IIRC the reason this was possible is because Microsoft shrewdly made IBM sign off on non-exclusive liscensing terms for DOS. They signed away their right to use MS-DOS on a proprietary PC that day. Apple makes the whole stack and has not liscensed their software to anyone. So its not exactly the same...
There is as much "perceived value" in style and interface as there is "perceived value" in genuine performance. A computer is a tool to do something, and for the vast majority of users not running servers, the interface contributes to the tool's usefulness as much as teh megahurtz. There is value in style and interface that goes well beyond workflow productivity enhancement. How many girls have you picked up at Starbucks with that incredibly thrifty, yet awesomely expandible, white box PC you built in your parents basement? Yeah, thats what I thought...:-)
Name one thing that someone buying a mini would do with it that would require them to replace it every 2 years vs. the 3 to 5 you mention? And what is this "regular work" that people do that requires an xMac, but you can't do on a Mini? Last I checked "regular Microsoft Office" works fine on a Mini, and the "creative apps".. well those work too, but if you do it for a living, a Mac Pro will more than pay for itself...
They don't have a consumer desktop line, which is what a whole lot of people and companies want. Their Mac Pros are good for the money if and only if you actually need all the high end hardware they mandate. The entry level Mac Pro is $2800 with no monitor. Now that's no surprising as it features things like dual quad core Xeons. Ok, fine, but there are very, very, very few apps that can use 8 cores. There are, in fact, very few that can use 4 cores. So for most people it, like much of the other high end hardware you have to get (ECC RAM, for example) is a waste of money. Consider that MPC (our supplier at work) will happily sell me a single quad core desktop for just under $1000. Think about this for a second, most consumers buy laptops. Over 60% of computers Apple sells are portable. For those who don't, they are buying iMacs in droves. For them, the convinience of a decently powered C2D machine with a built in large LCD, a big hard disk, and a sleek form factor is a winning combo.
Next, Apple's business customers *do* use apps that can scale to 4 and 8 cores and use all the CPU cycles they can get. Their business customers aren't people using Word/Excel etc.. who would be equally as well served by iMacs, they are digital media professionals who use Final Cut, Photoshop, After Effects, Maya, etc... All of these apps will use as many cores as you throw at them. These are also the customers for which color calibration and the ability to upgrade GPU matters. For these users, a comparible Dell or HP workstation costs as much or more than the Mac Pro and doesn't run OSX.
For those few business people who use desktop macs for non-demanding, non-creative puropses, and for whose companies are ideologically opposed to an All-in-One, there is no reason a Mini wouldn't work for them. I suspect most companies who have these types of workers aren't buying them macs though, because a 200$ crap-box from HP will work for them for even less money.
The point is, of the few consumers that don't buy a laptop and don't buy an iMac, not much market truly exists. Those people would be well served by a Mini, or if they really can't resist the urge to tinker, they'd be better of kitbashing themselves a Linux box. Because lets face it, thats what they were going to do anyways.
If you look at the data, consumers hardly, if ever aftermarket-upgrade their computers in the way people on slashdot envision. Most hardware add-ons are USB. And even then, they hardly-if-ever have more than one or two USB devices. The people who do buy hubs. Thats why they buy iMacs. Apple *has* a low cost computer with no monitor that has a fast C2D in it and graphics good enough to use most consumer apps. Its called the Mini and if you look at the stats of consumers who walk into Apple stores, they buy iMacs almost 10:1 over minis. Its because when they look at the total value proposition. By the time they add a 24" LCD to a 500$ mini, they might as well buy an iMac.
It doesn't matter if it holds up in court. Can psystar afford to hire lawyers to even defend against this type of suit? Thats usually how these things go. Its not like they are suing HP here. Its a couple of kids building cheap white box PCs. Unless one of their parents is mega-loaded, they won't stand a chance against Apple legal...
I guess... except when I upgraded from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, I understood and welcomed the auth dialogs when I was installing software and editing system settings. I understood that this was protecting me against malware. It was billed to be a "good thing" by Apple, and Apple explained that this allowed them to do things like multiple accounts, etc.. Users actually revolted against app vendors who didn't follow the ADC guidelines to make their Apps work on OSX and not require admin rights to run. Anyone remember Quark!:-)
Of course it could be that in the case of OSX, there were so many other cool new features compared to OS9 that people generally overlooked the minor annoyance of typing their password when they installed software. Perhaps MS problem isn't UAC, its the lack of other reasons to move to Vista - and thus get used to and put up with UAC.
