Interesting article and it essentially confirms what I was saying. The Power 5 will replace the Power 4 and the Power 5 will have members that go all up and down the entire IBM product line which will include something very much like a 980 whatever the marketing boys end up calling the thing. With Power 5 being released in 2004, a 980 release in 2005 is reasonable.
In case you're wondering, I'm guessing the informative mod was about IBM's announced plans about the Power 5 and that's a legitimate mod. Power 5 is coming out and it's known around what time. The Power customers IBM has like to plan ahead, they like absolute predictability and reliability which is why they choose the chip in the first place. You can be reasonably sure that IBM will do everything it can to fulfill those expectations. There's a lot of money in that market and IBM doesn't want to disappoint.
Unfortunately, Applescript only recently came out with a decent development environment. Now that you have a free professional class dev tool (based on gcc) that includes the ability to make applescript applications (applescript studio) I expect that Applescript usage will increase.
The only thing left to do on apple's part is to fund an applescript evangelist and create some user awareness for the technology.
Panther competes with XP and will likely erode any areas of XP leadership that exist. Panther+1 is likely to eclipse XP entirely and Panther+2 will make XP look hopelessly outdated. Longhorn will likely be released in the same timframe as Panther+3 or Panther+4 (way to early to tell). So we're going to have up to 3-5.x OS releases on the Mac side before Longhorn is released. This assumes, Btw that Longhorn's schedule doesn't slip to 2006 as other MS OS releases have in the past.
Apple has a golden opportunity to re-establish a meaningful, visible lead in the OS area that will drive switchers to their platform. The pricing difference is the lowest it's ever been and likely to remain that way as the largest cost of commodity PCs becomes the Windows license. Since Apple is using most of the same parts, any further pricing pressure on component suppliers will largely also benefit Apple.
Panther will not necessarily tear up Longhorn based on first to market but Apple's 'every six months a significant new release' schedule will tear up Longhorn's 'releases several years apart' schedule. Adjusting and improving so quickly is a key advantage.
Actually, Apple has made it really, really easy to shift to FreeBSD or Darwin if they get out of line. Technologically, they've made themselves vulnerable to such a switch so if Apple ever does get mean, running Darwin/GNUStep on the same hardware and then shifting to FreeBSD/GNUStep on your next hardware purchase means you have a very easy technology route out of Apple slavery. Apple knows this, of course, which is why they did it. Their business pitches sometimes include this explicitly.
Now GNUSTep isn't going to be resynced with Cocoa API inside of 4-5 years but do you really think that apple will become a big bad monopoly within that time frame? I don't.
Microsoft doesn't have to be formally unseated for the playing field on the desktop to radically change. If MS had a 80% share instead of a 90%+ share of the regular desktop market the other 20% would be a large enough market that *everybody would make multiplatform versions.
Where the article goes wrong is that it presents the fight like it's one about UI or OS features. It isn't. It's about legal and financial issues. Linux, Mac OS and Windows are all capable enough to write a letter, surf the web, and do your accounting on which is the vast bulk of PC use to this day. MS is trapped by the market and its own business decisions to need to increase growth in order for those options not to stay underwater (thus invalidating their entire company compensation scheme). Their efforts to extract more money from existing customers, to break the informal contract they have kept for decades on casual piracy, and creating more and more restrictive EULA's will end up with their market share eroding. Apple will benefit from this as will Linux but Linux will be hampered by their reliance on the GPL which is and will remain the main focus of MS' FUD attack.
You're pointing out one of the great things that Apple's pushing, universal XML pref files. This makes creating 3rd party tools a snap and even hand editing prefs very, very easy. I wish that the OSS group would get behind that.
Yes, the perpetual rights of archimedes to the screw seemed to have held up, right? Not! Nobody copied the pythagorean theorem either without compensating good old Pythagoras. I don't think so.
By not coming up with modern examples and pushing things back before 1710, you essentially concede that settled law for the entire period the US has been a country is essentially my position.
You're an AC crank. I leave your further errors on the subject to somebody who is a history pedant. Try this argument on the Capitol historian sometime and be prepared for chapter and verse on exactly how wrong you are.
I'll bother to refute one thing though, your mistaken idea on civil disobedience. Ghandi, MLK and the rest created a style of civil disobedience. Nobody stamped that style and said it was the only one available (well, except you). I point to one campaign done in the style I outlined above that has succeeded to change the law, the campaign against the 55mph limit.
