Which is one major reason that OS/2 withered - it did such a good job running Windows program that nobody saw the need to actually buy OS/2-native programs... If Apple undertook a similar strategy, it would probably be the last straw for many Mac developers...
Except that Windows didn't suck nearly as much back then as it does now as far as security is concerned. There wasn't an issue with the hack-my-box-so-it-can-be-a-slave, always on internet we have now. There seems so be a rising disgust with the crapware that MS is putting out, Longhorn delays, and the worry that when it does come out that Longhorn won't be as good as it should be.
Heres a clue kids, go download the GNU editor Crimson Editor and learn to write your own code. You'll be faster, more efficient and make better pages. Just give it time.
You have got to be kidding me! I'll learn to write my own code when you holier-than-though code jockies learn to do GOOD print design by writing raw postcsript code. Who the fuck needs Quark or InDesign! Get serious. Why the fuck should someone who is a designer have to write code? It's a failure of the software not writing clean code. Not a failure of designer not wanting to dick around in raw html.
Wrong. Steve got a batch of the good LSD. Can't you tell the difference. He's not running around all paranoid like a sweaty monkey. He's groovin' on some cool tunes on his iPod.
Yup. I too saw the OSX handwriting on the wall. I knew the analysts were wrong, having used Macs for 16 years, I know this company inside and out. I could tell that Steve and OSX and the iMacs were the right direction (especially after the mid 90's). I finally bought some stock when it was at $13 and was ridiculed by several people. I told a couple people they should get on the bandwagon while the gettin' was cheap and they laughed.
Of the 33 people (just offhand) that I know that have home computers, only four are gamers. Four! 12% The fact of the matter is that my mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law (and his parents), and most people are NOT gamers. Slashdot geeks are gamers. Most are not.
Make no bones about it - there is no substantial non-Windows gaming market.
I can't seem to find numbers on the web but I seem to remember a statistic that Mac owners purchase 2-3 times the software (not sure if that also applies to games) than the average PC owner. Even though the market share is 2% the installed base is more like 8-10%
Please correct me if I am wrong with the numbers I am pulling from memory: 25 million Macs of the 240 million computers in the US (sorry, can't seem to find world-wide figures). That means the Mac market buys more like a 16-30% market. If I were a business, I wouldn't ignore a possible 30% of the market.
Also, remember that if for some wild reason Microsoft stopped selling Windows.The Windows PC market share would be zero but there still would be an installed base of ~210 million computers to sell sofware and services. It's never really about market share and all about installed base and their buying behaviors.
Seems people here have missed out on the tidbit that Apple projects to sell over 17.7 million songs on the iTMS for October. That's up from 10.8 million songs in May. At this rate they will reach 20 million songs per month by December (or sooner). That's 240 million songs per year and growing. I don't have numbers for the rest on the online music industry (a little help here from anyone with the time to get current numbers) but it seems that they are increasing their lead. Can you say "juggernaut"?
First of all, if it ever came to be, it would have to be hideously expensive. Don't think about the $100 cost of OS X upgrades now.
What if OS X for x86 was double or triple the price of OS X for PPC. Apple already did this for one of their pro applications. I believe it was Shake or Logic that was priced higher for a x86 version when it was first aquired by Apple. Even now Shake is priced at $4999 for Linux vs. $2999 for Mac OS X. This is a nice little incentive (albeit at the high-end of the software spectrum) to buy Apple hardware. This would be for the shrink-wrapped version for those with their own hardware or building their own systems and doesn't address how they would price OS X for system resellers. I would imagine that PC companies would have to pay enough thus making those low-end boxes not as cheap as with Windows on them.
I would also guess that some people out there would shell out $249 or even $289 for OS X on x86. Would this eat away at Apple's high end market? Some, but maybe not much. I represent Apple's current high-end market (print/3D/web designer) but I wouldn't be putting together a custom PC box and slapping OS X on it. Too much headache for me and I have work to do. Those that do build their own systems is a market, I think, that doesn't buy many Macs. Sure there are probably many on Slashdot that have switched to or added a Mac. But there are probably many more that haven't and won't because they just want to build it themselves. Remember, we Mac users have really never been able to build our own systems. Why would we start now?
