Re:That is Disingenuous Spin, His answer IS politi
on
Rob Pike Responds
·
· Score: 1
There are a couple of important differences.
For one, it is completely obvious to any reader that Mr Pike didn't answer the question. He dismissed the question while making a valid statement. Hardly as bad as, say, Bill Shatner's/. interview, even. I can't think of a good example of a politician dodging a question based on disagreement with the posed analogy in recent history off the top of my head. But - consider Bush's recent response to the question posed to him in the third debate on the minimum wage. He rapidly turned the issue towards education, and essentially said "if you're earning minimum wage, it's because you're too stupid to earn more." A reasonable statement, but not one he'd likely vocalize in so many words. But how many viewers noticed that he a) dodged the question b) made a pretty controversial statement too? That's disingenuous.
For another, in general, most of the questions posed to a politician are fair game. They're bastards if they don't respond to questions about public policy or legislature or economics. Rob Pike is here to talk about software and code and unix and google. HINAL. Does he have anything interesting to say about patents that hasn't already been said hundreds of times by people far more qualified to speak about the subject? Quite possibly not. It's not his job. It's his right to tell the original poster to go Dick Cheney himself.
Hey, it's a good thing they're emulating RAM. I was really concerned they were going to come out with a product that let you run OS X but not use any RAM! I'm not to sure about this software emulation of RJ-45 though. My poor PC only has BNC and AUI.
-CA has not - ever, to my knowledge - had "co-CEOs".
-I have also never heard any allegations of friendship between W and anyone high up at CA. Not that it couldn't happen, but I'd like to see some other source that would suggest this.
-CA's education department was and is abominable. I lost no sleep over them after the October 2001 layoffs. Now, the upcoming October 2004 layoffs.....heh....
Have you ever actually had a DeskStar crash? Mine has run smoothly ever since I got it. Were there certain lots that were especially prone to failure?
There was a batch of IBM hard drives (this is before IBM sold their drive business to Hitachi), specifically, the DeskStar "DeathStar" 75GXP. They were terrible. Basically, IBM shipped them with higher specs than the tolerances they built them with would allow. But they were cheap, and this was back in the day (2000ish) when 60 GB was a really nice size, and 7200 rpm was fast. I don't remember the full story, but slashdot has covered it originally here and here. (Thanks google! too bad slashdot's own search function is beyond worthless.) And yes, I have a friend who had one which crashed, and I've heard many other stories of the 75GXP dying way before its time. Obviously, the implications of knowingly shipping hardware which you know will cause your customers expensive data loss are pretty, um, evil.
In 1999, I bought a DeskStar 22GXP. It was great - no problems except for my shitty broken IDE controller on my motherboard. I've also had an IBM UltraStar 9ES which has served me very well even longer.
What do you think should be the standard for US military intervention in foreign lands? Clearly there are cases where a lot of lives will be lost if an external party doesn't intervene. Specifically, I'm thinking of the genocide occurring in Darfur right now. What action do you think the US should take, if any?
Okay, in Greenblatt's defense, my question was about 50% troll. But the latter part of my question, the proposal to drop Ingres in favor of developing postgresql, is a totally valid question, even if completely implausible. And the first part of the question could have been a real softball, setting him up to deliver a slam-dunk, naming a feature or two where Ingres really shines that the other open source databases don't offer. (I'm sure there are such features, even if they are overshadowed by Ingres's other shortcomings.)
And Greenblatt dropped the ball. He didn't even pretend to answer the question! I asked "Why X instead of Y?" and he said "X++. A, B, and C. We're going to do Z." Pathetic.
I suspect one of two things: Greenblatt doesn't really buy the whole Ingres/OSS vision himself, or his answers were engineered/filtered by a CA committee.
I'm wondering, what does CA expect customers will get out of the open-source Ingres strategy? It seems you can already do better than Ingres for free, and with more favorable licensing terms (either BSD or GNU), even if you're looking for faster, more reliable, or a more robust database. Sure, third party developers could address Ingres's short comings now that it's open source, but why would they bother? (I'm mostly speaking about PostgreSQL, but even MySQL can be better capable than Ingres in some applications).
