I'm not seeing your point. Are you saying that patents make it impossible for people to use patented technologies without a license? Well, yeah. That's the idea.
That is not, however, what this argument is about. This argument is about whether patents on software processes and methods should be granted at all. I say they should be, because they serve to promote progress and innovation. I have offered a theoretical argument to explain why this is true. Others say they shouldn't, because they stifle innovation. I have yet to hear any argument at all-- either theoretical or empirical-- to explain that position.
Saying that patents make it impossible to use patented technologies without a license has absolutely nothing to do with innovation or progress. If anything, it encourages progress, albeit in a slipshod and mostly ineffectual way, by those who wish to avoid paying license fees. These folks are forced to come up with new and different ways of accomplishing their goals. That's progress.
I'm right there with ya. Back in August I impulse-bought-- literally!-- a dual 1 GHz G4 with 17" monitor. I love it. Of course, that was back when I hadn't been laid off by a failing employer, but you can blame that on my own clueless optimism. Hell, at least my new Mac is paid for.
Agreed. I have a medium-sized library of MP3s, ripped from my library of about 300 CDs. iTunes tells me that my library amounts to 14.7 days of music, comprised of 4,922 songs. (Over 23 GB, if you're wondering.) The only tool I need to manage it all is iTunes. It sorts and organizes my files on disk for me, and lets me browse by artist, album, or genre. It never takes me more than about two seconds to find the precise song I'm after out of the nearly 5,000 in the library. And even with all those songs, it still launches in one bounce.
Do you have a source for this info? According to the Open Group's web site, Apple has not been given permission to use the UNIX brand name. (I've heard that that's simply because they haven't asked for it, because asking for it requires that Apple pay the Open Group a certification fee that Apple doesn't feel is worth it.)
It's just a technicality. OS X is UNIX, it's just not UNIX(tm).
That's gotta be the worst idea I've ever heard. Generally, Apple's machines are no cheaper than AnyCo's Intel machines, and sometimes more expensive. When you buy a Mac, you're paying for a complete user experience, the most visible part of which is the OS.
If you put Linux on a Mac, you're combining expensive hardware with user-hostile software. You get the worst of both worlds!
Surely that's a combination suitable only for wealthy masochists.
No offense, but your knowledge is out of date. The G4 PowerBooks are notoriously hard to work on. Adding RAM is easy, but adding an AirPort card or replacing the hard drive requires practically skinning the whole laptop. It's a huge pain in the ass.
OS X 10.0 was really memory hungry, but 10.1 reduced that considerably. Jaguar reduced it still further. You can be perfectly happy with 128 MB if you don't try to do very many things at once. And, of course, the great thing about the VM system in OS X is that you don't constantly swap when you've got too many programs open. Earlier today I had several programs open at once-- Office, Photoshop, Maya, OmniWeb, and lots of little ones-- and I decided to kick off a session of Jedi Knight II. My machine swapped like crazy for about ten seconds while every available memory page was written to disk, and then the game fired right up and ran perfectly. When I quit, my machine swapped like crazy for another ten or fifteen seconds while the whole world got swapped back in, and I was right back where I needed to be.
No. (And in the Mac world, it's not called "monitor spanning." It's simply called using multiple monitors.)
-Is the G3 going to be replaced soon in the Ibook
No.
-How much battery does a 15.x display AND a superdrive eat?
The display eats basically none at all. The PowerBook gets about 4 hours of battery life with Jaguar, plus or minus half an hour, and modulo what you're doing. If you're just word processing and whatnot and you keep the hard drive spun down most of the time, that can easily push the 5 hour mark.
Burning DVDs is sure to eat battery power, so backing up your MP3 collection on a transatlantic flight is probably not the best idea.
Absolutely. My girlfriend lugged an original blueberry iBook through medical school, a PhD, and the first year of her surgery residency... and that's just so far. She's beaten that thing like a redheaded stepchild, and hasn't had the first problem with it. It's been by far the most reliable and durable laptop I've ever seen.
My first consideration was the iBook plus USB fdd but the price quickly shilled her.
