An excellent point. It is very easy for me, as highly experienced with Mac OS administration, to feel too smug about the fact that my computer does the same things as Windows without nearly as many vulnerabilties.
Yet this thinking is the same as what permeates the Windows IT community, and it is not helpful.
It is more important for IT units to understand the OBJECTIVE to the use of any technology, rather than pigeonholing themselves to a single technology that, because no alternatives exist outside if it, is limiting and vulnerable.
That said, it still generally costs less to support a Mac user than a Windows user, though that difference has shrunk, I feel, over the last two years. But where Mac users are so knowledgable about their computers that they appear arrogant to IT staff, a PC user is typically the opposite--a person that doesn't know the difference between a computer chip and a potato chip.
Microsoft IT caters to the computer-user-as-victim. Mac user's arrogance comes from their self-empowerment of the computer, and need answers to more specific questions about problems of their computer than a typical PC user. (My opinion, which could be wrong.)
I see, daily, an annoying point where IT users are OVER-trained in one technology set, which blinds them to more efficient and effective resolutions to company computer service and infrastructure.
My business concentrates on Mac OS X systems used in a publishing environment. They work much like their Windows counterparts and could even be integrated with the larger domain for more efficiency. But when I speak of this to others they look at me with confusion and, maybe, heresy?
These people act as if Macs are toys or inferior in some way. Of course, this is far from the case, but their training has changed how they see technology. This really isn't the old Mac/PC debate. (Apple lost the first war. But they still found an important place in today's computing world.)
No computer technology is perfect, of course. But the mistaken ubiquity that IT is Microsoft and Microsoft is IT makes all other non-MS technicial initiatives and products harder to sell in concept or through a store.
Macintosh systems are less affected just as other PC browsers present less of a target on PCs. There's a reason why geeks still call IE by its sly nickname, "Internet Exploder."
The key here, as I'm sure has been stated, is in how Internet Explorer on Windows works. It's interaction with the internet (through its integration as a part of of the OS) is a liability because Microsoft has allowed a program that connects to the internet to permit external sources to download and launch external applications or link itself to external applications, all of which are dutifully managed by the operating system. No other browser I know is that guillible. IE provides no clear definition between operating system and browser to those who exploit it.
Spyware links itself to the unique components of IE and the Windows registry because some nutjob at Microsoft thought that anything found on the internet should be accessible to use in Windows (note that I didn't say "the browser", but Windows.).
Other browsers isolate all activity to the browser alone. Java and JavaScript on a Mac are not allowed to execute items from anywhere except the browser. If an exploit has been noted in these browsers that tries to touch operating system areas, it's truly an exploit, and not a "feature" that needs a fix as it would be found in IE/Windows. Take a look at the cookies in Safari on a Mac to that on a PC. The cookies saved aren't much different. But Safari and many other browsers don't recognize or allow commands or configuration requests from these cookies. IE for Windows does.
After the winning destruction his movies did at the Oscars (as well as the money made) it is virtually a lock that Peter J. will be given carte blanche for directing "The Hobbit", or producing it to maintain creative reins while handling other projects. New Line is happy. The Tolkien estate is happy. Hollywood is happy.
I don't think I'm missing the point, but let me see if I can clarify.
If you have a file open on the device you are about to disconnect physically, without informing the OS that you are about to remove it, how is the OS going to reconcile the file you have open? Currently, the Mac OS tells you that you can't disconnect network drives with files open from it. It has no mechanism to keep you from being stupid and removing FireWire drives in this manner. Currently apps don't autosave your work much, just in case you want to revert.
Should it save its contents to some non-volatile flash RAM or save it locally and tacitly resynchronize/save the file back to the original removeable disk when/if it is reattached? That would be a nice option, but it may increase the cost of a Mac (or any computer).
In my experience, this affected Macs much less in a brownout situation than PCs. The Macs (at the time, desktop G3 systems) stayed up after a power blink of 0.5 sec, losing no data. I think current Mac OS hardware is more robust in this area, but this is not really a fault of the computer or the OS. No power, no computer worky. Sorry.
Workaround in a mission-critical area: Buy an uninterruptable power supply, petition Apple to make a computer with very expensive (but non-volatile) flash RAM, or use an Apple laptop, which has its own battery that makes it resistant to brownouts and blackouts.
Issue 2: The Dock in Mac OS X.
Grousing. In the old Mac OS 9 days, there was a Dock analogue called the Launcher. It was ugly, and I rarely set it up for users, but it worked. Some people still use it for their Classic apps in OS X.
