Why do people insist on hanging on to their delusions like this.
Look just because GW stabbed his buddy in the back when the enron empire was in the process of collapsing that does not mean GW and his party did not help enron for years before that.
etc.
None of which contradicts my post. I merely noted that the original poster had said: "After all, we now know that successful corporations are not allowed to fail." and that clearly wasn't true because Enron had been allowed to fail.
I never claimed that Enron did or did not receive favorable treatment from Bush or anyone else.
Try actually reading the post before you flame it, especially if you are going to start getting all tetchy about it and throw around emotive terms like "delusions".
That MS has dumbed down their software to the point that you realy need very little learning to be able to be very effective with it
We are talking about Computer Science students. These are people who are learning programming, not system administration or use of business applications. So your point doesn't really apply. Programming on the Windows platform is different in the details to programming on other platforms but is not significantly easier.
Using (for example) Visual Studio as your IDE is just as challenging as using development tools on Linux/Mac OS/whatever and you will learn just as much about programming principles.
(Yeah, before you start flaming me, I KNOW Java and.NET are different animals.. but they ARE competing technologies in some senses.)
Risking going a little offtopic, I think that they are a lot closer than many people seem to think..NET really is a direct competitor to Java. The CLI is a virtual machine much like the Java VM (although tuned for more languages than just C#). C# itself is clearly trying to solve the same language design problems as the Java programming language. The.NET framework has fairly similar functionality to the J2EE framework classes.
The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
I'm not at all convinced this is true. A good counter-example is Apple, who for years owned the educational market both in high schools and universities in the US. It didn't lead (as Apple had hoped it would) to widespread use of Macs in the commercial world.
A good Computer Science school teaches the principles of computing. These are abstract ideas that can be applied to any hardware or software platform. The OS you use at university should not impact the OSes you are able or interested to use later. I learnt on Unix and VMS systems, neither of which I use in my professional or hobbyist life now.
Existing corporations and existing power-structures are not allow to fail or be challenged.
This is clearly not true. Let's take a recent example: Enron which lobbied the government for a bail-out and other protections but didn't receive them.
Of course sometimes it does happen, for example Long term capital management whose bailout (IMHO) stunk to high heaven. But clearly there is not some conspiracy to ensure that all failing corporations are protected in the way you seem to be suggesting.
You also say: in the rare cases that a corporation does fail, Congress will hold dozens of hearings to find out why and make sure that it doesn't happen again.. Well given the consequences to the employees of Enron, not to mention the tax payers of California and other states that Enron stiffed, not to mention the shareholders whose millions are now worthless, perhaps it would be a very good thing if Congress ensured that the corporate malpractices that caused Enron to fail were curtailed...
Let's hope Mr. Jones doesn't set a precedent. The next article at Wired talked about how the Catholic church sees the Internet as a great opportunity for evangelism:
Foley also quotes the Pope as saying, "Consider... the positive capacities of the Internet to carry religious information and teaching beyond all barriers and frontiers. Such a wide audience would have been beyond the wildest imaginings of those who preached the Gospel before us.... Catholics should not be afraid to throw open the doors of social communications to Christ, so that his good news may be heard from the housetops of the world."
I can see it now, hundreds of "Get Eternal Life FAST" and "Jesus and his horny college teen friends want to see you in church" from HotPope@blasphemy.nu all sent via open Korean servers. Sigh.
To be fair to Jones (and as a Californian I hate having to be fair to one of our Republican candidates:-) it isn't unsolicited commercial email. Of course I'd still consider it spam but technically he's right, especially in the context of CA's spam law which does explicitly define it as commercial email.
However the Wired article does mention the spams are using forged headers and were sent via an elementary school's servers in Korea. Now this is pretty despicable, even if it is not technically illegal (I don't know relevant Korean law). This would-be governor is stealing server resources from Korean school kids in his bid to get his political message out. That's a low tactic indeed. I do hope Mr. Jones doesn't support laws that make using someone's computer resources without permission illegal...
Plus, (at the risk of getting flamed) most commercial software companies will give more credence to someone with a research background than to someone who worked on the latest Open Source project.
That's arguable. The case where it is clearly true is where the company is working in a highly technical field that your research is directly relevant to. For example if do a PhD on highly efficient 3D rendering algorithms you will be of great interest to several games companies. If your research is in number theory I know several financial software firms who'd love to talk to you.
But, if you have done research in graphics, you probably aren't going to be interesting to a bank.
A research background will probably make you highly attractive to a very small number of specialized software companies. Good experience on a successful open source project is likely to be more attractive to much larger number of general software development shops.
Finally only take a research position at a university if you really love the subject you are going to be researching. You must have a vocation for this work. Its badly paid, you'll get little recognition and you will need to be very good at what you do. Its not for the faint of heart.
As someone who has hired a large number of software engineers in the last decade, I'd like to give a little perspective on this issue.
It is a very difficult market for engineers. There are far fewer companies than there were 24 months ago and those that remain have cut hiring right back. When I can hire I get flooded with applications, many of which are from people with a lot of relevant experience. A newly minted graduate is going to come up short against someone who has been building commercial software for 5-10 years.
Getting on a successful open source project and showing you can make a real contribution is going to help you stand out from the crowd. Choose your project wisely - if you want to be an operting system engineer then getting on board with one of the core Linux projects will be much more impressive than building yet another Quake level editor, and vice versa. You'll need to have people on the project who can vouch for you and the contributions you have made. The higher the profile the project and reference it provides you the better: having Linus tell me what a great job you did on the kernel extensions you built will help you a lot.
Bear in mind that to really make an impact on a substantive project, whether its commercial or open source, is going to take a while. Spending a week adding a couple of printlns isn't going to cut it.
