They actually state that it will only run on Apple sold machines, they do not specifically state THEIR DRM'D MACHINES
Rather than using DRM, if they use specific altered BIOS and/or a specific chipset then that is all that is necessary. The OS will not have the drivers/ability to work on other hardware.
Apple will most likely still be designing their own MB's, even if they do include Intel chips, so this is a very easy way for them to maintain sales on their own, still technically proprietary, machines. DRM may be used, but if it does then it will probably be a second line of attack, not the primary.
One reason, despite their higher quality, has to be the onerous copy protection attached to each format, including such idiocy as disabling digital bass management at the player level thus requiring users to run six analog connections between their SACD/DVD players and their home theater receivers.
Er, both of these formats use a resolution that current digital interconnects are not capable of. They decided that instead of creating a new digital standard, or messing up an existing one so that some things would work together but some won't, to go the good old "everyone can handle analog" route.
Seriously, neither SPDIF (coax) or TOSLINK (optical) has the bandwidth for multichannel 96k audio, or 192k audio, both of which are supported with DVD-Audio.
In much the same vein SACD uses a bitstream rather than decimating the stream from the converters into set word lengths. This is conceptually why it sounds better, because you are skipping the decimation stage in the A/D convertor, and also not having to reconstruct the digital words back into a bitstream for the D/A convertor.
SACD's bitstream is at a bit over 2Mhz, which is above the bandwidth that standard SPDIF/TOSLINK circuitry is capable of.
Yes, all this DRM stuff really annoys me too. However this is the one case where connections were done in a way to try to make it more universal rather than create more industry confusion.
Imagine buying an SACD player with SPDIF that only worked with Sony Receivers made since 2001? People would be annoyed, just like they are about HDMI, etc.
If the natural language interface to Facade is not only a way of interrogating the characters but also a way of changing the state of the game and advancing the plot, then that's a fairly significant step further than Starship Titanic, which pretty much limited the parser to interrogating the characters for answers.
I hate to disagree with you here, especially since you worked with TDV, but Starship Titanic did rely on using the parser to change and advance the game.
Specifically one had to convince the Bellbot to smash a TV. You had to talk him into it via the Spookitalk engine.
Anyone else remember Starship Titanic by Digital Village, Douglas Adam's game company?
3d rendered characters (which looked much better IMHO that the pictures for this game) that used a system called Spookitalk so that you could type in what to say to the characters and they could pretty intelligently attempt to reply.
I haven't played this game yet, but I did play ST and enjoyed it. Hopefully this takes that concept of AI and expands it farther as if you have played ST for a while you eventually can figure out what kind of responses you will get from the different characters.
My point being that this concept is not nearly new at all, even with the audio element which is what people seem to be claiming is different.
Well according to the grandfather posting who was calling for 'standardized' menus it would be like this:
Visitors to the art gallery are presented with olive drab walls on which all the paintings are hung on. Of course they are only hung on North facing walls in order to minimize the confusion of a patron having to turn.
All picture frames are of course 1" thick and blue, so that a patron can truly evaluate where the art ends and the wall begins.
We would also like to announce that due to the complaints of a few patrons starting next year we will no longer display any art using the color "red" as this is thought to be a violence provoking color. Any patrons not prepared and wearing red clothing will be able to check out a grey smock to ensure they can comply with our new artistic standards!
First off I agree that many menus are obnoxious, and not straight forward to the user. There is also a lot of overuse of video clips going into and out of menus.
However, when you purchase a movie/TV show/etc. you are buying a creative piece. You may not consider it art, but the people who create it do. They (and in many cases 'they' refers to the studios more than the producers/directors/actors/etc but the studios do also own creative rights to the work), they have the right to create a whole package of their creative work, menus and all.
Standardizing menus removes a part of the art they want to surround their work with, from packaging, to starting the piece, to the piece itself.
Not everyone will like every menu system, but hey that is what creative works are about. Some people like them, some people don't. Just like any other art form.
I'm fairly sure that most/. readers will not consider these elements art, and as such will probably mod me down, however no matter what you opinion is as far as the quality of these items are, yes by all definitions they can be considered art. Of course by all means you can choose to dislike them.
It can be done to a limited amount. Dolby has plug-ins that will virtualize a 5.1 mix to headphones and it sounds close.
