It's also doing very well indeed in the embedded systems sector.
Re:Why can't they still sell PCs without OS?
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
"Not to mention that the parts HP, Gateway, Dell, etc. buy to build their PCs usually don't have official Linux support (and in some cases, not even inofficial Linux support).
HP have quite an extensive range of Linux servers (several distros, including Debian), and offer it as a choice for some desktops, but the latter option only has any prominence on the section of their site for Enterprise customers (they'll sell Linux servers to anybody who wants one).
"I'm guessing you know how hard it is to train people to use a computer let alone windows, osx, or linux."
Having trained a fairly large number of total computer-illiterates, I don't think it's particularly hard if one avoids meaningless techno-babble or treating people like idiots just because they don't know anything about computers. By far the most problematic (and infuriating) users are the ones who think they're experts but know bugger all!
"Many, many case (as much as 90%, in my experience) of tech support calls consist of unplugged mouse, unplugged power, minimized program, etc etc. "
These tend to come from untrained (or poorly trained) users though. Remember that the majority of people need somebody to "install" their DVD player (i.e. plug it in and connect it to the TV), so their chances of successfully connecting up and using a totally unfamiliar device are very, very small.
"Hopefully it's better today"
I think its worse today than it used to be in the days of mainly command-line systems because companies like Apple and Microsoft have conveyed an impression that anybody can buy a computer, take it home, and use it straight away. And while GUIs have certainly made computers _more_ accessible, they are still a long way from being immediately intuitive to those with no prior experience.
"the amount of clueless users out there is mind boggling"
This is because companies have been marketing computers to clueless people without telling them that they may require some training, or how to obtain it at an affordable price.
"Not to mention the politics of assigning blame that seems to take hold the bigger a company is so a company tend to stick to what's known to work"
As many business analysts will tell you, an alarming proportion of companies also still follow policies that obviously do not work, but are still in place for historic reasons or because somebody at the top wants things done that way. Note that I'm not necessarily referring to computing policies here, but making a general observation.
"The situation we end up right now is the fallout from the IBM days, when no one was fired for choosing IBM"
It was actually more a case of IBM lending legitimacy to what were then mostly referred to as "microcomputers" than people actually buying a large amount of genuine IBM machines. They only sold around 3 million of them worldwide in the first five years of its life, and within a year of that, clone makers had already overtaken them in sales, as had the Commodore-64 (by a very significant margin). It was therefore the clones that actually established the IBM PC as a standard in a market where a large number of incompatible proprietary systems were competing with CP/M, which provided compatibility at the software and CPU level, but not in terms of other hardware (the wide range of floppy disk formats made life particularly difficult for ISVs). By contrast, the PC clones had standard keyboards, standard floppies, only two different displays (MDA and CGA) compared with a vast range of CP/M terminals, and standard expansion slots that could all use the same cards, and it was this as much as the original coming from IBM that generated a demand which fueled an entire industry of software, expansions, and peripheral devices.
"The thing is, not all jobs require computer to do."
Very true, although the computer industry does its best to convince us otherwise!
"Stuff like accounting only use minimal amount of computing skill, marketing people who are good at spending $5000+ on a projector (but arguably is the money bringer in a company), and corporate lawyers. These people have scarce need for computing but most of them are experienced with office in some form."
I can't speak for the US because I'm not based there. However, from my experience, the only Office item that marketing people use much is PowerPoint, but they don't seem to be very familiar with it, and would therefore probably be happy with some other piece of softwa
"If you've had ANY reaction to the commercial that makes you remember it more, then they're doing just what they've paid for."
They're doing what they were paid for if the money made from selling more products exceeds the amount spent on the marketing campaign, and not otherwise. There have been plenty of campaigns that people remembered for all the wrong reasons which failed to do this, or even resulted in negative sales, and those campaigns quickly ended up being withdrawn (e.g. "Dude, you're getting a Dell!").
"Yes, you can hurt Microsoft or Sony by buying their system and never buying games."
But not as much as you hurt yourself. To make Sony lose $300, you have to lose $600 (it is lost because you are buying something you never intend to use), so you hurt yourself twice as much as you hurt Sony. I don't know how much MS lose on each current XBox-360, but I'm willing to bet that it's a lot less than they cost at retail, so once again to hurt Microsoft, you've got to hurt yourself a lot more. It's a bit like standing in a swarm of bees and letting them sting you because you really hate bees, and know that every sting will kill one, or letting a bully punch you in the face until his hand hurts, and then sitting in hospital after extensive facial reconstructive surgery thinking "Hey, I really showed him. I bet his knuckles will be sore for days...".
