Maybe because some of us "dumb knobs" could actually use some of the stuff you knock so casually. I do highly graphic intensive 3D simulations of manufacturing systems for a living. I will max out any graphics card you put in front of me and be begging for more. Same with RAM and same with CPU. I'm an engineer, not some management dweeb with more machine than I can use.
What's more I have to travel since we have several hundred plants in my company spread across the globe. It is highly inconvenient to tote a full desktop unit on the road and a laptop with good 3D graphics could help immensly. Right now even the fastest laptops out there just can't work fast enough for me to use them for anything but the smallest models. Try modeling a 150,000 square foot plant in full 3D and without heavy LOD you'll choke any PC on the market today. Never mind doing any numerical analysis on it.
There are people who can use fast laptops. Don't criticize just because you aren't one of them.
While I have no documentation to back this up I am highly dubious that caller pays is against any regulation. Caller pays exists on land lines so why should it be any different for wireless? Of course the big providers aren't going to be crazy about it because it costs them more money and they *gasp* actually have to cooperate with each other. Naturally they'll claim there is "little demand" but that is just a lie of omission. People don't demand it because they can't get it anywhere.
No, the only reason we do not have caller pays is because the big phone companies don't want to foot the bill for the system required to do it. Period. It has nothing to do with regulations, consumer demand, or anything else. Just greed and laziness.
Bet me I'm not. My day job is doing simulations of manufacturing plants. Heavy 3D graphics and numerical analysis to boot. We have Dual 800mhz PIII's with 2 Gig of RAM and the fastest graphics accelerators out there and I max those out. But I also don't expect my web browser to be especially snappy when I do. If you are doing that much stuff on your machine, bad multitasking should almost be expected. That's just a fact, regardless of OS. (And I use both NT and IRIX at work and it doesn't matter which one I use for the results to be the same. Only difference is I never crash IRIX.)
Why? Three words. No Caller Pays. Until cellular and landline companies get their head out of their collective greedy arses and institute caller pays for all calls, every cellular plan will be a bad one. The only reason they aren't doing it is because they don't want to deal with the billing costs. Boo-hoo. Don't care. I'm not going to use my cell phone more because I'm not going to pay for someone (read telemarketers) to call me on my own dime that I don't want to speak to. The europeans managed to figure this out. Why the US companies can't, I have no idea.
And yes I am aware that there are few places in the US where caller pays is available. But so far it isn't most.
Re:Getting JAVA + SSL to work in Mozilla (Windows)
on
Netscape 6.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Cool. Thanks. Worked great. This eliminates one huge barrier keeping me from using Mozilla all the time. Just a few more bugs to go.
Now if I could just get the Dust Puppy on/. to actually display in Mozilla I'd be a happy man.
Not disputing what you are seeing but the machine I'm using (PII 366mhz) is slower than yours and it's a laptop so the graphics are probably slower too and I've never experienced what you describe. Performance for me has (since about Build 17 anyway) been good enough that I only use Netscape 4 for secure sites. In fact I'm typing this through the nightly build of Mozilla (from about 3 days ago) right now. I can't remember the last time it crashed on me and it is definitely faster than Netscape 4.*
Not to say I don't have issues with Mozilla still. I still don't see a lot of images correctly (like the little icon for user friendly right here on/. , or any image on the Motley Fool) and I can't do anything using SSL (even though I have the SSL module). I have a few nits with some parts of the interface but I'm hoping those will get resolved eventually.
To get back to my original point however, keep trying. Mozilla works really well these days and is improving very quickly.
You have a golden opportunity to bring your users into the modern era. Ideally from an institution's point of view they should be using a network and I don't mean sneakernet. Simply eliminate the floppy drives.
Thats right. Pitch 'em.
Force them to use a network. Teach them how. Get the proper infrastructure in place. Yes this will cause you some short term pain. In exchange you'll have a simpler, easier to maintain network and in the long run, life will be better.
