If I remember correctly, it's much harder to hear sub-sonic bullets. That could be appealing to military snipers; a large-caliber rifle that can be easily dialed up for range or power, or dialed way down to make it very difficult to identify where the shots are coming from.
They already have something for that, it's called a silencer.
To be clear, these are different technologies with different drawbacks. Sound suppressors (or silencers) don't slow down the round to subsonic speeds, so even if fired with suppressor, the bullet will still make a loud sonic boom when it passes close to an object like a tree. In order to prevent that, you need to use subsonic rounds, which are already available and in use. The problem with subsonic rounds, and any bullet below the speed of sound, is the lack of range and power.
...all police get to experience the taser and pepper spray before they are issued the gear, so they know it hurts like a motherfucker.
Sorry, but this is completely untrue. I know a number of police officers and my brother used to be one. I just double checked with him. He was issued police grade pepper spray but neither he nor any of the other cops he knew had tried it on themselves. A couple of them had tried stun guns on themselves, but just horsing around, not as part of training.
i can't find the specifics of the case you are talking about, but i'm assuming since you didn't state she died, that she didn't. until you post a link to a news article i'm going to point out even old grannies can wield a knife.
Strangely I assumed typing "elderly woman taser" into Google would bring up the article. Instead it seems to bring up articles about dozens of different incidents. a good one is this one here. The woman was in a wheelchair and was wielding weapons, but since she was elderly and immobilized, without tasers they could have simply waited her out or used a different non-lethal solution instead of tasering her over and over again until she died. Read that article and tell me if you honestly think the cops would have killed her if they did not have tasers.
i will say one thing though. private security shouldn't be issued tasers. all the cases i can find where it was really misused has been private security guards.
Amnesty international's report on taser abuse lists hundreds of deaths, but the vast majority seem to be police (not private security) using them on people who did not pose an immediate threat to the officers or others.
Really, I think tasers can be a great benefit to law enforcement. I just think they have been deployed without proper training or guidelines for when they can be used, and this has lead to overuse and abuse. The same problem is a very real concern with other, new, less-lethal technologies.
Realistically speaking, how many keyboards have a usb input on them?
Every one I own not in a box of old parts.
I also take it that you have no need for a printer. Since you're sticking to the budget angle, I should remind you that almost all budget printers are now usb only.
The printer is plugged into the USB printer port on the wireless hub so all the computers can use it. It used to be plugged into the keyboard on an old computer except for when she used her iPod, when she'd unplug the printer until she was done. That's not really a terrible option if you're using a budget system to begin with.
Look, the whole novelty is cute, but the thing has no upgradeability, and isn't very fast. For only about $150 more...
$250 versus $400 is a pretty big difference for buyers on the very low end.
When I did the math, it was $340, not $400.
I quoted the entire exchange. See where the $400 number comes from? You said $150 more than $250, for your first alternative, which adds up to $400.
So an extra $90s to increase your performance 10 fold is out of the picture, but they have enough money to afford digital downloads?
Often it is putting money together all at once that is a problem when you're really poor. I know I've been there. In any case, some digital downloads are free, both legal and potentially illegal. Some of us actually like indy music.
Would you also care to explain how a pc sporting 400Mhz of processing power and 256mb of RAM is going to run iTunes without slowing down to a crawl?
That's a very interesting question. The article claimed it supported iTunes, but did not explain how. Potentially, they are running it remotely and simply connecting to a VNC session using a Firefox plug-in, such that all the processing is done in the "cloud" they refer to, while the processor handles the interface, like a thin client of old.
taser misuse is drastically overstated. i'll grant there is probably isolated cases of cops abusing their powers, but they would do that taser or not. they are just bad cops, taking the taser away changes nothing.
I disagree. For example, in the instance of the elderly woman in the retirement home that made a big splash in the press, I seriously doubt the cop would have hit her with a baton or shot her with a pistol. The fact that is was a taser and just for "disabling without hurting" probably made a large difference in the way he made his choice.
