By the way, we do need to prevent things like guns and explosives from getting on the planes themselves - of course, that's another problem entirely and isn't related to ID. I can see why we would want to prevent explosives, but I fail to see why banning guns actually helps us. If the passangers aboard the planes on 9/11 had guns, the attacks could not have happened. The presence of guns by average citizens is often a deterent to certain types of crime.
I predict that Blu-Ray will fail and HD-DVD will win. And I don't care one way or the other about Sony (although I try to avoid products containing mal-ware.)
I think the PS3 will fail and take Blu_ray with it.
I'm aware of these, but you are missing the point I was trying to make. Its about momentum. In 1986, Apple's momentum and energy was focused on the Mac. In order for the scenario I described to have succeeded, they would have had to put all their energies into delivering GUI on Apple II (i.e. no Mac).
Microsoft successfully did this with Windows (i.e. slow migration from DOS and they maintained some backwards compatbility the whole time.)
The reason is that teachers - and probably the teacher in question - behave in a very authoritarian manner towards their students (i.e. they are bullies).
That's interesting. Just about all of my teachers were about the exact opposite of bullies and authoritarians. Most teachers I know today are similarly very nice people. Where are all these nasty teachers coming from? I hear about them online a lot, and see news reports of bad teachers, but somehow have managed to avoid them most of my life.
Good for you. I had lots of teachers who were bullies. (And they tended to be bad teachers and very stupid individuals.)
I'm not saying these people don't exist, but I doubt they are a very large group and I dought they actually BUY very many DVDs. If they are buying DVDs, it is probably used or bargain bin.
Big endian is bass ackwards and risc cannot outperform cisc in real applications (only theoretical). PowerPC can operate in either big or little endian mode. PPC Macs were big endian because MacOS always operates PowerPC in big endian mode (originally to ease compatibility with 680x0.)
Yea, because all those people that don't have access to broadband are not worth selling to. All those people who are too poor to pay for internet connection consistently every single month (or Cable TV with digital and pay-per-view fees, or plain old standard telephone line even) , but who could afford a DVD or two now and then are also not worth selling to. You'd be suprised how many people that don't have any phone, TV cable, and other basic services have quite nice stereos, TVs, game consoles, DVD players, etc. They just choose what to save up for and what to not keep paying for again and again and again. Do neither of those two groups of people deserve to watch movies?
Sorry, but we're not quite to a point where your everything from the internet and nowhere else market works. I have to call bullshit on this one. I don't believe there are people who don't have cable OR internet OR a phone who buy significant amounts of DVDs. I also disagree with the idea that disk media should be retired, but I just can't go along with your claim without some evidence to back it up.
And it isn't about whether someone "deserves" to watch a movie. It is about whether it makes economic sense to offer a particular product. I think there is a lot of life left in standard def DVDs. I think that some kind of next generation DVD format will succeed - and I think it will be HD-DVD. I think it will take longer than most people think for HD-DVD (assuming it wins) to surpass standard def DVDs. My guess is that it won't happen until 2012.
I disagree. I think that when the price comes down on next gen DVD (players and disks), then people will want them. It took a while for DVD to become popular. And I also think that the format war isn't helping.
There is a compelling reason to want higher capacity disks for computer data. This will also help drive adoption of next gen drives and disks.
If only there were some way the installer could detect your platform and auto-strip on installation. Too bad that's impossible. There were installers that did this. They typically asked you whether you wanted to install the app for "this macintosh" or "any macintosh" (because some people had applications on a server.)
NeXTSTEP had fat binaries that supported 68k, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC in the early '90s. Mac OS had fat binaries that supported 68k and PPC. They've been around long enough, and the disk space lost is minimal (images and other such binary data makes up the vast majority of disk space of an application). Then why were there utilities for the Mac for stripping PPC or 68K code out of fat binaries to save disk space?
Yeah, NeXT had fat binaries, but NeXT users were all extremely wealthy and could afford large disks.
Basically, I agree with your point, I'm just saying that in the past disk space cost more. That's why no one had schemes like the one Apple has for multi-language resources in each application in the past. The amount of disk space today for iTunes to contain French, German, Chinese, etc UI resources is trivial, but it wasn't trivial in the early 90s.
The same goes for their very elegant way of handling backward compatibility through frameworks that contain multiple versions. Nice, but in the past, we couldn't afford the disk space.
You are confusing the Mac with the Apple II. The Mac shipped in 1984. The IBM PC in 1981. By 1984, IBM had the high end of the market basically sewn up.
The only way that Apple could have won would have been two things: pick a chip for the Apple II with an upgrade path (i.e. not the 6502), and build the Mac UI on top of the Apple II.
