You're either full of shit or have some really weird problem with your mini. I've worked on quite a few and have been able to boot into multiple versions of OSX and Ubuntu. As for a general purpose computer, qua? A mini will run Office, all your web stuff, play music, manage photos, and even play some games. How is that not worth while for a general purpose computer? Do you even have a Mac mini?
It's Command + Option + O + F, don't complain it doesn't work if you did it wrong. You can also hold down the Option key as the machine powers on and be given a nice graphical boot device switcher. Any bootable volumes will be listed there and are all selectable.
I think we don't see Apple handing out pre-release discs for everyone's PC specifically because it is MacOS as opposed to PCOS. MacOS is intended to run on Macs. There's little money to be made in selling operating systems. About two million copies of Tiger have been sold since April, that is about a quarter billion dollars in revenue if you don't count any sort of discount pricing (student etc.). The revenue for the quarter was about three and a half billion with more than a million Macs sold and about six million iPods. Selling Macs and iPods made Apple far more money than selling copies of their OS.
Giving out developer copies of the OS willy nilly isn't going to get them anywhere. It might expose a bunch of people to the OS but isn't any sort of guarantee they're going to develop for it. In the end you have a bunch of people with developer copies expecting the OS to run on their PCs and getting thuroughly upset when the shipping product does not. There's also far more hassle involved allowing any old developer PC to run the OS. There would need to be a huge effort writing drivers for the multitude of hardware combinations on developers' desks. If there was a requirement for developer PCs to resemble the Mac dev kits...it would pay off just to buy a Mac dev kit and work from there.
You're not buying the software itself though. The compiled binary on a disc is simply a representation of a product made by an original author; much in the same way a printing of a book is a copy of some original manuscript. The box contains (or is) a license to use the software in whatever manner specified in the body of the license or under what can be reasonably construed as fair use. Making a backup copy of the distribution media or using spreadsheet software as a database would however be fair use. Cracking a bit of software to run in a way the license specifically forbids probably would not be fair use. Again it goes back to the specific stipulations of the license.
You're equating a EULA with a shrinkwrap license. A shrinkwrap license says that simply opening the box is an agreement to abide by the license. A EULA (specifically OSX's) is most often the sort that needs to be manually agreed to. When you install OSX it presents you with the product's EULA. You have the option at that time to disagree with the license, pack up the software, and tell Apple you want a refund. You don't agree to the license when you purchase the product, only when you install it. Shrinkwrap licenses would not hold up well in court, click through ones however would. You have the option to click through the license without reading its stipulations. If you break the license that you agreed to abide by you are liable for whatever damages the court levies on you.
If a software vendor sold a product for education use at a discount, the concept of no license protections would allow businesses to pay the education price for commercial use. The same thing happens if software is free for personal use but requires a fee for commercial use. The vendor has no protections against the predatory actions of cheapskates and freeloaders without being able to enforce a usage license. Fair use does not include using the software without paying for it because simply because you are a tightwad.
I guess people wanting OSX to run on commodity PCs haven't been watching the computer industry for very long. The dominant player in a market has inherent advantages over all challengers. Many of these advantages are based on logical fallacies but are advantages none the less.
The market dominator can easily cut margins to lower prices in the face of competition. Windows costs $200 for a spanking new copy of Windows XP Home. If Apple released OSX for $129, Microsoft could easily drop the price of Windows down to $90 to keep from losing sales. The market dominator also has the ability to strongarm customers into avoiding the competition. "Gee eMachines, it would be a shame if Windows XP's OEM price for you went up a little bit, that would kill your margins wouldn't it?" says Microsoft. There's also the herd mentality of nontechnical consumers. They couldn't tell you what an OS was, they just want to download their AOL and send some e-mails. Trying to tell them there's alternatives to Windows will be met with "What is Windows?"
Part of the reason OSX is such a desirable OS is because it only has to support a limited hardware base from a single manufacturer. A driver writer at Apple can pull up all of the specifications for some chip used in some particular revision of the eMac to get something working right. That isn't really a possibility when the multitude of PC configurations that exist. There's little reason to put that sort of effort into the endeavor when there's going to be far less money to be made than selling Mac hardware with the OS.
A EULA is not void because you think it sucks. Software is not sold to you, its use is licensed to you. There's no transfer of ownership. A license can say all sorts of things, most of the time licenses disclaim responsibility for anything the software might inadvertently do or not do. You've always got the option of rejecting a license, in which case usage is not granted to you. You break a EULA and the software vendor sues you, they are probably going to run unless the stipulation broken was onerous or illegal. A stipulation that you had to punch a nun to use the software would not hold up in court. One saying you couldn't post decompiled source to your website probably would however.
By using a bit of software with a EULA, that use is a tacit agreement to the license. Even if you ripped the executable out of an installer file and never clicked through a license agreement you can still be bound by a EULA. Just because my car doesn't have bullet-resistant windows doesn't mean you can hop in and drive it around without my consent just because you had a baseball bat.
You're making a bad argument and one I specifically described. What happens when Apple does something? They haven't done something. Reacting as if they have done something is silly. There's a lot of rabid speculation going on and no real facts are being presented. If they allow the RIAA to tell me I can't rip a CD into iTunes I'll be pissed. As of right now they're just keeping copies of OSX from running on any old PC. I'm not too pissed about this, in fact I'm not at all.
The math for the situation is fairly simple. Apple makes a nice profit on their hardware, on average a few hundred dollars. Let's say the average price of a Mac is $1700 and the average margin is 25%. In the case Apple makes about $425 in profit per machine. Selling a million machines in a quarter would mean they make about $425m in profit.
