Let's suppose you use Myth TV. My guess is that you'll probably waste... oh... 10h getting it working. In a couple of years you'll need to rebuild it from scratch. So let's call that 10h @ $50/h = $500 + $500 worth of hardware. Both of these figures are conservative.
So that's $1000 for 2y of PVR.
Or you could buy a TiVo. That's $50-300 + $200 of subscriptions for 2y of PVR (by which time TiVo is bankrupt...). And sales tax. Yada yada yada.
Then there's your cable TV bill (or are you doing all this for broadcast?). Let's call that $50/month. So now we're at:
$50 x 24 = $1200. $250 - $1000 for PVR.
Add a bunch more for premium stations. Add a bunch more for more than one PVR.
This will buy you, say 29-44 SEASONS of TV on DVD @$50/season or 725-1100 episodes of iTMS video. I just don't watch that much TV... So it's already cheaper to buy TV content on DVD (but you have to wait for it to come out and miss stuff that never comes out) or iTMS (but it's not HD and it's arguably not quite broadcast quality -- but you do get to keep it).
Hill Street Blues actually had all the kinds of things you're talking about, just better done and lower key. It wasn't designed to be exactly five seasons long, rushed to completion in four, and then stretched back out to five -- so it didn't have a specific five-season arc that was resolved after four seasons, and its main arc wasn't deeply reliant on a character that left the show after the first season resulting in major plot surgery.
Hill Street Blues's major themes were about power, corruption, and the failure of good intentions. Its arc plots tended to be one to two seasons long, but had enough loose ends that larger arcs could successfully be formed out of them later. E.g. Jesus Martinez's career from gang leader to urban activist to corrupt politician is as strong an arc as any crap about blowing up planets or wars between telepaths or galactic saviors sent backwards in time.
A common problem with science fiction and fantasy, in general, is that it substitutes Scale for Substance. Anyone can write a story with huge armies, huge battles, and planets exploding. But actually putting some insight about human (or non-human) nature into the story is the hard part. (And writing halfway decent dialog is no mean feat -- B5 could have used some.)
When it ended, it had proven that not only could you tell a complex, layered story over multiple years (and through the demise of syndication, yearly struggles with funding, and often frustrating and unexpected troubles with schedules and actors), but that a lean, creator-driven show could succeed artistically." Read on for chromatic's review.
It seems to me that Babylon 5 was an attempt to produce something a little like Hill Street Blues in space. It wasn't as well written, acted, or... good as HSB. By the time Babylon 5 appeared, there were numerous TV shows imitating HSB's layered stories, mixture of short and arc plots, ensemble casts, etc. -- including thirtysomething, St. Elsewhere, and so forth. Almost all of these shows were better than Babylon 5, they just weren't science fiction.
All of our studies are written as if they will be released publicly BUT it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released. The vendor knows that they're taking a risk. They pay for the research either way but only have control over whether it is published, not over content. So if their intent is to use it as an outward facing piece, they may end up with something they don't like. Either way, I think it's of high value to them. If there are aspects of the results that favor the sponsor's product, in my experience, it goes to the marketing department and gets released publicly; if it favors the competitors product it goes off to the engineering folks as a tool to understand their product, their competitor's product, and the problem more clearly. Either way, we maintain complete editorial control over the study and there is no financial incentive for us if it becomes a public study or is used as an internal market analysis piece. The methodology has to be as objective as possible to be of any real value in either case.
So they are paid to provide honest assessments of MS software vs. competitor software and then if the results are good it goes to marketing, and if they're bad they go to engineering. MS is huge and has zillions of products, and it probably pays for dozens or hundreds of these tests every year. The interesting question (which would never be answered) is "how many such studies have you done for Microsoft which never get shown to the public?" You can guess your own answer.
This kind of thing is a huge issue in academia where non-results (e.g. failures to obtain a predicted result or failures to replicate a published result) are seldom published. So if one researcher uses dodgy data to buttress a result and gets a publication out of it, it's highly unlikely that failures to replicate the result will ever see the light of day. In this case, Microsoft hires someone to perform a test of product A vs. B, it favors A, so they publish. The numbers are so small there's no statistical significance -- so for all we know MS could have given the same brief to the same outfit five times, gotten one positive result, and sent it off to marketing.
