Well, your bullshit answer doesn't really fly with me. (How comparing an Escalade to an iPhone makes any kind of sense is beyond me? But it got modded +4 Insightful, so I'll bother responding.)
Almost all the satisfied iPhone owners I know who purchased one for PERSONAL use, vs. business use, fall into the wage category mentioned. ($25K - $50K salaries)
None of these folks are interested in driving big, flashy SUVs, though - nor could most of them even afford the gas or personal property taxes on one!
The people complaining that the iPhone isn't as "open" as some Nokias or other smartphones completely miss the point. MOST customers are interested in what a phone lets them do, easily, out of the box. Once they're sold on that, and own/use the phone for a while - they get familiar enough (and maybe even bored enough?) with what's on it that they become motivated to install additional applications. Unlike other phones, the iPhone already uses the iTunes music store as a delivery mechanism -- a tool the "masses" are largely familiar with using already.
Once again, ease of use and "quality of presentation" trumps pure "feature set". This is why Apple is continuously successful, despite some of the "geek" types and cheapskates panning everything they do.
And as others pointed out, the iPhone really isn't that expensive a device in the grand scheme of things. Most people earning $25K to $50K annually that I know already spend more on a monthly cable bill than what the phone subscription costs. Most iPhone games are what? About $5 each? That's sure cheaper than those $60 Playstation 3 and XBox 360 titles that the same demographic buys quite a few of.
I think some of it depends on who gets elected. I see McCain taking us ever further towards facism, while Obama will take us down the path of socialism instead. Either way, as you said, our nation winds up in essentially the same place in the end.
This sort of thing is all part of the move to the "New World Order" that presidents like Bush have spoken about fondly in several speeches in the last decade.
The majority in the USA apparently haven't learned from history, so now we're doomed to repeat it.
I predict a quick slide towards Socialism in U.S. govt. over the next 4-8 years. Our Constitution doesn't sound ALL that different from the ones written for countries like the U.S.S.R. Like them, we'll reduce it to a piece of paper that is only paid lip service to - and the masses will grumble a bit, but probably accept it, as they've been "boiling the frog" slowly, for a long time now.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing. Back in the mid to late 1980's, I remember quite a few BBS's run by pre-teens and teens, primarily operating for the purpose of defrauding telcos, hacking systems, swapping credit card info, and generally causing trouble.
Honestly, I'd say maybe only 1 in 3 actually DID anything with the information, but just having access to it was a thrill, in and of itself, for the other 2 in 3.
I heard lots of stories of people who supposedly "carded" themselves all sorts of computer upgrades and the like. But the people I knew personally who attempted it were never successful getting anything. (One guy told me a story about having some item shipped to an abandoned house a few houses down from him. But he said right before the UPS guy dropped it off at the door, a suspicious looking vehicle pulled up and parked by the house, sitting there for hours. He figured it was a set-up to catch whoever ordered it, so he never did try to get his package.)
I guess the point is, this stuff is nothing new. It simply moved from the "BBS underground" to the Internet, where it's probably more difficult to keep it really "underground" for long, with so many more potential site visitors.
The touch-screen was a bone-headed idea for a voting machine from the very start!
Even ATM machines have sets of physical buttons down the left and right hand sides of their touch-screen displays, so you can alternately choose options by pressing them.
(I often do, since my local bank's ATM is really bad about selecting what I press when I touch the screen itself.)
I'm 37 myself, and I remember "Jager-bombs" consisting of a shot of Jager dropped into a glass of BEER.
BTW, I've had a few of the ever-popular "Red Bull and Vodka" drinks before - but I don't care for 'em. That weird feeling you get when you mix a depressant with a stimulant doesn't do much for me.
The thing is, there's really no clear measuring stick proving these vulnerabilities would be circumvented by switching to another OS.
Microsoft OS's (especially on the desktop) are in such wide use compared to anything else, there are bound to be more people discovering and reporting flaws than in the alternatives.
I'm definitely not a "Microsoft apologist", as anyone who knows me very well can attest. But I also think much can be said for running an OS that receives very regular security patches and fixes, vs. one that seems to primarily run via "security via obscurity".
Anything is *possible*, but I'd be willing to bet you're completely wrong.
Most people working on open-source projects seem to have put the work on the "back burner" from very early on. This isn't some new status for them.
If you have doubts of that, just look at all the abandoned projects to be found on Sourceforge.
The exceptions tend to be the relative few regular contributors to the "high profile" projects that have the most popularity. (EG. Firefox or Open Office) I think that's probably because the "status" of being a part of something that well known and successful has definite "value". It earns the person a certain level of respect in the community and that has a clear chance of translating to financial benefits when interviewing for jobs.
9 times out of 10, the people doing a free, open-source project do so for the learning aspect of it, and because it solves some personal computer dilemma they're experiencing. (If you're working on the next great video format converter utility, I'm willing to bet you're somebody who had a personal need to convert a bunch of video.) I don't see why a poor economy would drive noticeable numbers of these people to quit writing code that personally helps them in their daily lives?
I believe the definition of a skeptic is someone who is doubtful about something. To me, that's different than being a "non-believer".
If you're skeptical about an event, that means you're the type to question it, rather than accept it simply because it's what you were told.
That's how I look at most UFO sighting reports. I go into them with a good measure of doubt, and refuse to settle for one person's tale, when they have little or no real evidence to back it up.
