People seem to have the ethos in computing of buying the cheapest junk with the highest specs possible, not realizing that they just supported junk instead of quality. This is how quality is ratcheted lower, and it becomes difficult or impossible to find anything decent.
That may well be true, but what the heck does it have to do with this story?
Most of people don't need highest-end hardware that is not expensive only because of it's (supposed) quality, but mostly because it's a luxury, a rarity. That DOES NOT make the lower end items of same kind any junk.
There may well be some graphics card manufacturers that use cheapest crap possible (remember the bad image quality on lots of geforce cards some time ago because of bad components on filter?), and some of them may even build radeons, but 9500 as a chip is no more piece of junk than 9700(PRO) is.
And what comes to grandparent posts "saving a few bucks", there's about two hundred euro (That's here, and I couldn't care less what it's in US), difference, to the some people, that is a HUGE amount of money.
tweaking and playing are both very natural and very educational: but don't return it. You broke it: you fix it. On this, I mostly agree, if you start physically modifying a piece of hardware, anything that goes wrong is your responsibility, it's got nothing to do with manufacturing or material defects that warranty is supposed to pay for.
If you haven't realized it yet, people from finland don't really like swedes, and the same goes the other way around. I think this goes for a lot of neighbouring countries though. The US is the fifth canadian territory, right?:)
That's just it. For those not so deeply aware of our situation here, there is no real dislike between most finns and swedes, just friendly picking between neighbours.
I don't like the language though... but that probably has more to do with it being compulsory subject here than anything else.
None of which was obviously _really_ irreparable? It's well known that some broken drives only have faulty electronics and can be fixed by replacing controller board with a part from another drive of some models, and recovery companies can obviously perform kludgery of same kind, but more demanding.
I recently followed a usenet news story, somebody had a broken hard drive (40GB Maxtor, if I remember correctly) had taken his hd into one of those data recovery companies - they figured out it was one of those broken controller cases so they and the owner hunted for a replacement part for it, found one, and put it in. Now we had a perfectly working drive, but somehow it had corrupt maintenace track - it keeps calibration data or something there, so the drive still could not read itself. And what did they do next? Nothing, gave up. It was not possible to get anyt data at all out from a perfectly working hard drive with reasonable amount of work and/or money.
You aren't giving any details so I have to guess that all of the drives were probably physically fine, not small fragments of platter you were so easily extracting data from? And if they broke in 1998/1999 when were they bought? Or more relevantly, how BIG were those?
I'm no God so I may well be wrong, but if you've got news story or something about recovering data from physically broken hard drive in tens of gigabytes I'd like to see it.
Formatting is a different story, as it doesn't overwrite data, and even long usage of that will leave some parts of the disk unwritten where the original data can be extracted.
You've already got some fools AUTOMATED WORM poking in your computer, if you are too stupid or too lazy to fix it yourself, then by all means, other fools are welcome to try to do it for you.
I wouldn't mind if they, in doing so, "accidentally" formatted your drives. Might teach a lesson.
I woulndn't be betting a very large sum on your unyielding faith on neglicence being absolutely and one hundred percently being wiped out whenever someone does a crime as a result.
If you leave a loaded gun on somewhere where a lunatic gets hold of it and shoots someone, OF COURSE you are responsible of very dangerous negligence even if he did commit a crime of worst sort.
If you leave doors wide open into your working place and someone steals all the stuff, YOU will get fired, and very probably sued. Even if it was someone else that did the crime.
If you leave your server wide open and someone "walks in" and uses that "gun" to "shoot someone", you should be just as much responsible as you are with those physical doors and physical weapon.
I've already installed a goddamnit IRC client on my phone, not only is it cheaper but I can guarantee it's more geeky... and makes people drop their eyes, as this is nothing like those new phone/pda combos that are all scream, but perfectly regular looking and very small phone.
Guess other IM clients as well as email exist too, but most of my e-friends are on IRC instead of ICQ/MSN or whatever.
These points have nothing to do with SMS, but reflect the class of the person receiving the message. I can bet you some prick with a text pager is still going to be disruptive and scream something like, "Guys, guys! Check out the message Bobby sent me!"
Yes they do. Okay, some people will always be pricks no matter how silent their comm device is, but in some situations talking to phone is disturbing or for some other reason not possible even if you aren't a prick and yelling into it.
