Do you know how to read? As the first reply indicated, I was referring to revenue per user, not total revenue.
There might be somewhat compatible alternatives to Word, but none that are as fully featured and fast. I also think you underestimate the need for Word compatibility among users, and particularly businesses.
There is also the other factor of exposure to Apple products. The more consumers that buy Apple iPods, the more that may just buy a Mac Mini, eMac, iMac, iBook or PowerBook. That means less revenue to MS for their OS cash-cow.
I seriously doubt MS is even remotely worried about this, since Apple would have to have five or ten times its present sales to even make a small dent. More importantly, I doubt any corporate clients are going to go Apple just because of the iPod and mini. Besides, they probably make as much if not more money from Apple users than they do from Windows users because of the price of MSO:Mac and VPC -- both of which I bought.
Most importantly, however, MS can pull the plug on Apple anytime they want by eliminating MSO:Mac. Fact is, a whole lot of people, myself included, exist in a world dominated by MSO and need to interact with it; if Office:Mac didn't exist, I wouldn't own a PowerBook. Hell, if VPC didn't exist I probably wouldn't, because I also need Access.
Any time MS wants to, they can effectively kill, or at least really marginalize, Apple with their MSO weapon.
First off: it's "Macs" not "MACS." A Mac is a computer, while a MAC, IIRC, is a machine address code.
Back on-topic I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of Microsoft employees use Macs; they probably have the money and the technical inclination to learn more about all aspects of computer software.
Furthermore, it's relatively easy to run a variety of operating systems with VPC, so on a Mac they might run OS X and Windows and Linux. Or dual-boot OS X and Linux, because eventually everyone, I think, gets tired of their own dogfood.
Sadoly, however, I can't imagine how one would measure this, so I suppose we'll just have to go on rumor and innuendo. Maybe someone from MS -- and not the MBU -- will post.
The MBU, btw, is the Mac Business Unit, which produces OS X versions of Office and such. I read the blog of one of their developers sometimes, which is here.
Before Google, no one knew definitively how to spell anything; it's only recently, since the advent of the Internet, that spelling has been standardized. Fortunately, this makes information exchange much, much easier than during the dark days before 1991.
If he wasn't kicked out from Apple, NeXT would no doubt have Mac application compatibility. Then Apple would be the only company with UNIX workstations that also run all popular personal computer apps. Sun and Microsoft would be in deep trouble. And by '95, Apple would run NextStep on consumer Macs and Microsoft wouldn't have any product with unique advantages to grab 90%+ market share.
I doubt it. Sun mostly made servers, and Apple hardware on that time wasn't fast or robust enough to be used on servers. Meanwhile, the expense of Macs is what I think fundamentally doomed them -- I remember family members in the late 80s and early 90s deciding how to get on the PC train. They would look at the nice, $1,600 Mac or the bargain $1,000 DOS and later Windows machine. The Mac looked better but cost more. Virtually all of them went with PCs (which is what I always used. I fondly remember making boot disks for Ultima 7. Those were the days). MS's biggest product advantage has always been 1) its price compared to competitors and 2) its increasing size, which allowed it to control the APIs and dictate licensing terms. I don't think NeXT would have made a dent.
Exactly. In HS, I got in trouble for recommending that classmates read The Student as Nigger. Although it has a somewhat provocative title and I don't agree with everything it contains, I agree with the fundamental point, which is that schools are designed to push individuals into boxes and form rules around their lives. When I got called into the administration's office, they threatened to suspend me -- and I told them I had nothing to say and would find a lawyer. The synagogue of which I was a member kindly hooked me up with an attorney from the ACLU, and one call was all it took for the problem to go away.
The chief irony, of course, was that by trying to punish me for doing nothing wrong, the school reinforced the exact points made in the essay.
I also visit the Ars Technica Agora Classified forum, where members semi-regularly sell Apple stuff. I think there actually are a few PowerBooks in there today.
Craigslist is also fairly popular, and if you have one in your city you can arrange a pickup.