There are a couple of issues:
DSP: you need a multichannel mix (probably stored Dolby Digital) that you will need to decode, then re-encode in near real-time, plus delay the video to make up for the latency of this decode/encode process
Not everyone's ears have the same shape and as such the tweaking necessary for one person is not the same as someone else. Of course a general result is pretty good, but while it good it still has some bad in it (phase issues, hollow sound) for possibly a large portion of the audience. Of course this is mostly moot by the reality of how many people use mp3 as an audio format.
Consumer interest: these products already exist, or at least did exist, but hardly anyone seems to care enough to buy them, or even find out about them
Unfortunately the second reason highlights a physics problem that is not correctible unless you make custom earpieces for each individual like you can have done with Etymotic earphones. Even the inside contours of the earlobe and the contours in the shaft of the ear will cause phase and frequency differences that are more important that one might think. It all happens so close to the ear and in such a small space that little differences are highly exacerbated.
A great example of that is in Musical Theatre (I am sound designing Music Man in the next few weeks by coincidence), where when you mount a microphone on an actors head, even little differences like a tuft of hair can cause major issues. Different hats/wigs, or someone's hair falling down where it shouldn't be significantly changes the quality of the sound. The miniature 'caves' that are created around the mic are in the right place to seem like a real life cave as far as the sound system is concerned.
Actually your ears are quite capable of hearing and detecting location in full 3 dimensions with only 2 ears being present. This is because of the shape of your ears and head.
Sound having to go around your head and ears is distorted frequency wise. Your brain detects the different frequency response, as well as the different timing between the sound heard by both ears (this is phase BTW), to figure out what direction a sound is coming from including any angle of front/back as well as height information.
The brain can also distinguish very well the difference between the original sound, and reflected sounds to help determine area size and original sound source distance.
Since recorded sound does not hit you from different directions as diverse as those in nature sound from speakers will always sound different than a live experience. This is why things like fan and machine noise are ignored by most people when they are in the room, but record it and it sticks out like a sore thumb. That stuff typically is reflected willy-nilly and hits you from all angles. Since this is just background noise most people have trained themselves to tune it out unless it is really abundant. Make all that sound come from headphones, or a set of speakers that can be pinpointed by the ears and suddenly the noise is much more directional and your ears won't tune it out.
As far as 13.1 goes, there has been a 10.2 movement going on for almost a freaking decade now, lead most of that time by Tomlinson Holman. 10.2 still has such small penetration, even in actual Movie Theaters that I highly doubt 13.1 will get any penetration into the home except for those people into conspicuous consumption (look its my 3rd hummer, I park it next to my schooner), and they don't really appreciate it, they only hope others notice it.
And just because a theater has lots of speakers does not mean that they are discreet. All of the left side speakers utilize the same playback channel, the right side of course is the same. This way no matter where you sit between the front and back of the 'house' the side surround information will be the same. There are a few discreet front speakers (between 3 and 7 depending on the system) and usually 1 back channel.
Have you actually taken the time to dissect a good Monster Cable?
Mind you the low end stuff (XP, 100 series, etc are all just normal cables), but the M-Series or 1000 series stuff.
Those cables are intense. The dielectric locks the individual pairs in place so that crosstalk and inductance are constant even if the cable is moved around or bent (sure it will change some, but not nearly as much as a cheaper cable will).
There is a lot of copper in those things, and everyone should agree that the more signal flow the better, especially with high power cables (i.e. speaker cables).
They also have a lifetime guarantee with no questions asked. Yes, if you read the warranty information there are caveats, but as someone who knows some pro-line Monster reps, any retailer is told by Monster to not ask any questions unless it is extremely obvious that they did something amazing stupid with the cables. A cable doesn't work, even if visibly damaged, and the retailers are supposed to grab it and pull one off the rack for you. Yes, honest retailers (hard to find nowadays I know) will do this.
Why are people having such difficulty with this? The processor of choice will have very little effect on the mindshare/marketshare of the platforms.
Apple machines will still be Apple machines. They will still look different (Apple isn't going to start using Lian-Li cases all of a sudden people), the OS is still different, and your typical user is still going to think that all their friends use Windows, so they should too.
