And Darwin is just the kernel. That's all that's been ported to X86. The Quarts graphic engine is highly optimized for the PowerPC architechture, and only really performs decently when Altivec is present. That's one of the reasons OSX on a G3 is so dismal.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Writing this on a iBook with a 600 MHz G3, I can tell you there's nothing dismal about it. And as CPU's get faster, the difference will become less and less relevant. Even on slow hardware, Aqua just seems jerkier. It doesn't really stop you from getting work done.
Apple would have to be incredibly stupid to have written Aqua in a non-platform-independent manner. They've already got a platform-agnostic foundation-- why would they write higher-level stuff to be tied to the PowerPC? Darwin is *much* more than the kernel, and so much more than the kernel should be available on PC hardware. Apple releases Darwin x86 side-by-side with the PPC version to ensure continued platform independence. It's likely that there are some platform-specific hacks they'd have to work around for an x86 port of the high-level API's, but they'd have to be morons to add fundamentally platform-specific features to the OS.
If Apple wanted to move to x86, I'd bet money they could have a shipping product within 18 months. The reason they don't isn't technology, it's their business model. If they chose to go to PC hardware, they'd have to deal with a bunch of new challenges-- supporting multiple platforms, getting developers to cross-compile to both CPU's, etc.
If they continued the proprietary model, they'd have to find a good way of preventing users from running OS X on commodity hardware. (which would cut into margins) If, on the other hand, they chose to allow running it on commodity hardware, then they'd have to come up with a new pricing strcuture and they'd have to deal with the onslaught of tech support calls from people with non-standard hardware. Either way, it'd severely distract Apple from its core focus on being able to build and sell the whole widget on proprietary hardware.
Actually, I think Apple is stupid for not moving toward PC hardware-- their real value is in their software and industrial design skills, not in their hardware per se. They could continue selling curvy boxes with high margins, and they can charge high enough prices to run on other x86 hardware that they can compensate for the lost hardware revenue. But such a change would be expensive and painful in the short run, and risky in the long run. It's unlikely that Steve Jobs has either the desire or the guts to do it.
I'm gonna comment on both this comment and its children since it relates to the whole thread...
Neither Mac OS *or* Windows forces key shortcuts on apps. Doing so would have all sorts of problems. If I wanted to write a Mac OS app that uses command-t for paste, there'd be nothing stopping me from doing that.
What has made Mac OS and Windows apps consistent is that Apple and Microsoft (or at least Apple, I imagine Microsoft is the same) publish very specific and detailed UI guidelines instructing developers on the "correct" way of doing things. They specify the standard keybindings. (paste=v, copy=c, open=o, print=p, etc on Mac OS)
Once developers start following these conventions, they begin to have the force of habit, and users start to expect them. So after a few years any developer that does anything else is flagged by reviewers and others as non-conforming, and the product in question doesn't sell as well. Hence almost all apps support the conventions, and the UI experience is consistent.
On free OS's, on the other hand, there is no central authority to set these sorts of standards, and there is no market pressure to be consistent with the way other apps do things. That's why you have so many apps with such braindead UI conventions (control-middleclick to get a scrollbar on an xterm? WTF?)
As a result, using X is absolutely bewildering for a newbie, and even experienced users are completely clueless when encountering a new app that doesn't act like previous apps.
The idea that this is a feature of *nix is assinine. Being able to change colors of backgrounds and styles of windows is great. Having different apps use different keybindings and different UI conventions is simply bewildering.
Even if you had a central repository for such keybindings, it would still be stupid to let the user change them. For starters, this would cause problems if a system keybinding overwrote a applicatin keybinding. More to the point, having everyone use the same keybinding makes it easier for others to use your computer. You aren't going to want to have to change every keybinding every time you stit down at a new computer. It's much better for everyone to just standardize on a single scheme, and then everyone expects the same behavior.
Really, who cares whether paste is cmd-v or cmd-p? It seems far more important for the convention to be consistent accross applications than for the user to be able to change it, since it's essentially arbitrary anyway. Since 99% of users are used to the Mac/Windows conventions, I see no reason for Linux GUI's not to use the same conventions. Apple put a lot of thought into the placement of undo, cut, copy, and paste, and those at the very least should stay in the bottom row. And others like (O)pen, (P)rint, select (A)ll, and (Q)uit just make sense.
I think this is a good example of why geeks shouldn't design interfaces. They seem to have an infinite tolerance for clumsy design, and no perception of how bewildering their designs are to non-geeks. Yes, shift-middleclick is a perfectly functional way to access functions on an xterm, but no one is going to just figure that out on his own. Every geek should run his GUI by some non-geeks to make sure that his design decisions aren't completely asinine.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. P4's and G4's both have lots of optimizations that allow them to detect low-level parallelism and thus execute instructions in parallel. The G4 is arguably a bit better at this, in part because it has a RISC instruction set and thus has more flexibility in the ordering of instructions, compared with the Godawful x86 instruction set which often takes several cycles to execute.
The other major advantage that a G4 has is altivec, but I would argue that this isn't as great an advantage as Apple claims. True, it's cleaner and faster than MMX or KNI in the Intel line, but the difference isn't *that* great, and more to the point many developers aren't taking advantage of it. So while you can get a 6x speed boost on seti@home or photoshop, it's not going to do much for your run-of-the-mill applcation.
Finally, in terms of overall speed, I think it's ludicrous to claim that Macs are 2-3 times faster at the same clock rate. True, it's somewhat faster at the same clock rate due to a simpler instruction set, shallower pipeline, and other reasons, but I simply don't buy a 3-fold performance advantage. On average, a 866 G4 is probably equivalent to a 1 GHz or maybe 1.2 GHz P4. That's still substantially slower than Intel's top-of-the-line 2 Ghz P4's.
Apple has been very successful at selling the idea of a "megahertz myth," and to a certain extent they may be right. But honestly, better architectures can only push you so far. If the chip is doing fewer cycles per second, that *has* to be a handicap.
So I would say Macs at the moment are slower than their PC counterparts. They also happen to be less power-hungry, have better industrial design, run a better OS, be easier to use, etc. That's why I bought one. But I don't think we should be doing Apple's PR job for them. The G4 is a fast chip, but it's not *that* fast.
Re:It's a damn scooter
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This is IT?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I must say I'm rather disappointed with the/. community on this one. If the claims Kamen makes are true, this is a truly impressive piece of technology, and at a *minimum* it will be very useful in a number of niche markets.
I think whether it penetrates the consumer market and is able to compete with scooters, bicycles, and cars for short-haul trips is an unsolved question. But it clearly has a niche. It's a fraction of the weight and cost of a car, it's smaller (albeit a bit heavier) than a bike, and it's a *lot* faster than walking. Most of us can walk comfortably at 3-4 MPH. This thing goes 8-12 MPH. So it's definitely useful.
