"Adobe used it exclusively and never bother to upgrade."
It's not that they didn't "bother" to upgrade. It's that they were told that OSX 10.5 would support 64-bit carbon, then told about a year later that it wouldn't.
If I were one of the biggest 3rd party developers for the Mac platform, I'd feel pretty disgusted at that decision. I'd be seriously considering whether I could ever trust the Apple development routemap, and where to apply resources first.
But for every 1 of those people there are 20,000 people who right now are tapping out yet another form debt collection letter and could do it just as easily from a $200 box running Linux.
I'm convinced that before we see a lot of enterprise-y business software go Mac, it will go Linux.
There may be TCO benefits to a home user, but as you observe, in a corporate with experts in locking down desktops and internal support, that doesn't apply.
If I put "lastminute.com" into Google, they've got about the top 6 links in the search page. The URL of their competitors is clearly shown elsewhere.
Are lastminute.com in trouble? Have they got SCO-level management fighting against the reality than anyone can set up what they do (and a lot of their site isn't "last minute" anyway).
You know what's funny? The most likely impact of this move is that more people will link to this slashdot article and drive this up the main index, to the detriment of them.
The correct answer is to use what's appropriate and think in terms of cost (including long term). If you were at Google and wanted to rewrite the search engine, you'd be working in C++ for most of it. You'd possibly be thinking about how you store each piece of data for optimised storage and retrieval speed.
That solution needs it. On the other hand, if you're building an information application with 1000 hits/hour peak, speed isn't your critical matter. It's developer time. You want something that makes code maintenance cheap and that means something like Java or.net, with well-defined classes, the simplest use of data, and barely any tricksy optimisation.
The real challenge is when something small gets bigger. I worked in a business where a system for a business area that they thought would be small hit big. It had been deployed on a really nasty architecture, and they had to rewrite it to make it work properly.
No businessman with any sense about computer systems would use a computer to run such a process.
It's only processed once and for 1 purpose. Which means that a whole load of set up costs doesn't get paid back. Computer systems have quite a lot more set up than a manual process, but save in the long run.
It's simple. If you're calculating interest, a computer does it better, faster and cheaper than a person. But voting isn't complicated.
No transmission speed or multiple location requirement. If the votes don't get counted for a few more hours, what's the problem? In an election near me, they had e-voting, and it took a few hours to get the results out because of a glitch with the network. Driving the ballots to a central point would have taken less time.
Reliability. Paper ballots are not subject to damage from electromagnetic forces. The heads don't crash on a pencil.
Audit. You can't audit a sum or a byte. Paper gives you a trail.
This is definitely not how most unix admins would react.
Yes, and guess what? This is definitely not how most windows admins would react, either.
I've always maintained that a good unix guy can do anything on windows with a bit of training, but a windows guy will generally be completely out of his element in unix.
Why? What do you think that UNIX has got that Windows doesn't? Because to suggest that someone would be out of their depth suggests that Windows lacks features that UNIX has. The only other possibility is that you're saying that it has the same features, yet is much harder to maintain.
how are those statistics "gerrymandered"? If anyone's gerrymandering, it's you, quoting retail laptop numbers (where Apple are strong). Why don't the sales by Dell or those from large mail order companies count?
Personally, if I knew that my blank CD purchases were going to inflict Bryan Adams, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette on the world, I think I'd buy them across the border.
The problem is that there are certain languages/tools/frameworks that have a lot more noisy programmers than others.
Rails is perhaps the biggest at the moment. Thousands of people are blogging/twittering about Rails. In reality, almost nobody is running a commercial app on it (except Twitter and the 37signals stuff).
Java and c# people mostly don't go making a lot of noise, yet there are far more of them around.
And experience does matter. Sure, I could pick up and start coding Java quite quickly, but I wouldn't have the in-depth experience that comes with use.
In the end, can anyone look at that period when copyright was 28 years and say that the period after it produced better art for having longer terms?
Because that's what the test should be. Copyright is there to grant temporary monopoly so that people create.
I'm not going to argue that the movies were better in the olden days, as time acts as a sorter between wheat and chaff. But in that period you had most Billy Wilder films, Hitchcock's best work, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, a whole bunch of great Disney animated movies and modern classics like Chinatown and The Godfather.
I certainly don't think that movies were worse then than now.
It's yet another cranky decision by the people at the OLPC. Intel to not work on other competing projects? Are they kidding? No company is going to agree that and bet on a single project at this early stage in the development of such projects.
Competition is good. The more different players in this market, the better. Because more innovation will deliver lower costs, and products closest to what people want. If the people at the OLPC care most about getting computing power to the people in developing countries, they'd welcome that,not try and stop it.
