The PRC has looked the other way on intellectual property issues and while large number of their country freely pirate software. Now....they want an antitrust case?
I don't understand what that has to do with anything. Antitrust laws are not intellectual property laws. MS wants China to enforce IP laws and China says they will comply with regard to MS's offerings, but they're also enforcing unrelated antitrust laws, also with regard to MS's offerings. If we were talking about any other criminal law instead of antitrust, like one you understood, would you see a conflict?
What about if China was enforcing theft laws against MS, because as a company they have been stealing automobiles from the streets (in multiple countries and were convicted in the US and EU of grand theft auto)? Would you see a conflict if China agreed to enforce IP laws for Windows, but also started looking into bringing charges against MS for all their auto theft?
In this case I'd have to agree. Not a big Microsoft fan but China has never been one to really enforce anti-piracy.
China has also never been much for enforcing copyright either. MS has been pressuring them using US politicians to enforce copyright law, which will cost chinese citizens money. How can they complain then, if China also enforces another law they usually ignore. MS is the one who wants to be treated as a special case.
If they want to play dirty then let the rest of the world play dirty against them. I hope the whole world has their chance to sue Microsoft for no good reason. Yeah, because two wrongs clearly make a right.
Actually, China does have good reason. MS is breaking the law the same as they've been convicted of breaking it in the US. If someone runs a fraud operation and hits people in multiple countries should one of those countries ignore it if part of the money was recovered and given back in a different country? How does that help their citizens who have been hurt?
Doing wrong even to those who do wrong to you always comes back around. Not because any sense of karma or universal justice, but because nothing in the world happens in a vacuum, and there are always consequences.
In this case, we're talking about business. The more antitrust abuse hurts MS the better, because the consequence of that may well be to provide MS with incentive to stop doing it.
No other option like Linux or OSX which all the fanboys claim is superior anyways? What's the problem?
The problem is even if they are objectively superior, they aren't superior to the end user because through use of a monopoly MS can introduce artificial problems with those competing products in ways that are detrimental to end users. The free market works because people act in their own best, financial interests. With a monopoly you can make sure people's best financial interests are to use your product, even if it is inferior to other offerings. At that point, generally, innovation slows to a slow crawl because it's cheaper to get sales by breaking compatibility with your competitors than doing real work. That's why 90% of users still don't have a single spell checker that can work in all their programs, even though such technology was for sale by a competitor a decade ago.
I mean, I don't like Microsoft's products, particularly their operating systems, because I think they've completely lost touch with what a computer is supposed to do, but when it comes down to it, it's our fault, not Microsoft's, that their junk software is so ingrained in the entire computing industry.
Similarly, when we buy recycled metal from the Queens Scrap Metal company it s our own fault, for not investigation them, finding out they are owned by the Mafia, killed off the people running the rival scrap metal businesses, paid off politicians and cops to ignore them, and consequently charge more. I mean, we can't expect companies to obey the laws or the police to do their jobs. It's really our fault. We're the ones who vote with our dollars and because we don't pay more to have our metal shipped from another state (several times the trucks keep getting hijacked) we're to blame for the situation. Please stop whining and complaining about the mafia. It's ridiculous.
But that is what doesn't make sense. Last time I checked Microsoft charged less for Windows in China than in the US not more.
Yup. It's called differential pricing. It is indicator that MS is charging as much as they can squeeze a given person for, instead of a price determined by the quality of the product in comparison to competing offerings. Any economist would see such a thing and have to look into the mechanism as to why, it is not a free, capitalist market operating. When you look even a little closer you see how MS has taken actions to make sure competitors are not allowed to compete on their merits with MS using their monopoly to create artificial problems. Then you see how MS has purposely kept the Web crippled to avoid it enabling competitors to bypass MS's artificial problems. At that point the law has clearly been broken and MS is sucking down a lot of cash in the process. If MS is demanding the other laws be enforced to insure they get paid for copies of Windows, then they have to expect their own very profitable criminal acts to be paid for and more importantly, stopped from happening in future.
