Take it easy, there. I'm not 100% sure about Ellison. Sure, there's an Oracle for OS X, and the guys this really fruity dude who acts like he's God and keeps Japanese gardens & exotic fish in his back yard, but that's really only circumstantial evidence.
I do agree with your contention, however. Safari seems to be vastsly underrepresented, unless the Apple market share is a lie.
Which is entirely possible. I've never seen a market-share statistic I've ever had any reason to trust. For all I really know, it's me and eleven other guys using Macs in all of North America, and four of them are Steve Jobs, Avi Tevanian, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates.
Apple has something like a 2% to 4% share of the sales market (depending on who you ask) and something like a 5% to 8% share of active personal computers in use (depending on who you ask).
Given that nearly all current Apple systems are running OS X, and well over half of them are running Safari, how do they arrive at "Less than 0%" of users for all browsers other than IE and Firefox?
Even using the most anti-Apple zealotry numbers available, Safari use has gotta be at least 1%.
I also think Firefox use has got to be a bit higher than the 8% claimed here. Sure, IE is "what's there" on a new Windows installation, but I've yet to meet anybody who actually prefers IE. Sure, I could see some people jumping ship to it when the new version ships (if it even comes close to delivering current promises), but the current state of IE is that it is inferior in almost every way that matters to Firefox.
The biggest problem with this theory is that it would require the very smart people at Microsoft to fail to notice a conspiracy against them which even Dvorak was able to see coming.
Given how paranoid they are in Redmond, you would have to have a pretty high opinion of yourself to think you are more clued-in than the execs at Microsoft. (Yes, I'm also looking in your direction, Robert X. Cringely...)
Apple makes money selling computers. More money than nearly any other computer maker. Their sales are lower than Dell, but their margins are higher. A lot of other computer makers (HP, Gateway, etc.) only wish they made the kind of money on computers that Apple does.
Selling an OS, on the other hand, they would quickly go the way of BeOS and a dozen other failed attempts at creating a rival operating system for third-party commodity systems. It would mean the death of Apple and the end of OS X.
Here is a complete list of all the non-MS operating system companies making money as software only entities over the fifteen years since Microsoft dominated the market:
Be careful what you as for, according to the software industry it already is the norm and the **AA on even numbered days says that CDs and DVDs aren't sold, only licensed.
Copyright holders like to say that in press releases about copy protection, but make them own up to seeing it that way on their packaging, and I think you will find them singing a different tune.
The entire industry depends on consumers believing that they are buying a copy, yet treats them like they are not. If they only want to "lease" content to us, fine... but let's insist that they be up front about it.
Then, after movie sales have evaporated in favor of NetFlix, on-demand downloads, and other, cheaper, ways of watching a movie only once, they *just might* come around to realizing that they only reason to buy a copy of a movie is because you want to own it.
Kind of reminds me of that line in The Commitments:
"Jimmy, you were the one who told us about Frankie Goes To Hollywood before anybody else even knew about them... *and* you were the first to know they were shite."
The only "discussion" it really seems to have provoked is whether Zonk should be fired or not.
I think he should be. This "article" he linked and quoted says absolutely nothing interesting or new about gaming, while selecting the most vulgar and juvenile metaphor available to make a rather stale point.
games.slashdot.org should be doing stories about games. If I wanted to read about women getting vaginal juices all over hardwood floors, I would be browsing porn sites. There's bound to be enough perverts out there with a "floor wetting" fettish for there to be several sites catering to their desires.
Not only do they have the legacy of DVD's farther up the trail, but they have HD-on-demand downloads screaming up the road behind them.
If they can't make BluRay or HD-DVD:
1. Extremely Cheap 2. Fair 3. Convenient
Then people will just keep buying DVD's until Apple or Intel or whoever else comes out with high-def movies you can download overnight (and eventually faster) for $19 a pop.
The only way to "push" the Blu-Ray format would be to release a few blockbusters on Blu-Ray only... but nobody is going to do that because the DVD market has become far too important to the profits of movies these days, and selling only a few thousand HD disks instead of a few million DVD's will utterly kill your business.
It gets even worse for them. So far, nobody has found a legal means to shut down AllOfMP3.com. What happens when everybody buys media consoles and computers for on-demand HD movies, and then some russian mobster introduces "AllOfH264.com"? Suddenly, by taking advantage of gaps in international copyright law, we will be able to download any movie for about 50 cents each without violating any specific law.
