Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
That's been my position all along.
So, you also support the current crypto policy I would assume. Because, really, there's no way to protect our mail if private companies start being the cole deliverers.
I think that crypto should be unregulated. Anyone should be allowed to use any strngth encryption they please with no strings attached.
As for the privacy issue, certainly there is a possiblity that a private mail carrier will go reading you mail. But the same possibility exists with the USPS. I don't see any reason why the private alternative is worse.
Oh, and another thing---there's nothing stopping any new mail delivery services from starting up, but I don't see any. Perhaps it's not as cost-effective as you think?
It's illegal. There actually was a startup in the seventies that tried to do first class mail deliveries (letters, not packages) in New York (This may not be quite right. Don't remember where I read this). The government shut them down. The fact is that it's illegal to compete with the post office in first class mail delivery. That's stupid.
urban delivery subsidises the rural post.
People keep saying this like it's a good thing. I don't understand it. If it costs more to deliver mail to a given location, then that person should be charged more. The same thing is true with bananas. I pay more for my bananas here in Minnesota than someone would in Central America. Is that a bad thing?
The fact is that different geographical areas have different costs and benefits. Cities are more crowded, dirtier, and have less open space. The country has higher mail service, less access to technology, and other problems. We balance the options and make a choice. Why should we single out one piece of that equation and subsidize it? Does the government pay me for the lousy air I have to breathe or the lack of peace and quiet? The fact is that I chose to live where I do and I chose to bear the costs of living there. Why should someone who chooses to live in the country be any different?
The FDA is charged with keeping food safe, and banks are completely dependant on the gov't.
But there's not a government provider of all banks. And it certainly is not illegal to open a competing bank.
Networks don't have as much gov't control, but the wires themselves do--AT&T ring a bell (pun intended)? Or Portland requiring that wires be opened to competition? The effects may be good for business, but the gov't is running the show.
But your point was that if we let the private sector provide the service, that they could go under and we would be without service. This is true in all of these markets. Yet we don't employ government farmers, bankers, or long-distance companies. Regulation is a long way from nationalization.
Um, *how* could the USPS go under? Either the gov't would have to collapse, or it would have to be purposely dismantled, and in both cases the laws concerning sending mail follow it.
The chances of several mail-delivery firms all going under simultaeneously and so fast that no one could take their place is equally small. A company the size of UPS doesn't just "go under." They lose money gradually, and other businesses take over their marketshare as they decline. Of course, strikes can cripple a carrier, but that's partly because labor laws prevent companies from hiring replacements.
And what incentive would there be for me to use them over the USPS?
Who says you have to. We can privatize the USPS and leave it intact. If you're happy with it, then go right ahead and keep using it.
The point is that some of us are not happy with the USPS and want an alternative. We are prevented by law from doing so. That's not right.
As for why another company would be more efficient: they've been a government monopoly for 220 years. How can they possibly be efficient. They've never had any particular incentive to keep prices down or provide good service.
$.33 provides a lot of potential profit. The average household gets at least 4 letters a day. That's $1 per household, per day, 365 days a year. By my calculations, that's a more than $25 billion industry. That's a lot of potential profit if someone can find more efficient ways of doing it.
Look any socialist country. All state-run industries are bloated, inefficient, and under productive. What's so special about the USPS that it should be different?
The reason we give the post office the upper hand is because we can't trust a business outside the government with our nations mail. If they went under the country would be screwed... so we keep USPS.. and as a matter of fact I think they do a great job.
That's funny. We trust private corporations with our food, our banks, our health care, and our networks. The nation would be in trouble without those. Do you think we should nationalize those too?
In a free market, there would be several carriers offering a variety of services. That's a hell of a lot more reliable than a single, monolithic government agnency. How do we know the USPS won't go down at some point? If they did, there would be no alternatives in the first class mail space, because it's illegal to deliver first class mail.
Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
If folks out on the farm had to pay ten times as much to mail their payments in to the phone company as I did (living in the city), it just wouldn't be fair.
So if I choose to live in a lot in the middle of nowhere, and it takes the mailman half an hour to pick up my mail, you're saying that it's "not fair" to charge me more for that service? How is that? If I choose to live in the boonies, how is it "fair" for the rest of you to subsidize me? It might be convenient, and it is nice for me, but it most definitely not "fair" by any definition I can think of.
So if the Constitution said the government had the power to shoot people at random would that be ok too? My question is not whether it is Constitutional. My question is whether it is right. I hope you see a difference between the two.
Actually, it is open to competition. Look at UPS, FedxEx, Airborne, DHL, and dozens of other courier services. And while the competitors offer better services in some areas, their costs are orders of magnitude higher and they still don't offer some services which you get with the mail (most notably free daily pick-up and drop-off)
Um, private corporations are legally prohibited from doing first-class mail. That would explain why there's no competition in that area. And that would also explain why they're the only ones who do daily delivery and pickup: most of the mail is first-class, and its illegal for other companies to handle it.
