People are always so dismissive of any attempt to do things differently. For me that's one of the most mystifying human tendencies.
And (having spent all but the last 6 months of my life in Seattle) I can confirm that people from Seattle are even more resistant to change than anyone else. These are people who will complain to the city if their neigbor repaints a brown house gray.
The law doesn't help the disabled, it helps the enabled who happen to have on bigger disability: they're friends with those in office.
This may be true in the narrow context of your life, although probably less so than you think. But it's not true everywhere. I spent years in the transit industry, which is one of the places where ADA has caused the biggest changes. Today, pretty much all new transit vehicles are being ordered with automatic stop-announcement hardware (which comprises both illuminated signs for the deaf and voice recordings for the blind).
If you've ever listened to old-fashioned manual stop announcements on any system you can understand why this hardware has been a major help to disabled riders. And it only is being installed because of threats of lawsuits by disabled advocacy groups under the ADA.
The ADA has also precipitated, by itself, a shift to low-floor equipment for both bus and rail lines -- which benefits the elderly as well as the disabled -- and dramatically changed attitudes toward serving disabled customers in the transit industry as a whole.
In any case, why would the ADA change the price for building a ramp? It's still the same concrete and metal. And if the demand for ramps caused by the ADA is really that great, you'd think more ramp contractors would have shown up to at least partially offset the increased demand.
And it defeats the purpose of the law to say "the customers weren't complaining, so why should we comply?" The whole idea behind disability-law reform is to allow people to move and live independently, not at the mercy (i.e. pity) of bouncers (or relatives, or anyone else). If disabled customers can't get into a business without begging for help, and the business refuses to upgrade accordingly, the business should be shut down.
Something very similar happened in my Mom's condo, with two different 65W PowerBook power adapters. They would stop charging the 'Book whenever the paper shredder was turned on. In order to get them to work, they'd have to be plugged into a different circuit... then we could plug them back into the original circuit and they'd work OK until the next shredder use.
Ultimately, both of them quit working altogether. IANA[electrician] and she didn't feel like hiring one, so I just got her another adapter and she unplugs it before using the shredder. I'd love to hear someone explain well why this would happen, though.
You wouldn't get too many boxes this way... another example of Apple choosing non-brain-dead defaults.
Macs are set by default to automatically check for updates daily. They prompt the user, and then keep reminding him frequently if he declines to install, when they find an update. By the time you "reverse-engineer" the patch the vast majority of machines will be protected.
Yes, it's possible to attack Macs in a cornucopia of different ways. No, it's not this trivial.
If you want to be technical about it, that site is not for the party, it's for the party's U.S. House caucus. There is a corresponding site at housedemocrats.gov for the donkeys. Thus the sites can have the.gov address; they are in theory performing official business of the relevant representatives...
I always liked internal Mac design, but older Macs, although somewhat elegant on the inside, were very difficult to upgrade.
Understatement...
I still remember the afternoon (yes, afternoon) I spent upgrading the RAM on my PM 7100. The mobo was buried in the bottom of the case under a large number of non-easily-removable components. Eventually, I had to fully take apart the upper case (containing HD, floppy, CD-ROM and power supply) and have probably 30 pieces on the floor. Just to put two lousy 16MB SIMMs in.
And my next machine, a PM 8500, was not much better. Apple didn't get user upgradability religion, even for its pro machines, until very late in the game.
the original G4s (Yikes and Sawtooth), with the translucent-and-graphite case, were pretty quiet.
The later revisions, Quicksilver and the various Mirrored Drive Door machines, got progressively louder.
A dual-processor MDD ("wind tunnel") is way, way louder than a G5. A Quicksilver or single MDD is louder than a G5. A Yikes or Sawtooth is probably about the same, except that the optical drive in the G5 is louder because it's only hidden behind the Swiss-cheese front panel.
I have a dual 1.8GHz G5 and a cheap HP Athlon XP 2400+ box sitting here, both about 4' from my ears.
The dual G5 is quieter both at idle and, especially, under load, while the Athlon's CPU fan (one of three small fans in the box, including the power supply fan) throttles up to full power at about 20% CPU load and sounds like a jet on takeoff. There is no middle setting; the CPU fan is either on or off. The G5's (9, in my box) fans can ramp up gradually as the load increases; they only get loud if the thing uses both processors at 100% for more than about 10 minutes.
