.Mac gained about 400,000 customers last year to reach 1M customers. That is a fairly substantial growth. At an attach rate of $50-75 per account this represents a $50M revenue source a year. Not to mention people who buy iLife ($79) for its iPhoto, Mail and now iWeb integration.
Give that away for yet another ad ridden "portal" with a Me-too consumer experience? D'oh.
Gil is right up there as one of the worst managers of Apple. The article, is quite naive in looking at all the events from Amelio's point of view. The guy was practically milking the company to death, $2000 a day to lease his private jet to apple? A $5M loan. And always blaming others for his failures. Case in point, Macworld presentations: Jobs practices his speech several times to make sure everything goes without a hitch, and here you have a guy blaming his speech writer and a failed teleprompter for his drone-athon. Utterly shameful.
This guy brazenly tried to take credit for the iMac and Apple's turnaround under Jobs.
Amelio made one good decision for Apple: getting Steve Jobs back. Jobs did the right thing, kicking out bozos like Ellen Hancock and Amelio.
I was wondering if any of the slashdotters can throw light on Open Source Verilog compilers. I know of the icarus project but that seems to be quite... dead? Any active or good open source verilog compilers out there. I would appreciate your inputs.
I was expecting the quality to suck, but the quality surprised me...! Connected my Powerbook to our board room projector (800x600).... the quality is much better than I anticipated. Granted its not DVD quality, but the image is much better than most TVs.
I don't know what apple is doing, but the 320x240 video looks better than TV quality. The images are crisp, colors are quite lush and yes, no blotchy spots from bad encoding.
Took almost 20 minutes to download a 40 min episode... and this on a shared T1. The files are between 110-120 MB each. I can see why they are not doing HD quality... 400-600 MB would take for ever to download... (not everyone has an OC-3 pipe at home....; stuck with Comcast at home....).
All in all a good compromise between speed and quality. Pleasantly surprised, is more like it!
BTW, the real travesty that has not been mentioned before is the Dell ditty website http://www.dellditty.com/> I guess this is Michael Dell's idea of being hip. While Apple has captured the imagination of the urban-hip, Dell ditty website is trying to position itself as the alternative to the red-neck hip.
Also take a look at this page http://www.dellditty.com/Guitar.aspx> the same color scheme and arrows that were used to promote the iPod Shuffle.
I guess when Steve said, Dell was busy copying Apple, he was understating it.
a good way to make money out of OSS that is... Shareholders and employees be damned as long as Darl the CEO has a fat paycheck
those who can do, those who cannot...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Design a Canon Cat. Jef's time to make an impact with his interface ideas came and went. His idea for the original Mac was implemented whole sale with the Canon Cat. It had everything Jef wanted including his stupid "LEAP" keys and an invisible interface.
The result an utter failure, Canon dropped the product in 6 months. Jef claimed that he did not get the support he wanted and had to make compromises on his vision. Bullshit, this man had his time to impress us with his interface expertise and product design skills. It was an utter failure.
Remember, Jef was a professor by training... his ideas are at best academic. If Jef had his way, the Mac would have been a glorified typewriter. It took the the genius of Bill Atkinson, Bruce Horn, Steve Jobs among many others to give us the Macintosh. These guys are the true fathers of the Mac.
Jef has a case of sour grapes, being kicked out of the Mac team by Steve Jobs, and then having his beloved Cat being canned by Canon at Steve's insistence. Jobs, insisted the Canon drop the Cat, if they were to invest in NeXT. Canon invested close to $100M in NeXT!
What we are left with is an academic who time has passed by.
This is just in... Steve Jobs announced Airport Express at "D"
http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/
True to Apple's vision, Computers not Media Centers become hubs for your media!!! Absolutely freaking right on the spot... ! Now we know why Apple's not licensing the DRM to other players... You can bet that 50% of people who bought an iPod will buy this...
Here's Jobs describing the gizmo...
"We looked at the most popular place people listen to their music," said Jobs during his keynote at "D." "The first place is on the computer; Second is the iPod; The third place is in the car -- right now the solutions out there aren't very good but we are working with some folks on that; the next place is in the home."
Now thats creative thinking from Carly... With AOL and now HP firmly behind it, Apple is making sure that don't make the same mistake once again (ie not licensing the Mac early enough to establish the standard...)
IMHO, this is even bigger news for QuickTime the stealth tech behind iTMS.
I joined theIndian Institute of Technology, Delhi in the summer of 1994. I had gotten a high rank [sic] in the IIT entrance examination, thereby gaining the "privilege" of "choosing" Computer Science.
