I'm just speculating - What if this mouse has the same round "puck" shape as Apple's current infamous model?
Most Likely: The "Puck II", without a cord, leaves the user totally clueless as to its orientation. Apple explains that "learning by trial and error is a valuable experience to the user especially when used in an educational institution."
Least Likely: The "Puck II's" entire surface area can be used for rubbing, clicking and squeezing. With the new "clean" civilian GPS signal, Apple uses GPS to determine the relative motion of the mouse with respect to the monitor and hence the pointer direction. The mouse's orientation becomes irrelevent.
Just a random "fun" idea that wouldn't really work...
There are two variations of the PowerPC architecture that are being marketed to two distinctly different markets.
The first variety, the IBM Power4, is for servers. This is the area of that should be of most interest to the Linux market at the moment. With two of these 64 bit processors on one chip and a 500 MHz bus between them (See this ZDnet article.) they will make killer e-commerce servers that will beat any x86 chip this year.
The second variety, the G4 from Motorola sports the 128 bit AltiVec vector processor. This caters to the graphics market that is Apple's bread & butter. It wipes out the P3 in applications that are optimized for AltiVec - even at a lowly 500 MHz clockspeed.
This processor is also of interest to the academic research/defense industry. Look at what makes a Cray, a Cray - you guessed it, vector processing. While I'm not comparing the G4 to a Cray, it's 128 bit vector processor does make a cluster of them a much cheaper alternative for algorithms/code designed for a vector processor.
The Linux Angle I've asked myslef over the past couple months why all the common x86 distros were introducing PPC versions? Surely the Linux on Mac market isn't large enough to make it worth trying to compete with the established players like LinuxPPC and Yellow Dog.
It is now that I realize what may be their underlying motive. -- I think we're going to see IBM pouring money into efforts to see to it that Linux/Apache/etc are optimized for their processor. Everyone wants to be a contender for potential IBM funding to sharpen Linux and other OSS for their fast hardware that isn't hamstrung by backwards compatability... This can give one of the lesser known distros an opportunity to steal some of RedHat's mindshare. -- Just a thought, but who knows?
The author of the ZDnet article is confusing our contempt for the RIAA with a minority view that any kind of copyright is bad.
IMHO,/.ers contempt for the RIAA has nothing to do with copyright enforcement but rather the RIAA's attempts to stifle technology rather than being creative and embracing it.
Those of us with a keen sense of technology and where it is going know that "resistence is futile" and will laugh at anyone who thinks they can. Just as we'ld probably agree that Amtrak, as a national railway, is obsolete, so to is the physical medium for music distribution.
If the RIAA would realize the tremendous opportunity for profit with all of us having a personal jukebox in our house and charge a nickle per song played, and $1/song for unlimited play, we might actually like them. We'ld save money and they'ld probably pull in twice as much profit as they do now by cutting out the other middlemen and manufacturing costs. This would make everyone happy, I think.
The alure of Napster to geeks is not free music, it's the desire to use the most convenient technology to sample, buy, and store, our legitamately aquired music. Until the RIAA realizes that the FM radio is obsolete and the net is its replacement they're going to wallow in their own self pity, squander their money on legal expenses, and become irrelevant to the next generation of musicians.
With 1,000 small magnets mounted on the perimeter of the flywheel you could use it to generate your clock signal. (1000 magnets * 50,000 rpm = 40 MHz)
Benefits:
1) Reducing the number of components on the MB will increase efficiency
2) APM - As the flywheel slows so will the clock speed - prolonging its overall usable life.
If the main issue keeping X/Mozilla/Gtk etc from having decent antialiasing is a good set of TrueType fonts, please note that both MS and Apple make their base font sets available for free download.
MS has their web font set available to provide a common user experience in all browsers and platforms. - If I recall correctly these may even be distributed by anyone assuming they use the MS "packaging". (Unusual move for MS, but this is when they introduced fonts like Comic Sans and Netscape was still the dominant browser. - They wanted to "enhance" the web by adding a common set of fonts beyond the basic Serif and San Serif varieties)
Apple has released System 7 software for free download on their website. These systems include the common MacOS Truetype fonts. (Times, Helvetica, Courier are included) Apple's two fork file structure complicates things but not too much.
I think free beer fonts is something I can live with. They're not such an essential part of the OS that they have to be hackable. - I'm also betting that all dominent distros could receive permission from Apple to bundle these already free fonts on their CD making install/setup easy for everyone.
Success of Linux on the desktop depends on features... - I give Linux an 18 month window of oppotunity to proove itself on the desktop, after that people will ignore it. After said time, if we haven't made an impact, the market will see the desktop as a WinMe vs. MacOSX world. (Yes, we'll still be using Linux on our desktops but y'all know what I mean by desktop OS.)
