Yeah, building off of NeXT's OS certainly was a smart shortcut. But the most important decision for OS X was to not really worry about any of the legacy stuff, and that is what I think made OS X actually happen, compared to the failure of previous efforts like copeland. OS X shipped with the "classic" compatibility layer, but it was really a half-assed solution more just to shut up the whiners, Apple was not really committed backwards compatibility. It's a tough decision to make, but sometimes it's what needs to happen to really move forward.
I don't think you can really accurately say that it was either the iMac or the iPod that saved Apple. Apple was never on the verge of shuttering its building, even though some pundits liked to pretend it was. Even in its lowest days, it still had lots of loyal fans, smart engineers, and a good pile of cash. Apple's biggest problem was a lack of focus. It had a huge and diverse product line that spread its resources too thin, and made it really hard to get some things done (IE, a revamped operating system).
The iMac is sort of a cornerstone example of the focus that Apple found. Instead of selling dozens of different desktop computers, they started selling just two, the iMac and the Powermac workstations. Instead of selling you Apple branded printers/scanners/cameras with your Mac, they gave you a couple USB ports and pointed you towards some third party devices.
The same focus that lead to the iMac eventually allowed Apple to release OS X, and then the iPod. The iPod has allowed Apple to reinvent itself to a significant degree, but I think they'd still be around even if their adventures into music hadn't happened. They wouldn't be near as big as they are now, but they'd still exist, they'd still be selling computers, and they'd still have lots of fans.
The article describes those blue lines as a quartz plate that sort of shapes the melted microchip parts. I think the blue strips in the one part of the diagram are more of a graphic simplification for visual clarity rather than a drawing meant to show an entirely realistic diagram of what is going on. I wouldn't think it particularly easy to make strips of quartz that tiny, not to mention properly align them over equally small transistors and stuff beneath.
But even if it is possible, maybe the techniques used to shape quartz in that way don't work with the materials used to make the transistors. I'm sure there's a reason why they didn't do as you suggested.
If a chip is designed to run at a certain speed, but manufacturing flaws make it run slower, then it a very real sense the chip didn't work. The fact that it still is possible to use the chip for some things doesn't mean that it's not broken.
I once rode home a bike that had one of the pedals broken off. It took longer than usual, because I was travelling at a lower speed, but by your definition my bike didn't have a defect. In my opinion, a missing pedal is pretty darn broken.
I think the reason that most of these 20-something wunderkids have seen such big successes boils down mainly to luck and probabilities. There's lots of people out there at all sorts of ages who are working hard, and it's just the nature of how the world works that some end up being in the right place at the right time, and things just sort of fall into place.
Hard work and great ideas are very important, no doubt, but there's always an element of chance involved. Chance doesn't discriminate in regards to age, so everyone can benefit(or sometimes suffer) because of it. In some ways it's the ultimate equalizer.
All that being said, the computer/internet industry has made younger entrepreneurs a little more likely, only because the cost of entry for software is so low in terms of initial capital.
There are many different ways in which a plane can crash, they don't all involve a high-speed death spiral into the ground from 30,000ft. Even in the case of total engine failure, a plane basically just becomes a glider, which isn't an inherently uncontrollable craft. A competent pilot would likely be able to control their descent reasonably well in such a case, and even make a good safe landing if an appropriate stretch of ground is nearby. But if you happen to be flying over mountains or something else unforgiving, you're in for a crash. But it isn't necessarily going to be a fireball of death type crash. You're probably relying a whole lot on luck in that case.
Your argument falls flat when you cite Apple as an counter-example to linux. Apple is run by a notorious control-freak, they're a company that regularly ignores their own interface guidelines, and they make basically arbitrary changes to the visual presentation of key applications whenever they feel like it.
I think there's a good argument to be made for "creative vision", and even the fact that sometimes you have to take your users, "kicking and screaming", into the future. There are, however, a few caveats to doing it successfully. First off, you have to be a good at designing. Apple only sells one basic iMac design at a time, you don't get much choice there. But the designs are generally aesthetically pleasing, interesting, and sometimes unusual, but they still remain functional. And so Apple sells plenty of iMacs.
