Xerox was offered by Steve Jobs the option to invest $1,000,000 in Apple before they went public in exchange for two visits to PARC to see the developments and talk to the developers of the Xerox Alto. Xerox gladly jumped at the chance and when Apple went public, the stock had split into 800,000 shares (from 100,000) and was worth 17.6 Million. If you ask me, that qualifies as compensation for what Xerox gave apple.
As for Open Source, apple cares about it as far as it provides them a benifit. When it stops providing a benefit, they will stop caring. Just because you're pissed that Aqua and all the coolness behind OS X is not availible for your computer does not mean that what Apple has done is not a good thing. Apple has done quite a few good things.
1) Commercial backing of OSS. Whatever you may think of their own OSS policy, Apple has brought the immage that OSS software can be more than just a hobbyist toy. And let's face it, despite the inroads RedHat made in that direction, that immage was slipping.
2) Unix to the masses. As great as Linux was for bringing UNIX to people, it was still far to difficult to install or obtain pre-installed. OS X came along and suddenly people who would never have seen UNIX before have it on their own machine. This leads into point 3.
3) Broke the M$ stangle hold. Before OS X, Linux was loosing it's grip. Companies had stopped shipping preinstalled linux boxes and it had slowly begun trickling out of the major news. OS X came along and revitalized this. OSS software supported by a commercial company, UNIX in a user friendly environment. More and more people are aware of the alternative.
Finaly, if BSD has no GPL, and therefore does not require the releaing of modifications to the public domain, then Apple is doing what is 100% within their rights to do with the software as that is the way the software was designed. You may personaly not like it, but ethicaly, moraly etc etc etc, there is nothing wrong with it.
The too that I mentioned appeared in a magazine, though I can't find the specifics on them. One of those sites had them, but the links were broken. But a quick read through Apple Confidential I believe had the references and maybe even pictures. Just ask a mac guy who subcribes to Mac Addict to send you the PDFs
No, but apple tends to use high quality drives. Alot of them are IBMs, but if I remember right, my 5400 had a Wester Digital Caviar, which was at the time one of the more expensive models made.
Apple has always liked to tease it's competitors. Remember C:>ONGRATULATIONS.WIN95 ad that Apple ran? Or the "Welcome IBM, Really" ad. Apple keeps that edge to them because it sets them apart (for better or worse) from all the other computer makers.
I can give you a really good reason. Take out a map and a compass (the tool for drawing circles not for finding north and south) Now, in general, convention goers are inclinded to drive about 6 or so hours to go to a convention, and people who fly don't count, driving is cheaper (usualy). So assuming an average speed of 60 MPH, in 6 hours, one could travel a total of 360 miles. So, space your compass to that appropriate distance according to the scale on your map. Now center your compass on Boston, and draw and arc on the land surrounding Boston. Note the major population areas enclosed and factor in the types of people in that area. Now do the same thing arround NYC. Notice that the total area enclosed and major population areas are much larger. Now, within each of these arcs is the range that most goers would be willing to drive to the respective conventions. Do you see a reason for wanting to be in NYC?
Actualy, this could severely kill some of the attendence. With a lot of the mac word stuff, people frequently drove in for the weekend. Geographicaly speaking, MWNY was in a much better position, oftne you could get drivers from as far away as the DC area into NYC. So you have people from all up and down the east coast with a roughly equal travel time for all out of state participents. Boston however is tucked away in a corner of the US. And has been pointed out many times, NYC is a much bigger tourist attraction, giving people a bigger reason to spend a few days in NYC, justifying the drive.
Xerox was well paid for the windowing environment and some of their developers moved to Apple. That's not theft. As for the use of BSD code. I suppose you could claim it that way, but I see it as opensource software was designed so that well developed and documented code could be used and improved in the best possible ways, and Apple has done that. They have used the BSD code in what is currently the best possible way, to bring UNIX to the masses.
If every time you tried to explain your reasoning for why you do something out of the norm (like buy a mac, use UNIX etc etc etc) and then were told that your are a stupid delusional lemming who is following a puppet master and can't see the truth, have no technical knowledge and are a rabid zealot etc etc etc etc etc, you'd begin to get a little pissed off too, and then you would find it very easy to treat those who mock you with disdain.
