They OS is none too shabby neither (and security and ither updates are automagic.)
Microsoft makes no hardware, since they realized that they were making it into a chump's game themselves. So they have to partner with companies that do make hardware.
To be big enough to partner with Microsoft means that you have reached a size sufficient to have drummed out any creativity you might ever have had, not to mention that the options as far as chassis and options are limited.
Microsoft itself, in the process of commoditizing the hardware, has made it economically impossible to change anything beyond the cosmetics of the cases.
Apple is not bound by these limitations. The new iMac G5, a flat screen balanced on a pedestal, with everything else tucked away inside, could NOT have come from ANY company producing Windows hardware.
The iPod makes its own case for its own form factor and its repeated for the iPod Shuffle.
Microsoft CAN NOT hope to compete because they would have to take over one of their partners, andn I can certainly see that happening, and then actually have an idea (as well as a clue.)
Sorry but the people that would be available to Microsoft would reach for a parts catalogue first and THAT'S the problem.
"A raft of companies is newly emboldened to challenge the software giant in every market: music, messaging, mobile phones and more."
Microsoft didn't come up with those application and they aren't particularly welcome in those areas.
This article reads like it was their's to lose when we're just trying to keep the elephant out of the living room because, like any elephant in a living room, it is very very messy.
which is not a bad idea (except for the US balance of payments,)
But how do you know that our insatiable apetite for cheaper, faster, better won't out strip their production capacity and market conditions will leave the Indian poor still out in the cold and dark.
The price will rise due to demand and the Indian farmer is right back where he started, competing with us and our much fatter wallets.
the margins are too low, (thanks to Microsoft's comoditizing the whole market) and anybody that they 'partner' with is less than whole-hearted about it.
Bill G. comoditization means that they don't do any R&D or Design anymore (and that all the fuckin' boxes look like crap, differentiated only by cheap plastic panel)
Bill G.'s not going to lose any sleep over this but maybe he should.
Smalltalk (well maybe not Smalltalk, it would have to be renamed before it gets taken seriously.)
Whaaahaha!!! I WANT ONE! NnOoWw! (And I'm the one who's got to shell out the dough!)
If this thing hits with a price point of $800, it is going to be BIG splash.
I suspect that it will run with a G4 processor for the better temperature handling.
It doesn't have to come with all the gegaws. That is what USB and FireWire is for. My iMac is only a screen on a pedestal now. Its not a big leap to come up with a tablet.
Hell if its a tablet, it shouldn't come with anything but the strict minimum, 802.11g AirPort, PostScript display capabilities, and QuickTime. So it needs some OS X components. The new core architecture's all set up for it. Ram is down to $100 a gig so that's not the problem.
Its got to do hand writing recognition (old tech by now) and write to a honking great big flash memory or maybe he's got the iPod drive capacity in mind and its got to synch with an iMac. eMac or PowerMac.
This could be GREAT! (And knowing what Apple can do, it really could be.)
Do it Mr. Jobs.
Make good on the DynaBook. (Bill G. will eat hit %^&#-ing hat.:-)
When he commoditized the PC market, he made his own support by creating the clones, and wiping IBM off the PC map.
But now that that game is over, none of the mom and pop PC assemblers have two nickels to rub together.
He's in a real bind because NOBODY can just break into the telecom market. Its too well regulated. The FCC can be bought to mandate AGAINST phones that have lousy characteristics just like the auto industry was mandated against selling cars that have jousy characteristics (Name "Corvair" ring a bell. That was car crashed for no reason too. And don't ghet me started on the steering columns...)
All it takes is some persons who couldn't call 911 because their phones crashed and Microsoft will be up to its ears in litigation. Granted they are getting practice shutting up their own fansites but that is in civil court.
This could send people to jail criminally.
And don't count out civil court ability to do damage to Microsoft.
Somebody who's unnecessarily crippled, after lying there holding a crippled phone, makes a convincing witness in front of a judge trying a case for damages based on potential future earnings and 'pain and suffering'.
Besides, Microsoft doesn't make hardware (Some keyboards, mice and the XBox excepted.)
Telecom is a hardware business. They may make their money from charging you every month but they can't charge you without seling you the hardware.
Gates won't be able to leverage his closed standards because NONE of the telecom providers are going to just GIVE HIM CONTROL.
They KNOW what Gates did to the PC hardware business.
What needs to be done is to put up and then attack a site which the 'regime' does not atack as it is clearly a shill. You are not the subject of attack, but some one who suposedly is is getting clobbered.