Be aware that a good commercial software engineer has more than just technical skills. You need to be able to work under pressure, to a deadline and in a team. Just being a great hacker isn't enough. Use your time to demonstrate that you have these skills in addition to your coding abilities. One of the disadvantages of an open source project is that many (not all) of them aren't run with the degree of close teamwork and tight deadlines that are the staple of commercial software development. And of course, the one's that have established teams working on them may be the hardest for a newbie programmer to get into.
Yes, its rather Catch-22, but it takes a while to build up the reputation that will carry you into the better companies, roles and projects.
Because nobody builds there own PCs. All geeks buy their PCs prefab. Are these guys smoking crack?
Smoking crack? Maybe, maybe not:-)
I am not a member of the MPAA (IANAM[MPAA]?) but I doubt their goal is to entirely stamp out piracy. They just want to restrict it enough that it is a marginal hit to their income not a major one. Let's say that 1% of computer owners are geeks who roll their own, then what do the MPAA care if those 1% of computers don't have copy protection on them? The other 99% do and that leaves a very good market for MPAA members to sell to.
Its rather like security measures - we all know there is no such thing as a truly cracker-proof system, but if we make it "hard enough" to break into our machines it doesn't have to be perfect.
I'm guessing that Jack would be just delighted if most of the major manufacturers of PC hardware put in copy protection and the geeks didn't. I doubt he'll say that in public though - an all-or-nothing approach is more likely to bully the major manufacturers into swallowing this load.
The interesting thing is how much of an opportunity this might open up for smaller box builders to capture a bigger market share. Once word got out that all the Dell/Gateway/Compaq machines were copy protected there might be enough people who started looking to other, smaller builders that they could start grabbing some major market share.
If I follow you argument correctly, what you are saying is there is an inverse relationship between the number of people under a single government and the amount of freedom individuals have under that government (for governments of the same type).
If that is true, then I'm afraid all Americans are living in a state where they have zero individual freedom. Everything I say is already absolutely prescribed by the government. I cannot be typing this message because obviously it is speaking a truth that the government doesn't want you to hear. I expect the black helicopters will be arriving to whisk me away any second.... Nope, don't hear them...
Oops sorry, this posting is a refutation of your theory.
Paranoid guff about a "One World Government" goes down very well with right-wing conspiracy theorists, but in the real world its just doesn't hold up to a moment's scrutiny.
National sovereignty is an outdated and fast fading notion - look at the extraordinary transformation Europe is undergoing barely 50 years after nationalism devastated that continent. It is particularly dissapointing that those on the political left are suddenly discovering the "virtues" of nationalism. National boundaries are arbitrary and dangerous divisions between people. More wars have been fought on the basis of what we now call "national interest" than for any other cause, even religion.
One of the great advantages of the Net is that it disregards national boundaries. The world is moving away from the narrow perspective of the nation state; its a shame that Mr. Nader is getting himself so mired in this tired idea.
Which is not to say that trans-national organizations like WIPO, WTO and the European Union shouldn't be democratic and transparent: they should. But we should welcome the death of the nation state, not mourn it.
I agree with much of what you posted, - this is not a flame of your post - but you made a couple of errors that are worth correcting:
Diversity, while good, is expensive. Expect no software except through Cocoa or VirtualPC.
Not so, Carbon apps would run just fine in a Mac OS X for Intel. Most of the applications running natively on Mac OS X are Carbon apps, not Cocoa apps; for example Microsoft Office for X is a Carbon app. Perhaps you are thinking of Classic which won't be part of Mac OS X for Intel?
If Apple ports OS X to x86, is it advantageous to it's target market?
Flat out: No. Target market loses the whole widget equation. Software, OS, and hardware are no longer integrated. Ease of use is hampered. Design decisions are hampered by lowest common denominator effect, unless they release their own PCs, and then they gain no advantage.
Actually there is one enormous advantage for Apple of a Mac OS X for Intel that only runs on Apple built hardware. They can use fast, relatively cheap x86/x96 CPUs. Currently the PowerPC CPUs - with the greatest respect to Steve's marketing snow job - are at about 2 years behind Intel CPUs in terms of performance for a given price point. This is hurting Apple more than it cares to admit.
My prediction is that 2-3 years from now, when most Mac software is Carbon or Cocoa based, Apple will announce the switch from Power PCs to Intel CPUs. They won't support Classic on these machines - emulating a 68k on Intel hardware would be too slow as you pointed out - but most Mac users won't care. Apple will not allow Mac OS X for Intel to run on anything other than Apple Intel-based Macs to prevent their hardware revenues being canibalized as they were when the licensed Mac OS to the clone makers.
I'm not trying to flame; they just are very expensive.
The typical reply is that iMacs are cheap. That's why I told my parents to get one. For the rest of us who actually use computers, we want a computer we can take apart and fiddle around with. Macs just can't do this.
Okay, this is funny for two reasons. First just stop and think for a moment about: "...they just are very expensive... iMacs are cheap...". Ummm, so what you're saying is Apple sell a cheap line of computers (starting at $799) and a more expensive line? That doesn't seem unreasonable, and it also seems to contradict the rest of your argument. Just because some Macs are expensive doesn't mean all Macs are expensive.
But even more priceless is: "For the rest of us who actually use computers, we want a computer we can take apart and fiddle around with". Which is hilarious. Because the "we" who want to open up our computers and fiddle with them are the tiny, tiny minority of computer users. Most people don't want to ever open up the case of their computer. Ever. They wouldn't do it if you paid them.
