There is nothing in this machine that makes it stand out; there is very little value and very little credibility to this company. Aside from the various violations in copyright law and End-User License Agreement made, this company fails to show how it is any cheaper or better than the Apple standard configurations.
I think this is good publicity for Apple, because it shows that its computers are priced very competitively for the features it offers. People have pointed out a Dell laptop or desktop with all of the same features as an iMac, MacBook, or MacBook Pro, in general is the same price or priced higher by just a $100 margin. Take into consideration the price of Windows Vista Ultimate, you might actually come out better with a Mac.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up because your post is one of those few posts that I really would like to mod up. What I can't understand is the Western mentality and sudden build of hate towards China. The Olympics is supposed to be a happy thing--yet people manage to connect something bad about China with it.
It seems that the Western media has been trying to pick a fight with China ever since the media tension of Iraq and September 11 attacks have begun to fade from recent memory. Now we hear stories of Chinese military build-ups, Cafferty of CNN labeling Chinese people as a bunch of fraudsters, etc. Why so much hate?
China isn't perfect, but Tibet and the Dalai Lama are far from it. This Dalai isn't for real, is he? Were he real, how can a good buhdda monk ran a counry with 95% of its people were bounded slaves in all his so called previous lives? The communist Chinese were no angels, but they did liberate all Tibetans from the 9 ranked unhumane fudeal society; except they were not Tibetans...
Dalai Lama was lording it up in his huge palace while the slave population was worked to death to provide him with more riches? And when the monks were raping young boys as punishment? I suggest you put down the CIA paid-for propaganda and start reading history books. Then you might not support the Dalai Bin Lama. The image of the Dalai Lama is as fake as China's own propaganda.
I really question why the Western world is so much in love with the idea of Tibet when they can't even get their facts straight.
As consumers are beginning to learn, why are movies that are being bought provided as a service? If you're going to DRM, you either offer all movies available to a collection at a flat rate, with the monthly fee as the right to access such collection--otherwise you don't. You either sell an album or you sell the right to listen to it.
DRM'ed marketplaces claim you are "buying" an album, but the reality is that DRM gives you the right to use it until they turn off their DRM servers. They need to advertise that; anything short of that is misrepresentation.
I should also add the only way they'd be able to detect in some cases is that the serial number isn't listed in the official database. The packaging will be exactly the same if they're knock-offs during the night; they'll just be unrecorded in the books.
The irony is that most of the "genuine" boards are made by Chinese companies, such as ASUS (CEO is ethnically Chinese, but born in Taiwan) who has operations in China. How do you tell a fake from a real these days? A friend of mine told me that the same factories that make real DVD boxes during the day are run at night and make *exactly* the same packaging for counterfeiting. Sometimes the counterfeit is the real McCoy.
It's a prime example of a business trying to get the advantages of the open source development model without giving back to the community. I think you'd be quite right in saying this is Doing It Wrong.
I have to say I disagree. If you look at how Zimbra (open-source Microsoft® Exchange slaughterer) works, it really is a miracle that you get a first-grade email server with CalDav, Jabber, Wiki, self-updating and indexing search, with a MySQL-based message store connected by an OpenLDAP implementation (with capabilities of integrating with other directories) in an interface of commercial quality and usability, you will find that this is open-source wedded with commercial enterprise done right.
And I don't disagree with their business model. I think it is perfectly acceptable for them to ensure that commercial releases are tested thoroughly for QA, and that connectors integrating with commercial technologies such as Outlook or iSync stay commercial. I have no qualms about paying for an Outlook connector or an iSync connector. If you don't pay for the commercial edition, you're on your own like any open-source software. But at the very least, you get to run a mail server that is not crippled and probably a very formidable competitor to Exchange (which sadly can't run in Opera, Safari, or Firefox).
I don't see why you guys don't think this can work. These companies deserve to be rewarded for their hard work, and they are making money by adding value to a product, not crippling it. If you're an all open-source user any way, why would you need an iSync or an Outlook connector? Perhaps the only thing they could do better is change their license to GPL instead of MPL.
Oh, and I hope Microsoft doesn't buy Yahoo. Because your next upgrade path is Exchange, if Zimbra isn't released from a Microsoft merger or forked to a new project.
A lot of people criticize Apple for being insecure, but how is this different from any of the kernel buffer overflow bugs on Linux? As I echoed in an earlier posting, it's not so much the platform, it's about whose code you run. No matter how secure your system is, no matter what version of Linux you run, if you run a piece of software with sudo that does rm -rf / , I honestly doubt you're going to have much left on your hard drive.
People like to criticize OS providers, but Apple has a pretty good strategy. A lot of the Cocoa frameworks are obscure, and so it's security by obscurity. But on the same token, it works to both their benefit and to their disadvantage, by simultaneously being able to fix on security bug on a framework that will fix it in most that use its Core-based frameworks (CoreImage, CoreAnimation, Quartz/PDF, etc), but also a disadvantage in that one bug in a Cocoa app could potentially affect all other Cocoa apps on the system.
