professionals are concerned with stability, and as such don't have time for things like viruses, spyware, crashes, etc. the crashes problem is thankfully mostly erradicated with pcs, but security issues still plague them in comparison to macs. if you use a mac, the simple truth is your uptime is going to be higher.
mac is a visually stunning environment. much like the mozart effect can help people think clearer, i believe the environment's asthetic qualities help the user be more creative. comparing aqua to luna is like comparing classical music to rap. i just don't see the professionalism in luna.
integrated media workflows are important to these individuals. quicktime, and the pervasive use of pdf in os x, makes it a more streamlined environment for content producers
final cut pro. i don't know what else to say on this one. all the friends i talk to at my college say it blows away anything comparable for pcs
despite all that, macs are considered more usable by the experts. many studies have been done on the subject, and most of them lean towards macs being the easier to use machines. i'm not going out of my way to say why, but i'll leave this up to the reader.
many can argue things like price, or performance for macs. however a dual 2.0 or soon a dual 2.5 performs well enough for these people. a 30" LCD is going to be a godsend to those doing HD work. combine this with FCP-HD, DVD studio pro 3.0, motion, photoshop CS, and many many more professional apps, and the mac is easily better than a pc at such work.
it's simple really. if you do these sorts of things for a living, the chances are you make enough money from one-two jobs to easily afford a powerful mac. a lot of people in the video, content creation, graphcis, and printing industry swear by the macs for increased productivity.
if a mac lets you finish 10 jobs instead of 7 jobs in the same amount of time, that's a large some of money you otherwise wouldn't make. a tool to professionals is a rather cheap one time cost to production, so to foregoe the correct tool for a "$500" savings, is a bit rediculous.
quartz extreme has pretty liberal requirements.
from apple's website:
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required.
Tiger, coming out mid 2005, has an addition called Quartz 2D, in which the entire portion of the pipe line that used to require main system memory, is totally eliminated. This enables you to opengl pixel shaders on top of your already existing window compositions. If you haven't heard, or seen, dashboard for Tiger there's a nice water-dropplet animation whenever you place a dashboard widget on the desktop.
these tiger specific additions are all part of the bigger picture -- core image, new to tiger, which is going to require a minimum 64mb graphics card to accomplish said effects.
this geforce 6600, with 128mb of ram, is well over the required minimum specs for such effects in Tiger coming a whole 8 or so months away. i doubt longhorn's requirements will differ much from this.
Jack of all trades, master of none
I'm glad to see some people "get it." It just isn't viable to have one device do everything. From a usability standpoint, it's a nightmare. Trying to use a device that has one function, as opposed to a device with 15, it's clear that you have to try and form generalizations and some sort of system to organize it all for accessability. This job gets exponentially harder as you increase the functions.
In usability class 101 they have you design a clock, radio, phone, cd player, and alarm all into one device. The point of the activity is to teach people that this stuff is hard. It's usually to also drive home the point that it's not something that's wise to do. The iPod is a very very specific device. It's obvious by it's design that Apple also Gets It when it comes to interface design, because half the things that other companies spout off as features, Apple purposefully left out (Such as built in recording, FM tuner, USB and Firewire in two different ports, replacable batteries). All these extra functions only serve to further complicate the device.
wow. what a moron. apple never claimed their OS was open souce. they said the base system, darwin, (made by opendarwin) is what their system is based off of. at least if you're going to lie, tell one that's hard for people to debunk.
yeah. apple's SO closed. that's why they use ppc, an open architecture (unlike x86) openfirmware (an open bios implementation), standard component protocls and connections like pci, pci-x, agp, usb, firewire, ide, sata and more. that's why they've now switched completely to DVI monitors instead of ADP. that's why their filesystem, hfs+, has a fully working read/write implementation in linux.. because you know they CLOSED the format of course! (yeah right) more like they opened the documentation on it. that preferences system they use.. it's also know as xml, not some binary registry file. i'm sorry, but apple's only form of lock-in is that no other major manufacturers make ppc mobos and ppc chips besides apple and ibm on a wide enough scale to get high enough performance for os x.
