> offer a "cheapish" mac and make a thin margin on it.
Apple has NEVER sold a product at a margin anyone would ever call 'thin.' I doubt they would do a closeout at an outlet store under %25 over cost of production. Normal pricing at Apple is more like 50-200% markup.
> reap the fat margin on the upgrades.
That they sure do. Look at this announcement, the dropped the price on their 1G upgrade by the street price on a 1GB stick of DDR-400. They are now getting $325 (plus keeping the 256MB stick they would normally have installed) for a stick of memory that you can get from A list brands for at least a hundred less. I haven't seen price gouging like this since Radio Shack was dominant in the industry.
> What you are missing is that the mac mini was designed to sell accessories.
No it isn't. Apple doesn't sell those accessories and has never been in the business of enabling what it sees as competitors. It goes against the whole Zen of Mac to require a buttload of accessories to make a Mac do a job it is being targeted to.
If Apple plans to sell a home theater machine, expect a different rev that will be perfectly designed for that job, with the full set of plugs on the rear, s-video, component video, RCA jacks for the two channel audio and composite video and an optical audio connector. And it will come in the expected wide form factor to sit nicely stacked with an amp, DVD player and TIVO. Also expect it to come preloaded with all of the required software. So it Just Works.
> But I really think they were just trying to make the box as cheaply as > possible and realized most users would not need 5.1, so they could let > it be a separate device.
That is only valid IF they were not thinking of HD content. Face it, ALL HDTV content has multichannel sound. It makes no sense to require an add on device that costs darned near as much as a whole DVD player (cheep Chinese, but they are the most hackable anyway) to make a mini-mac useful for home theater if that was something they were planning to target the unit for. Adding an optical jack at the factory only costs pennies.
They don't release specs or source for a simple reason, lack of interest.
Look guys, lots of buyers of wireless access points are geeks so a developer community can build up around the popular products, see Linksys for an example. But how many digital camera owners are developers? And just how many would WANT to develop on a camera? Yes, if my Olympus came with the source tree on the CD there are a couple of itches I'd probably scratch but I really can't think of any major software issues with the sucker I'd want to work on as far as adding major new functionality. JPEG2000 support might be nice but I seriously doubt the camera has the compute power to make it practical.
The one feature I'd add to mine is to have it grab an image from the CCD on power on and see if all the pixels are black, if so display a notice to remove the lens cover instead of grinding away on the motor first.
> Tell that to the people who took a bath in Enron, money that cannot > "always" then be moved to another company--the money's gone, start over!
Sorry, anyone who puts a major fraction of their nest egg into a single security is an sucker and I invoke Heinlein's "It is immoral to allow a sucker to keep their money." wisdom on them. Diversification. It is a basic investing concept and anyone who wishes to enter the arena should learn the basic rules beforehand. And Shrub's private account scheme will not be true free markets since you must pick from a preselected list of historically low risk investment options. It isn't like they are going to let some idiot put their whole wad into a penny stock.
> Then I want every last cent which came out of my paychecks for the last > four years which went into the approximately $200 Billion which we're > spending on Iraq. > > Doesn't quite work that way, does it?
Nope, here is how it DOES work though. You didn't want the IRAQ invasion, you made that viewpoint known to your elected representives beforehand and in the recent general elections. Had your view carried the day there would have been no invasion of Iraq or at least GWB would have paid a price at the ballow box in November. We don't like getting ripped off on Social Security and are using the political process to have our grievences heard. If our side prevails you will have to deal with it. Since I assume you are a liberal/progressive you had best learn to deal with disappointment since you are in the minority at this point in history and probably will remain there another decade or two.
Our side had to suck it up from the New Deal to Reagan and again through the dark days of Bill Clinton. The wheel turns though and it is now your turn to be on the wrong side of history.
>..or that moveon.org is the base of the Democrats?... >...maybe watch too much Murdoch propaganda
Nope, while I do track Fox I also follow a variety of sources, including a good sampling of the opposition press like CNN and the NYT. A goodly number of liberals/progressives are worried that moveon and the Michael Moore crowd ARE now the base of the Democratic Party and rightly so. The Democratic party has been purging those few moderates who didn't get voted out of office because they came from what are now red states; see the now endangered species called "Southern Democrat" for an example of what I am talking about. The remaining Democrats in Congress tend to represent the extreme viewpoints of moveon.org and the Deaniacs. That sort of monochromatic mindset is leading to further erosion of Democratic electoral prospects and a lot of leading Democrats are writing about it and proposing various courses of action in the left leaning literature.
