and interfaces directly with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004
Somebody buy these guys a copy of X-Plane!. If not for the better environments and the fully customizable aircraft, then at least for the fact that the entire simulation can be controlled remotely over UDP.
As well, in OS X's case, removing these applications and replacing them with another is trivial. Don't like iTunes? Drag it to the trash, empty the trash, and you no longer have iTunes. All this, and you don't suddenly lose functionality- iTunes does not contain the Core Audio API, and you can safetly delete any i* application without another application losing a dependency.
As an experiment, put Address Book in the trash, and see if iCal or Mail can still access your contacts. It can.
That doesn't explain Apple's strategy for.Mac. Which is obviously subscription based.
Yes, I was thinking about that, and my joke aside, you do only pay for that once a year. If I were paying monthly, I'd be much more inclined to cancel it at will: every month I'd see the charge, and I'd ask myself how often I used it that month, and did I really need it that much, and I would hem and haw and eventually cancel it out of guilt of spending.
But if it's once a year, every time I get the bill for.Mac, my first thought is "What would I do without my.Mac!" It's a weird micro-economic thing- dollar amounts don't receive the weighting they might deserve compared to transaction count. Most.mac users probably rationalize instantly "It's only $7.50 a month!" Whereas if they were paying $7.50 a month, transacting each month, they'd think different (pun intended).
Maybe M$ should charge yearly. (BillG please ignore this)
This is just a conjecture on my part, but it seems that one of Jobs' insights, or pecadilloes, or whatevers about selling is that he thinks people hate supscriptions. He could have made iTMS a subscription service, but didn't, and he prospered. He shows little interest in Sirius because you only really rent Sirius or XM, and perhaps he takes a given that this makes people think twice before buying -- subscriptions are the anathema of gee-whiz, they reek of responsibility and if you are being sold a subscription, you're going to put a lot more thought into it before you do it. It also perhaps worth remarking, if only in passing, that the most successful internet/IT ventures of the last decade have been either free to the consumer (Yahoo, Google) or paid on instance of use (eBay, Amazon).
Contrast this with everyone's M$ conspiracy theory, where.NET is a big trap to suck everyone into paying monthly to use Word. I don't think this would work; imagine all those home users seeing "MICROSOFT.COM THANKS YOU-0231" on their Amex statement every month, and then wondering if there was another way. Even if monthly subscriptions are cheaper than buying a new package every 5 years, the psychological impact of paying monthly for something that only seems to get more features every year or two would insurmountable (and, after all, how many features could they possibly add to Word to justify the constant payment, the days the net is slow, etc.)
So, I guess I agree with Jobs on this, and I have doubts about subscriptions for pure information services.
Although, I do have.mac.... Hmm. I'm a hippocrite.
talked to an Apple "Genius" at an Apple Store about this wake-from-sleep problem, and he said I shouldn't let the PowerBook go to sleep. Instead, I should shut down the computer completely before unplugging it, then power it back up when I got home. Ah, what genius!
Technically, I don't think the ADC interface supports "hot-plugging," or any sort of connecting/disconnecting while a computer is not shut down. It does work in some cases, but that does not mean it is supported.
I am no expert, by Yahoo! finance is always handy for this sort of thing:
Total revenue is up about 28%, and gross margin has moved about the same amount, over the past three years. (Working from their last end-of-year, June '04)
R&D is up about 80%
SA&G (this includes marketing) is up about 91%
These added operating expenses seriously cut into operating income bewteen '03 and '04, cutting about 24% over the three year period
Insiders have sold (net) 31,000,000 shares over the past 6 months. (this is about 3% of M$'s shares outstanding.) BillG has, in this week alone, announced a planned sale of $100,000,000 in MS shares.
M$ now has around $16 billion in cash (they've spent about half of this since Jne '04 according to the cash flow, but I haven't been playing close attention, so damned if I know what they bought.)
I'm not sure what any of this means, but it's clear they're taking a big risk on marketing, and Bill would rather have his paper wealth somewhere else.
As everyone else here has stated, you can compile C and C++ on Mac OS X using gcc and the bundled IDE (XCode is free as in beer, but > $100 value, IMO).
For rapid application development, the Apple cognate for VBasic would be Objective-C + Cocoa Bindings. This week I wrote a special-purpose table/row-based music-library type program in about three hours, with about 20 lines of code and everything else wired together graphically in Interface Builder.
I am not trained as a programmer, and took no computer classes in high school or college (my degree is in film production). If I could learn it by osmosis over lunch breaks in a few months, I'm sure anyone with experience could make huge use of the facilities available.
I didn't see Polish instantly, so you do have to click "Edit" in the window to add it to the search list, but once it's at the top, you've logged out and logged back in, the Finder will be very happily Polski.
BTW, your English skills
About those English skills... if you did have an app that wasn't localized, and the developers happened to follow the rules (which they tend to, in tha Apple world), you could do the localization yourself. In order to localize an OS X app you don't need any $$$ tools, or even the sources, or even need to know any coding. Just open up the app's package and make a copy of the English.lproj, rename it "pl.lproj," and edit the "localizable.strings" text file.
