This is not a fair summary of the UK law. It does not treat making and owning as the same thing. It does however make the possession of some kinds of material involving children a strict liability offense. That is, simple possession is an offence, and the onus is on the defendant to prove innocence.
This is quite different from the general law on other materials. Material with a tendency to deprave or corrupt is unlawful under the Obscene Publications Act. Material with a tendency to incite to racial hatred is unlawful under the Race Relations Act. The laws of Blasphemy forbid some kinds of slurs on the Christian religion. However, in these cases, what is unlawful is publication or public utterance, not simple private possession.
So to possess a copy of Lady Chatterley was not a criminal offense, and I don't think anyone was ever prosecuted for it. But Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, as the publisher.
The UK is trying to treat different offences and different sorts of material differently and appropriately. They may or may not have got it right, but they are trying, contrary to the impression given above.
Rekall - many thanks for the suggestion. Looks like a contender, at least for some things. Have to set up mysql for them, but the fact that Suse is including it is very promising.
Two Asus barebones, neither one seems to have a jumper. Just as well, since you have to update to run 64 bit processors. You do need to use a special keyboard command at startup - the only thing that works when you have an incompatible processor.
Filemaker may be bad, but you have to see it from the user's perspective, looking for something to replace it with.
As a pretty naive user with Filemaker, you can have some small business/charity applications up and working in no time at all. For instance, you want to keep track of inventory and sales made at the front desk of your little charity. Yes, you could go out and buy a proper POS terminal and bar code reader and application, but your idea of high spend on IT is a couple hundred dollars on laser printer. Write it in Filemaker in an afternoon, it will work fine, and your volunteers will be able to use it. Do mail merge for your mailing list and keep track of donations. Register all your accessions, complete with a big user button that says: backup now! You're an historian, researching lets say aristocratic families and party connections and MPs interests in 18th century Britain. You get someone to explain how to use FM in a couple of afternoons, and here you are, adding files and defining relations without even knowing you are doing something that is supposed to be difficult. And then doing at least basic statistics on what you have found.
Its the combination of being able to design and layout forms for printing and data entry, and also do calculations on fields, and all with almost no learning curve, that is so attractive.
I have really looked at other things to use instead. OO is impenetrable, but probably worth persisting with. Kexi doesn't allow scripting yet. Revolution - the nearest thing there is to a Hypercard replacement, but its a real programming environment. You do not write the inventory thing in an afternoon.
The great thing about FM is that it is not coding. PythonCard is a noble project, but even more of a programming environment than Revolution.
Don't know. Tell me what to use instead, on Linux, I'd genuinely love to know!
Yes, Olive oil is a vegetable oil. However, unlike say hydrogenated corn oil, we have a history of human populations eating it, cooking with it, going back thousands of years. We've also a lot of population statistics to suggest that those populations have neither high rates of diabetes nor heart disease. Finally, we have studies of the ingredients and their effect which are similarly supportive. We have just about none of this for the massive shift to either polyunsaturated vegetable oils, like safflower and corn and soy, or to hydrogenated variants. In fact, all the experiments performed on shifting fat consumption onto polyunsaturated led to poor health outcomes. The results of the shift to a combination of vegetable oils and refined carbohydrate diets are coming in now.
Rapeseed oil is an entirely new ingredient in the human diet. I don't think there is any large scale population evidence to suggest it is safe or beneficial.
It is an extraordinary thing, how ready we are to shift away from unprocessed to heavily processed foods on grounds of health, where there is no evidence whatever of benefit. Cow's milk for instance, is being substituted by soy milk, one of the most manufactured foods there is, with no evidence of any benefit, and much to the contrary. Sometimes myths are created - one important one is that the Japanese diet contains large quantities of soy. It doesn't. It contains small quantities of soy, very carefully and cautiously prepared, including by long fermentation. There is a reason for this.
Get Nourishing Traditions by Fallon. And remember what Elizabeth David said. It should be engraved on the hearts of all dieticians.
"The only accompaniment any vegetable needs, is a little good butter".
Exercise will certainly do some good. However, the problem has come from the two great uncontrolled dietary experiments the US has undertaken in the last 50+ years.
The first was the large scale introduction of vegetable oil, often hydrogenated, into the diet, to replace animal fats. There is not, and never was, any scientific basis for exposing mass populations to dietary elements which their evolutionary history could not have prepared them for.
The second was the large scale move to a high carbohydrate diet. it was called low-fat. Low-fat sounds reasonable and uncontroversial. High carbohydrate, which is what it was, has neve been shown to improve the health of any population, and would have been very controversial if labelled as what it was.
