This may seem a bit contradictory to you, but that's because you don't understand the Reality Distortion principle.
No, that's because you don't understand history.
For quite some time (well through the NetBurst years), POWER had the upper hand. It had more registers, better memory bandwidth, and an instruction pipeline that wasn't absurdly deep. In addition, the POWER chips (and their derivatives, such as the G3 and G4) ran cooler than Intel's offerings, making them a much better choice for the sort of space-constrained designs that Apple favored.
But times change. IBM wasn't too interested in developing small runs of custom chips just for Apple, and as Intel started to ready the Core line (abandoning NetBurst in the process) the PowerPC advantage disappeared.
At one point PowerPC was better. When that was no longer the case, Apple switched. It's as simple as that.
Fuck that, Apple is just another Microsoft, and the reason people don't see it is this weird blindness people get when the "in-thing" is around.
Not quite. MS is known for avoiding interoperable standards at all costs. Apple is not 100% open, but they're a hell of a lot better than MS when it comes to formats.
Examples:
MS sells music in WMA format. Apple sells it in AAC.
MS's browsers... 'nough said. Apple makes Safari and sponsors the development of the open-source WebKit engine.
MS's web solutions usually feature a closed-source httpd and a proprietary server-side language. Apple ships Apache and PHP.
MS ships Monad. Apple ships bash, tcsh, and others.
See a pattern?
Now that's not to say that Apple is entirely open. They've still got their own bizarre connectors, the iPod still requires iTunes, and the iPhone team seems to have a pathological compulsion to reinvent the wheel as many times as possible (ignoring IDLE, SyncML, CalDAV, etc in the process.) Still, (at least in my experience) Apple tends to be a lot more open than MS when it comes to data formats.
I felt the same about my MBP at first, but even with the underclocked-as-standard graphics card that comes with it, it gets incredibly noisy when running 3D games, and after a couple of hours it just locks up due to overheating.
Then call AppleCare. They're very proactive when it comes to replacing machines due to overheating -- if you're getting hard locks due to heat issues that is definitely not par for the MBP course, and if it's under warranty they'll replace it.
I ended up reading a lot of horror stories about Mac assembly over the last few years, thermal paste being applied too liberally to the CPU etc, so perhaps the machine would run better if I cleaned it out and re-applied the thermal paste myself, but I don't want to have to do that when I've already paid over a thousand pounds for the machine.
Sigh. The thermal paste thing was an issue... for the first few weeks of the 2006 machines. That's it. If you weren't an early, early adopter, you didn't get bitten by that issue.
The OSX UI is pretty nice, but Ubuntu is even better once you setup compiz correctly, and Avant Window Manager is a great replacement for the Dock.
You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that the only reason to use OS X is the UI. Lest that continue, you might want to consider the following observations from a fellow MBP user: Broadcom WiFi + Linux is painful, suspend/resume isn't quite as reliable as on OS X, dual screen setups on OS X "just work -- on Ubuntu they might work... if you're willing to screw with your xorg.conf, power consumption under Ubuntu can be brought down almost to the level of OS X -- if you're willing to do quite a bit of tuning with powertop, etc.
Yes, OS X has a pretty UI -- and compiz does too -- but there's a heck of a lot more to it than that. Pretending that Ubuntu's support for the MBP is equivalent to OS X's is just silly.
Looks like all that supposed security you hear about in Mac OS X is really just a huge joke.
Not really. The ASLR can be bypassed, and the NX support is indeed quite incomplete in Leopard (it's heap only IIRC), but the real strength of OS X's security comes from the Unix permissions model. It's still very tricky to write malware that, say, turns a Mac into a zombied warez server. It's still difficult to get root, which would be necessary to do most of the useful things you can do with a compromised box.
On Windows, once you've got access to a user account you've got root, since 9 times out of 10 the person won't have the patience to fight with all their legacy software (and Windows poor UI) and run as a limited account.
Ask yourself this: if Mac OS X's security is such a joke, why haven't any of the millions upon millions of Macs out there been part of a botnet? Yeah, I know... marketshare, etc... but if the security really is as you're making it out to be, isn't it kinda odd that there aren't *any* zombied Macs? Surely with several million trivially exploitable machines, somebody would have taken advantage of them, right?
Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
What are you talking about? If you've got an Intel-based Mac, Leopard is actually faster. The kernel handles SMP much, much better, and many of the things like Spotlight received serious optimization -- try using a Tiger-based Mac and a Leopard-based one side-by-side under load and you'll see a difference.
Hmm. yeah, that invisible hand does a really great job eh?
The invisible hand is working fine. I know, I know -- this is clearly a failure of the free market: they're conspiring to raise prices, SMS messages are too expensive, it's almost pure profit, etc. I know. But that still doesn't mean that the invisible hand isn't working. A lot of people get this one wrong, so I understand your mistake... but the free market won't always derive a "fair" price, or the "right" price (in your mind) for a good. Instead, the price of a good will (eventually) arrive at whatever price the market can bear. In this case, that happens to be $0.20/message. Why? Because that's what most people are willing to pay.
Now personally I think that's absurd. I haven't paid to send an SMS in a long, long time, and I don't really see the appeal; I certainly would never pay $0.20 to send 160 characters when I can send an e-mail for much, much less. But I'm an outlier. The point of equilibrium appears to be $0.20, thus the carriers can charge that and people will pay it.
Let me guess that iBench is an apple app designed to highlight every slow part of JS in every browser. Oh and to be quick and use anything that Safari actually does right. Seems like a fair test to me. I bet even MS could make IE7 30 times quicker in some tests than Safari if they wanted too.
I think one key difference is that you can completely remove Safari from OS X and substitute another browser wih no loss of OS funationality. The same cannot be said for Windows -- if you use, say, nLite to rip out IE completely, you break a number of things.
They also do a fair amount of lock in like closing Darwin (What? No one screaming about this? Yeah that's what I thought
God damn it. Not this again.
We're not screaming about it because it never happened. I'm serious, the source is still distributed for every release. They delayed the release of the source once during the early part of the x86 transition. A couple of moron bloggers and anti-Apple zealots heard about it and extrapolated that Apple was "closing Darwin". They were full of shit, but that hasn't stopped this myth from living on.
If you would provide this, I would switch. Even if the shows had ads. Away from the same system without ads. I'm okay with ads, I understand that's how you make your money. Other people might not be so noble, but if your application was easier to use, and came with a remote control, they'd never set anything up...but once they do, they aren't switching.
What about this: provide us with a feed and standard HTTP-accessible files for each episode. Mux in the ads with the video. Yes, people will strip them out, but if they're short enough (say, 15 seconds), most people wouldn't go to the trouble of stripping them out.
Why would this work? Because your situation is really goddamn critical. You can't beat the pirates when it comes to convenience. At best you can match them. The *only* area you can win in is release speed. Let me repeat that: the only area you can win in is release speed. That and large-scale distribution. The two areas you can win in are speed and large-scale distribution. Those, and legality. The three areas you can win in are legality, speed, and scale of distribution. Monty Python cracks aside, I'm serious: there are very few areas that you can match or beat the pirates. If you want to win, you've got to focus on those areas.
You will never be able to protect your content fully. As long as folks can avoid paying a buck, as long as they can avoid watching an ad, they will do so. You can't win at the arms race, but you if you can release content faster, more reliably, and more legitimately than the pirates, people will watch your ads.
P.S. You're probably gonna get used to taking a pay cut too -- you can win, but you won't end up with the pre-broadband margins that you've been used to.
You may be a bit ahead of the times in your prediction, but I believe you're close. But that's not what I wanted to comment on. I wanted to comment on this:
For the first time in years it is faced with real and credible competition from both Apple and Canonical.
I very much disagree with this. Microsoft isn't faced with competition from Canonical. They're faced with competition from Linux; Canonical may be a "symptom" of this, but they're not the real competition. Right now, Canonical's got (arguably) the best, most usable UI for new users, thus they have some of the largest user base. If Canonical gets destroyed by Microsoft and Ubuntu ceases to exist, there will be a huge development influx into other distros, probably concentrating on either Fedora or one of the many Ubuntu spin-offs. The problem that MS is facing is that desktop Linux is somewhat of a hydra. They've managed against it thus far is really just because (continuing the metaphor) it took a while to grow. The nature of open sources licenses mean that it will be incredibly easy for "modern desktop Linux" to survive the death of their current front-runner.
