3. Don't call the client the server and the server the client, its confusing! (yes it made sence in the old unix model where you are already connected via SSH and you were then running a connection BACK to your desktop, obviously if this protocol is adapted for the web the terminology will definatly need to be changed)
There was no ssh in the old unix model. Unix predates ssh by a few decades.
Look, the naming distinction between server and client is very simple: a server listens on the network for clients to connect to it. A server provides access to hardware that the client doesn't have. An ftp server provides access to the hard drive. An X server provides access to the graphics card. There's nothing confusing about it, it works the same like any other client/server design.
I used to have a set up with a single central X graphics server and three different application servers. The application servers ran X client applications which connected to the central graphics server for their output. Makes perfect sense.
Ofcourse, the web is different. The part that listens on the network there is on the remote machine, not on the local machine.
3) The best chance of further entrenching and extending the current music industry model in the online world is the iTMS/Fairplay model.
Did you know that the itms has a lot of independent music? I'm not talking about indie as a genre, I'm talking as a business model. Lots of the artists from cdbaby have their music up on the itms.
You can buy from the itms and buy indie, if you want to. Problem is: not enough people want to. That's the free market. People want to buy from the mainstream record companies, despite a crappier product and higher prices, only because of familiarity and community (having the same music as your friends). Tough deal. Apple is only giving people what they want.
The top 40 is not this magical thing where all the good music in the world ends up. The top 40 is an artificial creation of the music industry to simplify the market. If you can sell 40 singles 10.000 times each, or you can sell 10.000 singles 40 times each, it's obviously much preferable to do the former, because your overhead is a lot lower.
Top 40 music is no better than what you find on independent sites. In fact, often it is worse because it has to cater to the lowest common denominator.
Check out cdbaby.com, whatever your taste, I guarantee you that there will be music on there that you'll like. As a nice bonus, most of that music can be bought via itunes too.
You could use Google maps, and Yahoo finance. No flash.
Perzactly -- I have machines which support no plugins at all, and the rest have zaplets to kill off plugins.
I really have no use for most plugin technologies.
Maybe you don't, but the customers of my company do.
I've built web apps that were impossible to build without flash or java. Most things that deal with editable graphics are no-goes using just ajax. One of them was a floorplan viewer/editor that literally had thousands of distinct objects (separately selectable/modifyable) on screen at any one time. Could you imagine having to load hundreds of objects from the server each time you change the zoom level?
And no, that app could not have been built as a desktop application. It was the web-based replacement FOR the desktop application, because the deployment headaches of putting a desktop application everywhere wasn't feasible for some of our customers.
Heck, most web games you could not build without flash or java. Don't anger the web game gods, for their disciples are plentiful.
That, and I'm hoping if Apple does a phone they will figure out something better than the 12 phone buttons in a grid.
Apple make their keyboards with regular qwerty layouts (albeit with tweaks for the extra symbols). Sometimes the ease of use of convention outweighs the benefits of a complete redesign. I would expect them instead to improve on how you enter data with a classic phone keyboard (by making a better T9?).
Almost all true innovation in software was done by the time 1980 rolled around:
The graphical interface as we know it, with cascading windows, menus, icons, a mouse and scalable type flowed out of Doug Engelbart's NLS system in the 60's, and was there pretty much exactly as it exists today at Xerox by the late 70's.
The spreadsheet was invented in the 70's by dan bricklin (the first one was visicalc, not lotus 123; even MS had a spreadsheet called multiplan a year before before lotus released 123).
The word processor was pretty much fully formed by '76 (wordstar was merely a copy-cat too btw, of the dedicated word processing systems that came before it).
Nothing truly innovative ever happened on the IBM PC platform. No PC app was ever released to my knowledge that didn't have a functional predecessor on another platform.
Nobody is innovating, at least not by the metric you're using, of new paradigms. However, the metric I prefer is that of delivering more capability to the end user by combining that which existed before in more clever ways. By this metric there is still a lot of innovation happening, and by this metric Vista may still be innovative.
