Good lord, how do you figure that? 100 million is 3 percent of 3.3 billion. There's only (!) 6 billion humans on the planet. There aren't 3.3 billion folks with access to reliable electricity, never mind their own computer.
Microsoft's sales figures for Mac Office are secret, but we can make some good guesses. Apple claims to sell 2.5 million Macs a year. Let's assume that Mac people who don't buy Office are evened out by Mac people who keep the software on their old Macs current. Which will probably give a figure that's way too high, but we have to start somewhere. Microsoft gets about $125 for each copy of Mac Office, so we're talking income of about $315 million per year.
That's a lot of money to you or me, but it's peanuts to Microsoft -- less than 1% of their income! Plus they have to work relatively hard for that money. They probably save a little money from overlapping code bases, but enough to account for a customer base that's 30 times smaller?
Switching to Mozilla will protect you from abusive BHOs and toolbars. But those are easy to get rid of. The worst -- most tenacious and disruptive -- spyware uses the stupid little "custom features" hooks that Windows is full of. The only way you can completely avoid those is to never download a shareware or freeware app, ever. Somehow, I doubt such a strategy will catch on.
It doesn't help that spyware databases software databases have gotten so undiscriminating. You run a spyware scanner, and even the best ones raise red flags over stuff that has some of the features of spyware, but simply isn't. These include customer support tools like backweb. Yes, these can be abused, but ultimately anything you install in your system can be abused. It's simply a question of whether you trust whoever provided the software. Gator and Alexa have used up our trust. Backweb and the CS orgs that use it have not.
There's also the cookie issue. Yes, cookies are a grave threat to privacy. But the solution is in your browser: configure it use a good privacy policy, or if you totally hate cookies, not to accept them at all. Scanning the cookie database is a waste of time. Yet all adware scanners insist on doing it.
Did you even bother to read that story you linked? Only a few of the people mentioned in the story refused honors because they disapproved of the concept. Most simply refused because the party in power (the real source of such appointments, the Queen just does as she's told) was not to their liking. One guy even refused a CBE because he thought he rated a bigger distinction!
Your obsolete understanding of how the UK government works suggests that you've been reading Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard. Amusing stuff, but not terribly authoritative.
This got modded up as "funny". It deserved the upmod, but there's no joke here. Anyone want to bet that somebody is drawing up maps designed to misinform terrorists? I don't mind getting lost one in a while in the name of Homeland Security, but I shudder to think that such maps might fall into the hands of emergency services people.
All your comments rate "insightful", but you overlooked a small point. Tech tends to concentrate in urban centers because that's where the talent pool is. (And of course, the talent is available only in urban centers because that's where the jobs are. It's a vicious circle, as the Silicon Valley real-estate market attests.) As computing and communication technology becomes more and more pervasive, it becomes more practical to look beyond the Silicon Valleys and Bangalores to locate your software engineering biz.
A leading post on this story comments that maybe we westerners will have to compete, not just with our urban Indian counterparts, but even with Indian peasants. I'm sure that was meant as a joke, but in fact the possibility is not that far off!
And all software companies target all platforms. Oh, wait...
Creating, maintaining, and supporting a port for a separate platform is expensive. Not to mention the planning and marketing hassle for upper management, which always has to worry about spreading its attention too thinly. That's why nobody but open-source zealots has a "runs on everything" policy. Microsoft can certainly afford to make their software run every platform that could conceivable support it, but they have to have some motivation.
There are two reasons to go to so much trouble. The obvious one is to make money. This is obviously not a pressing concern when your annual profit is $1.3 billion and your cash reserves are $40 billion. I don't suppose they ignore every chance to turn a buck, but it has to be worth their trouble. Is a platform that accounts for less than 3% of all desktop computers worth the trouble? I'm skeptical. Not when Microsoft's investments in Windows development typically returns a 200% profit! Microsoft often complains that Mac Office sales are "below expectations". Which might not be honest, but certainly doesn't imply a positive attitude.
