Actually, "being a jackass" is definitely illegal. It's called "disorderly conduct," and it refers to any attempt to disquiet or agitate an otherwise orderly assembly of people. It's been against the law for as long as we've had laws.
Oh, it pertains to no such thing. Drop the agenda-mongering and look at the facts of the case: Two men were causing a disturbance on government property. When given the opportunity to stop, they refused, knowing full well that they were in danger of being arrested on a misdemeanor charge.
These boys weren't exercising their right to free speech. They were, deliberately and with malicious intent, making a public nuisance of themselves. And we have laws against that sort of thing.
The freedom of speech is not a freedom to be a shithead.
Do you mean to suggest that Open Office (which I'm guess is what you're saying should be downloaded from openoffice.org) is comparable to Office? Golly. Remember that "you're comparing a first-class ticket to" analogy? We're back in that territory again.
AppleWorks is fairly shoddy software by 21st-century standards, but at least it supports new, cutting-edge technologies like "cut" and "paste."
You're either a jackass, you've missed the whole OSS movement, or you haven't been on/. for very long.
If OSS means Office of Strategic Services, then just one out of three. If it means anything else, then I guess it's two out of three.
GTFOH.
Your guess is as good as mine here.
It seems as though you misunderstood the meaning of HEAVY VIDEO EDITING.
It seems as though you misunderstood the definition of iMovie. It is, in fact, capable of moderately sophisticated, multi-track, non-linear video editing in either standard or high definition. And it's bundled with the Mac mini.
your DV cam (which probably COMES with the software to do so now)
Software that (1) has to be installed, (2) has to be learned and (3) doesn't work with anything else on your computer. Sounds like a poor substitute for iMovie.
burning them to a dvd (DVD burner probably comes with software to create videos as well)
Software that (1) has to be installed, (2) has to be learned and (3) doesn't work with anything else on your computer. Sounds like a poor substitute for iDVD.
Otherwise you can use movie maker or some other little bullshit program that just gets the job done.
Software that (1) has to be installed, (2) has to be learned, (3) doesn't work with anything else on your computer and (4) is a "bullshit program." Sounds like a poor substitute for iMovie and iDVD.
No, every parent in america DOES NOT have a mini dv camcorder.
Literally? No. It's a figure of speech. Mini-DV cameras are ubiquitous.
every parent in america does not want to use Photoshop (an image editing suite) to edit pictures
Which is why Apple bundles iPhoto. We keep coming back to the main point here, don't we? Which is that the software bundled with the Mac mini makes your life easier instead of harder, and that no comparable software is available for the PC at any price.
By the way, there is maybe 1 family out of 10 who actually does record all of little timmy's events with a dv cam and tries to back them up on DVDs.
Let's say it were one family out of ten. That would still be 10 million families in the United States alone. Nice market.
Of course, it's not one out of ten. It's much, much higher.
Everyone else is content with video tapes or just hooking the fucking camera up to the A/V inputs on the TV and going with it.
Oh, I see. Because that's the way we did it in 1989, that's how we should do it today. Got it. Great plan you've got there.
In case you're wondering, this is why Apple's profits for the quarter ending 12/25 quadrupled over the previous year's. This is why they're growing like a house on fire: because they don't say, "You should be satisfied with doing it the old, clumsy, hard way."
Your philosophy is, "It should be hard," so you're okay with things that are hard. Apple's philosophy is, "It should easy." So they make it easy.
The Mac mini has specifically been designed for people who already have a desk with a keyboard, mouse and computer monitor under it. They're sick of putting up with the attendant crap that comes with using a PC, so they want to get rid of their big, ugly, noisy computer and replace it with something small, quiet and easy to use. That's the Mac mini customer.
Anybody who doesn't already have a monitor, keyboard and mouse will do the arithmetic and find that either an eMac or an iMac G5 is the better value.
This is not an accident. This is not the result of somebody at Apple failing to do the math. This is a very deliberate choice.
