One of the things I noticed wastching these tournaments on TV is that a good number of the players, especially the younger ones, have strong backgrounds in math. Several of the bio's that they have done were of players with degree's in math from places like MIT or CalTech. There is definitely a human angle that involves reading your opponent but that kicks in after you have done the math. You have to know what the "rational" play is before you can make a judgement based on the human element to do the "irrational" play. Reading the other player only helps so much if you don't really know what the odds are and how big a risk you really are taking. There are a few dramatic stone cold bluffs in the televised WPT games but mostly there are a lot more semi-bluffs, playing aggresive with a not so strong but not hopless hand - you have to know the math before you even know whether or not you are bluffing. Most people are probably just intuiting this and only really *know* when it is painfully obvious. The pro's, especially the more mathematically astute ones, are calculating the odds with much more precision.
Oddly enough companies outside the US are almost always willing to sell to US customers. I've ordered things from Canadian, UK, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Austrailian web sites and companies. I've rarely had a problem
Sure, it's a matter of size and being worth their while. America has a 280 million potential customers and a $10 trillion economy and a single, well established (fairly) predictable legal system. Singapore by contrast has 4 million potential customers and a $106 million dollar economy. Setting up the infrastructure to sell to that market (translation, understanding & adapting to local laws, etc. etc.) is difficult & expensive the market is so small it may not even end up being profitable, why bother when there are so many more people in America (or perhaps Europe, or the larger "anglosphere" countries) that have yet to buy your product. Even Austrailia where there is no language barrier and the legal system is essentially the same (also based on English common law with presumption of innocence, jury trials etc.) but still has only 19 million customers and a $528 billion dollar economy is not necessarily going to be worth bothering with if you're a small or medium-sized American business. Still most large American (and very many small) companies DO sell to all or most of the countries you mention - they just don't sell to them from their American web sites.
I don't see that he mixed any metaphors. He used one metaphor consistently throughout the post. Of course it was extended to the point of being beaten to death, but it wasn't illogically mixed with any other metaphors.
I'll grant you that Windows has been making real inroads into what was a Mac/Unix market. But Apple is still the dominant player. Instead of trading anecdotes how about some video editing software market research from M2 Research.
As for platforms, the Mac still dominates this market with currently 58% of all products being Mac-based.
To be fair they note as you do that Windows is growing in this market. However a couple of notes on that: A report about trends will use data which was gathered over the past couple of years, years during which 1) Apple's hardware was stagnating. 2) Apple was effecting a change from one OS to another with all the disruption that entails, and 3) FinalCut Pro and Apples other digital media purchases were only beginning to make thier presence felt in the market.
Each of those conditions that hurt Apple, or in the case of FinalCut Pro wasn't yet helping much, are now turning to Apples advantage.
1) Apple has turned to IBM which has basically built a chip just for them and has managed a very quick jump that has gotten them back into a game they were loosing badly. Now that they have caught up it's pretty clear that IBM is committed to keeping pace or perhaps even taking the lead. This is easier since for IBM the PowerPC is just a stripped down version of their own flagship Power series. Lagging hardware will no longer be dragging Apple down among video professionals. Aside from the new chip you know video professionals are drooling over those dual independant 1 GHz frontside busses - one for each processor. They aren't unhappy about getting optical digital audio either or a FireWire port on the front were you need it, and they are among the few people that really use all those extra features that help make Macs so expensive compared to similar PC's (gigabit ethernet, FireWire 800, etc.)
2) Apple and most of the software vendors have completed the transition to OS X. This means that there are no longer gaping holes in the software lineup & switching between OS 9 and X or often being stuck in classic. It has already led some UNIX software over to the UNIX based Mac and their are indications that this trend is continuing. It also means that Apple's programming resources are no longer tied up just getting the basic functionality of a new system working but are now in a position to add new features or be switched to other projects, many of which will be professional digital media projects. Now that they have the foundation completed it will be very interesting to see what the can build on top of it.
3) FinalCut Pro has proven itself in the market and has significantly grown it's marketshare at the expense not only of Premiere but even of much more expensive Avid systems. This growth occurred *before* there was decent hardware for it to run on, it will accelerate now that a lack of decent hardware is no longer a problem. Apple's other purchases are also starting to have their effect as Apple drops support for Windows and puts windows users in the same bind that Adobe is putting mac users (Switch platforms or switch software - nasty and user-unfriendly hardball but there it is.) Apple is committed to continued domination of this (growing) niche and has money in the bank to purchase more of these relatively tiny but influential software companies if the ones they have already bought are insufficient to turn the tide away from Windows. Adobe doesn't have a corresponding strategy or motivation to turn the industry to PC's, they are (relatively) platform agnostic. They got out only after they were beaten and their was no money left. They'll keep AfterEffects and their graphics tools on the Mac because the Mac represents 30% of their revenue - you don't throw that money away in a snit over one of your deservedly less popular products (If Apple were planning on attempting a Photoshop killer it might be different).
Given the choice between supporting either Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux (or whatever its called this week), I'd go with the overwhelmingly dominant operating system.
