Many people try to classify Apple as a luxury niche producer: a Ferrari, a Morgan.
I am not one of them. I'm arguing that it's possible for a company to be successful without selling the most widgets. Is HP dying because they don't sell as many PCs as Dell? A profitable company is a profitable company.
I was also responding to the troll-ish nature of the article, which implied that Apple's products must be inferior because Apple is a smaller company than Dell. Even if you think Apple's products suck, this is a patently ridiculous conclusion.
It's predictions of the near-future were a little off.
No, they were a lot off, just like a lot of articles about Apple have been in the last 25 years. I'm not suggesting that Apple is indefeatable, but it's not a given, as the article so calmly suggests.
You know by lazily discounting the main thesis of an argument because of some speculative minor points is quite regressive.
The main argument is that Apple is doomed to failure because they aren't more like other companies. To back this up the author cites very old failures (the Mac LC!?), and concludes that this will lead to the failure of Apple's newer ventures. It didn't (Did "Bob" ruin Microsoft?), and frankly, the article's conclusions have been proven wrong.
Apple has had minor run-ups in its fortunes before - they rarely last more than 12-18 months...
Right...which is why they've been around for 25+ years.
If Apple is really the brains of the industry--if its products are so much better than Microsoft's or Dell's or IBM's or Hewlett-Packard's--then why is the company so damned small?
Does the size of a company determine the quality of it's product? Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
If you answer yes to either of those questions, you're out of your fucking mind.
I'd also like to point out that the year-old article you're linking to predicts that the iPod will be crushed by competitors such as the Dell DJ "selling for as little as $299", that the iTunes Music Store will be crushed by Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Sony, and that it will take "at least a year" for Apple to sell 100 million songs. None of these things are even remotely true.
But the decisions which are made against what is percieved to be in the best economic interest of the shareholders must be answered to and will probably result in termination.
My point is that this depends heavily on the shareholders themselves. Not every shareholder of every company is a greedy bastard demanding returns at any human cost. I would also note that not every "good" act is a monetary loss, and not every "evil" one is a monetary gain. I think this perception is one of the things that perpetuates the problems described above.
The mistake is not made in the small actions of people at the bottom, it's made in the small actions of the government years ago to allow such structures to exist.
This is only true if you pretend that people didn't do any of these things to each other before 1890 or so.
They have no soul, they have no conscience, no moral or ethical values, no sympathy, and no regrets.
They also have no brain, no body, no mouth, no ears, no hate, no greed, no life and absolutely no capability beyond that which is given to them by humans.
Yeah they take direction from groups of humans, but the mechanisms of the corporation can dispose of humans which get in the way of those shareholders.
Shareholders which are themselves human. There's no escaping the fact that it's humans all the way down. Generalizing "corporations" as all bad seems like a way of glossing over the fact that all people do bad things to one another. If it's a dog-eat-dog world, you're blaming the teeth.
Is anybody else sick of hearing about the Transcendence of Gadgetry?
I think that what you're seeing is the reaction of a price-conscious but design-ignorant market to a well-designed product. In other words, people are so used to buying things based on how cheap they are, or how popular it is, or how it looks, that it's a revealation to them that a more expensive, well-designed product might make them happier.
To someone that has never encountered good design, it seems like magic.
As a design student (yeah, I know), I can look at an iPod(including it's context) and list a million ways in which it's a good design. But it's not magic to me. Nor should it be to anyone else. If consumers were more quality-conscious, we'd have less Wal-Mart, shitty music, shitty food, and shitty consumer electronics (read:toys).
That will never happen, but I think events like the iPods surprise success are more of a foil to rampant consumerism than a symptom of it.
We live in an age where most of the popular music sucks
I hate to break it to you, but this is true in any era.
I don't understand why there have been so many comments about the one-button mouse.
The Mac mini doesn't even come with one of them.
What, really, is the gripe? There is nothing stopping you from using a multi-button mouse. There isn't even the disincentive of having the machine come with a mouse that you'd won't use. Is it really that offensive that Apple doesn't want to sell you something that you can get elsewhere, or that you might already own?
Command-click (alt-click with PC keyboard) does this on most mac browsers and is MUCH faster than a right-click, because you don't have to (1) wait for a menu to pop up and then (2) select the item from the menu. It takes one "beat" instead of three,
That's a really bad example. Almost every mouse these days is has a clickable scroll wheel (a middle button), which does this in one click.
