The Bill of old was decidedly apolitical and non-whiny. The new Bill is just another whining corporate executive using his position of power to extract favors from the federal government.
I admit I have never been a fan of Microsoft's products and I think they used lots of dirty tricks achieve their monopoly. But, I was never a big MS basher and had some grudging respect for the way they achieved their success without favors from the government.
But, Microsoft's exponential growth phase is behind them and despite consistent earnings and profits, their stock price has been flat for about three years. They even tried buying back stock which hasn't helped. Something has to be done.
The old Bill would have been stalking the halls of the company coming up with some way to "cut off the air supply" to the current tech leaders (e.g. eBay, Google, Linux). Instead he has resorted to calling the competition commies and is flying to Washington to whine about how unfair it is that he can't import all the cheap foreign labor he wants.
Well, boo hoo, Bill. Google is growing like crazy and not having any trouble recruiting. Why don't you resurrect some of that old ruthlessness and quit your whining.
As others have pointed out, all projects are "late". This phenomena is not unique to IT projects. I put "late" in quotes because the projects are usually delivered on time -- from a realistic standpoint -- but the manager has to lie about the cost and time to be assigned the project in the first place.
There are two type of managers. Let's call them "Honest Joe" and "Sleazy Bob". Both want to lead the project and must meet with the executive who can approve the project. This is how it goes.
Executive: "Hi Joe. Tell me you much this project will cost and how long it will take."
Honest Joe: "It's going to cost five million dollars and will take about eighteen months".
Executive: "Thanks, Joe. You're fired. Before you clean out your office, could you stop by Bob's office and tell him I want to talk to him?"
Bob walks in...
Sleazy Bob: "Wow, I really like your tie. You know, I saw that tee shot you made on number four yesterday. Absolutely amazing. Did you ever consider going pro?"
Executive: "Thanks, Bob. Now about this project. How much will it cost and how long will it take?"
Sleazy Bob: "Six months and a half a mil."
Executive: "Sounds great. Get on it".
Eighteen months and five million dollars later the project is complete and Bob gets promoted.
If I had a nickel for every time I've seen this scenario play out, I wouldn't need a job anymore.
Only a committee of pin-headed MBAs could come up with a strategy as incredibly stupid and shortsighted as Napster's strategy. Take a good look at what's going on here. The companies involved in this venture have been unable to come up with a hardware/software combination that is superior to iPod/iTunes, so they have decided to compete by offering an easily copied payment/distribution system. Crazy.
I think the subscription model will fail. But, even if I'm wrong, Napster is incredibly foolish to use their distribution and payment method as the primary differentiator. Why? Because, as pointed out in the article, Apple can very easily start their own subscription service and usurp Napster's "advantage" overnight.
I guess I can't blame them too much. Making really nice, easy-to-use hardware and software is very difficult, expensive and requires talented, creative and innovative engineers. Unfortunately, those types of people are in short supply at companies like Dell and Napster. Dell built it's business by innovating in operations and direct hardware distribution. Napster is just a bunch of VCs, MBAs and other twits trying to make a buck by leveraging a well-known brand name they bought at a fire sale.
I'm going to hold onto my Apple stock...I think there is very little threat from these guys.
Nothing like an indignant anonymous coward with axe to grind. Oh yeah, my experience with computer quality issues so "much less meaningful" than yours. Talk about presumptuous and arrogant. Get a grip, man. If you're going launch into a rant based on a bunch of assumptions you've cooked up in your mind about my experience with computer quality issues then at least have the balls to sign-in first.
I post a four sentence rebuttal and it's "people like you" blah, blah, blah. People like me? What the hell do you know about me from the those four sentences?
No. People with "combo" drives will be fine, because "combo" drives support DVD-ROM.
All the "combo" drives that Apple has shipped with Macs can read DVDs. Hell, my 1999, 400 MHz G3 iMac can read DVDs. I installed Panther from DVD on that machine.
The point being, you don't need a "Superdrive"-equipped Mac to install from a DVD install disk.
If you had bought Apple stock three years ago, you would have made gains of over four hundred percent. Had you invested the same money in MS three years ago, you would have made, to date, precisely squat. Therefore, over the last three years, Apple has whooped MS's ass from a stockholders standpoint.
MS is no longer a growth company. Their heyday as the premire tech growth stock is gone. Ditto for Intel. There are new stock market darlings these days like Google. The second coming of Apple is kind kind of unique.
