Wrong, they don't give you a "discount" for information, they penalize you for not having a card.
This is a specious distinction. There's no economically coherent distinction between a "discount" price and a "penalty" price. Grocery stores charge as much as they think they can get away with, just like every other for-profit business. The idea that there's a "fair" price for a 2 liter bottle of sugar-water is just silly. You're helping to pay for all manner of fixed and variable costs on top of the raw cost of producing the sugar water. Incidentally, most grocery stores operate on razor-thin margins-- people are hardly getting ripped off.
In each of the two metro areas I've lived in recently, there were multiple supermarket chains with and without loyalty cards. I imagine the same is true in most other metro areas. If you don't like the loyalty-card stores, go to a store that doesn't offer one. If those stores are more expensive, well, that's a choice you'll have to make. Most people have bigger things to worry about than saving a couple of pennies on the dollar on their grocery bills.
Why is virtually no one pointing out that the print version is still widely available at libraries across the country. Regardless of the motivations behind the web retraction (and I wouldn't be surprised if their motives were either cowardly or sleazy) the simple fact is that the contents of that essay are still widely available, to virtually every American. You can't suppress past issues of a publication that gets sent out to hundreds of thousands of Americans every week.
The web is still in its infancy, and is relatively unreliable for serious research compared with the mature print industry. Anyone who treats a standalone web site as a credible primary source needs to be whacked with a clue-by-four anyway. Web sites of publications like this are slightly more credible precisely because there are thousands of pulp versions of the same content that we can compare them to if there are disputes over what was originally written.
I bought my iBook when I was a junior studying CS. I managed to do most of my CS-related homework on it without problems-- you can get compilers or interpreters for most major languages, and Panther comes with an X server, allowing you to run other Unix programs.
Do you even have any idea how and why the Roman empire fell? Here's a hint: the process took nearly 400 years from the fall of the republic to the collapse of the Roman empire. So if we consider the last 50 or 100 years as the rise of the American empire, that means we can count on at least another 300 years of Pax Americana before the barbarians start breaching our gates. Even if we assume that America has been an empire since 1776, that still gives us 150 more years.
Um, software update does effectively run with root access. How do you think it patches system files? So you're effectively giving root access to anyone who exploits it.
Now is it *likely* that anyone would do this to you specifically? Not really. But this is a terrible way to think about computer security. The fact is you don't know what creative ways someone might come up with to exploit this hole. The fact that you can't think of an exploit that will work against you doesn't mean there isn't one-- if the software is exploitable, all that's needed is a bit of social engineering to find a way to make use of it in the real world.
The "who would hack little old me" argument might have worked 5 years ago when there were relatively few people on the 'net and most of them were responsible adults. But these days the 'net is swarming with script kiddies, and if a vulnerability appears it's likely to be exploited quickly and in parallel.
I'll grant that in this particular case, it seems unlikely that there's any way this could be exploited without access to your local network, which presumably is secure. But it's never a good idea to rely on such assumptions-- there are many examples where minor holes were discovered, were poo-pooed by the authorities, and were later discovered to be major holes because of a clever exploit no one thought of. That could happen in this case as well-- someone might figure out a way to trick your Mac into connecting to someone other than Apple.
I think these folks misunderestimate the sheer volume of information we have collected about ourselves. Modern historians have been able to piece together a more or less complete history of the Greek and Roman worlds 2500 years ago using a few thousand written documents and archeological digs. We have more information than we can possibly process for every era of American history for at least 200 years back.
So yes, 99.99% of all information in existence today will probaly be lost 1000 years from now. The remaining.01% will still probably dwarf the information we currently posess about the world 1000 years from now.
For starters, we still publish about as many books as any other society in history. There are books available on literally every topic available, and most of them have thousands of copies in circulation. So imagine that 99.9% of all books are nuked, chances are the majority of those books will still survive, and historians only need 1 copy to make use of it.
Finally, this article massively underestimates how easy it is to preserve digital information. 10 years from now, terrabyte hard drives will be commonplace, and no doubt second-generation DVD-R's will hold tens of gigabytes of data. All you have to do is copy those files en masse to the latest format every 10 or 20 years, and you've preserved the information. One person can do that in his spare time quite easily. Furthermore, file formats aren't *that* hard to reverse-engineer. Even if the world forgot what a Microsoft Word document looked like (which is extremely unlikely) they should be able to look at the raw data and figure it out well enough to at least read the plaintext. And I doubt we'll ever forget what ASCII means.
As for people losing their personal correspondance-- perhaps 99.99% of people will lose their email correspondance at some point in their lives. So in a nation of 300 million people, that leaves only 30,000 complete email correspondances for future historians to peruse. Imagine how much we'd know about Greek or Roman times if we had the complete correspondance of 30,000 average Greek or Roman citizens...
In conclusion, I think quite the opposite is true. Historians 1000 years from now will have more material than they can possibly process about the early 21st century. The trick will be in assimilating all that information into something useful, not finding enough to work with.
Re:Slashdot: News for thieves. Like ethics matter.
on
What Free Cable?
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· Score: 2
I'm usually critical of people who pirate software, steal cable, etc, but I'm less critical of this particular variety of "stealing" cable. And yes, I did this myself last night, so I'm not a disinterested observer.
I guess my take on it is that while I know they don't *want* me "stealing" cable, I see no reason to assume that it *is* stealing. I'm paying $50/month for a piece of co-ax that can send and recieve data to and from the outside world. It so happens that one type of data I recieve is basic cable. I see no principled reason why I'm allowed to make use of one type of data coming off that piece of co-ax, and not another.
If there were a contract of some sort promising that we would only use the services we paid for, or if they put at least some kind of scrambling or blocking on it, I would be reluctant to circumvent security measures to get cable. But when all I have to do is take the cable they gave me and plug it into the back of the TV, I find it quite a stretch to say that that counts as theft. If they don't want me using the service, they should make at least a token effort to prevent it.
The requirements you list have nothing to do with the underlying technology and everything to do with the policies of your ISP. Cable ISP's tend to be more fascist about servers and statics, but that's not because of any intrinsic flaw in the technology.
The point is that most users in most areas have a choice between cable and DSL, and those that don't are likely to get that choice soon. The fact that a few people with niche requirements (and I'm sorry, but static IP and running servers are niche requirements for home broadband) don't have multiple choices doesn't necessarily prove that the market's uncompetitive. DSL and cable both serve the average consumer quite well, and so it seems to me that this is enough competition to falsify the claim that heavy-handed regulation is needed to combat the lack of consumer choice.
I'm all for competition, but it seems to me that the flavor of "competition" these rules were designed for foster is an awfully strange beast. I can't think of any other industry where the larger firms are required to share their facilities with smaller competitors.
I think the basic problem with this approach is that someone has to decide what a "reasonable" price for access to Baby Bell lines is. If that price is too high, baby bells will be able to undercut them and they'll get driven out of business. However, if the price is set below the market rate, then the upstarts will forever be living parasitically off the efforts of the local Baby Bell, and will never have any incentive to build infrastructure of their own. As a result, the "competition" between the Baby Bell and the upstart competitors will be fought in the political arena over access to shared resources, rather than any sort of competition in the open market.