This was the point in your post where the little alarm in my head started going off.
You can get an iBook for $1000. If your sister is a student, you can lop a bit off of that price. A built-in CDRW/DVDROM drive will cost you a few hundred bucks more. If these prices "shill" her, then you're probably not going to be able to swing a new Mac. Which is a shame, because it's really the way to go.
I'd suggest finding some way to get the $1000 iBook, but rather than springing for the combo drive, just buy one of those tiny USB keychain drives, like this one. (Not positive that link is going to work. The URL looks temporary. Try it anyway.)
These little widgets cost about $90 and hold 128 MB. If you format it FAT-- or whatever they call the DOS disk format these days-- you should be able to mount it on any Mac or PC that's equipped with USB. Easier to use and faster than a CDRW, and lots cheaper.
Your basic analysis is good, but by far the best advice would be for you to go to the nearest Apple retail store and talk to the folks there. Tell them everything you just posted here, and they'll be able to suggest the right solution for you. You'll also get the side benefit of being able to play with all the machines before you buy one. The only downside is that the new laptops probably won't be in stores for a least a week, and maybe more like two or three.
Yes, but you have to assemble it yourself. I bought a brand new Power Mac G4 in August, and I had it up and running with all my software on it in about an hour and fifteen minutes. It hasn't even been turned off since, and I've only rebooted it twice (for 10.2.1 and again for 10.2.2).
Macs are definitely for people, like myself, who don't get any particular kick out of tinkering. If you prefer to tinker, then don't buy a Mac.
I'd say, given Apple's history of dropping their entire customer base every so often....
Apple has done that twice in the entire 25-year history of their company. First they went from the Motorola 68K architecture to the PowerPC architecture, and eventually they had to drop support for 68K processors in the OS. (Although I'm not sure when that was exactly; OS 8? I know I ran System 7 on a 68K machine.)
Then Apple decided to start, essentially, from scratch on OS X, so they had to draw a line somewhere. Older machines are still fully supported-- you can get AppleCare contracts on old machines, and Apple is still releasing bug fixes for the last few squirmys in OS 9-- but they won't run OS X, at least officially.
Consider that the lifespan of Mac OS Classic (for lack of a better name) was 18 years, from 1984 through 2002. That means it's fair to assume that OS X will be around for about the same amount of time; there's no reason to think that it won't be. And Apple got about 7 years out of the 68K family, and the PowerPC family has been around for about 11 years so far, with no end in sight. (The PowerPC 970 from IBM proves that the PowerPC architecture has a lot of life left in it.)
So you're correct that Apple does have a history of dropping their entire customer base every so often: about once every twelve years, on average. But your assertion that a brand new machine will be unsupported in 1-2 years is-- no offense-- completely nuts.
AppleWorks is a perfectly competent office application if you don't need all the features of Office
Most people I know really only need a word processor-- personally, I mean, not for business uses where Excel rules the earth. If that's the case, you can probably get by nicely with TextEdit, which is OS X's equivalent to Microsoft's NotePad. (Actually, it's the latest incarnation of TeachText, but that's another story.)
TextEdit supports reading and writing RTF files for fully formatted text, tab stops, pagination, and so forth and so on. It's perfectly adequate for letters to grandma and such. And it's dead simple to use, and fast, even on older machines.
I remember when it came time for 666 with Intel, but all the ads I saw clearly said "667" probably because they were too scared to use a famous symbolic number from christian history/mythology.
Just for the record, Christianity is a religion. Best to refer to it as such, rather than inaccurately describing it as a history or a mythology.
But on the other subject, isn't 667 a more accurate way of describing 666-and-two-thirds megahertz, anyway? Intel and Motorola just rounded up to the nearest million hertz, rather than truncating down.
it just happens that Photoshop is just about the only benchmark Apple uses when they compare PC's to Macs
That's because, if I recall correctly, Photoshop is the single most widely used Mac application in history. In other words, more people have used and continue to use Photoshop on the Mac than any other piece of software, not counting the OS itself. On the other side of the coin, virtually nobody-- when figured as a fraction-- uses Photoshop for Windows. So it's the perfect benchmark for Mac users, and the worst possible one for PC users.
