Lightning doesn't strike the same spot twice. (obviously false (ouch!))
A watched pot never boils. etc...
This is like numerology. You take a bunch of squishy data (aphorisms) and attempt to rigorously evaluate them.
I am reminded of Charlie Brown's answer to the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" His answer: Eight if they're skinny, four if they're fat.
I am actually replying to dangitman, who said "Why act surprised, when you were trolling with racism and sexism, and you know it? The GP post is not flamebait - it's just exposing your flamebait for what it really is."
Resistance to Islamist domination does not constitute racism. First off, Islam is not a race. Second, I would like to see my country remain a place where *all* religions may be practiced, not only one. Unlike under, say, SHARI'A LAW!
Opposition to giving birth out of wedlock does not constitute sexism. First off, I don't think men should do it either. The rest of that is not my problem. Second, statistically speaking, I do not think that there is any better way to improve the opportunities and the situation for a mother AND her child than marriage.
It's people like you who give liberals a bad name by refusing to address facts. Instead, you just start tossing around some of your magic words (racist, sexist, etc..) as if calling me names refutes any of the points I make.
I can call you an flaming liberal asshole, for example, but that does not rebut your argument.
Look, I appreciate your level tone, but it's the same dulcet delivery which lulls us into thinking that it's okay to go through life without seeing what is happening. It provides us with the comfortable feeling that no decisions are required, and that no actions need be taken.
What you are saying is that a few thousand trees standing together do not make a forest.
I would appreciate you withdrawing your bigot statement. That is as offensive to me as it would surely be to you. You and I may disagree on what the facts are, and what the facts mean, but you have a far less credible case to support calling me a bigot than I have for saying that France faces an Intifada.
How did they control for so-called "reverse" causation? Off the top of my head, I would limit the sample set to those who won the prize before a cut-off age, which might be the youngest age of death of any nominee. Not sure about that, but that's where I would start.
NONE OF WHICH ADDRESSES the issue of non-causality--that these are both effects of some other cause. What they have identified is a small syndrome (a collection of symptoms or behaviors), but because there are only two elements, they leap to say that one element causes the other simply by controlling against the opposite case.
I am not arguing that there is no causal relationship. What I am arguing is that they seem not to have considered that perhaps they have not found the cause. All they are saying is that they have found a correlation, and that they have failed to find some causal relationships. This does not constitute finding a different causal relationship.
That Republicans and Democrats are both equally serious about both the First and Second Amendments. And that they are on opposite sides on both issues.
What this scant research has found is a correlation between Nobel winners and longer life. What it has NOT proven is a causal relationship. The weak-kneed nonsense about "social benefits conferred" is a presumed conclusion laid on top of some research which may or may not support it.
This is a better conclusion: People who tend to win also tend to live longer, due to a separate causal factor.
Now gimme my Nobel Prize. I just corrected a bunch of Junk Scientists.
Gee, I hope I don't get called a troll again, but I'll disagree with you as well.
Developed countries do not have an overpopulation problem. Undeveloped countries do. There may come a day when the earth as a place (and a system, etc) has an overpopulation problem, and by that time, I would hope that development is not such a dicey proposition.
But if France gives up on making French people, then there will be no France, no matter how many people immigrate from other areas. That region will then be something else where France used to be. Please see Istanbul for details.
Can you think of a better way to help developing countries than by freeing them from unplannable family growth? All handouts do is exacerbate the problem of overpopulation by removing both incentive and ability to change the situation.
Who in France would not wish to turn back the clock?
Every night, over 100 cars are burned by the immigrants who will be the new France. The birthrate is below replacement rate. 43% of all children in France are born to unwed mothers.
France is quietly fighting an intifada in les banlieux (sp?), and France is losing. You might say that France is a quagmire.
If you like France the way it was, I recommend that you visit soon, and take lots of pictures. The France to come will be a Muslim nation. Some people like it that way. The Paristinians certainly would. Those who prefer the former and vanishing culture of France would like to turn back the clock.