And a few things that probably will soon be adopted by the PC market like laptops that sleep on close, consistant user interface, and the one-button mouse (just kidding!--about the mouse that is).
Why should Apple have the right to dictate what people do with their iPods (which is what this amounts to) in the first place?
Actually, I don't think that Apple cares what the hell YOU do with your iPod. They care that another company is trying to profit from their products without their permission. Remember, we don't know the whole story behind why Apple didn't license their DRM to REAL (would you if you had a choice and you didn't need them?). But it is certainly within their rights not to enter into a partnership with companies that don't benefit Apple or that they just plain don't like.
While the energy balance may work out, what about the economics? Would
the labor and dollars we spend growing ethanol be more wisely spent reducing
fuel consumption?
Actually when you factor in the waste product of corn ethanol (high-quality
feed in the form of a distillers mash) I would imagine the economics would be
more favorable for ethanol.
Really, when you turn this around, distillation of corn could really be seen
as just a refining process in the production of high-quality feed for cattle
and hogs. Ethanol is just a waste product that we get for free.
As far as conservation, that is something we should be doing anyway. And we
should be spending money on promoting conservation not at the exclusion of R&D
on renewable sources of energy.
One big reason for this is because ethanol needs to be very pure for combustion,
the main thing being that it can't have any other liquids like water in it.
Not true. Ethanol
only needs to be pure when mixed with gasoline. I believe you can burn wet ethanol
(mixture of 90% alcohol/10% water) in most flex fuel cars without modification.
In fact, we used to burn a 180 proof mixture in our cars and trucks on our farm
in the late 70's with minor modifications.
This statistic that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than is gained
by burning it is bandied about all over the place but it is *only* valid if
you are talking about corn, I'm not even sure that it is still valid for corn.
Cellulose ethanol is a terrific idea, and saves food crops for food purposes...
Actually, it's a myth that the ethanol process uses corn that goes for food.
Most corn doesn't get processed
into food. It is used as animal feed and the by-product of corn ethanol production
is a distiller's mash that is actually better for animal feed since it is high
in protein and rich in water-soluble vitamins and minerals. Because the fermentation
process removes only starch, all the remaining digestible nutrients are left
in the distiller's grain.
Additionally, the net energy
output of corn ethanol is 34% (PDF). It does not take as much or more energy to
produce a gallon of ethanol. Plus, this is using traditional distillation methods.
If we really wanted cheap energy we could use solar
stills and run a 160-170 proof ethanol in our slightly modified E-85 cars
and trucks.
I do think ethanol from waste straw is a good idea but getting it from corn
is also a good idea that could be even better.
Everything that I have heard and read show that Macs are cheaper when factoring in TCO. In addition to less support (how many times have heard "...my company has 1000 PCs with 100 PC support techs and 2000 Macs with 3 Mac support techs...") and longer lasting hardware ("...we have a SE/30 that we still use as a mail server...") to increased productivity ("...virus? What stinking virus?...It just works!)
Here's a few examples I found when googling for info on Mac vs. Windows TOC:
Macs Shine In Total Cost Of Ownership "The TOC (total operating cost) for the Wintel machines amounts to $253.86 per year, every year until it is retired," Canterbury told Sellers. "The Macs run us $53.25 per year. Quite a difference and one our board and parents heard loud and clear."
Return On Investments between the Macintosh and Windows platforms. [NOTE: of course this is where the Mac shines but I think that it translates to other areas of general productivity]
"This benchmark supersedes a common but misleading bench-mark: cost-of-ownership. An ROI benchmark correlates the cost of ownership and productivity of media producers to revenue and profit. Detailed ROI analysis reveals that a Macintosh-using creative professional produces $26,441 more annual revenue and $14,488 more net profit (per person) than a Windows user of comparable skill engaged in similar work."
