Gnustep and gnustepweb needs to do a better job of getting the word out- when you go to the website and you can't figure out the state of the product, there's a problem.
Apple makes money on the iPod, but not because it has custom Apple hardware. The iPod is really a commodity piece of hardware with custom apple software.
What seperates the ipod from all the idiotic copy-cat products? Apple software.
Apple killed the mac clones program because they were subsidizing the clones, and lost money on every one sold. When Jobs tried to replace the expiring contracts with one where Apple made money, the clone sellers balked.
The purpose of the iPod is to get people buying Macs. The purpose of that is not to sell Mac hardware, but to sell OS X.
Apple makes nothing on hardware-- hardware is a commodity. Apple makes all their profits on SOFTWARE. Whether the softwware is boxed in an ipod, a Mac or shrinkwrap.
I find it amazing that all you pc weenies complain about Apple not selling commodity hardware (When really they do) but you think a software based business model would cause Apple to go under.
Frankly, you have no fucking clue, just the ability to link to wikipedia and misinterpret what you find there.
Its really sad how slashdot is filled with flatline idiots. This is why linux is such a crappy application-- no passion, no crativity, and no ability to think in the linux community.
People are stupid, and I do not know why I waste my time trying to educate them.
Jesus, if you glanced at their earnings statement it would be lost on you-- since you don't know the difference between revenue and profits.
Furthermore,you'd see that iTunes music is a very small part of their software business, even revenue wise, and is a non-existant part of their hardware business.
The ipod, like the mac, is merely a nice box for Apple's software.
What apple sells, and what they make money on is the user experience. The user experience doesn't come from the hardware it comes from the software.
And you're being silly in assuming that Apple will never give you the option to deploy to other platforms.
Apple has not taken this option away, it has simply not extended ti to 5.3 YET.
To not make 5.3 support that is inconsistent with the way Apple has been doing business for 20 years.
Yet Apple announces something and people go into a panic based on their assumptions about what it means... ignoring the last time they paniced and the fact that Apple didn't do what they were assuming.
Actually, Golds practical price is in the 800s, though theoretically it should be in the 3,200s.
The reason the price of gold is below 800 is that historically central banks accumulated gold for centuries-- the US federal reserve confiscated all privately owned gold in the country. Other countries did it for longer.
When their fiat currencies show weakness, they dump gold on the market. This manipulation has been going on for the last 30 years or so-- since Bretton Woods.
For a good description of the international monetary system, that is not at all dry, check out "The creature from Jekyll Island". For a description of money, read "What has the government done with our money" by Murrey Rothbard.
The intrinsic value of gold is set based on teh quanity of it in the planet-- not the quantity above ground or currenty on the market. While makrets often do not refelct intrinsic value, you can determine that gold has intrinsic value while federal reserve notes are pure fiat.
Usiung the commodity as money does not tie it up in stockpiles-- it does not inflate the price. You use some ina gold necklace if you wish, but hte price of that necklace will be MUCH higher than the price of gold, so it will not be a commodity price affecting situation.
It is actually false to say that the monetary supply needs to grow with the economy. This is one of those keynsian waving-of-hands things. The size of the monetary supply is irrelevant to the size of the economy-- providied the monetary supply is actually money.
Money is divisible. If there physically is not enough of a given commodity metal, then other metals can be used, or more likely, simply smaller quantities of it will be necessary.
Furthermore, its impossible for federal reserve notes to be managed to grwo with the size of the economy because federal reserve note supplies are not managed... federal reserve notes are simply issued when the government wants to spend money it doesn't have.
When the US was on a gold standard, prices were not constant-- they went DOWN. The reason is that technology resulted in increases in productivity.
These increases were reflected in the price of just about every consumer good on the market.
Imagine a situation where its not just computers that go down in price over time?
That's the natural result of increases in poroductivity (which also, counters the argument that more money is needed when the economy grows-- divisability isn't necessary as lower prices mean a relatively constant amount of money supply needed.)
If you think about this, you'll see that this is always the case-- its a law of nature. Teh price is the economic value, and the value of the money is the inverse of the value of the economy.
With a constant money supply, based on something impossible to counterfit prices would go down.
ALL of inflation, and all the loss of the benefits of productivity in consumer prices is a tax on the economy and a tax on people. That is money literally stolen out of your pocket by the federal government via counterfiting of the US Dollar.
With a stable money supply, prices would go down and profits would go UP. With inflation, prices go up, and profits seem to go up, but actually they are just denominated in ever cheaper dollars.
Unfortunately, socialist economists who want to argue for devaluation of the dollar will use figures denominated in dollars to "prove" their points, while never acknowledging that the value of a dollar is different between their two examples. This slight of hand has fooled many generations of "economists".
(This does eventually get around to google, and is actually on topic, but requires a bit of explanation.)
Right, and I think your points are underappreciated. Unfortunately, to be pendantic, you're talking about the issue of currency, not money. Visa is a currency, because its a representation of money, and it happens to be backed by something people think is money- the federal reserve note.
But, and here's what trips people up, the federal reserve note is not money.
To be money, currency has to have a couple features: 1. Divisability -- this the federal reserve note does, you can get quarters for your dollars and dollars for your quarters, its exchangeable. 2. Physical Robustness-- FRNs have this as well. They tend to last quite awhile and you can get a replacement when they are worn out, unlike, say, salt or corn, or other things people used as currency in the past. 3. Intrinsic value-- this is where the federal reserve note fails. Even salt is better money in this view. The paper and metal in our money have virtually no economic value-- between %1 and 1/100th of a % of face value.