I'm a college student, and until last year I lived about a 15 minute walk away from campus. That meant I spent half an hour to an hour every day walking between class and home. This thing would have therefore saved me 10-20 minutes per day of walking time-- not a huge savings, but non-trivial. In addition, I make short trips around campus that take 5-10 minutes of walking. This thing could cut those times in half at least.
Could a bicycle do the same thing? Yes, but not nearly as well. First, bicycles are not as stable as this thing apperantly is. Secondly, if it works as described, bicycles don't deal with crowded sidewalks as well as this thing does. This is because a bicycle has to be moving to be stable. So if you have to stop to deal with traffic, you have to get off the seat and stand, which isn't very comfortable or convenient. Bicycles also don't deal well with sandy or slippery terrain, and you're farther off the ground, so falls will hurt a lot more. With this thing, at worse it starts to tip forward or backwards and you can just step off.
Also, because it's not as big or bulky as a bicycle, most people will probably be able to just bring the thing in with them when they arrive at their destinations. In my case, I work on campus, so I could just bring the thing into my office and leave it there until its needed. And it apperantly has an access key, so if you stole it you'd have to rip out the electronics and replace them in order to use it again.
The big concerns as I see them are threefold. First is the cost. This is *not* going to replace a car, so it has to be a lot cheaper than a car. I think $3000 is too high for 90% of consumers. If they can get it down to about $2000, there are going to be plenty of yuppies who will be willing to shell out for them. If they get it down to $1000, they'll be able to easily sell millions of them. I imagine that most of the cost is in the custom electronics and precision hardware-- stuff that should come down in price as it's mass-produced. Going after corporate and government markets should give them time to perfect their technique and bring costs down before invading the consumer space.
The second concern is weight. 65 lbs is more than most people can carry for any distance, and it's more than some people can even pick up at all. If I were to get one, one thing that I'd want to be able to do is take it on the bus with me, and it sounds like it's a little too heavy for that. I'd imagine that the battery and motors are most of the weight-- hopefully they can make a lightweight version soon.
The third factor that I think will impact its success is the extent to which different form factors can be made. For example, I can imagine an enclosed version for use in cold places in the winter. Or a slightly larger version with a small cargo bin for hauling stuff around. If the technology is flexible enough to accomodate these sorts of adjustments to the form factor, then I can see them making different model to meet different niches. If they made one big enough to let me carry a couple of bags of groceries on the back, that would eliminate one of the major reasons I'd need a car.
Re:A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else
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Apple releases iPod
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· Score: 2
They would have to be incredibly stupid not to include Windows support for this device. They've clearly sunk some R & D dollars into this device, and if they want to recoup those dollars they need to sell as many as possible. And remember-- FireWire is Apple's baby. If they can sell a million iPods to PC users that means a million PC's with FireWire ports, which thereby expands the market for Apple's other firewire-enabled devices.
If they're smart, they're working on a PC version of iTunes, or with existing MP3 players to get iPod compatibility. They can make sure that the Mac version is out first and has the best compatibility, but it's icing on the cake if they can sell a bunch of them to PC users as well.
This is *not* a zero-sum game. Apple not only gets the revenue from the devices themselves, but if these devices are popular they promote FireWire and they get their name out in front of the public reaping opportunities for future efforts like this. I wouldn't be surprised if they release analogous devices for digital video/DVD playback in the next year or two, thereby expanding on the "digital hub" analogy that they've been pushing since January.
The point is that Apple is not a monopoly, and it doesn't tend to behave like one.
Um, excuse me? Apple acts like Microsoft wished it could. They make closed, proprietary hardware, they have a closed, proprietary OS, and they dictate all sorts of things about their platform, from what peripherals will be standard to what browser is installed by default to which hardware will be supported in future OS version. Apple's a *lot* more fascist about discouraging people from using things in unauthorized ways.
History is litterred with examples of companies that got screwed over by Apple's "monopolistic" behavior. Exhibit A is the cloning fiasco. Apple encouraged a half-dozen different companies to clone their hardware, and then a couple of years later they changed their minds and left those cloners out to dry. The same behavior can be seen in the decision to switch from ATI to nvidia graphics cards-- made largely based on Steve Jobs' spite at ATI's leaking Apple's hardware announcements.
Apple has always acted like a smug monopolist. The only reason they've avoided the DOJ's wrath is that their market share is smaller. But if the situation were reversed and the Mac OS were the dominant platform, you know Apple would be every bit as arrogant as MS, probably more so.
With all that said, I happen to like many of the things that Apple shoved down its users' throats. I don't consider "behaving like a monopolist" to be necessarily a bad thing, as long as the resulting product is good. But don't tell me that Microsoft abuses its "monopoly" more than Apple. If anything, Apple is more aggressive about its use of its monopoly on the Mac platform than Microsoft is about Windows. Microsoft just happens to have a more popular product, and so they get more scrutiny. But judged soley on their actions, Apple is far more monopolistic than Microsoft.
"As I said, it's tremendously naive to think that our current working conditions are a result of kind bosses and the benevolence of the free market."
Did you even *read* my comment? I didn't say that it was due to kind bosses. I said it was due to the competition between the bosses. I see no evidence in the documents you showed me that this wasn't the case. Yes, in the short term a strike can raise wages moderately above the market level. But if those workers in 1912 had demanded modern working conditions and pay, they would have simply been fired. In the long run, economic growth and the accululation of capital are the primary drivers of improved conditions and better pay, not unions. All the unions in the nation could be disbanded tomorrow and conditions would remain far better than they were 100 years ago. Employers maintain good conditions because they don't want to lose their best workers to the competition, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Have you ever actually *used* IE 5 for Mac? It's a damn good browser-- better than anything Netscape makes and on par with IE 5.5 for Windoze. In a lot of ways it's better than IE 5.5-- it's more standards compliant, and isn't full of proprietary hooks into the OS like it is with Windoze.
Microsoft might not pour as much money into IE for Mac as it does for Windows, but it certainly isn't a bad browswer. IMHO it's the best browser on the Mac platform.
We have not gained eight hour work days... by the grace of our employers or of the government.
I agree with the general sentiment of your post, but I don't really see how this is related. The 8 hour work day came about as a result of rising living standards and rising wages, which in turn was the result of the market process in action. While unions like to take credit for it, it's not like we'd all be working 12 hour days had the unions not stepped in. The reason is simple-- if one employer tried to make its employees work 12-hour days, other employees would quickly lure away their best people with offers of a shorter work day. Unions simply made a big deal out of it and then took credit for it. The "bitter struggle" of the union movement was largely wasted effort-- wages would have risen and working hours would have shortened with our without union activism.
