Say what you will about Christianity and other modern religions, (and I will) they're not, at their core, pyramid schemes for making profits. Scientology is.
I'm unconvinced. I am convinced Christianity started as a doomsday cult that was a genuine religion, not a for profit endeavor. That said, by the time the bible was put together and Christianity really emerged in the basic form and beliefs it has today, I'd argue it was primarily just a way for priests to make money and gather power. Certainly some clergy truly believe, but then so do some scientologists. Certainly many modern christian churches started off as money making schemes and have remained that way (just look at the history of some of the major televangelists).
2) "George Bush should be shot". Not constitutionally protected speech. Expect the Party Van.
Actually, you're mistaken. For speech not to be protected it has to advocate criminal violence, not just state an opinion about it. For example, writing that "G. Bush deserves to be shot" is legal, whereas writing "I want you to all go shoot G. Bush" is not legal (at least in most context). You'll also note, in the previous poster's blog, he claimed G. Bush should be impeached, convicted of treason, and shot. That is not illegal violence any more than saying a convicted murderer in Texas should be executed.
It's a sign of a degraded and tribal approach to politics that you are unable to criticise the policies of the Bush administration without stepping over the incitement line by calling for Bush to be killed.
I disagree. It is a perfectly valid opinion to think Bush is both a traitor and should be convicted and punished with death. I'd like to see a lot more politicians convicted as traitors and executed, particularly when they sell out the American people by taking lobbying dollars from foreign governments. I think it would be a step in the right direction for cleaning up or dreadfully corrupt political system.
I'm sure once President Obama or Clinton is in office you'll complain that the other tribe keep crossing the line in their attacks too.
You're assuming an awful lot. Not everyone blindly buys into the democrat vs. republican nonsense.
However, this guy has to go in front of a jury. A jury is likely to be more sympathetic to him than the "Behead those who insult Islam" types... It's kind of funky but the system does have checks an balances.
The problem is when you're dealing with a powerful, non-government organization that can undermine those checks and balances. So maybe this kid is let go. That's still not a win for free speech because in the process of being fined, his identity was made known to the church of scientology who have a formal program of harassment of anyone who speaks out against them. This means the kid will likely find himself the subject of slander and other attacks, including ones from outside the UK's legal authority. As a result, many other people will be discouraged from making use of their freedom of speech in the future.
Basically, this is an example of why the "chilling effect" argument in the US was so critical to creating effective freedom of speech laws and precedents. Not that the US is perfect in this regard, but on a federal level they recognized that being forcibly identified to the authorities themselves was enough to hinder freedom of speech in unacceptable ways. Freedom of speech needs the right to anonymous free speech and anonymous access to that speech in order to be an effective protection for the democratic process. This is a concept that seems to be missing in the UK and losing ground in the US as well.
That dosen't make them any less expensive. Would you argue that a Mercedes is not an expensive car because the comparable Toyotas (well, Lexuses) are similarly priced?
You're missing the point. I have no problem with people claiming they are expensive. I just think it is stupid to claim they are "more expensive than PCs." To use your car analogy, would it be fair to say Lexus brand cars are more expensive than "cars"? Obviously Apple computers are more expensive than some PCs and less expensive than others, but are comparable to other computers with similar specifications; just as Lexus are priced similar to other cars with similar specifications.
I have worked with Dell systems for years, and in my experience they have been on the whole well-built and of very high quality. Yes, this is a generalization, but not overly so based upon the qualitative statistics I've collected.
Consumer Reports is my primary source of reliability statistics on computers, but most of the other independent reviewing companies have agreed with them. Dell hardware has been well below average for many years with regard to reliability. The surprise is that in 2007, they've actually turned that around for the majority of their laptops. Those same Consumer Reports studies have placed Apple hardware as #1 for reliability for many years running and it still handily beats Dell, even for laptops.
Moving up to the present, the Dell systems you can get for around $450 including a decent LCD monitor are not crap.
According to independently gathered statistics, well yeah they sort of are. A Dell desktop in general is about four times as likely to fail within the first year as an Apple desktop. As for personal experience with large numbers of Dell systems, was involved in the purchasing of hundreds of cheap Dell towers for use in a huge network testing facility. We had a nearly 10% failure rate in the first year, which was fine because we expected it based upon their numbers and the fact that we'd be running them 24/7 and had extra machines on standby to swap in. What we didn't expect was the driver hell we went through. You see, the test systems we bought had certain hardware in them, but when we received large orders of that same model we found huge variation as to what was actually inside them. Most troubling, they had three different video cards only one of which had drivers for all the OS's we were planning to run on them. When we complained, Dell told us on the lower end they just buy from whoever wins that bid (regardless of quality or consistency). That's a great way to get a low price, but it is hard to argue it is a path to quality.
In short, anecdotes are not really reflective of the market and even small scale studies can fail to reflect real trends. There are professional companies out there evaluating systems. That's all they do. They don't take advertising money. They don't take free systems for testing. They go in and buy systems anonymously, just like real people, the they test them and publish the results. Anyone looking to be accurately informed, especially anyone making large purchasing decisions would probably benefit greatly from buying a subscription.
Simply, you cannot guess the quality from the price.
That's why companies like Consumer Reports exist. They do extensive testing of products and can tell you what quality you can expect from a given vendor. You'll note Apple has been #1 for reliability in their reports for many years now.
But this is under assumption of perfect information, which is never satisfied in the real world. Therefore, markets never work very well in the real world.
I'd say truly free markets can work quite well based upon reasonable information provided false advertising laws are enforced and people actually bother to look into their major purchases. The former is only partly true these days and I cant speak to the latter... not that it matters since we don't have a free capitalist market because of certain monopoly abuses that have been ignored by the authorities.
There are a lot of brands that will last MUCH more, and are way BETTER than apple... IBM/Thinkpads notebooks are a good example. A Thinkpad is years ahead of apple in everything you can imagine. That's a KNOWN fact by everyone that cares enough to research.
First, the functionality of a Thinkpad is significantly less because it doesn't run OS X and thus misses out on all the benefits thereof. Second, according to Consumer Reports, Lenovo laptops, including the Thinkpad score worse for reliability than Apple's offerings, by a fairly significant margin. I believe it was about half again as likely to suffer hardware failure within the first year.