And thus the "Dollar" is not money. But it is ignorance of this that leads people to think it is money, and this ignorance is something the government sure does appreciate.
It didn't use to be this way. The dollar is defined as about an ounce of silver. For much of this countries history, and according to the constitution, that is what a dollar is (or a comperable amount of gold- the founding fathers didn't link our currency to just one metal-- they linked it to those two.)
This means that legally you can get an ounce of silver for every dollar in your pocket--- if the government was followng the law.
But thru a series of steps starting with the founding of the federal reserve in 1913, the criminalization of gold ownership, and ultimately, when Nixon "closed the gold window", the governmetn weened us off of money, and let us keep trading currency instead.
BTW, Currency means a "current reciept." A "Current reciept" is a piece of paper that acts as a proxy for something of value, usually an amount of gold or silver.
Amazingly, people accepted this worthless paper as if it had the same value as it did back when you could exchange it for gold or silver... and still do today. Furthermore, I've heard an amazing number of justifications for why its *good* that our paper isn't backed by anything of value, including that "foriegners who hav dollars shouldnt' be allowed to hold them without penalty, and os we need inflation."
The reality is, government couldn't meet its responsibilities, and rather than change its ways, it just violated the law and continued to print money that it couldn't back. When it was called on this (By France, who demanded gold for their dollars) we just reneged on the whole deal.
So, despite the law, despite the constitution, we have a currency that is not money, and that is redeemable for nothing, and ultimately, worth nothing.
Eventually this situation, and the excesses that have been allowedd by it, will come home to roost in teh form of a currency crash.
So, google can do good, by providing a currency that is one to one backed by dollars, or if they want to be really good, by gold. egold and other companies have set up gold payment systems that allow people to pay for goods wtih grams of gold, electronically. Hopefully, google will do paypal's multiple currency features one better by offering gold or silver as an asset you can hold your account balance in.
Also, I think that bankers will not be able to do much about this situation-- if Google goes the route of paypal and is not a bank (And does not engage in fractional reserve banking) they are not a threat to banks-- because they are not making loans... but they are sure to give one bank a lot of card clearing business.
Uh, have you actually done this? Have you made a serious App using GnustepWeb?
I believe serious apps have been made with Cayenne and Tapestry, but last I looked they lacked something I needed (though I think those projects probably have a good future.)
But GnustepWeb is not a WO replacement. (Again, last I looked).... its a long long way off.
Ok, I looked again and it looks like GnustepWeb died in 2003, which was about when I last looked at it.
Seriously, though, if you have a deployed web app and you built it with OSS that is comperable to WO, lets see it... I'd LOVE to be shown to be wrong here!
There is some confusion here. They didn't "Change the terms". What they did was LOWER THE PRICE.
It used to be you paid $699 for a box with the development environement in it, a test-deployment license, and a full deployment license. You could deploy it anywhere.
Now you pay $0 for the development system, and $499 for a copy of OSX Server for deployment.
So, if you had 4 Mac Server, before your cost was $2,800-- for 4 copies of WebObjects.
Now your cost is.... $0! If your Mac Servers are XServes (since OS X Server is free with them, and WO is free with OS X Server.)
So, for that situation, they lowered the price by almost $3,000.
Even if you're not using OS X Server, you have always had to buy deployment licenses, and that was $699 with the WO retail box.
Now they have basically bunded WebObjects with their client OS for FREE, and with their server OS for FREE, reducing the additional cost of WebObjects to Zero.
How is this bad again?
As to deployment on non-Mac machines, you have *always* needed a deployment license to do that, and that cost $699 before. I think its pretty safe to say that once they get this adjustment to the business model worked out, it won't cost more than $699 to deploy WO apps on non-Mac hardware.
And they may well just open source the whole thing.
Any way you cut it, this is a price cut. Yes, their support for non-mac hardware is lagging, but that's not uncommon with WO...and generally WO deployed apps stay on the old version for awhile after the new version comes out-- its not like there are a lot of commercial WO apps out there that are just waiting for 5.3.
As to open source alternatives, there are none. There are some WO developers working on essentially a replacement in open source, and that may be a great project ultimately.
But most open source methods for doing web applications pale when compared to web objects. Its unfortunate there are so many thousands of Java and Open source devleopers out there creating inferior projects and spending more time to do it, when all they need to do is use WO and have a better solution quicker.
WO is really fantastic, and its really under-estimated, and not well understood in the general community. Apple lowered the price and made the model simpler before, and all they've done here is do the same thing again.
Its not unreasonable for Apple to charge money for WebObjects-- its one hell of a great solution, and is currently unmatched in the market place, free or proprietary. For what it does, its a total bargain.
Apple makes its money on Software. Apple is a software company. Apple makes hardware because they want their software to run well.
The idea that Apple is a hardware company is common, but misguided. Yes, they make hardware, but that's not the focus of their business model.
Apple makes more money selling an OS upgrade than selling a Mac. Apple makes as much from selling a piece of hardware that you could call that profit profit of the OS with free hardware, or profit of the hardware with free softwware.
If there were 40 million Mac clones being sold every year and Apple made as much from each one of them as it does from an iPod, Apple would be about 8 times more net revenue than it is now. IF it made as much as it does frome each OS upgrade, it would be 16 times as much revenue.
Macs are just a box for Apple software.
This is why so many people are perplexed at apple's actions.
The purpose of limiting OS X on intel to Apple hardware is to give them a chance to make the transition first *before* organizing a profitable cloning arrangement, assuming there are enough people who want to sell mac clones.
