Hey, if you want to block millions of potential visitors, that's your prerogative. Personally, I'd like to keep the doors open for them.
I've always felt that online retailers who neglect the mac Web share are really making a big mistake. Say they are 5% of Web users. Which 5% are they? Well, they are the ones with disposable income who can afford to shell out more for a computer. That means you've eliminated the 40% of Windows users who are pirating it in a country that does not enforce copyright law well. When it comes to potential customers, unless you're selling a product that only works on Windows you are actually cutting out more like 10-15% of your potential customers, and it is one of the most affluent chunks of that total market. It seems like a pretty poor idea to me.
Browser marketshare varies widely according to audience.
I'll second this. I do a little work on a Web based interface to a security product for very, very large network operators who can afford to shell out the big bucks. A major portion of our interface was nonfunctional in IE for about a year and a half before anyone noticed because all our customers use Firefox or Safari or Opera or Lynx. If you're actually trying to find information that is practical for your application you need to look at your market segment and similar sites.
Also, any site that already restricts browser access is going to have skewed results, because the potential audience using other browsers has either cloaked their browser to look like the supported one, or has gone somewhere else.
Yeah, IE only sites skew numbers because people fake it or go elsewhere. Likewise, sites that are defaults for a browser (like Google for Firefox or MSN for IE) will have results skewed towards that specific browser, so Google's numbers would not have been all that useful to you. Look for a Web site that targets the same demographic, but does not have any of these factors to muddle the numbers.
I'd also like to echo other people here in voicing another argument against IE specific Web services. No one knows what the market share in five years is going to look like, and ripping out your working solution because IE is down to 50% would be a horrible snafu. Further, as more and more devices start to provide Web browsing capabilities, like phones, PDAs, PVRs, and televisions, standards become more and more important. Your company itself could standardize on Linux from some vendor in the next 5 years. It doesn't hurt to be a little forward thinking and keep your tools flexible. There just isn't much you could not implement to be cross-platform if you have a competent developer, and if you don't you're likely to have all sorts of other problems as well.
Anecdotes are not valid evidence for making objective decisions. Look at the Consumer Reports studies, or any of the other independent studies for useful information.
If we had bought Macs, we'd be no better off than we are now; we'd just have half as many computers for the same money.
The cost and benefit for any given deployment of machines will be different in different situations. I've purchased large numbers of Dells, because they were the best value at the time, but I took the failure rate into account and had a number of spare machines and a quick restore option handy. Even with those extra machines as spares the cost was lower than going with another vendor and the cost incurred with swapping them was minimal since they paid for shipping, and it only took a few minutes of actual work to swap them (very unusual situation).
In the past seven years, only one of them has suffered a hardware failure...
I don't have numbers from 7 years ago, but for machines from 3 years ago an independent study a friend of mine bought access to while doing some purchasing shows emachines average a 18% failure rate in three years of use, which is still not as bad as Dell, but is a lot worse than a vendor like Apple or Sony or Lenovo. Also, those failures were almost 50% more likely to be the hard drive resulting in data loss. So if you have 3 emachines and one failed over 7 years, you're doing about average.
Sorry, this is factually incorrect. The number of files with PlayForSure on them is much, much higher than FairPlay. Pretty much the only songs with Fairplay on them are ones purchased from the iTMS, which accounts for about 3% of the music on iPods and.5% of music on computers. For a long time (and for some installs now) Windows Media Player added PlaysForSure DRM by default to every CD ripped. As a result there are about 10 times as many files with PlaysForSure as there are Fairplay.
There's a reason Microsoft doesn't support it with their own player, the Zune.
I don't have a Zune, but by all firsthand accounts they do play some PlaysForSure songs, just not all of them and I don't know as anyone has figured out exactly which ones.
The linked description does not seem to have any references to other descriptions of this vulnerability, nor do they seem to be showing up in Google or in the normal security channels. Anyone have a link to some real information on this. If this is truly a zero-day situation who was exploited and what are the details of the exploit? Was this a manual exploit or a worm?
I have no reason to doubt the linked description, but it is pretty vague. Where's the beef?
Who the hell even THINKS about enabling telnet on any box these days?
Sadly, a whole lot of people. I work for a company that makes very expensive and cool specialty servers that perform certain security related functions. As a security company, naturally we take care not to tarnish our reputation by leaving these servers vulnerable themselves. We try to encourage our customers to be moderately responsible as well, as any box can be made insecure. I know of at least on tier-1 ISP that has one of our boxes sitting publicly accessible with telnet enabled and no IP access restrictions.
As for who uses telnet in general, most ISPs in Asia seem to use telnet to configure their systems via their control networks. Large financial institutions in Europe use telnet, as use of encryption is restricted on their trusted networks, for reasons of transparency to the stock regulating authorities. ISPs in South America often use telnet and provide shell accounts to customers. I'm sure there are more groups that use it for one reason or another.
At times I wish game designers would FORGET about hit points.
Way back in the day there was a minigame asteroids like game called "lunatic fringe." Instead of hit points, your ship had various features, like thrust, maneuvering jets, lasers, and a few more. You could repair them over time if you had enough spare parts. When you took damage, one or more of these features was degraded. Take a hit from an alien craft and suddenly your ability to turn would behave sporadically, or you would accelerate more slowly, or your lasers would fire one time in three. It was one of the best ideas ever, and I wish modern games would take their cue from it.
I think it would be better (and "cooler") if Apple accepted that DRM is evil, full stop. And took the trouble to realise that DRM is sneaking in the back door because most of the populace is far too ill-informed to realise what is happening. Oh, and not locking iTunes into iPod by using a proprietary DRM format themselves.
If you think the market or consumer would be in a better position if Apple had not gotten into that market, then I think you're a shortsighted idiot. MS would be the gatekeeper for music and video by now and we wouldn't be having a discussion about politicians weighing in on the DRM issue because it would have already been decided years ago.
I'm sorry, how is this a comparison??? You mean an office package that allows importation of a closed standard but exportation/saving as an open standard is the same as Apple supporting DRM?
It is called an analogy. Apple calls for DRM to be banned, like many people, including the OpenOffice developers, call for ubiquitous closed data formats to be banned. Apple still uses DRM, however, because it is the only way they can do business selling music, just like OpenOffice still reads and writes.doc because it is a reality of the existing market. Is that too much of a stretch for you somehow?
But by your definition, Apple have reached the minimum criteria for possible investigation for antitrust issues.
Yes in some jurisdictions courts are now looking to see if Apple has enough influence to be considered a monopoly. Compare that to MS which is a monopoly (legally) and has been repeatedly convicted of abusing their monopoly including in regard to this particular market and has not stopped that action.
Rubbish. You just have two monopolies battling twice as hard to screw the customer over. And the distinct possibility of a price-fixing cartel between the two of them which is even worse.
Do you even understand why monopolies are bad or what actions they take that are illegal? A monopoly in one market lets you undermine free trade in a second market. In this case the secondary markets are music jukebox software, online music download stores, and DRM formats. One monopoly undermining one of those markets means that market quickly becomes another monopoly and consumers lose entirely. Two monopolies both leveraging their power against that market means there is still some level of limited competition, that market does not become another monopoly, and while consumers suffer, they suffer a lot less. Apple's proposal is that the governments or RIAA stop the method of abuse they are using which will stop MS from abusing it in that same way. What they reject is stopping their abuse until then as it will hand the market to MS resulting in negative affects for everyone, including Apple.
Stuff I buy has to be useful to *ME*, not as something purely to elevate me amongst my peers. You'll find this out for yourself with some proper assertion and self-worth therapy.
Grow up. If you don't like something in a non-monopolized market, don't buy it. Gee that was hard. Playing the social martyr and rejecting something because other people like it is just like those jackasses who claim to like bands until they are popular then cry about how they used to be cool, but aren't anymore. It is juvenile. I don't give a rat's ass if Apple puts their logo on things, or what society's view of their gadgets are. I don't even own an iPod. I also don't go around trying to convince other people they are evil because they are popular. I just look at the situation objectively. DRM is a problem, but multiple competing DRM schemes are a lot better for society than one, proprietary one.