Which is to say, not as crazy as it seems on the surface. If people really like the MS application, and like being able to access it anywhere, they're liable to pay.
I don't believe that a 1.26 GHz Pentium III is on par with a 1.25 GHz G4 processor
I don't think many people do, but this was the fastest BTO processor cappucino PC would include. The price is still twice as high, so I figured I wouldn't twist the knife. I was also trying to stifle my fanboyism
(In my personal experience, a Pro Tools rig running a Pentium III at equvalent MHz can't hold a candle to a Mac, particularly with lots of plugin instances. But this is reliant on alot of factors, not just CPU.)
I looked this up and it is a pretty awesome box for an embedded app. For someone who just wants a computer, I think it's probably not worth the hassle.
I get a total of $808 configured thus:
Pentium mobile at 650Mhz (the fastest they'll install for you)
PC133 256MB RAM
40GB 4200 RPM drive
Slot-loading combo drive
DOS-formatted drive (add $159 for XP Pro)
Integrated graphics, (no VRAM cited, so I assume this is shared.)
it does have PS/2 and serial ports, but only USB1.1. It includes a firewire.
I don't think this is the right machine for the application, and even though it is a much lesser machine than the Mini, it still is more expensive.
Cool box, just waiting for hacking, but not for the punters.
there will inevitebly be security flaws that could be exploited if a bad widget gets onto your computer somehow
The potential exists, but in order for the widget to do damage it would have to be downloaded and installed by the user, like any other trojan horse. If the widget wants to do anything outside of your home directory, the user will get a dialogue asking for an admin password.
This will require a certain level of responsibility from users, but no more so than any compiled program.
Then again, making it all javascript-shell script friendly, on top of making it look pretty is dangerous; it makes trojans easier to write and more tempting to the victims (nobody would ever download a.sh file that claimed to output stock quotes or search Amazon.com, but they would certainly download a widget that advertised such features).
for i in `mdfind Tiger` do cp $i/Volumes/Backup/$i done
"mdfind" is "find", except meta-data instead of file name. It will find any file containing the word "Tiger" and copy it off to a backup drive. You can replace "Tiger" with
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody buy these guys a copy of X-Plane!. If not for the better environments and the fully customizable aircraft, then at least for the fact that the entire simulation can be controlled remotely over UDP.
The DNF-100 Multiband Digital Noise Supressor! Will the Sonic Solutions NoNoise HTDM plug-in ever get over this snub!?
Patents still expire? I thought Congress had taken care of that by now :^(
OS X and Linux both typically come with tons.
As well, in OS X's case, removing these applications and replacing them with another is trivial. Don't like iTunes? Drag it to the trash, empty the trash, and you no longer have iTunes. All this, and you don't suddenly lose functionality- iTunes does not contain the Core Audio API, and you can safetly delete any i* application without another application losing a dependency.
As an experiment, put Address Book in the trash, and see if iCal or Mail can still access your contacts. It can.
That doesn't explain Apple's strategy for .Mac. Which is obviously subscription based.
Yes, I was thinking about that, and my joke aside, you do only pay for that once a year. If I were paying monthly, I'd be much more inclined to cancel it at will: every month I'd see the charge, and I'd ask myself how often I used it that month, and did I really need it that much, and I would hem and haw and eventually cancel it out of guilt of spending.
But if it's once a year, every time I get the bill for .Mac, my first thought is "What would I do without my .Mac!" It's a weird micro-economic thing- dollar amounts don't receive the weighting they might deserve compared to transaction count. Most .mac users probably rationalize instantly "It's only $7.50 a month!" Whereas if they were paying $7.50 a month, transacting each month, they'd think different (pun intended).
Maybe M$ should charge yearly. (BillG please ignore this)
This is just a conjecture on my part, but it seems that one of Jobs' insights, or pecadilloes, or whatevers about selling is that he thinks people hate supscriptions. He could have made iTMS a subscription service, but didn't, and he prospered. He shows little interest in Sirius because you only really rent Sirius or XM, and perhaps he takes a given that this makes people think twice before buying -- subscriptions are the anathema of gee-whiz, they reek of responsibility and if you are being sold a subscription, you're going to put a lot more thought into it before you do it. It also perhaps worth remarking, if only in passing, that the most successful internet/IT ventures of the last decade have been either free to the consumer (Yahoo, Google) or paid on instance of use (eBay, Amazon).
Contrast this with everyone's M$ conspiracy theory, where .NET is a big trap to suck everyone into paying monthly to use Word. I don't think this would work; imagine all those home users seeing "MICROSOFT.COM THANKS YOU-0231" on their Amex statement every month, and then wondering if there was another way. Even if monthly subscriptions are cheaper than buying a new package every 5 years, the psychological impact of paying monthly for something that only seems to get more features every year or two would insurmountable (and, after all, how many features could they possibly add to Word to justify the constant payment, the days the net is slow, etc.)
So, I guess I agree with Jobs on this, and I have doubts about subscriptions for pure information services.
Although, I do have .mac.... Hmm. I'm a hippocrite.
I, for one, have replaced the default folder and home icons.
BTW, my icons seem not to have been affected by the update.
