OK, now that the analogy has run its course: a multitouch trackpad has nothing in common with a clutch pedal, and using one finger for a primary click and two for a secondary click is a perfectly natural way to do things. After just a day or two you will find yourself wanting to do it on other people's machines instead of feeling around for a second button.
I'm not following the logic in your hypothetical scenario.
Look at it this way: when you buy the Mac, you get a copy of OS X with it. When you buy a boxed version of OS X, you are buying a copy that is licensed to be installed on a Mac.
Look, I don't like it either, but nobody's lying to you. Until the courts decide otherwise, Apple can tell you you're not allowed to install OS X on your PC because the license only covers Macs.
Now, them telling you that doesn't *mean* anything, because they're not going to go after an individual anyway.* They are however going after Psystar. That they got to a courtroom without the judge simply dismissing the case and saying "your license terms don't hold up" should tell you that the word "lie" is a bit melodramatic.
* Note the Microsoft actually does, in the form of building time bombs into Windows that will cripple the system if WGA is not passed. And that's on top of the mandatory activation. Everyone has come to accept this, and it barely gets brought up these days. So why is Apple's bundling of hardware and software, which is a business model that predates the personal/micro computer, still considered outrageous?
"Music, in general, is less popular". I have trouble figuring out what that even means.
*Everything* is in a decline right now. But music specifically has a problem where the product for the first time has become easier to copy than it is to buy. This is not people voting against Kelly Clarkson by valiantly pledging to torrent it instead of buying the CD. Like some sort of economic American Idol. This is people taking advantage of getting stuff for free and not getting caught.
Last month a lot of non-Top 40 acts were at the top of the Billboard charts. Bands like "TV on the Radio", who, despite having a very large audience, are not the sort of band that your average Reader's Digest subscriber knows or cares about. If anything, that trend might point to people rejecting mass market pop, but consider this: people who care enough about music to buy a full album are a dying breed. Fire up iTunes, the current largest music retailer. Their best-seller is Flo Rida, "Right Round". That song was terrible the first time it came out, twenty-four damn years ago.
Music involves kids taking flute lessons, college marching bands, wedding songs, battery operated greeting cards. Music permeates culture, you can't just say it's not popular. Maybe we can say that the CD format is declining, and the full length album is going with it. But from where I stand it's not because people's tastes are improving any.
Do you even listen to real music? Or do you just listen to Weird Al and video game soundtracks as you type your anonymous screeds about the "soul of recording"?
2008 was a good year for indies, and 2009 was shaping up to be even better, even before SXSW. So no, not "every popular band" sounds like shit. Buy some good music, then you won't have to be so cranky.
I guarantee you would not be able to tell whether or not an album was produced with Pro Tools or anything else just by listening.
Besides replacing a faulty fan here and there, I can't say I've ever swapped out anything on a laptop besides HDD & RAM, and I've opened up more of them then I like to think about. If something breaks on a laptop board, you have to hope it's on the outside and a little solder will fix it, otherwise you're out a laptop. It's not worth the money to do any significant repairs and I don't know that it ever was.
The idea of the Apple tax relies on the idea that Macs and PCs are equivalent. That with a Mac you are paying extra to get the same product.
Is that definitely true or false? I don't know. It depends on the person. Obviously Ballmer wants you to think they're the same, and the dig quoted here is designed to imply that, without his having to actually say it. For me personally, it's not true at all.
At least in the US, it also has to do with the circuit courts suddenly granting software patents in the 90s, despite the fact that SCOTUS has been always been very clear that algorithms are not eligible.
I know some people don't consider software to be algorithms, but I do, and besides, the actual criteria goes deeper than that.
Seriously. If you don't want it online, or you're not allowed to put it online: don't put it online.
Us techs increasingly sound like grizzled frontiersmen by saying this. But it's just how the internet works. Do I care that after '95 a bunch of guys with MBAs showed up and thought you could slap a Terms of Use on something and change the laws of physics?
Material on a server should be expected to be served, hypertext should be expected to be hyperlinked to.
