Lemmings all jumping the shark...

Yeah, but what happens when everyone is jumping off the same cliff?

What do you do then?

You are left with few choices anymore except old versions that have been abandoned in favor of the new insanity.

Of course that leaves the new users in a bit of a pickle then because they aren't familiar with all of the old standbys like dfm or windowmaker and have to start sorting out this crap from scratch.

Macs? Yeah, I have a couple.

> What's more, it is trivial to configure each application

> to start in a different virtual screen to reduce the

> overlapping clutter of all applications on one desktop.

No. We've been there and done that and we're not impressed.

It's not enough to make it easy to merely jail your apps onto one desktop. You also need to be able to easily move them around. You also need to be able to have windows from the same app spread out across different desktops. Don't need to "configure" anything.

That's the 1994 level of X functionality.

MacOS still isn't there yet and has a really crappy switcher.

No backstabbing at Buzzards Nest

No. What Apple is pulling is a bit different. CD and DVD stores may be struggling these days but they still can buy product wholesale. They don't have to buy product at the same price that Apple gets to sell it on the iTunes store.

That's a considerable difference and not something to be casually glossed over.

Amazon does well as a web vendor either way. Spinny disks aren't really out of style quite yet.

Fanboy silliness.

...I am surprised that the silly fanboy didn't try to frame the act of subsidizing the sale of an Android phone as some sort of grave patent infringement. It would go better with the rest of the days nonsense.

Android phones are sold the way any other phones are including Apple and Nokia.

City Slickers and whatnot.

> When people on that benighted continent can display real guns,

You know, we have not yet quite eradicated all of the non-human animal species from the rest of this planet. You clueless city folk should contemplate that before you start whining about how well armed other parts of the planet are.

Boats straight to London.

This isn't much different than the situation you must have now. Electronics have to get off the boat sometime. Chances are that they are unloaded on the coast and take the rest of their journey by rail or by truck.

Certainly they've solved this problem by now as there are plenty of stores that aren't near the ocean.

Hardly a better mousetrap.

A Roku is cheap but remarkably limited.

Of course many people will flock to the cheapest option available regardless of quality or suitability.

The real problem with building a better mousetrap is that most people won't want to pay for it. It doesn't matter how good it is.

PC stores...

I dunno. Stores that sell PCs in general seem to have a bit less focus. The old school computer store is nowhere to be seen anymore. Mom and Pop speciality shops are getting harder to find. Most stores that do sell PCs anymore are more general purpose stores where PCs can kind of get lost in the corner somewhere.

A more specialized setup might not be such a bad idea actually. Hard to say if it would work out for PCs though with a similar setup to the Apple store since PCs have thinner margins.

The margins on Apple kit can absorb the absurd rents you pay in some malls.

Although such a concept might already be past it's time...

Silly, outdated, font fixations.

> I think you need your eyes checked, IE9 is crisp and clear on all my machines...

No. IE is simply not all that. It never was.

Steps back in amazement...

...as some poster makes a bunch of grand pronouncements without actually backing them up with any meaningful amount of detail.

...actually I wasn't really that amazed.

No less irrational than science in general

> Plain irrational - so if sometime in the future Apple came out with the device that best met your needs, was the right price and did exactly what you wanted you would NOT buy it 'just' because it was sold by Apple.

If you are a power user, there is really little chance of that ever happening.

Apple is Apple. They have been this way for over 20 years and if anything they are only getting WORSE rather than better. They're not very open. They don't play well with other people's data. They don't pay much attention to less casual users of any kind.

That is why I dumped my iPhone. It was a poor choice for non-trivial use of basic phone features. Trivial phone use cases were ignored and suitable mods were explicitly forbidden.

Delete Apps?

I have had apps mysteriously disappear from iDevices.

If you aren't in full control of the device, you aren't in full control of it. That's all there is to it. It doesn't matter who the Robber Baron in question is. It's a problem across the board.

It's a shame that most people are more like the audience from the 1984 commercial rather than the girl with the hammer.

