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Steve Jobs Interview with Time Magazine
broohaha wrote to us with the
online version of Time's interview with Steve Jobs. It's the cover of this week's edition, and gives an interesting perspective into the labyrinth of his mind. The most interesting part is the Pixar stuff, IMHO. Just waiting for Toy Story II right now.
Interesting rhetorical gymnastics. Too bad they're either misleading or flat out wrong.
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
The very quote you use says "don't need", as opposed to "make sure..does not". Quite a different logical meaning there. Perhaps you would be happier with a car or television that *forced* the user to be intimate with it's underlying technology? Maybe you should have to manually set the fuel-air ratio in your Honda? Screw channels, you should have to manually tune your TV. The entire computing world is built upon the concept of functional abstraction, otherwise we'd be trying to send web pages using assembly language. Apple is trying to 'abstract' up to the user level by integrating software and hardware. Many users may not know how a computer works. So what? Perhaps, God forbid, they actually want to do other things with their lives.
Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...
Gee, that's funny, my cable modem dowloaded a file the other night at 180KB/s. That pipe seems pretty full to me. Perhaps my Macs are running NT without my knowledge...
Apple finally realized that to get consumers you need to get their workplace
Hardly. I don't see Sony products anywhere in my workplace, and they seem to do okay. People bought two million iMacs because they were easy to use and looked cool (at least to their eyes), while the computers at work were neither. Frankly, I'd be less likely to buy the same product I see at work (phone, VCR, company car) because I know PHBs only care about buying what the herd mentality tells them they should buy, and what fits with the corporate culture. They're gonna buy the white Ford Taurus GL, not the SHO, and surely not a Beetle/Audi TT/Ferrari/anything mildy interesting. As people see how clueless some IT departments are, they'll come to the same conclusion about computers.
Not only can their product not work at that level, but they have no interest in developing one that can (MS at least used the OS/2 code they had written for IBM to make NT)
So the world needs another kernel? Avie Tevanian did a lot of work on what became the Mach kernel. Avie worked for Steve at NeXT. Apple bought NeXT. A lot of the other technology (e.g., QuickTime) was "homegrown" at Apple. People used to complain that Apple had NIH-syndrome. Now you criticize them because they didn't reinvent the wheel? So what are we to make of companies that now support Linux? How about IBM? Is this an indictment against OS/2 and AIX, or is it just good business? How about SGI and IRIX?
So what if Jobs has his own ideology about technology? Since Apple is a vertical integrator, they will never dominate the overall market. You can take Steve's vision or leave it. If I don't like Saab's vision for the automobile, I don't buy one, but I'm not frightened by them. I'm more frightened by a company that's wants to have a piece of everything. Now who could that be?
I remember a TV special a while back where Pixar was explaining their choice in computers. It had nothing to do with price/performance, but rather performance/cubic foot... They liked the suns because they were so small they could stack tons and tons of them in a relatively small area and get much more processing power than they could by trying to fit Onyx's or anything else into that area.
I think that shows that there are so many other factors to consider when you're in need of processing power... Yeah alphas are cheap, but whose going to sell you 400 quad alpha systems and ships them standard in low profile enclosures?
anyone involved in the real world can tell you that linux/xeon is the only way to go for rendring and 3d animation/modeling.
You're just crazy! For one, so many studios and/or software companies would need to report their solutions to Linux. For two Xeon is a bum when it comes to the highend... Yeah, it's 25% faster than PIII's, but compared to Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, it's the bottom of the barrell so far as floating point performance goes... and that's what you need for rendering... lots of it...