But you will never see Apple authorized crap hardware that doesn't work, like you do in the PC world.
Mis-edit. Scaled composites developed SpaceShipOne for $20 million... and the capacity of the shuttle is not greator and its capabilities are a little better (it can get into low earth orbit, but not geosync orbit) the costs are massively higher. Rutan's plans have him getting into shuttle type low earth orbit for a couple hundred million.... a whole program for far less than the cost of a single shuttle launch.
Even by the lowered expectations set by NASA the space shuttle is a total disaster. They wanted to fly 24 times a year and have 500 mission life span for a shuttle... they've never achieved that. And they expected the launch costs to be about a tenth of what they are.
NASA's political orientation and inefficiency mean that everything it does is ineffecient and overly expensive.
High cost and lack of access to space signficiantly inhibits science and research. On the other hand, the NASA and FAA burorats want to keep the cash coming, so they actively oppose all attempts to develop and launch cheaper alterantives in the private sector.
Remember, NASA can simply ground you, without reason or recourse. We're lucky scaled composits was allowed to launch at all, and I think this is because they were a plane based launch rather than a missle style launch.
But they have learned their lesson-- looks like they are going to ground Virgin Galactic-- AND prevent Burt Rutan from taking his own technology out of the country and launching there.
Interesting how they just nationalized his labor-- actually everyon'es labor-- by claiming that the government owns all your work if it wants to, and you can therefore not export it if they declare it strategic. That's akin to enslavement, or at the very least, outright theft.
History shows that "Big Science" is only Big because there's a lot of public (Eg: stolen) dollars they want to soak up.
NASA spends about a billion dollars per shuttle *flight*.... Space Ship one developed an entire program for $20 million. While they are not equivilent.
And the space shuttle is a disaster-- not because of it was built with private contractors, but because the politicos wanted to dole out the stolen money to a wide variety of states-- necessitating a complicated design that could have major parts built in a wide variety of states.
This is all to be expected--look at the commercial airline industry-- thousands of flights per accident. Let them into space nad you'll have a commercial space flight industry and all the NASA money can be left in the pockets of the poor starving americans it was stolen from (And the rich industrious americans who will invest it in jobs for the poor starving americans.)
I love how the lovers of government always point to failures of the government system as proof that its the only way. Terrorists crash into skyscrapers? Well, lets spend even more on the screening system that let them go thru.
Richard Branson has spent $100 million to have Burt Rutan design an advanced version of spaceship one. But because Richard Branson is a british citizen the US government won't even let him look at the designs for his own ship! The FAA is in the middle of what looks to be a 20 year process for making rules that will "allow" space ship two to fly commercially-- and gives no indication of when they will ever finish the rules, or that they have any incentive to not make the rules so onerous that safety is impaired The FAA's interference with SpaceShip One made safety worse, not better.
Government is a disease masquarading as its own cure. All NASA does is let government control the "high ground" for military purposes and *PREVENT* space science or access to space.
As I understand it, intel has adopted AMD's 64 bit instruction set.
I'm pretty sure Apple will be using these 64 bit processors, and also the Pentium M has great heat / power verses performance specs compared to previous pentiums. (Maybe AMD is still better.)
But, while the PowerPC is technically a better solution, there is no point in picking a solution you cannot ship to your customers.
Every time Apple has released a new PowerPC machine of any significance there has been a big delay in getting them in quanity. Furthermore, where PC makers refresh their lines 3-4 times a year, Apple is only able to do it twice a year.
AMD, Motorola and IBM all lack the capacity to meet Apple's requirements. The think that Intel has that's unique is the ability ot manufacture advanced chips in volume.
Furthermore, there is little to no R&D being done for the PPC platform (the cell and xbox PPC chips are akin to PPC 604 era chips, not appropriate for Apple). With only one customer, and a looming embedded market, both IBM and Motorola are not interested in advancing the PowerPC chips for Apple. Intel, on the other hand, has many customers and a strong competitor in AMD, and thus is well incentivized to advance their line. (Plus a lot of ongoing R&D) So, even though the PowerPC is a superior design, there's nobody there to advance it, and the performance advantage is eroding. This is the same thing that happened to Apple on the 6502 and 68000 lines as well.
Or put another way, The PPC is superior but marginalized, Mac OS is superior but marginalized. Apple can't give up Mac OS, but can innovate just as well in the Intel platform space as it does with the PowerPC.... and having the manufacturing oomph behind them is critical.
I think supply, more than anything else, is the reason Apple made the switch.
I think the parent is thinking that-- I think Apple makes Commodity PCs with the PowerPC processor, and will continue to do so when they move to Intel.
I'm sure Apple will not hesitate to put new features on their machines when they can-- something like WiFi was before WiFi became ubiquitous. But as you note, they tend to use other's chipsets... and so linux compatibility would be jsut as difficult as generic hardware that uses the same chipset.
Interestingly, people have ported Linux to PowerPC macs.
The idea that Apple will make it hard for them to do so for x86 Macs is kinda silly.
Shiller essentially announced triple boot-- Apple can't force microsoft to make windows compatible, but its clear Apple will do nothing heinous to make it incompatible (like making the memory controller be an undocumented ASIC).
In fact, I would be very surprised if Apple puts Airport in upcomming machines-- they will call them "Airport included" but they will likely use Intel's embedded WIFI hardware, rather than a proprietary solution.
(Also, there's no reason why linux can't run airport unless some peopel are being anal about licenses-- there are free drivers for airport for macs that don't support them, and the airport cards were made by lucent, and are not really proprietary. I use a Dell truemobile in one of my macs.)
