Tomorrow, Dvorak is going to follow in Cringely's steps and predict that Apple is going to start selling iPods in drive-throughs in an exclusive partnership with Burger King.
this article is full of non-sequiturs. It shocks me that it even gets a spot light.
"The theory explains several odd occurrences, including Apple's freak-out and lawsuits over Macintosh gossip sites that ran stories about a musicians' breakout box"
How does it explain it? No it doesn't. Where is the logical jump? Apple sues because it wants to keep its upcoming products from hurting sales (and hype) of their current products. That's the most reasonable and simple (and thus probably correct) explanation.
"the iPod was designed to get people to move to the Mac, this didn't happen."
What? Hasn't apple been gaining market share non-stop due to the halo effect? Didn't they just pass Dell in the educational market not even a week ago?
"This switch to Windows may have originally been planned for this year and may partly explain why Adobe and other high-end apps were not ported to the Apple x86 platform when it was announced in January"
Yeah, that makes sense. Everybody is buying a new version of the OS that will, for once, require new versions of software. Adobe is going to ignore this great opportunity to sell a upgrades. Yeah. That makes sense. Not. Sounds more like they simply got blind sided by the news and haven't finished porting yet.
"Apple OS x86 could gravitate toward the PC rather than Windows toward the Mac, I have to be realistic. It boils down to the add-ons."
NO it doesn't. Microsoft is a software company, thus they don't build their own laptops or desktops. They focus on licensing out their OS. Apple is a hardware company that creates their own boxes and does not license their OS. Since Apple controls the hardware and software, they can gravitate toward the PCs, but Windows will never move to Macs, even if they wanted to. Macs are proprietary to Apple. What a garbage speculation.
"Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers."
Don't you mean Apple can finally afford to invest even more into their OS, bundle it even better with iPods and iTunes, and use the halo effect to grab an even larger market share away from Dell, HP and stodgy Chinese makers? So you're saying Apple will become Alienware PCs? Yeah, and we can see how dominant those guys are in the market.
"To preserve the Mac's slick cachet, there is no reason an executive software layer couldn't be fitted onto Windows to keep the Mac look and feel. Various tweaks could even improve the OS itself."
So Apple would be selling a windows skin? It would be slower, buggier, assumes MS would be okay with a complete rebranding of their OS (good luck!), and yet he expects them to be able to directly compete with the biggest PC sellers in the world despite this hinderance? Let's not forget MS won't be giving Apple any coding documentation on core inner workings of the OS. And Apple is going to somehow be able to fix the security vulnerabilities and bugs that native MS developers have been struggling for years to do. And what happens if a MS patch breaks one of the "upgrades" Apple made to the OS? And doesn't this directly contradict the quote about dropping "expensive OS development?"
Sometimes I can read speculation and think, "Hm, that IS interesting." But this time the complete lack of logical progression makes this "theory" worthless even to someone who'd want to believe it.
I'm in a social organization and we have had a mailing list for a few years. we used to use hotmail and yahoo groups but there was too much bloat that was pissing off (the yahoo sig) or confusing (how to join list) new members. so we switched to Mailman on shared hosting service. that costs us a few dollars a month to have, but there hasn't been any confusion since. if gmail can offer a mailing list that doesn't have group joining requirements, stupid ads on the bottom of every email, and an easy interface to manage the users on the list, i'll make sure to switch to their service. In every solution, our email is still passing through servers we don't own so privacy isn't a concern anyway.
At first it was a mere capacity war, but they've shifted the playing field with the mini, nano, and now video iPods. I know people are often wishing they held out for the next big iPod evolution, but these days these evolutions are occuring so often that waiting simply isn't an option. Competitors are trying to copy the iPod, but by the time they finally make it to the market, their target has morphed from a clunky 20gig iPod to a tiny, polished flash player with a color screen, completely changing the focus for what the market values in a player.
And this is why Apple is so secretive about what it's working on. This element of surprise is what allows it to keep its lead over its competitors. It continues to innovate its product in logical, evolutionary steps while fighting feature bloat. And of course each revision looks even more attractive than the last. Its compeitors are too busy trying to out-do yesterday's news.
This is not a double standard. Microsoft would be lynched because of their past history and willingness to break the law and abuse power. Google has a relatively (if not totally) clean track record. Consumers (and slashdotters) have yet to find a real reason to believe Google will follow a similar path.
50% by 2020? Do you have any idea how many other industries are "projected" to grow [insert big number]% by [insert distant year]??
