I don't know about you, but I'm depressed after reading this answer.
Well, yes and no. My initial reaction was similar to yours, but after considering for a moment, I don't think this stuff matters. It may very well be true that it is not allowable to make a 2nd copy for home use, or do anything else from question #7. But it's also not legal to copy a newspaper or magazine article, or distribute music you recorded off the radio, and you know what? People have been doing both of those things for decades, and they continue to do so. Think back 10 or 20 years ago and recall how common it was for kids to swap cassette tapes, or make mixes of favorite songs. That was every bit illegal as the scenarios described in question #7.
So what's my point? The point is scale. If you're doing something on a small scale, nobody really cares. If you make a copy and give it to a friend, or your sister, or whatever, I think the precedent is well established that such acts "don't matter". What does matter (especially to the RIAA) is blindly sharing perfect digital copies to unknown quantities of people all over the world. As much as I can't stand the RIAA's entire approach to this, I sincerely believe they don't really give a shit about me making a copy of an album and giving it to my friend. They say they do, but at the end of the day it's basically impossible for them to find me and take me to court for a $15 album copy. It doesn't happen too often, it's slow and manual (the copying), limited in scope, and isn't worth that much to them financially. It's not worth their time.
But once I copy the thing and put it online for 2,000 others to download for free, I have jumped to a substantially higher level of copyright infringement, and the RIAA can do something about that - they have to find the one guy sharing that single copy, and they'll prevent 2,000 copies from propagating around the world. Of course, it's not that easy in practice, the RIAA is spending a ton of time and money on legal fees, but I think you can see their approach.
The issue of scale is extremely important. Bad behavior isn't necessarily going to be stopped, but if enough people are doing it, it becomes increasingly likely that somebody is going to do something. Remember Microsoft going through a gigantic legal battle about integrating Internet Explorer into Windows? Everyone said, "oh my god, you can't do that! No, no no!". But that's not the whole picture, becuase IBM did exactly that with OS/2 Warp - browser built-in, lots of tied in functionality. So what's the difference? OS/2 was used by a relatively small number of people compared to Windows, so the scale wasn't the same. It just didn't "matter" when IBM did it, but it did matter when Microsoft did the exact same thing on a much, much larger scale. The same thing is going on here with sharing copyrighted music. Just keep your copying and sharing small-time, local, and reasonable, don't do any file-sharing network stuff, and you won't have any problems from the RIAA.
Furthermore, all this is going to do is bolster the view that Macs are invincible.... Oh you say you found another new exploit or vulnerability? Psha! As if! Didn't you hear that the only "exploits" on Macs are total bullshit invented by a couple clowns who hate Steve Jobs? And dude, didn't you see that Apple commercial about "viruses"? The Mac didn't get sick at all! But the PC did!
The thing that's more concerning to me is that the tech news and media start sounding like CNN. It seems like anybody can step up and make a loud claim about something controversial, and the news sites just spread it around. Most other tech security claims are held accountable for documenting details and specifics, and being up-front about things like, "well, this only happens while using a random 3rd party wireless card, which would admitedly happen almost never on a Mac since most have built-in wireless...".
In any case, fucking huge, and nowhere near practical.
Totally agree with you - I am not about to trade in my laptop for a different computer that has a 1 liter (or larger) fuel canister attached to it. Most of the/. crowd are probably in agreement on this.
But you know who might find it practical? Anyone in the middle of nowhere, away from electric outlets, away from plugs. Field researchers, for instance, could really benefit from something like this. And powering your laptop or cell phone with a fuel cell is a much more efficient use of energy than plugging a 12-volt adapter into an electric generator.
About 3 years ago, some scientists hooked up a chimpanzee and captured brain signals to control a robotic arm. Their results were quite a bit more impressive I think, because the robotic arm had full motion control, and was physically located several hundred miles away from the chimp. But still, this stuff from Honda is cool, because it's controlled by humans using mri, not wires plugged into your brain like the monkey stuff. I just hope they don't try to put brain controller stuff in their vehicles...
"In some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux..."
