Whether or not this move is an intentional swipe at the Hackintosh trend, I'm rooting for Apple here:
(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.
(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me".
1) There is no such thing as "non-Apple gear". The entire hardware platform is the same as any Intel box running Windows or Linux. They use the same CPUs, chipsets, graphics cards, memory, hard drives, form factors, etc. etc. etc. as the rest of the industry with some minor changes to the boot system and system startup entry points (nothing that hurts running Windows or Linux on the same hardware for example).
2) true.
But I think the exception to Apple's behavior is that there are large numbers of customers who would be more than happy to fork over another wad of cash for an Apple branded netbook (in addition to their existing systems) and Apple has (yet again) failed to listen to their consumer.
That's fine, Apple probably can't make the numbers work to preserve some margin figure they want to maintain. All Apple demonstrates by this is that consumer feedback is not as much a part of their development process as most people seem to think (or hope) it is.
The problem is that not only is Apple saying "we can't be bothered with this netbook thing right now" but they are saying it with a middle finger, fully extended, at their customers. They've gone and put themselves out, expended effort, to ensure their users can't operate as they want to.
So really it's "give us your money for our overpriced commodity hardware and we don't care what you think or actually want, you'll think and want what we tell you to, how dare you try and step outside of our carefully crafted ecosystem"
But I think the exception to Apple's behavior is that there are large numbers of customers who would be more than happy to fork over another wad of cash for an Apple branded netbook (in addition to their existing systems) and Apple has (yet again) failed to listen to their consumer.
So, companies are free to make their own products up, but only as long as there isn't another product that may be in demand, in which case, they should be forced to spend time developing said product based on a hunch of someone who isn't familiar with intimate details of Apple's business?
The problem is that not only is Apple saying "we can't be bothered with this netbook thing right now" but they are saying it with a middle finger, fully extended, at their customers. They've gone and put themselves out, expended effort, to ensure their users can't operate as they want to.
Apple is a company who's goal is to make lots of money. If they want to shun one area and focus on other areas instead — perhaps because one area isn't as profitable as another area — why shouldn't they be able to? To Apple, their users are the people who buy their hardware. If you buy a Dell netbook, download an osx86 image off of the Internet and then install it, you're not an Apple users.
So really it's "give us your money for our overpriced commodity hardware and we don't care what you think or actually want, you'll think and want what we tell you to, how dare you try and step outside of our carefully crafted ecosystem"
So its a business. Whats wrong with that? If you disagree with their policies, dont use their products. Pirating it and using it isn't "sticking it to the man" somehow.
>If you buy a Dell netbook, download an osx86 image off of the Internet and then install it, you're not an Apple users.
Precisely. There aren't many non-apple users (classifying them as people who already own an Apple system, but want the improved portability the netbook formfactor affords) who are interesting in taking the time or energy to hackintosh their netbook. These people are saying, as loud as they can "Apple! We love your platform, make some hardware like a netbook and we will buy it! For goodness sakes, look at all the trouble we're going through to simulate it!"
Apple doesn't even have to R&D the netbook formfactor. They don't have to work with chip vendors to come up with lowpower chips and chipsets, or downgraded low power GPUs. They literally have to do nothing except get Jonny Ive to cook up a unibody case and put OSX on them. Charge $400 instead of $350 and they have and Apple netbook.
But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.
I'm trying as hard as I can to figure out what your point is. Apple isn't selling this stuff because they've decided not to. No matter how big you think this "hole" is and what your "equation" says, they get to pick what their product line is, not you.
So in your world, Apple has a big decision dartboard in the board room, and Steve goes there everyday and asks "should we sell a netbook?". The darts so far have landed on "No" or "Play Golf".
"Apple decided not to sell them." is not a reason, it's an effect of a long line of decision making. The first part of your statement is missing. "Netbooks _____, so Apple decided not to sell them". Fill in the blank with something that makes business sense and you'll probably be not too far off the mark. You have offered absolutely 0 to the analysis of why Apple is not in this space.
My point, since you have failed to deduce it, is that I think Apple couldn't make their margin goals on that product line (netbooks). They sell for between $300-400. Apple's absolutely bottom of the barrel offering is $500 with no peripherals whatsoever. Margins on netbooks are pitiful, probably close to break even. Apple wants to sell commodity hardware at 20% markup, they can't do that in the netbook space. Common, this is Business and Products 101.