There is one thing that's extremely slow on Firefox, but I think it's actually a bug. If I try to open the bookmarks/history library on Windows FF over an VPN+RDP session, it takes ages. SQLite must be using the network somehow. The bookmarks in general are slower now. But I really like the Library so it's sort of a tradeoff for me.
I definitely agree that FF used to be a lot leaner, and I was one of the many people that switched from Mozilla to Phoenix. But somewhere along the way I got hooked on the specific features that Firefox provides, so it'd have to slow down considerably before I thought it worth it to switch. I was worried it would get to that point but FF3 has behaved better for me than the later builds of FF2 did.
Obviously as far as Chrome is concerned, being Windows-only is sort of a deal-breaker for those of us in mixed environments. As I get older I notice that I really don't care if my software is slow unless it's really slow. Maybe it's less caffeine too:)
Who cares, if it has all of the features you need? Racing browsers is sort of like arguing over who has the biggest window cut into their PC case. Nobody "wins" that one:)
Here's my anecdote: I have not seen Firefox crash in at least the last six months, and have used both the 3.0 branch and 3.1 beta heavily. This is the Mac version, mind you. But I use the Windows 3.0 at work every day and that's never come down either. And I'm running plenty of plugins.
In all honesty I think at least half of the crap that crashes browsers is related to ads, and since I have those blocked, I don't have issues. It'd take a proxy server for me to do that with a stable build of Chrome and I just don't see the point.
Not that I don't like Chrome. I just can't remember the last time anything crashed on me. IE6 and the early FF3 and Chrome betas I guess.
I read what you said earlier about him suing to create a precedent. I still think he should have just included them in whatever he's suing Paramount for, but if what he's doing is SOP then I guess I was incorrect. I had a more practical impression of how lawsuits work but I guess with a suit against a large organization it would make sense to get a judge involved as early as possible.
Yes but lawsuits are all about damages. Perhaps I should have said "only principle".
The remedy that you receive is based on the damage done. It's not black and white, like "they wronged me so I want them to suffer the embarrassment of losing a lawsuit." You have to put a number on it, and if that number is too low for small claims, then you settle your differences by tossing a glass of scotch on the guy. It's how these things are done.
When you enter the court your are taking up the time of the judge, the clerks, the lawyers, and everyone who has to wait in line behind you to have their case heard. I'm sure Ellison is just doing this unofficially in order to create a little chaos.
The ones where people don't have over $100 to piss away on the layer that sits between the hardware and the web browser. I should have said many locations, I guess. But I was thinking netbooks as well, that's not really a location.
There will always be room for commercial and proprietary software. Especially if it is innovative. But I don't see a good reason why linux can't do to Windows what it did to traditional Unixes.
PC was a brand name. As in "IBM PC". Then everything that ran the same software was an IBM compatible, or a PC compatible. Then it was Wintel, but the "PC" name never died.
Cool parties are overrated. It's funny how Hodgman is the stuffy PC but in real life he's 100x hipper than Justin Long. The man wrote a fictional history of important hobos for christ's sake.
In a similar way I think linux's strength is in it's openness, and the marketing doesn't tell that story well. It's a tortoise and hare story. Desktop adoption is slow but in many markets I feel it is inevitable.
+1 on the "no trifles" bit. Judges don't like lawsuits based on principle because, well, you're supposed to be suing for damages. If it's just about the principle of the thing then send them a letter or something.
I'd imagine they'd offer all of the versions in those markets. And maybe anytime upgrade will work on Starter. So it'd be less like singling out and more like those OEMs have another option.
I'll bet a lot of those machines will end up as kiosks.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, now that the analogy has run its course: a multitouch trackpad has nothing in common with a clutch pedal, and using one finger for a primary click and two for a secondary click is a perfectly natural way to do things. After just a day or two you will find yourself wanting to do it on other people's machines instead of feeling around for a second button.
I'm not following the logic in your hypothetical scenario.
