Turns out that there was an "Internet cafe" across the street who evidently had no encryption turned on on their network and would let anyone with a wireless card connect to it.
That's not "encryption", that's authentication. Since the Internet Cafe probably doesn't want to bother managing userIDs and password (or MAC listings) for all of its customers, they just let their base station accept all attempted connections (presumably using DHCP to assign IPs).
The problem is that the data from your friend's computer to the base station is basically in the clear, since WEP is a very easy encryption algorithm to crack.
It's a well-known fact that despite Win NT/2000 servers being in the vast minority, they are susceptible to the vast MAJORITY of server cracks.
In the past, the server cracks tended to hurt the people who owned the servers, leaking information and so forth. These people couldn't sue MS for shoddy work, because that license agreement took away those rights.
But now we've got Code Red. People who never signed any sort of license agreement with MS are now paying the price for their lousy quality control. Can these people sue? If Code Red causes your ISP's network traffic load to go up, if it overloads your company's router, whatever, can MS be sued?
I'm waiting for the lawyers to start circling on this one...
"Revenge of the Jedi" wasn't a ploy; the name was changed at the last minute. There are extant movie posters which read "Revenge". Highly valuable among those who have too much extra money and a love of Ewoks...
If you think that g3 500mhz 66mhz bus is much faster than my celeron 500MHz 100 FSB, then you are sadly mistaken
Probably not, but I don't have G3/500 on a 66MHz bus. I have a two year old iMac with a G3/400, 384MB of RAM, a Rage 128 video card with 8MB of RAM, and a 100MHz bus. I'm quite sure that it will smoke your Celeron 500. Not that this matters to most people, as I'm about to mention.
I will compare photoshop marks on my laptop against yoru iBook's photoshop marks any day.
I still don't have a iBook.
And it might surprise you to know that I don't run Photoshop on my iMac. Neither does much of anyone the target market for the iBook. Photoshop Elements, perhaps.
When you can find me a Celeron that runs Mac OS, let me know. I work in the salt mines on Win NT all day long; coming home to a Mac OS box is a nice thing.
What people like you don't understand is that for 99.5% of the population, a 500MHz G3 on a 66MHz bus is fast enough. They want the feature set you get with the iBook. They want iTunes and iMovie, which are better than anything out there for free on the PC or the Mac. They want Firewire for their digital cameras and built-in Ethernet and Airport for their campus networks. They want a laptop built out of bulletproof plastic with a hard drive mounted on rubber washers for additional shock protection. They want 4-5 hour battery life. They want a 5 pound portable. And they want to pay as little as possible.
Apple cut corners on the iBook motherboard that make it just unattractive enough to me that I wasn't willing to run out and buy it without thinking hard about it. I probably won't buy one until the motherboard is revved. But I'm the uncommon case. The iBook is a really, really, really good laptop for most people.
I think the mouth-breather was confusing the 66MHz system bus (which Apple is doing only to slow down the iBooks and make the PowerBook G4s seem faster) with the performance of the 500MHz G3. If that bus speed was higher, then the iBooks would be a LOT more impressive. The difference in part costs would be trivial, but the loss of sales for G4 PowerBooks would probably makes it a deal-killer until Apple gets a 133MHz motherboard in the PB G4.
Another possible reason he might have thought the iBook CPU is "shitty" is the 256K of on-chip L2 cache. The cache is clocked 1:1 with the CPU, but it's small size means more cache misses. Performance is probably a wash compared to the 512K of L2 cache clocked at 2:1 or 3:2 that was used in the G3s present in older iBooks and iMacs. It's also a lot cheaper to use one part (CPU with cache controller and L2 cache) than multiple parts(CPU, cache controller chip and L2 cache chip).
All in all, it comes down to: what do you expect for $1200? In 1995, I paid $3300 (educational pricing) for a PowerBook 5300. The iBook is about ten times faster (literally, not figuratively), has more features, and costs slightly more than 1/3 the price of that awful, awful 5300. If I hadn't already replaced my PowerBook with an iMac, I'd rush out and get the iBook.
"limited problem domain" is the key. Given a limited problem domain, computers are better than anyone at anything. It's all in how you define the problem.
