Software updates saw Safari 4 launched, OS X updates including threading changes, Exchange support to mail, calendar, and address book, and OpenCL a new open graphics standard.
To be clear, the updates to OS X referred to are features of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which will ship in September and cost $29. It is not an update to 10.5 and is not yet available outside of developer previews.
Well, Safari 4 was indeed released. You shouldn't have quoted that.:-)
I make a point of mentioning the "OS X updates" mentioned refer to something (to differentiate it from all the updates mentioned) and then someone goes and complains anyway. Some people are never happy.
Software updates saw Safari 4 launched, OS X updates including threading changes, Exchange support to mail, calendar, and address book, and OpenCL a new open graphics standard.
To be clear, the updates to OS X referred to are features of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which will ship in September and cost $29. It is not an update to 10.5 and is not yet available outside of developer previews.
I disagree w/ most of your points. I don't think that making a profit is inherently evil (or that corporations are inherently evil).
You have to more than disagree with points, you have to logically refute them. Further, the first item you list wasn't one of my points. I said corporations have no ethics. That is not the same as corporations being evil and if you don't see the difference you need to learn that before we can have a rational discussion. I went rough and explained, point by point what was wrong with your assertions. You replied by saying I was wrong an repeating yourself. Unless you can address my points, you've failed to make any argument, just an empty assertion.
Yahoo mail is free because of advertising on their web-mail portal.
Which is no longer the cheapest option around.
For $19.99 a YEAR you get IMAP access and no ads in your emails.
For 0$ a year you get IMAP and no ads in your emails with Google.
I wasn't aware gmail even had IMAP access let alone for gratis but I would be curious to know how they can do that unless they are injecting adwords into your emails.
It's simple. They use GMail to better target ads. A robot looks through your e-mail messages content and when Google serves ads to you when looking at Web pages, they use that data to better target ads. This means you're more likely to be interested in the ads they present and more people click on them, making Google money from advertisers. It sure beats paying for e-mail and I prefer ads to actually be something that might interest me.
Well, considering that the entire OS is HTML/XML based, I'd say that they have a pretty efficient/good rendering engine.
Just so people aren't confused, the Palm Pre runs a stripped down Linux distro and Webkit. All the applications and the GUI are running on Webkit and the OS's only real job is to handle the hardware and provide a nice platform for Webkit to run. The browser they implemented for the Web should perform similarly to the iPhone or Safari or Chrome or any of the other Webkit based browsers, with the browser GUI being the real make or break aspect of their implementation.
What do corporations do with profits?...purchase companies...
Do you really think any sane person wants MS buying up and killing more innovative companies in their drive to prevent the rise of any new technologies that might threaten them? I mean seriously, they have bought and killed so many cool companies over the years I can't imagine anyone who can even conceive of this being a good thing, regardless of what areas of technology you pay attention to.
Generally speaking, corporations operating in the US are not evil.
Generally speaking, corporations have no ethics. They are greed personified and exist solely to make money. They do whatever makes them the most money, even when it is illegal or unethical. Laws should treat them appropriately and not try to pretend they deserve some sort of inherent rights. They exist as legal entities for the good of the people and all laws regarding them should be from that perspective.
There are no corporate slave camps, no corporate mass graves, nobody making two dollars a day, none of that.
Sure there are, they're just overseas as part of their foreign subsidiaries. The corporations would love for them to be here too, but don't have the ability to make that happen yet.
Here in the US, corporations provide cushy jobs to often times lazy Americans. You can get a job making 50-100k "managing" or generally doing other low effort things.
So a tiny subset of employees being paid more than they should be for the effort they put in is somehow a good thing?
So, ya, let's be smart, tax giant organizations providing millions of cushy, well paid jobs! We've killed manufacturing in this country, now let's kill of white collar jobs too!
If you think lower tax rates will significantly affect that, you're dreaming. Ballmer is blustering, but has no real options.
Also, why the hell do we want to give more money to a government that does nothing but waste it?
We the people control the government. It is our money they're spending and our debt they're creating. It's our fault what they do with it because we don't take enough time as a country to actually understand what's going on and vote for the right people. I actually think some people in our current government are trying to do the right thing to fix our economy, but then I actually have more than a 4th grade understanding of economics. We've been headed down a road to destruction for years now and turning aside is going to be really, really hard. A big part of that is tax reform. What do you call a system that is constantly moving in one direction? Unstable. That's where we are now because we have such absurdly low rates of progressiveness in our taxation. To balance our economy and stabilize things, we need to get rid of some of these loopholes. Right now corporations are paying their foreign subsidiaries huge amounts of money for very little as a way to funnel money out of the country instead of paying taxes on the earnings. They're using banks that won't cooperate so they can lie about it. It takes a twisted perspective to try to make them out to be the "good guys" here.
