1. The systems will cost just as much as if you'd ordered them with Windows in the first place.
It's hard to imagine that the limited run of these systems is responsible for the price increase; after all, you're talking about tossing in a hard drive and not installing, so it should be cheaper to produce. No doubt Dell is pocketing the extra change.
OTOH, the true savings are in the time you're not spending reformatting the hard drive. Negligible if you order only a handful of systems, but if you order a few thousand, that's a serious chunk of time.
If AOL wants to remain in existence, AOL needs to help topple the MS monopoly, first in browsers and then the desktop OS would help.
AOL doesn't give a rip about toppling MS, nor should they. here's why:
1) Right now, AOL only has to deal with two OS vendors, MS and Apple. And if Apple went away, they wouldn't be too bad off. But the point is, AOL is able to cut a deal with MS to keep AOL in Windows because of the DOJ, browser marketshare, et al (I'll touch on that in a sec.). Fragment the PC market into several OS's, and AOL is going to have a harder time cutting deals with various OS vendors. Worse yet, if Linux goes mainstream, how does that help AOL? It doesn't; in fact, most people savvy enough to use Linux despise AOL. I think it's safe to say that even if AOL did offer software for Linux, most distro's would shun it, or AOL would have to pay big bucks for inclusion.
2) AOL is the largest ISP on the planet. MS is still rabid about ownership of the browser market. AOL owns the number two browser. Mix it all together, and you see that AOL has some leverage against MS. As long as they keep signing deals to keep IE as the browser of choice for AOL, then MS doesn't have to worry about losing marketshare. But, just have AOL switch over to Netscape, and MS loses control that they've spent years fighting for. I have no doubt that switching over to Gecko on the Mac is a thinly veiled threat; "Don't push us." So, AOL get a pre-install deal with Windows, and MS remains the browser of choice for the world's largest ISP.
Remember when you were a kid and you had this cool idea for a video game, so you put it up on a website, but some big bully of a site came along, pushed you down in the mud, slashdotted your site and stole your lunch money?
Actors in movies are simply there to drive a story. Sure, that's the basic job description of why they are on the set. But CG actors will NEVER NEVER NEVER replace human actors.
Here's why: people don't care about CG characters, on or off screen (ok, Lara Croft is a notable exception, but that's mainly for an audience of 13 year old boys).
Answer me this: Could a CG character have played a more interesting Joker than Jack Nicholson in Batman? Would we have cared as much if a CG Gandalf had shown as much intensity as Ian McKellan? Would a CG character have riveted us as much as Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man? The answer is "No," because we find the actors to be just as compelling as the characters they play.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure CG characters are going to grow much more popular over the next decade. But, I predict, that popularity is going to be more faddish than anything.
That's a sociological perspective, not a finance perspective. A finance perspective would be the missed opportunity cost of what that $20 could have been invested in for 3 months, and at what rate of return.
However, we are purchasing this asset for entertainment rather than investment, so our rate of return will either be zero (for no purchase) or a negative number. If we buy it and hold onto it, then we will lose 100% of the cost. On the other hand, we could try and sell it on eBay in late October, and (provided you got a good price on it), figure that the value has depreciated 20%; we could then take the residual value of our 2-disc set and apply it to the purchase of the 4-disc set.
Blockbuster had a special going on, you pay $20 and get the LOTR DVD that was just released plus 10 free rentals. What a deal!
Not only that, but they had another deal where you pay a dollar or so to join the Kid's Club, and you get one free kid's rental every day until September 30th. For the past month, my family has been hitting Blockbuster 2 or 3 times a week, and almost never do we pay anything.
Oh, and someone mentioned Blockbuster forcing the editing of movies... I gotta say, I'm *highly* skeptical of that. I see those Cinemax porn movies all over the Blockbuster shelves, why would they force an edit of a guy raping a nun? And why would they even bother to carry a limited run title like that if they had a problem with it?
He asked me: "When did we, the public, without which public television would not exist, vote that we wanted to move to digital television? How is it in the public interest to move public programming to a new standard for which most people don't have televisions and which will eventually necessitate the the purchase of a new set?"
It's called "progress," Dad. Remeber the orignial TV set? It had a round screen, B&W, and was about 4" in diameter. Thank goodness there wasn't a lot of rhetoric back then about "Why do we need a rectangular TV?"
You're gonna have to buy a new TV set anyway; TV's today are only built to last about 5 years. So why not force broadcasters to maintain some kind of pace with advances in technology, and start producing higher resolution digital signals?