Yes, but which OS is that? That is the thing Apple is STILL the "king of video and sound". Adobe is retiring from the field not because the Mac video editting market is too small to bother with but because Apple ate their lunch. Premier has just conceded defeat in the professional market. It will continue to live on just fine doing corporate training video's in the same way that Adobe Pagemaker lived on doing corporate newsletters long after becoming irrelevant to the professional publishing world.
Perhaps this is their reasoning but I think they have waited too long. If Adobe had pursued this strategy right away when FinalCut was introduced it would have worked as you suggest but now it will be a near run thing. Apple is a niche player and has it's eye on dominating the video editting/production niche. FinalCut Pro is one of the "killer" (or "tractor") apps in their strategy. Once the Mac platform has a critical mass of users and a critical mass of applications many of which are Mac only even competing apps like Premier can't leave without doing themselves more harm than good. Instead of Adobe keeping their business their users (some reluctantly) switch to FinalCut Pro because the *other* apps they need and the other people they need to work with are all on the mac.
Sadly for Adobe FinalCut Pro has already proven itself and is widely regarded as a superior, even revolutionary product. Also Apples play to dominate the video/film production market doesn't rest on FinalCut alone but also on a fundamental technology (QuickTime) and a parallel strategy of "tractor apps" at the very high end (Shake), the very low end (iMovie) and in related fields (DVD Studio Pro, Logic) and on Apple hardware designed specifically for this market (why do you think they offer a "server" with an option for a high(ish) end video card and a FireWire port on the front?). Apple's hand has just gotten stronger with the introduction of the G5 and the introduction of the Pixlet codec. (not to mention the implications of Apple developing a codec at the specific request of Steve's other company which just happens to be a major Hollywood player and the developers of RenderMan (Coming to a Mac near you soon?))
Adobe may do OK despite all the advantages Apple has at this point since increasingly FinalCut Pro is not competing with Premiere at the low end of the spectrum but with Avid at the high end, but that begs the question of why someone getting in to the low end would buy a middle-to-low end product like Premiere when for the same price he can get a middle-to-high end product like FinalCut Pro on the platform with all the users and software (in this niche).
First, these activities do not cost people money, they cost corporations money.
What is it that you think corporations are? It is a group of PEOPLE(!) combined into one body (definition 3) that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members (definition 1 - both from The American Heritage Dictionary).
Despite the legal fiction that a corporation is a seperate entity in the end that is still a fiction . The corporation remains a group of people. Anything that costs the corporation money costs those people money. They may choose (or more likely in the large public corporation you are envisioning the managment they hire may choose) to pass that cost on to their customers, they may choose to maintain their profits by cutting costs elsewhere (i.e. their employees) or they may bear the cost themselves. In any of those scenarios though anything that costs a corporation money still costs people money.
For a large corporation those costs are spread out over hundreds of thousands or even millions of people a few thousands won't be missed. But similar losses which the shoplifter/slacking employee/hacker/frivilous litigant justifies as "not costing 'people'" any money adds up to be a lot of money that does cost real people real money. More likely on this "defacement day" many of the corporations won't be that large - my corporation for instance is made of two people, myself and my wife - I'm intensely aware that anything that costs my corporation money costs me money.
Most probably: "Shit, they stopped selling apple pie because it gives cancer!". It's sad, but a lot of people are gullible.
No, not gullible but scared to ever give that site their credit card again & angry if they already have. I have seen website defacements *kill* what had been very successful sites before and *people* lost money - the investors are out their investment, the management & employees are out of a job.
2. Themes. I really like the idea of customizing my OS and maybe tone down Aqua a bit.
Waaay back when OS X was under development and hadn't shipped yet I read a blurb about themes on one of the reasonably reliable (haha) rumor sites. It seems that themes was something they were actually planning on but Steve played with Kalieadescope (themes for OS 9) to try the idea out and *hated* it with a passion. He thought 99.9% of the themes were amateurish, ugly and big steps backwards in terms of usability and the remaining.1% weren't anything to write home about either.
Usually I don't give much credence to rumor sites, especially when their claiming to know what specific people did and though... BUT this anecdote aligns so perfectly with everything we know about Jobs, his personality and his values, that it seems very likely something like this IS what happened to the theme support which was known to be in development way back then.
Re:Big Brother? not necessarily.
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RFID Explained
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a relative who is one of the original developers of this type of RFID tag. They have (or had) a fridge at MIT which would automagically order certain items of food from Peapod whenever they got low. For instance it could be programmed to always maintain 2 Gallons of milk in the fridge. Whenever there was only one in the fridge for a certain amount of time (the length of time that milk would go bad) it would add the second to it's weekly peapod order.
More scarily they also had a demo of potential uses that showed it sharing it's data with the Smart TV in the next room so that the ads were targetted. For instance Pepsi could pay to place ads targetted at people that just threw out their last Coke.
Also as for the opt out method - The standard includes a "kill switch" that turns them off.
don't want you to think i'm arguing just for the sake of arguement.
That's OK I like arguing - why else would I be on/.
I just wanted to point out that the price that I got for the G-4 was from apple's website.
When I went to Apple's store yesterday there were no obvious links to G4 systems. I went back and see them but the dual 1.25 Ghz one is now $1600 not $1800 as in your post.
