Except that's file shares don't work like copiers. If I put files in a shared folder, it's not a book in a copier, but a system designed to create copies and distribute them to anyone who posts a request.
My system copies the data and sends it to other parties, or even multiple parties simultaneously. Just because my computer is doing the copy and distrubute work doesn't mean I bear no responsiblity. If I programmed a robot to shoot anyone entering my yard, I would eventually be guilty of murder. I couldn't pin it on an independant system.
So no, it isn't a copier that others help themselves to, its a system that happily copies and distributes content. If I feed content owned by other people into my magic file share, I know what the result will be, and I know that I'm perpetrating theft.
What people "seem to misunderstand" is that creating a fanciful story intended to absolve them of responsibilty for their own actions does not actually work in the real world.
Re:What a lod of tripe (the summary, not the story
on
Mac OS X May Go Embedded?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It is highly unlikely that the iTV will be anything at all Mac-like. Instead, it will almost certainly be an iPod with display outputs rather than a screen, and audio out rather than a headphone jack. All it needs to do is generate animated TV titles, just like those presented in today's iPod games.
By being a cousin to the iPod, it would share much the same hardware internals and custom designed software. It would really be insane to suggest that Apple would create an entire new distribution of the desktop Mac OS X just to support a $299 TV output device, given that it can poop out an iPod with an HDMI port and have a unified architecture that runs the same iTunes driven content, including iPod games.
An iPhone would be much the same. Handspring adapted the Palm to accomodate phone functions in designing the Treo, so why not add phone and text features to the iPod architecture and end up with a communications device? It's not a cell phone that plays iTunes, its an iPod cousin designed to act as a phone. That gives it all the stuff Apple has already standardized for free: cables to sync, charge, and display out to a TV (can your phone work as a DVR?), software to run iTunes and iPod games, and built in sync integration with iTunes.
Your anecdote could apply to any drug. That's why you need a prescription, and why drugs cost so much to bring to market. Any hysterical person can correlate [their own personal chemistry and reaction to a drug] and [dire consequences for the rest of mankind]. If you were deathly allergic to peanuts, would it make peanuts dangerous things that nobody should eat?
In any case, good for you for working to stop smoking.
Doctors & researchers were racing to find a cure for polio for the prominence of "discovering the cure." It has been postulated that the rush to find a cure for polio resulted in careless mixing of blood between test animals that brought the simian form of HIV to humans.
The same interest in curing HIV exists today, its just a harder problem to solve.
It's also easy to blame big evil drug companies for providing treatments rather than cures, but what about the big evil HMOs, who want to minimize costs? Certainly Kaiser Perminente and other HMOs are interested in cheap prevention measures, rather than expensive ongoing treatments.
Another issue preventing drug use is the lack of any mechanism similar to patent protection to induce finding new uses for existing drugs.
Consider Welbutrin: it was found to work better than other anti-depressants for many people, but after a media panic stunt that associated the drug with seizures, doctors were afraid to prescribe it. It was later found that the drug was also effective in helping people stop smoking. The Welbutrin name was tainted that its company rebadged it under a different name: Zyban. It was then proven that Welbutrin had no real danger for most people, and the seizure side effects associated with it only really affected people who already had seizure problems, and even then had less risk than alternative treatments.
Then Welbutrin (busparin) went generic and the profit motive for finding and proving new uses for the drug ended. Sales went to generics manufacturers.
Meanwhile, studies where already showing that welbutrin worked for many people as an aphrodisiac and could help them rebound from problems involving low libido, among other things. Unfortunately, not only was such a drug considered too racy (this was before Viagra), but since the drug maker would have to spend millions in clinical trials proving its efficacy, it made no sense to do so because there was little patent protection still available on the drug.
How many other drugs have known uses, but can't be formally proven because the costs are prohibitive? It's obvious that patent protection DOES create a strong profit motive for finding new uses for new drugs, but it does nothing for drugs we already have and know a lot about - drugs we know are fairly safe, and which have promising new uses.
A non-patent system, where new drugs are discovered and new uses are developed by non-profit 'open source' volunteers wouldn't have the money to do extensive formal clinical trials, which take years and can deliver huge disappointments. How far would Linux or any other FOSS project go in a software world where every program had to prove itself flawless over a long and expensive qualification testing period? Software is wholly unregulated, and anyone can dump out junk and sell it. Drugs aren't like that at all.
The only system that works at all is the huge profit potentials offered by patents, and it has serious shortcomings. As long as the FDA restricts new developments very conservatively, and as long as people can sue drug companies and win huge damages for any risk involved in taking a drug, we simply won't have full access to the drugs we already have.
There have only been ~7 Million 360's sold since its release last year. While people are clamoring over the shortage of Wii and PS3s, there are plenty of Xbox 360s everywhere I look, but nobody is interested. The market interested in the 360 is pretty much saturated. Even the PlayStation 2 outsold the Xbox 360 this year!
Of those 7 million units, likely less than half have a hard drive. That means the majority (of "Core systems") can't be used with the XBLive movie download service without an upgrade. So the real installed base for 360s is not only limited, but small.
More than 70 million iPods have been sold, and plenty more use iTunes as a free download. All of these people can buy iTunes movies and use them. That's a much larger market, and a faster growing market. Every quarter, Apple sells 8 million more and this quarter they are expected to sell 15-20 million. The demand for an iPod-TV device will be much higher than that for a game system that can be upgraded with a hard drive and then set up with...well who do you think is going to offer a better service for end uses, iTunes or the makers of PlaysForSure?
Palm drove itself out of business before WinCE even showed up.
Jeff Hawkins went from GRiD to Tandy to USR to 3COM and then Handspring with his Palm ideas, and was met with incompetence all the way. Palm and Handspring merged, creating Palm, split apart and rejoined together in an exhausting series of corporate incompetence. The Palm's high point was the Palm V, and it pretty much floundered since by trying to be more like what WinCE offered: big color screens with no battery life in a big box: useless.
