Yeah, they have a license to print money. That's not what I meant.:P I meant that their successfull little product has come with a TON of hassle that's going to cost them a lot of time and lawyering.
That's how Firefox has taken off so well. They came in as a web browser, same functions, and built upon it.
Emphasis mine.
Firefox started off as Mozilla Without All The Bloat. Mozilla having been the web browser with the same functions which then built upon it. Excessively.
You'd think Steve would have remembered the lesson of the Clone Wars (in which manufacturers like Motorola and Power Computing ate Apple's revenue stream instead of expanding the market base by introducing machines that were stripped of Apple's obscene markup) and stayed the hell away from anything that gives the consumer choice outside of the OS or hardware. Seems like the runaway success of the iPod has given them a nasty case of hubris.
I don't use iTMS and I don't use mobile phones (can't stand the things, personally), so for me this little stink is one big Nelson impression - "HAH-HAH!"
Funny how Apple got its start providing deeply hackable do-anything boxes, and now they're shitting their pants because the new generation of hackers are turning their turn-key kit into the deeply hackable do-anything boxes they want.
perhaps they shouldn't base a revenue stream on vendor lockin
If you haven't noticed, that's been Apple's revenue stream/strategy since 1984. They've finally entered a market where people know they have options (instead of the perception of either no options, or Apple kit and soft being the lesser evil), and they're getting exactly what they deserve.
Forget Krita, forget UI redesign.
on
The GIMP UI Redesign
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have around 400 gigs of Photoshop files. GIMP is completely and totally worthless to me until it can open and save every single last one of them (the vast majority having been created with Photoshop 5 or 5.5), including full support for all blending modes, masks, color modes, and fonts.
OpenOffice has.doc support. Why does GIMP's.psd support suck so much ass? The goal here shouldn't just be grabbing new users, it should be trying to sway or convert established, deeply entrenched users of other software. I can't use the GIMP not for any gui reasons (there's plenty of gui reasons, but if nobody used ugly or badly designed apps, then neither linux nor windows would have ANY marketshare) but for the simple fact that it doesn't open my damned documents. Even if I were to switch, I'd still have to keep PS around for working with my thousands of older documents.
An ex coworker of mien made a HUGE stink when he read the 3dsMAX (also an Autodesk product) EULA, noticing that the EULA allowed the user to use that license of max on not just THAT MACHINE but THAT MACHINE CONFIGURATION. Technically, according to the EULA, of you so much as upgraded the video card it was a new box and as such warranted a new licesne.
In professional circles, Autodesk is Big F*cking Money. Meaning you pay to play, or you don't play, at all. They're vastly worse than Adobe in that respect, though Adobe is definitely taking cues.
In the context of the license as my coworker understood it, you were "licensed" for one seat on defined hardware. In MY opinion, if you sell that hardware (and the software), you sell that license with it. Since Autodesk - on paper- won't f*cking LET YOU transfer that license to new hardware - even if it's the same box with a new vidcard - WHY are they shitting on licensed users for selling off kit with a software license they can't - technically, legally - transfer?
Forget google, forget Adobe, forget Microsoft - Autodesk is the real Software Evil.
Does this technology take forever to filter down or are we being taken on a ride of fantasy yet again?
The CD-ROM came out in the eighties. Yet it wasn't until the very late 90s that CD burners and blank media were widely available to consumers - at which point video DVDs were common, though it wasn't until the early 00s that DVD-Rs popped up on the market. While they became faster and more afforable much faster than CDs, they're still ultimately an evolution of the same technology and form factor. Anything significantly different is going to take longer to trickle down - flash memory has been around for just as long, but is just now hitting the price-to-capacity point where it's become consumer-friendly for a variety of devices.
I had a 4x SCSI CD burner in 1998 and thought paying a couple of hundred for the burner and a buck a blank was AWESOME. Now I have 16x double-layer DVD burners in all of my home machines (total cost : much less than that crotchety old 4x burner), and am paying less than a buck a blank for more than seven times the storage capacity.