The results of the experiments are now coming in. The evidence is that the results are increases in heart disease and diabetes and obesity. The way to solve the problem would be partially exercise, but a more important step would be going back to the diet traditionally eaten around 1900, before the great increase in heart disease. This would be a diet fairly high in animal fats, generally eaten incidentally to eating meat and poultry or dairy products, and one with (complex rather than refined) carbohydrates accounting for a much smaller percentage of calories than today. We would eat grass fed meat, fish and eggs, with fresh vegetables and butter on them, and relatively coarse, though not whole grain, bread. Olive oil would be used in cooking and salad. There would be a total lack of polyunstaturated and hydrogentated vegetable oil, and little or no refined sugar.
Exercise is fine, but exercise while eating faddish garbage is not going to solve the problem.
The inability to reflash the EFI has all the marks of being deliberate. The issue is not whether other OSs are supported. There is no reason why any company has to support them. The issue is not like trying to run BSD on your Thinkpad, where you just reboot when you don't have the drivers and restart, and reinstall XP. Not having the drivers does not reduce your machine to junk.
The issue is, or rather, one should be cautious, the issue may be, that this could be the first instance of a company having deliberately implemented something that reduces your computer to a doorstop if you just take reasonable steps to run something they don't like on it.
They are under no obligation to support Windows, Linux or Plan 9. What they are under an obligation to do is give you a way of reflashing your EFL.
If they do not. If it does turn out that the aim is and always was to sell hardware that you can only run what they choose on it, then it is indeed the first shot in a war. It will be the first of many such attempts by a lot of people. The OP in this thread, and some others, is right: it will be the first of many efforts to stop you altering your machine in any way from its purchased state, because someone feels it is less profitable for them if you do, and it will be the first of many measures taken to reduce your machine to junk as a sanction.
Its one of those test cases the community has to win. If it turns out to be what it looks like, there's no melodrama at all in looking at it like this.
"Otherwise, you potentially have the mother of all DRM traps in front of you."
Yes. This, if it turns out to be the way it looks at first glance, is truly evil. Very important to realise what you may be looking at. The first commercial example of a company which has totally taken away control of your hardware.
Lets hope it turns out not to be true. Because if it is true, its war.
Look at the charts. These things have stages. It has nothing to do with the DOJ. And, it might still rally before it crashes. But what you are seeing in the charts, is the smart money getting out, and the public feeling fear. Have a look at the charts from 2001. You will see the exact same thing.
Or, if you want to be frightened, have a look at Radio in '29. Same thing.
No. Aimed at Mac users, with the aim of keeping them and making them buy more. It will turn off others, but this is fine. The strategy is, picture yourselves as superior but victimized. You are being victimized because you are superior, and that's why you want to stay that way.
Weird or what?
But it is on a level with 'think different' and the marching morons.
It is hard for normal people to understand this stuff.
Thank you so much for posting this, I haven't laughed so much for a long time. What a great discussion. Oh dear, how true. How difficult, how impossible, how true!
This is so true, and in a way very funny. The only thing I would add is, tell them how to do some simple things in common apps. Like, Word or Excel. When to use Excel for a list, and when to use Word. Why not to use 3 or four tabs to indent in Word. Why not to use spaces to indent in Word. Or OO for that matter. What a database is, when you need one. What the difference is between when you need a flat one, and when only relations will do. What a text editor is.
Good luck with it. If its any good I will buy several copies and pass them out. How much cheaper it would be than the alternative....
Isn't the simplest, for the problem as stated, just external USB or Firewire enclosures, one per machine, with automated backups, big disks, and the enclosures the kind with temperature gauges and fans? Just buy them a bigger hard drive than you think they will ever need for the computer, and another one to go in the external to back up to.
Its only when they start to need more storage than will fit on one drive that this doesn't work, so over around 400G today. But you are only thinking about less than this for the whole house. Its by far the simplest solution. And if they do ever need more, odds are disks will be bigger and cheaper by then.
If they get real nervous, you can even buy some extras and keep them off site, rotate them every couple of weeks or months. That way you can almost never lose more than two weeks/months data from one machine even if the house burns down. You do have to make the trips to the off site location though.
The great thing is, everyone can relate to my backup, which is labelled with my name, that I plug into my machine. Hard to go wrong.
"So, what's wrong with running the OS I want on the box I want?"
