I think that if I'm paying the (sort of) big bucks for FCP, HDV should not cost me extra money, thus the annoyance.
What kind of limitations are you running into in FCE? I'm curious because even now I'm not sure how significant the differences are, except for the inability to edit media other than DV/HDV.
I think it's a matter of taste, since I've always found the Alt key position a little akward, maybe because I'm used to the control key after decades of emacs use.
The keyboard change is attributable to IBM. They wanted to make their keyboards work like a typewriter, so they moved the control key down and replaced it with caps lock at the time they introduced their PS/2 line. I'm still a bit upset at them for it and it's particularly unfortunate since IBM always made the best quality keyboards. Their old AT keyboard was probably the best keyboard ever made.
This is interesting, since it would seem to imply that a LCD TV would enable you to evade the license, especially if the inspector could be convinced it was "just" used as a computer monitor.
However, if you never turn on the TV, the detector vans they send around to check license compliance won't find it and so the law becomes unenforceable.
(Wow, that sounds like paranoid ranting from an American perspective, but I understand enforcement is actually done that way in the UK).
I don't think people are about to stop watching TV in exchange for PC-based watching, so I don't see much validity in the license fee for computers.
From what I can see, the Media Center PC is still a flop.
what this project is and what it means? I can see they got access to a mailing list, and they're putting together key dates in it, but I can't see the broader goal this is in support of.
I had to leave abruptly, which is why I didn't finish my comment.
If you need the features of Final Cut Pro, by all means buy it, but you might be able to get away with using the Final Cut Express feature set if you're not doing sophisticated color correction or compositing.
I own FInal Cut Pro, but I would be hard-pressed to find a reason to buy Final Cut Pro instead of Express today. And note that FCP does not have HDV support and will not until Final Cut Pro 5.0 is introduced at NAB a bit over a month from now.
One thing that's not too well known in MacOS X is that a nice subset of emacs commands works.
So if you want to go to the beginning of a line, Control-A does it, and Control-E goes to the end of the line.
I love this because I don't have to take my hands off the home keys to make it work. It's a real godsend to die-hard emacs users such as myself.
(This works only in Cocoa applications, so Internet Explorer users are out of luck, but in most programs, such as Safari, Mail, OmniWeb, etc, it works great.)
Motion's great but you only need it if you require fairly sophisticated effects. More importantly, it only works on fairly high-end hardware, with the graphics card being as important as the CPU.
If you just want to make the letters dance for title sequences, the Livetype program included with Final Cut Express and Pro is fine.
However, if you want to do professional DVD production, you want DVD Studio Pro, and the Production Suite bundle is a substantial discount.
In theory, I believe educational versions of software are only licensed for educational use, although this is obviously unenforceable except via your own karmic feelings.
If you haven't used Avid before, avoid it since it has a vertical cliff face learning curve. I tried playing with it at a tradeshow and it was nothing like any other editing program I'd seen before. It felt very modal and inflexible, which made it very difficult to get comfortable with. Of course if you want to eventually make a living editing mainstream motion pictures this might not be the best advice, but if you're rolling your own independent film it's not going to be the best choice.
The most featureful and best supported editing package is Apple's Final Cut Pro and its little brother Final Cut Express. You'd have to buy an Apple Macintosh computer to use them, but in my experience it's well worth it. Final Cut Express probably has all you need and at $299 or $99 when purchased with a Mac it's the deal of the century. If you need the featurees
When video editing was last discussed, most people who used Linux-based systems were still putting them together from CVS and fighting bugs, so I doubt that these products have the maturity you need to edit a film.
i don't know much about Adobe's Premiere Pro, but it's probably your best choice if you want to use Windows. Premiere used to be an absolutely ghastly program, with the result that Final Cut Pro slaughtered it in the marketplace despite being $400 more expensive. I understand that Premiere Pro copied a lot of features from Final Cut and so it might be fine. I don't have personal experience with it, though.
You might also want to check out Vegas Video, which has its set of adherents.
If you presently have a Windows computer, bear in mind that you'll probably need to upgrade it with FireWire ports and tons of disk space before it can become a video editing workstation. It will still most likely not run as smoothly as a Mac-based system where FireWire is built in and everything's designed and built by the same company.
