Man, say what you want about Steve Jobs. He's got a famous temper, he doesn't compromise, he likes closed systems, etc. and so on. But one thing he definitely has is balls, and sometimes we can benefit from it.
So, he apparently finally has convinced one label to drop the DRM, and yes, he's charging more for the content, but he goes and ups the bitrate, just so the content from the non-participating labels looks like shit in comparison. That takes some cojones, and I gotta say, I admire him for that. Could it possibly be that DRM will become one of those horrible memories from the past that we can all suppress? Time will tell, but at least today, I say this is relatively good news.
And, you know..."fuck the RIAA" goes without saying.
I'll be the first to admit that I wouldn't ever buy this thing unless it was like ridiculously great (I really don't like giving Microsoft my money). So, my own bias aside, is anyone else kind of dumbfounded that you can't use the thing as an external hard drive like every other large capacity MP3 player in existence? (Unless, of course, that David Pogue was wrong when he wrote that.)
Since when does "open source" mean...just posting random factoids about things? Does some list of facts about Linux, like who created it and when it was created, and for what purpose, mean the same thing as "open source"? Umm, no...it's just a bunch of facts.
Wouldn't "open sourcing" a human mean opening a database of DNA samples?
This site isn't open source, it's just narcissism.
My favorite comfort games are just games that I can pick up, play a bit until I'm bored, and then return. This means games that have no real "conclusion" or plot, or else just simple time wasters.
How do you cope with ocean levels that rise to inundate most coastal cities?
Hmmm...maybe "move the fucking cities"? Already, New Orleans has lost half of its population. There is no logical reason we have to live there, or anywhere else, you know...we just did, and it became a tradition, and so on. But already half of that population has moved elsewhere, and the rest of it could, too.
Anyway, we have already passed the oil peak. There is reasonable data to suggest that even if we burn every last drop of oil, and coal, and so on, that we won't get to the magic CO2 level just on the basis of that. In truth, it looks to me like man's contribution to this CO2 rise is minimal...like tossing a few extra grounds of coffee into your coffee maker in the morning. Sure, it makes the coffee stronger, but by how much? This climate change is happening, it has happened before at least four times we can measure through ice core samples, and it will happen again in another 700,000 years.
And we won't burn all the oil anyway...As the supply wanes, there will be massive wars over the remaining energy, and we will have a nuclear war long before we actually extract it. Besides, much of it is probably inextractable anyway. So rest easy.:)
I always just assumed that it's because that's not where U.S., or Russian, infrastructure is set up. I think the costs of running suitable rail lines and roads and whatnot out to areas where absolutely no one lives are just prohibitive to the kind of return it would show. That's just assumption on my part, though.
Someone wants to build a bridge across the Bering Strait, to re-link Asia and North America. Building that bridge is hard enough, but the real problem is that for it to be useful, we'd have to build a highway -- on both sides -- that'd have to be literally thousands of miles long just to get to any population centers. So, alas, no road trips to Beijing are in our future here in the USA.
I would think this will open up lots of new trade opportunities between Russia and North America. I don't know what that could mean, but it is certainly interesting. What kind of manufacturing prowess does Russia have that has been heretofore underutilized because they could not as efficiently get goods to North American ports? Or is this all a bunch of hooey?
(I thought of this because I remember reading this article about Pat Broe, which may or may not have been slashdotted, but it is about an investor in the Canadian port of Churchill, Manitoba, which could well profit from an opened northern passage.)
By the way, I live in Manhattan, and I think it's about time to move...to some city somewhere that's 20 or 30 miles inland.
When I was there this summer (connecting from the same connection as the locals...not one in a hotel), google access worked this way: you'd always get the first page of results in google.com, but if you had any trigger words in your search, you wouldn't get the second.
And google images works the same. Google vide has a message saying "this service doesn't work in your country".
Of course, one of the proxies solves that problem rather easily.