I think there are more iPOD nanos having problems than there are 360s at the moment, but we're not jumping all over our sacred cow Apple, now are we?
Well, given Apple shipped a million of them in the first two weeks, it's not impossible that there are more problem nanos than 360s. But then I doubt you'd need to wait ten weeks for a replacement.
Your imagination seems sorely limited. Nerve gas, mines disguised as children's toys, nuclear weapons... But no, it's a computer that restricts the user from pirating software that is the most evil technology you can imagine.
Yes they're saying you shouldn't buy it because the content available isn't compelling. How is this biased? If I said to you in 1999 that buying an HDTV was dumb because there was nothing to watch on HDTV (which was true and remains substantially true) would that have been bias? Sounds to me like recommendation backed up by explicitly stated evidence and reasoning. This is known colloquially as "reasoned argument".
They don't condemn the hardware. They do point out the online features. They do say it's promising. They just don't think most people should buy it now.
This type of interface is known as a wygiwys (What you get is what you see) the reverse of what you see is what you get.
Sorry this is fanboi crap. The "bold" button has been a bold "b" since v1. MacPaint's fill patterns were represented by themselves in MacPaint 1.0. This is what you get is what you see. In fact, by moving away from the verb / noun standard (i.e. by clicking this picture you will be reformatting a random subset of your document, try to guess how much) the new UI is neither WYSIWYG nor WYGIWYS, it's just stupid. And guess what, it wastes more vertical screen real estate. How much text can you edit on an 800x600 display now? 2 lines?!
Actually it bears a striking similarity to the approach used in Apple's Keynote & Pages applications, but instead of providing a small set of attractive and manageable options Microsoft has opted to overwhelm the user with a plethora of horrible options.
Lexus does not "prevent" Hyundai drivers from putting Lexus engines in their cars.
Indeed, in general, the car analogy is really very poor. High end cars are generally far less different from low end cars than a Mac is from a PC. Furthermore the differences between a Mac and a PC are almost entirely in software (which is cheap to manufacture) and not hardware (which is expensive to manufacture).
A better analogy would be with information products. E.g. Microsoft (and many software vendors) either obfuscate or refuse to document proprietary file formats in large part to prevent easy transition to rival products (and as an added bonus, it's often easier for engineers to ignore backwards compatibility). Oracle probably (I don't know) doesn't offer an "export to postgresql" button on its server products, I wonder why?
I don't think this has anything to do with blocking open source. I think it's more like specific chunks of an OS (specifically OS X) won't run on a machine without a magic chip on it.
So patents are apparently written in a very strange way for reasons that no doubt make sense to someone. Aside from converting a tree structure into a series of numbered paragraphs (this patent describes an X being comprised of Y and Z. The Y comprises a Q, R, and S. etc.) it is also written in a bewilderingly specific and yet vague way so as to at all times make it clear that whenever they talk about something in particular, they in fact mean to include stuff that they haven't mentioned and may not even have thought of.
So, having tried to wade through all of this, here's my potted summary.
A "tamper-resistant" code block can be created *automatically* (i.e. not by hand) by translating an ordinary code block into a tamper-proof code block. The tamper proof code-block may be composed of checksummed code with extra inserted code that performs arbitrary operations (using, for example, information stored on a ROM, or taken from the computer's clock, or from the user's settings) and then is expected to produce a specific result.
E.g. multiply the current time by the user's name converted into a number and subtract the checksum of the code block and produce the number it did when the code was initially "tamper-proofed".
To verify the code has not been tampered with it can be executed in an environment (a virtual machine, say) which behaves like the real environment but where system calls have no effect so that only the ancillory results are produced. If these results aren't right, the code block is rejected.
I'm probably missing a lot, but the proposed system is AT LEAST this sophisticated, which is a heck of lot more convoluted than, say, checksumming code blocks. I think figuring this out is well beyond the script kiddies that produce the majority of malware.
If you can't see the connection between mail clients (keeping in touch with people) and calendars (keeping track of appointments) you aren't looking very hard.