Maybe back in the days of the original TV set it was convenient for a handful of people in a room to say, "Let's move to a larger, rectangular screen," because so few people were affected by it. Today, the TV industry is so large that it literally takes an act of Congress to force the adoption of new technologies.
Maybe what Dad is really upset about is the fact that TV's may be becoming more sophisticated and harder to work on.
Intuit has announced that QuickBooks is coming back to the Mac. This is significant for the Mac to start making inroads back into businesses, because QB is such a staple of small business accounting.
I'm not sure what changed their minds; I just remember the announcement in 1997 that QB development on the Mac was being halted (I think it was already 2 years behind the PC version at that point). This in spite of the fact that one of the first things that Steve Jobs did was to put Intuit's CEO on the board of directors at Apple.
As a Mac user, I'm grateful, but I have to wonder what took so long...
Or I should say, it works too well. The system worked great initially, but pretty soon the oil got in between the connections of all the components that weren't soldered or printed on the mainboard, and thus rendered each of those components useless (CPU, memory, video card, and anything else in the PCI slots).
The only way to do a mineral cooled system would be to solder everything down. Of course, then you couldn't upgrade anything. I guess that might work for a laptop (how many people actually upgrade a CPU or a video card on a laptop?), but the memory would need to be maxed out, and then you have the extra weight of all the mineral oil in there to lug around. So maybe not.
on OS X, where you don't have a full screen mode with a task bar at the bottom. Tabs on OS X add that task bar functionality that is lacking (the dock is nice and all, but I still prefer a task bar).
On Windows and Linux system, I find the tabs confusing. And I mainly use Mozilla in Windows. The problem is that I keep looking to the bottom of the screen for window managment out of habit, and end up closing windows with 4 or 5 tabs by accident.
The best thing about tabs overall, though, is the pop-behind function. If it weren't for that, I'd never use tabs in Mozilla for Windows.
However, Mozilla for OS X is incredibly slow. I have a 933 mhz G4, I don't expect to have lag time on popup menus. Also, it seems to load pages more slowly than IE for OS X.
With the merger a done deal, HP is reorganizing their divisions, setting new strategies. They probably want to compete more fully with Dell head-to-head in the e-commerce space, and they can't do that if Dell is selling their products.
HP has an established brand of printers, well known, well liked. Dell's printer division is going to have to spend big bucks to get there. Better for HP to yank their printers now and use it as a competitive advantage to sell their own systems, and let Dell fumble around.
Well, I work for an advertising agency. AdCritic is a very useful tool and worth paying for. There's a lot of commercials that don't get nationwide airplay, and there's a lot of stuff you'd want to watch when you're concepting for a client's tv spot.
Most of the marketing managers at medium to large sized organizations would likely find it as a useful tool, not only to keep up on trends in tv advertising, but also to keep tabs on the competition.
And I'm sure that there are marketing students in undergraduate and graduate programs nationwide that might find it a useful tool in doing research.
I bet a lot of directors, producers, film editors, etc., would also find it a valuable service.
It would be pretty cool. Connectix would modify their VirtualPC software so that you could run Windows (natively) as a process within OS X, much as VirtualPC for Windows does now; the option to run both OS's without the speed hit of emulation.
The biiiiiiiig downside to going with x86 chips... Classic/OS 9 apps would not run. Bye-bye QuarkXPress, and every other big app that developers are dragging their feet on.
And another problem, the fact that all existing OS X apps would have to be recompiled for x86 binaries. Not a major task for the developer, but is every developer going to jump right on it? What a mess, after just having gone through the OS 9 to OS X transition.
And then there's the whole issue of hardware. No more fuzzy math talk about how megahertz don't count. Apple would have to get damn competitive on hardware, either by offering very competitive pricing with narrow margins (not likely)or by continually trying to add features that PC vendors only talk about (like they did with USB, FireWire, DVD burners, and screwless, hinged cases).
Apple wouldn't dare make the x86 jump for at least another year, minimum, and two years at best. They need to give the Mac community a little breather as we just went through the PC equivalent of open heart surgery.
They got stock for their $150 million, it's not like it was a "gimme"; stock which subsequently appreciated in value and would have made MS over a billion dollars in capital gains if they hadn't been so silly and sold it off as soon as they could.
I *hated* the feature of Oni that made you start off the game with virtually no moves, and slowly unlock moves as you progressed. I can't imagine a more annoying game.
Also, the lack of multiplayer killed Oni. They said, "Screw it, it's too slow over a modem." What about broadband players? What about LAN players? Bungie wasn't thinking too far ahead when they put Oni out.
