If I get it right, MSIE 6 is already not available as a standalone application for MacOS - it has only a "sort of" presence as a part of the whole MSN for MacOS X package.
Do you know what condition Russia was in right after the communist revolution? They were a mostly agrarian, poor as hell, big nation. They had the one of (the?) fastest industrializations in history.
And do you know how exactly did they achieve it? Hiring American engineers and buying American licenses on everything. Soviet motor industry until late 1960's still relied on licensed American cars of 1930's, like the main limmo of the entire Eastern Block - so called "pobieda", that was actually a revamped Ford A. FORD GODDAMNED A! A vehicle that not even an illegal imigrant would drive in America in 1940's, was still a rare luxury in Russia of the late 1960's!
How the hell is that a failure of communism
This recipe was actually pretty simple:
1. Steal whatever you can from the Tzarist treasury - diamonds, oil paintings, gold, whatever has any value in hard currency
2. Got the currency? Good. Now take it and hire American engineers to build your "communist" industry
3. ???????
4. Profit? No. Because you use American technology of the 1930's in 1960's. How the hell you can compete with American technology of the present day?
5. Look into the Tzarist treasury. Damned! It's empty!
6. Qucik! Call Gorby now! Let's start some perestroika. Anyone has Lech Walesa phone number?
also during that time the standard of living of the average Russian citizen was skyrocketing
Too bad we never actually noticed that. Do you have any figures to prove that?
I am an American, I love what my country is supposed to stand for
Good for you. I am not an American. I am sometimes highly critical on American policy. But the main difference between you and me is that I actually saw communism. And I just know it does not work. As simple as that. Whatever you want to say about America - it works. Yes, yes, sometimes it works in a wrong way. Maybe not sometimes, maybe even too damned often. But it WORKS. You can't say that about communism - it "works" only as long as long there is any Tzarist treasury to loot. When it runs dry - the game is over.
Has the semi-failure of the XBox been the first high-profile dent to MS made by the consumer at large?
It was not their first market failure, and certainly not the biggest one. Windows 3.1 just by its very own name keeps the record of two products rejected by the consumers. And there was Xenix, and there were the early versions of Internet Explorer that nobody seemed to use, and there was the early MS Word for Windows, that seemed to be no serious competition to the mighty WordPerfect etc. Whatever you would say about Bill, you can't say that he easily gives up on anything.
im surprised apple has done nothing to use their music store to entice people to subscribe to.mac. although there is plenty of free music in your idisk. they could have a 10 free songs a month for.mac subscribers, or something to that effect. or maybe im just crazy.
The reason is actually pretty simple. Dot Mac is available worldwide. So far iTunes music store is available only for US residents (or - to be more precise - to holders of credit cards with billing address in the USA). This is due to licensing issues. The kind of deal you are talking about would lead to incredible legal difficulties, probably not worth the hassle. This may hovewer change at some point in the future, when iTunes music store will also be available for everyone.
I was gearing up to buy a Mac -- a 17" iMac or a 12" PowerBook, but with new chips on the horizon I think I'll hold off for a few months.
The 970 will most probably premier in the high-end machines, like PowerMac and XServe. It's highly unlikely that 17" iMac or 12" powerbook will get the new chip in the close future. Apple usually tends to differentiate its product line even by means of effectively cripplling its low end machines - like deliberate blocking of non-mirroring external video on the iBooks (technically possible for Radeon, but crippled by Apple on iBooks) or the lack of L3 cache on the 12" powerbook.
So if the machines that interest you are the iMac and 12" powerbook, you are safe to buy them now. No serious upgrade is likely for them to happen in next half year (maybe some minor speed bumps, like the recent one for iBooks). The ones that are likely to see major changes are Powermacs, and indeed I would recommend holding with purchases in their case.
I think the likely scenario is that the G3-based iBooks will be eventually ditched (there is hardly any development of this product line since more than half year), and the 12" powerbook G4 will become the new low-end of the Apple portable line; the high-end being some Mucho Macho Seventeen Incher With The Brand New Chip.
You are a member of a peaceful meeting. Someone (not you, not your friend, not a member of organization you endorse, not anyone you even know) throws a bomb. You are arrested and sentenced to death for "conspiracy with unknown person". Would you call this justice? And that is the essence of the Haymarket trial. Nobody knows who threw the bomb, and no liaisons were proven for the hanged persons. They just stood there, that was their only guilt.