Media companies will lobby Congress to put a stop to network-based distributions from other countries, and somebody will think of a way to do it. Meanwhile, while they fight for that, it is up to us (through good proxies like the EFF) to lobby hard for a "CCPA" (Copyright Consumer Protection Act) which should outlaw all copy protections which interfere with Fair Use of the product, in the same manner that the DMCA outlaws technology which interferes with tech-based copyright protections.
In other words, it should be law that any DVD I buy which enjoys the protection of copyright in the US must allow me to:
1. Archive it to hard drive (as often as I need to) 2. Back it up on another disk (as often as I chose to) 3. Loan it to friends and family members 4. Watch it on any playback device in my house 5. Convert it to other formats
Anything short of that, and it should be treated as a rental of the content, not a sale of a copy. The packaging should be clearly and visibly labeled "NOT FOR SALE - LIMITED USE ONLY" on the front and spine of the case, and the disk should be priced accordingly.
Yes, all corporations act 100% out of self-interest.
However, it is always in their self-interest to make you want to spend your money on their products, because if people do not volunteer to be their customers, they do not have a business.
Being "cool" is one way to go about this. Some people (precious few) are more likely to buy from a good corporate citizen than the cheapest alternative. Apple has survived for decades thanks to such people.
If you think corporations are "evil", ask yourself if you buy from evil corporations. And don't give me that "I don't have a choice" line. You always have a choice. It's your money, and you have the right to do without the products of any given company if you wish.
Well, there's a lot of appeal to the idea of walking around in a virtual world with a stunningly handsome/beautiful avatar to represent you as you interact with people and do stuff.
The place where these games fall down is that the "stuff to do" still isn't really fun enough. The WoW missions seem like fun at first, but they all quickly blur into "travel 10 minutes to that place, engage in the same basic MMORPG combat system that goes all the way back to text-based level-grinding MUD's, then travel all the way back. When you do, you will get some meaningless rewards."
It's a time-sink, in the sense that dumping nickels into a video slot machine is a time-sink, but it's not really all that fun.
The day somebody comes up with an emersive, interactive, MMO which has a fun game or two braided into it, that person is going to become very wealthy.
The other problem is, most adults eventually reach the point where they realize that paying $20 a month to walk around and talk to people in a virtual world is kind of stupid when they can do that in the real world pretty much for free. You don't get to look like an elf (unless you are willing to undergo radical elective surgery), but otherwise you can meet just as many interesting people by joining a church choir, a co-rec sports team, a political party caucus or whatever.
Heck, go to sci-fi and anime cons, and you can meet people just as nerdy as you see in an MMORPG... and you can even make yourself look a little bit like an elf, if you really want to.
"My dog was six inches tall last year." "My dog is two feet tall this year." "Based on this trend, my dog will be taller than my house in a few years."
Okay, first an acknowledgement of one of my own mistakes gets modded down as "Troll", now a light-hearted comment which could not possibly inspire flame has been modded down as "Flamebait."
Look's like some frisky moderator wants to bitchslap me today. Heh. Might as well give it up, kid. My Karma's so good, if I cancelled and restarted my acount I'd be coming back as the god Vishnu himself.
Not to mention access to Afghanistan for a pipeline.
LOL! Looks like somebody finally got around to renting F-911.
Let me get you up to speed: The pipeline in question does not exist, has not existed, is not currently planned, and the plans which once did exist for it were scrapped long before the war.
We didn't build a pipeline the Afghanistan. We built roads and voting booths.
Oil is costing $65 a barrel right now. If anybody is getting rich off the current state of affairs, it's hybrid car manufacturers.
Today primetime television starts at the same time everywhere, not because it's the same number on the clock but it's the same time of day.
Actually, it starts at 7:00 in the Central time zone, but 8:00 everywhere else. A hold-over from the fact that most American "farm country" used to be in the midwest, and farmers go to bed earlier.
This is why you sometimes hear networks promoting a show as airing at "9, 8 central."
How many deaths will it take to stop US Imperialism?
We won't know until it starts.
If we are an empire, where in the hell are our tributes from Afghanistant, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, and France??? American citizens shouldn't be paying taxes at all, what with all these vassal states we've conquered sitting securely under our mighty thumbs, providing wealth and slave labor to finance our all-night bacchanals.
Slashdot Mirror
Take it easy, there. I'm not 100% sure about Ellison. Sure, there's an Oracle for OS X, and the guys this really fruity dude who acts like he's God and keeps Japanese gardens & exotic fish in his back yard, but that's really only circumstantial evidence.
"All I really need is this thermos!!!"
"... and this chair."
