Slashdot Mirror
iBox Episode 2
coolgeek writes "According to this article on Wired, the iBox (original SlashDot post), later renamed to the CoreBox, has run into some trouble. Their strategy is to clone Mac computers using spare parts from repair centers. Evidently, the supplier of the repair parts was reminded by Apple Computer's Legal Department that supplying to a computer manufacturer was a breach of contract. Consequently, the supplier has chosen to stop supplying parts. More information on at the CoreComputing website, and they say the game isn't over yet..."
frist psot bitches!
I am very tired.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
I mean who whould have guessed Apple would have threatened to sue their supplier into oblivion?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
this looks cool
Frizist Pizost, biznaitches. All of you can blow me.
I was under the impression that every Apple-authorized repair center had a similar contract with Apple, which is why I didn't put too much stock in the original story (I expected this to happen - similar things have been tried before). Where are they going to find reliable suppliers who are not authorized by Apple?
I remember that one of the CPU upgrade makers had a deal where they'd send you a new CPU and daughtercard, and give you a major discount if you sent in your old daughtercard (so they could swap CPUs and resell it, since they had no other way to obtain the daughtercards the CPUs were soldered to). I don't think that strategy would really work in this case.
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is lord! he doesn't want yo uot steasl computer parts
Hrm... If hatch's law passes, i wonder if apple will be able to destroy the iBox users computers.
And they say that microsoft is monopolistic.
Dirty-joke-sense tingling.
Stop tingling, dammit.
The coolest voice ever.
Now do you really think good quality parts are just laying around at repair centers?
Great business strategy, buy broken, or unusable parts, build computer out of them, and sell to Joe Smoe who can't afford an Apple, so he'll buy an Apple?
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Just wait until Apple has market share. You think this is bad? This is nothing.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
the supplier of the repair parts was reminded by Apple Computer's Legal Department that supplying to a computer manufacturer was a breach of contract
I wonder if it's okay to supply parts to a (non-business) individual, for 'DIY home repair'? Could be a good way to put together an OS X box on the cheap.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
low-cost, configurable Mac clones based on older motherboards from Apple.
Dude, I wonder why when I booted up my Mac it said:
APPLE ][
]_
The coolest voice ever.
I mean no-one would try to restrict fair trade surely ?
Apple have always liked to sue the people that activly promote or enhance their products.
Is it "Hate Apple Day" again already?
Don't you realize that you are pissing off customers such as myself!
Screw the G5; I'm buying a dual opteron!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
That so many of the people who support Open Source software initiatives and browbeat companies like Microsoft for their heavy handed policies...are also among the largest supports of Apple.
I admit, I don't know much about Apple, their computers or their business model. But their corporate policies sure do not seem to be in line with the same ideals associated with Open Source.
Doesn't look like it...
Looks worse to me....
I could just see it, a few hours after the Apple store closes, the dumpster divers show up and root through the trash.
Thanks to their hard work, you can buy an iBox, no two the same. Today they are offering a special on an iMac hybrid that has a modern flat-screen stuck on the front of an old bulbous blue first-gen iMac that has an orange mouse.
Tomorrow, they expect to have a "PowerBox" PowerBook made from notebook guts obtained during a particularly successful dumpster-dive installed into the toilet-seat discarged by the plumbing place next door. The local wildlife was restless that night: this machine has a live mouse.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Begun, this Clone War has....
"He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." - Steve Jobs on Bill Gates
What is going on!!??
One has to wonder what would happen NOW if Apple suddenly allowed clones.
I guess it doesn't fit into their ultimate scheme of things. They don't really seem to care about overwhelmingly taking a huge chunk of the market (only enough to be "profitable")...err, only enough at their pace.
Colossians 2:8
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and it works great. I picked up a copy of OS X on ebay for $50. It's not the fastest system (800mhz) but it's a great music jukebox.
I'm sure most people familiar with this product aren't surprised that Apple took this route. This company should've taken a different strategy and market this as a PPC box that could run Linux and then leak to Mac sites that this could also run Mac OS.
The iBox would devistate sales for Apple if it went off without a hitch. A fast, cheap, and easily upgradable box might be exactly what consumers want but that doesn't matter. Mac OS X costs more to make than Apple charges for it. Most people would buy an iBox to suppliment their current machine (server, etc) and would probably not even buy a new license of OS X.
So you get a nice cheap box, but at what real cost? The degradation of OS X? The death of Apple? Wake up, the iBox would be bad for everyone in the long run.
Oh no!
Sincerely,
Apple Computer
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
is it more acceptable for hardware manufacturer to fence off competitors? eg Apple restricting parts to be used on Apply-Only machines, while everyone's crying foul when MS is trying to install its own browser on its own product (and still allows competing browsers to be installed).
imagine what would happen if Ford only allows its "rolling" tyres to be fitted on its cars...
"would devistate sales for Apple if it went off without a hitch. A fast, cheap, and easily upgradable box might be exactly what consumers want but that doesn't matter"
Are you saying that Apple's boxes aren't cheap, fast, or even easily upgradable?