Not to start a flame-war, but can we stick the subject at hand? Crypto controls are bad-- no argument there. But I don't see how that necessarily implies anything about labor relations or workplace rules.
The postal service *does* have a monopoly. If you don't believe me, try starting up a first-class mail delivery service. You'll find police at your door to shut you down.
Notice that the USPS and FedEx do deliver to practically any place. You just have to pay more if you live in Alaska or Hawii. This is, it seems to me, as it should be-- if you choose to live in a place that's hard to deliver to, you pay the extra societal costs of getting mail. It's not like someone's going to go bankrupt from paying an extra 10 cents per letter for their mail.
The post office should be privatised. All this would really require is to repeal the laws making it illegal to compete with it in first-class mail. Then, when the private sector kicks the USPS's ass and takes away most of its customers, the government can either disband it or turn it into a truly private company that would have some incentive to modernise.
The problem with cable/DSL is that most cable and local phone companies are government-created monopolies. You generally have to get permission from the city council or county zoning board or whomever before you can lay cables. And not surprisingly, once one company has done it, they lobby hard to prevent any other company from laying competing lines. Result: monopoly.
I'm not sure what the exact solution is, but this is certainly not a market failure. What's needed is more genuine competition, not a government takeover of the industry.
Also, it seems to me that there are far more pressing societal problems than the lack of fast internet. I have it and love it, but I'm a middle-class yuppie college student. For your average American, having to dial in with a modem is an extremely minor annoyance. So there are more important things that governments should be doing, like plowing the streets and putting out fires. Let's get them to do a good job of that before we load them up with more responsibilities that rightly belong to the private sector, eh?
Haven't looked at a lot of benchmarks comparing Crusoe to the alternatives, so you might be right, but I find it hard to believe that emulating x86 in software can possibly be much faster than more traditional designs. Even assuming run-time optimization and a better underlying architecture, you still have to pay a performance price for the overhead of running the emulation software. If you're running the same code repeatedly and there's a lot of room for run-time optimization, I can imagine a slight advantage over Intel and AMD's offerings, but not that much. And Crusoe's claims bear that out-- they claim ridiculously good power consumption and passable performance.
As for the G3, I'm certainly not going to pretend as Apple does that a 500 MHz G3 is going to outperform a 1 GHz x86 chip. But I think there's solid evidence that there's a moderate performance advantage. The G3 is a sweet little chip, and the power of RISC along with good engineering gives it a narrow edge. Most of the realistic benchmarks I've seen put them even or with Apple slightly ahead. And usually the benchmarks that show them even are done on programs where the optimization is better on x86. (Linux stuff compiled with GCC, for example)
So like I said, my hunch is that a G3/500 will tend to edge out a Crusoe/600. It might be that the Crusoe is slightly faster. Either way, I think the iBook is clearly the better value.
You're English isn't too good, so I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying i'm an Apple employee astroturfing Apple products?
You're free to believe that if you want, but I'm not. I'm a student who would buy a laptop if I had a bit more money, and I've been looking long and hard at getting an iBook, which is why I remember the specs.
And let's say for the sake of argument that I am an Apple employee. So what? I think my point still stands-- this laptop isn't a good deal for the money. Isn't a comparison with a competing product a useful contribution to the message board? Would you rather I poured hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants?
Usually, you pay a premium of $200-$300 for equivalent functionality in a Mac compared with the PC alternative. In this case, though, it seems like the opposite is true. The only advantages I see to this machine are PC card slot and lower weight. (iBook is 4.9 pounds, this is 3.3, IIRC)
The two have more or less equivalent battery life (Apple claims 5 hours, these guys claim 5.5) If you get one of the higher-end iBooks, memory, hard drive, etc are the same. And CPU speed is pretty much identical-- I'd guess a G3/500 will edge out a Crusoe/600, but even if not it's not going to be much behind. Crusoes are optimised for power consumption, not performance.
On the downside, there's no internal media (which probably accounts for the weight difference) and apperantly you can't even get DVD-ROM or CD-RW without going to a third party. And the iBook includes FireWire ports and an interal 802.11 slot, which this does not.
Most striking is the price. To get an equivalently loaded iBook (with DVD and 128 MB RAM) is $1500. This is "approximately" $2000. Why would you pay $500 extra for a laptop with fewer features, lousy performance, and the inelegance of x86?
So, really, the only reason to prefer this to an iBook is if you need something that runs Windoze. If you have the option of running a real OS (either Mac OS or *nix) get an iBook and save some money.
Re:Betting the farm on "Software as service"? Stup
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HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 2
But wait, if there is going to be connectivity everywhere, why the heck bother paying a continuing lease to store ones personal data on someone else's server, when it can simply be stored on one's own?
Um, backups? Uptime and reliability? Economies of scale? Security? Lack of technical expertise on the part of consumers?
Look, in theory anyone with a DSL connection can run his own web server, mail server, etc. Yet, most don't. Why? Because that's what we pay ISP's to do--maintain fast, reliable, secure, servers that give us the services we want without us having to do the work of changing backup tapes, patching the OS when security holes are found, wearing a pager 24/7 to ensure good uptime, etc. Running a stable, secure, reliable server is a lot of work, and it makes sense to pay someone else to do it.
So it is with.net. If it's true that consumers will want somebody to manage their desktop software for them (and I'm not convinced that they will, but it's plausible that at least some will) then those consumers will probably want someone to run the application server for them so that they don't have to maintain it.
I personally like having my software locally, and I don't want Microsoft or anyone else changing it without telling me. But then, I'm typing this on a Mac, so I don't have to deal with MS crap as it is. I have no plans to use.net if and when it ships. But for those consumers who choose to use.net, I would think they'd be willing to shell out significant money to have someone else run the application servers. This isn't stupidity on their part-- it's just that most consumers have neither the time, nor the expertise, nor the interest to run their own servers.
I dunno, the slow-mo girl shots seemed pretty straight-forward to me. The girls were attractive and Kevin Smith did them the same way any other movie would. He did make them longer and a bit more exaggerated than most movies do, but that hardly counts as biting satire. I think he was just kind of lazy when writing the script, and so he threw in some mindless titilation to keep people interested.
The whole movie was like that-- he was too lazy to come up with clever or original jokes or gags, so he used lots of "dick and fart jokes," celebrity cameos, homophobic humor, and in jokes to his previous movies and to the hot movies of the last couple of decades.
Look, I was amused by many of the jokes, but it wasn't brilliant humor. It was in the same intellectual ballpark as "dude, where's my car." The only difference is that this movie had more big-name stars in it and was more pretentious.
You can get a better idea of what this looks like here.
Notice the little note at the bottom-- *Two -thirds of AOL Time Warner's minutes come from communications services (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, greetings)
That doesn't seem right-- many people use mail clients that operate "offline," and hence wouldn't be counted in these statistics. That doesn't mean that AOL and MS are taking over everyone's email.
