Wow. You're just completely married to 1979, aren't you? Let me see if I can be as clear as possible here: You are wrong. In every single thing you said here, you are wrong. Your information is out of date. You do not have a clue what you're talking about.
But you know what the funniest part was? The part that absolutely cracked me up and made milk shoot out of my nose? The part where you said that you incorrectly type three hyphens instead of typing a dash because it's faster. Where's the fire, son? What's so damn important that you can't take the fraction of a second necessary to get it right?
You're a dinosaur, son. You're bounded within a nutshell, and you've deluded yourself into believing that you're the king of infinite space.
If you ever decide to look at a damn calendar, you let me know. Kay?
It's essentially indistinguishable from Word in usage.
You evidently don't use Word much. Even Word, which is about as 20th-century a program as you're going to find still in common use, is head-and-shoulders superior to the abomination that is Lyx.
I'm interested in being able to do anything I want in a reasonable fashion
Me too. It's just that your definition of "reasonable" isn't the same as mine.
Take your use of three hyphens to indicate a dash, for instance. That's a leftover from the bad old days of seven-bit typesetting systems. Why don't you use real en (-) and em (--) dashes instead? I'm guessing it's because you're still under the mistaken apprehension that hyphens are an acceptable alternative. Even if that were still true, three hyphens is exactly the wrong number. In the old days, typewritten manuscripts used two hyphens to indicate an em dash and on hyphen to indicate an en dash.
See? TeX has you all screwed up.
I don't consider things like doing search-replace in an XPress Tags file to insert ligatures from an Expert font reasonable
Good grief. Me neither. Good thing it's not 1989 any more. "Expert fonts?" Holy cow. Those things went out with hand-kerning.
nor is having to access the glyph palette in InDesign to insert alternates for Zapfino or Hoefler Text reasonable either
Good thing InDesign automatically inserts contextual glyphs when the "use contextual alternates" box is checked then, huh?
Granted, InDesign doesn't handle particularly baroque fonts like Zapfino, but all proper Mac programs do. E.g., Pages.
the Pages module in iWork
Module? I think you need to do a little more to familiarize yourself with what you're talking about. Pages isn't a "module." It's a program. And iWork is just the brand name of a set of programs sold in one box.
I'm not saying that TeX should be used for all things
That's good. Because I'm saying that it should be used for no things. There's not a single need for TeX left. It's obsolete, obviously and painfully so.
how does one get XML through InDesign to get a typeset page with as little human intervention as possible?
Why would you want to do it "with as little human intervention as possible?" Remember: We're creating art here, not stamping out tin cans. This isn't programming a computer.
The problem lies not with the tool, but with your attitude, I think.
You missed my point. Writing TeX is programming a computer. You have to learn a whole new language. There's no excuse for that.
Pages has an on-line help file, no?
No idea. I've been using Pages since an early internal beta, and I've never needed it.
why do a lot of the documents shown in screen grabs have lines which are too long for their typesize
Because how long a line of type needs to be is a matter of opinion.
Taking over the world doesn't matter to me. Being correct does.
But see, that's the problem. Typesetting isn't a science. There's no correct or incorrect. It's an art. And because TeX is a programming language that requires you to run a damn compiler in order to generate a page of type, it takes the art right out of it. Which is why generating a document that conforms to somebody else's idea of what it should look like is fairly easy, as long as you're comfortable with programming a computer, but generating a document that looks like what you want it to look like is damn near impossible.
TeX is the most-flexible, least-limited typesetting tool available
It saddens me to think that you might even believe that.
While XPress and InDesign are both serviceable enough, they're not customizable / programmable enough
See? There you go. You're more interested in programming a computer than you are in creating something beautiful. That explains your myopia.
I submit that if one understands TeX (and LaTeX) and works with them as they are intended to be adjusted, that there's really no limit to what one can do
That's fine, but this is the 21st century. There's absolutely no excuse for making somebody learn to write computer programs in order to crank out a letter to grandma.