I have no qualms in admitting that theonly reason I went ahead with Computer Science was because of convention - if you took the IIT entrance test, and got a high enough rank, you opted for CS as a rule of thumb! Sure, there were and are people who break this rule, but I had no motivation to be an exception in this regard.
Now, even though I chose CS as my area, I had no interest in Computer Science or computers at that point. The reaso was simple enough: I was a little over 18 years old, and I had never, ever used a computer in my life. I had no ide what to look forward to, or what to be interested in. The concept of "programming" was alien to me. What reall interested me were Physics, Mathematics andArt.
During my first week at IIT, in one of the "Introduction to UNIX" kind of lab sessions, I was trying to ward off sleep when I noticed something totally amazing: one guy had caused a "large sized funny message" to appear on somebod else's screen (he had piped the output ofbanner to write, etc.). I was so fascinated that I asked him how he did it. He told me something of the effect that he had spent a lot of effort in learning these cool tricks and if I can, I should figure it out myself. It made me fume, but I could do little because I had more fundamental things to figure out (what the hell is an "operating system", why it is called "EUNUCHS", what this "editor" thing is, and how it is related to "vi"...) Stressful times, indeed.
Nonetheless, I wanted to "show the guy"... etc
I spent the next day reading some kind of UNIX book, and it gave me a headache I did not know the human head i capable of withstanding. I am not sure if it is appropriate to haveSystem V be your introduction to Computing, vi be your first editor, etc., but in retrospect, I think it's not any worse than a "simpler" system to be introduced to. If you don't realize it's abuse, you can take a lot of it! The book helped me successfully login to the system after a few days of trying, but vi drove me nuts.
The book also mentioned man pages. I tried to solve the "what to learn" by making the solution a derivative of "how t learn" - I decided that I would read every single man page on the system, no matter how long it takes. I intended t create a model of how the whole thing worked by ingesting more and more information
I think the approach turned out to be reasonable. By next summer, I had a job as a software porter and maintainer fo the Institute's mainframe. This gave me happiness beyond description (consider this: student disk quotas on th mainframe were 4 MB each, while I had 2 GB of disk space to play with!
Shortly afterwards, I was involved in many related scenarios at IIT Delhi, such as the establishment of theIntel Technology Lab, and so on.
Thus, my interest in operating systems and computers was born out of spite rather than anything else
Nope, it was Alan Kay (of Apple and, Dynabook fame) who said, "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible" This was the philosophy from the Mac guidelines.
And of course, as Einstein said, "Things should be as simple as possible. But no simpler."
And it was Thoreau who said "Simplify, simplify, simplify" which I wish the GNOME/KDE/OO.org developers would take to heart!
What is it with constant Apple updates on/. ? IS it the paid advertising from Apple on the site? Seriously, I don't see a news post on "Dell Optiplex line updated with Mobiplex" or "HP Pavillion now includes Centrion".
Why whore yourselves to covering every little thing that Apple does? There are plenty of Mac websites for that...
Your argument falls apart easily. One just has to look at Mac OS X. Here's a UNIX variant (BSD nevertheless...) that is easier to use than Windows.
Ease of use is important but then so is intelligent design. Windows arguably has the former , Linux the latter, but OS X seems to get it right on both counts.
Windows problems are not limited to poor kernel design (extraneous graphics routines and such are included in the kernel, bad bad bad...) but also extend to the usability front. Cryptic error messages and bad interfaces compound this problem. The users have been desensitized to reading dialog boxes since they often do not help. Admittedly, many of the viruses use social engineering to spread.. and the reason this is successful is that users are used to seeing tons of very cryptic messages written by engineers-- virus writers take advantage of the ability of the Windows user to blindly click the OK button without reading the dialog box.
Apple dialog warnings on the other hand seem to have been written by humanities majors who seem to speak well to the user. Even GNOME has done an amazing job in making the error warning easy to understand...
So if I post a joke about the Beatles on Slashdot.
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
.Mac gained about 400,000 customers last year to reach 1M customers. That is a fairly substantial growth. At an attach rate of $50-75 per account this represents a $50M revenue source a year. Not to mention people who buy iLife ($79) for its iPhoto, Mail and now iWeb integration.
Give that away for yet another ad ridden "portal" with a Me-too consumer experience? D'oh.
Gil is right up there as one of the worst managers of Apple. The article, is quite naive in looking at all the events from Amelio's point of view. The guy was practically milking the company to death, $2000 a day to lease his private jet to apple? A $5M loan. And always blaming others for his failures. Case in point, Macworld presentations: Jobs practices his speech several times to make sure everything goes without a hitch, and here you have a guy blaming his speech writer and a failed teleprompter for his drone-athon. Utterly shameful.
