No, they won't. OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Your typical UNIX admin will be lost at sea, trying to run a Mac like his Solaris or HP UX machines.
Gee, I've never felt lost at sea with OS X. I guess I must not be a typical Unix admin. But then again I always have had a soft spot in my heart for AIX.
Rip my DVD's to iTunes. Watch them on the TV, or on any computer device in my home. Buy a season pass to the shows I want to see, and watch them commercial free.
As a bonus it syncs all my family pictures so when I'm not watching something, my 1080P panel is a giant picture frame.
I don't care if you hate Apple. It works. It's easy. It's convenient. And I've been enjoying my TV that way for the last two years.
That's MY TV. Not NBC's, ABC's, CBS', Comcast's or anyone elses. It's mine. And it scares the bejeezus out of the content producers.
Right. It's all my fault. I'm so ungrateful for shelling out my hard earned cash and not wanting to view an insane amount of advertising.
Or... could it be that network executives have forgotten that people tune in to see programming and not that people tune in for the sole purpose of viewing advertising that they sold to other companies?
I got tired of watching commercial interruptions that were longer than the program segments they interrupted. I canceled my TV service more than two years ago. I don't miss it.
So if advertising revenue is the "Golden Egg" for the networks, isn't it kind of stupid for them to start killing the geese? How much advertising revenue will they get if no one watches? Networks provide a service I don't need. And when they decided to interrupt the programs I wanted to see so often, they turned it into a service I didn't want.
Go ahead. Make adds unskippable. (they're trying) Until they find a way to beam them directly into my brain, I'm not watching. I've even cut the adds out of the DVD's I own. Thought you could force me into watching those Mr. Network Executive? Think again.
Go ahead and blame me for your commercial interruptions. Until is sucks less, much less, I won't be re-subscribing.
...Apple took so long in getting the DRM off their store. Took 'em even longer than Amazon, funny that.
Yeah, it's not like they had to honor contracts with an industry that demanded they use DRM. I mean really, if Apple were a really great company they'd have signed deals then then screamed, "SCREW YOU" at the top of their lungs while they just gave the music away and broke their contracts willy-nilly.
Sum my post up however you want. They entered the mp3 player market late with a more expensive offering, and now dominate it. They entered the smart phone market late with a more expensive offering and have made such an impact that ATT extended their exclusivity and ATT agreed to pay a sizable sum to Apple for each phone sold.
Yeah, that's definitely the description of a company that has invested years in subliminal advertising to convince millions of people to buy their obviously inferior products.
Or...could it possibly be that they're doing something right?
Nah, let's not be silly. Couldn't possibly be that they're doing something right. I bet they just perfected the "Reality-distortion-field-amplifier" and managed to cover the entire surface of the Earth.
It's not, it's the toy of whoever paid for the damn thing, and Apple, like the RIAA and the MPAA, seems far too keen on forgetting that one bit.
Yeah. It sucks that Apple gives away Xcode for free with their OS. It also sucks that Steve Jobs has been telling Hollywood to go pound sand on DRM and price. Just think of all the wonderful products we'd have out in the market. Why I bet you "Plays-for-sure" would be so awesome compared to the DRM Apple used. If only it had been given a fair chance. Apple had quite the nerve to go and insist that their vendors drop DRM altogether. I mean really. Consumers need choice in the DRM market and Apple is abusing their position to deny consumers choice.
Apple is doing something Microsoft fears. Gaining market share based on the merit of their products. Imagine that. Something becoming popular and successful because it gives people something they want. It may not be what you want, so don't buy it.
No one made people go out and buy iPods. No one made people go out and buy iPhones. No one made anyone go out and buy Macs.
So if no one is making people do this, why on earth are they?
IT unions would turn Silicon Valley into the next Detroit.
Actually, it's Silicon Valley that needs to learn from Detroit as well. Unions came into existence because corporations were taking advantage of the labor force. Individually, labor has no power. If they join together, in a Union, they have power.
60+ hour work weeks with no over-time or comp-time, because management decided to make all the IT staff "exempt, salaried proffessionals" saves the business tons of money. But it works their labor pool into the ground. Do you think they care? If they cared they wouldn't be doing it.
My prediction: IT Unions will happen. It's not that IT workers want them, it's that they want to stop working like slaves.
Keep in mind that there are companies that treat their employees right. Not every shop will be a Union shop, but it's more likely to happen than not. IT workers at IBM already had a union vote. It failed to pass, but I find it telling that there was enough interest that it came to a vote. If the treatment of the workforce continues to degrade their lives, eventually the workforce will rebel.