The OLPC people just don't get the real world. They closed their "buy one give one" despite that giving free laptops to the sort of people that they claim to be serving.
What? An African country couldn't produce some basic textbooks for $200? I can buy Jules Verne books for £1. Hire some writers, get the books written, and distribute the proofs to printers near to where you want them distributed.
And PCs and internet - there's no infrastructure there, is there? Where's some village going to get its internet from? Who's going to fix a cracked screen?
As for obsolete, we're not talking about the latest knowledge here. Millions of kids around the world don't even go to school, or aren't literate. In the west, we've been teaching kids to read for decades. There's no reason that books from 20 years ago can't be used to teach kids to read.
Why invest large amounts of money in centralized antiquated technologies rather than look towards the future?
Because it's more cost effective right now. If you want to improve the well-being of these people, you start by getting them the basic skills of literacy and numeracy that we take for granted. From that, they can build on that to skill their populations.
How, pray tell do you expect a citizen of an impoverished nation to be reading your English post on an internet forum without a computer and access to the internet? How would they do it if they didn't "focus on the basics" of reading and writing? Where are they supposed to learn about free markets and agriculture?
I dunno. Books maybe? Set up a foundation to write some textbooks and distribute them. Books cost very little - a lot less than computers. They don't need an internet network, power or a support infrastructure.
Alternatively you could do broadcasts. Many countries in the world already do this - educating people about health and education via TVs that are often public to a village.
The difference is that most of those companies were very much unsound. Apart from the outright fraudsters, there were the.coms that had little revenue, high costs and therefore, losses.
For some, they sold up and got out just before the whole thing collapsed and went off with their millions. We'll see the same thing with many Web 2.0 companies.
But Google isn't one of them. It does have a high P/E, but it's making profits. It's a viable business, at least until someone comes along and does it a lot better.
Yes, exactly. It's a fine phone. But it's not revolutionary. Apple has shown us that Nokia probably could have put it out years ago. Nokia was just bleeding us for extra money.
Yup, because there isn't a competitive market between Motorola, Nokia, SE, Samsung and others. Have you thought perhaps that Nokia and the rest have been evolving technology (such as in miniturisation and power) and Apple have now just taken what's already been done? The iPhone has one revolutionary aspect - the multi-touch screen (XDA phones got there first with touchscreen).
Using your numbers, Apple got 2% of the market IN ONE MONTH!. That should scare the crap out of Nokia and friends. Nokia, SE, Motorola (and to a much lesser extent Samsung and LG) have had decades of lead time on this.
Let's see what the figures are over the next 12 months. There were huge numbers of sales from people who had been waiting 6 months for this phone.
You fail to see the big picture because you're hung up on feature lists. Aside from MIDI, only recently have the big cell phone companies let you install your own MP3 ringtones. Why all of a sudden? Because the iPhone was coming. Also, you can install your own limited set of ringtones on an iPhone.
Bullshit. I had an MP3 ringtone on my cellphone 2 years ago, and it wasn't even a new phone then. That's over a year before the iPhone announcement.
Sounds like you got p0wned by Nokia all these years, and don't want to admit it.
Sounds like you're an Apple fanboy, and don't want to admit it. You've swallowed a lot of kool-aid about it being revolutionary. It isn't. The UI may be an improvement but it's not revolutionary. I had an XDA phone 3 years ago that had a touch screen.
Instead of being mad/jealous/outraged with Apple for producing such a great phone (at whatever price point), people should be made at Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola for feeding us SUCH CRAP for so many years.
Crap like the N95 with 3G, HSDPA, a 5mp camera, installable applications, MMS, GPS and so forth?
Apple shouldn't have been able to beat the big cell phone companies at their own game so easily. The iPhone should have been the sort of phone that the masses (not geeks) looked at and thought was OK, but not a showstopper. That didn't happen. Why? Because the big three have been selling us garbage phones for years at high prices and we've lapped it up, believing that they were bleeding edge. But they weren't.
Apple aren't exactly killing Nokia. They had less than 2% of all sales in July - which may have been a blip due to pent-up demand.
Apple couldn't have put more than four or five years into R&D for the iPhone. What has Nokia been doing for the last 30 years? Ericsson? Motorola? Coming up with crappy little phones with crappy little keypads that play crappy little dee-dee-dul-dee ringtones. Put simply: Apple ate their lunch.
Thanks - installing your own ringtones - something else the iPhone can't do.
Sure, the recent offerings from Nokia are approaching iPhone quality, but SE and Moto are still far behind. And if there wasn't an iPhone to push them in this direction? We'd be happily consuming whatever underfunctioning turd of a handset the big three told us was state of the art.