Yes, because they are a corporation who are responsible for making as much money for their shareholders as possible. At this level they are no different to Microsoft. Get used to it.
I'm used to the motivations of corporations and don't claim Apple is not acting in their best fin
No, it's because the intelligent and computer savvy people tend to use many OSes -- Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X etc.
Umm, and you don't think that is in direct conflict with the implicit statement that people who use Mac OS are clueless? I think you're being contrary or did not bother to read what I was responding to.
No, but they can be more expensive depending on your needs.
And you think this is in conflict with my statement, "Apple machines' failing is that there is not as much variety of them, which means a given person is more likely to end up paying for things they don't want in order to get something they do want. That is a completely different problem than being overpriced."
Maybe you did not even read my post.
You know, I am really sick of Apple hardware. Logic board failures, wireless express cards breaking, high pitch noises, hardware getting too hot for my own comfort. I haven't had those issues else-where.
Good for you, I hope your lucky rabbit foot or whatever keeps working for you. Why do I care about your anecdotes? Are they in some way a better data source for me than multiple independent studies? All hardware breaks. Apple hardware breaks less often than most hardware, about the same amount as Lenovo hardware (statistically speaking) while costing slightly less on average. All your anecdotes don't add up to any sort of reliable data from which one should make decisions.
I usually have an application open at my parties called "Tunez" - please Google for it if you don't believe me.
Umm, why would someone disbelieve that you're running some program?
It has a simple web interface that can be accessed from anything with a web browser; be it a laptop, PC, handheld, whatever. No proprietary software is needed to access the non-proprietary format music files to play at my parties.
So? Nothing you've mentioned indicates how this is superior to iTunes for my uses. Looking at the page it does not handle Mp4 or Wav files, so that disqualifies it right there, even if the interface was as nice as iTunes, which I find doubtful since it has a Web interface.
Oh, and it should all run quite nicely on a reasonable 486 machine that's probably about 10-15 years old - possibly a 386 even.
I tossed all those old machines long ago. It might be a good candidate for those old SGI workstations in the garage, if it was in some way better than what I'm using now.
You may also wish to Google for "MythTV" or "Freevo" also as these will happily handle the video side of things
Neither supports my remote control and both have issues on PPC hardware. The legacy machine I'm using is an old dual g4 533. It has no problem recording a TV show, while playing another, and encoding/burning yet another to DVD.
So if you've got one propping open a door somewhere, load on a Linux distro and an app (or just use a bootable CD) and you've got a box that will do all that yours will - but in an open fashion with no requirement to hand over any money in the process.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. I had an old machine already. I didn't have to "hand over any money." The software I'm using was all free as in beer. Sure I could build a myth TV box as a hobby project, if I had the time, but why? I have a perfectly functional media server, webserver, PVR machine already. I don't see how making a mythTV box would be any cheaper, nor do I suppose it would be as nice of an interface. Burning a DVD of a given show is about 4 mouse clicks. I really like iTunes' interface for playing music and most people are familiar with it. What is my incentive and how is a mythTV box and cheaper or better?
You know, I've owned plenty of cheap PCs, and none of them have fit that description. I don't believe Apple would have to sacrifice reliability to offer affordable computers with the features people need.
You miss the point. Any company can always offer more options so that they have models that better fit the needs of some subset of people. If Apple had a thousand models, someone would still be unhappy that the exact feature set they want was not available and they need to buy the model with a 120G hard drive when all they really need is 110G. This is more of an issue for Apple than other companies since they tie their OS and hardware, but I was trying to explain the other part of the equation. Apple does not sell to fit the very, very low end, like the bottom of the line Dell machines, which use inferior grade parts much of the time and, in fact, whatever manufacturer bids lowest for a given lot. The same model of machine from Dell may contain a whole slew of different parts. The consistent part is they are all the lowest quality, cheapest ones they could buy. This is why Dell consistently has higher failure rates than almost anyone else and it is also one of the reasons why some of their computers are very inexpensive. Sometimes these computers are a good deal, if you have a lto of them and keep replacements handy, but for an individual family these are usually very poor machines, that fail and lose the data they contain and are nonfunctional or being repaired regularly or fail right out of warranty, resulting in higher total cost of ownership.
My comments are objective. I spoke to objective data collected by independent reviews and from a small scale study in the workplace. My personal experience is one of the three thinkpads I owned or was given by work failed, and then only after many years. I've had four different powerbooks, two of which had issues. That, like everything you've cited, it subjective data. It is anecdotal, and not particularly useful for determining real trends.
Nor did I say powerbooks are more reliable. I simply stated that your anecdotes are not a valid sample set and your opinions, if based solely on that, are unlikely to be accurate, except by chance.
I qualified the statement about physics because it is not just Macs or Windows, but divided among disciplines, from what I've seen. I know some physicists specializing in fluid dynamics and lasers who have told me they pretty much have to have a mac to do anything useful. I also know some who work with aerospace modeling who need Windows exclusively. I suspect this is broken up by discipline for the most part.
This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that Apple prevents other companies from using its DRM.
What's the most common DRM on songs owned by individuals in the US and Europe? Gee, that would be PlaysForSure because of Microsoft's illegally bundling with Windows. What is the one and only reason MS has not monopolized DRM? Apple. So, you think Apple should license their DRM scheme, but doing so would remove their ability to leverage the iPod's success, while not reducing MS's ability to leverage Window's success. How long do you think that would last? Apple can't abandon their tie in with FairPlay until someone stops MS from leveraging their Windows monopoly because they will lose the entire market in a few years. Apple suggests making DRM illegal, getting rid of both at once and being the best of all possible worlds for end users. What's to complain about, that they aren't willing to put their gun down and let MS shoot them in the face?
While Apple may claim they use DRM because the industry said to, that hasn't stopped them from using it to maintain their iPod+ITMS monopoly.
Apple may or may not have monopoly influence in the portable digital music player market, but their tying of that to the iTMS is not for purposes of selling music, it is for the purpose of selling iPods. Apple doesn't want the music business and they run it at a break even rate. Apple would love to outsource that somewhere or simply license music and video the same as everyone else. The problem is if they don't maintain their lock in, the online digital music market will be entirely controlled by Microsoft, who could use that to disadvantage both iPods and Macs. That is why Apple got into the market i the first place, to counter MS's move. I think they were surprised by how well the iPod did and they aren't going to walk away from it, but I believe they are sincere in wanting DRM gone. It just isn't practical for them to be the only one to abandon DRM, either by abandoning the mainstream music market as some claim they should or by abandoning their ability to promote that and practically surrendering the market to MS.
Yes two monopolies. MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Apple may have a monopoly on portable, digital music players. Both are leveraging their market influence in those markets into the DRM, online music sales, and jukebox software markets. Is there something you're not understanding about that?
You can significantly grow year after year, and never achieve 10% market penetration, let alone dominance. They can grow, and their competition will outgrow them, as it always has been.
Over the last few years, Apple has been growing faster than the market, although not by a huge amount. But it is true they probably will not dominate the market unless MS's monopoly is destroyed or weakened by some other mechanism.
I was referring to iTunes, the online store/service, or if you will, iTunes, who would like to be the gateway to any and all online media.
The official name is "The iTunes Music Store." If you want people to know what you're talking about you should be a little more precise.
Not the shitty bloated app that my kid installed on my PC after he wasted his hard earned money on an iPod (all the other kids have them, gotta be cool, i remember how it is).
Wow, you're bitter. I actually like the application. It is a lot nicer than Mplayer, WinAmp, BB, or WMP. I usually have it open on my media server and no one at my parties that I've seen has had any problems using it. I might mention, that is a seven year old machine, and it seems to run it just fine while also recording my TV shows and serving up Web pages, so it can't be too bloated.
No, they'd be playing the same game as MS. The Dells and eMachines would offer OS/X on their boxes, just like they offer Windows and are starting to offer linux.
