Making "gobs and gobs" of money doesn't sound dead in the water to me. Being irrelevant AND making gobs and gobs of money sounds ideal, really; you don't need to do much except have a treasure bath.
So how do you refer to the greedy part of coprorate america, as distinct from the non-greedy part of coprorate america, if you don't use the greedy corporate america phrase?
Also imagine Disk Utility having a popup to format a Disk that made users choose between:
Don't confuse possibilities with defaults. There's two mechanisms already established for giving advanced users more choices: Option-click a control or menu item to get more choices. Or a show-advanced-options preference without a GUI interface that you can turn on with the "defaults write" command.
Plus the whole "Advanced Options" kind of button....
School buses aren't out making both directions stop.
Taxis aren't double-parked blocking the through lane.
Stopping and starting for traffic lights, even if you don't stay there long, is also bad for your average speed. If you accellerate hard to get back to speed, you burn a lot more fuel than accelerating slowly. (The motorbike I own, a Honda ST1100, is known for 50+ mpg if you "ease" away from stops... but mid-40s if you ride it like it is supposed to be ridden.)
And braking hard at the last minute for a light doesn't do you any good; the light's already changed, you're waiting anyway--if you get to the red light faster, you're just stopped longer.
Basically, in-town commuting is horrible. I'd rather be in a subway tunnel than on the roads. So I've got a transit pass.
SoundCheck is horrible. It seems to work on transient peak volume, rather than RMS or any other sustained measure of real or perceived levels.
As a result, if you have a seriously mixed-genre collection and you've got the whole mess on Shuffle, you have to swing the volume level by very large amounts. And boy does it hurt when a track that is marked as "quiet" by SoundCheck comes along, but it's really fairly loud on average--it just doesn't have big peaks.
Fortunately, for Mac users, there's a solution, that works by re-computing the SoundCheck level with a much better acoustic model--but it takes much, much, much longer. It took SoundCheck a couple of hours to process my library, and iVolume a couple of days. (It also can't work with protected files because you can't get the raw digital wave out of a protected file. But I wanted all that stuff in MP3 anyway, so I burned audio CDs and ripped them back--iTunes does a great job of keeping all the ID3 information when you do that. Though not album artwork.)
On suitable architectures, modern sudo includes a LD_PRELOAD library which it injects to prevent programs from exec()ing other programs. It's still not foolproof, of course, but it makes things like "someuser ALL=(root) NOEXEC:vi" a lot safer.
Don't forget the built-in Bluetooth, for even more keyboards and mice to choose from. Add a program like Salling Clicker, and you can use your Bluetooth PDA or cellphone as a remote.
In your first case, actually licensing the patent to someone else is "doing something with it". They're not squatting, they're actually going and finding someone who can bring their idea to production.
Even in your second case, they "did something"--though they cannot market the product, they can show progress towards design and the reason why they cannot complete it. That sounds more than good enough to show that it isn't squatting.
...and thus was born a generation of RCE-immune region-free players.
At least, the region free firmware for my Apex 1500 doesn't interfere with any RCE discs, and works just fine with all my imported discs. (And it does Macrovision-disable, so I got one for my Mom to hook to her old TV through her old VCR.)
My super-cheap-and-crappy region-free Nova player doesn't have any trouble with RCE discs either. Though it gets a bit snarky about some of my home-burned DVDs (that I made from my old VHS tapes, haven't really tried dups of real DVDs on it).
Some of the earlier decks did, indeed, fail to completely obey the UOP specification.
In fact, early decks had a handy Stop-Play trick: insert the disc, hit STOP while it was deciding if it was a DVD or CD, then hit Play and it would start playing at Chapter 1. (Or you could hit the chapter button and go anywhere you wanted.)
I really should un-hack my Panasonic A300, that's still a nice deck.
Apple got very vigorously ripped on for switching to Windows-type file suffixes and hiding them by default when the OS X Public Betas came out. There was some amount of yelling going around before that with the Developer Previews. Google should be able to find it for you. The concession Apple made at the time was the addition of the "Show extension" or "Use extension" checkboxes. (And some of the "Use extension" ones just cause the Save dialog to show the extension it will add--it always adds one.) Damn it, we liked type/creator, all they needed was a way of configuring a way to open a given type in a particular app rather than the creator app, and everyone could be happy. (Like having most things open in the creator, but all jpegs and gifs open in your favorite viewer.)
