I really do not see how having Dell or HP sell computers running OSX will degrade the quality of the OS, but that is just me.
Then you probably are exactly the sort of user who should switch to OS X.
It has become increasingly the case that Dell and Gateway computers have been using cheaper and cheaper components to undercut each other's price points, and quality has suffered. Many recent news stories and articles on this topic have been published lately. Have you not been reading?
Windows is a system designed to be installed on any commodity PC and with proper drivers operate flawlessly. I personally have had great luck with Windows on many PCs because I am careful in selecting my hardware when I put together systems. Unfortunately I have seen it is more often the case that people buy preassembled systems that were designed to meet low price points and the systems are absolute trash. Windows is unstable and the users are typically unsatisfied.
In these cases Microsoft almost always gets the blame. *nix users love to make jokes about Windows instability and what have you, because as a general rule the stories they tell of blue screens and lost data are backed by hard numbers. And yet there is still a huge percentage of users that have rock solid systems running on Windows without any problems (without Viruses and Worms, even, though that's an entirely different issue).
At some point you have to realize that when it comes to computers, sometimes you really do get what you pay for. That cheap CD-Burner is going to make coasters. That cheap sound card is going to hang and leave applications wihtout sound, or not allow different applications to share the sound device, this USB interface is going to interfere with that Parallel Port so you can either use your web-cam OR your printer, but not both (and sometimes your Sound Card or your Printer, but not both).
This all sounds like bullshit from MS-DOS days, but it's quite true today. I have on many occassions found that while repairing someone's practically brand new system that there really wasn't much wrong with it except that they were attempting to do two things with their system at once that it just doesn't like to do.
THESE are exactly the sorts of problems that Apple wants to keep tight control over.
"Why should they care?" people will ask.
They care because OS X is more stable than Windows. It functions more reliably, it does so with less complication and less knowledge required by the user. Apple does NOT want to add in the nightmare of universal hardware support and complicate things by trying to figure out what crap component some users added that made this or that program stop working unexpectedly.
If Apple can control the number of failure points in the OS, they can keep that reputation of being a more solid and easier to use/configure OS than Microsoft.
If they decide to open the floodgates of cheap hardware and 3rd party commodity system resellers, then they will simply turn into yet another *nix distributor, and take on all of the headaches that come with a huge sea of unsupported hardware. After all, Joe Sixpack would be pretty pissed if he buys a USB webcam that won't work on the OS X system he bought from Dell/Gateway/Whoever. That would then reflect negatively on Apple.
You might say you'd rather have OS X on generic x86 haredware, but Apple doesn't want the negative factors. They make OS X and you don't. They win.
For now, there won't be any official support for OS X on generic PCs. That isn't stopping you from buying a copy of OS X and tricking in into installing, but when something doesn't work right, don't expect Apple to care. You are, after all, an unsupported user.
Freeloaders are smarter than they are, and for every Napster and Grokster user that gets annoyed by a service that "goes legal" and requires fee based downloads, there are dozens of other users who have figured out ways to trade files illegally under the radar.
Invitation based file-trading email-lists, for example. IRC. Direct file transfer in IM Clients. Private FTP sites. Even private web-sites. The list goes on.
It makes a lot of sense, or maybe it doesn't. I really don't know. All I know is that I keep going to Apple's store to buy an iPod Nano and I end up with a $5000 Mac in my shopping cart. I really don't know how that keeps happening!:)
Needless to say the price tag keeps waking me up and I never quite get around to placing the order. Maybe if it weren't for that insane desire to pair a MAC with the NANO I would have already purchased an iPod by now.
Considering so many uses only request the last four digits, that makes the SSN a really insecure PIN in some cases. Insecure because it's only 4 digits, and because it never changes.
I know this kind of thing may be subjective, but I just can't say I think that the Sony systems have ever been in anything close to the Mac's league.
I don't even own a Mac, but I've been drooling over their designs for years.
IBM's Aptiva "Stealth" line was some super sexy kit in the PC world for it's time, and it only managed to do this by being a late Performa clone in black.
More recent systems like the Ice Cube and Shuttle small form factor cases are almost getting there, but they fail when you realize getting a perfectly matching monitor, keyboard, and mouse isn't easy to do.
There are definitly some really sweet looking case mods, but once again you just end up with this beautiful work of art for a case and bland looking UI devices.
Maybe that'll be the next trend in custom cases? Matching keyboards, mice, and drive-plates?