That is not to say I don't think non-lethal options such as a taser are a bad idea or cause more harm than good; only that we should consider whether this new technology will cause more harm or good and whether training will change that.
So 2 USB ports, but no PS/2 ports, which means no thumb drive or iPod support
My girlfriend's computer is sitting on her desk. It has two USB ports. One has a keyboard plugged in and a mouse and ipod plugged into the keyboard. The other USB port is empty. How then, do you infer no iPod support from 2 USB ports? It seems to work for her.
Why would anyone use iTunes if they a) couldn't connect an iPod to transfer their songs to, and b), couldn't connect a cd drive to burn their songs on.
Maybe they just want a good UI for listening to music they download either purchased or free from the internet.
Look, the whole novelty is cute, but the thing has no upgradeability, and isn't very fast. For only about $150 more...
$250 versus $400 is a pretty big difference for buyers on the very low end.
Right, one technology is never going to be our solution. In the north, they could do other things, such as ground source heat pumps, which would drastically lower the amount of energy needed to heat/cool homes, and that extra energy saved could be put to other uses.
Heat pumps are a favorite of mine, but the initial cost ~$20,000 i simply too high for even the average home builder without assistance. Retrofitting existing homes is even a worse value proposition. Most people simply don't have the capital.
Hell, just encourage everyone to replace electric water heaters with tankless water heaters.
In the north, most people heat both their homes and water with natural gas or propane instead of electric. I actually replaced my water heater recently and went with a traditional (gas with tank) one instead of tankless one both because of the huge cost difference and the lesser capabilities of the latter.
I haven't tried Opera for a while (always seemed slow on OS X). Have they managed the ability to dynamically resize text boxes yet? It sure is convenient for long Slashdot posts and the like to just drag the box bigger instead of scrolling the tiny, default box.
How about mandatory solar panels on every new home, and incentives to put solar panels on existing homes?
Do you think that is cost effective for homes in the north in areas with high precipitation? Solar is just not a good option in many cases. Rather, tax cuts for any energy saving or generating technology added to a home would make a lot more sense. Where I'm at, for example, wind power is much, much more cost effective.
Apple has played nice with the Konqueror folks and gone out of their way to help them integrate changes and revise the way the shared code base was developed such that improvements from multiple groups including Konqueror, Apple, and Nokia can all be included.
Only after many complaints from Konqueror developers: at the beginning Apple didn't cooperate much.. Apple was probably worried of having a bad image in the opensource community.
Do we have to go over this again? Have you read the comments by the KHTML developers? Here's what happened. Apple developed Webkit without telling anyone and released the code back as one big dump in a different versioning system. One of the KHTML developers commented that it was going to be a huge pain trying to sort it all out, leading other people who read the forums to think Apple was intentionally obscuring things and numerous unrelated people picked it up and wrote complaints. Then, one of the KHTML developers sent an e-mail to Apple asking if they would help and Apple responded to them right away by going through and commenting things for them with comments specific to what was added where and what the KHTML team needed to reintegrate parts of it. Basically, they went out of their way to help.
So now the KHTML people started integrating some of the changes, but they were unhappy with some of what Apple had done and as a whole decided to intentionally hold off on pulling in some of the changes they did not like as well as other changes that depended upon those. They also had problems with the process because they were used to being the only ones contributing anything major and were not well organized to handle things from others.
Eventually, Nokia and a few others started making major contributions as well, but tended up contributing them to Apple's fork (Webkit) because it was more aligned with what they needed and the Konqueror team realized they were starting to fall way behind on all this free code from others. At this point they've mostly seemed to have decided Webkit is the way going forward.
The problem I have with your post, is it is still based upon that initial round of forum comments based upon someone's complaint being taken out of context, before anyone bothered to ask Apple for a more granular set of their changes and on the KHTML team intentionally deciding not to integrate many of the changes back into KHTML. That version of events was misinformed at the time, but you'd think numerous discussions like this and several Slashdot articles including direct quotes from the KHTML team would have cleared things up.
