Wicked cool, but not as much as I hoped...
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
OK - I love the new iMac. It's great-looking, finally a G4 is included, the screen looks real nice, and the drive combinations are right on. This is probably the Mac that the Cube should have been. The price is about $100 higher than I'd like, but I expect to see the price points all adjusted once the new Pro machines _finally_ ship. Even though they still have old iMacs around for now, they need to get the new one to the sub $1000 point ASAP.
iPhoto is a compelling new application, and I'm going to download it and play with it tonight - it supports my Olympus 3000 so I'll try it directly instead of just using the reader like I normally do.
The new reconfiguration of the iBook line is nice, too - and the 14.1" screen on the high-end model will be a plus.
But - what about the Pro line? Apple's margins are fattest on the tower Macs, and they're not announcing anything today. Unless they do something soon, expect a bad quarter. I don't know about Motorola's yields, but Apple must be pretty pissed at them since they obviously can't get enough G5 (or fast G4 - whatever) processors to announce anything yet.
So, they'll sell a ton of iMacs, but I was hoping for a little more this time around.
According to Apple's just-completed keynote, what you're looking for would be iPhoto...
While we all kvetch about Microsoft Passport and the way they're weaving everything to give Microsoft a cut of transactions, Apple is doing much the same thing between iTools and Apple's 1-click license. They're selling goods, storage, and now with iPhoto they're selling services (photo finishing and albums) online as well.
I wouldn't be surprised now to see them start cutting deals with the music publishers to offer some form of semi-secure (maybe not really secure, but a non-trivial hack) music streaming through iTunes as well.
Windows isn't cheap to support, but it's a lot cheaper than those figures. I have 150 users here, and we support them with 5 people (myself and 4 staffers). However, of those 5, 1 does primarily applications support (we have a lot of legacy apps) and runs the 2 NetWare servers, and 1 does mostly database work and development. I run the group and work mainly on security. We really have 2 people specializing in NT administration, and we're just fine that way.
I'd also estimate the per-person dollar figures to be a lot lower than $150k/person/year. I'd say a figure of $100-$110k for a highly-paid NT person (total, not salary) is still high, but closer to reality. The skilled Unix person is more expensive, but you _will_ often need fewer of them. Total cost for most shops is probably somewhat comparable.
I used to support about 100 Macs pretty easily with 2 people, so that support cost goes even lower...
Also, I don't know exactly what the OEM cost for Windows is, but I believe that it's typically well under $100 in volume (around $50-$60 or so, typically). XP Pro (NT 4 and 2000 Pro, as well) add a little more to the ticket, but most OEMs typically raise the price $100 from what they'd charge for the "home" OS versions for the pro stuff. At least part of that $100 is profit for the vendor.
Retail packages of the server OS usually include 5-25 licenses. But that's still pricey, of course. I can say that our Enterprise license pricing (we're part of a group with a bigger company, so we qualify) is very attractive - it includes the server CAL, desktop Windows (any version), and Office Pro. It almost makes Windows worth using;-)
I just recently started using a DiskOnkey (the 128MB model), and it's a terrific device. They cost about $150 each, and it's about 50% longer (and about 5 or so mm wider) than the Leatherman Micra I carry on my keychain, just to give you a size idea. There are smaller devices (like the Q Drive), but the DiskOnKey is rugged as hell, and so far has stood up to quite the beating.
What's it good for? Well, in my case, I'm using it to hold a set of Windows sysadmin tools (a VNC installer, Terminal Server client software, and a few other utilities), along with a full electronic copy of my company DR plan, and a ton of policy/procedure documents. With all that, I still have room to shuttle files around as well.
In fact, it's been so handy that we're replacing our printed copies of many off-site manuals with these. That way, it's much easier to keep up-to-date, and all we need to access everything is a computer with USB support and the ability to read HTML, PDF, and Word documents.
The coolest thing I found is that they're bootable, too - I just need to put an OS on one and it's an even better toolkit. Is the storage as cost-effective as CD-ROM? Of course not - it doesn't hold nearly as much, and the 128MB device, as I mentioned, cost $150. But it's far more rugged than a CD, and can be used in all sorts of circumstances where a CD can't. Heck, even a lot of the stripped-down PCs that are used in corporate IT shops have free USB ports.
Why wouldn't they be able to use wireless? 802.11b equipment generally gets along OK with 2.4 Gb cordless phones, as long as both devices are well-made and play nicely (letting you select between channels, etc).
My AirPort gear (re-badged Lucent cards) behaves just fine with cordless phones. Worst case should be a little fiddling with channel selection for best results.
That's basically what the TOS was up here in New England for the old Media One RoadRunner network that AT&T bought when they bought Media One and then did a system swap with Time Warner (AT&T got a lot of Boston area franchises about a year ago in exchange for giving some of their other territories to Time Warner).
Unlike the @home portion of the AT&T network, New England users were not generally affected by last week's outage, and we were always allowed to run servers, though they are unsupported. We did have to deal with Port 80 blocking when Code Red was peaking this summer, though (dealt with in my case by using ZoneEdit's redirection to hit my Port 8080, and by running Apache in the first place).
