I don't buy CD's now, and I don't go to movies, either. I'm not as absolute about movies, though - I have a ton of free Blockbuster rental coupons I'm still using (from a giveaway when I bought my DVD player last year), and I borrow DVD's from my local library, too. I won't pay for them until the DeCSS lawsuit is either thrown out by the court or dropped by the plaintiffs.
Not that I spent a ton of money on rentals or going to the movies before the lawsuit, but I'm trying to be consistent. without movies, I watch even less TV than I did before - my television viewing nowadays is pretty much confined to local news, Red Sox games, and WWF Smackdown (even though Fox carries the Sox and Paramount carries the WWF).
It's tough to live your whole life in a vacuum, though, even if you try. I wish there were more independent places to get music and film, but maybe that'll be one of the things that comes out of all this legal wrangling that's going on.
I agree that the RIAA should be avoided at all costs, and not just for the month of August - until they get a clue. That doesn't mean that Napster is a Good Thing, though. Napster is a neat idea, that has folks behind it who are just as greedy as the labels - they just haven't figured out how to turn their movement into dollars yet.
Sharing music is a reasonable thing, given that a lot of trading is of rarities and bootlegs that you can't buy in your local store. My own MP3 usage has been to this pattern:
I rip all my own stuff so I can play it off my PC's. I download all kinds of TMBG rarities and boots. I've bought all their albums, too. I download an occasional file that looks interesting, and if it's pretty good I consider buying the album. Occasionally I exchange files with some of my meatspace friends.
I suspect a lot of Napster users are like me in that sense - it's a tool to complete collections and poke around interesting stuff, rather than just a way of getting all the free songs you can.
I see Napster as being the commercially oriented sacrificial lamb to the greater goal of opening up the distribution system. The cat's out of the bag, and soon the Gnutella's of the world will be dominant and unstoppable - and nobody will be able to stop it since there's no commercial shop behind the software.
If the RIAA had a clue, though, they'd adapt Gnutella to their own ends and provide for micropayments as part of it. The fact that they don't is just proving that the established order just doesn't Get It.
It's not like the answering machine can watch TV - why try and convince it to? That must be ABC's target audience, since humans have a tendency to do one of two things when they get an ad on their answering machine, either:
A: fast forward through the message. Newer machines just let you skip with a single button push.
B: Get so angry at this blatant waste of time and invasion of personal space that they actively avoid the ABC network, even if it means skipping Regis.
This makes no sense at all. Anyone who'd be influenced positively by an answering machine ad is probably too stupid to own and operate a machine in the first place, and accordingly has a job that pays so bad they can't afford any of the crap that gets advertised on ABC to begin with.
Hell, most systems only work when a human answers, they don't hang up. The only people who should be considering running answering machine ads for ABC are the other networks. If NBC ran ads for ABC that way, they'd be so pissed at ABC they might well skip their Regis fix.
- -Josh Turiel
Newsflash: Crappy movies are crappy movies!
on
End Of Fox Animation
·
· Score: 4
If a movie sucks, it doesn't matter if it's animated with cardboard paper, claymation, computers, or live action. It still sucks. Titan AE had no real clear market, no "core constituency" of people who'd see it, like it, and spread the word. It also had to go up against MI:2, which was essentially a cartoon done with live actors (a John Woo trademark), and that further sealed it's doom.
One of the many problems in Hollywood is that a studio will release something original, thoughtful, and creative, and that triggers a huge wave of "me too" copies. Disney has success with animation? Let's all get into animation!
Since "Chicken Run" was a hit, there'll probably be a huge wave of Claymation films coming up. Nobody understands why Chicken Run was a hit - they just understand that it made a lot of money. Duh.
Remember this mentality when we complain about the utter lack of clues that groups like the RIAA show. This is how they think. They can't see any farther than the first dollar signs, and reflexively avoid doing anything different. As soon as someone stumbles across a way to make money using digital technology (like MP3), every studio will jump on board. And if they come up with a way to make money selling unencumbered DVD's, they'll all shift within days.
In Hollywood, it's all about two things: not risking your job if possible, and, of course, the Benjamins!
- -Josh Turiel
Re:Proof that .com companies are still overvalued
on
CNET Buys Ziff-Davis
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, me too, but at least AOL has a lot of real, revenue-producing customers and makes a consistent profit. They may or may not be overvalued, but at least they have some real value.
CNET is a pure.com, on the other hand, with minimal revenue and ample "upside". In other words, a company that has far too high a valuation.
- -Josh Turiel
Proof that .com companies are still overvalued
on
CNET Buys Ziff-Davis
·
· Score: 4
Until relatively recently, a buyout would be the other way around. Ziff-Davis was a large-scale cash machine, with print, web, and TV media, an educational presence, a successful trade show division (they put on N+I, Comdex, and Seybold among others). Not all the ventures were profitable, but they were an old-fashioned media conglomerate, with IDG their only serious competitor.
Then Z-D started spinning out businesses and taking on outside dollars as the Ziff family all cashed out. Today, most of the above-mentioned businesses are separate, and a money-losing.com manages to buy up what's left of a formerly significant brand name for relatively short money. I assume it's mainly a stock deal, of course. It's remarkable (and not necessarily in a good way) how things have been distorted.
Microsoft does buy/clone an awful lot of stuff, but they have developed some concepts in-house, too (here's a partial list):
Bought: MS-DOS PowerPoint FoxPro Internet Explorer (originally bought from Spyglass) Visio Hotmail
Cloned: MS Mouse Windows Media Player Streets Plus
Original: Excel (probably their best single original achievment) Word Access
Actually, one thing I give Microsoft credit for is not sticking to the NIH model. If someone else has a good idea, they are willing to buy it. Some companies will just ignore anything they didn't create in-house.
When it comes to integrating their purchases, though, I'd put Microsoft somewhere in the middle of the continuum, with Cisco the best example of hiw to integrate a company, and Computer Associates by far the worst.
To shift gears here, cola brands in general have valuable brand names because that's the only thing most can differentiate themselves on. I'd give you odds that most of the Coke drinkers are there for the image, not the taste. Same with Pepsi and the rest. I think most folks wouldn't recognize their cola in a taste test (except for Moxie drinkers - yecch!). It's all branding.
(Steve Jobs, to John Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water, or do you want to change the world?")
The Civic isn't remarkable so much for what is is today - it's remarkable for being a halfway decent car (if expensive), that applies a technology that ultimately will make a big difference in the way cars are built.
Right now, when my wife and I go to drive somewhere, we have a choice. We can drive her smaller Mazda 626 (she used to do a lot of distance driving), or my bigger Chevy Blazer (more comfy inside, hauls tons o' stuff, but only gets 20 MPG on the highway). Both are compromizes. We like the zippiness and economy of the Mazda, and we both like the roominess and visibility in the Blazer. But the mileage tradeoff is significant.
That said, as time goes by I'm looking farward to seeing the principles from the first-generation hybrids like the Toyota and Honda make their way into larger, more comfortable cars. It might well be possible to make a Blazer that gets 30+ MPG on the highway, or a minivan, or a larger family sedan with this technology.