The winning force wasn't merely the few people who explicitly made repeal part of their political message. The reason they were doing so was that there is a rule of law consensus in this country and they viewed that consensus being eroded by the massive resistance to the law and the police participation in that conspiracy (not creating sweeps to ticket all cars going over 55, they could have).
The legislature will continue to make harsher and harsher laws against copying as they are bought by the IP monied interests until the massive resistance is, once again, viewed as fraying the consensus on the rule of law and the law will adjust to the people's will despite massive campaign contributions because people will vote for a faction that promises sanity on the subject and the number of votes available will trump the money received (which is for the purpose of getting those votes anyway).
You may then, at that point, stand to the side like the double nickel whiners who want a restoration and cry out how could we lose?
Speculation on a 980 is actually fairly realistic. The big brother of the 970 is the Power 4. The Power 5 is just starting to replace the Power 4 and it would be realistic to see a cut down desktop chip based on it coming out in the near future as well. This is supposed to be the 980. A 990 to follow on after that is mere hyperbole. They're just going to be ramping up the 980 during the 2005 timeframe.
Re:Nope, cops wouild lose in that case
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 1
True story (scary though) I watched that little jig dance for the first time in E. Europe in the early 90s with a bunch of cousins. I had heard of the faked jig and to my eyes it was obvious. Nobody else in the room spotted it. Everybody else thought it was undoctored footage.
I wouldn't convict if a cop saw a car weaving, followed for >5 minutes after the weaving stopped, and only then hit his lights to stop the car. That's just too bogus no matter what drugs they found in the car afterwards.
Re:Gaming the Recorder and Black Boxes
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 1
Yes, but will the ACLU sue to stop C-SPAN from broadcasting Ashcroft's daily prayers?
Re:Gaming the Recorder and Black Boxes
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 1
Cops either get calls of a crime or see an incident that is supposed to be reported. When the cop wasn't called and doesn't file an incident report subsequent to turning on those lights there's a good chance that it would be an abuse of his powers.
I'm sure that pretty much any retired cop would be able to sort out a pretty good rule set for a consultant's fee.
I'm guessing that the problem is at the server end. 365 days * 3 years * number of police on duty at any one time equals a very expensive solution. Keep the idea on file though and in 10 years it will probably become reality.
You claim that authors have permanent rights over their creations. That is nonsense and worse. Permanent rights over intellectual creations have *never* been a part of US law and haven't been a part of most any other law system I'm familiar with for quite some time. Permanent monopolies lead to bad, bad things and most sensible governments have retreated from any pretensions that IP is permanent.
You state that works are seized by the government and placed into the public domain. But the US govt. cannot seize any property without just compensation. I challenge you to find any such compensation *ever* given to copyright holders or their heirs. Since the original term of copyright was for 14 years, I believe, there certainly would have been cases where the authorinventor would be alive and have lost economic benefit by his loss of property. I could just imagine the checks to Thomas Edison and Samuel Clemens!
But even ignoring the entire idiocy about the public domain being a creation of government, there's the entire concept of fair use. Fair use rights exist and there, again, is no compensation given. By what right does the government allow copying without compensation in some circumstances and require compensation in others? That's certainly not fair if the government's picking and choosing who is more worthy to pay for the use of an IP holder's property. But it's not doing that but refusing to extend a privilege to restrict copying to academics, students, and other classes of people. You can grant and restrict privileges willy nilly if you have a majority behind you but recognizing and not recognizing rights? The precedent would be positively terrifying in a precedent based legal tradition like the common law tradition (which the US has always subscribed to).
You then make a silly distinction between the useful arts and the fine arts. Newsflash, you don't understand 18th century english any more than you understand the history of copyright, patent and US law. Fine art *is* useful art. Furthermore, if Title 17 is not based on the Constitution as you claim then it is *invalid* and cannot be enforced. Obviously it is not invalid and it *is* based on the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land.
You state that copying without authorization is theft because it is taking something from the author. Pray tell, what has been taken? I borrow a book from a library, copy a chapter in the book at a xerox machine and return the book. What has the author lost? Nothing. If I did not return the book it would be theft but copying? Copyright and patent violations are much more defensible as what they are, grants of legal privilege in order to advance the arts and sciences.
