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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RE: I don�t get it and never have
by StephenBeDoper on Sun 25th Oct 2009 20:46
in reply to "I don’t get it and never have"
Member since:2005-07-06
I don’t get it and never have, why is Apple fighting Psystar in fact why didn’t they license OSX to Dell, Acer, Lenovo etc, etc soon after they changed platform? They missed an opportunity to be the dominant OS and I think MS has shown that a company can be viable if it concentrates on software and OSes.
Agreed. I don't hold out any hope that Apple will ever license OS X in the same "free-for-all" fashion as Windows - but I think that (very) selective OEM licensing would be consistent with their business model. In other words, allow third-party OEMs to offer OS X as a BTO option - but only on specific, Apple-approved models (that must meet specific minimum standards/requirements).
RE[2]: I don�t get
by wirespot on Sun 25th Oct 2009 21:42
in reply to "RE: I don�t get it and never have"
Member since:2006-06-21
Agreed. I don't hold out any hope that Apple will ever license OS X in the same "free-for-all" fashion as Windows - but I think that (very) selective OEM licensing would be consistent with their business model.
How? What would be their incentive? Apple is already making more money than any other OEM. It has market capitalization bigger than Dell and HP put together:
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/29/apple-dell-h...
Apple sells to a percentage of personal computer owners, but it skims the cream off the top. Those small percentages in buyers translate to a lot more money than all the rest are spending together. The same applies to other types of hardware, such as smartphones vs the iPhone.
So what would drive Apple to license OS X to other OEMs? It's not gonna be money. I don't see what else. OS X is an advantage they have built for themselves (anybody could have taken a *BSD or Linux flavor and done the same). Why would they give it up for scraps?
RE: I don�t get it and never have
by twitterfire on Mon 26th Oct 2009 13:42
in reply to "I don’t get it and never have"
Member since:2008-09-11
I don’t get it and never have, why is Apple fighting Psystar in fact why didn’t they license OSX to Dell, Acer, Lenovo etc, etc soon after they changed platform? They missed an opportunity to be the dominant OS and I think MS has shown that a company can be viable if it concentrates on software and OSes.
First: They can't stand a chance gainst Microsoft.
Second: They make thair money from hardware, not from software. You also can ask: if Apple is so good, why users, companies and top 500 fortune companies don't buy Apple harware to use with their Windows, Linux, BSD, AIX and HPUX oses? Why nobody uses the so called os x server version? That's because they can buy much better hardware for the same money. or they can buy
the same hardware for a much smaller amount of money.
Third: It will never be dominant. If for no other reason, you can't run the software you need on it. (besides emulators like cider-wine or vm's like vmware).
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
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Member since:
2006-02-22
I don’t get it and never have, why is Apple fighting Psystar in fact why didn’t they license OSX to Dell, Acer, Lenovo etc, etc soon after they changed platform? They missed an opportunity to be the dominant OS and I think MS has shown that a company can be viable if it concentrates on software and OSes.
Well if you had the choice to by a PC with the horror of an OS that is Vista or OSX, which would you, choose? Only a madman would have chosen Vista. Would this damage Apple hardware sales – yes probably but this would have been offset 50 fold by OS sales. This is not even a certainty some folk maybe more would feel thy get the genuine Apple experience if they had both the hardware and software.
I suspect this opportunity is fading Windows 7 isn’t a horror (not absolutely confident about this as I haven’t used it much, the hype makes me skeptical) and Ubuntu gets better on every release.