Mac is better in every way, but it is certianly not head and shoulders above the rest in the bundled apps
So completely wrong in every way.
Look at it this way: Windows is a great experience for people who want to use Microsoft Office. There are a lot of those people out there, and Windows is great for them.
Linux is great for people who have nothing in their lives except their computer. There are a few of these people, and they've taken up Linux in droves.
But the Mac is designed, from the inside out, for people who have lots of other stuff in their lives than their computers.
You know who the perfect Mac customer is? It's the new parents. Late twenties, disposable income, technologically savvy, and you just had a baby. You've got the CD collection from college. You've got the digital camera. Now, for the baby, you've got the video camera. And you've got grandparents, aunts and uncles who are just begging you for pictures and video of the baby.
The Mac is the perfect addition to that lifestyle.
How big is that market? Twenty or thirty million people in the United States alone.
Hang on a sec. Let's just take a step back. Are you seriously comparing Linux and Mac OS X? I mean, I know that they're both computer operating systems, but aside from that, are you seriously thinking of them as equivalent? Have you ever used Mac OS X? For that matter, have you ever used Linux?
You're comparing a first-class ticket on a 747 to the back seat of a crop-duster. Yes, one costs more than the other, but seriously, you get what you pay for.
DVD-ROM-- Cheap
True.
Quicken 2k5 -- GNU Cash
Wow. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Quicken --I find that a pencil and my bank card statement work as well for me--but now you're comparing that seat on a 747 to the back of a horse.
Office -- OOo
"Bryan, there's a message in my Alphabits! It says 'Oooooo!'"
"Peter, those are Cheerios."
Seriously, man, what's "Oooo" supposed to mean?
Video editing suite -- If you need to do heavy video editing you shouldn't be buying a $500 computer anyway.
Let's flash back five years, huh? "If you need to listen to compressed music files, you shouldn't be buying a $500 computer anyway." How much sense would that have made? How about going back 20 years. "If you need to us more than one font on a page, you shouldn't be buying a $500 computer anyway."
Every parent in America has a mini-DV camera. Every parent in America wants to put their movies of little Junior on DVD. And every parent in America wants the ability to do so without shelling out a quarter of a million bucks on a Fire system.
What people do with their computers has changed a bit since 1981. Might want to think about catching up with the rest of the class.
OS X becomes outdated in a year. Punch down $129 more for a new version.
You do know that upgrades are optional, right? It's not like Panther is going to stop working on 6/30.
If old versions of OS X will have updates remains to be seen.
No, it doesn't. Apple routinely releases security patches for Jaguar. Cheetah and Puma were end-of-lifed quickly; nobody should be running either of those any more.
Is MS office included in every mini sold
AppleWorks is, so you have to include something that's comparable to that. Whether that's Office or something else, I have no idea.
Is quicken included?
Yes.
Why not download openoffice instead?
Because it's a terrible, terrible piece of software for starters. For seconds, you've just offset the dollar-cost of something like AppleWorks for the time-and-trouble-cost of some piece of freeware that you get off some random Web site. So much for being a good out-of-the-box experience, huh?
From what I heard there are some kind of video editing software included in windows if you need it.
Not really. What comes with Windows is more along the lines of two VHS decks strung together with RF adapters. And you can only record on Microsoft tape.
While we are at it why not add in some cash for at least a keyboard for that mac mini
Apple did. The Apple wired keyboard used to be $49. Now it's $29. Apple gave people who buy minis a $20 discount on a keyboard. Same with the mouse, incidentally.
This is explicitly not true. The reason Apple recommends that RAM be installed by an expert is that this computer is small, and consequently it's tricky to get it open and get the RAM in without doing harm.
Swapping out internal components in the mini does not void your warranty, but if you screw something up in the process of swapping out an internal component, Apple won't fix it under your warranty. See?
