The issue is about whether or not the code in Linux is SCO's code or not. SCO is claiming IBM put some of its code into Linux in order to make Linux "Eterprise Ready". IBM says they didn't do any such thing. A patch removing all of the code SCO claims were put in illegally would be a tacit admission that the code is SCO's. Removing any code SCO claims is theirs would be the worst thing any kernel maintainer could do right now.
Finally, someone listened! Municipal data networks make perfect sense. Many municipalities manage their local utilities, adding data services to that I think is the natural extension.
The pricate telephone companies are never going to outlay the cash for significant upgrades to a local telecom system. They would much rather stick with their relatively old lines and equipment and charge their customers and arm and a leg for them. When the cities and counties own the lines, they're going to get a better price on services because they can shop around. I'm not saddened by the stories of woe coming out of the local Bells. Municipal data networks are being built and proposed because there is a need for them that isn't being met by the current owners of the data networks.
I don't understand why they don't work with the munis on these projects. Instead of whining about competition they should offer to manage the networks. They can get the management dollars without the outlay for construction. I suppose they don't like to play games where they don't make up the rules. If they're concerned about municipal networks competing for commercial services it because the market is the telcos' to lose. There's plenty of areas of the country that have a lot of cheap office space and a high standard of living. They do not however have the sort of data infrastructure that many businesses are looking for and are thus avoided by larger businesses. Building competitive data networks can draw a lot of business to an area. The Bells want to focus business in particular markets where they have a lot of leverage while a municipality wants to move business where it is.
It's sad that the telcos are so successful in their lobbying to prevent municipalities from reselling excess capacity. The money an RBOC makes it not going into local communities. The money Bumkiss county makes however does go into the community. In Georgia where the schools stand to make money the situation is even worse. The school districts could generate cashflow by selling something they're not using and wouldn't miss. At the very least it would be possible for their network to break even an essentially give the county schools a free 10Gb data network. At best they could put money back into that county's coffers. Even if those dollars don't go directly back into the school system the schools could still benefit. Hopefully the legislature in Utah and the SC in Missouri's case will see the telcos are whining about having their uncompetitive monopolies taken away and side with the municipalities.
Audits of nearly any bureaucratic program is bound to find all sorts of excesses and general problems in the program's methodologies. Bureaucracies tend to function in ways that perpetuate themselves. Whole processes and procedures are created in order to extend the need and scope of the bureaucracy. In a large enough organization you can create an Office of Redundant Redundancy and no one would notice until the organization was thoroughly audited.
I don't see why the ISS is sending people outside to check on the status of the station. Instead of using people for spacewalks why not micro/nanosats? They could be launched from a future shuttle mission or given to the crew in a resupply flight and launched from the airlock. It's need a radio tranceiver, control electronics, and a small CMOS or CCD camera. The AFRL has been working on nanosats for several years now and has a few prototypes. A nanosat cluster was supposed to be launched last year on the shuttle but I don't think it went up before the fleet was grounded. The PICOSat however was launched successfully and was built using COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) technology. The exterior of the station would be monitored regularly and docking procedures could be monitored from an advantageous angle.
Blaming the black out on a software bug is a damn cop-out. The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid that can barely keep up with the current demand. Any major failure in the system can cause a cascading failure of the entire section of the grid. That is a horrible design. A software bug may have been the trigger but it is by no means the true cause.
The grid in the North East US is supplied by horribly inefficient and antiquated power lines that were struggling to keep up thirty years ago. That they are still in use today is an outright crime. There's also the issue of the operators of the lines generators trying to save a few bucks by cutting maintenance on equipment and facilities and cutting supervising staffs down to skeleton crews. It is much easier to fit "software bug" into a sound bite so the news media will stick with that. Unfortunately the real cause of the black out is not ever going to be patched and another blackout is as inevitable as this last one was. I hope next time a few more people will have invested in backup generators or some alternate form of power to keep from losing their business during a blackout.
