Very few people in Apple's marketspace want a mid-grade machine. You might, but you and people like you are thin on the ground, and you're not going to fund the kind of margins that Apple et al need to survive.
Apple's market mirrors their product line: they're either home/SOHO users, for whom the iMac is adequate (it's quick enough, stylish and works well), or pro users who'd buy a Mac Pro and an ungodly-expensive calibrated monitor. The market for something between that is very, very thin. It exists in the enterprise in the Dell Latitude/Optiplex;HP Evo space (which Apple has near-zero presence in) but even then the emphasis is on manageability and support, not outright power.
What you want is Apple's OS on whitebox hardware. Apple tried that, and it nearly bankrupted them when the clonemakers resorted to attacking Apple's fat markets, rather than expanding into the razor-tin-margin land that is the commodity PC market.
Graphic designers use the right tool for the right job. The cheapest iMac is probably not that tool.
Apple will happily sell you a Mac Pro, or even a Cinema Display, that will work with your iMac (you could, oh, use the built-in display for your palettes, preview windows and such). The iMac is a consumer-grade machine. You can use it for professional design, and it will work, but there are some limitations and tradeoffs to make it work for the consumer market.
This is one of them: a consumer want a screen that costs less and has good response time. A professional graphic designer would be much less sensitive to price, much more tolerant of a poor response time and would probably not have bought a screen integrated into the body of the PC in the first place. They might've even bought a (very expensive) CRT and calibration unit.
Flash Player--up to version 9--still supports Mac OS X on PPC. There is/was a full Flash player (v7) for Windows Mobile. It was bad.
Flash Lite 2.0 doesn't support video and is more or less compatible with ActionScript as implemented in Flash 7. Flash Lite 3.0 is very new and does support video and parts of Flash 8's ActionScript. It works on S60/Symbian, BREW and WM5. I don't know what processor architectures it supports. It will run in a browser on WM5/6, but the experience is really unpleasant (though, really, this is WM, so unpleasant is de rigueur.)
I suspect Apple isn't including/adding/supporting Flash or Flash Lite on the iPhone is precisely the reason above: it really does suck. Apple would rather have a clean, if lobotomized, platform, then a interoperability clusterfuck that it Symbian or Windows Mobile.
Flash is a client-side technology. Most flash consumers use Windows and/or Intel CPUs. On a Mac OS X or Linux and/or PPC machine with equivalent power, Flash will run slower because it hasn't been worth the effort on Macromedia/Adobe's part to spend resources on smaller slices of the market.
Now, you can make arguments for the performance being partially the result of Mac OS or Linux's imaging system, but other (not all--a number are still optimized for x86) video codecs don't suffer as much.
It's unfortunate that the central issue among commenters here isn't that Wales may or may not have abused his expense account (and really, he'd be far from the first to do so), it's that this puts the Rachel Marsden editing scuffle from a few months back into an a new light:
Now, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here (was work done on the articles in question done before or after work was done on Wales?) but this kind of bending of the facts to suit a Wales (or anyone with responsibility at Wikipedia) really gives Wikipedia a black eye. If a normal media executive distorted facts about someone he/she was personally involved with, there would be a call from directors for a resignation if for no other reason than to save the organization's reputation. Between this and the overstock.com fiasco, it might be time for some resignations to happen before their credibility is overly damaged.
Yes, but Italian politics is a special case. Berlusconi has been up on corruption charges __MULTIPLE TIMES__ yet comes back more times than punching bag because he's charismatic, and because he's the least insane member of the Italian right wing (and when you understand that this includes Mussolini's direct descendant running on Mussolini's platform and getting an appreciable percentage of the vote, you'll understand "insane").
Besides, unlike American governments, Italian ones are lucky to last four months, let alone four years. If you don't like the current government, just wait five minutes and another one will be along shortly.
The iPod and iTunes do not force restrictive DRM. I have an iPod full of MP3s, and I can
copy said MP3s off the iPod very, very easily. They're not tagged, tracked or locked. At all.
There are at least four decent iPod management applications for systems able to run UNIX-a-like software. As long as your hardware and OS can see USB mass storage devices and can run said software, you can freely load non-DRM tracks to and from an iPod.