If all those things in the title were used to develop a website, i think the things one could accomplish are amazing. as it stands you can already use xhtml and xhmlhttprequest to do highly dynamic websites. sometimes i wish so much emphasis wasn't put on backwards compatability in the web. i wish browsers could automatically detect what version of html the webpage requires, and generate warnings if your browser's too old to properly render, with a handy "update here" link.
PS: Canvas is a new tag from apple, used to draw things into an img like component. apple's working with opera and mozilla to integrate it into their browsers. hopefully this will go somewhere. i've always wanted something like that directly javascript accessable, but have never had the luck. it requires hack extensions like java and flash which don't communicate well with the underlying javascript without using some kludge like liveconnect.
Python is not by any stretch less OO than Ruby. Having first class functions is not a liability, it's a strength. Object model is not bolted on Python - everything in Python is an object.
if i have to pass self to every single member function, that's bolted on. if i have to prepend and append __ to special object functions everywhere, that's bolted on.
i'm not sure what you mean by first class functions, but ruby is perfectly capable of something like:
def myFunction return 2 end
myVar = myFunction()
heck, ruby can even do this:
def foo return 2 end
def bar(other) return other.call end
myVar = bar(&foo)
in this case i'm defining foo, passing foo as a parameter to bar, and calling foo then returning it's return value. i'm not sure how first-class you can get, but that's pretty first-class to me.
Ruby people go to great lengths to attack Python at every opportunity. For the most part this appears to be because modern Python renders Ruby pretty much irrelevant. Ruby is not really better than Python as a language, period. Ruby is better than Perl, and pretty much equivalent to Python on all linguistic accounts, but loses royally on maturity, community and industrial popularity.
ruby came about after python. it took the lessons learned from python and perl and improved them even more. to this day, python still lacks many of the oop and functional (lisp like) features of ruby. to say something so arragant shows me you haven't used ruby. guess what, i have used python. it's the language that is lacking, not ruby. modern "windows" renders linux irrelevant too i'm sure, yet we persevere because linux is a better operating system. modern "windows" has the industrial backing, not linux. all i'm saying is don't consider something better just because it has the ring side advantage. nothing starts out more popular than an already existing language.
Offset that with the fact that most Rubyistas that talk crap about Pythonistas don't really have experience with Python, but merely reiterate the misunderstandings of other Rubyistas.
where have i lied? seriously. i don't know, so do tell me. the fact of the matter is i tried python before ruby simply because python was more popular. why of course whould i try a less popular niche language first? if you'd broaden your horizons and actually dive into ruby maybe you'd understand why the few of us loyal to it hold it so dear. i heard a great quote once: "When a community has a small number of utterly devoted followers, it's usually because most people just don't get it." I believe ruby is like that. along with scheme, OCaml, Haskell, and other hacker languages that require discipline and free thinking to adopt and appreciate.
Or maybe they tried it and found it lacking?
i assume you meant ruby by this.. but anyways, most python people i know have never seen ruby. and half the ones who haven't seen it haven't even heard of it. if only one in four has actually used it, which would be an overestimate, then that pretty much sums up the fact that "everyone uses [python] because it's all they know exists". i'm not stating at this point that it's clearly better, but i am saying that it doesn't get 1/10th the coverage.
And what is this fascination with OOP? The only task I can think of (please name some more if can think of any) that lends itself naturally towards OOP is GUI/Widget handling. Everything else is much better expressed using so-called "sum types" (read about ML to find out what they are) and pattern matching.
OOP lends itself to many problems. knowing when and where to use it of course is a strong point. however python claims to be OOP, yet half the base library is comprised of functions like intval( "1" ), whereas in ruby it's a thought off the other way around, as a function on an object (oop) "1".to_i. the clear distinction, whether you like it or not, as i stated in my post, is that ruby is a more pure oop based language. that's all i'm advocating and you'll be very hard pressed to say i'm wrong with that statement.
if you go to any major software house today, you'll find OOP is the tool of choice for the vast majority of jobs. procedural, functional, logical, and other language paradigms exist but they aren't often useful in the solutions where python is used. the simple matter is, if you're using python you're probably using it for oop. if you're using a poorly implemented oop language just to get the dynamic features of a scripting language, why not go with a first-class oop language rather than getting yesterday's scraps.