This is why machines like the Mac and most PCs are so popular. Most users don't want to be hardware engineers or system configurators. Machines "for the rest of us" (to borrow an Apple marketing slogan) are sealed units that people will never open. Being a geek is a noble and wonderful thing, but don't for a second forget that we are highly atypical computer users. What we want is not what the mass market wants.
I one had a posting from an old steam train worker on Africa somwhere. They used to have pairs of back-to-back steam engines for pulling heavy trains. The drive wheels used to have a random scatter in the diameter, and people in the engine shed used to try and match up sets of driving wheels with the same diameter, because that made the enginges 'run more smoothly'. From his account, it seems that on long, straight sections of track, the two engines would lock into step, but only if the wheels were a near match on both engines.
This is a relatively well-known phenomenon on steam railways. A good example if the Ffestiniog Railway in Wales which runs the (now) unique Fairlie double engines. These locomotives have two boilers and two mechanically separate engine units that swively independently on pivots under the main frames. You can see this on the photograph here. Effectively these are two back-to-back locomotives joined together.
The two engine units will synchronize when the locomotives run on relatively straight sections of track. Again the prevailing theory is that the synchronization occurs because of vibrations transmitted through the main frame.
The Ffestiniog also has a pair of near-identical Hunslet locomotives that are sometimes run double-headed. These will also synchronize to each other, again presumably synching through the vibrations transmitted between them. Its interesting that the locos have to be of similar types for the synchronization to occur: it doesn't happen when dissimilar locos double-head. Going back to clocks, I would guess that the phenomenon does not happen when the pendulum lengths or other characteristics of the clocks are different.
1. software production costs are hardly limited to the manual and cd. how'd it get there, how does it stay updated? how does it get sold?
Go back and read my comment again. I said the software manufacturing costs were low. I am well aware that the production costs are higher. There are signifcant R&D costs for hardware too. The big difference between software and hardware is that once the R&D costs have been paid for there are significant manufacturing costs for hardware and relatively low manufacturing costs for software, so holding software inventory is not the same problem as holding hardware inventory.
2. that hw liquidation scenario has only happened on a handful of isolated occasions to apple.
Absolutely not so. Apple has a long history of costly mistakes in this area. They are doing much better under Steve but go back 3 or 4 years and they had few models that were profitable overall. Looks at 1996, they lost $800 million. Look at 1997, they lost over $1 billion. Where do you think those losses came from? Virtually every Mac they sold in that period lost the company money.
The solution, then, is simple. Just as consumers pay much higher prices for higher quality automobiles, so should be the case for OS X on Intel. Put it out of the reach of "average" technology consumers by charging a premium price tag - as much as twice as much as a full version of a Windows OS.
People will either bite the bullet and buy the expensive OS, or just buy the Apple hardware. Either way Apple wins.
No, you're missing my point. That of course is true in terms of profit but the problem is revenues. Even if your profits are higher you still have a problem if you reduce your revenues to 10% of what they were. Stock prices are based on estimated future earnings. Rightly or wrongly these are usually factored with future revenues in mind. If I make a 50% profit on $1000 revenue that's a lot less attractive to shareholders than 1% profit on $1 billion revenue.
It may not make sense to apply this thinking to a company like Apple but people do. Wall Street always punishes a company for dropping its revenues. If Apple went ahead with a plan that removed 90% of its revenue stream the company's stock price would likely drop so low that the company would be acquired.
they can make more selling a handful of apps that mostly only run on the boxes they already sold for way more money?
Exactly. Mainly because the cost of manufacturing software is small (print the manual, burn the CD, total cost maybe $15 on a $100+ retail price). The cost of manufacturing a hardware box is large, say $1200-$1500 for a $2000 box. Imagine that Apple builds 250,000 machines at $1500 a pop, but only sells 50,000 at the original $2000 price. The market changes or they just built a bad machine, so they have to sell the rest at $1000 just to shift the inventory. They loose a fortune and their hardware profits are seriously negative for that quarter.
Back in the bad old days, pre-Jobs Apple built up large inventories of new models and hoped they could sell them. They often produced models that sold far fewer than they had hoped, so they had to sell off the remaining stock at a loss. This not only impacted their bottom line but it ate into the sales of the next model and lowered customer's expectations of what a Mac should cost. This is exactly why Apple lost $1 billion for two years straight.
Software is typically produced in small runs and its costs of manufacture is so small you can afford to just junk any excess inventory.
Thankfully Apple has learned to reduce its inventory to avoid this problem. They now maintain one of the lowest inventories of any manufacturer in any industry in the world.
Sorry for doubting, but you didn't mention you used to work at Apple on the OS X Intel port.:)
Just to clarify, I didn't work directly on the Intel port but the software I was working on was ported and so I had to keep it maintained and tested on Intel.
Obviously that would change things a bit, to say the least. My one question, though, if you happen to know the answer, is why Apple hasn't bothered to give the Darwin community the source now, since they would still like it tremendously and it would be very helpful. I'm asking as a question of logistics, not truth.
Mainly because people would draw exactly the right conclusion if Apple did release it: that Apple is preparing to move away from PowerPC to Intel. That would cause a lot of problems for Apple with its investors, with Motorola/IBM (which isn't exactly a stable relationship at the best of times), with its current customers and with Microsoft. As has been noted elsewhere, if Apple did go head-to-head with Microsoft in the Intel-based OS market it would put Office for OS X at serious risk.
So I don't think its a matter of logistics. In fact because Apple has to maintain two Darwin code bases (internal and external) to logistics of not releasing the Intel version are somewhat costly.
Which is why Apple will always be a marginal player, with marginal finances, selling to a fan club.