What ought to be happening is upstarts should be putting their own coax or fiber in the ground. Then there'd be no issue of who has to share their lines with whom. The problem is that state and local governments make this almost impossible, by signing exclusive contracts with a single cable or phone company and giving that company a de facto monopoly. Clearly all the regulatory hurdles to start a competing network is all but impossible.
It seems to me that the efforts of the geek community should be aimed at breaking down those political obstacles to new development, not taking sides in the pointless battle over how much the Baby Bells should have to "share" their facilities with competitors. As long as such "sharing" is the basis for competition, the Baby Bells will continue to dominate the market, and competing carriers will continue to place their stock in lobbying for more "access" to the entrenched monopoly's facilities rather than focusing on building competing infrastructure.
Why would they want that? The whole point of this announcement is that they want OS 9 to die so developers will focus entirely on OS X. The only reason to release the OS 9 source would be if Apple still thought it had some value, which from their perspective it doesn't.
You're quite correct that Intel was not "taken down." They're still very much "up" and show no signs of being knocked off their pedestal any time soon. However...
10 years ago it seemed that Intel would forever dominate desktop CPU's the way Microsoft dominates the desktop OS. Intel started getting sloppy, producing overpriced, underpowered chip, and one of its scrappy competitors managed to steal a significant chunk of their market share. The result was a tremendous spurt in x86 performance, lower prices, and win-win situation for consumers.
I think there's a valid analogy to Microsoft. If MS stops keeping their customers happy, there are plenty of potential competitors who will try to eat their lunch. They are successful because they mostly keep their customers happy and mostly produce good products. And before you start flaming me about the previous sentence, remember that Microsoft's customers are Joe Six pack and the PHB's not geeks who read slashdot. From the perspective of non-technical users, Windows was and still is the best thing on the market. Most of us don't like Windows for arcane technical reasons, but we're a tiny minority in the broad software market.
So the non-head-in-the-clouds claim that I'm trying to make is that free markets and competition works pretty damn well as a way of keeping companies accountable, and Intel is a good example. Contrary to prevailing/. belief, Microsoft is no exception. If they fall asleep at the wheel, they *will* have their asses handed to them by a smaller competitor, antitrust or no.
I guess I just don't agree with the your assessment of the facts:
What interest would it be to a U.S. company, other then appeasing vocal sympathetic US consumers, to see that the wealth they create abroad is distributed to that nations overall economy, espically since doing so would ultimatly raise the cost of labor there?
For the same reason that many McDonalds' pay $6-$7/hour for unskilled labor in the US-- they have to pay that much to attract workers. If it were the case that only the moral outrage of consumers raised wages, then why doesn't McDonalds pay all of its (non-unionized) workers minimum wage?
As industrialization progresses in the third world, corporations will have no choice but to provide higher wages and better conditions, because if they don't another corporation will lure away their best workers. While I'd like companies to have a "moral compass," it's not necessary to improve the lot of the poor. It certainly wasn't corporate generosity that led to the relatively high wages we have in the US.
Another thing to consider is this: At present, the only real product America can create at an advantage is management and creativity. What happens when poor nations can produce an equilivent to a college educated middle manager who will work for 1/5th of an American?
But this isn't true at all. It's not that we're unable to do manufacturing or other less skilled jobs. It's just that at the moment they aren't as profitable, so we leave them to less-skilled workers and focus on more profitable areas. If it came to pass that the third world was able to do as good of a job as us in all sectors of the economy, why shouldn't they expect comparable wages? What right does an American middle manager have to expect 5 times the pay to do an equivalent job?
In practice, I don't think the scenario you're predicting will happen any time soon. At present there is still a desperate need for highly skilled labor in many industries, and there looks to be no shortage of jobs for people who are able to fill them at the top levels of the economic ladder. Third world workers will gradually work their way up as well, but I don't see any sign that our lead is going to vanish any time soon. And by the time it does, wouldn't we expect their wages to have risen nearly as much as ours?
In other words, if Country X has as skilled a labor force, as much capital investment, and as robust an economy as ours, on what basis should we expect a higher standard of living? Shouldn't our goal be for everyone world-wide to someday be as wealthy as the US is today? I don't consider that a threat to US interests. On the contrary, it will be a great boon to American interests, as we will have ever-larger markets to sell our wares, and ever-larger selection in buying wares from other countries.
You may rest assured that computer geeks use their grasp of arcana to fleece people all the time. I see it all the time, from BOFH-types I'd encounter on the job to Bill Gates.
I think the difference between lawyers and other professions is that other professions can generally only fleece their own customers, while lawyers often fleece complete strangers. This is where the term "ambulance chaser" comes from, for example-- lawyers who look for injured people who can rack up enormous damages due to "pain and suffering." Yes, some of those claims are justified, but oftentimes they are not, and the goal is to find the richest person involved in the accident regardless of whether he was primarily responsible.
I'm not saying that lawyers fleece their own clients, but rather, that they help their clients fleece wealthy defendants based on trumped-up charges. This raises risks and hence costs for everyone.
Well, I don't think life would be any less complex or adversarial without lawyers, but I realize this is a point on which reasonable people can differ. I agree with you on "more legalistic" but that the existence of lawyers makes life "more legalistic" isn't a stretch, it's tautology. Computer geeks make life more complex and "more technologistic," but I don't count this against them.
The problem is that the more lawyers you have looking for clever ways to sue people, the more you need lawyers on the *other* side advising clients how to avoid such lawsuits. As a result you get an ever-escalating arms race between the two sides, and lawyers on both sides get rich.
It's not simply that lawyers are legalistic (which I agree is a tautology) but that lawyers legalisms are forced on the whole country, because we *all* have to change our behavior to avoid getting sued. Even companies that aren't doing anything wrong need to hire lawyers to make sure they're not running afowl of any technicalities, and to defend themselves when they are falsely accused of wrongdoing.
The result is a dead loss to the economy. Both sides hire more and more lawyers, and while the results turn out the same, the costs soar.
It would be a little bit like if hacking were a profitable profession, and half the computer geeks went into hacking and the other half went into computer security. The more geeks in the hacking profession, the more companies would have to hire other geeks for security purposes. People would rightly view this as a protection racket.
I'd love to see a reputable source for this. It sounds pretty difficult to quantify, given that money that goes to lawyers doesn't vanish out of the economy. I won't argue that there aren't overpaid lawyers (or overpaid computer geeks), but that money doesn't just disappear.
I don't remember the source, but the argument is that every frivolous lawsuit wastes the time and resources of dozens of people to no particular benefit. In addition, people trying to protect themselves from future frivolous lawsuits are forced to go our of their way to cover their asses. (things like "don't trim hedges with this" warnings on lawnmowers) Obviously assigning costs and benefits is going to have a major political aspect, so I'm not going to claim the exact figure is objective, but I think it's clear that there is a certain cost imposed on the economy by frivolous lawsuits and excessive litigousness.
The problem is, that just does'nt happen. The American non and semi-skilled labor force is slowly being pushed into the service sector, which does not pay nearly as much as manufacturing.