how about something more important, like integrated OOP. nothing's worse than claiming to be heavily object oriented, that has a bolted on OOP model.
for example.. python:
class foo: def __init__(self): // do stuff
ruby:
class foo def initialize // do stuff end end
python reminds me so much of windows. everyone uses it, because it's all they know exists. if you want to see a language with modern OOP, and clean syntax, give ruby a try some time.
there are many reasons to go with a freebsd based kernel over that of say win32's. it's tough to base something's worth on just the face value (API). a freebsd core has other key advantages. it lets you focus on application development, and occasional security maintenance rather than kernel implementation. you basically get, for free, the efforts of all the freebsd kernel developers. another perk is that also comes with the freebsd userland utilities (ls, mv, etc). great. now you don't have to implement those. now you're also freed from kernel documentation. you're freed from security patching (unless you find the freebsd community isn't patching quickly enough which right now is not the case). you get free POSIX compliance. you get an out-of-the-box ready environment for the majority of POSIX compliant unix software.
the advantage of leveraging a pre-existing base lets you focus more on what users really want now a days -- applications. and quite frankly all the things i just mentioned don't really matter to the vast majority of computer users. however from a business perspective, anything that allows me to spend less $$$ on kernel R&D and maintenance, and more $$$ on making windows a better overall environment is really just a win-win situation. nevermind all the other advantages that come with embracing a *nix environment like the hoards of unix people adopting, and supporting unix utilities on your system (see fink, darwinports, and now gentoo macos), things like nfs, etc. what apple did was more than just a smart move.. it was brilliant. it was almost like a phoenix rebirth of the tech industry, as now allllllll the unix people who've been clamoring for years saying "Hey look at me. we're better than proprietary" have finally made a voice. and who knows. if you're a decent programmer, maybe one day your name will appear in apple's file system in one of the unix header files, or man pages of a utility you wrote, getting distributed to millions of users.
it's not the performance or design of the kernel that's the reason to switch. it's simply the Right Thing to do. so why won't microsoft do it? last i remember, windows is last OS that isn't based off a unix derivative.
This is highly arguable. Don't you think Microsoft MADE the industry? Do you imagine your grandma typing "man tar"? For people who think they are so intelligent, come on.
apple created the industry, not microsoft. at least get your facts straight
..."billions of cash" means that we could have instantly cured software of "buggy" and "security holes". IBM 360 here we come
like it or not, money solves a lot of problems. it lets you pay competitive wages to hire the best of the best. it allows you fund the massive R&D for usability, Q&A, development and more. more money == more potential for a better product.
... "compensation for their illegal activities" because rokzy is a better judge and jury than any legal system, of course.
better judge? na. he's just agreeing with both the US justice dept and the european union, both of which have convicted microsoft of being a monopoly, and abusing those powers
... "fucking up the industry" must be because MS has gotten rid of those 18 Wordperfect disks I used install for incompatible printers
so now we have the flipside of the situation today, where office formats are totally closed with no plans to open documentation on it. where mshtml totally abuses w3c specs. we have to deal with microsoft reinventing every single protocol and standard and then closing it up rather than using what already exists. they've done more work to throw a wrench into the industry than any other company in the history of business i think. no one in their right mind would claim windows is a more stable, promising os, than things like BeOS, OS X, or Linux. if all things were equal, (i.e. # of market share) all 3 of those are clear winners in stability, interoperability, and security.
so yes. microsoft HAS fucked up the industry. and it won't get any better any time soon.
you're thinking of the MacBU. and yes, the mac bu is profitable. i believe they produce office, msn messenger, (used to do ie), and now virtualpc. not sure what else they do really. office is the big money maker.
yeah.. it's not like the created the pda market or anything.