Unfortunately Apple didn't manage space as well as temperature. From the factory the huge and heavy PMG5 can only hold 2 hard disks. Although aftermarket chassis are available to mount more, they interfere with the airflow and make the CPU fans work much harder, from what I've heard.
Steve Jobs has cared about quiet since the first Mac. Remember all the overheated Mac Plus power supplies, and those aftermarket fans that sat on top of the machine? And then there was the Cube, and now the iMac G5, both of which have had cooling issues possibly related to the search for quiet.
I wonder if the poster complaining of his loud PowerMac actually has a PM G4. The later "Quicksilver" and Mirrored Drive Door models were the loudest products Apple has ever made. The overengineered PM G5 design was a direct response to overwhelming customer complaint about those machines.
Other than that, what is the point of running XP on a Mac/Intel box? To be cool?
I have a small apartment. My G5 tower and WinXP/Linux PC take up way too much of that small apartment. If I could get rid of the PC by getting a Mac that would natively run Windows and x86 Linux I would be a very happy person.
I am a "Machead", but not all software runs on a Mac... I probably spend 90% of my time on the G5 and 10% of my time on the x86 machine.
Actually, it's both. (Lower marketshare and a safer OS, that is.)
Just to name some of the obvious... OS X can't use ActiveX, it's actually useful when you run a non-administrator account, it doesn't come with Swiss-cheese services enabled by default, it doesn't automatically trust machines on its own subnet, and there's no real equivalent on it to VB scripting.
With that in mind, I absolutely agree that Mac users are too smug and that a dedicated malware author could bring many of us to our knees. (Hell, I run as administrator just to save time, despite knowing the risks. It's a gamble, although I keep good backups.) But an OS X (or Linux) malware author would have to be much more skilled than most Windows-targeting skript kiddies to do a lot of damage.
In today's real world, if you run a Mac (or Linux), you're going to suffer far less than your average Windows user. If you use an out-of-the-box Mac to do typical home-user tasks, which probably include visiting shady corners of the Internet, you won't have the spyware infestations you would with an out-of-the-box Windows box. And most of the routine worms out there have no effect on a Mac.
1. the PS3 comes out
2. they make a non-fragile laptop; their stuff is cool-looking but much easier to break than an iBook
3. people forget about the r00tk1t -- that made it into non-techy national news
4. they come out with *any* non-absurd music player
I was a huge Sony fan for many years. But they've really lost direction in EVERYTHING but game consoles; I'll believe they get it back when I see it.
Even so, I think Apple's stock may be overvalued. It's valued for explosive growth; I think steady growth is more likely.
Re:I thought iPod was the lesser player...
on
iPod Owners Not Thieves
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I use the format because it is of excellent quality, you can get the codecs for nothing (no licensing fees), you'll always be able to find some player or plugin to play it, and it does not have DRM.
Funny... those are the exact reasons I use Apple Lossless, and somehow it's a lot easier to find compatible high-quality players. Yes, I know Apple could theoretically decide to start charging for future codec software. If they do, which would be stupid on their part, I'll just reencode to AIFF using the last free version and then go encode to FLAC somewhere else.
And, anyway, why do we need lossless for portable players? So far, they don't hook up to SPDIF... their DACs and line-out amps are not of sufficient quality for the difference between lossless and 256Kbps {mp3,aac} to matter, and if they were, listening on the subway, the sidewalk or the airplane isn't going to reveal that.
(Funny exception: for some strange reason the lowly iPod shuffle seems to have audio componentry that far outclasses the other players out there. No one knows why.)
The 17" Powerbook, as an example, has the same number of pixels as the Mac 23" Cinema display, crammed into a much smaller space.
Not quite... the 17" HD PowerBook is 1680x1050, the same resolution as the 20" Cinema. The 23" Cinema is 1920x1200.
But your point still stands. Of course, the real answer isn't arbitrarily lowering the resolution and therefore the capability of our displays. It's in a truly resolution-independent user interface. Even though it would be gawdawfully unusable most of the time, there are still a few times when I would much rather have 1600x1200 on my 12" PowerBook.