People don't know where you are, so they can't know what the best method is to talk to you. What it sounds like you'd really prefer is something different: voice-to-text of your voice mail. That actually makes some sense, but I don't know of a single provider that does SMS with anything other than hunt and peck keypad entry.
Then inform the people. If you are in the pub and can't hear because of noise, usually the other end can still hear you, so you can just tell you can't hear him and ask if he could send a message instead.
Indeed the grandparent post doesn't seem to even BEGIN to comprehend how much noise there would be on something like electron microscope scan of a newest generation of hard drive, and how horribly expensive and time consuming it would be to try to extract the real information out of that.
And that is assuming it hasn't been overwritten.
I doubt you ever will see that court case, people won't pay billions of dollars to get piece of data, unless it's really something world-shattering...
I don't think it's any specific number of resend tries, but a specific time, in a message "headers".
Some phones allow you to specify it, my brand new Siemens C55 presents the following choices of how long the server should try to send the message, dunno how often... network may, of course, choose to ignore this request: one hour three hours six hours twelve hours one day one week
and "maximum" whatever that is, probably dictated by the network.
First I was wondering why present that kind of option to the user at all, why not make it maximum all the time? But it may actually be quite handy, eg. if you need to send a message that has some rather short-term relevant information and it doesn't get there in time, it's better to instruct network not to deliver it after that, instead of always having phone to yell for maximum time and then have some week old obsolote thing popping in when the receiver remembers to free some slots...
If someone is willing to toss millions of dollars into getting something out of my only-once-overwritten drive, then they are perfectly welcome to do so.
Indeed, if someone is willing to give out that kind of money, they are welcome to give it to me and I give them that drive in perfect working order and all data fully readable without special tools!
I've never, ever, seen a study made of this, yet people are always making noise about it.
If anyone knows a story about recovering data from overwritten, even only once, with only one pattern, drive, please many people would like to see that link...
It may, in theory, have been possible on old hard drives, but current monsters have so huge densities that reading any trace data would be very near impossible. Prove me wrong, though, if it is possible, I'd really like to know what kind of equipment it was done with and how many millions (billions?) did that thing cost.
Good sir, that, is one hundred percent pure bullshit.
In most of the world, it's the other way around. Copying MP3's from the net is perfectly legal, and you don't even have to own the song on cd. Distributing is illegal.
Or at least it didn't when I last played it, sometimes the ball which cames right after you clean a color from the screen is of that color, but not at other times.
Ages old graphite moderated reactor with insufficient safety meatures, whose main purpose was to produce weapons grade plutonium, not energy. And despite that, the disaster still only happened after incompetent workers ran an insane test and ignored most of those safety mechanisms it did have. That's what chernobyl was.
So anyway, what does it have in common with modern electricity generating plants except that it used fission reaction? Nothing. Too bad pro-pollution nuke-FUD spreading people like you who think of themselves as "green" (HAH) don't happen to use their brain and care about facts like that.
We're not talking about thousands of years, but millions of years in the future. The topic of the thread was a show that supposedly takes place 100 Million Years in the Future.
We are not. Well, at least I was not, the show news was about sure was, about distant futures, but we're talking about humans there, they didn't even play a part in that one (except send the imaginary probes), so in context of this thread we may as well forget there ever was any show.
Off-topic as it may be I first replied to the part of original message that thought that "global warming is something that Earth will take care of", never saying anything about when. Global warming, or whatever humans can cause that could cause the downfall of our modern civilization will happen in the next thousand years. The ascent that probably follows will happen in next few thousand years after that.
We're not talking about thousands of years, but millions of years in the future. The topic of the thread was a show that supposedly takes place 100 Million Years in the Future.
There won't be any humans after 100 million years, even if there won't be any downfall, or if there is and our descendants survive it, they've evolved to something more than mere humans as we are now by then. And I wouldn't wager my head about that there even IS Earth at that point.
And they won't be using fossil fuels. Well, not the most advanced ones at least, of course we may have spread troughout the galaxy, split into several civilizations and maybe even several species, as selective pressures are different elsewhere... there may be more downfalls, maybe one of the "human" civilizations, maybe one even here, if we haven't dismantled or destroyed the planet, has just recently dropped and is again at just the point of using fossil fuels, but probability of just THAT at the right moment is very near non-existent.