1994-1998 Newton was cool but spendy and too big. 1998-2001 Palm was the cool cheap gadget to have. 2001-2007 iPod was the thing to have, who needs a PDA?
2000-2006 WinCE tried to play but nobody cared, Microsoft is ready to let it go.
When you say things like Windows 2.0 was technically impressive product, it makes it hard to take you seriously.
If you pull out bullet points from Wikipedia, then it appears that MS delivered some interesting innovations. Except they didn't; it was all crap. Nobody bought Windows 2.0. That's why MS was working on OS/2 until 1990.
Multitasking, PEM and PM sound great, but they didn't really work in Win95 when running actual applications people had. It wasn't more stable and reliable than the "ancient" Mac OS.
Further, I presented Microsoft's history with Cairo as a lesson about Microsoft, not in direct comparison with Apple. It's not an Apple vs MS holy war. I presented similar histories of Apple's failure to deliver their own products (linked to from TFA).
If you leave Apple out of the picture, it gets even worse for Microsoft, because other vendors were offering the features of Cairo long before MS even missed its first several ship dates.
NT 4 did not ship with all the promises of Cairo; Ms only managed to deliver its own version of PDO five years late, and 2-3 years later than NeXT had delivered its Windows port!
Don't ask me to give NT a break because it was trying to run on "high end PCs" rather than "workstations," because NeXT stopped building its own hardware and was running on PCs as early as 1992. That's FIVE YEARS before NT 4 shipped.
"My version" of reality only seems "warped and twisted" because you're reading history from Wikipedia without criticism or historical reference.
The power of small developers is equivalent to the "market power" exercised by bands on MySpace.
The RIAA labels that you find it so easy to vilify make acts and artists rich. There are no rock star developers. You portray RIAA artists as unhappy about the money they're making, but I don't think you know any developers who are struggling to run a business in a climate where most people don't see any need to pay for software.
Being pimped by a self agrandizing marketer is not anything new, but generally people are not so naive about it when they see it. You seem to fail to understand reality.
I think you have misjuged a significant point about small developers. You say "their contribution is static (existing software) and unchanging."
That applies to those who dumped their old versions out for exposure. However:
They now have to support copies of software sold at WalMart bargain bin pricing. The more copies sold, the more support they have to provide at no further gain (no royalties paid). The more copies sold, the more glutted the market is in their product and the fewer copies they'll be able to sell at a reasonable price. This establishes a throw-away price for small developer's software, which affects the entire market for shareware. It creates an illusion that it benefits small developers when in really just takes advantage of them to make a quick buck at their expense.
Unless of course, you're dealing with nonrenewable resources rather than a commodity.
If you can sell, say, eggcrates at a huge margin, then yes, new competators will rush in to produce eggcrates.
Selling software is different. Once you dump copies of software on the market, you devalue the price consumers expect to pay. They won't pay full price again if there will be another option to buy a grab bag of software at firesale prices. That destroys the expected price real developers can expect to charge, whether they participate or not.
It's like clearcutting the forest and selling off cheap wood. Who would pay regular prices for sustainable wood afterward? Why?
Phill Ryu is "known for his ability to con Mac users out of anything," as he describes himself on his website. His "My Dream App" similarly gamed Digg into being his free publicity machine. Good for him, but not so great for the small developers he's made a mockery out of, by selling their product out of his WalMart bargain bin at huge profits.
What exactly are the "competators" going to sell? Or do you mean it will employ more pimp operations that sell off software where only a fraction goes to the developers. It's like the RIAA, except for two details: the "organzers" aren't providing any production work as the RIAA does for music artists, and the developers aren't paid royalties. That mean that the more copies that are sold, the richer Ryu's Mac Heist gets, but the more copies of software the developers have to support, without any compensation.
It's total prostitution, and if you don't see that, you are either making money on it or benefiting from the cheap tricks.
However, as in the example I gave, antitrust policy is the way the US works. GE, GM, and General Mills might be big companies, but they are not conglomerates on the scale of German and Japanese companies, where mega umbrella companies enter and control multiple markets. As a sloppy example, Mitsubishi does everything from banking to heavy industry, oil, real estate, steel, cars, ag, beer, logistics, insurance, and it even cans tuna.
No American groups can do that because of different economic policies on competition. In the US, there are laws preventing companies from dominating industries and distorting competition, let alone owning multiple industries. The US similarly has had far less support for nationalized utilities.
The US government always investigates mergers and acquisitions to make sure that comeptition won't be distorted as companies converge. Back when Aldus and Adobe became Adobe, the company had to divest itself of Aldus Freehand (because it also had Adobe Illustrator); It sold it off to Macromedia.
Things have changed. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it stripped the software world of far more competition, but no action was taken. Adobe didn't have to get rid of Macromedia Freehand for Adobe Illustrator this time around, nor did it have to allow Dreamweaver and GoLive to remain in competition, and any of a number of other examples. The difference is a change in politics and economic thought.
Despite that shift, monopolies are only allowed where competition is unlikely to benefit consumers. Newspapers in a city are often allowed to join in non-competitive joint contracts to fix prices on advertising, keeping ad prices artificially high in order for newspapers to cheat off obsolescence. But that doesn't mean its legal for gas stations to collude on price fixing too.
Making blanked statements that "monopolies are legal as long as they're not hurting anyone" is similarly misinformed, particularly under the rather arrogant title "Bull... Once more for those who skipped class," so I had to jump on it.
I'm a sucker for arguing against anonymous cowards I guess.
You say recording labels have "more market power," but that's not true. It just sounds good. In any case, market power is not the issue.