OS makers know this. Expect to see such an interface on top of your favorite OS within a couple years. Many people are expecting it in Mac OS 10.5, for example.
The developer machines have BIOS... any word on whether the iMac/MacBook have EFI?
As much as I'd love a new thinner faster notebook, I can only really justify replacing my 12" 1.5GHz PB if I can also replace my Windows PC at the same time.
Still, I've probably already missed the boat to get one in a reasonable time frame, so I can wait...
... but when it is transfered to the iPod, it is converted to MP3. You can't move the MP3 back from the iPod easily, so that satisfies the basic requirement of the record companies.
To satisfy the *AA Apple would have to make it much harder to move songs off the iPod. Right now, you can easily access the entire filesystem from Terminal on a Mac or from the brain-dead Windows shell. That's too much even for the "we only care about inconveniencing legitimate users" industry groups.
You would need to build iPod handling into the OS at a relatively low level, so that to access the content one would have to either
hax0r the OS, or
find some way to read raw bits off the drive in the iPod from different hardware or another OS.
I chuckle at the idea of getting Microsoft (or even Apple, for that matter) to devote those kind of staff hours to iPod copy protection...
A few years ago someone mentioned that they had a light source behind their TV -- just a soft white light. In total darkness, the white light reduced eye tension as it allowed the eye to go from the bright TV to a gradient light to the dark wall, and it also increased the visible contrast of the TV.
So very true. Try it - it's amazing. Assuming your monitor isn't shoved all the way against the wall, put some kind of incandescent light behind it that will reflect off the walls around it.
For me, that gives me several extra hours of computing joy before my eyes die.
The other thing is: since I expect you're coding and working with lots of text, ditch your CRTs, use LCDs, make sure they're adjusted properly (if you're using analog inputs), and turn off anti-aliasing for small fonts. The sharpness makes an enormous difference.
And for whoever's sake make sure to turn on the light when it gets dark. The worst headaches I get are when I forget to do that and I'm suddenly sitting in a darkened room staring at 2 big monitors at full brightness.
I will buy an Intel Mac Mini the second the store is back up if it will run Windows and allow me to replace the ugly POS HP PC sitting next to my G5. (If I can triple-boot it with ordinary x86 Linux, so much the better...)
If it doesn't run Windows, it's not as compelling a purchase when I already have a G5 tower. I expect a lot of existing Macheads feel exactly the same way I do.
Never had a pixel die on me after the monitor was in my possession. (I've never dropped a monitor -- how do you do that, when it's just sitting on the desk? -- so YMMV.)
2 Apple 23" Cinemas - no dead pixels on either
1 Apple 15" PowerBook (1280x800) - no dead pixels
1 Apple 12" PowerBook (1024x768) - no dead pixels
1 Dell 14" (1280x1024) notebook - no dead pixels
1 old NEC 14" 1024x768 panel - no dead pixels, and backlight works after 9 years of everyday use
1 Samsung 193p (1280x1024) - 1 pixel with red element stuck off
1 POS Sony 17" panel (1280x1024) - 3 dead pixels, 1 with red element stuck on, 1 with blue element stuck off
... and a few others I no longer own, none as bad as that Sony.
Amelio didn't make great product decisions, and it certainly took Jobs, the iMac, etc. to get Apple back into public favor.
But Amelio, not Jobs, was the real financial savior of the company. When he was hired, there were going to be losses as far as the eye could see -- Apple really had not got its costs under control, and seemed to have no motivation to change old losing business practices such as custom-building all components and pricing without considering the rest of the market. Amelio, not Jobs, really got Apple to move toward industry-standard components and better inventory/distribution practices; Apple, while continuing to shrink, stopped losing money on his watch. It turned from Mercedes-Benz circa 1991 into Porsche circa 2004.
Like the other guy said, no Jobs without Amelio. I wish people would give him his due.
Jobs, for his part, is successful because he's a showman. People like entertainers, pure and simple. (That's why Paris is a mystery... she's not entertaining in any way...)