I'm of the opinion that bad information is better than no information, actually. No information = North Korea. Limited information = China. Notice any difference in those cultures. Quite frankly, it doesn't feel particularly repressive being there, and many of the people I met were aware of some of the outside stories about things (and not aware of others, true enough). Anyway, on the topic of stuff that happens inside China, the government's efforts haven't been that effective, anyway...never discount the power of word of mouth; even with the Internet, it's still probably the most effective communications medium. (For example, I learned stuff about Tian'men Square from local Chinese that I had not heard from either the Chinese official story, or the supposed western "truth". As with all things, it's all in how the details are described.."soldier" versus "terrorist", "liberator" versus "invader", etc. and so on...those nuances color the story more than the facts do.)
At least with limited information, if word of mouth / some other input tells you something different, it can make you say "hey, wait a minute", but if you have no information at all, then you don't even have anything to question.
Anyway, "truth" is a bullshit concept anyway...the biggest farce in all of this is that Americans think their information system is free, and would thus give them some supposed moral highground. Watch the world news in Canada, for example, and you'll learn more in 10 minutes than you will learn in a week on American coverage. Hey, you might actually see a Palestinian person who has some kids to raise and is just a very normal person, like talking about something benign. And, I say this as an American, by the way.
In any event, this wikipedia guy's stand is a fucking joke. He culdn't censor that shit if he wanted to; there's too much stuff there to censor. It'd take up his whole budget. It's kinda like me going around gloating about my moral standards because I haven't nuked anyone.
Told to me by a friend in China (I was just living there): Falun Gong is blocked/castigated/repressed (use whatever trigger word you want), basically, because the leader of said cult has become very, very powerful. He's become powerful in a way where he is able -- and has apparently demonstrated with some success -- that he is capable of mobilizing large groups of people to do things.
Over the years, he became increasingly critical of the government (perhaps rightly...I don't know the specifics of his arguments), and began to use his newfound leverage to threaten members of the government (I assume not in an "I'm gonna kill you way", but rather in a "My people want xyz, so do abc or else we come down on you like a ton of bricks and ruin your career" kind of way).
It seems to me an analogy would be with, say, Malcolm X in the USA. The point is, Falun Gong is threatened by the government, because they, as a group, have threatened the government (apparently repeatedly).
Imagine for a second if Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts teamed up and decided to turn their army of Christian fundamentalist drones into a revolutionary army (even if a peaceful one) against the U.S. government. You think the U.S. government would just let them?
In the USA, people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, JFK (threatened the Federal Reserve, which pretty much runs our country) all get the same treatment: bullet to the skull. Different style, perhaps, in the USA, but same outcome.
For the record, I'm opposed to said atrocities against Falun Gong just as much as you, but in labeling Hezbollah as some kind of mindless evil organization and Falun Gong as some bunch of nice people who are oppressed shows that you have little understanding of either side (maybe you read/watch a lot of bullshit American media...and I say that as an American). They're both groups with agendas, who are protecting their own, and threatening the status quo, and whenever anyone threatens the status quo, they get it up the ass, period.
Well, in my opinion, that's the whole point. The studios don't want to sell downloads...they're being dragged kicking and screaming into it because they are frightened of "piracy". So my guess is, for now, they'd rather sell you the DVD...
And, Apple will always be a niche competitor. To me, that's a good thing...it will keep them more nimble and focused on innovation. If Apple;s marketshare culd top out around 10%, it'd be prefect. Large enough that software developers would be hesitant to ignore the market, but small enough so Apple could keep up the pace of improving the OS's foundation rather than focusing as much on backward compatibility as Microsoft.
It seems like everyone wants this iPod "halo effect" to happen immediately, but sea change will not happen in the computer industry overnight, and Microsoft will remain top dog. In fact, many new Apple users will be running Windows on Apple's hardware...
It's too bad the contracts are only for four years...so we'll see this whole senseless charade again soon enough.
