Rendezvous, Microsoft And Apple

serendigital writes "MacCentral reports that a BusinessWeek article entitled: 'A Rendezvous with Redmond?' has -- with Rendezvous -- created an actual threat to Microsoft. As reported by MacCentral, it's interesting to note that BusinesWeek's 'Byte of the Apple' columnist Charles Haddad is on temporary leave and this article was written by a substitute columnist."

Worst quote ever in the Apple Section

[teamhasnoi]

Still, at the time many Apple observers reacted cautiously. "Cool app, but show me something real and meaty," seemed to be the general feeling.

That's what she said.

I can't believe I actually posted this. Wait...Yeah, I can.

This article is not readable.

[wealthychef]

This single-sentence article does not parse for me. It seems to be claiming that an article in Business Week is a threat to Microsoft.

Re:This article is not readable.

[Green Light]

From the linked article:

Apple is delivering on the immense potential of its no-fuss networking system. With luck, it could be a direct challenge to Microsoft

Now, apparently, Apple needs "luck" in addition to all of its products and services...

Sweet!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"You walked into a room bearing a laptop running Jaguar (the latest version of the OS X operating system) with a wireless networking (Wi-Fi) card, and you could instantly see the iTunes music files of everyone else in the room with a similar setup."

AWESOME!!!

-H. Rosen

Imagine a beowulf cluster of ...

[burgburgburg]

Wait, you wouldn't NEED a beowulf cluster, with the Rendezvous-enabled programs CPU-shifting the work in your office.

Tittillating tech titans touch together!

[HarveyBirdman]

Could the Belle of Cupertino and the Stud of Redmond be the hottest new couple on the Siliconwood stage? That's what this gossip reporter tried to find out this week, but alas there was little 411 to be found as intimate confidantes of both parties were tight lipped and mum!

Apple and Microsoft we heard to be discussing a "rendezvous" of some sort. Could it be merely a business deal, or a romantic entanglement? Une telle excitation!

Only time will tell, sassy tech fans! Maybe Microsoft can only tell us how Apple signs a contract. But if the stars favor romance as Valentine's Day (every geek's FAVORITE holiday!) approaches, perhaps Microsoft will learn if Apple cries out or sighs softly or squeals like a pig as she, well, consummates the deal, if you know what I mean.

And I know you know, you naughty voyeurs! ;-) Une fessée sur le fond pour vous!

Re:VOIP

[goombah99]

Yeah, that could replace e-mail as way of communicating. Just think about it. instead of typing you use your voice.

Re:VOIP

[brarrr]

>> but also a phone jack that you could plug your telephone into

you mean like a modem?

Rondevous

[cygnus]

the best thing about it is that you don't even have to spell it correctly for it to work.

Re:help

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, earlier you said it was a 300MHz Mac. Maybe the problem is the interface between the chair and the keyboard.

Spend Valentine's Day downloading Windows drivers

[mattbot 5000]

If you hurry, you might be able to get one in time to save Valentine's Day.

Re:And it works for games, too

[donutello]

Great! Now I can play Breakout, Super Breakout and Photoshop easily!

Re:Microsoft's response

[Chasuk]

Read at -1. Find out what THEY don't want you to know!

For my own amusement, I took the suggestion of your .sig, and discovered only that there are more functional illiterates on /. than I had ever imagined.

Is that what THEY didn't want me to discover?

Re:This article is not readable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the submitter's language is a little confusing. If you read it carefully, you'll see he's making the rather bold claim that a magazine article COULD be a threat to Microsoft, but ONLY if it includes Rendezvous support.

Since paper and ink currently are not capable of compiling the Rendezvous code, let alone running an TCP/IP stack, it seems Microsoft's position is secure.

However, if the magazine were to acquire some sort of co-processing unit to beef up its computational power, this might be something to keep an eye on. Or perhaps loading the ASCII representation of the article into a CPU would result in a Rendezvous-aware application? No word on which CPU would be involved, though based on the length of the article, I'm sure it would have to be CISC. How does this square with Apple's support of RISC technology? Is Apple moving to Intel in the near future? Questions, questions!!

Not 100% clear if it's any copy of business week or just the one on his desk. Interesting development, either way.

Kudos to Apple for creating a technology that could potentially run in a piece of paper!

Frying Pan; Fire

[jcsehak]

Yeah, but it could be better.

from the article: ...Bill's boxes to Steve's elegant machines.

This is the kind of subjectivity that has no place in real journalism. Zealots are Apple's real threat. So many people hear "Apple" and think "using a Powerbook at a Starbucks, sipping a latte, dressed in black." Apple users are art-fags to them, and derogatory comments about "Windoze" aren't going to do anything but make it worse.

How about some fucking objectivity? Lemmie give you a tip, Sparky - people will take you more seriously when you say "Apple's new technology poses a real threat to MS" if you don't follow it with "I'm getting a sex change so I could maybe have Steve's baby"

Re:Worst quote ever in the Apple Section

[damiam]

Already been done. [bbspot.com]

Re:Frying Pan; Fire

[pohl]

people will take you more seriously when you say "Apple's new technology poses a real threat to MS" if you don't follow it with "I'm getting a sex change so I could maybe have Steve's baby"

When did quotation marks become horribly-biased-paraphrase-marks? Was it about the same time that you said "I'm a pedophile"?

