You're thinking is so '90s. From Apple's perspective, burning to DVD is so last year. The iPod is the portable media device of choice, since movies can be synched to any number of iPods.
Just think of music, and the percentage of people who rely on the CD-burning feature compared to people who are used to the idea that the iPod has replaced the CD.
The settlement terms basically prove it.
Regardless of whether Creative's patents were valid or not, Apple just performed a legal jujitsu. It basically allows Apple to use Creative to fight its battles.
One, the settlement strengthens the validity of Creative's patents. Creative is now free to go after the likes Sandisk (which has overtaken it in marketshare in the last year) and iRiver. Most importantly, it allows Creative to throw a wrench into Zune's imminent launch. I bet Microsoft never saw this coming. If Creative was a starving pit bull that was going after Apple out of anger, Apple just whipped out a nice juicy steak at the last second, made friends, and is now about to sic Creative the Well-Fed Pit Bull on Sandisk and Microsoft.
There's no doubt Apple's lawyers read Creative's lawyer the riot act. Patent battles are super expensive, and with Creative having to simultaneously sue Apple as well as defend against the counter-suit, the whole process would probably take 5 years or more and cost tens of millions of dollars. With Creative's sales shrinking quarter to quarter, it would be hard for the company to keep paying the lawyers over such an extended period of time. Last quarter's results kind of proved that.
But I think what really made Creative see the writing on the wall is the sudden appearance of Zune. Zune is the classic Microsoft move of screwing its partners over once they've outlived their usefulness (or in this case, proved totally useless). Creative maybe would have been willing to stick it out were it not for Zune, but with Zune competing directly with Creative's own products, they must have realized the company would be dead and bankrupt in a year, and once the money is gone, so long lawyers!
I'm willing to bet that virtually all the terms of this settlement were proposed by Apple. It makes Creative look like a winner when Creative will now be fighting battles on Apple's behalf. It also shows that Apple is serious about not letting the iPod give any ground in terms of marketshare. And it wouldn't surprise me if Creative's "Made for iPod" products quickly ends up outselling Creative's players. And unlike the music players, the accessories will probably be hugely profitable for Creative, which will just make Creative Apple's bitch in reality instead of just symbolically.
I can't wait for the next headline, though: "Creative Sues to Stop Microsoft Zune." Steve Jobs IS the new Godfather!
Uh, hello! World to Slashdot! Knock, knock, Engadget! Reminds me of a joke I heard about liberals and conservatives.
What's the difference between a liberal and a conservative? Liberals have no sense of humor.
I'm assuming the Engadget post is just another attempt to point to evidence that Bush is deranged or megalomanical. How anyone can mistake an obvious punchline to get laughs on a serious point about the importance of government-funded research seems that the more likely conclusion is that some people need to lighten up.
So for the humor impaired, here's a humor-obvious version of the punchline:
"They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." (Laughter)
With stories like this being highlighted as "news" on Slashdot, I propose the following format for future posts for the sake of the humor challenged readers among the Engadget and Slashdot crowd.
Apple announced today a new iPod with a widescreen touch-sensitive display. (Statement) Analyst Gene Munster in reaction stated, "This should only further strengthen Apple's dominant grip on the digital music market." (Opinion). At a local Apple store in New York City, iPod user Joe Smith had this to say about the new iPod: "It is clearly yet another device designed solely for a single purpose: to cause the iPod masses to offer up their credit card numbers in divine worship." (Joke).
Jobs did not "sell" the stock. He gave those shares back to Apple. Apple then sold it in a transaction that converted them to cash while taking those shares out of circulation (meaning Apple stock actually got a boost). That $295 million went straight to Uncle Sam.
And yes, believe it or not, the IRS has something called the AMT, whereupon they tax you for stock options that the moment of vesting, even if you sell none of it. Should that newly vested stock then lose all its value the next day, you still owe the tax on the original amount.
In other words, if Apple's stock had gone from $65/share to $1 the day after Jobs' 10 million options vested, Jobs would still have to pay the IRS the full $295 million in taxes even though his shares would be worth only 1/65 the original amount.
Quite the opposite. The ability to boot Windows makes Mac hardware more relevant, not less. They will go from selling 4 million boxes a year to selling 8 or 10 million. Apple is betting that most of those people will use OS X more and more, and Windows less and less. After all, the Intel Macs come chock full of very nice software (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, etc) which still has no equal in the Windows world.
The Machavellian aspect is this: a significant fraction of those dual-boot Macs will get their Windows partitions infected by some nasty malware or virus, thus FORCING USERS TO BOOT INTO LOVING AND SENSUOUS ARMS OF MAC OS X. And as we all know, once you go Mac, you DON'T GO BACK.
