Actually, 'loosing' instead of 'losing' was more egregious than 'more' instead of 'most';-)
Heh. I actually didn't have that reaction. I was a little confused by his original post and his clarification actually helped. As for "loosing" versus "losing," that mistake is ubiquitous on the web and it drives me crazy, but I have to admit that most of the people making that mistake are native English speakers; I'm a lot more inclined to overlook it when it's posted by a non-native English speaker.
Many people wants _real_ freedom for their software
No, they don't. If they did, they'd use GNU GPL v3.
But I think you mean the opposite of what you said: people want to be free to do whatever they want with the software, including taking away the software's freedom.
That's the thing. Free software is not about your freedom, it's about the software's freedom. It is not for the benefit of anyone in particular, it is for the benefit of the whole humanity. When you think about where rms came from, and when you read his writings, you realize that his ideal is not an indifferent "here's some code, use as you wish". It is an ideologically grounded "here's some code, it's for everyone to use, and if you build upon it, the result is also for everyone to use".
In other words, he was using the common English meaning of "freedom" rather than Stallman's Orwellian redefinition of the word.
The main thing that the original article is ignoring is the fact that the advertised EPA mileage for all cars (not just hybrids) is measured under idealized conditions that are not particularly close to real-world driving conditions, and the rated mileage for most cars, hybrid or not, is usually substantially greater than the mileage that the average driver will achieve.
For instance: I once owned a Saturn (non hybrid) that was rated for around 40 MPG (I can't remember the exact number, but it was definitely in the 35 to 40 MPG region). However, when new I believe my actual mileage was under 30 MPG and over the life of the car it drifted downwards until I was generally getting less than 25MPG.
My next car was a Prius that was rated 60 MPG highway and 66 MPG city (the only car I ever saw that had a higher mileage rated for city; that was second generation). I typically got 40 MPG. I was using it for relatively short trips, which is worst case for the Prius. When my wife took it on longer trips with mostly highway driving, she would get around 47 MPG.
The point is, I was satisfied because the mileage was far better than the Saturn, even though the Prius had a much larger and more comfortable interior. It fell below the rated mileage, but not really worse in this respect than the Saturn, proportionately speaking.
Some new hybrid owners get upset about the car not getting the rated mileage; many of these owners don't seem to have actually measured the mileage that they were getting in their previous non-hybrid car and just assume that it was getting its rated mileage. So they'll say "this car isn't getting any better mileage than my own car!" but they are invariably comparing apples to oranges: actual mileage of the hybrid vs. rated mileage of the old car.
I agree that TFA seems biased and not too well informed. I kind of doubt a class action suit on this basis would succeed.
So you'd deny Keith Henson his satellite launching whip patent [google.com] - just because he can't afford to buy a 747, modify it to attach the tow cable, and do aerobatics with it until he gets a payload out of the atmosphere?
Yes! That's a perfect example! That patent should have been denied!
Only people that invent stuff should get patents. An invention isn't just sitting around thinking up crap. Anyone can do that. To qualify as the inventor, you have to show that the idea is actually physically realizable, you have to work out all of the kinks to get it to work.
If you have an idea that sounds good but you can't afford to actually develop it into an invention, you shouldn't get a patent. Saying you could have invented it if you could have raised the money to develop it isn't enough. Hey, I could have been a surgeon if I could have afforded medical school! So maybe I should get a surgeon's salary.
Well, apparently that isn't the way it works -- apparently you can come up with some scheme and if someone eventually does it in actuality, they have to pay you! But it shouldn't work that way...
I actually thought you were joking (I have moderator points and I was going to mod you funny) until I read down your list and saw Barenaked Ladies (who should be sued for false advertising, by the way! Barenaked Ladies indeed!).
Besides them and possibly Sarah McLachlan, are you really under the impression that most people have heard of ANY of these?
OK, I'll give you an honest answer. The link you gave is peeing and moaning about how long it takes OS X to start a thread compared to other OS's, but if the thread is doing any real work, it is not going to matter if it took a few more microseconds or milliseconds to spawn it. This is a complete red herring. If you've got a real compute-bounded task that can benifit from mutliple threads, then OS X is going to do fine, the extra time it may have taken to spawn the threads will be completely trivial. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you are doing some heavy duty image processing with an application that can take advantage of multiple processors, the octo-core Mac Pro _will_ be nearly twice as fast as the quad-core Mac Pro.
If you have an application that is spending more time spawning threads than executing the threads, then I would question the software design, but furthermore I would say that if the threads are spending so little time actually processing, then execution time is going to seem instantaneous regardless of operating system. The sole exception would have to be an application that does nothing _else_ than spawn threads.