What??? A "Challenge?" Since when is the growth of nuclear power a threat to Toshiba? Don't they make consumer electronics? 5.4 billion? Aren't they better off buying some more direct competitors that might impact their bottom line in the year 2006?
Unless of course by 2020 they're also predicting that consumer electronics will have portable nuclear power sources too...
I don't want to speculate too much on why google is doing this, but i hardly think it's for what the journalist thinks.
the internet is awesome because it is open and free. if a company tried to cut out websites, people would use the unencumbered (i.e., the current) internet. nobody would switch to googleNet.
if anything, google is creating a backup network to cut down costs, create redundancy, and increase speeds. and if they really are making a second internet, it probably won't differ much from I2, essentially a faster way for google data centers to communicate with end users of their access points.
but i re-iterate: google is not going to be filtering the internet. that would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Your employer pays you to do your job. If your job is to do something you don't like, find a new job. I hardly doubt a "Conscientious Objector status" is something you can reasonably expect to get. Either way, it looks like you should be looking for a new job if you're really going to try to make a stand against the way your company operates.
the guy was fired for:
a) showing a horrible lack of judgement in deciding to post all that in a public location
b) disloyalty toward not only his NDA, but his company's product. his comments are hardly flattering toward something his own team is developing.
Work as a pastry chef assistant and go tell potential customers about how much the pastries there suck. work as an editor and write a piece about how bad your paper's reporters are.
this isn't news. you'd be fired for this in any other mass-market industry.
The White House announced today that it would be creating several state of the art nuclear recycling facilities. Citing environmental concerns about nuclear waste near civilians, the White House released a press statement indicating "the administration will take all necessary precautions to protect the welfare of citizens by choosing rural sites." The locations for these sites were listed in the press release followed by the statement, "Not only will the construction of these facilities further strengthen our economy, but the administration hopes to show the world that the Bush administration advocates environmentally friendly options such as recycling.
The locations for the plants were listed as follows:
Chippewa National Forest, Minnesota
White Mountain National Forest, Maine
Ouachita National Forest, Oklahoma
Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming
Tongass National Forest, Alaska
Cleveland National Forest, California
Boise National Forest, Idaho
Speaking of not doing evil, I'd say purposely breaking the law is quite evil. That said, complying with the law is an important part of being good, even if you disagree with the law. Crossing that line and deciding which laws you'll follow is how you end up with massive fraud like Enron, anti-trust cases such as MS, price fixing by companies like the RIAA or the oil industry, the mafia and gangs, Bush and his wiretapping, and even terrorists.
At least google is telling people when censorship is occuring as well as providing a valuable service.
In my opinion, in the IT field, it's always your responsibility to learn new technologies and your employer's *option* to aid you. Most of the time, it makes financial sense to train an employee in new skills than to hire a whole new one (and train them for the job).
But I find it difficult to believe that a person can be in this industry and not constantly and actively learn new things on their own. I always believed self-induced training was part of the job description. If that is not what people reading this believe, I can only say you should be happy you haven't been replaced by someone who believes otherwise.
Rather than the EU wasting resources on a Google clone, I'd rather see them investing in a browser (preferably FF, but any proprietary standards-compliant one works just as well). Of course with that line of thinking, I would hope they could also invest in Linux. If they're so afraid of an American company taking over the world and abusing its monopoly, they should start by helping its top, non-corporate-US, competitors.
By the time this project is completed (3-4 years?), the industry's landscape would have changed so much that it will be irrelevant. Even if it takes them 2 years to get to a beta from conception (probably less than how long it took MS), there is no way to predict how much more advanced the field will become. Their solution is to basically copy the current top players while throwing in a little hocus-pocus about indexing audio and video.
If reliably indexing multimedia is doable with today's technology (which it really isn't), Google, Yahoo, and MSN will have this in and out of beta and ready for production long before the EU has it.
By the time the project is live, it will be a copy (and derivation) of two to five year old technology. Predictably, it will be behind on various other related-fields that are out of its scope, such as Mapping, Local, News, OS integration or anything else that yahoo/google/msn has already introduced as of now. Imagine how much further those will each progress in the next two to five years and it's easy to see why this "ambitious" project will probably fade away into obscurity shortly after launch as just another search engine, killing its operational and research budget due to low returns, and thus destroying further development -- something it will desperately need if it will gain any market share in the long term.
Some would argue the America-centric nature of the current market leaders will hurt them against an EU counterpart; however, this is still a relatively new field with the leaders emerging in the US. Google is winning because it is perceived as the best, and the fact that it is US oriented certaintly hasn't stopped it from becoming world reknown in only a few years. Even in the past year, the dominant engines have pushed to internationalize themselves.