Actually, you kind of have that backwards. You don't rewrite your file format to be Spotlight-savvy. Instead, you provide a Spotlight plug-in called an "importer." An "importer" is a little object file that implements exactly one function: GetMetadataForFile. GetMetadataForFile takes a data structure of attributes, a content-type value and a path to a file on the disk as arguments. You write the function in such a way that you extract the metadata from the file and put it into the attributes data structure, then return boolean true.
I've never seen Microsoft Publisher, so I can't comment on comparisons of that product to Pages. But Pages is, quite literally, Keynote for paper.
If you've ever used Keynote, you'll know that it's basically a very simple but slick graphics program with some stuff added to make it good for interactive presentations. The "play slide show" mode with presenter graphics on the second monitor, for instance.
Pages is basically the same core application, only with some stuff added to make it good for producing multipage documents. Headers and footers and page numbering, for instance.
In both cases, the basic philosophy is, "Let's create an outstanding tool set to let people create great-looking graphics, then add the necessary features to make it do whatever else is required."
My favorite example of this has to do with images. Depending on where you're coming from, you might think that an image file can have a clipping path on it (print) or a matte (video). Either way, the result is the same: the background of the picture is transparent, and only the foreground shows up.
With your typical presentation or word-processing program, in order to use such an image, you have to go into Adobe Photoshop or a similar program, create a matte, and either save it as an alpha channel or a clipping path. Only then can you bring the image into the program.
In both Keynote and Pages, you can just drag layered Photoshop files from the desktop to your document window. The background is knocked out automatically. Poof. (Although from Steve's most recent keynotes, it seems that "Boom" is the new "Poof.")
Not quite correct. CoreImage is scalable. It'll run on anything at all, as long as Tiger runs. If graphics hardware is available, CoreImage will use the GPU. If it's not, it'll run in the CPU.
And here's the really cool part. If you've got graphics hardware that can run the necessary programs, but your CPUs are actually faster, CoreImage will note this and pull the routines back into the CPU for maximum performance.
Everybody who ever says a sentence beginning with "CoreImage requires" and then a list of hardware is telling a little lie. Truth is, CoreImage has no hardware requirements at all. It just has a list of hardware of which it will take special advantage.
This line was from my "Yin and Yang" post, which means I probably pissed you off somehow.
No kidding? Hand to God, I had no idea. I've never read your site but for the articles I specifically referred to. I thought -- if I may be blunt --that you kind of made an ass of yourself by writing at mind-numbing length about a topic about which you clearly knew nothing, so I didn't bother to go back. It's nothing personal; I just wasn't interested in that kind of spouting off.
I agree that it won't happen, but for completely different reasons. VOIP, to but it bluntly, sucks. The voice quality is worse than a traditional land-line and it only works if you've got electricity going to the various components.
Mobile phones, on the other hand, sound as good or better than VOIP phones most of the time, and work on batteries. And I can't remember the last time I paid for a non-international long-distance call.
If VOIP offered something above and beyond what we all already have on our mobile phones, then maybe it would have a shot. But as it is, I just don't see it taking off.
I'm pretty sure that Bob overstated the impact of the iTunes affiliate program pretty heavily. I haven't looked into it lately, but back when it first debuted it was obviously targeted at large-scale operations, not bloggers. For instance, the iTunes affiliate T&C specifically says that in order to be eligible, your site must have a clearly displayed "online privacy policy." That's the kind of stuff that individual Web sites just don't have.
So the "turn bloggers into record stores" idea is overstating it a bit, I think.
In the case of SGI, at least, you've kinda got that wrong. While it's true that SGI did at one time have an interest in selling cheap desktop computers with Linux on them, that died pretty quickly when they realized that lots of other people were also doing same.
No, SGI took Linux because it enabled them to get a mostly-sorta-source-code-compatible operating system up and running on IA-64 more quickly than they could have if they'd ported IRIX.
Apple, on the other hand, went with BSD because that's what NEXTSTEP was based on, and I believe NEXTSTEP pre-dated Linux by quite a ways. Or at least it pre-dated useful Linux. The fact that BSD didn't have lots of nasty IP-related entanglements the way Linux does was, in my totally inexpert opinion, more of a lucky break than conscious design.