I don't think Apple is plannng on fixing this problem because they probably give higher priority to fixing real problems.
Sharkey's post is incorrect and the parent is correct, as can be discovered by following the link Sharkey provided. The only mystery is: why wasn't Sharkey's post modded DOWN.
The link you provided shows you can get dual-dual at 3GHz or dual-quad at 2.66GHz. The parent's point was Apple's selling a dual-quad at 3GHz. What's your point?
The one statement that made this post lose a lot of credibility for me was:
"yes, I ran Word 2003 in Parallels"
Obviously that would solve the compatibility problems and should be just as fast. If she still thought it wasn't fast enough at that point, I'd have to say the problem was psychological, i.e. she must have perceived it as slower simply because she knew she was using a Mac.
"The sad, but obvious fact is that Word runs fastest natively under Windows on a PC."
If you were running it under Parallels, then it was running natively under Windows on a PC (a Mac, but as you point out the identical hardware specs; I don't think the Apple logo on the case was slowing it down).
Although this AC has a point, keep in mind that the Apple stock price has been run up recently in part due to rumors about the iPhone's imminent introduction. This was the reason for the pullback, expectations (totally based on rumor, not on any official announcement from Apple) for the iPhone had been factored into the price of the stock, so naturally any rumor of a delay would cause a decline in the price. In my opinion, the run-up in price due to the expectation of the iPhone was just as irrational as the drop on the delay rumor. But the point is, the stock goes up as well as down on rumors and comments by analysts that are all unacknowleded by Apple.
Having said that, I applaud Apple's attitude, which is: "We won't float vaporware and make promises that may or may not be kept. We will announce when we actually have the goods." That's an admirable stance. On the other hand, you can't blame the analysts for second guessing -- that's their job. But they are going to get it wrong sometimes (often?) and it's not Apple's fault when that happens. Ditto for the stock price; it's going to fluctuate quite a bit due to investor expectations, but it isn't Apple's fault when the expectations are too high unless they stoked the expecations themselves. Yes, Apple has an interest in keeping a lock on information that could unreasonably raise expectations (like revealing details of projects like the iPhone that may eventually be marketed soon, later or possibly never), but they will never be able to prevent speculation and the concomitant effect on stock price.
Good point, but remember that conservation of energy is not the only conservation law involved; angular momentum is also conserved and I think each of the situations you mention, while obeying conservation of energy, would violate conservation of angular momentum.
I think it is perfectly reasonable of you to make purchase decisions based on what you expect to be able to do with the hardware and the software. It's your money.
On the other hand, I think it is probably OK with Apple to lose you as a customer. This is because the profit they would make from sales to people like you would not match the profits they would lose from Mac users foregoing Mac purchases to run OS X on a PC. They make much more money from a hardware sale than an OS X sale.
I think the opinion piece at Daring Fireball had a great analysis of the situation. Apple will take steps that are likely to increase the sales of hardware at the profitable end of the market, but they won't take steps (like marketing OS X on a PC) that are likely to decimate their hardware sales. They tried this before; if they license the OS to run on non-Apple hardware, they will _not_ simply add OS X users -- it is certain that many people that were already buying their hardware and using OS X will make their next hardware purchase a non-Apple product. Obviously this is great for consumers, but no company is going to make a decision that will slash their profitablitly for the sake of a tenuous possibility of a gain somewhere down the road.
I'm not sure you understand what "or later" means, then. Which license you accept is up to the LICENSEE, not the licensor.
That means that the person *accepting* the license can choose either GPL 2, GPL 3, etc.
It also means that any further GPL revision cannot add more restrictions--they can always choose to accept it under the older license, which did not contain those restrictions.
Yes, but what if a future version of GPL actually had less restrictions than the former versions? By telling the licensee they can choose at will a later version, you can't tell what they will be able to do with the code. The point isn't what will happen to the rights of the licensee; the point is that the licensor has yielded all control over the code because future versions of the GPL may lift some restrictions that the licensor may have desired simply because they included the clause "or later versions" and they can't really anticipate what the later versions may or may not allow.
Now seeing as you've rudely told me to read the pulp fiction of history - folklore.org, sheesh - I'm going to throw you some real meat to digest. Go read Raskin's own words [vwh.net] and for bonus points go read his thesis "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System". Once you've read all that I'll at least take you seriously.
I had already read the linked site; it's just that a lot of this stuff is disputed by other members of the original Macintosh design team . I don't understand why you take "Raskin's own words" as gospel and label the recollections of Andy Hertzfeld and Bruce Horn and Larry Tesler as pulp fiction. BTW, does a link exist for the thesis in its entirety? (Not being sarcastic, I'd actually like to read it.)