The other reason to target a platform is to grab market share. So MS gave away Internet Explorer, hoping that this would eliminate their lagging position in Internet technology -- which it did, and then some. And they sell X-Boxes at a loss, hoping that this will lead to future dominance in the hypothetical "computing appliance" market -- which could be a big money-maker, or a total boondoggle, like UltimateTV or those stupid "smart displays".
Microsoft has had a lot of expensive boondoggles, and they'll have a lot more. But that's not a problem for them. They'll gladly spend money if it buys them a place in a growing market for emerging technology. Which definitely does not describe the Mac!
I am certainly not a "newness bigot" (at least, I hope I am not). In the original post, part of the problem that flyingember's mother had was that because she was running Windows 98, she was unable to run Napster.
The implication being that she has (to use your words) "more pressing problems" because she resists upgrading a system she's comfortable with. Sounds like bigotry to me. She's not refusing absolutely to upgrade -- she's looking at alternatives first.
I do some SOHO consulting, and that's precisely the strategy I would recommend. Abandoning a satisfactory setup that's less than 5 years old just because it won't run a particular application is stupid. First you need to see if there are alternative applications (which is the whole point of this Ask Slashdot). If there aren't, then you need to decide whether having the application is actually worth the expense and hassle of an upgrade. For a computer geek, it probably is -- the necessary fiddling is part of your vocation. But for anyone else, it's an open question.
Windows 2000 has pretty reasonable system requirements, even for older machines.
Not to put to fine a point on it: those "requirements" are crap. I happen to own an old laptop with precisely those specs. It just barely runs Windows 98, and bogs down horribly if you run any heavy-duty applications.
The bare minimum I would consider for an NT based system is about twice the specs Microsoft "requires": 300 Mhz CPU and 128 MBs RAM. And, as I mentioned before, many whitebox systems have non-Intel CPUs that just won't run NT, and would have to be replaced. Possibly a bigger hard disk will be required as well. Add in the cost of the new OS (these old people are so sticky about legalities!) and the time and hassle necessary to upgrade hardware and software, and there's a better than even chance that it's more economical just to trash the old system and buy a new one with 2000 or XP pre-installed. Which flyingember's mom might well end up doing -- after she's exhausted the alternatives.
But wait, there's more! I just noticed that the lady in question has a Philips Rush MP3 player. I used to own one (stolen). Not that good a player, but it has a few good features (like automatic bookmarking) that are hard to find. So you wouldn't want to replace it even if you had the money to spare.
And Philips does not support the Rush on NT-based OSs! The driver does work on Windows 2000 and XP, but it's tricky to install, and song downloads have a slight tendency to fail, lock up, or produce an unplayable file.
Yes, such a huge percentage of Mac sales, I'm sure
That was sarcasm, I assume? Jeez, what do you think people buy computers for? I don't mean people like you, I mean real people.
...the importer/exporter features of many MS Office competitors work just fine for the vast majority of files
Yes, I've read read the blurbs for StarOffice and KOffice too. I've also tried to use these filters to move documents back and forth -- something you obviously haven't done, or you wouldn't spout such glib nonsense.
All good points. And lets not forget the major hassle of upgrading from Windows 98 to an NT-based system. Even assuming the hardware's up to it, it's a major project. But in most cases, the hardware's not up to it, and you have to look at adding more RAM -- which might mean throwing RAM away to free the slots -- and even replacing a CPU, such as the AMD K2, that won't run XP.
People who stick with older computers don't do so because they're afraid of new technology. They do so because they have a tool that does the job, and replacing it means betting a lot of time and money on a new tools that might actually be less functional. That's a perfectly sane and rational attitude. Which is more than I can say about Lshmael's newness bigotry.
You mean there was actually a time when the word had actual meaning? OK, I take it back! It's not a meaninglessly cute phrase after all -- it's an honest to goodness cliche!
Sorry "automagically" doesn't even rate as a cliche. A cliche is a worn-out way of expressing an idea. "Automagically" never had an idea to express!
