Apple already has the subscription service for music.
No they don't. iTunes is not a subscription service. You buy a song for 99 cents and its yours. Yahoo and Napster both offer subscription services, but neither has been very succesful so far.
Now TV is a lot different. It has this concept of "the new episode" coming out each week, and there really isn't a similar concept in music. I think a service that sells each episode for $1.99 the day after they came out would be interesting. Alternatively, offering a a lump total for "the season", say $39.99 (based on 25 episodes for a season times $1.99 per episode minus some discount) could also be very interesting. I could see people buying such shows and watching them during their lunch hours at work, either on their Video iPod or just on their computer. Similarly people could watch them while on the train/mass transit system. Of course this is really akin to Video On Demand, so it would be nice to be able to get an HD version to watch on your big telly and it would be nice to be able to burn it to DVD (downsized for DVD) as well.
They obviously didn't interview anybody with kids! If you have kids, then it's not man or woman who rules the DVR, it's the kids. Sure one of you might do the grunt work on the DVR to set it to record, but you'll be setting it to record Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer. And there's a good chance you won't even be trusted to do that. Once their a couple of years old, they can do it much better than you can. Their superior hand-eye coordination also allows them to fast forward through commercials at maximum speed without ever having to rewind because they went to far.
Exactly. I like being able to highlight an address, hit a button, and have a Google Map of that address in a seperate tab. I also like being able to do Google Local search and Desktop search from the toolbar on my browser. Of course you can define all the searches and make them part of the Firefox search box, but you have to come up with your own nifty icons.
This is exaclty right. AJAX is built on XmlHttpRequest which is not a W3C standard. It was first implemented by Microsoft in IE 5, then by the Gecko crew in Mozilla 1.0. There is
a W3C proposal that is similar, but it is basicaly ex post facto. Apple and Opera adopted XmlHttpRequest basically so their users could use GMail. There are differences in implementation on each of these browsers, so there is definitely no standard.
What's sort of interesting is that Microsoft first introduced this as one of those non-ECMA standards they were popping out left and right in the late 90's. Many people believe these were all designed to hurt Netscape. They didn't really do much with this gem once Netscape had bit the dust. Then Google comes along and resurrects it with GMail making them look like them look like these great innovators, especially compared to Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. Oh the irony.
Are you going to sit there and try to invent a new form of advertising that isn't patented by Google, or are you just going to say "screw it" and charge for the use of your site?
You don't have to. You can use Google's ads. They have this thing called AdSense. You see they have offered a service -- highly targeted, non-obtrusive ads -- that are not only effective already, but as people become more sophisticated in blocking undesired content, will become even more effective because they are more desirable to the consumer. Google wins, Doubleclick loses because Google does not bother the consumers who will click on ads, buy goods, etc.
Now if all this means that Doubleclick folds and that some websites also fold because their business models depend on the Doubleclick style of advertising, so what? Seriously, who cares? There is no mandate that we must maintain the current level of free content on the web. There is no need to regulate this. Maybe it goes up, maybe it goes down. Search engines are also a force that can decrease the amount of total content, becuase they tend to identify the "better" content on certain subjects. Does that mean we should get rid of search engines so that all content providers have a more equal chance of getting visitors and thus an equal chance of getting ad revenue? Of course not.
Ok, so you're somewhat uninformed, but bring up an interesting point. First off, Neo uses the Java bidnings to Open Office so it is basically a Java program. So I will assume that when you say
How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if it were written in an easily-ported language like Java?
That what you really mean is "How much quicker could we have had NeoOffice on MacOS if Open Office was written in an easily-ported language like Java?" Otherwise your statement is just ignorant.
Of course if you knew much about Open Office, you would realize that 2.0 has a LOT of Java in it and this has caused a LOT of controversy. You see things written in Java require a runtime, the JRE (or JVM.) If you are using a Mac, then you are using a JRE that was written by Apple with technology licensed from Sun. If you are running Windows or Linux, chances are that you are using a JRE from Sun. The JRE while being "free", as in you didn't have to pay anything to get it, is not open, i.e. you do not have the source code for it. Even if you did have the source code (which you can get for free with Java 5.0+) it still uses a license that is neither free nor open. Now this is a very big deal to many people and some of them refuse to use anything Java or they insist on using a "truly free" JRE like GCJ even though it is generally considered inferior and somewhat incomplete.
