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Re-read my post and re-read the article, they already have projectiles that travel at 1.5kmps which breaks the sound barrier.

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Read the article;

They are talking about aluminim oxide powered turboprops traveling at about 200 meters per second, which is about ~400 miles per hour.

They also have been able to launch projectiles at about 1.5kmps, which is over 7 times faster, or about 3200 miles per hour, much much faster than the speed of sound under water or above water.

Meaning that the shock waves it gives off cannot be deteced by sonar!

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The speed of sound is determined by the medium in which you are measuring sound, so that in the air at sea level it can be ~700mph, but underwater it is considerably slower, I think. Regardless, if you read the article, they already have projectiles that travel faster than the speed of sound, traveling at 1.5km/s

So the bullet travels faster than the sound waves it produces, which means that a moving sub cannot 'hear' the bullet with passive sonar, and unless it uses active radar, cannot do a radar scan either (I think active radar can be detected by other subs...)

And besides the main point, the Soviet Squall has already been recorded/suspected to be capable of reaching speeds of 230miles per hour!

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Actually, I think the underlying principles may have merit.

You don't need to dispell the bubble at 1000 yards. You need to destabilize the bubble enough for tail slap to kick in, and you only need it far enough that the explosive warhead, if it detonates, doesn't damage the sub. Even 10 yards may be enough to soak up the explosion.

The same with the ablative armor. It doesn't need to even touch the warhead, because the destroying the bubble would be worse than tail slap; a wall of water rushing at the warhead at 200mph will do all the work you need.

A 5000lb torpedo would impact the water no different than if it were hitting a concrete barrier. The water would soak most of the impact. However, what I don't know is what range is necessary for the water to do all the work for the military.

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Here, let's spark one.

Super cavitating weapons would travel faster than the speed of sound, so it cannot be detected sonically.

The gas/water interface may be very radar noisy, so that might still work, I don't know.

A sonic attack, akin to a laser, should be able to collapse or deflect super cavitating weapons.

Focus the water waves/sound waves into a beam like weapon in the path of the super cavitating weapon, feed more energy into the bubble than it was designed to handle, and destabilize the cavitating devices capacity to create a stable bubble, forcing tail slap and mis-guides.

Or something as simple as 'ablative' armor, in which surface mounted explosives destroy the bubble and using the shockwave/water as a weapon against super-cavitating devices.

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Just like jet, prop, and other air-based propulsion technologies are only used to kill people?

Militaries are loss leaders, like racing teams for car manufacturers, but the technology is something that can be applied to anything; it takes a genius to figure it out, and a genius to apply it, but once we do, the 'capitalist' system rewards them for the efficiencies they exploit.

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Heck, not only does Imohotep do Darth Vader, he does a pretty mean Alien Xenomorph too :)

Then there are the Matrix/Jackie Chan/CTHD styled fight scenes.

It could almost be considered a parody of horror and adventure movies. Ha, they invented the hot air balloon in this movie!

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What I'm wondering is why shareholders with a clue aren't sueing the respective companies for 'fraudulent' behavior, considering copy protection is just a scam!

Like, are they so afraid of P2P technology, that movie sharing and such, will rise that watermarking is worth the effort?

It almost seems like the corporations involved are mixing their signals!

Are they trying to prevent pirate/bootlegs? Why would watermarking prevent that?

Are they trying to prevent people from copying content they legitamately own? Why would watermarking prevent that?

This is ludicrous!

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I'm not sure I get your point;

As long as the contract is well defined and specified about what the terms are, what's billable, what's required, what's requested, and what's supported, there should be no issue.

How much money is being exchanged? What services will be provided? What resources?

That is independent on whether the product is Open Source or not, the only difference is in the implementation in that the client has full access to the source, as it were.

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Alright, let's look at your example...
CoA designs sales tracking software X.
CoB, a purchaser of said software X, has added a feature to it, so it's now X.1
CoC and CoD want said feature, and you can provide it in future versions thanks to CoB.

