If they really have made a practical vehicle point-defense system, that's huge. Not so much for tanks, but for armored personnel carriers. (Warning: huge oversimplifications ahead.)
With a tank, the defensive goal is to survive long enough to shoot back and kill your attacker. Any amount of armor you need to pile on to do this is possibly okay, so long as you can still move and shoot.
With an APC, the defensive goal is to protect the troops in transit to their mission. That means the vehicle has to be able to carry a useful load of troops, which necessitates the vehicle be fairly bulky, which means the armor must cover more area, which means armor equivalent to a tank would be much heavier. Too heavy, for a variety of reasons. Therefore, armor on APCs is much lighter, and therefore less protective, than it is on tanks.
APC armor, even reactive armor, cannot be very protective against a warhead meant to kill a heavier tank. An APC faced by a bunch of guys with a few anti-tank rockets and some good hiding spots is in for serious trouble.
With this system, though, the APC might survive an attack long enough to dismount the troopers. That's a big deal... big enough to make it worth a big expense.
I'd bet that it's based on a Metal Storm gun of some sort. You could call them "machine guns" but they have no moving parts and a rate of fire a couple orders of magnitude higher than modern gatling cannons. See also their Wikipedia entry.
(I don't have any insider information; I'm just thinking the technologies are a really great fit.)
Especially if the rocket exhaust leaves a trail back to the firer's location. You can be certain that the armored vehicle crew (and their pals) will be highly motivated to drop some hot lead (or HE, or DU, whatever's handy) on that location right away.
"[...] it's going to have to [...] start selling OS X to PC users, rather than restricting it to the Mac. I don't see any valid reason why Apple isn't doing this [...]"
And he's a pundit? I can think of several valid reasons for not doing that: drivers, profitability, brand dilution, piracy, Microsoft's wrath... I'm sure there are more, but that's a pretty good start for a mere thirty seconds of thought.
Apparently he's spent even less time thinking about it than I have. I wonder if he thought more about the rest of the article?
Pardon the self-reply, but I took a moment to look into film scanners.
Check out this review site for some good info. An excellent Nikon film scanner went for about $3,000 a few years ago, and there were several sub-$1000 film scanners on their list. Presumably something better or cheaper can be found now.
I know this is over-budget for pratically everyone, but I just have to share.
My workplace recently replaced our venerable Fujitsu 4097D scanner. We ran hundreds of thousands of sheets through that thing, and it never needed service beyond my unskilled labor and Fujitsu's ScanAid consumable kits. But when the lease ran out, we chose to replace it with a color model.
Since the 4097D worked out so well, we looked at two of the current Fujitsu models. Both of these scan up to 600 dpi x 24 bit color (optical) and have hi-speed USB2 and SCSI interfaces. Both have flatbed capability in addition to the ADF.
The successor to the 4097D is the fi-5750C. It's roughly $6,000 and has a duty cycle of 8,000 pages per day. (They call that a "light duty" scanner, which cracks me up.) It also has a clever rotating 200-sheet 57 PPM ADF unit that makes it easy to use for both right- and left-handers. It can scan up to 12"x18".
The model fi-4340C is a bit more reasonable, going for about $3500. It can handle a slightly less huge variety of paper, and has a duty cycle of a mere 3,000 pages per day. It has a fixed 100-sheet 40 PPM ADF. It can scan up to 8.5"x14".
We purchased the fi-5750C. The hardest part of the installation was getting it upstairs... it's bulky and almost 80 pounds. Once I had it running, I took a small stack of mixed-size photos and dropped them in the ADF... it handled them wonderfully. Obviously a 600dpi 24-bit scan doesn't run at 57 PPM, but it's still pretty quick and it produced very nice-looking scans. Most importantly, the ADF didn't damage the photos.
One of these weekends I'm going to bring in a portable hard drive and a box of photos, and see how many gigabytes I can fill up in a day.
---
On a more realistic level, here's a couple things to keep in mind. First, scanning a photo print is making a copy of a copy. If you have access to negatives, try to scan them instead. I have no idea what equipment does that well, but I expect it's very expensive. It's probably best to work through a service for that.
Second, digitizing is the easy part... indexing is the hard part.
