I believe you are backwards in your thinking. Apples reputation of just working comes from the fact that there is a limit and tight control over the hardware and software. Double edged sword. The disadvantage is the consumer loses choice and pays more but for many people that is offset by the increased chance that it will just work. The PC world running MS Windows could do the same but no vendor is willing to risk that. Dell (or any computer assembler) COULD sell add on hardware that is thoughly tested with specific models of laptops and desktops and they could guarentee that it would work and work consistently. That concept is NOT unique to Apple at all, look at the x86 server market for a perfect example, very specific equipment and very specific options and upgrades and they work great and last long time. Sure, that cheaper raid controller from the computer show might work in that HP G4 but who knows. The downside for a company that tries this in the consumer market faces too much competition and no guarentee that the users will come back to buy their tested and guarenteed upgrades. If the company could force you to buy from them, they would. Apple has the choice and the ability to make that happen. Good or bad depending on what you are looking for in a personal computer and how much you are willing to pay.
Maybe off topic but it was specifically mentioned in the linked WSJ article.
A year ago, for instance, a basic mobile phone plan from Verizon cost $39.95 and included 400 minutes of talk time. The price hasn't changed, but the minutes have, increasing to 450. That's a 12-month price drop of 12.5% per minute of talking, which, if it involved PCs, would be downright inflationary.
I found the exact opposite with cellular service. The amount of options and "extras" make the per minute price appear lower but I doubt your actual bill will be any lower at all. I know that Verizon has been shrinking its America Choice coverage area as it decreases roaming agreements with other carriers. Sprint for example, has started charging more for messaging and used to povide free Vision access (internet access via the phone) for free on its higher priced plans but has dropped that. Cingular has NO unlimited messaging option any longer and also charges more for that service as well as its data service. I would say, overall, cell phone service has increased over the last few years. Maybe more minutes are included but they are defineatly making up the difference in other areas. For me to get the same functionality and options I have now with Sprint, would cost me about $40 more a month then it did just two years ago and switching to Verizon or Cingular would cost about $60 more a month then I pay now.
Any stories about big things to come, Apple has something exciting, Steve Jobs knows what he is doing, some master plan to take on the world blah blah blah. You guys need to realize that according to an article at the NYT and quoted elsewhere, Apple admitted to switching to Intel because IBM would not cut the price of the CPU's that Apple buys. IBM sees little profit from Apple now and would not budge, it was not worth a potential loss to IBM to keep supplying CPUs to Apple at a potential loss. It is nothing more then that plain and simple, it was a pure business decision for long term savings by Apple. A failed attempt by Apple to negotiate a lower price for a CPU, nothing else. Get over it man...
Jobs is betting the farm on OS X. His opinion at this point is that OS X has such an amazing lead on Windows, that it will eclipse Microsoft's offerings.
Your opinion of his opinion does not make sense in the real market (I'd also like to ask how you are aware of his inner feelings). First of all, any company only selling an OS is doomed. You have too much competition and the open source versions are being refined constantly. Yeah, maybe it work for a few years but IMHO, not much more then that. An OS is rapidly becoming a commodity and the current largest player MS has changed gears as well. Another point is if he, you and how many other people believe that OSX is SO much better then Windows, why is it not making higher sales or large jumps in sales in the existing open market? It's been out and avialable for what, four years? You think the general consumer is not buying it because they don't like the current model of CPU and suddenly this is change is the diamond?
He's only been waiting for the development of the OS to reach a level that he feels is "done". Care to expand on that? That statement does not make sense to me. Are you implying that the OS he is so confident and will take world consumers by storm and Apple is betting the farm on (in your words) will be "done" at some point? How do they make any money after that?
I am not trying to rag on any OS as I have nothing against Apple or MS and this is not meant to be a negative comment against either, just that your points do not make sense based on the current market and your inside Steves head thoughts are comical.
Face it, until there are a lot of changes made by vendors and MS running as anything other than admin makes life difficult for regular consumers.
Like just about every PC game made in the last few years that use some type of protection like SecuRom or Safedisk. This is straight from the SecuRom web site and references the SecuRom Business edition which is NOT what PC Games use, notice the asssumption for home users:
The SecuROM(TM) Business Edition provides the following features for maximum user convenience:
* Consumers can use SecuROM(TM)-protected software without Windows administrator rights. This is important in office environments (home users have administrator rights).