Its really weird how PC weenies get fixated on this image of Mac users as being cool. I mean, we just looked at what was out there and bought the computer we liked. Most of us don't even belong to a users group, so there's no opportunity for wallowing in our snobbishness, even if we were snobbs.
However, its a compliment, in fact, that you see us as being so cool.
So, thanks.
You may not realize it, but you don't have to be jealous -- you can be cool too!
Generally this is true... but people do migrate over time. Apple has seen very strong Mac sales lately... their marketshare is already growing.
Switching to intel will likely cause chaos, but after that will draw more people into the fold.
Everything Steve's done since comming back has been towards creating demand for Macs... the iMac made it easy to get on the net, and people switched, the iPod introduced millions of non-mac owners to the coolness of apple products. OS X has won massive amounts of geek mindshare.
And now going to Intel means that Apple will have adequate supply to meet this demand, and also makes hte product seem less of a "fringe" product.
The number one question windows users ask when you tell them about a mac is "can it run windows too?"... at least in my experience.
Oh, Jesus. Apple makes about $50 on that $999 (its not $2,000 anymore) piece of hardware, and it makes about $80 when someone buys OS X at retail.
Also, Apple's share of the installed ocmputer market is %16. This is because Macs last longer and are used longer than PCs. So, they sell less per year, but in terms of addressable market, they are much bigger than people think.
Because , contrary to what most people seem to think, the reason Jobs killed the clones was not opposition to cloning.
Jobs killed the clones because Apple lost money for every clone sold. Apple's deal with the cloners had thems subsidizing the costs of the clones. It was a bad deal.
I think Jobs realizes that he makes more money from OS X sold at retail than he does from a new Mac. Jobs is not perfectly passionless-- he is passionate about making great hardware, and he is also passionate about winning.
So, Apple will make hardware, and Apple will license the OS to *quality* hardware makers, at some point down the road. Apple will charge almost as much for OS X on a Dell or an HP as Microsoft chargest them... and Apple will have a rock solid agreement about the featureset of the machines to insure there are no driver issues.
Jobs may not like clones, but I think Steve Jobs really likes to win.
And since the game is shifting, Microsoft is becomming more vulnerable than I think people think. (Not like they are going out of business, but they will be down to %70 marketshare by 2015, I bet.)
You're making a lot of assumptions that are not backed up by what Apple has said.
Apple will support OS X on Macs. Apple has not said they will never license OS X to other PC manufacturers.
Apple has never said that they will make it very hard for people to run OS X on other machines... just that it won't do so out of the box.
By the way, Apple is a large volume, low margin business already. They are one of hte largest PC manufacturers in the world.
The reason they went to intel in the first place is lack of supply from their primary supplier.
Intel has plants all over the world. IBM has only one that makes PowerPCs. IBM has been unable to keep up with demand and that hurts Apples ability to refresh models.
Intel won't have this problem.
That's the reason they switched. And in the end, Apple will not complain when people pay $129 to buy Mac OS X at the retail store and put it on their DEll.
Their margin on that OS Upgrade is larger than the margin on a Macintosh.
Where's the insight? Come on.... you guys have been saying that Apple is dead every other year like clockwork-- every time they make a change we see dozens of posts like this one claiming that Apple is dead.
Its been 20 years that you've been predicting their demise.
Furthermore, your entire premise if flawed. Apple didn't say they were going to take people to court to stop them from running OS X on other hardware-- they just said that they would only support it on their own hardware.
Apple is not a premium seller of PCS. Apple sells inexpensive powerful computers with a better UI. There's no margin that needs to be protected! They make as much on each iPod sold as on the mac, and they make more selling an OS X upgrade than selling a Mac
This business model has worked fine for Microsoft-- why does it spell doom for Apple? They clearly have a superior product and their sales are growing, while other manufacturers sales are shrinking.
To me, a Power User-- the truely elite-- want their machine to be easy to use.
Because Easy to Use means consistent, reliable, etc.
IF you're a power user, you want to do whatever it is you're working on, rather than fight the machine.
Unix is for power users to the point that the Unix command line is a consistent UI. Linux is not because they adopted the un-usable windows interface.
Mac OS X has both the consistent UI and the consistant Unix commandline, and thus is the best OS for Power Users.
In short-- Power Users want easy to use. Doesn't mean your grandma is a power user, it just means that its been 20 years, and there's no excuse for computers to not be easy to use and reliable anymore.
So, Dell buys Mac OS X from Apple. I think Apple would notice. What does Dell then do-- have someone install it on each machine?
Or does Dell make a disk image and replicate that image on all the machines on the production line?
That replication is copyright violation... even if they buy a license for each copy.
Basically, if Dell wants to ship machines with OS X, then they will go to Apple and get better pricing, and a license to do so. Steve Jobs *will* take that call.
Apple's concerns are only that the machines that run it are not crap, and that they are fully compatible with the operating system. The price may be higher than Dell wants to pay, but it will still be a lot less than Dell buying OS X at retail.
As to locking the OS to the hardware-- there's a lot of stuff they COULD do, but they won't. They will make the kernal check the hardware once at startup, it will be a relatively obvious thing. In days hours or weeks someone will produce a kernel that gets around it.
What Apple will do is make it hard to pirate the OS-- all they want is to avoid having to support random hardware, and to make sure people running OS X pay for their copy.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the pointer to those sites.
Gnustep and gnustepweb needs to do a better job of getting the word out- when you go to the website and you can't figure out the state of the product, there's a problem.