Please do, but please read a little more about the American history. Maybe indeed thereare no such things as Native Americans, we all migrated here at one time or another from Eurasia. but the fact remains that one group of migrants committed the crime of genocide on the other. Maybe you had no Gulag, but you had concentration camps even before Lenin managed to say "bolshevism! sounds pretty cool for me!" (American first concentration camps were operating during miners strikes in Colorado in 1903-1904). Maybe you had no guilottine, but you used death penalty on people guilty of nothing else than having subversive political views (like the Haymarket Riot prisoners). Is it REALLY that much of a difference that you tend to fry dissidents on an electric chair rather than cut their heads off?
You are right at one point: It's amazing how fast we forget and take things out of historical context... Otherwise, would the mythos of the "America, land of the free" exist at all?
I was a Playstation afficionado for years (somehow, PS2 didn't catch my fancy - I am either too old for this, or modern consoles REALLY are too big and clumsy, compared to the natural beauty of the PSX). I loved the Playstation Dual Shock controllers. When I first heard of MacAlly iShock II game controller - which is basically a USB-equipped Dual Shock clone - I thought that this could be the game controller of my dreams.
And guess what? I don't use it. There is something about the body position (console: you sit on the floor or sofa and watch the TV; computer: you sit in front of sone desk) that facilitates the use of gamepads/controllers with console, but makes the same game controllers awkward when you try to use it with a computer. On a computer, notching matches a good mouse. Period.
Re:Why isnt this showing up in the apple section
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Why isnt this story showing up in the apple section of slashdot. Its fine that its on the front page, but it should be in the apple section as well
It could be a deliberate measure against this moron who posts "dear Father O'Day" and "I was copying a large file on my 9600" trollposts. Seems that this guy is unable to recognize an Apple-related topic if it does not have APPLE label (in large print for those kinda weak on reading).
Re:The single BEST Mac OS X Hack...
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Nothing will happen on a vanilla MacOS X - sudo will just ask for an admin's password.
When you can compile the kernel or compress a movie in 2 mins, who will really care that it can be done in 1?
Damn, I wish I had my copy of "Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" right now with me. I remember that there was a quote almost exactly the same as yours (of course, Heinlein did not mention specifically "compressing movies" or "compiling kernels", just something about calculations and miliseconds). Who says science-fiction predictions for XXI century are not accurate? Robert A. Heinlein predicted the spirit of Mac community 40 years ago:-).
Re:No matter how many times I read it...
on
More on the PowerPC 970
·
· Score: 3, Informative
it still seems weird to see IBM (creator of the PC) making chips for Apple
It's not that weird right now - their cooperation on PowerPC started almost 20 years ago. But it was weird ineed back then. I heard that on their first date, pardon, meeting, engineers of both companies wore the other company's dress code. The IBM guys came in jeans and t-shirts, the Apple guys came in suits and ties. How desperate both sides were to show each other that they have no hard feelings about past!
The PPC 970 will not really make the Macintosh competitive with modern PC's. It will make it competitive with PC's from the beginning of this year, which are not the fastest available any more, and will be even slower when compared to the machines that are available when the PPC 970 ships
"Being competitive" does not equal to 'having more computing power". Look how small is this thingy's power consumption! I guess when 970 ships, we will have similar situation as we have right now. x86 machines will consume enormous amount of power and dissipate enormous amount of heat, what usually results in this nice "quadruple augmented turbofan" sound that accompanies most PC desktops or "not enough battery life even to watch a full DVD" laptops. Not to mention that if you actually put this laptop on the top of your lap, you might get your testicles hard boiled.
And Apple will launch yet another series of slower but cool machines - both in terms of look and heat dissipation. Which actually is pretty much what we have already.
This story is so old that all it takes is to retype commentary from an old book (in this case, "Infinite Loop" by Michael S. Malone).
Apple went ino that tunnel in December 1995 (...) After 20 years of intense competition, almost every market niche in personal computing was filled. In every direction a giant company, many of them as big as Apple, squatted directly in the company's path. Mass-market a Windows clone and Compaq will crush you. Custom-build budget machines and you ran into Dell and Gateway. Laptops? IBM, Toshiba, NEC, Compaq, Hitachi and Acer had every market segment sewn up. Peripherals? Network computers? Hello Hewlett-Packard.
As we all know, Apple went out of that tunnel ignoring all the advices like "adopt x86", "allow cloning", "reduce your obscene profit margins". Jobs saved Apple selling iMacs and iBooks, computers as applish as can be (way slower than competition, overpriced yet stylish and still best-selling), and by killing the whole Apple clone bussiness (remember StarMax?). I think anyone claiming that by adaptation of x86 Apple would double its profit margins, should immediately start his own PC bussiness. If it's that easy, why don't you do this? Because Dell, Gateway, Compaq etc. would eat you for breakfast? Exactly! So why do you think Apple would fare any better on that market?