Administrator rights and the disadvantage of using them are completely blown off by software makers for home users.
This reply is not specifically to you but for the EULA threads in general. I mentioned slipsteaming in an earlier thread but it applies here as well. MS itself supports modifying the original XP distibution media and rolling your own modified version, where in the EULA determines what modifications are and are not "allowed"? Just because it might seem logical because they sell two different versions that doing this should violate something does not cut it. What if you modified a few bytes to make the BSOD (blue screen of death) a RSOD? Would it only violate the EULA is MS sold a different version with a RSOD as well? How would something that be worded in the EULA? What about modifying some undocumented hex value in the registry to change something? Is that an EULA violation as well?
I understand your issues about what is involved but the procedure is almost indentical to slipstreaming a service pack and people do that all the time.
At least it will mean that they probably don't have the correct evidence to sue a lot of people they wanted to.
My understanding is most of the evidence they have now for the individuals they have sued is nothing more then a list of file names from an automatted search and an ip address. I do not know how that is considered evidence at all. What makes it even worse is the RIAA and others have admitted to posting bogus files to P2P themselves.
You mean scour.net? I used that for a while back about 1997-1998. They even had a plugin you could download to allow single click to get the individual files from the remote computers. Of course I bypassed that whole concept and used smbclient on my Linux file server. This provided several advantages over using Windows to get the remote files. I could telnet/ssh into my home PC from work, use screen and smbmount to connect to shares listed on scour.net and download *.mp3 or whatever they had. Smbclient acted much more sane when network errors occured, I remeber Windows just hanging and I do not recall 95 having a task manger to kill off explorer. A third advantage was using the -n switch. You could specify your computer name with smbclient to be the same as the Windows 95/98 machine you connected to and it was fooled into not reporting it as a remote connection as the connection would not show up in the Windows connection monitor or the smb plugin offered by the site. I guess Windows got confused but the name and considered the connection to be local. When scour.net finally got taken down, I moved on to scanning subnets with nmap and something similar to NBTScan (NBN?). Not only would NBN report the remote computer names but it would try to login anonymous and a few other common names and passwords to the shares it did find. Not as efficient but fun to play with for a while.
I have a user on my machines called IEUSER with very little privleges. You can create a shortcuts to replace your normal IE shortcuts to start IE as that user automatically with:
Of course you can start any progam in this manner. The problem is when links are clicked from other applications, it starts IE being the default browser with my credentials. I have not figured out that one yet. On a side note, I leave IE as the defualt browser but have Kerio personall firewall set to request permission before allowing IE network access. This way, if a virus/spyware tries to call IE or the IE rending engine which is my default URL handler, I will be prompted by my firewall to allow access. If I did not actively click something to start this, I know something fishy is going on and investigate.
There is a fine line there though. Code and city regulations are normally for big picture items, like rusty cars in the yard, fences falling over etc.. Some HOA's take it to the extreme and complain about house number placement, number and type of trees, garage door always shut, limit of outside toys etc.. Where I live, the houses are far enough apart (avg 3-10 acres with many trees) that it does not matter what one does to their house as you probably can't see it from your house anyway. No HOA required luckily.
Not only stupid and ugly, but how is it blocking radio waves? Although more expensive then vinyl siding, aluminum siding is still an option. In the 70's it was very popular because it was cost effective when compared to other options. My parents had aluminum siding my whole life and we never had reception problems.. These people are whacked.
Others may have said this already but anyway something seems EXTREMELY fishy here..
Naperville library officials said... The scanners, made by Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics Corp....
Are other libraries in the US even thinking about any type of technology in this manner? I may have on my tin foil hat on but it seems to me someone at the Naperville Biometrics Corp has a really good relationship with someone in the Naperville Library or the Naperville city council.
What a way for a town to showcase the work of a local company. Yeah..
It can take an hour just to get the tools together to start a repair on a PC.
