No, the parent post is not insightful. Rules change when you hit monopoly status, and the reason is purely so that companies can have a chance to compete against entrenched monopolies in a sector.
You want to allow product tying for non-monopoly players, but disallow it for the monopolies. That's good governance, and talk of "silent promotion" merely attempts to weaken systems like this.
The things that Apple does may be the same as what Microsoft did in the bad old days (although I have yet to hear good examples beyond vague anti-corporate claptrap) but there is nothing wrong with that because Apple has no monopoly in any market.
Even with the iPod, Apple is not a monopoly player in the music space because that's something ruled in a court, and personal opinions count for nothing. I'd say that's the best point to move against Apple, but it's way off-topic (we're talking phones here) and so irrelevant.
Hell, even the whole sue-the-blogger fiasco was grounded in law and perfectly legal for any company, even Microsoft. It may have been odious, but it's perfectly legal to go after people inducing the breaking of NDAs in California. (To the lawyers: I'm going from memory here, please correct me if I've got this wrong).
Lastly, hating a company means that you're defining your reactions by them. It's precisely as valid as loving a company. Neither are logical or even sensible.
(to avoid potential derailment, I quite like Vista and it's my Windows OS of choice)
The only explanation I can see for Apple's recent surge in popularity is their marketing, which is absolutely top notch.
Yup, Apple make nothing whatsoever that couldn't be made elsewhere. Their success is purely down to marketing and the way that every single customer is blinded to their faults. Every. Single. Customer.
Apple's competitors somehow managed to *not* deliver products that could compete. But that'd be marketing again, wouldn't it? Maybe the marketing guys came up with the whole OS X thing, 'cause we all love the letter "X" don't we?
Crazy guys.
Hate Apple all you like, and good luck to you. Just drop the whole "marketing" meme. It wasn't true last year, it's not true now and it doesn't look likely next year. It's a weak excuse for failure to compete, and that's all it is. If you can't identify the reasons behind their success, it's your loss.
I'm pretty sure you've got to have a PC to run Visual Studio Express, and that PC has to have a copy of Windows on it. Your cost to develop WPF apps is a PC and Windows.
Just like your cost to develop OS X apps is a Mac (OS X is included).
In both cases, the tools themselves are free but you've got to have the right platform to run them.
Hell, even Linux has to be installed on something so that you can use the free OS and all the free tools.
It's no more expensive to develop for OS X than for Windows or Linux.
The executive summary (which I hope it's okay to quote here, but as a sample it indicates that the longer text is worth reading) notes:
Regardless of what the media has been harping on for a long time, and regardless of what system attackers have been saying about the "evil TPM protection" Apple uses, Apple is doing no TPM-related evil thing. In fact, Apple is doing no TPM-related cryptographic thing at all in Mac OS X. Yes, I know, there has been much talk of "TPM keys" and such, but there are no TPM keys that Apple is hiding somewhere.
More specifically, Apple simply does not use the TPM hardware. In Apple computer models that do contain a TPM, the hardware is available for use by the machine's owner. Of course, to use it you need a device driver, which Apple indeed doesn't provide.
I am releasing an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X, along with Mac OS X versions of popular open source trusted computing software from the Linux world. No reverse engineering was required to write this driver.
The driver and the software stack together make (a form of) trusted computing possible on Mac OS X, assuming you have a machine with a TPM. This page shows you how to "take ownership" of the TPM and begin using it.
For crying out loud, Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (a.k.a. LaGrande) does not mean you start putting TPMs "inside the CPU". Apple isn't shipping CPUs with "built-in TPMs."
I hope that helps kill some incorrect information out there in the wild. My understanding is that it's been a few years since we saw a TPM in any Mac, but I may be wrong about that.
Re:Jobs role in Apple is overrated
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Going from memory here (oh oh...) I think there was a time very early in the original Apple computer's life when Jobs managed to get credit for components using nothing but force of personality. Then there were the sales, persuading retailers to stock the thing.