I do agree with your contention, however. Safari seems to be vastsly underrepresented, unless the Apple market share is a lie.
Which is entirely possible. I've never seen a market-share statistic I've ever had any reason to trust. For all I really know, it's me and eleven other guys using Macs in all of North America, and four of them are Steve Jobs, Avi Tevanian, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates.
I question these numbers in general.
Apple has something like a 2% to 4% share of the sales market (depending on who you ask) and something like a 5% to 8% share of active personal computers in use (depending on who you ask).
Given that nearly all current Apple systems are running OS X, and well over half of them are running Safari, how do they arrive at "Less than 0%" of users for all browsers other than IE and Firefox?
Even using the most anti-Apple zealotry numbers available, Safari use has gotta be at least 1%.
I also think Firefox use has got to be a bit higher than the 8% claimed here. Sure, IE is "what's there" on a new Windows installation, but I've yet to meet anybody who actually prefers IE. Sure, I could see some people jumping ship to it when the new version ships (if it even comes close to delivering current promises), but the current state of IE is that it is inferior in almost every way that matters to Firefox.
The biggest problem with this theory is that it would require the very smart people at Microsoft to fail to notice a conspiracy against them which even Dvorak was able to see coming.
Given how paranoid they are in Redmond, you would have to have a pretty high opinion of yourself to think you are more clued-in than the execs at Microsoft. (Yes, I'm also looking in your direction, Robert X. Cringely...)
Short, but not non-existant.
Apple makes money selling computers. More money than nearly any other computer maker. Their sales are lower than Dell, but their margins are higher. A lot of other computer makers (HP, Gateway, etc.) only wish they made the kind of money on computers that Apple does.
Selling an OS, on the other hand, they would quickly go the way of BeOS and a dozen other failed attempts at creating a rival operating system for third-party commodity systems. It would mean the death of Apple and the end of OS X.
Any questions?
Be careful what you as for, according to the software industry it already is the norm and the **AA on even numbered days says that CDs and DVDs aren't sold, only licensed.
Copyright holders like to say that in press releases about copy protection, but make them own up to seeing it that way on their packaging, and I think you will find them singing a different tune.
The entire industry depends on consumers believing that they are buying a copy, yet treats them like they are not. If they only want to "lease" content to us, fine... but let's insist that they be up front about it.
Then, after movie sales have evaporated in favor of NetFlix, on-demand downloads, and other, cheaper, ways of watching a movie only once, they *just might* come around to realizing that they only reason to buy a copy of a movie is because you want to own it.
Kind of reminds me of that line in The Commitments:
"Jimmy, you were the one who told us about Frankie Goes To Hollywood before anybody else even knew about them... *and* you were the first to know they were shite."
The only "discussion" it really seems to have provoked is whether Zonk should be fired or not.
I think he should be. This "article" he linked and quoted says absolutely nothing interesting or new about gaming, while selecting the most vulgar and juvenile metaphor available to make a rather stale point.
games.slashdot.org should be doing stories about games. If I wanted to read about women getting vaginal juices all over hardwood floors, I would be browsing porn sites. There's bound to be enough perverts out there with a "floor wetting" fettish for there to be several sites catering to their desires.
He would have been fine, but then you had to go and add "spank" to the mix. Now he's hosed.
Holy crap. You sound exactly like the sort of whiner who would complain if they hung you with a brand new rope.
Not only do they have the legacy of DVD's farther up the trail, but they have HD-on-demand downloads screaming up the road behind them.
If they can't make BluRay or HD-DVD:
1. Extremely Cheap
2. Fair
3. Convenient
Then people will just keep buying DVD's until Apple or Intel or whoever else comes out with high-def movies you can download overnight (and eventually faster) for $19 a pop.
The only way to "push" the Blu-Ray format would be to release a few blockbusters on Blu-Ray only... but nobody is going to do that because the DVD market has become far too important to the profits of movies these days, and selling only a few thousand HD disks instead of a few million DVD's will utterly kill your business.
It gets even worse for them. So far, nobody has found a legal means to shut down AllOfMP3.com. What happens when everybody buys media consoles and computers for on-demand HD movies, and then some russian mobster introduces "AllOfH264.com"? Suddenly, by taking advantage of gaps in international copyright law, we will be able to download any movie for about 50 cents each without violating any specific law.
Media companies will lobby Congress to put a stop to network-based distributions from other countries, and somebody will think of a way to do it. Meanwhile, while they fight for that, it is up to us (through good proxies like the EFF) to lobby hard for a "CCPA" (Copyright Consumer Protection Act) which should outlaw all copy protections which interfere with Fair Use of the product, in the same manner that the DMCA outlaws technology which interferes with tech-based copyright protections.