Your entire arguement does not make sense because your conclusions about PC hardware all revolve around nothing more then ability to boot from an attached FW device. It would take me 30 seconds to get a recovery going on a PC and there are many ways of doing it, the easiest is insert the OS install CD/DVD and turn on the PC. I do not consider that "hard" by any means. On that note, using your logic, I do not have an external firewire HD or a Mac around so it would take me over an hour to round up what I needed to fix a Mac. You get the tools or equipment you need to fix your exisiting equipment that you have and support, you seem to think it is more logical to have a single repair mechanism and then buy and use equipment that you can repair with it. Do not confuse your lack knowledge with PC repair options to Apple being "light years ahead". Pretty much any PC made in the last three to five years can boot from an external USB device, a floppy, CD/DVD, or remotely over the network, and if the MB and bios support FW, that as well. Not every PC is the same but that is not a technical failing, that was a business decision by that MB manufactor or PC vendor.
Your financial assessment is missing one very important factor. Computer components are far cheaper now then they were in the past. That is not directly related to quality or design. I paid $40 per MB for 70ns memory years ago, it is not higher quality ram then the 512MB I paid the same price for last week. Same with my first 2x cd burner compared to what is available now.
I was looking for the subscription comparison as well. I know/. had an interview with the CEO or someone at Real.com about 8 months ago and he quoted some amount of paying subscribers that was actually much higher then I thought they would have been. I know there is a lot of people claiming the subscrition service is useless and never catch on but I strongly disagree. I have two teenagers and they are far more interested in quantity and listening to what is hot right now and could care less to actually "own" and hold a purchased music piece in thier hands. I'd assume this is probably the case for many teens. With different suscription companies now allowing portable music players into the mix it seems this would be the perfect solution.
Do you have any numbers to back up your market share claims? What about the subscription services? I'm only asking because I have not been able to find any that were not "as heard on/.".
You need to include advertising and marketing into your "we do not make money" concept. Other compnaies that do not sell hardware are making money selling @ $0.99 a song. I honestly see the music rental market having a much larger impact then the simple buy market that Apple offers now. My kids would much have access to more music then to own music. I'm sure they are not alone.
I've seen similar . I drove my 91 5.0 Mustang across the country several times. I got between 25-30 MPG at 75-80 MPH. That is the most I've ever seen in that car. Of course this could be more from the steady speed instead of the engine efficiency at certain RPM's. 80MPH in 5th gear is almost dead on 2K RPM. My Ford Aspire typcially gets 40-45 MPG in all around driving but sustained 75+ takes me down to about 35 MPG. Even though it is a 5 speed, I have no idea what RPM that is because it does not have a tach but it sounds very high:(
Michael Dell is just making sure that he has multiple sources for his supplies.
Would Michael Dell suggesting to Dell the company that they should start using RH more, be a conflict of interests for the other investors? He has a vested interest in both companies. What if he bought a decent size of AMD stock and then within the next few months Dell the company decides to start using AMD chips? Maybe there is no oversight for transactions like that but it sure as hell seems that there should be.
If your boss thinks that he cannot replace you, put some bait in front of him. Ask if they can match an offer or do something to change your work environment.
That is a slippery slope. In fact there are many articles and stories floating around jobs sites/newspapers about trying the counter offer route. Here is the short version as I understand it: Asking for a raise and throwing down a competing offer are two different things all together. If you like where you are but think you deserve more money, you ask for a raise or better conditions, you are asking based on a chance that better things may come. If you think the conditions will not change, you just do not like where you are, where you are going, or what you are doing then you look somewhere else. More money will not change any of those factors and normally only acts as a short term fix if the real reason you do not like there stays the same. The "bad blood" and attitude from each side after a counter offer is not comforting either. The authors bosss reaction already shows some of that.
Each boss and worker relationship is different but the general guidelines are that it does not normally work out well in the long run. I'm sure there are many exceptions as well.
If you used the file method, the OS would treat the encrypted file just as any other file so it would have no more or less error recovery then the underlying file/disk system that it is stored on has. I have a generic backup on my file server that simply runs rsync or tgz from cron between two physical disks. Not a production system but it serves me well.