Now I don't think Microsoft's death is imminent. They've got enough cash reserves and enough fingers in enough pies that they won't die anytime soon. But they are facing a serious threat, one that thus far they've been powerless to stop the growth of. Apple can be destroyed. Apple is kept at bay by Microsoft quite easily: until iWork is a drop-in replacement, Microsoft holds the upper hand in their relationship. (This is, I suspect, why Apple has been putting a substantial amount of development resources into the creation of a functional equivalent to Microsoft Office. As long as a majority of their consumer user-base depends on a Microsoft product, Apple can't afford to compete too directly with Microsoft.) Linux has no such Achilles' heel. The best Microsoft has against Linux is "trusted computing", but (thus far) manufacturers have essentially said "why bother" to Microsoft's pushes for it. Without widespread hardware lock-in, and without a clear financial target, Linux won't be easy for Microsoft to kill.
Much of Apple's webkit enhancements are now proprietary and not submitted back
Uh... what?
Unless I'm mistaken, Dave Hyatt et. al. commit their changes to the publicly available WebKit source. The nightlies reflect the most recent version of WebKit.
That wasn't the bit of your post that worried me though. The bit that worried me was this:
Apple is an exploiter of free software. Sometimes giving back is in their interest, but don't let that mislead you into thinking that they are a supporter.
See that alone indicates to me that you don't understand the concept of free software. Free software *can't* be exploited; that's its nature.
What you (and others) want is for Apple to be forced into contributing towards features that you want in a manner that you approve of. Problem is, just as the GCC team doesn't have to bow to Apple's will when it comes to licensing or (previously) architecture focus, neither do they have to bow to yours w/ regards to Ogg support.
And you know what? That's completely fine.
The licenses for the software they use allow that. Now you can (and may) argue that the creators of the software shouldn't have chosen the licenses they did -- but that's a whole other argument. As it stands, Apple uses open source software in a manner completely in line with the license, exceeds their legal obligations, and pays multiple developers to work on code which is then released under an open source license. That sounds like support to me.
The First Amendment guarantees your right to say/write what you'd like. It doesn't give you the right to say/write it in any private location you'd like.
TV is a dead business model, and they need to get on the bandwagon. Ever since I got Hulu on my Xbox, I've discovered how much I just don't care, and don't need, cable/satelite tv.
Yeah, ever since I started watching region-restricted, DRMd, non-downloadable content with mandatory ads I also realized how much I just don't care, and don't need that other region-restricted, DRMd, non-downloadable content with mandatory advertisements.
Presumably, the Macintosh Business Unit has "higher profit margins" because they don't actually have to spend a lot developing Office, rather they just have to port it? [...] Or does my logic have an obvious flaw that was so obvious, I missed it?
Kind of. Office for Mac is a (mostly) different codebase. The only real advantage the MBU gets is that they can rely on the Office for Windows team to actually share details/specs/etc for the file formats -- everything else is, from what I recall, written independently of the Windows codebase.
They have added a goddamn handler for the clickonce mime type. That is all. This is useful. This allows firefox adoption in the many businesses that deliver LOB thick client apps using clickonce.
It's useful, unless you don't want to make it easier to install software from any website that offers it. I would argue that ClickOnce is a lot more trouble than it's worth.
Before you get on your MS bashing high-horse, you might choose to take a glance at Sun, who has been including the _goddamn google toolbar_ in Java updates as a default option.
Unless I'm misremembering, a good number of us folk *have* bee bashing Sun for that. I believe the phrase "whoring themselves out for cash" has been used in the context of discussions about this behavior before...
I've been using the Beta for a while and it isn't a beta like say... an Ubuntu beta. This is a beta of a quality the open source world cannot obtain. We call this a release in linuxland. For this reason, I don't think there's anything strange about them aiming for a single RC.
That's a little harsh, don't ya think? Yeah, Beta 1's an RC by Ubuntu standards, but it's beta by Fedora standards and experimental by Debian standards.