I had thought Apple might try to secure a longer term deal with the labels (maybe agreeing to a pcrice increase with inflation or something). My plan at Apple would be:
(1) Negotiate long-term deal with the labels (10 years or more).
(2) Spend the next year either inking a deal with Apple Records and the Beatles, winning the lawsuit, or buying them outright.
(3) Convince one or two BIG artists to sell directly themselves with Apple as the distributor. Offer them like 50% of the proceeds of sales, and sell through the iTunes Music Store exclusively, with possible physical distribution at Apple Stores.
(4) Other smaller artists take notice, and an Apple label (maybe not named 'Apple' if the Beatles situation can't be won) suddenly begins to gain momentum, and fuck over the labels in the process (which would make me rather happy).
(5) Profit.
You could throw another step in there, since Jobs is Disney's largest shareholder. Apple and Jobs could buy Disney outright, and gain some record distribution and music IP themselves, which they could immediately market at a different standard than the labels who "won't play nice". Then they could sign artists to Buena Vista Music or whatever.
I know, I know, the prospect of Apple having this kind of media control is a bit scary. But personally, I don't fear it because I believe all music and video is destined to be free ("pirated", if you want), anyway...but I would sure like to see someone (Apple would be fine) bend those record industry jerks over and do to them what they've been doing to us for the past 40 years.
Look, Cringeley's talking out of his ass. That's his job.
But I don't see why people here are pooh-poohing the idea of Apple buying Adobe so much. I mean, forgetting about what you want, and focusing on what is good for Apple.
There are two things that will really harm (if not kill) Apple: (1) no Office; (2) no Photoshop.
However, of the two, I say #2 is even more important for Apple...Apple's core market is still graphics, despite all the mainstream press they've been getting. Without Photoshop there effectively is no OS X.
Secondly, Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, they acquired DVD Studio Pro from (who was it? some company that started with 'A'), they bought Logic. Are any of these pieces of software Apple's 'core' business? No, they aren't. I remember I was more than a little surprised to see Apple even acquire these pieces of software. Not only have they acquired them, they have redeveloped them into really nice apps. So clearly, part of their strategy is to provide extremely nice pro apps for their own OS.
One segment of pro apps they have avoided -- I am sure partially to not piss off Adobe -- is graphics. They lack a pro 3D app, and they lack a pro 2D app (though by working CoreImage into the OS, they have provided tools that programmers can use to recreate 75% of what Photoshop does easily). Further, Adobe controls the PDF format (which Apple uses fir display in their OS).
I dunno...I think Adobe would be a pretty much perfect fit for Apple. Other than Premiere (which sucks anyway), very little of their work seems to overlap, and then Apple would have a complete suite of pro apps guaranteed to run on OS X (and if they really wanted to be shitty, they could discontinue the Windows versions, and leave Microsoft high and dry).
I mean, if this became too much of a distraction for Apple, they could spin off a separate software company (a la FileMaker), but other than potential distractions, I fail to see how acquiring Adobe would be all that bad for Apple, and I can certainly see a lot of potential upside in the thought.
I will seed Think Secret and AppleInsider with some good fodder for an article about this.
This move is clearly proof that Apple is going to spin the music division into its own company. One campus for computers, one for music publishing/distribution.
I'd like to believe you, but Aspyr has already trimmed back the titles it's releasing, for example. Of course, maybe it just means the end of the porting business, but I think we're going to go through a period where game developers just say "reboot and play it under Windows". Hell, the way the market is today they say "Fuck off. You can't play our game."
As far as what percentage of Mac buyers will install XP...maybe only 10% of the current Mac owners will be inclined to do so, but this is being touted as a big new reason for switchers to buy Macs. I would think, then, that those new converts will be the one buying their Windows copies.
One sad thing about this, as a Mac user and Mac gamer, is that this probably puts a big fat nail in the coffin for AAA OS X-native game titles. Or maybe it's less of a nail, and more like sticky tape, meaning the coffin can be reopened if OS X attains a bigger critical mass.