I never argued for the artificial inflation of gold. The whole point of gold is to stop evil people from stealing your money.
Apple makes money on the iPod, but not because it has custom Apple hardware. The iPod is really a commodity piece of hardware with custom apple software.
What seperates the ipod from all the idiotic copy-cat products? Apple software.
Apple killed the mac clones program because they were subsidizing the clones, and lost money on every one sold. When Jobs tried to replace the expiring contracts with one where Apple made money, the clone sellers balked.
The purpose of the iPod is to get people buying Macs. The purpose of that is not to sell Mac hardware, but to sell OS X.
Apple makes nothing on hardware-- hardware is a commodity. Apple makes all their profits on SOFTWARE. Whether the softwware is boxed in an ipod, a Mac or shrinkwrap.
I find it amazing that all you pc weenies complain about Apple not selling commodity hardware (When really they do) but you think a software based business model would cause Apple to go under.
Frankly, you have no fucking clue, just the ability to link to wikipedia and misinterpret what you find there.
Its really sad how slashdot is filled with flatline idiots. This is why linux is such a crappy application-- no passion, no crativity, and no ability to think in the linux community.
People are stupid, and I do not know why I waste my time trying to educate them.
Jesus, if you glanced at their earnings statement it would be lost on you-- since you don't know the difference between revenue and profits.
Furthermore
The ipod, like the mac, is merely a nice box for Apple's software.
What apple sells, and what they make money on is the user experience. The user experience doesn't come from the hardware it comes from the software.
And you're being silly in assuming that Apple will never give you the option to deploy to other platforms.
Apple has not taken this option away, it has simply not extended ti to 5.3 YET.
To not make 5.3 support that is inconsistent with the way Apple has been doing business for 20 years.
Yet Apple announces something and people go into a panic based on their assumptions about what it means... ignoring the last time they paniced and the fact that Apple didn't do what they were assuming.
Actually, Golds practical price is in the 800s, though theoretically it should be in the 3,200s.
The reason the price of gold is below 800 is that historically central banks accumulated gold for centuries-- the US federal reserve confiscated all privately owned gold in the country. Other countries did it for longer.
When their fiat currencies show weakness, they dump gold on the market. This manipulation has been going on for the last 30 years or so-- since Bretton Woods.
For a good description of the international monetary system, that is not at all dry, check out "The creature from Jekyll Island". For a description of money, read "What has the government done with our money" by Murrey Rothbard.
The intrinsic value of gold is set based on teh quanity of it in the planet-- not the quantity above ground or currenty on the market. While makrets often do not refelct intrinsic value, you can determine that gold has intrinsic value while federal reserve notes are pure fiat.
Usiung the commodity as money does not tie it up in stockpiles-- it does not inflate the price. You use some ina gold necklace if you wish, but hte price of that necklace will be MUCH higher than the price of gold, so it will not be a commodity price affecting situation.
It is actually false to say that the monetary supply needs to grow with the economy. This is one of those keynsian waving-of-hands things. The size of the monetary supply is irrelevant to the size of the economy-- providied the monetary supply is actually money.
Money is divisible. If there physically is not enough of a given commodity metal, then other metals can be used, or more likely, simply smaller quantities of it will be necessary.
Furthermore, its impossible for federal reserve notes to be managed to grwo with the size of the economy because federal reserve note supplies are not managed... federal reserve notes are simply issued when the government wants to spend money it doesn't have.
When the US was on a gold standard, prices were not constant-- they went DOWN. The reason is that technology resulted in increases in productivity.
These increases were reflected in the price of just about every consumer good on the market.
Imagine a situation where its not just computers that go down in price over time?
That's the natural result of increases in poroductivity (which also, counters the argument that more money is needed when the economy grows-- divisability isn't necessary as lower prices mean a relatively constant amount of money supply needed.)
If you think about this, you'll see that this is always the case-- its a law of nature. Teh price is the economic value, and the value of the money is the inverse of the value of the economy.
With a constant money supply, based on something impossible to counterfit prices would go down.
ALL of inflation, and all the loss of the benefits of productivity in consumer prices is a tax on the economy and a tax on people. That is money literally stolen out of your pocket by the federal government via counterfiting of the US Dollar.
With a stable money supply, prices would go down and profits would go UP. With inflation, prices go up, and profits seem to go up, but actually they are just denominated in ever cheaper dollars.
Unfortunately, socialist economists who want to argue for devaluation of the dollar will use figures denominated in dollars to "prove" their points, while never acknowledging that the value of a dollar is different between their two examples. This slight of hand has fooled many generations of "economists".
(This does eventually get around to google, and is actually on topic, but requires a bit of explanation.)
Right, and I think your points are underappreciated. Unfortunately, to be pendantic, you're talking about the issue of currency, not money. Visa is a currency, because its a representation of money, and it happens to be backed by something people think is money- the federal reserve note.
But, and here's what trips people up, the federal reserve note is not money.
To be money, currency has to have a couple features:
1. Divisability -- this the federal reserve note does, you can get quarters for your dollars and dollars for your quarters, its exchangeable.
2. Physical Robustness-- FRNs have this as well. They tend to last quite awhile and you can get a replacement when they are worn out, unlike, say, salt or corn, or other things people used as currency in the past.
3. Intrinsic value-- this is where the federal reserve note fails. Even salt is better money in this view. The paper and metal in our money have virtually no economic value-- between %1 and 1/100th of a % of face value.
And thus the "Dollar" is not money. But it is ignorance of this that leads people to think it is money, and this ignorance is something the government sure does appreciate.