Hmmm, the rest of your comment seems to be a troll. I suppose I'll respond to the first part anyway.
I disagree with the "dollar-store cheap-crap" statement that's aimed at PCs.
The previous poster did not imply all PC's are cheap crap, only that there are PC's that are cheap crap and a lot of people buy them.
After all, a Mac is an x86-based platform that happens to be a conglomeration of selected hardware that happens to run well under OS X - that's no different to a knowledgable PC user choosing the right hardware combination that runs well under Windows or Linux.
Well it is different actually. Macs are prebuilt, so it would be akin to buying a PC from a higher end vendor (like Sony) who has gone to the effort of making sure they have quality parts and drivers that work well with the included OS.
Macs and "cheap-crap" pre-built PCs are all aimed at the people who, rightly or wrongly, don't want to spend the time building systems from components.
True. That just happens to be close to 100% of people though. People who build their own machines are negligible to the market. That is not to say there is anything wrong with doing it. I have and it can be a fun hobby, but it isn't really relevant to a discussion about Mac market share.
Yes, I'm sure the quality of Mac hardware is much better than a £250 PC - but then £250 of the cost of a Mac is due to it being packaged into a pretty looking box.
That's a great assertion, but not really supportable. Apple has similar margins to other companies on the high end. Above the costs of components are assembly costs, engineering costs, driver costs, testing costs, and included software development costs. All of these figure in more prominently than aesthetics of case design. As an aside, an old Mac tower of mine is hands down the best case I've ever used, from a functional perspective. You just lift a ring and the whole side opens up, taking half the hardware with it. It is by far the best case for usability and ease of changing parts that I have ever seen. Computer labs at the time had to take to locking them closed because it was so quick and easy to open them up and remove parts.
Yes, but the intersection is still mis-leading. Percentage of retail _or_ percentage of over-1000 computers could say something.
That's not misleading just because it isn't the numbers you want. They collected data by going to retail stores and surveying people buying computers. As a result, they can only talk about retail sales and the under over $1000 category was one of dozens they cut the data into for analysis. The fact that the over $1000 happens to coincide with Apple's major market, is interesting, but not too surprising.
But the intersection is just a narrowly crafted niche, for PR masturbation reasons.
Umm, so NPD decided to perform their survey in this way, not because it was practical, but because it would make Apple look good? Sounds like a tinfoil hat argument to me.
And probably more importantly, a tell-tale sign of a PR masturbation exercise, is that even that niche doesn't really support the conclusion they try to feed you.
So here's part of your problem. You're confusing the people who performed the study, with the dozens of publications that have tried to analyze it by writing articles about that one statistic revealed by the study. t has nothing to do with PR and everything to do with a lot of people thinking it was simply too interesting of a umber to ignore and so writing an article to analyze it and report on it (many of which were speculative).
Personally I think the claim is mis-leading anyway. The category is narrowly defined as not only over 1000, but also bought retail. So it's crafted to exclude all the expensive workstations and servers bought by corporations, since they don't usually just drive a truck to WalMart to buy them retail.
The way it has been presented by various articles is certainly misleading. The category definition ignoring internet sales was not, however, trying to get specific results, but just the way they were able to gather numbers most easily. As for servers, they aren't even a consideration for this study as it was about notebooks and desktops for home buyers.
In other words, it's just a PR masturbation exercise.
It could be considered PR if Apple had commissioned the study. This is not Apple, it is one line in one chart, in one study from an NPD study, who does this sort of thing for all sorts of markets (you know like all those Wii vs. Xbox360 vs. PS3 numbers you read). The only reason it has been made a big deal of, is because so many people found it surprising and wanted to analyze what it meant. And it is surprising and worth discussing. It just doesn't necessarily mean what all sorts of people seem to have assumed without bothering to actually look into it.
The HP model also has a touchscreen, tablet mode, and a fingerprint reader (which if I was a Mac fanatic I would hold out as absolutely critical requirements on the Mac to make a fair comparison, but I'll just discount them as extras).
You'll never get exact specs, especially if you're trying to use a particular vendor and be careful about price. The HP is lacking a Webcam, Firewire, and who knows what else, but also has some other things you didn't mention. The main problem I have with comparisons like yours, however, are that you don't take quality into account. HP laptops had more than three times the failure rate within the first year as Apple machines did (according to Consumer Reports). Sure they both have 2Gb of RAM, but from what vendor and how reliable is it?
If you want to do a comparison of an Apple laptop and want it to be meaningful, you really have to compare it to a Sony or Lenovo as those are the only two that even come close when comparing reliability and support ratings from independent vendors. You also can't start with a model form one vendor and try to get as close as possible from the other. You need to look at a few models from each and try to match up the closest specced systems where both parties have a comparable system.
As to Lenovo, most aren't available with the specs the Macbook has - when I checked their sitte[sic] the most expensive 15" laptop they current sell is about $1200. That in itself represents a very nice advantage of PC laptops: their ability to dial BACK the hardware when wanted.
Heh. That's kind of funny. Apple is inferior for not having very low end systems in some ranges, but when Lenovo doesn't have a high end competitor in a given size, that is a plus?
Even comparing feature to feature Mac's usually loose[sic], but it gets REALLY bad when I can choose a little bit slower processor. A little smaller of a hard drive, etc.
...assuming you ignore the quality of the hardware and only compare numbers, e.g. a 250Gb hard drive from any vendor is exactly the same as from any other vendor, even when they cost different prices and one lasts twice as long.
As has been said by others, Apple's main strength is their OS, not their hardware.
Oh I agree entirely, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing that according to independent testing and evaluation, Apple has fairly average margins for their market segment and some of the most reliable machines from any vendor. They make good hardware, arguably the best in the industry.
That OS would work fine on budget machines, which is what most people buy.
It would work as well as any other OS does on crappy hardware (provided it had good drivers), which is to say okay, but seemingly worse than on quality hardware, thus giving end users the impression that it was inferior.
And when it is stated that way, the truth is I can get a functional Windows laptop for $399. I can't get an Apple one unless I lay down a minimum of $1099.
