If you're an English professor, your time really isn't very expensive. Chances are, on an hourly rate, it costs the university more for a tech support person to spend 45 minutes going to an office to do something than it would cost for a typical prof to spend 10 minutes shutting up and following simple directions over the phone.
If you're the chair of a department and actually earn big boy money, you're not going to be personally calling tech support anyways.
I don't even know how you're trying to define UNIX, so it's hard to disagree but easy to understand why people think you're trolling. OS X is UNIX, as defined by the only body that says what UNIX is, the Open Group. Historically and technically, it's UNIX, too, though certainly not as purely so as some other distributions. Most people consider Linux to be a UNIX (or maybe "UNIX enough"), and it has far less direct relation to anything historically or technically than OS X does.
Cygwin is an emulator, not an OS, and it's missing most of the functionality that defines UNIX on a technical level (though it does have most of the shell stuff). There's nothing you can do to make Windows into UNIX, short of rewriting 99% of it. You might as well ask if running BSD in VMware makes the host OS into BSD, it's a nonsensical argument with no technical basis.
Yes, Apple has added support for resource forks to many UNIX tools. But I don't think you actually know what resource forks are, they have nothing to do with Darwin or the OS -- they're metadata that applications can save, or not, as they desire. That's exactly what I said the first time you brought it up. You can use plain old FreeBSD tools to do all your file operations and everything will work just fine.
And that's cool, if someone wants to argue over whether Gnome makes a system too user-friendly or Linspire is candy-ass, and that you should only ever use Slackware with csh, I can understand that some people feel that way.
You're wrong that OS X/Darwin don't use/etc, though -- they certainly do, though in some cases the settings there will be superceded by settings in the more "modern" XML config files Apple is encouraging other distros to use as well (it's hardly the first time in the history of UNIX a vendor has updated tools or config files). It most certainly doesn't use anything like a registry -- the registry is probably the biggest software disaster of the last two decades, and I wouldn't be caught dead relying on a system with one. Keeping hardware information, software information, user information and everything else wrapped up in a single easily-corruptible and minimally documented file is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Apple's config stuff is broken down pretty logically into XML files that are stored separately in places that make sense given the security context of the people who should be able to edit the contents. Apple doesn't mix user config data with application-specific data, nor hardware data with network data or system data. You can easily port the text files from one system to another, and there's no black magic involved or single points of failure. They also tend to be written in plain english, which makes them better than both the registry and most stuff in/etc. It does build binary versions of the text files for faster access during runtime, but you can delete those and it'll happily go on running.
Mostly (and I don't know your experience at all, so I'm not saying this applies to you), I think folks like to bitch about OS X because they haven't used it much and they find it hard to believe that Apple really isn't fucking it all up. Historically, the idea of Apple and UNIX just seems crazy, so this whole OS X thing must be a fever dream, it can't REALLY be a UNIX with an amazing, user-friendly GUI, can it? But back in 1989, nobody questioned that NeXT was selling UNIX boxes -- you couldn't go through a university computer lab anywhere in the western hemisphere without seeing a black NeXT box and hearing about how it was the greatest desktop UNIX ever made and someday every computer would be like it.
why use Apple's shitty proprietary container when you can compress with [divx|xvid|other mpeg4 codec] into a generic container like.mpeg?
Well, if all you're doing is dumping a random video into the wild, you're certainly best off using a generic MPEG4 codec (like DivX/Xvid) in avi for compatibility with decent quality.
But if you're doing anything more than that, the Quicktime container format offers tons of features and power that simply don't exist in other containers (because it's pretty arbitrarily extensible -- it's basically the TIFF of multimedia). QT is pretty much the polar opposite of shitty when it comes to multimedia -- after nearly two decades, there still isn't anything else in existence that comes close to it for rich media development. MKV is about the only container that even attempts to do a lot of what has been easy in QT for years (like multiple embedded soft subs in different code pages).
Of course, most of Apple's own apps export to QT by default, so I suspect most people who have random QT files do so because of that, or because they downloaded movie trailers encoded with Sorenson, a family of codecs that has only ever been developed for QT, and has continued to be the best quality codec for professional work where you can pore over each frame of video for hours.
People keep saying this, and I don't understand the logic behind it. This is not a case of the end user violating the EULA, this is a for-profit company violating the EULA to make money. That's a whole different ballgame.
Well, no, it's not that simple. Legally, the end-user is the person to whom the EULA applies, and Psystar isn't the end-user. The hardware and software were both paid for by Psystar's customer, and Psystar is installing it as a service to that customer. So even if the EULA is valid (which is questionable), Apple would probably have to take the individual buyers to court to enforce it, and considering the buyers paid full retail price for software, Apple is going to have a hard time showing what damage was done to them by the contract violation. Without any real damage to correct, there's nothing for a court to provide as a remedy to a contract violation.