It didn't use to be this way. The dollar is defined as about an ounce of silver. For much of this countries history, and according to the constitution, that is what a dollar is (or a comperable amount of gold- the founding fathers didn't link our currency to just one metal-- they linked it to those two.)
This means that legally you can get an ounce of silver for every dollar in your pocket--- if the government was followng the law.
But thru a series of steps starting with the founding of the federal reserve in 1913, the criminalization of gold ownership, and ultimately, when Nixon "closed the gold window", the governmetn weened us off of money, and let us keep trading currency instead.
BTW, Currency means a "current reciept." A "Current reciept" is a piece of paper that acts as a proxy for something of value, usually an amount of gold or silver.
Amazingly, people accepted this worthless paper as if it had the same value as it did back when you could exchange it for gold or silver... and still do today. Furthermore, I've heard an amazing number of justifications for why its *good* that our paper isn't backed by anything of value, including that "foriegners who hav dollars shouldnt' be allowed to hold them without penalty, and os we need inflation."
The reality is, government couldn't meet its responsibilities, and rather than change its ways, it just violated the law and continued to print money that it couldn't back. When it was called on this (By France, who demanded gold for their dollars) we just reneged on the whole deal.
So, despite the law, despite the constitution, we have a currency that is not money, and that is redeemable for nothing, and ultimately, worth nothing.
Eventually this situation, and the excesses that have been allowedd by it, will come home to roost in teh form of a currency crash.
So, google can do good, by providing a currency that is one to one backed by dollars, or if they want to be really good, by gold.
egold and other companies have set up gold payment systems that allow people to pay for goods wtih grams of gold, electronically. Hopefully, google will do paypal's multiple currency features one better by offering gold or silver as an asset you can hold your account balance in.
Also, I think that bankers will not be able to do much about this situation-- if Google goes the route of paypal and is not a bank (And does not engage in fractional reserve banking) they are not a threat to banks-- because they are not making loans... but they are sure to give one bank a lot of card clearing business.
Uh, have you actually done this? Have you made a serious App using GnustepWeb?
I believe serious apps have been made with Cayenne and Tapestry, but last I looked they lacked something I needed (though I think those projects probably have a good future.)
But GnustepWeb is not a WO replacement. (Again, last I looked).... its a long long way off.
Ok, I looked again and it looks like GnustepWeb died in 2003, which was about when I last looked at it.
Seriously, though, if you have a deployed web app and you built it with OSS that is comperable to WO, lets see it... I'd LOVE to be shown to be wrong here!
There is some confusion here. They didn't "Change the terms". What they did was LOWER THE PRICE.
It used to be you paid $699 for a box with the development environement in it, a test-deployment license, and a full deployment license. You could deploy it anywhere.
Now you pay $0 for the development system, and $499 for a copy of OSX Server for deployment.
So, if you had 4 Mac Server, before your cost was $2,800-- for 4 copies of WebObjects.
Now your cost is
So, for that situation, they lowered the price by almost $3,000.
Even if you're not using OS X Server, you have always had to buy deployment licenses, and that was $699 with the WO retail box.
Now they have basically bunded WebObjects with their client OS for FREE, and with their server OS for FREE, reducing the additional cost of WebObjects to Zero.
How is this bad again?
As to deployment on non-Mac machines, you have *always* needed a deployment license to do that, and that cost $699 before. I think its pretty safe to say that once they get this adjustment to the business model worked out, it won't cost more than $699 to deploy WO apps on non-Mac hardware.
And they may well just open source the whole thing.
Any way you cut it, this is a price cut. Yes, their support for non-mac hardware is lagging, but that's not uncommon with WO...and generally WO deployed apps stay on the old version for awhile after the new version comes out-- its not like there are a lot of commercial WO apps out there that are just waiting for 5.3.
As to open source alternatives, there are none. There are some WO developers working on essentially a replacement in open source, and that may be a great project ultimately.
But most open source methods for doing web applications pale when compared to web objects. Its unfortunate there are so many thousands of Java and Open source devleopers out there creating inferior projects and spending more time to do it, when all they need to do is use WO and have a better solution quicker.
WO is really fantastic, and its really under-estimated, and not well understood in the general community. Apple lowered the price and made the model simpler before, and all they've done here is do the same thing again.
Its not unreasonable for Apple to charge money for WebObjects-- its one hell of a great solution, and is currently unmatched in the market place, free or proprietary. For what it does, its a total bargain.
Why troll? Tiger works fine... its been a pretty smooth upgrade all around.
Apple makes its money on Software. Apple is a software company. Apple makes hardware because they want their software to run well.
The idea that Apple is a hardware company is common, but misguided. Yes, they make hardware, but that's not the focus of their business model.
Apple makes more money selling an OS upgrade than selling a Mac. Apple makes as much from selling a piece of hardware that you could call that profit profit of the OS with free hardware, or profit of the hardware with free softwware.
If there were 40 million Mac clones being sold every year and Apple made as much from each one of them as it does from an iPod, Apple would be about 8 times more net revenue than it is now. IF it made as much as it does frome each OS upgrade, it would be 16 times as much revenue.
Macs are just a box for Apple software.
This is why so many people are perplexed at apple's actions.
The purpose of limiting OS X on intel to Apple hardware is to give them a chance to make the transition first *before* organizing a profitable cloning arrangement, assuming there are enough people who want to sell mac clones.
But you will never see Apple authorized crap hardware that doesn't work, like you do in the PC world.