And since when do overweight people listen their body? Or what it tells them is correct?
I didn't think so. If the thing really can read some statistics from the skin, I'm going to bet that the microcontroller in these patches is a lot more accurate than hunger center already fsck'ed up by mistreating it.
Climbing up took us for a long time, but not nearly long enough for that to happen.
Fossil fuels have been formed in the course of million, not mere thousands of years. I seriously doubt it would take any more than few thousand years to be back at "point zero" (if we even fall further than that) something like middle ages or the roman empire, real civilization but not much in the field of technology.
And it's not only the fossil fuels, lots of metal ores that are near enough surface and easy enough for such an upstart civilization to access are long gone.
Plants will continue to grow, etc, and that will keep them alive... That's of course assuming our way to "greatness" is the only one, us humans are damn resourceful, who knows what kind of premises could science and some kind of technology be found.
It's not only one of its kind, there's one, rather common now, theory that says melting ice from arctic caused by global warming would cause golf stream to turn. That may not cause a "real" ice age, but it certainly would render most of northern europe uninhabitable, and could happen rather quickly.
And if that were to come true, trust me that we would not just idly sit there and die of starvation while the crops die, people would crowd to the more warm areas probably unleashing series of wars, maybe nuclear ones, this would be no small dispute over oil, but for the very survival. Did I mention nuclear war(s) would be a rather good way for that stone age to begin?
I haven't seen the program, but website linked states that they don't even expect it to be accurate due to chaotical nature of subject at hand and long timeframe. Merely saying that animals like those could _possibly_ evolve based on the scientific data is not claiming to know the future and say that they WILL.
Just one very small glimpse into one of countless potential futures. Nothing bad in that as long as it's acknowledged instead of 'em trying to claim that this and only this is exactly how it will be.
I dont think anyone has ever claimed that global warming, or much about anything else we can do, is somehow permanent. And most people agree that we indeed are in the middle of rather short warm period between ice ages, yes, temperatures will go down again.
Life survives, but any drastic changes are of course going to wreak havoc on all things we are now accustomed to and most depend on, man's position may seem stable, but it's not really very hard to imagine how easily we could be knocked back to stone age. Thus, better be carefully monitoring whichever way change is going, and be damn careful not to accelerate it in any way, and if possible, even try to brake.
It's of course early to speculate dunno if this "news" is even true, but maybe hardware prices will drop as a result. Kind of unfair for those people who don't care about that software or are perfectly happy with initial version to pay extra for hardware to support software development costs for who knows how far into the future they might have been estimated.
Now the people who want them, can buy only them without bothering others nor needing to purchase new hardware. This is kind of like how things work on PC side, brand makers bundle some commercial software into the initial price of the machine, but no major updates for free.
Hey, I got windows 98 and office 97 with my brand pc, their price was effectively included as part of the machine.
Now I'd like to upgrade my OS and Office to XP or 2002 or whatever they are called, are you claiming that HP/Dell/Compaq/whatever or MS should give them to me free? No? And what about that is different from what Apple is doing? Right, nothing.
MS has never charged you for an upgrade? Wake up, please.
What the hell are win95->win98->win98se->winme->win2k->winx p if not upgrades? And they sure as hell PAY, and A LOT. And updating those sometimes DOES force you to update something else, win32 is not any freaking wonderland without incompabilities because of versions, they may not be intended, but then again, that may well be the case with apple as well.
Of course you can start nitpicking about it not being the same because it's an OS and not some iApp, but that doesn't count, software is software is software, regardless whether it is operating system or something else.
And if you still won't buy that, well, bring on the office, visual suite, and all the other bazillions of m$ software that most certainly do pay to upgrade as well. Nobody has claimed that apple starts charging for bug/security fixes, but new versions, just like every other goddamnit software company on the planet does.
Because that's why things usually work in commercial software land.
You don't get fooDVD 3.0 for windoze free even if you bought v2, you don't get Photoshop 7 for mac free if you bought 3.0. You don't get Office 2002 for free even if o97 came with your machine sometime in the past.
Bugfixes and other minors things usually are free but major upgrades cost money, why would Apple have some special obligation to give their stuff away for free that others do not have?
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to have the ethos in computing of buying the cheapest junk with the highest specs possible, not realizing that they just supported junk instead of quality. This is how quality is ratcheted lower, and it becomes difficult or impossible to find anything decent.