"The problem is the numbers are really really small."
That's because not many people are stupid enough to throw six hundred bucks down the toilet to make Sony lose half that (while increasing Sony's market share figures, and therefore the number of games companies and movie studios that produce content, thus providing more incentive for others to buy a PS3) when they could also hurt them spending $250 on a Wii, or spending nothing and not buying a console at all.
"I'm aware of all your points, but don't forget the cost of retraining people to use Linux or Macs."
This is one important aspect. There are many others that may or may not have an effect on a given business: reliance on a particular software set that only runs on Windows; corporate acquisition policies that obtain everything from a single supplier; having in-house software that relies on Microsoft tools and technologies; requirements for compatibility with software that customers use; or simply the standard corporate blame-avoidance culture that results in everybody being terrified of changing even the most stupid company practices (I am not implying that using Windows is universally stupid, but rather that stupid practices continue for extremely long periods due to an innate aversion to risk).
"I'm fully aware of the discounts for volume buying, but that still won't break MS's stranglehold."
I did not imply that it would. My point was simply that few corporations base their buying decisions on price alone -- if they did, then IBM would not have dominated the entire IT sector for so many years when their competition offered what were often significantly better products for a lot less money. Macs would be thus rare on today's corporate desktops even if they cost a lot less than the equivalent Windows PC, just as Linux is despite the fact that it can offer significant savings when compared with annual renewals of corporate site licenses for desktop Windows.
"Of course, you can always look for people with skills in Mac or Linux, but since there's relatively few of them, you're limiting your own choices"
If by "skill" you mean the ability to wheel a mouse around and click on things, then yes, people with Windows "skills" are by far the easiest to find, but by the same token, any competent trainer could bring them up to an equivalent level of "skill" in OS X or a given Linux desktop in a few minutes, and they'd have far less chance of loading their computer and corporate mail servers to the gills with bots, spyware, and other bits of assorted crap. However, Windows users with something approaching any recognised definition of the term "skill" are only slightly less scarce than desktop Linux users (nearly all of whom are far better with computers than 95% of Windows users, and I'm being generous to Windows users here), and might actually be more scarce than people who can use OS X competently.
They've also been using Matsushita DVD drives for some time that have region-coding info in an area that can't be accessed from the computer itself. You can change the region code a maximum of five times, and there's no way around it (tools that worked with older drives are powerless with these, and there are as yet no loadable firmware hacks for them).
"See the price tag for a Mac. Then multiply by 1000 for a good-sized office."
See the price tag for the original IBM PC, XT, AT, and AT/E. Multiply it by 1000 for a good-sized office. Compare that price with competitors' offerings at the time, and wonder how IBM were able to sell even one of them if cost was such an important factor in the buying decisions of all but the smallest companies. Now realise that:
1) Those who buy things by the thousand get big discounts, and suppliers with bigger profit margins have more bargaining room than those operating on razor-thin ones. 2) Companies with good accountants can write a lot of the cost off against their taxes, so more expensive computers don't necessarily end up costing more over their projected life span.
"Although I kind of suspect the "flashiness" of Macs & OSX is another reason why. Business wants boring-looking stuff, not something that looks fancy."
If this is the case, then why do MS include fancy Aero UI features with every business version of Vista, but not all of the home editions? Surely this should be the other way around if business users want boring UIs?
"Imagine you're running a business."
Which is all you can do, because from what you've written, it's obvious you have never run one, or been involved in running one.
"Would you equip your 1000 employees with Toyotas or BMWs?"
You equip your employees with whatever offers the best deal to your company over the projected life time of the vehicles, and that is not always the same as what is best for a consumer buying one example from a dealer.
Note that even small businesses apply different criteria to their buying decisions than individuals. A professional carpenter or car mechanic does not go to a superstore looking for the cheapest tools -- they buy stuff that will stand up to years of constant use because paying three times as much for something that lasts your entire working life is cheaper than buying a new crappy one every couple of months. Small laboratories use expensive professional microscopes instead of a $25 "80,000x Magnification Super Microscope Set"; restaurants pay a premium for heavy-duty kitchen equipment; photographers will pay more for a lens than most people expect to spend on five cameras; musicians spend many thousands of dollars on instruments that seem much the same as ones for a few hundred to those with more modest abilities; etc., etc., etc.
"There are telltale signs when a device goes out of its way to stop working."
It's the little messages like "Windows has determined that you are a thieving bastard. Your local law enforcement agencies have been informed" that tend to give it away.
