Is this data anywhere near accurate? The iPhone group recruited me earlier this year for a software engineering gig (I got through two rounds of interviews, but didn't get the job), and they all but laughed at the idea I was making $85K, saying "we can blow that away." And I mean really, there's no way an engineering professional in Silicon Valley could live on $89K.
I'm sorry, but I just can't accept the premise here.
I went to the Sproutcore session at WWDC and IM'ed a friend back home to say "hey, this looks pretty interesting." He's done more webapp work than I have (I was mostly there for the iPhone SDK), and his reply was "meh, looks like a Rails clone".
That said, there are worse places to take your inspiration from than Rails and Cocoa.
Actually, the secret sauce may not be Sproutcore's Rails-ness, but rather the fact that it makes fairly aggressive use of cutting-edge CSS, the <canvas> tag, and other modern browser features to achieve a near-RIA experience entirely within the browser. With Apple's support for WebKit, and its shunning of Flash and Java on the iPhone, this is clearly the direction they want rich web content to go.
Have him check the terms of the company's ISP and domain contracts first. For example, as I was renewing my personal domain with GoDaddy the other day, I realized their terms include liquidated damages of $1 per message for spam sent from a GoDaddy account:
6. NO SPAM; LIQUIDATED DAMAGES.
You agree Go Daddy may immediately terminate any account which it believes, in its sole discretion, is transmitting or is otherwise connected with any spam or other unsolicited bulk email. In addition, if actual damages cannot be reasonably calculated then You agree to pay Go Daddy liquidated damages of $1 for each piece of spam or unsolicited bulk email transmitted from or otherwise connected with Your account, otherwise You agree to pay Go Daddy's actual damages. You acknowledge You have read and understand and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of Go Daddy â(TM)s Anti-spam Policy, available here . Such terms and conditions are applicable to the use of all Go Daddy Software and Services and are incorporated herein.
Unless he's eager to lose a lot of money and/or end up in court, he'll probably back off.
If they release this on schedule they will be abandoning some people with three year old hardware at that point.
But not very many. Net Applications reported that Intel Mac use surpassed PPC back in November. Tack on a year and there's just not that many PPCs still out there. It'd be aggressive, even for Apple, but the benefits of not supporting two CPU architectures are obvious, and they're probably not above using system updates to sell new hardware
Notice also that some of Apple's recent software is already Intel-only, like the AVCHD support in Final Cut, or their Java 1.6 (which is not only Intel-only, it's 64-bit Intel-only).
Sorry, but Apple keeping prices down - on a breakthrough distribution method with a breakthrough product that expanded the market insanely - doesn't equate to Apple's fault that record companies are losing money.
Sure it does, because properly understood, the record companies are in the music distribution business, which is exactly what the iTunes Store is. Apple is literally beating them at their own game, and quickly proving the record companies irrelevant. Of course, releasing your music on your own website with a tip jar or some other revenue model (hello, Coldplay) might, in turn, prove iTunes irrelevant. As long as Apple's still selling iPods by the kajillion, I don't imagine they're too concerned.
You know that because the word "iPod" appears in the headline, this story will be on the front of every major city newspaper's business section tomorrow.
There's gotta be a nice cottage industry of filing nonsense lawsuits against Apple. Maybe it drums up business for the legal firm's less ridiculous cases.
Whenever I meet young parents... they tell me that they are worried about losing control over the raising of their own children and about ceding the responsibility of implicating values and behaviors to a multi-dimensional media marketplace over which they have no control...
No, Hilary, that's just you. I'm a 40-year-old parent of two children, ages five and two, the former with autism and a severe heart condition. And I let him game all the time. He relates much better to the screen than to people and that's just how he is with that condition. Gaming is something we can enjoy together, and I don't want a totalitarian shrew presuming to make decisions as to how I raise my children.
Do I think that parents younger than me want the government making these decisions for them? Surely you jest.
I wonder if HIlary knows the degree to which she pisses off the under-40 vote with her anti-gaming crusade. She acts like she's in touch with young people, when in fact, she's already old and irrelevant.