This is hardly anti-Islamic sentiment, although it is anti-Islamist. Mods and replies, please draw the distinction before you accuse me of something terrible. There are plenty of Islamic nations out there, but only Islamists feel that France should also become such a place.
An unclassified report was released with information blacked out to make it unclassified. The problem is that whatever software was used to produce the PDF with classified information hidden had only applied a layer which was easily removed.
People who do not understand the technology they are working with should not have this kind of release authority. And that's the hard part--the higher up you are in the food chain, the less likely you are to understand the new tools your organization is working with.
There are very few users in government who could not do their jobs just fine using Windows 3.11, WordStar 3.x and an e-mail client on a fast but simple machine.
Slaved as the government is to Microsoft's development cycle, however, the government will always be at the cutting edge of compromised.
If you're happy with Office now, or you mostly create plain documents where formatting and design aren't high priorities, it may not be worth the effort to buy and learn the new version.
If you mostly create plain documents, MS Word is the wrong software.
Big name vendor + non-supported hardware. Any system consultant who works for a big-name vendor or a non-supported hardware manufacturer with a few years of experience should be able to tell you "don't do that".
There are enough valid reasons that we "can't" do things--I have no more patience with Microsoft's asinine reasons. Accordingly, I have no more Microsoft software*. I have G4 iMac for desktop music production, an HP Pavilion laptop for mobility, a Dell Dimension 8100 as a main web access and time-wasting machine, a Fujitsu 6300 (P-II,233) as a backup server and fileserver, and another Japan-only Fujitsu as a webserver. These machines all run Ubuntu (yes, the mac, too), and it was fairly easy to set up. I'm no expert, either--but if you know that you need a RAID1 backup system, and you know what that is but not how to do it, Ubuntu is the system to get you the rest of the way there. I tied together a wide variety of systems for different roles, and Ubuntu is what made it possible for somebody of my, er modest, skills.
I agree with you about his experience and the way he treated his client's production system. But you seem to be wrapping two different problems together. Promise, Micro-Soft, and HP have each made this difficult in petty, grubby little ways. This problem is their fault.
*Uhhh, except for a copy of MSFS 2002 on an old Win98SE drive. That's right--I only use windows to play games. One game. And that's only about once a month when I re-boot the Dell just to play.
Look here, Hillary- the problem is that the State is paying for health care in the first place. Knock that little bugaboo out and watch the civil liberties arguments wither.
How much "Social Spending" could more accurately be described as Government Subsidies for Failure?
If you want to mod me as a troll, or flamebait, or whatever, please consider this: the less the government has to do with you, the less room it has to infringe upon your rights. And when it has one hand on your internal organs and the other on your wallet, a la HillaryCare, that sounds like a lot of civil rights going up in smoke.
I agree, but you seem to have overlooked that with a non-MS OS, you can actually have better security while still employing people you may not trust. There is no reason that the workstation desktop user needs to have advanced permissions, particularly if the workstation exists as a glorified terminal. With humble user permissions on the workstation, the information worker can do whatever needs to be done locally, and still has access to tightly controlled and centrally located user areas (mailbox, storage) and share areas (shared storage, collaborative space).
This is all possible in theory under MS, but in practice, by the time you have security, you have too little ability. In UNIX/Linux shops, security can be had while preserving the ability to get things done.
I look forward to the day that the government internalizes its own security, instead of this hand-in-glove approach which leaves government beholden to MS. Yay, G-buntu!
Your parallel is obtuse: Before 9/11, the jihadis obviously had a but more going in the motivation department than we did. Otherwise, there would have been no 9/11. Your tired attempt to blame America for Islamist Imperialism has somehow failed to convince me. I hope that this does not mean I am blind.
One thing we may agree on here--many of these people had no interest in harming America five or ten years ago. The hard part seems to be proving that America's actions have caused this Islamist Jihad. It seems much simpler, more credible to say (and here I fear we disagree again) that from the evidence in the Nineties and even from 1979 on, this was coming, and we are lucky to have drawn the problem to a particular geographic location: Iraq.