Ultimately, it works out that I either walk to work or take the Blazer (I work in the town I live in - it's a long walk or short drive). She drives the Mazda to her job a couple of towns away. That way, even though I burn more gas, it still takes me a couple of weeks to go through a tank. Someday, as the technology spreads out, that won't matter. There will still be people who accuse me of unspeakable things because I own a sport-utility, but there are practical reasons to own one (how else can you get to Wasque Point on Chappy with fishing gear?) So I'll still have my ute - and it'll be a better automotive citizen, too. Hopefully this kind of technology (and fuel cells, too, down the road) will increase the efficiency of the whole fleet of cars, minivans, and sport-utilities. Then it won't be so important anymore whether you have a Honda Civic or a Ford Excursion from an energy point of view - because we'll all be using less of it.
- -Josh Turiel
Re:And to paraphrase George Carlin's retort...
on
Slashdot Meets X-Men
·
· Score: 2
"...and sometimes, it's a big, brown dick!"
How true. The challenge, though, for Katz is learning to tell the difference between when a cigar is a cigar, and when it's a dick. Not every story or movie is a parable about Geeks. Some are. But if Katz thinks they all are, then we're going to start snickering at him every time he reviews a movie. Some/.ers already do.
- -Josh Turiel
Katz: Must all be seen thru geek-colored glasses?
on
Slashdot Meets X-Men
·
· Score: 5
First of all: I do not filter Katz. I usually enjoy Katz' pieces. I think Katz is a worthy/. contributor And I think Katz brings us a needed perspective.
That said: Jon, do we need to have _everything_ run through a geek/Columbine filter all the time? Those references run through almost all your work, even when it's overkill. Virtually everyone here "gets" the alienation references in the X-Men, and doesn't need to be bludgeoned further with it.
In the canonical Katz article, we have some reference to: (circle one or more) Geeks/Nerds Columbine (usually referenced as "Post-Columbine) Goths Corporatism All of the above
Jon, you're a terrific writer, and I enjoy your work a lot, but, to paraphrase Freud; "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
So Linux companies are just like other software companies and give away software to reviewers. Big whoop. Not only do reviewers get free software, but so do a lot of tech managers, computer store store employees, user group members, and in fact just about anyone the software publisher thinks that they can sell more softare by giving a copy to.
Remember, people - the effective cost of a single software package, in box, is almost zero. This makes giving it away in large quantities a reasonable deal for the vendor. Microsoft even gives away enormous amounts of their stuff. I'm writing this whilst sitting in my my computer room at home - looking at the bookshelves I'd reckon that almost half the boxes I see there were free or extremely low-cost (like under $50 for a full retail copy of expensive software).
People get free copies of software for reasons other than reviewing. Influence is important, too. I wrote a handful of user group newsletter reviews, one review years back for Linux Journal, and a few other odds and ends, but that only accounts for a fraction of my free boxes of software. I got others sent to me at random when I ran a user group (a NetWare one), others when I worked for resellers, still more when I was running IT at a graphics shop, and more as a "thank you" for beta testing code. It's a routine, common suck-up for software publishers.
The only reason some people are paying attention to free copies of software all of a sudden is because of the proliferation of websites that present opinions and reviews. It's not news. And maybe a handful of people who do reviews for a handful of websites are influenced by getting free software - a tiny number, if it's true at all. Guess what. The same phenomenon will happen in the Windows and Mac worlds, too. It's not just a Linux thing. There's a lot of small enthusiast sites there that get free review stuff, too. Overall, the good stuff gets raves, and the crap gets slammed. Same as it ever was.
C'mon, folks. This is rapidly ceasing to be either News For Nerds or Stuff That Matters.
Virtually every market Corel plays in is a market dominated by another company, relegating them to a poor number 2. Their platform strategy has also been very uneven.
For instance: Corel WordPerfect Office: on Windows it competes with Microsoft Office. Unlike MS Office, Corel's product evolved from two separate companies' products (Borland Quattro and Paradox, WordPerfect) and really never had the advantage of good integration during the critical days before Microsoft locked up the suite market. Not to mention that they bought the WP Office product from Novell who had failed with it, and WordPerfect before that.
CorelDraw: It's probably their best stand-alone product, and the software they made their reputation with. But it's really tough nowadays to compete with Adobe and Macromedia (Illustrator and Freehand), not to mention that Corel's Mac support has been lacking (they alternate between neglect and religion), and the draw market is one where cross-platform compatibiliy and parity have always been critical.
Corel PhotoPaint: See CorelDraw. But it's Photoshop that croaks them there.
Corel Ventura Publisher: Another formerly market-leading product that waited too long to improve, got croaked, and then bought by Corel.
On Windows, Corel had a few good products, but got hurt by some QA issues (buggy releases of WordPerfect and CorelDraw in the past), and they specialize in marketing products that are all past their peaks. They killed off the cross-platform support of WordPerfect (one of WordPerfect's competitive strengths was that it ran on virtually every platform, now it runs on Windows and Linux - the Mac version and all the other platform versions are dead). They pinned all their hopes on a rapid transition to Linux, which has yet to happen. And they'll probably run out of cash before it happens.
Something else that's an issue in the death of a company is perception. People now see Corel as doomed - and their limited cash is forcing them out of events like PC Expo and MacWorld where they could at least try to make themselves look viable. Not to mention that their advertising has dried up, making it worse. I just hope somebody with a clue winds up with these products after Corel hits the FC hall of infamy. The only thing that might turn it around at this point is if Cowpland steps down and puts somebody in with tons of credibility in the industry. Novell got a few very good years with Eric Schmidt (though they're slipping back some now that Win2K is out of vapor), and Jobs saved Apple. I'm not sure who could bail out Corel, but it's sure not Cowpland and they're running out of time fast.
Uh, it's because the i815 is based on the i810 design, but with newer and more bells and whistles, and separate AGP support (i810 just used the embedded graphics controller, i815 lets you disable it). i810 was intended as a low-end "bridge" chipset for use in entry-level systems while the i820 and i840 became established.
I really think Intel wasn't backing Rambus out of any sinister conspiracy scheme - I think they really thought that PC100/PC133 wasn't going to hold up long-term in their roadmap and they needed something better. They had the Rambus investment, and didn't forsee DDR SDRAM. That's why they got caught flatfooted with the i810 being their only non-Rambus chipset and what opened the door to both Via and AMD.
I bet if they could do it all over again they would have started with the i815 as the low-end chipset, which would have both closed the window of opportunity that Via and AMD used to get business, and it would have eliminated the demand for SDRAM support on the i820 (and we all know how that worked out...), since there would have been an equivalent performing SDRAM chipset.
Finally, a lucid explanation of how the Open Source model isn't necessarily the best development model all of the time. It generally makes a lot of sense, and there are a lot of things it's well-suited to, but the points made in this article are valid and real.
Commercial software is typically designed for the simple purpose of making money. Not to make the world a better place, and not to do "something cool for the community" in order to satisfy egos. It's written to provide a useful program that pays the salaries of the people involved. Sure, there's exceptions, but that's the basic gist of it.
That said, what Apple has done is finally come up with a model by which they can exchange something with the community (Darwin), and yet maintain what they feel is their proprietary asset (the consistency of the Mac UI "experience" so they can sell more Macs and make more money for the employees and stockholders. Even though I'd like a little more from them, I'll settle for this. I have Apple stock - I don't want anybody to be able to make a Mac (which is possible when it's all open), but I do want people to be able to take advantage of some of the cool stuff Apple's done to improve other products and systems. It's a decent compromise.
