If you get your news from Time, then you are an idiot. Parts of Iraq may not be getting blasted, but the water will still give you dysentery, and the child mortality rates are still way above pre-1990 levels.
I agree - but that interaction is horribly overpriced. Let's say there are 450 class hours per year (15 cr. hr* 30wks) and you get 5 minutes of interaction per hour =37.5 hours per year. Round it up to 40, and assume $20,000 per year - that's $500 per hour. Even taking labs, libraries and grading papers into account, that interaction is still way overpriced.
But they get to define the terms, and they're always right, and it's never a two-way street.
Allowing a man personal time, doing housework, staying in shape, having regular no-strings sex and not using the courts to screw him to the wall when you decide you think you could do better - how many women don't fulfill these obligations and then come up with some rationalization to blame the husband anyway?
Had something similar happen to me that prevented cleaning out old IE browser cache from a previous XP install after a motherboard replacement. I had to not only take ownership and reset permissions of exch leaf directory individually, but also for some reason I had to reset auditing policies on each one, and even more inexplicably that only worked if the directory properties window was first closed and then reopened.
I actually have developed a method for creating highly calibrated, reference-grade stupidity under laboratory conditions. It may have commercial applications, so I won't divulge the details here.
For less demanding applications beer+TV usually works.
How are Mims' religious views relevant to this? It's more important that he has encouraged tens of thousands of people to do their own experiments and make their own scientific instruments. Mimms views on evolution are wrong, sure, but that does not affect his good scientific work in other fields.
Your first link claimed he hadn't changed anything in Mims' letter, but in fact cut an unspecified amount, likely the more cogent part. At any rate it all has no bearing on the case at hand. Attacking the messenger is not a valid tactic.
Your second link is an attempt at the old guilt-by-association argument - or perhaps even more tenuous. Something along the lines of "Al-jazeera reports on Bush and on al-Quaeda, therefore Bush is linked to Al-Quaeda"
Your third link is to a TV station whose idea of invesigative reporting goes no further than asking Pianka if he wanted to kill everybody and then taking everything he says as unvarnished truth.
Your fourth link is where you cribbed most of your post, and it is pure primate territorial display - "The wingnut echo chamber has recently gone insane..HOOT HOOT AAH AAH THUMPTHUMP... IDers hate our freedoms... HOOT!. It's like the green version of O'Reilly.
And here are a couple of first hand refutations in reply to that:
I took Evolutionary Ecology from Dr. Pianka a few years ago. He'd frequently get sidetracked onto:
1. Cool Australian lizards. 2. His buffalo. 3. How much he disliked his neighbors who kept killing rattlesnakes. 4. How some horrible disease is going to wipe out huge chunks of the population any year now, and how pleased he will be when that happens.
So, yep, sounds like Dr. Pianka to me. The quotes in the article all sound pretty familiar.
Posted by: Tiger Spot | April 2, 2006 09:18 PM
***
PZ,
when I was at SUNY Stony Brook, Pianka gave a similar talk where he said the same offensive crap. What Tiger Spot said sounds right, except we got the 45 minute version. My recollection is that it didn't go over very well. He does know his lizards however.
Posted by: Mike the Mad Biologist | April 2, 2006 09:44 PM
So no, Pianka isn't likely to spread a virus but he is looking forward to the deaths of billions of people.
"a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech [by Dr.Pianka] that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola."
Interestingly, the article exposing Pianka's genocidal ambitions was written by Forrest M. Mims III, the famous electronics education author, who apparently now is Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science and editor of The Citizen Scientist site of the Society for Amateur Scientists.
Right tail of raw scores is approximately log-normal or Pearson type IV- the higher you go the more the proportion of scorers is greater than the normal ditribution would predict.
The faith requirement is a peculiarity mostly of the big three religions - most traditional mythologies (pantheist, shamanist, animist etc.) as well as Buddhism don't think what a person believes is of much importance to gods or other higher entities, and logically, why should it be? It's a poor sort of truth that depends on whether you believe in it. At the same time the peculiar exclusive faith requirement helps to explain the exceptional memetic virulence of the big three religions.
