The specs on the X-series are even better: real-world battery life up to nine hours(!), changeable battery, ports-a-plenty, and no 4200rpm hard "drive". The Air doesn't come close to competing, especially with its lardy footprint, which is bigger than the MacBook's.
My cupboard is not as pretty as a hand sculpted one but it is functionally equivalent, lasts long enough and is considerably cheaper. Yes, but Craigslist is not functionally equivalent to a newspaper. None of the services that cherry-pick newspaper revenue streams are. And your point about the loss of quality just backs up my contention that Craigslist is, er, lower quality than newspapers in key respects.
It's more than just a loss of quality we're facing, although that is a tragedy. It's that there is no good link between the demand of people for accountable public life and the supply of that accountability. We previously got round it with a trick -- using the demand for classified advertising and TV listings and crosswords and sports results etc etc to pay for the investigative journalism -- but that trick is breaking down.
There are a lot of people pretty chuffed with their horse-and-carriage-beaten-by-car analogy; nobody seems to notice that the replacement isn't better, it's *worse*. As a newspaper, Craiglist sucks. But it has taken over one of the key ways newspapers make money.
It's not a straightforward "outdated business model" this: the model's been outdated since the radio came along. Nobody needs to buy news: we're drowning in free news. But we do need to live in a society where politicians and the powerful are held to account, where corruption is exposed and so on. The best way we've seen so far for doing this is investigative journalism, which isn't cheap. In fact, journalism is incredibly expensive to create. There isn't a single newspaper website out there that can afford to pay for the cost of its journalism by itself; they rely on subsidy from their print operations.
A Free Press isn't free. It has just been our luck that newspapers could make enough money from small ads to pay for all the journalists without actually having to try and sell us the unsellable (news). That luck is running out.
Anyone who has ever had to make a cross platform GUI application that works identically on Linux, Mac, and Windows, can tell you what a nightmare it is. Even if you use a good cross platform toolkit like Qt or wxWidgets, the apps are still not *identical*.
And neither they should be, since the platforms have very different interfaces. Menubar at top, or in the window is just the start of it.
When people say "if X then X" they usually mean "if X, then X is what is important".
Yes, granted. In fact, if the OP had said "If it works, his opinions about Apple don't matter" or something similar, I wouldn't be complaining. I only *am* complaining because his next post got on his high horse about reading comprehension, when he himself can't string a logical sentence together.
Not that high, spelling-kid.
What I did assert is that his status as an Apple-hater has no bearing on the effectiveness of his hack.
Yes, and why did you think that was? Because if his hack exists, it exists. So if he has a hack, then he has a hack. And because he has the hack that he has, if he has the hack that he has, then even if he hates Apple, he still has the hack that he has.
Jesus, this place used to be full of tech types who were so up for precision in language that they'd never let something like "IF X then X" past. Tautology isn't being pedantic -- it's using words to say precisely nothing.
Either way -- your argument is still rubbish. Until such times as he releases a single concrete detail, we have an Apple hater who claims to have a hack. That has a bearing on the likelihood of there being an effective real hack. Sure, if he has a hack then his Apple-hate status doesn't matter; while it's all smoke and mirrors, that status very much does.
AC: Even after he pointed out your poor reading comprehension
He pointed out someone else's poor reading comprehension, numbnuts.
Well, yes, but you're taking the GP too literally. Given that he was joking, I don't think anybody is claiming marketing can *make* you do things. But in this sense, "make" means "the marketing had-done such-a-good job that although he had logical reservations I still found myself powerfully drawn to buy it".
But that's many more words, so "make" does just as well.
Only if people permit themselves to be deceived. All the advertising dollars in the world won't influence my decisions a whit. Why? Because they're MY DECISIONS, and I don't choose to allow the advertising to cloud my judgement.