Dell beat themselves at their own game. They created the commodity PC market, and now they have nothing to compete on except for price...
It turns out that now-a-days, people want more than just price. They want design, portability, battery life, higher end features, an OS that works without having an IT dept to maintain it-and they are willing to pay for it. Those people are now buying Apple notebooks and iMacs. The clunky old inspirion doesn't cut it.
The other end of the market, the bargain basement cheap custom PCs that businesses buy by the boatload. Well, it took 10 years, but everyone else caught up with Dell's business model and are doing the same thing. There really is no cost advantage or ease of procurement when buying Dell vs. any other PC mfgr. Dell can't drop the price any lower to compete, because their margins are already razor thin. Their supply chain is leveraged to the max, so there is no room for efficiency there either.
Dell is getting beat at its own "cheap" game, and has no model to compete for the business of users that want more than just "cheap". I'd say they are between a rock and a hard place.
I can vouch for comcasts incompetence. You can snap your fingers and they will have a cable guy there "installing" for you, but their service is anything but fast and reliable. Especially in densely populated areas. I get the impression that they frequently oversell their cable nodes. Their business package is OK, but it costs more. At least you can get some sort of guaranteed service there... If I were in your shoes, I'd just get the FIOS. Its the best thing out there now.
How is this so? They just introduced a SDK based on Cocoa (an excelled Object Oriented GUI framework) for free, and have essentially created an online package management system complete with updates out of their store. They also added nearly every feature businesses asked for with respect to email/calendar and security. The press headlines seem overwhelmingly positive. Looks like they are building a lot of momentum to me...
I hear this from time to time, but what do you mean by "slowest decoding"? Last time I checked, all of the major editing apps use quicktime to author, and FWIW quicktime (using modern codecs, not the 1990 stuff) plays video very seamlessly. Even on Windows, playing an mpeg4 video in Quicktime vs. WMP, there is a huge difference. WMP skips more, and you can't accurately scrub using WM.
Who says apple is going to prevent "free" applications. Just because they want to sign apps that go on the phone, doesn't mean you have to pay for them. They likely want to protect the network. In any case, very high quality freeware/shareware are a large part of the value of the mac and have been since its inception. I seriously doubt they would stand in the way of this on the iphone. Time will tell..
Last time I checked, at least with respect to the iphone, Apple went out of their way to make available information about how to write Web 2.0 apps for it within days of its release. Then, when people complained that they wanted real apps, they decided to release an SDK (which was probably planned all along, just not complete enough to release when the phone hit). So in the 6 months between the iphone debut and the release of the SDK, a lot of people trashed their iphones with hacks because they couldn't wait for the real deal. Yep, thats pretty much what happened. What now about Apple's fault?:-)
Yes, the new feature set has to be compelling enough to focus on it in its entirety without "dissing" other products. Unfortunately, in effort to get it out the door, Microsoft removed what they had originally claimed were going to be the new compelling features of Vista long before it was released, so they kind of set themselves up for this. They also have a PR problem. The press frames their products as horrible and insecure (which may very well be the case) much of the time, which forces them into a reactionary role where they have to constantly explain how the next version will "suck less". This takes away from any potential positive messaging about new functionality.
Oh right, yeah I guess thats a good point. However, a NAS isn't really comparing apples to apples. Network devices are a whole different deal. They aren't fast enough to be practical in many circumstances (although they work well in others).
I don't see how any disk is OS dependent. Its just a disk, format it however you want! HFS+J, NTFS, FAT, ext2, whatever... You don't have to use the formatting that came on the disk.
Well I thought this was the case about a year ago. I had an old unlocked T-68i that was originally on T-mobile. My company had switched to ATT and I had switched and gotten a new phone, a T637. The only problem is, I had lost this phone, and my company was unable to get me a new phone for over 2 weeks. (Corp accounts have to go through a different service, can't use stores). Anyhow, I went to an ATT store and asked them if they could just sell me a sim and activate it in my T68i for the next few weeks until I got my new phone. No matter how many times I asked, they wouldn't do it. They would only activate a SIM for a phone I purchased through them. They kept giving me FUD about how the old phone "might not work", etc.. but in reality I suspect that the sale guy wouldn't get his bonus if they sold me just a SIM. So much for GSM portability.. in theory it works, but someone should tell their sales reps!