You are right of course, running the OS of your choice on the box of your choice is the way the industry is going. But a lot of the mac people are stuck in the past. The reason they ask the question, why would anyone want to run Windows on a Mac, is that they do not realise what has happened with this move. You won't be, in the old sense, running Windows on a Mac. You'll be running it on an Intel machine branded Apple. Its perfectly reasonable thing to do, as reasonable as running it on any other Intel machine with any other brand. As reasonable as running it on one branded Dell. Probably came out of the same factory in fact.
Roughly: 10 macs, half a dozen windows machines, three or four linux, two or three dual boot. Not to mention the ones I've worked on for other people. Its my opinion. It stands on its merits, not on my biography. Your mileage may vary.
I don't believe this 'much vaunted integration' exists. I think XP and OS X relate to their hardware in exactly the same ways and that a computer running XP is just as 'integrated' with its hardware, or as little, as one running OS X. You take either one out of the box and turn it on, and it works.
Not to blame Cupertino marketing however. Its one of the great marketing concepts. Almost as good as Wide Tracking Pontiacs. Lets see, how widely were they tracking, and by comparison to what?
If you think it isn't hard for them to go from 14 billion in revenues to either 60 billion or 100 billion, within five years, look at what they have done in the past.
The fact is, getting this kind of revenue is very difficult, almost never happens. And that's why buying into a multi billion dollar company at PE ratios of 40+ as an investment is a sure fire way to lose your shirt over time.
Momentum speculation is a different matter altogether. A different way for the amateur to lose. But the great thing about markets, we can all bet our futures differently. I think you'll lose your shirt, but good luck!
The problem with P/E ratios of 45+ is not the prospects of the company. The company will probably do fine, and grow. The problem is what you are paying for the growth. All the above posters keep arguing that Apple is a good company and will do well. It may very well. After all, people can see the prospects, and that is why they have placed this valuation on it.
The problem is, when you pay 45 times earnings for ANY COMPANY, regardless of what business it is in, you almost never make money.
There have been exceptions to this, but they are not really relevant. At the bottom, in 1931, PE ratios were very high, because although prices had collapsed, earnings had, temporarily, fallen faster. In a panic, when earnings are temporarily depressed, you can make money on high P/E purchases. At the bottom of a recession, prices usually start to move before earnings, giving rise to this phenomenon. But this is quite different. The market is doing quite well, P/E ratios on the whole are high, and Apple's is among the higher.
What you cannot make money on is buying growth stocks with high P/Es. It doesn't matter whether they are Apple or anyone else. It doesn't matter how creative they are. You cannot reason in generalities about this, any more than you can write C++ in generalities.
Most people in this thread are arguing that this time, for this company, its different. How different, for how long, does it have to be?
Apple currently does 1.8 billion on 14 billion revenues, or 13% pretax, and has a P/E of 46. Lets say the earnings carry on. But that at some point, probably in 5 years, Apple will sell for 'normal' P/E ratios. Lets say its 12. If Apple is still earning the same as now, its market cap will fall to (roughly) a quarter of what it is now. It will be about 18 billion.
Now, we know it is going to grow. So, lets say it grows revenues and profits by that same factor of 4. In that case, in five years time, it will sell for what it does today. But we want to make money on our investment. Probably, over five years, we want to double it at least, given the historic volatility in Apple stock and how risky it has been. And how volatile and risk the computer and consumer electronics businesses are. So, we need to see revenues and profits of 8 times current levels.
Lets think about what this means and whether it is likely. That means revenues of 112 billion in five years. Does this happen to mature companies in mature industries? Alas no.
Now, the Apple people will say, you don't understand, its perfectly possible, in five years they will be in whole new industries that we don't know about now, that we haven't even thought of. Like the iPod. Maybe. This requires them however in the next five years to do not one, but something like 20 iPods.
There is nothing critical of the company or its future in any of this. It is just pointing out that investing in Apple, or any other mature company, at P/E ratios of 45+, is not likely to make you any money.
When you compare to Dell, you have to look at where the market cap came from. In this case it came largely from P/E ratio growth. That's where large capitalisation rises usually come from. Shrinkage is also where huge losses usually come from.
Yes, you are quite right about the general perception of their situation, and that is why the company is valued at present levels. But alas, experience shows that when this happens, hope has invariably got ahead of itself. It is always true for over valued companies - by which is meant, ones with a P/E ratio over 40 - that there is an attractive and very convincing story. There would have to be - why else would their value have risen so high?
What the numbers and the history show however, is that this time it is never different. They always turn out to be bad investments. Well, not quite always, but so often that it amounts to always.
Another way to look at it is, after some period, say 5 years, it will have to sell for 'normal' P/E ratios. Say, around 12. OK, how fast do earnings have to grow in the meantime for you to make money if that happens?