I also consider the source. For example, I'd be more inclined to consider a report made by a professional pilot than one made by a trucker. Why? Because for starters, a pilot knows more about objects flying in the sky. He/she should be able to identify and rule out such things as other aircraft in the vicinity as NOT being from "other worlds". (If nothing else, he/she has the benefit of a control tower to communicate with via radio, to find out if they're tracking the same object, and if it's one they're aware of.)
Frankly, when I look at one of these lists of UFO reports, I find I can easily scratch 9 out of 10 off my list at first glance, because they offer so little concrete information. (As I said before, who really CARES that some farmer called in about seeing some strange blinking lights in the sky? That could be a million things, and a lack of others viewing the same thing and finding it odd enough to report indicates it's not worthy of following up on it.)
I can certainly understand the frustration of people like Lanier, trying to remove the incorrect information in his own biography that claims he "directs films". Yet I read his long-winded essay, and found myself quickly bored with his assertions and shrugging much of it off.
I guess I've realized that "getting all the facts" on a topic is, ultimately, an ongoing process; not just something you do once and you're done.
Anyone using a Wikipedia entry as "the truth" is foolish if he/she *really* believes that's the indisputable, final truth. However, 99.99% of the time, people just want to be filled in on a subject they know relatively little about in the first place. A "mostly correct, with a few factual flaws" article, whether it comes from wikipedia, a magazine, or a newspaper, is "good enough" for them. They're likely to FORGET more correct details than the original article had incorrect, anyway.
I don't really think sites like Wikipedia mean mankind is reverting to some "group-think is superior" philosophy of life and learning. Rather, we've realized the Internet allows experimenting with publications that don't have a single "author" -- and that brings a different set of pros and cons to the whole thing.
I consider myself kind of a "UFO skeptic", yet not willing to accept that ALL of it is bogus either.
Given that honestly witnessing such an event would be such an extraordinary thing, it just follows that a multitude of copy-cats would chime in with fake reports after hearing about it.
Roswell, in particular, interests me because there is so much information out there related to that sighting. It's not just a random case of some farmer in the middle of nowhere claiming he saw "weird lights in the sky" (and possibly submitting a bad photograph that looks like he tossed a frisbee in the air and snapped a picture of it).
Sure, it was possibly a secret spy aircraft owned by the military -- but even if that's what it was, that seems intriguing in and of itself. Why publicize it was just a "weather balloon", yet go to all the apparent trouble to guard it from public view, quickly whisking it away under military guard? The "Witness to Rosell" book published in 2007 lists over 600 people who claim, in some fashion, that it was really some type of UFO that was collected. That's a significant number of people.....
Are you really sure that's the case? I honestly don't know, but it would seem to me that a gigabit ethernet connection might suffice, if the music industry adopted that as a new standard?
Sure, it would require a bit of a learning curve (because you'd have to explain to people that they can't just plug their gear into a $30 10/100 switch full of other devices doing misc. Internet and LAN traffic, and expect proper results)... but on a dedicated, quality gigabit switch just for the music gear to interconnect and go to a dedicated port on the computer? Would this be an option?
I'd also think some other options could be cooked up that haven't even been explored yet. (EG. What about a new cabling standard that would plug into the SD/SDHC card slot in a device, but instead of being an actual flash card - it was just a way to tap into those connectors? What kind of latency and throughput could you achieve from that slot, if you weren't restricted to the read/write speeds of a memory card?)
No, that's very true. M-Audio gear is "prosumer" grade, at best. I'm not a professional audio engineer or musician. It's a hobby for me. I used to play rhythm guitar in a local band, but that was over a decade ago - and was really just a "phase" for me. I still like tinkering with music though. (Every time I've decided to just sell off all my music gear, it seems like a buddy comes along and wants to "jam" on some Saturday evening or what-not, and I get the urge to buy some stuff back again. So I've learned that "once a musician, always a musician" saying has some truth behind it. I just keep my instruments now....)
What I meant in my original post, though, was -- one can loosely describe Apple's definition of a "pro user" as anyone who is an "enthusiast", "power user" or earns money with what they do with their computer. If you really don't fall into any of these categories, and just want a cheap notebook because it's needed for a few music things you do (say, maintaining a tone library for your Line 6 guitar processor or something?), why are you fixated on buying a "latest and greatest" Macbook revision anyway?
I've never done much video editing on my older Macbook Pro 15", nor did I even do it on my 17" Powerbook G4 when I owned it....
Good video editing takes a lot of time, and I want to do it on a big display, sitting in a comfortable computer chair, at a computer desk where I've got a normal keyboard and mouse, all sitting at the proper height so it's ergonomically correct.
Using ANY laptop to edit video is a huge compromise. Even with the very latest in notebook drive technology, the biggest drive you can install in a portable is about 1/3rd. the capacity of the biggest SATA desktop drives (1.5TB) currently offered.
If you're one of these people using a regular Macbook for this stuff, attaching an external mouse, keyboard and monitor, an external hard drive, etc. ?? Well, you and I both know that's kind of a hack job anyway. Fine if it works for you, but don't cry about your missing firewire port. Because truthfully, you're just trying to do things with a consumer notebook that are in the outer fringes of its intended purposes.
Note, I'm saying this as someone who still uses both firewire audio gear (I have an M-Audio Firewire 410 unit) AND a Sony Digital 8 camcorder with firewire... so I *do* get the need for the connector at times.