This guy brazenly tried to take credit for the iMac and Apple's turnaround under Jobs.
Amelio made one good decision for Apple: getting Steve Jobs back. Jobs did the right thing, kicking out bozos like Ellen Hancock and Amelio.
You know, both Linus and Bill must have accumulated some seriously bad karma....
Linus is stuck using Linux.
The bigger irony is that for all the billions of dollars he has accumulated, Bill has to use Windows everyday.... ouch!
I was wondering if any of the slashdotters can throw light on Open Source Verilog compilers. I know of the icarus project but that seems to be quite ... dead? Any active or good open source verilog compilers out there. I would appreciate your inputs.
I was expecting the quality to suck, but the quality surprised me...! Connected my Powerbook to our board room projector (800x600).... the quality is much better than I anticipated. Granted its not DVD quality, but the image is much better than most TVs.
I don't know what apple is doing, but the 320x240 video looks better than TV quality. The images are crisp, colors are quite lush and yes, no blotchy spots from bad encoding.
Took almost 20 minutes to download a 40 min episode... and this on a shared T1. The files are between 110-120 MB each. I can see why they are not doing HD quality... 400-600 MB would take for ever to download... (not everyone has an OC-3 pipe at home....; stuck with Comcast at home....).
All in all a good compromise between speed and quality. Pleasantly surprised, is more like it!
A bit of research will show that TurboCAD runs native on OS X as well.
Like my mom
Like my fiance
Like my neighbors
Like my neighbors children
Like George Bush
Like Queen Elizabeth
While PDA addresses a smaller market
Like that IT dork in our office
Like that middle manager wannabe
Like the ArsTechnica reader
Simple how you can be more successful addressing a larger market with a device that people can operate and enjoy!
BTW, the real travesty that has not been mentioned before is the Dell ditty website http://www.dellditty.com/> I guess this is Michael Dell's idea of being hip. While Apple has captured the imagination of the urban-hip, Dell ditty website is trying to position itself as the alternative to the red-neck hip.
Also take a look at this page http://www.dellditty.com/Guitar.aspx> the same color scheme and arrows that were used to promote the iPod Shuffle.
I guess when Steve said, Dell was busy copying Apple, he was understating it.
Isn't IDC the bozos who predicted a $35billion Itanium server based business?
;-)
Now Linux is doomed
a good way to make money out of OSS that is... Shareholders and employees be damned as long as Darl the CEO has a fat paycheck
Design a Canon Cat. Jef's time to make an impact with his interface ideas came and went. His idea for the original Mac was implemented whole sale with the Canon Cat. It had everything Jef wanted including his stupid "LEAP" keys and an invisible interface.
The result an utter failure, Canon dropped the product in 6 months. Jef claimed that he did not get the support he wanted and had to make compromises on his vision. Bullshit, this man had his time to impress us with his interface expertise and product design skills. It was an utter failure.
Remember, Jef was a professor by training... his ideas are at best academic. If Jef had his way, the Mac would have been a glorified typewriter. It took the the genius of Bill Atkinson, Bruce Horn, Steve Jobs among many others to give us the Macintosh. These guys are the true fathers of the Mac.
Jef has a case of sour grapes, being kicked out of the Mac team by Steve Jobs, and then having his beloved Cat being canned by Canon at Steve's insistence. Jobs, insisted the Canon drop the Cat, if they were to invest in NeXT. Canon invested close to $100M in NeXT!
What we are left with is an academic who time has passed by.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson got his pseudonym from his latin name. Charles Lutwidge = Carolus Lewis = Lewis Carol.
My favorite Masiakasaurus knopfleri. Named after Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits.
This is just in... Steve Jobs announced Airport Express at "D"
http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/
True to Apple's vision, Computers not Media Centers become hubs for your media!!! Absolutely freaking right on the spot... ! Now we know why Apple's not licensing the DRM to other players... You can bet that 50% of people who bought an iPod will buy this...
Here's Jobs describing the gizmo...
"We looked at the most popular place people listen to their music," said Jobs during his keynote at "D." "The first place is on the computer; Second is the iPod; The third place is in the car -- right now the solutions out there aren't very good but we are working with some folks on that; the next place is in the home."
Just make sure you for the Judean Peoples front not the Peoples front of Judea.
Fuck off! We are the peoples front of Judea.
And BTW, in other news HP announced that the HPods will come in an array of tasty colors such as:
Beige, Sand, Tan, Silvery Black and Brown.
Now thats creative thinking from Carly... With AOL and now HP firmly behind it, Apple is making sure that don't make the same mistake once again (ie not licensing the Mac early enough to establish the standard...)