(Jeez! I can't enter "cliche'" properly. Slashdot changes accented characters to their 7-bit equivalents. Hey Rob! Why are you sending out headers that say "charset=iso-8859-1" when you're only using ASCII?)
Another victim of the vivendi meltdown. Slashdotter are already familiar with another one.
Elsewhere in this discussion somebody said they wanted to just pay a monthly rate for unlimited downloads. Vivendi is why that's a mistake. People sign up for cable TV mainly because they can get lots of shows that aren't available over the air. These shows used to be spread out over a lot of independent cable channels, but these channels got bought up by various conglomerates, of which Vivendi was probably the biggest. When Vivendi ran short of cash, they started cutting back on their programming. That's why the SciFi channel shows so many reruns of Tales From the Crypt. Of course, viewers didn't get any money back because Vivendi was spending less money to entertain them -- they were locked in.
If cable TV programming allowed you to just pay for what you want to watch, people could vote with their feet and it would be harder to screw them. But when it's an all-or-nothing service, you take what they give you.
Same with flat-rate online music services, like EMusic. Except there's even less competition in that marketplace, so the overall quality is especially low.
If MS loses the Mac marketplace, they lose a tiny percentage of their cash flow. I often wonder why they even bother. Makes them look less monopolistic?
If the Mac platform loses MS Office, they lose any chance of selling systems where reliable interoperability is an issue. By which I mean, where people need to be able open and edit Office files natively, without getting the formatting all munged up by import/export filters. This means no more workplace Macs (except maybe the art department) and no Macs purchased by people who need to take their work home. The pundits says this would probably mean the end of the Mac, and I don't see any flaw in their logic.
And yeah, you'll have reliable interoperability when all those PCs get Windows and Office overwritten by Linux, KDE, and KOffice. Which would be a nice change but one I'm not holding my breath for.
Quite true. But it didn't use to be this way. Time was when running a big company involved actual decision making. Maybe we need to bring back the robber barons?
No matter how big you make a disk, there will always be somebody who needs a bigger one. A typical SOHO network has maybe 30 to 60MB of non-redundant data. (Redundant data is stuff like application files you can easily re-install.) With incremental backups, the server will be obsolete long before it fills up.
Anyway, if your data needs are past this level, you need to think about hiring an IS person, not buying a backup gadget.
What makes this gadget a poor value is the level of safety is provides. All you're doing is copying your data from one hard disk to another. Two disks are better than one, but not that much better, especially if they're in the same building.
Serious backup solutions use reliable offline media. Hard disks are pretty reliable these days, but still not as reliable as a tape or CD. Plus you can stick them in a fireproof box or store them offsite. Add some HSM software and you've got a storage system that's as big as you need it to be.
No self-respecting campus network lacks this technology, but the SOHO user has been seriously neglected. Somebody needs to scale the tech down, and design the usual hand-holding front end so that you don't need a lot of training to manage the media. This has been an issue for years, even when SOHO computing consisted of one or two non-networked system. I guess catering to the low-end user is just not profitable enough.
And nicely priced too. But you didn't answer a key question: how does picture quality compare with POTV (Plain Old Television)?
This story has a slight taint of technology for its own sake. I can see combining TV and monitor to save space, but MsGeek just wants to replace an "ugly" and supposedly obsolete TV. Of course, a good TV costs more than these Aver Media gadgets, but not that much more.
The really funny thing is that she thinks her TV is ancient because it has a dipole input. News flash: all TVs have them. The difference here is that the dipole input is built into the TV. Most TVs ship with just the coax input built in, with a separate push-on balun to convert it into a dipole input. (Cheaper to make that way, I guess.) TV antennas may be unpopular, but they're hardly obsolete.
Junction boxes are very nice. They're even a necessity if you have more than 1 device that you need to plug into your TV. I bought mine so I wouldn't have to fiddle with the cables to bypass my settop box -- like when I want to record a scrambled or digital channel and watch an ordinary channel at the same time, or vice versa. Difficult to see how they help with cable clutter, though -- you actually need more cables to use them.