But still, I think all this "outrage" is overblown. For starters, firewire is a slowly dying standard. No, it's not dead yet - but it's been struggling for years. The music industry is the biggest proponent of it still, but they're always SLOW to adopt changes - so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise. (Remember when Windows XP was released, and for years afterwards, you still had big-name audio apps that only officially supported Win '95/'98? Look how long music synthesizer/workstation makers hung onto SCSI ports as the answer for attaching your CD/DVD-ROM drives and external storage. They only started moving to memory card slots and USB ports after they exhausted their list of drive makers willing to re-brand external SCSI drives for them!)
As for camcorders? Apple's iMovie '08 total rewrite should have been the first clue on that! The main reason it was done was to support "AVCHD" video formats, as used on all the cameras popping up with built-in hard drives or flash drive storage. All of these were using USB interfaces, which older iMovie versions didn't even recognize. Go to any retail store today, and count how many camcorders on sale still use firewire! I bet it's no more than 1 in 5, and would be even less if it weren't for Sony's clinging to firewire (i.link) on their products.
Apple is known for a rather "minimalist" attitude with their products, and will delete options any time they think one is getting "old in the tooth". They were the first to ditch the 3.5" floppy drive, and go to great lengths just to eliminate switches and buttons on their products (iPhone, iPods, their very basic wireless remote control, slot-loading drives on portables with no eject button to be found on them, etc. etc.).
Obviously, they recognize that true "Pro" type users (who generally earn an income from the work they do on their computer) could still need firewire, so it's there on the Macbook Pro. It's there on all currently shipping Mac Pros too, and at least for the time being, even on consumer iMacs. (But I bet it disappears off the next revision of those too.)
Bottom line? A lot of people just wanted to try to do things with Apple's cheaper "consumer focused" portable that go a little beyond what that core market would ever care to do with one. Apple pushed back, and is forcing you to choose a "Pro" version of their machine if you're doing "Pro" things with it. Either go along with this thinking, or don't -- and use a last generation notebook that you can pick up cheaper than ever right now. By the time IT wears out, firewire will be much less attractive an option for you anyway, I suspect.
I would only add that it strikes me as quite possible the choice of U.S. president is already pre-decided? I realize this is one of those "far out conspiracy theories"... but hear me out and see what you all think?
Perhaps, we're really being "governed" by a group of rich families with deep ties to the banking establishment? (Consider that President Bush's grandfather was married into this group of people.)
For quite a while now, America has been a "thorn in the side" of other nations, because we're perceived as a "young upstart" who won't just sit down and follow the rules (Socialism, etc.) that most other nations follow. We've got our own monetary system and are a big enough "player" in the world economics game that everyone has stakes in it... but how much more convenient would it be if our American dollar was eliminated, replaced by something more like the Euro?
The problem is, we've got this pesky "Constitution" and "Bill of Rights" that our citizens tend to be such strong believers in. Nobody is going to seriously accept a leader who steps in and tears all of that down in one fell swoop. So instead, it has to be taken apart slowly, brick by brick, so people hardly notice it changing until it's too late to do anything about it.
I think that's where we're at today. Just like the last couple elections, this one will be VERY close, but I predict we'll see Obama "win" because that's what the real "puppet-masters" pulling all the strings want to have happen. Just like Clinton, Obama is one of those relatively unknown people that ascends out of nowhere to be a popular, well-spoken figure that a lot of people like. And he has the agenda that the powers that be want for us.
(Interestingly though, Clinton may not have played along quite how they envisioned. With his JFK complex and all, he apparently really thought he could run the country his own way - instead of just being one of their puppets. That probably would have gotten him killed, except he was smart enough to orchestrate that FBI theft that got him enough "dirt" on important people so he became dangerous. That, too, may be a key reason his wife was pretty quickly "shut down" at getting to run for president this time around?)
Or hey, maybe this is all way off base... but I think it's interesting to ponder, at least.
People might have bought a laptop so they could "work anywhere they wanted" -- but that doesn't mean all environments are created equal.
I can technically work in a moving car, using my laptop, but it gives a lot of people motion sickness to do that for very long. Is that the laptop's fault?
The fact is, the new glossy displays on the 15" Macbook Pros can get very bright. People just receiving theirs are reporting they don't normally recommend even turning the brightness up more than about "5 clicks from the brightest setting". So it's certainly capable of things like using it outdoors in sunlight without the display totally washing out. That's something that wasn't even a possibility at all with many older laptops I've used.
That's YOUR opinion, but I'd argue it's quite one-sided and flawed too.
First off, you're upset that they dropped the price of a big selling notebook (older style white Macbook) by $100? Yeah, it's not "new tech", but it's a proven design people bought millions of already. And today, it's $100 cheaper than yesterday. If you follow typical Apple product life-cycles, it's likely it's going away within the next 6-9 months anyway. They like to do this with popular products, rather than immediately dropping them. (Remember the eMac, or the PowerMac G4 towers when they became the last system still capable of running MacOS 9.x natively?)
As for that Gateway laptop you're talking about? Does it have a mag-safe adapter on it? How about a backlit keyboard? When you lock one with a Kensington security cable, does it also lock the battery and hard drive compartments? How's the support from old Gateway these days? (I can still visit one of a couple local Apple stores in town, but "Gateway Country" stores didn't fare so well.....) And obviously, it lacks OS X too.
