You imply that Microsoft had a monopoly in 1995 but doesn't now partly on the basis that people can use Linux and open source software. However, in 1995 Microsoft had a smaller share of the market than it does now. Apple had a much larger market share in 1995 than now and OS/2 was still a (minor) player back then.
So if I understand your argument correctly Microsoft is more of a monopoly now than it was then if you're going by marketshare.
Furthermore, the fact that Linux is a viable competitor is not good from a capitalistic standpoint. Basically the lesson being taught by Linux is that the only way to compete with Microsoft is to give away your stuff for free. And even though Linux gives away its stuff for free it still can barely compete with Microsoft. On the desktop, Linux's marketshare makes Apple's marketshare look great and Apple has a pathetic desktop marketshare. This, to me, is a sign that Microsoft's monopoly is more powerful now than it was in 1995.
Yeah this is a pretty blatant rip off of OS X's Aqua theme. I kinda wish that they would get away with it though. I run OS X and it sucks to run half my apps in Aqua and the other half in some KDE or GNOME theme under XonX. It'd be nice if the X Windows stuff looked more like the Aqua stuff. So this could benefit Apple's OS X users as well. The problem is that it would also allow you to run the Aqua look and feel on non-OS X machines as well.
One example precedent here is how Java Swing apps have the full Aqua look and feel when running on the Mac but that this look and feel is available only on the Mac. (You've never really seen a really good looking Java Swing app until you've seen it on OS X, IMO.)
The other problem here is that if Apple doesn't defend their rights to Aqua then in a couple years Microsoft will have a free hand over copying it in the next rev of Windows.
Maybe Apple could license the Aqua look and feel to FirstTech for a trivial amount of money.
One thing I can say for sure though, Aqua is FAR superior to Windows classic, Windows Fisher-Price (XP), the Java look and feel, and most of the KDE/GNOME themes I've seen so far. (Although some of the X themes, especially a lot of the Enlightenment stuff, are really nice.) The Liquid look and feel, while pretty good, seems to be mostly a poor rip-off of Aqua. Real Aqua looks a lot better than the screenshots I've seen of Liquid. Presumably Liquid will look better as more development goes into it.
Sorry but Apple's overall head count has been increasing. While Dell, HP, Compaq, and so on have been laying off literally thousands of employees Apple has laid off 50 or so. But they've hired more than 50 or so in that same period.
Apple has over $4.2 billion in the bank. When Steve Jobs originally took over they had like $200some million.
Apple is an extremely efficient company these days. When their CFO last spoke recently (about a month or so ago) he remarked that they had their inventory down to 2 days. Apple is efficient for the same reason Dell is efficient: excellent inventory management.
There are also a number of major factors which are working toward's Apple's favor. OS X 10.1 is coming out and within the next year virtually all of the major applications will be converted to OS X. Because of its UNIX and NeXT roots and Java capabilities OS X appeals to a much wider crowd than Mac OS 9. Also, while Apple has languished somewhat with their G4 processors (2000 was not a good year) Apple will actually be in a better position going forward with the G5. The G5 is 64-bit and also runs existing 32-bit Macintosh applications. While the Wintel world will be split between the Itanium, P4, and the AMD Sledgehammer architectures, the Macintosh will on one chipset architecture.
Apple most certainly won't be crushing the Wintel world but they will most certainly continue to survive and yes, thrive in the marketplace.
The iMac also comes with FireWire, 10/100 Ethernet, 56Kbps modem built in. Apple doesn't skimp on any ports. That doesn't explain the entire price difference, but it explains some of it.
1. Games need to be written to open APIs like OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenPlay, and
so on. Games that are written to open APIs are more portable to different
operating systems which supports consumer choice and are more accessible to
open source development.
2. UNIX gaming. I love UNIX because it's elegant, powerful, widely
implemented, open, and standards-based. I want to game on UNIX, I don't
want to dual boot.
3. Wide availability of games.
HOW MAC OS X SUPPORTS THESE
1. Apple isn't pushing a lot of proprietary APIs needlessly. Sure, there
are some, but in general, games on the Mac using 3D graphics use OpenGL,
games that use 3D sound frequently use OpenAL, Apple is pushing for an
open API for networking called OpenPlay, and because it's UNIX, POSIX and
standardized UNIX APIs are bound to be widely used for threading, sockets,
filesystem I/O, and so on.
