Of course, there are some differences between climate change and the Iraq war.
Reasonably intelligent people who are aware of the facts don't doubt that climate change should be addressed, but also know that Iraq had nothing to do with global terrorism, Al Qaeda, or WMDs.
Conversely, the US has spent trillions on sending 4,000 soldiers to die in the sand, while officially having spent very little to do anything about climate change other than pay conservative think tanks to come up with "perhaps nothing is happening" propaganda.
So the difference is that irrational, ignorant fear can pull money out of Americans rather easily, as the Neocons have been doing expertly for the last decade, while rational, informed risks are being entirely ignored and can't get funding.
The fact that you have right wing opinions doesn't change reality. I don't know how old you are, but if you've witnessed "30 years of environmental chicken littling" and haven't grasped the relationship between why US cities are far cleaner than they were prior to regulation efforts in environmental issues (in particular with cars), or why air in US cities is easier to breathe than the "free market" air in Bangkok, then it's hard to take much of what you say seriously.
If anti-regulation conservatives had their way, we wouldn't have seat belts, catalytic converters, factory scrubbers, OSHA, etc and would all be living in 1850 shanty towns where 12 year old kids worked 80 hour weeks so that Chancellor Bush could afford to declare war on the other fascists over who gets to colonize Africa. Wake up it's 2008 and we're all a bit more sophisticated than that.
You get what you pay for. In the US, money gets spent on fear.
The Intestate highway system was not sold to Congress as a vital transportation network, but rather as a defense system that could be used to truck around ICBMs to shoot at the ruskies.
The foundations of the Internet were all funded out of DARPA research as ways to communicate during wars, where communication links might be severed and need to be routed around.
Many medical advancements have originated from the efforts to stitch people back together during wars.
If you look at how much money the US spends on being ready to kill, compared to how much it spends being ready to compete, it's no surprise why there's all this technology spilling from the military. They're the only ones being funded because fear results in funding.
If we poured money into education, transportation, information technology, health, etc, we'd see significant paybacks from those investments too. But Americans only think they're getting their money's worth when fear is involved. They haven't quite figured out why Pentagon toilet seats costs $10,000.
I don't think Republicans are entirely to blame, they've just corned the market on fear and have become great at selling it to the "I'll pay you to scare me" American public. Democrats also enjoy the funding that comes with fear, making it a key issue both sides can agree on.
The problem isn't so much whether Microsoft's innovation lies with marketing rather than engineering, but how the company has used its "innovations" to hold back the progress of technology.
It wasn't "wrong" for Microsoft to develop upon ideas Apple originated in graphical computing (just as Apple itself built upon existing ideas already in development). It was however fairly scandalous that Microsoft chose to repeatedly screw over its hardware partner, and certainly disappointing that the company delivered a shoddy, poorly designed imitation in Windows, and then used its market power to stop superior products from competitors from entering the market.
In 1991, Microsoft was extolling a vaporous vision of Cairo, what it planned to deliver after NT, as a copy of ideas from 1988's NeXTSTEP. But the company didn't even deliver NT until 1993 and never really shipped Cairo and the features it was supposed to deliver, apart from a few things that showed up a decade later around 2000. Microsoft didn't beat anyone in delivering technology, it simply lied about what it could do and used its clout to prevent real products from finding a market. That's "innovative" marketing, but certainly isn't praiseworthy.
Microsoft did the same thing in web browsers, in dev tools, in office apps, in server operating systems (NT vs Unix) and attempted to continue into media players, DRM licensing, and smartphones, the latter of which it is failing in.
The real problem with Microsoft isn't that it copies and refines existing ideas and builds upon them, but that it just copies ideas poorly and supports them with marketing lies, resulting in inferior products that are forced into the market as the only option for many buyers.
This has happened so frequently that the industry and now customers are well aware of what's going on, and its no longer working in a variety of new markets Microsoft is trying to enter.
Right, the features were advertised. However, desktop search never worked even as late as Windows XP. Ever try to find a file? Apart from the animated dog, it didn't do anything but offer lots of options for non-functional search.
I did a comparison a week prior that looks at Obama and McCain's positions (and actual voting patterns) on a variety of tech positions, following Obama's quite impressive outline of tech he gave at a presentation at Google and posted to his website. Of course, I also had to string in Apple and Microsoft, and how US corporations have taken an increasing role in subverting democracy in government:
While the United States prepares to elect a new president, candidates on both sides have made interesting comments about their affiliations with tech companies and their perspective on issues facing the tech industry.
Here's a look at Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain compare, looking first at how each relates to Apple and Microsoft, how corporations are leveraging money and political power to shape public policy to fit their own interests, and followed by a look at each candidate's stance on issues related to technology.
This is a typical Leander Kahney / Wired article that hyper-sensationalizes a story nugget that, rather than just pointing out what really happened, suggests a arc of drama that really isn't even accurate.
While Apple execs didn't really get HyperCard (and hated the idea of giving it away, as Bill Atkinson's deal required), it did serve as the model for Viola, a project by Pei-Yuan Wei at UC Berkeley to clone HyperCard for X Window systems.
"I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in [X Window for Unix]," Wei later explained. Wei intended to adapt Viola to use the Internet to distribute its hypermedia documents, but then happened upon the work already done by Berners-Lee on NeXT.
Adopting the HTTP architecture of Berners-Lee's www service resulted in the creation of the ViolaWWW web browser for X Window systems in 1992.
From there, NSCA's government funded (thanks, Al Gore) Mosaic browser, pattered after ViolaWWW, resulted in both Netscape and Spyglass/Internet Explorer.
Wired missed the real story of a stepping stone towards the user created web and instead created a dramatic soap opera about how Apple missed Sun's network genius because it had boxes with lines rather than lines with boxes. Never mind that Sun never managed to deliver either a web browser that mattered (HotJava?) or make any consumer contributions that caught on (client side Java?), just make a wild suggestion that makes no sense and allow your audience to come to a faulty conclusion that Apple should have been marketing the network, a product it wasn't selling, rather than the PC, a product it was. And on top, suggest that "owning" the browser market was or could be possible and/or profitable for anyone.
This reflects the typical tech pundit-mentality that everything should be owned by Microsoft-like companies, because it worked so well for Microsoft to monopolize the PC OS market. In reality, the utility software concepts (the core OS, web browser, codecs, protocols, etc) that pundits often think "somebody" should have owned are all better off either collectively owned in the form of open industry standards, or wide open in the form of free/public domain.