WEP is perfectly secure for a standard network, and anyone who is willing to spend 100 hours standing in my driveway just for access to a network on which everything else is passworded is simply insane.
I'm afraid he doesn't need to stand in your driveway. Are you 100% positive your Airport network cannot be accessed from any neighboring building? If it can (and I think it's quite possible, actually), then you could be vulnerable for some smartass neighborhood kid. He can wait, he can break your network on his home machine in its spare time, just like seti@home. 100 or 200 hours is not a problem for him.
My Graphite Airport Base Station is in my house. I still get the range when I'm about 50 meters from the building (yes, I did the ultimate nerdish test, walking around the property with an iBook and iChatting with a friend to see if I loose him). Unfortunately, this means that I would also catch Airport on the neighboring properties. Now, I'm not that much afraid of malicious hacker parking a big black van in front of my house, but actually if some neighbor kid would turn out to be a script kiddie, I'd be a dead duck.
To make it worse, the voice acting and writing were awful.
If I remember correctly, those cheap bastards "hired" for free their friends and relatives as unpaid actors. The mean b**ch who is on top of the whole conspiracy in the game is a mother of one of the authors, and aptly named Alfred Wooden is someone's father. Indeed, their acting is both mean and wooden. If this won't be improved in MP2, guys won't see my hard-earned money.
Having divorced parents really sucks. I hope that you have (had?) an easier time with it than I've had. My parents divorced when I was three and they've each been stressing me to hate the other ever since. My brother (not the one above) still has to deal with it.
But then again, it made us all nerds. Maybe it was worth it?;-)
(is there such a thing as "smiley denoting a very melancholic smile, somewhere between Humphrey Bogart and Woody Allen"?)
There is a major flaw in your reasoning, and I will try to demonstrate it:
If I chose open source software I download a free copy (...) If I chose proprietary software I buy a copy
My point is that the person who actually furbishes the office rarely purchases the software himself, and it's hardly possible that he/she will actually download anything. In a typical case, he/she orders it to a third company, as he/she does it with telephones, plumbing, eletrical wiring etc. So you ALWAYS hire a subcontractor to do all this. A part of the subcontractor fee will probably go to foreign companies. That's inevitable. But if the "foreign included" solution will be cheaper than the "foreign not-included" solution, why not choose the first one? After all, the whole idea of free market is based on that. So the only question is whether state instutitions choose the truly cheaper (=with lower TCO) solution. Law should force them to do this, but in my opinion law should be blind on the proprietary/non-proprietary software question just as it should be blind on the racial/gender/religion etc. issues.
I am "sorry" to say this (*), but there is really something fundamental about people that these tests do differentiate.
Agreed. But what is it, exactly? Is it your ability to achieve high social status? Definitely not, just look at some Fortune 500 executives or - as someone correctly pointed - George Dubya. Is it your ability to be a True Rocket Scientist Like The Eggheads From Old Sci-Fi Flicks? Neither, many famous inventors and scientific geniuses failed miserably in standardized tests.
Tests like SAT usually fail to measure the ability of thinking "out of the box", finding uncommon solutions (when you find an uncommon solution to a SAT question your answer is still wrong, even if you can well argue on that), transcending stereotypes etc.
Apple should offer exactly what they are good at: Integration, ease of use, usability, service. (...) I can't sell apples, but at least I get my oranges sold.
I can drink to that. But this is a slightly different topic - dot Mac is all about integration and ease of use. So if you just want to launch any WebDAV server, I don't hold anything against that. I'll just say that you're not offering "dot Mac alternative", you just offer some storage space by WebDAV.
I think Apple would be right to respond by increasing their value, whether it be via quality, reliability, service, price, or features.
So they would have to develop iSync (et al) for peanuts, and you would just "compete" by offering a cheaper WebDAV service? Do you think this would be a fair deal?
It seems there is an opportunity for a third party to establish a competitor to.Mac
Hardly. Remember that Apple does not give away iTunes, iPhoto, iSync and iOther iStuff for free because it's such a nice company. Basically they do it to promote their products, including dot Mac. If you launch this kind of "competition", Apple will sue your shoes off. And I think they'd be right about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what this means for IE on the Mac?
