Agreed. It's clearly a former iBook. The PowerBook G4 Titanium has black keys on the keyboard, while the iBook (previous and future version) has white keys.
Additionally, extracting a PowerBook G4 from its titanium enclosure with wide-aspect screen and sticking it in an aluminum suitcase with a regular screen would be a crime against nature.
Re:Making do without flippy floppy
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 2
The Mac I was referring to was the Macintosh Classic (code name XO) circa 1990.
Back when Apple designed it, they found that 256 MB ROM chips were cheaper than the smaller chips required by the spec, so they used the larger chips. Since they had a lot of extra space in ROM, they put a stripped down version of System 6.
As someone else mentioned, booting the Classic while pressing x-o would result in it booting from ROM, the computer equivalent of wriggling your ears, I suppose. I had a Classic Mac my freshman year in college, and I confirmed that it would boot from ROM (it just indicated that the boot volume was "locked" and used the RAM disk icon for those that care).
The Macintosh Classic was the last Mac to use the 68000 processor and was designed to be a low cost version. It was later replaced by the Classic II, which ran the 68030 chip (the same as the Color Classic), as someone else in this thread alluded.
I was a little confused when I read the story (maybe they were trying to increase the hit count from Apple users that click on any story that mentions Apple, iMac, etc.)
I thought the iMac started the return of Apple doing their industrial design in-house. Jonathan Ive, who heads the group, has been doing some great stuff: the iMac, PowerBook G4, (illfated) Cube, G4 Power Mac, all great designs. Prior to that Apple used to hire outside companies to design their products.
This isn't the first time they've had someone take credit for Apple's in-house work. The original Mac was designed by someone within Apple, but FrogDesign has been taking credit for it ever since. If I remember correctly, it turns out that FrogDesign put together the design language for Apple's post Apple II products (namely the Apple IIc), but not for the Mac. Later on, the Mac was redone to take that language into account -- I believe it was started with the Mac SE. But the original toaster design was done by some guy at Apple who's name escapes me.
Before some moderator on crack gives you an "interesting" simply because you wrote a lot.
> Gil Amelio is the one who opened the door for the mac clones,
> he didn't close it.
A move which nearly bankrupted Apple. No matter what you think about cloning, it's typically not a good idea to do any moves which will bankrupt a company.
> A the time that Next was bought, it was no better suited
> to running MacOS apps than Be was, it was just cheaper.
NeXT was $425 million, Be wanted around $150 million, so clearly NeXT was more expensive, but it was a better value. Remember, at the time BeOS couldn't even print. Also Jean-Louis didn't want to sell Be to Apple, he wanted to license BeOS to Apple. He wanted Be to be the Microsoft to Apple's IBM. By buying NeXT, Apple got Jobs, Tevanian, and the NeXT crew. And being a user of Mac OS X, I'd say it ended up being a smart move.
As for the rest, it's just flamebait: you're ignoring Apple's successful profitable quarters, high inventory turnover, the fact that "monopoly" doesn't mean what you think it does, the fact that Apple dumped just about every non-standard hardware component to kill the not-invented-here problem, the fact that MS Office is profitable for MS,... oh forget it.
Is it just me, or does Breathed come off as a bit of a jerk in that interview?
He started drawing poorly after Penguin Dreams, but he hit bottom by the end. Go back and look at your Happy Trails collection. Remove the booger jokes and the Donald Trump jokes, and you're left with nuthin'.
Making do without flippy floppy
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yeah, booting. Don't forget; we're talking about a Mac here, which has been able to boot from a CD, external FireWire drive, Zip drive, or whatever for about 10 years. The old Mac Classic could even boot from ROM (they had a complete version of the system software built onto ROM) for complete diskless operation. Thus the lack of a floppy for about 4 years.
These guys are really smart!
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Next project: take a new PowerBook G4, and remove all the innards and transplant them in an IBM PCjr case! That way you can get rid of the yucky titanium case and downright sickening 15.2" wide-aspect ratio screen. Cool!
You sound like a computer geek...go buy your GeForce3 and extra memory third party. It's easy enough to add this stuff to any Mac made in the last 10 years.
You're displaying a common misunderstanding about marketing -- things are generally priced based on what people will pay for them, not based on what they cost. Don't like it? Tough. That's capitalism.