The uber system

Considering that a lot of this problem stems from trying to take a problem that might have in other days been created as a more distributed system, sharding as a general approach may not be such a bad idea. You are trying to store the entire world in a relational database when degrees of separation limit relationships.

On the other hand, you have Zynga silliness that drives random connections between people across the planet. If the likes of Farmville didn't encourage everyone to have 10x the number of random "game friends" as real friends, the problem might be more manageable.

Microsoft is the great sand bagger.

> support for SSDs, better multi-threading support

Are you kidding? I was using both of these in 2001.

Why is Microsoft so g*d d*mned primitive that basic features that have been in other operating systems since the 90s are treated like some great new ephiphany?

Microsoft loves to hold back features so that you have to buy the next OS in order to get them.

Get "portable apps"

> Dear IT guys won't let me install a better viewer

Find a suitable app that doesn't require "installation". There are apps that have been specifically modified to get around this exact problem here.

Why not Win 3.1 then?

Windows 3.1 is a DOS shell.

XP is a version of NT.

Windows 7 is like BluRay. It's a product that represents a much smaller relative improvement than it's predecessor does. XP was the first consumer version of NT. The difference between it and it's predecessor was much more meaningful. (much like DVD)

It's not about naievely whining about age. It's about actually bothering to consider the characteristics of the products in question.

Plus, XP is really only as old as it's last service pack.

USB was in the dulldrums for a very long time.

USB was "dead" for a very long time even after Apple's alleged "intervention".

It was "dead" because it was new technology and it was trying to displace a lot of old technology.

It took awhile for USB vendors to figure out what to do with it and it also took a long time for related technologies to progress. In a lot of ways, many people haven't even gotten past those original basics. This is especially true of blithering Apple fanboys that try to give Apple Corp too much credit for USB.

USB didn't really take off until it was well supported by Windows.

All Apple's forcing the matter did was to make USB like ADB which is not saying much really.

Fanboy silliness.

If nothing succeeds like success, then Apple shouldn't need to bother with litigation.

They should just allow their product and their marketing team compete in the free market and let the customer decide what is really "superior".

The fact that they want to take choice away from us only shows us a fundemental lack of confidence in their own product.

Fanboy silliness.

> Regardless of who 'helped design' USB can you name a mainstream manufacturer who was installing USB as standard on their shipping products before Apple launched the iMac? Go on - name one.

Intel.

Intel was bundling USB ports on motherboards before fanboys thanked St. Steve for giving them no option except for a technology that had not fully matured yet. SCSI and ADB were perfectly fine. There was really no reason to discard them and force the issue.

Fanboys love to conflate "strip everything else out" with "being the first to offer".

The AIX admin from the alternate universe.

I wish AIX was like this. Really I do. That would mean that the AIX machines that I have been forced to use in the past would have been much more robust than they turned out in practice. Your description of AIX sounds like something out of an IBM ad rather than actual field experience.

The problem with "UNIX" is primarily that it is expensive and largely uneccessary.

The added expense of the hardware you're describing (above and beyond the mere garden variety Unix RISC servers) is why clustering has become popular in certain applications in recent years.

Linux, Sun & Oracle

Sun was the reference platform for Oracle for the longest time. Then it became Linux. The idea that you can't run your "mission critical" database on Linux is silly. So is the idea that corporations generally don't do this. It's the top Oracle platform for crying out loud.

Linux isn't just for appliances and hasn't been for quite a long time now.

Although companies are adverse to change. This is especially true of large companies. Although even these are and have been moving to Linux for "real work". The whole shenanigan with Sun and Oracle has probably even accelerated this. Then there's this whole nonsense with Itanium.

Silly fanboy excuses.

Yes. For many things I can and do notice the difference in network speed.

It's really easy to do if you bother to push the technology and try to get the most out of it.

Wireless is slow, unreliable, and insecure. With the exception of a marginal bit of convenience, it is clearly inferior to wired networking in every way.

Not everyone has a 80s approach to computing.

The right price...

At least as far as movies go, the prices continue to decline. BluRay disks can now be found in the same $5 bargain bins that have been full of DVDs for years.

The alternative...

> Yes, DRM is evil and I avoid it like the plague. The alternative

...is the last physical media format. It is both digital while being DRM free.