Did you know that IBM recently lost a lawsuit regarding over-time pay for IT professionals? Do you know what IBM's response was? They cut all their IT salaries by 15%. You know what this means? They hired you, you expected a 40 hour work week for your salary and they expected a 46 hour work week, but they didn't tell you that.
Unions are monsters. Ironically created and unleashed by corporate greed.
I'm not sure that the risk of "suddenly uncool" has been adequately factored into Apple's share price.
I'm not sure you understand Apple's customers.
Sure there are fleeting customers. However Apple has survived not because they had cool products, but because the quality of their products inspire quite fierce loyalty in their customers.
How many iPod owners replace the old iPod with anything other than another one?
How many iPhone users replace their iPhone with anything other than another one?
How many Mac users replace their Macs with anything other than another one?
If you see their success merely as a result of being "cool" then I think you are dismissing them far too easily.
Now if you want to talk about how much of Apple's success is Steve Jobs, then you have a point. His fanatical insistence on excellence is the real driver behind the success of the company. I have a very real concern for the future of the company when Jobs leaves.
Apple users aren't the sheep they're typically depicted as. The loyal users are loyal because they like great products that function really well and look as good as they function. Take away the fanatical devotion to great engineering and great product design, and you will have "just another tech company." If that happens it doesn't matter if it's Apple, Dell, Microsoft, or anyone else.
I know this is Slashdot, but if you had bothered to read the article you would have discovered that the cable would be managed and maintained by a management company. So the cost of maintenance would be shared among the community. Just like existing home owners associations today.
I currently pay a monthly fee to my association and it covers lawn care, water, sewer, snow removal and garbage removal. This would just tack on "fiber internet connection" to that list.
It prevents me from working on a project for years and learning about The Next Best Thing and then running to the competition.
I don't normally pay attention to anonymous cowards, but in this case it deserves a response.
What this contract really prevents is your employer keeping you happy and on the job. Does your contract guarantee your benefit plan? Your retirement plan? Cost of living minimum yearly raises? Severance should you be released?
A fair contract is one that benefits both parties. A non-compete only benefits the employee if they get something in return for the duration of the non-compete. If the contract only protects the companies interests then your interests are being thrown out the door. Don't accept their word that they will "do the right thing." If it's not in writing they don't have to and most likely won't.
My contract prohibits me from engaging in the same business as my current employer for up to 5 years after termination.
So you can't use your expertise to make a living for 5 years? Or does you contract have your employer paying you severance for 5 years? I'm betting it doesn't. I'm also betting that your employer is happy with the knowledge that he doesn't have to pay you market, or give you decent benefits because if you leave you can't compete with him for 5 years. It's just another form of indentured servitude and you're a willing participant.
Competition is the core of good Capitalism and you agreed not to. Oh yes that's great for your employer, no doubt about that.
Sigh... you can load all your non DRM-ed content all you want... for free on the Kindle. Amazon's done a horrible job of marketing that fact (for obvious reasons) but it's true.
And when Kindle fails and Amazon kills it do you think they'll just leave the service running indefinitely? How will you get content to your Kindle then? Does the end user license grant you the right to put content on the device as long as you own it? I didn't think so.
$10/book to own is too much for me, since I won't read most books more than once.
It's way to much for something that has no physical presence, that you can't share, give away, or resell. It's a money grab. The publishing industry needs to learn from the music industry. You cannot charge an insane amount of money just for the content. At least with a printed book there is a recognizable investment in printing plant, paper, ink, and distribution. With an ebook there's just distribution. Amazon has a significant infrastructure for distribution already in place so adding ebook distribution is really only maximizing use of their existing assets.
Publisher formats the manuscript then sends it to Amazon for distribution. That's a one time expense for them.
Amazon's distribution costs...well how much does is cost to send 100k of data over a network? Storage costs? A 200GB hard drive will hold approximately 400K books given each book is 500k in size (which is insanely generous for essentially a text file with no compression.)
Let's see, refunds for unsold books? None. Expenses for additional print runs? None. Sales lost because a book is out of print? None.
$10 for the e-version when even the paperback isn't that expensive? Get real. Everyone loves to hate on Apple, but thanks to them I don't have to spend $20 to buy one track anymore. $1 gets me just the song I want, legally.
Kindle will do more to kill print media than help it. $5 for new releases I would consider. $2 once it's in paperback I would do. But only if you scrap the DRM, and don't charge me for web sites or loading my own content. If they did that then the only thing that would still keep me from buying it is the absolutely horrible industrial design. Hello platinum colored speak and spell...no thanks.
When Linux "slowly gains market penetration," it's always a success.
Because Linux has to make it on it's own merits.
When Microsoft "slowly gains market penetration," it's always a failure.