In both cases, small and fairly powerless people are trading their talent in a marketing contract. The only difference is that the RIAA gives artists a flat fee + royalties, and Mac Heist just hands them a small flat fee and no royalties. I made no judgement there, just stating what it is.
What's being criticized is Mac Heist positioning itself as some sort of group in the public interest of software. It isn't. It's a pimp, and its a harsher pimp than the RIAA. Just facts to consider.
Nobody thinks they are "more qualified" to make decisions. People are just pointing out the hypocrisy of going apeshit indignant over the RIAA and then celebrating the far more abusive Mac Heist, which does less (not recording or providing any prodduction services) and takes more (no royalties, less upfront) from small developers. The fact that those same developers signed up does not mean they are getting a fair deal, just that there aren't really any options for them.
Some people have the capacity to see unfair situations and call attention to them. Just because you're not involved or injured doesn't mean there is no abuse going on in the world.
TFA actually pointed out the NT name is said to come from i860, and also mentions the use of NT in OS/2 3.0. Both were ~1988, so we don't need wikipedia in 2006 telling us trivia.
Recall that the Wikipedia is hardly well sourced. Many tech articles are supported by sensationalist articles from the Register which are "original research," or in other words conjecture designed to be snappy used as supporting facts.
Compare the wikipedia article on the iPod and the Zune. The iPod article scrounges up criticisms from every corner of Wikipedia, while the Zune reads like Microsoft talking points presentation. Pretty much every Microsoft article is a glowing fanfest, with little or no criticism at all. All their vaporware products aren't even mentioned, despite there being 4-5 titles every year that could be articles. Compare the apology of an article on Cairo. Misses completely.
Other Apple articles are just as bad, and read like a copy paste job from the web, not a set of facts with any historical significance.
The wikipedia is pretty useful outside of tech, but its tech articles are full of advocacy and reflect the same subjective bias of other user generated content. Articles skirt anything of encyclopedic value to present trivia, much of which is made up crap.
I know this because I've tried to write the beginnings of useful articles; what's already there is just ads and populist fiction. Who reading the wikipedia cares what the Apple store sells!? We don't need wikipedia telling us up to date reports of what's on sale on another web page, but a little history or background on the apple store as a project might be useful or interesting.
Actually exclusive deals are not illegal, and maintaining a monopoly often is.
Try googling news for "exclusive deal," and tell me how many of those are illegal. There are lots of examples of exclusive business deals.
However, while monopolies are allowed in specific areas where it is determined that competition would create more problems that it would solve, the existance of legal monopolies (for cable, power utilitites, water) generally overlap into areas often supplied by the government (municipal transportation, power, water), not competitive industries.
In competitive industires, monopolies are generally illegal. When Lowes Theaters bought AMC Theaters, it was forced by the state of California to divest itself of certain theaters so that it wouldn't own the majority of outlets in certain markets. That happened despite the fact that AMC/Lowes didn't even own all the theaters and had significant competition.
Microsoft's monopoly in operating systems was defined as a monopoly in the court, and found to be abusive in the narrow portion of evidence that was actually considered. Significant efforts were presented to solve that illegal monopoly and abuseive use, but then the current administration swung into power and dismissed any and all action.
So no, despite the rule of law being uninforced in America, monopolies are not generally "legal" just because an anonymous coward says they are. That's a myth. The US has a long history of breaking up monopolies and companies that exercise undo influence over markets. In other countries, including Europe and Asia, monoploy control is more common and not always illegal. Massive conglomerations are typical in Japan and Germany, but were always frowned upon in the US, back when the rule of law was enforced.
Illegal monopolies are not legal any more than illegal wars are legal. Just because something is allowed by a kowtowed populace and an uncritical press does not mean that the law does not exist or that it will never be enforced. Just wait until the red states have a moment to consider how much money they have lost! Once that happens, the US is sure to have a revolution of sorts and elect an administration more interested in enforcing the laws than in distractions of jews, flag burning, gay marrage & all the problems caused by minories.
NeXT offered the world an open standard for a graphical Unix powered by object oriented frameworks called OpenStep.
Sun and HP signed up to deliver OpenStep compliant, interoperable implementations for their operating sytems (Solaris and HP/UX) and GNU started work on GNUStep.
The competition was Cairo (Microsoft's vaporware that never materialized) and Taligent (IBM & Apple's vaporware that never materialized).
Despite being futuristic technology, open, and free, it was dumped upon by its own backers. Sun dumped NeXT for Java hype, and HP joined Taligent just prior to its failing, leaving a void that Microsoft could fill with nothing special.
Apple bought NeXT and repurposed its technology to build Mac OS X. Nobody says much about Taligent or JavaStations anymore, and Vista is struggling to look like Mac OS X. I guess you could say the whole desktop world fumbled the ball, and Apple happened to be in the right place at the right time to grab the ball and run with it.
Record companies aren't a monopoly. There are craploads of competing labels, and plenty of indie sources that act like labels without being abusive, such as CDBaby.
The "RIAA" is simply a lobby group that pushes a legal agenda in favor of various record labels. It's no monopoly.
Software is HARDER to break into, not easier. Sure, anyone can put up a website and send out shareware, but there are not many ways to distribute work in a way that small developers can benefit. They certainly can't compete against big developers, and the piracy of software is far more widespread than music. At least music acts somewhat like an ad to create fans. Nobody buys shareware 1 because they stole shareware 2 from the same developer.
Mac Heist's flat fee means that not only are developers in an abusive contract, but that they don't even make royalties! That's much worse than the RIAA style contracts.
The point is pretty clear: Microsoft gamed the world through the 90's by promising to outdo the competition, but ended up not even matching it ten years later.
Rinse, repeat. The same thing happened in the 80s and again in our decade. You chose to ignore all this, but it doesn't make the facts go away. Everyone hails Microsoft as an innovator and highly successful, but ignores the fact that it has trampled up on real innovation, and outside its monopolies, has been a huge failure.