I'd be interested to see some evidence of this. While it's certainly true that many workers are being pushed to the service sector, and while it's probably true that some take lower wages, it is *also* true that free trade opens up many new opportunities that those displaced workers can take advantage of. See my reply to the previous poster for the argument-- basically, every dollar we spend abroad will eventually come back to the US, and so the net job loss is zero. Focusing on the few losers while ignoring the broader gains for workers generally is disingenuous IMHO.
While displaced workers may enjoy some lower prices on manufactured goods, they still face fixed costs in housing and food, which at the lower end of the economic spectrum mean a lot more then saving a few hundred bucks on a fancy new laptop.
The laptop was an example, the same dynamic can be seen in many other areas, including many that poor and middle class workers would spend money on. For example, food costs have been dropping for 2 centuries, and would drop further if not for US protectionist policies. US tarriffs on sugar more than double its price IIRC, and there are many other examples. Tarriffs on steel will cost Joe Average when he buys a car or a major appliance. Tarriffs on lumber costs him when he buys a house (a home-building industry estimate was that a recent Bush tarriff on Canadian lumber will raise new home costs by $1500) And Joe average probably has a VCR, a TV, a DVD player, and a microwave manufactured in a Taiwanese or South Korean factory, all of which save him money.
Indeed, almost every purchase he makes will likely be cheaper because of free trade. Housing might be fixed, but food, clothing, and other essentials are anything but.
The problem is that it's much harder to measure these benefits because they go to the American public at large rather than specific segments. I might save a dollar on a shirt and 50 cents on a package of sugar. By themselves, these savings are nothing to get excited about, but when you add them up, they result in a substantial increase in standard of living for everyone. The savings on any one product is hard to measure, but when you add them up, they lead to substantial savings.
So it's sophistry to focus on the few people who are losing their jobs, while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of workers are benefitting from greater variety and lower prices on every product they purchase. And besides it's simply not true that free trade costs jobs on net. If there's a coherent argument for this proposition, I'd like to hear it.
Your comment seems to make the assumption that the money remains in the country, but it doesn't. A portion of the money spent on foreign goods (which are cheaper), and that is money leaving the country, so it's not a perfect cycling, like, say the human cardiovascular system, it is like a person walking around bleeding a bit faster than they are getting a transfusion.
Look at it this way. If I buy a product in Mexico for a dollar, my dollar goes accross the US-Mexican border. There are two possibilities: either the dollar eventualy makes its way back to the US, or it doesn't.
In the former case, the dollar will almost certainly come back to the US to purchase a US product of some kind. In that case, the net job loss is zero, since the same number of dollars is being spent either way, just to different people in different industries.
The other possilbity is that the dollar never returns to the US. But think for a moment about what that would mean if it happened a lot. Let's say that a billion dollars left the country never to return. That would mean that we just traded a billion dollars worth of goods and services for a billion otherwise worthless pieces of paper that cost a few million dollars to produce. If we could get other countries to take our dollars and never spend them here, we could happily do that forever. Every time someone loses his job, we can just print up some money and give it to him.
In reality the second scenario never happens in the long run. Eventually, enough money gets into foreign circulation that the flow of dollars both ways equalizes. So long term, every dollar that is spent overseas is matched by a dollar that gets spent on a US product by a foreign firm.
Hence I think it's economic sophistry to claim that spending on foreign products costs the US economy. It's simply not true, and only seems true because we only look at one side of the equation. When you look at the economy as a whole, you see that if anything free trade will create jobs due to the greater efficiency and higher wealth that will result. The only problem is that there are painful transitions for those who have to adjust and find new, higher-paying jobs.
The difference is that computer geeks don't usually use their grasp of arcana to fleece people, whereas many lawyers will use their knowledge of the law to harrass enemies of wealthy clients, fleece defendents with deep pockets, needlessly complicate otherwise simple transactions with legal nitpicking, and otherwise make our lives more complex, more legalistic, and more adversarial.
Successful geeks make their money largely by hiding the complexity of their craft-- by building clean, simple interfaces to complex underpinnings. Lawyers, on the other hand, often use the complexity of law as a club to intimidate less-clever opponents.
People don't hate lawyers because they're good at mastering arcana. They hate lawyers because too many of them use their grasp of arcana to enrich themselves by fleecing and harrassing others. There are estimates that every lawyers who enters the profession costs the US economy more than his salary in dead-weight costs. It's that dynamic-- not a resentment of success of intelligence, that I think drives resentment of the legal profession.
You have the cause and effect backwards. Jobs moving overseas are the *result* of rising living standards, not the cause of lower living standards. The reason the jobs are moving elsewhere is that workers here get paid too much for those sorts of jobs to be profitable here. Why is that? Because American workers have better-paying opportunities in the service sector or in higher-skill jobs.
The problem is that you're only looking at one half of the equation. You're looking at the people who lost their low-skill jobs to overseas competitors, but you're forgetting that that money has to be spent in the US eventually, and will most likely be spent on higher-skilled goods or services. That increased revenue translates to new jobs in other sectors of the economy.
Furthermore, when a manufacturing task gets outsourced, this leads to lower prices, benefitting all consumers. Most of the workers who are displaced will likely find new jobs paying just as well, and they benefit from lower prices from all the other manufacturing jobs that got outsourced.
I'm also appalled at the lack of regard for poor workers in other countries. What about the workers who are *getting* jobs in Taiwan? Are we really so narrow minded to completely discount their benefit? Even if outsourcing manufacturing jobs harms the average American worker (which it doesn't) might it be worth it if it helps workers in Taiwan who need those jobs much more than we do?
Personally, I don't pay enough attention to hardware to know off the top of my head what the best place to get a motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory, etc are. I'm sure I could figure it out, but it would take more time than I'd be willing to spend, for a very paltry return. On top of that, I'd have no warranty, no support from the manufacturer, no way of knowing whether some of the parts I installed are faulty, and I'd get a generic, ugly PC.
Dell, Compaq, Apple, et al make their money on design. They build integrated systems that are more than the sum of their parts. Personally, I'm not impressed with what most PC companies produce, which is why I bought an iBook, but if I were going to buy a PC, I'd be willing to spend an extra $50-$100 for a warranty, tech support, and a better design than I could come up with on my own.
As others have pointed out, this is 1400 a year, not per day. Malda needs to learn to read.
Secondly, I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous. It takes me about 5 seconds to recognize a piece of mail is spam and delete it. 5 seconds of my time isn't worth $1. And the 10k it took the mail server to store the message and fraction of a penny in bandwidth aren't worth a dollar either.
If corporate anti-spam offices are costing that much, then they're wasting their money. Let employees delete their own spam messages. It's really not that hard. It wastes maybe 5 minutes per week of my time. Is it annoying? Absolutely. Is it an "epidemic"? I don't think so.
I hate spam as much as the next guy, but a sense of perspective is important. The technology to filter spam is rapidly advancing, and ISP's often *do* respond to complaints. Once Asia gets with the program, I'd expect this problem to subside somewhat.
There will probably never be an x86 version of OS X, but it has nothing to do with the reasons you state.