The real killer for Linux though isn't going to be pretty type. With broadband coming up, streaming media is going to be the killer app.
While the caliber of this grooup seems unbeatable, it's too bad NASA doesn't apply this rigid development model to its unmanned space craft. -- I still don't understand how a difference in units (english vs. metric) managed to go undetected!
The only thing I could think of after hearing that such an error caused mulitmillion dollar craft to crash was IDIOTS - any scientist should be using SI units today.
All too often it's a fickle client that causes a program to become a mess... With each and every couple weeks they want a new feature. Then they get the first revision in their hands and they want something completely different. It's not that the programmer never gave them the time of day to figure out what they want, it's just that they are not engineers such as those at NASA that can write a tight spec on what is _needed_ as opposed to what their own whisical mind thinks would be cool - err I meant "productive".
For those who have read the "Halloween Papers", I'm sure you will recall that the guy who received them didn't publicly post them until he had added substantial comment to the overall text. This was intentional to assure that his public posting would fall under the "fair use" provision of copyright.
Let's all do Slashdot a favor in the future and be sure to add comments to any proprietary code or other documents before we post them to keep future cases more clear-cut on the side of Slashdot. -- Had the reader added a handful of comments between the lines before posting Slashdot would be on very firm ground now.
After the movie too much was answered to keep things interesting. All they could reasonably get out of the series was one season past the movie to add some closure like Mulder learning the truth about his sister and perhaps...
1) The good aliens defeat the bad aliens and humanity never knows what happened. (we're not evolved enough to handle the truth) 2) The good aliens are assisted by humanity, people learn the truth and we have our new friends come visit. 3) The bad aliens start the invasion and the future of humanity looks bleak. - Ths opens the opportunity to new plots in future periodic movies - somewhat like StarTrek.
SUMMARY The Apple Server market is already largely based on the x86. Darwin returns the market to Apple on x86 Hardware with all the advantages of OSS working for them too.
Apple's high end market is impervious to the hardware prices. The graphics market which makes up most of Apple's high end is very dedicated to the mac and they will pay though the nose for performance. The PPC velocity engine provides unparalled performance in that area and will not be easily dropped.
Apple's low end depends on ease of use and as more iMac sales become second mac purchases no one will be happy if their old PPC based software won't run.
MORE DETAILS & THOUGHTS
Apple's Server Failure Apple has not had a cost effective server solution for years. Their overpriced higher end hardware and $999 pricetag for AppleShare software lost them their market to AFS services on NT and Linux.
SOLUTION: Open Source their new BSD based OS, gain all the advantages of OSS, and compete head to head with Redhat and friends. Darwin running on commodity hardware gives them a revenue stream by selling their "distro" with an Aquasized look & feel and support fees. They also retain some control over the product by being the dominant distributor.
They now have their own top notch distro that will be kept up to date at little cost to them. - Who do you think is going to end up doing most of Darwin's IPv6 conversion work? Most likely, the FreeBSD guys.
Apple's Desktop: Best of Both It won't be long until XFree4 is forked & hacked to run transparently over Quartz/Aqua with an aquasized look. The best of both world's being- 1a) Any X based software (commercial or OSS) can be ported with relative ease and sold to the MacOS market. 1b) MacOS app developers that may have considered dropping support for the Mac with the cost required to port to Quartz should be more willing to do an X port which will allow them to market the same product with not much work to FreeBSD and Linux users. 2a)The existing base of Mac apps will still run in the Classic emulation "box". 2b)Companies like Adobe whos core user base still includes the Macintosh will of course be introducing native Cocoa/Quartz versions of thier apps.
Bets Hedged MS OFFICE: Apple knows that MS, now ruled to be a monopoly, no longer needs them in the market. MS seems less and less likely with every day passing (note the Mac IE team has been switched to WebTV) to be continuing support for MacOS Office. Apple seems to have been keenly aware of this with their continued development and pushing of their own office suite AppleWorks. Also, by offering X support in MacOSX they can reap the benefits from OSS Offfice apps under development. -- In short they are hoping that Linux's success will make MS Office less critical to their own platform.
THE PPC PROCESSOR: I don't think we're going to see any switch to the x86 any time soon. It would require a reltively slow emulation layer for classic mac apps to work. AND a port of Apple's Carbon APIs to the x86 too. -- In the short term all Mac apps on OSX will be Carbon based. -- Carbon is to MacOSX as WINE/Winelib is to Linux. The PPC processor's vector unit provides speed boosts to Photoshop filters (once optimized) that can not begin to be considered on a MHz comparison between processors. With SMP coming along and other improvemtns filtering up to the desktop from the OSS server base even prolonged development cycles for the PPC will make it worth while for thier core audience to stay with PPC.