It's not fair to say CoA never spent a dime to develop, because without the initial investments and design of X, there would not be X.1

Are you, CoB, gonna be miffed that someone else sold X.1? Well, how about the fact that because X is Open Source, you didn't *have* to pay for X in the first place? It cost you nothing to use it, so why would you be bothered that someone else is using your software, X.1?

Let's say you purchase product X, and modify the source to become X.1; The value of the product to you is in how you use it to satisfy your need to do sales tracking. If X.1 does that for you, all your needs have been met. Sales of X.1 to other companies through CoA is irrelevant because that was written into the contract and also because CoA spent the money you paid them to give you X, X.1.1, and X.2, saving you a further 400 hours. Does it matter to you that X.1.1 was created at CoC, giving you features you didn't pay for, but get for free because you have the source? And because X and X.1 and X.1.1 was so beneficial to you, you upgrade to X.2 for the support and service contracts.

What motivation would you have to make significant modifications to a program? How about knowing that you need said modifications to get your job done? Why does it matter that the vendor sells the mod in a future release? If that is an issue, create a contract in which features and enhancements to product X because of CoB give you a kickback; otherwise, live with the fact that without X you would have to roll your own, and instead of spending 200 hours of development, you would have to spend 1200 hours of development.

It's perfectly reasonable to ask for or look for profit sharing, as it was your work. The point is that you still *save* money by using X over rolling your own, and you still make more money using X.1 than by using X, and that there is a profit increase by licensing the codebase instead of rolling your own.

If the contract that CoA demands is no kickbacks, you can choose not to do business with them; on the other hand, since the source is free, by doing business with CoA, you get access to all the development on X that CoC, CoD, and CoA invest into the code, saving you previous development and resources.

It's the choice of whether the model saves you more money, or whether rolling your own does. It's a rational choice.

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So I release an Open Source product, say some sort of load balancing software, and I sell network devices that use this product.

Company B who buys my products and rebrands them to create their own variation of network devices is free to, and does.

Company C buys my products in order to use said network devices.

Both offer fixes and patches to my software, being Open Source, and both gain the benefits of using my software and products. What's to stop us from taking the software of CoB and creating a new network device?

Morals, I guess. On the other hand, it would make sense that CoB's mods are device specific, and essentially forked off from my branch. If I were to re-release them myself, I'd need to redevelop the hardware that CoB uses.

If there is no value in modifying a GPLed program, you wouldn't modify it.

If there is some marginal value, then it's worth modifying.

This is very similar to the current situation between Handspring and Palm, but instead of GPLed software we have licensed software. On the other hand, you can ask the question "Why should I release my software's source if company B can take it, make improvements, and sell better devices?

The added benefit is almost raw, unadultered competition. Whatever benefit CoB can add is the profit you can make. Whatever benefit I can add is the profit I can make. If my GPLed software didn't exist, CoB would be forced to reinvent the wheel. If CoB can release a product with my software that I cannot win against CoB, then, well, shame on me!

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Reread the original question and decided I was too vague.

How do you track if a product is implemented unchanged? You can't. You use the version ID number that came with the product.

Sure, they can lie about the version number or not changing the code, but that won't help them, and they are paying you per hour, as per your service contract, right?

This can be *confirmed* as simply as saying "We've replicated your setup and can't find the problem"
or
"Give us access to your setup so we can see what's going on."

What if a piece of unrelated code is changed and the customer finds a bug in another piece of code?

The unrelated code is irrelevant, then. Fix the bug, supply a patch, and incorporate into the product. Or document the bug and workarounds.

Who/how do you decide if this is covered under support?

Write a good support contract, and then prepared to be flexible and helpful. Customer satsifaction and all

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It means if they can tweak the code, it means when they do call tech support, they already have the problem and solution firmly in hand, but don't have the resources, means, or capability to fully thresh out the solution.

A side benefit is that if company B mods the hell out of the product, we've created a second product by effectively outsourcing development to company B.

It's a different issue whether we can create a new product with said mods, but the issue would be the services and such company B is providing with software, and not the software itself

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Support is the wrong term for an Open Source product.

