On another topic, is that another trick from the Intelligent Design crowd ?
If it is, it's a bad trick. The ID argument is: There are somethings that are too complicated to be the by product of the rules of the universe, so something must have bent the rules of the universe to get them created. The only thing that can bend the rules of the universe is God, so since the rules have been bent there is a god and he bent the rules.
So the universe being a VR sim helps that part that there might be somethings that are so complicated that they couldn't be the product of the rules of the universe alone. However the universe being VR destroys that the only one who can bend the rules is God, part, unless they want to degrade God to just some John Doe running a sim.
Although I could see a lot of religious ideas encoded as part of the structure of the VR. For example because of problems with pseudo randomness, rather then having a shared RNG, we hav each been given our own unique RNG (our soul) that decides those issues of randomness in our bodies/brains. And for those who like re-incarnation those AIs might be re-used and seed themselves on the life of a person the control/decide meaning that past lives effect us, because their experiences are still effecting the RNG that's deciding our randomness.
This isn't the simple case of buying a DVD player so you can watch DVD's. This is the case of "Buy our brand's DVD Player so you can listen to our brand of DVDs". This type of behavior makes me get stabby. (Sorry for not shouting)
Ummm, DVD is a brand. There are lots of optical drives that can read "dvd" media but can not play movie DVDs because no one paid to be part of the DVD brand. So it's a bit ironic that you chose DVD as the basis of your example.
If the suit is about not being able to play DRM'ed WMA, then unless the chips come with the DRM secrets and licenses to distribute them as DRM'ed WMA players that apple has not crippled anything, as that is they only have one of the 3 things required in their product as provided by their suppliers. Also since they have not always and may not always use that chip then I think they are more in the clear. I think they'd get in more trouble if they supported the format then dropped it when they switched to a chip that didn't support it any more.
There are also 2 things that I think puts apple really in the clear. their store sells some DRM free music, and there is another store (amazon) that sells digital music that can be played on iPod. I think those two things put the blame for all digital music not ubiquitously playable at the feet of the stores that universally chose formats that can't be played ubiquitously, and at labels that require that the gets sold be sold in a format that is not ubiquitously playable. After all amazon sells songs that can play on the ipod, and DRM-free songs from itunes will play on the zune.
There might be a genuine hurt to society here, but apple are not the ones that are ultimately to blame. Sue the music companies for stripping away your fair use.
So the RIAA wants to charge radio stations to advertise their product for them.
This is so dumb because not only is this the labels making them selves less useful to their clients. The Labels do 3 things for an artist, they promote them, they loan them money to cover recording costs, and they control access to other artists and producers an artist might want to collaborate with, and of those one of the most important these days is the promotion. But now the labels are looking to sour their vice like grip on radio, which is going to hurt their ability to promote, and is going to provide an opening for their competitors.
The only bad part about this is that, when this dumb move hurts they they are just going to get more irrational.
Read the article again. If you do you will see that it mentions the files they don't know about as an additional consideration, in the opinion written by the Judge. Here is the quote relevant quote from that which was included in the article:
If the subpoena is requesting production of the files in drive Z, the foregone conclusion doctrine does not apply. While the government has seen some of the files on drive Z, it has not viewed all or even most of them. While the government may know of the existence and location of the files it has previously viewed, it does not know of the existence of other files on drive Z that may contain incriminating material. By compelling entry of the password the government would be compelling production of all the files on drive Z, both known and unkown.
It's more then just confessions. The police can't decide you are a thief and then ransack your house on the hopes of finding something stolen. When they search they have to know what they are looking for, and have reason to believe that they will find it.
Here they are saying that he has files that they know nothing about. Because those files are unknown, he is protected from having to provide them.
Thinking about it, I'm surprised that we haven't heard of cases getting thrown out because of computer evidence collected outside of the scope of any search warrant poisoning too much of the subsequent evidence. I could imagine a warrant to look on your computer for a warez program they think you have turning up an ssh known_hosts file entry for a warez server. Since they weren't looking for that evidence (maybe because they thought the computer had not been networked, or was not involved in warez transmission, just storage) then they can't use it, and if they then go hunting the logs of that remote server to find the connection that can't be used either because it was evidence they only knew to look for because of evidence they weren't allowed to have anyway. And because you can't un-know information once you have tainted evidence you have to show that any subsequently gathered evidence did not come from knowledge of that evidence or at least would have eventually been discovered by other means.
However I must offer the following disclaimer: I am not a lawyer (nor do I do anal like so many of you non-lawyers), but I have watched a lot of Law & Order.
Disclaimer: Not being a lawyer, much
So the real place this comes into play is if you are on call for emergencies. If you are and you just have a phone then some one has to consciously escalate something to you as en emergency to pull you away from your life. If emergency and regular work email all get to you through the same channel then you have to keep checking the email box and evaluate all the incoming email, and you have to decide whether or not to treat something like an emergency, and since the consequences for being wrong can be severe you are likely to respond to a bunch of things that can wait til the next business day.
