A legacy file format importer that was written back in 1995 is likely going to be insecure whether its closed or open source.
I could easily see an OSS project making the same decision and choosing to drop old, unmaintained code modules because of security reasons. Its a pretty simple decision, if the feature benefits very few people but could affect anyone if there's a coding flaw, hide it/turn it off/whatever.
> it does seem like more and more school systems are going to Apple again.
Actually, they're dying in K-12, and they just cancelled the eMac which was pretty much designed for that market. Apple is doing extremely well in Higher Edu though.
I think you make a really good point, but not all advertising is supposed to get new customers -- a significant portion is targeted at the base -- existing customers (corny marketingism -- it's much cheaper to keep a customer than to find a customer).
In Apple's case, even if they produce no "switchers", they do very effectively send the message to existing Apple users that "PCs are Scary and Uncool. Don't buy a PC. Pay more for another Mac."
I can't recall the Genesis ads, but they could have been trying to fortify their existing installed base so they didn't buy into the new SNES hotness.
OS X's Application Controls isn't anything close to being "secure" -- It's implemented on the Finder rather than the OS level and can be bypassed by any convenient scripting environment (Applescript, MS Office, etc).
The database stuff in Notes is mostly ignored nowdays (for good reason). As far as most users are concerned it's a mail/calandar program and that's it.
Yeah -- Notes is increadibly System Admin friendly, so long as you have a large enough site to make it worthwhile.
Notes is a good example of "IBM listens to its customers", except it's customers are all IT Admins and Developers. That's why the UI philosophy is "Just make it good enough to get these users clammering for Outlook off my back."
During the dark days in the 90s, I recall an analyst stating that Mac fans were the only thing keeping the stock price from totally collapsing. Most of the current market cap is based on the iPod, so probably not that much anymore.
Hah - we did that one better and commodeered a brand new Pentium Pro 200 at work for Quake purposes. With an SVGA driver, you could crank up the resolution to an amazing 1024x768x32. It was beyond amazing at the time.
You can bet there will be no juicy information such as "We plan to have a expandible minitower on the market for $800 in 2007. So don't buy a PowerMac unless you *really* need it!!". Instead you'll get the standard Intel roadmap which anyone can read on the Inqurier.
I think this is really to molify institutional concerns about the Intel switchover -- It happened so fast, I imagine that quite a few shops that couldn't manage budgets/planning quickly enough. One day they were selling iMac G5s and the next day they weren't, and too bad if you were using Photoshop or something.
I guess I always imagined that oil companies had their own kick-ass GIS systems that would put consumer stuff like Google Earth to shame. Or maybe they do, but it's too much trouble to "fly around".
Well, as an American, a high "pay grade" implies some sort of government union bureaucracy, which usually is just the opposite of a technically elite organization. Apologies if my biases entered the discussion.
I should say that I found ye olde Mac OS phenomenal from a user-oriented design perspective -- far beyond OS X and NT and NextStep and other nerd-toys. But still, when running a web browser became an arduous task, and Mac-using friends came to me astounded by the multi-tasking abilities of Windows 98 (!), it was clear that MacOS was profoundly failing user demands in the late 1990s. Sure some technical users stuck to the Mac for the basic UI goodness, but let's be honest here -- there was very little else going for the platform, and it was a lame duck that Apple management had failed on multiple opportunities to replace.
As soon as Microsoft put some decent OS products on the market, Apple went from enormous profits to enormous losses, and ended up losing the majority of their market presence, forcing them to radically reshape their product marketing strategy. Was MacOS "good enough"? One can argue techncial details until the end of time, but from a business standpoint, it clearly wasn't.
Yup, as you admit, you are a "super-loyalist". MacOS was a complete shitfest in the late 90s... even regular users were getting fed-up, the techies were long gone. I do find it kind of humorus that your types are still desperately trying to rewrite the history of MacOS8 vs WinNT, but I don't think you'll get very far outside of the Evangalistas.
Anyway, thank you for providing an object example to my point about Applenuts that will post essays to counter the slightest infraction.
Mac Users list had an average paygrade of about 5.5.
In a lot of organizations, you need a certain amount of "pull" to get a Mac on your desk due to the higher cost structure. Anyway, a silly example that doesn't speak to my point at all.
Haven't you heard? All Mac programs* should be rewritten in Objective-C and Cocoa, and any failure to do so is evidence of complete, traitorous disloyalty to the Mac community. In fact, there's strong evidence that Carbon programs aren't really Mac programs at all! Omni are the gods of Cocoa, and therefore the most loyal Apple developer and most deserving of Zealot support.
