(The inevitable "I am legend" reference, on the other hand, has no theoretical basis, and is a little like me saying "Terminator!!!" every time someone talks about linux.)
Sure it has no basis, but can you really be 100% sure that what you are doing won't somehow go wrong? And in I Am Legend this was very very similar to what happened, with the terminator it was basically machines that could think, and no matter how great Linux is, it can't really think now can it? (Well, perhaps the kernel running on Linus' box might be able to...)
All these moves by MS has made me consider that inadvertently MS is making Windows shareware. And perhaps if things like this could be proven in court Windows might become shareware because clearly this seems to me that MS is offering a "trial version" of XP for people at no cost and you have to pay money to "upgrade" it to the normal version.
It is all the stupid patent issues. It has become that you can't even write a new OS without it being attacked by patent threats, let alone anything in hardware.
No, when it comes to something as major as the web, all major standards (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) need to be adhered to by the standards. For example, Canvas has a lot of potential, unfortunately MS seems determined not to include that in IE.
Yes, but look at even the most proprietary "standards". The NES still has a thriving emulation scene, it has some homebrew programs too. Obviously someone has a connector that lets you dump ROMs from a cartage. Same could be said for the 2600.
Sure, but how many people are geeks? Lets say the generic person opens up a time capsule filled with cassette tapes and floppy disks. What do you think most people are going to do A) Check the labels on the cassette tapes and toss them in a box and toss the floppies or B) Listen to the cassette tapes and purchase a USB floppy drive and look at the data on the floppies. Yes, us geeks would usually do letter B, (though most of us would have already had a USB floppy drive on hand) but the average person thinks that it is obsolete and isn't worth looking at.
Yes, but lets say it gets a bit wet in there and the screen shorts out, or there happens to be a minor earthquake that destroys the HD. Or the RAM gets corrupted. How many people have a laptop from 25 years ago that still works?
But these are investors. They have no loyalty, they just want to get a quick buck or be able to retire in 20 years rich. When someone tells you that your marketshare went down from 97% to 93%, a drop of 4%, some people will get scared and take out money. Likewise, if Apple can say that the Mac gained 3% in the last year, investors don't really care if it went from 3% or 6%.
I would argue that shareholders care a lot more about their marketcap than their marketshare.
Yes, but you have to get investors from somewhere. Even though MS keeps making money, if I had invested in MS I would be selling my stocks. Why? Because MS's marketshare has went down sharply. If McDonalds had a monopoly on drive thrus and everyone wanted to go to a drive thru and so McDonalds prospered, but yet when Burger King had a drive thru and food that tasted better than McDonalds I'm sure that many people would take out their McDonalds shares and invest in Burger King.
Mac is only growing because people see a lowercase "i" in front of everything and think it looks cool. Secondly, more people are buying Macs because everyone knows that Vista sucks and Linux isn't quite ready for a computer newbie to install. Once a new president is elected and the economy doesn't immediately recover, people will panic and stop buying expensive computers.
It's fairly widely known that hardware sales at Apple drive OS development. I would suspect that the clones winning this legal battle would force Apple to lower their hardware prices, and raise their software prices.
How? You seem to think that with a 5% marketshare in all computers and charging $110 for an OS isn't going to get your money. You are wrong. If you figure that about 365 million people own computers, and 5% of them own Mac and that OS X costs $110, and you do the math, you get to where Apple basically makes about $2 billion I think you can run a company on that, let alone develop an already mature OS. And when you count in that by opening up OS X to all computers Apple is only going to increase in marketshare, it will make for a very profitable business indeed. Take a look at Linux and other OSS projects, a lot of them are very, very, good. And some of the ones that are very, very, good, depend solely on donations or ad-revenue. Not a multi-million dollar budget that Apple has to work with.
Sure, iLife might be free with a new Mac, but they are clearly selling it. Think of it like a bundle deal where you get Office with a new Windows computer, saying that MS doesn't sell Office is a lie, much as how saying that Apple doesn't sell iLife.
iTunes comes as a free download, but don't you think that Apple makes money on each downloaded song? Money with promotions? Apple makes money off of iTunes in a similar way that Linux companies make money with Linux: By selling more than just the software.
They add value to the integrated products Apple offers; you can't assume their development would be sustainable if they were all that was on sale.
