Most Windows users don't understand what an operating system is or where the boundaries between the operating system, its desk top, and its application might be.
Even the ones who know they run "Windows XP" as opposed to some other version don't know what that means. They do know and use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access. Why do they know ? Because they start those applications frequently and a splash screen tells them what they are running. The equivalent to the splash screen for the operating system is only shown at startup, and most people neither reboot regularly nor pay attention when they do.
My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.
If I am right, competing with MS in the application space will be a lot harder than competing in the OS space, and we all know how successful competitors have been in the OS space.
IANAL: Merely WANTING to commit homicide is not a crime in the U.S.A. Even intending to commit homicide but never attempting is not a crime. If you want to imprison people for wanting to commit terrorism and/or wanting to harm the U.S.A, you aren't going to do it with criminal law. Do you advocate extra-legal detentions and thousands of people in Gitmo with no due process and no habius-corpus ?
If the answer to terrorism is criminal prosecution, then we can't detain the potential terrorist until he has acted on his plan and/or conspired with others to act on a plan. Just formulating a plan or just generally wanting to harm the U.S.A. is NOT a crime.
If the answer to terrorism is selective assassination of anyone suspected, declaring anyone with intent to harm the U.S.A. an unlawful enemy combatant, and indefinite detention without due process, then that is another matter entirely.
From TFA, "A person can download a song off the Internet when they pay for it or get permission."
The statement is true, but if they had said "A person can ONLY download a song off the Internet when they pay for it or get permission," they would of course be wrong. I have to think the first statement has an implied "ONLY"...
TFA: "A person cannot copy a song that they have legally downloaded (by paying a fee or obtaining permission) for someone else."
Even in a backwards nation like Canada;), it is NOT illegal to make a copy of music you have downloaded. Quite apart for music that is not copyrighted, even copyrighted music can be shared under fail use restrictions.
There is plenty of music in the world that is no longer copyrighted. By international treaty, copyrights expire!
By August 16, 2047, all of Elvis Presley's published works will be in the public domain. Many early recordings from the Jazz era are already in the public domain.
Works Originally Created on or after January 1, 1978
A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the author's life plus an additional 70 years after the author's death. In the case of "a joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for hire," the term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving author's death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author's identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
Works Originally Created before January 1, 1978, But Not Published or Registered by That Date
These works have been automatically brought under the statute and are now given federal copyright protection. The duration of copyright in these works will generally be computed in the same way as for works created on or after January 1, 1978: the life-plus-70 or 95/120-year terms will apply to them as well. The law provides that in no case will the term of copyright for works in this category expire before December 31, 2002, and for works published on or before December 31, 2002, the term of copyright will not expire before December 31, 2047.
Works Originally Created and Published or Registered before January 1, 1978
Under the law in effect before 1978, copyright was secured either on the date a work was published with a copyright notice or on the date of registration if the work was registered in unpublished form. In either case, the copyright endured for a first term of 28 years from the date it was secured. During the last (28th) year of the first term, the copyright was eligible for renewal. The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copyrights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, or for pre-1978 copyrights restored under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), making these works eligible for a total term of protection of 75 years. Public Law 105-298, enacted on October 27, 1998, further extended the renewal term of copyrights still subsisting on that date by an additional 20 years, providing for a renewal term of 67 years and a total term of protection of 95 years.
Public Law 102-307, enacted on June 26, 1992, amended the 1976 Copyright Act to provide for automatic renewal of the term of copyrights secured between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Although the renewal term is automatically provided, the Copyright Office does not issue a renewal certificate for these works unless a renewal application and fee are received and registered in the Copyright Office.
Public Law 102-307 makes renewal registration optional. Thus, filing for renewal registration is no longer req
You are delusional. Apple helped invent and standardize Firewire (IEEE 1394). Apple was the first computer company to popularize USB, and the first third-party USB devices were for Macs.
Run Linux on your Mac, and you won't even be bothered that only half or Mac OS X is open-source. If you want a fully closed system, buy Windows and run that on your Intel Mac.
Apple hardware is quite competitive with name brand PCs on a price per features basis. Macs are not as configurable, you can't easily build one yourself from spare parts, and there is no sub-$600 Mac available to the general public.
Many people think Macs empower them rather than incapacitate them, and whatever reason you will "never buy Apple products" has more to do with your irrational hysteria than any facts.
If a game is not available on the shelf at Walmart and Best Buy, it is very unlikely to be a hit. However, shelf space at Walmart and Best Buy is so limited that game publishers have to rent the shelf space. The publisher pays for shelf inches or an end-cap, and the retailer doesn't care so much if the game sells or not. The retailer makes money from shelf rent regardless.
Small developers and small distributors do not have the capital to pay Walmart $8M for a national role-out. Therefore there is no shelf space for the games. Therefore they don't sell well.
