Originally posted by trusso
Did anyone see ER on thursday? Carter was listening to an iPod!
It was just a joke... that's allAre you crazy? AMD is making a HUGE splash right now because of the Athlon64. And they are actually clocked slower than the current high end AthlonXP, but show a good performance gain due to the huge cache sizes. And just to put it to bed, I've learned over the years that if you let yourself get upset over Apples' ad campaign, you will end up being angry all the time. Apple's ads aren't terribly good at showing what their computers can do, just that they are hip. What sold the iMac? Colored plastic. That's it. It ran the same OS as the powermacs at the time, so the whole "3 minute" internet was the same. So I agree that Apple should show their software in ads, but I also accept that they never will.
Originally posted by ewinemiller
Your absolutely right. Here's a couple of moments I've had in the last year or so where I sat back and thought "this is cool".
1. In a phone conference with a coworker teaching us a new tool. He was connected to our server using Windows Terminal Services, we used the same thing to shadow his session and could watch every step. The server was in the server room, we were in the board room, he was across the country. Terminal Services (Remote Desktop in XP Pro) is something that has changed the way we do work, for the better. I don't have to carry home a laptop to be on call, a quick VPN connection, terminal services into my machine at work and it's like I'm there.
2. The first time I turned on XP's ClearType. It's absolutely amazing, OSX's font antialiasing does not even come close to its clarity.
3. A couple of months back I wrote a Visual Basic application that used COM (a windows technology) to control Corel Photopaint and do a couple of specific functions. Next I hacked the registry (a database that drives much of windows behavior) to add a couple of new options to the right mouse button menu when selecting image files. Now those functions are integrated features of Explorer, all in 15 minutes worth of work. If you think Cocoa apps are easy to write, you should try VB and COM.
4. A coworker checked in some source code with his SQL Server password in plain text. SQL Server can also execute command lines through a stored procedure so we connected to his SQL Server and used it to send net popups from his machine to other coworkers saying all kinds of outragous stuff. Really you could do this on pretty much any platform you've rooted, but it was still fun
5. We wrote an instant messaging tool for the office using VB and COM+, again VB and COM made it easy to instance an object on the server that relayed the message to all the registered clients.
Likewise I've had a few of those moments with OSX too, like when I got SendMail and the pop3 server up and running then pointed a personal domain at it, and the first time I bought something from the iTunes music store. Windows and OSX are tools, each can do some pretty cool things. If your perception of MS is still Windows 9x, or even just XP, you've missed about 90% of what they do and the technologies they provide. MS may not have something as visible and pretty as an iPod or new G5 and I think they will have a real hard time showing what they do in product placement kind of efforts, but there is plenty of cool in the things they do.