What I wonder even more, though, is what CA gets out of it. If CA is ready and willing to embrace open source software, why not drop Ingres from CA products that embed databases, and switch to PostgreSQL, shifting the Ingres developers to work on contributing to postgres's code? I'm thinking something more akin to Apple's open-source relationship with MacOS X, consider not only Darwin, but also GCC. I think it's proven to be an effective and beneficial relationship.
4. Patents encourage publishing your results, as
opposed to keeping everything super-secret. Art is a bad example there.
But there are a ton of technological processes that one could have kept
secret. Or which _are_ being kept secret. Patents encourage companies
to share this information with the rest of the world instead.
5.
Patents get licensed all the time. I'm sure that if someone absolutely
needed to do something impressionistic before the patent expired, they
could have negotiated a license.
Encourage, sure, for whatever that's worth. One of the features of a patent (as opposed to a copyright) is that if you can make money selling your patented product, you can do so, but if you can make more money NOT selling your product but holding on to its patent (maybe you developed it, more likely you're in a competing business and you acquired it), you're free to do that, too. So effectively you can patent something out of existence for the period the patent is valid, because no one can sell a product which uses your patent.
Copyrights, by definition, apply to "expressions" as opposed to ideas, i.e. published works. If you choose not to publish something (well, to put it in writing), you don't have a copyright to it, and anyone else can use your idea to make their own published work (they can't steal what you never made available to steal). And if you choose to publish it, at the very least, it's subject to the rules of fair use. Fair use has taken a lot of abuse recently, but it's still a real thing. E.g. you can't stop people from talking about your work just because you have a copyright on it.
Question: How is selling personal computers like selling carbonated sugar water?
Answer: It's not.
On the contrary: now more than ever, it's just like selling carbonated sugar water. Computers, like soft drinks, are commodities. Dell, HP, IBM, Sony, and their ilk are desperately trying to differentiate their products and convince potential buyers that they have a beautiful and unique product which they want to buy. Apple is doing this too, and successfully.
The reality is, any idiot can build a PC for half the money and end up with twice the power of the name-brand makers. So why can they get away with charging so much? The answer has a lot to do with the power of marketing and the corporate engine.
Of course, you can't just build a machine that runs Mac OS X. The very existence of the Macintosh platform depends on Apple convincing users that their product is more than a simple commodity available from any vendor.
So what does this have to do with Pepsi? Cola is a commodity. Any food producer can make their own cola product and sell it to people. But Coca Cola has the biggest market share of Cola, and combined with Pepsi the two completely dominate the market. Both companies have made a lot of profit in this business. This is the reason that to this day I can walk down the hallway and for my $1.50 I can get a 20oz bottle of refrigerated carbonated sugar water, when it has a commodity value of pennies on the dollar.
Step 2. is marketing. Of course, that doesn't make John Scully a good CEO.
Apple used to purchase quite a few smaller products from other developers and put them in the OS. Windowshade was one, and the menu bar clock was another (I forget the orignal name!)
SuperClock!
Actually, I don't remember Apple buying SuperClock from its developer. I think they might have just offerred the guy a job. For some reason, I don't remember, that was sort of 15 years ago.
BTW, it goes both ways. Remember Apple's mind-numbling backwards strategy for Control Strip when it first came out (pre-System 7.5)? Control Strip begat Desktop Strip.
This is who learning filters are ultimately the right solution. They will continue to improve, and spam is ultimately doomed in the face of such technology.
I agree the camram system is hopeless, but on this I think you've got it backwards. Spammers will and already are learning how to defeat filters by not making the same mistakes previous spammers did. Clueless users, however, are not, because they are by definition clueless. Unless learning filters become so advanced that they can parse human language and figure out if an email is an unsolicited commercial offer or other nonsense, no simple learning filter will "ultimately" be effective.
I am FAR more worried that the person I ran into at the bar last night will go home, and use hotmail, and send poorly formed HTML-only email, or mail via a relay that happens to have been obnoxiously picked up by SORBS or NJABL, or maybe they just used too many lines of ALL CAPS...will erroneously get picked up by my spam filter, than I am that they'll be too lazy to use a seemless sender-pays system.
