Comments on: Voodoo curses. Belief systems. And Apple, naturally.

By: Euphrosyne

Euphrosyne — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:13:30 +0000

You’re welcome, LA. I likes me some information, too.

By: vladimir_dt

vladimir_dt — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:04:42 +0000

Sorry to inform you Brian that almost every Unix package I’ve seen runs compiled under OSX. It’s Unix under the cute graphical interface, and with the CLI will preform most SW tasks quite well. Sun’s movement to Open Source is allowing most of their proprietary SW to be ported, and if it can be run on Linux, it can be run in OSX. And for those packages which cannot be run except under Windows, use one of the emulators, load up your software, and switch on the fly, and get better performance and reliability than on a native Windows box.
As for convincing all the business software providers, I don’t think Apple will care. They will rely on MS shooting itself in the foot as they have done with Vista to make their case for them.

By: Lara Amber

Lara Amber — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:11:15 +0000

Thanks much Euphrosyne, I like the sheer amount of information on the site.

By: Euphrosyne

Euphrosyne — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:35:12 +0000

Lara, there’s a woman who started investigating product claims oh, ages ago, and has written several books – she is severely unpopular with the industry, of course. She now has her own line of skin care and cosmetics; however, her investigative work long predates her own venture, and she still regularly reviews other companies. She also goes directly to the source – the research laboratories and reports – and maintains a very impressive ingredient directory which is regularly updated. Here’s the link:

http://www.cosmeticscop.com/learn/cosmetic_dictionary.asp?id=6&letter=A

By: Brian Angliss

Brian Angliss — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:46:15 +0000

Vlad – the vast majority of engineering software runs on PC or Unix, so there’s no option for EEs like me (or most chemical engineers, optical engineers, mechanical engineers, or any other engineer type I’ve worked with over the years) to use Mac, regardless of whether Apple is awesome or not.

Until Apple can convince all the business software providers (and I don’t mean marketing) to provide Mac options for their software, Apple will forever remain a toy, regardless of how powerful it is.

By: vladimir_dt

vladimir_dt — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:00:08 +0000

Wow! Gotta say I loved the whole thing up and until you started talking about a corporate product being driven by more belief than features. Great introduction to superstitious behavior as well. However, I must take you to task on the APPLE ™ is belief statement. I worked in the tech field for way too long, and have supported the following platforms/OS’s. Novell, MicroSoft DOS and Windows, Unix, HPUX, and Apple’s OS. I will grant you that all of them have some problems with regard to uptime, and ease of use by the end-user. I will grant you that in many cases, Intel/IBM machines were priced very affordably compared to machines that ran unix, like SUN boxes. I will however state categorically that if you do not have specific software that can ONLY be run on a PC, you will be happier and more productive on a Mac running OSX. When I got out of the support industry, I became a switcher, and I’ll never go back to cumbersome, slow, hard to fix, unreliable PC’s. NEVER. I’ve had to reboot my Mac Laptop running OSX10.4 exactly twice in the past year. Both times I had to do this was because I needed to install new software that demanded it. There are no PC users who can make the same claim unless they are lying.
Sorry, belief don’t enter into it. It’s bleed’n seafood flavor mate.

By: Lara Amber

Lara Amber — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:39:57 +0000

Euphrosyne,

So where would you find said information on skincare/beauty products? All the websites I’ve found are pushing their own agenda: we take money from the manufacturers, we want to push our own private line of products, etc.

Lara Amber

By: pookapooka

pookapooka — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:50:10 +0000

For my line of biz (music), no voodoo. The G5 is faster.

Hopefully the sounds that I organize inside the G5 is voodoo. So far it seems to be the case, working diabolically in this world toward my own fiendish, chthonic purposes.

By: Euphrosyne

Euphrosyne — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:43:11 +0000

You want to talk about the voodoo (although I prefer voudoun) corollary to advertising? Look at the beauty industry. I’m not talking about who’s targeted, who’s responsible for whose self-image, any of that. I mean the unsupported, untested, completely batshit claims made by every major cosmetics company for thousands and thousands of products, particularly the vast panoply of anti-aging goop. Every bit of information needed to shop intelligently for skin care products is readily available; most consumers, if asked outright, will admit that they DON’T BELIEVE the hype surrounding the $180 one-ounce bottle they’ve JUST BOUGHT. And there it is, in their hands and on their credit cards.

Sorry about the caps outbreak, but it makes me insane. If this is not pure magical thinking, I don’t know what is.

But how did you know what the penny was?