Cable clutter is an issue with me, both for my TV and my computer. I've tried using conduits and ties, and various storage thingees, but they don't work for me. Judging from your description of your setup, your main weapon against clutter is an orderly mind and orderly habits. Everything else is just tool. Which is cool, but not much help to those of us who are neatness-challenged.
Few days ago we had a story about the most irritating language in English. Didn't take it seriously because "automagically" wasn't on the list. My all time #1 irritant. It's just a cute way of saying "automatically". Cute language has its uses: it can amuse, satirize, and extend meaning. But this stupid word embodies cuteness for its own sake.
Well, I'm not sure you need to give away food to squeeze money out of compulsive gamblers. But basically I quite agree with you. Except that I don't think management chooses to be dominated by the numbers dweebs. The capital market is obsessed with numbers. I'm not sure why this is so, but until this changes, we'll continue to have shortsighted decisions like this.
Once you put that additude on it is very rare not to be saying "flamebait" for most stories, with most of the rest as troll.
Too, too true. But is Rush Limbaugh a flamebaiter or a troller? How about Bill O'Reilly? Are those Democratic Presidential hopefuls Redundant or just Overrated?
Anyway, I do agree that most "Important Stuff" isn't all that important. And if your idea of an interesting pastime is learning Klingon or hacking your Dreamcast to play Hunt the Wumpus, I'm not going to sneer. Everybody should grow in their own way and speed.
Still, there is stuff out there that really does matter. Like whether the media monopolies are going to drive us crazy with obnoxious, expensive, obstructive -- and ultimately useless -- attempts to sequester electronic content. And whether script kiddies are going to force us all to run goatsex screensavers. And whether we have to check with Homeland Security whenever we go to the bathroom. You gotta stay involved!
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's sales figures for Mac Office are secret, but we can make some good guesses. Apple claims to sell 2.5 million Macs a year. Let's assume that Mac people who don't buy Office are evened out by Mac people who keep the software on their old Macs current. Which will probably give a figure that's way too high, but we have to start somewhere. Microsoft gets about $125 for each copy of Mac Office, so we're talking income of about $315 million per year.
That's a lot of money to you or me, but it's peanuts to Microsoft -- less than 1% of their income! Plus they have to work relatively hard for that money. They probably save a little money from overlapping code bases, but enough to account for a customer base that's 30 times smaller?
It doesn't help that spyware databases software databases have gotten so undiscriminating. You run a spyware scanner, and even the best ones raise red flags over stuff that has some of the features of spyware, but simply isn't. These include customer support tools like backweb. Yes, these can be abused, but ultimately anything you install in your system can be abused. It's simply a question of whether you trust whoever provided the software. Gator and Alexa have used up our trust. Backweb and the CS orgs that use it have not.
There's also the cookie issue. Yes, cookies are a grave threat to privacy. But the solution is in your browser: configure it use a good privacy policy, or if you totally hate cookies, not to accept them at all. Scanning the cookie database is a waste of time. Yet all adware scanners insist on doing it.
I believe Michael chose the story title just to piss me off!
Your obsolete understanding of how the UK government works suggests that you've been reading Lyndon LaRouche or L. Ron Hubbard. Amusing stuff, but not terribly authoritative.
This got modded up as "funny". It deserved the upmod, but there's no joke here. Anyone want to bet that somebody is drawing up maps designed to misinform terrorists? I don't mind getting lost one in a while in the name of Homeland Security, but I shudder to think that such maps might fall into the hands of emergency services people.
A leading post on this story comments that maybe we westerners will have to compete, not just with our urban Indian counterparts, but even with Indian peasants. I'm sure that was meant as a joke, but in fact the possibility is not that far off!
Creating, maintaining, and supporting a port for a separate platform is expensive. Not to mention the planning and marketing hassle for upper management, which always has to worry about spreading its attention too thinly. That's why nobody but open-source zealots has a "runs on everything" policy. Microsoft can certainly afford to make their software run every platform that could conceivable support it, but they have to have some motivation.
