The current crowd of GOP liars want to steal Medicare from the elderly, they want to abolish a woman’s right to choose and have control over her own body, they want to abolish collective bargaining rights for our Unions, and on top of it all they want to blame the poor, the middle class and the public sector workers for a recession that the GOP created (Thanks to the Dullard “W”), while their beloved “Fat cats” continue to pay themselves exorbitant salaries, bonuses, fringe benefits.

The GOP is like the “Chicken Littles” always saying that the “Sky is Falling”, like the same ones that were the “Chicken Hawks” (“W” Wars), big talk no courage.

The United States, favors creativity wherever it can be found. We’re apostles of prosperity and defenders of the free exchange of ideas and when more people in more countries are free to rise, to invent, to communicate, to dissent, it’s not the doom of United States leadership, its the triumph of the American way.

Generations have worked hard and sacrificed much for the country to reach this point (individuals and our Unions that represented our poor, the middle class and public sector workers), and with further hard work and sacrifice (along with our relentless self-doubt) the United States will rise again, we do not tire and we are coming back, no matter what Fox news and their GOP “Chicken Littles” lackies keep saying about our nation. The win in New York was the beginning but the next will be Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and later the other states of our nation, Never Bet Against the United States, watch out GOP, we are coming for you!

But I am convinced this was a “Rally the IBM troops” demo. Look at the evidence:
1)IBM is long gone from the PC World;
2)IBM has no presence in the mobile revolution;
3)IBM is losing out to Oracle and Microsoft in the database world;
4)IBM is loing out to Oracle in the packaged server game;
5)IBM’s Lotus is losing bigtime to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint and Meeting Services;
6)IBM is losing in the Cloud to Amazon, Google, Microsoft even Rackspace…
And the list of hardware and software woes can go on.
Sure the BI and consulting businesses are going well. But the bottom line is the troopers and even the executive suite must be concerened that the major breakthroughs in technology are passing the company by despite having a huge R&D budget and a patent locker full to the brims.

So Watson and the Graphene Chip announcement were IBM’s wave to the troops and other stakeholders saying – “hey, we are still a player in info technology innovation”. And remarkably enough with well greased PR – the World and media tipped the hat to Big Blue and then moved on. And, as usual in the 24-hour media muddle, not asking the tougher follow on questions or investigating where and what is IBM presence and strategy beyond the next 6 months.

This has been a concern of mine for some time as well regarding the pace of growth of technology.
Doing more is simply not going to be enough to maintain the standard of living that people have been used to for the past few decades.
Everyone is going to have to learn how to adapt and adapt efficiently… that is, everyone in the bottom 90% (give or take a few percentages) of the pyramid.

On Watson, yah, that was a piece of work – some of us knew well that it was going to be slanted towards Watson. What, no finger to press the buzzer…. that alone was unfair.
Now, if it was listening and responding to human speech, my jaw would’ve dropped.

I have written a complete posting here on why I think the weatherman’s point of view on global warming is often flawed:
1)Its way too narrow in scope looking at small regions and not the big picture;
2)Its also too narrow a view in time – cherry picking one date versus another where as good studies use a smoothed average for the base time period often of decades to compare with a target year or three;
3)Its too particular. Climatologist have only worked out the basic models on why global warming is occurring; they are looking for more detailed models to explain some of the polar and other regional specific observations that can be seen as below:

Weathermen are often not looking to work with the solar interaction model that underlies most climatology studies. This is not to say that weather mechanisms do not effect Global Warming – clearly they do; it how they interact with the more global solar enrgy flux that is currently the subject of the most productive insights on weather. Like Handy’s frogs that get boiled to death by slow, small incremental temperature increases – humanity has to be more serious about the controlling the impact of global warming.

In addition, some of their discovered limitations are also due in part to the stringent requirements (the tighter the fence the less land it can cover) and also likely due in part to some decided movements away from other products (the hardware of nvidia and ati cards they use have hardware acceleration of flash on the chipset but the drivers lack the support to make that happen and software emulation must take place causing the decrepit performance we see with respect to flash on modern Mac systems).

As far as modern benchmarks are concerned there are far too many people who take one side of the Mac vs PC debate to have too many comparisons. We know that Adobe in some conference mentioned that Adobe products still, meaning CS5, perform better on PC than Mac by about 3-5% the reason likely being Apple’s late to arrive at modern drivers (the stringent requirements for their drivers also slow down the develop cycle). Apple has a mentality of ‘as long as it works let’s just leave it alone’ over ‘let’s push the system to see what we can get’ of Windows developers who want to showcase their own products.

http://creativemac.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=589477&afterinter=true

That is one benchmark I found a while ago, it’s outdated now, but since about 2003 it is a consistent trend that Adobe was announcing working with PC more, and then it became pretty apparent with tests above, and now in CS5 with Mac finally closing the 64-bit gap there is only marginal speed differences but huge cost differences making even more compelling reasons to use PCs for Adobe products. Also you can see from the OpenGL tests that 3d performance of OpenGL is amazingly better in Windows, and this is the same rendering engine Maya uses for their renderer (most of the time, you can also do others including DirectX which does not exist for Macs) and in addition a huge amount of plugins are available for the Windows side of things that is not available on Mac. The edition we have, 2010, is also not available in 64-bit on Mac, which aids even more in the push towards Windows for graphic design software of all varieties.

