More precisely...

> Exactly. #

>>

>> We're not designed.

A goat or a cow or even a pig can live off of things we cannot.

If your back garden is big enough, it's more than enough to sustain a cow. You can't say the same for yourself.

If you engage in clueless vegetarianism, you will hurt yourself.

The Flanders Effect

> How about avoiding going to iffy websites and clicking on banners without thinking?!

How about actually enforcing the bright line between data and applications.

No user should ever need to fear data. However, in the modern "the user is too stupid to be bothered" culture, things are automated in a foolish way that leads to all of the virus shenanigans you see on Windows.

If Apple has followed Microsoft's lead in this regard then shame on them.

Being like a MacBook Air

Being like a MacBook Air is basically taking the original netbooks and dressing them up a little bit and putting a decent GPU in them. Most of what makes the Apple product "distinctive" is entirely superficial.

...seems to work well enough for them both.

Being reactionary and derivative is how Microsoft and Dell have always been. It has served them well in the past and there's no reason it can't continue to serve them well. Microsoft has an entrenched monopoly that will take a long time to counteract. As long as that dominance remains, then Dell will always have a big part in it. Apple certainly isn't an immediate threat to either.

Neither company has ever been particularly good. That didn't interfere with their success in the past.

Apple is no BMW

Apple is no BMW.

It's more like Mercury. That's a Ford with some extra superficial bits.

It's just another Turing Machine. Really...

> The Personal Computer was never meant to be a business computer, it was designed to be

You're kidding right?

The PC was specifically designed as a business machine. It was designed as a business machine to keep the up and coming home computer company at the time from invading IBM's turf.

The PC was designed by IBM to sell to businesses so they wouldn't be tempted by the likes of Apple.

Don't try to BS those of us that were actually there.

> I think you need to go back and use some of the old alternatives to IE.

I did at the time.

I had absolutely no desire to flee to the allegedly "superior" IE.

Opera was fast and stable by comparison. IE was not.

No. It was DOS vs. MacOS.

> Windows success in the home is the primary reason it is a success at the office.

What? Were you just born yesterday?

DOS was a success in the office before Windows even existed.

The dominance of Windows is an extension of the dominance of MS-DOS in the workplace, not the other way around.

All about cats... with a little fiber.

You have to keep in mind that a lot of your total cost is going to be driven by labor and possibly repairs to walls that have to be destroyed rather than the cost of the cable itself. I opted for a bundled cable myself when I had my house wired during construction. The cable bundle was mainly an accounting gimmick so that I could get multiple cables dropped for one price rather than 2x or 5x.

At the time when I was shopping for cable, the bundle with the fiber was nearly the same as the one without. So now I have a fiber wired house. Not really sure yet what to do with it though.

Cat6 might have been an improvement but I'm not sold on the idea.

Another thing about the "structured cabling" is that it kind of serves as a bit of mass protection (like a motorcycle group on the highway) that resists bad handling. It simply won't bend easily in ways that are contrary to how fiber and network cat5 should be handled.

Handy too... I still get shivers any time I recall what they do to the poor cat5 they put in for phones. Ugly. Scary. Ugly. Ugly.

The "whatever" mentality.

The problem with conflating a Trojan with a self perpetuating virus is the whole "permission" thing. This brings up a separate issue. It's an issue of trust. The problem with any program that runs with your UID is the fact that it can DESTROY ALL OF YOUR DATA. It does not have to be a virus to be dangerous.

The coder could be merely incompetent.

This is why real operating systems don't give you free run of the entire system.

You don't have to be malicious. You could just be stupid.

You could execute "rm -rf $HOME" manually or run some app that does the same thing.

To be fair...

The car audio connection should be a standard input and you should be able to connect the iPod to your computer in a standard way too.

Real standards versus the Apple version of that idea.

He didn't seem to be saying that he "can't" use iTunes but rather than he would rather not.

I can't say I disagree with him.

Fanboy silliness.

MacOS is about as much Unix as Windows is.

Nothing significant that the user actually comes into contact is Unix. No Unix ideas or approaches are exposed to the end user. Anything that the common novice sees, will likely ever be exposed to,

or view as a valuable aspect of the platform is strictly proprietary Apple stuff.