FUD alert! It is not true. While some of the original people who wrote KHTML are now working on WebKit (but they work for Trolltech), it's absolutely not true that the Konqueror developers given up on KHTML. They're still developing it, although of course integrating stuff from WebKit where needed.
From the people I've talked to, more effort is going into porting things from KHTML into Webkit, than on developing new features/improvements in KHTML. There are developer previews of Konqueror that now use Webkit. I think most of the community now believes Webkit will replace KHTML going forward. Certainly that is what Trolltech seems to be saying.
No, you're thinking of GPL. The LGPL would have allowed them to use KHTML libraries without giving anything back.
They can link to it without giving anything back, but the LGPL does not allow them to make changes to it and distribute them without giving the source back. Since Apple had to make significant changes to make it work modularly and the way they wanted, they had to give all those changes back. They don't have to open source the code for Safari, which links to Webkit, and in fact they don't.
WebCore's "improvements" are largely Apple's own doing, apart from those changes which were shared upstream before KDE developers abandoned KHTML.
Apple has done significant work to make Webkit better than KHTML was, but they are certainly building on a lot of work that was done before they entered the game. Apple has played nice with the Konqueror folks and gone out of their way to help them integrate changes and revise the way the shared code base was developed such that improvements from multiple groups including Konqueror, Apple, and Nokia can all be included. That said, to claim Apple had a choice about how Webkit would be licensed or if their changes to it would be open source is simply not true.
Yes, because holding two fingers on the trackpad and then clicking is so much easier than just clicking the other button...err, wait...
Actually it is. According to the usability tests I've seen, it is faster and has a lower failure rate because to hit the second button you have to either stretch your hand over or use your other hand, neither of which is ideal. For mice, where one hand is already off the keyboard, multiple buttons are a usability win for experts, but for trackpad users it is a loss for novice users and expert users and more usable but less learnable for middle of the road users.
Apple open-sourced WebKit and it was so good that many of its improvements were copied back into KHTML.
Umm, KHTML was licensed as LGPL, which means Apple had to open source their fork if they distributed it. As for improvements being copied back, well that happened to some extent, but the Konquerer team seems to have pretty much given up on KHTML and are contributing to Webkit now.
well something that isnt said is that if you kill off safari, IE and other things, there isnt the competition for firefox to stay number one. As long as there is competition *everyone* is trying to be #1 and they all innovate, as soon as there is only one real choice that innovation will die down, which is likely to cause a new competitor (or several dozen) to join the fray.
Killing off Safari or Opera would be bad for competition, but on IE I have to strongly disagree. IE and the way MS bundles it with Windows is the single largest factor in why the Web is a constant attempt to create cool new things with old broken technology. They have single-handedly held back progress for nearly a decade now. IE dying would be about the best thing for competition and innovation ever.
I wonder how many people have stopped to think through the implications of this charge. If it's proven to be true, it could very well mean Diebold's CEO is guilty of treason.
Treason eh, you mean like intentionally exposing a secret agent's identity to the enemy? We all see how effective the government with an executive branch controlled by the Republicans has been at prosecuting treason committed by their fellow party members.
If they're able to get 70% of the market without cutting their margins, I'm sure they'd be happy with that.
If they had 70% of the market they could raise their margins because they would have undue influence on said market. That said, if for some reason they could only get 70% of the market by cutting their margins down to one ninth of what they are now, they'd do it, because it makes them more money. They're a business. The reason they stay focused on a small subset now is because the wider they spread the greater the risk to them and the less flexible they become in dealing with changes to the market. Right now they have to develop not only computer hardware, but the OS, a subset of user applications, and some network services all at once just to stay in the game against MS. They do it because OS X is their crown jewels and it is working, but they are very vulnerable and having too many models opens them up even more. Compare them to larger hardware companies like Acer and you'll note Apple offers considerable more models of computers into many more subsets of the market. The only reason it seems like Apple is not targeting widely is because they are usually compared to hardware companies three to ten times their size or to all the other PC vendors combined. As Apple's market share grows they will target more markets.