I don't know what the frontside bus is on an apple, g4 or g5, but it's most likely that it's less than 800 mhz in the p-4's.
You're right on the G4 which was crippled by a slow bus (so that impressive Altivec performance was actually slower than it could have been) but the G5 has a frontside bus 1/2 the speed of the processor. So on the 1.6 GHz the bus *is* 800 MHz, on the 1.8 GHz the bus is 900 MHz and on the dual 2.0 the frontside bus is a whopping 1 GHz.
there will be some things that apples are faster at, like photoshop. I still think that few people use photoshop enough to justify buying a computer to increase it's performance, especially when you're not talking minutes of difference to render, just 1.2 seconds versus 1.4.
Actually Pro Photoshop users are a reasonably large market and they tend to be in *very* time sensitive fields. Also, while Apples Photoshop bake-offs might cook the numbers a bit (pardon the pun), they aren't off by *that* much. If you are talking 1.2 seconds on the Mac it's not unreasonable that it might be 2.4 seconds on the PC. Still just a second or so off & not worth any extra expense. But pro photoshop users still do things that can take quite a bit longer than that even on the high end machines. But even photoshop users are probably starting to get to the point where extra speed is becoming superfluous (but not quite yet). The people that can really use all that vector processing power are film, video, broadcast users (& Apple hopes the consumer with the dv camcorder)
But, apples will never have better games or more compatability with software.
I'll grant you games, but then again that's what a cheap game console is for not a $1.5K to $3K+ workstation. As for software It's very rare that you can't get what you need, though as you point out you won't find it at Best Buy, but if you are only looking at the selection of software available from BestBuy* I can almost guarantee that you will find perfectly good Mac equivalents just by clicking on "Get Mac OS X Software" in the Apple menu. In many cases those equivalents will be the exact same product for the Mac - it's just that BestBuy only carries the PeeCee version. The only place where you will run into a lack of software for the Mac is titles that are too specialised to be sold at a mass consumer place like BestBuy. Of course if you are looking at the Mac's niche markets (graphics, video etc.) it might be the PeeCee that doesn't have the specialist software. Most of the PeeCee only software that is lacking on the mac is a lot of redundancy & shovelware. The PeeCee world probably have a dozen competing titles along the lines of DentistOfficeManager2000. The Mac using Dentist on the other hand has to settle for just one or maybe two titles (usually the better ones) in that particular niche or at worst has to settle for a general Office management title.
*If you think about it BestBuy, or any brick & mortar store only has a very small selection of software, a few thousand titles at best.
Still the fact that Apple released a radically better chip and even more importantly a radically better *system* for that chip to live in significantly changes the equation.
Sure the P4 is an older architecture, sure you would get unfair and unwarranted comments about the G5's 64 bitness but still you are comparing the current price of an existing Dell being sold today to a Mac that you CAN"T buy from Apple anymore.
To be fair the Dell still ends up looking better on paper for a price/performance comparison. Then again on paper it looks even better than before, the new more expensive PowerMac has only one 1.6 GHz chip instead of TWO 1.25 GHz chips.
However, the more effecient chip & fast frontside bus (formerly a real bottleneck on the G4's Altivec performance) goes a long way in compensating especially if you need the machine for anything that benefits from Altivec. By all accounts Altivec is much better than the P4's SSE2 and the G5 has 2 altivec units (over one in the G4) and finally has a bus that can keep them fed. The end result is that on many tasks the P4 will likely be faster than the more expensive G5 but on SOME processor intensive tasks it won't even be in the same class. Fortunately for Apple those tasks are what many people need a really fast processor for in the first place.
Apart from well known missing functionality (color pre-press and the like) the only real problem GIMP has....
Isn't this sort of like saying "aside from lacking an engine this is a perfectly good car & even has a nicer radio"? What do you think Photoshop is for? Pretty pictures on your computer are fine things but the *point* of a computer is to be a tool. In the case of a professional user it is to get a pretty picture not on the computer but into a magazine, poster, book jacket etc. Without minor functionality bullet points such as "color pre-press and the like" GIMP is not even competing with Photoshop but with the various crippled versions like Photoshop LE or Photoshop elements (or whatever they are calling it these days) which also lack professional functionality.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but until Linux replicates the Apple developer experience, it's likely to always feel "hacked together." Because in reality, it is.
And I think that probably is a GOOD thing. This "hacked" quality that is Linux's weakness on the desktop and will ensure that it will never be as easy to use as the Mac is also Linux's strength. The fact that all those developers are free to do as they damn well please (and to hell with UI consistency) is part of what they LIKE about it.
I see Linux and Apple as complimentary. And when it comes to growing marketshare I think they may make a good tag-team against windows. Linux has all it's advantages against windows and Apple will end up being one end of the "linux" market (yes, I know BSD) with an easy-to-use slick user experience for those that need or want it. They can only get that slick experience because they have a sometimes benevolent dictator weilding his proprietary hardware and software (and cherry-picking the best open-source stuff to integrate in to the mix)
It doesn't really matter who has a larger piece of the marketshare pie at any given point, they are both taking it from windows and I think it is good for either of them when the other does well.