In other words, it should be law that any DVD I buy which enjoys the protection of copyright in the US must allow me to:
1. Archive it to hard drive (as often as I need to)
2. Back it up on another disk (as often as I chose to)
3. Loan it to friends and family members
4. Watch it on any playback device in my house
5. Convert it to other formats
Anything short of that, and it should be treated as a rental of the content, not a sale of a copy. The packaging should be clearly and visibly labeled "NOT FOR SALE - LIMITED USE ONLY" on the front and spine of the case, and the disk should be priced accordingly.
Yes, all corporations act 100% out of self-interest.
However, it is always in their self-interest to make you want to spend your money on their products, because if people do not volunteer to be their customers, they do not have a business.
Being "cool" is one way to go about this. Some people (precious few) are more likely to buy from a good corporate citizen than the cheapest alternative. Apple has survived for decades thanks to such people.
If you think corporations are "evil", ask yourself if you buy from evil corporations. And don't give me that "I don't have a choice" line. You always have a choice. It's your money, and you have the right to do without the products of any given company if you wish.
Well, there's a lot of appeal to the idea of walking around in a virtual world with a stunningly handsome/beautiful avatar to represent you as you interact with people and do stuff.
The place where these games fall down is that the "stuff to do" still isn't really fun enough. The WoW missions seem like fun at first, but they all quickly blur into "travel 10 minutes to that place, engage in the same basic MMORPG combat system that goes all the way back to text-based level-grinding MUD's, then travel all the way back. When you do, you will get some meaningless rewards."
It's a time-sink, in the sense that dumping nickels into a video slot machine is a time-sink, but it's not really all that fun.
The day somebody comes up with an emersive, interactive, MMO which has a fun game or two braided into it, that person is going to become very wealthy.
The other problem is, most adults eventually reach the point where they realize that paying $20 a month to walk around and talk to people in a virtual world is kind of stupid when they can do that in the real world pretty much for free. You don't get to look like an elf (unless you are willing to undergo radical elective surgery), but otherwise you can meet just as many interesting people by joining a church choir, a co-rec sports team, a political party caucus or whatever.
Heck, go to sci-fi and anime cons, and you can meet people just as nerdy as you see in an MMORPG... and you can even make yourself look a little bit like an elf, if you really want to.
"My dog was six inches tall last year."
"My dog is two feet tall this year."
"Based on this trend, my dog will be taller than my house in a few years."
Stop reading the comments to dupes, and your feelings of deja vu will probably subside.
Okay, first an acknowledgement of one of my own mistakes gets modded down as "Troll", now a light-hearted comment which could not possibly inspire flame has been modded down as "Flamebait."
Look's like some frisky moderator wants to bitchslap me today. Heh. Might as well give it up, kid. My Karma's so good, if I cancelled and restarted my acount I'd be coming back as the god Vishnu himself.
You must be new here!
I am to you, user 62405.
Having been around as long as you have, I'm surprised that joke hasn't gotten old yet.
Not to mention access to Afghanistan for a pipeline.
LOL! Looks like somebody finally got around to renting F-911.
Let me get you up to speed: The pipeline in question does not exist, has not existed, is not currently planned, and the plans which once did exist for it were scrapped long before the war.
We didn't build a pipeline the Afghanistan. We built roads and voting booths.
Oil is costing $65 a barrel right now. If anybody is getting rich off the current state of affairs, it's hybrid car manufacturers.
Today primetime television starts at the same time everywhere, not because it's the same number on the clock but it's the same time of day.
Actually, it starts at 7:00 in the Central time zone, but 8:00 everywhere else. A hold-over from the fact that most American "farm country" used to be in the midwest, and farmers go to bed earlier.
This is why you sometimes hear networks promoting a show as airing at "9, 8 central."
Consider this nit to now be picked.
*insert the typical "Time of day is relative to the sun's relative position to your area" and "noon is supposed to be when the sun is overhead" and...
Dismissively rattling off those points does not change their merit.
How many deaths will it take to stop US Imperialism?
We won't know until it starts.
If we are an empire, where in the hell are our tributes from Afghanistant, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, and France??? American citizens shouldn't be paying taxes at all, what with all these vassal states we've conquered sitting securely under our mighty thumbs, providing wealth and slave labor to finance our all-night bacchanals.
Well, it was very rude of me...
(sigh) Preview first, then post.
ZZ