Gee. Here I discover I have five new moderator points.
First, this thread is not going to start much of a discussion, much less a good one. Flames and unsupported accusation from all sides, but not much in the line of discussion in the usual sense of the word.
Second, I saw the referenced page, the "piece of pro-Mac propaganda beats all". If there's any agreement is the rating system the author used wasn't very good -- and I'm a staunch Mac person.
Third, there is no third.
Fourth, Macs are great at running Photoshop and the Mac OS. Intel and Athlon machines are not. End of story. The rest is pretty much irrelevant (which means you don't have to read any further).
...most of Microsoft's various 'innovations' are renowned for their user interface, and here we have the interface acting as a potential security flaw.
While I found the New York Times article interesting, it's still the same old story of Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling. The article points out that people gravitate towards other people with the same views on the Internet. And this doesn't happen in meatspace?
I think the article gives short shrift to the fact that accessing opposing viewpoints is only a click away. In times past one would have to travel to the nearest newsstand and buy a rag of some sort. Anyone not willing to do that (i.e., most everybody) was at the mercy of what their cohorts reported secondhand (or worse).
>To correct a few of your points:
>
>(2) The decoupling of software from hardware is something Microsoft
>pioneered. Microsoft was not only the first software
>company,...
"First" software company? Isn't that a bit of a stretch? IBM was writing software for years.:-)
>(3) NuBus ran at 10MHz, which was faster than the 8MHz achieved by ISA
>(and, being 32-bit, NuBus was twice as wide), but
>not particularly 'high-speed'.... IBM had introduced... MCA...
Speed was -- and still is -- relative. The fact was that cards could do things on NuBus and MCA (and a few others) that couldn't be done on ISA. Virtually all Macs could take advantage of NuBus (aside from toaster Macs) whereas ISA completely dominated the PC market.
The PC market has been so (relatively) huge for so long that it's almost always been possible to point to some instance of hardware or software comparable to all other desktop platforms (think C64, Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, etc.) At some point the weight off averages has to be considered and until PCI, all PCs may just as well be considered to have been ISA only, IMO.
>(4) SCSI is inferior to IDE in most single-drive configurations, and is
>far more expensive. Moreover, this is not a recent
>change. The SCSI-1 implementation used on Macs for many years was far
>slower than standard IDE interfaces on comparable
>PCs at the time.
Whoa! Unless my memory is fading faster than I thought, IDE didn't even exist when Apple introduced SCSI on the Mac Plus. SCSI was the fastest kid on the block for a long time. That aside, my point was that the Mac had a high speed external plug-n-play expansion capability standard since 1986 (aside from setting SCSI ID, of course). The closest PCs have had is USB and that market needed the iMac to kick the chicken to lay the egg.
>(5) Sythesised audio was not invented by Apple...
I didn't say they did. What I did say was that it has been standard on every Mac since day one. Sound cards have become standard on PCs only within the last five years or so.
>(6) Apple was not the only company investigating the GUI in the 1980s. It
>was the first to release a product (the Apple Lisa), but
>the core concepts had been around for years. What changed in the 1980s was
>that microcomputers became fast enough and cheap
>enough to make GUIs practicable.
Good point though I must emphasize that the Mac GUI (largely inherited from the Lisa) was a quantum leap beyond what came before it. And making the first Mac "fast and cheap enough" was a major accomplishment. Too bad Scully over priced it against Jobs' recommendation.
Quibbles aside, your points are well taken. To summarize, I must reiterate that Apple -- via the Mac -- has far from "lost the battle for the desktop" (quoth the original poster I responded to) when in fact they created it in terms of what it looks and feels like today. Hmmm, "look and feel". Sounds familiar somehow...
>>How do you expect a company like Apple to compete with something like
>>Microsoft without leveraging whatever IP rights it has a right to?
>
> How about they actually produce a better product for a reasonable
>cost to consumers?
Where to start with this attitude? OK, how about defining the "product"? Apple produces computers (i.e., Macintosh) that are highly integrated with the OS. The OS features a by now very mature GUI which was designed from the beginning as part of the OS.
For many consumers, the elegance and ease of use of the Macintosh is indeed very reasonably priced. For such a discerning consumer, the value of that elegance isn't available anywhere else at any price.
> Before MS-DOS hit the streets, darn near any machine available to
>us consumer types had a closed architecture with a closed OS.
This is plain ignorance. THE first widespread Disk Operating System (DOS) was CP/M from Digital Research which ran on 8080/Z-80 systems. Early versions had to be configured and installed by the hobbyist (calling them "users" at that point in time is ludicrous). As the fledgling "microcomputer" industry -- still wearing diapers -- got up off all fours and toddled about the room, vendors were selling CP/M boxes already configured.
When IBM went a shopping for a DOS for their IBM PC, everybody and their brother fully expected it to sport a CP/M DOS since IBM made it known that they weren't going to develop their own. Lo and behold, Microsoft emerged with the contract using a CP/M rip-off they bought for a paltry $50K.
The rest of the industry which included companies such as Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack, each had their own proprietary DOS. Microsoft -- quite literally -- created nothing and changed nothing.