Think about it - Some Photoshop operations are still faster on a 450 MHZ PPC than a 700 MHz P3! With that kind of performance despite the disparity in MHz - it's worth their while to hang tight and wait for PPC problems to be solved.
COST: The high cost of Apple's high end hasn't slowed sales lately. Dedicated mac users who need speed will pay through the nose for it.
IMHO, the controversy wasn't about individuals fanaticly defending their rights over their "published works" but something more complex that struck a nerve with many of the Slashdot readership whether they posted to that discussion or not. (I'll try to explain my view)
WHO I think some folks are still uneasy with the thought that Slashdot is now a very much for-profit public company. As a public company they have a lawful obligation to maximize profit for their shareholders.
Despite this, we think of Slashdot as being different and they are. If the NY Times had published the entire discussion in a special Columbine One Year Later insert, we'ld be glad to have been heard, and their use of our "copyright" material wouldn't have surprised anyone. We expect Slashdot to exist on a higher moral plane than the rest of the media, and even if it can legally be done doesn't mean it's the Right Thing. We expected to be asked our feeling on the use of readers' comments before any kind of deals were signed.
Personlly, I think asking the overall readership their opinion on the matter in a Slashdot Poll *before* announcing the book as a done deal would have resulted in an overwelming positive response and given you the informal permission you needed to proceed without getting PR whacked. After the fact now, you've got all this greif and the publication of a good book is in limbo.
HOW If Slashdot had announced that the comments were going to be published in a $1 edition of Wired magazine there would have been less upheavel. Had/. announced that they were distributing 20,000 copies in "note-pack" bindings at this year's Comdex instead of bumper stickers, etc. there may have been only praise. - But, when you publish a "real" book for ThinkGeek, an Andover company, to sell for $14.95 - you're inevitably going to alienate some readers.
As legal as it may be, Slashdot readers don't want to be used to help Andover's bottom line without being asked nicely first. It helps us maintain our suspension-of-disbelief that your not really a for-profit concern.
I thinkg/. is doing the right thing now and I hope they're successful in getting the book to press. I hope this somehow helps some understand the tension here. I think I'm stating the obvious, but from a lot of other posts I've read, maybe not.
While this may have been moderate as "Funny" it brings up a serious issue/.ers should consider in this MS "censorship" discussion.
If someone created a bot that mirrored slashdot, syncing their site with Slashdot periodically through out the day - minus the banner ad - would Slasdot/Andover tolerate this "free speech" or would they sue for copyright violation? -- me think they'ld sue.
What if only readers' comments' were mirrored? They supposedly belong to the user. - I think they'ld still try to sue on behalf of/.ers.
Wouldn't a mirror have been a public service during the past two days?
Which brings me to my final question: When is Slashdot going to muster the courage to post the perhaps embarassing but noteworthy story of the DDoS attack?
I don't think the typical corporate response of clamming up about these things is befitting Slashdot.
What would the New York Times do if someone had taken out a full page ad with the spec and it went unnoticed by their reviewers into the national paper distribution?
Would the NY times be forced to destroy all their archived hard copies? Would libraries that keep the hard copies of the newspaper available until they get their microfilm copies be forced to rip out that page with what ever content may have been on the flip side?
Slashdot should think "what would the NYTimes do?" and follow accordingly.
My childish dream: All Slashdot readers sign up for one free month of MSN and post the full text on our web accounts there. See how they deal with their own customers... After a month they have lost money on tens of thousands of free 30 day accounts and the customer service calls when we find our websites deleted... On second thought maybe just making MS lose money on their free offerings is a good protest technique...
Macrovision prevents quality copies over the analog RCA outputs regardless of whether the recording medium is an analog VCR or converted to digital. No? - While I know most DVD players offer digital audio output for input into todays better amplifiers but I've never seen digital video out offered on a DVD player.
Q: Is there such thing and if so, until now, what purpose could it possibly have served?
Redmond WA. Microsmut announced today that have received a patent on a new technology known as "ZeroClick" for previewing e-mails and all executable attachments within, without requiring the user to actually do anything to open them. A Microsmut spokesperson said "This will help us serve our customers better enabling us to e-mail them software updates without any need for their intervention."
They further said that they will aggressively enforce this patent securing their competitve edge over Linux and other competing operating system that will not be able to provide similiar functionality. CEO, Billy predicts that this will lure users from the Linux platform who still must suffer with the "TwoClick" method for viewing an attachment.
Does anyone know where you can get a 10" LCD panel with a standard VGA connector for about $100? (mediocre quality will do)
The cheap LCD panel is the only real "value" to the hacker in all this. The rest of the parts for a cheap "thin client" is all off the shelf stuff readily available.
The cheapest LCD screens on the market are $500 or more because the lowest models are 14" active matrix displays sold to people who will be sitting in front of them hours on end.
