For many people, it makes sense to rent music. The average teen or college kid will not be listening to 90% of their current music collection in 5 years -- and for pop songs, probably won't be listening in six months.
And there's rental all-you-can eat services right now, and AFAIK there's no mass piracy going on. It's just easier to rip the CD.
Jobs has carefully constructed Apple so that the Macintosh can survive profitably with a 2% marketshare. There's no way he would have the patience to manage a product that serves 90% of the IT market like "M$" Windows or Office does.
That's why consumer devices are the growth market for Apple -- They can focus on Style and Ergonomics exclusively with none of those pesky backward-compatibility and legacy and integration issues to worry about.
When Microsoft gave away IE for free, it cut off Netscape's revenue source. I blame the downfall in software quality on Netscape's inability to find a new revenue stream.
Well, that's true, but let's not forget that Netscape's REAL business was Enterprise server software. The rise of Apache had a lot more to do with Netscape's poor finances than the rise of IE did.
In conclusion: + Netscape browser gets beat down by IE + Netscape web server loses against Apache and IIS + Netscape groupware gets squeezed off the map by MS Exchange and IBM Notes + Netscape application server (Kiva) gets overwhelmed by Java stuff like BEA and WebSphere
Endgame: Netscape ends up a as a lame portal company.
When he said "no one has ever sold that sofa for $2000 dollars", he's exaggerating a bit. You certainly could go into Macy's and buy that sofa for $2000, but why would you when there's a similar one for $800 next to it? The price structure exists because there's a tiny portion of the market that is not price-sensitive, once they've reaped that market, it becomes an issue of "clearing out old stock".
The other thing is that furniture prices are negotiable -- similar to automobiles. A Chevy might list at $30K, but 99% of the buyers will negotiate that price down.
Thanks for the lecture pops, but I didn't learn anything.
The iMac does have an internal ISA (err, "LPC") bus hidden deep inside, and except for the missing BIOS, is certainly 100% IBM-compatible. It's politically incorrect, but true.
The "administrator" issue was well known back in the NT4 era. MS had plenty of time to develop a technological solution in time for the consumer release of XP.
The Apple situation is not quite analogous because Apple was breaking everyone's applications anyway, so there's no legacy issues with regard to superuser access.
If you're hoping for a ground-up rewrite of Windows, forget it because it will never happen. OS X is also a rehash of a 20 year old OS, and it also will never be rewritten. Likewise with Solaris. In all cases, it's easier to fix the problems they know about rather than cause new problems with rewritten code.
Very good point -- Microsoft even stated that their goal with IE was to make it "transparent" to the Windows user experience. In those days, starting Nutscrape was a very jarring experience -- it started slow, the icons and colors were ugly and nonstandard, etc. They successfully defined Nutscrape as their own "box", with IE everywhere around it. Netscape/Mozilla didn't really figure this out until they created a semi-IE-clone with Firefox. And Apple has taken a very similar tactic with Safari.
But that's the business/marketing logic. I think the question was more related to the technical/security issues related to integration. On that point, I think it's an overrated effect -- IE would be just as problematic if it did not share libraries with the rest of Windows.
Heh. I love these doubletalk posts where MS is slammed for not being innovative at the same time Unix is praised for being stagnant for the last 20 years.
Hey, Linux just added ACL support a couple years ago. Is it OK to make witty remarks about how Linus just copies features from VMS?
It would just degenerate into the typical circlejerk of "Macs don't have viruses therefore they are secure!!" "What about nVIR in 1986?" "Norton made my P4 slower than my G3!" etc etc. You can have that flamewar any single day on Slashdot without an official Apple rep present.
The truth is that OS X Server doesn't have the greatest track record; Apple often lags other vendors for crossplatform OSS and Java patches by months; and there's been a few real boneheaded 'ease-of-use' security flaws in OS X. But you wouldn't get any discussion of that stuff, only the normal Macs Rule/PCs Suck/Visa-Versa garbage.
Mac OS, Linux and the BSDs manage to decouple the browser.
The browser is not decoupled in either Mac OS X or KDE. Both share a very similar architecture to Windows.
Saying "It's in the OS" really depends on your definition of "Operating System". From the traditional marketing/common-user definition, KDE is just as much part of the OS/Operating Envrionment as the higher-level libraries (such as MSHTML) included in Windows. If you want to run certain software, you get a coupled browser as part of the full-meal-deal. Claiming that Desktop Linux does not couple a browser is really a double-standard.
I think the/. crowd at least would understand that Apple's biggest boost in speed on these machines is likely not from the Intel CPU but from the improved boot process, the faster bus, the more modern bridge chips, etc.
You of course mean from Intel's boot process, Intel's faster bus, and Intel's bridge chips. Pogue does phrase that correctly, the computer is Intel-based (aka, a 'IBM PC-AT' or 'industry standard' architecture computer), not just Intel CPU-based. Which is a damning indictment of the end state of Mac system design.
