Besides, you're statement also seems to imply a lack of understanding, because completely changing the kernel in an OS is about as big a change as you can get. Any other change in an OS is a small matter by comparision.
So first you're saying that OS X isn't such a big deal, all they changed was the kernel; and now you're saying that I'm an idiot because I don't understand that "changing the kernel.. is as big a change as you can get." No, changing the WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM, from the kernel all the way up to the GUI, is as big a change as you can get. And no, Apple's PC market is not declining, their SHARE OF THE PC MARKET is declining. Big difference:
DC analyst Roger Kay told The Mac Observer that although Apple's market share was down fractionally, this small decline has been a trend over the past three years.
"This gentle decline has pretty much been the pattern for Apple over the years," Kay said. "Apple's changing emphasis to computing entertainment is part of that reason, in my opinion."
Kay also believes that Apple's slow decline in market share has more to do with the rest of the PC industry growing faster. "It isn't that Apple isn't growing. It's just that they are not growing as fast."
Kay also believes that although Apple products are more expensive that traditional Windows-based PCs, trends in the WinTel world have played a role in Apple adjusting pricing to be more competitive. "eMachines and HP fought it out for the best prices at Christmas time. Apple benefited from that a little by making their pricing and added ease-of-use a factor."
Re:I thought I would do this...
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 1
Only after the government troops take very heavy losses through the application of a Thermopylae-style stand by the samurai. And remember that in the first encounter between the samurai and the gun-toting troops was a rout. Not very realistic if you read the histories.
Marketshare is a zero-sum game, but manufacturing isn't. Market share is a percentage of all computers. Mac could gain hundreds of new users every day without ever losing a user and still lose market share because its rate of growth isn't as steep as the rest of the market's is.
However, all it means is Mac is using a new kernel, which ultimately means nothing. Mac didn't need a new kernel, it was fine by itself, the changes (as far as a desktop users are concerned) are mostly pointless.
These two sentences prove that you know very little about operating systems. There's a lot more to OS X than "a new kernel."
Instead of calling me a troll and coming up with a weak reply like that. Come on, all you did was attack my reply because I laid down a definitive statement about Apple being reliant on past users, which you seemed to take as an implication that no one buys a Mac that hasn't already had one.
Youre English isn't very good, either: that first "sentence" is a fragment (I'm not cracking the whip on this to be a bastard, but to make the point that your arguments are poorly thought out and that the lack of thought is apparent in the presentation as well. Clear thought and clear writing go together.) To your last point, you wrote:
Apple barely holds a fraction of the market on desktop, and even then it's only due to past users who refuse to change.
See that word "only"? I suggest that you look it up in a dictionary. It means a lot more than "Apple being reliant on past users." It's not an implication, it's an inaccurate assertion of fact. It means they are exclusively selling to past users; and while Apple's market share isn't growing, I'm guessing that its user base (in absolute numbers) is.
As to your second sentence as a whole, I "attacked" your posting because it was a manifest absurdity. You're overstating a very simple point: Apple's market share as a percentage is declining while Linux's is increasing. This is a surprise, because a lot of us expected Linux's market share to be cannibalized by Mac once OS X came out. I don't know if Windows' market share is still increasing, but if it is, it is despite the fact that the most important applications (Word Processing, email, internet) are platform-agnostic and some of the cutting-edge new applications (video editing above all) are more Mac-oriented.
The real reason is software compability. Most people have access to Windows software. That's why VirtualPC is such a popular product among Mac users. (Which leads me to ask: if you have a computer with OS X, VirtualPC and Windows XP, and a Linux partition, whose marketshare does that count toward?) Half of that software is "pirated" anyway (including copies of Windows).
What this means for Mac is that it is becoming a niche player. A solid niche, of course, and the only niche player in its industry that has hooks in the consumer market, but it's clear that unless something very drastic happens, Apple's niche status will be permanent. Even the iPod strategy doesn't appear to be strengthening Apple's market share. But as long as its user base continues to grow (even if its total market share doesn't), Apple can survive in that niche for a long, long time - especially with its peculiar place as a market innovator.