If the advertising is good enough, you won't have a choice. Good advertising sneaks in at the subliminal level, the level of brand awareness. It piggybacks on our inbuilt peer-influence mechanisms and makes us look more favourably on things without consciously choosing too. This is instinct being played on, not logic.
It cracks me up how many logical people -- scientists and the like -- argue that they're not swayed by such things, when many studies show that they're just as susceptible as the rest of us (most of them are pay-for and not online, sadly).
<i>I absolutely will not agree that marketing "makes" anybody do anything. Will it influence them, if they permit it to? Absolutely. Will it make anybody do anything they weren't already predisposed to do? Absolutely not.</i>
I didn't say it would make them, but it can absolutely sway people into things they're not predisposed to. Look at fashion! How many people will look back in 20 years and go "I wore that? What was I thinking!?" (this, however, usually excludes scientists. nice jumpers, lads)
I just get so impatient with this notion that marketing makes people do things. It makes me tetchy.
You think a multi-billion dollar industry (advertising) exists... and yet achieves nothing? Of course marketing makes people buy things. Put an attractive member of the preferred sex beside teh shiny shiny object and suddenly someone will want to buy it. This is not rocket science, it's basic humanity.
They sacrificed function for form in DVD Player. In early versions you could scan forward at various speeds, depending on how many times you pressed the scan button. But the UI wasn't great, so they simply locked it to 4X. Boo.
Good comment. Bar one thing: Apple was always the darling of the DTP mavens even when it lagged in power compared to Wintel and less expensive Wintel apps had more and better features than Photoshop.
What apps are these then? Unless you mean something like "Quake let you shoot things better than Photoshop," you're wrong. There's a reason Photoshop is peerless.
The "darling" thing, btw, came about because cost-to-switch is all in DTP, and X-Fancy-Feature is meaningless if it doesn't work on yr existing kit. That's why we're still using QXP 3.3 at my work.
YES! I did exactly the same thing (god this is sad) in the local Waterstones. From the first time I saw a NeXT brochure (which I still have) I wanted one of those things. Now, with Tiger finally adding the dictionary, I almost have one, apart from the complete works of Shakespeare, Digital Librarian, voice notes on email And Improv.
Can we please differentiate between a vulnerability and an exploit? Mac OS X has no exploits (aside from proof-of-concepts). It has had vulnerabilites, including some serious ones, but *not one* has turned into an exploit.
That makes how many have been reported compared to Windows utterly irrelevant.
And all that talk about "but windows has more users so it gets viruses written" is horseshit too. Why do people write viruses, for notoriety, right? Well remember the noise that surrounded the discovery of a simple vulnerability in Mac OS X? Can you image the fame that would surround the writer of the first OS X virus? It would be *huge*.
Finally, even if that supposition were true, wouldn't it still be better to be on OS X? There's no way it'll ever get to 98% marketshare, so it'll always be safer by that logic.
well, Jaguar was never sold as Jaguar in the UK (it had the print on the box, but in all branding it was Mac OS X 10.2) because of a complaint from Jaguar cars.
I'm not sure why nobody's picked up on this yet, probably the horrible must-work-in-a-ssh mentality. Sure, people who can ssh in can use man -k. But for the rest of us, typing in an xterm or similar, the original Mac programming environment - mpw - had the best method by far of helping someone on the command line.
It was called Commando, and if you couldn't remember a command's options, you could type it, press apple-enter (IIRC)... and a dialog box popped up with full-on gui goodness to let you enter the command. While you were chaning the options, it wrote and rewrote the exact command line you had to use in a pane at the bottom of the window. Genius.
the Audi A2 pretty much has it's hood welded shut - it's impossible to get in there, you just flip down a little panel for access to oil and water. And the MG TF - you can only get to the engine when the car's on a ramp. And the Mercedes A-class has the engine under the floor.
It's not new, really.
And the water/petrol problem isn't really a biggie. What happens when you fill up in the rain? A lot of tanks have a degree of water in there, don't sweat it. Petrol in the water would be bad, but since the nozzle will be larger, it shouldn't be a biggie.