Second, you need to be willing to accept that some of your ideas don't work, even if you're already poured countless hours into them, even if the day before you were entirely convinced it was the best idea ever. There's plenty of stories of Steve Jobs coming into Apple one day and deciding that a current product under design is all wrong, and throwing it all over and making a bunch of designers/engineers work ridiculous hours to get it down before a fast-approaching deadline. Even though your earlier ideas didn't work, you've learned a lot from them, and that makes the final result better, even if it's drastically different from the concepts that preceded it.
And I had a third caveat but I can't remember what it is. Maybe I'll add it later.
At the end of the day, I think the problem with linux on the desktop is even more straightforward. It's an issue of the desktop environment being so incredibly reliant on the little details, the polish and shine and fine tuning that makes a good design into a great one. The reality is that that kind of work is really boring, even soul-sucking at times. The adage is that the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the work. Getting it done well and in a consistent way generally requires a highly structured working environment, and generally you have to pay people to trudge through that kind of tedium. While there are companies that pay people to work on open-source, the bulk of OSS projects are done as side-projects or hobbies or whatnot. It's not an easy sell to convince some guy working on his free time to spend hours figuring out all those rough edges, and that's not made any easier by the fact that OSS by its very nature leaves a developer highly likely to receive constant criticism and flat-out insults. Then if you look at a project on the scale of an operating system (or a windowing system or whatever), then you're talking about a ton of work, and so you need a bunch of people willing to work through that tedium, and you need some way of tying it all together and making it come together coherently. That's a difficult problem to solve.
That's a good point, but there's something to be said for "creative vision" and innovation/experimentation. Maybe your idea is too hard to explain without actually showing it to someone. Maybe it doesn't really work until the details are settled, and you won't get to the details until you actually build it. Maybe it's too different, and everyone will be really uncomfortable about it until they've used it for a while. Maybe you're just smarter than everyone else. Or maybe your idea actually doesn't really work. Sometimes you can't be sure until you try it. And even if it doesn't work, chances are you learned a thing or two along the way.
But the most important part, as others have already noted, is that you need to be willing to discard your work if it doesn't pan out. It's a hard thing to do.
Yeah, it's nice to see Apple starting to make some inroads, particularly with the more tech-savvy crowd. But unless Apple decides to start selling a low-cost, moderately expandable, sans-monitor machine, they're not going to threaten the vast sea of windows machines flooding cubicle-land.
If you're buying state of the art workstations or laptops, sure, you'll get a pretty equivalent bang for your buck with the mac. But if you want to buy a bunch of $500 boxes for people to do word processing on, you're outta luck. Apple doesn't do the cut-throat low end market. It's a perfectly valid choice for them to make, but it's also a perfectly valid and existing market.
I'll also agree that you can make some decent TCO arguments in terms of supports costs and even useful life time, but that's not something that always comes into play in real world decisions, for better or worse.
I think the big flaw in your numbers is business users. The vast majority of them are not going to pay the premium for Apple hardware, and I don't see Apple selling budget boxes or licensing their OS anytime soon.
If you take businesses out of the count and look at a consumer level, then your numbers seems more feasible to me. You just have to walk into a college lecture hall and count the Apple logos to see the inroads that they're making.
I don't know if the jet of material that does the penetrating is really a liquid or not, but even if it were, that doesn't mean it would just splatter when it hit the tank. When you get to speeds high enough, it doesn't really matter what you're shooting. There are machines that use extremely high pressure water jets to cut through steel. I have no problem believing that an explosion can create the sorts of pressures and energy necessary to push liquid metal through steel.
Fair enough, but in a lot of ways, Steve Jobs = Apple right now. Since he's the CEO, what he says goes. He's been right more than he's been wrong, and Apple has prospered.
Apple is making money hand over fist selling Macs right now. Their computer sales are growing at a rate significantly better than the industry overall, and they have higher margins on their hardware than their competitors. I cannot fathom why you would think they should abandon that.