Absolutely true, but as Steve Jobs likes to point out exactly the same could be said of, say, BMW (who have a smaller market share of their industry than Apple do of theirs) and people tend not to use pejorative terms like "marginal". Apple is a succesful niche player producing high-quality, individualistic systems. There's nothing wrong with that and its a very good, sustainable business.
Four years as a senior software engineer on Apple's OS teams.
The last non-PPC port of OS X was Rhapsody DR2, to my knowledge, which lacked Aqua, Quartz, and Carbon. (It was, at that point, still essentially OPENSTEP 5 with a Platinum interface and QuickTime Media Layer injected, which at the time included QuickDraw GX and QuickDraw 3D.) It ran only on Intel and PowerPC.
What you say is true but incomplete. Mac OS X on Intel has been kept up until at least beta. After that I don't have first-hand knowledge, but I'd guess they still build it, as most of the work was done then. Aqua, Quartz and Carbon were included. Classic was not.
After that release, Jobs announced that Rhapsody was DBA (Dead Before Arrival) and announced his new Mac OS X scheme, which included the fact that the new operating system would not run on Intel. Mac OS X DP1 and later did not run on Intel hardware. And at no point did I hear anything about Alpha, and find it highly unlikely if for no other reason than due to the Darwin sources that were initially released.
Well I've seen Mac OS X beta running on Intel and I've seen the source code that supports it too, so it is real. The Alpha port went away much earlier, back in the Rhapsody days.
As you may remember, when Darwin was first released, many people wanted it to run on Intel, and this ended up being a massive job that still isn't finished. It wasn't that anything had been removed; it's that it simply hadn't been maintained at all since the old Mach 2.5 version, so the foundation, while there, was simply horrendously out of date. Had Apple continued Intel ports, and especially if they had done an Alpha port, it seems as though that code would have been included as well.
Imagine the situation where Apple did not want the outside world to know that they were continuing to maintain an Intel port. They would have released a version of the Darwin source that had the Intel parts switched out. Internally Apple has a different Darwin source tree than the one that has been released to the community.
Recently, in fact, as Darwin's been gotten to limp along on a few varieties of Intel motherboards (and "limp" is definitely the right word here), Apple's been helping a bit with the Intel port, but, again, they're having as much trouble as anyone. No "Here's a secret250,000-line patch to make it work." Just problem solving line by line, conflict by conflict. Given all that, I've always regarded the "OS X is secretely running on Intel" rumor as just that. A rumor.
Well it isn't. I've seen it, used it, worked on it. It doesn't really matter if you think I'm wrong, I have been in a privileged position that you haven't, sorry.
Unless you have a source I'm not aware of, then I'll assert that that's just wrong. Until Jobs took over, all software at Apple was available for free except for the products that came out of Clarus, so what you're saying is that Clarus held up Apple. That's a pretty big lump to swallow.
Claris (note spelling) was a wholly-owned subsidary of Apple and it had years when it made a substantial profit. There were some years pre-Jobs when Claris was the only part of Apple that sold software, there were other times when both Apple and Claris sold software separately. There was also a run of about 10 years when Claris didn't exist and Apple sold plenty of software. Your assertion of fact is erroneous.
Further, even now, Apple really has only a few major software products that have the potential to bring in money: Mac OS X ($129), whose sales have tapered; QuickTime Pro ($29); Final Cut Pro ($999); AppleWorks (still available for $69 but also shipping now with all new computers); and DVD Studio Pro. The rest of their software products are given away free--including their kick-ass developer tools, i* software, Mac OS X upgrades, QuickTime Streaming Server, etc. Again, I find it highly unlikely that those pieces of software sustain Apple's profits.
Not so. For example in 1994 Apple "only" made $310 million in profits. It isn't hard to see how a major proportion of that could come from software rather than hardware revenues, especially when you consider operating margins that year were under $150 million.
Furthermore, however, the profit margins on Apple hardware are generally quite large. Excluding the iMac and iBook (whose profit margins are extremely low; something like $40 on the old iMacs and $50 on the 12.1" iBooks) Apple pulls in $200+ profits on each computer and $250+ profit on their monitors minimum. Now notice that of the products I listed earlier only two are over $300 for the consumer, and tell me that the profit per unit is higher for software.
If the profit margins are so great on hardware how did Apple loose $1047 million in 1997? Yes, when Apple is doing everything right it can have great margins on its hardware. But that is not always the case. Even when Apple was loosing a billion dollars a year its software units were still profitable. There have been years when Apple has made staggering losses on its hardware and modest but real profits on its software. 1996 and 1997 were examples of this.
Unless you've got a source, I've got to label you as either a troll or a wishful thinker.
Sorry, I was an Apple employee for four years. I helped write a lot of this very profitable software. I know what I'm talking about.
Cringely resolves this complex matter in the space of a paragraph length assertion "The upside for Apple is enormous. Suddenly, their software budget is leveraged across a much larger number of units, making the company more profitable and able to spend even more on making the software better."
Actually I think he's right about profitability. Apple typically makes a much greater profit per unit of software than per unit of hardware. There have been years when Apple's entire profit margin has been from its software division(s).
The problem that Cringley misses is that Apple has to think not only of its profits but also of its revenues. If it lost the hardware business it would immediately drop its revenues from $8 billion to around $500 million. Even if its profits went up at the same time (which they might), they would get crucified on Wall Street for this. No sane company would ever pursue a strategy that involved such a dramatic cut in its revenue stream.
So even though Cringely is right about profitability he ignores the revenue impact so his overall argument is flawed.
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Why do people insist on hanging on to their delusions like this.
Look just because GW stabbed his buddy in the back when the enron empire was in the process of collapsing that does not mean GW and his party did not help enron for years before that.
etc.
