Gates is clearly a genius with business, but I don't think he's up to running the tech side of the company. Since he became the "chief software architect" they've been floundering.
I think the arguement can be made that Gates appreciates a brilliant technical achievement, but he clearly has little grasp of what everyday people want their technology to do: "And with this one 75-button remote, you can control all the plasma screens in your home!"
Contrast with Steve Jobs, who likely wouldn't be able to distinguish an efficient perl script if it bit him in the ass, knows exactly what he wants technology to do for him: let him do cool stuff really, really easily.
The time has past when some new excel data transformation could push upgrades, or any *normal* person creams themselves over the "smart home". We're swimming in gobs of good technology, but most of it is put together poorly.
And we've been waiting for hovercraft Jetson's cars for far too long (Ginger, anyone?) to be fooled by almost-there tech that we can't integrate into our lives.
Democratic Senators and the editorial board of The New York Times all said that the Soviet Union was a permenant fixture on the world stage, that co-existence rather than opposition was the only way to deal with it
What? That's a bit of a sweeping generalization without any links to back it up.
And please, no Freeper or NewsMax articles, thanks.
You all are the same as the respondants to the survey, you don't understand the freedoms guaranteed by the 1st amendment.
I understand, but there is the concept of in loco parentis for minors, as well as behavior appropriate for school.
Say you work for a government agency, or are a volunteer for one. How much slack do you think you'd get distributing flyers for the Ku Klux Klan? Freedom of speech, man!
With rights come responsibilities, as well as consequences. No one should be fired or expelled for speaking their mind, but there are legitimate issues of disrupting the education of others/proselytization/disturbing the peace/etc.
I fall on the side of free speech, but I also recognize there may be unintended consequences of that speech.
The real value of the GE brand is compounded by the fact that they make so much stuff: medical equipment, jet engines, consumer electronics, and light bulbs. Will I pay 50 cents extra for a GE bulb over a no-name brand? Absolutely -- especially if the bulb is in a hard-to-reach place that involves a ladder.
Add up all the products for which people are willing to pay a little more for the GE brand and you end up with a brand that has enormous value -- which is what Business Week is discussing.
Do you really think that's due to GE's brand name, and not to, say, purchasing better shelf space? If the HotPoints were on the floor, and GEs up in the forklift region, for $20 more, do you think more would buy the GE?
GE? Who the hell is the consumer that says "to hell with that $200 stove. I'll take that $700 GE! Because, hell, it's GE! They bring good things to life!"
Maybe GE gets their bang for buck on their missile systems? Most people tend to prefer the GE brand of missile over the "Crazy Eddie Just-Over-The-NC-Border" missiles, even if they come with a case of free Black Cats and M-80s.
Google tops North America, but Apple tops North America?
I'm hoping it was just your writing, and no, I haven't RTFA. I will, and I'm sure doing so will sort things out, but please, let's have *some* modicum of editing.
You do understand as well that the UI paradigm mandated by the one button mouse forces developers to put menu commands where they belong - in the menu - rather than some contextual menu, right?
The mac has a single menu bar along the top. Contextual in a mac environment means some commands are greyed out at any particular time, but any command should be accessible from the menu bar.
There is such a thing as tyranny of choice. When so many options become available, most people tend to shut down and choose the familiar, rather than what might be best or more appropriate. It happens in the grocery store, it happens in Windows. How many gels/solids/scent combinations of deodorant can the market bear, anyway?
What the hell am I thinking. This is/.
OK. Deodorant. It's this plastic encased product on the same aisle as the feminine hygiene products...
Ok, I'm a geek and I love to have the Internet wherever I am but why in the kitchen? Like I don't have enough shit on my crappy counter space... Why not do something like those failed Motorola wireless AIM clients and have a docking station and wlan? Why do we have to have a small form factor machine in the kitchen?
Because Helen Homemaker didn't want to look like the phantom of the opera just to get her recipes?
Ahh, if only we could go back to the days of harvest gold and avocado green. The hiiiiiiillls are aliiiiiiiive... with the sound of togggggle swiiiiitchess!
Most accounts have lost money since they began, and people are starting to question private accounts. Shitty timing to start this at the top of the bubble.
A big lesson here is that if you are going to create private accounts, the composition of the default fund is hugely important. It needs to be very low risk and well diversified. (And, I'd be happy to run it for a mere 0.00001% management fee)
Also, think about what it means to transition the US to a partially privatized system. That's hundreds of billions of dollars that the stock market is going to *have* to absorb. What does that do to valuations? What does that do to the concept of supply and demand? And of course, the most important question - who do I talk to about becoming a fund manager?
If you're going to note the lack of upgradability for the mac mini, you might as well just get the $149 Office 2004 for students and teachers. Same software - no upgrading.
That shaves $250 off the mini price to a more competitive $1151 to the shuttle's $1374 - a ~ $225 price advantage.