DEll and eMachines would agree to offer OS X, so long as their contracts with MS don't forbid it and they'd start to sell a few at first, slowly scaling up, and then a few months later when they had to re-negotiate their OEM license for Windows MS would kill them on the price, making their Windows machines 10-20% more expensive than comparable models from other companies. They would then have to choose between killing their Windows selling business, or dropping OS X (which would probably be 5% of their business, if that). At the same time, they'd be trying to get driver support for the OS X boxes, which would mean poor stability, delays, possible limitation on which vendors they could buy components from, etc. and likely make OS X gain a reputation for crashing. Finally, while no business likes being pushed around by another, they'd also realize that if they become primarily an OS X company, then they would be competing with and be at the mercy of Apple, instead of just being at the mercy of MS. Apple already did this once, then stopped licensing their OS driving companies out of business. No one wants to be there.
MS effectively controls access to the generic pre-installed market. If you think otherwise, you don't understand the way the market works at all.
They can grow, only because the market continues to grow.
This is untrue. Apple has been growing faster than the market on average, which means they are winning people over from vendors that sell Windows boxes. If you go to any scientific conferences, especially computer security, you'll notice about half the machines are now Apple laptops. That is a drastic change from a few years ago. Their market share is up and their install share is up even higher.
The market for computers in business and government will dwarf the market for computers at home.
Actually those two markets are moving closer and closer to the same size, but what makes you think OS X machines aren't used in government? I know the CIA, regular army, and Navy have some and I met a security guy from the pentagon (DoD) who was carrying a powerbook.
They will simply never have the amount of clout that microsoft has. It's ridiculous on it's premise.
Until MS's monopoly is broken, obviously no one will. That is not a good argument for Apple taking some given action that will almost certainly result in their market share decreasing instead of increasing.
I don't have to use a Mac, and my unfamiliarity with Macs has never affected my career in
Apple sells overpriced plastic boxes with lock-in that is done in such a way that it somehow doesn't grab the attention of the clueless sheep that use it.
Let me think, of the most intelligent and computer savvy people I know, about 80% of them use Macs. Is that because they are clueless or because they assessed the value they were getting based upon all criteria and decided the mac was a better tool for their purpose? Hmmm, they must be clueless huh? And again with the "overpriced" nonsense? Come one already, we've been over and over this. Macs aren't overpriced as shown by numerous comparisons of near identical configurations and independent assessments. They're about 20% more expensive than the average machine, putting them slightly below most other vendors with the same ratings for reliability and support. Apple machines' failing is that there is not as much variety of them, which means a given person is more likely to end up paying for things they don't want in order to get something they do want. That is a completely different problem than being overpriced.
Microsoft does not deliver what they promise in their software, and abuses their position at the top in an attempt to retain their peak; little do they know that if they slacked up a bit and let someone else grab a little more market share, people wouldn't be making as many death threats against them.
Given the track record of their detractors, I wouldn't be worried about death threats either since no one follows through. Lazy hackers, go drink some more mountain dew. It makes sense for them to keep making as much money as they can if no one will stop them.
Linux provides people with total control over their systems while making the most simple of tasks take ten times longer than they should
I can't make my Linux system do quite a few things that I can make my Windows box and Mac do. At the same time, I don't seem to have any more problem doing simple tasks than I do on Windows, and in fact many common tasks are easier. Your argument is very 1994.
There is no "good" option. There is only a "not quite as bad" option. All you fanboys need to stop stroking your egos and let people use whatever the fuck they want.
I use all of the above and I'm happy to help point out strengths and weaknesses of each platform as well as advise people as to which of those strengths and weaknesses are likely to apply to them. That is wholly separate from the topic of MS's affect upon the market and the lack of investment and innovation in OS development that has resulted.
As long as they follow their business model they've always had - tying software to hardware - they'll never achieve enough market penetration to be Microsoft.
Actually, in our current non-free market, that is the only way they can have significant growth.
For consumer level stuff, if iTunes becomes too cumbersome, people will move on. It's yet to face any serious competition, when it does, it won't seem like such an unstoppable force.
iTunes is a music jukebox application with about 1/10 the penetration of MS's Windows Media Player. Your comments don't make a lot of sense in that light.
They could have very microsoft-ish market share if they'd sell OS/X for commodity hardware.
They could go out of business if they'd sell OS X for commodity software. They already tried that once when they were ahead in the OS wars, and almost died. Several companies brought superior OS's to the market, but dies because of MS's monopoly power. Having a better OS is not enough to win in a monopolized market. It isn't even enough to survive unless you have a complete, separate chain of supply the monopoly cannot undermine.
I'd install it tomorrow if I could
Great. With you and all the other people that can afford to pay for a copy and who know how to install an OS, or even what an OS is, and who aren't locked into Windows for some applications or purposes that should boost Apple's market share about 3%, while completely killing the 50% of their revenue they get from hardware sales.
People don't install OS's. If Apple can't reach the pre-install market with OS X they are missing the largest chunk. If they are missing that chunk and are missing the business market who is still locked in with ActiveX,.doc, VB, exchange, etc then they are missing all but a tiny portion of the legal market, a good chunk of which Apple already has.
I'm sure some businesses love Macs and are all Apple this and Apple that, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
Apple does not target business for a number of pretty good reasons I'm not going into right now. Apple can slowly grow market share (as they have been) so long as they maintain their hardware/software chain. The minute they break that, MS can kill them.
You're right that the only way Apple will gain a large share of the market is by unbundling the two, but what you're failing to realize is that action is only possible if MS's monopoly is already broken or severely weakened. If Linux takes the business market, for example, then Apple could unbundle these two items. Or, if the government actually prosecuted MS effectively and broke them up into companies that were in competition with one another, then Apple would be forced to unbundle their products to survive as all the value of bundling would be gone, while the market would be highly competitive. Both are very unlikely in the near future.
Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes);
Apple is selling music players and needs a way to get music to users easily so they will buy said music players. The providers of said music are a cartel convicted of abuse multiple times. The cartel required DRM and Apple pushed back on how restrictive it is and prices. Does anyone think it would be better if Apple refused to do business with them and let Microsoft dominate the DRM market? Apple needed to be there to stop MS from using the incompatibility of DRM'd songs against their OS offering. There is nothing hypocritical about saying it would be better for everyone (except the RIAA) if DRM was no more, either voluntarily or by law. Does anyone complain that OpenOffice reads and writes.doc files, all while they talk about how bad it is people are locked in that format?
Apple's perceived arrogance when they warned consumers not to upgrade to Vista, while not rushing to fix the problem themselves;
Perceived arrogance? Some people think Apple was arrogant when they apologized for their software not working and recommended people hold off upgrades? Can you tell me the name of a software vendor that isn't cautioning customers to wait until things stabilize, because I'll happily stop doing business with the irresponsible twits.
...and Apple's seemingly unstoppable market dominance in the form of the iPod.
They have about 70% which is the minimum share where some governments start investigating possible antitrust issues due to dominance. Compare this to MS's 90% and multiple convictions for abuse. Some of Apple's actions are antitrust abuse if they have enough market share, but all in markets where MS already is abusing their monopoly and the governments have declined to stop them. Two wrongs don't make a right, but two monopolies battling one another is a lot better than one screwing consumers as hard as possible.
The iPhone featured heavily as well, aproduct[sic] that is months from release but steals the press from more competitive products.
Ummm... umm... what? Apple released pictures and discussed a cool upcoming new device and people paid attention and this is somehow indicative of Apple becoming an evil empire? I like it when companies come out with cool toys. I hate it when they come out with crap that no one likes but everyone has to use anyway.
Could Apple suddenly gain a dominant position in the market and then abuse that position? Well, it is vaguely possible, but the items listed are no reason to think it might be likely. If they do that, and we all suffer as a result I'll complain my head off, but one nice thing Apple has done to date is avoided any lock-in that keeps me from migrating all my hardware and files to another platform like Linux. Until they do that, I'm not about to lose any sleep over the danger of Apple, when the danger of MS has never been stopped and shows no signs of slowing.
That said I still miss Windows for a few applications and MOSTLY for the keyboard commands (in the OS GUI). Window Key + R + cmd = CLI. On the Mac it's click or Apple + Space + Term + Click.
