Okay, what if as you ate more and more ribs, they started bringing you ones that had less and less meat? As someone pointed out above, this is a bait and switch.
I would agree that this is "bait and switch" if, after renting more and more DVDs, they started sending you VHS tapes and/or offered you "enhanced service" to get top picks more quickly for an additional fee. This is not the case.
Using your analogy, even, I have a hard time faulting the restaurant who brought me skinnier ribs: Unless they told me beforehand that I'll be getting the same, meaty ribs throughout the duration of my stay, I'd have a hard time working up a lather about it. And it would not be, even possibly, illegal. (Now, if they started with meaty ribs and wound up with chicken necks or Rocky Mountain Oysters, you'd have a case...)
w/r/t your belief that "if people knew about it, they'd all just cancel at the end of every month and start up again at the beginning of the next," my guess would be that it's a small minority of customers who would be willing to lose their queue, their ratings, fill out the same forms every month, etc. so that they could be first in line for "Agent Cody Banks."
... what's upsetting about this is that it's not made public by NetFlix. They advertise "unlimited rentals," but penalize you for renting a lot. They encourage you to keep a large buffer of movies so that if your first choice isn't avaliable, you'll get a second, third, fourth, or lower choice, but they don't tell you that this will decrease your priority. That second point, in particular, is rather infuriating, because they're telling you to do something that is directly against your best interest if you want that first choice movie at some point!
To your first point, how responsible do you feel NetFlix is to publicize the underpinnings to their business? When you go to the "All You Can Eat Ribs" place, should the sign read
All Ewe Can Eat Ribs
(But don't actually eat too many, because then we lose money on you)
IMO, that answer is No.
w/r/t your second point, I still don't see how you extrapolated from the article that keeping a large buffer of movies works *against* you. Seems to me, if you keep movies you want in your buffer, that buffers you against having no movies at all (should the movies at the head of your queue be Waited). The data used in the article point out that what works against you is renting a high quantity of popular movies.
Finally, it is very important to note cancellation is always an option (no contract was the reason I've given it a try).
Excellent article, btw. A related point I'd be interested in hearing about is if and how NetFlix trys to "Save A Customer:" i.e. If I say I want to cancel, do they, and how do they, sweeten the pot to keep me aboard? Anyone experience this?
It sent a message (just as we sent a message in Japan) that stopped the fighting in its tracks and certainly saved a lot of lives. Do you at least appreciate how easily this principle could be abused? Do you at least see that, however warped, this was EXACTLY the stated rationale of Osama: that if they caused enough damage in one blow, that we'd reconsider and get out of the Middle East, thus saving them the trouble of having to start a war there?
The principal can certainly be abused, and the morality of the actors can be taken into question.
The principal itself, however, seems time-proven: Massive retaliation is more effective than "responses-in-kind."
The 'retaliation' (for being capitalistic infidels, apparently) from Osama et al. was not massive enough to make us rethink our positions and it created something more like an angered wasp, bringing to mind what Gene Wilder's Sheriff said in Blazing Saddles:
"Oh, don't shoot Mongo; you'll only make him mad."
Seems to be the point of the poster was that Japan had a long history of agressive & atrocious behavior which stopped soon after some very firm and significant pressure was applied in the form of several megatons of explosives.
It's a good point to note: tit for tat leads to ongoing conflict, while massive retaliation generally gets the message across more succinctly and saves lives in the long run.
Think about it, it doesn't make sense to spend
time and effort syncing your PDA, your Phone,
your iPod, and your desktop. It makes a lot more
sense to start putting them into one device, and syncing that to your desktop.
For some people, this may make a great deal of sense, but my PDA is not just a contact manager.
I use my pda all day long. I take notes on it in meetings. I read news on it on the subway or the bathroom (<-- not always easy to tell the difference...). I would not want my phone ringing while in a development meeting. I don't want to put up with the added bulk or cost of other devices vying for battery life. I don't even want color in my PDA (not until there's good reason for it).
I do want easy synching of info between desktop, phone, pda and music machine, but i want the best of each - for my use - doing each of these things. This should not be that difficult (there are enough data synching interfaces / ports on all of these devices), and my hope is Apple pulls it off with hardware or software or both.