What use would Communist China have for anti-Trust laws China isn't any more communist than for example the UK, Canada or Australia.
The term "communist" is confusing here because it refers to two very different things. The first use is a political term, referring to politicians who (confusingly) claim their end goal is to implement an extreme socialist economic system. That is the manner in which China was communist, although while that was the original claim of the communist party in China, they have since changed their position considerably. Consider it to be similar to the way the Democratic party in the US actually works against reforms that would lead to a more direct democracy in the US (or making their own nomination process more a republic by empowering super-delegates as representatives over direct election).
The second usage of the term "communist" is as an economic model, which China has always been to some degree. As an economic term, it simply refers to groups of people pooling and sharing some or all resources and labor. These groups are called cells. A cell might be a monastery, commune, or co-op... but the most common cell is a family or extended family. China is more communist than the US (larger extended families). What has been changing is they have gradually becoming less socialist, and more capitalist, as more industry moves from government ownership to private ownership. It is on these terms that China is enforcing anti-trust laws (which are designed to prevent trusts and monopolies owned by private parties from abusing that power in a way that undermines the benefits such capitalism brings).
I'd have to say that losing the engineers with the sense of responsibility and foresight to know what they need to do to provide for their families in the long term is not going to be a good trade off to keep the engineers who love their work so much they will neglect their families to do it for fun.
Your statement is predicated upon the difference in salary between Google employees and other engineers being so different that it will interfere with their ability to provide for their family in the long term. I think that is an absurd assertion. Whether you're a highly paid engineer at Google or a very highly paid engineer at Intel, you should have no problem providing for your family in the short or long term. People do so with a hell of a lot less than Google pays even their lowest paid employees.
Additionally, your assumption is that the engineers have families, which is, of course, not always the case. Some people have no interest in having a family. Some people are waiting until later in life. Basically, I think you're rationalizing and trying to defend your previous opinion more so than objectively looking at the pros and cons to Google.
But google is in a marketplace with essentially no competition, so maybe they have different needs.
??? If you limit the consideration to just the US and look at the market Google is most dominant in, they have what 40%? I'd say that is a lot of competition.
The manual that then follows is no worse than say Machievelli's "The Prince". or more apropos Sun Tzu "the art of war".
"The Prince" is considered by many to be a handbook for being a successful, evil dictator. I don't recall anything of the sort in "the art of war" which is part philosophy and part tactics.
Losing the people for whom it is not a good trade-off is not a great long term strategy for google in my opinion. Particularly since they don't have to lose those people.
I'm not sure I agree. All the best engineers I've worked with consider money to be secondary. Most of them have choices of many companies, but work somewhere that lets them solve interesting problems and make a real difference. It's what makes them happy, and a great many of them spend a lot more time working than they need to in order to get their paycheck. Additionally, most of the places I've worked at with such people have profit sharing plans (bonuses and stock options) which encourage this behavior and pay off significantly in comparison to salary.
To be honest, I'm not really convinced that an engineer that concerned about their salary is going to be as good of an engineer. Will they come in on weekends because it is what they love to do or will they consider that a bad business move since they're not getting paid for it? Will they defect to another company in the middle of a project if it will get them another 10% salary, thus leaving the company in a very bad place? For that matter, if they're that concerned about money, will they walk off with the company's source code and customer list and sell them on the sly to the competition if they think they can get away with it? Having people who value money that highly may well be a liability for a company in more ways than simply having to provide them with a higher salary. Maybe Google is better off losing those people for cultural reasons as well as those possibilities I listed above.
CodeWeaver routinely does contract work with companies to improve support for specific applications, which sounds exactly like what you are talking about.
Actually, what I'm talking about it soliciting feedback from potential business customers and using that to decide what programs to focus upon. Their current scheme only allows pledges of money for a given application, useless for mainstream business (as I described above). Right now I'm sure hundreds of companies evaluate CrossOver for use with one or more applications, reject it as not yet there, find there is no easy way to tell CodeWeavers what application's lack of support cost them a number of sales, and move on.
