Well documented as to exactly what the security offered is, and how it works. Not exactly "trust us" style security. Not to mention that the security has been certified independently by world governments. So, actually it's "Trust 256 bit AES by CBC at transport level, and trust all of the people who certify this."
Secure? Use BES. Still secure.
I'm not forgetting. I'm saying that it makes sense for Apple to try to see if they can transition those notebook users more over to an iOS model over the next few years, each release selling the benefits of a model that is more and more closed, so that eventually Apple can transition out of the "generic computer" model into the "appliance" model. That's clearly not something that can be done today. But it's something they certainly have the clout to be able to pull off over the next 5 years. And what I'm saying is that in doing that, they have an opportunity to - eventually - make lots of money by dropping the most demanding of users, and the functionality that supports them, in exchange for the amount of customers they could pick up by changing the entire marketplace so that many more customers were demanding iOS in Laptop form, and iOS on an iMac like device.
Because as easy as OSX may be, it still does loads more than it needs to for a good gigantic chunk of the audience that it does and could sell to, including all of the people who currently feel they have no need for a computer. It's got to be cheaper developing appliances for those people, than it currently is to build full-functioning computers, but that market hasn't been created yet. It's got a firm start though, and it's certainly a direction they COULD take their company in, and a good chunk of the world, if they wanted to, in a manner that would be incredibly profitable as they could easily sell a large selection of devices that did just enough, were almost identically spec'd but priced significantly different based on size and form. All it would take is a few years of introducing new features to OSX that make it particularly iOS like, marketing each change in functionality with sufficient "it's magic", and dropping things that are more general purpose from the background each time.
Not believe, know. Know that they prefer Office on Windows to anything on OSX. Know that they prefer MediaMonkey on Windows to the various media players on OSX. Know that they prefer doing essentially every task on Windows versus OSX because they are the kind of people that have run in to roadblocks on OSX where OSX says "Do things this way" and that's not the way they want to do things, and Windows does it different. These people exist in my life. They may not exist in your life. That's fine. But my original point is that both classes of people exist: Those who are moving from Windows to OSX, and those who are moving from OSX to Windows. And they all have different reasons, different experiences, and want to be treated in different ways as customers.
Except the people I know with Windows partitions were long time Mac users, not recent Windows converts still trying to hold on to the platform. I'm talking first mac they owned was released in 1984 kind of Mac users. And as new Windows users, they are learning that they don't really need OSX. Apple's attitude towards a variety of issues really has worn off on some people, and as much as they are comfortable with the platform, they are finding more reasons to be frustrated with Apple as a company, and thus are looking for opportunities to avoid them in the future. Actually most of the Mac users I know have actually been less and less proud of being Mac users since Jobs came back, just from a brand loyalty perspective. They don't like the way he runs things, and the way he acts. They never bought Macs as fashion statements, but rather as functional computers through the 90s, tools with which to do work. That kind 80s-90s Sculley-era Mac fan is perfectly willing to look at alternatives these days.
My point is that they WOULDN'T have a $500 desktop or a $300 netbook, because those are general purpose machines, so instead they have a $500 iPad, and a $300 iPod touch. And given their current direction, there will be a point where selling the SDK for iOS development on Ubuntu or FreeBSD is going to be cheaper for Apple to manage than selling those people Macs. And if Apple can start selling laptops with an OS that is similar to iOS in terms of restrictions, but where you have 80GB of internal memory to save your documents or your photos, with an attractive interface to share what little they want you to share with their portable iOS devices, why on earth wouldn't they do that? They have an OS in iOS that broadly supports the computer as an appliance market, and is so locked down it's primed for perfect vertical integration. Why spend the money supporting and developing a full desktop OS when at some point you don't have to? Especially now that hardware is so overly capable of doing every thing the average appliance owner wants it to. You might as well turn the iMac into essentially an iOS console, and the MacBook into an iOS device with a hardware keyboard, because it's not even a niche you're feeding to. You're actually just eliminating niche markets and supporting the desires of the main stream. It makes a ridiculous amount of business sense.
What information? The signal to noise ratio for tags in photos that aren't linked to an account that represent people, vs. represent things like "OMG" or "The broken speaker" or "I 3 the Wombles" is likely ridiculous. There's no unique identifier attached to the tags that link the tags together. Every one of those tags is represented only in terms of the photo that the tag is attached to, and the location in that photo the tag is placed over.
