Under XP, system crashes are mostly due to crappy hardware and third party drivers for it
Explain that to my old HP box that used to BSOD (well, the XP equivalent - an unannounced reboot) once or twice a week, without any add-ons, just the stock machine from HP running Windows XP Home with automatic update enabled. Sorry. Windows is still a piece of crap, no matter what hardware you run it on.
On the other hand, there's my wife's iBook which has only done one hard crash (the one with the multi-lingual reset screen) since 2000, and we leave it on 24/7 because I set it up to also run a webcam in the background that she doesn't even know about. It's not hard to figure out why people like OS X over Windows.
People in that particular niche can pay for a Firewire 800 card to go in the expansion slot without much trouble.
Actually, probably not. People who do that kind of work usually live paycheck-to-paycheck existances without health insurance, retirement plans, or a company behind them. They're only as good as the last piece of video they turned in and have no contracts or job security whatsoever. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
I use my Powerbook's modem for sending and receiving faxes. In many lines of business, it's the only way to get things done, especially anything with contracts or that requires signatures. And faxing is indespensible for international business. Fortunately, Apple's little USB (fax?)/modem is super small for traveling.
AMD has the capacity to produce the chips, but Apple needed an entire chipset and motherboard suite to start out the new line. AMD may be an option down the line, but to get this stuff started Apple needed someone with a broader range of skills.
I mean no disrespect, but if you are doing any video editing and post-production work on an apple platform machine, why aren't you doing it on a powermac?
Because you can't bring a Powermac into a war zone. Or a flood. Or any kind of disaster. Or anywhere where there isn't stable power. I know people who specialize in disaster footage. They get in, shoot it, run back to their camp/Explorer/hotel and edit, and squirt it out to their clients in a matter of two or three hours. (As a side note, they told me that it was pretty strange that in southern Mississippi during Katrina Sprint's cell phone service went down for days in their area, but data stayed up. Go figure.)
Everywhere I look companies are too heavily invested into Dell and other big name PC laptops.
The company I work for is rapidly... and involuntarily... getting rid of its Dell machines. Around May of 2003 they bought scads of Dells. Redid almost the entire building so everyone would have the same machines. Brought in maybe 300 or 400 of them.
Fast forward to December, 2004 -- they start failing. And not just one or two of them. More like one or two a day. It looks like since they were all bought at the same time, they're all failing at the same time. At least five went down last week. I'm not in the IT department, so I don't know exactly what's wrong with them. I just know when they fail and my people can't work.
Variable pricing makes sense. Why should a company like Apple or Google have the power to decide what a video or a song is worth?
Some people like simplicity. They like to know what to expect before they go shopping. They like to know how many items they can buy with a given ammount of money.
It doesn't work for everything, but it works for some things. If it didn't then there wouldn't be 100-yen stores on every corner in Tokyo, or Dollar Stores in every American city.
I don't see them running out and supporting linux, bsd or solaris though with iTunes.
They don't support FreeDOS, NeXT, QNX, WinCE, SkyOS, OS/2, OS/9, SGI, Sun, BeOS, AmigaDOS, or my old Commodore 64, either. What's your point? Apple went after two markets: It's own, and the largest one. When Linux becomes important to Apple and to consumers, iTunes will magically appear. Right now Linux is not a factor to either. It's the same chicken-and-egg situation that Linux people have been dealing with since its inception. If people suddenly started buying Amigas by the thousands, iTunes would become available. I hate to break it to you, but in spite of the Slashdot hype, Linux is still far from critical mass.
It's the web standard which Opera currently leads the way in supporting. It has the best CSS support of any browser, hands down.
I wouldn't say "hands down," considering that Safari passes the Acid2 test, and Opera doesn't. Or at least it didn't last time I checked. Has that changed?
Carrier current radio stations have been transmitting their signals over power lines for decades without any problems. Why is it different for internet?
I had this problem with the Gap web site a few weeks ago.
