I don't think VA, OSDN or Slashdot is likely to try to milk that cow again.
What I meant was that someone had already tried it and failed famously, and here someone was suggesting the same thing like it was a new idea. It just set off some alarms, though the OP says it wasn't a troll. Meh. I am a fool.
I think it was called at various times VA Linux and VA Research with among others Larry Augustine in the executive's seat and Eric Raymond in the board room.
YHBT YHL HAND -- I think.
I mean, think about it: Anonymous Coward writes about getting "capital venture" funding to compete with Dell, and spend lots of money advertising about open source, and who would "CERTAINLY" advice his friends to buy from such a company. Posted on Slashdot, which is part of OSDN/OSTG, which is, (surprise!) a subsidiary of VA Software.
God help anybody that actually takes that post seriously.
Why? The profit on a $2000 workstation is around 10%. The profit on a $200 OS is around 100%[1]. And the $2000 workstation has a lot of associated costs
You're forgetting the non-monetary cost. Namely: leverage. If they sold the OS alone, you would suddenly have a lot more choices about where to get your hardware. They might make tons of money in the short term, but it would be at the expense of entering into the cutthroat beige-box underworld/market, in which they would be promptly slaughtered.
They have a great product, but not so great that they could compete with Dell, et al. without the shield of exclusivity. You hear plenty of people saying they want to buy Mac OS X to run on beige-boxes, but nobody saying they want to buy a PowerMac to run Windows. Why should Apple take a chance like that when they can just continue to do as well as they have been getting people to run Mac OS X on PowerMacs?
Yeah, that's what I meant by the thousands over time. We all know of the intensely loyal Mac customers with, say, a G5 under the desk, a PowerBook on the desk, an iSight for both, a few AirPort Expresses, half a dozen iPods of various generations and models, and buys every OS and iLife upgrade the moment it comes out.
Apple appears to have very little interest in appealing to people who run Linux (or pirated Windows) on $300 AMD systems.
Indeed, and why should they? Targeting your product at people who don't like to spend money is a fool's game. Better to price something as you think it is worth.
I'd rather spend $200 on OSX for my workstation, than $200 for Windows anything -- especially if it worked properly.
They don't want your $200. They want thousands of your dollars over a very long period of time. They would rather you buy a new $2000 workstation from them in a few years than just buy a $200 operating system today.
The only way to really acheive that (even if the product is great) is by maintaining control over the platform. Microsoft did it through shady business pracitices and extraordinary luck. Apple does it by having a tightly closed system.
Seriously folks, how is Google competitively threatening Microsoft?
By being Google. By being big. By being popular. By having a tremendous amount of momentum. The threat is that Microsoft really doesn't know what they will do. A few years ago Google was a just a search engine. What will they do in the next few years?
Put another way, in what product categories could you purchase a Google offering instead of a Microsoft offering? Google doesn't offer an operating system product and doesn't offer an office productivity suite.
So? Maybe they will in the next 5 years. Maybe they won't. In any event, you're taking a very narrow view of competition. Google and Microsoft both have a pretty wide array of products, and quite a few of them are in direct competion.
The only way that Google will be able to become a genuine competitive threat is if Microsoft makes a serious mistake by heading down its proposed path of competing with Google on Google's browser-based terms.
So, you're saying that even if Google search crushes MSN search, Google Mail crushes Hotmail, Google Talk crushes MSN Messenger, Google Maps crushes MSN Mappoint, Google Earth crushes Terraserver, Blogger crushes MSN Spaces, Google Desktop crushes MSN Desktop Search, and so on, that Google isn't a threat to Microsoft?
On top of this both of these companies (and Yahoo! and Amazon, etc.) are going to be spawning a lot of new services in the next few years (e.g. Windows/Office Live), and gobbling up a lot of startups. Even if there is no "crushing" involved, it's foolish to say that there is no competition going on between them.
Without knowing what those products/brands are it is impossible to understand the post.
You might consider the possibility that if the post doesn't make any sense to you, it probably isn't something you're interested in.
For instance, if you don't know that VC stands for "venture capital", you probably don't care when some company you've never heard of receives it. And if you've never heard of Flickr (living under a rock, perhaps?), you probably don't care about companies claiming to be just like them.