As long as all the allegetions can be 'arguably' backed up, the proxy fight can continue unabated.
This gets the debate out of the 'close in' arena and gets into first ammendment rights.
But now, it would make it impossible for me to do anything, including completing my Bachelor's Degree.
I'd ask you to read the ADA but you'd probably wouldn't get it either.
[RANT] Like the slobs and other ignorant wastrels who sit there and just look at me for twenty minutes as I stand there rocking on my feet hanging to a pole and having to hold onto my cane in my other hand.
You'd think they'd give me a seat. Think again. [RANT OFF]
The streets here in downtown are constantly being torn up and whatever surface there might be is, literally, a holey mess. (I walk with a cane and its an exterience, let me tell you.)
I've often wondered why they bother paving them again when it would probably be smarter to just span the holed with 'arched' concrete segments resting on sidewalk supports that they could just lift out of the way, lay the cables/pipes/whatever and then replace.
It would certainly mean that the street isn't torn up for weeks at a time.
In effect the xxAAs are trying to rope the FCC into making all broadcasting a synchonous pay-for-view service without any recourse for pay-per-view-later (that would kill ALL recording, nevermind TIVO)
They are essentially trying to rewind the calendar to before they xxAAs lost the 'fair use' trials against those pesky player pianos. (And radio and TV and restaurant juke boxes and sheet music.)
They are against anything that makes a noise and they aren't getting paid. And fair use doesn't enter into their vocabulaty.
Apple has been spared the fate of PC manufacturers (reduction to comodity box assemblers,) and, Linux-like, nearly gives away the software. (Must piss off Microsoft no end.:-)
Apple has defied the tide, makes a decent buck and is out innovating the Microsoft and the box assemblers.
The market forces that permitted Microsoft to decimate the sources of hardware innovation by switching production to smaller and smaller assemblers while forcing component makers to use fewer and fewer chassis are the very same ones that have also put a limit on Microsoft's ability to respond to ANY innnovation.
They have reached their limit to growth. Their success in the x86 market has in fact limited them to the x86 market. If they hadn't been so successful at it, they wouldn't be in this pickle.
Apple will adapt because it can, as the revenue streams of iTunes and iPod prove.
Microsoft was always parasitic and its 'hosts', the supply chain of huge chassis manufacturers and of mom-n-pop box assemblers, are now weakened to the point that they can't respond to ANY threat.
Microsoft will make a fascinating business case to study in the next century.
around massive holes in the network (like ALL OF CHINA!)
The originators of the 'net imagined that the holes would be caused by massive disruptions, like a bomb just took out Cleveland or something.
But there was nothing that said that Cleveland couldn't just unplug itself.
That's what the situation you have in China.
Actually, Microsoft is now paying for its
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
success at comoditizing the PC.
There are almost no designers of PC chassis left. The differentiation comes with 'plastic panels' on the same box. Regardless of which panels you might buy, you're still stuck with the box underneath it all.
The Mac design team __designed__ the new iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac, eMac, MacMini and iMac to look, feel, work and be disctinctive.
In the case of the last two, the MacMini is arguably the smallest form factor white the latest iMac has suceeed in making the computer disappear entirely.
Gates will never be able to do that because of his success. There's NOBODY left who can do that kind of innovative design. He stuck with the same chassis with different coloured plastic panels stuck to them.
Actually the next 'paradigm shift is not here yet.
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 1
And, as much as I loathe Gates and his bullying monopolistic tactics, I'm not willing to count Microsoft out just yet.
Microsoft is definitely getting its head handed to it on every non-x86 platform (I LOVE my new G5 iMac [it screams with 2GB of RAM] and my friend loves his Linux and Sun boxes,) but the market share isn't there yet.
X-Box is costing them with every sale but they are making some money with the software. We'll see what happend with the introduction of Sony/IBM's CELL PS3 processor.
Mainframes are safe from Windows. No mainframe manufacturer or user will let him within a mile of their data centres. We'er talking real money invested in real processing power and real DASD space. It absolutely dwarfs anything Microsoft has ever even dreamed of.
The next big thing (NBT) will come from the realization that interning references (FKEYs) IN objects means a lot of inneficiency and expense.
Its not that the objects being stored change so much as the relationships that these objects participate in change.
I don't see Microsoft growing up from Access and realizing that keeping these participations in external tables, filled with Connection instances, which only point(refer) to the object instances on both sides of he N:M relationships, and instead 'upgrading' SQL to handle Relationships, and Connections, eliminates all of the vaguaries and costs associated with changing object models whenever the reality that business find themselves in changes.