2. OS X is UNIX. Huge chunks of it are even open source. (Not as open
source as Linux of course, but a lot better than nothing.)
3. The Mac has a wide variety of games available to it. The following is
a small sampling (this list also includes games scheduled to come out for
the Mac):
FPS
Doom 1-3
Quake 1-4 and Quake: Team Arena
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Rune and Rune: Halls of Valhalla
Alice
Oni
Halo (widely believed to be coming)
Deus Ex
Descent 3
Heavy Metal FAKK 2
Tomb Raider series including Tomb Raider: Chronicles
Max Payne (coming sometime)
RPG
Diablo 1-2 and D2X
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Icewind Dale
Baldur's Gate II (coming in a few weeks)
Neverwinter Knights
MMORPG
Shadowbane (widely considered to be the most promising MMORPG)
World War III Online
RTS
Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War
Warcraft 1-3 (including WC2: Beyond the Dark Portal)
Age of Empires 1 (and 2 coming this fall)
Total Annihilation
Summoner
Black and White (coming later this year most likely)
Myth 1-3
Tropico
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Sacrifice
Earth 2140
Majesty
TBS
Heroes of Might and Magic III (and the two expansion packs)
Civilization 2-3
Civilization: Call to Power
Alpha Centauri
Masters of Orion 2-3
ADVENTURE
Escape from Monkey Island III
Myst 1-3
Realmyst (coming sometime this year)
Vampire: The Masquerade>br>
Star Wars games (Pod Racer, etc.)
Star Trek games (like DS9: The Fallen)
Rogue Spear/Rainbox Six
Dragon's Lair 3D
OTHER
The Sims (and most of the other Sim-series like City/Theme Park/Tower/Ant/...)
Railroad Tycoon II
Soldier of Fortune
Tony Hawk
Driver
4x4 EVO
a ton card/boardgames (like Monopoly, Monopoly Casino, etc.)
a ton of arcade games (Centipede 3D, Atari 2600 action pack,
and other arcade remakes of classics)
and a ton of educational games and kids games which I don't really get into
and don't know the names for
Anyway, the only game I seriously miss on the OS X is Everquest and it
looks like Shadowbane should satisfy that (and Neverwinter Knights).
The Mac also gets a lot of games simultaneously (Blizzard in particular
has gotten progressively better and better about this and is 100%
simultaneous now).
A NOTE ON HARDWARE
The Macs have both the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live and the Nvidia
Geforce 3 cards available to them which are more or less the state of the
art in PC gaming.
SUMMARY
Again, what's really important is that games get written to open APIs.
Supporting both Linux and Mac gaming both accomplish this.
I bought my first ever Mac 5 months ago (because of OS X) and haven't
looked back since. It's worked out a lot better than I thought and I've
since become quite the Apple fan surprisingly enough. I've also found
that I really enjoy the Apple community (read a couple of issues of
http://www.appleturns.com for an example).
The Mac isn't perfect, but I've been really happy with it.
I also want to say that I think that the whole WINE approach to gaming
is horribly flawed in my opinion. We need games written to open APIs!
I'm not advocating that people ditch Linux for the Mac, but I do think that
people who genuinely care about open APIs should at least CONSIDER the Mac
if they're currently playing their games under Windows.
Diablo II is cheap compared to EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Asheron's Call, etc. as there is no monthly charge. EverQuest charged for the original game, charged for the first expansion pack, charged for the second expansion pack, and charges $10/month on top of that. There networking is definitely better but it's because it costs more. Diablo is cheap, so the support is cheap. You get what you pay for. This is not a complaint about either game. Just pointing out the different business models. Battle.net has actually gotten a whole lot better recently in terms of service. It hardly lags at all for me whereas 6 months ago it was barely usable. Also, with this latest release Blizzard simultaneously released Diablo II for both the Windows and the Mac. This is significant for me because I switched to Macs recently because of OS X (consumer UNIX). EverQuest is only available on Windows.