The base levels for taxes on corporations and the wealthy are far too high
Our corporate tax rates are not too different from other industrialized, first world countries, just more variable. We have the trained employees and locality to collect higher taxes even. As for individuals, the rate at which we tax the very wealth has been dropping for 20 years and most economists I know think it is far too low and should be brought back up to the levels from the 80's or 70's to stabilize the economy.
...and to solve that problem, legislators have put in so many loopholes that many corporations get away with paying almost nothing.
I see. Here I thought legislators put loopholes in because they were betraying our trust in exchange for large campaign donations from said corporations and because they and their friends own and run said corporations. I'm quite glad to learn they're really trying to do the right thing and solve our tax problem.
...I start to wonder just what it is this country will have left to export in 20 years; the trade deficit is already a serious problem. Of course, losing our tech industry to India may just be inevitable anyway, but we have to do something to attract and maintain industry.
We will never be able to compete with third world countries for being the cheapest place to operate and hire unless we're willing to drive the vast majority of our population into poverty and rescind all our human rights protections. Lowering our tax rates does little or nothing to change this equation. Companies do business in the US because we have a large number of educated well trained people, with cutting edge research in many fields, and because the people running the companies want to live here because of the quality of life. We should be playing to those strengths and focusing on fixing and expanding our educational system and research before we lose that advantage and maintaining the quality of life here so people who can live anywhere and hire workers anywhere prefer to do so here.
Awesome, we've finally achieved what we had decades ago in native apps.
That's what happens when you have such a broken market. The desktop OS market is broken and stagnates. People try to work around it and MS tries to stop them by crippling the Web as well. The real solution is to get rid of MS's monopoly, but in the mean time, we'll see things like this as ways the market tries to make money by moving the state of the art forward.
Example, decades have passed and we still can't use spellchecking in all applications on Windows, at least with Web applications we can do that in most of them.
Well, the other day I tried out the new Opera on OS X, so I might as well give Chrome a spin. It scores 100 on ACID3, although it does say the linktest failed. The javascript performance is quite good, beating even the Webkit nightly 846 to 963. To give you some reference here the Safari beta 4 gets 7223 and regular Safari does 3144, so we're seeing javascript running 3 times as fast as the fastest of the currently, stable browsers and actually faster than anything else in development I've tested (although not by a lot). Sadly, Chrome does not use the native text handling so it does not currently use the native spellchecking, but a separate one. It can't use the built in grammar checker or dictionary/thesaurus or other cool services in OS X. It can, by default, resize text fields though, so that's a plus. Basically, it isn't there yet for an everyday browser, but it has a lot of potential.
And how it doesn't suck then? I'd say that Safari and Chrome are comparable.
Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.
Apple sold 2 billion songs last year. Let's say a song costs $1 (average in US maybe lower, but Europe has higher prices to counter that). Last I heard Apple takes ~30% of that price.
Now, those figures mean that after paying the rights owners Apple gets $600 million a year from music alone (you do the math for videos and apps). Are you really telling me it costs that much to keep a service like itunes running?
Yes, in fact most reasonable analysts put the real margin at more like 10% once the costs of hosting the downloads and support are figured in. Of course then there are the advertising costs and the cost of processing all the music from vendors and paying people to run the thing.
I've seen reasonable estimates that Apple is taking in somewhere between 100 and 200 million a year from iTunes. According to their financial iPod and iPhone sales account for something like 40% of Apple's profits while all services including the ITunes and iPhone stores bring in something like 3%. It simply isn't a real money maker for them. It's a way to sell iPods.
Which does not directly lead to more revenue for Apple because Apple receives a very low amount of each content sale on iTunes
Some is greater than None. You just showed yourself it does directly lead to more revenue. It's not the primary focus but there is revenue from each sale.
Apple runs the iTunes store at about break even. They make basically nothing. On the other hand, other devices being able to use the service means more sales of those devices and fewer sales of Apple's devices. This means a net loss for Apple if they let this continue.
Apple earns increased revenue when iTunes gives people added incentive to go out and purchase an iPod or an iPhone
Which it still does even if you own a Pre.
I disagree. Pre's are made more capable in comparison to Apple's directly competing iPhone and iPod touch.
If the Pre is emulating an older iPod of some kind and is doing it 100%, then there is little Apple can do to block it, without issuing a firmware update for the entire line of iPods.
RTFA. The Pre emulates an iPod in "media mode" while still correctly identifying itself as a generic device, making this easy for Apple to block with a simple update to iTunes.
I vaguely recall a lawsuit where Apple was sued for limiting the iPod to only iTunes...
Umm, you can't use iPods with other music services and software? Since when?
...I don't think anybody has challenged the reverse (using something else with iTunes) in court...
I don't even understand what antitrust use you're alleging. Please reference the market you think Apple has monopolized and the secondary market you're thinking someone could sue Apple for undermining. Please make sure you differentiate the iTunes software from the ITunes Music Store in defining your market.
I can't see any reason why EOLing a product would be monopolistic.