The exercise is left to the reader, but its a big number. Now, how many companies have done this?
Any mature company with a price earnings ratio of 46 in normal times, ie not during a market panic, is overvalued. The chances of making money in it over five years are tiny. The chances of making a risk adjusted rate of return that exceeds that available from Treasuries is even smaller. Doesn't matter if its called Apple or anything else. Doesn't matter if its in tech or coal.
If you doubt it, do the homework and count the cases. Then compare to the number in which you would have lost money. Compare. Figure the odds.
So often the mac enthusiasts seem to be arguing that what the customer wants to do, he should be stopped from doing, in the interests of the company. The customer, not them but other customers of course, is seen as short sighted and perverse and often simply stupid. He has to be made to do things.
In this thread, we seem to have to stop him swapping OSs and using XP, which he will want to do. In others, we have to stop him buying Dells or white boxes to run OSX on, which he will want to do. I guess there are some threads where we have to stop him playing the wrong music on his iPods, or buying the music from the wrong store, or buying from the right store but with the wrong software.
At the same time, they feel a little puzzled that only a small percent of the market seems to share their enthusiasm.
Now why is it, if the hardware is so much better, that people will buy worse hardware if allowed? Why is it, if the integrated experience is so much better, that people will split the OS from the hardware? Why is it, if OSX is such a superior environment, that people will, if allowed to dual boot, move en masse to XP?
And why is it that the people who mostly have to be stopped from doing all these silly and wicked things are actually current Mac customers?
The political analogy is the concept of false consciousness. You know it? This was the view that the reason the working classes did not support the Party, and in fact often fought actively against it, was that they had been brainwashed. Once they were compulsorily liberated from their false consciousness, they would see the light.
Astonishingly enough, with the help of the KGB, most of them evnetually did.
There must be 100 people asking this question, with varying degrees of politeness, so here is the answer. It will seem extraordinary to many, but some people prefer XP. On the other hand, they like a nice shiny Apple laptop. So what they want is the OS they want, and they have a host of good and bad reasons for wanting it, on the hardware they want.
If you are a Mac user, this will seem stupid or worse to you. It seems stupid in the days of OSX, and it would have seemed stupid in the days of OS9. But it is not people like you who want to run Windows on that nice shiny hardware.
Its other people, not at all stupid, who just, believe it or not, feel differently. Not think differently, feel differently. Just like there are people who want to drink, I don't know, Coors, out of those shiny Budweiser glasses.
You all need to be more tolerant, and realise there is nothing wrong with this, and that there is no reason they should feel like you.
You may both be wrong. The reason people (not current mac people) will want to run Windows on a mac is that they like the designer brand and the look, and they have held off on buying one because they didn't want to run OSX. Yes, strange as it may seem, they actually wanted to run Windows. But, if possible, on a designer PC. Well, now they will have one. Some people are interestingly predicting that Apple will actually sell them preloaded before long, to meet the demand.
The conventional wisdom has always been that people bought macs for the OS. I'm not so sure any more. They may be buying for the hardware. In that case, if the software is available for non Apple machines, it will not hurt Apple hardware sales at all.
The difficulty one has with the Apple people's approach to this is its extreme conservatism. Nothing must change, they cry. Life is not like that. Business models adapt. They are using Intel now. They will split the OS and the hardware within a year or two, and do quite well at it too. And the mac people will applaud all the way.
Whenever you see stories like this, and among other things if they start building new buildings, buy executive jets, if in Europe, CEOs get enobled, which is a particularly horrifying portent for shareholders, but if in the US start being treated as visionaries, then, buy long term puts. Especially when the brokerage community is telling you to buy buy buy.
Now, the great mistake in these matters is buying your puts too early, and I admit to thinking the time had come at 400. However, how anyone can lose in long term puts at this point defies belief. Is 500 possible? Probably. But I confidently expect to see 50 before we see 1,000. Friends, what we are seeing now is not part of the history of Internet or computing. It is a chapter in the history of hysteria.
Caution: this is not investment advice, and I am completely unqualified to give any. These are opinions offered to stimulate thought and discussion and of educational value only. If that!
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This is not a fair summary of the UK law. It does not treat making and owning as the same thing. It does however make the possession of some kinds of material involving children a strict liability offense. That is, simple possession is an offence, and the onus is on the defendant to prove innocence.
This is quite different from the general law on other materials. Material with a tendency to deprave or corrupt is unlawful under the Obscene Publications Act. Material with a tendency to incite to racial hatred is unlawful under the Race Relations Act. The laws of Blasphemy forbid some kinds of slurs on the Christian religion. However, in these cases, what is unlawful is publication or public utterance, not simple private possession.
