Funny... I thought this was half-assed BS, just like their half-assed legal maneuvers, and their half-assed products.
Come to think of it, their lawyers are doing a half-assed effort on the half-assed legal maneuvers, so is this really three-quarters assed?
The SCO Group's business plan:
1. Create half-assed product that won't sell 2. Buy rights to UNIX 3. Get bought by Linux company 4. Shed all ties to Linux and sue people for for some outlandish crap 5. ??? 6. Profit!
Actually, this "irony" of which you speak occurred back in 1995 with the Power Macintosh 6100/60. If you don't believe me, remove that funky looking heatsink that Apple used in those "fat pizza box" cases, and you will see Big Blue's logo shining right up at ya.
Now be nice. Some of us have MCSE certifications, run Microsoft servers, support Microsoft products, and read and post to Slashdot from PowerBook G4s. I am one, and so is one of my coworkers.
Oh, and we recently got our CIO (son of a career IBM employee, biggest cheerleader for OS/2 ever) to ditch his boatanchor of a ThinkPad and get a PowerBook.
Please don't file "MCSE" under "ignorant" - some of us have much broader horizons that you might expect.
Apple did make these, and I actually have one that is about four years old with a Pentium 166 on it. I call it the "PC on a Stick" because it has a chipset, processor, sound card, memory controller, DIMM slot, and other features of a x86 PC all on one big honkin' PCI card. They licensed the design to Orange Micro, who made the OrangePC and ran with it, until the product went *poof*
Here's the reason why they never went anywhere:
Why would you buy a $1800 Mac, and then buy a $500 PC Compatibility Card and share the same hard disk, etc. when you can spend $500 on an actual PC and get a different hard disk, more memory (a la more DIMM slots that one), faster processor speed (you could actually support the heat sink, as it was gravity-friendly to put it on the board, rather than hanging off a PCI card, not to mention it could be bigger for more dissapation etc.), it was upgradeable through it's own PCI bus, had it's own IDE for adding more drives, didn't use proprietary wierd drivers in your OS to interface with the Apple hardware, et. al.
If anyone ever tried to get Windows NT 4 onto one of these back in the day, they would know exactly what I am talking about. It would instantly bluescreen saying that the mass storage was inaccessible, because I'll be damned if Windows NT didn't have drivers for that bastardization of a PC inside a Mac. Go figure.
Officially, the G3 and G4 brands are trademarks of Apple. Therefore, the G5 could be a Xeon MP if Apple wanted it to be. I'm glad they don't.
When Motorola and IBM hear the term "G3", they think PPC75x. When MOT hears the term "G4" they think PPC 74xx / 75xx. Neither of these companies use the G3 / G4 terminology, because that refers to the entire architecture from Apple.
"Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical. "
Bluetooth is slow. If it was 100 time faster, it would catch on faster, becuase there would be more applications for it. With less-than-megabit speeds, the only thing you would EVER want to do is serial I/O (sync stuff, keyboards), and *maybe* a mono audio stream.
The consumer electronics industry has been eyeballing FireWire (1394) for a while. It makes for one hell of an universal interconnect between all your digital devices, rather than having coax spaghetti and 20 IR or IF devices all over the place. Instead you have one FireWire hub, going to your receiver, your DVD player, your VCR, your CD changer, and your HDTV decoder, and one remote that tells one device what to tell the others...
Apple embraced the idea of using some commodity parts. This is evidenced by the Apple / ATX PS jumper you can find on the Beige G3 motherboards (specifically the "Gossamer")
You can flip that jumper from 1-2 to 2-3 and slam your ATX supply on there, and you're juiced and ready to go!
Roaming Profiles actually were available with Windows NT Server 4.0. However, to this day, it still requires a Domain Controller to use.
I think what the author is saying is that you can have a shared NetInfo directory between workstations, and still get your home directory (a.k.a. Desktop, Library, Documents, etc.)
These figures you have stated show how undervalued the company is.
If the market cap is $5.1B, and they have $4.4B in liquid bank assets, that means the Tech and patent portfolio, "Apple" brand, outstanding accounts receivable, Plant, Property, and Equipment are only worth $700M.
Go get the stock now... the Mac OS is probably worth $500M in development and marketing alone.
As old and archaic as the interface is, my old man is still using it.
He has spreadsheets that he originally wrote on the Apple II+ in 1980, and has continually updated to the point of such huge complexity it would take weeks to remake them in a more modern OS / Application.