And didn't Jobs talk Wozniak into leaving HP and focusing on Apple?
All the technical genius in the world would never have resulted in Apple becoming more than a garage company, and all the personality and salesmanship in the world can't sell a non-existant product. It took the respective geniuses of both Wozniak and Jobs to get the company started.
The Pilbara region of NW Australia is one of two (the other's in South Africa) that dates back to 3.6 billion years or so. There are a few places left with intact geology, but they're far between.
Wikipedia talks about Vaalbara, Ur and Kenorland predating Columbia, which was then followed by Rodinia, Pannotia, Pangaea, Laurasia and Gondwana.
This was all unknown to me until about ten minutes ago, but I'm pleased to see the Pilbara region of Australia (my country) is one of the oldest places on Earth, stretching back 3.6 billion years (the other's in South Africa).
I guess that if you can date the geology, you can talk about the continents, but their shape must be a bit of a mystery.
I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in forgiveness nor do I believe in rebirth. But I do believe in revenge.
Can you give one reason outside of Christian morality that this man shouldn't be tortured? Please note that the "he might be innocent" excuse just walked out of the door. And don't use the "we'll become monsters too" excuse because it is based on Christian morality (because there is nothing special about humanity).
The concept of justice requires him to be tortured and executed.
I'm an atheist, but I can give you some excellent reasons.
You will debase the people who carry out the punishment. It's lovely that *you* want someone tortured and executed. What about the person who has to carry out that act? What happens to them, year after year as they carry out revenge killings to make people like you happy?
You know what happens to them. They go insane and are themselves tortured. You commit a further crime by making someone torture another person. Do you know what most societies do to those who order the torturing?
Another excellent reason is that making this person suffer isn't impartial justice, it's emotional retribution. It has nothing to do with *why* we have a legal system. In fact, the legal system is partly created to stop this sort of thing happening. We don't want revenge killings and mob justice. We want fairness and impartiality in punishment. And why is that?
Well, sometimes the courts get it wrong. It happened a lot before blood typing and DNA evidence, and still happens today.
How do you recompense someone you tortured and killed when you made a mistake, or when people in the system manipulate evidence to ensure a guilty verdict?
In your retributive world, you'd have to torture and kill members of the bar, the police, the DA and maybe even the jury.
No, I'll stick with a world where there's an impartial, rational legal system, thanks very much. You can keep your torture fantasies to yourself.
So customers cannot give feedback, only developers. The actual users, the majority by far, have worthless opinions in your view.
That's a novel attitude, and it'll play well when you tell people who are trying Linux out that they can't provide feedback because they're "not good enough."
I think I know what you're trying to say, but you've got to drop the OSS religious zeal and support the people who want to use OSS products but don't have the time or skills to help develop them. Your attitude will only keep people away from Linux and OSS, which is precisely the wrong thing to do.
"Yes, but they do it too" is not a defence, either legally or ethically. Further, placing your military interrogators on a similar footing as the worst torturers on Earth doesn't really look so good.
So being forced out of his own company, and then seeing the company he founded next fail... neither of those were bad things?
I don't know if he's changed or learnt anything. I don't know the man and never will, but I think he's had stuff happen in his life that would change his personality.
A big difference is that authors can choose to GPL their work, or not, and that choice must be honoured in people's use of their creation.
It's not fair use to pull images from a bunch of games and sell them as your own. Even if the images were correctly credited, selling other people's work has to be okayed by those people, else it's plagiarism.
I'm pretty sure I can't pick up any GPL project, stick a pretty UI on the front, call it my work entirely an sell it as a packaged, standalone product. Well, I *can* but I'd get sued for it, which is fair enough. GPL advocates talk about code redistribution and attribution, which is their right as creators of works. We can't just erase the rights of the creators when it suits us.
Yeah, those Apple engineers just sit around all day, Googling for new OSS they can munge into iThis or iThat.