Most AI research is useless for this very reason. Data sets that are known to do well are re-used as "proof" that a particular algorithm works well. Heck, the act of inputting the data into the computer for processing usually involved human interaction which skews the data.
When it comes to performing tasks that a 5 year old can do, computers still suck.
Calculus is a more specific term, referring to derivatives, integrals, and some other more advanced concepts.
Nope.
There's also Predicate Calculus, which is the real name of what programmers do most of the time. No integrals involved.
Graph theory, base conversion math, statistics, probability, predicate calculus...any good software engineer should be at least conversant in all of these mathematical fields. From my experience, most people who call themselves "programmers" or "software engineers" aren't.
But since 'early adoption', haven't been used by armies, not even by Nazi-Germany.
Iraq used nerve gas against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war of the 80's and they also used it against the Iraqi Kurds. Maybe that's why Bush the Senior called Saddam "worse than Hitler"?
1. All CompSci degrees are not created equal. What some lower-rung schools call CS makes me cry. No theory, no math, no algorithms, just programming languages and trendy topics.
2. Software Engineering != CompSci. They are very different disciplines, and there are very few schools teaching Software Engineering right now. CMU and RIT are the two I know of (based on previous/. posters). You don't hire a physicist to design a car, you hire a mechanical engineer. The same should be true in software.
Could be, but aren't. The NY Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It's been owned by him for the last 8 years.
This is easily verifiable by going to http://www.nypost.com/posthistory/37314.htm. Checking your fact is, of course, a feat beyond the capabilities of 99.5% of all/. posters.
Two orders of magnitude. That's roughly how much faster a desktop app that I rewrote in C++ for my employer works these days.
Can you send me the original Java code? Absurdly slow Java code usually means a very bad programmer. I've written plenty of Java UI code and I've yet to see 10 seconds for a menu to appear.
I'll take that over half assed, broken JDBC drivers for Sybase any time. Does this language have a SINGLE API that's not broken?
Sun doesn't provide a Sybase driver. Sun provides a JDBC spec which driver writers can support. There are several companies which supply Sybase drivers (and I assume Sybase does, too). Blaming Sun for a broken Sybase database driver would be like blaming Microsoft because Dikatana sucked.
I won't even mention the quality of other Java related prdoucts such as servlet containers (yes I evaluated a number of them and they are all buggy as shit) and don't get me started on the dubious benefits of EJB with it's $15000/CPU rates.
I think you're looking at the wrong products.
Take a look at Resin. High quality, very fast, good support, $500/box licence for a servlet engine.
If you want EJBs, look at Orion. $1500/box for a fast EJB container that meets the J2EE spec fully. Oracle just dumped their own internally-developed J2EE app servers to licence and relabel Orion.
Both Orion and Resin are free for non-commercial use, including commercial development. You only have to pay when you deploy.
Oh, and Resin lets you download the source code, too. It's not quite Open Source (you can't ship modifications, I don't think), but I've yet to see the source for IIS on MS' web page...
There are Free (Speech and Beer) J2EE environments, but Resin and Orion are a good start in looking at quality J2EE servers.
Seriously, this is clearly hype without anything to back it up. What does "a LOT faster than Java" mean? UI code? Server code? XML parsing? FFT? Do you have numbers? Sample code?
I notice with some amusement that three of the four data sources you mention are MS databases. Now that's really a wide range of support!
And what does "nearly native access to MSSQL" mean exactly? Does it send back sector information from the hard disks?
JPython allows you to inherit from Java classes, write Java classes which inherit from JPython, and access the standard Sun APIs.
Beans are, more or less, a joke. Any class which uses getXXX (or isXXX for boolean)/setXXX to access fields is technicall a Java Bean. While you can write a bunch of support classes to make your Java Beans configurable via a GUI environment, no one does this for non-GUI components (and the market for 3rd party Java UI widgets isn't exactly booming).
By the by, Enterprise Java Beans have virtually nothing to do with Java Beans.
-jon
Re:Reminds me of "Rain on the Scarecrow"
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Dot-com Liquidator
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· Score: 2
Actually a lot of family farms collapsed because they over-borrowed, trying to get bigger. It's not much different than the way these dot-coms grew too fast on VC money.