Why most people should buy a Macintosh rather than a Windows PC A study from technology research company, Gartner has found Apple Macintosh computers to be up to 36 percent cheaper to own and run than competing PC products. The study utilised Gartner's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodology, which takes into account the direct and indirect costs of owning IT infrastructure.
And there are just so many other ones that I grow tired of providing the information
My point is that even if the commissioner does not unduly influence the research, he still has a huge influence simply in deciding which questions to ask.
Very true and very similar to surveys of public opinion. Baiting the response of the person taking a survey is a common practice:
Do you believe it is OK to kill babies?
versus:
Do you believe a women has a right to make her own decisions about her health care and her body?
We can make studies conclude what we want in how we structure them just as easily as making surveys conclude what we want by how we ask the questions.
He commented that some people talk about the distinctive smell of a PCB plant but he had no idea what they meant because he hasn't been able to smell anything in years.
Print shops used to be the same way before going to soy inks.
That's nothing. Back in my teens I worked on a hog farm. You know, one of those massive commercial operations that has several 1000 ft. hog buildings with thousands of the oinkers inside each. Each building had slotted floors so the hog shit and piss could collect underneath in a basement holding pit. This slurry was pumped out on a continual basis through a series of pipes to a large uncovered holding pond (now I believe state law requires them to be covered because you can smell them for miles downwind).
My job was to, once every six months, go under every hog building with another co-worker and blast the sediment from the basement holding pit with a high-pressure fire hose that pump liquid manure from the other end of the building. It took two people to hold the hose and if one slipped or fell down...look out. This all while the barn WAS FULL OF HOGS! Nasty, nasty, nasty!
Every once in a while the subterranean junction box where the pipes from all of the barns came together would get clogged up. We would take the fire hose (that was pumping liquid manure) and shove it down in it to try and blast out the obstruction. Several times while we were doing this my co-worker lost his grip on the hose (it was slippery as shit) and I was forced to let go lest it lift me in the air and swing me around like a large snake. Liquid hog shit would rain down all over the place until one of us would run the 1000+ ft to the tractor that was running the pump and shut it down.
And since farm workers were exempt from the minimum wage laws we did it all for $2.75 hour.
Ok, so here is a case (in MN no less) where a citizen hacked into a police database. He was so concerned about the ease of the hack (and what the database contained) that he contacted his state legislator. She was also concerned because her name was erroneously listed in the database as a crime suspect. She had him testify-- via phone and anonymously since he was probably afraid of being charged with a crime for hacking into the database--to the commitee hearing on the matter.
The result of his actions were to temporarily shut down the database, increase security when it was brought back up and purge most of the bad info from the database before bringing it back up. Should he have simply Minded His Own Business???
Of course he didn't demand a "Business Relationship" with the government but read the stories and tell me that we don't have a responsibilty of some sort.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Windows didn't suck nearly as much back then as it does now as far as security is concerned. There wasn't an issue with the hack-my-box-so-it-can-be-a-slave, always on internet we have now. There seems so be a rising disgust with the crapware that MS is putting out, Longhorn delays, and the worry that when it does come out that Longhorn won't be as good as it should be.
You have got to be kidding me! I'll learn to write my own code when you holier-than-though code jockies learn to do GOOD print design by writing raw postcsript code. Who the fuck needs Quark or InDesign! Get serious. Why the fuck should someone who is a designer have to write code? It's a failure of the software not writing clean code. Not a failure of designer not wanting to dick around in raw html.
Don't forget 68K to PPC.
Wrong. Steve got a batch of the good LSD. Can't you tell the difference. He's not running around all paranoid like a sweaty monkey. He's groovin' on some cool tunes on his iPod.
Very funny! Now that's why I like reading slashdot in the morning. Gets my day going in the right direction.
Yup. I too saw the OSX handwriting on the wall. I knew the analysts were wrong, having used Macs for 16 years, I know this company inside and out. I could tell that Steve and OSX and the iMacs were the right direction (especially after the mid 90's). I finally bought some stock when it was at $13 and was ridiculed by several people. I told a couple people they should get on the bandwagon while the gettin' was cheap and they laughed.
Look who's laughing now!
