The iPhone would be dead by now if Apple hadn't actually started competing half-heartedly on specs as well. It would also have been worse off today if it didn't somewhat suck initially, as users then wouldn't buy the next generation as well. It's just good planning: make a product that sucks but fixes a few niggling problems, and then make an upgrade that doesn't suck quite so much. Make people pay twice as much, twice in a year. It's a good way to make money.
The iPhone4 camera is still fairly poor, with grainy images and oversaturated colours.
Correction: hardcore Apple fans in Europe had already bought their iPhones in the U.S. before it launched here. Of course, later iPhones were also much, much better, making it a reasonable option in its own right and getting all the early adopters to upgrade at first opportunity.
Did people actually say that? I remember the iPhone selling spectacularly well back when it was 2G, lacked copy & paste, MMS and multitasking, had a piss poor camera, and the only "application support" was fucking javascript and HTML. Apple doesn't need anything to sell: it will sell no matter what.
Yes, poor family. This kind of thing sucks a lot of money from one part of the economy and onto the legal system. It's mainly in the lawyers' interest: the family could just as well invest their money on the lottery.
Besides, she can't sue anyone as she is dead. The lawyers, on the other hand, deserve the right to make a living from what they do best: hog the legal system with pointless lawsuits against people who can't argue their own case. Thus: the need for more lawyers! I suspect this ruling was made in solidarity with Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten's dear colleagues.
My first thought was "I'm not going to read all that"; but then my eyes fell down towards the bottom of your overly long comment, and I noticed that you veer off into/. cliché territory with blah blah RIAA/MPAA, software patents, corporations bigger than governments, Streisand effect, C&D letters, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
Perhaps you should stay away from this site for a while.
As to your more relevant point (your link is the one found in the story you're posting to, BTW), Microsoft's market share may be bigger, but they're mostly a software company. Apple's computers cost more (yes, they do) than equivalent hardware from the competition, so they should profit more from one computer than Microsoft + hardware manufacturer do together from theirs. But then Apple also took the lucrative Walkman market when Sony was busy with pushing ATRAC on mp3 customers, and used that to make inroads into mobile phone, selling only the most expensive phone on the market, which also happens to be quite popular, with almost 10% of the total mobile market. Apple expanded well, with a sharp focus on the most profitable consumers. But the rest of us are not going to buy the most expensive phone on the market, and we're not going to buy an expensive tablet with less capability than the netbook at half the price. That leaves a huge market to Everyone Else, which is still going to be Microsoft on computers and Nokia on mobile.
Well, I just took the yearly profit from Wikipedia for both. Either Wikipedia is wrong (which happens), or I didn't notice that Apple's numbers were from 2009 (which certainly is the case).
So yeah, I was wrong. But Microsoft's profit was still bigger than Apple's (but not nearly by 2x), and Apple's does fluctuate more.
And the quarter before that? I didn't see people queuing up for hours to buy the 3GS in the months before the release of the iPhone4. Come to think of it, they only do that immediately after the release of a new product.
The point you made is that Apple's profit fluctuates more than Microsoft's.
They perform extraordinarily well, for a failure. Their profits are still twice as big as Apple's, for instance. Perhaps the media and the stock market simply are delusional.
No, I think people = people. Some people can't let KDE 4.0 go, even though they're perfectly capable of shutting up about practically all competing desktops. And on the contrary to what you claim, its unfinished status was in fact known, and the lack of features wasn't celebrated as a breakthrough in usability, which it was in Gnome 2.0.
It was made clear, and it was well known to everyone who considered installing it, that KDE4 wasn't ready for prime time at release. Yet you think it's in any way credible that you just happened to stumble over kde.org and saw the release announcement even though you were living in a bubble at the time and hadn't heard the rumours that it might not be quite the finished article just yet.
KDE Project Ships Fourth Major Version of cutting edge Free Software Desktop
With the fourth major version, the KDE Community marks the beginning of the KDE 4 era.
[...] For those interested in getting packages to test and contribute, several distributions have notified us that they will have KDE 4.0 packages available at or soon after the release. The complete and current list can be found on the KDE 4.0 Info Page, where you can also find links to the source code, information about compiling, security and other issues.
"Cutting edge." "Marks the beginning." "Packages to test and contribute." Not: what you said.
I can understand that you're angry if you installed it and noticed an immediate drop in productivity, since what it actually did, then, was to expose you as an imbecile.