A manager at Vivendi once told me that they could sell 50K units of an empty box at Christmas because the parents have no idea which games are good. They buy them randomly, and having and end-cap and a pretty box will result in more sales than any amount of game play quality.
The problems with electronic distribution have still not been overcome: Separating the good from the boring, handling payment, limited bandwidth, and game magazines won't review or publicize unless the publisher advertises.
I call bullshit. iPods are ubiquitous and people still can't be bothered to check out the facts. If your MP3 play takes a single AAA battery, it is already bigger than an iPod shuffle which is approximately the size and weight of a small pack of Wrigley's gum or any other USB memory stick.
$880 is more than the cost of ANY iPod.
All iPods also work as removable storage devices. Plug into USB and copy files from your hard disk. For iPods with screens, copy pictures from your hard disk and carry them around/view them on your iPod.
And yes, all iPods play MP3 files and several other non-DRM formats. If you don't use the iTunes store, you need never see DRM on your iPod.
I have never lived in Silicon valley, but I have been a regular visitor for about 15 years. I travel there for business meetings and conventions usually for a week at a time. I have been all over the valley at all times of year, etc. My follow-up question would be "which Silicon Valley ?"
Stanford is certainly a great source for alpha nerds, but the founding technology seeds of Silicon valley were not started by Stanford grads. Think HP, Varian, Xerox PARC, National labs, Nasa, Apple,... Stanford fuels the fire but isn't necessary. I always enjoy overhearing conversations about mutex locks and Posix compliance and Java Beans and silicon-on-copper while buying a Barbie for my daughter, but there are concentrated nerd communities in many places nowadays.
As for rich people, why would anyone locate/fund a start-up in Silicon Valley now ? The cost of doing business there is outrageous. There are great people in many places where start-up costs are half or a third and you don't even have to leave the USA. Consider Research Triangle in North Carolina. Venture capital can be spent anywhere, and it goes so much further other places.
Economically, the valley is the poster city for comparison between the haves and the have-nots. Compare the have-nots who drive 2 hours to work every day and raise 5 children in a tenement vs. the childless power couple with dual 6 figure incomes, a 1000sf ranch in Mountain View, and evidently dead end genes.
Culturally Silicon Valley has some "issues."
People used to raise families there, but not anymore. I always ask people I meet about their families, and few have any children. Almost none have more than 1 child. Families with the famous 2.5 children used to live in those ubiquitous 1000sf 1950's ranch style houses.
The Silicon Valley of the early 90s changed radically in the late 90s and changed again after the.com bust. The Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose used to be a great place to stay. You could step out of the lobby and get on the light rail. You could walk to restaurants, a mall, and clubs late into the night and the sidewalks were still crowded. The light rail is still there, but there is no-place to go anymore. During the late 90s, office space became so precious that the malls, restaurants, and clubs were forced out to make way for higher paying tenants. Then the bubble burst and Downtown San Jose was left a lifeless corpse. Now the places to stay when on business are Sunnyvale or Mountain View. I liked the "culture" of the valley better in the early 90s.
Cocoa dropped and in some cases regained the following incomplete list:
- Objective-C++ (regained years later) - Cross-platform support (Openstep worked on many platforms including Windows NT) - Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) (now only for Java) - Pantone color calibration/matching support - Built-in Renderman support (from PIXAR) - Integrated inter-machine Distributed Objects - Portable Distributed Objects (PDO) - Distributed Object Linking and Embedding (D'OLE) - A single unified OO method of development (OS X requires use of procedural APIs) - Services (Cocoa context menus are not universally available anymore and Services menu is hidden) - NeXTime (Replaced in 2005 with QTKit which is very nice) - PhoneKit, - IndexingKit, - DBKit (was already replaced with EOF which is still missing) - 3DKit, (OpenGL support in OS X is great now) - MachKit, - DriverKit (Replaced with inferior IOKit) - SoundKit - MusicKit (Donated to Stanford) - NSHosting (Per-application remote display and control [like X-Windows but better]) - WebObjects for Objective-C - DigitalLibrarian (Indexed everything including documentation. HelpViewer is horrible and Spotlight isn't there yet) - Automated Fax support (restored later) - Reliable standard pasteboard type for vector graphics - Stand alone applications (Cocoa applications must now link all of Carbon which expands the API that a developer must encounter, reduces portability, and degrades the resulting application for no apparent benefit) - Advantages of immutable collection classes (reduced because they are all mutable in CoreFoundation)
[skip early history of Jobs and Apple] - Stve Jobs Starts NeXT and releases NeXTstep on NeXT computers - Jonathan Schwartz starts Lighthouse Design to develop NeXTstep applications - Lighthouse Design is very successful and Jonathan Schwartz and Steve Jobs frequently share a stage at NeXTWorld convention. - NeXT can't figure out a buisiness model for selling expensive workstations with great object oriented development tools (NeXTstep) - Sun and Apple collaborate on Openstep (the successor to NeXTstep) - Lighthouse Design ships all of their (very cool) applications for Openstep 68K, Openstep Intel, - -Openstep SPARC, HPUX PA-RISC, Solaris-SunOS/SPARC, and Openstep Enterprise for Windows NT. - NexT can't figure out a business model for selling object ware and developer tools (Openstep) - Sun forgets about Openstep to pursue Java - Sun Buys Lighthouse Design and makes Jonathan Schwartz head of Java Applications Group - Apple Buys NeXT and makes Steve Jobs a consultant - Apple ships Openstep 4.2 for INTEL and not PPC/Mac! - Sun Java Applications Group is unable or unwilling to do anything with Lighthouse Design's applications - Steve Jobs takes over Apple from the inside becomming iCEO and then CEO of Apple - Jonathan Schwartz is promoted several times - Apple renames Openstep Cocoa, removing a lot of features in the process. - Jonathan Schwartz is promoted to COO of Sun - Apple slowly restores features to Cocoa and adds new things that were never there before - Sun can't figure out a business model for selling object ware and developer tools (Java) - Sun can't figure out a business model for selling expensive workstations - Jonathan Schwartz is promoted to CEO of Sun
Anyone notice similarities in the career arc for these two individuals? Anyone notice that Apple and Sun both make integrated hardware and software and provide object oriented development platforms ?