On the other hand, an effective micropayment-based sender-pays-receiver system is nearly transparent, and the user doesn't care that they may have just wasted one microbuck to send you an email.
Almost any RDBMS is simpler to manage than Oracle is. I've used Oracle, Informix, Postgresql, MS SQL server, mysql, etc etc, though not Ingres.
You didn't mention DB2. If you had, it would be in the "worse than Oracle" category, I assure you (I've managed DB2 on windows, unix, and - ugh - 390).
Lack of competition mainly stifles evolution when you're dealing with evolution of sexually-reproducing species. At that point it matters that you have to compete with your own species to reproduce. A huge amount of life on Earth reproduces asexually, which means competition with your own species is less important (but not completely - there could be homicide within asexual species). At early stages of evolution, like if you're a prokaryote or something, there is plenty of challenge posed by your (non-biological) environment. Survival of the fittest still applies, because the non-fit get killed off by the environment. Death by natural causes, i.e.
A few corrections:
The Civic Hybrid, like the Insight, is available with either a Continuously Variable Transmission (see also Honda Civic HX and some other Japanese Hondas) OR a 5-speed manual transmission. The manuals get better fuel efficiency but worse emissions. The Toyota Prius is only available with a CVT because the CVT is the component which "hybridizes" the drivetrain.
The Civic Hybrid does not have an aluminum chassis. Only the Insight does. Weight and aereodynamics-wise, the Civic Hybrid is almost identical to a any other Civic sedan (plus some weight, mainly for the batteries).
All three of these hybrids use regenerative (electric) breaking, but do NOT have electric motors to drive the wheels independent of the drive train. They also have friction brakes which engage during hard braking.
The Civic Hybrid does, however, benefit from a very fuel efficient 1.3L engine. Most notably, it's able to de-power 3 of its 4 cylinders while cruising. It also uses 2 spark plugs per cylinder. The upcoming (2005) Honda Accord Hybrid will have the ability to fully deactivate some of its 6 cylinders.
Like most cars, the Honda Civic has moved up-market in the past 12 years. It's a bigger, more powerful, more expensive car than it used to be. Yes, the Civic Hybrid is meant to be comparable to a modern Civic. The result comes pretty close. It's only slightly slower and has slightly less trunk space.
The referenced Honda Diesel gets 80 MPG (Diesel gallons), and can go 130 MPH. I have not seen any claim that it gets 80 MPG WHILE DRIVING AT 130 MPH - that would be unbelievable. Diesel motors are typically high-torque, low-horsepower, so being able to get to 130 MPH is a significant accomplishment. I don't know what the top speed of the Volkswagen TDIs is, but I suspect it's a little less than 130 MPH. Honda's proof of concept is merely that they can build a Diesel car which gets good fuel efficiency during normal driving while still having a good maximum power output (top speed).
FYI, IIRC, Honda does compete in F1 facing already, so crazy low coefficient of drag vehicles are not out of the question.
Apple doesn't sell upgrades. That $129 gets you a full version of the OS. You can sell your old version on ebay if you want; you won't need it to install 10.4
Can I get $129 deducted from the price of my next Macintosh purchase if I elect to use my existing MacOS X license? Can I sell the MacOS X license that Apple bundled with my last computer when I buy 10.[234] off the shelf for it? A software licensing model that doesn't discount upgrades vs. full new products is completely absurd in the 21st century. Then again, so is one that bundles a HUGE amount of software together, and doesn't allow me to buy just the part I want at a reduced cost (I'm talking about being able to buy the OS without the iLife Apps, mainly).
You'll never be a mac user because you require a list of bullet-item features without any sort of regard for the UI problems that make them necessary or alternate ways to solve those problems.
Your example of having to add a USB mouse as a third party option (Apple will even sell it to you!) and comparing it to installing Yellow Dog Linux over MacOS is obviously absurd.
UI controls at the edge of the screen are actually much "closer" than redundant menu bars which are part each the window. You're not even solving a problem here.
I used to like the idea of multiple virtual desktops on a Mac, but then I started using Expose. Multiple virtual desktops is a horrible kludge.