Blu-Ray burners are currently retailing for 500$ and up; HD-DVD for 600$ and up, and the media is between 10$ and 25$ per disk. At those price points, I'd say we're still having issues getting to BR/HD-DVD, let alone beyond it. In five years these burners will be under 100$ and the media will be under 5$; at which point the technology in the article will hopefully be hitting the wild at a price point similar to where Blu Ray and HD-DVD are now - prohibitively expensive for consumers, but available for those who actually need it.
... like the damned interweb isn't slow enough already. I thought the point of broadband was to have more interwebs faster, not to have the same interwebs at the same speed. Guess I was wrong.
Give this crap a few more years and video ad penetration and prevalence will be even worse than it is on television. At least TV doesn't run their ads embedded in the content.* And the comic books I read have the decency to run the ads in the back or not at all (I pointedly do not buy anything that runs ads inline - if it's something I want to read I'll wait for a trade paperback).
Looks like Google is increasingly flexible about the definition of "don't be evil.":P
* Network popunders popovers are one thing (it's the net shilling its own product, after all) - I mean, like, a frigging Preperation H advert and a Depends advert running on opposite sides of the screen while you're trying to focus on Battlestar Galactica or the weather report or whatever.
Emphasis mine, and holy shit is it a HUGE selling point. OS X is one DVD and it gives you the option of slurping over users, user data and configuration from either another machine (through firewire) or another partition/drive on the box, and that - despite the fact that the 10.3 installer will sleep the damned drives during the transfer - is awesome. Because ideally you only need to do it once but realistically, shit happens. Shit happens regardless of your skill level. Hard drives die - more frequently than I'd like - and when we get new kit here at work, we need to transition to it as quickly and painlessly as possible. So an OS install and update needs to be as quick and painless as possible. A windows install is neither (OS, then drivers, then The Joy of mucking around with CD-Rs and whatnot if one of the things you need a driver for is your network adapter). Linux distros vary. OS X is a breeze.
Yeah, I've only installed OS X once on this machine. The last time I installed it was on my home media box when - after six months of solid continual use - the OS decided to shit all over the filesystem and corrupt the root disk (that being apple prone to screwing up a system, thank you). And you can bet your ass I was happy as hell that it took almost no time or hassle *cough* drivers *cough* to get the machine back up.
Apple understands that the times you'll be installing an OS are the times you really wish you weren't. The fact they've gone to great lengths to make this as easy and painless as possible is to their credit.
... and the ONLY bullet point on that buzzword list that I actually use is QE.
But I'm one of those freaks who uses an OS only because it happens to have the applications I want/need to use. From that standpoint, OS X and Win2k (I haven't used XP and don't plan to bother with Vista) both do exactly what I need them to do - they run my apps.
The fact that Apple keeps adding features I don't use while continuing to neglect the stuff I do use (*cough* finder *cough*) is a source of great annoyance to me. The fact that Windows is just an ugly-ass API between 3d Studio Max and my hardware - and that I don't need or use it for anything else - is a source of no annoyance to me.
The one feature that you list this is an actual point if niftiness is the single-DVD install. It's quite convenient.
Of course, the parent to your post is an idiot, so we're both ultimately wasting keystroke. All glory to the intertron, etc.
Apple : Porsche prices for Chevette parts. It's been this way since the iMac and the blue G3s were introduced, way back in 98/99 - they use completely mediocre hardware, stick it in a nice case, and charge you a steep price for the privelege. They got away with GeForce2s and Maxtor hard drives because at the time they were plugged into the only commercial PPC processor on the market. Now Apple's lost that excuse - now you're paying for a pretty case and the ability to legally run OS X on it. There's nothing really special under the hood anymore.
Oh, and Mac video cards during the PPC era were roughly 3-5x the price of their PC counterparts, if they were available at all. Maybe that's changed with the move to Intel processors, but what hasn't changed is if you want the privilege of an upgradeable video card, you still have to buy their most expensive (read : highest marked-up) hardware.
Don't get me wrong - I've been using Apple kit since before it was trendy. But the kool-aid wore off a long, long time ago.