Few people know that OS X is actually developed by three high school kids, and has been since the public beta (they've moved on from school now, of course). They started with the BSD source code and some crayons for UI design. Apple buys them a pair of runners every now and then as payment, and they're lucky to get even that much.
The iPod is just a Walkman with the name shaved off and a new coat of paint.
Those sneaky Apple engineers! They do nothing! No wonder they get paid so poorly.
Please, Darkness404, expand on your ideas. We need *more* detail.
Even skipping past the other implications, I never heard the Great Man giving credit to anyone else but himself. You hear all the time about how the iPod's success is because Steve Jobs himself said how loud the volume button should go, but you never hear who was actually the guy who designed the bloody thing. Well, not from Apple. It's not hard to dig up the names, but I'd like just once to hear Apple just come out and say "we'd like to thank these guys for making it possible."
You've never heard Jobs give credit because you've clearly never listened to a keynote speech (load up the WWDC keynote from last week, skip to the last five minutes). Since he returned to Apple in '97 he's given credit where it's due. *Other* people say that Jobs did this or that, but I'd want some proof before believing that *he* goes around saying all these things. A lot of anti-Apple posters put up strawman arguments about this.
As for the designer of the iPod... you've not heard of Johnathan Ives? He keeps winning industrial design awards, and is widely known as a brilliant designer.
Even better - read the Wikipedia page on the iPod. You'll see lots more names than just "Steve Jobs".
The cult of Jobs is reinforced when people assume that strawman posts in the past were accurate. You seem to have swallowed many of them, hook, line and sinker. That's okay, there are plenty of places to learn more.
There is no area of science that is completely and utterly grasped, known and documented. There is no theory or 'law' that is completely certain to be true in every single case.
That's not how science works, and very few scientists would pretend otherwise. In fact, I've seen this used as a strawman to beat scientifically-based arguments with faith-based ones. It's revealing that you use it as well.
Science is all about what we know today to account for observed behaviour and predict future behaviour. The best we have are theories that have held true so far, and work well in prediction. There are no absolute laws that we know of. None. We've called some theories "laws", but they're still theories. A good example would be Newton's laws of motion, which were then modified by relativity because they break down at high fractions of c. We called them laws, but they're no more than theories. That's not to understate their usefulness - they're exceptionally accurate and ideal for predictive purposes, especially with relativity factored in.
Conservation of energy is one of the best theories we have, although it was modified slightly to bring mass into the equation (well, mass and energy are exchangeable). There have been no known exceptions to this puppy, in the 'real world' (ie applied science) or on paper.
It's pretty solid. The story about cracking water and then recombining it to get the same water plus a bit of energy would require a large rewriting of current physics. The enormity of breaking conservation of energy is hard to understate. It allows free energy. It's magic.
It's not reasonable to criticise people for not holding their minds open for any and every theory, regardless of how reasonable it seems at first blush. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, after all.
Once the proof is provided and reproduced in experiments by different people, you'll see acceptance.
Talk up the real world all you like, but everything you encounter (in your air-conditioner experiences) can and has been explained somewhere in science. The fact that some people didn't understand the application of theory well enough doesn't negate science. After all, air conditioners are just applied science - they started with theory and were invented to realise the effects of that theory.
Science is not dogma. You haven't even tried to show why you think this, but the quickest way to disprove your point is this: you can run your own experiments and see the same results. You can reproduce anything in science. Dogma allows no testing, no verification, no argument and is the opposite of science. People who conflate the two have fundamentally misunderstand the concept of "science".
Compare also say, OSX. I don't know ANY mac user hankering for OS9, and things like leopard are still eagerly snatched up even with teething troubles, so it's not just new OS shock - I think vista really is a step backwards for most users.
There were a lot of Mac users hankering for MacOS 9 until about 10.2, when OS X started to really mature. There was even a 'return to classic' movement early on (can't recall their name now). The many advantages of OS X compared to MacOS 9 helped get reluctant users on board though.
I see Vista as having more problems in user acceptance than early OS X did, but OS X had a few problems of its own.
