Price per share is basically meaningless; it just gives you an idea of the ratio of the companies value to the number of shares they have issues. You should look at the market capitalization, which is the sock price times the number of shares:
Apple Computer, Inc. $8,714,424,780
Gateway, Inc. $1,966,516,110
The market cap can't really tell you how the company is doing, you need to look at the change in price, as this lovely chart will show. To get an idea of Gateways financial woes beyond the stock price, you could look at recent market news, such a S&P's plans to cut Gateways credit, which was already downgraded to junk a few months a go, even further. See, if you get more meaningful facts, they look even worse;)
In IGN’s coverage, they speculate that the new game will be Final Fantasy Unlimited, based on the anime. NOA’s VP also hinted that the title will include GBA connectivity.
While it is possible that Nintendo would have the Gamecube modem and broadband adapter ready in time for a MMORPG Final Fantasy Game, this seems far more likely as just the other day Miyamoto was talking was talking about the problems with online console gaming. Personally, I would rather have a great, offline RPG that can compete with the goodness of FF4-6 than something I have that requires me to shell out a lot more money for hardware (hence the $199 GCN in the first place:)
we should give Apple a little credit for removing CD-ROM autoplay in OS X (which only allows you to turn on autoplay of audio CDs and DVDs). Followed swiftly by a slap on the wrist for not removing it from the latest builds of 9 an leaving X vulnerable through classic, of course:)
I'm sorry, but that ain't going to happen any time soon.
You haven't used a nightly build any time lately, have you. They are well on the way to both and I would set a target of Q3 or Q4 this year for full CSS support and acceptable scripting support.
Actually, he said they have no taste, not they have no class (although I'm sure that's been said as well;). Probably an error in Revenge of the Nerds, which is largely "based on actual events" aka "poorly researched." The whole quote goes:
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. So I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success: I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products."
--Triumph of the Nerds PBS documentary interview (May 1996)
Are your online bank/finance sites just rejecting you because they don't know your broser (i.e. you must download Netscape or IE as oppesed to just not working because of JavaScript problems)? If so, just get OW 4.1b1 or a nightly build of 4.1, go to Preferences>Compatibility, and have it identify itself as some browser they do support.
As a long term strategy, it's in Apple's best interest to package software which will also run on Linux boxes.
Why? If you want people to shell out $ for your OS, you have to prove that it is better (for what they are doing) than the free alternative. I would be appalled if apple made Mozilla the default browser for OS X, since your bundled software is supposed to show off the OS. While Mozilla has the best rendering engine around (I always use it to test my web pages first, and then go into other browsers and see what won't work:), even with the recent enhancements to the interface, it has one of the worst attempts at an Aqua UI of any major app on the platform (including Java ones). Change that abomination at the top of my window to an NSToolbar, use Quartz for text, and clean up the default theme (circa Netscape Communicator) and we'd have a good default browser for OS X; if Apple had a sincere desire to do this, they could devote some engineers to working on the Mozilla project. It seems far more likely, however, that Apple would bundle OmniWeb, since they have already started bundling Omni apps with their new machines. If they could just finish the JS and CSS support, OmniWeb could also make a great default browser. Just dump that crap version of IE that hasn't been changed in over a year!
While the Power4 will no doubt compete with the Itanium in the server space, since many people are talking about when 64-bit chips will hit the desktop, you should note that its "friend" the G4, which has been out since before the P4, is by no means meant to compete with new Intel offerings; the Goldfish PowerPC 8500 ("G5") is aimed squarely to dominate the desktop space before Intel can get to it with 64-bit chips. It's ability to run 32-bit code at much better speed than the othet 64-bit offerings makes it much more appealing to people looking to transition to 64-bit on the desktop, and if they can pull off the.13 SOI, 500MHz RapidIO bus, etc. it should reassert A.I.M.'s competitiveness in high-end desktops. Now when it will actually ship, how much of this will get implemented, and at what frequency it starts at is anyone's guess.
Since i haven't seen a single post that was on topic, i'd like to actually talk about the mouse.