Re:Its very simple why its moderated funny
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
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· Score: 1
If you haven't been to China and seen these things first hand...[snip]...you're really not qualified to make such a pseudo-intellectual statement on Chinese affairs.
Actually, when you peel the paper off a "Free Tibet" bumper sticker, it says on the inside "You are now qualified to make psuedo-intellectual statements about Chinese affairs." FYI.
Do you seriously think that Mac isn't BUILT on eye-candy?
Mac OS X is built on quality design. That, in turn, happens to look pretty cool to most people.
I don't know about anybody else, but when I say "eye-candy" as a derrogatory term, I mean visual elements added in ignorance of any overall design. There is a reason that Mac OS X looks cool, where tackyrip-offs of the visual elements do not. When you simply "paste-on" a bunch of stuff that "looks cool", you end up with an incoherent mess. This is the dominant practice in open source UI design.
In other words, the problem isn't "glitz". It's improper use of it. Apple can afford the glitz because they have skilled designers that know how to use it properly. Open source projects do not, and they suffer by spending too much time adding "eye-candy" in without any coherent vision.
Most cell phones are not really sub-$100 devices. Their true cost of a web-enabled phone is often well over $100, but the true cost is hidden somewhere in the 1 to 2 year contract with the provider.
Likewise, this device, which hasn't actually been built yet, will cost more than $100. Even the linked article says the cost to build will be $130-$150 for the first 5-10 million. Add in all the other costs involved in getting them to the people and it's unlikely to cost under $200.
I concur--it's the marketing. iPods are remarkably overpriced and underfeatured for what you get compared to other portable digital audio players.
"Overpriced" is something you say about something that costs so much that nobody is buying it. The fact is that Apple is selling millions of the things from $100-$400 to people that obviously think they are worth as much.
Even things Apple initiated, like the protocol behind what free software users call "ZeroConf" (what Apple now calls "Bonjour") aren't present in iPods despite the nice service it could help provide to iPod users--with wireless communication hardware built into a portable digital audio player, one could share audio clips, playlists, images, and so on just by being physically near them or on the same local network as them.
Yeah, but why?
I've always found it pretty easy to share things with people physically near me without resorting to wireless networks. I usually just walk over to them and show them, or perhaps tell them.
I get what you're saying, and yeah it's a "neat" possibility, but there's certainly not iPod-scale demand for such a thing at this point in time. There are already far too many ways to share data, and far too few situatons in which people are without some other means. What you're basically asking for is an iPod with WiFi; if you do that, then why not have a web browser? Oh, whoops, now you're asking for something quite different from anything the iPod has been to date.
I wanted a mini until I found out more about it but the design of the box is just stupid. Why doesn't it have a laptop-style memory upgrade port on the bottom of the board, thus the bottom of the case?
Because it uses full-size RAM. Such a panel would be as wide as the whole case. More parts, more cost, and a big ugly seam on the case for something that few people will do at all, and those that do will do maybe once.
Why does it not have 800 Mbps firewire?
None of Apple's consumer line has FireWire 800. If you need FireWire 800 (editing HD or something), you're probably more interested in a PowerBook or PowerMac.
Also, there's no room. FW800 uses a differently shaped port, so you would have to lose something already on there, and there really isn't anything non-critical. You could drop the modem, but I suspect there is much more demand for it than FW800.
FWIW, the Mac mini doesn't come with a pony, either, which I think is a glaring oversight, as I really want a pony.
She said it was like trying to use a PC with ten foot chopsticks.
Your daughter is awesome.
Note that this does not exclude a learning curve and more sophistication _after_ entry. Entry must be immediate and rewarding.
Indeed. I've long argued that many products and interfaces could be made dramatically better if the designers simply *visualized* the learning curve. Apple's curves are always exponential.
You're lucky... Since I worked at a computer repair store in highschool, I got called in to fix all those things you did.... Fscking BASTARD!
I had it even better. I worked computer repair at my school. I got to spend an hour and a half of class time every day fucking things up and then fixing them.
It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included.