Because if they had a blockbuster product they wouldn't be gaining slowly. A large company will gain market share simply based on it size and the amount of marketing money they can throw at it. Microsoft has a lot of money to throw. I'll consider Zune a success when there is significant demand for it and the division makes a healthy profit.
Please give me an example of Apple's "bad technology."
One word. Performa.
Apple's had their share of flops, fortunately they've become focused on delivering quality and value instead of throwing a ton of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. I was an iPod skeptic. I was an iPhone skeptic. They have gotten very good at isolating the markets they want to enter and going in with very good products.
i had a girl come in with her apple not knowing how to install office, install the virus protection, or how to even eject a CD. she didn't know a thing about her new computer because she bought it solely for the shine fact.
Odds are pretty good she'd have the same amount of knowledge with a Microsoft based PC.
You can find as much anecdotal evidence as you want. The fact of the matter is that Apple, under Steve's guidance since his return, has made great strides in improving their market share. You can blame it on shiny all you want, but the simple fact is that Apple has always been shiny and that alone wasn't helping them. Saying that's it's just the shiny now is simplifying things a little too much. Sure there are a lot of people who will buy just based on looks. Then there are a lot of smart people who will buy despite the longer warranties or $100-$200 price difference on wintel hardware. (If the price difference is more than that you really aren't comparing equivalent hardware.)
Here's an anecdote that I just love. Working with a colleague at a disaster recovery site we needed to transfer some files to a Windows server we were recovering. His Windows based laptop wouldn't connect to the server. My Mac mounted the share and transfered the files flawlessly. Not being able to get stuff from a laptop to the customers recovery server is not a valid excuse for missing the Recovery Time Objective. Yeah, I just bought it for the shiny.
I'll join in with the chorus of "Bullshit" as to the position on Apple Customers. Apple Customers value Shiny, and will continue to swarm accordingly.
And this is why you don't understand Mac's and the people who buy them. You look at the Mac and all you see if the Shiny. You look at Windows and all you see if the Shiny.
Die hard Mac users are that way because it works. Shiny is a bonus. Apple almost did go under because they kept producing expensive computers that were lagging behind the curve. Maybe you don't remember that time. I sure do. Windows 95 was almost good enough to lure me away. Almost.
Think what you want, but the insistence on Steve of quality and value have saved the company. The value of their stock is a clear indicator. Take a look at the value before Steve came back, take a look now. Their market share is growing. It's certainly not because the Mac OS is shinier than Vista.
One thing I remember that was interesting, and in retrospect should have been obvious, was that then ants they brought aboard for typical ant ecological duties _could_not_be_controlled.
Actually, the ants which ultimately took over the biosphere were never supposed to be there in the first place. They had carefully selected a couple of ant species however the species which dominated road in on some plants which were not properly quarantined. The "alien" species quickly dominated and destroyed the other two. I actually visited Biosphere 2 while I was living in Arizona. Those little brown ants were all over the place.
Other good lessons learned:
Concrete releases carbon dioxide. Loads of it. Way more than their small environment could convert back to oxygen.
The glass in the dome absorbed frequencies of light which many plants need for photosynthesis. Plants didn't grow as well as they originally thought.
It really was a remarkable place, even if it was treated as a red-headed step child by the media. The primary lesson is that building a closed, self-sustaining environment is a lot more complicated than anyone thinks. All the more reason we should keep trying and keep learning.
You act like we just 'adapt' through some magical evolution process or physically 'adapt'. In a way you are making my point, but sadly you are not smart enough to realize you are arguing the same point.
Free advice: Stay in school and take a rhetoric class.
Adaptation is not evolution. Any dictionary will tell you that. We are not arguing the same point. You would have humanity change the biosphere to maintain the status quo. You're arguing that if we don't change the biosphere we'll be in trouble. That's a load of crap. We can adapt to the changes in the biosphere and adapt our behavior to minimize our impact on it.
and if we aren't smart enough to get idiots like you to support fixing the problem, maybe we should die off.
Idiots like me are the ones who will keep people like you from permanently destroying the ecosystem in some misguided attempt to "fix" the symptoms. People like me have the up hill battle of getting people like you to realize that we as a species are no where near mature enough in our knowledge to start toying with the planetary biosphere to try and maintain the status quo.
Nature is cyclic. Humanity has influenced it but people who say that doing one simple thing will negate humanities effects are naive. It's a system and there isn't a computer large enough to model all of the inputs in that system. I doubt we even know for sure what all of those inputs are. The planet warms and cools. This is documented fact. Yet you would have us stop that cycle so you can maintain your beach house? Your ski resort?
Why don't people like you start by changing humanity's behavior before you go toy with the biosphere? Reduce, reuse, recycle. Get with the program before you start building giant sun shades in space, or seeding chemicals into the atmosphere.