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I believe you are backwards in your thinking. Apples reputation of just working comes from the fact that there is a limit and tight control over the hardware and software. Double edged sword. The disadvantage is the consumer loses choice and pays more but for many people that is offset by the increased chance that it will just work. The PC world running MS Windows could do the same but no vendor is willing to risk that. Dell (or any computer assembler) COULD sell add on hardware that is thoughly tested with specific models of laptops and desktops and they could guarentee that it would work and work consistently. That concept is NOT unique to Apple at all, look at the x86 server market for a perfect example, very specific equipment and very specific options and upgrades and they work great and last long time. Sure, that cheaper raid controller from the computer show might work in that HP G4 but who knows. The downside for a company that tries this in the consumer market faces too much competition and no guarentee that the users will come back to buy their tested and guarenteed upgrades. If the company could force you to buy from them, they would. Apple has the choice and the ability to make that happen.
Good or bad depending on what you are looking for in a personal computer and how much you are willing to pay.
Maybe off topic but it was specifically mentioned in the linked WSJ article.
A year ago, for instance, a basic mobile phone plan from Verizon cost $39.95 and included 400 minutes of talk time. The price hasn't changed, but the minutes have, increasing to 450. That's a 12-month price drop of 12.5% per minute of talking, which, if it involved PCs, would be downright inflationary.
I found the exact opposite with cellular service. The amount of options and "extras" make the per minute price appear lower but I doubt your actual bill will be any lower at all. I know that Verizon has been shrinking its America Choice coverage area as it decreases roaming agreements with other carriers. Sprint for example, has started charging more for messaging and used to povide free Vision access (internet access via the phone) for free on its higher priced plans but has dropped that. Cingular has NO unlimited messaging option any longer and also charges more for that service as well as its data service. I would say, overall, cell phone service has increased over the last few years. Maybe more minutes are included but they are defineatly making up the difference in other areas. For me to get the same functionality and options I have now with Sprint, would cost me about $40 more a month then it did just two years ago and switching to Verizon or Cingular would cost about $60 more a month then I pay now.
Any stories about big things to come, Apple has something exciting, Steve Jobs knows what he is doing, some master plan to take on the world blah blah blah. You guys need to realize that according to an article at the NYT and quoted elsewhere, Apple admitted to switching to Intel because IBM would not cut the price of the CPU's that Apple buys. IBM sees little profit from Apple now and would not budge, it was not worth a potential loss to IBM to keep supplying CPUs to Apple at a potential loss. It is nothing more then that plain and simple, it was a pure business decision for long term savings by Apple. A failed attempt by Apple to negotiate a lower price for a CPU, nothing else. Get over it man...
Jobs is betting the farm on OS X. His opinion at this point is that OS X has such an amazing lead on Windows, that it will eclipse Microsoft's offerings.
Your opinion of his opinion does not make sense in the real market (I'd also like to ask how you are aware of his inner feelings). First of all, any company only selling an OS is doomed. You have too much competition and the open source versions are being refined constantly. Yeah, maybe it work for a few years but IMHO, not much more then that. An OS is rapidly becoming a commodity and the current largest player MS has changed gears as well. Another point is if he, you and how many other people believe that OSX is SO much better then Windows, why is it not making higher sales or large jumps in sales in the existing open market? It's been out and avialable for what, four years? You think the general consumer is not buying it because they don't like the current model of CPU and suddenly this is change is the diamond?
He's only been waiting for the development of the OS to reach a level that he feels is "done".
Care to expand on that? That statement does not make sense to me. Are you implying that the OS he is so confident and will take world consumers by storm and Apple is betting the farm on (in your words) will be "done" at some point? How do they make any money after that?
I am not trying to rag on any OS as I have nothing against Apple or MS and this is not meant to be a negative comment against either, just that your points do not make sense based on the current market and your inside Steves head thoughts are comical.
Face it, until there are a lot of changes made by vendors and MS running as anything other than admin makes life difficult for regular consumers.
Like just about every PC game made in the last few years that use some type of protection like SecuRom or Safedisk. This is straight from the SecuRom web site and references the SecuRom Business edition which is NOT what PC Games use, notice the asssumption for home users:
The SecuROM(TM) Business Edition provides the following features for maximum user convenience:
* Consumers can use SecuROM(TM)-protected software without Windows administrator rights. This is important in office environments (home users have administrator rights).
Administrator rights and the disadvantage of using them are completely blown off by software makers for home users.
This reply is not specifically to you but for the EULA threads in general.