How wouldn't it be sustainable? Linux and other OSS projects make good software with absolutely no money save for donations, etc. Surely Apple can make a decent OS that needs little fixing by selling it for $100,
According to various sources, about 365 million people own computers. Getting Apple's ~5% marketshare gives about 18,250,000 now take that by $110 (about the price of OS X) Gives a total of $ 2,007,500,000 now tell me that that isn't enough to keep a business profitable and make a good OS. Not to mention that take that by about every 7 years when the person gets a new computer and you have a money machine.
Microsoft can get away with being an OS- and office-only company because they have 20 times more customers buying Windows. You can bet they don't spend 20 times as much developing it, though. Scale is on their side and not Apple's.
Yes, but Apple will grow when it stops being Mac only and stops with the absurd pricing of hardware. It is very, very, hard to justify a $600 purchase of a new Mac when I can get a $400 system with the same specs. Myself, I would buy OS X if it was easy to install on a normal computer, and many others would too.
Though IANAL, I think that the fact that the default OS X system checks to see if it is a Mac or not violates principles of anti-trust laws. Before, most systems that were not Macs did not contain a PPC CPU so the programs were compiled for the PPC architecture. Now it is an x86 binary and the fact that it checks if it is a Mac or not could be taken as an anti-trust thing.
If Apple was a software company, then they wouldn't be losing money.
Then explain to me why Apple is making iLife, OS X, iPhone OS, iTunes, etc.
it could spell the end of Apple. Without Apple, no more OS X development. Parasites are never beneficial to anything but themselves.
Riiiight, like you know how MS managed to go bankrupt after IBM PC compatible clones came on the market.
Apple can live on the iPod, iPhone, and the Macs. Sure, some people will go buy OS X and install it on a normal computer, that still makes money for Apple you act as if OS X is somehow some radically new OS. It isn't. It is BSD with a nice GUI and Coco, etc. All the various versions of OS X do is change up the GUI, fix some bugs and add in a couple of new features. Charging $100 for an OS is enough money to keep development of it going. You act as if Apple sells OS X as a loss, which they clearly don't.
Honestly, your date of birth, age, address, full name is worth absolutely nothing to the average person. Secondly, how many people actually run packet sniffers for malicious purposes? Not that many, then take that number and see how many really care about your address and name? Few, very few. Now, if this contained our social security number, we might be worried, but for this? It is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Ok, now aside from BSD (which, has Linux binary emulation you can enable to make Flash work), Flash works on just about every major OS there is along with any major browser.
So what is a major current browser that isn't supported? I don't see any (unless you are talking about text-based or console-based browsers such as lynx). Now, does Flash have problems? Yes. But saying it doesn't work on every current OS and browser is just plain wrong.
Yes but as far as I can tell, the one or two year old hardware still has the horrible drivers (correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't installed Linux on an ATI box for a while).
GNewSense is not meant for the average person the way Ubuntu/Fedora/OS X/Windows is. It is meant more or less for developers who want to either A) have a totally free system or B) have a free system as a base for other distros.
No matter what the people from the FSF will tell you, GNewSense is not meant for the average person.
And I'm not clear on what advantages GNewSense would have over OpenBSD.
Well, GNewSense is based on Linux which gives you slightly more software than *BSD (yes, you can emulate Linux on BSD). And GNewSense seems a lot more easy for the average computer user to install rather than OpenBSD (not that an average user would install either OpenBSD or GNewsense).
Why don't you use Ubuntu? And I'm not trying to troll, but why would the average person use GNewSense as a normal desktop rather than using Ubuntu which seems to have more of everything (more repos, more drivers, etc)
Take a look at ATI. ATI is working on releasing the specs of their cards and helping to write Open Source drivers. But they are not ready yet and they still have some legal issues that they are working out.
But in the meantime they have released good binary drivers.
I take it someone has never used ATI's drivers. The binary ones are horrible. On the other hand nVidia's proprietary drivers are decent or better.
Slashdot Mirror
The key problem with this is that Comcast's subscribers most likely won't know how much bandwidth they have used.
(The inevitable "I am legend" reference, on the other hand, has no theoretical basis, and is a little like me saying "Terminator!!!" every time someone talks about linux.)
Sure it has no basis, but can you really be 100% sure that what you are doing won't somehow go wrong? And in I Am Legend this was very very similar to what happened, with the terminator it was basically machines that could think, and no matter how great Linux is, it can't really think now can it? (Well, perhaps the kernel running on Linus' box might be able to...)
