Even if this one were approved, Apple already has Logic Pro, Soundtrack Pro, and Garage Band , for this market.
Hello, I am a sound designer and an occasional beta-tester for Digidesign.
Digidesign has a very love-hate relationship with the Mac platform, I have observed. They started with it and used Apple's great MIDI and audio support to make their product awesome (and vice versus). They do also, however, have a PC version (that I've never seen used in the wild), are owned by Avid (which has gone seriously pro-PC in the last 5 years), and Digi is constantly chasing the Mac's hardware platform (the PCI Express transition has been painful for a lot of people, the Intel transition less so.)
Digi would have a ton of trouble dragging their userbase to PCs. We Pro Tools users don't use them, we hate them culturally, all of our jigs and tools are Mac-centric, and frankly we'd have nothing to gain by the move (since we all own $3000 workstations anyways, cost isn't an issue), thus we would oppose it fiercely, from a marketing point of view.
That said, Apple's line of audio software is nowhere near where is needs to be in terms of workflow and interoperability to work for music and post-production sound. We have a joke that you need to have a Ph.D. in order to understand Logic (it's the Linux of DAWs, powerful but unfriendly), and Soundtrack Pro doesn't do 5.1 and doesn't use dedicated hardware for DSP or IO. Neither have good Avid interoperation, which is still the industry standard, and the interoperability standard (OMF and AAF) is controlled by Digidesign and Microsoft, and tends to be a moving target.
IMHO, If Pro Tools users lost the Mac, it wouldn't cause a migration to the PC in professional recording, it would cause a huge fragmentation of platforms in professional recording. Pro Music people would probably go to Logic or Nuendo on Mac, post would probably switch to Nuendo, or someone enterprising developer will write a Post-Centric DAW (they've existed in the past, but it's a small market, so the economics have to be just so). Also, Pro Tools has a huge installed base in amateur music and home recording, and these people would stay on Mac, either switching to GarageBand, or switching to OSS like Ardour or Jokosher. This would have the unwelcome (to MS) side effect of spurring their development. All of this fragmentation would also cause the development of stronger interoperability standards, which MS wouldn't want, either.
I've observed that a lot of complaints about modern PHP derive from the fact that it's a dynamic interpreted language, but that in many ways it behaves like a compiled, angry, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot language, like C.
PHP will segfault, just like C, if you recurse too far on the stack, but almost every other scripting language has a mechanism for catching a stack overflow as an exception and then letting the programmer handle it. PHP in this case just crashes; even C allows you to register a function to act if your program has a segmentation violation.
The long-complained-about static binding of class methods to their superclass, and not to child classes is in a similar vein. PHP does what C++ does: static methods execute in the scope of the class they're declared in, and not the class the method is called on. This is a requirement if your language is strict and compiled, like C++, but it's completely superfluous if you're running a dynamic language like PHP. It also makes a lot of tricks used by Ruby and Python developers to make slick frameworks basically impossible.
Insightful. Microsoft holds all manner of weird patents, like "a user-interface entity that changes colors upon modification to indicate modified state" or somesuch. Thus if Linux incoprorates said, it violates patent, res ipso loquitor.
The reason that Microsoft doesn't just start litigating is that it'll start a nuclear war among all the major players in the industry, since they all hold patents on stuff that is obvious, has prior art, and everyone already uses. The long game for MS is to separate Linux from her big corporate sponsors, read IBM, so that suing linux become like nuking Eniweitok, as opposed to Pyongyang.
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Last I heard, there was no small country or city that was switching to Apple.
Countries and City's shouldn't switch to Apple, any more than they should switch to Windows or even Linux. Countries and Cities and really any corporation should switch to no preference, as this is most likely to keep their data formats (and thus options) open going forward.
If your organization uses all Windows, you're not locked in as long as your workflows and information systems can tolerate other systems and work with them. Countries and Cities should be free to use all Windows or Linux, as long as they are not in the position of requiring information providers or consumers to use a particular platform.
Apple's doing well now not necessarily because more people use them, thus platform lockin+network effect, but because there's less of a magic wall of incompatibility between Apple users and other OS users than there was in, say, 1994.
Not to burst your bubble so fast, but Photoshop has a dependency on QuickDraw, which is not in NextStep or GNUStep. iTunes has dependencies on QuickTime, CoreAudio, and the FairPlay tech, which are not in GNUStep. Office is not built on Cocoa/NextStep at all, it's built on Carbon, which has no Open Source reverse-engineering project.
Have you considered buying a 1-year old PCI Express G5? Their CPU is a pinch slow, but if you want a "mid-range Mac tower" it's exactly what you're looking for. I've purchased several 1-2 year old used mac desktops before and have been very happy overall.