The marketing campaign for the original IBM PC (in the UK at least) consisted of a magazine page with picture of it and a Charlie Chaplin look-alike, the words "IBM PC", and a little IBM logo (the old one with three letters made out of stripes) at the bottom right-hand corner of the page next to a phone number. It was so bewilderingly meaningless that people ended up turning it around and folding it in strange ways in the hope that there was some hidden message, but AFAIK nobody ever found one.
"For the great many, they do what is right because it is right, and for others, because they simple have no reason to do otherwise. As down on the "sheeple" as Slashdotters like to be, the average human being is quite decent"
I would agree that the average person is indeed pretty decent. However, these same decent people have done dreadful things when told to by someone in authority, and even more kept silent while dreadful things happened to others, so the fact that most of the people in any given society are decent does not mean that their societies are as decent as them. In fact, history teaches us that the majority of societies bigger than a single village have been pretty horrible unless one had the good fortune to be a member of the ruling classes, in which case they were very wonderful indeed.
"and that is in fact a difficult admission for me to make, because it means that creating change in the world is significantly harder than merely guilting people into it."
Guilt has been felt by many who saw horrible things happening to others, but they still did nothing to prevent it. Again, history says that a society mostly made up of decent people with an innate respect for laws and lawmakers is by far the easiest for despots to rule over, because it is almost entirely self-controlling.
"For the few who have a great deal to gain from violating the law (which was originally written down in an attempt to codify what societies thought were good basic rules to live by), there's nothing that would prevent them from violating it anyway."
I think you'll find that most laws throughout history have been written to ensure that the wealthy and powerful stayed that way, and the few societies which start out with a more egalitarian system inevitably end up with one in which those with enough money or political connections not only receive an entirely different type of "justice" to everyone else, but get can also get new laws written and old ones changed for their own benefit, irrespective of whether this is detrimental to society as a whole. There is a saying about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance, which could also be phrased as "complacency is the enemy of freedom", and there is no more complacent society than one that consists almost entirely of decent, law-abiding people.
"the only reason we respect any non-living entity's rights at all is to promote perceived benefits to the culture itself."
What a load of BS. People respect the fact that the government has a big stick to hit them with, so they do what they're told, in the vast majority of cases without knowing or caring why they have to do it, only that they do. The government could change the US constitution clause on copyrights and patents to read "To further the income of members of congress and the senate, copyrights and patents will be presented to the rich and powerful in return for payments made to members, for a period not to exceed the time that those making the payments remain rich and powerful enough to continue with them", and nothing would happen beyond a load of whinging and whining by the few who knew what had happened, while the rest of the population would be too preoccupied with Paris Hilton et. al. to notice that it had happened.
"It is Europe that uses PAL, and that's moot with HMDI anyway."
Unfortunately, it's HDMI that's moot in Europe, not PAL. There have only been something like 2 million hi-def capable TVs sold in Europe, and a fair proportion of those are owned by bars and other such establishments where the attraction is the big screen rather than high definition (which European broadcasters have been slow to take up, so it still isn't available in all countries, even by cable or satellite). Add to this the fact that most of the existing sets lack HDMI inputs, and you have a situation where the PS3's high definition capabilities are not going to be a major selling point, either for games, or movies. Of course, this doesn't mean that the PS3 won't sell in Europe, but it will have to do so irrespective of its HD capabilities rather than because of them.
NB: Sony do have one major ally in the form of Nintendo Europe, who have probably done as much to sell PS2s and XBoxes as Sony and MS. They have more power than anyone else to ensure a miserable European XMas for the Wii .
"Just think of the billions of dollars taken out of the world wide economy that could have been spent on REAL business improvements."
But would most likely have been spent on higher salaries for top executives, jets for top executives, apartments in the most expensive areas of the world's most expensive cities for top executives to use when they spend a day there once every three years, high-class hookers pushing wheel-barrows full of cocaine into said apartments during that day, share options for top executives, golden parachutes so top executives can live like kings after the creditors have picked over the bones of the company that the incompetent top executives have ruined, but not before selling all those shares they optioned, thus rendering other employee shares worthless, and siphoning the pension fund into a series of untraceable numbered overseas accounts
The fact that the media companies are playing hardball with MS has no real bearing on what they expect to get from Apple. Microsoft's past record of selling DRM-protected media either directly or via third party licensees has been very poor, even when those doing the selling are retail giants such as Wal-Mart or Amazon, and that was when every music player except Apple's could (theoretically at least) play those media. Gates and Co. will thus have a very hard job indeed convincing them that a new player only they make which cannot use any existing Microsoft DRM format, but has a new one of its own that won't work with anything else, will be successful enough to avoid being dropped after a couple of years, during which its non-compliance with prior MS formats will sew enough confusion to destroy most other MS-format music players, leaving Apple with the market pretty much to itself.
