As a matter of fact, I do. I lost interest in Apple desktops since discontinuation of iMac G3's. All Mac-branded desktops since then were just too loud for my taste (that included both iMac G4 and G5, they just changed from loud to even louder). Mac Mini again runs just whisper quiet, just as my G3 iBook. However, there's a rule of thumb that you should never purchase equipment that will be later described as "revision A" - so I keep on waiting for the first "rev. B" Mac Mini with my purchase. I just hope it will meet minimum requirements for Doom 3 (the original minis were just a bit too weak).
Re:My iBook died two months ago...
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Unless these are Intel machines, I won't buy. Sorry, I don't want to invest in a dying platform. I'm no Intel fan (more an AMD fan, and I loved the PowerPC), but buying a Gx Mac now is thrown away money. Whatever Steve says, I don't believe that binaries will stay Intel/PowerPC for very long.
Well, let's assume they won't stay Intel/PowerPC for more than 5 years. So what? Your 2005 machine will have hard time running 2010 software anyway - Intel/PowerPC switch has nothing to do with it. You won't room "Doom III" or even MacOS 10.4 with all features on a '2000 iBook.
Why do I assume 5 years period? I estimate it from similar situation with 68k/PowerPC switch. The first PowerPC Macs were introduced in spring 1994. The last 68k Macs were discontinued in spring 1996. So it was two years of dual CPU hardware - and further two years when software ran on both CPUs (Apple dropped 68k support in MacOS in 1998). Mactels are not to be expected before 2006. This gives me this 1+2+2 formula. Of course, it's just a guess but the bottom line is that every platform is a dying platform - no matter what you buy now, it will be obsolete in 5 years, anyway...
Surely you could at least just reformat the harddrive?
Throwing out the whole PC seems a bit excessive.
In fact, for Average Joe it can be quite a good solution - provided that the replacement computer is a Mac instead of just another Wintel. Seriously, if you use Windows and you are just a person with no technical understanding of computers, spyware will inevitably return.
1. With the next generation of consoles becoming nothing more than computers, what becomes the purpose of having two separate machines? Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?
I think I'm fairly close to being the ideal target consumer for consoles - owning the original PSX (now defunct), Dreamcast and PS2 (and definitely about to buy either PS3 or next XBox). I am also a typical suburban father (who also enjoys techno-gagdets) with three sons (who enjoy them even more). For me, the purpose of having separate machines is obvious: console gaming is always done in the living room and it is always more or less a social phenomenon. Personal computer gaming is also present in my house, but it is - as the name suggests - exactly personal. That's how I see the difference and the purpose of owning separate copies of - say - "Tomb Raider" for the computer and the console.
Poland is also one of the most populous Eastern Europe countries so it's hardly surprising that they were the first to break the 1,000,000 lines target.
I wonder to what extent it can be caused by dire housing conditions in Poland. When you have a 10-pax family crowded in one 2-bedroom flat (if you think it's too far-fetched, you've obviously never been to Poland), you get already 10 persons with broadband internet if you just connect this one household. In Scandinavia, you might require 5 DSL lines to achieve the same goal...
is there anywhere I can register a company and employ myself to avoid it? E.g. If I create a company based in the Netherlands Antilles (sic?) will my company still be affected by this legislation?
You can avoid it only as long as your company would not enter European or American market. Enter them and you are bound by their IP law.
Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
It's really easier than you think - it's all about dilution of responsibility. During the Vietnam War someone noted that while in theory nobody would accept burning children alive, some children are being burnt alive due to decisions made in a long chain of command where everyone is responsible for just a tiny bit of the whole process - from workers in plant making napalm bombs, to the pilot who is "just following orders", to Robert McNamara, who deals just with abstract figures, maps, tables etc. So you would be just the guy who draws an arrow on the map. Or the guy who is just pressing the button. In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
The thing is, there was an article on here yesterday about a sub-$300 computer...hardware = commodity, and Apple will only be able to squeeze a higher cost out of Mac fans for so long. I don't think the margins are $1k on hardware when the laptops retail for $1k...
