My money is on the "Celeron-M" being in both the iBook and the Mini (if the Mini survives the transition). That would allow them to put single-core Pentium-M in most of the Powerbook line, with the dual-core only in special pro models.
Apple will play dual-core laptops for all the margin they're worth, which means there's no way they will be introduced at the bottom or even the middle of the line-up.
Agreed -- Big corporations often upgrade the hardware & software at the same time, so it is a safe assumption that 64-bit Vista desktops will become pretty common.
The problem with running CONVERT is that your new NTFS drive will have absolutely zero file permissions -- Everyone Full Control everywhere. (Unless there's a "Repair Permissions" feature in XP that I'm unaware of...) But maybe everyone runs as admin and you don't care.
Sorry, but I disagree. This was tied up into OpenOffice Advocacy, and therefore (A) An expensive office suite migration was decided upon without waiting to see if there would be more practical third-party ODF support for MS Office, and (B) The MS Office XML formats were dismissed largely for OSS-centric reasoning and not necessarily MA's policy objectives.
Not to mention the third-party-addon argument is pretty much universal and not restricted to accessibility plugins.
Maybe a dumb question, but how does Lynx integrate with screen readers? Is there a library interface, or does the screen reader have to query the terminal and say "Well, this text is red so I guess it must be a link"? It seems to me that it would almost be easier to build a web reader around wget than Lynx.
Look, there's nobody to blame but the advocates who linked OpenDocument and OpenOffice in what looks like blatent Anybody-But-Microsoftism.
They tried to use the advantages of an open document format to make up for the feature deficiencies of a second-tier office suite. The problem is that there's certain deficiencies that can't be easily overlooked, and accessiblity just happens to be one that's coded into law.
In the worst possible case, I will volunteer to write converters to make sure these new documents can be exported into proprietary apps.
That's not the worst case -- that's the best case for everyone. If OpenDocument is going to be a success, it needs the broadest possible software support. If it's just a psuedo-proprietary attempt to FUD-Attack the open MS XML formats and get rid of MS Office, then OpenDocument is worthless.
The interesting part of this accessiblity issue is that it makes it very obvious what people's motives really are.
This makes sense -- if you go back six or seven years ago, Microsoft was opening up the IE APIs to thirdparty developers, while Nutscrape was adamant about keeping their browser a closed box. IIUC, JAWS and other Windows screenreaders directly access the IE DOM rather than screen-scraping.
Even after the launch of Mozilla, there's always been questions about the API stability and there has not been much if any thirdparty software which encapsulates Mozilla tech, which is a bit of a shame.
Absolutely -- The cheapest and most obvious route to OpenDocument support for almost every organization is a translation filter for their existing MS Office apps.
Since 3rd party filters are already in development, this whole scrum in Mass. is really pointless. Most agencies will probably just roll out the filter.
> Microsoft does work to do what the MPAA would like to do - whereas so far Apple has done the opposite
Uh, no. Apple is very close to MPAA members, especially concerning DRM issues, and of course you know what Steve Jobs' other job is. If you have a WSJ sub, you can find an interview with Jobs ranting about what a mistake DVD was and how next-gen media needs to be "uncopyable".
Absent any affirmative statement either way from Apple, it's all specualtion about what they will or won't do. But, MS needs to make public statements about this stuff and Apple doesn't, and it's not correct to draw conclusions from that. Apple has never made an upfront annoucement about DRM (or anything really).
> going to be Apple because they will at least argue for it.
(A) Probably 80% of Macs sold have integrated display (B) It's safe assumption that there will be no official Bluray upgrade for the installed base. (C) Apple has proven they will gladly fuck with the connector plug to spur monitor upgrades (D) For all you & I know, the current Apple displays might meet the copyprotection spec.
So, no it doesn't seem like Apple is an obvious champion of obsolete monitors.
Uh, every Firefox plugin is "safe for scripting". If you run a thirdparty (un-)installation program, it could easily install a nasty firefox plugin that achives the exact same effect as this ActiveX control.
Also, it's only Microsoft talking up the whole HDCP DVI protected video paths for computers (to come in Vista). Apple has not made any moves in that direction, nothing announced or in development.
