You'd have to be doing pretty badly not to cover the costs of porting to Mac.
I'll say it one more time, then I will give up: coding is only a small part of the expense of selling an application. I've already provided the details in my previous posts.
I didn't say that you couldn't make a living selling Mac apps. But most of the companies that do so specialize in the Mac marketplace. It a lot easier to support the Mac if all your employees have Mac expertise. It also helps if there are a lot of Mac users who are into the particular specialized software (graphics, publishing, music) that you sell.
But if you happen to have a major product that already runs on Windows, just porting it the Mac is not a guarantee of more profits. Remember, it's not enough to just get more customers: you have to get enough customers to justify your extra costs.
Consider FrameMaker. (A product I personally loathe, but which happens to be a standard technical writing tool.) It was never a Windows-only product: it started out on UNIX. At its peak (version 5.6) it was available on Windows, Mac, Solaris/SPARC, HP-UX, AIX, and IRIX, and there was a beta version for Linux. But now FrameMaker has abandoned all platforms except Windows and Solaris/SPARC. Now, you can hardly accuse the publisher of not knowing the Mac marketplace: FrameMaker belongs to Adobe, and they're probably the biggest vendor of Mac software there is. They just weren't making enough money to justify all those versions.
I would be the last person to deny that. I just spent the last year writing about Java. When it comes to creating web pages, my mantra is "code to the standard, not the browser!"
But there's more to creating a commercially successful application than writing code. There's QA, distribution, support, marketing, grabbing space on retail shelves and online distribution channels. These things cost money, and doing them for marginal platforms actually costs more: it's harder to hire people with the necessary expertise. People who insist that software developers can easily support every little platform out there are ignorant of the way the marketplace works.
Of course it's circular logic. That's the way the marketplace works. You can't make money writing applications for a platform that doesn't have a lot of users, and users don't adopt a platform that doesn't have applications.
Microsoft's OSs have always been challenged by alternatives that were technologically superior: CP/M, QNX, Amiga, OS/2, and a bunch of others I can't be bothered to dredge my memory for. I even worked for one or two of the companies that created these alternatives. (Ever hear of CTOS?) But once Microsoft achieved a critical mass of locked-in users, none of these had much of a future. Linux is kept alive mainly by its advantages as a server-side OS. Mac is kept alive by its coolness factor and the fact that Microsoft still writes applications for it. All the others are gone.
If game studios would stop developing against DirectX and start using OpenGL instead, it would be much easier for them to support platforms other than Windows.
Gee you don't ask much. Just that game developers abandon their existing code base and totally retrain their programmers, just to sell a few games to people who represent a tiny portion of the market. Don't hold your breath until that happens!
Even if you develop against platform-agnostic APIs, it still costs a lot of money to support users running your software on different platforms, because of the cost of extra training and procedural documentation for your support staff. Again, there's no incentive to do that as long as those platforms represent a tiny percentage of the market
It's hard to read anything into such convoluted logic. You think mass extinctions aren't cool, but human-caused extinctions don't count because they are "relatively" small? Dude, we're currently losing 30,000 species per year. Bet you didn't know that.
So driving thousands of species to extinction is no big deal, because many more have gone extinct naturally? That's like saying Hitler and Stalin were no big deal, because the millions they murdered were a tiny percentage of all the murders that ever happened.
Anyway, when we lose a species, we impoverish our own environment. We already live in a world that is a lot less interesting and enjoyable because there are no longer thousands of whales crowding the oceans or huge flocks of migratory birds crowding the skies. North American now has a tiny fraction of the forests it had 200 years ago. And so on. If trends continue, our grandchildren will live in a world where there are no natural creatures that you can see without a microscope. And it will take millions of years to evolve new ones. So humanity will live out the rest of its existence surrounded by potted plants, domesticated animals, and "weed" species like rats and raccoons.
There's also the little detail that we're kind of dependent on all the biodiversity we're destroying. You destroy a species here and a species there — no big deal, there are many more. But you do this enough times, and some vital ecological link gets broken, and some natural system we unknowingly rely on to get food, water, or air just stops working. But hey, that's no big deal — just one more extinct species, right?
The problem with UI inconsistencies is that they make you hunt around for the particular thing you need to click on. Obviously you're very good at that, so good you don't even notice the effort involved. That's not true for most people.