I believe as of Tiger the default is no longer to hide extensions, but I've never run a fresh install of Tiger, only upgrades from Panther (from Jaguar (from Cheetah...)).
But, even with Windows-type suffixes, you still have to deal with UNIX Execute permission and have a well-formed executable. (Yes, I know Windows NT and NTFS have an execute permission, and the kernel obeys it. It's just set to ON on every file I've ever seen, except where I've explicitly cleared it.)
What this means is that Apple has an excellent opportunity to somehow make program and data files visually distinct. Use the X bit, the TYPE code, and/or the file header to highlight "clicking on me starts a new application" somehow. Overlaid gear icon? Obviously you have to mark applications, if you mark data as "safe", then someone just has to fake up an application icon with the "safe" mark.
Now you've still got Carbon and Classic-created files which have their X bits turned on by default because the APIs didn't exist--that default really should be changed to X bit OFF. After all, how many Carbon and Classic applications create executable files? Someone writing shell scripts in a Classic program is going to know how to deal with missing X, I hope. (As long as the interface layer preserves X on overwrite, this would be like having to chmod +x your new shell script on standard Unix.)
Back in the 80s, and early 90s, most VHS (and Beta) tapes came out at more than $100 per. 6 months to a year later they dropped to the $20-$40 range. This was for what they called "sell-through", the higher prices at initial release were to milk the most out of the rental shops. Some tapes never did hit sell-through until the mid-90s when the movie houses realized that there was something to this home-video thing after all. (And the big rental stores wanted 100s of each new movie for their guaranteed-available-new-release thing.)
Rich-content e-mail is just another one of the results of the battle between Netscape and Microsoft. They both added programming languages to HTML (JavaScript and VBScript). I hold Netscape just as responsible for the ensuing damage to the network.
One of these days I'm going to see if I can rig Thunderbird to alert on any attempt to fetch a URL from an e-mail tries to go to a host which differs from the From address. So spoofers can still send out "account-confirm@paypal.com", but they'd have to find an XSS exploit because all their links would have to go to http://something.paypal.com/. Just a "Hey, did you mean that" alert, so friends can still mail URLs to each other.
PowerPC CPUs have been superscalar all the way to the PowerPC 601, in 1992.
They go farther back than that: the POWER processor is also superscalar, though it was not a single-chip design. I think that takes the timeline back to 1988 or 1989, for availability in 1990. A load-store unit, a fixed-point unit, a floating-point unit, and a branch/control unit. Because of the "fused-multiply-add" instruction, they claimed it could complete 5 operations (but 4 instructions) per clock. (I think I remembered all that right....)
When I first saw the assembly reference for those processors, I had to ask, "Does the 'R' really mean 'R'educed?" Doesn't sound as good, but 'Regularized' makes more sense in many current RISC designs.
Maybe these guys (caution, may contain Flash) can turn their attention to a suitable V8-powered weedwacker; if you dare them to do it now, they might have one ready for spring.
How can you have a viable DRM implementation under any open license?
As another poster commented, if you have to keep something secret (like a decryption key), then your source code is incomplete and useless--you can't build a working decoder from it.
If you can build a working decoder, you can decode to anything you want. There's no reason for it to be the screen or sound card, it can just as easily be an unencumbered file in your P2P shared directory.
Now it would be nice if we can get Nikon out of the 35mm frame mindset when designing future SLR gear.
But that single frame size is what gives you that line of interchangeable lenses that make typical SLRs attractive in the first place!
There are SLR cameras that have a non-interchangable lenses, but that's not what people think about when they talk about an SLR. In fact, many people forget that meaning or SLR is that the viewfinder looks through the main lens, and concentrate on the interchangable lens aspect.
So, I don't see 35mm frame size going away any time soon. Digital cameras and backs for other standard sizes are already out there--but boy does a medium-format digital back run for some impressive $$$.