No one seems to see a market for the lower quality ones for use in cool geeky toys. Who do we convince otherwise now that NetAppliance has failed to step up to the plate?
Why aren't VA Linux or Penguin Computing filling this niche?
I have no doubt that Linux and OSS will continue to thrive in networking applications. Open source and un*x has dominated this area for a long time now and I don't see it slowing down.
However, when/.ers speak of their hopes and dreams for Linux, we talk of "world domination". This means Linux everywhere, business apps, educational apps, productivity apps, etc.
People seem to ignore the fact that for "World domination" the support of commercial companies by the Wall Street types will be needed. - I would even question if OSS projects like GNU office applications would have developers if not for the ego trip of being part of Something Big a la "world domination".
Wall St. types are easily swayed, follow like sheep and THEIR DECISIONS ARE OFTEN BASED ON ERRONEOUS PERCEPTIONS. Hence, a few nervous investors tend to have a snowball effect, and perceptions are often more important than reality.
_If_ LinuxCare totally closes shop (and as it has no assets, who'ld buy it?), and _If_ *Wall street* sees this as a lack of a market for Linux Support, - all Linux stocks will suffer. _If_ this cause one of the prominent Wall street "Linux" companies to fold or pull out of the Linux market, or even if it causes the disappearance of more private but prominent linux companies to go under because VC funding dries up, -- How long do you think it will take before app developers decide to "cut their losses" and discontinue support for important business apps like Notes for Linux?
I'm not sure if I'm being overly pessimistic or just making sure I'm not burying my head in the sand while truly hoping for "world domination".
I have no idea how this will effect Wall Street, maybe today it will go unnoticed but be noticed if/when they go under, but I'm sure that at some point we're going to have to find a way to respond to Wall Street or kiss our hopes and dreams for Linux to be more than just Yet Another Un*x good bye.
Linuxcare represented the "creme -de-la-creme" of the Linux support industry. With its apparent failure to maintain growth momentum, yet less turn a profit, - for a pure service company - spells trouble for all Linux stocks and the open source industry as a whole.
If a company like LinuxCare, without the development expenditures of say Redhat (which still maintains that it will see profits one day from support fees) can't make it, then it would follow that companies with a higher overhead (like Redhat) turning out unprofitable products (open source) are also doomed to failure.
I love linux, but without commercial support it will not be accepted in most corporate environments or the desktop.
I was just wondering what people thought about putting spammers out of business by driving their 800 number costs through the roof with a multitude of spurious phone calls. - (Jamming their lines might be an interesting side effect if there were enough participants.)
I wouldn't mind writing (and running) a script that would call a list of 800 numbers repeatedly, all night long, whilst I'm sleeping. -- Doing this alone is pointless, if thousands of people do this it might impact the profits generated from spam.
I have little knowledge of how these games work, don't play 'em, don't read about 'em so please excuse this post if it's something that's already been shown to be flawed.
What about an SSL style encryption scheme but where the end user has to buy thier certificate. - The purchase of the certificate would be akin to the purchase of a license. In the EUSA they agree that any abuse of the rules will result in the termination of their certificate.
Any fooling around and you can longer authenticate your self to the server without paying for another certificate. This should deter most would be cheaters.
Also, secret keys renegotiated periodically during game play should make any possible hacks much, much harder.
If this works, it should also work with open source games. (The games are open and free but the certificates aren't)
Any comments re my idea from those with more knowledge in gaming/crypto?
This isn't a question, just my observations that may be worthwhile presenting for comment. If Slackware use has slowed, (as the comments here indicate)in may be in no small part due to lack of marketing savvy -and no, I don't mean commercialization. From recent trade shows - I have in my CD library free CDROMs of almost every Linux distro under the sun. At none of the recent shows (Linux Business Expo aka Comdex, Bazarre, LWE New York) did I find Slackware offering free CDs. - Just a Walnut Creek booth offering to sell you T-shirts and CD sets - without even a book for the price. While I have not installed every distro yet, I have played with several of them. Based on my experience with them I was able to make recommendations to folks who ask me "what distro should I use". In the last 4-6 weeks two friends have purchased boxed sets based on my recommendations*. I don't work for a big consulting firm, - I'm just a guy running linux. Aditionally, most people, given the choice between starting their first linux install from a CD or from FTPing a few hundred MB, will choose the CD. - If they like Linux, they will buy the full distro to get the additional applications or to upgrade when the next version comes along. Without the free giveaways Slackware has severly limited its potential growth. I know Slackware is not generally thought of as being for a first time user, but bear in mind that many first time users of _Linux_ at home are coming from a Unix work environemnt. They would be comfortable with Slackware. Thank you, Aaron Greenberg ahg@remove.me linuxfund.org (* I intentionally don't mention what disros I've recommended.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just speculating - What if this mouse has the same round "puck" shape as Apple's current infamous model?