Back to the point -- a lot of the people behind some of the wonderful, open source, free software out there have a big time objection to using Java. Apache is trying to build an open JRE called Harmony, that promises to be as good as Sun's. So maybe that will make Java more acceptable to more people.
However, even if Apache succeeds, a lot of people are not fans of Java. Java on Windows was very slow as a GUI back in the late 90's. If you are using Java 1.4+, it is actually pretty fast now because it uses hardware acceleration, and only promises to get faster. Other synergistic technologies such as SWT can make Java as fast as "native" applications. Still you'd have to expect 5 years+ before opinions formed in the late 90s change, and who knows where Java will be by then.
Is it possible for you to even raise your kids without a TV? I can certainly live without a TV (over a year now, almost 3 years depending on how you count it).
It is so annoying when people say stuff like this. It is so fashionable, just listen to Madonna talk about he she doesn't watch TV and doesn't let her stupid kids watch TV. Being a parent is not about not watching TV. It's about doing what's best for your kids. And that's not usually what some schmuck in a book tells you is best for all kids. Use your head. Yes there are people who want TVs, Nintendos, etc. to babysit their kids because they are most concerned with what's easiest for them, not what's best for their kids. If you're afraid that's what you would do if you let your kids watch TV, then you probably shouldn't have had kids in the first place and you will probably just find some other way to avoid doing your job as a parent.
I don't see anything about "creating and maintating infrastructure" or "fascilitate commerce" or "make our lives easier." You can try to claim Technology X is a modern evolution of this or that, but it's just an attempt to justify something that you or somebody else wants.
The problem with "things implemented for the common good" is that somebody has to decide what is the common good. I don't know anybody that smart. Maybe the best way to get internet connectivity to rural areas is through municipal broadband. Or maybe broadband is not that way, maybe it's WIMAX. Who knows? Why not let consumers and economics decide? Why let somebody in Washington decide, especially when that somebody is likely to be influenced by contributions by Comcast or somebody else motivated more by their own financial gains than by "common good."
In case you missed 1992-2000, some Democrats like free markets, too.
Most other countries in the developed world have made it a national priority to deploy broadband and they are putting public resources behind the effort. I think we should.
So this guy wants the gov to rollout broadband. And his justification for this? Because others have done it. Because other countries have more broadband thus. Wah wah wah. Suddenly "keeping up with the Jonses" (or in this case South Korea?) has become a reason to nationalize an industry? What country do we live in? Was this guy alive in the 80's when everybody from England to Russia to China conceded that socialism was a failure and that they had to embrace free markets? Just listen to this guy talk about how he would get the government to back "universal" broadband:
One of those is to redefine universal service so as to make broadband an eligible subject for universal service support. Where at the moment it just makes telephone service affordable and that's something that it needs to continue to do... we should add broadband deployment (to that mission).
So telephone service is his model for this? Has this guy ever heard of VOIP? One of the reasons that VOIP is so much cheaper than traditional telephone lines is because its consumers do not have to pay the huge litany of regulatory fees and taxes. Why are there all these regulatory fees and taxes? So that telephone service can be "universal"... But wait it gets worse:
And I think where that happens, the local government has a legitimate role to play in providing the services, exactly analogous to what happened 100 years ago with municipal electric utilities. Where the investor-owned utilities didn't want to provide the service, the local government stepped in, and today, 100 years later, we still have municipal electric utilities. And this is a service every bit as essential in this century as electricity was in the early days.
So he wants to create government backed monopolies for selling broadband services (that's what municipal utility companies are.) I'm sure he would also demand regulation of these monopolies so they don't overcharge people. We don't have to look too far to see what happens in such situations. Just go back a few years to the California energy crisis and the rolling blackouts of 2001. Of course to prevent such a situation, you can regulate the companies providing service to the local municipal broadband comapny -- but then we're back at nationalizing the entire industry.
