As far as I know it's the MBU (Mac Business Unit) that lives in Mountain View (great place, btw - I lived there for a year:-), and they all threatened to resign when MS wanted to move them up to Redmond - MS wanting to consolidate everyone to one location.
I did a quick search, and I can't find anything linking the Zune to Mountain View. I did find the blog of a Zune tester who apparently lives in Washington ("I was at the Rascal Flatts concert in Tacoma, Washington on Sunday.")
So, according to a manager at Redmond, there are ~16,000 iPods at MS-HQ. From looking at that bin, they've managed to get about 0.1% of those people to "upgrade" to a zune...
I especially love the employee who gained brownie-points by putting something (anything!) in the ipod-bin, even if it was only an iPod *cover* [huge grin]. I wonder if Steve (that's Balmer, in case of confusion) was watching him walk on by, and he thought he had to put *something* in...
If MS can only get 0.1% of their *own* people to switch, they ain't gonna make it too big in the far more neutral marketplace...
EVERY manufacturer who advertises 16.2 million colours uses a 6-bit display and dithering. Apple has a setting of "millions of colours" in their preferences, and they stuck with that description when they used a 6-bit display.
The point is that this is temporal dithering, not spacial dithering. There's no point in saying "my eye can see the difference when there's dithering in an image" because that's not what's taking place.
Consider a nominally 1-bit system, a single red LED. Apply zero power, and it's black. Apply constant 5v (with appropriate resistors:-) and it's bright-red. Now apply a pulse-wave-modulation to that LED, and you will be able to *see* a smoothly-varying intensity between 0 and 1 (black and bright-red) even though the LED is only switching fully on or fully off. The pulse-train is controllable by a digital system, so you can electronically vary the effective brightness of this 1-bit system.
In this, the 1-bit output is temporally dithering its on/off state to give the illusion of a multi-bit system. Scale this up to a 6-bit system, and it's easy to generate the illusion of an 8-bit system. To the human eye there is no difference, we don't have the refresh-rate to catch the LED off or on, we just see the aggregated results of very fast controlled flickering.
Well, step 1 isn't a problem, assuming by LOT you're meaning that getting a lot of aluminium would be an issue. About 8% of the earth's crust is Al. That's a LOT of Al:-)
The current process for extracting Al from the raw material is well-understood, if energy-demanding and not particularly "clean". I think step 6 is your problem one...
Dunno about the ponies, but OpenStep (sort of) runs on Windows and gives you all the ObjC goodness you're being deprived of, and there's also The cocotron. All this can be found at the wikipedia entry which also does a half-decent job of explaining what it is that makes Cocoa so nice to use.
What the Wikipedia article misses is the simplicity of the language - it's just about right, not the "You want to shoot off your foot ? Here have a howitzer!" of C++ nor the "well, we have a penknife. It's a bit rusty" of plain old 'C'. Any C program compiles without error under ObjC because ObjC is a formal superset of 'C', but you still get all the nice messaging/objects/categories/interfaces of a proper object-orientated language. With ObjC/Cocoa, it's hard *not* to write a decently-designed (probably M-V-C) application.
It may not have a "common runtime language", but you can (try to) prise ObjC/Cocoa out of my cold dead hands. Betcha can't.
The currency is pounds sterling, but most places will accept euro's, at least in London.
Actually, it's you lot who drive on the other side of the road...
Having lived in CA for almost 3 years, I have yet to come across anything vaguely resembling bacon. Bacon should consist partly of meat... As for food in general, even SF is only 'ok' when you're used to London standards. It has sufficiently different food to be interesting though.
I'd say this was a wash. I've lived in lots of places and known some knockout girls in pretty much all of them. The UK is no exception.
Yes they can. They only need to defer the revenue from the previous quarter to the current one => no financial irregularities and a much nicer PR piece.
I'm not saying they *did* this (40M copies doesn't sound so much to me) but there's nothing stopping them.
I was talking about instant coffee - I'm not much of a coffee drinker, so I don't have a percolater. Basically you drop a teaspoon of ready-to-go coffee granules into a cup, pour boiling water on top, then add creamer and serve. There's no wait, and the coffee is very very hot (as it ought to be).