Floppies are not absolutely necessary components in a computer especially since it is very possible to boot off of CDs. If you must allow them to carry something let them access the CD drive and tell them they need a CD burner. (they aren't that expensive) If you are feeling nice, make a few workstations available where you have CD burners in place and let people copy their floppies to CD's there.
The sooner everyone take these steps, the sooner we can bury the floppy. It's overdue.
I saw one of these at a trade show earlier this year. Seriously cool and seriously expensive. I don't remember the exact price but $20,000 US seems to stick in my head. My memory could be faulty however and the price may have dropped significantly since then. Can't really say I need one but I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at one either!
OK, presuming it all works as detailed (and I don't see any reason why it can't thus far) why didn't anyone think of this before? What a brilliant hack. It might not be very fast without unusually heavy use of memory (after all there is a reason a lot of games copy stuff to the hard drive) but still, it's a really cool idea. Even is a nice way to let people (like your kids) play games or use other applications while maintaining a secure system in the process. Nice...
What the judge suggests seem to be a good idea, but it isn't quite so simple upon further reflection. There are some communications that should not be subject to any statute of limitations, just as there are are some serious crimes that should not be subject to one. The tough part is in deciding which is which and what sorts of emails should be subject to later scrutiny and which should be dismissed as a product of another "era". I suspect it would be difficult if not impossible to come up with a clear standard for which is which.
Besides, putting aside all "paranoia" about our government for a moment, there is something to be said for being responsible for one's actions. Taking a moment to think about what you do and say is never a bad thing. Despite the protections we enjoy, our past can come back to haunt us sometimes. Better be sure what you are doing is important enough to justify that happening.
Even if the company were to "move" to another country if they still want to do business here in the US they will have to have be incorporated in some way in the US. Hence the government can still stick it to them unless they completely pull out of the US market. Since that isn't going to happen, your arguement is meaningless.
I don't mean to sound especially cynical but isn't this rather obvious? Duh... 90% of the problems in any organization are due to bad management.
I mean, how hard iz it to git these new fangled computermibobs to werk? Any dern fool can do it. Jest giv 'em some mountain dew and lock em in a closet fer a munth er too. How herd is thet to manage?
There is a rather unfortunate belief (rather prevelant on/. actually) that big companies aren't interested in listening to public perception and customer wishes. This isn't really true at all. Most organizations really are interested. The problem is that it is frequently difficult to get the attention of the people who can make the changes. Every company, big or small, makes some boneheaded decisions. (whether intentional or not) The difference is in whether the corporate culture and leadership is responsive to the inputs they have available to them. And that is not an easy task.
Companies will pay attention particularly well if there is loud feedback in a public forum. Most companies love good publicity and will react very strongly to negative publicity. Companies are self interested organizations and avoiding negative publicity is very much of interest to them because it can impact their bottom line, as well as stock price, quite directly.
A bit of background info. My father worked in an engineering office for one of the baby bells. His job was to design the facilities that would be needed to get service to a particular location. For example if your subdevelopment needed 20 new cable drops, he would decide what equipment was needed, what had to be installed, etc, etc. This is how I know what (admitedly little) I know, so please pardon me if my terminology isn't exactly correct.
A huge part of the problem with getting DSL service rolled out is that the phone companies simply do not have the facilities to properly do the job. Several years ago (~10) some genius decided to go from two cables per houshold, to one cable per household. This was shortly before the real explosion in demand for non voice services. (read the internet, fax machines, etc) The long and the short of it is that the phone companies are facing a fairly significant limitation in the availability of facilities to offer new services from. This means that in many cases they often can't offer DSL service even to places that might otherwise be able to get it.
There are other issues too. DSL is a clever technology which permits the phone companies to use a percentage of the current infrastructure for a purpose it wasn't really designed for. (it was designed for voice communication) If you live in a rural area, forget about it. If you don't happen to live near a central office, forget about it. They can't afford the upgrades to "do it right", so you will either get some alternative (cable, wireless, sattelite) or you will be waiting for quite a long time. Given the problems the telco's are having getting their infrastructure problems solved, is it really that surprising that the service itself is not of the highest quality?
