Coffee connoisseur William McAlpin, an importer and wholesaler in Bar Harbor, Maine, who owns a coffee plantation in Costa Rica, says 175 degrees is "probably the optimum temperature, because that's when aromatics are being released. Once the aromas get in your palate, that is a large part of what makes the coffee a pleasure to drink."
Spilling coffee on yourself should not cause burns that quickly or burns that require skin grafts. That is just f'ing stupid.
You seem to be saying that any sufficiently "rare" problem regardless of cause is insignificant. Oh, what you left out was "at least" 700, and "had settled out of court". You also make the incredible assumption that the temperatures across all of those cups were consistent and that those 700 burn cases were not clustered at the high end of the temperatures. Which of course is why their attempted defense using that stupid line of reasoning fell on its face (well, that telling jurors that graphic images of the damaged skin was 'statistically insignificant'). This is the same company that refuses to stop using trans-fat oil here because "they want to provide a consistent flavor experience". Yet, they stopped using them in all of the countries that banned the use. Here is a hint, the non trans-fat oils must be replaced 2-3x more often than the trans-fat containing oils so it increases cost. So as a cost savings measure they knowingly use more hazardous ingredients because no one is stopping them.
As previously pointed out the punitive damages didn't come from the woman in question, they came from the jury pissed off at how McDonalds behaved during the ordeal. So...the people that got all the information, that sat there and directly witnessed all of the proceedings believed that McDonalds was behaving very poorly. Of course, all the armchair quarterbacks are willing to villify the old lady.
Last I heard that particular store had been cited REPEATEDLY for violations regarding their coffee. They were intentionally cranking the heat up beyond what is normally acceptable in order to squeeze an extra few pennies out of their coffee filters. They got slapped upside the head in the lawsuit because the violations they were repeatedly cited for finally caused an injury. Now...you can argue until you are blue in the face about all the other stupid details, but at the end of the day it boiled down to "We fucking told you to knock that shit off and you didn't, now we are going to slap you upside the head in the hopes you will finally get it through your thick skulls".
Also...205F is just a hair below boiling. Now...I would just love to watch you immediately drink a nice cup of boiling water to prove your point. I see that Coffee Association quote thrown out word for word all over the internet, but I have not been able to find a true source for it.
As it stands now, this case gets paraded about quite a bit as an example of why we should defend big companies from anything bad happening to them. They have made this case the poster child for their cause because of how easy it is to blame the victim. By all means, continue to perpetuate the notion that companies should be protected from shitty behavior. Maybe next time we can be discussing how a company actually sent a REAL stalker to people's homes as part of a marketing campaign. Maybe we can even discuss a homeowner shooting that stalker and then being sent to jail because they had opted in! Give these idiot assholes an inch and they will take a mile, and they will take it FAR faster than the average citizens that can't afford hordes of lawyers, lobbyists, and buying judges.
Well...I must say, I am a bit surprised. Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled to see so many responses along the lines of "no communication is no communication". It is just surprises me given so much of the entitlement mentality and anything on the internet is not wrong stuff. So...my hat is off to you slashdot.
Unless it was some automated nonsense or a fake, she gets what she deserves. If things went so far that the recipient went through the trouble of going to court to block communication then she should have known better than to initiate communication. I'm sorry, but a restraining order is pretty much the opposite of "please poke me" regardless of it was virtual or real. I am thrilled this is being handled this way, I am unbelievably happy that this is not turning into "let us make another 'on the internet' law!", I am devastated that my tax dollars are going to be spent dealing with this woman's stupidity.
WTF? How dare you ago against the groupthink?! Immediately admit that Apple is a giant monopolistic badguy that does nothing good or else your account will be revoked! I mean...you can't talk about any of the open source stuff they give back! You can't talk about how people like their products without pointing out how those people are stupid mindless self absorbed asshats with too much money. I mean...how can you sit there and break the hypocrisy of standards?! The groupthink is well within rationality to demand that everyone follow standards except when the standards should be broken. I suppose next you will tell me that the Canon helpdesk shouldn't be forced into supporting Kodak cameras! I don't want to have to choose products based on their features, I want to be able to force the world to break standards to or otherwise misbehave to do what I want, but I want them to not break standards or misbehave for anyone else that I don't agree with.
You forgot "Prostitution". Imagine if all the tax dollars spent on congress critters banging hookers translated into those hookers having to bang everyone for free... No man would ever be alone again.
I don't know if you can really consider it hyperbole inflation given so few people are familiar with Kafka. I mean...it is probably on a similar scale of having the value of the dollar inflating.0000001 and then complaining inflation went up.
Years ago when I talked to them they proudly claimed they did not work on commission. However, every item had a 'point value' assigned to it, and if you reached certain tiers of points sold you would get a bonus added to your check. So since it was not a direct commission they could advertise that way to drag more people in thinking that their employees would be good honest folk since they weren't commission based sales.
I was trying to buy the sale of the week hard drive once and they were taking AGES to help me because they had people looking at computers. I watched one rep sell an elderly couple a high dollar gaming rig so they could email their child who was doing missionary work abroad. He ran off to get the paperwork for them to sign and I walked up, walked them all the way down to the other end of the display and pointed out a machine that was $1500 less. They were VERY happy. The associates, when they could finally be bothered to help me, got the drive and walked me to the front of the store like a criminal. I would have left, but the drive was a really good deal, and I was feeling pretty good about screwing them on the $1500 for being assholes.