Actually you can. if you're willing to buy refurbs. But that is neither here nor there. Apple does not have a machine in every market segment and that is a significant drawback for potential buyers. It is not, however the same drawback as their hardware being more expensive than that from other, comparable, vendors.
Regardless of specs, the Windows laptop has a far lower entry point, because the people who make those computers aren't forcing you to buy faster hardware that you don't need.
Your phrasing is a bit inflammatory. No one is forcing you to do anything. Apple is one, fairly small, hardware vendor. Of course they won't have comparable hardware to every other hardware vendor on the planet combined. They already have a pretty broad selection of models for a company their size, with more than twice as many systems as companies like Asus, who have significantly mo
How long will all the other laptop makers be able to hide the losses their "premium" laptops must be suffering because no one wants Vista? While they "race to the bottom" Apple is selling exactly the same hardware for twice as much. The only difference is software.
I don't know where you get these ideas from. Apple sells higher end hardware and ignores the very low end. For what they offer though, their prices are quite similar to other premium hardware vendors like Sony and Lenovo. Seriously, other vendors aren't losing money or subsidizing their high end offerings. They aren't losing money on them either. They're charging similar amounts to what Apple is. There have been plenty of studies of Apple's margins and they really aren't that far off of other vendors. They're a bit high for towers and a bit low for all-in-ones and the mini.
Frankly, I'm tired of this unsupported "Macs are more expensive" bullcrap. Macs have fewer offerings than the rest of the companies put together. For what they sell though, they're right in line with other vendors offering similar hardware with similar reliability and support rates.
I would much rather see a OS dedicated to gaming that could be easily configured to dual boot. That way bloat ware and misc PC clutter would not sit in the background wasting precious memory and potentially interrupting gaming sessions. Normal users could think of it as booting their PC up into Console Mode.
...or they could just buy a console. Seriously, if I wanted to game on a console, I'd buy one. A PC is a multi-purpose machine, which means I want to be able to use it as such. I want to be able to pause a game, look at a Web site, and go back to the game. I want to be able to play a MMORPG without shutting down my twelve browser tabs, chat program, calendar program, text editor, terminals, e-mail reader, photoshop, and PDF editor. I want to be able to play a game on one monitor and still have my IM program running in the other to chat with my co-gamers.
I mean, games that require fullscreen and disable extra monitors are bad enough, but forcing me to reboot my computer twice every time I want to play a game. What an annoying idea.
Because clearly high action MMOs and a Simulation game are clearly analogous.
The Sims has been the standard for casual gaming for years now. Between the Sims and WoW products and expansion packs they made up six of the top ten PC games titles in 2007 and the situation was similar in 2006, 2005, etc. If you're really aiming at the mass market casual gamer, then you should be looking really closely at the system requirements for two games, WoW and the Sims. It's not about genres of games, but markets for games. No game targeted at a much smaller market is going to unseat WoW. The reason I used the latest Sims2 expansion pack for my example is because it has higher system requirements than WoW (being new) and is more representative of what a publisher needs to target today in order to still reach a similar size market.
Outside of the 1 GB Ram, the requirements are for hardware that is many years old at this point. The requirements don't even require a system from 2 years back. The CPU and Video cards they require them would have been old hat in a system back in 2003.
Try comparing them to the system requirements for something like, the latest Sims2 expansion pack, which is targeting the mainstream, casual gamer market. It works with three different Intel integrated graphic chipsets and with a GeForce2. It requires a 2.0 Ghz Pentium 2. The lowest end graphics card for AoC is the GeForce FX 5800, released in 2003 (not old hat in 2003) and which was a high end card at the time. I have a midrange consumer laptop (like about half of casual gamers these days). I bought it this year and it does not meet those requirements. You can buy an $800 desktop from Dell right now that doesn't meet those requirements.
The truth is, AoC does not run on a good portion of the casual gamer systems in use to play WoW today. It doesn't run on OS X, which cuts out a big chunk of WoW players right there. I think your view of what a casual gamer's machine looks like is severely skewed, probably because you're a computer geek or possibly an "extreme gamer." If you want to hit the casual gamer market you need to look at what Walmart was selling a couple of years ago, and pick one of their mid-priced systems, not something that shipped with a several hundred dollar graphics card at the time and not a "gaming computer" from any period in time. You also can't assume users will have upgraded their RAM, most don't and don't even know that it is an option for them.
Basically, they created the ultimate MMO gateway drug. Now a lot of new products are hitting the market, and I think WoW will see a lot of defections as players who've hit the upper limit and gotten everything it's possible to get in the game, start looking for a new challenge and a less happy candy colored world.
One of the aspects of MMO that Blizzard seems to understand really well, but no one else has to date is the value of the networking. All the supposed WoW-killers have technologically limited their potential users to a small subset of what WoW supports. This is understandable to some degree, but they have all taken it to extremes by emulating other games system requirements instead of mainstream games like WoW, the Sims, etc. If 60% of WoW players have a system that can play a new game, can you expect up to 60% to switch? Likely, no, because almost all of those 60% want to continue playing with their friends, one of whom at least probably does not have a system that will run the new game.
The formula for a real WoW-killer is a system that will run on a midrange system from two years ago (a little higher than Wow's requirements but nothing like AoC and about what Blizzard targeted when they released), which has a Mac version from day one, and which still keeps the learning curve relatively low. Running on consoles is a step in the right direction, provided they can interact with PC users. Finally, it needs to keep from changing the basic features that appeal to the mainstream (like not primarily PvP). On top of that there is plenty of room for innovation with better game play, more user content, the ability to buy third party content, etc. But the key is not to lose the ability for people to keep playing with their friends in a casual way... and that is where every single so-called WoW-killer has failed to date.
I don't think it likely either of these will dethrone WoW. First, the system requirements for both seem to be missing the "midrange computer from two years ago" that is the normal target for mainstream games. As such, they're only hitting the relatively small "extreme gamer" market. Next, there is no support for the Mac, which cuts out 14% of the total US market and much more of the game buying market. Third, losing a small portion of the market because of requirements can lose you much bigger portions of the market because these are networked games. If just one person in a group of friends has a Mac or a lower end PC, the entire group may well decide to stick with WoW or some other game that they can all play (especially if that one player is the cute co-ed gamer in the dorm).