If Apple is worried about losing money from clone competition, the solution is easy: raise liscencing fees. Apple could have easily done this and recouped any losses from cannibalized sales.
The problem was that Apple's hardware at the time sucked. When cloners started building boxes that blew Apple's offerings out of the water, this cannibalized their sales because people weren't going to pay unreasonable prices for inferior products.
What Apple should have done is improve their own offerings to match those of the clones. This should have been easy-- Apple has an enormous R & D budget, and the advantage of having the software team in-house.
The reason Apple killed the clones had little to do with the finances of the situation. Had they allowed cloning to continue, I'd guess the Mac market share would be much bigger than it was now. They could easily have eaten the short-term losses and come out the better for it.
The real reason the clones were killed was the same reason the Newtons were closed-- Steve's ego. Steve Jobs doesn't care about long-term strategic issues. He is perfectly fine having Apple be a niche computer maker. What he wants is creative control. He wants to be able to dictate how every Mac user's computer will look and feel, from the GUI to the case design. And if that means that Mac market share never goes above 5%, so be it.
It's really quite sad. Apple could easily spin off their software division, port to x86, and compete directly with Microsoft. Apple Computer would be a hardware company, Applesoft could be the software company. The hardware side would pay the software side royalties. And they could beg Motorolla and IBM to get into the PowerPC Mac cloning market, while simultaneously offering PC OEM's the option to install OS X on their machines. With a serious push into business applications and an open platform, Apple could pose a serious threat to the Windows hegemony.
But alas that won't happen because Steve isn't willing to give up control of the platform. He's content to be a big fish in a small pond. Meanwhile Bill Gates counts his billions and plots his next industry takeover...
No, the difference is that our government doesn't throw you in jail if you express "treasonous" opinions, and doesn't try to censor the spread of opinions deemed harmful to the regime. All manner of anti-government propoganda flows accross the 'net and the US government doesn't do a thing to stop it.
Look, I think Carnivore is a despicable invasion of my privacy, and I want it shut down now. But let's have a sense of persepctive. The US government thus far uses its surveilance powers relatively benign ways-- to catch drug dealers and terrorists for the most part. Yes, they probably stretch the bounds of the Constitution on occasion, but most of us, most of the time, have our civil liberties fully protected.
The Chinese regime, on the other hand, uses their surveilance power to brutally crush any dissent. There's simply no comparing the two. To even *suggest* that Carnivore is even close to this gives the Chinese regime a respectability they don't deserve.
The Chinese regime ruthlessly suppresses criticism of their regime, plays nationalistic propoganda exalting the government's actions, and displays xenophobia against non-Chinese peoples. They haven't started killing Jews yet, but I'd say they certainly fit this part.
centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
It's a one-party dictatorship headed by Jiang Zemin and the Communist party. I see no difference with Hitler and the Nazi party.
severe economic and social regimentation
They've loosened economic controls somewhat in recent years, but it's still damn regimented. Much of the economy is state-owned, and the rest is expected to toe the government line. They're getting better on this score, but they still seem to fit this part.
forcible suppression of opposition
Can you say Tienamen Square? Jailing of dissidents? Oppression of Tibet? They fit this one in spades.
So I'd say "fascist" is a pretty good description of the Communist regime. In practice, most "communist" and "fascist" regimes end up looking pretty similar. The only substantive difference between Hitler and Stalin was that Stalin killed a lot more people than Hitler did. Both used a thin veneer of ideology to mask the fact that they were both just bloodthirsty tyrants.
Re:More information from the keynote
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 3, Insightful
*You* can build a box from scratch with commodity parts. My mother can't. You don't care if your computer matches the furniture. My mother might. You can figure out how to use cumbersome GPL-ed tools to manipulate images, video, audio, etc. My mother would never even try such a thing.
The iApps aren't targeted at you. They are targeted at average consumers who aren't tech-savvy. And for many non-tech-savvy users, paying an extra $200 for a machine that's tightly integrated with software, includes simple plug-and-play apps, and requires a minimum of behind-the-scenes tinkering is a great deal. For many consumers, paying an extra $50 so their computer can be a conversation piece rather than an eye-sore is money well spent.
Perhaps you're not one of them, but that doesn't make it wrong. And slashdot's motto isn't "News for mascochistic nerds with no aesthetic taste." Not all nerds like to spend their weekends wrestling with their souped up, built-from scratch athlon box. Some of us value our time and are happy to pay a premium for quality, superb industrial design, good aesthetics, and an OS that blows both XP and Linux out of the water.
Re:There's a good chance it's fake...
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Apple PDA?
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· Score: 2
No, the last big Apple product fake was... the iWalk, which SpyMac claimed was what Apple would unveil when they unveiled the iPod instead. They even had alleged photos of the device, which turned out to be bogus, by their own admission. It looked completely different from the iWalk they're hyping now.
Furthermore, spymac has *no* credibility or track record. They were completely unknown when they released their fake iWalk pictures last time, and since that time they've spent most of their time continuing to hype the iWalk. They simply have never broken a major story, so I see no reason why anyone should trust them.
On the other hand, the Cube story came from AppleInsider, the only rumors site with a decent record of rumors that have turned out to actually be true. Even back in summer 2000, AppleInsider already had a long track record and had actually posted a few rumors that turned out to be true.
This is a hoax. The video looks and feels like a hoax. The web site seems like a fake. They have no track record or credibility. Steve Jobs is said to have disliked the Newton, and Apple has recently done its best to quash talk of an Apple-branded PDA. And even if true, a rebirth of the Newton would not be a big enough deal to justify all the hype Apple's whipping up unless it has some really amazing specs.
I'm disappointed that slashdot linked to them, giving them traffic and credibility they don't deserve.
"Aqua" refers to the GUI layer of the Mac OS API's, i.e. the PDF-based, Display PostScript-derived graphics layer (quartz) and the "look and feel" that goes along with it. Aqua is not an API in and of itself.
There are 2 native Mac OS API's-- Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is a streamlined subset of the classic OS 9 API's designed to work well under preemptive multitasking. Cocoa is the NextStep-derived API's, which are supposed to be the future of the Mac OS.
Developers typically choose one API or the other to write their code in. Carbon prefers C/C++ and makes it easy to port existing OS 9 apps to the new OS. Cocoa uses Objective C or Java as the base language, and generally requires a from-scratch re-write.
Unlike the switch to PPC, Mac OS X does *not* run anything in emulation (aside from the Classic process, which can be switched off entirely if one doesn't want to run classic apps) Carbon is a 100% native Mac OS X API's, and is fully preemptive, fully uses modern memory management, etc. No "old MacOS code" is to be found in Carbon. They implemented many of the same API's, but the code to do so is entirely Mac OS X native.
Office X (like most existing apps) was most likely written as a Carbon app. That means that it has *no* similarlities to OpenStep, and porting it to OpenStep would be practically the same as re-writing it from scratch.
When you say "there aren't any significant OS/X native apps," perhaps you mean that there aren't very many Cocoa apps. This is true, but it's simply wrong to confuse Cocoa with "native." Carbon is *not* a Mac OS 9 emulation layer. Carbon apps are every bit as "native" as Cocoa apps. They happen to call an API set similar to the classic Mac OS API's for the convenience of developers, but the code implementing these API's is entirely new.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, they don't give you a "discount" for information, they penalize you for not having a card.
