Hehe, I think I really nailed it there! How he ever got started in the news business is beyond me. I suppose he might have had something credible to say once upon a time, when the world was young, back in 1986.
Ironically, getting fired from Microsoft might be the best thing that ever happened in that guy's life. I mean, just imagine how it must feel to work for a *bleep* like Steve Ballmer? To have a big, paranoid, evil corporation slowly eating away at your soul, eroding your mind and destroying your personal self? No money in the world is worth it. Really.
Well, cell phones have been stuck in a kind of cold war feature stand-off between Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and others for many years now, and while the phones have gotten more features and ever more buttons, they tend to be overly complex and buggy. I guess somewhere along the way, phone developers lost track of the users' needs and got bogged down in a Microsoft-like mindset of feature masturbation: to cram as many useless features and gadgets in there as possible. GUess what? People don't want more features. They want real usability, and those concepts are usually mutually exclusive, something the dominant players today will never understand. I hope the Android (and the iPhone SDK) will tackle this and not slowly fizzle out like the Palm OS, Symbian and Windows Mobile are doing. I hope Google et al can do this in a user-centric OS, and not create another feature hell and tarball of bugs. As we all know, the internets are just a series of tubes, and it's all about connecting the wires right...
I most definitely agree. I had a VCR made by Hitachi which lasted 12 years before I gave it away to a friend. It was still working flawlessly. As far as I know it still works fine. I think I used it almost every day since I first bought it. Indestructible! The two VCRs I bought later lasted a year each (a Sony and a Samsung). They don't make stuff the way they used to, because they are no longer manufactured in Japan. They are cobbled together by underpaid poor bastards in a horrible place in China.
That's a bad movie. Remember, I grew up in the 1980s. It sucked, I can tell you. In most of those 1980s nuke war movies there's the Black Scientist, usually played by Richard Pryor. He is of course a Computer Expert. So, he sits down in front of the Evil War Mainframe, made by Evil IBM or some such war-mongering manufacturer, and starts hitting random key combinations that look like real commands (the computer goes "Prrreeet prrreeeeet! DOES NOT COMPUTE: INSUFFICIENT DATA" or similar). And eventually, the guy saves the world and becomes a hero, of course.
I've had no problems at all so far. Except that I think Tiger had a much cleaner and slicker interface. I DON'T like the new dock and definitely NOT the translucent menu bar or the stupid side bar in the Finder windows. Horrible! The panels and windows are a darker grey, too. Those are NOT improvements. Tiger was so perfect... why did they have to change the UI? But, apart from those cosmetic issues: no technical problems. Works like a Swiss watch, is quick, and beautifully integrated with the hardware (a MacBook Pro). It really seems the guys at Apple know what they are are doing. I did an "archive and install" (so, so easy!) and all my apps work beautifully (and for some there are already minor updates available). Everything works as advertised, and it is definitely a nice, but by no means mandatory, upgrade. Apple, you did a great job on the nuts and bolts department, but the paint job is, well, blah.
This is debatable, since the Soviets apparently had no concrete plans to attack western Europe during the cold war at least not after the fall of Nikita Khrushchev. But the again I'm no expert o the subject. The Day after was communist propaganda? On what do you base this revelation? Maybe Jason Robards, Steve Guttenberg, John Lithgow and JoBeth Williams were all red commie bastards too?
That's really interesting. I remember how close we came to war a couple of times during the 1970s and 80s, and of course in the 50s and 60s. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bomber Command in Britain could have wiped out a large part of the USSR before the American bombers had reached their targets! But by this time the Soviets would probably have vaporized the German cities and it would have been to late anyway, because there would have been precious little to fight over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_bomber
The British developed their A and H bombs independently from the United States, since the US chose to ignore a technology sharing treaty the UK and US had after the war. The British got their super bomb working in the Grapple test series in 1957-58 after only nine (reasonably clean) tests. Pretty impressive, but it took all the might of the crumbling Empire to build it. They scrapped all the old bombers and battleships, and rather needlessly built THREE high-tech V bombers: the Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor. (And simultaneously an atomic submarine program.) They were super, but the sheer costs must have contributed to the collapse of the British Empire. See my sig, btw. Says it all. I've read lots of accounts from the Grapple series. Security was pretty good, but some people were rather close to the explosions. They were horrifies by the strange heat wave from the bombs and the super-intense flash! People who were facing away from the bomb and closed their eyes could see the bones inside their hands! How many of them contracted cancer and disorders nobody knows.