I agree with another poster, Bungie must have rushed Oni out the door when they were in talks to be assimilated by the Borg cube.
Sitting next to Doom 3 on the shelf, this thing is going to look like a relic of a bygone era. It's too bad Bungie really screwed this one up. And I'm not even sure it gave X-Box the big boost it was supposed to.
A year ago, I was really jazzed about Halo. Now, I would suggest that Bungie forget about giving Mac and PC users some warmed-over port of a two year old console game.
That's kind of where this argument is going, and is probably another assumption you could make about the survey.
eMachines sets the bar for low cost, but only people who are totally focused on cost to the exclusion of quality, productivity, et cetera, would buy such a piece of junk.
Yes, Apple is not low-cost when you put an iMac next to an eMachines. IBM is more comparable to Apple.
and even then, it's not true OS9, since you'll have some of the enhancements of the upgrade but keep some of 9.1.
Since all that is really necessary to do it is to fool the installer, that means it's not a real hardware issue and that Apple could, but didn't want to do it -- AT ALL; there's not even an unsupported OS upgrade available for pre-g3 machines.
Again, what are you arguing for here? You fault Apple for not just letting you install OS 9 on pre-G3 systems, but your previous point is that OS 9 includes enhancements that break the OS on those systems. If Apple were to modify the installer to only install those items that run and leave out those that don't, then you aren't really running the full OS 9, are you? That sort of scenario also leaves Apple open to customer service headaches, because Apple will have officially endorsed running a hobbled version of OS 9, which may perform in unpredictable ways, causing an increase in customer services calls, and eliminating the profit margin on OS 9 sales to pre-G3 customers, so why do it?
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1. The systems will cost just as much as if you'd ordered them with Windows in the first place.
It's hard to imagine that the limited run of these systems is responsible for the price increase; after all, you're talking about tossing in a hard drive and not installing, so it should be cheaper to produce. No doubt Dell is pocketing the extra change.
OTOH, the true savings are in the time you're not spending reformatting the hard drive. Negligible if you order only a handful of systems, but if you order a few thousand, that's a serious chunk of time.
If AOL wants to remain in existence, AOL needs to help topple the MS monopoly, first in browsers and then the desktop OS would help.
AOL doesn't give a rip about toppling MS, nor should they. here's why:
1) Right now, AOL only has to deal with two OS vendors, MS and Apple. And if Apple went away, they wouldn't be too bad off. But the point is, AOL is able to cut a deal with MS to keep AOL in Windows because of the DOJ, browser marketshare, et al (I'll touch on that in a sec.). Fragment the PC market into several OS's, and AOL is going to have a harder time cutting deals with various OS vendors. Worse yet, if Linux goes mainstream, how does that help AOL? It doesn't; in fact, most people savvy enough to use Linux despise AOL. I think it's safe to say that even if AOL did offer software for Linux, most distro's would shun it, or AOL would have to pay big bucks for inclusion.
2) AOL is the largest ISP on the planet. MS is still rabid about ownership of the browser market. AOL owns the number two browser. Mix it all together, and you see that AOL has some leverage against MS. As long as they keep signing deals to keep IE as the browser of choice for AOL, then MS doesn't have to worry about losing marketshare. But, just have AOL switch over to Netscape, and MS loses control that they've spent years fighting for. I have no doubt that switching over to Gecko on the Mac is a thinly veiled threat; "Don't push us." So, AOL get a pre-install deal with Windows, and MS remains the browser of choice for the world's largest ISP.
Remember when you were a kid and you had this cool idea for a video game, so you put it up on a website, but some big bully of a site came along, pushed you down in the mud, slashdotted your site and stole your lunch money?
Actors in movies are simply there to drive a story. Sure, that's the basic job description of why they are on the set. But CG actors will NEVER NEVER NEVER replace human actors.
Here's why: people don't care about CG characters, on or off screen (ok, Lara Croft is a notable exception, but that's mainly for an audience of 13 year old boys).
Answer me this: Could a CG character have played a more interesting Joker than Jack Nicholson in Batman? Would we have cared as much if a CG Gandalf had shown as much intensity as Ian McKellan? Would a CG character have riveted us as much as Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man? The answer is "No," because we find the actors to be just as compelling as the characters they play.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure CG characters are going to grow much more popular over the next decade. But, I predict, that popularity is going to be more faddish than anything.