You deny ignoring bad law is civil disobedience if you don't do it in front of a cop and for all the world to see. Fine, call it an act of private rebellion, a big middle finger to the powers that be, whatever. Since you can't seem to figure out the history or actual legal theory of IP law, I'm not going to bother on this one.
As for dismissing Lawrence Lessig as a loon, he actually is actually a widely respected legal scholar, law professor, former SC clerk, and and prosecuted Eldred v Ashcroft which, though lost, did garner the votes of two justices who agreed with his theories. Loons generally don't get 4 SC judges to agree that their pet cause is worth being heard in the SC (Cooley rule) and are even less likely to get 2 justices to agree with them.
Re:Sorry to dissapoint.
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem with these old fashioned techniques is that not hitting record at the start of an incident will be against regulations. In that case starting a record session in the middle when there are cries of police brutality will be sure to get the jury to both get the prisoner off and also end the cop's career.
There are likely other ways to get around this (the fact that the cop has physical control of the hard drive sounds promising) but dirty cops will have to have an entirely new level of sophistication to get around the system.
In short it's going to clean things up for a while at a minimum.
The cost to distribute and sell CDs is much, much higher than it is to go through the iTunes store. How many returns to you have to go through? How many of those CDs go into the bargain bins or are remaindered/returned?
Apple's got 5M active OS X users and maybe 1 in 5 of those downloaded iTunes 4. If you don't have a US billing address credit card you can't purchase yet either. Eventually the mac market will peak but it isn't even close yet. The Windows market hasn't even been launched, just announced for next year.
The most recent quarter had Apple being profitable at $0.04 a share. Apple has 365M shares outstanding so a $0.01 per share difference in profitability is 3.65M in profit. If Apple is profiting $0.30/song then 125,000 songs per day means a quarterly profit increase of about $0.01 at the current rate of sales or 25% of their last quarterly profit.
For financial analysts and the stock obsessed this is a significant change. It will grow even more significant next year when the Windows version of the iTunes store turns that into $0.20 per share in quarterly profits.
The stock market is forward looking (thus Apple's popped $5 since this broke from $13 to $18 a share) and it will likely be several years before anybody else can compete with Apple due to its unique legal position (Apple is legally restrained from becoming a competitor to the major labels due to an old legal settlement with the Beatle's record label, Apple Records).
Web services are all about increasing profit margins and escaping commoditization. Apple's need for this is higher than most box builders because of its 'cool' image, something that Dell doesn't have to worry about. With the iTunes store and.Mac Apple's demonstrating that it can execute with real results to its bottom line.
Nobody's claiming that this is going to 'save' Apple. What it will do is enhance profitability and get market analysts to take the Wintel FUD with a larger grain of salt.
What's the Microsoft web service that is currently expanding their revenue as much as Apple is gaining from the iTunes store? How about something that's as profitable as.mac? As the computer market matures everybody expects web services to become more important. Apple's making the transition in a very public way and in a way that's going to end up nibbling away at the Wintel market from the high end as Linux nibbles from the low end.
That's clueless. You're comparing an artist who distributes via several different distribution chains, has an established reputation, and was no doubt promoted in a major way to a computer company initiating a distribution method that is only available in the US (to US credit card holders anyway), only available to computer users who have an internet connection (48% of the population) and connect via Macintosh (around 4-6% of internet connected computers (macs connect to the internet more often than their market share)) who have Mac OS X capable computers and have upgraded to the recently released iTunes 4.
That's such a tiny universe of users and they still downloaded 2M songs. When the Windows version of the iTunes store comes out, it'll have 20x the distribution reach. When the iTunes store goes international it'll triple or quadruple again.
Everybody who understands how big a development this service is also understands what kind of financial impact this is likely to have for Apple. This is why Apple's stock price is jumping through the roof.
Intellectual property is separated out from other property because it is not owned by right but by government privilege. This is why there is a copyright and patent clause in the US Constitution that is distinct from the right to own property. Unauthorized copying may or may not be in violation of the govt. granted privilige and only when it is in violation of such privilege is copying theft. By a 7-2 margin, the current US supreme court voted recently that the Congress has virtual carte blanche to set such times and terms for the govt. privilege. I can assure you that the vote would not have worked out that way if intellectual property would have been of a same kind as real property.
I view a significant portion of violation of the copyright privilege as acts of civil disobedience in political protest against the current terms of the copyright privilege. You can call this theft much as the lunch counter protests were called trespassers in their rap sheets among other things.