Linux is more likely to be a positive than a negative for Apple.
I agree but I think linux helps Apple in many more ways. First, as you pointed out Apple is exploiting open-source projects for their own products (and giving back too).
Second Linux has kept Windows from dominating the low-end server market which helps keep Mac's as viable client machines.
Even more importantly to Apple linux has promoted/preserved open standards which are as important to Apple as they are to linux as niche players competing against a monopoly.
Finally, Apple will do better in a heterogeneos computing environment. If linux starts gaining serious desktop market-share all the above effects will increase. Also Apple's selling-points would be even more compelling. An "open-source(ish)" unix that's broadly compatible with linux but with a very slick consumer oriented user environment and wealth of comercial consumer software, brain-dead easy to use interface & tight hardware/software integration would be an easy sell in a linux world. Even if linux starts becoming "user-friendly" it will be a long time before the perception that it isn't change and it's unlikely that it will ever become as "user-friendly" as MacOS because it's developers and users value power, flexibility, configurability at the expense of ease-of-use rather than vise-versa as Apple does. For this reason I think Apple and Linux are largely carving their niches out of Windows from opposite ends (though that has changed somewhat with OS X).
An interesting question is if either (or both collectively) gains a critical mass of market-share what will windows selling point be? That it's easier to use than linux? Get a Mac! That it's more "open" with more hardware vendors than Apple? Get a linux machine!
Jeff Raskin the original lead developer on the Macintosh (and the man responsible for it's name - it was his favorite eating apple) has largely debunked this as a myth. While I don't think he claims that Parc's work had NO influence on the Mac he has pointed out that many of the supposedly stolen concepts (such as the GUI itself) were present in his computer science thesis published in 1967 before Parc's existed. He also notes that some of the supposedly stolen concepts were already part of either the Mac or Lisa projects which were already under way BEFORE the infamous visit and that he (Raskin) had used others prior to his involvement with Apple itself. Further some concepts (such as drag-and-drop) were never used at Parc and others were used at Parc but not on the SmallTalk system which had been shown to Steve Jobs.
He sums up his take on the myth this way:
he Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small. It was not, as many accounts anachronistically relate, stolen from PARC by Steve Jobs after he saw the Alto running SmallTalk on a visit. For one thing the usual account (as in Levy's book, "Insanely Great" and others) denigrates the original and creative work done by all the Apple employees that put their hearts into the Mac. Most of the histories of the Mac were written without their authors interviewing the original team (Brian Howard, who contributed so much, is always missed), and the history of the Mac that Apple's own P/R department dispensed was based on Jobs's version. Many didn't speak with me: without knowing that I had worked out many of the key usability ideas when Jobs was still in grade school and before there was a Xerox PARC to learn from, it is perhaps understandable that people would find it necessary to invent a history that derives the Mac's genesis from the nearest similar work. The honest intellectual debt the Mac owes to the work at PARC was not a case of highway robbery.
Quoting from memorty (I can't find his orginal essay on the history of the mac) he attributes the persistance of the myth to the fact that both Steve Jobs and the former Parc guys retell it that way. Steve, because it reinforces his reputations as a visionary genius (HE understood the significance of the GUI when the suits at Xerox were blind, He saw "it was good" and he bid it be fruitful and multiply). The guys at Parc saw it that way because Steve really did "get it". What the Parc guys didn't realise is that Steve "got it" not because he was a visionary genius but because Jef Raskin (and others at Apple) had been patiently explaining the same concepts to him for years (going back to Jef Raskin visiting the Steve's back in their famous garage).
Jobs knows what will sell, and doesn't market (Ok, forget the cube) what won't.
Granted the cube bombed, but not because it wasn't cool/desireable but because it was priced out of it's market. I watched the keynote via webcast and thought "At last a monitorless iMac... and REALLY cool looking too - I want one." Then they announced the price and I thought "wow, is THAT overpriced, It's going to bomb big time." You could tell that the live audience had the same response - all sorts of enthusiasm and then a sort of embarrassed silence when the price popped up onto the screen.
Soda n. 2.b. Chiefly Northeastern U.S., Eastern Missouri, & Southwestern Illinois. See soft drink.
soft drink
n. In both senses also called soda pop, also called regionally cold drink, drink, pop, soda, soda water, tonic.
1. A nonalcoholic, flavored, carbonated beverage, usually commercially prepared and sold in bottles or cans.
2. A serving of this beverage
I was talking about mandating that the *government* use the metric system, and that commercial products change their labeling.
Madating it on private manufacturers is still forcing people (manufacturers in this case) to do something that don't want to/don't see a need for/believe their customers wouldn't want. For that matter in most instances we already have this - government mandated labels include metric measurements often in the dominant position (take a look at nutritional info on any food item). If you don't want to buy your milk by the gallon you are free to buy it in handy 3.78 Liter bottles that are suprisingly clearly labelled as such (I just looked, the text was the same size - though it was in parenthesis)
The US government already does tend to favor the metric system in every area it influences. Usage of metric in the US seems to be influence by two factors. Metric is used in any given area in direct proportion to government regulation of that area (which is why Americans think only illicit drugs are measured in "kilos" and "Klicks" are some obscure military unit of measurement). Medicine (very highly regulated) is measured in grams, food (less regulated) is measured with English units but has metric equivalents very clearly labeled; Anything free from government labelling regulations use English units of measurement. This is sometimes offset by the other influence: metric is used in inverse proportion to it's visibility/impact on the public. Highway signage for example, even though it is entirely in the government realm, is in miles because switching would irritate the public.