Apple II was a major contender early on. If Apple had concentrated on improving the Apple II instead of trying to kill it off, they might have been able to build their market share. Instead, they wasted time and resources on the Apple III.
They were able to deliver an amazing machine with the Lisa/Mac, but it was released after IBM owned most of the market (except the low end which was Commodore). The Mac became a niche player only after desktop publishing came along and saved it.
They still probably had a chance to win at that point, but they had very poor management. The Mac had at most 12% of the market during its heyday in the late 80s.
I think it would have been possible to build a Mac-like UI on top of the Apple II. If they had done that, they could have built on their earlier success, maintained their huge library of software (which was a major driver of Apple II sales all through the 80s), and I think they could have beat the IBM PC. Unfortunately Apple's corporate culture disdained the Apple II and the very fine engineers who were working on it.
I think that part of the problem was that Commodore bought MOS and then didn't reinvest in the 6502, instead choosing to cost the thing down so as to fight a price war with TI because of Tramiel's personal vendetta over having lost the market for calculators. That prevented their from being an upgrade path for all of the popular systems that used 6502. This in turn prevented there from being a serious early competitor to x86.
What home user really cares if their PC takes 150W or 180W ? Nobody... Anyone using a laptop?
Seriously, the reason for Apple to switch to x86 was due to the fact that Intel has focused their business around creating the best possible chips for laptop computers. Laptops are now more than 50% of Macintoshes sold (and probably more than 50% of personal computers in general).
More money is being spent on R&D for the x86 architecture than anything else and this R&D is focused like a laser on the PC laptop/desktop use case.
There was a time when the best chip available for a laptop was a PowerPC G3. It was fast and it used really low power. And maybe PPC had a better more elegant architecture. But the fact is that more money has been poured into the x86 architecture so that TODAY and looking at the published roadmaps for the next few years, x86 looks like the clear winner in the PC market.
By using X86 as the primary architecture for Windows, binary compatibility is maintained. While Linux is ported to many different architectures, it doesn't have binary compatibility between them. This is why most Linux software seems to be distributed as source that the user then has to compile. Obviously for closed source models, this is not acceptable.
Use of Universal binaries (e.g. OS X) wastes disk space that up until recently would have been too costly for most people.
The teacher is more upset about the video than the broken window, because it makes the teacher look like a fool
Uhhh, why? This incident makes the perpetrator look like a fool. Why does having a vandal break a window make the victim look foolish?
Right. Let me seriously answer that question. The reason is that teachers - and probably the teacher in question - behave in a very authoritarian manner towards their students (i.e. they are bullies). And the last thing a bully wants is the idea that one of their victims can stand up to them in any way and "get away with it". The fact that the teacher's window being broken was publicized on YouTube makes it worse because now the students can refer to this video and relive a type of revenge against the teacher, if only in their minds.
It makes the student into kind of a "hero" who stood up to a bully. And so, like most bullies, this teacher is lashing out in an unintelligent manner.
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Redmond is part of the greater Seattle area, dufus.
Texas is actually short for "Texas sucks".
I predict that Blu-Ray will fail and HD-DVD will win. And I don't care one way or the other about Sony (although I try to avoid products containing mal-ware.)
I think the PS3 will fail and take Blu_ray with it.
Yeah, then the hackers will all have to buy Qt licenses.
I'm aware of these, but you are missing the point I was trying to make. Its about momentum. In 1986, Apple's momentum and energy was focused on the Mac. In order for the scenario I described to have succeeded, they would have had to put all their energies into delivering GUI on Apple II (i.e. no Mac).
Microsoft successfully did this with Windows (i.e. slow migration from DOS and they maintained some backwards compatbility the whole time.)
That's interesting. Just about all of my teachers were about the exact opposite of bullies and authoritarians. Most teachers I know today are similarly very nice people. Where are all these nasty teachers coming from? I hear about them online a lot, and see news reports of bad teachers, but somehow have managed to avoid them most of my life.
Good for you. I had lots of teachers who were bullies. (And they tended to be bad teachers and very stupid individuals.)I'm not saying these people don't exist, but I doubt they are a very large group and I dought they actually BUY very many DVDs. If they are buying DVDs, it is probably used or bargain bin.
This is exactly right.
Yea, because all those people that don't have access to broadband are not worth selling to. All those people who are too poor to pay for internet connection consistently every single month (or Cable TV with digital and pay-per-view fees, or plain old standard telephone line even) , but who could afford a DVD or two now and then are also not worth selling to. You'd be suprised how many people that don't have any phone, TV cable, and other basic services have quite nice stereos, TVs, game consoles, DVD players, etc. They just choose what to save up for and what to not keep paying for again and again and again. Do neither of those two groups of people deserve to watch movies?