If a Conan novel had a small piece about metallurgy while some blacksmith was forging a new sword for the hero, would that make it a science fiction book?
How about if we had a novel about an industrial chemist in the 1970s, where we cut between his work in zinc production and his failure to find a woman fascinated by zinc. Would that be a science fiction book?
No, we use science fiction as a shorthand for futuristic fiction. The science in just about every science fiction work has been there to drive a plot about people and what happens to them.
It's not about being too stupid to get this right, it's about having no actual guidelines for a classification system that's always been meant more as a help than a rule.
Exactly how much text should be devoted to science? 10% 5% 80%? How much? Should the book explain how the science works, or just take it as read? How integral should the science be to the characters and the plot? Is it a veneer or fundamental? What happens if the science is later shown to be rubbish?
Whether you like it or not, science fiction covers everything from H.G. Wells to Iain M Banks to Warhammer 40,000. Most of the books classed as science fiction are melodramas, and most of them aren't so great anyway. They're all science fiction though, because that's the best convenient label.
Greg Egan Greg Bear Kim Stanley Robinson Alastair Reynolds
... to a greater or lesser degree, every one of these people write Science Fiction as you use the term, and integrate science into their plots far more than Crichton. That's a quick four off the top of my head. I could add many, many more. Hell, even Stephen Donaldson's "Gap" series had more science in there, complete with in-depth between-chapter descriptions for pivotal technology.
But all of these writers, with Crichton and just about every other science fiction author, use the science to set up a story about people. I'd argue that Crichton is nothing special here, and his science is generally pretty poor. He's in good company though, as far as authors go, and I'd accept that any author I listed could be called a crap writer with some justification.
As far as book classification goes, we have "future => science fiction" and "no technology => fantasy" but they're put in the same section in most bookstores. Most of these books are really melodramas, more soap opera than serious fiction, but the setting makes the genre.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the parent post is not insightful. Rules change when you hit monopoly status, and the reason is purely so that companies can have a chance to compete against entrenched monopolies in a sector.
You want to allow product tying for non-monopoly players, but disallow it for the monopolies. That's good governance, and talk of "silent promotion" merely attempts to weaken systems like this.
The things that Apple does may be the same as what Microsoft did in the bad old days (although I have yet to hear good examples beyond vague anti-corporate claptrap) but there is nothing wrong with that because Apple has no monopoly in any market.
Even with the iPod, Apple is not a monopoly player in the music space because that's something ruled in a court, and personal opinions count for nothing. I'd say that's the best point to move against Apple, but it's way off-topic (we're talking phones here) and so irrelevant.
Hell, even the whole sue-the-blogger fiasco was grounded in law and perfectly legal for any company, even Microsoft. It may have been odious, but it's perfectly legal to go after people inducing the breaking of NDAs in California. (To the lawyers: I'm going from memory here, please correct me if I've got this wrong).
Lastly, hating a company means that you're defining your reactions by them. It's precisely as valid as loving a company. Neither are logical or even sensible.
single problem.
Oh, wait.
But at least Vista is the user's best friend.
Oh.
(to avoid potential derailment, I quite like Vista and it's my Windows OS of choice)
The only explanation I can see for Apple's recent surge in popularity is their marketing, which is absolutely top notch.
Yup, Apple make nothing whatsoever that couldn't be made elsewhere. Their success is purely down to marketing and the way that every single customer is blinded to their faults. Every. Single. Customer.
Apple's competitors somehow managed to *not* deliver products that could compete. But that'd be marketing again, wouldn't it? Maybe the marketing guys came up with the whole OS X thing, 'cause we all love the letter "X" don't we?
Crazy guys.
Hate Apple all you like, and good luck to you. Just drop the whole "marketing" meme. It wasn't true last year, it's not true now and it doesn't look likely next year. It's a weak excuse for failure to compete, and that's all it is. If you can't identify the reasons behind their success, it's your loss.
That comment actually makes sense and isn't the over-emotive whining elsewhere.