And maybe the reaction would be different no ?
supplying to a computer manufacturer was a breach of contract
My God, that's a first. Apple computer is shutting down a hobbyist project using legal arguments that are actually valid. As someone who has been following Apple Legal for years, this is only the second time i can think of such a thing actually happening (the first was the iTunes sharing thing that used an SDK that it violated the terms of). I'm amazed.
" Now do you really think good quality parts are just laying around at repair centers?
/// that really smells burnt when someone plugs it in.
They aren't lying around. They are in those cardboard boxes in the basement, tossed in with pieces of Apple II shells that have gone a rich brown with age, 60 pin ribbon cables, the occasional Sinclair TS-1000 taken in on trade, and that Apple
Apple needs at least some competition somehow. Perhaps two competing business units within the company, or something. They have a good architecture, a good operating system, and well-designed products. But....
I was in Micro Center four days ago, about a cheap as retail gets, and a 2000 dollar Macintosh had a 60 GB hard drive, and its specs were probably in reach of a $300 DIY system (without the monitor). If I get a two thousand dollar computer in 2003, it better have a shitload more than 60 GB for a hard drive. Even if the LCD was $1000, COME ON. It wasn't even dual-processor.
Since OSX, I want to get a mac, but that is just ridiculous. Troll Away! Thanks!
I see nothing wrong with someone who designs a machine taking exclusive rights to use the parts of that design.
What would be monopolistic is if you failed to reveal enough information to someone else to design an alternate computer to run the software on another platform.
Unfortunately that's the general rule, unless you stick with open-source software. It would be a great rule for the FTC to impose.
Requiring product developers to make a market in each and every one of their component, however, would be an unreasonable burden. How would you prevent a competitor from sabotaging your supplies by buying up one minor part? How would you apportion your R&D costs fairly to each element of the design? Wouldn't you be at risk of underpricing one element and giving something away to the competition? Who is going to generate the specifications for each part that are adequate for another assembler to user? Are you obligated to not change the part?
Making a market for a product has overhead. It would be unreasonable to require anyone who develops a composite box to document and market each piece of their design.
Keep in mind that the economics of manufacturing overwhelmingly favor non-unique parts already. The premium of a custom part is not something that will ever be justified just to block clones.
These are Apple spare parts. Apple has a limited stock of these to be used as replacements. They expect the part it replaces to be sent back so it can be reworked. There is not some magical motherboard fairy that creates an endless supply for someone to leech off and resell as new.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
ur ghey. pls die. k thx by.
Well, that's not to suprising.
I wouldn't imagine it would be to hard to get OSX running on some other PPC platform with enough emulation, something like VMWare. or even an intel box with even more emulation.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Steve Jobs shoots Apple in the foot once again. MBA classes all across America probably use Apple's poor business decisions as examples of how to offend customers and how *not* to grow business... the *one* thing Apple excels at ;)
Steve Jobs & Apple are permanent fuck-ups.
huh? iBox? X-Box??
cycles and cycyclecles
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
How is it any more underhanded then reverse engineering the IBM BIOS from scratch? Just because you made an agreement doesn't make the agreement right. How is what you're talking about any different then the contracts Microsoft signed with clone-makers in mid-90s to squelch OS/2?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Do you think Sony would allow a repair center to resell PS2 components to a third party, who would in turn sell something called a "Play Stashun?" Is anyone jumping down Sony's throat for not allowing cloning of PlayStations?
Perhaps we can consider that not every platform benefits from being cloned.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Not because of better hardware (since even their "new" machines will fall woefully short of a PC with a mid-end AMD)...
Wow, I didn't even know there was a mid-end. I knew about the high end, and I knew about the low end. but this mid-end concept is totally blowing my mind. Is it anything like the 'mid-range'?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Okay, any other ex-Spry employees here that, when they see 'ibox,' think 'Internet in a Box'? Yikes. Time for some therapy to re-supress THOSE particular memories...
Everyone knows that the homosexual community doesn't take kindly to having their favorite hardware cloned.
That is EXACTLY what I'm saying, but I love OS X more than air so get outta my face!
... riding his Segway when he found out about iBox, and shit himself. In his embarrassment, he said "iThink iNeed to Destroy iBox! iSue, iSue! iThink iCan, iThink iCan!".
Thats exactly what happened. Scout's honor.
teh v3ry gey apple.
st1ck h3@d 1n rectum mac fag
thanx
So this will result either in fewer cheap Macs or in prohibitively expensive Macs. Hmmm. Sounds like a win-win situation for real computer users.
"Besides, their stuff tends to work better and shows better design that MS =)"
If it did, you'd have 9 times as many Apple users as M$ users. It is the other way around.
The only flat panel iMac I see listed at store.apple.com that has a 60GB hard drive runs $1299. So that particular incident is all Micro Center. But all of this is really beside the point.
When you buy an Apple machine you're not buying the box, you're buying the overall product. Apple thinks of the computer as a whole, not processor, firmware, software. If you don't care about any of this and just want a cheap generic DIY box, then why are you interested in Macs at all? Just for the transparent windows?