So instead of this presaging the future for deals between Apple and the music/movie industry, this could just as easily be a giant vote of no confidence by that industry in the Zune, which has not after all sold to anybody at this point, and even if it turns out to be wildly successful, will still take years to displace all the existing iPods, especially when it's only being launched in the US, thus ensuring that the rest of the world will be using something else (most probably an iPod) for at least another year.
No, although if memory serves me, people were queuing up for them just prior to launch, and even more did it for Windows-95. I'll leave comments on the latter for others...
Wow, a queue with seven people in it! That must have wound its way for at least two dozen feet from the front of the store, or even more if some of them were fat. If this sort of massive demand keeps up, people might have to wait in line for five or even ten minutes to get a PS/2, so buy yours before Christmas to avoid gigantic lines with ten or even a dozen people in them. You know it makes sense!
It actually says that there was little interbreeding, not no interbreeding. Note also that we are unusual among hominids in having nearly identical DNA throughout the entire species, whereas (for example) Chimpanzees have considerably more genetic diversity in any small group than all the humans on the planet put together. It appears that this may have been the result of a near extinction caused by a catastrophic event (possibly a super volcano) around 70,000 years ago that reduced the entire human population of the planet to around 2,000 individuals, resulting in the loss of many human genetic lines that were distinct from our own.
The above has significant implications for the cited mitochondrial DNA study in two ways:
1) It is highly probable that Neanderthals had the same level of genetic diversity as other hominids, so all the study actually proves is that the family of one Croatian Neanderthal whose mtDNA was sequenced didn't interbreed with the small sub-group of human survivors who were our ancestors.
2) The loss of so many human genetic lines means that we do not as yet know whether some other human group's genetic material found its way into Neanderthals, and vice-versa.
Furthermore, because remains of Neanderthals are rare, and only a small fraction of those have usable DNA, a completely negative result from all of them would mean that our ancestors (rather than the more diverse pre-catastrophy group of humans) didn't interbreed with the the families of the half dozen individuals available for testing at the time when those individuals died. This is significant in the case of the Croatian Neanderthal who was sequenced because he died 45.000 years ago, which was not only 17,000 years before Neanderthals as a species became extinct, but also before there was a significant human presence in most of the areas where Neanderthals lived for any notable level of crossbreeding to occur.
Those eugenicists would adore your use of the term "sub-human" to imply that those with minor genetic differences from your own (i.e. minor enough that we can inter-breed) are inferior.
"Yes, that was MS's version of the Java language that could have made Java popular on the Windows desktop if Sun hadn't sued them."
Microsoft's VM was a lot better than Sun's at that time, and their Windows GUI library made AWT look like the utter pile of shit that it was. They also put a lot of effort into marketing Java as the future of Windows application development to developers, and had a language independent native interface and interoperability layer that was offered to Sun, but rejected in favour of JNI.
"Sun decided that pure Java was more important than success on the Windows desktop so I guess they should be happy that things turned out the way they wanted."
I think it was more of a case of Scott McNeally's pathological hatred of MS leading to yet another in a remarkable series of bone-headed maneuvers that ended up nearly bankrupting Sun. This particular bone of contention seemed to revolve around the fact that while the MS VM and libraries supported JNI, their use required a command-line switch, and Sun reckoned that the command-line switch should be used to enable Microsoft's options rather than theirs (for some reason, an old illustration of Swift's Lilliputians and their war over what end of a boiled egg was the correct one for breaking with a spoon kept coming to me whenever I read about that particular saga).
"These days MS isn't interested in Java and Windows developers are even less interested."
And because of Mono, the same can be said for growing numbers of Linux and OS X developers. By cutting off their own nose to spite their face, Sun not only closed the door on a big source of revenue (MS were their biggest, and therefore most lucrative licensee at that time), but also spurred the development of a competing system by a company with effectively unlimited funds that had already written their own Java compiler, VM, and libraries, and therefore had a very good idea of not only what Java had done right, but also what was wrong with it. This together with Sun's foot-dragging over open sourcing Java led in its turn to a clone of the competing system that check-mates Java's ability to run on a variety of platforms. Way to go Sun!
Slashdot Mirror
It's also doing very well indeed in the embedded systems sector.
"Not to mention that the parts HP, Gateway, Dell, etc. buy to build their PCs usually don't have official Linux support (and in some cases, not even inofficial Linux support).