Meanwhile CodeWeavers waits for individuals looking for a game to play or the lone contractor looking to dump their Windows box, then spends their time on said applications, pretty much ignoring those larger missed opportunities. This is probably one of the reasons why, despite the greatly lower price of Crossover, VMs running Windows are a much, much more popular solution in the business world.
Then one day people found out that the only way they could use the free service was to download some Windows-only program that spewed out ads by the dozen. Linux and BSD users were locked out.
That's an interesting perspective. When there is Windows only software, I'd think most people would be more concerned with Mac OS X being locked out than Linux (given their relative market share) let alone BSD. Unless, I suppose, one classifies OS X as a BSD.
OS specific ads seem pretty pointless. There seem to be well proven technologies to inject ads into Web content, regardless of OS.
I'm not sure what exactly you would do in their place.
They should do real market research in the business sector and see what companies are using VMs, remote desktops, etc. to enable, and how much it is costing them per seat. They should actually market themselves to big companies deploying alternate OS's, like IBM. They should, at very least, solicit feedback on their Website from business customers as to what programs would result in sales for them, without requiring those customers to promise to make a purchase in future; since at that point they've already lost the sale.
Personally I've always found it better to run windows applications on Windows, either installed on the machine or in a VM. Personally, I get at least as good stability, and usually better performance, running (supported) Windows apps using CrossoverOffice, the commercial version of Wine.
Crossover is fine if it just happens to work well with the one or two applications you actually need. If you're looking to run a larger selection of applications or something they don't support well, then a VM or native install is really the only option. Personally, I don't think this needs to be the case. I think CodeWeavers has a very flawed business model that has hampered them more than anything else. They could be making significant money from small business (and larger business).
The problem I have is with CodeWeavers' method of deciding what applications to support. They ask users to pledge a certain amount of money if they get an application supported and working well. That's a fine method of deciding what to work on if your users are hobbyists looking for support for some video game. It is a complete non-starter in business. For example, I tested it out for use with a certain Adobe application and it was nonfunctional. I looked into when they would support it, and the answer seemed to be "never" because not enough people pledged money. Since this is mainly a business application, what do they expect people to do? Have you ever tried getting approval for a purchase order that says if CodeWeavers ever gets this application supported we'll give them some amount of money... but we have no idea when or if that will ever happen? Not a chance. So, of course, we moved on and purchased a bunch of copies of a virtualization environment and Windows to run in it. Now in my case, they only lost a few dozen sales, but I know another, very, very big company that did a similar evaluation... but they needed a solution within a few weeks. They easily lost 500 sales there for the same application.
Basically, I think if they started targeting business customers with a plan that made even a lick of sense to potential business users they'd be pulling in a lot more money, money they could reinvest to make faster progress and more fully support a wide range of programs.
If it has the same market as crude oil, it will sell at crude oil price.
This is not, necessarily so. It could sell at a higher price because it is more "green" and people are willing to pay more to protect the environment. Put in a few "save the planet" gas stations in CA and I bet you could easily get half again the price.
With them being the sole producers, they will effectively become a de facto OPEC member...
Not really. Other OPEC members don't have the same ability to constantly grow production capability for a set cost and without competing for new oil fields. They would be either a "more than equal" member or a threat and enemy to be undercut or killed.
...and will remain so until patents have expired...
This is unlikely. Other companies are already working on similar technologies. If they bring it to market and are profitable, investment in these other companies will go nuts, and they will almost certainly bring similar tech to market in less than 20 years. These other companies would also upset the entire OPEC power base.
It's not that simple. Many applications now require 10.4...
That's because 10.4 introduced a whole pile of core services that made developer's jobs easier and apps more powerful. A lot of developers decided they wanted to use the services so the new versions are not backwards compatible.
...a growing number [tuaw.com] already require 10.5
Not many, actually. Just ones that use CoreAnimation or Time Machine (the new bits in 10.5).