The world would not be better off if the web had developed around pioneering, but proprietary HyperCard software owned by Apple. Ideally, the web will continue to be based on open standards, and proprietary extension elements like Flash/Silverlight/ActiveX will all go away.
Anyone with an IQ over 90 should recognize that you've only beaten up a strawman and delivered vacuous accusations that are absurd on their face.
My "pay per click blog"? You mean a website with ads? How unique is that dipshit?
I have no problem ignoring twitter blah blah fake conversations, but reading a constant conspiracy theory about how he's overturning society through his sock puppets is too fucking much to dig through.
Shoving your tongue up the asshole of Digg doesn't make you look any smarter either. FYI, while RDM has been effectively banned from getting more than 50 Diggs by a handful of Windows Enthusiasts (but not by Digg itself), I still write plenty of the articles that sit on the front page of Digg, just not under a name that Diggtards can start crying about.
Actually no I didn't set up multiple Digg accounts. I just put Digg tags on my articles and asked readers to digg my articles, which resulted in lots of people new to Digg hitting my articles and driving them to the front page.
I was then censored by Digg because they got complaints from Windows Enthusiasts worried that the world would be exposed to some criticism of Microsoft. One person (you?) then posted up a shit storm of anonymous blog trolling about how I was "gaming Digg" with 50 different accounts because there were that many people who primarily just hit my articles, and were new to Digg.
I had over a thousand readers write Digg and CC: me to ask that they not censor my content (and delete Digg postings that had lots of comments on them), but Digg said they couldn't handle getting complaints from the Windows Enthusiasts, so they waited until the bullshit blew over and then said I could use my account again.
I have no respect for Digg.
I also have higher readership now than I had with articles getting lots of Diggs, and get less gibberish hate mail from morons who can't craft a sensible criticism.
I don't have the time or inclination to create multiple accounts (I can't handle remembering more than one password), so your over the top blustering about "massive hypocrisy" is a bit too much. You shouldn't be so simple as to equate the anonymous accusations of nobodies with "being guilty."
As for slashdot, I clearly wasn't saying that twitter "M$" posts are intelligent conversation. Nobody is confused by twitter self conversations, but when 2-3 comment cops start blowing out regular diatribes about sockpuppets then yes, it becomes a far larger problem and one of the reasons smart people don't comment on threads that start to sound more like Digg comments.
Oh, and fuck you for working so hard to seed false information. Expressing one's opinion is not the same as trying to restrict others from being heard out of fear they are right. You are core to what sucks about the world.
Apple does seem to be hit and miss on HD access on its laptops:
- the original iBook was about 27 layers of crap wrapped around the core HD like cellophane, and bolted together with 27 different types of screws. It took me two hours to remove one, and I cheated by just bending shit out of the way.
- the modern MacBooks have RAM and a SATA HD that falls out after you remove a cover behind the battery. Very nice, although you still need to take out 3 screws on the plate.
- MacBook Pros require more disassembly, not as bad as the iBooks but not nearly as convenient as the MacBook.
Most HP/Dell/Thinkpad laptops have a single screw that holds in a slide out HD caddy. However, some PC laptops, including a quite modern HP model I tried to upgrade, artificially limit the size of the HD you can install (!).
I tried to add an 80 GB HD to a machine that shipped with 40, and it didn't work. I called HP and they first suggested I had to buy an HD from them, and then admitted that it just wouldn't support a larger HD. That is insane. If Apple did something like that, it would be front page news for months.
a) Microsoft can punitively raise their Windows licensing to the point where any savings from shipping Windows-free Linux PCs are erased. As long has Microsoft can maintain that kind of pricing power over what is a utility monopoly, things can't change. Incidentally, that's why every PC maker advertises "we recommend Windows XP/Vista." It's in their contract! Linux sales and advertising are tightly controlled by Microsoft using its OEM leverage.
b) PC makers investing in software development are afraid that their contributions to GPL software would be used against them. So HP develops a desirable Linux distro that works flawlessly with all the modern video cards, etc, and then Dell can come along and sell it on their PCs without any contribution back, and at no investment expense. Dell wins, HP loses all its investment.
The reason Apple is doing well is because it has no obligation to or dependance upon Microsoft for Windows licensing. If it did, it would instantly be in the same boat as Palm and the other PC makers. And secondly, Apple can invest heavily in developing its own proprietary OS.
Mac OS X is a unix distro with a unique kernel that is open but which no other PC maker can effectively really use or benefit from, and a proprietary development framework and GUI.
Recall that Ray Noorda at Novell and then Caldera tried to pull off something similar with OpenLinux and then United Linux, but couldn't manage to get either one together. If a major software developer couldn't wrangle a suitable Linux desktop distro, how could a PC maker like Dell or HP, neither of which can make software that isn't any better than a flaming turd?
Before you volunteer to help a PC company develop a Linux distro, you might want to consider why they aren't asking for help and why the task might be less appealing than driving nails through your eyelids.
You are like ugly people in a bar. Sure they have a right to be somewhere, but they scare away the hotties.
Given that there aren't that many Slashdots around to share and read intelligent posts, your constant prattling about sockpuppets is not just bothersome, but destructive to any hopes of maintaing any intelligent discussion.
If nothing else, you're just troll feeding. By throwing a monumental fit every time somebody posts a crack about Windows or "M$," you are actually creating sympathy for the opposite of your advocacy opinion. Maybe just let it slide and the fairly intelligent people who read them will figure that shit out for themselves.
Do you really think you need to sculpt public opinion for those who can't recognize obvious reality for themselves? Is that strategy also working for the extreme right?
What's useful about it is that it shows Apple is upselling customers to higher quality computers. HP and Dell make $1200 laptops that compare with the MacBook in hardware features, but they have to sell $700 laptops because consumers want cheap stuff.
Apple has the market power to push people toward better machines. That results in better profitability, but also higher customer satisfaction, better reliability, and a longer equipment life span.
Average sale prices of PCs are diving into the toilet, and Dell/HP would like to reverse the trend, but they can't. If one tries to prop PC prices up, the other undercuts them with cheap crap and ends up with "higher market share" despite lower profits (or greater losses).