$200/255gal = $0.78/gal for the methanol alone, so your $0.50-0.60/gal figure sounds a little suspicious. For non-waste oil, it's hard to find anything below $1.50, and then you need to figure labor and equipment plus road tax, so in the end it'll be close to $3.00/gal.
Convetional PV will never return the energy required to produce it, let alone make a profit. The dye PV work might change the cost equation, but it isn't quite ready yet.
Plants are quite cost and energy efficient solar to portable high-density-energy converters, despite the GP post's claim, and they work today. Nuclear is much better environmentally, but public opinion does not turn on a dime.
Quoting from David Korten's The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism (pp.185-6):
In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.
Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.
The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that
The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
While the GP was way over the top, the problem I have with Microsoft is precisely that it as a whole often does not try to serve its customers as well as it can but only as it is forced to. There are many excceptions , and certainly most of MS stuff is more usable than most aspects of Linux and FOSS, even if well short in impotant ways of some past and present commercial competitors.
Here are some reasons to ding MS:
No support or meaningful documentation with purchase
No guarantee of function or open disclosure of bugs
Onerous EULAs
File formats such a Word's designed for MS secrecy first and functionality second
Other tech decisions made to make the user's life harder or to to monkey-wrench the Windows computer industry [i.e. potential thieves / competitors]: in Win 3.1 one could just move a directory to move a program - ever since Win95 backups can't be relied upon and time-consuming reinstalls are needed. The aim was to reduce unlicensed software use, but mostly it just made life difficult. (and don't tell me the registry is anything like a real database, either). The recent "security patch" that breaks web applet function to avoid paying more royalties to Eolas is another such user/industry-interfering tactic. MS has a pretty well-founded reputation of screwing every partner they ever had, including all the MCPs with one-sided contracts and threats of rabid lawyers, if not outright fraud.
More pervasive intentional technical shortcomings include: no built-in OS scripting, search, encryption, secure delete, antivirus, anti-malware or automatic system maintenance worthy of the name, opaque OS operation, impossibility of troubleshooting leading to reinstalls, hardware-tied license reactivation, useless product key methods, secret APIs, embrace and extend tactics to kill real standards, important accessories written by 3rd-string programmers and never updated, and, of course, persistent mediocre taste and interface design sense.
"the install docs might not make much sense to you, but they'll get you to a perfectly functioning system even if you just follow the directions without any understanding at all."
And that and a windows box will let you get some actual work done.
Seriously, what distro actually gets your printers and scanners, cd burner, sound and networking right without endless screwing around, even for common hardware? Not just the theoretical capacity to use those things but actual usability and security? Hell, even configuring your screen resolution can be a huge hairy deal.
And even once you have done that, where is the documentation? Not just the documentation for the switches that no one ever uses, but how to actually do what most people want? You can't even search the documentation and the installation properly without a hell of a lot of experience with obsure command-line programs plus encylopedic knowledge of the crazy filesystem organization. Where are the docs, drives, drivers, devices, or program files? Which services are really needed for what? Where are the *#$%# config files and which #^%@! line in which one of them needs hand-twiddling this time? Deleting or moving or renaming foo can be epected to affect what? How can you tell for sure whether the shell command you spent a half-hour typing won't do something catastrophic? Which one of the 20 text editors [or program purporting to do whatever] in the default install sucks least? Proper answers to any of these questions are simply not to be found in the materials that new users can find easily, including available books, and without this knowledge linux is not merely usless to the newcomer but severely dangerious to his schedule, sanity and data.
You can't expect a user to have a clue about any of this after reading the install manual or even 95% of the introductory linux books out there. The same complaints cannot be thrown at real OSes such as Windows or Mac. They actually work, and the interfaces are not constructed by the autistic otaku code-monkeys that develop OSS, so most of the time no documentation is really required.