Regarding peeling your skin off - that's the point you see, it doesn't do that. You sip a small amount of coffee and the larger amount of water in your mouth mixes with it and lowers the temperature.
The coffee as-poured by McDonalds is ~82 degrees C. I boil a kettle, immediately pour the water into the cup, add creamer and server. It's likely to be far hotter (close to 100 degrees C) than the coffee at McDonalds. I drink (well, sip) it pretty much straight-away as well. So does everyone I know.
THIRD DEGREE BURNS oughtn't be the issue. Did you know that if you put your hand into a fully-operational blender, your hands will turn into LIQUIDISED FLESH. It's such an unbelievably stupid act that no-one would have much sympathy for you though. As no-one has much sympathy for the woman who puts not-even-boiling-hot coffee between her thighs and (get this!) does so while she's driving.
- From an earlier post on Digg -
I'm sorry, I guess I'm just sick of this "defence" of stupidity, in the case of the McDonald's coffee case.
Coffee is *made* with boiling-hot water. It is *supposed* to be scalding-hot. I don't care whether it's plus or minus a few degrees of the average scalding-hot water that coffee is usually made with - that shouldn't be the issue, it'll still hurt like hell. The issue ought to be "did the defendent do something unbelievably stupid or was the company negligent". The answer is that *yes*, she did something stupid; she put a frail paper-cup of scalding-hot water between her thighs and then (presumably involuntarily) squeezed her legs together.
Yes, she was hurt, badly. Yes, McDonalds could have made the coffee at a lower temperature, and they were making it hotter for commercial reasons. Both of those are true and neither ought to be relevant. The decision ought to have been based on whether what she did was a reasonable thing to do with *any* fresh cup of coffee - basically whether she should have expected to have been able to pour said cup of coffee over her without injury. I invite anyone defending her to make *themselves* a cup of coffee and pour it over their thighs (at your own risk, of course) - it'll scald you just as badly.
That is in fact what the McDonalds lawyer ought to have done. Simply made a fresh cup of coffee in the court, and asked for volunteers (judge, jury if it was a jury trial ?) to have scalding-hot coffee poured over them. Anyone defending her case would presumably consider *normal* scalding-hot coffee to be non-injurious to human skin.
McDonalds only have a "reasonable" burden of care - if the coffee-cup had dissolved and the contents scalded her, I think we'd all be behind her, but it didn't. People have too little sense of personal responsibility these days, it's easier to sue and "donate" the blame to someone else. It's a sad day for society in general when gross stupidity is defended against common sense.
None of this means I don't feel sorry for her, by the way - I do. I just also think it was her fault, and given that she's become the poster-child for incongruous lawsuits, I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I also think it's a travesty when the courts are overflowing with cases, and innocent people rot in jail awaiting their trial while stupid things like this waste court time; I think there'd be a lot less cases like this if the loser-pays-costs model was adopted, as in the UK, but that's another issue.
For what it's worth, this "the UK is the CCTV capital of the world" meme is massively overstated. The vast majority (at least 90-odd percent) of the cameras they're talking about are in private hands - they're the CCTV cameras in shops, bars, outside businesses like banks, in ATM's, in tube-tunnels etc. etc.
The rest are mainly traffic cameras, mounted on junctions - I'm not sure if speed-cameras (automated, but only snapshots, not video) are counted in there as well.
There are *some* (I know of some on Oxford St. in London) people-monitoring cameras, and I think the ones on Oxford St. were put in at the behest of the shops along Oxford St. All those shops work closely with the police to prevent theft - it's the only street I know where police literally line the border between the pavement (sidewalk) and the road at xmas-time to keep pedestrians on the pavement. It's a very very busy shopping area.
As a counterpoint, I work in California. Perhaps it's because I'm more aware of cameras than most, but there seem to be just as many traffic-cameras mounted on poles at junctions; there are video cameras on trains and busses; there are video cameras in petrol-stations; also around the offices I work, and even within the corridors at junction points; there are video cameras in tunnels I drive through, and outside buildings like banks; there are video-cameras in ATMs I use; there are video-cameras in bars I go to at night, and in every police-car I've seen.
It doesn't seem so different to me, speaking as someone who lived in London for 15 years and moved to CA.