Wah wah. Safari 1.2 won't run on Jaguar. Camino and OmniWeb both run on Jaguar, OmniWeb 4.5 and 5 both use Safari's rendering engine. You've got options, including sticking with Safari 1.1.
There's nothing requiring you to upgrade MacOS every year. If what you've got works for you there's little reason to upgrade simply because a new version came out. Major commercial apps have pretty wide support bases and typically run on 10.1 and up. Smaller shareware apps move a little quicker and some of them require at least 10.2 in order to run. It is in a developer's best interest to support a wide range of systems so it will be a long time before 10.3 or newer is an absolute minimum requirement for a majority of software.
If you want to troll you could at least be creative about it.
Actually Microsoft killed IE in name but released MSN Explorer in its place. Explorer uses the Tasman rendering engine with the glitzy MSN interface on top of it. It's pretty much the same as MSN Explorer on Windows, including even WMP and Messenger.
It is likely Microsoft will keep MSN Explorer et al up to date because they are trying to grab the Mac crowd for MSN internet access. Earthlink and AOL have long had good support for Mac users and as such they've got quite a few Mac subscribers. Every Mac you buy comes with 30 days of free Earthlink service, AOL dial-up support in Internet Connect, and an AIM compatible IM client. Apple's very friendly with Earthlink and AOL for sticking with them even in bad times. MSN on the other hand has pretty much ignored the Mac market for most of its operational lifetime. Now that MSN is fighting to retain customers left and right they have to support the Mac market. They're losing customers left and right to cheaper dial-up services and broadband providers.
Finally, OSDL already has working groups and specifications for Linux in data centers and in carrier grade facilities. It makes a lot of sense to get a specification for desktop systems as well. Thus far the only specifications Linux has had to brag about in Enterprise space is its comformance with the Open Group's Unix specifications. Meeting technical guidelines is great but that doesn't really demonstrate the practical ability of Linux in any environment.
A smart specification and reference implementation will let just about anybody with the know-how build Enterprise grade Linux systems. As such just about anyone will be able to compete in the business, not just the kids with big brand names.
I think cell phones are the most abused technology and are thus the most hated. I think some people associate telephones with being at home and as such act on a cell phone as they do at home. People talk loudly, stop paying attention to the world around them, and generally shut off the parts of their brain that don't involve chattering. If people using cell phones weren't jerks there'd be little reason to hate them as they're pretty damn useful.
In September the FCC finally approved the Nokia 6600 for sale in the US. It might be available from cellular retailers but I don't think any of the major GSM carriers are offering it. It might be possible to find a reseller that offers subsidys for contracts to get the price down. Nokia's come out with the 6620 which is a bit like the 6600 with EDGE support and a few more improvements and optimizations. Hopefully that means the 6600 will come down from the rather exorbitant $550 it is going for now.
Whoops. More than once I've shaded a window instead of expanding it or expanded it when I meant to shade it. Although with ultra speed mouse settings you might be able to go from shade to close without knowing it.
I don't understand how people could have not expected this to happen. The previous version of iLife was $49 mostly due to iDVD's included media. The other iApps were available for download, including iMovie and iPhoto's very large updates. It seems just as likely now as it did then that the "free" iApps will be available for download at some point. If they aren't the old versions will not delete themselves from your hard drive. These new programs have been out for a couple days now and iPhoto imported pictures off my camera just fine. They've all yet to self destruct.
I'm also having trouble seeing how the new iLife suite isn't worth the price. The educational discount cuts the price down to $29 which will set you back a couple Frappucinos for the month. If it isn't worth the upgrade stick with the old stuff. I ordered it because GarageBand seems like an awesome app to play around with. I liked what I saw of SoundTrack but really do not need all of its features nor do I want to spend that sort of money. Even the full retail price isn't too bad considering what's included. It didn't bother me too much paying $50 for a suite of programs I use all the time.
Tog has some very valid points on some aspects of OSX's interface. On the other hand it is obvious he really liked the way OS9's interface worked. His favorite interface hacks are ones that bring back elements from OS9. While Classic MacOS has some very good interface elements not all of them need to be ported to OSX.