I don't know all the details of USB2, that's for darn sure. But I believe there is a difference between USB 1.x and USB 2.x beyond the adoption of hi-speed mode. (Not all USB 2 devices are hi-speed, yet they are still distinct from earlier USB devices. Or so it seems to me.) Anyway, I'm just guessing as to the actual spec they'd use, if any. I am very likely to be mistaken on some details. But I think that my central idea, that Apple would choose a vey limited spec and support improvements to it while casting great swathes of legacy hardware by the wayside, is pretty sound.
An amusing way they could set their spec is to fully support anything with a "Vista Ready" label.
"I don't believe that they would have "all the problems MS does" as Cringely seems to."
They wouldn't have all Microsoft's problems, but they'd have to have some.
If they ever do this, Apple would chop off a huge mass of legacy hardware as unsupported. I'd bet the minimum PC spec would be something like a Core Solo with EFI and PCIe. For cards and periphrials, I'd say PCIe, ExpressCard, USB2, and Firewire. Everything else would likely be unsupported by Apple. Supporting hardware going forward from that baseline would not be nearly so big a challenge as supporting every ISA, PCI, and AGP card known to man, plus the vast wasteland of old USB, serial, and parallel devices.
Microsoft has many reasons to not abandon all that stuff, but Apple has no incentive to pick it up.
If Apple comes out with a really small and light touchscreen notebook (like the Fujitsu P1510D) I'd do the same. Sadly, the iBook lacks a touchscreen and is too large and heavy for our application.
"People like Apple because it just works. Put OS X on any PC and that advantage goes away."
Well, kind of. It would more likely be a major remaining selling point for Apple hardware over generic. Buy retail OSX and install on generic hardware, get no support. Buy Apple hardware, get full support. It's a pretty easy and sharp divide to maintain.
The trouble would come if Apple really did try to fully support generic hardware. On that road lies madness.
Apple will release OSX for generic PCs eventually. (PCs of some minimum specification, that is.) The question is simply when.
But it won't happen until one or the other of the following becomes true: 1) Apple PC hardware sales become insufficiently profitable to remain a (mostly) hardware company or 2) Apple decides it is in its best interests to fight a head-to-head OS marketshare war with Microsoft
Which won't happen until at least:
2a) The minimum-spec PCs themselves have a very large market penetration. (I think minimum-spec will at least require EFI.)
and
2b) Microsoft's continued development of apps for OSX can be lost without serious strategic harm
and
2c) Microsoft interoperability protocols are sufficiently documented or openness is legally enforced such that MS would have serious trouble fighting dirty
and
2d) Apple is supremely confident that OSX can crush XP/Vista/Whatever in terms of user experience
Of these, (1) is clearly not the case. It seems almost certain that (2a) is not true. (2b) will be solved if Apple comes out with their own office suite, or once OpenOffice has a version truly native to OSX. (2c) is close, and (2d) is obviously here right now.
In all, probably not this year. If it doesn't happen by one month after Vista's release, then I think it'll be a long while yet.
(Hmmm... I wonder if the real reason 32-bit Vista does not support non-BIOS-emulating EFI is to reduce the number of "Vista-ready" PCs that are OSX-ready? Microsoft might well be fearful of this move and have already executed their countermeasure. Can Apple make a BIOS version of OSX? Would they? Will manufacturers generally support EFI if Microsoft doesn't require it?)
PS: Now that I've placed my bets, it's time to go RTFAs.:-)
Here's a real-world example. I'm the network administrator for a medical clinic; we're a Windows-centric shop in the server room. We have 12 providers. Seven of these providers have their own laptops.
Three years ago, only one of these providers had a Mac. (A PowerBook.) Today, all but one are on Macintosh laptops, and the last Windows holdout says she'll change next time she replaces her laptop.
True. But note that this version has its own restrictions. If those restrictions aren't a problem, or if you're willing to risk the consequences of violating the license, then again... that's the last copy you'll ever buy.
"For $125 (student/teacher) you can buy the Windows OS and then run the PC version of Office."
That may be so. But when you buy the copy of XP for this, you're not buying an OEM XP license tied to a particular machine anymore. Nor are you buying Office tied to a particular machine. You'll need to have to have the full portable versions.
