So true. When a no-name brand mp3 player fails, you just crack the case open, give it a shake and a dust, check the PCB for cracks in any of the layers and maybe replace a chip or two with off-the-shelf ones (or ones you can make yourself).
Easy!
Apple make it too hard for those of us with a few simple tools (soldering iron, electronics vice, magnifying glass, CRO, multimeter and possible a silicon chip fabrication facility).
Microsoft is evil, but don't ever use Apple as an example of a less evil company. Next to Apple, Microsoft's evil seems like they are small annoyances. Apple will place you in a torture rack and charge you for the privilege. Because the torture rack is really beautiful, has rounded corners, and an easy-to-use interface.
Why weren't you modded up as "+n Funny" ?
Clearly you missed all the legal cases against Microsoft, mounted by governments around the world. You managed not to see or hear all the evidence of illegal activity and the subsequent convictions.
If you want to describe a corporation as "evil" then at least look at their legal record and judge accordingly. Apple are a minnow compared to the whale of Microsoft in the world of corporate shenanigans and skullduggery. Both are insignificant compared to other corporations.
(Then there's the whole issue of how a corporation is neutral, as it makes absolutely no decisions and takes no actions. The people who work there, however, are another matter. And lastly, if you're getting upset about Apple or Microsoft, you're not ready to look at the world of big energy corporations. You'll need sedatives for that.)
Referenda don't do so well here in Aus. We tend to get irritated by the idea that we have to all file into the polls, and unless there's a really good reason (or unless it's done in conjunction with a federal election), anything put up to the people will have a slight negative hit.
On top of that, there's a massive cost in organising the entire nation's adults to turn out. Who pays for that?
And yes, they can suck it up just like the religions have to. Even the radical nutjobs haven't asked that the constitution be changed to suit their goals.
It was always graphical, and never had a command line. It's the exact opposite.
That's not to say your point is completely invalid - it had nothing to do with BSD, there was no real security (apart from some anti-virus apps and some simple memory protection), and the multi-tasking was cooperative instead of preemptive.
It's just that calling it "DOS with a GUI" staggers me.
Google "study of apple marketing" (with quotes) and you'll see three articles about apples (the fruit).
Take the quotes off and things get a bit more sensible, but you may want to read a few of the articles on the first page or two. A lot of them talk about good marketing combined with good products, which is not the point you're making. Others talk about good marketing and how other companies can do the same, which again is not the point you're making. You want them to say that customers only buy Apple products because of the marketing and their own fanatical bias, but sensible analysts don't go that far.
Talking about a bunch of fanatics not only misses the point, it also ensures companies (who buy into that) cannot possibly compete with Apple. Think for a moment - the number of iPhone users is increasing. Either Apple are getting more fanatics in the cult every day, or customers are getting something from their iPhone that you've not identified.
Which do you reckon is more likely? Get out Occam's Razor and cut away the extraneous rubbish.
It's the same with competitors who think a list of features trumps the actual usability of a device. Thankfully people are coming around on that one.
The whole "Apple is all hype and fanatics" thing isn't true - the products have to be good enough to carry that off and still bring in new customers.
As an Australian, I'm a bit surprised that we're held up as any kind of model for health insurance.
The previous government insituted a 30% rebate on healthcare insurance, to help prop-up those companies with taxpayers funds. You get that back at tax time. Even with the rebate enticing people in, health insurance has risen many times since this policy came in.
If you choose not to be in the private healthcare system, you pay a penalty at tax time that increases by 2% every year from 30 onwards. I think it's around $800 or so.
On top of that, every now and then you see stories in the news about the rise of cosmetic surgery, done through private healthcare (and of course increasing premiums for all members). Several of them even advertise this, as well as alternative therapies.
Finally, private hospitals don't run ambulance services or have emergency departments. That's all done on the public purse. They only do the things that make them money. And when any hospital performs an operation, they bump the cost up for privately insured patients who must pay the difference between the bill and the (lower) scheduled fee.
So we've got welfare for corporations who apparently can't survive unless they're propped up by taxpayer money, penalties for refusing to get on board the gravy train, private hospitals picking and choosing what they'll treat and specialists making a fat pile of cash out of anyone on private insurance.