Yes, other courier services are faster. But given the choice, I think most of us would still prefer to use the USPS in most cases for sending non-urgent packages. It's sort of the low end of courier services; popular, cheap, and perhaps not as fast as the higher-end stuff but it still gets the job done.
If it's so great, why should the government have to give it a legal monopoly? If I want to have someone else deliver my mail, by what right does the government tell me I can't? All the good things the USPS does could be done just as well as the private sector. In addition we'd see the benefits that result from an open, competitive market. I'd be willing to be money that you'd see prices drop and reliablility improve. The USPS is really not reliable at all. Mail regularly comes mangled or doesn't come at all, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Seriously! All we need is some "new" mail company with 1 year of experience to start delivering mail to some 300 million Americans. Yeah, that'll work.
OK, look. If you want to send your mail with the USPS, fine. Don't force me to. If I want to pay Fedex or UPS or the kid down the street to deliver a letter, what business do you or the government have telling me I can't? It's really that simple. No matter how good the Post office is, there's no reason I should be forced to use it.
The same can be said of Microsoft. The vast majority of users are perfectly happy with Windoze and can't imagine any alternative. So the simple fact that you like them doesn't mean that they couldn't be better.
The difference is that at least Microsoft does have some competition to keep them at least somewhat honest. Imagine if Microsoft were granted a legal monopoly on the OS business how much Windows would suck.
I think we get used to whatever we use on a regular basis. If the Post Office monopoly were broken up, I think you'd see dramatice price cuts and vastly increased relieablity. There's a reason why UPS and FedEx are preferred by most businesses: they have to earn their customers. The Post Office has the first class mail market guarunteed, so they can afford to do a half-ass job in the parcel market. If they lose market share, what do they care? It's next to impossible to fire a government employee anyway, so why should they care?
The biggest one is that computers are powerful because they are programmable. Not because microsoft has programmed something for them, not because I hacked out something for them, but because anyone can program them.
If I were among the 90% of computer users who are not geeks, I would be bewildered by this attitude. For those people, a computer is no differenct from a toaster. You turn it on and get a job done with it. That's it. Learning to program takes a large investment of time, and I can think of very few jobs that home-written, amateur programs can do better than professional apps. I'd be interested in some examples of things that Joe Sixpack will want to program. I can't think of any.
You seem to have no comprehension of the time and effort it takes to learn to program effectively. Becoming a competent programmer takes more than just learning the syntax of a language. It requires thinking about your computer in a whole new way. For most users, the computer just presents them with a menu of options, and you pick one. How the computer does what it does is irrelevant. You just point and click and the computer does as it's told. Programming, on the other hand, requires systematic and careful thought about precisely how a task should be carried out in a step-by-step fashion. It is non-interactive, and computers are not the least bit helpful when something goes wrong. I shudder at the prospect of teaching my grandfather, my mother, or my sister to program. All of them are plenty smart, but they simply do not have the interest or the patience to learn programming skills.
Learning to program may be required for getting "the most out of your computer." But learning to rebuild your cars engine is likewise necessary for getting "the most out of your car." That does not mean that everyone should learn to rebuild engines any more than we should all learn to rebuild kernals.
Let me repeat myself: not everyone's life revolves around computers. Most people don't care if they are getting the most out of their systems. They want to take advantages of the things that computers are most useful for, and do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. For non-geeks, that means a simple GUI like the Mac OS, and using apps like email and word processing. Getting more out of their computers requires more effort than they are willing to invest. This does not make them stupid, lazy, or ignorant. It simply means that their priorities are different than yours. For most people, email, web browsing, word processing, and games are the only things worth taking the time to learn.
A basic principle of economics is involved here: the division of labor. One of the reason we are so productive is that each person specializes on a specific task and gets really good at it. We geeks are good at making computers go. Other people become good at other things. To expect everyone to learn to program is as silly as expecting everyone to learn to be plumbers or doctors or carpenters. The whole point of having programmers is so *they* can do the programming, and the rest of the population can concentrate on other tasks. I don't plan to learn the ins and out of other peoples' profession, and I don't expect others to learn how to do my job. If someone has a computer problem they can't solve, they should hire a geek to solve it, not try to become a geek themselves.
But in any event, LinuxPPC is an open source product, and given the way open source operates, it's unlikely that Apple could keep details given to LinuxPPC secret if they wanted to. If Be wants to know how the G3 works, they can just look at LinuxPPC's source, or even simpler, ask the LPPC developers. I don't know what the exact problem the Be team had is, but I suspect that they're just lazy and see larger market share on the Wintel side to expend the effort to figure it out. As others have suggested, Intel money can't have hurt either.