The most Apple could maybe hope for is an injunction against Psystar from installing the software as a service in the future, which might well be all they care about, but this is all a pretty strange situation legally. It's unusual for someone to sell a product at retail to anyone who pays the price, and then try to enforce restrictions on completely legal uses of the product by the customer.
Apple would be very very smart to make cheap $300 desktops and notebooks till they can choke out all the competition by MS and then go back to their current strategy, that would make Jobs really rich and perhaps let there be more innovation.
But that assumes Jobs cares about world domination (or being the world's technological savior) in the way that Gates does. Jobs has made it clear many times over the years that he is (whether you like his work or not) an artist, and as such he's more concerned with getting his "vision" out there than with diluting it so that more people take part. I mean, what incentive does he personally have to compromise -- more money? What can he do with another billion dollars that he can't do with the billions he has already? He can already innovate or play in any way he likes, he has both whatever hardware and whatever software he wants in his walled garden and it doesn't affect him at all if other stuff exists outside his universe. All he's interested in are premium products for discerning consumers (in his eyes).
Which is not to say i wouldn't love to see lower cost Macs, and it seems inevitable as hardware prices decline that we'll see them (who would have ever expected to see a $599 Mac back in the 1990s?), but you can sell a premium product for a couple hundred bucks and have it still be a premium product. I don't think (so long as Jobs is alive, at least) that Apple will ever treat price as a feature, because someone out there can always build something cheaper.
I hate the idea of funding the development of content that only 5% of the player base is intended to enjoy.
Sorry, but I want them to spend their development $s making content I can get into with my wife and a few friends.
I agree, I left WoW a year or so ago after we beat Kara, because I was looking at having to "attune" to more shit and I realized the whole process was retarded. We actually spent a month or so going back and playing some old lvl 60 dungeons that were easy to get into, because it was much more fun to simply play a variety of well-designed dungeons than it was to work for the "best" dungeons with the "best" equipment.
I understand the treadmill idea, that it's an easy way to create pseudo-content and slow down players from doing everything the game has to offer and quitting because they're "done" with the game. But WoW has gotten enough content at this point that maybe slowing people down isn't so necessary -- there really IS enough genuine, human-designed, interesting content to keep us entertained without artificial limitations.
I sure didn't have any interest in going back to WoW until I heard about this, now I'm starting to think it might be genuinely fun again, that I can just design a new character and play and be able to actually access all that content I paid for without being penalized. I'd rather they encouraged people to create more characters and play the existing content in a new way, rather than slowing down characters as a way to ration out the content.
If you are not making your work publicly available why use the GPL?
Just because you don't necessarily want/need to make it public doesn't mean you want to distribute it as binary-only or not be able to use other GPL code in the development or expand it in unforeseen ways in the future.
I'm not a programmer, but in one of my past jobs I used to hire developers for projects. One of the caveats I applied to everything we did was that it had to be GPLed, partly for flexibility down the line if we needed to modify it or distribute it to partners (gov't and universities), but also because the nature of the work was such that 95% of the foundations already existed in other GPL projects, all we needed was customization to our particular workflow. It's no secret that a lot of free software is only usable by techs, and much of what I was doing was developing user-friendly interfaces for our employees, and then paying to have the backend made functional.
But we never had the software available for the public, just because they'd have little interest in it as it was so customized for our particular use and I'm sure some of the very situation-specific code was fairly hacky. I know the developers did push patches upstream when it made sense, and I encouraged them to do so and even paid for more hours here and there to make sure the code was clean enough to do that. I strongly suspect that most developers who make a living with GPL/BSD software (other than employees of Red Hat and Mozilla and the like) pay their rent on projects like this. It's a great symbiotic relationship between the GPL software community and private enterprise.
It has been my experience that people that exclaim how Mac OS X is a "true UNIX" are often the type that never touch the command-line and haven't experienced the level of crap that is apple glomming-on all their filesystem meta-data to the things that resemble unix the most.
Keep in mind that the Mach microkernel is not unix, it came from CMU. Some userland stuff came from the *BSD lineage, but calling OS X a "true UNIX" rings about as true as calling windows + cygwin the same.
I have no reason to doubt your experiences, but whether or not other people touch the command line has nothing to do with whether or not an OS is UNIX, nor does the kernel architecture (or kernel lineage or school of origin, for that matter). Solaris and AIX have different kernels, but they're both the basis of true UNIX systems. UNIX isn't about being able to port drivers, it's about a common set of applications, shells, commands, protocols, and functionality. Mac OS X 10.5 is a UNIX '03 certified OS. Just because it doesn't compile someone's favorite Linux tool without some porting doesn't mean it isn't UNIX -- IRIX wouldn't compile most of the desktop software on sourceforge, either.