The only difference is that the banks were smarter than the VCs (lending instead of buying) and probably got a better return on their investments when farms had to be liquidated to pay off debts than the VCs get when these companies are stripped and sold for parts.
-jon
Re:The only thing that helps is taxes
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Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 2
What planet does this happen on?
The planet of Long Island. When the private power company went bust, LI municipalities took over electric service. Prices dropped.
Um, no. Apple's P/E ratio is about 41. Sun's is about 29 (these numbers are from Yahoo! Finance as of 1:40PM, PDT, 6/26/01). Historically, P/E ratios tend to average around 30. Sun might be overvalued for a lot of reasons (chief among them is the glut of second-hand Sun equipment available due to the collapse of the dot-coms). Depending on this quarter's numbers for Apple, Apple might be undervalued (it'll depend on how much money the new iBooks made for Apple).
I don't think anyone is saying Apple is a bigger company than Sun. It has fewer employees, has less in gross revenue, and has less net revenue. What people are talking about are how many copies of Mac OS X are installed vs. how many copies of Solaris/Sun OS are installed. No one is talking about number of users; just as a UNIX box is multi-user, so are Macs. If a school has one Mac and 500 students, is that 500 Mac users?.
Pretty soon, there will be more copies of Mac OS X installed than copies of Solaris/Sun OS (the number of Sun OS installs are shrinking every day, as that OS is seriously old at this point). That's a remarkable thing.
The S203 has no built-in wireless support. You have to add a PC card to get this. It does have 2 PC-card slots, so you could add the Ethernet AND the wireless (a wireless PC card costs more than the $100 for the Airport card), but we're now past the $1300 mark.
The S203 weighs two pounds more than the iBook. It is also substantially larger.
It is rated at 2 hours of battery life. That means about one hour (90 minutes tops) in the real world. You could buy a second battery, but that costs money and adds weight.
No FireWire means no video cameras and no high-speed external storage, like a CD-burner (USB CD-RW are a joke). Of course, we could add a FireWire PC-card (more money), but we've already used up two slots on wireless and Ethernet.
I don't know why a 13.3" screen is better than a 12" screen with the same # of pixels. As far as I can tell, it just makes the computer larger.
The max RAM on the Toshiba is 512MB. It only has one slot, so if you upgrade, you need to throw away the 128MB it comes with. The iBook has 64MB soldered (the more expensive iBooks have 128MB soldered), and a slot to add an additional 512MB. No throw-away memory is a plus in my book.
The larger hard drive, more base RAM, IR support, DVD and PC Card slots are nice to have, but you have to balance this against no built-in FireWire, Ethernet, or 802.11 support, slower video, larger size and weight (40% heavier!), and far worse battery life (one-half to one-third of the iBook's battery life!).
Considering the original premise (Macs are vastly overpriced compared to PCs), I think I've proven my point. They aren't. Comparable feature sets (some additions, some subtractions) are available at the same price point.
I have always wondered about this one. If Apple is a hardware company, why do they sell software, including their own OS instead of just giving it away for free to drive up sales of their hardware?
Apple didn't start charging for the OS until 7.1 (System 7 Pro), back in 1992. The stink this caused was amazing. Apple did put System 7 in a shrink-wrapped box, but if you just wanted to copy the floppies, any Mac dealer would do it.
Those numbers mean nothing; it's not the amount of money, it's the number of seats. Sun sells multi-million dollar machines. The most expensive Mac is around $5K.
And if anything, those numbers show that Sun is either grossly overvalues or Apple is grossly overvalued. With $8Billion less in sales, Apple made only $1.1Billion less than Sun. Meanwhile, Sun is worth nearly $40Billion more than Apple. It's not what your sales are, it's your P/E ratio...
Apple can get away overcharging for its hardware as long as they control the platform. When that goes away, so does Apple.
Oh, bullshit. Apple doesn't overcharge for its hardware. Let's do an easy one. The new iBook has a 500MHz G3, Rage Mobility 128 w/8MB VRAM, 2 USB ports, Firewire, wireless antenna, Composite video out, VGA out, CD-ROM, 64MB of RAM (up to 570MB of RAM possible), a 12" 1024x768 screen, microphone, stereo speakers, stereo sound out, a 4-5 hour battery life, weighs 5 pounds, ships with OS X, and costs $1300. For $200 more, you can get a machine with DVD and 128MB of RAM (up to 640MB of RAM for this one).