Hell, even Apple's new word processor produces typography that's easily on par with TeX --infinitely superior to, if you consider that Pages can do both 8- and 16-bit Unicode --and does it through an easy-to-use front end interface. There's just no excuse.
I challenge you to find a better on-line text on a tool for typography
Um. I don't think Pages even comes with a manual. There's no need for one.
If you're not managing to get things done in TeX as you might wish, you've only yourself to blame
Great attitude. Tell me again why your point of view hasn't taken over the world?
Well, except for the fact that TeX is about three million years behind the state of the art in typography.
And if you think QuarkXPress is worth using, no offense, but you're about three million years behind the state of the art, too. It's InDesign or nothing today.
To the contrary. If you use a USB one, you can just plug it into your keyboard. If you want to plug it directly into Obscure And Useless Slot Type #7 on the computer itself, you have to get up and go to wherever you keep your computer.
It can be edited by just about anyone, and AFAIK is quite accurate in content.
Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? It's accurate as far as you know. You can say the same thing about your average set of encyclopedias, but the difference is that those outfits pay some fairly smart people a decent salary to do nothing but comb through the articles day after day to make sure they're correct.
Same thing with these pictures. They're accurate as far as you or I know.
Terragen, a freeware program that converts the basic brightness data in aerial pictures into a topographical map, to generate the ground-level vista was used.
Yoda pleased to hear this will be.
Re:Need a Dual G% with thier software...
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: 1
HD is only 19 Mbps. You don't need hardly any disk bandwidth at all to play back HD.
FireWire media readers are the thing. And I use GPRS (data over GSM) all the time via my mobile phone, to which I connect my Mac with Bluetooth.
Re:Need a Dual G% with thier software...
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: 3, Funny
Well, I guess it's about that time. We're coming up on another release of Mac OS X, so it's time to blow the dust off the old "here's the difference between the name and the version number" lecture.
Frankly, after the sheer number of recitations this particular lesson got back in the roll-up to Panther in 2003, I'm kind of amazed that there's anybody left who doesn't understand this oh-so-simple concept. But apparently there's always another idiot out there, so here we go again.
The name of the software is "Mac OS X." That's its name. It's pronounced "Mac OS Ten," because we all learned back in elementary school that the Romans used letters instead of numbers. Remember how they made us do arithmetic, how we all learned that L + L = C and M + M = MM and all that? You thought that was just useless make-work, but no! It was, in fact, vitally important for your future understanding of product names. Well the future is now, friends. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
In addition to a name, the software has a version number. That version number, as of tonight, is 10.3.7. Every time Apple releases another version of the software, the version number changes. Sometimes the changes are small, from 10.3.6 to 10.3.7. Sometimes they're big, like from 10.2 to 10.3.
So there are two parts, okay? There's the name -- Mac OS X --and the version number. Two separate things.
So when you wrote, "X.4," you were demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between a name and a number. You were, in short, being an idiot.
Now, before you get all whiney and complain that my harsh words have made your vagina hurt, let me reassure you: I empathize, I really do. Apple is the one to blame here. It's their fault for creating such a skull-twistingly confusing product with a number in its name, and a Roman numeral at that. What, are we all speaking Latin again? Are we all sitting around going "Quo vadimus?" at each other? Just who the hell do Apple think they are, making things all hard like that? Arrogant little pricks.
However, in Apple's defense...there are like six point two billion people on this planet. You're the only one left who doesn't get this.
So, just in the future, you might want to think about extracting your head from your rectum and getting with the program, huh, chief?
There's a good boy.
Re:From the "interesting read" link...
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: 4, Informative
Wireless gizmos come in two parts: the antenna and the guts. The antennas are already built into all Mac hardware. All you need to add is the guts.
With the Dell, on the other hand, you get neither antennas nor guts. That means that, if you add wireless via a card or some damn thing, it's either going to perform really poorly or it's going to have a big-ass antenna sticking out of it.