More to the point, if most of AOL's clicks are coming through email, do we really care? AOL *is* an ISP, and reading email is one of the main things people do with their computers. I don't think controlling a person's email is the same as controlling their content.
The same considerations apply to MS and Yahoo. I'll bet money that HotMail accounts for at least half of MS's hits. Again, this isn't a terribly sinister development-- Hotmail is a convenient mail client, and it's not like they try to control what you send in your emails.
Yahoo! also offers popular mail service, so i you take out mail-reading as an activity, the numbers look more like this:
AOL: 10%
Yahoo!: 5%
MSN: 4%
Napster: 3.6%
In other words, the top 4 web *content* sites take up at most a quarter of time spent online, not half as the report says.
More to the point, the fact that only 39% of our time is spent on the rest of the web isn't all that sinister either. That's still a big chunk of time, and it's *still* distributed over thousands of sites. I'd like to see the numbers for the top 70% and 80% figures-- that would likely be more informative.
The fact that a few big players are able to attract a lot of people with highly generic content doesn't mean that people don't have choices. A lot of people have come online in the last few years, and they will tend to gravitate to the big names. That doesn't mean that the rest of us can't continue to enjoy slashdot.
Besides, I think it's narrow-minded to assume that just because MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! are big they don't offer useful content. Yahoo! in particular offers dozens of useful features that I use on a regular basis-- news, stock quotes, movie listings, search. These are all things that are fairly generic in nature and I don't particularly care who provides them. I go to more obscure sites like slashdot for tech news or salon for poltical commentary. But that doesn't negate the value of being able to get a free stock quote or movie listing at one of the big three.
However, in some cases classic starts up automatically when a classic app gets launched, and short of removing the actual program I haven't found a way to change that.
This particularly annoying because often it will pick a classic app when you open a document-- some PDFs open with classic acrobat even though I've got Preview, and in the beta at least.sit files got opened by classic stuffit. I'd like to have a "never launch classic" checkbox, so this doesn't happen.
This is a very valid point. If this is what the lawsuit would be over (and the facts are sa you relate them), I would wholeheartedly support it. The key issue here, then, is fraud-- you were sold a product that had hidden conditions.
But this is very different from the more general claim that you're "forced" to purchase Windows. Here you knew you were going to get Windows, you just weren't told what the conditions of that purchase would be. It's a different issue.
But I agree with you-- if a company is going to stick a draconian EULA inside the box where the user can't read it until after he opens it, he has every right to return it for a refund. If they want to make it binding, they should force the sales clerk to show you a copy of the EULA before you walk out of the store with your copy. Otherwise, you have every right to get your money back when you find the EULA.
No, but selling very dangerous *addictive* products that provide no benefit to the consumer is immoral. The "pleasure" people receive from smoking is an easing of the withdrawal symptoms.
This is how you see it. Many smokers would disagree with you. They would claim that indeed smoking is a pleasurable experience that enriches their lives. What right do you have to force your values on them?
It doesn't help that tobacco companies shamelesly target their maketing at these young people.
No, it doesn't. But this doesn't justify taking away the freedom of adults. Quitting smoking isn't easy, but it's possible. We should certainly try to prevent kids from smoking, but once someone is an adult, it's his choice whether to smoke or not. What business do you have telling him otherwise?
Cars provide a real benefit, fatty food is not addictive and probably not as lethal, and alcohol is nearly as bad as tobacco
"Benefit" is in the eye of the beholder. Many smokers think cigarettes provide a benefit as well. Fatty food is not as addictive, but so what? It definitely tastes good, and lots of people eat it when they know they shouldn't. Perhaps it's not *as* evil as cigarettes, but the issue is the same. Fatty food kills, and therefore McDonalds must be a company of murderers.
Furthermore, tobacco can be consumed in moderate quantities as well. Lots of people smoke an occasional cigar, and I have friends who will puff on a cigarette if offered but don't smoke the rest of the time.
Sure they are, but an addiction is a physical dependency, not a choice.
Bullshit. It's not a physical dependency like with heroin. It's a habit, and like any habit, it's difficult but not impossible to break. So it's still a choice. It's a difficult choice, but so what? There are lots of other bad habits that we have no trouble identifying as personal choices. Cigarettes are a harder habit to break than most, but it's still a habit and people do quit all of the time.
But if those were the tobacco comanpies only customers, they would be very small operations, I assure you.
So you're claiming that an adult who started smoking as a kid is not responsible for his actions once he reaches adulthood? I don't buy that. Tobacco isn't such a powerful substance that anyone who uses it is powerless to stop. Whether they started as a kid or not, adults have the ability and the right to choose to smoke or not smoke. With that right comes responsibility. If you choose to smoke, you suffer the consequences.
So we should look at ways to reduce teen smoking, but in the meantime we should stop funneling money to lawyers and politicians and stop driving up the prices of cigarettes for adults.
Next pc I get, it will be coming from Penguin Computing, VA Linux, or I'll just build it myself.
I think this is really the point-- the market is working. People don't like Windows, and so other companies are offering alternatives. The big manufacturers don't offer it, but that's because the big manufacturers mostly serve average comsumers. Not many average customers want Windows, and so they don't offer them.
I suspect I could find a car part that the Big Three car makers all use. In that case it would be exactly analogous-- I want a "big brand" car without component X, and I can't get it. I think it would be a disaster if the government sued every time this happened.
My point is that these laws and lawsuits are not necessary. Linux and Mac OS both would have done just fine without the DOJ or class action lawsuits. And companies like VA Linux and Penguin Computing have been able to offer machines with competing offerings without suffering for it. The market is working, leave it alone. I just don't see what everyone is getting so worked up about. Most consumers want Windows, and therefore that's what most companies offer. A few of us want alternatives, and there are competing companies to offer that. Perhaps there was a period of a couple of years when a lot of people wanted name-brand PC's without Windows and couldn't get them, but that period is over now. What is served by looting Microsoft over it?
Well, that's a bit more reasonable, but not much. Keep in mind that Classic is a userland program like any other. From an fundamental OS design standpoint, there's no reason it should matter. OS X is a pure Unix implementaiton that happens to have Classic as one of the apps that runs on it.
The fact that VMWare runs on Linux doesn't make Linux a bad OS. It's precisely the same issue. From an OS design standpoint, classic apps don't exist. There just happens to be a userland application called "classic."
So I'd say Linus is still pretty ignorant about the whole issue.
Slashdot Mirror
And Darwin is just the kernel. That's all that's been ported to X86. The Quarts graphic engine is highly optimized for the PowerPC architechture, and only really performs decently when Altivec is present. That's one of the reasons OSX on a G3 is so dismal.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Writing this on a iBook with a 600 MHz G3, I can tell you there's nothing dismal about it. And as CPU's get faster, the difference will become less and less relevant. Even on slow hardware, Aqua just seems jerkier. It doesn't really stop you from getting work done.