I mentioned slipsteaming in an earlier thread but it applies here as well. MS itself supports modifying the original XP distibution media and rolling your own modified version, where in the EULA determines what modifications are and are not "allowed"? Just because it might seem logical because they sell two different versions that doing this should violate something does not cut it. What if you modified a few bytes to make the BSOD (blue screen of death) a RSOD? Would it only violate the EULA is MS sold a different version with a RSOD as well? How would something that be worded in the EULA? What about modifying some undocumented hex value in the registry to change something? Is that an EULA violation as well?
I understand your issues about what is involved but the procedure is almost indentical to slipstreaming a service pack and people do that all the time.
At least it will mean that they probably don't have the correct evidence to sue a lot of people they wanted to.
My understanding is most of the evidence they have now for the individuals they have sued is nothing more then a list of file names from an automatted search and an ip address. I do not know how that is considered evidence at all. What makes it even worse is the RIAA and others have admitted to posting bogus files to P2P themselves.
You mean scour.net? I used that for a while back about 1997-1998. They even had a plugin you could download to allow single click to get the individual files from the remote computers. Of course I bypassed that whole concept and used smbclient on my Linux file server. This provided several advantages over using Windows to get the remote files.
I could telnet/ssh into my home PC from work, use screen and smbmount to connect to shares listed on scour.net and download *.mp3 or whatever they had. Smbclient acted much more sane when network errors occured, I remeber Windows just hanging and I do not recall 95 having a task manger to kill off explorer. A third advantage was using the -n switch. You could specify your computer name with smbclient to be the same as the Windows 95/98 machine you connected to and it was fooled into not reporting it as a remote connection as the connection would not show up in the Windows connection monitor or the smb plugin offered by the site. I guess Windows got confused but the name and considered the connection to be local. When scour.net finally got taken down, I moved on to scanning subnets with nmap and something similar to NBTScan (NBN?). Not only would NBN report the remote computer names but it would try to login anonymous and a few other common names and passwords to the shares it did find. Not as efficient but fun to play with for a while.
You can create shortcuts that integrate runas
/user:ieuser /savecred "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE"
I have a user on my machines called IEUSER with very little privleges. You can create a shortcuts to replace your normal IE shortcuts to start IE as that user automatically with:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\runas.exe
Of course you can start any progam in this manner.
The problem is when links are clicked from other applications, it starts IE being the default browser with my credentials. I have not figured out that one yet. On a side note, I leave IE as the defualt browser but have Kerio personall firewall set to request permission before allowing IE network access. This way, if a virus/spyware tries to call IE or the IE rending engine which is my default URL handler, I will be prompted by my firewall to allow access. If I did not actively click something to start this, I know something fishy is going on and investigate.
I can't remember what my supervisor told me to do this morning when I got in but I remember that episode of CHiPs that aired over 25 years ago.
There is a fine line there though. Code and city regulations are normally for big picture items, like rusty cars in the yard, fences falling over etc.. Some HOA's take it to the extreme and complain about house number placement, number and type of trees, garage door always shut, limit of outside toys etc.. Where I live, the houses are far enough apart (avg 3-10 acres with many trees) that it does not matter what one does to their house as you probably can't see it from your house anyway. No HOA required luckily.
Not only stupid and ugly, but how is it blocking radio waves? Although more expensive then vinyl siding, aluminum siding is still an option. In the 70's it was very popular because it was cost effective when compared to other options. My parents had aluminum siding my whole life and we never had reception problems..
These people are whacked.
Others may have said this already but anyway something seems EXTREMELY fishy here..
Naperville library officials said...
The scanners, made by Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics Corp....
Are other libraries in the US even thinking about any type of technology in this manner? I may have on my tin foil hat on but it seems to me someone at the Naperville Biometrics Corp has a really good relationship with someone in the Naperville Library or the Naperville city council.
What a way for a town to showcase the work of a local company. Yeah..
If they could only have figured out how to stick to standards (or *jointly* come up with new, open standards) none of this would be necessary..
Dude, how is a business going to tie people into the perpetual upgrade cycle and maintenance contracts by using a standard?
It can take an hour just to get the tools together to start a repair on a PC.
