While I appreciate the opinions and arguments of the author, I am dismayed by the constant references back to the BeBox. Yes the BeBox and Amiga (similar case) were excellent platforms when they were introduced. Yes, each had quite revolutionary ideas. Unfortunately, neither caught on. Both were targeted at geeks - a niche market with questionable budgets, based on the "$1k is TOO much to pay for a box" posts.
Apple does not invent everything, although historically they tried! Apple is clever at evaluating technologies, combining them into their existing product, and making the results available to the mass audience. I agree that many of the individual accomplishments are unremarkable, packaging all these into a new release is impressive. And doing this three times (10.0, 10.1, and 10.2) in about three years is amazing for any product. Doing this with an operating system is unparalled*.
Take a step back and evaluate Apple's announcement in the broader industry context. You may not be amazed, but I think you'll be impressed.
.
* I suggested that Apple's OS release schedule was unparalled based on the number of features being introduced. This isn't an achievement driven entirely by the programmars in Cupertino. With the Mach / BSD underpinnings, open source software can be easily ported over to the new machine (see: fink, apt-get, etc.). In many cases (e.g. Safari, ProjectBuilder, etc.), Apple is applying a flashly UI on top of standard source. The result is a relatively small number of programmers producing a large number of features. Compare this to Microsoft which uses entirely custom code and where you need a large number of programmers to get a small number of features. Compare this to the Linux model where you need a large number of programmers (as most are part-time), to get a moderate number of features. Solaris and other commercial Unixes also have this advantage, but neither has been quite as driven; I don't understand why this is so.
If this analysis is correct, OS X should have an impressive feature and Microsoft will need to change their OS development model. Linux / BSD, if they can avoid fragmentation, will continue to provide much of the R&D that the other OSes rely on.
Actually, the solution is quite easy - just buy a new machine.
It might seem like I'm joking, but I mean this entirely seriously. An Apple machine will generally offer 3-5 years of life as your primary box. I figure that thereafter that disk space, memory, speed, and software requirement limitations will force an upgrade. Major OS releases are occurring about once a year. For that, you get many features you won't use plus three or four that you probably can't live without. Let's price those at $25 each (under the assumption that you probably could live without them even if you won't admit it to yourself). By this estimate, you're paying $50 a year ($125 - $75) after the first year to stay current. If you replace your compute every four year, the high cost you complain about is really $150 ($50 x 3 since each machine will come with the latest OS). This doesn't seem so bad to me, but let's continue.
If you replace your machine every year (which you'd like to do anyway), the overhead goes to $0. This makes Apple happy and it makes you happy because you can always show off the latest, coolest machine. It might not make your bank account so happy, but two out of three isn't bad. I hope this helps justify your next purchase.
Or how about when nanotech gets smaller then 1nm, are we going to have to the change that name too?
Given that atoms are on the order of 0.1 to 0.3 nm and given the strong limitations imposed by nuclear physics (particularly the strong force), I don't think there is much risk.
I need to start reading "New Scientist" magazine as "Not Science" magazine. They, like Discover, are far too focused on hype at the neglect of content.
How people who initially disagree with something(The Matrix) that chatises their way of life(Organized Religion) do their best to make it seem their way is actually confirmed through it.
Quite true. Next thing you know, someone will be trying to make a religion out of Jedi's or something...
Brian Hayes recently published an article tackling this issue. He include a graph showing the cost of disk space over time and discusses the impact of increasing storage space on media companies. I strongly recommend taking a look.
I concur. In 1980, a typical machine ran at 1 MHz. Today, 4 GHz machines are not uncommon. Modern processors can dispatch several instructions per second (for optimized code). Thus, compuational power has increased by a factor of roughly 10,000 over the last 25 years.
The software industry will continue to grow. The rate at which computational power is increasing may slow after this decade, but people entering the software industry today will still see another factor of 10,000 (if not much more). This is truly revolutionary.
I usually assume that the problem space addressible by computers goes as the log of the computational power. I expect the software industry to focus on these new applications. Today's big software programs, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and even operating systems will become increasingly dominated by open source efforts as the software industry views these at 'too simple' to gain significant differentiation and added value. The market for tools to develop these complex new applications may become increasingly important (and even more difficult than today).
