> I think they will have some sort of special chips on their MOBO that > will prevent multiple parts of the OSX from functioning if that chip > isn't there.
You are talking about the DRM option and I covered that in the original post. Do the XBox thing and Apple becomes THE poster child for the dark side.
Plus it won't even work. A Mac ISN'T an X-Box. All of the files have to be available in the clear when running on the mac and programmers who haven't signed the Greater NDA Pact with the devil have to be able to use one. All of the binaries will get decrypted ASAP and any sections which look for the fritz chip will get fixed, Standard copy protection removal techniques will serve for the job, hell I was removing copy protection schemes from games in the '80s; thousands have the required skills. When you also realize the best places to put protection is in the lower levels of the OS but those are Open Source on Mac, it really limits their options. Even if a bare metal boot isn't practical, Mac on Linux should be straight forward. Just buy a video card with a chipset the MacOS windowing system (Quartz?) can deal with and you should be golden.
No, nobody has EVER thought of the Swiss as pacifist. They were neutral in WWII because as bankers in a hard to attack location, well placed to profit from both sides mind you, they found it the sensible course. But go read some history, they used to be THE place for the European Powers to recruit mercs from.
The modern French are probably about as close as you can get and survive semi independently with a voice on the world stage.
The most pacific are of course the Canadians and they get away with it by the happy circumstance of having as their sole neighbor the most civilized AND powerful nation in history. When we eventually screw the pooch and lose our civilization whoever suplants us will of course get Canada as a free bonus prize, they being totally dependent on our willingness to ensure their security at no cost to them.
> No, but they can use the DMCA to go after someone who hacks their OS > in order to circumvent certain restrictions.
Yes, but this is copy control on a whole different order from DVDs and CSS. This would be Sony saying that from date X Sony Pictures DVDs would only play on Sony brand DVD players and they would be wielding the DMCA to enforce it.
> Right now, the PPC is open to all, yet nobody has come out with a Mac > clone.
Right now nobody has seen enough profit in it. Mac sales are currently a piss in the ocean of PC sales and a clone vendor who couldn't strike a bargain to bundle OS X into a supported product wouldn't hope to capture 1% of the Mac market, certainly not enough money to fight off Apple's legal dept.
Now we have the hacker (hacker, not cracker) community who will be doing it 'because it is there' if for no other reason. Once a patch exists it will be days until the patched.iso goes on BT and it is all over. Apple's legal dept is of little use against BT and some 15yo hacker with a leetspeak userid somewhere on the Internet outside US jurisdiction. See the case of DVD Jon for a lesson; they did track him down and he ended up getting a medal. Literally.
> Also, the people of Naboo were supposed to be pacifists who just > happened to have well-armed starfighters at their disposal.
Only kind of pacifists that survive long. If you would have peace, know war. Heck, even the 'peaceloving' French have a carrier battle group rusting away at harbor.
> So maybe it's possible to share, as long as neither species has the > technology to obliterate, enslave, or merely cook and eat each other.
What a crock. Forget the tech and look to morals and clue for the answer. How many countries on THIS planet have the tech to "obliterate, enslave or cook" most of the rest of the population? Obviously it isn't a techological limit. And besides, those Gungans appeared to have a fair bit of tech themselves.
> Apple makes non-clone x86 hardware which is capable of running Linux or > Windows but different enough to keep OS X off of Dells and other clones.
If it is close enough to run Windows (barring a specific port from Microsoft of course) it IS a PC. Even if nobody manages to get it running on the bare metal Mac On Linux should have no problems booting it unless they invoke the specter of DRM and the DMCA. They sell box sets. Unless they pull those I can go BUY a copy of OSX-x86 and load it in MOL. At that point they are boned legally, in exactly the same way Microsoft has to permit Windows XP to be loaded in VMWare if you have a valid serial number and they have to let me run Internet Explorer in Crossover Office.
They play enough games and those infamous lawyers of theirs could be spending their days negotiating a settlememt with the DOJ's Antitrust Division.
> While Apple might lag the bleeding edge clones at the upper end of the > market this won't matter at the Mini/iMac/iBook level where most of > Apple's (or Dell's for that matter) volume is.
They often lag by YEARS currently. Compare Macs at any price band against Dell/HP/etc and you will find the Mac behind in CPU, RAM, HDD, video chipset or almost any other metric. And their line never goes as far up or down as the beige box market. None of this is likely to change by swapping out the PPC chip for a Pentium. Apple operates at higher profit margins, more akin to Sun than Dell and unless that changes they will never be a volume player. And as for beating Dell at their own game, good luck, they are Intel's very bestest customer and Steveo is the new guy in the game.
> If Apple charges competitive prices, like they do for their Mini, there > will not be much economic incentive to go to great lengths to run OSX > on existing hardware.
Of course there will. Apple has NEVER been competetive on price and everything else in a current Mac is stock PC hardware. The price of the PPC chip almost certainly isn't the reason why this is so. So forget these dreams of Apple supplanting Dell as the volume PC vendor and face reality. A non-trivial percentage of the legions of Dell and eMachines owners would give Apple the same $99 for a box of OS X as Apple charges their current customers. Instead they will be downloading it via BT after it gets 'fixed.'
> Also, Apple has some rather mean legal dogs that would likely bite > anyone who tries to circumvent their restrictions for money.
We all know they have sharp lawyers. But that just means this issue is finally going to be settled once and for all: Can a vendor of software dictate it can only be loaded on the PCs they make?
So far the console makers have had some success (Although Sony didn't manage to stop one of the emulators for the PlayStation) in this area but no PC maker has tried yet. And just today the Supremes declined to even consider reopening the Lexmark case. And we DO know a hardware maker can't forbid third party software from being run from Atari v Activision. How the console makers avoid that clear ruling is a mystery.
> I don't think AMD could provide the volume that Apple would need.
You might have a point if Apple were going with x86_64. But at this point I'm sure AMD could supply all the Athlons they could ever hope to sell. Remember, Apple is bound by their deal with Microsoft to never be a volume player, to stay safely in their low volume, high margin niche. Stray from that and Office disappears.
> If you haven't programmed for these early systems, I'd highly recommend > you reconsider. A "16bit UNIX-like OS" cannot fit into 1k, 4k (or later > 64k) on a sub 1Mhz, 4 or 8 bit processor.
