> CDMA systems showed us that it is possible to > transmit two signals at the same time and the same > frequency and distinguish them at the receiver; a > task which at first might seem impossible.
Agreed, but CDMA system have an enormously high requirement on power control. The point is, you can have two signals at the same time and frequency, but the signals have to be generally at the same power, so that one can be properly decoded. Managing the received power is one of the hardest things about a CDMA system. In fact, although theoretically an IS-95 CDMA system should be able to support more than 60 times the users as a regular AMPS system, the problems with managing power make this more like 6-8.
And since the received power must be managed, that implies regulated spectrum. So as you said, "a long, long way from these ideas to an unregulated spectrum"
Perhaps, I'm not the most knowledgeable guy on RF interface, but I went to The University of Texas at Austin, got my degree in electrical engineering (studying electromagnetics), worked at Ericsson designed cellular systems and RF planning, worked at a company making "smart antennas" for cellular systems. From my experience, I had a hard time understanding what he was talking about. "Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow"? Of course it is, that's how the radio spectrum works. But then he goes off on, "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green." Which makes little sense to me.
It's not that using a radio frequency somehow "depletes" a resource -- it means that if you put a green object in a green room with green lights, after a point you won't be able to see the object any more, kind of like how camouflage works. The problem is when you have a lot of signaling broadcasting in an area, the noise level can increase to the point that no single signal can be resolved. The classic example is how it's very difficult to understand a particular conversation in a noisy room. And that's why you have to generally parcel out radio spectrum and define limits on how it can be used (signal strength, bandwidth characteristics, noise levels, coverage patterns, etc)
That guy's nutty analogy makes me think he's a leftover of the dotcom era -- when eyeballs was more important than revenue and other silly things. Admittedly, I should read the whole article, but the first few paragraphs made me feel like I'm talking to a crazy guy on the bus.
> I have never read (becides from slashdot) that MS > loses money on everything but Win/Office.
Abrahams, Paul. "Microsoft Shows 85% Profit Margins for Windows," Financial Times. November 17, 2002. (Sorry, but the URL is for subscribers only).
Here are some choice quotes from the article:
Microsoft has revealed for the first time that it has made profit margins of 85 per cent on its Windows system while its remaining businesses made losses, raising questions about the benefits of the group's costly efforts at diversification.
The client division, which markets Windows, generated operating profits last quarter of $2.48bn on revenues of $2.89bn, implying margins of 85 per cent.
Among Microsoft's other businesses, the home and entertainment di vision, which includes the Xbox games console, lost $177m in the quarter on revenues of $505m. Salomon Smith Barney estimates it loses about $120 on each console it sells. MSN, the internet service provider and portal, lost $97m, down from losses of $199m in the same quarter last year, on revenues up from $431m to $531m.
The business solutions group, which provides software for small and medium-sized businesses and includes recent acquisitions Great Plains of the US and Navision of Denmark, lost $68m on revenues of $107m.
And the CE/Mobility division, which includes mobile telephone software and the Windows CE operating system for handheld computers, lost $33m on revenues of $17m.
The Register also has an article based on Microsoft's public SEC filings:
The breakdown of financials by division was published for the first time in Microsoft's Form 10-Q filing to the Securities & Exchange Commission, presumably as a side-effect of corporate America's attempt at a post-Enron clean-up. For the period ended September 30th, the two cash cows of Client (i.e. Windows) and Information Worker (Office) produced operating income of $2.48 billion on revenue of $2.89 billion, and $1.88 billion on $2.38 billion respectively.
CE/Mobility only pulls in slightly more revenue and has slightly lower losses ($14 million in and $48 million out in 2001), and Xbox has resulted in a revenue boost plus a substantially increased loss for Home and Entertainment (the loss was $68 million on $236 million in 2001).
Of course, you don't have to take their word for it; just check out Microsoft's recent SEC filings. It seems that Windows and Office pay the rent for all of Microsoft's other endeavors. I guess that's one of the hundreds of perks of illegally abusing your monopoly!
Inertia can keep a company going for a long time. In the company I work for, I have seen mistakes that cost the company tens of millions of dollars, made not by people who successfully built the company, but by people who were brought in later. The fact that the company is still around just shows the inertia.
Apple brought in a number of people to try to fix the company, and Amelio nearly ran it into the ground. Scores of analysts had given Apple up for dead. Jesse Berst of Ziff Davis even moronically suggested that Apple should shut down its R&D labs and give the money to start ups. Then Jobs returned, made strong decisions, and today Apple is a different company.
So, I'd say that Jobs earned his money. He is one of the few "rock star" CEOs that has earned the money he made. It's a lot harder to fix a terminally broken company than it is to keep one going.
I would say that the business world is certainly a "what have you done lately". 1997 is receding fast, and Jobs is going to have to continue to lead Apple towards success to be worth that kind of compensation. Now that Apple is healthy, the next benchmark is increased market share. Dell has shown in its quarterly earnings that a company can do well in this economic downturn. It's time for Apple to do the same.
> Basically, each metallic window needs only focus > on one thing.