I don't thing that they 'get it'.
If adopted universally, it would also mean the end of 404s and the other symptoms of 'dead links' that currently bedevil Google. But that's for another time.
How do you print out a web page? Just print the links on their own pages. Wiki 'gathers' a bunch of information by allowing you to access it. If you're printing it out, you've cut off that option so you need to print out to the level required. (A page with the WikiLinks on it would make an acceptable ToC. If you want an index, file them out locally and use the word processor's facilities.)
"How do you attach it in an e-mail? I just send the link. Beats sending an entire file.
"Submit it for a publication?" I just send out the link. Publication doesn't really apply here.
I've been using Wikis for years and that what I do.
The idea that you divide your readership/audience into those who paid and those who didn't is inevitable but its also anathema to the existence of the internet.
We are about to enter an era of severe commercial Balkanization of the wwweb and maybe the whole of the 'net into smaller and smaller divisions.
Of course that itself is anathema to the concept of advertising on the wwweb where the idea is to reach any and every body's eye balls.
The wider context, the sharing of information, is going to be lost.
The only sites with unpaid presence will be corporations who need one for providing a multi-regional point of contact, because PR babble still needs to go out.
The wwweb and the net will become a much quiter place since the sites who disseminate info, like the NYTimes, will become subscription only.
Content aggregators will limit their own growth but will preserve their 'print' revenues.
Web advertisers will still rely on Spam with dimishing returns as Baysian filters get more and more discrimating.
What I DO with them, my value adding application, doesn't __have__ to be open source. (Well... I develop code in Smalltalk. Its __always__ been open source.)
Slashdot Mirror
They OS is none too shabby neither (and security and ither updates are automagic.)
Microsoft makes no hardware, since they realized that they were making it into a chump's game themselves. So they have to partner with companies that do make hardware.
To be big enough to partner with Microsoft means that you have reached a size sufficient to have drummed out any creativity you might ever have had, not to mention that the options as far as chassis and options are limited.
Microsoft itself, in the process of commoditizing the hardware, has made it economically impossible to change anything beyond the cosmetics of the cases.
Apple is not bound by these limitations. The new iMac G5, a flat screen balanced on a pedestal, with everything else tucked away inside, could NOT have come from ANY company producing Windows hardware.
The iPod makes its own case for its own form factor and its repeated for the iPod Shuffle.
Microsoft CAN NOT hope to compete because they would have to take over one of their partners, andn I can certainly see that happening, and then actually have an idea (as well as a clue.)
Sorry but the people that would be available to Microsoft would reach for a parts catalogue first and THAT'S the problem.
"A raft of companies is newly emboldened to challenge the software giant in every market: music, messaging, mobile phones and more."
Microsoft didn't come up with those application and they aren't particularly welcome in those areas.
This article reads like it was their's to lose when we're just trying to keep the elephant out of the living room because, like any elephant in a living room, it is very very messy.
That has everything to do with it (until we're civilized enough to achieve universality of hegemony.)
On about $300k I'm out about 50%. (Looking at the deduction lines on my cheque statements leaves me with a real mixed feeling.)
I'd take anything Rupert Murdoch says with enough salt to ruin my taste buds.
Hope it never gets hot enough to boil. (If the guy's runing a Pentium 4 it just might.)
which is not a bad idea (except for the US balance of payments,)
But how do you know that our insatiable apetite for cheaper, faster, better won't out strip their production capacity and market conditions will leave the Indian poor still out in the cold and dark.
The price will rise due to demand and the Indian farmer is right back where he started, competing with us and our much fatter wallets.
the margins are too low, (thanks to Microsoft's comoditizing the whole market) and anybody that they 'partner' with is less than whole-hearted about it.
Bill G. comoditization means that they don't do any R&D or Design anymore (and that all the fuckin' boxes look like crap, differentiated only by cheap plastic panel)
Bill G.'s not going to lose any sleep over this but maybe he should.
It WON'T be running Windows.
I just thought of something that's just crying out to a wireless input pad.
The MacMini!
Rather than get all heated up over the MacMini and then having to connect up your old monitor, keyboard and mouse to it, remote a tablet to it.
Swell, my DynaBook idea has just gome up in smoke...
Smalltalk (well maybe not Smalltalk, it would have to be renamed before it gets taken seriously.)
:-)
Whaaahaha!!! I WANT ONE! NnOoWw! (And I'm the one who's got to shell out the dough!)
If this thing hits with a price point of $800, it is going to be BIG splash.
I suspect that it will run with a G4 processor for the better temperature handling.