Window shades were a good idea when there was nowhere else for the windows to go. In OSX the Dock is the out of the way window repository and for the better I think. Since the Dock now adds an ownership icon to windows it is easy to see what is in the window and what it belongs to. If you've got a Word document and Safari window in the Dock you can easily tell which is the one you want to bring back up by the ownership icon. With window shades it was easy to lose a shaded window behind other windows or not be able to find the particular window you were looking for. The Dock keeps the windows in a common area and gives a visual representation of them.
I agree with Tog on white space to a degree. Some widgets in Classic MacOS were in desperate of added white space. Then other widgets were given too much white space. The white space added to windows controls was a very good idea in my opinion. The Platinum window controls were ridiculously close to one another which made it easy to be sloppy and close a window without meaning to. The added space is also good on tools windows. At 1280x960 the close button on tool windows was teeny tiny. Its Aqua counterpart is much easier to hit and more noticable. The amount of space given to buttons and labels however is bordering on absurdity. Interface builder suggests no less than four miles between buttons and labels on an interface. Too many small developers are using the suggested window metrics and ending up with horribly spaced windows.
If the course requires your instructor to teach Microsoft Office products in class then thems the breaks. In most situations it will be the end result that actually matters to people. Who cares if you code in vi or emacs as long as it compiles and works like it is supposed to. In this particular instance the course is about Microsoft products, the actual assignments are just busy work to take you through the functions of the applications in the suite. The instructor doesn't really care about the class' hobbies, they just needed an assignment that was easy to itemize for PowerPoint.
I would wager that by the time Doom 3 has been out a month there will be several MP mods readily available for it. Existing mods as well as brand new ones that use the unique features of the D3 engine will be all over the place. The D3 SP game is just one example of what the engine can do, just like Quake I and II were. Quake 2 as a single player game was decent but not great. Quake 2 as a base for mods was much better. Action Quake and Weapons Factory were awesome Quake 2 mods.
There's about 1.2 million iBooks over the age of a year old according to Apple's 10-K filing. Since the dual USB iBook came out in May of 2001 you could probably drop the number of dual USB iBooks down to about a million. The problem is a manufacturing defect. If it were a design defect just about every dual USB iBook would be suffering from the problem.
Having heard about this a long time ago it seems to me that the people organizing this crap are just doing it for the publicity. They get to whine and people will pay attention to them.
The iPod battery problem is pretty absurd. I've miraculously fixed more than one iPod whose owner knew beyond any doubt their iPod battery was dead. A bug in the 1.x firmware causes the iPod to not wake up if the battery charge drops to zero. All that is required is a few minutes charging and a hard reset, holding down menu+play/pause for a few seconds.
That isn't to say several people haven't really had their battery die. In the case of a truly dead battery there's always been a few options. Since the second generation iPod's release there's been iPod batteries available for sale from various retailers. Besides retailers there's always been AppleCare available for the iPods. It costs $60 for an extra two years of warranty coverage. That is $60 for three years total of battery replacement and any other sort of repairs. You don't even need to buy it when you buy the iPod. Whining about not being willing to protect a $300-500 investment is a bit absurd to me.
The situation is similar for the iBooks. Having a major hardware component die is absolutely no fun. However this sort of failure is something that would be covered and has been covered under the hardware warranty. If people with failed logic boards did have AppleCare they'd be up and running again in under a week. Instead they want to rant and rave and make money selling t-shirts.
The year 1904 was choosen because it was the first leap year of the 20th century. Using this as their epoch beginning saved them several dozens of leap year checking indstructions. Apparently they thought this was pretty cool and it has stuck with the Mac since.
Macintosh as a platform would have died a long time ago if it wasn't for those greedy shareware developers you have such disdain for. Some of the best pieces of software available for the Mac have been shareware applications. Most of these applications don't force you to buy them in order to get full functionality. Some people want too much money for ridiculously simple applications but you're under no obligation to purchase or use them.
