Tag: apple

Apple is losing the technology edge

mark gonzales (former apple chief for sw) makes a good point why apple has not really been that innovative lately.

But I think the market share discussion is missing the primary calculation that must go on in the exec staff of Apple (and I know if did through the 80s and 90s.) It takes development $ to keep an OS on the cutting edge, and marketing $ to explain the differences and advantages. These costs must be recovered, in the end, by sales (thus from customers.)

Market share comes into play when you divide these costs by units. To put some numbers on it, if Apple has 5% share, and Microsoft 90% share, Microsoft can spend 17x more on R&D than Apple can, and maintain price parity.

Apple SOAP

apple quietly put in SOAP support in their updated apple script environment for OS X 10.1. now we are cooking. the (self declared) “biggest UNIX vendor by the end of the year” joins the frenzy that is SOAP. welcome apple. with so much support under its belt, SOAP will be ubiquitous before you know whats going on.

Technical webcasts

killing some time at the office, i came across technetcast.com which has some good webcasts available for download. the top 30 streams are:

  1. God and Computers, Lecture 1: Introduction
  2. The Golden Penguin Bowl
  3. It’s 2001. Where Is HAL?
  4. ReconBots
  5. Donald Knuth: MMIX, A RISC Computer for the New Millennium
  6. codebytes: Bjarne Stroustrup
  7. CodeBytes 0x02: Developers React to MacOS X
  8. Spiritual Robots: Ralph Merkle Presentation
  9. Bjarne Stroustrup: C++, A New Language for the New Millennium
  10. Spiritual Robots: Doug Hofstadter Presentation
  11. Danny Hillis on Game Software Development
  12. XBox, One Year Later
  13. Essential XML/SOAP with Don Box
  14. God and Computers, Lecture 2: Randomization
  15. The Nautilus Project
  16. Consoles vs. PCs: Is the PC Really Dead?
  17. ORA P2P: jxta – From UNIX to Java to XML
  18. The Technology Behind Google
  19. The Semantic Web
  20. Keeping Software Soft
  21. Linus Torvalds: The Latest Linux Technical Report
  22. codebytes: GNU Hurd with Thomas Bushnell
  23. Python 9: Interview with Bruce Eckel
  24. Spiritual Robots: Bill Joy Presentation
  25. Spiritual Robots: Ray Kurzweil Presentation
  26. SOAP Programming with Java: A Foundation for Web Services and UDDI
  27. Early Computer Crime
  28. Bill Gates Keynote at GDC 2000
  29. XML in eCommerce and Enterprise (Panel)
  30. Silicon Snake Oil: A Skeptical View of Computing

State of Info-Mac

Hello everyone!

In the last few weeks, I noticed that the Info-Mac archive has been updated
in quite unusual intervals. There are days with just 1 or 2 files being
made accessible, and other days when the number of new files is closer to 65.

A colleague of mine is a shareware author, and more than 2 weeks ago
he uploaded another submission to ,
waiting for it to be put on the server. And there it still sits, as he
found out when he tried to upload it again, assuming that it had gone missing.
The server message he got back was that the file can't be overwritten.

My question is: What's up with Info-Mac? It seems to me that the Info-Mac
volunteers can no longer handle all the work, so the archive has run into
the problems mentioned above.

What can we users of this great (thanks a lot to all volunteers) Mac archive
do to help out with the maintaining? I see several possibilities, please
comment:

1. Get a sponsor (TidBITS has done it before), so maybe you can afford a
staffer for the archive.
2. Look out for new volunteers who could help with maintenance work.
3. Collect licensing fees from major mirrors of the Info-Mac archive, i.e.
AOL (They get the best Mac shareware archive on the planet for free, don't
they?)
4. Or: why not collect an upload fee from shareware authors? My colleague
for example would be happy to contribute financially if on the other hand
the Info-Mac archive was upgraded.

If you suffer from work overload, dear Info-Mac volunteers, please tell us
so that all users may help to do something about it.

I send this message to the Digest so as to see what others think about the
current state of Info-Mac.

I'd really appreciate your comments.

Ciao,

Gregor Rothfuss

gregor@swix.ch

P.S. Whatever the state of the Info-Mac is, it's still the best. However, it
could even become better.