Really, there is nothing wrong with either of these games, but they just aren't targeted at the same demographic as WoW, or if they are they are very poorly targeted. Some day someone will come out with a WoW-killer but I don't think either of these are even viable candidates.
Please stop misleading people. The US has a huge range of consumer protection laws well beyond advertising. Maybe we don't have as many as Europe, but nor do we have the dearth you are indicating. We have lemon laws, health and safety laws, contract restrictions, and fair use laws, just to name a few.
That's it (I don't think I've missed anything big). In addition to those, we have anti-monopoly laws, the basic gist of which is: -You cannot, through monopolistic powers, interfere with the business of competitors.
The US has similar antitrust laws to most of the rest of the world. They make it criminal to leverage monopoly power from one market into another or fix prices (which is unrelated to interfering with competitors). Mind you our current administration's appointees seem to have been ignoring many of these laws and not bothering to prosecute them, but that does not mean they don't exist.
Now the reason this French law seems stupid to Americans is because Microsoft is not preventing competition with anyone!
Lets ignore whether they are or are not for now. They are price fixing which hurts consumers and which laws in the US, including antitrust laws regulate. Remember when the RIAA was convicted of price fixing? It wasn't hurting indy publishers, but it was hurting consumers.
but really what the French law is trying to do is **preempt** the harmful act, and in doing so it is overly broad.
No they weren't. They were trying to stop a harmful act against an individual, the same as the example I presented above.
At least that's how Americans see it.
Americans are (for the most part) absurdly ignorant about their own laws and economics. I should know. I am an American and after many years in the public school system I was just lucky to realize how weak the education it gave me was. Luckier yet, I stumbled upon classic writings on logic, reason, rhetoric, and critical thinking that gave me the tools I needed to educate myself and which seem to have been stripped out of the US's educational system.
In short, how "Americans" see something is pretty pointless since most of them have very vague ideas about what the laws and intentions of the laws are and those ideas are riddled full of urban myths and half truths. If it wasn't oversimplified on the Simpsons or Oprah, there isn't a lot of point in trying to discuss it with the average American. Frankly, I think the level of intentional misinformation being pumped out by American companies and the government itself has pretty much rendered reasoned discourse with the average person to be pointless.
Who decides what is a "tie-in" and what is simply a component of a whole product ? Is an engine "tied-in" to a car ? How about leather seats ?
This is the wrong question. Those are all tie-ins, just not necessarily illegal ones. In this case, Asus decided it was an illegal tie in and consequently they advertised that they would refund the cost of it. In general the courts decide based upon numerous factors such as the effect upon the market and availability of non-tied alternatives. In this case the courts ruled not that it was illegally tied, but that the refund offer was intentionally misleading and an attempt to trick consumers into thinking they had an option, only to discover that option was realistically, nothing but a scam.
How is bundling Linux with a computer any different than bundling Windows?
Windows has overwhelming market share in the desktop OS market and hence bundling it with other products is a violation of antitrust law and undermines the capitalist free market. Linux has a tiny amount of market share and is licensed in such a way to prevent it from ever wielding monopoly influence regardless of its market share.
That said, I don't see why this would force anyone to bundle anything. Rather it is simply saying companies that participate in MS's illegal bundling will be held accountable for rectifying that.
What surprises me is that the French got labelled as surrender-happy, when Norway, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg all did the same thing...
Most Americans don't even know where those countries are, especially the Americans who find these jokes funny. France is the one with the Eiffel tower. You see it in movies, hence they can relate and hence it can be funny.
...not to mention the Italians which switched sides in both world wars to avoid being the losing side.
Italy is where pizza comes from, right? Seriously, there were jokes about Italy being a country of cowards for many, many years, but in recent years France is more prominent in the world stage and more critical of and opposed to the US, so it makes for a better target (and is more useful for politicians to criticize).
I agree that the core libs are a port, as there are a serious amount changes under the hood. Do you consider an application a port if no code changes occur and it builds and runs using the native widgets in an OS?
I guess it doesn't matter much what I consider a port, but when users are accustomed to features working across all their applications on an OS, when they don't, well they throw that application into the same bin as OpenOffice and often look for better more "native" solutions; regardless of whether or not the application was originated on another OS.
Recent versions of QT use the native widgets for Mac [1] without changes. There are always cases where an application taken from the Windows centric UI style (KDE, Win32) to OSX might need some extra code to make it look more OSXy, but QT at least tries to give you a leg up.
Certainly they make an effort to make things closer to the experience with native applications, but they also try to reuse as much as possible, which often results in sort of a "least common denominator" effect. You end up with applications that can't use any features of any OS that are not also present in all the other OS's supported (or sometimes only features in one OS, making it like a port in this regard).
I think there is a middle ground between the high expectations I set, and the rather grim picture painted by yourself.
I didn't think I was painting a grim picture. I was just trying to be realistic. For now QT is Linux first, and everything else second. The functionality it affords reflects this. Most of the developers are on Linux and primarily targeting it and many don't even know about the features of OS X and Vista that they aren't supporting, because they don't use those OS's enough to be familiar with said features.
They are a good step towards letting developers quickly target multiple platforms and keep an application up to date on all of them, but they are certainly not providing the same level of quality and functionality that truly native applications do. Perhaps in the future that will no longer be the case. In the mean time, well maybe I can recommend some apps to people who don't use Linux, but who might like apps that right now are Linux only.
Funny; in my mind, interoperability also includes providing back compatibility for MSN, the "legacy" protocol which happens to be the most widely deployed instant messaging protocol.
While I've read widely differing statistics on IM market share, I haven't seen any put MSN as more than 25% of the worldwide market and significantly less for the US market. Pidgin does provide interoperability with MSN and even supports file transfers. What they don't do is waste a lot of time optimizing that minor feature, over and over again as Microsoft changes it again and again.
A devil's advocate might posit that putting effort into developing XMPP (taking pains to point out your spelling error "XMMP") is more of a waste than trying to track MSN's upgrades, because of the deployment size, but as someone who runs ejabberd in his basement...:)
Adding features to XMPP has to be done once and can be done based upon the spec. Adding the same feature for MSN has to be done over and over and each time has to be done via reverse engineering. The point of Pidgin is to allow people to easily communicate via IM, despite the fragmented industry. To that end supporting XMPP fits with the project goals, whereas getting people migrate away from MSN does the same. There is even an argument for intentionally neglecting features for MSN. When you consider the extra effort required because of MS's shenanigans, it is a no brainer, IMHO.