Besides Mac-only shareware there's literally thousands of OS programs available through Fink, GNU-Darwin, and Darwin Ports. If one of these free as in speech apps works better or as well as a shareware one use it instead of the shareware, vote with your wallet.
There's also plenty of choice in your Mac specific applications. There's several browsers, mail clients, IM programs, media players, editors, and whatever else you want. Not all of them are free or open source but your options are definitely not limited to commercial products.
Laptops definitely use less power than their desktop counterparts. Consider they're powering an LCD and logic components off a fraction ofthe power your PC and monitor are using. They're also got a built-in UPS in the form of their battery. Running a laptop off its internal battery rather than the house batteries in a solar installation just means that much more you can have connected at night.
Depending on where you live that may or may not be a problem. In countries with lax copyright laws or no specific deals with other countries/trade blocs you can do whatever you want with a copyrighted song. If you live in Europe or North America you have far fewer rights to works copyrighted in other countries. If you're in Canada or the UK you can't sell a work copyrighted in the US but not in your country. The owner in the US can get in touch with whoever handles copyright problems in Canada or the UK and have you persecuted to the largest extent they can manage. The same goes for a work copyrighted in the UK but not in the US. The owner in the UK can get in touch with the FBI and have them come after you at their leisure. European and North American countries tend to respect their trading partners' copyrights even if they don't necessarily support their enforcement or specifics.
When you go to sell a copyrighted work you need permission from the copyright holder. As such the work needs to have a registered copyright in the country you intend to sell it. To sell a song from the US in Canada the song needs to have a registered copyright in Canada and you need the holder's permission. If the song only has a registered copyright in the US you're not going to be able to sell it outside the US in most countries.
Thus far the major record companies have not seen fit to allow any US based services to sell their shwag outside of the US. The prime hurdle is few places outside the US are so friendly to some our ridiculously lopsided copyright laws. Until copyright laws in Canada and Europe get more draconian it isn't likely any US based music services are going to be doing much business outside the US.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is about whether or not the code in Linux is SCO's code or not. SCO is claiming IBM put some of its code into Linux in order to make Linux "Eterprise Ready". IBM says they didn't do any such thing. A patch removing all of the code SCO claims were put in illegally would be a tacit admission that the code is SCO's. Removing any code SCO claims is theirs would be the worst thing any kernel maintainer could do right now.
Finally, someone listened! Municipal data networks make perfect sense. Many municipalities manage their local utilities, adding data services to that I think is the natural extension.
The pricate telephone companies are never going to outlay the cash for significant upgrades to a local telecom system. They would much rather stick with their relatively old lines and equipment and charge their customers and arm and a leg for them. When the cities and counties own the lines, they're going to get a better price on services because they can shop around. I'm not saddened by the stories of woe coming out of the local Bells. Municipal data networks are being built and proposed because there is a need for them that isn't being met by the current owners of the data networks.
I don't understand why they don't work with the munis on these projects. Instead of whining about competition they should offer to manage the networks. They can get the management dollars without the outlay for construction. I suppose they don't like to play games where they don't make up the rules. If they're concerned about municipal networks competing for commercial services it because the market is the telcos' to lose. There's plenty of areas of the country that have a lot of cheap office space and a high standard of living. They do not however have the sort of data infrastructure that many businesses are looking for and are thus avoided by larger businesses. Building competitive data networks can draw a lot of business to an area. The Bells want to focus business in particular markets where they have a lot of leverage while a municipality wants to move business where it is.
It's sad that the telcos are so successful in their lobbying to prevent municipalities from reselling excess capacity. The money an RBOC makes it not going into local communities. The money Bumkiss county makes however does go into the community. In Georgia where the schools stand to make money the situation is even worse. The school districts could generate cashflow by selling something they're not using and wouldn't miss. At the very least it would be possible for their network to break even an essentially give the county schools a free 10Gb data network. At best they could put money back into that county's coffers. Even if those dollars don't go directly back into the school system the schools could still benefit. Hopefully the legislature in Utah and the SC in Missouri's case will see the telcos are whining about having their uncompetitive monopolies taken away and side with the municipalities.