I have been card-carrying Democrat since I turned 18, but sometimes I really hate Democrats. If the US is behind in broadband usage, well maybe that's because there are a lot of people in the US who do not need it. When people need it, then they will demand it enough to pay for it. If their dial-up connection is good enough for them, why do we need the government telling them that they are wrong? If somebody wants to move to somewhere very rural, well they are probably getting a lot financial benefits by doing this. No broadband is a potential part of this trade-off. Why is it the gov's job to provide them broadband? Is it also the gov's job to put a Cheesecake Factory or an Apple Store down the street from them too? Should that be a universal right as well?
Another example, of course, is software. Microsoft, for one, seems to be in no particular hurry to cut the price of Windows. Ten years ago, an upgrade version of Windows 95, then fresh from the labs in Redmond, Wash., was being sold in most stores for $89.95. If you shop online for Windows XP Home, the third-generation successor to Windows 95, you'll find it in the same ballpark.
Ditto with Microsoft Office, which includes Word, Excel and the like. The high-end version of Office 97, which was introduced eight years ago, went for $499; the most recent Office had the same price when it came out in 2003.
Ohhh so that's how a monopoly works...
Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE.
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 1
As a long time J2EE developer, I hear ya. I did a lot of investigation and experimentation with RoR, for the very reasons you listed. I tried out some of the tutorials and was amazed at how fast it was to get something going and how little code/configuration there was to write. I think RoR is on to something, but is way,way off from being anything other than a great prototyping tool right now.
It uses a lot of assumptions and works best with MySQL. Once you start using it with a legacy database and start having to throw in things distributed transactions on dbs like Oracle, then it suddenly becomes a lot more painful. Throw in making it deal with a stored procedure or some complex CRUD-related logic, and suddenly you start wondering what the point was at all. If you can start from scratch on your schema, so that you can devise your schema so that all your CRUD is straightforward, and only have to deal with a single open source database, then it's great. In other words, it's great for prototyping.
I think other technologies (J2EE and.NET) will borrow for RoR though. Groovy will make it a lot easier to do something exactly equivalent to RoR inside a JVM. It won't be too hard for such a framework to make use of JTA as well as the many other technologies in J2EE (and the open source projects based on it.)
I think the author's point was that there are a lot of people who will not buy a new Mac because of the looming architecture change. There is a lot of historical evidence for this. Apple lost market share when they switched from 68K to PPC and lost it again when they switched to OSX. As you point out, they did these transitions exceptioanlly well, and there was support for the old architecture well after the initial switch. But each switch still provided a lot of reason not to buy a new Mac, and that often translated into people buying something other than a Mac. You can rationalize all you want, but you just sound ridiculous running around telling people to go out and buy a new Mac right now.
Many of the traits you listed correspond to traits that were selected by nature. So a tall, muscular male with all his hair was probably going to live longer and provide more for his children, thus was genetically desirable for females. That's all changed with this (still relatively new) thing we have called civilization. Now there are new traits that are being selected, and some of those traits are definitely geeky. So maybe you're right and geek is not as sexy right now, but in the long run it will be. If the meek shall inherit the earth, first they will inherit the women.
I said your arguments were typical of a certain type of person, and you seem to agree with that statement. I did not say that you were that type of person. Perhaps it makes you uncomfortable to realize that you share views with people that you would generally disagree with. I'm just pointing out the similarities.
Everyone STARTS somewhere different. Then, through hard WORK, they END UP somewhere better, and where they END UP is limited only by their DRIVE and BELIEF that they can get there.
First your insistence on all capitalization to emphasize your point just shows how weak your point is. Second, this is completely false. No matter how much drive and belief you have, you are limited. It doesn't matter how much you want to be Einstein, you will come up short. You cannot accomplish anything. I'm sorry if your parents and teachers told you this and you believed them, but it's just not true. All people have limitations of various sorts, and that includes intellectual limitations caused by genetic variance. You weren't capable of becoming a great composer or a Nobel prize winning physicist or a grandmaster of chess (or for that matter President of the United States, or similar) from that moment you were conceived.