Advantage: Apple.
Re:iMac mini NEEDS a PC card slot
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I've seen lots and lots of PowerBooks in my line of work. Practically everybody I encounter, professionally, has one.
Know how many PC cards I've seen? Zero. Nary a one.
Since you're going to put the necessary ports on the machine anyway, and since you're going to build wireless antennas in anyway, what possible use is there for a PC card slot? Leave it out and keep costs down.
Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?
People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink.
Re:Need a Dual G% with thier software...
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
If you type "X.4" when you mean "Mac OS X version 10.4" one more time, I swear to holy God above that I'm going to punch you right in the mouth.
I've long since given up on hoping that the average Slashdot poster might be well informed. Need I bid farewell to my last remaining hope of basic English literacy as well?
Re:That little WiFi board connector
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
I believe it's a Compact PCI interface in a miniaturized form factor.
So there ya go. Cheap-ass motherfuckers like your own precious self have yet another thing to bitch and moan about.
We all read Ayn Rand in high school, right? Anybody want to place a bet on how long it's going to be before Steve Jobs pulls a John Galt and says, "Screw you guys, I'm taking my toys and going home?" Except in keeping with the theme he'd have to use 22,000 words to say it. And he'd have to do it via the telegraph while listening to Aaron Copland at really high volume or some damn thing.
But mark my words: The time is coming.
Re:Need a Dual G% with thier software...
on
Mac mini Dissection
·
· Score: 1
I just laughed so hard, milk came out my nose. It wouldn't be such a big deal, but I'm drinking gin.
I'm starting to come to that sort of cusp, though. You know the one I mean? The one where people who log in to Internet message boards and write things of the form "blah blah CoreImage blah blah" -- when none of the "blah" is in any way or form related in the slightest bit to what CoreImage is or does -- go from being hilarious to mildly amusing to annoying to fucking pissing me off.
I'm approaching that point pretty darned quickly right now.
If you persist in these fantasies, glance at Macfixit's or even Apple's support boards some time; they veritably groan under the weight of your, er,.1% of Macdom.
Actually, it seems that my off-the-cuff estimate was more accurate than I'd realized. One tenth of one percent of all Mac users would be about 35,000 people. If anything, that number is too high.
On the merits, Firefox is the better browser
Negative, Ghost Rider.
No extension I've described is "built into the browser"
Okay, that's just bullshit, right? I mean, we're talking about browser extensions here. They are, by definition, in the browser. That means if oh-so-clever you decides to install a browser extension to let you, I don't know, compare prices on new tires or something, you're going to have to fire up your browser every time you want to use it!
Hence the stupid.
What can be accomplished with one click in Firefox is a far more efficient interaction than calling up Dashboard, mousing to a given widget, and typing in your request for a dictionary entry or translation.
You left out the "go to the dock, click the browser icon, wait like thirty minutes for your shit-ass browser to bother launching itself, dig through menus and toolbars and whatever the hell else and find the widget you're looking for." Then it's one click.
As opposed to, you know, just hitting one key to call up Dashboard.
You're welcome to the extra effort; the rest of us have work to do.
Then may I suggest you get the hell out of your Web browser and go do it?
Just for the record, the full year of AppleCare comes with the iPod. For a fee --I don't remember how much, but it's less than $100 --you can double that to two years.
And the treatment you get with AppleCare is amazing. I just got through writing a long comment about my AppleCare experience. The key phrase: "Here's your new one."
I did everything Creative recommended, the built in scan-disk, formatting the disk, upgrading the firmware
In my opinion, that's a sign of a major difference between the way Creative thinks of their products and the way Apple thinks of theirs.
When my old-school 5 GB iPod died last year, I decided, instead of spending $250 to repair it, that I'd spend $50 more and get a new 20 GB model. (Mine was long out of warranty, you see. Always buy AppleCare, y'all!)