No kidding. Here.
Audits of nearly any bureaucratic program is bound to find all sorts of excesses and general problems in the program's methodologies. Bureaucracies tend to function in ways that perpetuate themselves. Whole processes and procedures are created in order to extend the need and scope of the bureaucracy. In a large enough organization you can create an Office of Redundant Redundancy and no one would notice until the organization was thoroughly audited.
I don't see why the ISS is sending people outside to check on the status of the station. Instead of using people for spacewalks why not micro/nanosats? They could be launched from a future shuttle mission or given to the crew in a resupply flight and launched from the airlock. It's need a radio tranceiver, control electronics, and a small CMOS or CCD camera. The AFRL has been working on nanosats for several years now and has a few prototypes. A nanosat cluster was supposed to be launched last year on the shuttle but I don't think it went up before the fleet was grounded. The PICOSat however was launched successfully and was built using COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) technology. The exterior of the station would be monitored regularly and docking procedures could be monitored from an advantageous angle.
Blaming the black out on a software bug is a damn cop-out. The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid that can barely keep up with the current demand. Any major failure in the system can cause a cascading failure of the entire section of the grid. That is a horrible design. A software bug may have been the trigger but it is by no means the true cause.
The grid in the North East US is supplied by horribly inefficient and antiquated power lines that were struggling to keep up thirty years ago. That they are still in use today is an outright crime. There's also the issue of the operators of the lines generators trying to save a few bucks by cutting maintenance on equipment and facilities and cutting supervising staffs down to skeleton crews. It is much easier to fit "software bug" into a sound bite so the news media will stick with that. Unfortunately the real cause of the black out is not ever going to be patched and another blackout is as inevitable as this last one was. I hope next time a few more people will have invested in backup generators or some alternate form of power to keep from losing their business during a blackout.
Actually I don't know. With an MSN username it works just like Explorer on Windows. I would bet a Hotmail address works as well.
Wah wah. Safari 1.2 won't run on Jaguar. Camino and OmniWeb both run on Jaguar, OmniWeb 4.5 and 5 both use Safari's rendering engine. You've got options, including sticking with Safari 1.1.
There's nothing requiring you to upgrade MacOS every year. If what you've got works for you there's little reason to upgrade simply because a new version came out. Major commercial apps have pretty wide support bases and typically run on 10.1 and up. Smaller shareware apps move a little quicker and some of them require at least 10.2 in order to run. It is in a developer's best interest to support a wide range of systems so it will be a long time before 10.3 or newer is an absolute minimum requirement for a majority of software.
If you want to troll you could at least be creative about it.
Actually Microsoft killed IE in name but released MSN Explorer in its place. Explorer uses the Tasman rendering engine with the glitzy MSN interface on top of it. It's pretty much the same as MSN Explorer on Windows, including even WMP and Messenger.
It is likely Microsoft will keep MSN Explorer et al up to date because they are trying to grab the Mac crowd for MSN internet access. Earthlink and AOL have long had good support for Mac users and as such they've got quite a few Mac subscribers. Every Mac you buy comes with 30 days of free Earthlink service, AOL dial-up support in Internet Connect, and an AIM compatible IM client. Apple's very friendly with Earthlink and AOL for sticking with them even in bad times. MSN on the other hand has pretty much ignored the Mac market for most of its operational lifetime. Now that MSN is fighting to retain customers left and right they have to support the Mac market. They're losing customers left and right to cheaper dial-up services and broadband providers.
Premiere.
Finally, OSDL already has working groups and specifications for Linux in data centers and in carrier grade facilities. It makes a lot of sense to get a specification for desktop systems as well. Thus far the only specifications Linux has had to brag about in Enterprise space is its comformance with the Open Group's Unix specifications. Meeting technical guidelines is great but that doesn't really demonstrate the practical ability of Linux in any environment.
A smart specification and reference implementation will let just about anybody with the know-how build Enterprise grade Linux systems. As such just about anyone will be able to compete in the business, not just the kids with big brand names.