That has locked HP and Dell into low profit spirals where they have to support junk instant eWaste PCs that only last for 18 months. Apple is not only maintaining a higher ASP, but also developing a quality brand and rapidly eating into the valuable growth in the market.
That's also why the fascination with "market share" is pointless. Obviously, Apple's 5% of the world / 9% of the US is far more valuable per percentage point than the 30% shares of HP and Dell. Every new percent Apple adds is a major expansion into greater profitability while the PC makers burn their brands as they turn into profitless Packard Bell junk vendors.
That in turn enables Apple to invest in developing better software that further differentiates its brand. Low prices are great, but most people don't want to drive a Yugo just because its cheaper.
"It's weird how zealots will claim that Apple's hardware is the be-all and end-all of computing equipment but simultaneously declare that licensing OS X to third parties would destroy Apple"
It's less weird when you realize that the reason Apple sells premium hardware is BECAUSE it is subsidizing the development of its own OS and software. Apple sells Mac OS X upgrades for less than Windows, and iLife/iWork are considerably less than their equivalents. Apple make nice software, but sells it as a premium on top of nice hardware.
If Apple sold cheap hardware, or lined up cheap hardware licensees, or sold OS X at retail, it would have to change from a hardware-centric model to a software-centric one. It's easy to sell desirable hardware; it's hard to sell software. People don't see value in software, and refuse to pay for it unless DRM prevents them from stealing it. That's why there's no healthy mobile software market, why Microsoft has to laden DRM and activation into Windows (because piracy of Windows no longer supports its interests), and why Apple doesn't sell Mac OS X for use on non-Apple hardware.
When you consider that Apple brings in half the revenue of Microsoft despite selling 5% of the number of copies, it helps clarify that yes, the software business is high margin, but it's also a hard sell, particularly if you happen to lack an established monopoly. Nobody else has been able to sell a commercial desktop OS, so why think Apple can? The community can't even successfully give Linux away on the desktop in any self-supporting sort of way. Obviously, this desktop software sales business is hard to crack into, particularly with a heavily armed monopolist in the way.
The Quartz compositing of Mac OS X is indeed heavier than prior generation of Linux' X11 or the old Windows XP GDI in terms of memory footprint. When Vista brought modern compositioning graphics to Windows, users felt the extra weight. However, apart from its sophisticated windowing system, Mac OS X is pretty efficient in terms of processes because it uses the same Unix model as Linux. Windows still uses the old thread model of NT, which doesn't handle multiple processes very efficiently.
So it depends upon what you are broadly generalizing about when say Mac OS X and Windows are memory hogs. Certainly they are when running complex desktop apps that don't exist for Linux. But if we're talking about mobile mini laptops, Mac OS X already has a more sophisticated application in the iPhone. Linux has been refined over the last decade primarily for server applications. That's why it holds a MySQL performance lead, but why its still rough for use in mobiles, particularly compared to the iPhone and the huge resources Apple dumped into making Mac OS X appropriate for use in power limited, resource limited, size/thermal limited devices.
Microsoft hasn't invested in that category, and largely neither has the Linux community.
In addition to the "think of the children" publicity, Apple would also benefit from having a huge worldwide population learning Cocoa development tools. That seems to be a major reason why Microsoft is pushing its war on cheap linux mini-laptops: if emerging countries learn Unix-style development, that will threaten the company's ability to sell Windows to those markets. That's also why Microsoft is ready to throw out super cheap licensing in China.
Of course, Apple doesn't need a me-too mini laptop; it has the iPhone/iPod touch, which are selling well in foreign markets. It is also going to broadly push Cocoa Touch development tools, just as a Mac OS X-based XO.
Why market a cheap $300 laptop without enough power to be a real laptop when for the same price you can sell a WiFi mobile computer that fits in your pocket and is more practical? Does anyone really see mini-laptops as more than a curiosity? They remind me of the Timex-Sinclair $99 handheld PCs with membrane keyboards of the early 80s: everybody bought one to say they had it, but it wasn't very practical or useful for anything. The iPod touch/iPhone appear to have a far larger potential impact. Of course I say that because I like what Apple has been doing lately, but it's still pretty uncontroversial.
When Apple approached OLPC about basing its mini laptop on a light version of Mac OS X, it was rebuffed because the project wanted everything to be fully open source and unfettered with proprietary software. Now it's ready to put Windows on the XO?
With Mac OS X, the XO would have a native environment for running free software including Sugar, along with or in addition to running commercial Mac software. Unlike clone PCs, there's no vast range of hardware to support. Development tools are simpler and Apple currently has no business plan for selling its dev tools. That seems to make far more sense than slapping on a OS designed primarily to run on full sized, corporate desktops with expensive Office software licensing.
It's too bad OLPC set such lofty ideals about open development, setting itself up to drop them immediately and become yet another extension of a monopoly that doesn't have the technical merits to run on low cost mobile devices.
If only Vista had the ability to run across multiple machines.
Which highlights the HUGE elephant in the room on this issue: the whole thing is a marketing ploy, not a tech related solution.
The Problem: Microsoft is finding its core PC maker customers are bleeding away at the very low end ($300 PCs) where the Windows OEM license is just too expensive to justify. If it allows this to continue, progress made in Linux on those devices will trickle up into more and more complex and sophisticated devices, quickly making OEMs wonder why they're paying for a Windows license on full price desktop PCs and laptops.
Microsoft's Solution Announce that Windows can be stripped down and will be sold for low end PC devices (ie, a marketing announcement).
The Real Solution Required Developing a scalable OS that can actually work on low end PC devices. Currently, Linux scales down much better than Windows XP, and Vista is only getting larger. Microsoft has to invest in stripping down XP, another distraction from Vista.
Microsoft spent ten years working on WinCE, which doesn't work well enough for anyone to use in the hand held PC realm that it was expressly designed for. If you want to argue about technology limitations of the day, then remember that desktop Linux was being developed at the same time as WinCE, 1998-2008. WinCE can't blame its shortcomings on existing technology of the day.
There is no evidence that Microsoft has the technical chops to developer a suitable mobile OS. "Embedded XP" is just XP sold to fill the market for PC-based devices. "Embedded CE" is just WinCE sold for non-PDA devices. Microsoft has no mobile OS to sell, and clearly has no ability to develop one anytime soon. It couldn't deliver decent performance in Vista within a half decade of trying, and that was just a PC desktop OS overhaul.