I solved the problem by shopping at another online store. The Gap lost about $800 in Chrismtas sales from me that I spent elsewhere. If I was a shareholder, I'd be pissed that they're turning away customers.
I hope they saved at least that much by hiring incompetent web site developers.
there are few websites (including my bank) which don't work with Safari
Time to find a new bank. I'd worry about having my money with an institution that requires me to use an unstable, insecure method of transmitting my personal financial data.
I told my bank (Washington Mutual) that, and I suspect lots of other people did, too, because they now support all standard browsers as well as Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Oh no! Downloads are down less than 1% since the third quarter!
Seriously, it's right before Christmas, as the article points out.
This brings up an interesting point. Some people (like me) are giving lots of friends and business associates iTunes gift cards this Christmas. Will the sales of these songs not count until next quarter? I know my wife hasn't bought anything from iTunes in the last couple of months because she thinks she's going to get a great big iTunes card for Christmas.
Unfortunately, and I may be alone, but this just sounds like more trash polluting the earth. McD's will give out or sell millions of these, people will be fascinated for mere minutes, and most will be discarded or throw into a toy chest, creating more silcion based hardly-biodegradable trash polluting the earth.
And how is this different from the trash that rolls off the assembly lines at Dell or eMachines?
Slashdot Mirror
It really does sound like you have some bad hardware in your machine somewhere.
I solved the problem by selling the HP and buying a Powerbook.
Under XP, system crashes are mostly due to crappy hardware and third party drivers for it
Explain that to my old HP box that used to BSOD (well, the XP equivalent - an unannounced reboot) once or twice a week, without any add-ons, just the stock machine from HP running Windows XP Home with automatic update enabled. Sorry. Windows is still a piece of crap, no matter what hardware you run it on.
On the other hand, there's my wife's iBook which has only done one hard crash (the one with the multi-lingual reset screen) since 2000, and we leave it on 24/7 because I set it up to also run a webcam in the background that she doesn't even know about. It's not hard to figure out why people like OS X over Windows.
People in that particular niche can pay for a Firewire 800 card to go in the expansion slot without much trouble.
Actually, probably not. People who do that kind of work usually live paycheck-to-paycheck existances without health insurance, retirement plans, or a company behind them. They're only as good as the last piece of video they turned in and have no contracts or job security whatsoever. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
I use my Powerbook's modem for sending and receiving faxes. In many lines of business, it's the only way to get things done, especially anything with contracts or that requires signatures. And faxing is indespensible for international business. Fortunately, Apple's little USB (fax?)/modem is super small for traveling.
AMD has the capacity to produce the chips, but Apple needed an entire chipset and motherboard suite to start out the new line. AMD may be an option down the line, but to get this stuff started Apple needed someone with a broader range of skills.
I mean no disrespect, but if you are doing any video editing and post-production work on an apple platform machine, why aren't you doing it on a powermac?
Because you can't bring a Powermac into a war zone. Or a flood. Or any kind of disaster. Or anywhere where there isn't stable power. I know people who specialize in disaster footage. They get in, shoot it, run back to their camp/Explorer/hotel and edit, and squirt it out to their clients in a matter of two or three hours. (As a side note, they told me that it was pretty strange that in southern Mississippi during Katrina Sprint's cell phone service went down for days in their area, but data stayed up. Go figure.)
That's one application. There's probably others.
Everywhere I look companies are too heavily invested into Dell and other big name PC laptops.
The company I work for is rapidly... and involuntarily... getting rid of its Dell machines. Around May of 2003 they bought scads of Dells. Redid almost the entire building so everyone would have the same machines. Brought in maybe 300 or 400 of them.
Fast forward to December, 2004 -- they start failing. And not just one or two of them. More like one or two a day. It looks like since they were all bought at the same time, they're all failing at the same time. At least five went down last week. I'm not in the IT department, so I don't know exactly what's wrong with them. I just know when they fail and my people can't work.
Variable pricing makes sense. Why should a company like Apple or Google have the power to decide what a video or a song is worth?