Calling the truth "inflammatory" just means you prefer your face buried in the cool sand.
Bias is opinion. Opinions are useful if you are aware they are opinion and can "consider the source."
Many news sources have an obvious political leaning, but the fact that their bias is obvious means that their bias can openly be considered when evaluating what that source is saying.
Anyone reading my stuff is also aware that I similarly have strong personal views on technology. Bias is only deceptive when it is hidden. The Wall Street Journal doesn't pretend to be liberal, and the NY Times doesn't pretend to be conservative. I enjoy reading both, because both offer viewpoints and interesting information without pretending to be something they are not.
Hidden bias is used by writers such as Paul Thurrott - he suggests he really likes Apple stuff, only to spin everything he says in a deceptive and negative way.
Microsoft is behind a huge wave of fraud marketing, and has a history of these tactics, from its attack on Linux and its affiliation with SCO, to its regular FUD comments against Apple - including Ballmer's suggestion that the company is not interested in selling Windows for Macs because they only care about "Real PCs." The Zune campaign is a new example.
Being biased can be entertaining and engaging - consider Jon Stewart. Even Rush Limbaugh, when he's not making fun of the handicapped, is fun to laugh at; however, pretending to not be biased and stating opinions as uncontroversial facts is misleading and slimy.
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One interesting effort in ranking news is NewsTrust, althought it could conceptually be subverted by astroturfing.
It seems that people are far more gullable in believing anonymous hearsay than they should be. Facts can be "called into question" by the most rediculous claims, and those nebulous claims are given equal airtime. It happens in science ("global warming is only a theory!!!") in software ("vaporware vs a real product, we say wait to see how this vapor turns out!!!") and in politics ("global warming is only a theory!!!").
Mac Heist is the RIAA of Mac Software. They market small developers' work and earn them new sales. Developers are happy to sign away rights to sales they would never have seen otherwise, and the organizers make a lot of money from it. Actually, the cut they take is far larger than any other promoter, including the often vilified record companies.
As with musicians, small developers have little capacity to reach broad markets and sell their work. Without an RIAA, they'd be asking for change - like shareware. Not many can live off their work without promotion. Sign them up in a stacked contract, give them money they wouldn't otherwise get, and then market the hell out of it. Throw in "charity."
Keep at least two Mac Heist articles on the front page of Digg at all times for weeks. Make lots of money without creating anything. The RIAA, but with a fatter profit margin.
Phill Ryu is "known for his ability to con Mac users out of anything," as he describes himself on his website. His "My Dream App" similarly gamed Digg into being his free publicity machine. Where are the Mike Caddicks for Phill Ryu? Certainly he's interested in limelight and attention. Why hasn't he been vilified by the police of spam on Digg? He's running a high profit operation on the backs of small developers. The outrage! Capitalism! Oh, wait, nobody cares about spam on Digg, because 80% of Digg is spam.
No, apparently charges of spam and "gaming Digg" only apply when an author, who makes absolutely no money from his work, submits his articles to Digg and other people enjoy them. If there is anything that might challenge the audience, or distract them from what they've been told by CNET, they it must be attacked with a fury.
Maybe if I start taking advantage of small developers and spin out unoriginal, content-free marketing, all the spam and gaming charges will go away.
Quibbling about whether the i860 fits your idea of what 64-bit means is not very interesting. I was only pointing out that the i860 was a modern processor. I made no error.
Clearly, you can write for days about how you don't like things. Just don't confuse your personal prejudices against reality and "factual errors."
I didn't present that Microsoft's Cairo was bad only because it didn't achieve everything it hoped; rather, I pointed out that Microsoft has a history of overpromising and underdelivering.
In 1981, 1991, and 2001, Microsoft promised to deliver what other companies actually delivered within a few years... except that Microsoft didn't really ever deliver.
Its version of the 1984 Mac came out in the end of 1995 - unimpressively. Its version of the 1989 NeXTSTEP stopped trying to ship in 1996. Its version of the 2002 Mac OS X is just now planning to ship in 2007, minus most of its planned features.
The real question is: why are you defending the world from reality?
And before you completely spaz out about how little I like Microsoft, remember that I have repeatedly castigated Apple for its failures as well.
I make errors as well, and appreciate when they are pointed out so I don't make them again, but your rant just pulls crap out of context and presents it in a very disingenous and misleading way. You aren't attacking facts, you're just trying to attack me personally because there is nothing really controversial about Microsoft's reign of incompetence over the tech industry.
The i860 was a 32-bit ALU along with a 64-bit FPU. All of its buses were 64-bits wide, or wider. But lets ask Intel: the Intel i860 64-Bit Microprocessor Data Sheet.
You pick out various other things out of context to discredit my article, but you are clearly just excited about Microsoft. The very real problem is that this article directly attacks the church you worship at; its not a personal thing, I just think you shouldn't be worshiping mediocrity.
It's simply undebatable that Microsoft promised Cairo in 1991 as its own NeXT that would arrive just a few years later, and then spent the 90's cranking out more procedural DOS instead. If you are impressed with Microsoft's track record, its only because you don't know what would be possible had they not stopped any and all real progress.
If you want to call a mix of fraud and incompetence "optimism," well maybe you should work for the government.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that's file shares don't work like copiers. If I put files in a shared folder, it's not a book in a copier, but a system designed to create copies and distribute them to anyone who posts a request.
My system copies the data and sends it to other parties, or even multiple parties simultaneously. Just because my computer is doing the copy and distrubute work doesn't mean I bear no responsiblity. If I programmed a robot to shoot anyone entering my yard, I would eventually be guilty of murder. I couldn't pin it on an independant system.