To prove my point, find a mac user, and tell them you're interested in possibly buying a mac, but your still seeing better prices on the PC side and ask them why they use a mac and what you would need to make your mac work (and how much it would cost) and they will gladly give you as much information as you want to know. Because you approached them respectfuly and were asking honest questions.
Now go up to another one, point at their mac and ask why do you use that thing, they're so slow and expensive, and they will respond with disdain because that's how ou approached them.
That's not the point. Say to the average uneducated (or slightly educated) person, Nation of Islam, and they will more likely than not connjure up a terrorist reference. This is a bad thing. And comparing people to them espesialy "rabid mac fans" does nothing to help either immage.
I can give you one very very good reason why Apple would want to be in a position where they have brand-name loyalty instead of the best price. Innovation. Apple has the luxury of being able to play with new technologies. To put out machines that aren't standard and see what they do. No PC maker (with the possible exception of sony) and no clone vendor has the money or the safety net with which to toy with no standard and new equipment. Apple is allowed to make mistakes (like the cube) and take risks (like the new iMac design) because they have brand name loyalty. Without that, the moment Apple strayed from the norm, or did something the consumers didn't like, they would loose customers and money very quickly. As you yourself said, there is no difference to most consumers between a compaq or a gateway. So if compaq started making new computers that looked different and maybe used some not quite standard parts or a new technology (like all USB), you can bet a lot of money that people would just go buy gateways and clones. Not so with Apple, they have loyalty. People will buy their stuff, or they will hold out for a change. It gives Apple a position of power.
One of the schools I've worked for would beg to differ on your point regarding failing in either a month or in 5 years. It seems almost universal that any computer which they purchased after 1998 (with the exception of the iMacs and the custom builts that they put IBMs into) the HDD failed roughly every 2 years. Like wise, a friend of mine has been running a server out of his basement for 3 years and is beginning to experience HDD failures in nearly the exact order that he bought the drives.
He was talking about the fact that the parent post had said you can get a PC for half as much as a mac. Since the iBooks cost $1,200 it logicaly follows that if the parent statement was true, a comparable PC laptop would cost $600. He was asking where he could get one.
What do you need a case sensitive FS for? I've honestly never come across a need to have a "random.file" and a "RANDOM.file" ever. Why do you need case sensitvity?
On top of being able to run *most* of the software that Linux will run, OS X also gives you Photoshop, M$ Office and other commercial apps, a bunch of non commercial apps (www.macosxapps.com, most of the old classic apps and Virtual PC which will get just about any Windows app other than games working on the mac.
If there is some linux program that you just can't live without that wont run under OS X, you also have the option to install Linux on your laptop as well.
For file types, usualy what would happen is Mac OS would search for the parent program, if that wasn't found, it would then search for a similar program, if it couldn't decide on a good one, it would ask you to choose, giving a recomended and an all programs list, with an option to have all similar files open with teh same program.
As for extensions, yeah, they did tend to get left behind. Most of the time they didn't cause problems.the main difference between them and.dlls is that *most* of the time, extensions were named appropriately giving you some idea as to whether you needed it or not (i.e. people on broad band did not need "Modem Dialer"). Most.dlls on the other hand have cryptic names
Did an internship for a large name power and electronics company a while back. They had a very simple way of setting up a "custom distro" for their machines. They took a machine, installed and configured it the way they wanted and then made a ghost of the HDD. Any computer that needed to be installed simply had the ghost installed to it. All the programs and configs that were needed installed right over the network in one swell foop. This same company also obtains licences to modify code for their own internal use.
That being said, this company does not see a compelling reason to switch to an open source OS and find new programs (or new versions of the programs), recode programs for their needs, reinstall the entire system and reteach their employees how to use the new system.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the OS and it's programs were written in the optimal way, that is, as highly portable as possible, wouldn't it simply be a matter of including seperate versions of the machine specific code and then having everythig else just recompile to the appropriate version during install? Granted this leads to the problem of extreamly long install times, but then again, OSS developers love a challenge right?