Comparing MS's software lifecycle to that of "Linux distros" is foolish; each distro has its own set of release criteria, none of which match Microsoft's. Ubuntu is all about being a cutting-edge desktop distro -- one of the side effects of this is that sometimes it's not terribly polished or stable. Fedora/CentOS are all about business support -- multimedia and consumer features aren't anywhere near as polished as they are with some other OSs. Debian's all about stability and reliability -- what ships in a release may not be the latest/greatest version of a package, but if it's in the stable repos it's been tested every which way.
Saying that "We call this a release in Linux land" is every bit as meaningful as referring to Mac OS X 10.6 by saying "We call this an 'update' in PC land." Yeah, it sounds catchy, but comparing a specific product lifecycle to an entire ecosystem is just silly.
Right now, you can either develop for the web, which will work everywhere, or write one app in Win32/.Net, one in Objective C for Mac, one in Java with Blackberry specific apis, one in Objective C for iPhone, one in [whatever palm is up to], one in.net for winmobile, etc, etc etc.
You're not free from platform issues with a web app either. Just of the top of my head:
You have to deal with browser variances (or use a framework that abstracts that away at the expense of performance). Even though JavaScript implementations have improved, some browsers still do things "differently."
Mobile device hardware and input methods are too varied. On the desktop, you have to deal with different APIs, sure, but the input devices are pretty much standard (keyboard, mouse, etc.) On a mobile device, your input devices are different from the desktop, as well as being different from another mobile device. There's no way that the same UI is going to be usable, let alone easy to use, on both a touch-only device at 320x480 and a QWERTY thumbboard device with a D-pad at 320x240.
Mobile devices are still far more hardware constrained than the desktop. The iPhone and the Nokia E71 have two relatively fast processors, two WebKit-based renderers, and two relatively fast JavaScript implementations -- and they still choke on some traditional web apps. All that JavaScript that performs just great in Firefox or IE may well slow to a crawl when executed on a mobile device. "No problem", I hear you say, "we'll just write an alternate 'low-JS' version for the mobile devices". Sure, you can do that -- but isn't that kinda what you were trying to avoid in the first place?
Mobile browsers suck. This is getting better, but progress is kinda slow. The iPhone, Android, and S60 phones use WebKit -- but (most) Blackberries and (almost all) Palm devices have pretty poor browsers. Windows Mobile, with its version of IE, has a downright comical rendering engine. (Seriously. To quote Gizmodo: "Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag.") Good luck writing CSS and JavaScript that delivers a desktop experience across all those different browsers.
Pretty much each of those issues can be solved (and indeed, often is solved) by doing browser detection and delivering a different mix of CSS/JS. But if you're going to do that, why bother writing a web app in the first place?
Note: If you want some excellent examples of why web apps are completely unfeasible for mobile use, check out Gizmodo's mobile browser comparison.
Wow. So you've managed to take a story about astroturfing (something which is manipulative, deceitful, and certainly not a good idea by any standards) and spin it into an indication that capitalism is inherently bad.
Fucking bravo. Seriously. That's some DC-worthy spin right there.
I would (if I were seriously worried about this sort of thing), do something like the following for a desktop unit:
1) Get a thick case that can be locked.
2) Get a "giant fuck-off padlock".
3) Apply #2 to #3.
4) Place the case somewhere somewhat distant from monitor and input devices. Ensure that case is in location that is very inconvenient to access.
5) Wire up phase lines of the power supply directly to the RAM sockets, controllable by a switch. Also add a killswitch that cuts all power to the inside of the case.
Now in the event that I see [MIBs/ninjas/other attacker] coming in time, I hit the killswitch. The machine powers off and (since it will take them a while to access the inside and get to a position where they can cool the chips, I'm relatively safe. The lock and thick case are more an insurance policy.)
If my door gets kicked down, I hit the killswitch. Power supply nukes my RAM, destroying the chips. Not exactly subtle, and I'd definitely go to jail under RIPA, but if the alternative is a longer sentence it might be worth it. This provides an added bonus, as I hear that ninjas can't touch you (or your RAM chips) if you[/they] are on fire...
And yet somehow, despite all that, Apple has used the exact same strategy to allow backwards compatibility with pre-OS X applications for the last 7 years.