As I recall this was the rumor before Apple made the NeXT purchase. Macworld had a big spread about how Be might be the next Mac OS. There apperantly were talks, but Be demanded too much money. The plan was to build Mac complaitibility environment on top of Be the way they did with NeXTStep.
This could've been very cool, although OS X is gonna be very cool as well. OS X is basically a seriously hacked copy of the NeXT OS with a Mac compatibility box ("Classic") to allow Mac apps to run without modification and a stripped-down sub set of the Mac OS API's that allow Mac apps to work under a modern OS environment with only minor alteration. ("Carbon") However, the future of the platform is planned to be the third "box" ("Cocoa"), which is basically the OpenStep API's. So in a sense, Next is the future of the Mac OS. The same thing could have been done with Be's OS-- build a compatinility box for old apps, and develop new apps in Be's native environment.
Apple does have a "netboot" feature built into iMacs that allow remote booting. I wonder if that's true of the iBook too? If so, perhaps it would be possible to boot off the wireless network. That would be so cool.
The iMac I understand...attracts customers who don't know much about computers other then "point & click"...but who among them is going to get a hub?
Apple hopes a whole lot of them. In fact, that's their target audience. The point is that Joe Sixpack orders DSL, buys a couple of iBooks and a hub, runs the GUI-based setup tool, and he's got a super-fast, super-reliable network connection. This may be the first real networking for the masses. If Apple's configuration program is as simple as they seem to think it is, pretty much anyone should be able to set up a home network with it.
Keep in mind that this thing is designed to go with the iBook. The iBook's got the antenna built in, and a $100 card that can be easily added on to enable airport. Then you just plug the hub into either a DSL "modem" or phone line, and you've got yourself wireless internet anywhere in the house. This could be a big hit among consumers. The biggest problem I see is the $2000 total for the computer + card + hub is still a little pricey. But there are still a *lot* of computerless consumers that can afford that if it's compelling enough.
Don't get me wrong, most Slashdotters are, including me. Being a geek isn't a bad thing. But most people are not geeks. And most non-geeks are happy to have a "toy" OS that gets the job done. They can do word processing, graphics, web browsing, email, and games, and that's about it. But that's all they are interested in doing. The computer is a tool. It's a very useful tool, but it's still just a tool.
Even those of us who do like to tinker with out systems from time to time still want to be able to hide that complexity when they need to get other work done. When I am writing a paper, checking my email, or playing Starcraft, my "toy" Mac OS works just fine. The interface is much nicer, it's much simpler to set up and use, and it's generally more productive. When I want to tinker, I have an old Mac on which I install LinuxPPC, and then I can tinker to my heart's content.
There's no reason non-geeks should learn to use vi, know a programming language, reformat a hard drive, or edit text-based configuration files. These tasks are not the least bit relevant to their lives, and are simply extra work. An oversimplified interface and glazing over of problems is a good thing for 90% of what people do with computers. If their computer crashes, it doesn't matter to them why it crashed. There's no point in giving them the gruesome details of what failed where and how. They'll just reboot and try again. If it continues failing, they switch apps and/or upgrade. They might run disk doctor occasionally, or ask a more knowledgable friend for help. But for the most part they just want the OS to do as it's told, even if they aren't using it as intended.
A good analogy is a car. For most of us, it's much nicer to have a simple dashboard that gives us a sumarry of what our car is doing than a window that let's us look and the engine and take measurements manually. The mechanically inclined might like rebuilding their engines, but for the rest of us, we are happy to think of our cars as a black box that needs oil changes, fillups, and the rest gets taken care of by the mechanic. Most peoples' lives do not revolve around their computers, any more than around their cars.
The question is whether the hub is smart enough to route everything correctly if you just plug the ethernet hub into the wireless hub and start plugging in computers. I don't know the ins and outs of ethernet topologies, but there are several conceivable configurations. The wireless hub could be plugged into a 56k connection, and thus the ethernet hub would be "downstream," or the ethernet hub could be plugged into a net router, in which case it would be "upstream." The question is whether everything would work correctly either way, or if it would require a specific configuration to set up. There's also a question of whether Joe Sixpack will know to buy such a hub. There are a lot of hubs out there, and a lot of it looks pretty cryptic. I would be pretty intimidated if I were a non-technical user. Built-in hub abilities would allow Apple to control the configuration more, and make life easier for the end user that doesn't care what goes on in the little flying saucer.
12.1 inch display? did apple just set back in time about 4 years? i beta tested laptops at dell last year, and 14.1 was the standard, with the 15 inch inspiron 7000 the premium.