Re:Apple becoming a music company
on
Birth of the iPod
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
i disagree. there's a difference between a system's capability to do something, and a system's potential to do something better.
as an OPERATING system, i.e., not the 3rd party games/software, mac os is more advanced. this is impossible to contest. quartz extreme, UNIX underpinnings, aqua, usability studies, and prepackaged, more featureful, bundled software (iLife, Mail, Safari) don't lie.
windows just like many other oses can get you from point a to point b, and if your application happens to be a game you're pretty much going to need windows. but does that mean windows has some inherent superior game development apis? not really. coreaudio, openal, opengl and many other libraries on the mac are equivalent to directx. that's a product of market share and mind share, not of a system's potential.
here's another analogy that might clear things up: at the end of the day, if you could run all your windows software on mac os x, on your x86 box, would you honestly actually use windows over os x considering all the advantages the base system has? i'm willing to bet the vast majority would switch if the barrier to entry were 0. of course that's not the case, so for now we have the market friction inbetween the two OSes like a wedge carving out the "audio/video/style" people who cherish the platform (for different reasons) and the necessity folk who just want something that runs word and their games.
Re:Apple becoming a music company
on
Birth of the iPod
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think you're missing a third reason why some of us happen to use macs:
They're better. style? yeah it's nice, but i don't *need* a pretty computer. Necessity? I could code on linux/windows just as easily as the mac. No, i use it because it's a better operating system. It gets out of my way. I know some people don't like to admit it, but every market has a high and low end. BMWs and Toyotas aren't really in the same class of vehicle. Think of it like this: The person who has the means to purchase a BMW never really considers purchasing the Toyota. Likewise the opposite, the Toyota buyer never really considers the BMW as it's too far out of a comfortable price range.
basically what i'm trying to say is apple's niche is perfectly fine -- high end quality computers. Sure there is a market for the low end. a rather large (95%) market, but that's not apple's target. It would be silly for BMW to market towards the toyota buyers. i think that's why apple's switch compain wasn't very successful
apple's profits are still vastly in desktop/laptop sales. so your "focus on the music products" as a longevity argument wouldn't really hold much water. If apple lost 50% of it's desktop/laptop sales in the next few years, it would really hurt their profits. they can't self sustain themselves on a low return item like the ipod, at least not at the moment. (low return in the sense that you might profit $50 off an ipod and $500 off a powermac).
at any rate, as i said before. apple's doing just fine. sales are way up, and the highest in 8 years as the last quarterly report says. we might have the ipod to thank for increased media exposure/switchers, but by no means is it the company's saving grace at the moment as a cash cow.
multi-core means more than one physical chip. hyperthreading means more than one thread sharing resources in a single core. for example, the ibm power5 chip that just came out is a multi-core hyperthreaded chip, with 4 logical processors and 2 physical cores, on 1 total chip.
Slashdot Mirror
it's not even my birthday
i'd rather everyone stop coding strictly towards one database api, and use abstracted interfaces like PEAR, ado.net, jdbc, odbc, etc.
you a wwdc student too? that's the only time i saw them demo it, was during the students only day.
despite all that, macs are considered more usable by the experts. many studies have been done on the subject, and most of them lean towards macs being the easier to use machines. i'm not going out of my way to say why, but i'll leave this up to the reader.
many can argue things like price, or performance for macs. however a dual 2.0 or soon a dual 2.5 performs well enough for these people. a 30" LCD is going to be a godsend to those doing HD work. combine this with FCP-HD, DVD studio pro 3.0, motion, photoshop CS, and many many more professional apps, and the mac is easily better than a pc at such work.
it's simple really. if you do these sorts of things for a living, the chances are you make enough money from one-two jobs to easily afford a powerful mac. a lot of people in the video, content creation, graphcis, and printing industry swear by the macs for increased productivity.
if a mac lets you finish 10 jobs instead of 7 jobs in the same amount of time, that's a large some of money you otherwise wouldn't make. a tool to professionals is a rather cheap one time cost to production, so to foregoe the correct tool for a "$500" savings, is a bit rediculous.
quartz extreme has pretty liberal requirements.
from apple's website:
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required.