Two good forums for this are http://www.creativecow.net and http://www.2-pop.com/ . I have to run, good luck with your project!
Most likely because having multiple ends for the cable will confuse most people. It's much simpler for the end user to have a single cable with a single thing to plug into.
Remember, much of Apple's appeal is based on simplicity, and they're delivering it here.
The majority by space, but isn't the majority by population urban?
That aside, it genuinely costs more to provide service in areas with low population density, because the infrastructure is shared by fewer people. Simple enough.
I would argue that the price of broadband is a fairly minor expense for the overwhelming majority of people who would want it in the first place, and that's true even if it's $59 a month.
Think about what you pay for your car and car insurance for a reasonable contrast.
Of course if you wanted to buy three albums a month, Napster seems to make sense. I wonder how many people want to buy that much music, since that's what Napster is really counting on.
Okay, the peer to peer network is not a fair comparison, because it's not money driven. But how many people download or downloaded more than, say, two albums a month via peer to peer? If you did, Napster might not be such a bad deal.
I consider Napster to be like cable TV, since you pay forever, and in return you get new programming every month. With Napster, you get new music continuously added every month that you can play at no extra cost.
It's not for me personally. I buy from 0-3 albums a month on iTunes, maybe averaging one album a month, which is a lot cheaper than Napster, and when things are tight and I don't feel like looking at music, I don't need to spend anything. For me, the iTunes store is by far the best model.
For new users, they can get hooked on the iTunes store one track at a time. The store is definitely well-designed and addictive, so it will suck you in, and then you're going to get the iPod and all will be well.
The big disadvantage of the cable TV model is that nobody wants a recurring charge on their credit card. That's a much harder sell to me than something I can spend money on it when I feel like it and ignore it when I don't.
The other disadvantage is actual patterns of listening to music. I find that when I discover new stuff, I listen to it a lot in the first month or two, and then it goes back in the rotation and I listen to old/new stuff. In short, music retains its value. It's unlikely you want to watch a TV series more than, say, ten or so times over its life. I have tracks in iTunes I've played hundreds of times. In short, it seems like many people like listening to music they've acquired before, and only slowly decide to add new tracks to their collection. This seems to make the iTunes music store model more natural.
Finally, Napster clearly has a tough row to hoe in encouraging people to give up their iPods. I have looked at competing music players and compared to the iPod they are just plain laughable.
So Napster does have financial advantages if you want to buy into the cable TV model of music. But as I've said, I don't think that's how most people want to buy music or think about it.
Nobody's going to send Google's founders to the poorhouse, if that's what your goal is.
Google's supporting Wikipedia because (i) they can, at negligible cost; and (ii) they want the public relations benefits at sites like Slashdot.
The Slashdot audience may be relatively small, but it is influential, as Slashdot users talk to each other and people outside the community.
If Google did something to shut down or reduce support of Wikipedia, they would lose all that public relations gold, and they would gain nothing, because negative information about Google is not going to be hard to find, ever.
Because they're rich, and people like you are jealous. Period.
Can you imagine the headlines on Slashdot and other media if Google tried to censor Wikipedia? It would destroy their reputation for "not being evil" utterly, and I know Google values that enormously, not only as a moral principle, but as part of their marketing.
If you haven't noticed, their article on Google includes unfavourable information such as a mention of low salaries and a whole section on criticism of the search engine.
Google is aware that there are plenty of outlets in which unfavourable information about their company can be aired. I really don't think they have any plans to try and suppress news about their company. I'm sure they know all too well that it would be impossible.
Personally, I hate video games because nearly all of them are all about people killing each other. People kill each other enough in Watts without adding an artificial Watts for us to kill each other. This seems like a concept that could attract my interest, with a positive goal of maintaining a romance, instead of the tiresome negative goal of not being killed, which you always fail at in the end.
I have a feeling the result was pretty dreadful, because otherwise it would have been released in some fashion, as a free thing to try if nothing else. At the same time, it would have definitely been interesting to try, and perhaps another group could pick up similar ideas and make something worthwhile out if it.