Yes, they have as obscene margins on high-end Powermacs. From the fact that there are sub $5000 cars you should not deduct that other makers cannot sell cars with margins higher than $10000 - it's all just question of how well you position your brand versus the others. Hardware is commodity just as shirts or cars, but there will always be demand for designer shirts or flashy cars. I guess Apple will continue trying to exploit this segment, leaving the sub $300 market to computer equivalents of Fiat and alike.
Apple needs no pathway to profit - it is profitable as a hardware company. They need software only as a selling point for their hardware. Releasing MacOS X compatible with standard non-brand PC's would undermine their hardware sales - and it would be a pathway to ginormous losses like they had in 1997 and 1998, when they allowed cloning. They are profitable since then precisely because Jobs killed clones. Do you seriously believe he did it only to reintroduce Mac cloning ten years later?
There's much irony in the fact that in his heroic years, Disney used to be a victim of intellectual property rights abuse. First, he was "outlawyered" by his coworker Charles Mintz who basically stole rights to Oswald, The Lucky Rabbit, leaving Disney seemingly without any chance. To get out of this predicament, Disney had to hastily invent another character and thus Mickey was born. But even then, major Hollywood studios have had a virtual monopoly on sound and Disney had no option but use a patent-infringing system known as Cinephone to create the first Mickey Mouse cartoon.
One might expect that being a victim of abuse, Disney should never be abusive to the others. However, in real life it's almost always the opposite. When you are a victim, you don't dream about the perfect world, where nobody is a victim - you dream of the world where YOU are no longer a victim. I think this could partially explain this company's attitude to patents, copyright and trademark. "There was no mercy for me - why should I have it now for anyone?"
Seriously, I might send a Linux user a nice shell script that wipes his home folder; if he's an idiot and chmods it in order to run it and *does* run it and loses all of his files, does that make Linux less secure? Or does that make such user an idiot?
The golden rule of ergonomics is that the user is always right, even if he's wrong. If 90% of all users keep repeating the same mistake, then you have faulty user interface (bad design, flawed concept etc.). It should be redesigned - and bitching about "user stupidity" is nothing but common excuse for stupid designers.
Better AI: do you really want it?
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
While I generally agree with the author's complain, I can recommend him a game with quite decent enemy AI: Operation Flashpoint. However, this is also a good example why too good enemy AI can be bad for gameplay. In Flashpoint, you can really be killed by Russian sniper or sneaking soldier just behind your back - but it's as exciting as getting blue screen of death when playing. You just die - and that's it. Personally, I found it surprisingly boring and quite happily returned to totally unrealistic, AI-foolish "Max Payne 2".
I realize that decoding Ogg Vorbis takes a bit more horsepower than mp3, but current iPods should be more than capable.
What makes you so sure? People who develop Linux for iPod tried to implement Ogg Vorbis on iPod and they claim it is not possible, at least not in real time (but probably this is what you mean). You can boot Linux kernel on iPod, but if you try to use it to play OGGs you get - what they nicely describe - "about 80% of real time". If you can do it in 100%, please join their effort.
Though it should be pointed out that Apple has already changed processor architecture once, and made it completely transparent to the end-user.
Have you been that end-user in mid-1990's? Apple indeed has made some enormous effort to make it transparent-ish enough, but I doubt that any Mac user with first hand experience would call it "completely transparent". Some applications were available as "fat binaries", but some were distributed as "68k" and "PPC" separately. Some old games of that era refused to run in the new environment (and native PPC ports never came). My old Lucas Arts adventure games are still on my bookshelf, but I can't play them anymore on my new Macs...
The FSF are denigrated as communists, yet they emphasize the free as in freedom of GNU/Linux constantly. It is ironic that the real communists want to use GNU/Linux because it is free as in beer.