For example, with Windows Vista, you will get more: - system instability - viruses - application crashes - lost data - maintenance time - security patches - bug fixes
But it doesn't stop there! In order to take advantage of all new features in Vista, you will also get to spend more money on fancy hardware, including juiced up graphics cards to render the fancy new user interface.
After rtfa, I've concluded that this submission is grossly mis-titled.
Yeah, it's nice that you'll be able to use a blackberry or mobile phone to make calls, etc., while riding a BART train, but who calls that "wireless"?
The term "wireless" is usually related to 802.11, wifi, or "wireless networking", not the ability to make cell phone calls. But I guess that's incorrect, and we can now state that most of the planet is already "outfitted with wireless".
I know all kinds of smart people try really hard to predict things like this, and they give all sorts of explanations that "support" their position. But here is why the Internet won't go away: it is useful, and people like it.
If you look throughout history, in all cultures, if people find something to be useful, no amount of government or corporate intervention or regulation will dissuade those people from doing what they want. Despite most citizens not giving a shit about voting in government elections, very few people will stand by and allow a government or corporation to take away something they want. It just does not happen. This happens all over the world, in all cultures, and when this stand-off becomes a big enough event, it makes the news as a "revolution".
So no, the internet isn't going to be flushed down the tubes by ISPs or whatever, because consumers will not allow it.
You're right, percentages don't matter much until you know the initial totals. So 6% of 14 billion is obviously way, way more than %9 of 4 billion. But that's only revenue, not profit.
So how much of Dell's 14 and Apple's 4 billion is profit? How much goes to operating expenses? It is widely known that one of Apple's biggest profit generators is the iPod product line (and not iTunes Music Store). Given that they're selling million and millions of these things, this suggests Apple's profits (not revenues) might be pretty good.
I don't know how many employees either company has, but here in Austin, Dell pretty much employs an entire suburb's worth of people. That can't be cheap, and it's definitely not the only big branch of Dell employees.
Obviously, the stated purpose is to protect the students from predators, so the problem appears to be "how to protect the students when they're on the internet". But - and I mean this with the utmost, non-flamebait sincerity - isn't a big part of Christianity the ability to control people and their behavior? And given that, is the problem instead, "how to maintain control over what the students say, think and do"?
To be fair, religion in general (not just Christianity) serves as a means of population control. It tells us when to be happy, when to be afraid, how to live, how not to live, how to treat each other, etc. And it keeps us all looking for the big payoff in the sky, instead of paying attention to the boring details of our mundane lives. But all of this is subjective and varies widely across different cultures, just like religion does.
I can't help but think part of this "student protection" plan is to in fact maintain a tighter hold on the students, including what they say and do on the internet.
I agree, it's about time that we see some changes in the Hollywood world, but I think it's a bit ironic that Steven Soderbergh is the one pushing ahead.
I think many/most of us would agree that Hollywood movies generally suck, and the experience is even worse when you factor in inflated ticket prices, bad (and expensive) movie food/snacks, noisy kids/cellphones, parking nightmares, etc. So it's interesting to me that it would be Soderbergh would leads the charge for us to leave that all behind. Because it's Soderbergh himself who has produced or directed some really great films, including Pleasantville, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Ocean's Eleven (and Twelve), Erin Brokovich, and one of my favorite movies of all time, Traffic.
The irony is that it's the work of guys like Soderbergh who keep me going to the otherwise shithole movie theaters.
I think you're right, the original article had no visible association with NCSA other than the url. But this is just like the classic telephone game: I tell you something, you repeat it to somebody else with a minor addition/change, then that person tells somebody else, etc. By the time it goes 4 or 5 hops, it's been totally twisted around, and my original message has turned into something idiotic, and everyone thinks I said it. This is exactly what happened here, because it started showing up on blogs, and then news sites started writing about it.
Overall, everyone was more or less accurate with regard to the articles details and results, etc., but the fact that this was just a single web page posted on a single web server in the ncsa.uiuc.edu subdomain was lost on everyone. People did not carry that important detail along, and over time it morphed into something else. Pretty quickly, we started seeing articles like, "NCSA Compares Google and Yahoo Index Numbers" appear on slashdot, which is hugely popular, and suddenly the whole world thought that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications was on a crusade to figure out which search engine is better. Hence the disclaimer from NCSA to formally tell the world that this "article" was "published" by two students, and that's all.