See also the Aeon Flux cartoon. Or Cartoon Network and The Venture Brothers. Or Sci-Fi and Battlestar Galactica.
I support these channels in spite of the huge volumes of total CRAP they generate because, on very rare occasions, they'll spit out something totally awesome completely by accident.
At the point I had access to MTV, MTV2 was also available and was nothing but music videos. They used to play MTV2 in one of the local bars I frequented until VJs - and all the bullshit that comes with them - started showing up more and more often.
I liked the cartoons - animation was (and is) something MTV could have done a LOT with. But alas, reality tv is cheaper.:|
MTV hasn't been watchable since my junior year of high school - and even at that point, they were steadily cutting out the watchable bits (Aeon Flux and their other cartoons) in favor of reality TV, rap videos, etc.
Have they done anything noteworthy since Beavis & Butthead? I can't think of a single thing.
but where are the asteroid mines and space colonies, the moonbases and He3 refining facilities, or even an interstellar probe to the nearest star system?
They're hanging out with the flying cars, of course.
That's great and all, except for one thing. He ain't talkin' about WINDOWS.:P
My OS X workstation has 4.5 gigs of ram. The rest of the OS X boxes at work have either 4 or 4.5 and the OS sees all of it. Some of the apps don't, but the idea was to be able to multitask, not have After Effects eat ALL THE RAM, so the fact it can only see 3 out of 4.5 gigs is a good thing.
Seriously. It takes several minutes round trip to get a signal to Mars - nevermind Saturn or the Pioneer probes. Any signal we pick up would have been sent tens - if not hundreds, or thousands - of years after it was sent. Our earliest signals traffic - if you could even pick it up that far distant - is less than a hundred light years out. So anything we're technologically capable of picking up with our present equipment will have been transmitted by a civilization that is now centuries ahead of us - assuming they're still around.
Space is big. Radio (the human-produced signal range) is teeny. Really, really, ridiculously teeny. A moderately close neighbor - say, 200ly out - at the same technology level could be transmitting right at us and we won't pick it up until the 23rd century.
I agree that the stability issue wasn't the OS, it was the apps - one of the reasons I still use iTunes is that it was the very first Mac MP3 player I found that was stable. A thing I continue to miss about Classic MacOS - Photoshop ran like a rock. 5.x crashed on me once on my old G3 powerbook - and that was over the course of three or four years of daily useage. Photoshop on OS X is another matter entirely, unfortunately: I still use PS 5.5 in Classic because unlike PSCS (or CS2), it doesn't make VLC or iTunes skip when processing obnoxiously large documents.
It's been my experience that Apple and Adobe, as well as a lot of Macromedia - applications would run stably on the old MacOS... things didn't get twitchy until you started running web browsers, instant messangers, etc.
OS 9 blew by comparison to OS X (10.2 and higher) - X was the one thing Classic had never, ever been - stable.
Those system requirements, though? The last revision of OS 9 required 32-64 megs of ram (iirc it needed at least 32 or 48 to install but you could run it with less once it was on disk), had virtually zero VRAM requirments (the requirment being "a video card") and ran useably (for varying definitions of useable) on machines ranging from 60mhz to 1.4ghz. Virtual memory was optional and ram paritioning (much as everyone hated it) meant that you could balance your application load so that you could run everything you wanted with no danger of any app stealing memory from any other app.
Then here comes OS X, which runs like absolute SHIT at its minimum requirment of 256 megs of ram, runs like a slug on 512 and finally gets useable at around a gig or two. A lot of older video cards that worked on 9 don't work on X, and you need at least 32 megs of VRAM to enable GPU offloading - 64 if you want some of the newer features. Aaaand the OS runs useably on machines ranging from dual G4 450s up to present day hardware. Anyone with older kit is, in a word, humped. Hell, I can't even run photoshop useably under OS X on my home machine, and it's a 1ghz G4 with a gig of ram.