So to possess a copy of Lady Chatterley was not a criminal offense, and I don't think anyone was ever prosecuted for it. But Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, as the publisher.
The UK is trying to treat different offences and different sorts of material differently and appropriately. They may or may not have got it right, but they are trying, contrary to the impression given above.
Rekall - many thanks for the suggestion. Looks like a contender, at least for some things. Have to set up mysql for them, but the fact that Suse is including it is very promising.
Two Asus barebones, neither one seems to have a jumper. Just as well, since you have to update to run 64 bit processors. You do need to use a special keyboard command at startup - the only thing that works when you have an incompatible processor.
FineReader perhaps? The native linux ones I've tried simply didn't work at all.
Filemaker may be bad, but you have to see it from the user's perspective, looking for something to replace it with.
As a pretty naive user with Filemaker, you can have some small business/charity applications up and working in no time at all. For instance, you want to keep track of inventory and sales made at the front desk of your little charity. Yes, you could go out and buy a proper POS terminal and bar code reader and application, but your idea of high spend on IT is a couple hundred dollars on laser printer. Write it in Filemaker in an afternoon, it will work fine, and your volunteers will be able to use it. Do mail merge for your mailing list and keep track of donations. Register all your accessions, complete with a big user button that says: backup now! You're an historian, researching lets say aristocratic families and party connections and MPs interests in 18th century Britain. You get someone to explain how to use FM in a couple of afternoons, and here you are, adding files and defining relations without even knowing you are doing something that is supposed to be difficult. And then doing at least basic statistics on what you have found.
Its the combination of being able to design and layout forms for printing and data entry, and also do calculations on fields, and all with almost no learning curve, that is so attractive.
I have really looked at other things to use instead. OO is impenetrable, but probably worth persisting with. Kexi doesn't allow scripting yet. Revolution - the nearest thing there is to a Hypercard replacement, but its a real programming environment. You do not write the inventory thing in an afternoon.
The great thing about FM is that it is not coding. PythonCard is a noble project, but even more of a programming environment than Revolution.
Don't know. Tell me what to use instead, on Linux, I'd genuinely love to know!
Yes, Olive oil is a vegetable oil. However, unlike say hydrogenated corn oil, we have a history of human populations eating it, cooking with it, going back thousands of years. We've also a lot of population statistics to suggest that those populations have neither high rates of diabetes nor heart disease. Finally, we have studies of the ingredients and their effect which are similarly supportive. We have just about none of this for the massive shift to either polyunsaturated vegetable oils, like safflower and corn and soy, or to hydrogenated variants. In fact, all the experiments performed on shifting fat consumption onto polyunsaturated led to poor health outcomes. The results of the shift to a combination of vegetable oils and refined carbohydrate diets are coming in now.
Rapeseed oil is an entirely new ingredient in the human diet. I don't think there is any large scale population evidence to suggest it is safe or beneficial.
It is an extraordinary thing, how ready we are to shift away from unprocessed to heavily processed foods on grounds of health, where there is no evidence whatever of benefit. Cow's milk for instance, is being substituted by soy milk, one of the most manufactured foods there is, with no evidence of any benefit, and much to the contrary. Sometimes myths are created - one important one is that the Japanese diet contains large quantities of soy. It doesn't. It contains small quantities of soy, very carefully and cautiously prepared, including by long fermentation. There is a reason for this.
Get Nourishing Traditions by Fallon. And remember what Elizabeth David said. It should be engraved on the hearts of all dieticians.
"The only accompaniment any vegetable needs, is a little good butter".
Exercise will certainly do some good. However, the problem has come from the two great uncontrolled dietary experiments the US has undertaken in the last 50+ years.
The first was the large scale introduction of vegetable oil, often hydrogenated, into the diet, to replace animal fats. There is not, and never was, any scientific basis for exposing mass populations to dietary elements which their evolutionary history could not have prepared them for.
The second was the large scale move to a high carbohydrate diet. it was called low-fat. Low-fat sounds reasonable and uncontroversial. High carbohydrate, which is what it was, has neve been shown to improve the health of any population, and would have been very controversial if labelled as what it was.
