Its fine, except macs don't have 5% market share, they have 2%. Worldwide. Whether they have zero tolerance for things is not clear either. Mac users put up with quite a lot as you can tell from the forums.
Market share is probably a bigger factor than is allowed for in the post. Even if you develop a successful piece of malware, you'll have a very hard time getting it to spread. And who is going to pay you for it?
Its a two product line company - whether they are in the same business is immaterial. The task for an investor is to figure out whether the current price which he has to pay for both product lines bundled is good value. And, since the price will fluctuate, he has to figure out at what level its good value. There are really two variables you have to consider in this, the earnings and how much you should pay for those earnings.
he computer product line is basically no growth, so probably it should have a price/earnings ratio of around 10-15. This means that iPod product line has to carry the burden of the current price earnings ratio of around 30. Back of the envelope: assume iPod sales are deliverying half of the current earnings, then we would have to be paying around double (using the 15 x estimate) or about 60 x earnings.
At this point you see why an analyst starts to get nervous. He does not know and has no way of finding out what the earnings from the iPod product line are. So he does not know if he is really talking a p/e ratio of 60, 30 or maybe 100.
The thing he does know is that the iPod product line is much riskier than the computer product line. The stability of the computer product line in recent years is striking. The iPod has come from nowwhere and could, he thinks, go back there.
He says what you would say. The range of uncertainty is too great, I cannot value this company, stay away. Or buy on momentum, and realise you are not an investor. After all, there are lots of companies to buy, there is nothing special about this one.
Personal view: the Apple enthusiasts are too cheerful. One should only buy Apple when they are in the depths of despair. Sell when they are euphoric. The best and most reliable indicator in world markets.
People often use capitalism as an adjective applied to particular activities in a society. They have the feeling that a corporation seeking profit is capitalist, whereas a charity is not.
This is a mistake. It is the system, not the particular activity or organisation that is capitalist. The interesting thing about FOSS and Western capitalism, and the thing that is incompatible with Old Left and Marxist analyses, is that within capitalist system, there has evolved stuff like the endowment of charities, the donation of intellectual property to FOSS, the free distribution of software...and so on. If the Left would ever raise their eyes from their Microsoft supplied Windows screens long enough to use and see what Open Software means, they would be confronted with a very uncomfortable refutation of their overall world view.
What it shows is that the Marxist account of human nature, and of the evolution of capitalism, was just wrong. Peoples motivations are more complicated and diverse than allowed for. The flexibility of capitalist societies is far greater than expected.
Do not be surprised. We are dealing with an evolutionary environment. It is a bit like looking at an ecosystem at a given point and projecting what you see into the indefinite future. This is what Marx did. You cannot do it.
He was also deeply hampered by taking Hegel seriously, which can be compared to trying to run with your legs tied together.
The interesting thing about open source (politically, not technically) is that the phenomenon should not be possible if the Marxist account of capitalist societies is correct.
What OSS shows is that self interest is a more complicated thing than the traditional left wing models allow, and that it manifests itself in more varied ways than they allow. So we have for instance Sun with OO, acting assuredly out of perceived self interest, yet in a way that would be inexplicable in traditional Marxist terms.
I have often wondered why left wing academics seem wedded to MS, and unwilling to even try OSS or find out about it. Perhaps it would be too disturbing. A bit like finding that the Lord does not in fact strike you dead if you eat pork in a cold non-desert climate, and are not a pastoral nomad. You start to wonder if the problem might not be the Lord's view of pork, but some rather specific ecological aspects of pig rearing, hot deserts, pastorality and nomadism. And that is really really scary.
Similarly the discovery that self interest can motivate large sections of a community to act in apparently non-proft maximising ways, to the benefit of society as a whole, and in a capitalist society at that. Well, that is a truly terrifying idea. If that is possible, whole lives can have been wasted in devotion to false ideals.
Yes, they have been. And masses exterminated as well. In fact, what Western societies have discovered, and OSS is an instance of this, is that freedom to follow one's beliefs, and the means to do it, leads people to act in very interesting and varied ways, which benefit their fellow man in ways Marx never dreamed of.
The truly great thing Bill Gates and Microsoft did for the world was to enable the open hardware industry model. There were two elements to this. One was the IBM - Compaq lawsuit, when the bios got opened up. Gates seems to have had no role, or at least no public role, in this. But the other was entirely down to Gates, it was keeping the rights to sell the OS to anyone who made computers that would run it, and actually selling it and making it universal.
It was this combination of things that led to the marginalisation of the model in which hardware and software are tied and proprietary - the model that Apple carried on working to and struggling with and losing market share with all through the late eighties and nineties. If this model had prevailed, computers would be far less usable, we would all be far less free to do what we want with them, and the world would be a worse place. We would have incompatible connectors, buses, processors. We would have applications that would only run on my OS which would only run on my hardware. It would be absolutely dire and horrible. So we should be enormously grateful to Gates for having wrecked Apple's (and more important its business model's) potential domination of the industry.
Now it is true that what replaced this was in the short term only halfway better for us. But, in the Hegelian dialectic of the movement of computing history, the resultant domination of the industry by MS, with closed OS but on open hardware, contained its own contradiction and thus the seeds of its destruction, and after performing its historic mission, this phase will end up on the dustbin of history, and we will enter the millenarial new world of open OS on open hardware.