That may well be true, but what the heck does it have to do with this story?
Most of people don't need highest-end hardware that is not expensive only because of it's (supposed) quality, but mostly because it's a luxury, a rarity. That DOES NOT make the lower end items of same kind any junk.
There may well be some graphics card manufacturers that use cheapest crap possible (remember the bad image quality on lots of geforce cards some time ago because of bad components on filter?), and some of them may even build radeons, but 9500 as a chip is no more piece of junk than 9700(PRO) is.
And what comes to grandparent posts "saving a few bucks", there's about two hundred euro (That's here, and I couldn't care less what it's in US), difference, to the some people, that is a HUGE amount of money.
tweaking and playing are both very natural and very educational: but don't return it. You broke it: you fix it.
On this, I mostly agree, if you start physically modifying a piece of hardware, anything that goes wrong is your responsibility, it's got nothing to do with manufacturing or material defects that warranty is supposed to pay for.
If you haven't realized it yet, people from finland don't really like swedes, and the same goes the other way around. :)
... but that probably has more to do with it being compulsory subject here than anything else.
I think this goes for a lot of neighbouring countries though. The US is the fifth canadian territory, right?
That's just it. For those not so deeply aware of our situation here, there is no real dislike between most finns and swedes, just friendly picking between neighbours.
I don't like the language though
None of which was obviously _really_ irreparable?
It's well known that some broken drives only have faulty electronics and can be fixed by replacing controller board with a part from another drive of some models, and recovery companies can obviously perform kludgery of same kind, but more demanding.
I recently followed a usenet news story, somebody had a broken hard drive (40GB Maxtor, if I remember correctly) had taken his hd into one of those data recovery companies - they figured out it was one of those broken controller cases so they and the owner hunted for a replacement part for it, found one, and put it in. Now we had a perfectly working drive, but somehow it had corrupt maintenace track - it keeps calibration data or something there, so the drive still could not read itself. And what did they do next? Nothing, gave up. It was not possible to get anyt data at all out from a perfectly working hard drive with reasonable amount of work and/or money.
You aren't giving any details so I have to guess that all of the drives were probably physically fine, not small fragments of platter you were so easily extracting data from? And if they broke in 1998/1999 when were they bought? Or more relevantly, how BIG were those?
I'm no God so I may well be wrong, but if you've got news story or something about recovering data from physically broken hard drive in tens of gigabytes I'd like to see it.
Formatting is a different story, as it doesn't overwrite data, and even long usage of that will leave some parts of the disk unwritten where the original data can be extracted.
You've already got some fools AUTOMATED WORM poking in your computer, if you are too stupid or too lazy to fix it yourself, then by all means, other fools are welcome to try to do it for you.
I wouldn't mind if they, in doing so, "accidentally" formatted your drives. Might teach a lesson.
I woulndn't be betting a very large sum on your unyielding faith on neglicence being absolutely and one hundred percently being wiped out whenever someone does a crime as a result.
If you leave a loaded gun on somewhere where a lunatic gets hold of it and shoots someone, OF COURSE you are responsible of very dangerous negligence even if he did commit a crime of worst sort.
If you leave doors wide open into your working place and someone steals all the stuff, YOU will get fired, and very probably sued. Even if it was someone else that did the crime.
If you leave your server wide open and someone "walks in" and uses that "gun" to "shoot someone", you should be just as much responsible as you are with those physical doors and physical weapon.
... now that we've got Java phones and GPRS.
I've already installed a goddamnit IRC client on my phone, not only is it cheaper but I can guarantee it's more geeky... and makes people drop their eyes, as this is nothing like those new phone/pda combos that are all scream, but perfectly regular looking and very small phone.
Guess other IM clients as well as email exist too, but most of my e-friends are on IRC instead of ICQ/MSN or whatever.
These points have nothing to do with SMS, but reflect the class of the person receiving the message. I can bet you some prick with a text pager is still going to be disruptive and scream something like, "Guys, guys! Check out the message Bobby sent me!"
Yes they do. Okay, some people will always be pricks no matter how silent their comm device is, but in some situations talking to phone is disturbing or for some other reason not possible even if you aren't a prick and yelling into it.
People don't know where you are, so they can't know what the best method is to talk to you. What it sounds like you'd really prefer is something different: voice-to-text of your voice mail. That actually makes some sense, but I don't know of a single provider that does SMS with anything other than hunt and peck keypad entry.