If Apple were to license their OS, they wouldn't get to 20% marketshare in the PC market. They'd drop to about 0%, because they wouldn't be selling macs anymore. Apple tried licensing in the past. It didn't eat into windows marketshare, the clones ate into Apple's marketshare. It didn't help them at all.
It's debatable. There have been plenty of people who've said that if they were in Apple's position, they'd license the Mac OS and let others battle it out to make the hardware. That would be a seriously foolish move for Apple partly because they make so much money off of hardware, but also because one of their main design philosophies is designing the whole "widget". Apple seems to really like being in direct control of as many pieces of their products as they can. I bet if they thought they could realistically design and manufacture their own CPUs, they'd do that to.
Maybe they've got something in mind but that they don't think they can convince different chip makers to move in that direction. They've just got a ton of cash laying around, maybe they felt like taking a little risk is worth it to get certain types of chips that they really want. This isn't Apple just blindly jumping into an industry that they have no idea about. There's got to be a specific reason for this.
While the definition of "beta" isn't set in stone, it's usually meant as a version of a soon to be released product that's mostly through the design phase, and more into the polish, tuning, and bug squashing phase. You don't want to be adding features while moving from Beta to release, because then you'll add in more bugs that won't get tested for.
But you're right that it's not completely fair to definitively judge beta software in terms of speed and performance. But I don't think it's horribly unfair to make some assumptions based on what you see, nor to run some quick tests to see how something runs on more "reasonable" hardware. I'm guessing that the majority of computers out there do not have 256MB+ stuck on their video cards, and Ars Technica seems to be skeptical that AT&T will be able to squeeze enough performance out of their software to make it useable on more common hardware. It's certainly not wrong for AT&T to release software like that, but it's also not the best way to make your new web browser popular.
Perhaps you're right, I'm not really an expert in this sort of thing. But I thought one of the "rules" of computers was that as long as they can fulfill a specific set of really basic functions (Turing completeness it's called, I think), then they are capable of any calculation that any other computer would be able to do.
This doesn't mean that programming some of those tasks wouldn't be awfully complicated and inefficient, nor does it say anything about how long it would take for the program to run, but seeing as they had machines 60 years ago that were turing complete, I find it hard to believe that your average GPU from today isn't also.
There are things that the GPU might not be able to do at a speed acceptable enough to actually be useable, but I think that fits nicely into the tool box analogy. You could use your cordless drill to cut a sheet of plywood in half if you drilled enough holes all the way down the middle of it. It'd take all damn day, but you could do it.
No, he just wants some of the obvious technical problems with the game to be addressed. EvE is a pretty amazing game, but it has plenty of rough edges and some glaring flaws. EvE is also an extremely competitive game, beyond pretty much anything I've ever played online. There's many examples of bots and macro-miners, and those sorts of things. In a game that's so cut-throat, and that has relatively few restrictions/rules, when someone does break the rules it tends to make many of the players very upset.
The developers are fully aware of many of these issues, yet when the players ask for them to be addressed, the devs sometimes play dumb or more often say it'll be dealt with and then never really say whether it got fixed or not.
Short version: There's lots of bots in the game. Players complain. CCP keeps saying Don't worry, we're taking care of it. But the bots never go away. Rinse and repeat that sequence for various other issues.
In its most basic definition, a GPU is just a CPU that's been highly specialized towards graphics. It can't do anything that a CPU can't also do, it just is able to do particular things much faster. Basically, they take a lot of the common tasks that graphics require of a processor, and they put really efficient ways to do it directly into the hardware, and they put a whole lot of them.
Think of a CPU as a big tool box. There's something in there for every task, including a screwdriver that can be used to put screws into things. Then next to it, you have a big cordless 18 volt drill (The GPU). Way easier to drive screws with that than the manual screwdriver in your toolbox. But when you need to drive a nail instead, yeah you could bash it in with your screw gun, but it's easier to go back to your toolbox and find a hammer.
I guess that would make a physics processor the nail gun. Or something...
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Yeah, building off of NeXT's OS certainly was a smart shortcut. But the most important decision for OS X was to not really worry about any of the legacy stuff, and that is what I think made OS X actually happen, compared to the failure of previous efforts like copeland. OS X shipped with the "classic" compatibility layer, but it was really a half-assed solution more just to shut up the whiners, Apple was not really committed backwards compatibility. It's a tough decision to make, but sometimes it's what needs to happen to really move forward.