Besides, Macs have never been about being the fastest computers in the world. I have a dual 1 GHz G4-- using it right now-- and it's faster than I am, so I would never know it if it were faster still. Macs are about the overall user experience. Nobody buys a Mac-- especially a Mac laptop-- for the CPU alone.
Your post was pretty pointless, there, axxackall. It's sad that you've yet to come to terms with the fact that Mac OS X is a better operating system, by any meaningful metric, than PowerPC Linux. Go to your nearest Apple store and spend an hour or two using one of their display machines. Nobody will mind; just try it out and see all the wonderful goodness that is OS X.
My argument is that they should not be granted, because the net effect is not congruent the intentions of the patent system: software patents do not promote innovation.
Your argument is flawed because your premise is false. What evidence is there that patents on software and software methods affect industry and innovation any differently than any other sort of patents? Not "Tim O'Reilly said," mind you, but rather actual evidence? (As much as I respect Tim, his opinion is still just that: an opinion.)
Being the first to implement does not make something not obvious.
No, not being obvious makes it non-obvious. That much is... obvious. (Sorry.)
One-click shopping carts are not an obvious idea. Not now, and not in 1996. If you have a different opinion on this matter, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. But the hard evidence is in the prior art, and there isn't any. Just because an idea is simple in hindsight doesn't make it non-obvious.
I remember using Amazon's one-click shopping cart to buy some Christmas presents in November or December of 1997 or 1998. (I'm judging the year by what I remember buying, and who I bought it for, but I can't remember which of those two years it was.) When I saw it, I thought, "Hey, that's a neat idea. I've never seen anything like that before." I'm sure some people looked at it and thought, "Pff. I could have done that," but that alone isn't enough to make Amazon's patent claim unreasonable or invalid.
And there's no evidence to date that Amazon's patent has done anything to squelch innovation in electronic shopping-cart design, except in the case of disgruntled pundits who spend their time complaining about how unfair patents are instead of sitting at their drawing boards trying to come up with the next brilliant idea. But I expect these same people would be complaining about something else if it weren't for the patent issue, so I don't count them.
Exactly. Which is why the only sensible course of action in most cases is to bet on the horse that you think is most likely to stay in the race longest. Which is more likely? That Microsoft will go out of business, or that Red Hat will go out of business? Smart money's on the Fortune 100 company with $40 billion in the bank.
You're finally starting to think like a businessman.
With the transition to web services (based in India - cheapst developers) the IT industry's model will switch to a rental one.
You're confusing web services with the application service provider model. They're not the same thing at all. And the ASP model has not been particularly popular to date, so the transition to it is far from a sure thing.
It has often been said that the employees of the patent office are not qualified to evaluate whether technology patent applications are valid or not. I assert, in this case moreso even than others, that the opposite is true. In fact, technology people aren't qualified to evaluate whether technology patent applications, such as the application covering "one-click," are valid.
The key criteria for a patent grant in this case is non-obviousness. If "one-click" shopping carts were as obvious as some people say they are, there should have been a rich library of prior art. In fact, there was none. Anybody who looks at a "one-click" shopping cart will say, as Tim does, that it's a "completely trivial application of cookies." In fact, it's a simple but decidedly non-obvious application of cookies, database integration, periodic tasks, and other software components.
The "one-click" shopping cart patent is an excellent example of something that the USPTO got right.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not seeing your point. Are you saying that patents make it impossible for people to use patented technologies without a license? Well, yeah. That's the idea.
That is not, however, what this argument is about. This argument is about whether patents on software processes and methods should be granted at all. I say they should be, because they serve to promote progress and innovation. I have offered a theoretical argument to explain why this is true. Others say they shouldn't, because they stifle innovation. I have yet to hear any argument at all-- either theoretical or empirical-- to explain that position.