Except that AAPL is actually zooming downwards at the moment. Something like -4% in less than an hour after the keynote ended.
My hunch is that it's because Apple just fired a big-ass shot across Microsoft's bow with iWork.
No. I'm sure MS and Apple know perfectly well what the other is doing, and MS and Apple strategies aren't deliberately trying to step on each other's toes. Perhaps you haven't heard the axiom "buy on rumor, sell on news."
It's standard AAPL behavior during and shortly after the keynotes. Wait a week or two (maybe more) before the true impact of the keynote news trickles into the market maker's strategies. All is good with Apple stock. Much of the swing is strictly technical manipulation based on non-institutional float, put/call options expiry, tape painting, and bare knuckles intimidation.
Apple has ~5% share for the PC market. It has a tiny distance to drop, and almost everything to gain. Same with Linux. I think Bill knows this, which is why he resorted to the specter of ***COMMUNISM*** in his latest interviews. IT folk and end users don't bat an eye about ***COMMUNISM***. Why would they? Computer use isn't some socio-economic theory. That's a Wall Street bogeyman. Unless you bought MSFT prior to five years ago, MSFT has been flat to down, i.e. not a good investment compared to Apple (and others). The price of establishing a monopoly with no innovation, I guess.
Err...someone who doesn't want to void the warranty? My post was in reply to one that noted that the specs page says:
"Memory upgrade must be performed by an Apple Authorized Service provider.".
Are there "authorized service providers" that do not price gouge like the apple store? I would very much like 1GB of memory but there is no way I would pay these prices for it.
It doesn't say "memory must be purchased from Apple" only that the upgrade is performed by an authorized service provider.
Go out and buy RAM from RAMJet or whomever, and trot down to an Apple Store if you want to keep the warranty intact.
If you don't care - I know tons of/. readers are oh-so-careful not to void any warrantees with unnecessary mods - wait about 12 hours after the mac minis start shipping, then google for the damn japanese schematic detailing the 19 steps for cracking open the case, disassembling the case, sticking in the gig stick of RAM, neon tubing, the Radeon X800 XT with the slot cut out of the side of the mac to accommodate it, the peltier cooler, neon tubing and dry ice special effects.
24 hours after they ship, you can probably buy a ABS plastic extruded plastic case cracker with instructions off somebody's dot mac site.
1. Jobs tells crew to make a $500 iMac. 2. Apple personnel set out to design and produce a cheap iMac with that goal in mind 3. Rumor leaks to press 4. Everyone gets excited 5. Apple goes on the record to confirm or deny the rumours depending on the validity of the rumour and the way they want the market and public to react. Thereby either calming market tensions or elevating public intrest. 6. Everyone gets correct info. 7. Everyone is wins.
Perhaps Apple *is* attempting to go on record confirming the rumors, while also putting the fear of God in anyone who might think about breaking NDAs. Perhaps this is a pro forma show of trademark/look and feel protection that is required by law (if you don't attempt to protect a trademark/trade dress, you run the risk of losing your sole rights to it), yet the rumors may have been authorized under the table by Apple to guage interest and increase the hype.
MR. CICCOLO, the search strategist, said that in a way his team was trying to match - and reverse - what Google has achieved. "As Google use became widespread, people began asking why it was so much easier to find material on the external Web than it was on their own computers or in their company's Web sites," he said. "Google sets a very high standard for that Web. We would like to set the next standard, so that people will find it so easy to do things at work that they'll wonder why they can't do them on the Internet."
They seem to be explicity targeting intranets or known good databases, so the spammer issue might be moot.
This raises another issue, however. Will this technology become so useful as to lead to the bad old days of proprietary information dbs a la Lexis/Nexis? I'm assuming the indexing will have to take place on company-owned servers.
Slashdot Mirror
At first they were built as vast point-to-point straight lines miles and miles long.
This design led to very boring drives, and consequently people fell asleep at the wheel.
Man! We were so close! A blip of about 30 or 40 years between those straight stretches of highway, and self-navigating vehicles.
How much easier would it have been if when those straight stretches were built, to imbed some magnetic waypoints. Dang.
Gates is clearly a genius with business, but I don't think he's up to running the tech side of the company. Since he became the "chief software architect" they've been floundering.
I think the arguement can be made that Gates appreciates a brilliant technical achievement, but he clearly has little grasp of what everyday people want their technology to do: "And with this one 75-button remote, you can control all the plasma screens in your home!"
Contrast with Steve Jobs, who likely wouldn't be able to distinguish an efficient perl script if it bit him in the ass, knows exactly what he wants technology to do for him: let him do cool stuff really, really easily.
The time has past when some new excel data transformation could push upgrades, or any *normal* person creams themselves over the "smart home". We're swimming in gobs of good technology, but most of it is put together poorly.