You're right about one thing. Rome didn't fall because of a water shortage. But you don't seem to grasp why Rome did fall. Arrogance. Sign up for a history class along with that rhetoric class. Some of us do remember history and we're trying not to repeat it.
They are worse in terms of the existence of humans on this planet with consideration to the population affected by the changes.
Sorry, this is a load of crap. Human beings are the most adaptable species on the whole planet. Human beings have resided in the hottest places on the planet and in some of the coldest too. If climate change is a "threat" to us, we deserve to die off.
As for science 'fixing' the problem, this doesn't necessarily mean a plan on the scale of Dr Evil to alter the world. It could be as simple as dusting the upper atmosphere with reflect particles or even droppping a few large scale reflective panels in space that could be controlled to regulate the climate, both of which could be adjusted, changed or removed if they had negative impacts that science doesn't foresee.
And this is exactly the kind of arrogance which will destroy the planet. We begin to think we can change the entire system just to suit us. Do you have any idea what this will actually do? Not in the short term, in the long term. The very long term. And what about the desserts that once blossomed? (and there is evidence of this) If climate change which would have brought rains back to them is stopped, what will happen then? When you stop a natural cycle, you may actually do more harm than good.
What scares me the most is one of these crack-pot ideas will actually gain enough support to get implemented. Then afterwards we discover that we've stopped a cycle that is necessary in some fashion, and are unable to go back. Attempting to change a biosphere the size of the planet where we don't even understand half of the systems that operate on it and in it is not only arrogant, it's suicidal.
"Global Warming" has simply become a political toy. Worse, it's turned science into pulp fiction. Express a dissenting view, even if you have evidence to back it up and you're ostracized. Everyone loves to say that a "majority" of scientists agree that humanity is the sole cause of global warming. Gee, 50.1 percent is also a majority. Science has to have dissenters. That was the point of the article. Submitting to "group think" only benefits politicians.
Conservation is a wonderful thing, it's do-able now. The dooms-day theatrics of "global warming" have short term gains and long term set-backs. You can only cry wolf so many times before people start to ignore you completely.
Just the other night the wife and I were in a pick up group for Zul Far'rak and there was this Tauren Druid who was like...suicidal! He didn't have any care for survival! He just ran into everything in bear form! No care at all if he lived through it! He must have been a terrorist in training!
Nintendo fans are like Apple fans. They assume that their favorite company comes up with every concept they market. For instance, people who think that the browser on the iPhone is something wonderful and new have never seen Opera Mini.
I had Opera Mini on my Nokia. Safari on the iPhone blows it away.
Nintendo is going back to what Apple has gone back to: Making things that appeal to the majority, not just the dedicated, hard core minority. Making products that don't have the feature list of the competition, but doing things so well the competition can't stand up.
Other people are right. If Nintendo had tried to compete with Sony and MS on "their" turf, it would have lost. Instead they are going back to making fun games that appeal to a broader market. MS and Sony can duke it out in the feature list arena. Hard core gamers will still be able to get their fix. Nintendo has simply decided to persue a different market.
1. High end phone users often keep an extra battery to swap out.
High end users typically have high end phones with crappy batteries. Therefore they need to swap batteries/charge batteries frequently. Apple's claiming 8 hours of talk time. Are there people who will go beyond that? Sure. I'll go out on a limb here and say that most people won't.
2. Many phones offer an extended life battery.
Could this be because the manufacturer included a crappy battery to begin with? Forcing people to pay more for a bigger battery later? Na, that couldn't possibly be it.
I've owned two other smart phones with outstanding battery life with the included manufacturers battery. A Sony P800 and a Nokia e61. I've never needed to swap the battery on either phone. I've never needed to purchase a spare battery for either phone. And yes there are times when I've been on conference calls 6+ hours a day. End user swap-ability is only required if your device is a power hog and your battery capacity is too small.
I'd say Apple did their homework. They figured that carrying around spare batteries and chargers all the time was not consumer friendly and decided to build a device that easily goes all day.
I'm sure we'll hear first hand fairly quickly if they've succeeded or not, but so far battery life reports have been pretty spot on with what Apple said they would be.
No offense, but carry an extra battery. I'd MUCH rather carry an extra battery and get fast internet speeds than get slow internet speeds.
This is where it comes down to personal preference. You don't mind walking around with spare batteries in your pockets. I do. Dropping a client call because the battery died is not acceptable to me. I need a phone with an all day talk time (and have used my phone on all-day conference calls). I will sacrifice fast internet to achieve my goal.