In order to quell the current skepticism about childhood immunizations, they need to do a lot more work to explain why some children seem to turn autistic overnight after getting certain vaccinations. And even if they haven't linked it to disease, they also need to stop putting ethyl-mercury in flu vaccinations. Just because they haven't come up with a disease caused by it, that doesn't mean injecting mercury is good for you, and it certainly isn't necessary for the vaccine to work. Given the controversy about these things and the effort to "sweep it under the rug" by many agencies, I'm not surprised at all people are skeptical...
Because most if not all classes at Universities use email discussion groups, as do on campus clubs, etc... Also, most schools use email as a primary means for students to contact professors and for professors to distribute notices to their classes. If you don't give your students email, how are you gonna do all this? Google apps, yahoo hosted, whatever... I think students need email just as employees of companies need email.
Whether to use outsourced webmail for students or not is one issue, but categorizing "higher ed" as universally having below average skills in IT is totally wrong. I went to school at a large Big Ten institution and from my experience as both a student and as one of those "college students who needed spending cash" who worked in IT there, I have to say I was very impressed. They never had service outages, their connections were lightning fast, and the services provided were pretty much everything you needed and nothing you didn't. The in house solutions were creative and well thought out. After all, many of the "students who needed cash" IT people in college (like myself) were CS/CSE majors who actually understood the fundamentals of how systems worked, and ended up working for the very vendors that ended up making the products used when they graduated.
After I graduated, I went on to work at a large IT consulting/systems integrator that worked in the business/government space. I have to say that in my professional life I have run into many more "business" IT managers or workers who fit the "below average skills" category than I ever met in college. The decisions made in business IT just make me cringe compared to what I saw at my University. There is much more cost cutting "to make me look good to my boss" in spite of the quality and robustness of solutions, much more reliance on vendors who run rampant pursuing their own goals of lock-in rather than coming up with sensible solutions for their customers, and to be quite honest, a much lower bar for hiring IT staff. Lets face it, its not all that hard to get a job as an IT person in business. You really just have to have an MCSE.
The other thing you might not want to forget is things like LDAP and Kerberos, distributed file systems, cryptography, and in some cases operating systems themselves came out of technology created in University IT labs.
Most antibiotics don't have antifungal activity, therefore it wouldn't inhibit yeast cultures. I fact, one of the risks of antibiotic therapy is yeast infection. Long term treatment with antibiotics can disrupt the normal bacteria balance in the body (in addition to killing whatever bug you wanted it to kill), and yeast can proliferate causing anything from a minor irritation to full blown secondary fungal infection.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC the reason this was possible is because Microsoft shrewdly made IBM sign off on non-exclusive liscensing terms for DOS. They signed away their right to use MS-DOS on a proprietary PC that day. Apple makes the whole stack and has not liscensed their software to anyone. So its not exactly the same...
Name one thing that someone buying a mini would do with it that would require them to replace it every 2 years vs. the 3 to 5 you mention? And what is this "regular work" that people do that requires an xMac, but you can't do on a Mini? Last I checked "regular Microsoft Office" works fine on a Mini, and the "creative apps".. well those work too, but if you do it for a living, a Mac Pro will more than pay for itself...
Next, Apple's business customers *do* use apps that can scale to 4 and 8 cores and use all the CPU cycles they can get. Their business customers aren't people using Word/Excel etc.. who would be equally as well served by iMacs, they are digital media professionals who use Final Cut, Photoshop, After Effects, Maya, etc... All of these apps will use as many cores as you throw at them. These are also the customers for which color calibration and the ability to upgrade GPU matters. For these users, a comparible Dell or HP workstation costs as much or more than the Mac Pro and doesn't run OSX.
For those few business people who use desktop macs for non-demanding, non-creative puropses, and for whose companies are ideologically opposed to an All-in-One, there is no reason a Mini wouldn't work for them. I suspect most companies who have these types of workers aren't buying them macs though, because a 200$ crap-box from HP will work for them for even less money.
The point is, of the few consumers that don't buy a laptop and don't buy an iMac, not much market truly exists. Those people would be well served by a Mini, or if they really can't resist the urge to tinker, they'd be better of kitbashing themselves a Linux box. Because lets face it, thats what they were going to do anyways.