A lot of the time, the drivers included on the CD are usualy out of date and often broken by some obscure feature in the latest OS attachment. Happened with my Logitech Optical Mouse, both the PC and the Mac drivers that came with the mouse were outdated and the newest OS updates had broken them. Eventualy, I just used the default OS drivers since I decided the additional features the Logitech drivers gave me were a waste, but the point remains the same.
While those are indeed reasons to switch, they aren't quite compelling.
Freedom from DRM. So far, there is no DRM in Mac OS, and untill there is, that isn't a reason to switch.
Freedom to use the OS however you want to. I want to use my OS to get my daily work done. There isn't much beyond that that the OS has to do. This isn't really a clear argument, can you be more specific?
Freedom to tweak and change, even at code-level. I rarely have the desire to do this. Most programs work perfectly fine for me, and for those that dont, I get an alternative program. Even still, this argument is only compelling for a minority of computer users, I believe the original poster's intent was compelling reasons for other people to switch.
Freedom to install the OS on any machine you want to without asking "Mother May I?" Not quite. I can install it on any machine I want to, assuming that the machine is compatable with the OS hardware support. The main issue of course being that there are still seperate distros of Linux (PPC, x86, SPARC). When will we see a distro with all the nessesary code in one package, and a universal install?
Freedom from bullshit licenses and other nightmares. I'll give you that one. But again, the argument could still be made that for most intents and purposes, Apple provides the same freedom to it's users.
Freedom from the vast majority of viruses and exploits. Seems to me that that's a better argument to switch to mac than to linux.
Like I said, they're all very good reasons, but none of them are compelling to most users.
"They're breasts. If you saw them everytime you got up and looked in the miror and everytime you looked down, you wouldn't find them so facinating after a while."
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, Visor screens are active matrix screens, meaning that essentialy the refreshrate is 0 while the state of the screen is not changing.
Besides, ever try to read an online text book? It's a hell of a lot easier to read when the words aren't refreshing at 80Hz
From Apple Confidential:
Xerox was offered by Steve Jobs the option to invest $1,000,000 in Apple before they went public in exchange for two visits to PARC to see the developments and talk to the developers of the Xerox Alto. Xerox gladly jumped at the chance and when Apple went public, the stock had split into 800,000 shares (from 100,000) and was worth 17.6 Million. If you ask me, that qualifies as compensation for what Xerox gave apple.
As for Open Source, apple cares about it as far as it provides them a benifit. When it stops providing a benefit, they will stop caring. Just because you're pissed that Aqua and all the coolness behind OS X is not availible for your computer does not mean that what Apple has done is not a good thing. Apple has done quite a few good things.
1) Commercial backing of OSS. Whatever you may think of their own OSS policy, Apple has brought the immage that OSS software can be more than just a hobbyist toy. And let's face it, despite the inroads RedHat made in that direction, that immage was slipping.
2) Unix to the masses. As great as Linux was for bringing UNIX to people, it was still far to difficult to install or obtain pre-installed. OS X came along and suddenly people who would never have seen UNIX before have it on their own machine. This leads into point 3.
3) Broke the M$ stangle hold. Before OS X, Linux was loosing it's grip. Companies had stopped shipping preinstalled linux boxes and it had slowly begun trickling out of the major news. OS X came along and revitalized this. OSS software supported by a commercial company, UNIX in a user friendly environment. More and more people are aware of the alternative.
Finaly, if BSD has no GPL, and therefore does not require the releaing of modifications to the public domain, then Apple is doing what is 100% within their rights to do with the software as that is the way the software was designed. You may personaly not like it, but ethicaly, moraly etc etc etc, there is nothing wrong with it.
The too that I mentioned appeared in a magazine, though I can't find the specifics on them. One of those sites had them, but the links were broken. But a quick read through Apple Confidential I believe had the references and maybe even pictures. Just ask a mac guy who subcribes to Mac Addict to send you the PDFs
No, but apple tends to use high quality drives. Alot of them are IBMs, but if I remember right, my 5400 had a Wester Digital Caviar, which was at the time one of the more expensive models made.