Trying to call MacOS a Unix is a classic case of Apple fanboys badly misunderstanding technical details.

Digital Music

I have a radical suggestion.

How about you allow the advancing technology to make your product more useful?

I buy more DVDs because my iTunes-esque personally hacked setup makes the content more useful because I can do interesting things with it. Most people won't bother because the industry likes to put up roadblocks against this sort of thing. They are worried about the thieves that they are forgetting about the customer.

Of course I am a vulture though. Amazon allows me to very easily and brutally price shop the stuff I do buy. I can exploit Amazon to show me when stuff is on deep discount and bide my time. Or I can just wait for the long tail to inevitably deposit things into the Walmart/Tesco bargain bin. For most stuff I am patient.

The glut of content available for purchase suppresses prices and makes it easier to be a cheap b*stard.

Only BBC stuff seems to be immune to this... '-p

Pale imitations

Well, if you can't give the public something other than the MP3 then you've got a basic business problem regardless of what your particular philosophy on music is. Even before the idea of selling copies of the music became passe, the biggest cash cow for a musician was actually playing in front of an audience.

If you can't offer that, then you are immediately at a disadvantage regardless of what era of the music business you happen to find yourself in.

Yes such "musicians" are pale imitations. They get to suffer for it like any other mediocre player in the market.

Yeah... whatever.

> 1. Found exceptional new talent.

Yes. Like Warrant, Cindrella, Nitro and Pretty Boy Floyd.

With gatekeepers like that, we're probably better off the the Vandals.

SBA nonsense

> Resolution Magazine (pro-audio and studio tech) recently ran a feature that illustrated how sales of prime industry production software *died* as soon as it was ripped off and torrented.

You make it sound like piracy is a new thing or something. It isn't even "apps" have been pirated for as long as there have been personal computers (longer probably). The idea that any form of piracy caused the "death" of some app is just lame whiners trying to make excuses for some other failure of their own.

"production" software is pirated a whole lot less for the simple reason that the people who would be doing the pirating are very visible and have something to lose. The UK edition of the SBA could come knocking.

Things like market saturation and cheaper competitors are a more likely culprit.

...don't have to pirate Beatles files from iTunes if you already own CDs or tapes or the original vinyl.

Apple's approach is pre-industrial.

> Seriously, how many of you know what components are inside a microwave and how they interact

That's great. You could call the microwave the Macintosh of the cooking world. It is a device that seems to offer greater ease and efficiency but it's really much more of a bother because of a near total lack of standardization. Every microwave is different. You can't just shove something in and forget about it like a proper oven. You have to keep futzing with it and baby sit it much like a poorly designed GUI.

This willful ignorance approach actually makes a microwave more bother to deal with than a stove, oven, grill or even an open fire. Even for foods specifically designed to be cooked in a microwave, you can't trust in a standard simple recipe. You have to baby sit the thing to make sure you don't end up with bits still frozen and other bits carmelized.

Industrial standardization doesn't just benefit the tinkerer. It benefits everyone. Everyone uses stuff that's been put together and sooner or later people might need something serviced. Making the front or back end of things more difficult really doesn't help anything.

No. An Atari 800 is not "stylish".

> The iMac has a thunderbolt port and firewire

Been there. Done that. Tried that for a dying Mini that violated the cultural mythology that surrounds Apple and the quality level of it's products.

NOT having something that is not spread across the whole table in a bunch of discrete little boxes with a bunch of cables and possibly walwarts to match is actually one of the nice things about the whole IBM Clone approach. Being able to change my own hard drive or RAM on a PC laptop is not something that really requires any compromises for the extra maintainability or cost effectiveness I get out of it.

Apple fanboys have low expecations. Really they do. Then they make excuses when people with more taste state the obvious and inevitable.

The nice thing about PCs is they are flexible enough that you can create something better. (even better than what's typical for WinDOS or Macs)

Queue the usual fanboy excuses...

You don't have to give the end user the big middle finger in order to make it pretty or quiet.

PC laptop makers have been doing this for years. It simply requires acknowledging the fact that a user might have misjudged what they initially needed and don't want to toss an entire rather expensive machine into a landfill just because it is a little bit out of spec.

Of course the cult of willful ignorance will lead to people not having enough taste to realize they are eating dirt and can have something better.