Yeah but the Mind Worms (MIND WORMS!?!?) aren't. I can understand the role they play in the game, but the fact that you can't turn them off, and you can't tell your governors to NOT build them seems like a needless oversight.
I used to be an open-source developer, but have by and large given up on it because I got sick and tired of getting flamed by anonymous assholes on Slashdot.
Okay let's say Bill is worth 50 billion dollars on paper. 750 million is something like 1.5% of his total worth?
You're ignoring the huge amount of money and resources donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the past. In fact, this $750 million is in additon to another $750 million they pledged in 1999 to the same organization.
But what's another $12.5 million for immunization in India, or $43 million for antimilarial drugs here and there. After all, it's just a drop in the bucket to Bill Gates -- he would donate more if he weren't so greedy and evil, right? They set up that Foundation as a tax dodge, and certainly not as a way of making sure that money gets directed at the right groups doing the right things, and not people just looking for a handout. No, there's definitely no need to make sure the money gets spent making a difference and not pissed away by NGO bureaucracy. You can just "donate" and forget about it, like you do with that $1.50 to the guy in the street who's just going to go buy some Wild Irish Rose and hit you up for another $1.50 tomorrow.
Yeah, I'm kind of annoyed at the way Slashdotters seem to have reacted to this news.
High school will not be, and shouldn't be, "the best years of your life."
I wish I had realized sooner that the people I used to get that "best years" line from were always bitter old hags that seemed dissatisfied with their life.
Nevertheless, I do wonder if there's some sort of sticker or seal on the inside to let Apple know you've opened the case.
In my experience with PC repair, you can usually tell by how thoroughly the person who brought it in denies having opened the case, which is always in proportion to how broken it is.
Actions that control an application to get something done. If the application is scriptable, AppleScript can be used for these types of Actions. Objective-C is a good choice if the application has a public API, such as Address Book and iChat.
Which I read to mean that it works both ways. AppleScriptable apps *are* Automator-aware. One just has to write Automator Actions to make use of them in Automator. Also, there is no single API for "Automator-Awareness" -- any functionality you expose in your app can be accessed in an Automator action.
Yes, AppleScriptability probably will suffer over time, as it sounds like the latter method would be easier to implement than the former. But I doubt that developers that have already added AppleScript support would remove it in favor of another API, unless the functionality gained was significant.
But then, I could be talking out of my ass, as I have little experience with Objective-C, and even less experience with AppleScript, and a lot of experience with talking out of my ass.
the ability to build event scripts with XML and/or HTML sounds freakin' awesome.
I think you're mistaken. Dashboard widgets are written in HTML+JavaScript. Automator actions are written in AppleScript or Objective-C.
It's basically built on top of AppleScript, so you won't be able to do anything that can't already be done with AppleScript. Apps or functions that aren't scriptable will be inaccessable to Automator.
On the other hand, I think developers will be more prone to add scripting support now that scripting is more accessable to users, and not the pain in the ass that AppleScript typically is.
Amazing, in asking people not to share open sourced projects under the BSD license, apparently, Apple does not understand the BSD license either.
Again, you're amazed simply because you assume that BSD is effectively the same as the GPL. It isn't. BSD allows anyone to take the code, modify it, and sell it, without giving anything back.
I checked the OSX license agreement, and it doesn't seem to be worded the same way a BSD license is worded.
Why would it be? Nobody has claimed that Mac OS X is BSD-licensed.
So this is not an actual BSD license, but it tends to pretend that it covers the whole OS, even the Open Sourced parts, of which it claims are not transferable without the original media, etc.
Yes, the BSD license allows this.
Some Open Sourced parts have a GPL license, apparently.
Yes, and source is available. I couldn't tell you where, exactly, as I've never had the need to recompile (say) GCC from scratch, but I assure you it's available.
Actually, the main reason people buy computers these days is to replace their old one, which mysteriously doesn't work as well as it used to. They're seen as a thing that naturally degrades over time : "it's obsolete the minute you buy it" is something I hear a lot, and though there was a time in the late 90s when that was true, it's just not any more, but the perception is still there. This is one of the myths that Apple is combating with the Mac mini.
They are fulfilling their legal obligations and nothing more.
If you want people who use your code to "give back to the community" in the way you want, you should license your code in a way that requires them to do so. Add a clause that says "if you're a big company and you take our code, you have to help us out because we're smaller, even if our goals are very different".