There are two reasons to go to so much trouble. The obvious one is to make money. This is obviously not a pressing concern when your annual profit is $1.3 billion and your cash reserves are $40 billion. I don't suppose they ignore every chance to turn a buck, but it has to be worth their trouble. Is a platform that accounts for less than 3% of all desktop computers worth the trouble? I'm skeptical. Not when Microsoft's investments in Windows development typically returns a 200% profit! Microsoft often complains that Mac Office sales are "below expectations". Which might not be honest, but certainly doesn't imply a positive attitude.
The other reason to target a platform is to grab market share. So MS gave away Internet Explorer, hoping that this would eliminate their lagging position in Internet technology -- which it did, and then some. And they sell X-Boxes at a loss, hoping that this will lead to future dominance in the hypothetical "computing appliance" market -- which could be a big money-maker, or a total boondoggle, like UltimateTV or those stupid "smart displays".
Microsoft has had a lot of expensive boondoggles, and they'll have a lot more. But that's not a problem for them. They'll gladly spend money if it buys them a place in a growing market for emerging technology. Which definitely does not describe the Mac!
I do some SOHO consulting, and that's precisely the strategy I would recommend. Abandoning a satisfactory setup that's less than 5 years old just because it won't run a particular application is stupid. First you need to see if there are alternative applications (which is the whole point of this Ask Slashdot). If there aren't, then you need to decide whether having the application is actually worth the expense and hassle of an upgrade. For a computer geek, it probably is -- the necessary fiddling is part of your vocation. But for anyone else, it's an open question.
Not to put to fine a point on it: those "requirements" are crap. I happen to own an old laptop with precisely those specs. It just barely runs Windows 98, and bogs down horribly if you run any heavy-duty applications.The bare minimum I would consider for an NT based system is about twice the specs Microsoft "requires": 300 Mhz CPU and 128 MBs RAM. And, as I mentioned before, many whitebox systems have non-Intel CPUs that just won't run NT, and would have to be replaced. Possibly a bigger hard disk will be required as well. Add in the cost of the new OS (these old people are so sticky about legalities!) and the time and hassle necessary to upgrade hardware and software, and there's a better than even chance that it's more economical just to trash the old system and buy a new one with 2000 or XP pre-installed. Which flyingember's mom might well end up doing -- after she's exhausted the alternatives.
But wait, there's more! I just noticed that the lady in question has a Philips Rush MP3 player. I used to own one (stolen). Not that good a player, but it has a few good features (like automatic bookmarking) that are hard to find. So you wouldn't want to replace it even if you had the money to spare.
And Philips does not support the Rush on NT-based OSs! The driver does work on Windows 2000 and XP, but it's tricky to install, and song downloads have a slight tendency to fail, lock up, or produce an unplayable file.
Does Mrs. Flyingember sound a little smarter yet?
People who stick with older computers don't do so because they're afraid of new technology. They do so because they have a tool that does the job, and replacing it means betting a lot of time and money on a new tools that might actually be less functional. That's a perfectly sane and rational attitude. Which is more than I can say about Lshmael's newness bigotry.
You mean there was actually a time when the word had actual meaning? OK, I take it back! It's not a meaninglessly cute phrase after all -- it's an honest to goodness cliche!
I'm sure you're right. Can't imagine why else they'd bother to do any Mac software at all.
(Jeez! I can't enter "cliche'" properly. Slashdot changes accented characters to their 7-bit equivalents. Hey Rob! Why are you sending out headers that say "charset=iso-8859-1" when you're only using ASCII?)
Elsewhere in this discussion somebody said they wanted to just pay a monthly rate for unlimited downloads. Vivendi is why that's a mistake. People sign up for cable TV mainly because they can get lots of shows that aren't available over the air. These shows used to be spread out over a lot of independent cable channels, but these channels got bought up by various conglomerates, of which Vivendi was probably the biggest. When Vivendi ran short of cash, they started cutting back on their programming. That's why the SciFi channel shows so many reruns of Tales From the Crypt. Of course, viewers didn't get any money back because Vivendi was spending less money to entertain them -- they were locked in.