That's true of the 12", but the larger PowerBooks have a single 512MB stick, which will make upgrading with non-Apple RAM much easier and much less expensive.
When I bought my PowerBook last summer, I had to pay extra money to get the single 512MB stick instead of two 256 sticks, so that I could buy an extra $95 stick from Crucial.
While it may sound like the Chinese police force operate a Gestapo-like regime but that's far from the truth. Believe or not, China has laws and 99% of the time, they are followed.
As I wrote about in some of my previous posts, tell that to Harry Wu. I heard him and Dan Picouda, the US Consular Officer who worked to free him, speak. It was both an enlightening and frightening experience.
The most salient point is that in China, the authorities wield absolute, arbitrary power over you. This means that, more likely than not, your experience will be like that of the parent poster. If not, the Chinese government can more or less do whatever it wants to you.
This may be a strange concept to you, but for many people in the world, freedom and democracy are not their top priorities. Often, security and prosperity trump it.
The problem with your implication is that, over the long term, security and prosperity are inextricably linked with freedom and democracy. Western Europe had to learn this the hard way, and it took centuries to implement democratic frameworks, which most scholars think began with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century. Those structures didn't become entrenched throughout Europe until after World War II, and only spread to eastern Europe following the end of the Cold War. The point is that the Western world has had a lot of practice and a lot of backsliding that led to lots of nasty wars, abuses of power and egotism.
Over the short term, some countries may experience a marginally better quality of life due to a government's unwillingness to to respect human rights. Over the long term, however, that kind of government inevitably creates more problems than it solves. See the Soviet Union for a large example. See places like the Balkans or Iraq for smaller ones.
If Peru had adopted and maintained democratic institutions a century ago, your friend would be much better off today. Instead, people opt or are forced into short term, "temporary" structures in which the government has more power than it should. Then that power is misused. It happened in ancient Rome -- a "tyrant" (before the word gained a pejorative connotation) would seize power during an emergency and then relinquish it. Until someone didn't want to. The point is that real benefits, materialistic and otherwise, come from a free people. It's only a fool's choice to offer security or freedom, because the two can't be fundamentally separated.
If you want to play games, you don't want a Mac anyway. If you want to do real video editing or 3D modeling, you don't want a Mac mini. The Radeon 9200 does exactly what 99% of Mini users need it to do. A faster card would pump up the cost and produce more heat and, consequently, noise.
If you want to play some games, get a Mac -- World of Warcraft runs very well on my 1.5 ghz PowerBook -- but if you want to play the latest games that demand the most powerful graphics cards the day those games hit the street, don't get a Mac because you'll be disappointed.
Apple has a whole section for games on their website. Gaming on Macs isn't practically impossible, as many posters here and on other Apple stories seem to imply.
Exactly. The brilliant design and relatively active after market that developed around the Cube helped keep its prices relatively, although I expect them to sink now that the mini is out. Although I never would have bought one at the time Apple was producing them because of the OS, they were nice machines that could have been a grand slam had Apple priced them closer to the current minis and further from the PowerMacs.
Ironically enough, that's true in most cases (pun unintended), but not true for the PowerMac G5, which is a huge beast and much larger than G4 PowerMacs. Despite its girth, the PowerMac G5s don't even have enough hard drive bays.
Arguably there is a purpose to their size, which might allow more fans and results in a quieter experience. But Apple desktops, particularly if one also buys their gigantic, FP monitors, are big and call quite a bit of attention to themselves (in a good way, IMO).
That being said, maybe Apple is going in both directions: the mini and the PowerMac are on opposite ends of the side scale, as are the 12" laptops and the 17" PowerBook. [Warning: Car metaphor imminent] That way they can get customers who prefer driving BMW Minis as well as those who prefer H2s. [/Car]
Thanks for the compliment. I think the strange thing about Sun and open source/ slashdot types is that Sun doesn't fit easily in the overall scheme of things. They've done some great things to advance open source, and their employees contribute to just about every large open source project out there. They still do a tremendous amount of work on OOo. Still, their half-assed, pretend efforts at creating an open source version of Solaris, and now this patent business, is probably worse than staying all closed-source because they're only muddying the waters. Sometimes they slam Linux, sometimes they embrace it.