I mostly work on Windows, and whenever I switch to Mac, all the little GUI differences drive me up the wall. And yet I know plenty of people who've gone from Windows to Mac without effort. People are different, that's all.
Even on Windows, the fashion for using "skinned" UIs drives me crazy, because it means I have to hunt for UI components I should be able to access without thinking. Obviously there are people who have no trouble remembering where the buttons and menu bars are in all their different applications, and they would seem to be the ones driving UI design these days. So eye candy is valued over usability. That's pretty frustrating for many users.
Well, yeah, if you're going to carry over a lot of Galactica concepts, you might as well do a Galactica remake. But why do you need to carry anything over from anything? Creatively, it would have been better to start from absolute scratch.
Businesswise, it's a different story. NBC/Universal already owned the rights to the first Galactica, so it was easier to persuade them to back a remake than to back something completely original. By the same token, CBS/Paramount is not going to back a completely original SF show when there's any hope of reviving Star Trek.
Consider Battlestar Galactica. The new series is pretty good, but does it really make sense for it to be a remake? From a storytelling point of view, the answer is a definite No: they made so many basic changes, they might as well have started from scratch. But that's not the way Hollywood works. It doesn't like taking chances, and even a remake of a lame Star Wars ripoff is "safer" than a totally new concept.
That's why Berman was able to retain control of Star Trek as long as he did: he was a known quantity, and the people with the money like known quantities. The fans hate him for his unimaginative stories, but to the money people, imagination is risk, and risk is evil.
Even outside Hollywood, any franchise with an established fan base is unkillable. Prime example: Sherlock Holmes. His creator was utterly sick of him only 6 years after creating him. But he couldn't fight the rabid (and in my opinion, rather lame) fan base, which still exists 130 years later.
If the old Berman crew were still in charge, it'd be the first episode: time travel is the standard dodge of unimaginative SF writers. (There have have been some great TT stories, some even on Star Trek, but the sub-genre is thoroughly mined out. It's only current virtue is that it's paradoxical, so the writer doesn't have to come up with a consistent plot.) But if they've abandoned the warm-and-fuzzy Federation that has been the backdrop of Star Trek since the 60s, then hopefully they're abandoning the tired plot gimmicks too.
It's amusing (and sad) to hear this argument used in favor of Windows Vista — or any version of Windows. Backwards compatibility is the only reason the Wintel platform even exists! We're talking a stream of hardware and software upgrades that goes all the way back to the Intel 4004, the the very first commercial microprocessor.
If sticking with old versions of Windows is "backwards thinking" than upgrading to Vista represents "forward thinking". Which is absurd. If Vista had retained its serious innovations, like the next-generation file system, than maybe upgrading would mean getting access to some serious new technology. But they had to strip most of that out in or to get the thing out the door. What's left is changes designed to fix Windows' many security flaws (not just bugs, but vulnerabilities that were designed in!) and some UI changes that are mostly imitations OS X.
Speaking of which, is anybody who's planning to buy a new machine just to run Vista even considering buying a Mac instead? You can argue about whether or not the Mac is superior, but the fact is that few folks can even consider that option, because they have a bunch of Windows apps they need to be able to run. Backward compatibility isn't "backward thinking", it's just a fact of life.
Each of us is a programming amateur just once (I hope), but learns many additional languages throughout his career, and I think we want those non-newbie books to be concise and get to the point.
Yes that's a need — but it's a need that's already been met. The first thing anybody does when they're trying to get a new language accepted is to write a language reference. For Java, it's Gosling, Arnold, and Holmes. For C++, it's Stroustrup For Perl, it's the camel book. And so on. Yes, these books meet a big need. But there's no need to write these books over and over. And yet, that's what most programming texts do.
I never said cows had nothing to do with global warming. Indeed, I remember how the "skeptics" sneered when scientists first suggested that agricultural methane was a factor. ("Cow farts changing the weather! Those stupid liberals.") What I don't accept is Fox's oversimplified version of the cow fart issue being trotted out as a "I don't know who to believe" argument. I certainly haven't seen anything solid to suggest that cows are a bigger factor than industrial pollution.
What's frustrating here is that Dean has not thought to ask the question I'd really liked answered: why does this bozo believe that he has a legal claim to the top Google hit for a particular search term? Dean, how about it? At the very least it will probably shut the guy up.
Slashdot Mirror
So why do you suppose Adobe — a Mac-centric company — stopped supporting the Mac version of FrameMaker?