You provide the source, so the only support you can provide is... how to open it in a text editor, how to compile it, how to modify it, how to check out and check in. In the sense that the Source is it's own product and all.

Support for the binary and all is no different than any other product; the source acts like documentation, which is all the difference...

"So I'm using version 3.X.X.Y and keep having this problem, with this trace and dump. We looked at the corresponding source and found this <description of problem> but dunno if this was it. When we recompiled with <this fix> the problem went away, but we still have <portion of problem>"

In this case, the Source is being leveraged by the customer, and you, against the product, making the product that much more useful and useable.

Does this make sense?

I dunno about a company buying your software, customizing it to hell, and then demanding support. If that company wanted support, it should be purchasing a support contract, with full disclosure and documentation of the changes and customization to said product. In the end it makes your product more useful and customer oriented and it makes your support issues easier because you have essentially outsourced a full development team at no cost to you for a new flavor of your product

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Support the binary version of the product.

That's what you sell, that's what you produce.

The Source is available for everyone to access, use, compile, tweak, etc.

To be clear, make this kind of separation:
Branded binary release of an Open Source product. This is sold/given away/whatever, and this is supported. Each binary should have a ID, a version number or tag, such that your support organization can track and file problems against this version.

The Source itself has it's own, different, versioning scheme. Allow for forums, mailing lists, and chatrooms for this, different, product.

In a way you can treat the Source as a document describing and explaining the product; but treat the product like any other closed source product, and support it as such. If people have problems with the Open Source product, well, the whole point of Open Source is that they can and should fix it themselves. If they can contribute a fix, review, give credit, and incorporate.

If they find a bug or problem that is big enough that you *should* fix, then fix it, credit, document, and incorporate.

The point is that the product is not free, but that the Source is

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If the challenge has been met, by these researchers, then it means it can be met again and again(the whole point of scientific process and such)

Which means any player or device that uses any of these technologies can be hacked or cracked or tampered with (or not, depending on what the research conclusions were) reliably and consistently.

Which means *not* publishing is actually fraud and lying to the various stock holders and people in charge of the music industry who may otherwise never know that they are about to pull another 'CSS'

Right?

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of id vs ego (and perhaps a dash of superego as well)

Where the id says "More! Grunt! More!"
The ego says "I am satisfied. All's right with the world."
And the Superego says "Consume. Spend. Buy. Just do it!"

You know what? Mac people have had to rationalize for far too long. We've had to settle for 400Mhz!

Argh! When will someone come to quench our thirst for raw power? Motorola? IBM? Apple?

Do not bother to fight the irrational/id. The best you can do is placate it and compromise; promise it a *dual* 2Ghz system!

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If you can't convince the market or the consumers you exist and are worth buying, why bother producing?

On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of reasons I prefer Debian to Redhat;

Debian has a better debug and design cycle (read longer and more thorough) such that it works on more systems and works more reliably.

Of course this is all word of mouth; I run only one Debian system, but I failed to get Red Hat, Mandrake, and Caldera to install on it. I tried Debian because it was touted as more reliable and better debugged, though almost an entire release cycle behind, and found that it worked.

Debian also has a nice update/package manager, apt, though a bit cryptic in UI, is very useful. Network aware and dependency aware! It's cool.

So Debian has a place; if a company existed that managed to market it correctly (just those two above make TCO for corporations much smaller) I'm sure it could survive, but you're right, it does boil down to marketing.

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I would *love* if they did this!

Imagine, me downloading Delerium's Silence, and then asking the server for other songs with similar fingerprints?

Now I can search across the spectrum!

Or I can encode my own songs for Napster, say my fav CDs, and then get other hits for similar music!

I'd love to find music that sounds like Chrono Cross "Time of the Dreamwatch". Yet I don't know how. Or songs that sound like Ah! My Goddess, melancholy and sentimental.

I dunno, if they use it to actually characterize songs, for filtering purposes, they can also use it for searching and indexing purposes too!