For these and other reasons, I and many others feel uncertain toward Sun. There's also a great deal of confusion about what they're doing these days, which is understandable because of the mixed messages they keep sending. That may be in part because they don't seem to have a conherent strategy, and if they do it's well-hidden from my eyes.
Exactly. I've read that some people actually intend to use the external HD as a boot drive and the internal drive for storage/scratch disk. FW enclosures and HDs are so cheap these days that, unless one is pressed for space, it makes more sense to go that route.
I got caught up in the Mac Mini frenzy. To me $499 is impluse buy pricing. I figured it was worth it to let me have my first Mac to enjoy and learn on. I had been holding out for the next gen PowerBook. I went to the Apple Store and began an order.
$100 more for the SuperDrive and faster CPU. I'll buy my own RAM and deal with a putty knife to put it in. Yeah, I need Wi-Fi and Bluetooth because you can't add that afterwards. Applecare? Good idea. Now it was $800, even with my educational discount. It was no longer in impulse buy range. I left the site.
Not surprisingly, if you want everything and the kitchen sink, the MM's going to cost more. Frankly, if it were me, I wouldn't bother with Applecare on such an inexpensive machine, and I'd get 512MB of RAM and *maybe* wireless. Probably no wireless. That's $575 for what's almost a disposable computer. For more storage space, I'd use an external FW HD, since that will transfer between computers.
If you want all those extras, you're probably not *really* the mini's target audience. Even so, I still think the mini with 512MB of RAM and airport is a deal.
I'm as much a Mac fan as the next slashdotter, but I don't think many people who can't afford/won't buy Windows are going to be driven to OS X simply becaues MS stops providing security updates. I think it's more likely that they'll opt to go with the free solution that proably works on their current hardware -- meaning some flavor of Linux.
A relatively small number of people might opt to go with Macs on their next upgrade cycle. For most, though, I suspect Linux makes more sense -- or they'll just buy Windows. Note that, when I bought my PowerBook, part of the reason I chose OS X was irritation with MS's new activation scheme, which Inconvenienced me even though I had bought a legal copy of Windows.
I realize you're aiming for funny, but I'll answer seriously because I think that there is an important point underneath the humor.
We don't like Sun, but we do share some common interests with Sun. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that we do like Sun, at least a little bit, but don't trust them. This pretend-opening of patents makes us like them even less, and is an example of why we don't trust them. The patents they offer only apply to their license, which isn't compatible with the GPL or BSD-style, and is therefore even more duplicitous than their alleged opening of Solaris code. All of Sun's recent efforts seem more like an effort to confuse and befuddle open source people. Unfortunately for them, open source people aren't so easily fooled, and thus tell Sun to take their dwimmercraft elsewhere, for the open source people are not so easily ensnared by promises of false baubles and trinkets.
We still like Sun, at least somewhat, for giving out OpenOffice.org and fighting against MS for many years. They're the sort of friend we wouldn't want to leave at home at night with our wife and wouldn't want at our back in a fight.
So kidnapping a bunch of innocent people and keeping them in cages and torturing them is ok, as long as they aren't *all* your citizens makes such a tremendous difference?!?
What proof do you have that those captured at Guantanamo Bay are innocent? Most of the inmates were caught in Afganistan for fighting against US soldiers or having links to the Taliban.
I suppose genocide doesn't relate to human rights in your book.The US has never committed genocide, and you're trolling when you say that.
If you hate your country so much that you don't have the courage to look it in the eyes, then please stop making your feeble attempts to represent it. You are embarassing those of us who do actually give a shit about what America once stood for.
Fine. If your agenda revolves chiefly around hating the US and trolling/., so be it.