> Because there was a Microsoft to provide an OS to them machines that
>Compaq managed to hack away the IP rights from IBM we all enjoy hardware
>advances we would have never seen otherwise. All this, at costs WAY below
>what would otherwise have been available.
Uh... yah. Sure. What were you doing during the 1980s? Sucking your thumb and soiling your diapers?
The IBM PC Clone market during the 1980s (and well into the 1990s) was dominated by the ISA bus originally designed for the IBM PC AT; an archaic and slothful beast that led to some of the most amazing kludges to get the machines do more than act as more than glorified smart terminals (in terms of graphics) and do more than beep (when it came to sound).
Virtually everything done prior to the PCI bus for PC Clones was a futile exercise in playing catchup to what the Mac II accomplished back in 1988 (high speed 32 bit plug-and-play bus; fast memory mapped video cards sporting 24 bit color, et al.) based on the groundwork of the original Mac back in 1984 (fast memory mapped graphics, 3.5" floppy, built-in sound chip, built-in high speed serial) and fleshed out with the Mac Plus in 1986 (SCSI bus for high speed peripherals, and networking leveraging the high speed serial bus).
While it is certainly true that the PC Clone market supported a dizzying array of inexpensive hardware available for it, making it work could make the cost soar if you included labor costs. There was an old commercial with the tag line "you can pay me now or you can pay me later". Mac customers paid up front. PC users paid less at first but kept on paying in the long run.
> I thank the computer gods daily that way back in the day Apple
>decisively lost the battle for the desktop.
They did? Do you use a mouse? GUI? Memory mapped graphics? Multiple monitors? Synthetic sound?
Virtually everything you take for granted on your desktop machine is there because Apple developed it. And don't whine about how they "stole" it from Xerox PARC because (a) Apple paid for the privilege of examining what PARC was doing, (b) Xerox had no immediate plans to develop what was happening in PARC at the time as a product, and (c) Apple developed what we see on the desktop; what came out of PARC in the guise of the Alto was a very different beast.
>As is in constant evidence by
>their actions, they have no interest in allowing the rest of us lesser
>folk decide what we want in a machine or what OS will run on it. We sure
>as hell wouldn't have seen anything like a Linux come around.
If by "lesser folk" you mean geeks who are often more concerned with hacking their OS and hardware instead of just using it to get work done... you have a point.:-j
renoX wrote: I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast... Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop.
Now let me get this straight -- Mac users should measure how fast their machines are by using a benchmark instead of how fast it accomplishes the work they need to do? I am gobsmacked.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee. Here I discover I have five new moderator points.
First, this thread is not going to start much of a discussion, much less a good one. Flames and unsupported accusation from all sides, but not much in the line of discussion in the usual sense of the word.
Second, I saw the referenced page, the "piece of pro-Mac propaganda beats all". If there's any agreement is the rating system the author used wasn't very good -- and I'm a staunch Mac person.
Third, there is no third.
Fourth, Macs are great at running Photoshop and the Mac OS. Intel and Athlon machines are not. End of story. The rest is pretty much irrelevant (which means you don't have to read any further).
Thank yew. Thankyewverimuch
.
"Renowned"? Don't you mean "notorious"? 
While I found the New York Times article interesting, it's still the same old story of Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling. The article points out that people gravitate towards other people with the same views on the Internet. And this doesn't happen in meatspace?
I think the article gives short shrift to the fact that accessing opposing viewpoints is only a click away. In times past one would have to travel to the nearest newsstand and buy a rag of some sort. Anyone not willing to do that (i.e., most everybody) was at the mercy of what their cohorts reported secondhand (or worse).
Anonymous coward wrote:
...
:-)
... IBM had introduced ... MCA ...
...
...
>To correct a few of your points:
>
>(2) The decoupling of software from hardware is something Microsoft
>pioneered. Microsoft was not only the first software
>company,
"First" software company? Isn't that a bit of a stretch? IBM was writing software for years.
>(3) NuBus ran at 10MHz, which was faster than the 8MHz achieved by ISA
>(and, being 32-bit, NuBus was twice as wide), but
>not particularly 'high-speed'.
Speed was -- and still is -- relative. The fact was that cards could do things on NuBus and MCA (and a few others) that couldn't be done on ISA. Virtually all Macs could take advantage of NuBus (aside from toaster Macs) whereas ISA completely dominated the PC market.
The PC market has been so (relatively) huge for so long that it's almost always been possible to point to some instance of hardware or software comparable to all other desktop platforms (think C64, Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, etc.) At some point the weight off averages has to be considered and until PCI, all PCs may just as well be considered to have been ISA only, IMO.
>(4) SCSI is inferior to IDE in most single-drive configurations, and is
>far more expensive. Moreover, this is not a recent
>change. The SCSI-1 implementation used on Macs for many years was far
>slower than standard IDE interfaces on comparable
>PCs at the time.
Whoa! Unless my memory is fading faster than I thought, IDE didn't even exist when Apple introduced SCSI on the Mac Plus. SCSI was the fastest kid on the block for a long time. That aside, my point was that the Mac had a high speed external plug-n-play expansion capability standard since 1986 (aside from setting SCSI ID, of course). The closest PCs have had is USB and that market needed the iMac to kick the chicken to lay the egg.
