Back before Microsoft decided to caponise their consumer Windows CE platform and only promote the stripped down version in the Pocket PC there were a number of flash-based "laptops" like this in fairly common use. The Thinkpad z50 was the first really practical one I know of...
Pity about the Jornada line being dumped. I had the Jornada 568 and it was a much better handheld than the iPaq.
It got that monopoly by virtue of the fact that they control the DRM formats that can be played by their music play, which has an overwhelming share of the market.
What monopoly? This isn't like Windows, where you need to run Windows to run Windows applications. Every song I've bought from the iTunes music store is stored in DRM-free audio CDs (as Apple recommends!) and can be played on any music player in the world.
I'm not locked into iTunes, or the iPod. I don't even *like* the iPod. I gave my iPod to my daughter and I'm using iTunes because it just works better than the other music players I've used, and because Fairplay is "honor system" DRM... Apple doesn't try and stop me from feeding the output of iTunes into a recording program, or Garage Band, or anything else. I buy from the iTunes Music store because it just works. I also buy from eMusic.
I've had an MP3 playing phone, and after using it a while I decided that I've never had a sillier device. Take the two devices that I own that are hungriest for power, and run them off the same battery? I have enough trouble as it is with my phone being dead when I need it!
You really want an MP3 playing phone? Make me an offer on mine. But you don't get to return it when you discover what a bad idea it is.
To do a "match" you have to make *both* parts as equal to each other as possible.
That's the other valid way of doing it, but then you literally can't match the capability of even a $400 cheapo PC with anything less than a Mac Pro... which makes the "Mac Tax" a lot more than 40% if you need anything less than a Mac Pro. Apple doesn't make anything cheaper than a Mac Pro that has the absolute minimum functionality that the "non granny" people driving Moore's Law in the PC world (that is, gamers) absolutely need: the ability to upgrade the video card... so the kind of match you're talking about just doesn't work for anything less.
Mac users...
Mac users like me are quite willing to recognise the "Mac Tax" and accept it as the cost of not dealing with Windows or Linux frustrations. Mac users like me don't seem affected by the Reality Distortion Field. If that means I'm not a "Mac user", so be it. What's it say in the Bible? Oh yes...
How I wish you were one or the other hot or cold! But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth - (Rev 3:15-16)
But Inside Mac was never my bible, so if being "one or the other" is a requirement, I'll take my chances of expulsion from the Cult of Mac for telling it like it is.
Those kids aren't using the slots in a $699 gateway.
They ABSOLUTELY are. Anyone who is even vaguely into gaming upgrades their video card at least as often as their CPU, and two of my son's friends have only upgraded their CPU because they wanted to switch from AGP to PCI-E to get a better video card.
And there's definitely crippled PCs, but they're crippled for the same reason Apple's hardware is crippled... because the punters don't know any better. They buy a Mac mini Core Duo, even though it's got the appalling GMA950 video controller in it. I would much rather have a 1.7 GHz Celeron and any nVidia 6000- or 7000- series GPU than anything with a GMA950 in it... I've run the same games side by side on the two platforms and the performance of the Mini is appalling.
Basically, the Mini, the low-end iMac, and the non-pro Macbooks, are precisely the kind of "dirt cheap" machines that can't do a real job that the comparable 40% cheaper PCs are.
I've walked literally hundreds of people through the frustration of months (maybe a year) later having to go out and buy a real machine that can do real work.
And I've had the embarassing experience of making the exact same argument you are now and talking people into buying low end Macs, and having them just as crippled as your $400 low end PC with integrated video when the time came that they wanted to play games. I bought a Mac Mini myself and it's just fine for anything non-challenging, and a big improvement over the upgraded G3 I replaced with it, but my (at the time) Celeron 1.7 PC with an nVidia graphics card blew it out of the water for games.
Now I recommend getting a generic white-box PC for games, and a cheap Mac for anything you actually care about... so when your game box needs to be reinstalled to clean up the spyware you don't find yourself unable to make your online bill payments while you wait for your computer-geek friend to bail you out.