None of which contradicts my post. I merely noted that the original poster had said: "After all, we now know that successful corporations are not allowed to fail." and that clearly wasn't true because Enron had been allowed to fail.
I never claimed that Enron did or did not receive favorable treatment from Bush or anyone else.
Try actually reading the post before you flame it, especially if you are going to start getting all tetchy about it and throw around emotive terms like "delusions".
That MS has dumbed down their software to the point that you realy need very little learning to be able to be very effective with it
We are talking about Computer Science students. These are people who are learning programming, not system administration or use of business applications. So your point doesn't really apply. Programming on the Windows platform is different in the details to programming on other platforms but is not significantly easier.
Using (for example) Visual Studio as your IDE is just as challenging as using development tools on Linux/Mac OS/whatever and you will learn just as much about programming principles.
(Yeah, before you start flaming me, I KNOW Java and .NET are different animals..
.NET really is a direct competitor to Java. The CLI is a virtual machine much like the Java VM (although tuned for more languages than just C#). C# itself is clearly trying to solve the same language design problems as the Java programming language. The .NET framework has fairly similar functionality to the J2EE framework classes.
but they ARE competing technologies in some senses.)
Risking going a little offtopic, I think that they are a lot closer than many people seem to think.
They seem pretty comparable to me...
The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
I'm not at all convinced this is true. A good counter-example is Apple, who for years owned the educational market both in high schools and universities in the US. It didn't lead (as Apple had hoped it would) to widespread use of Macs in the commercial world.
A good Computer Science school teaches the principles of computing. These are abstract ideas that can be applied to any hardware or software platform. The OS you use at university should not impact the OSes you are able or interested to use later. I learnt on Unix and VMS systems, neither of which I use in my professional or hobbyist life now.
Existing corporations and existing power-structures are not allow to fail or be challenged.
This is clearly not true. Let's take a recent example: Enron which lobbied the government for a bail-out and other protections but didn't receive them.
Of course sometimes it does happen, for example Long term capital management whose bailout (IMHO) stunk to high heaven. But clearly there is not some conspiracy to ensure that all failing corporations are protected in the way you seem to be suggesting.
You also say: in the rare cases that a corporation does fail, Congress will hold dozens of hearings to find out why and make sure that it doesn't happen again.. Well given the consequences to the employees of Enron, not to mention the tax payers of California and other states that Enron stiffed, not to mention the shareholders whose millions are now worthless, perhaps it would be a very good thing if Congress ensured that the corporate malpractices that caused Enron to fail were curtailed...
Let's hope Mr. Jones doesn't set a precedent. The next article at Wired talked about how the Catholic church sees the Internet as a great opportunity for evangelism:
... the positive capacities of the Internet to carry religious information and teaching beyond all barriers and frontiers. Such a wide audience would have been beyond the wildest imaginings of those who preached the Gospel before us.... Catholics should not be afraid to throw open the doors of social communications to Christ, so that his good news may be heard from the housetops of the world."
Foley also quotes the Pope as saying, "Consider
I can see it now, hundreds of "Get Eternal Life FAST" and "Jesus and his horny college teen friends want to see you in church" from HotPope@blasphemy.nu all sent via open Korean servers. Sigh.
To be fair to Jones (and as a Californian I hate having to be fair to one of our Republican candidates :-) it isn't unsolicited commercial email. Of course I'd still consider it spam but technically he's right, especially in the context of CA's spam law which does explicitly define it as commercial email.
However the Wired article does mention the spams are using forged headers and were sent via an elementary school's servers in Korea. Now this is pretty despicable, even if it is not technically illegal (I don't know relevant Korean law). This would-be governor is stealing server resources from Korean school kids in his bid to get his political message out. That's a low tactic indeed. I do hope Mr. Jones doesn't support laws that make using someone's computer resources without permission illegal...
A Belgian guy, Dennis Vieren, probably designed and built the most beautiful aluminium (sic) case ever, called project "Frozen".
I think there's little doubt that Dennis built the case.
Perhaps you meant "A Belgian guy, Dennis Vieren, designed and built what is probably the most beautiful aluminum case ever..."?
Plus, (at the risk of getting flamed) most commercial software companies will give more credence to someone with a research background than to someone who worked on the latest Open Source project.
That's arguable. The case where it is clearly true is where the company is working in a highly technical field that your research is directly relevant to. For example if do a PhD on highly efficient 3D rendering algorithms you will be of great interest to several games companies. If your research is in number theory I know several financial software firms who'd love to talk to you.
But, if you have done research in graphics, you probably aren't going to be interesting to a bank.
A research background will probably make you highly attractive to a very small number of specialized software companies. Good experience on a successful open source project is likely to be more attractive to much larger number of general software development shops.
Finally only take a research position at a university if you really love the subject you are going to be researching. You must have a vocation for this work. Its badly paid, you'll get little recognition and you will need to be very good at what you do. Its not for the faint of heart.
As someone who has hired a large number of software engineers in the last decade, I'd like to give a little perspective on this issue.
It is a very difficult market for engineers. There are far fewer companies than there were 24 months ago and those that remain have cut hiring right back. When I can hire I get flooded with applications, many of which are from people with a lot of relevant experience. A newly minted graduate is going to come up short against someone who has been building commercial software for 5-10 years.
Getting on a successful open source project and showing you can make a real contribution is going to help you stand out from the crowd. Choose your project wisely - if you want to be an operting system engineer then getting on board with one of the core Linux projects will be much more impressive than building yet another Quake level editor, and vice versa. You'll need to have people on the project who can vouch for you and the contributions you have made. The higher the profile the project and reference it provides you the better: having Linus tell me what a great job you did on the kernel extensions you built will help you a lot.