HP have quite an extensive range of Linux servers (several distros, including Debian), and offer it as a choice for some desktops, but the latter option only has any prominence on the section of their site for Enterprise customers (they'll sell Linux servers to anybody who wants one).
"I'm guessing you know how hard it is to train people to use a computer let alone windows, osx, or linux."
Having trained a fairly large number of total computer-illiterates, I don't think it's particularly hard if one avoids meaningless techno-babble or treating people like idiots just because they don't know anything about computers. By far the most problematic (and infuriating) users are the ones who think they're experts but know bugger all!
"Many, many case (as much as 90%, in my experience) of tech support calls consist of unplugged mouse, unplugged power, minimized program, etc etc. "
These tend to come from untrained (or poorly trained) users though. Remember that the majority of people need somebody to "install" their DVD player (i.e. plug it in and connect it to the TV), so their chances of successfully connecting up and using a totally unfamiliar device are very, very small.
"Hopefully it's better today"
I think its worse today than it used to be in the days of mainly command-line systems because companies like Apple and Microsoft have conveyed an impression that anybody can buy a computer, take it home, and use it straight away. And while GUIs have certainly made computers _more_ accessible, they are still a long way from being immediately intuitive to those with no prior experience.
"the amount of clueless users out there is mind boggling"
This is because companies have been marketing computers to clueless people without telling them that they may require some training, or how to obtain it at an affordable price.
"Not to mention the politics of assigning blame that seems to take hold the bigger a company is so a company tend to stick to what's known to work"
As many business analysts will tell you, an alarming proportion of companies also still follow policies that obviously do not work, but are still in place for historic reasons or because somebody at the top wants things done that way. Note that I'm not necessarily referring to computing policies here, but making a general observation.
"The situation we end up right now is the fallout from the IBM days, when no one was fired for choosing IBM"
It was actually more a case of IBM lending legitimacy to what were then mostly referred to as "microcomputers" than people actually buying a large amount of genuine IBM machines. They only sold around 3 million of them worldwide in the first five years of its life, and within a year of that, clone makers had already overtaken them in sales, as had the Commodore-64 (by a very significant margin). It was therefore the clones that actually established the IBM PC as a standard in a market where a large number of incompatible proprietary systems were competing with CP/M, which provided compatibility at the software and CPU level, but not in terms of other hardware (the wide range of floppy disk formats made life particularly difficult for ISVs). By contrast, the PC clones had standard keyboards, standard floppies, only two different displays (MDA and CGA) compared with a vast range of CP/M terminals, and standard expansion slots that could all use the same cards, and it was this as much as the original coming from IBM that generated a demand which fueled an entire industry of software, expansions, and peripheral devices.
"The thing is, not all jobs require computer to do."
Very true, although the computer industry does its best to convince us otherwise!
"Stuff like accounting only use minimal amount of computing skill, marketing people who are good at spending $5000+ on a projector (but arguably is the money bringer in a company), and corporate lawyers. These people have scarce need for computing but most of them are experienced with office in some form."
I can't speak for the US because I'm not based there. However, from my experience, the only Office item that marketing people use much is PowerPoint, but they don't seem to be very familiar with it, and would therefore probably be happy with some other piece of softwa
"The point of marketing is to make you remember."
The point of marketing is to sell more products.
"If you've had ANY reaction to the commercial that makes you remember it more, then they're doing just what they've paid for."
They're doing what they were paid for if the money made from selling more products exceeds the amount spent on the marketing campaign, and not otherwise. There have been plenty of campaigns that people remembered for all the wrong reasons which failed to do this, or even resulted in negative sales, and those campaigns quickly ended up being withdrawn (e.g. "Dude, you're getting a Dell!").
"Yes, you can hurt Microsoft or Sony by buying their system and never buying games."
But not as much as you hurt yourself. To make Sony lose $300, you have to lose $600 (it is lost because you are buying something you never intend to use), so you hurt yourself twice as much as you hurt Sony. I don't know how much MS lose on each current XBox-360, but I'm willing to bet that it's a lot less than they cost at retail, so once again to hurt Microsoft, you've got to hurt yourself a lot more. It's a bit like standing in a swarm of bees and letting them sting you because you really hate bees, and know that every sting will kill one, or letting a bully punch you in the face until his hand hurts, and then sitting in hospital after extensive facial reconstructive surgery thinking "Hey, I really showed him. I bet his knuckles will be sore for days...".
"The problem is the numbers are really really small."
That's because not many people are stupid enough to throw six hundred bucks down the toilet to make Sony lose half that (while increasing Sony's market share figures, and therefore the number of games companies and movie studios that produce content, thus providing more incentive for others to buy a PS3) when they could also hurt them spending $250 on a Wii, or spending nothing and not buying a console at all.