Obviously I haven't used one, but I don't see what problem they're trying to solve with this leaning instead of clicking thing... it seems to me that that would be even worse for your wrist after repetitive use, and judging from the other mice on the companies website, they're not exactly masters of ergonomics or industrial design.
This does bring up a question I've wondered about, though; if Apple offers their own 2-button scroll wheel mouse, what will it look like. The last time we heard rumors that they were designing one was back during the days of their hockey-puck mouse, so the mouse would have had the fruit and ice design scheme. I must say Apple's current no button clickable mouse is beautiful, even though I use my Logitech Cordless Optical Mouse most of the time, I keep it on my desk for the prettiness factor (the Logitech isn't bad though, it almost perfectly matches the colors of a graphite G4 tower, it just can't hold a candle to a translucent black oval floating above your desk;).
Of course, there's no guarantee Apple will ever make a two-button mouse, but I don't think you can rule out the possibility that they might start at least including them with Power Macs. Apple has admitted that many of their customers need the extra button and scroll wheel, particularly gamers; when Apple furnished Power Macs for QuakeCon, they came with 3rd party two button mice, and you'll wonder how you ever used the Mac OS X Finder with a one-button mouse once you switch.
So I think there is plenty of motivation, although they would probably keep the present mouse on the iMacs (the iMacs now actually use a special mouse with a white bubble instead of a black one, ditto for the keyboard). So my question is what would it look like? Hopefully nothing like this one from Green, in form or function, but how do you make a mouse as stunning as the current one with buttons and a scroll wheel breaking up the design? Would be a very different design, but the new towers might see a very new design sometime soon as well, and they might take that opportunity to switch keyboard and mouse designs ont the pro products as well, after all, is Apple going to use the same style they've had since the G3 when they start making 5th gen towers.
Porting Costs?
This is a compression/decompression codec.
all that is required is to read in bits,
transform them, and read them out.... you don't HAVE any porting
( assuming you keep it for x86 )
please, if you want to argue, make sense.
I said, "1)There are enough content creators on Linux that they will sell enough copies of Sorenson Video 3 Pro to recoup their porting costs." Sorenson Video 3 Pro is a $499 program, very different from the decoder and basic encoder incuded with QuickTime, which have been on OS X from the start; although SV3P works as a plug-in, it would definitely need a lot of porting work to get it to work on Linux; they haven't even got it ported to OS X yet!
Please, if you want to argue, read the post fully, and check the links if you need to.
So whats the progress of the Sorenson codec on non-OSX UNIX?
This is just me, but you'd probably have more sucess complaining to Sorenson about that, if you think you can convince them that 1)There are enough content creators on Linux that they will sell enough copies of Sorenson Video 3 Pro to recoup their porting costs or 2)Content creators feel that there are enough content consumers on Linux that they feel support for the platform is important. You could just try to get Apple to fully implement QuickTime on Linux, if you think you can convince them of #2 above.
How about Aqua themes?
Why the hell do you feel that you have the right to Apple's art? Source code is one thing, pixmaps are another thing entirely. If someone copied art that my design team had spent many long hours designing, I would go after them a lot harder than Apple did.
How is Apple helping me again?
By employing dozens of programmers who work on open source code, perhaps? By building and open source steaming media server that you can run on your favorite OS? By having, "one of the biggest gcc compiler design teams in the world" and giving all that code back?
And when Apple and Microsoft release media players that support this finalized MPEG-4 standard, are they going to charge people $0.25 to download them or just absorb the cost for a free download?
They are going to absorb the cost; they mentioned that in the story and the press release. That's why you have to put up with those QuickTime Pro reminders; Apple buy licenses to several codecs that you get in the free download of QuickTime.
If all the media playing software supports both patented MPEG-4 codecs AND Tarkin, which one do you think content producers are going to use?