Most songs available for purchase on Apple's Music store are DRM-encumbered and can only be loaded on an iPod via iTunes on Windows or Macintosh systems. This doesn't mean you can't, oh, buy a CD, rip it, and load it on your iPod. iTunes (unlike, say, Windows Media) does not rights-manage music not bought at the iTMS. What the iPod does have is a slightly obfuscated method of loading songs and the ability to play protected AACs. It's not--by far--a tarpit of DRM like Sony's older ATRAC Walkman or Microsoft's Zune.
It's not a flat-file-system based Ogg player, if that's what you want. It does play patent-restricted formats, but in this way it's no more evil than a SanDisk is.
The Q is one of the best of a very poor lot (the other being the iPaq 6900, which is nice and Intermec CN3, which is a brick and really not practical for most people). The next tier drops you into the HTC Wizard/Apache/TyTYN OEMs and the Treo, which are flakey.
The level below that is awful. I have an eTen M700 on evaluation, which has some pretty cool hardware (sIRF III GPS) but is bundled with the kind of craplets that remind me why I don't buy commodity desktop PCs, either. The poor translation ("Configurate to Wireless 802.11!") would be okay if it wasn't a harbinger of things to come. (like how it locks up on low battery, rather than warning you if the 802.11 radio is on, or how the phone application hangs the whole system). If they could have spent the time wasted developing things like "Skin Chooser", "Photo Borders", "Birthday Reminder" and improved the core system.
I can totally understand why people go for the iPhone or a decent BlackBerry despite the iron-fisted control of the third-party market and the lack of choices. Sometimes it's nice to have something that just works.
I agree with everything you've said, except for "resting on their laurels". WM hasn't been given any laurels. At all.
We're in the middle of a deployment of these units to our sales staff and they're outright awful, regardless of the vendor source. Applications hang and lock the whole device, database stores get corrupt (oh, good job on persistent storage, guys--next time, how about an FS that doesn't cheese files on reboot) phone functionality is iffy and the hardware runs the gamut from "okay" (MotoQ, iPaq 6900) to outright awful (some of the dime-a-dozen Taiwanese makes).
There are bugs in the platform that make, say, mail so bad that you pretty much have to use Exchange or replace Pocket Outlook with a third-party mail client. The aforementioned cemail.vol corruption problem is astounding: you can pretty much cheese your mailbox just by resetting the device while checking mail (which you will have to do because it will crash). It took a lot of digging to find out that the only option is to blow away the mailbox, which is really hard to do as the file is locked on device bootup. Exchange makes this a little less painful, but only slightly.
This behaviour exists in any app on any WM5+ handheld that uses Microsoft's database volumes (eg, any app that wants to keep client-side data) and is a side effect of adding persistent storage without a decent FS. Before WM5, your handheld would self-erase upon power loss or hard crash. WM2003 was about as safe as it got, but with WM2003 you don't get push mail, persistent storage and a whole lot of other services. Contrast this with BlackBerry.
Then there's device management (or rather, there **isn't** device management). You have to buy Exchange to do remote-wipe and SMS (or a third party app) to do anything else, and even then it barely does anything.
And then there's ActiveSync, which is a tool of Satan.
I can think of no other better evidence of Microsoft's monopoly effect in action than WM: no other company could have released something as patently awful and sucker so many people into using it unless they had another market they could leverage. It's especially amazing when in the other corner you have BlackBerry, which provides a rock-solid experience, great management tools and perfect push/sync (MS' push/sync is a nasty hack, by comparison. Sure, you can Frankenstein your implementation with third-party tools, but by that point you're in interoperability hell and the devices are still hanging and pissing users off. And god help you make third-party WM software to overcome MS's problems, because if you get wide enough adoption Microsoft will either buy you out (if you're lucky) or release a shoddy competitor (if you're not).
WM is simply a vehicle to enable developers to take the path of least resistance. If it wasn't for the huge Windows developer base (and Microsoft's combination of deep pockets and sheer bloody-mindedness), this platform would be dead. It's scary to think that WM6 is, what, the eigth iteration of this product and it still can't hold a candle to the Newton Messagepad 2000, let alone BlackBerry.