Having too much share of a given market is "being monopolistic" but that isn't illegal. Using your monopoly to undermine free trade or fix prices is illegal, but not "monopolistic". Before you tell us "Russia's reasoning seems rather flawed" shouldn't you at least comprehend the basic concepts behind what Russia is talking about?
Windows devs are a dime a dozen and therefore cheap to hire.
Are you talking about Windows developers with experience creating user interfaces and coding for appliance style devices that don't use the normal inputs and only have fullscreen displays?
There are a lot more Linux people qualified to create such devices than Windows people from my experience in the industry. If, however, you're talking about developers with no experience and without the proper skills, sure you can find more Windows developers, but that sure isn't going to save you money.
[T]he other major browsers [are] all pretty good nowadays.
Largely because they've copied features originally introduced in Opera.
One of my complaints about Opera is that the reverse does not seem to be true often enough. Firefox eventually copies most of the useful features of Opera. Opera never gets around to copying the useful features of other browsers. E.g. it still doesn't allow me to resize text fields.
It costs a licensing fee. It has more security liability than pretty much any other choice.
The cost of a Windows XP licence is trivial compared with that of the hardware and custom software development.
Linux costs nothing to license. BSD costs nothing to license. Windows costs something. That's an added, unneeded cost.
Might as well go for one that has lots of development tools for which the software can be run on a normal desktop computer.
Because there aren't lots of dev tools for Linux that run on a normal desktop computer?
. It's easier to develop for windows that to develop for a custom devkit.
How is it easier to develop an ATM on Windows than on Linux? They both have tons of tools and myriad experienced developers and companies. Linux is probably better optimized for appliance uses and has a larger share of the appliance market than Windows, making it easier to find companies to work on it.
In short, I don't buy your arguments at all. Using Windows on an ATM is a sign someone in management somewhere is an incompetent buffoon.
Um, no, it's about 40% faster on Javascript compared with 9.64, on Linux at least, running Sunspider.
I ran sunspider right after using it. It scored ~10% slower than 9.64 did on OS X 10.5.7 on the same Intel Core 2 Duo with plenty of RAM. Sunspider, of course will vary based upon hardware, but my setup is pretty average.
Being multiplatform, it's not likely that Opera will specifically engineer chunks of the browser for the Mac.
Then it will forever be inferior to native applications.
That's the deal with multiplatform software;
No. That's the deal with some multi-platform software. Lot's of multi-platform software is ported well enough to take advantage of native services Adobe CS suite, for example, handles them just fine. Mostly you see this problem in OSS software where the people start out on Linux and target it primarily, and then go for feature parity with other OS's. It makes for software limited to the least common denominator of OS's. When dealing with professional software user feedback usually gets this sort of thing fixed in a hurry.
Safari is also a lousy integrator into Windows. Does that make Safari bad?
It makes Safari on Windows bad, although probably not to the extent Opera on OS X is bad. Safari on Windows is not lacking in any features I know of because of the way it is implemented. It may have a few UI inconsistencies. Opera on OS X, however, is lacking in significant functionality. It can't use my spelling checker which I've spent years training so I have to re-teach it every single word I've already taught everything else. It can't use my mouse gestures, instead I have to re-teach it the same gesture my other programs already know. It can't do grammar checking at all that I know of. It can't do language translations or auto bibliography formatting or auto-correct line endings or automatically look up words in the dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia. All this stems from the fact that they don't use the native text handling, of course. I suspect, most of the developers don't even know enough about OS X to know how much they are crippling their software.
On that note, sounds like Safari is right up your street.
Safari is my browser of choice on OS X, but I've switched numerous times. Opera is one that has never been much of a contender and my comment was simply a quick review for others in the same boat why this has not changed with the beta. I go between Opera and Firefox on Windows, although Chrome has been looking better and better of late.
...doesn't make it bad, just bad for you.
I suppose everything is a matter of perspective to some degree, but you must admit Opera is pretty weak on OS X. They seem to have more or less always treated it as a third class platform. They're better than they were way back in the day, but still nowhere close to being serious about seriously competing.
Unlike Google, when Opera says something is a beta, they mean it. I'd check it out when it comes out of beta.
Beta usually means feature complete. They might optimize it more and pull up the javascript performance, but the beta is a pretty good indication that the javascript is unlikely to be an order of magnitude better, to compete with the new engines from other developers. Further, it is unlikely they will suddenly add support for native text handling/services post beta. Finally, it is unlikely they will add some other completely new feature that is going to be so cool I'll want to use opera for it. I don't think the fact that it is a beta has much bearing on my premise.
Seriously neither Google nor Yahoo! are anything close to a monopoly.
I understand your confusion. Most of the discussion of antitrust law on Slashdot is a discussion of Microsoft. Antitrust law is about undermining markets by leveraging market share. These laws apply to monopolies and cartels (also known as trusts). The RIAA is a good example. It is a bunch of companies illegally colluding to undermine the music publishing industry, although no individual member company has a monopoly. In this case the contention is that several tech companies are colluding and forming a trust to collectively disadvantage employees in the tech industry, instead of competing for hires.