The results of the experiments are now coming in. The evidence is that the results are increases in heart disease and diabetes and obesity. The way to solve the problem would be partially exercise, but a more important step would be going back to the diet traditionally eaten around 1900, before the great increase in heart disease. This would be a diet fairly high in animal fats, generally eaten incidentally to eating meat and poultry or dairy products, and one with (complex rather than refined) carbohydrates accounting for a much smaller percentage of calories than today. We would eat grass fed meat, fish and eggs, with fresh vegetables and butter on them, and relatively coarse, though not whole grain, bread. Olive oil would be used in cooking and salad. There would be a total lack of polyunstaturated and hydrogentated vegetable oil, and little or no refined sugar.
Exercise is fine, but exercise while eating faddish garbage is not going to solve the problem.
The inability to reflash the EFI has all the marks of being deliberate. The issue is not whether other OSs are supported. There is no reason why any company has to support them. The issue is not like trying to run BSD on your Thinkpad, where you just reboot when you don't have the drivers and restart, and reinstall XP. Not having the drivers does not reduce your machine to junk.
The issue is, or rather, one should be cautious, the issue may be, that this could be the first instance of a company having deliberately implemented something that reduces your computer to a doorstop if you just take reasonable steps to run something they don't like on it.
They are under no obligation to support Windows, Linux or Plan 9. What they are under an obligation to do is give you a way of reflashing your EFL.
If they do not. If it does turn out that the aim is and always was to sell hardware that you can only run what they choose on it, then it is indeed the first shot in a war. It will be the first of many such attempts by a lot of people. The OP in this thread, and some others, is right: it will be the first of many efforts to stop you altering your machine in any way from its purchased state, because someone feels it is less profitable for them if you do, and it will be the first of many measures taken to reduce your machine to junk as a sanction.
Its one of those test cases the community has to win. If it turns out to be what it looks like, there's no melodrama at all in looking at it like this.
"Otherwise, you potentially have the mother of all DRM traps in front of you."
Yes. This, if it turns out to be the way it looks at first glance, is truly evil. Very important to realise what you may be looking at. The first commercial example of a company which has totally taken away control of your hardware.
Lets hope it turns out not to be true. Because if it is true, its war.
Look at the charts. These things have stages. It has nothing to do with the DOJ. And, it might still rally before it crashes. But what you are seeing in the charts, is the smart money getting out, and the public feeling fear. Have a look at the charts from 2001. You will see the exact same thing.
Or, if you want to be frightened, have a look at Radio in '29. Same thing.
Read Rothbard while you are at it.
Aimed at Dell and MS?
No. Aimed at Mac users, with the aim of keeping them and making them buy more. It will turn off others, but this is fine. The strategy is, picture yourselves as superior but victimized. You are being victimized because you are superior, and that's why you want to stay that way.
Weird or what?
But it is on a level with 'think different' and the marching morons.
It is hard for normal people to understand this stuff.
Thank you so much for posting this, I haven't laughed so much for a long time. What a great discussion. Oh dear, how true. How difficult, how impossible, how true!
This is so true, and in a way very funny. The only thing I would add is, tell them how to do some simple things in common apps. Like, Word or Excel. When to use Excel for a list, and when to use Word. Why not to use 3 or four tabs to indent in Word. Why not to use spaces to indent in Word. Or OO for that matter. What a database is, when you need one. What the difference is between when you need a flat one, and when only relations will do. What a text editor is. Good luck with it. If its any good I will buy several copies and pass them out. How much cheaper it would be than the alternative....
Isn't the simplest, for the problem as stated, just external USB or Firewire enclosures, one per machine, with automated backups, big disks, and the enclosures the kind with temperature gauges and fans? Just buy them a bigger hard drive than you think they will ever need for the computer, and another one to go in the external to back up to.
Its only when they start to need more storage than will fit on one drive that this doesn't work, so over around 400G today. But you are only thinking about less than this for the whole house. Its by far the simplest solution. And if they do ever need more, odds are disks will be bigger and cheaper by then.
If they get real nervous, you can even buy some extras and keep them off site, rotate them every couple of weeks or months. That way you can almost never lose more than two weeks/months data from one machine even if the house burns down. You do have to make the trips to the off site location though.
The great thing is, everyone can relate to my backup, which is labelled with my name, that I plug into my machine. Hard to go wrong.
"So, what's wrong with running the OS I want on the box I want?"
You are right of course, running the OS of your choice on the box of your choice is the way the industry is going. But a lot of the mac people are stuck in the past. The reason they ask the question, why would anyone want to run Windows on a Mac, is that they do not realise what has happened with this move. You won't be, in the old sense, running Windows on a Mac. You'll be running it on an Intel machine branded Apple. Its perfectly reasonable thing to do, as reasonable as running it on any other Intel machine with any other brand. As reasonable as running it on one branded Dell. Probably came out of the same factory in fact.