I think cell phones are the most abused technology and are thus the most hated. I think some people associate telephones with being at home and as such act on a cell phone as they do at home. People talk loudly, stop paying attention to the world around them, and generally shut off the parts of their brain that don't involve chattering. If people using cell phones weren't jerks there'd be little reason to hate them as they're pretty damn useful.
In September the FCC finally approved the Nokia 6600 for sale in the US. It might be available from cellular retailers but I don't think any of the major GSM carriers are offering it. It might be possible to find a reseller that offers subsidys for contracts to get the price down. Nokia's come out with the 6620 which is a bit like the 6600 with EDGE support and a few more improvements and optimizations. Hopefully that means the 6600 will come down from the rather exorbitant $550 it is going for now.
sed s/close/shade/g
Whoops. More than once I've shaded a window instead of expanding it or expanded it when I meant to shade it. Although with ultra speed mouse settings you might be able to go from shade to close without knowing it.
I don't understand how people could have not expected this to happen. The previous version of iLife was $49 mostly due to iDVD's included media. The other iApps were available for download, including iMovie and iPhoto's very large updates. It seems just as likely now as it did then that the "free" iApps will be available for download at some point. If they aren't the old versions will not delete themselves from your hard drive. These new programs have been out for a couple days now and iPhoto imported pictures off my camera just fine. They've all yet to self destruct.
I'm also having trouble seeing how the new iLife suite isn't worth the price. The educational discount cuts the price down to $29 which will set you back a couple Frappucinos for the month. If it isn't worth the upgrade stick with the old stuff. I ordered it because GarageBand seems like an awesome app to play around with. I liked what I saw of SoundTrack but really do not need all of its features nor do I want to spend that sort of money. Even the full retail price isn't too bad considering what's included. It didn't bother me too much paying $50 for a suite of programs I use all the time.
Tog has some very valid points on some aspects of OSX's interface. On the other hand it is obvious he really liked the way OS9's interface worked. His favorite interface hacks are ones that bring back elements from OS9. While Classic MacOS has some very good interface elements not all of them need to be ported to OSX.
Window shades were a good idea when there was nowhere else for the windows to go. In OSX the Dock is the out of the way window repository and for the better I think. Since the Dock now adds an ownership icon to windows it is easy to see what is in the window and what it belongs to. If you've got a Word document and Safari window in the Dock you can easily tell which is the one you want to bring back up by the ownership icon. With window shades it was easy to lose a shaded window behind other windows or not be able to find the particular window you were looking for. The Dock keeps the windows in a common area and gives a visual representation of them.
I agree with Tog on white space to a degree. Some widgets in Classic MacOS were in desperate of added white space. Then other widgets were given too much white space. The white space added to windows controls was a very good idea in my opinion. The Platinum window controls were ridiculously close to one another which made it easy to be sloppy and close a window without meaning to. The added space is also good on tools windows. At 1280x960 the close button on tool windows was teeny tiny. Its Aqua counterpart is much easier to hit and more noticable. The amount of space given to buttons and labels however is bordering on absurdity. Interface builder suggests no less than four miles between buttons and labels on an interface. Too many small developers are using the suggested window metrics and ending up with horribly spaced windows.
If the course requires your instructor to teach Microsoft Office products in class then thems the breaks. In most situations it will be the end result that actually matters to people. Who cares if you code in vi or emacs as long as it compiles and works like it is supposed to. In this particular instance the course is about Microsoft products, the actual assignments are just busy work to take you through the functions of the applications in the suite. The instructor doesn't really care about the class' hobbies, they just needed an assignment that was easy to itemize for PowerPoint.
I would wager that by the time Doom 3 has been out a month there will be several MP mods readily available for it. Existing mods as well as brand new ones that use the unique features of the D3 engine will be all over the place. The D3 SP game is just one example of what the engine can do, just like Quake I and II were. Quake 2 as a single player game was decent but not great. Quake 2 as a base for mods was much better. Action Quake and Weapons Factory were awesome Quake 2 mods.