Dude, it was never published, it was posted on one web server that is part of the ncsa.uiuc.edu sub-domain (specifically, vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu). There are probably hundreds of machines that are in this network, and posting something on a web server running there does not equate to NCSA formally publishing an article. What we're talking about here is a web page written by two students, they worked on a project, they wanted to post it for other people to see. So that's what they did, period.
Stupidly, everyone is claiming that NCSA backed this whole thing, like they (NCSA) are on some crusade to compare Yahoo and Google. But this must be taken for what it is - a project by two students. NCSA's disclaimer is just trying to make this clear for the idiots out there who think that every little thing a student says or does must have been funded, supported, backed, etc. by NCSA.
I see your point, and for the rest of the world, I think it applies. But Microsoft doesn't really have a solid track record of doing things the way other entities do. Instead, they've established an undeniable reputation of doing whatever the f*ck they want, no matter what anybody thinks about it. If anybody has a problem with 'em, Microsoft will happily take it to court and drag it out until you can't afford to fight it, or they'll just buy you out up front (everyone has their price, and Microsoft is sure to find out how much).
I almost feel bad for Microsoft that the name is so important. I mean, they just don't get it - if you make a really good product, your name will not matter. Especially if you make a really good product and most computers on the planet already use it. I mean, look at Apple (not trying to be fanboy here), but how exciting of a name is OS X? Yeah, there are the code names - Tiger, Panther, etc. - but it's just a neutral, numeric name. X is the roman numeral for 10, which followed OS 9, which followed OS 8, which followed System 7, and System 6, etc. People who use Macs and swear by them couldn't care less what the goddamn name is, and Apple knows this. Microsoft, on the other hand, has problably spent millions of dollars on positioning research, market analysis, an army of lawyers to research everything under the sun, etc.
I think he is countering the notion that workers are overloaded with info
I think he's trying to get everybody all worried about overloading each other with information so that they'll think it's necessary to upgrade to Office 12. I mean, how many more new features are really necessary by most humans who work in an office environment?
Instead of adding a bunch of complicated features that solve contrived problems for a thin slice of Office users, I'd like to see them put some serious effort into making Word documents fully readable by any other version of Word. Imagine... you could send a document to another person without concern that it would be unreadable on their end... now that would be something to get excited about.
So anyway, yeah, the point of Gates' comments is less about substance and more about manipulating the market. He does this all the time, most recently with the "iPod will go away" comments. Ballmer is now doing it with "Google will be gone in 5 years". These guys know they are getting hammered by Apple and Google in specific market spaces, and rather than respond with better product offerings, they respond with subtle slander.
I read somewhere on/. that the origin of a Tiger was in Asia, so I thought I would get my copy from China this weekend (it's too far away to go there today)...
"If they [Motorola] delay their product out of annoyace at Steve, they're the ones who will lose revenue, not Apple."
This is exactly true, and everybody knows it, including Motorola.
But consider the following statements, which one sounds better?
"We, Motorola, are not done with our product that we have been hyping for a while now, so please trust us, it's not vaporware, we really will ship it at some unknown point in the future."
or
"Any delays in our product shipment are entirely Apple's fault."
This is called blame shifting, and sounds a lot like what 4 year old children do to each other ("I only punched her because she looked at me funny! It's not my fault, it's hers!").
The specs you link to show that it has a max processor speed of 500Mhz. The Mac mini goes up to 1.4Ghz. They say that a celeron can go higher, but not 900Mhz higher.
And for sake of argument, even if the the celeron could get itself up 1.4ghz, it would not offer the same actual performance of a G4. This is the age-old argument about the architectures being so different that the clock speeds don't matter, but it cannot be stressed enough. The CISC-based Intel/AMD processors are not as efficient at getting work done as the RISC-based PowerPC processors.