What you just said doesn't make any sense. The "3% profit margin" is net profit. It's the money Apple has left after they pay for little things like, oh, R&D and advertising.
Gross margins are almost 28%, which is the real raw profit. In fact, gross margins are so healthy, it allows Apple to spend about $500 million a year on R&D alone, and still maintain net profitability.
Maintaining gross margins on expanding revenues is what really counts, and Apple put in some stellar numbers on that front.
Hello! The $61 million in net profit is what Apple has left AFTER expenses like R&D. Apple currently is spending about half a billion a year on R&D, and it STILL manages to be profitable. It would help if you actually understood a quarterly statement before spouting about profits.
No one has bitched because the security issues were publicized only a few days ago. There's such a thing as thoroughly testing a patch before releasing it, as 10.2.8 version 1 downloaders may now. 72 hours is hardly enough time for testing, let alone writing a patch. Like duh.
No doubt when Apple DOES release a patch for Jaguar, all the pissy Apple-haters will be even more convinced Apple only released the patch because of their pissiness (rolling eyes).
I should point out that the Photoshop 7.0.1 update and the Photoshop 7.0.1 G5 Processor Plug-In are two different things. You can have Photoshop 7.0.1 without the G5 plug-in, although the G5 plug-in only works with Photoshop version 7.0.1.
the dual 1.42 GHz G4 posted a time of 35 seconds while the dual 2.0 GHz G5 posted a time of 29 seconds. Barefeats EMPHATICALLY states the results are for Photoshop 7.01 without the G5 plug-in
On the recent comparison page, we see the exact same times (35 seconds vs. 29 seconds) for the MP-aware tests, leading one to assume that even this latest round of benchmarks were tested without the G5 plug-in, and thus don't give the real picture as to the G5's performance.
I'd like to see Barefeats release Photoshop tests with the G5 plug-in...then we can start talking performance points.
Yeah, there's something screwy with the MP-aware Photoshop 7.0 test. It shows that the dual 2 GHz G5 is only 17% faster than the dual 1.42 G4.
The dual G5 has a clockspeed advantage of 40% alone, not to mention an FSB that is 8x faster than the pokey 167 Mhz bus on the G4. There is no way in heck that the G5 can post scores that are only 17% faster than the G4.
Maybe it was tested without using the optimized G5 plug-in, but the result is certainly very odd. I hope the barefeats guy gives some clarification about this (and if it was because the G5 was running Photoshop without the new plug-in, I wish he would stop posting scores until he actually can get some "real" G5 results!)
This is the killer statement in the whole article:
"The vector version of Jet3D runs an order of magnitude faster than the scalar version (speedups of 10X-13X are typical)." The dual 2GHz G5 was benchmarked at 5177 MFLOPS (a 1040% increase over the scalar test) and 1.29 MFLOPS/MHz."
5177 MFLOPS when running a Velocity Engine optimized version of Jet3D.
Now, how much does an P4 extrapolated to 3.2 GHz get? Like 288 MFLOPS?
Someone please explain to me how 5177 MFLOPS and ~300 MFLOPS are even comparable.
As the Mathematica guy said, the competition is no longer high-end PCs, it's now $10,000 UNIX workstations...and the G5 is still faster than any of them.
No wonder the G5s smoke the dual Xeon in the Photoshop, Mathematica, Logic, and Luxology app bake-off. All these apps would have been optimized to use the Velocity Engine.
If I were a scientist doing lots of image processing and vector calculations, I'd need a cluster of about 18 or so 3.2 GHz P4 machines to keep up with the dual 2 GHz G5 PowerMac running a typical Velocity Engine optimized app.
That's a sweet 5177 MFLOPS for you - evidence the G5s rock as hard as Apple has been indicating.
It galls me that people can argue how unjust this war is. People glibly talk about the "horrors" of Saddam's regime, but really, have these people really considered what goes on in Iraq? Check out the 20/20 special with women who have first-hand experience of how brutal the regime is, and that whatever the reasons Bush may be (badly) attempting to communicate, the war is a war for human rights, plain and simple. Where is the righteous rage against Saddam's atrocities? Where are all the mass marches for all the Iraqis who have been tortured in the most unimaginable ways? Why is it okay to preserve the status quo and allow thousands more to suffer while a war that will end this brutal, truly fascist regime is immoral?
They are educated. They aren't required to veil themselves. They can work. But these four women from Iraq say they were missing two crucial things in their homeland freedom and dignity
The four women Maha Hussain, Zainab al-Suwaij, Katrin Michael and Roz Rasool told ABCNEWS' Barbara Walters stories that could be punishable by death in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Even Iraqis in the United States are terrified to speak frankly about Saddam's regime, largely because they are terrified of reprisals against family members.