Two problems with this. First is the price. 12" is cheaper than 14". Apple's pro line has 14". They wanted this to be within the reach of the average consumer. A 14" monitor would've added to the price.
More importantly, this is designed to be a small machine. They're promoting this as the machine you take with you on the schoolbus, up into the tree house, on the couch, etc. A bigger display means a heavier iBook. 12" is plenty big for what it needs to do.
they also mention playing multiplayer games. no way you'll get openGL support for this box's hardware, so you better be into bridge.
Nonsense. The iBook has a high-end ATI portable graphics chipset, and the MacOS has OpenGL support built in. At the keynote, Bungie showed a kick-ass new game called "Halo" that had some real-time animated OpenGL scenes that I thought were very impressive. This thing'll be able to run anything existing PowerMacs and iMacs can now, and that includes all the big games: Quake III, Starcraft (Brood Wars soon), Myth II, and others. Steve Jobs is making a big push for games on the Mac, and standardizing on OpenGL is a big piece of that push.
Do some reading before you post on something you know nothing about.
As I recall, the big stink was over a *dollar* per port liscencing fee. And I think they might have even ruduced that. Apple put a lot of work into this technology, and if they can make some money on it, great. I don't think a dollar a port is going to seriously hamper its development.
Apple says it's 802.11 wireless, which I haven;t heard of, but it's apperantly an industry standard. 11 Mbps throughput, 150 foot range, 10 conputers on one $299 hub. $100 per iBook for the cards. And they're working on a card to wire existing Powerbooks. Available in September. Impressive.
What I want to know is what they are talking about when they say that you can use multiple computers on a single internet connection. Does it do some kind of IP sharing so that multiple computers can use the same dynamic IP address? Or is it assuming that you've got a multiple-IP broadband connection? That's quite a bit more expensive, and they could get a lot of disappointed customers if they expect to do this. If this does in fact let you use multiple computers over the same 56k connection, that could be very cool.
It's too bad they didn't add a couple more ports and made the thing an ethernet hub as well. Then all those families with their iMacs could immediately make themselves a home network upon purchasing an iBook and a hub. It wouldn't add more than $50 to the cost, and would make it much more useful.
Um... $300 for the hub, 100 for the card. $400 total. And you can use up to 10 iBooks with each hub. That means that you can wire a home wireless network for under $1000, even if you have half a dozen computers. Pretty spiffy.
The LinuxPPC people will probably take a few weeks after introduction to get it to run. If Steve was really serious about the OpenSource movement, he'd give them advance access to one so it'd run Linux on release day. The power consumption probably won't be as good. 8.6 had some dramatic battery life improvements. But there's no reason it wouldn't run eventually. Both the iMac and the PB G3's run Linux just fine.
Well, I meant motherboard + processor + memory + graphics card, etc. I don't think you can get this with any kind of quality for less than several hundred bucks. A low-end Pentium II or K6 by itself costs more than $50.
Now, would you like that segement of cable to be hooked up to anything? Might be a problem if your neighbors prefer planting carrots over coax in their yards...unless, of course, we have legal mechanisms such as easements and right-of-ways.
Most people have more than one neighbor. Chances are that one of them will be willing to extend my cable into their yard. And likewise to every other yard.
Besides, even if it is necessary to have things like right-of-way or easements, that still doesn't justify prohibiting others from providing a competing service. Right now, if I decided to start a cable service in my neighborhood, even if I had the consent of every property holder involved, I would still be prevented by law from doing so. That's a violation of private property rights, and it makes no sense whatsoever.
The trouble with that argument is that cable and telephone wiring tend to be "monopoly-inducing." Just like the electric, gas and water companies all tend to be single providers in an area.
You're putting the cart before the horse. cable service is not inherently "monopoly inducing." They are monopolies because the government has granted them exclusive access. In other words, cable companies have monoplies by law.
it also takes a lot of politics to get permission to put that infrastructure on public and private land.
Again, this is the result of the government. In a free market, there would be a lot less "public" land, and a lot less restrictions on what private landowners could allow. Therefore it would be possible to build such a network privately.
Part of the compact between the people and the infrastructure builders is that the people give permission to the builders in exchange for builders providing for the public good.
Why do they need permission? If I want to lay down a cable from one end of my yard to the other, what business is that of anyone else? Obviously, if AOL wants to make such a network, they'd need permission from specific property holders, but that's not the same as requiring permission from "the people."
When I tried it, the queue was about 30 people. Now it's up to 80. Pretty soon it'll be so long that nobody'll get to see it. I'm glad I caught this early, before the line. It is very cool, although I couldn't quite read my message.
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Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
That's been my position all along.
So, you also support the current crypto policy I would assume. Because, really, there's no way to protect our mail if private companies start being the cole deliverers.