It doesn't have to come with all the gegaws. That is what USB and FireWire is for. My iMac is only a screen on a pedestal now. Its not a big leap to come up with a tablet.
Hell if its a tablet, it shouldn't come with anything but the strict minimum, 802.11g AirPort, PostScript display capabilities, and QuickTime. So it needs some OS X components. The new core architecture's all set up for it. Ram is down to $100 a gig so that's not the problem.
Its got to do hand writing recognition (old tech by now) and write to a honking great big flash memory or maybe he's got the iPod drive capacity in mind and its got to synch with an iMac. eMac or PowerMac.
This could be GREAT! (And knowing what Apple can do, it really could be.)
Do it Mr. Jobs.
Make good on the DynaBook. (Bill G. will eat hit %^&#-ing hat.
When he commoditized the PC market, he made his own support by creating the clones, and wiping IBM off the PC map.
But now that that game is over, none of the mom and pop PC assemblers have two nickels to rub together.
He's in a real bind because NOBODY can just break into the telecom market. Its too well regulated. The FCC can be bought to mandate AGAINST phones that have lousy characteristics just like the auto industry was mandated against selling cars that have jousy characteristics (Name "Corvair" ring a bell. That was car crashed for no reason too. And don't ghet me started on the steering columns...)
All it takes is some persons who couldn't call 911 because their phones crashed and Microsoft will be up to its ears in litigation. Granted they are getting practice shutting up their own fansites but that is in civil court.
This could send people to jail criminally.
And don't count out civil court ability to do damage to Microsoft.
Somebody who's unnecessarily crippled, after lying there holding a crippled phone, makes a convincing witness in front of a judge trying a case for damages based on potential future earnings and 'pain and suffering'.
Besides, Microsoft doesn't make hardware (Some keyboards, mice and the XBox excepted.)
Telecom is a hardware business. They may make their money from charging you every month but they can't charge you without seling you the hardware.
Gates won't be able to leverage his closed standards because NONE of the telecom providers are going to just GIVE HIM CONTROL.
They KNOW what Gates did to the PC hardware business.
No more possibilities of sequels or prequels or what ever you call the discontinuous style of blathering on.
AND NO MORE CHARACTERS AND PROPS FROM KIDDIE'S IMAGINATIONS!!!
lawyers all feel safe in attacking it.
What needs to be done is to put up and then attack a site which the 'regime' does not atack as it is clearly a shill. You are not the subject of attack, but some one who suposedly is is getting clobbered.
As long as all the allegetions can be 'arguably' backed up, the proxy fight can continue unabated.
This gets the debate out of the 'close in' arena and gets into first ammendment rights.
Then you get press without involving the lawyers.
But now, it would make it impossible for me to do anything, including completing my Bachelor's Degree.
I'd ask you to read the ADA but you'd probably wouldn't get it either.
[RANT]
Like the slobs and other ignorant wastrels who sit there and just look at me for twenty minutes as I stand there rocking on my feet hanging to a pole and having to hold onto my cane in my other hand.
You'd think they'd give me a seat. Think again.
[RANT OFF]
The streets here in downtown are constantly being torn up and whatever surface there might be is, literally, a holey mess. (I walk with a cane and its an exterience, let me tell you.)
I've often wondered why they bother paving them again when it would probably be smarter to just span the holed with 'arched' concrete segments resting on sidewalk supports that they could just lift out of the way, lay the cables/pipes/whatever and then replace.
It would certainly mean that the street isn't torn up for weeks at a time.
like crap (on purpose.)
Leave it to neo-Ludites to come and smash it up.
In effect the xxAAs are trying to rope the FCC into making all broadcasting a synchonous pay-for-view service without any recourse for pay-per-view-later (that would kill ALL recording, nevermind TIVO)
They are essentially trying to rewind the calendar to before they xxAAs lost the 'fair use' trials against those pesky player pianos. (And radio and TV and restaurant juke boxes and sheet music.)
They are against anything that makes a noise and they aren't getting paid. And fair use doesn't enter into their vocabulaty.
No way can you explain the toilet right being next to the snack bar?
Apple has been spared the fate of PC manufacturers (reduction to comodity box assemblers,) and, Linux-like, nearly gives away the software. (Must piss off Microsoft no end. :-)
Apple has defied the tide, makes a decent buck and is out innovating the Microsoft and the box assemblers.
The market forces that permitted Microsoft to decimate the sources of hardware innovation by switching production to smaller and smaller assemblers while forcing component makers to use fewer and fewer chassis are the very same ones that have also put a limit on Microsoft's ability to respond to ANY innnovation.