I have a friend whose partner was driving down a motorway (equivalent to a freeway) in Britain. Unlike California where lanes are de-facto equivalent, in the UK it's customary to have faster lanes towards the "outside" (more to the right) of the road; she was driving in the fast lane at ~100 mph, as was typical for the road.
Her BMW had an "intelligent" system on-board as well as the GPS, and out of nowhere, it told her to "stop the car". So she did. Quickly. In the fast-lane, on the motorway. Chaos ensued.
She's not unintelligent (though, being blonde, she did get a certain amount of follicle-related humour directed at her), but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation. She's one of those people who don't interact well with machines or computers. She didn't think it through, she just reacted. In fact there *was* something seriously wrong with the engine, but nothing that would prevent her from pulling onto the hard-shoulder (the emergency lane).
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene" (though whether it's nature or nurture is up for debate) whereby people either abrogate all responsibilty to the machine, or they treat it as an advisory adjunct to their daily lives. Perhaps it's just the growing pains of a society in the midst of rapid change. Perhaps in a couple of decades, when the holistic neural interface(TM) is commonplace, it'll be us "techno-savvy" yesterday's-(wo)men that people will be laughing and pointing fingers at, Nelson-like. I wonder what it'll feel like, when the boot is on the other foot...
In other words, sure, people do stupid things, but this is an opportunity to educate, not to mock.
Objective C is an absolutely gorgeous language. Absolutely my language of choice these days, I'll even install GnuStep on Linux boxes to have the same environment. IMHO it manages to get it just right - neither the hideous complexity ("you want a gun to shoot your foot, here have a howitzer instead") of C++ nor the limiting simplicity ("well, we have a pen-knife") of C.
People dismiss the language because of its [syntax], but there really are differences between method-calls and ObjC messages, and since ObjC is a strict superset of C, I can forgive it the brackets, if only because I've written complicated lex/yacc grammars before myself.
This is a product that hasn't launched yet, hasn't been seen in the wild, and only demo'd under controlled circumstances. Yet we've had his illustrious personage repeatedlytell us that this phone is going to be a bust.
If it's such a dead-certain bust, why is he constantly mentioning it in the media ? Surely shome mishtake ? The fact is that he's terrified Apple are going to repeat their success with the iPod, and it shows.
Seriously, Apple are not in the traditional 'business' market - as in: the pinstripe suit brigade. They make XServes, and cool 8-core workstations, but these are mainly for the creative crowd doing video/audio editing.
The iPhone is targetted at the same demographic the iPod was - people with sufficient disposable income to purchase a premium product, and who care about the "spit-and-polish" that only Apple seem to apply liberally.
The "closed" nature seems to be a bit over-blown too. Just because jo(e)-random-nobody can't (well, as of now, can't) write personal apps doesn't mean Apple can't turn it into a platform if they *want* to...
$500 is a chunk of change, but it's hardly out of reach. That study of college-students pointed out that 25% of them (from memory) were considering getting one. If a college student can consider getting one, anyone can. Personally, as a college student, beer was more important than 'phones, but I accept that the world moves to a different beat these days... An iPod-induced beat, of course...
You shouldn't be forced to buy an overpriced quad core system just to get a PCI slot or a fullsize drive bay
As far as I can see, you're not *forced* to buy anything. It seems the Mac Pro is very popular already, without any legal requirement for N per household...
Speaking as someone who priced up a Dell and a Mac Pro, and had the Mac Pro come out some $2000 cheaper, I voted with my wallet, and I'm very happy with the result:-)
So, I tried to reply to this, once it was being marked as 'insightful'... But the new/. text-formatter sucks dead bunnies through thin straws for preformatted text. So, here's a link to my blog-post instead.
Summary:
- There's more to security than a firewall.
- Linux is a fine server OS too, no disagreement there.
- OSX has a better client than SWAT.
- Disk performance on OSX is fine.
- OSX doesn't need a "guru" to administer.
Ah, but that leaves just one possibility for their secret project: it must be a stationary device.
Perhaps it's a clever tie-in to their *real* next product - a stationery device! Except with google, it would of course be net-orientated electronic stationery... ladies, gentlemen and others, I give you the google tablet - the "Goblet".
MS had to be careful with their XBox, because they were adopting the Sony approach: sell the hardware at a loss, and make money on the software (games) afterwards.