Go do some research. There has been a great number of these types of events. No knock warrants, false 911 calls, SWAT raids on the wrong address. There have been tons of innocent people harassed and more than a few killed. This guy was actually lucky it was his dogs.
So the minute that I bring something to market a competitor that has deeper pockets should simply be able to take my product and use its market presence to kill my product. Trade secret will not protect you from the big dogs simply stealing your stuff.
Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company that uses it's software as a value add to sell their hardware.
Time Machine can mostly back up to an arbitrary server over the internet. It uses AFP, so you can use a Linux server using AFP. Though I think there may be some caveats there as well. I think it may be possible to use other mount types, but I haven't messed with it. I am pretty sure you can encrypt the backup as well, but I haven't tried.
1. Apple is a big company. I mean the smaller groups. They can't bring anything to market because anyone they approach to mfg the item will simply take the idea, cut them out, and take the profit themselves. Ideas shouldn't be patented, implementations should be.
2. Reselling OS X installed on PCs with quasisupported hardware makes OS X look bad. This hurts Apple. A huge part of the "Just Works" comes from it only existing in a controlled environment. The alternative here is that rather than allowing any home hackers to do this kind of stuff they simply quit selling it altogether.
3. Time Machine can use an iDisk online backup as well. Personally I don't like the online backup service stuff unless it is a server I own. That is just my own paranoia though. The restore process is VERY easy regardless if you are looking for an individual file or doing a full restore. I have done both. The interface is a big piece of what makes it nice. By default if it can reach your backup location, be it USB drive, Time Capsule, or iDisk it does a differential every 1hour.
I think software patents are nothing short of stupid. You can't patent math. Standards are a double edged sword. MS Office.doc/docx is the defacto standard for most things. That means that it is terribly difficult for something better to come along. They basically purchased their official standard status for their Office 2k7 crap. So...it is hard to say one way or the other. Standards are only good when the best of breed gets to be the standard. Patents in general are just a very difficult problem to deal with. A lack of patents destroys innovation. If I come up with some brilliant idea there is nothing to stop MS from simply making a copy of it, marketing it it, and selling it as their own and leaving me ass out for the brain work I had to do. Look how much MS steals as is...imagine if there were no barriers to their thievery...
I will point out that Apple doesn't seem to have done much to actively stop people from installing on non Apple hardware. What they have done is actively gone after people who try to profit commercially by doing it. So, I would prefer a more open license, but their license really isn't that horrible and most of it is open source anyways. They don't seem to care much about the tinkerers so much as the thieves. Ultimately they can do whatever the hell they want, and they make no secret of the hardware requirement. The people defending the violation of the licensing terms are effectively advocating for MS and Cisco and whoever to steal GPL code and use it how they want against the terms of the license. I will certainly agree there are trade offs.
Not that I disagree with your hard drive example, but I will provide a counter anyways. Time Machine is easily the most elegant personal backup solution I have ever seen. It just works. I have wiped my Mac clean and restored from Time Machine seamlessly. I have recovered files. I recently bought a Time Capsule (again, well below retail) to serve as my home wireless and NAS. Wireless Time Machine Backups... no CDs. No USB drives. No nonsense. As long as my MBP is home and online it will do it's scheduled backup without me having to mess with anything or remember to do it. VERY nice. So yeah...you need another Mac in case of emergency, but the quality of care during that emergency is worlds better.
I should also point out...you are officially the second person to have asked me how to do something on a Mac and I have been using mine for almost 2 years. Which was kind of the original point I was making. It really has squat to do with why I chose to check out a Mac, or why I like mine, but it is an amusing side effect. I really would like a more open OS X, but until that happens I am happy that a lot of the underlying engine stuff is OSS.:)
It was all those little things added up that I would pay more for. Individually, probably not.
Patents are an entirely different and rather lengthy discussion. I think they should exist. I think they should be restricted to more tangible/specific things. I have a hard time with the timeframe, because it is a double edged sword. If they worked correctly in specificity the 20years wouldn't be a big deal because it would force everyone else to find a new way. IE, you can't just say "used magnet to hold plug in". (Also, I'm not 100% on this, but from what I can tell the charger gets cut off when the battery is full so no battery damage, which I have watched kill more than a few batteries before).
I am reasonably sure all of those have shortcuts, if not most. I could look them up, but I doubt you care that much about them. I actually found a pdf somewhere that someone was kind enough to gather up, what I assume is, all of the keyboard shortcuts and their context. It is 2 pages or so. Command-Arrow lets you move around your spaces...I know this one for sure because I changed it and clobbered another key mapping that I didn't realize I needed at the time. I install Warp which lets you move spaces using edge flipping with the mouse. I have no answer for sloppy focus. I actually find sloppy focus irritating as hell on a laptop, and I would only buy an Apple laptop, not desktop. OS X seems to be decent at understanding when you accidentally brushed the mouse pad vs trying to actively move it, but I HATE brushing it and having sloppy focus start dumping text into the wrong window. However, Cocotron is the project I was talking about in moving apps away from OS X. The OS X/hardware "DRM" ties I'm not very upset about, Apple is a hardware company, nothing says they have to sell their OS on the street to anyone with a PC. The debate on that irritates me quite a bit, because while I would love to run OS X on PC hardware, there are very good reasons why they do not want to support that jungle of shitty drivers and it really is about this sense of entitlement that Apple somehow owes it to people. The OS X license is what you pay for, and the OS X license says you must have Apple hardware. Arguably they could put a license out that says "You didn't buy our hardware, but want the OS anyways...That will be $2,000". OS X is sold as a thing to make their hardware useful, not as a thing by itself. Again...a totally separate debate.