There's zero filesystem metadata "glommed on" in Darwin, I don't even know what you're talking about. Sure, the OS and supported filesystems are happy to store lots of metadata if applications request it, but that's true of every modern desktop OS out there, most just don't use it much. Solaris has been "glomming on" ACL metadata for a decade and a half.
Most people are perfectly happy treating Linux as a UNIX, and it has nothing directly to do with any of the "real" BSD or System V UNIXes, it's a mish-mash of ideas from copies of both. If it makes you feel better, install Darwin with X11 and skip the whole Aqua GUI -- you'll be looking at a BSDish OS with as much in common with its brethren as any other UNIX.
Yeah, that's the biggest flaw in this report -- I doubt many >$1000 PCs are sold at retail overall, folks tend to buy anything over $1000 direct from the OEM, not a reseller. in that price range people usually want to select certain options or configurations, it's mainly the ~$500 email/web boxes that people buy off the shelf at Fry's or Best Buy as-is.
So it seems fairly meaningless in terms of drawing any useful conclusions, other than simply verifying in another way that Apple's retail strategy is very successful, which we already knew since they're one of the most profitable per-square foot retail operations in the world.
Sure they may use a stable UNIX based OS, but you can get just that with any respectable Linux OS (Debian, Ubuntu, etc., depending on the person's preference.)
Only if you don't want to use any major commercial apps with any kind of support. The reason people are spending money on the Mac is that it's the best of all worlds -- a true UNIX system with commercial, user-friendly apps apps, full hardware/software support, and it even integrates your windows stuff right on the desktop with none of the drawbacks of WINE or other hacks. Heck, Fusion is even supporting some Direct3D on the Mac now, which would be useful if Apple had any 21st century GPUs in their consumer systems.
It is funny that they claim more progress working on this for six months than working on Gentoo for four years.
Nothing surprising about that. The first 95% of any project is the easy part that can be done by anyone over a weekend. It's the last 5% that requires hard work and expertise, and will break your soul if you care about making it as good as it was in your imagination when you began.
I have one of the 1999-vintage Sony Picturebooks and while you're right about the nightmare of booting from CD, they're easy as pie to boot from any generic USB floppy drive ($20 at Fry's). Combine that with a DOS floppy that has USB mass storage support (easily found at bootfloppies.com or similar places) and you can install whatever you want from a $10, 2-4 gig flash drive you probably have already.
I have to admit, I've found the USB floppy drive to be handy to own in the years since I got it, I probably have to pull it out every 6 months or so for some other use. Not bad to have in your toolkit.
Huh? Does anybody believe that who isn't just grasping for reasons that they already support making possession illegal?
It's certainly not a universal agreement. In the US & UK, that's the prevailing legal reasoning, though. The idea is that the actual abuse is one thing, but that because sexual abuse creates long-term harmful effects to the child, the graphic evidence of the abuse itself can be both a trigger and a source of new trauma for the victim, all related directly to the initial act. There are plenty of crimes that are essentially continuations of the consequences of an initial criminal act.
let's think about that argument rationally. Can anybody honestly say they envision a straight, sexually "normal" (ie, doesn't get off on kiddie porn) person sitting around going, "you know what? I bet there's a market for a video of me assfucking a 10 year old. Fuck the possibility of life in prison and being shunned by my friends and family, let's go for it?" I don't. If there are ANY such people in the world, they are a vast minority of the already relatively small number of people who are involved in such a thing.
You're assuming too much about others from how people in our small part of the world act. You're right, few in the US or Canada or a similarly comfortable country would risk the stiff legal and social penalties involved unless they had a personal interest in the material. That's why most of the commercial stuff comes from Eastern Europe, Russia and Southeast Asia, where enforcement is lax, the economies suck, and there is good money to be made by the mob or whatever locals can rent a child for a few hours. Indeed, even the victims and their families (can) get good money for participating, which makes it a rather twisted situation in which there's little social stigma attached and selling your own kids can be seen as a legitimate form of income (so much so that the local cops don't care about it so long as they get their bribes). There are perfectly normal folks with no sexual interest in children who make their livings from it in those places, because they can make more money in a day doing that than they can in 6 months back on the family farm. Just because someone works in porn in the US doesn't mean they personally are into gangbangs or anal sex -- it's a similar dynamic there. The lighting guy and makeup artist and such are just showing up for a paycheck. And they're all just working for some guy who'll happily sell whatever vice rich westerners (and Japanese, and Singaporeans) are willing to pay the most for.
The thing is, that is quite frankly bogus - thanks to differing age limits, it's illegal to possess photos which are of people who are over the age of consent and which don't involve any sort of abuse. (There are cases of 16/17 year olds being convicted for taking nude photos of themselces possessing nude photos of their similarly-aged boyfriend/girlfriend.)