You should be aware that not taking into account that it's *also* civil disobedience means you're taking a political stand and the company you're keeping is not one that I would be very happy with. Advocates of hacking for revenge like the RIAA and whores who want everybody else's IP but nobody can have theirs like Disney disgust me and make me nervous when I agree with them. They should make you nervous too if you have a pinch of moral sense.
It's amazing, really that they've managed to make the Apple Records restrictions actually work for them. The industry knows that if Apple ever tries to compete with them the ghost of the Beatles (Apple Records) will rise up and beat Apple down so Apple uniquely becomes a large enough player who *can* partner without being able to be an actual threat.
The entire point of PPC/Power ISA was that it would run 32 bit code without speed penalty in a 64 bit environment. PPC up until now has been Power chips that have been cut down to *only* run 32 bit code. The distinction is disappearing and now it's a 64bit chip just like it's bigger brothers labelled Power.
Apple, as the sole manufacturer of their hardware platform, is in the unenviable position of having to be both an e-machines equivalent (price sensitive, low cost supplier) and the IBM (high quality, premium price supplier) of its market as well as being the Sony (innovative cool supplier) to boot. Limited engineering resources leads Apple to shift things from one area to another. XServe isn't progressing as fast as it could if Apple was just a server company and neither are any of the other directions Apple is going. Right now it's clear that it's the desktop pro line that's going to get attention with a new chip generation and (if the article is right) a much, much better system bus. Going out on a speculative limb here, I'd like to see a system that can modularly scale processors much higher than anything on the market so if you need real time 3D CAD or instantaneous kernel compiles you can scale up to 4, 8, 16 or 32 processors in a sound proofed, super-cooled 'fat mac' cabinet. That would nicely take care of the high end as you would end up paying 3k for the first unit and then just upgrade processor numbers until you max the cabinet.
The extra scaling availability would have speed freaks drooling and anything that would have a scaling ability beyong Windows Professional (desktop level solution which currently can't handle more than 4 processors) would give Apple a real shot at bragging rights whether or not the individual chip for the Mac stays up front in the chip speed wars.
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Interesting article and it essentially confirms what I was saying. The Power 5 will replace the Power 4 and the Power 5 will have members that go all up and down the entire IBM product line which will include something very much like a 980 whatever the marketing boys end up calling the thing. With Power 5 being released in 2004, a 980 release in 2005 is reasonable.
In case you're wondering, I'm guessing the informative mod was about IBM's announced plans about the Power 5 and that's a legitimate mod. Power 5 is coming out and it's known around what time. The Power customers IBM has like to plan ahead, they like absolute predictability and reliability which is why they choose the chip in the first place. You can be reasonably sure that IBM will do everything it can to fulfill those expectations. There's a lot of money in that market and IBM doesn't want to disappoint.
Unfortunately, Applescript only recently came out with a decent development environment. Now that you have a free professional class dev tool (based on gcc) that includes the ability to make applescript applications (applescript studio) I expect that Applescript usage will increase.
The only thing left to do on apple's part is to fund an applescript evangelist and create some user awareness for the technology.
Panther competes with XP and will likely erode any areas of XP leadership that exist. Panther+1 is likely to eclipse XP entirely and Panther+2 will make XP look hopelessly outdated. Longhorn will likely be released in the same timframe as Panther+3 or Panther+4 (way to early to tell). So we're going to have up to 3-5 .x OS releases on the Mac side before Longhorn is released. This assumes, Btw that Longhorn's schedule doesn't slip to 2006 as other MS OS releases have in the past.
Apple has a golden opportunity to re-establish a meaningful, visible lead in the OS area that will drive switchers to their platform. The pricing difference is the lowest it's ever been and likely to remain that way as the largest cost of commodity PCs becomes the Windows license. Since Apple is using most of the same parts, any further pricing pressure on component suppliers will largely also benefit Apple.
Panther will not necessarily tear up Longhorn based on first to market but Apple's 'every six months a significant new release' schedule will tear up Longhorn's 'releases several years apart' schedule. Adjusting and improving so quickly is a key advantage.
