[Macworld]

Post your comments for The Macalope: High-hanging fruit here

[KPOM]

On top of that, now that it is getting serious traction, Samsung (the poster child for the "open" Android's success) is adding its own APIs, and experimenting with different operating systems. In other words, it is becoming less "open."

[quakerotis]

As a nitwit, I resemble some of the remarks made here.
Apology accepted. carry on...

[sinclairmacleod]

Thank goodness, dear Macalope, that you are inoculated against the epidemic of stupidity that is running through the journalistic ranks. The New Yorker used to be known for quality journalism and yet today they publish an article that calls the launch of the iPhone 5 'tepid' while the Galaxy Note is a roaring success and guess what Apple is doomed. As a Brit, I find it bizarre the cheerleading in American journals for a foreign company with, at best, questionable business tactics.
Thanks for keeping me sane.

[patriotusa]

I'm glad you mentioned protected and dynamic memory. Before OS X I was having a real hard time defending the old Mac OS because of the lack of these features. Friends or relatives would call me saying they had bought more RAM for their Mac because their browser kept giving them out-of-memory errors, but it didn't help. I would then have to explain that they wasted their money on more RAM because all they needed to do was get info on the application and manually assign more memory to it. By 2000 I had given up recommending Macs to friends and was seriously considering switching to Windows. Thank goodness for OS X and its modern memory management.

[SuperMatt]

Windows is open? So they give the source code away for free? Really? Somebody tell the Winotaur!

[StefN]

I like to leave the comment "Macaloped" on the article sites. What would really help is a Macalope call to go with it. I checked Animal Planet. No luck, oddly. Closest I can find is a moose call, which I will render thusly: "Yooahhh. Wah. Wah. Wah." Can we have a native Macalope call rendering to use?

[whisper]

Quote

I like to leave the comment "Macaloped" on the article sites. What would really help is a Macalope call to go with it. I checked Animal Planet. No luck, oddly. Closest I can find is a moose call, which I will render thusly: "Yooahhh. Wah. Wah. Wah." Can we have a native Macalope call rendering to use?

Shouldn't the Macalope sound like a 3.5" floppy being ejected given the classic Mac as a head?

[wesley96]

I like to have what Tim Wu is smoking because he's actually putting Microsoft in the "open" category. Hoo-ah. Windows is popular and is used on a dominant platform, but that has nothing to do with it being open.

[bastion]

Windows has never been more open than Mac OS by any defensible definition of the term.

[immovableobject]

The extent of Windows' "openness" is that it is licensed to multiple computer vendors. This is a different kind of "open" than open source, but it does offer some benefit. Windows-based computers have become a commodity offering consumers a wide range of choice, from cheap crappy systems to specialized systems for niche markets.

One downside of this arrangement is that the OS and hardware are not as closely tuned to each other as with Apple's Macs. Microsoft can't possibly QA their software on every potential configuration. When it comes time for support, there is finger pointing. Neither Microsoft nor the computer company are inclined to take full responsibility. The user is caught in the middle. This presents opportunities for PC experts who are only happy to recommend Windows solutions and charge plenty to support them. That's the hidden Microsoft tax.

[technolawyer]

Netscape was an influential company, but not a successful company. In its best year, Netscape earned a profit of just $23 Million and had working capital of just $202 Million. Netscape lost money during most of its other years in existence.

Apparently, Tim Wu never bothered to review Netscape's SEC filings. What's more frightening is that his editor at the New Yorker never thought to ask, "Are you sure about including Netscape in that litany?" This explains why I stopped reading the New Yorker a while ago.

Apple, having just reported its best quarter, is of course doomed. Let's hope Tim Cook doesn't borrow from Netscape's playbook. If he does, AOL will end up buying Apple for a few billion dollars.

The Macalope is wrong. This isn't high hanging fruit. It's highbrow low hanging fruit.

[technolawyer]

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Shouldn't the Macalope sound like a 3.5" floppy being ejected given the classic Mac as a head?

I presume you mean expensive electric ones Apple used as opposed to the cheap manual ones everyone else used. Even when Mac OS didn't have protected memory, Apple still made nice hardware, albeit beige.

[StefN]

Quote

Shouldn't the Macalope sound like a 3.5" floppy being ejected given the classic Mac as a head?

Maybe as a courting call?