If I get it right, MSIE 6 is already not available as a standalone application for MacOS - it has only a "sort of" presence as a part of the whole MSN for MacOS X package.
Do you know what condition Russia was in right after the communist revolution? They were a mostly agrarian, poor as hell, big nation. They had the one of (the?) fastest industrializations in history.
And do you know how exactly did they achieve it? Hiring American engineers and buying American licenses on everything. Soviet motor industry until late 1960's still relied on licensed American cars of 1930's, like the main limmo of the entire Eastern Block - so called "pobieda", that was actually a revamped Ford A. FORD GODDAMNED A! A vehicle that not even an illegal imigrant would drive in America in 1940's, was still a rare luxury in Russia of the late 1960's!
How the hell is that a failure of communism
This recipe was actually pretty simple:
1. Steal whatever you can from the Tzarist treasury - diamonds, oil paintings, gold, whatever has any value in hard currency
2. Got the currency? Good. Now take it and hire American engineers to build your "communist" industry
3. ???????
4. Profit? No. Because you use American technology of the 1930's in 1960's. How the hell you can compete with American technology of the present day?
5. Look into the Tzarist treasury. Damned! It's empty!
6. Qucik! Call Gorby now! Let's start some perestroika. Anyone has Lech Walesa phone number?
also during that time the standard of living of the average Russian citizen was skyrocketing
Too bad we never actually noticed that. Do you have any figures to prove that?
I am an American, I love what my country is supposed to stand for
Good for you. I am not an American. I am sometimes highly critical on American policy. But the main difference between you and me is that I actually saw communism. And I just know it does not work. As simple as that. Whatever you want to say about America - it works. Yes, yes, sometimes it works in a wrong way. Maybe not sometimes, maybe even too damned often. But it WORKS. You can't say that about communism - it "works" only as long as long there is any Tzarist treasury to loot. When it runs dry - the game is over.
LOTR as a musical? Who wants to see that?
Is it a musical? Is it on the London West End? Then the answer is obvious: Japanese tourists.
Has the semi-failure of the XBox been the first high-profile dent to MS made by the consumer at large?
It was not their first market failure, and certainly not the biggest one. Windows 3.1 just by its very own name keeps the record of two products rejected by the consumers. And there was Xenix, and there were the early versions of Internet Explorer that nobody seemed to use, and there was the early MS Word for Windows, that seemed to be no serious competition to the mighty WordPerfect etc. Whatever you would say about Bill, you can't say that he easily gives up on anything.
im surprised apple has done nothing to use their music store to entice people to subscribe to .mac. although there is plenty of free music in your idisk. they could have a 10 free songs a month for .mac subscribers, or something to that effect. or maybe im just crazy.
The reason is actually pretty simple. Dot Mac is available worldwide. So far iTunes music store is available only for US residents (or - to be more precise - to holders of credit cards with billing address in the USA). This is due to licensing issues. The kind of deal you are talking about would lead to incredible legal difficulties, probably not worth the hassle. This may hovewer change at some point in the future, when iTunes music store will also be available for everyone.
I was gearing up to buy a Mac -- a 17" iMac or a 12" PowerBook, but with new chips on the horizon I think I'll hold off for a few months.
The 970 will most probably premier in the high-end machines, like PowerMac and XServe. It's highly unlikely that 17" iMac or 12" powerbook will get the new chip in the close future. Apple usually tends to differentiate its product line even by means of effectively cripplling its low end machines - like deliberate blocking of non-mirroring external video on the iBooks (technically possible for Radeon, but crippled by Apple on iBooks) or the lack of L3 cache on the 12" powerbook.
So if the machines that interest you are the iMac and 12" powerbook, you are safe to buy them now. No serious upgrade is likely for them to happen in next half year (maybe some minor speed bumps, like the recent one for iBooks). The ones that are likely to see major changes are Powermacs, and indeed I would recommend holding with purchases in their case.
I think the likely scenario is that the G3-based iBooks will be eventually ditched (there is hardly any development of this product line since more than half year), and the 12" powerbook G4 will become the new low-end of the Apple portable line; the high-end being some Mucho Macho Seventeen Incher With The Brand New Chip.
You are a member of a peaceful meeting. Someone (not you, not your friend, not a member of organization you endorse, not anyone you even know) throws a bomb. You are arrested and sentenced to death for "conspiracy with unknown person". Would you call this justice? And that is the essence of the Haymarket trial. Nobody knows who threw the bomb, and no liaisons were proven for the hanged persons. They just stood there, that was their only guilt.
I could go on and on.
