Microsoft Bashing

you're right, I forgot about the wifi setups (Because I don't have one of those fancy wifi gadgets) but I guess I was thinking if the ipod touch and the like where the only way to play ball is to buy from the app store.

It wouldn't surprise me if google made everything store-only and you couldn't just mount the gizmo as a drive and copy programs to it.

unless of course it's like that already.

Google does *not* restrict you to their app store. They're quite deliberate about it -- there's a setting you click on to make the decision for yourself "allow out-of-market applications."

I read last week that AT&T has disabled this button in some of their phones, but that's AT&T's doing, not Google's.

As for the "mount as a drive" you can do that, too -- if I wanted to, I could take the microSD card out of my phone, plug it into a computer, and copy stuff to/from the card.

Android is quite deliberate about being open where Apple and Microsoft are not. I think you can count on that continuing to be the case because the Android revenue stream doesn't depend on locking users into a walled garden.
Google encourages carriers to stick with the official build by offering a split on the ad revenue, not by forcing the phones to always behave in an approved manner.

ah HA! Encourages.... someday they'll use more crafty forms of encourangement, just you watch!!!! :-)

Yes, yes, I'm still waiting for the emergence of the Red Hat monopoly that you announced a decade ago. :)

Yes, yes, I'm still waiting for the emergence of the Red Hat monopoly

that you announced a decade ago. :)

yes yes, well I'm waiting too.

I'd like to point out that every other pundit in the world is wrong most of the time and nobody ever gives them shit about it. I'm right ALL of the time, except for that one case. :-)

Admittedly I think I'm getting overzealous with my detriment of google.
I had a few good points and I've sorta been running on the moment.

1) they say they aren't evil. Well if that's true then they're ignorant because you can't be a nice big company.
2) google web toolkit: proves that you can be too smart for your own good. Sure it does what they say, but it's a beast and it may be open source but it's lock-in as good as MS ever dished out because it's too complicated to touch.


I think those are my two biggies, everything else is extrapolation.

Doesn't mean I'm gonna be wrong though.

Ford (and red hat isn't exactly a complete bygone yet. apple looked pretty hurtin a few years ago, (before the second coming of jobs) and look at them now) ][

erm... momentum.

Ford (and red hat isn't exactly a complete bygone yet. apple looked

pretty hurtin a few years ago, (before the second coming of jobs) and

look at them now) ][

Quite a few people believe that the *real* reason Bill Gates retired is because he wants to make a "triumphant comeback" in a few years to "save the company" just like Steve Jobs did.

That's the Microsoft we know, right? Always copying Apple...

I really dislike the "decline of the desktop" and fear that eventually I won't be able to even buy a powerful desktop computer that lasts me several years.




Hopefully this 8 core Mac Pro lasts a while.

Does anyone else think Windows 7 is teh sux0r?  It took me a half

Windows 7 sucks less than Vista. That really isn't saying much. It's still Windows, it still sucks, and they still keep moving things around so that you want to kill someone when you can't figure out how to perform basic system operations.

one of these number: the death of the desktop is overrated by
magnitudes.

The fact that we are entering "the post-PC era" does not mean that desktop computers are going to go away, any more than the "PC era" caused mainframes to go away. Mainframes are still alive and well, but they no longer are the platform that leads the direction of the industry. Similarly, in the post-PC era, there will still be PC's -- many of them, unfortunately, still running Microsoft garbage. However, they will not lead the direction of the industry anymore.

I guess what I'm really worried about isn't the decline of the desktop, it's the decldecline of the Macintosh desktop. The innovation that led the way through the early years of OS X and even the last years of OS 8 and 9 -- bringing the Internet in reach of people who didn't want to deal with the complications of a Windows PC -- has reached a point of stagnation to the degree that it looks from the outside like Apple isn't paying any attention to their desktop market.

In my relatively short life I've forked more than $6,000 into Apple workstation hardware without regret. I literally don't know of any other computer that can match the parallelism that this Mac is able to have, just like when I had my old G4 workstation, I never saw another compuer come close to what it did.

I want there to still be an Apple workstation in a few years when it's upgrade time that's better than everything else, able to hold several internal drives, PCI/whatever-is-around cards, etc. I feel like if that isn't the mainstream, which it's not, Apple is going to kill off that product class and make more shiny little gadgets.

Then I'll have to seek a computer that can handle my work from elsewhere.

Then I'll probably have to run Windows.

Then I will die :-P

Jun 29 2010 11:38pm from the8088er @uncnsrd
I guess what I'm really worried about isn't the decline of the desktop,

it's the decldecline of the Macintosh desktop. The innovation that led

The decldecline? Is that the declaration of the decline?

isn't the mainstream, which it's not, Apple is going to kill off that

product class and make more shiny little gadgets.

Not to worry. Apple will need to keep building the Macintosh product line.
They may only have 10% of the market, but they'll need that revenue when they eventually only have 10% of the "shiny little gadgets" market.

The Big Desktop Computer will continue to be useful for a class of users who do most of their computing from a single location, do not have their own (or their employers') servers, and whose computing work involves a lot of resource-intensive operations. Since multimedia comes to mind, I'd say Apple will continue to serve that market quite nicely.

Windows will continue to become even more boring, utilitarian, and irrelevant.
It will remain popular, but only because of the momentum generated by decades of monopoly.

If Microsoft wants to build a desktop/laptop operating system that is useful in the post-PC era, they could deliver a barebones version of Windows that just offers an empty desktop and then *gets the hell out of the way*. They won't do this, of course, because they still think they need to use Windows as a ball-and-chain to keep users tied to Microsoft crap.

Right ... but until they offer that kind of operating system for an ordinary PC, it isn't enough.

Well, actually, it does work on an ordinary PC. Our boxes are really nothing more than ordinary laptop motherboards (although we've used non-laptop motherboards, too). We can install an OEM version of Windows on these boxes.