Historically, Apple don't sell at a loss. I'm pretty sure that (even at the low price of $300 for a 1GHz/256/40G PC in that form factor) Apple will be making money off this - they don't care if you hack it.
In fact, the more hackable it is, the better - jo(e) public buys it so (s)he can watch their iTMS movies on the big screen, the geeks buy it to hack it. Box numbers go up either way, which helps Apple PR, and helps them persuade people they have *the* viable platform for the home.
I wonder how long it'll be before the USB-2 port is made available (it is running OSX, after all), at which point you get an external 1T drive on it as well, in one of the mac-mini style enclosures...
Yes, the playing field (from Apple's perspective) is now probably twice as worse - up from a thimble to an eggcup, compared to Microsoft's mountain-range, that is...
I think what he's trying to say is that the actions MS are taking right now to increase their revenue are not as effective as the ones Apple are taking.
MS are, and have been for a decade or so (as you point out), vastly more profitable than Apple. That's not in dispute. A large part of that profitability comes from their own inertia, however. The fact that they *are* the massively-dominant market leader itself propogates that position, meaning they get "money for nothing" as people migrate to the market leader.
To maintain the market lead, however, you still have to put in effort. If you sit back on your laurels, you will eventually be overtaken. I *think* the point of his article is that MS aren't doing as much to maintain their lead, as Apple are to try and catch up. Looking at the net incomes for both companies over the last 6 years: Year Apple MS 2006 1,989 12,600 2005 1,328 12,250 2004 266 8,168 2003 69 7,531 2002 65 5,355 2001 -25 7,346
(Apologies for the formatting,/. has a really crappy interface for formatted text, and <ecode doesn't cut it:-(
So, the inertia is still strongly (vastly!) with MS, but if the current trends continue, Apple are *improving* at a far greater rate than MS are. Note, that I'm not defending this position, it's just how I see his argument.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know it's the MBU (Mac Business Unit) that lives in Mountain View (great place, btw - I lived there for a year :-), and they all threatened to resign when MS wanted to move them up to Redmond - MS wanting to consolidate everyone to one location.
I did a quick search, and I can't find anything linking the Zune to Mountain View. I did find the blog of a Zune tester who apparently lives in Washington ("I was at the Rascal Flatts concert in Tacoma, Washington on Sunday.")
Simon.
So, according to a manager at Redmond, there are ~16,000 iPods at MS-HQ. From looking at that bin, they've managed to get about 0.1% of those people to "upgrade" to a zune...
I especially love the employee who gained brownie-points by putting something (anything!) in the ipod-bin, even if it was only an iPod *cover* [huge grin]. I wonder if Steve (that's Balmer, in case of confusion) was watching him walk on by, and he thought he had to put *something* in...
If MS can only get 0.1% of their *own* people to switch, they ain't gonna make it too big in the far more neutral marketplace...
Simon.
EVERY manufacturer who advertises 16.2 million colours uses a 6-bit display and dithering. Apple has a setting of "millions of colours" in their preferences, and they stuck with that description when they used a 6-bit display.
:-) and it's bright-red. Now apply a pulse-wave-modulation to that LED, and you will be able to *see* a smoothly-varying intensity between 0 and 1 (black and bright-red) even though the LED is only switching fully on or fully off. The pulse-train is controllable by a digital system, so you can electronically vary the effective brightness of this 1-bit system.
The point is that this is temporal dithering, not spacial dithering. There's no point in saying "my eye can see the difference when there's dithering in an image" because that's not what's taking place.
Consider a nominally 1-bit system, a single red LED. Apply zero power, and it's black. Apply constant 5v (with appropriate resistors
In this, the 1-bit output is temporally dithering its on/off state to give the illusion of a multi-bit system. Scale this up to a 6-bit system, and it's easy to generate the illusion of an 8-bit system. To the human eye there is no difference, we don't have the refresh-rate to catch the LED off or on, we just see the aggregated results of very fast controlled flickering.
Simon
Well, step 1 isn't a problem, assuming by LOT you're meaning that getting a lot of aluminium would be an issue. About 8% of the earth's crust is Al. That's a LOT of Al :-)
The current process for extracting Al from the raw material is well-understood, if energy-demanding and not particularly "clean". I think step 6 is your problem one...