If that's the case, then why not just turn up and stand in line five minutes before the place opens instead of suffering for several days?
"I'm aware of all your points, but don't forget the cost of retraining people to use Linux or Macs."
This is one important aspect. There are many others that may or may not have an effect on a given business: reliance on a particular software set that only runs on Windows; corporate acquisition policies that obtain everything from a single supplier; having in-house software that relies on Microsoft tools and technologies; requirements for compatibility with software that customers use; or simply the standard corporate blame-avoidance culture that results in everybody being terrified of changing even the most stupid company practices (I am not implying that using Windows is universally stupid, but rather that stupid practices continue for extremely long periods due to an innate aversion to risk).
"I'm fully aware of the discounts for volume buying, but that still won't break MS's stranglehold."
I did not imply that it would. My point was simply that few corporations base their buying decisions on price alone -- if they did, then IBM would not have dominated the entire IT sector for so many years when their competition offered what were often significantly better products for a lot less money. Macs would be thus rare on today's corporate desktops even if they cost a lot less than the equivalent Windows PC, just as Linux is despite the fact that it can offer significant savings when compared with annual renewals of corporate site licenses for desktop Windows.
"Of course, you can always look for people with skills in Mac or Linux, but since there's relatively few of them, you're limiting your own choices"
If by "skill" you mean the ability to wheel a mouse around and click on things, then yes, people with Windows "skills" are by far the easiest to find, but by the same token, any competent trainer could bring them up to an equivalent level of "skill" in OS X or a given Linux desktop in a few minutes, and they'd have far less chance of loading their computer and corporate mail servers to the gills with bots, spyware, and other bits of assorted crap. However, Windows users with something approaching any recognised definition of the term "skill" are only slightly less scarce than desktop Linux users (nearly all of whom are far better with computers than 95% of Windows users, and I'm being generous to Windows users here), and might actually be more scarce than people who can use OS X competently.
"Thailand is such a *massive* creator of open-source software, it shall surely die without their support."
That's as nothing compared to their gigantic portfolio of commercial packages!
"That guy could very well just be a genuine idiot, and yet you're trying to insult him by saying he's corrupt as well."
While calling him an idiot isn't in the least insulting.
They've also been using Matsushita DVD drives for some time that have region-coding info in an area that can't be accessed from the computer itself. You can change the region code a maximum of five times, and there's no way around it (tools that worked with older drives are powerless with these, and there are as yet no loadable firmware hacks for them).
"See the price tag for a Mac. Then multiply by 1000 for a good-sized office."
See the price tag for the original IBM PC, XT, AT, and AT/E. Multiply it by 1000 for a good-sized office. Compare that price with competitors' offerings at the time, and wonder how IBM were able to sell even one of them if cost was such an important factor in the buying decisions of all but the smallest companies. Now realise that:
1) Those who buy things by the thousand get big discounts, and suppliers with bigger profit margins have more bargaining room than those operating on razor-thin ones.
2) Companies with good accountants can write a lot of the cost off against their taxes, so more expensive computers don't necessarily end up costing more over their projected life span.
"Although I kind of suspect the "flashiness" of Macs & OSX is another reason why. Business wants boring-looking stuff, not something that looks fancy."
If this is the case, then why do MS include fancy Aero UI features with every business version of Vista, but not all of the home editions? Surely this should be the other way around if business users want boring UIs?
"Imagine you're running a business."
Which is all you can do, because from what you've written, it's obvious you have never run one, or been involved in running one.
"Would you equip your 1000 employees with Toyotas or BMWs?"
You equip your employees with whatever offers the best deal to your company over the projected life time of the vehicles, and that is not always the same as what is best for a consumer buying one example from a dealer.
Note that even small businesses apply different criteria to their buying decisions than individuals. A professional carpenter or car mechanic does not go to a superstore looking for the cheapest tools -- they buy stuff that will stand up to years of constant use because paying three times as much for something that lasts your entire working life is cheaper than buying a new crappy one every couple of months. Small laboratories use expensive professional microscopes instead of a $25 "80,000x Magnification Super Microscope Set"; restaurants pay a premium for heavy-duty kitchen equipment; photographers will pay more for a lens than most people expect to spend on five cameras; musicians spend many thousands of dollars on instruments that seem much the same as ones for a few hundred to those with more modest abilities; etc., etc., etc.
"There are telltale signs when a device goes out of its way to stop working."
It's the little messages like "Windows has determined that you are a thieving bastard. Your local law enforcement agencies have been informed" that tend to give it away.
