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.
Thread beginning with comment 391022
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[3]: I don't get
by Moochman on Mon 26th Oct 2009 00:57
in reply to "RE[2]: I don�t get"
Member since:2005-07-06
I wouldn't call MS-sized profits from OEM sales of the OS "scraps".
I think Apple may be paranoid because last time they allowed clones, it was a disaster--they lost tons of money in hardware sales and weren't remotely able to make up for it in OS sales. The big difference is that today their OS runs on the same machines that run Windows, which means that theoretically they could have transformed the market overnight.
Ultimately though Apple decided to go the safe route and protect its hardware sales, with the knowledge that it was a surefire, instant way to profit--as opposed to the somewhat risky prospect of battling things out on Microsoft's own turf.
Member since:2006-02-22
Agreed but thinking of the number of hardware + software platforms there were BBCs, Acorns Be+BeBox etc linking your hardware to your software seems risky.
MS has shown that selling an OS can make you a rich and powerful company and certainly the profits aren't scraps.
Now Apple sells a a very good OS but artificially linked to it's own hardware which is basically the same as every one elses. This looks risky to me especially when it had the opportunity to be the major OS vendor.
RE[3]: I donÃ�¢ï¿ÂÂ
by StephenBeDoper on Mon 26th Oct 2009 13:33
in reply to "RE[2]: I don�t get"
Member since:2005-07-06
How?
The "how" was described in that part of my post that you didn't quote.
What would be their incentive?
If it's profitable, that's usually incentive enough for publicly-traded companies like Apple. There's also the incentive of increasing the OS X userbase/marketshare while letting someone else do the grunt work of selling the individual machines.
Apple is already making more money than any other OEM.
What relevance does that have? Their goal as a business is to make as much money as possible - not to simply make more money than their competitors.
So what would drive Apple to license OS X to other OEMs? It's not gonna be money. I don't see what else.
If they were to do it, I'm sure it be done in a strategically-careful way, Apple being Apple. Partnering with the right OEM could help get Apple into markets where OS X has almost no presence, E.g. commercial hosting.
OS X is an advantage they have built for themselves (anybody could have taken a *BSD or Linux flavor and done the same).
Anybody? I take you meant "anybody with a few hundred million dollars lying around to buy the underlying technology and the company that developed it"?
Why would they give it up for scraps?
Is that some sort of dry, subtle satire on the elitist Mac user stereotype? Or are you seriously trying to imply that all users of non-Apple computers are "scraps"?
News
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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2006-06-21
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?