Some people like simplicity. They like to know what to expect before they go shopping. They like to know how many items they can buy with a given ammount of money.
It doesn't work for everything, but it works for some things. If it didn't then there wouldn't be 100-yen stores on every corner in Tokyo, or Dollar Stores in every American city.
The best way to get your mom off Windows is to get her a Mac Mini.
An open standard compatible with all mp3 players would give me a chance to retire my iPod for something potentially better.
Why would you need to retire your iPod? iPods have played MP3s since day one. Sounds like you don't even own one and you're just another SlashTroll.
I don't see them running out and supporting linux, bsd or solaris though with iTunes.
They don't support FreeDOS, NeXT, QNX, WinCE, SkyOS, OS/2, OS/9, SGI, Sun, BeOS, AmigaDOS, or my old Commodore 64, either. What's your point? Apple went after two markets: It's own, and the largest one. When Linux becomes important to Apple and to consumers, iTunes will magically appear. Right now Linux is not a factor to either. It's the same chicken-and-egg situation that Linux people have been dealing with since its inception. If people suddenly started buying Amigas by the thousands, iTunes would become available. I hate to break it to you, but in spite of the Slashdot hype, Linux is still far from critical mass.
I'm not a broker or a stock expert or anything, but can't they use their own stock instead of, or in addition to cash?
You forgot my favorite: subLogic Flight Simulator.
It's the web standard which Opera currently leads the way in supporting. It has the best CSS support of any browser, hands down.
I wouldn't say "hands down," considering that Safari passes the Acid2 test, and Opera doesn't. Or at least it didn't last time I checked. Has that changed?
Because your cell phone tower didn't cost $200,000,000.00 to build.
Carrier current radio stations have been transmitting their signals over power lines for decades without any problems. Why is it different for internet?
I'll have to dig through my credit card statements, but that sounds like a great idea. I'll do just that.
I had this problem with the Gap web site a few weeks ago.
I solved the problem by shopping at another online store. The Gap lost about $800 in Chrismtas sales from me that I spent elsewhere. If I was a shareholder, I'd be pissed that they're turning away customers.
I hope they saved at least that much by hiring incompetent web site developers.
there are few websites (including my bank) which don't work with Safari
Time to find a new bank. I'd worry about having my money with an institution that requires me to use an unstable, insecure method of transmitting my personal financial data.
I told my bank (Washington Mutual) that, and I suspect lots of other people did, too, because they now support all standard browsers as well as Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Oh no! Downloads are down less than 1% since the third quarter! Seriously, it's right before Christmas, as the article points out.
This brings up an interesting point. Some people (like me) are giving lots of friends and business associates iTunes gift cards this Christmas. Will the sales of these songs not count until next quarter? I know my wife hasn't bought anything from iTunes in the last couple of months because she thinks she's going to get a great big iTunes card for Christmas.
She's wrong, of course. But that's another story.
Especially in a "decline" of less than half of one percent.
It's just another sign that Apple is going out of business. Has been since 1984.
I have never used Konfabulator but from the looks of the things Dashboard looks like a Konfabulator ripoff.
If you're going to paint it like someone ripped off someone else, then it's Konfab that ripped off Apple's Desktop Accessories, which were developed 21 years before Konfabulator.
In case you didn't get the hint, Konfabulator (now YWE apparently) predates Apple Dashboard. A lot.
I got your hint. The problem with your argument is that Apple's Desktop Accessories pre-date Konfabulator by 21 years.
If you're going to argue history, try to have your facts straight.
And Apple's Desktop Accessories pre-date Konfabulator by 20 years.
Unfortunately, and I may be alone, but this just sounds like more trash polluting the earth. McD's will give out or sell millions of these, people will be fascinated for mere minutes, and most will be discarded or throw into a toy chest, creating more silcion based hardly-biodegradable trash polluting the earth.
And how is this different from the trash that rolls off the assembly lines at Dell or eMachines?