Apple does its best to encourage such requirements, presumably in an effort to boost sales of OS X upgrades.
Mostly I think they just want developers to take advantage of new tech, where appropriate, so users get better apps and OS X's reputation and overall experience increase (getting them more Mac sales). Apple doesn't make much selling OS X upgrades.
So yes, in effect, they do force you to pay for it!
No. Application developers, in practice, make you pay for it, if you want to run the latest version of something they're offering (as of 10.5). For 10.6, it sounds like most of the new technologies they're adding will work for older applications, even if the developer does nothing (and thus won't break backwards compatibility). We'll have to wait and see.
At least on windows i've seen the complete USB subsystem fall over after repeated hotplugs. If repeated hotplugs can do it I suspect a malfunctioning device can easilly[sic].
That's just Windows screwing up, not the controller failing.
Numerous people claimed Apple was fixing problems with OS X's stability and performance, although this is not what Apple's information released so far says. That's a failure to understand what Apple did say.
What I do see is end users rightfully objecting that they should pay for narrow-market SDK/developer features that may or may not ever be useful to the end-user.
They should pay? Says who? Apple hasn't even said if they're charging for this and if they are, does that force people to buy it? If you don't like it, vote with your wallet and don't buy it, just like many people aren't buying Vista. At least for people buying new computers this one will be an improvement in speed and stability and presumably will not introduce and anti-features like Vista has. I can see complaining because you're buying a new computer and can only get it with Vista, which is inferior for your needs. What's the complaint if you can only get a new Mac with snow leopard?
The average Safari/iTunes/Word user has zero use for any of this stuff.
Everyone has a use for faster response times and better multitasking and use of resources. Still, if people don't think it is worth $X.XX, they can just not pay for it. Where's the problem?
Of course, if Microsoft suggested that users should buy an upgrade to get the.NET 3.0 SDK, the internet would explode with universal outrage.
Maybe, maybe not. MS is an interesting case because they have a monopoly and a lot of people have no viable alternatives to paying them to run applications they need as the result of certain illegal acts. That said, so long as the majority of critical programs still run on XP, who cares what MS releases and suggests we pay for?
Without the "Defend Everything Apple Does Or Might Do" crowd, this would be a pretty boring discussion.
Congrats. You combined a straw man argument with an argument by association. It takes skill to wedge two logical fallacies into one sentence. If you look at my posting history, I call out Apple for all sorts of things they do that I feel are improper. This just isn't on of them. Heck, before they announced snow leopard I read people complaining of forums that Apple should stop adding features and focus on optimizing and refactoring code. Personally, I wish they'd focus on certain new features instead, but we don't all get what we want. When snow leopard comes out I'll decide if it is worth whatever Apple charges for it. It's not like people have to buy something just because Apple makes it you know.
Charging for stability is not going to go over well with consumers, because lack of stability is a product flaw, and consumers do not appreciate being charged for fixing a product flaw.
Okay, now go read the linked description of snow leopard and show me where is says they're charging for making OS X more stable, instead of adding new technologies that make applications on top of OS X more stable and faster.
Case in point with USB ports why are some computers still shipping with PS/2 ports? Why not? USB doesn't really offer much over PS/2,
I'd say being able to instantly discover new devices plugged in is a pretty big advantage for USB. USB connectors don't break regularly when plugged in and removed on a regular basis as PS/2 do. Malfunctioning USB devices can't hose the USB controller as PS/2 devices do. Compliant USB devices should never fry themselves when hot swapped, while compliant PS/2 devices can and do.
(I've had cases where on a USB keyboard on a system under load, the computer couldn't keep up with my typing and everything was appearing a half second or so after I'd typed it. the same has never occurred on PS/2 keyboards)
Either can be slow and crappy if you have buggy drivers or your OS has bugs.
Given that both connectors cost pennies, the PS/2 port has lasted much longer than it should have.