No, it's a matter of conflicting jurisdictions and federal supremacy. States set the laws for age of consent, but it is federal law that says anyone under 18 is a minor and can't be featured in sexually explicit imagery. There are lots of places in the law where states and the federal government set different standards, it doesn't mean either jurisdiction is insincere in their reasoning.
OK, child abuse is illegal for one thing, so if they're broadcasting an illegal act, what's the point of making the broadcast itself illegal.
No, it's so they can charge the viewers with a crime. The intent here would be to try and prevent commercial sites overseas from selling a streaming video of child sexual abuse to Americans. The guys overseas are out of our legal reach, and they've got a profitable business, so there's no reason for them to stop abusing more kids unless we can get their customers. I'm assuming the ambiguity they're worried about is if somebody watches the webcast but doesn't save it, he's not technically in possession of child porn by the time the cops show up at his front door.
There may be more to it than that, but this aspect of the new law makes practical and legal sense.
As it stands they prosecute people who have the image but didn't commit the act. Those who seek sexual gratification from these images are likely the ones who are going to pursue the actual act in the future, or so goes the reasoning.
That isn't the reasoning behind the prohibition on possession. We don't jail people because of statistical likelihoods. Possession is illegal because it is considered a continuation and extension of the original crime of sexual abuse, and because (like with drugs) the thought is that if you cut off demand, the suppliers will necessarily abuse fewer children. The legal reasoning has had to show some connection between possession and the actual abuse of children in order to be upheld in most countries with a guarantee of free expression.
what the differences are between this one and the one that was struck down?
The previous laws were outlawing pornography involving adults that only pretended or appeared to be underage, and of completely virtual child porn. The law here is about creating virtual child pornography, but using a real minor's identifiable likeness to do so. It's an interesting legal situation since there is no direct sexual abuse anywhere in the chain.
The Supreme Court has previously said (ie in Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition) that unless there is real child being used to create porn, it's a simple matter of free speech.
Certainly it would be easy to imagine a case where you could use the face of an underage public figure to make a clear political or social commentary (I'm not saying it would be tasteful, just very possible). I'm not so sure that you could make such a case for private individuals. One issue would be for the courts to decide if such a use would really be considered true child pornography rather than simply a case of defamation or something similar.
One major factor that jumps to mind is that in creating the fake child porn, you aren't directly causing any damage to the victim, it's only through distribution that the victim is harmed (or even aware something has happened!). But child porn is illegal to create or possess, which would mean people looking at major felonies for a victimless crime if they simply created images for their own use and never distributed them. I can't see the court endorsing that. Without distribution of the images, we seem to be close to the realm of thought crimes, but with distribution it would be a very interesting case to see argued.
I think that's half the idea -- to provide an external motivator for packages to wrap things up and release something stable periodically.
The other half of the idea is that it provides a more uniform platform for software/hardware support -- the idea being that Adobe or NVidia could make a release that works with all the March 2019 distros, and support people could offer support for the March 2019 distros. It is, after all, one thing to be familiar with the package management of 5 different distros, and another thing entirely to be familiar with the specific point release quirks of the software packages on 5 different distros.
Of course reality would be nowhere near as elegant as this theory.
While I completely agree with you, I wonder how much of an issue this is in practice. Exactly how many 10 year old games are you playing today?
Plenty of people still play Starcraft, Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Panzer General, Diablo, a lot of the old Jane's flight simulations. I still play the old Win95 versions of Axis & Allies and Risk 2, the newer versions aren't very good. There are active modding communities still making additional content for a lot of those games, because there are no modern equivalents.
It's no secret that the game industry is cyclical, and unfortunately that means for some genres it will be years before we see another quality game, if ever. Turn-based strategy games, for example, have almost completely died due to the popularity of real-time strategy games (thankfully the Nintendo DS has brought back some great turn-based games!). I would gladly pay several hundred dollars for an updated version of Jane's Longbow 2, but nobody makes that genre anymore and possibly never will. It's nearly impossible to run now because it was coded specifically for the original Voodoo3D, and even the best glide wrappers tend to be flaky when I've experimented.
The RIAA doesn't own any copyrights, the member companies do. So all legal filings have to come on behalf of the actual copyright holder (ie ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP).
But it is the RIAA performing the investigations, making settlement offers, and (as I understand it) even employing the attorneys who litigate the cases, at least initially. So yes, as a matter of legal record, it is ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP being represented in court, but as a practical matter it is the RIAA doing so on behalf of all their member companies.
The FDA approves all medical devices like automated external defibrillators and surgical robots. It's a long, expensive process that is considerably less fungible than, say, pharmaceutical trials.