I can see no other rational business reason not to get into that space. There may be one, but I don't see it. You are certainly not offering a compelling analysis.
It introduces a product gap that their analysis should have spotted but they were willing to chance. The effect of that product gap is that something filled the hole via consumer demand and that was either:
a) People bought vanilla netbooks and "suffered" with XP.
b) People bought netbooks and turned them into hackintoshes.
Either way, Apple didn't realize revenue from these purchases. Smart business would have tried to capitalize on this form factor, which is why every major manufacturer other than Apple has some kind of netbook offering. My claim is that this is an oversight on the part of Apple. Sure they wouldn't have realized revenue from these sales, but they would have kept their consumers "in the fold" since netbooks are usually a second purchase.
Apple's response so far has not been to fill the hole in the product line with a product (even an overpriced one), but by crippling their software.
It's a scorched earth policy, if they can't have the consumer's money, nobody can.
But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.
It won't have a good profit margin. Why should Apple waste time on it? They have many other products that are selling incredibly well (with much higher profit margins). It seems like Apple wants to work on those products instead.
Also, its not very good form to insult someone in a debate. It doesn't help further your point, and indicates that you don't have any additional items to add that will help further the discussion. And good discussion is what a lot of people come to HN for, not simply the news.
Seriously, considering that my longer, and more thoughtful reply was rather trollishly shot-down as stupid and overly long, with no counter analysis provided by the complainant, I think I restrained myself rather well.
You seem awfully confident about (1). It's almost like you think Dell couldn't sell a piece of software that was locked to Dell gear. I'm not so sure.
Remember, the goal of "software protection" (be it DRM, platform locks, or anticheating software) isn't to make it impossible to break the system; it's to make it (a) impossible to do it cost-effectively, and (b) impossible to do it permanently.
The rest of your argument, with the "middle fingers" and whatnot, I don't care. Again: companies should be able to sell whatever they want, modulo antitrust and regs.
Take a Macintosh, open it. Inspect using the novel technique of "looking".
Not to be glib, but when Apple decided to ditch other platforms for Intel-styled chips, they bought into the entire R&D work of their principle competitors. Back in the day with the 680x0 Macs and the PowerPC Macs, even things like RAM and video-cards weren't interchangeable between the platforms (due to endian-issues and timing issues etc.). The early 3d cards were a prime example of having to buy Apple branded hardware (or co-developed in partnership) for Apple branded computers. So for example, if you wanted to upgrade your Mac with a better video card, you couldn't run over and buy the $199 Nvidia card that 90% of the market could buy. You had to buy the "Made for Macintosh" Nvidia card at the 20% markup.
What Apple bought when going Intel was expertise in a vast marketplace of hardware manufacturers and R&D departments, doing Apple's work effectively for them. So what's in an Apple branded case? Probably some x-ATX board, the standard combination of chipset chips from whoever Apple could purchase from cheapest, a perfectly stock Intel chip and perfectly stock memory. With PCI-E ports with perfectly stock video cards (or video on the mobo, like value PC builders go with). If you are careful you might notice Apple uses a different boot system that's equivalent to the traditional BIOS (and is the direction some PC systems have already gone as well).
What Apple also bought when adopting an open architecture was that unfortunately, it makes locking it down really really hard. They came to the same party as everybody else, but they don't like the music. Too bad.
If Apple wants to sell a closed architecture, then that's what they should sell. But they decided to adopt an architecture that's designed not to be locked down, then are trying to lock it down after the fact.
It just took you over 300 words to say the same thing you said one comment earlier. I think you know less about how platform technology works than you think you do, and you'd benefit from opening your mind a bit. Again: Dell could probably lock code down to Dell boxes, if they had anything worth locking down.
So, I just took the 7 minutes required to give a casual read to every comment you've posted here, and here's what I've come up with:
* I have no idea what your technical expertise is, because you're anonymous, haven't filled out your profile, and have never posted a technical comment here. You have "a lead developer" and an ex CTO that screwed your company, so I assume you (a) didn't found that company and (b) don't lead a dev team. Once you typed the letters C++.
* You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg.
* Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN.
I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are.