Now I'm not saying Garry Kasparov was "destined" to be world champion, or that he did not work very hard to achieve that title. I'm just saying that he had a genetic advantage, in regards to playing chess, over almost all other people. In addition, he could have been born somewhere else and even with the same genetic gifts, it would have been impossible for him to become a chess grandmaster. There's a lot of things you can't control in life, and all your desire and hard work cannot always overcome these things. Just look at Ramanujan for one of billions of examples.
The brain is like any other muscle and the brain bearer can develop it, just like any other muscle.
Only it's not a muscle, and that's why you are wrong. It is ridiculous to disregard genetic differences as potential causes for physical and behavioral differences in people. Mozart was composing symphonies at age five. Do you think that was only a product of hard work? There have been numerous writings about
Asperger's Syndrome and certain types of intelligence.
It's just called genetic variance, don't be so defensive about it...
Also, the converse of your argument would then be that a lack of intelligence shows a lack of hard work. This is typical Protestant work ethic thinking. It makes it a lot easier to point fingers at poor people and call them lazy.
Tibco's implementation definitely leaves a lot to be desired. Their success has always came from their ties with Reuters (who used to own a huge stake in the company) and thus their use in high profile environments. Its never been because of their technology.
To develop for the Mac, you still need to learn Cocca, or Carbon. Objective C. The little gotchas of the Mac systems. HFS+. Quartz. It's still Mac programming.
Right, and to develop for Linux you have to learn Qt,GTK, etc. There are what fifteen+ different filesystems supported by Linux? I'm not a desktop developer, but perhaps there is less to learn on Apple, and perhaps the APIs/IDEs are better. Whatever "algorithms" your code might have are probably going to be written in some flavor of C. It will be at least as easy to optimize this for OSX on x86 as it would be for Linux on x86, and it might even be easier if XCode will be using Intel compilers.
Intel has been planning a
dual-core, Pentium-M processor since they nixed the "Pentium 5" last year. Maybe they will introduce this quicker than originally expected, but that is pure speculation.
If the Linux user-base is only ever Newegg whiteboxers and business servers, then Linux will have failed to ever make a significant impact on the desktop market. This is what Dvorak is talking about. He outlines why Linux has not done so already. He claims that Linux on the desktop needs to improve a lot. His point with regards to Apple is that developers who write desktop apps will probably prefer to write them for OSX instead of Linux, once the Apple x86 migration is done. If that is true, then clearly Linux on the desktop will not improve as much as it needs and it will indeed remain limited to said whiteboxers.
In fact they've always seen a market share shrink everytime they've changed architectures. People just don't buy lame duck systems. It would be amazing if their market share did not shrink significantly over the next two years. They must be really convinced they can really make much better computers on x86 in a couple of years. That or this really was an act of desperation caused by IBM telling them to take a hike on the low-energy G5 for notebooks...
So not only has Apple dumped IBM, they also appear to be planning to dump gcc.
Let's hope so. I can only imagine OSX 10.5 (Leopard?) compiled with Intel's compiler, with
the threading bugs fixed, and running on a
multi-core Pentium-M... Then people will understand Apple's choice.
Yeah they should use the P4EEs in their top-of-the-lines and call them ExtremeMacs (or MacExtremes). As bad as that sounds ExtremeBooks sounds even worse.
I think you may be on to something. Apple's decision will really tell a lot about their plans for the future. They've made good money as a niche player, offering compelling performance for professionals in music, video, and publishing. They've also appealed to conspicuous consumers who wanted something "different" from the typical Wintel offering. Finally, they've also appealed to those wanting greater ease of use. That market has really deteriorated as those people tend to also want something cheap (see the educational market.) Their choice of processor could signal either a move to solidify one or more of these markets, or an attempt for more popular appeal.
Itanium would be an excellent choice to continue to appeal to the high end professional crowd. It has always been high on raw performance, just check out some benchamrks. It was mostly a victim of bad timing. It came along to challenge Big (UNIX) Iron from Sun and IBM, but it did this during a time when smaller servers running Linux were displacing those same servers. Still it's not hard to imagine some dual-CPU Itanium2's with properly compiled versions of Photoshop, Maya, Quark, etc. really performing admirably. And when it comes to laptops, Itanium can be used there too.
Intel has been working on the Millington core, a low voltage version of Itanium designed to run on blade servers. Blade servers have to run cool, just like laptops.