I think this is correct. Additionally I think the metallic interface is used when the application isn't document-centric. So Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are document-centric and should use the regular pin stripes. Dantz Retrospect and Virex are not document-centric, and should therefore use the metallic appearance.
The only problem I have is I like the pin stripe look better than the metallic interface. So I'd hate to see too many applications using the metallic look.
> But tabbed browsing is simply one implementation > of a multiple-document interface (MDI). The HIG > does specifically call out MDI as being evil. > See, the Mac got where it is today by > establishing a fairly simple desktop metaphor > and sticking with it.
Where the Mac is today? You mean with ~3% market share for sales?;-)
When you say that tabbed browsing is a form of MDI, and MDI is evil, you run the risk of sounding pedantic. People don't buy computers or software because it matches some Ivory Tower's idea of what is a good interface. They buy because it fits their needs the best.
I have been a Mac user for a while, and when I first heard about tabs in Chimera, I had no idea why anyone would want them. However, once I tried them, I learned that tabs work best for me. I like to load different sites into different browser windows, and then load sub pages for a particular site in tabs in the same window. It keeps things neater and allows me to quickly go back to my place without having to sit through a painful page reload. To me, three windows with three tabs is more organized that nine windows spanning three different web sites.
Maybe tabs aren't the only solution for this, but I'd like to see something that effectively replaces the functionality and still meets with the HIG-nazis' idea of what is good design.
Perhaps the case is in general MDI is not a good idea, but there are specific cases where it is a good idea -- like when you're browsing the web.
Safari's product managers need to realize that there are a significant number of people who will never switch to Safari full time until it has two things:
1. Tabbed browsing (or something that substitutes the functionality) 2. Support for the Mac OS keychain
It would also have beautiful carpet and wood floors. The wood would be from a famous old house known for its incredible floors. The carpet would be the newest thing, thick and plush. The floors would be so stunning that everyone who saw them would want them.
However, because of the way the floors are textured, it would take forever to walk between rooms. There would also be, for some reason, rainbow colored beachballs all over the damn house, in the weirdest places. Every time you tried to walk from the kitchen to the garage, it would take you twice as long as you would expect. And you'd see a beachball on the way. You would think, "What's up with the floors? My funky old college apartment had a crumbling foundation, but I could at least sprint between the rooms!"
I went to The University of Texas at Austin, and in the electrical engineering program there was little room for the grade inflation the author talks about. I think every single course was graded on a curve. To get an A, your grade had to be the class average plus the standard deviation. To get a B, your grade had to be the class average plus half the standard deviation. And so on. This made it a lot harder to grades to be inflated.
My wife teaches biology at a local community college, and she said that many of her students wouldn't put up with the system I had to have in college. The problem is, for many people today getting anything less than A is unsatisfactory because high grades are so important (rather than actually mastering the material).
There are "A" students who cram before tests, get old tests and memorize them, and hound the professor for higher grades, and there are "A" students that know the material so well, they could actually teach the class. In a perfect world, the former would get a B or C, and the latter would get the A.
> The kicker is that the people who are wanting > clone tech to become immortal are just deluding > themselves. They will die, and there clone will > live on, but it will not be them.
What if a recording company cloned one of their artists, and raised it as a piece of property (since they own all derivative works of the artist). Then the artist would have to "compete" with perhaps a younger version of themself. So imagine if the old, Las Vegas-styled Elvis had to suddenly meet up with his 20-something year old rockabilly self. From the artist's perspective, it would suck, but from the music company's perspective, they would have conceivably a perpetular source of youngish talent, that wouldn't be ravaged by age, booze, etc. When that clone got too old, they could clone another, and have a perpetual artist. Kinda creepy.
Jobs for president? The guy's a millionaire, but he still only takes $1 for his annual salary. He completely turned around Apple (with help of course, but I don't think it could have been done without him). He's a straight shooter (willing to fire people in the elevator down to the lobby, or at least he used to). We could do worse than Jobs.
It has to do with the fact that service providers are assigned blocks of numbers, rather than individual numbers for their subscribers. So imagine two service providers A and B. Maybe they both get a single 10,000 block of phone numbers. Imagine that A has 9,000 subscribers (and thus has used 90%) of their numbers, and B has 1,000 subscribers (and has used 10%). If A gains another 2,000 subscribers, they can't use B's number block. They have to apply to the FCC for another block of 10,000 numbers. In the meantime, B is has plenty of room. As a result, you run out of numbers, even though they're not all being used.
Their is a concept called Number Pooling that means that if a service provider has a block of 1,000 numbers that they aren't using, they have to return that block of numbers to the "pool" for other service providers to use. Number Pooling is mandated in many areas under specific circumstances.
The telecom industry is slowly getting away from the idea of number block routing. With Number Portability and Number Pooling, they're moving towards a system that improves on that. Number blocks are "tagged" as having a subscriber that no longer has service with the service provider that owns that block. Then the switch goes to a centralized database and determines where that subscriber is, and the call is routed accordingly.
Number Portability exists in a limited extent today, so in many areas of the country when you move between service providers (but stay in the same service area), you can keep your phone number. So the situation is being alleviated, but New York is probably the biggest market in the country, and things are pretty strained there.