Apple machines will not suddenly get any cheaper. In fact the rumor mills speculated that Apple could buy PPC chips for LESS than Intel chips at the volume they purchase. Whether this is true or not, Apple will certainly have R&D costs involved with the hardware switch which will be amortized across the price of the individual machines sold.
I personally expect Apple machines to hit a pretty close price mark to where they are now, they will just have slightly different motherboards (but still Apple specific, even if they can load other OS's 'easier'), and a different CPU.
The major draw is still the OS. The OS that is slick looking, pretty darn easy to use, and has a Unix core that is pretty powerful. It comes with pretty nice Digital Photo management, Music Jukebox, Movie Editing & DVD Authoring with HD capabilities, music creation software, system wide integrated services like spell check, search, copy/paste, dictionary, etc., etc., etc.
People looking to switch that want the cheapest possible solution will still buy a Linspire machine. People who have heard of Macs, know Mac users, and have been curious will pay a bit more to get these machines.
The Intel switch while significant for future speed increases, concerns over vector processing and endian issues, and for developer support, is pretty much going to be mostly a non-issue.
The biggest issue is the rumored lack of Classic support, even in Rosetta, and the answer to that is: OS 9 has been dead for 5 years, update you friggen software if you want to update your Machine/OS. If you need to use ancient software, run it on an ancient machine it was designed for!
This is not a new concept, when the PCI based Macs came out, many studios used Nubus Macs for years with older Protools/SDII systems, as they liked the platform, it did what they needed, and those machine ran practically forever. They realized that when a new software came along that they needed they would either put another machine along side it to run the new, or throw the old software out with the machine as it was antiquated. I have seen some of those systems still in use today!
How can you possibly secure a network against attacks if your users are constantly undermining your lockdown efforts?
This really isn't that hard. I run 8 university computer labs, and in the last 2 years I have had 1 machine get infected. That machine was in a faculty member's office, and he had formatted it and reinstalled windows in order to undo my lockdown.
Between good imaging tools (ghost, etc.), setting policies, using industry lock down tools (deep freeze, driveshield, etc.), and creative use of license management software along with partitioning schemes and well set up network drive management keeping users under control is not that too much of a challenge.
My departments are all underfunded to boot, and we can still pull this stuff off. We have the added detriment of using some software (Discreet products mostly) that require admin access by all users, or they just don't work.
We even have a set of machines running XP that we don't use driveshield on so that we can experiment with configurations. Number of worms/virus's: 0. Spyware, well more than 0, but not much considering that 18-20 year olds use them every day.
The first step is deploying infrastructure that is appropriate. When I first started working on our campus, one of my departments wanted to set up a Win2003 server. I finally convinced them that deploying a Mac OS X server was better. And for our needs it certainly is. We also use a number of Linux machines to get other background work done (interestingly enough to make Windows network browsing actually work across subnets).
I by no means am a Microsoft fan. The more I work with their products, the more they annoy me. But even I concede that you can lock them down in a business/educational setting very well if you do the research and take the time.
Why is it that anti-Mac trolls always have to harp on the 1 button mouse thing?
Even though it gives developers a reason to not hide options in contextual menus (which are still easily available with a control click) making a more straightforward user experience
Even though you can plug in any USB mouse/trackball/etc, and will automatically map 2 buttons and the scroll wheel, and more buttons can be used for other parts of the OS (expose, etc)
As with the above, how many advanced PC users keep the crap mouse that Dell/Gateway/whoever sends them? Don't they get better mice for their system anyway?? I haven't seen a Mac in quite a while that doesn't have at least 5 buttons, but on our campus there is a concern about buying new PC's for a computer lab as Maya requires 3 buttons (I finally told them it will use the clickable scroll wheel just fine)
Not to mention it really is easier for non-technical and new users. I have a 3 year old. He loves playing on the computer, but we try to get him to also play with real people and outdoors and everything. As such he hasn't had enough computer time to conceptualize how a multibutton mouse works, as he is busy staring at the screen and madly trying to click around to make Dora the Explorer jump or whatnot. Most mice are way to large for his hands, and dealing with multiple buttons would require him looking away from the screen to reposition his hand, or at least make sure he is hitting the right one.