Much of Mac OS X's value comes as result of Apple's approach to product design. The ease of use, peripheral connectivity that "just works", seamless integration and low maintenace don't come for free -- they come as a result of looking the computer as a whole product, not various disperate pieces slammed into a box ala Dell. You can't have both.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
He was manufacturing clones from Apple parts purchased through a repair center. Of course he was going to get his supplier shut down. That was a stupid idea. He should have been buying gnereal PPC componenets and getting OS X to work on them.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
If this has taught us anything, it's that we fail to grasp history. PowerComputing, UMax, and other companies legally got parts from Apple and made clones. All of this happened with the blessing of Apple during the Gil Amilio days. What happened? The clones killed Apple's sales (cheaper and better will always sell better), along with Apple's crazy product line that had way too many models almost killed the company. This would be no different. However, Apple should take a good hard look at what John Fraser accomplished. He made an upgradeable system (albeit a older, slower system) that could run OS X with a G4 processor. The people sure seemed to like it.
With the impending release of the PPC 970's, Apple will have a bundle of G4 processors left. Why not create a "low-end" system that's upgradeable for the folks who want to customize their own systems but don't need the gee-whiz speed of the high-end systems. The eMac is still the best G4 deal in town, but if you make a system without a built in monitor, it's a whole lot cheaper. Sure, Apple's generous 30% profit margins would take a hit on this one, perhaps into the industry standard 15-20% range, but it would be a profitable system. Hell, hire Fraser, he's already got the design and the buzz. I'm sure he and Jonathan Ive would come up with a killer system. By using Apple's resources, he and Ive could focus on making the CoreBox/iBox what it is visioned to be. We all saw this coming, however, I thought Apple would go straight to Fraser and cut off his company. Apple is saving it's own ass here, it paid attention to history and learned from it VERY quickly.
Apple has strict, legally binding contracts with the vendors who sell their systems and service parts...so I can understand them wanting to enforce the contracts (otherwise precident is set).
;-)
But, it's a shame that a young guy's business is being affected. Based on the press I've seen, he just wanted to do something cool and really wasn't just in it for the money.
But, let's face it, I'm sure BMW or Mercedes would be a little perturbed if you started building cars based on their parts and not exactly hiding the fact that many of the parts were comparible -- just the body was different
-psy
Steve Jobs shoots Apple in the foot once again. MBA classes all across America probably use Apple's poor business decisions as examples of how to offend customers and how *not* to grow business
Please enlighten us as to how allowing a third party to distribute a cheap knockoff of a design that Apple spent years creating will bolster Apple's image of quality and help them increase revenue.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Just like they killed the X86 platform...
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
will this decision eventually affect 2nd hand parts as well? ie you cannot savage old Apple parts and use it on another machine, or build a new (non-apple branded) machine out of old parts?
MY COMMODORE 64 WILL SMOKE YOUR POS
APPLE ][!!! IT CAN PLAY ALL THE LATEST
GAMES LIKE BATTLEZONE, AND GEOS BEATS
ANYTHING APPLE HAS. AND IT CAN USE A
TAPE DRIVE FOR MASSIVE STORAGE.
WHERE DO YOU EVEN PLUG THE JOYSTICK
IN?
_
_
please ignore the code at the bottom. i needed it to get past the lameness filter.
----
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while (count-- && (*dest++ = *c_msg++) != 0);
while (count-- && (*dest++ = *c_msg++) != 0);
while (count-- && (*dest++ = *c_msg++) != 0);
while (count-- && (*dest++ = *c_msg++) != 0);
while (count-- && (*dest++ = *c_msg++) != 0);
I understand the mindset of the Apple fanatics.
When Apple makes a move to shut someone down, they are doing it because they have to in order to survive. After all, they have less than 10% market share. They need to be a lot more defensive of the position that they have.
Namely killing off PPC Mac clones, Purchasing NeXT instead of Be, Refusing to give Be the engineering specs that they needed to support the Be OS on post 9600 Macs, Killing off the iBox, whatever it happens to be.
Steve Jobs understands that people who seem themselves as David, fighting for survival against a monsterous Goliath will give more and tolerate more than other people. "Sure we have to pay a premium for Apple hardware, but when they gain market share we will be able to reap the rewards. Economics of scale always applies, so even though I overpaid for this G3 tower, by the time the G5 is out, the prices will be lower."
The mentality that leads to "One platform over all others." is one that is filled with logic defects. Listen to a Mac user who will slam someone who chooses windows because of availability of games, but they jump up and cheer when Apple uses a gaming chipset for the graphics cards in their new model. They did this with the ATI Rage, and GeForce cards as they were introduced.
Take it from me, I used to be one of them. You can't save them. You can't convert them. All you can do is not tease too much when one of them wakes up and decides that his wallet is the best place to find most of his money and that not being able to run a program is not the same as not wanting to run that program.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
'nuff said.
Yes! It would be doom for Apple to become an OS vendor. There are no companies of any size or power in the field that get by on the strength of their OS and software alone.