"We're seeing a dramatic increase in developer productivity with NEXTSTEP on SPARC," said Jonathan Schwartz, president of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a leading independent software vendor for NeXT. "In delivering our entire family of developer and end-user products to the SPARC platform, we're confident SPARC system users now have the ideal environment to begin making their transition to objects." http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/1995-05/sunf lash.950523.3868.xml
"Lighthouse had a highly-regarded suite of software including the Quantrix spreadsheet, Diagram! vector graphics package and Concurrence presentation software. The names might mean little to today's Apple users, more's the pity. Apple's Mac OS X is a cosmetically enhanced update of the old NeXT system..... Jonathan - Schwartz, told us that the source would in all likelihood remain in Sun's morgue."
"Little chance," he told us. "We're not really trying to promote Objective-C anymore, much though I loved the products we built. We think this Java thing has some legs to it."
Lighthouse produced awesome NeXTstep/Openstep applications. Recall that Openstep was an open standard cross platform framework provided by NeXT (Steve Jobs) and Sun (Scott McNealy). Little things like the first web browser and content editor, the dev tools for the game Doom, and Lotus Improve originated in NeXTstep. Scott McNealy once famously said Sun puts all of its wood behind one arrow, and Openstep is that arrow. Um, then Java came along and Sun forgot about Openstep.
Sun acquired Lighthouse Design in ~1996. Lighthouse produced Diagram which was imitated in the form of Visio. Lighthouse was rumored to be producing a project management application (think MS Project). Sun initially said they would release the Lighthouse suite of NeXTstep/Openstep applications as Java applications for enterprise users. Sadly, Sun was never released them. Maybe there was no market or Sun wasn't able to get them to work as Java apps.
Openstep went on to become Apple's Cocoa. Lighthouse's applications dies inside Sun. Jonathan Schwartz became Sun CEO.
I am the founder and owner of probably the most successful formerly Openstep based software companies. We were very successful, and I suspect but can't prove that we made a lot more money from Openstep than NeXT ever did. Apple acquired NeXT and after a couple of years refused to sell more Openstep deployment licenses at any price (reneging on a couple of years of promises to the contrary that I personally heard emanate from Steve Job's mouth).
We sold specialized vertical market software for a lot of money. We could easily have bundled a Mac with each license to use our applications as long as Apple let our customers toss the Mac in a dumpster and run the software on an embedded Intel based single board computer. Apple clearly did not regard such a proposition as an adequate business model for selling Openstep deployment licenses.
Neither Apple nor Mr. Jobs nor market conditions have changed in any way that would change this. Yellow Box is not coming back. OS X on generic Intel will not be sanctioned by Apple any time soon. The rules of doing business with Apple have become painfully clear.
Ha ha. Nice one! Executable UML... I'm still giggling. Is it subtitled "how to write 10,000 lines of code with 1 million pages of paper that nobody will ever read" ?
Public Television (and radio) in the USA is funded minimally through general tax revenue and primarily through voluntary contributions from businesses and viewers. Like most of the BBC, Public Television in the USA is commercial free and provides content slightly more cerebral than the common fare on for-profit TV. There are annoying "pledge drives" where viewers are beseeched to contribute and there are "funding provided by..." announcements at the start of shows.
However, Public Television seldom draws more than 5% viewer-ship (even though it is practically al I watch and hear). Viewer-ship ratings are arguably a metric of "quality" as judged by the masses.
Any form of taxation includes the threat of force for failure to pay. In theory, if you don't pay your British TV license, you will be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, your assets may be confiscated and you may be imprisoned. Such licenses/taxes and accompanying threats of force are very harsh in exchange for mere entertainment. I much prefer voluntary funding systems whether directly from viewers or through advertisements.