I actually didn't disagree with everything you said in your original post (I only mentioned the parts I disagreed with, and I'd like to second your quote from Raskin:
As I said in my history of the Mac Project (the one currently being serialized in CHAC), the Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small. -- Jef Raskin
...along with your statement in your original post that the universities are the real R&D engines. That's very important to keep in mind, but it applies not just to the Mac but to every new product (ranging from the important ones to the trivial). Every technological advance dependent on the contribution of hundreds or even thousands of individual researchers, not just great leaps made by a handful.
That doesn't in any way mitigate the fact that the designers of the Macintosh at Apple made a crucial step in applying the ideas arrived at by these researchers. I would encourage interested Slashdot readers to read the link to the blog you provided and also read the folklore.org (Hertzfeld's blog) account and reach there own conclusions, not so much about Raskin vs. the other guys but more importantly about the degree of innovation that occurred at Apple at this time.
I think you are the one that is engaging in fantasy. The Mac was _not_ Raskin's idea. He had an idea for an appliance computer that he dubbed Macintosh, but that computer was nothing like what the Mac design ultimately became after Steve Jobs hijacked the project. In fact, Raskin opposed many of the features that eventually distinguished the Macintosh. He opposed for instance: the graphical user interface, the mouse (he wanted to use navigation keys). He eventually had to leave the project because his ideas clashed so much with the direction the machine was going. See www.folklore.org for details.
Of course, in the years before Raskin's death he gave many interviews in which he promoted the idea that he was "father of the Macintosh" and was wont to claim he invented such concepts as click-and-drag -- a claim that seems to be contradicted by people who were actually there.
Actually, the Mac was not created by Jobs, and certainly not by Raskin (he barely had anything to do with the ultimate design). It was created by a team -- a team that worked for _Apple_.
Mac OS was NOT an unremarkable OS, it was completely remarkable for its time. It incorporated many, many ideas that hadn't been implemented in a personal computer before. The fact that a few researchers had been working on GUI concepts didn't make it an "old" field. Taking these ideas and creating a practical product is far from mere integration. The computer only had 64K ROM and 128K ram, so some aspects of the OS would certainly be considered primitive by today's standards (but not from 80's standards, MS marketed a more primitive OS very successfully for years after the Mac was introduced) but it still had a completely bit-mapped display with proportional fonts, a completely realized overlapping window system, completely integrated mouse, no necessity for a command line interface at all... This was not just a reimplementation of some PARC ideas, they improved on many of them and added their own innovations in order to create a coherent product at a price point of $2500. The Macintosh and the Mac OS allowed the ideas of researchers like Douglas Engelbart and the Xerox PARC team to have a large commercial impact, and no one else was even thinking about producing a product like this at the time. Some of the ideas were being used in high end workstations but producing something like this at the personal computer level was unprecedented.
As for buying the program that became iTunes; who cares? Apple has bought software projects before and will again. Seems smart to me. Just because that don't design everything themselves means they aren't innovative?
As far as iPod goes, an idea for an MP3 player was apparently brought to them by Tony Fadell but still Apple designed it themselves. MP3 players were already such old news when the iPod was introduced that even Apple advocates were disappointed at the time (What, this is the big new exciting product -- an MP3 player?) Of course, in retrospect, you could say iPod was another MP3 player in the way that Macintosh was another personal computer. Anyway, when somebody brings an idea to Dell for a product that no one else is selling or at least works in a way that no other product works, and they run with it and develop and market the product, I'll concede you have a point.
I'll just close with this -- anyone who wants to know if what Apple does to produce a new product is more like R&D or more like integration should peruse www.folklore.org or, equivalently, read the book "Revolution in the Valley" by Andy Hertzfeld and then decide whether the Mac team was just throwing a bunch of preexisting ideas together or if they were really inventing something.
The thing that amazes me is how quickly the stainless steel back accumulates scratches. Of course, I don't blame Apple for this. I have an new iPod 20GB that I've only had for a couple of months. There are a couple of serious scuff marks in the central area and several noticeable scratches at random spots.
None of this really matters in any practical sense, but I think the reason it bugs people (it even bugs me a little) is because the device is so shiny and pristine when you first remove it from its packaging. We'd like it to stay that way for a while, but the scratches show up almost immediately. For some reason I notice it first in the stainless steel part -- maybe the scratches are just more noticeable there.
Note: it is unlikely that Apple is going to go to a material more scratch resistant than steel (cost is prohibitive). So anyone who wants to keep their iPod in pristine condition should put it in a case from the minute they remove it from the packaging.