Remember this: if the Soldiers come home without winning, this time, the war will follow them. This is a lesson which perhaps ONLY Americans could reasonably have failed to learn by this point in history--so why doesn't Europe see this?
I wonder if it occurred to any of the that the approx. $300 billion could be used to provide food, medical supplies, clean water and decent housing to most of Africa, propelling America to a saint-like status, and eliminating most anti-american bias that has accumulated.
This is a fantastic idea. We'll just let any old gang of thugs do whatever they want with our money, and we won't even pretend that we could do something about the organized murder and repression, even if we did care. Better yet, we could send legions of volunteers into "Africa". Even though most of these well-intentioned youngsters and age-ing hippies would simply be killed outright, that would still be better than spending money on nasty old war. And since we would make no distinction between governments in Africa, then we would aid genocide as well as democracy, since all life is precious, and value judgements have no place in covolized discourse, and without a military, we will rely exclusively upon "civilized discourse" of the sort which has aided and abetted the genocide in Sudan.
Whoops, I mean Africa.
Pacifism is for people who have no concept of evil. I am an agnostic, and I do not believe in God, but I have seen enough evil, and know that it is worth fighting against. The alternative is--well--the absurd yet commonly advocated scenario I gave in the first paragraph.
If you truly are interested in "propelling America to Saint-like status", then get on board the anti-jihad program. Nothing keeps Muslims more miserable than Islamist oppression.
And I hope nobody feels I am being overly prickly, or straying from the topic. Hopefully Freedom is not too right-wing a concept for slashdot. The post itself is pretty powerfully slanted to the left--this reply is slanted to the right--if, of course, you think freedom is a right-wing concept.
This is the Candle-Maker's Union railing against the introduction of the light bulb. After all, if people are allowed to produce light in their own homes without wax, the whole candle industry would crumble. And then where would we be? Candles have introduced a whole new world of light, and without the candle industry, all will be lost--rampant crime in the streets, homes darkened and shuttered for safety. Nobody can produce light bulbs on a sustainable basis--the economics of the situation prevent it. You burn one candle per night, which supports the industry that keeps you safe. But if you only buy a single light bulb each year, well--NOBODY can succeed in a business model with such margins--light bulbs will be more expensive to produce than you can charge! No, the only way to keep the world lit and safe is to ensure that the wax-handlers and wick-dippers are kept employed. We dare not tinker with this model--we play with bulb "technology" at our peril.
Think of the bees!
Or you can just pay me to not produce light bulbs, and then I don't care.
Regarding the question posed at the end of the article lead, of course criticism, whether well-founded or not, is good for a bureaucracy. Not that they like it when they hear it. Naturally, an organization such as NASA has the mental horsepower available to sort out the wheat from the chaff. NASA has suffered in the past (to the tune of several dead astronauts) from inadequate criticism, internal and external. Now that they have this "culture of listening" or whatever it's called these days, it would be a pity of we had nothing to say.
Yeah, we'll all just stand at the shores and guard the beach while the sneaky intelligentsia* soar overhead in their sleek aero-liners. Too bad we're not smart enough to prevent the "flight" of the intelligentsia* to their overseas utopiae. We long for the old overlords to show us how they did it in Paris, currently burning at the hands of youths (of no particular distinguishing common thread, in fact a broad strata of society), under the enlightened leadership of the best Socialist intelligentsia* the world has seen.
I'll stay here with my non-intelligentsia* shotgun and my non-Socialist Republican VRWC membership card.
You sound like a pretty fart smeller, though--you'd better git on that aero-plane with yore intelligentsia chums.
*In trendy Liberal Soviet vocabulary, right-winger spell-checks YOU!