These guys have G3 logic boards starting at $199 and G4 logic boards starting at $249, both sans CPU. One could roll his own PPC box at a reasonable price.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
...Well anyways when he starts trashing our computers I'm sure there will be 3 more people trashing his back.
dammnit. - should be in the sen hatch bashing thread.
Google cache.
Buy one now.
Forums.
Apple has never allowed someone else to sell a computer with their proprietary mobo.
Never.
And one way or another it isn't going to happen now or in the future.
Never.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple is not dominant in its market, and is not in a position to stifle competition on a scale that would require intervention by public authorities.
It's always funny reading the Apple appoligist, defending every lawsuit they do, defending their overpriced systems, what have you. I'm going to put straight these myths now.
.mac ? People flip out when they buy out an anti-virus company to assumably integrate it with Windows Update.
1) the "BMW" of computers. Macs are PCs, and cheaply made ones at that. The only thing that makes a Mac a Mac, is a case, cpu, and board. Their boards are at least 18 months behind x86 tech, their cpus, albeit a better design lag behind current x86 preformance. Their cases are also too small to put much more then another harddrive. The overall quality of Apple computers isn't even up to snuff with the x86 world. Read some forums about dented and pain peeling of Powerbooks, noise issues of Powermacs, keys falling off cheeply made iBooks, and you get the picture. The myth of "Apple quality" is greater then their "mhz myth"
2) OSX is the greatest OS since sliced bread. This comes from the fast that it's a "UNIX-based" OS that's "for a consumer". Well, if you want to compare feature for feature of the OS, Windows XP beats it hand down. I can also show you a couple linux distros that easily compare. Yes it's pretty, then try to do something useful with it, and you find that the OS doesn't do it, and it's a $20 shareware application to get it to work(joysticks anyone?). You buy a $2000 computer, and you still get nag screens with their media player asking for $20. You want a real unix, install a linux disto or a real *BSD. And OSX isn't cheap either, every year, they have a new $129 that kills backwards compatability(you want new iTunes? buy 10.2 for $129) And people complain about Mircosoft's "forced upgrades"? How much would Mircosoft be bashed if they started to tie payed services into XP like
3) Apple is a "friendly" company. Apple will sue anyone and everything. You have a theme that remotely has circular buttons? Apply legal will be on you like flies on manure. You want to talk about Microsoft buying competition, ask current Emagic customers about Apple. Mircosoft buys Virtual PC for a valid reason(server virtualization), Apple buys Emagic to lock their customers into expensive hardware. Mircosoft sues to stop RealPC because the company sold the rights to the program years ago(to the company MS bought BTW). Apple sues a company for making their systems for 1/2 the cost. If Joe Bag O'Donuts can make Macs for 1/2 price using Apple parts, how much is Apple REALLY overcharging for their systems?
4) "Consumer" vs. "Pro"....the whole idea that "consumers"(and boy I hate when I'm refered to as a consumer) need crappy integrated systems and slow hardware comes from Apple. Apple for years hasn't been able to offer workstation level proformance on systems, so they decide "consumers" don't need to do things like upgrade. And to make matters worse, they intentionally cripple their low end of their lines, to not comptete with higher priced offerings. An example is monitor spaning on an iBook..although the video chipset is capable, they intentionaly disable it, so if you want it, you have to buy a higher priced Powerbook. Wouldn't be needed if they could offer REAL reasons to buy higher priced Powerbooks, then to get functionality that they crippled on lower systems. Apple lovers even AGREE with this, because "that's what Apple has to do" As a computer buyer, I want the best for my money, and I don't want intentionally crippled hardware...Apple users disagree.
5) It all "just works" Yes, and my PS2 and Gamecube all "just work" out of the box as well. You stray from what you get via default from Apple, and it's less then 50/50 that it will "just work" Plug in a video cam? Hope it has OSX drivers. I've had better luck with things that "just work" in Mandrake Linux better then in OSX.
I could go on about Apple....but one major question remains....Why is it exactly that people support such a company to such great lengths?
I'm not gonna get into the debate over what Apple should or shouldn't be doing, but I've seen some in this thread wondering how it works, these contracts with service providers (AASPs, Specialists, and Self-servicing Providers).
/. crowd interested. :-)
In a nutshell, here's how it works:
There are two ways you can order parts from Apple, essentially:
1. You can "service stock" the part. With this method, you buy it at the highest price. Apple doesn't expect anything back, since it's an order for something you want to stock, generally. It has other uses, but this is the main use.
2. You can order an "exchange part", where you send back the defective or failed part upon completion of the repair. Using this method, the part's cost to you is cheaper, and thus cheaper to your customers (ideally). Exchange orders are typically the most popular types of orders.
When I say cheaper via the exchange method, I mean it. Contractually, I can't disclose the difference(s)--it's essentially NDA information--but it's enough to warrant ordering exchange parts when you can.
However, if you don't return the failed or defective part within a certain time window, you get invoiced for the full price of the part you ordered. This acts as a pretty decent fraud deterrent, since if you wanted to pay full price, knowing about the return date ahead of time, you would have stocked the part to begin with. (And you wouldn't have taken a hit on your service provider rating because you failed to return something to Apple.)