"Branching" may be too strong of a word for Knights of the Old Republic. You're right, it's essentially linear story development with one major fork. However, the gameplay is for the most part non-linear: the first two and last two worlds must be done in order, but the middle four can be done in any order. The order you choose significantly affects gameplay, though not the end result. The major game fork doesn't only affect the ending, since your alignment affects the gameplay as well, and depending on the courses of dialog you take, you can end up with different characters in your party in the end-game (at least 4 are affected I think) and even the middle part of the game. I don't know what more you could have asked for from that fork. Character interaction is, unfortunately, completely singular. Though I guess you do choose what sex your character is...
Bottom line for me is, I actually wanted to play KotOR a second time through. I never do that. That's not branching, but I think it says a lot about the quality of the game and how open it is in other ways.
a) no matter what encoder you use, MP3 quality plateaus WAY below 320kbps. (nevermind that encoding any MP3 with a constant bitrate is retarded)
b) while it doesn't improve quality significantly, playing back 320kbps MP3s on your iPod WILL use up the battery almost twice as fast as 160kbps encoded (AAC or MP3) audio, for example. The buffer hasn't gotten any bigger, so the disk has to work twice as hard per hour to keep it full during playback. battery life is way more important to people than the quality difference between 320kbps MP3 and 192kbps MP3.
One of the bigger failures of modern keyboards, including the USB Apple keyboards, is the lack of any kind of decent Caps Lock indication. The current Apple keyboards have a green LED on the caps lock key itself. Which is sort of cool, except that if your left hand is actually on the keyboard, you can't tell if you've got Caps Lock engaged or not (my hands are opaque). IIRC, the Apple Extended Keyboard II (what made a II a II, anyway?), had a Caps Lock key that stuck down when activated. It definitely also had a light in the upper right corner of the keyboard, which is a lot more visible than the on-key LED they use now. It looks like the Matias keyboard has a similar cool-looking less-functional LED, too. Does anyone know if caps lock stays down? The caps lock - A key gap is also lacking according to the tidbits review, which is also disappointing.
Slashdot Mirror
But I already have a perfectly good monitor.
There are a couple of important differences.
For one, it is completely obvious to any reader that Mr Pike didn't answer the question. He dismissed the question while making a valid statement. Hardly as bad as, say, Bill Shatner's /. interview, even. I can't think of a good example of a politician dodging a question based on disagreement with the posed analogy in recent history off the top of my head. But - consider Bush's recent response to the question posed to him in the third debate on the minimum wage. He rapidly turned the issue towards education, and essentially said "if you're earning minimum wage, it's because you're too stupid to earn more." A reasonable statement, but not one he'd likely vocalize in so many words. But how many viewers noticed that he a) dodged the question b) made a pretty controversial statement too? That's disingenuous.
For another, in general, most of the questions posed to a politician are fair game. They're bastards if they don't respond to questions about public policy or legislature or economics. Rob Pike is here to talk about software and code and unix and google. HINAL. Does he have anything interesting to say about patents that hasn't already been said hundreds of times by people far more qualified to speak about the subject? Quite possibly not. It's not his job. It's his right to tell the original poster to go Dick Cheney himself.
Hey, it's a good thing they're emulating RAM. I was really concerned they were going to come out with a product that let you run OS X but not use any RAM! I'm not to sure about this software emulation of RJ-45 though. My poor PC only has BNC and AUI.
-CA has not - ever, to my knowledge - had "co-CEOs".
-I have also never heard any allegations of friendship between W and anyone high up at CA. Not that it couldn't happen, but I'd like to see some other source that would suggest this.
-CA's education department was and is abominable. I lost no sleep over them after the October 2001 layoffs. Now, the upcoming October 2004 layoffs.....heh....
Have you ever actually had a DeskStar crash? Mine has run smoothly ever since I got it. Were there certain lots that were especially prone to failure?
There was a batch of IBM hard drives (this is before IBM sold their drive business to Hitachi), specifically, the DeskStar "DeathStar" 75GXP. They were terrible. Basically, IBM shipped them with higher specs than the tolerances they built them with would allow. But they were cheap, and this was back in the day (2000ish) when 60 GB was a really nice size, and 7200 rpm was fast. I don't remember the full story, but slashdot has covered it originally here and here. (Thanks google! too bad slashdot's own search function is beyond worthless.) And yes, I have a friend who had one which crashed, and I've heard many other stories of the 75GXP dying way before its time. Obviously, the implications of knowingly shipping hardware which you know will cause your customers expensive data loss are pretty, um, evil.