Government doesn't change not because government administrators wouldn't like to (paternalistic do-goodism being the joy of government administrators everywhere) but because their clientele, the people they *serve* would rather continue to get information in the format they actually use and has the democratic tools to check government's desire to "fix" things. Is it the governments role to "do me good" even when I don't want it to/"don't know any better"? Is it the public's servant or it's teacher? Different societies have different views but in American society the answer is pretty clear and any politician getting it wrong is commiting political suicide.
The only way we're ever going to switch is if the government mandates....
You are making my point for me. A *mandate* is "An authoritative command or instruction" - Dictionary.com. If people need to be commanded to switch that is evidence enough that they don't *want* to.
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One of the things I noticed wastching these tournaments on TV is that a good number of the players, especially the younger ones, have strong backgrounds in math. Several of the bio's that they have done were of players with degree's in math from places like MIT or CalTech. There is definitely a human angle that involves reading your opponent but that kicks in after you have done the math. You have to know what the "rational" play is before you can make a judgement based on the human element to do the "irrational" play. Reading the other player only helps so much if you don't really know what the odds are and how big a risk you really are taking. There are a few dramatic stone cold bluffs in the televised WPT games but mostly there are a lot more semi-bluffs, playing aggresive with a not so strong but not hopless hand - you have to know the math before you even know whether or not you are bluffing. Most people are probably just intuiting this and only really *know* when it is painfully obvious. The pro's, especially the more mathematically astute ones, are calculating the odds with much more precision.
Oddly enough companies outside the US are almost always willing to sell to US customers. I've ordered things from Canadian, UK, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Austrailian web sites and companies. I've rarely had a problem
Sure, it's a matter of size and being worth their while. America has a 280 million potential customers and a $10 trillion economy and a single, well established (fairly) predictable legal system. Singapore by contrast has 4 million potential customers and a $106 million dollar economy. Setting up the infrastructure to sell to that market (translation, understanding & adapting to local laws, etc. etc.) is difficult & expensive the market is so small it may not even end up being profitable, why bother when there are so many more people in America (or perhaps Europe, or the larger "anglosphere" countries) that have yet to buy your product. Even Austrailia where there is no language barrier and the legal system is essentially the same (also based on English common law with presumption of innocence, jury trials etc.) but still has only 19 million customers and a $528 billion dollar economy is not necessarily going to be worth bothering with if you're a small or medium-sized American business. Still most large American (and very many small) companies DO sell to all or most of the countries you mention - they just don't sell to them from their American web sites.
exact replication of your original document... could be implemented using a combination of HTML, PHP, and java.
Hahahahahaha... hahaha.. Oh my... *giggle* can I have some of what you're smoking?
I don't see that he mixed any metaphors. He used one metaphor consistently throughout the post. Of course it was extended to the point of being beaten to death, but it wasn't illogically mixed with any other metaphors.
Each of those conditions that hurt Apple, or in the case of FinalCut Pro wasn't yet helping much, are now turning to Apples advantage.
1) Apple has turned to IBM which has basically built a chip just for them and has managed a very quick jump that has gotten them back into a game they were loosing badly. Now that they have caught up it's pretty clear that IBM is committed to keeping pace or perhaps even taking the lead. This is easier since for IBM the PowerPC is just a stripped down version of their own flagship Power series. Lagging hardware will no longer be dragging Apple down among video professionals. Aside from the new chip you know video professionals are drooling over those dual independant 1 GHz frontside busses - one for each processor. They aren't unhappy about getting optical digital audio either or a FireWire port on the front were you need it, and they are among the few people that really use all those extra features that help make Macs so expensive compared to similar PC's (gigabit ethernet, FireWire 800, etc.)
2) Apple and most of the software vendors have completed the transition to OS X. This means that there are no longer gaping holes in the software lineup & switching between OS 9 and X or often being stuck in classic. It has already led some UNIX software over to the UNIX based Mac and their are indications that this trend is continuing. It also means that Apple's programming resources are no longer tied up just getting the basic functionality of a new system working but are now in a position to add new features or be switched to other projects, many of which will be professional digital media projects. Now that they have the foundation completed it will be very interesting to see what the can build on top of it.
3) FinalCut Pro has proven itself in the market and has significantly grown it's marketshare at the expense not only of Premiere but even of much more expensive Avid systems. This growth occurred *before* there was decent hardware for it to run on, it will accelerate now that a lack of decent hardware is no longer a problem. Apple's other purchases are also starting to have their effect as Apple drops support for Windows and puts windows users in the same bind that Adobe is putting mac users (Switch platforms or switch software - nasty and user-unfriendly hardball but there it is.) Apple is committed to continued domination of this (growing) niche and has money in the bank to purchase more of these relatively tiny but influential software companies if the ones they have already bought are insufficient to turn the tide away from Windows. Adobe doesn't have a corresponding strategy or motivation to turn the industry to PC's, they are (relatively) platform agnostic. They got out only after they were beaten and their was no money left. They'll keep AfterEffects and their graphics tools on the Mac because the Mac represents 30% of their revenue - you don't throw that money away in a snit over one of your deservedly less popular products (If Apple were planning on attempting a Photoshop killer it might be different).