I've worked with a lot of the surgical robots and voice control systems available in the past decade, and they're much more reliable and consistent in manual performance than whatever random surgeon happens to be on call that day. Sure, a doc always has to be driving the thing -- they're nowhere near autonomous (that's still decades away for even simple things), but the point of the robotics is not to remove the expert decision-making of the doctor, it's to eliminate the mechanical aspects of surgery where most things go unpredictably wrong. Just brushing your glove up lightly against the wrong piece of anatomy can cause major internal bleeding, not to mention how difficult it is to precisely control your hands for every split second of a 14-hour long procedure where doctors might have to trade off several times with all sorts of tools still inside the patient.
The robotics also make an unbeatable teaching tool. The surgeons in 50 years are going to be vastly superior to even the docs we have today, because they'll not only be able to watch from the chief's POV from day one of their residency, they'll be used to rehearsing every procedure in the simulator beforehand and handing off the controls to different specialists elsewhere for a few minutes whenever they need.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're an English professor, your time really isn't very expensive. Chances are, on an hourly rate, it costs the university more for a tech support person to spend 45 minutes going to an office to do something than it would cost for a typical prof to spend 10 minutes shutting up and following simple directions over the phone.
If you're the chair of a department and actually earn big boy money, you're not going to be personally calling tech support anyways.
I don't even know how you're trying to define UNIX, so it's hard to disagree but easy to understand why people think you're trolling. OS X is UNIX, as defined by the only body that says what UNIX is, the Open Group. Historically and technically, it's UNIX, too, though certainly not as purely so as some other distributions. Most people consider Linux to be a UNIX (or maybe "UNIX enough"), and it has far less direct relation to anything historically or technically than OS X does.
Cygwin is an emulator, not an OS, and it's missing most of the functionality that defines UNIX on a technical level (though it does have most of the shell stuff). There's nothing you can do to make Windows into UNIX, short of rewriting 99% of it. You might as well ask if running BSD in VMware makes the host OS into BSD, it's a nonsensical argument with no technical basis.
Yes, Apple has added support for resource forks to many UNIX tools. But I don't think you actually know what resource forks are, they have nothing to do with Darwin or the OS -- they're metadata that applications can save, or not, as they desire. That's exactly what I said the first time you brought it up. You can use plain old FreeBSD tools to do all your file operations and everything will work just fine.
And that's cool, if someone wants to argue over whether Gnome makes a system too user-friendly or Linspire is candy-ass, and that you should only ever use Slackware with csh, I can understand that some people feel that way.
/etc, though -- they certainly do, though in some cases the settings there will be superceded by settings in the more "modern" XML config files Apple is encouraging other distros to use as well (it's hardly the first time in the history of UNIX a vendor has updated tools or config files). It most certainly doesn't use anything like a registry -- the registry is probably the biggest software disaster of the last two decades, and I wouldn't be caught dead relying on a system with one. Keeping hardware information, software information, user information and everything else wrapped up in a single easily-corruptible and minimally documented file is just a disaster waiting to happen.
/etc. It does build binary versions of the text files for faster access during runtime, but you can delete those and it'll happily go on running.
You're wrong that OS X/Darwin don't use
Apple's config stuff is broken down pretty logically into XML files that are stored separately in places that make sense given the security context of the people who should be able to edit the contents. Apple doesn't mix user config data with application-specific data, nor hardware data with network data or system data. You can easily port the text files from one system to another, and there's no black magic involved or single points of failure. They also tend to be written in plain english, which makes them better than both the registry and most stuff in
Mostly (and I don't know your experience at all, so I'm not saying this applies to you), I think folks like to bitch about OS X because they haven't used it much and they find it hard to believe that Apple really isn't fucking it all up. Historically, the idea of Apple and UNIX just seems crazy, so this whole OS X thing must be a fever dream, it can't REALLY be a UNIX with an amazing, user-friendly GUI, can it? But back in 1989, nobody questioned that NeXT was selling UNIX boxes -- you couldn't go through a university computer lab anywhere in the western hemisphere without seeing a black NeXT box and hearing about how it was the greatest desktop UNIX ever made and someday every computer would be like it.
Nope,it maxes out at 1024x768 per screen on a Mac Mini:
Mac System compatibility
DualHead2Go Digital Edition*
Mac Mini 2048x768 (2x 1024x768)
Mac Pro 3840x1200 (2x 1920x1200)
iMac (17") 2560x1024 (2x 1280x1024)
iMac (20") 3840x1200 (2x 1920x1200)
Well, if all you're doing is dumping a random video into the wild, you're certainly best off using a generic MPEG4 codec (like DivX/Xvid) in avi for compatibility with decent quality.