Agreed. They are more of a second world nation. I got a little carried way...I have that tendency.
South Korea is a one of our major allies as is Japan. North Korea hates both of those countries. I have many Japanese friends and they are terrified of a North Korea with nukes.
Have you forgotten the mass genocide Saddam has commit, even to his own people? If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.
Not even close. You would have to have a very limited knowledge of history to come to that conclusion. Every heard of Pol Pot? That's a example from recent history. There are hundreds of other examples if you look back thousands of years.
I'm still amazed people buy into the "we had bad intelligence" argument regarding WMDs. Heck, Karl Rove even admitted that the WMD angle was just the most sellable excuse rather than the real reason. The plan for invading Iraq was developed in the late nineties. When the folks who developed the plan came into power in 2000, the invasion of Iraq became inevitable. It would have occurred had their been no 9/11. It would have occurred even if the WMD claims were discredited in advance. The "we need to save the people of Iraq from this evil dictator" excuse was not mentioned until it became clear that there were no WMDs.
For the record, I'm fine with the idea that some people feel that it's the responsibility of the US to save people from evil dictators even though I don't think we should. But, I'm surprised when act as though the "we must save the people of Iraq" was the original intention.
I also don't agree with you on North Korea. They scare the hell out of me. I just don't understand your position. It was important to invade Iraq (which was not a threat to the US and had essentially no viable army and no WMDs) simply to save it's people from their leader, but we need not worry about a sophisticated, first-world nation with a massive army and nuclear weapons?
Now, their dictator is completely nutz, but very predictable. US intel knows that.
Where did you get that idea? Do you have inside sources? Since when are crazy people predictable? You want to blame US intelligence blunders for the WMD fiasco re: Iraq, but then turn around and say we should trust US intelligence re: N. Korea?
Saddam is an evil man. But, Iraq was never a threat to the US or it's allies. North Korea is a threat to the US and our allies. I, for one, don't believe it's the responsibility of the US to save nations from their leaders. I don't believe in nation building. I do believe in protecting the nation from real threats. North Korea is a real threat.
While I agree that certain aspects of computer performance have remained relatively flat over the past ten years, there has been a huge improvement when manipulating graphics, audio and video.
Compress a 10 minute video to MPEG-1 on a ten year old Mac or PC and then do the same thing on a modern Mac or PC. The difference is huge. Ditto for manipulating graphics and audio.
Outsourcing is where companies move jobs to where the people are.
That is a silly statement. There people everywhere. Outsourcing is the movement of jobs to cheaper labor markets.
Whether outsourcing high tech jobs to cheap foreign labor markets is good thing or a bad thing is a value judgment that depends a lot on your circumstance and economic class. If you are someone who has lost a job and/or cannot land a job due to outsourcing, then you will consider it a *bad* thing. If you are gainfully employed and an investor in a company whose stock price rises due to lower labor costs from outsourcing, then you will consider outsourcing a *good thing*.
Whether outsourcing will be to the benefit or detriment of the US economy in the long term is a prediction usually based on one's economic and political ideology.
There are two ways to get rid of it: you can allow the people to move to where the jobs are (through unrestricted immigration), or you can get rid of the jobs altogether.
Another silly statement. The situation is nowhere near as black and white as that.
Yeah, the electronics to do 10+Mbps DSL have been around some time. I worked on some VDSL stuff that did 25 Mbps. The latest fashion in DSL is the VDSL/ADSL compromise called ADSL2 which will do 10 Mbps to about 8 Kft.
The problem is that there are lots and lots of people on lines longer than that. Once you get over 8 Kft, the performance isn't any better than regular ADSL.
If it were just a matter of upgrading the electronics in their network, they could easily offer these services. As it stands now, they have to dig up streets and deploy active remote nodes deeper in the network. That's going to take a lot of money and time.
Great. Now we will have the same piss-poor programs from the same five mego-opoly media behemoths streaming into our homes but, this time, transmitted on a different pipe using a different transmission protocol. Whoop-tee-do.
Seriously, more competition in the service provider space might keep prices down, but since it will be the same garbage programing, I can't get very excited.
Although I'd rather not see Microsoft's proprietary technology used in the transmission protocol, I'm not too worried. TV streams from the Baby Bells are still a long way off for most people. The vast majority of their outside plant facilities need backhoe-style upgrades to get that fiber to your house.