You purport to think the My Lai massacre was the story of the century despite the fact that it was a blip compared to other crimes perpetrated by the Vietnamese communists both during and after the war. You think Iraq is a "quagmire" (that oh-so-trendy term) despite the fact that the country is largely at peace, the terrorists have been routed from their safe havens and there's an election coming up in three weeks. You continue to insist that Fisk's "it was an American cruise missile" story got it right despite the fact that that story was as thoroughly debunked as the Piltdown Man. You claim to have served in uniform, and yet you don't speak like a soldier. You say it was all about the oil. You think Saddam was a "US creation." You insist that "US meddling" is worse than totalitarianism and mass murder.
It seems to go on and on.
I don't think anybody with two brain cells to rub together could sincerely be that hate-filled. I think that you might be playing a little joke.
Very funny, mister name-nobody-can-pronounce. You sure pulled one over on the rest of us. Har har har.
Yeah. Sorry. Still don't believe you. Your story just doesn't ring true. Especially the part about "I don't know what it's called and I couldn't care less." Not the words of a veteran.
And the "I was in Leavenworth" bit? Now you're just reaching.
Seriously, man, you can make your point without concocting absurd stories.
Slashdot Mirror
And also such annoyances as the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Education.
Yes, by all means, vote libertarian if you want contaminated food, unsafe planes and even more poorly educated kids.
First one, then the other.
Actually, "being a jackass" is definitely illegal. It's called "disorderly conduct," and it refers to any attempt to disquiet or agitate an otherwise orderly assembly of people. It's been against the law for as long as we've had laws.
Oh, it pertains to no such thing. Drop the agenda-mongering and look at the facts of the case: Two men were causing a disturbance on government property. When given the opportunity to stop, they refused, knowing full well that they were in danger of being arrested on a misdemeanor charge.
These boys weren't exercising their right to free speech. They were, deliberately and with malicious intent, making a public nuisance of themselves. And we have laws against that sort of thing.
The freedom of speech is not a freedom to be a shithead.
OOo = Open Office.org
/. for very long.
Do you mean to suggest that Open Office (which I'm guess is what you're saying should be downloaded from openoffice.org) is comparable to Office? Golly. Remember that "you're comparing a first-class ticket to" analogy? We're back in that territory again.
AppleWorks is fairly shoddy software by 21st-century standards, but at least it supports new, cutting-edge technologies like "cut" and "paste."
You're either a jackass, you've missed the whole OSS movement, or you haven't been on
If OSS means Office of Strategic Services, then just one out of three. If it means anything else, then I guess it's two out of three.
GTFOH.
Your guess is as good as mine here.
It seems as though you misunderstood the meaning of HEAVY VIDEO EDITING.
It seems as though you misunderstood the definition of iMovie. It is, in fact, capable of moderately sophisticated, multi-track, non-linear video editing in either standard or high definition. And it's bundled with the Mac mini.
your DV cam (which probably COMES with the software to do so now)
Software that (1) has to be installed, (2) has to be learned and (3) doesn't work with anything else on your computer. Sounds like a poor substitute for iMovie.
burning them to a dvd (DVD burner probably comes with software to create videos as well)
Software that (1) has to be installed, (2) has to be learned and (3) doesn't work with anything else on your computer. Sounds like a poor substitute for iDVD.
Otherwise you can use movie maker or some other little bullshit program that just gets the job done.
Software that (1) has to be installed, (2) has to be learned, (3) doesn't work with anything else on your computer and (4) is a "bullshit program." Sounds like a poor substitute for iMovie and iDVD.
No, every parent in america DOES NOT have a mini dv camcorder.
Literally? No. It's a figure of speech. Mini-DV cameras are ubiquitous.
every parent in america does not want to use Photoshop (an image editing suite) to edit pictures
Which is why Apple bundles iPhoto. We keep coming back to the main point here, don't we? Which is that the software bundled with the Mac mini makes your life easier instead of harder, and that no comparable software is available for the PC at any price.
