Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against Microsoft when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
Actually Microsoft has failed repeatedly in expanding their Windows business model (MS software + parter hardware) into new areas. They've failed in making any money on SmartPhones and PDAs, they've floundered with Tablets, Oragami, TV set top boxes, and Media Center home convergence, and they failed miserably in trying to play the same game against the iPod with WMA licensing.
What has Microsoft done recently? They've started playing Apple, building their own hardware + software combination, the very same tactic everybody though Apple couldn't pull off, but which has kept the Mac alive. Other platforms, which tried to take the licensing path, didn't go anywhere: BeOS, NeXT/OPENSTEP, Solaris/Intel for the desktop, among others. Apple also applied this successfuly with the iPod.
Microsoft has decided they really want to own platforms the way Apple does, so they have more control over the fit and finish, and aren't at the mercy (or indifference) of hardware partners.
Witness:
the Xbox and Xbox360 - no licensing on others' hardware!
the Zune - abandons hardware partners to take on the iPod itself - no licensing!
Do you supose Microsoft has a plan, or that these new turns in any way reflect the dismal failure of previous efforts to license software out?
An overview of Microsoft's directions is presented in mythbuster articles in RoughlyDrafted Magazine:
The Microsoft iPod-Killer Myth
According to proponents of this myth, Microsoft is out to kill Apple's iPod with a player they will design and build on their own. Once it arrives, they expect Microsoft to clean up not only the music player market, but also online music sales, leaving Apple on the sidelines. They're wrong, here's why.
The Microsoft Invincibility Myth
According to proponents of this myth, Microsoft's expertise in building software platforms ensures that everything that Microsoft does will turn to gold. This supposed invincibility is used to prove how Microsoft will eventually dominate all new markets, from online music stores to the iPod, and how advances by Linux and Apple's Mac OS X will never make any significant impact on PC desktops. They're wrong, here's why.
There is actaully little money in contextual ads or "Content Match." The unrealistic dotcom business models that involved selling content using ads are repeating, but that doesn't mean they will work this time around. Consider your own example: MySpace.
MySpace had to get bailed out by Google; they *weren't* making money on their non-stop heavy handed ad-extravaganza. Have you ever visted MySpace? It has more ads going than than an "Advertising suppliment" and there are interstitials and popups and every other trick in the book. It's the highest trafficed site on the web: and they're still in business trouble!
If the #1 top traffic site in the world + shamless quantities of advertising = money losing failure, where do you get the idea that AdSense and other programs are making webmasters rich?
Google jumped in to float MySpace because it represents a marketplace they can use to experiment with gaudy ads and even video. They couldn't let it go strategically either. However, don't think that these sites are making money on all those ads, particularly after the bandwidth spent hosting all that fat content. Have you noticed how the Wall Street Journal and other real sites are linked to subscriptions? That's because advertising doesn't pay the rent!
All the ventures that expected to sell things via advertising went under in the dotcom years - I was here watching. Nothing has changed just because people have forgot about the lessons they were suposed to have learned.
I have dealt with AdSense, AdBrite, and Yahoo! and not only do they pay pretty much nothing for views or clicks, but the traffic they report (even just for impressions, which they don't have to pay for) was around 1/8 the figure of my own stats, pretty much across the board.
I had stats running in three ways: my own web logs, external counting via cookie based Urchin stats (Google Analytics), and the impression numbers related by affiliates. All of these together were consistant. Yet after 100,000 page views, and multiplied by the number of times Yahoo! was putting an ad on my page (3 or 4, depending on their whim), they would consistantly report not ~350,000 views, but rather ~ 45,000.
If they filter out 85% of my traffic, how many clicks did they absorb? In talking to other web hosts with significant traffic, I saw a pretty clear pattern of fraud out of all the pay-per-click advertisers.
The real money in online advertising is not related to banner ads or the contextual ads, but rather Paid Placement Search: paying the search engines to show an ad for a product right when users are searching for it. There is big money in this because it actually results in a lot of sales; banner ads are purposefully overlooked by readers who have grown numb to them.
In any event, no amount of clever business models is going to sell blog advertising that earns any significant money. Unfortunately, the real money in web advertising for individuals (apart from paid placement search) is in creating thousands of fake domains that try to catch searchers typing things in directly, then show them Google/Yahoo ads for what they were looking for; this works, and makes the slumlord domain parkers money.
That's why there are so many worthless "fake search" sites, and why even Google searches now return plenty of these fake search or fake content sites, because Google, et all, are creating a model where catching buyers is more valuable than presenting real information.
Since providing access to information (and sneaking ads into the mix) is Google's core compentency and their singular business model, how long can Google crap where it eats? Can they expect users to keep using them for search results if the results they offer are worthless pages full of their own ads?
Google originally unlocked the web and made it accessable. Now they are
Rather than trying to establish who came up with an idea, I'd like to see more attention given to new, innovative ideas. I'd like to see Microsoft, Apple, and open source groups copy each other's good ideas as much as possible. Good ideas deserved to be copied!
As noted in my various articles on Apple and OSS, companies open things for strategic purposes.
Apple is opening their iCal Server to get it established as an alternative to Exchange Server. They pointed say on their website that Active Directory shops can set up Xserves to run their calendars and leave AD to user authentication, saving all those Microsoft per user Client Access Licenses.
Apple also wants people using Bonjour and would like other distros to benefit from launchd (less likely, since Linux isn't really all about biting off new ways of doing things).
I wrote up more examples of why Apple (an other commercial developers) will only release things as open source while their product has no chance of sales or market penetration otherwise, at:
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Open Source Values and the Peanut Gallery
The value proposition involved in choosing an open source strategy, and a roast of the emerging peanut gallery who are attempting to hijack and betray the free software movement.
BSD and GPL: Different Sources for Different Horses
The benefits and the motivations behind two very different styles of open source development: the BSD style license, pioneered by UC Berkeley and MIT; and the GPL invented by Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement.
The Revolution Will be Open Sourced!
Over the last decade, every player in the software development industry has been dramatically affected by an open source revolution. How will Apple adapt to fit into this new world? Are they leading, following, or falling behind? Do they stand to benefit from an increased adoption of open source practices, or will they simply have to change how they do business?
Apple and Open Source... Strange Buffaloes?
Tim Bray's "Time to Switch?" and John Gruber's "Why Apple Won't Open Source Its Apps" both discuss the potential risks and benefits Apple would face in open sourcing their consumer applications. Here's my take: Apple does not make fierce profits from $130 Mac OS X retail sales, and there isn't a conspiracy behind new apps not working on an old OS.
The 'Mac OS X Closed by Pirates' Myth
According to the proponents of this myth, Apple has abandoned their open source initiatives as they move to Intel, because they are afraid that, armed with the Darwin source code, pirate 3lit3 haxx0rs will p0wn them and have Mac OS X running on generic PCs. They're wrong, here's why.
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BTW, there is no chance they will open up Aqua et all as long as they can sell millions of copies at retail, duh. Even Novell isn't opening their NDS jewels. Solaris is open because nobody needs to buy it anymore.
MySpace gets lots of visits because half of the visitors are returning several times an hour because the crapload of ads and layers of WMP's on autoplay crash their browser repeatedly.
Seriously, if you try to use MySpace on a Mac, you'll be luck to get three pages deep (not counting intersititals) before your browser gives up.
MySpace better milk it while they got it, because running their site like that means it isn't going to be popular long. The teen market is notoriously fickle and they have shorter attention spans than the rest of us.
Don't think other companies are going to ignore the youth networking market either. Remember that Friendster pretty much started it, but after their systems slowed to a crawl, everyone just picked up and moved to the next one. MySpace is not only performing poorly, but the ad glut is embarrasingly shameless.
I wrote about Apple making an entry into social networking with.Mac - their business is not motivated by advertising placement:
An awful lot of screed is being disgorged about Apple's DRM, despite the fact that it is effortlessly simple to get around. Even the most basic user can make a playlist and burn a CD, then use it in whatever device or platform they desire.
People posting about how they bought lots of iTMS songs, then moved to Linux, and now are hopelessly befuddled about their options, are complete liars pushing FUD.
