That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You can argue semantics all you want, but the fact is, people are using software and not paying the creators the amount that they want for it.
Whether or not you think the price they were asking was fair is irrelevent. If you disagree with the price, you take your dollars elseware. I'd love a 22" apple cinema display, I just can't afford it. That doesn't give me the right to break into compUSA and take one.
The fact that software is much easier to reproduce doesn't change anything. When I buy a piece of software, in my mind, I'm not paying primarily for the media, or the packaging, or the booklet. I know the costs of all that are factored in, but that's not my main concern. I'm paying for the utility of the program, or maybe the entertainment that it's going to bring me.
If ambrosia makes a game that I play for 2 hours a day for a month, that's 60 hours of entertainment. If they want $15 for that, that's not unreasonable at all. That's way more bang for my buck than I'll get going out to see a movie. When I walk out of a movie, all I've got to show for it is a ticket stub. After the shareware game has lost its initial excitement, I've still got a legit copy of it for those future rainy days, and hopefully my registration has helped convince a talented bunch of programmers/artists to release more good work.
Over 3000 users of the popular internet forum Slashdot will be arrested and spend months in jail for utilizing evil hacking techniques to circumvent the NYT registration sequence.
Re:More information from the keynote
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That is 100% it. Apple has realized, (and hopefully the consumers are realizing too) that a 2+ Ghz processor with a 60 Gig harddrive and whatever is of no use to the average person if the software running on it is too complex. Another 400 mhz of clock speed might enable the computer to encode mp3's twice as fast, but that advantage is wasted if crummy software requires me to spend twice as long organizing my songs and setting up the CD.
iMovie isn't full featured by any means, but it's incredibly easy to use. I can do things with iMovie on an ibook faster than can be done with something like premier on any type of hardware you care to throw at it. And hey, it's free as well. Hard to beat that.
The new iMac is about more than itself. It's more about creating a home for the software. It's about creating a new interaction between people and computers. This interaction won't mean that much to powerusers, at least not in the beginning, but that's why it's targeted at the everyday consumer. I think it's quite brilliant.
Re:Interesting response to Apple shows...
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That is it exactly. The only other place that the computer industry moves is in numbers. It's nice to see processor speeds go up, or watch HD sizes increase, but it's not suprising. It's expected and demanded. Apple changes the way computers look, work, and interact with people. It's exciting.
The original imac, and this as well, were never invisioned as something that geeks could get into. Neither their shape or their technical specs were meant to inspire awe and praise from the likes of the slashdot crowd. Eye appealing is a fairly subjective thing. I also think that the couple small pictures on that site aren't really fair to judge it by. It doesn't give much of an idea about how input/keyboard/mouse is handled, among other things.
That being said, it reminds me too much of the light that the dentist puts in my face. I hate the dentist.
I just think some of the results are odd. Also, some of them on that page did not have explanations, which is strange as well.
Shawn Fanning of Napster for Entrepreneurship? Napster was nice and all, but did Fanning really make a business? It seems to me that he had an excellent idea for a piece of software, it got big, and someone threw money at it. It sort of road the coat-tails of a technology boom. And look at them now. You can't really make a sucessful company by following their business plan. They hardly have one, and it hasn't been particularly profitable. The entertainment category award makes much more sense to me.
And I'm all for Bob Metcalf, but the blurb on him didn't really say anything about what he's done lately. Yeah, ethernet is great and all, but these are the 2001 awards. Ethernet is not new.
Same with Gordon Moore. His little writeup is all about stuff he did back in the day. And yeah, a lot of it is still relevant, but surely 2001 had some hardware development that's more interesting than a 'law' everyone has been quoting for years.
Yeah, the most amusing argument that I hear from friends when I harass them about pirating software is "Well, I'm not making any money off of it, so it's not that bad." I can see their point when talking about something like maya, where it's hard to justify that much of an expense for something you're just fooling around with. I don't really agree with it, but I can see their point of view. But their argument falls apart when you start talking about games and such. Most of us will never make a dime playing games. Am I to believe that no software is worth paying for unless you can make more money off of it?
terribly uninsightful
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Revolutions, particularly ones that can happen in a span as narrow as a year, are rarely predictable. It seems like a silly claim to say that they will not happen. Evolution, of course, will continue.
The whole article is pretty empty to me. The technologies that were big the past year will continue to get smaller and more powerful. Wow, I've never seen electronic devices go through that before.