Given the choice between supporting either Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux (or whatever its called this week), I'd go with the overwhelmingly dominant operating system.
Yes, but which OS is that? That is the thing Apple is STILL the "king of video and sound". Adobe is retiring from the field not because the Mac video editting market is too small to bother with but because Apple ate their lunch. Premier has just conceded defeat in the professional market. It will continue to live on just fine doing corporate training video's in the same way that Adobe Pagemaker lived on doing corporate newsletters long after becoming irrelevant to the professional publishing world.
Perhaps this is their reasoning but I think they have waited too long. If Adobe had pursued this strategy right away when FinalCut was introduced it would have worked as you suggest but now it will be a near run thing. Apple is a niche player and has it's eye on dominating the video editting/production niche. FinalCut Pro is one of the "killer" (or "tractor") apps in their strategy. Once the Mac platform has a critical mass of users and a critical mass of applications many of which are Mac only even competing apps like Premier can't leave without doing themselves more harm than good. Instead of Adobe keeping their business their users (some reluctantly) switch to FinalCut Pro because the *other* apps they need and the other people they need to work with are all on the mac.
Sadly for Adobe FinalCut Pro has already proven itself and is widely regarded as a superior, even revolutionary product. Also Apples play to dominate the video/film production market doesn't rest on FinalCut alone but also on a fundamental technology (QuickTime) and a parallel strategy of "tractor apps" at the very high end (Shake), the very low end (iMovie) and in related fields (DVD Studio Pro, Logic) and on Apple hardware designed specifically for this market (why do you think they offer a "server" with an option for a high(ish) end video card and a FireWire port on the front?). Apple's hand has just gotten stronger with the introduction of the G5 and the introduction of the Pixlet codec. (not to mention the implications of Apple developing a codec at the specific request of Steve's other company which just happens to be a major Hollywood player and the developers of RenderMan (Coming to a Mac near you soon?))
Adobe may do OK despite all the advantages Apple has at this point since increasingly FinalCut Pro is not competing with Premiere at the low end of the spectrum but with Avid at the high end, but that begs the question of why someone getting in to the low end would buy a middle-to-low end product like Premiere when for the same price he can get a middle-to-high end product like FinalCut Pro on the platform with all the users and software (in this niche).
First, these activities do not cost people money, they cost corporations money.
What is it that you think corporations are? It is a group of PEOPLE(!) combined into one body (definition 3) that is granted a charter recognizing it as a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members (definition 1 - both from The American Heritage Dictionary).
Despite the legal fiction that a corporation is a seperate entity in the end that is still a fiction . The corporation remains a group of people. Anything that costs the corporation money costs those people money. They may choose (or more likely in the large public corporation you are envisioning the managment they hire may choose) to pass that cost on to their customers, they may choose to maintain their profits by cutting costs elsewhere (i.e. their employees) or they may bear the cost themselves. In any of those scenarios though anything that costs a corporation money still costs people money.
For a large corporation those costs are spread out over hundreds of thousands or even millions of people a few thousands won't be missed. But similar losses which the shoplifter/slacking employee/hacker/frivilous litigant justifies as "not costing 'people'" any money adds up to be a lot of money that does cost real people real money. More likely on this "defacement day" many of the corporations won't be that large - my corporation for instance is made of two people, myself and my wife - I'm intensely aware that anything that costs my corporation money costs me money.
Most probably: "Shit, they stopped selling apple pie because it gives cancer!". It's sad, but a lot of people are gullible.
No, not gullible but scared to ever give that site their credit card again & angry if they already have. I have seen website defacements *kill* what had been very successful sites before and *people* lost money - the investors are out their investment, the management & employees are out of a job.
2. Themes. I really like the idea of customizing my OS and maybe tone down Aqua a bit.
.1% weren't anything to write home about either.
Waaay back when OS X was under development and hadn't shipped yet I read a blurb about themes on one of the reasonably reliable (haha) rumor sites. It seems that themes was something they were actually planning on but Steve played with Kalieadescope (themes for OS 9) to try the idea out and *hated* it with a passion. He thought 99.9% of the themes were amateurish, ugly and big steps backwards in terms of usability and the remaining
Usually I don't give much credence to rumor sites, especially when their claiming to know what specific people did and though... BUT this anecdote aligns so perfectly with everything we know about Jobs, his personality and his values, that it seems very likely something like this IS what happened to the theme support which was known to be in development way back then.
I have a relative who is one of the original developers of this type of RFID tag. They have (or had) a fridge at MIT which would automagically order certain items of food from Peapod whenever they got low. For instance it could be programmed to always maintain 2 Gallons of milk in the fridge. Whenever there was only one in the fridge for a certain amount of time (the length of time that milk would go bad) it would add the second to it's weekly peapod order.