What kind of zealot are you ?
- Everyone who runs Mc OS X runs Darwin. Darwin is the kernel, I/O layer, and BSD APIs of Mac OS X. Darwin is Open Source. If I use a closed source Window Manager and APIs to develop software on Linux, is Linux is not Open Source. If I use the close source Quartz window manager and closed source APIs in Mac OS X, does that make Darwin any less open ?
- It is not Apple's fault that currently shipping Windows versions cannot boot with industry standard EFI used with Mac Intel. Would you rather be stuck with BIOS forever ? Microsoft has adopted EFI for 64 bit Windows. Windows will come to Mac Intel.
- There is nothing stopping Linux from running on Mac Intel. The Linux developers have only had Mac Intel hardware to use for at most one month. Linux will run on Mac Intel soon.
- OS X is linked to Apple hardware. Apple doesn't care and doesn't restrict what you do with Apple hardware. Your "Fact" is sadly misinformed.
- Why do you care about Apple's share of legal on-line DRMed music sales ? If you don't like their store or their DRM scheme, buy from the brick and mortar store or from Amazon.com and load the music from CD to you iPod.
"The reason this is bad news for education in Europe, particularly Switzerland and France, is that Apple is a lock in company. Buy the hardware and you are stuck. You can't move the OS to another hardware vendor, and with the MacIntels, you can't boot any other OS on the hardware. This is not something any sane person would want for public sector institutions in his country. MS is bad enough. But at least you can run the hardware of your choice and get it wherever you want."
You can run Linux on your Mac hardware, and soon you will be able to run Windows on your Mac hardware.
Mac OS "Darwin" is Open-Source. Only the higher level APIs and applications are closed source. You are always free to use X-Windows and Qt or whatever you want instead of Apple's higher level APIs.
"Its a moral issue, and its a political issue, its about personal freedom, and its the exact same debate as is happening in Massachusets, but on a different subject. Some companies, and Apple is one, want to lock their customers in. The customers should not go for it."
I might agree with you that there is a moral and political issue if your accusation had any merit. How much of MS Windows is Open Source compared to how much of Mac OS X ? Apple is not doing anything to prevent you from running Windows or Linux or Solaris or anything else you want on Macs. Only Windows incompatibility with industry standard EFI has delayed Windows on Mac hardware.
"What Apple wants is, you buy the hardware, it only runs OSX."
What Apple wants is you but the hardware. That is where they make their money. They don't care what you do with the hardware. They only provide an OS and awsome APIs and bundled applications at all to encourage you to buy the hardware.
"Then you buy an iPod, it will only play stuff bought at the Mac store."
It also plays music loaded from any CDs you might own and any CDs you buy at your local brick and mortar music store. It also plays music you might have downloaded or pirated via the internet.
"Then you can only buy at the Mac store if you do it using some Mac application...."
OK, this one is true. How many other on-line music stores let you access them via third party applications ? It's a good thing you don't need to use the iTunes music store at all with your iPod.
You are a sadly misinformed person.
Have you have flown on a commercial airline in thelast 30 years? If so, you trusted your life to software. Thare is a standard called DO-178B Level A that applies to aircraft software upon which lives depend. There is a saying in the commercial avionics business: "Nobody has ever died from software failure on an airplane, yet." There have been some accidents where software played a role, but I won't quibble with that now.
The point is that safety critical software is developed routinely. It has been developed in asembly language. It has certainly been developed in Ada, C, and sub-sets of C++. It is expensive. Validation of avionics software and certification in an aircraft can easilly cost an order of magnitude more that just writing the software, and writing the software using required processes and producing required artifacts is not cheap either.
Microsoft has never been particularly innovative. I suspect you don't perceive innovation _now_ because you are aware of the prior art. Microsoft was not more innovative back in the day. You were probably just not as aware of the copious prior art when Windows 95 appeared. For example, the Windows 95 "look" was a poor copy if the NeXTstep 1988 look... The Win 16 API was a sad copy of the Mac Toolbox. Slashdot will tell you that the only notable innovation from Microsoft was "Bob."
Slashdot Mirror
Most Windows users don't understand what an operating system is or where the boundaries between the operating system, its desk top, and its application might be.
Even the ones who know they run "Windows XP" as opposed to some other version don't know what that means. They do know and use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access. Why do they know ? Because they start those applications frequently and a splash screen tells them what they are running. The equivalent to the splash screen for the operating system is only shown at startup, and most people neither reboot regularly nor pay attention when they do.
My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.
If I am right, competing with MS in the application space will be a lot harder than competing in the OS space, and we all know how successful competitors have been in the OS space.
See the comment from a DoD Program Manager http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195339&cid =16005044
See the comment from a DoD ProgramManager http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195339&cid =16005044
IANAL: Merely WANTING to commit homicide is not a crime in the U.S.A. Even intending to commit homicide but never attempting is not a crime.