Another interesting side-effect is the stats. Apple is always fond of calling people 'switchers', as if when the person buys a Mac for his home, his Windows box suddenly disappears. Well, now, we've got a machine that can run anything....so...er...what is it? Makes me feel like the only real way to track platform penetration will be browser stats.
Strange new developments, indeed, even though we all knew it would happen when Apple went Intel.
I'm sure you meant that in jest, as we all know Apple hedged their bets and essentially two-timed IBM by keeping a fancy woman in Intel as a bit on the side. I guess if IBM claimed to have 'dumped' Apple at any point, it'd be more the actions of a 'spurned lover' trying to save face;-)
The parent poster displayed some supreme idiocy, but that's one point of his that's up for debate. Could the G5 have been retrofitted into a lower power design to accommodate Apple's unique needs? I say yes. Was it worth it for IBM to do this when they gained all three next generation console manufacturers as customers? I say no. Therefore, I'd say it's probably just as true that IBM dumped Apple, as Apple dumped IBM.
IMO, the real sequence was that IBM effectively dumped Apple by ceasing serious development on desktop G5s, and then Apple dumped IBM because it wasn't getting what it needed.
Hey Ruby/Rails users...giving you a chance to evangelize. I've never used it, but to me, it almost seems like a framework designed to make quick demos, but every demo I have seen is completely lacking in any design or uniqueness.
So, my question is this: how easy is it if you want to have a more complex visual layout? What If I want a form to submit to an encrypted text file? What if I need to work this system into a very intricate design?
What I'm trying to get at is: does its simplicity w/r/t getting something quick and dirty together mean it's a pain in the ass when you want to do something very special with it? Or is it equally easy to completely customize and change?
Personally, I think Dvorak is a fucking genius. Every time he writes sone inane babble, he gets his employers a TON of traffic, and then he just gets to go home and have a beer and watch all the idiots on slashdot actually try to argue with his ridiculous ideas.
Keeps him employed, and keeps those ad sales people happy.
Every single thing ever written has been created by someone with an agenda. Nothing is trustable. The whole notion of 'truth' is just silly anyway. There is no such thing. Never has been, never will be.
Wikipedia's as good a source as any other, for pretty much anything, IMO.
Yeah, but FireWire Target Disk mode is the kind of feature that will literally save your (data) life. Also, it helps makes the process of migrating from an old mac to a neweer mac trivial; when I bought my new PowerBook, it was just hit a button and I literally couldn't tell my new machine from my old one (as they were both 12" PowerBooks), and all within 1-2 hours.
(In fact, it was funny, I accidentally deleted some data on the new machine before I realized it wasn't the old one.)
Anyway, BIOS sucks ass. It always has. So, since Apple doesn't need it, why the hell would they adopt it, especially when (as other posters point out) the PC industry is moving away from it and toward EFI anyway? It's not like EFI is some big huge hurdle; getting these alternative OSs up on the machines will happen in relatively short order, and for now it gives Apple a nice little buffer time to get the whole product line out and work out some kinks. Seems sensible rather than evil to me.
Thanks for pulling numbers out of your ass, but you should really do some research instead of just fingering yourself.
Crunch their last quarter numbers a little bit more and you might just find that the last quarter was the first time that iPod+iTunes made up 50% (or more) of their business.
14 million iPods @ $200 per unit (yes, I am pulling that number out of my ass, but it ought to be pretty close, given the price points of the product matrix and how each model sells) = 2.8 billion dollars. Add on the 'several hundred million from sales on the iTunes Music Store, plus relates accessory sales from the Apple retail chain, and iPod+iTunes revenue easily beats the necessary 2.85 million mark which represents half of their 4Q revenue. We'll know more when they formally announce their financials, of course, but it looks like the iPod is the top dog at Apple, at least until they grow PC marketshare.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, say what you want about Steve Jobs. He's got a famous temper, he doesn't compromise, he likes closed systems, etc. and so on. But one thing he definitely has is balls, and sometimes we can benefit from it.