The Linux Fault Threshold is the point in any conversation about Linux at which your interlocutor stops talking about how your problem might be solved under Linux and starts talking about how it isn't Linux's fault that your problem cannot be solved under Linux. Half the time, the LFT is reached because there is genuinely no solution (or no solution has been developed yet), while half the time, the LFT is reached because your apologist has floundered way out of his depth in offering to help you and is bullshitting far beyond his actual knowledge base.
How did this get modded redundant? I'm not familiar with exim, but this "specify/document first" method seems like something that open source should adopt as a given.
I'll get flamed for saying it, but the real reason peole snap at people asking reasonable questions is that often there are no reasonable answers when it comes to open source problems. I've been using linux for nearly 10years and the quality level is almost always very low compared to anything, let alone the cheerleaders' hype. Here's a clue: if it requires four obscure command-line options, manually installing more services and editing config files to do something that a Mac can do out of the box, it isn't really working, even if it is in the FM, which it generally really isn't. It isn't that this is occasionally the situation, but every single time you want to do the least little thing in linux it takes hours of fucking around because the application developers are just totally incompetent wankers with delusions of competence.
Leaving aside the AMD part of the quesion, a mobile 64-bit uP would have been good for Apple. Apple will end up having G4, G5, 32-bit x86 and x64 versions all bundled in each application - they could have cut that down if the initial MacIntel models hadn't been 32-bit. 64-bit makes sense for people who are going to keep their computers for two or three years, too. It won't be long before >4GB is standard, even sooner for those running multiple OSes on VMs.
Check out the article. They did a wide variety of tests, both 32 and 64 bit, multithreaded different ways as well as single threaded, on a variety of applications compiled on both MS and Intel compilers and noted when the results seemed to favor the Duo a bit too much, for example when some 64 bit versions of software seemed slow. No set of benchmarks is going to be perfect, but at the end of the day, people actually want to use the chip and find out about how fast it will run their applications rather than argue about theoretical points of instruction scheduling and numbers of registers.
The Core Duo is a laptop chip. If you need a proper server or all-out FP number-cruncher it isn't your chip - but it really did amazingly well in these tests, not perceptably slower than the very fastest chips in many practical cases, and was reasonably good at everything. Once you factor in power per $ or per watt, the core duo has to be considered the best in the x86 domain for just about everything they tested. Even though processor power differences are really irrelevant for all but a few tasks these days, and even for those, a few % either way is usually imperceptable, I thought the article was interesting and worth reading.
Warning: PDF er..196 page PDF - the good stuff starts around p.68...what may well be the greatest microarchitecture ever...
400,000 discrete transistors - nothing micro about that architecture!;)
That would be what - maybe a die 0.3mm on a side today? maybe a bit over 1 mm**2 with all the memory? 65 nm process could give it a bit of a clock boost, too, I reckon. The hand laid-out traces on the circuit boards would still look better, though.
The heat on a MBP is all on the bottom toward the front of the laptop in a patch a couple inches on a side. It isn't really all that hot, either, unless you have that patch flat against your leg. It is hot enough that wearing shorts might be uncomfortable, though.
There's more to hardware than the motherboard, and even there I doubt I'll have the capacitor problems I've had on PCs with the MacBook Pro. The 2 Gz core duo is about the fastest thing you can put on your lap without burning your thighs; it is thin and has a reasonable battery life, too. But good industrial design is the very essence of hardware: the case quality, visible engineering, lid latch, keyboard and light, screen appearance, port placement, power adapter and cord and CD eject mechanism are all noticably better than on any Windows laptop. The aluminum is nearly fingerprint-proof. All the diferences are well thought out and helpful with the exception of the missing Firewire 800 (it has FW400) and PC card slot (it has some chewing-gum-size thing with few cards presently available), but I don't expect those two things will be a real problem.
The hardware is certainly well-engineered, but OSX is still the main attraction. It's just vastly nicer to use than Windows or Linux - and I say that not as a fanboy but as someone who after using 128 and 512k Macs and Lisas 1984-1990 went entirely to Windows (1991-___) as well as some Linux (1997-____).