That said, I agree with the rest of your argument.
Could OO.o use a FireFox/Thunderbird-style makeover -- i.e. break it up into a bunch of single purpose apps that can be downloaded individually? I think that in the end this would be a marketing ruse rather than a technically desireable simplification...
A word-processor ultimately needs 95% of the functionality of *everything else* in an Office app (r.g. drawing functionality from presentation / drawing; graph presentation from the spreadsheet, etc.) which will tend to make each of the individual apps 95% as large as the suite.
It's arguable whether an email client needs the functionality of a word-processor (I think that integration of Word into Outlook is brain-damaged), but the number of things that could readily be split off OO.o is pretty small, and their functionality is relatively minor.
Except that this is a marginal cost that ignores that cost of getting where we are in the first place (i.e. developing the shuttle, building and maintaining an organization that operates it) and the opportunity cost of not having spent the money on something else (e.g. a bunch of conventional rockets). The NASA budget for shuttle operations is $5B/year. It launches how many shuttles in a good year? It launched one this year, so that's $60 million/ton.
Vista is the first time MS is paying attention to graphics (just look at all the "pretty" stuff from transparent windows to screen shots on the taskbar).
You don't get Windows XP's interface by ignoring graphics -- you get it by paying careful attention to graphics while having no taste.
Most importantly the development tools MS is providing are awesome! Visual Studio 2005 is really easy to use, and very powerful. Anyone who has seen sparkle knows that it's pretty sweet. Before you start screaming flash, you are right, they were first to market, but sparkle is better for developers, much better.
Sparkle looks cool, its output won't run on anything other than late model Windows devices, which kind of defeats the point. How will Sparkle compare with... oh... Flash 9? It's not as though Adobe/Macromedia doesn't already have something that does everything Sparkle does, only cross-platform: it's called Director.
But, here is why apple should be scared. MS is taking away every reason you should use OSX, with the exception "I hate MS", which Linux can cover.
Given that the Linux desktop so far seems pretty much a clone of Windows 95, I disagree.
Like it or not, apple has only been able to stay a float because the graphic community has been unflinching behind them, but that is starting to change. XP couldn't support them, Vista can.
This is what folks said about Windows 95 vs. Windows 3.1. Where's Microsoft's answer to Core Image?
While the OSX "users" are still backing OSX (for now; the tablet pc is really appealing to creative's because of the pressure sensitivity),
a) Graphics professionals have been using pressure sensitive tablets with Macs since before Windows computers had a standard mechanism for attaching them (the first tablets were ADB devices).
b) Tablet PCs *are* attractive to graphics professionals, but at least for desktop use, Wacom's combined display tablets are the thing every graphics pro I know drools over, and they work just fine on Macs, thanks.
traditional Apple developers are starting to stray. Quark is starting to hedge bets on Vista and MS's XML model, take a look at some news articles on their site www.quark.com.
Quark is starting to become irrelevant.
Third party software developers have always been Microsoft's strength.
Yes, they allow them to establish markets and then use monopoly power to drive them out of business. E.g. Borland, Ashton Tate, Wordperfect.
Vista has made it really easy for developers, while OSX still isn't.
Really easy for developers... to do what? Support Vista? Maybe. Of course to support Windows you'll have to deal with XP, 2000, 98, and Vista for years to come. And it's about as hard to support those platforms as to support Windows XP, Mac OS, and Linux. Which is why a typical game that ships today won't install on many Windows computers.
MS needs one desktop OS competitor to be able to hold off monopoly accusations and say "people have other options", and that is why they haven't gone after Apple's market.
Yeah that's it, they haven't *tried*.
Because of Linux Microsoft doesn't need Apple's OS around anymore (remember the 150million they gave apple to stay in business in the late 90's). Because Linux exists MS will now start focusing on apple's market. MS can't kill Linux because it is a hobby OS. For the most part people maintain it for free, on their own time, they are passionate about it, and it's their baby. They won't let it die. OSX on the other hand doesn't have that kind of story. Apple knows this and that is why they are transitioning to Intel, just in case.
How does transitioning to Intel have any relevance to this?