In a couple of years we will get him a multi-button mouse, in the mean time he does way better, and gets more from the system not having to deal with it. The same thing is true for Mom's and Grandma's/Grandpa's who all fit into a special demographic: People who buy a computer and just use what came with it.
You are advanced, figure out how to plug in a different mouse already! I know you can do it.
The other interesting bit is my son currently uses a 7 year old Mac running Tiger, and it doesn't feel considerably slower than my G4. Try saying that about Windows on a P4 versus a PII or early PIII, I know, I have had to set such monstrosities up! (Users with PII's demanding XP).
Our family fits into this discussion really well, we have 4 computers, 1 the 7 year old Mac, 1 now retired is a 8 year old Mac, my machine is a 3 year old G4, and we have a 5 year old AMD machine running my website because it was free and at the time I didn't have a spare Mac to set it up on.
We aren't at a point where we would even consider upgrading, with the exception that I would like a laptop. If I get one, all those machines will still be in use and cranking away, probably for years to come.
If you are well-off and just want a new iPod, trading it in may be the way to go.
Or you could give it to me.
Or you could give it to a friend you know who isn't as well off but might enjoy an iPod.
Even if they have to spend $50 - $100 to get a new battery it is cheaper than a new iPod, and doesn't involve selling your soul and losing your friends trying to get a free one from Gratis.
Finally, who in their right mind would host any type of server on a Windows or Macintosh machine? Hence the Linux boxes.
You obviously have never looked into Mac OS X server. When I started my current job, their old Red Hat server was dying, bad choices of hardware and no basic software maintenance on the part of my predecessor.
I had to get a solution up very fast (it was two weeks before final exams), and it had to be cross platform (read Mac, PC, and Linux) compatible.
I grabbed a G4 and set up a copy of Mac OS X Server I had from my previous employment, and started setting it up, while also trying to retrofit an available PC with Linux.
I was able to deploy the OS X based solution much faster, so much so that my very pro Windows supervisor found a way to afford an Xserve within 9 months (and we have really really tight budgets).
I now also have 9 linux machines making sure things go smoothly with our network, shadowing our license management, and doing other random tasks as well, however I shudder to think of the type of integration we have with all three platforms at the moment and trying to get it working as solidly and quickly under any other platform.
I have 3 systems, all Dual Pentium II Xeons with identical hardware and cases. 2 run SuSe 9.2, and one runs XP Pro.
All of them are basically running background services, the XP machine handles our license management software and DriveShield control.
Except for upgrading the kernel the Linux boxes just stay up until I reboot them to shuffle things around (physically moving the cases, power runs, or networking).
The XP box, while it doesn't crash per se, completely forgets it has a network card about every 58-64 days or so, but a reboot fixes it.
That is darned annoying. Especially with 100+ days of uptime on the identical machines with SuSe.
And while I'm on that, 200 bucks? If you are really trying to get money, why not charge 20 bucks? For 200 bucks, most people are likely to seek outside help. For 20 bucks, people are more likely to just fork it over. I'd bet you'd have a greater ROI with the lower charge.
Well obviously they went to the (Adobe, Digidesign, Microsoft, ) school of business, where when we notice piracy, we raise the price!
So what if charging less would gain many more sales and overall more profit, that would make us look like wusses!
Here at our organization the men are real men, the women are real women, and the little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are real little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, and forcing you to take out a mortgage to buy all our software validates our existences.
Microsoft has a 90% stranglehold on marketshare, would you say that we benefit in quality, cost and inovation in their one-player-sytem?
I will probably be modded as troll for this, but so be it.
Yes, I do benifit in quality, cost and innovation from this, as I use Macintosh and Linux.
Since most of the slimy business players out there are busy trying to hijack the large & easy to break into kid on the block, that gives them less incentive to try to mess with our more secure and smaller market share workhorses.
I can get lots of work done efficiently without having to have a dual-core/dual processor system to run my extraneous firewalls, anti-spyware, anti-virus, and malware processes.
While I would gladly never have to deal with a Windows system again (or at least a lot less than I do now), I would gladly like to see them continue to be a big player as they will very likely always create code that has more holes than swiss cheese.
And that gives yet another layer of protection for those of us using OS's that allow us to work efficiently and just get work done.
Common market? What does this really mean? Obviously if we are talking about mixing/editing a song it probably refers to the common audio marketplace.