I've heard arguments like this before and they usually end up in the same thing. It's not that OS X is worse at "keyboardability," it is that Windows users have trained themselves to learn the keyboard shortcuts for Windows, but not for OS X. Others have already pointed out Cmd-space+t+e+enter works for what you want, but beyond that it works for so many more things than the same feature in Windows. In Windows you're limited to things in the start menu, while on OS X it includes all applications and even files and their contents. I can hit cmd-space+m+p+l+s+enter and it will pull up that PDF about the MPLS protocol that I was reading the other day. I find that way easier than opening a Windows to c: and then running a search to try to find it.
Before 10.4, you might have been able to argue that using the keyboard on Windows was better, but it is behind these days. Take selecting a given window with the keyboard. Say you have 100 windows open, 10 per application. To go from app 1, window 1 to app 5 window 5 you hit the same key combination 49 times. On OS X you hit one key combination 4 times and then another 4 times. That's 41 fewer key presses. The more windows, the bigger the advantage to OS X. Another thing is because OS X is designed for one button mice by default, you almost never find programs that make that the only way to get to some function, rather than putting it in a regular menu. This means it is easy to use the keyboard to navigate to any function, which is untrue for a number of Windows apps.
I think you're just wrong. I think you are used to Windows keyboard shortcuts and what is most annoying about OS X ones to you is that they are not the ones you've already memorized. I use both OS's daily and I know which one seems ahead for keyboardability to me.
The summary doesn't even mention Apple... (then again, I didn't rtfa, but I think the question stands.)
The article does talk about OS X, but no more so than Vista. This does seem to be poorly classified. Does Slashdot have a "generic OS's" or "baseless speculation" category?
I think 10 years from now you will see just about every application running in an isolated environment, possibly a VM of sorts. In particular, applications which access machines or applications that are not "trusted" will be run isolated from other applications on the system. They will be able to save files to a scratchpad area and send events to certain other applications such as a printing subsystem, but that's about it.
Mandatory Access Controls. They exist now in SELinux, TrustedBSD, Solaris, and there is an OS X port. Instead of incurring the overhead for a VM for every app (although that is not a huge overhead in many cases) OS's simply restrict the behaviors of applications to a predefined set. I think this is definitely the direction the OS security field is moving in. It also won't apply only to untrusted applications. Each application will be assigned an ACL based upon what it is supposed to be doing. In this way a buffer overflow in that application is a lot harder to exploit. Want send spam messages, you'd better find an overflow in the e-mail client or in the core of the OS itself.
My personal model for this type of security includes levels of trust for every application. Applications that ship by default have high levels of trust and preassigned ACLs that match up with what they are supposed to be doing. Applications that are signed and certified by trusted parties have slightly lower levels of trust, and are assigned an ACL included with them when installed. Other applications are given lesser amounts of trust based upon if the are just signed or just certified or neither. They are assigned a merger of the accompanying ACLs and the OS's default ACL for that trust level (possibly with multiple versions of these for different application types). All this is, of course, configurable by the user, but good, fairly strict defaults are applied. Add to this a good UI for when an application wants more privileges than its current ACL (a rare occurrence with good design) and you have a pretty hardened security layer. Communication between applications would, of course, be restricted, with certain services available to most end user applications using standard APIs. For this to work, some services like an update manager and a license/registration service would need to be standardized and made convenient to developers. VMs in ACLs of their own can be used to help ease a transition from old software.
I also see most applications using virtually no local storage except security credentials and cached data. All "real data" will be stored on "the big server in the sky" or "the big server run by the IT department." The exceptions will be applications demanding extreme privacy, such as diaries and non-networked dayplanners, applications demanding offline use, such as cellphone notepads, and "convenience applications" like calculators and non-networked games.
I think within 10 years we'll have more storage capacity on the average device than we know what dodo with it and RAID setups will be the norm. I also almost all devices will have network connections all the time increasing the use of network storage as well. Depending upon how the industry and how current events unfold we may have a lot of remote, encrypted data or we may not. We may well have centralized network storage in the form of a server in everyone's home. We may actually move back and forth between such scenarios as time progresses (as we have in the past).
Vista is essentially a shinier piece of crap. Microsoft has pretty much ceased innovating.
I think there are real improvements in Vista, although there are many technologies added to benefit MS and disadvantage customers as well. Indexed searching is not really that innovative, but it is an improvement. Fewer default privileges for standard users is a plus.
...then the market will eventually eat them alive. People hate IE7 and some started switching to Firefox due to IE6's poor maintenance.
If MS stopped doing any work tomorrow, eventually, the market would move on. As it is, however, MS doesn't do no work, they simply do the minimum necessary to not lose the market. IE is a good example. People hated IE6 and IE5 for that matter. It was terrible and put head to head with Firefox was a pile of dung. After many years of this, MS still only lost about 20% of the market and retained the lion's share. The market did not eat them alive, despite the fact that they were way behind. MS used their monopoly to undermine market forces in this regard. Now they have put out IE7 which is a "me too" solution and will still not keep up with Firefox, but it will be "good enough' so that most people won't be so annoyed that they will go out of their way to educate themselves on their options and find something else.
The same thing applies with Vista. It is basically a counter to OS X. Gee OS X has had these features for years now and we've seen their market share double and it seems to be getting faster. So MS countered with another "me too" and it probably will work. It also includes a whole slew of lock-ins designed to make it harder to move away from.
Everyone seems to think that Microsoft can never fail. Big players lose big all the time when they make mistakes, and Microsoft can fall just like any other company.
Oh MS can certainly fail, but because of their position releasing inferior products is less likely to be the cause of their fall from grace, than other factors. Pure distrust for the US and growing anti-americanism may actually be the pebble that releases the avalanche and kills MS.
Vista isn't really bad, it's boring. It's so boring that I wouldn't want to buy a new computer to have it, or upgrade to it. It's so boring that it makes upgrading to it from XP look unnecessary and gaudy. So boring, in fact, that the power users won't use it and the non-power users will be confused by its strange layout and lack of familiar options.
People don't have to want Vista. It will come on every new computer in the store. They will eventually need or want a new computer and then they will have Vista and so long as it isn't so bad that people can't stand it, MS's dominance will go on.
Everything may be Vista in a few years because people will buy new computers with it on there, but I suspect at least somewhat of a backlash.
What sort of backlash? Some people are still using Win2K. Maybe some corporations will continue doing so. Maybe some will switch to Linux. I don't think it will be a big deal. Most people will be running it and it will be harder than ever to move away from it because in addition to the Web being designed for IE only, and your documents being in.doc or.xls format and games being released first on Windows, your video downloads will only work on Windows and your PDFs will now be XPS files tht will only be created and read properly on Windows, etc.
Big players come and go. Yes, MS might be able to run dry for a few years, but if they keep releasing seriously disappointing OS's, people will eventually catch on and go to Mac or something.
In a free market this would happen, but our antitrust laws are not enforced against MS. I have little confidence that the free market will be able to solve this problem.
There is a lot of discussion about various parts of OS's, but here is something. This is my wish list of what I'd like to see i the ideal OS released in 3 years:
Completely open source, for innovation and support from a variety of vendors.
Security granularity for files, users, applications, local services, network services, and hardware access broken down individually and by group
Well thought out security defaults, UI, and trust levels for all of the above so the user rarely if ever will have to see any of it
Open standards and file formats used everywhere
Easy communication and sharing of centralized services for all applications (spelling, grammar, dictionary, thesaurus, scripts, translation, mouse gestures, voice activation, screenshots and motion capture, etc.) all available to all programs along with the ability to add arbitrary ones.
Better UI's with more options for easy customization for even the clueless.
Virtualization integrated into the OS and somewhat abstracted from the interface. You should be able to run application designed for legacy OS's as though they were native with minimal noticeable differences. A non-native application should just be an icon you click on and it "just works."
Central package management for finding, downloading, licensing, updating, deleting, and controlling every application including all commercial software.
Portable applications the user can drag to a network share, thumb drive, iPod, IM session, e-mail message, or whatever and which will still work on the other end.
Integrated compiler and build tools, for auto-magically building custom binaries from included source invisible to end users.