Linux already works and is free.
Interestingly, Apple has ported its desktop OS to the iPhone/iPod Touch "WiFi mobile platform" as a low power, flexible, but intentionally limited feature set (ie, not a desktop GUI nor a small laptop), offering a different alternative to Linux based micro-laptops rather than trying to ape them.
Microsoft should have pursued an original strategy like Apple or delivered a mini-desktop that works like the Linux community. Instead, it's in the position of trying to FUD Linux to death with a press release, despite not having the technology to sell.
That would typically happen in a market with competition. However, Linux is not a commercial competitor on the desktop. No PC maker has it in its own interests to sell, market, or develop Linux, so it's not being sold.
The reason that HP or Dell or some smaller company isn't pushing hard for Linux is because there's no proprietary value in doing so. If Company X invested huge amounts of work into making Linux ideal on the desktop, other companies could take that work and put it on their own PCs. Unlike the server market, there's no real business model for earning revenue just from support as Red Hat does. Even Red Hat sees no market potential on the desktop.
That leaves PC makers willing to push Windows, even when it is not the best solution (particularly in mobile devices). There's no development investment to be lost to other hardware competitors.
The only company that isn't pushing Windows is Apple, but that's because it has its own proprietary OS, which is like (LIKE not is!) a superset of Linux with a custom GUI and dev frameworks. Apple can invest heavily in Mac OS X knowing that other companies can't just take its work and reuse it to add value to their own PCs. Incidentally, that's also part of why Apple has no interest in selling Mac OS X as an OS for other PCs: it serves as a major differentiator.
Until PC makers individually work or group together to develop their own OS (imagine a consortium between Dell and HP to develop a desktop Linux), the only other desktop OS will be Mac OS X. That is unlikely to happen because of the competitive barriers of Windows (installed base of software, drivers, and familiarity, but more importantly the fact that Dell and HP can't afford to have Microsoft jack up their Windows OEM prices due to the fact that they've started selling Linux PCs).
And so the status quo is resisting any change. It would take a lot of outside pressure to push PC makers to do anything different. Continued popularity of the Mac might help, continued problems with Vista might help, and continued progress on making Linux easy to use might help, but the real problem is that PC makers lack much vision and don't want to upset their business or take any risks because the commodity hardware market is very low margin. There's simply little room to compete in between Apple at the slick premium top and Windows at the high volume middle.
It makes sense that PC makers wouldn't want to continue paying Microsoft $30-50 per OEM license to put Windows on a PC that sells for $700 and has a $350 bill of materials, but it appears that they're more worried about investing millions into Desktop Linux and seeing no real return because everyone else would share their contributions to the GPL software base. Of course, if you're selling ten million PCs, those OEM licenses are costing a third of a billion dollars, so at some point you'd think Dell and HP would exercise some leadership in investing in Desktop Linux. But again, Microsoft can simply raise their OEM prices and inflate the cost of Windows per PC, making any efforts to diversify a no-win gamble.
10 million Windows PCs @ $30 Windows OEM = $300 M of Windows licensing vs 5 million Linux PCs @ $0 Windows OEM = $150 M of Windows licensing saved, potentially invested into Linux development 5 million Windows PCs @ a punitively priced $60 Windows OEM = $300 M of Windows licensing, all potential savings lost
As long as Microsoft can charge whatever price it wants for its monopoly utility software on an individual basis, it can effectively make Linux impossible for larger PC makers to invest in. If Microsoft's OEM prices were open and regulated like most every other monopoly, then alternatives (particularly free ones) would have a chance to compete. As it is, the only way to compete with Microsoft is to compete full throttle as Apple does - all Mac OS X and no Windows dependancies at all.
That's like saying if you build a WalMart from bricks and it doesn't work out, you can use your bricks to build a McDonalds somewhere else instead without much trouble, because you already have the bricks. - You might be able to share some library code between platforms, but applications developed for Cocoa Touch are not going to be highly portable to Android because of a subset of commonality in of the programming languages used on both.
Android is essentially Java, except the code is converted into a non Java bytecode to run on a different VM so that Google doesn't have to pay Sun for it.
Cocoa Touch is based upon the very different Cocoa frameworks.
It will be easier to port Java code to Cocoa Touch, although the UI will still need to be built custom for the Cocoa Touch platform.
The fact that Mac OS X is built upon Unix means that Unix software can be run on it. It does not mean that software developed for Mac OS X can be easily ported to other Unix-like operating systems.
There is probably as much shared code between the Windows and Mac port as there would be between a Mac and Linux port.
If there were Cocoa and Carbon frameworks for Linux, that might change. But that's not likely to happen. Even GNUstep is now significantly different than Cocoa.
You might as well keep going and tell us that the iPod is too expensive for people who just want to listen to music and that the iPhone is too expensive for people who just want to make calls.
The PC serious gamer market is not big enough for Apple to attack. The desktop PC market is reaching a plateau. Apple is growing far faster than the industry overall, with consistent ~35% growth while the PC market chugs along at 4% on average.
Apple's percentage of the worldwide market for PCs and x86 servers (which is the numbers IDC and Gartner throw around) include lots of markets Apple does not even compete in. Those numbers are designed to marginalize anyone who does not sell x86, Windows-based PCs.
For the first time in decades, Apple is revealing how absurd those figures are. The reason everyone sees Apple logos on computers in every cafe, concert, conference, and campus is that Apple now has a large chunk of the consumer market, and is working its way into corporations because of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah just wait until the bill on that Iraq invasion comes due.
And how much were you paying for gas 8 years ago?
Of course, there are some differences between climate change and the Iraq war.
Reasonably intelligent people who are aware of the facts don't doubt that climate change should be addressed, but also know that Iraq had nothing to do with global terrorism, Al Qaeda, or WMDs.
Conversely, the US has spent trillions on sending 4,000 soldiers to die in the sand, while officially having spent very little to do anything about climate change other than pay conservative think tanks to come up with "perhaps nothing is happening" propaganda.
So the difference is that irrational, ignorant fear can pull money out of Americans rather easily, as the Neocons have been doing expertly for the last decade, while rational, informed risks are being entirely ignored and can't get funding.