I think people are just as interested as they ever have been with the olympics, maybe even more so. I think a lot of the problem with the bad ratings is simply because the coverage is horrible.
A) NBC delays the coverage for multiple hours in order to run it during prime-time. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten that the one of the big things that makes the sports exciting is that you don't know who won in advance. Given the prevelence of alternative media outlets (*cough* internet *cough*) there is little reason to watch if I already know who won.
B) They only cover a limited number of "popular" sports and even then the coverage is shallow. The sports I'm most interested in are wrestling, taekwondo, and judo. However unless there is an american in a gold medal match, I will never see these sports. (and even then the match usually isn't shown in its entirety) Even for track, swimming and the other more popular sports, the coverage is shallow and very incomplete.
C) Those stupid "Olympic Moments". You know the ones. Where they show some banal feel good piece about how some athlete's parents were run over by a piece of farm equipment, his sister has cancer and his dog ran away but he persevered and made it to the olympics. Or where they waste time on some useless piece of trivia about the host country. No one I have ever spoken to likes these. We watch the olympics for one reason, the sports. I don't really care about the life history of the athletes. Just show me the sports.
D) Overcommercialization. Yes I know companies pay the bills. But that doesn't mean they have to be crass about it or run 15 minutes of commercials for every 3 minutes of athletics.
E) American-centrism. Yes, all us Americans love to see an American win. However believe it or not I still like the sports even if an american isn't involved. Yes, I really do like track if Michael Johnson doesn't win. I will still watch swimming if Jenny Thompson isn't involved. Etc. The olympics provides a rare chance to see a lot of the best athletes in the world at a wide variety of sports all in one place at one time. Whether an american wins or not, is really of very little importance.
And there are other reasons, but I'm tired of thinking about it. If NBC wants me to watch, they should get some people who actually understand sports to schedule their programming. Until then, I have better things to do.
How many times has your Palm crashed? One big benefit of the "keep it simple" mentality is a VERY stable platform.
Umm, fairly often actually. I've owned one for about 2 years and it has crashed hard enough to require a reset about once every 2-3 months. Pretty good but still more than I'd like. I don't even really do anything very fancy with it or use it as heavily as many people do. Not to say I'm displeased with it or anything but I haven't found it's stability to be especially remarkable personally.
Nice to see a licensee finally starting to push on the hardware limits of the palm platform. I realize Palm has been successful in very large part from their Keep-It-Simple philosophy, but they haven't really pushed things (both hardware and software) as hard as they could. The current palm based machines aren't radically advanced from the originals. (not that the originals were bad, I still use mine) I've wanted to upgrade my palm for a while but the platform hasn't advanced enough to really make it worth the cost, for me at least. This gives me hope that I might have something worth upgrading to soon.
I still can't stand how slow Mozilla runs on my dual-500!
Think it's about time they released a version with all that debugging code ripped out. The slow UI is a big turnoff.
I'm not trying to be snide or anything but I think that is a problem particular to your machine. I've been running the nightly builds as well as the "stable" releases for several months now. Debugging code or not, Mozilla is as fast on my machine (PII 366mhz Thinkpad 770Z) as any other similarly capable browser I've tried, including IE 5 and Netscape 4.7, and generally pretty stable. While I don't doubt it may be running slow on your machine, don't be so sure it is the debugging code.
Personally the only real problems I have (besides some already documented bugs) are that it doesn't work with Acrobat reader properly and that sites that do secure banking refuse the connection. (and yes I have the SSL stuff installed) Other than that I use it for 90% of the web browsing I do and it generally works pretty well and is really quite fast. My experiences with it lead me to believe that people complaining about the slowness of it either have some compatibility issues unresolved or are using a very old build. (it was slow for me too at first) While it certainly isn't production code yet, it's getting close and getting there pretty quickly.
Just because it is a privately held organization, it doesn't necessarily follow that it isn't censorship. The Washington Post, NY Times, and virtually every media organization in the US is privately held, yet they are perfectly capable of censorship if they were so inclined.