Creating a machine that can't be maintained is just greed and engineering laziness on Apple's part. If they were really all that the fanboys claim, then they could create upgradeable gear without compromising any of the "finer points".

Storage and memory are 2 things that are constantly getting bigger and cheaper and are designed specifically to be easy to change.

Longevity increases the likelihood for a needed upgrade.

> With a PC you will have to upgrade the hard drive.

No you don't. You can use any number of external options including the same sort of "Time Capsule" approach. PCs have been able to do this since the pre-Next days.

Although for a single machine n00b household, all of that stuff is kind of stupid and ultimately sub-optimal for the class of user that Apple is supposed to cater to.

If you bought a machine 8x more than it needs to be, then it better last a long time.

If you are expecting to keep the thing longer than a PC is supposed to be able to last, then of course it should be upgradeable so that you can accommodate future needs. This should be obvious even if you don't consider the fact that Macs have always been more anemic in what they actually include in this regard (RAM & disk).

Can barely find them with a map and a flash light...

> I didn't even know those 3 new additions existed.

The effort required to find these new pebbles being called Dwarf planets was extraordinary. That should put them in a separate class quite distinct from Pluto or any of the other planets (or even Ceres for that matter).

The fact that Pluto was found by some amateur with simple tools should count for something.

Belittling the basement...

> Think how much instant coffee you could

> drink for the price of a paper cup full of

> milky white shit at Starbucks.

Or you could just make proper coffee starting with fresh whole ingredients.

"The basement" is just a means to denigrate those with a clue and who care about all the finer details that make a good product possible and who might shun the herd or Madison avenue nonsense.

The PC does more...

PCs do more than tablets. Doesn't matter if it's a PC running Linux, a PC running WinDOS or a PC running MacOS. Although Apple fanboys seem intent on trashing their own PC OS these days.

So when you are "out having a life", the PC will do the things that the tablets refuse to do.

You don't need an Apple product in order to pretend to be a screenwriter in Starbucks.

Although sometimes you have to pull out a real PC in order to do what the tablets can't or wont do.

Silly fanboy nonsense.

> What the market place is clearly showing is that most

> people don't want general purpose computing, at

So people have stopped buying all of those cameras that have video formats that will make an iThing choke? They're giving up BluRay and DVD too? Don't think so.

While there are plenty of people willing to buy limited SUPPLEMENTAL devices, there's no real indication yet that people are willing to completely give up some means to deal with whatever content and devices are out there.

Sometimes you want to do something there isn't speciality silicon for. You don't even have to be that geeky to want such a thing either. Apple shills are trying to redefine "geeky" while ignoring Apple's own marketing history.

App store Schmapps store.

You don't need a poor copy of apt-get to manage different hardware architectures for the same app. You can simply package them together and let the installer logic sort things out. Or you could even use fat binaries, but that wastes a lot of space on devices that don't really have any to spare. Either way, it's not a terribly difficult problem.

I don't buy it either.

The major pain point is performance. This becomes readily apparent if you try to use non-supported video formats with an iPhone or AppleTV. The claim in the article that no one would notice the difference is just mindless fanboyism.

The iPhone and the AppleTV are sufficiently locked down that most people are unable to run up against these performance limitations. That's not the case with a general purpose machine and applications that will try to exploit every cycle that the platform has to offer.

Compatibility is also a major issue, especially for proprietary platforms where most of the common tools are not available as source code anyone is free to start the porting effort.

Fanboys arguing against an outdated view of the opposition.

> the ARM solutions only have to match the performance of the Intel based laptops,

Which includes Sandy Bridge.

Intel doesn't exactly stand still either.

ARM can't even match Atom and that's the stuff that other PC users snicker at. ARM has a very narrow area of appeal. Beyond that, it has no hope of competing against the PC on it's own terms.

If we were meant to be vegetarian...

...then I could just let the grass in the back garden grow long and invite the all the neighbors over for a grazing party.

Humans are simply not equipped to be vegans. Being a proper vegetarian requires a bit of a clue or you risk damaging your body.

The confused fanboy...

> I'm still mystified as to why people

Confused. It's pretty simple really. Someone either likes the Apple hardware but not the OS that it happens to be sold with or they like the OS but find the hardware it is sold with to be overpriced or limited.