I don't think you can really accurately say that it was either the iMac or the iPod that saved Apple. Apple was never on the verge of shuttering its building, even though some pundits liked to pretend it was. Even in its lowest days, it still had lots of loyal fans, smart engineers, and a good pile of cash. Apple's biggest problem was a lack of focus. It had a huge and diverse product line that spread its resources too thin, and made it really hard to get some things done (IE, a revamped operating system).
The iMac is sort of a cornerstone example of the focus that Apple found. Instead of selling dozens of different desktop computers, they started selling just two, the iMac and the Powermac workstations. Instead of selling you Apple branded printers/scanners/cameras with your Mac, they gave you a couple USB ports and pointed you towards some third party devices.
The same focus that lead to the iMac eventually allowed Apple to release OS X, and then the iPod. The iPod has allowed Apple to reinvent itself to a significant degree, but I think they'd still be around even if their adventures into music hadn't happened. They wouldn't be near as big as they are now, but they'd still exist, they'd still be selling computers, and they'd still have lots of fans.
The article describes those blue lines as a quartz plate that sort of shapes the melted microchip parts. I think the blue strips in the one part of the diagram are more of a graphic simplification for visual clarity rather than a drawing meant to show an entirely realistic diagram of what is going on. I wouldn't think it particularly easy to make strips of quartz that tiny, not to mention properly align them over equally small transistors and stuff beneath.
But even if it is possible, maybe the techniques used to shape quartz in that way don't work with the materials used to make the transistors. I'm sure there's a reason why they didn't do as you suggested.
Then you're much more forgiving than most people.
If a chip is designed to run at a certain speed, but manufacturing flaws make it run slower, then it a very real sense the chip didn't work. The fact that it still is possible to use the chip for some things doesn't mean that it's not broken.
I once rode home a bike that had one of the pedals broken off. It took longer than usual, because I was travelling at a lower speed, but by your definition my bike didn't have a defect. In my opinion, a missing pedal is pretty darn broken.
I think the reason that most of these 20-something wunderkids have seen such big successes boils down mainly to luck and probabilities. There's lots of people out there at all sorts of ages who are working hard, and it's just the nature of how the world works that some end up being in the right place at the right time, and things just sort of fall into place.
Hard work and great ideas are very important, no doubt, but there's always an element of chance involved. Chance doesn't discriminate in regards to age, so everyone can benefit(or sometimes suffer) because of it. In some ways it's the ultimate equalizer.
All that being said, the computer/internet industry has made younger entrepreneurs a little more likely, only because the cost of entry for software is so low in terms of initial capital.
There are many different ways in which a plane can crash, they don't all involve a high-speed death spiral into the ground from 30,000ft. Even in the case of total engine failure, a plane basically just becomes a glider, which isn't an inherently uncontrollable craft. A competent pilot would likely be able to control their descent reasonably well in such a case, and even make a good safe landing if an appropriate stretch of ground is nearby. But if you happen to be flying over mountains or something else unforgiving, you're in for a crash. But it isn't necessarily going to be a fireball of death type crash. You're probably relying a whole lot on luck in that case.
Your argument falls flat when you cite Apple as an counter-example to linux. Apple is run by a notorious control-freak, they're a company that regularly ignores their own interface guidelines, and they make basically arbitrary changes to the visual presentation of key applications whenever they feel like it.
I think there's a good argument to be made for "creative vision", and even the fact that sometimes you have to take your users, "kicking and screaming", into the future. There are, however, a few caveats to doing it successfully. First off, you have to be a good at designing. Apple only sells one basic iMac design at a time, you don't get much choice there. But the designs are generally aesthetically pleasing, interesting, and sometimes unusual, but they still remain functional. And so Apple sells plenty of iMacs.