On the hardware front, from what I gather the new Intel ones are much more Linux friendly, but I haven't honestly tried. I just use VMware Fusion for my Windows/Linux needs. The "Unity" feature is awesome.:)
I didn't accuse you specifically of bringing up the cheap laptop, so much as that is where the stereotype comes from. Now that we are in the realm of talking comparable systems we can discuss it fairly. The price difference we are discussing shows that the difference in cost is not the spec hardware, it is exactly those bells and whistle things as you said. Those bells and whistle things have made my MBP the best laptop I have owned. My previous Dell is a close 2nd, and the HP before that was a total f'ing disaster and the Compaq previous to that one going back to the store within a week.
Now..to clarify..the glowing keys is neat, but it is the auto dim screen that makes it nice. Having the laptop automatically adjust to not burn by eyeballs out in low light is pretty nice. The magnetic thing being proprietary doesn't bother me in the least, I support the idea that a company doing something actually innovative should get their time limited monopoly on it. Now, I will be honest, the construction of Dell laptops seems to be pretty decent. One of the tests I do buying a laptop is press/torque on the screen. If you can push on the back and see distortion or torque the top corners and see distortion DO NOT BUY! You are a light tap away from losing the screen. The MBP and my last Dell both passed that test with flying (nondistorting) colors. I'm not sure what you mean by the keyboard shortcuts. I have a 2 page document listing all of the keyboard shortcuts that I will probably never remember or use with my Mac. There is a shortcut for damned near everything there too. Amusingly enough I can never remember the ctrl-alt-del equivilent of force quit because I use it so rarely. I have an opposite view on the features, but that is definitely a usage pattern issue. The things I have had to fight with to make work on other systems, be they Win or Lin, "Just Work" on my Mac. The proprietary thing does bother me a little, but not much. I'm not opposed to commercial software, I am opposed to commercial software that treats me like a criminal by default and removes features while telling me it is an upgrade (Win). OS X doesn't ask for keys, doesn't 'activate', and really doesn't do all that much 'lock in' at all. I figure the best chance that Linux has is actually tied to the Mac world. OS X and Linux are MUCH more closely related under the hood than either of them are to Windows. There are lots of projects from the Linux world that have moved into the Mac world with little to no hastle, and there are projects to bring Cocoa and whatnot into Linux. Apple has given quite a bit to the OSS world in other areas too. http://www.apple.com/opensource/ I believe their CalDAV server is OSS as well among other things.
In the end a lot of it does come down to usage patterns and personal preference. I refused to touch a Mac until the whole Spaces/Expose thing because I was not willing to give up those features from my Linux desktop. I am not saying that Apple builds the bestest laptops evar! I am saying that the price difference between a MBP and another high end laptop is fairly trivial. Given that my magnetic thing has already saved my MBP from a horrible death I can safely say that extra $200 could be allocated to that feature alone and still be worth it. There are many high end laptops from other vendors that cost WAY more than even an Apple. You want to talk overpriced, go look at a Voodoo PC or Alienware (before the HP and Dell takeovers) or any of those other 'gamer' rigs and tell me that pretty colors with 'tattoos' and LEDs is worth their price.
I never had to deal with Dell support much, but my few run ins with Apple support were quite the opposite. I reported a bug post update once, figured it would go off into the void and I would never hear anything about it. Within 30 minutes an engineer called me back and was helping me put together a package of information so they could fix the bug. Within 24hrs they identified a fix and calle
You can be insightful while making a joke. I think my original point stands quite well that Linux is mostly associated with "difficult" and "stuff for geeks". You can argue technical stuff until you are blue in the face, but it means absolutely SQUAT when compared to marketing. They were discussing not using the word Linux in marketing. I think that is perfectly reasonable thing to do from a marketing perspective even if it seems goofy from a technical perspective.
I don't like the Windows interface. I don't like the KDE interface because last I used it was trying very hard to pretend to be Windows. I am OK with the Gnome interface, but I have actually been pretty pleased with the Mac interface. Now, I had assumed that most people would find the absurdity of buying a Mac based entirely on the notion that people wouldn't ask questions to be a quite obvious joke, so forgive me. However, I will be more than happy to point out why the cost difference is non issue despite how many times people try that.
Saying a Yugo and a BMW are the same thing because they both have tires and engines is a similar comparison to the cheap laptop vs MBP argument. So inevitably they drag out the high quality laptops to compare...well immediately the gap shrinks considerably and the MBPs are only slightly more expensive. So...now to explain why that small gap exists and why it is worth it. First, shell construction. The MBP has a much more durable shell made of better materials, the new ones even more so. The AC adapter is a magnetic thing, now if you don't have kids or critters you may not understand it, but that magnetic thing has already paid for the cost of my laptop as a high velocity child ran through the cable and it popped free instead of taking the machine off the table. The front loading CD/DVD is a big deal for me as a traveler too. I absolutely HATE those pop out drives while on a plane or other tight place, it is like they designed them to be easy to break and impossible to use. Nothing on the back! I think putting all your connectors and cables on the back of a laptop is pretty stupid, and again makes travel use a damned nightmare. The ambient light sensor that autodims the screen and backlights the keyboard is another good one. The people who try to reduce it to a discussion about memory/cpu/video/drive are rigging the argument. Some of that money you pay for a MBP goes into the overall design that seems to be totally lacking in PC laptops. Seriously...why in God's name would you still have all the F-Keys defaulting to their F-Key behavior on a laptop when the Fn-Fkey function is easily going to be used 10x as often. So...I did get it cheap, I did have other reasons for switching, and you are deluded or misinformed about prices.