How much of the code you've written and/or worked with over the years trickled down to mainstream users in meaningful ways, and in what timeframe should we/you expect this to occur?
i.e. How quickly does the software and hardware tools of your trade today become part of the arsenal of either home digital fx enthusiasts, hobbyists or "small film" makers tomorrow?
When it first came out, I signed up using mostly bogus info and my Yahoo id.
Recently, while using Monster.com (and being unable to recall my old account info based on a former Prodigy address), Monster asked me to 'link' to my Passport account. I thought i'd be able to avoid Yet Another Registration Process by using Passport.
Each screen on the passport signon took ~a full minute to render. Trying a few passwords took 5 minutes of my life away.
Once I did sign onto Passport and 'link' it to Monster, I *still* needed to register with Monster:
What's the point? Why was I asked to link my Passport account if it didn't get me in right away?
Wouldn't Monster have remembered me next time with a cookie anyway?
This is beyond security and megopolies; this is about *usability* where MSFT, in theory, 'has an edge.' It was not very usable, and completely without utility.
You can call it "private" and "reasonable", but as long as I can sit out in my garage and listen in without anyone ever being able to tell that I did so, then it ain't private and you have no real expectation of privacy.
You make decent points, but you still seem to confuse your ability to see or hear my doings with the private nature of my doings themselves. This i agrue, is a slippery slope...
If you're on your garage listening in to me in my backyard, the problem is not my unreasonable / ignorant expectation of privacy, it's THAT YOU'RE LISTENING TO ME AND INVADING MY PRIVACY.
The slipperiness of the slope comes in where you say "I can listen in, easily, to you, so you therefore cannot expect what you're doing to be private."
So, if you had a machine available to you that decrypted all SSH traffic on a subnet you specified, without you or it breaking a sweat, does this mean it's unreasonable of me to think my SSH session is private?
The EtherPeg stuff is all in good fun, especially where the people knew they were being sniffed, BUT...
Would you also say that it's OK for me to walk around with my 900MHz radio receiver and listen to peoples cordless phonecalls? They're not encrypted; are they private in your estimation?
Can I intercept cell calls?
How about screen RF from folks' ATM transactions (the bank kind)?
None of these are encrypted, but all of them are private by most reasonable standards.
Even software like Outlook, which is specifically designed for this type of big-business structure, has trouble handling huge amounts of email (its not so much the amount of email thats the problem as much as the lack of security in the product....
Outlook has significantproblems scaling to the degree a behemoth like AOL-TW demands. It's beyond the almost complete absence of security that makes Outlook a really poor choice in large corporate envornments - Outlook basically falls prey to the same ills as AOL's client software: It's intended originally for ease-of-use over security and scalability.
I have definite biases here (as I prefer corporate mail solutions that run on a variety of platforms, scale out the wazoo, and Just Work), but they're rooted firmly in practical experience (first-hand and otherwise) of replacing 10's of Exchange boxes with several different solutions that actually SOLVED user requirements.
Eating your own dog food is definitely a Good Idea.
Someone mentioned that they could use iPlanet and still be eating their own; this is good, but not what they're breading their butter with...
Why wouldn't they appropriate some mail servers - running the same code & on the same platforms as their public servers - but keep them for IUO?
This way, they're finding - and, with hope, trouncing - any bugs or general nonsense and instability, while at the same time, not subjecting their business to all the Herbal Viagra and natural breast augmentation adverts we've come to expect in userx093jr7@aol.com inboxen.
EZPass is tied to your credit card, too, but it's 'mounted' in your car and so precautions against getting your car broken into prevent your EZPass from getting stolen, too.
As far as recovering a stolen EZPass tag, if someone uses it (or goes through a toll without covering it with the anti-RF mylar), you'll know where they are and when. And there's surveillance at toll points.
Question: EZPass has recently asked me to send in my tags for an 'upgrade:' Anyone know what they're upgrading?
There's no DIY aspect to Macs. It's like buying a dishwasher.
I disagree about there being no DIY: While you usually don't start with a motherboard, choice of power supplies and processors, etc., there's a pretty large assortment of choices to start low and build big.