Tiger, coming out mid 2005, has an addition called Quartz 2D, in which the entire portion of the pipe line that used to require main system memory, is totally eliminated. This enables you to opengl pixel shaders on top of your already existing window compositions. If you haven't heard, or seen, dashboard for Tiger there's a nice water-dropplet animation whenever you place a dashboard widget on the desktop.
these tiger specific additions are all part of the bigger picture -- core image, new to tiger, which is going to require a minimum 64mb graphics card to accomplish said effects.
this geforce 6600, with 128mb of ram, is well over the required minimum specs for such effects in Tiger coming a whole 8 or so months away. i doubt longhorn's requirements will differ much from this.
real geeks only need one monitor
Jack of all trades, master of none
I'm glad to see some people "get it." It just isn't viable to have one device do everything. From a usability standpoint, it's a nightmare. Trying to use a device that has one function, as opposed to a device with 15, it's clear that you have to try and form generalizations and some sort of system to organize it all for accessability. This job gets exponentially harder as you increase the functions.
In usability class 101 they have you design a clock, radio, phone, cd player, and alarm all into one device. The point of the activity is to teach people that this stuff is hard. It's usually to also drive home the point that it's not something that's wise to do. The iPod is a very very specific device. It's obvious by it's design that Apple also Gets It when it comes to interface design, because half the things that other companies spout off as features, Apple purposefully left out (Such as built in recording, FM tuner, USB and Firewire in two different ports, replacable batteries). All these extra functions only serve to further complicate the device.
wow. what a moron. apple never claimed their OS was open souce. they said the base system, darwin, (made by opendarwin) is what their system is based off of. at least if you're going to lie, tell one that's hard for people to debunk.
yeah. apple's SO closed. that's why they use ppc, an open architecture (unlike x86) openfirmware (an open bios implementation), standard component protocls and connections like pci, pci-x, agp, usb, firewire, ide, sata and more. that's why they've now switched completely to DVI monitors instead of ADP. that's why their filesystem, hfs+, has a fully working read/write implementation in linux.. because you know they CLOSED the format of course! (yeah right) more like they opened the documentation on it. that preferences system they use.. it's also know as xml, not some binary registry file. i'm sorry, but apple's only form of lock-in is that no other major manufacturers make ppc mobos and ppc chips besides apple and ibm on a wide enough scale to get high enough performance for os x.
lockin. yeah right.
If all those things in the title were used to develop a website, i think the things one could accomplish are amazing. as it stands you can already use xhtml and xhmlhttprequest to do highly dynamic websites. sometimes i wish so much emphasis wasn't put on backwards compatability in the web. i wish browsers could automatically detect what version of html the webpage requires, and generate warnings if your browser's too old to properly render, with a handy "update here" link.
PS: Canvas is a new tag from apple, used to draw things into an img like component. apple's working with opera and mozilla to integrate it into their browsers. hopefully this will go somewhere. i've always wanted something like that directly javascript accessable, but have never had the luck. it requires hack extensions like java and flash which don't communicate well with the underlying javascript without using some kludge like liveconnect.
if i have to pass self to every single member function, that's bolted on. if i have to prepend and append __ to special object functions everywhere, that's bolted on. i'm not sure what you mean by first class functions, but ruby is perfectly capable of something like:
heck, ruby can even do this:in this case i'm defining foo, passing foo as a parameter to bar, and calling foo then returning it's return value. i'm not sure how first-class you can get, but that's pretty first-class to me.
Ruby people go to great lengths to attack Python at every opportunity. For the most part this appears to be because modern Python renders Ruby pretty much irrelevant. Ruby is not really better than Python as a language, period. Ruby is better than Perl, and pretty much equivalent to Python on all linguistic accounts, but loses royally on maturity, community and industrial popularity.
ruby came about after python. it took the lessons learned from python and perl and improved them even more. to this day, python still lacks many of the oop and functional (lisp like) features of ruby. to say something so arragant shows me you haven't used ruby. guess what, i have used python. it's the language that is lacking, not ruby. modern "windows" renders linux irrelevant too i'm sure, yet we persevere because linux is a better operating system. modern "windows" has the industrial backing, not linux. all i'm saying is don't consider something better just because it has the ring side advantage. nothing starts out more popular than an already existing language.