I don't own an ipod, but adding this [instert functionality here] might convince me to buy one.
How many times have I read this on /. Give me a break! It's such an old argument.
Of the 33 people (just offhand) that I know that have home computers, only four are gamers. Four! 12% The fact of the matter is that my mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law (and his parents), and most people are NOT gamers. Slashdot geeks are gamers. Most are not.
I can't seem to find numbers on the web but I seem to remember a statistic that Mac owners purchase 2-3 times the software (not sure if that also applies to games) than the average PC owner. Even though the market share is 2% the installed base is more like 8-10%
Please correct me if I am wrong with the numbers I am pulling from memory: 25 million Macs of the 240 million computers in the US (sorry, can't seem to find world-wide figures). That means the Mac market buys more like a 16-30% market. If I were a business, I wouldn't ignore a possible 30% of the market.
Also, remember that if for some wild reason Microsoft stopped selling Windows.The Windows PC market share would be zero but there still would be an installed base of ~210 million computers to sell sofware and services. It's never really about market share and all about installed base and their buying behaviors.
Seems people here have missed out on the tidbit that Apple projects to sell over 17.7 million songs on the iTMS for October. That's up from 10.8 million songs in May. At this rate they will reach 20 million songs per month by December (or sooner). That's 240 million songs per year and growing. I don't have numbers for the rest on the online music industry (a little help here from anyone with the time to get current numbers) but it seems that they are increasing their lead. Can you say "juggernaut"?
What if OS X for x86 was double or triple the price of OS X for PPC. Apple already did this for one of their pro applications. I believe it was Shake or Logic that was priced higher for a x86 version when it was first aquired by Apple. Even now Shake is priced at $4999 for Linux vs. $2999 for Mac OS X. This is a nice little incentive (albeit at the high-end of the software spectrum) to buy Apple hardware. This would be for the shrink-wrapped version for those with their own hardware or building their own systems and doesn't address how they would price OS X for system resellers. I would imagine that PC companies would have to pay enough thus making those low-end boxes not as cheap as with Windows on them.
I would also guess that some people out there would shell out $249 or even $289 for OS X on x86. Would this eat away at Apple's high end market? Some, but maybe not much. I represent Apple's current high-end market (print/3D/web designer) but I wouldn't be putting together a custom PC box and slapping OS X on it. Too much headache for me and I have work to do. Those that do build their own systems is a market, I think, that doesn't buy many Macs. Sure there are probably many on Slashdot that have switched to or added a Mac. But there are probably many more that haven't and won't because they just want to build it themselves. Remember, we Mac users have really never been able to build our own systems. Why would we start now?
And the PC market has slowly been adopting various ideas from Apple.
Desktop metaphor, USB, Firewire, WYSIWYG, Newton, etc...
And a few things that probably will soon be adopted by the PC market like laptops that sleep on close, consistant user interface, and the one-button mouse (just kidding!--about the mouse that is).
I wasn't too worried about the others but John Ashcroft really got me serious about backup. You never know what that crazy fucker will do!
Actually, I don't think that Apple cares what the hell YOU do with your iPod. They care that another company is trying to profit from their products without their permission. Remember, we don't know the whole story behind why Apple didn't license their DRM to REAL (would you if you had a choice and you didn't need them?). But it is certainly within their rights not to enter into a partnership with companies that don't benefit Apple or that they just plain don't like.
Actually when you factor in the waste product of corn ethanol (high-quality feed in the form of a distillers mash) I would imagine the economics would be more favorable for ethanol.
Really, when you turn this around, distillation of corn could really be seen as just a refining process in the production of high-quality feed for cattle and hogs. Ethanol is just a waste product that we get for free.
As far as conservation, that is something we should be doing anyway. And we should be spending money on promoting conservation not at the exclusion of R&D on renewable sources of energy.
Not true. Ethanol only needs to be pure when mixed with gasoline. I believe you can burn wet ethanol (mixture of 90% alcohol/10% water) in most flex fuel cars without modification. In fact, we used to burn a 180 proof mixture in our cars and trucks on our farm in the late 70's with minor modifications.