There's no irony, there's no contradiction. For example, Friedrich Engels described communist revolution as "ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom". In history of totalitarianisms, there never was a single one ideology that would openly reject "freedom". All of them rather tried to redefine "freedom" to fit their scheme, instead. I must say that Stallman's way of thinking that "this is not a free license, because it does not PROHIBIT something", somewhat resembles me the same phenomenon. I would rather hear "think free as in lack of prohibitions" instead of "think free this, not free that".
I wouldn't wanna be left in space knowing I have X days of oxigen left... very stressfull...
Bad news: you do. You live on a spaceship called "Planet Earth" whose primary oxigen generator is known as "Rainforest". It's ability of producing oxygen is decaying. From this decay you could calculate your X. Scared? You bloody well should be.
In previous episode of this space opera series, we have seen how attempts to repair "Rainforest" by the brave crew of "Planet Earth" using "Kyoto Agreement" failed due to actions of certain interstellar villain named "Bushadministration". Stay with us for the next episode!
You are aware that when you buy a PS3, you don't need to throw your old console into the trash, right?
Well, the clutter of devices is never really a good idea in your living room (or the room where you keep your main TV-set). For a certain period of time, my PSX cohabitated with my Dreamcast and I don't have good memories of that period. Besides, consoles die - my old PSX is now in need of laser replacement that probably will never come, anyway, as it is beyond any economical justification so one way or another it will find its way to the trash.
I hope they either provide a way to connect old PS2 controllers (bluetooth device with controller ports?) or release a 'classic' controller identical to PS2 model as option.
Since it is supposed to be - quoting TFA - "backward compatible all the way to the original PlayStation" - it will be obviously possible. Backwards compatibility was the key factor for me to chose PS2 instead of XBox - I just would miss Syphon Filter and my kids would miss Crash Bandicoot games too much to scrap all our old collection of our favorite games. PS2 even reads PSX memory cards, so we could move even our saved game profiles. I hope this will be possible with PS3 too. If it will - and it looks like it will - then Microsoft has nothing to offer me. Again.
guess what, RMS is the reason why linux exists and why we are able to use it productively. he's the single most important reason as to why we still have open sourcecode at all.
Not true. The single most important reason why we have open source code was "consent decree" from 1956, when Justice Department agreed to drop charges based on Sherman Antitrust Law against AT&T in exchange for compulsory licensing of all technologies developed by AT&T to American public for "nominal fee". When Bell Labs - part of the AT&T empire - developed Unix, they were obliged to supply source code to basically anyone who asked. That's how the open source Unix culture was born. RMS - with all due respect - has joined it quite later, when it was already florishing.
Was their some technical reason for Microsoft going with Unix early on, or was it a matter of preference or prejudice?
Frankly, this question puzzles me as well. Technically, we could have the era of contemporary Windows XP/KDE/GNOME/MacOS X (Unix-ish or at least Posix-ish home OS'es for Average Joe) some fifteen years before, if only Apple could see earlier that the original MacOS development is a dead-end street... just as the 'non-NT' Windows family is. I think in terms of Steve vs Bill approach, it was indeed largely a matter of preference being prejudice. Steve was a college dropout and he was always showing his "academia fetish" (even now, look to what extent Apple wants to be the "campus company" - I really doubt if it's just a matter of marketing). From what I've read about it, it was not even that he "looked at Unix" - he looked starry eyed at university guys and asked them what would they want to have on their desktop computers. That's why got involved with Avadis Tevanian, developing the Mach/BSD branch of the Unix family, and thus NeXT, thus MacOS X etc.
Gates, on the other hand, has never had any other fetish than just corporate power struggles. That's why he was little interested in "Unix culture" or BSD. He knew that there is some potential in Unix, but instead of talking to long-haired bearded weirdos from the academia, he talked to SCO, because he wanted to have corporate-like solution for corporations (with hopeful deal with the IBM that eventually failed). However, the corporate approach to Unix failed and Bill abandoned Unix entirely, even as a server option - and begun developing the NT family.