Mis-edit. Scaled composites developed SpaceShipOne for $20 million... and the capacity of the shuttle is not greator and its capabilities are a little better (it can get into low earth orbit, but not geosync orbit) the costs are massively higher. Rutan's plans have him getting into shuttle type low earth orbit for a couple hundred million.... a whole program for far less than the cost of a single shuttle launch.
Even by the lowered expectations set by NASA the space shuttle is a total disaster. They wanted to fly 24 times a year and have 500 mission life span for a shuttle... they've never achieved that. And they expected the launch costs to be about a tenth of what they are.
NASA's political orientation and inefficiency mean that everything it does is ineffecient and overly expensive.
High cost and lack of access to space signficiantly inhibits science and research. On the other hand, the NASA and FAA burorats want to keep the cash coming, so they actively oppose all attempts to develop and launch cheaper alterantives in the private sector.
Remember, NASA can simply ground you, without reason or recourse. We're lucky scaled composits was allowed to launch at all, and I think this is because they were a plane based launch rather than a missle style launch.
But they have learned their lesson-- looks like they are going to ground Virgin Galactic-- AND prevent Burt Rutan from taking his own technology out of the country and launching there.
Interesting how they just nationalized his labor-- actually everyon'es labor-- by claiming that the government owns all your work if it wants to, and you can therefore not export it if they declare it strategic. That's akin to enslavement, or at the very least, outright theft.
Government is the problem, not the solution.
History shows that "Big Science" is only Big because there's a lot of public (Eg: stolen) dollars they want to soak up.
NASA spends about a billion dollars per shuttle *flight*.... Space Ship one developed an entire program for $20 million. While they are not equivilent.
And the space shuttle is a disaster-- not because of it was built with private contractors, but because the politicos wanted to dole out the stolen money to a wide variety of states-- necessitating a complicated design that could have major parts built in a wide variety of states.
This is all to be expected--look at the commercial airline industry-- thousands of flights per accident. Let them into space nad you'll have a commercial space flight industry and all the NASA money can be left in the pockets of the poor starving americans it was stolen from (And the rich industrious americans who will invest it in jobs for the poor starving americans.)
I love how the lovers of government always point to failures of the government system as proof that its the only way. Terrorists crash into skyscrapers? Well, lets spend even more on the screening system that let them go thru.
Richard Branson has spent $100 million to have Burt Rutan design an advanced version of spaceship one. But because Richard Branson is a british citizen the US government won't even let him look at the designs for his own ship! The FAA is in the middle of what looks to be a 20 year process for making rules that will "allow" space ship two to fly commercially-- and gives no indication of when they will ever finish the rules, or that they have any incentive to not make the rules so onerous that safety is impaired The FAA's interference with SpaceShip One made safety worse, not better.
Government is a disease masquarading as its own cure. All NASA does is let government control the "high ground" for military purposes and *PREVENT* space science or access to space.
As I understand it, intel has adopted AMD's 64 bit instruction set.
I'm pretty sure Apple will be using these 64 bit processors, and also the Pentium M has great heat / power verses performance specs compared to previous pentiums. (Maybe AMD is still better.)
But, while the PowerPC is technically a better solution, there is no point in picking a solution you cannot ship to your customers.
Every time Apple has released a new PowerPC machine of any significance there has been a big delay in getting them in quanity. Furthermore, where PC makers refresh their lines 3-4 times a year, Apple is only able to do it twice a year.
AMD, Motorola and IBM all lack the capacity to meet Apple's requirements. The think that Intel has that's unique is the ability ot manufacture advanced chips in volume.
Furthermore, there is little to no R&D being done for the PPC platform (the cell and xbox PPC chips are akin to PPC 604 era chips, not appropriate for Apple). With only one customer, and a looming embedded market, both IBM and Motorola are not interested in advancing the PowerPC chips for Apple. Intel, on the other hand, has many customers and a strong competitor in AMD, and thus is well incentivized to advance their line. (Plus a lot of ongoing R&D) So, even though the PowerPC is a superior design, there's nobody there to advance it, and the performance advantage is eroding. This is the same thing that happened to Apple on the 6502 and 68000 lines as well.
Or put another way, The PPC is superior but marginalized, Mac OS is superior but marginalized. Apple can't give up Mac OS, but can innovate just as well in the Intel platform space as it does with the PowerPC.... and having the manufacturing oomph behind them is critical.
I think supply, more than anything else, is the reason Apple made the switch.
I think the parent is thinking that-- I think Apple makes Commodity PCs with the PowerPC processor, and will continue to do so when they move to Intel.
I'm sure Apple will not hesitate to put new features on their machines when they can-- something like WiFi was before WiFi became ubiquitous. But as you note, they tend to use other's chipsets... and so linux compatibility would be jsut as difficult as generic hardware that uses the same chipset.
Interestingly, people have ported Linux to PowerPC macs.
The idea that Apple will make it hard for them to do so for x86 Macs is kinda silly.
Shiller essentially announced triple boot-- Apple can't force microsoft to make windows compatible, but its clear Apple will do nothing heinous to make it incompatible (like making the memory controller be an undocumented ASIC).
In fact, I would be very surprised if Apple puts Airport in upcomming machines-- they will call them "Airport included" but they will likely use Intel's embedded WIFI hardware, rather than a proprietary solution.
(Also, there's no reason why linux can't run airport unless some peopel are being anal about licenses-- there are free drivers for airport for macs that don't support them, and the airport cards were made by lucent, and are not really proprietary. I use a Dell truemobile in one of my macs.)