Moreover, if it really is a question of saving disk space by avoiding redundant different-architecture code, the installer should be able to do this just fine: Put code for both architectures on the install DVD and then let the installer select the right code for the machine.
For the most part, I think the OS installer already does this. The part that supports multiple architectures are the binaries in application bundles. You can run programs to strip those out, as well, but they don't generally take much space and it is nice to be able to e-mail an application to someone on another platform and have it work just fine for them as well.
While reflections on the desktop and a new way to flip through folders would be worth $120 to you? No, but I also wouldn't buy a car with only three wheels and then turn around and pay for the 4th wheel which should have been included in the first place.
Your analogy is flawed. It implies the improvements Apple is making are bug fixes, ie, a missing wheel. What Apple is adding are new technologies. It is more akin to turning around and paying to convert your 2 wheel drive vehicle to all wheel drive, which allows increased performance in off-road conditions. Grand Central is not a bug fix, but it does increase performance for multi-core systems. OpenCL is not a bug fix, but it allows increased performance for applications that have spare GPU cycles. Neither is needed to have a functional and fast system, just as adding all wheel drive and an airfoil are not fixing problems with the car you bought, but do provide improvements to performance and the former may keep your car from bogging down in adverse conditions.
But it *doesn't* apply to such militia who intentionally camouflage themselves as non-combatants, which also applies to the vast majority of the prisoners in Guantanamo.
I'm not at all convinced it does. Can you provide a citation that shows they intentionally disguised themselves as non-combatants?
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I don't understand what that has to do with anything. Antitrust laws are not intellectual property laws. MS wants China to enforce IP laws and China says they will comply with regard to MS's offerings, but they're also enforcing unrelated antitrust laws, also with regard to MS's offerings. If we were talking about any other criminal law instead of antitrust, like one you understood, would you see a conflict?
What about if China was enforcing theft laws against MS, because as a company they have been stealing automobiles from the streets (in multiple countries and were convicted in the US and EU of grand theft auto)? Would you see a conflict if China agreed to enforce IP laws for Windows, but also started looking into bringing charges against MS for all their auto theft?
China has also never been much for enforcing copyright either. MS has been pressuring them using US politicians to enforce copyright law, which will cost chinese citizens money. How can they complain then, if China also enforces another law they usually ignore. MS is the one who wants to be treated as a special case.
Actually, China does have good reason. MS is breaking the law the same as they've been convicted of breaking it in the US. If someone runs a fraud operation and hits people in multiple countries should one of those countries ignore it if part of the money was recovered and given back in a different country? How does that help their citizens who have been hurt?
Doing wrong even to those who do wrong to you always comes back around. Not because any sense of karma or universal justice, but because nothing in the world happens in a vacuum, and there are always consequences.In this case, we're talking about business. The more antitrust abuse hurts MS the better, because the consequence of that may well be to provide MS with incentive to stop doing it.
The problem is even if they are objectively superior, they aren't superior to the end user because through use of a monopoly MS can introduce artificial problems with those competing products in ways that are detrimental to end users. The free market works because people act in their own best, financial interests. With a monopoly you can make sure people's best financial interests are to use your product, even if it is inferior to other offerings. At that point, generally, innovation slows to a slow crawl because it's cheaper to get sales by breaking compatibility with your competitors than doing real work. That's why 90% of users still don't have a single spell checker that can work in all their programs, even though such technology was for sale by a competitor a decade ago.
Similarly, when we buy recycled metal from the Queens Scrap Metal company it s our own fault, for not investigation them, finding out they are owned by the Mafia, killed off the people running the rival scrap metal businesses, paid off politicians and cops to ignore them, and consequently charge more. I mean, we can't expect companies to obey the laws or the police to do their jobs. It's really our fault. We're the ones who vote with our dollars and because we don't pay more to have our metal shipped from another state (several times the trucks keep getting hijacked) we're to blame for the situation. Please stop whining and complaining about the mafia. It's ridiculous.