This would be a problem for the longterm survival of our form of government were it to continue until we ended up with effective one party rule but I'm confident the situation will self correct soon. Either the Democrats will totally self destruct, leading to the creation of one or more new parties, or they will get a clue and become competitive again. It just might take another decade or two. See how long the Republicans spent in the wilderness as a result of their inability to compete for an example.
Yes. NR might be the oldest voice on the Right, but they certainly aren't anywhere near the extreme edge of that philosophy. Go read em for yourself if you don't believe me, they are dead center on all of the issues that matter with viewpoints on both sides of most of them. Even on Iraq you can find columnists there both pro and con.
This is because innovation in political thought is now owned by the 'conservatives' these days while the 'liberals/progressives' are forced to act as conservatives in that they are reduced to defending the welfare state almost solely on the basis that it is the status quo and we therefore shouldn't meddle with it, i.e. the textbook conservative positon of fifty years ago.
> do you even have any idea WHO Stalin was? WHAT he did? HOW MANY he killed?
Yup, 'ol Joe Stalin killed just about as many as the maniacs at the NYT would if their kind ever truly came to power. The road to hell is paved with the 'good intentions' of the sort of idiots who publish the NYT, twist the 'news' over at CBS and form the moveon.org base of the Democratic Party.
> A G4 Mac will outperform any Dell computer of the same clock frequency
Which is meaningless since Dell hasn't sold a sub 2Ghz machine in a year or so and Apple is peddling these mini-macs with 1.2 and 1.4Ghz processors. It is hard to find a LAPTOP with a CPU that slow.
I know all about the POWER platform being a better performer clock for clock, almost anything beats a P4 clock for clock though, just ask AMD who is also stomping a mudhole in Intel in that department. But quantify has a quality of it's own and when the Intel machine has twice the clock speed that is an advantage that is hard to beat. (I am typing this on an Athlon64 clocked at 2.0Ghz and rated at 3200 "Intel equiv".)
> you'd have to spend a bunch of cash to buy anti-virus/spyware programs..
Eh? I haven't a single anti-virus program installed on a Fedora box.:) FC would run just fine on the typical Dell and with a quick addition of Dag's fine repo to the up2date config to get around the stupid patent problems associated with all popular digital media, would serve quite nicely as a basic PC.
> The Mac mini is intended for ordinary people who HAVE a cheap Dell
Nice idea, would be nice if it worked but I hope nobody is betting the ranch on it. Spend as much (or close to) as the original system just to replace the box part with something half as powerful, woefully underpopulated with RAM and with the punyiest hard drive anyone still makes as a new item. It's size and low noise might have let it make sense as a media center PC.. except it lacks IR, video capture, optical audio output, progressive scan video and enough storage to make it practical.
Personally I know a few people I'd recommend one to, on the grounds they put it on a KVM and only connect IT to the net and run their other stuff on the 'doze box. But they would never do it because the ones who most NEED a Mac to escape the horrors you rightly ascribe to Windows are the ones who NEVER will.
Yes OS X is nice and all that, but OSX and iLife isn't worth THAT much of a premium; and lets face it, beyond what comes preloaded on a Mac you are pretty much S.O.L. unless you install Fink and once you do that you may as well run the stuff in the native environment they were written for and use the occasional legacy Mac app via MOL under Yellowdog.
Which is the Apple problem, they are selling underperforming hardware at very premium pricing, hoping that a) the nice case and b) the couple of nice apps they artifically keep exclusive to their machines will justify the price. For a few arts crowd types (and slashdot editors who managed to cash out some.com dollars before the bust) it seems to be a fair deal but everyone else just shakes their heads and wonders "WTF?" And apple stays in their assigned place, a niche 2% player waiting for the day when the Penguin passes them by and seals their doom.
If you think the Mac suffers a lack of 3rd party apps now, just wait until they aren't the designated competition anymore. Of course none of this will matter to the faithful, who will keep right on buying whatever Steve declares to be 'cool' until there isn't an Apple anymore, then they will read the latest rumors of who is buying the old Apple IP and promising to resurrect the platform.... remind you of anyone?
p.s. Yes this post IS a troll. Sorry guys I just have zero sympathy for the Mac 'faithful' anymore. Wake up and put down the little plastic cup with Steve's special Kool-Aid.
Kinda defeats the whole mini-pc look whne you have to pile up a load a crap beside it. Doesn't look good. And I don't think I'd like to do video capture via an external device. I like my PVR-350 for that.