The women are speaking out because they feel they are speaking for the voiceless people living under Saddam's regime.
"We know how it looks like inside Iraq," al-Suwaij said on 20/20. "We saw the torture. We saw our relatives and our friends disappearing day after day."
Human rights groups estimate that at least 290,000 Iraqis have disappeared since Saddam took power 34 years ago. Hussain was just a schoolgirl in Baghdad when the reality of life under Saddam hit home. She recalls riding on a school bus at age 13 and seeing a crowd gathered in the center of the capital, around bodies of men hanging from poles. "I remember the blue faces, the long necks," she said.
Saddam's reign of terror extended far beyond public executions. He established a strategy of brutalizing women in order to control their men. Although the stories these women tell are horrific and difficult to substantiate, they are consistent with a pattern of cruelty toward women documented by various human rights groups.
Routine Rapes, Human Meat Grinders, Chemical Baths
Al-Suwaij knows firsthand how even young girls were imprisoned for what seem to be trivial offenses. Al-Suwaij says she had a 16-year-old cousin who was beaten and tortured with electrical shocks for having written something against the government in her school notebook.
And if a man is a dissident or if a man writes a letter or makes a joke about Saddam, these women said, authorities would rape his wife or female relatives in front of him.
"Rape is used as a tool to humiliate the woman, but to also bring men into submission," Hussain said. To compound the humiliation, authorities would videotape the torture and rape and send the tape to family members.
Saddam's contempt for human rights extended to his well-documented use of poison gas against his own people. The horror of one of those chemical attacks still haunts Michael 16 years later.
"Children, women, men ¦ vomiting, screaming, crying with swollen eyes. Everybody was ¦ screaming, 'We are blind. We cannot see,' " Michael said. She said she still has difficulty breathing, because of her exposure to the gas.
Al-Suwaij has seen the inside of an Iraqi prison, and she describes horrific scenes. She said she was shown "human meat grinders" in which people were shredded and disposed of in a septic tank, and chemical baths in which people were literally dissolved.
"You cannot exaggerate about these things. People were slaughtered," she said.
All four women met earlier this month with members of the Bush administration.
Uh, excuse me, but isn't Palladium a Windows-based DRM technology? I very much doubt we'll see Palladium on the Mac.
Secondly, I think the purpose of the conference is to underscore the fact that Apple is taking a PRO-CONSUMER stance with regards to DRM, from iTunes use of MP3s to the ease with which one can burn CDs and DVDs.
The debate is whether Apple will continue taking this pro-consumer position or whether they'll cave in like Microsoft and Intel to the forces of the RIAA and Hollywood.
At least that's how I read the announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking is so '90s. From Apple's perspective, burning to DVD is so last year. The iPod is the portable media device of choice, since movies can be synched to any number of iPods.
Just think of music, and the percentage of people who rely on the CD-burning feature compared to people who are used to the idea that the iPod has replaced the CD.
The settlement terms basically prove it. Regardless of whether Creative's patents were valid or not, Apple just performed a legal jujitsu. It basically allows Apple to use Creative to fight its battles. One, the settlement strengthens the validity of Creative's patents. Creative is now free to go after the likes Sandisk (which has overtaken it in marketshare in the last year) and iRiver. Most importantly, it allows Creative to throw a wrench into Zune's imminent launch. I bet Microsoft never saw this coming. If Creative was a starving pit bull that was going after Apple out of anger, Apple just whipped out a nice juicy steak at the last second, made friends, and is now about to sic Creative the Well-Fed Pit Bull on Sandisk and Microsoft. There's no doubt Apple's lawyers read Creative's lawyer the riot act. Patent battles are super expensive, and with Creative having to simultaneously sue Apple as well as defend against the counter-suit, the whole process would probably take 5 years or more and cost tens of millions of dollars. With Creative's sales shrinking quarter to quarter, it would be hard for the company to keep paying the lawyers over such an extended period of time. Last quarter's results kind of proved that. But I think what really made Creative see the writing on the wall is the sudden appearance of Zune. Zune is the classic Microsoft move of screwing its partners over once they've outlived their usefulness (or in this case, proved totally useless). Creative maybe would have been willing to stick it out were it not for Zune, but with Zune competing directly with Creative's own products, they must have realized the company would be dead and bankrupt in a year, and once the money is gone, so long lawyers! I'm willing to bet that virtually all the terms of this settlement were proposed by Apple. It makes Creative look like a winner when Creative will now be fighting battles on Apple's behalf. It also shows that Apple is serious about not letting the iPod give any ground in terms of marketshare. And it wouldn't surprise me if Creative's "Made for iPod" products quickly ends up outselling Creative's players. And unlike the music players, the accessories will probably be hugely profitable for Creative, which will just make Creative Apple's bitch in reality instead of just symbolically. I can't wait for the next headline, though: "Creative Sues to Stop Microsoft Zune." Steve Jobs IS the new Godfather!