Now assume they stop selling Macs and only sell the OS. Let's assume they sell it for the $129 they currently do and have a 50% margin on it. That is roughly $65 per copy of the OS sold. That is almost a seventh of the profit from their hardware sales. Now you could argue that more people would buy the OS alone if they could run it on any old PC so they could make up for the loss of hardware revenue. Their costs would increase for OS development however since they would need to support every bit of crap hardware under the sun. If they didn't no one would bother buying the OS.
A second problem is the one of piracy. Why buy OSX when it is a torrent site away? Microsoft has managed to survive mass piracy of Windows out of sheer sales volume. Windows ships on millions of PCs every quarter, and is likely looking at a single pirated copy per 20 OEM copies of the OS sold. Even a $25 OEM copy of Windows makes Microsoft some money, it even saves them money as most OEM contracts put the onus of support on the head of the OEM and not Microsoft.
Everyone here has been waiting for OSX-x86 ISOs to hit torrent sites so they can run OSX on their whitebox PCs. As has been seen many times before, not every ADC member holds up their end of the bargain with regard to their NDA. Knowing this full well it was rather obvious Apple would have to take some sort of action to keep their OS from being widely pirated within days of the first dev kits being delivered.
There's a lot of hand waving here about companies removing people's rights and slippery slope arguments along the lines of "if they do X they will eventually do Y for reason Z". This entirely ignores the fact that Tiger-x86 is probably the hottest thing to hit torrent sites in a long time. It was bad enough when developer releases of Tiger for PowerPC were making the rounds and people were making stupid assessments of the system months before release. The development kits and pre-release copies of OSX are meant to be in Mac developer hands, not Joe Dork down the street on his PC.
It is not a particular right to run OSX on anything but a Mac, the OSX EULA that you have to agree to in order to install the system specifically states that. Apple locking OSX onto Macs means they can continue to sell the machines with a straight face. No one would bother to buy a Mac if they could just grab a copy of Tiger and slap it on their PC at home. Apple would have little incentive to continue Mac development if there were no Macs being sold.
It's sort of funny that people make such as big deal about the GUI, when in reality the laser printer was (and still is) equally important. Guess who invented the laser printer? Hint... it starts with a X...
But the company that made the laser printer into something people would buy started with an A. Xerox had their laser printers but offered little incentive for people to buy them. The Xerox Star came with one but the machine was priced far beyond what anyone would reasonably be expected to pay for a personal computer. IBM tied their laser printers to their big iron and thus didn't really have mass appeal in the printing world.
It was Apple with the LaserWriter that really kicked off the popularity of laser printers. The LaserWriters had built-in PostScript interpreters and could be shared on a local network among several machines. All of a sudden flyers, marketing papers, and even boring office memos were adorned with graphics and fancy fonts.
Xerox has a sad history of inventing cool things and letting them rot on the vine. The Alto and the Star were cool concepts but commercial failures due to poor marketing and positioning. The Mac took off where they didn't by focusing on regular consumers (not seven and eight figure executives) and by having a killer app; desktop publishing.
MetroWerks officially leaving the Mac development market is a move that has been a long time coming. They started up in the early 90s about the time Symantec began to lose interest in Mac development. Symantec's management got their eye on other technologies and the Mac Dev group and their products suffered from managerial disinterest. CodeWarrior swarmed the scene with a fast compiler, a good debugger, a nice GUI, and a really nice class library (PowerPlant). It wasn't long before PowerPlant had won over the lionshare of Mac development from MPW/MacApp and ThinkC/TCL. Unfortunately after they went public in 1994 they never really managed to turn a profit. They held on for quite a while because Apple subsidized them with development contracts, a huge site license, and even gave out $100 MetroMoney coupons with paid developer accounts to buy MetroWerks shwag.
Apple's subsidies were propping up MetroWerks and when Apple started looking like a losing horse they started porting their dev tools to every platform they could. They haven't really put much effort into their Mac product since the late-90s when they started their shotgun approach to product development. They basically took their IDE and debugger and ported them to every damn platform they could find. None of their ports were really planned out, they just hoped one or two would stick and pay for the rest of the company. As they moved into new markets they put their existing products essentially in maintenance mode. They were on the verge of bankruptcy when they got Motorola to buy them out in 1999. When Motorola spun off their chip division as Freescale they sent MetroWerks with it.
There was little chance of MetroWerks supporting Apple's move to Intel, they hardly support Apple on PowerPC chips. Most of what used to be MetroWerks is now Freescale supporting Freescale products. What used to be the MetroWerks of old is long gone.
Apple is smart to release their own usable IDE and give it away to anyone that wants it. It lowers the barrier of entry to Mac development to simply purchasing a Mac. If you want to write the Next Big Thing you can plunk down a few bucks for a Mac mini and sign up for a free ADC account and a couple of mailing lists. Just a few years ago the only feasible option would be to fork over a few hundred dollars to MetroWerks or suffer with a painfully outdated MPW. Apple also gets to be really flexible with their architectures as the Intel switch is showing. Symantec's decline in interest on the Mac could have doomed the PowerPC lines if MetroWerks hadn't come along when it did. What happened to Symantec is now happing to MetroWerks. Instead of waiting for someone else to rescue Mac develop efforts Apple made Project Builder good and called it Xcode.
VAIO stands for "Video Audio Integrated Opteration". The line started in 1997 IIRC with so-named desktops. The VAIO brand covered desktop towers and monitors, usually sold as a kit. The original monitors were nice Trinitron screens with built-in speakers and a subwoofer. The towers themselves weren't really anything special but did come loaded with a suite of video and audio editing applications. Anymore the VAIO moniker has lost its original meaning and all of Sony's PCs are branded as VAIOs.
