Your x86 box is probably covered with by more patents (hardware-wise) than anything that Apple's made in the past few years. Or, at least all their patented stuff is licensed from Intel, these days.
MacOS X is on it's way to becoming an opensourcish product. Alreay you've got the kernel, QuickTime server, and who knows what else?
Apples a different company than they were 10 years ago.
Everything that QuickTime downloads is somewhere on your hard drive, usually in your browsers cache. Just go in there, and poke around and pull out most recent quicktime movie, and 9 times out of 10, that's the one you were looking for. If you want a more elegant solution, pay apple for the pro version that does more than simply play movies.
Maybe it's your system that's a piece of shit. What else do you have installed on there? Surely there's something your'e overlooking.
For one, Sorenson's a LOT more resource hungry, simply because it compresses the data much more effectively than otehr codecs, such as Cinepak... It also needs a lot of muscle behind it to decompress all those frames.
Bash it all you want. Just don't bash it until you know all the facts.
Register it so you can get the pro version and you can save anything you want. They just give the bare minimum of features away for free... If you want to do more than watch movies, then you need to buy it. It gets you more than the ability to save files, though. You can also recompress them with different codecs and add video effects.
Get over it. Aside from the current lack of protected memory, the MacOS is generally far superior to NT in terms of usability and multimedia support. Yes, the machine may crash a little bit more (NT's far from perfect in that regard), but for the most part, crashing Mac's are generally a sign that people simply are operating them under different groups of assumptions.
And why not go check out the prices of NT capable systems from major vendors, prior to getting angry at apple? First off, you're comparing the price of a LOW END wintel machine (i doubt you can buy a machine preloaded with NT from a major manufacturer for $800) to the highend of the iMac line. The middle range of the iMac's is $1300, gives you 64 megs of memory, 8 megs of VRAM, a DVD player, USB and FireWire, awesome speakers, and it just looks cooler and runs quieter than anything else.
Wait til Windows 2000 is available. You'll see the average price of machines float upwards again, as it's way too resource hungry for the current crop of $500 PC's.
I'd say you pretty much get what you pay for with your hardware. Mac's cost more, but in general, i feel their archeticture is far superior to that of the lowend crop of windows machines.
Brand recognition means nothing in terms of Apple and the Linux community. No matter what they do or don't do, a LOT of people around here find a way to criticize them. It's not like they're at all respected by a lot of linux users, and delivering Quicktime for linux isn't going to get them any extra respect from those folks.
Funny. Just yestereday there was a discussion here about how opensource developers weren't producing the most usable interfaces in the world ("CLI's rule!").
Apple's all about image. There's absolutley no chance that they'll choose to release just the libraries needed without their own player. If they ever did port QuickTime to Linux, they'ed produce a full implentation. Libraries, player etc.. That means that you could do like Windows and Mac developers do and construct your own player on top of quicktime.
QuickTime's so much more than a bunch of codecs. Well, especially on the Mac, where developers know that quicktime will be available to them, just about every app uses quicktime for their imaging functions, in that you can upgrade quicktime and all of a sudden your applications can support new file types, etc.
Be happy that there is an ASPL to complain about. You don't see a MSSPL (Guess what that could be?) among others (Intuit, Adobe, Corel (so far as wordperfect goes)) haven't even taken the first step of allowing the viewing of the code to their core products so that people can work to extend or fix them, "for free" as you put it.
It is their code, and i'd reckon that you should be thankful that they have decided to start opensourcing their products (even if you don't like their particular license).
And you know what? Owning the Windows and Mac multimedia markets is just about owning the the digital video market. What are they combined? 99% of the desktops out there? If Linux would hurry up and get some market share, then there'd be an argument that they're not covering all the platforms with their cross platform strategy, but Linux is just a little blip on the radar, so far as their potential market goes.
