ESR is predicating his argument on the notion that hardware must necessarily cost more than the software that runs on it. He's obviously never negotiated a contract for a site license for Oracle.
Or looked at the video game console market, where consoles are actually sold at a loss, because the real money is in games.
Or met anybody who listens to a lot of music, as such people can easily spend far more on CDs than on a decent stereo system.
...he made some pretty strong poits, would you pay just as much for an OS as for the hardware itself? I didnt think so.
If the hardware is useless to you without the OS, and the total cost of the two together is still within reason, why wouldn't you?
Yes, the hardware can still be useful to some people without Windows, but not nearly as many. Being cheaper than Windows isn't enough to let Linux win. It has to provide customers with more value for their money than Windows. And as long as most applications that most people want to use run on Windows but not Linux, Windows will beat Linux on the desktop.
1) The numbers you quote are "peak"numbers, obtained by optimizing for the particular test being run. The "baseline" numbers are probably a better approximation to what you'll see in real world use. Here, the story is reversed: The Dell scores 779 vs. the Sun's 701.
2) SPECFP? What about integer performance, which is more important for most applications. On SPECINT2000, the Dell whips the SunBlade both in baseline (790 vs. 537) and peak (811 vs. 610) performance measurements.
3) How about price/performance? I can't find any mention of the Sun Blade 2050 on Sun's site. However, the 900 MHz Sun Blade 1000 (which is slower than the 2050) goes for $11,000. I can get the Dell with similar amounts of memory and HD space for $2500.
4) How does the Sparc's better performance / clock make it a better CPU? Is there some intrinsic value to clock cycles that I don't know about?
Look, I think there are good reasons in some cases to buy Suns over commodity Intel hardware. And there's probably a good argument to be made that these benchmarks don't correspond well to any real world performance, anyways. But you're just fooling yourself if you think that Sun beats out Intel when it comes to raw performance as measured by benchmarks.
... gain on the desktop then every Linux user that has children should teach all there children to use Linux and only Linux, Micro$oft should not enter these children's lives while they are at home.
In fact, if you truly care about Linux, you should home school your children, so as to better shield them from the pernicious, evil influence of Windows!
He has a long-standing history of making sure Macs are as non-expandable as possible. Which doesn't mean he's going to bolt the G4 case closed, but he is going to limit expansion options as much as possible where it won't ruin sales of the particular model.
This is nonsense.
Consider this: There are, roughly, two classes of stereo buyers: People who just want to throw CDs in the player and listen to music, and don't care a lot about getting optimal sound quality, and music geeks who are obsessed with getting the best sound quality they possibly can. The first group buys a small all-in-one boom box or compact stereo. The second group doesn't have a stereo, but rather a "sound system" that they assembled themselves from components made by multiple manufacturers, and attached to one another using expensive adamantium-plated yak-hair-insulated cables.
It's true that the iMacs aren't particularly expandable: Because they're targeted at people like that first group of music listeners, who just want an all-in-one package that works with a minimum of fuss. These people don't really want or need expandability, and providing them with expandability at the expense of other things that they would value more (such as compactness and simplicity) would be stupid.
But your claim about expandability is simply false where the PowerMacs are concerned -- these are intended more for people like the second group of listeners, and are easy to get into and easy to expand. Tell me, in what way is the expandability of these machines crippled? While they may be marginally less expandable than a build-it-yourself PC, they're far from crippled.
Jobs isn't opposed to expandability. It's just that unlike you, he understands that expandability is not an absolute, universal value of equal (and great) importance to all computer users, and that providing expandability can come at the expense of other values that are more important to many users.
Mac holds about 5% of the market. Well that is what I have been told It sure as heck seems bigger but lets say that 5% is true.
No, Macs account for about 5% of new computer sales. Because Macs tend to have longer lifetimes than PCs, that 5% of sales translates into a larger percentage of actual desktop systems in use -- I've heard that the BSA estimates them at 15%, though I can't find this on their website.
This article currently has 117 comments (at threshold 1). The one immediately below it, about a minor version OS release, has about 300. Far too few people understand or care about this issue for any progress to be made. It's simply not engaging to people in the same way that the president getting a blowjob from an intern is. This apathy ensures that the moguls will continue to consolidate their power.
Nothing personal to you but everyone here is so narrow minded. There are uses for this. If you can't think of one then it's not for you.