Sure, you can see some examples here
http://www.redlightrunner.com/appleads.html
(notably, 1984, Lemmings, Crowd Control and y2k)
From this site
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/ads.html
Examples include snail and toasted bunnies. It also has the links for the other ads, but some of them appear to be broken.
Apple has always liked to tease it's competitors. Remember C:>ONGRATULATIONS.WIN95 ad that Apple ran? Or the "Welcome IBM, Really" ad. Apple keeps that edge to them because it sets them apart (for better or worse) from all the other computer makers.
I can give you a really good reason. Take out a map and a compass (the tool for drawing circles not for finding north and south) Now, in general, convention goers are inclinded to drive about 6 or so hours to go to a convention, and people who fly don't count, driving is cheaper (usualy). So assuming an average speed of 60 MPH, in 6 hours, one could travel a total of 360 miles. So, space your compass to that appropriate distance according to the scale on your map. Now center your compass on Boston, and draw and arc on the land surrounding Boston. Note the major population areas enclosed and factor in the types of people in that area. Now do the same thing arround NYC. Notice that the total area enclosed and major population areas are much larger. Now, within each of these arcs is the range that most goers would be willing to drive to the respective conventions. Do you see a reason for wanting to be in NYC?
Actualy, this could severely kill some of the attendence. With a lot of the mac word stuff, people frequently drove in for the weekend. Geographicaly speaking, MWNY was in a much better position, oftne you could get drivers from as far away as the DC area into NYC. So you have people from all up and down the east coast with a roughly equal travel time for all out of state participents. Boston however is tucked away in a corner of the US. And has been pointed out many times, NYC is a much bigger tourist attraction, giving people a bigger reason to spend a few days in NYC, justifying the drive.
Xerox was well paid for the windowing environment and some of their developers moved to Apple. That's not theft. As for the use of BSD code. I suppose you could claim it that way, but I see it as opensource software was designed so that well developed and documented code could be used and improved in the best possible ways, and Apple has done that. They have used the BSD code in what is currently the best possible way, to bring UNIX to the masses.
If every time you tried to explain your reasoning for why you do something out of the norm (like buy a mac, use UNIX etc etc etc) and then were told that your are a stupid delusional lemming who is following a puppet master and can't see the truth, have no technical knowledge and are a rabid zealot etc etc etc etc etc, you'd begin to get a little pissed off too, and then you would find it very easy to treat those who mock you with disdain.
To prove my point, find a mac user, and tell them you're interested in possibly buying a mac, but your still seeing better prices on the PC side and ask them why they use a mac and what you would need to make your mac work (and how much it would cost) and they will gladly give you as much information as you want to know. Because you approached them respectfuly and were asking honest questions.
Now go up to another one, point at their mac and ask why do you use that thing, they're so slow and expensive, and they will respond with disdain because that's how ou approached them.
That's not the point. Say to the average uneducated (or slightly educated) person, Nation of Islam, and they will more likely than not connjure up a terrorist reference. This is a bad thing. And comparing people to them espesialy "rabid mac fans" does nothing to help either immage.
I can give you one very very good reason why Apple would want to be in a position where they have brand-name loyalty instead of the best price. Innovation. Apple has the luxury of being able to play with new technologies. To put out machines that aren't standard and see what they do. No PC maker (with the possible exception of sony) and no clone vendor has the money or the safety net with which to toy with no standard and new equipment. Apple is allowed to make mistakes (like the cube) and take risks (like the new iMac design) because they have brand name loyalty. Without that, the moment Apple strayed from the norm, or did something the consumers didn't like, they would loose customers and money very quickly. As you yourself said, there is no difference to most consumers between a compaq or a gateway. So if compaq started making new computers that looked different and maybe used some not quite standard parts or a new technology (like all USB), you can bet a lot of money that people would just go buy gateways and clones. Not so with Apple, they have loyalty. People will buy their stuff, or they will hold out for a change. It gives Apple a position of power.
One of the schools I've worked for would beg to differ on your point regarding failing in either a month or in 5 years. It seems almost universal that any computer which they purchased after 1998 (with the exception of the iMacs and the custom builts that they put IBMs into) the HDD failed roughly every 2 years. Like wise, a friend of mine has been running a server out of his basement for 3 years and is beginning to experience HDD failures in nearly the exact order that he bought the drives.