Nope. Anything with a GUI will need to at least have that reworked. NextStep used Display PostScript, I assume that GNUStep is using GhostScript, and MacOS X is using... damn! I forgot it's fun name. But while *Step is postscript based, MacOS X's display is PDF based. That plus NextStep and OpenStep have basically been abandoned for the past few years in favor of OS X, which means that there's lots of enhancements out there that aren't even on the list to be reimplemented.
What'd be nice is if Apple realized that as soon as OS-X consumer is out, NextStep and OpenStep are basically completely dead products. Even if they didn't release all the source (which wouldn't be happen because of license from Adobe, Pantone and others), it'd still be nice if they shipped the OS CD's at a neglible cost so people could have the option of installing OpenStep on their windows machines and at least see what the fuss used to be about.
Yes, Slashdot does seem to cater to Linux and Opensource stuff the most. However, it is first and foremost "news for nerds"... That's why we see stories about Processors, Satelites, Planets, and anything else.
Why should it be suprising that finally there's a less biased moderator out there who can mark someone as a troll for bashing microsoft? I personally dislike seeing posts marked up simply bcause the take a swipe at MSFT or say something good about Linux, regardless as to whether or not it's actually true or not.
The day that moderation falls into the hands of a "secret cabal with opensource credentials" is the day i never come back here again. Right now, this place is fun simply for the fact that there's a wide range of opinions and ideas. It would suffer horribly if people realized there was no point in disagreeing with anybody because the "secret cabal of moderators" would mark them down to -1, effectively out of sight.
Personally, when I moderate, I always look for the more intellegent comments coming from views that aren't the normal slashdot norm. the higher they're scored, the more people see them, and it generally starts a good discussion.
I've learned a lot here either from my replies to my comments and/or other discussions i didn't take place in, because two smart people with different views will post a string of comments poking holes in one anothers arguments. That's good. If it were the way you described it, it'd be simply a site dedicated to patting the backs of open source developers. How much fun would that be?
We're not talking about Apps, here... Rather the general GUI.
Witness:
Xerox's Alto in the 70's gave way to Apple's Macintosh in the 80's which gave way to Microsofts Windows (though it was a step backwards in my eyes) which almost gave way to Netscape's browser, except Microsoft Internet Explorer stole netscape's thunder.
Where have the Unixes been through all this? Basically sitting on the side lines in terms of creating interfaces, but creating great innovations under the hood (X stands out in my mind).
Now, Apple's taken their interface to a new level (which we'll get to see soon enough), Microsoft is continuing to interwind IE further into the OS and GUI, and Gnome and KDE are basically still where Windows 95 with a very partially implemented browser on top of it.
The advantage of a closed source/proprietary development team is this: The manager can say do this and this. The developers have goals and milestones. If they decide to concentrate on some other area, they're out of jobs. Open source is a lot more lenient, where people get to choose whate they'll do and when they'll do it.
don't bash linux if it gets easier to use. You'll always have the option of shedding whatever GUI it puts in front of you. Besides, with it's new found Linux compatibility, the BSD family would seem to benefit from whatever improvements come linux's way.
What will you do then? Make a new operating system with the goal of making it as complicated as possible?:)
Commanche seemed like an AWESOME idea/attempt. Once again, I haven't ventured a look at it a many months.
But if it could be extened and cover Bind, Apache, and Sendmail, you'd have an absolutely awesome product. One of the main gripes I read in magazines about linux is the difficulty in setting up it's components ("in order to do xxx you need to navigate through a text file").
Lot's of ISP's seem to have created Perl scripts and such that automate a lot of the tasks associated with administering a server. If only those were carried the next step forward so you could either do your admin via SSH, KDE/Gnome, or a browser, and have that functionality included with the major distro's.... There'd probably be lots of salivating NT guru's looking to jump over.
That attitude won't win you the desktop, unfortunately.
This generation want's nice pretty GUI's, with a pretty help button, and a wizard that guides them through mundane tasks.
If Linux and other opensource developers aren't prepared to give that to them, they should forget about unseating Windows 98 on the desktop and even Windows NT/2000 on the lowend server.