>(5) Sythesised audio was not invented by Apple
I didn't say they did. What I did say was that it has been standard on every Mac since day one. Sound cards have become standard on PCs only within the last five years or so.
>(6) Apple was not the only company investigating the GUI in the 1980s. It
>was the first to release a product (the Apple Lisa), but
>the core concepts had been around for years. What changed in the 1980s was
>that microcomputers became fast enough and cheap
>enough to make GUIs practicable.
Good point though I must emphasize that the Mac GUI (largely inherited from the Lisa) was a quantum leap beyond what came before it. And making the first Mac "fast and cheap enough" was a major accomplishment. Too bad Scully over priced it against Jobs' recommendation.
Quibbles aside, your points are well taken. To summarize, I must reiterate that Apple -- via the Mac -- has far from "lost the battle for the desktop" (quoth the original poster I responded to) when in fact they created it in terms of what it looks and feels like today. Hmmm, "look and feel". Sounds familiar somehow
>>How do you expect a company like Apple to compete with something like
... yah. Sure. What were you doing during the 1980s? Sucking your thumb and soiling your diapers?
... you have a point. :-j
>>Microsoft without leveraging whatever IP rights it has a right to?
>
> How about they actually produce a better product for a reasonable
>cost to consumers?
Where to start with this attitude? OK, how about defining the "product"? Apple produces computers (i.e., Macintosh) that are highly integrated with the OS. The OS features a by now very mature GUI which was designed from the beginning as part of the OS.
For many consumers, the elegance and ease of use of the Macintosh is indeed very reasonably priced. For such a discerning consumer, the value of that elegance isn't available anywhere else at any price.
> Before MS-DOS hit the streets, darn near any machine available to
>us consumer types had a closed architecture with a closed OS.
This is plain ignorance. THE first widespread Disk Operating System (DOS) was CP/M from Digital Research which ran on 8080/Z-80 systems. Early versions had to be configured and installed by the hobbyist (calling them "users" at that point in time is ludicrous). As the fledgling "microcomputer" industry -- still wearing diapers -- got up off all fours and toddled about the room, vendors were selling CP/M boxes already configured.
When IBM went a shopping for a DOS for their IBM PC, everybody and their brother fully expected it to sport a CP/M DOS since IBM made it known that they weren't going to develop their own. Lo and behold, Microsoft emerged with the contract using a CP/M rip-off they bought for a paltry $50K.
The rest of the industry which included companies such as Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack, each had their own proprietary DOS. Microsoft -- quite literally -- created nothing and changed nothing.
> Because there was a Microsoft to provide an OS to them machines that
>Compaq managed to hack away the IP rights from IBM we all enjoy hardware
>advances we would have never seen otherwise. All this, at costs WAY below
>what would otherwise have been available.
Uh
The IBM PC Clone market during the 1980s (and well into the 1990s) was dominated by the ISA bus originally designed for the IBM PC AT; an archaic and slothful beast that led to some of the most amazing kludges to get the machines do more than act as more than glorified smart terminals (in terms of graphics) and do more than beep (when it came to sound).
Virtually everything done prior to the PCI bus for PC Clones was a futile exercise in playing catchup to what the Mac II accomplished back in 1988 (high speed 32 bit plug-and-play bus; fast memory mapped video cards sporting 24 bit color, et al.) based on the groundwork of the original Mac back in 1984 (fast memory mapped graphics, 3.5" floppy, built-in sound chip, built-in high speed serial) and fleshed out with the Mac Plus in 1986 (SCSI bus for high speed peripherals, and networking leveraging the high speed serial bus).
While it is certainly true that the PC Clone market supported a dizzying array of inexpensive hardware available for it, making it work could make the cost soar if you included labor costs. There was an old commercial with the tag line "you can pay me now or you can pay me later". Mac customers paid up front. PC users paid less at first but kept on paying in the long run.
> I thank the computer gods daily that way back in the day Apple
>decisively lost the battle for the desktop.
They did? Do you use a mouse? GUI? Memory mapped graphics? Multiple monitors? Synthetic sound?
Virtually everything you take for granted on your desktop machine is there because Apple developed it. And don't whine about how they "stole" it from Xerox PARC because (a) Apple paid for the privilege of examining what PARC was doing, (b) Xerox had no immediate plans to develop what was happening in PARC at the time as a product, and (c) Apple developed what we see on the desktop; what came out of PARC in the guise of the Alto was a very different beast.
>As is in constant evidence by
>their actions, they have no interest in allowing the rest of us lesser
>folk decide what we want in a machine or what OS will run on it. We sure
>as hell wouldn't have seen anything like a Linux come around.
If by "lesser folk" you mean geeks who are often more concerned with hacking their OS and hardware instead of just using it to get work done
renoX wrote: I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast ... Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop.
Now let me get this straight -- Mac users should measure how fast their machines are by using a benchmark instead of how fast it accomplishes the work they need to do? I am gobsmacked.