What about the great hordes of corporate Microsoft certified IT weenies If MS drops the ball hard enough, for long enough, Apple will take these customers.
Even if Microsoft is still shipping XP Service Pack 2 in 2012, Apple will make only marginal corporate inroads if you have to buy a Mac to get OS X. Companies always like to have choice in hardware supplier -- whether mainframes running MVS (IBM, Amdahl, Hitachi), workstations running Unix, or personal computers running DOS/Windows. The winner if Microsoft drops the ball hard-enough-long-enough will be Linux.
Unless, of course, Jobs licenses OS X. But given what he did to the last group of Apple OS licensors, Dell, Gateway, and the rest would demand license terms that amount to a permanent cession of control. And I don't think Jobs could bring himself to do that, unless he decided to get out of the Mac business entirely.
Yeah! Oil shot up in price in the 1970s due to conflict in the Middle East, and it never came back down then, either! 1985-2003 never actually happened!
For the analogy to work, your non-cowardly ex-isolationists would have to declare war on Japan, and then inexplicably divert the bulk of military force to conquering, say, Indonesia.
Let's see . . .
1) The United States, despite being attacked by Japan, pursued a "Europe First" anti-Germany warfighting strategy.
2) The first major U.S. land forces engagements in World War II were all fighting French soldiers in French territory in Africa.
3) On the Pacific front, the vast bulk of U.S. military force was first sent into combat in the islands of the south Pacific near Australia. Which included combat in the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia.
So now I'm stuck. Did you make an unintentionally ironic statement out of historical ignorance, or did you make a subtle and wry comment poking fun at the people who say we should have concentrated on Afghanistan?
Yeah, McBride is probably safe behind the corporate veil, along with his attorneys. But if I were IBM, I'd try to go after them both.
Darl gave an interview where he said he didn't "understand" why IBM didn't just buy SCO to make the lawsuit go away. And the lawyer compensation plan for the attorneys includes a share of whatever SCO would get if SCO was bought out. This wasn't just a lawsuit to get a settlement for SCO, it was a suit to push IBM into personally enriching McBride-as-stockholder, plus later his attorneys.
If I were IBM, I'd file even a futile charge against the corporate veil to warn others that IBM will go after you personally if you try this sort of nonsense. And I'd go to the media and make the point that IBM usually doesn't try to pierce the veil, but did this time specifically because McBride was trying to push IBM into buying his stock by having his company pursue an utterly baseless case.
Certainly not the case here in the UK - if you want to use the Ordinance Survey's data then you have to pay them for it, you can't just rip it off and use it for your own maps. I'm surprised if this isn't the same in the US - someone has gone to a lot of effort to collect the data, why should you automatically get it for free?
In fact, a traditional feature of commerically-produced street maps in America is the addition of non-existent streets, so that copyright infingement can be proved when a ripoff inculdes the phony street.
However, unlike Britain, the U.S. has nothing like Crown Copyright covering works produced by the state. Unlike Ordinance Service maps, United States Geological Survey maps (like other state-produced works) are automatically public domain.
You cannot make a comparison like that . . . [y]ou cannot compare Apple unit sales with the sum of all the PC unit sales, it makes no sense
Fine. Then Max Fomitchev made no sense. "Market share" specifically is a comparison of the sales of one company in a market to the sum of the sales of all the market, and he's the one who brought it up, calling it "remarkable".
Why is it that Mac hardware unit sales get compared to Windows OS unit sales but not Linux OS unit sales and downloads?
Well, in this specific case? There was no comparison to Windows OS sales or maket share. The comparison was Macs to the whole PC market, and thus because of how Apple sells OSes, implicitly Mac OS to the whole OS market (subsuming Windows, Linux, and everybody else). The purpose of the comparison was to see if Apple had a "remarkable" market share. And the answer was no, they only had a couple of percent of the market.
Not all PCs run Windows; many run Linux or some other unix (variants).