Compared to things like the MacOS and Windows, the older window managers like FVWM, Afterstep, and Lestif feel far inferior in terms of basic usablility. Gnome and KDE looked promising, but quite honestly I haven't looked at either of those in probably about a year, so I can't comment there.
Last time I looked, they were looking rather smooth, but they're basically reimplementing the windows interface with just a couple extra's.
When we start seeing things like open source 3 dimensional window managers, it'll be a new story, but a lot of the times it appears that open source is mainly about refining existing technologies rather than creating new ones. Before you flame me, notice I said "most of the time"
I've always believed that in order to sell something short, you need to first find a buyer. You two then make an agreement that on a certain date you'll sell that person said amount of shares at the price you agreed to agreed to earlier, no matter what the price is at day. You don't put anything up at the time you make the agreement.
Basically you both have to be in agreement it's going down. But how far down is the real question. If it doesn't go far enough, or heavan forgive, it goes up... you're kinda screwed.
With options, if it goes down, you don't need to buy. With shorts, you can't change your mind and say "oops!" never mind
I can't believe no one hasn't nominated that guy that always posts under the name "Anonymous Coward". He always posts so MANY comments in every discussion (he's almost super human in how it seems he never even goes to sleep. A new story can be posted at 3 AM EST, and there he his, going "first post!" and plays a very important role around here in encouraging slashdot to add features (witness: Moderation and then meta-moderation, thresholds, etc...).
Yep. Anonymous Coward should take the grand prize...
I guess you don't understand stock options then, because they're far away from being guarenteed. CEO's should be paid in stock options. The more the merrier. In fact, I don't even thing many of them should even receive a cash salary or golden parachute.
Option get issued usually at the price of the companies stock on a given day. When they vest you can then buy them at that price. If the stocks went up, yay! you can buy them a discounted price. If it's went down... Well, you're screwed then.
Yes, CEO's should be paid in stock options exclusively. Maybe not in all industries but the tech industry, yes. Maybe then they'ed care about what they were doing. Witness Gil Amelio with his high salary and golden parachute - how motivated was he when he was at apple.
It's worth noting that NBA rookies are surer bets than most of the high flying companies. There's often clauses in their contracts that say "if you don't play so and so many games, well, you're out this much." They can also be traded away, but who'll want them if they don't perform?
Here's a poll idea for Rob:
How many slashdotters: A - got rich with stock options B - got taken advantage because of stock options C - never even got stock options D - prefer cash over stock options E - prefer stock options over cash D - Rob sucks, Petrified Natelie Portman Beowolf cluster rule.
Smart people care about the things that you mentioned (price, speed). Unfortunately, we're not in the majority.
John Q Public wants the either the biggest megahertz computer or the cheapest one possible. Those are the only two things they really care about.
They're going to feel quite hosed when they sit and think "Wow. My 700 MHz machine is slower than his 600 MHz machine. That sucks!".
If people didn't care about megahertz, why a few years back, did Cyrix and AMD market their chips as P133 or PR150's? Because they needed to have a speed gauge. Especially Cyrix, whose chips ran comparatively slower, but still got the equivalant performance of the faster chips.
If Crusoe does appear in machines where people have a say about which processor is in it, either Transmeta or whoever is selling the machines is going to have to do a damn good job explaining to customers why those couple hundred megahertz disappeared. If they make it understandable, Transmeta could blossom. But if they over look it, people will shy away from their machines, thinking that they're *much* slower than intels offerings.
There used to be a time when companies were generally valued at 7-15 times earnings. As people have gained confidence, that level has been growing. And no, amazon didn't invent the whole valuation scheme. But it arose somewhere between Microsoft and Yahoo. Amazon was just there to ride the wave as far as it could.
The whole tech industry is suffering from over inflated stock prices. Yes. Suffering. Becuase once the bubble bursts, lot's of former millionaires will once again be mortal again. It's only a matter of time before the gov't puts the breaks on the growth trend we've been having for the past decade. And then what?