I think what the Longhorn FAQ is claiming is that you're supposed to write to Longhorn's APIs, not the old Win32 stuff. This is exactly the same as MacOS X; old apps run in a compatibility box, meaning mediocre performance, so users have to upgrade all their applications.
You are right that the lack of Photoshop for a long time seriously hurt adoption of MacOS X. Fortunately for Microsoft, all they have to do is get Office working and I don't think there's a big concern. Look at all the software on a typical Windows box; the overwhelming majority of is has MS's name on it. MS could lose every single creative professional back to the Macintosh and I doubt that they'd even notice it revenue-wise.
(I should clarify one of my earlier statements - when I said "probably not compatible with XP", I meant you probably can't take a computer "built for Longhorn" and run XP on it due to a lack of drivers. Once you go forward, you have to, well, go forward).
----- Gates: The truth is: the fewer operating systems there are within a company, the better it is from a security point of view.
SPIEGEL: I beg your pardon?
Gates: Simply because one must spend billions of dollars to ensure the security of each individual system. Our company has an unbelievable number of people who are solely responsible for this type of security around the clock.
SPIEGEL: The particular charm of Linux is that it is an adaptable system that users can shape themselves.
Gates: If everything runs under the same platform, however, you can better concentrate resources and more quickly repair errors. For instance, in a hospital where different systems are used, a single problem in one section cause the other systems to crash. Thus, from a security standpoint it is always better to focus on one system.
SPIEGEL: But your small competitor Apple, for example, is much less frequently a victim of virus attacks...
Gates:... put so sweepingly, that is not correct. Of course we are the largest target, simply because we have the most widely disseminated system. But it affects others in exactly the same way. Linux is, in many respects, even more significantly affected.
SPIEGEL: In a few hours a Windows virus can travel across the world like an epidemic...
Gates:... above all because of our global popularity. But we know that. And we must apply still more time and money to it. However, spam or data theft are not questions of the operating system. For this, you also need laws and global standards.
SPIEGEL: Once again: Windows is the most vulnerable.
Gates: You could look at that in many ways. The speed with which, for example, the Linux community reacts to problems is not especially high -- that's because this system, unlike ours, simply does not keep thousands of people on standby to deal with problems. In this respect, a commercially distributed operating system also has decisive benefits. Sweeping judgments don't help because we all have to take the problems seriously. Even Linux developers know that there is no miracle cure in Linuxland. They, too, must continue to work and continue to make progress. ---
(Then the interview proceeds to other topics).
I thought this was interesting because, as far as I can tell, all I need to do in order to keep my Macintosh functioning securely is to make sure software update is on, and that at a time convenient to me I run it and update my system.
Windows patches are so frequent and their consequences so probematical that I can see a reason to keep legions of people around to fix them. But I've never had trouble with my Mac's security updates (knock on aluminum).
As far as I know there are no virii or spyware programs currently running on MacOS X. Perhaps someone could correct me if I'm wrong, but surely that enormously reduces the problem and therefore the amount of maintenance needed.
If computer A requires little maintenance and computer B requires lots, it seems to me that reducing the numbers of computer B you have and increasing computer A is the best way to deal with the problem.
I hear that Best Buy is going to stock the Mac Mini at some point and that might fix the "no software at Best Buy" problem for real. Not that I would buy my software there, of course. Apple Retail stores are great, and there's nothing like them for Windows.
I agree with the people who say that if you want to play games, get a game console. It's cheap, it's better for games than all but the most amped-up PCs, and when technology improves you can throw it away and buy a new one without getting all teary-eyed about your $3,000 investment down the drain.
A large percentage of people are very change-resistant, so your point C is actually valid, sad as it may be.
A closer reading of that FAQ answer would make me a bit alarmed if I were a Windows user.
They are saying that "the goal is", not that it will happen.
I could say today that my goal is to create a pig that flies over the moon, and that wouldn't make it happen, even if I were Microsoft.
I was a MacOS X early adopter (perhaps was is the wrong word; I use it on my primary computers to this day), and I still remember how MacOS 9 applications ran under MacOS X. That is to say, not all that well. Everyone who was running X, including myself, absolutely longed for native applications in the first year or so. After Photoshop and Final Cut Pro made it to X, pretty much all was bliss, but it took us a year of pain to get there.