Actually Microware's OS9 Level I ran on a 6809 with 64k RAM. I owned a copy ported to the Tandy CoCo I/II with 64k RAM and a.89Mhz 6809e. It was as much *NIX as you could ram into a 64k machine. Multi-processing, multi-user, termcap, serial terminals, a shell with pipes, redirection and job control, vi, rogue, and if you had managed to stuff a hard drive in you could even run a K&R compliant C compiler without playing the floppy shuffle.
OS9 Level II on the CoCo III with 512K of memory and double the CPU clock was actually livable by the standards of the day. It even had a windowing system! Don't be slagging the old school dude, Pentiums! Bah! Athlons! Bah! A unix wizard needs not these things.
> Hacking aside, Apple is committed to locking down OSX for x86 to > Apple-branded hardware.
Three options here.
1. The new x86 Macs only run OS X. In this case there is zero change in new adoption and a slow bleed away since Apple will always be behind the tech curve. The PPC chip was their only ace in the hole, they run stock IDE drives, year old video cards, etc. Since they only introduce new hardware twice per year that also means that they will usually be six months to a year behind on the CPU.
2. The new Mac hardware is a stock Dell compatible PC capable of running Windows. This means it will be a good universal box capable of running OS X, BSD, Linux and Windows. Appealing to some, but always overpriced and underpowered, see above. More interesting will be the instant porting of OS X to commodity hardware. This will be resisted at Apple but pretty hard to prevent. By not selling it though, they are creating a massive pirate community instead of paying customers.
3. Option two but with a pervasive DRM system to eliminate running on clone hardware. Massive backlash as Apple is perceived as going over to the 'dark side'. The Apple faithful will of course drink the kool aid and remain faithful, insisting DRM is now good because Steve said so. In a sane world it would invoke the Justice Dept's Anti-trust division's wrath but we all know that won't happen.
> Since when is "computer literate" defined as being a programmer?
Since the first 'computer literacy' class was taught. Back then it tended to be BASIC on a micro, but BASIC counts. Then, like the rest of modern education, it got dumbed down to 'secretary' class.
> Your analogy to English is wrong. It's like saying someone who is > literate must also be an author.
Pretty much nailed it one my young product of modern education. Congratulations on being in the top half of the bell curve! I am not saying everyone should be a PUBLISHED author, but should possess the basic skills to write a narrative report, a research paper, personal letter, etc. to be called 'literate' in the English language. That simply reading/listening to English written by someone else is insuffient even if perfectly understood.
I am not saying every high school student should be able to program a web browser in C++. I am not even saying they must prove their skills by contributing 10,000 quality lines to the Mozilla Foundation. What I do say is that for someone to be called 'computer literate' they must understand the principles enough to at least write basic personal workflow enhancing scripts, macros, etc. which indicates they possess the fundemental understanding required to readily learn and use more advanced tools should they need it later.
> Computers are not "mind enhancing tools." Computers are just TOOLs.
And just what do you think these TOOLS are designed to make their user more productive with? Just as a lever or hammer enhances one's physical abilities a computer enhances the mental powers.
> They will eventually turn as many components of their so-called > Enterprise version of Linux into closed source, proprietary software, > in the same style as most of the UNIX OSes out there.
Common conspiracy theory, but almost certainly wrong. Where do you think they GET their Enterprise distro? Fedora. RHEL4 is basically FC3 cleaned up and polished a bit more. They know they lack the resources to fully test enterprise software inhouse so they depend on Fedora for wide testing of all new technology. See SELinux, udev, heck even the 2.6 kernel.
Currently RH does ship some closed components, such as a JDK, Acrobat, Flash, etc. But they do it on a totally seperate CD-ROM called Extras. As far as I know they don't own the rights to a single line of code that isn't currently Free or in the process of becoming free (some parts of their new directory server aren't yet Free Software but is scheduled to become so) so it would be crossing a bright red line if they ever produced a closed package.
If you don't believe me, go to ftp.redhat.com and download the entire source for RHEL and look at the license tags on the packages. 100% OSS/FS product and likely to remain that way. RH 'gets it' on the value of Open so they aren't likely to do something as suicidal as what you are afraid of.
> More importantly, however, GNU is essential: without the GNU compiler > and the GNU command line utilities, Linux wouldn't run; there simply > are no substitutes.
Riight. Please put down the crackpipe and slowly walk away from it.
BSD has a fully functioning userland. They currently use GCC & Friends for the build chain but lets face it, GCC hasn't been a FSF project in years. Most GCC development has been at Cygnus -> RedHat. And there ARE alternate C compilers around should the need ever arise to make a GNU free Linux.
> As I recall, GNU was the biggest component in terms of LOC, even > bigger than the kernel.
I seriously doubt that. Unless you rig the game and don't count X, KDE, Moz, OOo, Apache, Perl, PHP, etc and do count GNOME even though it is a GNU project in acronym only. (If it were really a FSF/GNU project there wouldn't even be TALK of using Mono or Java.)
The GNU Utilities are very useful, but life could continue if the unthinkable happened and some legal snafu caused them to become unavailable. Regular sh sucks compared to bash but it does work. Same for the rest of the GNU stuff, it is generally best of breed but there were actually versions of those commands before GNU and many are still available and if they don't build on a modern Linux based system could be fixed fairly quickly.
> I am old school. If I can not write code for it then I do not consider > it my computer.
Amen, but we are a vanishing minority. Today 'computer literate' means 'able to browse the Interweb thingy with IE and write a gramatically incorrect short letter with Word' at best.
But listen up folks, being computer literate means being able to program in exactly the same way that being literate in English means being able to express thoughts in properly constructed words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. Calling someone 'computer literate' because they can use a couple of programs written by someone else would be like calling someone literate in English because they can watch Cribs on MTV. Computers are mind enhancing tools, being limited to thinking only someone else's thoughts isn't thinking at all.
Look folks, consoles aren't going to 'kill' the PC game. Both have a place in the world because each lends itself to different sorts of games.
Console:
Big splashy 100 million dollar hollywierd epics with commercial tieins to the NFL, NASCAR, latest hollywierd blockbuster, sequel #7, etc.
Mostly limited to games that appeal to the younger set with the reflexes for twitch games.
PC:
Many of the same splashy epic games as on the console, after all once you sink 50+ million into graphics, cutscenes and voice talent the porting cost isn't a problem.
Games that need a keyboard, high resolution graphics, large storage or any other PC only feature. For all the talk of HD-TV, for the next decade any console game must run and be fully playable at the effective 320x480i resolution of the typical 19" WalMart special NTSC television sitting in the typical teenager's bedroom. That makes a lot of PC strategy games hard to deal with on a console.