There are plenty of good things about the system, but thre way insurance is handled is pretty awful.
I'm not even American, nor have I ever been there, but I reckon that if you can't find the humour in Dick Cheney shooting his friend, mistaking him for a deer (or was it a duck), then there's something wrong.
Maybe I should post AC when I throw in a silly comment. Some of you guys are far too serious.
The lawyer is a complete twit for basing a defense of his client on something that can (and has) been easily disproved.
The lawyer compounds his own stupidity by making a large cash offer for someone to prove him wrong.
Someone does that and asks for the money, and the lawyer puts the final nail is his coffin of bozo-ness by claiming it was just a joke all along. Ha ha, who wouldn't laugh at a trial of a man accused of four murders! Oh, those long nights must fly by with such hilarity!
Palm used an unsupported method to link to iTunes, had no agreement with Apple for this and did it for a product that competes directly with Apple's iPhone.
Why on Earth should Apple support them? They can only lose by doing so, since maintaining the Palm's access to iTunes makes it a more attractive competitor to people weighing up between an iPhone and a Palm Pre.
I can see why people are talking up interoperability, but this was no open standard that Apple are abusing. The Palm Pre is spoofing the authentication details to appear as an iPhone. That's a behaviour that will almost always be broken, and is a very short-sighted move on Palm's part.
Surely we all knew this was going to happen? When I heard how Palm were doing this, I started counting the days.
Yeah. I know a guy who's brother's girlfriend's uncle's cleaner knows someone who once talked to a guy in a bar, but *that* guy's sister's grandson's nephew's monkey's uncle was a personal friend of Steve Jobs, and he knew the guy who dries the executive's hands in the Apple research division, and that guy knows a girl who once dated Steve Ballmer, but she hated the way he sweats so much, and her friend's cousin once met Steve Jobs, who knows Jonathan Ive's accountant, who's looking for a way to write off the costs of developing a new interface for handling tablet input.
What was I.. Oh that's right, so the secret formula for Coke is mostly sugar, right, and those eleven herbs and spices? Yeah, ten of them are salt and pepper, and one's a genetically modified version of thyme, but it's crossed with a secret DNA strand that was developed in Area 51 from alien genetics. Don't ask me how I know. I'll need a chart to get *that* out.
So, a product that's never been announced and only ever carried by the rumours that "it'd be really cool if Apple did, like, a tablet, you know!" is being discussed.
There is no substance at all, no "there" there. How can anyone seriously discuss what to expect from a product that has no information whatsoever about it? It's just all circle-jerk stuff, the sort of stuff kids fantasise about but has no connection to reality.
(sigh) I love talking tech as much as anyone, but can we at least try to stay grounded in reality?
Hell, it's just as likely to hover 14 cm above a solid surface, have a voxel-based GPU, holographic memory unit all powered by a microtok generator. Why not just make shit up? The UI will be based on the user's thoughts, but will react before the user knows they're thinking about an action because that's how cool it'll probably be, maybe.
Yup. News for nerds. Making shit up. So what does The Onion do for stories these days if Slashdot is going to nick the good ones?
And no, the iPhoto red-eye removal is not just a black paint tool. I just tried it (never use iPhoto, but was curious about your earlier claim) and it seems to try to find nearby red pixels before stripping the red out and shading them with a dark grey. I don't like red-eye removal tools at the best of times, so I'd not tried this before.
Out of curiosity, do any image editors actually recognise an eye, and refuse to use a red-eye reduction tool outside the eye's pupil? That's pretty sophisticated image recognition.
All of which is so easy to say when neither you nor anyone you love stands to be the person who suffers most.
Would you be in such a rush to publish if it were your wife, son, daughter, mother, father or whatever? Knowing that you'd be giving the publicity to actual terrorists and likely signing the death warrant of your loved one?
I'd bet a vast amount of money that you'd cave on your principles, especially when strict adherence to them gives the kidnappers precisely what they want.