It's too bad, actually: when I heard her on Olbermann's podcast, she sounded like a rational adult, unlike the fear-mongering Republicans with their paranoid fantasies and their apparent belief that Jack Bauer himself will personally report to them on Inauguration Day. But like her husband, the only civil liberty she actually supports in is abortion, and that's not good enough.
Yeah, but still, it looks like nothing more than a "me too" service, which works with fewer clients than its Ajax/Flash-based competitors. So again: who, other than Microsoft, gets any value out of this?
Lets face it, Universal own the content, and content rules
Wrong. Distribution rules in most economic systems. The distributor controls the producer's access to the audience, and the audience's control to the content. As an earlier post above pointed out, iTunes is a different form of distribution, and is therefore a competitor to NBC. But since old media can't figure out how to handle technological and social change, they're paralyzed. They need to make as much money as possible out of alternative means of distributing each episode of Heroes, since broadcast loses another couple percent of its viewership each year.
This does seem like part of a full-court press by all parts of Universal (music, TV, etc.), against iTunes, which strikes me as somewhat silly in the end, because Apple's power (and profits) come from the iPod, not iTunes. Apple probably doesn't care that much if iTunes faces competition, as long as stuff still works on the iPod (and who in their right mind would release in an iPod-incompatible format today? Only Microsoft, and how's that working out for them?). It's like saying that Shutterfly is a mortal threat to iPhoto, since it competes with iPhoto's built-in service to order prints. Guess what? Either way, customers are still buying high-margin Macs and iLife.
The IOC was rather famously burned by widely-reported technological problems with IBM systems at the Atlanta games in 2006, with bugs that reported some athletes as being 7 or 8 meters tall. Near the end of the games, I recall there was a proclamation that the IOC would no longer adopt any technology that hadn't been in production for at least n years. This may simply be a case of Vista, being not even a year out of beta, not qualifying for consideration under this very conservative restraint.
The 360 will have Halo 3. The Wii will likely have Mario Galaxies and possibly even Super Smash Brothers Brawl. And the PS3 will have... what? How many crappy holiday seasons can Sony survive?
I think they're banking on a couple, actually. Their stubborn resistance to permanently lower the price and their continued statements of pride (if not bombast) makes me think that they believe the Wii is a short-term thing, a fad, one whose technical limitations will cause it to hit the wall in a year or two, at which point the PS3 will become the mainstream machine, and still command a hefty price. By this thinking, the 360 isn't a concern; while the Wii is outselling the PS3 6-to-1 in Japan, it's outselling 360 by 15-to-1 (or, crunched another way, even the lowly PS3 is outselling 360 almost 3-to-1). Hopelessly irrelevant in Japan, 360 isn't the competitor, and Sony is simply counting on Nintendo to fail.
Crummy idea? Wishful thinking? I'd say so. But that's what this behavior looks like to me.
even without prior knowledge of the joke, what do you think the chances are that an Apple employee could publish this and still have a job the next day?
Tim wrote this long after Steve's return to Apple, and has a history of writing outlandish April Fool's articles. The previous year, he claimed that he'd been slipped a CD-ROM from unknown sources that ran the entire QuickTime stack on every Microsoft-licensed platform: WinCE, XBox, etc. The 2005 article cited here was a little infamous because MacTech publication slipped so badly that the article actually came out in June. Still, when I saw him at WWDC, he said that he couldn't believe anyone had fallen for it even then, given the utter obsolescence and obscurity of SNOBOL, pushed over the top by his fanciful "SNOJOB". Anyways, Tim's activities still seem to be OK with management -- we QuickTime developers appreciate his openness and availability on the list.
Ironically, the one thing Apple won't let him do is put his name on his own books ( 1, 2), which are officially attributed to "Apple".
Clearly, the PS3 isn't worth $600 to very many people. I'll be surprised if it's worth $500 either. Despite all the technology they've crammed in there, the games library has almost zero appeal. Boring, joyless games plus Blu-Ray does not equal $500.
With the Wii outselling PS3 6-to-1 in Japan, there's little reason to think third-party software makers will turn this around.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this data anywhere near accurate? The iPhone group recruited me earlier this year for a software engineering gig (I got through two rounds of interviews, but didn't get the job), and they all but laughed at the idea I was making $85K, saying "we can blow that away." And I mean really, there's no way an engineering professional in Silicon Valley could live on $89K.