Simon Delivers in Minnesota is wonderful
on
Webvan Out Of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Our family uses Simon Delivers where we live in Minnesota. Ordering groceries from the web is a godsend. It saves tons of time and the selection is much, much larger. I hope Simons does okay because I'd hate to think I had to start going to the grocery store again. *shudders in horror* =)
Check out Apple's store. There are a lot of firewire hard drives, tape backup systems, DVD authoring systems, non-Sony cameras, scanners, and so on. Furthermore, FireWire is going 800MB/s this summer from what I've read which is still much faster than the as-yet-nonexistant USB 2.0. FireWire is also a standard: IEEE 1394.
I think that the author of this article did everyone a disservice by choosing such an antagonistic title.
I'm a huge supporter of Linux but I went out and got a Macintosh anyway. The reason is that where I work I am _required_ to use Microsoft Outlook (primarily for its scheduling purposes) and to read (and write) Microsoft Office documents. Furthermore, since I help develop a web site, I am _required_ to verify that our website works with Internet Explorer. We deploy our application on a Solaris box.
I have tried using VMWare to overcome these problems with varying degrees of success. But in the end, I found using an X server under Windows 2000 faster than running VMWare under Linux.
Mac OS X allows me to run the Microsoft software I am _required_ to run without having to run a Microsoft OS. Furthermore, I will eventually be able to run most if not all of my Linux applications on OS X as well.
Mac OS X opens up a whole new platform where GNU and X Windows software will run efficiently. I really don't see this as an "Us versus Them" type of situation. Both OSes are UNIX.
Apple does some proprietary stuff with their Quartz and Aqua interface. However, it's at least loosely based on a standard (PDF) and I think they do some real innovation there. Hopefully the good ideas in Quartz/Aqua will get integrated into X Windows in some fashion.
But at least Apple is supporting LDAP instead of some BS like ActiveDirectory, OpenGL instead of Direct3D, NFS/HTTP/WebDAV instead of AppleTalk, UNIX instead of yet another proprietary OS, and so on. The new Apple hardware and OS is a lot more open than closed. Certainly a lot more open than it used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
You imply that Microsoft had a monopoly in 1995 but doesn't now partly on the basis that people can use Linux and open source software. However, in 1995 Microsoft had a smaller share of the market than it does now. Apple had a much larger market share in 1995 than now and OS/2 was still a (minor) player back then.
So if I understand your argument correctly Microsoft is more of a monopoly now than it was then if you're going by marketshare.
Furthermore, the fact that Linux is a viable competitor is not good from a capitalistic standpoint. Basically the lesson being taught by Linux is that the only way to compete with Microsoft is to give away your stuff for free. And even though Linux gives away its stuff for free it still can barely compete with Microsoft. On the desktop, Linux's marketshare makes Apple's marketshare look great and Apple has a pathetic desktop marketshare. This, to me, is a sign that Microsoft's monopoly is more powerful now than it was in 1995.
(Disclosure: I'm both a Linux and an OS X user.)
Yeah this is a pretty blatant rip off of OS X's Aqua theme. I kinda wish that they would get away with it though. I run OS X and it sucks to run half my apps in Aqua and the other half in some KDE or GNOME theme under XonX. It'd be nice if the X Windows stuff looked more like the Aqua stuff. So this could benefit Apple's OS X users as well. The problem is that it would also allow you to run the Aqua look and feel on non-OS X machines as well.
One example precedent here is how Java Swing apps have the full Aqua look and feel when running on the Mac but that this look and feel is available only on the Mac. (You've never really seen a really good looking Java Swing app until you've seen it on OS X, IMO.)
The other problem here is that if Apple doesn't defend their rights to Aqua then in a couple years Microsoft will have a free hand over copying it in the next rev of Windows.
Maybe Apple could license the Aqua look and feel to FirstTech for a trivial amount of money.
One thing I can say for sure though, Aqua is FAR superior to Windows classic, Windows Fisher-Price (XP), the Java look and feel, and most of the KDE/GNOME themes I've seen so far. (Although some of the X themes, especially a lot of the Enlightenment stuff, are really nice.) The Liquid look and feel, while pretty good, seems to be mostly a poor rip-off of Aqua. Real Aqua looks a lot better than the screenshots I've seen of Liquid. Presumably Liquid will look better as more development goes into it.