We should all be enormously grateful to Bill Gates for taking us halfway there, and not be too critical. It was in the nature of the case that the kind of person and company who would take us halfway there, would be the one to be dragged kicking and screaming the rest of the way. They were not to know they were the instrument of history - still don't!
I agree with you. I think that if MS wants to stop you installing any other WP than Office, they should have that right; you don't have to buy from them. I think when they did that nasty stuff with DR Dos, that was fine too. You didn't have to run Windows. I think that charging schools for all their computers, not just for the ones running Windows, and OEMs the same way for all the machines they ship: well, fine, they don't have to deal with MS if they don't want to. Its a free country. And Explorer. Well, if I were them, I would detect all other browsers and just delete them right away in the nightly checkins. Why the hell should people use non-standard browsers on their OS. And email clients?
And so more power to Apple. I think Apple actually is remarkably forbearing. It lets iTunes run on Windows after all, it certainly didn't have to do that. It lets the music carry on playing for as long as you like. It could have just introduced a rental scheme, so you had to buy it again every year. If you ask, it does actually let you play their music on more than one machine. Now that's pretty big hearted of them, seems to me.
And hey, you don't like it - well, just buy something else.
Re:The late great Mancur Olson
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 1
An example of what Thatcher did was the Big Bang in the City. For many years, centuries, the UK capital markets had operated like a private club. This was broken up. The result was greatly increased access to capital, increased competition, and a key ingredient in revitalising the economy. Similarly, denationalisation broke up 50 years of static monopolies.
You need to read Olson. He controls, of course, for size of economy. And you have to be clear what breakup means. It basically means lowering of entry barriers and barriers to competition. As an example, there used to be a gentlemen's agreement in the UK that company cars would only be bought from 'British' car companies, and there was strong pressure for Rover aka British Leyland to get a 'fair share'. Taxes were so arranged that the way to get a car was as a company perk. At the same time there was an understanding that industrial peace would be purchased at any price at British Leyland. The result was hugely expensive cars in the UK bought by people who were not spending their own money, and so had neither incentive nor means to bargain.
The uncompetitive Rover cost position set a floor under prices. It is a classic case. Probably the excess paid for cars that actually went to Rover and the Rover workforce was a few billions. The costs to the whole UK economy for spending over the going rate for all cars and trucks over the same period was in the high tens of billions. Meanwhile, Rover subsidized its exports to the Continent. Effectively what was happening was, the whole country was paying huge amounts of money to keep Rover's business model going, and one or two percent of that was going to the workforce.
The workforce were just fine with that, because it was more than they were getting otherwise. Similarly, the costs imposed by the City club on the country were enormous, but the City didn't care. The small fraction of those costs that they got were more than they would otherwise have gotten.
This is the kind of thing that late stage Thatcher government broke up for good, and no succeeding government has dared reinstate. The attack on barristers/solicitors, and on anti competitive practices in real estate transfers is another example.
Early stage Thatcher was a disaster - but Olson might argue that the disastrous shock of the combination of deficit spending and tight money were what it took to produce real structural change and break up the old interest group alliances.
Anyone who really thinks the old collusive UK pre-Thatcher were so great was not living there. It was a country the best and brightest left if they had any way out. The rest stayed and went on strike, because there was nothing constructive to do.
The late great Mancur Olson
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Olson was puzzled why economic growth was faster in the South, after it lost the civil war, and also why France in the 19c after having had three or four revolutions and two catastrophic war time defeats had grown faster than Britain under stable rule. He concluded and showed that long periods of stability allow vested interests to accumulate anti competitive practices which enrich them at the expense of the whole.
We are looking at a classic example of this. Consider those who profit from the DMCA. Olson's insight was that it is in their interests to impose costs on society as a whole which are many times, maybe 100s of times, greater than what they themselves receive, as long as what they receive is more than they otherwise would.
Let interest groups carry on behaving like this for year after year, and gradually the costs imposed on society become so great that economic growth slows or stops totally.
Then, only a dramatic structural change, abolition of the accretions, will help. The good news is, it helps dramatically.
In an ideal world, the various Federal Agencies would counterbalance such interests, because they, being nominated by people elected on a broader basis, will have it in their interests to represent the country as a whole. However, special interests are ingenious and find ways through, and this only works by fits and starts.
It can be done. Thatcher did it in the UK. Democracies can do it, when they see the need. This is the good news, the bad news is, it has to get pretty bad first!
No this is not true. Look up the article on Ars Technica, or look up the Pegasus material. Apple's share was at its peak before the Mac arrived.
One day someone should write a list of great Apple myths, starting out with this one. Oh and the wonderful myth that since Jobs came back, share has increased.
"Copying one part of Apple's marketing strategy alone is not sufficient to match their unparalleled marketing genius."
No, you have to work very hard at it, and first acquire 15% of a growing market, and then figure out some way to get steadily down to 2%, while having your fans cheer all the way and proclaim your unparalleled growth and extraordinary marketing genius.
There may not be room for two of these in the world.
Here is what we should be asking, and what I think the answers would be.
