Re:Why can't PC companies innovate? Apple is dead
on
iMac Clone Gets Sued
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· Score: 1
> All companies copy each other. > This is true for cases, hardware, etc...
Only if you buy cheap PC clones.
> This is what business is about.
False. It's only true for no-talent hacks who try to justify their low-grade thefts with "everyone else is doing it."
> Apple is dead and will stay dead because it > never understood that.
...except that they're one of the few computer companies that's actually *gaining* in market share right now. The ones that followed your market plan are busily going down the tubes. Packard-Bell, for example. The ones that are doing well have established a market presence are are defending it as much as they can. Try starting up a computer company that ships everything in a Gateway-type "cow box" and see how well you do. Until they sue you to death.
You're kind of going the wrong way about this if you're comparing a single stylistic item (bulbous fenders) with a complete design (the iMac).
If Mercedes-Benz came out with an MB pickup truck that looked *exactly* like one of the big Dodge RAM pickups, with the minor exception of an MB logo on the hood, you can bet your ass that they'd get sued into the stone age over it.
Bulging fenders are a stylistic bit on a par with the round mouse on the iMac.
Note also that some of the trucks that you think are ripoffs of the Dodge are just different trucks made by Dodge.
REALLY actually, there are lawsuits like this all of the time. People like fashion designers, home furniture makers, and soft drink companies sue other all of the time for copying industrial designs.
Just remember that the only reason Apple lost the "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft was because Apple had previously signed a badly-written contract with MS that basically gave away the ranch. Microsoft didn't win because of "look and feel" merits- Apple lost because of Apple's crappy lawyers in the early 1980s.
I've been needing a new laptop, and if the rumored specs on the Consumer Portable are right, then it's just the ticket.
Palm computers are pretty neat, but I've just got too many "horsepower issues" for a shirt pocket computer. It's not just the power users that would have a problem, either, since many of the most common computing tasks just need too much graphics resolution to fit into a handheld package.
If Apple manages to get the true "P1" down to the $1000-$1300 range, with a 300 MHz PPC 740, there's not much reason to buy a Palm computer for half that price.
Side note: if the P1 specs are right, then it should be a trivial thing to shoehorn LinuxPPC into it...
The "MS investment/QT settlement" thing happened at about the same time. The lawsuit was going on for some time before that, but a "smoking gun" turned up in the QT trial, and Microsoft was going to lose bigtime (eventually). But it was in the Bad Days at Apple, so Apple gave MS another option... keep selling Office for Mac, and invest $150 million in non-voting stock, along with licensing the QuickTime code for Windows.
The QT licensing is the largest part of it overall, and a big reason that Apple keeps making about $50 million more profit per quarter than everyone expects.
I saw a tri-LCD monitor setup at the Infocomm show that did just this sort of thing. The gap between the LCDs was less than 3/4".
Unfortunately, due to the way they make LCD panels, there's enough stuff hanging out around the edges to keep them from butting up against one another.
I haven't seen any LCD screens that come close to a good CRT for color accuracy and contrast ratio, and I've seen all of the current releases from all of the major LCD makers.
LCDs are pretty keen, but I'd rather have a CRT that costs 1/3 as much with a better picture.
Now, when they finally get the DLP projection monitors down to low prices, we'll see some interesting things.
One single large monitor is NOT the same as using multiple monitors with a single desktop. The Xerox machines had no multiple monitor support. Starting with the Mac II (and the SE, for that matter), setting up several monitors with a common desktop has been a cinch. For example, the machine I'm working on is a dual-monitor one, and I've worked with up to SEVEN on one machine (five through video cards in slots, and two through the old "SCSI monitor" adapters that used to be available). Each with a different combination of color depth and resolution, for that matter...
HDTV Sets? No. HDTV Projectors, yes...
on
PBS Goes Digital
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· Score: 1
With the advances in DLP technology, by the middle of next year you should be able to buy a sub-$2000 video projector that will handle HDTV and NTSC. I've seen demos of 1280 x 1024 DLP machines, and TI is supposed to start selling a 1600 x 1200 chip in about three months. Slap a lens, a light source, and a decoder on that, and you have a 2000 lumen HDTV projector smaller than a lunch box...