My 8500 (~8 years old) was designed with a PPC604 CPU running @ 120MHz. Standard buss was Fast-SCSI-2.
It's now got a relatively recent G3/400MHz in there, and ATTO Ultra-Wide SCSI controller, lots more RAM and DASD. All of this, I've Done Myself, and the box is MORE than usable for the variety of tasks I throw at it; if i needed more juice, I could certainly add it.
If you go to Mac Rescue, or David Baucom's site and the like, you'll see plenty of 'barebones' Macs and the add-ons you can buy to soup-up yourself pretty nicely.
You can get yourself a pretty nice LinuxPPC box for around $200.
Takes a bit more looking than on the PC-side (it's sort've like finding Linux-compatible componants was ~3 years ago...), but it's definitely more than do-able.
Do you have an axe to grind with Apple or with the poster? His was hardly FUD at all.
* OS X does not come with bash by default.
Maybe it's not bash, but it's got at least some of the cool things bash does (scrolling through previous commands a la set -o vi; auto-completion, etc.)
* OS X does not have a remote login service enabled by default. You have to explicitly turn it on.
* No OS X versions since 10.0.1 enable telnet. When you check the "Allow Remote Login" box, you enable ssh.
Why are you quibbling here? the remote services are available and dirt-simple to implement. No one who cares about the privacy of their data should be using telnet anymore, anyway. free (beer and/or speech) ssh clients abound.
* While Applescript could be used for an attach, so could basically any other scripting language. VBScript? Perl?/bin/sh? Yup. So what's the big deal?
definitely agree about perl and shell scripting - I don't immediately see, though, how anyone could "surruptitiously" run a VB script.
(The previous poster was alluding to that story where the iMac was stolen and recovered thanks in part to running AppleScripts at startup and dial-ins to ISPs... could you do that in VBScript without being obvious? [that's an actual question])
If you like the command line and GNU tools, OS X is pretty cool.
I guess they can build a uterine wall with hormones and growth factors, but what about the constant flow of oxygen the organism needs? And what about the growing need for nutrients a growing fetus (foetus) requires?
And what of excersize and the other hormones (adrenelin, hypothalamic goo, etc) that all go into the Stew (Stu?) of Life? Do we really know the complete list of Ingredients a human baby needs, and can it be supplied in a lab?
For example, a dialysis machine is ~50 times bigger than a kidney and ~500 times less efficient & effective - now we want to artificially create all the other systems that make us up?
Wouldn't it be easier, on several levels, to start with, like, rodents or something, then work our way up?
In the computer industry, the money is ALWAYS in software rather than hardware... The marginal cost for an additional copy of Palm OS, or Tony Hawk 2.5X, or whatever, is practically nothing;
Margins can be better on software, and the cost of duplication is certainly cheaper,
but Intel and Cisco, e.g., have done fairly well for themselves primarily as hardware vendors.
Also, market saturation will reach the hardware market for PDAs much faster than the software market... Eventually, devices will reach sufficient power and size that continual advancement is senseless...
Again, can't disagree with your overall thinking, but - Couldn't the same be said for the desktop and possibly even server market? i.e. that the machines are getting (have gotten) so immensely powerful that people simply won't buy new ones anymore?
Part of the reason why this doesn't happen, unfortunately, is that the software developers and programmers continue to 1) push existing processing performance capabilities, and/or 2) write ineficient code. In my experience, it's been a combination of those two, with the stress on 2).
If done well (Apple and Sun have done this well, IMO), running both hardware and software shops (to whatever extent) can work well for the company and the consumer.
This should make sense: Execution, as always, will play a major role in the success or failure:
1) Hardware division's now free - though more accountable - to create excellent hardware solutions. (My hope is they innovate, but don't create solutions to problems that don't exist [e.g. the MPEG 4-playing, holographic projector model with purple inverse backlighting].)
They may even, as a poster had mentioned, be able to license WinCE, another OS, or at least parts / applications thereof where they were not able to do previously.
Could/would they also license hardware technology from Sony and others?
2) Software division's now free to find additional licensees, not get (completely) hand-tied for what they can and can't do based solely on what one hardware platform provider is giving them.
In this respect, I'd love to see what the folks from Be have in store for OS 5.5...