Actually, you brought up one of the points I wanted to make, except I would argue it from the opposite direction. Do you know anyone who relys on eyeglasses that will just carry the glasses around in their pockets, and worse, pockets containing other junk like keys, change, etc.? If you do this, they will end up good and scratched up. The anti-scratch coating does not make them invulnerable.
Maybe this is more of an issue with people who just use glasses for reading, as we don't wear them all the time and so we are constantly taking them off and carrying them around. I have a few pair of reading glasses and I have a case for each pair and am careful to always put them in a case before putting them in my pocket. I have an iPod which I don't have a case for, and although I mostly use it in my car, I do carry it in my pocket sometimes. The glasses have few scratches, the iPods has more. Wow, must be because of that anti-scratch coating!
Now, why do I take such good care of a pair of $20 glasses that I bought at the drug store and not the $300 iPod? Because noticeable scratches on my reading glasses are really distracting to me; the scratches on the iPod don't bug me that much.
By the way, I've had this latest iPod only a couple of months, without extensive handling, but the stainless steel back has a couple of scuff marks and several easily identifiable scratches. It looks more scratched up than the polycarbonate front (I'm not saying it _is_ more scratched up, I'm saying the scratches are more noticeable in normal light on the steel side). Unless you can get an anti-scratch coating made out of diamond, I don't think you are going to get it more scratch-resistant than stainless steel, and that collects noticable scratches pretty readily.
It's not the material or the coating. It's the handling. The scratches don't bug me, but if they bug you, you should get a case like I use for my glasses.
> I wonder how Job's will keynote this. Not a guy who likes to say 'I was wrong'
He's done it plenty of times. Not said "I was wrong" but introduced some product that has been railed about for years but Apple held out on -- the latest example would be the Mac Mini. He simply says something like "For years people have been telling us we should have [fill in longed for product here] and I think those people are really going to like this..." This is usually followed by wild applause from the keynote audience.
Sure, you're not going to hear any "mea culpa" on stage. But frankly, if this the above is the tack Jobs takes (as it undoubtedly will be) then I think he has a more balanced and rational view than the multi-button fanatics posting here (not referring to the parent but some other postings). As so many have already pointed out, OS X has supported two (and even three) buttons and scroll wheels from its inception, so the only issue here is the existence of an Apple-branded two button mouse. This seems like a pretty minor issue; if Apple was really so fanatically fixated on one button mice, OS X wouldn't support anything else.
Robert X. Cringely did a documetary on the PC industry that aired on PBS a few years back called "Revenge of the Nerds." There's a very minor part of that documetary that has always stuck with me. Right at the beginning several people are quoted including a ten year old boy who loves to dabble in electronics and technology. When he's asked what his friends say about this, he says "Boy, he's a nerd. Yeah, but I don't mind, I'm used to being called a nerd, can't have other people stop your dreams."
I found that very touching, and I wonder if that attitude has something to do with the reason why there aren't more women in technological fields and especially in IT (not to put too fine a point on it, how many ten year old girls can you find that would say something similar).
The concern about the lack of women in IT and related fields is mostly linked to the salaries involved (not too many projects devoted to encouraging girls to become truck drivers). And when a high paying field like IT has such a small percentage of women, the goal is to remove any barriers that may specifally target women.
Up until now the emphasis was to remove biases in education (biases like calling on boys more often than girls in math classes, yadayadayada) But I always thought that the social factors outside of the classroom were very important and I'm glad to see that this is being recongnized, although I think the approach to address the problem is wrong.
Teaching nine-year-olds that there is no stigma is pointless. Their peers will be glad to inform them that there is a stigma. The question is, why are there more boys at that age that are willing to resist the stigma and be, to a certain extent, loners than there are girls?
The most frustrating thing is that the choices nine-year-olds make about what interests they pursue will acutally influence what career path they start to persue when they are twice that age; but the social pressures that they hold all-important at the age of nine will become practically irrelevant when they are adults (or I should say that they may still find social pressure to be motivating as adults but it will be based on a totally different set of criteria).
My oldest stepdaughter was about 14 when I married her mother. At that age she thought anybody who had anything to do with a computer was impossibly geeky, and she certainly wouldn't touch one herself. Now she is 22 and a journalist and you couldn't pry her iBook out of her hands.
I have three other daughters, the youngest one is six. I hope they can have a choice of careers from the widest selection that is open to them, but there is this problem, I think, that we socialize girls to be more dependent on the opinion of their peers while boys apparently can sometimes be more independent. Rather than trying to convince girls that IT is social, non-stigmatized, etc., I feel we should be trying to get them to be more resistant to socal pressure. It isn't easy -- I didn't teach them that their friend's opinion is so important, but they pick it up anyway.