The only time I've seen memory use like that from firefox was loading a flash web app. Maybe you had bad luck and you got a flash ad that leaked memory like a sieve.
That's probably not a leak. You probably grew the scope chain by inadventently creating nested closures. I wrote a web app which was sensitive to this, and managed to trim its runtime memory footprint up to 100 megs by being more careful about how I use closures.
If you really want to do app development for the web right now, my money's on flash. It is extremely undervalued as a web development platform. Orders of magnitude easier to develop desktop-like apps in than HTML/CSS/JS.
Flash: Inkscape. It's not there yet, animation isn't ready. They're actually trying to design the interface correctly, rather than just imitate all the other animation software we've seen over the years. Also, they do seem to sort of be waiting for software that can view it (for most purposes, this means browsers that support SVG/SMIL). This will probably be every bit as powerful as Flash... there will be those who disagree of course, but who wouldn't have laughed if you'd suggested that mozilla would be the superior of IE in the beginning?
SVG is not an alternative to SWF. SWF offers you exact control over individual animation frames (with a frame-based event model), background loading of content during the animation, a built-in scripting engine (instead of a poorly interfacing non-standardized JS bridge), and so on. SVG is a nice vector graphics format, SWF is a vector-based application platform that happens to support vector graphics.
I suggest you go and build a few vector-based web applications in flash and SVG and then come back and tell us how you fared. I've done the comparison first hand, and right now there is no choice but flash.
Though admittedly, except for the player, the entire flash development chain can be built using open source tools.
I'm not against convergence per se. It's just that converged devices as they now stand do not perform well enough in their comm roles, which is the linchpin for the whole concept. The best of the devices are mediocre PDAs, which is good enough for most of us.
I disagree. I have a qtek 8020. It's your average windows mobile 2003 smartphone (I know, boo, boo, but show me a good enough open source cell phone and I'll buy it). As a phone, it is excellent. Normal cell phone form-factor and weight, excellent reception (it's GSM, since I live in europe), adequate volume (up and down buttons on the side to change during the conversation), profiles support (silent, speakerphone,...), a normal back-lighted phone keyboard, and basically every quality you would expect from a normal cell phone.
The calendar integration is nicely done. Just press a button during the conversation to bring up your day view, and from there it's easy to switch to week or month view, add appointments, and so on. Integration with my mac desktop is sufficient. Just put it in the cradle and it syncs the calendar and address book. I don't know how good the linux integration is.
As for the internet functionality, I'm satisfied there too. The reception is excellent (it's GPRS), with almost universal reception, even in fast-moving vehicles (I read bbc news and fark on the train just a few days ago). The built-in msn messenger client is adequate (over here that's the primary IM platform), and for the other networks there are a few jabber clients which serve my needs. The built-in explorer is sort of iffy, producing too much broken pages and being too slow since it has to load too much content over the slow GPRS link, but I'm using opera mini now, and that works well enough to browse the web without too much waiting or brokenness (even on gprs, since it uses a server-side proxy to trim down and reformat pages). I only use pocket explorer for checking my gmail account, which in the mobile version (m.gmail.com) is actually quite usable on the small screen.
Not that there aren't any downsides. The major downsides in my experience are: - battery life (I have to recharge every single night) - small screen (the successor has a bigger screen, but it was too expensive) - glitchy (nothing show stopping, but still, it's microsoft, there are glitches) - very proprietary (most of the 3rd party software that I wanted was commercial) - bandwidth (no 3G, which means that it is reduced to analog modem speeds) - bluetooth sucks (poor battery life, bluetooth modem configuration is a PITA, doesn't sync over bluetooth until you explicitly start the sync from the phone, and on, and on...)
Also, the cell phone keyboard is at times quite annoying to use for posting on forums, IM'ing or sending mails in gmail, but you have to make a trade-off somewhere. I could always get a bluetooth stowaway keyboard or something like that.