Small games. Paying ~10/disc to Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft to help subsidize the initial console purchase ensures that small games will never find a niche on the console, which is one reason for the heavy saturation of franchise epics there.
New games. PCs get new technology first so the latest shiny thing will always be there. And remember that John Carmack is likely to write first for the PC and outsource the console ports
Internet addicts will stay on the PC and game companies won't pass over their coin. Ok, the new generation of consoles have basic online play but how many are going to let you have ICQ running along side it on the second monitor?
> With MS Office, the store can pass the buck to Microsoft.
No you can't. Go read the license. Part of the special OEM pricing is that the OEM, that is the store in the case of a mom & pop chop shop, is responsible for all end user support. Why do you think Dell owners call Dell for support instead of Microsoft? Same reason. Only if you buy your copy of Windows or Office for full retail in a box do you get the right to call Microsoft tech support without whipping out the ol' credit card.
Which is one reason why it would make sense for a shop to include OOo. Drop in a disclaimer on the ticket to the effect of "Open Office is included at NO COST as a courtesy to our customers. However, since we have made no money from supplying it to you we can only provide support on the same for fee consulting basis we provide for ANY computer problem. You are encouraged to visit the software's Internet home at www.openoffice.org." Face it, one or two support calls will devour all of the profit from selling an OEM copy of MS Office.
Seriously, why does slashdot feed this troll pageviews?
This clown is in the same short list of paid shills for SCO/Microsoft that MOG was in before she went a little too far and got her head handed to her.
He is just trying to put the idea that Linux folk are unstable sorts who shouldn't be allowed to be near the mission critical infrastructure into pointy haired heads.
> Firefox is shaky because tabbed browsing was introduced by Opera
Look farther back for the innovation. Other people had did hypertext, but the idea of standards (HTML is SGML) based markup delivered across diverse networks with multimedia (at the time mostly pictures) and the ability to seamlessly link to content hosted on computers outside the author's network was first created in an open environment (research) and the first implementation was released as open. Then the first totally graphical browser, and the foundations underpinning the market leader today (Microsoft's own Internet Explorer) was released as Free Software. It's name was NCSA Mosiac. NCSA also implemented a httpd server that went on to greatness. After being abandoned by NCSA it was taken over by a band of OSS programmers and patched so much it was renamed "Apache". You may have heard of it, it now powers about 70% of the web servers worldwide. So non-commercial OSS types created the World Wide Web that lead to the Tech Explosion of the 1990's and direct descendents of their original code is in use to this very day on millions and millions of machines. In short, they changed the world. Where I come from that is called innovation.
> Where email is concerned, I can't think of any whizz bang email > programthat sets itself apart from most other email in an innovative > way.
But email as we understand it, as in a universal service across networks, is an invention of the OSS/Unix community. Sendmail wasn't an open source re-invention of a commercial product, it was and remains to this very day, THE mail transport mechanism for the Internet. The very IDEA of a universal cross network, cross OS, cross archetecture mail transport didn't really exist until sendmail created it.
> Yes, IRC was around before AOL but AOL brought internet chat awareness > to the masses so they get the credit.
Please be consistent. You admit AIM was only a poor imitation of IRC yet you don't give the credit for the innovation to OSS. Although to be truthful, neither can claim the credit because Compuserve's CB Simulator did it first and inspired all of the later implementations all the way down to IRC's use of the term 'channel'.
> Open source needs commercial software and commercial software is > recognizing the importance of and becoming more reliant upon open > source.
No it doesn't. It does need commercial USERS and the demands for QC and documentation they bring plus the money they are increasingly willing to spend to obtain it. But we don't 'need' commercial software anymore, never did. That was a major league wrong turn. I expect we will still have closed CONTENT, i.e. games, but the idea of software as a big secret black box is dead.
Even if you don't get full redistribution rights the idea of not getting a copy of the source along with binaries is fast dying. Eventually all software will routinely ship with source and might not even bother with binaries as the underlying hardware becomes diverse again. Closed binaries were only really practical during the WinTel hegenomy where there was, for all intents and purposes, one hardware and one software platform. Part of the normal software install routine might include compiling a version for your computer. (This would make the Gentoo kids the leading edge of the revolution. Ugh.)
Just tried searching for "Revenge of the Sith" on bittorrent's new search engine and "filetype:torrent Revenge of the Sith" on Google. Google wins hands down for number of hits. Two hits on BT's search and three pages on Google.
> One thing that people seem to forget is that publishers and such > actually have gone after libraries in the past too, because they felt > that if people could check out their book from the library, it would > hurt their sales.
Yes, many authors and publishers hate the idea of lending libraries, usually the medium volume outfits. For a small circulation book getting a majority of libraries to buy a copy represents the bulk of copies sold, for a blockbuster they are pulling in so much cash they don't care. But there have been many attempts to outlaw/restrict public libraries. In England libraries actually have to PAY the author so don't think it couldn't happen here, especially as things go digital.
The only reason we haven't had something awful like that here is most libraries are government operations or non-profits and have been PR savy enough to make their opponents come off as the sort who kick puppies for sport.
(And full disclosure: yes I work for a public library.)
> Let's return to that America where colored people --
Where the fuck did you get that from my post? Or is that the sort of knee jerk response you throw without even thinking because you have found that most people are conditioned to get defensive and often curl up in the fetal position when anyone hurls the race card at them?
Never said America hadn't made some positive advances in the last century. But on balance we are going down the shitter. Who cares who has the vote or sits where on the bus if there ain't going to BE a bus anymore and nobody gets to vote? When we are ALL equally poor, illiterate and powerless I guess you will be celebrating... right up till our new masters put your 'revolutionary' ass up against the wall.
> Let's return to that America where we overthrew governments, even > democratic ones, because the Dole Fruit company didn't like their policy > or because they were nationalizing the oil we'd stolen fair and square.
What the heck are you blithering about? Find ONE real representive government that we overthrew? Marxist one man, one vote, one time cesspits, third world dictators, assorted tyrants, yes and we should be mostly proud of it.
> Now we get grief even for overthrowing tyrants if we kill a few tens > of thousands and create near-civil war in the process
Oh, you are one of those. Sorry pal, if you can't believe it wasn't worth invading Iraq FROM THE IRAQI POINT OF VIEW you are simply an ignorant ass not worthy of further discussion. History has already pretty much ruled on that question.
> That's what they said in the 60s, with the race riots and Vietnam.