Get off your soapbox and consider the situation here. Really think about exactly how much you would personally sacrifice if you were involved in this.
A) There is an unproportionally large number of cases against American companies. So you would not expect companies from the world's largest economy to feature heavily in world commerce, in both good and bad ways? Who are you comparing with, when you say it's disproportionate?
I flipped through a few pages, and couldn't be bothered to gather enough data to talk to points B and C. I note you didn't post any numbers either, but I'm sure you have a thorough analysis somewhere to back your claims up.
All these years, and still there are people who don't get that Apple's numbering system is non-standard.
Every OS X.n is a major release. Every OS X.n.o.p is a minor release for security, bug fixes, etc.
Both the OS X and Windows releases are consolidation releases, with a few new features but mostly performance improvements and under-the-hood stuff. They're identical in scale.
Those upgrades would happily install to a freshly formatted drive, and made no checks for previous versions. The only real argument that they were upgrades is that you can't have a Mac that could run OS X without already having a copy of an earlier OS version (OS X or MacOS). There is no sales channel for blank Macs.
None of which changes your point that the prices are about the same between Windows and OS X. Apple have a much simpler price structure (one price, one box) but what people actually end up paying is about the same. This will be the first major OS version where that's not true, but since both companies are releasing a 'consolidation' version, this is atypical.
Slashdot Mirror
Really?
I don't recall much in the way of lock in for the Apple-I or Apple-II.
Perhaps you could give a bit more detail, or are you just trolling?
I'm sure buggy-whip manufacturers made a fair profit in their time. What does that prove?
That you're not very good with analogies?
So true. When a no-name brand mp3 player fails, you just crack the case open, give it a shake and a dust, check the PCB for cracks in any of the layers and maybe replace a chip or two with off-the-shelf ones (or ones you can make yourself).
Easy!
Apple make it too hard for those of us with a few simple tools (soldering iron, electronics vice, magnifying glass, CRO, multimeter and possible a silicon chip fabrication facility).
Microsoft is evil, but don't ever use Apple as an example of a less evil company. Next to Apple, Microsoft's evil seems like they are small annoyances. Apple will place you in a torture rack and charge you for the privilege. Because the torture rack is really beautiful, has rounded corners, and an easy-to-use interface.
Why weren't you modded up as "+n Funny" ?
Clearly you missed all the legal cases against Microsoft, mounted by governments around the world. You managed not to see or hear all the evidence of illegal activity and the subsequent convictions.
If you want to describe a corporation as "evil" then at least look at their legal record and judge accordingly. Apple are a minnow compared to the whale of Microsoft in the world of corporate shenanigans and skullduggery. Both are insignificant compared to other corporations.
(Then there's the whole issue of how a corporation is neutral, as it makes absolutely no decisions and takes no actions. The people who work there, however, are another matter. And lastly, if you're getting upset about Apple or Microsoft, you're not ready to look at the world of big energy corporations. You'll need sedatives for that.)
Ah, you're just like the rabid Apple fans then.
If you define yourself by a product, either by its inclusion or absence from your life, then you're still defining yourself by that product.
Referenda don't do so well here in Aus. We tend to get irritated by the idea that we have to all file into the polls, and unless there's a really good reason (or unless it's done in conjunction with a federal election), anything put up to the people will have a slight negative hit.
On top of that, there's a massive cost in organising the entire nation's adults to turn out. Who pays for that?
And yes, they can suck it up just like the religions have to. Even the radical nutjobs haven't asked that the constitution be changed to suit their goals.
Are you advocating for selling Linux (not the support, the OS), including advertising or creating a subscription-only version? Really?
I can't see how your response reads any other way.
MacOS was nothing at all like "DOS with a GUI."
It was always graphical, and never had a command line. It's the exact opposite.
That's not to say your point is completely invalid - it had nothing to do with BSD, there was no real security (apart from some anti-virus apps and some simple memory protection), and the multi-tasking was cooperative instead of preemptive.
It's just that calling it "DOS with a GUI" staggers me.
Google "study of apple marketing" (with quotes) and you'll see three articles about apples (the fruit).