Oh, and the OS is incessantly writing to disk and eats VM like a pig. Every app can steal ram from every other app, so a total pig of an app like After Effects will drive your web browsers into swap, where they get to wait long seconds or longer minutes to load new windows and URLS while AE renders out video. Among other examples.
So. New OS. Five times the system requirements. Runs like complete shit unless you plonk down the cash for brand new hardware. All kinds of security and stability enhancements. Big pretty new interface that exists only to eat shitloads of CPU and GPU.
Only it's produced by Apple instead of Microsoft, so it's the greatest thing EVER.
Of course, Mac users are used to being forced into buying new kit every two or three years anyway, so we're all used to it.:P
XBox gaming actually weakens Microsoft's hold on the desktop.
Maybe for casual gamers. Keep in mind, there are a ton of games available for Windows that won't run on the X-Box - World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, older games like Quake and Systemshock 2, Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory, etc.
As a casual gamer, I use my Windows box as a 3d workstation (no games installed), and I'm quite happy with my Nintendo DS. The only games Microsoft has that I might want are Halo 2 and 3, and it's not worth plonking down money for an XB360, two games, and a television just to get an FPS fix.
In my opinion, Microsoft is missing a mark Nintendo has been hitting for a long time now - most gamers just want fun games. Not Team Deathmatch with grotesque system requirments. They're also missing a killer franchise - Halo may be a good series, but it lacks the brand recognition and the slavish "buy-on-sight" fanbase that the Final Fantasy series or the various Nintendo franchises (Zelda, Metroid, Mario, etc) command.
Hell, outside of Halo I can't think of a single X-Box title. Let alone one I'd be interested in.
They won't be the ones paying the fine. Why should they care?
Bono says "fuck" on the Grammy awards and CBS foots the bill. If anything, this will help kill off what's left of "live" media coverage in favor of the rolling five or ten minute delay a lot of broadcasters use to catch and scrub things like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they have a license to print money. That's not what I meant. :P I meant that their successfull little product has come with a TON of hassle that's going to cost them a lot of time and lawyering.
That's how Firefox has taken off so well. They came in as a web browser, same functions, and built upon it.
Emphasis mine.
Firefox started off as Mozilla Without All The Bloat. Mozilla having been the web browser with the same functions which then built upon it. Excessively.
You'd think Steve would have remembered the lesson of the Clone Wars (in which manufacturers like Motorola and Power Computing ate Apple's revenue stream instead of expanding the market base by introducing machines that were stripped of Apple's obscene markup) and stayed the hell away from anything that gives the consumer choice outside of the OS or hardware. Seems like the runaway success of the iPod has given them a nasty case of hubris.
I don't use iTMS and I don't use mobile phones (can't stand the things, personally), so for me this little stink is one big Nelson impression - "HAH-HAH!"
Funny how Apple got its start providing deeply hackable do-anything boxes, and now they're shitting their pants because the new generation of hackers are turning their turn-key kit into the deeply hackable do-anything boxes they want.
perhaps they shouldn't base a revenue stream on vendor lockin
If you haven't noticed, that's been Apple's revenue stream/strategy since 1984. They've finally entered a market where people know they have options (instead of the perception of either no options, or Apple kit and soft being the lesser evil), and they're getting exactly what they deserve.
I have around 400 gigs of Photoshop files. GIMP is completely and totally worthless to me until it can open and save every single last one of them (the vast majority having been created with Photoshop 5 or 5.5), including full support for all blending modes, masks, color modes, and fonts.
.doc support. Why does GIMP's .psd support suck so much ass? The goal here shouldn't just be grabbing new users, it should be trying to sway or convert established, deeply entrenched users of other software. I can't use the GIMP not for any gui reasons (there's plenty of gui reasons, but if nobody used ugly or badly designed apps, then neither linux nor windows would have ANY marketshare) but for the simple fact that it doesn't open my damned documents. Even if I were to switch, I'd still have to keep PS around for working with my thousands of older documents.
OpenOffice has
So. Fix that. Please!
Yes.
But that purchase was a couple of years in the future at the time my coworker was making a fuss about the MAX EULA.