I like the analogy of a person physically moving 1,000 boxes from one side of the house to the other. The CISC person might be able to get from one side to other (and back) in 2 seconds, but each time he does he can only carry a single box with him, so it would take 2,000 seconds to move all boxes. Whereas the RISC person might take 5 seconds to make the same round-trip distance, but each time he can carry 20 boxes, so it takes a total of 250 seconds (5 seconds * 1000 boxes / 20 boxes-per-trip). The numbers I used are not meant to exactly correlate to a Celeron vs. G4, but they convey the right idea - efficiency and speed are not equivalent.
The parent post is right on. In fact, I think it barely touches on the differences between Office and Pages (or any other Windows-based software vs. it's Mac counterpart).
For example, look at iPhoto: fairly minimal on features. In fact, when iPhoto was released, I recall hearing all kinds of important sounding people say a bunch of unimpressive things, that iPhoto lacked features, that it didn't have the power, blah blah blah. But what they missed was the simplicity of use. iPhoto is so much easier to use that it absolutely nails 90% of the things you want to do in a perfect, simple package. For the remaining 10% of your photo tasks (advanced editing, for instance), use something else.
Apple's approach in general is to nail the common use cases, and nail 'em to the goddamn wall, whereas the Microsoft approach (and again, a majority of apps on Windows) is to offer you 4,000 features that you can't understand or figure out, so you kinda hobble along with the app, barely able to get your tasks done.
So could Apple have added multiple sub-document support? Yeah, probably. Do I even know what that is, aside from having read someone else's rant that it doesn't exist in Pages? No, I don't, and I don't think I care. I could say the same thing for a lot of the other "features" that are supposedly "missing" from Pages.
The Omni Group also gets this same design principle - do something well, and keep it simple. There's a huge reason why OmniOutliner is an app that I (and thousands of other folks) use on a regular basis, and it's not because it has all kinds of complicated, contrived "features" that some marketing group in Redmond came up with under corporate sales pressure.
I don't think there's much credibility to the claim of a G5 powerbook shipping within the next 6 months. I was just reading something the other day (I think it may have been another article at The Register, in fact), where one of the Apple higher-ups was quoted as saying that a G5 in a Powerbook would be "the mother of all thermal challenges", and then immediately refused to answer any more questions about it.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a superfast Powerbook hit the market, I think it would only do good things for customers and Apple as a company. But it took about 2 years before Apple engineers figured out how to pack the G4 into a Powerbook. I'd love to eat crow about this rumor and be proven wrong, but I just don't see it.
I worry about the quality because it's being made by Griffin. I bought two iTrips -- one for my 1st gen iPod, and one for my wife's 3rd gen iPod. They both suck.
I've had similar experiences with the iTrip (I agree, they suck), but from all the reading I've done, it seems that's mostly a function of the concept sucking, not the specific implementation. Said another way, most of the other radio tuner things by other manufacturers also suck, some more than Griffen's iTrip.
The only one I've seen that looks like it would actually function is the pod freq by Sonnet. Of course, it's giganto compared to the size of the iTrip, and it also costs about $100 at places like Amazon, etc.
I guess it's easiest to just release the existing stuff for free, but it looks like these are the original, pre-OSX applications (aka, "classic"). So they have not been ported to OSX.
I don't have System 9 installed on my machine, so this isn't too exciting...
- all music companies care about DRM, and they will all continue to care about DRM
- Apple will face more competition for the ipod
- all audio players will get smaller in size
- hard drives will get cheaper, as will audio players in general
- tivo-for-audio (something that has existed for more than a year) will continue to exist
- some guy thinks players should display lyrics like a karaoke machine
- they think consumers want a single device for everything - pda, audio, phone, watch, video player - even though integrated devices are unsuccessful in many other areas of life (tv/vcr, fridge/web browser, etc.)
The above items are all written by me, and certainly omit some of the details. But I fail to see how any of this reveals anything interesting or unexpected about "the future" of digital audio.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but I'm depressed after reading this answer.