He was talking about the fact that the parent post had said you can get a PC for half as much as a mac. Since the iBooks cost $1,200 it logicaly follows that if the parent statement was true, a comparable PC laptop would cost $600. He was asking where he could get one.
What do you need a case sensitive FS for? I've honestly never come across a need to have a "random.file" and a "RANDOM.file" ever. Why do you need case sensitvity?
Don't know what moron modded you flamebait but...
On top of being able to run *most* of the software that Linux will run, OS X also gives you Photoshop, M$ Office and other commercial apps, a bunch of non commercial apps (www.macosxapps.com, most of the old classic apps and Virtual PC which will get just about any Windows app other than games working on the mac.
If there is some linux program that you just can't live without that wont run under OS X, you also have the option to install Linux on your laptop as well.
For file types, usualy what would happen is Mac OS would search for the parent program, if that wasn't found, it would then search for a similar program, if it couldn't decide on a good one, it would ask you to choose, giving a recomended and an all programs list, with an option to have all similar files open with teh same program.
.dlls is that *most* of the time, extensions were named appropriately giving you some idea as to whether you needed it or not (i.e. people on broad band did not need "Modem Dialer"). Most .dlls on the other hand have cryptic names
As for extensions, yeah, they did tend to get left behind. Most of the time they didn't cause problems.the main difference between them and
Did an internship for a large name power and electronics company a while back. They had a very simple way of setting up a "custom distro" for their machines. They took a machine, installed and configured it the way they wanted and then made a ghost of the HDD. Any computer that needed to be installed simply had the ghost installed to it. All the programs and configs that were needed installed right over the network in one swell foop. This same company also obtains licences to modify code for their own internal use.
That being said, this company does not see a compelling reason to switch to an open source OS and find new programs (or new versions of the programs), recode programs for their needs, reinstall the entire system and reteach their employees how to use the new system.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the OS and it's programs were written in the optimal way, that is, as highly portable as possible, wouldn't it simply be a matter of including seperate versions of the machine specific code and then having everythig else just recompile to the appropriate version during install? Granted this leads to the problem of extreamly long install times, but then again, OSS developers love a challenge right?
A lot of the time, the drivers included on the CD are usualy out of date and often broken by some obscure feature in the latest OS attachment. Happened with my Logitech Optical Mouse, both the PC and the Mac drivers that came with the mouse were outdated and the newest OS updates had broken them. Eventualy, I just used the default OS drivers since I decided the additional features the Logitech drivers gave me were a waste, but the point remains the same.
While those are indeed reasons to switch, they aren't quite compelling.
Freedom from DRM.
So far, there is no DRM in Mac OS, and untill there is, that isn't a reason to switch.
Freedom to use the OS however you want to. I want to use my OS to get my daily work done. There isn't much beyond that that the OS has to do. This isn't really a clear argument, can you be more specific?
Freedom to tweak and change, even at code-level.
I rarely have the desire to do this. Most programs work perfectly fine for me, and for those that dont, I get an alternative program. Even still, this argument is only compelling for a minority of computer users, I believe the original poster's intent was compelling reasons for other people to switch.
Freedom to install the OS on any machine you want to without asking "Mother May I?"
Not quite. I can install it on any machine I want to, assuming that the machine is compatable with the OS hardware support. The main issue of course being that there are still seperate distros of Linux (PPC, x86, SPARC). When will we see a distro with all the nessesary code in one package, and a universal install?
Freedom from bullshit licenses and other nightmares.
I'll give you that one. But again, the argument could still be made that for most intents and purposes, Apple provides the same freedom to it's users.
Freedom from the vast majority of viruses and exploits.
Seems to me that that's a better argument to switch to mac than to linux.
Like I said, they're all very good reasons, but none of them are compelling to most users.
FYI, the G4s have 7 stage pipelines It's in the side bar about halfway down the page.
I thought that only worked for large dinosaurs in the middle of a theme park gone haywire
As one of my female friends said to me:
"They're breasts. If you saw them everytime you got up and looked in the miror and everytime you looked down, you wouldn't find them so facinating after a while."