We have batteries and accessories for your Google's Bigger Index. Buy now from our extensive selection of Google's Bigger Index, and when you buy your Google's Bigger Index you get free shipping. Buy now. Google's Bigger Index.
Balloon Help was a fantastic invention, badly served by those who misunderstood its true value.
Brain-dead balloons like those now served by tooltips (This is your hard disk. This is a window. This saves your work) might have been OK for Grandma, but were of no use to the power user and weren't the real advantage.
What was of use to the power user was the fact that it gave stateful feedback in a stateless environment. Like say the button to add a new File sharing user was greyed out. You couldn't click it, and there's no obvious reason why. Balloon Help on, mouse over... "You cannot add a user now because File Sharing is not turned on. Turn it on in the Chooser" or the like.
Gave you the feedback of CLi-style error messages with the do-anything statelessness of GUI. I miss it.
I wonder if brushed metal actually has nothing to do with the various explanations Apple has given for it - for "real devices" etc - and a lot to do with cross-platform.
iTunes looks identical to the mac version, almost, and that's a Good Thing. Quicktime was the first cross-platform windows app of note, and it's... brushed metal. Hm.
Got to wonder if Apple has a cross-platform plan, even if only a big-disaster-become-softco one, or one for apps with revenue streams a la ITMS. iPhoto's brushed metal, and it has a revenue stream. Safari and iMovie don't, but Safari at least could conceivably be released for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
The specs on the X-series are even better: real-world battery life up to nine hours(!), changeable battery, ports-a-plenty, and no 4200rpm hard "drive". The Air doesn't come close to competing, especially with its lardy footprint, which is bigger than the MacBook's.
My cupboard is not as pretty as a hand sculpted one but it is functionally equivalent, lasts long enough and is considerably cheaper.
Yes, but Craigslist is not functionally equivalent to a newspaper. None of the services that cherry-pick newspaper revenue streams are. And your point about the loss of quality just backs up my contention that Craigslist is, er, lower quality than newspapers in key respects.
It's more than just a loss of quality we're facing, although that is a tragedy. It's that there is no good link between the demand of people for accountable public life and the supply of that accountability. We previously got round it with a trick -- using the demand for classified advertising and TV listings and crosswords and sports results etc etc to pay for the investigative journalism -- but that trick is breaking down.
There are a lot of people pretty chuffed with their horse-and-carriage-beaten-by-car analogy; nobody seems to notice that the replacement isn't better, it's *worse*. As a newspaper, Craiglist sucks. But it has taken over one of the key ways newspapers make money.
It's not a straightforward "outdated business model" this: the model's been outdated since the radio came along. Nobody needs to buy news: we're drowning in free news. But we do need to live in a society where politicians and the powerful are held to account, where corruption is exposed and so on. The best way we've seen so far for doing this is investigative journalism, which isn't cheap. In fact, journalism is incredibly expensive to create. There isn't a single newspaper website out there that can afford to pay for the cost of its journalism by itself; they rely on subsidy from their print operations.
A Free Press isn't free. It has just been our luck that newspapers could make enough money from small ads to pay for all the journalists without actually having to try and sell us the unsellable (news). That luck is running out.
Anyone who has ever had to make a cross platform GUI application that works identically on Linux, Mac, and Windows, can tell you what a nightmare it is. Even if you use a good cross platform toolkit like Qt or wxWidgets, the apps are still not *identical*.
And neither they should be, since the platforms have very different interfaces. Menubar at top, or in the window is just the start of it.
When people say "if X then X" they usually mean "if X, then X is what is important".
Yes, granted. In fact, if the OP had said "If it works, his opinions about Apple don't matter" or something similar, I wouldn't be complaining. I only *am* complaining because his next post got on his high horse about reading comprehension, when he himself can't string a logical sentence together.