Re:I'm waiting for the wireless version.
on
The USB Wristband
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· Score: 1
I have one of the USB watches made by LAKS. Had it for years. It's not more annoying to take off and plug in than anything on a belt or chain. In practice it's much better, since you don't tend to forget it as easily, and you never lose it (unless you're one of those weird people who loses their watch all the time).
This article is beyond silly. This product is neither inventive nor useful in my opinion. If I had a USB armband, I would leave it at home (and during the day suddenly swear at myself for having left it at home), since the motivation to carry my USB watch is not that it's USB, but that it's a watch.
Ultimately, I'd like my retinal scan to be my password. Nobody sane is gonna steal my eye for my password.
You overestimate the amount of sane people in the world.
This is why I reject biological scans. Nothing I could ever have is that sensitive that I would want to risk losing an eyeball over it. Besides, a password you can change when compromised (or even before it gets compromised), but when someone manages to duplicate whatever biological trait you use to identify yourself, you're screwed (which together with cloning tech might actually turn out to be a fine way of copying bio identities).
If total deregulation of the market is so desirable, you must have a long list of warzones without the rule of law where markets are just supershiny.
Don't let your hate of government blind you from simple economic principles: free markets are unstable and have a non-negligible likelihood of collapsing into monopoly without government supervision.
And they are trying to push developers in the direction they want them to go, rather than providing what developers want. For instance, they have a heavy focus now on using Flash for on-line forms and applications, but when was the last time you actually used a Flash application online? And yet many developers use PHP and are now interested in Ruby and AJAX but Macromedia have very poor support for those technologies.
You go develop a web app with AJAX, and then do the same in flash, and come back and tell us that AJAX is preferable. I spent 8 months writing a moderately large CAD web app (that views and manipulates AutoCAD drawings) that was a combination of flash and ajax, and I tell you, flash is a MUCH better web app development platform. It comes with a much richer library of code (actual components), much more functionality (support for vector graphics), and since there are no competing flash player implementations (as there are competing browsers), you write code once and run it everywhere. And yes, for once that is not hype. There are some minor incompatibilities, but 95+ percent of the time your code will run completely correct on the other platforms first time you try it.
Also, many of the reasons people have historically rejected flash hold true for AJAX too, like poor support for browser history, poor support for the visually handicapped, and poor support for unusual platforms (you need firefox at the least, which does not run on embedded systems).
You're blind if you can't see the flash apps out there. Flash remains the most popular choice for web game development, for example.
Without metadata you are locked into a single way of organizing your files: folder view. No artist view, no genre view, nothing but the basic folder view. MP3 players used to be like that, and they never caught on because such a system is a pain in the rear end to use if you don't like micromanaging folders and filenames.
If you really want to load up the ipod everywhere, enable it for disk use, then place the itunes installer on there for mac and win. Or, just put sharepod on the ipod, which will run without an install.
But with the iPod gaining first a color screen (so you can view pictures on your music player!) and now video, it is almost laughable hearing about the desire for simplicity. Apple are slowing throwing the kitchen sink into their product.
Apple throw the kitchen sink in there in a way that makes it invisible. The video functionality if the ipod is completely invisible unless you use it. The basic behavior of the ipod is pretty much unchanged, except it has gotten a little glossier over the years.
Same thing with itunes. Even though it can do a LOT more, its user interface has actually simplified over the last few versions (in my experience at least).
I'll give it some credit for its size, but I really don't think that most people go out and shop for a PC with "Must be no larger than a cigar box" at the top of their list.
The mini's size actually works against it. People don't take it seriously. They don't think it's a real computer. I've had derisive remarks about its size from more than one person I've showed it to.
The thing Apple does not advertise at all but that really surprised me was the noise of the system, or rather the lack thereof. It's quiet. It's so quiet I never turn it off yet sleep right next to it. In comparison, small form factor PC's tend to be so noisy as to be annoying. Same goes for low-end PC's.