I know they are claiming these services are just around the corner, but they have been saying that for about 15 years now. How many of you can't get a DSL line because you are on a long line? Of those who can get it, how many get more than 1.5 Mbps? Yeah, thought so.
They need at least 10 Mbps to each house for this roll-out. It's gonna be a while.
That was my first thought as well. I remember when Apple released a demo version of Project X. I thought it was kind of clever, but ultimately not very useful. Then, Jobs returned to Apple and the project got canceled.
The competitors are trying to make this all about compatibility with online music outlets. That is irrelevant. Customers don't care. Until Apple's patent on the scroll wheel (now called the "click wheel" since they integrated the buttons) runs out, the competition is screwed.
There is no doubt that many people are buying iPods for it's aesthetic qualities, but it is the ease of use facilitated by the click/scroll wheel that makes people love it and recommend it to their friends.
I have tried dozens of other MP3 players and not one of them has a navigation and control mechanism that even comes close to the iPod. When you have hundreds or thousands of songs, the ability to easily navigate trumps every other design aspect. The fact that children and non-tech-savvy folks can learn to use the click wheel efficiently in just a few minutes is really hard to beat.
The competitors will tell potential customers it's about file formats, price, battery life, FM tuners, etc. and they can make their products in pretty pastels just like Apple. However, until they create a human interface that a thirteen year old girl can learn to navigate within a few minutes of opening the box, they are going to have a tough time stealing market share.
It looks like Apple is going to market this thing very directly at PC to Mac "switchers" and schools.
If you check out the Mac mini QTVR movies, there's one showing it connected to PC peripherals and the Apple Store's Mac mini page highlights that it can be used with your old PC's peripherals. The Mac mini's main page even recommends upgrading school computer labs from PC to Mac so that you can "spend your time teaching advanced topics instead of basic computer maintenance". Ouch. I knew that this would be the target market, but I didn't expect such a direct sales pitch to PC users and schools.
As a side note, you get to see how big the power brick is for the mini. If you look at the "with Mac peripherals" QTVR movie you see that if you use an Apple monitor, you are stuck with two power bricks and a bunch of cables. Seeing that picture makes me want to buy an iMac G5.;-)
I was comparing the specs of iBooks and the iMac mini. The only differences seem to be a slightly higher bus speed and clock speed plus faster RAM. Other than that, the specs are roughly the same.
Anyone else think maybe Apple just repackaged the iBook's motherboard and turned up the speed a bit?
I'll believe a technology turnaround when *hiring* becomes more common, *salaries* start to get a boost, and business start investing in large, long-term IT projects.
That pretty much sums the situation up in a single sentence. Excellent.
And, this is really funny:
It's also a major upper management status toy, and since when has the technology downturn denied that particular economic segment anything?
Globalization of the economy is a *good* thing. Eventually it will lead to an equalization of wages and a higher standard of living for everyone in the world, not just people in rich countries.
Score -5 Pure Speculation
Do you have a crystal ball which allows you to predict the current experiment in global economics is going to play out? The theory predicting the outcome you espouse is not based on unassailable fact as solid and provable as Newtonian physics. It's a shaky economic theory. It's a theory that not all economists agree on. The proponents of this theory may end up being correct, but I'm really sick of people making it sound as though it's a sure thing.
The other problem with this argument is that it implies that the motivation for moving jobs to cheap markets arises from some altruistic desire to improve the lives of laborers around the world. That, of course, is BS. Individuals and corporations that use cheap imported labor (legal or illegal) or move operations to cheap labor markets do so to reduce costs and improve profits in the short term so that investors make more money and executives get a bigger annual bonuses. They don't care one bit about the long term effects and it's naive to believe that they do.
So, let's change the statement to make it more accurate:
According to many popular, present-day, ivory-tower economists, globalization (facilitated by trade agreements negotiated by a tiny, answer-to-no-one ruling elite) will eventually lead to increased income and better quality of life for everyone around the world. This theory has been presented as fact by it's promoters in the corporate media. Those who question the theory are labeled "protectionists" (a fresh derogatory label replacing the aging term "commie") and apparently considered "retarded" by certain childish Slashdot readers.
You'll have to forgive me if I'm skeptical of all the "lifts all boats", "everyone benefits" and "not a zero-sum game" arguments. The economy is a game. In every game there are winners and losers. Modern economic globalization does not change that rule. Only time will tell if globalization eventually benefits the US economy and it's workers.
