Who wrote Word and Excel, when the market already had Wordperfect and Lotus?
Er, Word and Excel with both Mac products first - no Wordperfect or Lotus to compete with. And Excel was born Multiplan and bought by MS, so don't give too much credit on aggressive development there.
Moving against both WP and Lotus only happened when neither company was willing to develop Windows versions, so MS took the application jump-start plan used on the Mac and moved it to Windows. Smart, but hardly the David/Goliath encounter that you suggest.
Why erect non-human readable signs where they get in the way? What are the benefits of me being able to see this large thing other than to know something is there?
And I know I'll be shouted down for this, but isn't this a much better application for something like RFID? (technical issues, notwithstanding) What's wrong with having this information in the airwaves and some kind of small indicator that a signal is being transmitted?
Pay attention, boy. As several other posts around here have mentioned:
Apple announced earnings last Wednesday (4/14) after market close. In the conference call, Apple announced that iTMS made money. Apple's CFO announced that iTMS made money. Not some reporter - an Apple executive. Not 3 months ago in the Journal, 2 days ago in a conference call with analysts.
From MacNN:
"Responding to iTunes song pricing, Apple said that the higher-than expected pricing on some albums was due to the disparity in pricing from different labels, but the the "vast majority" of the albums remain at $9.99 and songs remain at $0.99. Apple said the iTunes Music store showed a small profit in the March quarter and looked promising for the company. The company said it expected to provide an update on the iTunes Music Sales and the Pepsi promotion closer to the First Anniversary of the iTunes Store (end of April). "
Yet Berkeley and UCLA, around 150 acres, aren't well ranked. UC Irvine (my school), at 1500 acres is the highest in CA.
Irvine has quite good coverage and a fairly coherent plan for the campus. Clearly the didn't include the undeveloped parts of campus, or areas such as faculty housing (though that too is well covered).
A lot of the aviation 'firsts' had nothing to do with commercial interests on the part of the participants. They just wanted to DO it, because they thought they could.
Uh huh.
While I won't argue that Lindbergh was interested in doing this, the $25,000 Raymond Orteig Prize was most certainly a driving force behind the actual attempt. Even the most noble person needs to eat, and unlike science, engineering advances almost always come with some reward, be it financial or strategic.
According to the original policies, with some exceptions, songs had to be $.99 and albums could cost up to $.99 * # tracks, but Apple strongly encouraged labels to set the album price at $9.99. That's the decision of the label.
My wife's great grandfather (81 yrs. old) just "got a dell dude" for under $700.... in the end, it came down to getting the best value for my money. I would have had to spend $300 more for the eMac and had a computer that was considerably slower...
Er, what do 81 year olds do on their computers these days that they need such performance? In my experience, novices value usability and reliability foremost and these factors so rarely get mentioned in the great price comparisons.
Uh, I had the opposite response. "Why in the f*&k did they do it that way?!" Keyboard control is practically nonexistant. And Finder blows... Damn I hate the way it works. It doesn't allow to see where you are in the filesystem very well. It's just awkward and slow to use.
In 10.3 you can control *everything* from the keyboard if you want. I honestly don't see how OS X navigation is any different than Windows assuming you take advantage of all modes. Personally, I don't like the spatial Finder mode, I use column, or list with disclosure to see subdirectories.
The killer feature Apple has is that they have a GUI for everything in the system and it hides a lot of complex stuff so the end-user doesn't have to worry about every little detail (of course sometimes that backfires when I simply can't do something because it's hiding the details).
You've never seen Terminal, have you? Apple usually gives you two ways of doing it - the easy, GUI one, and the harder, totally complete in all detail CLI one. For example, creating a disk image is trivial in Disk Utility, if you want a fairly standard one. If you want to pick your compression scheme, and dozens of other options, you can use hdiutil and do all kinds of damage.
Simple. Revoke their corporate charter. As others have stated which should be obvious to anyone over the age of 9, financial consequences are only effective if they are sufficiently large to overcome the benefits derived by receiving them.
In some cases, such as with MS, it's virtually inconceivable that such a financial consequence could be introduced. Even a $10B annual penalty would not be effective. Why? Because Microsoft has no other avenue that can augment their current business model enough - they'd simply become sufficiently larger abusers to cover the penalty. The true value of MSs business, barring predatory practices, is massively lower in terms of profits than what they are now so the financial penalties against MS to change their behavior would need to be unacceptably massive.