Most Likely: The "Puck II", without a cord, leaves the user totally clueless as to its orientation. Apple explains that "learning by trial and error is a valuable experience to the user especially when used in an educational institution."
Least Likely: The "Puck II's" entire surface area can be used for rubbing, clicking and squeezing. With the new "clean" civilian GPS signal, Apple uses GPS to determine the relative motion of the mouse with respect to the monitor and hence the pointer direction. The mouse's orientation becomes irrelevent.
Just a random "fun" idea that wouldn't really work...
There are two variations of the PowerPC architecture that are being marketed to two distinctly different markets.
The first variety, the IBM Power4, is for servers. This is the area of that should be of most interest to the Linux market at the moment. With two of these 64 bit processors on one chip and a 500 MHz bus between them (See this ZDnet article.) they will make killer e-commerce servers that will beat any x86 chip this year.
The second variety, the G4 from Motorola sports the 128 bit AltiVec vector processor. This caters to the graphics market that is Apple's bread & butter. It wipes out the P3 in applications that are optimized for AltiVec - even at a lowly 500 MHz clockspeed.
This processor is also of interest to the academic research/defense industry. Look at what makes a Cray, a Cray - you guessed it, vector processing. While I'm not comparing the G4 to a Cray, it's 128 bit vector processor does make a cluster of them a much cheaper alternative for algorithms/code designed for a vector processor.
The Linux Angle
I've asked myslef over the past couple months why all the common x86 distros were introducing PPC versions? Surely the Linux on Mac market isn't large enough to make it worth trying to compete with the established players like LinuxPPC and Yellow Dog.
It is now that I realize what may be their underlying motive. -- I think we're going to see IBM pouring money into efforts to see to it that Linux/Apache/etc are optimized for their processor. Everyone wants to be a contender for potential IBM funding to sharpen Linux and other OSS for their fast hardware that isn't hamstrung by backwards compatability... This can give one of the lesser known distros an opportunity to steal some of RedHat's mindshare. -- Just a thought, but who knows?
The author of the ZDnet article is confusing our contempt for the RIAA with a minority view that any kind of copyright is bad.
/.ers contempt for the RIAA has nothing to do with copyright enforcement but rather the RIAA's attempts to stifle technology rather than being creative and embracing it.
IMHO,
Those of us with a keen sense of technology and where it is going know that "resistence is futile" and will laugh at anyone who thinks they can. Just as we'ld probably agree that Amtrak, as a national railway, is obsolete, so to is the physical medium for music distribution.
If the RIAA would realize the tremendous opportunity for profit with all of us having a personal jukebox in our house and charge a nickle per song played, and $1/song for unlimited play, we might actually like them. We'ld save money and they'ld probably pull in twice as much profit as they do now by cutting out the other middlemen and manufacturing costs. This would make everyone happy, I think.
The alure of Napster to geeks is not free music, it's the desire to use the most convenient technology to sample, buy, and store, our legitamately aquired music. Until the RIAA realizes that the FM radio is obsolete and the net is its replacement they're going to wallow in their own self pity, squander their money on legal expenses, and become irrelevant to the next generation of musicians.
With 1,000 small magnets mounted on the perimeter of the flywheel you could use it to generate your clock signal. (1000 magnets * 50,000 rpm = 40 MHz)
Benefits:
Just an idea...
If the main issue keeping X/Mozilla/Gtk etc from having decent antialiasing is a good set of TrueType fonts, please note that both MS and Apple make their base font sets available for free download.
MS has their web font set available to provide a common user experience in all browsers and platforms. - If I recall correctly these may even be distributed by anyone assuming they use the MS "packaging". (Unusual move for MS, but this is when they introduced fonts like Comic Sans and Netscape was still the dominant browser. - They wanted to "enhance" the web by adding a common set of fonts beyond the basic Serif and San Serif varieties)
Apple has released System 7 software for free download on their website. These systems include the common MacOS Truetype fonts. (Times, Helvetica, Courier are included) Apple's two fork file structure complicates things but not too much.
I think free beer fonts is something I can live with. They're not such an essential part of the OS that they have to be hackable. - I'm also betting that all dominent distros could receive permission from Apple to bundle these already free fonts on their CD making install/setup easy for everyone.
Success of Linux on the desktop depends on features... - I give Linux an 18 month window of oppotunity to proove itself on the desktop, after that people will ignore it. After said time, if we haven't made an impact, the market will see the desktop as a WinMe vs. MacOSX world. (Yes, we'll still be using Linux on our desktops but y'all know what I mean by desktop OS.)
The real killer for Linux though isn't going to be pretty type. With broadband coming up, streaming media is going to be the killer app.