The copy which is available has a built-in 30 day time limit and, unlike previous editions of Windows 7, 'enthusiasts' don't seem to have found a way around this yet. While this is pretty normal practice for test editions, it would make it possible for Microsoft to leak the software without it affecting the final product.
Anyone tried to reset the clock yet?
SWIM says that TFM is full of it and that the timebomb can be reset/avoided quite easily...
Slashdot Mirror
This may seem a bit contradictory to you, but that's because you don't understand the Reality Distortion principle.
No, that's because you don't understand history.
For quite some time (well through the NetBurst years), POWER had the upper hand. It had more registers, better memory bandwidth, and an instruction pipeline that wasn't absurdly deep. In addition, the POWER chips (and their derivatives, such as the G3 and G4) ran cooler than Intel's offerings, making them a much better choice for the sort of space-constrained designs that Apple favored.
But times change. IBM wasn't too interested in developing small runs of custom chips just for Apple, and as Intel started to ready the Core line (abandoning NetBurst in the process) the PowerPC advantage disappeared.
At one point PowerPC was better. When that was no longer the case, Apple switched. It's as simple as that.
Fuck that, Apple is just another Microsoft, and the reason people don't see it is this weird blindness people get when the "in-thing" is around.
Not quite. MS is known for avoiding interoperable standards at all costs. Apple is not 100% open, but they're a hell of a lot better than MS when it comes to formats.
Examples:
MS sells music in WMA format. Apple sells it in AAC.
MS's browsers... 'nough said. Apple makes Safari and sponsors the development of the open-source WebKit engine.
MS's web solutions usually feature a closed-source httpd and a proprietary server-side language. Apple ships Apache and PHP.
MS ships Monad. Apple ships bash, tcsh, and others.
See a pattern?
Now that's not to say that Apple is entirely open. They've still got their own bizarre connectors, the iPod still requires iTunes, and the iPhone team seems to have a pathological compulsion to reinvent the wheel as many times as possible (ignoring IDLE, SyncML, CalDAV, etc in the process.) Still, (at least in my experience) Apple tends to be a lot more open than MS when it comes to data formats.
I felt the same about my MBP at first, but even with the underclocked-as-standard graphics card that comes with it, it gets incredibly noisy when running 3D games, and after a couple of hours it just locks up due to overheating.
Then call AppleCare. They're very proactive when it comes to replacing machines due to overheating -- if you're getting hard locks due to heat issues that is definitely not par for the MBP course, and if it's under warranty they'll replace it.
I ended up reading a lot of horror stories about Mac assembly over the last few years, thermal paste being applied too liberally to the CPU etc, so perhaps the machine would run better if I cleaned it out and re-applied the thermal paste myself, but I don't want to have to do that when I've already paid over a thousand pounds for the machine.
Sigh. The thermal paste thing was an issue... for the first few weeks of the 2006 machines. That's it. If you weren't an early, early adopter, you didn't get bitten by that issue.
The OSX UI is pretty nice, but Ubuntu is even better once you setup compiz correctly, and Avant Window Manager is a great replacement for the Dock.
You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that the only reason to use OS X is the UI. Lest that continue, you might want to consider the following observations from a fellow MBP user: Broadcom WiFi + Linux is painful, suspend/resume isn't quite as reliable as on OS X, dual screen setups on OS X "just work -- on Ubuntu they might work... if you're willing to screw with your xorg.conf, power consumption under Ubuntu can be brought down almost to the level of OS X -- if you're willing to do quite a bit of tuning with powertop, etc.
Yes, OS X has a pretty UI -- and compiz does too -- but there's a heck of a lot more to it than that. Pretending that Ubuntu's support for the MBP is equivalent to OS X's is just silly.
Looks like all that supposed security you hear about in Mac OS X is really just a huge joke.
Not really. The ASLR can be bypassed, and the NX support is indeed quite incomplete in Leopard (it's heap only IIRC), but the real strength of OS X's security comes from the Unix permissions model. It's still very tricky to write malware that, say, turns a Mac into a zombied warez server. It's still difficult to get root, which would be necessary to do most of the useful things you can do with a compromised box.