The overall / corporate unit needs to ensure the software / licensing division is careful when licensees start canibalizing their own sales rather than increasing marketshare for the Palm platform. (c.f. the Apple clone market)
As a user, my hope is they keep the Palm a vital platform - this should help do that, but let's hope they keep their eye on the ball.
The fact that Microsoft chose to build a competing browser from the ground up and give it away for free, largely to do the same thing, vindicates this strategy.
It wasn't your point, I realize, but MSFT did not really build IE from the ground up - they started with several large bits of code and functionality from Spyglass, et al. And Netscape had been giving away their browser for free, as well (it's just they weren't bundling it with a desktop OS for which they had a monopoly...)
As far as Netscape not capitolizing on the traffic their portal generated; they did make some pretty nice ad revenue from it, it's just they got more interested in selling server software (because of the aforementioned lack of revenues from client software) and thought that'd save their bacon.
The points about buying the eyeballs of everyone who didn't change their default homepage (~90%+ of all users), and of getting a leverage point against MSFT are right on.
Switching to a Linux base would be another step on the road - faster, more stable, and no rebooting after the latest 'service pack';)
Pretty sure most of their infrastructure is FreeBSD-based. (a company i worked for was in talks with AOL - my company's infrastructure was FreeBSD; this was a reason for the proceedings)
No rebooting for service packs, already.
The move, for AOL, seems a good one to get better client software out there for users. Create the One-Stop-Shop distro for the AOL crowd.
I read Yahoo news almost exclusively offline on my Palm (same for Slashdot, thanks to R. Lawrence's cool AvantSlash script), and I'm not seeing any ads.
In any event, Yahoo provides some good services - if this keeps them from charging me for them, I don't see how it's much different than TV or print news (which is mostly 'advertorial' anyway).
> "Two words "Linux Ready" I'm pretty sure that the current OEM License doesn't prohibit leaving empty space on the hard drive, or shipping a CD with the system that includes another OS."
Leaving the OS unistalled means you abandon ~80+% of the users. End of story. This is why AOL, Real Networks and all those other companies pay so much money (tens of millions per year) to have their code SHIP INSTALLED on machines: They know the majority of users use what comes on their computers, and that's all.
(And it's a similar argument to why GPL advocates prefer the source code included in a given distribution rather than simply "made available" on a company website.)
mjolnir_ on wrote:
> "BeOS was basically confined to the pre-G3 systems (PowerPC 601, 603, 604) and thus decided to invade the Intel-based PC market."
BeOS worked fine on some G3 systems, and ~all "BeOS-Ready" systems upgraded to G3. If Be decided to remain in that market - and not get swayed away by the promise of pre-installs on major Intel consumer machines - they could still have cut their 'niche in the niche.'
Slashdot Mirror
That Chiller Theater hand / clamation and music *freaked* me out.
...
am Googling for it now
thanks for the reminder.
S
I would agree that this is "bait and switch" if, after renting more and more DVDs, they started sending you VHS tapes and/or offered you "enhanced service" to get top picks more quickly for an additional fee. This is not the case.
Using your analogy, even, I have a hard time faulting the restaurant who brought me skinnier ribs: Unless they told me beforehand that I'll be getting the same, meaty ribs throughout the duration of my stay, I'd have a hard time working up a lather about it. And it would not be, even possibly, illegal. (Now, if they started with meaty ribs and wound up with chicken necks or Rocky Mountain Oysters, you'd have a case ...)
w/r/t your belief that "if people knew about it, they'd all just cancel at the end of every month and start up again at the beginning of the next," my guess would be that it's a small minority of customers who would be willing to lose their queue, their ratings, fill out the same forms every month, etc. so that they could be first in line for "Agent Cody Banks."
To your first point, how responsible do you feel NetFlix is to publicize the underpinnings to their business? When you go to the "All You Can Eat Ribs" place, should the sign read
All Ewe Can Eat Ribs
(But don't actually eat too many, because then we lose money on you)
IMO, that answer is No.
w/r/t your second point, I still don't see how you extrapolated from the article that keeping a large buffer of movies works *against* you. Seems to me, if you keep movies you want in your buffer, that buffers you against having no movies at all (should the movies at the head of your queue be Waited). The data used in the article point out that what works against you is renting a high quantity of popular movies.