I predict OSX won't survive this round with MS and Apple becomes a premium hardware supplier. Say bubye to OSX, I don't see it making it past this decade.
'First of all, "it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer"? Is Dvorak really insinuating that only the elite use Windows these days?'
No, he's insinuating Windows is really hard to use. Possibly deliberately.
But they were living in a society which did not guarantee free speech.
If it's legal, to, say throw someone in prison just for expressing an opinion then it's reasonable to expect people to publish their opinions anonymously.
I could certainly sympathise with the argument that -- say -- secret ink dot patterns in color photocopiers will allow the Chinese secret police to locate and punish dissidents.
To make a different analogy:
Arguing that these dot patterns abridge freedom of speech is akin to arguing that putting serial numbers on handguns abridges the right to bear arms because if you bought a gun and then randomly shot people (I would assume illegally) and the gun used for the shootings was traced to you via the serial number it would be terribly, terribly unfair.
"If I'm free to speak, but free to get hounded by the FBI/fired/audited by the IRS if I say something that the authorities don't like, that's a pretty thin kind of freedom."
If the FBI harasses you for -- say -- exercising free speech, then that's illegal. The IRS's ability to hound people is pretty scandalous, but it's hardly a free speech issue.
If you say something offensive and your neighbor shoots you for it, that's a crime. That isn't a problem with your right to free speech, it's a problem with your self-restraint and your neighbor's propensity to shoot people.
There seem to be a lot of people who confuse *freedom* with *freedom to do antisocial stuff and remain anonymous*. These are not the same things.
Free speech is not free *anonymous* speech.
We all want cheap color printers. Fine. We don't want the world flooded with forged documents -- so we take some barely perceptable measures to curb that. Deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of NeverWinter Nights servers attract larger consistent followings with no advertising.
Let's suppose you use Myth TV. My guess is that you'll probably waste ... oh ... 10h getting it working. In a couple of years you'll need to rebuild it from scratch. So let's call that 10h @ $50/h = $500 + $500 worth of hardware. Both of these figures are conservative.
So that's $1000 for 2y of PVR.
Or you could buy a TiVo. That's $50-300 + $200 of subscriptions for 2y of PVR (by which time TiVo is bankrupt...). And sales tax. Yada yada yada.
Then there's your cable TV bill (or are you doing all this for broadcast?). Let's call that $50/month. So now we're at:
$50 x 24 = $1200.
$250 - $1000 for PVR.
Add a bunch more for premium stations. Add a bunch more for more than one PVR.
This will buy you, say 29-44 SEASONS of TV on DVD @$50/season or 725-1100 episodes of iTMS video. I just don't watch that much TV... So it's already cheaper to buy TV content on DVD (but you have to wait for it to come out and miss stuff that never comes out) or iTMS (but it's not HD and it's arguably not quite broadcast quality -- but you do get to keep it).
No ... phraud!
Hill Street Blues actually had all the kinds of things you're talking about, just better done and lower key. It wasn't designed to be exactly five seasons long, rushed to completion in four, and then stretched back out to five -- so it didn't have a specific five-season arc that was resolved after four seasons, and its main arc wasn't deeply reliant on a character that left the show after the first season resulting in major plot surgery.
Hill Street Blues's major themes were about power, corruption, and the failure of good intentions. Its arc plots tended to be one to two seasons long, but had enough loose ends that larger arcs could successfully be formed out of them later. E.g. Jesus Martinez's career from gang leader to urban activist to corrupt politician is as strong an arc as any crap about blowing up planets or wars between telepaths or galactic saviors sent backwards in time.
A common problem with science fiction and fantasy, in general, is that it substitutes Scale for Substance. Anyone can write a story with huge armies, huge battles, and planets exploding. But actually putting some insight about human (or non-human) nature into the story is the hard part. (And writing halfway decent dialog is no mean feat -- B5 could have used some.)
When it ended, it had proven that not only could you tell a complex, layered story over multiple years (and through the demise of syndication, yearly struggles with funding, and often frustrating and unexpected troubles with schedules and actors), but that a lean, creator-driven show could succeed artistically." Read on for chromatic's review.