Welcome to Slashdot. You see this sort of thing here all the time:
TiVo: "I don't see the use for this. I never want to record television anyways, and when I do, *I* am intelligent enough to program my VCR." (Missing that TiVo completely changes the way you watch television.)
TV tuner hardware for the computer: "Why would I want to watch TV on my computer? I've got a nice couch with a big TV." (Missing that some of us live in small apartments or dorm rooms and would love to be able to save a bit of space by having the computer display to double duty.)
Macs: "Why would I want to spend all that money on a Macintosh, when I can assemble my own machine out of chewing gum, duct tape, and rubber bands, that runs twice as fast for 1/10th the price?" (Missing that most people don't like to tinker with their computer.)
Sure, it'll take some time and money to get it built and tested, but I know people who would be willing to pay for such an environment.
You missed the AC's point. Even if the distribution you describe was incredibly easy to install, it's still an extra hoop that osgeek now requires his users to jump through, and an extra expense they must deal with on top of the price of his application. While there may be some people willing to jump through that hoop, that group is a tiny fraction of the total number of users out there, meaning that osgeek is losing all of the big-market advantages he was excited about.
Every piece of infrastructure that isn't directly useful to end-users suffers the same chicken-and-egg problem: Users won't go to the trouble of installing it because they won't see what value there is in it -- there won't be any apps for it at first. And application authors won't code to the infrastructure because no users have it installed, and requiring them to install it complicates the application install process, and may also add cost.
Currently, the only way to really get around this problem on any large scale is to pre-load your infrastructure onto the machine before the machine is sold - i.e. put it into the OS.
Another possible solution is a system like FreeBSD ports, which allows the OS to figure out what pieces of infrastructure an application requires, go out and download and install them without the user having to know about it. But OS vendors have no compelling reason to do this: All the infrastructure they care about they can put into the OS themselves.
While playing my first copy of Tomb Raider, I was surprised to see those familiar "octogon tunnels" normally associated with a movie camera used in bright sunlight. I'm sure there's a technical name for them; be glad to hear it from someone if they know.
The term is "lens flare". IIRC, it's actually an artifact of bad optics, and is not something that all cameras will produce -- to some degree, it's a deliberate "effect" even when you see it in movies.
And the absurd war on drugs -- people would probably use less drugs if they were legal. The laws against drug use #1 assume that the citizens don't have the ability to use them intelligently and #2 force us to go to a doctor, even if we don't need or want to. I mean why should I go to a doctor to get medicine for things that are obvious?
I agree with you WRT the war on drugs. Right now, the only thing that keeps it alive is selective enforcement: If middle and upper class people were subject to drug laws to the same degree that poor people are, the laws would be repealed within months.
And while I also agree with you that requiring prescriptions is stupid for a lot of things, I'd like to point out one exception: Antibiotics. Improperly using antibiotics leads to the development of drug-resistant strains of diseases. This is bad for everyone, so you can't really make the same "Keep your laws off my body" argument that you can for free access to other drugs.
we still have the problem of corporations eager to figure out what breakfast cereals we prefer.
The horror!
If you can afford to put time into getting upset about this, you're more fortunate than 99% of the humans who have ever walked the earth.
Please, read Brin. He's got a much more thoughtful (and productive) take on how to maintain a reasonable balance of power between individuals and institutions than mainstream civil libertarianism.
So who pays their salaries? Where does that party get the money with which they do so?
Well, I say greedy bastards, and hope the open source community comes up with something better.
Even if they do, it probably won't matter. What you and many other technologists can't seem to acknowledge is that the hard part usually isn't coming up with new technologies, but rather getting those technologies into the hands of users in a convenient and usable form. By the time the open source community catches the MPEG-4 taillights, there will already be a load of content out there in MPEG-4 form, and no users are going to want to futz with a new format.
IMO, Netflix is interesting to nerds because it's an example of someone using computers to create a new sort of service -- sure, you could imagine doing the same thing without computers, but the entire process would be a lot more cumbersome. The computer is what makes the interface to your "rental queue" reasonable.
Compare this to, say, Amazon, which took a sort of service (catalog shopping) that predated computers and computerized it.
RAM, as I figure it, is at least 65 times more expensive (that's not 65% more, it's 6500% more).