So, he apparently finally has convinced one label to drop the DRM, and yes, he's charging more for the content, but he goes and ups the bitrate, just so the content from the non-participating labels looks like shit in comparison. That takes some cojones, and I gotta say, I admire him for that. Could it possibly be that DRM will become one of those horrible memories from the past that we can all suppress? Time will tell, but at least today, I say this is relatively good news.
And, you know..."fuck the RIAA" goes without saying.
Yeah, but that just makes you like the crow with the bendy stick to catch bugs.
I'll be the first to admit that I wouldn't ever buy this thing unless it was like ridiculously great (I really don't like giving Microsoft my money). So, my own bias aside, is anyone else kind of dumbfounded that you can't use the thing as an external hard drive like every other large capacity MP3 player in existence? (Unless, of course, that David Pogue was wrong when he wrote that.)
This would of course be a huge problem...if MSN Music had any customers.
Hmm.
Since when does "open source" mean...just posting random factoids about things? Does some list of facts about Linux, like who created it and when it was created, and for what purpose, mean the same thing as "open source"? Umm, no...it's just a bunch of facts.
Wouldn't "open sourcing" a human mean opening a database of DNA samples?
This site isn't open source, it's just narcissism.
My favorite comfort games are just games that I can pick up, play a bit until I'm bored, and then return. This means games that have no real "conclusion" or plot, or else just simple time wasters.
Hmmm...maybe "move the fucking cities"? Already, New Orleans has lost half of its population. There is no logical reason we have to live there, or anywhere else, you know...we just did, and it became a tradition, and so on. But already half of that population has moved elsewhere, and the rest of it could, too.
Anyway, we have already passed the oil peak. There is reasonable data to suggest that even if we burn every last drop of oil, and coal, and so on, that we won't get to the magic CO2 level just on the basis of that. In truth, it looks to me like man's contribution to this CO2 rise is minimal...like tossing a few extra grounds of coffee into your coffee maker in the morning. Sure, it makes the coffee stronger, but by how much? This climate change is happening, it has happened before at least four times we can measure through ice core samples, and it will happen again in another 700,000 years.
And we won't burn all the oil anyway...As the supply wanes, there will be massive wars over the remaining energy, and we will have a nuclear war long before we actually extract it. Besides, much of it is probably inextractable anyway. So rest easy. :)
I always just assumed that it's because that's not where U.S., or Russian, infrastructure is set up. I think the costs of running suitable rail lines and roads and whatnot out to areas where absolutely no one lives are just prohibitive to the kind of return it would show. That's just assumption on my part, though.
Someone wants to build a bridge across the Bering Strait, to re-link Asia and North America. Building that bridge is hard enough, but the real problem is that for it to be useful, we'd have to build a highway -- on both sides -- that'd have to be literally thousands of miles long just to get to any population centers. So, alas, no road trips to Beijing are in our future here in the USA.
I think the consequences will be more 'warming' than 'chilling'.
I would think this will open up lots of new trade opportunities between Russia and North America. I don't know what that could mean, but it is certainly interesting. What kind of manufacturing prowess does Russia have that has been heretofore underutilized because they could not as efficiently get goods to North American ports? Or is this all a bunch of hooey?
(I thought of this because I remember reading this article about Pat Broe, which may or may not have been slashdotted, but it is about an investor in the Canadian port of Churchill, Manitoba, which could well profit from an opened northern passage.)
By the way, I live in Manhattan, and I think it's about time to move...to some city somewhere that's 20 or 30 miles inland.
When I was there this summer (connecting from the same connection as the locals...not one in a hotel), google access worked this way: you'd always get the first page of results in google.com, but if you had any trigger words in your search, you wouldn't get the second.