Well, yes and no. My initial reaction was similar to yours, but after considering for a moment, I don't think this stuff matters. It may very well be true that it is not allowable to make a 2nd copy for home use, or do anything else from question #7. But it's also not legal to copy a newspaper or magazine article, or distribute music you recorded off the radio, and you know what? People have been doing both of those things for decades, and they continue to do so. Think back 10 or 20 years ago and recall how common it was for kids to swap cassette tapes, or make mixes of favorite songs. That was every bit illegal as the scenarios described in question #7.
So what's my point? The point is scale. If you're doing something on a small scale, nobody really cares. If you make a copy and give it to a friend, or your sister, or whatever, I think the precedent is well established that such acts "don't matter". What does matter (especially to the RIAA) is blindly sharing perfect digital copies to unknown quantities of people all over the world. As much as I can't stand the RIAA's entire approach to this, I sincerely believe they don't really give a shit about me making a copy of an album and giving it to my friend. They say they do, but at the end of the day it's basically impossible for them to find me and take me to court for a $15 album copy. It doesn't happen too often, it's slow and manual (the copying), limited in scope, and isn't worth that much to them financially. It's not worth their time.
But once I copy the thing and put it online for 2,000 others to download for free, I have jumped to a substantially higher level of copyright infringement, and the RIAA can do something about that - they have to find the one guy sharing that single copy, and they'll prevent 2,000 copies from propagating around the world. Of course, it's not that easy in practice, the RIAA is spending a ton of time and money on legal fees, but I think you can see their approach.
The issue of scale is extremely important. Bad behavior isn't necessarily going to be stopped, but if enough people are doing it, it becomes increasingly likely that somebody is going to do something. Remember Microsoft going through a gigantic legal battle about integrating Internet Explorer into Windows? Everyone said, "oh my god, you can't do that! No, no no!". But that's not the whole picture, becuase IBM did exactly that with OS/2 Warp - browser built-in, lots of tied in functionality. So what's the difference? OS/2 was used by a relatively small number of people compared to Windows, so the scale wasn't the same. It just didn't "matter" when IBM did it, but it did matter when Microsoft did the exact same thing on a much, much larger scale. The same thing is going on here with sharing copyrighted music. Just keep your copying and sharing small-time, local, and reasonable, don't do any file-sharing network stuff, and you won't have any problems from the RIAA.
Furthermore, all this is going to do is bolster the view that Macs are invincible. ... Oh you say you found another new exploit or vulnerability? Psha! As if! Didn't you hear that the only "exploits" on Macs are total bullshit invented by a couple clowns who hate Steve Jobs? And dude, didn't you see that Apple commercial about "viruses"? The Mac didn't get sick at all! But the PC did!
The thing that's more concerning to me is that the tech news and media start sounding like CNN. It seems like anybody can step up and make a loud claim about something controversial, and the news sites just spread it around. Most other tech security claims are held accountable for documenting details and specifics, and being up-front about things like, "well, this only happens while using a random 3rd party wireless card, which would admitedly happen almost never on a Mac since most have built-in wireless...".
In any case, fucking huge, and nowhere near practical.
/. crowd are probably in agreement on this.
Totally agree with you - I am not about to trade in my laptop for a different computer that has a 1 liter (or larger) fuel canister attached to it. Most of the
But you know who might find it practical? Anyone in the middle of nowhere, away from electric outlets, away from plugs. Field researchers, for instance, could really benefit from something like this. And powering your laptop or cell phone with a fuel cell is a much more efficient use of energy than plugging a 12-volt adapter into an electric generator.
About 3 years ago, some scientists hooked up a chimpanzee and captured brain signals to control a robotic arm. Their results were quite a bit more impressive I think, because the robotic arm had full motion control, and was physically located several hundred miles away from the chimp. But still, this stuff from Honda is cool, because it's controlled by humans using mri, not wires plugged into your brain like the monkey stuff. I just hope they don't try to put brain controller stuff in their vehicles...
Here's an article from New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4262
"In some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux..."
For example, with Windows Vista, you will get more:
- system instability
- viruses
- application crashes
- lost data
- maintenance time
- security patches
- bug fixes
But it doesn't stop there! In order to take advantage of all new features in Vista, you will also get to spend more money on fancy hardware, including juiced up graphics cards to render the fancy new user interface.
omg for a second there i thought you posted a url to http://wickedweasel.com.