Service providers are NOT allowed to buy most parts from Apple and resell them directly to others; non-CIPs (so-called "customer-installable parts", such as RAM and rechargeable batteries) must be installed by a service provider or returned to Apple.
Just some info for the
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Nobody will read this far down in the discussion but I just want to put this bit of truth out into the ether:
...eventually.
1. Apple isn't evil because of "going after" this parts supplier. The supplier is in obvious breech of contract. Duh. There's plenty to criticise in the Apple company and in the Mac platform; pick a reason, just make it a valid one, okay?
2. Clones are bad for the Macintosh platform. Bad, bad, bad. Any strategy which erodes their ability to leverage OS/iApps/Hardware into a seamless, second-to-none user experience will be death to the platform. It is not good. It is bad. It will kill the one, single unique thing about this company and they will be swallowed up into the sea of mediocrity that is the rest of the PC industry. Nobody should want that, as even PC users benefit from Apple's R&D.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
In the os war before a linux came onto the main scene but after microsoft became known as the evil corporation, people were saying if it were apple that had been triumphant we would be in better shape. It's articles like this that clearly show that neither company is moral in it's business practices. Forcing a company to stop it's actions because it threatens the small population of customers that apple has.
apple defends it's products, which include the hardware as well as the software. while i don't always agree with the way they defend their IP, it is understandable that they do so in order to provide a consistent experience to ther entire product line. imagine if you had a bad experience with a mac clone that was bodged together from older(and very likely used) parts. unless you are tech saavy, you might blame the entire computer(hardware and software) instead of just isolating the blame to the hardware. what happens in this instance? you blame apple, even though they were not responsible for the end package. until there is an "apple certified" used component clone manufacturer( like car manufacturers re-certifying used/out of lease cars, outfits like corecrib will likely be pushed out of business...
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
BMW *will* let you buy all the spare parts and make your own, because you'll find it way cheaper to just buy a new BMW.
Q: How did the Linux action originate? How and when did you come to realize there was this problem?
A: It really goes back to last fall. I joined the company last summer, and we spent a quarter or two looking at this Unix operating system asset we have.
SCO ends up owning the intellectual-property rights to the Unix operating system, which is a pretty substantial asset to be holding. So we started looking closely at where Unix was relative to Linux. Linux was starting to take off, and we did have some concerns.
We saw some initial problems last fall, and we tried to address those with vendors in the December time frame. We didn't really get a lot of traction with just having friendly discussions. So we came out in the first part of this year and basically said, 'We are going to enforce our intellectual-property rights.' And even though we weren't directly going after IBM at that point, they had a violent reaction to (that).
So at that point in time, we tried to work through the issues with IBM. We came to an impasse, and that's what led to our filing our lawsuit against IBM on March 7. Concurrent with filing our lawsuit against IBM, we put them on notice that we were going to be revoking our AIX (IBM's Unix distribution) license. Under the contract, we have to give them 100 days notice. That notice was due on Friday, June 13, and if we hadn't had the issues resolved then, we would revoke their AIX license.
During the period of time we were focused on the IBM issues, it came to our attention that we had our code, our Unix System 5 code, showing up directly inside of Linux. So that, in turn, led us to send out letters to 1,500 of the largest companies around the world, to let them know we had these substantial intellectual-property violations and to notify them that we had these problems. We didn't think that necessarily they were the ones that generated the problems, but they had been passed a hot potato they were holding.
Was it a matter of someone at SCO just working with Linux source code and saying, 'Hey, that looks familiar?'
When we filed against IBM, they were supposed to respond in 30 days, and they filed an extension for another 60 days. So we had about 60 days where we were waiting for IBM to respond. So we turned a group of programmers loose--we had three teams from different disciplines busting down the code base, the different code bases of System 5, AIX and Linux. And it was in that process of going through the deep dive of what exactly is in all of these code bases that we came up with these more substantial problems.
Why was IBM the initial focus?
When we first started talking about how we were trying to protect our intellectual-property assets around Unix...IBM basically became very upset we were going to go down the path of even talking about intellectual-property rights in relation to Linux. And they basically threatened that if we didn't pull back from our statements that we were going down that path, they would quit doing business with us at all.
To me, it was a strange posture to be taking for a company that collects a billion and a half dollars a year on their own intellectual-property portfolio. And so that caused us to go digging on what was behind the initial set of problems we found...And as we dug deeper, we found that we did have significant violations going on with respect to their version of Unix they had licensed from us.
At one of their conventions this year, an IBM executive stood in front of an audience and said that IBM was going to destroy the value of Unix and move it all over to Linux. They were going to take the know-how, the people, the methods they developed over the years around AIX--which is our licensed version of Unix--and they were going to transport all that in a wholesale fashion over to Linux. Those statements alone caused us alarm. When we dug deeper, we found they, in fact, had been doing that and they were going to do more.
What would IBM need to have done to keep this from going to court?
Because Apple is nowhere near a MONOPOLY. Many practices that are *fine* in the normal business world become not fine when you are a monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly, apple is not.
