BIG BROTHER BILL GATES PROTECTOR OF ALL,,,, ARRGH!

[JJkizak]

Remember guys---Jobs and Gates used to smoke dope together.(maybe). That's one reason Gates gave Jobs 150 million to keep Apple from tanking.

JJK

[meagain]

I cannot imagine Gates ever smoking weed just by the way he looked/dressed. I can't fathom that. Jobs did LSD (I understand). He's so much more cool and always has been. I plan to buy future products from the cool guy.

[mas]

"That's one reason Gates gave Jobs 150 million to keep Apple from tanking."

Nope!

You also forget the MS is the largest Mac developer as well. And the Office suite is their cash cow! And Office is dominant in the Mac world as well.

During the mid 90's when both IBM and Sun tried to buy Apple, Apple had over 18 Billion dollars cash in the bank. That was larger than Sun! It is just a bit difficult to make a leveraged offer against cash in the bank!

And this never dwindled to less than 6 Billion cash in the bank with NO debt.

Yep, thats a company about to tank! You can debate market share and strategic management strategy all you like, but the company was never near tanking financially!

Bottom line. People have choices. If you make a choice and then cry about being a victim of your choice, what is the point? You have simply demonstrated convincingly that you are an idiot. Gee judge, it is the gun's fault that I bought it and shot myself! Save me from myself! And just like the absurd anti-trust suit against MS where all the whiny victims who had effectively voted for MS by buying Windows for umpteen years ran to the government to save them from themselves, they have the opportunity now to make alternative choices. But at some point they need to become sufficiently cognizant enough to hopefully make an informed intelligent choice that suites their needs and/or desires.

I have never been a MS fan, but I find the complaining about MS rather sad and rather comedic, especially amongst those who have repeatedly supported them all these years.

And Jobs is not much better with his elitist vision whereby the message is more about image and Apple telling you what you should be doing with the machines rather than simply providing responsive tools to enable you to do as you choose. And this was exactly what happened for 15 years with our using the Mac in science and engineering - as Apple literally and repeatedly told us that it was a desktop publishing machine and not a machine intended for scientific application! After all, it was Job's refusal to open the Mac up with the addition of expansion slots in the Mac II that led to his being tossed the first time!

Personally I would prefer if they simply tried to be responsive to the marketplace and to enable folks, rather than to try to impose their vision of what and how things should be done on users.

But ultimately, we are responsible for our choices, whether we assume the responsiblity or not.

[JJkizak]

Gee, I really don't remember it that way from reading the financial pages.

JJK

[mas]

You evidently didn't have the opportunity to deal directly with
Motorola development in Jefferson City outside of Knoxville either. It
was a hoot as they had their custom wire wrapped expansion chassis
spread across a second table as they could not use the existing
topology to support even their internal development of the 68K family
and subsequent PPC technology. And we had the same problems at Lawrence
Berkeley which had effectively been taken over by the Mac. And every
time we would talk with Apple, we would be told that "But hey, its a
desktop publishing machine!"

From there I jumped into the middle of Power and the RS6000 SP internals development. The 90's were fun.[]

I love the Mac, but if you want to
hear folks gripe about Apple, don't talk to PC folks, talk to Mac folks
(especially in the old days!).

Among other issues, we're still
having similar problems with the MacBook Pro, with its asymmetrical RAM
- despite UNIX's ability to dedicate processors and to pin memory! But
they choose to make it asymmetrical with only a 3GB capacity spread
across two banks/channels for a dual core processor and utilizing
virtual technology. So much for the hardware working in concert with
the OS! Its reminiscent of the hot dog bun and the hot dog
manufacturers who can't agree on the quantity to sell! And that doesn't
include Apple's choice of video cards which even if they use the same
chipset as the generic PC variations, employ only half of the VRAM! []

So
yeah, I am part of the Mac 'loyal opposition'! I sure wish they would
come out with a MacBook Pro variation configured similarly to the Dell
M1710 - without the wacked colors and cutesy flashing lights. Perhaps
Jobs and company should spend more time listening to their market and
less time hanging with Bono and backdating stock options.

On the other hand, the big Mac Pro is sweet! As long as you are not silly enough to buy your expanded memory options or video cards from Apple! Their prices for RAM, Hard drives and video cards are insane! Go 3rd party for that.

[computerdude]

I think it's gotten to the point that MS is so obsessed with WPA that it's going to ruin Vista. They can't just sell the software on encrypted disks or whatever; they have to make WPA such a major aspect of the OS that it controls much of its functionality making it harder to do what you want. (I can't remem. the exact info about the "encrypted disks." I just recall a game being made where each key was specific to each disk and the disk itself was truly unable to be copied.)

Theres always going to be cracks and keygens and tweaks, so why not just let it be and not bring the OS down? As it is, MS (and obviously Gates) makes plenty of profit from the business world in addition to the consumers.

And I agree with previous poster; win2k was great

[coda]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=YktZkyx4wtM

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000363.html