Buy what you like, but personally, I'm more inclined to say the real "ripoff" are these sub-standard quality laptops Toshiba, Gateway, Dell, HP and others keep cranking out. I have no problem paying more for quality, and I think with Apple, it's generally there. (Claiming OS X is simply "cutesy graphics and a slick UI" sells it pretty short too, but I'm not even going to get started on that.)
I think DV camcorders using firewire are on their way out. True, I have an old Sony TRV-730 that needs a firewire connection... but one big reason iMovie got a major re-write last year was to support the new video formats all these camcorders use that have internal hard drive or flash memory storage.
Every one of those I've seen is connecting up via USB, not firewire.
I got a nasty ding in one corner of my old Aluminum Powerbook, one time, when it fell off a table onto a concrete floor at a job site.
Truthfully though, there's no reason to believe that same impact wouldn't have caused a big crack in the plastic of a different laptop?
The machine still worked just fine afterwards, which was the critical thing. And with the advent of the mag-safe adapter plug, the situation that caused the fall in the first place would have been avoided.
Since then, I've owned 2 more aluminum Apple notebooks, and I've managed to keep them pretty much ding and scratch free. It's no different than the iPods, really. If you put them in a case whenever possible and treat them like the expensive piece of electronics gear they are, they'll serve you well and you'll keep them looking nice.
If you can't take better care of your stuff, you may want to look at those "Toughbook" laptops instead?
I have the matte finish Macbook Pro right now, but I've gone to glossy displays for all of my new LCD monitor purchases, and am now going to order a new MB Pro - glossy screen and all.
The only people I really hear throwing huge fits about this are the self-proclaimed "pro photography" set, who claim they can't do accurate color comparisons without their matte displays.
To them, I say:
1. You couldn't do them anyway on most LCD matte finish laptop screens, when they weren't even accurately displaying all 16.7 million colors in the spectrum at all.
2. If you're fighting the glare issue, you're working in sub-optimal conditions that aren't conducive to anything as tedious as color matching and photo touch-up work! Consider it your warning that you need to change your surroundings before continuing your work... not a reason to get a different display.
And BTW, not all "glossy" displays are created equal, either. I recently tried out a glossy finish Acer 22" LCD panel that everyone describes as more of a "semi gloss" look.
All true, but honestly, my iPod earbuds sounded far superior to many of the other cheap ones I've used. The absolute worst ones I think I ever heard were the pairs some of the airlines hand out for you to use, to listen to satellite radio with. (They've got the volume and channel change controls built into the armrests of the seats, and you plug the earbuds right into them.)
The problem with the poor quality ones is, they don't reproduce some of the sounds accurately - so you wind up turning them up louder to hear the words a singer is singing, or what-not.
Background noise is a big issue too, but even with it quiet around you, cheap ones still have this separate issue.
re: nothing wrong with wanting it to just work....
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That's *exactly* my mentality these days, and yet sometimes, I almost feel guilty about it.
Honestly, I've worked in I.T. long enough now that I'm just kind of "burnt out" on what used to be the "thrill" or "challenge" of figuring out how to make an OS perform some function or other it claims to support.
I love Linux for the same "core reason" I loved it when I first started using it. It's great at consistently and reliably performing a task or set of tasks over and over again without failure. The downside is, the "pain" is usually all up-front, in hammering and prying everything into shape so it does what's required.
By contrast, an OS like Windows (or let's be fair here, even OS X Server) promises a lot of functionality that's just "a few mouse clicks away". And often, you can get some fairly complex thing up and running in minutes that way, but the "pain" comes unexpectedly, at random points in time down the road, when things don't *quite* work as expected, or some automatic update changes its behavior unexpectedly, or ??
But if I could have a "perfect world" of operating systems, I'd want one that has the "just click a few options to configure" ease, with the Linux-type reliability. I don't think we've ever really gotten there on the server side of things. On the workstation side, I think OS X is closer than anything else I've used - but again, it may never get 100% there with as many random possibilities a workstation user comes up with throughout their use of a "desktop" PC.
I'm not a huge fan of our "patent crazy" society today either, but a legitimate patent is a legitimate patent.....
Complaining that "Those of you that use Windows will never know the dock because Steve Jobs doesn't want it that way." changes nothing.
Yes, if Steve Jobs and company were the ones who first developed the exact "dock" mechanism that they employ in their OS, and they opt to sell said OS commercially with that feature in it, then it's perfectly appropriate that people using Windows would "never know" the dock.
There have to be literally thousands of different ways a person could present an application launcher to users on a GUI screen display. Why are people so unimaginative that they'd rather try to mimic an existing one than design something different, in what's obviously a different OS?
The OS X dock is visually appealing, and I think pretty functional, overall. But I'd hardly say it's the "best possible" way to do what it does.
I've actually thought, personally, that some sort of 3-D looking launch "ring" would be one superior idea. (As you keep adding new icons to the "ring", it wouldn't "run out" of horizontal screen space like a "dock" does, since only so many would be visible at a given time. The ring would appear to rotate, exposing new icons and hiding others as they "turn" past your field of view. You could even configure it to "stack" rings on top of each other, so clicking a folder icon on the bottom ring would make the second one fade into view, stacked on top of the first - containing the icons in that folder.)