I keep hearing how 3G is vital to the success of the iPhone, yet no one has been able to present a scenario where Edge, although slower, would not be passable. Since the iPhone doesn't allow tethering, you can't use it as your primary internet connection for your PC, so that's out of the picture. I need a phone for phone calls. Web surfing while waiting at an airport/restaurant is simply a bonus. 30 seconds to view a site versus 10 seconds. I can easily live with that.
Um, you're made up numbers are not in your favor...
EDGE phone: You spend two whole minutes on this because the connection is so slow. The radio operates most of the time pulling data at slow speeds, sucking down, say, 1 watt for 60 seconds of that time.
So for two minutes on edge, by your example, I use 2 watts.
3G phone: You spend 30 seconds on this because it's a nice fast connection. The radio only operates some of the time, pulling data at high speeds but sucking down, say, 4 watts for 10 seconds of that time.
And for 30 seconds on 3G, by your example, I use 12 watts.
So with 3G the phone goes dead mid-day and now I can't access my brokerage account at all. This is coming out ahead? I don't think so. Again if I have to choose slow that lasts all day to fast that last half a day (or less) I'll chose slow. Fast access is worth crap when your battery is dead. I don't want to have to carry around 3-4 extra batteries let along keep track of which is charged. Nor do I want to be tethered to a power outlet every few hours.
Sure they could have put a bigger battery on it, but that defeats the purpose of having a slim phone.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they won't. OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Your typical UNIX admin will be lost at sea, trying to run a Mac like his Solaris or HP UX machines.
Gee, I've never felt lost at sea with OS X. I guess I must not be a typical Unix admin. But then again I always have had a soft spot in my heart for AIX.
One word: AppleTV
Rip my DVD's to iTunes. Watch them on the TV, or on any computer device in my home. Buy a season pass to the shows I want to see, and watch them commercial free.
As a bonus it syncs all my family pictures so when I'm not watching something, my 1080P panel is a giant picture frame.
I don't care if you hate Apple. It works. It's easy. It's convenient. And I've been enjoying my TV that way for the last two years.
That's MY TV. Not NBC's, ABC's, CBS', Comcast's or anyone elses. It's mine. And it scares the bejeezus out of the content producers.
Right. It's all my fault. I'm so ungrateful for shelling out my hard earned cash and not wanting to view an insane amount of advertising.
Or... could it be that network executives have forgotten that people tune in to see programming and not that people tune in for the sole purpose of viewing advertising that they sold to other companies?
I got tired of watching commercial interruptions that were longer than the program segments they interrupted. I canceled my TV service more than two years ago. I don't miss it.
So if advertising revenue is the "Golden Egg" for the networks, isn't it kind of stupid for them to start killing the geese? How much advertising revenue will they get if no one watches? Networks provide a service I don't need. And when they decided to interrupt the programs I wanted to see so often, they turned it into a service I didn't want.
Go ahead. Make adds unskippable. (they're trying) Until they find a way to beam them directly into my brain, I'm not watching. I've even cut the adds out of the DVD's I own. Thought you could force me into watching those Mr. Network Executive? Think again.
Go ahead and blame me for your commercial interruptions. Until is sucks less, much less, I won't be re-subscribing.
...Apple took so long in getting the DRM off their store. Took 'em even longer than Amazon, funny that.
Yeah, it's not like they had to honor contracts with an industry that demanded they use DRM. I mean really, if Apple were a really great company they'd have signed deals then then screamed, "SCREW YOU" at the top of their lungs while they just gave the music away and broke their contracts willy-nilly.
Sum my post up however you want. They entered the mp3 player market late with a more expensive offering, and now dominate it. They entered the smart phone market late with a more expensive offering and have made such an impact that ATT extended their exclusivity and ATT agreed to pay a sizable sum to Apple for each phone sold.
Yeah, that's definitely the description of a company that has invested years in subliminal advertising to convince millions of people to buy their obviously inferior products.
Or...could it possibly be that they're doing something right?
Nah, let's not be silly. Couldn't possibly be that they're doing something right. I bet they just perfected the "Reality-distortion-field-amplifier" and managed to cover the entire surface of the Earth.
It's not, it's the toy of whoever paid for the damn thing, and Apple, like the RIAA and the MPAA, seems far too keen on forgetting that one bit.
Yeah. It sucks that Apple gives away Xcode for free with their OS. It also sucks that Steve Jobs has been telling Hollywood to go pound sand on DRM and price. Just think of all the wonderful products we'd have out in the market. Why I bet you "Plays-for-sure" would be so awesome compared to the DRM Apple used. If only it had been given a fair chance. Apple had quite the nerve to go and insist that their vendors drop DRM altogether. I mean really. Consumers need choice in the DRM market and Apple is abusing their position to deny consumers choice.