If you're willing to wait a few more months, the first run of Intel Mac's will hit 1 year old, and their ebay prices will start nosediving, too. Those have upgradeable CPU sockets and everything, you just have to be a PCI Express fan.
GSM is very secure, but is a communications protocol, not a DRM protocol. GSM allows Andrew and Betty to talk, without Charlie hearing. As has been stated often before, in DRM, Betty and Charlie are the same person.
Mac doesn't do mid-range headless, tho if you wait another few months, one-year-old Intel Mac Pros will start coming on the market:D . Half of the macs I've ever owned have been used, were 1-2 years old when I got them (off of ebay in both cases), and lasted 2-3 years after I bought them, without having to replace any parts, so that might be an option.
Web browsers are a commodity that have an absolute zero cost, so people find the highest quality very quickly. That's why Firefox is the leading browser. Oh wait...
If iTunes is easy to use with an iPod and cheap enough, people WON'T go visiting 12 eMusic sites to save $0.11 on a song, particularly if they have to download it, drag it into iTunes, try to get the artwork, etc etc.
Selling the music is fine, but he wants to sell PLAYERS. The iTunes store is an inducement to buy an iPod, DRM makes the iTunes store harder to work. Sure if there was no DRM you could buy your music anywhere, but iTunes makes it *easy* to buy music. He figures people wouldn't bother shopping around 10 e-music sites if iTunes just has it and talks to their iPod.
I don't think we disagree. OEM bundling makes Windows affordable from the buyer's perspective. I don't think it has anything to do with Microsoft's bottom line. The price of a Vista DVD is strictly a matter of what people are willing to pay for a Brand New Revolutionary Windows Operating System.
OEM bundling is simply an effective exploitation of network effects to create market share: people walk into a store to buy a computer, they come out with an install of Windows. Before Windows bundling was all the rage, you'd buy the two separately, causing people to consider the purchase of both carefully. Bundling makes the purchase decision easier, even if that decision is the wrong one for certain other reasons.
The point is that you buy the box, period. The OS is a feature of the box, and when Windows is sold separately, it's a much harder sell, cuz that's not how people evaluate.
They really should have designed the iPod such that if, for whatever reason, the USB cable is unplugged while writing to disk, the operation is reverted and the iPod keeps working
An iPod is a hard drive, as far as an operating system is concerned. File copying is an operation of the operating system. It is up to the operating system to detect a fault and recover.
An iPod or Ipod-like device could be made in such a way that it's a special peripheral, not a mass storage device, and thus you'd need a special client to talk to it, and it could handle such things more gracefully, but that would make the iPod much more complicated and less useful.
But you can't claim or even imply this is the secret of Windows' success. I remember when Windows 3.1 came out. Home users willingly bought and installed it on their existing 286/386 machines in droves, which were running DOS up to that point. It was a good product introduced at the right time for the right audience. [...] The OEM bundling resulted as a by-product.
When Windows 3.1 came out, computers were much more expensive relatively, so getting a better OS with a new machine was a very pricey proposition. When a copy of a full-featured version of the OS costs as much as a low-end computer, however, the decision is different, and the computer is much more of a commodity that simply comes out of the box with everything it needs to be useful; the alternate idea, that you buy a computer and buy an OS to run on it, is simply not economical. OEM bundling is what makes Windows affordable.
Microsoft has made some good plays and makes some good products -- I still think Excel is the best application ever written -- but OEM bundling is what sustains the market share. Computer purchasers are never presented with a genuine, unencumbered decision about which OS to run, with good information and prices which reflected the actual underlying value of products. They don't want to make the decision, anyways, they just want a box that works. Windows 3.1 is a good upgrade from MS-DOS, but computers at the time were expensive, rare (relative to today), and doing things like buying a new OS in a box and installing it wasn't such a tough choice, since people were willing to spend a lot of time and TLC on their boxes (they'd spent so much money on them, after all).
It's like radios -- you, the end-user, used to have to buy the tubes from RCA, and there were ads saying how great the tubes were, and you spent a lot of money on them because you'd spent so much money on your radio set, and replacing a bad triode was cheaper than buying a new radio. But now you just buy the thing as a block, and the radio is so cheap you don't care what transistors are in it, because the radio is taken for granted to always work and has become the foundation of other tech, like cellphones and WiFi.
Some companies, like Apple, and Google, but others too, are trying to build enabling technologies on top of computers like cellphones build on top of radio. They want you to take the computer for granted. Microsoft's Windows platform people are in the position of arguing "Look at all the great things you can do with Microsoft's tubes! Remember, it's the TUBES that make it work."