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Well, your bullshit answer doesn't really fly with me. (How comparing an Escalade to an iPhone makes any kind of sense is beyond me? But it got modded +4 Insightful, so I'll bother responding.)
Almost all the satisfied iPhone owners I know who purchased one for PERSONAL use, vs. business use, fall into the wage category mentioned. ($25K - $50K salaries)
None of these folks are interested in driving big, flashy SUVs, though - nor could most of them even afford the gas or personal property taxes on one!
The people complaining that the iPhone isn't as "open" as some Nokias or other smartphones completely miss the point. MOST customers are interested in what a phone lets them do, easily, out of the box. Once they're sold on that, and own/use the phone for a while - they get familiar enough (and maybe even bored enough?) with what's on it that they become motivated to install additional applications. Unlike other phones, the iPhone already uses the iTunes music store as a delivery mechanism -- a tool the "masses" are largely familiar with using already.
Once again, ease of use and "quality of presentation" trumps pure "feature set". This is why Apple is continuously successful, despite some of the "geek" types and cheapskates panning everything they do.
And as others pointed out, the iPhone really isn't that expensive a device in the grand scheme of things. Most people earning $25K to $50K annually that I know already spend more on a monthly cable bill than what the phone subscription costs. Most iPhone games are what? About $5 each? That's sure cheaper than those $60 Playstation 3 and XBox 360 titles that the same demographic buys quite a few of.
I think some of it depends on who gets elected. I see McCain taking us ever further towards facism, while Obama will take us down the path of socialism instead. Either way, as you said, our nation winds up in essentially the same place in the end.
This sort of thing is all part of the move to the "New World Order" that presidents like Bush have spoken about fondly in several speeches in the last decade.
The majority in the USA apparently haven't learned from history, so now we're doomed to repeat it.
I predict a quick slide towards Socialism in U.S. govt. over the next 4-8 years. Our Constitution doesn't sound ALL that different from the ones written for countries like the U.S.S.R. Like them, we'll reduce it to a piece of paper that is only paid lip service to - and the masses will grumble a bit, but probably accept it, as they've been "boiling the frog" slowly, for a long time now.
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/A5DA99A5DC85587B862574F0000EB107?OpenDocument
I was going to say pretty much the same thing. Back in the mid to late 1980's, I remember quite a few BBS's run by pre-teens and teens, primarily operating for the purpose of defrauding telcos, hacking systems, swapping credit card info, and generally causing trouble.
Honestly, I'd say maybe only 1 in 3 actually DID anything with the information, but just having access to it was a thrill, in and of itself, for the other 2 in 3.
I heard lots of stories of people who supposedly "carded" themselves all sorts of computer upgrades and the like. But the people I knew personally who attempted it were never successful getting anything. (One guy told me a story about having some item shipped to an abandoned house a few houses down from him. But he said right before the UPS guy dropped it off at the door, a suspicious looking vehicle pulled up and parked by the house, sitting there for hours. He figured it was a set-up to catch whoever ordered it, so he never did try to get his package.)
I guess the point is, this stuff is nothing new. It simply moved from the "BBS underground" to the Internet, where it's probably more difficult to keep it really "underground" for long, with so many more potential site visitors.
The touch-screen was a bone-headed idea for a voting machine from the very start!
Even ATM machines have sets of physical buttons down the left and right hand sides of their touch-screen displays, so you can alternately choose options by pressing them.
(I often do, since my local bank's ATM is really bad about selecting what I press when I touch the screen itself.)
I'm 37 myself, and I remember "Jager-bombs" consisting of a shot of Jager dropped into a glass of BEER.
BTW, I've had a few of the ever-popular "Red Bull and Vodka" drinks before - but I don't care for 'em. That weird feeling you get when you mix a depressant with a stimulant doesn't do much for me.
The thing is, there's really no clear measuring stick proving these vulnerabilities would be circumvented by switching to another OS.
Microsoft OS's (especially on the desktop) are in such wide use compared to anything else, there are bound to be more people discovering and reporting flaws than in the alternatives.
I'm definitely not a "Microsoft apologist", as anyone who knows me very well can attest. But I also think much can be said for running an OS that receives very regular security patches and fixes, vs. one that seems to primarily run via "security via obscurity".
Anything is *possible*, but I'd be willing to bet you're completely wrong.
Most people working on open-source projects seem to have put the work on the "back burner" from very early on. This isn't some new status for them.
If you have doubts of that, just look at all the abandoned projects to be found on Sourceforge.
The exceptions tend to be the relative few regular contributors to the "high profile" projects that have the most popularity. (EG. Firefox or Open Office) I think that's probably because the "status" of being a part of something that well known and successful has definite "value". It earns the person a certain level of respect in the community and that has a clear chance of translating to financial benefits when interviewing for jobs.
9 times out of 10, the people doing a free, open-source project do so for the learning aspect of it, and because it solves some personal computer dilemma they're experiencing. (If you're working on the next great video format converter utility, I'm willing to bet you're somebody who had a personal need to convert a bunch of video.) I don't see why a poor economy would drive noticeable numbers of these people to quit writing code that personally helps them in their daily lives?
I believe the definition of a skeptic is someone who is doubtful about something. To me, that's different than being a "non-believer".
If you're skeptical about an event, that means you're the type to question it, rather than accept it simply because it's what you were told.
That's how I look at most UFO sighting reports. I go into them with a good measure of doubt, and refuse to settle for one person's tale, when they have little or no real evidence to back it up.