... good as HSB. By the time Babylon 5 appeared, there were numerous TV shows imitating HSB's layered stories, mixture of short and arc plots, ensemble casts, etc. -- including thirtysomething, St. Elsewhere, and so forth. Almost all of these shows were better than Babylon 5, they just weren't science fiction.
It seems to me that Babylon 5 was an attempt to produce something a little like Hill Street Blues in space. It wasn't as well written, acted, or
All of our studies are written as if they will be released publicly BUT it is up to the sponsor if the study is publicly released. The vendor knows that they're taking a risk. They pay for the research either way but only have control over whether it is published, not over content. So if their intent is to use it as an outward facing piece, they may end up with something they don't like. Either way, I think it's of high value to them. If there are aspects of the results that favor the sponsor's product, in my experience, it goes to the marketing department and gets released publicly; if it favors the competitors product it goes off to the engineering folks as a tool to understand their product, their competitor's product, and the problem more clearly. Either way, we maintain complete editorial control over the study and there is no financial incentive for us if it becomes a public study or is used as an internal market analysis piece. The methodology has to be as objective as possible to be of any real value in either case.
So they are paid to provide honest assessments of MS software vs. competitor software and then if the results are good it goes to marketing, and if they're bad they go to engineering. MS is huge and has zillions of products, and it probably pays for dozens or hundreds of these tests every year. The interesting question (which would never be answered) is "how many such studies have you done for Microsoft which never get shown to the public?" You can guess your own answer.
This kind of thing is a huge issue in academia where non-results (e.g. failures to obtain a predicted result or failures to replicate a published result) are seldom published. So if one researcher uses dodgy data to buttress a result and gets a publication out of it, it's highly unlikely that failures to replicate the result will ever see the light of day. In this case, Microsoft hires someone to perform a test of product A vs. B, it favors A, so they publish. The numbers are so small there's no statistical significance -- so for all we know MS could have given the same brief to the same outfit five times, gotten one positive result, and sent it off to marketing.
I think there are more iPOD nanos having problems than there are 360s at the moment, but we're not jumping all over our sacred cow Apple, now are we?
Well, given Apple shipped a million of them in the first two weeks, it's not impossible that there are more problem nanos than 360s. But then I doubt you'd need to wait ten weeks for a replacement.
if you really think about it, functions like sin(x) and ln(x) are really not closed form either
..., so I can't integrate S 1 dx ?
Think about it harder.
You can express anything as an infinite series. E.g. 1 = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +
Your imagination seems sorely limited. Nerve gas, mines disguised as children's toys, nuclear weapons... But no, it's a computer that restricts the user from pirating software that is the most evil technology you can imagine.
Imagine that.
Yes they're saying you shouldn't buy it because the content available isn't compelling. How is this biased? If I said to you in 1999 that buying an HDTV was dumb because there was nothing to watch on HDTV (which was true and remains substantially true) would that have been bias? Sounds to me like recommendation backed up by explicitly stated evidence and reasoning. This is known colloquially as "reasoned argument".
They don't condemn the hardware. They do point out the online features. They do say it's promising. They just don't think most people should buy it now.
This type of interface is known as a wygiwys (What you get is what you see) the reverse of what you see is what you get.
Sorry this is fanboi crap. The "bold" button has been a bold "b" since v1. MacPaint's fill patterns were represented by themselves in MacPaint 1.0. This is what you get is what you see. In fact, by moving away from the verb / noun standard (i.e. by clicking this picture you will be reformatting a random subset of your document, try to guess how much) the new UI is neither WYSIWYG nor WYGIWYS, it's just stupid. And guess what, it wastes more vertical screen real estate. How much text can you edit on an 800x600 display now? 2 lines?!
Actually it bears a striking similarity to the approach used in Apple's Keynote & Pages applications, but instead of providing a small set of attractive and manageable options Microsoft has opted to overwhelm the user with a plethora of horrible options.
Lexus does not "prevent" Hyundai drivers from putting Lexus engines in their cars.
Indeed, in general, the car analogy is really very poor. High end cars are generally far less different from low end cars than a Mac is from a PC. Furthermore the differences between a Mac and a PC are almost entirely in software (which is cheap to manufacture) and not hardware (which is expensive to manufacture).