I think that crypto should be unregulated. Anyone should be allowed to use any strngth encryption they please with no strings attached.
As for the privacy issue, certainly there is a possiblity that a private mail carrier will go reading you mail. But the same possibility exists with the USPS. I don't see any reason why the private alternative is worse.
Oh, and another thing---there's nothing stopping any new mail delivery services from starting up, but I don't see any. Perhaps it's not as cost-effective as you think?
It's illegal. There actually was a startup in the seventies that tried to do first class mail deliveries (letters, not packages) in New York (This may not be quite right. Don't remember where I read this). The government shut them down. The fact is that it's illegal to compete with the post office in first class mail delivery. That's stupid.
urban delivery subsidises the rural post.
People keep saying this like it's a good thing. I don't understand it. If it costs more to deliver mail to a given location, then that person should be charged more. The same thing is true with bananas. I pay more for my bananas here in Minnesota than someone would in Central America. Is that a bad thing?
The fact is that different geographical areas have different costs and benefits. Cities are more crowded, dirtier, and have less open space. The country has higher mail service, less access to technology, and other problems. We balance the options and make a choice. Why should we single out one piece of that equation and subsidize it? Does the government pay me for the lousy air I have to breathe or the lack of peace and quiet? The fact is that I chose to live where I do and I chose to bear the costs of living there. Why should someone who chooses to live in the country be any different?
The FDA is charged with keeping food safe, and banks are completely dependant on the gov't.
But there's not a government provider of all banks. And it certainly is not illegal to open a competing bank.
Networks don't have as much gov't control, but the wires themselves do--AT&T ring a bell (pun intended)? Or Portland requiring that wires be opened to competition? The effects may be good for business, but the gov't is running the show.
But your point was that if we let the private sector provide the service, that they could go under and we would be without service. This is true in all of these markets. Yet we don't employ government farmers, bankers, or long-distance companies. Regulation is a long way from nationalization.
Um, *how* could the USPS go under? Either the gov't would have to collapse, or it would have to be purposely dismantled, and in both cases the laws concerning sending mail follow it.
The chances of several mail-delivery firms all going under simultaeneously and so fast that no one could take their place is equally small. A company the size of UPS doesn't just "go under." They lose money gradually, and other businesses take over their marketshare as they decline. Of course, strikes can cripple a carrier, but that's partly because labor laws prevent companies from hiring replacements.
And what incentive would there be for me to use them over the USPS?
Who says you have to. We can privatize the USPS and leave it intact. If you're happy with it, then go right ahead and keep using it.
The point is that some of us are not happy with the USPS and want an alternative. We are prevented by law from doing so. That's not right.
As for why another company would be more efficient: they've been a government monopoly for 220 years. How can they possibly be efficient. They've never had any particular incentive to keep prices down or provide good service.
$.33 provides a lot of potential profit. The average household gets at least 4 letters a day. That's $1 per household, per day, 365 days a year. By my calculations, that's a more than $25 billion industry. That's a lot of potential profit if someone can find more efficient ways of doing it.
Look any socialist country. All state-run industries are bloated, inefficient, and under productive. What's so special about the USPS that it should be different?
The reason we give the post office the upper hand is because we can't trust a business outside the government with our nations mail. If they went under the country would be screwed... so we keep USPS.. and as a matter of fact I think they do a great job.
That's funny. We trust private corporations with our food, our banks, our health care, and our networks. The nation would be in trouble without those. Do you think we should nationalize those too?
In a free market, there would be several carriers offering a variety of services. That's a hell of a lot more reliable than a single, monolithic government agnency. How do we know the USPS won't go down at some point? If they did, there would be no alternatives in the first class mail space, because it's illegal to deliver first class mail.
Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
If folks out on the farm had to pay ten times as much to mail their payments in to the phone company as I did (living in the city), it just wouldn't be fair.
So if I choose to live in a lot in the middle of nowhere, and it takes the mailman half an hour to pick up my mail, you're saying that it's "not fair" to charge me more for that service? How is that? If I choose to live in the boonies, how is it "fair" for the rest of you to subsidize me? It might be convenient, and it is nice for me, but it most definitely not "fair" by any definition I can think of.
So if the Constitution said the government had the power to shoot people at random would that be ok too? My question is not whether it is Constitutional. My question is whether it is right. I hope you see a difference between the two.
Actually, it is open to competition. Look at UPS, FedxEx, Airborne, DHL, and dozens of other courier services. And while the competitors offer better services in some areas, their costs are orders of magnitude higher and they still don't offer some services which you get with the mail (most notably free daily pick-up and drop-off)
Um, private corporations are legally prohibited from doing first-class mail. That would explain why there's no competition in that area. And that would also explain why they're the only ones who do daily delivery and pickup: most of the mail is first-class, and its illegal for other companies to handle it.