Apple Computer announced another future failure today, when they revealed their new "iPod" mp3 player. Millions of techies, music geeks, and young school children felt their hearts sink when they saw that Apple's new product didn't live up to the random hype surrounding it.
One upset consumer was heard to say, "I read on some web site claiming to have apple insiders that their new digital device was going to be a fully digital electric car with handwriting recognition, 14 pci slots, and a breakfast buffet in the trunk. How dare Apple promise something so great and then deliver a simple mp3 player?"
Other people have complained about the price, feeling that even though the hard drive that powers the iPod costs $400 all by itself, Apple should've cut the price significantly so that their customers don't have to spend so much money. An stock analyst in an expensive suit told us, "I don't get it. Apple somehow managed to post a profit this past quarter, despite everyone else bleeding money and complaining how bad the economy is for computer makers. Where do they get the gall to not be losing millions of dollars?"
After this extreme disappointment, Apple watchers are all looking into the future, hoping for better results from their favorite company next time. Rumors of a levitating PDA that has voice recognition, does tarot card readings, and has wireless access that allows it to communicate with NASA's Cassini space probe have gotten everyone excited!
agreed. If you're making money off of it, a $600 software package isn't all that horrible at all. I'm just one of those poor college students that can hardly scrape together enough cash for pizza on a sunday night, much less even afford the educational discounted prices. Hopfeully if I end up in whatever job requiring me to use photoshop professionally, $600 bucks once, and then the occasional upgrade won't be a major shot to whatever salary I'm making.
charging excessive prices for software that I really appreciate and would like to pay for, except they're just out of my price range by leaps and bounds...
I dunno about this. I've recently been watching a bunch of SNL Celebrity jeopardy episodes that I downloaded, and i don't know if I can take anything with Sean Connery in it seriously anymore.
Buckfutter!
As far as I've seen, MS hasn't done anything illegal or monopolistic with the Xbox so far. While they're obviously using their considerable wealth to make an extremely bold push into a market, they aren't doing anything illegal. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the console area, and its OS monopoly isn't all that helpful for it either.
Not many people would question that MS has a monopoly. Dell, compaq, et all won't jump from windows because of the Xbox. First off that just wouldn't make sense. And second, you're right, there is no really viable alternative for an easy switch. But just because MS has a monopoly, doesn't mean the DOJ should expect them to stop doing business. You may not like it, but MS is a business. They sell stuff. That's what they do.
Re:Wow... Just pause a moment and take it all in.
on
Happy Birthday Hubble
·
· Score: 2
I'll definately agree that space is full of fascinating things, and I'm all for the exploration of space, but come on, maybe you should get off of your computer and go outside a little more often. The trees and mountains and rivers and animals are every bit as beautiful and interesting, and they're just a little more accecssible.
The sad thing about it is, taking money from the space program probably does not benefit the health of the earth very much. Infact, the space program is responsible for much of the knowledge of the earth that we have. A lot of the current ecological buzzwords that people are worrying about are considered 'global issues', and where else can you observe the globe as one big object than from space?
oh, and on a side note, the CNN page linked about it had a little box with the 'hubble top ten', the first one of which was about hubble's view of Jupiter getting attacked by the shoemaker-levy comet, and it talked about how great a view hubble had. I just had to say that the picture they included with it was absolutely awful. I haven't really done any searching for images, but I hope hubble got a few better than the one that CNN just showed me.
The problem with the internet is that the detailed coverage can be overwhelming, and the different points of view can conflict and confuse. A lot of people like their information in easily digestible, bite size chunks. And while it's sad that that often results in watered down biased commentary instead of intelligent and concise articles, it's ingrained into many people's attention spans.
The internet was founded on the exchange of information, but for a number of reasons, wasn't established with any real way to verify said info. And while the stories and opinions given by more traditional media aren't always complete or accurate, they still carry more validity in the minds of the public just due to tradition.
The information overload that the internet can so easily press on us seems to me to be an almost impossible challenge to reliably and fairly overcome. As people begin to realize that like the real world, the internet is full of people who want to take your money, not make the world a better place, of course their faith in it as a revolution will falter.
It's not that the internet isn't living up to its possibilities, it's that it's falling short of greatly accelerated and overstated expectations.