Apple is charging you a premium for the convenience of buying it from them. They're not the only company that charges for the convenience: ever bought popcorn at the movies? Do you pay a 1000% markup on Coke at a fast food place? Did you know that most liquor companies bottle the exact same stuff in a generic bottle and sell it for half the price as a "house brand"? My company charges about $10k for a bottom of the line PC if you insist that we sell you one to go with our multi-million dollar telephone switch. And customers pay it, because it's simpler that way.
the court will provide a temporary injunction allowing XP to be put on the market until they make a decision.
Something good could come out of that. Considering that the Supreme Court (according to the New York Times) ignored the fact that Bush used different qualifications for determining if a ballot was to be thrown out (the very basis of their "decision" against Gore), maybe this could be another reason to impeach the five members of the Supreme Court Maybe then we could all believe in democracy again.
Not a great movie, but a fun movie
on
Review: Rush Hour 2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree with Katz on this one. Jackie Chan's movies are always fun, and although I enjoyed Rush Hour 2, it wasn't as good as Rush Hour 1 or Rumble in Toronto -- I mean Rumble in the Bronx. In Rush Hour 1, the script was a little tighter and made a little more sense. Rumble in the Bronx had some of Jackie's best stunts, particularly in the gang fight scene with Stigmata by Ministry playing in the background.
Rush Hour 2 felt, well rushed, where the script needed a little more polishing. This makes sense because I heard that Chan wasn't happy with the results of the stunts in the movie. The first act was pretty painful, but the movie got better in Act 2 and 3. But the script could have benefited from a rewrite (or perhaps this was just an editing problem). What was the point of the "Snoopy tattoo"? Why did the customs agent say she got rid of Lee and Carter when she really sent them to find the plates? Why did Lee carry around his dad's badge all the time (he took it to the US on a spur of the moment trip with Carter)? Why did Ricky Tan look younger than Lee even though he used to be Lee's father's partner?
The movie was funny though. Chris Tucker was funny once again, and Jackie Chan still excels at physical comedy. Chan also gets bonus points for doing the incredible stunts himself -- which should embarrass American "action stars" like Swartzenegger, Willis, Stallone, Reeves, etc. In an industry where any person with access to a harness, a computer to digitally remove the harness, tons of explosives, and sunglasses can be called an action star, it's cool to see Jackie Chan do his own stunts and make them look breathtaking.
Just to save some time, I'm listing all the standard rebuttals that go with any Microsoft monopoly story. Please pick one:
( ) Oh, great, now every company is going to have to ask the government's permission before they add any new features
( ) Why does the government want to punish any company when they become successful? Sun, Netscape, Apple, Kodak, etc. are all just jealous of Microsoft's success
( ) If you don't like Windows, DON'T use it! It's not like their forcing you to use it
( ) I'm not a big Microsoft supporter or anything, but I like how they're giving me free stuff. Do we really want the government to force us to pay more for stuff Microsoft wants to give us for free?
( ) Oh, yeah, well Apple has a monopoly on PowerPC-based Macs as well. Try to buy a Mac without Apple's OS and see who REALLY has a monopoly
And to save time for the moderators, here are the mod points: Moderation totals: Troll=1, Flamebait=1, Redundant=1
On a completely unrelated note, remember the story that the LA Times reported back in 1998 where Microsoft "was secretly been planning a massive media campaign designed to influence state investigators by creating the appearance of a groundswell of public support for the company"? Every time I read the same tired arguments as above, I can't help but think about that story.
Just so we can all prepare for the next time this happens, what's the proper way to pronounce "IIS"?
( ) "aye-aye-ess"
( ) "two-ess"
( ) "aye-ayes"
( ) "aye-iz"
(Of course I don't know how to say it! I run Apache/Linux and Apache/Mac OS X.)
Now with deeper pipelines and higher operating tem
on
Sun's Zippy New Chips
·
· Score: 2
And it doesn't enable the Internet either.
I'm a little surprised a technical web site would fall for the pure marketing hype. Next we're going to have an article complaining that the Ultra SPARC IIIs run only at 900 MHz and can't play the new space cadet game. That is a fun game it wasnt free but it was worth the money.