I find it suspicious that Mac adoption has exploded shortly after the release of Bootcamp. I'd like to know what fraction of this 8.5% of Mac users is dual booting to Windows. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I figure the Mac revolution would have happened when OSX was released, or maybe when the iPod was launched. Why should the surge happen today?
It didn't "happen today". Mac market share has been steadily increasing for many years now, pretty much since OS X was released. You haven't noticed these articles are published every quarter as Apple's share is higher than the same quarter the previous year each time.
A 50-50 split market isn't really that much better. It comes down to the lesser of two evils decision, and both companies will know that the alternative is generally not acceptable to their customer-base and so they're safe.
That's a lot better than now where people just buy computers without even knowing they have a choice (Windows pre-installed is the only thing in the local store). Additionally, think of what a difference a 50-50 split would make to proprietary Web technologies (for example). It would sure kill IE only Web pages and push standards. And it isn't just the Web, but everything. Programs would be written to be portable to different OS's from the start, server technologies would all have to be able to handle standards, etc.
I REALLY hope that increased Marketshare will motivate games being ported to OS X. I fear it will have to be at least 20% for that to happen though.
It's not a cut-off magical number. The more market share Apple has, the more developers will target it. Apple already gets a significant number of games ported and most major game companies not owned by Microsoft do plan for OS X in their initial development plan.
The few dozen Mac users I've known over the years (those who repeatedly buy Macs, not just one before switching to something else) are all either grandparents or students who share one trait: lack of computer savvy.
My experience in the computer security and software programming industries is somewhat different. Heck, go to DefCon or Blackhat next year and count the MacBooks. Among those very computer savvy people there seem to be more than a few fans.
One of the hardest parts of using Linux is working around all the problems with incompatibility both with Windows and with all the other technologies Windows interoperates with. For example, Web technologies/pages that only work with IE and Windows.
The more of anything other than Windows taking market share, the fewer of these problems will remain. When Web pages and services are recoded to work with OS X and Windows, standards become important and Linux wins as well. The same applies to hundreds of other technologies.
They're currently on a crest, but they'll sink and rise again.
Sales are different different quarters, but year-over-year they haven't been going in cycles for over a decade. They've just been slowly going up. The trick is predicting how high up they'll go, as eventually everyone loses share again.
They have an upper limit of around 10-15% market share.
They haven't had market share that high in twenty years, when the industry was completely different.
They've made it quite clear that they don't *want* any more than that, and aren't interested in meeting the needs of the rest of the market.
I disagree. They want more market share and they're expanding both their PC business and their other markets. Apple is just conservative about expanding into new segments of the PC market, but they've slowly been targeting parts of the market both lower and higher than previously.
If they decoupled their anaemic hardware offerings from their OS, they could see double digit growth yearly, but failing that they'll stay right where they've always been.
If Apple decoupled their hardware and OS sales they'd go out of the OS business. The desktop OS market is monopolized. Nobody with any business sense is stupid enough to try that. Until MS monopoly is seriously weakened, Apple needs a business plan that bypasses that market.
Maybe you're not understanding the power of being a monopolist. It matters very little what people switch to, so long as it is not controlled by Microsoft. If there are enough players in the desktop OS market so that Microsoft cannot control the direction of the industry and use it to prevent innovation in that and related markets then we all win.
Good or bad we don't want to replace MS's domination of the industry with Apple's, we want t make sure one company doesn't have domination so all the companies have to work for us and keep us happy to make money.
I would trust the individual... how hard is it to buy an "independant" survey these days?
Consumer Reports? They don't even accept free samples from vendors, insisting on anonymously buying their test systems through regular retail channels to avoid cherry picking. Their reputation is their only real asset. If you have any evidence that the most trusted consumer review company in the world is being bribed it will be front page news.
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If I remember correctly, it's much harder to hear sub-sonic bullets. That could be appealing to military snipers; a large-caliber rifle that can be easily dialed up for range or power, or dialed way down to make it very difficult to identify where the shots are coming from.