Yea, exactly. Back in WWII we bestrode the world and all foes of Truth, Justice and the American Way trembled. But the rot was already deep inside even then. See the stories and op-eds from last week during the 60th anniversay of VE day where we finally apologized for selling millions into slavery and death at Stalin's hand because our 5th column had the president's ear at Yalta. Vietnam was the first unmistakable sign of it being a fatal affliction.
There is a core group walking the halls of power dedicated to the destruction of everything America stands for. Vietnam was their greatest victory. Now we strain to field fairly small forces in Afganistan and Iraq because the foe has gutted our armed forces. The foes of liberty control vast swaths of the command & control and culture too much for us to have a realistic hope of defeating them in the time that remains. Sorry, web bloggers, matt drudge and Fox News just aren't enough to counter balance the forces of all of the major media, academia (including most importantly primary and secondary education curricula), most of the major non-profits (even those founded by decidedly anti-communist tycoons like the Ford Foundation, etc.) and major government agencies remain in enemy hands because teh civil service laws were designed to ensure it. The US State Department is practically enemy territory and has been for generations.
We are in the long twilight struggle folks, if we battle with all our might we may push the fall of the West back another generation, but that is it. For the next generation is the generation of the lost, as they become the mainstream it is pretty much over. They are the products of a public school system that has taught them self esteem, tolerance and how to become pregnant but they can't construct a sentence. Then the mass media teaches them to watch Survivor and what MTV teaches isn't even speakable in polite company.
Then Grand Theft Auto teaches through repetition that the proper response to driving like a maniac and wrecking your car is to point a gun at the first little ol lady driving by and tell her to "get out of the car, bitch." We went from video games where you were the lone hero tasked with saving the world from the hordes of evil scum to games where you ARE the evil scum in a single generation. No, it isn't RockStar Game's fault, it is OUR fault for buying crap like that. For giving our kids the money to buy crap like that. For not teaching them well enough that they wouldn't be interested in buying that crap in the first place.
Meanwhile India is teaching their upcoming generation the way we did it a hundred years ago, and teaching them English to boot. They are going to eat our lunch and deserve to, they are doing it through hard work and determination, values we forgot. Britain planted the seeds of Western Civilization there, we must pray they took firm root. Perhaps they will learn from our mistakes.
> The US has quite a few flaws, but think long and hard on the above > before you break out the champagne to celebrate Chinese dominance.
Yea, but at the rate we are going down the ol shitter the fall of US world dominance is a forgone conclusion in another generation. So all we can hope is that we manage to export Western Civilization to places like China & India before we collapse. Because we certainly haven't had a use for it here the last 50 years and Europe no longer even remembers having had it.:(
> This may be your opinion, but I think that if you look beyond your > prejudices, you'll find that Java is so much more. For example, C/C++ > code can't dynamically load individual components (i.e. reflection) > without extra metadata (e.g. a shared library).
Not opinion, facts. Java isn't really even an OO language since it lacks multiple inheritence and while operator overloading causes no end of problems in the hands of the inexperienced, is pretty much required to have a full OO experience. Not that I'm a fan of OO itself mind you, but Java is directly marketed as something it isn't in any sane definition of Object Oriented. In my opinion object oriented is just a buzzword that turns a normal program into an unmaintainable horror that eats ram and cycles like popcorn. Look at TK for an example of how to get almost all of the purported benefits of objects in a totally procedural implementation that is well behaved and fairly understandable.
As for C++ using libraries to load components, well duh, that is what a library IS. Which, btw, is the correct way to gain code reuse. Find me an example of OO code reuse that compares to the sort of wholesale reuse any of the libraries, mostly in C, included on a modern Free Software distro acomplish.
> You're pulling out nonsense now. Javac being a Java program is a GOOD > thing because it is portable and available to Java programs.
You misundersand. I say it is bogus that Javac only compiles to one target, a platform that only existed in Sun's imagination. Look, I understand the alure of psuedo compiled/interpreted languages such as Java. I used to love BASIC-09. And for the original purpose Sun had in mind when creating Java it even made sense. But then the Internet came along and everyone had to stamp Internet on everything and Sun repurposed Java from Cable TV settop boxes to some 'platform for the Internet' and things went horribly wrong.
If you want platform independence you get it through tools like GNU automake/autoconf, not writing for a mythical platform and producing emulators for the half dozen platforms with enough market to justify the horrendous expense of porting and debugging a runtime environment as complex as the JRE.
Java the virtual machine is a daft idea. Speaking as someone in the Free world that is. The only reason to want a VM is to redistribute binaries across multiple platforms and we in the Free world have to think really hard to remember why anyone would want to do that when the compiler is sitting right there, ready to turn a tar.gz or.src.rpm into native binaries.
Java the language is a sorta OO language that will find it's niche once GCJ strips away the platform and religion baggage from it.
> java is not an emulator. It is a virtual machine.
Not much practical difference these days. Care to draw the line where emulation stops and virtualization starts, between Xen, VMWare Wine, etc. Yes, by specing a virtual machine with no actual hardware they saved the hit of emulating hardware registers and banging bits on a virtualized keyboard controller.
> If you have a problem with this, I suggest you take it up with the > inventors of P-Code
Good example. Proof that A) Java was nothing new and B) in the end the marketplace decided it was a bad idea, hence it is a dead language. Heck, Pascal itself will be a dead language once Borland gives up on Delphi.
> Don't worry, your insults toward myself and millions of other > professional developers shall not deter me from getting your Java > licensing issues resovled! The next version of White Box Linux shall > have Java!
Hey, just yanking yer chain. It is just that so many Java devels have become almost Amigian in there religious devotion to what in the end is just a language, and not a perticularly original or clever one, designed more to forbid bad programming practices (which has it's place in the corporate
You risked one, I'm reaching for -1 Flamebait. What is karma but for the burning!:)
> I have to say that I'm proud to have been a vocal early adopter that > helped Java reach the status it has today. It's a good language, a good > platform, hosted by a good company, and supported by many.
I looked at Java several times, each time concluding it was a castrated C++ and the only available compiler was for a machine that didn't exist but this didn't bother the fanboys because for some daft reason they had decided to write the emulator first instead of the usual process of doing it AFTER the real hardware was no longer available. And of course there was the involvement of Sun, the Sybil of the computing business, where one never knew which maniacal personality would be in charge today, but you knew it wouldn't be a sane one because it didn't HAVE a sane one. As for supported by many, yea if you count ex VB coders. Guess it is progress of a sort.
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> I think they will have some sort of special chips on their MOBO that
> will prevent multiple parts of the OSX from functioning if that chip
> isn't there.