The data isn't just sitting there static, though: It's being searched. To switch to hard drives and maintain their current performance level, they would have to increase the parallelism of the search, by having many more copies of the index. One copy of the index on disk is not really equivalent to one copy of the index in DRAM, because the DRAM index can be searched many times in the period it takes to search the HD index once.
The quantity they're trying to minimize is not dollars per megabyte, but rather dollars per (megabytes searchable per second).
Out of curiosity, how many Macs/PCs/Unix boxes are we talking about here? Knowing that you have 2 Mac techs and only 1 PC tech doesn't tell us much unless we know how many of each sort of machine is being maintained, here.
Groove is "peer to peer", but they're all about business collaboration tools. While this includes file sharing, it's only one small piece of what they do. It's not something that people are going to be installing to swap MP3s.
I wanted my Apple (now outdated) and so I invested my $3500k 4-5yrs ago, and it was/is awesome. Now with some of the new stuff they are coming out with I'm PLANNING on getting another... not just talking about it...
Amen. I'd had a growing interest in Macs as I heard about OS X -- I'd used NeXTstep some while I was in college, and thought it was great. Linux was okay, but I always found X pretty painful.
When the G4 cube came out, I cracked and bought one. Sure, it was overpriced for the features it offered, but the thing was beautiful, and I was flush with cash. It's turned out to be the best computer I've owned (thanks largely to OS X), and one of the few impulse-buys I've made that I haven't ended up viewing as a mistake, in retrospect.
Now these new machines look really tempting. I'll probably hold off for 6 months or a year (I'm no longer so flush with cash), but I'll be picking up one of the dual G4s w/SuperDrive sooner or later. It'll sort of hurt to give up the elegant little package of the cube, though.
You joke about 'The Simpsons', but: A few years ago, I moved into my own place. I didn't own a television at the time. Previously, I'd watched my roommates' TV. I knew from previous experience that I got more done without a TV around, so I figured I'd not buy one of my own.
It was around 5pm on sunday evening that I finished with the move. And I thought to myself: "You know, 'The Simpsons' will be coming on in a couple of hours." And the thought of missing the show was so unpleasant to me that I drove to the store right then and bought a small set.
I showed my mother my iPod, and she said that she would love to have one, if only she could copy her CDs onto it without having to have a computer inbetween. IMHO, an iPod-type device which lets you dump CDs straight onto it would sell like hot-cakes.
One problem with such a thing: Where would it get the disc/track title and artist info? iTunes depends on CDDB (and therefore a network connection) for that. Come to think of it -- are there any iTunes users here who can tell me what it does if you rip a CD when you're not connected to the net?
I really wanted to get Speakeasy DSL for exactly the reasons you name. They were clearly a power-user-friendly ISP. So I signed up for an installation. After a few months of Verizon failing to complete their part of the installation process, I gave up and got a cable modem.
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Or looked at the video game console market, where consoles are actually sold at a loss, because the real money is in games.
Or met anybody who listens to a lot of music, as such people can easily spend far more on CDs than on a decent stereo system.
If the hardware is useless to you without the OS, and the total cost of the two together is still within reason, why wouldn't you?
Yes, the hardware can still be useful to some people without Windows, but not nearly as many. Being cheaper than Windows isn't enough to let Linux win. It has to provide customers with more value for their money than Windows. And as long as most applications that most people want to use run on Windows but not Linux, Windows will beat Linux on the desktop.
1) The numbers you quote are "peak"numbers, obtained by optimizing for the particular test being run. The "baseline" numbers are probably a better approximation to what you'll see in real world use. Here, the story is reversed: The Dell scores 779 vs. the Sun's 701.
2) SPECFP? What about integer performance, which is more important for most applications. On SPECINT2000, the Dell whips the SunBlade both in baseline (790 vs. 537) and peak (811 vs. 610) performance measurements.
3) How about price/performance? I can't find any mention of the Sun Blade 2050 on Sun's site. However, the 900 MHz Sun Blade 1000 (which is slower than the 2050) goes for $11,000. I can get the Dell with similar amounts of memory and HD space for $2500.
4) How does the Sparc's better performance / clock make it a better CPU? Is there some intrinsic value to clock cycles that I don't know about?