On Windows, once you've got access to a user account you've got root, since 9 times out of 10 the person won't have the patience to fight with all their legacy software (and Windows poor UI) and run as a limited account.
Ask yourself this: if Mac OS X's security is such a joke, why haven't any of the millions upon millions of Macs out there been part of a botnet? Yeah, I know... marketshare, etc... but if the security really is as you're making it out to be, isn't it kinda odd that there aren't *any* zombied Macs? Surely with several million trivially exploitable machines, somebody would have taken advantage of them, right?
No, he's just not an idiot. BTW Apple pays people to report verifiable bugs to them.
Interesting. Since I (and perhaps others) have never heard of this, perhaps you could corroborate your story with a link to Apple's policy on this?
Once Apple switched to Intel chips, new releases started to become progressively slower. Leopard would be an embarrassment if it weren't for the fact that Vista was even a bigger embarrassment.
What are you talking about? If you've got an Intel-based Mac, Leopard is actually faster. The kernel handles SMP much, much better, and many of the things like Spotlight received serious optimization -- try using a Tiger-based Mac and a Leopard-based one side-by-side under load and you'll see a difference.
I can say anything I like about him as long as it's not defamatory.
And as long as it's not against his religion. Or race.
Hey look, I can make tangentially-related jabs at your country too!
Hmm. yeah, that invisible hand does a really great job eh?
The invisible hand is working fine. I know, I know -- this is clearly a failure of the free market: they're conspiring to raise prices, SMS messages are too expensive, it's almost pure profit, etc. I know. But that still doesn't mean that the invisible hand isn't working. A lot of people get this one wrong, so I understand your mistake... but the free market won't always derive a "fair" price, or the "right" price (in your mind) for a good. Instead, the price of a good will (eventually) arrive at whatever price the market can bear. In this case, that happens to be $0.20/message. Why? Because that's what most people are willing to pay.
Now personally I think that's absurd. I haven't paid to send an SMS in a long, long time, and I don't really see the appeal; I certainly would never pay $0.20 to send 160 characters when I can send an e-mail for much, much less. But I'm an outlier. The point of equilibrium appears to be $0.20, thus the carriers can charge that and people will pay it.
Good guess. Unfortunately, you're wrong. It's an open source benchmarking app for Mac OS X. [sourceforge.net]
Good guess. Unfortunately, I'm wrong. That's (apparently) the wrong iBench. Mea culpa!
Let me guess that iBench is an apple app designed to highlight every slow part of JS in every browser. Oh and to be quick and use anything that Safari actually does right. Seems like a fair test to me. I bet even MS could make IE7 30 times quicker in some tests than Safari if they wanted too.
Good guess. Unfortunately, you're wrong. It's an open source benchmarking app for Mac OS X.
I think one key difference is that you can completely remove Safari from OS X and substitute another browser wih no loss of OS funationality. The same cannot be said for Windows -- if you use, say, nLite to rip out IE completely, you break a number of things.
They also do a fair amount of lock in like closing Darwin (What? No one screaming about this? Yeah that's what I thought
God damn it. Not this again.
We're not screaming about it because it never happened. I'm serious, the source is still distributed for every release. They delayed the release of the source once during the early part of the x86 transition. A couple of moron bloggers and anti-Apple zealots heard about it and extrapolated that Apple was "closing Darwin". They were full of shit, but that hasn't stopped this myth from living on.
If you would provide this, I would switch. Even if the shows had ads. Away from the same system without ads. I'm okay with ads, I understand that's how you make your money. Other people might not be so noble, but if your application was easier to use, and came with a remote control, they'd never set anything up...but once they do, they aren't switching.
What about this: provide us with a feed and standard HTTP-accessible files for each episode. Mux in the ads with the video. Yes, people will strip them out, but if they're short enough (say, 15 seconds), most people wouldn't go to the trouble of stripping them out.
Why would this work? Because your situation is really goddamn critical. You can't beat the pirates when it comes to convenience. At best you can match them. The *only* area you can win in is release speed. Let me repeat that: the only area you can win in is release speed. That and large-scale distribution. The two areas you can win in are speed and large-scale distribution. Those, and legality. The three areas you can win in are legality, speed, and scale of distribution. Monty Python cracks aside, I'm serious: there are very few areas that you can match or beat the pirates. If you want to win, you've got to focus on those areas.