Technically, I don't think the ADC interface supports "hot-plugging," or any sort of connecting/disconnecting while a computer is not shut down. It does work in some cases, but that does not mean it is supported.
FTA- The XBox 2 is expected to be PowerPC-based, and the development systems for it are Apple G5 computers running a PowerPC version of Windows NT
Reading this, I suddenly had this image in my head of Spock, walking around under remote control without his brain.
FTA: "We now need something that's not proprietary. Banks don't like proprietary things,"
Maybe Microsoft should write a message queuing library, in order to guarantee "interoperability"
That's alot of executive producers, even by today's standards.
I also wonder what the IP status of these Enterprise episodes would be. Perhaps they should be GPL'd. (ha ha only serious)
I am no expert, by Yahoo! finance is always handy for this sort of thing:
Total revenue is up about 28%, and gross margin has moved about the same amount, over the past three years. (Working from their last end-of-year, June '04)
R&D is up about 80%
SA&G (this includes marketing) is up about 91%
These added operating expenses seriously cut into operating income bewteen '03 and '04, cutting about 24% over the three year period
Insiders have sold (net) 31,000,000 shares over the past 6 months. (this is about 3% of M$'s shares outstanding.) BillG has, in this week alone, announced a planned sale of $100,000,000 in MS shares.
On the other hand, looking at the balance sheet.
M$ now has around $16 billion in cash (they've spent about half of this since Jne '04 according to the cash flow, but I haven't been playing close attention, so damned if I know what they bought.)
I'm not sure what any of this means, but it's clear they're taking a big risk on marketing, and Bill would rather have his paper wealth somewhere else.
As everyone else here has stated, you can compile C and C++ on Mac OS X using gcc and the bundled IDE (XCode is free as in beer, but > $100 value, IMO).
For rapid application development, the Apple cognate for VBasic would be Objective-C + Cocoa Bindings. This week I wrote a special-purpose table/row-based music-library type program in about three hours, with about 20 lines of code and everything else wired together graphically in Interface Builder.
I am not trained as a programmer, and took no computer classes in high school or college (my degree is in film production). If I could learn it by osmosis over lunch breaks in a few months, I'm sure anyone with experience could make huge use of the facilities available.
Try to smile when you say that.
I didn't see Polish instantly, so you do have to click "Edit" in the window to add it to the search list, but once it's at the top, you've logged out and logged back in, the Finder will be very happily Polski.
BTW, your English skills
About those English skills... if you did have an app that wasn't localized, and the developers happened to follow the rules (which they tend to, in tha Apple world), you could do the localization yourself. In order to localize an OS X app you don't need any $$$ tools, or even the sources, or even need to know any coding. Just open up the app's package and make a copy of the English.lproj, rename it "pl.lproj," and edit the "localizable.strings" text file.
Ask, and it shall reveal.
Isn't that a Mac OS X web sharing path!
Sounds like .Mac.
Which is to say, not as crazy as it seems on the surface. If people really like the MS application, and like being able to access it anywhere, they're liable to pay.
Big if, though.
I don't think many people do, but this was the fastest BTO processor cappucino PC would include. The price is still twice as high, so I figured I wouldn't twist the knife. I was also trying to stifle my fanboyism
(In my personal experience, a Pro Tools rig running a Pentium III at equvalent MHz can't hold a candle to a Mac, particularly with lots of plugin instances. But this is reliant on alot of factors, not just CPU.)
Me again... a fairer comparison is a cappacino EZ3
This combo is $1,042
Intel Pentium III @1.26 GHz
PC133 256MB RAM
40GB 4200RPM HD
Slot-loading DVD-CDR Combo drive
XP Pro
Intel integrated graphics
No montior or keyboard
PC people, no flame, but what makes this more expensive!?
I looked this up and it is a pretty awesome box for an embedded app. For someone who just wants a computer, I think it's probably not worth the hassle.
I get a total of $808 configured thus:
Pentium mobile at 650Mhz (the fastest they'll install for you)
PC133 256MB RAM
40GB 4200 RPM drive
Slot-loading combo drive
DOS-formatted drive (add $159 for XP Pro)
Integrated graphics, (no VRAM cited, so I assume this is shared.)
it does have PS/2 and serial ports, but only USB1.1. It includes a firewire.
I don't think this is the right machine for the application, and even though it is a much lesser machine than the Mini, it still is more expensive.
Cool box, just waiting for hacking, but not for the punters.
The potential exists, but in order for the widget to do damage it would have to be downloaded and installed by the user, like any other trojan horse. If the widget wants to do anything outside of your home directory, the user will get a dialogue asking for an admin password.
This will require a certain level of responsibility from users, but no more so than any compiled program.
Then again, making it all javascript-shell script friendly, on top of making it look pretty is dangerous; it makes trojans easier to write and more tempting to the victims (nobody would ever download a .sh file that claimed to output stock quotes or search Amazon.com, but they would certainly download a widget that advertised such features).
FTA:
"mdfind" is "find", except meta-data instead of file name. It will find any file containing the word "Tiger" and copy it off to a backup drive. You can replace "Tiger" with
and backup any HQ video or image file.I need this feature now!
Now he just smites kittens.