Look, I think there are good reasons in some cases to buy Suns over commodity Intel hardware. And there's probably a good argument to be made that these benchmarks don't correspond well to any real world performance, anyways. But you're just fooling yourself if you think that Sun beats out Intel when it comes to raw performance as measured by benchmarks.
In fact, if you truly care about Linux, you should home school your children, so as to better shield them from the pernicious, evil influence of Windows!
This is nonsense.
Consider this: There are, roughly, two classes of stereo buyers: People who just want to throw CDs in the player and listen to music, and don't care a lot about getting optimal sound quality, and music geeks who are obsessed with getting the best sound quality they possibly can. The first group buys a small all-in-one boom box or compact stereo. The second group doesn't have a stereo, but rather a "sound system" that they assembled themselves from components made by multiple manufacturers, and attached to one another using expensive adamantium-plated yak-hair-insulated cables.
It's true that the iMacs aren't particularly expandable: Because they're targeted at people like that first group of music listeners, who just want an all-in-one package that works with a minimum of fuss. These people don't really want or need expandability, and providing them with expandability at the expense of other things that they would value more (such as compactness and simplicity) would be stupid.
But your claim about expandability is simply false where the PowerMacs are concerned -- these are intended more for people like the second group of listeners, and are easy to get into and easy to expand. Tell me, in what way is the expandability of these machines crippled? While they may be marginally less expandable than a build-it-yourself PC, they're far from crippled.
Jobs isn't opposed to expandability. It's just that unlike you, he understands that expandability is not an absolute, universal value of equal (and great) importance to all computer users, and that providing expandability can come at the expense of other values that are more important to many users.
No, Macs account for about 5% of new computer sales. Because Macs tend to have longer lifetimes than PCs, that 5% of sales translates into a larger percentage of actual desktop systems in use -- I've heard that the BSA estimates them at 15%, though I can't find this on their website.
I have a degree, don't regret it, and think it's a good idea for most people who want to work in this field, but:
There are more ways to "advance in life" than to climb the corporate ladder.
This article currently has 117 comments (at threshold 1). The one immediately below it, about a minor version OS release, has about 300. Far too few people understand or care about this issue for any progress to be made. It's simply not engaging to people in the same way that the president getting a blowjob from an intern is. This apathy ensures that the moguls will continue to consolidate their power.
We have become unworthy of self-governance.
Welcome to Slashdot. You see this sort of thing here all the time:
TiVo: "I don't see the use for this. I never want to record television anyways, and when I do, *I* am intelligent enough to program my VCR." (Missing that TiVo completely changes the way you watch television.)
TV tuner hardware for the computer: "Why would I want to watch TV on my computer? I've got a nice couch with a big TV." (Missing that some of us live in small apartments or dorm rooms and would love to be able to save a bit of space by having the computer display to double duty.)
Macs: "Why would I want to spend all that money on a Macintosh, when I can assemble my own machine out of chewing gum, duct tape, and rubber bands, that runs twice as fast for 1/10th the price?" (Missing that most people don't like to tinker with their computer.)
You missed the AC's point. Even if the distribution you describe was incredibly easy to install, it's still an extra hoop that osgeek now requires his users to jump through, and an extra expense they must deal with on top of the price of his application. While there may be some people willing to jump through that hoop, that group is a tiny fraction of the total number of users out there, meaning that osgeek is losing all of the big-market advantages he was excited about.
Every piece of infrastructure that isn't directly useful to end-users suffers the same chicken-and-egg problem: Users won't go to the trouble of installing it because they won't see what value there is in it -- there won't be any apps for it at first. And application authors won't code to the infrastructure because no users have it installed, and requiring them to install it complicates the application install process, and may also add cost.
Currently, the only way to really get around this problem on any large scale is to pre-load your infrastructure onto the machine before the machine is sold - i.e. put it into the OS.
Another possible solution is a system like FreeBSD ports, which allows the OS to figure out what pieces of infrastructure an application requires, go out and download and install them without the user having to know about it. But OS vendors have no compelling reason to do this: All the infrastructure they care about they can put into the OS themselves.
Oh really? Like it crippled the reputation of linux?
Linux is crippled in the eyes of anyone who cares a lot about ease-of-use, or just doesn't like tinkering with their computer.
The term is "lens flare". IIRC, it's actually an artifact of bad optics, and is not something that all cameras will produce -- to some degree, it's a deliberate "effect" even when you see it in movies.