For you this means Windows looks like Windows, and Mac looks like Mac. The running application may be written for KDE, but this doesn't matter anymore.
While I applaud the efforts to make these libraries/environments cross platform, I think your comment is a bit misleading. Anything written in these is still obviously a port. It is better than having to run under an X server, but still not exactly native for speed or features compared to software written with native toolkits. From what I've read, for example, KDE apps run on OS X to not automatically gain the features OS X offers to native applications, like universal spellchecking, grammar checking, and other system services. Nor can they export their GUIs or install using OS X's.app bundles.
This is a step forward and gives developers a good way to target more platforms at once, but don't overstate the case lest you set expectations too high.
What would it take to add direct connection transfer support to Pidgin so I can actually send someone a file on MSN? Currently it maxes out around 4KB/s which is useless. I always wondered why this is not a priority.
I imagine support for all closed, legacy formats is a pretty low priority. Why prioritize reverse engineering and optimizing less used features of an intentionally obfuscated format championed by someone trying to prevent the type of interoperability that is Pidgin's goal? Isn't it better for them to optimize file transfer over XMMP or the video and voice capabilities? I mean, if you want to transfer files with other users, there are plenty of other protocols that do work and where the Pidgin team doesn't have to work so hard only to have it intentionally broken by Microsoft at a later date. It is an inefficient use of their resources compared to working on core features using open protocols where they don't have to put in all that extra effort to overcome MS's antics.
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I'm unconvinced. I am convinced Christianity started as a doomsday cult that was a genuine religion, not a for profit endeavor. That said, by the time the bible was put together and Christianity really emerged in the basic form and beliefs it has today, I'd argue it was primarily just a way for priests to make money and gather power. Certainly some clergy truly believe, but then so do some scientologists. Certainly many modern christian churches started off as money making schemes and have remained that way (just look at the history of some of the major televangelists).
Actually, you're mistaken. For speech not to be protected it has to advocate criminal violence, not just state an opinion about it. For example, writing that "G. Bush deserves to be shot" is legal, whereas writing "I want you to all go shoot G. Bush" is not legal (at least in most context). You'll also note, in the previous poster's blog, he claimed G. Bush should be impeached, convicted of treason, and shot. That is not illegal violence any more than saying a convicted murderer in Texas should be executed.
It's a sign of a degraded and tribal approach to politics that you are unable to criticise the policies of the Bush administration without stepping over the incitement line by calling for Bush to be killed.I disagree. It is a perfectly valid opinion to think Bush is both a traitor and should be convicted and punished with death. I'd like to see a lot more politicians convicted as traitors and executed, particularly when they sell out the American people by taking lobbying dollars from foreign governments. I think it would be a step in the right direction for cleaning up or dreadfully corrupt political system.
I'm sure once President Obama or Clinton is in office you'll complain that the other tribe keep crossing the line in their attacks too.You're assuming an awful lot. Not everyone blindly buys into the democrat vs. republican nonsense.
The problem is when you're dealing with a powerful, non-government organization that can undermine those checks and balances. So maybe this kid is let go. That's still not a win for free speech because in the process of being fined, his identity was made known to the church of scientology who have a formal program of harassment of anyone who speaks out against them. This means the kid will likely find himself the subject of slander and other attacks, including ones from outside the UK's legal authority. As a result, many other people will be discouraged from making use of their freedom of speech in the future.
Basically, this is an example of why the "chilling effect" argument in the US was so critical to creating effective freedom of speech laws and precedents. Not that the US is perfect in this regard, but on a federal level they recognized that being forcibly identified to the authorities themselves was enough to hinder freedom of speech in unacceptable ways. Freedom of speech needs the right to anonymous free speech and anonymous access to that speech in order to be an effective protection for the democratic process. This is a concept that seems to be missing in the UK and losing ground in the US as well.
You're missing the point. I have no problem with people claiming they are expensive. I just think it is stupid to claim they are "more expensive than PCs." To use your car analogy, would it be fair to say Lexus brand cars are more expensive than "cars"? Obviously Apple computers are more expensive than some PCs and less expensive than others, but are comparable to other computers with similar specifications; just as Lexus are priced similar to other cars with similar specifications.
Consumer Reports is my primary source of reliability statistics on computers, but most of the other independent reviewing companies have agreed with them. Dell hardware has been well below average for many years with regard to reliability. The surprise is that in 2007, they've actually turned that around for the majority of their laptops. Those same Consumer Reports studies have placed Apple hardware as #1 for reliability for many years running and it still handily beats Dell, even for laptops.
Moving up to the present, the Dell systems you can get for around $450 including a decent LCD monitor are not crap.According to independently gathered statistics, well yeah they sort of are. A Dell desktop in general is about four times as likely to fail within the first year as an Apple desktop. As for personal experience with large numbers of Dell systems, was involved in the purchasing of hundreds of cheap Dell towers for use in a huge network testing facility. We had a nearly 10% failure rate in the first year, which was fine because we expected it based upon their numbers and the fact that we'd be running them 24/7 and had extra machines on standby to swap in. What we didn't expect was the driver hell we went through. You see, the test systems we bought had certain hardware in them, but when we received large orders of that same model we found huge variation as to what was actually inside them. Most troubling, they had three different video cards only one of which had drivers for all the OS's we were planning to run on them. When we complained, Dell told us on the lower end they just buy from whoever wins that bid (regardless of quality or consistency). That's a great way to get a low price, but it is hard to argue it is a path to quality.
In short, anecdotes are not really reflective of the market and even small scale studies can fail to reflect real trends. There are professional companies out there evaluating systems. That's all they do. They don't take advertising money. They don't take free systems for testing. They go in and buy systems anonymously, just like real people, the they test them and publish the results. Anyone looking to be accurately informed, especially anyone making large purchasing decisions would probably benefit greatly from buying a subscription.
That's why companies like Consumer Reports exist. They do extensive testing of products and can tell you what quality you can expect from a given vendor. You'll note Apple has been #1 for reliability in their reports for many years now.