Not that high, spelling-kid. What I did assert is that his status as an Apple-hater has no bearing on the effectiveness of his hack.
Yes, and why did you think that was? Because if his hack exists, it exists. So if he has a hack, then he has a hack. And because he has the hack that he has, if he has the hack that he has, then even if he hates Apple, he still has the hack that he has.
Jesus, this place used to be full of tech types who were so up for precision in language that they'd never let something like "IF X then X" past. Tautology isn't being pedantic -- it's using words to say precisely nothing.
Either way -- your argument is still rubbish. Until such times as he releases a single concrete detail, we have an Apple hater who claims to have a hack. That has a bearing on the likelihood of there being an effective real hack. Sure, if he has a hack then his Apple-hate status doesn't matter; while it's all smoke and mirrors, that status very much does.
AC: Even after he pointed out your poor reading comprehension
He pointed out someone else's poor reading comprehension, numbnuts.
" If his hack works, it works."
And? Tautology is all very nice, but it doesn't actually mean anything. What were your marks for writing in school?
Oops:
"the marketing had done such a good job that although I had logical reservations I still found myself powerfully drawn to buy it"
"Marketing made me do it" is a cop out.
Well, yes, but you're taking the GP too literally. Given that he was joking, I don't think anybody is claiming marketing can *make* you do things. But in this sense, "make" means "the marketing had-done such-a-good job that although he had logical reservations I still found myself powerfully drawn to buy it".
But that's many more words, so "make" does just as well.
Only if people permit themselves to be deceived. All the advertising dollars in the world won't influence my decisions a whit. Why? Because they're MY DECISIONS, and I don't choose to allow the advertising to cloud my judgement.
If the advertising is good enough, you won't have a choice. Good advertising sneaks in at the subliminal level, the level of brand awareness. It piggybacks on our inbuilt peer-influence mechanisms and makes us look more favourably on things without consciously choosing too. This is instinct being played on, not logic.
It cracks me up how many logical people -- scientists and the like -- argue that they're not swayed by such things, when many studies show that they're just as susceptible as the rest of us (most of them are pay-for and not online, sadly).
<i>I absolutely will not agree that marketing "makes" anybody do anything. Will it influence them, if they permit it to? Absolutely. Will it make anybody do anything they weren't already predisposed to do? Absolutely not.</i>
I didn't say it would make them, but it can absolutely sway people into things they're not predisposed to. Look at fashion! How many people will look back in 20 years and go "I wore that? What was I thinking!?" (this, however, usually excludes scientists. nice jumpers, lads)
I just get so impatient with this notion that marketing makes people do things. It makes me tetchy.
... and yet achieves nothing? Of course marketing makes people buy things. Put an attractive member of the preferred sex beside teh shiny shiny object and suddenly someone will want to buy it. This is not rocket science, it's basic humanity.
You think a multi-billion dollar industry (advertising) exists
They sacrificed function for form in DVD Player. In early versions you could scan forward at various speeds, depending on how many times you pressed the scan button. But the UI wasn't great, so they simply locked it to 4X. Boo.
Good comment. Bar one thing:
Apple was always the darling of the DTP mavens even when it lagged in power compared to Wintel and less expensive Wintel apps had more and better features than Photoshop.
What apps are these then? Unless you mean something like "Quake let you shoot things better than Photoshop," you're wrong. There's a reason Photoshop is peerless.
The "darling" thing, btw, came about because cost-to-switch is all in DTP, and X-Fancy-Feature is meaningless if it doesn't work on yr existing kit. That's why we're still using QXP 3.3 at my work.
YES! I did exactly the same thing (god this is sad) in the local Waterstones. From the first time I saw a NeXT brochure (which I still have) I wanted one of those things. Now, with Tiger finally adding the dictionary, I almost have one, apart from the complete works of Shakespeare, Digital Librarian, voice notes on email And Improv.
Thanks for the NeXTBook, really.