They already have something for that, it's called a silencer.
To be clear, these are different technologies with different drawbacks. Sound suppressors (or silencers) don't slow down the round to subsonic speeds, so even if fired with suppressor, the bullet will still make a loud sonic boom when it passes close to an object like a tree. In order to prevent that, you need to use subsonic rounds, which are already available and in use. The problem with subsonic rounds, and any bullet below the speed of sound, is the lack of range and power.
...all police get to experience the taser and pepper spray before they are issued the gear, so they know it hurts like a motherfucker.
Sorry, but this is completely untrue. I know a number of police officers and my brother used to be one. I just double checked with him. He was issued police grade pepper spray but neither he nor any of the other cops he knew had tried it on themselves. A couple of them had tried stun guns on themselves, but just horsing around, not as part of training.
i can't find the specifics of the case you are talking about, but i'm assuming since you didn't state she died, that she didn't. until you post a link to a news article i'm going to point out even old grannies can wield a knife.
Strangely I assumed typing "elderly woman taser" into Google would bring up the article. Instead it seems to bring up articles about dozens of different incidents. a good one is this one here. The woman was in a wheelchair and was wielding weapons, but since she was elderly and immobilized, without tasers they could have simply waited her out or used a different non-lethal solution instead of tasering her over and over again until she died. Read that article and tell me if you honestly think the cops would have killed her if they did not have tasers.
i will say one thing though. private security shouldn't be issued tasers. all the cases i can find where it was really misused has been private security guards.
Amnesty international's report on taser abuse lists hundreds of deaths, but the vast majority seem to be police (not private security) using them on people who did not pose an immediate threat to the officers or others.
Really, I think tasers can be a great benefit to law enforcement. I just think they have been deployed without proper training or guidelines for when they can be used, and this has lead to overuse and abuse. The same problem is a very real concern with other, new, less-lethal technologies.
Realistically speaking, how many keyboards have a usb input on them?
Every one I own not in a box of old parts.
I also take it that you have no need for a printer. Since you're sticking to the budget angle, I should remind you that almost all budget printers are now usb only.
The printer is plugged into the USB printer port on the wireless hub so all the computers can use it. It used to be plugged into the keyboard on an old computer except for when she used her iPod, when she'd unplug the printer until she was done. That's not really a terrible option if you're using a budget system to begin with.
Look, the whole novelty is cute, but the thing has no upgradeability, and isn't very fast. For only about $150 more...
$250 versus $400 is a pretty big difference for buyers on the very low end.
When I did the math, it was $340, not $400.
I quoted the entire exchange. See where the $400 number comes from? You said $150 more than $250, for your first alternative, which adds up to $400.
So an extra $90s to increase your performance 10 fold is out of the picture, but they have enough money to afford digital downloads?
Often it is putting money together all at once that is a problem when you're really poor. I know I've been there. In any case, some digital downloads are free, both legal and potentially illegal. Some of us actually like indy music.
Would you also care to explain how a pc sporting 400Mhz of processing power and 256mb of RAM is going to run iTunes without slowing down to a crawl?
That's a very interesting question. The article claimed it supported iTunes, but did not explain how. Potentially, they are running it remotely and simply connecting to a VNC session using a Firefox plug-in, such that all the processing is done in the "cloud" they refer to, while the processor handles the interface, like a thin client of old.
taser misuse is drastically overstated. i'll grant there is probably isolated cases of cops abusing their powers, but they would do that taser or not. they are just bad cops, taking the taser away changes nothing.
I disagree. For example, in the instance of the elderly woman in the retirement home that made a big splash in the press, I seriously doubt the cop would have hit her with a baton or shot her with a pistol. The fact that is was a taser and just for "disabling without hurting" probably made a large difference in the way he made his choice.
That is not to say I don't think non-lethal options such as a taser are a bad idea or cause more harm than good; only that we should consider whether this new technology will cause more harm or good and whether training will change that.