(Remember, Office Small Buisiness Edition is a curse laid upon this Earth, because you cannot legally move it from the OEM's machine to any other. This has caused my employer headaches that have only ended with the advent of OpenOffice.org 2.0. Rather than buy new copies of MS Office when we upgraded the desktop machines, or risking an MS audit by moving the software to unlicensed machines, we switched to OOo2.)
So those will be the last copies of that MS software you'll ever buy, won't they? You'll never have need to buy another copy because of machine-specific license restrictions, but only when you need new features. Microsoft doesn't do upgrade pricing any more, so at that point why wouldn't you buy a native version for the same price? (Or switch to a free alternative?)
Put that in Microsoft's long-term revenue model and light it... I bet they won't like the taste very much. If they only get to sell new software when people need new features, they're going to have to re-think the way they license their product.
Apple makes their Macintosh money from hardware sales. OSX is great and all, but from a revenue perspective it's beside the point. There's little doubt that this move will help sell more Macs.
But it gets better.
Had Apple included the BIOS entensions to EFI, a Windows user buying Mactel hardware could have just installed right over OSX without even seeing it. But Apple didn't make it that easy, and now we see why. The buyer wanting Windows on Mactel hardware will now have to interact with OSX, at least for long enough to run Boot Camp. And let's be honest, the apparent slickness of Boot Camp will not fail to impress any user savvy enough to install their own OS. That may lead the buyer to try OSX and actually compare it to Windows head-to-head.
Apple is obviously confident that OSX will compare very well to XP in this situation. They've already achieved the minimum mission with this user: the hardware sale. But this way they have a really fair shot at turning the Windows-using Mactel buyer into a dual user or switcher, which is a much bigger win in the long run.
So for developers... yeah, some won't bother to produce apps for OSX. Maybe fewer will now. But I don't know if that's such a big deal. Apple still gets the hardware sales, so its short-term prospects are still fine. And if this move helps increase OSX market share, that will be a countervailing pressure on developers. I'm guessing it'll be a wash overall. Those developers who care about OSX will still develop for it, those who hate OSX won't start, and the folks who work on both still have a very similar strategic choice to make.
On the virtulazation front? Of course Apple will support it. They may or may not make their own solution, but it is certainly going to happen. Boot Camp is just a stopgap... virtualization is a better scenario for Apple anyway, for all the reasons above.
I'm not a graphic designer, but even I can tell that the Boot Camp Windows logo is effing brilliant.
First, it's a very nifty dodge for the copyright and trademark issue. While MS would be nuts to sue them over use of Microsoft logos in this context, Apple has completely dodged the issue. (They've generally been very careful to avoid any potential copyright issues in the whole process, especially by emphasizing the need for a legal, non-upgrade XP CD.) Microsoft is left with no grounds to complain.
Secondly, the MacOS logo is still color in Boot Camp, but the other logo is greyscale. One is the new hotness, the other is old and busted. Graphic design messages don't get more clear.
Apple has just totally counted coup on Microsoft. I bet the entire Apple marketing department will be useless for the rest of the week... none of them will be able to stop laughing.
True. From my experience, they're better about it now than they used to be. (The triple-CD cases are pretty fragile. Apparently the trick is to order them with a t-shirt as extra packing material.)
Yet I don't think that the fellow above had his linux box cracked three times while on dialup. Or if he did... well, that's another good reason to use OpenBSD.:-)
"Now there is the implied threat that if others (read: Linux companies) don't cough up the dough, he's going to yank OpenSSH away from us."
That's right! If you don't pay, Theo will send out his legion of 1337 repo men to confiscate all extant copies of the OpenSSH source and binaries!
Or... maybe they just won't work on it so much. It's really hard to "yank" BSD-licensed code, after all. (I seem to recall that's why he uses the BSD license.)
Yeah. Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and George Steinbrenner are poor to this day because of their abrasive personalities. If only they'd been nicer, they'd have been more successful!
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If they really have made a practical vehicle point-defense system, that's huge. Not so much for tanks, but for armored personnel carriers. (Warning: huge oversimplifications ahead.)
With a tank, the defensive goal is to survive long enough to shoot back and kill your attacker. Any amount of armor you need to pile on to do this is possibly okay, so long as you can still move and shoot.