Schools can be helpful in changing this, but of course the real problem has to be recognized before solutions can be sought.
This is why I say GPL is only free in the sense of Free Beer, not Free Speech. Of course, the GPL advocates always claim the exact opposite -- it's very Orwellian!
Actually, when Al Gore was informed that he got the majority of votes to be elected to the Apple board of directors, he initially thought that meant he would _not_ be joining the board. It was then explained to him that board elections do not operate under the same rules as American presidential elections...
No wonder the machines didn't actually go up in price. If they had, then I'd have to pay more to get the *same* performance as before.
Oh, please! Be fair, the machines didn't just "not go up in price." They went down in price! The new dual 1GHz machines now sell at the mid-level price, several hundred dollars less than the old 1GHz. Even if the performance was basically unchanged across the board (which I don't beleive the Bare Feats benchmark proves anyway) the price/performance ratio has definitely improved.
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Actually, 'loosing' instead of 'losing' was more egregious than 'more' instead of 'most' ;-)
Heh. I actually didn't have that reaction. I was a little confused by his original post and his clarification actually helped. As for "loosing" versus "losing," that mistake is ubiquitous on the web and it drives me crazy, but I have to admit that most of the people making that mistake are native English speakers; I'm a lot more inclined to overlook it when it's posted by a non-native English speaker.
Many people wants _real_ freedom for their software
No, they don't. If they did, they'd use GNU GPL v3.
But I think you mean the opposite of what you said: people want to be free to do whatever they want with the software, including taking away the software's freedom.
That's the thing. Free software is not about your freedom, it's about the software's freedom. It is not for the benefit of anyone in particular, it is for the benefit of the whole humanity. When you think about where rms came from, and when you read his writings, you realize that his ideal is not an indifferent "here's some code, use as you wish". It is an ideologically grounded "here's some code, it's for everyone to use, and if you build upon it, the result is also for everyone to use".
In other words, he was using the common English meaning of "freedom" rather than Stallman's Orwellian redefinition of the word.
The main thing that the original article is ignoring is the fact that the advertised EPA mileage for all cars (not just hybrids) is measured under idealized conditions that are not particularly close to real-world driving conditions, and the rated mileage for most cars, hybrid or not, is usually substantially greater than the mileage that the average driver will achieve.
For instance: I once owned a Saturn (non hybrid) that was rated for around 40 MPG (I can't remember the exact number, but it was definitely in the 35 to 40 MPG region). However, when new I believe my actual mileage was under 30 MPG and over the life of the car it drifted downwards until I was generally getting less than 25MPG.
My next car was a Prius that was rated 60 MPG highway and 66 MPG city (the only car I ever saw that had a higher mileage rated for city; that was second generation). I typically got 40 MPG. I was using it for relatively short trips, which is worst case for the Prius. When my wife took it on longer trips with mostly highway driving, she would get around 47 MPG.
The point is, I was satisfied because the mileage was far better than the Saturn, even though the Prius had a much larger and more comfortable interior. It fell below the rated mileage, but not really worse in this respect than the Saturn, proportionately speaking.
Some new hybrid owners get upset about the car not getting the rated mileage; many of these owners don't seem to have actually measured the mileage that they were getting in their previous non-hybrid car and just assume that it was getting its rated mileage. So they'll say "this car isn't getting any better mileage than my own car!" but they are invariably comparing apples to oranges: actual mileage of the hybrid vs. rated mileage of the old car.
I agree that TFA seems biased and not too well informed. I kind of doubt a class action suit on this basis would succeed.
Thanks. I'll bet they never thought of that!
You'd put words in his mouth and then fire him for those words? Gee, I'm glad I don't work for you...
The title of the Slashdot post says 33 developers. That's a lot of developers. This is an important clarification.
Yes! That's a perfect example! That patent should have been denied!
Only people that invent stuff should get patents. An invention isn't just sitting around thinking up crap. Anyone can do that. To qualify as the inventor, you have to show that the idea is actually physically realizable, you have to work out all of the kinks to get it to work.
If you have an idea that sounds good but you can't afford to actually develop it into an invention, you shouldn't get a patent. Saying you could have invented it if you could have raised the money to develop it isn't enough. Hey, I could have been a surgeon if I could have afforded medical school! So maybe I should get a surgeon's salary.
Well, apparently that isn't the way it works -- apparently you can come up with some scheme and if someone eventually does it in actuality, they have to pay you! But it shouldn't work that way...
I actually thought you were joking (I have moderator points and I was going to mod you funny) until I read down your list and saw Barenaked Ladies (who should be sued for false advertising, by the way! Barenaked Ladies indeed!).
Besides them and possibly Sarah McLachlan, are you really under the impression that most people have heard of ANY of these?