Please find the comparable Wintel laptop. Or, if you'd like, find a comparable x86 Linux laptop, where the hardware actually works.
This "Apple hardware is overpriced" canard has got to go.
Apple isn't going to go to commodity x86 motherboards, because they are a hardware company which writes an OS. Steve has said more than once that having tight control over both hardware and software lets Apple deliver the "feel" they want. Give that up, and you might as well turn off the lights at 1 Infinite Loop. If there is an x86-based Mac, it won't run on clones.
His Royal Steveness was quoting Salvidor Dali. And I think you completely miss the point of the quote. Let me explain it to you. A good artist does something "in the style of" someone else. A great artist takes an idea from someone else and does something so incredible with it, it makes it theirs.
This quote might be used to explain Apple and Xerox vis a vis the GUI. No one much remembers or cares about Xerox and the GUI. "Great Artists Steal" has nothing to do with Apple and FreeBSD. In that case, Apple is clearly borrowing, at best.
And Apple doesn't have to "give anything back." Apple, as a corporation, is responsible for increasing shareholder value. That's it. Anything which Apple does which doesn't have that as a goal can lead to a lawsuit. If enough Free Software people want Apple to port QuickTime to Linux (or allow Sorenson to port the codec), then start buying Apple stock, and when you own enough stock so you can control the board of Apple, you can determine that the best way to increase shareholder value is to give away Apple's crown jewels. Then you'll get the codec.
Have you ever heard a Candaian mention their Charter of Rights and Freedoms? A Brition? Anyone from any commonwealth country? You have educated yourselves into being a bunch of obnoxious prats and the rest of us are tired of hearing it.
Then piss off.
Britons don't mention their Free Speech rights because they don't got 'em. There is no British Consititution, just Common Law (see, we learn stuff in our 'merican public schools). In the name of "Security" Britain's has passed many laws which would be flagrantly unconstitutional in the US.
If something like the Hague Treaty was to become law in the US, there would be a serious uprising. Mark my words. We've got all those guns for a reason.
Not having read the robot novels, I would hope they at least explored the grey areas where these laws broke down. From the fans touting them as some kind of panacea in technological ethics, I somehow doubt they do.
Yes, in one of the Robot Novel (basically murder mysteries where the detective was a robot; Asmiov must have loved writing murder mysteries, as most of his better stories basically followed their pattern), the robot deduces a Zeroth Law: No robot shall cause harm to humanity, or through inaction allow harm to come to humanity. It then modified the other laws to follow.
To avoid spoilers, I won't say what the robot decided to do (or not do) based on this realization. But I'd assume that it would allow a robot to do something like (warning: Goodwin's law violation about to occur) kill Hitler to stop WWII.
As for whether or not the Three Laws are slavery, well, that's a tough call. You don't want your creation to destroy you. But you want to give it free will. But I don't know if the Three Laws are much more than a secularized version of the Ten Commandments. Most of them distill down to "respect your creators (God, parents), and respect other people (don't lie about them, rob them, or kill them)". A pretty huge chunk of humanity has the Ten Commandments burned into our brains by society; did they ever make anyone feel like a slave?
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That's not "encryption", that's authentication. Since the Internet Cafe probably doesn't want to bother managing userIDs and password (or MAC listings) for all of its customers, they just let their base station accept all attempted connections (presumably using DHCP to assign IPs).
The problem is that the data from your friend's computer to the base station is basically in the clear, since WEP is a very easy encryption algorithm to crack.
-jon
In the past, the server cracks tended to hurt the people who owned the servers, leaking information and so forth. These people couldn't sue MS for shoddy work, because that license agreement took away those rights.
But now we've got Code Red. People who never signed any sort of license agreement with MS are now paying the price for their lousy quality control. Can these people sue? If Code Red causes your ISP's network traffic load to go up, if it overloads your company's router, whatever, can MS be sued?
I'm waiting for the lawyers to start circling on this one...