Finally, it is very important to note cancellation is always an option (no contract was the reason I've given it a try).
Excellent article, btw. A related point I'd be interested in hearing about is if and how NetFlix trys to "Save A Customer:" i.e. If I say I want to cancel, do they, and how do they, sweeten the pot to keep me aboard? Anyone experience this?
The principal can certainly be abused, and the morality of the actors can be taken into question.
The principal itself, however, seems time-proven: Massive retaliation is more effective than "responses-in-kind."
The 'retaliation' (for being capitalistic infidels, apparently) from Osama et al. was not massive enough to make us rethink our positions and it created something more like an angered wasp, bringing to mind what Gene Wilder's Sheriff said in Blazing Saddles:
"Oh, don't shoot Mongo; you'll only make him mad."
Seems to be the point of the poster was that Japan had a long history of agressive & atrocious behavior which stopped soon after some very firm and significant pressure was applied in the form of several megatons of explosives.
It's a good point to note: tit for tat leads to ongoing conflict, while massive retaliation generally gets the message across more succinctly and saves lives in the long run.
Frightening, yes, but historically accurate.
For some people, this may make a great deal of sense, but my PDA is not just a contact manager.
I use my pda all day long. I take notes on it in meetings. I read news on it on the subway or the bathroom (<-- not always easy to tell the difference ...). I would not want my phone ringing while in a development meeting. I don't want to put up with the added bulk or cost of other devices vying for battery life. I don't even want color in my PDA (not until there's good reason for it).
I do want easy synching of info between desktop, phone, pda and music machine, but i want the best of each - for my use - doing each of these things. This should not be that difficult (there are enough data synching interfaces / ports on all of these devices), and my hope is Apple pulls it off with hardware or software or both.
Greetings -
How much of the code you've written and/or worked with over the years trickled down to mainstream users in meaningful ways, and in what timeframe should we/you expect this to occur?
i.e. How quickly does the software and hardware tools of your trade today become part of the arsenal of either home digital fx enthusiasts, hobbyists or "small film" makers tomorrow?
When it first came out, I signed up using mostly bogus info and my Yahoo id.
Recently, while using Monster.com (and being unable to recall my old account info based on a former Prodigy address), Monster asked me to 'link' to my Passport account. I thought i'd be able to avoid Yet Another Registration Process by using Passport.
Each screen on the passport signon took ~a full minute to render. Trying a few passwords took 5 minutes of my life away.
Once I did sign onto Passport and 'link' it to Monster, I *still* needed to register with Monster:
What's the point? Why was I asked to link my Passport account if it didn't get me in right away?
Wouldn't Monster have remembered me next time with a cookie anyway?
This is beyond security and megopolies; this is about *usability* where MSFT, in theory, 'has an edge.' It was not very usable, and completely without utility.
If you're on your garage listening in to me in my backyard, the problem is not my unreasonable / ignorant expectation of privacy, it's THAT YOU'RE LISTENING TO ME AND INVADING MY PRIVACY.
The slipperiness of the slope comes in where you say "I can listen in, easily, to you, so you therefore cannot expect what you're doing to be private."
So, if you had a machine available to you that decrypted all SSH traffic on a subnet you specified, without you or it breaking a sweat, does this mean it's unreasonable of me to think my SSH session is private?
Extreme, yes - but it's precisely the same point.
it's not private.
...
The EtherPeg stuff is all in good fun, especially where the people knew they were being sniffed, BUT
Would you also say that it's OK for me to walk around with my 900MHz radio receiver and listen to peoples cordless phonecalls? They're not encrypted; are they private in your estimation?
Can I intercept cell calls?
How about screen RF from folks' ATM transactions (the bank kind)?
None of these are encrypted, but all of them are private by most reasonable standards.
Outlook has significant problems scaling to the degree a behemoth like AOL-TW demands. It's beyond the almost complete absence of security that makes Outlook a really poor choice in large corporate envornments - Outlook basically falls prey to the same ills as AOL's client software: It's intended originally for ease-of-use over security and scalability.