OK, I'll give you an honest answer. The link you gave is peeing and moaning about how long it takes OS X to start a thread compared to other OS's, but if the thread is doing any real work, it is not going to matter if it took a few more microseconds or milliseconds to spawn it. This is a complete red herring. If you've got a real compute-bounded task that can benifit from mutliple threads, then OS X is going to do fine, the extra time it may have taken to spawn the threads will be completely trivial. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you are doing some heavy duty image processing with an application that can take advantage of multiple processors, the octo-core Mac Pro _will_ be nearly twice as fast as the quad-core Mac Pro.
If you have an application that is spending more time spawning threads than executing the threads, then I would question the software design, but furthermore I would say that if the threads are spending so little time actually processing, then execution time is going to seem instantaneous regardless of operating system. The sole exception would have to be an application that does nothing _else_ than spawn threads.
I don't think Apple is plannng on fixing this problem because they probably give higher priority to fixing real problems.
Sharkey's post is incorrect and the parent is correct, as can be discovered by following the link Sharkey provided. The only mystery is: why wasn't Sharkey's post modded DOWN.
The link you provided shows you can get dual-dual at 3GHz or dual-quad at 2.66GHz. The parent's point was Apple's selling a dual-quad at 3GHz. What's your point?
The one statement that made this post lose a lot of credibility for me was:
"yes, I ran Word 2003 in Parallels"
Obviously that would solve the compatibility problems and should be just as fast. If she still thought it wasn't fast enough at that point, I'd have to say the problem was psychological, i.e. she must have perceived it as slower simply because she knew she was using a Mac.
"The sad, but obvious fact is that Word runs fastest natively under Windows on a PC."
If you were running it under Parallels, then it was running natively under Windows on a PC (a Mac, but as you point out the identical hardware specs; I don't think the Apple logo on the case was slowing it down).
Although this AC has a point, keep in mind that the Apple stock price has been run up recently in part due to rumors about the iPhone's imminent introduction. This was the reason for the pullback, expectations (totally based on rumor, not on any official announcement from Apple) for the iPhone had been factored into the price of the stock, so naturally any rumor of a delay would cause a decline in the price. In my opinion, the run-up in price due to the expectation of the iPhone was just as irrational as the drop on the delay rumor. But the point is, the stock goes up as well as down on rumors and comments by analysts that are all unacknowleded by Apple.
Having said that, I applaud Apple's attitude, which is: "We won't float vaporware and make promises that may or may not be kept. We will announce when we actually have the goods." That's an admirable stance. On the other hand, you can't blame the analysts for second guessing -- that's their job. But they are going to get it wrong sometimes (often?) and it's not Apple's fault when that happens. Ditto for the stock price; it's going to fluctuate quite a bit due to investor expectations, but it isn't Apple's fault when the expectations are too high unless they stoked the expecations themselves. Yes, Apple has an interest in keeping a lock on information that could unreasonably raise expectations (like revealing details of projects like the iPhone that may eventually be marketed soon, later or possibly never), but they will never be able to prevent speculation and the concomitant effect on stock price.
Good point, but remember that conservation of energy is not the only conservation law involved; angular momentum is also conserved and I think each of the situations you mention, while obeying conservation of energy, would violate conservation of angular momentum.
I think it is perfectly reasonable of you to make purchase decisions based on what you expect to be able to do with the hardware and the software. It's your money.
On the other hand, I think it is probably OK with Apple to lose you as a customer. This is because the profit they would make from sales to people like you would not match the profits they would lose from Mac users foregoing Mac purchases to run OS X on a PC. They make much more money from a hardware sale than an OS X sale.
I think the opinion piece at Daring Fireball had a great analysis of the situation. Apple will take steps that are likely to increase the sales of hardware at the profitable end of the market, but they won't take steps (like marketing OS X on a PC) that are likely to decimate their hardware sales. They tried this before; if they license the OS to run on non-Apple hardware, they will _not_ simply add OS X users -- it is certain that many people that were already buying their hardware and using OS X will make their next hardware purchase a non-Apple product. Obviously this is great for consumers, but no company is going to make a decision that will slash their profitablitly for the sake of a tenuous possibility of a gain somewhere down the road.
Yes, but what if a future version of GPL actually had less restrictions than the former versions? By telling the licensee they can choose at will a later version, you can't tell what they will be able to do with the code. The point isn't what will happen to the rights of the licensee; the point is that the licensor has yielded all control over the code because future versions of the GPL may lift some restrictions that the licensor may have desired simply because they included the clause "or later versions" and they can't really anticipate what the later versions may or may not allow.
- Dennis D.