Apple will gain by offering their hardware with Windows on it--some people/companies would buy Mac hardware with its high quality, high "fidelity", and great looks, if only they could run their installed base of Windows-only SmackHead DBM. This reduces the initial cost of adoption for the customer, and increases market share. Apple will gain by offering their Operating System on existing hardware--long story short, picture millions of PCs with little stickers that say [WinXP/Vista/OSX READY]. This reduces the initial cost of adoption for the customer, and increases market share. Apple will gain by continuing to offer what they really want you to buy--Apple Macintosh hardware running the Apple Macintosh Operating System. But they're willing to let you walk in, rather than jump.
They are already moving into the low-cost hardware market with the Mac mini, which is a wedge for further expansion "down" the market space. How many more of those can they sell if you can still run your Windows games on it? What about your favorite SmackHead Groupware/CRM/ERP Client? Low end expansion is done through Win-on-Mac.
They are now also expanding "across" the market space into Sony's territory, where fidelity is such a concern that purchasers are willing to accept Sony's proprietary protocols and behind-the-scenes-isms in order to guarantee that the peripherals and the OS all get along. Tell me Apple can't do that and better?
Of course, if Sony doesn't cooperate, Apple can't get the OS onto the hardware reliably. So high-end expansion is done through OSX-on-Mac, and THIS REMAINS THE CORE BUSINESS.
But gee, how can we take advantage of the amazing fidelity offered by Apple iLife and iWork apps, combined with the ubiquity of the iPod? Hmmm... how to leverage the iPod and a collection of seamless applications?
People who say that OSX is waiting on applications have it backwards. The applications have been developed using OSX as an incubator, and when OSX comes to a computer near you, you won't have to worry about how to get your frigging photos off fo your frigging camera and onto a frigging CD or onto a friggin website. You'll just click [OKAY], and Thy Convergence come, Thy Will be Done, on HP as it is on Apple.
Besides, look at the product pattern since Jobs came back: High end laptop, low end laptop, high end desktop, low end desktop. Apple believes in the foursquare. View the iPod as an amazingly successful lever for convergence (so successful it grew FAR beyond expectations). So, OSX-on-Mac, Win-on-Mac, OSX-on-PC, Win-on-PC. In this case, the last one is off-limits, but it can be reduced by attacking it from more than one direction, which will also lead to an increase on OSX-on-Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
What goes up must come down. (suspected true)
Lightning doesn't strike the same spot twice. (obviously false (ouch!))
A watched pot never boils. etc...
This is like numerology. You take a bunch of squishy data (aphorisms) and attempt to rigorously evaluate them.
I am reminded of Charlie Brown's answer to the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" His answer: Eight if they're skinny, four if they're fat.
I am actually replying to dangitman, who said "Why act surprised, when you were trolling with racism and sexism, and you know it? The GP post is not flamebait - it's just exposing your flamebait for what it really is."
Resistance to Islamist domination does not constitute racism. First off, Islam is not a race. Second, I would like to see my country remain a place where *all* religions may be practiced, not only one. Unlike under, say, SHARI'A LAW!
Opposition to giving birth out of wedlock does not constitute sexism. First off, I don't think men should do it either. The rest of that is not my problem. Second, statistically speaking, I do not think that there is any better way to improve the opportunities and the situation for a mother AND her child than marriage.
It's people like you who give liberals a bad name by refusing to address facts. Instead, you just start tossing around some of your magic words (racist, sexist, etc..) as if calling me names refutes any of the points I make.
I can call you an flaming liberal asshole, for example, but that does not rebut your argument.
What you are saying is that a few thousand trees standing together do not make a forest.
I would appreciate you withdrawing your bigot statement. That is as offensive to me as it would surely be to you. You and I may disagree on what the facts are, and what the facts mean, but you have a far less credible case to support calling me a bigot than I have for saying that France faces an Intifada.
Thank you.
NONE OF WHICH ADDRESSES the issue of non-causality--that these are both effects of some other cause. What they have identified is a small syndrome (a collection of symptoms or behaviors), but because there are only two elements, they leap to say that one element causes the other simply by controlling against the opposite case.
I am not arguing that there is no causal relationship. What I am arguing is that they seem not to have considered that perhaps they have not found the cause. All they are saying is that they have found a correlation, and that they have failed to find some causal relationships. This does not constitute finding a different causal relationship.