The terrorists have already won. I can even give you the exact date: December 12, 2000.
I didn't say that you couldn't make a living selling Mac apps. But most of the companies that do so specialize in the Mac marketplace. It a lot easier to support the Mac if all your employees have Mac expertise. It also helps if there are a lot of Mac users who are into the particular specialized software (graphics, publishing, music) that you sell.
But if you happen to have a major product that already runs on Windows, just porting it the Mac is not a guarantee of more profits. Remember, it's not enough to just get more customers: you have to get enough customers to justify your extra costs.
Consider FrameMaker. (A product I personally loathe, but which happens to be a standard technical writing tool.) It was never a Windows-only product: it started out on UNIX. At its peak (version 5.6) it was available on Windows, Mac, Solaris/SPARC, HP-UX, AIX, and IRIX, and there was a beta version for Linux. But now FrameMaker has abandoned all platforms except Windows and Solaris/SPARC. Now, you can hardly accuse the publisher of not knowing the Mac marketplace: FrameMaker belongs to Adobe, and they're probably the biggest vendor of Mac software there is. They just weren't making enough money to justify all those versions.
I would be the last person to deny that. I just spent the last year writing about Java. When it comes to creating web pages, my mantra is "code to the standard, not the browser!"
But there's more to creating a commercially successful application than writing code. There's QA, distribution, support, marketing, grabbing space on retail shelves and online distribution channels. These things cost money, and doing them for marginal platforms actually costs more: it's harder to hire people with the necessary expertise. People who insist that software developers can easily support every little platform out there are ignorant of the way the marketplace works.
Of course it's circular logic. That's the way the marketplace works. You can't make money writing applications for a platform that doesn't have a lot of users, and users don't adopt a platform that doesn't have applications.
Microsoft's OSs have always been challenged by alternatives that were technologically superior: CP/M, QNX, Amiga, OS/2, and a bunch of others I can't be bothered to dredge my memory for. I even worked for one or two of the companies that created these alternatives. (Ever hear of CTOS?) But once Microsoft achieved a critical mass of locked-in users, none of these had much of a future. Linux is kept alive mainly by its advantages as a server-side OS. Mac is kept alive by its coolness factor and the fact that Microsoft still writes applications for it. All the others are gone.
Gee you don't ask much. Just that game developers abandon their existing code base and totally retrain their programmers, just to sell a few games to people who represent a tiny portion of the market. Don't hold your breath until that happens!
Even if you develop against platform-agnostic APIs, it still costs a lot of money to support users running your software on different platforms, because of the cost of extra training and procedural documentation for your support staff. Again, there's no incentive to do that as long as those platforms represent a tiny percentage of the market
How many of them even have IM accounts?
Dude, you are hackerdom personified!
It's hard to read anything into such convoluted logic. You think mass extinctions aren't cool, but human-caused extinctions don't count because they are "relatively" small? Dude, we're currently losing 30,000 species per year. Bet you didn't know that.
If you're going for a socratic argument, I'm too dense to see it. Why don't you just go ahead and explain yourself.
So driving thousands of species to extinction is no big deal, because many more have gone extinct naturally? That's like saying Hitler and Stalin were no big deal, because the millions they murdered were a tiny percentage of all the murders that ever happened.
Anyway, when we lose a species, we impoverish our own environment. We already live in a world that is a lot less interesting and enjoyable because there are no longer thousands of whales crowding the oceans or huge flocks of migratory birds crowding the skies. North American now has a tiny fraction of the forests it had 200 years ago. And so on. If trends continue, our grandchildren will live in a world where there are no natural creatures that you can see without a microscope. And it will take millions of years to evolve new ones. So humanity will live out the rest of its existence surrounded by potted plants, domesticated animals, and "weed" species like rats and raccoons.
There's also the little detail that we're kind of dependent on all the biodiversity we're destroying. You destroy a species here and a species there — no big deal, there are many more. But you do this enough times, and some vital ecological link gets broken, and some natural system we unknowingly rely on to get food, water, or air just stops working. But hey, that's no big deal — just one more extinct species, right?
I enjoy puns, but that one is past lame.
The problem with UI inconsistencies is that they make you hunt around for the particular thing you need to click on. Obviously you're very good at that, so good you don't even notice the effort involved. That's not true for most people.