An interesting comparison that nobody seems to be making: what about all the other platforms that make no effort at interoperability with other hardware or software? Why hasn't Scandinavia or France been grandstanding against:
- Sony Playstation games, which don't play on an Xbox, or a GameCube. None can be burned to CD and played elsewhere. - Microsoft's Windows platform, which "locks" applications written to its APIs to its own OS? No way to burn your Windows apps to a CD and import them into Linux. - Apple's Mac OS X software (apart from CLI apps) can't be burned to a CD to run on Linux. - What about Linux' Gnome and KDE apps? Shouldn't everything be a massively fat binary to run anywhere?
( insert 5,000 other obvious and absurd examples here )
Further, rabidly attacking Apple over DRM is like attacking Starbucks over their coffee bean economics. They're the leaders in fair trade/shade grown/sustainable coffee production, so yeah attack them for trying to give a corporate shit about playing fair, then rejoice after putting them out of business, and watch ADM-CoffeeCo replace them selling Frankincoffee grown in the wake of slash and burned rainforest.
Or, in the case of Apple, do a dance on their tombstone, and then you can get rewarded by the WMA alternative, which doesn't support unlimited CD burning, expires tracks when you stop paying for subscription fees, and will soon only run on Paladium PCs.
But if you notice in any sort of retail store... all the products are locked up behind glass, labeled with security tags, policed by security and electronic surveillance. Why? because people would steal anything that wasn't.
Which is the point of DRM - preventing uncontrolled theft. You can do DRM well, or you can do DRM horribly, but the point of DRM is to restrict end users from mass-duplicating and distributing your work.
All the hyper-inflated hubris about how "DRM needs to just go away" is tired, childish, and ignorant. If you want free content, you can make do with ad sites like YouTube to "watch your programming;" if you want MPAA/Hollywood content, you'll need to accept that they won't hand it out freely for anyone to pirate without taking a stab at limiting their losses.
The discussion should be: "how can DRM exist in a way that doesn't trample our existing concept of fair use?" not, "when are movies and music going to be open source and pirate-ready?"
I was on an overhead wing propjet (some Korean or Chinese made thing, looked kinda like a Dornier 328) taking off from Ventiane (Laos) last week, and when the the engines kicked on, it sounded so much like the THX berzschwaaaangahn! that I had to smile. After that, it was just a regular sorta scary, sorta funny (but mostly predictable) ride, and the food was crappy, so the whole experience was very movie theater like.
Microsoft's inability or disinterest in leveraging their.Net API to rapidly build new applications and system utilities stands in stark contrast to Apple use of Cocoa, the API they're selling to their developers.
Apple uses Cocoa not only to rapidly build new freestanding apps like iPhoto, but has rebuilt bundled apps like Mail with it, as well as pretty much everything that isn't Java or a standing legacy codebase (like iTunes or the Finder, which was ported from OS 9 in Carbon). Apple is very much eating their own dog food, so that the direction they sell to developers is actually being put into practice at home, and actively being developed by its owner (and premier user).
The difference:
- Cocoa isn't a flavor of the month. It has functional origins back into the 1989 release of NeXTSTEP, making it over 15 years old. - Apple moved decisively to Cocoa after revealing their strategy for Mac OS X around 2000. - The work to modernize the NeXT APIs into today's Tiger Cocoa (yum) is comparable to delivering.Net 2.0 - more than 1/2 a decade. - Cocoa has incrementally absorbed an increasing role in Mac OS X as it expands to encompass new functions that were only available procedurally before in Mac OS X.
So Apple has a strategy that they are decisively using, while Microsoft takes wild stabs at various things, few of which ever get to mature before a new stab is announced.
Microsoft 2006 sounds a lot like Apple 1996. The difference: there isn't another NeXT for Microsoft to buy.
Well they are either trying to kill their customer base off, or they are trying to raise animals as cheaply as possible so that they can get beef to market at a price consumers will inhale.
When you raise animals knee deep in shit, you have to give them antibiotics to keep them from getting infections that would ruin their suitability for eating.
One alternative is to raise animals in very clean environments, and for example "certify" milk as opposed to cooking it. The problem with being clean instead of cooking, zapping or chemically killing off the microbes afterward, it that it's a lot more expensive. A LOT MORE EXPENSIVE. Compare meat prices/portion sizes/product demand in France with Texas and you'll realize why the US meat industries use antibiotics and are interested in options like irradiation and Carbon Dioxide packaging instead of EU-style certified clean animal husbandry.
It's fashionable to whine about mega-frankinfood, but as soon as customers start paying extra for premium raised meat, "The Corporations" will start providing it. How many people are ready to pay extra for organic produce? The market for "organic & humane" meat is similarly small. Everyone else in America is happy buying huge quantities of cheap, quickly produced meat products to stuff in their fat faces.
That is the crux of the problem with content: Users do not buy content, they buy a license to use it. Arguing otherwise is simplistic and disingenuous. Arguing "against DRM" is also problematic, because it is an untenable position.
If you were right, and we all "owned" every bit of IP we obtained on CDs, DVDs, and whatever else, then yes, DRM would just be a hinderance. DRM (quite obviously) is supposed to protect [content makers] from [users who are trying to rip it off].
Trying to treat IP "content" as a "real good" is a silly because there are no "real goods" that we can duplicate at no cost and then mass distribute an infinite number of flawless reproductions instantly, across the planet. If we had the capacity to do anything like that for cars, houses or other real property, then the business model for producing those real goods would instantly vanish.
If you fail to see the need for DRM, you can't be taken very seriously. The issue isn't "whether DRM is going to exist," but rather "how can we ensure user's fair use rights be protected?"
Anyone talking about how DRM is going to go away because there will "always be holes in DRM" is an idiot, and that kind of rhetoric is really counter productive in trying to ensure that customers a generation from now have a similar set of freedoms in using content as those we have come to expect with VCRs, CD/MP3s, etc.
"No-DRM" speeches are as counter productive as the "No-Nukes" protests of the 70-80s, where a clean, future potential for properly engineered energy policy was destroyed by ignorant people caught up in a semantic rah-rah fest. Instead, we got several generations of dirty power plants that are far more dangerous to the environment and society, and an uncertain future.
By driving all your energy "against DRM", you confuse the real issue, and will likely ensure that we will get something far worse than a "reasonable compromise on DRM that provides for fair use."
There most certainly are technical solutions to a social problems!
Locks and car alarms are "good enough" solutions to prevent vehicle theft. Are they fool proof? Of course not. Am I inconvenienced by having to carry around keys and remember to lock/unlock doors? Yes. But I prefer not to have bums sleeping in my car, or people yanking anything in view simply because they can without any effort. And yes, I've had my car broken into (security defeated). It makes me want to find ways to make things more secured, not less.
I've also had people steal the spark plugs off my motorcycle (for use as a crack pipe) more than once. I can't really lock them down. Sometimes social problems are too great to be able to protect yourself from (I can't really afford/don't care to park my bike in a locked up garage all the time), and you take an occasional loss. Other times, you can take some reasonable precautions to secure your stuff.
Referring to DRM as a failure because:
a) some implementations are retarded, excessively restrictive, or unfair b) most any DRM can be gotten around...is pretty simple minded. The same can be said of any sort of security system, from a hardened firewall, to front door locks, to passports or any other system we've set up to regulate how things work and at least slow down people who are trying to steal or commit whatever crime.
In other threads under this story, you'll find a lot of rah-rah talk about what a good idea "no DRM" is, but imagine if your server, home, checkbook, or identity records lacked any attempt at security, simply because "no security is absolute."
Cory sounds like he's 14. All his moral outrage comes from wanting to watch TV without paying for it, so it's hard to sympathize with his shrill, juvenile rants.
WOW plays poorly on G4 Macs because they have outdated graphics cards compared to gamer PCs.
A 2003 Dual 2 GHz G5 will play WOW poorly if you have a vanilla video card, but not because of the G5. In fact, if you watch processor use while the game is "challenged," you'll notice that with dual G5s, the CPUs are running about 60%. Turn one off and the processor redlines, but the gameplay doesn't change drastically. Put in a higher end PCI card, and it plays like a totally different machine.