All these moves by MS has made me consider that inadvertently MS is making Windows shareware. And perhaps if things like this could be proven in court Windows might become shareware because clearly this seems to me that MS is offering a "trial version" of XP for people at no cost and you have to pay money to "upgrade" it to the normal version.
It is all the stupid patent issues. It has become that you can't even write a new OS without it being attacked by patent threats, let alone anything in hardware.
No, when it comes to something as major as the web, all major standards (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) need to be adhered to by the standards. For example, Canvas has a lot of potential, unfortunately MS seems determined not to include that in IE.
Yes, but look at even the most proprietary "standards". The NES still has a thriving emulation scene, it has some homebrew programs too. Obviously someone has a connector that lets you dump ROMs from a cartage. Same could be said for the 2600.
Sure, but how many people are geeks? Lets say the generic person opens up a time capsule filled with cassette tapes and floppy disks. What do you think most people are going to do A) Check the labels on the cassette tapes and toss them in a box and toss the floppies or B) Listen to the cassette tapes and purchase a USB floppy drive and look at the data on the floppies. Yes, us geeks would usually do letter B, (though most of us would have already had a USB floppy drive on hand) but the average person thinks that it is obsolete and isn't worth looking at.
Yes, but lets say it gets a bit wet in there and the screen shorts out, or there happens to be a minor earthquake that destroys the HD. Or the RAM gets corrupted. How many people have a laptop from 25 years ago that still works?
Ummm... I'm sure that most of us who are 25 years old or older have pictures of themselves that are stored in bad conditions and still look decent.
But these are investors. They have no loyalty, they just want to get a quick buck or be able to retire in 20 years rich. When someone tells you that your marketshare went down from 97% to 93%, a drop of 4%, some people will get scared and take out money. Likewise, if Apple can say that the Mac gained 3% in the last year, investors don't really care if it went from 3% or 6%.
I would argue that shareholders care a lot more about their marketcap than their marketshare.
Yes, but you have to get investors from somewhere. Even though MS keeps making money, if I had invested in MS I would be selling my stocks. Why? Because MS's marketshare has went down sharply. If McDonalds had a monopoly on drive thrus and everyone wanted to go to a drive thru and so McDonalds prospered, but yet when Burger King had a drive thru and food that tasted better than McDonalds I'm sure that many people would take out their McDonalds shares and invest in Burger King.
Mac is only growing because people see a lowercase "i" in front of everything and think it looks cool. Secondly, more people are buying Macs because everyone knows that Vista sucks and Linux isn't quite ready for a computer newbie to install. Once a new president is elected and the economy doesn't immediately recover, people will panic and stop buying expensive computers.
It's fairly widely known that hardware sales at Apple drive OS development. I would suspect that the clones winning this legal battle would force Apple to lower their hardware prices, and raise their software prices.
How? You seem to think that with a 5% marketshare in all computers and charging $110 for an OS isn't going to get your money. You are wrong. If you figure that about 365 million people own computers, and 5% of them own Mac and that OS X costs $110, and you do the math, you get to where Apple basically makes about $2 billion I think you can run a company on that, let alone develop an already mature OS. And when you count in that by opening up OS X to all computers Apple is only going to increase in marketshare, it will make for a very profitable business indeed. Take a look at Linux and other OSS projects, a lot of them are very, very, good. And some of the ones that are very, very, good, depend solely on donations or ad-revenue. Not a multi-million dollar budget that Apple has to work with.
All of those come free with Apple hardware (and one, iTunes, is free to everyone with no strings attached).
Then will you explain why: http://www.apple.com/ilife/ tries to sell you
Buy iLife '08 $79 ($99 Family pack)
Sure, iLife might be free with a new Mac, but they are clearly selling it. Think of it like a bundle deal where you get Office with a new Windows computer, saying that MS doesn't sell Office is a lie, much as how saying that Apple doesn't sell iLife.
iTunes comes as a free download, but don't you think that Apple makes money on each downloaded song? Money with promotions? Apple makes money off of iTunes in a similar way that Linux companies make money with Linux: By selling more than just the software.
They add value to the integrated products Apple offers; you can't assume their development would be sustainable if they were all that was on sale.