Seriously, expecting any historical consistency out of this crowd is pointless. Intel processors suck because they are "CISC", remember.
*except the Apple programs that are written in carbon (almost all of them)
I suppose it made some sensational sense, but the real news was that HP was dropping Itanium Workstations, and MS was stopping XP for IA64, making it practically impossible for that a desktop Itaniums for Macs would ever appear. Not that I expect Dvorak to know anything about chip roadmaps.
But to be fair, the ultimtely correct Apple/Intel rumors were swirling around and he was just trying to spice them up a bit.
Ever ask yourself how so many Dvorak posts end of on the front page of Slashdot?
Slashdot owes it's success to posting trolls on it's front page all day, every day.
These Dvorak columns got huge comment responses across every Mac-oriented tech site, ZDNet would be really stupid to be paying people to post them. The slashvertisements are for the random hardware products that get posted or the crappy unknown hardware review sites.
There is some rational basis for Mac users defending iTunes DRM -- it runs on Macs while the others don't. After a decade of seeing Macs being cut out of one market or another, having an Apple technology ontop in one segement is small victory. I'm not saying that justifies the extermism, but it does explain it.
Think about it, if you were doing well by professional trolling (and I'm not saying he's not) would you talk about it on video, and lose all that revenue by 'serious' news sites deciding not to link to you anymore?
Everyone is pretty much on to him at this point, so by admitting it, he can troll the Mac users one last time. In a few years, everyone will have forgotten about it and he can start the cycle by trolling them again. This happened before when he was fired from MacWorld.
Most of the stuff that Dvorak said was so batty (Itanium Macs?) that it was doubtful that anyone really thought he was being all that serious.
Oh, I agree that the Intel Macs are sweet machines -- and the G4 PowerBook upgrade curve was so bleh that there was probably massive pent up demand for fast laptops.
But even in the PowerPC dark days I observed this behavior among certain users. There's several people I know who continually rotate through multiple Macs and iPods, just because that's a convienent way to spend their (inherited) savings. I don't care what the resale value is, selling a PB 1.3Ghz and buying a 1.5Ghz, or buying a G4 Mini "because it's cute" when you already have a G5 Tower isn't really rational behavior. And these people tend to talk much like the zealous posts seen on the interweb.
The thing is though one has to understand that the Mac community is a tiered structure. At the top...
Interesting post. If you look at the Mac Community 10 years ago, the "Top technical elite" had almost entirely bailed off the platform.
It was the "very vocal ignorant" zealot-type users that pulled Apple through their dark days. They felt that Apple was getting a bad rap in the press (although it was deserved IMO), and formed this "Evangilista" group which involved flooding the airwaves with denials and counter-arguments to any bit of news which might be perceived as a negative to Apple. The fact that Apple rebounded just validated this behavior and mandated that it must continue.
So, when the technical users returned for the nice UI and Unix-underpinnings of OS X, they're probably scratching their heads over why every silly little Apple lawsuit is worthy of essays worth of Brand-Loyalist attention, or even makes the papers at all. But at this point everyone in the computing press (not just Dvorak) understands that riling up Mac users = Page Hits and Attention. That is why ever little bit of minor Mac news becomes a major trade story.
Another issue is that Apple themselves thrives off these super-loyalists. A key element of their product strategy is based on the fact that there's a large group of wealthy Appleites that will buy anything they put out for a maximum premium. I saw these stats recently that showed that over 40% of Omni users are already running on Intel Macs. Omni is a small developer favored by the super-loyalists, but that's an astounding level of uptake even among that crowd. So, tossing the zealots an occasional pile of red meat really only helps Apple.
I suspect, but can't prove, that the "Evangilista" still exists (formally or infomally, sponsord by Apple or not). There's several Slashot users that one can count on only seeing when there's some bad Apple news to spin.
You know, every few years when it's "new console time" it's pretty much the same pattern -- there's not really any new information 99% of the time, so every little tidbit gets spun this way and that in order to make some group of fanboys collectively shit.
This goes on for a couple years, the systems get released, everyone is happy, and then the cycle starts again.
One would like to believe that everyone involved in this is 14 years old and buying videogames with allowance from mom, but sadly, it's become legitimate conduct for adults.
Atari was always a completely screwed up company, so it's no suprise they never figured out how to co-market their consoles and their computers.
Probably the smartest product Atari made was the XEGS -- a game console based on the 8-bit computer. Unfortuately it came out about 4 years too late, and at the same time that Atari was trying to sell the 7800 console.
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A legacy file format importer that was written back in 1995 is likely going to be insecure whether its closed or open source.