OS X is mostly like any other UNIX. As long as you have the source code and can recompile it it should work under OS X in most cases.
Sorry but Apple's overall head count has been increasing. While Dell, HP, Compaq, and so on have been laying off literally thousands of employees Apple has laid off 50 or so. But they've hired more than 50 or so in that same period.
Apple has over $4.2 billion in the bank. When Steve Jobs originally took over they had like $200some million.
Apple is an extremely efficient company these days. When their CFO last spoke recently (about a month or so ago) he remarked that they had their inventory down to 2 days. Apple is efficient for the same reason Dell is efficient: excellent inventory management.
There are also a number of major factors which are working toward's Apple's favor. OS X 10.1 is coming out and within the next year virtually all of the major applications will be converted to OS X. Because of its UNIX and NeXT roots and Java capabilities OS X appeals to a much wider crowd than Mac OS 9. Also, while Apple has languished somewhat with their G4 processors (2000 was not a good year) Apple will actually be in a better position going forward with the G5. The G5 is 64-bit and also runs existing 32-bit Macintosh applications. While the Wintel world will be split between the Itanium, P4, and the AMD Sledgehammer architectures, the Macintosh will on one chipset architecture.
Apple most certainly won't be crushing the Wintel world but they will most certainly continue to survive and yes, thrive in the marketplace.
OS X is not limited to a single mouse button. They fully support right-click context menus and all that. It even supports the mouse wheel.
The iMac also comes with FireWire, 10/100 Ethernet, 56Kbps modem built in. Apple doesn't skimp on any ports. That doesn't explain the entire price difference, but it explains some of it.
DESIRED QUALITIES FOR GAMING
1. Games need to be written to open APIs like OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenPlay, and so on. Games that are written to open APIs are more portable to different operating systems which supports consumer choice and are more accessible to open source development.
2. UNIX gaming. I love UNIX because it's elegant, powerful, widely implemented, open, and standards-based. I want to game on UNIX, I don't want to dual boot.
3. Wide availability of games.
HOW MAC OS X SUPPORTS THESE
1. Apple isn't pushing a lot of proprietary APIs needlessly. Sure, there are some, but in general, games on the Mac using 3D graphics use OpenGL, games that use 3D sound frequently use OpenAL, Apple is pushing for an open API for networking called OpenPlay, and because it's UNIX, POSIX and standardized UNIX APIs are bound to be widely used for threading, sockets, filesystem I/O, and so on.
2. OS X is UNIX. Huge chunks of it are even open source. (Not as open source as Linux of course, but a lot better than nothing.)
3. The Mac has a wide variety of games available to it. The following is a small sampling (this list also includes games scheduled to come out for the Mac):
FPS
Doom 1-3
Quake 1-4 and Quake: Team Arena
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Rune and Rune: Halls of Valhalla
Alice
Oni
Halo (widely believed to be coming)
Deus Ex
Descent 3
Heavy Metal FAKK 2
Tomb Raider series including Tomb Raider: Chronicles
Max Payne (coming sometime)
RPG
Diablo 1-2 and D2X
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Icewind Dale
Baldur's Gate II (coming in a few weeks)
Neverwinter Knights
MMORPG
Shadowbane (widely considered to be the most promising MMORPG)
World War III Online
RTS
Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War
Warcraft 1-3 (including WC2: Beyond the Dark Portal)
Age of Empires 1 (and 2 coming this fall)
Total Annihilation
Summoner
Black and White (coming later this year most likely)
Myth 1-3
Tropico
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Sacrifice
Earth 2140
Majesty
TBS
Heroes of Might and Magic III (and the two expansion packs)
Civilization 2-3
Civilization: Call to Power
Alpha Centauri
Masters of Orion 2-3
ADVENTURE
Escape from Monkey Island III
Myst 1-3
Realmyst (coming sometime this year)
Vampire: The Masquerade>br> Star Wars games (Pod Racer, etc.)
Star Trek games (like DS9: The Fallen)
Rogue Spear/Rainbox Six
Dragon's Lair 3D
OTHER
The Sims (and most of the other Sim-series like City/Theme Park/Tower/Ant/...)