Not every program benefits from Open Source, either, though many do. I love Bungie and Id's giving away old game code to help jumpstart programmers and projects, but you don't see any of them opening up their latest and greatest engines, either. That's because the latest engine is something they can earn money licensing - they leave money on the table if they give the latest stuff away. But at least they share something, if not everything. Corel Linux may be open, but Corel WordPerfect isn't, and never will be, I bet. Companies need revenue somewhere, and unless you're in the systems support business, if you give away razors you need to be able to sell blades. The only reallt open commercial office suite, for instance, is StarOffice. But Sun isn't using StarOffice to make money - they're using it to try and sell Sun equipment and they're giving it away because it may help them towards that goal and because Scott McNealy has a personal vendetta against Bill Gates (but who doesn't?). StarOffice is a razor, and Sun workstations and servers (and their little bitty SunRays) are the blades in this scenario.
I think that the Mac overall will do just fine with no more Open Source contact than they have right now - but I would like to see more. Some programs will benefit from being opened, some will not. People like ESR (and a lot of the/. community) want everything to be open, RMS (and another huge group of/.ers) want everything to be Free. The real world is far more nuanced than that, for better or for worse.
Common sense says "my network is my property, and mine alone to allow visitors".
However, the IP address space is a public resource, documented and available to any who are willing to participate. You can look up any address block and find out who owns it if you want (like a Registry of Deeds here in most US states). And in order to get a block, you have to agree to the "rules".
The question I'd ask here is "where is the boundary between public and private property?" Obviously, if a system is accessible over the Internet and a service is available, then that service, at least, probably meets the requirements of "public", even if the owner doesn't realize that the service is accessible. Using that service may be public, even though it's not polite.
I'd say if it's behind a firewall that blocks the pings, or not accessible through a NAT export, then it's private. Kind of like the difference between a gated community and a regular old subdivision, to use an imperfect analogy. I can drive into a subdivision, map and photograph every street and house I see, and then use the information for whatever legal purpose I want (I could legally sell it to people wanting, for instance, to publish guides to preferred neighborhoods). I'm free to look at the houses so long as I don't actually trespass on the private property that they rest on.
If I want to map and document a gated gommunity, though, the street is private and blocked off, with restricted access. I need the permission of whoever runs the gatehouse to go inside and map the streets and houses within. If I can see all the houses without having to go through the gatehouse I can still take my photographs, though.
And there's the conundrum. If I block all inbound access to my network (except for exported hosts), then the scans will be stopped at my gatehouse (firewall), and only the things I have chosen to make visible will be mapped. Those systems are public, though my network is private.
Where this company is being unethical is in trying to do this activity as stealthily as possible. If a surveyor wants to try and map my neighborhood, fine. Let them show me their credentials and announce their presence. If I see someone skulking around in the middle of the night in a car with the lights dimmed, who pauses in front of each house for a while, I just may think they're up to no good. And someone else may think that and either call the cops (the offending visitor's ISP) or just shoot 'em.
If I don't want to be mapped (and I, for one, don't), I'll erect my own gate and cordon off my address space that way. If someone sneaks in anyway then I may shoot the varmint myself.
Mainframes don't just have faster memory - in fact, the DRAM used may even be slower. It's the overall I/O, the speed at which the mainframe talks to peripherals and storage, the speed and caching in the storage systems, and the ability of the mainframe to do all these things at full blast simultaneously. The speed advantage to a mainframe, as you indicate, isn't one of CPU power per se - it's the ability the mainframe has to walk and chew gum whilst simultaneously rubbing its tummy, so to speak.
The memory difference isn't just one of memory interleaving (many boards do that now), or the memory-side bus. All PC processors get their speed from outrageous multipliers - which accounts for a couple of things to today's systems:
1: The tight code loops of a lot of benchmarks operate mainly from cache - creating way-high scores.
2: There isn't that much difference between a 1 GHz processor and a 600 MHz processor in real-world usage. Some things will be faster, but many more virtually unaffected.
Mainframe buses don't have the bandwidth restrictions that PC buses have. And when you think about it, we have 10x multipliers on PC processors, but the bus has only improved 4x since the 486 and the glory days of the 33 MHz bus. Most servers need faster I/O buses, not faster processors. When 64-bit 2x PCI is commonplace (or something better), and the FSB hits 250 MHz, and the operating systems finally become worthy of all that horsepower is when the PC will really start to make a dent in the mainframe's world. Until then, there's a reason why a mainframe will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a PC server will cost (at most) tens of thousands. PC servers are neat, and they do a pretty good job at what they are designed for - but it ain't no mainframe.
You're right - it does sound real close to a laptop. I think that real "post-PC devices" will take advantage of flash memory, improved LCD technology (not necessarily in the full-color, XGA-class form factor), and a mixture of chicklet keyboards (when applicable) and stylus input for navigation and editing. The other thing that can help these devices is some of the newer lithium battery technology where you can pretty much mold the battery to the available space.
The advantage to leveraging software doesn't come in just recycling Win32 cruft (or Unix cruft, for that matter). Photoshop on a tablet is probably a waste of a tablet and a waste of Photoshop as well. But a simplified sketch application that can re-use some Photoshop code on top of Unix API's might be a hit. Likewise, I'm not suggesting that Word (or StarOffice, for that matter) would be a program that should or could be ported. A tablet application would probably be far simpler, and a "terminal appliance" that fits into a PC form factor but uses far less power (and generates far less heat) might use a more robust app. But good development can allow a vendor to re-use a lot of code in between.
I don't see us running today's x86 software on these devices as is - but there is some potential, more so than if you have to write from scratch. Despite the elegance and simplicity of the Palm OS (and I'm addicted to my Palm Vx), there is very little potential to bring software over to the platform from other systems. It's not easy at all, though it is do-able. Mobile Linux at least has the potential to be better than that - code reuse doesn't necessarily mean application reuse, though. Thank heavens.
With Crusoe, Transmeta is playing in the second-most cutthroat market next to DRAM - the x86 CPU business. At one point, there were a plethora of x86 CPU's on the market. Now there is basically just AMD and Intel (I know Cyrix still exists through Via, but it's in a small niche until proven otherwise). And as much power as mobile chips burn, the other components burn as much or more power in operation, meaning that there will have to be some pretty darn compelling advantages to Crusoe for it to get design wins in traditional laptop systems. This is where Transmeta wants to play.
The caveat to this gloom is that Transmeta's chips can also be used for newer, non-laptop devices that can use different components and lower power budgets than traditional PC laptops. Mobile Linux is a factor here, too - the chips usually deployed in this product space (Motorola Dragonball - Palm, Intel StrongARM - the late Newton, WinCE, and others, Hitachi SH3 - WinCE, and a few other chips, too) have excellent performance and are generally light on power draw, but do not offer x86 compatibility. Transmeta brings that to the table with much less power usage than the AMD or Intel alternatives. This will allow companies to leverage the existing x86 software base and Unix software much easier than other platforms do. The "post-PC" market is where Transmeta will live or die.
The other thing to remember in this market is the cost factor. Intel and AMD already charge low prices for their mobile chipsets. Transmeta isn't trying to compete on a "bang-for-the-buck" basis, because they'll get slaughtered that way. Transmeta can't afford to go up against Intel directly like that, nor can they even afford to take on AMD. The answer is to "hit 'em where they ain't", to paraphrase Wee Willie Keeler, and play for the wireless, appliance, and PDA markets against those specialty chips.
It's definitely do-able, and Transmeta may get a few design wins in the laptop market as well - but any laptop chip sales are almost gravy on top of the appliance market. There's room for another player there - why not Transmeta?
