Mac browsers user agent strings contain “Macintosh”.
I know this because I develop a library for parsing them and just days ago someone filed an issue telling me that “Macintosh” was old timey and I should be transliterating to “Mac”. I did not accept the change.
I don't know if that's the most accurate description of their reasoning, though I agree with your decision.
"Could we perhaps rename the Macintosh platform to simply Mac? It hasn't been branded as Macintosh since 1998, and I'd like to avoid having to "translate" this to Mac for newer users that simply don't know what a Macintosh is."
Perhaps this use is to prevent trademark abandonment issues? I don’t think it’d be great for Apple if, e.g. Monoprice were to come out with a Macintosh computer.
This is a decent possibility, yeah. Other companies keep old trademarks active that way too.
"Standard Oil" in the US is one still used like that. It was split up between different companies for different states, and the current companies still use "Standard"/"Esso"/etc trademarks in obscure places to keep them active even though it's not part of their regular branding. I believe Chevron has a single gas station in each state named "Standard" although everything else looks like a Chevron station. Exxon sometimes labels their diesel pumps "Esso Diesel". At one point BP owned it in some states; I think they sold marine fuel on Lake Erie as "SOHIO" (Standard Oil of Ohio) still despite rebranding SOHIO stations in the late 80s everywhere else in the state. (This was several years ago that I remember seeing this, some things may have changed since then.)
(Outside of the US I think ExxonMobil owns it everywhere, and still regularly brands stations as Esso.)
Hey, this is an unrelated question but I've been looking for MDs turned SWEs and vice versa. I assume since you are here that you understand the life of a SWE. Do you have any thoughts about jumping from SWE to medicine?
As an attending anesthesiologist in a teaching hospital (University of Virginia Medical Center) for 15 years, I had occasion to interact with only one (1) software engineer who decided to change careers, attend med school, and then become an anesthesiologist. He was super-smart but oddly enough not an exceptional anesthesiology resident, though highly competent by the time he finished training with us and went on to a career in academic medicine, where he was a superb teacher.
The reason he had difficulty as a resident from time to time is that he was reluctant to do things unless there was a logical reason to do so. In medicine, and especially anesthesiology, where five minutes of respiratory obstruction/anoxia can lead to permanent brain damage or death right on the OR table, there are times when you do what works and has been shown by experience to work WITHOUT reasoning about the absolute best thing to do. Sometimes the correct action is not logical.
I'm not a doctor but I've dated enough med students to tell you that the value proposition of being an MD is far overrated. You have no more earning potential than a typical SWE, or less if you're not one of the top earning specialities. But the top earners don't hit their potential for a LONG time, and work insane hours. Probably most doctors are lucky to be broke, ie just finished paying off student loans, by 40, assuming a normal med school timeline. It makes more sense economically and sanity-wise to switch to law.
Have you considered that some people might choose their career based on something other than money? The sentence "med students should probably do law instead" strikes me as very very odd; they are such wildly different occupations that unless your sole consideration is money I'd say most med students would never want to do law, and most law students would never want to do medicine.
I thought we were talking about a SWE making a late-life career change, so I offered one perspective. Certainly I'm glad that doctors exist, and I hope they chose their profession for altruistic reasons (although I'm not sure I believe that to be the common case).
Have you been following the closures of law schools in recent years? In part it's because the cost of attending is so steep that it takes many years to pay off student debt at an entry level salary. As this fact becomes more widely known, and the career prospects for those who graduate from lower tier law schools become ever more dim, the trend will continue. Also, the intellectual demands of law vs. medicine vs. SWE are so very different in kind, it's hard for this MD to believe they are interchangeable. For example, about every decade I decide I'm going to try to learn how to program: after a few hours of complete failure, I abandon my efforts until the next time.
Thanks. I'm specifically not concerned about money (other than tuition if it comes to that). Not that it is unimportant, but I won't bring any to my grave.
As I've gotten to do business, negotiations, and dealing with "money" more, I became kind of disillusioned to the power game. It's not always as fun as commonly portrayed and medicine seems like a very demanding but cool job. Maybe the grass is just greener and it gets as boring (if not more due to the lower potential for creativity).
The reason why I switched from SW development to veterinary medicine (looking back on it) is because I do much better with a service-oriented role instead of a project-oriented one. If I finish my notes I can put everything to bed each day and not have to worry about deadlines or doing parts of a project incrementally so I'm not swamped at the end. It's nice to help people but if I was more interested in projects, veterinary medicine would be a bad way to do it.