Yes, other courier services are faster. But given the choice, I think most of us would still prefer to use the USPS in most cases for sending non-urgent packages. It's sort of the low end of courier services; popular, cheap, and perhaps not as fast as the higher-end stuff but it still gets the job done.
If it's so great, why should the government have to give it a legal monopoly? If I want to have someone else deliver my mail, by what right does the government tell me I can't? All the good things the USPS does could be done just as well as the private sector. In addition we'd see the benefits that result from an open, competitive market. I'd be willing to be money that you'd see prices drop and reliablility improve. The USPS is really not reliable at all. Mail regularly comes mangled or doesn't come at all, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Seriously! All we need is some "new" mail company with 1 year of experience to start delivering mail to some 300 million Americans. Yeah, that'll work.
OK, look. If you want to send your mail with the USPS, fine. Don't force me to. If I want to pay Fedex or UPS or the kid down the street to deliver a letter, what business do you or the government have telling me I can't? It's really that simple. No matter how good the Post office is, there's no reason I should be forced to use it.
The same can be said of Microsoft. The vast majority of users are perfectly happy with Windoze and can't imagine any alternative. So the simple fact that you like them doesn't mean that they couldn't be better.
The difference is that at least Microsoft does have some competition to keep them at least somewhat honest. Imagine if Microsoft were granted a legal monopoly on the OS business how much Windows would suck.
I think we get used to whatever we use on a regular basis. If the Post Office monopoly were broken up, I think you'd see dramatice price cuts and vastly increased relieablity. There's a reason why UPS and FedEx are preferred by most businesses: they have to earn their customers. The Post Office has the first class mail market guarunteed, so they can afford to do a half-ass job in the parcel market. If they lose market share, what do they care? It's next to impossible to fire a government employee anyway, so why should they care?
The biggest one is that computers are powerful because they are programmable. Not because microsoft has programmed something for them, not because I hacked out something for them, but because anyone can program them.
If I were among the 90% of computer users who are not geeks, I would be bewildered by this attitude. For those people, a computer is no differenct from a toaster. You turn it on and get a job done with it. That's it. Learning to program takes a large investment of time, and I can think of very few jobs that home-written, amateur programs can do better than professional apps. I'd be interested in some examples of things that Joe Sixpack will want to program. I can't think of any.
You seem to have no comprehension of the time and effort it takes to learn to program effectively. Becoming a competent programmer takes more than just learning the syntax of a language. It requires thinking about your computer in a whole new way. For most users, the computer just presents them with a menu of options, and you pick one. How the computer does what it does is irrelevant. You just point and click and the computer does as it's told. Programming, on the other hand, requires systematic and careful thought about precisely how a task should be carried out in a step-by-step fashion. It is non-interactive, and computers are not the least bit helpful when something goes wrong. I shudder at the prospect of teaching my grandfather, my mother, or my sister to program. All of them are plenty smart, but they simply do not have the interest or the patience to learn programming skills.
Learning to program may be required for getting "the most out of your computer." But learning to rebuild your cars engine is likewise necessary for getting "the most out of your car." That does not mean that everyone should learn to rebuild engines any more than we should all learn to rebuild kernals.
Let me repeat myself: not everyone's life revolves around computers. Most people don't care if they are getting the most out of their systems. They want to take advantages of the things that computers are most useful for, and do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. For non-geeks, that means a simple GUI like the Mac OS, and using apps like email and word processing. Getting more out of their computers requires more effort than they are willing to invest. This does not make them stupid, lazy, or ignorant. It simply means that their priorities are different than yours. For most people, email, web browsing, word processing, and games are the only things worth taking the time to learn.
A basic principle of economics is involved here: the division of labor. One of the reason we are so productive is that each person specializes on a specific task and gets really good at it. We geeks are good at making computers go. Other people become good at other things. To expect everyone to learn to program is as silly as expecting everyone to learn to be plumbers or doctors or carpenters. The whole point of having programmers is so *they* can do the programming, and the rest of the population can concentrate on other tasks. I don't plan to learn the ins and out of other peoples' profession, and I don't expect others to learn how to do my job. If someone has a computer problem they can't solve, they should hire a geek to solve it, not try to become a geek themselves.
I'm pretty sure they reverse engineered the G3's.
But in any event, LinuxPPC is an open source product, and given the way open source operates, it's unlikely that Apple could keep details given to LinuxPPC secret if they wanted to. If Be wants to know how the G3 works, they can just look at LinuxPPC's source, or even simpler, ask the LPPC developers. I don't know what the exact problem the Be team had is, but I suspect that they're just lazy and see larger market share on the Wintel side to expend the effort to figure it out. As others have suggested, Intel money can't have hurt either.