I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever.
I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here.
> I have no idea what your technical expertise is...blah blah blah
Correct, correct and correct. I did a fair amount of hacking about as a computational linguist in my younger years. I haven't run into many others who have. So I'd suspect that we'd talk past each other in any technical conversation. Only one correction, I co-lead my company's dev team, usually providing front-end design work, domain expertise and providing pithy input on algorithmic analysis for some of the more problematic issues that regular coding won't teach. Like, "should I recursively crawl an unweighted digraph to find up-to n-length paths between disjoint and incomplete sets of nodes?" or "how should I deal with a sparse matrix when computing the steady state values of an Eigenvector on a graph with an uncertain morphology?" or my recent fav "given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?"
> You really, really dislike Apple. As evidence for that, I submit the fact that you (a) have never agreed with any pro-Apple comment here, (b) said you have an irrational dislike for the platform, (c) haven't used it enough to make sense in an argument about how app focus works on OS X, and (d) tried to win an argument about how overpriced Apple hardware is by linking to what appears to be the worst-reviewed input device on NewEgg.
I really really dislike Apple's pricing scheme and worse yet Apple fanboys who can inject even the most insane irrationality into any topic that even mentions fruit. For example, our current "discussion" centers around pretty basic business decisions, for which your reply is first disagreement, then agreement but without agreeing with my principle point just to be contrary, while simultaneously insulting me all because I said something to the effect of "Apple can't make the margins work". I think it's the word can't associated with Apple that got you riled up -- I dunno.
Specific responses:
a) I have said and agreed with some things Pro-Apple where I see it. Reread my posts in detail. If you want some more, Apple makes a reasonably good OS, writes reasonably good software. It's nothing particularly special, but it's at least modern and up-to-date.
b) I do irrationally dislike the platform, you'll get no argument from me.
c) I used 'em off and on since at least the late 80's. But not terribly hardcore or for any extended length of time. My pretty much unused MacBook Pro goes down in personal history as one of the worst wastes of money I've ever managed to throw away.
d) And then I linked to one of the highest rated input devices on NewEgg and it was still 50% below the cost of the comparable Apple offering. And still nobody could provide any rational statement why Apple's kb/mouse combo was worth $100 other than vague hand waving about being more "productive" or "feeling better about yourself" or some other touchy-feely nonsense. Which is a small scale exemplar of the irrationality that pervades the entire platform from top to bottom...correction, at the bottom. What Apple is doing at the top is perfectly rational from a business perspective. They've managed to finally crack the nut on two things:
1) How to sell absolutely vanilla PC hardware at high margins - something no other maker does effectively, it's the holy grail of the modern computer business.
2) How to get people to use their feelings in a consumer purchase rather than their brains. So people will shell out 20-50% above cost to buy said vanilla PC hardware because it runs that one killer app you can't get on a Windows computer, Steve Jobs' love.
>Your dislike for Apple currently constitutes the majority of all your comment-words on HN.
Good. When the entire Apple ecosystem stops being majority filled with pretentious snobbish self-absorbed assholes too in touch with their feelings to be healthy, I'll complain about something else and have only good things to say about the platform.
>I have no problem arguing with you on how effective software protection could or couldn't be on a standardized ISA with a tiny number of valid build configurations, or how microarchitectural profiling works, or what the parameters are for a "win" for Apple in this cat-and-mouse game are.
To be honest, I haven't kept up with the latest ISA developments from Intel (and I guess AMD since they kinda diverged a bit for a while there into mutually incompatible register and vector unit ops - but I guess they've kissed and made-up). But last time I checked there's a CPUID opcode (0FA2h with appropriate values in EAX for desired returns to check in EBX, ECX, etc.) in the x86 ISA that Apple is probably using to lock out Atom chips. Hackintoshers would have to find where Apple calls CPUID and fill the registers with something else that would pass Apple's processor check, or just force a positive reponse - probably 3 or 4 other approaches or whatever. In other words, probably a 2 hour hack and patch. Maybe they're doing something more sophisticated in their check, but I doubt Apple went through the effort of counting clock cycles on some standard discriminator test-set of opcodes just to determine processor type so they could salt the earth for Hackintoshers.