> Not only is it a dupe, but the announcement was so widely anticipated > and so widely reported....
Oh come on people! Anyone who doesn't already know slashdot's biases is too new here. They typify the stereotypes of the Mac zealot.
But since I'm going to get -1 flamebait anyway, I'll get ontopic and comment about this turkey.
At $399 it would offer some value, just because it can run OS X and a PC based machine can't. At $349 I might buy one myself. At $499 it is a rip. Go price out a cute little epia if you want a small computer, and the epia can actually DO the small media centric computer thing, unlike the mini-mac which lacks any sort of expansion slot. An epia would also make a better thin client.
Folks, Dell is selling complete PC machines for $499, with better specs I might add, including the display! EPIA machines can be built up in one lots for about the same price. But I guess Apple is still bound by their unwritten agreement with Microsoft that they can't actually compete in the non-apple market if they want Office to continue shipping.
> This month is the last month that hotfixes for Windows NT 4.0 will be > released.
Microsoft Sez:
> January 1, 2005 Beginning on this date, Pay-per-incident and > Premier support are no longer available. This includes security > hotfixes.
That means it is already toast. Next security bug is end of the road for NT unless you sign onto their 'special migration program' with undisclosed terms and conditions and that go through '06... almost certainly Jan 1, 06.
Still not exactly horrible for a lifespan though. Although as the sole source of errata it makes it suck more than when RedHat drops support for an old version since something like Fedora Legacy for NT would be illegal. Still, people who buy closed software know and accept the fact it is a dead end.
I know it is standard procedure to ridicule anything the present administration does, but going after ANY spammers is OK in my book. And going after the worst of the porn spammers is even better. Hell, I'l a geek and have been known to look at that stuff but these days I feel like I need a bath after I work through my inbox.... and that is after spamassassin has had first crack at it.
> When you buy a book do you feel that gives you the right to distribute > slightly edited copies of it? You bought a copy. You didn't buy the > copyright.
I a natural state of affairs I would have exactly that right because I bought a copy and could therefore do whatever I please with with it. However copyright law specificly forbids me from redistribution and public performance because we as a people, through our elected representives, decided that granting the original author a monopoly on those things was a good thing to do in the interest of promoting "progress in the sciences and useful arts" not because it is YOUR property that you deign to license.
I happen to agree with the general idea of copyrights and patents but think the "limited times" portion of the Constituition has been illegally tossed aside. But unless I opt for violent revolution I'm bound by my otherwise willing participation in our Former (and could be again) Republic to either abide by its laws or to engage in conspicious acts of civil disobediance and accept the penalties for doing so. So I don't tend to redistribute copyrighted material.
> That means that you are restricted by copyright law, and can only > copy it if I say it's alright.
Within limits you are right. (Fair use doctrine, working copies, in memory copies of computer programs, certain other exclusions, but I'm not a lawyer and they have a illegal monopoly on dispensing legal advice so colsult one if you have questions.)
> And my terms are the GPL.
Which only grants rights otherwise removed by copyright law, on condition that all of it's conditions are met. Uses other than redistribution are outside of it's scope.
> I've been interested in free software for a long time -- that is, > software I can acquire today and use for the forseeable future without > owing anyone money or other compensation, including requiring > registration (even if no fee). To me that's the essential quality of > free software.
That is free, not Free. And as a rule it is the absolute worse class of software on planet earth today.
Almost all 'free' software is either infested with spyware or worse, and tends to either disappear with no warning or start charging once a user base is built up.
Shareware is only a smidge better, as at least there is some incentive to continue development and you already know going in that the author wants money, but it tends to share the worst aspects of Free Software and closed in that it is usually a one man band (with no ability to harness the userbase) with no promise of continued development.
Full on Commercial product is usually bug infested due to the closed development but often offers enticing features. But again, it tends to have no future so it is dangerous to develop a dependency on one. (Quick, how many closed products have YOU been bitten by over the last ten years by their sudden demise?)
Free Software, when a viable option exists suffers from none of the above problems. That is why I prefer it.
> If the source code is there, and if modifications are permitted, > that's fine of course and is icing on the cake. The BSD license is > beautiful.
No, is the source isn't available it is crap, doomed to someday leave it's users high and dry. Good for disposable software like games, but not for anything longer term.
> Such a company cannot use so much as a line of GPL code without legally > binding themselves to commit suicide, hence for them GPL != free.
