The "no cuts" story is interesting. Had no idea Miyazaki was such a tough S.O.B. But I guess that goes with being a great filmmaker.
It stems from a 1980's North American release of Nausicaa that had been licensed by some fly-by-night American company. Re-titled "Warriors of the Wind", it was severely cut (running less than 66% of the original's time), utterly incomprehensible, and a total disaster. Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli were so pissed off that they asked fans to forget the existence of the film and adopted a strict "no edits" clause for any future foreign licensing deals.
Have you programmed in ML? Lisp? What about Prolog?
Yes, Yes, and Yes. Non-Procedural Programming was one of the requirements for my CS degree;)
Which is one of the major benefits of a truly good CS program; it will expose you to a wide variety and languages and language types, along with giving you a good grounding in theory. The more languages (from as many different styles as possible) you're already familiar with, the more trivial it is to pick up $NEW_HOT_LANG, especially given how similar so many of todays "must know" languages are (If you have any experience with Java, C# is an afternoon of messing around at worst, for instance).
Does anybody have comparisons for OS X machines? They render much of their OS in the GPU, right?
A lot of the lower end machines still ship with 32 Megs on the card, and run fine (provided you've got a decent amount of system memory). Obviously that's too low for serious gaming, but the OS has no troubles with that amount of memory on the GPU.
Having 256 on the GPU would be on the extreme high-end (only the highest end powermac ships by default with a card that big), not "a happy medium" for OS X.
I'd bet good money Rio and Apple are using the same HDD's for their players.
You'd lose good money, too. Apple uses Toshiba drives, the Karma at least used a brand new, first generation Hitachi drive that gained a reputation for flakiness.
That you cannot make enough money selling to Joe Average walking into Circuit City and buying your OS off the shelf to support a company of any real size. Be proved that. NeXT proved that. Even MS only makes a tiny fraction of their income off of box OS sales. Apple would suffer enormous lay-offs if they even tried to do it.
The real money, the money that supports companies of any size, is in OEM licensing to box manufacturers. Apple could easily survive if Dell, HP, e-Machines and the like were buying a license every time they sold a computer, but without that they'd be dead inside the year. And do you honestly believe MS would let OS X be included on the computers those companies shipped. They'd be right back to their "Oh, you can do that, but Windows licenses are now full cost" tactics, and Apple would be locked out just like Be was.
I hope Steve learns a lesson from this and does not put DRM in the official version
It seems to me the only lesson to be learned is "If we don't make a serious effort to make our x86 macs different enough from vanilla PCs, a bunch of jackassess will just download it off some P2P network, run it on their own boxes, and freeload off our hard work".
Having learned that, why would he not make it harder for people to obtain and use OS X without purchasing their products?
In other news, umbrella manufacturer thinks everyone could benefit from an umbrella.
If they're only thinking that, they're doing it wrong. They should be paying off some dumb-ass politician so that he can introduce legislation mandating that everyone has to buy an UmbrellaCo brand umbrella.
Why can't they, at least, make all the music available in one region available in all the rest?
Copyright law. Pick any song. Let's call it Song A. Song A can have many different copyright holders in different countries. In the US, Joe may hold Song A's license. In Japan, Takeshi may hold it. If you license it from Joe, you can sell copies of it in the US, but if you sell copies in Japan, you've just violated Takeshi's copyright, and he can sue you into next year. To sell a song universally, Apple would need to work out a license with ALL of that song's copyright holders, which would likely be impossible, since they might all want different restrictions, compensation, etc, etc.
Dell sells more volume than Apple, so in the short term at least they'd have a pricing advantage thanks to that. Additionally, Apple's distinguishing hardware feature is their industrial design, which costs quite a bit more than pumping out variations on the generic beige tower design. Both of these factors, together with the razor thin profit margins that the Dells and e-Machines and what not sell at, guarantee that Apple's hardware prices are higher than the competitions.