I'm a little jealous that folks had static addresses, though - a static IP makes things so much simpler.
When a company grows big and successful, they usually build a "sanitized" and romanticized version of their startup story. In it, all the big battles are edited out, the people who wound up on the outs disappear from the history rolls, and everything is edited to make them look like a small, humble company that did well.
So Apple and HP get the myth of the garage story, Cisco hides their battles with Stanford, and Microsoft sells Gates as a Harvard dropout (conveniently leaving out the family connections he used to get Microsoft in all the right places). The creation myth is what you get when you read Fast Company - but the true stories are out there and easy to find. It's just not what the companies themselves are trumpeting.
Remember, in business as well as politics, history is written by the winning side.
I bitch about it because virtually all software short of the OS itself is usually a free upgrade. Windows users can upgrade to the latest Windows Media without buying extra software - they don't even have to buy a new copy of Windows to do it. Apple has a tradition of being generous with their software updates, with minor versions usually being free and all the updates that go with it.
The other thing is that I was a normal MacOS 8.x user. And I paid for QT Pro. When I bought an upgrade to MacOS 9, my QT Pro continued to work. Then I shelled out $120 for MacOS X - now if I want to keep QT Pro, I have to fork out another $30 on top of that.
I have no objection to paying for the Pro edition - but if each OS/QT upgrade is going to kill my Pro features then I don't expect to pay $30 for the Pro upgrade. Either bundle it (after all, I paid $120 at retail for it) with retail copies of the Mac OS, or charge a hell of a lot less (like maybe $10) for the Pro version.
Actually, QuickTime is part of the MacOS, just as Windows Media is part of Windows. Of course, there are far fewer Macs, but that's besides the point...
Also, QuickTime doesn't require a reboot nowadays, at least not on Win2K or XP. It is also included on a the CD with a lot of cameras and scanners, which helps, too.
The UI has issues (it deviates too much from Apple's UI guidelines), but is generally cleaner and easier to navigate than either Real or Windows Media Player, IMHO.
What Apple does with QT marketing that's really annoying is the relentless shilling for QT Pro that pops up darn near every time you open a document (I won't get started about how they stiffed those of us who'd bought the Pro version with QT3 and then were stuck with QT5 and the OS X upgrade).
I see virtually no point to fancy 3G technology and broadband phones. All I need to see in a mobile phone is the following:
- Good voice clarity - equivalent to wired when in better-than-marginal conditions.
- Good enough battery life to talk for at least 3 or so hours on a charge. LiIon batteries for no memory and good power density.
- Antennas that are either recessed or integrated to the body. Nokias do this well in current models. No protruding breakable dongles like the StarTAC.
- A phone that fits in my pocket.
- The ability to download phone numbers from my PC. But that's all the PIM functionality I want.
And from the phone company, I want the following:
- Coverage almost anywhere. Digital, too. No more AMPS service anywhere.
- No roaming. At all. And no long distance if the carrier has a national footprint.
- Either free incoming or "caller pays" incoming, the way real telcos do it.
- Finally, and most importantly - I want a service that just gives me minutes, at a comparable cost to wired minutes. I should pay less than $0.10 per minute for any kind of outbound call, regardless of location or destination. One of the things that sucks the most about US mobile phone companies (I can't speak to what they do elsewhere) is the way they differentiate between peak and off-peak, and the high cost of minutes once you use the monthly allotment. I don't pay extra on my wired phone - I shouldn't have to on a mobile.
Slightly better data support would be nice (up to, say, 56k support), but not essential. If I need wireless data badly enough, I can buy it separately. And if I want broadband, I probably will do better having it wired (to my home) than in my pocket on the road.
OK, the SS screwed the pooch on September 11th. They'll be super paranoid now (in the proper clinical sense). But if they can't distinguish between jawing and plotting, they have no chance of stopping the next attacks. None
Actually, the Secret Service did their job perfectly on September 11 - the proof is that the President and Vice-President are still alive. The FBI and CIA screwed the pooch, though. The mission of the Secret Service is to investigate and prosecute crime involving the Treasury Department (of which they are a part) - and that gives them cover to handle almost anything with a financial component (hence the Steve Jackson Games case). They also provide protection to the President, Vice President, major party candidates, visiting heads of state, and so on. As a result, they handle threats to those who they protect.
But nothing in the Secret Service's functions would imply any responsibility for detecting the terrorist activity that culminated in the September 11 attacks. When it happened, they got the Vice President to shelter outside of Washington, and they got the President onto Air Force One (which isn't just an ordinary 747...) with fighter escorts and they started playing "where's Waldo" until they were sure they could bring him back to the White House safely.
As much as the Secret Service gets (justly) criticized for what we see as excesses in the computer-related cases they've had a hand in, the group that protects the Executive are as good as it gets. They take security very seriously, and would put themselves in front of a bullet or a bomb before allowing their charge to be hurt.