It also includes a physical token to establish and transfer ownership rights.

When would you not take advantage of the better option?

> How often do people even use Ethernet these days anyway?

When ever it's available.

If your device is not lame and intentionally crippled, why not take advantage of a Gigabit connection? You would have to be some sort of stupid fundie type person not to.

Using the best technology available and the highest quality components. Imagine that?

Gold plated latinum cables

Yeah, thunderbolt sounds impressive and all except for the $50 cables.

Vast majority of developers...

There is nvidia specific kit in the highend desktop computation market. These are expensive machines with multiple special purpose GPU cards. They utilize a proprietary nvidia API. However they are by no means general purpose machines. They are very specialized, much like a computing cluster.

This is a small niche. Seems to do well for particular problems. Not at all general purpose.

AMD seems to be trying to take that approach onto the desktop. Dunno if will really matter there though. Between Doom and XBMC, most people seem to be pretty well set with the current kit.

yah-de-yah

As long as it decodes blurays and flash video, I couldn't give a toss.

Playing the race card

> Would it be ok to charge black people more for car insurance because they were statistically a higher risk?

Using your postal code against you will cover that well enough.

A usb NIC dongle?

Besides being just plain ugly and not terribly portable, it's just plain slow.

A proper GigE card is one of the better interfaces for moving around lots of bulk. If you've got disks that are screamers, then you need interfaces to match. eSATA would also be handy.

USB anything holds out the slimmest prospects for keeping up with a really speedy SSD.

Except...

Except it is not really more. It's more about hype and conspicuous consumption more than anything else. You just want to show the world you've got money to burn.

I don't care about first year depreciation on computers or cars because I expect to keep and use both for long enough that neither has any "trade in value".

That's one thing that you can do when you "buy quality". You spend less over the long haul and the fact that you throw less stuff into landfills is just a nice hippie bonus.

No signatures with sprouts.

This is why all of my Spinach is now buttered London pub style now...

MS style English hijacking silliness.

No. It's MacOS. It's MacOS version 10.x.

...don't understand tech well enough to pick it apart.

>> You do realize that 10 years ago, you barely had USB support in Windows, you definately didn't support TRIM, SATA 2/3, PCIe, effective multi-cpu computing (no, most programs were, and some still are, single threaded), and Windows 2000 had a nasty 128GB(ish) hard drive limitation requiring <<

...it's funny that you mention these sorts of things since it's Macs mostly that are limited in this manner now. TRIM and SATA are both things that you can either take or leave. So is any form of internal expansion bus (esp. for a Mac). And "multi-cpu" computing only really requires a good OS level scheduler in order to get some benefit from. A lot of what you are whining about is really nothing to be fixated on. Certainly not worth limiting yourself in terms of upgrades.

I created my first fanboy style ugly cable octopus with such a machine.

...and I had a ~ 10 year old PC laptop that I put a 100G hard drive into. Was very effective thing for helping to improve the longevity of the thing (along with the memory upgrade). That machine is not far off of a modern netbook or macbook air really.

Whining about stuff that Apple does poorly anyway...

As far as the 128G limit goes, this is a silly thing to whine about since most Macs have rather meagre laptop drives anyways. This means that Macs always have a smaller hard drive than whatever is typical for any sort of PC. Been this way since the 68k days. Once you've booted the system, the BIOS likely doesn't matter so much anymore.

Hiding your gold...

Hiding your gold really doesn't really take much. Gold is something that goes for hundreds of dollars/pounds for a single OUNCE. You can have a volume of coins equal to the spare change in your pocket being worth the total life savings of a lot of people.

You can buy a rather respectable car for what a pound of gold is worth.

Metal coinage does include a premium however. Might not matter so much over the long term though.

Since Gold is a real thing, you don't have to entrust it to anyone else. You don't have to trust that the same financial institutions that have been running amok lately will properly look after your stuff.

Real Estate

> Property. Have you tried to sell anything for what it is supposed to be worth recently?

You don't sell it. You collect the rents.

Need tenants able to pay though...