Workaround: Many, most third-party. Apple's interface, until OS X was icon-centric for launching apps, rather than menu-centric (in Windows Start menu). The Dock is no more perfect than the Start menu, but at least it provides a consistent launcher for common apps, instead of having the user search through folders for the right app icon to launch.
Better: Have installers ask user to add icon for applications to the Dock, which isn't done most of the time, forcing users to search about in the Applications folder.
Issue 3: Dimmed menus.
A bit of a grouse, but logical. Some OS X apps by third parties HAVE shown info in the greyed out menu as to why the option is not available. I believe it is more programming efficient to leave a greyed out menu than to attempt to hide it (affecting where and the order of menus on the menu bar from one moment to the next, which would confuse the hell out of me).
I believe Tog's thought, of adding a special option in a greyed-out menu as to why this command is dimmed, could be useful. Otherwise I think he is blowing the issue up. Of course, the more complex the app (especially with palettes and THEIR commands, the more weight his argument holds.
Issue Seven: Disk Drive Nazi.
Not a problem, at least until removeable drives arrived.
The Mac OS has always been intelligent, preventing you as the user from accidentally ejecting or formatting a disk you are using, including network devices. This is a Good Thing. Compare this to the behavior in Windows, which will still allow you to eject media in use, causing All Kinds of Hell.
Workaround: His point seems more specific to USB and FireWire drives. Unless Apple creates a hardware lock that physically locks a device, preventing the thing from being removed, then there's not a lot to do there, except Apple making the OS more robust in screaming at people to tell the OS that the drive is to be disconnected before they physically remove it.
Get the Department of Defense together with Verizon and para-drop a shitload of cellphones in Mosul and other Iraqi hot-spots with flyers on how the insurgents can call their friends.
After the 40th day where the D.A.M.N. Windows-based soul tracking system was offline due to spyware, God, CIO/CEO/Ruler of All You Know, has proclaimed the end of Bill Gates.
Orville Redenbacher, speaking through an interpreter for the dead, announces an end to those pesky husks that end up between your teeth after a movie at the theater.
By redefining the UNIX rights, Microsoft hopes to quell the growth of UNIX family operating systems, of course.
Why Microsoft doesn't just embrace the UNIX family and not fight it beats the hell out of me.
Take a Linux distribution (or BSD, or Darwin, or whatever), place a Windows GUI on it, port their apps so that anyone can buy Office (profit!), inherit stronger security from the UNIX model, and add classic Windows support with their Virtual PC/Virtual Server technology they bought from Connectix.
Perhaps they feel that are in too deep to change.
"Hear that, Mr. Gates? It is the sound of inevitability..."
Gates predicts his company will dominate music as his company dominates in the operating system arena.
But this is an entirely new battlefield, and he is making predictions based on what he has done in a separate area, one that he, as the computer wars begun, could not have foreseen at all, and can only preach of in retrospect.
Microsoft is not in full control of what he sells--the music. Nor does Jobs. However, Apple sells music in a manner that both music companies feel exhibits some level of control to minimize easy copying and tracking of sold music as well as getting them a cut. (Having a large marketshare in selling music players that access said music store is good for business, too.) People feel more in control of what they buy in the iTunes music store.
Microsoft and other companies have a more draconian DRM than Apple's that greatly restricts how to receive music and where it can be placed. There's also the matter of several, different, and confusing music stores that all use different music players and, as a result, lead to a confusing buying purchase. Place Windows at the center of this morass of players and stores and you have Too Many Cooks Looking for Profit, Inc.
Gates, like Jobs, knows what has happened in the past. But Jobs learns from his lessons and has shown a certain business shrewness of late that Gates and others have yet to truly match today. It's this fact, and not old computer history, that will determine which is the stronger businessman of tomorrow. Want some prediction? Look at Apple's stock price over the last 3 years and compare it to the same earning trend to Microsoft. Or Dell. Or HP. Or Adobe. Or Oracle. Or IBM.
I feel that Gates in the past was in the right place, pulling the right strings at the right time. Jobs, historically, has been in the right place at the right time while creating ideas or greatly tweaking old ones to generate a new product at a time when no one else was thinking of such things.
PocketPCs are more versatile. I know this and don't even own one.
Meanwhile, Palm has tried more to generate cash than generate a strategy that makes their product diverse enough to work like an operating system, and not like an appliance with canned tasks.