Q: If the iPod model were applied to ebooks and enewspapers, would it feel right? No. Q: If all electronic publishing were to have 90% of the media market, and be done on the iPod model, would we be ok with that? No. Q: If it was Microsoft with 90% of the epublishing market, using the iPod model, would we like that? No.
This is about freedom to (1) buy the content of my choice without being tied to any particular software for that purpose (2) to access it, read or play it, on hardware made by the vendor of my choice.
Think DRM stopping you from running Office under Wine. Think ebooks on a Sony reader which cannot be exported or read on anything else. Think what that giveaway line about 'Apple's music' implies. Its not Apple's, its mine, I bought it. This is about who has the power, the consumer or the supplier.
The intellectual contortions of the Apple lobby in trying to explain why something bad is good when done by Apple are ridiculous.
The game of Mornington Crescent, on the other hand, as a great role to play in Philosophy.
If you really want an insight into modern philosophy, read or catch Jumpers, by Tom Stoppard.
After that read a bit of Kant, J L Austin, Nozick. Maybe have a look at some Strawson. Read Thought and Action by Hampshire. Several times.
Try to write down new thing you have learned. You will not be able to.
It is generally admitted in informal conversations between philsophers that they are engaged in a sort of sophisticated parlour game. A friend of mine once went to see his old Philosophy teacher. "Why did you give it up?", his teacher asked. He smiled and said, "because I stopped believing there could be meaningful synthetic a priori propositions". "I know what you mean" his teacher replied.
If you don't understand, be thankful. Or start reading. The student was deliberately committing an elementary philsophical howler. The teacher was saying, yes, I understand, it really is all a load of rubbish.
You have a PM who is measured on sales. Sales by now are hugely upgrades. The only way to motivate upgrades is new features. So you introduce them, whether they are really needed or wanted, or not. They are then heavily used by the salespeople, before the sale, selling to people who are not the end users of those features.
And so it comes about that IT buys, and what the ordinary user thinks of as a glorified on screen typewriter actually becomes, via Word macros, a powerful if flawed programming language, and what the end user thinks of as a document becomes a program that can wipe his hard drive or change anything at all on his machine it chooses.
This is not about mono culture versus poly. If you had twenty different PMs behaving like this across the whole industry, it would be as bad or worse. Its about feature driven business models in areas where the buyer is not a sophisticated end user of the products. IT buys Office. What does IT really know about using Word to write? Hosts of features can be sold to IT that could never be sold to the people who use the stuff....
You wonder why? Because you have to give people something to show, visible to the world, that they have got for their money, and the more useless it is the better. You are selling to people who you are encouraging to feel different. Now, there is a subset who want to send out the message that they are different enough for a few hundred dollars to be of no importance to them whatever compared to the color of the thing.
It is designer label marketing. The funny part is, its aspirational, not having arrived. The richest guy I ever knew was once arranging a car purchase. His assistant asked him what kind he wanted. "a blue one, yes dark blue" he said. I don't suppose he even knew what marque it was.
Meanwhile lots of sad people go around saying they wouldn't be seen dead in a Ford and thinking various other brands are marks of class.
Basically, the black mac, its marketed for you to send a message to your friends, which, if you had achieved what the message would like to send, it would never occur to you to want to send it, and certainly not like this.
Its like Lenox china for the digerati, and equally gauche.
Open to conviction, but don't really object in the same way. Don't use wireless, but would happily use ndiswrapper. Do use an Epson scanner with iscan. The issue seems to be, what would be the social consequences of the model were universally adopted? I agree that if all manufacturers of the most desirable graphics cards were in some way to make their cards unusable with Linux, we'd have a real problem, but they don't.
The problem with the Apple model is lock-in, and the deliberate use of lock-in to force you to buy hardware you'd rather not. If you look at the reactions when its proposed that Apple should release OSX to non-Apple branded hardware, what people are really saying is, Mac users would rather buy OSX and run it on different, generic, cheaper hardware. Given the chance they would. This is why they have to be forced to buy Apple branded, to run OSX. Similarly, this is why not to release iLife and iWork to Windows or Linux. We have to force them to buy our hardware to get it. Then Aperture. We have to force them to buy our hardware to get that too. Then, lets make it hard to move from iLife to another bundle of apps on Windows or Linux. That way, we'll keep the repeat business. Similarly with Aperture. Similarly with iTunes. Lets only allow iTunes to work conveniently or at all with our software, and our iPods. That way we can force people to carry on using iPods. Even if they might prefer different hardware at some point.
Understand the thinking. But we have to understand that if this model were generally adopted, intellectual freedom would wither. The freedom to run the OS of your choice on the (alternative) hardware of your choice is very basic. Don't know what happened to Mossberg, that he cannot see this. The freedom to inspect the code of your graphics card driver and rewrite it doesn't seem in the same league.
Its an interesting example of the intellectual contortions Apple mavens are led into.
We start out having to approve of everything Apple does. Then we realise that there is a key difference between Apple and other vendors: you can only run OSX on Apple branded hardware. So you have to argue that this model is better in some way. Defying the evidence of decades, you also have to argue that it is coming back. It is like the intellectual contortions of the old left on the Soviet invasion of Czecho. Clearly the workers must have invited them in, otherwise why would they be there?