The N95 came out way before the iPhone was released. Has all the features of an iphone + more. I'll maybe give them the credit for getting Nokia to add 8GB of memory, though.
You don't have to like the iPhone. You don't have to buy an iPhone. You don't have to believe it's the best phone out there. But you can't help but realize that for years we've been sold a big fat lie about what a mobile phone could be. Thanks to the iPhone, we don't believe the Nokia/SE/Moto lie anymore.
Unlike being told that a phone is totally revolutionary despite missing a bunch of features that were in my phone from 3 years ago and being told that web based apps are the future, then told that an SDK is coming in February.
You've got a touch screen, 8GB of memory and not much else.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheapest Macbook in the UK - £729. Cheapest Dell is about half that.
It's not that they didn't "bother" to upgrade. It's that they were told that OSX 10.5 would support 64-bit carbon, then told about a year later that it wouldn't.
If I were one of the biggest 3rd party developers for the Mac platform, I'd feel pretty disgusted at that decision. I'd be seriously considering whether I could ever trust the Apple development routemap, and where to apply resources first.
Next time, why don't you try "Hey, they were a little late, but it gave me a chance to check out some of the new iMacs."
I'm convinced that before we see a lot of enterprise-y business software go Mac, it will go Linux.
There may be TCO benefits to a home user, but as you observe, in a corporate with experts in locking down desktops and internal support, that doesn't apply.
If I put "lastminute.com" into Google, they've got about the top 6 links in the search page. The URL of their competitors is clearly shown elsewhere.
Are lastminute.com in trouble? Have they got SCO-level management fighting against the reality than anyone can set up what they do (and a lot of their site isn't "last minute" anyway).
You know what's funny? The most likely impact of this move is that more people will link to this slashdot article and drive this up the main index, to the detriment of them.
The correct answer is to use what's appropriate and think in terms of cost (including long term). If you were at Google and wanted to rewrite the search engine, you'd be working in C++ for most of it. You'd possibly be thinking about how you store each piece of data for optimised storage and retrieval speed.
That solution needs it. On the other hand, if you're building an information application with 1000 hits/hour peak, speed isn't your critical matter. It's developer time. You want something that makes code maintenance cheap and that means something like Java or .net, with well-defined classes, the simplest use of data, and barely any tricksy optimisation.
The real challenge is when something small gets bigger. I worked in a business where a system for a business area that they thought would be small hit big. It had been deployed on a really nasty architecture, and they had to rewrite it to make it work properly.
If you go to sites like Jobserve, you won't see many Python and Ruby jobs. It's mostly C#, Java and C++.
No businessman with any sense about computer systems would use a computer to run such a process.
It's only processed once and for 1 purpose. Which means that a whole load of set up costs doesn't get paid back. Computer systems have quite a lot more set up than a manual process, but save in the long run.
It's simple. If you're calculating interest, a computer does it better, faster and cheaper than a person. But voting isn't complicated.
No transmission speed or multiple location requirement. If the votes don't get counted for a few more hours, what's the problem? In an election near me, they had e-voting, and it took a few hours to get the results out because of a glitch with the network. Driving the ballots to a central point would have taken less time.
Reliability. Paper ballots are not subject to damage from electromagnetic forces. The heads don't crash on a pencil.
Audit. You can't audit a sum or a byte. Paper gives you a trail.
Yes, and guess what? This is definitely not how most windows admins would react, either.
I've always maintained that a good unix guy can do anything on windows with a bit of training, but a windows guy will generally be completely out of his element in unix.
Why? What do you think that UNIX has got that Windows doesn't? Because to suggest that someone would be out of their depth suggests that Windows lacks features that UNIX has. The only other possibility is that you're saying that it has the same features, yet is much harder to maintain.
That said, you did give us The Cat Came Back.
Rails is perhaps the biggest at the moment. Thousands of people are blogging/twittering about Rails. In reality, almost nobody is running a commercial app on it (except Twitter and the 37signals stuff).
Java and c# people mostly don't go making a lot of noise, yet there are far more of them around.
And experience does matter. Sure, I could pick up and start coding Java quite quickly, but I wouldn't have the in-depth experience that comes with use.
Surely the IETF could come up with a "piracy bit" to go with the evil bit?
"He's more machine than man now"
Because that's what the test should be. Copyright is there to grant temporary monopoly so that people create.
I'm not going to argue that the movies were better in the olden days, as time acts as a sorter between wheat and chaff. But in that period you had most Billy Wilder films, Hitchcock's best work, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, a whole bunch of great Disney animated movies and modern classics like Chinatown and The Godfather.
I certainly don't think that movies were worse then than now.
Competition is good. The more different players in this market, the better. Because more innovation will deliver lower costs, and products closest to what people want. If the people at the OLPC care most about getting computing power to the people in developing countries, they'd welcome that,not try and stop it.
