Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 14:22:02 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Mundie, Perens, GPL, BSD etc again Message-ID: <p0510030cb74fa4ad0890@[194.78.241.123]> In-Reply-To: <000a01c0f56b$4f4c9a60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> References: <000a01c0f56b$4f4c9a60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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At 12:18 AM -0700 6/15/01, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > I beg to differ! Most people that claim to like being different all > seem to want to wear the same all-black clothing, they go to the same > piercing places to get the same steel rivets injected into the same > spots in their lips, they get the same paint spray cans to put the same > colors in their hair, etc. etc. etc. I must disagree. For a very long time, I wore all-black clothing (and would still prefer to do so if my wife didn't strenuously object), and I've never voluntarily had any part of my body pierced (except when having surgery). The only thing that has ever pierced my body involuntarily (so far) was the lead of a pencil I was carrying, as I was trying to sneak back into class after having snuck out to get it sharpened, and I was crawling along the floor when the lead broke off inside my right palm. That was 3rd grade, and you can still see the lead in my palm today. The only jewelry I sport is a digital watch and usually a wedding ring, although if I'm wearing a suit and tie, I may also have a tie clip or stud, and if I'm wearing a shirt with French cuffs, I will also have cufflinks. No, the glasses don't count as "jewelry". > The real point of my not-so-subtle jabbing is that if Apple really > wanted to sell computers based on their merits, they wouldn't resort > to a cheap physological trick of the translucent colors. It wasn't a "cheap physological [sic] trick". It was one of the most expensive manufacturing ramp-ups in history, because up to that point in time, no one had *EVER* managed to figure out how to do casting of translucent plastics on anything remotely resembling that kind of scale -- maybe small pocket calculators, but that was about it. No, they had powerful machines, at reasonable prices, with the most user-friendly OS on the planet, and the clincher was that they were stunningly beautiful and looked absolutely nothing like the previous generations of machines that stodgy old computer businesses had been shoving down people's throats since the 1980s. Then the entire world got on the translucent bandwagon. Unfortunately, none of them could do it as well as Apple, so they really brought down the overall average level of interest that was displayed by the people. Which is what drove Apple to explore ever more different case designs, color combinations, patterns, etc.... > Note that Apple never gave the userbase a choice. They ran the translucant > colors and never offered black or beige or white as options. So, I don't > see that the majority likes the ugly colors. If Apple offered > basic beige in addition to the ugly colors so that the users had a _real_ > choice, and the majority turned their back on beige, then I'd say your > right. The majority turned their back on beige because, for the first time in many, many years, Apple was getting a serious percentage of first-time computer users to buy their machines, instead of selling upgrades into the same mass of people that had bought previously bought their shlock. Moreover, they were also getting much higher levels of converts from the PC side, which at that time was still offering only the beige and black garbage. Which is what made them panic and jump on the translucent bandwagon. > All of this is advertising and marketing tricks, and people generally don't > resort to those sorts of cheap tricks unless their attempting to make > up a deficiency in their product elsewhere. There was no deficiency. What they were trying to do was attract people's attention, and then once they had their attention, they would see that not only was the product in question better than the competition in every way (including price/performance and especially total cost of ownership), but it was also a hell of a lot more physically attractive -- instead of an ugly computer box you try to desperately hide under your desk, people now had computing sculpture that they could proudly display on top of the desk. > It's screaming that the casing > is more important than the guts. Style instead of substance. No, Apple had both style and substance. As they've had with all the products since the iMac launch, but especially the PowerMacintosh G3, the LCD Studio Display, the PowerBook G4, the original iBook, and now the new "iceBook". Even the Cube had both style and substance, the primary problem was that it was no more upgradeable than an iMac and you had to pay extra for a display. People tended to either want a less expensive machine (so they went with the iMac), or a more upgradeable machine (so they went with the PowerMac G4), leaving the Cube in the cold. Now that the price has come down a lot on the Cube, they are moving a lot faster. > This is > just like the VW new-bug. VW could care less about making a good > car, what they want to make is a car that looks like the old 60's bugs > because the baby-boomers all have fond memories of their