Disclaimer: I will absolutely back you on the tower variety of Macs. I think those are overpriced to say the least. I haven't really looked at iMacs because I'm not a fan of the built into the monitor model of things. I am pretty happy with the Mini I own, but it was a good ebay deal that is being used as a very nice media center.
1. The average user doesn't understand that a TiVo is a Linux device.
2. And every one of those products loudly announces to the average consumer that it is powered by Linux doesn't it...
3. Aren't you lucky then. It does indeed advertise that I know what I am doing, and around people that think they know what they are doing it prompts them to explain to me how they couldn't get XYZ to work in Linux and then want me to fix their home computer while sitting in my cubicle. Worse, it encourages them to forward EVERY email they receive with any mention of anything Linux related regardless how old or irrelevant the news is. Now, outside of work it is never an issue either way.
4. You fail at humor. I did find a cheap MBP. "paying a premium on hardware" is an asinine comment, because there is a great deal of design and manufacturing in their laptops that is superior to your standard junk $400 plastic crap. Calling it mostly proprietary isn't quite true either. The core of it is open source, the Apple shiney is proprietary. So I can use almost all of the normal open source software that I use on the Mac. NeoOffice, GIMP, and a whole variety of other projects. Macports and Fink are both huge repositories dedicated to getting all of that open source goodness on your Mac. Why would I put a Windows theme on anything given that I hate how the interface works?
5. Again...humor. Now...I honestly do get quite a few "do you like it" type questions about the MBP, but I don't mind answering "how do you like it". What irritates me is "How do I configure my NDISwrapper using network card so you can tell me how to manually install the packages I need to make the GUI work because I want some obscure feature I read about that doesn't seem to be enabled in the version in the package manager?" This of course is followed by the expectant stare as if I can magically tell them what to type to configure it all without actually seeing anything that is wrong with the computer. Ironically enough with your reference to Google using Linux...most of these people can't seem to use Google either...
I think most people found it amusing rather than something to try and pick a part point by point as some kind of factual analysis of the problem of saying something runs Linux.
I am also secretly praying that the next OS X "cat" is Pussy Cat just to see the "Buy a Mac and get Pussy for free!" reverse the MS/Apple market share overnight.
It means "unknown" and "strange" to anyone who hasn't heard of it or isn't very computer savvy. It means "complex" and "difficult" to anyone who has heard of it that is moderately computer savvy. It means "shut the hell up and stop asking me stupid f'ing Linux questions every time I sit down at my desk!" to those of us who have used it and work with any one in the previous two categories. Seriously...I started using a Mac so I could get my nice unixy and open source goodness without having to play 20 questions every time I booted my damned laptop. Now they just look and say "oh, its a Mac, those are expensive" and walk away.
Yeah...I mean...we all see the Republicans howling in the street these days about how they refuse to become prisoners of a runaway government...yet were cheering on that very behavior for the 8 years their boy George was in charge.
Yes but that behavior has been well studied in people. Rather than taking a $10 gain and allowing a competitor to take a $5 gain, most people will spend $5 to make a competitor take a $10 loss. I do have a very pessimistic world view, because humans are little more than hairless talking monkeys with delusions of grandeur and "rational" doesn't exactly mean a whole lot. For every great man in human history that has moved us forward, there are many more shit flinging bottom feeders being drug along by their tails.
I think you are making an age assumption here. I attend significant amount of technical training classes...that and I have turned a 4 year degree into a 10 year project. I will graduate with something near 200 credit hours...
The real hypocrisy is that they have shown plants to respond to all kinds of external stimulus. Yet they all happily eat salads. The lack of meat has destroyed their brain so their reasoning fails. The only ethical thing to do is eat excrement since the animal already did the unethical killing of the food source. SO...I tell them all to just "eat shit". It is the only ethical choice for them.
Now...high school is a bit of a different beast. However, I am rarely bored in classes I take anymore. There is always someone else to help understand the subject and there are almost always more students than teachers. If you are bored it is because you are allowing someone else to fall behind. If you understand it so well that you have nothing to do, help the others understand and then you can all move forward.
I can tell you from personal experience hearing another student say "I could not have passed without you" is much more fulfilling than simply hearing the instructor say "you passed". Only the foolish refuse to train their replacements. The brilliant will have a hard time finding enough replacements to keep them moving upward.
You know what...you can go to hell. I for one am very concerned about our poor public servants that would have to clean up the mess left by drive by orgies. This isn't about children, this is about stopping sex from happening in society all the places violence does. How the hell would the post office function if people would just quit and it turns into a big damned orgy? School orgies?! Do you really want that!? My god...those poor janitors...
You mean like how social networking has changed the whole marketing game? They are in their death bed screaming. The trouble is they have stockpiles of cash that they can use to purchase government. Government doesn't exist in a land of market failure, so they just tax more, punish more, and insist that it isn't the broken laws, it is that people just refuse to behave.
Seriously...write something up and send it to one of the anti-patent groups involved in the Bilski stuff. Worst that can happen is that they ignore it.