That's great! I always base my choice of media player based on how it looks! I don't care whether it works well, or has useful features, or stays out of my way when I'm trying to do simple things, but it had better look as awesome as my Chinese (or Japanese, I forget) character tatoo, and the window in my computer's case (the one that lets you see my rad water cooling rig), and the neon lights I installed on my Civic (to make it go faster, and get me more poontang).
I think maybe Apple's own iPhoto might be a better comparison. It blows both right out of the water, though.
It doesnt look like it will compete with Photoshop though at this stage. It is more of a basic organization and editing program.
I am not a professional photographer, but I think it's more than competitive with Photoshop for that market already. Dispite the name, Photoshop isn't especially tailored for photographer's workflows. Aperture is, and I can definitely see people who don't need Photoshop's other editing capabilities making the switch. Just as they did with their last new pro product, Motion, they've created something that doesn't quite resemble anything else out there.
It looks pretty slick but has some fairly hefty system requirements.
I find the reason why to be really interesting. Instead of making duplicate copies for your edited photos (as you would with most tools), Aperture just stores the CoreImage filter settings for each version, and re-applies them to the original when you view them. It just saves "the diffs". But instead of having to actively re-render the filters each time you want to make a change, as you would with Photoshop, you can just adjust the filter's settings in realtime (or close enough to realtime). In other words, CoreImage is the shit, and it requires some decent hardware to run at a respectable rate.
Your Mac power-on-to-login times seem way out of whack. I would suspect printer or other add-on drivers. Mac OS X isn't the fastest to boot, but I've never seen boots that slow.
Quicksilver might be a big cause for slow login-to-usable times. Depending on the build and how many items you have in the catalog, QS can be very slow to startup, especially with the PowerBook's 5400RPM disk, and 167MHz bus speed.
In any event, you should use Sleep most of the time. (If you get Sleep-to-Wake times longer than 2 seconds, something is seriously wrong.) A lot of recent switchers (as I'm guessing you are) don't seem to use it enough. Unlike with Windows, month-long uptimes are typical.
True, the iPod has never had video before, but plenty of other devices have, and I've been able to download episodes of my favorite TV shows for years now over my cable company's digital VOD system, transfer them to my PC and put them on whatever video device I want to.
You fail to state how you do this. I suspect that it isn't something that five million people (about the number of iTunes Music Store users) know how to do. I know how, with my particular cable setup, but it is rarely worth the time or effort.
Well again, VOD is already quite popular. Almost everybody has it (whether they even know it or not)
Perhaps this is true for your city, but it is definitely not common across the US. In my area it's also significantly more expensive than regular cable, and only has about six channels. Broadband internet access is far more common, and particularly common among current and potential iPod/iTunes users.
Well, so you're saying a TV requires 34 buttons to control it?
If you're the kind of idiot that remote manufacturers think that you are, then yes. On the other hand, if you've at least mastered fire and are capable of producing crude stone tools, then you could probably manage with six buttons and some menus and modes. (That is, if Apple were to include a tuner, which in any event, I don't see as likely.)
Really, I was trying to say that the "6 vs. 40" line isn't really a measure of complexity as it is redundancy. I heartily support the lack of buttons.
I don't think the right to shield a source should have anything to do with who you are (journalist or not), but some other standard weighing public interest concerns against the need for confidential sources to feel safe.
This is exactly what Whistleblower Protection is all about. Unfortunately, it seems that only three or four people on earth even know about it. It isn't perfect, but it certainly exists.
This effectively is a fourth option: 4) Allow anyone that reveals confidential information in the public interest protection from legal retaliation.
Apple releasing a living room media center app called FrontRow with an iPod-like remote (which has 6 buttons compared to Microsoft Media Center's 40 buttons)
Bear in mind that the button comparison is a bit skewed, as Windows Media Center's remote includes functions for that archaic device: the television.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think VA, OSDN or Slashdot is likely to try to milk that cow again.
What I meant was that someone had already tried it and failed famously, and here someone was suggesting the same thing like it was a new idea. It just set off some alarms, though the OP says it wasn't a troll. Meh. I am a fool.
I think it was called at various times VA Linux and VA Research with among others Larry Augustine in the executive's seat and Eric Raymond in the board room.