That's a sociological perspective, not a finance perspective. A finance perspective would be the missed opportunity cost of what that $20 could have been invested in for 3 months, and at what rate of return.
:-D
However, we are purchasing this asset for entertainment rather than investment, so our rate of return will either be zero (for no purchase) or a negative number. If we buy it and hold onto it, then we will lose 100% of the cost. On the other hand, we could try and sell it on eBay in late October, and (provided you got a good price on it), figure that the value has depreciated 20%; we could then take the residual value of our 2-disc set and apply it to the purchase of the 4-disc set.
THAT'S the finance perpective.
Blockbuster had a special going on, you pay $20 and get the LOTR DVD that was just released plus 10 free rentals. What a deal!
Not only that, but they had another deal where you pay a dollar or so to join the Kid's Club, and you get one free kid's rental every day until September 30th. For the past month, my family has been hitting Blockbuster 2 or 3 times a week, and almost never do we pay anything.
Oh, and someone mentioned Blockbuster forcing the editing of movies... I gotta say, I'm *highly* skeptical of that. I see those Cinemax porn movies all over the Blockbuster shelves, why would they force an edit of a guy raping a nun? And why would they even bother to carry a limited run title like that if they had a problem with it?
He asked me: "When did we, the public, without which public television would not exist, vote that we wanted to move to digital television? How is it in the public interest to move public programming to a new standard for which most people don't have televisions and which will eventually necessitate the the purchase of a new set?"
It's called "progress," Dad. Remeber the orignial TV set? It had a round screen, B&W, and was about 4" in diameter. Thank goodness there wasn't a lot of rhetoric back then about "Why do we need a rectangular TV?"
You're gonna have to buy a new TV set anyway; TV's today are only built to last about 5 years. So why not force broadcasters to maintain some kind of pace with advances in technology, and start producing higher resolution digital signals?
Maybe back in the days of the original TV set it was convenient for a handful of people in a room to say, "Let's move to a larger, rectangular screen," because so few people were affected by it. Today, the TV industry is so large that it literally takes an act of Congress to force the adoption of new technologies.
Maybe what Dad is really upset about is the fact that TV's may be becoming more sophisticated and harder to work on.
Just make sure you don't have a kernel panic while using the funky robotic hand or it might turn you into a cranky soprano girl.
Intuit has announced that QuickBooks is coming back to the Mac. This is significant for the Mac to start making inroads back into businesses, because QB is such a staple of small business accounting.
I'm not sure what changed their minds; I just remember the announcement in 1997 that QB development on the Mac was being halted (I think it was already 2 years behind the PC version at that point). This in spite of the fact that one of the first things that Steve Jobs did was to put Intuit's CEO on the board of directors at Apple.
As a Mac user, I'm grateful, but I have to wonder what took so long...
Microsoft would like nothing better than for Sun to release a version of Java that isn't backwards compatible. That would give them two options:
1) Stick with the old Java 2 VM for a really really really long time, claiming backwards compatibility, and watch Sun fall on its face, or
2) Upgrade to Java 3 immediately and watch everything break.
Either way they obey the letter of the law, and it gives MS an opportunity to really push C# as developers get frustrated with the transition.
Or I should say, it works too well. The system worked great initially, but pretty soon the oil got in between the connections of all the components that weren't soldered or printed on the mainboard, and thus rendered each of those components useless (CPU, memory, video card, and anything else in the PCI slots).
The only way to do a mineral cooled system would be to solder everything down. Of course, then you couldn't upgrade anything. I guess that might work for a laptop (how many people actually upgrade a CPU or a video card on a laptop?), but the memory would need to be maxed out, and then you have the extra weight of all the mineral oil in there to lug around. So maybe not.
on OS X, where you don't have a full screen mode with a task bar at the bottom. Tabs on OS X add that task bar functionality that is lacking (the dock is nice and all, but I still prefer a task bar).
On Windows and Linux system, I find the tabs confusing. And I mainly use Mozilla in Windows. The problem is that I keep looking to the bottom of the screen for window managment out of habit, and end up closing windows with 4 or 5 tabs by accident.
The best thing about tabs overall, though, is the pop-behind function. If it weren't for that, I'd never use tabs in Mozilla for Windows.
However, Mozilla for OS X is incredibly slow. I have a 933 mhz G4, I don't expect to have lag time on popup menus. Also, it seems to load pages more slowly than IE for OS X.
How is Apple going to feel about an Aqua theme that is easily distributable to Linux and Windows users?
They ain't gonna be happy...
That's why Apple will be hard-coding the OS X version to make calls to their windowing API's rather than building a theme.