Part of me is worried that the main reason Linux is gaining market share on the desktop is because it's free as in beer. If that's true, then those who make a living writing software are likely to be in for some real problems in the future. But as long as something not Windows increases its marketshare at the expense of Windows, it helps all non-Windows operating systems.
Re:I thought I would do this...
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't know what it is with the networks. They have no understanding of what is good.
Firefly was too complicated. Network execs are PHBs, they don't like complicated. They want shows that their children (who usually are homozygous recessive for the PHB gene) can understand, shows about clothes, and having sex with the wrong people, and cars, and football. A show about a bunch of space-smuggling horse-riding misfits who were on the losing side of a failed revolution and eke out their living by breaking the laws of the oppressive winning side while trying not to bend morality too far, and trying (and often failing) to remain loyal to their ideals and one another - that's all about tone and nuance. The only tone network execs understand is shrill, and "nuance?" What's that, a new brand of shampoo and conditioner? Compare Firefly's "Objects in Space" to an episode of Friends some time. Everyone on earth would say "Objects in Space" was a far superior work - except the ad executives who run the media. It's synergy, bay-bee.
And I can't understand what it is with viewers - are we so deprived of sci-fi that we will accept anything at all?
I see you saw this story. Maybe I'm not being fair; Battlestar Galactica : The Sex Files was a half-decent remake, slightly better in some ways than the original (less B-movieish), but stiff and cold and rather superficial, really (adding in the whole Last Samurai old-tech beats new-tech angle,* and that hoary old pod-people/Manchurian candidate storyline, I mean, really). How SciFi could greenlight an expensive retread like Battlestar Galactica and kill Farscape is beyond me.
(*By the way, read up on Saigo Takamori some time, the guy Last Samurai was vaguely based on; his troops used guns. There was a kamikaze group in the earlier Boshin war who fought with katana against rifles and cannons, but they were mopped up pretty damned guickly.)
Nice troll, there, but I know I'm not the only Mac user on Slashdot who only got a Mac after OS X came out. So it's not just "due to past users who refuse to change."
There are plenty of databases. This isn't a sudden discovery of something that was always there - when it comes to deep space (i.e., not solar system) objects, you wouldn't find anything that had always been there and that wasn't already known using just a 3 in. scope; this is an honest-to-goodness new star that just started lighting up the surrounding nebula.
Given the Palm platform's pretty shaky hold on market share right now, I don't think they can afford to drop even a single-digit percentage of their market. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Of course, Wine doesn't run on PPC hardware without an emulator as well: in this case QEMU. It looks like QEMU may be starting to develop PPC emulation on x86.
Re:Have a nice cup of flaming hot death!
on
WineConf 2004 Wrapup
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· Score: 4, Informative
You notice there aren't any projects to run Mac OS apps under Linux.
Comcast has gobbled up most of the cable providers on the East Coast, at least; they are also cable broadband internet providers and a telephone company (though they're not a major player, as Bell Atlantic (NYNEX) is the big fish in that sector in this part of the US).
PHP is a server side technology; it doesn't matter WHICH browser you code to, because the PHP doesn't care. CSS, ok, CSS is different: but here's the problem with coding to IE6's CSS model: you don't know how it's going to change in the future. You have no idea how Microsoft is going to change its support of the CSS features whose behavior is peculiar in IE6. With W3C standards, at least you have a target that stays (relatively) still - the other browsers at least are all going to keep backward compatibility to the W3C recs.
Unless you're doing a lot of weird CSS hacking, making a standards-based page look good in IE6 is a lot easier than making an IE6 page work in Safari or Mozilla.
Now, if you said JAVASCRIPT, well, that would make more sense; the object models are significantly different between IE6 and Mozilla and Safari and Opera. There the smart thing is to write separate pages for both browsers and use those PHP programmer skills to serve up the right page for each.