There is another big reason why this will fail. Without speculating on MSN or Yahoo, Google has, on many ocassions, stated it collects all of its data and uses it to learn context. For example, Google's translation system should improve as they index more and more text in foreign languages. Their search results should sharpen in acuracy as their engine refines context sensitive queries. Context is an extremely important part of translation. Systems using old word/phrase conversion technques already exist and suck. What will the EU base their "advanced" translation system on? Without massive amounts of comparable language data (such as, say, scanned books), their system will be just as limited as anything you can buy in the stores.
In short, unless the current market leaders screw up, it's going to take a lot more than merely copying current technologies to grab any significant market share. Half the battle is usage data and result adjustments, which requires market share. Unless the EU's project is loosely defined, given plenty of budgetary flexibility, has no necessarily permanent feature goals, it will not be able to adapt quickly enough to survive the current or future market. Since we're talking about management riddled in red tape, I highly doubt it meets any of the requirements I just mentioned.
greylisting -> postfix -> mailscanner -> razor2 -> pyzor -> dcc checks -> spam assassin -> clamav -> bitdefender -> mailscanner -> ~/Maildir I haven't had a real spam get into my INBOX in months
Dude. You can reduce that to the following to achieve the same results:
Do you realize you can find social security and credit card numbers using Google, right? (number wild card searches)
Now imagine this. The reporter went out and searched for credit cards and SSN's. It would be very reporter-like for that reporter to say "Hey, I found some information!" But it would be crossing the line to say, "Mr Schmidt at 123 ABC lane with the social security number 123 34 5678 has the credit card 4314341239102481.
Yep, in some cases, the information is out there. Yep, anybody could find it. No, it does not mean you should put it in the headlines to make your selfish point. Now imagine "Mr Schmidt" being you and see how you feel.
Slashdot Mirror
Tomorrow, Dvorak is going to follow in Cringely's steps and predict that Apple is going to start selling iPods in drive-throughs in an exclusive partnership with Burger King.
this article is full of non-sequiturs. It shocks me that it even gets a spot light.
"The theory explains several odd occurrences, including Apple's freak-out and lawsuits over Macintosh gossip sites that ran stories about a musicians' breakout box"
How does it explain it? No it doesn't. Where is the logical jump? Apple sues because it wants to keep its upcoming products from hurting sales (and hype) of their current products. That's the most reasonable and simple (and thus probably correct) explanation.
"the iPod was designed to get people to move to the Mac, this didn't happen."
What? Hasn't apple been gaining market share non-stop due to the halo effect? Didn't they just pass Dell in the educational market not even a week ago?
"This switch to Windows may have originally been planned for this year and may partly explain why Adobe and other high-end apps were not ported to the Apple x86 platform when it was announced in January"
Yeah, that makes sense. Everybody is buying a new version of the OS that will, for once, require new versions of software. Adobe is going to ignore this great opportunity to sell a upgrades. Yeah. That makes sense. Not. Sounds more like they simply got blind sided by the news and haven't finished porting yet.
"Apple OS x86 could gravitate toward the PC rather than Windows toward the Mac, I have to be realistic. It boils down to the add-ons."
NO it doesn't. Microsoft is a software company, thus they don't build their own laptops or desktops. They focus on licensing out their OS. Apple is a hardware company that creates their own boxes and does not license their OS. Since Apple controls the hardware and software, they can gravitate toward the PCs, but Windows will never move to Macs, even if they wanted to. Macs are proprietary to Apple. What a garbage speculation.
"Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers."
Don't you mean Apple can finally afford to invest even more into their OS, bundle it even better with iPods and iTunes, and use the halo effect to grab an even larger market share away from Dell, HP and stodgy Chinese makers? So you're saying Apple will become Alienware PCs? Yeah, and we can see how dominant those guys are in the market.
"To preserve the Mac's slick cachet, there is no reason an executive software layer couldn't be fitted onto Windows to keep the Mac look and feel. Various tweaks could even improve the OS itself."
So Apple would be selling a windows skin? It would be slower, buggier, assumes MS would be okay with a complete rebranding of their OS (good luck!), and yet he expects them to be able to directly compete with the biggest PC sellers in the world despite this hinderance? Let's not forget MS won't be giving Apple any coding documentation on core inner workings of the OS. And Apple is going to somehow be able to fix the security vulnerabilities and bugs that native MS developers have been struggling for years to do. And what happens if a MS patch breaks one of the "upgrades" Apple made to the OS? And doesn't this directly contradict the quote about dropping "expensive OS development?"