The MacBook Pro actually leaves me feeling a little cold compared to the more durable plastic and lighter weight of the iBook, but as a sheer tool, there has never been anything quite at the uncompromising level of MacBook Pro.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get your news from Time, then you are an idiot. Parts of Iraq may not be getting blasted, but the water will still give you dysentery, and the child mortality rates are still way above pre-1990 levels.
I agree - but that interaction is horribly overpriced. Let's say there are 450 class hours per year (15 cr. hr* 30wks) and you get 5 minutes of interaction per hour =37.5 hours per year. Round it up to 40, and assume $20,000 per year - that's $500 per hour. Even taking labs, libraries and grading papers into account, that interaction is still way overpriced.
But they get to define the terms, and they're always right, and it's never a two-way street.
Allowing a man personal time, doing housework, staying in shape, having regular no-strings sex and not using the courts to screw him to the wall when you decide you think you could do better - how many women don't fulfill these obligations and then come up with some rationalization to blame the husband anyway?
Had something similar happen to me that prevented cleaning out old IE browser cache from a previous XP install after a motherboard replacement. I had to not only take ownership and reset permissions of exch leaf directory individually, but also for some reason I had to reset auditing policies on each one, and even more inexplicably that only worked if the directory properties window was first closed and then reopened.
I actually have developed a method for creating highly calibrated, reference-grade stupidity under laboratory conditions. It may have commercial applications, so I won't divulge the details here.
For less demanding applications beer+TV usually works.
Your first link claimed he hadn't changed anything in Mims' letter, but in fact cut an unspecified amount, likely the more cogent part. At any rate it all has no bearing on the case at hand. Attacking the messenger is not a valid tactic.
Your second link is an attempt at the old guilt-by-association argument - or perhaps even more tenuous. Something along the lines of "Al-jazeera reports on Bush and on al-Quaeda, therefore Bush is linked to Al-Quaeda"
Your third link is to a TV station whose idea of invesigative reporting goes no further than asking Pianka if he wanted to kill everybody and then taking everything he says as unvarnished truth.
Your fourth link is where you cribbed most of your post, and it is pure primate territorial display - "The wingnut echo chamber has recently gone insane
Here's a better link to someone proposing that Pinka didn't mean it:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/04/pianka
And here are a couple of first hand refutations in reply to that:
So no, Pianka isn't likely to spread a virus but he is looking forward to the deaths of billions of people.
Absolutely right. Windfarms are beautiful. Sublime, really - like 70-meter carbon-fiber prayer wheels.
Luddite Statists, to be more precise.
Who knows if they're Democrats? Greenies, just as likely.
there is a small but significant subset of environmentalists that literally wouldn't be happy until humans are extinct.
0 7/feature1p/index.html
Maybe not such a small segment - andd they may not be willing to wait for ordinary Malthusan consequenses to get rid of people.
Here's a recent article about Dr. Eric R. Pianka, University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Texas Academy of Science named as the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist for 2006: http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-
"a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech [by Dr.Pianka] that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola."
Interestingly, the article exposing Pianka's genocidal ambitions was written by Forrest M. Mims III, the famous electronics education author, who apparently now is Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science and editor of The Citizen Scientist site of the Society for Amateur Scientists.
Some suggestions:
Tell me about a time the system crushed your spirit and turned you into a bitter misanthrope.
Tell me about a time you overcame your bitter misanthropy and pretended to care about management's fad du jour.
What is the most entertaining pointed question you ever asked management in a meeting?
Have you played buzzword bingo?
Brainstorm how your diversity will synergize customer-focused quality transactions with our core competencies.
Tell me about a flawed evaluation metric [bingo!] you have seen and what it actually rewarded.
How do you prefer to procrastinate?
If you were to "sell out", how much would you want? No, really - how much?
Right tail of raw scores is approximately log-normal or Pearson type IV- the higher you go the more the proportion of scorers is greater than the normal ditribution would predict.
http://sweb.uky.edu/~jcscov0/ratioiq.htm
http://www.abelard.org/burt/burt-ie.asp
"religions insist you take things on faith"
The faith requirement is a peculiarity mostly of the big three religions - most traditional mythologies (pantheist, shamanist, animist etc.) as well as Buddhism don't think what a person believes is of much importance to gods or other higher entities, and logically, why should it be? It's a poor sort of truth that depends on whether you believe in it. At the same time the peculiar exclusive faith requirement helps to explain the exceptional memetic virulence of the big three religions.