Yes! I was a GP/family doctor for a while before going back into training to become an anesthesiologist. The reason I liked anesthesiology so much and hated GP/family medicine is because each case in the OR was self-contained: once I woke the patient up, I had succeeded. GP/family medicine, on the other hand, consisted of seeing the same people over and over who never got much better or worse but rather required maintenance that would go on forever. I loved leaving the hospital each day not having to wonder if I'd done enough or the right thing or missed a diagnosis.
The usefulness of money is that it gives you more free time between now and death. And yes, tuition is a killer. So is lost earning potential as you go through school instead of working. As for creativity and mental exercise, I think law is way closer to engineering than medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than later. The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?
>Law is way closer to engineering than medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than late
>The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?
"X is just a system! Why is this not automated?" is a common engineer mindset :) Unfortunately, X is just a system is only a good approximation if you don't actually understand much about what's going on. When you actually zoom in on the problem, the rough edges and hidden complexity start to become apparent, and your abstraction is no longer useful.
Computers are incredibly simple machines when compared to most messy real world systems, and we still have a heap of trouble dealing with them.
Healthcare has tons of potential to be improved by technology. There are regulatory and incumbent forces that will make it difficult and unfun to work on, but the general stance that automation can help reduce difficulty and human errors seems like a given to me.
I actually have hands on experience with EMR (epic) and I can tell you their convoluted solutions only make a complex system worse. As for actual clinical care, all the experience I have is second-hand, through friends and family in the field, but the ones I've talked to have admitted that most of med school is rote learning and bemoaned how easy it is to make mistakes.
I also have experience with something of an EMR, both from the implementation/standards side and the buying side. It is a complete and utter mess. The amount of cruft is insane, and service is very poor (nobody masters the subject, so you get the poor support). It is very tiresome.
>... medicine, which imho is one of the professions that's going to be automated away sooner rather than later. The job of a doctor is at least partly to memorize a bunch of rules that take symptoms as input and return a diagnosis. Why is that not a python script?
That made me laugh big-time even though I can't tell a python script from a boa constrictor.
Later rather than sooner would be much more accurate.
Of course I am concerned with creativity on an intellectual level, not necessarily related to painting or sculpting or other arts.
Curiously the MDs I work with have been relatively unanimous about this: there is a variability in cases and you do, in a way, have to be "creative", but in a very limited sense of what that means. "Creative" in your analysis. Some thought that was a boring aspect of the job, some thought that was the whole point.
What kind of creativity could you demonstrate in the OR?
It took me a long time to figure that out as a kid. Listening to Beatles songs with lyrics like “the man in the Mac said you gotta go back” or “the banker never wears a Mac “ I had no idea what that was.
> The Bluesbreakers then consisted of Green, Fleetwood, John McVie and Mayall. Mayall gave Green free recording time as a gift, in which Fleetwood, McVie and Green recorded five songs. The fifth song was an instrumental that Green named after the rhythm section, "Fleetwood Mac" ("Mac" being short for McVie).
That's Mackintosh with a "k", isn't it? At least, wikipedia says (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackintosh) this is the standard spelling of it. Although it also says its inventor was a Charles Macintosh (no "k").
McIntosh [1] is a type of Apple. At [1] you can also read about McIntosh ("McIntosh Laboratories") the hi-fi brand [2]. My father was an audiophile, and had various McIntosh hardware (pre-amplifier, tuner, oscilloscope, ...). Apple named the Mac after the Apple but deliberately misspelled it as "Macintosh" to avoid confusion with the hi-fi brand. As I grew up with the hardware from McIntosh (Laboratories), that'll for me always be real McIntosh. Even though the real one is the apple genus.
..and then there's "Big Mac". I'm not sure where that got its name from, nor if it has anything to do with McIntosh (labs or apple). It was innovated before the Mac was invented though.
Getting rid of the spinny disk icon in favor of some smoother, less detailed "SSD" icon seems likely but terribly offensive. The spinny disk icon has terrific character.
Even funnier is that with the open sourcing of PowerPC (and therefore steadily declining prices, soon in hobbyist range?), the IBM architecture might soon be one of those that "Think Different !" (And I'm willing to bet that we won't see a PowerPC Macintosh for a while...)
At that time I was still a bit anti communist but pro China. Hence this is the first campaign with Tibet issues made me pause. I am. Anti both as ypthey are the same. Hence the think different would trigger very different thought if launched today.