No matter how you look at it though, Apple's stuff just has a style that really can't be exactly duplicated by anyone else (though I find it difficult to really explain why I feel this way).
I keep being tempted to buy a Mini but I know that I'd probably really like the Mac and then be unhappy that I didn't buy the Power Mac G5 Quad Core (which I should just break down and do anyway...)
They can stop crying and start getting ready for it. If they don't fill the demand, someone will. As soon as I can have a high speed internet connection without the help of either the local cable company or telephone company then I'll be free of both.
At that point, any content I can't get online, I simply will do without. Sell me entertainment online, or sell me nothing. It makes no difference to me. There's plenty of free and legal clips of amusement here and there at least as worthwhile as the junk they air on TV anyway.
Besides, I find reading books and doing technical reading online is a better use of my time than watching television in the first place.
"Officials say there's no Big Brother agenda in the Missouri project (outside of the obvious)-- the data will remain anonymous (Unless we want to watch a specific person), leaving no possibility to track specific people from their driveway to their destination (without a reason, though any reason at all will do)."
When I log on, my IM Client would log into my e-mail account, send off a message to all of my friends telling them I'm online. It would then download all messages from my friends who are online getting their last known IP.
Naturally people with Static IPs wouldn't need to announce themselevs so often, and the client could always check last known IPs right from the get go.
This whole process could be made to work rather transparently to the user, BUT setting it up initially might be difficult for some users (a bad thing), and I could easily see inboxes getting filled with junk messages pass between IM clients.
There are better ways than this to handle the situation, but for a decentralized network it's one that could be made easily enough.
I personally have been pondering this question for years and have finally decided that the Jabber way of doing things is still probably the best "so far". While it isn't perfect, it's a step in the right direction.
FWIW, on Windows I use Trillian Pro and the jabber plugin is functional, though it does leave plenty to be desired, esspecially when using it with GTalk.
And of corse you need to calculate the cost per bit after the mapping overhead, and make sure that is still cheap enough to be useful.
If reliable, even though expensive, it will certainly be useful. 10 gigs of fast non-volatile random access memory has many uses, even if very expensive. Those uses just might be niche markets, but they exist just the same.
Sometimes a yield is so good that very few processors actually fail at higher speeds, resulting in a batch of very good chips. Since the market still wants the lower rated chips, it sometimes becomes necissary to clock a perfectly good chip lower than it is actually capable of being clocked.
The Intel Celeron 300a (I believe) was a great example of this. 300a chips were so high quality, that most of them available could be run at around 500mhz (if I remember correctly).
I may have a home network where video is streamed about, but how many normal people are really going to set this up?
A lot more than you think. If people are buying iPods and Airtunes, it already shows that while the average population may not be totally computer savvy, they are starting to realize the potential entertainment values a high power PC can present. Oh, sure they mostly see it in illegally downloaded movies and music, but they do realize there are legit uses as well.
I expect they're just waiting for the right product to come out, something easy to use that will let them view all of their internet-obtained content (with or without DRM) on their TVs, in their living rooms.
I believe just charging the water would not create a current within the fish unless the fish had a ground that didn't also ground the water. Path of lease resistance and all that.
An easier solution would be induction charged fish.
To claim that they don't have a share of the profits from the music store would be more of a lie than I'd expect even from a representative of the music industry.
Executive word play.
Think along these lines.
We are selling our songs through iPod.
Okay, they're selling the music through iTunes. Let's say they have decided the music's "cost" is $.50. It's probably not, but we're guessing here. They are selling something that doesn't actually cost anything to manufacture, a digital copy. The cost of producing a song will only be put up at the production of the song and profit will only come after X number of songs are sold. Anything beyond that point is just a continued revenue stream. Keeping that in mind, after they sell so many copies of the song they're getting some profit, though the concept of "enough" is subjective.
but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue
If he means iTunes, which many suspect he does because he's a moron, then this statement is true. Apple keeps the iTunes Music Store Profits. The music industry made their money selling the song. The store makes it's money being a legitimate outlet and handling the transaction.
What it sounds like to me is that this guy is saying he thinks the music industry should make money twice. Once up front at the sale of the a song, and once again at the end of the day by cutting into the iTunes Music Store profit margin. By wording his statement in the way that he has, it makes the general public feel as if the music industry is losing out on this deal, when what he's really saying is that they're just not walking away with as much of a cut as they would like.
So let me run his statement through my nifty little PR translator.