Its entirely in the spirit of the GPL to do as little as you're legally required to do. Thats why it's the GPL and not public domain, or BSD.
This is simply not made very clear to your average non-technical user.
I edited out a line in the above post that said : "A lot of people (even smart people) don't realize this, but a lot of people don't realize a lot of things, and we don't go firing off lawsuits every time someone is mistaken about something they purchased."
I removed this, because I was wrong -- we *do* go firing off lawsuits, all the time. I would contend that the vast majority of these are stupid, launched by otherwise smart and reasonable people that want someone to pay for the fact that they made a mistake. They just seem to get vengeful and willfully stupid as soon as they enter their credit card number. But that's a not much of an argument.
The large volume of posters on Apple's own discussion forums would disagree with you as to this particular point.
A vocal minority. Those forums have the highest concentration of dissatisfied customers I have ever seen, many of whom think that they are talking to Apple directly. There are also "several dozen" posts a day claiming that they'll never buy an Apple product again, that trivial and well-documented tasks are "impossible!!!", and asking "When Apple will release OS X for Windows?"
Considered TightVNC to be a moderate threat. Nice feature, but I think it's overreacting a little.
As part of a rather insidious prank, I once compiled a version of TightVNC without a system tray icon. It was maybe six lines of code taken out. No other changes, but it was basically invisible for an unsuspecting user, and one could definitely cause a lot of chaos with it. I don't doubt that some malware incorporates some kind of VNC.
Suing all of the major record labels because they release their music on CDs? After all, I'm *forced* to buy a portable CD player of I want to take my music with me.
Or you could buy an iPod, but apparently that's bad because as everyone on Slashdot knows that nobody buys iPods unless they're forced to.
Slashdot Mirror
The Matrix could easily have been renamed Shadowrun the movie.
Meanwhile, Shadowrun could have been named "Neuromancer the Game".
Many people try to classify Apple as a luxury niche producer: a Ferrari, a Morgan.
I am not one of them. I'm arguing that it's possible for a company to be successful without selling the most widgets. Is HP dying because they don't sell as many PCs as Dell? A profitable company is a profitable company.
I was also responding to the troll-ish nature of the article, which implied that Apple's products must be inferior because Apple is a smaller company than Dell. Even if you think Apple's products suck, this is a patently ridiculous conclusion.
It's predictions of the near-future were a little off.
No, they were a lot off, just like a lot of articles about Apple have been in the last 25 years. I'm not suggesting that Apple is indefeatable, but it's not a given, as the article so calmly suggests.
You know by lazily discounting the main thesis of an argument because of some speculative minor points is quite regressive.
The main argument is that Apple is doomed to failure because they aren't more like other companies. To back this up the author cites very old failures (the Mac LC!?), and concludes that this will lead to the failure of Apple's newer ventures. It didn't (Did "Bob" ruin Microsoft?), and frankly, the article's conclusions have been proven wrong.
Apple has had minor run-ups in its fortunes before - they rarely last more than 12-18 months...
Right...which is why they've been around for 25+ years.
If Apple is really the brains of the industry--if its products are so much better than Microsoft's or Dell's or IBM's or Hewlett-Packard's--then why is the company so damned small?
Does the size of a company determine the quality of it's product?
Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
If you answer yes to either of those questions, you're out of your fucking mind.
I'd also like to point out that the year-old article you're linking to predicts that the iPod will be crushed by competitors such as the Dell DJ "selling for as little as $299", that the iTunes Music Store will be crushed by Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Sony, and that it will take "at least a year" for Apple to sell 100 million songs. None of these things are even remotely true.
I know (from experience) that it takes no more than five minutes to explain left- and right-clicking to a three-year-old child.
Really bad example. Young children are exceptionally good learners.
But the decisions which are made against what is percieved to be in the best economic interest of the shareholders must be answered to and will probably result in termination.
My point is that this depends heavily on the shareholders themselves. Not every shareholder of every company is a greedy bastard demanding returns at any human cost. I would also note that not every "good" act is a monetary loss, and not every "evil" one is a monetary gain. I think this perception is one of the things that perpetuates the problems described above.
The mistake is not made in the small actions of people at the bottom, it's made in the small actions of the government years ago to allow such structures to exist.
This is only true if you pretend that people didn't do any of these things to each other before 1890 or so.
They have no soul, they have no conscience, no moral or ethical values, no sympathy, and no regrets.