YHBT YHL HAND -- I think.
I mean, think about it: Anonymous Coward writes about getting "capital venture" funding to compete with Dell, and spend lots of money advertising about open source, and who would "CERTAINLY" advice his friends to buy from such a company. Posted on Slashdot, which is part of OSDN/OSTG, which is, (surprise!) a subsidiary of VA Software.
God help anybody that actually takes that post seriously.
Why? The profit on a $2000 workstation is around 10%. The profit on a $200 OS is around 100%[1]. And the $2000 workstation has a lot of associated costs
You're forgetting the non-monetary cost. Namely: leverage. If they sold the OS alone, you would suddenly have a lot more choices about where to get your hardware. They might make tons of money in the short term, but it would be at the expense of entering into the cutthroat beige-box underworld/market, in which they would be promptly slaughtered.
They have a great product, but not so great that they could compete with Dell, et al. without the shield of exclusivity. You hear plenty of people saying they want to buy Mac OS X to run on beige-boxes, but nobody saying they want to buy a PowerMac to run Windows. Why should Apple take a chance like that when they can just continue to do as well as they have been getting people to run Mac OS X on PowerMacs?
Actually, they want both.
Yeah, that's what I meant by the thousands over time. We all know of the intensely loyal Mac customers with, say, a G5 under the desk, a PowerBook on the desk, an iSight for both, a few AirPort Expresses, half a dozen iPods of various generations and models, and buys every OS and iLife upgrade the moment it comes out.
Apple appears to have very little interest in appealing to people who run Linux (or pirated Windows) on $300 AMD systems.
Indeed, and why should they? Targeting your product at people who don't like to spend money is a fool's game. Better to price something as you think it is worth.
Will Apple go after ZDNet like it does bloggers for "violating" the license agreement for OS X x86?
No, but they probably will go after them for showing Sherlock under the heading "The Mac OS Advantage".
I'd rather spend $200 on OSX for my workstation, than $200 for Windows anything -- especially if it worked properly.
They don't want your $200. They want thousands of your dollars over a very long period of time. They would rather you buy a new $2000 workstation from them in a few years than just buy a $200 operating system today.
The only way to really acheive that (even if the product is great) is by maintaining control over the platform. Microsoft did it through shady business pracitices and extraordinary luck. Apple does it by having a tightly closed system.
Seriously folks, how is Google competitively threatening Microsoft?
By being Google. By being big. By being popular. By having a tremendous amount of momentum. The threat is that Microsoft really doesn't know what they will do. A few years ago Google was a just a search engine. What will they do in the next few years?
Put another way, in what product categories could you purchase a Google offering instead of a Microsoft offering? Google doesn't offer an operating system product and doesn't offer an office productivity suite.
So? Maybe they will in the next 5 years. Maybe they won't. In any event, you're taking a very narrow view of competition. Google and Microsoft both have a pretty wide array of products, and quite a few of them are in direct competion.
The only way that Google will be able to become a genuine competitive threat is if Microsoft makes a serious mistake by heading down its proposed path of competing with Google on Google's browser-based terms.
So, you're saying that even if Google search crushes MSN search, Google Mail crushes Hotmail, Google Talk crushes MSN Messenger, Google Maps crushes MSN Mappoint, Google Earth crushes Terraserver, Blogger crushes MSN Spaces, Google Desktop crushes MSN Desktop Search, and so on, that Google isn't a threat to Microsoft?
On top of this both of these companies (and Yahoo! and Amazon, etc.) are going to be spawning a lot of new services in the next few years (e.g. Windows/Office Live), and gobbling up a lot of startups. Even if there is no "crushing" involved, it's foolish to say that there is no competition going on between them.
Without knowing what those products/brands are it is impossible to understand the post.
You might consider the possibility that if the post doesn't make any sense to you, it probably isn't something you're interested in.
For instance, if you don't know that VC stands for "venture capital", you probably don't care when some company you've never heard of receives it. And if you've never heard of Flickr (living under a rock, perhaps?), you probably don't care about companies claiming to be just like them.
If you haven't been to China and seen these things first hand...[snip]...you're really not qualified to make such a pseudo-intellectual statement on Chinese affairs.