I also consider the source. For example, I'd be more inclined to consider a report made by a professional pilot than one made by a trucker. Why? Because for starters, a pilot knows more about objects flying in the sky. He/she should be able to identify and rule out such things as other aircraft in the vicinity as NOT being from "other worlds". (If nothing else, he/she has the benefit of a control tower to communicate with via radio, to find out if they're tracking the same object, and if it's one they're aware of.)
Frankly, when I look at one of these lists of UFO reports, I find I can easily scratch 9 out of 10 off my list at first glance, because they offer so little concrete information. (As I said before, who really CARES that some farmer called in about seeing some strange blinking lights in the sky? That could be a million things, and a lack of others viewing the same thing and finding it odd enough to report indicates it's not worthy of following up on it.)
I can certainly understand the frustration of people like Lanier, trying to remove the incorrect information in his own biography that claims he "directs films". Yet I read his long-winded essay, and found myself quickly bored with his assertions and shrugging much of it off.
I guess I've realized that "getting all the facts" on a topic is, ultimately, an ongoing process; not just something you do once and you're done.
Anyone using a Wikipedia entry as "the truth" is foolish if he/she *really* believes that's the indisputable, final truth. However, 99.99% of the time, people just want to be filled in on a subject they know relatively little about in the first place. A "mostly correct, with a few factual flaws" article, whether it comes from wikipedia, a magazine, or a newspaper, is "good enough" for them. They're likely to FORGET more correct details than the original article had incorrect, anyway.
I don't really think sites like Wikipedia mean mankind is reverting to some "group-think is superior" philosophy of life and learning. Rather, we've realized the Internet allows experimenting with publications that don't have a single "author" -- and that brings a different set of pros and cons to the whole thing.
I consider myself kind of a "UFO skeptic", yet not willing to accept that ALL of it is bogus either.
Given that honestly witnessing such an event would be such an extraordinary thing, it just follows that a multitude of copy-cats would chime in with fake reports after hearing about it.
Roswell, in particular, interests me because there is so much information out there related to that sighting. It's not just a random case of some farmer in the middle of nowhere claiming he saw "weird lights in the sky" (and possibly submitting a bad photograph that looks like he tossed a frisbee in the air and snapped a picture of it).
Sure, it was possibly a secret spy aircraft owned by the military -- but even if that's what it was, that seems intriguing in and of itself. Why publicize it was just a "weather balloon", yet go to all the apparent trouble to guard it from public view, quickly whisking it away under military guard? The "Witness to Rosell" book published in 2007 lists over 600 people who claim, in some fashion, that it was really some type of UFO that was collected. That's a significant number of people.....
Are you really sure that's the case? I honestly don't know, but it would seem to me that a gigabit ethernet connection might suffice, if the music industry adopted that as a new standard?
Sure, it would require a bit of a learning curve (because you'd have to explain to people that they can't just plug their gear into a $30 10/100 switch full of other devices doing misc. Internet and LAN traffic, and expect proper results) ... but on a dedicated, quality gigabit switch just for the music gear to interconnect and go to a dedicated port on the computer? Would this be an option?
I'd also think some other options could be cooked up that haven't even been explored yet. (EG. What about a new cabling standard that would plug into the SD/SDHC card slot in a device, but instead of being an actual flash card - it was just a way to tap into those connectors? What kind of latency and throughput could you achieve from that slot, if you weren't restricted to the read/write speeds of a memory card?)
No, that's very true. M-Audio gear is "prosumer" grade, at best. I'm not a professional audio engineer or musician. It's a hobby for me. I used to play rhythm guitar in a local band, but that was over a decade ago - and was really just a "phase" for me. I still like tinkering with music though. (Every time I've decided to just sell off all my music gear, it seems like a buddy comes along and wants to "jam" on some Saturday evening or what-not, and I get the urge to buy some stuff back again. So I've learned that "once a musician, always a musician" saying has some truth behind it. I just keep my instruments now....)
What I meant in my original post, though, was -- one can loosely describe Apple's definition of a "pro user" as anyone who is an "enthusiast", "power user" or earns money with what they do with their computer. If you really don't fall into any of these categories, and just want a cheap notebook because it's needed for a few music things you do (say, maintaining a tone library for your Line 6 guitar processor or something?), why are you fixated on buying a "latest and greatest" Macbook revision anyway?
I've been saying the same thing as you!
I've never done much video editing on my older Macbook Pro 15", nor did I even do it on my 17" Powerbook G4 when I owned it....
Good video editing takes a lot of time, and I want to do it on a big display, sitting in a comfortable computer chair, at a computer desk where I've got a normal keyboard and mouse, all sitting at the proper height so it's ergonomically correct.
Using ANY laptop to edit video is a huge compromise. Even with the very latest in notebook drive technology, the biggest drive you can install in a portable is about 1/3rd. the capacity of the biggest SATA desktop drives (1.5TB) currently offered.
If you're one of these people using a regular Macbook for this stuff, attaching an external mouse, keyboard and monitor, an external hard drive, etc. ?? Well, you and I both know that's kind of a hack job anyway. Fine if it works for you, but don't cry about your missing firewire port. Because truthfully, you're just trying to do things with a consumer notebook that are in the outer fringes of its intended purposes.