The last revision of G5 Macs have PCIe, and better video cards. The Intel Macs have the same stuff or better. It's no surprise that WOW plays better with a much better video card.
The G5/Core Duo are not being compared when you pit them against each other playing WOW; it's pretty much just the video card difference.
Piracy worked to entrench MS-DOS and later Windows, but would work against Apple.
Microsoft's business model involves licensing OS software as broadly as possible. That requires creating cheap licensing and allowing piracy to achieve dominant market share, while at the same time building complex licensing rules that monetize their market share control for the customers who can and will pay for it.
So, OEMs get fairly cheap licensing that allows them to sell a range of PCs from bare bones to elaborate gaming machines (with most of the software development covered by Microsoft). Microsoft then sells IT departments the related server licenses and client access licenses (per user licensing) to make their real money.
Apple is not Microsoft, and has never had a similar goal or business model. Neither did NeXT. Both aspired (driven largely by Steve Jobs) to develop and deliver state of the art hardware that ran exceptionally well integrated software. Apple's Macs were so far ahead of anything else available that the company began pricing its hardware at a significant premium, which resulted in turing the Mac platform into a hi-end brand through the 80s & 90s. NeXT, in agreements with Apple, entered the high end workstation market exclusively.
When Apple and NeXT merged, their combined control of markets wasn't spectacular: it was in the area of ~5% or less of all PCs shipped. The company targeted consumer sales, worked to regain strongholds in education, and has since delivered server products. They continue to make their money from hardware, not software licensing. In fact, the Xserve sales talk makes a big deal about how much cheaper they are when compared to Microsoft's client access style licensing.
The way Apple licenses its software should serve as a wake up call to anyone who still thinks that the company would secretly welcome piracy as an attempt to bump up its market share.
Apple already freely licenses Windows software that it believes would somehow benefit the company:
- Bonjour for Windows is free (establishes Bonjour as an industry standard) -.Mac tools for XP is free (encourages.Mac subscription sales) - iTunes for Windows is free (iPod sales) - QuickTime for Windows is free (establishes QT as a standard)
So if Apple thought that Mac OS X for PCs would be a clever ploy, they could throw it out there. They do know how to distribute software, are not averse to developing free tools, and understand how to create maintain platforms.
Mac OS X however, is built to sell Apple's hardware. The combination of X + Mac hardware results in a package experience that is carefully controlled and easier to maintain.
Microsoft spends a lot of its development efforts in supporting a huge array of hardware and maintaining support for decades of legacy. Apple can simply drop old cruft, release new hardware and offer immediate support for it with a new patch of OS X.
Apple built another platform along the same lines with the iPod + iTunes + FairPlay iTMS. They work well as a package. Apple isn't licensing FairPlay for the same reason: you'd end up with a splintered experience of fake competition (everybody licenses the same songs for the same price anyway from the same music cartel), and Apple would suddenly lose control of a system they now own. So the next time the iTMS gets hacked, Apple wouldn't be able to release a patch that solves their problems, but they'd have to work with all these other stores/players/devices who were also selling FairPlay systems and figure out how to patch them all.
Look at Apple's 1995 attempt at licensing: there was no benefit for Apple. No innovation really, just nimble companies that could obtain small batches of faster chips and sell off Apple's reference designs with the fastest of PPC processors available. Apple owes its shareholders those profits, and they owe their paying customers new developments and innovation.
Of course, my mom can't really go out and get a Dell, build a Linux kernel on it, and assemble an array of FOSS programs that work anything remotely like Mail/Safari/iLife. Heck, I couldn't be bothered to set that up, and I sure as heck wouldn't want to try maintaining/administrating it for my mom in another state.
In fact, iTunes is about the only thing you WOULDN'T have to live without, since there have been several stabs at getting the Windows version workable on Linux. Everything else in the Mac experience is missing.
To suggest Mac OS X is anything remotely similar to "BSD + some apps" is profoundly retarded and disingenious.
The value IBM was adding to Apple's Mac platform evaporated when Apple's PPC partners decided the desktop wasn't anything they cared about. That occured around 2000, when Microsoft completely abandoned NT's cross platform strategy plans. PPC has been on life support and in denial since PPC lost out on every desktop apart from Apple's. Since then, Apple has been leading Mac OS X development away from 68K/PPC dependance and toward a place where they could jump on the only viable platform for desktop PCs.
You can cry for PPC, but there isn't any way that Apple could continue to develop a processor platform entirely independant from the rest of the desktop PC world and remain competitive with the economies of scale enjoyed by Intel/AMD, particularly after its PPC partners gave up.
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Linux is a very useful tool for many jobs, but its versatility is actually a major barrier for anyone trying to deploy it on the desktop. Everything is splintered to fit various different needs. Commonality and standarization is the value Apple adds with their products; the processor and underlying core OS are mere elements.
Apple can jump to Intel because they control the whole Mac world. Microsoft couldn't manage to keep Windows 2000 up on Alpha, PowerPC or MIPS because they shared control of the PC world with manufacturers.
Similarly, while Apple benefits from solid BSD foundation code, they could theoretically adapt Mac OS X Cocoa frameworks to live on top of Windows (as OSE was), Solaris or Linux (yes I realize that would not be very practical). But the point is, Apple's core competency was not PPC+BSD. It is the "Mac experience," which has little to do with individual components that might be in a Mac.
So the price of oil goes up momentarily for what, a year? And this analyst decides that, since oil producers didn't instantly develop the technology to extract hydrocarbons from shale, or find a whole new set of oil reserves in areas we haven't even yet begun to look, that its all downhill from here? What bullshit.
That sounds an awful lot like the 1970's analysts who said we'd have no oil at all by 2000.
Or the brainiac reporter who insisted that Apple's iPod was not going to have any effect on Mac sales after interviewing 10 iPod users who didn't also buy a Mac on their visit to the Apple store in 2004.
Anyone can rub together two brain cells and write a report that glosses over market realities with some sensationalist simplifications.
Basic economics indicates that that the market can fall behind reality for several years. But obviously, at some point when oil rises to a level where it can comfortably stay, all kinds of results will kick in: conservation, alternative fuels, alternative oil discovery, alternative oil sources. To suggest that we've hit the end of the oil pan is plainly retarded.
We've only known about the middle east's oil for most of a century. There's plenty of places we haven't looked, and more we know about and chose not to exploit because either the market can't support it yet, or there is lower hanging fruit, or there are political or environmental concerns we can't resolve yet.
The word "evolved" was used to create the suggestion that genetic variation within a genus or species is the same thing as life springing from non-living matter, or a lifeform making dramatic jumps to 'outsmart' genetic error correction systems and thereby develop incredable new technologies via random flaws in DNA which result in totally different lifeforms.
It's like talking about your dog's puppies having "evolved" longer hair (or a louder bark) than their parents.
By associating two totally different things with the same word, you can create the illusion that both share the same flaws (or accuracy, depending on what ideas you are trying to spin). This is particularly effective in linking a non-controversial idea with a rabidly controversial one in order to create controversy for both (or depending on the desired goal, to do the opposite!)
One could do the same thing by:
- referring to birth control as "abortion" - referring to global warming as "climate change" - referring to imprisoned people you torture without trial as "illegal combatants" - referring to the establishment of state sponsored religion as "faith based inititives"
IBM announced a lot of things. It was their inability to deliver that prompted Apple to switch.
Further, this announcement is news for IBM's server business. It isn't even relevant to Apple's business, since they don't use IBM's POWER server processors even in their server products. The PowerPC is a cousin that benefits from hand me downs.
CNet brought Apple into the story to give it some interest. Who cares otherwise? The "news" sure wouldn't have been on the Slashdot front page had it not involved Apple in the headline.
Even if IBM/Freescale had found some "hyperconducting cold fusion" technology to bolt onto the PPC to make it competitive with Intel's latest stuff (ie performance of the G5 and efficiency of the G4), it wouldn't serve Apple's needs to keep maintaining a platform that is significantly different from the commodity PC market.
