suggesting that I lied when I said I didn't know what "Mac troll" meant? I can guess, of course. To call someone a "troll" would be like calling him an ape or a buffoon, I suppose. But I don't know what that has to do with the Macintosh. But hey, if you want to spout nonsense and then imagine that I'm just pretending not to make head or tails of it, be my guest. If I simply ignore the parts of your comments that make no sense at all, it'll save me a lot of time.
No, you provided one data point and tried to say that it indicated a trend.
It sounds an awful lot like you're looking for a technical document with charts and graphs and appendices and page after page of itty-bitty type. So sorry to disappoint. That's not how people usually communicate, you see.
You presented your opinion as though it were fact and that anyone who disagreed was an idiot.
Again, we're going to remove the nonsense from this sentence and
It isn't a company
Whatever. "Community." Blah. I am unimpressed by new-age jargon. It's a company.
Software under OSI-approved licenses is more libre than most other software.
I don't recognize concepts like "more free." That's like arguing that somebody is "less pregnant." Sure, there's an interpretation you could make that would lead to that conclusion, but it's hardly a useful or interesting one.
You also think your opinion is more valid than anyone else's.
Um. Duh. If I thought some conflicting idea was right, that would be my opinion. That's what "opinion" means.
He's implying that you are only denegrating F/OSS
Who? Is that another company with a silly and deliberately confusing name?
IF it confuses a lot of people (I don't see it, perhaps you need to learn to WRITE English.
After an abomination like that, I'm going to stick with my theory that I'm the literate one between us.
Amusing words from someone who has called people liers
Yeah, definitely. I'm the literate one.
I am upset that you classify all x86 software as "shitty".
Please feel free to try to convince me otherwise. I have never seen a piece of software for the PC --I'm not sure where this "x86" business came from; probably the same place that brought us "AMD64" --that could be classified as anything other than a massive train wreck.
How the hell does ~5% of computer users even begin to qualify as "the rest of us" ?
You're trying to say that you think PCs are good because they're popular? How often, in your experience, is the popular thing also the best thing?
I'd very much like to hear about something productive that you do with your worse-than-useless computers and your terrible software. Thus far all I've heard is "I have this many gigabytes of storage" and "I am going to school to learn to write terrible software of my very own."
You are trying to argue that something can't be both a name and a web address.
Correct. If the Web address is "openoffice.org," the name of the company is "Open Office." If the company that makes Open Office wants to deliberately confuse people by choosing a name that baffles, that's their choice. But it doesn't make it a name. It's still just a Web address.
You are trying to argue that if something has even the slightest restriction then it cannot be free.
No, I'm saying that freedom and "open source" software are not related.
You are arguing that your personal experience with a single software product provides a basis for judging an entire software methodology.
Boiling it down, this sentence reads, "You think your opinion is valid." Yes, that's correct. I do.
It's become clear that you're a Mac troll
I don't know what that expression means.
What you are saying is that you had one bad experience
No, I used one example to illustrate a larger point. This seems to have confused a significant number of people, to my never-ending surprise. I just sort of assumed that people were capable of reading and understanding written English. Silly me.
The entire point of your post was to try to promote the Mac platform by claiming to have found a deficiency in Linux and extending that to all of open source.
The point of my comment was to share my opinion. I didn't realize when I did it that there are people out there who believe that an opinion can be wrong.
I *am* upset over the fact that people like you seem to think OSX is A Divine Gift To All Mankind, whle classifying all x86 software as being "shitty".
Robbed of sarcasm, you said that you are unhappy that I think Mac OS X is good and that other operating systems are bad.
Poor thing.
Apple has no experience in how to write a proper x86 program.
What would be "a proper x86 program?" I haven't the foggiest idea what that expression is intended to mean.
here is a short description of the kind of stuff I do
All I got out of that is that you're a college kid who thinks that the number of hard drives attached to his computer is going to impress somebody. You really are living in your own world. Which is fine and all. It's just kind of a shame that it's about ten years behind the rest of us.
I'm pretty sure nobody was wondering that, but it's ever so nice of you to chip in like that.
...except maybe yourself. Maybe you plan to collect them and show them as objects of art or something. You certainly won't be doing anything useful or productive with them.
I'm sorry that you're so upset over the fact that people care about what their computers can be used for rather than about how many bits can dance on the head of a pin. A computer that does not run useful software has absolutely no practical use, and is of no value to anybody.
Well
OpenOffice.org is the name of the software.
That's not a name. It's a Web address. When the Web address is "openoffice.org," the name is Open Office. What about this is confounding you?
Illustrative of what?
I'm sorry you had trouble following my anecdote. Next time I'll do my best to write with an audience of short-attentioned mouth-breathers in mind.
For you to claim that open source software doesn't provide licensing freedom is either stupid or dishonest.
But "open source" software has nothing at all to do with freedom. If it had anything to do with freedom, the software would be in the public domain. Since it's not, it's not about freedom. It's a commercial enterprise just like any other.
As for reliability, there are plenty of studies that show the reliability of open source.
I'm really not interested in studies. I'm interested in my own personal experience, which says precisely the opposite. A million articles add up to precisely nothing when my own experience tells me otherwise.
I don't think this will be news to anyone except (perhaps) you but paid support is available for open source software.