For current comparison, I saw an LCD-based projector from Toshiba (the TLP 650) at InfoComm last week... pushing a 1080 line HDTV signal onto a 20' wide screen at about 1000 lumens. $9995, and it was about as big as a large laptop.
For home use, if you're sticking to 1080 HDTV, there are some LCD projectors out there right now that run for $5000 or less. You'd just need a decoder.
Four thousand DVD titles isn't enough for you?
on
DIVX is dead
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· Score: 1
Make a trip to Best Buy or a Virgin Megastore before you say silly stuff like that. There's a LOT of DVD stuff out there.
I went to North Texas in a program that was precursor to the current Honors Program. One more year of high school would have killed me. It was that miserable.
One side note: the Village Voice article tries to make a point about "not getting a date on Firday night," when that's just one of the details. It was getting beat up for blowing the curve on a math test, getting shoved around for asking a girl out on the Friday, or any of the other violent and crappy things that can happen to you when you're not one of the social elites, and dare to step out of your appointed niche.
There is already a large group of people doing a search for Earth-crossing asteroids. They're called "amateur astronomers."
It would taks a *much* larger investment in time and equipment to get an automated optical search going, involving hundreds of small telescopes and image capturing devices. The Arecibo telescope project happened only because the equipment was basically already in place, and the data only needs interpretation.
As a comparison, SETI@Home only needs a few gigs of information passed through a server, along with the "free" client time, versus the millions of dollars worth of CCDs and telescopes that you would need for an ongoing optical search (SETI@Home is only going to run for two years, versus the "never can stop" optical asteroid search).
If you're running an old client, you might not be doing as much as you think. The earlier versions didn't run as thorough a check, and the newer ones do ten or more times as much work. That's mentioned on the SETI Web page. On the other hand...
I'm sort of wondering if the Mac client (at least) has some optimization problems, or a conflict with some extension or other. I'm running it on a G3/233, and it's taking *forever* to finish a chunk (as much as 40 hours). Maybe it's something to do with my setup, but I'm not getting any responses from the Project SETI team about it.
It's a hardware story... how hard would it be to implement this on a linux box?
Just about any interesting new computer toy should be reported here. If linux (and other) users don't keep up on what's new, they're going to end up in the silicon ghetto, just like Microsoft would want.
Not nothing... a break.
on
DOJ vs NSI
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· Score: 2
The reason "nothing" has been happening in the Microsoft case is that the judge had to take a break to work on another case. The Microsoft case is going to be starting back up real soon now, and it's looking worse and worse for Microsoft (more evidence in the Caldera case, which will almost certainly affect the Microsoft case, along with other stuff). The discussion about Microsoft isn't whether they're going to lose, but how much is going to happen to them when they do lose...
Twenty or thirty years ago, this sort of stuff might not have happened, but there *were* a lot of problems... like murders... at schools. They just didn't get reported. When one kid got knifed at my high school in the 1970s, it didn't make the papers or TV. Two weeks after it happened, a small article appeared in the Dallas paper (100 miles away) about how the kid was getting out of intensive care. As far as the local media cared, it never happened.
And (as a small example) the worst case of school violence happened over 60 years ago, when someone blew up a school. Many more died then in Colorado.
I've been hearing that "copy protection is at an end" every year or two since the late 1980s. I remember when one game on the Apple II had sectors physically burned out with a laser to keep people from copying the disks. It lasted about a month, until someone noticed that the code that looked for the burned sectors could be cut out with a single flipped bit in one subroutine.
The big companies will always tru new schemes, and the hackers will always work their way around it.
The thing about HERF guns and the like is that you don't *need* a continuous output. For example, a 10-amp circuit at 120 volts is 1200 watts (less than most hair dryers). Charge a capacitor with it for a second or so, and discharge quickly. For a couple of milliseconds, you get power levels in the megawatt/second range.