Which is the essence of why people get macs. They're less annoying. If you don't think generic wintel boxes are annoying, then there is nothing of appeal in the mac for you.
The Mini can't even really run OSX well with all of the graphical flair turned on.
Not true. I own a 1.25 ghz mini. My graphical flair is turned on. The system works well. The only thing you don't get is coreimage based flair, but most OS X flair is not coreimage flair. You do need half a gig of ram at least for the flair to work well, but that's the default spec nowadays, so...
The fact of the matter is that it's still a very pricey computer for what it is.
It's a mac. A real one. It's dirtcheap for a mac. Now, for a low-end PC, yes, it's expensive, but that is not what it is to people who buy one. The point of the mini is not to compete with low-end PC's, it's too give people who are normal PC users but tired of windows a chance to affordably get into the mac world. My previous PC was top-of-the-line when I got it, and I've always had top-of-the-line machines. The mini for me was an experiment to see if the mac way of working suited me. That's also how Apple has profiled it. I'm a switched now, and my next mac will be higher end.
And really, can you think of another major manufacturer that sells a computer and doesn't include a keyboard and mouse? Are basic input devices really optional in Apple's world?
I don't like how a lot of manufacturers require you to get a keyboard, mouse and screen even when you already have them. Choice is good. Do you disagree with that?
This would allow people interested in OS X but unwilling to buy an Apple machine to get into OS X, but still retain revenue from hardware sales and maintain the quality level associated with Apple hardware. Even if there were no restrictions on price points, the hardware licensing should make up for lost margin on Apple hardware.
Apple tried this with the clones back in the 90's. It's a business model that doesn't work. If the clones are more expensive, or the same price, pretty much no one buys them, since you might as well get Apple's own hardware. If the clones are cheaper, the per-machine revenue for apple is much lower (dell would need a profit, and there is a slimmer profit margin to begin with, leaving little for Apple). That means you must sell much higher numbers, but the limits of the mac's market share are dictated not that much by price that you could double or triple the marketshare just by a 10 or 20 procent price cut. In the end, allowing clones would hurt Apple's bottom line. There is no business case for it.
Besides, price is not an excuse to not get into OS X. The mini is $500. That is low enough that nobody can sensibly claim they stick with wintel for merely price reasons. Price/performance can be argued, but mostly I hear people boiling it down to wanting to "try the mac", but not being able to "afford it", and I think those are BS excuses.
Apple is playing with fire. Those developer releases will certainly get out in the world. I'm also certain someone will find a way to get around the Apple-only requirement once the x86 Macs start shipping, cutting into Apple's hardware revenue.
Almost no one is going to run OS X on generic boxes. You'll need considerable technical know how to do it, ruling out the majority of people. And those who do know how, won't want to, because you'll only have access to security updates running a licensed copy of OS X. Any holes that make software updates possible Apple will seal with those very updates you're downloading.
Linux has basic support for a lot of hardware, but doesn't fully take advantage of it. Either that or drivers are constantly in a state of flux (ahem, no ABI).
Linus, years ago, decided that binary drivers on linux would be a pain. That you would only have source-level stability, not binary stability. Because of this, if you want to do drivers on linux, you have to open source them, or you have to make releases for every kernel version under the sun. When it comes to hardware makers, they usually refuse to do the first thing for IP reasons, and refuse to do the second thing for financial reasons.
Because of this, the only people who will write drivers are third parties. And since you can't do binary releases, there are no commercial driver developers for linux, so the only people left to develop them are those who need those drivers to actually make use of the hardware. They'll only write as much of the driver as they need themselves, leaving a lot of the esoteric features unsupported. And, since the drivers are written out of necessity, most of them will not actively modify the driver until it no longer works for them, meaning that incompatible kernel versions will trigger development only after release, when a new driver is actually required, instead of just "nice to have".