Yeah, but Linus was in charge when all these people gave their time and possibly their careers to the continuation and growth of Linux. They need to realize that the person that started it all has his own agenda for his project, and they really have no right to demand otherwise. They need to accept that Linux wasn't devised with capitalism as a goal, and if they succeeded in replacing Linus with someone who's utmost priority was making money off of Linux, a large part of the "heart and soul" of it would really be lost. Anyone who jumped into the commercial linux field without realizing this, doesn't deserve to profit off of it. It's an interesting balance for public companies like redhat, whos legal responsibilty is first to make the shareholders money, when their product is made by a lot of people that spend half their time complaining about and hating the richest software manufacturers.
I'm really not sure what sort of heirarchy for making decisions exists, but it seems to me that having one person who can say for sure where the core goes is a fairly effective way to do it. It's sort of like the whole argument that the most effective form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. Although I don't necessarily agree with this, the main argument for it is the efficiency it allows. Having a single person at the top also helps keep a little more conformity among the linux world, which is important. Linux is a fairly complicated world with all the different distros and such, giving them a chance to create friction and arguments between people at the highest level probably wouldn't be very productive. With Linus, that problem doesn't really exist, unless he has more than one personality bouncing around in his head. I think he's also got the greater good of Linux as an operating system as his prime concern, rather than its viability as a monery making product. Hence the nonapologetic delays, and the whole it'll be released when it's ready mentality. Although this might bug some of the people that are trying to make money off of it, and need to impress clients, it's more in line with the ideals of Linux.
A zealous core group of users isn't a bad thing, infact it's a testament that the community matters to some people. I just think it can be bad when the administrators on the site tend to support that so much, to the point where they neglect or inappropriately attack the rest of their users, the majority of their users, who aren't part of that zealous core group.
I don't think I've ever gotten a link to post correctly on slashdot. I for some reason just become a complete moron whenever I type text into a small box.
I think it's important to try less to create a community, and more to just think of it as offering a service to people, and you're just providing the space for them to make the community.
The userbase is far more important than the actual site, and the people running it need to know that. I'd imagine most people that read/. on a regular basis find the threads far more interesting than the articles themselves. The articles should be seen as just a foundation for discussion. Indeed most of the criticism that I see here about/. is started when the people running the site use their article postings as a chance to influence others with their own thoughts on the front page, rather than discuss it with the 'masses' in the threads.
I haven't been with/. since the beginning, only the past two years or so, so I can't really comment on the initial growing pains/patterns. But another communitish site that has been doing well that I have been participating in from early on, href="http://www.livejournal.com">livejournal, has been extremely good about implementing the users requests, and gaining a lot of loyalty. The admins realize that their users are the livelyhood, their best and only real advertising is word of mouth, and that the users will define what the community is, and their job is just to make sure the servers can handle it. They go so far as to encourage related software development from the userbase.
It seems to me that/. as a community sort of suffers from too singular a mentality in the leadership, clashing with a more varied and diverse user base than they imagine. Things like the relentless microsoft bashing and shameless linux promotion from the very people running the site seem to alienate many of the intelligent readers, just go through the threads about MS' DNS servers going down on wednesday. The usual argument is, it's taco's site, he can do whatever the hell he wants. That's ok, but/. presents itself as a community, which is more than just a website, and if it wants to continue to nurture that, it has to realize that it's serving other people now, not its creator.
Do you really think the market for computers allowinging massive tinkering with the innerworkings of the OS is anywhere near as large as the market for computers that all look and work predictably, have consistant interfaces and procedures? Oh, and there's also that infinately customizable free OS that apple would have to campaign against. I think its name starts with an L or something...
Isn't the beauty of linux supposed to be how rarely it needs to be restarted? As much as this sounds just like eyecandy, it's actually got the potential to be a bigger deal than you'd think. Especially for the whole linux as an OS for everyone movement. Think about the average consumer that doesn't care what their computer is doing when booting up, they just want it running. A nice graphical progress bar (something along the lines of the macos startup deal), but maybe just a tad bit more geeky just to keep it interesting. That would mean more to most people than text flying by faster than you can read it.
Re:If we could only send a Jackass to the moon...
on
New G4s Coming Our Way
·
· Score: 2
motorola has demonstrated 1Ghz chips perhaps, but as for being able to produce any significant number of G4's at a higher clock speed than 500mhz, they haven't been doing so well. It's motorola's issue here, not directly apple's. Now, it's completely apple's fault that they're so entirely dependent on motorola, and as such so dramatically effected by their mistakes. But why would you ever think that Apple is deliberately holding back on clock speed. The only reason that Macs have been stuck at 500mhz for so long is because there aren't faster G4's in production. Sure, they probably realize the foolishness in the mhz speed race that intel and amd are having, but that's what's happening, and if Apple could sell more computers by keeping up better, I'm fairly certain they would.