Couple that with the fact that as long as their hardware costs more, the die-hard OS X fans will prefer to buy a cheap box and install their own, the fact that the masses will stick with the cheap thing they know rather than the expensive thing they don't, and the vastly increased costs Apple faces in trying to pump out drivers for ever random hardware device on the planet that a purchaser of Generic Intel OS X might want to use it with, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
I probably just dont understand the business well enough but if Apple could sell 5 million copies of OS X for (generic) Intel system, why wouldnt they? Is -all- of their money made off of the hardware?
The vast bulk of it. 80-90% if I recall correctly.
How does selling lots of copies of OS X equal Apple losing money?
You're assuming they'd sell lots of copies. That's a big assumption. Certainly their current level of OS license sales couldn't sustain the company, so even if we assume that everyone who uses OS X now were to buy a copy of "Generic Intel OS X", they'd need to expand their sales share significantly.
What the "Why don't they just sell it for generic boxes like Microsoft does and make $$$" crowd forgets is that Microsoft doesn't actually make a lot of money off of people walking in to Circuit City and buying a box copy of Windows. The vast majority of people view installing an OS as being more complicated than building a rocket ship from scratch using only a stick of gum and some 2x4's; the hobbyist market who is comfortable with this sort of thing isn't big enough to sustain a company of any significant size.
No, the real money is in OEM licensing to large volume hardware manufacturers. If Apple sold OS X for generic Intels, everyone would be able to undercut them on hardware prices, so forget about that business. And the walk-in market isn't nearly big enough to sustain them. So unless they could secure a number of OEM deals with the Dells and HPs of the world, they'd be bankrupt within the year. And Microsoft has historically done everything in their power to prevent even insignificant companies like Be from getting their OS shipping pre-installed from the OEM. You'd better believe they'd pull out all the stops to keep Apple out of that market.
Thanks for proving my point. There will now be an x86 monopoly on computers starting in 2007. No alternatives, no choices, and nowhere to run when Intel/AMD pull off their Trusted Computing schemes (they're both part of the Trusted Computing Group).
You know who else is a member? IBM. Staying with the PPC wouldn't have helped any.
What are you going to do, switch to Windows?
You'll be stuck with "Trusted Computing" and intel chips there, too. And a much more user-unfriendly UI as well.
I really don't care about the payment method, aside from mentioning that giveing Russian criminals access to credit card numbers seemed silly.
I have no intention of paying money for an illegal service. If legality isn't being offered, I'd rather just use one of the umpteen billion free music downloading tools.
They were only ever possibly technically legal in Russia (those madatory licensing laws don't give the rights for world wide distribution, as the Russian rights holders for the works do not hold the copy rights for the works in other jurisdictions), and even there, Moscow Police & the City Prosecutor have concluded that they are violating Russian law, as those same mandatory licensing laws are not held to cover online distribution. However, as it is a civil matter, the individual rights holders are going to need to file suit against the company.
In short, I have very little desire to give my credit card information to a Russian outfit that is violating both international and local Russian laws.
Just click the goddamn link and read the rules. The winner is defined as the 500 millionth entry (with the counter starting at 480,000,000), with each entry generated by either buying a song or using, FOR FREE, the iTMS "refer a friend" feature to refer a song to itunes500@apple.com.
Second, its against an sane company's policy for the for the network admin to review the keylogging information and then use that information for illegal purpose, eg identity theft.
Oh, well that's a relief. I'm sure he'll think to himself "Well, I was going to take this credit card number, steal a bunch of money from him with it, break a number of laws, and bugger off to a tropical paradise, but darn it all, that would contravene my company's network policy"
Metrowerks used to have an x86 compiler, but they sold all of the IP related to it a few months ago because they didn't think it was still a viable product.
So while Metrowerks could update their product so that devs don't have to abandon it for Xcode, it's unlikely that they will (as they'd either have to start from scratch again or rebuy their own IP, probably at a significant premium).
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't honestly expect a big conglomerate to do the nice thing and not notice them, did they?
That said, all they need to do is change the project name to Qing's Kuest and tweak the art-work.
The "no cuts" story is interesting. Had no idea Miyazaki was such a tough S.O.B. But I guess that goes with being a great filmmaker.