Windows has brought in frameworks, and for the most part, they have been a mild success. But the problem with Windows is that its users have no way of telling what software to trust and what not to trust. They aren't as computer savvy as half the audience on Slashdot is, nor do they care; they just want things to work. Give a Grandma a Linux box and give her the root password and tell me what will happen a week later? When I type in a sudo password, I have no idea what to expect from a commercial program like IBM DB2. It's all about taking a leap of faith and by relying on history to tell you if you should trust something or not.
You're right. There is no real solution to the root problem. I know Linux users who run everything as ``root." I know users who install a software without checking for known signatures of it. People will dismiss the Apple security dialog for sudo rights just to get on with the next step.
The fact is that software is a trust issue. Open source is less frightening because the code is available for all to see and many use open source code because they trust the eyes of public scrutiny and its developers.
I can't believe people still have Windows, Darwin/OS X, or Linux have more/less security bugs. Granted, Windows has had more gaping holes and an inherently flawed security system, but it's really about the trust you give into a software.
You have no way of knowing that Adobe, Sony (rootkits, remember?), or Microsoft is out there to screw you with their call-home bugs and root kits. It's not so much a system trust, but a software trust. Ultimately, Linux is just as dangerous as Windows if a commercial piece of software is released for Linux that requests you to run it as root. And many users will. The same with Apple and its UNIX-based security levels.
No matter how good a platform is, any code can be a virus or a trojan horse if software developers decide to abuse the trust between them and their users. You can say that Apache is better than IIS, or Apple OS X is better than Windows, but when users type in the password to sudo, they are inherently trusting the software developers to do the right thing, especially with closed- and commercial- software where no source code is available for public scrutiny.
Blockbuster is already on the decline. Its decline is so obvious that it's the subject of mockery. The fact that they still charge a quasi-late fee (even though they claimed they eliminated fees) by calling it a "stocking charge" is proof enough that their store model is doomed. Even their online store doesn't charge a stocking fee for keeping a DVD longer than needed.
It kind of reminds me of an Onion gig: "Please, we're just asking for one more chance," added (vice president of marketing) Waters as she dropped to her knees and extended her arms out to the assembled crowd. They might be able to salvage some business, but as far as being the trendsetter? Too little, too late.
For those that don't know, Bruce Tonkin, Chair of the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) of ICANN, holds shares in Melbourne IT, which is an ICANN-approved registrar. Hence a conflict of interest. So don't ever run a WHOIS query on a registrar you intend to buy the name from!
It seems to me that FUD and Orwellian Emmanuel Goldstein propaganda is being spouted again. It's a classic example of the "us vs. them" mentality, with a high assumption and negative bias to the Chinese engineer as a spy for the PRC. Before September 11, the US was looking for an enemy; that enemy was China. There has been a great amount of discrimination towards the Chinese (even Taiwanese-Chinese) since then. It turns on Wen Ho Lee's case was the result of the collective laziness of scientists at the national laboratory, and in any other condition, would simply have been overlooked.
Was "naturalized" a necessary article in the description of the Chinese scientist? Whether we are naturalized or not, a US citizen is a US citizen, just as most people in the US have their roots from the Old World.
I am not against an investigation that could save us from disaster. But what I am against is the preponderance of guilt in public channels by people that represent our justice system: that the Chinese engineer is more likely to have stolen secrets for the PRC than to not have. Attorney Generals should refrain from making public statements.
I never understood why GPS is considered such a good feature in a cell phone. On the contrary, it is possibly a bad thing, given the number of cases of wire tapping, cell phone eavesdropping (even when turned off). We already have enough privacy concerns given that triangulation can already tell a close-enough location of a cell phone user.
I see a lot of implementation problems before even getting involved with the ethical issues. I mean, there's the usual friend-or-foe IDing issues. Then there's the problem of getting the software to recognise a weapon. If you program it to recognise the shape of an AK, it'll pick up replicas or toys or, heck, lots of stuff that looks vaguely gun-shaped. And the enemy will simply resort to distorting the shape of the weapon, which can't be hard to do. Given that it will be a while before AI technology will improve, it doesn't seen any more effective than a remote-controlled car.
And as far as the legal issues, this seems like skirting the boundaries, and definitely violating the spirit, if not the letter of the law.
Maybe his attorneys will be able to get some assistance from some of the Harvard Law School students in Professor Nesson's 'Evidence' class, who have been assigned -- as part of their coursework -- the drafting of a motion to quash an RIAA subpoena." How's that for applying classwork in a practical application? More schools should be doing what Harvard is doing instead of succumbing to the demands of the RIAA. I wish I had a professor like that...