Yup. It's called differential pricing. It is indicator that MS is charging as much as they can squeeze a given person for, instead of a price determined by the quality of the product in comparison to competing offerings. Any economist would see such a thing and have to look into the mechanism as to why, it is not a free, capitalist market operating. When you look even a little closer you see how MS has taken actions to make sure competitors are not allowed to compete on their merits with MS using their monopoly to create artificial problems. Then you see how MS has purposely kept the Web crippled to avoid it enabling competitors to bypass MS's artificial problems. At that point the law has clearly been broken and MS is sucking down a lot of cash in the process. If MS is demanding the other laws be enforced to insure they get paid for copies of Windows, then they have to expect their own very profitable criminal acts to be paid for and more importantly, stopped from happening in future.
The term "communist" is confusing here because it refers to two very different things. The first use is a political term, referring to politicians who (confusingly) claim their end goal is to implement an extreme socialist economic system. That is the manner in which China was communist, although while that was the original claim of the communist party in China, they have since changed their position considerably. Consider it to be similar to the way the Democratic party in the US actually works against reforms that would lead to a more direct democracy in the US (or making their own nomination process more a republic by empowering super-delegates as representatives over direct election).
The second usage of the term "communist" is as an economic model, which China has always been to some degree. As an economic term, it simply refers to groups of people pooling and sharing some or all resources and labor. These groups are called cells. A cell might be a monastery, commune, or co-op... but the most common cell is a family or extended family. China is more communist than the US (larger extended families). What has been changing is they have gradually becoming less socialist, and more capitalist, as more industry moves from government ownership to private ownership. It is on these terms that China is enforcing anti-trust laws (which are designed to prevent trusts and monopolies owned by private parties from abusing that power in a way that undermines the benefits such capitalism brings).
Your statement is predicated upon the difference in salary between Google employees and other engineers being so different that it will interfere with their ability to provide for their family in the long term. I think that is an absurd assertion. Whether you're a highly paid engineer at Google or a very highly paid engineer at Intel, you should have no problem providing for your family in the short or long term. People do so with a hell of a lot less than Google pays even their lowest paid employees.
Additionally, your assumption is that the engineers have families, which is, of course, not always the case. Some people have no interest in having a family. Some people are waiting until later in life. Basically, I think you're rationalizing and trying to defend your previous opinion more so than objectively looking at the pros and cons to Google.
But google is in a marketplace with essentially no competition, so maybe they have different needs.??? If you limit the consideration to just the US and look at the market Google is most dominant in, they have what 40%? I'd say that is a lot of competition.
"The Prince" is considered by many to be a handbook for being a successful, evil dictator. I don't recall anything of the sort in "the art of war" which is part philosophy and part tactics.
I'm not sure I agree. All the best engineers I've worked with consider money to be secondary. Most of them have choices of many companies, but work somewhere that lets them solve interesting problems and make a real difference. It's what makes them happy, and a great many of them spend a lot more time working than they need to in order to get their paycheck. Additionally, most of the places I've worked at with such people have profit sharing plans (bonuses and stock options) which encourage this behavior and pay off significantly in comparison to salary.
To be honest, I'm not really convinced that an engineer that concerned about their salary is going to be as good of an engineer. Will they come in on weekends because it is what they love to do or will they consider that a bad business move since they're not getting paid for it? Will they defect to another company in the middle of a project if it will get them another 10% salary, thus leaving the company in a very bad place? For that matter, if they're that concerned about money, will they walk off with the company's source code and customer list and sell them on the sly to the competition if they think they can get away with it? Having people who value money that highly may well be a liability for a company in more ways than simply having to provide them with a higher salary. Maybe Google is better off losing those people for cultural reasons as well as those possibilities I listed above.
Actually, what I'm talking about it soliciting feedback from potential business customers and using that to decide what programs to focus upon. Their current scheme only allows pledges of money for a given application, useless for mainstream business (as I described above). Right now I'm sure hundreds of companies evaluate CrossOver for use with one or more applications, reject it as not yet there, find there is no easy way to tell CodeWeavers what application's lack of support cost them a number of sales, and move on.