But if you're doing anything more than that, the Quicktime container format offers tons of features and power that simply don't exist in other containers (because it's pretty arbitrarily extensible -- it's basically the TIFF of multimedia). QT is pretty much the polar opposite of shitty when it comes to multimedia -- after nearly two decades, there still isn't anything else in existence that comes close to it for rich media development. MKV is about the only container that even attempts to do a lot of what has been easy in QT for years (like multiple embedded soft subs in different code pages).
Of course, most of Apple's own apps export to QT by default, so I suspect most people who have random QT files do so because of that, or because they downloaded movie trailers encoded with Sorenson, a family of codecs that has only ever been developed for QT, and has continued to be the best quality codec for professional work where you can pore over each frame of video for hours.
Wow, that guy has some awesome little utilities. Thanks for the link!
Well, no, it's not that simple. Legally, the end-user is the person to whom the EULA applies, and Psystar isn't the end-user. The hardware and software were both paid for by Psystar's customer, and Psystar is installing it as a service to that customer. So even if the EULA is valid (which is questionable), Apple would probably have to take the individual buyers to court to enforce it, and considering the buyers paid full retail price for software, Apple is going to have a hard time showing what damage was done to them by the contract violation. Without any real damage to correct, there's nothing for a court to provide as a remedy to a contract violation.
The most Apple could maybe hope for is an injunction against Psystar from installing the software as a service in the future, which might well be all they care about, but this is all a pretty strange situation legally. It's unusual for someone to sell a product at retail to anyone who pays the price, and then try to enforce restrictions on completely legal uses of the product by the customer.
But that assumes Jobs cares about world domination (or being the world's technological savior) in the way that Gates does. Jobs has made it clear many times over the years that he is (whether you like his work or not) an artist, and as such he's more concerned with getting his "vision" out there than with diluting it so that more people take part. I mean, what incentive does he personally have to compromise -- more money? What can he do with another billion dollars that he can't do with the billions he has already? He can already innovate or play in any way he likes, he has both whatever hardware and whatever software he wants in his walled garden and it doesn't affect him at all if other stuff exists outside his universe. All he's interested in are premium products for discerning consumers (in his eyes).
Which is not to say i wouldn't love to see lower cost Macs, and it seems inevitable as hardware prices decline that we'll see them (who would have ever expected to see a $599 Mac back in the 1990s?), but you can sell a premium product for a couple hundred bucks and have it still be a premium product. I don't think (so long as Jobs is alive, at least) that Apple will ever treat price as a feature, because someone out there can always build something cheaper.
Finally, I can use both my 1024x768 monitors at 60hz!
The Matrox solution would have been awesome in, say, 1996. As it stands, it's only really useful for driving a projector or TV as the second display.
I agree, I left WoW a year or so ago after we beat Kara, because I was looking at having to "attune" to more shit and I realized the whole process was retarded. We actually spent a month or so going back and playing some old lvl 60 dungeons that were easy to get into, because it was much more fun to simply play a variety of well-designed dungeons than it was to work for the "best" dungeons with the "best" equipment.
I understand the treadmill idea, that it's an easy way to create pseudo-content and slow down players from doing everything the game has to offer and quitting because they're "done" with the game. But WoW has gotten enough content at this point that maybe slowing people down isn't so necessary -- there really IS enough genuine, human-designed, interesting content to keep us entertained without artificial limitations.
I sure didn't have any interest in going back to WoW until I heard about this, now I'm starting to think it might be genuinely fun again, that I can just design a new character and play and be able to actually access all that content I paid for without being penalized. I'd rather they encouraged people to create more characters and play the existing content in a new way, rather than slowing down characters as a way to ration out the content.
Just because you don't necessarily want/need to make it public doesn't mean you want to distribute it as binary-only or not be able to use other GPL code in the development or expand it in unforeseen ways in the future.
I'm not a programmer, but in one of my past jobs I used to hire developers for projects. One of the caveats I applied to everything we did was that it had to be GPLed, partly for flexibility down the line if we needed to modify it or distribute it to partners (gov't and universities), but also because the nature of the work was such that 95% of the foundations already existed in other GPL projects, all we needed was customization to our particular workflow. It's no secret that a lot of free software is only usable by techs, and much of what I was doing was developing user-friendly interfaces for our employees, and then paying to have the backend made functional.
But we never had the software available for the public, just because they'd have little interest in it as it was so customized for our particular use and I'm sure some of the very situation-specific code was fairly hacky. I know the developers did push patches upstream when it made sense, and I encouraged them to do so and even paid for more hours here and there to make sure the code was clean enough to do that. I strongly suspect that most developers who make a living with GPL/BSD software (other than employees of Red Hat and Mozilla and the like) pay their rent on projects like this. It's a great symbiotic relationship between the GPL software community and private enterprise.