A better analogy would be with information products. E.g. Microsoft (and many software vendors) either obfuscate or refuse to document proprietary file formats in large part to prevent easy transition to rival products (and as an added bonus, it's often easier for engineers to ignore backwards compatibility). Oracle probably (I don't know) doesn't offer an "export to postgresql" button on its server products, I wonder why?
I don't think this has anything to do with blocking open source. I think it's more like specific chunks of an OS (specifically OS X) won't run on a machine without a magic chip on it.
Thank you for your positive feedback. I'm thrilled that you and your friends love the NGE.
Regards,
John Smedley.
So patents are apparently written in a very strange way for reasons that no doubt make sense to someone. Aside from converting a tree structure into a series of numbered paragraphs (this patent describes an X being comprised of Y and Z. The Y comprises a Q, R, and S. etc.) it is also written in a bewilderingly specific and yet vague way so as to at all times make it clear that whenever they talk about something in particular, they in fact mean to include stuff that they haven't mentioned and may not even have thought of.
So, having tried to wade through all of this, here's my potted summary.
A "tamper-resistant" code block can be created *automatically* (i.e. not by hand) by translating an ordinary code block into a tamper-proof code block. The tamper proof code-block may be composed of checksummed code with extra inserted code that performs arbitrary operations (using, for example, information stored on a ROM, or taken from the computer's clock, or from the user's settings) and then is expected to produce a specific result.
E.g. multiply the current time by the user's name converted into a number and subtract the checksum of the code block and produce the number it did when the code was initially "tamper-proofed".
To verify the code has not been tampered with it can be executed in an environment (a virtual machine, say) which behaves like the real environment but where system calls have no effect so that only the ancillory results are produced. If these results aren't right, the code block is rejected.
I'm probably missing a lot, but the proposed system is AT LEAST this sophisticated, which is a heck of lot more convoluted than, say, checksumming code blocks. I think figuring this out is well beyond the script kiddies that produce the majority of malware.
If you can't see the connection between mail clients (keeping in touch with people) and calendars (keeping track of appointments) you aren't looking very hard.
That said, I agree with the rest of your argument.
Could OO.o use a FireFox/Thunderbird-style makeover -- i.e. break it up into a bunch of single purpose apps that can be downloaded individually? I think that in the end this would be a marketing ruse rather than a technically desireable simplification...
A word-processor ultimately needs 95% of the functionality of *everything else* in an Office app (r.g. drawing functionality from presentation / drawing; graph presentation from the spreadsheet, etc.) which will tend to make each of the individual apps 95% as large as the suite.
It's arguable whether an email client needs the functionality of a word-processor (I think that integration of Word into Outlook is brain-damaged), but the number of things that could readily be split off OO.o is pretty small, and their functionality is relatively minor.
Except that this is a marginal cost that ignores that cost of getting where we are in the first place (i.e. developing the shuttle, building and maintaining an organization that operates it) and the opportunity cost of not having spent the money on something else (e.g. a bunch of conventional rockets). The NASA budget for shuttle operations is $5B/year. It launches how many shuttles in a good year? It launched one this year, so that's $60 million/ton.
Vista is the first time MS is paying attention to graphics (just look at all the "pretty" stuff from transparent windows to screen shots on the taskbar).
... oh ... Flash 9? It's not as though Adobe/Macromedia doesn't already have something that does everything Sparkle does, only cross-platform: it's called Director.
... to do what? Support Vista? Maybe. Of course to support Windows you'll have to deal with XP, 2000, 98, and Vista for years to come. And it's about as hard to support those platforms as to support Windows XP, Mac OS, and Linux. Which is why a typical game that ships today won't install on many Windows computers.
You don't get Windows XP's interface by ignoring graphics -- you get it by paying careful attention to graphics while having no taste.
Most importantly the development tools MS is providing are awesome! Visual Studio 2005 is really easy to use, and very powerful. Anyone who has seen sparkle knows that it's pretty sweet. Before you start screaming flash, you are right, they were first to market, but sparkle is better for developers, much better.