Then inform the people. If you are in the pub and can't hear because of noise, usually the other end can still hear you, so you can just tell you can't hear him and ask if he could send a message instead.
Indeed the grandparent post doesn't seem to even BEGIN to comprehend how much noise there would be on something like electron microscope scan of a newest generation of hard drive, and how horribly expensive and time consuming it would be to try to extract the real information out of that.
And that is assuming it hasn't been overwritten.
I doubt you ever will see that court case, people won't pay billions of dollars to get piece of data, unless it's really something world-shattering...
I don't think it's any specific number of resend tries, but a specific time, in a message "headers".
... network may, of course, choose to ignore this request:
Some phones allow you to specify it, my brand new Siemens C55 presents the following choices of how long the server should try to send the message, dunno how often
one hour
three hours
six hours
twelve hours
one day
one week
and "maximum" whatever that is, probably dictated by the network.
First I was wondering why present that kind of option to the user at all, why not make it maximum all the time? But it may actually be quite handy, eg. if you need to send a message that has some rather short-term relevant information and it doesn't get there in time, it's better to instruct network not to deliver it after that, instead of always having phone to yell for maximum time and then have some week old obsolote thing popping in when the receiver remembers to free some slots...
Why would I want to do it several times?
If someone is willing to toss millions of dollars into getting something out of my only-once-overwritten drive, then they are perfectly welcome to do so.
Indeed, if someone is willing to give out that kind of money, they are welcome to give it to me and I give them that drive in perfect working order and all data fully readable without special tools!
I've never, ever, seen a study made of this, yet people are always making noise about it.
If anyone knows a story about recovering data from overwritten, even only once, with only one pattern, drive, please many people would like to see that link...
It may, in theory, have been possible on old hard drives, but current monsters have so huge densities that reading any trace data would be very near impossible. Prove me wrong, though, if it is possible, I'd really like to know what kind of equipment it was done with and how many millions (billions?) did that thing cost.
Good sir, that, is one hundred percent pure bullshit.
In most of the world, it's the other way around. Copying MP3's from the net is perfectly legal, and you don't even have to own the song on cd. Distributing is illegal.
No it doesn't.
Or at least it didn't when I last played it, sometimes the ball which cames right after you clean a color from the screen is of that color, but not at other times.
Indeed it does.
Ages old graphite moderated reactor with insufficient safety meatures, whose main purpose was to produce weapons grade plutonium, not energy. And despite that, the disaster still only happened after incompetent workers ran an insane test and ignored most of those safety mechanisms it did have. That's what chernobyl was.
So anyway, what does it have in common with modern electricity generating plants except that it used fission reaction? Nothing. Too bad pro-pollution nuke-FUD spreading people like you who think of themselves as "green" (HAH) don't happen to use their brain and care about facts like that.
Oh well.
Ilwrath? Spider Overlords? Oh, no, those were most fun to play with! Just get the nifty hyperwave caster and play God for those stoopid arachnids.
As an added bonus, it got you rid of the stupid rhinoes as well.
We're not talking about thousands of years, but millions of years in the future. The topic of the thread was a show that supposedly takes place 100 Million Years in the Future.
... there may be more downfalls, maybe one of the "human" civilizations, maybe one even here, if we haven't dismantled or destroyed the planet, has just recently dropped and is again at just the point of using fossil fuels, but probability of just THAT at the right moment is very near non-existent.
We are not. Well, at least I was not, the show news was about sure was, about distant futures, but we're talking about humans there, they didn't even play a part in that one (except send the imaginary probes), so in context of this thread we may as well forget there ever was any show.
Off-topic as it may be I first replied to the part of original message that thought that "global warming is something that Earth will take care of", never saying anything about when. Global warming, or whatever humans can cause that could cause the downfall of our modern civilization will happen in the next thousand years. The ascent that probably follows will happen in next few thousand years after that.
We're not talking about thousands of years, but millions of years in the future. The topic of the thread was a show that supposedly takes place 100 Million Years in the Future.
There won't be any humans after 100 million years, even if there won't be any downfall, or if there is and our descendants survive it, they've evolved to something more than mere humans as we are now by then. And I wouldn't wager my head about that there even IS Earth at that point.