Smart and granular audio controls by application, file, location, network resource, and sound level. My browser should never play loud music from a Website at work, and my IM chats should be heralded by a quiet ding. At home my Web browser should play music or not on a per-site basis, defaulting to off. My global volume control should allow me to make sure nothing coming out of my machine is ever above a given volume. I should be able to mix and match audio output devices and sounds from applications.
Better options for keeping multiple workstations and portables in synch and backed up without any work on my part.
GPS functionality. My machine should no where it is, and where everything else is and tell me.
Unified, secure communications by person. The OS should manage public-private keys for individuals and allow a given person to be identified and communicated with securely using voice, video, instant text, delayed text, etc. using a variety of networks including direct wifi with other machines cellular networks, and ethernet.
Any machine should be able to participate in ubiquitous and secure distributed computing, allowing me access to more resources when I need them for big jobs and to share my resources with others when I'm not using them.
Well, that is the list off the top of my head. Does anyone else have any wishes for the OS of tomorrow?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if you want to block millions of potential visitors, that's your prerogative. Personally, I'd like to keep the doors open for them.
I've always felt that online retailers who neglect the mac Web share are really making a big mistake. Say they are 5% of Web users. Which 5% are they? Well, they are the ones with disposable income who can afford to shell out more for a computer. That means you've eliminated the 40% of Windows users who are pirating it in a country that does not enforce copyright law well. When it comes to potential customers, unless you're selling a product that only works on Windows you are actually cutting out more like 10-15% of your potential customers, and it is one of the most affluent chunks of that total market. It seems like a pretty poor idea to me.
Browser marketshare varies widely according to audience.
I'll second this. I do a little work on a Web based interface to a security product for very, very large network operators who can afford to shell out the big bucks. A major portion of our interface was nonfunctional in IE for about a year and a half before anyone noticed because all our customers use Firefox or Safari or Opera or Lynx. If you're actually trying to find information that is practical for your application you need to look at your market segment and similar sites.
Also, any site that already restricts browser access is going to have skewed results, because the potential audience using other browsers has either cloaked their browser to look like the supported one, or has gone somewhere else.
Yeah, IE only sites skew numbers because people fake it or go elsewhere. Likewise, sites that are defaults for a browser (like Google for Firefox or MSN for IE) will have results skewed towards that specific browser, so Google's numbers would not have been all that useful to you. Look for a Web site that targets the same demographic, but does not have any of these factors to muddle the numbers.
I'd also like to echo other people here in voicing another argument against IE specific Web services. No one knows what the market share in five years is going to look like, and ripping out your working solution because IE is down to 50% would be a horrible snafu. Further, as more and more devices start to provide Web browsing capabilities, like phones, PDAs, PVRs, and televisions, standards become more and more important. Your company itself could standardize on Linux from some vendor in the next 5 years. It doesn't hurt to be a little forward thinking and keep your tools flexible. There just isn't much you could not implement to be cross-platform if you have a competent developer, and if you don't you're likely to have all sorts of other problems as well.
I work in an office...
Anecdotes are not valid evidence for making objective decisions. Look at the Consumer Reports studies, or any of the other independent studies for useful information.
If we had bought Macs, we'd be no better off than we are now; we'd just have half as many computers for the same money.
The cost and benefit for any given deployment of machines will be different in different situations. I've purchased large numbers of Dells, because they were the best value at the time, but I took the failure rate into account and had a number of spare machines and a quick restore option handy. Even with those extra machines as spares the cost was lower than going with another vendor and the cost incurred with swapping them was minimal since they paid for shipping, and it only took a few minutes of actual work to swap them (very unusual situation).
In the past seven years, only one of them has suffered a hardware failure...
I don't have numbers from 7 years ago, but for machines from 3 years ago an independent study a friend of mine bought access to while doing some purchasing shows emachines average a 18% failure rate in three years of use, which is still not as bad as Dell, but is a lot worse than a vendor like Apple or Sony or Lenovo. Also, those failures were almost 50% more likely to be the hard drive resulting in data loss. So if you have 3 emachines and one failed over 7 years, you're doing about average.
Bzzt. That would be FairPlay.
Sorry, this is factually incorrect. The number of files with PlayForSure on them is much, much higher than FairPlay. Pretty much the only songs with Fairplay on them are ones purchased from the iTMS, which accounts for about 3% of the music on iPods and .5% of music on computers. For a long time (and for some installs now) Windows Media Player added PlaysForSure DRM by default to every CD ripped. As a result there are about 10 times as many files with PlaysForSure as there are Fairplay.
There's a reason Microsoft doesn't support it with their own player, the Zune.
I don't have a Zune, but by all firsthand accounts they do play some PlaysForSure songs, just not all of them and I don't know as anyone has figured out exactly which ones.
The linked description does not seem to have any references to other descriptions of this vulnerability, nor do they seem to be showing up in Google or in the normal security channels. Anyone have a link to some real information on this. If this is truly a zero-day situation who was exploited and what are the details of the exploit? Was this a manual exploit or a worm?
I have no reason to doubt the linked description, but it is pretty vague. Where's the beef?
Who the hell even THINKS about enabling telnet on any box these days?
Sadly, a whole lot of people. I work for a company that makes very expensive and cool specialty servers that perform certain security related functions. As a security company, naturally we take care not to tarnish our reputation by leaving these servers vulnerable themselves. We try to encourage our customers to be moderately responsible as well, as any box can be made insecure. I know of at least on tier-1 ISP that has one of our boxes sitting publicly accessible with telnet enabled and no IP access restrictions.
As for who uses telnet in general, most ISPs in Asia seem to use telnet to configure their systems via their control networks. Large financial institutions in Europe use telnet, as use of encryption is restricted on their trusted networks, for reasons of transparency to the stock regulating authorities. ISPs in South America often use telnet and provide shell accounts to customers. I'm sure there are more groups that use it for one reason or another.
At times I wish game designers would FORGET about hit points.
Way back in the day there was a minigame asteroids like game called "lunatic fringe." Instead of hit points, your ship had various features, like thrust, maneuvering jets, lasers, and a few more. You could repair them over time if you had enough spare parts. When you took damage, one or more of these features was degraded. Take a hit from an alien craft and suddenly your ability to turn would behave sporadically, or you would accelerate more slowly, or your lasers would fire one time in three. It was one of the best ideas ever, and I wish modern games would take their cue from it.
I think it would be better (and "cooler") if Apple accepted that DRM is evil, full stop. And took the trouble to realise that DRM is sneaking in the back door because most of the populace is far too ill-informed to realise what is happening. Oh, and not locking iTunes into iPod by using a proprietary DRM format themselves.
If you think the market or consumer would be in a better position if Apple had not gotten into that market, then I think you're a shortsighted idiot. MS would be the gatekeeper for music and video by now and we wouldn't be having a discussion about politicians weighing in on the DRM issue because it would have already been decided years ago.
I'm sorry, how is this a comparison??? You mean an office package that allows importation of a closed standard but exportation/saving as an open standard is the same as Apple supporting DRM?
It is called an analogy. Apple calls for DRM to be banned, like many people, including the OpenOffice developers, call for ubiquitous closed data formats to be banned. Apple still uses DRM, however, because it is the only way they can do business selling music, just like OpenOffice still reads and writes .doc because it is a reality of the existing market. Is that too much of a stretch for you somehow?
But by your definition, Apple have reached the minimum criteria for possible investigation for antitrust issues.
Yes in some jurisdictions courts are now looking to see if Apple has enough influence to be considered a monopoly. Compare that to MS which is a monopoly (legally) and has been repeatedly convicted of abusing their monopoly including in regard to this particular market and has not stopped that action.
Rubbish. You just have two monopolies battling twice as hard to screw the customer over. And the distinct possibility of a price-fixing cartel between the two of them which is even worse.
Do you even understand why monopolies are bad or what actions they take that are illegal? A monopoly in one market lets you undermine free trade in a second market. In this case the secondary markets are music jukebox software, online music download stores, and DRM formats. One monopoly undermining one of those markets means that market quickly becomes another monopoly and consumers lose entirely. Two monopolies both leveraging their power against that market means there is still some level of limited competition, that market does not become another monopoly, and while consumers suffer, they suffer a lot less. Apple's proposal is that the governments or RIAA stop the method of abuse they are using which will stop MS from abusing it in that same way. What they reject is stopping their abuse until then as it will hand the market to MS resulting in negative affects for everyone, including Apple.