Offset that with the fact that most Rubyistas that talk crap about Pythonistas don't really have experience with Python, but merely reiterate the misunderstandings of other Rubyistas.
where have i lied? seriously. i don't know, so do tell me. the fact of the matter is i tried python before ruby simply because python was more popular. why of course whould i try a less popular niche language first? if you'd broaden your horizons and actually dive into ruby maybe you'd understand why the few of us loyal to it hold it so dear. i heard a great quote once: "When a community has a small number of utterly devoted followers, it's usually because most people just don't get it." I believe ruby is like that. along with scheme, OCaml, Haskell, and other hacker languages that require discipline and free thinking to adopt and appreciate.
Or maybe they tried it and found it lacking?
i assume you meant ruby by this.. but anyways, most python people i know have never seen ruby. and half the ones who haven't seen it haven't even heard of it. if only one in four has actually used it, which would be an overestimate, then that pretty much sums up the fact that "everyone uses [python] because it's all they know exists". i'm not stating at this point that it's clearly better, but i am saying that it doesn't get 1/10th the coverage.
And what is this fascination with OOP? The only task I can think of (please name some more if can think of any) that lends itself naturally towards OOP is GUI/Widget handling. Everything else is much better expressed using so-called "sum types" (read about ML to find out what they are) and pattern matching.
OOP lends itself to many problems. knowing when and where to use it of course is a strong point. however python claims to be OOP, yet half the base library is comprised of functions like intval( "1" ), whereas in ruby it's a thought off the other way around, as a function on an object (oop) "1".to_i. the clear distinction, whether you like it or not, as i stated in my post, is that ruby is a more pure oop based language. that's all i'm advocating and you'll be very hard pressed to say i'm wrong with that statement.
if you go to any major software house today, you'll find OOP is the tool of choice for the vast majority of jobs. procedural, functional, logical, and other language paradigms exist but they aren't often useful in the solutions where python is used. the simple matter is, if you're using python you're probably using it for oop. if you're using a poorly implemented oop language just to get the dynamic features of a scripting language, why not go with a first-class oop language rather than getting yesterday's scraps.
for example.. python:
ruby:
python reminds me so much of windows. everyone uses it, because it's all they know exists. if you want to see a language with modern OOP, and clean syntax, give ruby a try some time.
there are many reasons to go with a freebsd based kernel over that of say win32's. it's tough to base something's worth on just the face value (API). a freebsd core has other key advantages. it lets you focus on application development, and occasional security maintenance rather than kernel implementation. you basically get, for free, the efforts of all the freebsd kernel developers. another perk is that also comes with the freebsd userland utilities (ls, mv, etc). great. now you don't have to implement those. now you're also freed from kernel documentation. you're freed from security patching (unless you find the freebsd community isn't patching quickly enough which right now is not the case). you get free POSIX compliance. you get an out-of-the-box ready environment for the majority of POSIX compliant unix software.
the advantage of leveraging a pre-existing base lets you focus more on what users really want now a days -- applications. and quite frankly all the things i just mentioned don't really matter to the vast majority of computer users. however from a business perspective, anything that allows me to spend less $$$ on kernel R&D and maintenance, and more $$$ on making windows a better overall environment is really just a win-win situation. nevermind all the other advantages that come with embracing a *nix environment like the hoards of unix people adopting, and supporting unix utilities on your system (see fink, darwinports, and now gentoo macos), things like nfs, etc. what apple did was more than just a smart move.. it was brilliant. it was almost like a phoenix rebirth of the tech industry, as now allllllll the unix people who've been clamoring for years saying "Hey look at me. we're better than proprietary" have finally made a voice. and who knows. if you're a decent programmer, maybe one day your name will appear in apple's file system in one of the unix header files, or man pages of a utility you wrote, getting distributed to millions of users.
it's not the performance or design of the kernel that's the reason to switch. it's simply the Right Thing to do. so why won't microsoft do it? last i remember, windows is last OS that isn't based off a unix derivative.
This is highly arguable. Don't you think Microsoft MADE the industry? Do you imagine your grandma typing "man tar"? For people who think they are so intelligent, come on.
apple created the industry, not microsoft. at least get your facts straight
or build it and install it yourself via darwinports or fink.
boy that sure was hard.
