... there are now many Apple customers who have no idea that Apple actually makes PCs - they think they're solely a producer of MP3 players

Anyway, the greatest genius to work at Apple was Jef Raskin - the designer behind the Canon Cat.

For the uninitiated, the Canon Cat is the greatest computer ever designed. It featured an interface pared down the to simplest, cleanest possible given the hardware & functional requirements. It resolved several issues that have continued to plague software into the 21st century ... even the case was an aesthetic masterpiece compared to its competitors.

To give you an idea of Raskin's approach to the user interface - basically, the Cat was a document processor, and it worked off floppy discs. Each disc would contain a single document - which was effectively a copy of the Cat's working memory.

However, rather than the usual "save", "load", "format", "copy" commands you'd expect for working with floppies, Raskin provided a "DISK" button, which did the right thing at the right time.

If there was an unformatted disc in the drive and the "DISK" button was pressed, the Cat would format the disc and save your document to it.

If there was a formatted disc in the drive with an old copy of your document on it, the Cat would overwrite it.

If there was a formatted disc in the drive with a newer copy of your document on it, the cat would load it.

If there was a formatted disc in the drive with a different document, and you had just saved your document to a different disc, it would switch to the new document. Otherwise it'd just beep and refuse to switch, because to do so would cause you to lose data.

You can read the entire Cat manual here.

I should warn you, though: if you're already frustrated with the way modern PCs work, you'll be almost moved to tears at the realisation that we could be so much further ahead, if people just listened to designers like Raskin. Or Bruce Tognazzini for that matter.

Basically, UI design (by which I mean the entire user experience & operating paradigm, not just graphical layout) has remained fundamentally unchanged since the Xerox Alto from the 1970's ... with a few brief flickers of genius like the Canon Cat standing out as notable exceptions.

That was a magnificent parody! It makes me even more eager to buy a new MacBook Pro. I've been subject to PCs for the last 3 years, and can't wait to say goodbye.

-- The Gilded Fork

Food Philosophy. Sensuality. Sass.

Apple did a superlative job with every aspect of the marketing of the iPod. This video summarises the difference between Microsoft and Apple marketing in a manner that had me laughing so hard there were tears in my eyes, the first time I saw it.

Err...Bob...when Steve Wozniak left Apple his net worth was estimated at over $100million.

And it's not "rent collecting" that beats inventing. It's *marketing*, particularly *mass* marketing. It's the knack of knowing how to make a product accessible and economical to vast numbers of people.

Hence, Rockefeller, Ford (sorry, Adam), Eastman (Kodak), and now Bill Gates.

Ross wrote:
Jobs & Wozniak were maligned by the hackers for failure "to share" once they realised they had a commercially viable product. I've no doubt that Gates has been a target because he followed a fully capitalistic approach almost from the get-go and was monumentally successful. It all fits.

I reply:

Bill Gates has taught us that rent collecting beats inventing when it comes to making big $$$$$$. Likewise Steve Jobs. The real heroes are inventor/creators like Wozniak, who in the fullness of time, are screwed out of their just rewards. Gates is a billionare. What has he invented lately? Jobs is a flake and a very bad manager of the efforts of his betters.

Fortunately for the human race the inventor/creators get their greatest joy out of inventing and creating. They willingly forego much of the material reward that in all justice should be theirs. It is well for us that the coin of their realm is largely the doing and succeeding.

Bob Kolker

“There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.” - Jeremy S. Anderson

The lefty-liberal bias in hi-tech is clearly traceable to the early hacker culture of the 70s, which the likes of Jobs was a part. This is the same culture that evolved into the open source community from which came Unix, Linux, Apache, PHP, etc. Nothing wrong with that per se, I program in PHP myself, but there's an underlying sentiment that "information wants to be free". The fully distributed and ubiquitous nature of the Web--as open source as *anything* has ever been--only adds to the illusion that it's all there for the taking.

Many parts of the software industry still exhibit an adolescent quality that readily devolves into touchy-feely perspectives on the market process.

Jobs & Wozniak were maligned by the hackers for failure "to share" once they realised they had a commercially viable product. I've no doubt that Gates has been a target because he followed a fully capitalistic approach almost from the get-go and was monumentally successful. It all fits.