This is a specious distinction. There's no economically coherent distinction between a "discount" price and a "penalty" price. Grocery stores charge as much as they think they can get away with, just like every other for-profit business. The idea that there's a "fair" price for a 2 liter bottle of sugar-water is just silly. You're helping to pay for all manner of fixed and variable costs on top of the raw cost of producing the sugar water. Incidentally, most grocery stores operate on razor-thin margins-- people are hardly getting ripped off.
In each of the two metro areas I've lived in recently, there were multiple supermarket chains with and without loyalty cards. I imagine the same is true in most other metro areas. If you don't like the loyalty-card stores, go to a store that doesn't offer one. If those stores are more expensive, well, that's a choice you'll have to make. Most people have bigger things to worry about than saving a couple of pennies on the dollar on their grocery bills.
Why is virtually no one pointing out that the print version is still widely available at libraries across the country. Regardless of the motivations behind the web retraction (and I wouldn't be surprised if their motives were either cowardly or sleazy) the simple fact is that the contents of that essay are still widely available, to virtually every American. You can't suppress past issues of a publication that gets sent out to hundreds of thousands of Americans every week.
The web is still in its infancy, and is relatively unreliable for serious research compared with the mature print industry. Anyone who treats a standalone web site as a credible primary source needs to be whacked with a clue-by-four anyway. Web sites of publications like this are slightly more credible precisely because there are thousands of pulp versions of the same content that we can compare them to if there are disputes over what was originally written.
I bought my iBook when I was a junior studying CS. I managed to do most of my CS-related homework on it without problems-- you can get compilers or interpreters for most major languages, and Panther comes with an X server, allowing you to run other Unix programs.
I say go for it.
Do you even have any idea how and why the Roman empire fell? Here's a hint: the process took nearly 400 years from the fall of the republic to the collapse of the Roman empire. So if we consider the last 50 or 100 years as the rise of the American empire, that means we can count on at least another 300 years of Pax Americana before the barbarians start breaching our gates. Even if we assume that America has been an empire since 1776, that still gives us 150 more years.
Um, software update does effectively run with root access. How do you think it patches system files? So you're effectively giving root access to anyone who exploits it.
Now is it *likely* that anyone would do this to you specifically? Not really. But this is a terrible way to think about computer security. The fact is you don't know what creative ways someone might come up with to exploit this hole. The fact that you can't think of an exploit that will work against you doesn't mean there isn't one-- if the software is exploitable, all that's needed is a bit of social engineering to find a way to make use of it in the real world.
The "who would hack little old me" argument might have worked 5 years ago when there were relatively few people on the 'net and most of them were responsible adults. But these days the 'net is swarming with script kiddies, and if a vulnerability appears it's likely to be exploited quickly and in parallel.
I'll grant that in this particular case, it seems unlikely that there's any way this could be exploited without access to your local network, which presumably is secure. But it's never a good idea to rely on such assumptions-- there are many examples where minor holes were discovered, were poo-pooed by the authorities, and were later discovered to be major holes because of a clever exploit no one thought of. That could happen in this case as well-- someone might figure out a way to trick your Mac into connecting to someone other than Apple.
I think these folks misunderestimate the sheer volume of information we have collected about ourselves. Modern historians have been able to piece together a more or less complete history of the Greek and Roman worlds 2500 years ago using a few thousand written documents and archeological digs. We have more information than we can possibly process for every era of American history for at least 200 years back.
.01% will still probably dwarf the information we currently posess about the world 1000 years from now.
So yes, 99.99% of all information in existence today will probaly be lost 1000 years from now. The remaining
For starters, we still publish about as many books as any other society in history. There are books available on literally every topic available, and most of them have thousands of copies in circulation. So imagine that 99.9% of all books are nuked, chances are the majority of those books will still survive, and historians only need 1 copy to make use of it.
Finally, this article massively underestimates how easy it is to preserve digital information. 10 years from now, terrabyte hard drives will be commonplace, and no doubt second-generation DVD-R's will hold tens of gigabytes of data. All you have to do is copy those files en masse to the latest format every 10 or 20 years, and you've preserved the information. One person can do that in his spare time quite easily. Furthermore, file formats aren't *that* hard to reverse-engineer. Even if the world forgot what a Microsoft Word document looked like (which is extremely unlikely) they should be able to look at the raw data and figure it out well enough to at least read the plaintext. And I doubt we'll ever forget what ASCII means.
As for people losing their personal correspondance-- perhaps 99.99% of people will lose their email correspondance at some point in their lives. So in a nation of 300 million people, that leaves only 30,000 complete email correspondances for future historians to peruse. Imagine how much we'd know about Greek or Roman times if we had the complete correspondance of 30,000 average Greek or Roman citizens...
In conclusion, I think quite the opposite is true. Historians 1000 years from now will have more material than they can possibly process about the early 21st century. The trick will be in assimilating all that information into something useful, not finding enough to work with.
I'm usually critical of people who pirate software, steal cable, etc, but I'm less critical of this particular variety of "stealing" cable. And yes, I did this myself last night, so I'm not a disinterested observer.
I guess my take on it is that while I know they don't *want* me "stealing" cable, I see no reason to assume that it *is* stealing. I'm paying $50/month for a piece of co-ax that can send and recieve data to and from the outside world. It so happens that one type of data I recieve is basic cable. I see no principled reason why I'm allowed to make use of one type of data coming off that piece of co-ax, and not another.
If there were a contract of some sort promising that we would only use the services we paid for, or if they put at least some kind of scrambling or blocking on it, I would be reluctant to circumvent security measures to get cable. But when all I have to do is take the cable they gave me and plug it into the back of the TV, I find it quite a stretch to say that that counts as theft. If they don't want me using the service, they should make at least a token effort to prevent it.
The requirements you list have nothing to do with the underlying technology and everything to do with the policies of your ISP. Cable ISP's tend to be more fascist about servers and statics, but that's not because of any intrinsic flaw in the technology.
The point is that most users in most areas have a choice between cable and DSL, and those that don't are likely to get that choice soon. The fact that a few people with niche requirements (and I'm sorry, but static IP and running servers are niche requirements for home broadband) don't have multiple choices doesn't necessarily prove that the market's uncompetitive. DSL and cable both serve the average consumer quite well, and so it seems to me that this is enough competition to falsify the claim that heavy-handed regulation is needed to combat the lack of consumer choice.
I'm all for competition, but it seems to me that the flavor of "competition" these rules were designed for foster is an awfully strange beast. I can't think of any other industry where the larger firms are required to share their facilities with smaller competitors.
I think the basic problem with this approach is that someone has to decide what a "reasonable" price for access to Baby Bell lines is. If that price is too high, baby bells will be able to undercut them and they'll get driven out of business. However, if the price is set below the market rate, then the upstarts will forever be living parasitically off the efforts of the local Baby Bell, and will never have any incentive to build infrastructure of their own. As a result, the "competition" between the Baby Bell and the upstart competitors will be fought in the political arena over access to shared resources, rather than any sort of competition in the open market.