Actually, Apple has made it really, really easy to shift to FreeBSD or Darwin if they get out of line. Technologically, they've made themselves vulnerable to such a switch so if Apple ever does get mean, running Darwin/GNUStep on the same hardware and then shifting to FreeBSD/GNUStep on your next hardware purchase means you have a very easy technology route out of Apple slavery. Apple knows this, of course, which is why they did it. Their business pitches sometimes include this explicitly.
Now GNUSTep isn't going to be resynced with Cocoa API inside of 4-5 years but do you really think that apple will become a big bad monopoly within that time frame? I don't.
MS sold those shares during the dotcom bubble when Apple was at $100-$150.
Microsoft doesn't have to be formally unseated for the playing field on the desktop to radically change. If MS had a 80% share instead of a 90%+ share of the regular desktop market the other 20% would be a large enough market that *everybody would make multiplatform versions.
Where the article goes wrong is that it presents the fight like it's one about UI or OS features. It isn't. It's about legal and financial issues. Linux, Mac OS and Windows are all capable enough to write a letter, surf the web, and do your accounting on which is the vast bulk of PC use to this day. MS is trapped by the market and its own business decisions to need to increase growth in order for those options not to stay underwater (thus invalidating their entire company compensation scheme). Their efforts to extract more money from existing customers, to break the informal contract they have kept for decades on casual piracy, and creating more and more restrictive EULA's will end up with their market share eroding. Apple will benefit from this as will Linux but Linux will be hampered by their reliance on the GPL which is and will remain the main focus of MS' FUD attack.
You're pointing out one of the great things that Apple's pushing, universal XML pref files. This makes creating 3rd party tools a snap and even hand editing prefs very, very easy. I wish that the OSS group would get behind that.
Yes, the perpetual rights of archimedes to the screw seemed to have held up, right? Not! Nobody copied the pythagorean theorem either without compensating good old Pythagoras. I don't think so.
By not coming up with modern examples and pushing things back before 1710, you essentially concede that settled law for the entire period the US has been a country is essentially my position.
You're an AC crank. I leave your further errors on the subject to somebody who is a history pedant. Try this argument on the Capitol historian sometime and be prepared for chapter and verse on exactly how wrong you are.
I'll bother to refute one thing though, your mistaken idea on civil disobedience. Ghandi, MLK and the rest created a style of civil disobedience. Nobody stamped that style and said it was the only one available (well, except you). I point to one campaign done in the style I outlined above that has succeeded to change the law, the campaign against the 55mph limit.
The winning force wasn't merely the few people who explicitly made repeal part of their political message. The reason they were doing so was that there is a rule of law consensus in this country and they viewed that consensus being eroded by the massive resistance to the law and the police participation in that conspiracy (not creating sweeps to ticket all cars going over 55, they could have).
The legislature will continue to make harsher and harsher laws against copying as they are bought by the IP monied interests until the massive resistance is, once again, viewed as fraying the consensus on the rule of law and the law will adjust to the people's will despite massive campaign contributions because people will vote for a faction that promises sanity on the subject and the number of votes available will trump the money received (which is for the purpose of getting those votes anyway).
You may then, at that point, stand to the side like the double nickel whiners who want a restoration and cry out how could we lose?
Speculation on a 980 is actually fairly realistic. The big brother of the 970 is the Power 4. The Power 5 is just starting to replace the Power 4 and it would be realistic to see a cut down desktop chip based on it coming out in the near future as well. This is supposed to be the 980. A 990 to follow on after that is mere hyperbole. They're just going to be ramping up the 980 during the 2005 timeframe.
True story (scary though) I watched that little jig dance for the first time in E. Europe in the early 90s with a bunch of cousins. I had heard of the faked jig and to my eyes it was obvious. Nobody else in the room spotted it. Everybody else thought it was undoctored footage.
I wouldn't convict if a cop saw a car weaving, followed for >5 minutes after the weaving stopped, and only then hit his lights to stop the car. That's just too bogus no matter what drugs they found in the car afterwards.
Yes, but will the ACLU sue to stop C-SPAN from broadcasting Ashcroft's daily prayers?
Cops either get calls of a crime or see an incident that is supposed to be reported. When the cop wasn't called and doesn't file an incident report subsequent to turning on those lights there's a good chance that it would be an abuse of his powers.
I'm sure that pretty much any retired cop would be able to sort out a pretty good rule set for a consultant's fee.
I'm guessing that the problem is at the server end. 365 days * 3 years * number of police on duty at any one time equals a very expensive solution. Keep the idea on file though and in 10 years it will probably become reality.