Minis were a cost effective low profile HTPC for awhile there (not any more though).

Meh I say!

> Sitting in Starbucks pretending to write a novel suddenly costs a lot less?

Nah. They decided to port that bit of software to Linux and Windows.

ppppfffft

> There are working snow leopard VM's for both vmware and virtual box.

I had a somewhat working Snow Leopard image running on Virtual Box. It didn't run very long before crashing but it could at least get itself started. Then I swapped motherboard and went from an Intel CPU to an AMD CPU and it stopped working completely.

This is the sort of stuff that makes a vintage 1994 copy of Linux seem less arcane.

If If If

> If you aren't on a regular rotation for your hardware

...then you are probably just like any other corporation or individual on the planet. Most people don't like p*ssing away money. This is true for grannies as well as corporate big shots. Most of us cubicle dwelling types have machines that are underpowered even without getting into forced upgrades primarily meant to allow Microsoft milk it's cash cows.

Manure still isn't caviar

...the fact that people struggle with WinDOS doesn't really impact the issue of suitability of alternatives.

An idiot will be equally ill at ease no matter what they are running. With a more robust system, they will at least be less of a menace to themselves and everyone else around them. If it's a corporate environment, then SOME ONE ELSE is doing the hard work anyways. So the problem of "the idiot being his own admin" is even less relevant.

Apple can't out compete MS-DOS

> One of the things Apple has demonstrated is that in PC, in music player, in mobile and in tablet that it can produce a product that people will want

...except this is not entirely true.

Most notable in your list of "successes" is the "PC".

This was something where Apple failed to compete against MS-DOS of all things.

Now their "mobile" success is being threatened by Android.

If Apple really can compete based on merits then why does it have to engage in dubious legal nonsense and dirty tricks. Why does Apple need to take the Tivo approach to competitors?

Extra cost not really worth it...

The difference in price in one of these TVs compared to it's conventional counterpart will pay for an HTPC or an appliance that already makes these embedded features seem obsolete.

The fanboy dance.

> Perhaps if you used a tablet instead of a smartphone

Nope. A bigger tablet really doesn't help.

Not all of the detractors here are people that have never touched a fondleslab.

Tablets are inherently bad at some things. Whereas other Tablet failings are artificial limitations imposed by platform vendors.

Stop swimming in the cool-aid

> So control freaky that you can download the free VLC app from the App

...except you can't because Apple doesn't allow proper free software.

It offends their "control freak" sensibilities. Can't have the end users installing whatever they want or sharing things with each other.

This is a great app for overcoming the fact that the stock iPad is a walled garden that doesn't allow for things like avi or mpeg or samba. The fact that is "convoluted" should not be held against it.

It seems it is getting marked off for the iPad's limitations despite the fact that this product is a means to bypass those limitations.

The N in NAS means you can use the stuff anywhere.

> Running a server program on a PC is no good. All my vids are on a NAS

So you just mount your NAS as a drive on whatever machine AirVideo is running on.

How long have MacOS and Window supported this sort of thing? Forever?

...fixatnig on the wrong technical details.

> Not a thousand times more than 1995?

>

> Well, apart from the fact that you can pretty much just plug in a scanner, printer, tablet or what-have-you and it will self-configure the thing instead of your having to muck about with IRQs and drivers for hours.

>

That is a function of bus design that has very little do do with whether or not the clock on the CPU is at 60Mhz or 3Ghz.

No. You miss on this metric too.

> Didn't it take 300 Sparc stations about 6 months to render the first Toy Story? I am not saying that you could do that on a PC (yet) but Blender's

>

By 1997 and perhaps even 1995, PCs were already being used in render farms.

Sparc CPUs were never anything to write home about in terms of performance. That's why D2 was using Alpha machines running Linux to render the effects in movies like Titanic.

People are having a hard time trying to figure out what makes a new machine better than an old one in practical terms. A lot of the stuff that we think of as "modern and new" has been around for awhile already.

Just run hdparm for yourself...

> "but disk I/O has become a bottleneck at the platter surface level, and is set to remain that way."

>

>So if this is the case, why do they keep increasing the bus speed? Surely if the bottleneck is the platter, then the bus is not full, and making it wider does nothing. This doesn't sound right.