So no, it isn't a copier that others help themselves to, its a system that happily copies and distributes content. If I feed content owned by other people into my magic file share, I know what the result will be, and I know that I'm perpetrating theft.
What people "seem to misunderstand" is that creating a fanciful story intended to absolve them of responsibilty for their own actions does not actually work in the real world.
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Device Problems In Search of a Solution
It is highly unlikely that the iTV will be anything at all Mac-like. Instead, it will almost certainly be an iPod with display outputs rather than a screen, and audio out rather than a headphone jack. All it needs to do is generate animated TV titles, just like those presented in today's iPod games.
By being a cousin to the iPod, it would share much the same hardware internals and custom designed software. It would really be insane to suggest that Apple would create an entire new distribution of the desktop Mac OS X just to support a $299 TV output device, given that it can poop out an iPod with an HDMI port and have a unified architecture that runs the same iTunes driven content, including iPod games.
An iPhone would be much the same. Handspring adapted the Palm to accomodate phone functions in designing the Treo, so why not add phone and text features to the iPod architecture and end up with a communications device? It's not a cell phone that plays iTunes, its an iPod cousin designed to act as a phone. That gives it all the stuff Apple has already standardized for free: cables to sync, charge, and display out to a TV (can your phone work as a DVR?), software to run iTunes and iPod games, and built in sync integration with iTunes.
iPod, iPhone, iTV: Why Apple's New Platform Works
Your anecdote could apply to any drug. That's why you need a prescription, and why drugs cost so much to bring to market. Any hysterical person can correlate [their own personal chemistry and reaction to a drug] and [dire consequences for the rest of mankind]. If you were deathly allergic to peanuts, would it make peanuts dangerous things that nobody should eat?
In any case, good for you for working to stop smoking.
Doctors & researchers were racing to find a cure for polio for the prominence of "discovering the cure." It has been postulated that the rush to find a cure for polio resulted in careless mixing of blood between test animals that brought the simian form of HIV to humans.
The same interest in curing HIV exists today, its just a harder problem to solve.
It's also easy to blame big evil drug companies for providing treatments rather than cures, but what about the big evil HMOs, who want to minimize costs? Certainly Kaiser Perminente and other HMOs are interested in cheap prevention measures, rather than expensive ongoing treatments.
Another issue preventing drug use is the lack of any mechanism similar to patent protection to induce finding new uses for existing drugs.
Consider Welbutrin: it was found to work better than other anti-depressants for many people, but after a media panic stunt that associated the drug with seizures, doctors were afraid to prescribe it. It was later found that the drug was also effective in helping people stop smoking. The Welbutrin name was tainted that its company rebadged it under a different name: Zyban. It was then proven that Welbutrin had no real danger for most people, and the seizure side effects associated with it only really affected people who already had seizure problems, and even then had less risk than alternative treatments.
Then Welbutrin (busparin) went generic and the profit motive for finding and proving new uses for the drug ended. Sales went to generics manufacturers.
Meanwhile, studies where already showing that welbutrin worked for many people as an aphrodisiac and could help them rebound from problems involving low libido, among other things. Unfortunately, not only was such a drug considered too racy (this was before Viagra), but since the drug maker would have to spend millions in clinical trials proving its efficacy, it made no sense to do so because there was little patent protection still available on the drug.
How many other drugs have known uses, but can't be formally proven because the costs are prohibitive? It's obvious that patent protection DOES create a strong profit motive for finding new uses for new drugs, but it does nothing for drugs we already have and know a lot about - drugs we know are fairly safe, and which have promising new uses.
A non-patent system, where new drugs are discovered and new uses are developed by non-profit 'open source' volunteers wouldn't have the money to do extensive formal clinical trials, which take years and can deliver huge disappointments. How far would Linux or any other FOSS project go in a software world where every program had to prove itself flawless over a long and expensive qualification testing period? Software is wholly unregulated, and anyone can dump out junk and sell it. Drugs aren't like that at all.
The only system that works at all is the huge profit potentials offered by patents, and it has serious shortcomings. As long as the FDA restricts new developments very conservatively, and as long as people can sue drug companies and win huge damages for any risk involved in taking a drug, we simply won't have full access to the drugs we already have.
Apple's Billion Dollar Patent Bluster
Did you mean: _soup?_
There have only been ~7 Million 360's sold since its release last year. While people are clamoring over the shortage of Wii and PS3s, there are plenty of Xbox 360s everywhere I look, but nobody is interested. The market interested in the 360 is pretty much saturated. Even the PlayStation 2 outsold the Xbox 360 this year!
...well who do you think is going to offer a better service for end uses, iTunes or the makers of PlaysForSure?
Of those 7 million units, likely less than half have a hard drive. That means the majority (of "Core systems") can't be used with the XBLive movie download service without an upgrade. So the real installed base for 360s is not only limited, but small.
More than 70 million iPods have been sold, and plenty more use iTunes as a free download. All of these people can buy iTunes movies and use them. That's a much larger market, and a faster growing market. Every quarter, Apple sells 8 million more and this quarter they are expected to sell 15-20 million. The demand for an iPod-TV device will be much higher than that for a game system that can be upgraded with a hard drive and then set up with
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
Palm drove itself out of business before WinCE even showed up.
Jeff Hawkins went from GRiD to Tandy to USR to 3COM and then Handspring with his Palm ideas, and was met with incompetence all the way. Palm and Handspring merged, creating Palm, split apart and rejoined together in an exhausting series of corporate incompetence. The Palm's high point was the Palm V, and it pretty much floundered since by trying to be more like what WinCE offered: big color screens with no battery life in a big box: useless.
1994-1998 Newton was cool but spendy and too big.
1998-2001 Palm was the cool cheap gadget to have.
2001-2007 iPod was the thing to have, who needs a PDA?