You are all lamers! Using massively bloated or merely bloated editors, when everyone who is anyone knows that it is ed that is the Standard Editor!
It is small! It is efficient! It is scriptable! It works with any termcap, no matter how broken! It works on a 52 bps paper teletype!
Ed is so useful, a very handy UNIX tool is named after one of its internal commands: g/re/p!
Why do you need anything else? And there are no confusing error messages to understand!
(Seriously, there's this "you know you're a real sysadmin when" moment when you actually make it through a VI "open mode" session because the termcaps are still on the disk that hasn't mounted and which you're trying to repair from the emergency single-user session using some strange IBM TTY that doesn't do any VT or ANSI terminal emulation. If you haven't used "open mode", it's only slightly more sophisticated than ed all on its own. Ed is actually easier to use.... And OS X does have ed.)
Don't forget that, in 1995 and 1996, Apple made some of the crappiest low-end machines of their existence. Look up the Performa 5200/5300 and 6200/6300 family, googling up "road apples" should help.
Having shit low-end machines means anyone "just trying" a Mac gets a horrible user experience ever, slow machines, unstable software, and so on. And then they buy something else for their next box.
And those low-end machines weren't that cheap, either.
It is possible to build a dock-connector plug which gives line-out. I can't think of one that ONLY does line-out, but I do have a car/AC combination charger which also provides a line-out jack on the body, so you only need one lead coming from the iPod itself, even without the dock.
It was about the same price as one of the docks, IIRC.
The Repair Extension covers a machine up to a specific date, which has passed, OR up to three years after the date of purchase, whichever gives MORE coverage. Many machines are, therefore, still covered, particularly the later-purchased 800 MHz machines and the 900 MHz speed-bumped machines.
Plus, the repair is warranted for 90 days.
If you're getting intermittent display faults and want to force a failure, run "glxgears" for a while.
I found out the Magic Incantations to talk to the right people at Apple too late after the last failure, as the repair was already underway. So they sent me an Airport Express instead, which is a pricey-but-neat way to hook up the hi-fi to iTunes. (Or anything, with appropriate extra software.)
The magic is, you want to talk to Consumer Releations, not the regular support people.
They did hint that if it fails again, they'll replace the unit--and to call Consumer Relations directly next time it goes, even outside of the 90-day repair warranty.
I've got LG for my cheap writer, after being quite happy with their CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives. It's worked a treat. My first DVD burner was a Pioneer A04, mainly 'cause of Mac OS compatibility. By that same logic, I replaced the A04 with a 110D, which isn't Mac OS officially supported--but it no longer matters, because Tiger doesn't care as much and I know about PatchBurn now anyway.
The LG has been more reliable at linked packet writing than the very slightly more expensive Pioneer 110D. Both of them do Disk-At-Once nicely. I recently switched backup media to DVD+R from -R, and upgraded the Pioneer's firmware, and put them both on USB 2.0 instead of FireWire, and they both work well now. Something about the Pioneer and my cheapo USB + FireWire cages was resulting in complete FireWire bus hangs.
So LG, despite being Goldstar + some other companies, is gaining marks in my books.
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Making "gobs and gobs" of money doesn't sound dead in the water to me. Being irrelevant AND making gobs and gobs of money sounds ideal, really; you don't need to do much except have a treasure bath.
So how do you refer to the greedy part of coprorate america, as distinct from the non-greedy part of coprorate america, if you don't use the greedy corporate america phrase?
Don't confuse possibilities with defaults. There's two mechanisms already established for giving advanced users more choices: Option-click a control or menu item to get more choices. Or a show-advanced-options preference without a GUI interface that you can turn on with the "defaults write" command.
Plus the whole "Advanced Options" kind of button....
Don't forget:
Stopping and starting for traffic lights, even if you don't stay there long, is also bad for your average speed. If you accellerate hard to get back to speed, you burn a lot more fuel than accelerating slowly. (The motorbike I own, a Honda ST1100, is known for 50+ mpg if you "ease" away from stops... but mid-40s if you ride it like it is supposed to be ridden.)