Now I'm not necessarily saying that this particular case is censorship, (it might be but that is for you to decide for youself) but just because it is a private organization doesn't necissarily mean that it isn't.
Yeah we have good land lines here and that is one reason why in some places wireless is so popular, but the real problem as I see it is that we do not have "caller-pays" billing. Why on earth would I use my cut the cord so that I can pay to have a bunch of telemarketers voice-spam me on my own dime?
There is also the fact that the various wire options are still absurdly priced in comparison to land lines. Sure I expect a premium for mobility, but good grief...
I've run into this with our local cablemodem vendor. (Buckeye Cablesystem in this case - unfortunately I can't yet get DSL to my door even though I'm close enough) They want to charge an extra $10 for every extra computer hooked up to their lines. Where do these folks get off thinking they are entitled to this extra money? I'm paying for the pipe to my house, nothing more. If I'm leasing equipment from them (ala cable boxes or NIC's) then they can charge me for thoses but beyond that it is none of their business what I hook up to the pipe. (so long as I'm not doing anything illegal with the connection)
I've no problem with companies trying to make a buck but this is ridiculous. They are providing no additional benefit but think they are entitled to additional money? Not from me. I'm paying for a pipe, not the right to use my own computers.
Besides, this is really not enforcable as far as I can tell. If you set things up right, I'm not sure how they could tell if you had such a network or not.
Anyone working in 3D CAD or 3D engineering simulation software (like me) will have an almost insatiable demand for faster 3D. Many companies are using 3D simulation software for plant layouts, offline robotic programming, human ergonomic analysis, finite element analysis, and of course CAD among 3D provides some enormous advantages for communication of concepts.
It isn't about games for everyone. Games are great but I personally would rather see the acceleration hardware aimed at major CAD vendors (Autodesk, PTC (ProEngineer), SDRC (I*DEAS), Dassault Systemes (CATIA), UG Solutions Inc) rather than games because that would help me more. 3D graphics available today are really pretty slow compared to what I really need. (and yes we have some pretty high end hardware to work on too) Try rendering an entire plant in 3D with product in it and flying around in real time with a reasonable level of detail. (no you don't use a CAD system for this, you use dedicated VR or 3D simultion software like QUEST) The currently availlable hardware still only permits fairly crude cartoonish models. It has been quickly improving though...
Actually what I'd really love to see any of them release their products for linux, but that's another topic... (funny thing is, most of them have unix versions already so it shouldn't be all that hard a port)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have to presume that you are either unemployed or work for a company that has any competitors. Apple's competitors would love to learn about the shape, specs, or software on any of Apple's new products ahead of their release. If Dell, just to pick a random competitor, knows what Apple's new computer is going to look like and do before it is released that provides them with a competitive advantage. This is especially true since a lot of the recent appeal of Apple's machines has been in their visual appearance.
Now is a leak about the look of the new cube going to put Apple out of business? Probably not. But it does permit their competition to take the new design into account in their strategic planning at an earlier stage. This provides a substantial advantage to that competitor. Anyone who has ever been involved with strategic planning for a company will verify this. The more you know about what your competition is up to, the better you can react to it. And yes, even the seemingly little things can matter.
When you are in a commodity market (and the PC industry is increasingly becoming one) the more you can do to differentiate yourself from the competition the better off you generally are. There are very good reasons why all car companys are so secretive about the appearance of new vehicles. There are very good reasons why Transmeta was so secretive about its new processor design. And they all have to to with competitive intelligence.
Apple is being very intelligent by staying mum about new designs. Innovative companies that give away what they are doing will quickly find themselves put out of business by competitors able to react quickly. Read "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu sometime. It is the canonical text on strategic thinking, whether it be military or for a competitive business. Knowing what the competition is doing ahead of time is an incredible advantage. Apple knows and recognizes this and it acting in its best interest. I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner.