Your accessories are the same but your warranty is entirely different. If you go into an Apple Store to get your hPod fixed they'll basically be able to reset it for you and that is about it. The hPod's warranty is entirely up to HP or the retailer to bought it at if you bought their warranty. I believe the software CDs are different. IIRC the hPods came with two CDs, one for Windows and the other for Mac.
Keyword here is catalytic reaction. A catalyst is a substance that initiates a chemical reaction but is not consumed itself in the reaction. The catalyst in the paint would stay in existence, it would simply break down pollutants when they came in contact with the material when UV radiation was hitting it. As long as the pollutants were reduced to innocuous materials there wouldn't be an issue with toxic waste disposal.
You're right, I haven't bought a student copy of OSX in quite a while. At $69 you're getting a really good deal on a fully functional copy of the OS. There's no limitation to the education licensed copies save for you need to be a higher education student or some sort of education faculty. The one-time hardware discount is extremely nice considering you end up with a significant savings over even the normal education discounts (including the $99 cost of a student developer account).
The market share numbers are overused and overvalued. Far too often you see market share numbers vary wildly between two different reporting companies. Those numbers also represent computer sales for every imaginable facet of the industry. If you look at more fine grained numbers Macs have far higher share numbers. In the POS market Macs probably make up a percent or two while in the IT management market probably upwards of 40%.
You hit it on the nose. What the writer doesn't seem to grasp is that Windows is basing its keyboard combinations on DOS combinations. When both hands are on the keyboard holding down the CTRL key to do something is little more difficult than the Shift or Alt keys. In a GUI environment the situation is a little different, one hand is typically by the keyboard but not necessarily on it and the other is on the mouse.
On my desk my left hand hovers by the keyboard while my right is on the mouse, I don't know anyone who has this setup reversed. So with my left hand sort of by the keyboard I can keep my thumb near the Command key and get ready to hit some shortcut. Instead of having to use my smallest and least dexterous of my fingers to hold down this meta key I get to use my thumb. It puts my hand in a more restful state and so hitting often used shortcuts (save, cut, copy, paste, close window) is a pretty quick action.
When using a keyboard designed for Windows I find myself rarely if ever bothering with keyboard shortcuts. Hitting CTRL+S is a real hassle, especially when most Windows keyboards have tiny CTRL and Alt keys. Windows apps need little save and print buttons because it is downright uncomfortable to use shortcut keys.
With the Aqua LAF for Swing having Cocoa available through Java doesn't do anyone much good. With a very simple "am I running on a Mac?" if statement you can turn on the Aqua LAF and have a JMenuBar become the application's Mac menu bar. While being able to build a Java GUI in Interface Builder is nice it isn't something a whole lot of people are doing.
The biggest issue is in order to write Cocoa applications using Java you have to learn Cocoa. If you're going through that effort it is a lot simpler to spend the two days learning Objective-C and getting used to retain counts. You'll find there's a lot more support and documentation than writing Cocoa apps in Java.
When YellowBox was intended to run on Mach/PPC, Mach/x86 and NT/x86 a Java bridge likely made a lot of sense. A single application binary would run on any of those systems without recompilation. Java at the time was also seen as the Next Big Thing in application development. The plans for YellowBox never panned out and Java was not the Next Big Thing with client application development (despite its success on the server). It's entirely likely that the Java bridge will end up falling under the APSL and end up in the hands of third party maintainers or an entirely new bridge will be written by a third party.
I can use a windows box without a mouse, i can't do that on a mac, maybe thats because i'm just not smart enough to look up all the hotkeys.
You can pretty easily get around OSX without a mouse. Control + F2 highlights the Apple Menu and thus the whole menubar. Control + F3 highlights the Dock. If you turn on Mouse Keys you can just move the mouse around with the keyboard, just like you can in Windows. Instead of listing a bunch of keyboard shortcuts look them up on Apple's KBase.
AppleWorks is a nice suite if all you need to do is work with files you've created and work with and only need rudimentary Word and Excel support. When you start needing more advanced features that Office has AppleWorks begins to look extremely basic.
Two excellent examples of this are change tracking and comments. There's no comparable feature in AppleWorks for these. In networked environments these features of Office are seeing more and more use. If several users all edit the same document at different times being able to track the changes made to said document is extremely important. This couples well with the ability to make out of channel comments about the document that travel with it.
If you're trying to switch a business and their existing document base over from Windows PCs to Macs you're going to need software with not just good but excellent Office compatibility. You can't replace a tool with a new one that does half as much as the old.
While you're entirely correct about Windows being entrenched because of entire businesses running on Access/VB/Excel mutants I think you're missing the point of Apple's iWork suite. There's quite a few instances where Office and its associated complexity would be far from ideal, also something along the lines of InDesign would be entirely inappropriate.
Say you run a coffee shop with your wife and have a couple of college kids working for you part time with an iMac in the office. You need to work up some new paper inserts for your on-table freestanding signs. With Pages this is pretty simple. You first find a template that you figure will work out pretty well for you (Announcement Postcard). Then you pick an image from iPhoto from a recent event, maybe a live accoustic set some local band played. From there you type into some text boxes and move stuff around just a little and print them out.
Where Pages is saving you a lot of hassle is in being able to tweak your layout and have very fine grained control over the placement of everything. Your images and text boxes are easy to line up and resize, text flow actually works logically, and you can pull images right out of iPhoto. Pages has the word processing features you need like a built-in dictionary and spell-check but also has a surprising amount of control over the layout, something most people would expect only from a dedicated layout application.
Typing this reply up I launched Pages to see if I could do just what I described fairly easily. I was able to make up a pretty nice little printout in just a few minutes. If I printed this on a decent inkjet printer I think it would be difficult to tell I finished it so quickly. I even got a little creative at the last minute and figured out how to mask a screenshot of Google Maps to have round edges to give directions to my theoretical coffee shop. If iWork is destined to have a spreadsheet application that is as easy to work with as the rest of the suite they'll have a very nice tool for small businesses all over the place.