If you look at the data, consumers hardly, if ever aftermarket-upgrade their computers in the way people on slashdot envision. Most hardware add-ons are USB. And even then, they hardly-if-ever have more than one or two USB devices. The people who do buy hubs. Thats why they buy iMacs. Apple *has* a low cost computer with no monitor that has a fast C2D in it and graphics good enough to use most consumer apps. Its called the Mini and if you look at the stats of consumers who walk into Apple stores, they buy iMacs almost 10:1 over minis. Its because when they look at the total value proposition. By the time they add a 24" LCD to a 500$ mini, they might as well buy an iMac.
It doesn't matter if it holds up in court. Can psystar afford to hire lawyers to even defend against this type of suit? Thats usually how these things go. Its not like they are suing HP here. Its a couple of kids building cheap white box PCs. Unless one of their parents is mega-loaded, they won't stand a chance against Apple legal...
Right except windows NT has its roots in VMS, which IIRC a multi-user system. So somewhere along the way they got lost...
I guess... except when I upgraded from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, I understood and welcomed the auth dialogs when I was installing software and editing system settings. I understood that this was protecting me against malware. It was billed to be a "good thing" by Apple, and Apple explained that this allowed them to do things like multiple accounts, etc.. Users actually revolted against app vendors who didn't follow the ADC guidelines to make their Apps work on OSX and not require admin rights to run. Anyone remember Quark! :-)
Of course it could be that in the case of OSX, there were so many other cool new features compared to OS9 that people generally overlooked the minor annoyance of typing their password when they installed software. Perhaps MS problem isn't UAC, its the lack of other reasons to move to Vista - and thus get used to and put up with UAC.
Dell beat themselves at their own game. They created the commodity PC market, and now they have nothing to compete on except for price...
It turns out that now-a-days, people want more than just price. They want design, portability, battery life, higher end features, an OS that works without having an IT dept to maintain it-and they are willing to pay for it. Those people are now buying Apple notebooks and iMacs. The clunky old inspirion doesn't cut it.
The other end of the market, the bargain basement cheap custom PCs that businesses buy by the boatload. Well, it took 10 years, but everyone else caught up with Dell's business model and are doing the same thing. There really is no cost advantage or ease of procurement when buying Dell vs. any other PC mfgr. Dell can't drop the price any lower to compete, because their margins are already razor thin. Their supply chain is leveraged to the max, so there is no room for efficiency there either.
Dell is getting beat at its own "cheap" game, and has no model to compete for the business of users that want more than just "cheap". I'd say they are between a rock and a hard place.
Yeah and they also tell people their DVR is better than the TivoHD or Series 3. Anyone who has used both knows its a total lie.
I can vouch for comcasts incompetence. You can snap your fingers and they will have a cable guy there "installing" for you, but their service is anything but fast and reliable. Especially in densely populated areas. I get the impression that they frequently oversell their cable nodes. Their business package is OK, but it costs more. At least you can get some sort of guaranteed service there... If I were in your shoes, I'd just get the FIOS. Its the best thing out there now.
How is this so? They just introduced a SDK based on Cocoa (an excelled Object Oriented GUI framework) for free, and have essentially created an online package management system complete with updates out of their store. They also added nearly every feature businesses asked for with respect to email/calendar and security. The press headlines seem overwhelmingly positive. Looks like they are building a lot of momentum to me...
I hear this from time to time, but what do you mean by "slowest decoding"? Last time I checked, all of the major editing apps use quicktime to author, and FWIW quicktime (using modern codecs, not the 1990 stuff) plays video very seamlessly. Even on Windows, playing an mpeg4 video in Quicktime vs. WMP, there is a huge difference. WMP skips more, and you can't accurately scrub using WM.
Who says apple is going to prevent "free" applications. Just because they want to sign apps that go on the phone, doesn't mean you have to pay for them. They likely want to protect the network. In any case, very high quality freeware/shareware are a large part of the value of the mac and have been since its inception. I seriously doubt they would stand in the way of this on the iphone. Time will tell..
So what does this have to do with DRM exactly? Looks like a bug to me...
Last time I checked, at least with respect to the iphone, Apple went out of their way to make available information about how to write Web 2.0 apps for it within days of its release. Then, when people complained that they wanted real apps, they decided to release an SDK (which was probably planned all along, just not complete enough to release when the phone hit). So in the 6 months between the iphone debut and the release of the SDK, a lot of people trashed their iphones with hacks because they couldn't wait for the real deal. Yep, thats pretty much what happened. What now about Apple's fault? :-)
How hard is it to make a computer frickin count votes. I mean give me a break.
Voting machine:
"Click the candidate you want to vote for A) B) C) D)..."