That's basically it. MSN is allowed to get into the same agreements as AOL. But, Microsoft as a whole cannot use Windows as a leverage to push MSN. That's an illegal abuse of their monopoly
Clearly Microsoft either doesn't know how to get into agreements like this without illegally leveraging their monopoly or they don't care to. That makes them a weaker business because they don't know how to negotiate for both parties' mutual benefit without resorting to, "Do what we want or you can't sell you product with Windows." Breaking them up would force them to learn how to negotiate properly and would probably make them a better company in the long run.
This may seem a bit offtopic, but this reminds me of a boss I once had who didn't know how to get people to do what she wanted without threatening their jobs. It's important for a manager to be able to get their employees to do things not just because the manager is telling them to, but because it's to the mutual benefit of all parties involved. That's how the best work is done. For her, she couldn't do that. All she knew was, "Do as I say, or I'll fire you." No kidding. After she was promoted to my boss, she threatened to fire me every two days for things as silly as not helping her troubleshoot her computer. I and everyone else in her group quit (with others in the company threatening to quit if they were moved into her group) and she got demoted. But in Microsoft's case, they've got a monopoly and the other parties can't "quit" Microsoft. Can you imagine Compaq or Dell not selling Windows-based computers any more and staying in business for more than a month?
Quick! Name a company that manufactures small web cams!
Either you said "X10" or you thought "X10" and then tried to quickly come up with another company name because you hate X10's ads so much.
As the token slashdot reader who works in marketing (Technical Marketing to be precise, but the sleeze travels by osmosis), I want to weigh in here.
The point of advertising is name recognition, rather that to directly influence sales. That's the reason why it's so hard to quantify how successful an ad campaign has been: generally $x ad dollars does not equal $x increase in revenue. One can say that after an $x ad campaign went out, the company saw a $y increase in sales, but one cannot assume that the increase in sales was directly related to the ad campaign.
So the idea is to get you to think of the brand name when you think of a product type. X10 is successfully doing that, although I don't condone the method. So for every person that refuses to buy X10's product on principle, there's probably 3-4 people that will recognize the product name but will forget the annoying context.
Ads do work the way people think, assuming that the person thinking is a marketing person. You're right, Pepsi tastes better to you and no matter how Coke advertises you aren't going to switch (for me, it's the opposite, I prefer Coke, although I don't generally drink soft drinks). But taste is a psychological thing as well. Here's an example: have you ever taken a sip of something when you expected it to be something else? Maybe you were drinking Pepsi at a restaurant, but your waitperson gave you iced tea instead? That first taste is horrible because you were expecting Pepsi, but you got a completely different taste in your mouth.
Coke and Pepsi advertising are trying to get you to associate a particular taste with a feeling. Most people drink the soft drink that they're used to -- something they drank when they were young. It's the psychological aspect that the companies are trying to define for you.
The most important things to teach students about any subject is diversity. I can't believe how many college grads that I had to interview that thought they were good candidates because they knew all Microsoft stuff. I hired the one who had experience with at least three different environments, and could tell me the pros and cons of each. Give me someone who knows 10 years of A, and someone who knows 5 years of A and 5 years of B, and I'm more likely to hire the latter.
So I would pick at least O'reilly's "Unix in a Nutshell" so you always have your reference.
How about getting your email address stuck on a forwarded joke or chain letter?
I used to get tons of jokes or chain letters forwarded to me (which I never read), but then I noticed I started getting spam in my private email account (I have a public account I use for emailing people I don't know, and a private one for people that I know). then I figured it out. If someone sends you a chain letter or joke forwarded to a bunch of people, and anyone on that list forwards it to someone else, before long you'll have a great source of email addresses. and good luck suggesting that they list addresses using BCC, instead of To. If you can't get them to stop sending you "fwd:fwd:funny joke", how are you going to get them to use BCC?
So not only are chain letters annoying and stupid, but they'll breed spam to boot.
Although I wouldn't put it past Dubya to legislate pi to a particular value -- this is the guy that doesn't believe Social Security is a Federal program, and his party has been trying to legislate the story of biblical creation as science for decades -- it was actually Indiana where this happened.
in 1897 Representative T.I. Record introduced House Bill 246 suggesting three values for pi: 3.2, 4, and ~3.23. These three figures were based on the work of an amateur mathematician Edward Goodwin. The bill was quickly forwarded to the Committee on Swamp Lands (of course), which then forwarded it to the Committee on Education. This committee gave it a pass, where the House approved it unanimously. The bill made it to the Senate.