Stuff I buy has to be useful to *ME*, not as something purely to elevate me amongst my peers. You'll find this out for yourself with some proper assertion and self-worth therapy.
Grow up. If you don't like something in a non-monopolized market, don't buy it. Gee that was hard. Playing the social martyr and rejecting something because other people like it is just like those jackasses who claim to like bands until they are popular then cry about how they used to be cool, but aren't anymore. It is juvenile. I don't give a rat's ass if Apple puts their logo on things, or what society's view of their gadgets are. I don't even own an iPod. I also don't go around trying to convince other people they are evil because they are popular. I just look at the situation objectively. DRM is a problem, but multiple competing DRM schemes are a lot better for society than one, proprietary one.
Yes, because they are a corporation who are responsible for making as much money for their shareholders as possible. At this level they are no different to Microsoft. Get used to it.
I'm used to the motivations of corporations and don't claim Apple is not acting in their best fin
No, it's because the intelligent and computer savvy people tend to use many OSes -- Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X etc.
Umm, and you don't think that is in direct conflict with the implicit statement that people who use Mac OS are clueless? I think you're being contrary or did not bother to read what I was responding to.
No, but they can be more expensive depending on your needs.
And you think this is in conflict with my statement, "Apple machines' failing is that there is not as much variety of them, which means a given person is more likely to end up paying for things they don't want in order to get something they do want. That is a completely different problem than being overpriced."
Maybe you did not even read my post.
You know, I am really sick of Apple hardware. Logic board failures, wireless express cards breaking, high pitch noises, hardware getting too hot for my own comfort. I haven't had those issues else-where.
Good for you, I hope your lucky rabbit foot or whatever keeps working for you. Why do I care about your anecdotes? Are they in some way a better data source for me than multiple independent studies? All hardware breaks. Apple hardware breaks less often than most hardware, about the same amount as Lenovo hardware (statistically speaking) while costing slightly less on average. All your anecdotes don't add up to any sort of reliable data from which one should make decisions.
I usually have an application open at my parties called "Tunez" - please Google for it if you don't believe me.
Umm, why would someone disbelieve that you're running some program?
It has a simple web interface that can be accessed from anything with a web browser; be it a laptop, PC, handheld, whatever. No proprietary software is needed to access the non-proprietary format music files to play at my parties.
So? Nothing you've mentioned indicates how this is superior to iTunes for my uses. Looking at the page it does not handle Mp4 or Wav files, so that disqualifies it right there, even if the interface was as nice as iTunes, which I find doubtful since it has a Web interface.
Oh, and it should all run quite nicely on a reasonable 486 machine that's probably about 10-15 years old - possibly a 386 even.
I tossed all those old machines long ago. It might be a good candidate for those old SGI workstations in the garage, if it was in some way better than what I'm using now.
You may also wish to Google for "MythTV" or "Freevo" also as these will happily handle the video side of things
Neither supports my remote control and both have issues on PPC hardware. The legacy machine I'm using is an old dual g4 533. It has no problem recording a TV show, while playing another, and encoding/burning yet another to DVD.
So if you've got one propping open a door somewhere, load on a Linux distro and an app (or just use a bootable CD) and you've got a box that will do all that yours will - but in an open fashion with no requirement to hand over any money in the process.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. I had an old machine already. I didn't have to "hand over any money." The software I'm using was all free as in beer. Sure I could build a myth TV box as a hobby project, if I had the time, but why? I have a perfectly functional media server, webserver, PVR machine already. I don't see how making a mythTV box would be any cheaper, nor do I suppose it would be as nice of an interface. Burning a DVD of a given show is about 4 mouse clicks. I really like iTunes' interface for playing music and most people are familiar with it. What is my incentive and how is a mythTV box and cheaper or better?
You know, I've owned plenty of cheap PCs, and none of them have fit that description. I don't believe Apple would have to sacrifice reliability to offer affordable computers with the features people need.
You miss the point. Any company can always offer more options so that they have models that better fit the needs of some subset of people. If Apple had a thousand models, someone would still be unhappy that the exact feature set they want was not available and they need to buy the model with a 120G hard drive when all they really need is 110G. This is more of an issue for Apple than other companies since they tie their OS and hardware, but I was trying to explain the other part of the equation. Apple does not sell to fit the very, very low end, like the bottom of the line Dell machines, which use inferior grade parts much of the time and, in fact, whatever manufacturer bids lowest for a given lot. The same model of machine from Dell may contain a whole slew of different parts. The consistent part is they are all the lowest quality, cheapest ones they could buy. This is why Dell consistently has higher failure rates than almost anyone else and it is also one of the reasons why some of their computers are very inexpensive. Sometimes these computers are a good deal, if you have a lto of them and keep replacements handy, but for an individual family these are usually very poor machines, that fail and lose the data they contain and are nonfunctional or being repaired regularly or fail right out of warranty, resulting in higher total cost of ownership.
Well, it is not very objective.
My comments are objective. I spoke to objective data collected by independent reviews and from a small scale study in the workplace. My personal experience is one of the three thinkpads I owned or was given by work failed, and then only after many years. I've had four different powerbooks, two of which had issues. That, like everything you've cited, it subjective data. It is anecdotal, and not particularly useful for determining real trends.
Nor did I say powerbooks are more reliable. I simply stated that your anecdotes are not a valid sample set and your opinions, if based solely on that, are unlikely to be accurate, except by chance.
I qualified the statement about physics because it is not just Macs or Windows, but divided among disciplines, from what I've seen. I know some physicists specializing in fluid dynamics and lasers who have told me they pretty much have to have a mac to do anything useful. I also know some who work with aerospace modeling who need Windows exclusively. I suspect this is broken up by discipline for the most part.
This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that Apple prevents other companies from using its DRM.
What's the most common DRM on songs owned by individuals in the US and Europe? Gee, that would be PlaysForSure because of Microsoft's illegally bundling with Windows. What is the one and only reason MS has not monopolized DRM? Apple. So, you think Apple should license their DRM scheme, but doing so would remove their ability to leverage the iPod's success, while not reducing MS's ability to leverage Window's success. How long do you think that would last? Apple can't abandon their tie in with FairPlay until someone stops MS from leveraging their Windows monopoly because they will lose the entire market in a few years. Apple suggests making DRM illegal, getting rid of both at once and being the best of all possible worlds for end users. What's to complain about, that they aren't willing to put their gun down and let MS shoot them in the face?
While Apple may claim they use DRM because the industry said to, that hasn't stopped them from using it to maintain their iPod+ITMS monopoly.
Apple may or may not have monopoly influence in the portable digital music player market, but their tying of that to the iTMS is not for purposes of selling music, it is for the purpose of selling iPods. Apple doesn't want the music business and they run it at a break even rate. Apple would love to outsource that somewhere or simply license music and video the same as everyone else. The problem is if they don't maintain their lock in, the online digital music market will be entirely controlled by Microsoft, who could use that to disadvantage both iPods and Macs. That is why Apple got into the market i the first place, to counter MS's move. I think they were surprised by how well the iPod did and they aren't going to walk away from it, but I believe they are sincere in wanting DRM gone. It just isn't practical for them to be the only one to abandon DRM, either by abandoning the mainstream music market as some claim they should or by abandoning their ability to promote that and practically surrendering the market to MS.
Two monopolies?
Yes two monopolies. MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Apple may have a monopoly on portable, digital music players. Both are leveraging their market influence in those markets into the DRM, online music sales, and jukebox software markets. Is there something you're not understanding about that?
You can significantly grow year after year, and never achieve 10% market penetration, let alone dominance. They can grow, and their competition will outgrow them, as it always has been.
Over the last few years, Apple has been growing faster than the market, although not by a huge amount. But it is true they probably will not dominate the market unless MS's monopoly is destroyed or weakened by some other mechanism.
I was referring to iTunes, the online store/service, or if you will, iTunes, who would like to be the gateway to any and all online media.