So if you already have an irrevocable work/life boundary you are safe, but if there are some degrees of work that may always interfere with your life a device like a blackberry can make work more invasive.
My Bad. I suck and forgot to format that. There are supposed to be a few breaks in all the text. Here's a broken up version:
The terrasoft people may beg to differ with you.
And if you insist on being revisionist and ignoring all Linux distros for Mac, please be sure to logically consistent and stop using all utilities and programs they spawned, like yum.
Also why is a computer that is made with mix & match components something resembling a computer and a computer that is treated by the vendor somewhat like an appliance a TV? A more apt comparison is to say that Apple is a high end home theater integrator that custom makes it's own cables, while Microsoft is like the monster cable products, inc. Which is to say that the two corporations are largely different in what they do, even though they are in a similar arena.
As for freedom and monopoly, they are two different things. Apple isn't really monopolistic, yes there music store isn't completely open, but that haven't really pushed to get artists to only publish to iTunes to lock out non-ipods. In the appliance model itms content that is DRM'ed is like vacuum cleaner bags, you can buy ones that lock you in to one vendors vacuums, they don't have a monopoly as a supplier of bags for all vacuums, and you can use 3rd party bags with their vacuums. Further I would say that MOST people don't want to build everything they use for themselves, the want people to make it for them and have it just work. That's pretty much the way it is for all consumer goods. Sure hobbyists lose the many of the perks they gained when that category of product type first became a commodity item, but no one is making you be a hobbyist. However I do think it's pretty bogus to imply that a more consumer oriented treatment of the consumer computer market would be a bad thing. What you are putting forth is that good and evil are subjective relative to hobbies. Basically you are putting forth a world model were it is morally right for athletes to be above the law caused darned if that doesn't make our sports better.
To preemptively address one response to this comment. Consider this: Lot's of different companies make refrigerators, and lots of companies make food that requires refrigeration, but you don't often have to worry about whether you the food you buy is going to be compatible with your refrigerator, or when you take leftover out of your fridge to give to someone else you don't have to worry if they will be compatible with the other person's fridge. And all of this happened with out any sort of monopoly pulling the strings.
The terrasoft people may beg to differ with you.
And if you insist on being revisionist and ignoring all Linux distros for Mac, please be sure to logically consistent and stop using all utilities and programs they spawned, like yum.
Also why is a computer that is made with mix & match components something resembling a computer and a computer that is treated by the vendor somewhat like an appliance a TV? A more apt comparison is to say that Apple is a high end home theater integrator that custom makes it's own cables, while Microsoft is like the monster cable products, inc. Which is to say that the two corporations are largely different in what they do, even though they are in a similar arena.
As for freedom and monopoly, they are two different things. Apple isn't really monopolistic, yes there music store isn't completely open, but that haven't really pushed to get artists to only publish to iTunes to lock out non-ipods. In the appliance model itms content that is DRM'ed is like vacuum cleaner bags, you can buy ones that lock you in to one vendors vacuums, they don't have a monopoly as a supplier of bags for all vacuums, and you can use 3rd party bags with their vacuums.
Further I would say that MOST people don't want to build everything they use for themselves, the want people to make it for them and have it just work. That's pretty much the way it is for all consumer goods. Sure hobbyists lose the many of the perks they gained when that category of product type first became a commodity item, but no one is making you be a hobbyist. However I do think it's pretty bogus to imply that a more consumer oriented treatment of the consumer computer market would be a bad thing. What you are putting forth is that good and evil are subjective relative to hobbies. Basically you are putting forth a world model were it is morally right for athletes to be above the law caused darned if that doesn't make our sports better.
To preemptively address one response to this comment. Consider this: Lot's of different companies make refrigerators, and lots of companies make food that requires refrigeration, but you don't often have to worry about whether you the food you buy is going to be compatible with your refrigerator, or when you take leftover out of your fridge to give to someone else you don't have to worry if they will be compatible with the other person's fridge. And all of this happened with out any sort of monopoly pulling the strings.
We shouldn't be wasting taxpayer money on an unconstitutional space program or an unconstitutional non-war.
Wait, why is it unconstitutional? Does that mean that the Lewis and Clark expedition was unconstitutional too? Trust jefferson to go and warp the intent of the founding fathers.
1. They do lousey research.
2. They care as much about announced plans as they do about current practice when rating companies.
3. They have admitted that their active chastisements are targeted at the companies that will get them the most press to target, instead of the worst, in terms of practice.
In summary, they suck. What they say isn't that based in reality. And in my opinion they have reached the point where they are doing more harm to the cause of environmental progress then they are doing good.
Everyone hypes the vast number of cycles that the SETI at home project has realized, but what is the wattage that those cycles used to do all that computation. Sure maybe they would have been on anyway, but as most people with laptops can attest to power consumption varies with activity so all that SETI at home work has a had a real energy cost.
I point this out not because I'm any sort of super green. but because many of the advocates of SETI are and I like pointing out things like this to people like that.