Okay, I understand the fact that Apple's revenues come frome selling hardware. You pay more for the hardware, and you get high quality software as added value.
:)
But the problem lies with people who own a PC right now and are considering upgrading to a Mac. What if they recently purchased a nice 17" or 18" TFT monitor (or higher), which they'd like to keep? An expensive super-fast NVidia or ATI videocard, a high-capacity/high-speed harddrive and so on.
The most affordable Macs are Imacs, and they come with an integrated monitor and inferior 3d graphics (they are still based on the equivalent of DirectX 7 technology). Now the only option for people wanting to keep their monitor and expensive videocard (yes, I know, you'd have to fool around with firmware updates to get the card to work on a Mac, but it's possible) would be to purhcase a PowerMac G4. These things are damn expensive, even used ones!
Again, I understand the fact that Apple's source of income lies in its hardware sales. But it would be really cool if Apple just released an ATX form factor motherboard with a G4 CPU on it, and bundled with MacOS X. Leave the case, power supply, DDR memory, videocard, harddrive, monitor and everything else to the buyer (or perhaps even clone system builders).
To make selling such an "upgrade kit for advanced users" sufficiently interesting, Apple would have to sell it with a higher profit margin. That's okay. Add another 100 or perhaps even 200 euro's/dollars to the manufacturing and distribution costs and it might still be interesting for quite a few of us.
But please allow us the choice in the rest of the hardware. All the Apple stuff that we would be interested in would be the architecture and software.
Anyway, since Steve Jobs is obsessed with providing Apple customers with "the complete experience", a product like what I just described would probably be out of the question, even if it would be sold beside the complete Mac solutions, wich many people would still buy, and even if they sold it at a price which would make it economically profitable for Apple (and would perhaps even lead to a substantially increased marketshare). Too bad. I'd really like to try out MacOS X.
Now I think of it: just allowing the 3d subsystem in new Imacs to be upgraded with a regular AGP-card would already make such machines more interesting to me.
Oh well, at least Linux is looking better and better every day. It will get there. I'm particularly excited about state-of-the-art GUI projects such as DirectFB and Fresco/Berlin.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
to as much profit as they want. If you want a new board because you broke yours, and your computer is old, and they want to charge you $10,000, that's their perogative. If they do bad business, they lose marketshare. If they do good business, they can gain more.
IF you feel they are ripping you off, there are other choices.
The problem is not the hardware or the vendor, but that the logic is hardwired into a bunch of silicon chips.
A single gp processor on an fpga is not going to outperform a PPC or a Pentium, but with affordable gate array sizes increasing into the tens of millions over the next few years you could add as many processors as you want and outperform any hardwired single cpu.
At that point, who needs to be restricted to any hardware vendors hardwired logic implementation.
Of course then we can complain about Xilinx and Altel ruling the world instead of the IBM, Microsoft or Apple.
Microsoft has been legally found to be a monopoly. "Fine," say you. "That doesn't make them evil."
If you haven't been paying attention, there are a few other things they've done that put them beyond the category of aggressive competitors. For example:
- They committed perjury by faking video testimony.
- They're still under investigation in the EU for displaying a pattern of illegal monopoly protection.
- They've done quite a few other things that could qualify as nasty.
You may think Apple, Sun, Red Hat, et. al. engage in practices that sometimes benefit themselves over the needs of their users. But it is one thing for a company to make an occasional mistake in the attempt to profit, and another thing entirely to have a corporate culture of complete arrogance, unfettered greed, and deceit.All companies are not the same.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Well, I left Kentucky back in '49
An' went to Detroit workin' on a 'sembly line
The first year they had me puttin' wheels on cadillacs
Every day I'd watch them beauties roll by
And sometimes I'd hang my head and cry
'Cause I always wanted me one that was long and black.
One day I devised myself a plan
That should be the envy of most any man
I'd sneak it out of there in a lunchbox in my hand
Now gettin' caught meant gettin' fired
But I figured I'd have it all by the time I retired
I'd have me a car worth at least a hundred grand.
CHORUS: I'd get it one piece at a time, and it wouldn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style, I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is a round.
So the very next day when I punched in
With my big lunchbox and with help from my friends
I left that day with a lunch box full of gears
Now, I never considered myself a thief
GM wouldn't miss just one little piece
Especially if I strung it out over several years.
The first day I got me a fuel pump
And the next day I got me an engine and a trunk
Then I got me a transmission and all of the chrome
The little things I could get in my big lunchbox
Like nuts, an' bolts, and all four shocks
But the big stuff we snuck out in my buddy's mobile home.
Now, up to now my plan went all right
'Til we tried to put it all together one night
And that's when we noticed that something was definitely wrong.
The transmission was a '53, and the motor turned out to be a '73
And when we tried to put in the bolts all the holes were gone.
So we drilled it out so that it would fit
And with a little bit of help with an adaptor kit
We had that engine runnin' just like a song
Now the headlight' was another sight
We had two on the left and one on the right
But when we pulled out the switch all three of 'em come on.