>

You can group multiple drives together. This is also a rather old idea.

Plus there's the possibility of newer tech. Just because your average n00b Mac user can't think of a way to use the extra capacity doesn't mean it shouldn't be developed.

SSD looks very promising and could be 60 times faster than spinny disk. The extra speed has usable potential because the underlying interfaces have the means to support it.

...days to hours my DVD jukebox array rather than days. Too bad I would need a 2nd mortgage to afford the equivalent amount of SSD storage.

Not your average AOL coaster...

>> A real geek?

>

> Uses hard-drive platters as mug coasters, then reassembles them and uses them in live servers.

>

...tried the first part of that idea for a bit after my last MythTV related drive failure.

Didn't realize the platters were so shiny...

The novelty soon wore out and I just tossed what was left content to the fact that nearly no one is geeky enough to put the drive back together again (and read my "vital" data).

If someone does bother they will likely be disappointed (Dr Who and Stargate reruns).

Scale is the thing.

> 72TB of storage in an enterprise managed cluster for $10k?

...well this kind of deflates the idea that you can having your own local storage or that you won't get raped on cloud storage. I can have a 7TB array for a little more than the cost of the disks and it will fit inside one of my PCs. Do this twice and I've probably got more/better redundancy than some "enterprise" solution.

When you are trying to be everyone's Time Machine the problem gets big in a hurry and becomes something quite apart from what you are trying to replicate and replace.

The thought of moving terabytes in and out of the cloud is just... painful.

Well...

...certainly neither one of them is an Archimedes or DaVinci.

That's something to consider when the mythical work of an ancient genius is seemingly debunked.

That doesn't necessarily invalidate the effort.

Although I've always thought that having a group of well disciplined soldiers might be a factor in putting together a Sicilian death ray.

Are you kidding?

Win 95 was universally hailed as an improvement over Windows 3.1 in pretty much every way including the desktop shell. In fact, there were 3rd party add-ons for Windows 3.1 to make it more like what would eventually be Windows 95.

Although there's no good reason that legacy UIs can't remain available for those that actually like them. This sort of nonsense isn't about making the product better but artificially creating some reason for new sales.

The word processor is an OLD problems.

Artificial bother is what IT people complain about. Bother is something that you should choose yourself to engage in because it adds some value for you, not just because the relevant monopolist needs to milk it's cash cow.

Apple silliness

Yes. The idea that the top of the screen represents an easy target is just stupid.

What the Apple approach does is require you to first touch your application window and then to touch the top of the screen. If you just go for the top of the screen, you stand a good chance of opening THE WRONG APP MENU.

ANY WHERE in your app's window is a much better place to access context relevant controls. The target got be the whole window (right click anyone) or just the conventional title/menu bar.

Either way, you probably have to touch it anyways.

...it's like people at Canonical are buying into all of the Apple hype without actually bothering to use it first.

Lame trolls abusing bad jargon.

> All you armchair freetards that don't

> install and run Unity and give it a

> good fair go can go piss off.

This "freetard" has several Macs in his stable.

So when I say that I despise clueless idiots that try to mindlessly follow Apple's lead, I'm not only just talking about the ill suited follower that I have direct experience with but the original inspiration.

Being willing to try new things is kind of how we became Linux users in the first place.

Trying to claim otherwise is just delusional.

Some of us are even willing to blow a few quid on trying something new.

Ubuntu was not my first distribution and will likely not be my last.

No such beast.

> The goal behind Unity is to design an environment

> that is at home on larger touch-based devices like

> tablets, but still works well on full-fledged workstations.

Except this is a fundementally stupid idea. They are radically different means to interact with the system. The idea that you should enforce some sort of "foolish consistency" is a completely alien and un-unix approach. If you want to be trendy and develop a new interface for the shiny new tablets then knock yourself out. Just don't try to overlay this on top of a radically different form factor.

I don't want a UI for a 10 inch tablet on my 30 inch monitor.

Might be a good idea to figure out something to do with those tablets that you can plug into your PC that they sell at the local electronics store though or how to exploit these tablets as alternate input devices.

Turning my desktop into Canonical's take on the iPad is not cool.

If anything, this seems like a flashback to Windows 3.1.