The techinical reason is that they're too busy trying to get OSX ready to take on a project as massive as a processor family switch again. The jump to PowerPC was a pretty amazing thing, and they pulled it off pretty well. It was also made possible by the fact that the PPC line offered so much power over the older chips, that emulation for backwards compatibility ran at a reasonable pace. I'm not sure that a switch to say, x86 architecture would provide the power to emulate PPC software and run it acceptably. And that would be a necessity.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You can argue semantics all you want, but the fact is, people are using software and not paying the creators the amount that they want for it.
Whether or not you think the price they were asking was fair is irrelevent. If you disagree with the price, you take your dollars elseware. I'd love a 22" apple cinema display, I just can't afford it. That doesn't give me the right to break into compUSA and take one.
The fact that software is much easier to reproduce doesn't change anything. When I buy a piece of software, in my mind, I'm not paying primarily for the media, or the packaging, or the booklet. I know the costs of all that are factored in, but that's not my main concern. I'm paying for the utility of the program, or maybe the entertainment that it's going to bring me.
If ambrosia makes a game that I play for 2 hours a day for a month, that's 60 hours of entertainment. If they want $15 for that, that's not unreasonable at all. That's way more bang for my buck than I'll get going out to see a movie. When I walk out of a movie, all I've got to show for it is a ticket stub. After the shareware game has lost its initial excitement, I've still got a legit copy of it for those future rainy days, and hopefully my registration has helped convince a talented bunch of programmers/artists to release more good work.
Over 3000 users of the popular internet forum Slashdot will be arrested and spend months in jail for utilizing evil hacking techniques to circumvent the NYT registration sequence.
That is 100% it. Apple has realized, (and hopefully the consumers are realizing too) that a 2+ Ghz processor with a 60 Gig harddrive and whatever is of no use to the average person if the software running on it is too complex. Another 400 mhz of clock speed might enable the computer to encode mp3's twice as fast, but that advantage is wasted if crummy software requires me to spend twice as long organizing my songs and setting up the CD.
iMovie isn't full featured by any means, but it's incredibly easy to use. I can do things with iMovie on an ibook faster than can be done with something like premier on any type of hardware you care to throw at it. And hey, it's free as well. Hard to beat that.
The new iMac is about more than itself. It's more about creating a home for the software. It's about creating a new interaction between people and computers. This interaction won't mean that much to powerusers, at least not in the beginning, but that's why it's targeted at the everyday consumer. I think it's quite brilliant.
That is it exactly. The only other place that the computer industry moves is in numbers. It's nice to see processor speeds go up, or watch HD sizes increase, but it's not suprising. It's expected and demanded. Apple changes the way computers look, work, and interact with people. It's exciting.
The original imac, and this as well, were never invisioned as something that geeks could get into. Neither their shape or their technical specs were meant to inspire awe and praise from the likes of the slashdot crowd. Eye appealing is a fairly subjective thing. I also think that the couple small pictures on that site aren't really fair to judge it by. It doesn't give much of an idea about how input/keyboard/mouse is handled, among other things.
That being said, it reminds me too much of the light that the dentist puts in my face. I hate the dentist.
I just think some of the results are odd. Also, some of them on that page did not have explanations, which is strange as well.
Shawn Fanning of Napster for Entrepreneurship? Napster was nice and all, but did Fanning really make a business? It seems to me that he had an excellent idea for a piece of software, it got big, and someone threw money at it. It sort of road the coat-tails of a technology boom. And look at them now. You can't really make a sucessful company by following their business plan. They hardly have one, and it hasn't been particularly profitable. The entertainment category award makes much more sense to me.
And I'm all for Bob Metcalf, but the blurb on him didn't really say anything about what he's done lately. Yeah, ethernet is great and all, but these are the 2001 awards. Ethernet is not new.
Same with Gordon Moore. His little writeup is all about stuff he did back in the day. And yeah, a lot of it is still relevant, but surely 2001 had some hardware development that's more interesting than a 'law' everyone has been quoting for years.
Yeah, the most amusing argument that I hear from friends when I harass them about pirating software is "Well, I'm not making any money off of it, so it's not that bad." I can see their point when talking about something like maya, where it's hard to justify that much of an expense for something you're just fooling around with. I don't really agree with it, but I can see their point of view. But their argument falls apart when you start talking about games and such. Most of us will never make a dime playing games. Am I to believe that no software is worth paying for unless you can make more money off of it?