If I had to guess, I'd assume that Win32/.net applications would have a similar trajectory of doom, and if there are significant differences between Win32 and Longhorn APIs, I'd be pretty alarmed by that paragraph if I was relying on non-Microsoft Windows software, or if I was developing same.
Microsoft might be counting on Office to hold people in the new environment. They'll build a version of Office for Longhorn with lots of spiffy features. The old Office won't work well on Longhorn. So someone buys a new computer with Longhorn (probably not compatible with XP), and they have to upgrade Office so they can run Word. This is just what Microsoft wants.
Microsoft has on its side the makers of commodity computers, and that's a powerful friend because many people like having interchangeable computers where nothing is particularly special but you can build interesting things out of components. I don't like that at all - I like my computers being special and unique, like Apple's - but I recognize much of the world loves it. I also think most of the world hates change and so really has to have a powerful jolt to switch.
Because of this, I think there's about a 10-15% ceiling on Apple's market share even if things go outstandingly well. Of course that would mean a 3-5 times improvement over the next few years. I think that's very doable, and I think some of the lovers of commodity computers might go for Linux as a commodity OS. That might mean there would be a world of 10-15% Apple, 10-15% Linux and the rest Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft's majority of computers sold is in danger, but they're in deep danger of slipping significantly if they don't improve their products dramatically, even pre-Longhorn.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that if I'm paying the (sort of) big bucks for FCP, HDV should not cost me extra money, thus the annoyance.
What kind of limitations are you running into in FCE? I'm curious because even now I'm not sure how significant the differences are, except for the inability to edit media other than DV/HDV.
D
I think it's a matter of taste, since I've always found the Alt key position a little akward, maybe because I'm used to the control key after decades of emacs use.
The keyboard change is attributable to IBM. They wanted to make their keyboards work like a typewriter, so they moved the control key down and replaced it with caps lock at the time they introduced their PS/2 line. I'm still a bit upset at them for it and it's particularly unfortunate since IBM always made the best quality keyboards. Their old AT keyboard was probably the best keyboard ever made.
D
This is interesting, since it would seem to imply that a LCD TV would enable you to evade the license, especially if the inspector could be convinced it was "just" used as a computer monitor.
D
However, if you never turn on the TV, the detector vans they send around to check license compliance won't find it and so the law becomes unenforceable.
(Wow, that sounds like paranoid ranting from an American perspective, but I understand enforcement is actually done that way in the UK).
I don't think people are about to stop watching TV in exchange for PC-based watching, so I don't see much validity in the license fee for computers.
From what I can see, the Media Center PC is still a flop.
D
what this project is and what it means? I can see they got access to a mailing list, and they're putting together key dates in it, but I can't see the broader goal this is in support of.
Could some kind soul let me know?
Many thanks.
D
I had to leave abruptly, which is why I didn't finish my comment.
If you need the features of Final Cut Pro, by all means buy it, but you might be able to get away with using the Final Cut Express feature set if you're not doing sophisticated color correction or compositing.
I own FInal Cut Pro, but I would be hard-pressed to find a reason to buy Final Cut Pro instead of Express today. And note that FCP does not have HDV support and will not until Final Cut Pro 5.0 is introduced at NAB a bit over a month from now.
D
One thing that's not too well known in MacOS X is that a nice subset of emacs commands works.
So if you want to go to the beginning of a line, Control-A does it, and Control-E goes to the end of the line.
I love this because I don't have to take my hands off the home keys to make it work. It's a real godsend to die-hard emacs users such as myself.
(This works only in Cocoa applications, so Internet Explorer users are out of luck, but in most programs, such as Safari, Mail, OmniWeb, etc, it works great.)
D
Motion's great but you only need it if you require fairly sophisticated effects. More importantly, it only works on fairly high-end hardware, with the graphics card being as important as the CPU.
If you just want to make the letters dance for title sequences, the Livetype program included with Final Cut Express and Pro is fine.
However, if you want to do professional DVD production, you want DVD Studio Pro, and the Production Suite bundle is a substantial discount.