The article claims there's a tax on shiny aesthetics
No, there's a tax on an operating system that doesn't suck asteroids through millipore filters. It's always been the operating system and applications that sold the Mac. The shiny aesthetics are a marketing ploy, but even if they weren't there Macs would still cost 40% more for comparable hardware... because that is how much more valuable OS X is than Windows, to people who actually care about how they spend their time.
Applications that use OpenGL for 3d should be able to run, OpenGL is well enough understood and there are enough readily re-usable (open source or cheaply licensed) OpenGL implementations that a thin OpenGL layer that just passed OpenGL calls to OS X should be relatively easy to do... probably easier than emulating a 2d video card. DirectX, though, would mean running the red Queen's Race against Microsoft.
Continuing on with the experiment, setting the screen size to 1680x1050 on my second screen (the laptop panel) lets "coherence" work without rescaling. It's nice, but not as useful as it seems because all the "Windows" windows are still rendered into a single layer... so selecting any of them brings them all up above all the OSX windows.
I was hoping for better. An early competitor to the Citrix technology in Windows Terminal Server, NTerprise, did real window level virtualization. It operated at the GDI level rather than screen-scraping, and you could share local and remote UNIX and Windows windows on the same desktop without any clue other then rendering speed which was which.
On the other hand having the command-X/V/C copy and paste commands work consistently is a BIG boon. Now if only they'd have an option to present a 101-key layout to the virtual machine and keep the rest of the Apple command keys in the Apple world.
With Windows 2000 the taskbar and windows are scaled up with no antialiasing, and downright ugly. It seems like this is implemented by making the Windows desktop transparent and maximizing the virtual screen... and they don't have the support for a resizable virtual screen in Windows 2000. I suppose it will work without distortion if I set the VM screen size to match my macbook screen from the start.
(why Windows 2000? Because I already own a copy of Windows 2000, and see no reason to spend an extra couple of hundred dollars when I'm only using Windows as a hosted OS to run a specific application)
Feature match a Mac to a Gateway minitower and you have to fork out around two grand for a Mac Pro to get a Mac that has any expansions slots.
Feature match a Mac to any laptop with an ATI or nVidia GPU, and you're in the two grand range again.
You can always shade a "feature match" your way. The fact is, if you're playing the "feature match" game and you can't make your preferred side half the price of the competition, you're in trouble. If the best you can do is make it "only a little more expensive"... face it, you're lost.
Comparing Macs to PCs by speccing out both to satisfy some set of requirements (a game machine, an entertainment console, office automation,...), the Mac Tax is on average in the 40% range. There's exceptions, but that's the overwhelming trend.
Unofficially, it depends on who is using the word, but genereally is't some kind of unwanted e-mail.
Unofficially, there's a technical term, that has the meaning I used. There's also casual usage and slang. The casual meaning of "stuff I don't want" (and not necessarily email.. spam started in Usenet) is not useful in this discussion, any more than the slang meaning of "bitch" would be useful at a dog show.
I used to, back in the '90s. I used to contact the businesses referenced in the very few spams that I got that seemed to be for real non-scam products. At first, I got pretty good responses, but after a while it seemed that the remaining businesses that were still spamming knew exactly what they were were doing and what it cost in terms of lost sales, and just counted that as part of the cost of doing business.
On the other hand... it's been five years since I've had time to micromanage my spam load that finely... but I really don't think things could have gotten better.
On the gripping hand, if you really do organize a real boycott and get a lot of attention on it (set up a boycott website, promote it, get it BoingBoinged...) and it really DOES start hurting their sales, you might get somewhere. Most boycotts have little or no effect, and if they're crooked enough to spam they know that. Your mission would be to get one started that's one of the exceptional effective ones.
Every time you send mail to someone you've never sent mail to before, that's unsolicited email.
Unsolicited broadcast email. Broadcast means it's bulk. More than that, broadcast means it's indiscriminate - real email from your bank telling you about a new branch isn't spam, they're your bank, they have a relationship with you... but the same message from a competing bank, sent to the same mix of people who are largely NOT their customers, that's spam. Unsolicited, of course, simply means you didn't ask for it.