On the other hand, if Apple really just wants to focus on mass appeal, expanding their "different" niche, then they are better off going for cheaper chips, a la the Pentium family. Maybe dual core P4s for desktops and Pentium M's for laptops? Certainly their success with the iPod and Mini, plus their never ending attempt to publicize "switchers" suggest that this is what Apple really wants. Maybe the Mini has shown them that they can sell a lot of computers if they just lower their prices.
Another case of reality and perception being different. Win 2K seemed better than XP only because it existed before the onslaught of worms and spyware that we see today. Most of the vulnerabilities in XP existed in 2k. MS tended to fix the 2k problems as they fixed the XP ones, hence all the service packs and hot fixes. XP did add some new vulnerabilities by turning on more services by default, but 2k was really no better.
Slashdot Mirror
Now TV is a lot different. It has this concept of "the new episode" coming out each week, and there really isn't a similar concept in music. I think a service that sells each episode for $1.99 the day after they came out would be interesting. Alternatively, offering a a lump total for "the season", say $39.99 (based on 25 episodes for a season times $1.99 per episode minus some discount) could also be very interesting. I could see people buying such shows and watching them during their lunch hours at work, either on their Video iPod or just on their computer. Similarly people could watch them while on the train/mass transit system. Of course this is really akin to Video On Demand, so it would be nice to be able to get an HD version to watch on your big telly and it would be nice to be able to burn it to DVD (downsized for DVD) as well.
They obviously didn't interview anybody with kids! If you have kids, then it's not man or woman who rules the DVR, it's the kids. Sure one of you might do the grunt work on the DVR to set it to record, but you'll be setting it to record Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer. And there's a good chance you won't even be trusted to do that. Once their a couple of years old, they can do it much better than you can. Their superior hand-eye coordination also allows them to fast forward through commercials at maximum speed without ever having to rewind because they went to far.
Exactly. I like being able to highlight an address, hit a button, and have a Google Map of that address in a seperate tab. I also like being able to do Google Local search and Desktop search from the toolbar on my browser. Of course you can define all the searches and make them part of the Firefox search box, but you have to come up with your own nifty icons.
This is exaclty right. AJAX is built on XmlHttpRequest which is not a W3C standard. It was first implemented by Microsoft in IE 5, then by the Gecko crew in Mozilla 1.0. There is a W3C proposal that is similar, but it is basicaly ex post facto. Apple and Opera adopted XmlHttpRequest basically so their users could use GMail. There are differences in implementation on each of these browsers, so there is definitely no standard.
What's sort of interesting is that Microsoft first introduced this as one of those non-ECMA standards they were popping out left and right in the late 90's. Many people believe these were all designed to hurt Netscape. They didn't really do much with this gem once Netscape had bit the dust. Then Google comes along and resurrects it with GMail making them look like them look like these great innovators, especially compared to Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. Oh the irony.
Now if all this means that Doubleclick folds and that some websites also fold because their business models depend on the Doubleclick style of advertising, so what? Seriously, who cares? There is no mandate that we must maintain the current level of free content on the web. There is no need to regulate this. Maybe it goes up, maybe it goes down. Search engines are also a force that can decrease the amount of total content, becuase they tend to identify the "better" content on certain subjects. Does that mean we should get rid of search engines so that all content providers have a more equal chance of getting visitors and thus an equal chance of getting ad revenue? Of course not.
Of course if you knew much about Open Office, you would realize that 2.0 has a LOT of Java in it and this has caused a LOT of controversy. You see things written in Java require a runtime, the JRE (or JVM.) If you are using a Mac, then you are using a JRE that was written by Apple with technology licensed from Sun. If you are running Windows or Linux, chances are that you are using a JRE from Sun. The JRE while being "free", as in you didn't have to pay anything to get it, is not open, i.e. you do not have the source code for it. Even if you did have the source code (which you can get for free with Java 5.0+) it still uses a license that is neither free nor open. Now this is a very big deal to many people and some of them refuse to use anything Java or they insist on using a "truly free" JRE like GCJ even though it is generally considered inferior and somewhat incomplete.