In 1999, I bought a DeskStar 22GXP. It was great - no problems except for my shitty broken IDE controller on my motherboard. I've also had an IBM UltraStar 9ES which has served me very well even longer.
The powermac G5 ships with Seagate SATA drives.
Time to stop using Maxtor / Western Digital drives, I think. (or those infamous IBM DeathStars)
What do you think should be the standard for US military intervention in foreign lands? Clearly there are cases where a lot of lives will be lost if an external party doesn't intervene. Specifically, I'm thinking of the genocide occurring in Darfur right now. What action do you think the US should take, if any?
Okay, in Greenblatt's defense, my question was about 50% troll. But the latter part of my question, the proposal to drop Ingres in favor of developing postgresql, is a totally valid question, even if completely implausible. And the first part of the question could have been a real softball, setting him up to deliver a slam-dunk, naming a feature or two where Ingres really shines that the other open source databases don't offer. (I'm sure there are such features, even if they are overshadowed by Ingres's other shortcomings.)
And Greenblatt dropped the ball. He didn't even pretend to answer the question! I asked "Why X instead of Y?" and he said "X++. A, B, and C. We're going to do Z." Pathetic.
I suspect one of two things: Greenblatt doesn't really buy the whole Ingres/OSS vision himself, or his answers were engineered/filtered by a CA committee.
1. Get assigned bug to fix; get distracted and read slashdot instead.
2. ???
3. Bug is fixed; I profit.
Hmm....
I'm wondering, what does CA expect customers will get out of the open-source Ingres strategy? It seems you can already do better than Ingres for free, and with more favorable licensing terms (either BSD or GNU), even if you're looking for faster, more reliable, or a more robust database. Sure, third party developers could address Ingres's short comings now that it's open source, but why would they bother? (I'm mostly speaking about PostgreSQL, but even MySQL can be better capable than Ingres in some applications).
What I wonder even more, though, is what CA gets out of it. If CA is ready and willing to embrace open source software, why not drop Ingres from CA products that embed databases, and switch to PostgreSQL, shifting the Ingres developers to work on contributing to postgres's code? I'm thinking something more akin to Apple's open-source relationship with MacOS X, consider not only Darwin, but also GCC. I think it's proven to be an effective and beneficial relationship.
4. Patents encourage publishing your results, as opposed to keeping everything super-secret. Art is a bad example there. But there are a ton of technological processes that one could have kept secret. Or which _are_ being kept secret. Patents encourage companies to share this information with the rest of the world instead.
5. Patents get licensed all the time. I'm sure that if someone absolutely needed to do something impressionistic before the patent expired, they could have negotiated a license.
Encourage, sure, for whatever that's worth. One of the features of a patent (as opposed to a copyright) is that if you can make money selling your patented product, you can do so, but if you can make more money NOT selling your product but holding on to its patent (maybe you developed it, more likely you're in a competing business and you acquired it), you're free to do that, too. So effectively you can patent something out of existence for the period the patent is valid, because no one can sell a product which uses your patent.
Copyrights, by definition, apply to "expressions" as opposed to ideas, i.e. published works. If you choose not to publish something (well, to put it in writing), you don't have a copyright to it, and anyone else can use your idea to make their own published work (they can't steal what you never made available to steal). And if you choose to publish it, at the very least, it's subject to the rules of fair use. Fair use has taken a lot of abuse recently, but it's still a real thing. E.g. you can't stop people from talking about your work just because you have a copyright on it.
Answer: It's not.
On the contrary: now more than ever, it's just like selling carbonated sugar water. Computers, like soft drinks, are commodities. Dell, HP, IBM, Sony, and their ilk are desperately trying to differentiate their products and convince potential buyers that they have a beautiful and unique product which they want to buy. Apple is doing this too, and successfully.