*phew* that was close!
After rtfa, I've concluded that this submission is grossly mis-titled.
Yeah, it's nice that you'll be able to use a blackberry or mobile phone to make calls, etc., while riding a BART train, but who calls that "wireless"?
The term "wireless" is usually related to 802.11, wifi, or "wireless networking", not the ability to make cell phone calls. But I guess that's incorrect, and we can now state that most of the planet is already "outfitted with wireless".
I know all kinds of smart people try really hard to predict things like this, and they give all sorts of explanations that "support" their position. But here is why the Internet won't go away: it is useful, and people like it.
If you look throughout history, in all cultures, if people find something to be useful, no amount of government or corporate intervention or regulation will dissuade those people from doing what they want. Despite most citizens not giving a shit about voting in government elections, very few people will stand by and allow a government or corporation to take away something they want. It just does not happen. This happens all over the world, in all cultures, and when this stand-off becomes a big enough event, it makes the news as a "revolution".
So no, the internet isn't going to be flushed down the tubes by ISPs or whatever, because consumers will not allow it.
You're right, percentages don't matter much until you know the initial totals. So 6% of 14 billion is obviously way, way more than %9 of 4 billion. But that's only revenue, not profit.
So how much of Dell's 14 and Apple's 4 billion is profit? How much goes to operating expenses? It is widely known that one of Apple's biggest profit generators is the iPod product line (and not iTunes Music Store). Given that they're selling million and millions of these things, this suggests Apple's profits (not revenues) might be pretty good.
I don't know how many employees either company has, but here in Austin, Dell pretty much employs an entire suburb's worth of people. That can't be cheap, and it's definitely not the only big branch of Dell employees.
Blog anonymously? That should solve the problem.
Obviously, the stated purpose is to protect the students from predators, so the problem appears to be "how to protect the students when they're on the internet". But - and I mean this with the utmost, non-flamebait sincerity - isn't a big part of Christianity the ability to control people and their behavior? And given that, is the problem instead, "how to maintain control over what the students say, think and do"?
To be fair, religion in general (not just Christianity) serves as a means of population control. It tells us when to be happy, when to be afraid, how to live, how not to live, how to treat each other, etc. And it keeps us all looking for the big payoff in the sky, instead of paying attention to the boring details of our mundane lives. But all of this is subjective and varies widely across different cultures, just like religion does.
I can't help but think part of this "student protection" plan is to in fact maintain a tighter hold on the students, including what they say and do on the internet.
I agree, it's about time that we see some changes in the Hollywood world, but I think it's a bit ironic that Steven Soderbergh is the one pushing ahead.
I think many/most of us would agree that Hollywood movies generally suck, and the experience is even worse when you factor in inflated ticket prices, bad (and expensive) movie food/snacks, noisy kids/cellphones, parking nightmares, etc. So it's interesting to me that it would be Soderbergh would leads the charge for us to leave that all behind. Because it's Soderbergh himself who has produced or directed some really great films, including Pleasantville, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Ocean's Eleven (and Twelve), Erin Brokovich, and one of my favorite movies of all time, Traffic.
The irony is that it's the work of guys like Soderbergh who keep me going to the otherwise shithole movie theaters.
I think you're right, the original article had no visible association with NCSA other than the url. But this is just like the classic telephone game: I tell you something, you repeat it to somebody else with a minor addition/change, then that person tells somebody else, etc. By the time it goes 4 or 5 hops, it's been totally twisted around, and my original message has turned into something idiotic, and everyone thinks I said it. This is exactly what happened here, because it started showing up on blogs, and then news sites started writing about it.
Overall, everyone was more or less accurate with regard to the articles details and results, etc., but the fact that this was just a single web page posted on a single web server in the ncsa.uiuc.edu subdomain was lost on everyone. People did not carry that important detail along, and over time it morphed into something else. Pretty quickly, we started seeing articles like, "NCSA Compares Google and Yahoo Index Numbers" appear on slashdot, which is hugely popular, and suddenly the whole world thought that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications was on a crusade to figure out which search engine is better. Hence the disclaimer from NCSA to formally tell the world that this "article" was "published" by two students, and that's all.
why publish it in the first place?