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I haven't seen anyone post concerning the network to the kitchen or bathroom :)

My first thought would be to use wireless; that's one less interface to have to deal with. Create a wireless network for the ethernet, and you're set. Add wireless keyboards and mice, and that improves the situation, though due to the hazardous nature of the two environments, an optical mouse like Apple's (one button, no openings for stuff to fall in, you can actually wrap it up in saran wrap as well), and one of those freaky waterproof membrane keyboards. But keyboards are cheap, you cah probably use a standard USB keyboard and just be careful to clean it out once in a while :)

For the monitor you almost definitely want some form of LCD; they don't have some of the size/water problems that a CRT does :)

Even better, get an LCD and encase it in a plexiglass/aluminum container to protect it :)

Essentially a laptop will work best; get an old one, place it inside a secure and protected container, and give it some wireless optical accessories. When it's not in use, fold it up into it's protected container, and it won't ever get in trouble. The optical mouse will have no tracking issues, no gunk issues, and the keyboard, well, make sure it's cheap :)

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That's the problem Apple faces squarely, except they don't have the option of faster processors.

They have machines that can do DVD burning, mp3 ripping, movie making, and game playing. Is the GHz issue hurting them? I dunno, they seem to be marketing their other strengths, such as wireless networking, style and fashion, and plain useability.

I hope it works out, I happen to enjoy my Titanium PowerBook :)

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Very nice comment, sympathetic, nostalgic, conceding, yet still ending with a note of doom.

As long as Apple continues to make a profit, it can survive. That's necessary, but not sufficient. Apple also needs to continue gaining/getting developer support. It needs to get commercial apps.

It's already got the Microsoft products, so it's not being kept out of the office. It's got the Adobe products, so it's still strong in the graphics industry. It's got the BSD OS in OS X, so hopefully they can woo and attract the large and diversified Open Source guys.

Apple's strength and hope is diversification. It can, right now, tackle multiple growth points; the development community who prefer a Unix workstation (at commodity prices with a slick if unoptimized UI), the education community which has traditionally worked with Macs, the business community with it's full suite of M$ Office programs and sealed box hardware, the Good Looking People, with the Titanium powerbook and the Cube, the graphics and DTP community as a traditional stronghold for Macs, and the consumer market, with it's pretty and stylish iMacs.

Apple just has to be smart enough to choose 2 or 3 of the fastest growing markets and jump in; will it be people who, having become saturated with cheap fast computers, desire style and flash? Will it be the education market, as schools start to get networked and connected as never before? Will it be the business industry, as the economy recovers and gets back on track? Or the development community, as the economy recovers and everything tech becomes hot again? Or the home market, with the push for digital content, digital hubs, and digital media?

Hopefully Apple will choose wisely, because it would be nice to see what other cool stuff they can pull off in six years :)

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You know, if someone were willing to take the fall (because of loyalty, deferred rewards, or stupidity), wouldn't just going out and killing all the lawyers, destroying their offices, their computers, their servers, and their homes get Rambus out of trouble?

I mean allegations of fraud require evidence, but if all the evidence were gone...

Still would there be enough circumstancial evidence lying around?

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The cost of developing verifiably bug-free software is not justifiable in some situations. The use of the word many is a value judgement that is at best subjective.

NASA, for example, can ill afford buggy software.
Medical centers and hospitals can ill afford buggy software.
The Army and armed services can ill afford buggy software.

Now the real question is, can the average user afford buggy software?

I dunno, I would much prefer no bugs to bugs. How much would I pay for that?

I don't know.

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Unless I'm mistaken, X on OS X is being worked on/works, and NVIDIA is just handling hardware access, isn't it?

Slap an X server (whether it be xFree or something else), and you get X-Windows, don't you?

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How ironic that NVIDIA is pushing hard into the Mac market with their GeForce line of cards, when the Mac OS X system is exactly a BSD OS on the PPC platform =)

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It's where I work =)

e-speak is open source.

http://www.espeak.net

It's not currently, shall we say, polished to a glowing shine, but it's out there. It's goal and intent is to allow e-services (web being a superset of this. PDAs, cell phones, cars, and other devices could be serviced as well as PCs) in which 'composition' and 'mediation' can occur between services from different vendors or suppliers.