Slashdot Mirror
Coffee connoisseur William McAlpin, an importer and wholesaler in Bar Harbor, Maine, who owns a coffee plantation in Costa Rica, says 175 degrees is "probably the optimum temperature, because that's when aromatics are being released. Once the aromas get in your palate, that is a large part of what makes the coffee a pleasure to drink."
Spilling coffee on yourself should not cause burns that quickly or burns that require skin grafts. That is just f'ing stupid.
You seem to be saying that any sufficiently "rare" problem regardless of cause is insignificant. Oh, what you left out was "at least" 700, and "had settled out of court". You also make the incredible assumption that the temperatures across all of those cups were consistent and that those 700 burn cases were not clustered at the high end of the temperatures. Which of course is why their attempted defense using that stupid line of reasoning fell on its face (well, that telling jurors that graphic images of the damaged skin was 'statistically insignificant'). This is the same company that refuses to stop using trans-fat oil here because "they want to provide a consistent flavor experience". Yet, they stopped using them in all of the countries that banned the use. Here is a hint, the non trans-fat oils must be replaced 2-3x more often than the trans-fat containing oils so it increases cost. So as a cost savings measure they knowingly use more hazardous ingredients because no one is stopping them.
As previously pointed out the punitive damages didn't come from the woman in question, they came from the jury pissed off at how McDonalds behaved during the ordeal. So...the people that got all the information, that sat there and directly witnessed all of the proceedings believed that McDonalds was behaving very poorly. Of course, all the armchair quarterbacks are willing to villify the old lady.
Last I heard that particular store had been cited REPEATEDLY for violations regarding their coffee. They were intentionally cranking the heat up beyond what is normally acceptable in order to squeeze an extra few pennies out of their coffee filters. They got slapped upside the head in the lawsuit because the violations they were repeatedly cited for finally caused an injury. Now...you can argue until you are blue in the face about all the other stupid details, but at the end of the day it boiled down to "We fucking told you to knock that shit off and you didn't, now we are going to slap you upside the head in the hopes you will finally get it through your thick skulls".
Also...205F is just a hair below boiling. Now...I would just love to watch you immediately drink a nice cup of boiling water to prove your point. I see that Coffee Association quote thrown out word for word all over the internet, but I have not been able to find a true source for it.
As it stands now, this case gets paraded about quite a bit as an example of why we should defend big companies from anything bad happening to them. They have made this case the poster child for their cause because of how easy it is to blame the victim. By all means, continue to perpetuate the notion that companies should be protected from shitty behavior. Maybe next time we can be discussing how a company actually sent a REAL stalker to people's homes as part of a marketing campaign. Maybe we can even discuss a homeowner shooting that stalker and then being sent to jail because they had opted in! Give these idiot assholes an inch and they will take a mile, and they will take it FAR faster than the average citizens that can't afford hordes of lawyers, lobbyists, and buying judges.
Well...I must say, I am a bit surprised. Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled to see so many responses along the lines of "no communication is no communication". It is just surprises me given so much of the entitlement mentality and anything on the internet is not wrong stuff. So...my hat is off to you slashdot.
Unless it was some automated nonsense or a fake, she gets what she deserves. If things went so far that the recipient went through the trouble of going to court to block communication then she should have known better than to initiate communication. I'm sorry, but a restraining order is pretty much the opposite of "please poke me" regardless of it was virtual or real. I am thrilled this is being handled this way, I am unbelievably happy that this is not turning into "let us make another 'on the internet' law!", I am devastated that my tax dollars are going to be spent dealing with this woman's stupidity.
WTF? How dare you ago against the groupthink?! Immediately admit that Apple is a giant monopolistic badguy that does nothing good or else your account will be revoked! I mean...you can't talk about any of the open source stuff they give back! You can't talk about how people like their products without pointing out how those people are stupid mindless self absorbed asshats with too much money. I mean...how can you sit there and break the hypocrisy of standards?! The groupthink is well within rationality to demand that everyone follow standards except when the standards should be broken. I suppose next you will tell me that the Canon helpdesk shouldn't be forced into supporting Kodak cameras! I don't want to have to choose products based on their features, I want to be able to force the world to break standards to or otherwise misbehave to do what I want, but I want them to not break standards or misbehave for anyone else that I don't agree with.
You forgot "Prostitution". Imagine if all the tax dollars spent on congress critters banging hookers translated into those hookers having to bang everyone for free... No man would ever be alone again.
I don't know if you can really consider it hyperbole inflation given so few people are familiar with Kafka. I mean...it is probably on a similar scale of having the value of the dollar inflating .0000001 and then complaining inflation went up.
Or the interns they gave the police escort to. What no one talked about was that it was actually a prisoner transport.
Years ago when I talked to them they proudly claimed they did not work on commission. However, every item had a 'point value' assigned to it, and if you reached certain tiers of points sold you would get a bonus added to your check. So since it was not a direct commission they could advertise that way to drag more people in thinking that their employees would be good honest folk since they weren't commission based sales.
I was trying to buy the sale of the week hard drive once and they were taking AGES to help me because they had people looking at computers. I watched one rep sell an elderly couple a high dollar gaming rig so they could email their child who was doing missionary work abroad. He ran off to get the paperwork for them to sign and I walked up, walked them all the way down to the other end of the display and pointed out a machine that was $1500 less. They were VERY happy. The associates, when they could finally be bothered to help me, got the drive and walked me to the front of the store like a criminal. I would have left, but the drive was a really good deal, and I was feeling pretty good about screwing them on the $1500 for being assholes.