What ought to be happening is upstarts should be putting their own coax or fiber in the ground. Then there'd be no issue of who has to share their lines with whom. The problem is that state and local governments make this almost impossible, by signing exclusive contracts with a single cable or phone company and giving that company a de facto monopoly. Clearly all the regulatory hurdles to start a competing network is all but impossible.
It seems to me that the efforts of the geek community should be aimed at breaking down those political obstacles to new development, not taking sides in the pointless battle over how much the Baby Bells should have to "share" their facilities with competitors. As long as such "sharing" is the basis for competition, the Baby Bells will continue to dominate the market, and competing carriers will continue to place their stock in lobbying for more "access" to the entrenched monopoly's facilities rather than focusing on building competing infrastructure.
Why would they want that? The whole point of this announcement is that they want OS 9 to die so developers will focus entirely on OS X. The only reason to release the OS 9 source would be if Apple still thought it had some value, which from their perspective it doesn't.
You're quite correct that Intel was not "taken down." They're still very much "up" and show no signs of being knocked off their pedestal any time soon. However...
/. belief, Microsoft is no exception. If they fall asleep at the wheel, they *will* have their asses handed to them by a smaller competitor, antitrust or no.
10 years ago it seemed that Intel would forever dominate desktop CPU's the way Microsoft dominates the desktop OS. Intel started getting sloppy, producing overpriced, underpowered chip, and one of its scrappy competitors managed to steal a significant chunk of their market share. The result was a tremendous spurt in x86 performance, lower prices, and win-win situation for consumers.
I think there's a valid analogy to Microsoft. If MS stops keeping their customers happy, there are plenty of potential competitors who will try to eat their lunch. They are successful because they mostly keep their customers happy and mostly produce good products. And before you start flaming me about the previous sentence, remember that Microsoft's customers are Joe Six pack and the PHB's not geeks who read slashdot. From the perspective of non-technical users, Windows was and still is the best thing on the market. Most of us don't like Windows for arcane technical reasons, but we're a tiny minority in the broad software market.
So the non-head-in-the-clouds claim that I'm trying to make is that free markets and competition works pretty damn well as a way of keeping companies accountable, and Intel is a good example. Contrary to prevailing
I guess I just don't agree with the your assessment of the facts:
What interest would it be to a U.S. company, other then appeasing vocal sympathetic US consumers, to see that the wealth they create abroad is distributed to that nations overall economy, espically since doing so would ultimatly raise the cost of labor there?
For the same reason that many McDonalds' pay $6-$7/hour for unskilled labor in the US-- they have to pay that much to attract workers. If it were the case that only the moral outrage of consumers raised wages, then why doesn't McDonalds pay all of its (non-unionized) workers minimum wage?
As industrialization progresses in the third world, corporations will have no choice but to provide higher wages and better conditions, because if they don't another corporation will lure away their best workers. While I'd like companies to have a "moral compass," it's not necessary to improve the lot of the poor. It certainly wasn't corporate generosity that led to the relatively high wages we have in the US.
Another thing to consider is this: At present, the only real product America can create at an advantage is management and creativity. What happens when poor nations can produce an equilivent to a college educated middle manager who will work for 1/5th of an American?
But this isn't true at all. It's not that we're unable to do manufacturing or other less skilled jobs. It's just that at the moment they aren't as profitable, so we leave them to less-skilled workers and focus on more profitable areas. If it came to pass that the third world was able to do as good of a job as us in all sectors of the economy, why shouldn't they expect comparable wages? What right does an American middle manager have to expect 5 times the pay to do an equivalent job?
In practice, I don't think the scenario you're predicting will happen any time soon. At present there is still a desperate need for highly skilled labor in many industries, and there looks to be no shortage of jobs for people who are able to fill them at the top levels of the economic ladder. Third world workers will gradually work their way up as well, but I don't see any sign that our lead is going to vanish any time soon. And by the time it does, wouldn't we expect their wages to have risen nearly as much as ours?
In other words, if Country X has as skilled a labor force, as much capital investment, and as robust an economy as ours, on what basis should we expect a higher standard of living? Shouldn't our goal be for everyone world-wide to someday be as wealthy as the US is today? I don't consider that a threat to US interests. On the contrary, it will be a great boon to American interests, as we will have ever-larger markets to sell our wares, and ever-larger selection in buying wares from other countries.
You may rest assured that computer geeks use their grasp of arcana to fleece people all the time. I see it all the time, from BOFH-types I'd encounter on the job to Bill Gates.
I think the difference between lawyers and other professions is that other professions can generally only fleece their own customers, while lawyers often fleece complete strangers. This is where the term "ambulance chaser" comes from, for example-- lawyers who look for injured people who can rack up enormous damages due to "pain and suffering." Yes, some of those claims are justified, but oftentimes they are not, and the goal is to find the richest person involved in the accident regardless of whether he was primarily responsible.
I'm not saying that lawyers fleece their own clients, but rather, that they help their clients fleece wealthy defendants based on trumped-up charges. This raises risks and hence costs for everyone.
Well, I don't think life would be any less complex or adversarial without lawyers, but I realize this is a point on which reasonable people can differ. I agree with you on "more legalistic" but that the existence of lawyers makes life "more legalistic" isn't a stretch, it's tautology. Computer geeks make life more complex and "more technologistic," but I don't count this against them.
The problem is that the more lawyers you have looking for clever ways to sue people, the more you need lawyers on the *other* side advising clients how to avoid such lawsuits. As a result you get an ever-escalating arms race between the two sides, and lawyers on both sides get rich.
It's not simply that lawyers are legalistic (which I agree is a tautology) but that lawyers legalisms are forced on the whole country, because we *all* have to change our behavior to avoid getting sued. Even companies that aren't doing anything wrong need to hire lawyers to make sure they're not running afowl of any technicalities, and to defend themselves when they are falsely accused of wrongdoing.
The result is a dead loss to the economy. Both sides hire more and more lawyers, and while the results turn out the same, the costs soar.
It would be a little bit like if hacking were a profitable profession, and half the computer geeks went into hacking and the other half went into computer security. The more geeks in the hacking profession, the more companies would have to hire other geeks for security purposes. People would rightly view this as a protection racket.
I'd love to see a reputable source for this. It sounds pretty difficult to quantify, given that money that goes to lawyers doesn't vanish out of the economy. I won't argue that there aren't overpaid lawyers (or overpaid computer geeks), but that money doesn't just disappear.
I don't remember the source, but the argument is that every frivolous lawsuit wastes the time and resources of dozens of people to no particular benefit. In addition, people trying to protect themselves from future frivolous lawsuits are forced to go our of their way to cover their asses. (things like "don't trim hedges with this" warnings on lawnmowers) Obviously assigning costs and benefits is going to have a major political aspect, so I'm not going to claim the exact figure is objective, but I think it's clear that there is a certain cost imposed on the economy by frivolous lawsuits and excessive litigousness.
The problem is, that just does'nt happen. The American non and semi-skilled labor force is slowly being pushed into the service sector, which does not pay nearly as much as manufacturing.