Hell, do they have majors for "fireman"? I agree with you in principle, but they actually do offer a fire science as a degree program at schools such as Arizona State University. It's an applied science degree geared toward the preparation of fire service.
There are also other degrees that are vocational-oriented, besides the usual white-collar suspects (business, law, medical, engineering). Aviation Management is one that trains students to become a pilot. They are required to take a Calculus class, when the math graduation requirement for many majors is still basic Algebra.
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There is nothing in this machine that makes it stand out; there is very little value and very little credibility to this company. Aside from the various violations in copyright law and End-User License Agreement made, this company fails to show how it is any cheaper or better than the Apple standard configurations.
I think this is good publicity for Apple, because it shows that its computers are priced very competitively for the features it offers. People have pointed out a Dell laptop or desktop with all of the same features as an iMac, MacBook, or MacBook Pro, in general is the same price or priced higher by just a $100 margin. Take into consideration the price of Windows Vista Ultimate, you might actually come out better with a Mac.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up because your post is one of those few posts that I really would like to mod up. What I can't understand is the Western mentality and sudden build of hate towards China. The Olympics is supposed to be a happy thing--yet people manage to connect something bad about China with it.
It seems that the Western media has been trying to pick a fight with China ever since the media tension of Iraq and September 11 attacks have begun to fade from recent memory. Now we hear stories of Chinese military build-ups, Cafferty of CNN labeling Chinese people as a bunch of fraudsters, etc. Why so much hate?
China isn't perfect, but Tibet and the Dalai Lama are far from it. This Dalai isn't for real, is he? Were he real, how can a good buhdda monk ran a counry with 95% of its people were bounded slaves in all his so called previous lives? The communist Chinese were no angels, but they did liberate all Tibetans from the 9 ranked unhumane fudeal society; except they were not Tibetans...
Dalai Lama was lording it up in his huge palace while the slave population was worked to death to provide him with more riches? And when the monks were raping young boys as punishment? I suggest you put down the CIA paid-for propaganda and start reading history books. Then you might not support the Dalai Bin Lama. The image of the Dalai Lama is as fake as China's own propaganda.
I really question why the Western world is so much in love with the idea of Tibet when they can't even get their facts straight.
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
As consumers are beginning to learn, why are movies that are being bought provided as a service? If you're going to DRM, you either offer all movies available to a collection at a flat rate, with the monthly fee as the right to access such collection--otherwise you don't. You either sell an album or you sell the right to listen to it.
DRM'ed marketplaces claim you are "buying" an album, but the reality is that DRM gives you the right to use it until they turn off their DRM servers. They need to advertise that; anything short of that is misrepresentation.
I should also add the only way they'd be able to detect in some cases is that the serial number isn't listed in the official database. The packaging will be exactly the same if they're knock-offs during the night; they'll just be unrecorded in the books.
The irony is that most of the "genuine" boards are made by Chinese companies, such as ASUS (CEO is ethnically Chinese, but born in Taiwan) who has operations in China. How do you tell a fake from a real these days? A friend of mine told me that the same factories that make real DVD boxes during the day are run at night and make *exactly* the same packaging for counterfeiting. Sometimes the counterfeit is the real McCoy.
I have to say I disagree. If you look at how Zimbra (open-source Microsoft® Exchange slaughterer) works, it really is a miracle that you get a first-grade email server with CalDav, Jabber, Wiki, self-updating and indexing search, with a MySQL-based message store connected by an OpenLDAP implementation (with capabilities of integrating with other directories) in an interface of commercial quality and usability, you will find that this is open-source wedded with commercial enterprise done right.
And I don't disagree with their business model. I think it is perfectly acceptable for them to ensure that commercial releases are tested thoroughly for QA, and that connectors integrating with commercial technologies such as Outlook or iSync stay commercial. I have no qualms about paying for an Outlook connector or an iSync connector. If you don't pay for the commercial edition, you're on your own like any open-source software. But at the very least, you get to run a mail server that is not crippled and probably a very formidable competitor to Exchange (which sadly can't run in Opera, Safari, or Firefox).
I don't see why you guys don't think this can work. These companies deserve to be rewarded for their hard work, and they are making money by adding value to a product, not crippling it. If you're an all open-source user any way, why would you need an iSync or an Outlook connector? Perhaps the only thing they could do better is change their license to GPL instead of MPL.
Oh, and I hope Microsoft doesn't buy Yahoo. Because your next upgrade path is Exchange, if Zimbra isn't released from a Microsoft merger or forked to a new project.
A lot of people criticize Apple for being insecure, but how is this different from any of the kernel buffer overflow bugs on Linux? As I echoed in an earlier posting, it's not so much the platform, it's about whose code you run. No matter how secure your system is, no matter what version of Linux you run, if you run a piece of software with sudo that does rm -rf / , I honestly doubt you're going to have much left on your hard drive.