> And, while we're at it, why not assign each > individual a phone number that they keep for > life, no matter where they move, like a domain > name?
Telecom companies are working on this. A concept called ENUM allows subscribers to be assigned IP addresses that are abstracted from the ways the actual call is routed. This is mostly coming about because of VoIP, but it has merits with regular E.164 telephone numbers as well. The telecom industry moves a little slower than the computer industry, so expect to see something like this within 3-5 years. Happy waiting!
> If you are a gov't manger and are given a budget > your job is get the job done and the spend the > money - and maybe beg for more. There are no kudos > for doing a job efficiently and being under > budget.
First, any single person's "pork" is another person's "necessary plan to ensure the safety of America". That's why it's so hard to control government spending. But what about running government more efficiently?
Okay, so if you incent a government manager to be under budget and return whatever's left, they'll consistently overestimate their budgets, and then return what's left so they'll look like "heros".
So then, someone else comes along and says, "Whenever the government prices something out, it's way too expensive. It's because they overestimate their budgets. We should incent them if they correctly estimate their budgets."
Lather, rinse repeat. It happens in the private sector all the time, so why should we expect governments to be any different?
The problem is if someone wants to corrupt any system, they can, because no system is infallible. The only way to watch out for this is for a person without a vested interest to monitor the activities to make sure that things are working efficiently. But then, for every government department, you've got to have an oversight committee, so now you've increased the bureaucracy in the government.
The moral of the story? Anyone who thinks there's an easy answer to solving the problem of government spending isn't thinking about it hard enough. The way to control government spending is for citizens, businesses, the press, and the even the government to exhaustively monitor what the government is doing. Sounds like a lot of work, right? What was that about the price of freedom?
> I actually wonder if Apple is developing a radical > corporate strategy which involves a sense of > responsibility to the computer industry as a whole
What an interesting idea. The big advantage software companies have on hardware companies is the incredible margins: the cost of goods sold for software is basically nil (the price of the CDs), while for hardware, you have all the costs of buying the parts to make your hardware. Keep in mind, R&D is handled as a capitalized expense and isn't amortized over the cost of each unit sold.
So software companies could enjoy huge margins, while hardware companies had to be happy with less than 25%.
Microsoft benefited from this, but they also increased the barrier of entry for competitors by illegally abusing their monopoly. So it wasn't enough to build a better Word processor; you had to be able to make it much better and cheaper than Word (since Word was generally bundled in price with the rest of MS Office), and be completely compatible with Word's file format (because of the network effect).
What's interesting is that open file formats (and Open Source in general) lowers these barriers of entries. For example, if all software applications use the same file format, then the software packages have to compete on their own merits since the network effect related to file compatibility is eliminated.
With Apple embracing open source and open file formats, they're essentially leveling the playing field between software vendors and hardware vendors. If they can get software vendors to adopt open formats, the cost of switching between software vendors will reduce for the users, and it will be easier for new entrants to build competing software programs. In that case, Apple will succeed as well, because they're building some of the best hardware (the new 17" PowerBook G4 is Exhibit A). If their plan works, competition will increase in the computer industry, benefiting all.
> Subnotes/small notes are notoriously hard to sell, > but I guess it does plug a hole in the Apple > notebook strategy.
Good point, but I have a one word answer for you: "Japan".
In Japan, they're willing to pay a premium for subnotebooks, and I suspect that's where the majority of Apple's sales will be for this product. Apple used to have a PowerBook 2400, which was perfect for that market. However, during the winnowing after Jobs's return, they got rid of it, along with a lot of other products since back then they all used separate motherboards and were very expensive to develop. Now, it looks like they've got an iBook motherboard and a PowerBook motherboard, so the development of a subnotebook should more tolerable.
For the people I know in Japan, they loved my PowerBook, but they were more interested in subnotebooks, so they'd go with Windows. With the new 12" PowerBook G4 they can get a subnotebook with Mac OS X, a DVD burner, and a G4 processor. They're going to love it.
At some point, didn't he even say that unlike some people, he really likes Open Source?
Couple that with Safari (to knock out Internet Explorer) and Keynote (to give PowerPoint a run for its money), and Apple's making quite a few jabs at Microsoft.
> Ctrl-click on a text field, select spelling and > activate "Check Spelling As You Type"
Cool! Too bad this trick doesn't work in Chimera. That is the only thing that Omniweb has on Chimera. If Safari can add support for tabs and the Mac OS X keychain, then it will be ready for me.
And today the Mercury News reports that the Business Software Alliance and another hi-tech trade group, the Comptuer Systems Policy Project, will join together to lobby Washington over the proposed bill.
Hi-tech? The Comptuer Systems Policy Project? Is this a new organization specializing in greetings technologies, or have they used a secret DMCA-protected encoding scheme to hide the real name and purpose of their organization?
I hope The Inquirer's fact checking is better than their spell checking.
There's also the issue of - at which point is it better to have only 100,000 people paying a small fee for a product than for one million people to have it for free (even if only 3-400,000 actually use it)?