What has happened to Apple's in-house hardware design teams?
There was a note on the rumor sites a couple months ago about certain chipset teams being disbanded.
I'm going to give both Citrix and Microsoft some credit here.
Citrix's business was based on low-level modifications to Windows, and because of that it was always seen as a risky product that significantly lagged behind MS's service pack levels. WinFrame was an extremely fragile product.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was under a lot of pressure for not providing Unix-like remote access. Other than Citrix, they had no choice but to build their own (certainly breaking Citrix in the process).
So, while Citrix had to give up some of their tech, they actually came out ahead because the low-level component of their product is now validated as a supported part of the Windows OS.
Let me try to follow your argument: When Pogue talks about "Intel-ready", he's not referring to a CPU. When Pogue talks about a computer's "speed", he's not talking about the computational speed, but some other quickness that a G5 iMac does not possess. Okey...
Actually, RedHat and a lot of their customers might want this as a feature. For support of critical servers, many users will not want the base OS tampered with and will be more than happy to hand the keys to RedHat et al.
However, none of that would prevent you from developing your own code, you would just have to disable the protections or create your own secure bootstrap policy.
Also, this would be using the chip as a security feature and really isn't "digital rights management".
+ IFrames are synchronous(one request at a time), while AJAX is obviously asynchronous.
+ Calling back from an IFrame onLoad event tend to be a pain in the ass, while it's automatic with XmlHttpRequest.
The upshot is that IFrames tend break badly if the user clicks 'too fast' and the code isn't super robust. Also, they make an annoying click sound when they load on IE.
when a DOM gets linearly more complex, Internet Explorer will get exponentially less responsive.
Actually, Firefox seems a lot worse in this regard. Throw something fun at it like a 10MB table, and it will take 10x longer than IE to load, and afterward you can barely pull down a menu.
I wouldn't be suprised if IE had nasty corner cases, it has a "lazy" DOM that, in general, tends be much more performant than Firefox on large documents.
Slashdot Mirror
For many people, it makes sense to rent music. The average teen or college kid will not be listening to 90% of their current music collection in 5 years -- and for pop songs, probably won't be listening in six months.
And there's rental all-you-can eat services right now, and AFAIK there's no mass piracy going on. It's just easier to rip the CD.
Jobs has carefully constructed Apple so that the Macintosh can survive profitably with a 2% marketshare. There's no way he would have the patience to manage a product that serves 90% of the IT market like "M$" Windows or Office does.
That's why consumer devices are the growth market for Apple -- They can focus on Style and Ergonomics exclusively with none of those pesky backward-compatibility and legacy and integration issues to worry about.
3) Carmack says so. ;-)
Read anything from Carmack in the last year or so? He's big into pimping XNA, which means he's presumably gone all the way over to DirectX.
When Microsoft gave away IE for free, it cut off Netscape's revenue source. I blame the downfall in software quality on Netscape's inability to find a new revenue stream.
Well, that's true, but let's not forget that Netscape's REAL business was Enterprise server software. The rise of Apache had a lot more to do with Netscape's poor finances than the rise of IE did.
In conclusion:
+ Netscape browser gets beat down by IE
+ Netscape web server loses against Apache and IIS
+ Netscape groupware gets squeezed off the map by MS Exchange and IBM Notes
+ Netscape application server (Kiva) gets overwhelmed by Java stuff like BEA and WebSphere
Endgame: Netscape ends up a as a lame portal company.
When he said "no one has ever sold that sofa for $2000 dollars", he's exaggerating a bit. You certainly could go into Macy's and buy that sofa for $2000, but why would you when there's a similar one for $800 next to it? The price structure exists because there's a tiny portion of the market that is not price-sensitive, once they've reaped that market, it becomes an issue of "clearing out old stock".
The other thing is that furniture prices are negotiable -- similar to automobiles. A Chevy might list at $30K, but 99% of the buyers will negotiate that price down.
Too bad you guys missed out on that WML fad :)
There really was no war. Sloppy HTML has been the status quo since the very beginning of the web.
In fact it's usually cited the main reason that HTML became popular in the first place.
> Apple took a look at everything they were putting in, and rewrote most of it.
Prove it. And if that is true, why did OS X 10.0 ship missing modern UNIX APIs?
Thanks for the lecture pops, but I didn't learn anything.
The iMac does have an internal ISA (err, "LPC") bus hidden deep inside, and except for the missing BIOS, is certainly 100% IBM-compatible. It's politically incorrect, but true.
The "administrator" issue was well known back in the NT4 era. MS had plenty of time to develop a technological solution in time for the consumer release of XP.
The Apple situation is not quite analogous because Apple was breaking everyone's applications anyway, so there's no legacy issues with regard to superuser access.
If you're hoping for a ground-up rewrite of Windows, forget it because it will never happen. OS X is also a rehash of a 20 year old OS, and it also will never be rewritten. Likewise with Solaris. In all cases, it's easier to fix the problems they know about rather than cause new problems with rewritten code.