When a robber is taken off the street, the value of the pool of potential robbery victims goes up for those willing to assume the risk of robbing, creating a new incentive for people to start robbing. Robbers are hard to prosecute because most of them use assumed names, don't carry ID, and can easily fade into the background in a large city. Had we just allowed private security companies to market to potential victims, we'd be far better off now. I know it's difficult to think of prosecution as ineffectual in these matters, but when you evaluate the issues we'd be better off if the government didn't bother with robbery suspects.
My point? The flaw in your reasoning is that you're forcing individual victims to solve a problem that they shouldn't even have to worry about. The purpose of criminal punishment is not just economic -- it's to create the conditions of a civilized society by morally condemning certain conduct. We really wouldn't be better off individually hiring guards to protect against robbery, and we shouldn't have to individually spend our time and resources receiving and then deleting gigabytes of spam.
Slashdot Mirror
People are always so dismissive of any attempt to do things differently. For me that's one of the most mystifying human tendencies.
And (having spent all but the last 6 months of my life in Seattle) I can confirm that people from Seattle are even more resistant to change than anyone else. These are people who will complain to the city if their neigbor repaints a brown house gray.
This may be true in the narrow context of your life, although probably less so than you think. But it's not true everywhere. I spent years in the transit industry, which is one of the places where ADA has caused the biggest changes. Today, pretty much all new transit vehicles are being ordered with automatic stop-announcement hardware (which comprises both illuminated signs for the deaf and voice recordings for the blind).
If you've ever listened to old-fashioned manual stop announcements on any system you can understand why this hardware has been a major help to disabled riders. And it only is being installed because of threats of lawsuits by disabled advocacy groups under the ADA.
The ADA has also precipitated, by itself, a shift to low-floor equipment for both bus and rail lines -- which benefits the elderly as well as the disabled -- and dramatically changed attitudes toward serving disabled customers in the transit industry as a whole.
In any case, why would the ADA change the price for building a ramp? It's still the same concrete and metal. And if the demand for ramps caused by the ADA is really that great, you'd think more ramp contractors would have shown up to at least partially offset the increased demand.
And it defeats the purpose of the law to say "the customers weren't complaining, so why should we comply?" The whole idea behind disability-law reform is to allow people to move and live independently, not at the mercy (i.e. pity) of bouncers (or relatives, or anyone else). If disabled customers can't get into a business without begging for help, and the business refuses to upgrade accordingly, the business should be shut down.
Ultimately, both of them quit working altogether. IANA[electrician] and she didn't feel like hiring one, so I just got her another adapter and she unplugs it before using the shredder. I'd love to hear someone explain well why this would happen, though.
I don't know who modded you "troll"... I agree completely.
Macs are set by default to automatically check for updates daily. They prompt the user, and then keep reminding him frequently if he declines to install, when they find an update. By the time you "reverse-engineer" the patch the vast majority of machines will be protected.
Yes, it's possible to attack Macs in a cornucopia of different ways. No, it's not this trivial.
If you want to be technical about it, that site is not for the party, it's for the party's U.S. House caucus. There is a corresponding site at housedemocrats.gov for the donkeys. Thus the sites can have the .gov address; they are in theory performing official business of the relevant representatives...
Understatement...
I still remember the afternoon (yes, afternoon) I spent upgrading the RAM on my PM 7100. The mobo was buried in the bottom of the case under a large number of non-easily-removable components. Eventually, I had to fully take apart the upper case (containing HD, floppy, CD-ROM and power supply) and have probably 30 pieces on the floor. Just to put two lousy 16MB SIMMs in.
And my next machine, a PM 8500, was not much better. Apple didn't get user upgradability religion, even for its pro machines, until very late in the game.
the original G4s (Yikes and Sawtooth), with the translucent-and-graphite case, were pretty quiet.
The later revisions, Quicksilver and the various Mirrored Drive Door machines, got progressively louder.
A dual-processor MDD ("wind tunnel") is way, way louder than a G5. A Quicksilver or single MDD is louder than a G5. A Yikes or Sawtooth is probably about the same, except that the optical drive in the G5 is louder because it's only hidden behind the Swiss-cheese front panel.