The fact that you have right wing opinions doesn't change reality. I don't know how old you are, but if you've witnessed "30 years of environmental chicken littling" and haven't grasped the relationship between why US cities are far cleaner than they were prior to regulation efforts in environmental issues (in particular with cars), or why air in US cities is easier to breathe than the "free market" air in Bangkok, then it's hard to take much of what you say seriously.
If anti-regulation conservatives had their way, we wouldn't have seat belts, catalytic converters, factory scrubbers, OSHA, etc and would all be living in 1850 shanty towns where 12 year old kids worked 80 hour weeks so that Chancellor Bush could afford to declare war on the other fascists over who gets to colonize Africa. Wake up it's 2008 and we're all a bit more sophisticated than that.
You get what you pay for. In the US, money gets spent on fear.
The Intestate highway system was not sold to Congress as a vital transportation network, but rather as a defense system that could be used to truck around ICBMs to shoot at the ruskies.
The foundations of the Internet were all funded out of DARPA research as ways to communicate during wars, where communication links might be severed and need to be routed around.
Many medical advancements have originated from the efforts to stitch people back together during wars.
If you look at how much money the US spends on being ready to kill, compared to how much it spends being ready to compete, it's no surprise why there's all this technology spilling from the military. They're the only ones being funded because fear results in funding.
If we poured money into education, transportation, information technology, health, etc, we'd see significant paybacks from those investments too. But Americans only think they're getting their money's worth when fear is involved. They haven't quite figured out why Pentagon toilet seats costs $10,000.
I don't think Republicans are entirely to blame, they've just corned the market on fear and have become great at selling it to the "I'll pay you to scare me" American public. Democrats also enjoy the funding that comes with fear, making it a key issue both sides can agree on.
Obama's Apple, McCain's Microsoft: the Politics of Tech
The problem isn't so much whether Microsoft's innovation lies with marketing rather than engineering, but how the company has used its "innovations" to hold back the progress of technology.
It wasn't "wrong" for Microsoft to develop upon ideas Apple originated in graphical computing (just as Apple itself built upon existing ideas already in development). It was however fairly scandalous that Microsoft chose to repeatedly screw over its hardware partner, and certainly disappointing that the company delivered a shoddy, poorly designed imitation in Windows, and then used its market power to stop superior products from competitors from entering the market.
In 1991, Microsoft was extolling a vaporous vision of Cairo, what it planned to deliver after NT, as a copy of ideas from 1988's NeXTSTEP. But the company didn't even deliver NT until 1993 and never really shipped Cairo and the features it was supposed to deliver, apart from a few things that showed up a decade later around 2000. Microsoft didn't beat anyone in delivering technology, it simply lied about what it could do and used its clout to prevent real products from finding a market. That's "innovative" marketing, but certainly isn't praiseworthy.
Microsoft did the same thing in web browsers, in dev tools, in office apps, in server operating systems (NT vs Unix) and attempted to continue into media players, DRM licensing, and smartphones, the latter of which it is failing in.
The real problem with Microsoft isn't that it copies and refines existing ideas and builds upon them, but that it just copies ideas poorly and supports them with marketing lies, resulting in inferior products that are forced into the market as the only option for many buyers.
This has happened so frequently that the industry and now customers are well aware of what's going on, and its no longer working in a variety of new markets Microsoft is trying to enter.
From Vista to Zune: Why Microsoft Canâ(TM)t Sell to Consumers
Right, the features were advertised. However, desktop search never worked even as late as Windows XP. Ever try to find a file? Apart from the animated dog, it didn't do anything but offer lots of options for non-functional search.
I did a comparison a week prior that looks at Obama and McCain's positions (and actual voting patterns) on a variety of tech positions, following Obama's quite impressive outline of tech he gave at a presentation at Google and posted to his website. Of course, I also had to string in Apple and Microsoft, and how US corporations have taken an increasing role in subverting democracy in government:
While the United States prepares to elect a new president, candidates on both sides have made interesting comments about their affiliations with tech companies and their perspective on issues facing the tech industry.
Here's a look at Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain compare, looking first at how each relates to Apple and Microsoft, how corporations are leveraging money and political power to shape public policy to fit their own interests, and followed by a look at each candidate's stance on issues related to technology.
Obama's Apple, McCain's Microsoft: the Politics of Tech
This is a typical Leander Kahney / Wired article that hyper-sensationalizes a story nugget that, rather than just pointing out what really happened, suggests a arc of drama that really isn't even accurate.
While Apple execs didn't really get HyperCard (and hated the idea of giving it away, as Bill Atkinson's deal required), it did serve as the model for Viola, a project by Pei-Yuan Wei at UC Berkeley to clone HyperCard for X Window systems.
"I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in [X Window for Unix]," Wei later explained. Wei intended to adapt Viola to use the Internet to distribute its hypermedia documents, but then happened upon the work already done by Berners-Lee on NeXT.
Adopting the HTTP architecture of Berners-Lee's www service resulted in the creation of the ViolaWWW web browser for X Window systems in 1992.
From there, NSCA's government funded (thanks, Al Gore) Mosaic browser, pattered after ViolaWWW, resulted in both Netscape and Spyglass/Internet Explorer.
Wired missed the real story of a stepping stone towards the user created web and instead created a dramatic soap opera about how Apple missed Sun's network genius because it had boxes with lines rather than lines with boxes. Never mind that Sun never managed to deliver either a web browser that mattered (HotJava?) or make any consumer contributions that caught on (client side Java?), just make a wild suggestion that makes no sense and allow your audience to come to a faulty conclusion that Apple should have been marketing the network, a product it wasn't selling, rather than the PC, a product it was. And on top, suggest that "owning" the browser market was or could be possible and/or profitable for anyone.
This reflects the typical tech pundit-mentality that everything should be owned by Microsoft-like companies, because it worked so well for Microsoft to monopolize the PC OS market. In reality, the utility software concepts (the core OS, web browser, codecs, protocols, etc) that pundits often think "somebody" should have owned are all better off either collectively owned in the form of open industry standards, or wide open in the form of free/public domain.
The world would not be better off if the web had developed around pioneering, but proprietary HyperCard software owned by Apple. Ideally, the web will continue to be based on open standards, and proprietary extension elements like Flash/Silverlight/ActiveX will all go away.
Safari on Windows? Apple and the Origins of the Web
Clearly you care enough to prattle on about it.
I'm sure you are very clever in your own mind.