If Bill Gates was a frequent speeder, what ticket amount would you need to levy to change that behavior. $1M would be inconsequential. $100M might get his attention, but nobody could justify that. You'd take his license away - that works for everybody. If he drives without it, you chuck him in jail. Simple. Jail essentially puts everyone on the same resource plane.
There is no comparable move for corporations except to revoke their charter. That's the equivalent of throwing them in jail, or delivering a death penalty. Take the 3 strikes law and apply it to corporations. You get to break the law sufficiently only twice and continue in a given time period (monopoly, criminal negligence, sell weapons to North Korea, etc. - the equivalent of corporate felonies. We can make a list.) After those, you get a warning, a big fine, some kind of half-assed restriction on your behavior, but you do it a 3rd time, we declare the *corporation* as irresponsible. Shareholders will actually punish the corporation most heavily as they close in on that 3rd strike, the risk of being a shareholder increases - much as it does for corporations with poor bond ratings. That's what'd really keep things in check.
Of course, since these guys essentially run the nation, I'd never fly.
http://www.lightparty.com/Misc/CorporateDeath.ht ml
I tried getting my network printer up and running with a friend's MacOS X box and it was nowhere near as easy as some Slashdotters make it seem. I had to know the location of the printer on my LAN (MacOS X did not search my LAN for acceptable printers, nor did it discover that this Brother HL1270N is the only printer on the LAN...
Well, the problem is that scanning the LAN is not a great solution either. Apple decided to fix the problem properly instead and came up with Rendezvous (Zeroconf). Not only does it solve the problem of locating the printer, it solves the problem of setting up the printer. The Brother HL-5070 is such a printer and you just plug it into your network and you're done.
The real solution to the UI design issue is to not need a UI to design. That's Apple's real goal and is the real problem with the printing UI debate - there shouldn't be a UI for connecting to a network printer. When you hit print it should simply offer the printer as a choice. No configuration.
If it costs $30M to get into orbit, you don't waste that on a $1M satellite. You use it for a $30M+ satellite. NASA should be safe for high-cost payloads provided that they have the reliability record (only time will tell).
If it costs $6M to get into orbit, then a whole pile of people can get into the game that weren't previously there, and some design decisions may change. Plans like GPS look much more attractive provided the satellites are cheap. Consider launching 50 $2M satellites:
With NASA, that costs you $1.5B (launch) + $100M (hardware). With SpaceX, that costs you $300M (launch) + $100M (hardware).
SpaceX is an attractive option provided they can launch very frequently, even if their reliability is terrible. Simply build 100 satellites and if half fail, you're still way ahead of the NASA budget.
Remember, what often makes launch failures so catastrophic is not the $30M lost on the launch, but the $1B lost on hardware at the tip of that rocket.
SpaceX will cause people to design cheaper, less-advanced satellites. Unfortunately, it will also further clutter our orbital spaces. I really have to think that with the advent of private launches, that the world govts need to coordinate and essentially tax each launch to cover debris tracking and ultimately debris cleanup.
I think any Apple engineer will tell you that Steve plays a direct role in many of Apple's high-profile products. There's no doubt that some sort of element like the scroll wheel came out of his head, even if he had no direct role in it's implementaiton.
Now, whether he plays a positive or negative role is another matter. It's my understanding that much of the ever-changing UI in OS X+iApps is due to his input.
Not all engineering is suffering, but the computer and EE areas certainly are. Civil, chemical, biomedical, mechanical engineerings are strong and growing.
I've talked to a number of executives of engineering firms and they indicate that offshoring is not really a major trend. Yes, it is impacting some areas very heavily such as support, but for programmers and engineers, it's a rather minor situation, and the good engineering/programming jobs are likely to always remain local to the company.
The weak job situation for most programmers is not due to offshoring, but rather to simply a lack of jobs, and the fact that the peak of students entering computer majors was around 1999/2000, so they are graduating in highest numbers right now - there's simply more demand than supply. The Merc and other publications are hollaring 'offshore' at the top of their lungs, and unfortunately some people can only hear what they hear the loudest.
So, the economic balance does not explain the US failure to correct this economically damaging condition, there must have been another reason.
Sure. As much as the US talks of wanting US companies to not retain and abuse their monopoly, the US itself wants the option to retain and abuse any of their monopolies. MSFT isn't so much a monopoly for Gates as it is a monopoly for the US over the rest of the world - a lot of money flows to these shores as a result.
The monopolies that we have historically stopped are those that reside exclusively in the US - phone systems and whatnot. Anything that might shift off-shore as a result of breaking the monopoly is much more difficult for the US to justify. DeBeers and OPEC are bad monopolies because control resides outside of the US and at the expense of US interests. MSFT is a good monopoly because the reverse is true.