That's all I'm saying.
The Second Amendment guarantees the First.
This is a better conclusion: People who tend to win also tend to live longer, due to a separate causal factor.
Now gimme my Nobel Prize. I just corrected a bunch of Junk Scientists.
...whom you wish to cite as policy guidance?
While your flaming flamebait sits unremarked. Please step to the window on the left to pick up youor Slashdot +3 Liberal mod.
Gee, I hope I don't get called a troll again, but I'll disagree with you as well.
Developed countries do not have an overpopulation problem. Undeveloped countries do. There may come a day when the earth as a place (and a system, etc) has an overpopulation problem, and by that time, I would hope that development is not such a dicey proposition.
But if France gives up on making French people, then there will be no France, no matter how many people immigrate from other areas. That region will then be something else where France used to be. Please see Istanbul for details.
Can you think of a better way to help developing countries than by freeing them from unplannable family growth? All handouts do is exacerbate the problem of overpopulation by removing both incentive and ability to change the situation.
Heh. Does Second Life have a population problem?
Who in France would not wish to turn back the clock?
Every night, over 100 cars are burned by the immigrants who will be the new France. The birthrate is below replacement rate. 43% of all children in France are born to unwed mothers.
France is quietly fighting an intifada in les banlieux (sp?), and France is losing. You might say that France is a quagmire.
If you like France the way it was, I recommend that you visit soon, and take lots of pictures. The France to come will be a Muslim nation. Some people like it that way. The Paristinians certainly would. Those who prefer the former and vanishing culture of France would like to turn back the clock.
This is hardly anti-Islamic sentiment, although it is anti-Islamist. Mods and replies, please draw the distinction before you accuse me of something terrible. There are plenty of Islamic nations out there, but only Islamists feel that France should also become such a place.
Are MMO games even allowed under Shari'a?
Now I can type at 16GBpS! Imagine how fat and poorly-designed our operating systems can be now! Th1s r0cks[shift one]
...with that tiny screen, and all-in-one form factor, I say it's running The System.
I'll buy one when they come out with the iPhone SE/30.
An unclassified report was released with information blacked out to make it unclassified. The problem is that whatever software was used to produce the PDF with classified information hidden had only applied a layer which was easily removed.
People who do not understand the technology they are working with should not have this kind of release authority. And that's the hard part--the higher up you are in the food chain, the less likely you are to understand the new tools your organization is working with.
There are very few users in government who could not do their jobs just fine using Windows 3.11, WordStar 3.x and an e-mail client on a fast but simple machine.
Slaved as the government is to Microsoft's development cycle, however, the government will always be at the cutting edge of compromised.
...A guy with a nick of JHWH is asking for professional advice? I hope your name is John Herbert Walker Hoover. Just Sayin'...
If you mostly create plain documents, MS Word is the wrong software.
Big name vendor + non-supported hardware. Any system consultant who works for a big-name vendor or a non-supported hardware manufacturer with a few years of experience should be able to tell you "don't do that".
There are enough valid reasons that we "can't" do things--I have no more patience with Microsoft's asinine reasons. Accordingly, I have no more Microsoft software*. I have G4 iMac for desktop music production, an HP Pavilion laptop for mobility, a Dell Dimension 8100 as a main web access and time-wasting machine, a Fujitsu 6300 (P-II,233) as a backup server and fileserver, and another Japan-only Fujitsu as a webserver. These machines all run Ubuntu (yes, the mac, too), and it was fairly easy to set up. I'm no expert, either--but if you know that you need a RAID1 backup system, and you know what that is but not how to do it, Ubuntu is the system to get you the rest of the way there. I tied together a wide variety of systems for different roles, and Ubuntu is what made it possible for somebody of my, er modest, skills.
I agree with you about his experience and the way he treated his client's production system. But you seem to be wrapping two different problems together. Promise, Micro-Soft, and HP have each made this difficult in petty, grubby little ways. This problem is their fault.