Doesn't it make much more sense to go after MS rather then companies which are definitely not monopolies and not abusive ones at that?
It makes sense to go after both, but it seems like such obvious, long term abuse as MS has been engaged in would be a prime target if they weren't donating so much money to both political parties.
A quick look shows the OS X version passes Acid3, is about 10% slower on javascript benchmarks compared to the last version, and still has no support for system services so it can't use the same spelling checker as all the other OS X programs or the grammar checker or other tools. Basically, I don't see anything that is here to motivate me to switch. Opera may be a really nice browser for Windows, but it is still subpar for OS X.
There have always been products competing with both the iPod and iPhone that have a longer and more impressive bullet list of features.
Ah yes, it's the "Grumpy Featurism" hand-wave. Let's brush all the objective, reasoned, based-on-evidence arguments aside, and claim they are trumped by my personal claim of "It's better".
I'm not sure I even understand what you're trying to say here. You can certainly look up bullet point lists of features of various music players and smartphones. A significant number will be longer than Apple's offerings, they certainly were last time I looked. They certainly were when the iPod debuted as per the famous "no wi-fi less space than a Nomad" dismissal. I'm sure not going to bother doing a bunch of research to prove it though.
The problem being, the average person doesn't enjoy using them and half those features are so poorly implemented they are just painful to use. Many geeks are happy to work around poorly designed interfaces for the sake of overall functionality.
What a load of weasel words. Citations, please?
Do your own research. There have been plenty of usability studies over the years that agree with my position and personal experience.
Based on hard sales figures, the "average person" most certainly prefers Nokia phones in general to Apple phones.
First, Apple doesn't compete in the general cell phone market, but the smartphone market, which has been fairly distinct, although the lines are now blurring. Apple does not have the largest share of that market either, but they are certainly an up and coming contender based upon the rapidly increasing popularity. Second, market share is not a measure of individual preference because in the US phones are tied to providers and because phones and service are not free, so individuals have to choose a phone they can afford rather than one they want.
I still wonder if Android would exist or if it would have the level of functionality it does if Apple were not providing such strong competition.
The rapid and continual march of technology in the billion dollar mobile phone market has been going on for a decade or so, but Google would've only took interest in response to a Johnny come lately that, as you agree yourself, is not the dominant player in the market? Please...
We're talking about the smartphone market not the regular phone market. Based upon the huge number of phones that are designed to look like iPhones and the number of smartphone features designed to clone iPhone functionality, I think you have to be pretty oblivious not to see Apple as having a huge impact and pushing other developers to start adding functionality to compete. Multitouch and the Android Market, are good examples.
But it's just a shame we never hear about this technology on Slashdot.
What are you talking about? There have been dozens of articles about Android on Slashdot. The last one was three days ago!
Reading Slashdot, you'd think that the mobile phone market considered of Apple as a dominant player, and only Android coming along afterwards to provide competition
Umm, Android was released after the iPhone, but articles on Slashdot appear to discuss cool new technology and things nerds like to discuss. It is not reflective of market share. We often discuss technologies that have little or no market share because they are cool and innovative, even if they never become widely deployed.
It would be like Slashdot only covering OS X, giving a brief mention to Ubuntu, and never mentioning a major player like Windows at all.
But Slashdot certainly discusses both OS X and Ubuntu in much greater frequency than their market share would indicate, compared to Windows articles. That's because that is
Mmmm... Apple's dominance includes not only portable music devices (iPods)
I don't think this will stand up legally due to the numbers you cite not including music playing cell phones, which make up a significant portion of the market. This, of course, depends upon how the market is distinguished.
...but the actual distribution of music (iTunes)
First, the ITunes store and the iTunes application are in different markets and it is important to distinguish that you're referring to the former not the latter. Second, while Apple may well have dominance in said market, it is a problematic market, since it is already compromised by the illegal actions of a cartel, convicted multiple times of undermining free trade. Personally, I think Apple has had a net positive impact on innovation in the market, but it is so broken already the issue is quite muddled.
In any case, it's not illegal to have a dominant market position; it's only illegal to use that dominance to stifle competition. Fortunately, Apple hasn't demonstrated any significant tendency to eliminate competition in the markets they do dominate.
Elimination of competition is not the only issue, simply undermining free competition in a way that artificially increases their share is sufficient to damage free trade. Some of Apple's actions in said markets certainly qualify as tying in the eyes of the law, if they are ruled to have dominance in either of those markets. The issue being, they probably don't in the first market and the second market is so broken any tying is fairly immaterial or even positive. There is a lot of room for debate on it though.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize any user can add shortcuts to any menu option with the Keyboard & Mouse pref pane, right?
Not anymore. With Snow Leopard they can add shortcuts with the Keyboard and Mouse preference panes. (They split them up in the new version). :)
Software updates saw Safari 4 launched, OS X updates including threading changes, Exchange support to mail, calendar, and address book, and OpenCL a new open graphics standard.