..but it has a few strikes against it, at least for SMBs:
The subscription model can make it price-competitive with Exchange, which is a hard sell in some places.
The subscription model makes less than palatable for people who like to own their software. People have trouble buying software with a built-in poison pill.
The more amusing features aren't part of the OS version (mobile support, Outlook connector, HA/DR)
Compared to Exchange on a Select agreement, or hosted Exchange, it's not bad at all. For smaller SMBs, though, it doesn't quite fit right.
It actually makes more sense to use L/100km than MPG and it's ilk. MPG tends to psycologically inflate differences for fuel-efficient vehicles while hiding the real inefficiences in those that gulp gas.
No. Do not use roaming profiles. You're in for a world of suffering when someone's profile reaches the tens/hundreds of megabytes size and some misbehaving app corrupts itself (Outlook, for example--or perhaps the user's registry).
Mapping My Documents is a good idea, though. Another option (if you're not doing graphics/video/suchlike) might be using Terminal Server and just backing that up.
It's because Israelis are "white people" and Indians are "brown people."
Americans don't like brown people doing work that (white) Americans could do. You'll also see this in the uproar about manufacturing (usually auto) jobs going to Mexico, but hardly a peep about the same jobs going to Canada.
Only now is Air Canada getting its act together and behaving like a responsible corporation (after emerging from bankruptcy as essentially a completely different company).
The point that you forget to mention is that, while they were a crown corporation, they were a pretty good airline. Since they were privatised, they've become very, very poor.
Sometimes, you know, the government can actually deliver better services because their interest is, by and large, keeping their clients happy, rather than generating a profit for their shareholders. You'll see this across a lot of infrastructure services. Look at, say, the American nuclear industry versus that of France, or the sad state of California's electricity market, or the privatisation of water utilities (and the resulting drop-off in quality) in Ontario.
We have to make the distinction between a crown corporation and a government-backed monopoly (like, what, say, Telus or Verizon sort of is). One is government providing a service (such as WiFi to the people). The other is corporation and its shareholders being given a free lunch. The first is ok, the second not so much.
BMW: Mini Cooper (same problem as VW -- see below -- only worse, but the front seat space is nice
Chrysler: Neon/SX2.0, PT Cruiser
GM/Pontiac: Vibe (a twin of Toyota's Matrix)
Ford: Focus
Honda: Civic. You may wish to try the base 4-cyl Accord. Its more than I was able to afford at the time, but it fits well.
Mazda: Protegé/Protegé5
Subaru: Impreza (don't drive the WRX variant unless you can afford it, it'll ruin just about anything other than the Celica or Protegé)
Toyota: Echo, Prius, Corolla, Matrix, Celica (although the Celica is very low-slung and takes some getting used to). I found the Camry too large and too much of a cruiser for my tastes.
Volkswagen: Golf, Jetta, new Beetle (the new Beetle has an awesome amount of headroom -- I can fit in it with ease and have a sunroof. The problem with VWs is their truly miniscule rear leg-room in anything smaller than the Passat
I never tried the Cavalier/Sunfire, Nissan's Sentra or any of the Koreans.
Vehicles like the Miata or Honda S2000 are "you must be this short to ride" jobs. Two-seaters generally don't have much seat track and the steering wheel is (despite tilt and/or telescoping) just at the right height to cause knee injury when the door closes.
I maintain that the problem is dash/footspace design for most vehicles. Large cars have a long (but not long enough), shallow footwell that forces you to bend your knees for comfort, but with a pronounced dash that you cannot get your knees in front of. Smaller cars push the dash further away and usually allow you to drop your legs down instead of straight out.