By the way, there is maybe 1 family out of 10 who actually does record all of little timmy's events with a dv cam and tries to back them up on DVDs.
Let's say it were one family out of ten. That would still be 10 million families in the United States alone. Nice market.
Of course, it's not one out of ten. It's much, much higher.
Everyone else is content with video tapes or just hooking the fucking camera up to the A/V inputs on the TV and going with it.
Oh, I see. Because that's the way we did it in 1989, that's how we should do it today. Got it. Great plan you've got there.
In case you're wondering, this is why Apple's profits for the quarter ending 12/25 quadrupled over the previous year's. This is why they're growing like a house on fire: because they don't say, "You should be satisfied with doing it the old, clumsy, hard way."
Your philosophy is, "It should be hard," so you're okay with things that are hard. Apple's philosophy is, "It should easy." So they make it easy.
You've stumbled onto the business plan.
The Mac mini has specifically been designed for people who already have a desk with a keyboard, mouse and computer monitor under it. They're sick of putting up with the attendant crap that comes with using a PC, so they want to get rid of their big, ugly, noisy computer and replace it with something small, quiet and easy to use. That's the Mac mini customer.
Anybody who doesn't already have a monitor, keyboard and mouse will do the arithmetic and find that either an eMac or an iMac G5 is the better value.
This is not an accident. This is not the result of somebody at Apple failing to do the math. This is a very deliberate choice.
that quicken 2005 for MAC is a TRIAL version!
Nope. Full version.
Mac is better in every way, but it is certianly not head and shoulders above the rest in the bundled apps
So completely wrong in every way.
Look at it this way: Windows is a great experience for people who want to use Microsoft Office. There are a lot of those people out there, and Windows is great for them.
Linux is great for people who have nothing in their lives except their computer. There are a few of these people, and they've taken up Linux in droves.
But the Mac is designed, from the inside out, for people who have lots of other stuff in their lives than their computers.
You know who the perfect Mac customer is? It's the new parents. Late twenties, disposable income, technologically savvy, and you just had a baby. You've got the CD collection from college. You've got the digital camera. Now, for the baby, you've got the video camera. And you've got grandparents, aunts and uncles who are just begging you for pictures and video of the baby.
The Mac is the perfect addition to that lifestyle.
How big is that market? Twenty or thirty million people in the United States alone.
XP-Pro -- No just get Linux instead
Hang on a sec. Let's just take a step back. Are you seriously comparing Linux and Mac OS X? I mean, I know that they're both computer operating systems, but aside from that, are you seriously thinking of them as equivalent? Have you ever used Mac OS X? For that matter, have you ever used Linux?
You're comparing a first-class ticket on a 747 to the back seat of a crop-duster. Yes, one costs more than the other, but seriously, you get what you pay for.
DVD-ROM-- Cheap
True.
Quicken 2k5 -- GNU Cash
Wow. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Quicken --I find that a pencil and my bank card statement work as well for me--but now you're comparing that seat on a 747 to the back of a horse.
Office -- OOo
"Bryan, there's a message in my Alphabits! It says 'Oooooo!'"
"Peter, those are Cheerios."
Seriously, man, what's "Oooo" supposed to mean?
Video editing suite -- If you need to do heavy video editing you shouldn't be buying a $500 computer anyway.
Let's flash back five years, huh? "If you need to listen to compressed music files, you shouldn't be buying a $500 computer anyway." How much sense would that have made? How about going back 20 years. "If you need to us more than one font on a page, you shouldn't be buying a $500 computer anyway."
Every parent in America has a mini-DV camera. Every parent in America wants to put their movies of little Junior on DVD. And every parent in America wants the ability to do so without shelling out a quarter of a million bucks on a Fire system.
What people do with their computers has changed a bit since 1981. Might want to think about catching up with the rest of the class.
