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"Mac affiliates were making better machines than Apple"

So by Apple killing this the consumer loses the option to use better machines?

Personally, I wish that I could buy Apple hardware with OSX as an added "option". I could knock $129 off the price by using my own OS. But, truthfully, it's not about price. By being able to use my own bootloader and my own OS^1, I could avoid the sort of hoop jumping longtime Mac users (e.g. John Battelle and Rob Pike) have recently described.

1. At least, having Apple make this easy, not make the user resort to extensive hackery to do it.

Apple makes beautiful hardware. That part of Apple has not changed. The mounting annoyances, if you haven't noticed, all come from Apple's efforts to lock down and exert total control over software.

The idea of paying for Ubuntu, as code, only shows how far afield some Linux users have drifted. There is a difference between paying for support and paying for a license to use some (free) code. If you need help, pay for support. Suggestions to force everyone else to pay for use of free code because you need help make little sense. Is that what this is, or have I misread it?

Interesting comments. I've been working with an APL-derivative and this sounds similar to how I have been thinking about things. It's a matter of massaging the data to get in into a certain representation, e.g. a matrix, then from there it's very, very easy to work with using APL. As you say a few operators is all you need. The code is very terse. Very powerful. The real work seems to be shaping the data into the right representation first, a matrix. I use non-APL-descendent programs, the usual UNIX utilities, to do this for now.

True. AltaVista was certainly good enough for me.

I distinctly remember when someone recommended Google to me. I tried it and was unimpressed. They had a sparse index.html (which has served them well over the years) but other than that, AltaVista was still better. AltaVista was the first real search engine and I still think it was the best.

Sort of like how Google's obsession with Facebook is hurting Google?