Very good point -- Microsoft even stated that their goal with IE was to make it "transparent" to the Windows user experience. In those days, starting Nutscrape was a very jarring experience -- it started slow, the icons and colors were ugly and nonstandard, etc. They successfully defined Nutscrape as their own "box", with IE everywhere around it. Netscape/Mozilla didn't really figure this out until they created a semi-IE-clone with Firefox. And Apple has taken a very similar tactic with Safari.
But that's the business/marketing logic. I think the question was more related to the technical/security issues related to integration. On that point, I think it's an overrated effect -- IE would be just as problematic if it did not share libraries with the rest of Windows.
Heh. I love these doubletalk posts where MS is slammed for not being innovative at the same time Unix is praised for being stagnant for the last 20 years.
Hey, Linux just added ACL support a couple years ago. Is it OK to make witty remarks about how Linus just copies features from VMS?
It would just degenerate into the typical circlejerk of "Macs don't have viruses therefore they are secure!!" "What about nVIR in 1986?" "Norton made my P4 slower than my G3!" etc etc. You can have that flamewar any single day on Slashdot without an official Apple rep present.
The truth is that OS X Server doesn't have the greatest track record; Apple often lags other vendors for crossplatform OSS and Java patches by months; and there's been a few real boneheaded 'ease-of-use' security flaws in OS X. But you wouldn't get any discussion of that stuff, only the normal Macs Rule/PCs Suck/Visa-Versa garbage.
Or, he was just trying to relate to the audience of zitfaced PC techs here.
Mac OS, Linux and the BSDs manage to decouple the browser.
The browser is not decoupled in either Mac OS X or KDE. Both share a very similar architecture to Windows.
Saying "It's in the OS" really depends on your definition of "Operating System". From the traditional marketing/common-user definition, KDE is just as much part of the OS/Operating Envrionment as the higher-level libraries (such as MSHTML) included in Windows. If you want to run certain software, you get a coupled browser as part of the full-meal-deal. Claiming that Desktop Linux does not couple a browser is really a double-standard.
> But that's not what the AC was saying
Filter out the reactionary Linux Zealot spin, and more-or-less that's what he is getting at.
I think the /. crowd at least would understand that Apple's biggest boost in speed on these machines is likely not from the Intel CPU but from the improved boot process, the faster bus, the more modern bridge chips, etc.
You of course mean from Intel's boot process, Intel's faster bus, and Intel's bridge chips. Pogue does phrase that correctly, the computer is Intel-based (aka, a 'IBM PC-AT' or 'industry standard' architecture computer), not just Intel CPU-based. Which is a damning indictment of the end state of Mac system design.
What has happened to Apple's in-house hardware design teams?
There was a note on the rumor sites a couple months ago about certain chipset teams being disbanded.
I'm going to give both Citrix and Microsoft some credit here.
Citrix's business was based on low-level modifications to Windows, and because of that it was always seen as a risky product that significantly lagged behind MS's service pack levels. WinFrame was an extremely fragile product.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was under a lot of pressure for not providing Unix-like remote access. Other than Citrix, they had no choice but to build their own (certainly breaking Citrix in the process).
So, while Citrix had to give up some of their tech, they actually came out ahead because the low-level component of their product is now validated as a supported part of the Windows OS.
Let me try to follow your argument: When Pogue talks about "Intel-ready", he's not referring to a CPU. When Pogue talks about a computer's "speed", he's not talking about the computational speed, but some other quickness that a G5 iMac does not possess. Okey...
Actually, RedHat and a lot of their customers might want this as a feature. For support of critical servers, many users will not want the base OS tampered with and will be more than happy to hand the keys to RedHat et al.
However, none of that would prevent you from developing your own code, you would just have to disable the protections or create your own secure bootstrap policy.
Also, this would be using the chip as a security feature and really isn't "digital rights management".
> OK, so what is wrong with using iFrames?
+ IFrames are synchronous(one request at a time), while AJAX is obviously asynchronous.
+ Calling back from an IFrame onLoad event tend to be a pain in the ass, while it's automatic with XmlHttpRequest.
The upshot is that IFrames tend break badly if the user clicks 'too fast' and the code isn't super robust. Also, they make an annoying click sound when they load on IE.
Have you ever tried using them? There's no progress bar, so the user experience sucks for large files.
(Also, if you have your own component, you can do the sane thing and upload binary asyncronously rather than bloating up the request with Base64).
Actually, Firefox seems a lot worse in this regard. Throw something fun at it like a 10MB table, and it will take 10x longer than IE to load, and afterward you can barely pull down a menu.
I wouldn't be suprised if IE had nasty corner cases, it has a "lazy" DOM that, in general, tends be much more performant than Firefox on large documents.
Even back in MFM's heyday, SCSI was the standard for workstations and servers.