You will never be able to protect your content fully. As long as folks can avoid paying a buck, as long as they can avoid watching an ad, they will do so. You can't win at the arms race, but you if you can release content faster, more reliably, and more legitimately than the pirates, people will watch your ads.
P.S. You're probably gonna get used to taking a pay cut too -- you can win, but you won't end up with the pre-broadband margins that you've been used to.
You may be a bit ahead of the times in your prediction, but I believe you're close. But that's not what I wanted to comment on. I wanted to comment on this:
For the first time in years it is faced with real and credible competition from both Apple and Canonical.
I very much disagree with this. Microsoft isn't faced with competition from Canonical. They're faced with competition from Linux; Canonical may be a "symptom" of this, but they're not the real competition. Right now, Canonical's got (arguably) the best, most usable UI for new users, thus they have some of the largest user base. If Canonical gets destroyed by Microsoft and Ubuntu ceases to exist, there will be a huge development influx into other distros, probably concentrating on either Fedora or one of the many Ubuntu spin-offs. The problem that MS is facing is that desktop Linux is somewhat of a hydra. They've managed against it thus far is really just because (continuing the metaphor) it took a while to grow. The nature of open sources licenses mean that it will be incredibly easy for "modern desktop Linux" to survive the death of their current front-runner.
Now I don't think Microsoft's death is imminent. They've got enough cash reserves and enough fingers in enough pies that they won't die anytime soon. But they are facing a serious threat, one that thus far they've been powerless to stop the growth of. Apple can be destroyed. Apple is kept at bay by Microsoft quite easily: until iWork is a drop-in replacement, Microsoft holds the upper hand in their relationship. (This is, I suspect, why Apple has been putting a substantial amount of development resources into the creation of a functional equivalent to Microsoft Office. As long as a majority of their consumer user-base depends on a Microsoft product, Apple can't afford to compete too directly with Microsoft.) Linux has no such Achilles' heel. The best Microsoft has against Linux is "trusted computing", but (thus far) manufacturers have essentially said "why bother" to Microsoft's pushes for it. Without widespread hardware lock-in, and without a clear financial target, Linux won't be easy for Microsoft to kill.
Much of Apple's webkit enhancements are now proprietary and not submitted back
Uh... what?
Unless I'm mistaken, Dave Hyatt et. al. commit their changes to the publicly available WebKit source. The nightlies reflect the most recent version of WebKit.
That wasn't the bit of your post that worried me though. The bit that worried me was this:
Apple is an exploiter of free software. Sometimes giving back is in their interest, but don't let that mislead you into thinking that they are a supporter.
See that alone indicates to me that you don't understand the concept of free software. Free software *can't* be exploited; that's its nature.
What you (and others) want is for Apple to be forced into contributing towards features that you want in a manner that you approve of. Problem is, just as the GCC team doesn't have to bow to Apple's will when it comes to licensing or (previously) architecture focus, neither do they have to bow to yours w/ regards to Ogg support.
And you know what? That's completely fine.
The licenses for the software they use allow that. Now you can (and may) argue that the creators of the software shouldn't have chosen the licenses they did -- but that's a whole other argument. As it stands, Apple uses open source software in a manner completely in line with the license, exceeds their legal obligations, and pays multiple developers to work on code which is then released under an open source license. That sounds like support to me.
First Amendment, anyone?
The First Amendment guarantees your right to say/write what you'd like. It doesn't give you the right to say/write it in any private location you'd like.
TV is a dead business model, and they need to get on the bandwagon. Ever since I got Hulu on my Xbox, I've discovered how much I just don't care, and don't need, cable/satelite tv.
Yeah, ever since I started watching region-restricted, DRMd, non-downloadable content with mandatory ads I also realized how much I just don't care, and don't need that other region-restricted, DRMd, non-downloadable content with mandatory advertisements.
Presumably, the Macintosh Business Unit has "higher profit margins" because they don't actually have to spend a lot developing Office, rather they just have to port it? [...]