Mine came in the mail --I bought it from the online Apple Store -- and it worked great for a few days, but then it started acting funny. I called Apple, and without even really listening to my problem, the guy says, "I see from your mailing address that you're about 20 minutes from the Apple Store So-n-So. Can you take it in there? I can make you an appointment in half an hour, if that's good for you."
I said sure, got in my car and drove to the Apple Store. When I got there I went to the "genius bar" and introduced myself, and one of the guys behind it said, "Oh, hi. Here." And he handed me a brand new 20 GB iPod, still in the box.
I should have just sprinted for the door, of course, but I stood there looking stupid instead. He told me that Apple policy for people with misbehaving iPods that are still covered under warranty is for the customer, if possible, to just take it in to the nearest Apple store and exchange it for a brand new one of comparable size and features, no questions asked. They didn't even have any paperwork. Just "Sorry for the inconvenience. Here's your new one."
How many computer or consumer-electronics companies do you know whose official, written company policy is "Sorry for the inconvenience, here's your new one?"
I know this is old news, but maybe there's somebody out there somewhere who doesn't know yet.
Apple had iTunes years before they had the iPod. Apple bought the source code for the program that became iTunes back in the Mac OS 9 days, if you can believe that. They made it the best damn music management software in the world, then they added MP3 player support. I forget what MP3 players were on the market then, but they were all USB, and iTunes had software features for letting you drag and drop music from your library to your MP3 player.
Only then, after Apple saw all the stuff that was wrong with the MP3 players that existed at the time, did they start working on the iPod. And you can really tell. The sync feature, which I thought was pretty unnecessary when I first got my iPod, is a wonder.
So yeah, your point is 100% dead on, in my opinion. Apple started with the software -- that is, the user experience -- first, and added the hardware component later. And they're better off for it.
I'm pretty sure it's going to happen sometime shortly after Creative stops issuing press releases saying "Our goal for 200X is to take market share away from Apple."
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. You're just completely married to 1979, aren't you? Let me see if I can be as clear as possible here: You are wrong. In every single thing you said here, you are wrong. Your information is out of date. You do not have a clue what you're talking about.
But you know what the funniest part was? The part that absolutely cracked me up and made milk shoot out of my nose? The part where you said that you incorrectly type three hyphens instead of typing a dash because it's faster. Where's the fire, son? What's so damn important that you can't take the fraction of a second necessary to get it right?
You're a dinosaur, son. You're bounded within a nutshell, and you've deluded yourself into believing that you're the king of infinite space.
If you ever decide to look at a damn calendar, you let me know. Kay?
You want to do typography? Use a markup language.
Um. No. That's kind of the exact opposite of the point.
It's essentially indistinguishable from Word in usage.
You evidently don't use Word much. Even Word, which is about as 20th-century a program as you're going to find still in common use, is head-and-shoulders superior to the abomination that is Lyx.
I'm interested in being able to do anything I want in a reasonable fashion
Me too. It's just that your definition of "reasonable" isn't the same as mine.
Take your use of three hyphens to indicate a dash, for instance. That's a leftover from the bad old days of seven-bit typesetting systems. Why don't you use real en (-) and em (--) dashes instead? I'm guessing it's because you're still under the mistaken apprehension that hyphens are an acceptable alternative. Even if that were still true, three hyphens is exactly the wrong number. In the old days, typewritten manuscripts used two hyphens to indicate an em dash and on hyphen to indicate an en dash.
See? TeX has you all screwed up.
I don't consider things like doing search-replace in an XPress Tags file to insert ligatures from an Expert font reasonable
Good grief. Me neither. Good thing it's not 1989 any more. "Expert fonts?" Holy cow. Those things went out with hand-kerning.
nor is having to access the glyph palette in InDesign to insert alternates for Zapfino or Hoefler Text reasonable either
Good thing InDesign automatically inserts contextual glyphs when the "use contextual alternates" box is checked then, huh?