Microsoft has to make a bunch of noise about any hardware standard because thousands of companies need to be ready for any particular new OS feature. Apple markets their own displays and really doesn't have to say a word until the day after the software is released.
> I still think Apple computers will be able to play Blu-Ray discs on the monitors we have today.
Depends on the MPAA more than on Apple or Microsoft. MS doesn't add a bunch of crap to Windows for the hell of it - they do it because there's a percieved need by software developers (in this case, the MPAA).
Right, if you use GMail. However, Gmail is what you use to send funny links to your pals, while Outlook/Exchange is what you use for the important stuff (at least in most businesses). That's Microsofts advantage in this -- they can get at the important data ("the knowledge") much more easily than Google.
I think from Microsoft's POV, Google's web search is nothing more than a very profitable targetted advertisement channel. Of course they would love to undercut this revenue, but the Google Desktop product is a much bigger threat to their traditional businesses than anything at google.com.
Google is a verb. You never saw the Jennifer Lopez talking about how she "Netscaped It" in Maid in Manhattan.
Actually there was a time when people "surfed the Netscape" -- they were basically synonomous with "web" for a while.
Microsoft didn't just beat Netscape by building a better web browser -- they also endovered to make the web and Windows as seamless as possible. And that's their big opportunity against Google -- Google is just passively indexing web pages so that they can deliver targetted advertisements. Microsoft can drive search into elements that are outside of the web -- office documents, corporate email, even application systems inside your company.
The other thing is that Ray Ozzie shouldn't be underestimated. This is a very bright man who has put a lot of thought into knowledge management topics.
My impression of MS's Windows-Only licence provision was to discourage software companies from doing "quick-ports" to Linux using Wine. In other words, it is still meant to be a distribution provision, not an end user runtime restriction. (The end user doesn't know what the licence of MSVCR70.dll is anyway.)
It does invalidate some of the proposed ideas for GPL3 which address having to distrbute source code for web services/applications.
Basically, the FSF were hoping that the courts would restrict people's right to modify software under copyright law, but it looks like that's not happening.
If you can take over a program, you can issue the same malformed drawing commands which can take over a system. So there's no difference in "privilege seperation" -- the former is just a lot easier to exploit.
That was only half the conspiracy. The other half was that Dell has a standing policy not to do business with other hardware companies, so when Apple bought Next, they felt they had to move off WO.
And I'm not sure if MS really cared about webobjects, they just wanted a friendly customer to demonstrate their commerce server product. The ASP version of dell.com was also larger and had more features, so it was probably a v2.0 design as well.
Are you serious? If you were seriously bothered by "vendor lock-in, the "upgrade" treadmill, etc", a Mac is just about the last thing you should purchase.
Staying on Apple's marketing plan is the price of admission to the Mac world, and is the reason Apple can afford to produce such a nicely packaged product.
Now for one thing an IBM Laptop will never be able to compete with: Sleep Mode. Apples are EXTREMELY nice in this area.
Evidence? I have both a Powerbook G4 and T31, and I would rate them about equal in sleep mode. (Apple gets a slight edge because the Wifi reconnects faster). I never shut down either machine, and the ThinkPad goes automatically in hibernation if I don't use it for a few days, while the Apple just dies.
The TP will get a little wonky with the display when it docks and undocks, but since Apple doesn't even make a dock, that evens out. (And regardless if you think a dock is unimportant, if Apple made one, I'd buy it.)
The problem is that most games are designed to be "scalable" to a certain degree, so there's no absolutes in what sort of PC one needs. Some people were having fun with Doom3 on old PIII/GF3 systems, while others were complaining that the high-end eyecandy was choking their brand new high-end boxes, and still others were finding the game totally unplayable on their new Intel Extreme Dells.
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So, are you predicting that Adobe will be ready to go in January?
My money is on the "Celeron-M" being in both the iBook and the Mini (if the Mini survives the transition). That would allow them to put single-core Pentium-M in most of the Powerbook line, with the dual-core only in special pro models.
Apple will play dual-core laptops for all the margin they're worth, which means there's no way they will be introduced at the bottom or even the middle of the line-up.
Agreed -- Big corporations often upgrade the hardware & software at the same time, so it is a safe assumption that 64-bit Vista desktops will become pretty common.