Your costs are incorrect. Maya Unlimited costs $16,000, Maya Complete costs $7500, and Maya Builder (which is comperable to Max from what I understand) is $2995.
Maya seems to cost more but it also does more out of the box. (plus is easier to use than Max) Once you add in enough modules to Max to bring it to the same level of capability, the cost ends up being fairly similar. Max is a great package but if you are going to compare the two, make it an apples to apples comparison.
I think a more interesting question is whether some of the mac developers as they update their software will find that it is relatively easy to port to unix. Maybe it's just wishful thinking but it's an interesting thought. The mac world's strengths (apps and user interface) and unix world's strengths (reliability & networking) are somewhat complementary so it is a nice thing to hope for at least.
This also might have the highly desirable side effect of forcing some folks writing unix software take Apple's lead on user interface issues. Since Apple is generally considered one of the best at user interfaces, perhaps some of it will rub off.:-)
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What's more I have to travel since we have several hundred plants in my company spread across the globe. It is highly inconvenient to tote a full desktop unit on the road and a laptop with good 3D graphics could help immensly. Right now even the fastest laptops out there just can't work fast enough for me to use them for anything but the smallest models. Try modeling a 150,000 square foot plant in full 3D and without heavy LOD you'll choke any PC on the market today. Never mind doing any numerical analysis on it.
There are people who can use fast laptops. Don't criticize just because you aren't one of them.
No, the only reason we do not have caller pays is because the big phone companies don't want to foot the bill for the system required to do it. Period. It has nothing to do with regulations, consumer demand, or anything else. Just greed and laziness.
Bet me I'm not. My day job is doing simulations of manufacturing plants. Heavy 3D graphics and numerical analysis to boot. We have Dual 800mhz PIII's with 2 Gig of RAM and the fastest graphics accelerators out there and I max those out. But I also don't expect my web browser to be especially snappy when I do. If you are doing that much stuff on your machine, bad multitasking should almost be expected. That's just a fact, regardless of OS. (And I use both NT and IRIX at work and it doesn't matter which one I use for the results to be the same. Only difference is I never crash IRIX.)
And yes I am aware that there are few places in the US where caller pays is available. But so far it isn't most.
Now if I could just get the Dust Puppy on /. to actually display in Mozilla I'd be a happy man.
Not to say I don't have issues with Mozilla still. I still don't see a lot of images correctly (like the little icon for user friendly right here on /. , or any image on the Motley Fool) and I can't do anything using SSL (even though I have the SSL module). I have a few nits with some parts of the interface but I'm hoping those will get resolved eventually.
To get back to my original point however, keep trying. Mozilla works really well these days and is improving very quickly.
Thats right. Pitch 'em.
Force them to use a network. Teach them how. Get the proper infrastructure in place. Yes this will cause you some short term pain. In exchange you'll have a simpler, easier to maintain network and in the long run, life will be better.
Floppies are not absolutely necessary components in a computer especially since it is very possible to boot off of CDs. If you must allow them to carry something let them access the CD drive and tell them they need a CD burner. (they aren't that expensive) If you are feeling nice, make a few workstations available where you have CD burners in place and let people copy their floppies to CD's there.
The sooner everyone take these steps, the sooner we can bury the floppy. It's overdue.
I saw one of these at a trade show earlier this year. Seriously cool and seriously expensive. I don't remember the exact price but $20,000 US seems to stick in my head. My memory could be faulty however and the price may have dropped significantly since then. Can't really say I need one but I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at one either!
OK, presuming it all works as detailed (and I don't see any reason why it can't thus far) why didn't anyone think of this before? What a brilliant hack. It might not be very fast without unusually heavy use of memory (after all there is a reason a lot of games copy stuff to the hard drive) but still, it's a really cool idea. Even is a nice way to let people (like your kids) play games or use other applications while maintaining a secure system in the process. Nice...
Besides, putting aside all "paranoia" about our government for a moment, there is something to be said for being responsible for one's actions. Taking a moment to think about what you do and say is never a bad thing. Despite the protections we enjoy, our past can come back to haunt us sometimes. Better be sure what you are doing is important enough to justify that happening.