The Zune will start slow because it will take a while for people to get their heads OFF of the Ipod and to see the Zune for what it is.... an oversized Gigabeat S that costs $40 more for fewer features?
"Joe Veh, I'm not buying you any more hard memory. You're just going to have to delete some of your old files. When I was a kid *I* didn't have hundreds of whole-universe save games and who knows what else. What to delete? I don't know, kid, you're just going to have to use your judgement."
The biggest "casual" overhead of Aqua/Quartz on older machines is the "shadow" around windows. There's an application extension (APE//Haxie) called "shadowkiller" that removes the shadow and significantly improves response time on older Macs.
OK, Firefox has some security design flaws. Installing extensions at the request of the remote site and asking the user if you want to install it, that's a mistake. There's been one vulnerability in this already.
However, this is a TINY hole compared to what Microsoft exposes in IE with ActiveX. And you can simply not install extensions, or remove all the whitelisted sites, and you've closed it. You can't turn off ActiveX because the HTML conrol is itself an ActiveX component!
It's like the difference between not washing your hands after using a public lavatory, and running barefoot over broken glass through a "Hot" ward in a Michael Crichton disaster epic snogging the Ebola patients.
Performance problems won't be an issue for too much longer. Hardware virtualisation support and better video drivers for use with VMs will make the problem "go away", so long as you're willing to purchase enough RAM, and RAM is "cheap" now.
I've had people assure me that virtualization overhead is "negligable" like this for, well, 20 years now. It used to just be the mainframe weenies doing it, now everyone is...
Even if RAM is "cheap", it's not "free", and besides Blizzard and the rest of the game companies want to use that RAM for their own purposes, and because you want the most FPS you're going to want to give it to them.
And it's not just RAM, there's CPU time (you're running multiple operating systems, each with their own scheduling properties - reminds me of Apple's "cooperative multitasking" that made each application part of the scheduler... and made NeXTstep on a 68030 more responsive than OS/9 on a G3 at 5-10 times the clock speed) and all kinds of other resource conflicts, not to mention the lack of hardware memory protection inside video cards to keep the various operating systems from treading on each other's toes.
I have never gotten 3d acceleration working in FreeBSD on PPC Macs.
I think you missed this bit. or you missed the implications of it: and craft yourself hardware that works with FreeBSD. If that means "not a Mac" that shouldn't be an issue...
Odds are you can get more money selling your Mac as a Mac than you'd pay for a well-supported non-Mac that exceeds its performance in every respect.
The performance overhead of virtual machines, particularly when it comes to video, makes it unlikely that people will use this for home use anyway. Half the security and reliability problems in Windows are caused by the demand for frames-per-second, give up more for the dubious protection of a virtual machine? I don't think so!
Nobody would be able to use or distribute the MS patent encumbered code...
What "patent encumbered code"?
A "do not sue" patent license doesn't change whether the licensed software is "patent-encumbered" or not. Whether Microsoft's alleged (and unspecified) patents are valid or not is irrelevant - Novell hasn't conceded anything, they've just bought a "get out of FUD" card.
Hey, you guys who are all up in arms about Vista...
How many of you have installed Windows XP?
One reason I'm still using Windows 2000 is because Windows XP already gave Microsoft too much say in what I could do with my computer. If you accepted Windows XP, why draw the line at Windows Vista?
If the Domain Name System supported English it would allow my name to be a domain name, but not even IDN allows me to put a space in a domain name.
What, "da Silva" isn't an English name?
If not, then what is? English is a mongrel language, every name in it comes from a conqueror or settler. Should we go back to the Angles and Saxons, or perhaps to a good celtic name like Cúchulainn?
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Back before Microsoft decided to caponise their consumer Windows CE platform and only promote the stripped down version in the Pocket PC there were a number of flash-based "laptops" like this in fairly common use. The Thinkpad z50 was the first really practical one I know of...