And braking hard at the last minute for a light doesn't do you any good; the light's already changed, you're waiting anyway--if you get to the red light faster, you're just stopped longer.
Basically, in-town commuting is horrible. I'd rather be in a subway tunnel than on the roads. So I've got a transit pass.
As a result, if you have a seriously mixed-genre collection and you've got the whole mess on Shuffle, you have to swing the volume level by very large amounts. And boy does it hurt when a track that is marked as "quiet" by SoundCheck comes along, but it's really fairly loud on average--it just doesn't have big peaks.
Fortunately, for Mac users, there's a solution, that works by re-computing the SoundCheck level with a much better acoustic model--but it takes much, much, much longer. It took SoundCheck a couple of hours to process my library, and iVolume a couple of days. (It also can't work with protected files because you can't get the raw digital wave out of a protected file. But I wanted all that stuff in MP3 anyway, so I burned audio CDs and ripped them back--iTunes does a great job of keeping all the ID3 information when you do that. Though not album artwork.)
On suitable architectures, modern sudo includes a LD_PRELOAD library which it injects to prevent programs from exec()ing other programs. It's still not foolproof, of course, but it makes things like "someuser ALL=(root) NOEXEC:vi" a lot safer.
Don't forget the built-in Bluetooth, for even more keyboards and mice to choose from. Add a program like Salling Clicker, and you can use your Bluetooth PDA or cellphone as a remote.
Even in your second case, they "did something"--though they cannot market the product, they can show progress towards design and the reason why they cannot complete it. That sounds more than good enough to show that it isn't squatting.
At least, the region free firmware for my Apex 1500 doesn't interfere with any RCE discs, and works just fine with all my imported discs. (And it does Macrovision-disable, so I got one for my Mom to hook to her old TV through her old VCR.)
My super-cheap-and-crappy region-free Nova player doesn't have any trouble with RCE discs either. Though it gets a bit snarky about some of my home-burned DVDs (that I made from my old VHS tapes, haven't really tried dups of real DVDs on it).
In fact, early decks had a handy Stop-Play trick: insert the disc, hit STOP while it was deciding if it was a DVD or CD, then hit Play and it would start playing at Chapter 1. (Or you could hit the chapter button and go anywhere you wanted.)
I really should un-hack my Panasonic A300, that's still a nice deck.
I believe as of Tiger the default is no longer to hide extensions, but I've never run a fresh install of Tiger, only upgrades from Panther (from Jaguar (from Cheetah...)).
But, even with Windows-type suffixes, you still have to deal with UNIX Execute permission and have a well-formed executable. (Yes, I know Windows NT and NTFS have an execute permission, and the kernel obeys it. It's just set to ON on every file I've ever seen, except where I've explicitly cleared it.)
What this means is that Apple has an excellent opportunity to somehow make program and data files visually distinct. Use the X bit, the TYPE code, and/or the file header to highlight "clicking on me starts a new application" somehow. Overlaid gear icon? Obviously you have to mark applications, if you mark data as "safe", then someone just has to fake up an application icon with the "safe" mark.
Now you've still got Carbon and Classic-created files which have their X bits turned on by default because the APIs didn't exist--that default really should be changed to X bit OFF. After all, how many Carbon and Classic applications create executable files? Someone writing shell scripts in a Classic program is going to know how to deal with missing X, I hope. (As long as the interface layer preserves X on overwrite, this would be like having to chmod +x your new shell script on standard Unix.)
Back in the 80s, and early 90s, most VHS (and Beta) tapes came out at more than $100 per. 6 months to a year later they dropped to the $20-$40 range. This was for what they called "sell-through", the higher prices at initial release were to milk the most out of the rental shops. Some tapes never did hit sell-through until the mid-90s when the movie houses realized that there was something to this home-video thing after all. (And the big rental stores wanted 100s of each new movie for their guaranteed-available-new-release thing.)
Apple laptops don't always explode.
Sometimes they just have a serious thermal fault in the main logic board.
Here's hoping the iBook G4 doesn't have that particular fault, I'd like to try some different failures....
Rich-content e-mail is just another one of the results of the battle between Netscape and Microsoft. They both added programming languages to HTML (JavaScript and VBScript). I hold Netscape just as responsible for the ensuing damage to the network.