I've watched them cut their market support to where essentially only Windows is supported. Not the best plan without something better to offer. It's the same battle that MP3 player makers have against Apple--they can't offer much better since they don't have a better online music interface to match the iPod's simple operation.
That's a thought offered by many, but not likely to happen, at least for the main OS X product. The OS X core is an open source project.
Apple gets its profits from hardware. It just uses its software to leverage the purchase of its Macs (Mac OS X) and iPods (iTunes Music Store).
For Apple to license Mac OS X would mean its eventual demise as it would not make much money. Not even Microsoft relies on a simple software sell model, diversifying into peripheral hardware and things like the XBox.
That doesn't mean someone couldn't take Darwin and meld that with Linux components...
Mac OS X meets almost all of the criteria that the article suggests for Linux compatibility......except that Mac OS X is not Linux. (That, and the Windows codecs, although the popular VLC application does the trick in all but the stickiest non-QuickTime codec.
So, taking a page from both Apple and Microsoft's business handbook, what can the Linux community "steal" from Microsoft and Apple to make Linux a stronger enterprise player?
Getting things from the Apple side isn't very hard since its resources come from the FreeBSD world, which is open source. Samba works great in OS X, which means stronger integration in Linux is needed to match OS X's performance, which I suspect does nothing particularly special.
Same is true for AD authentication. Mac OS X uses a plug-in its Directory Services that understands this LDAP-variant...surely this is something that would work in Linux, or does it lack a refined mechanism for handling multiple directory services as OS X?
Ximian already provides Exchange compatibility in its mail product, and Exchange 2000 works with IMAP provided that Outlook Web Access (WebDAV) is running. Special features of Exchange (and its Outlook client) may be missing, but Mac users are still missing features from Entourage, the successor to the Outlook client on Mac OS X, so this is not quite the biggie. Linux/Intel users can run VMware (as Mac users would run Virtual PC) to use the actual Outlook client if needed.
The Microsoft Office component is a toughie. Mac OS users have a genuine Office client. Microsoft knows that holding back creation of a Linux client would sap power from its enterprise drive.
No easy answers in this, really. I think, however, that Linux could use a central business owner, although I know its nature makes that impossible. But wait--isn't that what Apple's doing with OS X by licensing or using BSD components?
What if a company licensed a Linux distro and took the reins to make a Linux-compatible OS with the same functionality, but also the "one-click" simplicity, application strength, and security that Mac OS X enjoys in its Mach/BSD fusion?
Of course, we know that this appears to have been done, with Red Hat, et al. But has it really been done well?
Not that I worry much about Microsoft. I worry more about Comcast. They control more of my life, in the format in which I receive my home internet connection and cable television, than any other entity right now.
What if, in their infinite wisdom, that Comcast requires that you use a Windows box to take advantage of "special features" of their device that MS creates propriatarily? In simpler language, I am used to Microsoft making things that don't fully integrate with my Mac OS arrangement (and generally, I usually don't care since I have plenty of alternatives with my platform). However, Comcast loves to charge its customers for things they don't or can't use, and it's hard enough to know exactly how they are sticking it to me as it is.
On the plus side, they may be a company that I worry about, but my cable internet from Comcast is 2.5MBits and whomps my office connection easily.
However, the existence of these technologies is one thing. I wonder how many games truly utilize them under OS X in comparison to use of DirectX elements in PC games. You may know more about this. It seems like a developer would pick DirectX elements over the cross-platform elements...
Doom 3 came out only in early August. Knowing how id Software makes fairly tight code, it should not take Aspyr more than 2-3 months to port this baby, based on my experience with how they port. In the Mac world, that's not a bad wait; although Blizzard holds the best release record with Diablo 2 in my mind since the Mac version was out maybe 6 weeks after the PC game release.
Some games Aspyr have ported, like Splinter Cell, took freaking forever to migrate--I would guess that the game used a lot of proprietary code within its XBox and Microsoft game origins. DirectX is a blessing on the PC side, but a curse on Apple gaming since OS X has no successor or counterpart to its past GameSprockets technology in Mac OS 9.
Older Quake-engine games such as Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Jedi Academy and, of course, Quake 3 itself run very well on Macs, even with menial 16MB video cards since the computer processor and video processor try to share the load better, in my opinion, than some stock PCs. It's not surprising that this game will need some real horsepower in video rendering that even challenges the typically graphic-happy Macs.
The size of the installed base of Macs is most relevant to any software port. No company is going to sink cash into porting a game if the market of the game is insufficient to cover the cost of porting, licenses, and profit margins.