Apple would have to be incredibly stupid to have written Aqua in a non-platform-independent manner. They've already got a platform-agnostic foundation-- why would they write higher-level stuff to be tied to the PowerPC? Darwin is *much* more than the kernel, and so much more than the kernel should be available on PC hardware. Apple releases Darwin x86 side-by-side with the PPC version to ensure continued platform independence. It's likely that there are some platform-specific hacks they'd have to work around for an x86 port of the high-level API's, but they'd have to be morons to add fundamentally platform-specific features to the OS.
If Apple wanted to move to x86, I'd bet money they could have a shipping product within 18 months. The reason they don't isn't technology, it's their business model. If they chose to go to PC hardware, they'd have to deal with a bunch of new challenges-- supporting multiple platforms, getting developers to cross-compile to both CPU's, etc.
If they continued the proprietary model, they'd have to find a good way of preventing users from running OS X on commodity hardware. (which would cut into margins) If, on the other hand, they chose to allow running it on commodity hardware, then they'd have to come up with a new pricing strcuture and they'd have to deal with the onslaught of tech support calls from people with non-standard hardware. Either way, it'd severely distract Apple from its core focus on being able to build and sell the whole widget on proprietary hardware.
Actually, I think Apple is stupid for not moving toward PC hardware-- their real value is in their software and industrial design skills, not in their hardware per se. They could continue selling curvy boxes with high margins, and they can charge high enough prices to run on other x86 hardware that they can compensate for the lost hardware revenue. But such a change would be expensive and painful in the short run, and risky in the long run. It's unlikely that Steve Jobs has either the desire or the guts to do it.
I'm gonna comment on both this comment and its children since it relates to the whole thread...
Neither Mac OS *or* Windows forces key shortcuts on apps. Doing so would have all sorts of problems. If I wanted to write a Mac OS app that uses command-t for paste, there'd be nothing stopping me from doing that.
What has made Mac OS and Windows apps consistent is that Apple and Microsoft (or at least Apple, I imagine Microsoft is the same) publish very specific and detailed UI guidelines instructing developers on the "correct" way of doing things. They specify the standard keybindings. (paste=v, copy=c, open=o, print=p, etc on Mac OS)
Once developers start following these conventions, they begin to have the force of habit, and users start to expect them. So after a few years any developer that does anything else is flagged by reviewers and others as non-conforming, and the product in question doesn't sell as well. Hence almost all apps support the conventions, and the UI experience is consistent.
On free OS's, on the other hand, there is no central authority to set these sorts of standards, and there is no market pressure to be consistent with the way other apps do things. That's why you have so many apps with such braindead UI conventions (control-middleclick to get a scrollbar on an xterm? WTF?)
As a result, using X is absolutely bewildering for a newbie, and even experienced users are completely clueless when encountering a new app that doesn't act like previous apps.
The idea that this is a feature of *nix is assinine. Being able to change colors of backgrounds and styles of windows is great. Having different apps use different keybindings and different UI conventions is simply bewildering.
Even if you had a central repository for such keybindings, it would still be stupid to let the user change them. For starters, this would cause problems if a system keybinding overwrote a applicatin keybinding. More to the point, having everyone use the same keybinding makes it easier for others to use your computer. You aren't going to want to have to change every keybinding every time you stit down at a new computer. It's much better for everyone to just standardize on a single scheme, and then everyone expects the same behavior.
Really, who cares whether paste is cmd-v or cmd-p? It seems far more important for the convention to be consistent accross applications than for the user to be able to change it, since it's essentially arbitrary anyway. Since 99% of users are used to the Mac/Windows conventions, I see no reason for Linux GUI's not to use the same conventions. Apple put a lot of thought into the placement of undo, cut, copy, and paste, and those at the very least should stay in the bottom row. And others like (O)pen, (P)rint, select (A)ll, and (Q)uit just make sense.
I think this is a good example of why geeks shouldn't design interfaces. They seem to have an infinite tolerance for clumsy design, and no perception of how bewildering their designs are to non-geeks. Yes, shift-middleclick is a perfectly functional way to access functions on an xterm, but no one is going to just figure that out on his own. Every geek should run his GUI by some non-geeks to make sure that his design decisions aren't completely asinine.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. P4's and G4's both have lots of optimizations that allow them to detect low-level parallelism and thus execute instructions in parallel. The G4 is arguably a bit better at this, in part because it has a RISC instruction set and thus has more flexibility in the ordering of instructions, compared with the Godawful x86 instruction set which often takes several cycles to execute.
The other major advantage that a G4 has is altivec, but I would argue that this isn't as great an advantage as Apple claims. True, it's cleaner and faster than MMX or KNI in the Intel line, but the difference isn't *that* great, and more to the point many developers aren't taking advantage of it. So while you can get a 6x speed boost on seti@home or photoshop, it's not going to do much for your run-of-the-mill applcation.
Finally, in terms of overall speed, I think it's ludicrous to claim that Macs are 2-3 times faster at the same clock rate. True, it's somewhat faster at the same clock rate due to a simpler instruction set, shallower pipeline, and other reasons, but I simply don't buy a 3-fold performance advantage. On average, a 866 G4 is probably equivalent to a 1 GHz or maybe 1.2 GHz P4. That's still substantially slower than Intel's top-of-the-line 2 Ghz P4's.
Apple has been very successful at selling the idea of a "megahertz myth," and to a certain extent they may be right. But honestly, better architectures can only push you so far. If the chip is doing fewer cycles per second, that *has* to be a handicap.
So I would say Macs at the moment are slower than their PC counterparts. They also happen to be less power-hungry, have better industrial design, run a better OS, be easier to use, etc. That's why I bought one. But I don't think we should be doing Apple's PR job for them. The G4 is a fast chip, but it's not *that* fast.
I must say I'm rather disappointed with the /. community on this one. If the claims Kamen makes are true, this is a truly impressive piece of technology, and at a *minimum* it will be very useful in a number of niche markets.
I think whether it penetrates the consumer market and is able to compete with scooters, bicycles, and cars for short-haul trips is an unsolved question. But it clearly has a niche. It's a fraction of the weight and cost of a car, it's smaller (albeit a bit heavier) than a bike, and it's a *lot* faster than walking. Most of us can walk comfortably at 3-4 MPH. This thing goes 8-12 MPH. So it's definitely useful.
I'm a college student, and until last year I lived about a 15 minute walk away from campus. That meant I spent half an hour to an hour every day walking between class and home. This thing would have therefore saved me 10-20 minutes per day of walking time-- not a huge savings, but non-trivial. In addition, I make short trips around campus that take 5-10 minutes of walking. This thing could cut those times in half at least.