Bear in mind that to really make an impact on a substantive project, whether its commercial or open source, is going to take a while. Spending a week adding a couple of printlns isn't going to cut it.
Be aware that a good commercial software engineer has more than just technical skills. You need to be able to work under pressure, to a deadline and in a team. Just being a great hacker isn't enough. Use your time to demonstrate that you have these skills in addition to your coding abilities. One of the disadvantages of an open source project is that many (not all) of them aren't run with the degree of close teamwork and tight deadlines that are the staple of commercial software development. And of course, the one's that have established teams working on them may be the hardest for a newbie programmer to get into.
Yes, its rather Catch-22, but it takes a while to build up the reputation that will carry you into the better companies, roles and projects.
Because nobody builds there own PCs. All geeks buy their PCs prefab. Are these guys smoking crack?
:-)
Smoking crack? Maybe, maybe not
I am not a member of the MPAA (IANAM[MPAA]?) but I doubt their goal is to entirely stamp out piracy. They just want to restrict it enough that it is a marginal hit to their income not a major one. Let's say that 1% of computer owners are geeks who roll their own, then what do the MPAA care if those 1% of computers don't have copy protection on them? The other 99% do and that leaves a very good market for MPAA members to sell to.
Its rather like security measures - we all know there is no such thing as a truly cracker-proof system, but if we make it "hard enough" to break into our machines it doesn't have to be perfect.
I'm guessing that Jack would be just delighted if most of the major manufacturers of PC hardware put in copy protection and the geeks didn't. I doubt he'll say that in public though - an all-or-nothing approach is more likely to bully the major manufacturers into swallowing this load.
The interesting thing is how much of an opportunity this might open up for smaller box builders to capture a bigger market share. Once word got out that all the Dell/Gateway/Compaq machines were copy protected there might be enough people who started looking to other, smaller builders that they could start grabbing some major market share.
Sadly the only example you quoted is still in business so I think you might want to go back to your sources on this one...
Perhaps you could post a link to one of these articles you mention and we could find out what was really said.
If I follow you argument correctly, what you are saying is there is an inverse relationship between the number of people under a single government and the amount of freedom individuals have under that government (for governments of the same type).
If that is true, then I'm afraid all Americans are living in a state where they have zero individual freedom. Everything I say is already absolutely prescribed by the government. I cannot be typing this message because obviously it is speaking a truth that the government doesn't want you to hear. I expect the black helicopters will be arriving to whisk me away any second.... Nope, don't hear them...
Oops sorry, this posting is a refutation of your theory.
Paranoid guff about a "One World Government" goes down very well with right-wing conspiracy theorists, but in the real world its just doesn't hold up to a moment's scrutiny.
National sovereignty is an outdated and fast fading notion - look at the extraordinary transformation Europe is undergoing barely 50 years after nationalism devastated that continent. It is particularly dissapointing that those on the political left are suddenly discovering the "virtues" of nationalism. National boundaries are arbitrary and dangerous divisions between people. More wars have been fought on the basis of what we now call "national interest" than for any other cause, even religion.
One of the great advantages of the Net is that it disregards national boundaries. The world is moving away from the narrow perspective of the nation state; its a shame that Mr. Nader is getting himself so mired in this tired idea.
Which is not to say that trans-national organizations like WIPO, WTO and the European Union shouldn't be democratic and transparent: they should. But we should welcome the death of the nation state, not mourn it.
I agree with much of what you posted, - this is not a flame of your post - but you made a couple of errors that are worth correcting:
Diversity, while good, is expensive. Expect no software except through Cocoa or VirtualPC.
Not so, Carbon apps would run just fine in a Mac OS X for Intel. Most of the applications running natively on Mac OS X are Carbon apps, not Cocoa apps; for example Microsoft Office for X is a Carbon app. Perhaps you are thinking of Classic which won't be part of Mac OS X for Intel?
If Apple ports OS X to x86, is it advantageous to it's target market?
Flat out: No. Target market loses the whole widget equation. Software, OS, and hardware are no longer integrated. Ease of use is hampered. Design decisions are hampered by lowest common denominator effect, unless they release their own PCs, and then they gain no advantage.
Actually there is one enormous advantage for Apple of a Mac OS X for Intel that only runs on Apple built hardware. They can use fast, relatively cheap x86/x96 CPUs. Currently the PowerPC CPUs - with the greatest respect to Steve's marketing snow job - are at about 2 years behind Intel CPUs in terms of performance for a given price point. This is hurting Apple more than it cares to admit.
My prediction is that 2-3 years from now, when most Mac software is Carbon or Cocoa based, Apple will announce the switch from Power PCs to Intel CPUs. They won't support Classic on these machines - emulating a 68k on Intel hardware would be too slow as you pointed out - but most Mac users won't care. Apple will not allow Mac OS X for Intel to run on anything other than Apple Intel-based Macs to prevent their hardware revenues being canibalized as they were when the licensed Mac OS to the clone makers.
I'm not trying to flame; they just are very expensive. The typical reply is that iMacs are cheap. That's why I told my parents to get one. For the rest of us who actually use computers, we want a computer we can take apart and fiddle around with. Macs just can't do this.
Okay, this is funny for two reasons. First just stop and think for a moment about: "...they just are very expensive... iMacs are cheap...". Ummm, so what you're saying is Apple sell a cheap line of computers (starting at $799) and a more expensive line? That doesn't seem unreasonable, and it also seems to contradict the rest of your argument. Just because some Macs are expensive doesn't mean all Macs are expensive.