Granted, InDesign doesn't handle particularly baroque fonts like Zapfino, but all proper Mac programs do. E.g., Pages.
the Pages module in iWork
Module? I think you need to do a little more to familiarize yourself with what you're talking about. Pages isn't a "module." It's a program. And iWork is just the brand name of a set of programs sold in one box.
I'm not saying that TeX should be used for all things
That's good. Because I'm saying that it should be used for no things. There's not a single need for TeX left. It's obsolete, obviously and painfully so.
how does one get XML through InDesign to get a typeset page with as little human intervention as possible?
Why would you want to do it "with as little human intervention as possible?" Remember: We're creating art here, not stamping out tin cans. This isn't programming a computer.
The problem lies not with the tool, but with your attitude, I think.
What if one wants to deploy on a Windows box?
Then you deserve what you get.
There's no need to write macros to do basic tasks
You missed my point. Writing TeX is programming a computer. You have to learn a whole new language. There's no excuse for that.
Pages has an on-line help file, no?
No idea. I've been using Pages since an early internal beta, and I've never needed it.
why do a lot of the documents shown in screen grabs have lines which are too long for their typesize
Because how long a line of type needs to be is a matter of opinion.
Taking over the world doesn't matter to me. Being correct does.
But see, that's the problem. Typesetting isn't a science. There's no correct or incorrect. It's an art. And because TeX is a programming language that requires you to run a damn compiler in order to generate a page of type, it takes the art right out of it. Which is why generating a document that conforms to somebody else's idea of what it should look like is fairly easy, as long as you're comfortable with programming a computer, but generating a document that looks like what you want it to look like is damn near impossible.
TeX is the most-flexible, least-limited typesetting tool available
It saddens me to think that you might even believe that.
While XPress and InDesign are both serviceable enough, they're not customizable / programmable enough
See? There you go. You're more interested in programming a computer than you are in creating something beautiful. That explains your myopia.
I submit that if one understands TeX (and LaTeX) and works with them as they are intended to be adjusted, that there's really no limit to what one can do
That's fine, but this is the 21st century. There's absolutely no excuse for making somebody learn to write computer programs in order to crank out a letter to grandma.
Hell, even Apple's new word processor produces typography that's easily on par with TeX --infinitely superior to, if you consider that Pages can do both 8- and 16-bit Unicode --and does it through an easy-to-use front end interface. There's just no excuse.
I challenge you to find a better on-line text on a tool for typography
Um. I don't think Pages even comes with a manual. There's no need for one.
If you're not managing to get things done in TeX as you might wish, you've only yourself to blame
Great attitude. Tell me again why your point of view hasn't taken over the world?
Well, except for the fact that TeX is about three million years behind the state of the art in typography.
And if you think QuarkXPress is worth using, no offense, but you're about three million years behind the state of the art, too. It's InDesign or nothing today.
TeX is a fantastic solution ... if you want your documents to look like TeX documents.
If you want something else, TeX is a hideous bitch-goddess from hell who wants to fuck you up the ass and then gnaw your head off.
To the contrary. If you use a USB one, you can just plug it into your keyboard. If you want to plug it directly into Obscure And Useless Slot Type #7 on the computer itself, you have to get up and go to wherever you keep your computer.
Pain in the ass.
Wow. I had no idea people were still using CorelDRAW.
It can be edited by just about anyone, and AFAIK is quite accurate in content.
Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? It's accurate as far as you know. You can say the same thing about your average set of encyclopedias, but the difference is that those outfits pay some fairly smart people a decent salary to do nothing but comb through the articles day after day to make sure they're correct.
Same thing with these pictures. They're accurate as far as you or I know.
Terragen, a freeware program that converts the basic brightness data in aerial pictures into a topographical map, to generate the ground-level vista was used.
Yoda pleased to hear this will be.
HD is only 19 Mbps. You don't need hardly any disk bandwidth at all to play back HD.