Back to the point -- a lot of the people behind some of the wonderful, open source, free software out there have a big time objection to using Java. Apache is trying to build an open JRE called Harmony, that promises to be as good as Sun's. So maybe that will make Java more acceptable to more people.
However, even if Apache succeeds, a lot of people are not fans of Java. Java on Windows was very slow as a GUI back in the late 90's. If you are using Java 1.4+, it is actually pretty fast now because it uses hardware acceleration, and only promises to get faster. Other synergistic technologies such as SWT can make Java as fast as "native" applications. Still you'd have to expect 5 years+ before opinions formed in the late 90s change, and who knows where Java will be by then.
I don't see anything about "creating and maintating infrastructure" or "fascilitate commerce" or "make our lives easier." You can try to claim Technology X is a modern evolution of this or that, but it's just an attempt to justify something that you or somebody else wants.
The problem with "things implemented for the common good" is that somebody has to decide what is the common good. I don't know anybody that smart. Maybe the best way to get internet connectivity to rural areas is through municipal broadband. Or maybe broadband is not that way, maybe it's WIMAX. Who knows? Why not let consumers and economics decide? Why let somebody in Washington decide, especially when that somebody is likely to be influenced by contributions by Comcast or somebody else motivated more by their own financial gains than by "common good."
In case you missed 1992-2000, some Democrats like free markets, too.
I have been card-carrying Democrat since I turned 18, but sometimes I really hate Democrats. If the US is behind in broadband usage, well maybe that's because there are a lot of people in the US who do not need it. When people need it, then they will demand it enough to pay for it. If their dial-up connection is good enough for them, why do we need the government telling them that they are wrong? If somebody wants to move to somewhere very rural, well they are probably getting a lot financial benefits by doing this. No broadband is a potential part of this trade-off. Why is it the gov's job to provide them broadband? Is it also the gov's job to put a Cheesecake Factory or an Apple Store down the street from them too? Should that be a universal right as well?
As a long time J2EE developer, I hear ya. I did a lot of investigation and experimentation with RoR, for the very reasons you listed. I tried out some of the tutorials and was amazed at how fast it was to get something going and how little code/configuration there was to write. I think RoR is on to something, but is way,way off from being anything other than a great prototyping tool right now.
.NET) will borrow for RoR though. Groovy will make it a lot easier to do something exactly equivalent to RoR inside a JVM. It won't be too hard for such a framework to make use of JTA as well as the many other technologies in J2EE (and the open source projects based on it.)
It uses a lot of assumptions and works best with MySQL. Once you start using it with a legacy database and start having to throw in things distributed transactions on dbs like Oracle, then it suddenly becomes a lot more painful. Throw in making it deal with a stored procedure or some complex CRUD-related logic, and suddenly you start wondering what the point was at all. If you can start from scratch on your schema, so that you can devise your schema so that all your CRUD is straightforward, and only have to deal with a single open source database, then it's great. In other words, it's great for prototyping.
I think other technologies (J2EE and
I think the author's point was that there are a lot of people who will not buy a new Mac because of the looming architecture change. There is a lot of historical evidence for this. Apple lost market share when they switched from 68K to PPC and lost it again when they switched to OSX. As you point out, they did these transitions exceptioanlly well, and there was support for the old architecture well after the initial switch. But each switch still provided a lot of reason not to buy a new Mac, and that often translated into people buying something other than a Mac. You can rationalize all you want, but you just sound ridiculous running around telling people to go out and buy a new Mac right now.
Say hello to my little friend: Charles Darwin.
Many of the traits you listed correspond to traits that were selected by nature. So a tall, muscular male with all his hair was probably going to live longer and provide more for his children, thus was genetically desirable for females. That's all changed with this (still relatively new) thing we have called civilization. Now there are new traits that are being selected, and some of those traits are definitely geeky. So maybe you're right and geek is not as sexy right now, but in the long run it will be. If the meek shall inherit the earth, first they will inherit the women.