As for.Mac, I'm sure the numbers may be disappointing to Apple, but it's probably better to have 200,000 people paying to support all the resources that go into providing those services (the disks, the backup solutions, caching, bandwidth, etc) than however many people were using iTools (many with multiple accounts) for free. I'm a.Mac subscriber, and I love it. Using iSync to keep three Macs in sync is worth the price of admission to me, and using iDisk for the small documents I need to share between the three machines (in different locations) has been worth it.
You bring up some good points. However, it could be argued that Apple would have been better off if they had priced the service such that the take rate was much higher than just 200,000 people. I'm just guessing since I don't work for Apple -- though I'd like to; anybody out there work for Apple?:-)
If they had signed up 1,000,000 people (representing a take rate of 25-50% -- I'm guessing because I'm too lazy to look up the estimated number of iTools users), they would have had more paying users, and likely more revenue. For example if 200,000 signed up when the price was $99, perhaps they would have gotten 1 million for a price of $49 (generally price/demand curves aren't linear). I'm simplifying this because I don't know how many people got the special signup rate, but this is probably generally correct. In any case, the revenue would have been higher, and they would have had a larger pool of users. The latter is an advantage because of an application of the network effect. That is, the more people that use something, the more valuable it becomes. In this case, a low adoption rate will discourage others from signing up for the service.
There's two ways to look at this: a low adoption rate could mean that the quality of service would be higher. This is the case with cell phones, in that the service quality is inversely proportional to quantity of users (because the more users, the higher the noise floor, for CDMA systems). That's why cell phone service was generally better back in the early 1990s when there were fewer users. However, this is not the case with iTools/.Mac; the service quality is generally no better than when it was a free service. Another way to look at this is the fewer users you have, the higher the fixed cost per user will be. Apple still has to set up servers, routers, maintenance, etc for the system, as illustrated by Apple having significant service outages due to (probably) router difficulties. So at some point, Apple may choose to shut down the service. The fewer the quantity of users, the more likely Apple will be to shut down the service -- think Apple's failure with "eWorld". Since users realize this, and also realize that Apple's terms of service do not allow a refund in the event that the user wants to terminate the service, I'm sure a significant number of target users are resisting signing up for.Mac because they're worried the service will be cancelled, and they'll be out of their $99. So Apple would have been better off going with a lower annual fee to gain more users (while still being profitable), and perhaps moving to a tiered system to gain more revenue from other users, as opposed to the silly "bundled" idea.
I am a subscriber to.Mac, but out of 10 people I knew who used iTools, only two people signed up for the service. Informally polling, it seemed that a $49 annual price point (with a $29 special deal) would have captured an additional 4 people.
> I have linux, doze, and Mac, and the only one that > doesn't crash often in a blaze of glorified bit chaos is > the linux box
> I think the aura started fading the year Apple released > the rather pricey 840AV in a whirlwind of marketing > hype, that, for me, led to a rather disappointing > experience
I think Apple's come out with a few machines and a couple of operating system versions since then. You may want to check out their site to see what you've missed.
I don't mind Apple charging for software that is worth it ; iTunes and iPhoto (maybe) are worth the money.
However, Apple has two problems:
1. Software for money is held to a higher standard than free software. iTunes is incredible: it's fast, has plenty of features, and works great. iPhoto on the other hand is slow, very slow, and extremely slow. Plus you can't combine photo albums, and it doesn't perform well when you have thousands of pictures. So if Apple is going to start charging for software it should perform to a higher standard. Unfortunately, when Apple dumped the for-free iTools for the $99/year.Mac, the service didn't get any better; I still have problems getting my email. In short, they'd better make iPhoto a helluva lot better if they want my money.
2. Bundling! It will be really annoying if Apple makes you buy iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto together. Like.Mac, Apple built their value proposition on a number of factors, like someone buying a virus checker every year (without upgrading), buying web space, buying email, etc. The problem is if you only want one or two of these items, their value proposition falls apart. For example, there aren't any Mac OS X viruses, so what's the point of Virux? I see the same problem with the proposed 3 app bundle. I am only interested in iPhoto (and see #1 for limitations on that), but I have no need for iMovie (I have no DV camera) or iDVD (I don't have a DVD burner in my PowerBook). If they bundle the three together, it may help their, "but you get 3 applications for only $79 (or whatever)", but the point is the other two are basically shovelware if you don't have the entry hardware.
Somebody at Apple is playing a dangerous game where they believe that Apple purchasers have an inflexible view towards price. That is, Apple purchasers will pay anywhere from $0 to a premium price because it's from Apple. While it's true that Apple users will pay more for Apple products because they're generally of higher quality, Apple users aren't stupid when it comes to value propositions. Exhibit A is.Mac. Apparently fewer than 200,000 people signed up for the service, which is likely a 5-10% take rate. That take rate doesn't bode well for Apple's model to make.Mac a heavy source of revenue.
What Apple needs to do is figure out what their goals are: is it to gain more short term revenue (charge for.Mac, charge for iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, and who knows what else?) and a recuring revenue stream? Or is it to grow adoption of Mac OS X and gain overall market share? I'm not sure they can do both at the same time since the former means milking their installed base, while the latter means actually growing their business.