Office is still going to be good at what Office is currently good at, working in larger corporate environments on documents with very rudimentary layout needs but extensive data management needs. Pages for instance won't do a data merge that will let me print out several sheets of Avery labels with data taken from an Excel spreadsheet. It will however let me very easily design a new brochure for my business that I can send as a PDF to a print shop to have nice full color copies made.
I find it funny yet a little disturbing that there is some amount of surprise in these findings. I suppose a large percentage of OSS advocates that don't realize that software being Free doesn't necessarily mean it is free. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Say my company is considering some sort of solution to let all of the employees in various offices instant message each other. There's two solutions available which will meet the company's needs. There's Closed Source Messenger (CSM) and Open Source Messenger (OSM). CSM is priced based on the number of users and as such will cost my company a few thousand dollars up front. OSM is a project attracting some attention of Codeforge.net but is licensed under the GPL so we can pick it up for the cost of a download.
The benefit of CSM is that it runs on our current workgroup server and is managed through the same interface as all of the other services. Our small IT staff can easily deploy it and manage the whole setup without too much extra effort. They also get a phone number to add to the tech support reference sheet if they do run into trouble. CSM however costs a bit up front and is not quite as configurable as we might really like.
OSM is nice because there's no licensing issues no matter how many users we add to the system and have a lot of flexibility in its configuration. We can also get it up and running on whatever server system we might have available which gives us some choices down the road. On the downside the configuration is a handful of text files with confusing commennts and the documentation is a semi-useful Wiki.
Which system is cheaper? Well the OSM doesn't really have an obvious price tag so most will claim it is cheaper by default. However one of its drawbacks is the lack of consistant help and a configuration that is less than simple. This leads to the possibility that it might be misconfigured or simply that our IT folks have to waste a bunch of time (money) figuring out how to properly set up and manage the whole thing. The CSM costs us for every user we have using the system which puts a hamper on deploying it throughout other offices. We also have less direct contact with the developer if we're not a huge customer so if there's an obscure feature we'd like to see its less likely to ever be added.
In this hypothetical situation there's not necessarily a financial advantage going open source. We're looking for the best tool for the job, not to follow some particular ideology. One thing we gain from the open source solution is flexibility and mobility. If the CSM only runs on Windows we're going to be stuck with Windows for a very long time. If the OSM works on Windows, Linux, and OSX we have a lot of options down the road. It is also more likely for the open source solution to attempt to act in a more open fashion. Instead of using some proprietary communication system it might simply be an extension of Jabber or IRC or some such. In such a case we might have more choices in our end-user client so employees wouldn't be forced to use a particular platform on their desks.
Nowhere did I advocate teaching kids one particular paradigm of computing. Did your school not cover reading comprehension? What you're suggesting is schools go out of their way to provide platform hetrogeneity and stop "forcing" kids to learn one particular computing paradigm. This is wasteful and very unproductive.
There's millions of people using Palm based computers so the platform is obviously one that might be beneficial for people to know how to use. Your list doesn't include PalmOS. Why? You weren't thinking about it or it is unimportant to your particular view of the computing world. You likely don't own a Palm. Your plan does not properly expose school children to PalmOS, you're focing them to concentrate their studies and thinking patterns on desktop computing. It is easy to see that mobile computing is becoming more important and will likely continue to increase in importance in the future.
The idea behind your argument is you need to give children the most exposure to computer platforms as possible so they can make a choice as to which is their favorite or whatnot. It is not a high school or middle school or elementary school's job to teach children how to use a computer. It is their job to give them tools they will use later in life to teach themselves how to do and use anything they want. Composition is a tool, logic is a tool, research skills are a tool, reading comprehension is a tool. If you stick Reader Rabbit on a computer to help young kids learn to read it doesn't matter if it runs Windows or MacOS. If you're showing them how to type without killing their hands it doesn't make a lot of difference if the keyboard is a Happy Hacker or Apple Pro or Logitech. I'd rather the school just teach kids to find their own answers rather than fill their heads with a bunch of preposterous bullshit like Intelligent Design or Base 6. A kid taught how to find answers can easily move between Windows, MacOS, Linux, OS/2, CP/M, PalmOS, or their TiVo.
From a practicality standpoint, your idea of hetrogeneity isn't going to work because it is ungodly expensive for schools. They have lots of computers but a very small if any technical staff. Supporting more than a handful of different systems is often times ridiculously difficult. If a district wants systems their IT staff can't manage they're going to need a larger staff which adds another layer of departmental complexity. This in turn costs them more money and fewer resoources end up going to things like field trips or music programs.
So, say it worked great in all beta builds until the gold master. It had been tested and came up green so in latter beta builds it wasn't tested anymore because it worked. Then say sometime between the last beta build and the GM (which are a few builds apart) a butterfly flapped its wings bug caused SMB mounting to break in Finder. Errors happen because systems are complex and there's dependancies that depend on more dependancies, a error in the chain can cause really weird errors in seemingly unrelated parts of the system.
Your car analogy is flawed. New cars do have bugs when they roll off the lot. You would be really surprised at the number of real issues every car or every batch of cars has off the factory floor. Many times however these flaws and bugs don't crop up and cause a noticeable problem for a long time if ever. There are some problems that do crop up quickly however. It would be one thing if the manufacturer ignored this and went on its merry way. It is entirely another if they repair your car for you. I just had the dome light fixed in my car because of a faulty latch, should I be screaming about the manufacturer not having any QA? No.
The car analogy also falls flat when compared to something as easily changed as computer software. A patch containing the repair can be very small and be distributed to millions of affected users very quickly. If your car is in the shop for a week you're out one car. If SMB shares don't show up in Finder's Browse window properly you're not out SMB shares as you can work around the problem if need be.