Could a bicycle do the same thing? Yes, but not nearly as well. First, bicycles are not as stable as this thing apperantly is. Secondly, if it works as described, bicycles don't deal with crowded sidewalks as well as this thing does. This is because a bicycle has to be moving to be stable. So if you have to stop to deal with traffic, you have to get off the seat and stand, which isn't very comfortable or convenient. Bicycles also don't deal well with sandy or slippery terrain, and you're farther off the ground, so falls will hurt a lot more. With this thing, at worse it starts to tip forward or backwards and you can just step off.
Also, because it's not as big or bulky as a bicycle, most people will probably be able to just bring the thing in with them when they arrive at their destinations. In my case, I work on campus, so I could just bring the thing into my office and leave it there until its needed. And it apperantly has an access key, so if you stole it you'd have to rip out the electronics and replace them in order to use it again.
The big concerns as I see them are threefold. First is the cost. This is *not* going to replace a car, so it has to be a lot cheaper than a car. I think $3000 is too high for 90% of consumers. If they can get it down to about $2000, there are going to be plenty of yuppies who will be willing to shell out for them. If they get it down to $1000, they'll be able to easily sell millions of them. I imagine that most of the cost is in the custom electronics and precision hardware-- stuff that should come down in price as it's mass-produced. Going after corporate and government markets should give them time to perfect their technique and bring costs down before invading the consumer space.
The second concern is weight. 65 lbs is more than most people can carry for any distance, and it's more than some people can even pick up at all. If I were to get one, one thing that I'd want to be able to do is take it on the bus with me, and it sounds like it's a little too heavy for that. I'd imagine that the battery and motors are most of the weight-- hopefully they can make a lightweight version soon.
The third factor that I think will impact its success is the extent to which different form factors can be made. For example, I can imagine an enclosed version for use in cold places in the winter. Or a slightly larger version with a small cargo bin for hauling stuff around. If the technology is flexible enough to accomodate these sorts of adjustments to the form factor, then I can see them making different model to meet different niches. If they made one big enough to let me carry a couple of bags of groceries on the back, that would eliminate one of the major reasons I'd need a car.
They would have to be incredibly stupid not to include Windows support for this device. They've clearly sunk some R & D dollars into this device, and if they want to recoup those dollars they need to sell as many as possible. And remember-- FireWire is Apple's baby. If they can sell a million iPods to PC users that means a million PC's with FireWire ports, which thereby expands the market for Apple's other firewire-enabled devices.
If they're smart, they're working on a PC version of iTunes, or with existing MP3 players to get iPod compatibility. They can make sure that the Mac version is out first and has the best compatibility, but it's icing on the cake if they can sell a bunch of them to PC users as well.
This is *not* a zero-sum game. Apple not only gets the revenue from the devices themselves, but if these devices are popular they promote FireWire and they get their name out in front of the public reaping opportunities for future efforts like this. I wouldn't be surprised if they release analogous devices for digital video/DVD playback in the next year or two, thereby expanding on the "digital hub" analogy that they've been pushing since January.
The point is that Apple is not a monopoly, and it doesn't tend to behave like one.
Um, excuse me? Apple acts like Microsoft wished it could. They make closed, proprietary hardware, they have a closed, proprietary OS, and they dictate all sorts of things about their platform, from what peripherals will be standard to what browser is installed by default to which hardware will be supported in future OS version. Apple's a *lot* more fascist about discouraging people from using things in unauthorized ways.
History is litterred with examples of companies that got screwed over by Apple's "monopolistic" behavior. Exhibit A is the cloning fiasco. Apple encouraged a half-dozen different companies to clone their hardware, and then a couple of years later they changed their minds and left those cloners out to dry. The same behavior can be seen in the decision to switch from ATI to nvidia graphics cards-- made largely based on Steve Jobs' spite at ATI's leaking Apple's hardware announcements.
Apple has always acted like a smug monopolist. The only reason they've avoided the DOJ's wrath is that their market share is smaller. But if the situation were reversed and the Mac OS were the dominant platform, you know Apple would be every bit as arrogant as MS, probably more so.
With all that said, I happen to like many of the things that Apple shoved down its users' throats. I don't consider "behaving like a monopolist" to be necessarily a bad thing, as long as the resulting product is good. But don't tell me that Microsoft abuses its "monopoly" more than Apple. If anything, Apple is more aggressive about its use of its monopoly on the Mac platform than Microsoft is about Windows. Microsoft just happens to have a more popular product, and so they get more scrutiny. But judged soley on their actions, Apple is far more monopolistic than Microsoft.
"As I said, it's tremendously naive to think that our current working conditions are a result of kind bosses and the benevolence of the free market."
Did you even *read* my comment? I didn't say that it was due to kind bosses. I said it was due to the competition between the bosses. I see no evidence in the documents you showed me that this wasn't the case. Yes, in the short term a strike can raise wages moderately above the market level. But if those workers in 1912 had demanded modern working conditions and pay, they would have simply been fired. In the long run, economic growth and the accululation of capital are the primary drivers of improved conditions and better pay, not unions. All the unions in the nation could be disbanded tomorrow and conditions would remain far better than they were 100 years ago. Employers maintain good conditions because they don't want to lose their best workers to the competition, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Um, this is me on a Mac OS X v10.1 box...
/System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app/Contents/Resources/TruBlueEnvironment
tlee@mybox % ps aux | grep TruBlu
tlee 299 5.4 26.5 1106840 34676 ?? R 25:50.39
Looks like it's running as my user to me...
Have you ever actually *used* IE 5 for Mac? It's a damn good browser-- better than anything Netscape makes and on par with IE 5.5 for Windoze. In a lot of ways it's better than IE 5.5-- it's more standards compliant, and isn't full of proprietary hooks into the OS like it is with Windoze.
Microsoft might not pour as much money into IE for Mac as it does for Windows, but it certainly isn't a bad browswer. IMHO it's the best browser on the Mac platform.
We have not gained eight hour work days... by the grace of our employers or of the government.
I agree with the general sentiment of your post, but I don't really see how this is related. The 8 hour work day came about as a result of rising living standards and rising wages, which in turn was the result of the market process in action. While unions like to take credit for it, it's not like we'd all be working 12 hour days had the unions not stepped in. The reason is simple-- if one employer tried to make its employees work 12-hour days, other employees would quickly lure away their best people with offers of a shorter work day. Unions simply made a big deal out of it and then took credit for it. The "bitter struggle" of the union movement was largely wasted effort-- wages would have risen and working hours would have shortened with our without union activism.
Not to start a flame-war, but can we stick the subject at hand? Crypto controls are bad-- no argument there. But I don't see how that necessarily implies anything about labor relations or workplace rules.