To be clear, the updates to OS X referred to are features of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which will ship in September and cost $29. It is not an update to 10.5 and is not yet available outside of developer previews.
Well, Safari 4 was indeed released. You shouldn't have quoted that. :-)
I make a point of mentioning the "OS X updates" mentioned refer to something (to differentiate it from all the updates mentioned) and then someone goes and complains anyway. Some people are never happy.
Software updates saw Safari 4 launched, OS X updates including threading changes, Exchange support to mail, calendar, and address book, and OpenCL a new open graphics standard.
To be clear, the updates to OS X referred to are features of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which will ship in September and cost $29. It is not an update to 10.5 and is not yet available outside of developer previews.
I disagree w/ most of your points. I don't think that making a profit is inherently evil (or that corporations are inherently evil).
You have to more than disagree with points, you have to logically refute them. Further, the first item you list wasn't one of my points. I said corporations have no ethics. That is not the same as corporations being evil and if you don't see the difference you need to learn that before we can have a rational discussion. I went rough and explained, point by point what was wrong with your assertions. You replied by saying I was wrong an repeating yourself. Unless you can address my points, you've failed to make any argument, just an empty assertion.
Yahoo mail is free because of advertising on their web-mail portal.
Which is no longer the cheapest option around.
For $19.99 a YEAR you get IMAP access and no ads in your emails.
For 0$ a year you get IMAP and no ads in your emails with Google.
I wasn't aware gmail even had IMAP access let alone for gratis but I would be curious to know how they can do that unless they are injecting adwords into your emails.
It's simple. They use GMail to better target ads. A robot looks through your e-mail messages content and when Google serves ads to you when looking at Web pages, they use that data to better target ads. This means you're more likely to be interested in the ads they present and more people click on them, making Google money from advertisers. It sure beats paying for e-mail and I prefer ads to actually be something that might interest me.
Well, considering that the entire OS is HTML/XML based, I'd say that they have a pretty efficient/good rendering engine.
Just so people aren't confused, the Palm Pre runs a stripped down Linux distro and Webkit. All the applications and the GUI are running on Webkit and the OS's only real job is to handle the hardware and provide a nice platform for Webkit to run. The browser they implemented for the Web should perform similarly to the iPhone or Safari or Chrome or any of the other Webkit based browsers, with the browser GUI being the real make or break aspect of their implementation.
What do corporations do with profits? ...purchase companies...
Do you really think any sane person wants MS buying up and killing more innovative companies in their drive to prevent the rise of any new technologies that might threaten them? I mean seriously, they have bought and killed so many cool companies over the years I can't imagine anyone who can even conceive of this being a good thing, regardless of what areas of technology you pay attention to.
Generally speaking, corporations operating in the US are not evil.
Generally speaking, corporations have no ethics. They are greed personified and exist solely to make money. They do whatever makes them the most money, even when it is illegal or unethical. Laws should treat them appropriately and not try to pretend they deserve some sort of inherent rights. They exist as legal entities for the good of the people and all laws regarding them should be from that perspective.
There are no corporate slave camps, no corporate mass graves, nobody making two dollars a day, none of that.
Sure there are, they're just overseas as part of their foreign subsidiaries. The corporations would love for them to be here too, but don't have the ability to make that happen yet.
Here in the US, corporations provide cushy jobs to often times lazy Americans. You can get a job making 50-100k "managing" or generally doing other low effort things.
So a tiny subset of employees being paid more than they should be for the effort they put in is somehow a good thing?
So, ya, let's be smart, tax giant organizations providing millions of cushy, well paid jobs! We've killed manufacturing in this country, now let's kill of white collar jobs too!
If you think lower tax rates will significantly affect that, you're dreaming. Ballmer is blustering, but has no real options.
Also, why the hell do we want to give more money to a government that does nothing but waste it?
We the people control the government. It is our money they're spending and our debt they're creating. It's our fault what they do with it because we don't take enough time as a country to actually understand what's going on and vote for the right people. I actually think some people in our current government are trying to do the right thing to fix our economy, but then I actually have more than a 4th grade understanding of economics. We've been headed down a road to destruction for years now and turning aside is going to be really, really hard. A big part of that is tax reform. What do you call a system that is constantly moving in one direction? Unstable. That's where we are now because we have such absurdly low rates of progressiveness in our taxation. To balance our economy and stabilize things, we need to get rid of some of these loopholes. Right now corporations are paying their foreign subsidiaries huge amounts of money for very little as a way to funnel money out of the country instead of paying taxes on the earnings. They're using banks that won't cooperate so they can lie about it. It takes a twisted perspective to try to make them out to be the "good guys" here.
That said, current tax laws are a mess.
True.
The base levels for taxes on corporations and the wealthy are far too high
Our corporate tax rates are not too different from other industrialized, first world countries, just more variable. We have the trained employees and locality to collect higher taxes even. As for individuals, the rate at which we tax the very wealth has been dropping for 20 years and most economists I know think it is far too low and should be brought back up to the levels from the 80's or 70's to stabilize the economy.