Apple adds about 3 million new Macs to their base each year. I guess that about 1 million old Macs get tossed, so that is not a bad replace rate. I think that number has accelerated with the use of OS X, of which, my estimate, one half of the installed base cannot use. Practically no games are made for OS 9 any more, so the software market has a tiny window of revenue from Mac folks.
Gaming purchases vary to taste, and not every game will be purchased evenly. Some games sell better as a Mac port, others will not due to issues such as poor game play, bad interfaces, or bad timing in the port (it was too little, too late to arrive: Splinter Cell is already in this list as two versions on PC and consoles are already out since this original release).
I agree about the specific machines that can handle modern games, though I believe your estimation on minimum processor power to be underrated. A 2000 500MHz G4 with a RAGE 128 card is too old for most new FPS, but may still do OK with other games like Neverwinter Nights. There are plenty of G4 systems with better graphic setups of 32MB or stronger to fit the base. My dual processor 867MHz G4 with an Radeon 9000 64MB card still whomps ass and hasn't lost any zing with any game I toss at it. Halo rocks.
I didn't say that all 25 million estimated Macs in use are capable of Doom 3. But it does stand to note it per my earlier comment.
Again, marketshare is not the installed base. Macs last longer in the field and so you will find more of them still in use over time than a PC purchased in the same time. You are not going to find any 5 year old PCs playing anything new in the gaming world, but older Macs may have a crack at it (though, again, using that RAGE 128 found in these systems would suck ass).
You hit the nail right on the head regarding Mac user's nearly-fearless tendency to buy software. I would add that it's the reason that Mac games are still ported since the reliability, relative power and ease of Macs since G4s and OS X arrived make people willing to try something new out.
I'm sure someone has mentioned Aspyr, Blizzard, MacPlay, MacSoft, and other companies who port Mac versions of popular games.
But all this talk presumes that, in order for gaming to be successful on a Mac, that (1) the Mac itself has to be less expensive, and (2) that the game must arrive on the Mac at the same time as the PC version, if there is a PC version.
First off, people don't buy Apple products because they are cheaper, but because they want a certain quality of machine.
Second, the Macintosh installed base of computer is around 15-25% (don't confuse this with marketshare, which is the total percentage of Macs sold in comarison to the rest of the computer market). That means it's impractical to make a game that is Mac only or works immediately on a Mac unless you have a great gaming team that knows how to make things port well. Some companies, like the team that put together Neverwinter Nights, made the game data so portable that Mac users had installed the 2 game expansions using the PC/Linux versions before the Mac versions of the expansions arrived 2 or so months ago.
Third, I'd rather let the PC users be my beta testers. There are hundreds of new games in the PC market, and most of them are crap. The games that rise to the top typically do get ported to the Mac, if they weren't on a later deploy list already. And take heart, the time that a PC game is ported to a Mac is much, much less than, say, 9 years ago. I might have to wait about 3 to 6 months for a popular PC to make its Mac debut, Usually, the wait is worth it as any game-stopping bug is squashed before I see it, and the game plays wonderfully on my computer.
Some games are slow to port, like Halo, Splinter Cell, and Battlefield 1942, and some great games were never ported, like Half-Life. But overall the Mac gaming world has profit and gives those who do play a world of pleasure. However, don't buy a Mac to play the latest games--the market just won't accommodate.
Next time you see the great popcorn adventure "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (I highly recommend it), watch the newspapers that flow on-screen early in the movie after the first attack in New York.
Next to Sir Laurence Olivier finding work in the movie (despite being dead), it was one of the many funny in-jokes of the movie. The link above details more.
This is really a load of shit that should be placed in a tin foil hat.
For starters, ballots don't show what color you are.
Two, for such a conspiracy to happen, the perpetrators would also remove many white votes as well if they were attempting such a lamebrain idea over county or district lines.
Some people can't vote because they can't understand the instructions. Many people can't do much of anything because instructions are hard to interpret. What typical user, for example, really knows how to use their computer efficiently?
It's not the fault of the tool or the voters, but in how we teach them. Sometimes a private voice vote in a closed booth may be the way to go.
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An excellent point. It is very easy for me, as highly experienced with Mac OS administration, to feel too smug about the fact that my computer does the same things as Windows without nearly as many vulnerabilties.
Yet this thinking is the same as what permeates the Windows IT community, and it is not helpful.
It is more important for IT units to understand the OBJECTIVE to the use of any technology, rather than pigeonholing themselves to a single technology that, because no alternatives exist outside if it, is limiting and vulnerable.