Just because things cost more, doesn't mean they are not common. Quite a number of installations of Protools existed in 1996, actually a lot compared to the market's size.
Now the market is a lot larger, so it seems like it is way more common today, when in reality it is not.
The real difference is that Joe Sixpack does play around with audio editing now because the tools have become so cheap. This implies the market of people working/playing with audio is larger, not that the general population all play with music (from a technical standpoint, not counting playing MP3s and such) these days.
So why not create subfolders in your Mac's Application folder?
Most Mac OS X apps can be anywhere in the filesystem and still work, so create a folder, say/Applications/Internet and put Safari.app, Mail.app, IE, etc. all in there. Then do the same for any other apps you have.
So a couple apps may have to be outside of that, but I would guess that for most users it is very few (NFS Manager is the only one I can think of that breaks when you move it).
I do this for the University I work for. An Adobe CS folder for those apps, a Macromedia MX folder for all of those, it really helps clean things up. Of course I also make sure that everyone has the main apps (Photoshop, Freehand, etc) on their dock as well.
Kids: Remember, don't take tax advice from a guy who thinks it's OK to just not do your taxes if you're not a government employee. We have a name for people like this. They're called "future inmates".
Very true. I warned a friend of mine to be careful about this as he told me he hadn't file for a number of years.
Turns out the IRS thought he owed them some money, a LOT of money.
He ended up paying not as much, but still a lot of money to accountants to get the IRS off his back. All in all he was very lucky, but he almost lost everything he owned.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than using DRM, if they use specific altered BIOS and/or a specific chipset then that is all that is necessary. The OS will not have the drivers/ability to work on other hardware.
Apple will most likely still be designing their own MB's, even if they do include Intel chips, so this is a very easy way for them to maintain sales on their own, still technically proprietary, machines. DRM may be used, but if it does then it will probably be a second line of attack, not the primary.
Specifically one had to convince the Bellbot to smash a TV. You had to talk him into it via the Spookitalk engine.
Anyone else remember Starship Titanic by Digital Village, Douglas Adam's game company?
3d rendered characters (which looked much better IMHO that the pictures for this game) that used a system called Spookitalk so that you could type in what to say to the characters and they could pretty intelligently attempt to reply.
I haven't played this game yet, but I did play ST and enjoyed it. Hopefully this takes that concept of AI and expands it farther as if you have played ST for a while you eventually can figure out what kind of responses you will get from the different characters.
My point being that this concept is not nearly new at all, even with the audio element which is what people seem to be claiming is different.
Well according to the grandfather posting who was calling for 'standardized' menus it would be like this: Visitors to the art gallery are presented with olive drab walls on which all the paintings are hung on. Of course they are only hung on North facing walls in order to minimize the confusion of a patron having to turn. All picture frames are of course 1" thick and blue, so that a patron can truly evaluate where the art ends and the wall begins. We would also like to announce that due to the complaints of a few patrons starting next year we will no longer display any art using the color "red" as this is thought to be a violence provoking color. Any patrons not prepared and wearing red clothing will be able to check out a grey smock to ensure they can comply with our new artistic standards!
First off I agree that many menus are obnoxious, and not straight forward to the user. There is also a lot of overuse of video clips going into and out of menus.
However, when you purchase a movie/TV show/etc. you are buying a creative piece. You may not consider it art, but the people who create it do. They (and in many cases 'they' refers to the studios more than the producers/directors/actors/etc but the studios do also own creative rights to the work), they have the right to create a whole package of their creative work, menus and all.
Standardizing menus removes a part of the art they want to surround their work with, from packaging, to starting the piece, to the piece itself.
Not everyone will like every menu system, but hey that is what creative works are about. Some people like them, some people don't. Just like any other art form.
I'm fairly sure that most /. readers will not consider these elements art, and as such will probably mod me down, however no matter what you opinion is as far as the quality of these items are, yes by all definitions they can be considered art. Of course by all means you can choose to dislike them.
Hey, when I think big, I think big.