By going with Intel, Apple benefits from PC world's economy of scale in the area of general purpose chipsets (wireless, integrated bus controllers), manufacturing, and key areas of software development. Apple's core competencies do not involve maintaining the only desktop version of PPC software development tools, laying out the yawn-er bit of common logic board designs, and convincing programmers to specialize in Altivec optimizations.
By picking up lower cost, common parts that fulfill the boring bits of PCs, Apple can concentrate on delivering an advanced user interface, higher level software tools, and hardware/software integration & fit and finish, things that Apple really does well, and that are not tied to low level hardware details.
Apple has delegated all that lower level stuff to Intel, which has been plugging along for the last decade providing similar services for boring PC companies like HP and Dell that have been loathe to deploy any of the new stuff Intel has introduced: from USB to EFI.
Apple makes a great darling showoff customer for Intel, while Intel delivers Apple with a high quality set of end to end solutions for desktop hardware that covers a range of consumer/workstation/server needs. The whole point of Apple going with Intel was that neither PPC partner wanted to support Apple in delivering G4/G5 products built for desktops, laptops and workgroup servers.
IBM wants to make gigantor server arrays for big customers, and Freescale wants to make imbedded processors for cars and videogames. No wizzy new technology is going to change that, because no matter what they discover, the PPC fabricators are not going to be focused on delivering it for Apple, since they've chosen business elsewhere in the spectrum.
Dramatically changing the rules of a complex system to a simple subset of rules only make sense to someone who does not understand why the system has any complexity in the first place.
One could say the same about the rules of any system:
"Games are too complicated. Ballgames should only have two rules: run with the ball, get point when ball delivered."
Taxes are complex because they reflect a complex set of inducements and penalties that represent tax policy. Do you think that if we made broad and sweeping across the board changes to how income taxes are charged and collected, that those changes would have no effect on how business worked going forward?
Would someone who deducted charitable contributions continue giving if there were no tax benefit? Would someone who had earned income credits for using environmentally friendly devices continue if there were no tax benefit? Would someone continue to try to earn a profit if those additional profits were taxed severely at a certain level? Would people contribute to long term savings and/or retirement accounts if there was suddenly no tax benefit to doing so?
One major difference between EU and US taxes lies with the culture of US independence, where people generally and historically vote a preference toward paying their own way and carrying a more direct responsibility for their own investments and financial security.
In the EU, society takes care of health care, education, transportation and social services. In the US, the upper middle classes (and up) takes care of themselves, while the lower majority grovels as WalMart wage slaves and inner city thugs. As the system perpetuates (and further entrenches), it becomes more difficult to demand that successful individuals give away their wealth to socially rehabilitate the trailer park set that has chosen a lifestyle of sweatspants, TV, buffets and crystal meth.
The same conflicts are present in the EU, but socialism paves over discrepancies to a larger extent.
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In other news:
People in the top US tax bracket do not pay 35% of their income. They pay accountants to find ways to avoid paying taxes. Also, the top tax rates and and the number of different tax brackets in existence have both dropped dramatically since the early 80s, creating a further rift between the ants and the grasshoppers.
I state that as a non-highly paid, urban office worker. I didn't get the state to pay for my healthcare or education, and at this point, I'm not excited about liquidating my accounts to pay for some meth fiend's dental work. At the same time however, it'd be nice if the US took better care of the poor, because I don't want to face an virulent public pandemic outbreak of, say, SARS in a country with dysfunctional health care.
Nobody is accusing the government (or AT&T) of spying on terrorists.
The question is instead: can an administration that lied to start a war be trusted to take further illegal actions against American citizens, based on unknown goals?
- The administration lied to start a war which is both killing thousands of innocent civilians and killing/wounding/shell-shocking a new generation of young American soldiers.
- The war serves no purpose to secure American people or interests, but rather inflames terrorism against Americans.
- The original lie was told to start a war that would enrich specific corporations by rebuilding the destruction with Iraqi money, but backfired when we started losing the war, and it turned from a quick invasion to a Vietnam style boondoggle, and is now clearly a long term police state that will generate a new breed of terrorism.
- American soldiers are now dying and suffering to support and contain a tragic mistake the administration made to divert interest from real terrorist threats (like Osama bin Ladin IN AFGHANISTAN, who was left alone !! and N. Korea, which has the capacity to nuke people rather than just crash planes) and instead create a patriotic smoke screen and enrich corporate friends.
- Does this shamefully incompetent, dishonest and inept administration deserve some blind trust that any investigations it handles need not ever follow any of the basic rules of law, rules designed to protect against abuses of power against American citizens?
People with the capacity to think, whether they are conservative, moderate, or liberal, should question an administration that thinks it is above the law, particularly when it HAS A HISTORY of using wartime hysteria to mask over illegal, destructive and unethical behavior.
The illegal acts of the administration are far beyond Nixon's; it's just that the current president thinks he has enough unthinking supporters to do whatever suits his objectives and those of his corporate partners. The 2005 US is looking a LOT like Hitler's pre-war Germany.
It's not really the time to be unthinkingly supportive of illegal government actions, which are wrapped up in criminal arrogance and hiding behind a flag. Wake up!
WOW is highly dependent on your graphics card. The Intel Mac's PCIe graphics card is far better than what most Mac users are used to: middle of the road 4x AGP or less.
Watching the processor use graph on my dual 2.0 GHz (first generation) G5, I could turn off one processor and see a minor difference in performance. With both processors running, utilization was about 60% on both at the max.
When I upgraded my G5's video card, I saw enormous advances in how the game played, how many effects I could turn on, and the top resolution.
Therefore, I'd say WOW isn't a very good test of processor differences between Core Duo and G5, particularly if you are not comparing a similar bus architecture and video card, which is the real bottleneck.
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Another benchmarking flaw comes from comparing the Intel build of 10.4.4 against the PPC build, as the PPC version isn't identical.
All the comparisons I've seen so far haven't even bothered to install the same amount of RAM. WTF? Who DOESN'T know that installing another 512 MB in a Mac makes Mac OS X run completely different?!
One could take any Mac, run benchmarks with differing amounts of RAM, enable different features, disable various components of Mac OS X, and do things like delete caches and adjust things like disk speed and graphics resolution, and get fantastic different results from the same machine.
Unless benchmarks are done by someone who knows what they are doing, they are completely useless. Of course, benchmarks are generally done by somebody trying to prove a given point, so they are frequently misleading and exaggerated by design.
When motives aren't getting in the way of the 'truth', incompetence usually is.
Well "prototype," like "beta," can refer to a wide range of things, from barely functional to "we're being careful."
The MacWorld demonstrators didn't use the word prototype to me, they called it prerelease hardware. The amount of room for adjusting things with shipping less than a month away is clearly limited. Optimizing battery life is a software effort that could make quite a bit of progress within a couple weeks of final testing, but it's pretty obvious that they aren't going to make any changes to the hardware, such as adding FW800.
I originally mentioned a bill of rights to officially protect fair use rights. Currently, our fair use rights are based on (I believe) the Betamax court case decision. There is not a clear definition of what fair use is. In many other countries, there is no principle of fair use at all.
You said such a bill of rights would somehow limit future rights. But our rights today are rather shaky and under attack from IP holders, so having a starting definition of 'inalienable' rights would do the opposite: define a foundation of user rights to be built upon later.
The idea that somehow anything not stated would automatically be lost is your own invention, and not supported by any examples.
As I pointed out about the Bill of Rights, and as you pointed out about the Constitution, one can draft a law that serves its intended purpose by wording it as needed. Sheesh.
Using your line of specious reasoning, will the DMCA somehow limit future attempts at privacy destruction or fair use dismantling? Will it somehow stop future expansion DRM? Hardly; it's a foot in the door.
If we'd had a clear bill of rights for fair use prior to the introduction of the DMCA, it would not have passed or been much easier to throw out.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Microsoft has failed repeatedly in expanding their Windows business model (MS software + parter hardware) into new areas. They've failed in making any money on SmartPhones and PDAs, they've floundered with Tablets, Oragami, TV set top boxes, and Media Center home convergence, and they failed miserably in trying to play the same game against the iPod with WMA licensing.