I believe that severe accidents that are not fatal are often more expensive then death benefits. As such home accidents being most costly does not directly correlate to them being most deadly.
All I see are a bunch of opinions in the thread, and I don't think opinions should be suppressed via moderation.
There are no right or wrong opinions (unless based on too little or incorrect information) and every one has a right to form their own opinion and should be to express it.
However I disagree with your assertion with regard to suppressing opinion via moderation. Supposing nowhere in the thread is anything intended to be a troll or flamebait or whatever. There is still one negative morderation tag that applies, and that is the offtopic tag. Slashdot comments are not intended as a wide ranging forum for free flowing ideas. They are intended as discussions on the topic of the story, or at least that is what the artifacts in the moderation system lead me to believe.
There is a problem with your comparison. In the Apple AT&T arangement apple provides support and ongoing software updates for the iPhone. With the proposed NBC Apple arrangement there is no ongoing work on NBC's part.
I've got to respectfully disagree. Your original post is overrated, flamebait, a troll and funny (in the way ignorance generally is).
With all due respect, you are being a prick.
Sadly not being a prick wasn't one of my goals in that post. My post should have and did get modded down. I just hope that some of the mods looking at my post turned their eyes up-word and gave the whole tread the modding that it deserved.
Also I love that you posted your message as yourself.
(And to the childish mods: if you disagree, post a reply. My original response wasn't a troll, flamebait, overrated or funny. You're not accomplishing anything productive by abusing the mod system.)
I've got to respectfully disagree. Your original post is overrated, flamebait, a troll and funny (in the way ignorance generally is).
They'll never compete? really? every new mac you can Leopard on is also a machine capable of runing vista. On intel Macs they do compete.
You want to see which is better? Again really? You really expect that one is better. With the vast number of things that an OS might be used for there is no one single metric for better-ness. And why can't you compare them, because one of them is better in regards to the breadth of hardware it supports? It would be cool if we could compare which is better but we can't cause one of them is so bad at meeting my needs to even run it for comparison. Yeah, ok. I can see right now that Vista is better at meeting your needs, now you know.
And what did you do minutes after some one responded to your mail, you responded with a smug, aren't I smart and superior to you response. Hmmm, it's as though that first message was some sort of bait. And since you railed at both the person whose comment you provoked and the mods, you were both trolling and flame baiting.
Oh and you didn't include this but it was essentially off topic too, As it wasn't about the review of OS X, or about OS X, just about how you couldn't compare it to vista cause you wouldn't buy apple hardware.
Personally I think that Apple hardware is very versatile and that they have an OS and software that let you take very good advantage of that hardware. I'm a sys admin and my mac laptops have been like computing swiss army knives for me. I've solved a lot of problems that other people would have and did give up on because I was able to leverage the flexibility of both the hardware and OS. That's not to say that what is good for me is good for someone with different ends in mind for their computer
I think Theo is making some unstated assumptions. If you assume that in the absence of virtualization would result in the different virtual machines each being their own server, then if root level access on one VM would allow you to take over the host OS, then the security of each machine on the server has been reduced to the security of the weakest machine on the server. And since it is his assertion that virtualization would increase utilization, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a good chance that that is the assumption he is making.
The counter assumption is that in the absence of virtualization all the services that would have run on the VMs would just all run on the same server, then virtualization can increase security because no one service may constitute a top to bottom root exploit but some combination of them may. Of course adding the extra overhead of the VMs potentially decreases the utilization your services get from the machine. However most of the time when security is discussed it is this scenario they are talking about.
And of course the reality of what happens in the field is that there is a little of both going on. You have both server that did too many things being broken up into VMs, and clumps of smaller servers being replaced with a single larger capacity VM server.
mean, if you want to talk about it, then let's just say what's going on with that. The current pop-culture of gaming right now is biased towards multiplayer, either FPS or MMORPG, doesn't care about story, art, or single-player gameplay. If that's who's handing out awards, then it's no surprise that Halo is the big game this year.
Wait, trends in gaming? Hasn't the wii out sold the xbox360 already? Doesn't that mean that Wii sports has outsold ALL xbox360 games?
"My friends and I only play FPS and MMORPGs and have narrowed our world view to the point that other game genres and trends don't show up in our small minded view of the world", does not mean the world is changing to adhere to your ignorance. If you pay attention you might notice that guitar hero and games of that type are also pretty big right now, or be surprised to find that people are still playing the pokemon games.
Google already does code for google. They're the first hit.
Seriously though, this article depresses me. The unspoken sentiment is that typical websites can't survive without google. Which implies that typical websites can't survive on word of mouth, aggregator sites, and features highlighting them on good websites. I can't think of a single site that I found through google. I use google to search large sites, go to sites with awkward URLs, or find one time use references. But apparently the good sites that can survive on word of mouth are not typical any more.
It really saddens me because it reminds me of TV. Shows that can that do well via word of mouth get canceled or messed with before the audience peeks, and many of the shows that succeed do so because they are they slightly appeal to many demographics rather then being really well received by a few. What happens when the start up costs for websites go up and you need substantial ads from the get go, will there be any new great sites, that aren't flukes.