That said, it still generally costs less to support a Mac user than a Windows user, though that difference has shrunk, I feel, over the last two years. But where Mac users are so knowledgable about their computers that they appear arrogant to IT staff, a PC user is typically the opposite--a person that doesn't know the difference between a computer chip and a potato chip.
Microsoft IT caters to the computer-user-as-victim. Mac user's arrogance comes from their self-empowerment of the computer, and need answers to more specific questions about problems of their computer than a typical PC user. (My opinion, which could be wrong.)
I see, daily, an annoying point where IT users are OVER-trained in one technology set, which blinds them to more efficient and effective resolutions to company computer service and infrastructure.
My business concentrates on Mac OS X systems used in a publishing environment. They work much like their Windows counterparts and could even be integrated with the larger domain for more efficiency. But when I speak of this to others they look at me with confusion and, maybe, heresy?
These people act as if Macs are toys or inferior in some way. Of course, this is far from the case, but their training has changed how they see technology. This really isn't the old Mac/PC debate. (Apple lost the first war. But they still found an important place in today's computing world.)
No computer technology is perfect, of course. But the mistaken ubiquity that IT is Microsoft and Microsoft is IT makes all other non-MS technicial initiatives and products harder to sell in concept or through a store.
Macintosh systems are less affected just as other PC browsers present less of a target on PCs. There's a reason why geeks still call IE by its sly nickname, "Internet Exploder."
The key here, as I'm sure has been stated, is in how Internet Explorer on Windows works. It's interaction with the internet (through its integration as a part of of the OS) is a liability because Microsoft has allowed a program that connects to the internet to permit external sources to download and launch external applications or link itself to external applications, all of which are dutifully managed by the operating system. No other browser I know is that guillible. IE provides no clear definition between operating system and browser to those who exploit it.
Spyware links itself to the unique components of IE and the Windows registry because some nutjob at Microsoft thought that anything found on the internet should be accessible to use in Windows (note that I didn't say "the browser", but Windows.).
Other browsers isolate all activity to the browser alone. Java and JavaScript on a Mac are not allowed to execute items from anywhere except the browser. If an exploit has been noted in these browsers that tries to touch operating system areas, it's truly an exploit, and not a "feature" that needs a fix as it would be found in IE/Windows.
Take a look at the cookies in Safari on a Mac to that on a PC. The cookies saved aren't much different. But Safari and many other browsers don't recognize or allow commands or configuration requests from these cookies. IE for Windows does.
Interesting. But they still control publishing rights, but no movie rights? Hm. Source?
Mod points to you, sir, if I could.
After the winning destruction his movies did at the Oscars (as well as the money made) it is virtually a lock that Peter J. will be given carte blanche for directing "The Hobbit", or producing it to maintain creative reins while handling other projects. New Line is happy. The Tolkien estate is happy. Hollywood is happy.
I don't think I'm missing the point, but let me see if I can clarify.
If you have a file open on the device you are about to disconnect physically, without informing the OS that you are about to remove it, how is the OS going to reconcile the file you have open? Currently, the Mac OS tells you that you can't disconnect network drives with files open from it. It has no mechanism to keep you from being stupid and removing FireWire drives in this manner. Currently apps don't autosave your work much, just in case you want to revert.
Should it save its contents to some non-volatile flash RAM or save it locally and tacitly resynchronize/save the file back to the original removeable disk when/if it is reattached? That would be a nice option, but it may increase the cost of a Mac (or any computer).
Item 1; Power failure crashing
In my experience, this affected Macs much less in a brownout situation than PCs. The Macs (at the time, desktop G3 systems) stayed up after a power blink of 0.5 sec, losing no data. I think current Mac OS hardware is more robust in this area, but this is not really a fault of the computer or the OS. No power, no computer worky. Sorry.
Workaround in a mission-critical area: Buy an uninterruptable power supply, petition Apple to make a computer with very expensive (but non-volatile) flash RAM, or use an Apple laptop, which has its own battery that makes it resistant to brownouts and blackouts.
Issue 2: The Dock in Mac OS X.
Grousing. In the old Mac OS 9 days, there was a Dock analogue called the Launcher. It was ugly, and I rarely set it up for users, but it worked. Some people still use it for their Classic apps in OS X.
Workaround: Many, most third-party. Apple's interface, until OS X was icon-centric for launching apps, rather than menu-centric (in Windows Start menu). The Dock is no more perfect than the Start menu, but at least it provides a consistent launcher for common apps, instead of having the user search through folders for the right app icon to launch.