You claim that authors have permanent rights over their creations. That is nonsense and worse. Permanent rights over intellectual creations have *never* been a part of US law and haven't been a part of most any other law system I'm familiar with for quite some time. Permanent monopolies lead to bad, bad things and most sensible governments have retreated from any pretensions that IP is permanent.
You state that works are seized by the government and placed into the public domain. But the US govt. cannot seize any property without just compensation. I challenge you to find any such compensation *ever* given to copyright holders or their heirs. Since the original term of copyright was for 14 years, I believe, there certainly would have been cases where the authorinventor would be alive and have lost economic benefit by his loss of property. I could just imagine the checks to Thomas Edison and Samuel Clemens!
But even ignoring the entire idiocy about the public domain being a creation of government, there's the entire concept of fair use. Fair use rights exist and there, again, is no compensation given. By what right does the government allow copying without compensation in some circumstances and require compensation in others? That's certainly not fair if the government's picking and choosing who is more worthy to pay for the use of an IP holder's property. But it's not doing that but refusing to extend a privilege to restrict copying to academics, students, and other classes of people. You can grant and restrict privileges willy nilly if you have a majority behind you but recognizing and not recognizing rights? The precedent would be positively terrifying in a precedent based legal tradition like the common law tradition (which the US has always subscribed to).
You then make a silly distinction between the useful arts and the fine arts. Newsflash, you don't understand 18th century english any more than you understand the history of copyright, patent and US law. Fine art *is* useful art. Furthermore, if Title 17 is not based on the Constitution as you claim then it is *invalid* and cannot be enforced. Obviously it is not invalid and it *is* based on the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land.
You state that copying without authorization is theft because it is taking something from the author. Pray tell, what has been taken? I borrow a book from a library, copy a chapter in the book at a xerox machine and return the book. What has the author lost? Nothing. If I did not return the book it would be theft but copying? Copyright and patent violations are much more defensible as what they are, grants of legal privilege in order to advance the arts and sciences.
You deny ignoring bad law is civil disobedience if you don't do it in front of a cop and for all the world to see. Fine, call it an act of private rebellion, a big middle finger to the powers that be, whatever. Since you can't seem to figure out the history or actual legal theory of IP law, I'm not going to bother on this one.
As for dismissing Lawrence Lessig as a loon, he actually is actually a widely respected legal scholar, law professor, former SC clerk, and and prosecuted Eldred v Ashcroft which, though lost, did garner the votes of two justices who agreed with his theories. Loons generally don't get 4 SC judges to agree that their pet cause is worth being heard in the SC (Cooley rule) and are even less likely to get 2 justices to agree with them.
The problem with these old fashioned techniques is that not hitting record at the start of an incident will be against regulations. In that case starting a record session in the middle when there are cries of police brutality will be sure to get the jury to both get the prisoner off and also end the cop's career.
There are likely other ways to get around this (the fact that the cop has physical control of the hard drive sounds promising) but dirty cops will have to have an entirely new level of sophistication to get around the system.
In short it's going to clean things up for a while at a minimum.
Apple also has decent sales in Japan and the EU, zones which also have enough free cash to afford the legitimate purchase of music.
The cost to distribute and sell CDs is much, much higher than it is to go through the iTunes store. How many returns to you have to go through? How many of those CDs go into the bargain bins or are remaindered/returned?
Apple's got 5M active OS X users and maybe 1 in 5 of those downloaded iTunes 4. If you don't have a US billing address credit card you can't purchase yet either. Eventually the mac market will peak but it isn't even close yet. The Windows market hasn't even been launched, just announced for next year.
The most recent quarter had Apple being profitable at $0.04 a share. Apple has 365M shares outstanding so a $0.01 per share difference in profitability is 3.65M in profit. If Apple is profiting $0.30/song then 125,000 songs per day means a quarterly profit increase of about $0.01 at the current rate of sales or 25% of their last quarterly profit.
.Mac Apple's demonstrating that it can execute with real results to its bottom line.
For financial analysts and the stock obsessed this is a significant change. It will grow even more significant next year when the Windows version of the iTunes store turns that into $0.20 per share in quarterly profits.
The stock market is forward looking (thus Apple's popped $5 since this broke from $13 to $18 a share) and it will likely be several years before anybody else can compete with Apple due to its unique legal position (Apple is legally restrained from becoming a competitor to the major labels due to an old legal settlement with the Beatle's record label, Apple Records).