Meanwhile CodeWeavers waits for individuals looking for a game to play or the lone contractor looking to dump their Windows box, then spends their time on said applications, pretty much ignoring those larger missed opportunities. This is probably one of the reasons why, despite the greatly lower price of Crossover, VMs running Windows are a much, much more popular solution in the business world.
Funny, a company recently worked for lost a lot of their top talent to Google, and a lot of them took a pay cut to go there.
That's an interesting perspective. When there is Windows only software, I'd think most people would be more concerned with Mac OS X being locked out than Linux (given their relative market share) let alone BSD. Unless, I suppose, one classifies OS X as a BSD.
OS specific ads seem pretty pointless. There seem to be well proven technologies to inject ads into Web content, regardless of OS.
They should do real market research in the business sector and see what companies are using VMs, remote desktops, etc. to enable, and how much it is costing them per seat. They should actually market themselves to big companies deploying alternate OS's, like IBM. They should, at very least, solicit feedback on their Website from business customers as to what programs would result in sales for them, without requiring those customers to promise to make a purchase in future; since at that point they've already lost the sale.
Crossover is fine if it just happens to work well with the one or two applications you actually need. If you're looking to run a larger selection of applications or something they don't support well, then a VM or native install is really the only option. Personally, I don't think this needs to be the case. I think CodeWeavers has a very flawed business model that has hampered them more than anything else. They could be making significant money from small business (and larger business).
The problem I have is with CodeWeavers' method of deciding what applications to support. They ask users to pledge a certain amount of money if they get an application supported and working well. That's a fine method of deciding what to work on if your users are hobbyists looking for support for some video game. It is a complete non-starter in business. For example, I tested it out for use with a certain Adobe application and it was nonfunctional. I looked into when they would support it, and the answer seemed to be "never" because not enough people pledged money. Since this is mainly a business application, what do they expect people to do? Have you ever tried getting approval for a purchase order that says if CodeWeavers ever gets this application supported we'll give them some amount of money... but we have no idea when or if that will ever happen? Not a chance. So, of course, we moved on and purchased a bunch of copies of a virtualization environment and Windows to run in it. Now in my case, they only lost a few dozen sales, but I know another, very, very big company that did a similar evaluation... but they needed a solution within a few weeks. They easily lost 500 sales there for the same application.
Basically, I think if they started targeting business customers with a plan that made even a lick of sense to potential business users they'd be pulling in a lot more money, money they could reinvest to make faster progress and more fully support a wide range of programs.
You are correct. That was a typo on my part. Thanks for the correction.
This is not, necessarily so. It could sell at a higher price because it is more "green" and people are willing to pay more to protect the environment. Put in a few "save the planet" gas stations in CA and I bet you could easily get half again the price.
With them being the sole producers, they will effectively become a de facto OPEC member...Not really. Other OPEC members don't have the same ability to constantly grow production capability for a set cost and without competing for new oil fields. They would be either a "more than equal" member or a threat and enemy to be undercut or killed.
...and will remain so until patents have expired...This is unlikely. Other companies are already working on similar technologies. If they bring it to market and are profitable, investment in these other companies will go nuts, and they will almost certainly bring similar tech to market in less than 20 years. These other companies would also upset the entire OPEC power base.
That's because 10.4 introduced a whole pile of core services that made developer's jobs easier and apps more powerful. A lot of developers decided they wanted to use the services so the new versions are not backwards compatible.
...a growing number [tuaw.com] already require 10.5Not many, actually. Just ones that use CoreAnimation or Time Machine (the new bits in 10.5).
Apple does its best to encourage such requirements, presumably in an effort to boost sales of OS X upgrades.Mostly I think they just want developers to take advantage of new tech, where appropriate, so users get better apps and OS X's reputation and overall experience increase (getting them more Mac sales). Apple doesn't make much selling OS X upgrades.