"Six Sigma" - Say no more - you're doomed.
$200/255gal = $0.78/gal for the methanol alone, so your $0.50-0.60/gal figure sounds a little suspicious. For non-waste oil, it's hard to find anything below $1.50, and then you need to figure labor and equipment plus road tax, so in the end it'll be close to $3.00/gal.
Convetional PV will never return the energy required to produce it, let alone make a profit. The dye PV work might change the cost equation, but it isn't quite ready yet.
Plants are quite cost and energy efficient solar to portable high-density-energy converters, despite the GP post's claim, and they work today. Nuclear is much better environmentally, but public opinion does not turn on a dime.
Unfortunately, yes, they are. See http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.ht
"make a great product, make our customers happy"
While the GP was way over the top, the problem I have with Microsoft is precisely that it as a whole often does not try to serve its customers as well as it can but only as it is forced to. There are many excceptions , and certainly most of MS stuff is more usable than most aspects of Linux and FOSS, even if well short in impotant ways of some past and present commercial competitors.
Here are some reasons to ding MS:
No support or meaningful documentation with purchase
No guarantee of function or open disclosure of bugs
Onerous EULAs
File formats such a Word's designed for MS secrecy first and functionality second
Other tech decisions made to make the user's life harder or to to monkey-wrench the Windows computer industry [i.e. potential thieves / competitors]: in Win 3.1 one could just move a directory to move a program - ever since Win95 backups can't be relied upon and time-consuming reinstalls are needed. The aim was to reduce unlicensed software use, but mostly it just made life difficult. (and don't tell me the registry is anything like a real database, either). The recent "security patch" that breaks web applet function to avoid paying more royalties to Eolas is another such user/industry-interfering tactic. MS has a pretty well-founded reputation of screwing every partner they ever had, including all the MCPs with one-sided contracts and threats of rabid lawyers, if not outright fraud.
More pervasive intentional technical shortcomings include: no built-in OS scripting, search, encryption, secure delete, antivirus, anti-malware or automatic system maintenance worthy of the name, opaque OS operation, impossibility of troubleshooting leading to reinstalls, hardware-tied license reactivation, useless product key methods, secret APIs, embrace and extend tactics to kill real standards, important accessories written by 3rd-string programmers and never updated, and, of course, persistent mediocre taste and interface design sense.
"the install docs might not make much sense to you, but they'll get you to a perfectly functioning system even if you just follow the directions without any understanding at all."
And that and a windows box will let you get some actual work done.
Seriously, what distro actually gets your printers and scanners, cd burner, sound and networking right without endless screwing around, even for common hardware? Not just the theoretical capacity to use those things but actual usability and security? Hell, even configuring your screen resolution can be a huge hairy deal.
And even once you have done that, where is the documentation? Not just the documentation for the switches that no one ever uses, but how to actually do what most people want? You can't even search the documentation and the installation properly without a hell of a lot of experience with obsure command-line programs plus encylopedic knowledge of the crazy filesystem organization. Where are the docs, drives, drivers, devices, or program files? Which services are really needed for what? Where are the *#$%# config files and which #^%@! line in which one of them needs hand-twiddling this time? Deleting or moving or renaming foo can be epected to affect what? How can you tell for sure whether the shell command you spent a half-hour typing won't do something catastrophic? Which one of the 20 text editors [or program purporting to do whatever] in the default install sucks least? Proper answers to any of these questions are simply not to be found in the materials that new users can find easily, including available books, and without this knowledge linux is not merely usless to the newcomer but severely dangerious to his schedule, sanity and data.