The reality is, any idiot can build a PC for half the money and end up with twice the power of the name-brand makers. So why can they get away with charging so much? The answer has a lot to do with the power of marketing and the corporate engine.
Of course, you can't just build a machine that runs Mac OS X. The very existence of the Macintosh platform depends on Apple convincing users that their product is more than a simple commodity available from any vendor.
So what does this have to do with Pepsi? Cola is a commodity. Any food producer can make their own cola product and sell it to people. But Coca Cola has the biggest market share of Cola, and combined with Pepsi the two completely dominate the market. Both companies have made a lot of profit in this business. This is the reason that to this day I can walk down the hallway and for my $1.50 I can get a 20oz bottle of refrigerated carbonated sugar water, when it has a commodity value of pennies on the dollar.
Step 2. is marketing. Of course, that doesn't make John Scully a good CEO.
Apple used to purchase quite a few smaller products from other developers and put them in the OS. Windowshade was one, and the menu bar clock was another (I forget the orignal name!)
SuperClock!Actually, I don't remember Apple buying SuperClock from its developer. I think they might have just offerred the guy a job. For some reason, I don't remember, that was sort of 15 years ago.
BTW, it goes both ways. Remember Apple's mind-numbling backwards strategy for Control Strip when it first came out (pre-System 7.5)? Control Strip begat Desktop Strip.
This is who learning filters are ultimately the right solution. They will continue to improve, and spam is ultimately doomed in the face of such technology.
I agree the camram system is hopeless, but on this I think you've got it backwards. Spammers will and already are learning how to defeat filters by not making the same mistakes previous spammers did. Clueless users, however, are not, because they are by definition clueless. Unless learning filters become so advanced that they can parse human language and figure out if an email is an unsolicited commercial offer or other nonsense, no simple learning filter will "ultimately" be effective.
I am FAR more worried that the person I ran into at the bar last night will go home, and use hotmail, and send poorly formed HTML-only email, or mail via a relay that happens to have been obnoxiously picked up by SORBS or NJABL, or maybe they just used too many lines of ALL CAPS...will erroneously get picked up by my spam filter, than I am that they'll be too lazy to use a seemless sender-pays system.
On the other hand, an effective micropayment-based sender-pays-receiver system is nearly transparent, and the user doesn't care that they may have just wasted one microbuck to send you an email.
Almost any RDBMS is simpler to manage than Oracle is. I've used Oracle, Informix, Postgresql, MS SQL server, mysql, etc etc, though not Ingres.
You didn't mention DB2. If you had, it would be in the "worse than Oracle" category, I assure you (I've managed DB2 on windows, unix, and - ugh - 390).
Lack of competition mainly stifles evolution when you're dealing with evolution of sexually-reproducing species. At that point it matters that you have to compete with your own species to reproduce. A huge amount of life on Earth reproduces asexually, which means competition with your own species is less important (but not completely - there could be homicide within asexual species). At early stages of evolution, like if you're a prokaryote or something, there is plenty of challenge posed by your (non-biological) environment. Survival of the fittest still applies, because the non-fit get killed off by the environment. Death by natural causes, i.e.
A fair question. I don't know, but a list of the statistics they did publish is available from the article on vtec.net.
A few corrections:
The Civic Hybrid, like the Insight, is available with either a Continuously Variable Transmission (see also Honda Civic HX and some other Japanese Hondas) OR a 5-speed manual transmission. The manuals get better fuel efficiency but worse emissions. The Toyota Prius is only available with a CVT because the CVT is the component which "hybridizes" the drivetrain.
The Civic Hybrid does not have an aluminum chassis. Only the Insight does. Weight and aereodynamics-wise, the Civic Hybrid is almost identical to a any other Civic sedan (plus some weight, mainly for the batteries).
All three of these hybrids use regenerative (electric) breaking, but do NOT have electric motors to drive the wheels independent of the drive train. They also have friction brakes which engage during hard braking.
The Civic Hybrid does, however, benefit from a very fuel efficient 1.3L engine. Most notably, it's able to de-power 3 of its 4 cylinders while cruising. It also uses 2 spark plugs per cylinder. The upcoming (2005) Honda Accord Hybrid will have the ability to fully deactivate some of its 6 cylinders.