To 1984. Apple has just shipped Macintosh, and the realization is just hitting everybody (even the Apple II division - remember the IIgs?) that "you know, mice, pointing, and graphics are the One True Path". Microsoft starts working on a program called Windows (which doesn't surface until 3 years later, starting a trend for the company), Atari starts working on the ST (the legendary "Jackintosh", and Commodore gets the Amiga project underway.
Of all those, Amiga does something truly different, using nifty custom chips to give the machine a rich color palette and animation capabilities far ahead of it's time. The OS is pretty slick, too, and uses the hardware well.
Years pass. Commodore and Atari join the dustbin of history along with the Berlin Wall. Amiga survives briefly, being passed from owner to owner. After exhausting the capabilities of Motorola's dated 68000 processor series, PowerPC upgrades start hitting the marketplace, but few notice the improved performance possible. Thanks to a neat product called Video Toaster, Amiga has enough of an installed base that the market doesn't die completely, but it starts the long, slow fade into oblivion.
Cut to a couple of years ago - Gateway buys the remains of Amiga and potimism flares up that, in fact, they'll take the plunge into a new platform and out of the Wintel business. These plans, too, fizzle - Amiga instead becomes a "set of technologies" and an "information appliance", and it dies again. A handful of Amiga division people manage to extricate themselves from Gateway's clutches and split Amiga back away from Gateway.
Today, Amiga is now just another OS for Intel-based PC's. Whoopee do. As a platform, Amiga had the promise of continuity to the installed base, plus the opportunity to pick up converts from the weakened Microsoft monopoly. Apple's continued existence and profits prove that there is still a market for different platforms, if you give people a good reason to buy them.
The catch here is that Amiga now will have to compete with Be, Linux, Microsoft, and perhaps even Apple (if Darwin/OS X makes the jump to Intel) for mind and market share. It's not the same box anymore - it's just another Intel-based OS, though one that old Amiga software can be ported to relatively easily.
Though enough old Amiga users may buy generic boxes to run the "new" OS-only Amiga that Amiga will survive for a time, I think the ballgame's over. By dropping the hardware plans, they may have conserved capital (developing hardware is expensive, especially non-Wintel stuff - don't underestimate Apple's development costs), but at the sacrifice of long-term viability.
Meanwhile, Amiga remains the Rasputin of platforms. It just won't die!
- -Josh Turiel
If you just want Windows code, develop on Windows
on
Why Develop On Linux?
·
· Score: 2
The advantage of developing on Linux (or just about any Unix) is that it's a consistent, simple, and well-documented environment, with good portability to other platforms. If you develop on Windows as your primary platform, it's easy to get trapped into using hidden and undocumented API's that don't behave consistently from version to version, and it's real easy to wind up with Windows-only code.
Windows-only code isn't automatically a Bad Thing, but it does reduce your options going forward, and it links you inextricably to the Beast. Should there be a strategic need to change platforms a some point, it's going to be a more difficult task to go from Windows to Unix (or whatever) than the other way around.
That said, Visual Studio is a fairly slick IDE, though there are nice IDE's on Linux, as well. If you're developing for Windows, Visual Studio is really nice.
- -Josh Turiel
I'm a lot more interested in their cheaper upgrade
on
Power Up That iMac
·
· Score: 4
For $300, you get a 400MHz board with 512k of cache - a much better deal for most. $500 to upgrade an older Rev. A through D iMac isn't such a big whoop, when you're constrained to Rage Pro graphics and a 66 MHz system bus. But for $300 (OK, $299), it's a nice way to kick a little life into the old iMac. I may get one for my wife's iMac, and then set her up with ViaVoice once she has the processor to chew through it properly.
Just to point it out, the current 2.0 iMacs run at 350 and 400 MHz, but with a 100 MHz system bus and the ability to use standard SDRAM DIMMs (not the laptop SO-DIMMs the older ones use). This processor upgrade is only for the older ones.
The one other thing to keep in mind is that Apple is almost a lock to announce new iMacs at Macworld next month, given that the current line dates back to October with no changes since then. At the very least, expect a speed bump in the current models, with possibly more RAM added, and maybe things like a DVD added to the low end model and price cuts as well. Apple makes a lot of profit on iMacs, relative to most low-end systems.
Oh yeah - it went over like a fart in church. Never mind.
Seriously - one of the advantages of having a boatload of cash is that you can go out and buy all the things you need to keep some innovation alive. But Microsoft hasn't done much original stuff since the first version of Excel (which, ironically, shipped on the Mac first).
An awful lot of the products and tools they've hung their hats on over the years have been bought, in fact. A much abbreviated list of some of their significant purchases goes like this:
MS-DOS (purchased, an X86 clone of CP/M)
PowerPoint (they bought Nashoba Systems, the company behind that, Nutshell, and FileMaker)
Visio (just bought last fall)
FrontPage (they bought Vermeer)
Hotmail
WebTV
And in gaming, they bought Access Software (the Links people), and they have the publishing deal that got Age of Empires produced.
Is there anything wrong with that, though? I really don't think so. If a company wants to play in a particular marketplace they can either roll their own, or buy someone who has it ready-made. Cisco has executed that strategy brilliantly, but they get lauded for it because (a) they aren't seen as pure evil, and (b) they have integrated companies pretty seamlessly.
So purchasing Bungie isn't necessarily bad. If Bungie gets to keep doing what they're doing (so long as it makes money), than there's nothing wrong with the transaction. Microsoft gets guaranteed good content for the X-box when it ships (Bungie is a pretty darn solid gaming company), other platforms continue to get their fair share of software, and everybody makes money. I won't not buy a new Bungie game because it's now Microsoft, but I won't buy it if it sucks, regardless of the publisher. And if they stop producing Mac and Linux games, then they're leaving money on the table. I'm sure the Mac side is profitable, and very possibly the Linux side too.
Speaking of things oral - Woody Allen once told a joke that went something like this:
"I'd like to say a brief word now about oral contraception.
[pause]
I had an experience with oral contraception, just the other day...
[bigger pause]
I asked a woman to sleep with me - and she said no."
(badda-bing!)
Actually, it was quite risque for the early Sixties... And the album it's on, "Standup Comic" is a classic. Woody in his day practically invented the cerebral one liner.
Of course, your get rich quick method has probably been used to copy floppies more than once - or so the apocryphal tech support stories go.
Actually, I keep 2 sets of batteries and a charger handy for my Quicktake - it works pretty well for a low-end camera like that one. But for the mass market to take off, we need battery life comparable to a heavily used conventional camera, where you drop a new photo lithium battery in it every few months and then shoot away. Then you only need one spare in your pack, and if it dies you can replace it at any store.
Digital camera power consumption is way higher than that for most uses. There are ways you can minimize battery consumption, but since most cameras offer no real TTL viewfinders, the LCD is a valuable substitute. The other caveat is that conventional camera users don't have to worry about power management, so I figure that digital users shouldn't have to, either.
Granted, this is a very high, difficult standard, but it should be the target that camera makers shoot for. The natural price curves that happen over time will bring a camera with the features I want into the target price range, but it'll take some really good engineering to hit the power budgets that I'd like to see.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy CD's now, and I don't go to movies, either. I'm not as absolute about movies, though - I have a ton of free Blockbuster rental coupons I'm still using (from a giveaway when I bought my DVD player last year), and I borrow DVD's from my local library, too. I won't pay for them until the DeCSS lawsuit is either thrown out by the court or dropped by the plaintiffs.