> It is legal for police to take garbage without a search > warrant.
IANAL either, but if it's legal, then the mayor and police chief are hypocrits when they said it was illegal when the same was done to them:
"'I consider Willamette Week's actions in this matter to be potentially illegal and absolutely unscrupulous and reprehensible,' [read a release from the mayor's office]. "I will consider all my legal options in response to their actions.'"
One of the major points of the article is that politicians and the executors of the law are too willing to take away our civil liberties -- a la the Total Information Awareness or the PATRIOT Act--, but they become indignant when the same is done to them.
> This week, are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia? I can't > seem to remember
We're at war with Eastasia, and we've always been at war with Eastasia. We've never been at war with Eurasia; they're our friends. You should know that. Perhaps you need a visit to the Ministry of Love?
You know, if political trends continue, Slashdot will have to add a (+1 1984 reference)
Slashdot Mirror
> CDMA systems showed us that it is possible to
> transmit two signals at the same time and the same
> frequency and distinguish them at the receiver; a
> task which at first might seem impossible.
Agreed, but CDMA system have an enormously high requirement on power control. The point is, you can have two signals at the same time and frequency, but the signals have to be generally at the same power, so that one can be properly decoded. Managing the received power is one of the hardest things about a CDMA system. In fact, although theoretically an IS-95 CDMA system should be able to support more than 60 times the users as a regular AMPS system, the problems with managing power make this more like 6-8.
And since the received power must be managed, that implies regulated spectrum. So as you said, "a long, long way from these ideas to an unregulated spectrum"
Perhaps, I'm not the most knowledgeable guy on RF interface, but I went to The University of Texas at Austin, got my degree in electrical engineering (studying electromagnetics), worked at Ericsson designed cellular systems and RF planning, worked at a company making "smart antennas" for cellular systems. From my experience, I had a hard time understanding what he was talking about. "Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow"? Of course it is, that's how the radio spectrum works. But then he goes off on, "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green." Which makes little sense to me.
It's not that using a radio frequency somehow "depletes" a resource -- it means that if you put a green object in a green room with green lights, after a point you won't be able to see the object any more, kind of like how camouflage works. The problem is when you have a lot of signaling broadcasting in an area, the noise level can increase to the point that no single signal can be resolved. The classic example is how it's very difficult to understand a particular conversation in a noisy room. And that's why you have to generally parcel out radio spectrum and define limits on how it can be used (signal strength, bandwidth characteristics, noise levels, coverage patterns, etc)
That guy's nutty analogy makes me think he's a leftover of the dotcom era -- when eyeballs was more important than revenue and other silly things. Admittedly, I should read the whole article, but the first few paragraphs made me feel like I'm talking to a crazy guy on the bus.
> loses money on everything but Win/Office.
Abrahams, Paul. "Microsoft Shows 85% Profit Margins for Windows," Financial Times. November 17, 2002. (Sorry, but the URL is for subscribers only).
Here are some choice quotes from the article:
The Register also has an article based on Microsoft's public SEC filings:
Of course, you don't have to take their word for it; just check out Microsoft's recent SEC filings. It seems that Windows and Office pay the rent for all of Microsoft's other endeavors. I guess that's one of the hundreds of perks of illegally abusing your monopoly!
> Canyonero!
"Well it goes real slow
with the hammer down/
it's the country fried browser
endorsed by a clown!
Canyonero!"
Naw, sounds too much like Internet Explorer.
Inertia can keep a company going for a long time. In the company I work for, I have seen mistakes that cost the company tens of millions of dollars, made not by people who successfully built the company, but by people who were brought in later. The fact that the company is still around just shows the inertia.
Apple brought in a number of people to try to fix the company, and Amelio nearly ran it into the ground. Scores of analysts had given Apple up for dead. Jesse Berst of Ziff Davis even moronically suggested that Apple should shut down its R&D labs and give the money to start ups. Then Jobs returned, made strong decisions, and today Apple is a different company.
So, I'd say that Jobs earned his money. He is one of the few "rock star" CEOs that has earned the money he made. It's a lot harder to fix a terminally broken company than it is to keep one going.
I would say that the business world is certainly a "what have you done lately". 1997 is receding fast, and Jobs is going to have to continue to lead Apple towards success to be worth that kind of compensation. Now that Apple is healthy, the next benchmark is increased market share. Dell has shown in its quarterly earnings that a company can do well in this economic downturn. It's time for Apple to do the same.
> Basically, each metallic window needs only focus
> on one thing.
I think this is correct. Additionally I think the metallic interface is used when the application isn't document-centric. So Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are document-centric and should use the regular pin stripes. Dantz Retrospect and Virex are not document-centric, and should therefore use the metallic appearance.
The only problem I have is I like the pin stripe look better than the metallic interface. So I'd hate to see too many applications using the metallic look.
> But tabbed browsing is simply one implementation
;-)
> of a multiple-document interface (MDI). The HIG
> does specifically call out MDI as being evil.