So 2 USB ports, but no PS/2 ports, which means no thumb drive or iPod support
My girlfriend's computer is sitting on her desk. It has two USB ports. One has a keyboard plugged in and a mouse and ipod plugged into the keyboard. The other USB port is empty. How then, do you infer no iPod support from 2 USB ports? It seems to work for her.
Why would anyone use iTunes if they a) couldn't connect an iPod to transfer their songs to, and b), couldn't connect a cd drive to burn their songs on.
Maybe they just want a good UI for listening to music they download either purchased or free from the internet.
Look, the whole novelty is cute, but the thing has no upgradeability, and isn't very fast. For only about $150 more...
$250 versus $400 is a pretty big difference for buyers on the very low end.
Right, one technology is never going to be our solution. In the north, they could do other things, such as ground source heat pumps, which would drastically lower the amount of energy needed to heat/cool homes, and that extra energy saved could be put to other uses.
Heat pumps are a favorite of mine, but the initial cost ~$20,000 i simply too high for even the average home builder without assistance. Retrofitting existing homes is even a worse value proposition. Most people simply don't have the capital.
Hell, just encourage everyone to replace electric water heaters with tankless water heaters.
In the north, most people heat both their homes and water with natural gas or propane instead of electric. I actually replaced my water heater recently and went with a traditional (gas with tank) one instead of tankless one both because of the huge cost difference and the lesser capabilities of the latter.
I haven't tried Opera for a while (always seemed slow on OS X). Have they managed the ability to dynamically resize text boxes yet? It sure is convenient for long Slashdot posts and the like to just drag the box bigger instead of scrolling the tiny, default box.
How about mandatory solar panels on every new home, and incentives to put solar panels on existing homes?
Do you think that is cost effective for homes in the north in areas with high precipitation? Solar is just not a good option in many cases. Rather, tax cuts for any energy saving or generating technology added to a home would make a lot more sense. Where I'm at, for example, wind power is much, much more cost effective.
* no extra usb jack, so no uploading pictures, printing, scanning, using a thumb drive, or loading your ipod
Or you could spend the extra couple of dollars and buy a decent USB keyboard with a couple of ports built in and use those ports. USB is chainable.
Apple has played nice with the Konqueror folks and gone out of their way to help them integrate changes and revise the way the shared code base was developed such that improvements from multiple groups including Konqueror, Apple, and Nokia can all be included.
Only after many complaints from Konqueror developers: at the beginning Apple didn't cooperate much.. Apple was probably worried of having a bad image in the opensource community.
Do we have to go over this again? Have you read the comments by the KHTML developers? Here's what happened. Apple developed Webkit without telling anyone and released the code back as one big dump in a different versioning system. One of the KHTML developers commented that it was going to be a huge pain trying to sort it all out, leading other people who read the forums to think Apple was intentionally obscuring things and numerous unrelated people picked it up and wrote complaints. Then, one of the KHTML developers sent an e-mail to Apple asking if they would help and Apple responded to them right away by going through and commenting things for them with comments specific to what was added where and what the KHTML team needed to reintegrate parts of it. Basically, they went out of their way to help.
So now the KHTML people started integrating some of the changes, but they were unhappy with some of what Apple had done and as a whole decided to intentionally hold off on pulling in some of the changes they did not like as well as other changes that depended upon those. They also had problems with the process because they were used to being the only ones contributing anything major and were not well organized to handle things from others.
Eventually, Nokia and a few others started making major contributions as well, but tended up contributing them to Apple's fork (Webkit) because it was more aligned with what they needed and the Konqueror team realized they were starting to fall way behind on all this free code from others. At this point they've mostly seemed to have decided Webkit is the way going forward.
The problem I have with your post, is it is still based upon that initial round of forum comments based upon someone's complaint being taken out of context, before anyone bothered to ask Apple for a more granular set of their changes and on the KHTML team intentionally deciding not to integrate many of the changes back into KHTML. That version of events was misinformed at the time, but you'd think numerous discussions like this and several Slashdot articles including direct quotes from the KHTML team would have cleared things up.