Its really weird how PC weenies get fixated on this image of Mac users as being cool. I mean, we just looked at what was out there and bought the computer we liked. Most of us don't even belong to a users group, so there's no opportunity for wallowing in our snobbishness, even if we were snobbs.
However, its a compliment, in fact, that you see us as being so cool.
So, thanks.
You may not realize it, but you don't have to be jealous -- you can be cool too!
Generally this is true... but people do migrate over time. Apple has seen very strong Mac sales lately... their marketshare is already growing.
Switching to intel will likely cause chaos, but after that will draw more people into the fold.
Everything Steve's done since comming back has been towards creating demand for Macs... the iMac made it easy to get on the net, and people switched, the iPod introduced millions of non-mac owners to the coolness of apple products. OS X has won massive amounts of geek mindshare.
And now going to Intel means that Apple will have adequate supply to meet this demand, and also makes hte product seem less of a "fringe" product.
The number one question windows users ask when you tell them about a mac is "can it run windows too?"... at least in my experience.
Oh, Jesus. Apple makes about $50 on that $999 (its not $2,000 anymore) piece of hardware, and it makes about $80 when someone buys OS X at retail.
Also, Apple's share of the installed ocmputer market is %16. This is because Macs last longer and are used longer than PCs. So, they sell less per year, but in terms of addressable market, they are much bigger than people think.
Because , contrary to what most people seem to think, the reason Jobs killed the clones was not opposition to cloning.
Jobs killed the clones because Apple lost money for every clone sold. Apple's deal with the cloners had thems subsidizing the costs of the clones. It was a bad deal.
I think Jobs realizes that he makes more money from OS X sold at retail than he does from a new Mac. Jobs is not perfectly passionless-- he is passionate about making great hardware, and he is also passionate about winning.
So, Apple will make hardware, and Apple will license the OS to *quality* hardware makers, at some point down the road. Apple will charge almost as much for OS X on a Dell or an HP as Microsoft chargest them... and Apple will have a rock solid agreement about the featureset of the machines to insure there are no driver issues.
Jobs may not like clones, but I think Steve Jobs really likes to win.
And since the game is shifting, Microsoft is becomming more vulnerable than I think people think. (Not like they are going out of business, but they will be down to %70 marketshare by 2015, I bet.)
You're making a lot of assumptions that are not backed up by what Apple has said.
Apple will support OS X on Macs. Apple has not said they will never license OS X to other PC manufacturers.
Apple has never said that they will make it very hard for people to run OS X on other machines... just that it won't do so out of the box.
By the way, Apple is a large volume, low margin business already. They are one of hte largest PC manufacturers in the world.
The reason they went to intel in the first place is lack of supply from their primary supplier.
Intel has plants all over the world. IBM has only one that makes PowerPCs. IBM has been unable to keep up with demand and that hurts Apples ability to refresh models.
Intel won't have this problem.
That's the reason they switched. And in the end, Apple will not complain when people pay $129 to buy Mac OS X at the retail store and put it on their DEll.
Their margin on that OS Upgrade is larger than the margin on a Macintosh.
Where's the insight? Come on.... you guys have been saying that Apple is dead every other year like clockwork-- every time they make a change we see dozens of posts like this one claiming that Apple is dead.
Its been 20 years that you've been predicting their demise.
Furthermore, your entire premise if flawed. Apple didn't say they were going to take people to court to stop them from running OS X on other hardware-- they just said that they would only support it on their own hardware.
Apple is not a premium seller of PCS. Apple sells inexpensive powerful computers with a better UI. There's no margin that needs to be protected! They make as much on each iPod sold as on the mac, and they make more selling an OS X upgrade than selling a Mac
This business model has worked fine for Microsoft-- why does it spell doom for Apple? They clearly have a superior product and their sales are growing, while other manufacturers sales are shrinking.
Your post brings up an interesting perspective.
To me, a Power User-- the truely elite-- want their machine to be easy to use.
Because Easy to Use means consistent, reliable, etc.
IF you're a power user, you want to do whatever it is you're working on, rather than fight the machine.
Unix is for power users to the point that the Unix command line is a consistent UI. Linux is not because they adopted the un-usable windows interface.
Mac OS X has both the consistent UI and the consistant Unix commandline, and thus is the best OS for Power Users.
In short-- Power Users want easy to use. Doesn't mean your grandma is a power user, it just means that its been 20 years, and there's no excuse for computers to not be easy to use and reliable anymore.
So, Dell buys Mac OS X from Apple. I think Apple would notice. What does Dell then do-- have someone install it on each machine?
Or does Dell make a disk image and replicate that image on all the machines on the production line?
That replication is copyright violation... even if they buy a license for each copy.
Basically, if Dell wants to ship machines with OS X, then they will go to Apple and get better pricing, and a license to do so. Steve Jobs *will* take that call.
Apple's concerns are only that the machines that run it are not crap, and that they are fully compatible with the operating system. The price may be higher than Dell wants to pay, but it will still be a lot less than Dell buying OS X at retail.
As to locking the OS to the hardware-- there's a lot of stuff they COULD do, but they won't. They will make the kernal check the hardware once at startup, it will be a relatively obvious thing. In days hours or weeks someone will produce a kernel that gets around it.
What Apple will do is make it hard to pirate the OS-- all they want is to avoid having to support random hardware, and to make sure people running OS X pay for their copy.
I think programming requirements are far less of a factor than quality / tightness / organization of the software.
Windows is designed without security being a priority. It is intentional holes that are generally exploited in windows.
Mac OS was designed with security in mind.