OS X becomes outdated in a year. Punch down $129 more for a new version.
You do know that upgrades are optional, right? It's not like Panther is going to stop working on 6/30.
If old versions of OS X will have updates remains to be seen.
No, it doesn't. Apple routinely releases security patches for Jaguar. Cheetah and Puma were end-of-lifed quickly; nobody should be running either of those any more.
Is MS office included in every mini sold
AppleWorks is, so you have to include something that's comparable to that. Whether that's Office or something else, I have no idea.
Is quicken included?
Yes.
Why not download openoffice instead?
Because it's a terrible, terrible piece of software for starters. For seconds, you've just offset the dollar-cost of something like AppleWorks for the time-and-trouble-cost of some piece of freeware that you get off some random Web site. So much for being a good out-of-the-box experience, huh?
From what I heard there are some kind of video editing software included in windows if you need it.
Not really. What comes with Windows is more along the lines of two VHS decks strung together with RF adapters. And you can only record on Microsoft tape.
While we are at it why not add in some cash for at least a keyboard for that mac mini
Apple did. The Apple wired keyboard used to be $49. Now it's $29. Apple gave people who buy minis a $20 discount on a keyboard. Same with the mouse, incidentally.
This is explicitly not true. The reason Apple recommends that RAM be installed by an expert is that this computer is small, and consequently it's tricky to get it open and get the RAM in without doing harm.
Swapping out internal components in the mini does not void your warranty, but if you screw something up in the process of swapping out an internal component, Apple won't fix it under your warranty. See?
But don't you think Apple redid their entire Mail setup to make it work faster (e.g. better).
No. Tiger's mailboxes are compatible with Panther's mailboxes.
Actually, you kind of have that backwards. You don't rewrite your file format to be Spotlight-savvy. Instead, you provide a Spotlight plug-in called an "importer." An "importer" is a little object file that implements exactly one function: GetMetadataForFile. GetMetadataForFile takes a data structure of attributes, a content-type value and a path to a file on the disk as arguments. You write the function in such a way that you extract the metadata from the file and put it into the attributes data structure, then return boolean true.
Easy, easy.
I've never seen Microsoft Publisher, so I can't comment on comparisons of that product to Pages. But Pages is, quite literally, Keynote for paper.
If you've ever used Keynote, you'll know that it's basically a very simple but slick graphics program with some stuff added to make it good for interactive presentations. The "play slide show" mode with presenter graphics on the second monitor, for instance.
Pages is basically the same core application, only with some stuff added to make it good for producing multipage documents. Headers and footers and page numbering, for instance.
In both cases, the basic philosophy is, "Let's create an outstanding tool set to let people create great-looking graphics, then add the necessary features to make it do whatever else is required."
My favorite example of this has to do with images. Depending on where you're coming from, you might think that an image file can have a clipping path on it (print) or a matte (video). Either way, the result is the same: the background of the picture is transparent, and only the foreground shows up.
With your typical presentation or word-processing program, in order to use such an image, you have to go into Adobe Photoshop or a similar program, create a matte, and either save it as an alpha channel or a clipping path. Only then can you bring the image into the program.
In both Keynote and Pages, you can just drag layered Photoshop files from the desktop to your document window. The background is knocked out automatically. Poof. (Although from Steve's most recent keynotes, it seems that "Boom" is the new "Poof.")
Xcode does what you want. It's also got the big plus of being free.
It's also got the even bigger plus of, you know, not being Emacs.
Not quite correct. CoreImage is scalable. It'll run on anything at all, as long as Tiger runs. If graphics hardware is available, CoreImage will use the GPU. If it's not, it'll run in the CPU.
And here's the really cool part. If you've got graphics hardware that can run the necessary programs, but your CPUs are actually faster, CoreImage will note this and pull the routines back into the CPU for maximum performance.
Everybody who ever says a sentence beginning with "CoreImage requires" and then a list of hardware is telling a little lie. Truth is, CoreImage has no hardware requirements at all. It just has a list of hardware of which it will take special advantage.