And when is that going to happen?;) It's not that I don't like Tarkin and the other open codecs; I have half a dozen or so of them on my machine, and often they are a good choice for encoding video for my personal storage, but I don't expect to be able to distribute content with them. OTOH, there's no reason Tarkin can't make a plug-in that lets you use the codec in QuickTime; many other new codec makers have done it, like 3ivx; if they were willing to have Tarkin encoded data in QuickTime format files, they could even set it up so that the QuickTime player would automagiacally download the Tarkin codec if the user tried to play a Tarkin encoded file, but I doubt the people at Ogg would do that. Apple is all for having as many formats supported in QT as possible, but the push will be for everyone to use the standard, since that's where you'll be able to reach the largest audience, and with MPEG-4, it includes many devices other than computers; they had an MPEG-4 streaming to a cell phone at QT Live.
The "official" version of DivX;-) (the one that the company that makes the playa owns) is no longer open source, so there's no reason they can't start charging for the encoding tools sometime in the future (almost no one can get away with charging for a decoder). DivX;-) and the forthcoming Ogg Tarkin may be excellent codecs (more so the latter), but try to face the fact that the big-name content is going to be in big-name codecs, so if we can get a patented standard, it is better than having patented, undocumented formats.
I think the other posts Re: this comment explained it pretty well; No the earth cannot produce that much meat. The 100J of sunlight to 1J in you illustration gives you the general idea, but drastically overestimates, and since you wanted "a fact or two" I'll get the hard numbers, from Miller, Tyler G. Living in the Environment, Twelfth Edition, pp. 85. Assume 1,700,000 kilocalories hit a square meter of earth per year. 20,810 will be transferred to producers (plants). 3,368 will be transferred to consumers (the cattle). 383 will be transferred to a first level carnivore (the guy at McDonalds). To put it another way, if 100J of enery hits a plant, 1.2 are availible to the cattle, and.12 are availible to you. The conversion efficiencies are about 1.2% for converting energy to plants, 6% for converting plants to animals, and 10% for converting animals to other animals, so if you eat an animal you get.072% of the original energy, whereas eating a plant gives you.72% of the original energy.
This is not to say that we must all stop eating meat; the earth could support everyone eating a mediterranean diet for quite some time (assuming farming technology continues to advance). In case you haven't figured it out, the reason why Americans can eat this diet and still pay our farmers not to grow crops to keep the price of food artificially high (but also to ensure that they do not destroy America's cropland, which they would under strictly capitalist motivations) is because industrialized nations use many times the surface area of their nation to support their people, while persons in developing nations only use a fraction of their share of their nation's land area.
Arguing about how many people the earth can theoretically support is ridiculous; you are ignoring the base issue that the planet has a finite amount of resources and as the number of organisms depending on them increases, the share they can each use decreases. If you want to live on a very efficient diet (the world could not even support the current population if everyone ate as much meat as Americans), see drastic decreases in your share of the planet's surface area and the area of wilderness, then go ahead and leave your head up your ass.
We can debate all day about whether the ability to get John Q. Public's computer security patched so it stops DDoSing your web server outweighs the value of having full control over your machine, but honestly, if you don't trust a company enough to have confidence in simple software updates, should you really be running their stuff in the first place?
Bungie long ago released the Marathon 2/Infinity engine under the GPL (this was pre buyout/sellout, remember). If you haven't played this groundbreaking and largely unequaled game, do yourself a favor and head over to http://source.bungie.org/. They have binaries available for Mac OS X, Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and BeOS. Then go on eBay and the Marathon Trilogy Box Set for the data files:).
If you haven't tried the new Aleph One builds of Marathon, they allow you to play the original game with full OpenGL goodness and add many things that makers of new scenarios (yes, many people are still building Marathon scenarios) can take advantage of such as real 3D models (remember, the original is sprite based) and scripting, as well as a few hundred other improvements; check the Engine Development section of their site. There is also the M1A1 project at http://bighouse.bungie.org/m1/which allows you to play Marathon 1 on the A1 engine (Mac OS X and Mac OS only, and closed source due to the use of Bungie art, sorry)
I like the PS2 and think it has, for now, better games
The problem I foresee is that the XBox is only going to fall farther behind in 2002, with a spectacularly mediocre lineup consising mostly of games being released for all three consoles and many that the XBox is getting several quarters later than the PS2 or NGC (THPS3, GTA3, etc.).
You can get a dual G4 for (a little) less than $3000; remember that is the default configuration, some of that stuff can be ditched for a machine to be used only as a node.