Yes, I read it, and deduced that you've tried neither KDE nor Gnome. 1997. Seriously. "The setting to make the desktop usable as a desktop again." It's as if your only goal is to make the comment plausibly on-topic.
Clippy would have said: It looks like you're trying to have a conversation.
You're in the difficult 50K to 100K segment, which demands some knowledge and lots of genuine, honest curiosity. If you had only waited a week or two, you would be in the 100K+, which only requires a 50% troll ratio.
The thing is that people still bitch about KDE4 as if it still was stuck on 4.0. Mac OS X 10.0 was a pile of shit. Gnome 2.0 was shit. Windows Vista -- somehow, people stopped bitching about Vista when service pack 1, AKA Windows 7, came out. Some people have forgotten even how bad Gnome 2.0 was.
KDE? Oh, it's become pretty damn good in a very short time, works fine out of the box and you can configure it to hell and back if you don't like it. But people simply can't forgive the project for doing the same thing that Steve "can do no wrong" Jobs did with OS X 10.0: released too early. Hypocrites.
Someone with a three digit/. ID should know that Gnome took several years from the release of 2.0 (2002) until it was back to the usability level of 1.4. Gnome 2.6 (2004) was even forked by a couple of rather incompetent optimists. Of course, Gnome had usability experts from SUN who would claim that inability is two letters better than ability, since the ability to do things only would confuse those who don't understand why and how.
When did the 2.x series start coming good again? 2005? 2006? Or 2010, when they finally ditched Nautilus' obnoxious spatial mode? Or when GTK finally got an acceptable (it's still only half-decent) file selector?
Nokia made a decent profit again the last fiscal quarter after a short dip in the red, with their average phone being more expensive than before. And if the rumours about Gingerbread's system requirements are true (which is highly unlikely, but feature creep won't make it any lighter), the last cheap Android phones will be running 2.2.
For somone considering to invest in an office suite for the first time, you're basically saying that while the initial cost of Microsoft Office is higher than for OpenOffice, the long term cost is even worse.
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The iPhone would be dead by now if Apple hadn't actually started competing half-heartedly on specs as well. It would also have been worse off today if it didn't somewhat suck initially, as users then wouldn't buy the next generation as well. It's just good planning: make a product that sucks but fixes a few niggling problems, and then make an upgrade that doesn't suck quite so much. Make people pay twice as much, twice in a year. It's a good way to make money.
The iPhone4 camera is still fairly poor, with grainy images and oversaturated colours.
Correction: hardcore Apple fans in Europe had already bought their iPhones in the U.S. before it launched here. Of course, later iPhones were also much, much better, making it a reasonable option in its own right and getting all the early adopters to upgrade at first opportunity.
Did people actually say that? I remember the iPhone selling spectacularly well back when it was 2G, lacked copy & paste, MMS and multitasking, had a piss poor camera, and the only "application support" was fucking javascript and HTML. Apple doesn't need anything to sell: it will sell no matter what.
Who cares?
My cold will be over by then.
It's a great source for following the development of Mesa and X.org.
I wouldn't say GNUstep's "it doesn't quite work" beats Apple's "it just works", even though the latter doesn't actually hold true all the time.
Yes, poor family. This kind of thing sucks a lot of money from one part of the economy and onto the legal system. It's mainly in the lawyers' interest: the family could just as well invest their money on the lottery.
The car analogy is as inevitably stupid as it is inevitable.
Besides, she can't sue anyone as she is dead. The lawyers, on the other hand, deserve the right to make a living from what they do best: hog the legal system with pointless lawsuits against people who can't argue their own case. Thus: the need for more lawyers! I suspect this ruling was made in solidarity with Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten's dear colleagues.
My first thought was "I'm not going to read all that"; but then my eyes fell down towards the bottom of your overly long comment, and I noticed that you veer off into /. cliché territory with blah blah RIAA/MPAA, software patents, corporations bigger than governments, Streisand effect, C&D letters, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
Perhaps you should stay away from this site for a while.
As to your more relevant point (your link is the one found in the story you're posting to, BTW), Microsoft's market share may be bigger, but they're mostly a software company. Apple's computers cost more (yes, they do) than equivalent hardware from the competition, so they should profit more from one computer than Microsoft + hardware manufacturer do together from theirs. But then Apple also took the lucrative Walkman market when Sony was busy with pushing ATRAC on mp3 customers, and used that to make inroads into mobile phone, selling only the most expensive phone on the market, which also happens to be quite popular, with almost 10% of the total mobile market. Apple expanded well, with a sharp focus on the most profitable consumers. But the rest of us are not going to buy the most expensive phone on the market, and we're not going to buy an expensive tablet with less capability than the netbook at half the price. That leaves a huge market to Everyone Else, which is still going to be Microsoft on computers and Nokia on mobile.