Even when he finally broke down and bought a Mac in 1994, he bought a//e compatibility card for it (Apple made a PDS card that you could plug into a Mac that had a//e on it, and software emulated all of the add-on cards, and you could plug a 5.25in. floppy into the back. It even had a port to plug in a joystick or paddles!) He has continued to use these spreadsheets with his original VisiCalc 1.0 8-sector diskette on that machine, even though he has since bought a PowerMac and an iBook. The good ol 33Mhz '030 based Mac with the//e card still sits proudly in his home office with the ImageWriter pin-banger next to the Epson Stylus Photo.
What's funny is that he knows he is really screwed if that disk fails - you can't copy it because of the 8-sector format, and the manual says "if the disk ever goes bad, just mail us at $address and we'll send you a new one"
I can't believe that disk hasn't become completely degaussed after the 23+ years it has been in use
I work in the IS department of an enterprise environment where Macs are used to make print advertisements (big shock there.)
Moving forward to Mac OS X, one of the big question marks we had was how to push out OS updates. Under the existing Mac OS 9 infrastructure, we would have to either try to FileWave it out if it was just some extensions, or write some gawd-awful perl script with inline applescript to do some of this stuff.
With this remote install feature, now we can use the FREE package builder that comes on the development CD, and also is included in the NetInstall tools of Mac OS X Server to make a.pkg file of anything we want to put out there (default preferences, custom scripts, aliases to pain-in-the-ass SMB shares, etc.) or use pre-existing.pkg files and spew them across the network to unsuspecting users.
I can't wait to get out from behind this firewall to get it through Software Update. If this thing is scriptable too, I think I've found my long-awaited answer to the PC guys' Tivoli deployment scheme. FOR $500, I might add.
... that this Congressman is from San Diego, the home of Qualcomm. He is doing his job, fighting for his constituency, just like I'm sure the senators and represenatives from the home states and jurisdictions for Lucent and Motorola will be saying much the same things.
BTW: MOT and LU both make GSM equipment, so the argument that GSM = EU manufacturers is completely invalid. This congressman is just saying that because his constituent (Qualcomm) only makes CDMA stuff.
You know, in warfare, technological advantage is revered, yet in entertainment, it is reviled.
Are Iraqis calling us l33t hax0rs because we use nightvision, GPS, infrared imaging, and stealth aircraft?
Probably.
How does one call another a wallhacker in Farsi or Arabic?
As a former employee that went through the transition from Diamond Multimedia to S3 and eventually to SonicBlue, and being layed off when they decided to close the communications division, I saw this happening two years ago.
Working in the Rio / Comm Division QA labs, I saw that the place to be taking these products was to converge the digital media devices you make with home networking solutions that you also make. There were a few products that made it out the doors that did this (the Dell Digital Audio Receiver and Rio Receiver), and they worked quite well; but soon after, the communications division was to be shut.
In that reorganization, I saw some incredibly talented engineers (who had been around since before Diamond had bought Supra, and were responsible for the incredible SupraFAXModem and SupraSonic lines) laid off and get instantly hired by other companies in the SW Washington / NW Oregon area, such as Sharp Labs, Logitech, and Intel. These people still work there, creating great products.
Now that the age of wireless-in-the-home and broadband networking are upon us, SonicBlue has to buy home networking equipment that they once engineered to incorporate into devices that they once had on the engineering roadmap. Due to incredible mismanagement, along with exorborant costs of moving offices, and newfound competition from the digital audio core market (thanks, Apple!) the strain was too much to bear.
Now I will finally get some form of profit from the Employee Stock Purchase Program, in the form of a failed-investment tax writeoff...
This is the correct thought pattern.
The chief complaint of people that see what they can do with Mac OS X is "well can I run $title on it?"
With one of these kiosks hitched to a fast line (NOT DSL, CABLE, OTHER RESIDENTIAL ACCESS) they could find $title and get it right then when they purchase the hardware, rather than "Hmm... I better find out if I can do that, then come back and maybe get this"
For the most part, if a customer leaves the store to do some research, they will not be coming back to make the purchase. This is a way for the customer to find an answer right now, and walk out with $title AND that shiny new G4 and cinema display. CompUSA wins, Apple wins, the software developer wins, and the software distributor wins, but more importantly, the customer wins.
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This is premium-quality BS.
Funny... I thought this was half-assed BS, just like their half-assed legal maneuvers, and their half-assed products.
Come to think of it, their lawyers are doing a half-assed effort on the half-assed legal maneuvers, so is this really three-quarters assed?
The SCO Group's business plan:
1. Create half-assed product that won't sell
2. Buy rights to UNIX
3. Get bought by Linux company
4. Shed all ties to Linux and sue people for for some outlandish crap
5. ???
6. Profit!
Unfortunately, the company that I contract for actually uses SCO products in their stores.
If that company turns into a cloud of vapor with the accompanying *poof* sound, it would make all of our jobs 10x easier.