Better: Have installers ask user to add icon for applications to the Dock, which isn't done most of the time, forcing users to search about in the Applications folder.
Issue 3: Dimmed menus.
A bit of a grouse, but logical. Some OS X apps by third parties HAVE shown info in the greyed out menu as to why the option is not available. I believe it is more programming efficient to leave a greyed out menu than to attempt to hide it (affecting where and the order of menus on the menu bar from one moment to the next, which would confuse the hell out of me).
I believe Tog's thought, of adding a special option in a greyed-out menu as to why this command is dimmed, could be useful. Otherwise I think he is blowing the issue up. Of course, the more complex the app (especially with palettes and THEIR commands, the more weight his argument holds.
Issue Seven: Disk Drive Nazi.
Not a problem, at least until removeable drives arrived.
The Mac OS has always been intelligent, preventing you as the user from accidentally ejecting or formatting a disk you are using, including network devices. This is a Good Thing. Compare this to the behavior in Windows, which will still allow you to eject media in use, causing All Kinds of Hell.
Workaround: His point seems more specific to USB and FireWire drives. Unless Apple creates a hardware lock that physically locks a device, preventing the thing from being removed, then there's not a lot to do there, except Apple making the OS more robust in screaming at people to tell the OS that the drive is to be disconnected before they physically remove it.
Get the Department of Defense together with Verizon and para-drop a shitload of cellphones in Mosul and other Iraqi hot-spots with flyers on how the insurgents can call their friends.
Instead, they'll be calling Allah.
"Can we blow you up now?" "Good."
After the 40th day where the D.A.M.N. Windows-based soul tracking system was offline due to spyware, God, CIO/CEO/Ruler of All You Know, has proclaimed the end of Bill Gates.
Orville Redenbacher, speaking through an interpreter for the dead, announces an end to those pesky husks that end up between your teeth after a movie at the theater.
Announcing: Seedless corn.
By redefining the UNIX rights, Microsoft hopes to quell the growth of UNIX family operating systems, of course.
Why Microsoft doesn't just embrace the UNIX family and not fight it beats the hell out of me.
Take a Linux distribution (or BSD, or Darwin, or whatever), place a Windows GUI on it, port their apps so that anyone can buy Office (profit!), inherit stronger security from the UNIX model, and add classic Windows support with their Virtual PC/Virtual Server technology they bought from Connectix.
Perhaps they feel that are in too deep to change.
"Hear that, Mr. Gates? It is the sound of inevitability..."
Gates predicts his company will dominate music as his company dominates in the operating system arena.
But this is an entirely new battlefield, and he is making predictions based on what he has done in a separate area, one that he, as the computer wars begun, could not have foreseen at all, and can only preach of in retrospect.
Microsoft is not in full control of what he sells--the music. Nor does Jobs. However, Apple sells music in a manner that both music companies feel exhibits some level of control to minimize easy copying and tracking of sold music as well as getting them a cut. (Having a large marketshare in selling music players that access said music store is good for business, too.) People feel more in control of what they buy in the iTunes music store.
Microsoft and other companies have a more draconian DRM than Apple's that greatly restricts how to receive music and where it can be placed. There's also the matter of several, different, and confusing music stores that all use different music players and, as a result, lead to a confusing buying purchase. Place Windows at the center of this morass of players and stores and you have Too Many Cooks Looking for Profit, Inc.
Gates, like Jobs, knows what has happened in the past. But Jobs learns from his lessons and has shown a certain business shrewness of late that Gates and others have yet to truly match today. It's this fact, and not old computer history, that will determine which is the stronger businessman of tomorrow. Want some prediction? Look at Apple's stock price over the last 3 years and compare it to the same earning trend to Microsoft. Or Dell. Or HP. Or Adobe. Or Oracle. Or IBM.
I feel that Gates in the past was in the right place, pulling the right strings at the right time. Jobs, historically, has been in the right place at the right time while creating ideas or greatly tweaking old ones to generate a new product at a time when no one else was thinking of such things.
PocketPCs are more versatile. I know this and don't even own one.
Meanwhile, Palm has tried more to generate cash than generate a strategy that makes their product diverse enough to work like an operating system, and not like an appliance with canned tasks.
I've watched them cut their market support to where essentially only Windows is supported. Not the best plan without something better to offer. It's the same battle that MP3 player makers have against Apple--they can't offer much better since they don't have a better online music interface to match the iPod's simple operation.