I’ve been using Macs for a long time, one of my first computers was a Macintosh. My first reaction to that question was “nah, I don’t think I’m using a Macintosh. I’m pretty sure I’m using a Mac”.
The Date & Time icon is an analog clock with a paper calendar icon on top of it. Does the author think this is "incorrect" because the computer does not actually have a tiny analog clock inside of it? It does have another type of clock based on a newer technology.
The Energy Saver icon is a light bulb with a standard base screw-in socket. The computer doesn't have one of those inside it either. And the computer's energy usage isn't primarily from lighting. But the icon is an LED bulb, and we understand those as a way of saving energy.
The Screen Time icon is an hourglass. Is this incorrect because the computer does not internally use an actual hourglass to judge whether your session is too long? Nevertheless, the idea comes across OK because you can use an hourglass for similar purposes.
> The Energy Saver icon is a light bulb with a standard base screw-in socket. The computer doesn't have one of those inside it either. And the computer's energy usage isn't primarily from lighting. But the icon is an LED bulb, and we understand those as a way of saving energy.
Interestingly, this used to be a normal lightbulb, then evolved into a CFL and is an LED bulb today.
At that point it's just a picture. I like the old symbols, even if they're antiquated now. Maybe when I remember the humble beginnings, using floppies, there's some nostalgia
Apple has icons for SSDs. They are shown in the article right after this:
> So what should Apple do? Customized icons for different types of drives would be a good start. Time Machine drives get custom icons automatically, as do many other types of storage devices that were more common in the past, so surely Apple could design different icons for SSDs and Fusion Drives, and then display them appropriately based on the type of drive.
Apple could repurpose one of the existing SSD icons pretty easily.
Which one of those is supposed to be an SSD icon? Top row we have, from left to right, generic external drive, an optical disk drive, time machine, icloud, shared (network) drive, CD. Bottom row we have three types of floppy disks, a Sony MemoryStick, a CompactFlash, and and SD card.
Does not matter. Most people have not seen a floppy disk for 15 years at least, but they still understand what it means when they see it ("save as..."). Familiarity.
Nowadays, you could probably make an SSD that looks like an old 3’’ floppy. Might get a bit hot (because of very little airflow and thermal paste) but it could carry plenty of chips/terabytes, in all that space. Add a protected USB-C socket, and at the other end a flexible dock-attachment (like the Nintendo Switch) that looks like an old drive, and you’d have a very retro-looking removable-storage system you can point the kids at.
I hadn’t thought about it consciously before, but when I hear “Macintosh” a beige box from the 80’s or 90’s comes to mind, and with “Mac” I’m thinking post-millennial aluminum and glass. So, it’s sort of a temporal indicator for the product line.
I know, it should be an actual crime that Apple sells brand new iMacs in 2020 for a small fortune and by default they come with a shitty 5400rpm drive. It's insane. Those machines have very decent specs but everything feels 2011-slow purely because the system is running off something that belongs in a museum.
The drive itself is not the issue. You can run Linux on a spinning drive and it will still be quick and snappy, because your free RAM will be used for caching file data. I don't know why Windows and Mac aren't doing this properly.
The drive is the issue, linux just happens to a better job of using other resources to improve HDD performance. Said linux installation would still be much faster/more responsive on an SSD. For the prices that Apple charges for their computers they should include a low-tier SSD at the very least.
I'm not sure that's accurate. I don't think it has much to do with caching strategies and everything to do with all developers now having SSDs and so never testing their software against slower media.
APFS is “optimized for SSD”, so performance is miserable on hard disks. For awhile Apple held off upgrading the system disk if it was an HDD, but that’s no longer an option if you want to run the latest OS.
Maybe, but at the moment if you just go to Apple.com and select shop for iMac, you are presented with 3 choices at different price points, and all of them come with this 5400rpm drive(the most expensive one gets a fusion drive, but still). To get an SSD you need to manually edit the configuration. That's not just education users who place an order for a 1000 of these and don't care - that's part of configurations offered to your regular customer.
That’s purely for the benefit of marketing, so that they can say “starting from <low price that nobody actually pays>”. You should expect some anchoring from the company that elevated arbitrary pricing to an art form.
Apple doesn’t “need” to do anything, they have more money than god. What they do is price-anchoring arbitrarily low in the segments where they expect to have the most price-conscious customers. They entice people with “starting from <low price>” then sting further down the road.
It’s just good pricing technique, nothing to do with logistics.