Take the quotes off and things get a bit more sensible, but you may want to read a few of the articles on the first page or two. A lot of them talk about good marketing combined with good products, which is not the point you're making. Others talk about good marketing and how other companies can do the same, which again is not the point you're making. You want them to say that customers only buy Apple products because of the marketing and their own fanatical bias, but sensible analysts don't go that far.
Talking about a bunch of fanatics not only misses the point, it also ensures companies (who buy into that) cannot possibly compete with Apple. Think for a moment - the number of iPhone users is increasing. Either Apple are getting more fanatics in the cult every day, or customers are getting something from their iPhone that you've not identified.
Which do you reckon is more likely? Get out Occam's Razor and cut away the extraneous rubbish.
It's the same with competitors who think a list of features trumps the actual usability of a device. Thankfully people are coming around on that one.
The whole "Apple is all hype and fanatics" thing isn't true - the products have to be good enough to carry that off and still bring in new customers.
Ceiling cat is watching you...
nah!
As an Australian, I'm a bit surprised that we're held up as any kind of model for health insurance.
The previous government insituted a 30% rebate on healthcare insurance, to help prop-up those companies with taxpayers funds. You get that back at tax time. Even with the rebate enticing people in, health insurance has risen many times since this policy came in.
If you choose not to be in the private healthcare system, you pay a penalty at tax time that increases by 2% every year from 30 onwards. I think it's around $800 or so.
On top of that, every now and then you see stories in the news about the rise of cosmetic surgery, done through private healthcare (and of course increasing premiums for all members). Several of them even advertise this, as well as alternative therapies.
Finally, private hospitals don't run ambulance services or have emergency departments. That's all done on the public purse. They only do the things that make them money. And when any hospital performs an operation, they bump the cost up for privately insured patients who must pay the difference between the bill and the (lower) scheduled fee.
So we've got welfare for corporations who apparently can't survive unless they're propped up by taxpayer money, penalties for refusing to get on board the gravy train, private hospitals picking and choosing what they'll treat and specialists making a fat pile of cash out of anyone on private insurance.
There are plenty of good things about the system, but thre way insurance is handled is pretty awful.
One american is arrested and has their life ruined every 18 seconds just for smoking pot.
Really?
Who is this person? It must be awful for them to have their life ruined every 18 seconds.
I'm not even American, nor have I ever been there, but I reckon that if you can't find the humour in Dick Cheney shooting his friend, mistaking him for a deer (or was it a duck), then there's something wrong.
Maybe I should post AC when I throw in a silly comment. Some of you guys are far too serious.
[republican goon] Take him over to Cheney's land, for a bit of deer hunting... [/republican goon]
The lawyer is a complete twit for basing a defense of his client on something that can (and has) been easily disproved.
The lawyer compounds his own stupidity by making a large cash offer for someone to prove him wrong.
Someone does that and asks for the money, and the lawyer puts the final nail is his coffin of bozo-ness by claiming it was just a joke all along. Ha ha, who wouldn't laugh at a trial of a man accused of four murders! Oh, those long nights must fly by with such hilarity!
I can't quite get my head around this concept.
Palm used an unsupported method to link to iTunes, had no agreement with Apple for this and did it for a product that competes directly with Apple's iPhone.
Why on Earth should Apple support them? They can only lose by doing so, since maintaining the Palm's access to iTunes makes it a more attractive competitor to people weighing up between an iPhone and a Palm Pre.
I can see why people are talking up interoperability, but this was no open standard that Apple are abusing. The Palm Pre is spoofing the authentication details to appear as an iPhone. That's a behaviour that will almost always be broken, and is a very short-sighted move on Palm's part.
Surely we all knew this was going to happen? When I heard how Palm were doing this, I started counting the days.
Yeah. I know a guy who's brother's girlfriend's uncle's cleaner knows someone who once talked to a guy in a bar, but *that* guy's sister's grandson's nephew's monkey's uncle was a personal friend of Steve Jobs, and he knew the guy who dries the executive's hands in the Apple research division, and that guy knows a girl who once dated Steve Ballmer, but she hated the way he sweats so much, and her friend's cousin once met Steve Jobs, who knows Jonathan Ive's accountant, who's looking for a way to write off the costs of developing a new interface for handling tablet input.