Uh, hello! World to Slashdot! Knock, knock, Engadget! Reminds me of a joke I heard about liberals and conservatives.
What's the difference between a liberal and a conservative? Liberals have no sense of humor.
I'm assuming the Engadget post is just another attempt to point to evidence that Bush is deranged or megalomanical. How anyone can mistake an obvious punchline to get laughs on a serious point about the importance of government-funded research seems that the more likely conclusion is that some people need to lighten up.
So for the humor impaired, here's a humor-obvious version of the punchline:
"They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." (Laughter)
With stories like this being highlighted as "news" on Slashdot, I propose the following format for future posts for the sake of the humor challenged readers among the Engadget and Slashdot crowd.
Jobs did not "sell" the stock. He gave those shares back to Apple. Apple then sold it in a transaction that converted them to cash while taking those shares out of circulation (meaning Apple stock actually got a boost). That $295 million went straight to Uncle Sam.
And yes, believe it or not, the IRS has something called the AMT, whereupon they tax you for stock options that the moment of vesting, even if you sell none of it. Should that newly vested stock then lose all its value the next day, you still owe the tax on the original amount.
In other words, if Apple's stock had gone from $65/share to $1 the day after Jobs' 10 million options vested, Jobs would still have to pay the IRS the full $295 million in taxes even though his shares would be worth only 1/65 the original amount.
Quite the opposite. The ability to boot Windows makes Mac hardware more relevant, not less. They will go from selling 4 million boxes a year to selling 8 or 10 million. Apple is betting that most of those people will use OS X more and more, and Windows less and less. After all, the Intel Macs come chock full of very nice software (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, etc) which still has no equal in the Windows world.
The Machavellian aspect is this: a significant fraction of those dual-boot Macs will get their Windows partitions infected by some nasty malware or virus, thus FORCING USERS TO BOOT INTO LOVING AND SENSUOUS ARMS OF MAC OS X. And as we all know, once you go Mac, you DON'T GO BACK.
What you just said doesn't make any sense. The "3% profit margin" is net profit. It's the money Apple has left after they pay for little things like, oh, R&D and advertising. Gross margins are almost 28%, which is the real raw profit. In fact, gross margins are so healthy, it allows Apple to spend about $500 million a year on R&D alone, and still maintain net profitability. Maintaining gross margins on expanding revenues is what really counts, and Apple put in some stellar numbers on that front.
Hello! The $61 million in net profit is what Apple has left AFTER expenses like R&D. Apple currently is spending about half a billion a year on R&D, and it STILL manages to be profitable. It would help if you actually understood a quarterly statement before spouting about profits.
No one has bitched because the security issues were publicized only a few days ago. There's such a thing as thoroughly testing a patch before releasing it, as 10.2.8 version 1 downloaders may now. 72 hours is hardly enough time for testing, let alone writing a patch. Like duh. No doubt when Apple DOES release a patch for Jaguar, all the pissy Apple-haters will be even more convinced Apple only released the patch because of their pissiness (rolling eyes).
I should point out that the Photoshop 7.0.1 update and the Photoshop 7.0.1 G5 Processor Plug-In are two different things. You can have Photoshop 7.0.1 without the G5 plug-in, although the G5 plug-in only works with Photoshop version 7.0.1.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5sum.html
the dual 1.42 GHz G4 posted a time of 35 seconds while the dual 2.0 GHz G5 posted a time of 29 seconds. Barefeats EMPHATICALLY states the results are for Photoshop 7.01 without the G5 plug-in
On the recent comparison page, we see the exact same times (35 seconds vs. 29 seconds) for the MP-aware tests, leading one to assume that even this latest round of benchmarks were tested without the G5 plug-in, and thus don't give the real picture as to the G5's performance.
I'd like to see Barefeats release Photoshop tests with the G5 plug-in...then we can start talking performance points.