It currently runs on HPUX, Red Hat Linux, and Windows NT. It's known to have been compiled to run on Win2k, Madrake, and Debian, but those aren't supported.

It's cross platform nature is due to it's being written in Java, though there are XML, Python, and C interfaces (some are a little dusty)

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It was mainly a joke response to LA,T's post, more than anything else.

Anyway, to address your points, if you're being serious;

What is civilised or refined about a nation that shoots it's own students (Kent State)? or Murders it's people(Waco, Ruby Ridge)? Or kills babies (abortion)?

No, USA is not civilised or refined by any benchmark, indeed, it makes me wonder if you are just a fool?

Do you see what I'm saying? China breaking into superpower status is not tied to becoming a democracy. Being a democracy does not prevent a nation from being brutish or evil.

History has shown that it is ambition, greed, and desire that makes a state 'super'. Freedom and Democracy just make it a nicer place to live, for the people; in the case of the US, it *is* arguably the reason the people are here, and it is the people who make the nation 'super', nothing else.

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Your 'two' points:

1) Consumer loyalty actually exists, believe it or not. It translates into many little subtle things; like preference for Coke just because it tastes better, or always buying Ford because you're comfortable and secure in buying them, or always wearing Nike because Nike has always been comfortable, etc.

None of these have to do with advertising, per se. Advertising isn't meant for people who are already brand loyal; it's to build a correlation between the brand and the image it projects. When you have a cold, and you're miserable, what do you do? Vicks vaporub, some Tylenol cold and flu, maybe Kleenex medicated tissues, and Campbell's chicken soup.

2) I think the more precise view is that Coke needs to get enough mindshare to get people to drink until they become addicted =)

Coke and Pepsi really don't need to worry about 'stealing' the other's market share; if both are making a profit, than trying to steal from one another would only hurt themselves in a vicious duel. If they tried to win converts by changing flavors, they would probably only alienate their installed markets, so all they can do is try to inundate non-drinkers. What they can do is grow the market, however, by creating new drinks that the other doesn't dominate yet, like lightly flavored caffienated water drinks, or sports drinks, or whatever, but as each market matures, they... ah, I'm tired. I'll let someone else address your further points =)

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You can change it now, with the advent of OS X!

You now have both a GUI and a command prompt =)

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Does it work?

Well, I browse and surf the web for content. Not ads. I want to know more about, for example, gardening, how to make fountains, home repair, etc. Things that I do.

So it's a symbiotic approach. Corporate interests want me to be successful in these endeavors because it means I buy more, do more, spend more. If the various companies provide the sites and the info, while remaining branded or acknowledged, I get the info I want, and they get the presence they want.

So I don't see how this creates a problem. Coke, J&J, and John Deere hits their target audiences. The 'other' companies don't lose out; they just failed to advertise, but this metric of creating compelling sites with compelling content.

The Banner Ads only work where sites draw in viewers for people to see the Banner Ads. You can't advertise on non-existent sites, right?

The analogy to this is how tv ads sponsor and subsidize the tv shows that encapsulate and surround the ads. By making popular and successful tv shows, tv broadcasting can sell ads at high prices. By buying ads to link with popular tv shows, companies can create positive mindshare.

As per your thought that generic portals will win... it's all a matter of semantics between "portals" and generic portals. There is nothing that stops a Coke-web site from being a generic portal.

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With OS X you can actually boot into OS 9, if you so wish.

With W2k, you can't 'boot' into the OS/2, the POSIX, the Win95, Win99, or Dos layers.

In my original post, I was speculating on the fact that you could actually throw out the OS X and keep the OS 9, or throw out the OS 9 and keep the OS X; You can slim down and pare the Mac OS to something much more reasonable, where with XP, 3gb is 3gb, unless you want to pare down to Win2k instead, or Win98 (which isn't technically 'paring')

OS X needs 1.5gb, but ~350 is Classic; that drops it to 1.2gb

From there we can compare that WinXP is still more than twice the size of OS X =)

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Hrmm, well, it was partially a joke post, too. I'm glad you enjoyed it =)

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Yay China, I guess, since I'm Chinese.