So yes, in effect, they do force you to pay for it!No. Application developers, in practice, make you pay for it, if you want to run the latest version of something they're offering (as of 10.5). For 10.6, it sounds like most of the new technologies they're adding will work for older applications, even if the developer does nothing (and thus won't break backwards compatibility). We'll have to wait and see.
That's just Windows screwing up, not the controller failing.
Numerous people claimed Apple was fixing problems with OS X's stability and performance, although this is not what Apple's information released so far says. That's a failure to understand what Apple did say.
What I do see is end users rightfully objecting that they should pay for narrow-market SDK/developer features that may or may not ever be useful to the end-user.They should pay? Says who? Apple hasn't even said if they're charging for this and if they are, does that force people to buy it? If you don't like it, vote with your wallet and don't buy it, just like many people aren't buying Vista. At least for people buying new computers this one will be an improvement in speed and stability and presumably will not introduce and anti-features like Vista has. I can see complaining because you're buying a new computer and can only get it with Vista, which is inferior for your needs. What's the complaint if you can only get a new Mac with snow leopard?
The average Safari/iTunes/Word user has zero use for any of this stuff.Everyone has a use for faster response times and better multitasking and use of resources. Still, if people don't think it is worth $X.XX, they can just not pay for it. Where's the problem?
Of course, if Microsoft suggested that users should buy an upgrade to get theMaybe, maybe not. MS is an interesting case because they have a monopoly and a lot of people have no viable alternatives to paying them to run applications they need as the result of certain illegal acts. That said, so long as the majority of critical programs still run on XP, who cares what MS releases and suggests we pay for?
Without the "Defend Everything Apple Does Or Might Do" crowd, this would be a pretty boring discussion.Congrats. You combined a straw man argument with an argument by association. It takes skill to wedge two logical fallacies into one sentence. If you look at my posting history, I call out Apple for all sorts of things they do that I feel are improper. This just isn't on of them. Heck, before they announced snow leopard I read people complaining of forums that Apple should stop adding features and focus on optimizing and refactoring code. Personally, I wish they'd focus on certain new features instead, but we don't all get what we want. When snow leopard comes out I'll decide if it is worth whatever Apple charges for it. It's not like people have to buy something just because Apple makes it you know.
Okay, now go read the linked description of snow leopard and show me where is says they're charging for making OS X more stable, instead of adding new technologies that make applications on top of OS X more stable and faster.
I'd say being able to instantly discover new devices plugged in is a pretty big advantage for USB. USB connectors don't break regularly when plugged in and removed on a regular basis as PS/2 do. Malfunctioning USB devices can't hose the USB controller as PS/2 devices do. Compliant USB devices should never fry themselves when hot swapped, while compliant PS/2 devices can and do.
(I've had cases where on a USB keyboard on a system under load, the computer couldn't keep up with my typing and everything was appearing a half second or so after I'd typed it. the same has never occurred on PS/2 keyboards)Either can be slow and crappy if you have buggy drivers or your OS has bugs.
Given that both connectors cost pennies, the PS/2 port has lasted much longer than it should have.
For the most part, I think the OS installer already does this. The part that supports multiple architectures are the binaries in application bundles. You can run programs to strip those out, as well, but they don't generally take much space and it is nice to be able to e-mail an application to someone on another platform and have it work just fine for them as well.
Your analogy is flawed. It implies the improvements Apple is making are bug fixes, ie, a missing wheel. What Apple is adding are new technologies. It is more akin to turning around and paying to convert your 2 wheel drive vehicle to all wheel drive, which allows increased performance in off-road conditions. Grand Central is not a bug fix, but it does increase performance for multi-core systems. OpenCL is not a bug fix, but it allows increased performance for applications that have spare GPU cycles. Neither is needed to have a functional and fast system, just as adding all wheel drive and an airfoil are not fixing problems with the car you bought, but do provide improvements to performance and the former may keep your car from bogging down in adverse conditions.
I'm not at all convinced it does. Can you provide a citation that shows they intentionally disguised themselves as non-combatants?