Please do, but please read a little more about the American history. Maybe indeed thereare no such things as Native Americans, we all migrated here at one time or another from Eurasia. but the fact remains that one group of migrants committed the crime of genocide on the other. Maybe you had no Gulag, but you had concentration camps even before Lenin managed to say "bolshevism! sounds pretty cool for me!" (American first concentration camps were operating during miners strikes in Colorado in 1903-1904). Maybe you had no guilottine, but you used death penalty on people guilty of nothing else than having subversive political views (like the Haymarket Riot prisoners). Is it REALLY that much of a difference that you tend to fry dissidents on an electric chair rather than cut their heads off?
You are right at one point: It's amazing how fast we forget and take things out of historical context... Otherwise, would the mythos of the "America, land of the free" exist at all?
I was a Playstation afficionado for years (somehow, PS2 didn't catch my fancy - I am either too old for this, or modern consoles REALLY are too big and clumsy, compared to the natural beauty of the PSX). I loved the Playstation Dual Shock controllers. When I first heard of MacAlly iShock II game controller - which is basically a USB-equipped Dual Shock clone - I thought that this could be the game controller of my dreams.
And guess what? I don't use it. There is something about the body position (console: you sit on the floor or sofa and watch the TV; computer: you sit in front of sone desk) that facilitates the use of gamepads/controllers with console, but makes the same game controllers awkward when you try to use it with a computer. On a computer, notching matches a good mouse. Period.
Why isnt this story showing up in the apple section of slashdot. Its fine that its on the front page, but it should be in the apple section as well
It could be a deliberate measure against this moron who posts "dear Father O'Day" and "I was copying a large file on my 9600" trollposts. Seems that this guy is unable to recognize an Apple-related topic if it does not have APPLE label (in large print for those kinda weak on reading).
Nothing will happen on a vanilla MacOS X - sudo will just ask for an admin's password.
When you can compile the kernel or compress a movie in 2 mins, who will really care that it can be done in 1?
:-).
Damn, I wish I had my copy of "Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" right now with me. I remember that there was a quote almost exactly the same as yours (of course, Heinlein did not mention specifically "compressing movies" or "compiling kernels", just something about calculations and miliseconds). Who says science-fiction predictions for XXI century are not accurate? Robert A. Heinlein predicted the spirit of Mac community 40 years ago
it still seems weird to see IBM (creator of the PC) making chips for Apple
It's not that weird right now - their cooperation on PowerPC started almost 20 years ago. But it was weird ineed back then. I heard that on their first date, pardon, meeting, engineers of both companies wore the other company's dress code. The IBM guys came in jeans and t-shirts, the Apple guys came in suits and ties. How desperate both sides were to show each other that they have no hard feelings about past!
The PPC 970 will not really make the Macintosh competitive with modern PC's. It will make it competitive with PC's from the beginning of this year, which are not the fastest available any more, and will be even slower when compared to the machines that are available when the PPC 970 ships
"Being competitive" does not equal to 'having more computing power". Look how small is this thingy's power consumption! I guess when 970 ships, we will have similar situation as we have right now. x86 machines will consume enormous amount of power and dissipate enormous amount of heat, what usually results in this nice "quadruple augmented turbofan" sound that accompanies most PC desktops or "not enough battery life even to watch a full DVD" laptops. Not to mention that if you actually put this laptop on the top of your lap, you might get your testicles hard boiled.
And Apple will launch yet another series of slower but cool machines - both in terms of look and heat dissipation. Which actually is pretty much what we have already.
This story is so old that all it takes is to retype commentary from an old book (in this case, "Infinite Loop" by Michael S. Malone).
Apple went ino that tunnel in December 1995 (...) After 20 years of intense competition, almost every market niche in personal computing was filled. In every direction a giant company, many of them as big as Apple, squatted directly in the company's path. Mass-market a Windows clone and Compaq will crush you. Custom-build budget machines and you ran into Dell and Gateway. Laptops? IBM, Toshiba, NEC, Compaq, Hitachi and Acer had every market segment sewn up. Peripherals? Network computers? Hello Hewlett-Packard.
As we all know, Apple went out of that tunnel ignoring all the advices like "adopt x86", "allow cloning", "reduce your obscene profit margins". Jobs saved Apple selling iMacs and iBooks, computers as applish as can be (way slower than competition, overpriced yet stylish and still best-selling), and by killing the whole Apple clone bussiness (remember StarMax?). I think anyone claiming that by adaptation of x86 Apple would double its profit margins, should immediately start his own PC bussiness. If it's that easy, why don't you do this? Because Dell, Gateway, Compaq etc. would eat you for breakfast? Exactly! So why do you think Apple would fare any better on that market?