...and to solve that problem, legislators have put in so many loopholes that many corporations get away with paying almost nothing.
I see. Here I thought legislators put loopholes in because they were betraying our trust in exchange for large campaign donations from said corporations and because they and their friends own and run said corporations. I'm quite glad to learn they're really trying to do the right thing and solve our tax problem.
...I start to wonder just what it is this country will have left to export in 20 years; the trade deficit is already a serious problem. Of course, losing our tech industry to India may just be inevitable anyway, but we have to do something to attract and maintain industry.
We will never be able to compete with third world countries for being the cheapest place to operate and hire unless we're willing to drive the vast majority of our population into poverty and rescind all our human rights protections. Lowering our tax rates does little or nothing to change this equation. Companies do business in the US because we have a large number of educated well trained people, with cutting edge research in many fields, and because the people running the companies want to live here because of the quality of life. We should be playing to those strengths and focusing on fixing and expanding our educational system and research before we lose that advantage and maintaining the quality of life here so people who can live anywhere and hire workers anywhere prefer to do so here.
Awesome, we've finally achieved what we had decades ago in native apps.
That's what happens when you have such a broken market. The desktop OS market is broken and stagnates. People try to work around it and MS tries to stop them by crippling the Web as well. The real solution is to get rid of MS's monopoly, but in the mean time, we'll see things like this as ways the market tries to make money by moving the state of the art forward.
Example, decades have passed and we still can't use spellchecking in all applications on Windows, at least with Web applications we can do that in most of them.
Well, the other day I tried out the new Opera on OS X, so I might as well give Chrome a spin. It scores 100 on ACID3, although it does say the linktest failed. The javascript performance is quite good, beating even the Webkit nightly 846 to 963. To give you some reference here the Safari beta 4 gets 7223 and regular Safari does 3144, so we're seeing javascript running 3 times as fast as the fastest of the currently, stable browsers and actually faster than anything else in development I've tested (although not by a lot). Sadly, Chrome does not use the native text handling so it does not currently use the native spellchecking, but a separate one. It can't use the built in grammar checker or dictionary/thesaurus or other cool services in OS X. It can, by default, resize text fields though, so that's a plus. Basically, it isn't there yet for an everyday browser, but it has a lot of potential.
And how it doesn't suck then? I'd say that Safari and Chrome are comparable.
Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward. It has real sandboxing of tabs so that one tab can't make the others unresponsive or take down the browser is a huge leap forward. With the Web being so central to most people's workflow these days this is akin to the move to a multitasking OS. I think that's what has most of us excited, not speed or new features at this point. It has a long way to go, but the underlying architectural decisions provide for more potential.
Apple sold 2 billion songs last year. Let's say a song costs $1 (average in US maybe lower, but Europe has higher prices to counter that). Last I heard Apple takes ~30% of that price. Now, those figures mean that after paying the rights owners Apple gets $600 million a year from music alone (you do the math for videos and apps). Are you really telling me it costs that much to keep a service like itunes running?
Yes, in fact most reasonable analysts put the real margin at more like 10% once the costs of hosting the downloads and support are figured in. Of course then there are the advertising costs and the cost of processing all the music from vendors and paying people to run the thing.
I've seen reasonable estimates that Apple is taking in somewhere between 100 and 200 million a year from iTunes. According to their financial iPod and iPhone sales account for something like 40% of Apple's profits while all services including the ITunes and iPhone stores bring in something like 3%. It simply isn't a real money maker for them. It's a way to sell iPods.
Which does not directly lead to more revenue for Apple because Apple receives a very low amount of each content sale on iTunes
Some is greater than None. You just showed yourself it does directly lead to more revenue. It's not the primary focus but there is revenue from each sale.
Apple runs the iTunes store at about break even. They make basically nothing. On the other hand, other devices being able to use the service means more sales of those devices and fewer sales of Apple's devices. This means a net loss for Apple if they let this continue.
Apple earns increased revenue when iTunes gives people added incentive to go out and purchase an iPod or an iPhone
Which it still does even if you own a Pre.
I disagree. Pre's are made more capable in comparison to Apple's directly competing iPhone and iPod touch.
If the Pre is emulating an older iPod of some kind and is doing it 100%, then there is little Apple can do to block it, without issuing a firmware update for the entire line of iPods.
RTFA. The Pre emulates an iPod in "media mode" while still correctly identifying itself as a generic device, making this easy for Apple to block with a simple update to iTunes.
I vaguely recall a lawsuit where Apple was sued for limiting the iPod to only iTunes...
Umm, you can't use iPods with other music services and software? Since when?
...I don't think anybody has challenged the reverse (using something else with iTunes) in court...
I don't even understand what antitrust use you're alleging. Please reference the market you think Apple has monopolized and the secondary market you're thinking someone could sue Apple for undermining. Please make sure you differentiate the iTunes software from the ITunes Music Store in defining your market.