I'd be interested to see some evidence of this. While it's certainly true that many workers are being pushed to the service sector, and while it's probably true that some take lower wages, it is *also* true that free trade opens up many new opportunities that those displaced workers can take advantage of. See my reply to the previous poster for the argument-- basically, every dollar we spend abroad will eventually come back to the US, and so the net job loss is zero. Focusing on the few losers while ignoring the broader gains for workers generally is disingenuous IMHO.
While displaced workers may enjoy some lower prices on manufactured goods, they still face fixed costs in housing and food, which at the lower end of the economic spectrum mean a lot more then saving a few hundred bucks on a fancy new laptop.
The laptop was an example, the same dynamic can be seen in many other areas, including many that poor and middle class workers would spend money on. For example, food costs have been dropping for 2 centuries, and would drop further if not for US protectionist policies. US tarriffs on sugar more than double its price IIRC, and there are many other examples. Tarriffs on steel will cost Joe Average when he buys a car or a major appliance. Tarriffs on lumber costs him when he buys a house (a home-building industry estimate was that a recent Bush tarriff on Canadian lumber will raise new home costs by $1500) And Joe average probably has a VCR, a TV, a DVD player, and a microwave manufactured in a Taiwanese or South Korean factory, all of which save him money.
Indeed, almost every purchase he makes will likely be cheaper because of free trade. Housing might be fixed, but food, clothing, and other essentials are anything but.
The problem is that it's much harder to measure these benefits because they go to the American public at large rather than specific segments. I might save a dollar on a shirt and 50 cents on a package of sugar. By themselves, these savings are nothing to get excited about, but when you add them up, they result in a substantial increase in standard of living for everyone. The savings on any one product is hard to measure, but when you add them up, they lead to substantial savings.
So it's sophistry to focus on the few people who are losing their jobs, while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of workers are benefitting from greater variety and lower prices on every product they purchase. And besides it's simply not true that free trade costs jobs on net. If there's a coherent argument for this proposition, I'd like to hear it.
Your comment seems to make the assumption that the money remains in the country, but it doesn't. A portion of the money spent on foreign goods (which are cheaper), and that is money leaving the country, so it's not a perfect cycling, like, say the human cardiovascular system, it is like a person walking around bleeding a bit faster than they are getting a transfusion.
Look at it this way. If I buy a product in Mexico for a dollar, my dollar goes accross the US-Mexican border. There are two possibilities: either the dollar eventualy makes its way back to the US, or it doesn't.
In the former case, the dollar will almost certainly come back to the US to purchase a US product of some kind. In that case, the net job loss is zero, since the same number of dollars is being spent either way, just to different people in different industries.
The other possilbity is that the dollar never returns to the US. But think for a moment about what that would mean if it happened a lot. Let's say that a billion dollars left the country never to return. That would mean that we just traded a billion dollars worth of goods and services for a billion otherwise worthless pieces of paper that cost a few million dollars to produce. If we could get other countries to take our dollars and never spend them here, we could happily do that forever. Every time someone loses his job, we can just print up some money and give it to him.
In reality the second scenario never happens in the long run. Eventually, enough money gets into foreign circulation that the flow of dollars both ways equalizes. So long term, every dollar that is spent overseas is matched by a dollar that gets spent on a US product by a foreign firm.
Hence I think it's economic sophistry to claim that spending on foreign products costs the US economy. It's simply not true, and only seems true because we only look at one side of the equation. When you look at the economy as a whole, you see that if anything free trade will create jobs due to the greater efficiency and higher wealth that will result. The only problem is that there are painful transitions for those who have to adjust and find new, higher-paying jobs.
The difference is that computer geeks don't usually use their grasp of arcana to fleece people, whereas many lawyers will use their knowledge of the law to harrass enemies of wealthy clients, fleece defendents with deep pockets, needlessly complicate otherwise simple transactions with legal nitpicking, and otherwise make our lives more complex, more legalistic, and more adversarial.
Successful geeks make their money largely by hiding the complexity of their craft-- by building clean, simple interfaces to complex underpinnings. Lawyers, on the other hand, often use the complexity of law as a club to intimidate less-clever opponents.
People don't hate lawyers because they're good at mastering arcana. They hate lawyers because too many of them use their grasp of arcana to enrich themselves by fleecing and harrassing others. There are estimates that every lawyers who enters the profession costs the US economy more than his salary in dead-weight costs. It's that dynamic-- not a resentment of success of intelligence, that I think drives resentment of the legal profession.
You have the cause and effect backwards. Jobs moving overseas are the *result* of rising living standards, not the cause of lower living standards. The reason the jobs are moving elsewhere is that workers here get paid too much for those sorts of jobs to be profitable here. Why is that? Because American workers have better-paying opportunities in the service sector or in higher-skill jobs.
The problem is that you're only looking at one half of the equation. You're looking at the people who lost their low-skill jobs to overseas competitors, but you're forgetting that that money has to be spent in the US eventually, and will most likely be spent on higher-skilled goods or services. That increased revenue translates to new jobs in other sectors of the economy.
Furthermore, when a manufacturing task gets outsourced, this leads to lower prices, benefitting all consumers. Most of the workers who are displaced will likely find new jobs paying just as well, and they benefit from lower prices from all the other manufacturing jobs that got outsourced.
I'm also appalled at the lack of regard for poor workers in other countries. What about the workers who are *getting* jobs in Taiwan? Are we really so narrow minded to completely discount their benefit? Even if outsourcing manufacturing jobs harms the average American worker (which it doesn't) might it be worth it if it helps workers in Taiwan who need those jobs much more than we do?
Personally, I don't pay enough attention to hardware to know off the top of my head what the best place to get a motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory, etc are. I'm sure I could figure it out, but it would take more time than I'd be willing to spend, for a very paltry return. On top of that, I'd have no warranty, no support from the manufacturer, no way of knowing whether some of the parts I installed are faulty, and I'd get a generic, ugly PC.
Dell, Compaq, Apple, et al make their money on design. They build integrated systems that are more than the sum of their parts. Personally, I'm not impressed with what most PC companies produce, which is why I bought an iBook, but if I were going to buy a PC, I'd be willing to spend an extra $50-$100 for a warranty, tech support, and a better design than I could come up with on my own.
As others have pointed out, this is 1400 a year, not per day. Malda needs to learn to read.
Secondly, I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous. It takes me about 5 seconds to recognize a piece of mail is spam and delete it. 5 seconds of my time isn't worth $1. And the 10k it took the mail server to store the message and fraction of a penny in bandwidth aren't worth a dollar either.
If corporate anti-spam offices are costing that much, then they're wasting their money. Let employees delete their own spam messages. It's really not that hard. It wastes maybe 5 minutes per week of my time. Is it annoying? Absolutely. Is it an "epidemic"? I don't think so.
I hate spam as much as the next guy, but a sense of perspective is important. The technology to filter spam is rapidly advancing, and ISP's often *do* respond to complaints. Once Asia gets with the program, I'd expect this problem to subside somewhat.
There will probably never be an x86 version of OS X, but it has nothing to do with the reasons you state.
If Apple is worried about losing money from clone competition, the solution is easy: raise liscencing fees. Apple could have easily done this and recouped any losses from cannibalized sales.