So, basically, the reason driver support sucks on linux is entirely political. I guess linus has a point, that drivers should be open source. But the reality of that decision is that driver support will always suck on linux.
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3. Don't call the client the server and the server the client, its confusing!
(yes it made sence in the old unix model where you are already connected via SSH and you were then running a connection BACK to your desktop, obviously if this protocol is adapted for the web the terminology will definatly need to be changed)
There was no ssh in the old unix model. Unix predates ssh by a few decades.
Look, the naming distinction between server and client is very simple: a server listens on the network for clients to connect to it. A server provides access to hardware that the client doesn't have. An ftp server provides access to the hard drive. An X server provides access to the graphics card. There's nothing confusing about it, it works the same like any other client/server design.
I used to have a set up with a single central X graphics server and three different application servers. The application servers ran X client applications which connected to the central graphics server for their output. Makes perfect sense.
Ofcourse, the web is different. The part that listens on the network there is on the remote machine, not on the local machine.
3) The best chance of further entrenching and extending the current music industry model in the online world is the iTMS/Fairplay model.
Did you know that the itms has a lot of independent music? I'm not talking about indie as a genre, I'm talking as a business model. Lots of the artists from cdbaby have their music up on the itms.
You can buy from the itms and buy indie, if you want to. Problem is: not enough people want to. That's the free market. People want to buy from the mainstream record companies, despite a crappier product and higher prices, only because of familiarity and community (having the same music as your friends). Tough deal. Apple is only giving people what they want.
The top 40 is not this magical thing where all the good music in the world ends up. The top 40 is an artificial creation of the music industry to simplify the market. If you can sell 40 singles 10.000 times each, or you can sell 10.000 singles 40 times each, it's obviously much preferable to do the former, because your overhead is a lot lower.
Top 40 music is no better than what you find on independent sites. In fact, often it is worse because it has to cater to the lowest common denominator.
Check out cdbaby.com, whatever your taste, I guarantee you that there will be music on there that you'll like. As a nice bonus, most of that music can be bought via itunes too.
You could use Google maps, and Yahoo finance. No flash.
Perzactly -- I have machines which support no plugins at all, and the rest have zaplets to kill off plugins.
I really have no use for most plugin technologies.
Maybe you don't, but the customers of my company do.
I've built web apps that were impossible to build without flash or java. Most things that deal with editable graphics are no-goes using just ajax. One of them was a floorplan viewer/editor that literally had thousands of distinct objects (separately selectable/modifyable) on screen at any one time. Could you imagine having to load hundreds of objects from the server each time you change the zoom level?
And no, that app could not have been built as a desktop application. It was the web-based replacement FOR the desktop application, because the deployment headaches of putting a desktop application everywhere wasn't feasible for some of our customers.
Heck, most web games you could not build without flash or java. Don't anger the web game gods, for their disciples are plentiful.
That, and I'm hoping if Apple does a phone they will figure out something better than the 12 phone buttons in a grid.
Apple make their keyboards with regular qwerty layouts (albeit with tweaks for the extra symbols). Sometimes the ease of use of convention outweighs the benefits of a complete redesign. I would expect them instead to improve on how you enter data with a classic phone keyboard (by making a better T9?).
Nothing truly innovative ever happened on the IBM PC platform. No PC app was ever released to my knowledge that didn't have a functional predecessor on another platform.
Nobody is innovating, at least not by the metric you're using, of new paradigms. However, the metric I prefer is that of delivering more capability to the end user by combining that which existed before in more clever ways. By this metric there is still a lot of innovation happening, and by this metric Vista may still be innovative.
The only time I've seen memory use like that from firefox was loading a flash web app. Maybe you had bad luck and you got a flash ad that leaked memory like a sieve.
That's probably not a leak. You probably grew the scope chain by inadventently creating nested closures. I wrote a web app which was sensitive to this, and managed to trim its runtime memory footprint up to 100 megs by being more careful about how I use closures.