What has Microsoft done recently? They've started playing Apple, building their own hardware + software combination, the very same tactic everybody though Apple couldn't pull off, but which has kept the Mac alive. Other platforms, which tried to take the licensing path, didn't go anywhere: BeOS, NeXT/OPENSTEP, Solaris/Intel for the desktop, among others. Apple also applied this successfuly with the iPod.
Microsoft has decided they really want to own platforms the way Apple does, so they have more control over the fit and finish, and aren't at the mercy (or indifference) of hardware partners.
Witness:
the Xbox and Xbox360 - no licensing on others' hardware!
the Zune - abandons hardware partners to take on the iPod itself - no licensing!
Do you supose Microsoft has a plan, or that these new turns in any way reflect the dismal failure of previous efforts to license software out?
An overview of Microsoft's directions is presented in mythbuster articles in RoughlyDrafted Magazine:
The Microsoft iPod-Killer Myth
According to proponents of this myth, Microsoft is out to kill Apple's iPod with a player they will design and build on their own. Once it arrives, they expect Microsoft to clean up not only the music player market, but also online music sales, leaving Apple on the sidelines. They're wrong, here's why.
The Microsoft Invincibility Myth
According to proponents of this myth, Microsoft's expertise in building software platforms ensures that everything that Microsoft does will turn to gold. This supposed invincibility is used to prove how Microsoft will eventually dominate all new markets, from online music stores to the iPod, and how advances by Linux and Apple's Mac OS X will never make any significant impact on PC desktops. They're wrong, here's why.
MySpace had to get bailed out by Google; they *weren't* making money on their non-stop heavy handed ad-extravaganza. Have you ever visted MySpace? It has more ads going than than an "Advertising suppliment" and there are interstitials and popups and every other trick in the book. It's the highest trafficed site on the web: and they're still in business trouble!
If the #1 top traffic site in the world + shamless quantities of advertising = money losing failure, where do you get the idea that AdSense and other programs are making webmasters rich?
Google jumped in to float MySpace because it represents a marketplace they can use to experiment with gaudy ads and even video. They couldn't let it go strategically either. However, don't think that these sites are making money on all those ads, particularly after the bandwidth spent hosting all that fat content. Have you noticed how the Wall Street Journal and other real sites are linked to subscriptions? That's because advertising doesn't pay the rent!
All the ventures that expected to sell things via advertising went under in the dotcom years - I was here watching. Nothing has changed just because people have forgot about the lessons they were suposed to have learned.
I have dealt with AdSense, AdBrite, and Yahoo! and not only do they pay pretty much nothing for views or clicks, but the traffic they report (even just for impressions, which they don't have to pay for) was around 1/8 the figure of my own stats, pretty much across the board.
I had stats running in three ways: my own web logs, external counting via cookie based Urchin stats (Google Analytics), and the impression numbers related by affiliates. All of these together were consistant. Yet after 100,000 page views, and multiplied by the number of times Yahoo! was putting an ad on my page (3 or 4, depending on their whim), they would consistantly report not ~350,000 views, but rather ~ 45,000.
If they filter out 85% of my traffic, how many clicks did they absorb? In talking to other web hosts with significant traffic, I saw a pretty clear pattern of fraud out of all the pay-per-click advertisers.
I wrote up details in Secrets of Pay Per Click Advertising.
The real money in online advertising is not related to banner ads or the contextual ads, but rather Paid Placement Search: paying the search engines to show an ad for a product right when users are searching for it. There is big money in this because it actually results in a lot of sales; banner ads are purposefully overlooked by readers who have grown numb to them.
In any event, no amount of clever business models is going to sell blog advertising that earns any significant money. Unfortunately, the real money in web advertising for individuals (apart from paid placement search) is in creating thousands of fake domains that try to catch searchers typing things in directly, then show them Google/Yahoo ads for what they were looking for; this works, and makes the slumlord domain parkers money.
That's why there are so many worthless "fake search" sites, and why even Google searches now return plenty of these fake search or fake content sites, because Google, et all, are creating a model where catching buyers is more valuable than presenting real information.
Since providing access to information (and sneaking ads into the mix) is Google's core compentency and their singular business model, how long can Google crap where it eats? Can they expect users to keep using them for search results if the results they offer are worthless pages full of their own ads?
Google originally unlocked the web and made it accessable. Now they are
RoughlyDrafted Magazine has articles on what's really new in Time Machine in The Time Machine Rip-off Myth,
explained what new stuff Thurrott overlooked in WWDC Secrets Paul Thurrott Hopes You Miss,
and gave Three Reasons Why Microsoft Can't Ship (and Apple can).
The RDM Paul Thurrott story was dugg 1300+ times today!
Apple is opening their iCal Server to get it established as an alternative to Exchange Server. They pointed say on their website that Active Directory shops can set up Xserves to run their calendars and leave AD to user authentication, saving all those Microsoft per user Client Access Licenses.
Apple also wants people using Bonjour and would like other distros to benefit from launchd (less likely, since Linux isn't really all about biting off new ways of doing things).
I wrote up more examples of why Apple (an other commercial developers) will only release things as open source while their product has no chance of sales or market penetration otherwise, at:
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Open Source Values and the Peanut Gallery
The value proposition involved in choosing an open source strategy, and a roast of the emerging peanut gallery who are attempting to hijack and betray the free software movement.
BSD and GPL: Different Sources for Different Horses
The benefits and the motivations behind two very different styles of open source development: the BSD style license, pioneered by UC Berkeley and MIT; and the GPL invented by Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement.
The Revolution Will be Open Sourced!
Over the last decade, every player in the software development industry has been dramatically affected by an open source revolution. How will Apple adapt to fit into this new world? Are they leading, following, or falling behind? Do they stand to benefit from an increased adoption of open source practices, or will they simply have to change how they do business?
Apple and Open Source... Strange Buffaloes?
Tim Bray's "Time to Switch?" and John Gruber's "Why Apple Won't Open Source Its Apps" both discuss the potential risks and benefits Apple would face in open sourcing their consumer applications. Here's my take: Apple does not make fierce profits from $130 Mac OS X retail sales, and there isn't a conspiracy behind new apps not working on an old OS.
The 'Mac OS X Closed by Pirates' Myth
According to the proponents of this myth, Apple has abandoned their open source initiatives as they move to Intel, because they are afraid that, armed with the Darwin source code, pirate 3lit3 haxx0rs will p0wn them and have Mac OS X running on generic PCs. They're wrong, here's why.
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BTW, there is no chance they will open up Aqua et all as long as they can sell millions of copies at retail, duh. Even Novell isn't opening their NDS jewels. Solaris is open because nobody needs to buy it anymore.
MySpace gets lots of visits because half of the visitors are returning several times an hour because the crapload of ads and layers of WMP's on autoplay crash their browser repeatedly.
.Mac - their business is not motivated by advertising placement:
A F-44DF-A3BA-7FE0D9D77A19.html
Seriously, if you try to use MySpace on a Mac, you'll be luck to get three pages deep (not counting intersititals) before your browser gives up.
MySpace better milk it while they got it, because running their site like that means it isn't going to be popular long. The teen market is notoriously fickle and they have shorter attention spans than the rest of us.
Don't think other companies are going to ignore the youth networking market either. Remember that Friendster pretty much started it, but after their systems slowed to a crawl, everyone just picked up and moved to the next one. MySpace is not only performing poorly, but the ad glut is embarrasingly shameless.
I wrote about Apple making an entry into social networking with
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/A592FAA3-5A
recent stories from http://www.roughlydrafted.com/
1. BSD & GPL: Different Sources for Different Horses
2. The Revolution Will be Open Sourced!
3. Apple & Open Source... Strange Buffaloes?
4. The 'Mac OS X Closed by Pirates' Myth
An awful lot of screed is being disgorged about Apple's DRM, despite the fact that it is effortlessly simple to get around. Even the most basic user can make a playlist and burn a CD, then use it in whatever device or platform they desire.
E 6-426B-9B32-433F4CABC730.html7 A-44C1-9D8A-4AB90106BB4D.html5 A-41DF-8C18-99A08767ABEE.html
People posting about how they bought lots of iTMS songs, then moved to Linux, and now are hopelessly befuddled about their options, are complete liars pushing FUD.