The dual G5 is quieter both at idle and, especially, under load, while the Athlon's CPU fan (one of three small fans in the box, including the power supply fan) throttles up to full power at about 20% CPU load and sounds like a jet on takeoff. There is no middle setting; the CPU fan is either on or off. The G5's (9, in my box) fans can ramp up gradually as the load increases; they only get loud if the thing uses both processors at 100% for more than about 10 minutes.
Unfortunately Apple didn't manage space as well as temperature. From the factory the huge and heavy PMG5 can only hold 2 hard disks. Although aftermarket chassis are available to mount more, they interfere with the airflow and make the CPU fans work much harder, from what I've heard.
Steve Jobs has cared about quiet since the first Mac. Remember all the overheated Mac Plus power supplies, and those aftermarket fans that sat on top of the machine? And then there was the Cube, and now the iMac G5, both of which have had cooling issues possibly related to the search for quiet.
I wonder if the poster complaining of his loud PowerMac actually has a PM G4. The later "Quicksilver" and Mirrored Drive Door models were the loudest products Apple has ever made. The overengineered PM G5 design was a direct response to overwhelming customer complaint about those machines.
I have a small apartment. My G5 tower and WinXP/Linux PC take up way too much of that small apartment. If I could get rid of the PC by getting a Mac that would natively run Windows and x86 Linux I would be a very happy person.
I am a "Machead", but not all software runs on a Mac... I probably spend 90% of my time on the G5 and 10% of my time on the x86 machine.
Just to name some of the obvious... OS X can't use ActiveX, it's actually useful when you run a non-administrator account, it doesn't come with Swiss-cheese services enabled by default, it doesn't automatically trust machines on its own subnet, and there's no real equivalent on it to VB scripting.
With that in mind, I absolutely agree that Mac users are too smug and that a dedicated malware author could bring many of us to our knees. (Hell, I run as administrator just to save time, despite knowing the risks. It's a gamble, although I keep good backups.) But an OS X (or Linux) malware author would have to be much more skilled than most Windows-targeting skript kiddies to do a lot of damage.
In today's real world, if you run a Mac (or Linux), you're going to suffer far less than your average Windows user. If you use an out-of-the-box Mac to do typical home-user tasks, which probably include visiting shady corners of the Internet, you won't have the spyware infestations you would with an out-of-the-box Windows box. And most of the routine worms out there have no effect on a Mac.
Wake me up when
1. the PS3 comes out
2. they make a non-fragile laptop; their stuff is cool-looking but much easier to break than an iBook
3. people forget about the r00tk1t -- that made it into non-techy national news
4. they come out with *any* non-absurd music player
I was a huge Sony fan for many years. But they've really lost direction in EVERYTHING but game consoles; I'll believe they get it back when I see it.
Even so, I think Apple's stock may be overvalued. It's valued for explosive growth; I think steady growth is more likely.
Funny... those are the exact reasons I use Apple Lossless, and somehow it's a lot easier to find compatible high-quality players. Yes, I know Apple could theoretically decide to start charging for future codec software. If they do, which would be stupid on their part, I'll just reencode to AIFF using the last free version and then go encode to FLAC somewhere else.
And, anyway, why do we need lossless for portable players? So far, they don't hook up to SPDIF... their DACs and line-out amps are not of sufficient quality for the difference between lossless and 256Kbps {mp3,aac} to matter, and if they were, listening on the subway, the sidewalk or the airplane isn't going to reveal that.
(Funny exception: for some strange reason the lowly iPod shuffle seems to have audio componentry that far outclasses the other players out there. No one knows why.)
Not quite... the 17" HD PowerBook is 1680x1050, the same resolution as the 20" Cinema. The 23" Cinema is 1920x1200.
But your point still stands. Of course, the real answer isn't arbitrarily lowering the resolution and therefore the capability of our displays. It's in a truly resolution-independent user interface. Even though it would be gawdawfully unusable most of the time, there are still a few times when I would much rather have 1600x1200 on my 12" PowerBook.
OS makers know this. Expect to see such an interface on top of your favorite OS within a couple years. Many people are expecting it in Mac OS 10.5, for example.
Where were you at the last Steve Jobs dog and pony show? the top of the line is now a PPC PPC PPC PPC Mac. :)
...uh, so...
why hasn't anyone done it on laptops to date, if it didn't require any insight?