It's about time, too. It's sort of insulting, that one of the oldest civilizations on Earth is not quite a superpower, despite having developed and refined governement and buearacracy for the past 4000 years. Go team!

I wonder what you mean by the demise of the nation-state. A nation-state does not preclude the rise of geopolitical economic power structures, it just means that a nation-state has to be particularly large to achieve this. US is a good example of what could be potential 30 or so nation-states that collude and pool together to form a vaster, greater nation-state. So China already has that advantage, and the EU is finally catching up, in bits and pieces.

I actually think the EU is one of the smaller economic areas, in comparison to the US or to the Asias; do you remeber Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea? They form a formidable engineering and technology quartet, with India rising quickly too. But this is an uninformed 'opinion' post, on my part.

I don't think America will be challenged by these entities at all. I think what will happen is that America will *assimilate* these entities. We've already swallowed a large amount of India's talent pool; when they go back to further grown India, they will have been corrupted by the influences of American culture(as we have been by their music, curries, and tandori chicken =). This is happening to China, to Japan, to Taiwan, and many other places.

As much as I want to see a global government, I don't think that will happen any time soon. Too many vast cultural divides exist for that to be possible in the near future. Heck, the Taliban still wages war on womanhood, how the heck would they coexist with great nations where women are prime ministers and leaders of technology, finance, and economy?

I hope the US becomes a great force in this global govt, by assimilating and adapting all the relevent cultural forces and movements into itself, and spreading it's own sense of culture and values (hopefully not at the expense of diversity!) into a global economy and existence.

Louis

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Has no one realized yet how the web works?

Advertising, if one applies the proper transformations, is actually product information dispersal online.

If John Deere wants to advertise it's mowers and stuff, what they can do (and probably should!) is to host and design gardening, landscaping, and home-maintainance websites!

*Grow* the market, and makes sure your name is attached to it! So create http://www.jdweb.com/Garden or http://www.jdweb.com/DIY, etc.

I think this can be expanded to *any* product. If you're Johnson and Johnson, create the home healthcare, health, and self improvement pages. Don't bother too heavily with product placement, I don't think, but when people start associating 'health' and 'wellness' with J&J, they've done good advertsing.

Let's try more esoteric examples: Coke, which sells a drink.

Actually, they sell a lifestyle, in which the drink is part of the image and the taste. Create something hip and free for people to visit; web boards, movie reviews, hiking, bike, and rollerblade info sites, etc. Sites where people can go do things, and while they are at it, drink Coke.

Safeway Foodstores could host cooking sites, with recipes. Activity sites, like Coke. BBQ sites, with hints, anecdotes, stories, and recipes. Whatever!

It's similar to how a portal works, but much more targeted.

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It's all a function of perspective; a display that emits light in the RGB colorspace or reflects light in the CMYK colorspace can be functionally identical, because in the end they are both measured by the light your eyes absorb. The only advantage that a lighted display has is that it has a much broader dynamic range than a piece of paper; it can get brighter than ambient light.

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I am so very wrong.

The Intel P4s are something like $600 to the Athlon's $300. You acknowledge that yourself. But I think you misinterpret my words:
"get the fastest processor at the highest price"

I never meant for a buyer to spend the most money possible; that's silly and stupid. Rather take the most the can afford, say $170, and find all the CPUs at that price, and take the highest clocked CPU. This is perfectly valid for x86 CPUs because so much is weighted by clockspeeds, but across the various flavors of AMDs and Intels.

Using SharkyExtreme, $170 gives us an Athlon 950MHz, An Athlon T-bird 1.1GHz, and a P3 850MHz. Guess what? The T-bird wins.

I can see why you can interpret my statement to mean "Buy the most expensive CPU on the market", but with that kind of reasoning, one would buy, san, an SGI P3 Xeon or something!