I recommend the TV movies "Threads" (Britain, 1984) or "The Day After" (US, 1983) to anyone who'd like to know what a real nuclear war would do to our so-called civilization. Literally, within a few months, and for 50 years or more, the world would be thrown into chaos and sink to the deepest point ever, much lower than the Dark Ages. "Threads" scared the living daylights out of me by being brutally, horrifically, intensely honest and realistic, so very, very far from the stupid and maddening Hollywood clichés.
When I was growing up in Europe in the early 1980s there was still a very real threat of a hot cold war. A nuclear stand-off. The US deployed Pershing II medium range ballistic missiles to counter a possible Soviet attack and the USSR deployed similar SS-20 or SS-21 missiles as a counter measure. There was only a five-minute warning... It was crazy and hellish.
I of course knew there would be responses like "Linux is not an operating system" etc. But while that may be technically correct, it does not matter to businesses. What large companies need, for several reasons, is a consistent and unified user interface on the surface and a standardized and truly universal operating system framework to support it. To be adopted by the business community, the various Linux distributions need to merge and form a strong alliance around ONE distribution, heralded buy large corporations such as IBM, Google, Sun and HP. (I hesitate to use Dell's name in that context, byt they need to be in the mix too.) Once that happens, the transition to secure computing will be possible. And I think we will see this happen in stages, starting with point of sale systems and the like.
Get it looked at by a good Mac technician. There could be something wrong with the power management unit (PMU). You could try resetting the PMU and see what happens! Check out this page:
Though I am a Mac user, I applaud the great work being done by the Linux guys. I want Linux to be a huge success and eventually replace Windows as the default platform in the world. Free and open software is a beautiful thing.
I haven't read TFA yet (I will), but what is missing in the Linux community is unity and standardization. It would be great if people could rally around a single distribution of a common software framework, so that there is consistency and compatibility between different distributions - or better yet - that a single major flavour of Linux that more or less replaces Windows.
I wonder, is that possible? A unified set of standards in the Linux world would give us reliable and secure computing, something that simply cannot be attained in the Windows world. Ease of use, stability, reliability, security and open source software, that's what needed to replace today's bloated and ridiculously insecure and unreliable Windows systems.
90 degrees C is pretty hot. Much too hot! My MBP is not that hot at all, but as a precaution, and to make my little workhorse happy, I use Cool Feet that increase the flow of air underneath the computer. Before that I used a pair or erasers! (Does the trick just as well.)
Apart from my buddy's MBP that was replaced, no. But AppleCare covers *everything* that is supplied with the computer: internal parts such as the hard drive or display, obviously, but also the battery and software. AppleCare is worth every penny.
In the case of my co-orker's MBP, the thing kept shutting down. It was a known issue, according to Apple, so they replaced it. It's no big deal for them. They *know* you will keep buying their stuff (computers, software, iPhones, iPods...), so they are more than happy to help you, provided it's a identifiable bug or manufacturing defect, not normal wear and tear.
The MPB 2.16 C2D I bought had a minute bulge on the front, just above the screen latch (locking mechanism). Apple not only decided they should fix it: they said "OK, it's DOA. You will get another one." Just for that little defect! (It could of course have been a more serious problem with the mechanism, I don't know.) The new one I got has a gorgeous glossy display, since I changed my mind about that.
Well, you could have it replaced. If you have AppleCare that is. A colleague of mine recently sent his first generation MBP back to Apple, and they replaced with a brand new MBP, of the latest model, nearly three years he had originally bought the computer.
I actually read TFA called "Leopard's Release Date a Serious Mistake". A few lines down the author puts it this way: "With all things considered, did Apple make a serious mistake by delaying Leopard's release until October? I don't think so." So what was the point of the article?
Well of course Apple did the right thing when they decided to release Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard when it was good and ready, and not in beta form as that other software house which will not be mentioned sometimes do with its operating systems.