Shocking that such ignorance still exists about the use of GPL code. Back when NT had a POSIX subsystem Microsoft distributed the entire GNU toolchain for it on the SDK CD-ROM rather than reinvent the wheel for a product that didn't actually care about. So they included the source, including the small alterations they made to get it to run on NT and were totally in compliance with the GPL. Note that they did not have to release the entire Windows NT source tree, only the GNU software they were redistributing.
So long as you do not comingle GPL code with your own you are free to make use of it in your business and can even make some serious coin at it. But this is no different than any other software. For example if you had a copy of the Windows source tree and comingled that code with your product you would be breaking the law equally as if you stole GNU code. The difference is Microsoft wouldn't be interested in the sort of peaceful settlement the normally FSF negotiates.
> Your copy of my code is still my code, not yours. You merely have a > license to use it in certain ways as specified by the copyright law.
You have that exactly backwards. When I BUY a copy of your code (note I said BUY and not LICENSE) I own your code. Copyright laws then come into play restricting me from engaging in certain uses of my property because the government has granted you an artificial monopoly on those things. Go Google up a copy of the Constituition if you don't believe me. The monopoly grant is expressly to "promote science and the useful arts" NOT to give you the right to tell me what I can and can't do or to give Disney an eternal revenue stream. Should we as a people come to an agreement (through our elected representives) that the current Copyright and Patent system is no longer promoting the things it was intended to do we can and should alter the laws. This means it isn't your PROPERTY, it is a government grant that is subject to change.
> It was not an attempt to drop backwards compatibility, but rather an > attempt to produce a product vastly superior to an x86 based design.
True enough, but after a decade of Intel's marketing department telling everyone that anything that wasn't x86 compatible was a dead end, too many potential customers got mental whiplash when Intel then tried to get them to buy a non x86 processor.
Too often the cell companies design with the "Phone Company" mindset; i.e. they design a totally closed platform that they control so they can extract revenue from you. Yes the gadget can do cool ringtones, take pictures and play games.... at a per use charge for each.
If it isn't an open platform you can count me out. By open I don't mean it has to run Linux, but if I can't get a devel kit at little (use the pricing and availibility for the official Palm devkit as an example) or no cost it isn't open. If I can't download apps from sourceforge and install them without the vendor's blessing it isn't open. Notice that even WinCE is open by this definition.
Yes I understand that some parts of a cellphone's firmware must be unchangable for reasons that are obvious to anyone with an understanding of how things work, but the rest should be as open as possible, and standardized across multiple product lines and vendors is a big plus.
> Orkut, Google's new social networking site, is built using Microsoft's > innovative new product, ASP.NET
Someone doesn't know what the fsck they are talkimg about. Orkut was a solow project by a Google EMPLOYEE. One softie in an organization the size of Google only means they need to tighten up their hiring practices a bit more, they let a weak mind through their HR process. Ok, lame joke/flame aside, the guy was slamming a concept together in a hurry and probably using what was at hand. A good programmer can use just about anything for a prototype.
The problem is that Orkut isn't scaling well and won't because it is built on No Technology. If they decide they want to actually roll out an Orkut like service, expect it to be rewritten with more scalable technology.
> There will be an explosion of great apps soon...
Yea, and there were going to be office suites in Java. One of the reasons Corel is kaput is their suits believed the hype and sunk untold millions in a futile effort to get an office package to perform at an acceptable speed and have enough functionality to beat MS Works. Call me a cynic but get back to me when you at least can point me to some beta level stuff to look at.
> see how easy it is to create fantastic cross platform apps....
Whee! Tcl/Tk was making cross platform apps that could actually perform kinda well (for certain values of well... kinda like Java &.Net) a decade ago. Don't remember where it conquered the world, but I still use it where it's abilities are a good fit.
> Any ass can take a langauge that works on any platform and write a > program that only works only only one.
Not if it were truly a multi-platform environment. Java was such a platform until they added JNI.
Now, but if Mono actually ever matures enough to matter it might be possible to say that MONO is a multi-platform environment, but.NET isn't, never will be and was never (forget the PR) intended to be one.
Slashdot Mirror
> offer a "cheapish" mac and make a thin margin on it.
Apple has NEVER sold a product at a margin anyone would ever call 'thin.' I doubt they would do a closeout at an outlet store under %25 over cost of production. Normal pricing at Apple is more like 50-200% markup.
> reap the fat margin on the upgrades.