> See, the Mac got where it is today by
> establishing a fairly simple desktop metaphor
> and sticking with it.
Where the Mac is today? You mean with ~3% market share for sales?
When you say that tabbed browsing is a form of MDI, and MDI is evil, you run the risk of sounding pedantic. People don't buy computers or software because it matches some Ivory Tower's idea of what is a good interface. They buy because it fits their needs the best.
I have been a Mac user for a while, and when I first heard about tabs in Chimera, I had no idea why anyone would want them. However, once I tried them, I learned that tabs work best for me. I like to load different sites into different browser windows, and then load sub pages for a particular site in tabs in the same window. It keeps things neater and allows me to quickly go back to my place without having to sit through a painful page reload. To me, three windows with three tabs is more organized that nine windows spanning three different web sites.
Maybe tabs aren't the only solution for this, but I'd like to see something that effectively replaces the functionality and still meets with the HIG-nazis' idea of what is good design.
Perhaps the case is in general MDI is not a good idea, but there are specific cases where it is a good idea -- like when you're browsing the web.
Safari's product managers need to realize that there are a significant number of people who will never switch to Safari full time until it has two things:
1. Tabbed browsing (or something that substitutes the functionality)
2. Support for the Mac OS keychain
It would also have beautiful carpet and wood floors. The wood would be from a famous old house known for its incredible floors. The carpet would be the newest thing, thick and plush. The floors would be so stunning that everyone who saw them would want them.
However, because of the way the floors are textured, it would take forever to walk between rooms. There would also be, for some reason, rainbow colored beachballs all over the damn house, in the weirdest places. Every time you tried to walk from the kitchen to the garage, it would take you twice as long as you would expect. And you'd see a beachball on the way. You would think, "What's up with the floors? My funky old college apartment had a crumbling foundation, but I could at least sprint between the rooms!"
I went to The University of Texas at Austin, and in the electrical engineering program there was little room for the grade inflation the author talks about. I think every single course was graded on a curve. To get an A, your grade had to be the class average plus the standard deviation. To get a B, your grade had to be the class average plus half the standard deviation. And so on. This made it a lot harder to grades to be inflated.
My wife teaches biology at a local community college, and she said that many of her students wouldn't put up with the system I had to have in college. The problem is, for many people today getting anything less than A is unsatisfactory because high grades are so important (rather than actually mastering the material).
There are "A" students who cram before tests, get old tests and memorize them, and hound the professor for higher grades, and there are "A" students that know the material so well, they could actually teach the class. In a perfect world, the former would get a B or C, and the latter would get the A.
> The kicker is that the people who are wanting
> clone tech to become immortal are just deluding
> themselves. They will die, and there clone will
> live on, but it will not be them.
What if a recording company cloned one of their artists, and raised it as a piece of property (since they own all derivative works of the artist). Then the artist would have to "compete" with perhaps a younger version of themself. So imagine if the old, Las Vegas-styled Elvis had to suddenly meet up with his 20-something year old rockabilly self. From the artist's perspective, it would suck, but from the music company's perspective, they would have conceivably a perpetular source of youngish talent, that wouldn't be ravaged by age, booze, etc. When that clone got too old, they could clone another, and have a perpetual artist. Kinda creepy.
Al Gore never said he invented the Internet.
Jobs for president? The guy's a millionaire, but he still only takes $1 for his annual salary. He completely turned around Apple (with help of course, but I don't think it could have been done without him). He's a straight shooter (willing to fire people in the elevator down to the lobby, or at least he used to). We could do worse than Jobs.
In fact, we already are.
> Why are we running out of phone numbers?
It has to do with the fact that service providers are assigned blocks of numbers, rather than individual numbers for their subscribers. So imagine two service providers A and B. Maybe they both get a single 10,000 block of phone numbers. Imagine that A has 9,000 subscribers (and thus has used 90%) of their numbers, and B has 1,000 subscribers (and has used 10%). If A gains another 2,000 subscribers, they can't use B's number block. They have to apply to the FCC for another block of 10,000 numbers. In the meantime, B is has plenty of room. As a result, you run out of numbers, even though they're not all being used.
Their is a concept called Number Pooling that means that if a service provider has a block of 1,000 numbers that they aren't using, they have to return that block of numbers to the "pool" for other service providers to use. Number Pooling is mandated in many areas under specific circumstances.
The telecom industry is slowly getting away from the idea of number block routing. With Number Portability and Number Pooling, they're moving towards a system that improves on that. Number blocks are "tagged" as having a subscriber that no longer has service with the service provider that owns that block. Then the switch goes to a centralized database and determines where that subscriber is, and the call is routed accordingly.
Number Portability exists in a limited extent today, so in many areas of the country when you move between service providers (but stay in the same service area), you can keep your phone number. So the situation is being alleviated, but New York is probably the biggest market in the country, and things are pretty strained there.
> And, while we're at it, why not assign each
> individual a phone number that they keep for
> life, no matter where they move, like a domain
> name?