Pity about the Jornada line being dumped. I had the Jornada 568 and it was a much better handheld than the iPaq.
It got that monopoly by virtue of the fact that they control the DRM formats that can be played by their music play, which has an overwhelming share of the market.
What monopoly? This isn't like Windows, where you need to run Windows to run Windows applications. Every song I've bought from the iTunes music store is stored in DRM-free audio CDs (as Apple recommends!) and can be played on any music player in the world.
I'm not locked into iTunes, or the iPod. I don't even *like* the iPod. I gave my iPod to my daughter and I'm using iTunes because it just works better than the other music players I've used, and because Fairplay is "honor system" DRM... Apple doesn't try and stop me from feeding the output of iTunes into a recording program, or Garage Band, or anything else. I buy from the iTunes Music store because it just works. I also buy from eMusic.
I've had an MP3 playing phone, and after using it a while I decided that I've never had a sillier device. Take the two devices that I own that are hungriest for power, and run them off the same battery? I have enough trouble as it is with my phone being dead when I need it!
You really want an MP3 playing phone? Make me an offer on mine. But you don't get to return it when you discover what a bad idea it is.
To do a "match" you have to make *both* parts as equal to each other as possible.
That's the other valid way of doing it, but then you literally can't match the capability of even a $400 cheapo PC with anything less than a Mac Pro... which makes the "Mac Tax" a lot more than 40% if you need anything less than a Mac Pro. Apple doesn't make anything cheaper than a Mac Pro that has the absolute minimum functionality that the "non granny" people driving Moore's Law in the PC world (that is, gamers) absolutely need: the ability to upgrade the video card... so the kind of match you're talking about just doesn't work for anything less.
Mac users...
Mac users like me are quite willing to recognise the "Mac Tax" and accept it as the cost of not dealing with Windows or Linux frustrations. Mac users like me don't seem affected by the Reality Distortion Field. If that means I'm not a "Mac user", so be it. What's it say in the Bible? Oh yes...
How I wish you were one or the other hot or cold! But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth - (Rev 3:15-16)
But Inside Mac was never my bible, so if being "one or the other" is a requirement, I'll take my chances of expulsion from the Cult of Mac for telling it like it is.
Those kids aren't using the slots in a $699 gateway.
They ABSOLUTELY are. Anyone who is even vaguely into gaming upgrades their video card at least as often as their CPU, and two of my son's friends have only upgraded their CPU because they wanted to switch from AGP to PCI-E to get a better video card.
And there's definitely crippled PCs, but they're crippled for the same reason Apple's hardware is crippled... because the punters don't know any better. They buy a Mac mini Core Duo, even though it's got the appalling GMA950 video controller in it. I would much rather have a 1.7 GHz Celeron and any nVidia 6000- or 7000- series GPU than anything with a GMA950 in it... I've run the same games side by side on the two platforms and the performance of the Mini is appalling.
Basically, the Mini, the low-end iMac, and the non-pro Macbooks, are precisely the kind of "dirt cheap" machines that can't do a real job that the comparable 40% cheaper PCs are.
I've walked literally hundreds of people through the frustration of months (maybe a year) later having to go out and buy a real machine that can do real work.
And I've had the embarassing experience of making the exact same argument you are now and talking people into buying low end Macs, and having them just as crippled as your $400 low end PC with integrated video when the time came that they wanted to play games. I bought a Mac Mini myself and it's just fine for anything non-challenging, and a big improvement over the upgraded G3 I replaced with it, but my (at the time) Celeron 1.7 PC with an nVidia graphics card blew it out of the water for games.
Now I recommend getting a generic white-box PC for games, and a cheap Mac for anything you actually care about... so when your game box needs to be reinstalled to clean up the spyware you don't find yourself unable to make your online bill payments while you wait for your computer-geek friend to bail you out.
The article claims there's a tax on shiny aesthetics
No, there's a tax on an operating system that doesn't suck asteroids through millipore filters. It's always been the operating system and applications that sold the Mac. The shiny aesthetics are a marketing ploy, but even if they weren't there Macs would still cost 40% more for comparable hardware... because that is how much more valuable OS X is than Windows, to people who actually care about how they spend their time.