It's not valid. (PDF)
Actually, it's a myth that the ethanol process uses corn that goes for food. Most corn doesn't get processed into food. It is used as animal feed and the by-product of corn ethanol production is a distiller's mash that is actually better for animal feed since it is high in protein and rich in water-soluble vitamins and minerals. Because the fermentation process removes only starch, all the remaining digestible nutrients are left in the distiller's grain.
Additionally, the net energy output of corn ethanol is 34% (PDF). It does not take as much or more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol. Plus, this is using traditional distillation methods. If we really wanted cheap energy we could use solar stills and run a 160-170 proof ethanol in our slightly modified E-85 cars and trucks.I do think ethanol from waste straw is a good idea but getting it from corn is also a good idea that could be even better.
I don't know how this can be debatable.
Everything that I have heard and read show that Macs are cheaper when factoring in TCO. In addition to less support (how many times have heard "...my company has 1000 PCs with 100 PC support techs and 2000 Macs with 3 Mac support techs...") and longer lasting hardware ("...we have a SE/30 that we still use as a mail server...") to increased productivity ("...virus? What stinking virus?...It just works!)
Here's a few examples I found when googling for info on Mac vs. Windows TOC:
And there are just so many other ones that I grow tired of providing the information
Very true and very similar to surveys of public opinion. Baiting the response of the person taking a survey is a common practice:
Do you believe it is OK to kill babies?
versus:
Do you believe a women has a right to make her own decisions about her health care and her body?
We can make studies conclude what we want in how we structure them just as easily as making surveys conclude what we want by how we ask the questions.Print shops used to be the same way before going to soy inks.
"Fuck! How can you stand that smell?"
"What smell?"
"Never mind."
That's nothing. Back in my teens I worked on a hog farm. You know, one of those massive commercial operations that has several 1000 ft. hog buildings with thousands of the oinkers inside each. Each building had slotted floors so the hog shit and piss could collect underneath in a basement holding pit. This slurry was pumped out on a continual basis through a series of pipes to a large uncovered holding pond (now I believe state law requires them to be covered because you can smell them for miles downwind).
My job was to, once every six months, go under every hog building with another co-worker and blast the sediment from the basement holding pit with a high-pressure fire hose that pump liquid manure from the other end of the building. It took two people to hold the hose and if one slipped or fell down...look out. This all while the barn WAS FULL OF HOGS! Nasty, nasty, nasty!
Every once in a while the subterranean junction box where the pipes from all of the barns came together would get clogged up. We would take the fire hose (that was pumping liquid manure) and shove it down in it to try and blast out the obstruction. Several times while we were doing this my co-worker lost his grip on the hose (it was slippery as shit) and I was forced to let go lest it lift me in the air and swing me around like a large snake. Liquid hog shit would rain down all over the place until one of us would run the 1000+ ft to the tractor that was running the pump and shut it down.
And since farm workers were exempt from the minimum wage laws we did it all for $2.75 hour.
Ok, so here is a case (in MN no less) where a citizen hacked into a police database. He was so concerned about the ease of the hack (and what the database contained) that he contacted his state legislator. She was also concerned because her name was erroneously listed in the database as a crime suspect. She had him testify-- via phone and anonymously since he was probably afraid of being charged with a crime for hacking into the database--to the commitee hearing on the matter.
The result of his actions were to temporarily shut down the database, increase security when it was brought back up and purge most of the bad info from the database before bringing it back up. Should he have simply Minded His Own Business???
Of course he didn't demand a "Business Relationship" with the government but read the stories and tell me that we don't have a responsibilty of some sort.
Police database an easy target, hacker says
Police-files database shut down amid privacy concerns
Wow, that's a scary site. Now I have to disinfect my computer. Eeek!
Knee-jerk-pot-smoking hippies! The whole bunch of you!
Silly you. Don't you know smoking pot generally keeps the knee from jerking at all. Mellow...
It's the Rush Limbaugh-prescription-drug-abusing types that have the knee jerk problem.