Even Apple leaves this whole debate open as they claim to make their own hardware and software, but they certainly do use Vendors (however restricted) to build most of their drivers. That part to me, is still the same result, because Apple puts such stringent controls on everything it results in a lag time that has outpaced stability (meaning even with the focus of windows drivers being performance they still have gained enough stability to be 99% of what Apple has and yet still win in performance). That divide of performance will continue to expand in the years to come, but the stability gap will also close even more to where they are virtually identical (if we have not already hit that venture).

Okay, enough about drivers and benchmarks. I think I’m ran off the deep end with that topic, onto other things you’ve brought up.

What I see for Apple in the coming years is replacing Flash Player with something of their own, just like viewer can do video/pictures/pdfs it will in the future also do Flash. They will move more heavily into the markets that support their highly limited versus highly open mentality (iDevices) and they will begin to offer their own internet services, perhaps through Mobile Me. As far as off-site server rendering for FCP or Aperature, I doubt they would do it, Amazon has attempted that as well as a few others, and with exception of the @home projects, we don’t see a huge benefit over renting or using off-site services for huge file manipulations or renders. Since FCP still doesn’t use the graphics card in the machine for rendering I doubt I would see them to be enough modern-thinking to use dispersed rendering.

As for your last point I would make one change. Instead of mentioning Steve being first and creative, I would say Steve having the reputation of being first and creative. Few people remember the firsts in the case of Apple. Many times Apple comes in second, or far late to the game, but they always come in with a profitable device, amazing marketing, and the claim to fame which the populace mostly rolls over and gives them. I believe this marketing strategy to be inherently tied to their misinformation tactics that sell their products. They call something magical, instead of saying it is fast, they call it revolutionary when it is devolution, and they always claim first place when getting the silver.

Even recently they withdrew their own comments about being immune to viruses from their own website, but avoided to tell any of their sales people or make a media advertisement about it. They also word it in such a way that it sounds like they’ve been talking this way all along.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/campaigns/new_to_mac?mco=MTkyMTY1MjQ#reliable

My apologies for not including more performance benchmarks, again they are tricky to find, most of the information I have is from Apple employees, forums on Maya’s website as well as a history of information from the 20+ years I’ve been dealing with the computer industry. It is tricky, especially with Apple, to find an old article about their performance or not being king of the hill in graphic design anymore… it’s almost spooky sometimes.

Part of this was written while I was half asleep, please be kind. But any questions or comments, please feel free to respond.

I have heard mixed messages about who is responsible for Apple’s MacOS drivers – can you point me to the links which show that Apple has taken lead/sole resposnsibility for its Mac Drivers? Likewise -since the Phoronix study and one other I have not been able to find any second half 2010 benchmarks measuring comparative graphics performance of Adobe and other graphics software ON MacOS vs PCs. again if you have any benchmark links – send them this way.

I agree completely with you about the push for iServices – not just iTunes, AppStore and MacStore but a hug, still secret set of Cloud based Server farms. Whats to be on these ? Cloud based video and graphics services tied closely with Final Cut Pro and Aperture. Obviously Steve would love to shed his dependence on Adobe- the largely False attacks on Flash reveal that

I see Steve trying to establish a proprietary monpoly bastion using iDevices and iServices – and the reputation of always delivering the best first. Like Bill Gates throughout the 1990′s Steve has been largely successful in being first and creative but also teflon slick on avoiding criticism on short- changing customers when Steve and Apple decide it is necessary. Poor Graphics performance, no Java or Flash on iDevices, extortionate prices and no-multitouch on Macs, Verizon iPhone with no major improvements in software or hardware and no attempt to take advantage of new Verizon 4G/LTE, highly proprietary iDevices – yet the Apple fans keep coming back for more. A few more missteps like these and there are lots of players like Moto with Atrix and Xoom, Samsung with a ton of devices, RIM with new Storm and Playbook that will be glad to take advantage of the miscues as Android already has done in the smartphone market with leading marketshare.

As far as the article goes, I agree that the Mac is Dead. Even Steve Jobs admitted to losing the Desktop wars. But I think it goes beyond getting people on iDevices, it is more about getting people on iServices, and the iDevices just give an outlet for people to do that. But why would Apple restrict themselves to their own, often fanatical, laptop/desktop customer base? They go after Windows users equally well, today there are more iPhone/iPod users than there are MacOSX users, meaning they get a huge chunk of business from Windows users. Many Mac users tout the advantages of their system and almost always include the fact that they can run Windows making them just as compatible as any PC. That’s like shooting yourself in the foot to prove you can aim. Mac desktop platform is Dead, it does not mean that it is unprofitable.

And here is more RIM Playbook info of interest –

Ye Takethe5th Editor