Re copyrights, etc., even on the old SOLOHQ there were a couple of people that had trouble seeing the line between theft and property rights. Incredible. The attitude was, if these companies don't want to step up and make their data more accessible to the public then how can you condemn the frustrated consumer (read:thief) for taking it.

...yourself out, Dan.

Has anyone thought about doing an editorial on this? Lots of juicy material...

This proposed nationalisation is a new low, both in terms of its unjustness and its arbitrariness. It needs to be fought on every level, from the grassroots up.

I'm not proposing that Apple's behaviour in the past should be any reason not to fight this law with everything we have.

What I was referring to was my original anger on behalf of Apple.

Should this nationalisation happen, it'll be a terrible day for liberty & capitalism, the world over (because you just know it'll embolden rats like these wherever they may be lurking).

However, I won't be feeling bad for Apple. By instigating & supporting this kind of thing in the past against their competitors, they deserve to suffer it themselves.

Sadly, if those opposed to this scheme succeed in stopping it, it'll be Apple that escapes the consequences of its past actions.

You're right, Apple doesn't deserve it, but that's not the main problem, the worst thing about this is the new type of brazen precedent. Nationalizing entertainment devices? And ones where clearly there are plenty of other alternatives? That's a new low.

...is a leftie, and yes, that is a problem; but I'm speaking of principles here, Duncan. If entire countries are simply doing away with protection for technology, we are in a very precarious state.

It is bad enough that countries like China do not recognize the validity of copyrights and trademarks, so things are being stolen on a minute-by-minute basis; now that we are getting into proprietary technology, where does it stop?

I've seen our recipes and photos show up on blogs all over the world -- and those are only the ones I've had time to search for and catch. One was from China, and completely ignored my request to take down the information -- I have NO recourse.

This has got to change.

Fuck 'em. They deserve everything they get; Apple isn't Rearden Steel.

I guess, Duncan, you gotta ask yourself if your objective law is just for all or only for those who are just in themselves. Who should and who should not get the benifit of objective law? Can you decide that?

Had we not one law for all then perhaps one day soon your head would be the one on the block too. If we have rule of man, not rule of law, what do you depend on to keep your rights safe? Violence?

One objective law for all. You should defend it for your own selfish interest, not because it's some mercy or concession to the crooks of the world.

... then I thought, hang on - this is the same Apple that bitched to the DoJ about Microsoft making it's life difficult when it wanted to bring out Quicktime for Windows?

The same Apple whose very own Steve Jobs bitched about the 'inadequacy' of the proposed settlement of DoJ vs. Microsoft?

The same Apple who sued Microsoft for copying MacOS functionality in Windows (after they, themselves, filched the UI from Xerox?)

Fuck 'em. They deserve everything they get; Apple isn't Rearden Steel.

I'd love it if they pulled out of France.

Be careful about comparing patents to copyrights--with patents it's often the patent holder who's thieving. E.g., the recent Blackberry fiasco (look at the technology--it's clearly prior art & obvious but judge & jury are not really competent to tell that so Blackberry paid hundreds of millions to a company that didn't do anything but write a lot of nonsense on a patent application).

Jason: I'm not sure whether it's more prevalent or whether tech savvy people. Perhaps they feel more sure of themselves so they say what they think even though it's stupid (one of the side effects of living in a dumbed-down culture).

...what Apple is ultimately being punished for (a la Bill Gates) is that its crew of geniuses created a proprietary technology which the company is NOT BEING PERMITTED to keep proprietary if France has anything to say about it. That is theft, and it makes my blood far surpass the boiling point.

The downside of the digital age is that people have lost all respect for copyright, trademark, patent, and anything they deem to be "up for grabs" because it's on the internet. Are THEY the ones up til the wee hours creating such things? NO. Fucking bastards.

*Really* cranky today.

Grotesque isn't it? God forbid some company develops a good business plan and makes money off of it from voluntary customers. They have to be forced to stop at all costs. This mentality is particularly prevalent among tech savvy people, and I have never understood why.

- Jason