Installing PERL on a Windows machine is a snap. Of course, there's the whole question of whether PERL would be a good learner's language. Maybe Python (ActivePython is just as easy to install as ActivePerl)?
There were only two triumvirates: the unofficial first triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey (59-53 bce), and the official second triumvirate of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus (43-33 bce). We're talking a grand total of 16 years out of the Roman Republic's nearly 500 year history (509 bce - 33 bce). The Roman Republic was at a nearly constant state of civil war from the death of Tiberius Gracchus in 132 bce to the establishment of the Principate in 27 bce. So no, I don't think the triumvirate was the cause of the fall of the Republic.
I think the same dynamic problems you cite for 3-person groups would appear in 2-person groups. So yes, I think a 3 person is more stable than 2 person group. Is a group of 4 people more stable? Probably. 5? Probably more so than 4. But I'd say that 3 is a minimum.
The dynamics of a two-person crew are harder to manage than those of the three-person crew. If the two have a bad argument, there's no third party to mediate, and you end up with each one calling Earth looking for someone to back him up. In the end, both end up feeling isolated. With a three-person crew, there's someone to mediate and serve as a safety valve - even if two of the crew members aren't speaking to each other, there's a third person there they can talk to.
Rarely crashes? I'm guessing you didn't make the mistake of flashing the ROM on a Tungsten C. Crashes any time I enter an arbitrary url into the go menu.
WTF? Because my handle is from the name of a Sanskrit playwright and (more directly) of a character in an Arthur C. Clarke book, and because I watched the news enough to know how to translate the word "al Qaida" (and was apparently wrong: it is not "the Station," but "the base, the foundation," if this fellow is correct ), I must hate America?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't realize that Missouri and Indiana were in New England.
Communism is an economic structure. Democracy is a political one. There are also totalitarian capitalist countries.
Recognizing what is an obstacle might be AI, if it's done merely with a flat image.
Besides, you're statement also seems to imply a lack of understanding, because completely changing the kernel in an OS is about as big a change as you can get. Any other change in an OS is a small matter by comparision.
So first you're saying that OS X isn't such a big deal, all they changed was the kernel; and now you're saying that I'm an idiot because I don't understand that "changing the kernel .. is as big a change as you can get." No, changing the WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM, from the kernel all the way up to the GUI, is as big a change as you can get. And no, Apple's PC market is not declining, their SHARE OF THE PC MARKET is declining. Big difference:
DC analyst Roger Kay told The Mac Observer that although Apple's market share was down fractionally, this small decline has been a trend over the past three years.
"This gentle decline has pretty much been the pattern for Apple over the years," Kay said. "Apple's changing emphasis to computing entertainment is part of that reason, in my opinion."
Kay also believes that Apple's slow decline in market share has more to do with the rest of the PC industry growing faster. "It isn't that Apple isn't growing. It's just that they are not growing as fast."
Kay also believes that although Apple products are more expensive that traditional Windows-based PCs, trends in the WinTel world have played a role in Apple adjusting pricing to be more competitive. "eMachines and HP fought it out for the best prices at Christmas time. Apple benefited from that a little by making their pricing and added ease-of-use a factor."
Only after the government troops take very heavy losses through the application of a Thermopylae-style stand by the samurai. And remember that in the first encounter between the samurai and the gun-toting troops was a rout. Not very realistic if you read the histories.
Marketshare is a zero-sum game, but manufacturing isn't. Market share is a percentage of all computers. Mac could gain hundreds of new users every day without ever losing a user and still lose market share because its rate of growth isn't as steep as the rest of the market's is.
However, all it means is Mac is using a new kernel, which ultimately means nothing. Mac didn't need a new kernel, it was fine by itself, the changes (as far as a desktop users are concerned) are mostly pointless.
These two sentences prove that you know very little about operating systems. There's a lot more to OS X than "a new kernel."