Sometimes I can read speculation and think, "Hm, that IS interesting." But this time the complete lack of logical progression makes this "theory" worthless even to someone who'd want to believe it.
I'm in a social organization and we have had a mailing list for a few years. we used to use hotmail and yahoo groups but there was too much bloat that was pissing off (the yahoo sig) or confusing (how to join list) new members. so we switched to Mailman on shared hosting service. that costs us a few dollars a month to have, but there hasn't been any confusion since. if gmail can offer a mailing list that doesn't have group joining requirements, stupid ads on the bottom of every email, and an easy interface to manage the users on the list, i'll make sure to switch to their service. In every solution, our email is still passing through servers we don't own so privacy isn't a concern anyway.
At first it was a mere capacity war, but they've shifted the playing field with the mini, nano, and now video iPods. I know people are often wishing they held out for the next big iPod evolution, but these days these evolutions are occuring so often that waiting simply isn't an option. Competitors are trying to copy the iPod, but by the time they finally make it to the market, their target has morphed from a clunky 20gig iPod to a tiny, polished flash player with a color screen, completely changing the focus for what the market values in a player.
And this is why Apple is so secretive about what it's working on. This element of surprise is what allows it to keep its lead over its competitors. It continues to innovate its product in logical, evolutionary steps while fighting feature bloat. And of course each revision looks even more attractive than the last. Its compeitors are too busy trying to out-do yesterday's news.
This is not a double standard. Microsoft would be lynched because of their past history and willingness to break the law and abuse power. Google has a relatively (if not totally) clean track record. Consumers (and slashdotters) have yet to find a real reason to believe Google will follow a similar path.
1. Place cell phone next to egg
2. Set phone on fire
3. ??????
4. Profit-- Er I mean-- Dinner!
50% by 2020? Do you have any idea how many other industries are "projected" to grow [insert big number]% by [insert distant year]??
What??? A "Challenge?" Since when is the growth of nuclear power a threat to Toshiba? Don't they make consumer electronics? 5.4 billion? Aren't they better off buying some more direct competitors that might impact their bottom line in the year 2006?
Unless of course by 2020 they're also predicting that consumer electronics will have portable nuclear power sources too...
How come this acquisition makes no sense?
I don't want to speculate too much on why google is doing this, but i hardly think it's for what the journalist thinks.
the internet is awesome because it is open and free. if a company tried to cut out websites, people would use the unencumbered (i.e., the current) internet. nobody would switch to googleNet.
if anything, google is creating a backup network to cut down costs, create redundancy, and increase speeds. and if they really are making a second internet, it probably won't differ much from I2, essentially a faster way for google data centers to communicate with end users of their access points.
but i re-iterate: google is not going to be filtering the internet. that would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Your employer pays you to do your job. If your job is to do something you don't like, find a new job. I hardly doubt a "Conscientious Objector status" is something you can reasonably expect to get. Either way, it looks like you should be looking for a new job if you're really going to try to make a stand against the way your company operates.
the guy was fired for: a) showing a horrible lack of judgement in deciding to post all that in a public location b) disloyalty toward not only his NDA, but his company's product. his comments are hardly flattering toward something his own team is developing. Work as a pastry chef assistant and go tell potential customers about how much the pastries there suck. work as an editor and write a piece about how bad your paper's reporters are. this isn't news. you'd be fired for this in any other mass-market industry.
i, for one, welcome our new Goobuntu overlords
let's keep in mind Jobs is known for his block buster *products*. I'd say he has a good argument to become CEO if your reasoning is true.
The White House announced today that it would be creating several state of the art nuclear recycling facilities. Citing environmental concerns about nuclear waste near civilians, the White House released a press statement indicating "the administration will take all necessary precautions to protect the welfare of citizens by choosing rural sites." The locations for these sites were listed in the press release followed by the statement, "Not only will the construction of these facilities further strengthen our economy, but the administration hopes to show the world that the Bush administration advocates environmentally friendly options such as recycling.
The locations for the plants were listed as follows:
Chippewa National Forest, Minnesota
White Mountain National Forest, Maine
Ouachita National Forest, Oklahoma
Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming
Tongass National Forest, Alaska
Cleveland National Forest, California
Boise National Forest, Idaho
the earth isn't getting to -220C no matter how much global warming snowballs the earth.
Speaking of not doing evil, I'd say purposely breaking the law is quite evil. That said, complying with the law is an important part of being good, even if you disagree with the law. Crossing that line and deciding which laws you'll follow is how you end up with massive fraud like Enron, anti-trust cases such as MS, price fixing by companies like the RIAA or the oil industry, the mafia and gangs, Bush and his wiretapping, and even terrorists.