Before the Senate could make asses of themselves as well, a professor of mathematics at Purdue named C.A. Waldo, intervened, and it died an embarrassing death.
For a more humorous account, read Cecil Adam's account of this at the Straight Dope.
I'm sure he was accidentally shot, and then just left there to freeze for us to find him thousands of years later. "Whoops! Well, I'll get vindicated by somebody when the computer is invented," Og the killer caveman surely said.
If he were accidentally shot, don't you think the person who shot him would have carried him back to wherever? They did do burials back then. Even elephants bury their dead.
No, the only time you kill someone and leave 'em in a snowbank is because you're pretty sure the statute of limitations is longer than 5,000 years.
No, replace "automobile manufacturers" with "an automobile manufacturer with 95% market share and almost-exclusive bundling agreements with cities that any roads that are built can only have their cars driving on them", ad then you've got a pretty good analogy.
Throw in that this "automobile manufacturer" won't let you buy a car; you have to lease it from them on a yearly basis. Plus, they recently made it so that the radio in the car will only play radio stations that they own. To play others' radio stations, you can go to AutoZone and install a device in your car to play others radio stations, but studies have shown that most people who know nothing about cars won't bother to do this.
Make those changes, and then you've got a pretty good analogy.
Yeah, and Ford has a monopoly on all cars made with a "Ford" logo.
If Apple ever gets 95% of the computer market, then you can call them a monopoly, and we'll debate if they're abusing it.
But expanding the definition of monopoly to include any company that builds something unique is to render the word "monopoly" a useless word. A monopoly is defined as a commodity that is controlled by one party characterized such that the demand for the product is generally inflexible compared to price. As Apple-watchers know, the inexpensive iMac is why Apple is still making computers today. If they had stuck with their deal of making insanely expensive computers, everyone would have switched to PCs. The fact that Apple is constrained -- that is, cannot double the price of their computers and still maintain the same volume -- shows they don't have a monopoly.
It's been already been determined by legal experts that Microsoft has a monopoly, so I don't think that's up for discussion any longer.
Slashdot Mirror
> Actually he used an iBook.
Agreed. It's clearly a former iBook. The PowerBook G4 Titanium has black keys on the keyboard, while the iBook (previous and future version) has white keys.
Additionally, extracting a PowerBook G4 from its titanium enclosure with wide-aspect screen and sticking it in an aluminum suitcase with a regular screen would be a crime against nature.
The Mac I was referring to was the Macintosh Classic (code name XO) circa 1990.
Back when Apple designed it, they found that 256 MB ROM chips were cheaper than the smaller chips required by the spec, so they used the larger chips. Since they had a lot of extra space in ROM, they put a stripped down version of System 6.
As someone else mentioned, booting the Classic while pressing x-o would result in it booting from ROM, the computer equivalent of wriggling your ears, I suppose. I had a Classic Mac my freshman year in college, and I confirmed that it would boot from ROM (it just indicated that the boot volume was "locked" and used the RAM disk icon for those that care).
The Macintosh Classic was the last Mac to use the 68000 processor and was designed to be a low cost version. It was later replaced by the Classic II, which ran the 68030 chip (the same as the Color Classic), as someone else in this thread alluded.
I was a little confused when I read the story (maybe they were trying to increase the hit count from Apple users that click on any story that mentions Apple, iMac, etc.)
I thought the iMac started the return of Apple doing their industrial design in-house. Jonathan Ive, who heads the group, has been doing some great stuff: the iMac, PowerBook G4, (illfated) Cube, G4 Power Mac, all great designs. Prior to that Apple used to hire outside companies to design their products.
This isn't the first time they've had someone take credit for Apple's in-house work. The original Mac was designed by someone within Apple, but FrogDesign has been taking credit for it ever since. If I remember correctly, it turns out that FrogDesign put together the design language for Apple's post Apple II products (namely the Apple IIc), but not for the Mac. Later on, the Mac was redone to take that language into account -- I believe it was started with the Mac SE. But the original toaster design was done by some guy at Apple who's name escapes me.
Before some moderator on crack gives you an "interesting" simply because you wrote a lot.
> Gil Amelio is the one who opened the door for the mac clones,
> he didn't close it.
A move which nearly bankrupted Apple. No matter what you think about cloning, it's typically not a good idea to do any moves which will bankrupt a company.