Revolutions, particularly ones that can happen in a span as narrow as a year, are rarely predictable. It seems like a silly claim to say that they will not happen. Evolution, of course, will continue.
The whole article is pretty empty to me. The technologies that were big the past year will continue to get smaller and more powerful. Wow, I've never seen electronic devices go through that before.
now they can buy and redirect wedidfuckgeneralmotors.com
One upset consumer was heard to say, "I read on some web site claiming to have apple insiders that their new digital device was going to be a fully digital electric car with handwriting recognition, 14 pci slots, and a breakfast buffet in the trunk. How dare Apple promise something so great and then deliver a simple mp3 player?"
Other people have complained about the price, feeling that even though the hard drive that powers the iPod costs $400 all by itself, Apple should've cut the price significantly so that their customers don't have to spend so much money. An stock analyst in an expensive suit told us, "I don't get it. Apple somehow managed to post a profit this past quarter, despite everyone else bleeding money and complaining how bad the economy is for computer makers. Where do they get the gall to not be losing millions of dollars?"
After this extreme disappointment, Apple watchers are all looking into the future, hoping for better results from their favorite company next time. Rumors of a levitating PDA that has voice recognition, does tarot card readings, and has wireless access that allows it to communicate with NASA's Cassini space probe have gotten everyone excited!
agreed. If you're making money off of it, a $600 software package isn't all that horrible at all. I'm just one of those poor college students that can hardly scrape together enough cash for pizza on a sunday night, much less even afford the educational discounted prices. Hopfeully if I end up in whatever job requiring me to use photoshop professionally, $600 bucks once, and then the occasional upgrade won't be a major shot to whatever salary I'm making.
charging excessive prices for software that I really appreciate and would like to pay for, except they're just out of my price range by leaps and bounds...
I dunno about this. I've recently been watching a bunch of SNL Celebrity jeopardy episodes that I downloaded, and i don't know if I can take anything with Sean Connery in it seriously anymore. Buckfutter!
As far as I've seen, MS hasn't done anything illegal or monopolistic with the Xbox so far. While they're obviously using their considerable wealth to make an extremely bold push into a market, they aren't doing anything illegal. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the console area, and its OS monopoly isn't all that helpful for it either. Not many people would question that MS has a monopoly. Dell, compaq, et all won't jump from windows because of the Xbox. First off that just wouldn't make sense. And second, you're right, there is no really viable alternative for an easy switch. But just because MS has a monopoly, doesn't mean the DOJ should expect them to stop doing business. You may not like it, but MS is a business. They sell stuff. That's what they do.
The sad thing about it is, taking money from the space program probably does not benefit the health of the earth very much. Infact, the space program is responsible for much of the knowledge of the earth that we have. A lot of the current ecological buzzwords that people are worrying about are considered 'global issues', and where else can you observe the globe as one big object than from space?
oh, and on a side note, the CNN page linked about it had a little box with the 'hubble top ten', the first one of which was about hubble's view of Jupiter getting attacked by the shoemaker-levy comet, and it talked about how great a view hubble had. I just had to say that the picture they included with it was absolutely awful. I haven't really done any searching for images, but I hope hubble got a few better than the one that CNN just showed me.
The internet was founded on the exchange of information, but for a number of reasons, wasn't established with any real way to verify said info. And while the stories and opinions given by more traditional media aren't always complete or accurate, they still carry more validity in the minds of the public just due to tradition.
The information overload that the internet can so easily press on us seems to me to be an almost impossible challenge to reliably and fairly overcome. As people begin to realize that like the real world, the internet is full of people who want to take your money, not make the world a better place, of course their faith in it as a revolution will falter.
It's not that the internet isn't living up to its possibilities, it's that it's falling short of greatly accelerated and overstated expectations.
Yeah, but Linus was in charge when all these people gave their time and possibly their careers to the continuation and growth of Linux. They need to realize that the person that started it all has his own agenda for his project, and they really have no right to demand otherwise. They need to accept that Linux wasn't devised with capitalism as a goal, and if they succeeded in replacing Linus with someone who's utmost priority was making money off of Linux, a large part of the "heart and soul" of it would really be lost. Anyone who jumped into the commercial linux field without realizing this, doesn't deserve to profit off of it. It's an interesting balance for public companies like redhat, whos legal responsibilty is first to make the shareholders money, when their product is made by a lot of people that spend half their time complaining about and hating the richest software manufacturers.