That's a thought offered by many, but not likely to happen, at least for the main OS X product. The OS X core is an open source project.
Apple gets its profits from hardware. It just uses its software to leverage the purchase of its Macs (Mac OS X) and iPods (iTunes Music Store).
For Apple to license Mac OS X would mean its eventual demise as it would not make much money. Not even Microsoft relies on a simple software sell model, diversifying into peripheral hardware and things like the XBox.
That doesn't mean someone couldn't take Darwin and meld that with Linux components...
Mac OS X meets almost all of the criteria that the article suggests for Linux compatibility... ...except that Mac OS X is not Linux. (That, and the Windows codecs, although the popular VLC application does the trick in all but the stickiest non-QuickTime codec.
So, taking a page from both Apple and Microsoft's business handbook, what can the Linux community "steal" from Microsoft and Apple to make Linux a stronger enterprise player?
Getting things from the Apple side isn't very hard since its resources come from the FreeBSD world, which is open source. Samba works great in OS X, which means stronger integration in Linux is needed to match OS X's performance, which I suspect does nothing particularly special.
Same is true for AD authentication. Mac OS X uses a plug-in its Directory Services that understands this LDAP-variant...surely this is something that would work in Linux, or does it lack a refined mechanism for handling multiple directory services as OS X?
Ximian already provides Exchange compatibility in its mail product, and Exchange 2000 works with IMAP provided that Outlook Web Access (WebDAV) is running. Special features of Exchange (and its Outlook client) may be missing, but Mac users are still missing features from Entourage, the successor to the Outlook client on Mac OS X, so this is not quite the biggie. Linux/Intel users can run VMware (as Mac users would run Virtual PC) to use the actual Outlook client if needed.
The Microsoft Office component is a toughie. Mac OS users have a genuine Office client. Microsoft knows that holding back creation of a Linux client would sap power from its enterprise drive.
No easy answers in this, really. I think, however, that Linux could use a central business owner, although I know its nature makes that impossible. But wait--isn't that what Apple's doing with OS X by licensing or using BSD components?
What if a company licensed a Linux distro and took the reins to make a Linux-compatible OS with the same functionality, but also the "one-click" simplicity, application strength, and security that Mac OS X enjoys in its Mach/BSD fusion?
Of course, we know that this appears to have been done, with Red Hat, et al. But has it really been done well?
Not that I worry much about Microsoft. I worry more about Comcast. They control more of my life, in the format in which I receive my home internet connection and cable television, than any other entity right now.
What if, in their infinite wisdom, that Comcast requires that you use a Windows box to take advantage of "special features" of their device that MS creates propriatarily? In simpler language, I am used to Microsoft making things that don't fully integrate with my Mac OS arrangement (and generally, I usually don't care since I have plenty of alternatives with my platform). However, Comcast loves to charge its customers for things they don't or can't use, and it's hard enough to know exactly how they are sticking it to me as it is.
On the plus side, they may be a company that I worry about, but my cable internet from Comcast is 2.5MBits and whomps my office connection easily.
The first person who says that George Lucas stole their childhood will have the spleen stolen, forcibly.
For more clarification on how you should feel about this issue, please note this commentary by this popular game developer.
Got a light, they ask? Sure, we got your light.
Nuke it from orbit...it's the only way to be sure.
I stand corrected.
However, the existence of these technologies is one thing. I wonder how many games truly utilize them under OS X in comparison to use of DirectX elements in PC games. You may know more about this. It seems like a developer would pick DirectX elements over the cross-platform elements...
Doom 3 came out only in early August. Knowing how id Software makes fairly tight code, it should not take Aspyr more than 2-3 months to port this baby, based on my experience with how they port. In the Mac world, that's not a bad wait; although Blizzard holds the best release record with Diablo 2 in my mind since the Mac version was out maybe 6 weeks after the PC game release.
Some games Aspyr have ported, like Splinter Cell, took freaking forever to migrate--I would guess that the game used a lot of proprietary code within its XBox and Microsoft game origins. DirectX is a blessing on the PC side, but a curse on Apple gaming since OS X has no successor or counterpart to its past GameSprockets technology in Mac OS 9.
Older Quake-engine games such as Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Jedi Academy and, of course, Quake 3 itself run very well on Macs, even with menial 16MB video cards since the computer processor and video processor try to share the load better, in my opinion, than some stock PCs. It's not surprising that this game will need some real horsepower in video rendering that even challenges the typically graphic-happy Macs.