And we've been waiting for hovercraft Jetson's cars for far too long (Ginger, anyone?) to be fooled by almost-there tech that we can't integrate into our lives.
Democratic Senators and the editorial board of The New York Times all said that the Soviet Union was a permenant fixture on the world stage, that co-existence rather than opposition was the only way to deal with it
What? That's a bit of a sweeping generalization without any links to back it up.
And please, no Freeper or NewsMax articles, thanks.
having the firewall enabled often hinders legitimate uses of the system, such as dcc send
Hmmm... your examples could be a bit more varied. "The firewall sometimes stops you from being able to swap files, and... erm... swap files!"
C'mon. How about VNC, printer sharing, or list-serv access or something that doesn't sound so 14-year-old-in-the-basement.
You all are the same as the respondants to the survey, you don't understand the freedoms guaranteed by the 1st amendment.
I understand, but there is the concept of in loco parentis for minors, as well as behavior appropriate for school.
Say you work for a government agency, or are a volunteer for one. How much slack do you think you'd get distributing flyers for the Ku Klux Klan? Freedom of speech, man!
With rights come responsibilities, as well as consequences. No one should be fired or expelled for speaking their mind, but there are legitimate issues of disrupting the education of others/proselytization/disturbing the peace/etc.
I fall on the side of free speech, but I also recognize there may be unintended consequences of that speech.
You can bet your bottom dollar that Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham had editorial control over what the Washington Post printed.
Use school money, school controls you. Start an independent paper, school has no control.
The real value of the GE brand is compounded by the fact that they make so much stuff: medical equipment, jet engines, consumer electronics, and light bulbs. Will I pay 50 cents extra for a GE bulb over a no-name brand? Absolutely -- especially if the bulb is in a hard-to-reach place that involves a ladder.
Add up all the products for which people are willing to pay a little more for the GE brand and you end up with a brand that has enormous value -- which is what Business Week is discussing.
Do you really think that's due to GE's brand name, and not to, say, purchasing better shelf space? If the HotPoints were on the floor, and GEs up in the forklift region, for $20 more, do you think more would buy the GE?
NP. I will not use my relative anonymity and distance to stab at thee... :)
GE? Who the hell is the consumer that says "to hell with that $200 stove. I'll take that $700 GE! Because, hell, it's GE! They bring good things to life!"
Maybe GE gets their bang for buck on their missile systems? Most people tend to prefer the GE brand of missile over the "Crazy Eddie Just-Over-The-NC-Border" missiles, even if they come with a case of free Black Cats and M-80s.
I see by your number you come relatively late to /.
Perhaps this is some new breed of geek?
No, what am I thinking. It wasn't some sort of not-so-subtle analogy - it was an accurate description.
Please clean the keyboard after use.
OK. Google *hasn't* topped North America. C'mon, people. If you're going to summarize, please present the facts.
Google tops North America, but Apple tops North America?
I'm hoping it was just your writing, and no, I haven't RTFA. I will, and I'm sure doing so will sort things out, but please, let's have *some* modicum of editing.
You do understand as well that the UI paradigm mandated by the one button mouse forces developers to put menu commands where they belong - in the menu - rather than some contextual menu, right?
/.
The mac has a single menu bar along the top. Contextual in a mac environment means some commands are greyed out at any particular time, but any command should be accessible from the menu bar.
There is such a thing as tyranny of choice. When so many options become available, most people tend to shut down and choose the familiar, rather than what might be best or more appropriate. It happens in the grocery store, it happens in Windows. How many gels/solids/scent combinations of deodorant can the market bear, anyway?
What the hell am I thinking. This is
OK. Deodorant. It's this plastic encased product on the same aisle as the feminine hygiene products...
12! Just look on aisle 12, dammit!
I just counted, and I have a 78 button mouse.
Sure, some greybeards may call it a "keyboard" but I call it "the emacs mouse."
You don't know power until you can press an eight-key combination to move the cursor in any quarter-degree vector.
Ok, I'm a geek and I love to have the Internet wherever I am but why in the kitchen? Like I don't have enough shit on my crappy counter space... Why not do something like those failed Motorola wireless AIM clients and have a docking station and wlan? Why do we have to have a small form factor machine in the kitchen?
Because Helen Homemaker didn't want to look like the phantom of the opera just to get her recipes?
Ahh, if only we could go back to the days of harvest gold and avocado green. The hiiiiiiillls are aliiiiiiiive... with the sound of togggggle swiiiiitchess!
Most accounts have lost money since they began, and people are starting to question private accounts. Shitty timing to start this at the top of the bubble.
A big lesson here is that if you are going to create private accounts, the composition of the default fund is hugely important. It needs to be very low risk and well diversified. (And, I'd be happy to run it for a mere 0.00001% management fee)
Also, think about what it means to transition the US to a partially privatized system. That's hundreds of billions of dollars that the stock market is going to *have* to absorb. What does that do to valuations? What does that do to the concept of supply and demand? And of course, the most important question - who do I talk to about becoming a fund manager?