Applications that use OpenGL for 3d should be able to run, OpenGL is well enough understood and there are enough readily re-usable (open source or cheaply licensed) OpenGL implementations that a thin OpenGL layer that just passed OpenGL calls to OS X should be relatively easy to do... probably easier than emulating a 2d video card. DirectX, though, would mean running the red Queen's Race against Microsoft.
Continuing on with the experiment, setting the screen size to 1680x1050 on my second screen (the laptop panel) lets "coherence" work without rescaling. It's nice, but not as useful as it seems because all the "Windows" windows are still rendered into a single layer... so selecting any of them brings them all up above all the OSX windows.
I was hoping for better. An early competitor to the Citrix technology in Windows Terminal Server, NTerprise, did real window level virtualization. It operated at the GDI level rather than screen-scraping, and you could share local and remote UNIX and Windows windows on the same desktop without any clue other then rendering speed which was which.
On the other hand having the command-X/V/C copy and paste commands work consistently is a BIG boon. Now if only they'd have an option to present a 101-key layout to the virtual machine and keep the rest of the Apple command keys in the Apple world.
With Windows 2000 the taskbar and windows are scaled up with no antialiasing, and downright ugly. It seems like this is implemented by making the Windows desktop transparent and maximizing the virtual screen... and they don't have the support for a resizable virtual screen in Windows 2000. I suppose it will work without distortion if I set the VM screen size to match my macbook screen from the start.
(why Windows 2000? Because I already own a copy of Windows 2000, and see no reason to spend an extra couple of hundred dollars when I'm only using Windows as a hosted OS to run a specific application)
"Feature match..."
...), the Mac Tax is on average in the 40% range. There's exceptions, but that's the overwhelming trend.
Feature match a Mac to a Gateway minitower and you have to fork out around two grand for a Mac Pro to get a Mac that has any expansions slots.
Feature match a Mac to any laptop with an ATI or nVidia GPU, and you're in the two grand range again.
You can always shade a "feature match" your way. The fact is, if you're playing the "feature match" game and you can't make your preferred side half the price of the competition, you're in trouble. If the best you can do is make it "only a little more expensive"... face it, you're lost.
Comparing Macs to PCs by speccing out both to satisfy some set of requirements (a game machine, an entertainment console, office automation,
Unofficially, it depends on who is using the word, but genereally is't some kind of unwanted e-mail.
Unofficially, there's a technical term, that has the meaning I used. There's also casual usage and slang. The casual meaning of "stuff I don't want" (and not necessarily email.. spam started in Usenet) is not useful in this discussion, any more than the slang meaning of "bitch" would be useful at a dog show.
Yes I expect a spammer to care.
I used to, back in the '90s. I used to contact the businesses referenced in the very few spams that I got that seemed to be for real non-scam products. At first, I got pretty good responses, but after a while it seemed that the remaining businesses that were still spamming knew exactly what they were were doing and what it cost in terms of lost sales, and just counted that as part of the cost of doing business.
On the other hand... it's been five years since I've had time to micromanage my spam load that finely... but I really don't think things could have gotten better.
On the gripping hand, if you really do organize a real boycott and get a lot of attention on it (set up a boycott website, promote it, get it BoingBoinged...) and it really DOES start hurting their sales, you might get somewhere. Most boycotts have little or no effect, and if they're crooked enough to spam they know that. Your mission would be to get one started that's one of the exceptional effective ones.
And isn't spam any unsolicited e-mail?
No, spam is unsolicited broadcast email.
Every time you send mail to someone you've never sent mail to before, that's unsolicited email.
Unsolicited broadcast email. Broadcast means it's bulk. More than that, broadcast means it's indiscriminate - real email from your bank telling you about a new branch isn't spam, they're your bank, they have a relationship with you... but the same message from a competing bank, sent to the same mix of people who are largely NOT their customers, that's spam. Unsolicited, of course, simply means you didn't ask for it.