The back end looked kinda funny too
But we put it together and when we got thru
Well, that's when we noticed that we only had one tail-fin
About that time my wife walked out
And I could see in her eyes that she had her doubts
But she opened the door and said "Honey, take me for a spin."
So we drove up town just to get the tags
And I headed her right on down main drag
I could hear everybody laughin' for blocks around
But up there at the court house they didn't laugh
'Cause to type it up it took the whole staff
And when they got through the title weighed sixty pounds.
CHORUS: I got it one piece at a time, and it didn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style, I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around.
(Spoken) Ugh! Yow, RED RYDER this is the COTTON MOUTH in the PSYCHO-BILLY CADILLAC Come on
Huh, This is the COTTON MOUTH and negatory on the cost of this mow-chine there RED RYDER, you might say I went right up to the factory and picked it up, it's cheaper that way
Ugh!, what model is it?
Well, It's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56 '57, '58' 59' automobile
It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67 '68, '69, '70 automobile.
---------------
P.S. The slashcode lameness filter should be modified so it doesn't flag song lyrics as too few characters per line. I'm writing this long, irrelevant sentence to kick up the chr/line average above the lameness limit. It doesn't seem to do much to the average, but maybe this additional sentence will do it. Apologies to Johnny Cash for mangling his liyric punctuation. Damn you Taco! Goddammit, I've added line after line and the average is still to low, WTF is it with this lameness filter? It's lame. Dont' bother reading this, it's just irrelevant filler. And this is even more irrelevant filler. Is this how a lameness filter is supposed to work, in a totally lame way? Goddammit, now I'm getting really pissed, I keep checking and I'm still below the char/line limit. Couldn't lameness be indexed to karma so good posters don't have to mangle a short, succinct message with a load of BS to get past the lameness filter?
"Why? Why shouldn't people be able to assemble their own cars from spare parts? The contract is just a way to get around the fact that once you've sold a part, you don't have control over it."
The United States of America is a Neoliberal economy, we practice a philosophy of free market.
Repeat that 100 times before you go to bed each night, until you understand what it really means and what it does not mean.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
So my Apple iBook must be a pirated copy...
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I'm no longer a potential customer.
The Apple iBook I bought doesn't count because it's in the past and only future sales matter.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The fellow trying to make this system was a complete jerk to me many a time on the mac bulletin board we frequent so here's a little schadenfreude right back atcha, smart guy! Karma's a bitch.
They make software I enjoy using, to let me do things I need to do.
For the same reason I buy Adobe products, like Photoshop Elements.
I don't know if I necessarily support the product, but if I use past performance as an indicator for future expectations, then I *expect* Apple software to 'get it right' and I expect Apple to 'act reasonably' and cater to my needs.
And if they stop catering to my needs, or acting reasonably, or get it wrong, then of course I'll leave.
But maybe I'm not the most zealous of Mac users.
GPL Deconstructed
I own a Mac, and I do buy into the quality argument; I'm also a QA person (I hate to use the term engineer in the software industry), so I believe I have a worthwhile perspective on quality.
The components in a Mac may be the same stuff other PCs are made of, and therefore the quality isn't in those components: but it is in their integration that quality is visible, and in their use.
Let me explain, from my quality background:
A high quality software product is not one with zero bugs or defects. Zero bugs or defects is a low *error* product.
A high quality software product is one that the user enjoys using, or in situations where pleasure isn't a good indicator, the user can do their task effectively, efficiently, and with a minimum of hassle, problems, mistakes, and errors.
So to rephrase those in terms of a Mac, a piece of hardware:
A Mac is not high quality because it has no errors or defects.
A Mac is high quality because the user gets pleasure from it's use, or alternatively they can do the tasks they want, with a Mac, with a minimum of hassle, problems, errors, and setbacks.
So to bring it closer to home, I use a Mac, and I see it as high quality, and I agree with the BMW statement on multiple levels:
Small niche
Affluent niche
Image conscious niche
Quality conscious niche
I enjoy using my Mac. Already one of my metrics for quality is satisfied.
My PowerBook *feels* good to hold. My PowerMac *sounds* good, because it is so quiet. The case on the PowerMac is a pleasure to open, because it is so simple. I like opening it to just look at everything and how well laid out it is, because I like machines and technology. I put together PCs for 8 years, and after owning a PowerMac for 8 months, I wonder *why* no PC case is designed like this.
Hard drives are mounted on the floor on trays, instead of a freestanding cage in the middle of the case. This cuts down on vibration by directing it into the floor, and minimizes cable clutter because all the IDE connectors are at the edge of the motherboard, parallel to the connector on the hard drive. This also increases airflow because the cables and drives run left to right, instead of front to back on every PC case I've seen; so by design the drives are positioned to reduce vibration and increase circulation.
The case is covered in a thick swathe of plastic, and there's a plastic motherboard tray (probably all acrylic), both of which reduce vibration noise a lot. This *also* doubles as an aesthetic device, making the PowerMac more attractive than most PC cases, as well as providing handles to make the PowerMac easier to handle than most PC cases.