While the caliber of this grooup seems unbeatable, it's too bad NASA doesn't apply this rigid development model to its unmanned space craft. -- I still don't understand how a difference in units (english vs. metric) managed to go undetected!
The only thing I could think of after hearing that such an error caused mulitmillion dollar craft to crash was IDIOTS - any scientist should be using SI units today.
All too often it's a fickle client that causes a program to become a mess... With each and every couple weeks they want a new feature. Then they get the first revision in their hands and they want something completely different. It's not that the programmer never gave them the time of day to figure out what they want, it's just that they are not engineers such as those at NASA that can write a tight spec on what is _needed_ as opposed to what their own whisical mind thinks would be cool - err I meant "productive".
For those who have read the "Halloween Papers", I'm sure you will recall that the guy who received them didn't publicly post them until he had added substantial comment to the overall text. This was intentional to assure that his public posting would fall under the "fair use" provision of copyright.
Let's all do Slashdot a favor in the future and be sure to add comments to any proprietary code or other documents before we post them to keep future cases more clear-cut on the side of Slashdot. -- Had the reader added a handful of comments between the lines before posting Slashdot would be on very firm ground now.
I enjoy the "mythology" episodes more.
After the movie too much was answered to keep things interesting. All they could reasonably get out of the series was one season past the movie to add some closure like Mulder learning the truth about his sister and perhaps...
1) The good aliens defeat the bad aliens and humanity never knows what happened. (we're not evolved enough to handle the truth)
2) The good aliens are assisted by humanity, people learn the truth and we have our new friends come visit.
3) The bad aliens start the invasion and the future of humanity looks bleak. - Ths opens the opportunity to new plots in future periodic movies - somewhat like StarTrek.
I like #3 the most.
SUMMARY
The Apple Server market is already largely based on the x86. Darwin returns the market to Apple on x86 Hardware with all the advantages of OSS working for them too.
Apple's high end market is impervious to the hardware prices. The graphics market which makes up most of Apple's high end is very dedicated to the mac and they will pay though the nose for performance. The PPC velocity engine provides unparalled performance in that area and will not be easily dropped.
Apple's low end depends on ease of use and as more iMac sales become second mac purchases no one will be happy if their old PPC based software won't run.
MORE DETAILS & THOUGHTS
Apple's Server Failure
Apple has not had a cost effective server solution for years. Their overpriced higher end hardware and $999 pricetag for AppleShare software lost them their market to AFS services on NT and Linux.
SOLUTION: Open Source their new BSD based OS, gain all the advantages of OSS, and compete head to head with Redhat and friends. Darwin running on commodity hardware gives them a revenue stream by selling their "distro" with an Aquasized look & feel and support fees. They also retain some control over the product by being the dominant distributor.
They now have their own top notch distro that will be kept up to date at little cost to them. - Who do you think is going to end up doing most of Darwin's IPv6 conversion work? Most likely, the FreeBSD guys.
Apple's Desktop: Best of Both
It won't be long until XFree4 is forked & hacked to run transparently over Quartz/Aqua with an aquasized look. The best of both world's being-
1a) Any X based software (commercial or OSS) can be ported with relative ease and sold to the MacOS market.
1b) MacOS app developers that may have considered dropping support for the Mac with the cost required to port to Quartz should be more willing to do an X port which will allow them to market the same product with not much work to FreeBSD and Linux users.
2a)The existing base of Mac apps will still run in the Classic emulation "box".
2b)Companies like Adobe whos core user base still includes the Macintosh will of course be introducing native Cocoa/Quartz versions of thier apps.
Bets Hedged
MS OFFICE: Apple knows that MS, now ruled to be a monopoly, no longer needs them in the market. MS seems less and less likely with every day passing (note the Mac IE team has been switched to WebTV) to be continuing support for MacOS Office. Apple seems to have been keenly aware of this with their continued development and pushing of their own office suite AppleWorks. Also, by offering X support in MacOSX they can reap the benefits from OSS Offfice apps under development. -- In short they are hoping that Linux's success will make MS Office less critical to their own platform.
THE PPC PROCESSOR: I don't think we're going to see any switch to the x86 any time soon. It would require a reltively slow emulation layer for classic mac apps to work. AND a port of Apple's Carbon APIs to the x86 too. -- In the short term all Mac apps on OSX will be Carbon based. -- Carbon is to MacOSX as WINE/Winelib is to Linux.
The PPC processor's vector unit provides speed boosts to Photoshop filters (once optimized) that can not begin to be considered on a MHz comparison between processors. With SMP coming along and other improvemtns filtering up to the desktop from the OSS server base even prolonged development cycles for the PPC will make it worth while for thier core audience to stay with PPC.
Think about it - Some Photoshop operations are still faster on a 450 MHZ PPC than a 700 MHz P3! With that kind of performance despite the disparity in MHz - it's worth their while to hang tight and wait for PPC problems to be solved.