> A the time that Next was bought, it was no better suited
> to running MacOS apps than Be was, it was just cheaper.
NeXT was $425 million, Be wanted around $150 million, so clearly NeXT was more expensive, but it was a better value. Remember, at the time BeOS couldn't even print. Also Jean-Louis didn't want to sell Be to Apple, he wanted to license BeOS to Apple. He wanted Be to be the Microsoft to Apple's IBM. By buying NeXT, Apple got Jobs, Tevanian, and the NeXT crew. And being a user of Mac OS X, I'd say it ended up being a smart move.
As for the rest, it's just flamebait: you're ignoring Apple's successful profitable quarters, high inventory turnover, the fact that "monopoly" doesn't mean what you think it does, the fact that Apple dumped just about every non-standard hardware component to kill the not-invented-here problem, the fact that MS Office is profitable for MS, ... oh forget it.
I can't think of a better way to discuss the future of a company by asking a bunch of ex-employees!
> More important than your career or your pet
> peeve -- your family.
You may want to rethink that sentiment. No matter what your typical slashdot reader thinks, the word "family" doesn't include your computer.
Is it just me, or does Breathed come off as a bit of a jerk in that interview?
He started drawing poorly after Penguin Dreams, but he hit bottom by the end. Go back and look at your Happy Trails collection. Remove the booger jokes and the Donald Trump jokes, and you're left with nuthin'.
I remember when Microsoft used to pay college professors only $200 to talk about them.
Yeah, booting. Don't forget; we're talking about a Mac here, which has been able to boot from a CD, external FireWire drive, Zip drive, or whatever for about 10 years. The old Mac Classic could even boot from ROM (they had a complete version of the system software built onto ROM) for complete diskless operation. Thus the lack of a floppy for about 4 years.
Next project: take a new PowerBook G4, and remove all the innards and transplant them in an IBM PCjr case! That way you can get rid of the yucky titanium case and downright sickening 15.2" wide-aspect ratio screen. Cool!
You sound like a computer geek...go buy your GeForce3 and extra memory third party. It's easy enough to add this stuff to any Mac made in the last 10 years.
You're displaying a common misunderstanding about marketing -- things are generally priced based on what people will pay for them, not based on what they cost. Don't like it? Tough. That's capitalism.
Apple is charging you a premium for the convenience of buying it from them. They're not the only company that charges for the convenience: ever bought popcorn at the movies? Do you pay a 1000% markup on Coke at a fast food place? Did you know that most liquor companies bottle the exact same stuff in a generic bottle and sell it for half the price as a "house brand"? My company charges about $10k for a bottom of the line PC if you insist that we sell you one to go with our multi-million dollar telephone switch. And customers pay it, because it's simpler that way.
Same thing.
Hell, I've got karma to burn, so why not?
Something good could come out of that. Considering that the Supreme Court (according to the New York Times) ignored the fact that Bush used different qualifications for determining if a ballot was to be thrown out (the very basis of their "decision" against Gore), maybe this could be another reason to impeach the five members of the Supreme Court Maybe then we could all believe in democracy again.
I agree with Katz on this one. Jackie Chan's movies are always fun, and although I enjoyed Rush Hour 2, it wasn't as good as Rush Hour 1 or Rumble in Toronto -- I mean Rumble in the Bronx. In Rush Hour 1, the script was a little tighter and made a little more sense. Rumble in the Bronx had some of Jackie's best stunts, particularly in the gang fight scene with Stigmata by Ministry playing in the background.
Rush Hour 2 felt, well rushed, where the script needed a little more polishing. This makes sense because I heard that Chan wasn't happy with the results of the stunts in the movie. The first act was pretty painful, but the movie got better in Act 2 and 3. But the script could have benefited from a rewrite (or perhaps this was just an editing problem). What was the point of the "Snoopy tattoo"? Why did the customs agent say she got rid of Lee and Carter when she really sent them to find the plates? Why did Lee carry around his dad's badge all the time (he took it to the US on a spur of the moment trip with Carter)? Why did Ricky Tan look younger than Lee even though he used to be Lee's father's partner?