I have no reason to doubt your experiences, but whether or not other people touch the command line has nothing to do with whether or not an OS is UNIX, nor does the kernel architecture (or kernel lineage or school of origin, for that matter). Solaris and AIX have different kernels, but they're both the basis of true UNIX systems. UNIX isn't about being able to port drivers, it's about a common set of applications, shells, commands, protocols, and functionality. Mac OS X 10.5 is a UNIX '03 certified OS. Just because it doesn't compile someone's favorite Linux tool without some porting doesn't mean it isn't UNIX -- IRIX wouldn't compile most of the desktop software on sourceforge, either.
There's zero filesystem metadata "glommed on" in Darwin, I don't even know what you're talking about. Sure, the OS and supported filesystems are happy to store lots of metadata if applications request it, but that's true of every modern desktop OS out there, most just don't use it much. Solaris has been "glomming on" ACL metadata for a decade and a half.
Most people are perfectly happy treating Linux as a UNIX, and it has nothing directly to do with any of the "real" BSD or System V UNIXes, it's a mish-mash of ideas from copies of both. If it makes you feel better, install Darwin with X11 and skip the whole Aqua GUI -- you'll be looking at a BSDish OS with as much in common with its brethren as any other UNIX.
Yeah, that's the biggest flaw in this report -- I doubt many >$1000 PCs are sold at retail overall, folks tend to buy anything over $1000 direct from the OEM, not a reseller. in that price range people usually want to select certain options or configurations, it's mainly the ~$500 email/web boxes that people buy off the shelf at Fry's or Best Buy as-is.
So it seems fairly meaningless in terms of drawing any useful conclusions, other than simply verifying in another way that Apple's retail strategy is very successful, which we already knew since they're one of the most profitable per-square foot retail operations in the world.
Only if you don't want to use any major commercial apps with any kind of support. The reason people are spending money on the Mac is that it's the best of all worlds -- a true UNIX system with commercial, user-friendly apps apps, full hardware/software support, and it even integrates your windows stuff right on the desktop with none of the drawbacks of WINE or other hacks. Heck, Fusion is even supporting some Direct3D on the Mac now, which would be useful if Apple had any 21st century GPUs in their consumer systems.
Nothing surprising about that. The first 95% of any project is the easy part that can be done by anyone over a weekend. It's the last 5% that requires hard work and expertise, and will break your soul if you care about making it as good as it was in your imagination when you began.
I have one of the 1999-vintage Sony Picturebooks and while you're right about the nightmare of booting from CD, they're easy as pie to boot from any generic USB floppy drive ($20 at Fry's). Combine that with a DOS floppy that has USB mass storage support (easily found at bootfloppies.com or similar places) and you can install whatever you want from a $10, 2-4 gig flash drive you probably have already.
I have to admit, I've found the USB floppy drive to be handy to own in the years since I got it, I probably have to pull it out every 6 months or so for some other use. Not bad to have in your toolkit.
It's certainly not a universal agreement. In the US & UK, that's the prevailing legal reasoning, though. The idea is that the actual abuse is one thing, but that because sexual abuse creates long-term harmful effects to the child, the graphic evidence of the abuse itself can be both a trigger and a source of new trauma for the victim, all related directly to the initial act. There are plenty of crimes that are essentially continuations of the consequences of an initial criminal act.
You're assuming too much about others from how people in our small part of the world act. You're right, few in the US or Canada or a similarly comfortable country would risk the stiff legal and social penalties involved unless they had a personal interest in the material. That's why most of the commercial stuff comes from Eastern Europe, Russia and Southeast Asia, where enforcement is lax, the economies suck, and there is good money to be made by the mob or whatever locals can rent a child for a few hours. Indeed, even the victims and their families (can) get good money for participating, which makes it a rather twisted situation in which there's little social stigma attached and selling your own kids can be seen as a legitimate form of income (so much so that the local cops don't care about it so long as they get their bribes). There are perfectly normal folks with no sexual interest in children who make their livings from it in those places, because they can make more money in a day doing that than they can in 6 months back on the family farm. Just because someone works in porn in the US doesn't mean they personally are into gangbangs or anal sex -- it's a similar dynamic there. The lighting guy and makeup artist and such are just showing up for a paycheck. And they're all just working for some guy who'll happily sell whatever vice rich westerners (and Japanese, and Singaporeans) are willing to pay the most for.
No, it's a matter of conflicting jurisdictions and federal supremacy. States set the laws for age of consent, but it is federal law that says anyone under 18 is a minor and can't be featured in sexually explicit imagery. There are lots of places in the law where states and the federal government set different standards, it doesn't mean either jurisdiction is insincere in their reasoning.