The marketing campaign for the original IBM PC (in the UK at least) consisted of a magazine page with picture of it and a Charlie Chaplin look-alike, the words "IBM PC", and a little IBM logo (the old one with three letters made out of stripes) at the bottom right-hand corner of the page next to a phone number. It was so bewilderingly meaningless that people ended up turning it around and folding it in strange ways in the hope that there was some hidden message, but AFAIK nobody ever found one.
"I know personally about a Fortune 100 company who blew $1 billion on an IT project that went FUBAR."
A major IT project that is delivered on time, on budget, and works according to the original specification
is a very rare beast indeed.
"For the great many, they do what is right because it is right, and for others, because they simple have no reason to do otherwise. As down on the "sheeple" as Slashdotters like to be, the average human being is quite decent"
I would agree that the average person is indeed pretty decent. However, these same decent people have done dreadful things when told to by someone in authority, and even more kept silent while dreadful things happened to others, so the fact that most of the people in any given society are decent does not mean that their societies are as decent as them. In fact, history teaches us that the majority of societies bigger than a single village have been pretty horrible unless one had the good fortune to be a member of the ruling classes, in which case they were very wonderful indeed.
"and that is in fact a difficult admission for me to make, because it means that creating change in the world is significantly harder than merely guilting people into it."
Guilt has been felt by many who saw horrible things happening to others, but they still did nothing to prevent it. Again, history says that a society mostly made up of decent people with an innate respect for laws and lawmakers is by far the easiest for despots to rule over, because it is almost entirely self-controlling.
"For the few who have a great deal to gain from violating the law (which was originally written down in an attempt to codify what societies thought were good basic rules to live by), there's nothing that would prevent them from violating it anyway."
I think you'll find that most laws throughout history have been written to ensure that the wealthy and powerful stayed that way, and the few societies which start out with a more egalitarian system inevitably end up with one in which those with enough money or political connections not only receive an entirely different type of "justice" to everyone else, but get can also get new laws written and old ones changed for their own benefit, irrespective of whether this is detrimental to society as a whole. There is a saying about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance, which could also be phrased as "complacency is the enemy of freedom", and there is no more complacent society than one that consists almost entirely of decent, law-abiding people.
"the only reason we respect any non-living entity's rights at all is to promote perceived benefits to the culture itself."
What a load of BS. People respect the fact that the government has a big stick to hit them with, so they do what they're told, in the vast majority of cases without knowing or caring why they have to do it, only that they do. The government could change the US constitution clause on copyrights and patents to read "To further the income of members of congress and the senate, copyrights and patents will be presented to the rich and powerful in return for payments made to members, for a period not to exceed the time that those making the payments remain rich and powerful enough to continue with them", and nothing would happen beyond a load of whinging and whining by the few who knew what had happened, while the rest of the population would be too preoccupied with Paris Hilton et. al. to notice that it had happened.
"It is Europe that uses PAL, and that's moot with HMDI anyway."
Unfortunately, it's HDMI that's moot in Europe, not PAL. There have only been something like 2 million hi-def capable TVs sold in Europe, and a fair proportion of those are owned by bars and other such establishments where the attraction is the big screen rather than high definition (which European broadcasters have been slow to take up, so it still isn't available in all countries, even by cable or satellite). Add to this the fact that most of the existing sets lack HDMI inputs, and you have a situation where the PS3's high definition capabilities are not going to be a major selling point, either for games, or movies. Of course, this doesn't mean that the PS3 won't sell in Europe, but it will have to do so irrespective of its HD capabilities rather than because of them.
NB: Sony do have one major ally in the form of Nintendo Europe, who have probably done as much to sell PS2s and XBoxes as Sony and MS. They have more power than anyone else to ensure a miserable European XMas for the Wii .
"Just think of the billions of dollars taken out of the world wide economy that could have been spent on REAL business improvements."
But would most likely have been spent on higher salaries for top executives, jets for top executives, apartments in the most expensive areas of the world's most expensive cities for top executives to use when they spend a day there once every three years, high-class hookers pushing wheel-barrows full of cocaine into said apartments during that day, share options for top executives, golden parachutes so top executives can live like kings after the creditors have picked over the bones of the company that the incompetent top executives have ruined, but not before selling all those shares they optioned, thus rendering other employee shares worthless, and siphoning the pension fund into a series of untraceable numbered overseas accounts
The fact that the media companies are playing hardball with MS has no real bearing on what they expect to get from Apple. Microsoft's past record of selling DRM-protected media either directly or via third party licensees has been very poor, even when those doing the selling are retail giants such as Wal-Mart or Amazon, and that was when every music player except Apple's could (theoretically at least) play those media. Gates and Co. will thus have a very hard job indeed convincing them that a new player only they make which cannot use any existing Microsoft DRM format, but has a new one of its own that won't work with anything else, will be successful enough to avoid being dropped after a couple of years, during which its non-compliance with prior MS formats will sew enough confusion to destroy most other MS-format music players, leaving Apple with the market pretty much to itself.