According to Forbes, in 2003, Gates was worth $40.7B. So you're off by 20% right there. Since then he's given away more money and I don't believe the value of his stock has climbed any. This site puts that value closer to $30B. I can't vouch for the accuracy of it because I don't feel like doing the math. Keep in mind, too, that these figures represent wealth, which couldn't possibly be accessed all at once without decreasing the value of what's left, because so much of his money is tied up in MS stock. So we can assume that he's donating a larger portion of what he has than is indicated by your post. Furthermore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has about $27B in assets -- which means Gates has already given away quite a bit of cash.
This isn't trying to denigrate your contribution to charity or Gates'. It is, though, trying to demonstrate that, even on a relative scale, you're not necessary donating as much as you think you are. "So what?" the reader may ask -- and that's the deeper point. How much you give relative to Gates doesn't matter. If people wouldn't turn charity into a wang-measuring competition, I think the world might be at least a marginally better place.
I can't believe tripe like this gets modded informative. Fact of the matter is, Gates has so much money that he can't live any better lifestyle than he does now. Still, he doesn't have to do anything with his money -- he could keep until he dies, let the government take some -- if the death tax is even around then -- and leave a huge pile of cash for his family. (Assuming, of course, that MS is still as big as it is today in, say, ~35 years -- and there's no guarantee of that.)
So he doesn't have to give anything away. It isn't a matter of him being smart or dumb; it's a matter of him being compassionate. Much as I dislike MS's business practices, I have to laud Gates for his philanthropic effortts.
Comparing something like Guantanamo Bay, where foreign non-soldiers (for lack of a better term) are held, with China, where the government wields absolute, arbitrary power over every citizen, is simply wrong. The biggest menace in the world at the moment is red and dwells in the East. It already invaded and swallowed Tibet, fought several border wars with India and continues to threaten Taiwan. Contrast that with the U.S., which did invade Iraq (an act I'm not going to justify because it was probably a mistake), but would like nothing better than the Iraqis to govern themselves -- so we can leave.
Obviously, I'm not going to argue that the U.S. is the pinnacle of morality, because it isn't. America's human rights record is vastly better than China's, and they're not even in the same league.
If you want to discuss real oppression, talk to someone like Harry Wu, a Chinese-American man who I've heard speak. He was forced into the lau-gai, which were slave labor camps operated by the Chinese that still exist today. Or talk to members of Falun-Gong. China's government is much, much worse in terms of human rights violations than America'a.
Slashdot Mirror
Reader logs editor's grammar mistake.
Do you know how to read? As the first reply indicated, I was referring to revenue per user, not total revenue.
There might be somewhat compatible alternatives to Word, but none that are as fully featured and fast. I also think you underestimate the need for Word compatibility among users, and particularly businesses.
I seriously doubt MS is even remotely worried about this, since Apple would have to have five or ten times its present sales to even make a small dent. More importantly, I doubt any corporate clients are going to go Apple just because of the iPod and mini. Besides, they probably make as much if not more money from Apple users than they do from Windows users because of the price of MSO:Mac and VPC -- both of which I bought.
Most importantly, however, MS can pull the plug on Apple anytime they want by eliminating MSO:Mac. Fact is, a whole lot of people, myself included, exist in a world dominated by MSO and need to interact with it; if Office:Mac didn't exist, I wouldn't own a PowerBook. Hell, if VPC didn't exist I probably wouldn't, because I also need Access.
Any time MS wants to, they can effectively kill, or at least really marginalize, Apple with their MSO weapon.
Back on-topic I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of Microsoft employees use Macs; they probably have the money and the technical inclination to learn more about all aspects of computer software.
Furthermore, it's relatively easy to run a variety of operating systems with VPC, so on a Mac they might run OS X and Windows and Linux. Or dual-boot OS X and Linux, because eventually everyone, I think, gets tired of their own dogfood.
Sadoly, however, I can't imagine how one would measure this, so I suppose we'll just have to go on rumor and innuendo. Maybe someone from MS -- and not the MBU -- will post.
The MBU, btw, is the Mac Business Unit, which produces OS X versions of Office and such. I read the blog of one of their developers sometimes, which is here.