So my point is that the OEM bundling... I forget... whatever, it's bad.
This is just another way of saying you want to expand market share for the sake of expanding it.
I guess you're right, but if I like Linux, having more Linux users in the world makes Linux easier to use -- without having to change a line of code. MS OS's have lagged behind Linux's security and server capabilities, and behind OS X in home user features and usability, but that's from the perspective of individual users. On Window's side is ubiquity, and the fact that the guys from Geek Squad know how to fix all your little hard drive issues, and that novel you are writing will open at work, and on and on. If I ran Linux, all of this would be true for me, too, if the 90% were Linux.
Surely you knew that 90% of the world uses Windows. You can't claim a figure like that is only the result of monopolistic practices and be serious
You're right, under 60% or so they're merely "predatory practices!":D
It fits people's needs by being something that is brain-dead useable across an enormous variety of hardware
It fits people's needs by being on their computer when they bought it; people don't choose OS's, they're considered features of the box you pay for. Thus, Windows is useable for people, but the economic signal that drives Windows quality is the demands of the OEM bundlers, not the users. MS is trying to change this slowly, and maybe they'll just have to start selling their own computers at some point.
But what's the point in trying to expand market share, just for its own sake?
It's an important part of a bunch of positive feedback loop, not least of which is: more users -> more developers -> more software titles -> more users.
I got some food into me and up went my blood sugar and I was being too harsh. The person who invented the thing probably knows ablot about computers.
Something very important about computers is that people often buy them for bullet-point features. "ReadyBoost" makes a great bullet-point, while "Decreased OS memory footprint," no matter how you phrase it, doesn't. This is very vexing.
ReadyBoost is the computer equivalent of a chrome dashboard. It looks great, is a super feature for the gee-whiz effect alone, but certain exceptional conditions (involving deceleration and your face) might make it sub-optimal.
The first would work horribly, the second... horribly, but might wear your thumbdrive down slightly slower.
Either way, it will shuttup any "insufficient memory" alerts Vista may throw up, thus it's a feature: "Look how easy it is for me to add extra memory to my computer! How cool is that!" The fact that Vista consumes a gig or so of RAM just doing it's thing is simply above a casual user, thus such band-aids are effective.
No to look too far down my nose at anyone, but this feature is for shit, and the guy who came up with it doesn't know how computers work.
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Hello, I am a sound designer and an occasional beta-tester for Digidesign.
Digidesign has a very love-hate relationship with the Mac platform, I have observed. They started with it and used Apple's great MIDI and audio support to make their product awesome (and vice versus). They do also, however, have a PC version (that I've never seen used in the wild), are owned by Avid (which has gone seriously pro-PC in the last 5 years), and Digi is constantly chasing the Mac's hardware platform (the PCI Express transition has been painful for a lot of people, the Intel transition less so.)
Digi would have a ton of trouble dragging their userbase to PCs. We Pro Tools users don't use them, we hate them culturally, all of our jigs and tools are Mac-centric, and frankly we'd have nothing to gain by the move (since we all own $3000 workstations anyways, cost isn't an issue), thus we would oppose it fiercely, from a marketing point of view.
That said, Apple's line of audio software is nowhere near where is needs to be in terms of workflow and interoperability to work for music and post-production sound. We have a joke that you need to have a Ph.D. in order to understand Logic (it's the Linux of DAWs, powerful but unfriendly), and Soundtrack Pro doesn't do 5.1 and doesn't use dedicated hardware for DSP or IO. Neither have good Avid interoperation, which is still the industry standard, and the interoperability standard (OMF and AAF) is controlled by Digidesign and Microsoft, and tends to be a moving target.
IMHO, If Pro Tools users lost the Mac, it wouldn't cause a migration to the PC in professional recording, it would cause a huge fragmentation of platforms in professional recording. Pro Music people would probably go to Logic or Nuendo on Mac, post would probably switch to Nuendo, or someone enterprising developer will write a Post-Centric DAW (they've existed in the past, but it's a small market, so the economics have to be just so). Also, Pro Tools has a huge installed base in amateur music and home recording, and these people would stay on Mac, either switching to GarageBand, or switching to OSS like Ardour or Jokosher. This would have the unwelcome (to MS) side effect of spurring their development. All of this fragmentation would also cause the development of stronger interoperability standards, which MS wouldn't want, either.
X-Plane also has a Linux version. Any flight sim that lets you fly on a terrain- and physics- accurate model of Mars is king in my book ;).
I've observed that a lot of complaints about modern PHP derive from the fact that it's a dynamic interpreted language, but that in many ways it behaves like a compiled, angry, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot language, like C.