Go do some research. There has been a great number of these types of events. No knock warrants, false 911 calls, SWAT raids on the wrong address. There have been tons of innocent people harassed and more than a few killed. This guy was actually lucky it was his dogs.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6344
So the minute that I bring something to market a competitor that has deeper pockets should simply be able to take my product and use its market presence to kill my product. Trade secret will not protect you from the big dogs simply stealing your stuff.
Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company that uses it's software as a value add to sell their hardware.
Time Machine can mostly back up to an arbitrary server over the internet. It uses AFP, so you can use a Linux server using AFP. Though I think there may be some caveats there as well. I think it may be possible to use other mount types, but I haven't messed with it. I am pretty sure you can encrypt the backup as well, but I haven't tried.
1. Apple is a big company. I mean the smaller groups. They can't bring anything to market because anyone they approach to mfg the item will simply take the idea, cut them out, and take the profit themselves. Ideas shouldn't be patented, implementations should be.
2. Reselling OS X installed on PCs with quasisupported hardware makes OS X look bad. This hurts Apple. A huge part of the "Just Works" comes from it only existing in a controlled environment. The alternative here is that rather than allowing any home hackers to do this kind of stuff they simply quit selling it altogether.
3. Time Machine can use an iDisk online backup as well. Personally I don't like the online backup service stuff unless it is a server I own. That is just my own paranoia though. The restore process is VERY easy regardless if you are looking for an individual file or doing a full restore. I have done both. The interface is a big piece of what makes it nice. By default if it can reach your backup location, be it USB drive, Time Capsule, or iDisk it does a differential every 1hour.
I think software patents are nothing short of stupid. You can't patent math. Standards are a double edged sword. MS Office .doc/docx is the defacto standard for most things. That means that it is terribly difficult for something better to come along. They basically purchased their official standard status for their Office 2k7 crap. So...it is hard to say one way or the other. Standards are only good when the best of breed gets to be the standard. Patents in general are just a very difficult problem to deal with. A lack of patents destroys innovation. If I come up with some brilliant idea there is nothing to stop MS from simply making a copy of it, marketing it it, and selling it as their own and leaving me ass out for the brain work I had to do. Look how much MS steals as is...imagine if there were no barriers to their thievery...
:)
I will point out that Apple doesn't seem to have done much to actively stop people from installing on non Apple hardware. What they have done is actively gone after people who try to profit commercially by doing it. So, I would prefer a more open license, but their license really isn't that horrible and most of it is open source anyways. They don't seem to care much about the tinkerers so much as the thieves. Ultimately they can do whatever the hell they want, and they make no secret of the hardware requirement. The people defending the violation of the licensing terms are effectively advocating for MS and Cisco and whoever to steal GPL code and use it how they want against the terms of the license. I will certainly agree there are trade offs.
Not that I disagree with your hard drive example, but I will provide a counter anyways. Time Machine is easily the most elegant personal backup solution I have ever seen. It just works. I have wiped my Mac clean and restored from Time Machine seamlessly. I have recovered files. I recently bought a Time Capsule (again, well below retail) to serve as my home wireless and NAS. Wireless Time Machine Backups... no CDs. No USB drives. No nonsense. As long as my MBP is home and online it will do it's scheduled backup without me having to mess with anything or remember to do it. VERY nice. So yeah...you need another Mac in case of emergency, but the quality of care during that emergency is worlds better.
I should also point out...you are officially the second person to have asked me how to do something on a Mac and I have been using mine for almost 2 years. Which was kind of the original point I was making. It really has squat to do with why I chose to check out a Mac, or why I like mine, but it is an amusing side effect. I really would like a more open OS X, but until that happens I am happy that a lot of the underlying engine stuff is OSS.
It was all those little things added up that I would pay more for. Individually, probably not.
:)
Patents are an entirely different and rather lengthy discussion. I think they should exist. I think they should be restricted to more tangible/specific things. I have a hard time with the timeframe, because it is a double edged sword. If they worked correctly in specificity the 20years wouldn't be a big deal because it would force everyone else to find a new way. IE, you can't just say "used magnet to hold plug in". (Also, I'm not 100% on this, but from what I can tell the charger gets cut off when the battery is full so no battery damage, which I have watched kill more than a few batteries before).
I am reasonably sure all of those have shortcuts, if not most. I could look them up, but I doubt you care that much about them. I actually found a pdf somewhere that someone was kind enough to gather up, what I assume is, all of the keyboard shortcuts and their context. It is 2 pages or so. Command-Arrow lets you move around your spaces...I know this one for sure because I changed it and clobbered another key mapping that I didn't realize I needed at the time. I install Warp which lets you move spaces using edge flipping with the mouse. I have no answer for sloppy focus. I actually find sloppy focus irritating as hell on a laptop, and I would only buy an Apple laptop, not desktop. OS X seems to be decent at understanding when you accidentally brushed the mouse pad vs trying to actively move it, but I HATE brushing it and having sloppy focus start dumping text into the wrong window. However, Cocotron is the project I was talking about in moving apps away from OS X. The OS X/hardware "DRM" ties I'm not very upset about, Apple is a hardware company, nothing says they have to sell their OS on the street to anyone with a PC. The debate on that irritates me quite a bit, because while I would love to run OS X on PC hardware, there are very good reasons why they do not want to support that jungle of shitty drivers and it really is about this sense of entitlement that Apple somehow owes it to people. The OS X license is what you pay for, and the OS X license says you must have Apple hardware. Arguably they could put a license out that says "You didn't buy our hardware, but want the OS anyways...That will be $2,000". OS X is sold as a thing to make their hardware useful, not as a thing by itself. Again...a totally separate debate.