Two points: 1. The JD Powers survey is concerned with "initial vehicle quality" (factory defects that show up in the first year). It demonstrates that American manufacturing standards have greatly improved. This isn't suprising (as plant management has improved a great deal since the 70s/80s) and it doesn't mean that GM or Ford are suddenly making better cars. Many companies still skimp on the design and/or materials phase. Long-term quality problem frequency measures (like Consumer Reports' reliability history) bear this out. The head-gasket failures (Ford), transmission problems (Ford, Chrysler), electrical glitches (VW, BMW, Ford, GM), engine sludging (Toyota) and paint delamination (Ford, and especially Chrysler) that happens in the third to fifth yeay of certain vehicles' owners isn't accounted for in JD Power's surveys. 2. I'm 6'8" and drive a Mazda Protegé without trouble (just lean the seat back a bit) I fit even better in my mother's Toyota Echo. I fit extremely badly in my former company's Ford Crown Victoria because of the stupidly long dash. Car size has squat to do with interior room, especially if you're tall -- design does. I'd have to say that larger cars (and especially SUVs) waste interior space due poor design.
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Very few people in Apple's marketspace want a mid-grade machine. You might, but you and people like you are thin on the ground, and you're not going to fund the kind of margins that Apple et al need to survive. Apple's market mirrors their product line: they're either home/SOHO users, for whom the iMac is adequate (it's quick enough, stylish and works well), or pro users who'd buy a Mac Pro and an ungodly-expensive calibrated monitor. The market for something between that is very, very thin. It exists in the enterprise in the Dell Latitude/Optiplex;HP Evo space (which Apple has near-zero presence in) but even then the emphasis is on manageability and support, not outright power. What you want is Apple's OS on whitebox hardware. Apple tried that, and it nearly bankrupted them when the clonemakers resorted to attacking Apple's fat markets, rather than expanding into the razor-tin-margin land that is the commodity PC market.
Graphic designers use the right tool for the right job. The cheapest iMac is probably not that tool.
Apple will happily sell you a Mac Pro, or even a Cinema Display, that will work with your iMac (you could, oh, use the built-in display for your palettes, preview windows and such). The iMac is a consumer-grade machine. You can use it for professional design, and it will work, but there are some limitations and tradeoffs to make it work for the consumer market.
This is one of them: a consumer want a screen that costs less and has good response time. A professional graphic designer would be much less sensitive to price, much more tolerant of a poor response time and would probably not have bought a screen integrated into the body of the PC in the first place. They might've even bought a (very expensive) CRT and calibration unit.
I wish I could go longer than a week without someone saying "My Adobe doesn't work!"? Your Adobe what? Reader? Acrobat? Photoshop? Baked mud brick?
Flash Player--up to version 9--still supports Mac OS X on PPC. There is/was a full Flash player (v7) for Windows Mobile. It was bad.
Flash Lite 2.0 doesn't support video and is more or less compatible with ActionScript as implemented in Flash 7. Flash Lite 3.0 is very new and does support video and parts of Flash 8's ActionScript. It works on S60/Symbian, BREW and WM5. I don't know what processor architectures it supports. It will run in a browser on WM5/6, but the experience is really unpleasant (though, really, this is WM, so unpleasant is de rigueur.)
I suspect Apple isn't including/adding/supporting Flash or Flash Lite on the iPhone is precisely the reason above: it really does suck. Apple would rather have a clean, if lobotomized, platform, then a interoperability clusterfuck that it Symbian or Windows Mobile.
Flash is a client-side technology. Most flash consumers use Windows and/or Intel CPUs. On a Mac OS X or Linux and/or PPC machine with equivalent power, Flash will run slower because it hasn't been worth the effort on Macromedia/Adobe's part to spend resources on smaller slices of the market.
Now, you can make arguments for the performance being partially the result of Mac OS or Linux's imaging system, but other (not all--a number are still optimized for x86) video codecs don't suffer as much.
It's unfortunate that the central issue among commenters here isn't that Wales may or may not have abused his expense account (and really, he'd be far from the first to do so), it's that this puts the Rachel Marsden editing scuffle from a few months back into an a new light:
http://talkcontribs.blogspot.com/2007/06/whitewash-on-wikipedia.html
Now, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here (was work done on the articles in question done before or after work was done on Wales?) but this kind of bending of the facts to suit a Wales (or anyone with responsibility at Wikipedia) really gives Wikipedia a black eye. If a normal media executive distorted facts about someone he/she was personally involved with, there would be a call from directors for a resignation if for no other reason than to save the organization's reputation. Between this and the overstock.com fiasco, it might be time for some resignations to happen before their credibility is overly damaged.