Telecom companies are working on this. A concept called ENUM allows subscribers to be assigned IP addresses that are abstracted from the ways the actual call is routed. This is mostly coming about because of VoIP, but it has merits with regular E.164 telephone numbers as well. The telecom industry moves a little slower than the computer industry, so expect to see something like this within 3-5 years. Happy waiting!
> If you are a gov't manger and are given a budget
> your job is get the job done and the spend the
> money - and maybe beg for more. There are no kudos
> for doing a job efficiently and being under
> budget.
First, any single person's "pork" is another person's "necessary plan to ensure the safety of America". That's why it's so hard to control government spending. But what about running government more efficiently?
Okay, so if you incent a government manager to be under budget and return whatever's left, they'll consistently overestimate their budgets, and then return what's left so they'll look like "heros".
So then, someone else comes along and says, "Whenever the government prices something out, it's way too expensive. It's because they overestimate their budgets. We should incent them if they correctly estimate their budgets."
Lather, rinse repeat. It happens in the private sector all the time, so why should we expect governments to be any different?
The problem is if someone wants to corrupt any system, they can, because no system is infallible. The only way to watch out for this is for a person without a vested interest to monitor the activities to make sure that things are working efficiently. But then, for every government department, you've got to have an oversight committee, so now you've increased the bureaucracy in the government.
The moral of the story? Anyone who thinks there's an easy answer to solving the problem of government spending isn't thinking about it hard enough. The way to control government spending is for citizens, businesses, the press, and the even the government to exhaustively monitor what the government is doing. Sounds like a lot of work, right? What was that about the price of freedom?
> *sob*
:-)
17" screen isn't that big of a deal.
Of course 17" screen, autosensing backlit keyboard, 54 Gbps AirPort, and integrated Bluetooth. Now that's a big deal!
> I actually wonder if Apple is developing a radical
> corporate strategy which involves a sense of
> responsibility to the computer industry as a whole
What an interesting idea. The big advantage software companies have on hardware companies is the incredible margins: the cost of goods sold for software is basically nil (the price of the CDs), while for hardware, you have all the costs of buying the parts to make your hardware. Keep in mind, R&D is handled as a capitalized expense and isn't amortized over the cost of each unit sold.
So software companies could enjoy huge margins, while hardware companies had to be happy with less than 25%.
Microsoft benefited from this, but they also increased the barrier of entry for competitors by illegally abusing their monopoly. So it wasn't enough to build a better Word processor; you had to be able to make it much better and cheaper than Word (since Word was generally bundled in price with the rest of MS Office), and be completely compatible with Word's file format (because of the network effect).
What's interesting is that open file formats (and Open Source in general) lowers these barriers of entries. For example, if all software applications use the same file format, then the software packages have to compete on their own merits since the network effect related to file compatibility is eliminated.
With Apple embracing open source and open file formats, they're essentially leveling the playing field between software vendors and hardware vendors. If they can get software vendors to adopt open formats, the cost of switching between software vendors will reduce for the users, and it will be easier for new entrants to build competing software programs. In that case, Apple will succeed as well, because they're building some of the best hardware (the new 17" PowerBook G4 is Exhibit A). If their plan works, competition will increase in the computer industry, benefiting all.
> Subnotes/small notes are notoriously hard to sell,
> but I guess it does plug a hole in the Apple
> notebook strategy.
Good point, but I have a one word answer for you: "Japan".
In Japan, they're willing to pay a premium for subnotebooks, and I suspect that's where the majority of Apple's sales will be for this product. Apple used to have a PowerBook 2400, which was perfect for that market. However, during the winnowing after Jobs's return, they got rid of it, along with a lot of other products since back then they all used separate motherboards and were very expensive to develop. Now, it looks like they've got an iBook motherboard and a PowerBook motherboard, so the development of a subnotebook should more tolerable.
For the people I know in Japan, they loved my PowerBook, but they were more interested in subnotebooks, so they'd go with Windows. With the new 12" PowerBook G4 they can get a subnotebook with Mac OS X, a DVD burner, and a G4 processor. They're going to love it.
> "Open Source We think it's great"
At some point, didn't he even say that unlike some people, he really likes Open Source?
Couple that with Safari (to knock out Internet Explorer) and Keynote (to give PowerPoint a run for its money), and Apple's making quite a few jabs at Microsoft.
See, competition is a good thing after all!
> Ctrl-click on a text field, select spelling and
> activate "Check Spelling As You Type"
Cool! Too bad this trick doesn't work in Chimera. That is the only thing that Omniweb has on Chimera. If Safari can add support for tabs and the Mac OS X keychain, then it will be ready for me.
Hi-tech? The Comptuer Systems Policy Project? Is this a new organization specializing in greetings technologies, or have they used a secret DMCA-protected encoding scheme to hide the real name and purpose of their organization?
I hope The Inquirer's fact checking is better than their spell checking.
You bring up some good points. However, it could be argued that Apple would have been better off if they had priced the service such that the take rate was much higher than just 200,000 people. I'm just guessing since I don't work for Apple -- though I'd like to; anybody out there work for Apple?