I'm not saying I'm smart. I'm just saying that Wall Streets insane. They're all hunting for the next Yahoo's, Amazons, or Microsofts... WHen they pump up a companies value, most companies don't realize it's because of traders and not themselves.
Let's see LNUX is 131 a share today.... Would you buy it at $90/share in 6 months? But you need to pay today. That's how shorts work.
No... I don't have the money to gamble on something like that. Sorry, but though the street seems to be sanening up, it's still much too insane for me to get into anything like.
No. VA Linux, just as every Linux,.com, software, hardware and tech company are grossly overvalued. Really. There used to be a day when companies were valued based on their actual performance. Amazon suceeded in corrupting that definition so that it included their future performance.
Now, every company out there seems to believe that they should be valued based on what they think they can do rather than what they are doing now.
It seems that IBM is about the only tech company that's valued anywhere near the levels it's revenue would reflect if it were in any other industry. They actually trade a lower PE ratio than General Electric.
I mostly liked everything else he had to say, but due to the order of teh question, i was set off by him. Build a company. Get the sales. Get the PROFITS. Then you'll get your valuation. Any other order is just insane.
Crusoe CAN'T run java natively. It has it's own VLIW instruction set. On top of that sits the code morphing engine/JITC. So Transmeta can easily point to that as being proof they haven't built a processor that runs Java "natively".
Intel is definetly the entity to worry about so far as Crusoe goes. Did transmeta pay lioensing fees for MMX, etc? I'm sure intel's scrambling right now trying to find how they can keep this chip off the market. They'll probably end up with some sort of patent licensing agreement in the end. After all, transmeta probably want SSE (is that it?) instructions eventually, and imagine if they could produce a module that just dropped into socket 370's? Intel would probably die for their software simply because that would be much more efficient than either developing their own code morphing stuff or building x86 translation hardware into merced.
I read that the 700 MHz Crusoe chip actually only attains the performance of a 500MHz Pentium (II or III, I forgot - oh, can Crusoe emulate SIMD? Not like it matters, but I'm wondering).
So there you have it - code morphing, or just in time compiliing or whatever gives you about 70% of the performance precompiled code.
That's not to downplay Transmeta's theoretical accomplishment. Those extra 200MHz go to things like monitoring it's VM, throttling the clock, etc. So in the end you lose 30% of the performance but make it up with 35X less power consumed.
It's a great trade off for laptops, handhelds, etc. But not for workstations, servers, etc...
I still don't like the idea that they're keeping the instruction sets closed. It would seem like if someone out there wanted to port GCC to Crusoes native instructions, that would be good... But they just don't want to be percieved as being at all incompatible with Intel, i guees.
90% of people who use SGI workstations are potentially interested in Lightwave.
Probably about the same of Sun's workstations.
Their more competition in the low-end space on Macs, so probably only 10% of G3 and G4 (not iMac) owners would be interested in lightwave. They make that up with volume.
How many Linux users use 3D software in Linux everyday? Probably about zero. How many will spend $1500 for a 3D package? probably not many, either. If New-Tek starts getting letters from people who are already customers requesting Linux ports, they'll probably do it. But if they get 10,000 letters from slashdot readers, that's still not 1 firm commitment to buy. It's just lots of linux advocates. If they needed or wanted Lightwave, they'ed have swallowed their Linux pride and purchased an ample machine running Solaris, Irix, NT, Mac OS, or an old Amiga for that matter.
Yes, there's lots of linux machines out there. But lots are completely incapable of running lightwave. And all the capable ones are acting as servers or developers workstations.
If you said that the market for Lightwave was larger for Linux than SGI/Sun combined, they could easily turn and call you a liar. No offense.
About the best you could do is go buy a real copy of lightwave and then maybe return it as a symbolic gesture that you actually do have the money to spend if they bring the product over. But don't count on it.
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Your x86 box is probably covered with by more patents (hardware-wise) than anything that Apple's made in the past few years. Or, at least all their patented stuff is licensed from Intel, these days.