Anyone with an IQ over 90 should recognize that you've only beaten up a strawman and delivered vacuous accusations that are absurd on their face.
My "pay per click blog"? You mean a website with ads? How unique is that dipshit?
I have no problem ignoring twitter blah blah fake conversations, but reading a constant conspiracy theory about how he's overturning society through his sock puppets is too fucking much to dig through.
Shoving your tongue up the asshole of Digg doesn't make you look any smarter either. FYI, while RDM has been effectively banned from getting more than 50 Diggs by a handful of Windows Enthusiasts (but not by Digg itself), I still write plenty of the articles that sit on the front page of Digg, just not under a name that Diggtards can start crying about.
Your efforts at censorship don't matter.
Actually no I didn't set up multiple Digg accounts. I just put Digg tags on my articles and asked readers to digg my articles, which resulted in lots of people new to Digg hitting my articles and driving them to the front page.
I was then censored by Digg because they got complaints from Windows Enthusiasts worried that the world would be exposed to some criticism of Microsoft. One person (you?) then posted up a shit storm of anonymous blog trolling about how I was "gaming Digg" with 50 different accounts because there were that many people who primarily just hit my articles, and were new to Digg.
I had over a thousand readers write Digg and CC: me to ask that they not censor my content (and delete Digg postings that had lots of comments on them), but Digg said they couldn't handle getting complaints from the Windows Enthusiasts, so they waited until the bullshit blew over and then said I could use my account again.
I have no respect for Digg.
I also have higher readership now than I had with articles getting lots of Diggs, and get less gibberish hate mail from morons who can't craft a sensible criticism.
I don't have the time or inclination to create multiple accounts (I can't handle remembering more than one password), so your over the top blustering about "massive hypocrisy" is a bit too much. You shouldn't be so simple as to equate the anonymous accusations of nobodies with "being guilty."
As for slashdot, I clearly wasn't saying that twitter "M$" posts are intelligent conversation. Nobody is confused by twitter self conversations, but when 2-3 comment cops start blowing out regular diatribes about sockpuppets then yes, it becomes a far larger problem and one of the reasons smart people don't comment on threads that start to sound more like Digg comments.
Oh, and fuck you for working so hard to seed false information. Expressing one's opinion is not the same as trying to restrict others from being heard out of fear they are right. You are core to what sucks about the world.
Apple does seem to be hit and miss on HD access on its laptops:
- the original iBook was about 27 layers of crap wrapped around the core HD like cellophane, and bolted together with 27 different types of screws. It took me two hours to remove one, and I cheated by just bending shit out of the way.
- the modern MacBooks have RAM and a SATA HD that falls out after you remove a cover behind the battery. Very nice, although you still need to take out 3 screws on the plate.
- MacBook Pros require more disassembly, not as bad as the iBooks but not nearly as convenient as the MacBook.
Most HP/Dell/Thinkpad laptops have a single screw that holds in a slide out HD caddy. However, some PC laptops, including a quite modern HP model I tried to upgrade, artificially limit the size of the HD you can install (!).
I tried to add an 80 GB HD to a machine that shipped with 40, and it didn't work. I called HP and they first suggested I had to buy an HD from them, and then admitted that it just wouldn't support a larger HD. That is insane. If Apple did something like that, it would be front page news for months.
Newton Again: iPhone vs the Mini-Laptop
Two reasons why PC vendors aren't doing that:
a) Microsoft can punitively raise their Windows licensing to the point where any savings from shipping Windows-free Linux PCs are erased. As long has Microsoft can maintain that kind of pricing power over what is a utility monopoly, things can't change. Incidentally, that's why every PC maker advertises "we recommend Windows XP/Vista." It's in their contract! Linux sales and advertising are tightly controlled by Microsoft using its OEM leverage.
b) PC makers investing in software development are afraid that their contributions to GPL software would be used against them. So HP develops a desirable Linux distro that works flawlessly with all the modern video cards, etc, and then Dell can come along and sell it on their PCs without any contribution back, and at no investment expense. Dell wins, HP loses all its investment.
The reason Apple is doing well is because it has no obligation to or dependance upon Microsoft for Windows licensing. If it did, it would instantly be in the same boat as Palm and the other PC makers. And secondly, Apple can invest heavily in developing its own proprietary OS.
Mac OS X is a unix distro with a unique kernel that is open but which no other PC maker can effectively really use or benefit from, and a proprietary development framework and GUI.
Recall that Ray Noorda at Novell and then Caldera tried to pull off something similar with OpenLinux and then United Linux, but couldn't manage to get either one together. If a major software developer couldn't wrangle a suitable Linux desktop distro, how could a PC maker like Dell or HP, neither of which can make software that isn't any better than a flaming turd?
Caledera's OpenLinux: The Linux "Mac OS X" That Failed
And for insight on how well a community/corporate partnership can work, look at OpenMoko. It predates the iPhone, but still can't dial from the GUI.
Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone
Before you volunteer to help a PC company develop a Linux distro, you might want to consider why they aren't asking for help and why the task might be less appealing than driving nails through your eyelids.
Mobile EEE PC, UMPC, and Internet Tablets vs the iPhone: Linux' Mobile Problem
You are like ugly people in a bar. Sure they have a right to be somewhere, but they scare away the hotties.
Given that there aren't that many Slashdots around to share and read intelligent posts, your constant prattling about sockpuppets is not just bothersome, but destructive to any hopes of maintaing any intelligent discussion.
If nothing else, you're just troll feeding. By throwing a monumental fit every time somebody posts a crack about Windows or "M$," you are actually creating sympathy for the opposite of your advocacy opinion. Maybe just let it slide and the fairly intelligent people who read them will figure that shit out for themselves.
Do you really think you need to sculpt public opinion for those who can't recognize obvious reality for themselves? Is that strategy also working for the extreme right?
What's useful about it is that it shows Apple is upselling customers to higher quality computers. HP and Dell make $1200 laptops that compare with the MacBook in hardware features, but they have to sell $700 laptops because consumers want cheap stuff.
Apple has the market power to push people toward better machines. That results in better profitability, but also higher customer satisfaction, better reliability, and a longer equipment life span.
Average sale prices of PCs are diving into the toilet, and Dell/HP would like to reverse the trend, but they can't. If one tries to prop PC prices up, the other undercuts them with cheap crap and ends up with "higher market share" despite lower profits (or greater losses).