If you really want to do app development for the web right now, my money's on flash. It is extremely undervalued as a web development platform. Orders of magnitude easier to develop desktop-like apps in than HTML/CSS/JS.
Flash: Inkscape. It's not there yet, animation isn't ready. They're actually trying to design the interface correctly, rather than just imitate all the other animation software we've seen over the years. Also, they do seem to sort of be waiting for software that can view it (for most purposes, this means browsers that support SVG/SMIL). This will probably be every bit as powerful as Flash... there will be those who disagree of course, but who wouldn't have laughed if you'd suggested that mozilla would be the superior of IE in the beginning?
SVG is not an alternative to SWF. SWF offers you exact control over individual animation frames (with a frame-based event model), background loading of content during the animation, a built-in scripting engine (instead of a poorly interfacing non-standardized JS bridge), and so on. SVG is a nice vector graphics format, SWF is a vector-based application platform that happens to support vector graphics.
I suggest you go and build a few vector-based web applications in flash and SVG and then come back and tell us how you fared. I've done the comparison first hand, and right now there is no choice but flash.
Though admittedly, except for the player, the entire flash development chain can be built using open source tools.
I'm not against convergence per se. It's just that converged devices as they now stand do not perform well enough in their comm roles, which is the linchpin for the whole concept. The best of the devices are mediocre PDAs, which is good enough for most of us.
...), a normal back-lighted phone keyboard, and basically every quality you would expect from a normal cell phone.
I disagree. I have a qtek 8020. It's your average windows mobile 2003 smartphone (I know, boo, boo, but show me a good enough open source cell phone and I'll buy it). As a phone, it is excellent. Normal cell phone form-factor and weight, excellent reception (it's GSM, since I live in europe), adequate volume (up and down buttons on the side to change during the conversation), profiles support (silent, speakerphone,
The calendar integration is nicely done. Just press a button during the conversation to bring up your day view, and from there it's easy to switch to week or month view, add appointments, and so on. Integration with my mac desktop is sufficient. Just put it in the cradle and it syncs the calendar and address book. I don't know how good the linux integration is.
As for the internet functionality, I'm satisfied there too. The reception is excellent (it's GPRS), with almost universal reception, even in fast-moving vehicles (I read bbc news and fark on the train just a few days ago). The built-in msn messenger client is adequate (over here that's the primary IM platform), and for the other networks there are a few jabber clients which serve my needs. The built-in explorer is sort of iffy, producing too much broken pages and being too slow since it has to load too much content over the slow GPRS link, but I'm using opera mini now, and that works well enough to browse the web without too much waiting or brokenness (even on gprs, since it uses a server-side proxy to trim down and reformat pages). I only use pocket explorer for checking my gmail account, which in the mobile version (m.gmail.com) is actually quite usable on the small screen.
Not that there aren't any downsides. The major downsides in my experience are:
- battery life (I have to recharge every single night)
- small screen (the successor has a bigger screen, but it was too expensive)
- glitchy (nothing show stopping, but still, it's microsoft, there are glitches)
- very proprietary (most of the 3rd party software that I wanted was commercial)
- bandwidth (no 3G, which means that it is reduced to analog modem speeds)
- bluetooth sucks (poor battery life, bluetooth modem configuration is a PITA, doesn't sync over bluetooth until you explicitly start the sync from the phone, and on, and on...)
Also, the cell phone keyboard is at times quite annoying to use for posting on forums, IM'ing or sending mails in gmail, but you have to make a trade-off somewhere. I could always get a bluetooth stowaway keyboard or something like that.
I have one of the USB watches made by LAKS. Had it for years. It's not more annoying to take off and plug in than anything on a belt or chain. In practice it's much better, since you don't tend to forget it as easily, and you never lose it (unless you're one of those weird people who loses their watch all the time).