On the hardware front, from what I gather the new Intel ones are much more Linux friendly, but I haven't honestly tried. I just use VMware Fusion for my Windows/Linux needs. The "Unity" feature is awesome.
I didn't accuse you specifically of bringing up the cheap laptop, so much as that is where the stereotype comes from. Now that we are in the realm of talking comparable systems we can discuss it fairly. The price difference we are discussing shows that the difference in cost is not the spec hardware, it is exactly those bells and whistle things as you said. Those bells and whistle things have made my MBP the best laptop I have owned. My previous Dell is a close 2nd, and the HP before that was a total f'ing disaster and the Compaq previous to that one going back to the store within a week.
Now..to clarify..the glowing keys is neat, but it is the auto dim screen that makes it nice. Having the laptop automatically adjust to not burn by eyeballs out in low light is pretty nice. The magnetic thing being proprietary doesn't bother me in the least, I support the idea that a company doing something actually innovative should get their time limited monopoly on it. Now, I will be honest, the construction of Dell laptops seems to be pretty decent. One of the tests I do buying a laptop is press/torque on the screen. If you can push on the back and see distortion or torque the top corners and see distortion DO NOT BUY! You are a light tap away from losing the screen. The MBP and my last Dell both passed that test with flying (nondistorting) colors. I'm not sure what you mean by the keyboard shortcuts. I have a 2 page document listing all of the keyboard shortcuts that I will probably never remember or use with my Mac. There is a shortcut for damned near everything there too. Amusingly enough I can never remember the ctrl-alt-del equivilent of force quit because I use it so rarely. I have an opposite view on the features, but that is definitely a usage pattern issue. The things I have had to fight with to make work on other systems, be they Win or Lin, "Just Work" on my Mac. The proprietary thing does bother me a little, but not much. I'm not opposed to commercial software, I am opposed to commercial software that treats me like a criminal by default and removes features while telling me it is an upgrade (Win). OS X doesn't ask for keys, doesn't 'activate', and really doesn't do all that much 'lock in' at all. I figure the best chance that Linux has is actually tied to the Mac world. OS X and Linux are MUCH more closely related under the hood than either of them are to Windows. There are lots of projects from the Linux world that have moved into the Mac world with little to no hastle, and there are projects to bring Cocoa and whatnot into Linux. Apple has given quite a bit to the OSS world in other areas too. http://www.apple.com/opensource/ I believe their CalDAV server is OSS as well among other things.
In the end a lot of it does come down to usage patterns and personal preference. I refused to touch a Mac until the whole Spaces/Expose thing because I was not willing to give up those features from my Linux desktop. I am not saying that Apple builds the bestest laptops evar! I am saying that the price difference between a MBP and another high end laptop is fairly trivial. Given that my magnetic thing has already saved my MBP from a horrible death I can safely say that extra $200 could be allocated to that feature alone and still be worth it. There are many high end laptops from other vendors that cost WAY more than even an Apple. You want to talk overpriced, go look at a Voodoo PC or Alienware (before the HP and Dell takeovers) or any of those other 'gamer' rigs and tell me that pretty colors with 'tattoos' and LEDs is worth their price.
I never had to deal with Dell support much, but my few run ins with Apple support were quite the opposite. I reported a bug post update once, figured it would go off into the void and I would never hear anything about it. Within 30 minutes an engineer called me back and was helping me put together a package of information so they could fix the bug. Within 24hrs they identified a fix and calle
You can be insightful while making a joke. I think my original point stands quite well that Linux is mostly associated with "difficult" and "stuff for geeks". You can argue technical stuff until you are blue in the face, but it means absolutely SQUAT when compared to marketing. They were discussing not using the word Linux in marketing. I think that is perfectly reasonable thing to do from a marketing perspective even if it seems goofy from a technical perspective.
I don't like the Windows interface. I don't like the KDE interface because last I used it was trying very hard to pretend to be Windows. I am OK with the Gnome interface, but I have actually been pretty pleased with the Mac interface. Now, I had assumed that most people would find the absurdity of buying a Mac based entirely on the notion that people wouldn't ask questions to be a quite obvious joke, so forgive me. However, I will be more than happy to point out why the cost difference is non issue despite how many times people try that.
Saying a Yugo and a BMW are the same thing because they both have tires and engines is a similar comparison to the cheap laptop vs MBP argument. So inevitably they drag out the high quality laptops to compare...well immediately the gap shrinks considerably and the MBPs are only slightly more expensive. So...now to explain why that small gap exists and why it is worth it. First, shell construction. The MBP has a much more durable shell made of better materials, the new ones even more so. The AC adapter is a magnetic thing, now if you don't have kids or critters you may not understand it, but that magnetic thing has already paid for the cost of my laptop as a high velocity child ran through the cable and it popped free instead of taking the machine off the table. The front loading CD/DVD is a big deal for me as a traveler too. I absolutely HATE those pop out drives while on a plane or other tight place, it is like they designed them to be easy to break and impossible to use. Nothing on the back! I think putting all your connectors and cables on the back of a laptop is pretty stupid, and again makes travel use a damned nightmare. The ambient light sensor that autodims the screen and backlights the keyboard is another good one. The people who try to reduce it to a discussion about memory/cpu/video/drive are rigging the argument. Some of that money you pay for a MBP goes into the overall design that seems to be totally lacking in PC laptops. Seriously...why in God's name would you still have all the F-Keys defaulting to their F-Key behavior on a laptop when the Fn-Fkey function is easily going to be used 10x as often. So...I did get it cheap, I did have other reasons for switching, and you are deluded or misinformed about prices.