Apple is doing something Microsoft fears. Gaining market share based on the merit of their products. Imagine that. Something becoming popular and successful because it gives people something they want. It may not be what you want, so don't buy it.
No one made people go out and buy iPods. No one made people go out and buy iPhones. No one made anyone go out and buy Macs.
So if no one is making people do this, why on earth are they?
IT unions would turn Silicon Valley into the next Detroit.
Actually, it's Silicon Valley that needs to learn from Detroit as well. Unions came into existence because corporations were taking advantage of the labor force. Individually, labor has no power. If they join together, in a Union, they have power.
60+ hour work weeks with no over-time or comp-time, because management decided to make all the IT staff "exempt, salaried proffessionals" saves the business tons of money. But it works their labor pool into the ground. Do you think they care? If they cared they wouldn't be doing it.
My prediction: IT Unions will happen. It's not that IT workers want them, it's that they want to stop working like slaves.
Keep in mind that there are companies that treat their employees right. Not every shop will be a Union shop, but it's more likely to happen than not. IT workers at IBM already had a union vote. It failed to pass, but I find it telling that there was enough interest that it came to a vote. If the treatment of the workforce continues to degrade their lives, eventually the workforce will rebel.
Did you know that IBM recently lost a lawsuit regarding over-time pay for IT professionals? Do you know what IBM's response was? They cut all their IT salaries by 15%. You know what this means? They hired you, you expected a 40 hour work week for your salary and they expected a 46 hour work week, but they didn't tell you that.
Unions are monsters. Ironically created and unleashed by corporate greed.
I'm not sure you understand Apple's customers.
Sure there are fleeting customers. However Apple has survived not because they had cool products, but because the quality of their products inspire quite fierce loyalty in their customers.
How many iPod owners replace the old iPod with anything other than another one?
How many iPhone users replace their iPhone with anything other than another one?
How many Mac users replace their Macs with anything other than another one?
If you see their success merely as a result of being "cool" then I think you are dismissing them far too easily.
Now if you want to talk about how much of Apple's success is Steve Jobs, then you have a point. His fanatical insistence on excellence is the real driver behind the success of the company. I have a very real concern for the future of the company when Jobs leaves.
Apple users aren't the sheep they're typically depicted as. The loyal users are loyal because they like great products that function really well and look as good as they function. Take away the fanatical devotion to great engineering and great product design, and you will have "just another tech company." If that happens it doesn't matter if it's Apple, Dell, Microsoft, or anyone else.
I know this is Slashdot, but if you had bothered to read the article you would have discovered that the cable would be managed and maintained by a management company. So the cost of maintenance would be shared among the community. Just like existing home owners associations today.
I currently pay a monthly fee to my association and it covers lawn care, water, sewer, snow removal and garbage removal. This would just tack on "fiber internet connection" to that list.
I don't normally pay attention to anonymous cowards, but in this case it deserves a response.
What this contract really prevents is your employer keeping you happy and on the job. Does your contract guarantee your benefit plan? Your retirement plan? Cost of living minimum yearly raises? Severance should you be released?
A fair contract is one that benefits both parties. A non-compete only benefits the employee if they get something in return for the duration of the non-compete. If the contract only protects the companies interests then your interests are being thrown out the door. Don't accept their word that they will "do the right thing." If it's not in writing they don't have to and most likely won't.
So you can't use your expertise to make a living for 5 years? Or does you contract have your employer paying you severance for 5 years? I'm betting it doesn't. I'm also betting that your employer is happy with the knowledge that he doesn't have to pay you market, or give you decent benefits because if you leave you can't compete with him for 5 years. It's just another form of indentured servitude and you're a willing participant.
Competition is the core of good Capitalism and you agreed not to. Oh yes that's great for your employer, no doubt about that.
And when Kindle fails and Amazon kills it do you think they'll just leave the service running indefinitely? How will you get content to your Kindle then? Does the end user license grant you the right to put content on the device as long as you own it? I didn't think so.
It's way to much for something that has no physical presence, that you can't share, give away, or resell. It's a money grab. The publishing industry needs to learn from the music industry. You cannot charge an insane amount of money just for the content. At least with a printed book there is a recognizable investment in printing plant, paper, ink, and distribution. With an ebook there's just distribution. Amazon has a significant infrastructure for distribution already in place so adding ebook distribution is really only maximizing use of their existing assets.
Publisher formats the manuscript then sends it to Amazon for distribution. That's a one time expense for them.
Amazon's distribution costs...well how much does is cost to send 100k of data over a network? Storage costs? A 200GB hard drive will hold approximately 400K books given each book is 500k in size (which is insanely generous for essentially a text file with no compression.)