FireWire media readers are the thing. And I use GPRS (data over GSM) all the time via my mobile phone, to which I connect my Mac with Bluetooth.
Well, I guess it's about that time. We're coming up on another release of Mac OS X, so it's time to blow the dust off the old "here's the difference between the name and the version number" lecture.
...there are like six point two billion people on this planet. You're the only one left who doesn't get this.
Frankly, after the sheer number of recitations this particular lesson got back in the roll-up to Panther in 2003, I'm kind of amazed that there's anybody left who doesn't understand this oh-so-simple concept. But apparently there's always another idiot out there, so here we go again.
The name of the software is "Mac OS X." That's its name. It's pronounced "Mac OS Ten," because we all learned back in elementary school that the Romans used letters instead of numbers. Remember how they made us do arithmetic, how we all learned that L + L = C and M + M = MM and all that? You thought that was just useless make-work, but no! It was, in fact, vitally important for your future understanding of product names. Well the future is now, friends. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
In addition to a name, the software has a version number. That version number, as of tonight, is 10.3.7. Every time Apple releases another version of the software, the version number changes. Sometimes the changes are small, from 10.3.6 to 10.3.7. Sometimes they're big, like from 10.2 to 10.3.
So there are two parts, okay? There's the name -- Mac OS X --and the version number. Two separate things.
So when you wrote, "X.4," you were demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between a name and a number. You were, in short, being an idiot.
Now, before you get all whiney and complain that my harsh words have made your vagina hurt, let me reassure you: I empathize, I really do. Apple is the one to blame here. It's their fault for creating such a skull-twistingly confusing product with a number in its name, and a Roman numeral at that. What, are we all speaking Latin again? Are we all sitting around going "Quo vadimus?" at each other? Just who the hell do Apple think they are, making things all hard like that? Arrogant little pricks.
However, in Apple's defense
So, just in the future, you might want to think about extracting your head from your rectum and getting with the program, huh, chief?
There's a good boy.
Wireless gizmos come in two parts: the antenna and the guts. The antennas are already built into all Mac hardware. All you need to add is the guts.
With the Dell, on the other hand, you get neither antennas nor guts. That means that, if you add wireless via a card or some damn thing, it's either going to perform really poorly or it's going to have a big-ass antenna sticking out of it.
Advantage: Apple.
I've seen lots and lots of PowerBooks in my line of work. Practically everybody I encounter, professionally, has one.
Know how many PC cards I've seen? Zero. Nary a one.
Since you're going to put the necessary ports on the machine anyway, and since you're going to build wireless antennas in anyway, what possible use is there for a PC card slot? Leave it out and keep costs down.
Here's a crazy, mixed-up suggestion.
Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?
People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink.
If you type "X.4" when you mean "Mac OS X version 10.4" one more time, I swear to holy God above that I'm going to punch you right in the mouth.
I've long since given up on hoping that the average Slashdot poster might be well informed. Need I bid farewell to my last remaining hope of basic English literacy as well?
I believe it's a Compact PCI interface in a miniaturized form factor.
So there ya go. Cheap-ass motherfuckers like your own precious self have yet another thing to bitch and moan about.
We all read Ayn Rand in high school, right? Anybody want to place a bet on how long it's going to be before Steve Jobs pulls a John Galt and says, "Screw you guys, I'm taking my toys and going home?" Except in keeping with the theme he'd have to use 22,000 words to say it. And he'd have to do it via the telegraph while listening to Aaron Copland at really high volume or some damn thing.
But mark my words: The time is coming.
I just laughed so hard, milk came out my nose. It wouldn't be such a big deal, but I'm drinking gin.
I'm starting to come to that sort of cusp, though. You know the one I mean? The one where people who log in to Internet message boards and write things of the form "blah blah CoreImage blah blah" -- when none of the "blah" is in any way or form related in the slightest bit to what CoreImage is or does -- go from being hilarious to mildly amusing to annoying to fucking pissing me off.