2000-2006 WinCE tried to play but nobody cared, Microsoft is ready to let it go.
Newton, GO, GRiD, Palm & WinCE
When you say things like Windows 2.0 was technically impressive product, it makes it hard to take you seriously.
If you pull out bullet points from Wikipedia, then it appears that MS delivered some interesting innovations. Except they didn't; it was all crap. Nobody bought Windows 2.0. That's why MS was working on OS/2 until 1990.
Multitasking, PEM and PM sound great, but they didn't really work in Win95 when running actual applications people had. It wasn't more stable and reliable than the "ancient" Mac OS.
Further, I presented Microsoft's history with Cairo as a lesson about Microsoft, not in direct comparison with Apple. It's not an Apple vs MS holy war. I presented similar histories of Apple's failure to deliver their own products (linked to from TFA).
If you leave Apple out of the picture, it gets even worse for Microsoft, because other vendors were offering the features of Cairo long before MS even missed its first several ship dates.
NT 4 did not ship with all the promises of Cairo; Ms only managed to deliver its own version of PDO five years late, and 2-3 years later than NeXT had delivered its Windows port!
Don't ask me to give NT a break because it was trying to run on "high end PCs" rather than "workstations," because NeXT stopped building its own hardware and was running on PCs as early as 1992. That's FIVE YEARS before NT 4 shipped.
"My version" of reality only seems "warped and twisted" because you're reading history from Wikipedia without criticism or historical reference.
The Secrets of Pink, Taligent and Copland (and OpenStep)
The power of small developers is equivalent to the "market power" exercised by bands on MySpace.
The RIAA labels that you find it so easy to vilify make acts and artists rich. There are no rock star developers. You portray RIAA artists as unhappy about the money they're making, but I don't think you know any developers who are struggling to run a business in a climate where most people don't see any need to pay for software.
Being pimped by a self agrandizing marketer is not anything new, but generally people are not so naive about it when they see it. You seem to fail to understand reality.
I think you have misjuged a significant point about small developers. You say "their contribution is static (existing software) and unchanging."
That applies to those who dumped their old versions out for exposure. However:
They now have to support copies of software sold at WalMart bargain bin pricing.
The more copies sold, the more support they have to provide at no further gain (no royalties paid).
The more copies sold, the more glutted the market is in their product and the fewer copies they'll be able to sell at a reasonable price.
This establishes a throw-away price for small developer's software, which affects the entire market for shareware.
It creates an illusion that it benefits small developers when in really just takes advantage of them to make a quick buck at their expense.
Since Gruber has experience as a small developer, I think it is you who has underestimated his intelligence.
Unless of course, you're dealing with nonrenewable resources rather than a commodity.
If you can sell, say, eggcrates at a huge margin, then yes, new competators will rush in to produce eggcrates.
Selling software is different. Once you dump copies of software on the market, you devalue the price consumers expect to pay. They won't pay full price again if there will be another option to buy a grab bag of software at firesale prices. That destroys the expected price real developers can expect to charge, whether they participate or not.
It's like clearcutting the forest and selling off cheap wood. Who would pay regular prices for sustainable wood afterward? Why?
Phill Ryu is "known for his ability to con Mac users out of anything," as he describes himself on his website. His "My Dream App" similarly gamed Digg into being his free publicity machine. Good for him, but not so great for the small developers he's made a mockery out of, by selling their product out of his WalMart bargain bin at huge profits.
What exactly are the "competators" going to sell? Or do you mean it will employ more pimp operations that sell off software where only a fraction goes to the developers. It's like the RIAA, except for two details: the "organzers" aren't providing any production work as the RIAA does for music artists, and the developers aren't paid royalties. That mean that the more copies that are sold, the richer Ryu's Mac Heist gets, but the more copies of software the developers have to support, without any compensation.
It's total prostitution, and if you don't see that, you are either making money on it or benefiting from the cheap tricks.
I'm glad you like my site.
However, as in the example I gave, antitrust policy is the way the US works. GE, GM, and General Mills might be big companies, but they are not conglomerates on the scale of German and Japanese companies, where mega umbrella companies enter and control multiple markets. As a sloppy example, Mitsubishi does everything from banking to heavy industry, oil, real estate, steel, cars, ag, beer, logistics, insurance, and it even cans tuna.
No American groups can do that because of different economic policies on competition. In the US, there are laws preventing companies from dominating industries and distorting competition, let alone owning multiple industries. The US similarly has had far less support for nationalized utilities.
The US government always investigates mergers and acquisitions to make sure that comeptition won't be distorted as companies converge. Back when Aldus and Adobe became Adobe, the company had to divest itself of Aldus Freehand (because it also had Adobe Illustrator); It sold it off to Macromedia.
Things have changed. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it stripped the software world of far more competition, but no action was taken. Adobe didn't have to get rid of Macromedia Freehand for Adobe Illustrator this time around, nor did it have to allow Dreamweaver and GoLive to remain in competition, and any of a number of other examples. The difference is a change in politics and economic thought.
Despite that shift, monopolies are only allowed where competition is unlikely to benefit consumers. Newspapers in a city are often allowed to join in non-competitive joint contracts to fix prices on advertising, keeping ad prices artificially high in order for newspapers to cheat off obsolescence. But that doesn't mean its legal for gas stations to collude on price fixing too.
Making blanked statements that "monopolies are legal as long as they're not hurting anyone" is similarly misinformed, particularly under the rather arrogant title "Bull... Once more for those who skipped class," so I had to jump on it.
I'm a sucker for arguing against anonymous cowards I guess.
Why Microsoft Can't Compete With iTunes
You say recording labels have "more market power," but that's not true. It just sounds good. In any case, market power is not the issue.
In both cases, small and fairly powerless people are trading their talent in a marketing contract. The only difference is that the RIAA gives artists a flat fee + royalties, and Mac Heist just hands them a small flat fee and no royalties. I made no judgement there, just stating what it is.