An ex coworker of mien made a HUGE stink when he read the 3dsMAX (also an Autodesk product) EULA, noticing that the EULA allowed the user to use that license of max on not just THAT MACHINE but THAT MACHINE CONFIGURATION. Technically, according to the EULA, of you so much as upgraded the video card it was a new box and as such warranted a new licesne.
In professional circles, Autodesk is Big F*cking Money. Meaning you pay to play, or you don't play, at all. They're vastly worse than Adobe in that respect, though Adobe is definitely taking cues.
In the context of the license as my coworker understood it, you were "licensed" for one seat on defined hardware. In MY opinion, if you sell that hardware (and the software), you sell that license with it. Since Autodesk - on paper- won't f*cking LET YOU transfer that license to new hardware - even if it's the same box with a new vidcard - WHY are they shitting on licensed users for selling off kit with a software license they can't - technically, legally - transfer?
Forget google, forget Adobe, forget Microsoft - Autodesk is the real Software Evil.
Does this technology take forever to filter down or are we being taken on a ride of fantasy yet again?
The CD-ROM came out in the eighties. Yet it wasn't until the very late 90s that CD burners and blank media were widely available to consumers - at which point video DVDs were common, though it wasn't until the early 00s that DVD-Rs popped up on the market. While they became faster and more afforable much faster than CDs, they're still ultimately an evolution of the same technology and form factor. Anything significantly different is going to take longer to trickle down - flash memory has been around for just as long, but is just now hitting the price-to-capacity point where it's become consumer-friendly for a variety of devices.
I had a 4x SCSI CD burner in 1998 and thought paying a couple of hundred for the burner and a buck a blank was AWESOME. Now I have 16x double-layer DVD burners in all of my home machines (total cost : much less than that crotchety old 4x burner), and am paying less than a buck a blank for more than seven times the storage capacity.
Blu-Ray burners are currently retailing for 500$ and up; HD-DVD for 600$ and up, and the media is between 10$ and 25$ per disk. At those price points, I'd say we're still having issues getting to BR/HD-DVD, let alone beyond it. In five years these burners will be under 100$ and the media will be under 5$; at which point the technology in the article will hopefully be hitting the wild at a price point similar to where Blu Ray and HD-DVD are now - prohibitively expensive for consumers, but available for those who actually need it.
... like the damned interweb isn't slow enough already. I thought the point of broadband was to have more interwebs faster, not to have the same interwebs at the same speed. Guess I was wrong.
:P
Give this crap a few more years and video ad penetration and prevalence will be even worse than it is on television. At least TV doesn't run their ads embedded in the content.* And the comic books I read have the decency to run the ads in the back or not at all (I pointedly do not buy anything that runs ads inline - if it's something I want to read I'll wait for a trade paperback).
Looks like Google is increasingly flexible about the definition of "don't be evil."
* Network popunders popovers are one thing (it's the net shilling its own product, after all) - I mean, like, a frigging Preperation H advert and a Depends advert running on opposite sides of the screen while you're trying to focus on Battlestar Galactica or the weather report or whatever.
Ideally it's something you only do a single time.
Emphasis mine, and holy shit is it a HUGE selling point. OS X is one DVD and it gives you the option of slurping over users, user data and configuration from either another machine (through firewire) or another partition/drive on the box, and that - despite the fact that the 10.3 installer will sleep the damned drives during the transfer - is awesome. Because ideally you only need to do it once but realistically, shit happens. Shit happens regardless of your skill level. Hard drives die - more frequently than I'd like - and when we get new kit here at work, we need to transition to it as quickly and painlessly as possible. So an OS install and update needs to be as quick and painless as possible. A windows install is neither (OS, then drivers, then The Joy of mucking around with CD-Rs and whatnot if one of the things you need a driver for is your network adapter). Linux distros vary. OS X is a breeze.
Yeah, I've only installed OS X once on this machine. The last time I installed it was on my home media box when - after six months of solid continual use - the OS decided to shit all over the filesystem and corrupt the root disk (that being apple prone to screwing up a system, thank you). And you can bet your ass I was happy as hell that it took almost no time or hassle *cough* drivers *cough* to get the machine back up.