That still only adds up to "someday, maybe, it might be as good as what we already have."
Nope. I don't buy it.
Strange how you seem to follow my blog around from site to site then isn't it?
Do what now?
this situation just doesn't seem to be the place for your agenda
For my "agenda?" As I said, my "agenda" was to share what context I knew, because it's good for people to make up their own minds about things.
Why are you giving off a paranoid vibe here?
This line was from my "Yin and Yang" post, which means I probably pissed you off somehow.
No kidding? Hand to God, I had no idea. I've never read your site but for the articles I specifically referred to. I thought -- if I may be blunt --that you kind of made an ass of yourself by writing at mind-numbing length about a topic about which you clearly knew nothing, so I didn't bother to go back. It's nothing personal; I just wasn't interested in that kind of spouting off.
I don't see a privacy policy on your site. Seems to me like you're violating Apple's terms of service. Naughty naughty.
(Blog, incidentally, is not an acronym. Just so you know.)
I agree that it won't happen, but for completely different reasons. VOIP, to but it bluntly, sucks. The voice quality is worse than a traditional land-line and it only works if you've got electricity going to the various components.
Mobile phones, on the other hand, sound as good or better than VOIP phones most of the time, and work on batteries. And I can't remember the last time I paid for a non-international long-distance call.
If VOIP offered something above and beyond what we all already have on our mobile phones, then maybe it would have a shot. But as it is, I just don't see it taking off.
Just my two cents, obviously.
I'm pretty sure that Bob overstated the impact of the iTunes affiliate program pretty heavily. I haven't looked into it lately, but back when it first debuted it was obviously targeted at large-scale operations, not bloggers. For instance, the iTunes affiliate T&C specifically says that in order to be eligible, your site must have a clearly displayed "online privacy policy." That's the kind of stuff that individual Web sites just don't have.
So the "turn bloggers into record stores" idea is overstating it a bit, I think.
In the case of SGI, at least, you've kinda got that wrong. While it's true that SGI did at one time have an interest in selling cheap desktop computers with Linux on them, that died pretty quickly when they realized that lots of other people were also doing same.
No, SGI took Linux because it enabled them to get a mostly-sorta-source-code-compatible operating system up and running on IA-64 more quickly than they could have if they'd ported IRIX.
Apple, on the other hand, went with BSD because that's what NEXTSTEP was based on, and I believe NEXTSTEP pre-dated Linux by quite a ways. Or at least it pre-dated useful Linux. The fact that BSD didn't have lots of nasty IP-related entanglements the way Linux does was, in my totally inexpert opinion, more of a lucky break than conscious design.
I don't think something can be "extremely critical." That's like calling something "very unique."
I think you're trying to be funny.
You purport to think the My Lai massacre was the story of the century despite the fact that it was a blip compared to other crimes perpetrated by the Vietnamese communists both during and after the war. You think Iraq is a "quagmire" (that oh-so-trendy term) despite the fact that the country is largely at peace, the terrorists have been routed from their safe havens and there's an election coming up in three weeks. You continue to insist that Fisk's "it was an American cruise missile" story got it right despite the fact that that story was as thoroughly debunked as the Piltdown Man. You claim to have served in uniform, and yet you don't speak like a soldier. You say it was all about the oil. You think Saddam was a "US creation." You insist that "US meddling" is worse than totalitarianism and mass murder.
It seems to go on and on.
I don't think anybody with two brain cells to rub together could sincerely be that hate-filled. I think that you might be playing a little joke.
Very funny, mister name-nobody-can-pronounce. You sure pulled one over on the rest of us. Har har har.
Yeah. Sorry. Still don't believe you. Your story just doesn't ring true. Especially the part about "I don't know what it's called and I couldn't care less." Not the words of a veteran.
And the "I was in Leavenworth" bit? Now you're just reaching.
Seriously, man, you can make your point without concocting absurd stories.