I'm sorry, but I just can't accept the premise here.
I went to the Sproutcore session at WWDC and IM'ed a friend back home to say "hey, this looks pretty interesting." He's done more webapp work than I have (I was mostly there for the iPhone SDK), and his reply was "meh, looks like a Rails clone".
That said, there are worse places to take your inspiration from than Rails and Cocoa.
Actually, the secret sauce may not be Sproutcore's Rails-ness, but rather the fact that it makes fairly aggressive use of cutting-edge CSS, the <canvas> tag, and other modern browser features to achieve a near-RIA experience entirely within the browser. With Apple's support for WebKit, and its shunning of Flash and Java on the iPhone, this is clearly the direction they want rich web content to go.
Have him check the terms of the company's ISP and domain contracts first. For example, as I was renewing my personal domain with GoDaddy the other day, I realized their terms include liquidated damages of $1 per message for spam sent from a GoDaddy account:
Unless he's eager to lose a lot of money and/or end up in court, he'll probably back off.
But not very many. Net Applications reported that Intel Mac use surpassed PPC back in November. Tack on a year and there's just not that many PPCs still out there. It'd be aggressive, even for Apple, but the benefits of not supporting two CPU architectures are obvious, and they're probably not above using system updates to sell new hardware
Notice also that some of Apple's recent software is already Intel-only, like the AVCHD support in Final Cut, or their Java 1.6 (which is not only Intel-only, it's 64-bit Intel-only).
And instead, you can worry about drivers never being available for your cards, peripherals, etc.
Awaiting trademark-based cease-and-desist letter from Sega in five, four, three...
First the "Star Wars" prequels suck, then "Star Trek" falls apart in its 10th installment, now "Indiana Jones" might be bad?
Why, it's enough to make you want to see something new!
I call dibs on the first Zaku off the assembly line.
Sorry, but Apple keeping prices down - on a breakthrough distribution method with a breakthrough product that expanded the market insanely - doesn't equate to Apple's fault that record companies are losing money.
Sure it does, because properly understood, the record companies are in the music distribution business, which is exactly what the iTunes Store is. Apple is literally beating them at their own game, and quickly proving the record companies irrelevant. Of course, releasing your music on your own website with a tip jar or some other revenue model (hello, Coldplay) might, in turn, prove iTunes irrelevant. As long as Apple's still selling iPods by the kajillion, I don't imagine they're too concerned.
You know that because the word "iPod" appears in the headline, this story will be on the front of every major city newspaper's business section tomorrow.
There's gotta be a nice cottage industry of filing nonsense lawsuits against Apple. Maybe it drums up business for the legal firm's less ridiculous cases.
Whenever I meet young parents... they tell me that they are worried about losing control over the raising of their own children and about ceding the responsibility of implicating values and behaviors to a multi-dimensional media marketplace over which they have no control...
No, Hilary, that's just you. I'm a 40-year-old parent of two children, ages five and two, the former with autism and a severe heart condition. And I let him game all the time. He relates much better to the screen than to people and that's just how he is with that condition. Gaming is something we can enjoy together, and I don't want a totalitarian shrew presuming to make decisions as to how I raise my children.
Do I think that parents younger than me want the government making these decisions for them? Surely you jest.
I wonder if HIlary knows the degree to which she pisses off the under-40 vote with her anti-gaming crusade. She acts like she's in touch with young people, when in fact, she's already old and irrelevant.
It's too bad, actually: when I heard her on Olbermann's podcast, she sounded like a rational adult, unlike the fear-mongering Republicans with their paranoid fantasies and their apparent belief that Jack Bauer himself will personally report to them on Inauguration Day. But like her husband, the only civil liberty she actually supports in is abortion, and that's not good enough.
and will surely be delighted by the vapid, patronizing, derivative garbage that they bring to the video game medium.
...how's Duke Nukem Forever looking?
...someone other than bots reads Gamespot? Now that's news.
when true.com was trying to codify their business model in Michigan law, not New Jersey.
...when it was called ThinkFree Office.