If you want to imprison people for wanting to commit terrorism and/or wanting to harm the U.S.A, you aren't going to do it with criminal law. Do you advocate extra-legal detentions and thousands of people in Gitmo with no due process and no habius-corpus ?
If the answer to terrorism is criminal prosecution, then we can't detain the potential terrorist until he has acted on his plan and/or conspired with others to act on a plan. Just formulating a plan or just generally wanting to harm the U.S.A. is NOT a crime.
If the answer to terrorism is selective assassination of anyone suspected, declaring anyone with intent to harm the U.S.A. an unlawful enemy combatant, and indefinite detention without due process, then that is another matter entirely.
From TFA, "A person can download a song off the Internet when they pay for it or get permission."
;), it is NOT illegal to make a copy of music you have downloaded. Quite apart for music that is not copyrighted, even copyrighted music can be shared under fail use restrictions.
The statement is true, but if they had said "A person can ONLY download a song off the Internet when they pay for it or get permission," they would of course be wrong. I have to think the first statement has an implied "ONLY"...
TFA: "A person cannot copy a song that they have legally downloaded (by paying a fee or obtaining permission) for someone else."
Even in a backwards nation like Canada
There is plenty of music in the world that is no longer copyrighted. By international treaty, copyrights expire!
By August 16, 2047, all of Elvis Presley's published works will be in the public domain. Many early recordings from the Jazz era are already in the public domain.
HOW LONG COPYRIGHT PROTECTION ENDURES
From http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html
Works Originally Created on or after January 1, 1978
A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the author's life plus an additional 70 years after the author's death. In the case of "a joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for hire," the term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving author's death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author's identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
Works Originally Created before January 1, 1978, But Not Published or Registered by That Date
These works have been automatically brought under the statute and are now given federal copyright protection. The duration of copyright in these works will generally be computed in the same way as for works created on or after January 1, 1978: the life-plus-70 or 95/120-year terms will apply to them as well. The law provides that in no case will the term of copyright for works in this category expire before December 31, 2002, and for works published on or before December 31, 2002, the term of copyright will not expire before December 31, 2047.
Works Originally Created and Published or Registered before January 1, 1978
Under the law in effect before 1978, copyright was secured either on the date a work was published with a copyright notice or on the date of registration if the work was registered in unpublished form. In either case, the copyright endured for a first term of 28 years from the date it was secured. During the last (28th) year of the first term, the copyright was eligible for renewal. The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copyrights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, or for pre-1978 copyrights restored under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), making these works eligible for a total term of protection of 75 years. Public Law 105-298, enacted on October 27, 1998, further extended the renewal term of copyrights still subsisting on that date by an additional 20 years, providing for a renewal term of 67 years and a total term of protection of 95 years.
Public Law 102-307, enacted on June 26, 1992, amended the 1976 Copyright Act to provide for automatic renewal of the term of copyrights secured between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Although the renewal term is automatically provided, the Copyright Office does not issue a renewal certificate for these works unless a renewal application and fee are received and registered in the Copyright Office.
Public Law 102-307 makes renewal registration optional. Thus, filing for renewal registration is no longer req
You are delusional.
Apple helped invent and standardize Firewire (IEEE 1394).
Apple was the first computer company to popularize USB, and the first third-party USB devices were for Macs.
Run Linux on your Mac, and you won't even be bothered that only half or Mac OS X is open-source. If you want a fully closed system, buy Windows and run that on your Intel Mac.
Apple hardware is quite competitive with name brand PCs on a price per features basis. Macs are not as configurable, you can't easily build one yourself from spare parts, and there is no sub-$600 Mac available to the general public.
Many people think Macs empower them rather than incapacitate them, and whatever reason you will "never buy Apple products" has more to do with your irrational hysteria than any facts.
No special cable is needed other than the USB cable that comes with it. The Shuffle doesn't even need that. It plugs directly into a USB port.
No special drivers are need for Windows or Mac. The iPod works just like every other removable USB storage device.
If a game is not available on the shelf at Walmart and Best Buy, it is very unlikely to be a hit. However, shelf space at Walmart and Best Buy is so limited that game publishers have to rent the shelf space. The publisher pays for shelf inches or an end-cap, and the retailer doesn't care so much if the game sells or not. The retailer makes money from shelf rent regardless.
Small developers and small distributors do not have the capital to pay Walmart $8M for a national role-out. Therefore there is no shelf space for the games. Therefore they don't sell well.
A manager at Vivendi once told me that they could sell 50K units of an empty box at Christmas because the parents have no idea which games are good. They buy them randomly, and having and end-cap and a pretty box will result in more sales than any amount of game play quality.
The problems with electronic distribution have still not been overcome: Separating the good from the boring, handling payment, limited bandwidth, and game magazines won't review or publicize unless the publisher advertises.