Not that I spent a ton of money on rentals or going to the movies before the lawsuit, but I'm trying to be consistent. without movies, I watch even less TV than I did before - my television viewing nowadays is pretty much confined to local news, Red Sox games, and WWF Smackdown (even though Fox carries the Sox and Paramount carries the WWF).
It's tough to live your whole life in a vacuum, though, even if you try. I wish there were more independent places to get music and film, but maybe that'll be one of the things that comes out of all this legal wrangling that's going on.
- -Josh Turiel
I agree that the RIAA should be avoided at all costs, and not just for the month of August - until they get a clue. That doesn't mean that Napster is a Good Thing, though. Napster is a neat idea, that has folks behind it who are just as greedy as the labels - they just haven't figured out how to turn their movement into dollars yet.
Sharing music is a reasonable thing, given that a lot of trading is of rarities and bootlegs that you can't buy in your local store. My own MP3 usage has been to this pattern:
I rip all my own stuff so I can play it off my PC's.
I download all kinds of TMBG rarities and boots. I've bought all their albums, too.
I download an occasional file that looks interesting, and if it's pretty good I consider buying the album.
Occasionally I exchange files with some of my meatspace friends.
I suspect a lot of Napster users are like me in that sense - it's a tool to complete collections and poke around interesting stuff, rather than just a way of getting all the free songs you can.
I see Napster as being the commercially oriented sacrificial lamb to the greater goal of opening up the distribution system. The cat's out of the bag, and soon the Gnutella's of the world will be dominant and unstoppable - and nobody will be able to stop it since there's no commercial shop behind the software.
If the RIAA had a clue, though, they'd adapt Gnutella to their own ends and provide for micropayments as part of it. The fact that they don't is just proving that the established order just doesn't Get It.
- -Josh Turiel
It's not like the answering machine can watch TV - why try and convince it to? That must be ABC's target audience, since humans have a tendency to do one of two things when they get an ad on their answering machine, either:
A: fast forward through the message. Newer machines just let you skip with a single button push.
B: Get so angry at this blatant waste of time and invasion of personal space that they actively avoid the ABC network, even if it means skipping Regis.
This makes no sense at all. Anyone who'd be influenced positively by an answering machine ad is probably too stupid to own and operate a machine in the first place, and accordingly has a job that pays so bad they can't afford any of the crap that gets advertised on ABC to begin with.
Hell, most systems only work when a human answers, they don't hang up. The only people who should be considering running answering machine ads for ABC are the other networks. If NBC ran ads for ABC that way, they'd be so pissed at ABC they might well skip their Regis fix.
- -Josh Turiel
If a movie sucks, it doesn't matter if it's animated with cardboard paper, claymation, computers, or live action. It still sucks. Titan AE had no real clear market, no "core constituency" of people who'd see it, like it, and spread the word. It also had to go up against MI:2, which was essentially a cartoon done with live actors (a John Woo trademark), and that further sealed it's doom.
One of the many problems in Hollywood is that a studio will release something original, thoughtful, and creative, and that triggers a huge wave of "me too" copies. Disney has success with animation? Let's all get into animation!
Since "Chicken Run" was a hit, there'll probably be a huge wave of Claymation films coming up. Nobody understands why Chicken Run was a hit - they just understand that it made a lot of money. Duh.
Remember this mentality when we complain about the utter lack of clues that groups like the RIAA show. This is how they think. They can't see any farther than the first dollar signs, and reflexively avoid doing anything different. As soon as someone stumbles across a way to make money using digital technology (like MP3), every studio will jump on board. And if they come up with a way to make money selling unencumbered DVD's, they'll all shift within days.
In Hollywood, it's all about two things: not risking your job if possible, and, of course, the Benjamins!
- -Josh Turiel
Yeah, me too, but at least AOL has a lot of real, revenue-producing customers and makes a consistent profit. They may or may not be overvalued, but at least they have some real value.
.com, on the other hand, with minimal revenue and ample "upside". In other words, a company that has far too high a valuation.
CNET is a pure
- -Josh Turiel
Until relatively recently, a buyout would be the other way around. Ziff-Davis was a large-scale cash machine, with print, web, and TV media, an educational presence, a successful trade show division (they put on N+I, Comdex, and Seybold among others). Not all the ventures were profitable, but they were an old-fashioned media conglomerate, with IDG their only serious competitor.
.com manages to buy up what's left of a formerly significant brand name for relatively short money. I assume it's mainly a stock deal, of course. It's remarkable (and not necessarily in a good way) how things have been distorted.
Then Z-D started spinning out businesses and taking on outside dollars as the Ziff family all cashed out. Today, most of the above-mentioned businesses are separate, and a money-losing
- -Josh Turiel
Microsoft does buy/clone an awful lot of stuff, but they have developed some concepts in-house, too (here's a partial list):
Bought:
MS-DOS
PowerPoint
FoxPro
Internet Explorer (originally bought from Spyglass)
Visio
Hotmail
Cloned:
MS Mouse
Windows
Media Player
Streets Plus
Original:
Excel (probably their best single original achievment)
Word
Access
Actually, one thing I give Microsoft credit for is not sticking to the NIH model. If someone else has a good idea, they are willing to buy it. Some companies will just ignore anything they didn't create in-house.
When it comes to integrating their purchases, though, I'd put Microsoft somewhere in the middle of the continuum, with Cisco the best example of hiw to integrate a company, and Computer Associates by far the worst.
To shift gears here, cola brands in general have valuable brand names because that's the only thing most can differentiate themselves on. I'd give you odds that most of the Coke drinkers are there for the image, not the taste. Same with Pepsi and the rest. I think most folks wouldn't recognize their cola in a taste test (except for Moxie drinkers - yecch!). It's all branding.
(Steve Jobs, to John Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water, or do you want to change the world?")
- -Josh Turiel
The Civic isn't remarkable so much for what is is today - it's remarkable for being a halfway decent car (if expensive), that applies a technology that ultimately will make a big difference in the way cars are built.
Right now, when my wife and I go to drive somewhere, we have a choice. We can drive her smaller Mazda 626 (she used to do a lot of distance driving), or my bigger Chevy Blazer (more comfy inside, hauls tons o' stuff, but only gets 20 MPG on the highway). Both are compromizes. We like the zippiness and economy of the Mazda, and we both like the roominess and visibility in the Blazer. But the mileage tradeoff is significant.
That said, as time goes by I'm looking farward to seeing the principles from the first-generation hybrids like the Toyota and Honda make their way into larger, more comfortable cars. It might well be possible to make a Blazer that gets 30+ MPG on the highway, or a minivan, or a larger family sedan with this technology.
Ultimately, it works out that I either walk to work or take the Blazer (I work in the town I live in - it's a long walk or short drive). She drives the Mazda to her job a couple of towns away. That way, even though I burn more gas, it still takes me a couple of weeks to go through a tank. Someday, as the technology spreads out, that won't matter. There will still be people who accuse me of unspeakable things because I own a sport-utility, but there are practical reasons to own one (how else can you get to Wasque Point on Chappy with fishing gear?) So I'll still have my ute - and it'll be a better automotive citizen, too. Hopefully this kind of technology (and fuel cells, too, down the road) will increase the efficiency of the whole fleet of cars, minivans, and sport-utilities. Then it won't be so important anymore whether you have a Honda Civic or a Ford Excursion from an energy point of view - because we'll all be using less of it.