They also have no brain, no body, no mouth, no ears, no hate, no greed, no life and absolutely no capability beyond that which is given to them by humans.
Yeah they take direction from groups of humans, but the mechanisms of the corporation can dispose of humans which get in the way of those shareholders.
Shareholders which are themselves human. There's no escaping the fact that it's humans all the way down. Generalizing "corporations" as all bad seems like a way of glossing over the fact that all people do bad things to one another. If it's a dog-eat-dog world, you're blaming the teeth.
By your list of evil deeds, it would seem that everyone, everywhere is evil.
Is anybody else sick of hearing about the Transcendence of Gadgetry?
I think that what you're seeing is the reaction of a price-conscious but design-ignorant market to a well-designed product. In other words, people are so used to buying things based on how cheap they are, or how popular it is, or how it looks, that it's a revealation to them that a more expensive, well-designed product might make them happier.
To someone that has never encountered good design, it seems like magic.
As a design student (yeah, I know), I can look at an iPod(including it's context) and list a million ways in which it's a good design. But it's not magic to me. Nor should it be to anyone else. If consumers were more quality-conscious, we'd have less Wal-Mart, shitty music, shitty food, and shitty consumer electronics (read:toys).
That will never happen, but I think events like the iPods surprise success are more of a foil to rampant consumerism than a symptom of it.
We live in an age where most of the popular music sucks
I hate to break it to you, but this is true in any era.
I don't understand why there have been so many comments about the one-button mouse.
The Mac mini doesn't even come with one of them.
What, really, is the gripe? There is nothing stopping you from using a multi-button mouse. There isn't even the disincentive of having the machine come with a mouse that you'd won't use. Is it really that offensive that Apple doesn't want to sell you something that you can get elsewhere, or that you might already own?
Command-click (alt-click with PC keyboard) does this on most mac browsers and is MUCH faster than a right-click, because you don't have to (1) wait for a menu to pop up and then (2) select the item from the menu. It takes one "beat" instead of three,
That's a really bad example. Almost every mouse these days is has a clickable scroll wheel (a middle button), which does this in one click.
The modifiable military units are great.
Yeah but the Mind Worms (MIND WORMS!?!?) aren't. I can understand the role they play in the game, but the fact that you can't turn them off, and you can't tell your governors to NOT build them seems like a needless oversight.
I used to be an open-source developer, but have by and large given up on it because I got sick and tired of getting flamed by anonymous assholes on Slashdot.
So....you became what you hated.
Okay let's say Bill is worth 50 billion dollars on paper. 750 million is something like 1.5% of his total worth?
You're ignoring the huge amount of money and resources donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the past. In fact, this $750 million is in additon to another $750 million they pledged in 1999 to the same organization.
But what's another $12.5 million for immunization in India, or $43 million for antimilarial drugs here and there. After all, it's just a drop in the bucket to Bill Gates -- he would donate more if he weren't so greedy and evil, right? They set up that Foundation as a tax dodge, and certainly not as a way of making sure that money gets directed at the right groups doing the right things, and not people just looking for a handout. No, there's definitely no need to make sure the money gets spent making a difference and not pissed away by NGO bureaucracy. You can just "donate" and forget about it, like you do with that $1.50 to the guy in the street who's just going to go buy some Wild Irish Rose and hit you up for another $1.50 tomorrow.
Yeah, I'm kind of annoyed at the way Slashdotters seem to have reacted to this news.
High school will not be, and shouldn't be, "the best years of your life."
I wish I had realized sooner that the people I used to get that "best years" line from were always bitter old hags that seemed dissatisfied with their life.
Nevertheless, I do wonder if there's some sort of sticker or seal on the inside to let Apple know you've opened the case.
In my experience with PC repair, you can usually tell by how thoroughly the person who brought it in denies having opened the case, which is always in proportion to how broken it is.
It looks like we're both half right. Apple says:
Actions that control an application to get something done. If the application is scriptable, AppleScript can be used for these types of Actions. Objective-C is a good choice if the application has a public API, such as Address Book and iChat.
Which I read to mean that it works both ways. AppleScriptable apps *are* Automator-aware. One just has to write Automator Actions to make use of them in Automator. Also, there is no single API for "Automator-Awareness" -- any functionality you expose in your app can be accessed in an Automator action.
Yes, AppleScriptability probably will suffer over time, as it sounds like the latter method would be easier to implement than the former. But I doubt that developers that have already added AppleScript support would remove it in favor of another API, unless the functionality gained was significant.