With an APC, the defensive goal is to protect the troops in transit to their mission. That means the vehicle has to be able to carry a useful load of troops, which necessitates the vehicle be fairly bulky, which means the armor must cover more area, which means armor equivalent to a tank would be much heavier. Too heavy, for a variety of reasons. Therefore, armor on APCs is much lighter, and therefore less protective, than it is on tanks.
APC armor, even reactive armor, cannot be very protective against a warhead meant to kill a heavier tank. An APC faced by a bunch of guys with a few anti-tank rockets and some good hiding spots is in for serious trouble.
With this system, though, the APC might survive an attack long enough to dismount the troopers. That's a big deal... big enough to make it worth a big expense.
I'd bet that it's based on a Metal Storm gun of some sort. You could call them "machine guns" but they have no moving parts and a rate of fire a couple orders of magnitude higher than modern gatling cannons. See also their Wikipedia entry.
(I don't have any insider information; I'm just thinking the technologies are a really great fit.)
Especially if the rocket exhaust leaves a trail back to the firer's location. You can be certain that the armored vehicle crew (and their pals) will be highly motivated to drop some hot lead (or HE, or DU, whatever's handy) on that location right away.
This is a big advance for armored vehicles.
Come on, mods. That there is a post worthy of +5 Flamebait. Make it happen for the man.
"[...] it's going to have to [...] start selling OS X to PC users, rather than restricting it to the Mac. I don't see any valid reason why Apple isn't doing this [...]"
And he's a pundit? I can think of several valid reasons for not doing that: drivers, profitability, brand dilution, piracy, Microsoft's wrath... I'm sure there are more, but that's a pretty good start for a mere thirty seconds of thought.
Apparently he's spent even less time thinking about it than I have. I wonder if he thought more about the rest of the article?
Here's one that's apparently very good. No personal experience with it, though.
Pardon the self-reply, but I took a moment to look into film scanners.
Check out this review site for some good info. An excellent Nikon film scanner went for about $3,000 a few years ago, and there were several sub-$1000 film scanners on their list. Presumably something better or cheaper can be found now.
I know this is over-budget for pratically everyone, but I just have to share.
My workplace recently replaced our venerable Fujitsu 4097D scanner. We ran hundreds of thousands of sheets through that thing, and it never needed service beyond my unskilled labor and Fujitsu's ScanAid consumable kits. But when the lease ran out, we chose to replace it with a color model.
Since the 4097D worked out so well, we looked at two of the current Fujitsu models. Both of these scan up to 600 dpi x 24 bit color (optical) and have hi-speed USB2 and SCSI interfaces. Both have flatbed capability in addition to the ADF.
The successor to the 4097D is the fi-5750C. It's roughly $6,000 and has a duty cycle of 8,000 pages per day. (They call that a "light duty" scanner, which cracks me up.) It also has a clever rotating 200-sheet 57 PPM ADF unit that makes it easy to use for both right- and left-handers. It can scan up to 12"x18".
The model fi-4340C is a bit more reasonable, going for about $3500. It can handle a slightly less huge variety of paper, and has a duty cycle of a mere 3,000 pages per day. It has a fixed 100-sheet 40 PPM ADF. It can scan up to 8.5"x14".
We purchased the fi-5750C. The hardest part of the installation was getting it upstairs... it's bulky and almost 80 pounds. Once I had it running, I took a small stack of mixed-size photos and dropped them in the ADF... it handled them wonderfully. Obviously a 600dpi 24-bit scan doesn't run at 57 PPM, but it's still pretty quick and it produced very nice-looking scans. Most importantly, the ADF didn't damage the photos.
One of these weekends I'm going to bring in a portable hard drive and a box of photos, and see how many gigabytes I can fill up in a day.
---
On a more realistic level, here's a couple things to keep in mind. First, scanning a photo print is making a copy of a copy. If you have access to negatives, try to scan them instead. I have no idea what equipment does that well, but I expect it's very expensive. It's probably best to work through a service for that.
Second, digitizing is the easy part... indexing is the hard part.
