These boys say the book does not flatter. The first 10+ minutes of the discussion might interest Jobs fans.

I continue to be bemused by the people who will not invest a dime of their own money or an hour of their own time improving their career skills or buying a tool that will make them more productive.

I guess some of us are luckier than others.

Luxo Jr. Is that film.

I have the kindle and the nook, and I really like the way their screens aren't backlit. Is the ipad backlit when you are reading books on it, or is it just like a regular computer screen? This wouldn't stop me from buying one...just wondering.

Side trip: Just saw a video of someone who used the Pixar lamp as a Halloween costume. Pretty good work, but hopping everywhere probably got old fast.

A thoughtful child.

Pretty soon, some addled person is going to try this on your forehead, hoping to share gossip or dinner plans.

> I guess some of us are luckier than others.

Well, in my business, the postproduction shops who DIDN'T deeply invest in Final Cut Pro workstations are feeling pretty fuckin' lucky this year. Quite aside from the betrayal of a customer base, this is one of the most inexplicable suicides in the history of American business. I can find no analog... Not New Coke, not the Edsel, nuthin'. It's just weird.

Y'know.

Crid, they must have been inspired by Office 2007. I've been using the damn thing for two years now (at work, not my choice), and I still can never find anything with that ribbon interface. If they were going to divide it into categories, it might have helped if they had actually put stuff into the category that it belongs in. Not to mention that the ribbon is full of gigantic meaningless icons and takes up way too much screen space. I used to have a bunch of customized toolbars for Word and Powerpoint, but with Office 2007, they took away the ability to make your own toolbars.

At home, I use Open Office.

Same here, only nowadays it's Libre Portable.

Jobs had important insights on usability, but the insights never went beyond the top presentation of software. Microsoft, in the best results of its dominance, often did better... E.g. in most apps, every menu item can be reduced to a three-key macro of first letters.. Alt E, J, N or whatever. Day in and day out, I prefer the MS interface (in a well-designed app) to the Mac, which has just as many insane annoyances... (Enter to RENAME a file? Really? SHIFT-backspace to delete a file? I *HAVE* to use two hands?)

And once you're in the bowels of the OS, looking for network settings and so forth, it's every bit as shabby as Win7.

Hmm. Time for a look here.

"Day in and day out, I prefer the MS interface (in a well-designed app) to the Mac, which has just as many insane annoyances... (Enter to RENAME a file? Really? SHIFT-backspace to delete a file? I *HAVE* to use two hands?)"

To your last question, no, you don't. I guess you don't use it much - you can right-click and delete.

Irony: the feature (mouse-click rename) was licensed from Apple by Microsoft.

And that's not the only way to rename the file, of course.

What do you consider a "well-designed app"?

At work, the Site has decided that despite the fat contract with Symantec for Endpoint, the PCs will still be vulnerable in some un-named fashion if we don't go to Office 2010. This breaks the macros with which about 8 thousand regulatory-impact procedures were written. Congratulations. The need to continuously employ programmers has cost tax money yet again.

> I guess you don't use it much - you can
> right-click and delete.

Excessive fine-motor fuss. This ain't proficiency, it's distraction for fuckoffs:

• Look down from screen, locate mouse.

• Coordinate hand to mouse to cursor

• Move cursor to file icon

• Right click

• Fuss with popout to find deletion item

• Select deletion item.

On MS, a reflexive press of one distinctively placed and logically-labeled key under a single (index) fingertip.... Done. Or I can find that key by blindly crossing over with left hand, for an unsighted, tactile slam-dunk, while mousing with the right for selection. (And that Delete key hasn't moved in 25 years, whereas Apple's is relocated semi-annually.) (And Microsoft's had better mouse ballistics for at LEAST 11 years.) Or I can even readily select the icon, or several non-contiguous icons, using only the keyboard... with speedy, intuitive alpha-assist.

Jobs thinks people want to play video games all day, and spend a few seconds after each file deletion in autoerotic afterglow, basking in their sophisticated spiritual bond to this expensive, elegant data-processing machinery.

Gates thinks people want to do shit and go home.

I love Luxo Jr.! Pixar's short films are amazing. My favorite is Presto, but BURN-E (with the robot from WALL-E that has to fix the light) is a close second. Thank you, Pixar, for showing that computer animation can be about tiny acting moments.

> This breaks the macros with which about 8
> thousand regulatory-impact procedures were
> written.

The public servants who composed these materials had no business doing it on proprietary file formats. See ODT + LibreOffice, above.

> The need to continuously employ programmers has
> cost tax money yet again.

For fuck's sake, Mac has issued three (four?) completely incompatible, fuck-everything-and-take-it-from-the-top versions of the OS over the life of the platform. For a seven-second download and three minutes of configuration, Win7/64 can run the same word processor I was using in Reagan's first term. Not recompiles: The exact same pre-Duran Duran executables.

Bill Gates became the world's wealthiest life form by thinking about these things and being generous.

They are both mixed bags. I really like OSX because it's Unix-based, although to me, it would be better if they hadn't gone to such pains to hide that. There are still things for which I'd prefer a command-line interface, and I think it would be really cool if each folder window had a "run" box where you could type in a shell command and it would run that command in the currently displayed folder.

Windows and Mac have both had their hits and misses. To me, MS Word is and always has been an abortion; I can never find the things I need and everything is counter-intuitive. On the other hand, I found PowerPoint easy to navigate and very handy for a lot of things that its designers probably didn't intend, such as note-taking, annotating photos and figures from other documents, and building outlines and thought-sketches.

OK, the download actually takes a minute. Did I mention it was free?

Did I mention not needing Itunes to get it?

Does everyone understand the power and value that come from everyone in the world being able to write and distribute software at whatever price they like without approval from Cupertino?

CD: You know Win7 has TWO command environments now, right? Go to the start box and type "power".

"Gates thinks people want to do shit and go home."

Wow. For a gifted writer, you've managed to ignore the entire development of the GUI, and so you've risen once more to the level of "not even wrong".

Hey, you can be the hipster, it's OK.

You are correct about the stupidity of public servants, although you've stepped right into the best example of said stupidity I can prove: Starting in 1995, Savannah River Site decided to switch from the Apple architecture - in which the entire idea of desktop publishing was realized - and cost us a year of changing these same regulatory-level documents. They have to be character-accurate. Remember Y2K? You're welcome, we all paid for that, too; there was no Y2K issue for Macs.

AND the PC architecture was more expensive to maintain. I objected through official channels, and I still have the correspondence which says an ROI study was not required. WSRC, then the contractor, cheerfully hired more Help Desk people.

Refresh my memory: you're all for more Federal employment, right?

"Does everyone understand the power and value that come from everyone in the world being able to write and distribute software at whatever price they like without approval from Cupertino?"

Do you understand that in such cases time out from one's real job must be taken to learn the different programs and evaluate them - that they must each be individually evaluated for vulnerabilities to Internet attack to protect the DOD servers on the nearby LAN?

Not everybody is a small, lean, lightning-quick and totally foolproof operation like yours.

(By the way, if you plug your keyboard into a MacBook Pro, it'll recognize it and enable the things you want to do. It's not like these guys work in a vacuum.)

Use what you what. I don't mind that. Claims presented as fact, which aren't, though...