I can't see any reason why EOLing a product would be monopolistic.
Having too much share of a given market is "being monopolistic" but that isn't illegal. Using your monopoly to undermine free trade or fix prices is illegal, but not "monopolistic". Before you tell us "Russia's reasoning seems rather flawed" shouldn't you at least comprehend the basic concepts behind what Russia is talking about?
Windows devs are a dime a dozen and therefore cheap to hire.
Are you talking about Windows developers with experience creating user interfaces and coding for appliance style devices that don't use the normal inputs and only have fullscreen displays?
There are a lot more Linux people qualified to create such devices than Windows people from my experience in the industry. If, however, you're talking about developers with no experience and without the proper skills, sure you can find more Windows developers, but that sure isn't going to save you money.
[T]he other major browsers [are] all pretty good nowadays.
Largely because they've copied features originally introduced in Opera.
One of my complaints about Opera is that the reverse does not seem to be true often enough. Firefox eventually copies most of the useful features of Opera. Opera never gets around to copying the useful features of other browsers. E.g. it still doesn't allow me to resize text fields.
Ultimately it comes down to "why not?"
It costs a licensing fee. It has more security liability than pretty much any other choice.
The cost of a Windows XP licence is trivial compared with that of the hardware and custom software development.
Linux costs nothing to license. BSD costs nothing to license. Windows costs something. That's an added, unneeded cost.
Might as well go for one that has lots of development tools for which the software can be run on a normal desktop computer.
Because there aren't lots of dev tools for Linux that run on a normal desktop computer?
. It's easier to develop for windows that to develop for a custom devkit.
How is it easier to develop an ATM on Windows than on Linux? They both have tons of tools and myriad experienced developers and companies. Linux is probably better optimized for appliance uses and has a larger share of the appliance market than Windows, making it easier to find companies to work on it.
In short, I don't buy your arguments at all. Using Windows on an ATM is a sign someone in management somewhere is an incompetent buffoon.
Um, no, it's about 40% faster on Javascript compared with 9.64, on Linux at least, running Sunspider.
I ran sunspider right after using it. It scored ~10% slower than 9.64 did on OS X 10.5.7 on the same Intel Core 2 Duo with plenty of RAM. Sunspider, of course will vary based upon hardware, but my setup is pretty average.
Being multiplatform, it's not likely that Opera will specifically engineer chunks of the browser for the Mac.
Then it will forever be inferior to native applications.
That's the deal with multiplatform software;
No. That's the deal with some multi-platform software. Lot's of multi-platform software is ported well enough to take advantage of native services Adobe CS suite, for example, handles them just fine. Mostly you see this problem in OSS software where the people start out on Linux and target it primarily, and then go for feature parity with other OS's. It makes for software limited to the least common denominator of OS's. When dealing with professional software user feedback usually gets this sort of thing fixed in a hurry.
Safari is also a lousy integrator into Windows. Does that make Safari bad?
It makes Safari on Windows bad, although probably not to the extent Opera on OS X is bad. Safari on Windows is not lacking in any features I know of because of the way it is implemented. It may have a few UI inconsistencies. Opera on OS X, however, is lacking in significant functionality. It can't use my spelling checker which I've spent years training so I have to re-teach it every single word I've already taught everything else. It can't use my mouse gestures, instead I have to re-teach it the same gesture my other programs already know. It can't do grammar checking at all that I know of. It can't do language translations or auto bibliography formatting or auto-correct line endings or automatically look up words in the dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia. All this stems from the fact that they don't use the native text handling, of course. I suspect, most of the developers don't even know enough about OS X to know how much they are crippling their software.
On that note, sounds like Safari is right up your street.
Safari is my browser of choice on OS X, but I've switched numerous times. Opera is one that has never been much of a contender and my comment was simply a quick review for others in the same boat why this has not changed with the beta. I go between Opera and Firefox on Windows, although Chrome has been looking better and better of late.
...doesn't make it bad, just bad for you.
I suppose everything is a matter of perspective to some degree, but you must admit Opera is pretty weak on OS X. They seem to have more or less always treated it as a third class platform. They're better than they were way back in the day, but still nowhere close to being serious about seriously competing.
Unlike Google, when Opera says something is a beta, they mean it. I'd check it out when it comes out of beta.
Beta usually means feature complete. They might optimize it more and pull up the javascript performance, but the beta is a pretty good indication that the javascript is unlikely to be an order of magnitude better, to compete with the new engines from other developers. Further, it is unlikely they will suddenly add support for native text handling/services post beta. Finally, it is unlikely they will add some other completely new feature that is going to be so cool I'll want to use opera for it. I don't think the fact that it is a beta has much bearing on my premise.
Seriously neither Google nor Yahoo! are anything close to a monopoly.