Let's see, refunds for unsold books? None. Expenses for additional print runs? None. Sales lost because a book is out of print? None.
$10 for the e-version when even the paperback isn't that expensive? Get real. Everyone loves to hate on Apple, but thanks to them I don't have to spend $20 to buy one track anymore. $1 gets me just the song I want, legally.
Kindle will do more to kill print media than help it. $5 for new releases I would consider. $2 once it's in paperback I would do. But only if you scrap the DRM, and don't charge me for web sites or loading my own content. If they did that then the only thing that would still keep me from buying it is the absolutely horrible industrial design. Hello platinum colored speak and spell...no thanks.
Because Linux has to make it on it's own merits.
Because if they had a blockbuster product they wouldn't be gaining slowly. A large company will gain market share simply based on it size and the amount of marketing money they can throw at it. Microsoft has a lot of money to throw. I'll consider Zune a success when there is significant demand for it and the division makes a healthy profit.
One word. Performa.
Apple's had their share of flops, fortunately they've become focused on delivering quality and value instead of throwing a ton of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. I was an iPod skeptic. I was an iPhone skeptic. They have gotten very good at isolating the markets they want to enter and going in with very good products.
Odds are pretty good she'd have the same amount of knowledge with a Microsoft based PC.
You can find as much anecdotal evidence as you want. The fact of the matter is that Apple, under Steve's guidance since his return, has made great strides in improving their market share. You can blame it on shiny all you want, but the simple fact is that Apple has always been shiny and that alone wasn't helping them. Saying that's it's just the shiny now is simplifying things a little too much. Sure there are a lot of people who will buy just based on looks. Then there are a lot of smart people who will buy despite the longer warranties or $100-$200 price difference on wintel hardware. (If the price difference is more than that you really aren't comparing equivalent hardware.)
Here's an anecdote that I just love. Working with a colleague at a disaster recovery site we needed to transfer some files to a Windows server we were recovering. His Windows based laptop wouldn't connect to the server. My Mac mounted the share and transfered the files flawlessly. Not being able to get stuff from a laptop to the customers recovery server is not a valid excuse for missing the Recovery Time Objective. Yeah, I just bought it for the shiny.
You must be new to the world of marketing.
And this is why you don't understand Mac's and the people who buy them. You look at the Mac and all you see if the Shiny. You look at Windows and all you see if the Shiny.
Die hard Mac users are that way because it works. Shiny is a bonus. Apple almost did go under because they kept producing expensive computers that were lagging behind the curve. Maybe you don't remember that time. I sure do. Windows 95 was almost good enough to lure me away. Almost.
Think what you want, but the insistence on Steve of quality and value have saved the company. The value of their stock is a clear indicator. Take a look at the value before Steve came back, take a look now. Their market share is growing. It's certainly not because the Mac OS is shinier than Vista.
Actually, the ants which ultimately took over the biosphere were never supposed to be there in the first place. They had carefully selected a couple of ant species however the species which dominated road in on some plants which were not properly quarantined. The "alien" species quickly dominated and destroyed the other two. I actually visited Biosphere 2 while I was living in Arizona. Those little brown ants were all over the place.
Other good lessons learned:
It really was a remarkable place, even if it was treated as a red-headed step child by the media. The primary lesson is that building a closed, self-sustaining environment is a lot more complicated than anyone thinks. All the more reason we should keep trying and keep learning.
Free advice: Stay in school and take a rhetoric class.
Adaptation is not evolution. Any dictionary will tell you that. We are not arguing the same point. You would have humanity change the biosphere to maintain the status quo. You're arguing that if we don't change the biosphere we'll be in trouble. That's a load of crap. We can adapt to the changes in the biosphere and adapt our behavior to minimize our impact on it.
Idiots like me are the ones who will keep people like you from permanently destroying the ecosystem in some misguided attempt to "fix" the symptoms. People like me have the up hill battle of getting people like you to realize that we as a species are no where near mature enough in our knowledge to start toying with the planetary biosphere to try and maintain the status quo.
Nature is cyclic. Humanity has influenced it but people who say that doing one simple thing will negate humanities effects are naive. It's a system and there isn't a computer large enough to model all of the inputs in that system. I doubt we even know for sure what all of those inputs are. The planet warms and cools. This is documented fact. Yet you would have us stop that cycle so you can maintain your beach house? Your ski resort?
Why don't people like you start by changing humanity's behavior before you go toy with the biosphere? Reduce, reuse, recycle. Get with the program before you start building giant sun shades in space, or seeding chemicals into the atmosphere.
You're right about one thing. Rome didn't fall because of a water shortage. But you don't seem to grasp why Rome did fall. Arrogance. Sign up for a history class along with that rhetoric class. Some of us do remember history and we're trying not to repeat it.