Second, you need to be willing to accept that some of your ideas don't work, even if you're already poured countless hours into them, even if the day before you were entirely convinced it was the best idea ever. There's plenty of stories of Steve Jobs coming into Apple one day and deciding that a current product under design is all wrong, and throwing it all over and making a bunch of designers/engineers work ridiculous hours to get it down before a fast-approaching deadline. Even though your earlier ideas didn't work, you've learned a lot from them, and that makes the final result better, even if it's drastically different from the concepts that preceded it.
And I had a third caveat but I can't remember what it is. Maybe I'll add it later.
At the end of the day, I think the problem with linux on the desktop is even more straightforward. It's an issue of the desktop environment being so incredibly reliant on the little details, the polish and shine and fine tuning that makes a good design into a great one. The reality is that that kind of work is really boring, even soul-sucking at times. The adage is that the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the work. Getting it done well and in a consistent way generally requires a highly structured working environment, and generally you have to pay people to trudge through that kind of tedium. While there are companies that pay people to work on open-source, the bulk of OSS projects are done as side-projects or hobbies or whatnot. It's not an easy sell to convince some guy working on his free time to spend hours figuring out all those rough edges, and that's not made any easier by the fact that OSS by its very nature leaves a developer highly likely to receive constant criticism and flat-out insults. Then if you look at a project on the scale of an operating system (or a windowing system or whatever), then you're talking about a ton of work, and so you need a bunch of people willing to work through that tedium, and you need some way of tying it all together and making it come together coherently. That's a difficult problem to solve.
That's a good point, but there's something to be said for "creative vision" and innovation/experimentation. Maybe your idea is too hard to explain without actually showing it to someone. Maybe it doesn't really work until the details are settled, and you won't get to the details until you actually build it. Maybe it's too different, and everyone will be really uncomfortable about it until they've used it for a while. Maybe you're just smarter than everyone else. Or maybe your idea actually doesn't really work. Sometimes you can't be sure until you try it. And even if it doesn't work, chances are you learned a thing or two along the way.
But the most important part, as others have already noted, is that you need to be willing to discard your work if it doesn't pan out. It's a hard thing to do.
That might be true, but for millions of employees out there, it's not really their decision to make. Sad but true.
Yeah, it's nice to see Apple starting to make some inroads, particularly with the more tech-savvy crowd. But unless Apple decides to start selling a low-cost, moderately expandable, sans-monitor machine, they're not going to threaten the vast sea of windows machines flooding cubicle-land.
If you're buying state of the art workstations or laptops, sure, you'll get a pretty equivalent bang for your buck with the mac. But if you want to buy a bunch of $500 boxes for people to do word processing on, you're outta luck. Apple doesn't do the cut-throat low end market. It's a perfectly valid choice for them to make, but it's also a perfectly valid and existing market.
I'll also agree that you can make some decent TCO arguments in terms of supports costs and even useful life time, but that's not something that always comes into play in real world decisions, for better or worse.
I think the big flaw in your numbers is business users. The vast majority of them are not going to pay the premium for Apple hardware, and I don't see Apple selling budget boxes or licensing their OS anytime soon.
If you take businesses out of the count and look at a consumer level, then your numbers seems more feasible to me. You just have to walk into a college lecture hall and count the Apple logos to see the inroads that they're making.
Whatever, it works for him, and it's working for Apple. It doesn't seem to me to be a bad thing at all.
I don't know if the jet of material that does the penetrating is really a liquid or not, but even if it were, that doesn't mean it would just splatter when it hit the tank. When you get to speeds high enough, it doesn't really matter what you're shooting. There are machines that use extremely high pressure water jets to cut through steel. I have no problem believing that an explosion can create the sorts of pressures and energy necessary to push liquid metal through steel.
Fair enough, but in a lot of ways, Steve Jobs = Apple right now. Since he's the CEO, what he says goes. He's been right more than he's been wrong, and Apple has prospered.
Apple is making money hand over fist selling Macs right now. Their computer sales are growing at a rate significantly better than the industry overall, and they have higher margins on their hardware than their competitors. I cannot fathom why you would think they should abandon that.
If Apple were to license their OS, they wouldn't get to 20% marketshare in the PC market. They'd drop to about 0%, because they wouldn't be selling macs anymore. Apple tried licensing in the past. It didn't eat into windows marketshare, the clones ate into Apple's marketshare. It didn't help them at all.
