Economic dominance will fail first. Military dominance will follow
much later after a very long period of nasty attempts to retain it
(which may already have started). Cultural dominance will fall last,
unfortunately. :-)
That has been the pattern for the last few thousand years anyway.
On 10/03/2007, at 6:07 PM, Jeff Keller wrote:
> The Wikinomics book is pretty interesting. I see a pretty strong case
> presented that U.S. dominance is past history.
BackSNIP
> No aneurism ... the "Mac promotion" and "windows attacks" to be blunt
> seem petty to me. Clearly there has to be something I'm completely
> missing.
It was always the way that you paid more and got more. Macs always
appealed to people that didn't want to look under the hood but just
wanted it to work and look good in the process. IBM's, PC's or
whatever you are calling them these days were much better for people
who wanted to build their own, leave out stuff that they didn't need
or only wanted to do one or two tasks. Personally i think that they
both got it wrong and have spent years fixing their problems but t
least a Mac was prettier and more reliable most of the time.
Few people use both on a regular basis - I do but even then I am
'poisoned' by the fact that my first was a Mac (1984) and it looked
sooooo good next to those green screens. 2000 and XP seem impossibly
clunky to me and everything seems so crude. And if you can't do
something, you really need a sysop. to work it out and tell you what
to do in a condescending manner so I guess they generate much more
employment for spotty, obnoxious young males with high-function
Asberger's syndrome.
I've rarely had a problem that I couldn't sort out myself and never
had one that I couldn't sort without calling on a friend or two who
know more than me - and I'm really very computer-dumb. That's what
I'm paying for. Meanwhile #2 son has lifted the hood on my old
machine and converted it to a screamer with some bolt-ons (graphics
card, Sonnet fast chip, extra fans). He even discovered that he could
force one machine to run much faster by fiddling with some micro-
resistors - Apple produced a fast board and then disabled it to get a
range of speeds so the cheap machine was the premium machine with two
different resistor positions bridged! That's very naughty indeed.
Thus it is possible to play around with the gizzards if you are so
inclined - the idea of closed architecture is long gone. Even I have
been able to upgrade the memory in a Mac laptop, an idea unthinkable
ten years ago.
Oh, and what you are missing has nothing to do with computers - try
Sociology. Or even Anthropology!
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
(NB. Anyone who offended by any of the foregoing clearly has not read
it carefully enough).
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