-jon
-jon
Probably not, but I don't have G3/500 on a 66MHz bus. I have a two year old iMac with a G3/400, 384MB of RAM, a Rage 128 video card with 8MB of RAM, and a 100MHz bus. I'm quite sure that it will smoke your Celeron 500. Not that this matters to most people, as I'm about to mention.
I will compare photoshop marks on my laptop against yoru iBook's photoshop marks any day.
I still don't have a iBook.
And it might surprise you to know that I don't run Photoshop on my iMac. Neither does much of anyone the target market for the iBook. Photoshop Elements, perhaps.
When you can find me a Celeron that runs Mac OS, let me know. I work in the salt mines on Win NT all day long; coming home to a Mac OS box is a nice thing.
What people like you don't understand is that for 99.5% of the population, a 500MHz G3 on a 66MHz bus is fast enough. They want the feature set you get with the iBook. They want iTunes and iMovie, which are better than anything out there for free on the PC or the Mac. They want Firewire for their digital cameras and built-in Ethernet and Airport for their campus networks. They want a laptop built out of bulletproof plastic with a hard drive mounted on rubber washers for additional shock protection. They want 4-5 hour battery life. They want a 5 pound portable. And they want to pay as little as possible.
Apple cut corners on the iBook motherboard that make it just unattractive enough to me that I wasn't willing to run out and buy it without thinking hard about it. I probably won't buy one until the motherboard is revved. But I'm the uncommon case. The iBook is a really, really, really good laptop for most people.
-jon
-jon
I think the mouth-breather was confusing the 66MHz system bus (which Apple is doing only to slow down the iBooks and make the PowerBook G4s seem faster) with the performance of the 500MHz G3. If that bus speed was higher, then the iBooks would be a LOT more impressive. The difference in part costs would be trivial, but the loss of sales for G4 PowerBooks would probably makes it a deal-killer until Apple gets a 133MHz motherboard in the PB G4.
Another possible reason he might have thought the iBook CPU is "shitty" is the 256K of on-chip L2 cache. The cache is clocked 1:1 with the CPU, but it's small size means more cache misses. Performance is probably a wash compared to the 512K of L2 cache clocked at 2:1 or 3:2 that was used in the G3s present in older iBooks and iMacs. It's also a lot cheaper to use one part (CPU with cache controller and L2 cache) than multiple parts(CPU, cache controller chip and L2 cache chip).
All in all, it comes down to: what do you expect for $1200? In 1995, I paid $3300 (educational pricing) for a PowerBook 5300. The iBook is about ten times faster (literally, not figuratively), has more features, and costs slightly more than 1/3 the price of that awful, awful 5300. If I hadn't already replaced my PowerBook with an iMac, I'd rush out and get the iBook.
-jon
Most AI research is useless for this very reason. Data sets that are known to do well are re-used as "proof" that a particular algorithm works well. Heck, the act of inputting the data into the computer for processing usually involved human interaction which skews the data.
When it comes to performing tasks that a 5 year old can do, computers still suck.
-jon
Nope.
There's also Predicate Calculus, which is the real name of what programmers do most of the time. No integrals involved.
Graph theory, base conversion math, statistics, probability, predicate calculus...any good software engineer should be at least conversant in all of these mathematical fields. From my experience, most people who call themselves "programmers" or "software engineers" aren't.
-jon
Iraq used nerve gas against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war of the 80's and they also used it against the Iraqi Kurds. Maybe that's why Bush the Senior called Saddam "worse than Hitler"?
-jon
1. All CompSci degrees are not created equal. What some lower-rung schools call CS makes me cry. No theory, no math, no algorithms, just programming languages and trendy topics.
2. Software Engineering != CompSci. They are very different disciplines, and there are very few schools teaching Software Engineering right now. CMU and RIT are the two I know of (based on previous /. posters). You don't hire a physicist to design a car, you hire a mechanical engineer. The same should be true in software.
-jon
This is easily verifiable by going to http://www.nypost.com/posthistory/37314.htm. Checking your fact is, of course, a feat beyond the capabilities of 99.5% of all /. posters.
-jon
No it isn't, you idiot. The WASHINGTON TIMES is owned by the moonies.