Actually, when you peel the paper off a "Free Tibet" bumper sticker, it says on the inside "You are now qualified to make psuedo-intellectual statements about Chinese affairs." FYI.
Do you seriously think that Mac isn't BUILT on eye-candy?
Mac OS X is built on quality design. That, in turn, happens to look pretty cool to most people.
I don't know about anybody else, but when I say "eye-candy" as a derrogatory term, I mean visual elements added in ignorance of any overall design. There is a reason that Mac OS X looks cool, where tacky rip-offs of the visual elements do not. When you simply "paste-on" a bunch of stuff that "looks cool", you end up with an incoherent mess. This is the dominant practice in open source UI design.
In other words, the problem isn't "glitz". It's improper use of it. Apple can afford the glitz because they have skilled designers that know how to use it properly. Open source projects do not, and they suffer by spending too much time adding "eye-candy" in without any coherent vision.
Most cell phones are not really sub-$100 devices. Their true cost of a web-enabled phone is often well over $100, but the true cost is hidden somewhere in the 1 to 2 year contract with the provider.
Likewise, this device, which hasn't actually been built yet, will cost more than $100. Even the linked article says the cost to build will be $130-$150 for the first 5-10 million. Add in all the other costs involved in getting them to the people and it's unlikely to cost under $200.
I concur--it's the marketing. iPods are remarkably overpriced and underfeatured for what you get compared to other portable digital audio players.
"Overpriced" is something you say about something that costs so much that nobody is buying it. The fact is that Apple is selling millions of the things from $100-$400 to people that obviously think they are worth as much.
Even things Apple initiated, like the protocol behind what free software users call "ZeroConf" (what Apple now calls "Bonjour") aren't present in iPods despite the nice service it could help provide to iPod users--with wireless communication hardware built into a portable digital audio player, one could share audio clips, playlists, images, and so on just by being physically near them or on the same local network as them.
Yeah, but why?
I've always found it pretty easy to share things with people physically near me without resorting to wireless networks. I usually just walk over to them and show them, or perhaps tell them.
I get what you're saying, and yeah it's a "neat" possibility, but there's certainly not iPod-scale demand for such a thing at this point in time. There are already far too many ways to share data, and far too few situatons in which people are without some other means. What you're basically asking for is an iPod with WiFi; if you do that, then why not have a web browser? Oh, whoops, now you're asking for something quite different from anything the iPod has been to date.
I wanted a mini until I found out more about it but the design of the box is just stupid. Why doesn't it have a laptop-style memory upgrade port on the bottom of the board, thus the bottom of the case?
Because it uses full-size RAM. Such a panel would be as wide as the whole case. More parts, more cost, and a big ugly seam on the case for something that few people will do at all, and those that do will do maybe once.
Why does it not have 800 Mbps firewire?
None of Apple's consumer line has FireWire 800. If you need FireWire 800 (editing HD or something), you're probably more interested in a PowerBook or PowerMac.
Also, there's no room. FW800 uses a differently shaped port, so you would have to lose something already on there, and there really isn't anything non-critical. You could drop the modem, but I suspect there is much more demand for it than FW800.
FWIW, the Mac mini doesn't come with a pony, either, which I think is a glaring oversight, as I really want a pony.
She said it was like trying to use a PC with ten foot chopsticks.
Your daughter is awesome.
Note that this does not exclude a learning curve and more sophistication _after_ entry. Entry must be immediate and rewarding.
Indeed. I've long argued that many products and interfaces could be made dramatically better if the designers simply *visualized* the learning curve. Apple's curves are always exponential.
You're lucky... Since I worked at a computer repair store in highschool, I got called in to fix all those things you did.... Fscking BASTARD!
I had it even better. I worked computer repair at my school. I got to spend an hour and a half of class time every day fucking things up and then fixing them.
I'll say it again: OS X is what Linux on the Desktop aspires to be.
If only!
I'm afraid the truth is that Linux on the desktop is still aspiring to be Windows. That's the only reason it still sucks.
(...and now someone will link to GNUstep.)
It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included.