Or the lack thereof. I work for a very old company (over 150 years!) - and there are a lot of people here who are "lifers". At 3.5 years working here, there are about 100 people (out of 150 total) who have been here 5 years or longer - one person has been here 35 years, about a half-dozen more over 30 years, and another 10 or so 25-30 years. So there's continuity, and that's one factor in having a strong social culture. The longer-term people are, the more the culture is preserved.
We also have a golf league in the spring/summer, and a bowling (candlepins) league in the winter - each league has around 30-40 participants (with some people doing both). That encourages interaction, too. Basically, a lot more people here are friends IRL than I see at most places. And people mix across the layers of hierarchy - Vice-presidents golf and bowl alongside mailroom workers, and it's pretty comfortable for most.
At my previous company (my successor reads here regularly, so he can speak to it if he wants), it was still social to a point, but it seemed to be more a core of us at the management level (many of the managers were members of the partners' families) that socialized together, and then the "rank and file" pretty much hung together by department. There wasn't quite as much mixing, and the one real attempt at a "group" thing when I was there (a softball league) fizzled out after a couple of years. Mind you, it was still a very good place to work, and I'm still friends with the people I befriended there - they were pretty much all good people, there just wasn't as much mixing.
It may have changed since then, but I doubt too much. Higher-pressure environments and younger companies (like that one) don't seem to have quite as much socializing across boundaries.
One alternative is for Clippy to simply sit in the background, and, kind of like you suggested, always have shortcuts available for things it thinks you might want to do. But Clippy will have to "learn" what you do and not forget it from session to session. One reason it's so hated now is that Clippy doesn't really learn from experience. If I don't tell it I want to type a letter every time I insert the date, Clippy should eventually get the drift rather than asking the same question every time.
As an interesting sidenote, I'd say a slight majority of my users here actually like having the assistant available and visible (the cat is the most popular one, an informal walking-around survey shows). They ignore it most of the time, but people seem to like watching it cavort on screen. We turn it off by default when we do system builds, so users have to actually turn it on - many do so.
The reason that's interesting is because most of "us" (the/. readers) are advanced users - we almost all seem to hate Clippy with a passion. But my users who turn it on are the "rest of us", and by that measure, the Office Assistant is actually somewhat successful. But you wouldn't know it from our opinions. So we're probably not a good target market for that sort of interface, at least not at this point.
As we all know, Microsoft is absolutely merciless when it comes to tolerating failure. People get bounced out of the company constantly.
So does anyone want to guess what happened to the program manager for Bob?
That's right. Bill Gates married her. Go figure.
The idea of predictive interfaces was interesting, but Bob had the fatal flaw of being way too complicated for the hardware of the day. Some of the technology lives on in Office's Clippy, but Bob itself was a disaster to the point that even the people who pirated it returned it.
The two chefs really kind of got into it.
Shatner's natural cheeziness is perfect for this sort of production.
I thought the audience screaming, cheering, and holding up signs like it was a SmackDown! taping was hysterical.
The motorcycle entrance.
The suckitude:
Lame secret ingredient.
The announcers absolutely blew goats. Big-time.
Way too much computer graphics to distract from the action.
And not enough attention was paid to the food itself - the sheer exoticness and detail is one of the key things that makes the original Iron Chef so cool.
There's a fine line between the kind of cheeziness that comes from good intent and earnestness, and the kind that comes from a calculated effort to be cheese. Iron Chef (classic) is the former kind - the US version, while watchable, is more like the latter. I'll watch the second one, but I'm not sure I'd watch it regularly if it became an ongoing series.
Memory effect isn't even that much of a problem with current Ni-Cad batteries, unless you habitually do a partial discharge. A couple of partials won't kill them, though running the battery through a conditioning cycle will usually help if it does happen.
Li-Ion batteries will eventually die - they typically are rated for about 1K discharge cycles, IIRC. And when they die, they're more expensive than NiCad or NiMh batteries to replace.
I think ultimately you'll see disposable fuel cell "batteries", and/or an infrastructure where you can buy a little cheap pre-filled tank of fuel for it, much as you buy a battery off the shelf today.
Only some of the more esoteric applications will have end-users directly filling the tank themselves. But if you think about it, most portable power applications today excepting laptops) use a disposable battery - so that is easy to replace with compact, disposable tanks. I think laptops will have hybrid power systems, with perhaps a Li-Ion battery embedded in the machine, and a small fuel cell to provide continuous charging of the battery - and it'd run off AC power when stationary.
Given the higher power output and density of a fuel cell versus even a Li-Ion battery, having spares handy isn't quite so important. You don't have to stay so close to a refill point when your runtime is measured in days instead of hours.
1024x768 is about as high as most laptops get for resolution. Gateway has a 1280x1024 15.7" laptop screen (I know, because I'm using one here at work as I type this), and a few vendors squeeze a higher resolution out of 15.1" displays, but not on anything smaller that I know of. Dell has a monster 1600x1200 packed into a 15.1" display on their Precision Workstation M40, but that thing is heavy and expensive as all get out, along with being rather tiny-pixeled.