I don't see why Apple should act in any other way but to keep pumping out super-solid software and hardware. (The iPhone was a particularly impressive release, but most Apple products nowadays are very carefully tested. A notable exception being the very first generation MacBook Pros some years ago which were very buggy, and in many cases treated as DOAs and promptly replaced by Apple.)
A thorougly scatterbrained and rambling article in other words.
Probably, since the internet is a big place. It's like this giant, crowded, noisy bar where people keep spilling each others' beer: "-Oh excuse me, mate!" "-You bastard, what did you do that for?" "-Sorry again." and so on.;)
Maybe we should get back to the main topic: Vista, apparently a software release that MS really screwed up. I feel sorry for anybody that's forced to use it. Will post some new experiences from it today in another thread.
Why so antagonistic? That's so out of place, and there's no need for that. I simply forgot about the Mac mini; we don't sell that many of them since we are mainly aimed at the pro market. No need to get rude and nasty, either. I don't wear a blue shirt with a yellow Best Buy logo. You really shouldn't readily categorize people or draw quick conclusions about them like that. I'm a professional and I do know what I am talking about, like most people on this forum. But you are right about the second bit: Apple loves to ditch old tech and introduce something new, and quite often ahead of the rest of the market, and so sometimes there are few peripherals available for that technology for some time.
You have a point. Apple should perhaps add a medium range, expandable, modular Mac in between the iMac and the Mac Pro. People have been bitching Apple about that for years now. But I think it is likely Apple have looked into that and determined that there is no place for such a machine. Why is that? Well, there are some clues...
60-70 percent of Apple's computer sales are laptops: Macbook and MacBook Pro machines. I know this because I work for a major reseller. The rest is Mac Pros and iMacs.
There are two main categories of customers: professionals (music makers, video editors, graphics people, programmers, architects, photographers) and home users (students, retired people, switchers, everybody else).
Desktop computing and laptops is the second division, which creates a matrix consisting of four parts: pro laptops (MacBook Pros), home laptops (MacBooks), pro desktop (Mac Pros) and home desktop (iMacs, and to a lesser extent, Mac minis).
People who need raw power will buy the Mac Pro, and it isn't very expensive for someone who's running a business. The iMac provides a lot of power and value for the home user. Also, there are BTO options when you order any Mac. You can add faster hard drives, graphics cards etc. So maybe there is no need for an intermediate machine, or at least not a market for it.
But yes, you are right: it's easier just to go with the herd, go to a large electronics warehouse and get some cheap Windows Vista laptop. I might do that too next time, to be honest, but I would wipe the hard drive at once and install Ubuntu or Debian. Much nicer and easier. I have personally no use for Windows.
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Hehe, I think I really nailed it there! How he ever got started in the news business is beyond me. I suppose he might have had something credible to say once upon a time, when the world was young, back in 1986.
It's racist. We prefer the terms "artificial person" or "android".
Ironically, getting fired from Microsoft might be the best thing that ever happened in that guy's life. I mean, just imagine how it must feel to work for a *bleep* like Steve Ballmer? To have a big, paranoid, evil corporation slowly eating away at your soul, eroding your mind and destroying your personal self? No money in the world is worth it. Really.
Oh yeah, I remember that incident. Somebody at Microsoft was fired for doing just that some five or six years ago.
Well, cell phones have been stuck in a kind of cold war feature stand-off between Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and others for many years now, and while the phones have gotten more features and ever more buttons, they tend to be overly complex and buggy. I guess somewhere along the way, phone developers lost track of the users' needs and got bogged down in a Microsoft-like mindset of feature masturbation: to cram as many useless features and gadgets in there as possible. GUess what? People don't want more features. They want real usability, and those concepts are usually mutually exclusive, something the dominant players today will never understand. I hope the Android (and the iPhone SDK) will tackle this and not slowly fizzle out like the Palm OS, Symbian and Windows Mobile are doing. I hope Google et al can do this in a user-centric OS, and not create another feature hell and tarball of bugs. As we all know, the internets are just a series of tubes, and it's all about connecting the wires right...