In theory, I believe educational versions of software are only licensed for educational use, although this is obviously unenforceable except via your own karmic feelings.
D
If you haven't used Avid before, avoid it since it has a vertical cliff face learning curve. I tried playing with it at a tradeshow and it was nothing like any other editing program I'd seen before. It felt very modal and inflexible, which made it very difficult to get comfortable with. Of course if you want to eventually make a living editing mainstream motion pictures this might not be the best advice, but if you're rolling your own independent film it's not going to be the best choice.
The most featureful and best supported editing package is Apple's Final Cut Pro and its little brother Final Cut Express. You'd have to buy an Apple Macintosh computer to use them, but in my experience it's well worth it. Final Cut Express probably has all you need and at $299 or $99 when purchased with a Mac it's the deal of the century. If you need the featurees
When video editing was last discussed, most people who used Linux-based systems were still putting them together from CVS and fighting bugs, so I doubt that these products have the maturity you need to edit a film.
i don't know much about Adobe's Premiere Pro, but it's probably your best choice if you want to use Windows. Premiere used to be an absolutely ghastly program, with the result that Final Cut Pro slaughtered it in the marketplace despite being $400 more expensive. I understand that Premiere Pro copied a lot of features from Final Cut and so it might be fine. I don't have personal experience with it, though.
You might also want to check out Vegas Video, which has its set of adherents.
If you presently have a Windows computer, bear in mind that you'll probably need to upgrade it with FireWire ports and tons of disk space before it can become a video editing workstation. It will still most likely not run as smoothly as a Mac-based system where FireWire is built in and everything's designed and built by the same company.
Two good forums for this are http://www.creativecow.net and http://www.2-pop.com/ . I have to run, good luck with your project!
D
All they would have to do is print the disclaimer.
I would do it and add:
Note: TRUE.COM does not verify the identity of people who sign up for their service, so in reality they are no better than us.
D
Most likely because having multiple ends for the cable will confuse most people. It's much simpler for the end user to have a single cable with a single thing to plug into.
Remember, much of Apple's appeal is based on simplicity, and they're delivering it here.
D
The majority by space, but isn't the majority by population urban?
That aside, it genuinely costs more to provide service in areas with low population density, because the infrastructure is shared by fewer people. Simple enough.
I would argue that the price of broadband is a fairly minor expense for the overwhelming majority of people who would want it in the first place, and that's true even if it's $59 a month.
Think about what you pay for your car and car insurance for a reasonable contrast.
D
I'll bet the humiliation coming from that experience is a lot more effective than any harangue.
That's why he does it.
D
" ... we pay through every possible pocket to use it."
Maybe you're in an alternative universe, but last time I looked, basic cable modem or DSL service is about $30 a month.
I don't consider that to be a lot of compared to the value we get from the service.
D
Of course if you wanted to buy three albums a month, Napster seems to make sense. I wonder how many people want to buy that much music, since that's what Napster is really counting on.
Okay, the peer to peer network is not a fair comparison, because it's not money driven. But how many people download or downloaded more than, say, two albums a month via peer to peer? If you did, Napster might not be such a bad deal.
I consider Napster to be like cable TV, since you pay forever, and in return you get new programming every month. With Napster, you get new music continuously added every month that you can play at no extra cost.
It's not for me personally. I buy from 0-3 albums a month on iTunes, maybe averaging one album a month, which is a lot cheaper than Napster, and when things are tight and I don't feel like looking at music, I don't need to spend anything. For me, the iTunes store is by far the best model.
For new users, they can get hooked on the iTunes store one track at a time. The store is definitely well-designed and addictive, so it will suck you in, and then you're going to get the iPod and all will be well.
The big disadvantage of the cable TV model is that nobody wants a recurring charge on their credit card. That's a much harder sell to me than something I can spend money on it when I feel like it and ignore it when I don't.
The other disadvantage is actual patterns of listening to music. I find that when I discover new stuff, I listen to it a lot in the first month or two, and then it goes back in the rotation and I listen to old/new stuff. In short, music retains its value. It's unlikely you want to watch a TV series more than, say, ten or so times over its life. I have tracks in iTunes I've played hundreds of times. In short, it seems like many people like listening to music they've acquired before, and only slowly decide to add new tracks to their collection. This seems to make the iTunes music store model more natural.