Re:And this is convincing because...?
on
Macintosh Clustering
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Please. I've seen neither
Well, at least you admit that this comment wasn't based on any actual facts. Here is the complete text of the PDF:
Requirements: Macintoshes running OS X 10.1 or later with proper connections to the interet. (If the Macs are on an isolated network, manually configure their Network system preferences to use unique IP addresses from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254.)
Installation: Double click the Pooch installer. Repeat for additional Macs on the same local area network.
Congratulations! You have just built your first patallel computer. Now to test it:
1. Select a parallel application: Dowload the AltiVec Fractal Carbon dmo and drag it from the Finder to the Pooch alias icon on the desktop.
2. Select nodes: To add other nodes, click on Select Nodes... from the Job Window that just appeared to invoke the Node Scan Window. Double-clicking on a node moves it to the node list of the Job Window.
3. Launch: Click Launch Job in the Job Window to start your parallel job. Pooch should be distributing the code and launching the parallel application.
Congratulations! You are now operating your first parallel computer.
As you can see, there are only two sentences about actually installing the program, and three paragraphs about how to use it. Is the entire Beowolf book about installation and set up? Of course not, but a good few dozen pages are, so I'd say Pooch's 2/3s of a page wins.
This attempt to block out users seems to be very narrowly targeted at Trillian. I have seen reports of many third-party clients still working, and since my Fire.app has been connected the whole time without a hitch, I would assume that anyting that uses libfaim still works.
If they care so much about third-party clients on their system, they would just make everyone upgrade to a new official AIM client and put some more secure protocol into place; I'm guessing this is largely a politically motivated action against Trillian.
Slashdot Mirror
The market cap can't really tell you how the company is doing, you need to look at the change in price, as this lovely chart will show. To get an idea of Gateways financial woes beyond the stock price, you could look at recent market news, such a S&P's plans to cut Gateways credit, which was already downgraded to junk a few months a go, even further. See, if you get more meaningful facts, they look even worse ;)
At least Sony didn't buy out the company they wanted to make flagship games for their new console ;)
While it is possible that Nintendo would have the Gamecube modem and broadband adapter ready in time for a MMORPG Final Fantasy Game, this seems far more likely as just the other day Miyamoto was talking was talking about the problems with online console gaming. Personally, I would rather have a great, offline RPG that can compete with the goodness of FF4-6 than something I have that requires me to shell out a lot more money for hardware (hence the $199 GCN in the first place :)
we should give Apple a little credit for removing CD-ROM autoplay in OS X (which only allows you to turn on autoplay of audio CDs and DVDs). Followed swiftly by a slap on the wrist for not removing it from the latest builds of 9 an leaving X vulnerable through classic, of course:)
You haven't used a nightly build any time lately, have you. They are well on the way to both and I would set a target of Q3 or Q4 this year for full CSS support and acceptable scripting support.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. So I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success: I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products."
--Triumph of the Nerds PBS documentary interview (May 1996)
Are your online bank/finance sites just rejecting you because they don't know your broser (i.e. you must download Netscape or IE as oppesed to just not working because of JavaScript problems)? If so, just get OW 4.1b1 or a nightly build of 4.1, go to Preferences>Compatibility, and have it identify itself as some browser they do support.
Why? If you want people to shell out $ for your OS, you have to prove that it is better (for what they are doing) than the free alternative. I would be appalled if apple made Mozilla the default browser for OS X, since your bundled software is supposed to show off the OS. While Mozilla has the best rendering engine around (I always use it to test my web pages first, and then go into other browsers and see what won't work :), even with the recent enhancements to the interface, it has one of the worst attempts at an Aqua UI of any major app on the platform (including Java ones). Change that abomination at the top of my window to an NSToolbar, use Quartz for text, and clean up the default theme (circa Netscape Communicator) and we'd have a good default browser for OS X; if Apple had a sincere desire to do this, they could devote some engineers to working on the Mozilla project. It seems far more likely, however, that Apple would bundle OmniWeb, since they have already started bundling Omni apps with their new machines. If they could just finish the JS and CSS support, OmniWeb could also make a great default browser. Just dump that crap version of IE that hasn't been changed in over a year!