The postal service *does* have a monopoly. If you don't believe me, try starting up a first-class mail delivery service. You'll find police at your door to shut you down.
Notice that the USPS and FedEx do deliver to practically any place. You just have to pay more if you live in Alaska or Hawii. This is, it seems to me, as it should be-- if you choose to live in a place that's hard to deliver to, you pay the extra societal costs of getting mail. It's not like someone's going to go bankrupt from paying an extra 10 cents per letter for their mail.
The post office should be privatised. All this would really require is to repeal the laws making it illegal to compete with it in first-class mail. Then, when the private sector kicks the USPS's ass and takes away most of its customers, the government can either disband it or turn it into a truly private company that would have some incentive to modernise.
The problem with cable/DSL is that most cable and local phone companies are government-created monopolies. You generally have to get permission from the city council or county zoning board or whomever before you can lay cables. And not surprisingly, once one company has done it, they lobby hard to prevent any other company from laying competing lines. Result: monopoly.
I'm not sure what the exact solution is, but this is certainly not a market failure. What's needed is more genuine competition, not a government takeover of the industry.
Also, it seems to me that there are far more pressing societal problems than the lack of fast internet. I have it and love it, but I'm a middle-class yuppie college student. For your average American, having to dial in with a modem is an extremely minor annoyance. So there are more important things that governments should be doing, like plowing the streets and putting out fires. Let's get them to do a good job of that before we load them up with more responsibilities that rightly belong to the private sector, eh?
Haven't looked at a lot of benchmarks comparing Crusoe to the alternatives, so you might be right, but I find it hard to believe that emulating x86 in software can possibly be much faster than more traditional designs. Even assuming run-time optimization and a better underlying architecture, you still have to pay a performance price for the overhead of running the emulation software. If you're running the same code repeatedly and there's a lot of room for run-time optimization, I can imagine a slight advantage over Intel and AMD's offerings, but not that much. And Crusoe's claims bear that out-- they claim ridiculously good power consumption and passable performance.
As for the G3, I'm certainly not going to pretend as Apple does that a 500 MHz G3 is going to outperform a 1 GHz x86 chip. But I think there's solid evidence that there's a moderate performance advantage. The G3 is a sweet little chip, and the power of RISC along with good engineering gives it a narrow edge. Most of the realistic benchmarks I've seen put them even or with Apple slightly ahead. And usually the benchmarks that show them even are done on programs where the optimization is better on x86. (Linux stuff compiled with GCC, for example)
So like I said, my hunch is that a G3/500 will tend to edge out a Crusoe/600. It might be that the Crusoe is slightly faster. Either way, I think the iBook is clearly the better value.
You're English isn't too good, so I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying i'm an Apple employee astroturfing Apple products?
You're free to believe that if you want, but I'm not. I'm a student who would buy a laptop if I had a bit more money, and I've been looking long and hard at getting an iBook, which is why I remember the specs.
And let's say for the sake of argument that I am an Apple employee. So what? I think my point still stands-- this laptop isn't a good deal for the money. Isn't a comparison with a competing product a useful contribution to the message board? Would you rather I poured hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants?
Usually, you pay a premium of $200-$300 for equivalent functionality in a Mac compared with the PC alternative. In this case, though, it seems like the opposite is true. The only advantages I see to this machine are PC card slot and lower weight. (iBook is 4.9 pounds, this is 3.3, IIRC)
The two have more or less equivalent battery life (Apple claims 5 hours, these guys claim 5.5) If you get one of the higher-end iBooks, memory, hard drive, etc are the same. And CPU speed is pretty much identical-- I'd guess a G3/500 will edge out a Crusoe/600, but even if not it's not going to be much behind. Crusoes are optimised for power consumption, not performance.
On the downside, there's no internal media (which probably accounts for the weight difference) and apperantly you can't even get DVD-ROM or CD-RW without going to a third party. And the iBook includes FireWire ports and an interal 802.11 slot, which this does not.
Most striking is the price. To get an equivalently loaded iBook (with DVD and 128 MB RAM) is $1500. This is "approximately" $2000. Why would you pay $500 extra for a laptop with fewer features, lousy performance, and the inelegance of x86?
So, really, the only reason to prefer this to an iBook is if you need something that runs Windoze. If you have the option of running a real OS (either Mac OS or *nix) get an iBook and save some money.
But wait, if there is going to be connectivity everywhere, why the heck bother paying a continuing lease to store ones personal data on someone else's server, when it can simply be stored on one's own?
.net. If it's true that consumers will want somebody to manage their desktop software for them (and I'm not convinced that they will, but it's plausible that at least some will) then those consumers will probably want someone to run the application server for them so that they don't have to maintain it.
.net if and when it ships. But for those consumers who choose to use .net, I would think they'd be willing to shell out significant money to have someone else run the application servers. This isn't stupidity on their part-- it's just that most consumers have neither the time, nor the expertise, nor the interest to run their own servers.
Um, backups? Uptime and reliability? Economies of scale? Security? Lack of technical expertise on the part of consumers?
Look, in theory anyone with a DSL connection can run his own web server, mail server, etc. Yet, most don't. Why? Because that's what we pay ISP's to do--maintain fast, reliable, secure, servers that give us the services we want without us having to do the work of changing backup tapes, patching the OS when security holes are found, wearing a pager 24/7 to ensure good uptime, etc. Running a stable, secure, reliable server is a lot of work, and it makes sense to pay someone else to do it.
So it is with
I personally like having my software locally, and I don't want Microsoft or anyone else changing it without telling me. But then, I'm typing this on a Mac, so I don't have to deal with MS crap as it is. I have no plans to use
Speaking of things being wrong, Judas was one of the original 12 apostles. There was no "thirteenth apostle." Look it up...
I dunno, the slow-mo girl shots seemed pretty straight-forward to me. The girls were attractive and Kevin Smith did them the same way any other movie would. He did make them longer and a bit more exaggerated than most movies do, but that hardly counts as biting satire. I think he was just kind of lazy when writing the script, and so he threw in some mindless titilation to keep people interested.
The whole movie was like that-- he was too lazy to come up with clever or original jokes or gags, so he used lots of "dick and fart jokes," celebrity cameos, homophobic humor, and in jokes to his previous movies and to the hot movies of the last couple of decades.
Look, I was amused by many of the jokes, but it wasn't brilliant humor. It was in the same intellectual ballpark as "dude, where's my car." The only difference is that this movie had more big-name stars in it and was more pretentious.