A lot of the mechanical and electrical systems in aerospace seem to be relatively straightforward, but the one area that seems to crop up time and time again are the materials issues. From wiring insulation cracking, to heat tiles, to metal fatigue, and on and on.
Even to a lot of engineers, the materials engineering still seems like a black art and routinely turns out to be the main cause of aerospace problems. Both shuttle accidents were ultimately materials failures, and many of the recent airline accidents (non-terrorist) have been materials failtures: TWA 800, Swissair, AA NY in 12/2001, etc.
OS X supports full keyboard navigation so you can reach all menu items, screen elements with the keyboard.
OS X also supports UI scripting, so in Applescript you can specify to click a specific button, select a specific menu, etc. to automate specific tasks.
There are a number of utils for converting RSS from apps like NetNewsWire to MP3 playlists and stuffing it on your iPod. One such app:
http://www.tow.com/software/read_it_to_me/
Basically, use NNW to manage the news you want (TONS of sources - BBC, CNN, weblogs, etc. but not all include the full article text) and a click or two will take all your unviewed feeds, text-to-speech them to MP3 and sync them to your iPod.
You can later just click through the ones you heard (or everything from the day), and the next day it'll only sync across the new content.
Lots of options on OS X, but not sure about Windows + iPod.
Yeah, squishgin Microsoft into oblivion would be both grossly illegal and probably distruptive, and would be a great favor to the rest of the net but I'm not convinced the negatives outweigh the positives here...
Seriously, what's scary is that it appears the economics are still far in the favor of the virus/trojan/worm writers. There's just not enough money pouring directly into security realtive to what's pouring into breaking it.
Ok, nothing personally against Ray or Mitch, but justifying the value of Groove based on the value of Notes is like justifying the reliability of a Boeing 737 based on the reliability of a Boeing V-22 Osprey.
Notes is huge and does everything, but rarely does it work or prove useful.
If it's illegal under US law for me to kill Americans and illegal under Canadian law for me to kill Canadians, should I be allowed to stand in the US and shoot people indiscriminantly in Canada? I'm not breaking a US law, and I'm not in Canada breaking Canadian law.
Where was the crime committed? In the US where I reside, or in Canada where the harm was done? On the internet, the harm is typically done outside the border where the person is. Now, in the case of warez, there are three parties, and one victim. The UL and DL are parties to this, and the company whose stuff is being warez is the victim. If either the UL or DL is in the US, then the US should be all over them. If the UL is outside the US but the software owner is in the US, then they US should be able to extradite since the victim is in the US. If the DL is outside the US, then the US doesn't touch no matter what. Simple...:-)
Australians can work the warez scene all they want, so long as UL is in Australia only hosting Australian software. That's consistent with most laws.
I live in a major metropolitan area in California and got a quote of $2900 for pickup in 30 minutes. I work for the government and SOOOO wish I had one of these CDs right now.
I wonder what that phone call from Redmond would be like...
He's a businessman, and the kiddies that like his fancy animated fish don't care if it was rendered or developed on a Mac or not.
Yep. A year or two into his iCEO role, he was asked in an interview what computer he uses day to day. He said it was an Intel machine (Thinkpad, I think) running OpenStep.
Most evidence is that he's a very bottom line kind of guy. If Apple's hardware sucks, he's not using it. And I think that's how a lot of Apple's decisions get made (for good or bad): Steve won't release a product that he won't use himself. He doesn't see the utility in the Newton, so the Newton goes. He sees the utility in the iPod, so it gets the go-ahead.
It might sound stupid to run a company like this, but then he's not the only guy that does things this way. Warren Buffett makes a lot of decisions on the same rules. He considered buying Sees candy, Bombardier, and Dairy Queen because he liked the products. When the financials and management team checks out, he buys. But his personal preference is a big part of the decision.
Re:no manufacturing costs for windows?
on
Is Windows Worth $45?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ok, Copernicus, explain why Windows is more expensive than a Celeron with 30M transistors that required a $2B foundry and arguably about as many man-hours from end-to-end as Windows to produce?
Besides, how many here would consider Windows to be a substantially improved product if it had perhaps half as many lines of code? Particularly if they removed the buggy half.
I bet you're just another insecure Windows user...
Slashdot Mirror
Who wrote Word and Excel, when the market already had Wordperfect and Lotus?