COST: The high cost of Apple's high end hasn't slowed sales lately. Dedicated mac users who need speed will pay through the nose for it.
IMHO, the controversy wasn't about individuals fanaticly defending their rights over their "published works" but something more complex that struck a nerve with many of the Slashdot readership whether they posted to that discussion or not. (I'll try to explain my view)
/. announced that they were distributing 20,000 copies in "note-pack" bindings at this year's Comdex instead of bumper stickers, etc. there may have been only praise. - But, when you publish a "real" book for ThinkGeek, an Andover company, to sell for $14.95 - you're inevitably going to alienate some readers.
/. is doing the right thing now and I hope they're successful in getting the book to press. I hope this somehow helps some understand the tension here. I think I'm stating the obvious, but from a lot of other posts I've read, maybe not.
WHO
I think some folks are still uneasy with the thought that Slashdot is now a very much for-profit public company. As a public company they have a lawful obligation to maximize profit for their shareholders.
Despite this, we think of Slashdot as being different and they are. If the NY Times had published the entire discussion in a special Columbine One Year Later insert, we'ld be glad to have been heard, and their use of our "copyright" material wouldn't have surprised anyone. We expect Slashdot to exist on a higher moral plane than the rest of the media, and even if it can legally be done doesn't mean it's the Right Thing. We expected to be asked our feeling on the use of readers' comments before any kind of deals were signed.
Personlly, I think asking the overall readership their opinion on the matter in a Slashdot Poll *before* announcing the book as a done deal would have resulted in an overwelming positive response and given you the informal permission you needed to proceed without getting PR whacked. After the fact now, you've got all this greif and the publication of a good book is in limbo.
HOW
If Slashdot had announced that the comments were going to be published in a $1 edition of Wired magazine there would have been less upheavel. Had
As legal as it may be, Slashdot readers don't want to be used to help Andover's bottom line without being asked nicely first. It helps us maintain our suspension-of-disbelief that your not really a for-profit concern.
I thinkg
If someone created a bot that mirrored slashdot, syncing their site with Slashdot periodically through out the day - minus the banner ad - would Slasdot/Andover tolerate this "free speech" or would they sue for copyright violation? -- me think they'ld sue.
What if only readers' comments' were mirrored? They supposedly belong to the user. - I think they'ld still try to sue on behalf of
Wouldn't a mirror have been a public service during the past two days?
Which brings me to my final question: When is Slashdot going to muster the courage to post the perhaps embarassing but noteworthy story of the DDoS attack?
I don't think the typical corporate response of clamming up about these things is befitting Slashdot.
What would the New York Times do if someone had taken out a full page ad with the spec and it went unnoticed by their reviewers into the national paper distribution?
.. On second thought maybe just making MS lose money on their free offerings is a good protest technique...
Would the NY times be forced to destroy all their archived hard copies? Would libraries that keep the hard copies of the newspaper available until they get their microfilm copies be forced to rip out that page with what ever content may have been on the flip side?
Slashdot should think "what would the NYTimes do?" and follow accordingly.
My childish dream: All Slashdot readers sign up for one free month of MSN and post the full text on our web accounts there. See how they deal with their own customers... After a month they have lost money on tens of thousands of free 30 day accounts and the customer service calls when we find our websites deleted.
Macrovision prevents quality copies over the analog RCA outputs regardless of whether the recording medium is an analog VCR or converted to digital. No? - While I know most DVD players offer digital audio output for input into todays better amplifiers but I've never seen digital video out offered on a DVD player.
Q: Is there such thing and if so, until now, what purpose could it possibly have served?
Redmond WA. Microsmut announced today that have received a patent on a new technology known as "ZeroClick" for previewing e-mails and all executable attachments within, without requiring the user to actually do anything to open them. A Microsmut spokesperson said "This will help us serve our customers better enabling us to e-mail them software updates without any need for their intervention."
They further said that they will aggressively enforce this patent securing their competitve edge over Linux and other competing operating system that will not be able to provide similiar functionality. CEO, Billy predicts that this will lure users from the Linux platform who still must suffer with the "TwoClick" method for viewing an attachment.
Does anyone know where you can get a 10" LCD panel with a standard VGA connector for about $100? (mediocre quality will do)
The cheap LCD panel is the only real "value" to the hacker in all this. The rest of the parts for a cheap "thin client" is all off the shelf stuff readily available.
The cheapest LCD screens on the market are $500 or more because the lowest models are 14" active matrix displays sold to people who will be sitting in front of them hours on end.
No one seems to see a market for the lower quality ones for use in cool geeky toys. Who do we convince otherwise now that NetAppliance has failed to step up to the plate?