You can get a better idea of what this looks like here. Notice the little note at the bottom-- *Two -thirds of AOL Time Warner's minutes come from communications services (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, greetings) That doesn't seem right-- many people use mail clients that operate "offline," and hence wouldn't be counted in these statistics. That doesn't mean that AOL and MS are taking over everyone's email. More to the point, if most of AOL's clicks are coming through email, do we really care? AOL *is* an ISP, and reading email is one of the main things people do with their computers. I don't think controlling a person's email is the same as controlling their content. The same considerations apply to MS and Yahoo. I'll bet money that HotMail accounts for at least half of MS's hits. Again, this isn't a terribly sinister development-- Hotmail is a convenient mail client, and it's not like they try to control what you send in your emails. Yahoo! also offers popular mail service, so i you take out mail-reading as an activity, the numbers look more like this: AOL: 10% Yahoo!: 5% MSN: 4% Napster: 3.6% In other words, the top 4 web *content* sites take up at most a quarter of time spent online, not half as the report says. More to the point, the fact that only 39% of our time is spent on the rest of the web isn't all that sinister either. That's still a big chunk of time, and it's *still* distributed over thousands of sites. I'd like to see the numbers for the top 70% and 80% figures-- that would likely be more informative. The fact that a few big players are able to attract a lot of people with highly generic content doesn't mean that people don't have choices. A lot of people have come online in the last few years, and they will tend to gravitate to the big names. That doesn't mean that the rest of us can't continue to enjoy slashdot. Besides, I think it's narrow-minded to assume that just because MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! are big they don't offer useful content. Yahoo! in particular offers dozens of useful features that I use on a regular basis-- news, stock quotes, movie listings, search. These are all things that are fairly generic in nature and I don't particularly care who provides them. I go to more obscure sites like slashdot for tech news or salon for poltical commentary. But that doesn't negate the value of being able to get a free stock quote or movie listing at one of the big three.
Um, 6*80=240, which is only 3% of 8000. That would seem inconsistent with the claim that Exodus was one of three coloc locations for 8000 servers.
This is a good point.
.sit files got opened by classic stuffit. I'd like to have a "never launch classic" checkbox, so this doesn't happen.
However, in some cases classic starts up automatically when a classic app gets launched, and short of removing the actual program I haven't found a way to change that.
This particularly annoying because often it will pick a classic app when you open a document-- some PDFs open with classic acrobat even though I've got Preview, and in the beta at least
This is a very valid point. If this is what the lawsuit would be over (and the facts are sa you relate them), I would wholeheartedly support it. The key issue here, then, is fraud-- you were sold a product that had hidden conditions.
But this is very different from the more general claim that you're "forced" to purchase Windows. Here you knew you were going to get Windows, you just weren't told what the conditions of that purchase would be. It's a different issue.
But I agree with you-- if a company is going to stick a draconian EULA inside the box where the user can't read it until after he opens it, he has every right to return it for a refund. If they want to make it binding, they should force the sales clerk to show you a copy of the EULA before you walk out of the store with your copy. Otherwise, you have every right to get your money back when you find the EULA.
Excuse me, but how is my comment offtopic while his is not?
Allow me to cite his post in its entirety:
"Fuck you and your "points".
"Only a jackass would waste time trying to refute your juvenile ramblings. "
Now don't tell me there's anything ever remotely "on topic" about that.
No, but selling very dangerous *addictive* products that provide no benefit to the consumer is immoral. The "pleasure" people receive from smoking is an easing of the withdrawal symptoms.
This is how you see it. Many smokers would disagree with you. They would claim that indeed smoking is a pleasurable experience that enriches their lives. What right do you have to force your values on them?
It doesn't help that tobacco companies shamelesly target their maketing at these young people.
No, it doesn't. But this doesn't justify taking away the freedom of adults. Quitting smoking isn't easy, but it's possible. We should certainly try to prevent kids from smoking, but once someone is an adult, it's his choice whether to smoke or not. What business do you have telling him otherwise?
Cars provide a real benefit, fatty food is not addictive and probably not as lethal, and alcohol is nearly as bad as tobacco
"Benefit" is in the eye of the beholder. Many smokers think cigarettes provide a benefit as well. Fatty food is not as addictive, but so what? It definitely tastes good, and lots of people eat it when they know they shouldn't. Perhaps it's not *as* evil as cigarettes, but the issue is the same. Fatty food kills, and therefore McDonalds must be a company of murderers.
Furthermore, tobacco can be consumed in moderate quantities as well. Lots of people smoke an occasional cigar, and I have friends who will puff on a cigarette if offered but don't smoke the rest of the time.
Sure they are, but an addiction is a physical dependency, not a choice.
Bullshit. It's not a physical dependency like with heroin. It's a habit, and like any habit, it's difficult but not impossible to break. So it's still a choice. It's a difficult choice, but so what? There are lots of other bad habits that we have no trouble identifying as personal choices. Cigarettes are a harder habit to break than most, but it's still a habit and people do quit all of the time.
But if those were the tobacco comanpies only customers, they would be very small operations, I assure you.
So you're claiming that an adult who started smoking as a kid is not responsible for his actions once he reaches adulthood? I don't buy that. Tobacco isn't such a powerful substance that anyone who uses it is powerless to stop. Whether they started as a kid or not, adults have the ability and the right to choose to smoke or not smoke. With that right comes responsibility. If you choose to smoke, you suffer the consequences.
So we should look at ways to reduce teen smoking, but in the meantime we should stop funneling money to lawyers and politicians and stop driving up the prices of cigarettes for adults.
Next pc I get, it will be coming from Penguin Computing, VA Linux, or I'll just build it myself.
I think this is really the point-- the market is working. People don't like Windows, and so other companies are offering alternatives. The big manufacturers don't offer it, but that's because the big manufacturers mostly serve average comsumers. Not many average customers want Windows, and so they don't offer them.
I suspect I could find a car part that the Big Three car makers all use. In that case it would be exactly analogous-- I want a "big brand" car without component X, and I can't get it. I think it would be a disaster if the government sued every time this happened.
My point is that these laws and lawsuits are not necessary. Linux and Mac OS both would have done just fine without the DOJ or class action lawsuits. And companies like VA Linux and Penguin Computing have been able to offer machines with competing offerings without suffering for it. The market is working, leave it alone. I just don't see what everyone is getting so worked up about. Most consumers want Windows, and therefore that's what most companies offer. A few of us want alternatives, and there are competing companies to offer that. Perhaps there was a period of a couple of years when a lot of people wanted name-brand PC's without Windows and couldn't get them, but that period is over now. What is served by looting Microsoft over it?
Well, that's a bit more reasonable, but not much. Keep in mind that Classic is a userland program like any other. From an fundamental OS design standpoint, there's no reason it should matter. OS X is a pure Unix implementaiton that happens to have Classic as one of the apps that runs on it.
The fact that VMWare runs on Linux doesn't make Linux a bad OS. It's precisely the same issue. From an OS design standpoint, classic apps don't exist. There just happens to be a userland application called "classic."
So I'd say Linus is still pretty ignorant about the whole issue.