Right, And either Linux represents a large fraction of the PC OS market and constitutes a significant competitor to Microsoft Windows, or like Mac OS it is a niche product with an unremarkable market share and is not a significant competitor to Microsoft Windows. But since the article was dealing with Apple, the issue of Linux market share was not on point.
Once you eliminate the big market niches, corporate desktops and home game machines, how does Apple's MSY look? (hint: look at video, graphics, and pre-press market "niches.")
Yes, and once you eliminate the "big market niches" mainframes aren't used in, the IBM's mainframe sales/year is a decent share of the remaining niches.
Just like Mhz and MIPS, straight forward comparisons of MSY don't reflect underlying subtleties and complexities
Absolutely true. But MSY tells you exactly what market share Apple has, which is perfectly suited to telling you if the market share is "remarkable". And the only use of remarkable in reference to Apple's market share that is defensible according to these numbers is "Apple's market share is remarkable in how small it is relative to the share of media attention Apple gets."
To put it another way -- imagine if somebody claimed a G4 Mac had "remarkably high megahertz", and a reponse pointed out it was running at a third the clock of an Intel chip. Shouting "megahertz myth" at the guy who pointed out that difference wouldn't be a response to his point that the original claim was silly. The useful response would be, say, "Yeah, the guy who called it remarkable was being an idiot. In fact, he shouldn't have brought up megahertz at all, because of subtleties X and Y, and complications Z, W, and V."
There was bound to be a dip, as people planning a purchase would defer that purchase until the model they wanted was upgraded to intel chips.
Except there wasn't such a dip.
Apple 10-Q statements say that for the first half of FY2006, it had 12% higher Macinosh unit sales than 1H FY2005. And 1H FY2005 sales were 34% higher than 1H FY2004. And 1H FY2004 outpaced 1H FY2003 by 9%. Apple is on track to have its first third straight year of Mac unit sales growth since 1995.
Now, the FY2004 growth was within Apples "normal" year-to-year up-and-down variance, and the 2005 sales growth fits the "five years and replace" spike one would predict by the Apple-claimed five-year service life of Mac units (noting FY1995 and FY2000 were both anomalous-peak sales years).
But FY2006? All the available evidence is that Apple got a major boost from some factor. The iPod halo effect is often proposed, of course, but there may be a better one.
The other explanation would be that the Intel transition boosted sales, presumably from a mixture of PPC fans buying the last-and-best-available PPC Macs, and early adopters buying the first-available Intel Macs. That the Mac market works this way is given credence when one notes the fact that FY1995 was simultaneously a architecture transition year and the highest year for Mac unit sales from the introduction of the Mac to present.
In short, Mac buyers do not seem to wait for the dust to settle from transitions; they instead run out and buy during major architecture shakeups.
Well, they could support Win9x officially, of course, like they could also maintain official builds for Solaria, BeOS, and OS/2. It's just seen as more trouble than it is worth to keep the crufty Win9x API code in the Windows branch, and more effort than it's worth to create split Win9x and Windows branches, as opposed to other things 3.0 developer effort could be used on.
However, if anybody is interested in taking over the work, they can maintain a Windows 9x branch under the same terms as the Solaris, BeOS, and OS/2 people maintain theirs, and have 3.x+ versions of Firefox running on Win9x.
Um? Just because you were taught a definition of "species" in school doesn't mean that's the actual definition.
There a serious difficulties with the "interbreeding makes viable, reproduction-capable offspring" one. One is that it isn't binary. There is an entire range over "no descendants", "sterile descendants", "high miscarriage rate but some nonsterile descendants", and a dozen other variations. If the result of a crossbreeding is 90% of the time spontaneous abortion, but 10% of the time a fertile animal? What about crosbreeds being technically viable and nonsterile, but so sickly they can't survive outside of lab conditions? There are, as pointed out elsewhere, cases where populations A and C can both interbreed viably with B, but not with each other; how does one classify them?