More scarily they also had a demo of potential uses that showed it sharing it's data with the Smart TV in the next room so that the ads were targetted. For instance Pepsi could pay to place ads targetted at people that just threw out their last Coke.
Also as for the opt out method - The standard includes a "kill switch" that turns them off.
don't want you to think i'm arguing just for the sake of arguement.
/.
That's OK I like arguing - why else would I be on
I just wanted to point out that the price that I got for the G-4 was from apple's website.
When I went to Apple's store yesterday there were no obvious links to G4 systems. I went back and see them but the dual 1.25 Ghz one is now $1600 not $1800 as in your post.
I don't know what the frontside bus is on an apple, g4 or g5, but it's most likely that it's less than 800 mhz in the p-4's.
You're right on the G4 which was crippled by a slow bus (so that impressive Altivec performance was actually slower than it could have been) but the G5 has a frontside bus 1/2 the speed of the processor. So on the 1.6 GHz the bus *is* 800 MHz, on the 1.8 GHz the bus is 900 MHz and on the dual 2.0 the frontside bus is a whopping 1 GHz.
there will be some things that apples are faster at, like photoshop. I still think that few people use photoshop enough to justify buying a computer to increase it's performance, especially when you're not talking minutes of difference to render, just 1.2 seconds versus 1.4.
Actually Pro Photoshop users are a reasonably large market and they tend to be in *very* time sensitive fields. Also, while Apples Photoshop bake-offs might cook the numbers a bit (pardon the pun), they aren't off by *that* much. If you are talking 1.2 seconds on the Mac it's not unreasonable that it might be 2.4 seconds on the PC. Still just a second or so off & not worth any extra expense. But pro photoshop users still do things that can take quite a bit longer than that even on the high end machines. But even photoshop users are probably starting to get to the point where extra speed is becoming superfluous (but not quite yet). The people that can really use all that vector processing power are film, video, broadcast users (& Apple hopes the consumer with the dv camcorder)
But, apples will never have better games or more compatability with software.
I'll grant you games, but then again that's what a cheap game console is for not a $1.5K to $3K+ workstation. As for software It's very rare that you can't get what you need, though as you point out you won't find it at Best Buy, but if you are only looking at the selection of software available from BestBuy* I can almost guarantee that you will find perfectly good Mac equivalents just by clicking on "Get Mac OS X Software" in the Apple menu. In many cases those equivalents will be the exact same product for the Mac - it's just that BestBuy only carries the PeeCee version. The only place where you will run into a lack of software for the Mac is titles that are too specialised to be sold at a mass consumer place like BestBuy. Of course if you are looking at the Mac's niche markets (graphics, video etc.) it might be the PeeCee that doesn't have the specialist software. Most of the PeeCee only software that is lacking on the mac is a lot of redundancy & shovelware. The PeeCee world probably have a dozen competing titles along the lines of DentistOfficeManager2000. The Mac using Dentist on the other hand has to settle for just one or maybe two titles (usually the better ones) in that particular niche or at worst has to settle for a general Office management title.
*If you think about it BestBuy, or any brick & mortar store only has a very small selection of software, a few thousand titles at best.
No, you haven't stolen a thing. You have made an illegal copy. A copyright infringement.
/.ers get a date.
It's this kind of pedantry that makes it so hard for
Still the fact that Apple released a radically better chip and even more importantly a radically better *system* for that chip to live in significantly changes the equation.
Sure the P4 is an older architecture, sure you would get unfair and unwarranted comments about the G5's 64 bitness but still you are comparing the current price of an existing Dell being sold today to a Mac that you CAN"T buy from Apple anymore.
To be fair the Dell still ends up looking better on paper for a price/performance comparison. Then again on paper it looks even better than before, the new more expensive PowerMac has only one 1.6 GHz chip instead of TWO 1.25 GHz chips.
However, the more effecient chip & fast frontside bus (formerly a real bottleneck on the G4's Altivec performance) goes a long way in compensating especially if you need the machine for anything that benefits from Altivec. By all accounts Altivec is much better than the P4's SSE2 and the G5 has 2 altivec units (over one in the G4) and finally has a bus that can keep them fed. The end result is that on many tasks the P4 will likely be faster than the more expensive G5 but on SOME processor intensive tasks it won't even be in the same class. Fortunately for Apple those tasks are what many people need a really fast processor for in the first place.
Apart from well known missing functionality (color pre-press and the like) the only real problem GIMP has....
Isn't this sort of like saying "aside from lacking an engine this is a perfectly good car & even has a nicer radio"? What do you think Photoshop is for? Pretty pictures on your computer are fine things but the *point* of a computer is to be a tool. In the case of a professional user it is to get a pretty picture not on the computer but into a magazine, poster, book jacket etc. Without minor functionality bullet points such as "color pre-press and the like" GIMP is not even competing with Photoshop but with the various crippled versions like Photoshop LE or Photoshop elements (or whatever they are calling it these days) which also lack professional functionality.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but until Linux replicates the Apple developer experience, it's likely to always feel "hacked together." Because in reality, it is.