That, sir, was either SGI's IRIX or NeXT's NeXTStep.
... and who do you think started NeXT (clue: He'd just been ousted from Apple at the time)
Can we please differentiate between a vulnerability and an exploit? Mac OS X has no exploits (aside from proof-of-concepts). It has had vulnerabilites, including some serious ones, but *not one* has turned into an exploit.
That makes how many have been reported compared to Windows utterly irrelevant.
And all that talk about "but windows has more users so it gets viruses written" is horseshit too. Why do people write viruses, for notoriety, right? Well remember the noise that surrounded the discovery of a simple vulnerability in Mac OS X? Can you image the fame that would surround the writer of the first OS X virus? It would be *huge*.
Finally, even if that supposition were true, wouldn't it still be better to be on OS X? There's no way it'll ever get to 98% marketshare, so it'll always be safer by that logic.
well, Jaguar was never sold as Jaguar in the UK (it had the print on the box, but in all branding it was Mac OS X 10.2) because of a complaint from Jaguar cars.
Hey, BJH - any interest in selling one of those PC110s? I'm looking for one, and they're hard to find.
(Would've emailed, but your address isn't public)
Funny how things let out into the wild can include unintended information.
/. see them? Eugh.
I mean, I guess it's cool to have your lady's[1] boobies on your arty photo website, but to have all
[1] Or at least, your favourite model's
I'm not sure why nobody's picked up on this yet, probably the horrible must-work-in-a-ssh mentality. Sure, people who can ssh in can use man -k. But for the rest of us, typing in an xterm or similar, the original Mac programming environment - mpw - had the best method by far of helping someone on the command line.
... and a dialog box popped up with full-on gui goodness to let you enter the command. While you were chaning the options, it wrote and rewrote the exact command line you had to use in a pane at the bottom of the window. Genius.
It was called Commando, and if you couldn't remember a command's options, you could type it, press apple-enter (IIRC)
the Audi A2 pretty much has it's hood welded shut - it's impossible to get in there, you just flip down a little panel for access to oil and water. And the MG TF - you can only get to the engine when the car's on a ramp. And the Mercedes A-class has the engine under the floor.
It's not new, really.
And the water/petrol problem isn't really a biggie. What happens when you fill up in the rain? A lot of tanks have a degree of water in there, don't sweat it. Petrol in the water would be bad, but since the nozzle will be larger, it shouldn't be a biggie.
We have batteries and accessories for your Google's Bigger Index. Buy now from our extensive selection of Google's Bigger Index, and when you buy your Google's Bigger Index you get free shipping. Buy now. Google's Bigger Index.
God, google sucks nowadays.
That's the single funniest department tag I've ever seen on any /. story. Evar.
Balloon Help was a fantastic invention, badly served by those who misunderstood its true value.
... "You cannot add a user now because File Sharing is not turned on. Turn it on in the Chooser" or the like.
Brain-dead balloons like those now served by tooltips (This is your hard disk. This is a window. This saves your work) might have been OK for Grandma, but were of no use to the power user and weren't the real advantage.
What was of use to the power user was the fact that it gave stateful feedback in a stateless environment. Like say the button to add a new File sharing user was greyed out. You couldn't click it, and there's no obvious reason why. Balloon Help on, mouse over
Gave you the feedback of CLi-style error messages with the do-anything statelessness of GUI. I miss it.
I wonder if brushed metal actually has nothing to do with the various explanations Apple has given for it - for "real devices" etc - and a lot to do with cross-platform.
... brushed metal. Hm.
iTunes looks identical to the mac version, almost, and that's a Good Thing. Quicktime was the first cross-platform windows app of note, and it's
Got to wonder if Apple has a cross-platform plan, even if only a big-disaster-become-softco one, or one for apps with revenue streams a la ITMS. iPhoto's brushed metal, and it has a revenue stream. Safari and iMovie don't, but Safari at least could conceivably be released for Windows.