The Gateways with the big screens (the 9000 series) are nice, though heavy - but the prices are pretty good for what you get.
The Apple G4 has the cool 1152x768 15.2" widescreen, as another direction. I have one of those at home, and it's da bomb.
Maybe an iBook instead. Very rugged, easy on the battery, wireless built-in, speedy but not blazing. Fairly, cheap, too - as laptops go.
But as long as you want a nice screen, wireless, and plenty of storage, you can forget about long battery life - regardless of CPU. Those three things suck a lot more power than the CPU does. And if you want enough power to keep it going ad infinitum - forget about portability.
Laptops are full of design compromises, but if the original poster really thinks there's a market for his kind of spec, he should try and gather some funding and contract a Taiwanese manufacturer (like Alpha Top) to design and build them. Hardly anyone makes their own laptops anymore, anyway.
I've had some sort of full-time connection to the Net for about 8 years now, starting with a nailed-up 33.6 modem (with a router on my end), moving through ISDN, DSL, and finally cable today. Over all those years, I was only down for about 3 days between the Northpoint shutdown and when the AT&T tech showed up at my house with the cable modem (I spent the weekend in between rewiring the house). I couldn't conceive of life without a full-time fast connection.
With it, I provide e-mail to myself and some friends, web service, and a fast connection that lets anybody anywhere in the house plug in and run fast. There's an Airport base station too, with a hacked-in antenna, to allow use around the immediate neighborhood. Through it all, prices have steadily fallen (from $79/month plus phone line charges of about $45 for the V.34 to $50/month for the cable modem), performance has improved, and I couldn't imagine going back to the dark old days of dial-up. When I travel, I try to stay at hotels with broadband (a lot of Marriotts have it), and only occasionally are forced to use a modem. It's painful.
As a result, there are a lot of things I'd part with before I'd give up my connection. I'd chop out regular cable TV, ditch the OmniSky service (which is pretty darned cool, though), toss the cell phone, and stop collecting comic books before I dumped broadband. Easy.
When you get used to the convenience of having an always-on connection, very few people are going to give that up - though they may not be as dependent on it as I am. The only real people I see as being likely to churn out are people with serious cash flow problems (where the $50/month may be the difference between food and no food), and maybe folks who have had service problems to the point where they say "screw it, this isn't worth the money".
You're spot-on that Comdex is a highly unlikely target for a terror attack, but consider this:
An awful lot of the geeks who have important IT jobs at their companies go to Comdex (and Interop). Since so few companies do any kind of serious disaster or succession planning, if you took out the attendees at one of these conferences, you'd probably have a fairly large economic impact as the companies that employed the victims floundered afterwards.
The other point to attacking Comdex (particularly in a bio attack) would be that it's one of the largest conferences anywhere, with people attending from all over. Release a bio agent that is contagious and has an incubation time of a few days, and you can infect large portions of the country with relatively little effort.
A lot of companies depend on tech, even when they aren't in the tech business directly. And Comdex would be a target of opportunity. Is it likely? No. What we saw on September 11th was attacks on locations chosen mainly for their symbolic value. Further attacks of that nature would be likeliest. But it could happen. I do, however, think that the precautions that Comdex is taking are over the top.
I don't go to Comdex, but I do go to Interop (Atlanta - in fact I was there on September 11th and wound up driving home to Boston with a friend of mine who was there as well), and I bring my laptop to the classes, and a backpack onto the show floor (it's a lot more comfy and easier to stuff than the stupid vendor plastic bags). If these rules are in place next fall for Interop, it might well make going more trouble than it's worth.
I freely admit to being a wrestling fan (ducks), as a result WWF Smackdown is one of the only things I bother with on a regular basis (outside of news, the Red Sox, and an occasional This Old House episode). And when I get my weekly fix, I get not just one logo (UPN's) in the lower _right_ corner of the screen, I get the horrifyingly ugly (and not even translucent) WWF logo in the lower left corner! It wastes a significant amount of screen real estate, and just looks dumb.
Now there is a reason they do it - WWF actually owns the time that Smackdown runs on (as they do with all their shows), and so they brand their content as does the network (which brands _everything_). But it's still silly.
I'm sure there's other programs with similar double-branding, but I haven't seen them.
To all the folks who thought I was praising Apple (or blaming Microsoft) - I wasn't! Apple was a bunch of dummies for letting that code escape the dungeons in Cupertino! Really!
Now that I've vented a tad, I'll re-iterate. It was a stupid bug that could have easily been avoided. But OTOH, Apple does not really have a track record of releasing software this broken (or at least, installers this broken), so their response was very good - at least as good as what we've come to see from other vendors if not better than most. That does not, mind you, excuse the severity of the bug - rather, it praises the response.
And if you had followed the CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS to delete the old iTunes first, you never would have encountered the bug in the first place, no matter how many partitions you had. Many (perhaps most) Apple users, unfortunately, do not bother reading instructions.