That they sure do. Look at this announcement, the dropped the price on their 1G upgrade by the street price on a 1GB stick of DDR-400. They are now getting $325 (plus keeping the 256MB stick they would normally have installed) for a stick of memory that you can get from A list brands for at least a hundred less. I haven't seen price gouging like this since Radio Shack was dominant in the industry.
> What you are missing is that the mac mini was designed to sell accessories.
No it isn't. Apple doesn't sell those accessories and has never been in the business of enabling what it sees as competitors. It goes against the whole Zen of Mac to require a buttload of accessories to make a Mac do a job it is being targeted to.
If Apple plans to sell a home theater machine, expect a different rev that will be perfectly designed for that job, with the full set of plugs on the rear, s-video, component video, RCA jacks for the two channel audio and composite video and an optical audio connector. And it will come in the expected wide form factor to sit nicely stacked with an amp, DVD player and TIVO. Also expect it to come preloaded with all of the required software. So it Just Works.
> But I really think they were just trying to make the box as cheaply as
> possible and realized most users would not need 5.1, so they could let
> it be a separate device.
That is only valid IF they were not thinking of HD content. Face it, ALL HDTV content has multichannel sound. It makes no sense to require an add on device that costs darned near as much as a whole DVD player (cheep Chinese, but they are the most hackable anyway) to make a mini-mac useful for home theater if that was something they were planning to target the unit for. Adding an optical jack at the factory only costs pennies.
They don't release specs or source for a simple reason, lack of interest.
Look guys, lots of buyers of wireless access points are geeks so a developer community can build up around the popular products, see Linksys for an example. But how many digital camera owners are developers? And just how many would WANT to develop on a camera? Yes, if my Olympus came with the source tree on the CD there are a couple of itches I'd probably scratch but I really can't think of any major software issues with the sucker I'd want to work on as far as adding major new functionality. JPEG2000 support might be nice but I seriously doubt the camera has the compute power to make it practical.
The one feature I'd add to mine is to have it grab an image from the CCD on power on and see if all the pixels are black, if so display a notice to remove the lens cover instead of grinding away on the motor first.
> Tell that to the people who took a bath in Enron, money that cannot
> "always" then be moved to another company--the money's gone, start over!
Sorry, anyone who puts a major fraction of their nest egg into a single security is an sucker and I invoke Heinlein's "It is immoral to allow a sucker to keep their money." wisdom on them. Diversification. It is a basic investing concept and anyone who wishes to enter the arena should learn the basic rules beforehand. And Shrub's private account scheme will not be true free markets since you must pick from a preselected list of historically low risk investment options. It isn't like they are going to let some idiot put their whole wad into a penny stock.
> Then I want every last cent which came out of my paychecks for the last
> four years which went into the approximately $200 Billion which we're
> spending on Iraq.
>
> Doesn't quite work that way, does it?
Nope, here is how it DOES work though. You didn't want the IRAQ invasion, you made that viewpoint known to your elected representives beforehand and in the recent general elections. Had your view carried the day there would have been no invasion of Iraq or at least GWB would have paid a price at the ballow box in November. We don't like getting ripped off on Social Security and are using the political process to have our grievences heard. If our side prevails you will have to deal with it. Since I assume you are a liberal/progressive you had best learn to deal with disappointment since you are in the minority at this point in history and probably will remain there another decade or two.
Our side had to suck it up from the New Deal to Reagan and again through the dark days of Bill Clinton. The wheel turns though and it is now your turn to be on the wrong side of history.
> ..or that moveon.org is the base of the Democrats? ... ...maybe watch too much Murdoch propaganda
>
Nope, while I do track Fox I also follow a variety of sources, including a good sampling of the opposition press like CNN and the NYT. A goodly number of liberals/progressives are worried that moveon and the Michael Moore crowd ARE now the base of the Democratic Party and rightly so. The Democratic party has been purging those few moderates who didn't get voted out of office because they came from what are now red states; see the now endangered species called "Southern Democrat" for an example of what I am talking about. The remaining Democrats in Congress tend to represent the extreme viewpoints of moveon.org and the Deaniacs. That sort of monochromatic mindset is leading to further erosion of Democratic electoral prospects and a lot of leading Democrats are writing about it and proposing various courses of action in the left leaning literature.
This would be a problem for the longterm survival of our form of government were it to continue until we ended up with effective one party rule but I'm confident the situation will self correct soon. Either the Democrats will totally self destruct, leading to the creation of one or more new parties, or they will get a clue and become competitive again. It just might take another decade or two. See how long the Republicans spent in the wilderness as a result of their inability to compete for an example.