Why couldn't the installation process send along the MAC address, not as part of the packet headers, but as part of the payload?
I agree with you WRT the war on drugs. Right now, the only thing that keeps it alive is selective enforcement: If middle and upper class people were subject to drug laws to the same degree that poor people are, the laws would be repealed within months.
And while I also agree with you that requiring prescriptions is stupid for a lot of things, I'd like to point out one exception: Antibiotics. Improperly using antibiotics leads to the development of drug-resistant strains of diseases. This is bad for everyone, so you can't really make the same "Keep your laws off my body" argument that you can for free access to other drugs.
The horror!
If you can afford to put time into getting upset about this, you're more fortunate than 99% of the humans who have ever walked the earth.
Please, read Brin. He's got a much more thoughtful (and productive) take on how to maintain a reasonable balance of power between individuals and institutions than mainstream civil libertarianism.
So who pays their salaries? Where does that party get the money with which they do so?
Well, I say greedy bastards, and hope the open source community comes up with something better.
Even if they do, it probably won't matter. What you and many other technologists can't seem to acknowledge is that the hard part usually isn't coming up with new technologies, but rather getting those technologies into the hands of users in a convenient and usable form. By the time the open source community catches the MPEG-4 taillights, there will already be a load of content out there in MPEG-4 form, and no users are going to want to futz with a new format.
IMO, Netflix is interesting to nerds because it's an example of someone using computers to create a new sort of service -- sure, you could imagine doing the same thing without computers, but the entire process would be a lot more cumbersome. The computer is what makes the interface to your "rental queue" reasonable.
Compare this to, say, Amazon, which took a sort of service (catalog shopping) that predated computers and computerized it.
My last few movies from Netflix have come with return sleves addressed to someplace in Worcester, so I think we're in luck. (I'm in Boston, too.)
The data isn't just sitting there static, though: It's being searched. To switch to hard drives and maintain their current performance level, they would have to increase the parallelism of the search, by having many more copies of the index. One copy of the index on disk is not really equivalent to one copy of the index in DRAM, because the DRAM index can be searched many times in the period it takes to search the HD index once.
The quantity they're trying to minimize is not dollars per megabyte, but rather dollars per (megabytes searchable per second).
Out of curiosity, how many Macs/PCs/Unix boxes are we talking about here? Knowing that you have 2 Mac techs and only 1 PC tech doesn't tell us much unless we know how many of each sort of machine is being maintained, here.
Groove is "peer to peer", but they're all about business collaboration tools. While this includes file sharing, it's only one small piece of what they do. It's not something that people are going to be installing to swap MP3s.
Amen. I'd had a growing interest in Macs as I heard about OS X -- I'd used NeXTstep some while I was in college, and thought it was great. Linux was okay, but I always found X pretty painful.
When the G4 cube came out, I cracked and bought one. Sure, it was overpriced for the features it offered, but the thing was beautiful, and I was flush with cash. It's turned out to be the best computer I've owned (thanks largely to OS X), and one of the few impulse-buys I've made that I haven't ended up viewing as a mistake, in retrospect.
Now these new machines look really tempting. I'll probably hold off for 6 months or a year (I'm no longer so flush with cash), but I'll be picking up one of the dual G4s w/SuperDrive sooner or later. It'll sort of hurt to give up the elegant little package of the cube, though.
You joke about 'The Simpsons', but: A few years ago, I moved into my own place. I didn't own a television at the time. Previously, I'd watched my roommates' TV. I knew from previous experience that I got more done without a TV around, so I figured I'd not buy one of my own.
It was around 5pm on sunday evening that I finished with the move. And I thought to myself: "You know, 'The Simpsons' will be coming on in a couple of hours." And the thought of missing the show was so unpleasant to me that I drove to the store right then and bought a small set.
One problem with such a thing: Where would it get the disc/track title and artist info? iTunes depends on CDDB (and therefore a network connection) for that. Come to think of it -- are there any iTunes users here who can tell me what it does if you rip a CD when you're not connected to the net?
I really wanted to get Speakeasy DSL for exactly the reasons you name. They were clearly a power-user-friendly ISP. So I signed up for an installation. After a few months of Verizon failing to complete their part of the installation process, I gave up and got a cable modem.