So instead of this presaging the future for deals between Apple and the music/movie industry, this could just as easily be a giant vote of no confidence by that industry in the Zune, which has not after all sold to anybody at this point, and even if it turns out to be wildly successful, will still take years to displace all the existing iPods, especially when it's only being launched in the US, thus ensuring that the rest of the world will be using something else (most probably an iPod) for at least another year.
No, although if memory serves me, people were queuing up for them just prior to launch, and even more did it for Windows-95. I'll leave comments on the latter for others...
LOL! My fault for not previewing first...
Wow, a queue with seven people in it! That must have wound its way for at least two dozen feet from the front of the store, or even more if some of them were fat. If this sort of massive demand keeps up, people might have to wait in line for five or even ten minutes to get a PS/2, so buy yours before Christmas to avoid gigantic lines with ten or even a dozen people in them. You know it makes sense!
It actually says that there was little interbreeding, not no interbreeding. Note also that we are unusual among hominids in having nearly identical DNA throughout the entire species, whereas (for example) Chimpanzees have considerably more genetic diversity in any small group than all the humans on the planet put together. It appears that this may have been the result of a near extinction caused by a catastrophic event (possibly a super volcano) around 70,000 years ago that reduced the entire human population of the planet to around 2,000 individuals, resulting in the loss of many human genetic lines that were distinct from our own.
The above has significant implications for the cited mitochondrial DNA study in two ways:
1) It is highly probable that Neanderthals had the same level of genetic diversity as other hominids, so all the study actually proves is that the family of one Croatian Neanderthal whose mtDNA was sequenced didn't interbreed with the small sub-group of human survivors who were our ancestors.
2) The loss of so many human genetic lines means that we do not as yet know whether some other human group's genetic material found its way into Neanderthals, and vice-versa.
Furthermore, because remains of Neanderthals are rare, and only a small fraction of those have usable DNA, a completely negative result from all of them would mean that our ancestors (rather than the more diverse pre-catastrophy group of humans) didn't interbreed with the the families of the half dozen individuals available for testing at the time when those individuals died. This is significant in the case of the Croatian Neanderthal who was sequenced because he died 45.000 years ago, which was not only 17,000 years before Neanderthals as a species became extinct, but also before there was a significant human presence in most of the areas where Neanderthals lived for any notable level of crossbreeding to occur.
Those eugenicists would adore your use of the term "sub-human" to imply that those with minor genetic differences from your own (i.e. minor enough that we can inter-breed) are inferior.
"Yes, that was MS's version of the Java language that could have made Java popular on the Windows desktop if Sun hadn't sued them."
Microsoft's VM was a lot better than Sun's at that time, and their Windows GUI library made AWT look like the utter pile of shit that it was. They also put a lot of effort into marketing Java as the future of Windows application development to developers, and had a language independent native interface and interoperability layer that was offered to Sun, but rejected in favour of JNI.
"Sun decided that pure Java was more important than success on the Windows desktop so I guess they should be happy that things turned out the way they wanted."
I think it was more of a case of Scott McNeally's pathological hatred of MS leading to yet another in a remarkable series of bone-headed maneuvers that ended up nearly bankrupting Sun. This particular bone of contention seemed to revolve around the fact that while the MS VM and libraries supported JNI, their use required a command-line switch, and Sun reckoned that the command-line switch should be used to enable Microsoft's options rather than theirs (for some reason, an old illustration of Swift's Lilliputians and their war over what end of a boiled egg was the correct one for breaking with a spoon kept coming to me whenever I read about that particular saga).
"These days MS isn't interested in Java and Windows developers are even less interested."
And because of Mono, the same can be said for growing numbers of Linux and OS X developers. By cutting off their own nose to spite their face, Sun not only closed the door on a big source of revenue (MS were their biggest, and therefore most lucrative licensee at that time), but also spurred the development of a competing system by a company with effectively unlimited funds that had already written their own Java compiler, VM, and libraries, and therefore had a very good idea of not only what Java had done right, but also what was wrong with it. This together with Sun's foot-dragging over open sourcing Java led in its turn to a clone of the competing system that check-mates Java's ability to run on a variety of platforms. Way to go Sun!