(honestly, I'm mystified about that myself, though.)
As much as I'd love a new thinner faster notebook, I can only really justify replacing my 12" 1.5GHz PB if I can also replace my Windows PC at the same time.
Still, I've probably already missed the boat to get one in a reasonable time frame, so I can wait...
To satisfy the *AA Apple would have to make it much harder to move songs off the iPod. Right now, you can easily access the entire filesystem from Terminal on a Mac or from the brain-dead Windows shell. That's too much even for the "we only care about inconveniencing legitimate users" industry groups.
You would need to build iPod handling into the OS at a relatively low level, so that to access the content one would have to either
hax0r the OS, or
find some way to read raw bits off the drive in the iPod from different hardware or another OS.
I chuckle at the idea of getting Microsoft (or even Apple, for that matter) to devote those kind of staff hours to iPod copy protection...
So very true. Try it - it's amazing. Assuming your monitor isn't shoved all the way against the wall, put some kind of incandescent light behind it that will reflect off the walls around it.
For me, that gives me several extra hours of computing joy before my eyes die.
The other thing is: since I expect you're coding and working with lots of text, ditch your CRTs, use LCDs, make sure they're adjusted properly (if you're using analog inputs), and turn off anti-aliasing for small fonts. The sharpness makes an enormous difference.
And for whoever's sake make sure to turn on the light when it gets dark. The worst headaches I get are when I forget to do that and I'm suddenly sitting in a darkened room staring at 2 big monitors at full brightness.
I will buy an Intel Mac Mini the second the store is back up if it will run Windows and allow me to replace the ugly POS HP PC sitting next to my G5. (If I can triple-boot it with ordinary x86 Linux, so much the better...)
If it doesn't run Windows, it's not as compelling a purchase when I already have a G5 tower. I expect a lot of existing Macheads feel exactly the same way I do.
120G, 5400rpm or
100G, 7200rpm.
Both are currently available in your 15" or 17" PowerBook -- standard in the 17" (your choice of which) or as BTO options in the 15".
I hope you don't want Apple to come out with a BrickBook big enough for a 3.5" drive (which would more than use up your extra battery anyway)?
(I'm all for thinner, by the way. I'm happy with 4 hours of battery, but I want lighter and cooler-looking.)
2 Apple 23" Cinemas - no dead pixels on either
1 Apple 15" PowerBook (1280x800) - no dead pixels
1 Apple 12" PowerBook (1024x768) - no dead pixels
1 Dell 14" (1280x1024) notebook - no dead pixels
1 old NEC 14" 1024x768 panel - no dead pixels, and backlight works after 9 years of everyday use
1 Samsung 193p (1280x1024) - 1 pixel with red element stuck off
1 POS Sony 17" panel (1280x1024) - 3 dead pixels, 1 with red element stuck on, 1 with blue element stuck off
... and a few others I no longer own, none as bad as that Sony.
Amelio didn't make great product decisions, and it certainly took Jobs, the iMac, etc. to get Apple back into public favor.
But Amelio, not Jobs, was the real financial savior of the company. When he was hired, there were going to be losses as far as the eye could see -- Apple really had not got its costs under control, and seemed to have no motivation to change old losing business practices such as custom-building all components and pricing without considering the rest of the market. Amelio, not Jobs, really got Apple to move toward industry-standard components and better inventory/distribution practices; Apple, while continuing to shrink, stopped losing money on his watch. It turned from Mercedes-Benz circa 1991 into Porsche circa 2004.
Like the other guy said, no Jobs without Amelio. I wish people would give him his due.
Jobs, for his part, is successful because he's a showman. People like entertainers, pure and simple. (That's why Paris is a mystery... she's not entertaining in any way...)
Yuk. Overcooked chicken. :6 How anyone thinks she's hot is beyond me.
My point? The flaw in your reasoning is that you're forcing individual victims to solve a problem that they shouldn't even have to worry about. The purpose of criminal punishment is not just economic -- it's to create the conditions of a civilized society by morally condemning certain conduct. We really wouldn't be better off individually hiring guards to protect against robbery, and we shouldn't have to individually spend our time and resources receiving and then deleting gigabytes of spam.