In the end I don't think sites should be designed to optimize page rank, except for maybe online retailers that compete with other online retailers. If your site is good people will link to it and praise it and it's page rank will soar.
Ok circletimessquare, you are ignoring the content. Not all things that are used as propaganda are propaganda in all contexts.
Consider the two contexts:
Context 1:
Speaker A: Al Gore's Movie, An Inconvenient Truth, raises some good points about the environment that we should address.
Speaker B: Al Gore is a hypocrite!
Context 2:
Speaker A: Al Gore is great!
Speaker B: Al Gore is a hypocrite!
In Context 1, calling Al Gore a hypocrite is a propaganda distraction from the environmental issues that Speaker A is trying to discuss. In context 2, the topic of discussion isn't the environment, it's Al Gore, and as such Speaker B isn't being a distracting from the issue, because Al Gore is the issue. Now consider this article, amazingly enough it is about Al Gore, and not about the environment, so talking about Al Gore's practices isn't propaganda it's legitimate discourse.
Al Gore being a political figure who is not practicing what he preaches, is relevant to whether he's even a good spokesperson for environmental issues, because he distracts from the issues. The cause would be better served if Al used his influence to get a apolitical spokes person who is above reproach in front of people.
It's just like all those Anti-Gay republicans that have sex with dudes. It hurts their cause, and they are bad spokes-persons that should not be winning awards for their work, unless they are ironic awards from the people they claim to oppose.
Maybe the ipod halo effect stopped converting linux users to OS X. So it wasn't worth it to continue to let linux people use ipods all the shiny new ipods without moving to a consumer OS.
This could have simply been to close a DRM loophole with 3rd party library managers. iTunes won't put an itms song on an ipod unless the computer is authorized for that song, meaning that my itms music files have no worth to anyone else, but my understanding is that if you have a third party ipod library manager you can load anyones itms music store files and play them. Someone please correct me if I am wrong about that. So the net result is that these third party library managers potentially opened up the whole DRM can of worms, which I believe apple is charged with keeping a tight lid on.
Don't know if this is just the old world ipods (the nano, classic, and shuffle) or also includes the touch and iphone, if it does, it might be part of locking down ringtones.
There also is a chance that this is part of a change they needed to make now that the automatic ipod sync is going to be two way with new content from the wifi store needing to be DRM'ed to the purchasers ID and uploaded back to the computer's itunes library. Which I'm sure greatly complicates things.
I think his point was that google become popular and successful with people who weren't using microsoft OSes or browsers, so there is no part about it's success or popularity that has anything to do with microsoft except that in order to reach the magnitude of popularity it did it had to be usable with IE.
Unless you are trying to say that Microsoft is saying that they should be applauded for not crippling the web experience of their users so much that something like google would be impossible?
Ok so maybe microsoft is trying to say that there would not be as many internet connected computers out there if not for them to run on, but I think that apple, commodore, and atari, would have picked up the slack if the lack os MS had made IBM less successful.
Let me distill your comment into just the good parts.
The comparison doesn't do a lot of good, because the value of word is not just it's value as a word processor but it's value as part of a complete integrated solution, with a lot of well-integrated add-on apps available, and without doing a comparison that includes all those things, you are not going to get all the most important results. Some of the things that should be considered for a good comparison are: collaboration (shared workspaces, SharePoint and NetMeeting interop), revision control, extensibility model, autoformatting, the insane amount of clip art available for free from the Office website, mail merge, the document map functionality, and Office Update.
I don't necessarily agree with your sentiment but I figured I should re-present your good points, because without it you comment seems kind of flamebait-ish and not neccesarily on topic.
Well thanks to the Anonymous coward who flamed me. I'm glad, that not knowing me he decided what my motivations are, and accused me of trying coming up with my position only after I felt that something made me look stupid.
In response I think it's fair that I get to make an accusation. I know that my original post had gotten positive moderation. Then someone modded it down, and an AC flamed my post. So I am going to accuse that moderator of being the AC, and being the worst kind of Slashdot forum Troll/Karma Whore/Jerk.
I don't feel that apple's price change affects how other perceive me in anyway. I do not personally care about any "cool" factor the iPhone might have now or ever had. If anything I think that having the iPhone when it was scarce has been annoying because when people see you with it they assume that you want to stop what you were doing an answer a million questions about it, or be lectured on why it sucks, is evil, and I'm a fool for owning one.
What does happen to be true is that I have read numerous forums of long term apple customers and fanboys, and this forum, and I found the reaction of the two groups to the news to be different and I saw a lot of people not understanding and making bad assumptions about the comments of many apple proponents. So I tried to shed some light on the situation and irony of ironies, my attempt to clear up a lack of understanding and illuminate the ignorance that was leading to bad assumptions, was itself met with a lack of understanding and bad assumptions.