As I recall this was the rumor before Apple made the NeXT purchase. Macworld had a big spread about how Be might be the next Mac OS. There apperantly were talks, but Be demanded too much money. The plan was to build Mac complaitibility environment on top of Be the way they did with NeXTStep.
This could've been very cool, although OS X is gonna be very cool as well. OS X is basically a seriously hacked copy of the NeXT OS with a Mac compatibility box ("Classic") to allow Mac apps to run without modification and a stripped-down sub set of the Mac OS API's that allow Mac apps to work under a modern OS environment with only minor alteration. ("Carbon") However, the future of the platform is planned to be the third "box" ("Cocoa"), which is basically the OpenStep API's. So in a sense, Next is the future of the Mac OS. The same thing could have been done with Be's OS-- build a compatinility box for old apps, and develop new apps in Be's native environment.
Apple does have a "netboot" feature built into iMacs that allow remote booting. I wonder if that's true of the iBook too? If so, perhaps it would be possible to boot off the wireless network. That would be so cool.
The iMac I understand...attracts customers who don't know much about computers other then "point & click"...but who among them is going to get a hub?
Apple hopes a whole lot of them. In fact, that's their target audience. The point is that Joe Sixpack orders DSL, buys a couple of iBooks and a hub, runs the GUI-based setup tool, and he's got a super-fast, super-reliable network connection. This may be the first real networking for the masses. If Apple's configuration program is as simple as they seem to think it is, pretty much anyone should be able to set up a home network with it.
Keep in mind that this thing is designed to go with the iBook. The iBook's got the antenna built in, and a $100 card that can be easily added on to enable airport. Then you just plug the hub into either a DSL "modem" or phone line, and you've got yourself wireless internet anywhere in the house. This could be a big hit among consumers. The biggest problem I see is the $2000 total for the computer + card + hub is still a little pricey. But there are still a *lot* of computerless consumers that can afford that if it's compelling enough.
Don't get me wrong, most Slashdotters are, including me. Being a geek isn't a bad thing. But most people are not geeks. And most non-geeks are happy to have a "toy" OS that gets the job done. They can do word processing, graphics, web browsing, email, and games, and that's about it. But that's all they are interested in doing. The computer is a tool. It's a very useful tool, but it's still just a tool.
Even those of us who do like to tinker with out systems from time to time still want to be able to hide that complexity when they need to get other work done. When I am writing a paper, checking my email, or playing Starcraft, my "toy" Mac OS works just fine. The interface is much nicer, it's much simpler to set up and use, and it's generally more productive. When I want to tinker, I have an old Mac on which I install LinuxPPC, and then I can tinker to my heart's content.
There's no reason non-geeks should learn to use vi, know a programming language, reformat a hard drive, or edit text-based configuration files. These tasks are not the least bit relevant to their lives, and are simply extra work. An oversimplified interface and glazing over of problems is a good thing for 90% of what people do with computers. If their computer crashes, it doesn't matter to them why it crashed. There's no point in giving them the gruesome details of what failed where and how. They'll just reboot and try again. If it continues failing, they switch apps and/or upgrade. They might run disk doctor occasionally, or ask a more knowledgable friend for help. But for the most part they just want the OS to do as it's told, even if they aren't using it as intended.
A good analogy is a car. For most of us, it's much nicer to have a simple dashboard that gives us a sumarry of what our car is doing than a window that let's us look and the engine and take measurements manually. The mechanically inclined might like rebuilding their engines, but for the rest of us, we are happy to think of our cars as a black box that needs oil changes, fillups, and the rest gets taken care of by the mechanic. Most peoples' lives do not revolve around their computers, any more than around their cars.
The question is whether the hub is smart enough to route everything correctly if you just plug the ethernet hub into the wireless hub and start plugging in computers. I don't know the ins and outs of ethernet topologies, but there are several conceivable configurations. The wireless hub could be plugged into a 56k connection, and thus the ethernet hub would be "downstream," or the ethernet hub could be plugged into a net router, in which case it would be "upstream." The question is whether everything would work correctly either way, or if it would require a specific configuration to set up. There's also a question of whether Joe Sixpack will know to buy such a hub. There are a lot of hubs out there, and a lot of it looks pretty cryptic. I would be pretty intimidated if I were a non-technical user. Built-in hub abilities would allow Apple to control the configuration more, and make life easier for the end user that doesn't care what goes on in the little flying saucer.
12.1 inch display? did apple just set back in time about 4 years? i beta tested laptops at dell last year, and 14.1 was the standard, with the 15 inch inspiron 7000 the premium.