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You're either full of shit or have some really weird problem with your mini. I've worked on quite a few and have been able to boot into multiple versions of OSX and Ubuntu. As for a general purpose computer, qua? A mini will run Office, all your web stuff, play music, manage photos, and even play some games. How is that not worth while for a general purpose computer? Do you even have a Mac mini?
It's Command + Option + O + F, don't complain it doesn't work if you did it wrong. You can also hold down the Option key as the machine powers on and be given a nice graphical boot device switcher. Any bootable volumes will be listed there and are all selectable.
I think we don't see Apple handing out pre-release discs for everyone's PC specifically because it is MacOS as opposed to PCOS. MacOS is intended to run on Macs. There's little money to be made in selling operating systems. About two million copies of Tiger have been sold since April, that is about a quarter billion dollars in revenue if you don't count any sort of discount pricing (student etc.). The revenue for the quarter was about three and a half billion with more than a million Macs sold and about six million iPods. Selling Macs and iPods made Apple far more money than selling copies of their OS.
Giving out developer copies of the OS willy nilly isn't going to get them anywhere. It might expose a bunch of people to the OS but isn't any sort of guarantee they're going to develop for it. In the end you have a bunch of people with developer copies expecting the OS to run on their PCs and getting thuroughly upset when the shipping product does not. There's also far more hassle involved allowing any old developer PC to run the OS. There would need to be a huge effort writing drivers for the multitude of hardware combinations on developers' desks. If there was a requirement for developer PCs to resemble the Mac dev kits...it would pay off just to buy a Mac dev kit and work from there.
You're not buying the software itself though. The compiled binary on a disc is simply a representation of a product made by an original author; much in the same way a printing of a book is a copy of some original manuscript. The box contains (or is) a license to use the software in whatever manner specified in the body of the license or under what can be reasonably construed as fair use. Making a backup copy of the distribution media or using spreadsheet software as a database would however be fair use. Cracking a bit of software to run in a way the license specifically forbids probably would not be fair use. Again it goes back to the specific stipulations of the license.
You're equating a EULA with a shrinkwrap license. A shrinkwrap license says that simply opening the box is an agreement to abide by the license. A EULA (specifically OSX's) is most often the sort that needs to be manually agreed to. When you install OSX it presents you with the product's EULA. You have the option at that time to disagree with the license, pack up the software, and tell Apple you want a refund. You don't agree to the license when you purchase the product, only when you install it. Shrinkwrap licenses would not hold up well in court, click through ones however would. You have the option to click through the license without reading its stipulations. If you break the license that you agreed to abide by you are liable for whatever damages the court levies on you.
If a software vendor sold a product for education use at a discount, the concept of no license protections would allow businesses to pay the education price for commercial use. The same thing happens if software is free for personal use but requires a fee for commercial use. The vendor has no protections against the predatory actions of cheapskates and freeloaders without being able to enforce a usage license. Fair use does not include using the software without paying for it because simply because you are a tightwad.
I guess people wanting OSX to run on commodity PCs haven't been watching the computer industry for very long. The dominant player in a market has inherent advantages over all challengers. Many of these advantages are based on logical fallacies but are advantages none the less.
The market dominator can easily cut margins to lower prices in the face of competition. Windows costs $200 for a spanking new copy of Windows XP Home. If Apple released OSX for $129, Microsoft could easily drop the price of Windows down to $90 to keep from losing sales. The market dominator also has the ability to strongarm customers into avoiding the competition. "Gee eMachines, it would be a shame if Windows XP's OEM price for you went up a little bit, that would kill your margins wouldn't it?" says Microsoft. There's also the herd mentality of nontechnical consumers. They couldn't tell you what an OS was, they just want to download their AOL and send some e-mails. Trying to tell them there's alternatives to Windows will be met with "What is Windows?"
Part of the reason OSX is such a desirable OS is because it only has to support a limited hardware base from a single manufacturer. A driver writer at Apple can pull up all of the specifications for some chip used in some particular revision of the eMac to get something working right. That isn't really a possibility when the multitude of PC configurations that exist. There's little reason to put that sort of effort into the endeavor when there's going to be far less money to be made than selling Mac hardware with the OS.
A EULA is not void because you think it sucks. Software is not sold to you, its use is licensed to you. There's no transfer of ownership. A license can say all sorts of things, most of the time licenses disclaim responsibility for anything the software might inadvertently do or not do. You've always got the option of rejecting a license, in which case usage is not granted to you. You break a EULA and the software vendor sues you, they are probably going to run unless the stipulation broken was onerous or illegal. A stipulation that you had to punch a nun to use the software would not hold up in court. One saying you couldn't post decompiled source to your website probably would however.
By using a bit of software with a EULA, that use is a tacit agreement to the license. Even if you ripped the executable out of an installer file and never clicked through a license agreement you can still be bound by a EULA. Just because my car doesn't have bullet-resistant windows doesn't mean you can hop in and drive it around without my consent just because you had a baseball bat.
You're making a bad argument and one I specifically described. What happens when Apple does something? They haven't done something. Reacting as if they have done something is silly. There's a lot of rabid speculation going on and no real facts are being presented. If they allow the RIAA to tell me I can't rip a CD into iTunes I'll be pissed. As of right now they're just keeping copies of OSX from running on any old PC. I'm not too pissed about this, in fact I'm not at all.
The math for the situation is fairly simple. Apple makes a nice profit on their hardware, on average a few hundred dollars. Let's say the average price of a Mac is $1700 and the average margin is 25%. In the case Apple makes about $425 in profit per machine. Selling a million machines in a quarter would mean they make about $425m in profit.