MacOS X is on it's way to becoming an opensourcish product. Alreay you've got the kernel, QuickTime server, and who knows what else?
Apples a different company than they were 10 years ago.
Everything that QuickTime downloads is somewhere on your hard drive, usually in your browsers cache. Just go in there, and poke around and pull out most recent quicktime movie, and 9 times out of 10, that's the one you were looking for. If you want a more elegant solution, pay apple for the pro version that does more than simply play movies.
Maybe it's your system that's a piece of shit. What else do you have installed on there? Surely there's something your'e overlooking.
For one, Sorenson's a LOT more resource hungry, simply because it compresses the data much more effectively than otehr codecs, such as Cinepak... It also needs a lot of muscle behind it to decompress all those frames.
Bash it all you want. Just don't bash it until you know all the facts.
Register it so you can get the pro version and you can save anything you want. They just give the bare minimum of features away for free... If you want to do more than watch movies, then you need to buy it. It gets you more than the ability to save files, though. You can also recompress them with different codecs and add video effects.
Get over it. Aside from the current lack of protected memory, the MacOS is generally far superior to NT in terms of usability and multimedia support. Yes, the machine may crash a little bit more (NT's far from perfect in that regard), but for the most part, crashing Mac's are generally a sign that people simply are operating them under different groups of assumptions.
And why not go check out the prices of NT capable systems from major vendors, prior to getting angry at apple? First off, you're comparing the price of a LOW END wintel machine (i doubt you can buy a machine preloaded with NT from a major manufacturer for $800) to the highend of the iMac line. The middle range of the iMac's is $1300, gives you 64 megs of memory, 8 megs of VRAM, a DVD player, USB and FireWire, awesome speakers, and it just looks cooler and runs quieter than anything else.
Wait til Windows 2000 is available. You'll see the average price of machines float upwards again, as it's way too resource hungry for the current crop of $500 PC's.
I'd say you pretty much get what you pay for with your hardware. Mac's cost more, but in general, i feel their archeticture is far superior to that of the lowend crop of windows machines.
So are you saying that you'd pay for an opensource player, or that players to you are not valuable enough to be worthy of your money at all?
It's a serious question.
Brand recognition means nothing in terms of Apple and the Linux community. No matter what they do or don't do, a LOT of people around here find a way to criticize them. It's not like they're at all respected by a lot of linux users, and delivering Quicktime for linux isn't going to get them any extra respect from those folks.
Funny. Just yestereday there was a discussion here about how opensource developers weren't producing the most usable interfaces in the world ("CLI's rule!").
Apple's all about image. There's absolutley no chance that they'll choose to release just the libraries needed without their own player. If they ever did port QuickTime to Linux, they'ed produce a full implentation. Libraries, player etc.. That means that you could do like Windows and Mac developers do and construct your own player on top of quicktime.
QuickTime's so much more than a bunch of codecs. Well, especially on the Mac, where developers know that quicktime will be available to them, just about every app uses quicktime for their imaging functions, in that you can upgrade quicktime and all of a sudden your applications can support new file types, etc.
Be happy that there is an ASPL to complain about. You don't see a MSSPL (Guess what that could be?) among others (Intuit, Adobe, Corel (so far as wordperfect goes)) haven't even taken the first step of allowing the viewing of the code to their core products so that people can work to extend or fix them, "for free" as you put it.
It is their code, and i'd reckon that you should be thankful that they have decided to start opensourcing their products (even if you don't like their particular license).
And you know what? Owning the Windows and Mac multimedia markets is just about owning the the digital video market. What are they combined? 99% of the desktops out there? If Linux would hurry up and get some market share, then there'd be an argument that they're not covering all the platforms with their cross platform strategy, but Linux is just a little blip on the radar, so far as their potential market goes.