And in the end that gets you what, as an advertiser. "Oh look, here's a person we can't really advertise to because though we might be able to generalize the person's location, if they are a person, they aren't on the platform, we don't have gender or contact info or age information..."
I mean, seriously, compared to buying information related to an actual account, what kind of benefit would be derived from all the work that would have to go in to building a platform that would allow Facebook to differentiate between different objects tagged the same way, similar objects tagged differently, etc.? It's one of the most useless data-sets ever - relative to everything else Facebook offers.
Of course, your assumption is that Apple's problem is that the spec isn't good, as opposed to the problem being Apple not having developers capable of developing solid drivers for their own platform. Considering Apple devs had trouble even getting alarm clock code correct in known edge cases like daylight saving's time, I don't have a lot of faith in their devs (or their testers) these days.
You damn well can, because they insist on writing the drivers themselves. Hell, even the bootcamp video drivers aren't the same as the official nVidia drivers, and worse - every time you update Bootcamp, it replaces whatever video driver you HAVE installed to get better performance, with the latest version that THEY want to provide you. If they just let the hardware manufacturers code the drivers, and had some sort of driver certification process, this wouldn't be such a problem, would it.
I don't think the pro-audio/pro-video market are really that big a market, at least not compared to the amount of consumers they could pick up if they dumbed down the OS. Especially given that for the most part, pro-audio people and pro-video people spend a heck of a lot more on everything but their computers, compared to their computers, and in growing number have specific needs for their specific workflows that probably add to Apple's support and development costs. It's likely much easier to sell Grandma and Grandpa a simple e-mail and video chat device, and then support them with low paid scripted employees, than it is to make sure that the Firewire chipsets are as low latency as possible, or ensure that there are no problems installing the hard drives Native Instruments and East-West sell their sample libraries on now.
I mean, for every pedantic professional who needs everything to work just right all the time that you lose, if you can grab like, 3 or 4 consumers on lower end machines, you're probably making MORE profit. Especially on stuff like Applecare, etc.
I also don't see it really hurting their education sales much if they go really consumption based. In fact, the easier it is to just lock down the devices, and provide simple apps, the more attractive you've made the devices to the K-12 market. Downsize your sys-admins, buy Applecare for everything, and really, what problems will you run into with a glorified iPad in K-12? There are even benefits. Less risk of some kid knowing more than the under-paid sys-admin/english teacher and exploiting a hole, screwing around with "expensive school resources".
It's short term thinking, sure. But that's fine in the eyes of most stock-holders, so what does it matter?
Tags not linked to an account cannot be searched. They don't link to anything. You can't even see all the photos in an album with the same unlinked tag. It hardly identifies you, because as far as I can tell, they don't even try to assume unlinked tags are related to each other in any way, even if the text is the same. I've seen worse affronts to privacy in my life.
Fair enough, I suppose. I don't have to pay tax on subscriptions (at least it's not charged on my bills from Microsoft), and when I did development, I lived in a house with a bunch of other people who also did development, and back then MSDN wasn't explicitly a 1 user license (not sure what it is now), so we just split MSDN OS between the 5 of us... across 6 laptops, 4 servers, and 7 desktops, it was definitely what I'd consider cheap. I still have so many computers that even if I were doing development, MSDN OS would still possibly be worth it, though as I no longer do, Technet Standard seems to be working just fine, and with Office, it makes it even more worth it. But that's across 3 desktops, and 2 laptops, and the per-year renewal is only $150 USD, which is pretty easy to afford for a Canadian these days thanks to the relative state of the Canadian and American economies.
My last LGA775 mobo shipped with a game port on a bracket, and you can probably still buy a PCI sound card with a game port for less than $20...
Well, have you checked out Technet if you don't do developement, or MSDN if you do? I suppose it depends on what you do with your computers, how many computers you use, etc, but both of those can be options that can drastically reduce the cost of Microsoft software if the license terms apply to your situation.
Half the people I know with macs have installed Windows 7 on them. About half of those people have stopped using OSX all together, and intend on never buying Apple products again. Aren't anecdotes fun.
Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.