There are a couple of issues:
- DSP: you need a multichannel mix (probably stored Dolby Digital) that you will need to decode, then re-encode in near real-time, plus delay the video to make up for the latency of this decode/encode process
- Not everyone's ears have the same shape and as such the tweaking necessary for one person is not the same as someone else. Of course a general result is pretty good, but while it good it still has some bad in it (phase issues, hollow sound) for possibly a large portion of the audience. Of course this is mostly moot by the reality of how many people use mp3 as an audio format.
- Consumer interest: these products already exist, or at least did exist, but hardly anyone seems to care enough to buy them, or even find out about them
Unfortunately the second reason highlights a physics problem that is not correctible unless you make custom earpieces for each individual like you can have done with Etymotic earphones. Even the inside contours of the earlobe and the contours in the shaft of the ear will cause phase and frequency differences that are more important that one might think. It all happens so close to the ear and in such a small space that little differences are highly exacerbated.A great example of that is in Musical Theatre (I am sound designing Music Man in the next few weeks by coincidence), where when you mount a microphone on an actors head, even little differences like a tuft of hair can cause major issues. Different hats/wigs, or someone's hair falling down where it shouldn't be significantly changes the quality of the sound. The miniature 'caves' that are created around the mic are in the right place to seem like a real life cave as far as the sound system is concerned.
Sound having to go around your head and ears is distorted frequency wise. Your brain detects the different frequency response, as well as the different timing between the sound heard by both ears (this is phase BTW), to figure out what direction a sound is coming from including any angle of front/back as well as height information.
The brain can also distinguish very well the difference between the original sound, and reflected sounds to help determine area size and original sound source distance.
Since recorded sound does not hit you from different directions as diverse as those in nature sound from speakers will always sound different than a live experience. This is why things like fan and machine noise are ignored by most people when they are in the room, but record it and it sticks out like a sore thumb. That stuff typically is reflected willy-nilly and hits you from all angles. Since this is just background noise most people have trained themselves to tune it out unless it is really abundant. Make all that sound come from headphones, or a set of speakers that can be pinpointed by the ears and suddenly the noise is much more directional and your ears won't tune it out.
As far as 13.1 goes, there has been a 10.2 movement going on for almost a freaking decade now, lead most of that time by Tomlinson Holman. 10.2 still has such small penetration, even in actual Movie Theaters that I highly doubt 13.1 will get any penetration into the home except for those people into conspicuous consumption (look its my 3rd hummer, I park it next to my schooner), and they don't really appreciate it, they only hope others notice it.
And just because a theater has lots of speakers does not mean that they are discreet. All of the left side speakers utilize the same playback channel, the right side of course is the same. This way no matter where you sit between the front and back of the 'house' the side surround information will be the same. There are a few discreet front speakers (between 3 and 7 depending on the system) and usually 1 back channel.
Have you actually taken the time to dissect a good Monster Cable?
Mind you the low end stuff (XP, 100 series, etc are all just normal cables), but the M-Series or 1000 series stuff.
Those cables are intense. The dielectric locks the individual pairs in place so that crosstalk and inductance are constant even if the cable is moved around or bent (sure it will change some, but not nearly as much as a cheaper cable will).
There is a lot of copper in those things, and everyone should agree that the more signal flow the better, especially with high power cables (i.e. speaker cables).
They also have a lifetime guarantee with no questions asked. Yes, if you read the warranty information there are caveats, but as someone who knows some pro-line Monster reps, any retailer is told by Monster to not ask any questions unless it is extremely obvious that they did something amazing stupid with the cables. A cable doesn't work, even if visibly damaged, and the retailers are supposed to grab it and pull one off the rack for you. Yes, honest retailers (hard to find nowadays I know) will do this.
That list of ingredients is almost as weird as Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.
I'm just burning to know!
Sonar vision
He can friggen' see sound? That had to be one heck of an incident to cause that to happen.
Unless he just suffers from Synethesia...
Apple machines will still be Apple machines. They will still look different (Apple isn't going to start using Lian-Li cases all of a sudden people), the OS is still different, and your typical user is still going to think that all their friends use Windows, so they should too.
Apple machines will not suddenly get any cheaper. In fact the rumor mills speculated that Apple could buy PPC chips for LESS than Intel chips at the volume they purchase. Whether this is true or not, Apple will certainly have R&D costs involved with the hardware switch which will be amortized across the price of the individual machines sold.