But this is under assumption of perfect information, which is never satisfied in the real world. Therefore, markets never work very well in the real world.I'd say truly free markets can work quite well based upon reasonable information provided false advertising laws are enforced and people actually bother to look into their major purchases. The former is only partly true these days and I cant speak to the latter... not that it matters since we don't have a free capitalist market because of certain monopoly abuses that have been ignored by the authorities.
First, the functionality of a Thinkpad is significantly less because it doesn't run OS X and thus misses out on all the benefits thereof. Second, according to Consumer Reports, Lenovo laptops, including the Thinkpad score worse for reliability than Apple's offerings, by a fairly significant margin. I believe it was about half again as likely to suffer hardware failure within the first year.
Hmmm, the rest of your comment seems to be a troll. I suppose I'll respond to the first part anyway.
The previous poster did not imply all PC's are cheap crap, only that there are PC's that are cheap crap and a lot of people buy them.
After all, a Mac is an x86-based platform that happens to be a conglomeration of selected hardware that happens to run well under OS X - that's no different to a knowledgable PC user choosing the right hardware combination that runs well under Windows or Linux.Well it is different actually. Macs are prebuilt, so it would be akin to buying a PC from a higher end vendor (like Sony) who has gone to the effort of making sure they have quality parts and drivers that work well with the included OS.
Macs and "cheap-crap" pre-built PCs are all aimed at the people who, rightly or wrongly, don't want to spend the time building systems from components.True. That just happens to be close to 100% of people though. People who build their own machines are negligible to the market. That is not to say there is anything wrong with doing it. I have and it can be a fun hobby, but it isn't really relevant to a discussion about Mac market share.
Yes, I'm sure the quality of Mac hardware is much better than a £250 PC - but then £250 of the cost of a Mac is due to it being packaged into a pretty looking box.That's a great assertion, but not really supportable. Apple has similar margins to other companies on the high end. Above the costs of components are assembly costs, engineering costs, driver costs, testing costs, and included software development costs. All of these figure in more prominently than aesthetics of case design. As an aside, an old Mac tower of mine is hands down the best case I've ever used, from a functional perspective. You just lift a ring and the whole side opens up, taking half the hardware with it. It is by far the best case for usability and ease of changing parts that I have ever seen. Computer labs at the time had to take to locking them closed because it was so quick and easy to open them up and remove parts.
That's not misleading just because it isn't the numbers you want. They collected data by going to retail stores and surveying people buying computers. As a result, they can only talk about retail sales and the under over $1000 category was one of dozens they cut the data into for analysis. The fact that the over $1000 happens to coincide with Apple's major market, is interesting, but not too surprising.
But the intersection is just a narrowly crafted niche, for PR masturbation reasons.Umm, so NPD decided to perform their survey in this way, not because it was practical, but because it would make Apple look good? Sounds like a tinfoil hat argument to me.
And probably more importantly, a tell-tale sign of a PR masturbation exercise, is that even that niche doesn't really support the conclusion they try to feed you.So here's part of your problem. You're confusing the people who performed the study, with the dozens of publications that have tried to analyze it by writing articles about that one statistic revealed by the study. t has nothing to do with PR and everything to do with a lot of people thinking it was simply too interesting of a umber to ignore and so writing an article to analyze it and report on it (many of which were speculative).
The way it has been presented by various articles is certainly misleading. The category definition ignoring internet sales was not, however, trying to get specific results, but just the way they were able to gather numbers most easily. As for servers, they aren't even a consideration for this study as it was about notebooks and desktops for home buyers.
In other words, it's just a PR masturbation exercise.It could be considered PR if Apple had commissioned the study. This is not Apple, it is one line in one chart, in one study from an NPD study, who does this sort of thing for all sorts of markets (you know like all those Wii vs. Xbox360 vs. PS3 numbers you read). The only reason it has been made a big deal of, is because so many people found it surprising and wanted to analyze what it meant. And it is surprising and worth discussing. It just doesn't necessarily mean what all sorts of people seem to have assumed without bothering to actually look into it.
The HP model also has a touchscreen, tablet mode, and a fingerprint reader (which if I was a Mac fanatic I would hold out as absolutely critical requirements on the Mac to make a fair comparison, but I'll just discount them as extras).
You'll never get exact specs, especially if you're trying to use a particular vendor and be careful about price. The HP is lacking a Webcam, Firewire, and who knows what else, but also has some other things you didn't mention. The main problem I have with comparisons like yours, however, are that you don't take quality into account. HP laptops had more than three times the failure rate within the first year as Apple machines did (according to Consumer Reports). Sure they both have 2Gb of RAM, but from what vendor and how reliable is it?
If you want to do a comparison of an Apple laptop and want it to be meaningful, you really have to compare it to a Sony or Lenovo as those are the only two that even come close when comparing reliability and support ratings from independent vendors. You also can't start with a model form one vendor and try to get as close as possible from the other. You need to look at a few models from each and try to match up the closest specced systems where both parties have a comparable system.
As to Lenovo, most aren't available with the specs the Macbook has - when I checked their sitte[sic] the most expensive 15" laptop they current sell is about $1200. That in itself represents a very nice advantage of PC laptops: their ability to dial BACK the hardware when wanted.
Heh. That's kind of funny. Apple is inferior for not having very low end systems in some ranges, but when Lenovo doesn't have a high end competitor in a given size, that is a plus?
Even comparing feature to feature Mac's usually loose[sic], but it gets REALLY bad when I can choose a little bit slower processor. A little smaller of a hard drive, etc.
...assuming you ignore the quality of the hardware and only compare numbers, e.g. a 250Gb hard drive from any vendor is exactly the same as from any other vendor, even when they cost different prices and one lasts twice as long.
As has been said by others, Apple's main strength is their OS, not their hardware.
Oh I agree entirely, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing that according to independent testing and evaluation, Apple has fairly average margins for their market segment and some of the most reliable machines from any vendor. They make good hardware, arguably the best in the industry.
That OS would work fine on budget machines, which is what most people buy.
It would work as well as any other OS does on crappy hardware (provided it had good drivers), which is to say okay, but seemingly worse than on quality hardware, thus giving end users the impression that it was inferior.