Well, I just took the yearly profit from Wikipedia for both. Either Wikipedia is wrong (which happens), or I didn't notice that Apple's numbers were from 2009 (which certainly is the case).
So yeah, I was wrong. But Microsoft's profit was still bigger than Apple's (but not nearly by 2x), and Apple's does fluctuate more.
And the quarter before that? I didn't see people queuing up for hours to buy the 3GS in the months before the release of the iPhone4. Come to think of it, they only do that immediately after the release of a new product.
The point you made is that Apple's profit fluctuates more than Microsoft's.
Yes, one technology replaced another, taking away Kodak's old core business. What do you suggest will replace Office?
They perform extraordinarily well, for a failure. Their profits are still twice as big as Apple's, for instance. Perhaps the media and the stock market simply are delusional.
No, I think people = people. Some people can't let KDE 4.0 go, even though they're perfectly capable of shutting up about practically all competing desktops. And on the contrary to what you claim, its unfinished status was in fact known, and the lack of features wasn't celebrated as a breakthrough in usability, which it was in Gnome 2.0.
It was made clear, and it was well known to everyone who considered installing it, that KDE4 wasn't ready for prime time at release. Yet you think it's in any way credible that you just happened to stumble over kde.org and saw the release announcement even though you were living in a bubble at the time and hadn't heard the rumours that it might not be quite the finished article just yet.
Oh, and hey:
"Cutting edge." "Marks the beginning." "Packages to test and contribute." Not: what you said.
I can understand that you're angry if you installed it and noticed an immediate drop in productivity, since what it actually did, then, was to expose you as an imbecile.
Yes, I read it, and deduced that you've tried neither KDE nor Gnome. 1997. Seriously. "The setting to make the desktop usable as a desktop again." It's as if your only goal is to make the comment plausibly on-topic.
Clippy would have said: It looks like you're trying to have a conversation.
You're in the difficult 50K to 100K segment, which demands some knowledge and lots of genuine, honest curiosity. If you had only waited a week or two, you would be in the 100K+, which only requires a 50% troll ratio.
The thing is that people still bitch about KDE4 as if it still was stuck on 4.0. Mac OS X 10.0 was a pile of shit. Gnome 2.0 was shit. Windows Vista -- somehow, people stopped bitching about Vista when service pack 1, AKA Windows 7, came out. Some people have forgotten even how bad Gnome 2.0 was.
KDE? Oh, it's become pretty damn good in a very short time, works fine out of the box and you can configure it to hell and back if you don't like it. But people simply can't forgive the project for doing the same thing that Steve "can do no wrong" Jobs did with OS X 10.0: released too early. Hypocrites.
KDE apps would "just work"? I don't even understand what you're trying to do with this rather poor troll, apart from spewing regurgitated nonsense.
Someone with a three digit /. ID should know that Gnome took several years from the release of 2.0 (2002) until it was back to the usability level of 1.4. Gnome 2.6 (2004) was even forked by a couple of rather incompetent optimists. Of course, Gnome had usability experts from SUN who would claim that inability is two letters better than ability, since the ability to do things only would confuse those who don't understand why and how.
When did the 2.x series start coming good again? 2005? 2006? Or 2010, when they finally ditched Nautilus' obnoxious spatial mode? Or when GTK finally got an acceptable (it's still only half-decent) file selector?
My first question is; how many people will be running command line tools on their phone?
Plenty of really excellent GUI apps (some of them made with Qt) are simply front-ends to complex command line utillities.
Nokia made a decent profit again the last fiscal quarter after a short dip in the red, with their average phone being more expensive than before. And if the rumours about Gingerbread's system requirements are true (which is highly unlikely, but feature creep won't make it any lighter), the last cheap Android phones will be running 2.2.
For somone considering to invest in an office suite for the first time, you're basically saying that while the initial cost of Microsoft Office is higher than for OpenOffice, the long term cost is even worse.
This project isn't forked to create a better version, though, it's forked so that it doesn't depend on a gang of absolute scumbags.