What was I.. Oh that's right, so the secret formula for Coke is mostly sugar, right, and those eleven herbs and spices? Yeah, ten of them are salt and pepper, and one's a genetically modified version of thyme, but it's crossed with a secret DNA strand that was developed in Area 51 from alien genetics. Don't ask me how I know. I'll need a chart to get *that* out.
So, a product that's never been announced and only ever carried by the rumours that "it'd be really cool if Apple did, like, a tablet, you know!" is being discussed.
There is no substance at all, no "there" there. How can anyone seriously discuss what to expect from a product that has no information whatsoever about it? It's just all circle-jerk stuff, the sort of stuff kids fantasise about but has no connection to reality.
(sigh) I love talking tech as much as anyone, but can we at least try to stay grounded in reality?
Hell, it's just as likely to hover 14 cm above a solid surface, have a voxel-based GPU, holographic memory unit all powered by a microtok generator. Why not just make shit up? The UI will be based on the user's thoughts, but will react before the user knows they're thinking about an action because that's how cool it'll probably be, maybe.
Yup. News for nerds. Making shit up. So what does The Onion do for stories these days if Slashdot is going to nick the good ones?
I like your logic.
Apple's free iPhoto application doesn't do stuff as well as you'd like, therefore the Mac fails at "getting stuff done."
Yup, that's good thinking, right there. There can't possibly be any other apps for the Mac outside of Apple, can there?
http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/
http://www.pixelmator.com/
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/
Ah, you get the idea.
And no, the iPhoto red-eye removal is not just a black paint tool. I just tried it (never use iPhoto, but was curious about your earlier claim) and it seems to try to find nearby red pixels before stripping the red out and shading them with a dark grey. I don't like red-eye removal tools at the best of times, so I'd not tried this before.
Out of curiosity, do any image editors actually recognise an eye, and refuse to use a red-eye reduction tool outside the eye's pupil? That's pretty sophisticated image recognition.
People often forget that their rights end where others' rights begin.
All of which is so easy to say when neither you nor anyone you love stands to be the person who suffers most.
Would you be in such a rush to publish if it were your wife, son, daughter, mother, father or whatever? Knowing that you'd be giving the publicity to actual terrorists and likely signing the death warrant of your loved one?
I'd bet a vast amount of money that you'd cave on your principles, especially when strict adherence to them gives the kidnappers precisely what they want.
Get off your soapbox and consider the situation here. Really think about exactly how much you would personally sacrifice if you were involved in this.
Seriously?
You think your 'right to know' is more important than a direct threat to someone's life?
Wow. I hope you're never taken hostage by publicity-hungry killers. Or at least if you are, that people are more humane (and Human) than you.
A) There is an unproportionally large number of cases against American companies.
So you would not expect companies from the world's largest economy to feature heavily in world commerce, in both good and bad ways? Who are you comparing with, when you say it's disproportionate?
I flipped through a few pages, and couldn't be bothered to gather enough data to talk to points B and C. I note you didn't post any numbers either, but I'm sure you have a thorough analysis somewhere to back your claims up.
All these years, and still there are people who don't get that Apple's numbering system is non-standard.
Every OS X.n is a major release.
Every OS X.n.o.p is a minor release for security, bug fixes, etc.
Both the OS X and Windows releases are consolidation releases, with a few new features but mostly performance improvements and under-the-hood stuff. They're identical in scale.
10.2 through 10.5 were $129 upgrades.
Those upgrades would happily install to a freshly formatted drive, and made no checks for previous versions. The only real argument that they were upgrades is that you can't have a Mac that could run OS X without already having a copy of an earlier OS version (OS X or MacOS). There is no sales channel for blank Macs.
None of which changes your point that the prices are about the same between Windows and OS X. Apple have a much simpler price structure (one price, one box) but what people actually end up paying is about the same. This will be the first major OS version where that's not true, but since both companies are releasing a 'consolidation' version, this is atypical.