Roughly: 10 macs, half a dozen windows machines, three or four linux, two or three dual boot. Not to mention the ones I've worked on for other people. Its my opinion. It stands on its merits, not on my biography. Your mileage may vary.
I don't believe this 'much vaunted integration' exists. I think XP and OS X relate to their hardware in exactly the same ways and that a computer running XP is just as 'integrated' with its hardware, or as little, as one running OS X. You take either one out of the box and turn it on, and it works.
Not to blame Cupertino marketing however. Its one of the great marketing concepts. Almost as good as Wide Tracking Pontiacs. Lets see, how widely were they tracking, and by comparison to what?
If you think it isn't hard for them to go from 14 billion in revenues to either 60 billion or 100 billion, within five years, look at what they have done in the past.
s p?Country=USA&Symbol=AAPL&stocktab=finance000
s p?Country=USA&Symbol=dell&stocktab=finance
s p?Country=USA&Symbol=csco&stocktab=finance
http://quicktake.morningstar.com/Stock/Income10.a
then look at how long it took Dell, a much more consistently and arguably better managed company, to do what you are talking about
http://quicktake.morningstar.com/Stock/Income10.a
OK, not satisfied, have a look at Cisco
http://quicktake.morningstar.com/Stock/Income10.a
I know, I know, this time its different....
The fact is, getting this kind of revenue is very difficult, almost never happens. And that's why buying into a multi billion dollar company at PE ratios of 40+ as an investment is a sure fire way to lose your shirt over time.
Momentum speculation is a different matter altogether. A different way for the amateur to lose. But the great thing about markets, we can all bet our futures differently. I think you'll lose your shirt, but good luck!
The problem with P/E ratios of 45+ is not the prospects of the company. The company will probably do fine, and grow. The problem is what you are paying for the growth. All the above posters keep arguing that Apple is a good company and will do well. It may very well. After all, people can see the prospects, and that is why they have placed this valuation on it.
The problem is, when you pay 45 times earnings for ANY COMPANY, regardless of what business it is in, you almost never make money.
There have been exceptions to this, but they are not really relevant. At the bottom, in 1931, PE ratios were very high, because although prices had collapsed, earnings had, temporarily, fallen faster. In a panic, when earnings are temporarily depressed, you can make money on high P/E purchases. At the bottom of a recession, prices usually start to move before earnings, giving rise to this phenomenon. But this is quite different. The market is doing quite well, P/E ratios on the whole are high, and Apple's is among the higher.
What you cannot make money on is buying growth stocks with high P/Es. It doesn't matter whether they are Apple or anyone else. It doesn't matter how creative they are. You cannot reason in generalities about this, any more than you can write C++ in generalities.
Most people in this thread are arguing that this time, for this company, its different. How different, for how long, does it have to be?
Apple currently does 1.8 billion on 14 billion revenues, or 13% pretax, and has a P/E of 46. Lets say the earnings carry on. But that at some point, probably in 5 years, Apple will sell for 'normal' P/E ratios. Lets say its 12. If Apple is still earning the same as now, its market cap will fall to (roughly) a quarter of what it is now. It will be about 18 billion.
Now, we know it is going to grow. So, lets say it grows revenues and profits by that same factor of 4. In that case, in five years time, it will sell for what it does today. But we want to make money on our investment. Probably, over five years, we want to double it at least, given the historic volatility in Apple stock and how risky it has been. And how volatile and risk the computer and consumer electronics businesses are. So, we need to see revenues and profits of 8 times current levels.
Lets think about what this means and whether it is likely. That means revenues of 112 billion in five years. Does this happen to mature companies in mature industries? Alas no.
Now, the Apple people will say, you don't understand, its perfectly possible, in five years they will be in whole new industries that we don't know about now, that we haven't even thought of. Like the iPod. Maybe. This requires them however in the next five years to do not one, but something like 20 iPods.
There is nothing critical of the company or its future in any of this. It is just pointing out that investing in Apple, or any other mature company, at P/E ratios of 45+, is not likely to make you any money.
When you compare to Dell, you have to look at where the market cap came from. In this case it came largely from P/E ratio growth. That's where large capitalisation rises usually come from. Shrinkage is also where huge losses usually come from.
Yes, you are quite right about the general perception of their situation, and that is why the company is valued at present levels. But alas, experience shows that when this happens, hope has invariably got ahead of itself. It is always true for over valued companies - by which is meant, ones with a P/E ratio over 40 - that there is an attractive and very convincing story. There would have to be - why else would their value have risen so high?