IMHO, this is even bigger news for QuickTime the stealth tech behind iTMS.
This was quite interesting... it's from his FAAQ.
...) Stressful times, indeed.
... etc
Why I am obsessed with Operating Systems.
I joined theIndian Institute of Technology, Delhi in the summer of 1994. I had gotten a high rank [sic] in the IIT entrance examination, thereby gaining the "privilege" of "choosing" Computer Science.
I have no qualms in admitting that theonly reason I went ahead with Computer Science was because of convention - if you took the IIT entrance test, and got a high enough rank, you opted for CS as a rule of thumb! Sure, there were and are people who break this rule, but I had no motivation to be an exception in this regard.
Now, even though I chose CS as my area, I had no interest in Computer Science or computers at that point. The reaso was simple enough: I was a little over 18 years old, and I had never, ever used a computer in my life. I had no ide what to look forward to, or what to be interested in. The concept of "programming" was alien to me. What reall interested me were Physics, Mathematics andArt.
During my first week at IIT, in one of the "Introduction to UNIX" kind of lab sessions, I was trying to ward off sleep when I noticed something totally amazing: one guy had caused a "large sized funny message" to appear on somebod else's screen (he had piped the output ofbanner to write, etc.). I was so fascinated that I asked him how he did it. He told me something of the effect that he had spent a lot of effort in learning these cool tricks and if I can, I should figure it out myself. It made me fume, but I could do little because I had more fundamental things to figure out (what the hell is an "operating system", why it is called "EUNUCHS", what this "editor" thing is, and how it is related to "vi"
Nonetheless, I wanted to "show the guy"
I spent the next day reading some kind of UNIX book, and it gave me a headache I did not know the human head i capable of withstanding. I am not sure if it is appropriate to haveSystem V be your introduction to Computing, vi be your first editor, etc., but in retrospect, I think it's not any worse than a "simpler" system to be introduced to. If you don't realize it's abuse, you can take a lot of it! The book helped me successfully login to the system after a few days of trying, but vi drove me nuts.
The book also mentioned man pages. I tried to solve the "what to learn" by making the solution a derivative of "how t learn" - I decided that I would read every single man page on the system, no matter how long it takes. I intended t create a model of how the whole thing worked by ingesting more and more information
I think the approach turned out to be reasonable. By next summer, I had a job as a software porter and maintainer fo the Institute's mainframe. This gave me happiness beyond description (consider this: student disk quotas on th mainframe were 4 MB each, while I had 2 GB of disk space to play with!
Shortly afterwards, I was involved in many related scenarios at IIT Delhi, such as the establishment of theIntel Technology Lab, and so on.
Thus, my interest in operating systems and computers was born out of spite rather than anything else
Enjoy these fine cartoons on Powerpoint. I usually include them in my presentations...
. gi f
http://www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/graphics/misc/dilbert
http://www.idblog.org/images/dilbert8-9.gif
From the folks at CARS
... Microsoft brown-nosers aren't they? Wasn't there a story earlier about how they fired their CTO for making comments that criticized Microsoft?
Nope, it was Alan Kay (of Apple and, Dynabook fame) who said, "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible" This was the philosophy from the Mac guidelines.
And of course, as Einstein said, "Things should be as simple as possible. But no simpler."
And it was Thoreau who said "Simplify, simplify, simplify" which I wish the GNOME/KDE/OO.org developers would take to heart!
What is it with constant Apple updates on /. ? IS it the paid advertising from Apple on the site? Seriously, I don't see a news post on "Dell Optiplex line updated with Mobiplex" or "HP Pavillion now includes Centrion".
Why whore yourselves to covering every little thing that Apple does? There are plenty of Mac websites for that...
Your argument falls apart easily. One just has to look at Mac OS X. Here's a UNIX variant (BSD nevertheless...) that is easier to use than Windows.
Ease of use is important but then so is intelligent design. Windows arguably has the former , Linux the latter, but OS X seems to get it right on both counts.
Windows problems are not limited to poor kernel design (extraneous graphics routines and such are included in the kernel, bad bad bad...) but also extend to the usability front. Cryptic error messages and bad interfaces compound this problem. The users have been desensitized to reading dialog boxes since they often do not help. Admittedly, many of the viruses use social engineering to spread.. and the reason this is successful is that users are used to seeing tons of very cryptic messages written by engineers-- virus writers take advantage of the ability of the Windows user to blindly click the OK button without reading the dialog box.
Apple dialog warnings on the other hand seem to have been written by humanities majors who seem to speak well to the user. Even GNOME has done an amazing job in making the error warning easy to understand...
Will I get Instant Karma?