I don't know all the details of USB2, that's for darn sure. But I believe there is a difference between USB 1.x and USB 2.x beyond the adoption of hi-speed mode. (Not all USB 2 devices are hi-speed, yet they are still distinct from earlier USB devices. Or so it seems to me.) Anyway, I'm just guessing as to the actual spec they'd use, if any. I am very likely to be mistaken on some details. But I think that my central idea, that Apple would choose a vey limited spec and support improvements to it while casting great swathes of legacy hardware by the wayside, is pretty sound.
An amusing way they could set their spec is to fully support anything with a "Vista Ready" label.
"I don't believe that they would have "all the problems MS does" as Cringely seems to."
They wouldn't have all Microsoft's problems, but they'd have to have some.
If they ever do this, Apple would chop off a huge mass of legacy hardware as unsupported. I'd bet the minimum PC spec would be something like a Core Solo with EFI and PCIe. For cards and periphrials, I'd say PCIe, ExpressCard, USB2, and Firewire. Everything else would likely be unsupported by Apple. Supporting hardware going forward from that baseline would not be nearly so big a challenge as supporting every ISA, PCI, and AGP card known to man, plus the vast wasteland of old USB, serial, and parallel devices.
Microsoft has many reasons to not abandon all that stuff, but Apple has no incentive to pick it up.
As I've said elsewhere, look at the Fujitsu P1510D. One of those with OSX would be a near-perfect notebook computer.
If Apple comes out with a really small and light touchscreen notebook (like the Fujitsu P1510D) I'd do the same. Sadly, the iBook lacks a touchscreen and is too large and heavy for our application.
:-/
I'm hopeful, but I'm not holding my breath.
"People like Apple because it just works. Put OS X on any PC and that advantage goes away."
Well, kind of. It would more likely be a major remaining selling point for Apple hardware over generic. Buy retail OSX and install on generic hardware, get no support. Buy Apple hardware, get full support. It's a pretty easy and sharp divide to maintain.
The trouble would come if Apple really did try to fully support generic hardware. On that road lies madness.
Apple will release OSX for generic PCs eventually. (PCs of some minimum specification, that is.) The question is simply when.
:-)
But it won't happen until one or the other of the following becomes true:
1) Apple PC hardware sales become insufficiently profitable to remain a (mostly) hardware company
or
2) Apple decides it is in its best interests to fight a head-to-head OS marketshare war with Microsoft
Which won't happen until at least:
2a) The minimum-spec PCs themselves have a very large market penetration. (I think minimum-spec will at least require EFI.)
and
2b) Microsoft's continued development of apps for OSX can be lost without serious strategic harm
and
2c) Microsoft interoperability protocols are sufficiently documented or openness is legally enforced such that MS would have serious trouble fighting dirty
and
2d) Apple is supremely confident that OSX can crush XP/Vista/Whatever in terms of user experience
Of these, (1) is clearly not the case. It seems almost certain that (2a) is not true. (2b) will be solved if Apple comes out with their own office suite, or once OpenOffice has a version truly native to OSX. (2c) is close, and (2d) is obviously here right now.
In all, probably not this year. If it doesn't happen by one month after Vista's release, then I think it'll be a long while yet.
(Hmmm... I wonder if the real reason 32-bit Vista does not support non-BIOS-emulating EFI is to reduce the number of "Vista-ready" PCs that are OSX-ready? Microsoft might well be fearful of this move and have already executed their countermeasure. Can Apple make a BIOS version of OSX? Would they? Will manufacturers generally support EFI if Microsoft doesn't require it?)
PS: Now that I've placed my bets, it's time to go RTFAs.
Now, that wasn't very nice.
Here's a real-world example. I'm the network administrator for a medical clinic; we're a Windows-centric shop in the server room. We have 12 providers. Seven of these providers have their own laptops.
Three years ago, only one of these providers had a Mac. (A PowerBook.) Today, all but one are on Macintosh laptops, and the last Windows holdout says she'll change next time she replaces her laptop.
That ain't no fairy tale.
I can't think of a reason why they would. Just sayin'.
True. But note that this version has its own restrictions. If those restrictions aren't a problem, or if you're willing to risk the consequences of violating the license, then again... that's the last copy you'll ever buy.
"For $125 (student/teacher) you can buy the Windows OS and then run the PC version of Office."