As for the 17" Powerbook.. is anyone buying these things? I can't imagine lugging a 17" iMac's display around all day.
As far as I can tell, the 17" is intended to be a mobile desktop not a portable. Combined with wireless networking, this is a computer which may be carried from room to room in one site (say your home or office). As such, this may be a great machine for many on Slashdot. The smaller units are more appropriate for travel (just try to open and use a 17" in airline coach seating).
The market for traditional desktop computers is shrinking quickly . The current segments are shifting to small handhelds (palm / cell phone sized), travel computers (sony Vaio), single site (powerbook 17"), and servers (often rackmounted). Presumably we'll see another shift in a few years as next generation display technologies become available.
The problem is that the format of Slashdot matches our attention spans - very short. Readers read an article, make and read a few quick comments, and then move on to the next topic. Two days later, the topic has completely vanished from our screens, literally. This may not be the best venue for a serious threaded discussion. And honestly, I can't think of any online message boards which succeed in this (corrections please!) although some mailing lists may come close.
Back in the day database designers used the fact that ToC, NM was, at that time, the largest city name in the US to set CITY name fields to 21
Hmmm....And all this time I'd just assumed it was that large metropolis between San Diego and San Francisco, Ciudad del Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula. I've heard that some people choose to abbreviate its full name, though.
Unicode is closer, but does not offer a complete solution even for 'plain text'. The Han unification of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean means that several symbols are shared across these languages to fit into 16 bits. To be precise, you also need to know the font which is being used for the symbol! More recently (starting in either 2.x or 3.0), the range was extended to 32 bits. But even now, there are many ancient languages which cannot be expressed in the currently defined characters.
They're spending 1 billion, not to develop new cars, but to avoid spending even more on developing a real line of fuel cell cars. They want to keep selling us the same old same old year after year, which is far less expensive than developing something new.
That is certainly feasible. But...
By placing $1 billion into a public advertising campaign of this magnitude (similar to AT&T's 'You Will' ads), the penalty for backing out is higher. The publicity they are generating is unnecessary in your scenario.
Most existing mechanics WILL be obsolete. This increases the value of the dealerships which may be the only ones with access to the specialized tools.
Innovation does eventually happen. The transition from radio to television took several decades. Likewise, b&w to color television took a few decades. This design does offer advantages such as greatly increased interior space which cannot be achieved using existing technologies. GM seems to be making a calculated bet on what must be regarded as speculative technology without staking the company on it. They're investing, not gambling.
You forgot about the return of the 'software base station' functionality. The older technique worked well but requires too much babysitting for general users. There was a petition some time back to reimplement this feature. And here it is. Compared to their competitors, Apple is very responsive to feedback.
As for the rest, if you don't require these features, you've saved yourself some cash. Choice is a wonderful thing.
Wouldn't it be much easier to establish a permanent cable connection to one of the islands off of Antarctica where ice variations would not be an issue? Then you could establish a wireless relay (microwave or other) from their to the south pole stations.
Incidentally I don't fear for my 4096/1024 bit ElGamal/DSA gpg key in the near future. I am confident that installing a keyboard sniffer without me noticing is far easier than breaking that key.
I concur. I find this device far more threatening than any cluster of machines at the NSA.
Can you substantiate the charge about Griffin Technologies? It is interesting to read their press release for a product that they clearly don't ship. What makes you certain that this was withdrawn due to pressure from Apple and not due to a more innocent reason?
Slashdot Mirror
While I appreciate the opinions and arguments of the author, I am dismayed by the constant references back to the BeBox. Yes the BeBox and Amiga (similar case) were excellent platforms when they were introduced. Yes, each had quite revolutionary ideas. Unfortunately, neither caught on. Both were targeted at geeks - a niche market with questionable budgets, based on the "$1k is TOO much to pay for a box" posts.
Apple does not invent everything, although historically they tried! Apple is clever at evaluating technologies, combining them into their existing product, and making the results available to the mass audience. I agree that many of the individual accomplishments are unremarkable, packaging all these into a new release is impressive. And doing this three times (10.0, 10.1, and 10.2) in about three years is amazing for any product. Doing this with an operating system is unparalled*.