Two problems with this. First is the price. 12" is cheaper than 14". Apple's pro line has 14". They wanted this to be within the reach of the average consumer. A 14" monitor would've added to the price.
More importantly, this is designed to be a small machine. They're promoting this as the machine you take with you on the schoolbus, up into the tree house, on the couch, etc. A bigger display means a heavier iBook. 12" is plenty big for what it needs to do.
they also mention playing multiplayer games. no way you'll get openGL support for this box's hardware, so you better be into bridge.
Nonsense. The iBook has a high-end ATI portable graphics chipset, and the MacOS has OpenGL support built in. At the keynote, Bungie showed a kick-ass new game called "Halo" that had some real-time animated OpenGL scenes that I thought were very impressive. This thing'll be able to run anything existing PowerMacs and iMacs can now, and that includes all the big games: Quake III, Starcraft (Brood Wars soon), Myth II, and others. Steve Jobs is making a big push for games on the Mac, and standardizing on OpenGL is a big piece of that push.
Do some reading before you post on something you know nothing about.
As I recall, the big stink was over a *dollar* per port liscencing fee. And I think they might have even ruduced that. Apple put a lot of work into this technology, and if they can make some money on it, great. I don't think a dollar a port is going to seriously hamper its development.
Apple says it's 802.11 wireless, which I haven;t heard of, but it's apperantly an industry standard. 11 Mbps throughput, 150 foot range, 10 conputers on one $299 hub. $100 per iBook for the cards. And they're working on a card to wire existing Powerbooks. Available in September. Impressive.
What I want to know is what they are talking about when they say that you can use multiple computers on a single internet connection. Does it do some kind of IP sharing so that multiple computers can use the same dynamic IP address? Or is it assuming that you've got a multiple-IP broadband connection? That's quite a bit more expensive, and they could get a lot of disappointed customers if they expect to do this. If this does in fact let you use multiple computers over the same 56k connection, that could be very cool.
It's too bad they didn't add a couple more ports and made the thing an ethernet hub as well. Then all those families with their iMacs could immediately make themselves a home network upon purchasing an iBook and a hub. It wouldn't add more than $50 to the cost, and would make it much more useful.
Anyhow, I want one.
Um... $300 for the hub, 100 for the card. $400 total. And you can use up to 10 iBooks with each hub. That means that you can wire a home wireless network for under $1000, even if you have half a dozen computers. Pretty spiffy.
And it is 11 Mbps.
The LinuxPPC people will probably take a few weeks after introduction to get it to run. If Steve was really serious about the OpenSource movement, he'd give them advance access to one so it'd run Linux on release day. The power consumption probably won't be as good. 8.6 had some dramatic battery life improvements. But there's no reason it wouldn't run eventually. Both the iMac and the PB G3's run Linux just fine.
Well, I meant motherboard + processor + memory + graphics card, etc. I don't think you can get this with any kind of quality for less than several hundred bucks. A low-end Pentium II or K6 by itself costs more than $50.
Now, would you like that segement of cable to be hooked up to anything? Might be a problem if your neighbors prefer planting carrots over coax in their yards...unless, of course, we have legal mechanisms such as easements and right-of-ways.
Most people have more than one neighbor. Chances are that one of them will be willing to extend my cable into their yard. And likewise to every other yard.
Besides, even if it is necessary to have things like right-of-way or easements, that still doesn't justify prohibiting others from providing a competing service. Right now, if I decided to start a cable service in my neighborhood, even if I had the consent of every property holder involved, I would still be prevented by law from doing so. That's a violation of private property rights, and it makes no sense whatsoever.
The trouble with that argument is that cable and telephone wiring tend to be "monopoly-inducing." Just like the electric, gas and water companies all tend to be single providers in an area.
You're putting the cart before the horse. cable service is not inherently "monopoly inducing." They are monopolies because the government has granted them exclusive access. In other words, cable companies have monoplies by law.
it also takes a lot of politics to get permission to put that infrastructure on public and private land.
Again, this is the result of the government. In a free market, there would be a lot less "public" land, and a lot less restrictions on what private landowners could allow. Therefore it would be possible to build such a network privately.
Part of the compact between the people and the infrastructure builders is that the people give permission to the builders in exchange for builders providing for the public good.
Why do they need permission? If I want to lay down a cable from one end of my yard to the other, what business is that of anyone else? Obviously, if AOL wants to make such a network, they'd need permission from specific property holders, but that's not the same as requiring permission from "the people."
Proprietary systems do not benefit the people.
Nor do socialistic ones.
When I tried it, the queue was about 30 people. Now it's up to 80. Pretty soon it'll be so long that nobody'll get to see it. I'm glad I caught this early, before the line. It is very cool, although I couldn't quite read my message.