That may be so. But when you buy the copy of XP for this, you're not buying an OEM XP license tied to a particular machine anymore. Nor are you buying Office tied to a particular machine. You'll need to have to have the full portable versions.
(Remember, Office Small Buisiness Edition is a curse laid upon this Earth, because you cannot legally move it from the OEM's machine to any other. This has caused my employer headaches that have only ended with the advent of OpenOffice.org 2.0. Rather than buy new copies of MS Office when we upgraded the desktop machines, or risking an MS audit by moving the software to unlicensed machines, we switched to OOo2.)
So those will be the last copies of that MS software you'll ever buy, won't they? You'll never have need to buy another copy because of machine-specific license restrictions, but only when you need new features. Microsoft doesn't do upgrade pricing any more, so at that point why wouldn't you buy a native version for the same price? (Or switch to a free alternative?)
Put that in Microsoft's long-term revenue model and light it... I bet they won't like the taste very much. If they only get to sell new software when people need new features, they're going to have to re-think the way they license their product.
Apple makes their Macintosh money from hardware sales. OSX is great and all, but from a revenue perspective it's beside the point. There's little doubt that this move will help sell more Macs.
But it gets better.
Had Apple included the BIOS entensions to EFI, a Windows user buying Mactel hardware could have just installed right over OSX without even seeing it. But Apple didn't make it that easy, and now we see why. The buyer wanting Windows on Mactel hardware will now have to interact with OSX, at least for long enough to run Boot Camp. And let's be honest, the apparent slickness of Boot Camp will not fail to impress any user savvy enough to install their own OS. That may lead the buyer to try OSX and actually compare it to Windows head-to-head.
Apple is obviously confident that OSX will compare very well to XP in this situation. They've already achieved the minimum mission with this user: the hardware sale. But this way they have a really fair shot at turning the Windows-using Mactel buyer into a dual user or switcher, which is a much bigger win in the long run.
So for developers... yeah, some won't bother to produce apps for OSX. Maybe fewer will now. But I don't know if that's such a big deal. Apple still gets the hardware sales, so its short-term prospects are still fine. And if this move helps increase OSX market share, that will be a countervailing pressure on developers. I'm guessing it'll be a wash overall. Those developers who care about OSX will still develop for it, those who hate OSX won't start, and the folks who work on both still have a very similar strategic choice to make.
On the virtulazation front? Of course Apple will support it. They may or may not make their own solution, but it is certainly going to happen. Boot Camp is just a stopgap... virtualization is a better scenario for Apple anyway, for all the reasons above.
I'm not a graphic designer, but even I can tell that the Boot Camp Windows logo is effing brilliant.
First, it's a very nifty dodge for the copyright and trademark issue. While MS would be nuts to sue them over use of Microsoft logos in this context, Apple has completely dodged the issue. (They've generally been very careful to avoid any potential copyright issues in the whole process, especially by emphasizing the need for a legal, non-upgrade XP CD.) Microsoft is left with no grounds to complain.
Secondly, the MacOS logo is still color in Boot Camp, but the other logo is greyscale. One is the new hotness, the other is old and busted. Graphic design messages don't get more clear.
Apple has just totally counted coup on Microsoft. I bet the entire Apple marketing department will be useless for the rest of the week... none of them will be able to stop laughing.
No, they're called "tax abatements" or "subsidies".
True. From my experience, they're better about it now than they used to be. (The triple-CD cases are pretty fragile. Apparently the trick is to order them with a t-shirt as extra packing material.)
:-)
Yet I don't think that the fellow above had his linux box cracked three times while on dialup. Or if he did... well, that's another good reason to use OpenBSD.
"Now there is the implied threat that if others (read: Linux companies) don't cough up the dough, he's going to yank OpenSSH away from us."
That's right! If you don't pay, Theo will send out his legion of 1337 repo men to confiscate all extant copies of the OpenSSH source and binaries!
Or... maybe they just won't work on it so much. It's really hard to "yank" BSD-licensed code, after all. (I seem to recall that's why he uses the BSD license.)
He had to write his own driver code, though.
Yeah. Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and George Steinbrenner are poor to this day because of their abrasive personalities. If only they'd been nicer, they'd have been more successful!