Er, Word and Excel with both Mac products first - no Wordperfect or Lotus to compete with. And Excel was born Multiplan and bought by MS, so don't give too much credit on aggressive development there.
Moving against both WP and Lotus only happened when neither company was willing to develop Windows versions, so MS took the application jump-start plan used on the Mac and moved it to Windows. Smart, but hardly the David/Goliath encounter that you suggest.
Why erect non-human readable signs where they get in the way? What are the benefits of me being able to see this large thing other than to know something is there?
And I know I'll be shouted down for this, but isn't this a much better application for something like RFID? (technical issues, notwithstanding) What's wrong with having this information in the airwaves and some kind of small indicator that a signal is being transmitted?
I've shown these pictures to a girl I happened to have about the place
Hmm, you typically keep girls strewn about your place? That's not a bad idea...
Pay attention, boy. As several other posts around here have mentioned:
Apple announced earnings last Wednesday (4/14) after market close. In the conference call, Apple announced that iTMS made money. Apple's CFO announced that iTMS made money. Not some reporter - an Apple executive. Not 3 months ago in the Journal, 2 days ago in a conference call with analysts.
From MacNN:
"Responding to iTunes song pricing, Apple said that the higher-than expected pricing on some albums was due to the disparity in pricing from different labels, but the the "vast majority" of the albums remain at $9.99 and songs remain at $0.99. Apple said the iTunes Music store showed a small profit in the March quarter and looked promising for the company. The company said it expected to provide an update on the iTunes Music Sales and the Pepsi promotion closer to the First Anniversary of the iTunes Store (end of April). "
Yet Berkeley and UCLA, around 150 acres, aren't well ranked. UC Irvine (my school), at 1500 acres is the highest in CA.
Irvine has quite good coverage and a fairly coherent plan for the campus. Clearly the didn't include the undeveloped parts of campus, or areas such as faculty housing (though that too is well covered).
A lot of the aviation 'firsts' had nothing to do with commercial interests on the part of the participants. They just wanted to DO it, because they thought they could.
Uh huh.
While I won't argue that Lindbergh was interested in doing this, the $25,000 Raymond Orteig Prize was most certainly a driving force behind the actual attempt. Even the most noble person needs to eat, and unlike science, engineering advances almost always come with some reward, be it financial or strategic.
Apple doesn't set the album price.
According to the original policies, with some exceptions, songs had to be $.99 and albums could cost up to $.99 * # tracks, but Apple strongly encouraged labels to set the album price at $9.99. That's the decision of the label.
My wife's great grandfather (81 yrs. old) just "got a dell dude" for under $700. ... in the end, it came down to getting the best value for my money. I would have had to spend $300 more for the eMac and had a computer that was considerably slower...
Er, what do 81 year olds do on their computers these days that they need such performance? In my experience, novices value usability and reliability foremost and these factors so rarely get mentioned in the great price comparisons.
Uh, I had the opposite response. "Why in the f*&k did they do it that way?!" Keyboard control is practically nonexistant. And Finder blows... Damn I hate the way it works. It doesn't allow to see where you are in the filesystem very well. It's just awkward and slow to use.
In 10.3 you can control *everything* from the keyboard if you want. I honestly don't see how OS X navigation is any different than Windows assuming you take advantage of all modes. Personally, I don't like the spatial Finder mode, I use column, or list with disclosure to see subdirectories.
The killer feature Apple has is that they have a GUI for everything in the system and it hides a lot of complex stuff so the end-user doesn't have to worry about every little detail (of course sometimes that backfires when I simply can't do something because it's hiding the details).
You've never seen Terminal, have you? Apple usually gives you two ways of doing it - the easy, GUI one, and the harder, totally complete in all detail CLI one. For example, creating a disk image is trivial in Disk Utility, if you want a fairly standard one. If you want to pick your compression scheme, and dozens of other options, you can use hdiutil and do all kinds of damage.
Simple. Revoke their corporate charter. As others have stated which should be obvious to anyone over the age of 9, financial consequences are only effective if they are sufficiently large to overcome the benefits derived by receiving them.
t ml
In some cases, such as with MS, it's virtually inconceivable that such a financial consequence could be introduced. Even a $10B annual penalty would not be effective. Why? Because Microsoft has no other avenue that can augment their current business model enough - they'd simply become sufficiently larger abusers to cover the penalty. The true value of MSs business, barring predatory practices, is massively lower in terms of profits than what they are now so the financial penalties against MS to change their behavior would need to be unacceptably massive.