If they had signed up 1,000,000 people (representing a take rate of 25-50% -- I'm guessing because I'm too lazy to look up the estimated number of iTools users), they would have had more paying users, and likely more revenue. For example if 200,000 signed up when the price was $99, perhaps they would have gotten 1 million for a price of $49 (generally price/demand curves aren't linear). I'm simplifying this because I don't know how many people got the special signup rate, but this is probably generally correct. In any case, the revenue would have been higher, and they would have had a larger pool of users. The latter is an advantage because of an application of the network effect. That is, the more people that use something, the more valuable it becomes. In this case, a low adoption rate will discourage others from signing up for the service.
There's two ways to look at this: a low adoption rate could mean that the quality of service would be higher. This is the case with cell phones, in that the service quality is inversely proportional to quantity of users (because the more users, the higher the noise floor, for CDMA systems). That's why cell phone service was generally better back in the early 1990s when there were fewer users. However, this is not the case with iTools/.Mac; the service quality is generally no better than when it was a free service. Another way to look at this is the fewer users you have, the higher the fixed cost per user will be. Apple still has to set up servers, routers, maintenance, etc for the system, as illustrated by Apple having significant service outages due to (probably) router difficulties. So at some point, Apple may choose to shut down the service. The fewer the quantity of users, the more likely Apple will be to shut down the service -- think Apple's failure with "eWorld". Since users realize this, and also realize that Apple's terms of service do not allow a refund in the event that the user wants to terminate the service, I'm sure a significant number of target users are resisting signing up for
I am a subscriber to
> I have linux, doze, and Mac, and the only one that
> doesn't crash often in a blaze of glorified bit chaos is
> the linux box
> I think the aura started fading the year Apple released
> the rather pricey 840AV in a whirlwind of marketing
> hype, that, for me, led to a rather disappointing
> experience
You mean the Quadra 840 AV from 1993?
I think Apple's come out with a few machines and a couple of operating system versions since then. You may want to check out their site to see what you've missed.
> $50 for iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto together
.Mac, the service didn't get any better; I still have problems getting my email. In short, they'd better make iPhoto a helluva lot better if they want my money.
.Mac, Apple built their value proposition on a number of factors, like someone buying a virus checker every year (without upgrading), buying web space, buying email, etc. The problem is if you only want one or two of these items, their value proposition falls apart. For example, there aren't any Mac OS X viruses, so what's the point of Virux? I see the same problem with the proposed 3 app bundle. I am only interested in iPhoto (and see #1 for limitations on that), but I have no need for iMovie (I have no DV camera) or iDVD (I don't have a DVD burner in my PowerBook). If they bundle the three together, it may help their, "but you get 3 applications for only $79 (or whatever)", but the point is the other two are basically shovelware if you don't have the entry hardware.
.Mac. Apparently fewer than 200,000 people signed up for the service, which is likely a 5-10% take rate. That take rate doesn't bode well for Apple's model to make .Mac a heavy source of revenue.
.Mac, charge for iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, and who knows what else?) and a recuring revenue stream? Or is it to grow adoption of Mac OS X and gain overall market share? I'm not sure they can do both at the same time since the former means milking their installed base, while the latter means actually growing their business.
I don't mind Apple charging for software that is worth it ; iTunes and iPhoto (maybe) are worth the money.
However, Apple has two problems:
1. Software for money is held to a higher standard than free software. iTunes is incredible: it's fast, has plenty of features, and works great. iPhoto on the other hand is slow, very slow, and extremely slow. Plus you can't combine photo albums, and it doesn't perform well when you have thousands of pictures. So if Apple is going to start charging for software it should perform to a higher standard. Unfortunately, when Apple dumped the for-free iTools for the $99/year
2. Bundling! It will be really annoying if Apple makes you buy iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto together. Like
Somebody at Apple is playing a dangerous game where they believe that Apple purchasers have an inflexible view towards price. That is, Apple purchasers will pay anywhere from $0 to a premium price because it's from Apple. While it's true that Apple users will pay more for Apple products because they're generally of higher quality, Apple users aren't stupid when it comes to value propositions. Exhibit A is
What Apple needs to do is figure out what their goals are: is it to gain more short term revenue (charge for
> It is legal for police to take garbage without a search
> warrant.
IANAL either, but if it's legal, then the mayor and police chief are hypocrits when they said it was illegal when the same was done to them:
"'I consider Willamette Week's actions in this matter to be potentially illegal and absolutely unscrupulous and reprehensible,' [read a release from the mayor's office]. "I will consider all my legal options in response to their actions.'"
One of the major points of the article is that politicians and the executors of the law are too willing to take away our civil liberties -- a la the Total Information Awareness or the PATRIOT Act--, but they become indignant when the same is done to them.
> There are all sorts of possible useful uses.
All your suggestions are interesting. However, let's not forget that this is the company that came up with the Flower Power iMac.
So this means you *can't* rule out this patent allowing a future product to sin against nature.
> This week, are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia? I can't
> seem to remember
We're at war with Eastasia, and we've always been at war with Eastasia. We've never been at war with Eurasia; they're our friends. You should know that. Perhaps you need a visit to the Ministry of Love?
You know, if political trends continue, Slashdot will have to add a (+1 1984 reference)