The size of the installed base of Macs is most relevant to any software port. No company is going to sink cash into porting a game if the market of the game is insufficient to cover the cost of porting, licenses, and profit margins.
Apple adds about 3 million new Macs to their base each year. I guess that about 1 million old Macs get tossed, so that is not a bad replace rate. I think that number has accelerated with the use of OS X, of which, my estimate, one half of the installed base cannot use. Practically no games are made for OS 9 any more, so the software market has a tiny window of revenue from Mac folks.
Gaming purchases vary to taste, and not every game will be purchased evenly. Some games sell better as a Mac port, others will not due to issues such as poor game play, bad interfaces, or bad timing in the port (it was too little, too late to arrive: Splinter Cell is already in this list as two versions on PC and consoles are already out since this original release).
I agree about the specific machines that can handle modern games, though I believe your estimation on minimum processor power to be underrated. A 2000 500MHz G4 with a RAGE 128 card is too old for most new FPS, but may still do OK with other games like Neverwinter Nights. There are plenty of G4 systems with better graphic setups of 32MB or stronger to fit the base. My dual processor 867MHz G4 with an Radeon 9000 64MB card still whomps ass and hasn't lost any zing with any game I toss at it. Halo rocks.
I didn't say that all 25 million estimated Macs in use are capable of Doom 3. But it does stand to note it per my earlier comment.
Again, marketshare is not the installed base. Macs last longer in the field and so you will find more of them still in use over time than a PC purchased in the same time. You are not going to find any 5 year old PCs playing anything new in the gaming world, but older Macs may have a crack at it (though, again, using that RAGE 128 found in these systems would suck ass).
You hit the nail right on the head regarding Mac user's nearly-fearless tendency to buy software. I would add that it's the reason that Mac games are still ported since the reliability, relative power and ease of Macs since G4s and OS X arrived make people willing to try something new out.
I'm sure someone has mentioned Aspyr, Blizzard, MacPlay, MacSoft, and other companies who port Mac versions of popular games.
But all this talk presumes that, in order for gaming to be successful on a Mac, that (1) the Mac itself has to be less expensive, and (2) that the game must arrive on the Mac at the same time as the PC version, if there is a PC version.
First off, people don't buy Apple products because they are cheaper, but because they want a certain quality of machine.
Second, the Macintosh installed base of computer is around 15-25% (don't confuse this with marketshare, which is the total percentage of Macs sold in comarison to the rest of the computer market). That means it's impractical to make a game that is Mac only or works immediately on a Mac unless you have a great gaming team that knows how to make things port well. Some companies, like the team that put together Neverwinter Nights, made the game data so portable that Mac users had installed the 2 game expansions using the PC/Linux versions before the Mac versions of the expansions arrived 2 or so months ago.
Third, I'd rather let the PC users be my beta testers. There are hundreds of new games in the PC market, and most of them are crap. The games that rise to the top typically do get ported to the Mac, if they weren't on a later deploy list already. And take heart, the time that a PC game is ported to a Mac is much, much less than, say, 9 years ago. I might have to wait about 3 to 6 months for a popular PC to make its Mac debut, Usually, the wait is worth it as any game-stopping bug is squashed before I see it, and the game plays wonderfully on my computer.
Some games are slow to port, like Halo, Splinter Cell, and Battlefield 1942, and some great games were never ported, like Half-Life. But overall the Mac gaming world has profit and gives those who do play a world of pleasure. However, don't buy a Mac to play the latest games--the market just won't accommodate.
Next time you see the great popcorn adventure "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (I highly recommend it), watch the newspapers that flow on-screen early in the movie after the first attack in New York.
One Japanese paper shows a very familar outline of our favorite destroyer, ostensibly taking on the robots.
Next to Sir Laurence Olivier finding work in the movie (despite being dead), it was one of the many funny in-jokes of the movie. The link above details more.
This is really a load of shit that should be placed in a tin foil hat.
For starters, ballots don't show what color you are.
Two, for such a conspiracy to happen, the perpetrators would also remove many white votes as well if they were attempting such a lamebrain idea over county or district lines.
Some people can't vote because they can't understand the instructions. Many people can't do much of anything because instructions are hard to interpret. What typical user, for example, really knows how to use their computer efficiently?
It's not the fault of the tool or the voters, but in how we teach them. Sometimes a private voice vote in a closed booth may be the way to go.
Uh, has anyone caught that the filing was done by a Mr Justice Blackbourne?
So, if he is a judge, then justice is being sought by Justice Justice?