Disclaimer: I will absolutely back you on the tower variety of Macs. I think those are overpriced to say the least. I haven't really looked at iMacs because I'm not a fan of the built into the monitor model of things. I am pretty happy with the Mini I own, but it was a good ebay deal that is being used as a very nice media center.
1. The average user doesn't understand that a TiVo is a Linux device.
2. And every one of those products loudly announces to the average consumer that it is powered by Linux doesn't it...
3. Aren't you lucky then. It does indeed advertise that I know what I am doing, and around people that think they know what they are doing it prompts them to explain to me how they couldn't get XYZ to work in Linux and then want me to fix their home computer while sitting in my cubicle. Worse, it encourages them to forward EVERY email they receive with any mention of anything Linux related regardless how old or irrelevant the news is. Now, outside of work it is never an issue either way.
4. You fail at humor. I did find a cheap MBP. "paying a premium on hardware" is an asinine comment, because there is a great deal of design and manufacturing in their laptops that is superior to your standard junk $400 plastic crap. Calling it mostly proprietary isn't quite true either. The core of it is open source, the Apple shiney is proprietary. So I can use almost all of the normal open source software that I use on the Mac. NeoOffice, GIMP, and a whole variety of other projects. Macports and Fink are both huge repositories dedicated to getting all of that open source goodness on your Mac. Why would I put a Windows theme on anything given that I hate how the interface works?
5. Again...humor. Now...I honestly do get quite a few "do you like it" type questions about the MBP, but I don't mind answering "how do you like it". What irritates me is "How do I configure my NDISwrapper using network card so you can tell me how to manually install the packages I need to make the GUI work because I want some obscure feature I read about that doesn't seem to be enabled in the version in the package manager?" This of course is followed by the expectant stare as if I can magically tell them what to type to configure it all without actually seeing anything that is wrong with the computer. Ironically enough with your reference to Google using Linux...most of these people can't seem to use Google either...
I think most people found it amusing rather than something to try and pick a part point by point as some kind of factual analysis of the problem of saying something runs Linux.
I am also secretly praying that the next OS X "cat" is Pussy Cat just to see the "Buy a Mac and get Pussy for free!" reverse the MS/Apple market share overnight.
It means "unknown" and "strange" to anyone who hasn't heard of it or isn't very computer savvy. It means "complex" and "difficult" to anyone who has heard of it that is moderately computer savvy. It means "shut the hell up and stop asking me stupid f'ing Linux questions every time I sit down at my desk!" to those of us who have used it and work with any one in the previous two categories. Seriously...I started using a Mac so I could get my nice unixy and open source goodness without having to play 20 questions every time I booted my damned laptop. Now they just look and say "oh, its a Mac, those are expensive" and walk away.
Yeah...I mean...we all see the Republicans howling in the street these days about how they refuse to become prisoners of a runaway government...yet were cheering on that very behavior for the 8 years their boy George was in charge.
Yes but that behavior has been well studied in people. Rather than taking a $10 gain and allowing a competitor to take a $5 gain, most people will spend $5 to make a competitor take a $10 loss. I do have a very pessimistic world view, because humans are little more than hairless talking monkeys with delusions of grandeur and "rational" doesn't exactly mean a whole lot. For every great man in human history that has moved us forward, there are many more shit flinging bottom feeders being drug along by their tails.
I think you are making an age assumption here. I attend significant amount of technical training classes...that and I have turned a 4 year degree into a 10 year project. I will graduate with something near 200 credit hours...
The real hypocrisy is that they have shown plants to respond to all kinds of external stimulus. Yet they all happily eat salads. The lack of meat has destroyed their brain so their reasoning fails. The only ethical thing to do is eat excrement since the animal already did the unethical killing of the food source. SO...I tell them all to just "eat shit". It is the only ethical choice for them.
Now...high school is a bit of a different beast. However, I am rarely bored in classes I take anymore. There is always someone else to help understand the subject and there are almost always more students than teachers. If you are bored it is because you are allowing someone else to fall behind. If you understand it so well that you have nothing to do, help the others understand and then you can all move forward.
I can tell you from personal experience hearing another student say "I could not have passed without you" is much more fulfilling than simply hearing the instructor say "you passed". Only the foolish refuse to train their replacements. The brilliant will have a hard time finding enough replacements to keep them moving upward.
You know what...you can go to hell. I for one am very concerned about our poor public servants that would have to clean up the mess left by drive by orgies. This isn't about children, this is about stopping sex from happening in society all the places violence does. How the hell would the post office function if people would just quit and it turns into a big damned orgy? School orgies?! Do you really want that!? My god...those poor janitors...
You mean like how social networking has changed the whole marketing game? They are in their death bed screaming. The trouble is they have stockpiles of cash that they can use to purchase government. Government doesn't exist in a land of market failure, so they just tax more, punish more, and insist that it isn't the broken laws, it is that people just refuse to behave.
Seriously...write something up and send it to one of the anti-patent groups involved in the Bilski stuff. Worst that can happen is that they ignore it.