I thought it was related to furries. Glad to clear that up.
You can't.
Before Google, no one knew definitively how to spell anything; it's only recently, since the advent of the Internet, that spelling has been standardized. Fortunately, this makes information exchange much, much easier than during the dark days before 1991.
I doubt it. Sun mostly made servers, and Apple hardware on that time wasn't fast or robust enough to be used on servers. Meanwhile, the expense of Macs is what I think fundamentally doomed them -- I remember family members in the late 80s and early 90s deciding how to get on the PC train. They would look at the nice, $1,600 Mac or the bargain $1,000 DOS and later Windows machine. The Mac looked better but cost more. Virtually all of them went with PCs (which is what I always used. I fondly remember making boot disks for Ultima 7. Those were the days). MS's biggest product advantage has always been 1) its price compared to competitors and 2) its increasing size, which allowed it to control the APIs and dictate licensing terms. I don't think NeXT would have made a dent.
I fail to see how the demise or creation of Napster has anything whatsoever to do with knowledge of Government.
The chief irony, of course, was that by trying to punish me for doing nothing wrong, the school reinforced the exact points made in the essay.
Craigslist is also fairly popular, and if you have one in your city you can arrange a pickup.
When I bought my PowerBook last summer, I had to pay extra money to get the single 512MB stick instead of two 256 sticks, so that I could buy an extra $95 stick from Crucial.
As I wrote about in some of my previous posts, tell that to Harry Wu. I heard him and Dan Picouda, the US Consular Officer who worked to free him, speak. It was both an enlightening and frightening experience.
The most salient point is that in China, the authorities wield absolute, arbitrary power over you. This means that, more likely than not, your experience will be like that of the parent poster. If not, the Chinese government can more or less do whatever it wants to you.
The problem with your implication is that, over the long term, security and prosperity are inextricably linked with freedom and democracy. Western Europe had to learn this the hard way, and it took centuries to implement democratic frameworks, which most scholars think began with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century. Those structures didn't become entrenched throughout Europe until after World War II, and only spread to eastern Europe following the end of the Cold War. The point is that the Western world has had a lot of practice and a lot of backsliding that led to lots of nasty wars, abuses of power and egotism.
Over the short term, some countries may experience a marginally better quality of life due to a government's unwillingness to to respect human rights. Over the long term, however, that kind of government inevitably creates more problems than it solves. See the Soviet Union for a large example. See places like the Balkans or Iraq for smaller ones.
If Peru had adopted and maintained democratic institutions a century ago, your friend would be much better off today. Instead, people opt or are forced into short term, "temporary" structures in which the government has more power than it should. Then that power is misused. It happened in ancient Rome -- a "tyrant" (before the word gained a pejorative connotation) would seize power during an emergency and then relinquish it. Until someone didn't want to. The point is that real benefits, materialistic and otherwise, come from a free people. It's only a fool's choice to offer security or freedom, because the two can't be fundamentally separated.
If you want to play some games, get a Mac -- World of Warcraft runs very well on my 1.5 ghz PowerBook -- but if you want to play the latest games that demand the most powerful graphics cards the day those games hit the street, don't get a Mac because you'll be disappointed.
Apple has a whole section for games on their website. Gaming on Macs isn't practically impossible, as many posters here and on other Apple stories seem to imply.
Exactly. The brilliant design and relatively active after market that developed around the Cube helped keep its prices relatively, although I expect them to sink now that the mini is out. Although I never would have bought one at the time Apple was producing them because of the OS, they were nice machines that could have been a grand slam had Apple priced them closer to the current minis and further from the PowerMacs.
Arguably there is a purpose to their size, which might allow more fans and results in a quieter experience. But Apple desktops, particularly if one also buys their gigantic, FP monitors, are big and call quite a bit of attention to themselves (in a good way, IMO).