An interesting comparison that nobody seems to be making: what about all the other platforms that make no effort at interoperability with other hardware or software? Why hasn't Scandinavia or France been grandstanding against:
- Sony Playstation games, which don't play on an Xbox, or a GameCube. None can be burned to CD and played elsewhere.
- Microsoft's Windows platform, which "locks" applications written to its APIs to its own OS? No way to burn your Windows apps to a CD and import them into Linux.
- Apple's Mac OS X software (apart from CLI apps) can't be burned to a CD to run on Linux.
- What about Linux' Gnome and KDE apps? Shouldn't everything be a massively fat binary to run anywhere?
( insert 5,000 other obvious and absurd examples here )
Further, rabidly attacking Apple over DRM is like attacking Starbucks over their coffee bean economics. They're the leaders in fair trade/shade grown/sustainable coffee production, so yeah attack them for trying to give a corporate shit about playing fair, then rejoice after putting them out of business, and watch ADM-CoffeeCo replace them selling Frankincoffee grown in the wake of slash and burned rainforest.
Or, in the case of Apple, do a dance on their tombstone, and then you can get rewarded by the WMA alternative, which doesn't support unlimited CD burning, expires tracks when you stop paying for subscription fees, and will soon only run on Paladium PCs.
How ruthlessly absurd.
The Revolution Will be Open Sourced!
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/146AE13C-A0
BSD & GPL: Different Sources for Different Horses
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/3FA34DA6-CD
Apple & Open Source... Strange Buffaloes?
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/EB25ECDF-0E
Yes DRM is like jail.
But if you notice in any sort of retail store... all the products are locked up behind glass, labeled with security tags, policed by security and electronic surveillance. Why? because people would steal anything that wasn't.
Which is the point of DRM - preventing uncontrolled theft. You can do DRM well, or you can do DRM horribly, but the point of DRM is to restrict end users from mass-duplicating and distributing your work.
All the hyper-inflated hubris about how "DRM needs to just go away" is tired, childish, and ignorant. If you want free content, you can make do with ad sites like YouTube to "watch your programming;" if you want MPAA/Hollywood content, you'll need to accept that they won't hand it out freely for anyone to pirate without taking a stab at limiting their losses.
The discussion should be: "how can DRM exist in a way that doesn't trample our existing concept of fair use?" not, "when are movies and music going to be open source and pirate-ready?"
I was on an overhead wing propjet (some Korean or Chinese made thing, looked kinda like a Dornier 328) taking off from Ventiane (Laos) last week, and when the the engines kicked on, it sounded so much like the THX berzschwaaaangahn! that I had to smile. After that, it was just a regular sorta scary, sorta funny (but mostly predictable) ride, and the food was crappy, so the whole experience was very movie theater like.
Microsoft's inability or disinterest in leveraging their .Net API to rapidly build new applications and system utilities stands in stark contrast to Apple use of Cocoa, the API they're selling to their developers.
.Net 2.0 - more than 1/2 a decade.
Apple uses Cocoa not only to rapidly build new freestanding apps like iPhoto, but has rebuilt bundled apps like Mail with it, as well as pretty much everything that isn't Java or a standing legacy codebase (like iTunes or the Finder, which was ported from OS 9 in Carbon). Apple is very much eating their own dog food, so that the direction they sell to developers is actually being put into practice at home, and actively being developed by its owner (and premier user).
The difference:
- Cocoa isn't a flavor of the month. It has functional origins back into the 1989 release of NeXTSTEP, making it over 15 years old.
- Apple moved decisively to Cocoa after revealing their strategy for Mac OS X around 2000.
- The work to modernize the NeXT APIs into today's Tiger Cocoa (yum) is comparable to delivering
- Cocoa has incrementally absorbed an increasing role in Mac OS X as it expands to encompass new functions that were only available procedurally before in Mac OS X.
So Apple has a strategy that they are decisively using, while Microsoft takes wild stabs at various things, few of which ever get to mature before a new stab is announced.
Microsoft 2006 sounds a lot like Apple 1996. The difference: there isn't another NeXT for Microsoft to buy.
Well they are either trying to kill their customer base off, or they are trying to raise animals as cheaply as possible so that they can get beef to market at a price consumers will inhale.
When you raise animals knee deep in shit, you have to give them antibiotics to keep them from getting infections that would ruin their suitability for eating.
One alternative is to raise animals in very clean environments, and for example "certify" milk as opposed to cooking it. The problem with being clean instead of cooking, zapping or chemically killing off the microbes afterward, it that it's a lot more expensive. A LOT MORE EXPENSIVE. Compare meat prices/portion sizes/product demand in France with Texas and you'll realize why the US meat industries use antibiotics and are interested in options like irradiation and Carbon Dioxide packaging instead of EU-style certified clean animal husbandry.
It's fashionable to whine about mega-frankinfood, but as soon as customers start paying extra for premium raised meat, "The Corporations" will start providing it. How many people are ready to pay extra for organic produce? The market for "organic & humane" meat is similarly small. Everyone else in America is happy buying huge quantities of cheap, quickly produced meat products to stuff in their fat faces.
That is the crux of the problem with content: Users do not buy content, they buy a license to use it. Arguing otherwise is simplistic and disingenuous. Arguing "against DRM" is also problematic, because it is an untenable position.
If you were right, and we all "owned" every bit of IP we obtained on CDs, DVDs, and whatever else, then yes, DRM would just be a hinderance. DRM (quite obviously) is supposed to protect [content makers] from [users who are trying to rip it off].
Trying to treat IP "content" as a "real good" is a silly because there are no "real goods" that we can duplicate at no cost and then mass distribute an infinite number of flawless reproductions instantly, across the planet. If we had the capacity to do anything like that for cars, houses or other real property, then the business model for producing those real goods would instantly vanish.
If you fail to see the need for DRM, you can't be taken very seriously. The issue isn't "whether DRM is going to exist," but rather "how can we ensure user's fair use rights be protected?"
Anyone talking about how DRM is going to go away because there will "always be holes in DRM" is an idiot, and that kind of rhetoric is really counter productive in trying to ensure that customers a generation from now have a similar set of freedoms in using content as those we have come to expect with VCRs, CD/MP3s, etc.
"No-DRM" speeches are as counter productive as the "No-Nukes" protests of the 70-80s, where a clean, future potential for properly engineered energy policy was destroyed by ignorant people caught up in a semantic rah-rah fest. Instead, we got several generations of dirty power plants that are far more dangerous to the environment and society, and an uncertain future.
By driving all your energy "against DRM", you confuse the real issue, and will likely ensure that we will get something far worse than a "reasonable compromise on DRM that provides for fair use."
Stupid people fuck everything up.
There most certainly are technical solutions to a social problems!
...is pretty simple minded. The same can be said of any sort of security system, from a hardened firewall, to front door locks, to passports or any other system we've set up to regulate how things work and at least slow down people who are trying to steal or commit whatever crime.
Locks and car alarms are "good enough" solutions to prevent vehicle theft. Are they fool proof? Of course not. Am I inconvenienced by having to carry around keys and remember to lock/unlock doors? Yes. But I prefer not to have bums sleeping in my car, or people yanking anything in view simply because they can without any effort. And yes, I've had my car broken into (security defeated). It makes me want to find ways to make things more secured, not less.
I've also had people steal the spark plugs off my motorcycle (for use as a crack pipe) more than once. I can't really lock them down. Sometimes social problems are too great to be able to protect yourself from (I can't really afford/don't care to park my bike in a locked up garage all the time), and you take an occasional loss. Other times, you can take some reasonable precautions to secure your stuff.
Referring to DRM as a failure because:
a) some implementations are retarded, excessively restrictive, or unfair
b) most any DRM can be gotten around
In other threads under this story, you'll find a lot of rah-rah talk about what a good idea "no DRM" is, but imagine if your server, home, checkbook, or identity records lacked any attempt at security, simply because "no security is absolute."
Cory sounds like he's 14. All his moral outrage comes from wanting to watch TV without paying for it, so it's hard to sympathize with his shrill, juvenile rants.
WOW plays poorly on G4 Macs because they have outdated graphics cards compared to gamer PCs.