I most definitely agree. I had a VCR made by Hitachi which lasted 12 years before I gave it away to a friend. It was still working flawlessly. As far as I know it still works fine. I think I used it almost every day since I first bought it. Indestructible! The two VCRs I bought later lasted a year each (a Sony and a Samsung). They don't make stuff the way they used to, because they are no longer manufactured in Japan. They are cobbled together by underpaid poor bastards in a horrible place in China.
That's a bad movie. Remember, I grew up in the 1980s. It sucked, I can tell you. In most of those 1980s nuke war movies there's the Black Scientist, usually played by Richard Pryor. He is of course a Computer Expert. So, he sits down in front of the Evil War Mainframe, made by Evil IBM or some such war-mongering manufacturer, and starts hitting random key combinations that look like real commands (the computer goes "Prrreeet prrreeeeet! DOES NOT COMPUTE: INSUFFICIENT DATA" or similar). And eventually, the guy saves the world and becomes a hero, of course.
I've had no problems at all so far. Except that I think Tiger had a much cleaner and slicker interface. I DON'T like the new dock and definitely NOT the translucent menu bar or the stupid side bar in the Finder windows. Horrible! The panels and windows are a darker grey, too. Those are NOT improvements. Tiger was so perfect... why did they have to change the UI? But, apart from those cosmetic issues: no technical problems. Works like a Swiss watch, is quick, and beautifully integrated with the hardware (a MacBook Pro). It really seems the guys at Apple know what they are are doing. I did an "archive and install" (so, so easy!) and all my apps work beautifully (and for some there are already minor updates available). Everything works as advertised, and it is definitely a nice, but by no means mandatory, upgrade. Apple, you did a great job on the nuts and bolts department, but the paint job is, well, blah.
This is debatable, since the Soviets apparently had no concrete plans to attack western Europe during the cold war at least not after the fall of Nikita Khrushchev. But the again I'm no expert o the subject. The Day after was communist propaganda? On what do you base this revelation? Maybe Jason Robards, Steve Guttenberg, John Lithgow and JoBeth Williams were all red commie bastards too?
That's really interesting. I remember how close we came to war a couple of times during the 1970s and 80s, and of course in the 50s and 60s. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bomber Command in Britain could have wiped out a large part of the USSR before the American bombers had reached their targets! But by this time the Soviets would probably have vaporized the German cities and it would have been to late anyway, because there would have been precious little to fight over. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_bomber
The British developed their A and H bombs independently from the United States, since the US chose to ignore a technology sharing treaty the UK and US had after the war. The British got their super bomb working in the Grapple test series in 1957-58 after only nine (reasonably clean) tests. Pretty impressive, but it took all the might of the crumbling Empire to build it. They scrapped all the old bombers and battleships, and rather needlessly built THREE high-tech V bombers: the Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor. (And simultaneously an atomic submarine program.) They were super, but the sheer costs must have contributed to the collapse of the British Empire. See my sig, btw. Says it all. I've read lots of accounts from the Grapple series. Security was pretty good, but some people were rather close to the explosions. They were horrifies by the strange heat wave from the bombs and the super-intense flash! People who were facing away from the bomb and closed their eyes could see the bones inside their hands! How many of them contracted cancer and disorders nobody knows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
When I was growing up in Europe in the early 1980s there was still a very real threat of a hot cold war. A nuclear stand-off. The US deployed Pershing II medium range ballistic missiles to counter a possible Soviet attack and the USSR deployed similar SS-20 or SS-21 missiles as a counter measure. There was only a five-minute warning... It was crazy and hellish.
Nice sig! Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo!
I have never used an iPod under Linux. How is that done, if at all possible, since there is no version of iTunes for it?
I of course knew there would be responses like "Linux is not an operating system" etc. But while that may be technically correct, it does not matter to businesses. What large companies need, for several reasons, is a consistent and unified user interface on the surface and a standardized and truly universal operating system framework to support it. To be adopted by the business community, the various Linux distributions need to merge and form a strong alliance around ONE distribution, heralded buy large corporations such as IBM, Google, Sun and HP. (I hesitate to use Dell's name in that context, byt they need to be in the mix too.) Once that happens, the transition to secure computing will be possible. And I think we will see this happen in stages, starting with point of sale systems and the like.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319
Good luck!