One thing is for sure, if you are over forty years old and your job has been outsourced or you have been replaced by imported foreign labor, you will likely not benefit from globalization. You'll likely be living on much less money the rest of your life. To the elitist promoters of globalization, this merely some "minor pain" that must be endured by some in the labor class. The truth for those folks is that their boats have sunk to the bottom and are water-logged. So much for the "everyone benefits" hogwash.
Well, like I said, whether one prefers a document-centric or an application-centric approach is a personal choice. Each have their advantages and disadvantages. I prefer the application-centric approach for many reasons that I won't recite here.
I do agree that launch times in Windows for some applications is shorter. Although I don't know the all of the reasons, I do know a few.
I believe that programs like IE and Office are heavily integrated into the Windows OS. I would bet that means that many of the processes are running in the background even before launching. That would certainly speed up launch times. However, if you compare launch times for, say, Photoshop on both platforms, there is less of a difference in launch time. The heavy integration of applications into the OS has some drawbacks though. Like making it easier for viruses and such to access the OS core via an application. Applications in OS X are well isolated from the OS.
The other problem leading to slow launches on Macs is legacy issues. Many of the big mainstream applications originated on the old Mac OS and were rewritten for OS X. MS Office, IE and Photoshop are examples of such applications. Those applications tend to launch much slower than applications that were written from scratch for OS X. OS X does have a mechanism that allows for reduced launch times after the first launch of the application.
My experience with boot times on XP and OS X on similar hardware is opposite of yours. I'm not up on the issues regarding boot time, so I won't comment on that.
I would like faster launch times on my Mac, but launch time is not an important issue to me. The advantages of the OS X environment for me outweigh it's deficiencies relative to Windows. It's good to a have choice. I'm thankful for that.
Slashdot Mirror
The Bill of old was decidedly apolitical and non-whiny. The new Bill is just another whining corporate executive using his position of power to extract favors from the federal government.
I admit I have never been a fan of Microsoft's products and I think they used lots of dirty tricks achieve their monopoly. But, I was never a big MS basher and had some grudging respect for the way they achieved their success without favors from the government.
But, Microsoft's exponential growth phase is behind them and despite consistent earnings and profits, their stock price has been flat for about three years. They even tried buying back stock which hasn't helped. Something has to be done.
The old Bill would have been stalking the halls of the company coming up with some way to "cut off the air supply" to the current tech leaders (e.g. eBay, Google, Linux). Instead he has resorted to calling the competition commies and is flying to Washington to whine about how unfair it is that he can't import all the cheap foreign labor he wants.
Well, boo hoo, Bill. Google is growing like crazy and not having any trouble recruiting. Why don't you resurrect some of that old ruthlessness and quit your whining.
You are correct. A bit of an exaggeration on my part and kind of a lame punch line.
A better closing line would have been "if I had Sleazy Bob's ethics and morals, I'd be CEO by now".
As others have pointed out, all projects are "late". This phenomena is not unique to IT projects. I put "late" in quotes because the projects are usually delivered on time -- from a realistic standpoint -- but the manager has to lie about the cost and time to be assigned the project in the first place.
There are two type of managers. Let's call them "Honest Joe" and "Sleazy Bob". Both want to lead the project and must meet with the executive who can approve the project. This is how it goes.
Executive: "Hi Joe. Tell me you much this project will cost and how long it will take."
Honest Joe: "It's going to cost five million dollars and will take about eighteen months".
Executive: "Thanks, Joe. You're fired. Before you clean out your office, could you stop by Bob's office and tell him I want to talk to him?"
Bob walks in...
Sleazy Bob: "Wow, I really like your tie. You know, I saw that tee shot you made on number four yesterday. Absolutely amazing. Did you ever consider going pro?"
Executive: "Thanks, Bob. Now about this project. How much will it cost and how long will it take?"
Sleazy Bob: "Six months and a half a mil."
Executive: "Sounds great. Get on it".
Eighteen months and five million dollars later the project is complete and Bob gets promoted.
If I had a nickel for every time I've seen this scenario play out, I wouldn't need a job anymore.
Only a committee of pin-headed MBAs could come up with a strategy as incredibly stupid and shortsighted as Napster's strategy. Take a good look at what's going on here. The companies involved in this venture have been unable to come up with a hardware/software combination that is superior to iPod/iTunes, so they have decided to compete by offering an easily copied payment/distribution system. Crazy.