You are talking about the DRM option and I covered that in the original post. Do the XBox thing and Apple becomes THE poster child for the dark side.
Plus it won't even work. A Mac ISN'T an X-Box. All of the files have to be available in the clear when running on the mac and programmers who haven't signed the Greater NDA Pact with the devil have to be able to use one. All of the binaries will get decrypted ASAP and any sections which look for the fritz chip will get fixed, Standard copy protection removal techniques will serve for the job, hell I was removing copy protection schemes from games in the '80s; thousands have the required skills. When you also realize the best places to put protection is in the lower levels of the OS but those are Open Source on Mac, it really limits their options. Even if a bare metal boot isn't practical, Mac on Linux should be straight forward. Just buy a video card with a chipset the MacOS windowing system (Quartz?) can deal with and you should be golden.
> Uh, I think Switzerland
No, nobody has EVER thought of the Swiss as pacifist. They were neutral in WWII because as bankers in a hard to attack location, well placed to profit from both sides mind you, they found it the sensible course. But go read some history, they used to be THE place for the European Powers to recruit mercs from.
The modern French are probably about as close as you can get and survive semi independently with a voice on the world stage.
The most pacific are of course the Canadians and they get away with it by the happy circumstance of having as their sole neighbor the most civilized AND powerful nation in history. When we eventually screw the pooch and lose our civilization whoever suplants us will of course get Canada as a free bonus prize, they being totally dependent on our willingness to ensure their security at no cost to them.
> No, but they can use the DMCA to go after someone who hacks their OS
.iso goes on BT and it is all over. Apple's legal dept is of little use against BT and some 15yo hacker with a leetspeak userid somewhere on the Internet outside US jurisdiction. See the case of DVD Jon for a lesson; they did track him down and he ended up getting a medal. Literally.
> in order to circumvent certain restrictions.
Yes, but this is copy control on a whole different order from DVDs and CSS. This would be Sony saying that from date X Sony Pictures DVDs would only play on Sony brand DVD players and they would be wielding the DMCA to enforce it.
> Right now, the PPC is open to all, yet nobody has come out with a Mac
> clone.
Right now nobody has seen enough profit in it. Mac sales are currently a piss in the ocean of PC sales and a clone vendor who couldn't strike a bargain to bundle OS X into a supported product wouldn't hope to capture 1% of the Mac market, certainly not enough money to fight off Apple's legal dept.
Now we have the hacker (hacker, not cracker) community who will be doing it 'because it is there' if for no other reason. Once a patch exists it will be days until the patched
> Also, the people of Naboo were supposed to be pacifists who just
> happened to have well-armed starfighters at their disposal.
Only kind of pacifists that survive long. If you would have peace, know war. Heck, even the 'peaceloving' French have a carrier battle group rusting away at harbor.
> So maybe it's possible to share, as long as neither species has the
> technology to obliterate, enslave, or merely cook and eat each other.
What a crock. Forget the tech and look to morals and clue for the answer. How many countries on THIS planet have the tech to "obliterate, enslave or cook" most of the rest of the population? Obviously it isn't a techological limit. And besides, those Gungans appeared to have a fair bit of tech themselves.
> Apple makes non-clone x86 hardware which is capable of running Linux or
> Windows but different enough to keep OS X off of Dells and other clones.
If it is close enough to run Windows (barring a specific port from Microsoft of course) it IS a PC. Even if nobody manages to get it running on the bare metal Mac On Linux should have no problems booting it unless they invoke the specter of DRM and the DMCA. They sell box sets. Unless they pull those I can go BUY a copy of OSX-x86 and load it in MOL. At that point they are boned legally, in exactly the same way Microsoft has to permit Windows XP to be loaded in VMWare if you have a valid serial number and they have to let me run Internet Explorer in Crossover Office.
They play enough games and those infamous lawyers of theirs could be spending their days negotiating a settlememt with the DOJ's Antitrust Division.
> While Apple might lag the bleeding edge clones at the upper end of the
> market this won't matter at the Mini/iMac/iBook level where most of
> Apple's (or Dell's for that matter) volume is.
They often lag by YEARS currently. Compare Macs at any price band against Dell/HP/etc and you will find the Mac behind in CPU, RAM, HDD, video chipset or almost any other metric. And their line never goes as far up or down as the beige box market. None of this is likely to change by swapping out the PPC chip for a Pentium. Apple operates at higher profit margins, more akin to Sun than Dell and unless that changes they will never be a volume player. And as for beating Dell at their own game, good luck, they are Intel's very bestest customer and Steveo is the new guy in the game.
> If Apple charges competitive prices, like they do for their Mini, there
> will not be much economic incentive to go to great lengths to run OSX
> on existing hardware.
Of course there will. Apple has NEVER been competetive on price and everything else in a current Mac is stock PC hardware. The price of the PPC chip almost certainly isn't the reason why this is so. So forget these dreams of Apple supplanting Dell as the volume PC vendor and face reality. A non-trivial percentage of the legions of Dell and eMachines owners would give Apple the same $99 for a box of OS X as Apple charges their current customers. Instead they will be downloading it via BT after it gets 'fixed.'
> Also, Apple has some rather mean legal dogs that would likely bite
> anyone who tries to circumvent their restrictions for money.
We all know they have sharp lawyers. But that just means this issue is finally going to be settled once and for all: Can a vendor of software dictate it can only be loaded on the PCs they make?
So far the console makers have had some success (Although Sony didn't manage to stop one of the emulators for the PlayStation) in this area but no PC maker has tried yet. And just today the Supremes declined to even consider reopening the Lexmark case. And we DO know a hardware maker can't forbid third party software from being run from Atari v Activision. How the console makers avoid that clear ruling is a mystery.
> I don't think AMD could provide the volume that Apple would need.
You might have a point if Apple were going with x86_64. But at this point I'm sure AMD could supply all the Athlons they could ever hope to sell. Remember, Apple is bound by their deal with Microsoft to never be a volume player, to stay safely in their low volume, high margin niche. Stray from that and Office disappears.
> If you haven't programmed for these early systems, I'd highly recommend
.89Mhz 6809e. It was as much *NIX as you could ram into a 64k machine. Multi-processing, multi-user, termcap, serial terminals, a shell with pipes, redirection and job control, vi, rogue, and if you had managed to stuff a hard drive in you could even run a K&R compliant C compiler without playing the floppy shuffle.