One of these days I'm going to see if I can rig Thunderbird to alert on any attempt to fetch a URL from an e-mail tries to go to a host which differs from the From address. So spoofers can still send out "account-confirm@paypal.com", but they'd have to find an XSS exploit because all their links would have to go to http://something.paypal.com/. Just a "Hey, did you mean that" alert, so friends can still mail URLs to each other.
They go farther back than that: the POWER processor is also superscalar, though it was not a single-chip design. I think that takes the timeline back to 1988 or 1989, for availability in 1990. A load-store unit, a fixed-point unit, a floating-point unit, and a branch/control unit. Because of the "fused-multiply-add" instruction, they claimed it could complete 5 operations (but 4 instructions) per clock. (I think I remembered all that right....)
When I first saw the assembly reference for those processors, I had to ask, "Does the 'R' really mean 'R'educed?" Doesn't sound as good, but 'Regularized' makes more sense in many current RISC designs.
Maybe these guys (caution, may contain Flash) can turn their attention to a suitable V8-powered weedwacker; if you dare them to do it now, they might have one ready for spring.
How can you have a viable DRM implementation under any open license?
As another poster commented, if you have to keep something secret (like a decryption key), then your source code is incomplete and useless--you can't build a working decoder from it.
If you can build a working decoder, you can decode to anything you want. There's no reason for it to be the screen or sound card, it can just as easily be an unencumbered file in your P2P shared directory.
But that single frame size is what gives you that line of interchangeable lenses that make typical SLRs attractive in the first place!
There are SLR cameras that have a non-interchangable lenses, but that's not what people think about when they talk about an SLR. In fact, many people forget that meaning or SLR is that the viewfinder looks through the main lens, and concentrate on the interchangable lens aspect.
So, I don't see 35mm frame size going away any time soon. Digital cameras and backs for other standard sizes are already out there--but boy does a medium-format digital back run for some impressive $$$.
It is small! It is efficient! It is scriptable! It works with any termcap, no matter how broken! It works on a 52 bps paper teletype!
Ed is so useful, a very handy UNIX tool is named after one of its internal commands: g/re/p!
Why do you need anything else? And there are no confusing error messages to understand!
(Seriously, there's this "you know you're a real sysadmin when" moment when you actually make it through a VI "open mode" session because the termcaps are still on the disk that hasn't mounted and which you're trying to repair from the emergency single-user session using some strange IBM TTY that doesn't do any VT or ANSI terminal emulation. If you haven't used "open mode", it's only slightly more sophisticated than ed all on its own. Ed is actually easier to use.... And OS X does have ed.)
(For the truly humor-impaired....)
Having shit low-end machines means anyone "just trying" a Mac gets a horrible user experience ever, slow machines, unstable software, and so on. And then they buy something else for their next box.
And those low-end machines weren't that cheap, either.
It was about the same price as one of the docks, IIRC.
The warranty extension has not completely ended.
The Repair Extension covers a machine up to a specific date, which has passed, OR up to three years after the date of purchase, whichever gives MORE coverage. Many machines are, therefore, still covered, particularly the later-purchased 800 MHz machines and the 900 MHz speed-bumped machines.
Plus, the repair is warranted for 90 days.
If you're getting intermittent display faults and want to force a failure, run "glxgears" for a while.
The magic is, you want to talk to Consumer Releations, not the regular support people.
They did hint that if it fails again, they'll replace the unit--and to call Consumer Relations directly next time it goes, even outside of the 90-day repair warranty.
I'm getting good at changing all the machine-spacific preference files to match the new Ethernet MAC address that comes with a new board.
The LG has been more reliable at linked packet writing than the very slightly more expensive Pioneer 110D. Both of them do Disk-At-Once nicely. I recently switched backup media to DVD+R from -R, and upgraded the Pioneer's firmware, and put them both on USB 2.0 instead of FireWire, and they both work well now. Something about the Pioneer and my cheapo USB + FireWire cages was resulting in complete FireWire bus hangs.
So LG, despite being Goldstar + some other companies, is gaining marks in my books.