Saying that patents make it impossible to use patented technologies without a license has absolutely nothing to do with innovation or progress. If anything, it encourages progress, albeit in a slipshod and mostly ineffectual way, by those who wish to avoid paying license fees. These folks are forced to come up with new and different ways of accomplishing their goals. That's progress.
Are you fucking nuts? That's the single dumbest comment I've ever read at /.
Oh, I don't know. Seems like this one is even dumber.
We decided we'd rather have it "now"
I'm right there with ya. Back in August I impulse-bought-- literally!-- a dual 1 GHz G4 with 17" monitor. I love it. Of course, that was back when I hadn't been laid off by a failing employer, but you can blame that on my own clueless optimism. Hell, at least my new Mac is paid for.
1. Go to the Accounts system prefs pane; on the Login Options pane, choose the "Name and password" option.
2. Log out, then type ">console" in the user name box.
3. Ta-da.
If you can't get into that, then UNIX is just not for you, sir.
The iTunes is brilliant.
Agreed. I have a medium-sized library of MP3s, ripped from my library of about 300 CDs. iTunes tells me that my library amounts to 14.7 days of music, comprised of 4,922 songs. (Over 23 GB, if you're wondering.) The only tool I need to manage it all is iTunes. It sorts and organizes my files on disk for me, and lets me browse by artist, album, or genre. It never takes me more than about two seconds to find the precise song I'm after out of the nearly 5,000 in the library. And even with all those songs, it still launches in one bounce.
iTunes is definitely a killer app for the Mac.
Do you have a source for this info? According to the Open Group's web site, Apple has not been given permission to use the UNIX brand name. (I've heard that that's simply because they haven't asked for it, because asking for it requires that Apple pay the Open Group a certification fee that Apple doesn't feel is worth it.)
It's just a technicality. OS X is UNIX, it's just not UNIX(tm).
Do you mean Apple computers with Linux installed?
That's gotta be the worst idea I've ever heard. Generally, Apple's machines are no cheaper than AnyCo's Intel machines, and sometimes more expensive. When you buy a Mac, you're paying for a complete user experience, the most visible part of which is the OS.
If you put Linux on a Mac, you're combining expensive hardware with user-hostile software. You get the worst of both worlds!
Surely that's a combination suitable only for wealthy masochists.
No offense, but your knowledge is out of date. The G4 PowerBooks are notoriously hard to work on. Adding RAM is easy, but adding an AirPort card or replacing the hard drive requires practically skinning the whole laptop. It's a huge pain in the ass.
OS X 10.0 was really memory hungry, but 10.1 reduced that considerably. Jaguar reduced it still further. You can be perfectly happy with 128 MB if you don't try to do very many things at once. And, of course, the great thing about the VM system in OS X is that you don't constantly swap when you've got too many programs open. Earlier today I had several programs open at once-- Office, Photoshop, Maya, OmniWeb, and lots of little ones-- and I decided to kick off a session of Jedi Knight II. My machine swapped like crazy for about ten seconds while every available memory page was written to disk, and then the game fired right up and ran perfectly. When I quit, my machine swapped like crazy for another ten or fifteen seconds while the whole world got swapped back in, and I was right back where I needed to be.
-Can the new Ibook Monitor Span yet?
No. (And in the Mac world, it's not called "monitor spanning." It's simply called using multiple monitors.)
-Is the G3 going to be replaced soon in the Ibook
No.
-How much battery does a 15.x display AND a superdrive eat?
The display eats basically none at all. The PowerBook gets about 4 hours of battery life with Jaguar, plus or minus half an hour, and modulo what you're doing. If you're just word processing and whatnot and you keep the hard drive spun down most of the time, that can easily push the 5 hour mark.
Burning DVDs is sure to eat battery power, so backing up your MP3 collection on a transatlantic flight is probably not the best idea.
Absolutely. My girlfriend lugged an original blueberry iBook through medical school, a PhD, and the first year of her surgery residency... and that's just so far. She's beaten that thing like a redheaded stepchild, and hasn't had the first problem with it. It's been by far the most reliable and durable laptop I've ever seen.