I personally expect Apple machines to hit a pretty close price mark to where they are now, they will just have slightly different motherboards (but still Apple specific, even if they can load other OS's 'easier'), and a different CPU.
The major draw is still the OS. The OS that is slick looking, pretty darn easy to use, and has a Unix core that is pretty powerful. It comes with pretty nice Digital Photo management, Music Jukebox, Movie Editing & DVD Authoring with HD capabilities, music creation software, system wide integrated services like spell check, search, copy/paste, dictionary, etc., etc., etc.
People looking to switch that want the cheapest possible solution will still buy a Linspire machine. People who have heard of Macs, know Mac users, and have been curious will pay a bit more to get these machines.
The Intel switch while significant for future speed increases, concerns over vector processing and endian issues, and for developer support, is pretty much going to be mostly a non-issue.
The biggest issue is the rumored lack of Classic support, even in Rosetta, and the answer to that is: OS 9 has been dead for 5 years, update you friggen software if you want to update your Machine/OS. If you need to use ancient software, run it on an ancient machine it was designed for!
This is not a new concept, when the PCI based Macs came out, many studios used Nubus Macs for years with older Protools/SDII systems, as they liked the platform, it did what they needed, and those machine ran practically forever. They realized that when a new software came along that they needed they would either put another machine along side it to run the new, or throw the old software out with the machine as it was antiquated. I have seen some of those systems still in use today!
Between good imaging tools (ghost, etc.), setting policies, using industry lock down tools (deep freeze, driveshield, etc.), and creative use of license management software along with partitioning schemes and well set up network drive management keeping users under control is not that too much of a challenge.
My departments are all underfunded to boot, and we can still pull this stuff off. We have the added detriment of using some software (Discreet products mostly) that require admin access by all users, or they just don't work.
We even have a set of machines running XP that we don't use driveshield on so that we can experiment with configurations. Number of worms/virus's: 0. Spyware, well more than 0, but not much considering that 18-20 year olds use them every day.
The first step is deploying infrastructure that is appropriate. When I first started working on our campus, one of my departments wanted to set up a Win2003 server. I finally convinced them that deploying a Mac OS X server was better. And for our needs it certainly is. We also use a number of Linux machines to get other background work done (interestingly enough to make Windows network browsing actually work across subnets).
I by no means am a Microsoft fan. The more I work with their products, the more they annoy me. But even I concede that you can lock them down in a business/educational setting very well if you do the research and take the time.
On iTunes it only costs $8.91. Many other albums on there are also sub $10.
Even though it gives developers a reason to not hide options in contextual menus (which are still easily available with a control click) making a more straightforward user experience
Even though you can plug in any USB mouse/trackball/etc, and will automatically map 2 buttons and the scroll wheel, and more buttons can be used for other parts of the OS (expose, etc)
As with the above, how many advanced PC users keep the crap mouse that Dell/Gateway/whoever sends them? Don't they get better mice for their system anyway?? I haven't seen a Mac in quite a while that doesn't have at least 5 buttons, but on our campus there is a concern about buying new PC's for a computer lab as Maya requires 3 buttons (I finally told them it will use the clickable scroll wheel just fine)
Not to mention it really is easier for non-technical and new users. I have a 3 year old. He loves playing on the computer, but we try to get him to also play with real people and outdoors and everything. As such he hasn't had enough computer time to conceptualize how a multibutton mouse works, as he is busy staring at the screen and madly trying to click around to make Dora the Explorer jump or whatnot. Most mice are way to large for his hands, and dealing with multiple buttons would require him looking away from the screen to reposition his hand, or at least make sure he is hitting the right one.
In a couple of years we will get him a multi-button mouse, in the mean time he does way better, and gets more from the system not having to deal with it. The same thing is true for Mom's and Grandma's/Grandpa's who all fit into a special demographic: People who buy a computer and just use what came with it.
You are advanced, figure out how to plug in a different mouse already! I know you can do it.
The other interesting bit is my son currently uses a 7 year old Mac running Tiger, and it doesn't feel considerably slower than my G4. Try saying that about Windows on a P4 versus a PII or early PIII, I know, I have had to set such monstrosities up! (Users with PII's demanding XP).