Finally, Napster clearly has a tough row to hoe in encouraging people to give up their iPods. I have looked at competing music players and compared to the iPod they are just plain laughable.
So Napster does have financial advantages if you want to buy into the cable TV model of music. But as I've said, I don't think that's how most people want to buy music or think about it.
D
Nobody's going to send Google's founders to the poorhouse, if that's what your goal is.
Google's supporting Wikipedia because (i) they can, at negligible cost; and (ii) they want the public relations benefits at sites like Slashdot.
The Slashdot audience may be relatively small, but it is influential, as Slashdot users talk to each other and people outside the community.
If Google did something to shut down or reduce support of Wikipedia, they would lose all that public relations gold, and they would gain nothing, because negative information about Google is not going to be hard to find, ever.
Because they're rich, and people like you are jealous. Period.
D
Can you imagine the headlines on Slashdot and other media if Google tried to censor Wikipedia? It would destroy their reputation for "not being evil" utterly, and I know Google values that enormously, not only as a moral principle, but as part of their marketing.
If you haven't noticed, their article on Google includes unfavourable information such as a mention of low salaries and a whole section on criticism of the search engine.
Google is aware that there are plenty of outlets in which unfavourable information about their company can be aired. I really don't think they have any plans to try and suppress news about their company. I'm sure they know all too well that it would be impossible.
D
Of course it's not.
But I don't think there's a link where killing people in video games reduces people's desire to kill people in real life.
If anything, I think it's the other way around, and violent video games encourage a more violent lifestyle.
D
Personally, I hate video games because nearly all of them are all about people killing each other. People kill each other enough in Watts without adding an artificial Watts for us to kill each other. This seems like a concept that could attract my interest, with a positive goal of maintaining a romance, instead of the tiresome negative goal of not being killed, which you always fail at in the end.
I have a feeling the result was pretty dreadful, because otherwise it would have been released in some fashion, as a free thing to try if nothing else. At the same time, it would have definitely been interesting to try, and perhaps another group could pick up similar ideas and make something worthwhile out if it.
D
I think what the Longhorn FAQ is claiming is that you're supposed to write to Longhorn's APIs, not the old Win32 stuff. This is exactly the same as MacOS X; old apps run in a compatibility box, meaning mediocre performance, so users have to upgrade all their applications.
You are right that the lack of Photoshop for a long time seriously hurt adoption of MacOS X. Fortunately for Microsoft, all they have to do is get Office working and I don't think there's a big concern. Look at all the software on a typical Windows box; the overwhelming majority of is has MS's name on it. MS could lose every single creative professional back to the Macintosh and I doubt that they'd even notice it revenue-wise.
(I should clarify one of my earlier statements - when I said "probably not compatible with XP", I meant you probably can't take a computer "built for Longhorn" and run XP on it due to a lack of drivers. Once you go forward, you have to, well, go forward).
D
The exact phrase got me 726 results, which is far from overwhelming.
Without the quotes, it's a far more impressive 799,000.
D
These simply don't sound true to me:
...
... put so sweepingly, that is not correct. Of course we are the largest target, simply because we have the most widely disseminated system. But it affects others in exactly the same way. Linux is, in many respects, even more significantly affected.
... above all because of our global popularity. But we know that. And we must apply still more time and money to it. However, spam or data theft are not questions of the operating system. For this, you also need laws and global standards.
:-).
-----
Gates: The truth is: the fewer operating systems there are within a company, the better it is from a security point of view.
SPIEGEL: I beg your pardon?
Gates: Simply because one must spend billions of dollars to ensure the security of each individual system. Our company has an unbelievable number of people who are solely responsible for this type of security around the clock.
SPIEGEL: The particular charm of Linux is that it is an adaptable system that users can shape themselves.
Gates: If everything runs under the same platform, however, you can better concentrate resources and more quickly repair errors. For instance, in a hospital where different systems are used, a single problem in one section cause the other systems to crash. Thus, from a security standpoint it is always better to focus on one system.