- -Josh Turiel
- -Josh Turiel
First of all: /. contributor
I do not filter Katz.
I usually enjoy Katz' pieces.
I think Katz is a worthy
And I think Katz brings us a needed perspective.
That said:
Jon, do we need to have _everything_ run through a geek/Columbine filter all the time? Those references run through almost all your work, even when it's overkill. Virtually everyone here "gets" the alienation references in the X-Men, and doesn't need to be bludgeoned further with it.
In the canonical Katz article, we have some reference to: (circle one or more)
Geeks/Nerds
Columbine (usually referenced as "Post-Columbine)
Goths
Corporatism
All of the above
Jon, you're a terrific writer, and I enjoy your work a lot, but, to paraphrase Freud; "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
- -Josh Turiel
So Linux companies are just like other software companies and give away software to reviewers. Big whoop. Not only do reviewers get free software, but so do a lot of tech managers, computer store store employees, user group members, and in fact just about anyone the software publisher thinks that they can sell more softare by giving a copy to.
Remember, people - the effective cost of a single software package, in box, is almost zero. This makes giving it away in large quantities a reasonable deal for the vendor. Microsoft even gives away enormous amounts of their stuff. I'm writing this whilst sitting in my my computer room at home - looking at the bookshelves I'd reckon that almost half the boxes I see there were free or extremely low-cost (like under $50 for a full retail copy of expensive software).
People get free copies of software for reasons other than reviewing. Influence is important, too. I wrote a handful of user group newsletter reviews, one review years back for Linux Journal, and a few other odds and ends, but that only accounts for a fraction of my free boxes of software. I got others sent to me at random when I ran a user group (a NetWare one), others when I worked for resellers, still more when I was running IT at a graphics shop, and more as a "thank you" for beta testing code. It's a routine, common suck-up for software publishers.
The only reason some people are paying attention to free copies of software all of a sudden is because of the proliferation of websites that present opinions and reviews. It's not news. And maybe a handful of people who do reviews for a handful of websites are influenced by getting free software - a tiny number, if it's true at all. Guess what. The same phenomenon will happen in the Windows and Mac worlds, too. It's not just a Linux thing. There's a lot of small enthusiast sites there that get free review stuff, too. Overall, the good stuff gets raves, and the crap gets slammed. Same as it ever was.
C'mon, folks. This is rapidly ceasing to be either News For Nerds or Stuff That Matters.
- -Josh Turiel
Virtually every market Corel plays in is a market dominated by another company, relegating them to a poor number 2. Their platform strategy has also been very uneven.
For instance:
Corel WordPerfect Office: on Windows it competes with Microsoft Office. Unlike MS Office, Corel's product evolved from two separate companies' products (Borland Quattro and Paradox, WordPerfect) and really never had the advantage of good integration during the critical days before Microsoft locked up the suite market. Not to mention that they bought the WP Office product from Novell who had failed with it, and WordPerfect before that.
CorelDraw: It's probably their best stand-alone product, and the software they made their reputation with. But it's really tough nowadays to compete with Adobe and Macromedia (Illustrator and Freehand), not to mention that Corel's Mac support has been lacking (they alternate between neglect and religion), and the draw market is one where cross-platform compatibiliy and parity have always been critical.
Corel PhotoPaint: See CorelDraw. But it's Photoshop that croaks them there.
Corel Ventura Publisher: Another formerly market-leading product that waited too long to improve, got croaked, and then bought by Corel.
On Windows, Corel had a few good products, but got hurt by some QA issues (buggy releases of WordPerfect and CorelDraw in the past), and they specialize in marketing products that are all past their peaks. They killed off the cross-platform support of WordPerfect (one of WordPerfect's competitive strengths was that it ran on virtually every platform, now it runs on Windows and Linux - the Mac version and all the other platform versions are dead). They pinned all their hopes on a rapid transition to Linux, which has yet to happen. And they'll probably run out of cash before it happens.
Something else that's an issue in the death of a company is perception. People now see Corel as doomed - and their limited cash is forcing them out of events like PC Expo and MacWorld where they could at least try to make themselves look viable. Not to mention that their advertising has dried up, making it worse. I just hope somebody with a clue winds up with these products after Corel hits the FC hall of infamy. The only thing that might turn it around at this point is if Cowpland steps down and puts somebody in with tons of credibility in the industry. Novell got a few very good years with Eric Schmidt (though they're slipping back some now that Win2K is out of vapor), and Jobs saved Apple. I'm not sure who could bail out Corel, but it's sure not Cowpland and they're running out of time fast.
I give Corel until New Year's. Max.
- -Josh Turiel
Uh, it's because the i815 is based on the i810 design, but with newer and more bells and whistles, and separate AGP support (i810 just used the embedded graphics controller, i815 lets you disable it). i810 was intended as a low-end "bridge" chipset for use in entry-level systems while the i820 and i840 became established.
I really think Intel wasn't backing Rambus out of any sinister conspiracy scheme - I think they really thought that PC100/PC133 wasn't going to hold up long-term in their roadmap and they needed something better. They had the Rambus investment, and didn't forsee DDR SDRAM. That's why they got caught flatfooted with the i810 being their only non-Rambus chipset and what opened the door to both Via and AMD.
I bet if they could do it all over again they would have started with the i815 as the low-end chipset, which would have both closed the window of opportunity that Via and AMD used to get business, and it would have eliminated the demand for SDRAM support on the i820 (and we all know how that worked out...), since there would have been an equivalent performing SDRAM chipset.
Even Intel screws up sometimes, though.
- -Josh Turiel
Wow.
/. community) want everything to be open, RMS (and another huge group of /.ers) want everything to be Free. The real world is far more nuanced than that, for better or for worse.
Finally, a lucid explanation of how the Open Source model isn't necessarily the best development model all of the time. It generally makes a lot of sense, and there are a lot of things it's well-suited to, but the points made in this article are valid and real.
Commercial software is typically designed for the simple purpose of making money. Not to make the world a better place, and not to do "something cool for the community" in order to satisfy egos. It's written to provide a useful program that pays the salaries of the people involved. Sure, there's exceptions, but that's the basic gist of it.
That said, what Apple has done is finally come up with a model by which they can exchange something with the community (Darwin), and yet maintain what they feel is their proprietary asset (the consistency of the Mac UI "experience" so they can sell more Macs and make more money for the employees and stockholders. Even though I'd like a little more from them, I'll settle for this. I have Apple stock - I don't want anybody to be able to make a Mac (which is possible when it's all open), but I do want people to be able to take advantage of some of the cool stuff Apple's done to improve other products and systems. It's a decent compromise.
Not every program benefits from Open Source, either, though many do. I love Bungie and Id's giving away old game code to help jumpstart programmers and projects, but you don't see any of them opening up their latest and greatest engines, either. That's because the latest engine is something they can earn money licensing - they leave money on the table if they give the latest stuff away. But at least they share something, if not everything. Corel Linux may be open, but Corel WordPerfect isn't, and never will be, I bet. Companies need revenue somewhere, and unless you're in the systems support business, if you give away razors you need to be able to sell blades. The only reallt open commercial office suite, for instance, is StarOffice. But Sun isn't using StarOffice to make money - they're using it to try and sell Sun equipment and they're giving it away because it may help them towards that goal and because Scott McNealy has a personal vendetta against Bill Gates (but who doesn't?). StarOffice is a razor, and Sun workstations and servers (and their little bitty SunRays) are the blades in this scenario.