What's being criticized is Mac Heist positioning itself as some sort of group in the public interest of software. It isn't. It's a pimp, and its a harsher pimp than the RIAA. Just facts to consider.
Nobody thinks they are "more qualified" to make decisions. People are just pointing out the hypocrisy of going apeshit indignant over the RIAA and then celebrating the far more abusive Mac Heist, which does less (not recording or providing any prodduction services) and takes more (no royalties, less upfront) from small developers. The fact that those same developers signed up does not mean they are getting a fair deal, just that there aren't really any options for them.
Some people have the capacity to see unfair situations and call attention to them. Just because you're not involved or injured doesn't mean there is no abuse going on in the world.
TFA actually pointed out the NT name is said to come from i860, and also mentions the use of NT in OS/2 3.0. Both were ~1988, so we don't need wikipedia in 2006 telling us trivia.
Recall that the Wikipedia is hardly well sourced. Many tech articles are supported by sensationalist articles from the Register which are "original research," or in other words conjecture designed to be snappy used as supporting facts.
Compare the wikipedia article on the iPod and the Zune. The iPod article scrounges up criticisms from every corner of Wikipedia, while the Zune reads like Microsoft talking points presentation. Pretty much every Microsoft article is a glowing fanfest, with little or no criticism at all. All their vaporware products aren't even mentioned, despite there being 4-5 titles every year that could be articles. Compare the apology of an article on Cairo. Misses completely.
Other Apple articles are just as bad, and read like a copy paste job from the web, not a set of facts with any historical significance.
The wikipedia is pretty useful outside of tech, but its tech articles are full of advocacy and reflect the same subjective bias of other user generated content. Articles skirt anything of encyclopedic value to present trivia, much of which is made up crap.
I know this because I've tried to write the beginnings of useful articles; what's already there is just ads and populist fiction. Who reading the wikipedia cares what the Apple store sells!? We don't need wikipedia telling us up to date reports of what's on sale on another web page, but a little history or background on the apple store as a project might be useful or interesting.
Actually exclusive deals are not illegal, and maintaining a monopoly often is.
Try googling news for "exclusive deal," and tell me how many of those are illegal. There are lots of examples of exclusive business deals.
However, while monopolies are allowed in specific areas where it is determined that competition would create more problems that it would solve, the existance of legal monopolies (for cable, power utilitites, water) generally overlap into areas often supplied by the government (municipal transportation, power, water), not competitive industries.
In competitive industires, monopolies are generally illegal. When Lowes Theaters bought AMC Theaters, it was forced by the state of California to divest itself of certain theaters so that it wouldn't own the majority of outlets in certain markets. That happened despite the fact that AMC/Lowes didn't even own all the theaters and had significant competition.
Microsoft's monopoly in operating systems was defined as a monopoly in the court, and found to be abusive in the narrow portion of evidence that was actually considered. Significant efforts were presented to solve that illegal monopoly and abuseive use, but then the current administration swung into power and dismissed any and all action.
So no, despite the rule of law being uninforced in America, monopolies are not generally "legal" just because an anonymous coward says they are. That's a myth. The US has a long history of breaking up monopolies and companies that exercise undo influence over markets. In other countries, including Europe and Asia, monoploy control is more common and not always illegal. Massive conglomerations are typical in Japan and Germany, but were always frowned upon in the US, back when the rule of law was enforced.
Illegal monopolies are not legal any more than illegal wars are legal. Just because something is allowed by a kowtowed populace and an uncritical press does not mean that the law does not exist or that it will never be enforced. Just wait until the red states have a moment to consider how much money they have lost! Once that happens, the US is sure to have a revolution of sorts and elect an administration more interested in enforcing the laws than in distractions of jews, flag burning, gay marrage & all the problems caused by minories.
NeXT offered the world an open standard for a graphical Unix powered by object oriented frameworks called OpenStep.
Sun and HP signed up to deliver OpenStep compliant, interoperable implementations for their operating sytems (Solaris and HP/UX) and GNU started work on GNUStep.
The competition was Cairo (Microsoft's vaporware that never materialized) and Taligent (IBM & Apple's vaporware that never materialized).
Despite being futuristic technology, open, and free, it was dumped upon by its own backers. Sun dumped NeXT for Java hype, and HP joined Taligent just prior to its failing, leaving a void that Microsoft could fill with nothing special.
Apple bought NeXT and repurposed its technology to build Mac OS X. Nobody says much about Taligent or JavaStations anymore, and Vista is struggling to look like Mac OS X. I guess you could say the whole desktop world fumbled the ball, and Apple happened to be in the right place at the right time to grab the ball and run with it.
The Secrets of Pink, Taligent, Copland (and OpenStep)
Record companies aren't a monopoly. There are craploads of competing labels, and plenty of indie sources that act like labels without being abusive, such as CDBaby.
The "RIAA" is simply a lobby group that pushes a legal agenda in favor of various record labels. It's no monopoly.
Software is HARDER to break into, not easier. Sure, anyone can put up a website and send out shareware, but there are not many ways to distribute work in a way that small developers can benefit. They certainly can't compete against big developers, and the piracy of software is far more widespread than music. At least music acts somewhat like an ad to create fans. Nobody buys shareware 1 because they stole shareware 2 from the same developer.
Mac Heist's flat fee means that not only are developers in an abusive contract, but that they don't even make royalties! That's much worse than the RIAA style contracts.
The Danger of DRM
The point is pretty clear: Microsoft gamed the world through the 90's by promising to outdo the competition, but ended up not even matching it ten years later.
Rinse, repeat. The same thing happened in the 80s and again in our decade. You chose to ignore all this, but it doesn't make the facts go away. Everyone hails Microsoft as an innovator and highly successful, but ignores the fact that it has trampled up on real innovation, and outside its monopolies, has been a huge failure.