Nope. Anything with a GUI will need to at least have that reworked. NextStep used Display PostScript, I assume that GNUStep is using GhostScript, and MacOS X is using... damn! I forgot it's fun name. But while *Step is postscript based, MacOS X's display is PDF based. That plus NextStep and OpenStep have basically been abandoned for the past few years in favor of OS X, which means that there's lots of enhancements out there that aren't even on the list to be reimplemented.
What'd be nice is if Apple realized that as soon as OS-X consumer is out, NextStep and OpenStep are basically completely dead products. Even if they didn't release all the source (which wouldn't be happen because of license from Adobe, Pantone and others), it'd still be nice if they shipped the OS CD's at a neglible cost so people could have the option of installing OpenStep on their windows machines and at least see what the fuss used to be about.
What the hell?
Yes, Slashdot does seem to cater to Linux and Opensource stuff the most. However, it is first and foremost "news for nerds"... That's why we see stories about Processors, Satelites, Planets, and anything else.
Why should it be suprising that finally there's a less biased moderator out there who can mark someone as a troll for bashing microsoft? I personally dislike seeing posts marked up simply bcause the take a swipe at MSFT or say something good about Linux, regardless as to whether or not it's actually true or not.
The day that moderation falls into the hands of a "secret cabal with opensource credentials" is the day i never come back here again. Right now, this place is fun simply for the fact that there's a wide range of opinions and ideas. It would suffer horribly if people realized there was no point in disagreeing with anybody because the "secret cabal of moderators" would mark them down to -1, effectively out of sight.
Personally, when I moderate, I always look for the more intellegent comments coming from views that aren't the normal slashdot norm. the higher they're scored, the more people see them, and it generally starts a good discussion.
I've learned a lot here either from my replies to my comments and/or other discussions i didn't take place in, because two smart people with different views will post a string of comments poking holes in one anothers arguments. That's good. If it were the way you described it, it'd be simply a site dedicated to patting the backs of open source developers. How much fun would that be?
We're not talking about Apps, here... Rather the general GUI.
Witness:
Xerox's Alto in the 70's gave way to
Apple's Macintosh in the 80's which gave way to
Microsofts Windows (though it was a step backwards in my eyes) which almost gave way to
Netscape's browser, except
Microsoft Internet Explorer stole netscape's thunder.
Where have the Unixes been through all this? Basically sitting on the side lines in terms of creating interfaces, but creating great innovations under the hood (X stands out in my mind).
Now, Apple's taken their interface to a new level (which we'll get to see soon enough), Microsoft is continuing to interwind IE further into the OS and GUI, and Gnome and KDE are basically still where Windows 95 with a very partially implemented browser on top of it.
The advantage of a closed source/proprietary development team is this: The manager can say do this and this. The developers have goals and milestones. If they decide to concentrate on some other area, they're out of jobs. Open source is a lot more lenient, where people get to choose whate they'll do and when they'll do it.
don't bash linux if it gets easier to use. You'll always have the option of shedding whatever GUI it puts in front of you. Besides, with it's new found Linux compatibility, the BSD family would seem to benefit from whatever improvements come linux's way.
:)
What will you do then? Make a new operating system with the goal of making it as complicated as possible?
Commanche seemed like an AWESOME idea/attempt. Once again, I haven't ventured a look at it a many months.
But if it could be extened and cover Bind, Apache, and Sendmail, you'd have an absolutely awesome product. One of the main gripes I read in magazines about linux is the difficulty in setting up it's components ("in order to do xxx you need to navigate through a text file").
Lot's of ISP's seem to have created Perl scripts and such that automate a lot of the tasks associated with administering a server. If only those were carried the next step forward so you could either do your admin via SSH, KDE/Gnome, or a browser, and have that functionality included with the major distro's.... There'd probably be lots of salivating NT guru's looking to jump over.
That attitude won't win you the desktop, unfortunately.
This generation want's nice pretty GUI's, with a pretty help button, and a wizard that guides them through mundane tasks.
If Linux and other opensource developers aren't prepared to give that to them, they should forget about unseating Windows 98 on the desktop and even Windows NT/2000 on the lowend server.