This site is green and OS X is primarily white. I can think of one operating system that uses blue curvy edges pervasively, however...
Google isn't using paid ranking, they're ordering the text ads according to who paid more for them.
While the Power4 will no doubt compete with the Itanium in the server space, since many people are talking about when 64-bit chips will hit the desktop, you should note that its "friend" the G4, which has been out since before the P4, is by no means meant to compete with new Intel offerings; the Goldfish PowerPC 8500 ("G5") is aimed squarely to dominate the desktop space before Intel can get to it with 64-bit chips. It's ability to run 32-bit code at much better speed than the othet 64-bit offerings makes it much more appealing to people looking to transition to 64-bit on the desktop, and if they can pull off the .13 SOI, 500MHz RapidIO bus, etc. it should reassert A.I.M.'s competitiveness in high-end desktops. Now when it will actually ship, how much of this will get implemented, and at what frequency it starts at is anyone's guess.
Obviously I haven't used one, but I don't see what problem they're trying to solve with this leaning instead of clicking thing... it seems to me that that would be even worse for your wrist after repetitive use, and judging from the other mice on the companies website, they're not exactly masters of ergonomics or industrial design.
This does bring up a question I've wondered about, though; if Apple offers their own 2-button scroll wheel mouse, what will it look like. The last time we heard rumors that they were designing one was back during the days of their hockey-puck mouse, so the mouse would have had the fruit and ice design scheme. I must say Apple's current no button clickable mouse is beautiful, even though I use my Logitech Cordless Optical Mouse most of the time, I keep it on my desk for the prettiness factor (the Logitech isn't bad though, it almost perfectly matches the colors of a graphite G4 tower, it just can't hold a candle to a translucent black oval floating above your desk ;).
Of course, there's no guarantee Apple will ever make a two-button mouse, but I don't think you can rule out the possibility that they might start at least including them with Power Macs. Apple has admitted that many of their customers need the extra button and scroll wheel, particularly gamers; when Apple furnished Power Macs for QuakeCon, they came with 3rd party two button mice, and you'll wonder how you ever used the Mac OS X Finder with a one-button mouse once you switch.
So I think there is plenty of motivation, although they would probably keep the present mouse on the iMacs (the iMacs now actually use a special mouse with a white bubble instead of a black one, ditto for the keyboard). So my question is what would it look like? Hopefully nothing like this one from Green, in form or function, but how do you make a mouse as stunning as the current one with buttons and a scroll wheel breaking up the design? Would be a very different design, but the new towers might see a very new design sometime soon as well, and they might take that opportunity to switch keyboard and mouse designs ont the pro products as well, after all, is Apple going to use the same style they've had since the G3 when they start making 5th gen towers.
I said, "1)There are enough content creators on Linux that they will sell enough copies of Sorenson Video 3 Pro to recoup their porting costs." Sorenson Video 3 Pro is a $499 program, very different from the decoder and basic encoder incuded with QuickTime, which have been on OS X from the start; although SV3P works as a plug-in, it would definitely need a lot of porting work to get it to work on Linux; they haven't even got it ported to OS X yet!
Please, if you want to argue, read the post fully, and check the links if you need to.
This is just me, but you'd probably have more sucess complaining to Sorenson about that, if you think you can convince them that 1)There are enough content creators on Linux that they will sell enough copies of Sorenson Video 3 Pro to recoup their porting costs or 2)Content creators feel that there are enough content consumers on Linux that they feel support for the platform is important. You could just try to get Apple to fully implement QuickTime on Linux, if you think you can convince them of #2 above.
How about Aqua themes?
Why the hell do you feel that you have the right to Apple's art? Source code is one thing, pixmaps are another thing entirely. If someone copied art that my design team had spent many long hours designing, I would go after them a lot harder than Apple did.
How is Apple helping me again?
By employing dozens of programmers who work on open source code, perhaps? By building and open source steaming media server that you can run on your favorite OS? By having, "one of the biggest gcc compiler design teams in the world" and giving all that code back?