This article is beyond silly. This product is neither inventive nor useful in my opinion. If I had a USB armband, I would leave it at home (and during the day suddenly swear at myself for having left it at home), since the motivation to carry my USB watch is not that it's USB, but that it's a watch.
What desktop OS competition?
I mean seriously, who denies that MS has a desktop monopoly? Every other OS is pretty much irrelevant, and increasingly so.
America is a chick?
Three chicks actually.
What's unreasonable about requiring monopolies to lower market barriers so other companies can compete?
Ultimately, I'd like my retinal scan to be my password. Nobody sane is gonna steal my eye for my password.
You overestimate the amount of sane people in the world.
This is why I reject biological scans. Nothing I could ever have is that sensitive that I would want to risk losing an eyeball over it. Besides, a password you can change when compromised (or even before it gets compromised), but when someone manages to duplicate whatever biological trait you use to identify yourself, you're screwed (which together with cloning tech might actually turn out to be a fine way of copying bio identities).
If total deregulation of the market is so desirable, you must have a long list of warzones without the rule of law where markets are just supershiny.
Don't let your hate of government blind you from simple economic principles: free markets are unstable and have a non-negligible likelihood of collapsing into monopoly without government supervision.
And they are trying to push developers in the direction they want them to go, rather than providing what developers want. For instance, they have a heavy focus now on using Flash for on-line forms and applications, but when was the last time you actually used a Flash application online? And yet many developers use PHP and are now interested in Ruby and AJAX but Macromedia have very poor support for those technologies.
You go develop a web app with AJAX, and then do the same in flash, and come back and tell us that AJAX is preferable. I spent 8 months writing a moderately large CAD web app (that views and manipulates AutoCAD drawings) that was a combination of flash and ajax, and I tell you, flash is a MUCH better web app development platform. It comes with a much richer library of code (actual components), much more functionality (support for vector graphics), and since there are no competing flash player implementations (as there are competing browsers), you write code once and run it everywhere. And yes, for once that is not hype. There are some minor incompatibilities, but 95+ percent of the time your code will run completely correct on the other platforms first time you try it.
Also, many of the reasons people have historically rejected flash hold true for AJAX too, like poor support for browser history, poor support for the visually handicapped, and poor support for unusual platforms (you need firefox at the least, which does not run on embedded systems).
You're blind if you can't see the flash apps out there. Flash remains the most popular choice for web game development, for example.
Without metadata you are locked into a single way of organizing your files: folder view. No artist view, no genre view, nothing but the basic folder view. MP3 players used to be like that, and they never caught on because such a system is a pain in the rear end to use if you don't like micromanaging folders and filenames.
If you really want to load up the ipod everywhere, enable it for disk use, then place the itunes installer on there for mac and win. Or, just put sharepod on the ipod, which will run without an install.
But with the iPod gaining first a color screen (so you can view pictures on your music player!) and now video, it is almost laughable hearing about the desire for simplicity. Apple are slowing throwing the kitchen sink into their product.
Apple throw the kitchen sink in there in a way that makes it invisible. The video functionality if the ipod is completely invisible unless you use it. The basic behavior of the ipod is pretty much unchanged, except it has gotten a little glossier over the years.
Same thing with itunes. Even though it can do a LOT more, its user interface has actually simplified over the last few versions (in my experience at least).
I'll give it some credit for its size, but I really don't think that most people go out and shop for a PC with "Must be no larger than a cigar box" at the top of their list.
The mini's size actually works against it. People don't take it seriously. They don't think it's a real computer. I've had derisive remarks about its size from more than one person I've showed it to.
The thing Apple does not advertise at all but that really surprised me was the noise of the system, or rather the lack thereof. It's quiet. It's so quiet I never turn it off yet sleep right next to it. In comparison, small form factor PC's tend to be so noisy as to be annoying. Same goes for low-end PC's.
Which is the essence of why people get macs. They're less annoying. If you don't think generic wintel boxes are annoying, then there is nothing of appeal in the mac for you.