The OLPC people just don't get the real world. They closed their "buy one give one" despite that giving free laptops to the sort of people that they claim to be serving.
Books are stolen, get damaged, or become obsolete all the time.
You're sure that a book on English lit is more likely to get stolen than a $200 computer?
And PCs and internet - there's no infrastructure there, is there? Where's some village going to get its internet from? Who's going to fix a cracked screen?
As for obsolete, we're not talking about the latest knowledge here. Millions of kids around the world don't even go to school, or aren't literate. In the west, we've been teaching kids to read for decades. There's no reason that books from 20 years ago can't be used to teach kids to read.
Because it's more cost effective right now. If you want to improve the well-being of these people, you start by getting them the basic skills of literacy and numeracy that we take for granted. From that, they can build on that to skill their populations.
I dunno. Books maybe? Set up a foundation to write some textbooks and distribute them. Books cost very little - a lot less than computers. They don't need an internet network, power or a support infrastructure.
Alternatively you could do broadcasts. Many countries in the world already do this - educating people about health and education via TVs that are often public to a village.
For some, they sold up and got out just before the whole thing collapsed and went off with their millions. We'll see the same thing with many Web 2.0 companies.
But Google isn't one of them. It does have a high P/E, but it's making profits. It's a viable business, at least until someone comes along and does it a lot better.
Yup, because there isn't a competitive market between Motorola, Nokia, SE, Samsung and others. Have you thought perhaps that Nokia and the rest have been evolving technology (such as in miniturisation and power) and Apple have now just taken what's already been done? The iPhone has one revolutionary aspect - the multi-touch screen (XDA phones got there first with touchscreen).
Using your numbers, Apple got 2% of the market IN ONE MONTH!. That should scare the crap out of Nokia and friends. Nokia, SE, Motorola (and to a much lesser extent Samsung and LG) have had decades of lead time on this.Let's see what the figures are over the next 12 months. There were huge numbers of sales from people who had been waiting 6 months for this phone.
You fail to see the big picture because you're hung up on feature lists. Aside from MIDI, only recently have the big cell phone companies let you install your own MP3 ringtones. Why all of a sudden? Because the iPhone was coming. Also, you can install your own limited set of ringtones on an iPhone.Bullshit. I had an MP3 ringtone on my cellphone 2 years ago, and it wasn't even a new phone then. That's over a year before the iPhone announcement.
Sounds like you got p0wned by Nokia all these years, and don't want to admit it. Sounds like you're an Apple fanboy, and don't want to admit it. You've swallowed a lot of kool-aid about it being revolutionary. It isn't. The UI may be an improvement but it's not revolutionary. I had an XDA phone 3 years ago that had a touch screen.Crap like the N95 with 3G, HSDPA, a 5mp camera, installable applications, MMS, GPS and so forth?
Apple shouldn't have been able to beat the big cell phone companies at their own game so easily. The iPhone should have been the sort of phone that the masses (not geeks) looked at and thought was OK, but not a showstopper. That didn't happen. Why? Because the big three have been selling us garbage phones for years at high prices and we've lapped it up, believing that they were bleeding edge. But they weren't.
Apple aren't exactly killing Nokia. They had less than 2% of all sales in July - which may have been a blip due to pent-up demand.
Apple couldn't have put more than four or five years into R&D for the iPhone. What has Nokia been doing for the last 30 years? Ericsson? Motorola? Coming up with crappy little phones with crappy little keypads that play crappy little dee-dee-dul-dee ringtones. Put simply: Apple ate their lunch.
Thanks - installing your own ringtones - something else the iPhone can't do. Sure, the recent offerings from Nokia are approaching iPhone quality, but SE and Moto are still far behind. And if there wasn't an iPhone to push them in this direction? We'd be happily consuming whatever underfunctioning turd of a handset the big three told us was state of the art.
The N95 came out way before the iPhone was released. Has all the features of an iphone + more. I'll maybe give them the credit for getting Nokia to add 8GB of memory, though.
You don't have to like the iPhone. You don't have to buy an iPhone. You don't have to believe it's the best phone out there. But you can't help but realize that for years we've been sold a big fat lie about what a mobile phone could be. Thanks to the iPhone, we don't believe the Nokia/SE/Moto lie anymore.
Unlike being told that a phone is totally revolutionary despite missing a bunch of features that were in my phone from 3 years ago and being told that web based apps are the future, then told that an SDK is coming in February.
You've got a touch screen, 8GB of memory and not much else.
Living in the UK, I want to see someone using the touch keyboard. I'm skeptical that it's a better interface than my phone keyboard.
So, who owns it then?