PHP will segfault, just like C, if you recurse too far on the stack, but almost every other scripting language has a mechanism for catching a stack overflow as an exception and then letting the programmer handle it. PHP in this case just crashes; even C allows you to register a function to act if your program has a segmentation violation.
The long-complained-about static binding of class methods to their superclass, and not to child classes is in a similar vein. PHP does what C++ does: static methods execute in the scope of the class they're declared in, and not the class the method is called on. This is a requirement if your language is strict and compiled, like C++, but it's completely superfluous if you're running a dynamic language like PHP. It also makes a lot of tricks used by Ruby and Python developers to make slick frameworks basically impossible.
Insightful. Microsoft holds all manner of weird patents, like "a user-interface entity that changes colors upon modification to indicate modified state" or somesuch. Thus if Linux incoprorates said, it violates patent, res ipso loquitor.
The reason that Microsoft doesn't just start litigating is that it'll start a nuclear war among all the major players in the industry, since they all hold patents on stuff that is obvious, has prior art, and everyone already uses. The long game for MS is to separate Linux from her big corporate sponsors, read IBM, so that suing linux become like nuking Eniweitok, as opposed to Pyongyang.
Now if they only had NeverCrash, QuickBoot, HackSafe, SkinnyRAM, and DontNeedAFuckingDirectX9VideoCardToRun ;)
Well, gee. I hope that that little map of the Atlantic Ocean with my plane superimposed on it only has read privileges on /dev/autopilot :).
I think you read that John Gruber post a few too many times ;)
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Countries and City's shouldn't switch to Apple, any more than they should switch to Windows or even Linux. Countries and Cities and really any corporation should switch to no preference, as this is most likely to keep their data formats (and thus options) open going forward.
If your organization uses all Windows, you're not locked in as long as your workflows and information systems can tolerate other systems and work with them. Countries and Cities should be free to use all Windows or Linux, as long as they are not in the position of requiring information providers or consumers to use a particular platform.
Apple's doing well now not necessarily because more people use them, thus platform lockin+network effect, but because there's less of a magic wall of incompatibility between Apple users and other OS users than there was in, say, 1994.
Not to burst your bubble so fast, but Photoshop has a dependency on QuickDraw, which is not in NextStep or GNUStep. iTunes has dependencies on QuickTime, CoreAudio, and the FairPlay tech, which are not in GNUStep. Office is not built on Cocoa/NextStep at all, it's built on Carbon, which has no Open Source reverse-engineering project.
Have you considered buying a 1-year old PCI Express G5? Their CPU is a pinch slow, but if you want a "mid-range Mac tower" it's exactly what you're looking for. I've purchased several 1-2 year old used mac desktops before and have been very happy overall.
If you're willing to wait a few more months, the first run of Intel Mac's will hit 1 year old, and their ebay prices will start nosediving, too. Those have upgradeable CPU sockets and everything, you just have to be a PCI Express fan.
GSM is very secure, but is a communications protocol, not a DRM protocol. GSM allows Andrew and Betty to talk, without Charlie hearing. As has been stated often before, in DRM, Betty and Charlie are the same person.
Mac doesn't do mid-range headless, tho if you wait another few months, one-year-old Intel Mac Pros will start coming on the market :D . Half of the macs I've ever owned have been used, were 1-2 years old when I got them (off of ebay in both cases), and lasted 2-3 years after I bought them, without having to replace any parts, so that might be an option.
Web browsers are a commodity that have an absolute zero cost, so people find the highest quality very quickly. That's why Firefox is the leading browser. Oh wait...
If iTunes is easy to use with an iPod and cheap enough, people WON'T go visiting 12 eMusic sites to save $0.11 on a song, particularly if they have to download it, drag it into iTunes, try to get the artwork, etc etc.
Selling the music is fine, but he wants to sell PLAYERS. The iTunes store is an inducement to buy an iPod, DRM makes the iTunes store harder to work. Sure if there was no DRM you could buy your music anywhere, but iTunes makes it *easy* to buy music. He figures people wouldn't bother shopping around 10 e-music sites if iTunes just has it and talks to their iPod.
Open Source Medicine?
How would you write the GPL of pharmacopeia?
Every time you say "RTFM n00b," God kills a prospective Linux switcher. Cheers.
I don't think we disagree. OEM bundling makes Windows affordable from the buyer's perspective. I don't think it has anything to do with Microsoft's bottom line. The price of a Vista DVD is strictly a matter of what people are willing to pay for a Brand New Revolutionary Windows Operating System.