The Mini can't even really run OSX well with all of the graphical flair turned on.
Not true. I own a 1.25 ghz mini. My graphical flair is turned on. The system works well. The only thing you don't get is coreimage based flair, but most OS X flair is not coreimage flair. You do need half a gig of ram at least for the flair to work well, but that's the default spec nowadays, so...
The fact of the matter is that it's still a very pricey computer for what it is.
It's a mac. A real one. It's dirtcheap for a mac. Now, for a low-end PC, yes, it's expensive, but that is not what it is to people who buy one. The point of the mini is not to compete with low-end PC's, it's too give people who are normal PC users but tired of windows a chance to affordably get into the mac world. My previous PC was top-of-the-line when I got it, and I've always had top-of-the-line machines. The mini for me was an experiment to see if the mac way of working suited me. That's also how Apple has profiled it. I'm a switched now, and my next mac will be higher end.
And really, can you think of another major manufacturer that sells a computer and doesn't include a keyboard and mouse? Are basic input devices really optional in Apple's world?
I don't like how a lot of manufacturers require you to get a keyboard, mouse and screen even when you already have them. Choice is good. Do you disagree with that?
This would allow people interested in OS X but unwilling to buy an Apple machine to get into OS X, but still retain revenue from hardware sales and maintain the quality level associated with Apple hardware. Even if there were no restrictions on price points, the hardware licensing should make up for lost margin on Apple hardware.
Apple tried this with the clones back in the 90's. It's a business model that doesn't work. If the clones are more expensive, or the same price, pretty much no one buys them, since you might as well get Apple's own hardware. If the clones are cheaper, the per-machine revenue for apple is much lower (dell would need a profit, and there is a slimmer profit margin to begin with, leaving little for Apple). That means you must sell much higher numbers, but the limits of the mac's market share are dictated not that much by price that you could double or triple the marketshare just by a 10 or 20 procent price cut. In the end, allowing clones would hurt Apple's bottom line. There is no business case for it.
Besides, price is not an excuse to not get into OS X. The mini is $500. That is low enough that nobody can sensibly claim they stick with wintel for merely price reasons. Price/performance can be argued, but mostly I hear people boiling it down to wanting to "try the mac", but not being able to "afford it", and I think those are BS excuses.
Apple is playing with fire. Those developer releases will certainly get out in the world. I'm also certain someone will find a way to get around the Apple-only requirement once the x86 Macs start shipping, cutting into Apple's hardware revenue.
Almost no one is going to run OS X on generic boxes. You'll need considerable technical know how to do it, ruling out the majority of people. And those who do know how, won't want to, because you'll only have access to security updates running a licensed copy of OS X. Any holes that make software updates possible Apple will seal with those very updates you're downloading.
Linux has basic support for a lot of hardware, but doesn't fully take advantage of it. Either that or drivers are constantly in a state of flux (ahem, no ABI).
Linus, years ago, decided that binary drivers on linux would be a pain. That you would only have source-level stability, not binary stability. Because of this, if you want to do drivers on linux, you have to open source them, or you have to make releases for every kernel version under the sun. When it comes to hardware makers, they usually refuse to do the first thing for IP reasons, and refuse to do the second thing for financial reasons.
Because of this, the only people who will write drivers are third parties. And since you can't do binary releases, there are no commercial driver developers for linux, so the only people left to develop them are those who need those drivers to actually make use of the hardware. They'll only write as much of the driver as they need themselves, leaving a lot of the esoteric features unsupported. And, since the drivers are written out of necessity, most of them will not actively modify the driver until it no longer works for them, meaning that incompatible kernel versions will trigger development only after release, when a new driver is actually required, instead of just "nice to have".
So, basically, the reason driver support sucks on linux is entirely political. I guess linus has a point, that drivers should be open source. But the reality of that decision is that driver support will always suck on linux.