-jon
Can you send me the original Java code? Absurdly slow Java code usually means a very bad programmer. I've written plenty of Java UI code and I've yet to see 10 seconds for a menu to appear.
I'll take that over half assed, broken JDBC drivers for Sybase any time. Does this language have a SINGLE API that's not broken?
Sun doesn't provide a Sybase driver. Sun provides a JDBC spec which driver writers can support. There are several companies which supply Sybase drivers (and I assume Sybase does, too). Blaming Sun for a broken Sybase database driver would be like blaming Microsoft because Dikatana sucked.
I won't even mention the quality of other Java related prdoucts such as servlet containers (yes I evaluated a number of them and they are all buggy as shit) and don't get me started on the dubious benefits of EJB with it's $15000/CPU rates.
I think you're looking at the wrong products.
Take a look at Resin. High quality, very fast, good support, $500/box licence for a servlet engine.
If you want EJBs, look at Orion. $1500/box for a fast EJB container that meets the J2EE spec fully. Oracle just dumped their own internally-developed J2EE app servers to licence and relabel Orion.
Both Orion and Resin are free for non-commercial use, including commercial development. You only have to pay when you deploy.
Oh, and Resin lets you download the source code, too. It's not quite Open Source (you can't ship modifications, I don't think), but I've yet to see the source for IIS on MS' web page...
There are Free (Speech and Beer) J2EE environments, but Resin and Orion are a good start in looking at quality J2EE servers.
-jon
Seriously, this is clearly hype without anything to back it up. What does "a LOT faster than Java" mean? UI code? Server code? XML parsing? FFT? Do you have numbers? Sample code?
I notice with some amusement that three of the four data sources you mention are MS databases. Now that's really a wide range of support!
And what does "nearly native access to MSSQL" mean exactly? Does it send back sector information from the hard disks?
MS fanboys (or trolls) are always so amusing...
-jon
Beans are, more or less, a joke. Any class which uses getXXX (or isXXX for boolean)/setXXX to access fields is technicall a Java Bean. While you can write a bunch of support classes to make your Java Beans configurable via a GUI environment, no one does this for non-GUI components (and the market for 3rd party Java UI widgets isn't exactly booming).
By the by, Enterprise Java Beans have virtually nothing to do with Java Beans.
-jon
The only difference is that the banks were smarter than the VCs (lending instead of buying) and probably got a better return on their investments when farms had to be liquidated to pay off debts than the VCs get when these companies are stripped and sold for parts.
-jon
The planet of Long Island. When the private power company went bust, LI municipalities took over electric service. Prices dropped.
-jon
I don't think anyone is saying Apple is a bigger company than Sun. It has fewer employees, has less in gross revenue, and has less net revenue. What people are talking about are how many copies of Mac OS X are installed vs. how many copies of Solaris/Sun OS are installed. No one is talking about number of users; just as a UNIX box is multi-user, so are Macs. If a school has one Mac and 500 students, is that 500 Mac users?.
Pretty soon, there will be more copies of Mac OS X installed than copies of Solaris/Sun OS (the number of Sun OS installs are shrinking every day, as that OS is seriously old at this point). That's a remarkable thing.
-jon
The S203 has no built-in wireless support. You have to add a PC card to get this. It does have 2 PC-card slots, so you could add the Ethernet AND the wireless (a wireless PC card costs more than the $100 for the Airport card), but we're now past the $1300 mark.
The S203 weighs two pounds more than the iBook. It is also substantially larger.
It is rated at 2 hours of battery life. That means about one hour (90 minutes tops) in the real world. You could buy a second battery, but that costs money and adds weight.
No FireWire means no video cameras and no high-speed external storage, like a CD-burner (USB CD-RW are a joke). Of course, we could add a FireWire PC-card (more money), but we've already used up two slots on wireless and Ethernet.
I don't know why a 13.3" screen is better than a 12" screen with the same # of pixels. As far as I can tell, it just makes the computer larger.
The max RAM on the Toshiba is 512MB. It only has one slot, so if you upgrade, you need to throw away the 128MB it comes with. The iBook has 64MB soldered (the more expensive iBooks have 128MB soldered), and a slot to add an additional 512MB. No throw-away memory is a plus in my book.