I think the subscription model will fail. But, even if I'm wrong, Napster is incredibly foolish to use their distribution and payment method as the primary differentiator. Why? Because, as pointed out in the article, Apple can very easily start their own subscription service and usurp Napster's "advantage" overnight.
I guess I can't blame them too much. Making really nice, easy-to-use hardware and software is very difficult, expensive and requires talented, creative and innovative engineers. Unfortunately, those types of people are in short supply at companies like Dell and Napster. Dell built it's business by innovating in operations and direct hardware distribution. Napster is just a bunch of VCs, MBAs and other twits trying to make a buck by leveraging a well-known brand name they bought at a fire sale.
I'm going to hold onto my Apple stock...I think there is very little threat from these guys.
Nothing like an indignant anonymous coward with axe to grind. Oh yeah, my experience with computer quality issues so "much less meaningful" than yours. Talk about presumptuous and arrogant. Get a grip, man. If you're going launch into a rant based on a bunch of assumptions you've cooked up in your mind about my experience with computer quality issues then at least have the balls to sign-in first.
I post a four sentence rebuttal and it's "people like you" blah, blah, blah. People like me? What the hell do you know about me from the those four sentences?
Sorry to hear you got a lemon. I think it's a bit presumptuous to assume the problem is widespread based on anecdotal evidence though.
I've had my new 15" PB for over a month now and have had no problems. The trackpad scrolling works great and I love it.
No. People with "combo" drives will be fine, because "combo" drives support DVD-ROM.
All the "combo" drives that Apple has shipped with Macs can read DVDs. Hell, my 1999, 400 MHz G3 iMac can read DVDs. I installed Panther from DVD on that machine.
The point being, you don't need a "Superdrive"-equipped Mac to install from a DVD install disk.
If you had bought Apple stock three years ago, you would have made gains of over four hundred percent. Had you invested the same money in MS three years ago, you would have made, to date, precisely squat. Therefore, over the last three years, Apple has whooped MS's ass from a stockholders standpoint.
MS is no longer a growth company. Their heyday as the premire tech growth stock is gone. Ditto for Intel. There are new stock market darlings these days like Google. The second coming of Apple is kind kind of unique.
I agree. More like a second world nation, but not a third world nation. I got carried away...
Agreed. They are more of a second world nation. I got a little carried way...I have that tendency.
South Korea is a one of our major allies as is Japan. North Korea hates both of those countries. I have many Japanese friends and they are terrified of a North Korea with nukes.
That quote is not my position. I was paraphrasing the position of the post I was responding to.
Have you forgotten the mass genocide Saddam has commit, even to his own people? If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.
Not even close. You would have to have a very limited knowledge of history to come to that conclusion. Every heard of Pol Pot? That's a example from recent history. There are hundreds of other examples if you look back thousands of years.
I'm still amazed people buy into the "we had bad intelligence" argument regarding WMDs. Heck, Karl Rove even admitted that the WMD angle was just the most sellable excuse rather than the real reason. The plan for invading Iraq was developed in the late nineties. When the folks who developed the plan came into power in 2000, the invasion of Iraq became inevitable. It would have occurred had their been no 9/11. It would have occurred even if the WMD claims were discredited in advance. The "we need to save the people of Iraq from this evil dictator" excuse was not mentioned until it became clear that there were no WMDs.
For the record, I'm fine with the idea that some people feel that it's the responsibility of the US to save people from evil dictators even though I don't think we should. But, I'm surprised when act as though the "we must save the people of Iraq" was the original intention.
I also don't agree with you on North Korea. They scare the hell out of me. I just don't understand your position. It was important to invade Iraq (which was not a threat to the US and had essentially no viable army and no WMDs) simply to save it's people from their leader, but we need not worry about a sophisticated, first-world nation with a massive army and nuclear weapons?
Now, their dictator is completely nutz, but very predictable. US intel knows that.
Where did you get that idea? Do you have inside sources? Since when are crazy people predictable? You want to blame US intelligence blunders for the WMD fiasco re: Iraq, but then turn around and say we should trust US intelligence re: N. Korea?
Saddam is an evil man. But, Iraq was never a threat to the US or it's allies. North Korea is a threat to the US and our allies. I, for one, don't believe it's the responsibility of the US to save nations from their leaders. I don't believe in nation building. I do believe in protecting the nation from real threats. North Korea is a real threat.