Instead of calling me a troll and coming up with a weak reply like that. Come on, all you did was attack my reply because I laid down a definitive statement about Apple being reliant on past users, which you seemed to take as an implication that no one buys a Mac that hasn't already had one.
Youre English isn't very good, either: that first "sentence" is a fragment (I'm not cracking the whip on this to be a bastard, but to make the point that your arguments are poorly thought out and that the lack of thought is apparent in the presentation as well. Clear thought and clear writing go together.) To your last point, you wrote:
Apple barely holds a fraction of the market on desktop, and even then it's only due to past users who refuse to change.
See that word "only"? I suggest that you look it up in a dictionary. It means a lot more than "Apple being reliant on past users." It's not an implication, it's an inaccurate assertion of fact. It means they are exclusively selling to past users; and while Apple's market share isn't growing, I'm guessing that its user base (in absolute numbers) is.
As to your second sentence as a whole, I "attacked" your posting because it was a manifest absurdity. You're overstating a very simple point: Apple's market share as a percentage is declining while Linux's is increasing. This is a surprise, because a lot of us expected Linux's market share to be cannibalized by Mac once OS X came out. I don't know if Windows' market share is still increasing, but if it is, it is despite the fact that the most important applications (Word Processing, email, internet) are platform-agnostic and some of the cutting-edge new applications (video editing above all) are more Mac-oriented.
The real reason is software compability. Most people have access to Windows software. That's why VirtualPC is such a popular product among Mac users. (Which leads me to ask: if you have a computer with OS X, VirtualPC and Windows XP, and a Linux partition, whose marketshare does that count toward?) Half of that software is "pirated" anyway (including copies of Windows).
What this means for Mac is that it is becoming a niche player. A solid niche, of course, and the only niche player in its industry that has hooks in the consumer market, but it's clear that unless something very drastic happens, Apple's niche status will be permanent. Even the iPod strategy doesn't appear to be strengthening Apple's market share. But as long as its user base continues to grow (even if its total market share doesn't), Apple can survive in that niche for a long, long time - especially with its peculiar place as a market innovator.
Part of me is worried that the main reason Linux is gaining market share on the desktop is because it's free as in beer. If that's true, then those who make a living writing software are likely to be in for some real problems in the future. But as long as something not Windows increases its marketshare at the expense of Windows, it helps all non-Windows operating systems.
I don't know what it is with the networks. They have no understanding of what is good.
Firefly was too complicated. Network execs are PHBs, they don't like complicated. They want shows that their children (who usually are homozygous recessive for the PHB gene) can understand, shows about clothes, and having sex with the wrong people, and cars, and football. A show about a bunch of space-smuggling horse-riding misfits who were on the losing side of a failed revolution and eke out their living by breaking the laws of the oppressive winning side while trying not to bend morality too far, and trying (and often failing) to remain loyal to their ideals and one another - that's all about tone and nuance. The only tone network execs understand is shrill, and "nuance?" What's that, a new brand of shampoo and conditioner? Compare Firefly's "Objects in Space" to an episode of Friends some time. Everyone on earth would say "Objects in Space" was a far superior work - except the ad executives who run the media. It's synergy, bay-bee.
And I can't understand what it is with viewers - are we so deprived of sci-fi that we will accept anything at all?
I see you saw this story. Maybe I'm not being fair; Battlestar Galactica : The Sex Files was a half-decent remake, slightly better in some ways than the original (less B-movieish), but stiff and cold and rather superficial, really (adding in the whole Last Samurai old-tech beats new-tech angle,* and that hoary old pod-people/Manchurian candidate storyline, I mean, really). How SciFi could greenlight an expensive retread like Battlestar Galactica and kill Farscape is beyond me.
(*By the way, read up on Saigo Takamori some time, the guy Last Samurai was vaguely based on; his troops used guns. There was a kamikaze group in the earlier Boshin war who fought with katana against rifles and cannons, but they were mopped up pretty damned guickly.)