And they won't be using fossil fuels. Well, not the most advanced ones at least, of course we may have spread troughout the galaxy, split into several civilizations and maybe even several species, as selective pressures are different elsewhere
And since when do overweight people listen their body? Or what it tells them is correct?
I didn't think so. If the thing really can read some statistics from the skin, I'm going to bet that the microcontroller in these patches is a lot more accurate than hunger center already fsck'ed up by mistreating it.
Climbing up took us for a long time, but not nearly long enough for that to happen.
... That's of course assuming our way to "greatness" is the only one, us humans are damn resourceful, who knows what kind of premises could science and some kind of technology be found.
Fossil fuels have been formed in the course of million, not mere thousands of years. I seriously doubt it would take any more than few thousand years to be back at "point zero" (if we even fall further than that) something like middle ages or the roman empire, real civilization but not much in the field of technology.
And it's not only the fossil fuels, lots of metal ores that are near enough surface and easy enough for such an upstart civilization to access are long gone.
Plants will continue to grow, etc, and that will keep them alive
It's not only one of its kind, there's one, rather common now, theory that says melting ice from arctic caused by global warming would cause golf stream to turn. That may not cause a "real" ice age, but it certainly would render most of northern europe uninhabitable, and could happen rather quickly.
And if that were to come true, trust me that we would not just idly sit there and die of starvation while the crops die, people would crowd to the more warm areas probably unleashing series of wars, maybe nuclear ones, this would be no small dispute over oil, but for the very survival. Did I mention nuclear war(s) would be a rather good way for that stone age to begin?
I haven't seen the program, but website linked states that they don't even expect it to be accurate due to chaotical nature of subject at hand and long timeframe. Merely saying that animals like those could _possibly_ evolve based on the scientific data is not claiming to know the future and say that they WILL.
Just one very small glimpse into one of countless potential futures. Nothing bad in that as long as it's acknowledged instead of 'em trying to claim that this and only this is exactly how it will be.
I dont think anyone has ever claimed that global warming, or much about anything else we can do, is somehow permanent. And most people agree that we indeed are in the middle of rather short warm period between ice ages, yes, temperatures will go down again.
Life survives, but any drastic changes are of course going to wreak havoc on all things we are now accustomed to and most depend on, man's position may seem stable, but it's not really very hard to imagine how easily we could be knocked back to stone age. Thus, better be carefully monitoring whichever way change is going, and be damn careful not to accelerate it in any way, and if possible, even try to brake.
It's of course early to speculate dunno if this "news" is even true, but maybe hardware prices will drop as a result. Kind of unfair for those people who don't care about that software or are perfectly happy with initial version to pay extra for hardware to support software development costs for who knows how far into the future they might have been estimated.
Now the people who want them, can buy only them without bothering others nor needing to purchase new hardware. This is kind of like how things work on PC side, brand makers bundle some commercial software into the initial price of the machine, but no major updates for free.
Hey, I got windows 98 and office 97 with my brand pc, their price was effectively included as part of the machine.
Now I'd like to upgrade my OS and Office to XP or 2002 or whatever they are called, are you claiming that HP/Dell/Compaq/whatever or MS should give them to me free? No? And what about that is different from what Apple is doing? Right, nothing.
MS has never charged you for an upgrade? Wake up, please.
What the hell are win95->win98->win98se->winme->win2k->winx p if not upgrades? And they sure as hell PAY, and A LOT. And updating those sometimes DOES force you to update something else, win32 is not any freaking wonderland without incompabilities because of versions, they may not be intended, but then again, that may well be the case with apple as well.
Of course you can start nitpicking about it not being the same because it's an OS and not some iApp, but that doesn't count, software is software is software, regardless whether it is operating system or something else.
And if you still won't buy that, well, bring on the office, visual suite, and all the other bazillions of m$ software that most certainly do pay to upgrade as well. Nobody has claimed that apple starts charging for bug/security fixes, but new versions, just like every other goddamnit software company on the planet does.
Because that's why things usually work in commercial software land.
You don't get fooDVD 3.0 for windoze free even if you bought v2, you don't get Photoshop 7 for mac free if you bought 3.0. You don't get Office 2002 for free even if o97 came with your machine sometime in the past.
Bugfixes and other minors things usually are free but major upgrades cost money, why would Apple have some special obligation to give their stuff away for free that others do not have?