How wouldn't it be sustainable? Linux and other OSS projects make good software with absolutely no money save for donations, etc. Surely Apple can make a decent OS that needs little fixing by selling it for $100,
According to various sources, about 365 million people own computers. Getting Apple's ~5% marketshare gives about 18,250,000 now take that by $110 (about the price of OS X) Gives a total of $ 2,007,500,000 now tell me that that isn't enough to keep a business profitable and make a good OS. Not to mention that take that by about every 7 years when the person gets a new computer and you have a money machine.
Microsoft can get away with being an OS- and office-only company because they have 20 times more customers buying Windows. You can bet they don't spend 20 times as much developing it, though. Scale is on their side and not Apple's.
Yes, but Apple will grow when it stops being Mac only and stops with the absurd pricing of hardware. It is very, very, hard to justify a $600 purchase of a new Mac when I can get a $400 system with the same specs. Myself, I would buy OS X if it was easy to install on a normal computer, and many others would too.
Though IANAL, I think that the fact that the default OS X system checks to see if it is a Mac or not violates principles of anti-trust laws. Before, most systems that were not Macs did not contain a PPC CPU so the programs were compiled for the PPC architecture. Now it is an x86 binary and the fact that it checks if it is a Mac or not could be taken as an anti-trust thing.
If Apple was a software company, then they wouldn't be losing money.
Then explain to me why Apple is making iLife, OS X, iPhone OS, iTunes, etc.
it could spell the end of Apple. Without Apple, no more OS X development. Parasites are never beneficial to anything but themselves.
Riiiight, like you know how MS managed to go bankrupt after IBM PC compatible clones came on the market.
Apple can live on the iPod, iPhone, and the Macs. Sure, some people will go buy OS X and install it on a normal computer, that still makes money for Apple you act as if OS X is somehow some radically new OS. It isn't. It is BSD with a nice GUI and Coco, etc. All the various versions of OS X do is change up the GUI, fix some bugs and add in a couple of new features. Charging $100 for an OS is enough money to keep development of it going. You act as if Apple sells OS X as a loss, which they clearly don't.
Honestly, what are you going to do if the servers gets hacked? You can't exactly go to the hacker's computers and erase the data can you?
Honestly, your date of birth, age, address, full name is worth absolutely nothing to the average person. Secondly, how many people actually run packet sniffers for malicious purposes? Not that many, then take that number and see how many really care about your address and name? Few, very few. Now, if this contained our social security number, we might be worried, but for this? It is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Ok, now aside from BSD (which, has Linux binary emulation you can enable to make Flash work), Flash works on just about every major OS there is along with any major browser.
OS X? Yep
Windows? Yep
Linux? Yep
Internet Explorer? Yep
Firefox? Yes
Safari? Yes
Konqueror? yes
Opera? Yes
So what is a major current browser that isn't supported? I don't see any (unless you are talking about text-based or console-based browsers such as lynx). Now, does Flash have problems? Yes. But saying it doesn't work on every current OS and browser is just plain wrong.
But are the latest ATI drivers only for the latest ATI hardware or is there now a good driver for a 2-3 year old card?
Yes but as far as I can tell, the one or two year old hardware still has the horrible drivers (correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't installed Linux on an ATI box for a while).
GNewSense is not meant for the average person the way Ubuntu/Fedora/OS X/Windows is. It is meant more or less for developers who want to either A) have a totally free system or B) have a free system as a base for other distros.
No matter what the people from the FSF will tell you, GNewSense is not meant for the average person.
And I'm not clear on what advantages GNewSense would have over OpenBSD.
Well, GNewSense is based on Linux which gives you slightly more software than *BSD (yes, you can emulate Linux on BSD). And GNewSense seems a lot more easy for the average computer user to install rather than OpenBSD (not that an average user would install either OpenBSD or GNewsense).
Why don't you use Ubuntu? And I'm not trying to troll, but why would the average person use GNewSense as a normal desktop rather than using Ubuntu which seems to have more of everything (more repos, more drivers, etc)
Take a look at ATI. ATI is working on releasing the specs of their cards and helping to write Open Source drivers. But they are not ready yet and they still have some legal issues that they are working out. But in the meantime they have released good binary drivers.
I take it someone has never used ATI's drivers. The binary ones are horrible. On the other hand nVidia's proprietary drivers are decent or better.