> Or you could read any of the speeches from Democrats during the Clinton
:)
> Administration...
Guess that would have got my original post modded as "troll" instead of "flamebait".
But then what use is Karma if it isn't for burning in the cause of Truth and Justice?
> National Review is a balanced source now?
Yes. NR might be the oldest voice on the Right, but they certainly aren't anywhere near the extreme edge of that philosophy. Go read em for yourself if you don't believe me, they are dead center on all of the issues that matter with viewpoints on both sides of most of them. Even on Iraq you can find columnists there both pro and con.
This is because innovation in political thought is now owned by the 'conservatives' these days while the 'liberals/progressives' are forced to act as conservatives in that they are reduced to defending the welfare state almost solely on the basis that it is the status quo and we therefore shouldn't meddle with it, i.e. the textbook conservative positon of fifty years ago.
> do you even have any idea WHO Stalin was? WHAT he did? HOW MANY he killed?
Yup, 'ol Joe Stalin killed just about as many as the maniacs at the NYT would if their kind ever truly came to power. The road to hell is paved with the 'good intentions' of the sort of idiots who publish the NYT, twist the 'news' over at CBS and form the moveon.org base of the Democratic Party.
> ...misinformation coming from the right.
Yea, from the newpaper to the left of Stalin. If you want to read a more balanced discussion of the problem try here:
Donald Luskin on Social Security Reform & Crisis on NRO Financial
> A G4 Mac will outperform any Dell computer of the same clock frequency
Which is meaningless since Dell hasn't sold a sub 2Ghz machine in a year or so and Apple is peddling these mini-macs with 1.2 and 1.4Ghz processors. It is hard to find a LAPTOP with a CPU that slow.
I know all about the POWER platform being a better performer clock for clock, almost anything beats a P4 clock for clock though, just ask AMD who is also stomping a mudhole in Intel in that department. But quantify has a quality of it's own and when the Intel machine has twice the clock speed that is an advantage that is hard to beat. (I am typing this on an Athlon64 clocked at 2.0Ghz and rated at 3200 "Intel equiv".)
> you'd have to spend a bunch of cash to buy anti-virus/spyware programs..
:) FC would run just fine on the typical Dell and with a quick addition of Dag's fine repo to the up2date config to get around the stupid patent problems associated with all popular digital media, would serve quite nicely as a basic PC.
.com dollars before the bust) it seems to be a fair deal but everyone else just shakes their heads and wonders "WTF?" And apple stays in their assigned place, a niche 2% player waiting for the day when the Penguin passes them by and seals their doom.
Eh? I haven't a single anti-virus program installed on a Fedora box.
> The Mac mini is intended for ordinary people who HAVE a cheap Dell
Nice idea, would be nice if it worked but I hope nobody is betting the ranch on it. Spend as much (or close to) as the original system just to replace the box part with something half as powerful, woefully underpopulated with RAM and with the punyiest hard drive anyone still makes as a new item. It's size and low noise might have let it make sense as a media center PC.. except it lacks IR, video capture, optical audio output, progressive scan video and enough storage to make it practical.
Personally I know a few people I'd recommend one to, on the grounds they put it on a KVM and only connect IT to the net and run their other stuff on the 'doze box. But they would never do it because the ones who most NEED a Mac to escape the horrors you rightly ascribe to Windows are the ones who NEVER will.
Yes OS X is nice and all that, but OSX and iLife isn't worth THAT much of a premium; and lets face it, beyond what comes preloaded on a Mac you are pretty much S.O.L. unless you install Fink and once you do that you may as well run the stuff in the native environment they were written for and use the occasional legacy Mac app via MOL under Yellowdog.
Which is the Apple problem, they are selling underperforming hardware at very premium pricing, hoping that a) the nice case and b) the couple of nice apps they artifically keep exclusive to their machines will justify the price. For a few arts crowd types (and slashdot editors who managed to cash out some
If you think the Mac suffers a lack of 3rd party apps now, just wait until they aren't the designated competition anymore. Of course none of this will matter to the faithful, who will keep right on buying whatever Steve declares to be 'cool' until there isn't an Apple anymore, then they will read the latest rumors of who is buying the old Apple IP and promising to resurrect the platform.... remind you of anyone?
p.s. Yes this post IS a troll. Sorry guys I just have zero sympathy for the Mac 'faithful' anymore. Wake up and put down the little plastic cup with Steve's special Kool-Aid.