Fact is, open hardware won hands down. 97% of PCs in the world, you can buy any hardware you want and run the OS of your choice. Windows, Linux, Unix. The only thing Apple has done is reduce its hardware competition. By doing so, its been able to keep prices and margins up. By doing that, it has reduced sales and market share.
Open PC hardware is the great contribution of the 20th century to human intellectual freedom. If you think this is a strange thing to argue, consider that nowadays software is more than an application - the distinction between software and knowledge has blurred. Is Mathematica an application, or is it a math encyclopedia?
We should all defend the open hardware model at every opportunity, and we need to resist and rebut the Macfascist point of view, that one good supplier is all you need, you don't need choice.
I don't greatly care for it either, and prefer the traditional two pane file manager. But, you install Gnome and Nautilus for a naive user, you can walk away and get no calls about it. Never a single one about how to find my files. Spatial browsing is fine too, and if they find it irritating, which they may after a while, you just have it open files in the same window.
I don't know that its a lot better than Konqueror in this respect, but if all they are doing is finding their files, and doing Office type work, this is one thing they do not have problems with.
I usually put one task bar at the bottom, with the apps in it, a desktop switcher, the calendar, and the little dock for the open apps. They never seem to have problems finding their way around, so Gnome must be doing something right. At least, for them.
Yes I use emblems. To warn a user to be extra careful when using something. Like, I have to have gprename on one machine for some users, and I have a swiss army knife as the icon. But I want to warn occasional users to be very careful, so I put an exclamation point emblem in it.
You probably have other ideas about how you would do it, but in the social context of the organisation I did it for, it works, its accepted, and lots of other neater solutions would not be. Its accepted, the simple rule is, if an app has an exclamation point on its icon, only use it if you know what you are doing. People respect it.
This is not a sensible thing to do, what you are suggesting. Buy another hard drive, set it up as slave, and then install one of the following: PC Linux, PCBSD, DesktopBSD, or, what I would most recommend, Mandriva.
"Several iBooks have overheated with smoke over the last couple of years. We are no longer purchasing these for our District."
This is absolutely astonishing. Hope and trust that you sued? I have never heard of a computer doing this, and if any other supplier's machines of any sort did this, there would be an instant total recall. Cars get recalled for smaller safety defects than this. We are talking about something here that could burn people or start fires and burn down schools. This, if its really true, is amazing and horrifying. What was Apple's reaction when you told them?
You're right. He's right. He may be a terrible tech journalist, he may be a complete idiot, he may not be a nice man - but what he is saying this time is right. Its not a growth stock any more. If you thought it was any time in the last five years, you lost money. If you look at recent price action, something dramatic is going on. Don't know what, but am sure we will find out. Look at Dell also.
Time for them to settle down, start paying dividends, cut costs, and accept that they are a utility company now.
I didn't. I moved to Linux. It turned out to be easier to use, and with a more attractive and more controllable user interface. And far, far more software instantly available. I cannot tell you what a relief it was. As well as all this, it was hugely cheaper, there are absolutely no licensing issues no matter how many copies of something I want to run or who I want to give it to. I didn't move for ideological reasons, just because it works better.
Now, does the attitude of the Apple community and of the marketing department that caters to it matter? Should it be part of the buying decision? I think it should, and certainly, it is part of mine. How to explain this?
We have a product with some merits, and some drawbacks, but one that on balance is no better if no worse than its main alternative for most people, XP on Intel. It is different, and the mix of advantage and disadvantage is different, but on balance its no better. It is decidedly more expensive, both to buy and to keep, if you factor in the full cost of the upgrades you are always getting touched for. It promotes itself on the basis of lifestyle. Most of its features are directed at 'lifestyle'. These lifestyle features have invaded the OS and hardware and come to determine the product mix.
The result over the years is hardware enclosed in thick shiny polished aluminum cases that are noisy and heavy and expensive. The main selling point of these seems to have been it was not painted beige. Processors that have been seriously slow compared to the competition. Or machines that are cute tiny toys at high prices. Or all in ones, where you can't upgrade, but have to just throw out and buy a new one, whether you need a new monitor or not. Or laptops which look elegant, but have serious heat and noise problems. Machines that ship with absurdly low memory, and then touch you for absurd prices to increase the amount. And an OS that runs most applications on most tests slower than alternatives, and has a ridiculously underfeatured file manager built in to it. And minimal software choices unless you buy Microsoft or other commercial software.
The reason this is happening is that the marketing and promotional departments are not working in isolation, they are actually determining product features. As perhaps they should. But the result is that over the years, Apple has been a computer company that is no longer making products for people like me, and what is worse, its marketing department has moved to actively insulting people like me.
Well guys, we don't like it. We don't buy. And we say we don't like it publicly. And we probably will keep saying it. Get used to it.
Actually, we should start a site. Ex Apple users. There are a lot more of us than you think.
You are absolutely right. Its called preaching to the converted. In fact, the more you annoy the non-members of the church, the more you will please the fanatical members. It will not convert very many, but you probably don't, in your heart, really want to convert many. Part of what makes this particular church great is the small number of members.
It is a bit like those massive May Day parades. The aim is to keep the members brainwashed and buying.
Slashdot Mirror
Its fine, except macs don't have 5% market share, they have 2%. Worldwide. Whether they have zero tolerance for things is not clear either. Mac users put up with quite a lot as you can tell from the forums. Market share is probably a bigger factor than is allowed for in the post. Even if you develop a successful piece of malware, you'll have a very hard time getting it to spread. And who is going to pay you for it?