Scale that gadget of your up with a bigger power supply, and see what happens.
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> All companies copy each other.
> This is true for cases, hardware, etc...
Only if you buy cheap PC clones.
> This is what business is about.
False. It's only true for no-talent hacks who try to justify their low-grade thefts with "everyone else is doing it."
> Apple is dead and will stay dead because it
> never understood that.
...except that they're one of the few computer companies that's actually *gaining* in market share right now. The ones that followed your market plan are busily going down the tubes. Packard-Bell, for example. The ones that are doing well have established a market presence are are defending it as much as they can. Try starting up a computer company that ships everything in a Gateway-type "cow box" and see how well you do. Until they sue you to death.
You're kind of going the wrong way about this if you're comparing a single stylistic item (bulbous fenders) with a complete design (the iMac).
If Mercedes-Benz came out with an MB pickup truck that looked *exactly* like one of the big Dodge RAM pickups, with the minor exception of an MB logo on the hood, you can bet your ass that they'd get sued into the stone age over it.
Bulging fenders are a stylistic bit on a par with the round mouse on the iMac.
Note also that some of the trucks that you think are ripoffs of the Dodge are just different trucks made by Dodge.
REALLY actually, there are lawsuits like this all of the time. People like fashion designers, home furniture makers, and soft drink companies sue other all of the time for copying industrial designs.
Just remember that the only reason Apple lost the "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft was because Apple had previously signed a badly-written contract with MS that basically gave away the ranch. Microsoft didn't win because of "look and feel" merits- Apple lost because of Apple's crappy lawyers in the early 1980s.
I've been needing a new laptop, and if the rumored specs on the Consumer Portable are right, then it's just the ticket.
Palm computers are pretty neat, but I've just got too many "horsepower issues" for a shirt pocket computer. It's not just the power users that would have a problem, either, since many of the most common computing tasks just need too much graphics resolution to fit into a handheld package.
If Apple manages to get the true "P1" down to the $1000-$1300 range, with a 300 MHz PPC 740, there's not much reason to buy a Palm computer for half that price.
Side note: if the P1 specs are right, then it should be a trivial thing to shoehorn LinuxPPC into it...
The "MS investment/QT settlement" thing happened at about the same time. The lawsuit was going on for some time before that, but a "smoking gun" turned up in the QT trial, and Microsoft was going to lose bigtime (eventually). But it was in the Bad Days at Apple, so Apple gave MS another option... keep selling Office for Mac, and invest $150 million in non-voting stock, along with licensing the QuickTime code for Windows.
The QT licensing is the largest part of it overall, and a big reason that Apple keeps making about $50 million more profit per quarter than everyone expects.
I saw a tri-LCD monitor setup at the Infocomm show that did just this sort of thing. The gap between the LCDs was less than 3/4".
Unfortunately, due to the way they make LCD panels, there's enough stuff hanging out around the edges to keep them from butting up against one another.
I haven't seen any LCD screens that come close to a good CRT for color accuracy and contrast ratio, and I've seen all of the current releases from all of the major LCD makers.
LCDs are pretty keen, but I'd rather have a CRT that costs 1/3 as much with a better picture.
Now, when they finally get the DLP projection monitors down to low prices, we'll see some interesting things.
One single large monitor is NOT the same as using multiple monitors with a single desktop. The Xerox machines had no multiple monitor support. Starting with the Mac II (and the SE, for that matter), setting up several monitors with a common desktop has been a cinch. For example, the machine I'm working on is a dual-monitor one, and I've worked with up to SEVEN on one machine (five through video cards in slots, and two through the old "SCSI monitor" adapters that used to be available). Each with a different combination of color depth and resolution, for that matter...
With the advances in DLP technology, by the middle of next year you should be able to buy a sub-$2000 video projector that will handle HDTV and NTSC. I've seen demos of 1280 x 1024 DLP machines, and TI is supposed to start selling a 1600 x 1200 chip in about three months. Slap a lens, a light source, and a decoder on that, and you have a 2000 lumen HDTV projector smaller than a lunch box...