Now assume they stop selling Macs and only sell the OS. Let's assume they sell it for the $129 they currently do and have a 50% margin on it. That is roughly $65 per copy of the OS sold. That is almost a seventh of the profit from their hardware sales. Now you could argue that more people would buy the OS alone if they could run it on any old PC so they could make up for the loss of hardware revenue. Their costs would increase for OS development however since they would need to support every bit of crap hardware under the sun. If they didn't no one would bother buying the OS.
A second problem is the one of piracy. Why buy OSX when it is a torrent site away? Microsoft has managed to survive mass piracy of Windows out of sheer sales volume. Windows ships on millions of PCs every quarter, and is likely looking at a single pirated copy per 20 OEM copies of the OS sold. Even a $25 OEM copy of Windows makes Microsoft some money, it even saves them money as most OEM contracts put the onus of support on the head of the OEM and not Microsoft.
Everyone here has been waiting for OSX-x86 ISOs to hit torrent sites so they can run OSX on their whitebox PCs. As has been seen many times before, not every ADC member holds up their end of the bargain with regard to their NDA. Knowing this full well it was rather obvious Apple would have to take some sort of action to keep their OS from being widely pirated within days of the first dev kits being delivered.
There's a lot of hand waving here about companies removing people's rights and slippery slope arguments along the lines of "if they do X they will eventually do Y for reason Z". This entirely ignores the fact that Tiger-x86 is probably the hottest thing to hit torrent sites in a long time. It was bad enough when developer releases of Tiger for PowerPC were making the rounds and people were making stupid assessments of the system months before release. The development kits and pre-release copies of OSX are meant to be in Mac developer hands, not Joe Dork down the street on his PC.
It is not a particular right to run OSX on anything but a Mac, the OSX EULA that you have to agree to in order to install the system specifically states that. Apple locking OSX onto Macs means they can continue to sell the machines with a straight face. No one would bother to buy a Mac if they could just grab a copy of Tiger and slap it on their PC at home. Apple would have little incentive to continue Mac development if there were no Macs being sold.
But the company that made the laser printer into something people would buy started with an A. Xerox had their laser printers but offered little incentive for people to buy them. The Xerox Star came with one but the machine was priced far beyond what anyone would reasonably be expected to pay for a personal computer. IBM tied their laser printers to their big iron and thus didn't really have mass appeal in the printing world.
It was Apple with the LaserWriter that really kicked off the popularity of laser printers. The LaserWriters had built-in PostScript interpreters and could be shared on a local network among several machines. All of a sudden flyers, marketing papers, and even boring office memos were adorned with graphics and fancy fonts.
Xerox has a sad history of inventing cool things and letting them rot on the vine. The Alto and the Star were cool concepts but commercial failures due to poor marketing and positioning. The Mac took off where they didn't by focusing on regular consumers (not seven and eight figure executives) and by having a killer app; desktop publishing.
MetroWerks officially leaving the Mac development market is a move that has been a long time coming. They started up in the early 90s about the time Symantec began to lose interest in Mac development. Symantec's management got their eye on other technologies and the Mac Dev group and their products suffered from managerial disinterest. CodeWarrior swarmed the scene with a fast compiler, a good debugger, a nice GUI, and a really nice class library (PowerPlant). It wasn't long before PowerPlant had won over the lionshare of Mac development from MPW/MacApp and ThinkC/TCL. Unfortunately after they went public in 1994 they never really managed to turn a profit. They held on for quite a while because Apple subsidized them with development contracts, a huge site license, and even gave out $100 MetroMoney coupons with paid developer accounts to buy MetroWerks shwag.
Apple's subsidies were propping up MetroWerks and when Apple started looking like a losing horse they started porting their dev tools to every platform they could. They haven't really put much effort into their Mac product since the late-90s when they started their shotgun approach to product development. They basically took their IDE and debugger and ported them to every damn platform they could find. None of their ports were really planned out, they just hoped one or two would stick and pay for the rest of the company. As they moved into new markets they put their existing products essentially in maintenance mode. They were on the verge of bankruptcy when they got Motorola to buy them out in 1999. When Motorola spun off their chip division as Freescale they sent MetroWerks with it.
There was little chance of MetroWerks supporting Apple's move to Intel, they hardly support Apple on PowerPC chips. Most of what used to be MetroWerks is now Freescale supporting Freescale products. What used to be the MetroWerks of old is long gone.
Apple is smart to release their own usable IDE and give it away to anyone that wants it. It lowers the barrier of entry to Mac development to simply purchasing a Mac. If you want to write the Next Big Thing you can plunk down a few bucks for a Mac mini and sign up for a free ADC account and a couple of mailing lists. Just a few years ago the only feasible option would be to fork over a few hundred dollars to MetroWerks or suffer with a painfully outdated MPW. Apple also gets to be really flexible with their architectures as the Intel switch is showing. Symantec's decline in interest on the Mac could have doomed the PowerPC lines if MetroWerks hadn't come along when it did. What happened to Symantec is now happing to MetroWerks. Instead of waiting for someone else to rescue Mac develop efforts Apple made Project Builder good and called it Xcode.
VAIO stands for "Video Audio Integrated Opteration". The line started in 1997 IIRC with so-named desktops. The VAIO brand covered desktop towers and monitors, usually sold as a kit. The original monitors were nice Trinitron screens with built-in speakers and a subwoofer. The towers themselves weren't really anything special but did come loaded with a suite of video and audio editing applications. Anymore the VAIO moniker has lost its original meaning and all of Sony's PCs are branded as VAIOs.
Your accessories are the same but your warranty is entirely different. If you go into an Apple Store to get your hPod fixed they'll basically be able to reset it for you and that is about it. The hPod's warranty is entirely up to HP or the retailer to bought it at if you bought their warranty. I believe the software CDs are different. IIRC the hPods came with two CDs, one for Windows and the other for Mac.