The really funny thing is that some of the loudest apple fan boys that irritated the generic early adopter types so, don't have iphones, and may not own a single apple product. The people I all know with iPhones took the info fairly calmly. The ones who had it from the start thought that it would have been nice to spend less, but they bought a device that they thought they would like at a price that seemed worthwhile. The ones that JUST bought it, quietly checked to see they were in any price protection programs through their credit cards, or if they had some recourse through the apple store.
And now because I'm still kind of pissed and that A-hole Coward, I'd like to ask why he had the time to harass me, that Farscape / BSG crossover fanfic where Crichton gets it on with Starbuck isn't going to finish itself.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is, it's a bad trick. The ID argument is: There are somethings that are too complicated to be the by product of the rules of the universe, so something must have bent the rules of the universe to get them created. The only thing that can bend the rules of the universe is God, so since the rules have been bent there is a god and he bent the rules.
So the universe being a VR sim helps that part that there might be somethings that are so complicated that they couldn't be the product of the rules of the universe alone. However the universe being VR destroys that the only one who can bend the rules is God, part, unless they want to degrade God to just some John Doe running a sim.
Although I could see a lot of religious ideas encoded as part of the structure of the VR. For example because of problems with pseudo randomness, rather then having a shared RNG, we hav each been given our own unique RNG (our soul) that decides those issues of randomness in our bodies/brains. And for those who like re-incarnation those AIs might be re-used and seed themselves on the life of a person the control/decide meaning that past lives effect us, because their experiences are still effecting the RNG that's deciding our randomness.
Ummm, DVD is a brand. There are lots of optical drives that can read "dvd" media but can not play movie DVDs because no one paid to be part of the DVD brand. So it's a bit ironic that you chose DVD as the basis of your example.
If the suit is about not being able to play DRM'ed WMA, then unless the chips come with the DRM secrets and licenses to distribute them as DRM'ed WMA players that apple has not crippled anything, as that is they only have one of the 3 things required in their product as provided by their suppliers. Also since they have not always and may not always use that chip then I think they are more in the clear. I think they'd get in more trouble if they supported the format then dropped it when they switched to a chip that didn't support it any more.
There are also 2 things that I think puts apple really in the clear. their store sells some DRM free music, and there is another store (amazon) that sells digital music that can be played on iPod. I think those two things put the blame for all digital music not ubiquitously playable at the feet of the stores that universally chose formats that can't be played ubiquitously, and at labels that require that the gets sold be sold in a format that is not ubiquitously playable. After all amazon sells songs that can play on the ipod, and DRM-free songs from itunes will play on the zune.
There might be a genuine hurt to society here, but apple are not the ones that are ultimately to blame. Sue the music companies for stripping away your fair use.
So the RIAA wants to charge radio stations to advertise their product for them.
This is so dumb because not only is this the labels making them selves less useful to their clients. The Labels do 3 things for an artist, they promote them, they loan them money to cover recording costs, and they control access to other artists and producers an artist might want to collaborate with, and of those one of the most important these days is the promotion. But now the labels are looking to sour their vice like grip on radio, which is going to hurt their ability to promote, and is going to provide an opening for their competitors.
The only bad part about this is that, when this dumb move hurts they they are just going to get more irrational.
If the subpoena is requesting production of the files in drive Z, the foregone conclusion doctrine does not apply. While the government has seen some of the files on drive Z, it has not viewed all or even most of them. While the government may know of the existence and location of the files it has previously viewed, it does not know of the existence of other files on drive Z that may contain incriminating material. By compelling entry of the password the government would be compelling production of all the files on drive Z, both known and unkown.
It's more then just confessions. The police can't decide you are a thief and then ransack your house on the hopes of finding something stolen. When they search they have to know what they are looking for, and have reason to believe that they will find it.
Here they are saying that he has files that they know nothing about. Because those files are unknown, he is protected from having to provide them.
Thinking about it, I'm surprised that we haven't heard of cases getting thrown out because of computer evidence collected outside of the scope of any search warrant poisoning too much of the subsequent evidence. I could imagine a warrant to look on your computer for a warez program they think you have turning up an ssh known_hosts file entry for a warez server. Since they weren't looking for that evidence (maybe because they thought the computer had not been networked, or was not involved in warez transmission, just storage) then they can't use it, and if they then go hunting the logs of that remote server to find the connection that can't be used either because it was evidence they only knew to look for because of evidence they weren't allowed to have anyway. And because you can't un-know information once you have tainted evidence you have to show that any subsequently gathered evidence did not come from knowledge of that evidence or at least would have eventually been discovered by other means.
However I must offer the following disclaimer: I am not a lawyer (nor do I do anal like so many of you non-lawyers), but I have watched a lot of Law & Order. Disclaimer: Not being a lawyer, much
So the real place this comes into play is if you are on call for emergencies. If you are and you just have a phone then some one has to consciously escalate something to you as en emergency to pull you away from your life. If emergency and regular work email all get to you through the same channel then you have to keep checking the email box and evaluate all the incoming email, and you have to decide whether or not to treat something like an emergency, and since the consequences for being wrong can be severe you are likely to respond to a bunch of things that can wait til the next business day.