I'm pretty sure you've got to have a PC to run Visual Studio Express, and that PC has to have a copy of Windows on it. Your cost to develop WPF apps is a PC and Windows.
Just like your cost to develop OS X apps is a Mac (OS X is included).
In both cases, the tools themselves are free but you've got to have the right platform to run them.
Hell, even Linux has to be installed on something so that you can use the free OS and all the free tools.
It's no more expensive to develop for OS X than for Windows or Linux.
Surely it's not so surprising that the Mac number (as opposed to MacIntel) is flat. It's been a few years since Apple were selling them.
What's wrong with their laptops?
You may not like the variety, but the MBP is hardly anaemic and the MacBook (normal) is a powerful little machine even without a discrete GPU.
because it exposes the fact that today's Mac desktops are just commodity hardware with an extra $1,000 charge for an OS X dongle (TPM).
No, you're quite wrong about TPM. You may want to read up on it:
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/
The executive summary (which I hope it's okay to quote here, but as a sample it indicates that the longer text is worth reading) notes:
I hope that helps kill some incorrect information out there in the wild. My understanding is that it's been a few years since we saw a TPM in any Mac, but I may be wrong about that.
Going from memory here (oh oh...) I think there was a time very early in the original Apple computer's life when Jobs managed to get credit for components using nothing but force of personality. Then there were the sales, persuading retailers to stock the thing.
And didn't Jobs talk Wozniak into leaving HP and focusing on Apple?
All the technical genius in the world would never have resulted in Apple becoming more than a garage company, and all the personality and salesmanship in the world can't sell a non-existant product. It took the respective geniuses of both Wozniak and Jobs to get the company started.
The Pilbara region of NW Australia is one of two (the other's in South Africa) that dates back to 3.6 billion years or so. There are a few places left with intact geology, but they're far between.
Wikipedia talks about Vaalbara, Ur and Kenorland predating Columbia, which was then followed by Rodinia, Pannotia, Pangaea, Laurasia and Gondwana.
This was all unknown to me until about ten minutes ago, but I'm pleased to see the Pilbara region of Australia (my country) is one of the oldest places on Earth, stretching back 3.6 billion years (the other's in South Africa).
I guess that if you can date the geology, you can talk about the continents, but their shape must be a bit of a mystery.
Don't upset him! You wouldn't like him when he's angry.
I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in forgiveness nor do I believe in rebirth. But I do believe in revenge.
Can you give one reason outside of Christian morality that this man shouldn't be tortured? Please note that the "he might be innocent" excuse just walked out of the door. And don't use the "we'll become monsters too" excuse because it is based on Christian morality (because there is nothing special about humanity).
The concept of justice requires him to be tortured and executed.
I'm an atheist, but I can give you some excellent reasons.
You will debase the people who carry out the punishment. It's lovely that *you* want someone tortured and executed. What about the person who has to carry out that act? What happens to them, year after year as they carry out revenge killings to make people like you happy?
You know what happens to them. They go insane and are themselves tortured. You commit a further crime by making someone torture another person. Do you know what most societies do to those who order the torturing?
Another excellent reason is that making this person suffer isn't impartial justice, it's emotional retribution. It has nothing to do with *why* we have a legal system. In fact, the legal system is partly created to stop this sort of thing happening. We don't want revenge killings and mob justice. We want fairness and impartiality in punishment. And why is that?
Well, sometimes the courts get it wrong. It happened a lot before blood typing and DNA evidence, and still happens today.
How do you recompense someone you tortured and killed when you made a mistake, or when people in the system manipulate evidence to ensure a guilty verdict?
In your retributive world, you'd have to torture and kill members of the bar, the police, the DA and maybe even the jury.
No, I'll stick with a world where there's an impartial, rational legal system, thanks very much. You can keep your torture fantasies to yourself.
So customers cannot give feedback, only developers. The actual users, the majority by far, have worthless opinions in your view.