And google images works the same. Google vide has a message saying "this service doesn't work in your country".
Of course, one of the proxies solves that problem rather easily.
I'm of the opinion that bad information is better than no information, actually. No information = North Korea. Limited information = China. Notice any difference in those cultures. Quite frankly, it doesn't feel particularly repressive being there, and many of the people I met were aware of some of the outside stories about things (and not aware of others, true enough). Anyway, on the topic of stuff that happens inside China, the government's efforts haven't been that effective, anyway...never discount the power of word of mouth; even with the Internet, it's still probably the most effective communications medium. (For example, I learned stuff about Tian'men Square from local Chinese that I had not heard from either the Chinese official story, or the supposed western "truth". As with all things, it's all in how the details are described.."soldier" versus "terrorist", "liberator" versus "invader", etc. and so on...those nuances color the story more than the facts do.)
At least with limited information, if word of mouth / some other input tells you something different, it can make you say "hey, wait a minute", but if you have no information at all, then you don't even have anything to question.
Anyway, "truth" is a bullshit concept anyway...the biggest farce in all of this is that Americans think their information system is free, and would thus give them some supposed moral highground. Watch the world news in Canada, for example, and you'll learn more in 10 minutes than you will learn in a week on American coverage. Hey, you might actually see a Palestinian person who has some kids to raise and is just a very normal person, like talking about something benign. And, I say this as an American, by the way.
In any event, this wikipedia guy's stand is a fucking joke. He culdn't censor that shit if he wanted to; there's too much stuff there to censor. It'd take up his whole budget. It's kinda like me going around gloating about my moral standards because I haven't nuked anyone.
You think Falun Gong is about holistic medicine?
Told to me by a friend in China (I was just living there): Falun Gong is blocked/castigated/repressed (use whatever trigger word you want), basically, because the leader of said cult has become very, very powerful. He's become powerful in a way where he is able -- and has apparently demonstrated with some success -- that he is capable of mobilizing large groups of people to do things.
Over the years, he became increasingly critical of the government (perhaps rightly...I don't know the specifics of his arguments), and began to use his newfound leverage to threaten members of the government (I assume not in an "I'm gonna kill you way", but rather in a "My people want xyz, so do abc or else we come down on you like a ton of bricks and ruin your career" kind of way).
It seems to me an analogy would be with, say, Malcolm X in the USA. The point is, Falun Gong is threatened by the government, because they, as a group, have threatened the government (apparently repeatedly).
Imagine for a second if Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts teamed up and decided to turn their army of Christian fundamentalist drones into a revolutionary army (even if a peaceful one) against the U.S. government. You think the U.S. government would just let them?
In the USA, people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, JFK (threatened the Federal Reserve, which pretty much runs our country) all get the same treatment: bullet to the skull. Different style, perhaps, in the USA, but same outcome.
For the record, I'm opposed to said atrocities against Falun Gong just as much as you, but in labeling Hezbollah as some kind of mindless evil organization and Falun Gong as some bunch of nice people who are oppressed shows that you have little understanding of either side (maybe you read/watch a lot of bullshit American media...and I say that as an American). They're both groups with agendas, who are protecting their own, and threatening the status quo, and whenever anyone threatens the status quo, they get it up the ass, period.
Well, in my opinion, that's the whole point. The studios don't want to sell downloads...they're being dragged kicking and screaming into it because they are frightened of "piracy". So my guess is, for now, they'd rather sell you the DVD...
...but it will take time.
And, Apple will always be a niche competitor. To me, that's a good thing...it will keep them more nimble and focused on innovation. If Apple;s marketshare culd top out around 10%, it'd be prefect. Large enough that software developers would be hesitant to ignore the market, but small enough so Apple could keep up the pace of improving the OS's foundation rather than focusing as much on backward compatibility as Microsoft.