It stems from a 1980's North American release of Nausicaa that had been licensed by some fly-by-night American company. Re-titled "Warriors of the Wind", it was severely cut (running less than 66% of the original's time), utterly incomprehensible, and a total disaster. Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli were so pissed off that they asked fans to forget the existence of the film and adopted a strict "no edits" clause for any future foreign licensing deals.
Have you programmed in ML? Lisp? What about Prolog?
;)
Yes, Yes, and Yes. Non-Procedural Programming was one of the requirements for my CS degree
Which is one of the major benefits of a truly good CS program; it will expose you to a wide variety and languages and language types, along with giving you a good grounding in theory. The more languages (from as many different styles as possible) you're already familiar with, the more trivial it is to pick up $NEW_HOT_LANG, especially given how similar so many of todays "must know" languages are (If you have any experience with Java, C# is an afternoon of messing around at worst, for instance).
Does anybody have comparisons for OS X machines? They render much of their OS in the GPU, right?
A lot of the lower end machines still ship with 32 Megs on the card, and run fine (provided you've got a decent amount of system memory). Obviously that's too low for serious gaming, but the OS has no troubles with that amount of memory on the GPU.
Having 256 on the GPU would be on the extreme high-end (only the highest end powermac ships by default with a card that big), not "a happy medium" for OS X.
I'd bet good money Rio and Apple are using the same HDD's for their players.
You'd lose good money, too. Apple uses Toshiba drives, the Karma at least used a brand new, first generation Hitachi drive that gained a reputation for flakiness.
Of course, the Karma also has a reputation for breaking if you look at it cross-eyed, so that might have factored into it...
And mom & pop console purchaser is going to want to swap drives by hand?
That you cannot make enough money selling to Joe Average walking into Circuit City and buying your OS off the shelf to support a company of any real size. Be proved that. NeXT proved that. Even MS only makes a tiny fraction of their income off of box OS sales. Apple would suffer enormous lay-offs if they even tried to do it.
The real money, the money that supports companies of any size, is in OEM licensing to box manufacturers. Apple could easily survive if Dell, HP, e-Machines and the like were buying a license every time they sold a computer, but without that they'd be dead inside the year. And do you honestly believe MS would let OS X be included on the computers those companies shipped. They'd be right back to their "Oh, you can do that, but Windows licenses are now full cost" tactics, and Apple would be locked out just like Be was.
I hope Steve learns a lesson from this and does not put DRM in the official version
It seems to me the only lesson to be learned is "If we don't make a serious effort to make our x86 macs different enough from vanilla PCs, a bunch of jackassess will just download it off some P2P network, run it on their own boxes, and freeload off our hard work".
Having learned that, why would he not make it harder for people to obtain and use OS X without purchasing their products?
In other news, umbrella manufacturer thinks everyone could benefit from an umbrella.
If they're only thinking that, they're doing it wrong. They should be paying off some dumb-ass politician so that he can introduce legislation mandating that everyone has to buy an UmbrellaCo brand umbrella.
Why can't they, at least, make all the music available in one region available in all the rest?
Copyright law. Pick any song. Let's call it Song A. Song A can have many different copyright holders in different countries. In the US, Joe may hold Song A's license. In Japan, Takeshi may hold it. If you license it from Joe, you can sell copies of it in the US, but if you sell copies in Japan, you've just violated Takeshi's copyright, and he can sue you into next year. To sell a song universally, Apple would need to work out a license with ALL of that song's copyright holders, which would likely be impossible, since they might all want different restrictions, compensation, etc, etc.
Yes, the system is stupid.
Dell sells more volume than Apple, so in the short term at least they'd have a pricing advantage thanks to that. Additionally, Apple's distinguishing hardware feature is their industrial design, which costs quite a bit more than pumping out variations on the generic beige tower design. Both of these factors, together with the razor thin profit margins that the Dells and e-Machines and what not sell at, guarantee that Apple's hardware prices are higher than the competitions.