> you reconsider. A "16bit UNIX-like OS" cannot fit into 1k, 4k (or later
> 64k) on a sub 1Mhz, 4 or 8 bit processor.
Actually Microware's OS9 Level I ran on a 6809 with 64k RAM. I owned a copy ported to the Tandy CoCo I/II with 64k RAM and a
OS9 Level II on the CoCo III with 512K of memory and double the CPU clock was actually livable by the standards of the day. It even had a windowing system! Don't be slagging the old school dude, Pentiums! Bah! Athlons! Bah! A unix wizard needs not these things.
> Hacking aside, Apple is committed to locking down OSX for x86 to
> Apple-branded hardware.
Three options here.
1. The new x86 Macs only run OS X. In this case there is zero change in new adoption and a slow bleed away since Apple will always be behind the tech curve. The PPC chip was their only ace in the hole, they run stock IDE drives, year old video cards, etc. Since they only introduce new hardware twice per year that also means that they will usually be six months to a year behind on the CPU.
2. The new Mac hardware is a stock Dell compatible PC capable of running Windows. This means it will be a good universal box capable of running OS X, BSD, Linux and Windows. Appealing to some, but always overpriced and underpowered, see above. More interesting will be the instant porting of OS X to commodity hardware. This will be resisted at Apple but pretty hard to prevent. By not selling it though, they are creating a massive pirate community instead of paying customers.
3. Option two but with a pervasive DRM system to eliminate running on clone hardware. Massive backlash as Apple is perceived as going over to the 'dark side'. The Apple faithful will of course drink the kool aid and remain faithful, insisting DRM is now good because Steve said so. In a sane world it would invoke the Justice Dept's Anti-trust division's wrath but we all know that won't happen.
> Since when is "computer literate" defined as being a programmer?
Since the first 'computer literacy' class was taught. Back then it tended to be BASIC on a micro, but BASIC counts. Then, like the rest of modern education, it got dumbed down to 'secretary' class.
> Your analogy to English is wrong. It's like saying someone who is
> literate must also be an author.
Pretty much nailed it one my young product of modern education. Congratulations on being in the top half of the bell curve! I am not saying everyone should be a PUBLISHED author, but should possess the basic skills to write a narrative report, a research paper, personal letter, etc. to be called 'literate' in the English language. That simply reading/listening to English written by someone else is insuffient even if perfectly understood.
I am not saying every high school student should be able to program a web browser in C++. I am not even saying they must prove their skills by contributing 10,000 quality lines to the Mozilla Foundation. What I do say is that for someone to be called 'computer literate' they must understand the principles enough to at least write basic personal workflow enhancing scripts, macros, etc. which indicates they possess the fundemental understanding required to readily learn and use more advanced tools should they need it later.
> Computers are not "mind enhancing tools." Computers are just TOOLs.
And just what do you think these TOOLS are designed to make their user more productive with? Just as a lever or hammer enhances one's physical abilities a computer enhances the mental powers.
> They will eventually turn as many components of their so-called
> Enterprise version of Linux into closed source, proprietary software,
> in the same style as most of the UNIX OSes out there.
Common conspiracy theory, but almost certainly wrong. Where do you think they GET their Enterprise distro? Fedora. RHEL4 is basically FC3 cleaned up and polished a bit more. They know they lack the resources to fully test enterprise software inhouse so they depend on Fedora for wide testing of all new technology. See SELinux, udev, heck even the 2.6 kernel.
Currently RH does ship some closed components, such as a JDK, Acrobat, Flash, etc. But they do it on a totally seperate CD-ROM called Extras. As far as I know they don't own the rights to a single line of code that isn't currently Free or in the process of becoming free (some parts of their new directory server aren't yet Free Software but is scheduled to become so) so it would be crossing a bright red line if they ever produced a closed package.
If you don't believe me, go to ftp.redhat.com and download the entire source for RHEL and look at the license tags on the packages. 100% OSS/FS product and likely to remain that way. RH 'gets it' on the value of Open so they aren't likely to do something as suicidal as what you are afraid of.
> More importantly, however, GNU is essential: without the GNU compiler
> and the GNU command line utilities, Linux wouldn't run; there simply
> are no substitutes.
Riight. Please put down the crackpipe and slowly walk away from it.
BSD has a fully functioning userland. They currently use GCC & Friends for the build chain but lets face it, GCC hasn't been a FSF project in years. Most GCC development has been at Cygnus -> RedHat. And there ARE alternate C compilers around should the need ever arise to make a GNU free Linux.
> As I recall, GNU was the biggest component in terms of LOC, even
> bigger than the kernel.
I seriously doubt that. Unless you rig the game and don't count X, KDE, Moz, OOo, Apache, Perl, PHP, etc and do count GNOME even though it is a GNU project in acronym only. (If it were really a FSF/GNU project there wouldn't even be TALK of using Mono or Java.)
The GNU Utilities are very useful, but life could continue if the unthinkable happened and some legal snafu caused them to become unavailable. Regular sh sucks compared to bash but it does work. Same for the rest of the GNU stuff, it is generally best of breed but there were actually versions of those commands before GNU and many are still available and if they don't build on a modern Linux based system could be fixed fairly quickly.
> I am old school. If I can not write code for it then I do not consider
> it my computer.
Amen, but we are a vanishing minority. Today 'computer literate' means 'able to browse the Interweb thingy with IE and write a gramatically incorrect short letter with Word' at best.
But listen up folks, being computer literate means being able to program in exactly the same way that being literate in English means being able to express thoughts in properly constructed words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. Calling someone 'computer literate' because they can use a couple of programs written by someone else would be like calling someone literate in English because they can watch Cribs on MTV. Computers are mind enhancing tools, being limited to thinking only someone else's thoughts isn't thinking at all.
Look folks, consoles aren't going to 'kill' the PC game. Both have a place in the world because each lends itself to different sorts of games.
Console:
Big splashy 100 million dollar hollywierd epics with commercial tieins to the NFL, NASCAR, latest hollywierd blockbuster, sequel #7, etc.
Mostly limited to games that appeal to the younger set with the reflexes for twitch games.
PC:
Many of the same splashy epic games as on the console, after all once you sink 50+ million into graphics, cutscenes and voice talent the porting cost isn't a problem.
Games that need a keyboard, high resolution graphics, large storage or any other PC only feature. For all the talk of HD-TV, for the next decade any console game must run and be fully playable at the effective 320x480i resolution of the typical 19" WalMart special NTSC television sitting in the typical teenager's bedroom. That makes a lot of PC strategy games hard to deal with on a console.