There's about 1.2 million iBooks over the age of a year old according to Apple's 10-K filing. Since the dual USB iBook came out in May of 2001 you could probably drop the number of dual USB iBooks down to about a million. The problem is a manufacturing defect. If it were a design defect just about every dual USB iBook would be suffering from the problem.
Having heard about this a long time ago it seems to me that the people organizing this crap are just doing it for the publicity. They get to whine and people will pay attention to them.
The iPod battery problem is pretty absurd. I've miraculously fixed more than one iPod whose owner knew beyond any doubt their iPod battery was dead. A bug in the 1.x firmware causes the iPod to not wake up if the battery charge drops to zero. All that is required is a few minutes charging and a hard reset, holding down menu+play/pause for a few seconds.
That isn't to say several people haven't really had their battery die. In the case of a truly dead battery there's always been a few options. Since the second generation iPod's release there's been iPod batteries available for sale from various retailers. Besides retailers there's always been AppleCare available for the iPods. It costs $60 for an extra two years of warranty coverage. That is $60 for three years total of battery replacement and any other sort of repairs. You don't even need to buy it when you buy the iPod. Whining about not being willing to protect a $300-500 investment is a bit absurd to me.
The situation is similar for the iBooks. Having a major hardware component die is absolutely no fun. However this sort of failure is something that would be covered and has been covered under the hardware warranty. If people with failed logic boards did have AppleCare they'd be up and running again in under a week. Instead they want to rant and rave and make money selling t-shirts.
The year 1904 was choosen because it was the first leap year of the 20th century. Using this as their epoch beginning saved them several dozens of leap year checking indstructions. Apparently they thought this was pretty cool and it has stuck with the Mac since.
Macintosh as a platform would have died a long time ago if it wasn't for those greedy shareware developers you have such disdain for. Some of the best pieces of software available for the Mac have been shareware applications. Most of these applications don't force you to buy them in order to get full functionality. Some people want too much money for ridiculously simple applications but you're under no obligation to purchase or use them.
Besides Mac-only shareware there's literally thousands of OS programs available through Fink, GNU-Darwin, and Darwin Ports. If one of these free as in speech apps works better or as well as a shareware one use it instead of the shareware, vote with your wallet.
There's also plenty of choice in your Mac specific applications. There's several browsers, mail clients, IM programs, media players, editors, and whatever else you want. Not all of them are free or open source but your options are definitely not limited to commercial products.
Laptops definitely use less power than their desktop counterparts. Consider they're powering an LCD and logic components off a fraction ofthe power your PC and monitor are using. They're also got a built-in UPS in the form of their battery. Running a laptop off its internal battery rather than the house batteries in a solar installation just means that much more you can have connected at night.
Depending on where you live that may or may not be a problem. In countries with lax copyright laws or no specific deals with other countries/trade blocs you can do whatever you want with a copyrighted song. If you live in Europe or North America you have far fewer rights to works copyrighted in other countries. If you're in Canada or the UK you can't sell a work copyrighted in the US but not in your country. The owner in the US can get in touch with whoever handles copyright problems in Canada or the UK and have you persecuted to the largest extent they can manage. The same goes for a work copyrighted in the UK but not in the US. The owner in the UK can get in touch with the FBI and have them come after you at their leisure. European and North American countries tend to respect their trading partners' copyrights even if they don't necessarily support their enforcement or specifics.
When you go to sell a copyrighted work you need permission from the copyright holder. As such the work needs to have a registered copyright in the country you intend to sell it. To sell a song from the US in Canada the song needs to have a registered copyright in Canada and you need the holder's permission. If the song only has a registered copyright in the US you're not going to be able to sell it outside the US in most countries.
Thus far the major record companies have not seen fit to allow any US based services to sell their shwag outside of the US. The prime hurdle is few places outside the US are so friendly to some our ridiculously lopsided copyright laws. Until copyright laws in Canada and Europe get more draconian it isn't likely any US based music services are going to be doing much business outside the US.
Hello FAAD2.