Re:On leave? Good

[andrewski]

Maybe he means scraping the registry for the shattered corpse of an unsucessfully uninstalled program? Or perhaps he means the constant rebooting even in XP. Or, maybe, just maybe, it is Bonzi Buddy that is meaningful to him.

Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

It sounds like other OSes could create an equivalent to Rendezvous in about two weeks by writing a wrapper around nmap.

Heh. Or they could just download [apple.com] the source code and use that.

Re:Because the man is a moron.

[SirSlud]

Yeah, hell, why have computers provide *any* layer of abstraction between the hardware and the user software ...

Shit, lets just drop the IP layer altogether, cause all we need to do is write down the MAC address of each networking componant in the office and manually enter them anytime we do anything!

Brilliant!

Re:On leave? Good

[SirSlud]

If you *Really* wanted to support your claim that you can't do anything meaniful with a Mac, you'd have noted that you posted your comment from one.

Absolutely Not!!

[ClippyHater]

That sentence obviously reports that the article [b]coupled[/b] with Rendezvous creates the threat. Of course Microsoft will immediately retaliate with a brochure coupled with their technology, a few days after which it will be discovered that the brochure was created via PageMaker on a Mac by a contract desktop publisher working remotely. Meanwhile, the software will be on the frontpage of /. as a bug-ridden POS, after which hot fix 1 will immediately be released in 6 months (6 months being immediately for Redmond, as they will have a higher-priority project in the works for making MS Office, Notepad, Calculator, and Paint actually part of their next OS release).

Re:i'm sure that M$ is just shakin in their boots.

[saddino]

i think the fact that you'll pay about twice as much for a mac as for a comparable pc offsets the the fact that you have to spend an extra minute setting the PC up (assuming that the Mac doesn't crash and you need to find a paperclip somewhere to reset it).

Paperclip? That's the most out-of-date trolling I've seen in a while, LOL. Here let me finish for you:

...and after you reset that dumb Mac, you'll find you're stuck with that built-in 9 inch B&W POS monitor FOREVER, mac lusers!...

Re:This is sad

[cyb3r0ptx]

What if they spell 'incompetent' as 'incompitent'? Can he then remain on his 'pedistal'?

Re:Promiscuous sharing with Rendezvous and Wifi

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"You could get promiscuous with strangers: you could pair and exchange a song on the same short bus ride."

And strangers will be following you around as you walk the streets, trying to download the last few megabytes of that Metallica album.

graspee

Re:Frying Pan; Fire

[agent oranje]

Ease of hardware configuration...? I must be using my Mac wrong, as I've never heard of this "hardware configuration" you speak of.

Re:Sweet!!!

[WebMasterJoe]

There is this beautiful option in windows called searching. You could do a search on the domain for *.mp3, then select all and enque, I am sure that that's all this program is doing but it is just doing it in the background.

I don't usually respond to flamebait, but come on! You seriously think that automatic discovery is nothing more than a fancy front for a full-fledged domain search? And, by the way, how do you intend to search the whole domain?

I checked your website [epyon-industries.ath.cx] to see what kind of person we're dealing with, too. "At this site, you will discover all about our ability to help you build your corporate network, as well as our courteous and resourceful staff." We will discover all about your ability? Your resourceful staff should find a good grammar resource. And then there's the line at the bottom - "if you don't hire us, your stock holders will know." Whoever came up with that line should not be allowed to speak in public.

Zorkconf!

[Sentry21]

This is great! You could set up a rendezvous-enabled console app that would be able to describe to you the services available to you in whatever room you were in. Just imagine the possibilities! Let's say you took your laptop to a new company...

*user walks into a room*
Frobozz Magic Smoke Company Lobby
You have entered the lobby of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company. This building was constructed in the year 1998, by ten thousand slaves working for the Great Underground Empire, to hold the offices of the workers designing and implementing new forms of magic smoke.

> look
You see two broken web terminals, a secured file server, and a print server. One of the secretaries is chatting about how she got her nails done the other day.

*user walks north into the Human Resources department*

Human Resources
The Human Resources department of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company is widely considered to be the cruelest, most inhuman lot of soulless minions ever to serve the will of evil.

> look
You see two printers, a Sybase server, a Graphite G4, a speed-hole G4, and a voicephone.

> look G4
Do you mean the Graphite G4 or the speed-hole G4?

> graphite
The Graphite G4 is sharing two directories, marked 'music' and 'porn', and has 82% CPU free.

The potential is amazing! Go Apple!

--Dan

Apple already has this

[commodoresloat]

Turn on speech recognition. Use your voice to type an email, and send the email. It's pretty cool, and you can even tell your email program to attach an mp3 file of your voice. If you prefer real-time, just do this through IRC. But what would be really cool is if we can think of a way to have real-time voice-to-voice communication over the phone lines without having to use a computer. Now that would be the killer app.