They are going to absorb the cost; they mentioned that in the story and the press release. That's why you have to put up with those QuickTime Pro reminders; Apple buy licenses to several codecs that you get in the free download of QuickTime.
If all the media playing software supports both patented MPEG-4 codecs AND Tarkin, which one do you think content producers are going to use?
And when is that going to happen? ;) It's not that I don't like Tarkin and the other open codecs; I have half a dozen or so of them on my machine, and often they are a good choice for encoding video for my personal storage, but I don't expect to be able to distribute content with them. OTOH, there's no reason Tarkin can't make a plug-in that lets you use the codec in QuickTime; many other new codec makers have done it, like 3ivx; if they were willing to have Tarkin encoded data in QuickTime format files, they could even set it up so that the QuickTime player would automagiacally download the Tarkin codec if the user tried to play a Tarkin encoded file, but I doubt the people at Ogg would do that. Apple is all for having as many formats supported in QT as possible, but the push will be for everyone to use the standard, since that's where you'll be able to reach the largest audience, and with MPEG-4, it includes many devices other than computers; they had an MPEG-4 streaming to a cell phone at QT Live.
The "official" version of DivX ;-) (the one that the company that makes the playa owns) is no longer open source, so there's no reason they can't start charging for the encoding tools sometime in the future (almost no one can get away with charging for a decoder). DivX ;-) and the forthcoming Ogg Tarkin may be excellent codecs (more so the latter), but try to face the fact that the big-name content is going to be in big-name codecs, so if we can get a patented standard, it is better than having patented, undocumented formats.
This is not to say that we must all stop eating meat; the earth could support everyone eating a mediterranean diet for quite some time (assuming farming technology continues to advance). In case you haven't figured it out, the reason why Americans can eat this diet and still pay our farmers not to grow crops to keep the price of food artificially high (but also to ensure that they do not destroy America's cropland, which they would under strictly capitalist motivations) is because industrialized nations use many times the surface area of their nation to support their people, while persons in developing nations only use a fraction of their share of their nation's land area.
Arguing about how many people the earth can theoretically support is ridiculous; you are ignoring the base issue that the planet has a finite amount of resources and as the number of organisms depending on them increases, the share they can each use decreases. If you want to live on a very efficient diet (the world could not even support the current population if everyone ate as much meat as Americans), see drastic decreases in your share of the planet's surface area and the area of wilderness, then go ahead and leave your head up your ass.
You're telling me that you read Slashdot and you've never heard of the iPod?!?
We can debate all day about whether the ability to get John Q. Public's computer security patched so it stops DDoSing your web server outweighs the value of having full control over your machine, but honestly, if you don't trust a company enough to have confidence in simple software updates, should you really be running their stuff in the first place?
If you haven't tried the new Aleph One builds of Marathon, they allow you to play the original game with full OpenGL goodness and add many things that makers of new scenarios (yes, many people are still building Marathon scenarios) can take advantage of such as real 3D models (remember, the original is sprite based) and scripting, as well as a few hundred other improvements; check the Engine Development section of their site. There is also the M1A1 project at http://bighouse.bungie.org/m1/which allows you to play Marathon 1 on the A1 engine (Mac OS X and Mac OS only, and closed source due to the use of Bungie art, sorry)
The problem I foresee is that the XBox is only going to fall farther behind in 2002, with a spectacularly mediocre lineup consising mostly of games being released for all three consoles and many that the XBox is getting several quarters later than the PS2 or NGC (THPS3, GTA3, etc.).
You can get a dual G4 for (a little) less than $3000; remember that is the default configuration, some of that stuff can be ditched for a machine to be used only as a node.
Well, at least you admit that this comment wasn't based on any actual facts. Here is the complete text of the PDF:
As you can see, there are only two sentences about actually installing the program, and three paragraphs about how to use it. Is the entire Beowolf book about installation and set up? Of course not, but a good few dozen pages are, so I'd say Pooch's 2/3s of a page wins.If they care so much about third-party clients on their system, they would just make everyone upgrade to a new official AIM client and put some more secure protocol into place; I'm guessing this is largely a politically motivated action against Trillian.