Small games. Paying ~10/disc to Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft to help subsidize the initial console purchase ensures that small games will never find a niche on the console, which is one reason for the heavy saturation of franchise epics there.
New games. PCs get new technology first so the latest shiny thing will always be there. And remember that John Carmack is likely to write first for the PC and outsource the console ports
Internet addicts will stay on the PC and game companies won't pass over their coin. Ok, the new generation of consoles have basic online play but how many are going to let you have ICQ running along side it on the second monitor?
> With MS Office, the store can pass the buck to Microsoft.
No you can't. Go read the license. Part of the special OEM pricing is that the OEM, that is the store in the case of a mom & pop chop shop, is responsible for all end user support. Why do you think Dell owners call Dell for support instead of Microsoft? Same reason. Only if you buy your copy of Windows or Office for full retail in a box do you get the right to call Microsoft tech support without whipping out the ol' credit card.
Which is one reason why it would make sense for a shop to include OOo. Drop in a disclaimer on the ticket to the effect of "Open Office is included at NO COST as a courtesy to our customers. However, since we have made no money from supplying it to you we can only provide support on the same for fee consulting basis we provide for ANY computer problem. You are encouraged to visit the software's Internet home at www.openoffice.org." Face it, one or two support calls will devour all of the profit from selling an OEM copy of MS Office.
Seriously, why does slashdot feed this troll pageviews?
This clown is in the same short list of paid shills for SCO/Microsoft that MOG was in before she went a little too far and got her head handed to her.
He is just trying to put the idea that Linux folk are unstable sorts who shouldn't be allowed to be near the mission critical infrastructure into pointy haired heads.
> Firefox is shaky because tabbed browsing was introduced by Opera
Look farther back for the innovation. Other people had did hypertext, but the idea of standards (HTML is SGML) based markup delivered across diverse networks with multimedia (at the time mostly pictures) and the ability to seamlessly link to content hosted on computers outside the author's network was first created in an open environment (research) and the first implementation was released as open. Then the first totally graphical browser, and the foundations underpinning the market leader today (Microsoft's own Internet Explorer) was released as Free Software. It's name was NCSA Mosiac. NCSA also implemented a httpd server that went on to greatness. After being abandoned by NCSA it was taken over by a band of OSS programmers and patched so much it was renamed "Apache". You may have heard of it, it now powers about 70% of the web servers worldwide. So non-commercial OSS types created the World Wide Web that lead to the Tech Explosion of the 1990's and direct descendents of their original code is in use to this very day on millions and millions of machines. In short, they changed the world. Where I come from that is called innovation.
> Where email is concerned, I can't think of any whizz bang email
> programthat sets itself apart from most other email in an innovative
> way.
But email as we understand it, as in a universal service across networks, is an invention of the OSS/Unix community. Sendmail wasn't an open source re-invention of a commercial product, it was and remains to this very day, THE mail transport mechanism for the Internet. The very IDEA of a universal cross network, cross OS, cross archetecture mail transport didn't really exist until sendmail created it.
> Yes, IRC was around before AOL but AOL brought internet chat awareness
> to the masses so they get the credit.
Please be consistent. You admit AIM was only a poor imitation of IRC yet you don't give the credit for the innovation to OSS. Although to be truthful, neither can claim the credit because Compuserve's CB Simulator did it first and inspired all of the later implementations all the way down to IRC's use of the term 'channel'.
> Open source needs commercial software and commercial software is
> recognizing the importance of and becoming more reliant upon open
> source.
No it doesn't. It does need commercial USERS and the demands for QC and documentation they bring plus the money they are increasingly willing to spend to obtain it. But we don't 'need' commercial software anymore, never did. That was a major league wrong turn. I expect we will still have closed CONTENT, i.e. games, but the idea of software as a big secret black box is dead.
Even if you don't get full redistribution rights the idea of not getting a copy of the source along with binaries is fast dying. Eventually all software will routinely ship with source and might not even bother with binaries as the underlying hardware becomes diverse again. Closed binaries were only really practical during the WinTel hegenomy where there was, for all intents and purposes, one hardware and one software platform. Part of the normal software install routine might include compiling a version for your computer. (This would make the Gentoo kids the leading edge of the revolution. Ugh.)
Just tried searching for "Revenge of the Sith" on bittorrent's new search engine and "filetype:torrent Revenge of the Sith" on Google. Google wins hands down for number of hits. Two hits on BT's search and three pages on Google.
> One thing that people seem to forget is that publishers and such
> actually have gone after libraries in the past too, because they felt
> that if people could check out their book from the library, it would
> hurt their sales.
Yes, many authors and publishers hate the idea of lending libraries, usually the medium volume outfits. For a small circulation book getting a majority of libraries to buy a copy represents the bulk of copies sold, for a blockbuster they are pulling in so much cash they don't care. But there have been many attempts to outlaw/restrict public libraries. In England libraries actually have to PAY the author so don't think it couldn't happen here, especially as things go digital.
The only reason we haven't had something awful like that here is most libraries are government operations or non-profits and have been PR savy enough to make their opponents come off as the sort who kick puppies for sport.
(And full disclosure: yes I work for a public library.)
> Let's return to that America where colored people --
Where the fuck did you get that from my post? Or is that the sort of knee jerk response you throw without even thinking because you have found that most people are conditioned to get defensive and often curl up in the fetal position when anyone hurls the race card at them?
Never said America hadn't made some positive advances in the last century. But on balance we are going down the shitter. Who cares who has the vote or sits where on the bus if there ain't going to BE a bus anymore and nobody gets to vote? When we are ALL equally poor, illiterate and powerless I guess you will be celebrating... right up till our new masters put your 'revolutionary' ass up against the wall.
> Let's return to that America where we overthrew governments, even
> democratic ones, because the Dole Fruit company didn't like their policy
> or because they were nationalizing the oil we'd stolen fair and square.
What the heck are you blithering about? Find ONE real representive government that we overthrew? Marxist one man, one vote, one time cesspits, third world dictators, assorted tyrants, yes and we should be mostly proud of it.
> Now we get grief even for overthrowing tyrants if we kill a few tens
> of thousands and create near-civil war in the process
Oh, you are one of those. Sorry pal, if you can't believe it wasn't worth invading Iraq FROM THE IRAQI POINT OF VIEW you are simply an ignorant ass not worthy of further discussion. History has already pretty much ruled on that question.
> That's what they said in the 60s, with the race riots and Vietnam.