That's a novel attitude, and it'll play well when you tell people who are trying Linux out that they can't provide feedback because they're "not good enough."
I think I know what you're trying to say, but you've got to drop the OSS religious zeal and support the people who want to use OSS products but don't have the time or skills to help develop them. Your attitude will only keep people away from Linux and OSS, which is precisely the wrong thing to do.
"Yes, but they do it too" is not a defence, either legally or ethically. Further, placing your military interrogators on a similar footing as the worst torturers on Earth doesn't really look so good.
No, I fantasise about interesting Slashdot posts with no hyperbole, that are well-founded in logic and are relevant to the topic at hand.
Oh, and a reduction in weak troll posts like yours.
Ah, that'll always be the dream.
So being forced out of his own company, and then seeing the company he founded next fail... neither of those were bad things?
I don't know if he's changed or learnt anything. I don't know the man and never will, but I think he's had stuff happen in his life that would change his personality.
A big difference is that authors can choose to GPL their work, or not, and that choice must be honoured in people's use of their creation.
It's not fair use to pull images from a bunch of games and sell them as your own. Even if the images were correctly credited, selling other people's work has to be okayed by those people, else it's plagiarism.
I'm pretty sure I can't pick up any GPL project, stick a pretty UI on the front, call it my work entirely an sell it as a packaged, standalone product. Well, I *can* but I'd get sued for it, which is fair enough. GPL advocates talk about code redistribution and attribution, which is their right as creators of works. We can't just erase the rights of the creators when it suits us.
Have a look at the Pirate Bay's site. Lots of ads there... almost as if the traffic were bring used to sell advertising space.
Yeah, those Apple engineers just sit around all day, Googling for new OSS they can munge into iThis or iThat.
Few people know that OS X is actually developed by three high school kids, and has been since the public beta (they've moved on from school now, of course). They started with the BSD source code and some crayons for UI design. Apple buys them a pair of runners every now and then as payment, and they're lucky to get even that much.
The iPod is just a Walkman with the name shaved off and a new coat of paint.
Those sneaky Apple engineers! They do nothing! No wonder they get paid so poorly.
Please, Darkness404, expand on your ideas. We need *more* detail.
Even skipping past the other implications, I never heard the Great Man giving credit to anyone else but himself. You hear all the time about how the iPod's success is because Steve Jobs himself said how loud the volume button should go, but you never hear who was actually the guy who designed the bloody thing. Well, not from Apple. It's not hard to dig up the names, but I'd like just once to hear Apple just come out and say "we'd like to thank these guys for making it possible."
You've never heard Jobs give credit because you've clearly never listened to a keynote speech (load up the WWDC keynote from last week, skip to the last five minutes). Since he returned to Apple in '97 he's given credit where it's due. *Other* people say that Jobs did this or that, but I'd want some proof before believing that *he* goes around saying all these things. A lot of anti-Apple posters put up strawman arguments about this.
As for the designer of the iPod... you've not heard of Johnathan Ives? He keeps winning industrial design awards, and is widely known as a brilliant designer.
Even better - read the Wikipedia page on the iPod. You'll see lots more names than just "Steve Jobs".
The cult of Jobs is reinforced when people assume that strawman posts in the past were accurate. You seem to have swallowed many of them, hook, line and sinker. That's okay, there are plenty of places to learn more.
Got anything less than thirty years old?
Seriously, he's made peace with Wozniak long since. It broke their friendship, but it's before many current Apple users were even *born*.
And further - who has the same personality they had thirty years ago?
Your quote is true, and informative, but it's also reaching way back into the past. It's just not relevant to the man today.
You're making a poor point.
There is no area of science that is completely and utterly grasped, known and documented. There is no theory or 'law' that is completely certain to be true in every single case.
That's not how science works, and very few scientists would pretend otherwise. In fact, I've seen this used as a strawman to beat scientifically-based arguments with faith-based ones. It's revealing that you use it as well.