If cable TV programming allowed you to just pay for what you want to watch, people could vote with their feet and it would be harder to screw them. But when it's an all-or-nothing service, you take what they give you.
Same with flat-rate online music services, like EMusic. Except there's even less competition in that marketplace, so the overall quality is especially low.
If the Mac platform loses MS Office, they lose any chance of selling systems where reliable interoperability is an issue. By which I mean, where people need to be able open and edit Office files natively, without getting the formatting all munged up by import/export filters. This means no more workplace Macs (except maybe the art department) and no Macs purchased by people who need to take their work home. The pundits says this would probably mean the end of the Mac, and I don't see any flaw in their logic.
And yeah, you'll have reliable interoperability when all those PCs get Windows and Office overwritten by Linux, KDE, and KOffice. Which would be a nice change but one I'm not holding my breath for.
A nice example of spambot poison. But obviously hand-generated. The automatic kind is much more effective!
Quite true. But it didn't use to be this way. Time was when running a big company involved actual decision making. Maybe we need to bring back the robber barons?
Anyway, if your data needs are past this level, you need to think about hiring an IS person, not buying a backup gadget.
What makes this gadget a poor value is the level of safety is provides. All you're doing is copying your data from one hard disk to another. Two disks are better than one, but not that much better, especially if they're in the same building.
Serious backup solutions use reliable offline media. Hard disks are pretty reliable these days, but still not as reliable as a tape or CD. Plus you can stick them in a fireproof box or store them offsite. Add some HSM software and you've got a storage system that's as big as you need it to be.
No self-respecting campus network lacks this technology, but the SOHO user has been seriously neglected. Somebody needs to scale the tech down, and design the usual hand-holding front end so that you don't need a lot of training to manage the media. This has been an issue for years, even when SOHO computing consisted of one or two non-networked system. I guess catering to the low-end user is just not profitable enough.
This story has a slight taint of technology for its own sake. I can see combining TV and monitor to save space, but MsGeek just wants to replace an "ugly" and supposedly obsolete TV. Of course, a good TV costs more than these Aver Media gadgets, but not that much more.
The really funny thing is that she thinks her TV is ancient because it has a dipole input. News flash: all TVs have them. The difference here is that the dipole input is built into the TV. Most TVs ship with just the coax input built in, with a separate push-on balun to convert it into a dipole input. (Cheaper to make that way, I guess.) TV antennas may be unpopular, but they're hardly obsolete.
Cable clutter is an issue with me, both for my TV and my computer. I've tried using conduits and ties, and various storage thingees, but they don't work for me. Judging from your description of your setup, your main weapon against clutter is an orderly mind and orderly habits. Everything else is just tool. Which is cool, but not much help to those of us who are neatness-challenged.
Few days ago we had a story about the most irritating language in English. Didn't take it seriously because "automagically" wasn't on the list. My all time #1 irritant. It's just a cute way of saying "automatically". Cute language has its uses: it can amuse, satirize, and extend meaning. But this stupid word embodies cuteness for its own sake.
Well, I'm not sure you need to give away food to squeeze money out of compulsive gamblers. But basically I quite agree with you. Except that I don't think management chooses to be dominated by the numbers dweebs. The capital market is obsessed with numbers. I'm not sure why this is so, but until this changes, we'll continue to have shortsighted decisions like this.
Anyway, I do agree that most "Important Stuff" isn't all that important. And if your idea of an interesting pastime is learning Klingon or hacking your Dreamcast to play Hunt the Wumpus, I'm not going to sneer. Everybody should grow in their own way and speed.
Still, there is stuff out there that really does matter. Like whether the media monopolies are going to drive us crazy with obnoxious, expensive, obstructive -- and ultimately useless -- attempts to sequester electronic content. And whether script kiddies are going to force us all to run goatsex screensavers. And whether we have to check with Homeland Security whenever we go to the bathroom. You gotta stay involved!