I understand your confusion. Most of the discussion of antitrust law on Slashdot is a discussion of Microsoft. Antitrust law is about undermining markets by leveraging market share. These laws apply to monopolies and cartels (also known as trusts). The RIAA is a good example. It is a bunch of companies illegally colluding to undermine the music publishing industry, although no individual member company has a monopoly. In this case the contention is that several tech companies are colluding and forming a trust to collectively disadvantage employees in the tech industry, instead of competing for hires.
Doesn't it make much more sense to go after MS rather then companies which are definitely not monopolies and not abusive ones at that?
It makes sense to go after both, but it seems like such obvious, long term abuse as MS has been engaged in would be a prime target if they weren't donating so much money to both political parties.
A quick look shows the OS X version passes Acid3, is about 10% slower on javascript benchmarks compared to the last version, and still has no support for system services so it can't use the same spelling checker as all the other OS X programs or the grammar checker or other tools. Basically, I don't see anything that is here to motivate me to switch. Opera may be a really nice browser for Windows, but it is still subpar for OS X.
There have always been products competing with both the iPod and iPhone that have a longer and more impressive bullet list of features.
Ah yes, it's the "Grumpy Featurism" hand-wave. Let's brush all the objective, reasoned, based-on-evidence arguments aside, and claim they are trumped by my personal claim of "It's better".
I'm not sure I even understand what you're trying to say here. You can certainly look up bullet point lists of features of various music players and smartphones. A significant number will be longer than Apple's offerings, they certainly were last time I looked. They certainly were when the iPod debuted as per the famous "no wi-fi less space than a Nomad" dismissal. I'm sure not going to bother doing a bunch of research to prove it though.
The problem being, the average person doesn't enjoy using them and half those features are so poorly implemented they are just painful to use. Many geeks are happy to work around poorly designed interfaces for the sake of overall functionality.
What a load of weasel words. Citations, please?
Do your own research. There have been plenty of usability studies over the years that agree with my position and personal experience.
Based on hard sales figures, the "average person" most certainly prefers Nokia phones in general to Apple phones.
First, Apple doesn't compete in the general cell phone market, but the smartphone market, which has been fairly distinct, although the lines are now blurring. Apple does not have the largest share of that market either, but they are certainly an up and coming contender based upon the rapidly increasing popularity. Second, market share is not a measure of individual preference because in the US phones are tied to providers and because phones and service are not free, so individuals have to choose a phone they can afford rather than one they want.
I still wonder if Android would exist or if it would have the level of functionality it does if Apple were not providing such strong competition.
The rapid and continual march of technology in the billion dollar mobile phone market has been going on for a decade or so, but Google would've only took interest in response to a Johnny come lately that, as you agree yourself, is not the dominant player in the market? Please...
We're talking about the smartphone market not the regular phone market. Based upon the huge number of phones that are designed to look like iPhones and the number of smartphone features designed to clone iPhone functionality, I think you have to be pretty oblivious not to see Apple as having a huge impact and pushing other developers to start adding functionality to compete. Multitouch and the Android Market, are good examples.
But it's just a shame we never hear about this technology on Slashdot.
What are you talking about? There have been dozens of articles about Android on Slashdot. The last one was three days ago!
Reading Slashdot, you'd think that the mobile phone market considered of Apple as a dominant player, and only Android coming along afterwards to provide competition
Umm, Android was released after the iPhone, but articles on Slashdot appear to discuss cool new technology and things nerds like to discuss. It is not reflective of market share. We often discuss technologies that have little or no market share because they are cool and innovative, even if they never become widely deployed.
It would be like Slashdot only covering OS X, giving a brief mention to Ubuntu, and never mentioning a major player like Windows at all.
But Slashdot certainly discusses both OS X and Ubuntu in much greater frequency than their market share would indicate, compared to Windows articles. That's because that is
Mmmm... Apple's dominance includes not only portable music devices (iPods)
I don't think this will stand up legally due to the numbers you cite not including music playing cell phones, which make up a significant portion of the market. This, of course, depends upon how the market is distinguished.
...but the actual distribution of music (iTunes)
First, the ITunes store and the iTunes application are in different markets and it is important to distinguish that you're referring to the former not the latter. Second, while Apple may well have dominance in said market, it is a problematic market, since it is already compromised by the illegal actions of a cartel, convicted multiple times of undermining free trade. Personally, I think Apple has had a net positive impact on innovation in the market, but it is so broken already the issue is quite muddled.
In any case, it's not illegal to have a dominant market position; it's only illegal to use that dominance to stifle competition. Fortunately, Apple hasn't demonstrated any significant tendency to eliminate competition in the markets they do dominate.
Elimination of competition is not the only issue, simply undermining free competition in a way that artificially increases their share is sufficient to damage free trade. Some of Apple's actions in said markets certainly qualify as tying in the eyes of the law, if they are ruled to have dominance in either of those markets. The issue being, they probably don't in the first market and the second market is so broken any tying is fairly immaterial or even positive. There is a lot of room for debate on it though.