But even more priceless is: "For the rest of us who actually use computers, we want a computer we can take apart and fiddle around with". Which is hilarious. Because the "we" who want to open up our computers and fiddle with them are the tiny, tiny minority of computer users. Most people don't want to ever open up the case of their computer. Ever. They wouldn't do it if you paid them.
This is why machines like the Mac and most PCs are so popular. Most users don't want to be hardware engineers or system configurators. Machines "for the rest of us" (to borrow an Apple marketing slogan) are sealed units that people will never open. Being a geek is a noble and wonderful thing, but don't for a second forget that we are highly atypical computer users. What we want is not what the mass market wants.
I one had a posting from an old steam train worker on Africa somwhere. They used to have pairs of back-to-back steam engines for pulling heavy trains. The drive wheels used to have a random scatter in the diameter, and people in the engine shed used to try and match up sets of driving wheels with the same diameter, because that made the enginges 'run more smoothly'. From his account, it seems that on long, straight sections of track, the two engines would lock into step, but only if the wheels were a near match on both engines.
This is a relatively well-known phenomenon on steam railways. A good example if the Ffestiniog Railway in Wales which runs the (now) unique Fairlie double engines. These locomotives have two boilers and two mechanically separate engine units that swively independently on pivots under the main frames. You can see this on the photograph here. Effectively these are two back-to-back locomotives joined together.
The two engine units will synchronize when the locomotives run on relatively straight sections of track. Again the prevailing theory is that the synchronization occurs because of vibrations transmitted through the main frame.
The Ffestiniog also has a pair of near-identical Hunslet locomotives that are sometimes run double-headed. These will also synchronize to each other, again presumably synching through the vibrations transmitted between them. Its interesting that the locos have to be of similar types for the synchronization to occur: it doesn't happen when dissimilar locos double-head. Going back to clocks, I would guess that the phenomenon does not happen when the pendulum lengths or other characteristics of the clocks are different.
1. software production costs are hardly limited to the manual and cd. how'd it get there, how does it stay updated? how does it get sold?
Go back and read my comment again. I said the software manufacturing costs were low. I am well aware that the production costs are higher. There are signifcant R&D costs for hardware too. The big difference between software and hardware is that once the R&D costs have been paid for there are significant manufacturing costs for hardware and relatively low manufacturing costs for software, so holding software inventory is not the same problem as holding hardware inventory.
2. that hw liquidation scenario has only happened on a handful of isolated occasions to apple.
Absolutely not so. Apple has a long history of costly mistakes in this area. They are doing much better under Steve but go back 3 or 4 years and they had few models that were profitable overall. Looks at 1996, they lost $800 million. Look at 1997, they lost over $1 billion. Where do you think those losses came from? Virtually every Mac they sold in that period lost the company money.
People will either bite the bullet and buy the expensive OS, or just buy the Apple hardware. Either way Apple wins.
No, you're missing my point. That of course is true in terms of profit but the problem is revenues. Even if your profits are higher you still have a problem if you reduce your revenues to 10% of what they were. Stock prices are based on estimated future earnings. Rightly or wrongly these are usually factored with future revenues in mind. If I make a 50% profit on $1000 revenue that's a lot less attractive to shareholders than 1% profit on $1 billion revenue.
It may not make sense to apply this thinking to a company like Apple but people do. Wall Street always punishes a company for dropping its revenues. If Apple went ahead with a plan that removed 90% of its revenue stream the company's stock price would likely drop so low that the company would be acquired.
they can make more selling a handful of apps that mostly only run on the boxes they already sold for way more money?
Exactly. Mainly because the cost of manufacturing software is small (print the manual, burn the CD, total cost maybe $15 on a $100+ retail price). The cost of manufacturing a hardware box is large, say $1200-$1500 for a $2000 box. Imagine that Apple builds 250,000 machines at $1500 a pop, but only sells 50,000 at the original $2000 price. The market changes or they just built a bad machine, so they have to sell the rest at $1000 just to shift the inventory. They loose a fortune and their hardware profits are seriously negative for that quarter.
Back in the bad old days, pre-Jobs Apple built up large inventories of new models and hoped they could sell them. They often produced models that sold far fewer than they had hoped, so they had to sell off the remaining stock at a loss. This not only impacted their bottom line but it ate into the sales of the next model and lowered customer's expectations of what a Mac should cost. This is exactly why Apple lost $1 billion for two years straight.
Software is typically produced in small runs and its costs of manufacture is so small you can afford to just junk any excess inventory.
Thankfully Apple has learned to reduce its inventory to avoid this problem. They now maintain one of the lowest inventories of any manufacturer in any industry in the world.
Sorry for doubting, but you didn't mention you used to work at Apple on the OS X Intel port. :)
Just to clarify, I didn't work directly on the Intel port but the software I was working on was ported and so I had to keep it maintained and tested on Intel.
Obviously that would change things a bit, to say the least. My one question, though, if you happen to know the answer, is why Apple hasn't bothered to give the Darwin community the source now, since they would still like it tremendously and it would be very helpful. I'm asking as a question of logistics, not truth.
Mainly because people would draw exactly the right conclusion if Apple did release it: that Apple is preparing to move away from PowerPC to Intel. That would cause a lot of problems for Apple with its investors, with Motorola/IBM (which isn't exactly a stable relationship at the best of times), with its current customers and with Microsoft. As has been noted elsewhere, if Apple did go head-to-head with Microsoft in the Intel-based OS market it would put Office for OS X at serious risk.
So I don't think its a matter of logistics. In fact because Apple has to maintain two Darwin code bases (internal and external) to logistics of not releasing the Intel version are somewhat costly.