Even if the company were to "move" to another country if they still want to do business here in the US they will have to have be incorporated in some way in the US. Hence the government can still stick it to them unless they completely pull out of the US market. Since that isn't going to happen, your arguement is meaningless.
I mean, how hard iz it to git these new fangled computermibobs to werk? Any dern fool can do it. Jest giv 'em some mountain dew and lock em in a closet fer a munth er too. How herd is thet to manage?
Companies will pay attention particularly well if there is loud feedback in a public forum. Most companies love good publicity and will react very strongly to negative publicity. Companies are self interested organizations and avoiding negative publicity is very much of interest to them because it can impact their bottom line, as well as stock price, quite directly.
A huge part of the problem with getting DSL service rolled out is that the phone companies simply do not have the facilities to properly do the job. Several years ago (~10) some genius decided to go from two cables per houshold, to one cable per household. This was shortly before the real explosion in demand for non voice services. (read the internet, fax machines, etc) The long and the short of it is that the phone companies are facing a fairly significant limitation in the availability of facilities to offer new services from. This means that in many cases they often can't offer DSL service even to places that might otherwise be able to get it.
There are other issues too. DSL is a clever technology which permits the phone companies to use a percentage of the current infrastructure for a purpose it wasn't really designed for. (it was designed for voice communication) If you live in a rural area, forget about it. If you don't happen to live near a central office, forget about it. They can't afford the upgrades to "do it right", so you will either get some alternative (cable, wireless, sattelite) or you will be waiting for quite a long time. Given the problems the telco's are having getting their infrastructure problems solved, is it really that surprising that the service itself is not of the highest quality?
A) NBC delays the coverage for multiple hours in order to run it during prime-time. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten that the one of the big things that makes the sports exciting is that you don't know who won in advance. Given the prevelence of alternative media outlets (*cough* internet *cough*) there is little reason to watch if I already know who won.
B) They only cover a limited number of "popular" sports and even then the coverage is shallow. The sports I'm most interested in are wrestling, taekwondo, and judo. However unless there is an american in a gold medal match, I will never see these sports. (and even then the match usually isn't shown in its entirety) Even for track, swimming and the other more popular sports, the coverage is shallow and very incomplete.
C) Those stupid "Olympic Moments". You know the ones. Where they show some banal feel good piece about how some athlete's parents were run over by a piece of farm equipment, his sister has cancer and his dog ran away but he persevered and made it to the olympics. Or where they waste time on some useless piece of trivia about the host country. No one I have ever spoken to likes these. We watch the olympics for one reason, the sports. I don't really care about the life history of the athletes. Just show me the sports.
D) Overcommercialization. Yes I know companies pay the bills. But that doesn't mean they have to be crass about it or run 15 minutes of commercials for every 3 minutes of athletics.
E) American-centrism. Yes, all us Americans love to see an American win. However believe it or not I still like the sports even if an american isn't involved. Yes, I really do like track if Michael Johnson doesn't win. I will still watch swimming if Jenny Thompson isn't involved. Etc. The olympics provides a rare chance to see a lot of the best athletes in the world at a wide variety of sports all in one place at one time. Whether an american wins or not, is really of very little importance.
And there are other reasons, but I'm tired of thinking about it. If NBC wants me to watch, they should get some people who actually understand sports to schedule their programming. Until then, I have better things to do.
Umm, fairly often actually. I've owned one for about 2 years and it has crashed hard enough to require a reset about once every 2-3 months. Pretty good but still more than I'd like. I don't even really do anything very fancy with it or use it as heavily as many people do. Not to say I'm displeased with it or anything but I haven't found it's stability to be especially remarkable personally.
Nice to see a licensee finally starting to push on the hardware limits of the palm platform. I realize Palm has been successful in very large part from their Keep-It-Simple philosophy, but they haven't really pushed things (both hardware and software) as hard as they could. The current palm based machines aren't radically advanced from the originals. (not that the originals were bad, I still use mine) I've wanted to upgrade my palm for a while but the platform hasn't advanced enough to really make it worth the cost, for me at least. This gives me hope that I might have something worth upgrading to soon.