I'm really not sure what sort of heirarchy for making decisions exists, but it seems to me that having one person who can say for sure where the core goes is a fairly effective way to do it. It's sort of like the whole argument that the most effective form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. Although I don't necessarily agree with this, the main argument for it is the efficiency it allows. Having a single person at the top also helps keep a little more conformity among the linux world, which is important. Linux is a fairly complicated world with all the different distros and such, giving them a chance to create friction and arguments between people at the highest level probably wouldn't be very productive. With Linus, that problem doesn't really exist, unless he has more than one personality bouncing around in his head. I think he's also got the greater good of Linux as an operating system as his prime concern, rather than its viability as a monery making product. Hence the nonapologetic delays, and the whole it'll be released when it's ready mentality. Although this might bug some of the people that are trying to make money off of it, and need to impress clients, it's more in line with the ideals of Linux.
A zealous core group of users isn't a bad thing, infact it's a testament that the community matters to some people. I just think it can be bad when the administrators on the site tend to support that so much, to the point where they neglect or inappropriately attack the rest of their users, the majority of their users, who aren't part of that zealous core group.
I don't think I've ever gotten a link to post correctly on slashdot. I for some reason just become a complete moron whenever I type text into a small box.
The userbase is far more important than the actual site, and the people running it need to know that. I'd imagine most people that read /. on a regular basis find the threads far more interesting than the articles themselves. The articles should be seen as just a foundation for discussion. Indeed most of the criticism that I see here about /. is started when the people running the site use their article postings as a chance to influence others with their own thoughts on the front page, rather than discuss it with the 'masses' in the threads.
I haven't been with /. since the beginning, only the past two years or so, so I can't really comment on the initial growing pains/patterns. But another communitish site that has been doing well that I have been participating in from early on, href="http://www.livejournal.com">livejournal, has been extremely good about implementing the users requests, and gaining a lot of loyalty. The admins realize that their users are the livelyhood, their best and only real advertising is word of mouth, and that the users will define what the community is, and their job is just to make sure the servers can handle it. They go so far as to encourage related software development from the userbase.
It seems to me that /. as a community sort of suffers from too singular a mentality in the leadership, clashing with a more varied and diverse user base than they imagine. Things like the relentless microsoft bashing and shameless linux promotion from the very people running the site seem to alienate many of the intelligent readers, just go through the threads about MS' DNS servers going down on wednesday. The usual argument is, it's taco's site, he can do whatever the hell he wants. That's ok, but /. presents itself as a community, which is more than just a website, and if it wants to continue to nurture that, it has to realize that it's serving other people now, not its creator.
Do you really think the market for computers allowinging massive tinkering with the innerworkings of the OS is anywhere near as large as the market for computers that all look and work predictably, have consistant interfaces and procedures? Oh, and there's also that infinately customizable free OS that apple would have to campaign against. I think its name starts with an L or something...
Isn't the beauty of linux supposed to be how rarely it needs to be restarted? As much as this sounds just like eyecandy, it's actually got the potential to be a bigger deal than you'd think. Especially for the whole linux as an OS for everyone movement. Think about the average consumer that doesn't care what their computer is doing when booting up, they just want it running. A nice graphical progress bar (something along the lines of the macos startup deal), but maybe just a tad bit more geeky just to keep it interesting. That would mean more to most people than text flying by faster than you can read it.
motorola has demonstrated 1Ghz chips perhaps, but as for being able to produce any significant number of G4's at a higher clock speed than 500mhz, they haven't been doing so well. It's motorola's issue here, not directly apple's. Now, it's completely apple's fault that they're so entirely dependent on motorola, and as such so dramatically effected by their mistakes. But why would you ever think that Apple is deliberately holding back on clock speed. The only reason that Macs have been stuck at 500mhz for so long is because there aren't faster G4's in production. Sure, they probably realize the foolishness in the mhz speed race that intel and amd are having, but that's what's happening, and if Apple could sell more computers by keeping up better, I'm fairly certain they would.
The techinical reason is that they're too busy trying to get OSX ready to take on a project as massive as a processor family switch again. The jump to PowerPC was a pretty amazing thing, and they pulled it off pretty well. It was also made possible by the fact that the PPC line offered so much power over the older chips, that emulation for backwards compatibility ran at a reasonable pace. I'm not sure that a switch to say, x86 architecture would provide the power to emulate PPC software and run it acceptably. And that would be a necessity.