You expect a *spammer* to give a damn about that?
The Zune will start slow because it will take a while for people to get their heads OFF of the Ipod and to see the Zune for what it is. ... an oversized Gigabeat S that costs $40 more for fewer features?
How hard can it be to produce a decent player, really?
Especially when you're starting with a decent MP3 player. The Zune is basically a modified Gigabeat.
"Joe Veh, I'm not buying you any more hard memory. You're just going to have to delete some of your old files. When I was a kid *I* didn't have hundreds of whole-universe save games and who knows what else. What to delete? I don't know, kid, you're just going to have to use your judgement."
-- Genesis 0:1
The biggest "casual" overhead of Aqua/Quartz on older machines is the "shadow" around windows. There's an application extension (APE//Haxie) called "shadowkiller" that removes the shadow and significantly improves response time on older Macs.
http://unsanity.org/
(no relationship, just a former user of shadowkiller)
OK, Firefox has some security design flaws. Installing extensions at the request of the remote site and asking the user if you want to install it, that's a mistake. There's been one vulnerability in this already.
However, this is a TINY hole compared to what Microsoft exposes in IE with ActiveX. And you can simply not install extensions, or remove all the whitelisted sites, and you've closed it. You can't turn off ActiveX because the HTML conrol is itself an ActiveX component!
It's like the difference between not washing your hands after using a public lavatory, and running barefoot over broken glass through a "Hot" ward in a Michael Crichton disaster epic snogging the Ebola patients.
Performance problems won't be an issue for too much longer. Hardware virtualisation support and better video drivers for use with VMs will make the problem "go away", so long as you're willing to purchase enough RAM, and RAM is "cheap" now.
I've had people assure me that virtualization overhead is "negligable" like this for, well, 20 years now. It used to just be the mainframe weenies doing it, now everyone is...
Even if RAM is "cheap", it's not "free", and besides Blizzard and the rest of the game companies want to use that RAM for their own purposes, and because you want the most FPS you're going to want to give it to them.
And it's not just RAM, there's CPU time (you're running multiple operating systems, each with their own scheduling properties - reminds me of Apple's "cooperative multitasking" that made each application part of the scheduler... and made NeXTstep on a 68030 more responsive than OS/9 on a G3 at 5-10 times the clock speed) and all kinds of other resource conflicts, not to mention the lack of hardware memory protection inside video cards to keep the various operating systems from treading on each other's toes.
I have never gotten 3d acceleration working in FreeBSD on PPC Macs.
I think you missed this bit. or you missed the implications of it: and craft yourself hardware that works with FreeBSD. If that means "not a Mac" that shouldn't be an issue...
Odds are you can get more money selling your Mac as a Mac than you'd pay for a well-supported non-Mac that exceeds its performance in every respect.
Pluto is a Roman god, therefore all the controversy about whether it's a planet or not is their fault.
The performance overhead of virtual machines, particularly when it comes to video, makes it unlikely that people will use this for home use anyway. Half the security and reliability problems in Windows are caused by the demand for frames-per-second, give up more for the dubious protection of a virtual machine? I don't think so!
Nobody would be able to use or distribute the MS patent encumbered code...
What "patent encumbered code"?
A "do not sue" patent license doesn't change whether the licensed software is "patent-encumbered" or not. Whether Microsoft's alleged (and unspecified) patents are valid or not is irrelevant - Novell hasn't conceded anything, they've just bought a "get out of FUD" card.
Hey, you guys who are all up in arms about Vista...
How many of you have installed Windows XP?
One reason I'm still using Windows 2000 is because Windows XP already gave Microsoft too much say in what I could do with my computer. If you accepted Windows XP, why draw the line at Windows Vista?
I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning. :)
If the Domain Name System supported English it would allow my name to be a domain name, but not even IDN allows me to put a space in a domain name.
What, "da Silva" isn't an English name?
If not, then what is? English is a mongrel language, every name in it comes from a conqueror or settler. Should we go back to the Angles and Saxons, or perhaps to a good celtic name like Cúchulainn?
Whoops.