Web services are all about increasing profit margins and escaping commoditization. Apple's need for this is higher than most box builders because of its 'cool' image, something that Dell doesn't have to worry about. With the iTunes store and
Nobody's claiming that this is going to 'save' Apple. What it will do is enhance profitability and get market analysts to take the Wintel FUD with a larger grain of salt.
.mac? As the computer market matures everybody expects web services to become more important. Apple's making the transition in a very public way and in a way that's going to end up nibbling away at the Wintel market from the high end as Linux nibbles from the low end.
What's the Microsoft web service that is currently expanding their revenue as much as Apple is gaining from the iTunes store? How about something that's as profitable as
That's clueless. You're comparing an artist who distributes via several different distribution chains, has an established reputation, and was no doubt promoted in a major way to a computer company initiating a distribution method that is only available in the US (to US credit card holders anyway), only available to computer users who have an internet connection (48% of the population) and connect via Macintosh (around 4-6% of internet connected computers (macs connect to the internet more often than their market share)) who have Mac OS X capable computers and have upgraded to the recently released iTunes 4.
That's such a tiny universe of users and they still downloaded 2M songs. When the Windows version of the iTunes store comes out, it'll have 20x the distribution reach. When the iTunes store goes international it'll triple or quadruple again.
Everybody who understands how big a development this service is also understands what kind of financial impact this is likely to have for Apple. This is why Apple's stock price is jumping through the roof.
Intellectual property is separated out from other property because it is not owned by right but by government privilege. This is why there is a copyright and patent clause in the US Constitution that is distinct from the right to own property. Unauthorized copying may or may not be in violation of the govt. granted privilige and only when it is in violation of such privilege is copying theft. By a 7-2 margin, the current US supreme court voted recently that the Congress has virtual carte blanche to set such times and terms for the govt. privilege. I can assure you that the vote would not have worked out that way if intellectual property would have been of a same kind as real property.
I view a significant portion of violation of the copyright privilege as acts of civil disobedience in political protest against the current terms of the copyright privilege. You can call this theft much as the lunch counter protests were called trespassers in their rap sheets among other things.
You should be aware that not taking into account that it's *also* civil disobedience means you're taking a political stand and the company you're keeping is not one that I would be very happy with. Advocates of hacking for revenge like the RIAA and whores who want everybody else's IP but nobody can have theirs like Disney disgust me and make me nervous when I agree with them. They should make you nervous too if you have a pinch of moral sense.
It's amazing, really that they've managed to make the Apple Records restrictions actually work for them. The industry knows that if Apple ever tries to compete with them the ghost of the Beatles (Apple Records) will rise up and beat Apple down so Apple uniquely becomes a large enough player who *can* partner without being able to be an actual threat.
Legal jujitsu!
I like it.
The entire point of PPC/Power ISA was that it would run 32 bit code without speed penalty in a 64 bit environment. PPC up until now has been Power chips that have been cut down to *only* run 32 bit code. The distinction is disappearing and now it's a 64bit chip just like it's bigger brothers labelled Power.
Apple, as the sole manufacturer of their hardware platform, is in the unenviable position of having to be both an e-machines equivalent (price sensitive, low cost supplier) and the IBM (high quality, premium price supplier) of its market as well as being the Sony (innovative cool supplier) to boot. Limited engineering resources leads Apple to shift things from one area to another. XServe isn't progressing as fast as it could if Apple was just a server company and neither are any of the other directions Apple is going. Right now it's clear that it's the desktop pro line that's going to get attention with a new chip generation and (if the article is right) a much, much better system bus. Going out on a speculative limb here, I'd like to see a system that can modularly scale processors much higher than anything on the market so if you need real time 3D CAD or instantaneous kernel compiles you can scale up to 4, 8, 16 or 32 processors in a sound proofed, super-cooled 'fat mac' cabinet. That would nicely take care of the high end as you would end up paying 3k for the first unit and then just upgrade processor numbers until you max the cabinet.
The extra scaling availability would have speed freaks drooling and anything that would have a scaling ability beyong Windows Professional (desktop level solution which currently can't handle more than 4 processors) would give Apple a real shot at bragging rights whether or not the individual chip for the Mac stays up front in the chip speed wars.