I call bullshit. iPods are ubiquitous and people still can't be bothered to check out the facts. If your MP3 play takes a single AAA battery, it is already bigger than an iPod shuffle which is approximately the size and weight of a small pack of Wrigley's gum or any other USB memory stick.
$880 is more than the cost of ANY iPod.
All iPods also work as removable storage devices. Plug into USB and copy files from your hard disk. For iPods with screens, copy pictures from your hard disk and carry them around/view them on your iPod.
And yes, all iPods play MP3 files and several other non-DRM formats. If you don't use the iTunes store, you need never see DRM on your iPod.
I have never lived in Silicon valley, but I have been a regular visitor for about 15 years. I travel there for business meetings and conventions usually for a week at a time. I have been all over the valley at all times of year, etc. My follow-up question would be "which Silicon Valley ?"
... Stanford fuels the fire but isn't necessary. I always enjoy overhearing conversations about mutex locks and Posix compliance and Java Beans and silicon-on-copper while buying a Barbie for my daughter, but there are concentrated nerd communities in many places nowadays.
.com bust. The Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose used to be a great place to stay. You could step out of the lobby and get on the light rail. You could walk to restaurants, a mall, and clubs late into the night and the sidewalks were still crowded. The light rail is still there, but there is no-place to go anymore. During the late 90s, office space became so precious that the malls, restaurants, and clubs were forced out to make way for higher paying tenants. Then the bubble burst and Downtown San Jose was left a lifeless corpse. Now the places to stay when on business are Sunnyvale or Mountain View. I liked the "culture" of the valley better in the early 90s.
Stanford is certainly a great source for alpha nerds, but the founding technology seeds of Silicon valley were not started by Stanford grads. Think HP, Varian, Xerox PARC, National labs, Nasa, Apple,
As for rich people, why would anyone locate/fund a start-up in Silicon Valley now ? The cost of doing business there is outrageous. There are great people in many places where start-up costs are half or a third and you don't even have to leave the USA. Consider Research Triangle in North Carolina. Venture capital can be spent anywhere, and it goes so much further other places.
Economically, the valley is the poster city for comparison between the haves and the have-nots. Compare the have-nots who drive 2 hours to work every day and raise 5 children in a tenement vs. the childless power couple with dual 6 figure incomes, a 1000sf ranch in Mountain View, and evidently dead end genes.
Culturally Silicon Valley has some "issues."
People used to raise families there, but not anymore. I always ask people I meet about their families, and few have any children. Almost none have more than 1 child. Families with the famous 2.5 children used to live in those ubiquitous 1000sf 1950's ranch style houses.
The Silicon Valley of the early 90s changed radically in the late 90s and changed again after the
Here are some old threads in the mailing list archives after a minimal search/ 2001/8/9/38765/ 2001/8/8/43646
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa
Summary:
Cocoa dropped and in some cases regained the following incomplete list:
- Objective-C++ (regained years later)
- Cross-platform support (Openstep worked on many platforms including Windows NT)
- Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) (now only for Java)
- Pantone color calibration/matching support
- Built-in Renderman support (from PIXAR)
- Integrated inter-machine Distributed Objects
- Portable Distributed Objects (PDO)
- Distributed Object Linking and Embedding (D'OLE)
- A single unified OO method of development (OS X requires use of procedural APIs)
- Services (Cocoa context menus are not universally available anymore and Services menu is hidden)
- NeXTime (Replaced in 2005 with QTKit which is very nice)
- PhoneKit,
- IndexingKit,
- DBKit (was already replaced with EOF which is still missing)
- 3DKit, (OpenGL support in OS X is great now)
- MachKit,
- DriverKit (Replaced with inferior IOKit)
- SoundKit
- MusicKit (Donated to Stanford)
- NSHosting (Per-application remote display and control [like X-Windows but better])
- WebObjects for Objective-C
- DigitalLibrarian (Indexed everything including documentation. HelpViewer is horrible and Spotlight isn't there yet)
- Automated Fax support (restored later)
- Reliable standard pasteboard type for vector graphics
- Stand alone applications (Cocoa applications must now link all of Carbon which expands the API that a developer must encounter, reduces portability, and degrades the resulting application for no apparent benefit)
- Advantages of immutable collection classes (reduced because they are all mutable in CoreFoundation)
[skip early history of Jobs and Apple]
- Stve Jobs Starts NeXT and releases NeXTstep on NeXT computers
- Jonathan Schwartz starts Lighthouse Design to develop NeXTstep applications
- Lighthouse Design is very successful and Jonathan Schwartz and Steve Jobs frequently share a stage at NeXTWorld convention.
- NeXT can't figure out a buisiness model for selling expensive workstations with great object oriented development tools (NeXTstep)
- Sun and Apple collaborate on Openstep (the successor to NeXTstep)
- Lighthouse Design ships all of their (very cool) applications for Openstep 68K, Openstep Intel, - -Openstep SPARC, HPUX PA-RISC, Solaris-SunOS/SPARC, and Openstep Enterprise for Windows NT.