Sparkle looks cool, its output won't run on anything other than late model Windows devices, which kind of defeats the point. How will Sparkle compare with
But, here is why apple should be scared. MS is taking away every reason you should use OSX, with the exception "I hate MS", which Linux can cover.
Given that the Linux desktop so far seems pretty much a clone of Windows 95, I disagree.
Like it or not, apple has only been able to stay a float because the graphic community has been unflinching behind them, but that is starting to change. XP couldn't support them, Vista can.
This is what folks said about Windows 95 vs. Windows 3.1. Where's Microsoft's answer to Core Image?
While the OSX "users" are still backing OSX (for now; the tablet pc is really appealing to creative's because of the pressure sensitivity),
a) Graphics professionals have been using pressure sensitive tablets with Macs since before Windows computers had a standard mechanism for attaching them (the first tablets were ADB devices).
b) Tablet PCs *are* attractive to graphics professionals, but at least for desktop use, Wacom's combined display tablets are the thing every graphics pro I know drools over, and they work just fine on Macs, thanks.
traditional Apple developers are starting to stray. Quark is starting to hedge bets on Vista and MS's XML model, take a look at some news articles on their site www.quark.com.
Quark is starting to become irrelevant.
Third party software developers have always been Microsoft's strength.
Yes, they allow them to establish markets and then use monopoly power to drive them out of business. E.g. Borland, Ashton Tate, Wordperfect.
Vista has made it really easy for developers, while OSX still isn't.
Really easy for developers
MS needs one desktop OS competitor to be able to hold off monopoly accusations and say "people have other options", and that is why they haven't gone after Apple's market.
Yeah that's it, they haven't *tried*.
Because of Linux Microsoft doesn't need Apple's OS around anymore (remember the 150million they gave apple to stay in business in the late 90's). Because Linux exists MS will now start focusing on apple's market. MS can't kill Linux because it is a hobby OS. For the most part people maintain it for free, on their own time, they are passionate about it, and it's their baby. They won't let it die. OSX on the other hand doesn't have that kind of story. Apple knows this and that is why they are transitioning to Intel, just in case.
How does transitioning to Intel have any relevance to this?
I predict OSX won't survive this round with MS and Apple becomes a premium hardware supplier. Say bubye to OSX, I don't see it making it past this decade.
I'd say it's alm
'First of all, "it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer"? Is Dvorak really insinuating that only the elite use Windows these days?'
No, he's insinuating Windows is really hard to use. Possibly deliberately.
But they were living in a society which did not guarantee free speech.
If it's legal, to, say throw someone in prison just for expressing an opinion then it's reasonable to expect people to publish their opinions anonymously.
I could certainly sympathise with the argument that -- say -- secret ink dot patterns in color photocopiers will allow the Chinese secret police to locate and punish dissidents.
To make a different analogy:
Arguing that these dot patterns abridge freedom of speech is akin to arguing that putting serial numbers on handguns abridges the right to bear arms because if you bought a gun and then randomly shot people (I would assume illegally) and the gun used for the shootings was traced to you via the serial number it would be terribly, terribly unfair.
"If I'm free to speak, but free to get hounded by the FBI/fired/audited by the IRS if I say something that the authorities don't like, that's a pretty thin kind of freedom."
If the FBI harasses you for -- say -- exercising free speech, then that's illegal. The IRS's ability to hound people is pretty scandalous, but it's hardly a free speech issue.
If you say something offensive and your neighbor shoots you for it, that's a crime. That isn't a problem with your right to free speech, it's a problem with your self-restraint and your neighbor's propensity to shoot people.
If you looked at the Aperture demos and came to that conclusion ... you're not in the target market.
Hint: one of the demos featured round-trip-Photoshop integration.
You arguably have the right to bear arms, but no sane person questions the laws against murdering people with those arms.
There seem to be a lot of people who confuse *freedom* with *freedom to do antisocial stuff and remain anonymous*. These are not the same things.
Free speech is not free *anonymous* speech.
We all want cheap color printers. Fine. We don't want the world flooded with forged documents -- so we take some barely perceptable measures to curb that. Deal with it.