Our family fits into this discussion really well, we have 4 computers, 1 the 7 year old Mac, 1 now retired is a 8 year old Mac, my machine is a 3 year old G4, and we have a 5 year old AMD machine running my website because it was free and at the time I didn't have a spare Mac to set it up on.
We aren't at a point where we would even consider upgrading, with the exception that I would like a laptop. If I get one, all those machines will still be in use and cranking away, probably for years to come.
Or you could give it to me.
Or you could give it to a friend you know who isn't as well off but might enjoy an iPod.
Even if they have to spend $50 - $100 to get a new battery it is cheaper than a new iPod, and doesn't involve selling your soul and losing your friends trying to get a free one from Gratis.
I had to get a solution up very fast (it was two weeks before final exams), and it had to be cross platform (read Mac, PC, and Linux) compatible.
I grabbed a G4 and set up a copy of Mac OS X Server I had from my previous employment, and started setting it up, while also trying to retrofit an available PC with Linux.
I was able to deploy the OS X based solution much faster, so much so that my very pro Windows supervisor found a way to afford an Xserve within 9 months (and we have really really tight budgets).
I now also have 9 linux machines making sure things go smoothly with our network, shadowing our license management, and doing other random tasks as well, however I shudder to think of the type of integration we have with all three platforms at the moment and trying to get it working as solidly and quickly under any other platform.
I have 3 systems, all Dual Pentium II Xeons with identical hardware and cases. 2 run SuSe 9.2, and one runs XP Pro.
All of them are basically running background services, the XP machine handles our license management software and DriveShield control.
Except for upgrading the kernel the Linux boxes just stay up until I reboot them to shuffle things around (physically moving the cases, power runs, or networking).
The XP box, while it doesn't crash per se, completely forgets it has a network card about every 58-64 days or so, but a reboot fixes it.
That is darned annoying. Especially with 100+ days of uptime on the identical machines with SuSe.
Well obviously they went to the (Adobe, Digidesign, Microsoft, ) school of business, where when we notice piracy, we raise the price!
So what if charging less would gain many more sales and overall more profit, that would make us look like wusses!
Here at our organization the men are real men, the women are real women, and the little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are real little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, and forcing you to take out a mortgage to buy all our software validates our existences.
Thanks for your business!
I will probably be modded as troll for this, but so be it.
Yes, I do benifit in quality, cost and innovation from this, as I use Macintosh and Linux.
Since most of the slimy business players out there are busy trying to hijack the large & easy to break into kid on the block, that gives them less incentive to try to mess with our more secure and smaller market share workhorses.
I can get lots of work done efficiently without having to have a dual-core/dual processor system to run my extraneous firewalls, anti-spyware, anti-virus, and malware processes.
While I would gladly never have to deal with a Windows system again (or at least a lot less than I do now), I would gladly like to see them continue to be a big player as they will very likely always create code that has more holes than swiss cheese.
And that gives yet another layer of protection for those of us using OS's that allow us to work efficiently and just get work done.
Just because things cost more, doesn't mean they are not common. Quite a number of installations of Protools existed in 1996, actually a lot compared to the market's size.
Now the market is a lot larger, so it seems like it is way more common today, when in reality it is not.
The real difference is that Joe Sixpack does play around with audio editing now because the tools have become so cheap. This implies the market of people working/playing with audio is larger, not that the general population all play with music (from a technical standpoint, not counting playing MP3s and such) these days.
Hm, I guess I must have imagined working on a Protools III workstation in 1996 then. Strange.
Just because it wasn't cheap enough for joe sickpack to have laying about his hard drive, doesn't mean it does not exist.
Most Mac OS X apps can be anywhere in the filesystem and still work, so create a folder, say /Applications/Internet and put Safari.app, Mail.app, IE, etc. all in there. Then do the same for any other apps you have.
So a couple apps may have to be outside of that, but I would guess that for most users it is very few (NFS Manager is the only one I can think of that breaks when you move it).
I do this for the University I work for. An Adobe CS folder for those apps, a Macromedia MX folder for all of those, it really helps clean things up. Of course I also make sure that everyone has the main apps (Photoshop, Freehand, etc) on their dock as well.
Turns out the IRS thought he owed them some money, a LOT of money.
He ended up paying not as much, but still a lot of money to accountants to get the IRS off his back. All in all he was very lucky, but he almost lost everything he owned.