What the numbers and the history show however, is that this time it is never different. They always turn out to be bad investments. Well, not quite always, but so often that it amounts to always.
Another way to look at it is, after some period, say 5 years, it will have to sell for 'normal' P/E ratios. Say, around 12. OK, how fast do earnings have to grow in the meantime for you to make money if that happens?
The exercise is left to the reader, but its a big number. Now, how many companies have done this?
This time its different?
Any mature company with a price earnings ratio of 46 in normal times, ie not during a market panic, is overvalued. The chances of making money in it over five years are tiny. The chances of making a risk adjusted rate of return that exceeds that available from Treasuries is even smaller. Doesn't matter if its called Apple or anything else. Doesn't matter if its in tech or coal.
If you doubt it, do the homework and count the cases. Then compare to the number in which you would have lost money. Compare. Figure the odds.
This is not investment advice.
Its the logic that is so interesting.
So often the mac enthusiasts seem to be arguing that what the customer wants to do, he should be stopped from doing, in the interests of the company. The customer, not them but other customers of course, is seen as short sighted and perverse and often simply stupid. He has to be made to do things.
In this thread, we seem to have to stop him swapping OSs and using XP, which he will want to do. In others, we have to stop him buying Dells or white boxes to run OSX on, which he will want to do. I guess there are some threads where we have to stop him playing the wrong music on his iPods, or buying the music from the wrong store, or buying from the right store but with the wrong software.
At the same time, they feel a little puzzled that only a small percent of the market seems to share their enthusiasm.
Now why is it, if the hardware is so much better, that people will buy worse hardware if allowed? Why is it, if the integrated experience is so much better, that people will split the OS from the hardware? Why is it, if OSX is such a superior environment, that people will, if allowed to dual boot, move en masse to XP?
And why is it that the people who mostly have to be stopped from doing all these silly and wicked things are actually current Mac customers?
The political analogy is the concept of false consciousness. You know it? This was the view that the reason the working classes did not support the Party, and in fact often fought actively against it, was that they had been brainwashed. Once they were compulsorily liberated from their false consciousness, they would see the light.
Astonishingly enough, with the help of the KGB, most of them evnetually did.
There must be 100 people asking this question, with varying degrees of politeness, so here is the answer. It will seem extraordinary to many, but some people prefer XP. On the other hand, they like a nice shiny Apple laptop. So what they want is the OS they want, and they have a host of good and bad reasons for wanting it, on the hardware they want.
If you are a Mac user, this will seem stupid or worse to you. It seems stupid in the days of OSX, and it would have seemed stupid in the days of OS9. But it is not people like you who want to run Windows on that nice shiny hardware.
Its other people, not at all stupid, who just, believe it or not, feel differently. Not think differently, feel differently. Just like there are people who want to drink, I don't know, Coors, out of those shiny Budweiser glasses.
You all need to be more tolerant, and realise there is nothing wrong with this, and that there is no reason they should feel like you.
Or you like them, for that matter.
You may both be wrong. The reason people (not current mac people) will want to run Windows on a mac is that they like the designer brand and the look, and they have held off on buying one because they didn't want to run OSX. Yes, strange as it may seem, they actually wanted to run Windows. But, if possible, on a designer PC. Well, now they will have one. Some people are interestingly predicting that Apple will actually sell them preloaded before long, to meet the demand.
The conventional wisdom has always been that people bought macs for the OS. I'm not so sure any more. They may be buying for the hardware. In that case, if the software is available for non Apple machines, it will not hurt Apple hardware sales at all.
The difficulty one has with the Apple people's approach to this is its extreme conservatism. Nothing must change, they cry. Life is not like that. Business models adapt. They are using Intel now. They will split the OS and the hardware within a year or two, and do quite well at it too. And the mac people will applaud all the way.
Whenever you see stories like this, and among other things if they start building new buildings, buy executive jets, if in Europe, CEOs get enobled, which is a particularly horrifying portent for shareholders, but if in the US start being treated as visionaries, then, buy long term puts. Especially when the brokerage community is telling you to buy buy buy.
Now, the great mistake in these matters is buying your puts too early, and I admit to thinking the time had come at 400. However, how anyone can lose in long term puts at this point defies belief. Is 500 possible? Probably. But I confidently expect to see 50 before we see 1,000. Friends, what we are seeing now is not part of the history of Internet or computing. It is a chapter in the history of hysteria.
Caution: this is not investment advice, and I am completely unqualified to give any. These are opinions offered to stimulate thought and discussion and of educational value only. If that!