That's great! I always base my choice of media player based on how it looks! I don't care whether it works well, or has useful features, or stays out of my way when I'm trying to do simple things, but it had better look as awesome as my Chinese (or Japanese, I forget) character tatoo, and the window in my computer's case (the one that lets you see my rad water cooling rig), and the neon lights I installed on my Civic (to make it go faster, and get me more poontang).
is similar to Googles Picassa but on steroids.
I think maybe Apple's own iPhoto might be a better comparison. It blows both right out of the water, though.
It doesnt look like it will compete with Photoshop though at this stage. It is more of a basic organization and editing program.
I am not a professional photographer, but I think it's more than competitive with Photoshop for that market already. Dispite the name, Photoshop isn't especially tailored for photographer's workflows. Aperture is, and I can definitely see people who don't need Photoshop's other editing capabilities making the switch. Just as they did with their last new pro product, Motion, they've created something that doesn't quite resemble anything else out there.
It looks pretty slick but has some fairly hefty system requirements.
I find the reason why to be really interesting. Instead of making duplicate copies for your edited photos (as you would with most tools), Aperture just stores the CoreImage filter settings for each version, and re-applies them to the original when you view them. It just saves "the diffs". But instead of having to actively re-render the filters each time you want to make a change, as you would with Photoshop, you can just adjust the filter's settings in realtime (or close enough to realtime). In other words, CoreImage is the shit, and it requires some decent hardware to run at a respectable rate.
They are reverse engineering iTunes. I'd be willing to bet on it.
Pshaw! Why should they bother going after iTunes when can just create their own innovative and original products like Lsongs and MP3tunes?
Your Mac power-on-to-login times seem way out of whack. I would suspect printer or other add-on drivers. Mac OS X isn't the fastest to boot, but I've never seen boots that slow.
Quicksilver might be a big cause for slow login-to-usable times. Depending on the build and how many items you have in the catalog, QS can be very slow to startup, especially with the PowerBook's 5400RPM disk, and 167MHz bus speed.
In any event, you should use Sleep most of the time. (If you get Sleep-to-Wake times longer than 2 seconds, something is seriously wrong.) A lot of recent switchers (as I'm guessing you are) don't seem to use it enough. Unlike with Windows, month-long uptimes are typical.
True, the iPod has never had video before, but plenty of other devices have, and I've been able to download episodes of my favorite TV shows for years now over my cable company's digital VOD system, transfer them to my PC and put them on whatever video device I want to.
You fail to state how you do this. I suspect that it isn't something that five million people (about the number of iTunes Music Store users) know how to do. I know how, with my particular cable setup, but it is rarely worth the time or effort.
Well again, VOD is already quite popular. Almost everybody has it (whether they even know it or not)
Perhaps this is true for your city, but it is definitely not common across the US. In my area it's also significantly more expensive than regular cable, and only has about six channels. Broadband internet access is far more common, and particularly common among current and potential iPod/iTunes users.
Well, so you're saying a TV requires 34 buttons to control it?
If you're the kind of idiot that remote manufacturers think that you are, then yes. On the other hand, if you've at least mastered fire and are capable of producing crude stone tools, then you could probably manage with six buttons and some menus and modes. (That is, if Apple were to include a tuner, which in any event, I don't see as likely.)
Really, I was trying to say that the "6 vs. 40" line isn't really a measure of complexity as it is redundancy. I heartily support the lack of buttons.
The only button on a remote you need for a Television is "Power"
Indeed. Of course, that's not one of the six buttons on the Apple Remote.
I don't think the right to shield a source should have anything to do with who you are (journalist or not), but some other standard weighing public interest concerns against the need for confidential sources to feel safe.
This is exactly what Whistleblower Protection is all about. Unfortunately, it seems that only three or four people on earth even know about it. It isn't perfect, but it certainly exists.
This effectively is a fourth option: 4) Allow anyone that reveals confidential information in the public interest protection from legal retaliation.
Apple releasing a living room media center app called FrontRow with an iPod-like remote (which has 6 buttons compared to Microsoft Media Center's 40 buttons)
Bear in mind that the button comparison is a bit skewed, as Windows Media Center's remote includes functions for that archaic device: the television.