The problem with running CONVERT is that your new NTFS drive will have absolutely zero file permissions -- Everyone Full Control everywhere. (Unless there's a "Repair Permissions" feature in XP that I'm unaware of...) But maybe everyone runs as admin and you don't care.
> If you can provide a link I can read it.
Read it in the deadtree version, sorry.
> Apple would at least have to test with monitors being developed.
They just introduced PCIe with no vendor outreach, so nope. Besides, they can let MS and Intel carry the water as per usual.
> And all of them include a VGA or DVI port out.
The point is that the % of users affected by this would be very low.
> Why would that be a safe assumption?
Because they never sold DVD upgrade kits.
> We'll see next year when players arrive...
Yup, although I still doubt that Apple will get a pass from Hollywood on this one.
Sorry, but I disagree. This was tied up into OpenOffice Advocacy, and therefore (A) An expensive office suite migration was decided upon without waiting to see if there would be more practical third-party ODF support for MS Office, and (B) The MS Office XML formats were dismissed largely for OSS-centric reasoning and not necessarily MA's policy objectives.
Not to mention the third-party-addon argument is pretty much universal and not restricted to accessibility plugins.
Maybe a dumb question, but how does Lynx integrate with screen readers? Is there a library interface, or does the screen reader have to query the terminal and say "Well, this text is red so I guess it must be a link"? It seems to me that it would almost be easier to build a web reader around wget than Lynx.
Look, there's nobody to blame but the advocates who linked OpenDocument and OpenOffice in what looks like blatent Anybody-But-Microsoftism.
They tried to use the advantages of an open document format to make up for the feature deficiencies of a second-tier office suite. The problem is that there's certain deficiencies that can't be easily overlooked, and accessiblity just happens to be one that's coded into law.
In the worst possible case, I will volunteer to write converters to make sure these new documents can be exported into proprietary apps.
That's not the worst case -- that's the best case for everyone. If OpenDocument is going to be a success, it needs the broadest possible software support. If it's just a psuedo-proprietary attempt to FUD-Attack the open MS XML formats and get rid of MS Office, then OpenDocument is worthless.
The interesting part of this accessiblity issue is that it makes it very obvious what people's motives really are.
This makes sense -- if you go back six or seven years ago, Microsoft was opening up the IE APIs to thirdparty developers, while Nutscrape was adamant about keeping their browser a closed box. IIUC, JAWS and other Windows screenreaders directly access the IE DOM rather than screen-scraping.
Even after the launch of Mozilla, there's always been questions about the API stability and there has not been much if any thirdparty software which encapsulates Mozilla tech, which is a bit of a shame.
Absolutely -- The cheapest and most obvious route to OpenDocument support for almost every organization is a translation filter for their existing MS Office apps.
Since 3rd party filters are already in development, this whole scrum in Mass. is really pointless. Most agencies will probably just roll out the filter.
> Microsoft does work to do what the MPAA would like to do - whereas so far Apple has done the opposite
Uh, no. Apple is very close to MPAA members, especially concerning DRM issues, and of course you know what Steve Jobs' other job is. If you have a WSJ sub, you can find an interview with Jobs ranting about what a mistake DVD was and how next-gen media needs to be "uncopyable".
Absent any affirmative statement either way from Apple, it's all specualtion about what they will or won't do. But, MS needs to make public statements about this stuff and Apple doesn't, and it's not correct to draw conclusions from that. Apple has never made an upfront annoucement about DRM (or anything really).
> going to be Apple because they will at least argue for it.
(A) Probably 80% of Macs sold have integrated display
(B) It's safe assumption that there will be no official Bluray upgrade for the installed base.
(C) Apple has proven they will gladly fuck with the connector plug to spur monitor upgrades
(D) For all you & I know, the current Apple displays might meet the copyprotection spec.
So, no it doesn't seem like Apple is an obvious champion of obsolete monitors.
Uh, every Firefox plugin is "safe for scripting". If you run a thirdparty (un-)installation program, it could easily install a nasty firefox plugin that achives the exact same effect as this ActiveX control.
Also, it's only Microsoft talking up the whole HDCP DVI protected video paths for computers (to come in Vista). Apple has not made any moves in that direction, nothing announced or in development.