- NexT can't figure out a business model for selling object ware and developer tools (Openstep)
- Sun forgets about Openstep to pursue Java
- Sun Buys Lighthouse Design and makes Jonathan Schwartz head of Java Applications Group
- Apple Buys NeXT and makes Steve Jobs a consultant
- Apple ships Openstep 4.2 for INTEL and not PPC/Mac!
- Sun Java Applications Group is unable or unwilling to do anything with Lighthouse Design's applications
- Steve Jobs takes over Apple from the inside becomming iCEO and then CEO of Apple
- Jonathan Schwartz is promoted several times
- Apple renames Openstep Cocoa, removing a lot of features in the process.
- Jonathan Schwartz is promoted to COO of Sun
- Apple slowly restores features to Cocoa and adds new things that were never there before
- Sun can't figure out a business model for selling object ware and developer tools (Java)
- Sun can't figure out a business model for selling expensive workstations
- Jonathan Schwartz is promoted to CEO of Sun
Anyone notice similarities in the career arc for these two individuals?
Anyone notice that Apple and Sun both make integrated hardware and software and provide object oriented development platforms ?
"We're seeing a dramatic increase in developer productivity with NEXTSTEP on SPARC," said Jonathan Schwartz, president of Lighthouse Design, Ltd., a leading independent software vendor for NeXT. "In delivering our entire family of developer and end-user products to the SPARC platform, we're confident SPARC system users now have the ideal environment to begin making their transition to objects."f lash.950523.3868.xml
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/1995-05/sun
Screen shots of Lighthouse apps: [Be gentle with the poor host that provides these shots]
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Diagram.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Concurrence.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/OpenWrite.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Quantrix.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/Tables.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/TaskMaster.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/VarioBuilder.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/VarioData.gif
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/WetPaint.gif
Doom just for fun:
http://www.linuks.mine.nu/openstep/doom.png
Here is an article about Schwartz and the Lighthouse applications: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/22/suns_macos _x_suite/
.. Jonathan - Schwartz, told us that the source would in all likelihood remain in Sun's morgue."
"Lighthouse had a highly-regarded suite of software including the Quantrix spreadsheet, Diagram! vector graphics package and Concurrence presentation software. The names might mean little to today's Apple users, more's the pity. Apple's Mac OS X is a cosmetically enhanced update of the old NeXT system...
"Little chance," he told us. "We're not really trying to promote Objective-C anymore, much though I loved the products we built. We think this Java thing has some legs to it."
The Lighthouse's memorial site http://lighthouse.ithinksw.com/index.php referenced in the article and on this gnustep page http://cbbrowne.com/info/gnustep.html does not seem to work anymore.
Lighthouse Design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design
Lighthouse produced awesome NeXTstep/Openstep applications. Recall that Openstep was an open standard cross platform framework provided by NeXT (Steve Jobs) and Sun (Scott McNealy). Little things like the first web browser and content editor, the dev tools for the game Doom, and Lotus Improve originated in NeXTstep. Scott McNealy once famously said Sun puts all of its wood behind one arrow, and Openstep is that arrow. Um, then Java came along and Sun forgot about Openstep.
Sun acquired Lighthouse Design in ~1996. Lighthouse produced Diagram which was imitated in the form of Visio. Lighthouse was rumored to be producing a project management application (think MS Project). Sun initially said they would release the Lighthouse suite of NeXTstep/Openstep applications as Java applications for enterprise users. Sadly, Sun was never released them. Maybe there was no market or Sun wasn't able to get them to work as Java apps.
Openstep went on to become Apple's Cocoa.
Lighthouse's applications dies inside Sun.
Jonathan Schwartz became Sun CEO.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bog1.htm
I am the founder and owner of probably the most successful formerly Openstep based software companies. We were very successful, and I suspect but can't prove that we made a lot more money from Openstep than NeXT ever did. Apple acquired NeXT and after a couple of years refused to sell more Openstep deployment licenses at any price (reneging on a couple of years of promises to the contrary that I personally heard emanate from Steve Job's mouth).
We sold specialized vertical market software for a lot of money. We could easily have bundled a Mac with each license to use our applications as long as Apple let our customers toss the Mac in a dumpster and run the software on an embedded Intel based single board computer. Apple clearly did not regard such a proposition as an adequate business model for selling Openstep deployment licenses.
Neither Apple nor Mr. Jobs nor market conditions have changed in any way that would change this. Yellow Box is not coming back. OS X on generic Intel will not be sanctioned by Apple any time soon. The rules of doing business with Apple have become painfully clear.
I forget. What DRM badness and other jazz and which of Apple's actions have particularly ruled them out ?
Ha ha. Nice one!
Executable UML... I'm still giggling. Is it subtitled "how to write 10,000 lines of code with 1 million pages of paper that nobody will ever read" ?