Like most cars, the Honda Civic has moved up-market in the past 12 years. It's a bigger, more powerful, more expensive car than it used to be. Yes, the Civic Hybrid is meant to be comparable to a modern Civic. The result comes pretty close. It's only slightly slower and has slightly less trunk space.
The referenced Honda Diesel gets 80 MPG (Diesel gallons), and can go 130 MPH. I have not seen any claim that it gets 80 MPG WHILE DRIVING AT 130 MPH - that would be unbelievable. Diesel motors are typically high-torque, low-horsepower, so being able to get to 130 MPH is a significant accomplishment. I don't know what the top speed of the Volkswagen TDIs is, but I suspect it's a little less than 130 MPH. Honda's proof of concept is merely that they can build a Diesel car which gets good fuel efficiency during normal driving while still having a good maximum power output (top speed).
FYI, IIRC, Honda does compete in F1 facing already, so crazy low coefficient of drag vehicles are not out of the question.
Apple doesn't sell upgrades. That $129 gets you a full version of the OS. You can sell your old version on ebay if you want; you won't need it to install 10.4
Can I get $129 deducted from the price of my next Macintosh purchase if I elect to use my existing MacOS X license? Can I sell the MacOS X license that Apple bundled with my last computer when I buy 10.[234] off the shelf for it? A software licensing model that doesn't discount upgrades vs. full new products is completely absurd in the 21st century. Then again, so is one that bundles a HUGE amount of software together, and doesn't allow me to buy just the part I want at a reduced cost (I'm talking about being able to buy the OS without the iLife Apps, mainly).
You'll never be a mac user because you require a list of bullet-item features without any sort of regard for the UI problems that make them necessary or alternate ways to solve those problems.
Your example of having to add a USB mouse as a third party option (Apple will even sell it to you!) and comparing it to installing Yellow Dog Linux over MacOS is obviously absurd.UI controls at the edge of the screen are actually much "closer" than redundant menu bars which are part each the window. You're not even solving a problem here.
I used to like the idea of multiple virtual desktops on a Mac, but then I started using Expose. Multiple virtual desktops is a horrible kludge.
"Branching" may be too strong of a word for Knights of the Old Republic. You're right, it's essentially linear story development with one major fork. However, the gameplay is for the most part non-linear: the first two and last two worlds must be done in order, but the middle four can be done in any order. The order you choose significantly affects gameplay, though not the end result. The major game fork doesn't only affect the ending, since your alignment affects the gameplay as well, and depending on the courses of dialog you take, you can end up with different characters in your party in the end-game (at least 4 are affected I think) and even the middle part of the game. I don't know what more you could have asked for from that fork. Character interaction is, unfortunately, completely singular. Though I guess you do choose what sex your character is...
Bottom line for me is, I actually wanted to play KotOR a second time through. I never do that. That's not branching, but I think it says a lot about the quality of the game and how open it is in other ways.
a) no matter what encoder you use, MP3 quality plateaus WAY below 320kbps. (nevermind that encoding any MP3 with a constant bitrate is retarded)
b) while it doesn't improve quality significantly, playing back 320kbps MP3s on your iPod WILL use up the battery almost twice as fast as 160kbps encoded (AAC or MP3) audio, for example. The buffer hasn't gotten any bigger, so the disk has to work twice as hard per hour to keep it full during playback. battery life is way more important to people than the quality difference between 320kbps MP3 and 192kbps MP3.
One of the bigger failures of modern keyboards, including the USB Apple keyboards, is the lack of any kind of decent Caps Lock indication. The current Apple keyboards have a green LED on the caps lock key itself. Which is sort of cool, except that if your left hand is actually on the keyboard, you can't tell if you've got Caps Lock engaged or not (my hands are opaque). IIRC, the Apple Extended Keyboard II (what made a II a II, anyway?), had a Caps Lock key that stuck down when activated. It definitely also had a light in the upper right corner of the keyboard, which is a lot more visible than the on-key LED they use now. It looks like the Matias keyboard has a similar cool-looking less-functional LED, too. Does anyone know if caps lock stays down? The caps lock - A key gap is also lacking according to the tidbits review, which is also disappointing.