Which is why Apple will always be a marginal player, with marginal finances, selling to a fan club.
Absolutely true, but as Steve Jobs likes to point out exactly the same could be said of, say, BMW (who have a smaller market share of their industry than Apple do of theirs) and people tend not to use pejorative terms like "marginal". Apple is a succesful niche player producing high-quality, individualistic systems. There's nothing wrong with that and its a very good, sustainable business.
Where'd you learn this?
Four years as a senior software engineer on Apple's OS teams.
The last non-PPC port of OS X was Rhapsody DR2, to my knowledge, which lacked Aqua, Quartz, and Carbon. (It was, at that point, still essentially OPENSTEP 5 with a Platinum interface and QuickTime Media Layer injected, which at the time included QuickDraw GX and QuickDraw 3D.) It ran only on Intel and PowerPC.
What you say is true but incomplete. Mac OS X on Intel has been kept up until at least beta. After that I don't have first-hand knowledge, but I'd guess they still build it, as most of the work was done then. Aqua, Quartz and Carbon were included. Classic was not.
After that release, Jobs announced that Rhapsody was DBA (Dead Before Arrival) and announced his new Mac OS X scheme, which included the fact that the new operating system would not run on Intel. Mac OS X DP1 and later did not run on Intel hardware. And at no point did I hear anything about Alpha, and find it highly unlikely if for no other reason than due to the Darwin sources that were initially released.
Well I've seen Mac OS X beta running on Intel and I've seen the source code that supports it too, so it is real. The Alpha port went away much earlier, back in the Rhapsody days.
As you may remember, when Darwin was first released, many people wanted it to run on Intel, and this ended up being a massive job that still isn't finished. It wasn't that anything had been removed; it's that it simply hadn't been maintained at all since the old Mach 2.5 version, so the foundation, while there, was simply horrendously out of date. Had Apple continued Intel ports, and especially if they had done an Alpha port, it seems as though that code would have been included as well.
Imagine the situation where Apple did not want the outside world to know that they were continuing to maintain an Intel port. They would have released a version of the Darwin source that had the Intel parts switched out. Internally Apple has a different Darwin source tree than the one that has been released to the community.
Recently, in fact, as Darwin's been gotten to limp along on a few varieties of Intel motherboards (and "limp" is definitely the right word here), Apple's been helping a bit with the Intel port, but, again, they're having as much trouble as anyone. No "Here's a secret250,000-line patch to make it work." Just problem solving line by line, conflict by conflict. Given all that, I've always regarded the "OS X is secretely running on Intel" rumor as just that. A rumor.
Well it isn't. I've seen it, used it, worked on it. It doesn't really matter if you think I'm wrong, I have been in a privileged position that you haven't, sorry.Unless you have a source I'm not aware of, then I'll assert that that's just wrong. Until Jobs took over, all software at Apple was available for free except for the products that came out of Clarus, so what you're saying is that Clarus held up Apple. That's a pretty big lump to swallow.
Claris (note spelling) was a wholly-owned subsidary of Apple and it had years when it made a substantial profit. There were some years pre-Jobs when Claris was the only part of Apple that sold software, there were other times when both Apple and Claris sold software separately. There was also a run of about 10 years when Claris didn't exist and Apple sold plenty of software. Your assertion of fact is erroneous.
Further, even now, Apple really has only a few major software products that have the potential to bring in money: Mac OS X ($129), whose sales have tapered; QuickTime Pro ($29); Final Cut Pro ($999); AppleWorks (still available for $69 but also shipping now with all new computers); and DVD Studio Pro. The rest of their software products are given away free--including their kick-ass developer tools, i* software, Mac OS X upgrades, QuickTime Streaming Server, etc. Again, I find it highly unlikely that those pieces of software sustain Apple's profits.
Not so. For example in 1994 Apple "only" made $310 million in profits. It isn't hard to see how a major proportion of that could come from software rather than hardware revenues, especially when you consider operating margins that year were under $150 million.
Furthermore, however, the profit margins on Apple hardware are generally quite large. Excluding the iMac and iBook (whose profit margins are extremely low; something like $40 on the old iMacs and $50 on the 12.1" iBooks) Apple pulls in $200+ profits on each computer and $250+ profit on their monitors minimum. Now notice that of the products I listed earlier only two are over $300 for the consumer, and tell me that the profit per unit is higher for software.
If the profit margins are so great on hardware how did Apple loose $1047 million in 1997? Yes, when Apple is doing everything right it can have great margins on its hardware. But that is not always the case. Even when Apple was loosing a billion dollars a year its software units were still profitable. There have been years when Apple has made staggering losses on its hardware and modest but real profits on its software. 1996 and 1997 were examples of this.
Unless you've got a source, I've got to label you as either a troll or a wishful thinker.
Sorry, I was an Apple employee for four years. I helped write a lot of this very profitable software. I know what I'm talking about.
Cringely resolves this complex matter in the space of a paragraph length assertion "The upside for Apple is enormous. Suddenly, their software budget is leveraged across a much larger number of units, making the company more profitable and able to spend even more on making the software better."
Actually I think he's right about profitability. Apple typically makes a much greater profit per unit of software than per unit of hardware. There have been years when Apple's entire profit margin has been from its software division(s).
The problem that Cringley misses is that Apple has to think not only of its profits but also of its revenues. If it lost the hardware business it would immediately drop its revenues from $8 billion to around $500 million. Even if its profits went up at the same time (which they might), they would get crucified on Wall Street for this. No sane company would ever pursue a strategy that involved such a dramatic cut in its revenue stream.
So even though Cringely is right about profitability he ignores the revenue impact so his overall argument is flawed.