Dunno, don't care. Point is Apple chose to expend resources building this kind of processor check into their OS for the explicit purpose of preventing specifically Hackintoshers that use Atom powered netbooks. Hackintoshers on other x86 ISA hardware are unaffected. It's kind-of mean spirited in my book. It's also another demonstration that Apple's hardware is perfectly vanilla Intel platform hardware.
I mean, it's not my field. But I can buy a MacBook Pro today and install Windows on it. I suspect the differences between the MacBook Pro and an Atom Netbook are about as great as the MacBook Pro and the Wintel desktop sitting next to me. So I'm not pointing at a particularly small set of hardware and calling it "vanilla". But Apple has to keep their software a bit flexible through mid-cycle revs of their hardware (when was the last time they stealth swapped out motherboards for ones from a cheaper manufacturer or changed video card chipset vendors? The point is that Apple tries really hard to make that kind of thing not matter).
>I fully accept that you might win that argument; I feel comfortable with my position, though, with some fair amount of practical experience to back it. But whatever.
We are probably in violent agreement regarding the technical aspects of what Apple is doing re: stopping Atom based users of their software -- I'll even defer to your greater expertise in the field. And I suspect we're in agreement over why Apple is doing it. What I don't understand is why you've felt the need to pointlessly disagree with me and then insult me and how I've chosen to make my responses. This isn't Twitter last I saw. If my posts are tl;dr for you, then don't bother. Best yet, is that you've so far just disagreed with me for no particular reason other than to disagree with me. You've provided no counter-argument, no factual statement, no business reasoning, nothing except disparaging remarks about conciseness.
>I'm simply not going to do that until you tell me who you are and why I should take you at all seriously. Otherwise, I'm just going to remember you as someone never to talk to here.
Good. Don't talk to me. Other than general statements of adolescent contrarianism I'm attempting to use as a foil against which to provide more overly verbose commentary, you haven't said anything of any particular value in this thread before this post re:using the ISA to check processors. And now I know you're openly vindictive so I don't see this going in a particularly positive direction.
Oh, and once again, no response to a simple question (diff between Apple branded hardware and stock PC stuff). Just contrarianism.
First, you both are being annoying about the whole thing. From the sounds of it you are both in agreement. tptacek and you are just coming at the same solution from different directions. But it's clear that HN is full of brilliant people both in technology and business.
Second and OT. I'm interested in anything you can share regarding
"given a set of a large number of search terms with a lower cardinality bound of 1 million, how can we scan a set of strings against this search set without exhaustively scanning for every search term in the string set while preserving lemmas on the search set? How can we do this phonetically? How can we do this probabilistically in a weighted n-space?"
It sounds like this maps to a particular problem set I'm working on now. Any papers? We've looked into PLSs, numeric hash buckets, independent dispatch of search tests across large distributed systems, etc. All are either no better than a linear exhaustive search in the worst case, too network intensive, too memory intensive or too processor intensive for the applications we're interested in.
We're dealing with an issue where we have a large corpus of documents to search, and a very large number of search terms to search against this corpus. For example, say you had every comment ever posted in HN and you wanted to search them for every city/state/village/town/etc. The set of places has a cardinality that is very large, and the set of documents to search is also very large.
So to do a linear scan (naive search) of a single source document for each search term gives you some terrible O(n^2) or some such. You can try different techniques like:
1) Turn the document into a n-gram lex-trie where n is some value from 1 to some other single digit n. This effectively compresses all the word combinations down to some very fast per-character search usually a O(logn) I think (or better).
2) Tokenize the document into an overlapping n-gram hash which is basically the same as 1, but you eat up less memory if you pre-compute and keep the document hash-sets someplace else (like in a relational dB) but then you get very I/O bound on searches against the hashsets particularly in worst cases with lots of collisions. Plus this makes adding/removing documents more complicated for our purposes since we already compute various indexes and things for other purposes. Keeping half a dozen different kind of indexes really does start to eat up disk space after a while.
3) We thought about compiling the search list down into a lex-trie, doing the same with the documents, and using some kind of tree comparator algorithm to trim the searchterm lex-trie down, but that would be HUGE in memory usage, and driving it off of disk would probably turn us onto non-trie solutions like b+ trees or b* trees so we can page out the sub tree parts without too much performance hit, but at that point we may as well just be using indexed hash sets and the comparator algorithms get all funky since bx trees do all that balancing business, their morphology is mutable.