Simon.
For 'Openstep', I meant Gnustep of course...
Simon.
Dunno about the ponies, but OpenStep (sort of) runs on Windows and gives you all the ObjC goodness you're being deprived of, and there's also The cocotron. All this can be found at the wikipedia entry which also does a half-decent job of explaining what it is that makes Cocoa so nice to use.
What the Wikipedia article misses is the simplicity of the language - it's just about right, not the "You want to shoot off your foot ? Here have a howitzer!" of C++ nor the "well, we have a penknife. It's a bit rusty" of plain old 'C'. Any C program compiles without error under ObjC because ObjC is a formal superset of 'C', but you still get all the nice messaging/objects/categories/interfaces of a proper object-orientated language. With ObjC/Cocoa, it's hard *not* to write a decently-designed (probably M-V-C) application.
It may not have a "common runtime language", but you can (try to) prise ObjC/Cocoa out of my cold dead hands. Betcha can't.
Simon.
Not a very good troll, really...
Simon.
Yes they can. They only need to defer the revenue from the previous quarter to the current one => no financial irregularities and a much nicer PR piece.
I'm not saying they *did* this (40M copies doesn't sound so much to me) but there's nothing stopping them.
Simon.
I was talking about instant coffee - I'm not much of a coffee drinker, so I don't have a percolater. Basically you drop a teaspoon of ready-to-go coffee granules into a cup, pour boiling water on top, then add creamer and serve. There's no wait, and the coffee is very very hot (as it ought to be).
Regarding peeling your skin off - that's the point you see, it doesn't do that. You sip a small amount of coffee and the larger amount of water in your mouth mixes with it and lowers the temperature.
Simon.
The coffee as-poured by McDonalds is ~82 degrees C. I boil a kettle, immediately pour the water into the cup, add creamer and server. It's likely to be far hotter (close to 100 degrees C) than the coffee at McDonalds. I drink (well, sip) it pretty much straight-away as well. So does everyone I know.
THIRD DEGREE BURNS oughtn't be the issue. Did you know that if you put your hand into a fully-operational blender, your hands will turn into LIQUIDISED FLESH. It's such an unbelievably stupid act that no-one would have much sympathy for you though. As no-one has much sympathy for the woman who puts not-even-boiling-hot coffee between her thighs and (get this!) does so while she's driving.
- From an earlier post on Digg -
I'm sorry, I guess I'm just sick of this "defence" of stupidity, in the case of the McDonald's coffee case.
Coffee is *made* with boiling-hot water. It is *supposed* to be scalding-hot. I don't care whether it's plus or minus a few degrees of the average scalding-hot water that coffee is usually made with - that shouldn't be the issue, it'll still hurt like hell. The issue ought to be "did the defendent do something unbelievably stupid or was the company negligent". The answer is that *yes*, she did something stupid; she put a frail paper-cup of scalding-hot water between her thighs and then (presumably involuntarily) squeezed her legs together.
Yes, she was hurt, badly. Yes, McDonalds could have made the coffee at a lower temperature, and they were making it hotter for commercial reasons. Both of those are true and neither ought to be relevant. The decision ought to have been based on whether what she did was a reasonable thing to do with *any* fresh cup of coffee - basically whether she should have expected to have been able to pour said cup of coffee over her without injury. I invite anyone defending her to make *themselves* a cup of coffee and pour it over their thighs (at your own risk, of course) - it'll scald you just as badly.
That is in fact what the McDonalds lawyer ought to have done. Simply made a fresh cup of coffee in the court, and asked for volunteers (judge, jury if it was a jury trial ?) to have scalding-hot coffee poured over them. Anyone defending her case would presumably consider *normal* scalding-hot coffee to be non-injurious to human skin.
McDonalds only have a "reasonable" burden of care - if the coffee-cup had dissolved and the contents scalded her, I think we'd all be behind her, but it didn't. People have too little sense of personal responsibility these days, it's easier to sue and "donate" the blame to someone else. It's a sad day for society in general when gross stupidity is defended against common sense.