Sorry, this is a load of crap. Human beings are the most adaptable species on the whole planet. Human beings have resided in the hottest places on the planet and in some of the coldest too. If climate change is a "threat" to us, we deserve to die off.
And this is exactly the kind of arrogance which will destroy the planet. We begin to think we can change the entire system just to suit us. Do you have any idea what this will actually do? Not in the short term, in the long term. The very long term. And what about the desserts that once blossomed? (and there is evidence of this) If climate change which would have brought rains back to them is stopped, what will happen then? When you stop a natural cycle, you may actually do more harm than good.
What scares me the most is one of these crack-pot ideas will actually gain enough support to get implemented. Then afterwards we discover that we've stopped a cycle that is necessary in some fashion, and are unable to go back. Attempting to change a biosphere the size of the planet where we don't even understand half of the systems that operate on it and in it is not only arrogant, it's suicidal.
"Global Warming" has simply become a political toy. Worse, it's turned science into pulp fiction. Express a dissenting view, even if you have evidence to back it up and you're ostracized. Everyone loves to say that a "majority" of scientists agree that humanity is the sole cause of global warming. Gee, 50.1 percent is also a majority. Science has to have dissenters. That was the point of the article. Submitting to "group think" only benefits politicians.
Conservation is a wonderful thing, it's do-able now. The dooms-day theatrics of "global warming" have short term gains and long term set-backs. You can only cry wolf so many times before people start to ignore you completely.
Just the other night the wife and I were in a pick up group for Zul Far'rak and there was this Tauren Druid who was like...suicidal! He didn't have any care for survival! He just ran into everything in bear form! No care at all if he lived through it! He must have been a terrorist in training!
Or a ten year old half-wit...
Na, couldn't be that. He was a terrorist!
I had Opera Mini on my Nokia. Safari on the iPhone blows it away.
Nintendo is going back to what Apple has gone back to: Making things that appeal to the majority, not just the dedicated, hard core minority. Making products that don't have the feature list of the competition, but doing things so well the competition can't stand up.
Other people are right. If Nintendo had tried to compete with Sony and MS on "their" turf, it would have lost. Instead they are going back to making fun games that appeal to a broader market. MS and Sony can duke it out in the feature list arena. Hard core gamers will still be able to get their fix. Nintendo has simply decided to persue a different market.
High end users typically have high end phones with crappy batteries. Therefore they need to swap batteries/charge batteries frequently. Apple's claiming 8 hours of talk time. Are there people who will go beyond that? Sure. I'll go out on a limb here and say that most people won't.
Could this be because the manufacturer included a crappy battery to begin with? Forcing people to pay more for a bigger battery later? Na, that couldn't possibly be it.
I've owned two other smart phones with outstanding battery life with the included manufacturers battery. A Sony P800 and a Nokia e61. I've never needed to swap the battery on either phone. I've never needed to purchase a spare battery for either phone. And yes there are times when I've been on conference calls 6+ hours a day. End user swap-ability is only required if your device is a power hog and your battery capacity is too small.
I'd say Apple did their homework. They figured that carrying around spare batteries and chargers all the time was not consumer friendly and decided to build a device that easily goes all day.
I'm sure we'll hear first hand fairly quickly if they've succeeded or not, but so far battery life reports have been pretty spot on with what Apple said they would be.
This is where it comes down to personal preference. You don't mind walking around with spare batteries in your pockets. I do. Dropping a client call because the battery died is not acceptable to me. I need a phone with an all day talk time (and have used my phone on all-day conference calls). I will sacrifice fast internet to achieve my goal.
I keep hearing how 3G is vital to the success of the iPhone, yet no one has been able to present a scenario where Edge, although slower, would not be passable. Since the iPhone doesn't allow tethering, you can't use it as your primary internet connection for your PC, so that's out of the picture. I need a phone for phone calls. Web surfing while waiting at an airport/restaurant is simply a bonus. 30 seconds to view a site versus 10 seconds. I can easily live with that.
Um, you're made up numbers are not in your favor...
So for two minutes on edge, by your example, I use 2 watts.
And for 30 seconds on 3G, by your example, I use 12 watts.
So with 3G the phone goes dead mid-day and now I can't access my brokerage account at all. This is coming out ahead? I don't think so. Again if I have to choose slow that lasts all day to fast that last half a day (or less) I'll chose slow. Fast access is worth crap when your battery is dead. I don't want to have to carry around 3-4 extra batteries let along keep track of which is charged. Nor do I want to be tethered to a power outlet every few hours.
Sure they could have put a bigger battery on it, but that defeats the purpose of having a slim phone.