Sorry, but we're not quite to a point where your everything from the internet and nowhere else market works. I have to call bullshit on this one. I don't believe there are people who don't have cable OR internet OR a phone who buy significant amounts of DVDs. I also disagree with the idea that disk media should be retired, but I just can't go along with your claim without some evidence to back it up.
And it isn't about whether someone "deserves" to watch a movie. It is about whether it makes economic sense to offer a particular product. I think there is a lot of life left in standard def DVDs. I think that some kind of next generation DVD format will succeed - and I think it will be HD-DVD. I think it will take longer than most people think for HD-DVD (assuming it wins) to surpass standard def DVDs. My guess is that it won't happen until 2012.
I disagree. I think that when the price comes down on next gen DVD (players and disks), then people will want them. It took a while for DVD to become popular. And I also think that the format war isn't helping.
There is a compelling reason to want higher capacity disks for computer data. This will also help drive adoption of next gen drives and disks.
Yeah, NeXT had fat binaries, but NeXT users were all extremely wealthy and could afford large disks.
Basically, I agree with your point, I'm just saying that in the past disk space cost more. That's why no one had schemes like the one Apple has for multi-language resources in each application in the past. The amount of disk space today for iTunes to contain French, German, Chinese, etc UI resources is trivial, but it wasn't trivial in the early 90s.
The same goes for their very elegant way of handling backward compatibility through frameworks that contain multiple versions. Nice, but in the past, we couldn't afford the disk space.
You are confusing the Mac with the Apple II. The Mac shipped in 1984. The IBM PC in 1981. By 1984, IBM had the high end of the market basically sewn up.
The only way that Apple could have won would have been two things: pick a chip for the Apple II with an upgrade path (i.e. not the 6502), and build the Mac UI on top of the Apple II.
Apple II was a major contender early on. If Apple had concentrated on improving the Apple II instead of trying to kill it off, they might have been able to build their market share. Instead, they wasted time and resources on the Apple III.
They were able to deliver an amazing machine with the Lisa/Mac, but it was released after IBM owned most of the market (except the low end which was Commodore). The Mac became a niche player only after desktop publishing came along and saved it.
They still probably had a chance to win at that point, but they had very poor management. The Mac had at most 12% of the market during its heyday in the late 80s.
I think it would have been possible to build a Mac-like UI on top of the Apple II. If they had done that, they could have built on their earlier success, maintained their huge library of software (which was a major driver of Apple II sales all through the 80s), and I think they could have beat the IBM PC. Unfortunately Apple's corporate culture disdained the Apple II and the very fine engineers who were working on it.
I think that part of the problem was that Commodore bought MOS and then didn't reinvest in the 6502, instead choosing to cost the thing down so as to fight a price war with TI because of Tramiel's personal vendetta over having lost the market for calculators. That prevented their from being an upgrade path for all of the popular systems that used 6502. This in turn prevented there from being a serious early competitor to x86.
Also, why do we use QWERTY keyboards instead of Dvorak?
Seriously, the reason for Apple to switch to x86 was due to the fact that Intel has focused their business around creating the best possible chips for laptop computers. Laptops are now more than 50% of Macintoshes sold (and probably more than 50% of personal computers in general).
More money is being spent on R&D for the x86 architecture than anything else and this R&D is focused like a laser on the PC laptop/desktop use case.
There was a time when the best chip available for a laptop was a PowerPC G3. It was fast and it used really low power. And maybe PPC had a better more elegant architecture. But the fact is that more money has been poured into the x86 architecture so that TODAY and looking at the published roadmaps for the next few years, x86 looks like the clear winner in the PC market.
By using X86 as the primary architecture for Windows, binary compatibility is maintained. While Linux is ported to many different architectures, it doesn't have binary compatibility between them. This is why most Linux software seems to be distributed as source that the user then has to compile. Obviously for closed source models, this is not acceptable.
Use of Universal binaries (e.g. OS X) wastes disk space that up until recently would have been too costly for most people.
Uhhh, why? This incident makes the perpetrator look like a fool. Why does having a vandal break a window make the victim look foolish?
Right. Let me seriously answer that question. The reason is that teachers - and probably the teacher in question - behave in a very authoritarian manner towards their students (i.e. they are bullies). And the last thing a bully wants is the idea that one of their victims can stand up to them in any way and "get away with it". The fact that the teacher's window being broken was publicized on YouTube makes it worse because now the students can refer to this video and relive a type of revenge against the teacher, if only in their minds.It makes the student into kind of a "hero" who stood up to a bully. And so, like most bullies, this teacher is lashing out in an unintelligent manner.
Jack Thompson is to video games what Fred Phelps is to religion.
Talking out of your ass is a BAD thing. Who would have thought??