Yes, of course it is. As I said, I paid for such support myself, in the form of an in-house, full-time employee whose job it was to install and maintain Linux on our computers. My experience was so incredibly bad that I will not be considering a similar arrangement again. Ever. The fact that support is available does not mean that it's up to acceptable levels of quality.
I mentioned all this before, in that anecdote that so perplexed you. Poor thing.
Your blind assertions do not impress.
Impress whom? I didn't realize we were having a contest.
Actually he's probably referring to the software that is called OpenOffice.org
Pardon me for being insistent, but "openoffice.org" is a Web address, not a name. If the company that makes it doesn't want their customers to call it "Open Office," they should change the name. (They should probably change the name in any case. "Open Office" doesn't exactly stir the soul.)
What makes you think your experience is more typical than his?
Numbers.
So an IT guy that you apparently considered incompetent told you Linux was hard. This is supposed to be compelling?
No, it was supposed to be illustrative. Reading comprehension much?
We use open source software because we like the support, reliability and licensing freedom.
How odd. Because it has none of those three things.
Precisely how is is better than OpenOffice.org.
I assume you're referring to Open Office. (I'm not sure what the company's Web site has to do with this.) I don't think you'd be asking the question if you'd ever tried to use Open Office. It's really, really bad software. In particular, parts of its user interface are different from the Office just for the sake of being different. Not better, just different. That's bad, bad.
Or even cheaper proprietary choices--Corel, Lotus, etc.?
Same answer. They're bad because they're different from the standard without being better than the standard. If they were easier to use or more intuitive, that'd be one thing. But they're not. They're just different.
I've found the F/OSS community to be VERY helpful for the most part.
Boy oh boy. You're either lying, or your experiences have not been typical. The last time I ever used Linux for anything was the day the IT guy I'd hired to maintain my small company's computers told me that I should stick to Windows because I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to burn some files to a CD with Linux. I fired the IT guy, used an SBA loan to buy 12" PowerBooks for my entire staff (Apple gave us a great deal on a dozen) and haven't looked back since. Now we don't have any IT problems, and the $86,000 a year I'm saving by not employing a "computer guru" is four times what I paid for new computers.
I'm sorry that so many of you Slashdotters seem to think that being politically correct is reason enough to use bad software. It's not.
Not sure if OSX uses LF or CR, because it's unix, but it's also Mac OS.
The Mac, interestingly, is completely agnostic. It reads and writes 7-bit ASCII, Mac OS Roman, Windows Latin 1 and UTF-8 files with Mac, UNIX and DOS line endings with equal aplomb.
Heck, TextEdit even opens Word files.
So an episode of The Simpsons (25 minutes) would be about 1.4GB
You do know that we're not talking about a constant bit rate here, right? HD content, just like SD content, is encoded at a continuously variable bit rate in order to get the best program quality for the smallest number of bits.
So it is completely impossible for you to say "this many minutes equals this many bytes."
A full feature will come down to about 7 GB, but that's an average. You can't boil that down to bits-per-second.
How much could be saved by clipping the opening/closing credits (where possible) and converting them to still frames rather than video?
Um. None. I don't know, you know, how much television you watch, but credits are not stills. They move.
Did you not read the parts where I said "only on the Mac?" See, "the Mac" means "computers built by Apple and sold under the brand name 'Macintosh.'" I.e., hardware.
...don't. Because none of it means a single thing.
I know you'd love to make this all about transistors and gates and buses and whatever the hell else you think is oh-so-cool. But see, here's the thing: You can't. Not in any meaningful way, anyhow. Because the most elaborate jim-jam ever concocted isn't worth a hill of beans if it doesn't do anything useful.
It's becoming ever more obvious that if a computer doesn't run Mac OS X and Mac software, it doesn't do anything useful.
So while you'd love to argue the various merits of having this many registers on this many pipelines
the OS is not part of the hardware
Then what's the hardware for? Paperweight? Expensive art piece?
Software counts. Software is, in fact, vastly more important than hardware.
the logic here is elementary
I'm glad you feel so good about your logic, because apparently grammar and punctuation have eluded you.
Item the first: Mac OS X only runs on Macs. There's no need to go on, because this halts all discussion of other platforms, but because you seem so bafflingly ignorant, I'll keep going.
iMovie HD: only on the Mac.
iPhoto: only on the Mac.
iDVD: only on the Mac.
iChat: only on the Mac.
GarageBand: only on the Mac.
Final Cut Express HD: only on the Mac.
Keynote: only on the Mac.
Pages: only on the Mac.
Creative professional? Final Cut Pro HD, Logic and Motion are also only found on the Mac.
You find me just one non-silly alternative to any of those programs, and I will eat my hat.
You're wasting your time. What ATSC said has practically nothing to do with what's actually broadcast. HDTV = 1080i. The other format, 720p, is a non-starter.
Speed at which a Power Mac G3 from five years ago can run Mac OS X applications: some.
...zero.
Speed at which a G4 from two years ago can run Mac OS X applications: more.
Speed at which a G5 can run Mac OS X application: most.
Speed at which "Gherald's" pet computer of the week can run Mac OS X applications: um
Seems like the price/performance question is pretty simple, doesn't it? Your horse loses to five-year-old Apple hardware, and it wasn't even close.