Railroad Tycoon II
Soldier of Fortune
Tony Hawk
Driver
4x4 EVO
a ton card/boardgames (like Monopoly, Monopoly Casino, etc.)
a ton of arcade games (Centipede 3D, Atari 2600 action pack, and other arcade remakes of classics)
and a ton of educational games and kids games which I don't really get into and don't know the names for
Anyway, the only game I seriously miss on the OS X is Everquest and it looks like Shadowbane should satisfy that (and Neverwinter Knights).
The Mac also gets a lot of games simultaneously (Blizzard in particular has gotten progressively better and better about this and is 100% simultaneous now).
A NOTE ON HARDWARE
The Macs have both the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live and the Nvidia Geforce 3 cards available to them which are more or less the state of the art in PC gaming.
SUMMARY
Again, what's really important is that games get written to open APIs. Supporting both Linux and Mac gaming both accomplish this.
I bought my first ever Mac 5 months ago (because of OS X) and haven't looked back since. It's worked out a lot better than I thought and I've since become quite the Apple fan surprisingly enough. I've also found that I really enjoy the Apple community (read a couple of issues of http://www.appleturns.com for an example).
The Mac isn't perfect, but I've been really happy with it.
I also want to say that I think that the whole WINE approach to gaming is horribly flawed in my opinion. We need games written to open APIs!
I'm not advocating that people ditch Linux for the Mac, but I do think that people who genuinely care about open APIs should at least CONSIDER the Mac if they're currently playing their games under Windows.
AOL is definitely the lesser of two evils. AOL likes Linux for example.
Diablo II is cheap compared to EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Asheron's Call, etc. as there is no monthly charge. EverQuest charged for the original game, charged for the first expansion pack, charged for the second expansion pack, and charges $10/month on top of that. There networking is definitely better but it's because it costs more. Diablo is cheap, so the support is cheap. You get what you pay for. This is not a complaint about either game. Just pointing out the different business models. Battle.net has actually gotten a whole lot better recently in terms of service. It hardly lags at all for me whereas 6 months ago it was barely usable. Also, with this latest release Blizzard simultaneously released Diablo II for both the Windows and the Mac. This is significant for me because I switched to Macs recently because of OS X (consumer UNIX). EverQuest is only available on Windows.
Our family uses Simon Delivers where we live in Minnesota. Ordering groceries from the web is a godsend. It saves tons of time and the selection is much, much larger. I hope Simons does okay because I'd hate to think I had to start going to the grocery store again. *shudders in horror* =)
Check out Apple's store. There are a lot of firewire hard drives, tape backup systems, DVD authoring systems, non-Sony cameras, scanners, and so on. Furthermore, FireWire is going 800MB/s this summer from what I've read which is still much faster than the as-yet-nonexistant USB 2.0. FireWire is also a standard: IEEE 1394.
I think that the author of this article did everyone a disservice by choosing such an antagonistic title. I'm a huge supporter of Linux but I went out and got a Macintosh anyway. The reason is that where I work I am _required_ to use Microsoft Outlook (primarily for its scheduling purposes) and to read (and write) Microsoft Office documents. Furthermore, since I help develop a web site, I am _required_ to verify that our website works with Internet Explorer. We deploy our application on a Solaris box. I have tried using VMWare to overcome these problems with varying degrees of success. But in the end, I found using an X server under Windows 2000 faster than running VMWare under Linux. Mac OS X allows me to run the Microsoft software I am _required_ to run without having to run a Microsoft OS. Furthermore, I will eventually be able to run most if not all of my Linux applications on OS X as well. Mac OS X opens up a whole new platform where GNU and X Windows software will run efficiently. I really don't see this as an "Us versus Them" type of situation. Both OSes are UNIX. Apple does some proprietary stuff with their Quartz and Aqua interface. However, it's at least loosely based on a standard (PDF) and I think they do some real innovation there. Hopefully the good ideas in Quartz/Aqua will get integrated into X Windows in some fashion. But at least Apple is supporting LDAP instead of some BS like ActiveDirectory, OpenGL instead of Direct3D, NFS/HTTP/WebDAV instead of AppleTalk, UNIX instead of yet another proprietary OS, and so on. The new Apple hardware and OS is a lot more open than closed. Certainly a lot more open than it used to be.