No, it's so they can charge the viewers with a crime. The intent here would be to try and prevent commercial sites overseas from selling a streaming video of child sexual abuse to Americans. The guys overseas are out of our legal reach, and they've got a profitable business, so there's no reason for them to stop abusing more kids unless we can get their customers. I'm assuming the ambiguity they're worried about is if somebody watches the webcast but doesn't save it, he's not technically in possession of child porn by the time the cops show up at his front door.
There may be more to it than that, but this aspect of the new law makes practical and legal sense.
That isn't the reasoning behind the prohibition on possession. We don't jail people because of statistical likelihoods. Possession is illegal because it is considered a continuation and extension of the original crime of sexual abuse, and because (like with drugs) the thought is that if you cut off demand, the suppliers will necessarily abuse fewer children. The legal reasoning has had to show some connection between possession and the actual abuse of children in order to be upheld in most countries with a guarantee of free expression.
The previous laws were outlawing pornography involving adults that only pretended or appeared to be underage, and of completely virtual child porn. The law here is about creating virtual child pornography, but using a real minor's identifiable likeness to do so. It's an interesting legal situation since there is no direct sexual abuse anywhere in the chain.
The Supreme Court has previously said (ie in Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition) that unless there is real child being used to create porn, it's a simple matter of free speech.
Certainly it would be easy to imagine a case where you could use the face of an underage public figure to make a clear political or social commentary (I'm not saying it would be tasteful, just very possible). I'm not so sure that you could make such a case for private individuals. One issue would be for the courts to decide if such a use would really be considered true child pornography rather than simply a case of defamation or something similar.
One major factor that jumps to mind is that in creating the fake child porn, you aren't directly causing any damage to the victim, it's only through distribution that the victim is harmed (or even aware something has happened!). But child porn is illegal to create or possess, which would mean people looking at major felonies for a victimless crime if they simply created images for their own use and never distributed them. I can't see the court endorsing that. Without distribution of the images, we seem to be close to the realm of thought crimes, but with distribution it would be a very interesting case to see argued.
I think that's half the idea -- to provide an external motivator for packages to wrap things up and release something stable periodically.
The other half of the idea is that it provides a more uniform platform for software/hardware support -- the idea being that Adobe or NVidia could make a release that works with all the March 2019 distros, and support people could offer support for the March 2019 distros. It is, after all, one thing to be familiar with the package management of 5 different distros, and another thing entirely to be familiar with the specific point release quirks of the software packages on 5 different distros.
Of course reality would be nowhere near as elegant as this theory.
Plenty of people still play Starcraft, Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Panzer General, Diablo, a lot of the old Jane's flight simulations. I still play the old Win95 versions of Axis & Allies and Risk 2, the newer versions aren't very good. There are active modding communities still making additional content for a lot of those games, because there are no modern equivalents.
It's no secret that the game industry is cyclical, and unfortunately that means for some genres it will be years before we see another quality game, if ever. Turn-based strategy games, for example, have almost completely died due to the popularity of real-time strategy games (thankfully the Nintendo DS has brought back some great turn-based games!). I would gladly pay several hundred dollars for an updated version of Jane's Longbow 2, but nobody makes that genre anymore and possibly never will. It's nearly impossible to run now because it was coded specifically for the original Voodoo3D, and even the best glide wrappers tend to be flaky when I've experimented.
The RIAA doesn't own any copyrights, the member companies do. So all legal filings have to come on behalf of the actual copyright holder (ie ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP).
But it is the RIAA performing the investigations, making settlement offers, and (as I understand it) even employing the attorneys who litigate the cases, at least initially. So yes, as a matter of legal record, it is ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP being represented in court, but as a practical matter it is the RIAA doing so on behalf of all their member companies.
The FDA approves all medical devices like automated external defibrillators and surgical robots. It's a long, expensive process that is considerably less fungible than, say, pharmaceutical trials.
I've worked with a lot of the surgical robots and voice control systems available in the past decade, and they're much more reliable and consistent in manual performance than whatever random surgeon happens to be on call that day. Sure, a doc always has to be driving the thing -- they're nowhere near autonomous (that's still decades away for even simple things), but the point of the robotics is not to remove the expert decision-making of the doctor, it's to eliminate the mechanical aspects of surgery where most things go unpredictably wrong. Just brushing your glove up lightly against the wrong piece of anatomy can cause major internal bleeding, not to mention how difficult it is to precisely control your hands for every split second of a 14-hour long procedure where doctors might have to trade off several times with all sorts of tools still inside the patient.
The robotics also make an unbeatable teaching tool. The surgeons in 50 years are going to be vastly superior to even the docs we have today, because they'll not only be able to watch from the chief's POV from day one of their residency, they'll be used to rehearsing every procedure in the simulator beforehand and handing off the controls to different specialists elsewhere for a few minutes whenever they need.