*Uhhh, except for a copy of MSFS 2002 on an old Win98SE drive. That's right--I only use windows to play games. One game. And that's only about once a month when I re-boot the Dell just to play.
Look here, Hillary- the problem is that the State is paying for health care in the first place. Knock that little bugaboo out and watch the civil liberties arguments wither.
How much "Social Spending" could more accurately be described as Government Subsidies for Failure?
If you want to mod me as a troll, or flamebait, or whatever, please consider this: the less the government has to do with you, the less room it has to infringe upon your rights. And when it has one hand on your internal organs and the other on your wallet, a la HillaryCare, that sounds like a lot of civil rights going up in smoke.
I agree, but you seem to have overlooked that with a non-MS OS, you can actually have better security while still employing people you may not trust. There is no reason that the workstation desktop user needs to have advanced permissions, particularly if the workstation exists as a glorified terminal. With humble user permissions on the workstation, the information worker can do whatever needs to be done locally, and still has access to tightly controlled and centrally located user areas (mailbox, storage) and share areas (shared storage, collaborative space).
This is all possible in theory under MS, but in practice, by the time you have security, you have too little ability. In UNIX/Linux shops, security can be had while preserving the ability to get things done.
I look forward to the day that the government internalizes its own security, instead of this hand-in-glove approach which leaves government beholden to MS. Yay, G-buntu!
Your parallel is obtuse: Before 9/11, the jihadis obviously had a but more going in the motivation department than we did. Otherwise, there would have been no 9/11. Your tired attempt to blame America for Islamist Imperialism has somehow failed to convince me. I hope that this does not mean I am blind. One thing we may agree on here--many of these people had no interest in harming America five or ten years ago. The hard part seems to be proving that America's actions have caused this Islamist Jihad. It seems much simpler, more credible to say (and here I fear we disagree again) that from the evidence in the Nineties and even from 1979 on, this was coming, and we are lucky to have drawn the problem to a particular geographic location: Iraq. Remember this: if the Soldiers come home without winning, this time, the war will follow them. This is a lesson which perhaps ONLY Americans could reasonably have failed to learn by this point in history--so why doesn't Europe see this?
This is a fantastic idea. We'll just let any old gang of thugs do whatever they want with our money, and we won't even pretend that we could do something about the organized murder and repression, even if we did care. Better yet, we could send legions of volunteers into "Africa". Even though most of these well-intentioned youngsters and age-ing hippies would simply be killed outright, that would still be better than spending money on nasty old war. And since we would make no distinction between governments in Africa, then we would aid genocide as well as democracy, since all life is precious, and value judgements have no place in covolized discourse, and without a military, we will rely exclusively upon "civilized discourse" of the sort which has aided and abetted the genocide in Sudan.
Whoops, I mean Africa.
Pacifism is for people who have no concept of evil. I am an agnostic, and I do not believe in God, but I have seen enough evil, and know that it is worth fighting against. The alternative is--well--the absurd yet commonly advocated scenario I gave in the first paragraph.
If you truly are interested in "propelling America to Saint-like status", then get on board the anti-jihad program. Nothing keeps Muslims more miserable than Islamist oppression.
And I hope nobody feels I am being overly prickly, or straying from the topic. Hopefully Freedom is not too right-wing a concept for slashdot. The post itself is pretty powerfully slanted to the left--this reply is slanted to the right--if, of course, you think freedom is a right-wing concept.
This is the Candle-Maker's Union railing against the introduction of the light bulb. After all, if people are allowed to produce light in their own homes without wax, the whole candle industry would crumble. And then where would we be? Candles have introduced a whole new world of light, and without the candle industry, all will be lost--rampant crime in the streets, homes darkened and shuttered for safety.
Nobody can produce light bulbs on a sustainable basis--the economics of the situation prevent it. You burn one candle per night, which supports the industry that keeps you safe. But if you only buy a single light bulb each year, well--NOBODY can succeed in a business model with such margins--light bulbs will be more expensive to produce than you can charge!