> I used to really care about expansion slots.
Kinda defeats the whole mini-pc look whne you have to pile up a load a crap beside it. Doesn't look good. And I don't think I'd like to do video capture via an external device. I like my PVR-350 for that.
> Not only is it a dupe, but the announcement was so widely anticipated
> and so widely reported....
Oh come on people! Anyone who doesn't already know slashdot's biases is too new here. They typify the stereotypes of the Mac zealot.
But since I'm going to get -1 flamebait anyway, I'll get ontopic and comment about this turkey.
At $399 it would offer some value, just because it can run OS X and a PC based machine can't. At $349 I might buy one myself. At $499 it is a rip. Go price out a cute little epia if you want a small computer, and the epia can actually DO the small media centric computer thing, unlike the mini-mac which lacks any sort of expansion slot. An epia would also make a better thin client.
Folks, Dell is selling complete PC machines for $499, with better specs I might add, including the display! EPIA machines can be built up in one lots for about the same price. But I guess Apple is still bound by their unwritten agreement with Microsoft that they can't actually compete in the non-apple market if they want Office to continue shipping.
Quoth the submitter:
> This month is the last month that hotfixes for Windows NT 4.0 will be
> released.
Microsoft Sez:
> January 1, 2005 Beginning on this date, Pay-per-incident and
> Premier support are no longer available. This includes security
> hotfixes.
That means it is already toast. Next security bug is end of the road for NT unless you sign onto their 'special migration program' with undisclosed terms and conditions and that go through '06... almost certainly Jan 1, 06.
Still not exactly horrible for a lifespan though. Although as the sole source of errata it makes it suck more than when RedHat drops support for an old version since something like Fedora Legacy for NT would be illegal. Still, people who buy closed software know and accept the fact it is a dead end.
I know it is standard procedure to ridicule anything the present administration does, but going after ANY spammers is OK in my book. And going after the worst of the porn spammers is even better. Hell, I'l a geek and have been known to look at that stuff but these days I feel like I need a bath after I work through my inbox.... and that is after spamassassin has had first crack at it.
> When you buy a book do you feel that gives you the right to distribute
> slightly edited copies of it? You bought a copy. You didn't buy the
> copyright.
I a natural state of affairs I would have exactly that right because I bought a copy and could therefore do whatever I please with with it. However copyright law specificly forbids me from redistribution and public performance because we as a people, through our elected representives, decided that granting the original author a monopoly on those things was a good thing to do in the interest of promoting "progress in the sciences and useful arts" not because it is YOUR property that you deign to license.
I happen to agree with the general idea of copyrights and patents but think the "limited times" portion of the Constituition has been illegally tossed aside. But unless I opt for violent revolution I'm bound by my otherwise willing participation in our Former (and could be again) Republic to either abide by its laws or to engage in conspicious acts of civil disobediance and accept the penalties for doing so. So I don't tend to redistribute copyrighted material.
> That means that you are restricted by copyright law, and can only
> copy it if I say it's alright.
Within limits you are right. (Fair use doctrine, working copies, in memory copies of computer programs, certain other exclusions, but I'm not a lawyer and they have a illegal monopoly on dispensing legal advice so colsult one if you have questions.)
> And my terms are the GPL.
Which only grants rights otherwise removed by copyright law, on condition that all of it's conditions are met. Uses other than redistribution are outside of it's scope.
> I've been interested in free software for a long time -- that is,
> software I can acquire today and use for the forseeable future without
> owing anyone money or other compensation, including requiring
> registration (even if no fee). To me that's the essential quality of
> free software.
That is free, not Free. And as a rule it is the absolute worse class of software on planet earth today.
Almost all 'free' software is either infested with spyware or worse, and tends to either disappear with no warning or start charging once a user base is built up.
Shareware is only a smidge better, as at least there is some incentive to continue development and you already know going in that the author wants money, but it tends to share the worst aspects of Free Software and closed in that it is usually a one man band (with no ability to harness the userbase) with no promise of continued development.
Full on Commercial product is usually bug infested due to the closed development but often offers enticing features. But again, it tends to have no future so it is dangerous to develop a dependency on one. (Quick, how many closed products have YOU been bitten by over the last ten years by their sudden demise?)
Free Software, when a viable option exists suffers from none of the above problems. That is why I prefer it.
> If the source code is there, and if modifications are permitted,
> that's fine of course and is icing on the cake. The BSD license is
> beautiful.