The official name is "The iTunes Music Store." If you want people to know what you're talking about you should be a little more precise.
Not the shitty bloated app that my kid installed on my PC after he wasted his hard earned money on an iPod (all the other kids have them, gotta be cool, i remember how it is).
Wow, you're bitter. I actually like the application. It is a lot nicer than Mplayer, WinAmp, BB, or WMP. I usually have it open on my media server and no one at my parties that I've seen has had any problems using it. I might mention, that is a seven year old machine, and it seems to run it just fine while also recording my TV shows and serving up Web pages, so it can't be too bloated.
No, they'd be playing the same game as MS. The Dells and eMachines would offer OS/X on their boxes, just like they offer Windows and are starting to offer linux.
DEll and eMachines would agree to offer OS X, so long as their contracts with MS don't forbid it and they'd start to sell a few at first, slowly scaling up, and then a few months later when they had to re-negotiate their OEM license for Windows MS would kill them on the price, making their Windows machines 10-20% more expensive than comparable models from other companies. They would then have to choose between killing their Windows selling business, or dropping OS X (which would probably be 5% of their business, if that). At the same time, they'd be trying to get driver support for the OS X boxes, which would mean poor stability, delays, possible limitation on which vendors they could buy components from, etc. and likely make OS X gain a reputation for crashing. Finally, while no business likes being pushed around by another, they'd also realize that if they become primarily an OS X company, then they would be competing with and be at the mercy of Apple, instead of just being at the mercy of MS. Apple already did this once, then stopped licensing their OS driving companies out of business. No one wants to be there.
MS effectively controls access to the generic pre-installed market. If you think otherwise, you don't understand the way the market works at all.
They can grow, only because the market continues to grow.
This is untrue. Apple has been growing faster than the market on average, which means they are winning people over from vendors that sell Windows boxes. If you go to any scientific conferences, especially computer security, you'll notice about half the machines are now Apple laptops. That is a drastic change from a few years ago. Their market share is up and their install share is up even higher.
The market for computers in business and government will dwarf the market for computers at home.
Actually those two markets are moving closer and closer to the same size, but what makes you think OS X machines aren't used in government? I know the CIA, regular army, and Navy have some and I met a security guy from the pentagon (DoD) who was carrying a powerbook.
They will simply never have the amount of clout that microsoft has. It's ridiculous on it's premise.
Until MS's monopoly is broken, obviously no one will. That is not a good argument for Apple taking some given action that will almost certainly result in their market share decreasing instead of increasing.
I don't have to use a Mac, and my unfamiliarity with Macs has never affected my career in
Who modded this interesting?
Apple sells overpriced plastic boxes with lock-in that is done in such a way that it somehow doesn't grab the attention of the clueless sheep that use it.
Let me think, of the most intelligent and computer savvy people I know, about 80% of them use Macs. Is that because they are clueless or because they assessed the value they were getting based upon all criteria and decided the mac was a better tool for their purpose? Hmmm, they must be clueless huh? And again with the "overpriced" nonsense? Come one already, we've been over and over this. Macs aren't overpriced as shown by numerous comparisons of near identical configurations and independent assessments. They're about 20% more expensive than the average machine, putting them slightly below most other vendors with the same ratings for reliability and support. Apple machines' failing is that there is not as much variety of them, which means a given person is more likely to end up paying for things they don't want in order to get something they do want. That is a completely different problem than being overpriced.
Microsoft does not deliver what they promise in their software, and abuses their position at the top in an attempt to retain their peak; little do they know that if they slacked up a bit and let someone else grab a little more market share, people wouldn't be making as many death threats against them.
Given the track record of their detractors, I wouldn't be worried about death threats either since no one follows through. Lazy hackers, go drink some more mountain dew. It makes sense for them to keep making as much money as they can if no one will stop them.
Linux provides people with total control over their systems while making the most simple of tasks take ten times longer than they should
I can't make my Linux system do quite a few things that I can make my Windows box and Mac do. At the same time, I don't seem to have any more problem doing simple tasks than I do on Windows, and in fact many common tasks are easier. Your argument is very 1994.
There is no "good" option. There is only a "not quite as bad" option. All you fanboys need to stop stroking your egos and let people use whatever the fuck they want.
I use all of the above and I'm happy to help point out strengths and weaknesses of each platform as well as advise people as to which of those strengths and weaknesses are likely to apply to them. That is wholly separate from the topic of MS's affect upon the market and the lack of investment and innovation in OS development that has resulted.
As long as they follow their business model they've always had - tying software to hardware - they'll never achieve enough market penetration to be Microsoft.
Actually, in our current non-free market, that is the only way they can have significant growth.
For consumer level stuff, if iTunes becomes too cumbersome, people will move on. It's yet to face any serious competition, when it does, it won't seem like such an unstoppable force.
iTunes is a music jukebox application with about 1/10 the penetration of MS's Windows Media Player. Your comments don't make a lot of sense in that light.
They could have very microsoft-ish market share if they'd sell OS/X for commodity hardware.
They could go out of business if they'd sell OS X for commodity software. They already tried that once when they were ahead in the OS wars, and almost died. Several companies brought superior OS's to the market, but dies because of MS's monopoly power. Having a better OS is not enough to win in a monopolized market. It isn't even enough to survive unless you have a complete, separate chain of supply the monopoly cannot undermine.
I'd install it tomorrow if I could
Great. With you and all the other people that can afford to pay for a copy and who know how to install an OS, or even what an OS is, and who aren't locked into Windows for some applications or purposes that should boost Apple's market share about 3%, while completely killing the 50% of their revenue they get from hardware sales.
People don't install OS's. If Apple can't reach the pre-install market with OS X they are missing the largest chunk. If they are missing that chunk and are missing the business market who is still locked in with ActiveX, .doc, VB, exchange, etc then they are missing all but a tiny portion of the legal market, a good chunk of which Apple already has.
I'm sure some businesses love Macs and are all Apple this and Apple that, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
Apple does not target business for a number of pretty good reasons I'm not going into right now. Apple can slowly grow market share (as they have been) so long as they maintain their hardware/software chain. The minute they break that, MS can kill them.
You're right that the only way Apple will gain a large share of the market is by unbundling the two, but what you're failing to realize is that action is only possible if MS's monopoly is already broken or severely weakened. If Linux takes the business market, for example, then Apple could unbundle these two items. Or, if the government actually prosecuted MS effectively and broke them up into companies that were in competition with one another, then Apple would be forced to unbundle their products to survive as all the value of bundling would be gone, while the market would be highly competitive. Both are very unlikely in the near future.
Lets look at these one at a time:
Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes);
Apple is selling music players and needs a way to get music to users easily so they will buy said music players. The providers of said music are a cartel convicted of abuse multiple times. The cartel required DRM and Apple pushed back on how restrictive it is and prices. Does anyone think it would be better if Apple refused to do business with them and let Microsoft dominate the DRM market? Apple needed to be there to stop MS from using the incompatibility of DRM'd songs against their OS offering. There is nothing hypocritical about saying it would be better for everyone (except the RIAA) if DRM was no more, either voluntarily or by law. Does anyone complain that OpenOffice reads and writes .doc files, all while they talk about how bad it is people are locked in that format?
Apple's perceived arrogance when they warned consumers not to upgrade to Vista, while not rushing to fix the problem themselves;
Perceived arrogance? Some people think Apple was arrogant when they apologized for their software not working and recommended people hold off upgrades? Can you tell me the name of a software vendor that isn't cautioning customers to wait until things stabilize, because I'll happily stop doing business with the irresponsible twits.
They have about 70% which is the minimum share where some governments start investigating possible antitrust issues due to dominance. Compare this to MS's 90% and multiple convictions for abuse. Some of Apple's actions are antitrust abuse if they have enough market share, but all in markets where MS already is abusing their monopoly and the governments have declined to stop them. Two wrongs don't make a right, but two monopolies battling one another is a lot better than one screwing consumers as hard as possible.
The iPhone featured heavily as well, aproduct[sic] that is months from release but steals the press from more competitive products.