Public Television (and radio) in the USA is funded minimally through general tax revenue and primarily through voluntary contributions from businesses and viewers. Like most of the BBC, Public Television in the USA is commercial free and provides content slightly more cerebral than the common fare on for-profit TV. There are annoying "pledge drives" where viewers are beseeched to contribute and there are "funding provided by..." announcements at the start of shows.
However, Public Television seldom draws more than 5% viewer-ship (even though it is practically al I watch and hear). Viewer-ship ratings are arguably a metric of "quality" as judged by the masses.
Any form of taxation includes the threat of force for failure to pay. In theory, if you don't pay your British TV license, you will be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, your assets may be confiscated and you may be imprisoned. Such licenses/taxes and accompanying threats of force are very harsh in exchange for mere entertainment. I much prefer voluntary funding systems whether directly from viewers or through advertisements.
What kind of zealot are you ? - Everyone who runs Mc OS X runs Darwin. Darwin is the kernel, I/O layer, and BSD APIs of Mac OS X. Darwin is Open Source. If I use a closed source Window Manager and APIs to develop software on Linux, is Linux is not Open Source. If I use the close source Quartz window manager and closed source APIs in Mac OS X, does that make Darwin any less open ? - It is not Apple's fault that currently shipping Windows versions cannot boot with industry standard EFI used with Mac Intel. Would you rather be stuck with BIOS forever ? Microsoft has adopted EFI for 64 bit Windows. Windows will come to Mac Intel. - There is nothing stopping Linux from running on Mac Intel. The Linux developers have only had Mac Intel hardware to use for at most one month. Linux will run on Mac Intel soon. - OS X is linked to Apple hardware. Apple doesn't care and doesn't restrict what you do with Apple hardware. Your "Fact" is sadly misinformed. - Why do you care about Apple's share of legal on-line DRMed music sales ? If you don't like their store or their DRM scheme, buy from the brick and mortar store or from Amazon.com and load the music from CD to you iPod.
"The reason this is bad news for education in Europe, particularly Switzerland and France, is that Apple is a lock in company. Buy the hardware and you are stuck. You can't move the OS to another hardware vendor, and with the MacIntels, you can't boot any other OS on the hardware. This is not something any sane person would want for public sector institutions in his country. MS is bad enough. But at least you can run the hardware of your choice and get it wherever you want." You can run Linux on your Mac hardware, and soon you will be able to run Windows on your Mac hardware. Mac OS "Darwin" is Open-Source. Only the higher level APIs and applications are closed source. You are always free to use X-Windows and Qt or whatever you want instead of Apple's higher level APIs. "Its a moral issue, and its a political issue, its about personal freedom, and its the exact same debate as is happening in Massachusets, but on a different subject. Some companies, and Apple is one, want to lock their customers in. The customers should not go for it." I might agree with you that there is a moral and political issue if your accusation had any merit. How much of MS Windows is Open Source compared to how much of Mac OS X ? Apple is not doing anything to prevent you from running Windows or Linux or Solaris or anything else you want on Macs. Only Windows incompatibility with industry standard EFI has delayed Windows on Mac hardware. "What Apple wants is, you buy the hardware, it only runs OSX." What Apple wants is you but the hardware. That is where they make their money. They don't care what you do with the hardware. They only provide an OS and awsome APIs and bundled applications at all to encourage you to buy the hardware. "Then you buy an iPod, it will only play stuff bought at the Mac store." It also plays music loaded from any CDs you might own and any CDs you buy at your local brick and mortar music store. It also plays music you might have downloaded or pirated via the internet. "Then you can only buy at the Mac store if you do it using some Mac application...." OK, this one is true. How many other on-line music stores let you access them via third party applications ? It's a good thing you don't need to use the iTunes music store at all with your iPod. You are a sadly misinformed person.
Have you have flown on a commercial airline in thelast 30 years? If so, you trusted your life to software.
Thare is a standard called DO-178B Level A that applies to aircraft software upon which lives depend. There is a saying in the commercial avionics business: "Nobody has ever died from software failure on an airplane, yet." There have been some accidents where software played a role, but I won't quibble with that now.
The point is that safety critical software is developed routinely. It has been developed in asembly language. It has certainly been developed in Ada, C, and sub-sets of C++. It is expensive. Validation of avionics software and certification in an aircraft can easilly cost an order of magnitude more that just writing the software, and writing the software using required processes and producing required artifacts is not cheap either.
Microsoft has never been particularly innovative. I suspect you don't perceive innovation _now_ because you are aware of the prior art. Microsoft was not more innovative back in the day. You were probably just not as aware of the copious prior art when Windows 95 appeared. For example, the Windows 95 "look" was a poor copy if the NeXTstep 1988 look... The Win 16 API was a sad copy of the Mac Toolbox. Slashdot will tell you that the only notable innovation from Microsoft was "Bob."
m ld/
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95
http://www120.pair.com/mccarthy/nextstep/intro.ht