FUD alert! It is not true. While some of the original people who wrote KHTML are now working on WebKit (but they work for Trolltech), it's absolutely not true that the Konqueror developers given up on KHTML. They're still developing it, although of course integrating stuff from WebKit where needed.
From the people I've talked to, more effort is going into porting things from KHTML into Webkit, than on developing new features/improvements in KHTML. There are developer previews of Konqueror that now use Webkit. I think most of the community now believes Webkit will replace KHTML going forward. Certainly that is what Trolltech seems to be saying.
No, you're thinking of GPL. The LGPL would have allowed them to use KHTML libraries without giving anything back.
They can link to it without giving anything back, but the LGPL does not allow them to make changes to it and distribute them without giving the source back. Since Apple had to make significant changes to make it work modularly and the way they wanted, they had to give all those changes back. They don't have to open source the code for Safari, which links to Webkit, and in fact they don't.
WebCore's "improvements" are largely Apple's own doing, apart from those changes which were shared upstream before KDE developers abandoned KHTML.
Apple has done significant work to make Webkit better than KHTML was, but they are certainly building on a lot of work that was done before they entered the game. Apple has played nice with the Konqueror folks and gone out of their way to help them integrate changes and revise the way the shared code base was developed such that improvements from multiple groups including Konqueror, Apple, and Nokia can all be included. That said, to claim Apple had a choice about how Webkit would be licensed or if their changes to it would be open source is simply not true.
Yes, because holding two fingers on the trackpad and then clicking is so much easier than just clicking the other button...err, wait...
Actually it is. According to the usability tests I've seen, it is faster and has a lower failure rate because to hit the second button you have to either stretch your hand over or use your other hand, neither of which is ideal. For mice, where one hand is already off the keyboard, multiple buttons are a usability win for experts, but for trackpad users it is a loss for novice users and expert users and more usable but less learnable for middle of the road users.
Apple open-sourced WebKit and it was so good that many of its improvements were copied back into KHTML.
Umm, KHTML was licensed as LGPL, which means Apple had to open source their fork if they distributed it. As for improvements being copied back, well that happened to some extent, but the Konquerer team seems to have pretty much given up on KHTML and are contributing to Webkit now.
well something that isnt said is that if you kill off safari, IE and other things, there isnt the competition for firefox to stay number one. As long as there is competition *everyone* is trying to be #1 and they all innovate, as soon as there is only one real choice that innovation will die down, which is likely to cause a new competitor (or several dozen) to join the fray.
Killing off Safari or Opera would be bad for competition, but on IE I have to strongly disagree. IE and the way MS bundles it with Windows is the single largest factor in why the Web is a constant attempt to create cool new things with old broken technology. They have single-handedly held back progress for nearly a decade now. IE dying would be about the best thing for competition and innovation ever.
I wonder how many people have stopped to think through the implications of this charge. If it's proven to be true, it could very well mean Diebold's CEO is guilty of treason.
Treason eh, you mean like intentionally exposing a secret agent's identity to the enemy? We all see how effective the government with an executive branch controlled by the Republicans has been at prosecuting treason committed by their fellow party members.
If they're able to get 70% of the market without cutting their margins, I'm sure they'd be happy with that.
If they had 70% of the market they could raise their margins because they would have undue influence on said market. That said, if for some reason they could only get 70% of the market by cutting their margins down to one ninth of what they are now, they'd do it, because it makes them more money. They're a business. The reason they stay focused on a small subset now is because the wider they spread the greater the risk to them and the less flexible they become in dealing with changes to the market. Right now they have to develop not only computer hardware, but the OS, a subset of user applications, and some network services all at once just to stay in the game against MS. They do it because OS X is their crown jewels and it is working, but they are very vulnerable and having too many models opens them up even more. Compare them to larger hardware companies like Acer and you'll note Apple offers considerable more models of computers into many more subsets of the market. The only reason it seems like Apple is not targeting widely is because they are usually compared to hardware companies three to ten times their size or to all the other PC vendors combined. As Apple's market share grows they will target more markets.