No, is the source isn't available it is crap, doomed to someday leave it's users high and dry. Good for disposable software like games, but not for anything longer term.
> Such a company cannot use so much as a line of GPL code without legally
> binding themselves to commit suicide, hence for them GPL != free.
Shocking that such ignorance still exists about the use of GPL code. Back when NT had a POSIX subsystem Microsoft distributed the entire GNU toolchain for it on the SDK CD-ROM rather than reinvent the wheel for a product that didn't actually care about. So they included the source, including the small alterations they made to get it to run on NT and were totally in compliance with the GPL. Note that they did not have to release the entire Windows NT source tree, only the GNU software they were redistributing.
So long as you do not comingle GPL code with your own you are free to make use of it in your business and can even make some serious coin at it. But this is no different than any other software. For example if you had a copy of the Windows source tree and comingled that code with your product you would be breaking the law equally as if you stole GNU code. The difference is Microsoft wouldn't be interested in the sort of peaceful settlement the normally FSF negotiates.
> Your copy of my code is still my code, not yours. You merely have a
> license to use it in certain ways as specified by the copyright law.
You have that exactly backwards. When I BUY a copy of your code (note I said BUY and not LICENSE) I own your code. Copyright laws then come into play restricting me from engaging in certain uses of my property because the government has granted you an artificial monopoly on those things. Go Google up a copy of the Constituition if you don't believe me. The monopoly grant is expressly to "promote science and the useful arts" NOT to give you the right to tell me what I can and can't do or to give Disney an eternal revenue stream. Should we as a people come to an agreement (through our elected representives) that the current Copyright and Patent system is no longer promoting the things it was intended to do we can and should alter the laws. This means it isn't your PROPERTY, it is a government grant that is subject to change.
> It was not an attempt to drop backwards compatibility, but rather an
> attempt to produce a product vastly superior to an x86 based design.
True enough, but after a decade of Intel's marketing department telling everyone that anything that wasn't x86 compatible was a dead end, too many potential customers got mental whiplash when Intel then tried to get them to buy a non x86 processor.
Poetic justice if you ask me.
Too often the cell companies design with the "Phone Company" mindset; i.e. they design a totally closed platform that they control so they can extract revenue from you. Yes the gadget can do cool ringtones, take pictures and play games.... at a per use charge for each.
If it isn't an open platform you can count me out. By open I don't mean it has to run Linux, but if I can't get a devel kit at little (use the pricing and availibility for the official Palm devkit as an example) or no cost it isn't open. If I can't download apps from sourceforge and install them without the vendor's blessing it isn't open. Notice that even WinCE is open by this definition.
Yes I understand that some parts of a cellphone's firmware must be unchangable for reasons that are obvious to anyone with an understanding of how things work, but the rest should be as open as possible, and standardized across multiple product lines and vendors is a big plus.
> You got taken to school.
.Net) a decade ago. Don't remember where it conquered the world, but I still use it where it's abilities are a good fit.
By a Microsoft astroturfer? Yea. Right.
> Orkut, Google's new social networking site, is built using Microsoft's
> innovative new product, ASP.NET
Someone doesn't know what the fsck they are talkimg about. Orkut was a solow project by a Google EMPLOYEE. One softie in an organization the size of Google only means they need to tighten up their hiring practices a bit more, they let a weak mind through their HR process. Ok, lame joke/flame aside, the guy was slamming a concept together in a hurry and probably using what was at hand. A good programmer can use just about anything for a prototype.
The problem is that Orkut isn't scaling well and won't because it is built on No Technology. If they decide they want to actually roll out an Orkut like service, expect it to be rewritten with more scalable technology.
> There will be an explosion of great apps soon...
Yea, and there were going to be office suites in Java. One of the reasons Corel is kaput is their suits believed the hype and sunk untold millions in a futile effort to get an office package to perform at an acceptable speed and have enough functionality to beat MS Works. Call me a cynic but get back to me when you at least can point me to some beta level stuff to look at.
> see how easy it is to create fantastic cross platform apps....
Whee! Tcl/Tk was making cross platform apps that could actually perform kinda well (for certain values of well... kinda like Java &
> Any ass can take a langauge that works on any platform and write a
.NET isn't, never will be and was never (forget the PR) intended to be one.
> program that only works only only one.
Not if it were truly a multi-platform environment. Java was such a platform until they added JNI.
Now, but if Mono actually ever matures enough to matter it might be possible to say that MONO is a multi-platform environment, but