First your insistence on all capitalization to emphasize your point just shows how weak your point is. Second, this is completely false. No matter how much drive and belief you have, you are limited. It doesn't matter how much you want to be Einstein, you will come up short. You cannot accomplish anything. I'm sorry if your parents and teachers told you this and you believed them, but it's just not true. All people have limitations of various sorts, and that includes intellectual limitations caused by genetic variance. You weren't capable of becoming a great composer or a Nobel prize winning physicist or a grandmaster of chess (or for that matter President of the United States, or similar) from that moment you were conceived.
Now I'm not saying Garry Kasparov was "destined" to be world champion, or that he did not work very hard to achieve that title. I'm just saying that he had a genetic advantage, in regards to playing chess, over almost all other people. In addition, he could have been born somewhere else and even with the same genetic gifts, it would have been impossible for him to become a chess grandmaster. There's a lot of things you can't control in life, and all your desire and hard work cannot always overcome these things. Just look at Ramanujan for one of billions of examples.
Also, the converse of your argument would then be that a lack of intelligence shows a lack of hard work. This is typical Protestant work ethic thinking. It makes it a lot easier to point fingers at poor people and call them lazy.
Tibco's implementation definitely leaves a lot to be desired. Their success has always came from their ties with Reuters (who used to own a huge stake in the company) and thus their use in high profile environments. Its never been because of their technology.
Intel has been planning a dual-core, Pentium-M processor since they nixed the "Pentium 5" last year. Maybe they will introduce this quicker than originally expected, but that is pure speculation.
If the Linux user-base is only ever Newegg whiteboxers and business servers, then Linux will have failed to ever make a significant impact on the desktop market. This is what Dvorak is talking about. He outlines why Linux has not done so already. He claims that Linux on the desktop needs to improve a lot. His point with regards to Apple is that developers who write desktop apps will probably prefer to write them for OSX instead of Linux, once the Apple x86 migration is done. If that is true, then clearly Linux on the desktop will not improve as much as it needs and it will indeed remain limited to said whiteboxers.
In fact they've always seen a market share shrink everytime they've changed architectures. People just don't buy lame duck systems. It would be amazing if their market share did not shrink significantly over the next two years. They must be really convinced they can really make much better computers on x86 in a couple of years. That or this really was an act of desperation caused by IBM telling them to take a hike on the low-energy G5 for notebooks...
Yeah they should use the P4EEs in their top-of-the-lines and call them ExtremeMacs (or MacExtremes). As bad as that sounds ExtremeBooks sounds even worse.
I think you may be on to something. Apple's decision will really tell a lot about their plans for the future. They've made good money as a niche player, offering compelling performance for professionals in music, video, and publishing. They've also appealed to conspicuous consumers who wanted something "different" from the typical Wintel offering. Finally, they've also appealed to those wanting greater ease of use. That market has really deteriorated as those people tend to also want something cheap (see the educational market.) Their choice of processor could signal either a move to solidify one or more of these markets, or an attempt for more popular appeal.
Itanium would be an excellent choice to continue to appeal to the high end professional crowd. It has always been high on raw performance, just check out some benchamrks. It was mostly a victim of bad timing. It came along to challenge Big (UNIX) Iron from Sun and IBM, but it did this during a time when smaller servers running Linux were displacing those same servers. Still it's not hard to imagine some dual-CPU Itanium2's with properly compiled versions of Photoshop, Maya, Quark, etc. really performing admirably. And when it comes to laptops, Itanium can be used there too. Intel has been working on the Millington core, a low voltage version of Itanium designed to run on blade servers. Blade servers have to run cool, just like laptops.
On the other hand, if Apple really just wants to focus on mass appeal, expanding their "different" niche, then they are better off going for cheaper chips, a la the Pentium family. Maybe dual core P4s for desktops and Pentium M's for laptops? Certainly their success with the iPod and Mini, plus their never ending attempt to publicize "switchers" suggest that this is what Apple really wants. Maybe the Mini has shown them that they can sell a lot of computers if they just lower their prices.
Another case of reality and perception being different. Win 2K seemed better than XP only because it existed before the onslaught of worms and spyware that we see today. Most of the vulnerabilities in XP existed in 2k. MS tended to fix the 2k problems as they fixed the XP ones, hence all the service packs and hot fixes. XP did add some new vulnerabilities by turning on more services by default, but 2k was really no better.