XFree86 is nothing.
Compared to things like the MacOS and Windows, the older window managers like FVWM, Afterstep, and Lestif feel far inferior in terms of basic usablility. Gnome and KDE looked promising, but quite honestly I haven't looked at either of those in probably about a year, so I can't comment there.
Last time I looked, they were looking rather smooth, but they're basically reimplementing the windows interface with just a couple extra's.
When we start seeing things like open source 3 dimensional window managers, it'll be a new story, but a lot of the times it appears that open source is mainly about refining existing technologies rather than creating new ones. Before you flame me, notice I said "most of the time"
I've always believed that in order to sell something short, you need to first find a buyer. You two then make an agreement that on a certain date you'll sell that person said amount of shares at the price you agreed to agreed to earlier, no matter what the price is at day. You don't put anything up at the time you make the agreement.
Basically you both have to be in agreement it's going down. But how far down is the real question. If it doesn't go far enough, or heavan forgive, it goes up... you're kinda screwed.
With options, if it goes down, you don't need to buy. With shorts, you can't change your mind and say "oops!" never mind
I can't believe no one hasn't nominated that guy that always posts under the name "Anonymous Coward". He always posts so MANY comments in every discussion (he's almost super human in how it seems he never even goes to sleep. A new story can be posted at 3 AM EST, and there he his, going "first post!" and plays a very important role around here in encouraging slashdot to add features (witness: Moderation and then meta-moderation, thresholds, etc...).
Yep. Anonymous Coward should take the grand prize...
:)
I guess you don't understand stock options then, because they're far away from being guarenteed. CEO's should be paid in stock options. The more the merrier. In fact, I don't even thing many of them should even receive a cash salary or golden parachute.
Option get issued usually at the price of the companies stock on a given day. When they vest you can then buy them at that price. If the stocks went up, yay! you can buy them a discounted price. If it's went down... Well, you're screwed then.
Yes, CEO's should be paid in stock options exclusively. Maybe not in all industries but the tech industry, yes. Maybe then they'ed care about what they were doing. Witness Gil Amelio with his high salary and golden parachute - how motivated was he when he was at apple.
It's worth noting that NBA rookies are surer bets than most of the high flying companies. There's often clauses in their contracts that say "if you don't play so and so many games, well, you're out this much." They can also be traded away, but who'll want them if they don't perform?
Here's a poll idea for Rob:
How many slashdotters:
A - got rich with stock options
B - got taken advantage because of stock options
C - never even got stock options
D - prefer cash over stock options
E - prefer stock options over cash
D - Rob sucks, Petrified Natelie Portman Beowolf cluster rule.
Smart people care about the things that you mentioned (price, speed). Unfortunately, we're not in the majority.
John Q Public wants the either the biggest megahertz computer or the cheapest one possible. Those are the only two things they really care about.
They're going to feel quite hosed when they sit and think "Wow. My 700 MHz machine is slower than his 600 MHz machine. That sucks!".
If people didn't care about megahertz, why a few years back, did Cyrix and AMD market their chips as P133 or PR150's? Because they needed to have a speed gauge. Especially Cyrix, whose chips ran comparatively slower, but still got the equivalant performance of the faster chips.
If Crusoe does appear in machines where people have a say about which processor is in it, either Transmeta or whoever is selling the machines is going to have to do a damn good job explaining to customers why those couple hundred megahertz disappeared. If they make it understandable, Transmeta could blossom. But if they over look it, people will shy away from their machines, thinking that they're *much* slower than intels offerings.
There used to be a time when companies were generally valued at 7-15 times earnings. As people have gained confidence, that level has been growing. And no, amazon didn't invent the whole valuation scheme. But it arose somewhere between Microsoft and Yahoo. Amazon was just there to ride the wave as far as it could.
The whole tech industry is suffering from over inflated stock prices. Yes. Suffering. Becuase once the bubble bursts, lot's of former millionaires will once again be mortal again. It's only a matter of time before the gov't puts the breaks on the growth trend we've been having for the past decade. And then what?