Why aren't VA Linux or Penguin Computing filling this niche?
I have no doubt that Linux and OSS will continue to thrive in networking applications. Open source and un*x has dominated this area for a long time now and I don't see it slowing down.
/.ers speak of their hopes and dreams for Linux, we talk of "world domination". This means Linux everywhere, business apps, educational apps, productivity apps, etc.
However, when
People seem to ignore the fact that for "World domination" the support of commercial companies by the Wall Street types will be needed. - I would even question if OSS projects like GNU office applications would have developers if not for the ego trip of being part of Something Big a la "world domination".
Wall St. types are easily swayed, follow like sheep and THEIR DECISIONS ARE OFTEN BASED ON ERRONEOUS PERCEPTIONS. Hence, a few nervous investors tend to have a snowball effect, and perceptions are often more important than reality.
_If_ LinuxCare totally closes shop (and as it has no assets, who'ld buy it?), and _If_ *Wall street* sees this as a lack of a market for Linux Support, - all Linux stocks will suffer. _If_ this cause one of the prominent Wall street "Linux" companies to fold or pull out of the Linux market, or even if it causes the disappearance of more private but prominent linux companies to go under because VC funding dries up, -- How long do you think it will take before app developers decide to "cut their losses" and discontinue support for important business apps like Notes for Linux?
I'm not sure if I'm being overly pessimistic or just making sure I'm not burying my head in the sand while truly hoping for "world domination".
I have no idea how this will effect Wall Street, maybe today it will go unnoticed but be noticed if/when they go under, but I'm sure that at some point we're going to have to find a way to respond to Wall Street or kiss our hopes and dreams for Linux to be more than just Yet Another Un*x good bye.
Linuxcare represented the "creme -de-la-creme" of the Linux support industry. With its apparent failure to maintain growth momentum, yet less turn a profit, - for a pure service company - spells trouble for all Linux stocks and the open source industry as a whole.
If a company like LinuxCare, without the development expenditures of say Redhat (which still maintains that it will see profits one day from support fees) can't make it, then it would follow that companies with a higher overhead (like Redhat) turning out unprofitable products (open source) are also doomed to failure.
I love linux, but without commercial support it will not be accepted in most corporate environments or the desktop.
I want to beleive... show me the money.
I was just wondering what people thought about putting spammers out of business by driving their 800 number costs through the roof with a multitude of spurious phone calls. - (Jamming their lines might be an interesting side effect if there were enough participants.)
...preventing spam... @mac.com
I wouldn't mind writing (and running) a script that would call a list of 800 numbers repeatedly, all night long, whilst I'm sleeping. -- Doing this alone is pointless, if thousands of people do this it might impact the profits generated from spam.
Comments? Legal Issues? Interest?
--
Aaron
ahg@
I have little knowledge of how these games work, don't play 'em, don't read about 'em so please excuse this post if it's something that's already been shown to be flawed.
What about an SSL style encryption scheme but where the end user has to buy thier certificate. - The purchase of the certificate would be akin to the purchase of a license. In the EUSA they agree that any abuse of the rules will result in the termination of their certificate.
Any fooling around and you can longer authenticate your self to the server without paying for another certificate. This should deter most would be cheaters.
Also, secret keys renegotiated periodically during game play should make any possible hacks much, much harder.
If this works, it should also work with open source games. (The games are open and free but the certificates aren't)
Any comments re my idea from those with more knowledge in gaming/crypto?
-Aaron Greenberg
This isn't a question, just my observations that may be worthwhile presenting for comment. If Slackware use has slowed, (as the comments here indicate)in may be in no small part due to lack of marketing savvy -and no, I don't mean commercialization. From recent trade shows - I have in my CD library free CDROMs of almost every Linux distro under the sun. At none of the recent shows (Linux Business Expo aka Comdex, Bazarre, LWE New York) did I find Slackware offering free CDs. - Just a Walnut Creek booth offering to sell you T-shirts and CD sets - without even a book for the price. While I have not installed every distro yet, I have played with several of them. Based on my experience with them I was able to make recommendations to folks who ask me "what distro should I use". In the last 4-6 weeks two friends have purchased boxed sets based on my recommendations*. I don't work for a big consulting firm, - I'm just a guy running linux. Aditionally, most people, given the choice between starting their first linux install from a CD or from FTPing a few hundred MB, will choose the CD. - If they like Linux, they will buy the full distro to get the additional applications or to upgrade when the next version comes along. Without the free giveaways Slackware has severly limited its potential growth. I know Slackware is not generally thought of as being for a first time user, but bear in mind that many first time users of _Linux_ at home are coming from a Unix work environemnt. They would be comfortable with Slackware. Thank you, Aaron Greenberg ahg@remove.me linuxfund.org (* I intentionally don't mention what disros I've recommended.)