Look at it this way: when you buy the Mac, you get a copy of OS X with it. When you buy a boxed version of OS X, you are buying a copy that is licensed to be installed on a Mac.
Look, I don't like it either, but nobody's lying to you. Until the courts decide otherwise, Apple can tell you you're not allowed to install OS X on your PC because the license only covers Macs.
Now, them telling you that doesn't *mean* anything, because they're not going to go after an individual anyway.* They are however going after Psystar. That they got to a courtroom without the judge simply dismissing the case and saying "your license terms don't hold up" should tell you that the word "lie" is a bit melodramatic.
* Note the Microsoft actually does, in the form of building time bombs into Windows that will cripple the system if WGA is not passed. And that's on top of the mandatory activation. Everyone has come to accept this, and it barely gets brought up these days. So why is Apple's bundling of hardware and software, which is a business model that predates the personal/micro computer, still considered outrageous?
"Music, in general, is less popular". I have trouble figuring out what that even means.
*Everything* is in a decline right now. But music specifically has a problem where the product for the first time has become easier to copy than it is to buy. This is not people voting against Kelly Clarkson by valiantly pledging to torrent it instead of buying the CD. Like some sort of economic American Idol. This is people taking advantage of getting stuff for free and not getting caught.
Last month a lot of non-Top 40 acts were at the top of the Billboard charts. Bands like "TV on the Radio", who, despite having a very large audience, are not the sort of band that your average Reader's Digest subscriber knows or cares about. If anything, that trend might point to people rejecting mass market pop, but consider this: people who care enough about music to buy a full album are a dying breed. Fire up iTunes, the current largest music retailer. Their best-seller is Flo Rida, "Right Round". That song was terrible the first time it came out, twenty-four damn years ago.
Music involves kids taking flute lessons, college marching bands, wedding songs, battery operated greeting cards. Music permeates culture, you can't just say it's not popular. Maybe we can say that the CD format is declining, and the full length album is going with it. But from where I stand it's not because people's tastes are improving any.
Do you even listen to real music? Or do you just listen to Weird Al and video game soundtracks as you type your anonymous screeds about the "soul of recording"?
2008 was a good year for indies, and 2009 was shaping up to be even better, even before SXSW. So no, not "every popular band" sounds like shit. Buy some good music, then you won't have to be so cranky.
I guarantee you would not be able to tell whether or not an album was produced with Pro Tools or anything else just by listening.
Besides replacing a faulty fan here and there, I can't say I've ever swapped out anything on a laptop besides HDD & RAM, and I've opened up more of them then I like to think about. If something breaks on a laptop board, you have to hope it's on the outside and a little solder will fix it, otherwise you're out a laptop. It's not worth the money to do any significant repairs and I don't know that it ever was.
The idea of the Apple tax relies on the idea that Macs and PCs are equivalent. That with a Mac you are paying extra to get the same product.
Is that definitely true or false? I don't know. It depends on the person. Obviously Ballmer wants you to think they're the same, and the dig quoted here is designed to imply that, without his having to actually say it. For me personally, it's not true at all.
They came first for SOAP, and I didn't speak up because SOAP is hella lame.
Then they came for XML, and I didn't speak up because I'm always stuck debugging some terrible custom XML parser at work.
Then they came for HTTP, and by that time, no one was left to speak up...except for the people on IRC, and nobody cares what those dudes have to say.
Konqueror is kalling.
At least in the US, it also has to do with the circuit courts suddenly granting software patents in the 90s, despite the fact that SCOTUS has been always been very clear that algorithms are not eligible.
I know some people don't consider software to be algorithms, but I do, and besides, the actual criteria goes deeper than that.
Why is this modded funny? It's true, and it's terrifying.
Well, I don't think it's an actual patent, but it's at least true that they applied.
Seriously. If you don't want it online, or you're not allowed to put it online: don't put it online.
Us techs increasingly sound like grizzled frontiersmen by saying this. But it's just how the internet works. Do I care that after '95 a bunch of guys with MBAs showed up and thought you could slap a Terms of Use on something and change the laws of physics?