Its a two product line company - whether they are in the same business is immaterial. The task for an investor is to figure out whether the current price which he has to pay for both product lines bundled is good value. And, since the price will fluctuate, he has to figure out at what level its good value. There are really two variables you have to consider in this, the earnings and how much you should pay for those earnings.
he computer product line is basically no growth, so probably it should have a price/earnings ratio of around 10-15. This means that iPod product line has to carry the burden of the current price earnings ratio of around 30. Back of the envelope: assume iPod sales are deliverying half of the current earnings, then we would have to be paying around double (using the 15 x estimate) or about 60 x earnings.
At this point you see why an analyst starts to get nervous. He does not know and has no way of finding out what the earnings from the iPod product line are. So he does not know if he is really talking a p/e ratio of 60, 30 or maybe 100.
The thing he does know is that the iPod product line is much riskier than the computer product line. The stability of the computer product line in recent years is striking. The iPod has come from nowwhere and could, he thinks, go back there.
He says what you would say. The range of uncertainty is too great, I cannot value this company, stay away. Or buy on momentum, and realise you are not an investor. After all, there are lots of companies to buy, there is nothing special about this one.
Personal view: the Apple enthusiasts are too cheerful. One should only buy Apple when they are in the depths of despair. Sell when they are euphoric. The best and most reliable indicator in world markets.
People often use capitalism as an adjective applied to particular activities in a society. They have the feeling that a corporation seeking profit is capitalist, whereas a charity is not.
This is a mistake. It is the system, not the particular activity or organisation that is capitalist. The interesting thing about FOSS and Western capitalism, and the thing that is incompatible with Old Left and Marxist analyses, is that within capitalist system, there has evolved stuff like the endowment of charities, the donation of intellectual property to FOSS, the free distribution of software...and so on. If the Left would ever raise their eyes from their Microsoft supplied Windows screens long enough to use and see what Open Software means, they would be confronted with a very uncomfortable refutation of their overall world view.
What it shows is that the Marxist account of human nature, and of the evolution of capitalism, was just wrong. Peoples motivations are more complicated and diverse than allowed for. The flexibility of capitalist societies is far greater than expected.
Do not be surprised. We are dealing with an evolutionary environment. It is a bit like looking at an ecosystem at a given point and projecting what you see into the indefinite future. This is what Marx did. You cannot do it.
He was also deeply hampered by taking Hegel seriously, which can be compared to trying to run with your legs tied together.
The interesting thing about open source (politically, not technically) is that the phenomenon should not be possible if the Marxist account of capitalist societies is correct. What OSS shows is that self interest is a more complicated thing than the traditional left wing models allow, and that it manifests itself in more varied ways than they allow. So we have for instance Sun with OO, acting assuredly out of perceived self interest, yet in a way that would be inexplicable in traditional Marxist terms. I have often wondered why left wing academics seem wedded to MS, and unwilling to even try OSS or find out about it. Perhaps it would be too disturbing. A bit like finding that the Lord does not in fact strike you dead if you eat pork in a cold non-desert climate, and are not a pastoral nomad. You start to wonder if the problem might not be the Lord's view of pork, but some rather specific ecological aspects of pig rearing, hot deserts, pastorality and nomadism. And that is really really scary. Similarly the discovery that self interest can motivate large sections of a community to act in apparently non-proft maximising ways, to the benefit of society as a whole, and in a capitalist society at that. Well, that is a truly terrifying idea. If that is possible, whole lives can have been wasted in devotion to false ideals. Yes, they have been. And masses exterminated as well. In fact, what Western societies have discovered, and OSS is an instance of this, is that freedom to follow one's beliefs, and the means to do it, leads people to act in very interesting and varied ways, which benefit their fellow man in ways Marx never dreamed of.
Son, we are your parents. Got news for your: it was your parents invented Slashdot.
The truly great thing Bill Gates and Microsoft did for the world was to enable the open hardware industry model. There were two elements to this. One was the IBM - Compaq lawsuit, when the bios got opened up. Gates seems to have had no role, or at least no public role, in this. But the other was entirely down to Gates, it was keeping the rights to sell the OS to anyone who made computers that would run it, and actually selling it and making it universal.
It was this combination of things that led to the marginalisation of the model in which hardware and software are tied and proprietary - the model that Apple carried on working to and struggling with and losing market share with all through the late eighties and nineties. If this model had prevailed, computers would be far less usable, we would all be far less free to do what we want with them, and the world would be a worse place. We would have incompatible connectors, buses, processors. We would have applications that would only run on my OS which would only run on my hardware. It would be absolutely dire and horrible. So we should be enormously grateful to Gates for having wrecked Apple's (and more important its business model's) potential domination of the industry.
Now it is true that what replaced this was in the short term only halfway better for us. But, in the Hegelian dialectic of the movement of computing history, the resultant domination of the industry by MS, with closed OS but on open hardware, contained its own contradiction and thus the seeds of its destruction, and after performing its historic mission, this phase will end up on the dustbin of history, and we will enter the millenarial new world of open OS on open hardware.