I think you are the one that is engaging in fantasy. The Mac was _not_ Raskin's idea. He had an idea for an appliance computer that he dubbed Macintosh, but that computer was nothing like what the Mac design ultimately became after Steve Jobs hijacked the project. In fact, Raskin opposed many of the features that eventually distinguished the Macintosh. He opposed for instance: the graphical user interface, the mouse (he wanted to use navigation keys). He eventually had to leave the project because his ideas clashed so much with the direction the machine was going. See www.folklore.org for details.
Of course, in the years before Raskin's death he gave many interviews in which he promoted the idea that he was "father of the Macintosh" and was wont to claim he invented such concepts as click-and-drag -- a claim that seems to be contradicted by people who were actually there.
Actually, the Mac was not created by Jobs, and certainly not by Raskin (he barely had anything to do with the ultimate design). It was created by a team -- a team that worked for _Apple_.
Mac OS was NOT an unremarkable OS, it was completely remarkable for its time. It incorporated many, many ideas that hadn't been implemented in a personal computer before. The fact that a few researchers had been working on GUI concepts didn't make it an "old" field. Taking these ideas and creating a practical product is far from mere integration. The computer only had 64K ROM and 128K ram, so some aspects of the OS would certainly be considered primitive by today's standards (but not from 80's standards, MS marketed a more primitive OS very successfully for years after the Mac was introduced) but it still had a completely bit-mapped display with proportional fonts, a completely realized overlapping window system, completely integrated mouse, no necessity for a command line interface at all... This was not just a reimplementation of some PARC ideas, they improved on many of them and added their own innovations in order to create a coherent product at a price point of $2500. The Macintosh and the Mac OS allowed the ideas of researchers like Douglas Engelbart and the Xerox PARC team to have a large commercial impact, and no one else was even thinking about producing a product like this at the time. Some of the ideas were being used in high end workstations but producing something like this at the personal computer level was unprecedented.
As for buying the program that became iTunes; who cares? Apple has bought software projects before and will again. Seems smart to me. Just because that don't design everything themselves means they aren't innovative?
As far as iPod goes, an idea for an MP3 player was apparently brought to them by Tony Fadell but still Apple designed it themselves. MP3 players were already such old news when the iPod was introduced that even Apple advocates were disappointed at the time (What, this is the big new exciting product -- an MP3 player?) Of course, in retrospect, you could say iPod was another MP3 player in the way that Macintosh was another personal computer. Anyway, when somebody brings an idea to Dell for a product that no one else is selling or at least works in a way that no other product works, and they run with it and develop and market the product, I'll concede you have a point.
I'll just close with this -- anyone who wants to know if what Apple does to produce a new product is more like R&D or more like integration should peruse www.folklore.org or, equivalently, read the book "Revolution in the Valley" by Andy Hertzfeld and then decide whether the Mac team was just throwing a bunch of preexisting ideas together or if they were really inventing something.
- Dennis D.
The thing that amazes me is how quickly the stainless steel back accumulates scratches. Of course, I don't blame Apple for this. I have an new iPod 20GB that I've only had for a couple of months. There are a couple of serious scuff marks in the central area and several noticeable scratches at random spots.
None of this really matters in any practical sense, but I think the reason it bugs people (it even bugs me a little) is because the device is so shiny and pristine when you first remove it from its packaging. We'd like it to stay that way for a while, but the scratches show up almost immediately. For some reason I notice it first in the stainless steel part -- maybe the scratches are just more noticeable there.
Note: it is unlikely that Apple is going to go to a material more scratch resistant than steel (cost is prohibitive). So anyone who wants to keep their iPod in pristine condition should put it in a case from the minute they remove it from the packaging.
- Dennis D.
Actually, you brought up one of the points I wanted to make, except I would argue it from the opposite direction. Do you know anyone who relys on eyeglasses that will just carry the glasses around in their pockets, and worse, pockets containing other junk like keys, change, etc.? If you do this, they will end up good and scratched up. The anti-scratch coating does not make them invulnerable.
Maybe this is more of an issue with people who just use glasses for reading, as we don't wear them all the time and so we are constantly taking them off and carrying them around. I have a few pair of reading glasses and I have a case for each pair and am careful to always put them in a case before putting them in my pocket. I have an iPod which I don't have a case for, and although I mostly use it in my car, I do carry it in my pocket sometimes. The glasses have few scratches, the iPods has more. Wow, must be because of that anti-scratch coating!