Nice troll, there, but I know I'm not the only Mac user on Slashdot who only got a Mac after OS X came out. So it's not just "due to past users who refuse to change."
Very, very good point :-)
There are plenty of databases. This isn't a sudden discovery of something that was always there - when it comes to deep space (i.e., not solar system) objects, you wouldn't find anything that had always been there and that wasn't already known using just a 3 in. scope; this is an honest-to-goodness new star that just started lighting up the surrounding nebula.
Given the Palm platform's pretty shaky hold on market share right now, I don't think they can afford to drop even a single-digit percentage of their market. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Of course, Wine doesn't run on PPC hardware without an emulator as well: in this case QEMU. It looks like QEMU may be starting to develop PPC emulation on x86.
You notice there aren't any projects to run Mac OS apps under Linux.
Au contraire.
You mean Verizon (which was Bell Atlantic (which was NYNEX)).
I did, thanks.
Comcast has gobbled up most of the cable providers on the East Coast, at least; they are also cable broadband internet providers and a telephone company (though they're not a major player, as Bell Atlantic (NYNEX) is the big fish in that sector in this part of the US).
PHP is a server side technology; it doesn't matter WHICH browser you code to, because the PHP doesn't care. CSS, ok, CSS is different: but here's the problem with coding to IE6's CSS model: you don't know how it's going to change in the future. You have no idea how Microsoft is going to change its support of the CSS features whose behavior is peculiar in IE6. With W3C standards, at least you have a target that stays (relatively) still - the other browsers at least are all going to keep backward compatibility to the W3C recs.
Unless you're doing a lot of weird CSS hacking, making a standards-based page look good in IE6 is a lot easier than making an IE6 page work in Safari or Mozilla.
Now, if you said JAVASCRIPT, well, that would make more sense; the object models are significantly different between IE6 and Mozilla and Safari and Opera. There the smart thing is to write separate pages for both browsers and use those PHP programmer skills to serve up the right page for each.
Installing PERL on a Windows machine is a snap. Of course, there's the whole question of whether PERL would be a good learner's language. Maybe Python (ActivePython is just as easy to install as ActivePerl)?
The listserve list I'm an admin for used to have its archives on gopher; they finally bumped them off in about June or July.
There were only two triumvirates: the unofficial first triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey (59-53 bce), and the official second triumvirate of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus (43-33 bce). We're talking a grand total of 16 years out of the Roman Republic's nearly 500 year history (509 bce - 33 bce). The Roman Republic was at a nearly constant state of civil war from the death of Tiberius Gracchus in 132 bce to the establishment of the Principate in 27 bce. So no, I don't think the triumvirate was the cause of the fall of the Republic.
I think the same dynamic problems you cite for 3-person groups would appear in 2-person groups. So yes, I think a 3 person is more stable than 2 person group. Is a group of 4 people more stable? Probably. 5? Probably more so than 4. But I'd say that 3 is a minimum.
The dynamics of a two-person crew are harder to manage than those of the three-person crew. If the two have a bad argument, there's no third party to mediate, and you end up with each one calling Earth looking for someone to back him up. In the end, both end up feeling isolated. With a three-person crew, there's someone to mediate and serve as a safety valve - even if two of the crew members aren't speaking to each other, there's a third person there they can talk to.
PalmOS 6 (or whatever they call it) does incorporate a lot of stuff from BeOS, according to published reports.
Rarely crashes? I'm guessing you didn't make the mistake of flashing the ROM on a Tungsten C. Crashes any time I enter an arbitrary url into the go menu.
It might not be that small. Analog photography is like oil paints - part of the art is with the limits of the tech (especially B&W).
I hope so ...
WTF? Because my handle is from the name of a Sanskrit playwright and (more directly) of a character in an Arthur C. Clarke book, and because I watched the news enough to know how to translate the word "al Qaida" (and was apparently wrong: it is not "the Station," but "the base, the foundation," if this fellow is correct ), I must hate America?