The movie was funny though. Chris Tucker was funny once again, and Jackie Chan still excels at physical comedy. Chan also gets bonus points for doing the incredible stunts himself -- which should embarrass American "action stars" like Swartzenegger, Willis, Stallone, Reeves, etc. In an industry where any person with access to a harness, a computer to digitally remove the harness, tons of explosives, and sunglasses can be called an action star, it's cool to see Jackie Chan do his own stunts and make them look breathtaking.
Just to save some time, I'm listing all the standard rebuttals that go with any Microsoft monopoly story. Please pick one:
( ) Oh, great, now every company is going to have to ask the government's permission before they add any new features
( ) Why does the government want to punish any company when they become successful? Sun, Netscape, Apple, Kodak, etc. are all just jealous of Microsoft's success
( ) If you don't like Windows, DON'T use it! It's not like their forcing you to use it
( ) I'm not a big Microsoft supporter or anything, but I like how they're giving me free stuff. Do we really want the government to force us to pay more for stuff Microsoft wants to give us for free?
( ) Oh, yeah, well Apple has a monopoly on PowerPC-based Macs as well. Try to buy a Mac without Apple's OS and see who REALLY has a monopoly
And to save time for the moderators, here are the mod points: Moderation totals: Troll=1, Flamebait=1, Redundant=1
On a completely unrelated note, remember the story that the LA Times reported back in 1998 where Microsoft "was secretly been planning a massive media campaign designed to influence state investigators by creating the appearance of a groundswell of public support for the company"? Every time I read the same tired arguments as above, I can't help but think about that story.
> Why has this story got a `compaq` icon?
Mine's showing the standard Microsoft/Borg icon. An icon which was funny when I first saw it, but becomes more appropriate with each passing day.
Just so we can all prepare for the next time this happens, what's the proper way to pronounce "IIS"?
( ) "aye-aye-ess"
( ) "two-ess"
( ) "aye-ayes"
( ) "aye-iz"
(Of course I don't know how to say it! I run Apache/Linux and Apache/Mac OS X.)
And it doesn't enable the Internet either.
I'm a little surprised a technical web site would fall for the pure marketing hype. Next we're going to have an article complaining that the Ultra SPARC IIIs run only at 900 MHz and can't play the new space cadet game. That is a fun game it wasnt free but it was worth the money.
That's basically it. MSN is allowed to get into the same agreements as AOL. But, Microsoft as a whole cannot use Windows as a leverage to push MSN. That's an illegal abuse of their monopoly
Clearly Microsoft either doesn't know how to get into agreements like this without illegally leveraging their monopoly or they don't care to. That makes them a weaker business because they don't know how to negotiate for both parties' mutual benefit without resorting to, "Do what we want or you can't sell you product with Windows." Breaking them up would force them to learn how to negotiate properly and would probably make them a better company in the long run.
This may seem a bit offtopic, but this reminds me of a boss I once had who didn't know how to get people to do what she wanted without threatening their jobs. It's important for a manager to be able to get their employees to do things not just because the manager is telling them to, but because it's to the mutual benefit of all parties involved. That's how the best work is done. For her, she couldn't do that. All she knew was, "Do as I say, or I'll fire you." No kidding. After she was promoted to my boss, she threatened to fire me every two days for things as silly as not helping her troubleshoot her computer. I and everyone else in her group quit (with others in the company threatening to quit if they were moved into her group) and she got demoted. But in Microsoft's case, they've got a monopoly and the other parties can't "quit" Microsoft. Can you imagine Compaq or Dell not selling Windows-based computers any more and staying in business for more than a month?
Quick! Name a company that manufactures small web cams!
Either you said "X10" or you thought "X10" and then tried to quickly come up with another company name because you hate X10's ads so much.
As the token slashdot reader who works in marketing (Technical Marketing to be precise, but the sleeze travels by osmosis), I want to weigh in here.
The point of advertising is name recognition, rather that to directly influence sales. That's the reason why it's so hard to quantify how successful an ad campaign has been: generally $x ad dollars does not equal $x increase in revenue. One can say that after an $x ad campaign went out, the company saw a $y increase in sales, but one cannot assume that the increase in sales was directly related to the ad campaign.
So the idea is to get you to think of the brand name when you think of a product type. X10 is successfully doing that, although I don't condone the method. So for every person that refuses to buy X10's product on principle, there's probably 3-4 people that will recognize the product name but will forget the annoying context.