Take a step back and evaluate Apple's announcement in the broader industry context. You may not be amazed, but I think you'll be impressed.
.
* I suggested that Apple's OS release schedule was unparalled based on the number of features being introduced. This isn't an achievement driven entirely by the programmars in Cupertino. With the Mach / BSD underpinnings, open source software can be easily ported over to the new machine (see: fink, apt-get, etc.). In many cases (e.g. Safari, ProjectBuilder, etc.), Apple is applying a flashly UI on top of standard source. The result is a relatively small number of programmers producing a large number of features. Compare this to Microsoft which uses entirely custom code and where you need a large number of programmers to get a small number of features. Compare this to the Linux model where you need a large number of programmers (as most are part-time), to get a moderate number of features. Solaris and other commercial Unixes also have this advantage, but neither has been quite as driven; I don't understand why this is so.
If this analysis is correct, OS X should have an impressive feature and Microsoft will need to change their OS development model. Linux / BSD, if they can avoid fragmentation, will continue to provide much of the R&D that the other OSes rely on.
Actually, the solution is quite easy - just buy a new machine.
It might seem like I'm joking, but I mean this entirely seriously. An Apple machine will generally offer 3-5 years of life as your primary box. I figure that thereafter that disk space, memory, speed, and software requirement limitations will force an upgrade. Major OS releases are occurring about once a year. For that, you get many features you won't use plus three or four that you probably can't live without. Let's price those at $25 each (under the assumption that you probably could live without them even if you won't admit it to yourself). By this estimate, you're paying $50 a year ($125 - $75) after the first year to stay current. If you replace your compute every four year, the high cost you complain about is really $150 ($50 x 3 since each machine will come with the latest OS). This doesn't seem so bad to me, but let's continue.
If you replace your machine every year (which you'd like to do anyway), the overhead goes to $0. This makes Apple happy and it makes you happy because you can always show off the latest, coolest machine. It might not make your bank account so happy, but two out of three isn't bad. I hope this helps justify your next purchase.
Or how about when nanotech gets smaller then 1nm, are we going to have to the change that name too?
Given that atoms are on the order of 0.1 to 0.3 nm and given the strong limitations imposed by nuclear physics (particularly the strong force), I don't think there is much risk.
I need to start reading "New Scientist" magazine as "Not Science" magazine. They, like Discover, are far too focused on hype at the neglect of content.
How people who initially disagree with something(The Matrix) that chatises their way of life(Organized Religion) do their best to make it seem their way is actually confirmed through it.
Quite true. Next thing you know, someone will be trying to make a religion out of Jedi's or something...
Brian Hayes recently published an article tackling this issue. He include a graph showing the cost of disk space over time and discusses the impact of increasing storage space on media companies. I strongly recommend taking a look.
I concur. In 1980, a typical machine ran at 1 MHz. Today, 4 GHz machines are not uncommon. Modern processors can dispatch several instructions per second (for optimized code). Thus, compuational power has increased by a factor of roughly 10,000 over the last 25 years.
The software industry will continue to grow. The rate at which computational power is increasing may slow after this decade, but people entering the software industry today will still see another factor of 10,000 (if not much more). This is truly revolutionary.
I usually assume that the problem space addressible by computers goes as the log of the computational power. I expect the software industry to focus on these new applications. Today's big software programs, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and even operating systems will become increasingly dominated by open source efforts as the software industry views these at 'too simple' to gain significant differentiation and added value. The market for tools to develop these complex new applications may become increasingly important (and even more difficult than today).
As for the 17" Powerbook.. is anyone buying these things? I can't imagine lugging a 17" iMac's display around all day.
As far as I can tell, the 17" is intended to be a mobile desktop not a portable. Combined with wireless networking, this is a computer which may be carried from room to room in one site (say your home or office). As such, this may be a great machine for many on Slashdot. The smaller units are more appropriate for travel (just try to open and use a 17" in airline coach seating).