Every company makes stupid mistakes. The tough part is to handle it well when bad things happen, and Apple did OK (not perfect, because people lost data, but they took appropriate steps quickly) in that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
OK - I love the new iMac. It's great-looking, finally a G4 is included, the screen looks real nice, and the drive combinations are right on. This is probably the Mac that the Cube should have been. The price is about $100 higher than I'd like, but I expect to see the price points all adjusted once the new Pro machines _finally_ ship. Even though they still have old iMacs around for now, they need to get the new one to the sub $1000 point ASAP.
iPhoto is a compelling new application, and I'm going to download it and play with it tonight - it supports my Olympus 3000 so I'll try it directly instead of just using the reader like I normally do.
The new reconfiguration of the iBook line is nice, too - and the 14.1" screen on the high-end model will be a plus.
But - what about the Pro line? Apple's margins are fattest on the tower Macs, and they're not announcing anything today. Unless they do something soon, expect a bad quarter. I don't know about Motorola's yields, but Apple must be pretty pissed at them since they obviously can't get enough G5 (or fast G4 - whatever) processors to announce anything yet.
So, they'll sell a ton of iMacs, but I was hoping for a little more this time around.
According to Apple's just-completed keynote, what you're looking for would be iPhoto...
While we all kvetch about Microsoft Passport and the way they're weaving everything to give Microsoft a cut of transactions, Apple is doing much the same thing between iTools and Apple's 1-click license. They're selling goods, storage, and now with iPhoto they're selling services (photo finishing and albums) online as well.
I wouldn't be surprised now to see them start cutting deals with the music publishers to offer some form of semi-secure (maybe not really secure, but a non-trivial hack) music streaming through iTunes as well.
Windows isn't cheap to support, but it's a lot cheaper than those figures. I have 150 users here, and we support them with 5 people (myself and 4 staffers). However, of those 5, 1 does primarily applications support (we have a lot of legacy apps) and runs the 2 NetWare servers, and 1 does mostly database work and development. I run the group and work mainly on security. We really have 2 people specializing in NT administration, and we're just fine that way.
;-)
I'd also estimate the per-person dollar figures to be a lot lower than $150k/person/year. I'd say a figure of $100-$110k for a highly-paid NT person (total, not salary) is still high, but closer to reality. The skilled Unix person is more expensive, but you _will_ often need fewer of them. Total cost for most shops is probably somewhat comparable.
I used to support about 100 Macs pretty easily with 2 people, so that support cost goes even lower...
Also, I don't know exactly what the OEM cost for Windows is, but I believe that it's typically well under $100 in volume (around $50-$60 or so, typically). XP Pro (NT 4 and 2000 Pro, as well) add a little more to the ticket, but most OEMs typically raise the price $100 from what they'd charge for the "home" OS versions for the pro stuff. At least part of that $100 is profit for the vendor.
Retail packages of the server OS usually include 5-25 licenses. But that's still pricey, of course. I can say that our Enterprise license pricing (we're part of a group with a bigger company, so we qualify) is very attractive - it includes the server CAL, desktop Windows (any version), and Office Pro. It almost makes Windows worth using
This is the first good explanation for Geraldo Rivera I've seen yet!
I just recently started using a DiskOnkey (the 128MB model), and it's a terrific device. They cost about $150 each, and it's about 50% longer (and about 5 or so mm wider) than the Leatherman Micra I carry on my keychain, just to give you a size idea. There are smaller devices (like the Q Drive), but the DiskOnKey is rugged as hell, and so far has stood up to quite the beating.
What's it good for? Well, in my case, I'm using it to hold a set of Windows sysadmin tools (a VNC installer, Terminal Server client software, and a few other utilities), along with a full electronic copy of my company DR plan, and a ton of policy/procedure documents. With all that, I still have room to shuttle files around as well.
In fact, it's been so handy that we're replacing our printed copies of many off-site manuals with these. That way, it's much easier to keep up-to-date, and all we need to access everything is a computer with USB support and the ability to read HTML, PDF, and Word documents.
The coolest thing I found is that they're bootable, too - I just need to put an OS on one and it's an even better toolkit. Is the storage as cost-effective as CD-ROM? Of course not - it doesn't hold nearly as much, and the 128MB device, as I mentioned, cost $150. But it's far more rugged than a CD, and can be used in all sorts of circumstances where a CD can't. Heck, even a lot of the stripped-down PCs that are used in corporate IT shops have free USB ports.
Why wouldn't they be able to use wireless? 802.11b equipment generally gets along OK with 2.4 Gb cordless phones, as long as both devices are well-made and play nicely (letting you select between channels, etc).
My AirPort gear (re-badged Lucent cards) behaves just fine with cordless phones. Worst case should be a little fiddling with channel selection for best results.
That's basically what the TOS was up here in New England for the old Media One RoadRunner network that AT&T bought when they bought Media One and then did a system swap with Time Warner (AT&T got a lot of Boston area franchises about a year ago in exchange for giving some of their other territories to Time Warner).