A 2003 Dual 2 GHz G5 will play WOW poorly if you have a vanilla video card, but not because of the G5. In fact, if you watch processor use while the game is "challenged," you'll notice that with dual G5s, the CPUs are running about 60%. Turn one off and the processor redlines, but the gameplay doesn't change drastically. Put in a higher end PCI card, and it plays like a totally different machine.
The last revision of G5 Macs have PCIe, and better video cards. The Intel Macs have the same stuff or better. It's no surprise that WOW plays better with a much better video card.
The G5/Core Duo are not being compared when you pit them against each other playing WOW; it's pretty much just the video card difference.
Piracy worked to entrench MS-DOS and later Windows, but would work against Apple.
.Mac tools for XP is free (encourages .Mac subscription sales)
Microsoft's business model involves licensing OS software as broadly as possible. That requires creating cheap licensing and allowing piracy to achieve dominant market share, while at the same time building complex licensing rules that monetize their market share control for the customers who can and will pay for it.
So, OEMs get fairly cheap licensing that allows them to sell a range of PCs from bare bones to elaborate gaming machines (with most of the software development covered by Microsoft). Microsoft then sells IT departments the related server licenses and client access licenses (per user licensing) to make their real money.
Apple is not Microsoft, and has never had a similar goal or business model. Neither did NeXT. Both aspired (driven largely by Steve Jobs) to develop and deliver state of the art hardware that ran exceptionally well integrated software. Apple's Macs were so far ahead of anything else available that the company began pricing its hardware at a significant premium, which resulted in turing the Mac platform into a hi-end brand through the 80s & 90s. NeXT, in agreements with Apple, entered the high end workstation market exclusively.
When Apple and NeXT merged, their combined control of markets wasn't spectacular: it was in the area of ~5% or less of all PCs shipped. The company targeted consumer sales, worked to regain strongholds in education, and has since delivered server products. They continue to make their money from hardware, not software licensing. In fact, the Xserve sales talk makes a big deal about how much cheaper they are when compared to Microsoft's client access style licensing.
The way Apple licenses its software should serve as a wake up call to anyone who still thinks that the company would secretly welcome piracy as an attempt to bump up its market share.
Apple already freely licenses Windows software that it believes would somehow benefit the company:
- Bonjour for Windows is free (establishes Bonjour as an industry standard)
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- iTunes for Windows is free (iPod sales)
- QuickTime for Windows is free (establishes QT as a standard)
So if Apple thought that Mac OS X for PCs would be a clever ploy, they could throw it out there. They do know how to distribute software, are not averse to developing free tools, and understand how to create maintain platforms.
Mac OS X however, is built to sell Apple's hardware. The combination of X + Mac hardware results in a package experience that is carefully controlled and easier to maintain.
Microsoft spends a lot of its development efforts in supporting a huge array of hardware and maintaining support for decades of legacy. Apple can simply drop old cruft, release new hardware and offer immediate support for it with a new patch of OS X.
Apple built another platform along the same lines with the iPod + iTunes + FairPlay iTMS. They work well as a package. Apple isn't licensing FairPlay for the same reason: you'd end up with a splintered experience of fake competition (everybody licenses the same songs for the same price anyway from the same music cartel), and Apple would suddenly lose control of a system they now own. So the next time the iTMS gets hacked, Apple wouldn't be able to release a patch that solves their problems, but they'd have to work with all these other stores/players/devices who were also selling FairPlay systems and figure out how to patch them all.
Look at Apple's 1995 attempt at licensing: there was no benefit for Apple. No innovation really, just nimble companies that could obtain small batches of faster chips and sell off Apple's reference designs with the fastest of PPC processors available. Apple owes its shareholders those profits, and they owe their paying customers new developments and innovation.
By copying Microsoft's business model, they
I vote for not you
Of course, my mom can't really go out and get a Dell, build a Linux kernel on it, and assemble an array of FOSS programs that work anything remotely like Mail/Safari/iLife. Heck, I couldn't be bothered to set that up, and I sure as heck wouldn't want to try maintaining/administrating it for my mom in another state.
In fact, iTunes is about the only thing you WOULDN'T have to live without, since there have been several stabs at getting the Windows version workable on Linux. Everything else in the Mac experience is missing.
To suggest Mac OS X is anything remotely similar to "BSD + some apps" is profoundly retarded and disingenious.
The value IBM was adding to Apple's Mac platform evaporated when Apple's PPC partners decided the desktop wasn't anything they cared about. That occured around 2000, when Microsoft completely abandoned NT's cross platform strategy plans. PPC has been on life support and in denial since PPC lost out on every desktop apart from Apple's. Since then, Apple has been leading Mac OS X development away from 68K/PPC dependance and toward a place where they could jump on the only viable platform for desktop PCs.
You can cry for PPC, but there isn't any way that Apple could continue to develop a processor platform entirely independant from the rest of the desktop PC world and remain competitive with the economies of scale enjoyed by Intel/AMD, particularly after its PPC partners gave up.
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Linux is a very useful tool for many jobs, but its versatility is actually a major barrier for anyone trying to deploy it on the desktop. Everything is splintered to fit various different needs. Commonality and standarization is the value Apple adds with their products; the processor and underlying core OS are mere elements.
Apple can jump to Intel because they control the whole Mac world. Microsoft couldn't manage to keep Windows 2000 up on Alpha, PowerPC or MIPS because they shared control of the PC world with manufacturers.
Similarly, while Apple benefits from solid BSD foundation code, they could theoretically adapt Mac OS X Cocoa frameworks to live on top of Windows (as OSE was), Solaris or Linux (yes I realize that would not be very practical). But the point is, Apple's core competency was not PPC+BSD. It is the "Mac experience," which has little to do with individual components that might be in a Mac.
So the price of oil goes up momentarily for what, a year? And this analyst decides that, since oil producers didn't instantly develop the technology to extract hydrocarbons from shale, or find a whole new set of oil reserves in areas we haven't even yet begun to look, that its all downhill from here? What bullshit.
That sounds an awful lot like the 1970's analysts who said we'd have no oil at all by 2000.
Or the brainiac reporter who insisted that Apple's iPod was not going to have any effect on Mac sales after interviewing 10 iPod users who didn't also buy a Mac on their visit to the Apple store in 2004.
Anyone can rub together two brain cells and write a report that glosses over market realities with some sensationalist simplifications.
Basic economics indicates that that the market can fall behind reality for several years. But obviously, at some point when oil rises to a level where it can comfortably stay, all kinds of results will kick in: conservation, alternative fuels, alternative oil discovery, alternative oil sources. To suggest that we've hit the end of the oil pan is plainly retarded.
We've only known about the middle east's oil for most of a century. There's plenty of places we haven't looked, and more we know about and chose not to exploit because either the market can't support it yet, or there is lower hanging fruit, or there are political or environmental concerns we can't resolve yet.
The word "evolved" was used to create the suggestion that genetic variation within a genus or species is the same thing as life springing from non-living matter, or a lifeform making dramatic jumps to 'outsmart' genetic error correction systems and thereby develop incredable new technologies via random flaws in DNA which result in totally different lifeforms.
It's like talking about your dog's puppies having "evolved" longer hair (or a louder bark) than their parents.
By associating two totally different things with the same word, you can create the illusion that both share the same flaws (or accuracy, depending on what ideas you are trying to spin). This is particularly effective in linking a non-controversial idea with a rabidly controversial one in order to create controversy for both (or depending on the desired goal, to do the opposite!)
One could do the same thing by:
- referring to birth control as "abortion"
- referring to global warming as "climate change"
- referring to imprisoned people you torture without trial as "illegal combatants"
- referring to the establishment of state sponsored religion as "faith based inititives"
IBM announced a lot of things. It was their inability to deliver that prompted Apple to switch.
Further, this announcement is news for IBM's server business. It isn't even relevant to Apple's business, since they don't use IBM's POWER server processors even in their server products. The PowerPC is a cousin that benefits from hand me downs.
CNet brought Apple into the story to give it some interest. Who cares otherwise? The "news" sure wouldn't have been on the Slashdot front page had it not involved Apple in the headline.