While I agree that certain aspects of computer performance have remained relatively flat over the past ten years, there has been a huge improvement when manipulating graphics, audio and video.
Compress a 10 minute video to MPEG-1 on a ten year old Mac or PC and then do the same thing on a modern Mac or PC. The difference is huge. Ditto for manipulating graphics and audio.
Outsourcing is where companies move jobs to where the people are.
That is a silly statement. There people everywhere. Outsourcing is the movement of jobs to cheaper labor markets.
Whether outsourcing high tech jobs to cheap foreign labor markets is good thing or a bad thing is a value judgment that depends a lot on your circumstance and economic class. If you are someone who has lost a job and/or cannot land a job due to outsourcing, then you will consider it a *bad* thing. If you are gainfully employed and an investor in a company whose stock price rises due to lower labor costs from outsourcing, then you will consider outsourcing a *good thing*.
Whether outsourcing will be to the benefit or detriment of the US economy in the long term is a prediction usually based on one's economic and political ideology.
There are two ways to get rid of it: you can allow the people to move to where the jobs are (through unrestricted immigration), or you can get rid of the jobs altogether.
Another silly statement. The situation is nowhere near as black and white as that.
Yeah, the electronics to do 10+Mbps DSL have been around some time. I worked on some VDSL stuff that did 25 Mbps. The latest fashion in DSL is the VDSL/ADSL compromise called ADSL2 which will do 10 Mbps to about 8 Kft.
The problem is that there are lots and lots of people on lines longer than that. Once you get over 8 Kft, the performance isn't any better than regular ADSL.
If it were just a matter of upgrading the electronics in their network, they could easily offer these services. As it stands now, they have to dig up streets and deploy active remote nodes deeper in the network. That's going to take a lot of money and time.
Great. Now we will have the same piss-poor programs from the same five mego-opoly media behemoths streaming into our homes but, this time, transmitted on a different pipe using a different transmission protocol. Whoop-tee-do.
Seriously, more competition in the service provider space might keep prices down, but since it will be the same garbage programing, I can't get very excited.
Although I'd rather not see Microsoft's proprietary technology used in the transmission protocol, I'm not too worried. TV streams from the Baby Bells are still a long way off for most people. The vast majority of their outside plant facilities need backhoe-style upgrades to get that fiber to your house.
I know they are claiming these services are just around the corner, but they have been saying that for about 15 years now. How many of you can't get a DSL line because you are on a long line? Of those who can get it, how many get more than 1.5 Mbps? Yeah, thought so.
They need at least 10 Mbps to each house for this roll-out. It's gonna be a while.
That was my first thought as well. I remember when Apple released a demo version of Project X. I thought it was kind of clever, but ultimately not very useful. Then, Jobs returned to Apple and the project got canceled.
The competitors are trying to make this all about compatibility with online music outlets. That is irrelevant. Customers don't care. Until Apple's patent on the scroll wheel (now called the "click wheel" since they integrated the buttons) runs out, the competition is screwed.
There is no doubt that many people are buying iPods for it's aesthetic qualities, but it is the ease of use facilitated by the click/scroll wheel that makes people love it and recommend it to their friends.
I have tried dozens of other MP3 players and not one of them has a navigation and control mechanism that even comes close to the iPod. When you have hundreds or thousands of songs, the ability to easily navigate trumps every other design aspect. The fact that children and non-tech-savvy folks can learn to use the click wheel efficiently in just a few minutes is really hard to beat.
The competitors will tell potential customers it's about file formats, price, battery life, FM tuners, etc. and they can make their products in pretty pastels just like Apple. However, until they create a human interface that a thirteen year old girl can learn to navigate within a few minutes of opening the box, they are going to have a tough time stealing market share.
Doh. I guess I should have compared the dimensions before opening my mouth. That thing is damn small, huh?
It looks like Apple is going to market this thing very directly at PC to Mac "switchers" and schools.
;-)
If you check out the Mac mini QTVR movies, there's one showing it connected to PC peripherals and the Apple
Store's Mac mini page highlights that it can be used with your old PC's peripherals. The Mac mini's main page even recommends upgrading school computer labs from PC to Mac so that you can "spend your time teaching advanced topics instead of basic computer maintenance". Ouch. I knew that this would be the target market, but I didn't expect such a direct sales pitch to PC users and schools.