I'm not trying to be snide or anything but I think that is a problem particular to your machine. I've been running the nightly builds as well as the "stable" releases for several months now. Debugging code or not, Mozilla is as fast on my machine (PII 366mhz Thinkpad 770Z) as any other similarly capable browser I've tried, including IE 5 and Netscape 4.7, and generally pretty stable. While I don't doubt it may be running slow on your machine, don't be so sure it is the debugging code.
Personally the only real problems I have (besides some already documented bugs) are that it doesn't work with Acrobat reader properly and that sites that do secure banking refuse the connection. (and yes I have the SSL stuff installed) Other than that I use it for 90% of the web browsing I do and it generally works pretty well and is really quite fast. My experiences with it lead me to believe that people complaining about the slowness of it either have some compatibility issues unresolved or are using a very old build. (it was slow for me too at first) While it certainly isn't production code yet, it's getting close and getting there pretty quickly.
Now I'm not necessarily saying that this particular case is censorship, (it might be but that is for you to decide for youself) but just because it is a private organization doesn't necissarily mean that it isn't.
There is also the fact that the various wire options are still absurdly priced in comparison to land lines. Sure I expect a premium for mobility, but good grief...
I've no problem with companies trying to make a buck but this is ridiculous. They are providing no additional benefit but think they are entitled to additional money? Not from me. I'm paying for a pipe, not the right to use my own computers.
Besides, this is really not enforcable as far as I can tell. If you set things up right, I'm not sure how they could tell if you had such a network or not.
It isn't about games for everyone. Games are great but I personally would rather see the acceleration hardware aimed at major CAD vendors (Autodesk, PTC (ProEngineer), SDRC (I*DEAS), Dassault Systemes (CATIA), UG Solutions Inc) rather than games because that would help me more. 3D graphics available today are really pretty slow compared to what I really need. (and yes we have some pretty high end hardware to work on too) Try rendering an entire plant in 3D with product in it and flying around in real time with a reasonable level of detail. (no you don't use a CAD system for this, you use dedicated VR or 3D simultion software like QUEST) The currently availlable hardware still only permits fairly crude cartoonish models. It has been quickly improving though...
Actually what I'd really love to see any of them release their products for linux, but that's another topic... (funny thing is, most of them have unix versions already so it shouldn't be all that hard a port)
Now is a leak about the look of the new cube going to put Apple out of business? Probably not. But it does permit their competition to take the new design into account in their strategic planning at an earlier stage. This provides a substantial advantage to that competitor. Anyone who has ever been involved with strategic planning for a company will verify this. The more you know about what your competition is up to, the better you can react to it. And yes, even the seemingly little things can matter.
When you are in a commodity market (and the PC industry is increasingly becoming one) the more you can do to differentiate yourself from the competition the better off you generally are. There are very good reasons why all car companys are so secretive about the appearance of new vehicles. There are very good reasons why Transmeta was so secretive about its new processor design. And they all have to to with competitive intelligence.
Apple is being very intelligent by staying mum about new designs. Innovative companies that give away what they are doing will quickly find themselves put out of business by competitors able to react quickly. Read "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu sometime. It is the canonical text on strategic thinking, whether it be military or for a competitive business. Knowing what the competition is doing ahead of time is an incredible advantage. Apple knows and recognizes this and it acting in its best interest. I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner.
Maya seems to cost more but it also does more out of the box. (plus is easier to use than Max) Once you add in enough modules to Max to bring it to the same level of capability, the cost ends up being fairly similar. Max is a great package but if you are going to compare the two, make it an apples to apples comparison.
Check here for more details.
This also might have the highly desirable side effect of forcing some folks writing unix software take Apple's lead on user interface issues. Since Apple is generally considered one of the best at user interfaces, perhaps some of it will rub off. :-)