Your entire arguement does not make sense because your conclusions about PC hardware all revolve around nothing more then ability to boot from an attached FW device. It would take me 30 seconds to get a recovery going on a PC and there are many ways of doing it, the easiest is insert the OS install CD/DVD and turn on the PC. I do not consider that "hard" by any means. On that note, using your logic, I do not have an external firewire HD or a Mac around so it would take me over an hour to round up what I needed to fix a Mac. You get the tools or equipment you need to fix your exisiting equipment that you have and support, you seem to think it is more logical to have a single repair mechanism and then buy and use equipment that you can repair with it. Do not confuse your lack knowledge with PC repair options to Apple being "light years ahead". Pretty much any PC made in the last three to five years can boot from an external USB device, a floppy, CD/DVD, or remotely over the network, and if the MB and bios support FW, that as well. Not every PC is the same but that is not a technical failing, that was a business decision by that MB manufactor or PC vendor.
Your financial assessment is missing one very important factor. Computer components are far cheaper now then they were in the past. That is not directly related to quality or design. I paid $40 per MB for 70ns memory years ago, it is not higher quality ram then the 512MB I paid the same price for last week. Same with my first 2x cd burner compared to what is available now.
I was looking for the subscription comparison as well. I know /. had an interview with the CEO or someone at Real.com about 8 months ago and he quoted some amount of paying subscribers that was actually much higher then I thought they would have been. I know there is a lot of people claiming the subscrition service is useless and never catch on but I strongly disagree. I have two teenagers and they are far more interested in quantity and listening to what is hot right now and could care less to actually "own" and hold a purchased music piece in thier hands. I'd assume this is probably the case for many teens. With different suscription companies now allowing portable music players into the mix it seems this would be the perfect solution.
Do you have any numbers to back up your market share claims? What about the subscription services? I'm only asking because I have not been able to find any that were not "as heard on /.".
You need to include advertising and marketing into your "we do not make money" concept. Other compnaies that do not sell hardware are making money selling @ $0.99 a song. I honestly see the music rental market having a much larger impact then the simple buy market that Apple offers now. My kids would much have access to more music then to own music. I'm sure they are not alone.
I've seen similar . I drove my 91 5.0 Mustang across the country several times. I got between 25-30 MPG at 75-80 MPH. That is the most I've ever seen in that car. Of course this could be more from the steady speed instead of the engine efficiency at certain RPM's. 80MPH in 5th gear is almost dead on 2K RPM. My Ford Aspire typcially gets 40-45 MPG in all around driving but sustained 75+ takes me down to about 35 MPG. Even though it is a 5 speed, I have no idea what RPM that is because it does not have a tach but it sounds very high :(
Michael Dell is just making sure that he has multiple sources for his supplies.
Would Michael Dell suggesting to Dell the company that they should start using RH more, be a conflict of interests for the other investors? He has a vested interest in both companies. What if he bought a decent size of AMD stock and then within the next few months Dell the company decides to start using AMD chips? Maybe there is no oversight for transactions like that but it sure as hell seems that there should be.
If your boss thinks that he cannot replace you, put some bait in front of him. Ask if they can match an offer or do something to change your work environment.
That is a slippery slope. In fact there are many articles and stories floating around jobs sites/newspapers about trying the counter offer route. Here is the short version as I understand it:
Asking for a raise and throwing down a competing offer are two different things all together. If you like where you are but think you deserve more money, you ask for a raise or better conditions, you are asking based on a chance that better things may come.
If you think the conditions will not change, you just do not like where you are, where you are going, or what you are doing then you look somewhere else. More money will not change any of those factors and normally only acts as a short term fix if the real reason you do not like there stays the same.
The "bad blood" and attitude from each side after a counter offer is not comforting either. The authors bosss reaction already shows some of that.
Each boss and worker relationship is different but the general guidelines are that it does not normally work out well in the long run. I'm sure there are many exceptions as well.
What are you refering to with "top notch"? What are you looking for that you think should be better that the typical MB is lacking?
If you used the file method, the OS would treat the encrypted file just as any other file so it would have no more or less error recovery then the underlying file/disk system that it is stored on has. I have a generic backup on my file server that simply runs rsync or tgz from cron between two physical disks. Not a production system but it serves me well.