I could easily see an OSS project making the same decision and choosing to drop old, unmaintained code modules because of security reasons. Its a pretty simple decision, if the feature benefits very few people but could affect anyone if there's a coding flaw, hide it/turn it off/whatever.
A lot of the IBM/Lenovo stuff I think only exists for historical reasons. They had some of those same craplets running under Windows 3.1.
> it does seem like more and more school systems are going to Apple again.
Actually, they're dying in K-12, and they just cancelled the eMac which was pretty much designed for that market. Apple is doing extremely well in Higher Edu though.
I think you make a really good point, but not all advertising is supposed to get new customers -- a significant portion is targeted at the base -- existing customers (corny marketingism -- it's much cheaper to keep a customer than to find a customer).
In Apple's case, even if they produce no "switchers", they do very effectively send the message to existing Apple users that "PCs are Scary and Uncool. Don't buy a PC. Pay more for another Mac."
I can't recall the Genesis ads, but they could have been trying to fortify their existing installed base so they didn't buy into the new SNES hotness.
OS X's Application Controls isn't anything close to being "secure" -- It's implemented on the Finder rather than the OS level and can be bypassed by any convenient scripting environment (Applescript, MS Office, etc).
The database stuff in Notes is mostly ignored nowdays (for good reason). As far as most users are concerned it's a mail/calandar program and that's it.
Yeah -- Notes is increadibly System Admin friendly, so long as you have a large enough site to make it worthwhile.
Notes is a good example of "IBM listens to its customers", except it's customers are all IT Admins and Developers. That's why the UI philosophy is "Just make it good enough to get these users clammering for Outlook off my back."
During the dark days in the 90s, I recall an analyst stating that Mac fans were the only thing keeping the stock price from totally collapsing. Most of the current market cap is based on the iPod, so probably not that much anymore.
"Still have 486? Get a Pentium immediately!"
Hah - we did that one better and commodeered a brand new Pentium Pro 200 at work for Quake purposes. With an SVGA driver, you could crank up the resolution to an amazing 1024x768x32. It was beyond amazing at the time.
(everything except size and shape).
And Price.
You can bet there will be no juicy information such as "We plan to have a expandible minitower on the market for $800 in 2007. So don't buy a PowerMac unless you *really* need it!!". Instead you'll get the standard Intel roadmap which anyone can read on the Inqurier.
I think this is really to molify institutional concerns about the Intel switchover -- It happened so fast, I imagine that quite a few shops that couldn't manage budgets/planning quickly enough. One day they were selling iMac G5s and the next day they weren't, and too bad if you were using Photoshop or something.
Follow up: Of course there's a "pro" version of GE ... forgot about that.
I guess I always imagined that oil companies had their own kick-ass GIS systems that would put consumer stuff like Google Earth to shame. Or maybe they do, but it's too much trouble to "fly around".
Well, as an American, a high "pay grade" implies some sort of government union bureaucracy, which usually is just the opposite of a technically elite organization. Apologies if my biases entered the discussion.
I should say that I found ye olde Mac OS phenomenal from a user-oriented design perspective -- far beyond OS X and NT and NextStep and other nerd-toys. But still, when running a web browser became an arduous task, and Mac-using friends came to me astounded by the multi-tasking abilities of Windows 98 (!), it was clear that MacOS was profoundly failing user demands in the late 1990s. Sure some technical users stuck to the Mac for the basic UI goodness, but let's be honest here -- there was very little else going for the platform, and it was a lame duck that Apple management had failed on multiple opportunities to replace.
As soon as Microsoft put some decent OS products on the market, Apple went from enormous profits to enormous losses, and ended up losing the majority of their market presence, forcing them to radically reshape their product marketing strategy. Was MacOS "good enough"? One can argue techncial details until the end of time, but from a business standpoint, it clearly wasn't.
Yup, as you admit, you are a "super-loyalist". MacOS was a complete shitfest in the late 90s ... even regular users were getting fed-up, the techies were long gone. I do find it kind of humorus that your types are still desperately trying to rewrite the history of MacOS8 vs WinNT, but I don't think you'll get very far outside of the Evangalistas.
Anyway, thank you for providing an object example to my point about Applenuts that will post essays to counter the slightest infraction.
Mac Users list had an average paygrade of about 5.5.
In a lot of organizations, you need a certain amount of "pull" to get a Mac on your desk due to the higher cost structure. Anyway, a silly example that doesn't speak to my point at all.
Haven't you heard? All Mac programs* should be rewritten in Objective-C and Cocoa, and any failure to do so is evidence of complete, traitorous disloyalty to the Mac community. In fact, there's strong evidence that Carbon programs aren't really Mac programs at all! Omni are the gods of Cocoa, and therefore the most loyal Apple developer and most deserving of Zealot support.