Yes, but Italian politics is a special case. Berlusconi has been up on corruption charges __MULTIPLE TIMES__ yet comes back more times than punching bag because he's charismatic, and because he's the least insane member of the Italian right wing (and when you understand that this includes Mussolini's direct descendant running on Mussolini's platform and getting an appreciable percentage of the vote, you'll understand "insane").
Besides, unlike American governments, Italian ones are lucky to last four months, let alone four years. If you don't like the current government, just wait five minutes and another one will be along shortly.
There are at least four decent iPod management applications for systems able to run UNIX-a-like software. As long as your hardware and OS can see USB mass storage devices and can run said software, you can freely load non-DRM tracks to and from an iPod.
Most songs available for purchase on Apple's Music store are DRM-encumbered and can only be loaded on an iPod via iTunes on Windows or Macintosh systems. This doesn't mean you can't, oh, buy a CD, rip it, and load it on your iPod. iTunes (unlike, say, Windows Media) does not rights-manage music not bought at the iTMS. What the iPod does have is a slightly obfuscated method of loading songs and the ability to play protected AACs. It's not--by far--a tarpit of DRM like Sony's older ATRAC Walkman or Microsoft's Zune.
It's not a flat-file-system based Ogg player, if that's what you want. It does play patent-restricted formats, but in this way it's no more evil than a SanDisk is.
The Q is one of the best of a very poor lot (the other being the iPaq 6900, which is nice and Intermec CN3, which is a brick and really not practical for most people). The next tier drops you into the HTC Wizard/Apache/TyTYN OEMs and the Treo, which are flakey.
The level below that is awful. I have an eTen M700 on evaluation, which has some pretty cool hardware (sIRF III GPS) but is bundled with the kind of craplets that remind me why I don't buy commodity desktop PCs, either. The poor translation ("Configurate to Wireless 802.11!") would be okay if it wasn't a harbinger of things to come. (like how it locks up on low battery, rather than warning you if the 802.11 radio is on, or how the phone application hangs the whole system). If they could have spent the time wasted developing things like "Skin Chooser", "Photo Borders", "Birthday Reminder" and improved the core system.
I can totally understand why people go for the iPhone or a decent BlackBerry despite the iron-fisted control of the third-party market and the lack of choices. Sometimes it's nice to have something that just works.
Must. click. Preview. Button.
I agree with everything you've said, except for "resting on their laurels". WM hasn't been given any laurels. At all. We're in the middle of a deployment of these units to our sales staff and they're outright awful, regardless of the vendor source. Applications hang and lock the whole device, database stores get corrupt (oh, good job on persistent storage, guys--next time, how about an FS that doesn't cheese files on reboot) phone functionality is iffy and the hardware runs the gamut from "okay" (MotoQ, iPaq 6900) to outright awful (some of the dime-a-dozen Taiwanese makes). There are bugs in the platform that make, say, mail so bad that you pretty much have to use Exchange or replace Pocket Outlook with a third-party mail client. The aforementioned cemail.vol corruption problem is astounding: you can pretty much cheese your mailbox just by resetting the device while checking mail (which you will have to do because it will crash). It took a lot of digging to find out that the only option is to blow away the mailbox, which is really hard to do as the file is locked on device bootup. Exchange makes this a little less painful, but only slightly. This behaviour exists in any app on any WM5+ handheld that uses Microsoft's database volumes (eg, any app that wants to keep client-side data) and is a side effect of adding persistent storage without a decent FS. Before WM5, your handheld would self-erase upon power loss or hard crash. WM2003 was about as safe as it got, but with WM2003 you don't get push mail, persistent storage and a whole lot of other services. Contrast this with BlackBerry. Then there's device management (or rather, there **isn't** device management). You have to buy Exchange to do remote-wipe and SMS (or a third party app) to do anything else, and even then it barely does anything. And then there's ActiveSync, which is a tool of Satan. I can think of no other better evidence of Microsoft's monopoly effect in action than WM: no other company could have released something as patently awful and sucker so many people into using it unless they had another market they could leverage. It's especially amazing when in the other corner you have BlackBerry, which provides a rock-solid experience, great management tools and perfect push/sync (MS' push/sync is a nasty hack, by comparison. Sure, you can Frankenstein your implementation with third-party tools, but by that point you're in interoperability hell and the devices are still hanging and pissing users off. And god help you make third-party WM software to overcome MS's problems, because if you get wide enough adoption Microsoft will either buy you out (if you're lucky) or release a shoddy competitor (if you're not). WM is simply a vehicle to enable developers to take the path of least resistance. If it wasn't for the huge Windows developer base (and Microsoft's combination of deep pockets and sheer bloody-mindedness), this platform would be dead. It's scary to think that WM6 is, what, the eigth iteration of this product and it still can't hold a candle to the Newton Messagepad 2000, let alone BlackBerry.