It's debatable. There have been plenty of people who've said that if they were in Apple's position, they'd license the Mac OS and let others battle it out to make the hardware. That would be a seriously foolish move for Apple partly because they make so much money off of hardware, but also because one of their main design philosophies is designing the whole "widget". Apple seems to really like being in direct control of as many pieces of their products as they can. I bet if they thought they could realistically design and manufacture their own CPUs, they'd do that to.
Maybe they've got something in mind but that they don't think they can convince different chip makers to move in that direction. They've just got a ton of cash laying around, maybe they felt like taking a little risk is worth it to get certain types of chips that they really want. This isn't Apple just blindly jumping into an industry that they have no idea about. There's got to be a specific reason for this.
But if there's noone in the universe, then who's doing the imagining? I'm guessing this all has something to do with string theory.
While the definition of "beta" isn't set in stone, it's usually meant as a version of a soon to be released product that's mostly through the design phase, and more into the polish, tuning, and bug squashing phase. You don't want to be adding features while moving from Beta to release, because then you'll add in more bugs that won't get tested for.
But you're right that it's not completely fair to definitively judge beta software in terms of speed and performance. But I don't think it's horribly unfair to make some assumptions based on what you see, nor to run some quick tests to see how something runs on more "reasonable" hardware. I'm guessing that the majority of computers out there do not have 256MB+ stuck on their video cards, and Ars Technica seems to be skeptical that AT&T will be able to squeeze enough performance out of their software to make it useable on more common hardware. It's certainly not wrong for AT&T to release software like that, but it's also not the best way to make your new web browser popular.
Ah yes, because the people at Apple work for a living and want to earn money, everything they do must be evil. EEEVVVVILLLLL!
Maybe because the game console market is very different from the PC market?
Perhaps you're right, I'm not really an expert in this sort of thing. But I thought one of the "rules" of computers was that as long as they can fulfill a specific set of really basic functions (Turing completeness it's called, I think), then they are capable of any calculation that any other computer would be able to do.
This doesn't mean that programming some of those tasks wouldn't be awfully complicated and inefficient, nor does it say anything about how long it would take for the program to run, but seeing as they had machines 60 years ago that were turing complete, I find it hard to believe that your average GPU from today isn't also.
There are things that the GPU might not be able to do at a speed acceptable enough to actually be useable, but I think that fits nicely into the tool box analogy. You could use your cordless drill to cut a sheet of plywood in half if you drilled enough holes all the way down the middle of it. It'd take all damn day, but you could do it.
Yeah, probably.
No, he just wants some of the obvious technical problems with the game to be addressed. EvE is a pretty amazing game, but it has plenty of rough edges and some glaring flaws. EvE is also an extremely competitive game, beyond pretty much anything I've ever played online. There's many examples of bots and macro-miners, and those sorts of things. In a game that's so cut-throat, and that has relatively few restrictions/rules, when someone does break the rules it tends to make many of the players very upset.
The developers are fully aware of many of these issues, yet when the players ask for them to be addressed, the devs sometimes play dumb or more often say it'll be dealt with and then never really say whether it got fixed or not.
Short version: There's lots of bots in the game. Players complain. CCP keeps saying Don't worry, we're taking care of it. But the bots never go away. Rinse and repeat that sequence for various other issues.
In its most basic definition, a GPU is just a CPU that's been highly specialized towards graphics. It can't do anything that a CPU can't also do, it just is able to do particular things much faster. Basically, they take a lot of the common tasks that graphics require of a processor, and they put really efficient ways to do it directly into the hardware, and they put a whole lot of them.
Think of a CPU as a big tool box. There's something in there for every task, including a screwdriver that can be used to put screws into things. Then next to it, you have a big cordless 18 volt drill (The GPU). Way easier to drive screws with that than the manual screwdriver in your toolbox. But when you need to drive a nail instead, yeah you could bash it in with your screw gun, but it's easier to go back to your toolbox and find a hammer.
I guess that would make a physics processor the nail gun. Or something...