Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 25th Oct 2009 12:51 UTC
A couple of years ago, a professor at my university had a very interesting thought exchange with the class I was in. We were a small group, and I knew most of them, they were my friends. Anyway, we had a talk about language purism - not an unimportant subject if you study English in The Netherlands.
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Member since:2006-04-21
Exactly right. And I think it also applies to other, proprietary dinosaurs (mentioning no names, of course). Products should compete on their own merits, they shouldn't be forced on anyone. And I think that these days, 99% of the hardware you are going to use would work, on, say, Linux (even on my multifunctional, duplex, printer/scanner/fax/copier from HP, EVERYTHING works in Linux). Guess where the problems are? The graphics card in my desktop, which uses a proprietary driver for 3D and 2D acceleration.
Personally, if I weren't bothered about FOSS software (and many people aren't), I would gladly buy MacOS X if I could buy it cheaply and install it easily and legally on {insert any PC make here}. I would have bought a Mac already, if it weren't more expensive than an equivalent PC (and here in the UK, stuff that retails for $500 in the US is liable to retail for £500, i.e. almost double the cost to the American consumer). Now that the only chip that differentiates a Mac from a PC is the EFI (which isn't even proprietary to Apple, but a standard on Itanium), there really isn't much of an excuse for making Apple products expensive OR for keeping the OS tied to their hardware. I bet it would knock the socks off Windows 7 (apart from the strange drag-a-disk-icon-to-the-Trashcan feature, which I never liked but which might well now be gone).
Member since:2006-02-22
Member since:2008-09-11
I suspect that apple does not want to get relegated to the same territory ms is in whereby they produce nice hardware but then suffers massively from having to support every computer on the planet. If you look at the xbox you can see that ms can produce very nice software if they target a specific piece of hardware (rather crappy hardware tho!).
Microsoft makes money from software they write. Apple makes money form hardware they sell. And thay make money by tying the software to hardware. Because is the software who sells the hardware. Any rational human being wont buy some hardware from someone when they can buy the same hardware for less.
And Microsoft don't support hardware. It's the hardware makers who provide the drivers.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 20:46 UTC
"And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 17:32 UTC
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.More News »
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Member since:
2008-03-17
I Suspect that apple has no confidence in their brand.
It is generally well known that despite how much value for money (even if it were the case in apples computers) people will still go for cheaper products.
There are a few things to consider from apples point of view:
1) perhaps apple feels that the dilution of their brand to other manufacturers will reflect badly on them i.e. badly working hardware causes osx to function less optimally.
2) Dilution causes the expectation from consumers that apple should support other hardware. No matter how many disclaimers there are.
3) I imagine a lot of people only tolerate the hardware in order to get osx. (my laptop has roughly the same specs as a good macbook pro for at least 600 euros less with more usb ports and other slots).
I suspect that apple does not want to get relegated to the same territory ms is in whereby they produce nice hardware but then suffers massively from having to support every computer on the planet. If you look at the xbox you can see that ms can produce very nice software if they target a specific piece of hardware (rather crappy hardware tho!).
Edited 2009-10-25 13:15 UTC