Office 2004 for Mac - P/N: T9189LL/A $399.95
If you're going to note the lack of upgradability for the mac mini, you might as well just get the $149 Office 2004 for students and teachers. Same software - no upgrading.
That shaves $250 off the mini price to a more competitive $1151 to the shuttle's $1374 - a ~ $225 price advantage.
Except that AAPL is actually zooming downwards at the moment. Something like -4% in less than an hour after the keynote ended.
z =m &q=l&c=MSFT
My hunch is that it's because Apple just fired a big-ass shot across Microsoft's bow with iWork.
No. I'm sure MS and Apple know perfectly well what the other is doing, and MS and Apple strategies aren't deliberately trying to step on each other's toes. Perhaps you haven't heard the axiom "buy on rumor, sell on news."
It's standard AAPL behavior during and shortly after the keynotes. Wait a week or two (maybe more) before the true impact of the keynote news trickles into the market maker's strategies. All is good with Apple stock. Much of the swing is strictly technical manipulation based on non-institutional float, put/call options expiry, tape painting, and bare knuckles intimidation.
Apple has ~5% share for the PC market. It has a tiny distance to drop, and almost everything to gain. Same with Linux. I think Bill knows this, which is why he resorted to the specter of ***COMMUNISM*** in his latest interviews. IT folk and end users don't bat an eye about ***COMMUNISM***. Why would they? Computer use isn't some socio-economic theory. That's a Wall Street bogeyman. Unless you bought MSFT prior to five years ago, MSFT has been flat to down, i.e. not a good investment compared to Apple (and others). The price of establishing a monopoly with no innovation, I guess.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=on&
Err...someone who doesn't want to void the warranty? My post was in reply to one that noted that the specs page says:
/. readers are oh-so-careful not to void any warrantees with unnecessary mods - wait about 12 hours after the mac minis start shipping, then google for the damn japanese schematic detailing the 19 steps for cracking open the case, disassembling the case, sticking in the gig stick of RAM, neon tubing, the Radeon X800 XT with the slot cut out of the side of the mac to accommodate it, the peltier cooler, neon tubing and dry ice special effects.
"Memory upgrade must be performed by an Apple Authorized Service provider.".
Are there "authorized service providers" that do not price gouge like the apple store? I would very much like 1GB of memory but there is no way I would pay these prices for it.
It doesn't say "memory must be purchased from Apple" only that the upgrade is performed by an authorized service provider.
Go out and buy RAM from RAMJet or whomever, and trot down to an Apple Store if you want to keep the warranty intact.
If you don't care - I know tons of
24 hours after they ship, you can probably buy a ABS plastic extruded plastic case cracker with instructions off somebody's dot mac site.
"Mac mini: now shipping, with no-button mouse"
Leave it to Apple to simplify a single-element item.
No free hands from Apple
/. will complain about that "typically Apple" move...
Which is not a problem, since they ship the mac mini with a no-button mouse.
Of course,
I prefer this one:
1. Jobs tells crew to make a $500 iMac.
2. Apple personnel set out to design and produce a cheap iMac with that goal in mind
3. Rumor leaks to press
4. Everyone gets excited
5. Apple goes on the record to confirm or deny the rumours depending on the validity of the rumour and the way they want the market and public to react. Thereby either calming market tensions or elevating public intrest.
6. Everyone gets correct info.
7. Everyone is wins.
Perhaps Apple *is* attempting to go on record confirming the rumors, while also putting the fear of God in anyone who might think about breaking NDAs. Perhaps this is a pro forma show of trademark/look and feel protection that is required by law (if you don't attempt to protect a trademark/trade dress, you run the risk of losing your sole rights to it), yet the rumors may have been authorized under the table by Apple to guage interest and increase the hype.
These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it.
What if iWork was cross-platform, and/or included a light-weight reader/editor? Maybe bought some translator IP from DataViz?
From the article:
MR. CICCOLO, the search strategist, said that in a way his team was trying to match - and reverse - what Google has achieved. "As Google use became widespread, people began asking why it was so much easier to find material on the external Web than it was on their own computers or in their company's Web sites," he said. "Google sets a very high standard for that Web. We would like to set the next standard, so that people will find it so easy to do things at work that they'll wonder why they can't do them on the Internet."
They seem to be explicity targeting intranets or known good databases, so the spammer issue might be moot.
This raises another issue, however. Will this technology become so useful as to lead to the bad old days of proprietary information dbs a la Lexis/Nexis? I'm assuming the indexing will have to take place on company-owned servers.
Neither of them play games but my Nieces & Nephews
I hear NaN is a great game. It's on the mac now? WoW!