Now, why do I take such good care of a pair of $20 glasses that I bought at the drug store and not the $300 iPod? Because noticeable scratches on my reading glasses are really distracting to me; the scratches on the iPod don't bug me that much. By the way, I've had this latest iPod only a couple of months, without extensive handling, but the stainless steel back has a couple of scuff marks and several easily identifiable scratches. It looks more scratched up than the polycarbonate front (I'm not saying it _is_ more scratched up, I'm saying the scratches are more noticeable in normal light on the steel side). Unless you can get an anti-scratch coating made out of diamond, I don't think you are going to get it more scratch-resistant than stainless steel, and that collects noticable scratches pretty readily.It's not the material or the coating. It's the handling. The scratches don't bug me, but if they bug you, you should get a case like I use for my glasses.
- Dennis D.
> I wonder how Job's will keynote this. Not a guy who likes to say 'I was wrong'
He's done it plenty of times. Not said "I was wrong" but introduced some product that has been railed about for years but Apple held out on -- the latest example would be the Mac Mini. He simply says something like "For years people have been telling us we should have [fill in longed for product here] and I think those people are really going to like this..." This is usually followed by wild applause from the keynote audience.
Sure, you're not going to hear any "mea culpa" on stage. But frankly, if this the above is the tack Jobs takes (as it undoubtedly will be) then I think he has a more balanced and rational view than the multi-button fanatics posting here (not referring to the parent but some other postings). As so many have already pointed out, OS X has supported two (and even three) buttons and scroll wheels from its inception, so the only issue here is the existence of an Apple-branded two button mouse. This seems like a pretty minor issue; if Apple was really so fanatically fixated on one button mice, OS X wouldn't support anything else.
Robert X. Cringely did a documetary on the PC industry that aired on PBS a few years back called "Revenge of the Nerds." There's a very minor part of that documetary that has always stuck with me. Right at the beginning several people are quoted including a ten year old boy who loves to dabble in electronics and technology. When he's asked what his friends say about this, he says "Boy, he's a nerd. Yeah, but I don't mind, I'm used to being called a nerd, can't have other people stop your dreams."
I found that very touching, and I wonder if that attitude has something to do with the reason why there aren't more women in technological fields and especially in IT (not to put too fine a point on it, how many ten year old girls can you find that would say something similar).
The concern about the lack of women in IT and related fields is mostly linked to the salaries involved (not too many projects devoted to encouraging girls to become truck drivers). And when a high paying field like IT has such a small percentage of women, the goal is to remove any barriers that may specifally target women.
Up until now the emphasis was to remove biases in education (biases like calling on boys more often than girls in math classes, yadayadayada) But I always thought that the social factors outside of the classroom were very important and I'm glad to see that this is being recongnized, although I think the approach to address the problem is wrong.
Teaching nine-year-olds that there is no stigma is pointless. Their peers will be glad to inform them that there is a stigma. The question is, why are there more boys at that age that are willing to resist the stigma and be, to a certain extent, loners than there are girls?
The most frustrating thing is that the choices nine-year-olds make about what interests they pursue will acutally influence what career path they start to persue when they are twice that age; but the social pressures that they hold all-important at the age of nine will become practically irrelevant when they are adults (or I should say that they may still find social pressure to be motivating as adults but it will be based on a totally different set of criteria).
My oldest stepdaughter was about 14 when I married her mother. At that age she thought anybody who had anything to do with a computer was impossibly geeky, and she certainly wouldn't touch one herself. Now she is 22 and a journalist and you couldn't pry her iBook out of her hands.
I have three other daughters, the youngest one is six. I hope they can have a choice of careers from the widest selection that is open to them, but there is this problem, I think, that we socialize girls to be more dependent on the opinion of their peers while boys apparently can sometimes be more independent. Rather than trying to convince girls that IT is social, non-stigmatized, etc., I feel we should be trying to get them to be more resistant to socal pressure. It isn't easy -- I didn't teach them that their friend's opinion is so important, but they pick it up anyway.
Schools can be helpful in changing this, but of course the real problem has to be recognized before solutions can be sought.
This is why I say GPL is only free in the sense of Free Beer, not Free Speech. Of course, the GPL advocates always claim the exact opposite -- it's very Orwellian!
The main obstacle to computerization is that they haven't been able to come up with a satisfactory computer simulation of a "hanging chad."
Actually, when Al Gore was informed that he got the majority of votes to be elected to the Apple board of directors, he initially thought that meant he would _not_ be joining the board. It was then explained to him that board elections do not operate under the same rules as American presidential elections...
Oh, please! Be fair, the machines didn't just "not go up in price." They went down in price! The new dual 1GHz machines now sell at the mid-level price, several hundred dollars less than the old 1GHz. Even if the performance was basically unchanged across the board (which I don't beleive the Bare Feats benchmark proves anyway) the price/performance ratio has definitely improved.
- Dennis D.