Oh, we use AIX too, on our REAL hardware (AS/400, SP/2, RS-6000)
Actually, this "irony" of which you speak occurred back in 1995 with the Power Macintosh 6100/60. If you don't believe me, remove that funky looking heatsink that Apple used in those "fat pizza box" cases, and you will see Big Blue's logo shining right up at ya.
Replying as a resident in Oregon where we have both, I feel your pain.
Might be off topic, but the State of Washington doesn't have a property tax.
Now be nice. Some of us have MCSE certifications, run Microsoft servers, support Microsoft products, and read and post to Slashdot from PowerBook G4s. I am one, and so is one of my coworkers.
Oh, and we recently got our CIO (son of a career IBM employee, biggest cheerleader for OS/2 ever) to ditch his boatanchor of a ThinkPad and get a PowerBook.
Please don't file "MCSE" under "ignorant" - some of us have much broader horizons that you might expect.
Apple did make these, and I actually have one that is about four years old with a Pentium 166 on it. I call it the "PC on a Stick" because it has a chipset, processor, sound card, memory controller, DIMM slot, and other features of a x86 PC all on one big honkin' PCI card. They licensed the design to Orange Micro, who made the OrangePC and ran with it, until the product went *poof*
Here's the reason why they never went anywhere:
Why would you buy a $1800 Mac, and then buy a $500 PC Compatibility Card and share the same hard disk, etc. when you can spend $500 on an actual PC and get a different hard disk, more memory (a la more DIMM slots that one), faster processor speed (you could actually support the heat sink, as it was gravity-friendly to put it on the board, rather than hanging off a PCI card, not to mention it could be bigger for more dissapation etc.), it was upgradeable through it's own PCI bus, had it's own IDE for adding more drives, didn't use proprietary wierd drivers in your OS to interface with the Apple hardware, et. al.
If anyone ever tried to get Windows NT 4 onto one of these back in the day, they would know exactly what I am talking about. It would instantly bluescreen saying that the mass storage was inaccessible, because I'll be damned if Windows NT didn't have drivers for that bastardization of a PC inside a Mac. Go figure.
Officially, the G3 and G4 brands are trademarks of Apple. Therefore, the G5 could be a Xeon MP if Apple wanted it to be. I'm glad they don't.
When Motorola and IBM hear the term "G3", they think PPC75x. When MOT hears the term "G4" they think PPC 74xx / 75xx. Neither of these companies use the G3 / G4 terminology, because that refers to the entire architecture from Apple.
"Bluetooth is only now just catching on, so imagine how long it'll be before this becomes practical. "
Bluetooth is slow. If it was 100 time faster, it would catch on faster, becuase there would be more applications for it. With less-than-megabit speeds, the only thing you would EVER want to do is serial I/O (sync stuff, keyboards), and *maybe* a mono audio stream.
The consumer electronics industry has been eyeballing FireWire (1394) for a while. It makes for one hell of an universal interconnect between all your digital devices, rather than having coax spaghetti and 20 IR or IF devices all over the place. Instead you have one FireWire hub, going to your receiver, your DVD player, your VCR, your CD changer, and your HDTV decoder, and one remote that tells one device what to tell the others...
That's my kind of home automation and control.
Apple embraced the idea of using some commodity parts. This is evidenced by the Apple / ATX PS jumper you can find on the Beige G3 motherboards (specifically the "Gossamer")
You can flip that jumper from 1-2 to 2-3 and slam your ATX supply on there, and you're juiced and ready to go!
Roaming Profiles actually were available with Windows NT Server 4.0. However, to this day, it still requires a Domain Controller to use.
I think what the author is saying is that you can have a shared NetInfo directory between workstations, and still get your home directory (a.k.a. Desktop, Library, Documents, etc.)
This will go perfectly with my CompactFlash form factor Gene Sequencer!
Actually I prefer all of my dirty bombs to make the sound "KAPOW" and shake only half the windows in town.
/.-er?
-Osama Bin Laden
Now who knew that Bin Laden was a
My PDA will make noise and always be sounding the "dirty bomb" alert when I'm going to get water out of my Revigator!
Wait - treating customers like criminals is intrinsic to the computer business. Take, for example... Fry's!
These figures you have stated show how undervalued the company is.
If the market cap is $5.1B, and they have $4.4B in liquid bank assets, that means the Tech and patent portfolio, "Apple" brand, outstanding accounts receivable, Plant, Property, and Equipment are only worth $700M.
Go get the stock now... the Mac OS is probably worth $500M in development and marketing alone.
As old and archaic as the interface is, my old man is still using it.