None of this means I don't feel sorry for her, by the way - I do. I just also think it was her fault, and given that she's become the poster-child for incongruous lawsuits, I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I also think it's a travesty when the courts are overflowing with cases, and innocent people rot in jail awaiting their trial while stupid things like this waste court time; I think there'd be a lot less cases like this if the loser-pays-costs model was adopted, as in the UK, but that's another issue.
Simon.
For what it's worth, this "the UK is the CCTV capital of the world" meme is massively overstated. The vast majority (at least 90-odd percent) of the cameras they're talking about are in private hands - they're the CCTV cameras in shops, bars, outside businesses like banks, in ATM's, in tube-tunnels etc. etc.
The rest are mainly traffic cameras, mounted on junctions - I'm not sure if speed-cameras (automated, but only snapshots, not video) are counted in there as well.
There are *some* (I know of some on Oxford St. in London) people-monitoring cameras, and I think the ones on Oxford St. were put in at the behest of the shops along Oxford St. All those shops work closely with the police to prevent theft - it's the only street I know where police literally line the border between the pavement (sidewalk) and the road at xmas-time to keep pedestrians on the pavement. It's a very very busy shopping area.
As a counterpoint, I work in California. Perhaps it's because I'm more aware of cameras than most, but there seem to be just as many traffic-cameras mounted on poles at junctions; there are video cameras on trains and busses; there are video cameras in petrol-stations; also around the offices I work, and even within the corridors at junction points; there are video cameras in tunnels I drive through, and outside buildings like banks; there are video-cameras in ATMs I use; there are video-cameras in bars I go to at night, and in every police-car I've seen.
It doesn't seem so different to me, speaking as someone who lived in London for 15 years and moved to CA.
Simon.
IstartedtoreadthisbutIfoundthatitwasjustnotworthth eefforttounderstandwhatitwasthatyouweretryingtosay Paragraphswereinventedforareasonthatbeingtoallowpa rtsofthetexttobelogicallygroupedtogetherthussepara tingouttheproseandmakingiteasiertounderstandtheaut horIreallyrecommendthatyoutakethismessagetoheartot herwisepeoplejustwontbeabletounderstandwhatitisyou aretryingtosay
Actually, it was really hard to type that [grin] my fingers automatically put spaces in at the end of words!
Simon
I have a friend whose partner was driving down a motorway (equivalent to a freeway) in Britain. Unlike California where lanes are de-facto equivalent, in the UK it's customary to have faster lanes towards the "outside" (more to the right) of the road; she was driving in the fast lane at ~100 mph, as was typical for the road.
Her BMW had an "intelligent" system on-board as well as the GPS, and out of nowhere, it told her to "stop the car". So she did. Quickly. In the fast-lane, on the motorway. Chaos ensued.
She's not unintelligent (though, being blonde, she did get a certain amount of follicle-related humour directed at her), but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation. She's one of those people who don't interact well with machines or computers. She didn't think it through, she just reacted. In fact there *was* something seriously wrong with the engine, but nothing that would prevent her from pulling onto the hard-shoulder (the emergency lane).
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene" (though whether it's nature or nurture is up for debate) whereby people either abrogate all responsibilty to the machine, or they treat it as an advisory adjunct to their daily lives. Perhaps it's just the growing pains of a society in the midst of rapid change. Perhaps in a couple of decades, when the holistic neural interface(TM) is commonplace, it'll be us "techno-savvy" yesterday's-(wo)men that people will be laughing and pointing fingers at, Nelson-like. I wonder what it'll feel like, when the boot is on the other foot...
In other words, sure, people do stupid things, but this is an opportunity to educate, not to mock.
Simon.
Uh, no thanks.
Objective C is an absolutely gorgeous language. Absolutely my language of choice these days, I'll even install GnuStep on Linux boxes to have the same environment. IMHO it manages to get it just right - neither the hideous complexity ("you want a gun to shoot your foot, here have a howitzer instead") of C++ nor the limiting simplicity ("well, we have a pen-knife") of C.
People dismiss the language because of its [syntax], but there really are differences between method-calls and ObjC messages, and since ObjC is a strict superset of C, I can forgive it the brackets, if only because I've written complicated lex/yacc grammars before myself.
Simon.
This is a product that hasn't launched yet, hasn't been seen in the wild, and only demo'd under controlled circumstances. Yet we've had his illustrious personage repeatedly tell us that this phone is going to be a bust.