We should all be enormously grateful to Bill Gates for taking us halfway there, and not be too critical. It was in the nature of the case that the kind of person and company who would take us halfway there, would be the one to be dragged kicking and screaming the rest of the way. They were not to know they were the instrument of history - still don't!
I agree with you. I think that if MS wants to stop you installing any other WP than Office, they should have that right; you don't have to buy from them. I think when they did that nasty stuff with DR Dos, that was fine too. You didn't have to run Windows. I think that charging schools for all their computers, not just for the ones running Windows, and OEMs the same way for all the machines they ship: well, fine, they don't have to deal with MS if they don't want to. Its a free country. And Explorer. Well, if I were them, I would detect all other browsers and just delete them right away in the nightly checkins. Why the hell should people use non-standard browsers on their OS. And email clients?
And so more power to Apple. I think Apple actually is remarkably forbearing. It lets iTunes run on Windows after all, it certainly didn't have to do that. It lets the music carry on playing for as long as you like. It could have just introduced a rental scheme, so you had to buy it again every year. If you ask, it does actually let you play their music on more than one machine. Now that's pretty big hearted of them, seems to me.
And hey, you don't like it - well, just buy something else.
An example of what Thatcher did was the Big Bang in the City. For many years, centuries, the UK capital markets had operated like a private club. This was broken up. The result was greatly increased access to capital, increased competition, and a key ingredient in revitalising the economy. Similarly, denationalisation broke up 50 years of static monopolies.
You need to read Olson. He controls, of course, for size of economy. And you have to be clear what breakup means. It basically means lowering of entry barriers and barriers to competition. As an example, there used to be a gentlemen's agreement in the UK that company cars would only be bought from 'British' car companies, and there was strong pressure for Rover aka British Leyland to get a 'fair share'. Taxes were so arranged that the way to get a car was as a company perk. At the same time there was an understanding that industrial peace would be purchased at any price at British Leyland. The result was hugely expensive cars in the UK bought by people who were not spending their own money, and so had neither incentive nor means to bargain.
The uncompetitive Rover cost position set a floor under prices. It is a classic case. Probably the excess paid for cars that actually went to Rover and the Rover workforce was a few billions. The costs to the whole UK economy for spending over the going rate for all cars and trucks over the same period was in the high tens of billions. Meanwhile, Rover subsidized its exports to the Continent. Effectively what was happening was, the whole country was paying huge amounts of money to keep Rover's business model going, and one or two percent of that was going to the workforce.
The workforce were just fine with that, because it was more than they were getting otherwise. Similarly, the costs imposed by the City club on the country were enormous, but the City didn't care. The small fraction of those costs that they got were more than they would otherwise have gotten.
This is the kind of thing that late stage Thatcher government broke up for good, and no succeeding government has dared reinstate. The attack on barristers/solicitors, and on anti competitive practices in real estate transfers is another example.
Early stage Thatcher was a disaster - but Olson might argue that the disastrous shock of the combination of deficit spending and tight money were what it took to produce real structural change and break up the old interest group alliances.
Anyone who really thinks the old collusive UK pre-Thatcher were so great was not living there. It was a country the best and brightest left if they had any way out. The rest stayed and went on strike, because there was nothing constructive to do.
Olson was puzzled why economic growth was faster in the South, after it lost the civil war, and also why France in the 19c after having had three or four revolutions and two catastrophic war time defeats had grown faster than Britain under stable rule. He concluded and showed that long periods of stability allow vested interests to accumulate anti competitive practices which enrich them at the expense of the whole.
We are looking at a classic example of this. Consider those who profit from the DMCA. Olson's insight was that it is in their interests to impose costs on society as a whole which are many times, maybe 100s of times, greater than what they themselves receive, as long as what they receive is more than they otherwise would.
Let interest groups carry on behaving like this for year after year, and gradually the costs imposed on society become so great that economic growth slows or stops totally.
Then, only a dramatic structural change, abolition of the accretions, will help. The good news is, it helps dramatically.
In an ideal world, the various Federal Agencies would counterbalance such interests, because they, being nominated by people elected on a broader basis, will have it in their interests to represent the country as a whole. However, special interests are ingenious and find ways through, and this only works by fits and starts.
It can be done. Thatcher did it in the UK. Democracies can do it, when they see the need. This is the good news, the bad news is, it has to get pretty bad first!
No this is not true. Look up the article on Ars Technica, or look up the Pegasus material. Apple's share was at its peak before the Mac arrived. One day someone should write a list of great Apple myths, starting out with this one. Oh and the wonderful myth that since Jobs came back, share has increased.
"Copying one part of Apple's marketing strategy alone is not sufficient to match their unparalleled marketing genius." No, you have to work very hard at it, and first acquire 15% of a growing market, and then figure out some way to get steadily down to 2%, while having your fans cheer all the way and proclaim your unparalleled growth and extraordinary marketing genius. There may not be room for two of these in the world.
Here is what we should be asking, and what I think the answers would be.
Q: If the iPod model were applied to ebooks and enewspapers, would it feel right? No.
Q: If all electronic publishing were to have 90% of the media market, and be done on the iPod model, would we be ok with that? No.
Q: If it was Microsoft with 90% of the epublishing market, using the iPod model, would we like that? No.