Calling the truth "inflammatory" just means you prefer your face buried in the cool sand.
The Secret Failures of Microsoft
The Two Faced Monster Inside Zune
Bias is opinion. Opinions are useful if you are aware they are opinion and can "consider the source."
Many news sources have an obvious political leaning, but the fact that their bias is obvious means that their bias can openly be considered when evaluating what that source is saying.
Anyone reading my stuff is also aware that I similarly have strong personal views on technology. Bias is only deceptive when it is hidden. The Wall Street Journal doesn't pretend to be liberal, and the NY Times doesn't pretend to be conservative. I enjoy reading both, because both offer viewpoints and interesting information without pretending to be something they are not.
Hidden bias is used by writers such as Paul Thurrott - he suggests he really likes Apple stuff, only to spin everything he says in a deceptive and negative way.
Microsoft is behind a huge wave of fraud marketing, and has a history of these tactics, from its attack on Linux and its affiliation with SCO, to its regular FUD comments against Apple - including Ballmer's suggestion that the company is not interested in selling Windows for Macs because they only care about "Real PCs." The Zune campaign is a new example.
Being biased can be entertaining and engaging - consider Jon Stewart. Even Rush Limbaugh, when he's not making fun of the handicapped, is fun to laugh at; however, pretending to not be biased and stating opinions as uncontroversial facts is misleading and slimy.
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One interesting effort in ranking news is NewsTrust, althought it could conceptually be subverted by astroturfing.
It seems that people are far more gullable in believing anonymous hearsay than they should be. Facts can be "called into question" by the most rediculous claims, and those nebulous claims are given equal airtime. It happens in science ("global warming is only a theory!!!") in software ("vaporware vs a real product, we say wait to see how this vapor turns out!!!") and in politics ("global warming is only a theory!!!").
A recent example being Andrew Orlowski's iTunes Sales Are Collapsing Myth.
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The iTunes Vendor Lock In Myth
Mac Heist is the RIAA of Mac Software. They market small developers' work and earn them new sales. Developers are happy to sign away rights to sales they would never have seen otherwise, and the organizers make a lot of money from it. Actually, the cut they take is far larger than any other promoter, including the often vilified record companies.
As with musicians, small developers have little capacity to reach broad markets and sell their work. Without an RIAA, they'd be asking for change - like shareware. Not many can live off their work without promotion. Sign them up in a stacked contract, give them money they wouldn't otherwise get, and then market the hell out of it. Throw in "charity."
Keep at least two Mac Heist articles on the front page of Digg at all times for weeks. Make lots of money without creating anything. The RIAA, but with a fatter profit margin.
Phill Ryu is "known for his ability to con Mac users out of anything," as he describes himself on his website. His "My Dream App" similarly gamed Digg into being his free publicity machine. Where are the Mike Caddicks for Phill Ryu? Certainly he's interested in limelight and attention. Why hasn't he been vilified by the police of spam on Digg? He's running a high profit operation on the backs of small developers. The outrage! Capitalism! Oh, wait, nobody cares about spam on Digg, because 80% of Digg is spam.
No, apparently charges of spam and "gaming Digg" only apply when an author, who makes absolutely no money from his work, submits his articles to Digg and other people enjoy them. If there is anything that might challenge the audience, or distract them from what they've been told by CNET, they it must be attacked with a fury.
Maybe if I start taking advantage of small developers and spin out unoriginal, content-free marketing, all the spam and gaming charges will go away.
Digg Fraud Campaigns
Quibbling about whether the i860 fits your idea of what 64-bit means is not very interesting. I was only pointing out that the i860 was a modern processor. I made no error.
Clearly, you can write for days about how you don't like things. Just don't confuse your personal prejudices against reality and "factual errors."
I didn't present that Microsoft's Cairo was bad only because it didn't achieve everything it hoped; rather, I pointed out that Microsoft has a history of overpromising and underdelivering.
In 1981, 1991, and 2001, Microsoft promised to deliver what other companies actually delivered within a few years... except that Microsoft didn't really ever deliver.
Its version of the 1984 Mac came out in the end of 1995 - unimpressively.
Its version of the 1989 NeXTSTEP stopped trying to ship in 1996.
Its version of the 2002 Mac OS X is just now planning to ship in 2007, minus most of its planned features.
The real question is: why are you defending the world from reality?
And before you completely spaz out about how little I like Microsoft, remember that I have repeatedly castigated Apple for its failures as well.
Why Apple Failed
Newton Lessons
I make errors as well, and appreciate when they are pointed out so I don't make them again, but your rant just pulls crap out of context and presents it in a very disingenous and misleading way. You aren't attacking facts, you're just trying to attack me personally because there is nothing really controversial about Microsoft's reign of incompetence over the tech industry.
The i860 was a 32-bit ALU along with a 64-bit FPU. All of its buses were 64-bits wide, or wider. But lets ask Intel: the Intel i860 64-Bit Microprocessor Data Sheet.
You pick out various other things out of context to discredit my article, but you are clearly just excited about Microsoft. The very real problem is that this article directly attacks the church you worship at; its not a personal thing, I just think you shouldn't be worshiping mediocrity.
It's simply undebatable that Microsoft promised Cairo in 1991 as its own NeXT that would arrive just a few years later, and then spent the 90's cranking out more procedural DOS instead. If you are impressed with Microsoft's track record, its only because you don't know what would be possible had they not stopped any and all real progress.
If you want to call a mix of fraud and incompetence "optimism," well maybe you should work for the government.
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The Register's Collapsing iTunes Store Myth
If something is factually wrong in the article, why don't you point it out?
Sounds like you are just dismissing anything that doesn't fit your narrow world view.