Seriously, expecting any historical consistency out of this crowd is pointless. Intel processors suck because they are "CISC", remember.
*except the Apple programs that are written in carbon (almost all of them)
I suppose it made some sensational sense, but the real news was that HP was dropping Itanium Workstations, and MS was stopping XP for IA64, making it practically impossible for that a desktop Itaniums for Macs would ever appear. Not that I expect Dvorak to know anything about chip roadmaps.
But to be fair, the ultimtely correct Apple/Intel rumors were swirling around and he was just trying to spice them up a bit.
Ever ask yourself how so many Dvorak posts end of on the front page of Slashdot?
Slashdot owes it's success to posting trolls on it's front page all day, every day.
These Dvorak columns got huge comment responses across every Mac-oriented tech site, ZDNet would be really stupid to be paying people to post them. The slashvertisements are for the random hardware products that get posted or the crappy unknown hardware review sites.
There is some rational basis for Mac users defending iTunes DRM -- it runs on Macs while the others don't. After a decade of seeing Macs being cut out of one market or another, having an Apple technology ontop in one segement is small victory. I'm not saying that justifies the extermism, but it does explain it.
Think about it, if you were doing well by professional trolling (and I'm not saying he's not) would you talk about it on video, and lose all that revenue by 'serious' news sites deciding not to link to you anymore?
Everyone is pretty much on to him at this point, so by admitting it, he can troll the Mac users one last time. In a few years, everyone will have forgotten about it and he can start the cycle by trolling them again. This happened before when he was fired from MacWorld.
Most of the stuff that Dvorak said was so batty (Itanium Macs?) that it was doubtful that anyone really thought he was being all that serious.
Oh, I agree that the Intel Macs are sweet machines -- and the G4 PowerBook upgrade curve was so bleh that there was probably massive pent up demand for fast laptops.
But even in the PowerPC dark days I observed this behavior among certain users. There's several people I know who continually rotate through multiple Macs and iPods, just because that's a convienent way to spend their (inherited) savings. I don't care what the resale value is, selling a PB 1.3Ghz and buying a 1.5Ghz, or buying a G4 Mini "because it's cute" when you already have a G5 Tower isn't really rational behavior. And these people tend to talk much like the zealous posts seen on the interweb.
The thing is though one has to understand that the Mac community is a tiered structure. At the top ...
Interesting post. If you look at the Mac Community 10 years ago, the "Top technical elite" had almost entirely bailed off the platform.
It was the "very vocal ignorant" zealot-type users that pulled Apple through their dark days. They felt that Apple was getting a bad rap in the press (although it was deserved IMO), and formed this "Evangilista" group which involved flooding the airwaves with denials and counter-arguments to any bit of news which might be perceived as a negative to Apple. The fact that Apple rebounded just validated this behavior and mandated that it must continue.
So, when the technical users returned for the nice UI and Unix-underpinnings of OS X, they're probably scratching their heads over why every silly little Apple lawsuit is worthy of essays worth of Brand-Loyalist attention, or even makes the papers at all. But at this point everyone in the computing press (not just Dvorak) understands that riling up Mac users = Page Hits and Attention. That is why ever little bit of minor Mac news becomes a major trade story.
Another issue is that Apple themselves thrives off these super-loyalists. A key element of their product strategy is based on the fact that there's a large group of wealthy Appleites that will buy anything they put out for a maximum premium. I saw these stats recently that showed that over 40% of Omni users are already running on Intel Macs. Omni is a small developer favored by the super-loyalists, but that's an astounding level of uptake even among that crowd. So, tossing the zealots an occasional pile of red meat really only helps Apple.
I suspect, but can't prove, that the "Evangilista" still exists (formally or infomally, sponsord by Apple or not). There's several Slashot users that one can count on only seeing when there's some bad Apple news to spin.
You know, every few years when it's "new console time" it's pretty much the same pattern -- there's not really any new information 99% of the time, so every little tidbit gets spun this way and that in order to make some group of fanboys collectively shit.
This goes on for a couple years, the systems get released, everyone is happy, and then the cycle starts again.
One would like to believe that everyone involved in this is 14 years old and buying videogames with allowance from mom, but sadly, it's become legitimate conduct for adults.
Atari was always a completely screwed up company, so it's no suprise they never figured out how to co-market their consoles and their computers.
Probably the smartest product Atari made was the XEGS -- a game console based on the 8-bit computer. Unfortuately it came out about 4 years too late, and at the same time that Atari was trying to sell the 7800 console.
That's true -- I should have mentioned that the Pippen marketing did not associate it with Apple or Macs in any way.