Science is all about what we know today to account for observed behaviour and predict future behaviour. The best we have are theories that have held true so far, and work well in prediction. There are no absolute laws that we know of. None. We've called some theories "laws", but they're still theories. A good example would be Newton's laws of motion, which were then modified by relativity because they break down at high fractions of c. We called them laws, but they're no more than theories. That's not to understate their usefulness - they're exceptionally accurate and ideal for predictive purposes, especially with relativity factored in.
Conservation of energy is one of the best theories we have, although it was modified slightly to bring mass into the equation (well, mass and energy are exchangeable). There have been no known exceptions to this puppy, in the 'real world' (ie applied science) or on paper.
It's pretty solid. The story about cracking water and then recombining it to get the same water plus a bit of energy would require a large rewriting of current physics. The enormity of breaking conservation of energy is hard to understate. It allows
free energy. It's magic.
It's not reasonable to criticise people for not holding their minds open for any and every theory, regardless of how reasonable it seems at first blush. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, after all.
Once the proof is provided and reproduced in experiments by different people, you'll see acceptance.
Talk up the real world all you like, but everything you encounter (in your air-conditioner experiences) can and has been explained somewhere in science. The fact that some people didn't understand the application of theory well enough doesn't negate science. After all, air conditioners are just applied science - they started with theory and were invented to realise the effects of that theory.
Science is not dogma. You haven't even tried to show why you think this, but the quickest way to disprove your point is this: you can run your own experiments and see the same results. You can reproduce anything in science. Dogma allows no testing, no verification, no argument and is the opposite of science. People who conflate the two have fundamentally misunderstand the concept of "science".
Compare also say, OSX. I don't know ANY mac user hankering for OS9, and things like leopard are still eagerly snatched up even with teething troubles, so it's not just new OS shock - I think vista really is a step backwards for most users.
There were a lot of Mac users hankering for MacOS 9 until about 10.2, when OS X started to really mature. There was even a 'return to classic' movement early on (can't recall their name now). The many advantages of OS X compared to MacOS 9 helped get reluctant users on board though.
I see Vista as having more problems in user acceptance than early OS X did, but OS X had a few problems of its own.
How much science though?
If a Conan novel had a small piece about metallurgy while some blacksmith was forging a new sword for the hero, would that make it a science fiction book?
How about if we had a novel about an industrial chemist in the 1970s, where we cut between his work in zinc production and his failure to find a woman fascinated by zinc. Would that be a science fiction book?
No, we use science fiction as a shorthand for futuristic fiction. The science in just about every science fiction work has been there to drive a plot about people and what happens to them.
It's not about being too stupid to get this right, it's about having no actual guidelines for a classification system that's always been meant more as a help than a rule.
Exactly how much text should be devoted to science? 10% 5% 80%? How much?
Should the book explain how the science works, or just take it as read?
How integral should the science be to the characters and the plot? Is it a veneer or fundamental?
What happens if the science is later shown to be rubbish?
Whether you like it or not, science fiction covers everything from H.G. Wells to Iain M Banks to Warhammer 40,000. Most of the books classed as science fiction are melodramas, and most of them aren't so great anyway. They're all science fiction though, because that's the best convenient label.
Greg Egan
... to a greater or lesser degree, every one of these people write Science Fiction as you use the term, and integrate science into their plots far more than Crichton. That's a quick four off the top of my head. I could add many, many more. Hell, even Stephen Donaldson's "Gap" series had more science in there, complete with in-depth between-chapter descriptions for pivotal technology.
Greg Bear
Kim Stanley Robinson
Alastair Reynolds
But all of these writers, with Crichton and just about every other science fiction author, use the science to set up a story about people. I'd argue that Crichton is nothing special here, and his science is generally pretty poor. He's in good company though, as far as authors go, and I'd accept that any author I listed could be called a crap writer with some justification.
As far as book classification goes, we have "future => science fiction" and "no technology => fantasy" but they're put in the same section in most bookstores. Most of these books are really melodramas, more soap opera than serious fiction, but the setting makes the genre.