I haven't read TFA yet (I will), but what is missing in the Linux community is unity and standardization. It would be great if people could rally around a single distribution of a common software framework, so that there is consistency and compatibility between different distributions - or better yet - that a single major flavour of Linux that more or less replaces Windows.
I wonder, is that possible? A unified set of standards in the Linux world would give us reliable and secure computing, something that simply cannot be attained in the Windows world. Ease of use, stability, reliability, security and open source software, that's what needed to replace today's bloated and ridiculously insecure and unreliable Windows systems.
http://www.laptopstuff.co.uk/p/Cool_Feet_Laptop_Stand.htm
In the case of my co-orker's MBP, the thing kept shutting down. It was a known issue, according to Apple, so they replaced it. It's no big deal for them. They *know* you will keep buying their stuff (computers, software, iPhones, iPods...), so they are more than happy to help you, provided it's a identifiable bug or manufacturing defect, not normal wear and tear.
The MPB 2.16 C2D I bought had a minute bulge on the front, just above the screen latch (locking mechanism). Apple not only decided they should fix it: they said "OK, it's DOA. You will get another one." Just for that little defect! (It could of course have been a more serious problem with the mechanism, I don't know.) The new one I got has a gorgeous glossy display, since I changed my mind about that.
We will promptly take care of those guys when the revolution comes. ;)
Well, you could have it replaced. If you have AppleCare that is. A colleague of mine recently sent his first generation MBP back to Apple, and they replaced with a brand new MBP, of the latest model, nearly three years he had originally bought the computer.
Well of course Apple did the right thing when they decided to release Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard when it was good and ready, and not in beta form as that other software house which will not be mentioned sometimes do with its operating systems.
I don't see why Apple should act in any other way but to keep pumping out super-solid software and hardware. (The iPhone was a particularly impressive release, but most Apple products nowadays are very carefully tested. A notable exception being the very first generation MacBook Pros some years ago which were very buggy, and in many cases treated as DOAs and promptly replaced by Apple.)
A thorougly scatterbrained and rambling article in other words.
Probably, since the internet is a big place. It's like this giant, crowded, noisy bar where people keep spilling each others' beer: "-Oh excuse me, mate!" "-You bastard, what did you do that for?" "-Sorry again." and so on. ;)
Maybe we should get back to the main topic: Vista, apparently a software release that MS really screwed up. I feel sorry for anybody that's forced to use it. Will post some new experiences from it today in another thread.
Why so antagonistic? That's so out of place, and there's no need for that. I simply forgot about the Mac mini; we don't sell that many of them since we are mainly aimed at the pro market. No need to get rude and nasty, either. I don't wear a blue shirt with a yellow Best Buy logo. You really shouldn't readily categorize people or draw quick conclusions about them like that. I'm a professional and I do know what I am talking about, like most people on this forum. But you are right about the second bit: Apple loves to ditch old tech and introduce something new, and quite often ahead of the rest of the market, and so sometimes there are few peripherals available for that technology for some time.
60-70 percent of Apple's computer sales are laptops: Macbook and MacBook Pro machines. I know this because I work for a major reseller. The rest is Mac Pros and iMacs.
There are two main categories of customers: professionals (music makers, video editors, graphics people, programmers, architects, photographers) and home users (students, retired people, switchers, everybody else).
Desktop computing and laptops is the second division, which creates a matrix consisting of four parts: pro laptops (MacBook Pros), home laptops (MacBooks), pro desktop (Mac Pros) and home desktop (iMacs, and to a lesser extent, Mac minis).
People who need raw power will buy the Mac Pro, and it isn't very expensive for someone who's running a business. The iMac provides a lot of power and value for the home user. Also, there are BTO options when you order any Mac. You can add faster hard drives, graphics cards etc. So maybe there is no need for an intermediate machine, or at least not a market for it.
But yes, you are right: it's easier just to go with the herd, go to a large electronics warehouse and get some cheap Windows Vista laptop. I might do that too next time, to be honest, but I would wipe the hard drive at once and install Ubuntu or Debian. Much nicer and easier. I have personally no use for Windows.