Keyword here is catalytic reaction. A catalyst is a substance that initiates a chemical reaction but is not consumed itself in the reaction. The catalyst in the paint would stay in existence, it would simply break down pollutants when they came in contact with the material when UV radiation was hitting it. As long as the pollutants were reduced to innocuous materials there wouldn't be an issue with toxic waste disposal.
You're right, I haven't bought a student copy of OSX in quite a while. At $69 you're getting a really good deal on a fully functional copy of the OS. There's no limitation to the education licensed copies save for you need to be a higher education student or some sort of education faculty. The one-time hardware discount is extremely nice considering you end up with a significant savings over even the normal education discounts (including the $99 cost of a student developer account).
I suppose that's why the educational price for Tiger is only $79.
The market share numbers are overused and overvalued. Far too often you see market share numbers vary wildly between two different reporting companies. Those numbers also represent computer sales for every imaginable facet of the industry. If you look at more fine grained numbers Macs have far higher share numbers. In the POS market Macs probably make up a percent or two while in the IT management market probably upwards of 40%.
You hit it on the nose. What the writer doesn't seem to grasp is that Windows is basing its keyboard combinations on DOS combinations. When both hands are on the keyboard holding down the CTRL key to do something is little more difficult than the Shift or Alt keys. In a GUI environment the situation is a little different, one hand is typically by the keyboard but not necessarily on it and the other is on the mouse.
On my desk my left hand hovers by the keyboard while my right is on the mouse, I don't know anyone who has this setup reversed. So with my left hand sort of by the keyboard I can keep my thumb near the Command key and get ready to hit some shortcut. Instead of having to use my smallest and least dexterous of my fingers to hold down this meta key I get to use my thumb. It puts my hand in a more restful state and so hitting often used shortcuts (save, cut, copy, paste, close window) is a pretty quick action.
When using a keyboard designed for Windows I find myself rarely if ever bothering with keyboard shortcuts. Hitting CTRL+S is a real hassle, especially when most Windows keyboards have tiny CTRL and Alt keys. Windows apps need little save and print buttons because it is downright uncomfortable to use shortcut keys.
With the Aqua LAF for Swing having Cocoa available through Java doesn't do anyone much good. With a very simple "am I running on a Mac?" if statement you can turn on the Aqua LAF and have a JMenuBar become the application's Mac menu bar. While being able to build a Java GUI in Interface Builder is nice it isn't something a whole lot of people are doing.
The biggest issue is in order to write Cocoa applications using Java you have to learn Cocoa. If you're going through that effort it is a lot simpler to spend the two days learning Objective-C and getting used to retain counts. You'll find there's a lot more support and documentation than writing Cocoa apps in Java.
When YellowBox was intended to run on Mach/PPC, Mach/x86 and NT/x86 a Java bridge likely made a lot of sense. A single application binary would run on any of those systems without recompilation. Java at the time was also seen as the Next Big Thing in application development. The plans for YellowBox never panned out and Java was not the Next Big Thing with client application development (despite its success on the server). It's entirely likely that the Java bridge will end up falling under the APSL and end up in the hands of third party maintainers or an entirely new bridge will be written by a third party.
You can pretty easily get around OSX without a mouse. Control + F2 highlights the Apple Menu and thus the whole menubar. Control + F3 highlights the Dock. If you turn on Mouse Keys you can just move the mouse around with the keyboard, just like you can in Windows. Instead of listing a bunch of keyboard shortcuts look them up on Apple's KBase.
AppleWorks is a nice suite if all you need to do is work with files you've created and work with and only need rudimentary Word and Excel support. When you start needing more advanced features that Office has AppleWorks begins to look extremely basic.
Two excellent examples of this are change tracking and comments. There's no comparable feature in AppleWorks for these. In networked environments these features of Office are seeing more and more use. If several users all edit the same document at different times being able to track the changes made to said document is extremely important. This couples well with the ability to make out of channel comments about the document that travel with it.
If you're trying to switch a business and their existing document base over from Windows PCs to Macs you're going to need software with not just good but excellent Office compatibility. You can't replace a tool with a new one that does half as much as the old.
While you're entirely correct about Windows being entrenched because of entire businesses running on Access/VB/Excel mutants I think you're missing the point of Apple's iWork suite. There's quite a few instances where Office and its associated complexity would be far from ideal, also something along the lines of InDesign would be entirely inappropriate.
Say you run a coffee shop with your wife and have a couple of college kids working for you part time with an iMac in the office. You need to work up some new paper inserts for your on-table freestanding signs. With Pages this is pretty simple. You first find a template that you figure will work out pretty well for you (Announcement Postcard). Then you pick an image from iPhoto from a recent event, maybe a live accoustic set some local band played. From there you type into some text boxes and move stuff around just a little and print them out.
Where Pages is saving you a lot of hassle is in being able to tweak your layout and have very fine grained control over the placement of everything. Your images and text boxes are easy to line up and resize, text flow actually works logically, and you can pull images right out of iPhoto. Pages has the word processing features you need like a built-in dictionary and spell-check but also has a surprising amount of control over the layout, something most people would expect only from a dedicated layout application.
Typing this reply up I launched Pages to see if I could do just what I described fairly easily. I was able to make up a pretty nice little printout in just a few minutes. If I printed this on a decent inkjet printer I think it would be difficult to tell I finished it so quickly. I even got a little creative at the last minute and figured out how to mask a screenshot of Google Maps to have round edges to give directions to my theoretical coffee shop. If iWork is destined to have a spreadsheet application that is as easy to work with as the rest of the suite they'll have a very nice tool for small businesses all over the place.