At least google is telling people when censorship is occuring as well as providing a valuable service.
In my opinion, in the IT field, it's always your responsibility to learn new technologies and your employer's *option* to aid you. Most of the time, it makes financial sense to train an employee in new skills than to hire a whole new one (and train them for the job).
But I find it difficult to believe that a person can be in this industry and not constantly and actively learn new things on their own. I always believed self-induced training was part of the job description. If that is not what people reading this believe, I can only say you should be happy you haven't been replaced by someone who believes otherwise.
This reminds me from yesterday's news.
Rather than the EU wasting resources on a Google clone, I'd rather see them investing in a browser (preferably FF, but any proprietary standards-compliant one works just as well). Of course with that line of thinking, I would hope they could also invest in Linux. If they're so afraid of an American company taking over the world and abusing its monopoly, they should start by helping its top, non-corporate-US, competitors.
By the time this project is completed (3-4 years?), the industry's landscape would have changed so much that it will be irrelevant. Even if it takes them 2 years to get to a beta from conception (probably less than how long it took MS), there is no way to predict how much more advanced the field will become. Their solution is to basically copy the current top players while throwing in a little hocus-pocus about indexing audio and video.
If reliably indexing multimedia is doable with today's technology (which it really isn't), Google, Yahoo, and MSN will have this in and out of beta and ready for production long before the EU has it.
By the time the project is live, it will be a copy (and derivation) of two to five year old technology. Predictably, it will be behind on various other related-fields that are out of its scope, such as Mapping, Local, News, OS integration or anything else that yahoo/google/msn has already introduced as of now. Imagine how much further those will each progress in the next two to five years and it's easy to see why this "ambitious" project will probably fade away into obscurity shortly after launch as just another search engine, killing its operational and research budget due to low returns, and thus destroying further development -- something it will desperately need if it will gain any market share in the long term.
Some would argue the America-centric nature of the current market leaders will hurt them against an EU counterpart; however, this is still a relatively new field with the leaders emerging in the US. Google is winning because it is perceived as the best, and the fact that it is US oriented certaintly hasn't stopped it from becoming world reknown in only a few years. Even in the past year, the dominant engines have pushed to internationalize themselves.
There is another big reason why this will fail. Without speculating on MSN or Yahoo, Google has, on many ocassions, stated it collects all of its data and uses it to learn context. For example, Google's translation system should improve as they index more and more text in foreign languages. Their search results should sharpen in acuracy as their engine refines context sensitive queries. Context is an extremely important part of translation. Systems using old word/phrase conversion technques already exist and suck. What will the EU base their "advanced" translation system on? Without massive amounts of comparable language data (such as, say, scanned books), their system will be just as limited as anything you can buy in the stores.
In short, unless the current market leaders screw up, it's going to take a lot more than merely copying current technologies to grab any significant market share. Half the battle is usage data and result adjustments, which requires market share. Unless the EU's project is loosely defined, given plenty of budgetary flexibility, has no necessarily permanent feature goals, it will not be able to adapt quickly enough to survive the current or future market. Since we're talking about management riddled in red tape, I highly doubt it meets any of the requirements I just mentioned.
greylisting -> postfix -> mailscanner -> razor2 -> pyzor -> dcc checks -> spam assassin -> clamav -> bitdefender -> mailscanner -> ~/Maildir I haven't had a real spam get into my INBOX in months
Dude. You can reduce that to the following to achieve the same results:
rm -fR ~/Maildir/*
Good evening James McCalla!
Going b4nkrupt? Ne3d cash fast?
C1ick h3re for a low intere5t 11 billion d0llar lo4n!!
$SYS$attorney
...and then you wake up and realize a girlfriend would be as likely as naked ladies living in your pocket.
Do you realize you can find social security and credit card numbers using Google, right? (number wild card searches)
Now imagine this. The reporter went out and searched for credit cards and SSN's. It would be very reporter-like for that reporter to say "Hey, I found some information!" But it would be crossing the line to say, "Mr Schmidt at 123 ABC lane with the social security number 123 34 5678 has the credit card 4314341239102481.
Yep, in some cases, the information is out there. Yep, anybody could find it. No, it does not mean you should put it in the headlines to make your selfish point. Now imagine "Mr Schmidt" being you and see how you feel.
Great. With this, Microsoft is making XML is their own "proprietary" format. At least in that country.
How come I feel like installing this will give my computer another reason, er excuse, to crash Explorer...?