"Are you sure you want to vote for candidate B?"
"Are you really sure?"
"Really Really Sure?"
OK heres your receipt. Thanks for voting.
Thats like the simplest computer program on earth. What did they use some circa 1995 pentiums with the math error?
Yes, the new feature set has to be compelling enough to focus on it in its entirety without "dissing" other products. Unfortunately, in effort to get it out the door, Microsoft removed what they had originally claimed were going to be the new compelling features of Vista long before it was released, so they kind of set themselves up for this. They also have a PR problem. The press frames their products as horrible and insecure (which may very well be the case) much of the time, which forces them into a reactionary role where they have to constantly explain how the next version will "suck less". This takes away from any potential positive messaging about new functionality.
Oh right, yeah I guess thats a good point. However, a NAS isn't really comparing apples to apples. Network devices are a whole different deal. They aren't fast enough to be practical in many circumstances (although they work well in others).
I don't see how any disk is OS dependent. Its just a disk, format it however you want! HFS+J, NTFS, FAT, ext2, whatever... You don't have to use the formatting that came on the disk.
Well I thought this was the case about a year ago. I had an old unlocked T-68i that was originally on T-mobile. My company had switched to ATT and I had switched and gotten a new phone, a T637. The only problem is, I had lost this phone, and my company was unable to get me a new phone for over 2 weeks. (Corp accounts have to go through a different service, can't use stores). Anyhow, I went to an ATT store and asked them if they could just sell me a sim and activate it in my T68i for the next few weeks until I got my new phone. No matter how many times I asked, they wouldn't do it. They would only activate a SIM for a phone I purchased through them. They kept giving me FUD about how the old phone "might not work", etc.. but in reality I suspect that the sale guy wouldn't get his bonus if they sold me just a SIM. So much for GSM portability.. in theory it works, but someone should tell their sales reps!
In order to quell the current skepticism about childhood immunizations, they need to do a lot more work to explain why some children seem to turn autistic overnight after getting certain vaccinations. And even if they haven't linked it to disease, they also need to stop putting ethyl-mercury in flu vaccinations. Just because they haven't come up with a disease caused by it, that doesn't mean injecting mercury is good for you, and it certainly isn't necessary for the vaccine to work. Given the controversy about these things and the effort to "sweep it under the rug" by many agencies, I'm not surprised at all people are skeptical...
Because most if not all classes at Universities use email discussion groups, as do on campus clubs, etc... Also, most schools use email as a primary means for students to contact professors and for professors to distribute notices to their classes. If you don't give your students email, how are you gonna do all this? Google apps, yahoo hosted, whatever... I think students need email just as employees of companies need email.
Whether to use outsourced webmail for students or not is one issue, but categorizing "higher ed" as universally having below average skills in IT is totally wrong. I went to school at a large Big Ten institution and from my experience as both a student and as one of those "college students who needed spending cash" who worked in IT there, I have to say I was very impressed. They never had service outages, their connections were lightning fast, and the services provided were pretty much everything you needed and nothing you didn't. The in house solutions were creative and well thought out. After all, many of the "students who needed cash" IT people in college (like myself) were CS/CSE majors who actually understood the fundamentals of how systems worked, and ended up working for the very vendors that ended up making the products used when they graduated.
After I graduated, I went on to work at a large IT consulting/systems integrator that worked in the business/government space. I have to say that in my professional life I have run into many more "business" IT managers or workers who fit the "below average skills" category than I ever met in college. The decisions made in business IT just make me cringe compared to what I saw at my University. There is much more cost cutting "to make me look good to my boss" in spite of the quality and robustness of solutions, much more reliance on vendors who run rampant pursuing their own goals of lock-in rather than coming up with sensible solutions for their customers, and to be quite honest, a much lower bar for hiring IT staff. Lets face it, its not all that hard to get a job as an IT person in business. You really just have to have an MCSE.
The other thing you might not want to forget is things like LDAP and Kerberos, distributed file systems, cryptography, and in some cases operating systems themselves came out of technology created in University IT labs.
Most antibiotics don't have antifungal activity, therefore it wouldn't inhibit yeast cultures. I fact, one of the risks of antibiotic therapy is yeast infection. Long term treatment with antibiotics can disrupt the normal bacteria balance in the body (in addition to killing whatever bug you wanted it to kill), and yeast can proliferate causing anything from a minor irritation to full blown secondary fungal infection.
Or you can turn it off, or use another backup solution...?