I mostly work on Windows, and whenever I switch to Mac, all the little GUI differences drive me up the wall. And yet I know plenty of people who've gone from Windows to Mac without effort. People are different, that's all.
Even on Windows, the fashion for using "skinned" UIs drives me crazy, because it means I have to hunt for UI components I should be able to access without thinking. Obviously there are people who have no trouble remembering where the buttons and menu bars are in all their different applications, and they would seem to be the ones driving UI design these days. So eye candy is valued over usability. That's pretty frustrating for many users.
Well, yeah, if you're going to carry over a lot of Galactica concepts, you might as well do a Galactica remake. But why do you need to carry anything over from anything? Creatively, it would have been better to start from absolute scratch.
Businesswise, it's a different story. NBC/Universal already owned the rights to the first Galactica, so it was easier to persuade them to back a remake than to back something completely original. By the same token, CBS/Paramount is not going to back a completely original SF show when there's any hope of reviving Star Trek.
Old franchises never die. They just go on hiatus.
Consider Battlestar Galactica. The new series is pretty good, but does it really make sense for it to be a remake? From a storytelling point of view, the answer is a definite No: they made so many basic changes, they might as well have started from scratch. But that's not the way Hollywood works. It doesn't like taking chances, and even a remake of a lame Star Wars ripoff is "safer" than a totally new concept.
That's why Berman was able to retain control of Star Trek as long as he did: he was a known quantity, and the people with the money like known quantities. The fans hate him for his unimaginative stories, but to the money people, imagination is risk, and risk is evil.
Even outside Hollywood, any franchise with an established fan base is unkillable. Prime example: Sherlock Holmes. His creator was utterly sick of him only 6 years after creating him. But he couldn't fight the rabid (and in my opinion, rather lame) fan base, which still exists 130 years later.
If the old Berman crew were still in charge, it'd be the first episode: time travel is the standard dodge of unimaginative SF writers. (There have have been some great TT stories, some even on Star Trek, but the sub-genre is thoroughly mined out. It's only current virtue is that it's paradoxical, so the writer doesn't have to come up with a consistent plot.) But if they've abandoned the warm-and-fuzzy Federation that has been the backdrop of Star Trek since the 60s, then hopefully they're abandoning the tired plot gimmicks too.
It's amusing (and sad) to hear this argument used in favor of Windows Vista — or any version of Windows. Backwards compatibility is the only reason the Wintel platform even exists! We're talking a stream of hardware and software upgrades that goes all the way back to the Intel 4004, the the very first commercial microprocessor.
If sticking with old versions of Windows is "backwards thinking" than upgrading to Vista represents "forward thinking". Which is absurd. If Vista had retained its serious innovations, like the next-generation file system, than maybe upgrading would mean getting access to some serious new technology. But they had to strip most of that out in or to get the thing out the door. What's left is changes designed to fix Windows' many security flaws (not just bugs, but vulnerabilities that were designed in!) and some UI changes that are mostly imitations OS X.
Speaking of which, is anybody who's planning to buy a new machine just to run Vista even considering buying a Mac instead? You can argue about whether or not the Mac is superior, but the fact is that few folks can even consider that option, because they have a bunch of Windows apps they need to be able to run. Backward compatibility isn't "backward thinking", it's just a fact of life.
California just passed the same law. But we not talking about California or Denmark. See back to the beginning of the thread.
Yes that's a need — but it's a need that's already been met. The first thing anybody does when they're trying to get a new language accepted is to write a language reference. For Java, it's Gosling, Arnold, and Holmes. For C++, it's Stroustrup For Perl, it's the camel book. And so on. Yes, these books meet a big need. But there's no need to write these books over and over. And yet, that's what most programming texts do.
I never said cows had nothing to do with global warming. Indeed, I remember how the "skeptics" sneered when scientists first suggested that agricultural methane was a factor. ("Cow farts changing the weather! Those stupid liberals.") What I don't accept is Fox's oversimplified version of the cow fart issue being trotted out as a "I don't know who to believe" argument. I certainly haven't seen anything solid to suggest that cows are a bigger factor than industrial pollution.
What's frustrating here is that Dean has not thought to ask the question I'd really liked answered: why does this bozo believe that he has a legal claim to the top Google hit for a particular search term? Dean, how about it? At the very least it will probably shut the guy up.
Sure, toxic waste, no big deal. Right.
Review your chemistry: glass plus acidic chemicals equals leaching, especially if the glass is broken up.