Lithium-Ion batteries also have a greater likelihood of overheating. Really overheating.
- The subscription model can make it price-competitive with Exchange, which is a hard sell in some places.
- The subscription model makes less than palatable for people who like to own their software. People have trouble buying software with a built-in poison pill.
- The more amusing features aren't part of the OS version (mobile support, Outlook connector, HA/DR)
Compared to Exchange on a Select agreement, or hosted Exchange, it's not bad at all. For smaller SMBs, though, it doesn't quite fit right.It actually makes more sense to use L/100km than MPG and it's ilk. MPG tends to psycologically inflate differences for fuel-efficient vehicles while hiding the real inefficiences in those that gulp gas.
See this article.
No. Do not use roaming profiles. You're in for a world of suffering when someone's profile reaches the tens/hundreds of megabytes size and some misbehaving app corrupts itself (Outlook, for example--or perhaps the user's registry). Mapping My Documents is a good idea, though. Another option (if you're not doing graphics/video/suchlike) might be using Terminal Server and just backing that up.
You use a layer-2 network access control system and don't grant network access to non-certified desktops. Period.
And to think we only had to worry about intra-company squabbling, sabotage and incompetence prior to this. (hello, Bell Canada, I'm looking at you!)
More Saab than Jaguar, really.
It's because Israelis are "white people" and Indians are "brown people."
Americans don't like brown people doing work that (white) Americans could do. You'll also see this in the uproar about manufacturing (usually auto) jobs going to Mexico, but hardly a peep about the same jobs going to Canada.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns466/networking _solutions_package.html
Or even wired 802.1x..
You think the Democrats are far left? Wow... You don't know from left.
If Apple released something like this it wouldn't have sucked as much. :)
I never tried the Cavalier/Sunfire, Nissan's Sentra or any of the Koreans.
Vehicles like the Miata or Honda S2000 are "you must be this short to ride" jobs. Two-seaters generally don't have much seat track and the steering wheel is (despite tilt and/or telescoping) just at the right height to cause knee injury when the door closes.
I maintain that the problem is dash/footspace design for most vehicles. Large cars have a long (but not long enough), shallow footwell that forces you to bend your knees for comfort, but with a pronounced dash that you cannot get your knees in front of. Smaller cars push the dash further away and usually allow you to drop your legs down instead of straight out.
Two points:
1. The JD Powers survey is concerned with "initial vehicle quality" (factory defects that show up in the first year). It demonstrates that American manufacturing standards have greatly improved. This isn't suprising (as plant management has improved a great deal since the 70s/80s) and it doesn't mean that GM or Ford are suddenly making better cars.
Many companies still skimp on the design and/or materials phase. Long-term quality problem frequency measures (like Consumer Reports' reliability history) bear this out. The head-gasket failures (Ford), transmission problems (Ford, Chrysler), electrical glitches (VW, BMW, Ford, GM), engine sludging (Toyota) and paint delamination (Ford, and especially Chrysler) that happens in the third to fifth yeay of certain vehicles' owners isn't accounted for in JD Power's surveys.
2. I'm 6'8" and drive a Mazda Protegé without trouble (just lean the seat back a bit) I fit even better in my mother's Toyota Echo. I fit extremely badly in my former company's Ford Crown Victoria because of the stupidly long dash. Car size has squat to do with interior room, especially if you're tall -- design does. I'd have to say that larger cars (and especially SUVs) waste interior space due poor design.