"We want to make as much profit as possible by taking as much of the revenue generated and claiming our rights to preferably all of it. iTunes doesn't deserve any profit, because they wouldn't have a store if we didn't produce the content. Oh, and by the way, you may only listen to our content on our terms, so keep paying, chump."
I don't personally believe varying prices for songs make any sense at all, unless perhaps the scheme is based on a song's age.
My argument goes something like this.
If an artist releases a song today at $.99, no matter how he/she and their label may feel about it, that song is only worth as much as any other single song. Let popularity decide how much revenue that song brings in. Just because an artist decides their song is of greater value than every other song out there doesn't mean it actually is, and just because the label feels one particular song is worth more than others released in the same time frame doesn't mean reality agrees.
If it actually IS a more valuable song, it's increased volume of sales will show this, and in turn they will recieve more profit. If the song just generally sucks (which is true for the vast majority of music available) it isn't going to sell.
He states that he thinks some songs should be more than $.99. I'm sure many music industry morons think most music should be worth a whole lot more. I promise you I would buy considerably LESS music from iTunes if the songs were more than $.99. Even more than a few pennies more might shift my purchasing habits. It's a whole lot easier for me to keep "A doller per song" mindset than it is "A dollar and a quarter... a dollar and a half... three dollars for THIS piece of shit!?"
Let a song's popularity determine it's sales, and let it's sales determine the amount of income it generates for the music industry. The market is fickle and I'm sure there are a whole lot of people out there like myself who only use iTunes (and pay) because we feel the price point is right. Start fucking with that formula and just wait and see how long it takes for people to go right back to other methods of attaining music. It don't make THAT much of a shit's worth of difference to some of us.
Slashdot Mirror
I really do not see how having Dell or HP sell computers running OSX will degrade the quality of the OS, but that is just me.
Then you probably are exactly the sort of user who should switch to OS X.
It has become increasingly the case that Dell and Gateway computers have been using cheaper and cheaper components to undercut each other's price points, and quality has suffered. Many recent news stories and articles on this topic have been published lately. Have you not been reading?
Windows is a system designed to be installed on any commodity PC and with proper drivers operate flawlessly. I personally have had great luck with Windows on many PCs because I am careful in selecting my hardware when I put together systems. Unfortunately I have seen it is more often the case that people buy preassembled systems that were designed to meet low price points and the systems are absolute trash. Windows is unstable and the users are typically unsatisfied.
In these cases Microsoft almost always gets the blame. *nix users love to make jokes about Windows instability and what have you, because as a general rule the stories they tell of blue screens and lost data are backed by hard numbers. And yet there is still a huge percentage of users that have rock solid systems running on Windows without any problems (without Viruses and Worms, even, though that's an entirely different issue).
At some point you have to realize that when it comes to computers, sometimes you really do get what you pay for. That cheap CD-Burner is going to make coasters. That cheap sound card is going to hang and leave applications wihtout sound, or not allow different applications to share the sound device, this USB interface is going to interfere with that Parallel Port so you can either use your web-cam OR your printer, but not both (and sometimes your Sound Card or your Printer, but not both).
This all sounds like bullshit from MS-DOS days, but it's quite true today. I have on many occassions found that while repairing someone's practically brand new system that there really wasn't much wrong with it except that they were attempting to do two things with their system at once that it just doesn't like to do.
THESE are exactly the sorts of problems that Apple wants to keep tight control over.
"Why should they care?" people will ask.
They care because OS X is more stable than Windows. It functions more reliably, it does so with less complication and less knowledge required by the user. Apple does NOT want to add in the nightmare of universal hardware support and complicate things by trying to figure out what crap component some users added that made this or that program stop working unexpectedly.
If Apple can control the number of failure points in the OS, they can keep that reputation of being a more solid and easier to use/configure OS than Microsoft.
If they decide to open the floodgates of cheap hardware and 3rd party commodity system resellers, then they will simply turn into yet another *nix distributor, and take on all of the headaches that come with a huge sea of unsupported hardware. After all, Joe Sixpack would be pretty pissed if he buys a USB webcam that won't work on the OS X system he bought from Dell/Gateway/Whoever. That would then reflect negatively on Apple.
You might say you'd rather have OS X on generic x86 haredware, but Apple doesn't want the negative factors. They make OS X and you don't. They win.
For now, there won't be any official support for OS X on generic PCs. That isn't stopping you from buying a copy of OS X and tricking in into installing, but when something doesn't work right, don't expect Apple to care. You are, after all, an unsupported user.
Little thing called a memory card.