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If you're going to learn a new UI in the first place... or need to buy a new PC... though there's still the curse of less software Macs can finally tap into the whole OS/GNU software thing, because of the BSD underpinnings.

As well as the case that for any real Windows software requirements, there's always VirtualPC + W2k, which may still take less resources and outperform a Windows XP install!

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But isn't OS X actually 2 OSes and 2 UIs + a whole slew of *stuff*, to XPs OS + UI + stuff?

Apple has the BSD OS, atop which sits their Aqua UI; then there's their Mac Classic virtual OS and the Classic UI, + a bunch of Unix apps, their mail app, IE, and GNU stuff...

Where Microsoft has it's two UIs, Luna and Classic, their one OS (W2k++), + IE, the photo stuff, and their versions of GNU and Unix apps?

I think Mac OS X gets much smaller without the ~350mb of Classic, doesn't it?

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I dunno if the other replies are of this vein, but in y experience there's two pretty reliable ways to do this kind of comparison shopping; either getting the fastest MHz at the price you are willing to pay (say $90, you can get a 500MHz Celeron, a 650MHz Duron, or a 550 MHz Athlon, I'd get the Duron), or you can get the fastest processor at the highest price; 1.12GHz Intel, 1.25GHz AMD, I'd get the AMD Athlon...

It makes sense, because the market uses $$$ as the optimal means of conveying the value of performance!

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This just truly boggles the mind.

It's like... wondering 'What would happen if I replaced my coffee with ground walnuts?'

Yes; it makes absolutely no sense!

Well, I guess this guy is creative to a fault =)

Me, I would have thought it more interesting to take a G4 Cube and placed it inside, say, a juicer!

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Who cares? In the PC industry, the people who do these jobs (hint, they're called computer engineers) do it as well (or better) than Apple does it. The only reason that the PC's aren't as high-quality as Macs is because of the limitations in the architecture, not bad build quality.

Who cares? The people who buy the PCs care that they get something well designed. This applies as equally to Macs as to PCs, to cars. It means more to some than to others, but quality is what people pay for!

And thus the real question; are you actually acknowledging that Macs are higher quality than PCs?

Still, if the PC has problems because of limitations in the architecture, that's still a problem. Why is it that Compaq or Dell have not 'engineered' their own solution to overcome these limitations? Macs use the same AGP and PCI busses, memory busses, USB, Firewire, ATA drive specs, video connectors, etc, so it's possible. Why is it none of the PC manufacturers have done it yet?

<em>A) I don't WANT a PPC system.</em>
Then why are you even talking about Macs in the first place?

<em> Apple is stupid for doing all this itself. It hems the customer into using whatever Apple feels they should use, and drives up cost. Build quality isn't drastically improved (I'm 99% sure that an Open PPC system would be just as high quality as the closed Apple system. Besides, the old Apple clones were just as good as real Apples) and the industry hates you for it. Companys hate Intel for sucking it all in and doing their own chipsets, motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards, and (if Apple becomes big enough to matter) people will hate Apple for the same reasons.<em>

Why the heck is Apple stupid? HP uses it's own motherboard (not a stock one from Tyan, MSI, or Intel), though it probably relies on chipsets from Intel or something. By doing this Apple can provide it's own feature set at the advantage of everyone else. Apple was one of the earliest adopters of USB, because it could build it into the system instead of waiting for Intel or Tyan to design the motherboards with USB support. The same with Firewire. Or wireless networking. Or gigabit ethernet. It's called innovation, and it's called leading the pack. They can either wait for someone else to do it, and bundle it, or they can do it themselves!

You're 99% sure? I'm pretty sure than in an Open PPC system, you'd get identical results as today's open PC system. Crap devices with crap drivers and crap systems. Don't tell me they don't exist! Apple may be the cream of the crop in such a market, but tell me how Apple gets an advantage in an Open system? Apple gets no advantage, and the users gets one advantage: The ability to choose their own motherboard (that's it! Everything else in a Mac is already standard!)