Dude, it was never published, it was posted on one web server that is part of the ncsa.uiuc.edu sub-domain (specifically, vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu). There are probably hundreds of machines that are in this network, and posting something on a web server running there does not equate to NCSA formally publishing an article. What we're talking about here is a web page written by two students, they worked on a project, they wanted to post it for other people to see. So that's what they did, period.
Stupidly, everyone is claiming that NCSA backed this whole thing, like they (NCSA) are on some crusade to compare Yahoo and Google. But this must be taken for what it is - a project by two students. NCSA's disclaimer is just trying to make this clear for the idiots out there who think that every little thing a student says or does must have been funded, supported, backed, etc. by NCSA.
I, for one, welcome our new chum-tossing search-engine overlords...
I see your point, and for the rest of the world, I think it applies. But Microsoft doesn't really have a solid track record of doing things the way other entities do. Instead, they've established an undeniable reputation of doing whatever the f*ck they want, no matter what anybody thinks about it. If anybody has a problem with 'em, Microsoft will happily take it to court and drag it out until you can't afford to fight it, or they'll just buy you out up front (everyone has their price, and Microsoft is sure to find out how much).
I almost feel bad for Microsoft that the name is so important. I mean, they just don't get it - if you make a really good product, your name will not matter. Especially if you make a really good product and most computers on the planet already use it. I mean, look at Apple (not trying to be fanboy here), but how exciting of a name is OS X? Yeah, there are the code names - Tiger, Panther, etc. - but it's just a neutral, numeric name. X is the roman numeral for 10, which followed OS 9, which followed OS 8, which followed System 7, and System 6, etc. People who use Macs and swear by them couldn't care less what the goddamn name is, and Apple knows this. Microsoft, on the other hand, has problably spent millions of dollars on positioning research, market analysis, an army of lawyers to research everything under the sun, etc.
It's just sad. They so, so, so don't get it.
I think he is countering the notion that workers are overloaded with info
I think he's trying to get everybody all worried about overloading each other with information so that they'll think it's necessary to upgrade to Office 12. I mean, how many more new features are really necessary by most humans who work in an office environment?
Instead of adding a bunch of complicated features that solve contrived problems for a thin slice of Office users, I'd like to see them put some serious effort into making Word documents fully readable by any other version of Word. Imagine... you could send a document to another person without concern that it would be unreadable on their end... now that would be something to get excited about.
So anyway, yeah, the point of Gates' comments is less about substance and more about manipulating the market. He does this all the time, most recently with the "iPod will go away" comments. Ballmer is now doing it with "Google will be gone in 5 years". These guys know they are getting hammered by Apple and Google in specific market spaces, and rather than respond with better product offerings, they respond with subtle slander.
I read somewhere on /. that the origin of a Tiger was in Asia, so I thought I would get my copy from China this weekend (it's too far away to go there today)...
"If they [Motorola] delay their product out of annoyace at Steve, they're the ones who will lose revenue, not Apple."
This is exactly true, and everybody knows it, including Motorola.
But consider the following statements, which one sounds better?
"We, Motorola, are not done with our product that we have been hyping for a while now, so please trust us, it's not vaporware, we really will ship it at some unknown point in the future."
or
"Any delays in our product shipment are entirely Apple's fault."
This is called blame shifting, and sounds a lot like what 4 year old children do to each other ("I only punched her because she looked at me funny! It's not my fault, it's hers!").
slashdotted already? since it took about 60 seconds to load the main page, perhaps they're using that Rotundus robot as a web server...
The specs you link to show that it has a max processor speed of 500Mhz. The Mac mini goes up to 1.4Ghz. They say that a celeron can go higher, but not 900Mhz higher.
And for sake of argument, even if the the celeron could get itself up 1.4ghz, it would not offer the same actual performance of a G4. This is the age-old argument about the architectures being so different that the clock speeds don't matter, but it cannot be stressed enough. The CISC-based Intel/AMD processors are not as efficient at getting work done as the RISC-based PowerPC processors.