Further, it provides no guidance whatsoever in the case of organisms with non-sexual reproduction, because the test can't even be applied. So at best, the sexual reproduction definition of species cannot provide guidance for classification for over 90% of the biomass of Earth. If there was a perfectly clear and sensible definition of species for asexual reproducers, and applied to sexual reproducers it sometimes divided sexual reproducers into different species and other times groups non-crossable animals into a single species, shouldn't we go with it anyway because it gives us a general rule instead of a bunch of special cases that apply to only a tiny minority of organisms on Earth?
There is, as it happens, no actual consensus in the biosciences on the definitions of any of the cladistic terms, merely a general rough working agreement with ten thousand disputed cases. You can't violate the definition of species, because there isn't one.
No, I've seen the gp post's system described (I think). You pump the cold water up from the ocean deeps and run it through pipes in a collection area, and the humidity in the air (and any sea air in a warm area will be humid) condenses on the outside of the pipes, producing fresh water. All you need are pumps. What's better is that the system is not primarily interested in producing fresh water, but electricity -- good ol' ocean thermal energy conversion.
The problem is that there aren't huge numbers of sites where the geography is favorable for the system. Islands in the Pacific, mostly, because that's were most of the land that doesn't have continental shelves is.
Eh. Probably wouldn't change anything. For example, the Metropolitan Detroit area has relatively easy access to the fresh water in Lake Huron, Lake Michigan (because of the nature of the Huron-Mighican connection), and Lake Erie -- the third, fourth, and tenth largest freshwater lakes in the world. And yet, have a dry summer, and places wind up on water restriction -- because the infrastructure can't handle the increase in demand during a drought. Building infrastructure that delivers 95% of the time is "good enough" when the civil servants and politicians can order rationing and then blame the weather, instead of owning up for their own choice not to build better facilities.
How many OSes from that time would be safe to run on today's 'net?
Hard to say. Linux 2.0, now at version 2.0.40 (originally released 1996, last updated 2004), might be safe enough, assuming the other parts of the system have been patched as updates came out.
Intel's problem, I think, was that Gordon Moore gave up management in 1997. He accordingly wan't around to do the basic late-cycle sanity checking the P4 and Itanium lines needed before their 2000 and 2001 releases. If Moore had been running things, my bet is you'd have seen the P4 largely orphaned with a move to making faster P3s and starting development of the Core sooner, as Moore looked at the Athlon and at the P4 early samples in 1999 and shifted resources.
I make PDFs from Microsoft Word, or any other program with print functionality, on Windows XP all the time. All it takes is PDFCreator. It can also output PNG, JPEG, BMP, PCX, TIFF, PostScript, and Encapsulated PostScript files (only single-page printouts should be made into PNGs, JPEGs, BMPs, and PCXes, however).
Seriously, I was suprised years ago when free, legal products started showing up that can create PDFs (e.g., OpenOffice). If they're OK legally then Adobe is on mighty thin ice going after Microsoft.
Not in this case. Adobe is purportedly talking antitrust. Under antitrust laws, actions that are perfectly legal for normal people and companies are nontheless forbidden to monopolies. For example, Linux distros and Apple can bundle any media players they like with their OSes in Europe, but Microsoft was slapped down for doing the exact same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the great hordes of corporate Microsoft certified IT weenies
If MS drops the ball hard enough, for long enough, Apple will take these customers.
Even if Microsoft is still shipping XP Service Pack 2 in 2012, Apple will make only marginal corporate inroads if you have to buy a Mac to get OS X. Companies always like to have choice in hardware supplier -- whether mainframes running MVS (IBM, Amdahl, Hitachi), workstations running Unix, or personal computers running DOS/Windows. The winner if Microsoft drops the ball hard-enough-long-enough will be Linux.
Unless, of course, Jobs licenses OS X. But given what he did to the last group of Apple OS licensors, Dell, Gateway, and the rest would demand license terms that amount to a permanent cession of control. And I don't think Jobs could bring himself to do that, unless he decided to get out of the Mac business entirely.