Compared to the hard drive, and possibly even content downloads, the word "little" seems to accurately describe a memory card.
Freeloaders are the other half.
Freeloaders are smarter than they are, and for every Napster and Grokster user that gets annoyed by a service that "goes legal" and requires fee based downloads, there are dozens of other users who have figured out ways to trade files illegally under the radar.
Invitation based file-trading email-lists, for example. IRC. Direct file transfer in IM Clients. Private FTP sites. Even private web-sites. The list goes on.
It makes a lot of sense, or maybe it doesn't. I really don't know. All I know is that I keep going to Apple's store to buy an iPod Nano and I end up with a $5000 Mac in my shopping cart. I really don't know how that keeps happening! :)
Needless to say the price tag keeps waking me up and I never quite get around to placing the order. Maybe if it weren't for that insane desire to pair a MAC with the NANO I would have already purchased an iPod by now.
Now now, you know it's in poor taste to pick on someone for having such a high UID.
No, but I do remember Michael Dell saying he would sell Mac OS X on a Dell if Apple were to allow it.
Anyone who is dumb enough to use part of their SSN as a PIN deserves whatever happens.
I agree. However, that hasn't stopped many services from requiring the last 4 digits of a SSN# for identity verification.
It's idiotic.
Considering so many uses only request the last four digits, that makes the SSN a really insecure PIN in some cases. Insecure because it's only 4 digits, and because it never changes.
I ate one of those the other day.
I'm Still Waiting for Grand Theftendo
8 Bit NES Grand Theft Auto.
Amen.
Best "I wish I had Mod Points" post ever.
I know this kind of thing may be subjective, but I just can't say I think that the Sony systems have ever been in anything close to the Mac's league.
I don't even own a Mac, but I've been drooling over their designs for years.
IBM's Aptiva "Stealth" line was some super sexy kit in the PC world for it's time, and it only managed to do this by being a late Performa clone in black.
More recent systems like the Ice Cube and Shuttle small form factor cases are almost getting there, but they fail when you realize getting a perfectly matching monitor, keyboard, and mouse isn't easy to do.
There are definitly some really sweet looking case mods, but once again you just end up with this beautiful work of art for a case and bland looking UI devices.
Maybe that'll be the next trend in custom cases? Matching keyboards, mice, and drive-plates?
No matter how you look at it though, Apple's stuff just has a style that really can't be exactly duplicated by anyone else (though I find it difficult to really explain why I feel this way).
I keep being tempted to buy a Mini but I know that I'd probably really like the Mac and then be unhappy that I didn't buy the Power Mac G5 Quad Core (which I should just break down and do anyway...)
a diamond sheet big enough to cover an iPod screen would still cost more than the unit.
Right now they may be expensive, but with technology to manufacture them being what it is, they may not be much longer.
They can stop crying and start getting ready for it. If they don't fill the demand, someone will. As soon as I can have a high speed internet connection without the help of either the local cable company or telephone company then I'll be free of both.
At that point, any content I can't get online, I simply will do without. Sell me entertainment online, or sell me nothing. It makes no difference to me. There's plenty of free and legal clips of amusement here and there at least as worthwhile as the junk they air on TV anyway.
Besides, I find reading books and doing technical reading online is a better use of my time than watching television in the first place.
Done.
"Officials say there's no Big Brother agenda in the Missouri project (outside of the obvious)-- the data will remain anonymous (Unless we want to watch a specific person), leaving no possibility to track specific people from their driveway to their destination (without a reason, though any reason at all will do)."
The idea could work something like this --
When I log on, my IM Client would log into my e-mail account, send off a message to all of my friends telling them I'm online. It would then download all messages from my friends who are online getting their last known IP.
Naturally people with Static IPs wouldn't need to announce themselevs so often, and the client could always check last known IPs right from the get go.
This whole process could be made to work rather transparently to the user, BUT setting it up initially might be difficult for some users (a bad thing), and I could easily see inboxes getting filled with junk messages pass between IM clients.
There are better ways than this to handle the situation, but for a decentralized network it's one that could be made easily enough.
I personally have been pondering this question for years and have finally decided that the Jabber way of doing things is still probably the best "so far". While it isn't perfect, it's a step in the right direction.
FWIW, on Windows I use Trillian Pro and the jabber plugin is functional, though it does leave plenty to be desired, esspecially when using it with GTalk.
That won't help you one bit if the keyboard has within itself a hardware keylogger.
Some keyboards themselves are keyloggers.