So if you already have an irrevocable work/life boundary you are safe, but if there are some degrees of work that may always interfere with your life a device like a blackberry can make work more invasive.
My Bad. I suck and forgot to format that. There are supposed to be a few breaks in all the text. Here's a broken up version:
The terrasoft people may beg to differ with you.
And if you insist on being revisionist and ignoring all Linux distros for Mac, please be sure to logically consistent and stop using all utilities and programs they spawned, like yum.
Also why is a computer that is made with mix & match components something resembling a computer and a computer that is treated by the vendor somewhat like an appliance a TV? A more apt comparison is to say that Apple is a high end home theater integrator that custom makes it's own cables, while Microsoft is like the monster cable products, inc. Which is to say that the two corporations are largely different in what they do, even though they are in a similar arena.
As for freedom and monopoly, they are two different things. Apple isn't really monopolistic, yes there music store isn't completely open, but that haven't really pushed to get artists to only publish to iTunes to lock out non-ipods. In the appliance model itms content that is DRM'ed is like vacuum cleaner bags, you can buy ones that lock you in to one vendors vacuums, they don't have a monopoly as a supplier of bags for all vacuums, and you can use 3rd party bags with their vacuums. Further I would say that MOST people don't want to build everything they use for themselves, the want people to make it for them and have it just work. That's pretty much the way it is for all consumer goods. Sure hobbyists lose the many of the perks they gained when that category of product type first became a commodity item, but no one is making you be a hobbyist. However I do think it's pretty bogus to imply that a more consumer oriented treatment of the consumer computer market would be a bad thing. What you are putting forth is that good and evil are subjective relative to hobbies. Basically you are putting forth a world model were it is morally right for athletes to be above the law caused darned if that doesn't make our sports better.
To preemptively address one response to this comment. Consider this: Lot's of different companies make refrigerators, and lots of companies make food that requires refrigeration, but you don't often have to worry about whether you the food you buy is going to be compatible with your refrigerator, or when you take leftover out of your fridge to give to someone else you don't have to worry if they will be compatible with the other person's fridge. And all of this happened with out any sort of monopoly pulling the strings.
The terrasoft people may beg to differ with you. And if you insist on being revisionist and ignoring all Linux distros for Mac, please be sure to logically consistent and stop using all utilities and programs they spawned, like yum. Also why is a computer that is made with mix & match components something resembling a computer and a computer that is treated by the vendor somewhat like an appliance a TV? A more apt comparison is to say that Apple is a high end home theater integrator that custom makes it's own cables, while Microsoft is like the monster cable products, inc. Which is to say that the two corporations are largely different in what they do, even though they are in a similar arena. As for freedom and monopoly, they are two different things. Apple isn't really monopolistic, yes there music store isn't completely open, but that haven't really pushed to get artists to only publish to iTunes to lock out non-ipods. In the appliance model itms content that is DRM'ed is like vacuum cleaner bags, you can buy ones that lock you in to one vendors vacuums, they don't have a monopoly as a supplier of bags for all vacuums, and you can use 3rd party bags with their vacuums. Further I would say that MOST people don't want to build everything they use for themselves, the want people to make it for them and have it just work. That's pretty much the way it is for all consumer goods. Sure hobbyists lose the many of the perks they gained when that category of product type first became a commodity item, but no one is making you be a hobbyist. However I do think it's pretty bogus to imply that a more consumer oriented treatment of the consumer computer market would be a bad thing. What you are putting forth is that good and evil are subjective relative to hobbies. Basically you are putting forth a world model were it is morally right for athletes to be above the law caused darned if that doesn't make our sports better. To preemptively address one response to this comment. Consider this: Lot's of different companies make refrigerators, and lots of companies make food that requires refrigeration, but you don't often have to worry about whether you the food you buy is going to be compatible with your refrigerator, or when you take leftover out of your fridge to give to someone else you don't have to worry if they will be compatible with the other person's fridge. And all of this happened with out any sort of monopoly pulling the strings.
Wait, why is it unconstitutional? Does that mean that the Lewis and Clark expedition was unconstitutional too? Trust jefferson to go and warp the intent of the founding fathers.
1. They do lousey research. 2. They care as much about announced plans as they do about current practice when rating companies. 3. They have admitted that their active chastisements are targeted at the companies that will get them the most press to target, instead of the worst, in terms of practice. In summary, they suck. What they say isn't that based in reality. And in my opinion they have reached the point where they are doing more harm to the cause of environmental progress then they are doing good.
Everyone hypes the vast number of cycles that the SETI at home project has realized, but what is the wattage that those cycles used to do all that computation. Sure maybe they would have been on anyway, but as most people with laptops can attest to power consumption varies with activity so all that SETI at home work has a had a real energy cost.
I point this out not because I'm any sort of super green. but because many of the advocates of SETI are and I like pointing out things like this to people like that.
I believe that severe accidents that are not fatal are often more expensive then death benefits. As such home accidents being most costly does not directly correlate to them being most deadly.