I think that the Mac overall will do just fine with no more Open Source contact than they have right now - but I would like to see more. Some programs will benefit from being opened, some will not. People like ESR (and a lot of the
- -Josh Turiel
Common sense says "my network is my property, and mine alone to allow visitors".
However, the IP address space is a public resource, documented and available to any who are willing to participate. You can look up any address block and find out who owns it if you want (like a Registry of Deeds here in most US states). And in order to get a block, you have to agree to the "rules".
The question I'd ask here is "where is the boundary between public and private property?" Obviously, if a system is accessible over the Internet and a service is available, then that service, at least, probably meets the requirements of "public", even if the owner doesn't realize that the service is accessible. Using that service may be public, even though it's not polite.
I'd say if it's behind a firewall that blocks the pings, or not accessible through a NAT export, then it's private. Kind of like the difference between a gated community and a regular old subdivision, to use an imperfect analogy. I can drive into a subdivision, map and photograph every street and house I see, and then use the information for whatever legal purpose I want (I could legally sell it to people wanting, for instance, to publish guides to preferred neighborhoods). I'm free to look at the houses so long as I don't actually trespass on the private property that they rest on.
If I want to map and document a gated gommunity, though, the street is private and blocked off, with restricted access. I need the permission of whoever runs the gatehouse to go inside and map the streets and houses within. If I can see all the houses without having to go through the gatehouse I can still take my photographs, though.
And there's the conundrum. If I block all inbound access to my network (except for exported hosts), then the scans will be stopped at my gatehouse (firewall), and only the things I have chosen to make visible will be mapped. Those systems are public, though my network is private.
Where this company is being unethical is in trying to do this activity as stealthily as possible. If a surveyor wants to try and map my neighborhood, fine. Let them show me their credentials and announce their presence. If I see someone skulking around in the middle of the night in a car with the lights dimmed, who pauses in front of each house for a while, I just may think they're up to no good. And someone else may think that and either call the cops (the offending visitor's ISP) or just shoot 'em.
If I don't want to be mapped (and I, for one, don't), I'll erect my own gate and cordon off my address space that way. If someone sneaks in anyway then I may shoot the varmint myself.
- -Josh Turiel
Mainframes don't just have faster memory - in fact, the DRAM used may even be slower. It's the overall I/O, the speed at which the mainframe talks to peripherals and storage, the speed and caching in the storage systems, and the ability of the mainframe to do all these things at full blast simultaneously. The speed advantage to a mainframe, as you indicate, isn't one of CPU power per se - it's the ability the mainframe has to walk and chew gum whilst simultaneously rubbing its tummy, so to speak.
The memory difference isn't just one of memory interleaving (many boards do that now), or the memory-side bus. All PC processors get their speed from outrageous multipliers - which accounts for a couple of things to today's systems:
1: The tight code loops of a lot of benchmarks operate mainly from cache - creating way-high scores.
2: There isn't that much difference between a 1 GHz processor and a 600 MHz processor in real-world usage. Some things will be faster, but many more virtually unaffected.
Mainframe buses don't have the bandwidth restrictions that PC buses have. And when you think about it, we have 10x multipliers on PC processors, but the bus has only improved 4x since the 486 and the glory days of the 33 MHz bus. Most servers need faster I/O buses, not faster processors. When 64-bit 2x PCI is commonplace (or something better), and the FSB hits 250 MHz, and the operating systems finally become worthy of all that horsepower is when the PC will really start to make a dent in the mainframe's world. Until then, there's a reason why a mainframe will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a PC server will cost (at most) tens of thousands. PC servers are neat, and they do a pretty good job at what they are designed for - but it ain't no mainframe.
- -Josh Turiel
You're right - it does sound real close to a laptop. I think that real "post-PC devices" will take advantage of flash memory, improved LCD technology (not necessarily in the full-color, XGA-class form factor), and a mixture of chicklet keyboards (when applicable) and stylus input for navigation and editing. The other thing that can help these devices is some of the newer lithium battery technology where you can pretty much mold the battery to the available space.
The advantage to leveraging software doesn't come in just recycling Win32 cruft (or Unix cruft, for that matter). Photoshop on a tablet is probably a waste of a tablet and a waste of Photoshop as well. But a simplified sketch application that can re-use some Photoshop code on top of Unix API's might be a hit. Likewise, I'm not suggesting that Word (or StarOffice, for that matter) would be a program that should or could be ported. A tablet application would probably be far simpler, and a "terminal appliance" that fits into a PC form factor but uses far less power (and generates far less heat) might use a more robust app. But good development can allow a vendor to re-use a lot of code in between.
I don't see us running today's x86 software on these devices as is - but there is some potential, more so than if you have to write from scratch. Despite the elegance and simplicity of the Palm OS (and I'm addicted to my Palm Vx), there is very little potential to bring software over to the platform from other systems. It's not easy at all, though it is do-able. Mobile Linux at least has the potential to be better than that - code reuse doesn't necessarily mean application reuse, though. Thank heavens.
- -Josh Turiel
With Crusoe, Transmeta is playing in the second-most cutthroat market next to DRAM - the x86 CPU business. At one point, there were a plethora of x86 CPU's on the market. Now there is basically just AMD and Intel (I know Cyrix still exists through Via, but it's in a small niche until proven otherwise). And as much power as mobile chips burn, the other components burn as much or more power in operation, meaning that there will have to be some pretty darn compelling advantages to Crusoe for it to get design wins in traditional laptop systems. This is where Transmeta wants to play.
The caveat to this gloom is that Transmeta's chips can also be used for newer, non-laptop devices that can use different components and lower power budgets than traditional PC laptops. Mobile Linux is a factor here, too - the chips usually deployed in this product space (Motorola Dragonball - Palm, Intel StrongARM - the late Newton, WinCE, and others, Hitachi SH3 - WinCE, and a few other chips, too) have excellent performance and are generally light on power draw, but do not offer x86 compatibility. Transmeta brings that to the table with much less power usage than the AMD or Intel alternatives. This will allow companies to leverage the existing x86 software base and Unix software much easier than other platforms do. The "post-PC" market is where Transmeta will live or die.
The other thing to remember in this market is the cost factor. Intel and AMD already charge low prices for their mobile chipsets. Transmeta isn't trying to compete on a "bang-for-the-buck" basis, because they'll get slaughtered that way. Transmeta can't afford to go up against Intel directly like that, nor can they even afford to take on AMD. The answer is to "hit 'em where they ain't", to paraphrase Wee Willie Keeler, and play for the wireless, appliance, and PDA markets against those specialty chips.
It's definitely do-able, and Transmeta may get a few design wins in the laptop market as well - but any laptop chip sales are almost gravy on top of the appliance market. There's room for another player there - why not Transmeta?
- -Josh Turiel
"...this man, Jeff, 'Hemos' Bates, to be your lawfully wedded husband?"
Adrienne: "Bates? I thought you said your name was 'Jeff Gates'?!!
Hemos (wipes brow nervously): "No, sweetie, you must have mis-heard me that night..."
Adrienne: "You mean, you're not related to the Microsoft guy?"
Hemos: "No."
Adrienne: "You mean you're not worth billions?"
Hemos: "Well, no - but I help run Slashdot.org (Rob & company smile and wave), and I've got a bunch of VA Linux stock!"
Adrienne: "How much is 'a bunch', and what's the closing price as of yesterday?"