Couple that with the fact that as long as their hardware costs more, the die-hard OS X fans will prefer to buy a cheap box and install their own, the fact that the masses will stick with the cheap thing they know rather than the expensive thing they don't, and the vastly increased costs Apple faces in trying to pump out drivers for ever random hardware device on the planet that a purchaser of Generic Intel OS X might want to use it with, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
I probably just dont understand the business well enough but if Apple could sell 5 million copies of OS X for (generic) Intel system, why wouldnt they? Is -all- of their money made off of the hardware?
The vast bulk of it. 80-90% if I recall correctly.
How does selling lots of copies of OS X equal Apple losing money?
You're assuming they'd sell lots of copies. That's a big assumption. Certainly their current level of OS license sales couldn't sustain the company, so even if we assume that everyone who uses OS X now were to buy a copy of "Generic Intel OS X", they'd need to expand their sales share significantly.
What the "Why don't they just sell it for generic boxes like Microsoft does and make $$$" crowd forgets is that Microsoft doesn't actually make a lot of money off of people walking in to Circuit City and buying a box copy of Windows. The vast majority of people view installing an OS as being more complicated than building a rocket ship from scratch using only a stick of gum and some 2x4's; the hobbyist market who is comfortable with this sort of thing isn't big enough to sustain a company of any significant size.
No, the real money is in OEM licensing to large volume hardware manufacturers. If Apple sold OS X for generic Intels, everyone would be able to undercut them on hardware prices, so forget about that business. And the walk-in market isn't nearly big enough to sustain them. So unless they could secure a number of OEM deals with the Dells and HPs of the world, they'd be bankrupt within the year. And Microsoft has historically done everything in their power to prevent even insignificant companies like Be from getting their OS shipping pre-installed from the OEM. You'd better believe they'd pull out all the stops to keep Apple out of that market.
"Sexual rape"? As opposed to what?
Tentacle Rape.
Thanks for proving my point. There will now be an x86 monopoly on computers starting in 2007. No alternatives, no choices, and nowhere to run when Intel/AMD pull off their Trusted Computing schemes (they're both part of the Trusted Computing Group).
You know who else is a member? IBM. Staying with the PPC wouldn't have helped any.
What are you going to do, switch to Windows? You'll be stuck with "Trusted Computing" and intel chips there, too. And a much more user-unfriendly UI as well.
Or they could just buy a $5 PS/2 -> USB cable, like I did.
I really don't care about the payment method, aside from mentioning that giveing Russian criminals access to credit card numbers seemed silly.
I have no intention of paying money for an illegal service. If legality isn't being offered, I'd rather just use one of the umpteen billion free music downloading tools.
They were only ever possibly technically legal in Russia (those madatory licensing laws don't give the rights for world wide distribution, as the Russian rights holders for the works do not hold the copy rights for the works in other jurisdictions), and even there, Moscow Police & the City Prosecutor have concluded that they are violating Russian law, as those same mandatory licensing laws are not held to cover online distribution. However, as it is a civil matter, the individual rights holders are going to need to file suit against the company.
In short, I have very little desire to give my credit card information to a Russian outfit that is violating both international and local Russian laws.
Just click the goddamn link and read the rules. The winner is defined as the 500 millionth entry (with the counter starting at 480,000,000), with each entry generated by either buying a song or using, FOR FREE, the iTMS "refer a friend" feature to refer a song to itunes500@apple.com.
From TFA:
500 Millionth Download Promotion
Official Rules - US
1. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.
Second, its against an sane company's policy for the for the network admin to review the keylogging information and then use that information for illegal purpose, eg identity theft.
Oh, well that's a relief. I'm sure he'll think to himself "Well, I was going to take this credit card number, steal a bunch of money from him with it, break a number of laws, and bugger off to a tropical paradise, but darn it all, that would contravene my company's network policy"
Wouldn't it be a sight if they could ban it retroactively?
It would indeed.
That site being Arkansas.
Precariously balance a cup of liquid in your lap while driving a car
She was in the passenger seat. The car wasn't moving.
Metrowerks used to have an x86 compiler, but they sold all of the IP related to it a few months ago because they didn't think it was still a viable product.
So while Metrowerks could update their product so that devs don't have to abandon it for Xcode, it's unlikely that they will (as they'd either have to start from scratch again or rebuy their own IP, probably at a significant premium).