Just for the record, nobody has attached the name G5 to the PowerPC 970. Might not want to confuse the two in future.
My first consideration was the iBook plus USB fdd but the price quickly shilled her.
This was the point in your post where the little alarm in my head started going off.
You can get an iBook for $1000. If your sister is a student, you can lop a bit off of that price. A built-in CDRW/DVDROM drive will cost you a few hundred bucks more. If these prices "shill" her, then you're probably not going to be able to swing a new Mac. Which is a shame, because it's really the way to go.
I'd suggest finding some way to get the $1000 iBook, but rather than springing for the combo drive, just buy one of those tiny USB keychain drives, like this one. (Not positive that link is going to work. The URL looks temporary. Try it anyway.)
These little widgets cost about $90 and hold 128 MB. If you format it FAT-- or whatever they call the DOS disk format these days-- you should be able to mount it on any Mac or PC that's equipped with USB. Easier to use and faster than a CDRW, and lots cheaper.
Your basic analysis is good, but by far the best advice would be for you to go to the nearest Apple retail store and talk to the folks there. Tell them everything you just posted here, and they'll be able to suggest the right solution for you. You'll also get the side benefit of being able to play with all the machines before you buy one. The only downside is that the new laptops probably won't be in stores for a least a week, and maybe more like two or three.
Good luck.
Granted it is not a replacement for my Dual G4 with 2GB of RAM, scads of hard drive space and 22in Cinema Display
;-)
Careful, there. Nobody likes a show-off.
I can get blah blah long list of parts for $1600.
Yes, but you have to assemble it yourself. I bought a brand new Power Mac G4 in August, and I had it up and running with all my software on it in about an hour and fifteen minutes. It hasn't even been turned off since, and I've only rebooted it twice (for 10.2.1 and again for 10.2.2).
Macs are definitely for people, like myself, who don't get any particular kick out of tinkering. If you prefer to tinker, then don't buy a Mac.
I'd say, given Apple's history of dropping their entire customer base every so often....
Apple has done that twice in the entire 25-year history of their company. First they went from the Motorola 68K architecture to the PowerPC architecture, and eventually they had to drop support for 68K processors in the OS. (Although I'm not sure when that was exactly; OS 8? I know I ran System 7 on a 68K machine.)
Then Apple decided to start, essentially, from scratch on OS X, so they had to draw a line somewhere. Older machines are still fully supported-- you can get AppleCare contracts on old machines, and Apple is still releasing bug fixes for the last few squirmys in OS 9-- but they won't run OS X, at least officially.
Consider that the lifespan of Mac OS Classic (for lack of a better name) was 18 years, from 1984 through 2002. That means it's fair to assume that OS X will be around for about the same amount of time; there's no reason to think that it won't be. And Apple got about 7 years out of the 68K family, and the PowerPC family has been around for about 11 years so far, with no end in sight. (The PowerPC 970 from IBM proves that the PowerPC architecture has a lot of life left in it.)
So you're correct that Apple does have a history of dropping their entire customer base every so often: about once every twelve years, on average. But your assertion that a brand new machine will be unsupported in 1-2 years is-- no offense-- completely nuts.
Exactly. Anybody who would go out and buy a new computer just to play a game would definitely be a moron.
AppleWorks is a perfectly competent office application if you don't need all the features of Office
Most people I know really only need a word processor-- personally, I mean, not for business uses where Excel rules the earth. If that's the case, you can probably get by nicely with TextEdit, which is OS X's equivalent to Microsoft's NotePad. (Actually, it's the latest incarnation of TeachText, but that's another story.)
TextEdit supports reading and writing RTF files for fully formatted text, tab stops, pagination, and so forth and so on. It's perfectly adequate for letters to grandma and such. And it's dead simple to use, and fast, even on older machines.
I remember when it came time for 666 with Intel, but all the ads I saw clearly said "667" probably because they were too scared to use a famous symbolic number from christian history/mythology.
Just for the record, Christianity is a religion. Best to refer to it as such, rather than inaccurately describing it as a history or a mythology.