Material on a server should be expected to be served, hypertext should be expected to be hyperlinked to.
Fool me seven times, shame on you. Fool me eight or more times, shame on me.
There is one thing that's extremely slow on Firefox, but I think it's actually a bug. If I try to open the bookmarks/history library on Windows FF over an VPN+RDP session, it takes ages. SQLite must be using the network somehow. The bookmarks in general are slower now. But I really like the Library so it's sort of a tradeoff for me.
I definitely agree that FF used to be a lot leaner, and I was one of the many people that switched from Mozilla to Phoenix. But somewhere along the way I got hooked on the specific features that Firefox provides, so it'd have to slow down considerably before I thought it worth it to switch. I was worried it would get to that point but FF3 has behaved better for me than the later builds of FF2 did.
Obviously as far as Chrome is concerned, being Windows-only is sort of a deal-breaker for those of us in mixed environments. As I get older I notice that I really don't care if my software is slow unless it's really slow. Maybe it's less caffeine too :)
Who cares, if it has all of the features you need? Racing browsers is sort of like arguing over who has the biggest window cut into their PC case. Nobody "wins" that one :)
Here's my anecdote: I have not seen Firefox crash in at least the last six months, and have used both the 3.0 branch and 3.1 beta heavily. This is the Mac version, mind you. But I use the Windows 3.0 at work every day and that's never come down either. And I'm running plenty of plugins.
In all honesty I think at least half of the crap that crashes browsers is related to ads, and since I have those blocked, I don't have issues. It'd take a proxy server for me to do that with a stable build of Chrome and I just don't see the point.
Not that I don't like Chrome. I just can't remember the last time anything crashed on me. IE6 and the early FF3 and Chrome betas I guess.
Well then I suppose congratulations are in order.
I read what you said earlier about him suing to create a precedent. I still think he should have just included them in whatever he's suing Paramount for, but if what he's doing is SOP then I guess I was incorrect. I had a more practical impression of how lawsuits work but I guess with a suit against a large organization it would make sense to get a judge involved as early as possible.
Yes but lawsuits are all about damages. Perhaps I should have said "only principle".
The remedy that you receive is based on the damage done. It's not black and white, like "they wronged me so I want them to suffer the embarrassment of losing a lawsuit." You have to put a number on it, and if that number is too low for small claims, then you settle your differences by tossing a glass of scotch on the guy. It's how these things are done.
When you enter the court your are taking up the time of the judge, the clerks, the lawyers, and everyone who has to wait in line behind you to have their case heard. I'm sure Ellison is just doing this unofficially in order to create a little chaos.
The ones where people don't have over $100 to piss away on the layer that sits between the hardware and the web browser. I should have said many locations, I guess. But I was thinking netbooks as well, that's not really a location.
There will always be room for commercial and proprietary software. Especially if it is innovative. But I don't see a good reason why linux can't do to Windows what it did to traditional Unixes.
PC was a brand name. As in "IBM PC". Then everything that ran the same software was an IBM compatible, or a PC compatible. Then it was Wintel, but the "PC" name never died.
It was before your time I guess.
Cool parties are overrated. It's funny how Hodgman is the stuffy PC but in real life he's 100x hipper than Justin Long. The man wrote a fictional history of important hobos for christ's sake.
In a similar way I think linux's strength is in it's openness, and the marketing doesn't tell that story well. It's a tortoise and hare story. Desktop adoption is slow but in many markets I feel it is inevitable.
You're awfully concerned about the history of Slashdot for an AC.
What does it say about you that someone being serious is a scary thing?
+1 on the "no trifles" bit. Judges don't like lawsuits based on principle because, well, you're supposed to be suing for damages. If it's just about the principle of the thing then send them a letter or something.
11.1 Snarf!
I'd imagine they'd offer all of the versions in those markets. And maybe anytime upgrade will work on Starter. So it'd be less like singling out and more like those OEMs have another option.
I'll bet a lot of those machines will end up as kiosks.