Apple understands that the times you'll be installing an OS are the times you really wish you weren't. The fact they've gone to great lengths to make this as easy and painless as possible is to their credit.
... and the ONLY bullet point on that buzzword list that I actually use is QE.
But I'm one of those freaks who uses an OS only because it happens to have the applications I want/need to use. From that standpoint, OS X and Win2k (I haven't used XP and don't plan to bother with Vista) both do exactly what I need them to do - they run my apps.
The fact that Apple keeps adding features I don't use while continuing to neglect the stuff I do use (*cough* finder *cough*) is a source of great annoyance to me. The fact that Windows is just an ugly-ass API between 3d Studio Max and my hardware - and that I don't need or use it for anything else - is a source of no annoyance to me.
The one feature that you list this is an actual point if niftiness is the single-DVD install. It's quite convenient.
Of course, the parent to your post is an idiot, so we're both ultimately wasting keystroke. All glory to the intertron, etc.
Apple : Porsche prices for Chevette parts. It's been this way since the iMac and the blue G3s were introduced, way back in 98/99 - they use completely mediocre hardware, stick it in a nice case, and charge you a steep price for the privelege. They got away with GeForce2s and Maxtor hard drives because at the time they were plugged into the only commercial PPC processor on the market. Now Apple's lost that excuse - now you're paying for a pretty case and the ability to legally run OS X on it. There's nothing really special under the hood anymore.
Oh, and Mac video cards during the PPC era were roughly 3-5x the price of their PC counterparts, if they were available at all. Maybe that's changed with the move to Intel processors, but what hasn't changed is if you want the privilege of an upgradeable video card, you still have to buy their most expensive (read : highest marked-up) hardware.
Don't get me wrong - I've been using Apple kit since before it was trendy. But the kool-aid wore off a long, long time ago.
Indeed. Sure, there's a vocal minority, but said vocal minority is a minority even on slashdot.
And they are by-and-large the kind of people who spend hours editing the swear words out of the comments of kernel source.
If nobody uses it, It doesn't matter how "open" or "superior" a format is.
See also the Aeon Flux cartoon. Or Cartoon Network and The Venture Brothers. Or Sci-Fi and Battlestar Galactica.
I support these channels in spite of the huge volumes of total CRAP they generate because, on very rare occasions, they'll spit out something totally awesome completely by accident.
Sturgeon's Law in action.
At the point I had access to MTV, MTV2 was also available and was nothing but music videos. They used to play MTV2 in one of the local bars I frequented until VJs - and all the bullshit that comes with them - started showing up more and more often.
:|
I liked the cartoons - animation was (and is) something MTV could have done a LOT with. But alas, reality tv is cheaper.
They've made music suck, they're about to make video games suck, and they've also made a bunch of really shitty movies.
The M stands for Money.
As in, Advertising.
MTV hasn't been watchable since my junior year of high school - and even at that point, they were steadily cutting out the watchable bits (Aeon Flux and their other cartoons) in favor of reality TV, rap videos, etc.
Have they done anything noteworthy since Beavis & Butthead? I can't think of a single thing.
They're hanging out with the flying cars, of course.
That's great and all, except for one thing. He ain't talkin' about WINDOWS. :P
My OS X workstation has 4.5 gigs of ram. The rest of the OS X boxes at work have either 4 or 4.5 and the OS sees all of it. Some of the apps don't, but the idea was to be able to multitask, not have After Effects eat ALL THE RAM, so the fact it can only see 3 out of 4.5 gigs is a good thing.
Seriously. It takes several minutes round trip to get a signal to Mars - nevermind Saturn or the Pioneer probes. Any signal we pick up would have been sent tens - if not hundreds, or thousands - of years after it was sent. Our earliest signals traffic - if you could even pick it up that far distant - is less than a hundred light years out. So anything we're technologically capable of picking up with our present equipment will have been transmitted by a civilization that is now centuries ahead of us - assuming they're still around.