Ummm... umm... what? Apple released pictures and discussed a cool upcoming new device and people paid attention and this is somehow indicative of Apple becoming an evil empire? I like it when companies come out with cool toys. I hate it when they come out with crap that no one likes but everyone has to use anyway.
Could Apple suddenly gain a dominant position in the market and then abuse that position? Well, it is vaguely possible, but the items listed are no reason to think it might be likely. If they do that, and we all suffer as a result I'll complain my head off, but one nice thing Apple has done to date is avoided any lock-in that keeps me from migrating all my hardware and files to another platform like Linux. Until they do that, I'm not about to lose any sleep over the danger of Apple, when the danger of MS has never been stopped and shows no signs of slowing.
That said I still miss Windows for a few applications and MOSTLY for the keyboard commands (in the OS GUI). Window Key + R + cmd = CLI. On the Mac it's click or Apple + Space + Term + Click.
I've heard arguments like this before and they usually end up in the same thing. It's not that OS X is worse at "keyboardability," it is that Windows users have trained themselves to learn the keyboard shortcuts for Windows, but not for OS X. Others have already pointed out Cmd-space+t+e+enter works for what you want, but beyond that it works for so many more things than the same feature in Windows. In Windows you're limited to things in the start menu, while on OS X it includes all applications and even files and their contents. I can hit cmd-space+m+p+l+s+enter and it will pull up that PDF about the MPLS protocol that I was reading the other day. I find that way easier than opening a Windows to c: and then running a search to try to find it.
Before 10.4, you might have been able to argue that using the keyboard on Windows was better, but it is behind these days. Take selecting a given window with the keyboard. Say you have 100 windows open, 10 per application. To go from app 1, window 1 to app 5 window 5 you hit the same key combination 49 times. On OS X you hit one key combination 4 times and then another 4 times. That's 41 fewer key presses. The more windows, the bigger the advantage to OS X. Another thing is because OS X is designed for one button mice by default, you almost never find programs that make that the only way to get to some function, rather than putting it in a regular menu. This means it is easy to use the keyboard to navigate to any function, which is untrue for a number of Windows apps.
I think you're just wrong. I think you are used to Windows keyboard shortcuts and what is most annoying about OS X ones to you is that they are not the ones you've already memorized. I use both OS's daily and I know which one seems ahead for keyboardability to me.
I've never used a Mac, and I'm not terribly interested to...
I've never eaten chocolate, and I'm not terribly interested in so doing...
When you confess to ignorance on a topic, why would anyone value your opinions on it? You just said you don't know what you're talking about.
Why is this under Apple?
Because OS X is where OS's are headed, of course.
The summary doesn't even mention Apple... (then again, I didn't rtfa, but I think the question stands.)
The article does talk about OS X, but no more so than Vista. This does seem to be poorly classified. Does Slashdot have a "generic OS's" or "baseless speculation" category?
I think 10 years from now you will see just about every application running in an isolated environment, possibly a VM of sorts. In particular, applications which access machines or applications that are not "trusted" will be run isolated from other applications on the system. They will be able to save files to a scratchpad area and send events to certain other applications such as a printing subsystem, but that's about it.
Mandatory Access Controls. They exist now in SELinux, TrustedBSD, Solaris, and there is an OS X port. Instead of incurring the overhead for a VM for every app (although that is not a huge overhead in many cases) OS's simply restrict the behaviors of applications to a predefined set. I think this is definitely the direction the OS security field is moving in. It also won't apply only to untrusted applications. Each application will be assigned an ACL based upon what it is supposed to be doing. In this way a buffer overflow in that application is a lot harder to exploit. Want send spam messages, you'd better find an overflow in the e-mail client or in the core of the OS itself.
My personal model for this type of security includes levels of trust for every application. Applications that ship by default have high levels of trust and preassigned ACLs that match up with what they are supposed to be doing. Applications that are signed and certified by trusted parties have slightly lower levels of trust, and are assigned an ACL included with them when installed. Other applications are given lesser amounts of trust based upon if the are just signed or just certified or neither. They are assigned a merger of the accompanying ACLs and the OS's default ACL for that trust level (possibly with multiple versions of these for different application types). All this is, of course, configurable by the user, but good, fairly strict defaults are applied. Add to this a good UI for when an application wants more privileges than its current ACL (a rare occurrence with good design) and you have a pretty hardened security layer. Communication between applications would, of course, be restricted, with certain services available to most end user applications using standard APIs. For this to work, some services like an update manager and a license/registration service would need to be standardized and made convenient to developers. VMs in ACLs of their own can be used to help ease a transition from old software.
I also see most applications using virtually no local storage except security credentials and cached data. All "real data" will be stored on "the big server in the sky" or "the big server run by the IT department." The exceptions will be applications demanding extreme privacy, such as diaries and non-networked dayplanners, applications demanding offline use, such as cellphone notepads, and "convenience applications" like calculators and non-networked games.
I think within 10 years we'll have more storage capacity on the average device than we know what dodo with it and RAID setups will be the norm. I also almost all devices will have network connections all the time increasing the use of network storage as well. Depending upon how the industry and how current events unfold we may have a lot of remote, encrypted data or we may not. We may well have centralized network storage in the form of a server in everyone's home. We may actually move back and forth between such scenarios as time progresses (as we have in the past).
Vista is essentially a shinier piece of crap. Microsoft has pretty much ceased innovating.
I think there are real improvements in Vista, although there are many technologies added to benefit MS and disadvantage customers as well. Indexed searching is not really that innovative, but it is an improvement. Fewer default privileges for standard users is a plus.
If MS stopped doing any work tomorrow, eventually, the market would move on. As it is, however, MS doesn't do no work, they simply do the minimum necessary to not lose the market. IE is a good example. People hated IE6 and IE5 for that matter. It was terrible and put head to head with Firefox was a pile of dung. After many years of this, MS still only lost about 20% of the market and retained the lion's share. The market did not eat them alive, despite the fact that they were way behind. MS used their monopoly to undermine market forces in this regard. Now they have put out IE7 which is a "me too" solution and will still not keep up with Firefox, but it will be "good enough' so that most people won't be so annoyed that they will go out of their way to educate themselves on their options and find something else.
The same thing applies with Vista. It is basically a counter to OS X. Gee OS X has had these features for years now and we've seen their market share double and it seems to be getting faster. So MS countered with another "me too" and it probably will work. It also includes a whole slew of lock-ins designed to make it harder to move away from.
Everyone seems to think that Microsoft can never fail. Big players lose big all the time when they make mistakes, and Microsoft can fall just like any other company.
Oh MS can certainly fail, but because of their position releasing inferior products is less likely to be the cause of their fall from grace, than other factors. Pure distrust for the US and growing anti-americanism may actually be the pebble that releases the avalanche and kills MS.
Vista isn't really bad, it's boring. It's so boring that I wouldn't want to buy a new computer to have it, or upgrade to it. It's so boring that it makes upgrading to it from XP look unnecessary and gaudy. So boring, in fact, that the power users won't use it and the non-power users will be confused by its strange layout and lack of familiar options.
People don't have to want Vista. It will come on every new computer in the store. They will eventually need or want a new computer and then they will have Vista and so long as it isn't so bad that people can't stand it, MS's dominance will go on.
Everything may be Vista in a few years because people will buy new computers with it on there, but I suspect at least somewhat of a backlash.
What sort of backlash? Some people are still using Win2K. Maybe some corporations will continue doing so. Maybe some will switch to Linux. I don't think it will be a big deal. Most people will be running it and it will be harder than ever to move away from it because in addition to the Web being designed for IE only, and your documents being in .doc or .xls format and games being released first on Windows, your video downloads will only work on Windows and your PDFs will now be XPS files tht will only be created and read properly on Windows, etc.
Big players come and go. Yes, MS might be able to run dry for a few years, but if they keep releasing seriously disappointing OS's, people will eventually catch on and go to Mac or something.
In a free market this would happen, but our antitrust laws are not enforced against MS. I have little confidence that the free market will be able to solve this problem.
There is a lot of discussion about various parts of OS's, but here is something. This is my wish list of what I'd like to see i the ideal OS released in 3 years:
Well, that is the list off the top of my head. Does anyone else have any wishes for the OS of tomorrow?