Yeah, there's something screwy with the MP-aware Photoshop 7.0 test. It shows that the dual 2 GHz G5 is only 17% faster than the dual 1.42 G4. The dual G5 has a clockspeed advantage of 40% alone, not to mention an FSB that is 8x faster than the pokey 167 Mhz bus on the G4. There is no way in heck that the G5 can post scores that are only 17% faster than the G4. Maybe it was tested without using the optimized G5 plug-in, but the result is certainly very odd. I hope the barefeats guy gives some clarification about this (and if it was because the G5 was running Photoshop without the new plug-in, I wish he would stop posting scores until he actually can get some "real" G5 results!)
"The vector version of Jet3D runs an order of magnitude faster than the scalar version (speedups of 10X-13X are typical)." The dual 2GHz G5 was benchmarked at 5177 MFLOPS (a 1040% increase over the scalar test) and 1.29 MFLOPS/MHz."
5177 MFLOPS when running a Velocity Engine optimized version of Jet3D.
Now, how much does an P4 extrapolated to 3.2 GHz get? Like 288 MFLOPS?
Someone please explain to me how 5177 MFLOPS and ~300 MFLOPS are even comparable.
As the Mathematica guy said, the competition is no longer high-end PCs, it's now $10,000 UNIX workstations...and the G5 is still faster than any of them.
No wonder the G5s smoke the dual Xeon in the Photoshop, Mathematica, Logic, and Luxology app bake-off. All these apps would have been optimized to use the Velocity Engine.
If I were a scientist doing lots of image processing and vector calculations, I'd need a cluster of about 18 or so 3.2 GHz P4 machines to keep up with the dual 2 GHz G5 PowerMac running a typical Velocity Engine optimized app.
That's a sweet 5177 MFLOPS for you - evidence the G5s rock as hard as Apple has been indicating.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/World/2020_ira qiwomen030321.html
They are educated. They aren't required to veil themselves. They can work. But these four women from Iraq say they were missing two crucial things in their homeland freedom and dignity
The four women Maha Hussain, Zainab al-Suwaij, Katrin Michael and Roz Rasool told ABCNEWS' Barbara Walters stories that could be punishable by death in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Even Iraqis in the United States are terrified to speak frankly about Saddam's regime, largely because they are terrified of reprisals against family members.
The women are speaking out because they feel they are speaking for the voiceless people living under Saddam's regime.
"We know how it looks like inside Iraq," al-Suwaij said on 20/20. "We saw the torture. We saw our relatives and our friends disappearing day after day."
Human rights groups estimate that at least 290,000 Iraqis have disappeared since Saddam took power 34 years ago. Hussain was just a schoolgirl in Baghdad when the reality of life under Saddam hit home. She recalls riding on a school bus at age 13 and seeing a crowd gathered in the center of the capital, around bodies of men hanging from poles. "I remember the blue faces, the long necks," she said.
Saddam's reign of terror extended far beyond public executions. He established a strategy of brutalizing women in order to control their men. Although the stories these women tell are horrific and difficult to substantiate, they are consistent with a pattern of cruelty toward women documented by various human rights groups.
Routine Rapes, Human Meat Grinders, Chemical Baths
Al-Suwaij knows firsthand how even young girls were imprisoned for what seem to be trivial offenses. Al-Suwaij says she had a 16-year-old cousin who was beaten and tortured with electrical shocks for having written something against the government in her school notebook.
And if a man is a dissident or if a man writes a letter or makes a joke about Saddam, these women said, authorities would rape his wife or female relatives in front of him.
"Rape is used as a tool to humiliate the woman, but to also bring men into submission," Hussain said. To compound the humiliation, authorities would videotape the torture and rape and send the tape to family members.
Saddam's contempt for human rights extended to his well-documented use of poison gas against his own people. The horror of one of those chemical attacks still haunts Michael 16 years later.
"Children, women, men ¦ vomiting, screaming, crying with swollen eyes. Everybody was ¦ screaming, 'We are blind. We cannot see,' " Michael said. She said she still has difficulty breathing, because of her exposure to the gas.
Al-Suwaij has seen the inside of an Iraqi prison, and she describes horrific scenes. She said she was shown "human meat grinders" in which people were shredded and disposed of in a septic tank, and chemical baths in which people were literally dissolved.
"You cannot exaggerate about these things. People were slaughtered," she said.
All four women met earlier this month with members of the Bush administration.
They raised the iss
Uh, excuse me, but isn't Palladium a Windows-based DRM technology? I very much doubt we'll see Palladium on the Mac. Secondly, I think the purpose of the conference is to underscore the fact that Apple is taking a PRO-CONSUMER stance with regards to DRM, from iTunes use of MP3s to the ease with which one can burn CDs and DVDs. The debate is whether Apple will continue taking this pro-consumer position or whether they'll cave in like Microsoft and Intel to the forces of the RIAA and Hollywood. At least that's how I read the announcement.