But then, I could be talking out of my ass, as I have little experience with Objective-C, and even less experience with AppleScript, and a lot of experience with talking out of my ass.
the ability to build event scripts with XML and/or HTML sounds freakin' awesome.
I think you're mistaken. Dashboard widgets are written in HTML+JavaScript. Automator actions are written in AppleScript or Objective-C.
It's basically built on top of AppleScript, so you won't be able to do anything that can't already be done with AppleScript. Apps or functions that aren't scriptable will be inaccessable to Automator.
On the other hand, I think developers will be more prone to add scripting support now that scripting is more accessable to users, and not the pain in the ass that AppleScript typically is.
Amazing, in asking people not to share open sourced projects under the BSD license, apparently, Apple does not understand the BSD license either.
Again, you're amazed simply because you assume that BSD is effectively the same as the GPL. It isn't. BSD allows anyone to take the code, modify it, and sell it, without giving anything back.
I checked the OSX license agreement, and it doesn't seem to be worded the same way a BSD license is worded.
Why would it be? Nobody has claimed that Mac OS X is BSD-licensed.
So this is not an actual BSD license, but it tends to pretend that it covers the whole OS, even the Open Sourced parts, of which it claims are not transferable without the original media, etc.
Yes, the BSD license allows this.
Some Open Sourced parts have a GPL license, apparently.
Yes, and source is available. I couldn't tell you where, exactly, as I've never had the need to recompile (say) GCC from scratch, but I assure you it's available.
This is why people buy computers - to do stuff.
Actually, the main reason people buy computers these days is to replace their old one, which mysteriously doesn't work as well as it used to. They're seen as a thing that naturally degrades over time : "it's obsolete the minute you buy it" is something I hear a lot, and though there was a time in the late 90s when that was true, it's just not any more, but the perception is still there. This is one of the myths that Apple is combating with the Mac mini.
They are fulfilling their legal obligations and nothing more.
If you want people who use your code to "give back to the community" in the way you want, you should license your code in a way that requires them to do so. Add a clause that says "if you're a big company and you take our code, you have to help us out because we're smaller, even if our goals are very different".
Its entirely in the spirit of the GPL to do as little as you're legally required to do. Thats why it's the GPL and not public domain, or BSD.
Knocking on doors at Christmas Eve? Couldn't they have waited until the holidays were over? Not like the kids were going anywhere.
They came to serve the papers on Dec. 25, Christmas Day. He wasn't there.
Now Apple is going after almost the same type of kids, only these kids use Macs and share the latest OSX over the Internet.
Except that to get the software they had to agree that they wouldn't share it.
Amazing that OSX is based on open sourced software which was meant to be shared, yet has a commercial license preventing it from being shared.
This is only amazing because you don't understand how the BSD license works.
This is simply not made very clear to your average non-technical user.
I edited out a line in the above post that said : "A lot of people (even smart people) don't realize this, but a lot of people don't realize a lot of things, and we don't go firing off lawsuits every time someone is mistaken about something they purchased."
I removed this, because I was wrong -- we *do* go firing off lawsuits, all the time. I would contend that the vast majority of these are stupid, launched by otherwise smart and reasonable people that want someone to pay for the fact that they made a mistake. They just seem to get vengeful and willfully stupid as soon as they enter their credit card number. But that's a not much of an argument.
The large volume of posters on Apple's own discussion forums would disagree with you as to this particular point.
A vocal minority. Those forums have the highest concentration of dissatisfied customers I have ever seen, many of whom think that they are talking to Apple directly. There are also "several dozen" posts a day claiming that they'll never buy an Apple product again, that trivial and well-documented tasks are "impossible!!!", and asking "When Apple will release OS X for Windows?"
Considered TightVNC to be a moderate threat. Nice feature, but I think it's overreacting a little.
As part of a rather insidious prank, I once compiled a version of TightVNC without a system tray icon. It was maybe six lines of code taken out. No other changes, but it was basically invisible for an unsuspecting user, and one could definitely cause a lot of chaos with it. I don't doubt that some malware incorporates some kind of VNC.
Suing all of the major record labels because they release their music on CDs? After all, I'm *forced* to buy a portable CD player of I want to take my music with me.
Or you could buy an iPod, but apparently that's bad because as everyone on Slashdot knows that nobody buys iPods unless they're forced to.