Office is still going to be good at what Office is currently good at, working in larger corporate environments on documents with very rudimentary layout needs but extensive data management needs. Pages for instance won't do a data merge that will let me print out several sheets of Avery labels with data taken from an Excel spreadsheet. It will however let me very easily design a new brochure for my business that I can send as a PDF to a print shop to have nice full color copies made.
I find it funny yet a little disturbing that there is some amount of surprise in these findings. I suppose a large percentage of OSS advocates that don't realize that software being Free doesn't necessarily mean it is free. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Say my company is considering some sort of solution to let all of the employees in various offices instant message each other. There's two solutions available which will meet the company's needs. There's Closed Source Messenger (CSM) and Open Source Messenger (OSM). CSM is priced based on the number of users and as such will cost my company a few thousand dollars up front. OSM is a project attracting some attention of Codeforge.net but is licensed under the GPL so we can pick it up for the cost of a download.
The benefit of CSM is that it runs on our current workgroup server and is managed through the same interface as all of the other services. Our small IT staff can easily deploy it and manage the whole setup without too much extra effort. They also get a phone number to add to the tech support reference sheet if they do run into trouble. CSM however costs a bit up front and is not quite as configurable as we might really like.
OSM is nice because there's no licensing issues no matter how many users we add to the system and have a lot of flexibility in its configuration. We can also get it up and running on whatever server system we might have available which gives us some choices down the road. On the downside the configuration is a handful of text files with confusing commennts and the documentation is a semi-useful Wiki.
Which system is cheaper? Well the OSM doesn't really have an obvious price tag so most will claim it is cheaper by default. However one of its drawbacks is the lack of consistant help and a configuration that is less than simple. This leads to the possibility that it might be misconfigured or simply that our IT folks have to waste a bunch of time (money) figuring out how to properly set up and manage the whole thing. The CSM costs us for every user we have using the system which puts a hamper on deploying it throughout other offices. We also have less direct contact with the developer if we're not a huge customer so if there's an obscure feature we'd like to see its less likely to ever be added.
In this hypothetical situation there's not necessarily a financial advantage going open source. We're looking for the best tool for the job, not to follow some particular ideology. One thing we gain from the open source solution is flexibility and mobility. If the CSM only runs on Windows we're going to be stuck with Windows for a very long time. If the OSM works on Windows, Linux, and OSX we have a lot of options down the road. It is also more likely for the open source solution to attempt to act in a more open fashion. Instead of using some proprietary communication system it might simply be an extension of Jabber or IRC or some such. In such a case we might have more choices in our end-user client so employees wouldn't be forced to use a particular platform on their desks.
Nowhere did I advocate teaching kids one particular paradigm of computing. Did your school not cover reading comprehension? What you're suggesting is schools go out of their way to provide platform hetrogeneity and stop "forcing" kids to learn one particular computing paradigm. This is wasteful and very unproductive.
There's millions of people using Palm based computers so the platform is obviously one that might be beneficial for people to know how to use. Your list doesn't include PalmOS. Why? You weren't thinking about it or it is unimportant to your particular view of the computing world. You likely don't own a Palm. Your plan does not properly expose school children to PalmOS, you're focing them to concentrate their studies and thinking patterns on desktop computing. It is easy to see that mobile computing is becoming more important and will likely continue to increase in importance in the future.
The idea behind your argument is you need to give children the most exposure to computer platforms as possible so they can make a choice as to which is their favorite or whatnot. It is not a high school or middle school or elementary school's job to teach children how to use a computer. It is their job to give them tools they will use later in life to teach themselves how to do and use anything they want. Composition is a tool, logic is a tool, research skills are a tool, reading comprehension is a tool. If you stick Reader Rabbit on a computer to help young kids learn to read it doesn't matter if it runs Windows or MacOS. If you're showing them how to type without killing their hands it doesn't make a lot of difference if the keyboard is a Happy Hacker or Apple Pro or Logitech. I'd rather the school just teach kids to find their own answers rather than fill their heads with a bunch of preposterous bullshit like Intelligent Design or Base 6. A kid taught how to find answers can easily move between Windows, MacOS, Linux, OS/2, CP/M, PalmOS, or their TiVo.
From a practicality standpoint, your idea of hetrogeneity isn't going to work because it is ungodly expensive for schools. They have lots of computers but a very small if any technical staff. Supporting more than a handful of different systems is often times ridiculously difficult. If a district wants systems their IT staff can't manage they're going to need a larger staff which adds another layer of departmental complexity. This in turn costs them more money and fewer resoources end up going to things like field trips or music programs.
So, say it worked great in all beta builds until the gold master. It had been tested and came up green so in latter beta builds it wasn't tested anymore because it worked. Then say sometime between the last beta build and the GM (which are a few builds apart) a butterfly flapped its wings bug caused SMB mounting to break in Finder. Errors happen because systems are complex and there's dependancies that depend on more dependancies, a error in the chain can cause really weird errors in seemingly unrelated parts of the system.
Your car analogy is flawed. New cars do have bugs when they roll off the lot. You would be really surprised at the number of real issues every car or every batch of cars has off the factory floor. Many times however these flaws and bugs don't crop up and cause a noticeable problem for a long time if ever. There are some problems that do crop up quickly however. It would be one thing if the manufacturer ignored this and went on its merry way. It is entirely another if they repair your car for you. I just had the dome light fixed in my car because of a faulty latch, should I be screaming about the manufacturer not having any QA? No.
The car analogy also falls flat when compared to something as easily changed as computer software. A patch containing the repair can be very small and be distributed to millions of affected users very quickly. If your car is in the shop for a week you're out one car. If SMB shares don't show up in Finder's Browse window properly you're not out SMB shares as you can work around the problem if need be.