No, the only way to keep the world lit and safe is to ensure that the wax-handlers and wick-dippers are kept employed. We dare not tinker with this model--we play with bulb "technology" at our peril.
Think of the bees!
Or you can just pay me to not produce light bulbs, and then I don't care.
Doug Morris
CEO
Universal Candles
Regarding the question posed at the end of the article lead, of course criticism, whether well-founded or not, is good for a bureaucracy. Not that they like it when they hear it. Naturally, an organization such as NASA has the mental horsepower available to sort out the wheat from the chaff. NASA has suffered in the past (to the tune of several dead astronauts) from inadequate criticism, internal and external. Now that they have this "culture of listening" or whatever it's called these days, it would be a pity of we had nothing to say.
Yeah, we'll all just stand at the shores and guard the beach while the sneaky intelligentsia* soar overhead in their sleek aero-liners. Too bad we're not smart enough to prevent the "flight" of the intelligentsia* to their overseas utopiae. We long for the old overlords to show us how they did it in Paris, currently burning at the hands of youths (of no particular distinguishing common thread, in fact a broad strata of society), under the enlightened leadership of the best Socialist intelligentsia* the world has seen.
I'll stay here with my non-intelligentsia* shotgun and my non-Socialist Republican VRWC membership card.
You sound like a pretty fart smeller, though--you'd better git on that aero-plane with yore intelligentsia chums.
*In trendy Liberal Soviet vocabulary, right-winger spell-checks YOU!
Apple will gain by offering their hardware with Windows on it--some people/companies would buy Mac hardware with its high quality, high "fidelity", and great looks, if only they could run their installed base of Windows-only SmackHead DBM. This reduces the initial cost of adoption for the customer, and increases market share.
Apple will gain by offering their Operating System on existing hardware--long story short, picture millions of PCs with little stickers that say [WinXP/Vista/OSX READY]. This reduces the initial cost of adoption for the customer, and increases market share.
Apple will gain by continuing to offer what they really want you to buy--Apple Macintosh hardware running the Apple Macintosh Operating System. But they're willing to let you walk in, rather than jump.
They are already moving into the low-cost hardware market with the Mac mini, which is a wedge for further expansion "down" the market space. How many more of those can they sell if you can still run your Windows games on it? What about your favorite SmackHead Groupware/CRM/ERP Client? Low end expansion is done through Win-on-Mac.
They are now also expanding "across" the market space into Sony's territory, where fidelity is such a concern that purchasers are willing to accept Sony's proprietary protocols and behind-the-scenes-isms in order to guarantee that the peripherals and the OS all get along. Tell me Apple can't do that and better?
Of course, if Sony doesn't cooperate, Apple can't get the OS onto the hardware reliably. So high-end expansion is done through OSX-on-Mac, and THIS REMAINS THE CORE BUSINESS.
But gee, how can we take advantage of the amazing fidelity offered by Apple iLife and iWork apps, combined with the ubiquity of the iPod? Hmmm... how to leverage the iPod and a collection of seamless applications?
People who say that OSX is waiting on applications have it backwards. The applications have been developed using OSX as an incubator, and when OSX comes to a computer near you, you won't have to worry about how to get your frigging photos off fo your frigging camera and onto a frigging CD or onto a friggin website. You'll just click [OKAY], and Thy Convergence come, Thy Will be Done, on HP as it is on Apple.
Besides, look at the product pattern since Jobs came back: High end laptop, low end laptop, high end desktop, low end desktop. Apple believes in the foursquare. View the iPod as an amazingly successful lever for convergence (so successful it grew FAR beyond expectations). So, OSX-on-Mac, Win-on-Mac, OSX-on-PC, Win-on-PC. In this case, the last one is off-limits, but it can be reduced by attacking it from more than one direction, which will also lead to an increase on OSX-on-Mac.
Because Macintosh is a product, while Apple is a company, which also produced the Newton, among other things. Newton? Apple? Slight theme, anyway.
Why doesn't Micro-Soft call itself the Windows Software Company?