It seems like everyone wants this iPod "halo effect" to happen immediately, but sea change will not happen in the computer industry overnight, and Microsoft will remain top dog. In fact, many new Apple users will be running Windows on Apple's hardware...
It's too bad the contracts are only for four years...so we'll see this whole senseless charade again soon enough.
I had thought Apple might try to secure a longer term deal with the labels (maybe agreeing to a pcrice increase with inflation or something). My plan at Apple would be:
(1) Negotiate long-term deal with the labels (10 years or more).
(2) Spend the next year either inking a deal with Apple Records and the Beatles, winning the lawsuit, or buying them outright.
(3) Convince one or two BIG artists to sell directly themselves with Apple as the distributor. Offer them like 50% of the proceeds of sales, and sell through the iTunes Music Store exclusively, with possible physical distribution at Apple Stores.
(4) Other smaller artists take notice, and an Apple label (maybe not named 'Apple' if the Beatles situation can't be won) suddenly begins to gain momentum, and fuck over the labels in the process (which would make me rather happy).
(5) Profit.
You could throw another step in there, since Jobs is Disney's largest shareholder. Apple and Jobs could buy Disney outright, and gain some record distribution and music IP themselves, which they could immediately market at a different standard than the labels who "won't play nice". Then they could sign artists to Buena Vista Music or whatever.
I know, I know, the prospect of Apple having this kind of media control is a bit scary. But personally, I don't fear it because I believe all music and video is destined to be free ("pirated", if you want), anyway...but I would sure like to see someone (Apple would be fine) bend those record industry jerks over and do to them what they've been doing to us for the past 40 years.
I feel so much better after a nice diatribe...
Look, Cringeley's talking out of his ass. That's his job.
But I don't see why people here are pooh-poohing the idea of Apple buying Adobe so much. I mean, forgetting about what you want, and focusing on what is good for Apple.
There are two things that will really harm (if not kill) Apple: (1) no Office; (2) no Photoshop.
However, of the two, I say #2 is even more important for Apple...Apple's core market is still graphics, despite all the mainstream press they've been getting. Without Photoshop there effectively is no OS X.
Secondly, Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, they acquired DVD Studio Pro from (who was it? some company that started with 'A'), they bought Logic. Are any of these pieces of software Apple's 'core' business? No, they aren't. I remember I was more than a little surprised to see Apple even acquire these pieces of software. Not only have they acquired them, they have redeveloped them into really nice apps. So clearly, part of their strategy is to provide extremely nice pro apps for their own OS.
One segment of pro apps they have avoided -- I am sure partially to not piss off Adobe -- is graphics. They lack a pro 3D app, and they lack a pro 2D app (though by working CoreImage into the OS, they have provided tools that programmers can use to recreate 75% of what Photoshop does easily). Further, Adobe controls the PDF format (which Apple uses fir display in their OS).
I dunno...I think Adobe would be a pretty much perfect fit for Apple. Other than Premiere (which sucks anyway), very little of their work seems to overlap, and then Apple would have a complete suite of pro apps guaranteed to run on OS X (and if they really wanted to be shitty, they could discontinue the Windows versions, and leave Microsoft high and dry).
I mean, if this became too much of a distraction for Apple, they could spin off a separate software company (a la FileMaker), but other than potential distractions, I fail to see how acquiring Adobe would be all that bad for Apple, and I can certainly see a lot of potential upside in the thought.
I will seed Think Secret and AppleInsider with some good fodder for an article about this.
This move is clearly proof that Apple is going to spin the music division into its own company. One campus for computers, one for music publishing/distribution.
I'd like to believe you, but Aspyr has already trimmed back the titles it's releasing, for example. Of course, maybe it just means the end of the porting business, but I think we're going to go through a period where game developers just say "reboot and play it under Windows". Hell, the way the market is today they say "Fuck off. You can't play our game."
As far as what percentage of Mac buyers will install XP...maybe only 10% of the current Mac owners will be inclined to do so, but this is being touted as a big new reason for switchers to buy Macs. I would think, then, that those new converts will be the one buying their Windows copies.