Unlike the @home portion of the AT&T network, New England users were not generally affected by last week's outage, and we were always allowed to run servers, though they are unsupported. We did have to deal with Port 80 blocking when Code Red was peaking this summer, though (dealt with in my case by using ZoneEdit's redirection to hit my Port 8080, and by running Apache in the first place).
I'm a little jealous that folks had static addresses, though - a static IP makes things so much simpler.
And so do most religions, too...
When a company grows big and successful, they usually build a "sanitized" and romanticized version of their startup story. In it, all the big battles are edited out, the people who wound up on the outs disappear from the history rolls, and everything is edited to make them look like a small, humble company that did well.
So Apple and HP get the myth of the garage story, Cisco hides their battles with Stanford, and Microsoft sells Gates as a Harvard dropout (conveniently leaving out the family connections he used to get Microsoft in all the right places). The creation myth is what you get when you read Fast Company - but the true stories are out there and easy to find. It's just not what the companies themselves are trumpeting.
Remember, in business as well as politics, history is written by the winning side.
I bitch about it because virtually all software short of the OS itself is usually a free upgrade. Windows users can upgrade to the latest Windows Media without buying extra software - they don't even have to buy a new copy of Windows to do it. Apple has a tradition of being generous with their software updates, with minor versions usually being free and all the updates that go with it.
The other thing is that I was a normal MacOS 8.x user. And I paid for QT Pro. When I bought an upgrade to MacOS 9, my QT Pro continued to work. Then I shelled out $120 for MacOS X - now if I want to keep QT Pro, I have to fork out another $30 on top of that.
I have no objection to paying for the Pro edition - but if each OS/QT upgrade is going to kill my Pro features then I don't expect to pay $30 for the Pro upgrade. Either bundle it (after all, I paid $120 at retail for it) with retail copies of the Mac OS, or charge a hell of a lot less (like maybe $10) for the Pro version.
Actually, QuickTime is part of the MacOS, just as Windows Media is part of Windows. Of course, there are far fewer Macs, but that's besides the point...
Also, QuickTime doesn't require a reboot nowadays, at least not on Win2K or XP. It is also included on a the CD with a lot of cameras and scanners, which helps, too.
The UI has issues (it deviates too much from Apple's UI guidelines), but is generally cleaner and easier to navigate than either Real or Windows Media Player, IMHO.
What Apple does with QT marketing that's really annoying is the relentless shilling for QT Pro that pops up darn near every time you open a document (I won't get started about how they stiffed those of us who'd bought the Pro version with QT3 and then were stuck with QT5 and the OS X upgrade).
- Good voice clarity - equivalent to wired when in better-than-marginal conditions.
- Good enough battery life to talk for at least 3 or so hours on a charge. LiIon batteries for no memory and good power density.
- Antennas that are either recessed or integrated to the body. Nokias do this well in current models. No protruding breakable dongles like the StarTAC.
- A phone that fits in my pocket.
- The ability to download phone numbers from my PC. But that's all the PIM functionality I want.
And from the phone company, I want the following:
- Coverage almost anywhere. Digital, too. No more AMPS service anywhere.
- No roaming. At all. And no long distance if the carrier has a national footprint.
- Either free incoming or "caller pays" incoming, the way real telcos do it.
- Finally, and most importantly - I want a service that just gives me minutes, at a comparable cost to wired minutes. I should pay less than $0.10 per minute for any kind of outbound call, regardless of location or destination. One of the things that sucks the most about US mobile phone companies (I can't speak to what they do elsewhere) is the way they differentiate between peak and off-peak, and the high cost of minutes once you use the monthly allotment. I don't pay extra on my wired phone - I shouldn't have to on a mobile.
Slightly better data support would be nice (up to, say, 56k support), but not essential. If I need wireless data badly enough, I can buy it separately. And if I want broadband, I probably will do better having it wired (to my home) than in my pocket on the road.
Actually, the Secret Service did their job perfectly on September 11 - the proof is that the President and Vice-President are still alive. The FBI and CIA screwed the pooch, though. The mission of the Secret Service is to investigate and prosecute crime involving the Treasury Department (of which they are a part) - and that gives them cover to handle almost anything with a financial component (hence the Steve Jackson Games case). They also provide protection to the President, Vice President, major party candidates, visiting heads of state, and so on. As a result, they handle threats to those who they protect.
But nothing in the Secret Service's functions would imply any responsibility for detecting the terrorist activity that culminated in the September 11 attacks. When it happened, they got the Vice President to shelter outside of Washington, and they got the President onto Air Force One (which isn't just an ordinary 747...) with fighter escorts and they started playing "where's Waldo" until they were sure they could bring him back to the White House safely.
As much as the Secret Service gets (justly) criticized for what we see as excesses in the computer-related cases they've had a hand in, the group that protects the Executive are as good as it gets. They take security very seriously, and would put themselves in front of a bullet or a bomb before allowing their charge to be hurt.
Or the lack thereof. I work for a very old company (over 150 years!) - and there are a lot of people here who are "lifers". At 3.5 years working here, there are about 100 people (out of 150 total) who have been here 5 years or longer - one person has been here 35 years, about a half-dozen more over 30 years, and another 10 or so 25-30 years. So there's continuity, and that's one factor in having a strong social culture. The longer-term people are, the more the culture is preserved.