As a side note, you get to see how big the power brick is for the mini. If you look at the "with Mac peripherals" QTVR movie you see that if you use an Apple monitor, you are stuck with two power bricks and a bunch of cables. Seeing that picture makes me want to buy an iMac G5.
I was comparing the specs of iBooks and the iMac mini. The only differences seem to be a slightly higher bus speed and clock speed plus faster RAM. Other than that, the specs are roughly the same.
Anyone else think maybe Apple just repackaged the iBook's motherboard and turned up the speed a bit?
I'll believe a technology turnaround when *hiring* becomes more common, *salaries* start to get a boost, and business start investing in large, long-term IT projects.
That pretty much sums the situation up in a single sentence. Excellent.
And, this is really funny:
It's also a major upper management status toy, and since when has the technology downturn denied that particular economic segment anything?
Globalization of the economy is a *good* thing. Eventually it will lead to an equalization of wages and a higher standard of living for everyone in the world, not just people in rich countries.
Score -5 Pure Speculation
Do you have a crystal ball which allows you to predict the current experiment in global economics is going to play out? The theory predicting the outcome you espouse is not based on unassailable fact as solid and provable as Newtonian physics. It's a shaky economic theory. It's a theory that not all economists agree on. The proponents of this theory may end up being correct, but I'm really sick of people making it sound as though it's a sure thing.
The other problem with this argument is that it implies that the motivation for moving jobs to cheap markets arises from some altruistic desire to improve the lives of laborers around the world. That, of course, is BS. Individuals and corporations that use cheap imported labor (legal or illegal) or move operations to cheap labor markets do so to reduce costs and improve profits in the short term so that investors make more money and executives get a bigger annual bonuses. They don't care one bit about the long term effects and it's naive to believe that they do.
So, let's change the statement to make it more accurate:
According to many popular, present-day, ivory-tower economists, globalization (facilitated by trade agreements negotiated by a tiny, answer-to-no-one ruling elite) will eventually lead to increased income and better quality of life for everyone around the world. This theory has been presented as fact by it's promoters in the corporate media. Those who question the theory are labeled "protectionists" (a fresh derogatory label replacing the aging term "commie") and apparently considered "retarded" by certain childish Slashdot readers.
You'll have to forgive me if I'm skeptical of all the "lifts all boats", "everyone benefits" and "not a zero-sum game" arguments. The economy is a game. In every game there are winners and losers. Modern economic globalization does not change that rule. Only time will tell if globalization eventually benefits the US economy and it's workers.
One thing is for sure, if you are over forty years old and your job has been outsourced or you have been replaced by imported foreign labor, you will likely not benefit from globalization. You'll likely be living on much less money the rest of your life. To the elitist promoters of globalization, this merely some "minor pain" that must be endured by some in the labor class. The truth for those folks is that their boats have sunk to the bottom and are water-logged. So much for the "everyone benefits" hogwash.
There are lots of car chargers available of the iPod. Here's a few:
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http://www.xtrememac.com/adapters/car_charger.s
http://www.macally.com/new/new_podcig.html
There are quite a few car mounting solutions available as well.
Well, like I said, whether one prefers a document-centric or an application-centric approach is a personal choice. Each have their advantages and disadvantages. I prefer the application-centric approach for many reasons that I won't recite here.
I do agree that launch times in Windows for some applications is shorter. Although I don't know the all of the reasons, I do know a few.
I believe that programs like IE and Office are heavily integrated into the Windows OS. I would bet that means that many of the processes are running in the background even before launching. That would certainly speed up launch times. However, if you compare launch times for, say, Photoshop on both platforms, there is less of a difference in launch time. The heavy integration of applications into the OS has some drawbacks though. Like making it easier for viruses and such to access the OS core via an application. Applications in OS X are well isolated from the OS.
The other problem leading to slow launches on Macs is legacy issues. Many of the big mainstream applications originated on the old Mac OS and were rewritten for OS X. MS Office, IE and Photoshop are examples of such applications. Those applications tend to launch much slower than applications that were written from scratch for OS X. OS X does have a mechanism that allows for reduced launch times after the first launch of the application.
My experience with boot times on XP and OS X on similar hardware is opposite of yours. I'm not up on the issues regarding boot time, so I won't comment on that.
I would like faster launch times on my Mac, but launch time is not an important issue to me. The advantages of the OS X environment for me outweigh it's deficiencies relative to Windows. It's good to a have choice. I'm thankful for that.