Microsoft has to make a bunch of noise about any hardware standard because thousands of companies need to be ready for any particular new OS feature. Apple markets their own displays and really doesn't have to say a word until the day after the software is released.
> I still think Apple computers will be able to play Blu-Ray discs on the monitors we have today.
Depends on the MPAA more than on Apple or Microsoft. MS doesn't add a bunch of crap to Windows for the hell of it - they do it because there's a percieved need by software developers (in this case, the MPAA).
> For example, if you use GMail,
Right, if you use GMail. However, Gmail is what you use to send funny links to your pals, while Outlook/Exchange is what you use for the important stuff (at least in most businesses). That's Microsofts advantage in this -- they can get at the important data ("the knowledge") much more easily than Google.
I think from Microsoft's POV, Google's web search is nothing more than a very profitable targetted advertisement channel. Of course they would love to undercut this revenue, but the Google Desktop product is a much bigger threat to their traditional businesses than anything at google.com.
Google is a verb. You never saw the Jennifer Lopez talking about how she "Netscaped It" in Maid in Manhattan.
Actually there was a time when people "surfed the Netscape" -- they were basically synonomous with "web" for a while.
Microsoft didn't just beat Netscape by building a better web browser -- they also endovered to make the web and Windows as seamless as possible. And that's their big opportunity against Google -- Google is just passively indexing web pages so that they can deliver targetted advertisements. Microsoft can drive search into elements that are outside of the web -- office documents, corporate email, even application systems inside your company.
The other thing is that Ray Ozzie shouldn't be underestimated. This is a very bright man who has put a lot of thought into knowledge management topics.
> Think of Wine!
My impression of MS's Windows-Only licence provision was to discourage software companies from doing "quick-ports" to Linux using Wine. In other words, it is still meant to be a distribution provision, not an end user runtime restriction. (The end user doesn't know what the licence of MSVCR70.dll is anyway.)
It does invalidate some of the proposed ideas for GPL3 which address having to distrbute source code for web services/applications.
Basically, the FSF were hoping that the courts would restrict people's right to modify software under copyright law, but it looks like that's not happening.
> If you pay me $10,000 to write a program, you would assume that the program is yours, correct?
No, I wouldn't, because that's not how copyright law works. It has nothing to do with how much money you paid or where you got it.
If you can take over a program, you can issue the same malformed drawing commands which can take over a system. So there's no difference in "privilege seperation" -- the former is just a lot easier to exploit.
That was only half the conspiracy. The other half was that Dell has a standing policy not to do business with other hardware companies, so when Apple bought Next, they felt they had to move off WO.
And I'm not sure if MS really cared about webobjects, they just wanted a friendly customer to demonstrate their commerce server product. The ASP version of dell.com was also larger and had more features, so it was probably a v2.0 design as well.
Are you serious? If you were seriously bothered by "vendor lock-in, the "upgrade" treadmill, etc", a Mac is just about the last thing you should purchase.
Staying on Apple's marketing plan is the price of admission to the Mac world, and is the reason Apple can afford to produce such a nicely packaged product.
Now for one thing an IBM Laptop will never be able to compete with: Sleep Mode. Apples are EXTREMELY nice in this area.
Evidence? I have both a Powerbook G4 and T31, and I would rate them about equal in sleep mode. (Apple gets a slight edge because the Wifi reconnects faster). I never shut down either machine, and the ThinkPad goes automatically in hibernation if I don't use it for a few days, while the Apple just dies.
The TP will get a little wonky with the display when it docks and undocks, but since Apple doesn't even make a dock, that evens out. (And regardless if you think a dock is unimportant, if Apple made one, I'd buy it.)
The problem is that most games are designed to be "scalable" to a certain degree, so there's no absolutes in what sort of PC one needs. Some people were having fun with Doom3 on old PIII/GF3 systems, while others were complaining that the high-end eyecandy was choking their brand new high-end boxes, and still others were finding the game totally unplayable on their new Intel Extreme Dells.
Forget Healthcare, Energy, Natural Disasters, and whatever else ails you, citizen -- Joe Blow in Ghana can't afford a cellphone!
Yes, because the US is really suffering from the lack of computerization due to the ridiculous prices of the things. :P