The larger hard drive, more base RAM, IR support, DVD and PC Card slots are nice to have, but you have to balance this against no built-in FireWire, Ethernet, or 802.11 support, slower video, larger size and weight (40% heavier!), and far worse battery life (one-half to one-third of the iBook's battery life!).
Considering the original premise (Macs are vastly overpriced compared to PCs), I think I've proven my point. They aren't. Comparable feature sets (some additions, some subtractions) are available at the same price point.
-jon
Apple didn't start charging for the OS until 7.1 (System 7 Pro), back in 1992. The stink this caused was amazing. Apple did put System 7 in a shrink-wrapped box, but if you just wanted to copy the floppies, any Mac dealer would do it.
-jon
And if anything, those numbers show that Sun is either grossly overvalues or Apple is grossly overvalued. With $8Billion less in sales, Apple made only $1.1Billion less than Sun. Meanwhile, Sun is worth nearly $40Billion more than Apple. It's not what your sales are, it's your P/E ratio...
-jon
Oh, bullshit. Apple doesn't overcharge for its hardware. Let's do an easy one. The new iBook has a 500MHz G3, Rage Mobility 128 w/8MB VRAM, 2 USB ports, Firewire, wireless antenna, Composite video out, VGA out, CD-ROM, 64MB of RAM (up to 570MB of RAM possible), a 12" 1024x768 screen, microphone, stereo speakers, stereo sound out, a 4-5 hour battery life, weighs 5 pounds, ships with OS X, and costs $1300. For $200 more, you can get a machine with DVD and 128MB of RAM (up to 640MB of RAM for this one).
Please find the comparable Wintel laptop. Or, if you'd like, find a comparable x86 Linux laptop, where the hardware actually works.
This "Apple hardware is overpriced" canard has got to go.
Apple isn't going to go to commodity x86 motherboards, because they are a hardware company which writes an OS. Steve has said more than once that having tight control over both hardware and software lets Apple deliver the "feel" they want. Give that up, and you might as well turn off the lights at 1 Infinite Loop. If there is an x86-based Mac, it won't run on clones.
-jon
This quote might be used to explain Apple and Xerox vis a vis the GUI. No one much remembers or cares about Xerox and the GUI. "Great Artists Steal" has nothing to do with Apple and FreeBSD. In that case, Apple is clearly borrowing, at best.
And Apple doesn't have to "give anything back." Apple, as a corporation, is responsible for increasing shareholder value. That's it. Anything which Apple does which doesn't have that as a goal can lead to a lawsuit. If enough Free Software people want Apple to port QuickTime to Linux (or allow Sorenson to port the codec), then start buying Apple stock, and when you own enough stock so you can control the board of Apple, you can determine that the best way to increase shareholder value is to give away Apple's crown jewels. Then you'll get the codec.
-jon
Then piss off.
Britons don't mention their Free Speech rights because they don't got 'em. There is no British Consititution, just Common Law (see, we learn stuff in our 'merican public schools). In the name of "Security" Britain's has passed many laws which would be flagrantly unconstitutional in the US.
If something like the Hague Treaty was to become law in the US, there would be a serious uprising. Mark my words. We've got all those guns for a reason.
-jon
Yes, in one of the Robot Novel (basically murder mysteries where the detective was a robot; Asmiov must have loved writing murder mysteries, as most of his better stories basically followed their pattern), the robot deduces a Zeroth Law: No robot shall cause harm to humanity, or through inaction allow harm to come to humanity. It then modified the other laws to follow.
To avoid spoilers, I won't say what the robot decided to do (or not do) based on this realization. But I'd assume that it would allow a robot to do something like (warning: Goodwin's law violation about to occur) kill Hitler to stop WWII.
As for whether or not the Three Laws are slavery, well, that's a tough call. You don't want your creation to destroy you. But you want to give it free will. But I don't know if the Three Laws are much more than a secularized version of the Ten Commandments. Most of them distill down to "respect your creators (God, parents), and respect other people (don't lie about them, rob them, or kill them)". A pretty huge chunk of humanity has the Ten Commandments burned into our brains by society; did they ever make anyone feel like a slave?
-jon