The price of oil goes DOWN?
Don't think that will be happening any more
Yeah! Oil shot up in price in the 1970s due to conflict in the Middle East, and it never came back down then, either! 1985-2003 never actually happened!
For the analogy to work, your non-cowardly ex-isolationists would have to declare war on Japan, and then inexplicably divert the bulk of military force to conquering, say, Indonesia.
Let's see . . .
1) The United States, despite being attacked by Japan, pursued a "Europe First" anti-Germany warfighting strategy.
2) The first major U.S. land forces engagements in World War II were all fighting French soldiers in French territory in Africa.
3) On the Pacific front, the vast bulk of U.S. military force was first sent into combat in the islands of the south Pacific near Australia. Which included combat in the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia.
So now I'm stuck. Did you make an unintentionally ironic statement out of historical ignorance, or did you make a subtle and wry comment poking fun at the people who say we should have concentrated on Afghanistan?
Plan 9 from Outer Space, often regarded as the worst movie of all time.
Only by those who have been spared Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Yeah, McBride is probably safe behind the corporate veil, along with his attorneys. But if I were IBM, I'd try to go after them both.
Darl gave an interview where he said he didn't "understand" why IBM didn't just buy SCO to make the lawsuit go away. And the lawyer compensation plan for the attorneys includes a share of whatever SCO would get if SCO was bought out. This wasn't just a lawsuit to get a settlement for SCO, it was a suit to push IBM into personally enriching McBride-as-stockholder, plus later his attorneys.
If I were IBM, I'd file even a futile charge against the corporate veil to warn others that IBM will go after you personally if you try this sort of nonsense. And I'd go to the media and make the point that IBM usually doesn't try to pierce the veil, but did this time specifically because McBride was trying to push IBM into buying his stock by having his company pursue an utterly baseless case.
Of course, I'm the sort that holds grudges.
Certainly not the case here in the UK - if you want to use the Ordinance Survey's data then you have to pay them for it, you can't just rip it off and use it for your own maps. I'm surprised if this isn't the same in the US - someone has gone to a lot of effort to collect the data, why should you automatically get it for free?
In fact, a traditional feature of commerically-produced street maps in America is the addition of non-existent streets, so that copyright infingement can be proved when a ripoff inculdes the phony street.
However, unlike Britain, the U.S. has nothing like Crown Copyright covering works produced by the state. Unlike Ordinance Service maps, United States Geological Survey maps (like other state-produced works) are automatically public domain.
You cannot make a comparison like that . . . [y]ou cannot compare Apple unit sales with the sum of all the PC unit sales, it makes no sense
Fine. Then Max Fomitchev made no sense. "Market share" specifically is a comparison of the sales of one company in a market to the sum of the sales of all the market, and he's the one who brought it up, calling it "remarkable".
Why is it that Mac hardware unit sales get compared to Windows OS unit sales but not Linux OS unit sales and downloads?
Well, in this specific case? There was no comparison to Windows OS sales or maket share. The comparison was Macs to the whole PC market, and thus because of how Apple sells OSes, implicitly Mac OS to the whole OS market (subsuming Windows, Linux, and everybody else). The purpose of the comparison was to see if Apple had a "remarkable" market share. And the answer was no, they only had a couple of percent of the market.
Not all PCs run Windows; many run Linux or some other unix (variants).
Right, And either Linux represents a large fraction of the PC OS market and constitutes a significant competitor to Microsoft Windows, or like Mac OS it is a niche product with an unremarkable market share and is not a significant competitor to Microsoft Windows. But since the article was dealing with Apple, the issue of Linux market share was not on point.
Once you eliminate the big market niches, corporate desktops and home game machines, how does Apple's MSY look? (hint: look at video, graphics, and pre-press market "niches.")
Yes, and once you eliminate the "big market niches" mainframes aren't used in, the IBM's mainframe sales/year is a decent share of the remaining niches.