Yeah, but still, it looks like nothing more than a "me too" service, which works with fewer clients than its Ajax/Flash-based competitors. So again: who, other than Microsoft, gets any value out of this?
Great, a Flickr/YouTube wannabe that only works on Windows and XBoxes. So who actually wants this?
Gee, those have worked so well in the past. Good luck with that, guys. Say hey to Urge and Sony Connect while you're decomposing.
Lets face it, Universal own the content, and content rules
Wrong. Distribution rules in most economic systems. The distributor controls the producer's access to the audience, and the audience's control to the content. As an earlier post above pointed out, iTunes is a different form of distribution, and is therefore a competitor to NBC. But since old media can't figure out how to handle technological and social change, they're paralyzed. They need to make as much money as possible out of alternative means of distributing each episode of Heroes, since broadcast loses another couple percent of its viewership each year.
This does seem like part of a full-court press by all parts of Universal (music, TV, etc.), against iTunes, which strikes me as somewhat silly in the end, because Apple's power (and profits) come from the iPod, not iTunes. Apple probably doesn't care that much if iTunes faces competition, as long as stuff still works on the iPod (and who in their right mind would release in an iPod-incompatible format today? Only Microsoft, and how's that working out for them?). It's like saying that Shutterfly is a mortal threat to iPhoto, since it competes with iPhoto's built-in service to order prints. Guess what? Either way, customers are still buying high-margin Macs and iLife.
The IOC was rather famously burned by widely-reported technological problems with IBM systems at the Atlanta games in 2006, with bugs that reported some athletes as being 7 or 8 meters tall. Near the end of the games, I recall there was a proclamation that the IOC would no longer adopt any technology that hadn't been in production for at least n years. This may simply be a case of Vista, being not even a year out of beta, not qualifying for consideration under this very conservative restraint.
The 360 will have Halo 3. The Wii will likely have Mario Galaxies and possibly even Super Smash Brothers Brawl. And the PS3 will have... what? How many crappy holiday seasons can Sony survive?
I think they're banking on a couple, actually. Their stubborn resistance to permanently lower the price and their continued statements of pride (if not bombast) makes me think that they believe the Wii is a short-term thing, a fad, one whose technical limitations will cause it to hit the wall in a year or two, at which point the PS3 will become the mainstream machine, and still command a hefty price. By this thinking, the 360 isn't a concern; while the Wii is outselling the PS3 6-to-1 in Japan, it's outselling 360 by 15-to-1 (or, crunched another way, even the lowly PS3 is outselling 360 almost 3-to-1). Hopelessly irrelevant in Japan, 360 isn't the competitor, and Sony is simply counting on Nintendo to fail.
Crummy idea? Wishful thinking? I'd say so. But that's what this behavior looks like to me.
even without prior knowledge of the joke, what do you think the chances are that an Apple employee could publish this and still have a job the next day?
Tim wrote this long after Steve's return to Apple, and has a history of writing outlandish April Fool's articles. The previous year, he claimed that he'd been slipped a CD-ROM from unknown sources that ran the entire QuickTime stack on every Microsoft-licensed platform: WinCE, XBox, etc. The 2005 article cited here was a little infamous because MacTech publication slipped so badly that the article actually came out in June. Still, when I saw him at WWDC, he said that he couldn't believe anyone had fallen for it even then, given the utter obsolescence and obscurity of SNOBOL, pushed over the top by his fanciful "SNOJOB". Anyways, Tim's activities still seem to be OK with management -- we QuickTime developers appreciate his openness and availability on the list.
Ironically, the one thing Apple won't let him do is put his name on his own books ( 1, 2), which are officially attributed to "Apple".
...I hear that Bill Gates will give $1 to charity for every e-mail you send him. Why not put that ancient April Fool's joke on the front page too?
"Stuff is worth what people will pay for it."
Clearly, the PS3 isn't worth $600 to very many people. I'll be surprised if it's worth $500 either. Despite all the technology they've crammed in there, the games library has almost zero appeal. Boring, joyless games plus Blu-Ray does not equal $500.
With the Wii outselling PS3 6-to-1 in Japan, there's little reason to think third-party software makers will turn this around.