WEP is perfectly secure for a standard network, and anyone who is willing to spend 100 hours standing in my driveway just for access to a network on which everything else is passworded is simply insane.
I'm afraid he doesn't need to stand in your driveway. Are you 100% positive your Airport network cannot be accessed from any neighboring building? If it can (and I think it's quite possible, actually), then you could be vulnerable for some smartass neighborhood kid. He can wait, he can break your network on his home machine in its spare time, just like seti@home. 100 or 200 hours is not a problem for him.
Considering most Airports are at home.
My Graphite Airport Base Station is in my house. I still get the range when I'm about 50 meters from the building (yes, I did the ultimate nerdish test, walking around the property with an iBook and iChatting with a friend to see if I loose him). Unfortunately, this means that I would also catch Airport on the neighboring properties. Now, I'm not that much afraid of malicious hacker parking a big black van in front of my house, but actually if some neighbor kid would turn out to be a script kiddie, I'd be a dead duck.
To make it worse, the voice acting and writing were awful.
If I remember correctly, those cheap bastards "hired" for free their friends and relatives as unpaid actors. The mean b**ch who is on top of the whole conspiracy in the game is a mother of one of the authors, and aptly named Alfred Wooden is someone's father. Indeed, their acting is both mean and wooden. If this won't be improved in MP2, guys won't see my hard-earned money.
Having divorced parents really sucks. I hope that you have (had?) an easier time with it than I've had. My parents divorced when I was three and they've each been stressing me to hate the other ever since. My brother (not the one above) still has to deal with it.
;-)
But then again, it made us all nerds. Maybe it was worth it?
(is there such a thing as "smiley denoting a very melancholic smile, somewhere between Humphrey Bogart and Woody Allen"?)
There is a major flaw in your reasoning, and I will try to demonstrate it:
If I chose open source software I download a free copy (...) If I chose proprietary software I buy a copy
My point is that the person who actually furbishes the office rarely purchases the software himself, and it's hardly possible that he/she will actually download anything. In a typical case, he/she orders it to a third company, as he/she does it with telephones, plumbing, eletrical wiring etc. So you ALWAYS hire a subcontractor to do all this. A part of the subcontractor fee will probably go to foreign companies. That's inevitable. But if the "foreign included" solution will be cheaper than the "foreign not-included" solution, why not choose the first one? After all, the whole idea of free market is based on that. So the only question is whether state instutitions choose the truly cheaper (=with lower TCO) solution. Law should force them to do this, but in my opinion law should be blind on the proprietary/non-proprietary software question just as it should be blind on the racial/gender/religion etc. issues.
I am "sorry" to say this (*), but there is really something fundamental about people that these tests do differentiate.
Agreed. But what is it, exactly? Is it your ability to achieve high social status? Definitely not, just look at some Fortune 500 executives or - as someone correctly pointed - George Dubya. Is it your ability to be a True Rocket Scientist Like The Eggheads From Old Sci-Fi Flicks? Neither, many famous inventors and scientific geniuses failed miserably in standardized tests.
Tests like SAT usually fail to measure the ability of thinking "out of the box", finding uncommon solutions (when you find an uncommon solution to a SAT question your answer is still wrong, even if you can well argue on that), transcending stereotypes etc.
Give me a break, people -- standardized tests measure *something* well, but we're not sure what.
Standardized tests measure very well the ability to solve standardized tests. The question is - can they measure anything else?
Apple should offer exactly what they are good at: Integration, ease of use, usability, service. (...) I can't sell apples, but at least I get my oranges sold.
I can drink to that. But this is a slightly different topic - dot Mac is all about integration and ease of use. So if you just want to launch any WebDAV server, I don't hold anything against that. I'll just say that you're not offering "dot Mac alternative", you just offer some storage space by WebDAV.
I think Apple would be right to respond by increasing their value, whether it be via quality, reliability, service, price, or features.
So they would have to develop iSync (et al) for peanuts, and you would just "compete" by offering a cheaper WebDAV service? Do you think this would be a fair deal?
It seems there is an opportunity for a third party to establish a competitor to .Mac
Hardly. Remember that Apple does not give away iTunes, iPhoto, iSync and iOther iStuff for free because it's such a nice company. Basically they do it to promote their products, including dot Mac. If you launch this kind of "competition", Apple will sue your shoes off. And I think they'd be right about it.