Just like Mhz and MIPS, straight forward comparisons of MSY don't reflect underlying subtleties and complexities
Absolutely true. But MSY tells you exactly what market share Apple has, which is perfectly suited to telling you if the market share is "remarkable". And the only use of remarkable in reference to Apple's market share that is defensible according to these numbers is "Apple's market share is remarkable in how small it is relative to the share of media attention Apple gets."
To put it another way -- imagine if somebody claimed a G4 Mac had "remarkably high megahertz", and a reponse pointed out it was running at a third the clock of an Intel chip. Shouting "megahertz myth" at the guy who pointed out that difference wouldn't be a response to his point that the original claim was silly. The useful response would be, say, "Yeah, the guy who called it remarkable was being an idiot. In fact, he shouldn't have brought up megahertz at all, because of subtleties X and Y, and complications Z, W, and V."
In calendar year 2005 (Q2-4 FY2005, Q1 FY2006), Apple unit sales were 4.7 million.
In calendar year 2005, total PC unit sales were 208.6 million.
Apple's selling plenty to survive as a profitable niche product, sure. But they are competition for Microsoft in the same sense mainframes are.
There was bound to be a dip, as people planning a purchase would defer that purchase until the model they wanted was upgraded to intel chips.
Except there wasn't such a dip.
Apple 10-Q statements say that for the first half of FY2006, it had 12% higher Macinosh unit sales than 1H FY2005. And 1H FY2005 sales were 34% higher than 1H FY2004. And 1H FY2004 outpaced 1H FY2003 by 9%. Apple is on track to have its first third straight year of Mac unit sales growth since 1995.
Now, the FY2004 growth was within Apples "normal" year-to-year up-and-down variance, and the 2005 sales growth fits the "five years and replace" spike one would predict by the Apple-claimed five-year service life of Mac units (noting FY1995 and FY2000 were both anomalous-peak sales years).
But FY2006? All the available evidence is that Apple got a major boost from some factor. The iPod halo effect is often proposed, of course, but there may be a better one.
The other explanation would be that the Intel transition boosted sales, presumably from a mixture of PPC fans buying the last-and-best-available PPC Macs, and early adopters buying the first-available Intel Macs. That the Mac market works this way is given credence when one notes the fact that FY1995 was simultaneously a architecture transition year and the highest year for Mac unit sales from the introduction of the Mac to present.
In short, Mac buyers do not seem to wait for the dust to settle from transitions; they instead run out and buy during major architecture shakeups.
Microsoft left the wireless market over two years ago. The news made slashdot..
No, Microsoft does not sell wireless routers and access points. They used to, but they exited the market two years ago. The story made Slashdot..
even though they have their own line of wireless devices
No, they don't. They used to, yes, but they dropped the business two years ago. See this Slashdot story..
Well, they could support Win9x officially, of course, like they could also maintain official builds for Solaria, BeOS, and OS/2. It's just seen as more trouble than it is worth to keep the crufty Win9x API code in the Windows branch, and more effort than it's worth to create split Win9x and Windows branches, as opposed to other things 3.0 developer effort could be used on.
However, if anybody is interested in taking over the work, they can maintain a Windows 9x branch under the same terms as the Solaris, BeOS, and OS/2 people maintain theirs, and have 3.x+ versions of Firefox running on Win9x.
Um? Just because you were taught a definition of "species" in school doesn't mean that's the actual definition.
There a serious difficulties with the "interbreeding makes viable, reproduction-capable offspring" one. One is that it isn't binary. There is an entire range over "no descendants", "sterile descendants", "high miscarriage rate but some nonsterile descendants", and a dozen other variations. If the result of a crossbreeding is 90% of the time spontaneous abortion, but 10% of the time a fertile animal? What about crosbreeds being technically viable and nonsterile, but so sickly they can't survive outside of lab conditions? There are, as pointed out elsewhere, cases where populations A and C can both interbreed viably with B, but not with each other; how does one classify them?