That being said, maybe Apple is going in both directions: the mini and the PowerMac are on opposite ends of the side scale, as are the 12" laptops and the 17" PowerBook. [Warning: Car metaphor imminent] That way they can get customers who prefer driving BMW Minis as well as those who prefer H2s. [/Car]
For these and other reasons, I and many others feel uncertain toward Sun. There's also a great deal of confusion about what they're doing these days, which is understandable because of the mixed messages they keep sending. That may be in part because they don't seem to have a conherent strategy, and if they do it's well-hidden from my eyes.
Exactly. I've read that some people actually intend to use the external HD as a boot drive and the internal drive for storage/scratch disk. FW enclosures and HDs are so cheap these days that, unless one is pressed for space, it makes more sense to go that route.
$100 more for the SuperDrive and faster CPU. I'll buy my own RAM and deal with a putty knife to put it in. Yeah, I need Wi-Fi and Bluetooth because you can't add that afterwards. Applecare? Good idea. Now it was $800, even with my educational discount. It was no longer in impulse buy range. I left the site.
Not surprisingly, if you want everything and the kitchen sink, the MM's going to cost more. Frankly, if it were me, I wouldn't bother with Applecare on such an inexpensive machine, and I'd get 512MB of RAM and *maybe* wireless. Probably no wireless. That's $575 for what's almost a disposable computer. For more storage space, I'd use an external FW HD, since that will transfer between computers.
If you want all those extras, you're probably not *really* the mini's target audience. Even so, I still think the mini with 512MB of RAM and airport is a deal.
A relatively small number of people might opt to go with Macs on their next upgrade cycle. For most, though, I suspect Linux makes more sense -- or they'll just buy Windows. Note that, when I bought my PowerBook, part of the reason I chose OS X was irritation with MS's new activation scheme, which Inconvenienced me even though I had bought a legal copy of Windows.
We don't like Sun, but we do share some common interests with Sun. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that we do like Sun, at least a little bit, but don't trust them. This pretend-opening of patents makes us like them even less, and is an example of why we don't trust them. The patents they offer only apply to their license, which isn't compatible with the GPL or BSD-style, and is therefore even more duplicitous than their alleged opening of Solaris code. All of Sun's recent efforts seem more like an effort to confuse and befuddle open source people. Unfortunately for them, open source people aren't so easily fooled, and thus tell Sun to take their dwimmercraft elsewhere, for the open source people are not so easily ensnared by promises of false baubles and trinkets.
We still like Sun, at least somewhat, for giving out OpenOffice.org and fighting against MS for many years. They're the sort of friend we wouldn't want to leave at home at night with our wife and wouldn't want at our back in a fight.
What proof do you have that those captured at Guantanamo Bay are innocent? Most of the inmates were caught in Afganistan for fighting against US soldiers or having links to the Taliban.
I suppose genocide doesn't relate to human rights in your book.The US has never committed genocide, and you're trolling when you say that.
If you hate your country so much that you don't have the courage to look it in the eyes, then please stop making your feeble attempts to represent it. You are embarassing those of us who do actually give a shit about what America once stood for.
Fine. If your agenda revolves chiefly around hating the US and trolling /., so be it.
This isn't trying to denigrate your contribution to charity or Gates'. It is, though, trying to demonstrate that, even on a relative scale, you're not necessary donating as much as you think you are. "So what?" the reader may ask -- and that's the deeper point. How much you give relative to Gates doesn't matter. If people wouldn't turn charity into a wang-measuring competition, I think the world might be at least a marginally better place.
So he doesn't have to give anything away. It isn't a matter of him being smart or dumb; it's a matter of him being compassionate. Much as I dislike MS's business practices, I have to laud Gates for his philanthropic effortts.
Obviously, I'm not going to argue that the U.S. is the pinnacle of morality, because it isn't. America's human rights record is vastly better than China's, and they're not even in the same league.
If you want to discuss real oppression, talk to someone like Harry Wu, a Chinese-American man who I've heard speak. He was forced into the lau-gai, which were slave labor camps operated by the Chinese that still exist today. Or talk to members of Falun-Gong. China's government is much, much worse in terms of human rights violations than America'a.