You can't expect a user to have a clue about any of this after reading the install manual or even 95% of the introductory linux books out there. The same complaints cannot be thrown at real OSes such as Windows or Mac. They actually work, and the interfaces are not constructed by the autistic otaku code-monkeys that develop OSS, so most of the time no documentation is really required.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183505&
[continues with hilarious chat transcript]
How did this get modded redundant? I'm not familiar with exim, but this "specify/document first" method seems like something that open source should adopt as a given.
I'll get flamed for saying it, but the real reason peole snap at people asking reasonable questions is that often there are no reasonable answers when it comes to open source problems. I've been using linux for nearly 10years and the quality level is almost always very low compared to anything, let alone the cheerleaders' hype. Here's a clue: if it requires four obscure command-line options, manually installing more services and editing config files to do something that a Mac can do out of the box, it isn't really working, even if it is in the FM, which it generally really isn't. It isn't that this is occasionally the situation, but every single time you want to do the least little thing in linux it takes hours of fucking around because the application developers are just totally incompetent wankers with delusions of competence.
Leaving aside the AMD part of the quesion, a mobile 64-bit uP would have been good for Apple. Apple will end up having G4, G5, 32-bit x86 and x64 versions all bundled in each application - they could have cut that down if the initial MacIntel models hadn't been 32-bit. 64-bit makes sense for people who are going to keep their computers for two or three years, too. It won't be long before >4GB is standard, even sooner for those running multiple OSes on VMs.
Check out the article. They did a wide variety of tests, both 32 and 64 bit, multithreaded different ways as well as single threaded, on a variety of applications compiled on both MS and Intel compilers and noted when the results seemed to favor the Duo a bit too much, for example when some 64 bit versions of software seemed slow. No set of benchmarks is going to be perfect, but at the end of the day, people actually want to use the chip and find out about how fast it will run their applications rather than argue about theoretical points of instruction scheduling and numbers of registers.
The Core Duo is a laptop chip. If you need a proper server or all-out FP number-cruncher it isn't your chip - but it really did amazingly well in these tests, not perceptably slower than the very fastest chips in many practical cases, and was reasonably good at everything. Once you factor in power per $ or per watt, the core duo has to be considered the best in the x86 domain for just about everything they tested. Even though processor power differences are really irrelevant for all but a few tasks these days, and even for those, a few % either way is usually imperceptable, I thought the article was interesting and worth reading.
Warning: PDF ...what may well be the greatest microarchitecture ever...
;)
er..196 page PDF - the good stuff starts around p.68
400,000 discrete transistors - nothing micro about that architecture!
That would be what - maybe a die 0.3mm on a side today? maybe a bit over 1 mm**2 with all the memory? 65 nm process could give it a bit of a clock boost, too, I reckon. The hand laid-out traces on the circuit boards would still look better, though.
The heat on a MBP is all on the bottom toward the front of the laptop in a patch a couple inches on a side. It isn't really all that hot, either, unless you have that patch flat against your leg. It is hot enough that wearing shorts might be uncomfortable, though.
There's more to hardware than the motherboard, and even there I doubt I'll have the capacitor problems I've had on PCs with the MacBook Pro. The 2 Gz core duo is about the fastest thing you can put on your lap without burning your thighs; it is thin and has a reasonable battery life, too. But good industrial design is the very essence of hardware: the case quality, visible engineering, lid latch, keyboard and light, screen appearance, port placement, power adapter and cord and CD eject mechanism are all noticably better than on any Windows laptop. The aluminum is nearly fingerprint-proof. All the diferences are well thought out and helpful with the exception of the missing Firewire 800 (it has FW400) and PC card slot (it has some chewing-gum-size thing with few cards presently available), but I don't expect those two things will be a real problem.
The hardware is certainly well-engineered, but OSX is still the main attraction. It's just vastly nicer to use than Windows or Linux - and I say that not as a fanboy but as someone who after using 128 and 512k Macs and Lisas 1984-1990 went entirely to Windows (1991-___) as well as some Linux (1997-____).
The MacBook Pro actually leaves me feeling a little cold compared to the more durable plastic and lighter weight of the iBook, but as a sheer tool, there has never been anything quite at the uncompromising level of MacBook Pro.