I find it suspicious that Mac adoption has exploded shortly after the release of Bootcamp. I'd like to know what fraction of this 8.5% of Mac users is dual booting to Windows. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I figure the Mac revolution would have happened when OSX was released, or maybe when the iPod was launched. Why should the surge happen today?
It didn't "happen today". Mac market share has been steadily increasing for many years now, pretty much since OS X was released. You haven't noticed these articles are published every quarter as Apple's share is higher than the same quarter the previous year each time.
A 50-50 split market isn't really that much better. It comes down to the lesser of two evils decision, and both companies will know that the alternative is generally not acceptable to their customer-base and so they're safe.
That's a lot better than now where people just buy computers without even knowing they have a choice (Windows pre-installed is the only thing in the local store). Additionally, think of what a difference a 50-50 split would make to proprietary Web technologies (for example). It would sure kill IE only Web pages and push standards. And it isn't just the Web, but everything. Programs would be written to be portable to different OS's from the start, server technologies would all have to be able to handle standards, etc.
I REALLY hope that increased Marketshare will motivate games being ported to OS X. I fear it will have to be at least 20% for that to happen though.
It's not a cut-off magical number. The more market share Apple has, the more developers will target it. Apple already gets a significant number of games ported and most major game companies not owned by Microsoft do plan for OS X in their initial development plan.
The few dozen Mac users I've known over the years (those who repeatedly buy Macs, not just one before switching to something else) are all either grandparents or students who share one trait: lack of computer savvy.
My experience in the computer security and software programming industries is somewhat different. Heck, go to DefCon or Blackhat next year and count the MacBooks. Among those very computer savvy people there seem to be more than a few fans.
Why would OSX increase linux sales?
One of the hardest parts of using Linux is working around all the problems with incompatibility both with Windows and with all the other technologies Windows interoperates with. For example, Web technologies/pages that only work with IE and Windows.
The more of anything other than Windows taking market share, the fewer of these problems will remain. When Web pages and services are recoded to work with OS X and Windows, standards become important and Linux wins as well. The same applies to hundreds of other technologies.
Apple has seen these numbers before.
Not since 1995.
They're currently on a crest, but they'll sink and rise again.
Sales are different different quarters, but year-over-year they haven't been going in cycles for over a decade. They've just been slowly going up. The trick is predicting how high up they'll go, as eventually everyone loses share again.
They have an upper limit of around 10-15% market share.
They haven't had market share that high in twenty years, when the industry was completely different.
They've made it quite clear that they don't *want* any more than that, and aren't interested in meeting the needs of the rest of the market.
I disagree. They want more market share and they're expanding both their PC business and their other markets. Apple is just conservative about expanding into new segments of the PC market, but they've slowly been targeting parts of the market both lower and higher than previously.
If they decoupled their anaemic hardware offerings from their OS, they could see double digit growth yearly, but failing that they'll stay right where they've always been.
If Apple decoupled their hardware and OS sales they'd go out of the OS business. The desktop OS market is monopolized. Nobody with any business sense is stupid enough to try that. Until MS monopoly is seriously weakened, Apple needs a business plan that bypasses that market.
Maybe you're not understanding the power of being a monopolist. It matters very little what people switch to, so long as it is not controlled by Microsoft. If there are enough players in the desktop OS market so that Microsoft cannot control the direction of the industry and use it to prevent innovation in that and related markets then we all win.
Good or bad we don't want to replace MS's domination of the industry with Apple's, we want t make sure one company doesn't have domination so all the companies have to work for us and keep us happy to make money.
I would trust the individual... how hard is it to buy an "independant" survey these days?
Consumer Reports? They don't even accept free samples from vendors, insisting on anonymously buying their test systems through regular retail channels to avoid cherry picking. Their reputation is their only real asset. If you have any evidence that the most trusted consumer review company in the world is being bribed it will be front page news.