I have definite biases here (as I prefer corporate mail solutions that run on a variety of platforms, scale out the wazoo, and Just Work), but they're rooted firmly in practical experience (first-hand and otherwise) of replacing 10's of Exchange boxes with several different solutions that actually SOLVED user requirements.
Eating your own dog food is definitely a Good Idea.
Someone mentioned that they could use iPlanet and still be eating their own; this is good, but not what they're breading their butter with...
Why wouldn't they appropriate some mail servers - running the same code & on the same platforms as their public servers - but keep them for IUO?
This way, they're finding - and, with hope, trouncing - any bugs or general nonsense and instability, while at the same time, not subjecting their business to all the Herbal Viagra and natural breast augmentation adverts we've come to expect in userx093jr7@aol.com inboxen.
S
> but one had a problem (Blink 182's Dude Ranch).
there you go -
Some McDonald's in the area accept EZPass, but I don't think they do Speedpass around here.
EZPass is tied to your credit card, too, but it's 'mounted' in your car and so precautions against getting your car broken into prevent your EZPass from getting stolen, too.
As far as recovering a stolen EZPass tag, if someone uses it (or goes through a toll without covering it with the anti-RF mylar), you'll know where they are and when. And there's surveillance at toll points.
Question: EZPass has recently asked me to send in my tags for an 'upgrade:' Anyone know what they're upgrading?
I disagree about there being no DIY: While you usually don't start with a motherboard, choice of power supplies and processors, etc., there's a pretty large assortment of choices to start low and build big.
My 8500 (~8 years old) was designed with a PPC604 CPU running @ 120MHz. Standard buss was Fast-SCSI-2.
It's now got a relatively recent G3/400MHz in there, and ATTO Ultra-Wide SCSI controller, lots more RAM and DASD. All of this, I've Done Myself, and the box is MORE than usable for the variety of tasks I throw at it; if i needed more juice, I could certainly add it.
If you go to Mac Rescue, or David Baucom's site and the like, you'll see plenty of 'barebones' Macs and the add-ons you can buy to soup-up yourself pretty nicely.
You can get yourself a pretty nice LinuxPPC box for around $200.
Takes a bit more looking than on the PC-side (it's sort've like finding Linux-compatible componants was ~3 years ago ...), but it's definitely more than do-able.
Is there anything on the books (FCC, et al.) now that would stop me from *legally* implementing any of these solutions?
(And I'm not talking about ISP usage agreements and such.)
* OS X does not come with bash by default.
Maybe it's not bash, but it's got at least some of the cool things bash does (scrolling through previous commands a la set -o vi; auto-completion, etc.)
* OS X does not have a remote login service enabled by default. You have to explicitly turn it on.
* No OS X versions since 10.0.1 enable telnet. When you check the "Allow Remote Login" box, you enable ssh.
Why are you quibbling here? the remote services are available and dirt-simple to implement. No one who cares about the privacy of their data should be using telnet anymore, anyway. free (beer and/or speech) ssh clients abound.
* While Applescript could be used for an attach, so could basically any other scripting language. VBScript? Perl? /bin/sh? Yup. So what's the big deal?
definitely agree about perl and shell scripting - I don't immediately see, though, how anyone could "surruptitiously" run a VB script.
(The previous poster was alluding to that story where the iMac was stolen and recovered thanks in part to running AppleScripts at startup and dial-ins to ISPs ... could you do that in VBScript without being obvious? [that's an actual question])
If you like the command line and GNU tools, OS X is pretty cool.
I guess they can build a uterine wall with hormones and growth factors, but what about the constant flow of oxygen the organism needs? And what about the growing need for nutrients a growing fetus (foetus) requires?
And what of excersize and the other hormones (adrenelin, hypothalamic goo, etc) that all go into the Stew (Stu?) of Life? Do we really know the complete list of Ingredients a human baby needs, and can it be supplied in a lab?
For example, a dialysis machine is ~50 times bigger than a kidney and ~500 times less efficient & effective - now we want to artificially create all the other systems that make us up?
Wouldn't it be easier, on several levels, to start with, like, rodents or something, then work our way up?