Note, I'm saying this as someone who still uses both firewire audio gear (I have an M-Audio Firewire 410 unit) AND a Sony Digital 8 camcorder with firewire ... so I *do* get the need for the connector at times.
But still, I think all this "outrage" is overblown. For starters, firewire is a slowly dying standard. No, it's not dead yet - but it's been struggling for years. The music industry is the biggest proponent of it still, but they're always SLOW to adopt changes - so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise. (Remember when Windows XP was released, and for years afterwards, you still had big-name audio apps that only officially supported Win '95/'98? Look how long music synthesizer/workstation makers hung onto SCSI ports as the answer for attaching your CD/DVD-ROM drives and external storage. They only started moving to memory card slots and USB ports after they exhausted their list of drive makers willing to re-brand external SCSI drives for them!)
As for camcorders? Apple's iMovie '08 total rewrite should have been the first clue on that! The main reason it was done was to support "AVCHD" video formats, as used on all the cameras popping up with built-in hard drives or flash drive storage. All of these were using USB interfaces, which older iMovie versions didn't even recognize. Go to any retail store today, and count how many camcorders on sale still use firewire! I bet it's no more than 1 in 5, and would be even less if it weren't for Sony's clinging to firewire (i.link) on their products.
Apple is known for a rather "minimalist" attitude with their products, and will delete options any time they think one is getting "old in the tooth". They were the first to ditch the 3.5" floppy drive, and go to great lengths just to eliminate switches and buttons on their products (iPhone, iPods, their very basic wireless remote control, slot-loading drives on portables with no eject button to be found on them, etc. etc.).
Obviously, they recognize that true "Pro" type users (who generally earn an income from the work they do on their computer) could still need firewire, so it's there on the Macbook Pro. It's there on all currently shipping Mac Pros too, and at least for the time being, even on consumer iMacs. (But I bet it disappears off the next revision of those too.)
Bottom line? A lot of people just wanted to try to do things with Apple's cheaper "consumer focused" portable that go a little beyond what that core market would ever care to do with one. Apple pushed back, and is forcing you to choose a "Pro" version of their machine if you're doing "Pro" things with it. Either go along with this thinking, or don't -- and use a last generation notebook that you can pick up cheaper than ever right now. By the time IT wears out, firewire will be much less attractive an option for you anyway, I suspect.
I would only add that it strikes me as quite possible the choice of U.S. president is already pre-decided? I realize this is one of those "far out conspiracy theories" ... but hear me out and see what you all think?
Perhaps, we're really being "governed" by a group of rich families with deep ties to the banking establishment? (Consider that President Bush's grandfather was married into this group of people.)
For quite a while now, America has been a "thorn in the side" of other nations, because we're perceived as a "young upstart" who won't just sit down and follow the rules (Socialism, etc.) that most other nations follow. We've got our own monetary system and are a big enough "player" in the world economics game that everyone has stakes in it ... but how much more convenient would it be if our American dollar was eliminated, replaced by something more like the Euro?
The problem is, we've got this pesky "Constitution" and "Bill of Rights" that our citizens tend to be such strong believers in. Nobody is going to seriously accept a leader who steps in and tears all of that down in one fell swoop. So instead, it has to be taken apart slowly, brick by brick, so people hardly notice it changing until it's too late to do anything about it.
I think that's where we're at today. Just like the last couple elections, this one will be VERY close, but I predict we'll see Obama "win" because that's what the real "puppet-masters" pulling all the strings want to have happen. Just like Clinton, Obama is one of those relatively unknown people that ascends out of nowhere to be a popular, well-spoken figure that a lot of people like. And he has the agenda that the powers that be want for us.
(Interestingly though, Clinton may not have played along quite how they envisioned. With his JFK complex and all, he apparently really thought he could run the country his own way - instead of just being one of their puppets. That probably would have gotten him killed, except he was smart enough to orchestrate that FBI theft that got him enough "dirt" on important people so he became dangerous. That, too, may be a key reason his wife was pretty quickly "shut down" at getting to run for president this time around?)
Or hey, maybe this is all way off base ... but I think it's interesting to ponder, at least.
People might have bought a laptop so they could "work anywhere they wanted" -- but that doesn't mean all environments are created equal.
I can technically work in a moving car, using my laptop, but it gives a lot of people motion sickness to do that for very long. Is that the laptop's fault?
The fact is, the new glossy displays on the 15" Macbook Pros can get very bright. People just receiving theirs are reporting they don't normally recommend even turning the brightness up more than about "5 clicks from the brightest setting". So it's certainly capable of things like using it outdoors in sunlight without the display totally washing out. That's something that wasn't even a possibility at all with many older laptops I've used.
That's YOUR opinion, but I'd argue it's quite one-sided and flawed too.
First off, you're upset that they dropped the price of a big selling notebook (older style white Macbook) by $100? Yeah, it's not "new tech", but it's a proven design people bought millions of already. And today, it's $100 cheaper than yesterday. If you follow typical Apple product life-cycles, it's likely it's going away within the next 6-9 months anyway. They like to do this with popular products, rather than immediately dropping them. (Remember the eMac, or the PowerMac G4 towers when they became the last system still capable of running MacOS 9.x natively?)
As for that Gateway laptop you're talking about? Does it have a mag-safe adapter on it? How about a backlit keyboard? When you lock one with a Kensington security cable, does it also lock the battery and hard drive compartments? How's the support from old Gateway these days? (I can still visit one of a couple local Apple stores in town, but "Gateway Country" stores didn't fare so well.....) And obviously, it lacks OS X too.