OEM bundling is simply an effective exploitation of network effects to create market share: people walk into a store to buy a computer, they come out with an install of Windows. Before Windows bundling was all the rage, you'd buy the two separately, causing people to consider the purchase of both carefully. Bundling makes the purchase decision easier, even if that decision is the wrong one for certain other reasons.
The point is that you buy the box, period. The OS is a feature of the box, and when Windows is sold separately, it's a much harder sell, cuz that's not how people evaluate.
An iPod is a hard drive, as far as an operating system is concerned. File copying is an operation of the operating system. It is up to the operating system to detect a fault and recover.
An iPod or Ipod-like device could be made in such a way that it's a special peripheral, not a mass storage device, and thus you'd need a special client to talk to it, and it could handle such things more gracefully, but that would make the iPod much more complicated and less useful.
When Windows 3.1 came out, computers were much more expensive relatively, so getting a better OS with a new machine was a very pricey proposition. When a copy of a full-featured version of the OS costs as much as a low-end computer, however, the decision is different, and the computer is much more of a commodity that simply comes out of the box with everything it needs to be useful; the alternate idea, that you buy a computer and buy an OS to run on it, is simply not economical. OEM bundling is what makes Windows affordable.
Microsoft has made some good plays and makes some good products -- I still think Excel is the best application ever written -- but OEM bundling is what sustains the market share. Computer purchasers are never presented with a genuine, unencumbered decision about which OS to run, with good information and prices which reflected the actual underlying value of products. They don't want to make the decision, anyways, they just want a box that works. Windows 3.1 is a good upgrade from MS-DOS, but computers at the time were expensive, rare (relative to today), and doing things like buying a new OS in a box and installing it wasn't such a tough choice, since people were willing to spend a lot of time and TLC on their boxes (they'd spent so much money on them, after all).
It's like radios -- you, the end-user, used to have to buy the tubes from RCA, and there were ads saying how great the tubes were, and you spent a lot of money on them because you'd spent so much money on your radio set, and replacing a bad triode was cheaper than buying a new radio. But now you just buy the thing as a block, and the radio is so cheap you don't care what transistors are in it, because the radio is taken for granted to always work and has become the foundation of other tech, like cellphones and WiFi.
Some companies, like Apple, and Google, but others too, are trying to build enabling technologies on top of computers like cellphones build on top of radio. They want you to take the computer for granted. Microsoft's Windows platform people are in the position of arguing "Look at all the great things you can do with Microsoft's tubes! Remember, it's the TUBES that make it work."
So my point is that the OEM bundling ... I forget... whatever, it's bad.
I guess you're right, but if I like Linux, having more Linux users in the world makes Linux easier to use -- without having to change a line of code. MS OS's have lagged behind Linux's security and server capabilities, and behind OS X in home user features and usability, but that's from the perspective of individual users. On Window's side is ubiquity, and the fact that the guys from Geek Squad know how to fix all your little hard drive issues, and that novel you are writing will open at work, and on and on. If I ran Linux, all of this would be true for me, too, if the 90% were Linux.
I'd settle for 30% desktop penetration, frankly.
You're right, under 60% or so they're merely "predatory practices!" :D
It fits people's needs by being on their computer when they bought it; people don't choose OS's, they're considered features of the box you pay for. Thus, Windows is useable for people, but the economic signal that drives Windows quality is the demands of the OEM bundlers, not the users. MS is trying to change this slowly, and maybe they'll just have to start selling their own computers at some point.
It's an important part of a bunch of positive feedback loop, not least of which is: more users -> more developers -> more software titles -> more users.
Gates to Hackers: "Bring it ON!"
Your moment of zen:
so much dependsupon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
-- William Carlos Williams
I got some food into me and up went my blood sugar and I was being too harsh. The person who invented the thing probably knows ablot about computers.
Something very important about computers is that people often buy them for bullet-point features. "ReadyBoost" makes a great bullet-point, while "Decreased OS memory footprint," no matter how you phrase it, doesn't. This is very vexing.
ReadyBoost is the computer equivalent of a chrome dashboard. It looks great, is a super feature for the gee-whiz effect alone, but certain exceptional conditions (involving deceleration and your face) might make it sub-optimal.
Does it use the thumbdrive as core or swap?
The first would work horribly, the second ... horribly, but might wear your thumbdrive down slightly slower.
Either way, it will shuttup any "insufficient memory" alerts Vista may throw up, thus it's a feature: "Look how easy it is for me to add extra memory to my computer! How cool is that!" The fact that Vista consumes a gig or so of RAM just doing it's thing is simply above a casual user, thus such band-aids are effective.
No to look too far down my nose at anyone, but this feature is for shit, and the guy who came up with it doesn't know how computers work.