4) The best solution we've come up with so far is to set n to our maximum search term token length. Tokenize the document into an overlapping set of n-grams (New York City becomes New, New York, New York City, York, York City, City, etc.). We also have taken the search list and turned it into a big indexed hash, in one test we just shoved it all into a SQLite table (brilliant software). Each document token is simply searched against the table. If we get a result, it's good, if not, it's not a search term. It basically searches the document against the search set, inverting the problem.
So far it's hideously fast and all of our tests for the above 4 cases were single threaded. Once we multithread out the algorithm it should become even faster. Right now in our test C++ code, we run about 1/10 of a second per document (avg 1k/doc) on a search set of 30million terms. We also haven't developed our metrics for when a search list is "long enough" for this kind of thing to kick in vs. the naive search.
Sure you can index the documents down and just do a variation of the naive search, that's what we were advised to do, but it still reduces down to doing 30 million searches/document. Over a corpus of 10 million documents, that's gonna take a while even if a single term search against the index takes 1/100 of a second.
Thanks for the writeup. I've decided not to take you seriously. You might consider jumping back to the top of this comment thread, rereading my comment, and taking my word for it.
I actually made an account due to this thread after lurking for a while. I think elblanco raised some very interesting points from a business perspective that you didn't counter.
He was kind of a jerk about it. But two salient questions remain:
1) Why doesn't Apple have a netbook offering? "Because they don't" isn't really a good answer. That space is booming and still evolving right now. Apple could come in and define it for the entire marketplace.
2) Since Apple doesn't have one, why would they go through the trouble of shutting down atom based netbooks? Wouldn't this jeopardize future uses for an atom in a lower-end device like the Mac Mini?
I don't think you answered either question in your original comment:
"Whether or not this move is an intentional swipe at the Hackintosh trend, I'm rooting for Apple here:
(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.
(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me"."
So I'm not sure what word anybody is supposed to take exactly.
(1) Because introducing a product at the netbook price point would cannibalize sales that would go to the lowest-cost Macbook, and torpedo their profitability.
(2) Because allowing clones forces Apple to compete with other hardware vendors, and Apple sells a unified hardware/software product, and there is nothing in law or standard business principle that allows us to dictate to Apple how they package their products.
I don't know what your previous (1) has to do with this (1) ;) But I agree. I think elblanco agrees with you also, only he/she managed to give a reason. I've reread this thread a few times and still can't figure out why you two seem to be disagreeing over agreeing on this.
(2) Apple closed the loop on this when they killed off their clone market. Done right, hardware sales can bring in more money than pure software sales. Allow me to be contrary on one point. "and there is nothing in law or standard business principle that allows us to dictate to Apple how they package their products". Supply and demand would seem to dictate that you should supply what the consumers demand. Apple's done an effective job at controlling/predicting/creating what their consumers demand (for example, I didn't even think about a mult-touch mouse before, now I'm drooling in anticipation of getting one). But they seem to have gone a bit off-kilter here w/r to ultra-small notebooks. The 13" Macbook is huge compared to the 10" netbooks I see at Costco. If it weren't for their ridiculous battery life, I could see trading in my Macbook for a netbook since that's a hugely compelling feature for me.
You are right, Dell used to give out restore disks that locked to Dell hardware. They'd even give an appropriate error on non-Dell hardware. I don't think anybody cared to subvert it since it as usually COTS software they just packaged up.
(1) Just from a pure CS perspective, the Hackintoshers seem awfully smug, and I'd like to see them get knocked around by Apple for awhile. In a theoretic sense, it's far from established that Apple can't lock clones out. We have no idea what tricks they might come up with to reject non-Apple gear, and I for one really want to see what they are. When Microsoft did this to the Xbox and X360, we got some incredible systems research out of people like Bunny Huang and the MIT hackers.
(2) Just on general principles, if you don't have a monopoly and you aren't specially regulated, you clearly should be able to sell whatever combination of hardware and software you want to. Other people don't have the right to force you to sell some random configuration of your stuff. It's a really skeevy kind of Geek Exceptionalism that says "there's no GOOD reason why OS X shouldn't run on my Netbook, so you can't stop me".