SPIEGEL: But your small competitor Apple, for example, is much less frequently a victim of virus attacks
Gates:
SPIEGEL: In a few hours a Windows virus can travel across the world like an epidemic...
Gates:
SPIEGEL: Once again: Windows is the most vulnerable.
Gates: You could look at that in many ways. The speed with which, for example, the Linux community reacts to problems is not especially high -- that's because this system, unlike ours, simply does not keep thousands of people on standby to deal with problems. In this respect, a commercially distributed operating system also has decisive benefits. Sweeping judgments don't help because we all have to take the problems seriously. Even Linux developers know that there is no miracle cure in Linuxland. They, too, must continue to work and continue to make progress.
---
(Then the interview proceeds to other topics).
I thought this was interesting because, as far as I can tell, all I need to do in order to keep my Macintosh functioning securely is to make sure software update is on, and that at a time convenient to me I run it and update my system.
Windows patches are so frequent and their consequences so probematical that I can see a reason to keep legions of people around to fix them. But I've never had trouble with my Mac's security updates (knock on aluminum).
As far as I know there are no virii or spyware programs currently running on MacOS X. Perhaps someone could correct me if I'm wrong, but surely that enormously reduces the problem and therefore the amount of maintenance needed.
If computer A requires little maintenance and computer B requires lots, it seems to me that reducing the numbers of computer B you have and increasing computer A is the best way to deal with the problem.
Okay, flame away, both at Mr Gates and myself
D
If my memory serves, there is a way you can boot up MacOS X to a console-only mode which would work just like BSD.
You'd have to dig around a bit but I think you could get the total control you wanted with MacOS X.
D
I hear that Best Buy is going to stock the Mac Mini at some point and that might fix the "no software at Best Buy" problem for real. Not that I would buy my software there, of course. Apple Retail stores are great, and there's nothing like them for Windows.
I agree with the people who say that if you want to play games, get a game console. It's cheap, it's better for games than all but the most amped-up PCs, and when technology improves you can throw it away and buy a new one without getting all teary-eyed about your $3,000 investment down the drain.
A large percentage of people are very change-resistant, so your point C is actually valid, sad as it may be.
D
A closer reading of that FAQ answer would make me a bit alarmed if I were a Windows user.
They are saying that "the goal is", not that it will happen.
I could say today that my goal is to create a pig that flies over the moon, and that wouldn't make it happen, even if I were Microsoft.
I was a MacOS X early adopter (perhaps was is the wrong word; I use it on my primary computers to this day), and I still remember how MacOS 9 applications ran under MacOS X. That is to say, not all that well. Everyone who was running X, including myself, absolutely longed for native applications in the first year or so. After Photoshop and Final Cut Pro made it to X, pretty much all was bliss, but it took us a year of pain to get there.
If I had to guess, I'd assume that Win32/.net applications would have a similar trajectory of doom, and if there are significant differences between Win32 and Longhorn APIs, I'd be pretty alarmed by that paragraph if I was relying on non-Microsoft Windows software, or if I was developing same.
Microsoft might be counting on Office to hold people in the new environment. They'll build a version of Office for Longhorn with lots of spiffy features. The old Office won't work well on Longhorn. So someone buys a new computer with Longhorn (probably not compatible with XP), and they have to upgrade Office so they can run Word. This is just what Microsoft wants.
Microsoft has on its side the makers of commodity computers, and that's a powerful friend because many people like having interchangeable computers where nothing is particularly special but you can build interesting things out of components. I don't like that at all - I like my computers being special and unique, like Apple's - but I recognize much of the world loves it. I also think most of the world hates change and so really has to have a powerful jolt to switch.
Because of this, I think there's about a 10-15% ceiling on Apple's market share even if things go outstandingly well. Of course that would mean a 3-5 times improvement over the next few years. I think that's very doable, and I think some of the lovers of commodity computers might go for Linux as a commodity OS. That might mean there would be a world of 10-15% Apple, 10-15% Linux and the rest Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft's majority of computers sold is in danger, but they're in deep danger of slipping significantly if they don't improve their products dramatically, even pre-Longhorn.
D