The market for traditional desktop computers is shrinking quickly . The current segments are shifting to small handhelds (palm / cell phone sized), travel computers (sony Vaio), single site (powerbook 17"), and servers (often rackmounted). Presumably we'll see another shift in a few years as next generation display technologies become available.
BTW, this technique is referred to as 'impressioning' after the mark, or impression, left by the pin on the key.
Thanks.
The problem is that the format of Slashdot matches our attention spans - very short. Readers read an article, make and read a few quick comments, and then move on to the next topic. Two days later, the topic has completely vanished from our screens, literally. This may not be the best venue for a serious threaded discussion. And honestly, I can't think of any online message boards which succeed in this (corrections please!) although some mailing lists may come close.
Hmmm...This makes me wonder if we'll see the Silmarillion on film. Given all the revenue so far, it's certainly possible.
Back in the day database designers used the fact that ToC, NM was, at that time, the largest city name in the US to set CITY name fields to 21
Hmmm....And all this time I'd just assumed it was that large metropolis between San Diego and San Francisco, Ciudad del Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula. I've heard that some people choose to abbreviate its full name, though.
Unicode is closer, but does not offer a complete solution even for 'plain text'. The Han unification of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean means that several symbols are shared across these languages to fit into 16 bits. To be precise, you also need to know the font which is being used for the symbol! More recently (starting in either 2.x or 3.0), the range was extended to 32 bits. But even now, there are many ancient languages which cannot be expressed in the currently defined characters.
It's called "ASCII."
Unfortunately that doesn't help speakers of the majority of the world's languages (and even English texts may include words like 'fiancé' which are not directly expressible in ASCII). Likewise, this does not solve the question of how to store the valuable figures and margin notes. The preserved works of Galileo, Newton, and Euclid would be much less valuable without this information.
Try twenty years! There was an old pointing device for the Atari computers which used mercury switches. There is a note about it here.
They're spending 1 billion, not to develop new cars, but to avoid spending even more on developing a real line of fuel cell cars. They want to keep selling us the same old same old year after year, which is far less expensive than developing something new.
That is certainly feasible. But...
By placing $1 billion into a public advertising campaign of this magnitude (similar to AT&T's 'You Will' ads), the penalty for backing out is higher. The publicity they are generating is unnecessary in your scenario.
Most existing mechanics WILL be obsolete. This increases the value of the dealerships which may be the only ones with access to the specialized tools.
Innovation does eventually happen. The transition from radio to television took several decades. Likewise, b&w to color television took a few decades. This design does offer advantages such as greatly increased interior space which cannot be achieved using existing technologies. GM seems to be making a calculated bet on what must be regarded as speculative technology without staking the company on it. They're investing, not gambling.
You forgot about the return of the 'software base station' functionality. The older technique worked well but requires too much babysitting for general users. There was a petition some time back to reimplement this feature. And here it is. Compared to their competitors, Apple is very responsive to feedback.
As for the rest, if you don't require these features, you've saved yourself some cash. Choice is a wonderful thing.
Wouldn't it be much easier to establish a permanent cable connection to one of the islands off of Antarctica where ice variations would not be an issue? Then you could establish a wireless relay (microwave or other) from their to the south pole stations.
Now, in L33T SP34K:
Clearly, this is for you. As for your Scandanavian relatives with professional interests in cooking, you might suggest they visit this instead.
Incidentally I don't fear for my 4096/1024 bit ElGamal/DSA gpg key in the near future. I am confident that installing a keyboard sniffer without me noticing is far easier than breaking that key.
I concur. I find this device far more threatening than any cluster of machines at the NSA.
And if we ever did have a mark of the beast... er, Homeland Security ID, you can bet MS products would be running a lot of the system.
It might not be Microsoft. It might be Oracle. Why doesn't that make me feel any better?
Can you substantiate the charge about Griffin Technologies? It is interesting to read their press release for a product that they clearly don't ship. What makes you certain that this was withdrawn due to pressure from Apple and not due to a more innocent reason?
Right. And now we find that this was actually a clever sales tactic to persuade people to buy the Sony hardware instead.
This is the rare post which is both informative and funny.