(somebody runs off to find a paper for the quote while Jeff tells her how many shares he has)
Adrienne (after checking the number and calling her financial planner): "Oh, okay... I guess we'll keep going. But I want a house on a lake, too!"
Congrats, Hemos. Welcome to the marriage club. Just remember the words, "Yes dear", and it'll be a terrific life for both of you!
- -Josh Turiel
To 1984. Apple has just shipped Macintosh, and the realization is just hitting everybody (even the Apple II division - remember the IIgs?) that "you know, mice, pointing, and graphics are the One True Path". Microsoft starts working on a program called Windows (which doesn't surface until 3 years later, starting a trend for the company), Atari starts working on the ST (the legendary "Jackintosh", and Commodore gets the Amiga project underway.
Of all those, Amiga does something truly different, using nifty custom chips to give the machine a rich color palette and animation capabilities far ahead of it's time. The OS is pretty slick, too, and uses the hardware well.
Years pass. Commodore and Atari join the dustbin of history along with the Berlin Wall. Amiga survives briefly, being passed from owner to owner. After exhausting the capabilities of Motorola's dated 68000 processor series, PowerPC upgrades start hitting the marketplace, but few notice the improved performance possible. Thanks to a neat product called Video Toaster, Amiga has enough of an installed base that the market doesn't die completely, but it starts the long, slow fade into oblivion.
Cut to a couple of years ago - Gateway buys the remains of Amiga and potimism flares up that, in fact, they'll take the plunge into a new platform and out of the Wintel business. These plans, too, fizzle - Amiga instead becomes a "set of technologies" and an "information appliance", and it dies again. A handful of Amiga division people manage to extricate themselves from Gateway's clutches and split Amiga back away from Gateway.
Today, Amiga is now just another OS for Intel-based PC's. Whoopee do. As a platform, Amiga had the promise of continuity to the installed base, plus the opportunity to pick up converts from the weakened Microsoft monopoly. Apple's continued existence and profits prove that there is still a market for different platforms, if you give people a good reason to buy them.
The catch here is that Amiga now will have to compete with Be, Linux, Microsoft, and perhaps even Apple (if Darwin/OS X makes the jump to Intel) for mind and market share. It's not the same box anymore - it's just another Intel-based OS, though one that old Amiga software can be ported to relatively easily.
Though enough old Amiga users may buy generic boxes to run the "new" OS-only Amiga that Amiga will survive for a time, I think the ballgame's over. By dropping the hardware plans, they may have conserved capital (developing hardware is expensive, especially non-Wintel stuff - don't underestimate Apple's development costs), but at the sacrifice of long-term viability.
Meanwhile, Amiga remains the Rasputin of platforms. It just won't die!
- -Josh Turiel
The advantage of developing on Linux (or just about any Unix) is that it's a consistent, simple, and well-documented environment, with good portability to other platforms. If you develop on Windows as your primary platform, it's easy to get trapped into using hidden and undocumented API's that don't behave consistently from version to version, and it's real easy to wind up with Windows-only code.
Windows-only code isn't automatically a Bad Thing, but it does reduce your options going forward, and it links you inextricably to the Beast. Should there be a strategic need to change platforms a some point, it's going to be a more difficult task to go from Windows to Unix (or whatever) than the other way around.
That said, Visual Studio is a fairly slick IDE, though there are nice IDE's on Linux, as well. If you're developing for Windows, Visual Studio is really nice.
- -Josh Turiel
For $300, you get a 400MHz board with 512k of cache - a much better deal for most. $500 to upgrade an older Rev. A through D iMac isn't such a big whoop, when you're constrained to Rage Pro graphics and a 66 MHz system bus. But for $300 (OK, $299), it's a nice way to kick a little life into the old iMac. I may get one for my wife's iMac, and then set her up with ViaVoice once she has the processor to chew through it properly.
Just to point it out, the current 2.0 iMacs run at 350 and 400 MHz, but with a 100 MHz system bus and the ability to use standard SDRAM DIMMs (not the laptop SO-DIMMs the older ones use). This processor upgrade is only for the older ones.
The one other thing to keep in mind is that Apple is almost a lock to announce new iMacs at Macworld next month, given that the current line dates back to October with no changes since then. At the very least, expect a speed bump in the current models, with possibly more RAM added, and maybe things like a DVD added to the low end model and price cuts as well. Apple makes a lot of profit on iMacs, relative to most low-end systems.
- -Josh Turiel
No innovation? What about MS-BOB?
Oh yeah - it went over like a fart in church. Never mind.
Seriously - one of the advantages of having a boatload of cash is that you can go out and buy all the things you need to keep some innovation alive. But Microsoft hasn't done much original stuff since the first version of Excel (which, ironically, shipped on the Mac first).
An awful lot of the products and tools they've hung their hats on over the years have been bought, in fact. A much abbreviated list of some of their significant purchases goes like this:
MS-DOS (purchased, an X86 clone of CP/M)
PowerPoint (they bought Nashoba Systems, the company behind that, Nutshell, and FileMaker)
Visio (just bought last fall)
FrontPage (they bought Vermeer)
Hotmail
WebTV
And in gaming, they bought Access Software (the Links people), and they have the publishing deal that got Age of Empires produced.
Is there anything wrong with that, though? I really don't think so. If a company wants to play in a particular marketplace they can either roll their own, or buy someone who has it ready-made. Cisco has executed that strategy brilliantly, but they get lauded for it because (a) they aren't seen as pure evil, and (b) they have integrated companies pretty seamlessly.
So purchasing Bungie isn't necessarily bad. If Bungie gets to keep doing what they're doing (so long as it makes money), than there's nothing wrong with the transaction. Microsoft gets guaranteed good content for the X-box when it ships (Bungie is a pretty darn solid gaming company), other platforms continue to get their fair share of software, and everybody makes money. I won't not buy a new Bungie game because it's now Microsoft, but I won't buy it if it sucks, regardless of the publisher. And if they stop producing Mac and Linux games, then they're leaving money on the table. I'm sure the Mac side is profitable, and very possibly the Linux side too.
- -Josh Turiel
Speaking of things oral - Woody Allen once told a joke that went something like this:
"I'd like to say a brief word now about oral contraception.
[pause]
I had an experience with oral contraception, just the other day...
[bigger pause]
I asked a woman to sleep with me - and she said no."
(badda-bing!)
Actually, it was quite risque for the early Sixties... And the album it's on, "Standup Comic" is a classic. Woody in his day practically invented the cerebral one liner.
Of course, your get rich quick method has probably been used to copy floppies more than once - or so the apocryphal tech support stories go.
- -Josh Turiel
Actually, I keep 2 sets of batteries and a charger handy for my Quicktake - it works pretty well for a low-end camera like that one. But for the mass market to take off, we need battery life comparable to a heavily used conventional camera, where you drop a new photo lithium battery in it every few months and then shoot away. Then you only need one spare in your pack, and if it dies you can replace it at any store.
Digital camera power consumption is way higher than that for most uses. There are ways you can minimize battery consumption, but since most cameras offer no real TTL viewfinders, the LCD is a valuable substitute. The other caveat is that conventional camera users don't have to worry about power management, so I figure that digital users shouldn't have to, either.
Granted, this is a very high, difficult standard, but it should be the target that camera makers shoot for. The natural price curves that happen over time will bring a camera with the features I want into the target price range, but it'll take some really good engineering to hit the power budgets that I'd like to see.
- -Josh Turiel