So, in my opinion, the key factor indeed were personal fetishes and prejudices of Bill and Steve. Bill had a fetish of coporate takeovers, so he tried Unix "the corporate way" - AT&T -> SCO -> Microsoft -> (hopefully) IBM. Steve had a campus fetish, so he tried Unix the campus way: Berkeley -> Carnegie-Melon (Mach) -> Virginia Tech (MOX cluster). Somewhow, the latter seems to be the right path to develop Unix, and the former seems just to be repeating the same mistake again and again...
Obviously going after Apple's iPod world with the line "Windows powered software & devices".
You must be surely joking. Windows-compatible - yes, that's a good selling point. But Windows-powered? Even among Windows users - or even people who are actively anti-Linux or anti-Apple - nobody really advocates virtues of Windows as such. The key virtues are abundance of software and great hardware support (and then again, even the most pro-Linux or pro-Apple guys cannot deny them). But there is no positive brand association like "it is Windows powered, so it must be good", while you have that with Linux ("it runs Linux - so it must be rock stable!") or Apple ("it's made by Apple, so it will be probably easy to use!"). I would even say that Microsoft logo is already more a burden than advantage. XBox was not really a stunning success, especially when you consider the money they pumped into trying to promote it. Indeed, they still have the money, but the whole empire is just built around Windows (there would be no success for Internet Explorer if it wasn't bundled with Windows etc.). And they seem to have problems even with this very foundation of their power - Longhorn might be Microsoft's Copland (footnote: failed OS that Apple was promising for years and never delivered, what almost killed the company).
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I've got my money ready. Do you?
As a matter of fact, I do. I lost interest in Apple desktops since discontinuation of iMac G3's. All Mac-branded desktops since then were just too loud for my taste (that included both iMac G4 and G5, they just changed from loud to even louder). Mac Mini again runs just whisper quiet, just as my G3 iBook. However, there's a rule of thumb that you should never purchase equipment that will be later described as "revision A" - so I keep on waiting for the first "rev. B" Mac Mini with my purchase. I just hope it will meet minimum requirements for Doom 3 (the original minis were just a bit too weak).
Unless these are Intel machines, I won't buy. Sorry, I don't want to invest in a dying platform. I'm no Intel fan (more an AMD fan, and I loved the PowerPC), but buying a Gx Mac now is thrown away money. Whatever Steve says, I don't believe that binaries will stay Intel/PowerPC for very long.
Well, let's assume they won't stay Intel/PowerPC for more than 5 years. So what? Your 2005 machine will have hard time running 2010 software anyway - Intel/PowerPC switch has nothing to do with it. You won't room "Doom III" or even MacOS 10.4 with all features on a '2000 iBook.
Why do I assume 5 years period? I estimate it from similar situation with 68k/PowerPC switch. The first PowerPC Macs were introduced in spring 1994. The last 68k Macs were discontinued in spring 1996. So it was two years of dual CPU hardware - and further two years when software ran on both CPUs (Apple dropped 68k support in MacOS in 1998). Mactels are not to be expected before 2006. This gives me this 1+2+2 formula. Of course, it's just a guess but the bottom line is that every platform is a dying platform - no matter what you buy now, it will be obsolete in 5 years, anyway...
Surely you could at least just reformat the harddrive? Throwing out the whole PC seems a bit excessive.
In fact, for Average Joe it can be quite a good solution - provided that the replacement computer is a Mac instead of just another Wintel. Seriously, if you use Windows and you are just a person with no technical understanding of computers, spyware will inevitably return.
Why is this even on Slashdot? Harry Potter is just an outdated fad now.
Definitely - only for nerds it could be stuff that matters anything. Oh, wait...
1. With the next generation of consoles becoming nothing more than computers, what becomes the purpose of having two separate machines? Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?