Buy what you like, but personally, I'm more inclined to say the real "ripoff" are these sub-standard quality laptops Toshiba, Gateway, Dell, HP and others keep cranking out. I have no problem paying more for quality, and I think with Apple, it's generally there. (Claiming OS X is simply "cutesy graphics and a slick UI" sells it pretty short too, but I'm not even going to get started on that.)
I think DV camcorders using firewire are on their way out. True, I have an old Sony TRV-730 that needs a firewire connection... but one big reason iMovie got a major re-write last year was to support the new video formats all these camcorders use that have internal hard drive or flash memory storage.
Every one of those I've seen is connecting up via USB, not firewire.
I got a nasty ding in one corner of my old Aluminum Powerbook, one time, when it fell off a table onto a concrete floor at a job site.
Truthfully though, there's no reason to believe that same impact wouldn't have caused a big crack in the plastic of a different laptop?
The machine still worked just fine afterwards, which was the critical thing. And with the advent of the mag-safe adapter plug, the situation that caused the fall in the first place would have been avoided.
Since then, I've owned 2 more aluminum Apple notebooks, and I've managed to keep them pretty much ding and scratch free. It's no different than the iPods, really. If you put them in a case whenever possible and treat them like the expensive piece of electronics gear they are, they'll serve you well and you'll keep them looking nice.
If you can't take better care of your stuff, you may want to look at those "Toughbook" laptops instead?
I have the matte finish Macbook Pro right now, but I've gone to glossy displays for all of my new LCD monitor purchases, and am now going to order a new MB Pro - glossy screen and all.
The only people I really hear throwing huge fits about this are the self-proclaimed "pro photography" set, who claim they can't do accurate color comparisons without their matte displays.
To them, I say:
1. You couldn't do them anyway on most LCD matte finish laptop screens, when they weren't even accurately displaying all 16.7 million colors in the spectrum at all.
2. If you're fighting the glare issue, you're working in sub-optimal conditions that aren't conducive to anything as tedious as color matching and photo touch-up work! Consider it your warning that you need to change your surroundings before continuing your work ... not a reason to get a different display.
And BTW, not all "glossy" displays are created equal, either. I recently tried out a glossy finish Acer 22" LCD panel that everyone describes as more of a "semi gloss" look.
All true, but honestly, my iPod earbuds sounded far superior to many of the other cheap ones I've used. The absolute worst ones I think I ever heard were the pairs some of the airlines hand out for you to use, to listen to satellite radio with. (They've got the volume and channel change controls built into the armrests of the seats, and you plug the earbuds right into them.)
The problem with the poor quality ones is, they don't reproduce some of the sounds accurately - so you wind up turning them up louder to hear the words a singer is singing, or what-not.
Background noise is a big issue too, but even with it quiet around you, cheap ones still have this separate issue.
That's *exactly* my mentality these days, and yet sometimes, I almost feel guilty about it.
Honestly, I've worked in I.T. long enough now that I'm just kind of "burnt out" on what used to be the "thrill" or "challenge" of figuring out how to make an OS perform some function or other it claims to support.
I love Linux for the same "core reason" I loved it when I first started using it. It's great at consistently and reliably performing a task or set of tasks over and over again without failure. The downside is, the "pain" is usually all up-front, in hammering and prying everything into shape so it does what's required.
By contrast, an OS like Windows (or let's be fair here, even OS X Server) promises a lot of functionality that's just "a few mouse clicks away". And often, you can get some fairly complex thing up and running in minutes that way, but the "pain" comes unexpectedly, at random points in time down the road, when things don't *quite* work as expected, or some automatic update changes its behavior unexpectedly, or ??
But if I could have a "perfect world" of operating systems, I'd want one that has the "just click a few options to configure" ease, with the Linux-type reliability. I don't think we've ever really gotten there on the server side of things. On the workstation side, I think OS X is closer than anything else I've used - but again, it may never get 100% there with as many random possibilities a workstation user comes up with throughout their use of a "desktop" PC.
I'm not a huge fan of our "patent crazy" society today either, but a legitimate patent is a legitimate patent.....
Complaining that "Those of you that use Windows will never know the dock because Steve Jobs doesn't want it that way." changes nothing.
Yes, if Steve Jobs and company were the ones who first developed the exact "dock" mechanism that they employ in their OS, and they opt to sell said OS commercially with that feature in it, then it's perfectly appropriate that people using Windows would "never know" the dock.
There have to be literally thousands of different ways a person could present an application launcher to users on a GUI screen display. Why are people so unimaginative that they'd rather try to mimic an existing one than design something different, in what's obviously a different OS?
The OS X dock is visually appealing, and I think pretty functional, overall. But I'd hardly say it's the "best possible" way to do what it does.
I've actually thought, personally, that some sort of 3-D looking launch "ring" would be one superior idea. (As you keep adding new icons to the "ring", it wouldn't "run out" of horizontal screen space like a "dock" does, since only so many would be visible at a given time. The ring would appear to rotate, exposing new icons and hiding others as they "turn" past your field of view. You could even configure it to "stack" rings on top of each other, so clicking a folder icon on the bottom ring would make the second one fade into view, stacked on top of the first - containing the icons in that folder.)