I'm approaching that point pretty darned quickly right now.
If you persist in these fantasies, glance at Macfixit's or even Apple's support boards some time; they veritably groan under the weight of your, er, .1% of Macdom.
Actually, it seems that my off-the-cuff estimate was more accurate than I'd realized. One tenth of one percent of all Mac users would be about 35,000 people. If anything, that number is too high.
On the merits, Firefox is the better browser
Negative, Ghost Rider.
No extension I've described is "built into the browser"
Okay, that's just bullshit, right? I mean, we're talking about browser extensions here. They are, by definition, in the browser. That means if oh-so-clever you decides to install a browser extension to let you, I don't know, compare prices on new tires or something, you're going to have to fire up your browser every time you want to use it!
Hence the stupid.
What can be accomplished with one click in Firefox is a far more efficient interaction than calling up Dashboard, mousing to a given widget, and typing in your request for a dictionary entry or translation.
You left out the "go to the dock, click the browser icon, wait like thirty minutes for your shit-ass browser to bother launching itself, dig through menus and toolbars and whatever the hell else and find the widget you're looking for." Then it's one click.
As opposed to, you know, just hitting one key to call up Dashboard.
You're welcome to the extra effort; the rest of us have work to do.
Then may I suggest you get the hell out of your Web browser and go do it?
Just for the record, the full year of AppleCare comes with the iPod. For a fee --I don't remember how much, but it's less than $100 --you can double that to two years.
And the treatment you get with AppleCare is amazing. I just got through writing a long comment about my AppleCare experience. The key phrase: "Here's your new one."
I did everything Creative recommended, the built in scan-disk, formatting the disk, upgrading the firmware
In my opinion, that's a sign of a major difference between the way Creative thinks of their products and the way Apple thinks of theirs.
When my old-school 5 GB iPod died last year, I decided, instead of spending $250 to repair it, that I'd spend $50 more and get a new 20 GB model. (Mine was long out of warranty, you see. Always buy AppleCare, y'all!)
Mine came in the mail --I bought it from the online Apple Store -- and it worked great for a few days, but then it started acting funny. I called Apple, and without even really listening to my problem, the guy says, "I see from your mailing address that you're about 20 minutes from the Apple Store So-n-So. Can you take it in there? I can make you an appointment in half an hour, if that's good for you."
I said sure, got in my car and drove to the Apple Store. When I got there I went to the "genius bar" and introduced myself, and one of the guys behind it said, "Oh, hi. Here." And he handed me a brand new 20 GB iPod, still in the box.
I should have just sprinted for the door, of course, but I stood there looking stupid instead. He told me that Apple policy for people with misbehaving iPods that are still covered under warranty is for the customer, if possible, to just take it in to the nearest Apple store and exchange it for a brand new one of comparable size and features, no questions asked. They didn't even have any paperwork. Just "Sorry for the inconvenience. Here's your new one."
How many computer or consumer-electronics companies do you know whose official, written company policy is "Sorry for the inconvenience, here's your new one?"
I know this is old news, but maybe there's somebody out there somewhere who doesn't know yet.
Apple had iTunes years before they had the iPod. Apple bought the source code for the program that became iTunes back in the Mac OS 9 days, if you can believe that. They made it the best damn music management software in the world, then they added MP3 player support. I forget what MP3 players were on the market then, but they were all USB, and iTunes had software features for letting you drag and drop music from your library to your MP3 player.
Only then, after Apple saw all the stuff that was wrong with the MP3 players that existed at the time, did they start working on the iPod. And you can really tell. The sync feature, which I thought was pretty unnecessary when I first got my iPod, is a wonder.
So yeah, your point is 100% dead on, in my opinion. Apple started with the software -- that is, the user experience -- first, and added the hardware component later. And they're better off for it.
I'm pretty sure it's going to happen sometime shortly after Creative stops issuing press releases saying "Our goal for 200X is to take market share away from Apple."