Yea, exactly. Back in WWII we bestrode the world and all foes of Truth, Justice and the American Way trembled. But the rot was already deep inside even then. See the stories and op-eds from last week during the 60th anniversay of VE day where we finally apologized for selling millions into slavery and death at Stalin's hand because our 5th column had the president's ear at Yalta. Vietnam was the first unmistakable sign of it being a fatal affliction.
There is a core group walking the halls of power dedicated to the destruction of everything America stands for. Vietnam was their greatest victory. Now we strain to field fairly small forces in Afganistan and Iraq because the foe has gutted our armed forces. The foes of liberty control vast swaths of the command & control and culture too much for us to have a realistic hope of defeating them in the time that remains. Sorry, web bloggers, matt drudge and Fox News just aren't enough to counter balance the forces of all of the major media, academia (including most importantly primary and secondary education curricula), most of the major non-profits (even those founded by decidedly anti-communist tycoons like the Ford Foundation, etc.) and major government agencies remain in enemy hands because teh civil service laws were designed to ensure it. The US State Department is practically enemy territory and has been for generations.
We are in the long twilight struggle folks, if we battle with all our might we may push the fall of the West back another generation, but that is it. For the next generation is the generation of the lost, as they become the mainstream it is pretty much over. They are the products of a public school system that has taught them self esteem, tolerance and how to become pregnant but they can't construct a sentence. Then the mass media teaches them to watch Survivor and what MTV teaches isn't even speakable in polite company.
Then Grand Theft Auto teaches through repetition that the proper response to driving like a maniac and wrecking your car is to point a gun at the first little ol lady driving by and tell her to "get out of the car, bitch." We went from video games where you were the lone hero tasked with saving the world from the hordes of evil scum to games where you ARE the evil scum in a single generation. No, it isn't RockStar Game's fault, it is OUR fault for buying crap like that. For giving our kids the money to buy crap like that. For not teaching them well enough that they wouldn't be interested in buying that crap in the first place.
Meanwhile India is teaching their upcoming generation the way we did it a hundred years ago, and teaching them English to boot. They are going to eat our lunch and deserve to, they are doing it through hard work and determination, values we forgot. Britain planted the seeds of Western Civilization there, we must pray they took firm root. Perhaps they will learn from our mistakes.
> The US has quite a few flaws, but think long and hard on the above
:(
> before you break out the champagne to celebrate Chinese dominance.
Yea, but at the rate we are going down the ol shitter the fall of US world dominance is a forgone conclusion in another generation. So all we can hope is that we manage to export Western Civilization to places like China & India before we collapse. Because we certainly haven't had a use for it here the last 50 years and Europe no longer even remembers having had it.
> This may be your opinion, but I think that if you look beyond your
.src.rpm into native binaries.
> prejudices, you'll find that Java is so much more. For example, C/C++
> code can't dynamically load individual components (i.e. reflection)
> without extra metadata (e.g. a shared library).
Not opinion, facts. Java isn't really even an OO language since it lacks multiple inheritence and while operator overloading causes no end of problems in the hands of the inexperienced, is pretty much required to have a full OO experience. Not that I'm a fan of OO itself mind you, but Java is directly marketed as something it isn't in any sane definition of Object Oriented. In my opinion object oriented is just a buzzword that turns a normal program into an unmaintainable horror that eats ram and cycles like popcorn. Look at TK for an example of how to get almost all of the purported benefits of objects in a totally procedural implementation that is well behaved and fairly understandable.
As for C++ using libraries to load components, well duh, that is what a library IS. Which, btw, is the correct way to gain code reuse. Find me an example of OO code reuse that compares to the sort of wholesale reuse any of the libraries, mostly in C, included on a modern Free Software distro acomplish.
> You're pulling out nonsense now. Javac being a Java program is a GOOD
> thing because it is portable and available to Java programs.
You misundersand. I say it is bogus that Javac only compiles to one target, a platform that only existed in Sun's imagination. Look, I understand the alure of psuedo compiled/interpreted languages such as Java. I used to love BASIC-09. And for the original purpose Sun had in mind when creating Java it even made sense. But then the Internet came along and everyone had to stamp Internet on everything and Sun repurposed Java from Cable TV settop boxes to some 'platform for the Internet' and things went horribly wrong.
If you want platform independence you get it through tools like GNU automake/autoconf, not writing for a mythical platform and producing emulators for the half dozen platforms with enough market to justify the horrendous expense of porting and debugging a runtime environment as complex as the JRE.
Java the virtual machine is a daft idea. Speaking as someone in the Free world that is. The only reason to want a VM is to redistribute binaries across multiple platforms and we in the Free world have to think really hard to remember why anyone would want to do that when the compiler is sitting right there, ready to turn a tar.gz or
Java the language is a sorta OO language that will find it's niche once GCJ strips away the platform and religion baggage from it.
> java is not an emulator. It is a virtual machine.
Not much practical difference these days. Care to draw the line where emulation stops and virtualization starts, between Xen, VMWare Wine, etc. Yes, by specing a virtual machine with no actual hardware they saved the hit of emulating hardware registers and banging bits on a virtualized keyboard controller.
> If you have a problem with this, I suggest you take it up with the
> inventors of P-Code
Good example. Proof that A) Java was nothing new and B) in the end the marketplace decided it was a bad idea, hence it is a dead language. Heck, Pascal itself will be a dead language once Borland gives up on Delphi.
> Don't worry, your insults toward myself and millions of other
> professional developers shall not deter me from getting your Java
> licensing issues resovled! The next version of White Box Linux shall
> have Java!
Hey, just yanking yer chain. It is just that so many Java devels have become almost Amigian in there religious devotion to what in the end is just a language, and not a perticularly original or clever one, designed more to forbid bad programming practices (which has it's place in the corporate
> At the risk of starting a flamewar,
:)
You risked one, I'm reaching for -1 Flamebait. What is karma but for the burning!
> I have to say that I'm proud to have been a vocal early adopter that
> helped Java reach the status it has today. It's a good language, a good
> platform, hosted by a good company, and supported by many.
I looked at Java several times, each time concluding it was a castrated C++ and the only available compiler was for a machine that didn't exist but this didn't bother the fanboys because for some daft reason they had decided to write the emulator first instead of the usual process of doing it AFTER the real hardware was no longer available. And of course there was the involvement of Sun, the Sybil of the computing business, where one never knew which maniacal personality would be in charge today, but you knew it wouldn't be a sane one because it didn't HAVE a sane one. As for supported by many, yea if you count ex VB coders. Guess it is progress of a sort.