The problem was that Apple's hardware at the time sucked. When cloners started building boxes that blew Apple's offerings out of the water, this cannibalized their sales because people weren't going to pay unreasonable prices for inferior products.
What Apple should have done is improve their own offerings to match those of the clones. This should have been easy-- Apple has an enormous R & D budget, and the advantage of having the software team in-house.
The reason Apple killed the clones had little to do with the finances of the situation. Had they allowed cloning to continue, I'd guess the Mac market share would be much bigger than it was now. They could easily have eaten the short-term losses and come out the better for it.
The real reason the clones were killed was the same reason the Newtons were closed-- Steve's ego. Steve Jobs doesn't care about long-term strategic issues. He is perfectly fine having Apple be a niche computer maker. What he wants is creative control. He wants to be able to dictate how every Mac user's computer will look and feel, from the GUI to the case design. And if that means that Mac market share never goes above 5%, so be it.
It's really quite sad. Apple could easily spin off their software division, port to x86, and compete directly with Microsoft. Apple Computer would be a hardware company, Applesoft could be the software company. The hardware side would pay the software side royalties. And they could beg Motorolla and IBM to get into the PowerPC Mac cloning market, while simultaneously offering PC OEM's the option to install OS X on their machines. With a serious push into business applications and an open platform, Apple could pose a serious threat to the Windows hegemony.
But alas that won't happen because Steve isn't willing to give up control of the platform. He's content to be a big fish in a small pond. Meanwhile Bill Gates counts his billions and plots his next industry takeover...
No, the difference is that our government doesn't throw you in jail if you express "treasonous" opinions, and doesn't try to censor the spread of opinions deemed harmful to the regime. All manner of anti-government propoganda flows accross the 'net and the US government doesn't do a thing to stop it.
Look, I think Carnivore is a despicable invasion of my privacy, and I want it shut down now. But let's have a sense of persepctive. The US government thus far uses its surveilance powers relatively benign ways-- to catch drug dealers and terrorists for the most part. Yes, they probably stretch the bounds of the Constitution on occasion, but most of us, most of the time, have our civil liberties fully protected.
The Chinese regime, on the other hand, uses their surveilance power to brutally crush any dissent. There's simply no comparing the two. To even *suggest* that Carnivore is even close to this gives the Chinese regime a respectability they don't deserve.
regime that exalts nation and race
The Chinese regime ruthlessly suppresses criticism of their regime, plays nationalistic propoganda exalting the government's actions, and displays xenophobia against non-Chinese peoples. They haven't started killing Jews yet, but I'd say they certainly fit this part.
centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
It's a one-party dictatorship headed by Jiang Zemin and the Communist party. I see no difference with Hitler and the Nazi party.
severe economic and social regimentation
They've loosened economic controls somewhat in recent years, but it's still damn regimented. Much of the economy is state-owned, and the rest is expected to toe the government line. They're getting better on this score, but they still seem to fit this part.
forcible suppression of opposition
Can you say Tienamen Square? Jailing of dissidents? Oppression of Tibet? They fit this one in spades.
So I'd say "fascist" is a pretty good description of the Communist regime. In practice, most "communist" and "fascist" regimes end up looking pretty similar. The only substantive difference between Hitler and Stalin was that Stalin killed a lot more people than Hitler did. Both used a thin veneer of ideology to mask the fact that they were both just bloodthirsty tyrants.
*You* can build a box from scratch with commodity parts. My mother can't. You don't care if your computer matches the furniture. My mother might. You can figure out how to use cumbersome GPL-ed tools to manipulate images, video, audio, etc. My mother would never even try such a thing.
The iApps aren't targeted at you. They are targeted at average consumers who aren't tech-savvy. And for many non-tech-savvy users, paying an extra $200 for a machine that's tightly integrated with software, includes simple plug-and-play apps, and requires a minimum of behind-the-scenes tinkering is a great deal. For many consumers, paying an extra $50 so their computer can be a conversation piece rather than an eye-sore is money well spent.
Perhaps you're not one of them, but that doesn't make it wrong. And slashdot's motto isn't "News for mascochistic nerds with no aesthetic taste." Not all nerds like to spend their weekends wrestling with their souped up, built-from scratch athlon box. Some of us value our time and are happy to pay a premium for quality, superb industrial design, good aesthetics, and an OS that blows both XP and Linux out of the water.
No, the last big Apple product fake was... the iWalk, which SpyMac claimed was what Apple would unveil when they unveiled the iPod instead. They even had alleged photos of the device, which turned out to be bogus, by their own admission. It looked completely different from the iWalk they're hyping now.
Furthermore, spymac has *no* credibility or track record. They were completely unknown when they released their fake iWalk pictures last time, and since that time they've spent most of their time continuing to hype the iWalk. They simply have never broken a major story, so I see no reason why anyone should trust them.
On the other hand, the Cube story came from AppleInsider, the only rumors site with a decent record of rumors that have turned out to actually be true. Even back in summer 2000, AppleInsider already had a long track record and had actually posted a few rumors that turned out to be true.
This is a hoax. The video looks and feels like a hoax. The web site seems like a fake. They have no track record or credibility. Steve Jobs is said to have disliked the Newton, and Apple has recently done its best to quash talk of an Apple-branded PDA. And even if true, a rebirth of the Newton would not be a big enough deal to justify all the hype Apple's whipping up unless it has some really amazing specs.
I'm disappointed that slashdot linked to them, giving them traffic and credibility they don't deserve.
Dude, you need to get your facts straight.
"Aqua" refers to the GUI layer of the Mac OS API's, i.e. the PDF-based, Display PostScript-derived graphics layer (quartz) and the "look and feel" that goes along with it. Aqua is not an API in and of itself.
There are 2 native Mac OS API's-- Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is a streamlined subset of the classic OS 9 API's designed to work well under preemptive multitasking. Cocoa is the NextStep-derived API's, which are supposed to be the future of the Mac OS.
Developers typically choose one API or the other to write their code in. Carbon prefers C/C++ and makes it easy to port existing OS 9 apps to the new OS. Cocoa uses Objective C or Java as the base language, and generally requires a from-scratch re-write.
Unlike the switch to PPC, Mac OS X does *not* run anything in emulation (aside from the Classic process, which can be switched off entirely if one doesn't want to run classic apps) Carbon is a 100% native Mac OS X API's, and is fully preemptive, fully uses modern memory management, etc. No "old MacOS code" is to be found in Carbon. They implemented many of the same API's, but the code to do so is entirely Mac OS X native.
Office X (like most existing apps) was most likely written as a Carbon app. That means that it has *no* similarlities to OpenStep, and porting it to OpenStep would be practically the same as re-writing it from scratch.
When you say "there aren't any significant OS/X native apps," perhaps you mean that there aren't very many Cocoa apps. This is true, but it's simply wrong to confuse Cocoa with "native." Carbon is *not* a Mac OS 9 emulation layer. Carbon apps are every bit as "native" as Cocoa apps. They happen to call an API set similar to the classic Mac OS API's for the convenience of developers, but the code implementing these API's is entirely new.