There are no right or wrong opinions (unless based on too little or incorrect information) and every one has a right to form their own opinion and should be to express it.
However I disagree with your assertion with regard to suppressing opinion via moderation. Supposing nowhere in the thread is anything intended to be a troll or flamebait or whatever. There is still one negative morderation tag that applies, and that is the offtopic tag. Slashdot comments are not intended as a wide ranging forum for free flowing ideas. They are intended as discussions on the topic of the story, or at least that is what the artifacts in the moderation system lead me to believe.
There is a problem with your comparison. In the Apple AT&T arangement apple provides support and ongoing software updates for the iPhone. With the proposed NBC Apple arrangement there is no ongoing work on NBC's part.
With all due respect, you are being a prick.
Sadly not being a prick wasn't one of my goals in that post. My post should have and did get modded down. I just hope that some of the mods looking at my post turned their eyes up-word and gave the whole tread the modding that it deserved.
Also I love that you posted your message as yourself.
I've got to respectfully disagree. Your original post is overrated, flamebait, a troll and funny (in the way ignorance generally is).
They'll never compete? really? every new mac you can Leopard on is also a machine capable of runing vista. On intel Macs they do compete.
You want to see which is better? Again really? You really expect that one is better. With the vast number of things that an OS might be used for there is no one single metric for better-ness. And why can't you compare them, because one of them is better in regards to the breadth of hardware it supports? It would be cool if we could compare which is better but we can't cause one of them is so bad at meeting my needs to even run it for comparison. Yeah, ok. I can see right now that Vista is better at meeting your needs, now you know.
And what did you do minutes after some one responded to your mail, you responded with a smug, aren't I smart and superior to you response. Hmmm, it's as though that first message was some sort of bait. And since you railed at both the person whose comment you provoked and the mods, you were both trolling and flame baiting.
Oh and you didn't include this but it was essentially off topic too, As it wasn't about the review of OS X, or about OS X, just about how you couldn't compare it to vista cause you wouldn't buy apple hardware.
Personally I think that Apple hardware is very versatile and that they have an OS and software that let you take very good advantage of that hardware. I'm a sys admin and my mac laptops have been like computing swiss army knives for me. I've solved a lot of problems that other people would have and did give up on because I was able to leverage the flexibility of both the hardware and OS. That's not to say that what is good for me is good for someone with different ends in mind for their computer
I think Theo is making some unstated assumptions. If you assume that in the absence of virtualization would result in the different virtual machines each being their own server, then if root level access on one VM would allow you to take over the host OS, then the security of each machine on the server has been reduced to the security of the weakest machine on the server. And since it is his assertion that virtualization would increase utilization, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a good chance that that is the assumption he is making.
The counter assumption is that in the absence of virtualization all the services that would have run on the VMs would just all run on the same server, then virtualization can increase security because no one service may constitute a top to bottom root exploit but some combination of them may. Of course adding the extra overhead of the VMs potentially decreases the utilization your services get from the machine. However most of the time when security is discussed it is this scenario they are talking about.
And of course the reality of what happens in the field is that there is a little of both going on. You have both server that did too many things being broken up into VMs, and clumps of smaller servers being replaced with a single larger capacity VM server.
Wait, trends in gaming? Hasn't the wii out sold the xbox360 already? Doesn't that mean that Wii sports has outsold ALL xbox360 games?
"My friends and I only play FPS and MMORPGs and have narrowed our world view to the point that other game genres and trends don't show up in our small minded view of the world", does not mean the world is changing to adhere to your ignorance. If you pay attention you might notice that guitar hero and games of that type are also pretty big right now, or be surprised to find that people are still playing the pokemon games.
Google already does code for google. They're the first hit.
Seriously though, this article depresses me. The unspoken sentiment is that typical websites can't survive without google. Which implies that typical websites can't survive on word of mouth, aggregator sites, and features highlighting them on good websites. I can't think of a single site that I found through google. I use google to search large sites, go to sites with awkward URLs, or find one time use references. But apparently the good sites that can survive on word of mouth are not typical any more.
It really saddens me because it reminds me of TV. Shows that can that do well via word of mouth get canceled or messed with before the audience peeks, and many of the shows that succeed do so because they are they slightly appeal to many demographics rather then being really well received by a few. What happens when the start up costs for websites go up and you need substantial ads from the get go, will there be any new great sites, that aren't flukes.
In the end I don't think sites should be designed to optimize page rank, except for maybe online retailers that compete with other online retailers. If your site is good people will link to it and praise it and it's page rank will soar.
Ok circletimessquare, you are ignoring the content. Not all things that are used as propaganda are propaganda in all contexts.
Consider the two contexts:
Context 1:
Speaker A: Al Gore's Movie, An Inconvenient Truth, raises some good points about the environment that we should address.
Speaker B: Al Gore is a hypocrite!
Context 2:
Speaker A: Al Gore is great!
Speaker B: Al Gore is a hypocrite!