People like to criticize OS providers, but Apple has a pretty good strategy. A lot of the Cocoa frameworks are obscure, and so it's security by obscurity. But on the same token, it works to both their benefit and to their disadvantage, by simultaneously being able to fix on security bug on a framework that will fix it in most that use its Core-based frameworks (CoreImage, CoreAnimation, Quartz/PDF, etc), but also a disadvantage in that one bug in a Cocoa app could potentially affect all other Cocoa apps on the system.
Windows has brought in frameworks, and for the most part, they have been a mild success. But the problem with Windows is that its users have no way of telling what software to trust and what not to trust. They aren't as computer savvy as half the audience on Slashdot is, nor do they care; they just want things to work. Give a Grandma a Linux box and give her the root password and tell me what will happen a week later? When I type in a sudo password, I have no idea what to expect from a commercial program like IBM DB2. It's all about taking a leap of faith and by relying on history to tell you if you should trust something or not.
You're right. There is no real solution to the root problem. I know Linux users who run everything as ``root." I know users who install a software without checking for known signatures of it. People will dismiss the Apple security dialog for sudo rights just to get on with the next step.
The fact is that software is a trust issue. Open source is less frightening because the code is available for all to see and many use open source code because they trust the eyes of public scrutiny and its developers.
I can't believe people still have Windows, Darwin/OS X, or Linux have more/less security bugs. Granted, Windows has had more gaping holes and an inherently flawed security system, but it's really about the trust you give into a software.
You have no way of knowing that Adobe, Sony (rootkits, remember?), or Microsoft is out there to screw you with their call-home bugs and root kits. It's not so much a system trust, but a software trust. Ultimately, Linux is just as dangerous as Windows if a commercial piece of software is released for Linux that requests you to run it as root. And many users will. The same with Apple and its UNIX-based security levels.
No matter how good a platform is, any code can be a virus or a trojan horse if software developers decide to abuse the trust between them and their users. You can say that Apache is better than IIS, or Apple OS X is better than Windows, but when users type in the password to sudo, they are inherently trusting the software developers to do the right thing, especially with closed- and commercial- software where no source code is available for public scrutiny.
Blockbuster is already on the decline. Its decline is so obvious that it's the subject of mockery. The fact that they still charge a quasi-late fee (even though they claimed they eliminated fees) by calling it a "stocking charge" is proof enough that their store model is doomed. Even their online store doesn't charge a stocking fee for keeping a DVD longer than needed.
It kind of reminds me of an Onion gig: "Please, we're just asking for one more chance," added (vice president of marketing) Waters as she dropped to her knees and extended her arms out to the assembled crowd. They might be able to salvage some business, but as far as being the trendsetter? Too little, too late.
For those that don't know, Bruce Tonkin, Chair of the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) of ICANN, holds shares in Melbourne IT, which is an ICANN-approved registrar. Hence a conflict of interest. So don't ever run a WHOIS query on a registrar you intend to buy the name from!
It seems to me that FUD and Orwellian Emmanuel Goldstein propaganda is being spouted again. It's a classic example of the "us vs. them" mentality, with a high assumption and negative bias to the Chinese engineer as a spy for the PRC. Before September 11, the US was looking for an enemy; that enemy was China. There has been a great amount of discrimination towards the Chinese (even Taiwanese-Chinese) since then. It turns on Wen Ho Lee's case was the result of the collective laziness of scientists at the national laboratory, and in any other condition, would simply have been overlooked. Was "naturalized" a necessary article in the description of the Chinese scientist? Whether we are naturalized or not, a US citizen is a US citizen, just as most people in the US have their roots from the Old World. I am not against an investigation that could save us from disaster. But what I am against is the preponderance of guilt in public channels by people that represent our justice system: that the Chinese engineer is more likely to have stolen secrets for the PRC than to not have. Attorney Generals should refrain from making public statements.
I never understood why GPS is considered such a good feature in a cell phone. On the contrary, it is possibly a bad thing, given the number of cases of wire tapping, cell phone eavesdropping (even when turned off). We already have enough privacy concerns given that triangulation can already tell a close-enough location of a cell phone user.
I see a lot of implementation problems before even getting involved with the ethical issues. I mean, there's the usual friend-or-foe IDing issues. Then there's the problem of getting the software to recognise a weapon. If you program it to recognise the shape of an AK, it'll pick up replicas or toys or, heck, lots of stuff that looks vaguely gun-shaped. And the enemy will simply resort to distorting the shape of the weapon, which can't be hard to do. Given that it will be a while before AI technology will improve, it doesn't seen any more effective than a remote-controlled car. And as far as the legal issues, this seems like skirting the boundaries, and definitely violating the spirit, if not the letter of the law.
As with any never-ending chain: who's the cop of the cops?