And when it is stated that way, the truth is I can get a functional Windows laptop for $399. I can't get an Apple one unless I lay down a minimum of $1099.
Actually you can. if you're willing to buy refurbs. But that is neither here nor there. Apple does not have a machine in every market segment and that is a significant drawback for potential buyers. It is not, however the same drawback as their hardware being more expensive than that from other, comparable, vendors.
Regardless of specs, the Windows laptop has a far lower entry point, because the people who make those computers aren't forcing you to buy faster hardware that you don't need.
Your phrasing is a bit inflammatory. No one is forcing you to do anything. Apple is one, fairly small, hardware vendor. Of course they won't have comparable hardware to every other hardware vendor on the planet combined. They already have a pretty broad selection of models for a company their size, with more than twice as many systems as companies like Asus, who have significantly mo
I don't know where you get these ideas from. Apple sells higher end hardware and ignores the very low end. For what they offer though, their prices are quite similar to other premium hardware vendors like Sony and Lenovo. Seriously, other vendors aren't losing money or subsidizing their high end offerings. They aren't losing money on them either. They're charging similar amounts to what Apple is. There have been plenty of studies of Apple's margins and they really aren't that far off of other vendors. They're a bit high for towers and a bit low for all-in-ones and the mini.
Frankly, I'm tired of this unsupported "Macs are more expensive" bullcrap. Macs have fewer offerings than the rest of the companies put together. For what they sell though, they're right in line with other vendors offering similar hardware with similar reliability and support rates.
...or they could just buy a console. Seriously, if I wanted to game on a console, I'd buy one. A PC is a multi-purpose machine, which means I want to be able to use it as such. I want to be able to pause a game, look at a Web site, and go back to the game. I want to be able to play a MMORPG without shutting down my twelve browser tabs, chat program, calendar program, text editor, terminals, e-mail reader, photoshop, and PDF editor. I want to be able to play a game on one monitor and still have my IM program running in the other to chat with my co-gamers.
I mean, games that require fullscreen and disable extra monitors are bad enough, but forcing me to reboot my computer twice every time I want to play a game. What an annoying idea.
The Sims has been the standard for casual gaming for years now. Between the Sims and WoW products and expansion packs they made up six of the top ten PC games titles in 2007 and the situation was similar in 2006, 2005, etc. If you're really aiming at the mass market casual gamer, then you should be looking really closely at the system requirements for two games, WoW and the Sims. It's not about genres of games, but markets for games. No game targeted at a much smaller market is going to unseat WoW. The reason I used the latest Sims2 expansion pack for my example is because it has higher system requirements than WoW (being new) and is more representative of what a publisher needs to target today in order to still reach a similar size market.
Try comparing them to the system requirements for something like, the latest Sims2 expansion pack, which is targeting the mainstream, casual gamer market. It works with three different Intel integrated graphic chipsets and with a GeForce2. It requires a 2.0 Ghz Pentium 2. The lowest end graphics card for AoC is the GeForce FX 5800, released in 2003 (not old hat in 2003) and which was a high end card at the time. I have a midrange consumer laptop (like about half of casual gamers these days). I bought it this year and it does not meet those requirements. You can buy an $800 desktop from Dell right now that doesn't meet those requirements.
The truth is, AoC does not run on a good portion of the casual gamer systems in use to play WoW today. It doesn't run on OS X, which cuts out a big chunk of WoW players right there. I think your view of what a casual gamer's machine looks like is severely skewed, probably because you're a computer geek or possibly an "extreme gamer." If you want to hit the casual gamer market you need to look at what Walmart was selling a couple of years ago, and pick one of their mid-priced systems, not something that shipped with a several hundred dollar graphics card at the time and not a "gaming computer" from any period in time. You also can't assume users will have upgraded their RAM, most don't and don't even know that it is an option for them.
One of the aspects of MMO that Blizzard seems to understand really well, but no one else has to date is the value of the networking. All the supposed WoW-killers have technologically limited their potential users to a small subset of what WoW supports. This is understandable to some degree, but they have all taken it to extremes by emulating other games system requirements instead of mainstream games like WoW, the Sims, etc. If 60% of WoW players have a system that can play a new game, can you expect up to 60% to switch? Likely, no, because almost all of those 60% want to continue playing with their friends, one of whom at least probably does not have a system that will run the new game.
The formula for a real WoW-killer is a system that will run on a midrange system from two years ago (a little higher than Wow's requirements but nothing like AoC and about what Blizzard targeted when they released), which has a Mac version from day one, and which still keeps the learning curve relatively low. Running on consoles is a step in the right direction, provided they can interact with PC users. Finally, it needs to keep from changing the basic features that appeal to the mainstream (like not primarily PvP). On top of that there is plenty of room for innovation with better game play, more user content, the ability to buy third party content, etc. But the key is not to lose the ability for people to keep playing with their friends in a casual way... and that is where every single so-called WoW-killer has failed to date.
I don't think it likely either of these will dethrone WoW. First, the system requirements for both seem to be missing the "midrange computer from two years ago" that is the normal target for mainstream games. As such, they're only hitting the relatively small "extreme gamer" market. Next, there is no support for the Mac, which cuts out 14% of the total US market and much more of the game buying market. Third, losing a small portion of the market because of requirements can lose you much bigger portions of the market because these are networked games. If just one person in a group of friends has a Mac or a lower end PC, the entire group may well decide to stick with WoW or some other game that they can all play (especially if that one player is the cute co-ed gamer in the dorm).
Really, there is nothing wrong with either of these games, but they just aren't targeted at the same demographic as WoW, or if they are they are very poorly targeted. Some day someone will come out with a WoW-killer but I don't think either of these are even viable candidates.
Please stop misleading people. The US has a huge range of consumer protection laws well beyond advertising. Maybe we don't have as many as Europe, but nor do we have the dearth you are indicating. We have lemon laws, health and safety laws, contract restrictions, and fair use laws, just to name a few.
That's it (I don't think I've missed anything big). In addition to those, we have anti-monopoly laws, the basic gist of which is: -You cannot, through monopolistic powers, interfere with the business of competitors.The US has similar antitrust laws to most of the rest of the world. They make it criminal to leverage monopoly power from one market into another or fix prices (which is unrelated to interfering with competitors). Mind you our current administration's appointees seem to have been ignoring many of these laws and not bothering to prosecute them, but that does not mean they don't exist.