In Context 1, calling Al Gore a hypocrite is a propaganda distraction from the environmental issues that Speaker A is trying to discuss. In context 2, the topic of discussion isn't the environment, it's Al Gore, and as such Speaker B isn't being a distracting from the issue, because Al Gore is the issue. Now consider this article, amazingly enough it is about Al Gore, and not about the environment, so talking about Al Gore's practices isn't propaganda it's legitimate discourse.
Al Gore being a political figure who is not practicing what he preaches, is relevant to whether he's even a good spokesperson for environmental issues, because he distracts from the issues. The cause would be better served if Al used his influence to get a apolitical spokes person who is above reproach in front of people.
It's just like all those Anti-Gay republicans that have sex with dudes. It hurts their cause, and they are bad spokes-persons that should not be winning awards for their work, unless they are ironic awards from the people they claim to oppose.
Maybe the ipod halo effect stopped converting linux users to OS X. So it wasn't worth it to continue to let linux people use ipods all the shiny new ipods without moving to a consumer OS.
This could have simply been to close a DRM loophole with 3rd party library managers. iTunes won't put an itms song on an ipod unless the computer is authorized for that song, meaning that my itms music files have no worth to anyone else, but my understanding is that if you have a third party ipod library manager you can load anyones itms music store files and play them. Someone please correct me if I am wrong about that. So the net result is that these third party library managers potentially opened up the whole DRM can of worms, which I believe apple is charged with keeping a tight lid on.
Don't know if this is just the old world ipods (the nano, classic, and shuffle) or also includes the touch and iphone, if it does, it might be part of locking down ringtones.
There also is a chance that this is part of a change they needed to make now that the automatic ipod sync is going to be two way with new content from the wifi store needing to be DRM'ed to the purchasers ID and uploaded back to the computer's itunes library. Which I'm sure greatly complicates things.
I think his point was that google become popular and successful with people who weren't using microsoft OSes or browsers, so there is no part about it's success or popularity that has anything to do with microsoft except that in order to reach the magnitude of popularity it did it had to be usable with IE.
Unless you are trying to say that Microsoft is saying that they should be applauded for not crippling the web experience of their users so much that something like google would be impossible?
Ok so maybe microsoft is trying to say that there would not be as many internet connected computers out there if not for them to run on, but I think that apple, commodore, and atari, would have picked up the slack if the lack os MS had made IBM less successful.
Let me distill your comment into just the good parts.
The comparison doesn't do a lot of good, because the value of word is not just it's value as a word processor but it's value as part of a complete integrated solution, with a lot of well-integrated add-on apps available, and without doing a comparison that includes all those things, you are not going to get all the most important results. Some of the things that should be considered for a good comparison are: collaboration (shared workspaces, SharePoint and NetMeeting interop), revision control, extensibility model, autoformatting, the insane amount of clip art available for free from the Office website, mail merge, the document map functionality, and Office Update.
I don't necessarily agree with your sentiment but I figured I should re-present your good points, because without it you comment seems kind of flamebait-ish and not neccesarily on topic.
Well thanks to the Anonymous coward who flamed me. I'm glad, that not knowing me he decided what my motivations are, and accused me of trying coming up with my position only after I felt that something made me look stupid.
In response I think it's fair that I get to make an accusation. I know that my original post had gotten positive moderation. Then someone modded it down, and an AC flamed my post. So I am going to accuse that moderator of being the AC, and being the worst kind of Slashdot forum Troll/Karma Whore/Jerk.
I don't feel that apple's price change affects how other perceive me in anyway. I do not personally care about any "cool" factor the iPhone might have now or ever had. If anything I think that having the iPhone when it was scarce has been annoying because when people see you with it they assume that you want to stop what you were doing an answer a million questions about it, or be lectured on why it sucks, is evil, and I'm a fool for owning one.
What does happen to be true is that I have read numerous forums of long term apple customers and fanboys, and this forum, and I found the reaction of the two groups to the news to be different and I saw a lot of people not understanding and making bad assumptions about the comments of many apple proponents. So I tried to shed some light on the situation and irony of ironies, my attempt to clear up a lack of understanding and illuminate the ignorance that was leading to bad assumptions, was itself met with a lack of understanding and bad assumptions.
The really funny thing is that some of the loudest apple fan boys that irritated the generic early adopter types so, don't have iphones, and may not own a single apple product. The people I all know with iPhones took the info fairly calmly. The ones who had it from the start thought that it would have been nice to spend less, but they bought a device that they thought they would like at a price that seemed worthwhile. The ones that JUST bought it, quietly checked to see they were in any price protection programs through their credit cards, or if they had some recourse through the apple store.
And now because I'm still kind of pissed and that A-hole Coward, I'd like to ask why he had the time to harass me, that Farscape / BSG crossover fanfic where Crichton gets it on with Starbuck isn't going to finish itself.
In Conan (the barbarian), the character was well educated before being freed, and I believe went on to be a king with a long rule.
So maybe only being as smart as Conan isn't so bad.