Ads do work the way people think, assuming that the person thinking is a marketing person. You're right, Pepsi tastes better to you and no matter how Coke advertises you aren't going to switch (for me, it's the opposite, I prefer Coke, although I don't generally drink soft drinks). But taste is a psychological thing as well. Here's an example: have you ever taken a sip of something when you expected it to be something else? Maybe you were drinking Pepsi at a restaurant, but your waitperson gave you iced tea instead? That first taste is horrible because you were expecting Pepsi, but you got a completely different taste in your mouth.
Coke and Pepsi advertising are trying to get you to associate a particular taste with a feeling. Most people drink the soft drink that they're used to -- something they drank when they were young. It's the psychological aspect that the companies are trying to define for you.
The most important things to teach students about any subject is diversity. I can't believe how many college grads that I had to interview that thought they were good candidates because they knew all Microsoft stuff. I hired the one who had experience with at least three different environments, and could tell me the pros and cons of each. Give me someone who knows 10 years of A, and someone who knows 5 years of A and 5 years of B, and I'm more likely to hire the latter.
So I would pick at least O'reilly's "Unix in a Nutshell" so you always have your reference.
And then get "AppleDesign: The Works of the Apple Industrial Design Group" to remind you that computers should be more than boring boxes and uninspired designs.
How about getting your email address stuck on a forwarded joke or chain letter?
I used to get tons of jokes or chain letters forwarded to me (which I never read), but then I noticed I started getting spam in my private email account (I have a public account I use for emailing people I don't know, and a private one for people that I know). then I figured it out. If someone sends you a chain letter or joke forwarded to a bunch of people, and anyone on that list forwards it to someone else, before long you'll have a great source of email addresses. and good luck suggesting that they list addresses using BCC, instead of To. If you can't get them to stop sending you "fwd:fwd:funny joke", how are you going to get them to use BCC?
So not only are chain letters annoying and stupid, but they'll breed spam to boot.
in 1897 Representative T.I. Record introduced House Bill 246 suggesting three values for pi: 3.2, 4, and ~3.23. These three figures were based on the work of an amateur mathematician Edward Goodwin. The bill was quickly forwarded to the Committee on Swamp Lands (of course), which then forwarded it to the Committee on Education. This committee gave it a pass, where the House approved it unanimously. The bill made it to the Senate.
Before the Senate could make asses of themselves as well, a professor of mathematics at Purdue named C.A. Waldo, intervened, and it died an embarrassing death.
For a more humorous account, read Cecil Adam's account of this at the Straight Dope.
I'm sure he was accidentally shot, and then just left there to freeze for us to find him thousands of years later. "Whoops! Well, I'll get vindicated by somebody when the computer is invented," Og the killer caveman surely said.
If he were accidentally shot, don't you think the person who shot him would have carried him back to wherever? They did do burials back then. Even elephants bury their dead.
No, the only time you kill someone and leave 'em in a snowbank is because you're pretty sure the statute of limitations is longer than 5,000 years.
No, replace "automobile manufacturers" with "an automobile manufacturer with 95% market share and almost-exclusive bundling agreements with cities that any roads that are built can only have their cars driving on them", ad then you've got a pretty good analogy.
Throw in that this "automobile manufacturer" won't let you buy a car; you have to lease it from them on a yearly basis. Plus, they recently made it so that the radio in the car will only play radio stations that they own. To play others' radio stations, you can go to AutoZone and install a device in your car to play others radio stations, but studies have shown that most people who know nothing about cars won't bother to do this.
Make those changes, and then you've got a pretty good analogy.
Yeah, and Ford has a monopoly on all cars made with a "Ford" logo.
If Apple ever gets 95% of the computer market, then you can call them a monopoly, and we'll debate if they're abusing it.
But expanding the definition of monopoly to include any company that builds something unique is to render the word "monopoly" a useless word. A monopoly is defined as a commodity that is controlled by one party characterized such that the demand for the product is generally inflexible compared to price. As Apple-watchers know, the inexpensive iMac is why Apple is still making computers today. If they had stuck with their deal of making insanely expensive computers, everyone would have switched to PCs. The fact that Apple is constrained -- that is, cannot double the price of their computers and still maintain the same volume -- shows they don't have a monopoly.
It's been already been determined by legal experts that Microsoft has a monopoly, so I don't think that's up for discussion any longer.