..."billions of cash" means that we could have instantly cured software of "buggy" and "security holes". IBM 360 here we come
... "compensation for their illegal activities" because rokzy is a better judge and jury than any legal system, of course.
... "fucking up the industry" must be because MS has gotten rid of those 18 Wordperfect disks I used install for incompatible printers
like it or not, money solves a lot of problems. it lets you pay competitive wages to hire the best of the best. it allows you fund the massive R&D for usability, Q&A, development and more. more money == more potential for a better product.
better judge? na. he's just agreeing with both the US justice dept and the european union, both of which have convicted microsoft of being a monopoly, and abusing those powers
so now we have the flipside of the situation today, where office formats are totally closed with no plans to open documentation on it. where mshtml totally abuses w3c specs. we have to deal with microsoft reinventing every single protocol and standard and then closing it up rather than using what already exists. they've done more work to throw a wrench into the industry than any other company in the history of business i think. no one in their right mind would claim windows is a more stable, promising os, than things like BeOS, OS X, or Linux. if all things were equal, (i.e. # of market share) all 3 of those are clear winners in stability, interoperability, and security.
so yes. microsoft HAS fucked up the industry. and it won't get any better any time soon.
you're thinking of the MacBU. and yes, the mac bu is profitable. i believe they produce office, msn messenger, (used to do ie), and now virtualpc. not sure what else they do really. office is the big money maker.
i have a free remote.
yeah.. it's not like the created the pda market or anything.
i disagree. there's a difference between a system's capability to do something, and a system's potential to do something better.
as an OPERATING system, i.e., not the 3rd party games/software, mac os is more advanced. this is impossible to contest. quartz extreme, UNIX underpinnings, aqua, usability studies, and prepackaged, more featureful, bundled software (iLife, Mail, Safari) don't lie.
windows just like many other oses can get you from point a to point b, and if your application happens to be a game you're pretty much going to need windows. but does that mean windows has some inherent superior game development apis? not really. coreaudio, openal, opengl and many other libraries on the mac are equivalent to directx. that's a product of market share and mind share, not of a system's potential.
here's another analogy that might clear things up: at the end of the day, if you could run all your windows software on mac os x, on your x86 box, would you honestly actually use windows over os x considering all the advantages the base system has? i'm willing to bet the vast majority would switch if the barrier to entry were 0. of course that's not the case, so for now we have the market friction inbetween the two OSes like a wedge carving out the "audio/video/style" people who cherish the platform (for different reasons) and the necessity folk who just want something that runs word and their games.
I think you're missing a third reason why some of us happen to use macs:
They're better. style? yeah it's nice, but i don't *need* a pretty computer. Necessity? I could code on linux/windows just as easily as the mac. No, i use it because it's a better operating system. It gets out of my way. I know some people don't like to admit it, but every market has a high and low end. BMWs and Toyotas aren't really in the same class of vehicle. Think of it like this: The person who has the means to purchase a BMW never really considers purchasing the Toyota. Likewise the opposite, the Toyota buyer never really considers the BMW as it's too far out of a comfortable price range.
basically what i'm trying to say is apple's niche is perfectly fine -- high end quality computers. Sure there is a market for the low end. a rather large (95%) market, but that's not apple's target. It would be silly for BMW to market towards the toyota buyers. i think that's why apple's switch compain wasn't very successful
apple's profits are still vastly in desktop/laptop sales. so your "focus on the music products" as a longevity argument wouldn't really hold much water. If apple lost 50% of it's desktop/laptop sales in the next few years, it would really hurt their profits. they can't self sustain themselves on a low return item like the ipod, at least not at the moment. (low return in the sense that you might profit $50 off an ipod and $500 off a powermac).
at any rate, as i said before. apple's doing just fine. sales are way up, and the highest in 8 years as the last quarterly report says. we might have the ipod to thank for increased media exposure/switchers, but by no means is it the company's saving grace at the moment as a cash cow.
sorry that should be "multicore means more than one physical core"
multi-core means more than one physical chip. hyperthreading means more than one thread sharing resources in a single core. for example, the ibm power5 chip that just came out is a multi-core hyperthreaded chip, with 4 logical processors and 2 physical cores, on 1 total chip.