Now the reason this French law seems stupid to Americans is because Microsoft is not preventing competition with anyone!Lets ignore whether they are or are not for now. They are price fixing which hurts consumers and which laws in the US, including antitrust laws regulate. Remember when the RIAA was convicted of price fixing? It wasn't hurting indy publishers, but it was hurting consumers.
but really what the French law is trying to do is **preempt** the harmful act, and in doing so it is overly broad.No they weren't. They were trying to stop a harmful act against an individual, the same as the example I presented above.
At least that's how Americans see it.Americans are (for the most part) absurdly ignorant about their own laws and economics. I should know. I am an American and after many years in the public school system I was just lucky to realize how weak the education it gave me was. Luckier yet, I stumbled upon classic writings on logic, reason, rhetoric, and critical thinking that gave me the tools I needed to educate myself and which seem to have been stripped out of the US's educational system.
In short, how "Americans" see something is pretty pointless since most of them have very vague ideas about what the laws and intentions of the laws are and those ideas are riddled full of urban myths and half truths. If it wasn't oversimplified on the Simpsons or Oprah, there isn't a lot of point in trying to discuss it with the average American. Frankly, I think the level of intentional misinformation being pumped out by American companies and the government itself has pretty much rendered reasoned discourse with the average person to be pointless.
This is the wrong question. Those are all tie-ins, just not necessarily illegal ones. In this case, Asus decided it was an illegal tie in and consequently they advertised that they would refund the cost of it. In general the courts decide based upon numerous factors such as the effect upon the market and availability of non-tied alternatives. In this case the courts ruled not that it was illegally tied, but that the refund offer was intentionally misleading and an attempt to trick consumers into thinking they had an option, only to discover that option was realistically, nothing but a scam.
Windows has overwhelming market share in the desktop OS market and hence bundling it with other products is a violation of antitrust law and undermines the capitalist free market. Linux has a tiny amount of market share and is licensed in such a way to prevent it from ever wielding monopoly influence regardless of its market share.
That said, I don't see why this would force anyone to bundle anything. Rather it is simply saying companies that participate in MS's illegal bundling will be held accountable for rectifying that.
Most Americans don't even know where those countries are, especially the Americans who find these jokes funny. France is the one with the Eiffel tower. You see it in movies, hence they can relate and hence it can be funny.
...not to mention the Italians which switched sides in both world wars to avoid being the losing side.Italy is where pizza comes from, right? Seriously, there were jokes about Italy being a country of cowards for many, many years, but in recent years France is more prominent in the world stage and more critical of and opposed to the US, so it makes for a better target (and is more useful for politicians to criticize).
I guess it doesn't matter much what I consider a port, but when users are accustomed to features working across all their applications on an OS, when they don't, well they throw that application into the same bin as OpenOffice and often look for better more "native" solutions; regardless of whether or not the application was originated on another OS.
Recent versions of QT use the native widgets for Mac [1] without changes. There are always cases where an application taken from the Windows centric UI style (KDE, Win32) to OSX might need some extra code to make it look more OSXy, but QT at least tries to give you a leg up.Certainly they make an effort to make things closer to the experience with native applications, but they also try to reuse as much as possible, which often results in sort of a "least common denominator" effect. You end up with applications that can't use any features of any OS that are not also present in all the other OS's supported (or sometimes only features in one OS, making it like a port in this regard).
I think there is a middle ground between the high expectations I set, and the rather grim picture painted by yourself.I didn't think I was painting a grim picture. I was just trying to be realistic. For now QT is Linux first, and everything else second. The functionality it affords reflects this. Most of the developers are on Linux and primarily targeting it and many don't even know about the features of OS X and Vista that they aren't supporting, because they don't use those OS's enough to be familiar with said features.
They are a good step towards letting developers quickly target multiple platforms and keep an application up to date on all of them, but they are certainly not providing the same level of quality and functionality that truly native applications do. Perhaps in the future that will no longer be the case. In the mean time, well maybe I can recommend some apps to people who don't use Linux, but who might like apps that right now are Linux only.
While I've read widely differing statistics on IM market share, I haven't seen any put MSN as more than 25% of the worldwide market and significantly less for the US market. Pidgin does provide interoperability with MSN and even supports file transfers. What they don't do is waste a lot of time optimizing that minor feature, over and over again as Microsoft changes it again and again.
A devil's advocate might posit that putting effort into developing XMPP (taking pains to point out your spelling error "XMMP") is more of a waste than trying to track MSN's upgrades, because of the deployment size, but as someone who runs ejabberd in his basement...Adding features to XMPP has to be done once and can be done based upon the spec. Adding the same feature for MSN has to be done over and over and each time has to be done via reverse engineering. The point of Pidgin is to allow people to easily communicate via IM, despite the fragmented industry. To that end supporting XMPP fits with the project goals, whereas getting people migrate away from MSN does the same. There is even an argument for intentionally neglecting features for MSN. When you consider the extra effort required because of MS's shenanigans, it is a no brainer, IMHO.
While I applaud the efforts to make these libraries/environments cross platform, I think your comment is a bit misleading. Anything written in these is still obviously a port. It is better than having to run under an X server, but still not exactly native for speed or features compared to software written with native toolkits. From what I've read, for example, KDE apps run on OS X to not automatically gain the features OS X offers to native applications, like universal spellchecking, grammar checking, and other system services. Nor can they export their GUIs or install using OS X's.app bundles.
This is a step forward and gives developers a good way to target more platforms at once, but don't overstate the case lest you set expectations too high.
I imagine support for all closed, legacy formats is a pretty low priority. Why prioritize reverse engineering and optimizing less used features of an intentionally obfuscated format championed by someone trying to prevent the type of interoperability that is Pidgin's goal? Isn't it better for them to optimize file transfer over XMMP or the video and voice capabilities? I mean, if you want to transfer files with other users, there are plenty of other protocols that do work and where the Pidgin team doesn't have to work so hard only to have it intentionally broken by Microsoft at a later date. It is an inefficient use of their resources compared to working on core features using open protocols where they don't have to put in all that extra effort to overcome MS's antics.