If Bill Gates was a frequent speeder, what ticket amount would you need to levy to change that behavior. $1M would be inconsequential. $100M might get his attention, but nobody could justify that. You'd take his license away - that works for everybody. If he drives without it, you chuck him in jail. Simple. Jail essentially puts everyone on the same resource plane.
There is no comparable move for corporations except to revoke their charter. That's the equivalent of throwing them in jail, or delivering a death penalty. Take the 3 strikes law and apply it to corporations. You get to break the law sufficiently only twice and continue in a given time period (monopoly, criminal negligence, sell weapons to North Korea, etc. - the equivalent of corporate felonies. We can make a list.) After those, you get a warning, a big fine, some kind of half-assed restriction on your behavior, but you do it a 3rd time, we declare the *corporation* as irresponsible. Shareholders will actually punish the corporation most heavily as they close in on that 3rd strike, the risk of being a shareholder increases - much as it does for corporations with poor bond ratings. That's what'd really keep things in check.
Of course, since these guys essentially run the nation, I'd never fly.
http://www.lightparty.com/Misc/CorporateDeath.h
I tried getting my network printer up and running with a friend's MacOS X box and it was nowhere near as easy as some Slashdotters make it seem. I had to know the location of the printer on my LAN (MacOS X did not search my LAN for acceptable printers, nor did it discover that this Brother HL1270N is the only printer on the LAN...
Well, the problem is that scanning the LAN is not a great solution either. Apple decided to fix the problem properly instead and came up with Rendezvous (Zeroconf). Not only does it solve the problem of locating the printer, it solves the problem of setting up the printer. The Brother HL-5070 is such a printer and you just plug it into your network and you're done.
The real solution to the UI design issue is to not need a UI to design. That's Apple's real goal and is the real problem with the printing UI debate - there shouldn't be a UI for connecting to a network printer. When you hit print it should simply offer the printer as a choice. No configuration.
Well, the cost decision is a feedback loop.
If it costs $30M to get into orbit, you don't waste that on a $1M satellite. You use it for a $30M+ satellite. NASA should be safe for high-cost payloads provided that they have the reliability record (only time will tell).
If it costs $6M to get into orbit, then a whole pile of people can get into the game that weren't previously there, and some design decisions may change. Plans like GPS look much more attractive provided the satellites are cheap. Consider launching 50 $2M satellites:
With NASA, that costs you $1.5B (launch) + $100M (hardware).
With SpaceX, that costs you $300M (launch) + $100M (hardware).
SpaceX is an attractive option provided they can launch very frequently, even if their reliability is terrible. Simply build 100 satellites and if half fail, you're still way ahead of the NASA budget.
Remember, what often makes launch failures so catastrophic is not the $30M lost on the launch, but the $1B lost on hardware at the tip of that rocket.
SpaceX will cause people to design cheaper, less-advanced satellites. Unfortunately, it will also further clutter our orbital spaces. I really have to think that with the advent of private launches, that the world govts need to coordinate and essentially tax each launch to cover debris tracking and ultimately debris cleanup.
I'd be willing to bet that the iTunes Music Store will receive anchoring from retailers such as Target though.
Already started. You can now buy iTMS Gift Cards at Target.
I think any Apple engineer will tell you that Steve plays a direct role in many of Apple's high-profile products. There's no doubt that some sort of element like the scroll wheel came out of his head, even if he had no direct role in it's implementaiton.
Now, whether he plays a positive or negative role is another matter. It's my understanding that much of the ever-changing UI in OS X+iApps is due to his input.
Not all engineering is suffering, but the computer and EE areas certainly are. Civil, chemical, biomedical, mechanical engineerings are strong and growing.
I've talked to a number of executives of engineering firms and they indicate that offshoring is not really a major trend. Yes, it is impacting some areas very heavily such as support, but for programmers and engineers, it's a rather minor situation, and the good engineering/programming jobs are likely to always remain local to the company.
The weak job situation for most programmers is not due to offshoring, but rather to simply a lack of jobs, and the fact that the peak of students entering computer majors was around 1999/2000, so they are graduating in highest numbers right now - there's simply more demand than supply. The Merc and other publications are hollaring 'offshore' at the top of their lungs, and unfortunately some people can only hear what they hear the loudest.
So, the economic balance does not explain the US failure to correct this economically damaging condition, there must have been another reason.
Sure. As much as the US talks of wanting US companies to not retain and abuse their monopoly, the US itself wants the option to retain and abuse any of their monopolies. MSFT isn't so much a monopoly for Gates as it is a monopoly for the US over the rest of the world - a lot of money flows to these shores as a result.