Land and gold can both be held onto for as long as you like. At least land can generate passive income.

An inconvenient truth...

Of course there is something wrong with the Kindle.

The content is encumbered with DRM. It is tied to the device. An durable open standard that has endured for centuries is reduced to a fleeting single vendor standard.

It's the same problem as any content from iTunes that isn't music.

Darth Amadeus

> Hey, actors that are just chunks of dead plastic. Finally we have something that gives Mark Hamill a benchmark to compete against.

Cue the hysterical Mozart laugh...

Monopoly

> with all due respect, this is not monopoly behaviour.

Sure it is. It's the same process that allowed Microsoft to be bully OEM into doing it's bidding.

The main difference here is that is just a single company rather than a collection of them. In that respect it is WORSE because presents a smaller surface area for attack for any potential rival.

It also reduces choice in a more drastic and obvious way.

In that regard the whole "single vendro" thign may be less sustainable and ultimately better for the rest of us.

8 months?

How many apps do you have on your phone really? How many of those are payware? What's the average price of them?

It might add up to one Windows game or a single boxed set of a season of something from the BBC.

No. The kicker is all of your media files that previously came in industry standard formats that were not limited to a single hardware vendor. THAT is the stuff that ends up being an expensive pile of stuff that you don't want to buy again.

"Apps" are a distraction. They are probably an INTENTIONAL distraction.

Having a large library of single-vendor media content is a much bigger problem and one that certain people don't want the proles to wise up about.

unless you can find a converter program to convert them to mp3s

How about something that strips off the DRM like AnyDVD does for BluRay disks and mplayer does for DVDs?

Don't try to lie if you do it really badly.

> It's just the DRM protected TV episodes which don't.

Yes. In other words, anything meaningful in terms of content that is on iTunes that is not music is scrambled. Don't try to BS us. We can try this stuff out for ourselves you know.

It's a really incompetent lie you are trying to perpetrate.

Yeah... it's only the TV shows, or the movies, or the eBooks, or the audio books.

Borgia Pope

> Resurrecting the old DRM myth of iTunes lock-in in your

> title is just further nonsense. Apple clearly stated

Yes. This would be much like Steve Jobs complaining that a bunch of Playmates forced themselves on him when he visited the Playboy Mansion.

"Please Stop"

"I'm virtuous, really I am"

Jobs is about as virtuous as a Borgia pope.

Routing around censorship.

You don't need a "market" to sideload an app on Android. You can just use the development kit for that. Depending on what phone you have, that might just be the easiest approach anyways.

...a trolling we will go.

> But the truth is that a patent holder doesn't always know their patent is worthless until they test it in court.

I think you are giving the average patent troll far too much credit.

Yeah how about that Media Player...

> "How about a video player capable of MKV and FLV?"

My phone plays FLV with no problems with the stock player.

Dunno about MKVs as I don't have any.

Even without a special hand holding API, it should not be a big deal to have a better player that can separate video streams from normally unsupported containers and feed that into whatever hardware acceleration layer is available.

It's not the "media player framework", it's having suitably low level APIs that expose the available hardware acceleration.

This was Adobe's big problem on MacOS. When Apple did finally release a suitable API it still didn't support everything the hardware is capable of.

Fanboy silliness.

> A great many people want the Iphone but just cant afford it.

At least over here, the iPhone is subsidize EXACTLY the same way that Android is. It's also a similar price if you can't get the subsidized price for some reason. There really is ZERO reason to avoid buying an iPhone based on price.

The idea that anyone would buy an Android because they are cheap or because it is cheap is just nonsense.

This is just another iteration of the "Mac == BMW" nonsense.

... but you have to jump through hoops to find them!

My Android phone has a task manager that's easy to find in the Applications folder.

No "jumping through hoops" required.

It also has a services applet too. Although that's a little harder to find.

However, a simple "tidy things up" button would be generally more useful and usable. Even those of us that can jailbreak an iPhone and create a shell script to manipulate the SMS sqlite database would rather have a simple relevant utility preferably launched from a button rather than requiring one to open up a terminal shell.

bash on a smart phone just doesn't work that well.