I'm not saying I'm smart. I'm just saying that Wall Streets insane. They're all hunting for the next Yahoo's, Amazons, or Microsofts... WHen they pump up a companies value, most companies don't realize it's because of traders and not themselves.
Let's see LNUX is 131 a share today.... Would you buy it at $90/share in 6 months? But you need to pay today. That's how shorts work.
No... I don't have the money to gamble on something like that. Sorry, but though the street seems to be sanening up, it's still much too insane for me to get into anything like.
He feels they're UNDERVALUED?!?
.com, software, hardware and tech company are grossly overvalued. Really. There used to be a day when companies were valued based on their actual performance. Amazon suceeded in corrupting that definition so that it included their future performance.
No. VA Linux, just as every Linux,
Now, every company out there seems to believe that they should be valued based on what they think they can do rather than what they are doing now.
It seems that IBM is about the only tech company that's valued anywhere near the levels it's revenue would reflect if it were in any other industry. They actually trade a lower PE ratio than General Electric.
I mostly liked everything else he had to say, but due to the order of teh question, i was set off by him. Build a company. Get the sales. Get the PROFITS. Then you'll get your valuation. Any other order is just insane.
Crusoe CAN'T run java natively. It has it's own VLIW instruction set. On top of that sits the code morphing engine/JITC. So Transmeta can easily point to that as being proof they haven't built a processor that runs Java "natively".
Intel is definetly the entity to worry about so far as Crusoe goes. Did transmeta pay lioensing fees for MMX, etc? I'm sure intel's scrambling right now trying to find how they can keep this chip off the market. They'll probably end up with some sort of patent licensing agreement in the end. After all, transmeta probably want SSE (is that it?) instructions eventually, and imagine if they could produce a module that just dropped into socket 370's? Intel would probably die for their software simply because that would be much more efficient than either developing their own code morphing stuff or building x86 translation hardware into merced.
I read that the 700 MHz Crusoe chip actually only attains the performance of a 500MHz Pentium (II or III, I forgot - oh, can Crusoe emulate SIMD? Not like it matters, but I'm wondering).
So there you have it - code morphing, or just in time compiliing or whatever gives you about 70% of the performance precompiled code.
That's not to downplay Transmeta's theoretical accomplishment. Those extra 200MHz go to things like monitoring it's VM, throttling the clock, etc. So in the end you lose 30% of the performance but make it up with 35X less power consumed.
It's a great trade off for laptops, handhelds, etc. But not for workstations, servers, etc...
I still don't like the idea that they're keeping the instruction sets closed. It would seem like if someone out there wanted to port GCC to Crusoes native instructions, that would be good... But they just don't want to be percieved as being at all incompatible with Intel, i guees.
90% of people who use SGI workstations are potentially interested in Lightwave.
Probably about the same of Sun's workstations.
Their more competition in the low-end space on Macs, so probably only 10% of G3 and G4 (not iMac) owners would be interested in lightwave. They make that up with volume.
How many Linux users use 3D software in Linux everyday? Probably about zero. How many will spend $1500 for a 3D package? probably not many, either. If New-Tek starts getting letters from people who are already customers requesting Linux ports, they'll probably do it. But if they get 10,000 letters from slashdot readers, that's still not 1 firm commitment to buy. It's just lots of linux advocates. If they needed or wanted Lightwave, they'ed have swallowed their Linux pride and purchased an ample machine running Solaris, Irix, NT, Mac OS, or an old Amiga for that matter.
Yes, there's lots of linux machines out there. But lots are completely incapable of running lightwave. And all the capable ones are acting as servers or developers workstations.
If you said that the market for Lightwave was larger for Linux than SGI/Sun combined, they could easily turn and call you a liar. No offense.
About the best you could do is go buy a real copy of lightwave and then maybe return it as a symbolic gesture that you actually do have the money to spend if they bring the product over. But don't count on it.