old bugs and > want to re-live their youth. Problem here. The New VW Beetle is basically a VW Golf, with a new body. The VW Golf is widely recognized as one of the best cars in the world (in its sector), and is one of the most widely copied cars in the world (witness the new Nissan Almera, the Alfa Romeo 147, and the Peugeot 307, all three of which are almost exact rip-offs of the Golf). It is one of the safest cars in the world (scoring four stars out of four that were possible at the time, in the European New Car Assessment Program or EuroNCAP), and is one of the very best selling cars of all time. Moreover, the other cars from the other members of the VW Auto Group, which share the same basic platform as the Golf (the Seat Leon, the Skoda Fabia, the Audi A4, etc...) are also extremely, extremely successful in the market. If you were to add up all the cars sold in the world that are based on the same platform as the Golf, to the sales figures for the Golf itself, you would quickly see that this car has sold more copies than any other in history (almost certainly by at least one order of magnitude), and this record will not and indeed cannot be eclipsed for many, many decades to come -- there simply aren't enough cars sold in the world. The New Beetle builds on all of these advantages, and puts on a new face that a lot of people find very attractive. Indeed, this really is quite a lot like the change in the Macintosh between the original PowerMacintosh G3 (which was rather dowdy and beige), and the replacement "Blue & White" PowerMacintosh G3 (which was largely the same hardware, repackaged in a revolutionary new, extremely beautiful, and the most functional case that the computer industry has ever seen). > I only hope that with the introduction of MacOS X that Apple's turning their > back on these kinds of cheap tricks and starting to concentrate on substance > instead of style again. Again, Apple has plenty of substance here. It's based on Mach and *BSD Unix, with all the many years of knowledge NeXT had with NeXTstep and OpenStep, and combined with the many years of knowledge that Apple has in upgrading their installed base from an old platform (based on the Motorola 68000 family of chips) to a new one (based on the PowerPC), with a minimum of muss and fuss. >>And if you think VW has no competition in ugliness of small cars -- >>check out http://www.smart.com (a Daimler-Chrysler company) >>These monstrosities are plentiful on Paris roads, and expensive, and I >>can't understand it. Actually, the MCC Smart is a quite attractive car in my book. If you want ugly, there are plenty of other tiny two seaters I've seen running around here in Belgium that are far, far uglier. Unfortunately, I don't recall any names of the bloody things off the top of my head, but if you want something that looks like it came out of the rear-end of an elephant and then had the inside carved out and an engine put in, there are many far worse candidates than the MCC Smart. > Yech!! It looks like a sawed-off new-bug, or a new-bug that was rear-ended > by a semi-truck. Thank goodness they haven't let them into the US yet. Actually, it looks a lot like the Mercedes A-Class, because there was a lot of overlap in the Engineering teams (Mercedes is a 50% owner of MCC, and Swatch owns the other 50%), and the Smart benefited greatly from the previous experience that Mercedes had on the A-Class, specifically in the area of handling and avoiding being tipped over in extreme situations. Note that the one of the primary production facilities for the Mercedes A-Class is in the US, in their new plant in Alabama. This is the same one that is the primary production facility for the Mercedes M-Class. Their policies and procedures are so well documented here that they are allowed to make cars for both the domestic and export markets at the same shop on the same lines, because the government is quite confident that Mercedes does literally track each and every individual bolt and nut, and knows which ones have had the appropriate domestic taxes paid on them and which ones are destined for export. I would not be at all surprised to start seeing the new long-wheelbase version of the Mercedes A-Class in the US (where bigger cars are the rule, and morons can't get enough of the monster SUVs that are getting bigger and bigger with every year -- pretty soon they will literally be as big as houses, and what used to be four-lane superhighways will instead be back-country one-lane roads). You may be surprised to hear this, but the new long-wheelbase version of the Mercedes A-Class actually has *more* leg room in the back than the vaunted Mercedes S-Class, which is the choice of executives around the world as their roomiest and most comfortable car to be driven around in. -- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> /* efdtt.c Author: Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net> */ /* Represented as 1045 digit prime number by Phil Carmody */ /* Prime as DNS cname chain by Roy Arends and Walter Belgers */ /* */ /* Usage is: cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob */ /* where title-key = "153 2 8 105 225" or other similar 5-byte key */ dig decss.friet.org|perl -ne'if(/^x/){s/[x.]//g;print pack(H124,$_)}' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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