We also have a golf league in the spring/summer, and a bowling (candlepins) league in the winter - each league has around 30-40 participants (with some people doing both). That encourages interaction, too. Basically, a lot more people here are friends IRL than I see at most places. And people mix across the layers of hierarchy - Vice-presidents golf and bowl alongside mailroom workers, and it's pretty comfortable for most.
At my previous company (my successor reads here regularly, so he can speak to it if he wants), it was still social to a point, but it seemed to be more a core of us at the management level (many of the managers were members of the partners' families) that socialized together, and then the "rank and file" pretty much hung together by department. There wasn't quite as much mixing, and the one real attempt at a "group" thing when I was there (a softball league) fizzled out after a couple of years. Mind you, it was still a very good place to work, and I'm still friends with the people I befriended there - they were pretty much all good people, there just wasn't as much mixing.
It may have changed since then, but I doubt too much. Higher-pressure environments and younger companies (like that one) don't seem to have quite as much socializing across boundaries.
One alternative is for Clippy to simply sit in the background, and, kind of like you suggested, always have shortcuts available for things it thinks you might want to do. But Clippy will have to "learn" what you do and not forget it from session to session. One reason it's so hated now is that Clippy doesn't really learn from experience. If I don't tell it I want to type a letter every time I insert the date, Clippy should eventually get the drift rather than asking the same question every time.
/. readers) are advanced users - we almost all seem to hate Clippy with a passion. But my users who turn it on are the "rest of us", and by that measure, the Office Assistant is actually somewhat successful. But you wouldn't know it from our opinions. So we're probably not a good target market for that sort of interface, at least not at this point.
As an interesting sidenote, I'd say a slight majority of my users here actually like having the assistant available and visible (the cat is the most popular one, an informal walking-around survey shows). They ignore it most of the time, but people seem to like watching it cavort on screen. We turn it off by default when we do system builds, so users have to actually turn it on - many do so.
The reason that's interesting is because most of "us" (the
As we all know, Microsoft is absolutely merciless when it comes to tolerating failure. People get bounced out of the company constantly.
So does anyone want to guess what happened to the program manager for Bob?
That's right. Bill Gates married her. Go figure.
The idea of predictive interfaces was interesting, but Bob had the fatal flaw of being way too complicated for the hardware of the day. Some of the technology lives on in Office's Clippy, but Bob itself was a disaster to the point that even the people who pirated it returned it.
The good points:
The two chefs really kind of got into it.
Shatner's natural cheeziness is perfect for this sort of production.
I thought the audience screaming, cheering, and holding up signs like it was a SmackDown! taping was hysterical.
The motorcycle entrance.
The suckitude:
Lame secret ingredient.
The announcers absolutely blew goats. Big-time.
Way too much computer graphics to distract from the action.
And not enough attention was paid to the food itself - the sheer exoticness and detail is one of the key things that makes the original Iron Chef so cool.
There's a fine line between the kind of cheeziness that comes from good intent and earnestness, and the kind that comes from a calculated effort to be cheese. Iron Chef (classic) is the former kind - the US version, while watchable, is more like the latter. I'll watch the second one, but I'm not sure I'd watch it regularly if it became an ongoing series.
Memory effect isn't even that much of a problem with current Ni-Cad batteries, unless you habitually do a partial discharge. A couple of partials won't kill them, though running the battery through a conditioning cycle will usually help if it does happen.
Li-Ion batteries will eventually die - they typically are rated for about 1K discharge cycles, IIRC. And when they die, they're more expensive than NiCad or NiMh batteries to replace.
I think ultimately you'll see disposable fuel cell "batteries", and/or an infrastructure where you can buy a little cheap pre-filled tank of fuel for it, much as you buy a battery off the shelf today.
Only some of the more esoteric applications will have end-users directly filling the tank themselves. But if you think about it, most portable power applications today excepting laptops) use a disposable battery - so that is easy to replace with compact, disposable tanks. I think laptops will have hybrid power systems, with perhaps a Li-Ion battery embedded in the machine, and a small fuel cell to provide continuous charging of the battery - and it'd run off AC power when stationary.
Given the higher power output and density of a fuel cell versus even a Li-Ion battery, having spares handy isn't quite so important. You don't have to stay so close to a refill point when your runtime is measured in days instead of hours.
1024x768 is about as high as most laptops get for resolution. Gateway has a 1280x1024 15.7" laptop screen (I know, because I'm using one here at work as I type this), and a few vendors squeeze a higher resolution out of 15.1" displays, but not on anything smaller that I know of. Dell has a monster 1600x1200 packed into a 15.1" display on their Precision Workstation M40, but that thing is heavy and expensive as all get out, along with being rather tiny-pixeled.
The Gateways with the big screens (the 9000 series) are nice, though heavy - but the prices are pretty good for what you get.