If it's such a dead-certain bust, why is he constantly mentioning it in the media ? Surely shome mishtake ? The fact is that he's terrified Apple are going to repeat their success with the iPod, and it shows.
Simon.
The bit at the bottom that says:
Blaming Apple
I'd say both, but I place the blame more on Apple, the author of the offending application.
Simon.
Seriously, Apple are not in the traditional 'business' market - as in: the pinstripe suit brigade. They make XServes, and cool 8-core workstations, but these are mainly for the creative crowd doing video/audio editing.
The iPhone is targetted at the same demographic the iPod was - people with sufficient disposable income to purchase a premium product, and who care about the "spit-and-polish" that only Apple seem to apply liberally.
The "closed" nature seems to be a bit over-blown too. Just because jo(e)-random-nobody can't (well, as of now, can't) write personal apps doesn't mean Apple can't turn it into a platform if they *want* to...
$500 is a chunk of change, but it's hardly out of reach. That study of college-students pointed out that 25% of them (from memory) were considering getting one. If a college student can consider getting one, anyone can. Personally, as a college student, beer was more important than 'phones, but I accept that the world moves to a different beat these days... An iPod-induced beat, of course...
Simon
That is all.
Speaking as someone who priced up a Dell and a Mac Pro, and had the Mac Pro come out some $2000 cheaper, I voted with my wallet, and I'm very happy with the result
Simon
So, I tried to reply to this, once it was being marked as 'insightful'... But the new /. text-formatter sucks dead bunnies through thin straws for preformatted text. So, here's a link to my blog-post instead.
Summary:
- There's more to security than a firewall.
- Linux is a fine server OS too, no disagreement there.
- OSX has a better client than SWAT.
- Disk performance on OSX is fine.
- OSX doesn't need a "guru" to administer.
Simon.
Perhaps it's a clever tie-in to their *real* next product - a stationery device! Except with google, it would of course be net-orientated electronic stationery... ladies, gentlemen and others, I give you the google tablet - the "Goblet".
Remember, you heard it here first
Simon.
Not really, not when the passwd file has 'frontrow' as a user... First thing to do is try the same password as the username...
Simon
MS had to be careful with their XBox, because they were adopting the Sony approach: sell the hardware at a loss, and make money on the software (games) afterwards.
Historically, Apple don't sell at a loss. I'm pretty sure that (even at the low price of $300 for a 1GHz/256/40G PC in that form factor) Apple will be making money off this - they don't care if you hack it.
In fact, the more hackable it is, the better - jo(e) public buys it so (s)he can watch their iTMS movies on the big screen, the geeks buy it to hack it. Box numbers go up either way, which helps Apple PR, and helps them persuade people they have *the* viable platform for the home.
I wonder how long it'll be before the USB-2 port is made available (it is running OSX, after all), at which point you get an external 1T drive on it as well, in one of the mac-mini style enclosures...
Simon.
Yes, the playing field (from Apple's perspective) is now probably twice as worse - up from a thimble to an eggcup, compared to Microsoft's mountain-range, that is...
Simon
I think what he's trying to say is that the actions MS are taking right now to increase their revenue are not as effective as the ones Apple are taking.
/. has a really crappy interface for formatted text, and <ecode doesn't cut it :-(
MS are, and have been for a decade or so (as you point out), vastly more profitable than Apple. That's not in dispute. A large part of that profitability comes from their own inertia, however. The fact that they *are* the massively-dominant market leader itself propogates that position, meaning they get "money for nothing" as people migrate to the market leader.
To maintain the market lead, however, you still have to put in effort. If you sit back on your laurels, you will eventually be overtaken. I *think* the point of his article is that MS aren't doing as much to maintain their lead, as Apple are to try and catch up. Looking at the net incomes for both companies over the last 6 years:
Year Apple MS
2006 1,989 12,600
2005 1,328 12,250
2004 266 8,168
2003 69 7,531
2002 65 5,355
2001 -25 7,346
(Apologies for the formatting,
So, the inertia is still strongly (vastly!) with MS, but if the current trends continue, Apple are *improving* at a far greater rate than MS are. Note, that I'm not defending this position, it's just how I see his argument.
Simon.