They have reached their limit to growth. Their success in the x86 market has in fact limited them to the x86 market. If they hadn't been so successful at it, they wouldn't be in this pickle.
Apple will adapt because it can, as the revenue streams of iTunes and iPod prove.
Microsoft was always parasitic and its 'hosts', the supply chain of huge chassis manufacturers and of mom-n-pop box assemblers, are now weakened to the point that they can't respond to ANY threat.
Microsoft will make a fascinating business case to study in the next century.
The economic of censorship are drastically cheaper than what you portray.
Here's a policy for example:
It must be in 'plain text' or its banned. (And we WILL come looking for you!)
It must be 'politically' acceptable or its banned. (And we WILL come looking for you!)
Now "Have a nice day..."
around massive holes in the network (like ALL OF CHINA!)
The originators of the 'net imagined that the holes would be caused by massive disruptions, like a bomb just took out Cleveland or something.
But there was nothing that said that Cleveland couldn't just unplug itself.
That's what the situation you have in China.
success at comoditizing the PC.
There are almost no designers of PC chassis left. The differentiation comes with 'plastic panels' on the same box. Regardless of which panels you might buy, you're still stuck with the box underneath it all.
The Mac design team __designed__ the new iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac, eMac, MacMini and iMac to look, feel, work and be disctinctive.
In the case of the last two, the MacMini is arguably the smallest form factor white the latest iMac has suceeed in making the computer disappear entirely.
Gates will never be able to do that because of his success. There's NOBODY left who can do that kind of innovative design. He stuck with the same chassis with different coloured plastic panels stuck to them.
And, as much as I loathe Gates and his bullying monopolistic tactics, I'm not willing to count Microsoft out just yet.
:-)
Microsoft is definitely getting its head handed to it on every non-x86 platform (I LOVE my new G5 iMac [it screams with 2GB of RAM] and my friend loves his Linux and Sun boxes,) but the market share isn't there yet.
X-Box is costing them with every sale but they are making some money with the software. We'll see what happend with the introduction of Sony/IBM's CELL PS3 processor.
Mainframes are safe from Windows. No mainframe manufacturer or user will let him within a mile of their data centres. We'er talking real money invested in real processing power and real DASD space. It absolutely dwarfs anything Microsoft has ever even dreamed of.
The next big thing (NBT) will come from the realization that interning references (FKEYs) IN objects means a lot of inneficiency and expense.
Its not that the objects being stored change so much as the relationships that these objects participate in change.
I don't see Microsoft growing up from Access and realizing that keeping these participations in external tables, filled with Connection instances, which only point(refer) to the object instances on both sides of he N:M relationships, and instead 'upgrading' SQL to handle Relationships, and Connections, eliminates all of the vaguaries and costs associated with changing object models whenever the reality that business find themselves in changes.
I don't thing that they 'get it'.
If adopted universally, it would also mean the end of 404s and the other symptoms of 'dead links' that currently bedevil Google. But that's for another time.
Let My Pointers Go!
"How do you print out a Wiki effectively?"
How do you print out a web page? Just print the links on their own pages. Wiki 'gathers' a bunch of information by allowing you to access it. If you're printing it out, you've cut off that option so you need to print out to the level required. (A page with the WikiLinks on it would make an acceptable ToC. If you want an index, file them out locally and use the word processor's facilities.)
"How do you attach it in an e-mail? I just send the link. Beats sending an entire file.
"Submit it for a publication?" I just send out the link. Publication doesn't really apply here.
I've been using Wikis for years and that what I do.
The idea that you divide your readership/audience into those who paid and those who didn't is inevitable but its also anathema to the existence of the internet.
We are about to enter an era of severe commercial Balkanization of the wwweb and maybe the whole of the 'net into smaller and smaller divisions.
Of course that itself is anathema to the concept of advertising on the wwweb where the idea is to reach any and every body's eye balls.
The wider context, the sharing of information, is going to be lost.
The only sites with unpaid presence will be corporations who need one for providing a multi-regional point of contact, because PR babble still needs to go out.
The wwweb and the net will become a much quiter place since the sites who disseminate info, like the NYTimes, will become subscription only.
Content aggregators will limit their own growth but will preserve their 'print' revenues.
Web advertisers will still rely on Spam with dimishing returns as Baysian filters get more and more discrimating.
Oh well, it was interesting while it lasted.
I'd put the source for the components out there.
... I develop code in Smalltalk. Its __always__ been open source.)
What I DO with them, my value adding application, doesn't __have__ to be open source. (Well