But on the other subject, isn't 667 a more accurate way of describing 666-and-two-thirds megahertz, anyway? Intel and Motorola just rounded up to the nearest million hertz, rather than truncating down.
it just happens that Photoshop is just about the only benchmark Apple uses when they compare PC's to Macs
That's because, if I recall correctly, Photoshop is the single most widely used Mac application in history. In other words, more people have used and continue to use Photoshop on the Mac than any other piece of software, not counting the OS itself. On the other side of the coin, virtually nobody-- when figured as a fraction-- uses Photoshop for Windows. So it's the perfect benchmark for Mac users, and the worst possible one for PC users.
Besides, Macs have never been about being the fastest computers in the world. I have a dual 1 GHz G4-- using it right now-- and it's faster than I am, so I would never know it if it were faster still. Macs are about the overall user experience. Nobody buys a Mac-- especially a Mac laptop-- for the CPU alone.
What's wrong with OpenOffice?
Never used it, huh?
Your post was pretty pointless, there, axxackall. It's sad that you've yet to come to terms with the fact that Mac OS X is a better operating system, by any meaningful metric, than PowerPC Linux. Go to your nearest Apple store and spend an hour or two using one of their display machines. Nobody will mind; just try it out and see all the wonderful goodness that is OS X.
My argument is that they should not be granted, because the net effect is not congruent the intentions of the patent system: software patents do not promote innovation.
Your argument is flawed because your premise is false. What evidence is there that patents on software and software methods affect industry and innovation any differently than any other sort of patents? Not "Tim O'Reilly said," mind you, but rather actual evidence? (As much as I respect Tim, his opinion is still just that: an opinion.)
Being the first to implement does not make something not obvious.
No, not being obvious makes it non-obvious. That much is... obvious. (Sorry.)
One-click shopping carts are not an obvious idea. Not now, and not in 1996. If you have a different opinion on this matter, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. But the hard evidence is in the prior art, and there isn't any. Just because an idea is simple in hindsight doesn't make it non-obvious.
I remember using Amazon's one-click shopping cart to buy some Christmas presents in November or December of 1997 or 1998. (I'm judging the year by what I remember buying, and who I bought it for, but I can't remember which of those two years it was.) When I saw it, I thought, "Hey, that's a neat idea. I've never seen anything like that before." I'm sure some people looked at it and thought, "Pff. I could have done that," but that alone isn't enough to make Amazon's patent claim unreasonable or invalid.
And there's no evidence to date that Amazon's patent has done anything to squelch innovation in electronic shopping-cart design, except in the case of disgruntled pundits who spend their time complaining about how unfair patents are instead of sitting at their drawing boards trying to come up with the next brilliant idea. But I expect these same people would be complaining about something else if it weren't for the patent issue, so I don't count them.
Exactly. Which is why the only sensible course of action in most cases is to bet on the horse that you think is most likely to stay in the race longest. Which is more likely? That Microsoft will go out of business, or that Red Hat will go out of business? Smart money's on the Fortune 100 company with $40 billion in the bank.
You're finally starting to think like a businessman.
With the transition to web services (based in India - cheapst developers) the IT industry's model will switch to a rental one.
You're confusing web services with the application service provider model. They're not the same thing at all. And the ASP model has not been particularly popular to date, so the transition to it is far from a sure thing.
It has often been said that the employees of the patent office are not qualified to evaluate whether technology patent applications are valid or not. I assert, in this case moreso even than others, that the opposite is true. In fact, technology people aren't qualified to evaluate whether technology patent applications, such as the application covering "one-click," are valid.
The key criteria for a patent grant in this case is non-obviousness. If "one-click" shopping carts were as obvious as some people say they are, there should have been a rich library of prior art. In fact, there was none. Anybody who looks at a "one-click" shopping cart will say, as Tim does, that it's a "completely trivial application of cookies." In fact, it's a simple but decidedly non-obvious application of cookies, database integration, periodic tasks, and other software components.
The "one-click" shopping cart patent is an excellent example of something that the USPTO got right.