In the computer industry, the money is ALWAYS in software rather than hardware ... The marginal cost for an additional copy of Palm OS, or Tony Hawk 2.5X, or whatever, is practically nothing;
Margins can be better on software, and the cost of duplication is certainly cheaper, but Intel and Cisco, e.g., have done fairly well for themselves primarily as hardware vendors.
Also, market saturation will reach the hardware market for PDAs much faster than the software market ... Eventually, devices will reach sufficient power and size that continual advancement is senseless ...
Again, can't disagree with your overall thinking, but - Couldn't the same be said for the desktop and possibly even server market? i.e. that the machines are getting (have gotten) so immensely powerful that people simply won't buy new ones anymore?
Part of the reason why this doesn't happen, unfortunately, is that the software developers and programmers continue to 1) push existing processing performance capabilities, and/or 2) write ineficient code. In my experience, it's been a combination of those two, with the stress on 2).
If done well (Apple and Sun have done this well, IMO), running both hardware and software shops (to whatever extent) can work well for the company and the consumer.
This should make sense: Execution, as always, will play a major role in the success or failure:
1) Hardware division's now free - though more accountable - to create excellent hardware solutions. (My hope is they innovate, but don't create solutions to problems that don't exist [e.g. the MPEG 4-playing, holographic projector model with purple inverse backlighting].)
They may even, as a poster had mentioned, be able to license WinCE, another OS, or at least parts / applications thereof where they were not able to do previously.
Could/would they also license hardware technology from Sony and others?
2) Software division's now free to find additional licensees, not get (completely) hand-tied for what they can and can't do based solely on what one hardware platform provider is giving them.
In this respect, I'd love to see what the folks from Be have in store for OS 5.5 ...
The overall / corporate unit needs to ensure the software / licensing division is careful when licensees start canibalizing their own sales rather than increasing marketshare for the Palm platform. (c.f. the Apple clone market)
As a user, my hope is they keep the Palm a vital platform - this should help do that, but let's hope they keep their eye on the ball.
The fact that Microsoft chose to build a competing browser from the ground up and give it away for free, largely to do the same thing, vindicates this strategy.
It wasn't your point, I realize, but MSFT did not really build IE from the ground up - they started with several large bits of code and functionality from Spyglass, et al. ...)
And Netscape had been giving away their browser for free, as well (it's just they weren't bundling it with a desktop OS for which they had a monopoly
As far as Netscape not capitolizing on the traffic their portal generated; they did make some pretty nice ad revenue from it, it's just they got more interested in selling server software (because of the aforementioned lack of revenues from client software) and thought that'd save their bacon.
The points about buying the eyeballs of everyone who didn't change their default homepage (~90%+ of all users), and of getting a leverage point against MSFT are right on.
Pretty sure most of their infrastructure is FreeBSD-based. (a company i worked for was in talks with AOL - my company's infrastructure was FreeBSD; this was a reason for the proceedings)
No rebooting for service packs, already.
The move, for AOL, seems a good one to get better client software out there for users. Create the One-Stop-Shop distro for the AOL crowd.
In any event, Yahoo provides some good services - if this keeps them from charging me for them, I don't see how it's much different than TV or print news (which is mostly 'advertorial' anyway).
kesuki wrote:
> "Two words "Linux Ready" I'm pretty sure that the current OEM License doesn't prohibit leaving empty space on the hard drive, or shipping a CD with the system that includes another OS."
Leaving the OS unistalled means you abandon ~80+% of the users. End of story. This is why AOL, Real Networks and all those other companies pay so much money (tens of millions per year) to have their code SHIP INSTALLED on machines: They know the majority of users use what comes on their computers, and that's all.
(And it's a similar argument to why GPL advocates prefer the source code included in a given distribution rather than simply "made available" on a company website.)
mjolnir_ on wrote:
> "BeOS was basically confined to the pre-G3 systems (PowerPC 601, 603, 604) and thus decided to invade the Intel-based PC market."
BeOS worked fine on some G3 systems, and ~all "BeOS-Ready" systems upgraded to G3. If Be decided to remain in that market - and not get swayed away by the promise of pre-installs on major Intel consumer machines - they could still have cut their 'niche in the niche.'
Would *love* to see this, no matter what the condition is ...
Anyone know what software those RADAR multitrack recording systems are running atop BeOS?