The main cooling fan is 120mm, for low RPM and high cooling efficiency.
So as a technofetishist, I enjoy the design of my PowerMac and PowerBook. Elegant and efficient. Pleasure. All metrics for quality, in my book.
So then there's the other bit, about getting the job done; the Mac platform is the most efficient and effective platform right now for me to do what I want to do. Having access to a terminal suits me perfectly fine, because I can work from it. It beats Windows in some areas, and matches Linux. Then there's the applications, which beats Linux in most areas, and Windows in just about all areas. This is purely subjective because people have different needs.
I don't play games.
I make DVD-Rs using iMovie and iDVD, and I haven't seen anything on the Linux or Windows side that matches this combo in ease of use, elegance, and simplicity. 1 day to make a 1 hour iMovie, and 1 day to design the accompanying DVD, and that's because I'm a picky perfectionist bugger. If I wanted to slap something together, it would be 2 hour for the movie (the time it takes to import, plus minor titling and transitions), and 1 hour for the DVD (using stock layouts). These are professionaly looking layouts too, things I am *happy* to use, overjoyed, because when I use them, the people I will be giving thes
GPL Deconstructed
If anyone wants to give me a Mac, that would be very nice of them.
Hmmm.
if you're going to italicise for emphasis, at least make sure you're using the right word eh?
Can someone please help me test my assumption that anti-competitive practices and monopolies is bad for economy.
At the moment I feel anti-competition etc should be curbed to favour the smaller companies, that competition should be encouraged to benefit the whole. Overly Marxist?
A blog I run for the wealth
I'd quite fancy something non x86 for a bit of fun.
But is building a clone mac too expensive? Being able to run osX would be nice.
What's the alternative if I forgo osX and accept using Gentoo exclusively?
A blog I run for the wealth
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
You don't like Macs, that's fine. Just peachy.
Now take a look around: you are at apple.slashdot.org. Constructive criticism is more than welcome; incessant, whiny, myopic PC quackery IS NOT. So just fuck off with your red herrings and your half-baked arguments.
I'd de-construct your feeble potshots but I just can't be bothered.
(To others - sorry for the flamebait, I just hate posts like these.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Come on now people. Apple is a dying breed. Nothing to keep them around, certainly nothing worth much anymore.
If Apple would wake up and come up with an x86 compatibility such that real software actually ran on the Mac, that'd be one thing. But they think they still run the computing world.
What's that? That *THUD* sound? Oh, right, Apple just dropped below 3% market share... next stop, hostile takeovers.
and those fuckers at Mercedes won't sell me a standalone engine or sell me a whole car at a price I can afford. What a bunch of jerks.
You know what?
From a public policy/competition perspective, the consumer has more options for desktop/laptop PCs than just PPC. You can effectively do the same work on a Mac and a Wintel or *nix PC (with some notable exceptions, of course). Antitrust authorities are likely (very likely) to treat the entire desktop PC market as a single zone of competition, and not limit it to PPC devices.
I buy hardware based upon the hardware's merits and my grudges against the manufacturer.
So technically, I am not a potential OS customer, and I invalidated my own argument. Oh well, I'll win another later.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The alternative called Pegasos.
They have their own OS but also have gentoo on it.
They run OSX under Maconlinux emulation software.
They are very cheap:
http://www.morphos-news.de/
and from what I have heard work very well.
You should have a look.
"...it is wrong for Apple to exert this sort of control over basic hardware, and also to irrevocably tie its hardware to its software..."
While this seems like a valid point it really is not. Let me explain.
Ignoring the fact that Apple does not irrevocably tie its hardware to its software [yellowdoglinux.com] there are many reasons why this is flawed thinking. First of all if I made a product and wanted to sell it for a higher profit above what my competition sells something akin to it for it is my right to do so. If customers don't like it they don't have to buy it. If then I decide to sell parts to replace parts that might go bad in my product and I specify that it's for repair only again it's my right. If people don't like it they don't have to buy it. That's how a free market works: it doesn't matter if it's fair/competitive or not.
I would love for things to be competitive and I agree there needs to be someone to fill in the cheaper market. I don't agree Apple should be cheaper than x86 pc's. The ppc architecture is much better than the x86 one: so much so that I traded straight up my 1.2ghz 512ram x86 hp laptop for 600mhz 256ram ppc iBook laptop and have never looked back. It's not Apple that I'm crazy for and if someone else made decent systems on this architecture I would take a serious look at it (so if anyone knows of a manufacture please tell me). Yellowdog Linux is more than a capable OS for the ppc arch. However that is all personal preference and not at all the point.
The point is that the contract should be abided by or not signed at all. If it's not signed then eventually Apple will have to change it to survive or not survive at all. The customers and sellers have that choice; and some are taking that choice to heart. I feel that the same goes for all MS stuff too even though I loath the company.
/. Heroics - 99.999%
...I didn't follow the case too closely. Still, you get the idea. It's sort of like how Larry Ellison is now arguing that the market for Peoplesoft, JDE and Oracle is larger than just ERM apps, or whatever.