Even if IBM/Freescale had found some "hyperconducting cold fusion" technology to bolt onto the PPC to make it competitive with Intel's latest stuff (ie performance of the G5 and efficiency of the G4), it wouldn't serve Apple's needs to keep maintaining a platform that is significantly different from the commodity PC market.
By going with Intel, Apple benefits from PC world's economy of scale in the area of general purpose chipsets (wireless, integrated bus controllers), manufacturing, and key areas of software development. Apple's core competencies do not involve maintaining the only desktop version of PPC software development tools, laying out the yawn-er bit of common logic board designs, and convincing programmers to specialize in Altivec optimizations.
By picking up lower cost, common parts that fulfill the boring bits of PCs, Apple can concentrate on delivering an advanced user interface, higher level software tools, and hardware/software integration & fit and finish, things that Apple really does well, and that are not tied to low level hardware details.
Apple has delegated all that lower level stuff to Intel, which has been plugging along for the last decade providing similar services for boring PC companies like HP and Dell that have been loathe to deploy any of the new stuff Intel has introduced: from USB to EFI.
Apple makes a great darling showoff customer for Intel, while Intel delivers Apple with a high quality set of end to end solutions for desktop hardware that covers a range of consumer/workstation/server needs. The whole point of Apple going with Intel was that neither PPC partner wanted to support Apple in delivering G4/G5 products built for desktops, laptops and workgroup servers.
IBM wants to make gigantor server arrays for big customers, and Freescale wants to make imbedded processors for cars and videogames. No wizzy new technology is going to change that, because no matter what they discover, the PPC fabricators are not going to be focused on delivering it for Apple, since they've chosen business elsewhere in the spectrum.
Dramatically changing the rules of a complex system to a simple subset of rules only make sense to someone who does not understand why the system has any complexity in the first place.
One could say the same about the rules of any system:
"Games are too complicated. Ballgames should only have two rules: run with the ball, get point when ball delivered."
Taxes are complex because they reflect a complex set of inducements and penalties that represent tax policy. Do you think that if we made broad and sweeping across the board changes to how income taxes are charged and collected, that those changes would have no effect on how business worked going forward?
Would someone who deducted charitable contributions continue giving if there were no tax benefit?
Would someone who had earned income credits for using environmentally friendly devices continue if there were no tax benefit?
Would someone continue to try to earn a profit if those additional profits were taxed severely at a certain level?
Would people contribute to long term savings and/or retirement accounts if there was suddenly no tax benefit to doing so?
One major difference between EU and US taxes lies with the culture of US independence, where people generally and historically vote a preference toward paying their own way and carrying a more direct responsibility for their own investments and financial security.
In the EU, society takes care of health care, education, transportation and social services. In the US, the upper middle classes (and up) takes care of themselves, while the lower majority grovels as WalMart wage slaves and inner city thugs. As the system perpetuates (and further entrenches), it becomes more difficult to demand that successful individuals give away their wealth to socially rehabilitate the trailer park set that has chosen a lifestyle of sweatspants, TV, buffets and crystal meth.
The same conflicts are present in the EU, but socialism paves over discrepancies to a larger extent.
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In other news:
People in the top US tax bracket do not pay 35% of their income. They pay accountants to find ways to avoid paying taxes. Also, the top tax rates and and the number of different tax brackets in existence have both dropped dramatically since the early 80s, creating a further rift between the ants and the grasshoppers.
I state that as a non-highly paid, urban office worker. I didn't get the state to pay for my healthcare or education, and at this point, I'm not excited about liquidating my accounts to pay for some meth fiend's dental work. At the same time however, it'd be nice if the US took better care of the poor, because I don't want to face an virulent public pandemic outbreak of, say, SARS in a country with dysfunctional health care.
Nobody is accusing the government (or AT&T) of spying on terrorists.
The question is instead: can an administration that lied to start a war be trusted to take further illegal actions against American citizens, based on unknown goals?
- The administration lied to start a war which is both killing thousands of innocent civilians and killing/wounding/shell-shocking a new generation of young American soldiers.
- The war serves no purpose to secure American people or interests, but rather inflames terrorism against Americans.
- The original lie was told to start a war that would enrich specific corporations by rebuilding the destruction with Iraqi money, but backfired when we started losing the war, and it turned from a quick invasion to a Vietnam style boondoggle, and is now clearly a long term police state that will generate a new breed of terrorism.
- American soldiers are now dying and suffering to support and contain a tragic mistake the administration made to divert interest from real terrorist threats (like Osama bin Ladin IN AFGHANISTAN, who was left alone !! and N. Korea, which has the capacity to nuke people rather than just crash planes) and instead create a patriotic smoke screen and enrich corporate friends.
- Does this shamefully incompetent, dishonest and inept administration deserve some blind trust that any investigations it handles need not ever follow any of the basic rules of law, rules designed to protect against abuses of power against American citizens?
People with the capacity to think, whether they are conservative, moderate, or liberal, should question an administration that thinks it is above the law, particularly when it HAS A HISTORY of using wartime hysteria to mask over illegal, destructive and unethical behavior.
The illegal acts of the administration are far beyond Nixon's; it's just that the current president thinks he has enough unthinking supporters to do whatever suits his objectives and those of his corporate partners. The 2005 US is looking a LOT like Hitler's pre-war Germany.
It's not really the time to be unthinkingly supportive of illegal government actions, which are wrapped up in criminal arrogance and hiding behind a flag. Wake up!
WOW is highly dependent on your graphics card. The Intel Mac's PCIe graphics card is far better than what most Mac users are used to: middle of the road 4x AGP or less.
Watching the processor use graph on my dual 2.0 GHz (first generation) G5, I could turn off one processor and see a minor difference in performance. With both processors running, utilization was about 60% on both at the max.
When I upgraded my G5's video card, I saw enormous advances in how the game played, how many effects I could turn on, and the top resolution.
Therefore, I'd say WOW isn't a very good test of processor differences between Core Duo and G5, particularly if you are not comparing a similar bus architecture and video card, which is the real bottleneck.
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Another benchmarking flaw comes from comparing the Intel build of 10.4.4 against the PPC build, as the PPC version isn't identical.
All the comparisons I've seen so far haven't even bothered to install the same amount of RAM. WTF? Who DOESN'T know that installing another 512 MB in a Mac makes Mac OS X run completely different?!
One could take any Mac, run benchmarks with differing amounts of RAM, enable different features, disable various components of Mac OS X, and do things like delete caches and adjust things like disk speed and graphics resolution, and get fantastic different results from the same machine.
Unless benchmarks are done by someone who knows what they are doing, they are completely useless. Of course, benchmarks are generally done by somebody trying to prove a given point, so they are frequently misleading and exaggerated by design.
When motives aren't getting in the way of the 'truth', incompetence usually is.
Well "prototype," like "beta," can refer to a wide range of things, from barely functional to "we're being careful."
The MacWorld demonstrators didn't use the word prototype to me, they called it prerelease hardware. The amount of room for adjusting things with shipping less than a month away is clearly limited. Optimizing battery life is a software effort that could make quite a bit of progress within a couple weeks of final testing, but it's pretty obvious that they aren't going to make any changes to the hardware, such as adding FW800.
Your arguement is evolving.
I originally mentioned a bill of rights to officially protect fair use rights. Currently, our fair use rights are based on (I believe) the Betamax court case decision. There is not a clear definition of what fair use is. In many other countries, there is no principle of fair use at all.
You said such a bill of rights would somehow limit future rights. But our rights today are rather shaky and under attack from IP holders, so having a starting definition of 'inalienable' rights would do the opposite: define a foundation of user rights to be built upon later.
The idea that somehow anything not stated would automatically be lost is your own invention, and not supported by any examples.
As I pointed out about the Bill of Rights, and as you pointed out about the Constitution, one can draft a law that serves its intended purpose by wording it as needed. Sheesh.
Using your line of specious reasoning, will the DMCA somehow limit future attempts at privacy destruction or fair use dismantling? Will it somehow stop future expansion DRM? Hardly; it's a foot in the door.
If we'd had a clear bill of rights for fair use prior to the introduction of the DMCA, it would not have passed or been much easier to throw out.