//e compatibility card for it (Apple made a PDS card that you could plug into a Mac that had a //e on it, and software emulated all of the add-on cards, and you could plug a 5.25in. floppy into the back. It even had a port to plug in a joystick or paddles!) He has continued to use these spreadsheets with his original VisiCalc 1.0 8-sector diskette on that machine, even though he has since bought a PowerMac and an iBook. The good ol 33Mhz '030 based Mac with the //e card still sits proudly in his home office with the ImageWriter pin-banger next to the Epson Stylus Photo.
He has spreadsheets that he originally wrote on the Apple II+ in 1980, and has continually updated to the point of such huge complexity it would take weeks to remake them in a more modern OS / Application.
Even when he finally broke down and bought a Mac in 1994, he bought a
What's funny is that he knows he is really screwed if that disk fails - you can't copy it because of the 8-sector format, and the manual says "if the disk ever goes bad, just mail us at $address and we'll send you a new one"
I can't believe that disk hasn't become completely degaussed after the 23+ years it has been in use
I work in the IS department of an enterprise environment where Macs are used to make print advertisements (big shock there.)
.pkg file of anything we want to put out there (default preferences, custom scripts, aliases to pain-in-the-ass SMB shares, etc.) or use pre-existing .pkg files and spew them across the network to unsuspecting users.
Moving forward to Mac OS X, one of the big question marks we had was how to push out OS updates. Under the existing Mac OS 9 infrastructure, we would have to either try to FileWave it out if it was just some extensions, or write some gawd-awful perl script with inline applescript to do some of this stuff.
With this remote install feature, now we can use the FREE package builder that comes on the development CD, and also is included in the NetInstall tools of Mac OS X Server to make a
I can't wait to get out from behind this firewall to get it through Software Update. If this thing is scriptable too, I think I've found my long-awaited answer to the PC guys' Tivoli deployment scheme. FOR $500, I might add.
Thank you Apple!
1. Bundle music services that no one uses with cars that no one will buy
2. ???
3. Buy car manufacturer that makes good cars, and scrap ties to RIAA!!
... what does this have to do with the "Evil" bit? I mean, only four posts? Where's number 5!?!?
... that this Congressman is from San Diego, the home of Qualcomm. He is doing his job, fighting for his constituency, just like I'm sure the senators and represenatives from the home states and jurisdictions for Lucent and Motorola will be saying much the same things.
BTW: MOT and LU both make GSM equipment, so the argument that GSM = EU manufacturers is completely invalid. This congressman is just saying that because his constituent (Qualcomm) only makes CDMA stuff.
Good lord. Maybe I need to start encapsulating the sarcasm in an HTML tag so you guys KNOW WHEN THERE IS SARCASM PRESENT. sheesh.
You know, in warfare, technological advantage is revered, yet in entertainment, it is reviled. Are Iraqis calling us l33t hax0rs because we use nightvision, GPS, infrared imaging, and stealth aircraft? Probably. How does one call another a wallhacker in Farsi or Arabic?
As a former employee that went through the transition from Diamond Multimedia to S3 and eventually to SonicBlue, and being layed off when they decided to close the communications division, I saw this happening two years ago.
Working in the Rio / Comm Division QA labs, I saw that the place to be taking these products was to converge the digital media devices you make with home networking solutions that you also make. There were a few products that made it out the doors that did this (the Dell Digital Audio Receiver and Rio Receiver), and they worked quite well; but soon after, the communications division was to be shut.
In that reorganization, I saw some incredibly talented engineers (who had been around since before Diamond had bought Supra, and were responsible for the incredible SupraFAXModem and SupraSonic lines) laid off and get instantly hired by other companies in the SW Washington / NW Oregon area, such as Sharp Labs, Logitech, and Intel. These people still work there, creating great products.
Now that the age of wireless-in-the-home and broadband networking are upon us, SonicBlue has to buy home networking equipment that they once engineered to incorporate into devices that they once had on the engineering roadmap. Due to incredible mismanagement, along with exorborant costs of moving offices, and newfound competition from the digital audio core market (thanks, Apple!) the strain was too much to bear.
Now I will finally get some form of profit from the Employee Stock Purchase Program, in the form of a failed-investment tax writeoff...
This is the correct thought pattern. The chief complaint of people that see what they can do with Mac OS X is "well can I run $title on it?"
With one of these kiosks hitched to a fast line (NOT DSL, CABLE, OTHER RESIDENTIAL ACCESS) they could find $title and get it right then when they purchase the hardware, rather than "Hmm... I better find out if I can do that, then come back and maybe get this"
For the most part, if a customer leaves the store to do some research, they will not be coming back to make the purchase. This is a way for the customer to find an answer right now, and walk out with $title AND that shiny new G4 and cinema display. CompUSA wins, Apple wins, the software developer wins, and the software distributor wins, but more importantly, the customer wins.
When the going gets wierd, the wierd go pro...