The Apple G4 has the cool 1152x768 15.2" widescreen, as another direction. I have one of those at home, and it's da bomb.
Boy, I'd really like to see a Beowulf cluster of those!
What? Oh, okay - never mind...
Maybe an iBook instead. Very rugged, easy on the battery, wireless built-in, speedy but not blazing. Fairly, cheap, too - as laptops go.
But as long as you want a nice screen, wireless, and plenty of storage, you can forget about long battery life - regardless of CPU. Those three things suck a lot more power than the CPU does. And if you want enough power to keep it going ad infinitum - forget about portability.
Laptops are full of design compromises, but if the original poster really thinks there's a market for his kind of spec, he should try and gather some funding and contract a Taiwanese manufacturer (like Alpha Top) to design and build them. Hardly anyone makes their own laptops anymore, anyway.
I've had some sort of full-time connection to the Net for about 8 years now, starting with a nailed-up 33.6 modem (with a router on my end), moving through ISDN, DSL, and finally cable today. Over all those years, I was only down for about 3 days between the Northpoint shutdown and when the AT&T tech showed up at my house with the cable modem (I spent the weekend in between rewiring the house). I couldn't conceive of life without a full-time fast connection.
With it, I provide e-mail to myself and some friends, web service, and a fast connection that lets anybody anywhere in the house plug in and run fast. There's an Airport base station too, with a hacked-in antenna, to allow use around the immediate neighborhood. Through it all, prices have steadily fallen (from $79/month plus phone line charges of about $45 for the V.34 to $50/month for the cable modem), performance has improved, and I couldn't imagine going back to the dark old days of dial-up. When I travel, I try to stay at hotels with broadband (a lot of Marriotts have it), and only occasionally are forced to use a modem. It's painful.
As a result, there are a lot of things I'd part with before I'd give up my connection. I'd chop out regular cable TV, ditch the OmniSky service (which is pretty darned cool, though), toss the cell phone, and stop collecting comic books before I dumped broadband. Easy.
When you get used to the convenience of having an always-on connection, very few people are going to give that up - though they may not be as dependent on it as I am. The only real people I see as being likely to churn out are people with serious cash flow problems (where the $50/month may be the difference between food and no food), and maybe folks who have had service problems to the point where they say "screw it, this isn't worth the money".
You're spot-on that Comdex is a highly unlikely target for a terror attack, but consider this:
An awful lot of the geeks who have important IT jobs at their companies go to Comdex (and Interop). Since so few companies do any kind of serious disaster or succession planning, if you took out the attendees at one of these conferences, you'd probably have a fairly large economic impact as the companies that employed the victims floundered afterwards.
The other point to attacking Comdex (particularly in a bio attack) would be that it's one of the largest conferences anywhere, with people attending from all over. Release a bio agent that is contagious and has an incubation time of a few days, and you can infect large portions of the country with relatively little effort.
A lot of companies depend on tech, even when they aren't in the tech business directly. And Comdex would be a target of opportunity. Is it likely? No. What we saw on September 11th was attacks on locations chosen mainly for their symbolic value. Further attacks of that nature would be likeliest. But it could happen. I do, however, think that the precautions that Comdex is taking are over the top.
I don't go to Comdex, but I do go to Interop (Atlanta - in fact I was there on September 11th and wound up driving home to Boston with a friend of mine who was there as well), and I bring my laptop to the classes, and a backpack onto the show floor (it's a lot more comfy and easier to stuff than the stupid vendor plastic bags). If these rules are in place next fall for Interop, it might well make going more trouble than it's worth.
I freely admit to being a wrestling fan (ducks), as a result WWF Smackdown is one of the only things I bother with on a regular basis (outside of news, the Red Sox, and an occasional This Old House episode). And when I get my weekly fix, I get not just one logo (UPN's) in the lower _right_ corner of the screen, I get the horrifyingly ugly (and not even translucent) WWF logo in the lower left corner! It wastes a significant amount of screen real estate, and just looks dumb.
Now there is a reason they do it - WWF actually owns the time that Smackdown runs on (as they do with all their shows), and so they brand their content as does the network (which brands _everything_). But it's still silly.
I'm sure there's other programs with similar double-branding, but I haven't seen them.
To all the folks who thought I was praising Apple (or blaming Microsoft) - I wasn't! Apple was a bunch of dummies for letting that code escape the dungeons in Cupertino! Really!
Now that I've vented a tad, I'll re-iterate. It was a stupid bug that could have easily been avoided. But OTOH, Apple does not really have a track record of releasing software this broken (or at least, installers this broken), so their response was very good - at least as good as what we've come to see from other vendors if not better than most. That does not, mind you, excuse the severity of the bug - rather, it praises the response.
And if you had followed the CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS to delete the old iTunes first, you never would have encountered the bug in the first place, no matter how many partitions you had. Many (perhaps most) Apple users, unfortunately, do not bother reading instructions.
Every company makes stupid mistakes. The tough part is to handle it well when bad things happen, and Apple did OK (not perfect, because people lost data, but they took appropriate steps quickly) in that regard.