I think I'm fairly close to being the ideal target consumer for consoles - owning the original PSX (now defunct), Dreamcast and PS2 (and definitely about to buy either PS3 or next XBox). I am also a typical suburban father (who also enjoys techno-gagdets) with three sons (who enjoy them even more). For me, the purpose of having separate machines is obvious: console gaming is always done in the living room and it is always more or less a social phenomenon. Personal computer gaming is also present in my house, but it is - as the name suggests - exactly personal. That's how I see the difference and the purpose of owning separate copies of - say - "Tomb Raider" for the computer and the console.
Poland is also one of the most populous Eastern Europe countries so it's hardly surprising that they were the first to break the 1,000,000 lines target.
I wonder to what extent it can be caused by dire housing conditions in Poland. When you have a 10-pax family crowded in one 2-bedroom flat (if you think it's too far-fetched, you've obviously never been to Poland), you get already 10 persons with broadband internet if you just connect this one household. In Scandinavia, you might require 5 DSL lines to achieve the same goal...
is there anywhere I can register a company and employ myself to avoid it? E.g. If I create a company based in the Netherlands Antilles (sic?) will my company still be affected by this legislation?
You can avoid it only as long as your company would not enter European or American market. Enter them and you are bound by their IP law.
Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
It's really easier than you think - it's all about dilution of responsibility. During the Vietnam War someone noted that while in theory nobody would accept burning children alive, some children are being burnt alive due to decisions made in a long chain of command where everyone is responsible for just a tiny bit of the whole process - from workers in plant making napalm bombs, to the pilot who is "just following orders", to Robert McNamara, who deals just with abstract figures, maps, tables etc. So you would be just the guy who draws an arrow on the map. Or the guy who is just pressing the button. In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
Actually, he died 3 years ago having lived probably longer than you or me: he was 95.
Isn't there some sort of lawsuit you can bring against the patent office to force them to do their job?
:)
I heard of a procedure called "ballot". Time to use it for this purpose, perhaps?
The thing is, there was an article on here yesterday about a sub-$300 computer...hardware = commodity, and Apple will only be able to squeeze a higher cost out of Mac fans for so long. I don't think the margins are $1k on hardware when the laptops retail for $1k...
Yes, they have as obscene margins on high-end Powermacs. From the fact that there are sub $5000 cars you should not deduct that other makers cannot sell cars with margins higher than $10000 - it's all just question of how well you position your brand versus the others. Hardware is commodity just as shirts or cars, but there will always be demand for designer shirts or flashy cars. I guess Apple will continue trying to exploit this segment, leaving the sub $300 market to computer equivalents of Fiat and alike.
The thing is that you make more profit when you sell hardware box with $1000 margin rather than when you sell 10 boxes of OS for $50 retail.
Pathway to Apple Profit?
Apple needs no pathway to profit - it is profitable as a hardware company. They need software only as a selling point for their hardware. Releasing MacOS X compatible with standard non-brand PC's would undermine their hardware sales - and it would be a pathway to ginormous losses like they had in 1997 and 1998, when they allowed cloning. They are profitable since then precisely because Jobs killed clones. Do you seriously believe he did it only to reintroduce Mac cloning ten years later?
There's much irony in the fact that in his heroic years, Disney used to be a victim of intellectual property rights abuse. First, he was "outlawyered" by his coworker Charles Mintz who basically stole rights to Oswald, The Lucky Rabbit, leaving Disney seemingly without any chance. To get out of this predicament, Disney had to hastily invent another character and thus Mickey was born. But even then, major Hollywood studios have had a virtual monopoly on sound and Disney had no option but use a patent-infringing system known as Cinephone to create the first Mickey Mouse cartoon.
One might expect that being a victim of abuse, Disney should never be abusive to the others. However, in real life it's almost always the opposite. When you are a victim, you don't dream about the perfect world, where nobody is a victim - you dream of the world where YOU are no longer a victim. I think this could partially explain this company's attitude to patents, copyright and trademark. "There was no mercy for me - why should I have it now for anyone?"