Space is big. Radio (the human-produced signal range) is teeny. Really, really, ridiculously teeny. A moderately close neighbor - say, 200ly out - at the same technology level could be transmitting right at us and we won't pick it up until the 23rd century.
Talk about latency.
I agree that the stability issue wasn't the OS, it was the apps - one of the reasons I still use iTunes is that it was the very first Mac MP3 player I found that was stable. A thing I continue to miss about Classic MacOS - Photoshop ran like a rock. 5.x crashed on me once on my old G3 powerbook - and that was over the course of three or four years of daily useage. Photoshop on OS X is another matter entirely, unfortunately: I still use PS 5.5 in Classic because unlike PSCS (or CS2), it doesn't make VLC or iTunes skip when processing obnoxiously large documents.
It's been my experience that Apple and Adobe, as well as a lot of Macromedia - applications would run stably on the old MacOS... things didn't get twitchy until you started running web browsers, instant messangers, etc.
OS 9 blew by comparison to OS X (10.2 and higher) - X was the one thing Classic had never, ever been - stable.
:P
Those system requirements, though? The last revision of OS 9 required 32-64 megs of ram (iirc it needed at least 32 or 48 to install but you could run it with less once it was on disk), had virtually zero VRAM requirments (the requirment being "a video card") and ran useably (for varying definitions of useable) on machines ranging from 60mhz to 1.4ghz. Virtual memory was optional and ram paritioning (much as everyone hated it) meant that you could balance your application load so that you could run everything you wanted with no danger of any app stealing memory from any other app.
Then here comes OS X, which runs like absolute SHIT at its minimum requirment of 256 megs of ram, runs like a slug on 512 and finally gets useable at around a gig or two. A lot of older video cards that worked on 9 don't work on X, and you need at least 32 megs of VRAM to enable GPU offloading - 64 if you want some of the newer features. Aaaand the OS runs useably on machines ranging from dual G4 450s up to present day hardware. Anyone with older kit is, in a word, humped. Hell, I can't even run photoshop useably under OS X on my home machine, and it's a 1ghz G4 with a gig of ram.
Oh, and the OS is incessantly writing to disk and eats VM like a pig. Every app can steal ram from every other app, so a total pig of an app like After Effects will drive your web browsers into swap, where they get to wait long seconds or longer minutes to load new windows and URLS while AE renders out video. Among other examples.
So. New OS. Five times the system requirements. Runs like complete shit unless you plonk down the cash for brand new hardware. All kinds of security and stability enhancements. Big pretty new interface that exists only to eat shitloads of CPU and GPU.
Only it's produced by Apple instead of Microsoft, so it's the greatest thing EVER.
Of course, Mac users are used to being forced into buying new kit every two or three years anyway, so we're all used to it.
XBox gaming actually weakens Microsoft's hold on the desktop.
Maybe for casual gamers. Keep in mind, there are a ton of games available for Windows that won't run on the X-Box - World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights, older games like Quake and Systemshock 2, Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory, etc.
As a casual gamer, I use my Windows box as a 3d workstation (no games installed), and I'm quite happy with my Nintendo DS. The only games Microsoft has that I might want are Halo 2 and 3, and it's not worth plonking down money for an XB360, two games, and a television just to get an FPS fix.
In my opinion, Microsoft is missing a mark Nintendo has been hitting for a long time now - most gamers just want fun games. Not Team Deathmatch with grotesque system requirments. They're also missing a killer franchise - Halo may be a good series, but it lacks the brand recognition and the slavish "buy-on-sight" fanbase that the Final Fantasy series or the various Nintendo franchises (Zelda, Metroid, Mario, etc) command.
Hell, outside of Halo I can't think of a single X-Box title. Let alone one I'd be interested in.
They won't be the ones paying the fine. Why should they care?
Bono says "fuck" on the Grammy awards and CBS foots the bill. If anything, this will help kill off what's left of "live" media coverage in favor of the rolling five or ten minute delay a lot of broadcasters use to catch and scrub things like this.