Or does my logic have an obvious flaw that was so obvious, I missed it?
Kind of. Office for Mac is a (mostly) different codebase. The only real advantage the MBU gets is that they can rely on the Office for Windows team to actually share details/specs/etc for the file formats -- everything else is, from what I recall, written independently of the Windows codebase.
They have added a goddamn handler for the clickonce mime type. That is all. This is useful. This allows firefox adoption in the many businesses that deliver LOB thick client apps using clickonce.
It's useful, unless you don't want to make it easier to install software from any website that offers it. I would argue that ClickOnce is a lot more trouble than it's worth.
Before you get on your MS bashing high-horse, you might choose to take a glance at Sun, who has been including the _goddamn google toolbar_ in Java updates as a default option.
Unless I'm misremembering, a good number of us folk *have* bee bashing Sun for that. I believe the phrase "whoring themselves out for cash" has been used in the context of discussions about this behavior before...
I've been using the Beta for a while and it isn't a beta like say... an Ubuntu beta. This is a beta of a quality the open source world cannot obtain. We call this a release in linuxland. For this reason, I don't think there's anything strange about them aiming for a single RC.
That's a little harsh, don't ya think? Yeah, Beta 1's an RC by Ubuntu standards, but it's beta by Fedora standards and experimental by Debian standards.
Comparing MS's software lifecycle to that of "Linux distros" is foolish; each distro has its own set of release criteria, none of which match Microsoft's. Ubuntu is all about being a cutting-edge desktop distro -- one of the side effects of this is that sometimes it's not terribly polished or stable. Fedora/CentOS are all about business support -- multimedia and consumer features aren't anywhere near as polished as they are with some other OSs. Debian's all about stability and reliability -- what ships in a release may not be the latest/greatest version of a package, but if it's in the stable repos it's been tested every which way.
Saying that "We call this a release in Linux land" is every bit as meaningful as referring to Mac OS X 10.6 by saying "We call this an 'update' in PC land." Yeah, it sounds catchy, but comparing a specific product lifecycle to an entire ecosystem is just silly.
Right now, you can either develop for the web, which will work everywhere, or write one app in Win32/.Net, one in Objective C for Mac, one in Java with Blackberry specific apis, one in Objective C for iPhone, one in [whatever palm is up to], one in .net for winmobile, etc, etc etc.
You're not free from platform issues with a web app either. Just of the top of my head:
Pretty much each of those issues can be solved (and indeed, often is solved) by doing browser detection and delivering a different mix of CSS/JS. But if you're going to do that, why bother writing a web app in the first place?
Note: If you want some excellent examples of why web apps are completely unfeasible for mobile use, check out Gizmodo's mobile browser comparison.
Wow. So you've managed to take a story about astroturfing (something which is manipulative, deceitful, and certainly not a good idea by any standards) and spin it into an indication that capitalism is inherently bad.
Fucking bravo. Seriously. That's some DC-worthy spin right there.
I would (if I were seriously worried about this sort of thing), do something like the following for a desktop unit:
1) Get a thick case that can be locked.
2) Get a "giant fuck-off padlock".
3) Apply #2 to #3.
4) Place the case somewhere somewhat distant from monitor and input devices. Ensure that case is in location that is very inconvenient to access.
5) Wire up phase lines of the power supply directly to the RAM sockets, controllable by a switch. Also add a killswitch that cuts all power to the inside of the case.
Now in the event that I see [MIBs/ninjas/other attacker] coming in time, I hit the killswitch. The machine powers off and (since it will take them a while to access the inside and get to a position where they can cool the chips, I'm relatively safe. The lock and thick case are more an insurance policy.)
If my door gets kicked down, I hit the killswitch. Power supply nukes my RAM, destroying the chips. Not exactly subtle, and I'd definitely go to jail under RIPA, but if the alternative is a longer sentence it might be worth it. This provides an added bonus, as I hear that ninjas can't touch you (or your RAM chips) if you[/they] are on fire...
And yet somehow, despite all that, Apple has used the exact same strategy to allow backwards compatibility with pre-OS X applications for the last 7 years.
Funny, that.
SWIM says that TFM is full of it and that the timebomb can be reset/avoided quite easily...