And do you seriously think there would be a company that build a better motherboard than Apple? If they do, they should *already* be building better motherboards than Apple today!

<em>The PC I built I just as high quality as any Apple machine</em>
I already gave you that point.

I cannot argue cheaper. I cannot argue more powerful. Both of those qualities are due to the economics of volume in the PC market. Even support is a question of volume. There are less choices for the Apple machines. But there are still video cards, SCSI cards, hard disks, etc, for Macs.

Okay, so now we get to the meat of your argument. That the platform is being killed by a non open standard.

Well, 2 things.
Apple *is* the standard.
Anyone (Dell, Compaq, etc) can release their own PPC systems if they wanted, but they would need an OS. Apple, as a business, need not 'give' their OS to a competitor. Think about it.

Apple sells what it sells, and people buy it. It suits their needs, despite the comparison you bring up. It's stable enough, full featured enough, fast enough, powerful enough.

If they weren't, people wouldn't buy Apple. They would buy Compaq, or Dell, or like yourself, build their own system.

The platform you speak of is easy to use *because* of everything you point out. That Apple does it's own hardware and software and drivers, because they have their own OS, because they roll their own systems. You can't get that *anywhere* else because no one else does it. Microsoft will soon, when they release their XBox, and then you'll have *all* the same arguments against them as you do against Apple!

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So... You designed your own motherboards and chipsets, wrote your ROM bios code, spec-ed out your capicitors and diodes, pressed your own sheetmetal cases, injection molded your own case-skins, wrote your own firewire spec, then implemented the CMOS for it, and then wrote the drivers for it, designed and built the wireless antennas for your PC, and drafted your own bus specs and implementations?

You can create a PC as well as any 'lacky' who throws parts together. You may chose better or worse parts than any lacky, but when you buy Apple, you buy all of the above, and if you don't want to pay for that, then you can't get a PPC system.

Now I don't contest that a PC you build is stable or reliable; it cannot be denied that a multi-million dollar corp can build crap PCs too.

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Except that to the 'OoB' consumer, Apple PPC is the same as Apple x86. To the 'hackers', one would not be able to buy an Apple x86 board any more than they could buy an Apple PPC board, and an Epox or MSI or Intel motherboard would be as useful to a hacker then as those boards are to the hacker today.

People still wouldn't be able to run OS X on a Tyan motherboard, any more than they can or can't today.

I can't even begin to talk about 'wasted' R&D expenditures, though.

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All your base are belong to Apple!

You're not seeing something clearly. Hardware architecture (x86 vs PPC) has no bearing to the price of Apple hardware.

If, miraculously, Apple had adopted Intel instead of Motorola, their boxen would still be the same price; not because the parts are cheaper or more stock, but because Apple dedicates engineering resources to motherboard design, case design, style, look, and feel. Why do you think that if Apple adopted Intel that OS X would run under stock Intel hardware? I'd think you would *still* need an Apple motherboard, and Apple chipset, an Apple rom and bios, etc.

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Well, yeah. It's also called 'engineered'

Macs are an engineered solution... like cars, or ovens, or bunches of other things in our lives.

It's what you get when you buy a Mac.

Your only other choice... is to go work for Apple, I guess!

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Here's what I wonder...

Why do you need Apple's okay to make Mac clones?

Did Compaq petition IBM to make IBM-PC clones?

Do some cleanroom reverse engineering, create a nice, clean desktop system, and you have a Mac clone. It's anyone's guess whether you compete against Apple or help Apple grow the market, but there's your solution!

His need to control the hardware was smart. He doesn't need to bless hardware for clones to exist. All a clone maker needs to do is make sure that it runs the current OS 100%, and provide future functionality to support future OSes.


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Are easy.

Buy an iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac, Cube, or iMac!

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Hey, that's why I use Linux for my web and file server, Mac for my notebook, and Windows for my game machine!

To each their own strength!

I totally don't disagree with you on this!

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Get a Mac tower. Heck, get a dual CPU 533MHz G4 with built in firewire, CD-RW, gigabit ethernet, and a GeForce3 ^^

Geek dating!