The monopolies that we have historically stopped are those that reside exclusively in the US - phone systems and whatnot. Anything that might shift off-shore as a result of breaking the monopoly is much more difficult for the US to justify. DeBeers and OPEC are bad monopolies because control resides outside of the US and at the expense of US interests. MSFT is a good monopoly because the reverse is true.
A lot of the mechanical and electrical systems in aerospace seem to be relatively straightforward, but the one area that seems to crop up time and time again are the materials issues. From wiring insulation cracking, to heat tiles, to metal fatigue, and on and on.
Even to a lot of engineers, the materials engineering still seems like a black art and routinely turns out to be the main cause of aerospace problems. Both shuttle accidents were ultimately materials failures, and many of the recent airline accidents (non-terrorist) have been materials failtures: TWA 800, Swissair, AA NY in 12/2001, etc.
OS X supports full keyboard navigation so you can reach all menu items, screen elements with the keyboard.
OS X also supports UI scripting, so in Applescript you can specify to click a specific button, select a specific menu, etc. to automate specific tasks.
There are a number of utils for converting RSS from apps like NetNewsWire to MP3 playlists and stuffing it on your iPod. One such app:
http://www.tow.com/software/read_it_to_me/
Basically, use NNW to manage the news you want (TONS of sources - BBC, CNN, weblogs, etc. but not all include the full article text) and a click or two will take all your unviewed feeds, text-to-speech them to MP3 and sync them to your iPod.
You can later just click through the ones you heard (or everything from the day), and the next day it'll only sync across the new content.
Lots of options on OS X, but not sure about Windows + iPod.
Yeah, squishgin Microsoft into oblivion would be both grossly illegal and probably distruptive, and would be a great favor to the rest of the net but I'm not convinced the negatives outweigh the positives here...
Seriously, what's scary is that it appears the economics are still far in the favor of the virus/trojan/worm writers. There's just not enough money pouring directly into security realtive to what's pouring into breaking it.
Ok, nothing personally against Ray or Mitch, but justifying the value of Groove based on the value of Notes is like justifying the reliability of a Boeing 737 based on the reliability of a Boeing V-22 Osprey.
Notes is huge and does everything, but rarely does it work or prove useful.
If it's illegal under US law for me to kill Americans and illegal under Canadian law for me to kill Canadians, should I be allowed to stand in the US and shoot people indiscriminantly in Canada? I'm not breaking a US law, and I'm not in Canada breaking Canadian law.
:-)
Where was the crime committed? In the US where I reside, or in Canada where the harm was done? On the internet, the harm is typically done outside the border where the person is. Now, in the case of warez, there are three parties, and one victim. The UL and DL are parties to this, and the company whose stuff is being warez is the victim. If either the UL or DL is in the US, then the US should be all over them. If the UL is outside the US but the software owner is in the US, then they US should be able to extradite since the victim is in the US. If the DL is outside the US, then the US doesn't touch no matter what. Simple...
Australians can work the warez scene all they want, so long as UL is in Australia only hosting Australian software. That's consistent with most laws.
This is really cool.
I live in a major metropolitan area in California and got a quote of $2900 for pickup in 30 minutes. I work for the government and SOOOO wish I had one of these CDs right now.
I wonder what that phone call from Redmond would be like...
He's a businessman, and the kiddies that like his fancy animated fish don't care if it was rendered or developed on a Mac or not.
Yep. A year or two into his iCEO role, he was asked in an interview what computer he uses day to day. He said it was an Intel machine (Thinkpad, I think) running OpenStep.
Most evidence is that he's a very bottom line kind of guy. If Apple's hardware sucks, he's not using it. And I think that's how a lot of Apple's decisions get made (for good or bad): Steve won't release a product that he won't use himself. He doesn't see the utility in the Newton, so the Newton goes. He sees the utility in the iPod, so it gets the go-ahead.
It might sound stupid to run a company like this, but then he's not the only guy that does things this way. Warren Buffett makes a lot of decisions on the same rules. He considered buying Sees candy, Bombardier, and Dairy Queen because he liked the products. When the financials and management team checks out, he buys. But his personal preference is a big part of the decision.
Ok, Copernicus, explain why Windows is more expensive than a Celeron with 30M transistors that required a $2B foundry and arguably about as many man-hours from end-to-end as Windows to produce?
Besides, how many here would consider Windows to be a substantially improved product if it had perhaps half as many lines of code? Particularly if they removed the buggy half.
I bet you're just another insecure Windows user...