Seriously, I might send a Linux user a nice shell script that wipes his home folder; if he's an idiot and chmods it in order to run it and *does* run it and loses all of his files, does that make Linux less secure? Or does that make such user an idiot?
The golden rule of ergonomics is that the user is always right, even if he's wrong. If 90% of all users keep repeating the same mistake, then you have faulty user interface (bad design, flawed concept etc.). It should be redesigned - and bitching about "user stupidity" is nothing but common excuse for stupid designers.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly? Enemies who themselves have six different guns and switch up according to what the situation calls for? Bad guys who work in teams, who strategize, who create diversions to distract you? Where's the enemy Solid Snake who sneaks up on you with the silence of a ninja's church fart?
While I generally agree with the author's complain, I can recommend him a game with quite decent enemy AI: Operation Flashpoint. However, this is also a good example why too good enemy AI can be bad for gameplay. In Flashpoint, you can really be killed by Russian sniper or sneaking soldier just behind your back - but it's as exciting as getting blue screen of death when playing. You just die - and that's it. Personally, I found it surprisingly boring and quite happily returned to totally unrealistic, AI-foolish "Max Payne 2".
I realize that decoding Ogg Vorbis takes a bit more horsepower than mp3, but current iPods should be more than capable.
What makes you so sure? People who develop Linux for iPod tried to implement Ogg Vorbis on iPod and they claim it is not possible, at least not in real time (but probably this is what you mean). You can boot Linux kernel on iPod, but if you try to use it to play OGGs you get - what they nicely describe - "about 80% of real time". If you can do it in 100%, please join their effort.
Though it should be pointed out that Apple has already changed processor architecture once, and made it completely transparent to the end-user.
Have you been that end-user in mid-1990's? Apple indeed has made some enormous effort to make it transparent-ish enough, but I doubt that any Mac user with first hand experience would call it "completely transparent". Some applications were available as "fat binaries", but some were distributed as "68k" and "PPC" separately. Some old games of that era refused to run in the new environment (and native PPC ports never came). My old Lucas Arts adventure games are still on my bookshelf, but I can't play them anymore on my new Macs...
The FSF are denigrated as communists, yet they emphasize the free as in freedom of GNU/Linux constantly. It is ironic that the real communists want to use GNU/Linux because it is free as in beer.
There's no irony, there's no contradiction. For example, Friedrich Engels described communist revolution as "ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom". In history of totalitarianisms, there never was a single one ideology that would openly reject "freedom". All of them rather tried to redefine "freedom" to fit their scheme, instead. I must say that Stallman's way of thinking that "this is not a free license, because it does not PROHIBIT something", somewhat resembles me the same phenomenon. I would rather hear "think free as in lack of prohibitions" instead of "think free this, not free that".
I wouldn't wanna be left in space knowing I have X days of oxigen left ... very stressfull ...
Bad news: you do. You live on a spaceship called "Planet Earth" whose primary oxigen generator is known as "Rainforest". It's ability of producing oxygen is decaying. From this decay you could calculate your X. Scared? You bloody well should be.
In previous episode of this space opera series, we have seen how attempts to repair "Rainforest" by the brave crew of "Planet Earth" using "Kyoto Agreement" failed due to actions of certain interstellar villain named "Bushadministration". Stay with us for the next episode!
You are aware that when you buy a PS3, you don't need to throw your old console into the trash, right?
Well, the clutter of devices is never really a good idea in your living room (or the room where you keep your main TV-set). For a certain period of time, my PSX cohabitated with my Dreamcast and I don't have good memories of that period. Besides, consoles die - my old PSX is now in need of laser replacement that probably will never come, anyway, as it is beyond any economical justification so one way or another it will find its way to the trash.
I hope they either provide a way to connect old PS2 controllers (bluetooth device with controller ports?) or release a 'classic' controller identical to PS2 model as option.