This is about freedom to (1) buy the content of my choice without being tied to any particular software for that purpose (2) to access it, read or play it, on hardware made by the vendor of my choice.
Think DRM stopping you from running Office under Wine. Think ebooks on a Sony reader which cannot be exported or read on anything else. Think what that giveaway line about 'Apple's music' implies. Its not Apple's, its mine, I bought it. This is about who has the power, the consumer or the supplier.
The intellectual contortions of the Apple lobby in trying to explain why something bad is good when done by Apple are ridiculous.
No. Philosophy has no role in anything.
The game of Mornington Crescent, on the other hand, as a great role to play in Philosophy.
If you really want an insight into modern philosophy, read or catch Jumpers, by Tom Stoppard.
After that read a bit of Kant, J L Austin, Nozick. Maybe have a look at some Strawson. Read Thought and Action by Hampshire. Several times.
Try to write down new thing you have learned. You will not be able to.
It is generally admitted in informal conversations between philsophers that they are engaged in a sort of sophisticated parlour game. A friend of mine once went to see his old Philosophy teacher. "Why did you give it up?", his teacher asked. He smiled and said, "because I stopped believing there could be meaningful synthetic a priori propositions". "I know what you mean" his teacher replied.
If you don't understand, be thankful. Or start reading. The student was deliberately committing an elementary philsophical howler. The teacher was saying, yes, I understand, it really is all a load of rubbish.
Isn't it the MS Product Management culture?
You have a PM who is measured on sales. Sales by now are hugely upgrades. The only way to motivate upgrades is new features. So you introduce them, whether they are really needed or wanted, or not. They are then heavily used by the salespeople, before the sale, selling to people who are not the end users of those features.
And so it comes about that IT buys, and what the ordinary user thinks of as a glorified on screen typewriter actually becomes, via Word macros, a powerful if flawed programming language, and what the end user thinks of as a document becomes a program that can wipe his hard drive or change anything at all on his machine it chooses.
This is not about mono culture versus poly. If you had twenty different PMs behaving like this across the whole industry, it would be as bad or worse. Its about feature driven business models in areas where the buyer is not a sophisticated end user of the products. IT buys Office. What does IT really know about using Word to write? Hosts of features can be sold to IT that could never be sold to the people who use the stuff....
Well, went and looked. Can't tell how much it costs or how it works, and it doesn't seem to be usable on XP Home.
1.83Ghz - $1099.00
2.0 Ghz, 60GB HDD- $1299.00
2.0 Ghz, 80GB HDD, Black - $1499.00
You wonder why? Because you have to give people something to show, visible to the world, that they have got for their money, and the more useless it is the better. You are selling to people who you are encouraging to feel different. Now, there is a subset who want to send out the message that they are different enough for a few hundred dollars to be of no importance to them whatever compared to the color of the thing.
It is designer label marketing. The funny part is, its aspirational, not having arrived. The richest guy I ever knew was once arranging a car purchase. His assistant asked him what kind he wanted. "a blue one, yes dark blue" he said. I don't suppose he even knew what marque it was.
Meanwhile lots of sad people go around saying they wouldn't be seen dead in a Ford and thinking various other brands are marks of class.
Basically, the black mac, its marketed for you to send a message to your friends, which, if you had achieved what the message would like to send, it would never occur to you to want to send it, and certainly not like this.
Its like Lenox china for the digerati, and equally gauche.
Open to conviction, but don't really object in the same way. Don't use wireless, but would happily use ndiswrapper. Do use an Epson scanner with iscan. The issue seems to be, what would be the social consequences of the model were universally adopted? I agree that if all manufacturers of the most desirable graphics cards were in some way to make their cards unusable with Linux, we'd have a real problem, but they don't.
The problem with the Apple model is lock-in, and the deliberate use of lock-in to force you to buy hardware you'd rather not. If you look at the reactions when its proposed that Apple should release OSX to non-Apple branded hardware, what people are really saying is, Mac users would rather buy OSX and run it on different, generic, cheaper hardware. Given the chance they would. This is why they have to be forced to buy Apple branded, to run OSX. Similarly, this is why not to release iLife and iWork to Windows or Linux. We have to force them to buy our hardware to get it. Then Aperture. We have to force them to buy our hardware to get that too. Then, lets make it hard to move from iLife to another bundle of apps on Windows or Linux. That way, we'll keep the repeat business. Similarly with Aperture. Similarly with iTunes. Lets only allow iTunes to work conveniently or at all with our software, and our iPods. That way we can force people to carry on using iPods. Even if they might prefer different hardware at some point.
Understand the thinking. But we have to understand that if this model were generally adopted, intellectual freedom would wither. The freedom to run the OS of your choice on the (alternative) hardware of your choice is very basic. Don't know what happened to Mossberg, that he cannot see this. The freedom to inspect the code of your graphics card driver and rewrite it doesn't seem in the same league.
But, I'm open to argument.
Its an interesting example of the intellectual contortions Apple mavens are led into.
We start out having to approve of everything Apple does. Then we realise that there is a key difference between Apple and other vendors: you can only run OSX on Apple branded hardware. So you have to argue that this model is better in some way. Defying the evidence of decades, you also have to argue that it is coming back. It is like the intellectual contortions of the old left on the Soviet invasion of Czecho. Clearly the workers must have invited them in, otherwise why would they be there?