For current comparison, I saw an LCD-based projector from Toshiba (the TLP 650) at InfoComm last week... pushing a 1080 line HDTV signal onto a 20' wide screen at about 1000 lumens. $9995, and it was about as big as a large laptop.
For home use, if you're sticking to 1080 HDTV, there are some LCD projectors out there right now that run for $5000 or less. You'd just need a decoder.
Make a trip to Best Buy or a Virgin Megastore before you say silly stuff like that. There's a LOT of DVD stuff out there.
I went to North Texas in a program that was precursor to the current Honors Program. One more year of high school would have killed me. It was that miserable.
One side note: the Village Voice article tries to make a point about "not getting a date on Firday night," when that's just one of the details. It was getting beat up for blowing the curve on a math test, getting shoved around for asking a girl out on the Friday, or any of the other violent and crappy things that can happen to you when you're not one of the social elites, and dare to step out of your appointed niche.
There is already a large group of people doing a search for Earth-crossing asteroids. They're called "amateur astronomers."
It would taks a *much* larger investment in time and equipment to get an automated optical search going, involving hundreds of small telescopes and image capturing devices. The Arecibo telescope project happened only because the equipment was basically already in place, and the data only needs interpretation.
As a comparison, SETI@Home only needs a few gigs of information passed through a server, along with the "free" client time, versus the millions of dollars worth of CCDs and telescopes that you would need for an ongoing optical search (SETI@Home is only going to run for two years, versus the "never can stop" optical asteroid search).
If you're running an old client, you might not be doing as much as you think. The earlier versions didn't run as thorough a check, and the newer ones do ten or more times as much work. That's mentioned on the SETI Web page. On the other hand...
I'm sort of wondering if the Mac client (at least) has some optimization problems, or a conflict with some extension or other. I'm running it on a G3/233, and it's taking *forever* to finish a chunk (as much as 40 hours). Maybe it's something to do with my setup, but I'm not getting any responses from the Project SETI team about it.
It's a hardware story... how hard would it be to implement this on a linux box?
Just about any interesting new computer toy should be reported here. If linux (and other) users don't keep up on what's new, they're going to end up in the silicon ghetto, just like Microsoft would want.
The reason "nothing" has been happening in the Microsoft case is that the judge had to take a break to work on another case. The Microsoft case is going to be starting back up real soon now, and it's looking worse and worse for Microsoft (more evidence in the Caldera case, which will almost certainly affect the Microsoft case, along with other stuff). The discussion about Microsoft isn't whether they're going to lose, but how much is going to happen to them when they do lose...
Twenty or thirty years ago, this sort of stuff might not have happened, but there *were* a lot of problems... like murders... at schools. They just didn't get reported. When one kid got knifed at my high school in the 1970s, it didn't make the papers or TV. Two weeks after it happened, a small article appeared in the Dallas paper (100 miles away) about how the kid was getting out of intensive care. As far as the local media cared, it never happened.
And (as a small example) the worst case of school violence happened over 60 years ago, when someone blew up a school. Many more died then in Colorado.
Actually, about 20% of the home market, and closer to 30% of their target market (younger professionals with heavy Internet usage).
I've been hearing that "copy protection is at an end" every year or two since the late 1980s. I remember when one game on the Apple II had sectors physically burned out with a laser to keep people from copying the disks. It lasted about a month, until someone noticed that the code that looked for the burned sectors could be cut out with a single flipped bit in one subroutine.
The big companies will always tru new schemes, and the hackers will always work their way around it.
The thing about HERF guns and the like is that you don't *need* a continuous output. For example, a 10-amp circuit at 120 volts is 1200 watts (less than most hair dryers). Charge a capacitor with it for a second or so, and discharge quickly. For a couple of milliseconds, you get power levels in the megawatt/second range.
Scale that gadget of your up with a bigger power supply, and see what happens.