One sad thing about this, as a Mac user and Mac gamer, is that this probably puts a big fat nail in the coffin for AAA OS X-native game titles. Or maybe it's less of a nail, and more like sticky tape, meaning the coffin can be reopened if OS X attains a bigger critical mass.
Another interesting side-effect is the stats. Apple is always fond of calling people 'switchers', as if when the person buys a Mac for his home, his Windows box suddenly disappears. Well, now, we've got a machine that can run anything....so...er...what is it? Makes me feel like the only real way to track platform penetration will be browser stats.
Strange new developments, indeed, even though we all knew it would happen when Apple went Intel.
The parent poster displayed some supreme idiocy, but that's one point of his that's up for debate. Could the G5 have been retrofitted into a lower power design to accommodate Apple's unique needs? I say yes. Was it worth it for IBM to do this when they gained all three next generation console manufacturers as customers? I say no. Therefore, I'd say it's probably just as true that IBM dumped Apple, as Apple dumped IBM.
IMO, the real sequence was that IBM effectively dumped Apple by ceasing serious development on desktop G5s, and then Apple dumped IBM because it wasn't getting what it needed.
Hey Ruby/Rails users...giving you a chance to evangelize. I've never used it, but to me, it almost seems like a framework designed to make quick demos, but every demo I have seen is completely lacking in any design or uniqueness.
So, my question is this: how easy is it if you want to have a more complex visual layout? What If I want a form to submit to an encrypted text file? What if I need to work this system into a very intricate design?
What I'm trying to get at is: does its simplicity w/r/t getting something quick and dirty together mean it's a pain in the ass when you want to do something very special with it? Or is it equally easy to completely customize and change?
Personally, I think Dvorak is a fucking genius. Every time he writes sone inane babble, he gets his employers a TON of traffic, and then he just gets to go home and have a beer and watch all the idiots on slashdot actually try to argue with his ridiculous ideas.
Keeps him employed, and keeps those ad sales people happy.
And what source do you trust?
Every single thing ever written has been created by someone with an agenda. Nothing is trustable. The whole notion of 'truth' is just silly anyway. There is no such thing. Never has been, never will be.
Wikipedia's as good a source as any other, for pretty much anything, IMO.
Yeah, but FireWire Target Disk mode is the kind of feature that will literally save your (data) life. Also, it helps makes the process of migrating from an old mac to a neweer mac trivial; when I bought my new PowerBook, it was just hit a button and I literally couldn't tell my new machine from my old one (as they were both 12" PowerBooks), and all within 1-2 hours.
(In fact, it was funny, I accidentally deleted some data on the new machine before I realized it wasn't the old one.)
Anyway, BIOS sucks ass. It always has. So, since Apple doesn't need it, why the hell would they adopt it, especially when (as other posters point out) the PC industry is moving away from it and toward EFI anyway? It's not like EFI is some big huge hurdle; getting these alternative OSs up on the machines will happen in relatively short order, and for now it gives Apple a nice little buffer time to get the whole product line out and work out some kinks. Seems sensible rather than evil to me.
Thanks for pulling numbers out of your ass, but you should really do some research instead of just fingering yourself.
Crunch their last quarter numbers a little bit more and you might just find that the last quarter was the first time that iPod+iTunes made up 50% (or more) of their business.
14 million iPods @ $200 per unit (yes, I am pulling that number out of my ass, but it ought to be pretty close, given the price points of the product matrix and how each model sells) = 2.8 billion dollars. Add on the 'several hundred million from sales on the iTunes Music Store, plus relates accessory sales from the Apple retail chain, and iPod+iTunes revenue easily beats the necessary 2.85 million mark which represents half of their 4Q revenue. We'll know more when they formally announce their financials, of course, but it looks like the iPod is the top dog at Apple, at least until they grow PC marketshare.