Fact is, open hardware won hands down. 97% of PCs in the world, you can buy any hardware you want and run the OS of your choice. Windows, Linux, Unix. The only thing Apple has done is reduce its hardware competition. By doing so, its been able to keep prices and margins up. By doing that, it has reduced sales and market share.
Open PC hardware is the great contribution of the 20th century to human intellectual freedom. If you think this is a strange thing to argue, consider that nowadays software is more than an application - the distinction between software and knowledge has blurred. Is Mathematica an application, or is it a math encyclopedia?
We should all defend the open hardware model at every opportunity, and we need to resist and rebut the Macfascist point of view, that one good supplier is all you need, you don't need choice.
I don't greatly care for it either, and prefer the traditional two pane file manager. But, you install Gnome and Nautilus for a naive user, you can walk away and get no calls about it. Never a single one about how to find my files. Spatial browsing is fine too, and if they find it irritating, which they may after a while, you just have it open files in the same window.
I don't know that its a lot better than Konqueror in this respect, but if all they are doing is finding their files, and doing Office type work, this is one thing they do not have problems with.
I usually put one task bar at the bottom, with the apps in it, a desktop switcher, the calendar, and the little dock for the open apps. They never seem to have problems finding their way around, so Gnome must be doing something right. At least, for them.
Yes I use emblems. To warn a user to be extra careful when using something. Like, I have to have gprename on one machine for some users, and I have a swiss army knife as the icon. But I want to warn occasional users to be very careful, so I put an exclamation point emblem in it.
You probably have other ideas about how you would do it, but in the social context of the organisation I did it for, it works, its accepted, and lots of other neater solutions would not be. Its accepted, the simple rule is, if an app has an exclamation point on its icon, only use it if you know what you are doing. People respect it.
This is not a sensible thing to do, what you are suggesting. Buy another hard drive, set it up as slave, and then install one of the following: PC Linux, PCBSD, DesktopBSD, or, what I would most recommend, Mandriva.
"Several iBooks have overheated with smoke over the last couple of years. We are no longer purchasing these for our District."
This is absolutely astonishing. Hope and trust that you sued? I have never heard of a computer doing this, and if any other supplier's machines of any sort did this, there would be an instant total recall. Cars get recalled for smaller safety defects than this. We are talking about something here that could burn people or start fires and burn down schools. This, if its really true, is amazing and horrifying. What was Apple's reaction when you told them?
You're right. He's right. He may be a terrible tech journalist, he may be a complete idiot, he may not be a nice man - but what he is saying this time is right. Its not a growth stock any more. If you thought it was any time in the last five years, you lost money. If you look at recent price action, something dramatic is going on. Don't know what, but am sure we will find out. Look at Dell also.
Time for them to settle down, start paying dividends, cut costs, and accept that they are a utility company now.
What makes you all think I moved to Windows?
I didn't. I moved to Linux. It turned out to be easier to use, and with a more attractive and more controllable user interface. And far, far more software instantly available. I cannot tell you what a relief it was. As well as all this, it was hugely cheaper, there are absolutely no licensing issues no matter how many copies of something I want to run or who I want to give it to. I didn't move for ideological reasons, just because it works better.
Now, does the attitude of the Apple community and of the marketing department that caters to it matter? Should it be part of the buying decision? I think it should, and certainly, it is part of mine. How to explain this?
We have a product with some merits, and some drawbacks, but one that on balance is no better if no worse than its main alternative for most people, XP on Intel. It is different, and the mix of advantage and disadvantage is different, but on balance its no better. It is decidedly more expensive, both to buy and to keep, if you factor in the full cost of the upgrades you are always getting touched for. It promotes itself on the basis of lifestyle. Most of its features are directed at 'lifestyle'. These lifestyle features have invaded the OS and hardware and come to determine the product mix.
The result over the years is hardware enclosed in thick shiny polished aluminum cases that are noisy and heavy and expensive. The main selling point of these seems to have been it was not painted beige. Processors that have been seriously slow compared to the competition. Or machines that are cute tiny toys at high prices. Or all in ones, where you can't upgrade, but have to just throw out and buy a new one, whether you need a new monitor or not. Or laptops which look elegant, but have serious heat and noise problems. Machines that ship with absurdly low memory, and then touch you for absurd prices to increase the amount. And an OS that runs most applications on most tests slower than alternatives, and has a ridiculously underfeatured file manager built in to it. And minimal software choices unless you buy Microsoft or other commercial software.
The reason this is happening is that the marketing and promotional departments are not working in isolation, they are actually determining product features. As perhaps they should. But the result is that over the years, Apple has been a computer company that is no longer making products for people like me, and what is worse, its marketing department has moved to actively insulting people like me.
Well guys, we don't like it. We don't buy. And we say we don't like it publicly. And we probably will keep saying it. Get used to it.
Actually, we should start a site. Ex Apple users. There are a lot more of us than you think.
You are absolutely right. Its called preaching to the converted. In fact, the more you annoy the non-members of the church, the more you will please the fanatical members. It will not convert very many, but you probably don't, in your heart, really want to convert many. Part of what makes this particular church great is the small number of members.
It is a bit like those massive May Day parades. The aim is to keep the members brainwashed and buying.