And I think that probably is a GOOD thing. This "hacked" quality that is Linux's weakness on the desktop and will ensure that it will never be as easy to use as the Mac is also Linux's strength. The fact that all those developers are free to do as they damn well please (and to hell with UI consistency) is part of what they LIKE about it.
I see Linux and Apple as complimentary. And when it comes to growing marketshare I think they may make a good tag-team against windows. Linux has all it's advantages against windows and Apple will end up being one end of the "linux" market (yes, I know BSD) with an easy-to-use slick user experience for those that need or want it. They can only get that slick experience because they have a sometimes benevolent dictator weilding his proprietary hardware and software (and cherry-picking the best open-source stuff to integrate in to the mix)
It doesn't really matter who has a larger piece of the marketshare pie at any given point, they are both taking it from windows and I think it is good for either of them when the other does well.
All good points, but some of them are one (very critical) day outdated.
Dual 1.25 Ghz G4 Proc
What is this "G4" of which you speak? That is sooo last-week!
Linux is more likely to be a positive than a negative for Apple.
I agree but I think linux helps Apple in many more ways. First, as you pointed out Apple is exploiting open-source projects for their own products (and giving back too).
Second Linux has kept Windows from dominating the low-end server market which helps keep Mac's as viable client machines.
Even more importantly to Apple linux has promoted/preserved open standards which are as important to Apple as they are to linux as niche players competing against a monopoly.
Finally, Apple will do better in a heterogeneos computing environment. If linux starts gaining serious desktop market-share all the above effects will increase. Also Apple's selling-points would be even more compelling. An "open-source(ish)" unix that's broadly compatible with linux but with a very slick consumer oriented user environment and wealth of comercial consumer software, brain-dead easy to use interface & tight hardware/software integration would be an easy sell in a linux world. Even if linux starts becoming "user-friendly" it will be a long time before the perception that it isn't change and it's unlikely that it will ever become as "user-friendly" as MacOS because it's developers and users value power, flexibility, configurability at the expense of ease-of-use rather than vise-versa as Apple does. For this reason I think Apple and Linux are largely carving their niches out of Windows from opposite ends (though that has changed somewhat with OS X).
An interesting question is if either (or both collectively) gains a critical mass of market-share what will windows selling point be? That it's easier to use than linux? Get a Mac! That it's more "open" with more hardware vendors than Apple? Get a linux machine!
But still not smart enough â" he shouldâ(TM)ve ported NeXTStep to Intel architecture and become a software-only company.
Umm... They DID.
Jobs knows what will sell, and doesn't market (Ok, forget the cube) what won't.
Granted the cube bombed, but not because it wasn't cool/desireable but because it was priced out of it's market. I watched the keynote via webcast and thought "At last a monitorless iMac... and REALLY cool looking too - I want one." Then they announced the price and I thought "wow, is THAT overpriced, It's going to bomb big time." You could tell that the live audience had the same response - all sorts of enthusiasm and then a sort of embarrassed silence when the price popped up onto the screen.
Soda
n. 2.b. Chiefly Northeastern U.S., Eastern Missouri, & Southwestern Illinois. See soft drink.
soft drink
n. In both senses also called soda pop, also called regionally cold drink, drink, pop, soda, soda water, tonic.
1. A nonalcoholic, flavored, carbonated beverage, usually commercially prepared and sold in bottles or cans.
2. A serving of this beverage
I was talking about mandating that the *government* use the metric system, and that commercial products change their labeling.
Madating it on private manufacturers is still forcing people (manufacturers in this case) to do something that don't want to/don't see a need for/believe their customers wouldn't want. For that matter in most instances we already have this - government mandated labels include metric measurements often in the dominant position (take a look at nutritional info on any food item). If you don't want to buy your milk by the gallon you are free to buy it in handy 3.78 Liter bottles that are suprisingly clearly labelled as such (I just looked, the text was the same size - though it was in parenthesis)
The US government already does tend to favor the metric system in every area it influences. Usage of metric in the US seems to be influence by two factors. Metric is used in any given area in direct proportion to government regulation of that area (which is why Americans think only illicit drugs are measured in "kilos" and "Klicks" are some obscure military unit of measurement). Medicine (very highly regulated) is measured in grams, food (less regulated) is measured with English units but has metric equivalents very clearly labeled; Anything free from government labelling regulations use English units of measurement. This is sometimes offset by the other influence: metric is used in inverse proportion to it's visibility/impact on the public. Highway signage for example, even though it is entirely in the government realm, is in miles because switching would irritate the public.
Government doesn't change not because government administrators wouldn't like to (paternalistic do-goodism being the joy of government administrators everywhere) but because their clientele, the people they *serve* would rather continue to get information in the format they actually use and has the democratic tools to check government's desire to "fix" things. Is it the governments role to "do me good" even when I don't want it to/"don't know any better"? Is it the public's servant or it's teacher? Different societies have different views but in American society the answer is pretty clear and any politician getting it wrong is commiting political suicide.
The only way we're ever going to switch is if the government mandates....
You are making my point for me. A *mandate* is "An authoritative command or instruction" - Dictionary.com. If people need to be commanded to switch that is evidence enough that they don't *want* to.
A deep, unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You don't *really* believe that do you?