Further, it provides no guidance whatsoever in the case of organisms with non-sexual reproduction, because the test can't even be applied. So at best, the sexual reproduction definition of species cannot provide guidance for classification for over 90% of the biomass of Earth. If there was a perfectly clear and sensible definition of species for asexual reproducers, and applied to sexual reproducers it sometimes divided sexual reproducers into different species and other times groups non-crossable animals into a single species, shouldn't we go with it anyway because it gives us a general rule instead of a bunch of special cases that apply to only a tiny minority of organisms on Earth?
There is, as it happens, no actual consensus in the biosciences on the definitions of any of the cladistic terms, merely a general rough working agreement with ten thousand disputed cases. You can't violate the definition of species, because there isn't one.
No, I've seen the gp post's system described (I think). You pump the cold water up from the ocean deeps and run it through pipes in a collection area, and the humidity in the air (and any sea air in a warm area will be humid) condenses on the outside of the pipes, producing fresh water. All you need are pumps. What's better is that the system is not primarily interested in producing fresh water, but electricity -- good ol' ocean thermal energy conversion.
The problem is that there aren't huge numbers of sites where the geography is favorable for the system. Islands in the Pacific, mostly, because that's were most of the land that doesn't have continental shelves is.
Eh. Probably wouldn't change anything. For example, the Metropolitan Detroit area has relatively easy access to the fresh water in Lake Huron, Lake Michigan (because of the nature of the Huron-Mighican connection), and Lake Erie -- the third, fourth, and tenth largest freshwater lakes in the world. And yet, have a dry summer, and places wind up on water restriction -- because the infrastructure can't handle the increase in demand during a drought. Building infrastructure that delivers 95% of the time is "good enough" when the civil servants and politicians can order rationing and then blame the weather, instead of owning up for their own choice not to build better facilities.
These is the company that buys "contextual ads" on Google that read:
Misery
Looking for Misery?
Find exactly what you want today.
www.eBay.com
Agony
Browse a huge selection now
Find exactly what you want today
www.eBay.com
Loss
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com
I'm sure a system they run will show the same understanding of the point of having contextual ads.
How many OSes from that time would be safe to run on today's 'net?
Hard to say. Linux 2.0, now at version 2.0.40 (originally released 1996, last updated 2004), might be safe enough, assuming the other parts of the system have been patched as updates came out.
Intel's problem, I think, was that Gordon Moore gave up management in 1997. He accordingly wan't around to do the basic late-cycle sanity checking the P4 and Itanium lines needed before their 2000 and 2001 releases. If Moore had been running things, my bet is you'd have seen the P4 largely orphaned with a move to making faster P3s and starting development of the Core sooner, as Moore looked at the Athlon and at the P4 early samples in 1999 and shifted resources.
I make PDFs from Microsoft Word, or any other program with print functionality, on Windows XP all the time. All it takes is PDFCreator. It can also output PNG, JPEG, BMP, PCX, TIFF, PostScript, and Encapsulated PostScript files (only single-page printouts should be made into PNGs, JPEGs, BMPs, and PCXes, however).
This isn't just the third time the story's run this year. It's also the second time Zonk ran the story in the Science section this year.
Seriously, I was suprised years ago when free, legal products started showing up that can create PDFs (e.g., OpenOffice). If they're OK legally then Adobe is on mighty thin ice going after Microsoft.
Not in this case. Adobe is purportedly talking antitrust. Under antitrust laws, actions that are perfectly legal for normal people and companies are nontheless forbidden to monopolies. For example, Linux distros and Apple can bundle any media players they like with their OSes in Europe, but Microsoft was slapped down for doing the exact same thing.
No, print-to-PDF systems like PDFCreator create quite normal PDFs with searchable, selectable, copy-and-paste-to-Notepad-able text.
Microsoft, running eBay, PayPal, and Skype.