Let me know when when you want to go. And no cheap stuff; I'm a Mac user, I have expensive tastes... ;-)
With the merger a done deal, HP is reorganizing their divisions, setting new strategies. They probably want to compete more fully with Dell head-to-head in the e-commerce space, and they can't do that if Dell is selling their products.
HP has an established brand of printers, well known, well liked. Dell's printer division is going to have to spend big bucks to get there. Better for HP to yank their printers now and use it as a competitive advantage to sell their own systems, and let Dell fumble around.
Well, I work for an advertising agency. AdCritic is a very useful tool and worth paying for. There's a lot of commercials that don't get nationwide airplay, and there's a lot of stuff you'd want to watch when you're concepting for a client's tv spot.
Most of the marketing managers at medium to large sized organizations would likely find it as a useful tool, not only to keep up on trends in tv advertising, but also to keep tabs on the competition.
And I'm sure that there are marketing students in undergraduate and graduate programs nationwide that might find it a useful tool in doing research.
I bet a lot of directors, producers, film editors, etc., would also find it a valuable service.
It would be pretty cool. Connectix would modify their VirtualPC software so that you could run Windows (natively) as a process within OS X, much as VirtualPC for Windows does now; the option to run both OS's without the speed hit of emulation.
The biiiiiiiig downside to going with x86 chips... Classic/OS 9 apps would not run. Bye-bye QuarkXPress, and every other big app that developers are dragging their feet on.
And another problem, the fact that all existing OS X apps would have to be recompiled for x86 binaries. Not a major task for the developer, but is every developer going to jump right on it? What a mess, after just having gone through the OS 9 to OS X transition.
And then there's the whole issue of hardware. No more fuzzy math talk about how megahertz don't count. Apple would have to get damn competitive on hardware, either by offering very competitive pricing with narrow margins (not likely)or by continually trying to add features that PC vendors only talk about (like they did with USB, FireWire, DVD burners, and screwless, hinged cases).
Apple wouldn't dare make the x86 jump for at least another year, minimum, and two years at best. They need to give the Mac community a little breather as we just went through the PC equivalent of open heart surgery.
Just check out this .Mac webpage explaning membership and benefits.
In other words, you want Apple to keep subsidizing your web site?
Have a nice trip to Cuba. I don't they'll pay for your website either, though.
They got stock for their $150 million, it's not like it was a "gimme"; stock which subsequently appreciated in value and would have made MS over a billion dollars in capital gains if they hadn't been so silly and sold it off as soon as they could.
I *hated* the feature of Oni that made you start off the game with virtually no moves, and slowly unlock moves as you progressed. I can't imagine a more annoying game.
Also, the lack of multiplayer killed Oni. They said, "Screw it, it's too slow over a modem." What about broadband players? What about LAN players? Bungie wasn't thinking too far ahead when they put Oni out.
I agree with another poster, Bungie must have rushed Oni out the door when they were in talks to be assimilated by the Borg cube.
Sitting next to Doom 3 on the shelf, this thing is going to look like a relic of a bygone era. It's too bad Bungie really screwed this one up. And I'm not even sure it gave X-Box the big boost it was supposed to.
A year ago, I was really jazzed about Halo. Now, I would suggest that Bungie forget about giving Mac and PC users some warmed-over port of a two year old console game.
That's kind of where this argument is going, and is probably another assumption you could make about the survey.
eMachines sets the bar for low cost, but only people who are totally focused on cost to the exclusion of quality, productivity, et cetera, would buy such a piece of junk.
Yes, Apple is not low-cost when you put an iMac next to an eMachines. IBM is more comparable to Apple.
and even then, it's not true OS9, since you'll have some of the enhancements of the upgrade but keep some of 9.1.
Since all that is really necessary to do it is to fool the installer, that means it's not a real hardware issue and that Apple could, but didn't want to do it -- AT ALL; there's not even an unsupported OS upgrade available for pre-g3 machines.
Again, what are you arguing for here? You fault Apple for not just letting you install OS 9 on pre-G3 systems, but your previous point is that OS 9 includes enhancements that break the OS on those systems. If Apple were to modify the installer to only install those items that run and leave out those that don't, then you aren't really running the full OS 9, are you? That sort of scenario also leaves Apple open to customer service headaches, because Apple will have officially endorsed running a hobbled version of OS 9, which may perform in unpredictable ways, causing an increase in customer services calls, and eliminating the profit margin on OS 9 sales to pre-G3 customers, so why do it?