That has locked HP and Dell into low profit spirals where they have to support junk instant eWaste PCs that only last for 18 months. Apple is not only maintaining a higher ASP, but also developing a quality brand and rapidly eating into the valuable growth in the market.
That's also why the fascination with "market share" is pointless. Obviously, Apple's 5% of the world / 9% of the US is far more valuable per percentage point than the 30% shares of HP and Dell. Every new percent Apple adds is a major expansion into greater profitability while the PC makers burn their brands as they turn into profitless Packard Bell junk vendors.
That in turn enables Apple to invest in developing better software that further differentiates its brand. Low prices are great, but most people don't want to drive a Yugo just because its cheaper.
Mobile EEE PC, UMPC, and Internet Tablets vs the iPhone
"It's weird how zealots will claim that Apple's hardware is the be-all and end-all of computing equipment but simultaneously declare that licensing OS X to third parties would destroy Apple"
It's less weird when you realize that the reason Apple sells premium hardware is BECAUSE it is subsidizing the development of its own OS and software. Apple sells Mac OS X upgrades for less than Windows, and iLife/iWork are considerably less than their equivalents. Apple make nice software, but sells it as a premium on top of nice hardware.
If Apple sold cheap hardware, or lined up cheap hardware licensees, or sold OS X at retail, it would have to change from a hardware-centric model to a software-centric one. It's easy to sell desirable hardware; it's hard to sell software. People don't see value in software, and refuse to pay for it unless DRM prevents them from stealing it. That's why there's no healthy mobile software market, why Microsoft has to laden DRM and activation into Windows (because piracy of Windows no longer supports its interests), and why Apple doesn't sell Mac OS X for use on non-Apple hardware.
When you consider that Apple brings in half the revenue of Microsoft despite selling 5% of the number of copies, it helps clarify that yes, the software business is high margin, but it's also a hard sell, particularly if you happen to lack an established monopoly. Nobody else has been able to sell a commercial desktop OS, so why think Apple can? The community can't even successfully give Linux away on the desktop in any self-supporting sort of way. Obviously, this desktop software sales business is hard to crack into, particularly with a heavily armed monopolist in the way.
From Vista to Zune: Why Microsoft Can't Sell to Consumers
The Quartz compositing of Mac OS X is indeed heavier than prior generation of Linux' X11 or the old Windows XP GDI in terms of memory footprint. When Vista brought modern compositioning graphics to Windows, users felt the extra weight. However, apart from its sophisticated windowing system, Mac OS X is pretty efficient in terms of processes because it uses the same Unix model as Linux. Windows still uses the old thread model of NT, which doesn't handle multiple processes very efficiently.
So it depends upon what you are broadly generalizing about when say Mac OS X and Windows are memory hogs. Certainly they are when running complex desktop apps that don't exist for Linux. But if we're talking about mobile mini laptops, Mac OS X already has a more sophisticated application in the iPhone. Linux has been refined over the last decade primarily for server applications. That's why it holds a MySQL performance lead, but why its still rough for use in mobiles, particularly compared to the iPhone and the huge resources Apple dumped into making Mac OS X appropriate for use in power limited, resource limited, size/thermal limited devices.
Microsoft hasn't invested in that category, and largely neither has the Linux community.
In addition to the "think of the children" publicity, Apple would also benefit from having a huge worldwide population learning Cocoa development tools. That seems to be a major reason why Microsoft is pushing its war on cheap linux mini-laptops: if emerging countries learn Unix-style development, that will threaten the company's ability to sell Windows to those markets. That's also why Microsoft is ready to throw out super cheap licensing in China.
Of course, Apple doesn't need a me-too mini laptop; it has the iPhone/iPod touch, which are selling well in foreign markets. It is also going to broadly push Cocoa Touch development tools, just as a Mac OS X-based XO.
Why market a cheap $300 laptop without enough power to be a real laptop when for the same price you can sell a WiFi mobile computer that fits in your pocket and is more practical? Does anyone really see mini-laptops as more than a curiosity? They remind me of the Timex-Sinclair $99 handheld PCs with membrane keyboards of the early 80s: everybody bought one to say they had it, but it wasn't very practical or useful for anything. The iPod touch/iPhone appear to have a far larger potential impact. Of course I say that because I like what Apple has been doing lately, but it's still pretty uncontroversial.
ARM, x86 Chip Makers Fight to Ride Mobile Growth
When Apple approached OLPC about basing its mini laptop on a light version of Mac OS X, it was rebuffed because the project wanted everything to be fully open source and unfettered with proprietary software. Now it's ready to put Windows on the XO?
With Mac OS X, the XO would have a native environment for running free software including Sugar, along with or in addition to running commercial Mac software. Unlike clone PCs, there's no vast range of hardware to support. Development tools are simpler and Apple currently has no business plan for selling its dev tools. That seems to make far more sense than slapping on a OS designed primarily to run on full sized, corporate desktops with expensive Office software licensing.
It's too bad OLPC set such lofty ideals about open development, setting itself up to drop them immediately and become yet another extension of a monopoly that doesn't have the technical merits to run on low cost mobile devices.
iPod Game Console, Tablet at WWDC? Highly Unlikely
If only Vista had the ability to run across multiple machines.
Which highlights the HUGE elephant in the room on this issue: the whole thing is a marketing ploy, not a tech related solution.
The Problem:
Microsoft is finding its core PC maker customers are bleeding away at the very low end ($300 PCs) where the Windows OEM license is just too expensive to justify. If it allows this to continue, progress made in Linux on those devices will trickle up into more and more complex and sophisticated devices, quickly making OEMs wonder why they're paying for a Windows license on full price desktop PCs and laptops.
Microsoft's Solution
Announce that Windows can be stripped down and will be sold for low end PC devices (ie, a marketing announcement).
The Real Solution Required
Developing a scalable OS that can actually work on low end PC devices. Currently, Linux scales down much better than Windows XP, and Vista is only getting larger. Microsoft has to invest in stripping down XP, another distraction from Vista.
Microsoft spent ten years working on WinCE, which doesn't work well enough for anyone to use in the hand held PC realm that it was expressly designed for. If you want to argue about technology limitations of the day, then remember that desktop Linux was being developed at the same time as WinCE, 1998-2008. WinCE can't blame its shortcomings on existing technology of the day.