Sometimes keyboards are attached to keylogger adapters or dongles.
KeyGhost.Com
So, remember, either bring your own keyboard or just bring a laptop.
And of corse you need to calculate the cost per bit after the mapping overhead, and make sure that is still cheap enough to be useful.
If reliable, even though expensive, it will certainly be useful. 10 gigs of fast non-volatile random access memory has many uses, even if very expensive. Those uses just might be niche markets, but they exist just the same.
Yup, and what's more....
Sometimes a yield is so good that very few processors actually fail at higher speeds, resulting in a batch of very good chips. Since the market still wants the lower rated chips, it sometimes becomes necissary to clock a perfectly good chip lower than it is actually capable of being clocked.
The Intel Celeron 300a (I believe) was a great example of this. 300a chips were so high quality, that most of them available could be run at around 500mhz (if I remember correctly).
Yes, Least. Sorry about the typo.
I may have a home network where video is streamed about, but how many normal people are really going to set this up?
A lot more than you think. If people are buying iPods and Airtunes, it already shows that while the average population may not be totally computer savvy, they are starting to realize the potential entertainment values a high power PC can present. Oh, sure they mostly see it in illegally downloaded movies and music, but they do realize there are legit uses as well.
I expect they're just waiting for the right product to come out, something easy to use that will let them view all of their internet-obtained content (with or without DRM) on their TVs, in their living rooms.
I believe just charging the water would not create a current within the fish unless the fish had a ground that didn't also ground the water. Path of lease resistance and all that.
An easier solution would be induction charged fish.
To claim that they don't have a share of the profits from the music store would be more of a lie than I'd expect even from a representative of the music industry.
Executive word play.
Think along these lines.
We are selling our songs through iPod.
Okay, they're selling the music through iTunes. Let's say they have decided the music's "cost" is $.50. It's probably not, but we're guessing here. They are selling something that doesn't actually cost anything to manufacture, a digital copy. The cost of producing a song will only be put up at the production of the song and profit will only come after X number of songs are sold. Anything beyond that point is just a continued revenue stream. Keeping that in mind, after they sell so many copies of the song they're getting some profit, though the concept of "enough" is subjective.
but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue
If he means iTunes, which many suspect he does because he's a moron, then this statement is true. Apple keeps the iTunes Music Store Profits. The music industry made their money selling the song. The store makes it's money being a legitimate outlet and handling the transaction.
What it sounds like to me is that this guy is saying he thinks the music industry should make money twice. Once up front at the sale of the a song, and once again at the end of the day by cutting into the iTunes Music Store profit margin. By wording his statement in the way that he has, it makes the general public feel as if the music industry is losing out on this deal, when what he's really saying is that they're just not walking away with as much of a cut as they would like.
So let me run his statement through my nifty little PR translator.
"We want to make as much profit as possible by taking as much of the revenue generated and claiming our rights to preferably all of it. iTunes doesn't deserve any profit, because they wouldn't have a store if we didn't produce the content. Oh, and by the way, you may only listen to our content on our terms, so keep paying, chump."
I don't personally believe varying prices for songs make any sense at all, unless perhaps the scheme is based on a song's age.
My argument goes something like this.
If an artist releases a song today at $.99, no matter how he/she and their label may feel about it, that song is only worth as much as any other single song. Let popularity decide how much revenue that song brings in. Just because an artist decides their song is of greater value than every other song out there doesn't mean it actually is, and just because the label feels one particular song is worth more than others released in the same time frame doesn't mean reality agrees.
If it actually IS a more valuable song, it's increased volume of sales will show this, and in turn they will recieve more profit. If the song just generally sucks (which is true for the vast majority of music available) it isn't going to sell.
He states that he thinks some songs should be more than $.99. I'm sure many music industry morons think most music should be worth a whole lot more. I promise you I would buy considerably LESS music from iTunes if the songs were more than $.99. Even more than a few pennies more might shift my purchasing habits. It's a whole lot easier for me to keep "A doller per song" mindset than it is "A dollar and a quarter... a dollar and a half... three dollars for THIS piece of shit!?"
Let a song's popularity determine it's sales, and let it's sales determine the amount of income it generates for the music industry. The market is fickle and I'm sure there are a whole lot of people out there like myself who only use iTunes (and pay) because we feel the price point is right. Start fucking with that formula and just wait and see how long it takes for people to go right back to other methods of attaining music. It don't make THAT much of a shit's worth of difference to some of us.