Since it is supposed to be - quoting TFA - "backward compatible all the way to the original PlayStation" - it will be obviously possible. Backwards compatibility was the key factor for me to chose PS2 instead of XBox - I just would miss Syphon Filter and my kids would miss Crash Bandicoot games too much to scrap all our old collection of our favorite games. PS2 even reads PSX memory cards, so we could move even our saved game profiles. I hope this will be possible with PS3 too. If it will - and it looks like it will - then Microsoft has nothing to offer me. Again.
guess what, RMS is the reason why linux exists and why we are able to use it productively. he's the single most important reason as to why we still have open sourcecode at all.
Not true. The single most important reason why we have open source code was "consent decree" from 1956, when Justice Department agreed to drop charges based on Sherman Antitrust Law against AT&T in exchange for compulsory licensing of all technologies developed by AT&T to American public for "nominal fee". When Bell Labs - part of the AT&T empire - developed Unix, they were obliged to supply source code to basically anyone who asked. That's how the open source Unix culture was born. RMS - with all due respect - has joined it quite later, when it was already florishing.
Was their some technical reason for Microsoft going with Unix early on, or was it a matter of preference or prejudice?
Frankly, this question puzzles me as well. Technically, we could have the era of contemporary Windows XP/KDE/GNOME/MacOS X (Unix-ish or at least Posix-ish home OS'es for Average Joe) some fifteen years before, if only Apple could see earlier that the original MacOS development is a dead-end street... just as the 'non-NT' Windows family is. I think in terms of Steve vs Bill approach, it was indeed largely a matter of preference being prejudice. Steve was a college dropout and he was always showing his "academia fetish" (even now, look to what extent Apple wants to be the "campus company" - I really doubt if it's just a matter of marketing). From what I've read about it, it was not even that he "looked at Unix" - he looked starry eyed at university guys and asked them what would they want to have on their desktop computers. That's why got involved with Avadis Tevanian, developing the Mach/BSD branch of the Unix family, and thus NeXT, thus MacOS X etc.
Gates, on the other hand, has never had any other fetish than just corporate power struggles. That's why he was little interested in "Unix culture" or BSD. He knew that there is some potential in Unix, but instead of talking to long-haired bearded weirdos from the academia, he talked to SCO, because he wanted to have corporate-like solution for corporations (with hopeful deal with the IBM that eventually failed). However, the corporate approach to Unix failed and Bill abandoned Unix entirely, even as a server option - and begun developing the NT family.
So, in my opinion, the key factor indeed were personal fetishes and prejudices of Bill and Steve. Bill had a fetish of coporate takeovers, so he tried Unix "the corporate way" - AT&T -> SCO -> Microsoft -> (hopefully) IBM. Steve had a campus fetish, so he tried Unix the campus way: Berkeley -> Carnegie-Melon (Mach) -> Virginia Tech (MOX cluster). Somewhow, the latter seems to be the right path to develop Unix, and the former seems just to be repeating the same mistake again and again...
Obviously going after Apple's iPod world with the line "Windows powered software & devices".
You must be surely joking. Windows-compatible - yes, that's a good selling point. But Windows-powered? Even among Windows users - or even people who are actively anti-Linux or anti-Apple - nobody really advocates virtues of Windows as such. The key virtues are abundance of software and great hardware support (and then again, even the most pro-Linux or pro-Apple guys cannot deny them). But there is no positive brand association like "it is Windows powered, so it must be good", while you have that with Linux ("it runs Linux - so it must be rock stable!") or Apple ("it's made by Apple, so it will be probably easy to use!"). I would even say that Microsoft logo is already more a burden than advantage. XBox was not really a stunning success, especially when you consider the money they pumped into trying to promote it. Indeed, they still have the money, but the whole empire is just built around Windows (there would be no success for Internet Explorer if it wasn't bundled with Windows etc.). And they seem to have problems even with this very foundation of their power - Longhorn might be Microsoft's Copland (footnote: failed OS that Apple was promising for years and never delivered, what almost killed the company).