I like the analogy of a person physically moving 1,000 boxes from one side of the house to the other. The CISC person might be able to get from one side to other (and back) in 2 seconds, but each time he does he can only carry a single box with him, so it would take 2,000 seconds to move all boxes. Whereas the RISC person might take 5 seconds to make the same round-trip distance, but each time he can carry 20 boxes, so it takes a total of 250 seconds (5 seconds * 1000 boxes / 20 boxes-per-trip). The numbers I used are not meant to exactly correlate to a Celeron vs. G4, but they convey the right idea - efficiency and speed are not equivalent.
The parent post is right on. In fact, I think it barely touches on the differences between Office and Pages (or any other Windows-based software vs. it's Mac counterpart).
For example, look at iPhoto: fairly minimal on features. In fact, when iPhoto was released, I recall hearing all kinds of important sounding people say a bunch of unimpressive things, that iPhoto lacked features, that it didn't have the power, blah blah blah. But what they missed was the simplicity of use. iPhoto is so much easier to use that it absolutely nails 90% of the things you want to do in a perfect, simple package. For the remaining 10% of your photo tasks (advanced editing, for instance), use something else.
Apple's approach in general is to nail the common use cases, and nail 'em to the goddamn wall, whereas the Microsoft approach (and again, a majority of apps on Windows) is to offer you 4,000 features that you can't understand or figure out, so you kinda hobble along with the app, barely able to get your tasks done.
So could Apple have added multiple sub-document support? Yeah, probably. Do I even know what that is, aside from having read someone else's rant that it doesn't exist in Pages? No, I don't, and I don't think I care. I could say the same thing for a lot of the other "features" that are supposedly "missing" from Pages.
The Omni Group also gets this same design principle - do something well, and keep it simple. There's a huge reason why OmniOutliner is an app that I (and thousands of other folks) use on a regular basis, and it's not because it has all kinds of complicated, contrived "features" that some marketing group in Redmond came up with under corporate sales pressure.
I don't think there's much credibility to the claim of a G5 powerbook shipping within the next 6 months. I was just reading something the other day (I think it may have been another article at The Register, in fact), where one of the Apple higher-ups was quoted as saying that a G5 in a Powerbook would be "the mother of all thermal challenges", and then immediately refused to answer any more questions about it.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a superfast Powerbook hit the market, I think it would only do good things for customers and Apple as a company. But it took about 2 years before Apple engineers figured out how to pack the G4 into a Powerbook. I'd love to eat crow about this rumor and be proven wrong, but I just don't see it.
I worry about the quality because it's being made by Griffin. I bought two iTrips -- one for my 1st gen iPod, and one for my wife's 3rd gen iPod. They both suck.
I've had similar experiences with the iTrip (I agree, they suck), but from all the reading I've done, it seems that's mostly a function of the concept sucking, not the specific implementation. Said another way, most of the other radio tuner things by other manufacturers also suck, some more than Griffen's iTrip.
The only one I've seen that looks like it would actually function is the pod freq by Sonnet. Of course, it's giganto compared to the size of the iTrip, and it also costs about $100 at places like Amazon, etc.
I guess it's easiest to just release the existing stuff for free, but it looks like these are the original, pre-OSX applications (aka, "classic"). So they have not been ported to OSX.
I don't have System 9 installed on my machine, so this isn't too exciting...
for those who don't want to rtfa...
- all music companies care about DRM, and they will all continue to care about DRM
- Apple will face more competition for the ipod
- all audio players will get smaller in size
- hard drives will get cheaper, as will audio players in general
- tivo-for-audio (something that has existed for more than a year) will continue to exist
- some guy thinks players should display lyrics like a karaoke machine
- they think consumers want a single device for everything - pda, audio, phone, watch, video player - even though integrated devices are unsuccessful in many other areas of life (tv/vcr, fridge/web browser, etc.)
The above items are all written by me, and certainly omit some of the details. But I fail to see how any of this reveals anything interesting or unexpected about "the future" of digital audio.