There is no evidence that Microsoft has the technical chops to developer a suitable mobile OS. "Embedded XP" is just XP sold to fill the market for PC-based devices. "Embedded CE" is just WinCE sold for non-PDA devices. Microsoft has no mobile OS to sell, and clearly has no ability to develop one anytime soon. It couldn't deliver decent performance in Vista within a half decade of trying, and that was just a PC desktop OS overhaul.
Linux already works and is free.
Interestingly, Apple has ported its desktop OS to the iPhone/iPod Touch "WiFi mobile platform" as a low power, flexible, but intentionally limited feature set (ie, not a desktop GUI nor a small laptop), offering a different alternative to Linux based micro-laptops rather than trying to ape them.
Microsoft should have pursued an original strategy like Apple or delivered a mini-desktop that works like the Linux community. Instead, it's in the position of trying to FUD Linux to death with a press release, despite not having the technology to sell.
Of course, this has all happened before.
The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
Zune Sales Still in the Toilet
That would typically happen in a market with competition. However, Linux is not a commercial competitor on the desktop. No PC maker has it in its own interests to sell, market, or develop Linux, so it's not being sold.
The reason that HP or Dell or some smaller company isn't pushing hard for Linux is because there's no proprietary value in doing so. If Company X invested huge amounts of work into making Linux ideal on the desktop, other companies could take that work and put it on their own PCs. Unlike the server market, there's no real business model for earning revenue just from support as Red Hat does. Even Red Hat sees no market potential on the desktop.
That leaves PC makers willing to push Windows, even when it is not the best solution (particularly in mobile devices). There's no development investment to be lost to other hardware competitors.
The only company that isn't pushing Windows is Apple, but that's because it has its own proprietary OS, which is like (LIKE not is!) a superset of Linux with a custom GUI and dev frameworks. Apple can invest heavily in Mac OS X knowing that other companies can't just take its work and reuse it to add value to their own PCs. Incidentally, that's also part of why Apple has no interest in selling Mac OS X as an OS for other PCs: it serves as a major differentiator.
Until PC makers individually work or group together to develop their own OS (imagine a consortium between Dell and HP to develop a desktop Linux), the only other desktop OS will be Mac OS X. That is unlikely to happen because of the competitive barriers of Windows (installed base of software, drivers, and familiarity, but more importantly the fact that Dell and HP can't afford to have Microsoft jack up their Windows OEM prices due to the fact that they've started selling Linux PCs).
And so the status quo is resisting any change. It would take a lot of outside pressure to push PC makers to do anything different. Continued popularity of the Mac might help, continued problems with Vista might help, and continued progress on making Linux easy to use might help, but the real problem is that PC makers lack much vision and don't want to upset their business or take any risks because the commodity hardware market is very low margin. There's simply little room to compete in between Apple at the slick premium top and Windows at the high volume middle.
It makes sense that PC makers wouldn't want to continue paying Microsoft $30-50 per OEM license to put Windows on a PC that sells for $700 and has a $350 bill of materials, but it appears that they're more worried about investing millions into Desktop Linux and seeing no real return because everyone else would share their contributions to the GPL software base. Of course, if you're selling ten million PCs, those OEM licenses are costing a third of a billion dollars, so at some point you'd think Dell and HP would exercise some leadership in investing in Desktop Linux. But again, Microsoft can simply raise their OEM prices and inflate the cost of Windows per PC, making any efforts to diversify a no-win gamble.
10 million Windows PCs @ $30 Windows OEM = $300 M of Windows licensing
vs
5 million Linux PCs @ $0 Windows OEM = $150 M of Windows licensing saved, potentially invested into Linux development
5 million Windows PCs @ a punitively priced $60 Windows OEM = $300 M of Windows licensing, all potential savings lost
As long as Microsoft can charge whatever price it wants for its monopoly utility software on an individual basis, it can effectively make Linux impossible for larger PC makers to invest in. If Microsoft's OEM prices were open and regulated like most every other monopoly, then alternatives (particularly free ones) would have a chance to compete. As it is, the only way to compete with Microsoft is to compete full throttle as Apple does - all Mac OS X and no Windows dependancies at all.
Zune Sales Still In the Toilet
You could also say that about mobile phones in 2006, or about x86 PCs in 2005, or MP3 players in 2000.
That's like saying if you build a WalMart from bricks and it doesn't work out, you can use your bricks to build a McDonalds somewhere else instead without much trouble, because you already have the bricks.
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You might be able to share some library code between platforms, but applications developed for Cocoa Touch are not going to be highly portable to Android because of a subset of commonality in of the programming languages used on both.
Android is essentially Java, except the code is converted into a non Java bytecode to run on a different VM so that Google doesn't have to pay Sun for it.
Cocoa Touch is based upon the very different Cocoa frameworks.
It will be easier to port Java code to Cocoa Touch, although the UI will still need to be built custom for the Cocoa Touch platform.
GNUStep is hardly helpful in porting Cocoa apps to Linux. OpenStep is based on NeXTSTEP 4.0. Leopard's Cocoa is 9.0.
Mac developers using Obj-C are using it to write Cocoa apps. having an Obj-C compiler for Linux isn't the problem; having no Cocoa frameworks is.
The fact that Mac OS X is built upon Unix means that Unix software can be run on it. It does not mean that software developed for Mac OS X can be easily ported to other Unix-like operating systems.
There is probably as much shared code between the Windows and Mac port as there would be between a Mac and Linux port.
If there were Cocoa and Carbon frameworks for Linux, that might change. But that's not likely to happen. Even GNUstep is now significantly different than Cocoa.
You might as well keep going and tell us that the iPod is too expensive for people who just want to listen to music and that the iPhone is too expensive for people who just want to make calls.
The PC serious gamer market is not big enough for Apple to attack. The desktop PC market is reaching a plateau. Apple is growing far faster than the industry overall, with consistent ~35% growth while the PC market chugs along at 4% on average.
Apple's percentage of the worldwide market for PCs and x86 servers (which is the numbers IDC and Gartner throw around) include lots of markets Apple does not even compete in. Those numbers are designed to marginalize anyone who does not sell x86, Windows-based PCs.
For the first time in decades, Apple is revealing how absurd those figures are. The reason everyone sees Apple logos on computers in every cafe, concert, conference, and campus is that Apple now has a large chunk of the consumer market, and is working its way into corporations because of that.