To expand on this -- Iomega is in it up to here
on
CPRM Voted Down
·
· Score: 3
Iomega is already pioneering media storage copy protection schemes with its "HipZip Digital Audio Player"... From the corporate profile:
"The HipZip player recognizes MP3 format and Microsoft Windows Media(TM) Format (WMA) actively and is upgradeable to additional formats. It supports digital rights management (DRM) technology to secure commercial music content to PocketZip disks, offering artists and publishers protection from the unauthorized distribution of commercial content."
This is "phase one" in a larger project. Take a look at a document from InterTrust outlining the plan it is implementing along with Iomega.
(Don't know InterTrust? Read what CEO Victor Shear had to say to the US Senate just yesterday in this pressrelease.)
While the claim is made in that document that "Iomega and InterTrust are removing the roadblocks for consumers," it's clear that they're really just building their own roadblock around the corner: the consumer will download an mp3 or whatever from an InterTrust-enabled service directly to a Zip disk; the consumer is then free to carry that mp3 around from device to device on that disk; the consumer is NOT free to copy the mp3 to any other storage medium. Once all the "good" music is safely stored away behind InterTrust-enabled walls, an Iomega-branded disk then becomes the carrier-medium of choice (the LP or CD of the future!), and Iomega cleans up on the digital-content revolution. That would seem to be the long-term vision anyway.;)
So: Iomega benefits from increased sales to end users (Bob needs an Iomega disk to store his download of Britney Spears' latest hit and play it in his ZipWalkman, his ZipCarstereo, etc). Iomega benefits from industry kickbacks which reward this kind of stuff, directly or not. Iomega benefits from sales of "solutions" to other companies. Iomega benefits from CPRM adoption because it makes the whole Iomega/InterTrust scheme that much easier to implement.
In short, Iomega wants to position itself as a "key component" in the "civilizing" of digital distribution networks, and CPRM and similar initiatives would seem to be crucial to achieving that end.
I imagine that many of the others in the yay column have similar vested interests.
Anyone else think that we are getting closer and closer to EVERYTHING being about marketing?
Does it occur to anyone else that even "legitimate" fansites -- sites built and run by people unaffilliated with the movie studios etc -- are themselves " about marketing"?
Just because you're not getting paid to hype a product doesn't mean you aren't marketing it.:)
The rules indicate that the logo will be used on product boxes, and at a variety of sizes. A bitmapped image will neither scale well nor necessarily be of an adequate resolution to go to press.
I'm probably showing my ignorance, but is there a Gimp of the Illustrators/Freehands out there? And if not, why not?:)
And not because of some triumph of principle, but because after a while it just wasn't entertaining for them anymore, and there were other things to occupy their time.
I keep reading the sentence that I just wrote, and each time I get a little more frustrated. In both cases, I was pulled over for trivial things, like failing to use a turn signal at 1AM on a deserted street. Technically, I guess, I broke the law. But you know... why should I ever be in a position in which I am forced to defend myself like that? We all know I was pulled over not because of an exceedingly minor traffic violation, but because the cop harbored hopes that something more significant would arise. Yes, his job is to enforce even exceedingly minor traffic violations. But if I were a 50 year old woman driving a brand new Cadillac... who here thinks that violation would have been enforced? (You caught me! I'm a twenty-something male in a not-so-new vehicle...)
If I had been stopped and simply reminded to use my signal -- or even ticketed for it -- and left to go on my way, I wouldn't be writing an enormous diatribe on Slashdot right now.;) But I wasn't pulled over for that violation. I was pulled over for things the cop hoped I was doing. Were they actually wishing that crime was happening on their watch? And where's the line between vigilance and assumption of guilt? Hey, this is on topic, isn't it...:)
The "Why are you nervous?" question both cracks me up and infuriates me. Yes, when I'm driving down the street doing nothing horrendously wrong, transporting nothing illegal, minding my own business, and a person with a gun (and the power to do, ultimately, pretty much anything they want) forces me to stop and begins questioning me with the clear presumption that I must be a criminal, using rhetorical techniques and body language and other actions expressly designed to intimidate, I'm probably not going to be reacting to things "normally." Especially when I'm trying really hard to exercise my rights in the face of someone who ought to understand them better than me, and yet is pretending not to in hopes of an entertaining bust. And of course, all the while I have to work equally hard not to be the irritating smartass I want to be, to prevent the situation from escalating. Best of all, this all plays nicely into their game: sufficient "nervousness" or "hostility" can probably be construed as probable cause, if they want it to be. And then I'm going to have to open my mouth for that swab if eight cops have to hold me down to do it.
It's now standard procedure to append "Do you mind if I search your vehicle?" to routine traffic stop dialogue.
If the police have reasonable cause to do so, they don't need your permission.... yet refusing to allow a search on principle leads to a confrontational situation that may or may not end in a citizen's favor.
Twice now I have been through this conversation:
"Do you mind if I search your vehicle?"
"No, I see no need to search my vehicle."
"Do you have something to hide?"
"No, but you have no cause to search my vehicle."
"If you have nothing to hide, why do you mind if I search your vehicle?"
"Because there is no reason for you to be searching my vehicle."
"You seem nervous. Are you nervous?"
*repeat ad nauseum (for 20 or 30 minutes)*
Of course the cop knows better than the citizen that they have no right to search the vehicle without cause. But still this conversational tactic persists.
A swab in the mouth is arguably less intrusive in the short term than a cop digging McDonald's cartons from under the seat, yet in the long term... the possibility for abuse is terrifying, far more than the possibilities that exist in relation to your car.
"Do you mind if I swab your mouth for the database?" will only escalate the already contentious relationship between the citizenry and the police. And here, we have a situation where it's not only, "Do you have something to hide?" but, "Will you have something to hide in the future?" From the start, such a confrontation will not only set up the citizen as a potential perp at the moment, but a potential long-term criminal....
It has taken a great deal of strength not to look at that gun, get out of my car and say, "Fine. Whatever the fuck you wanna do. I have nothing to hide." People who (a) don't know better, or (b) have less contempt for law enforcement officers are probably at some disadvantage. And it's those people -- people with far less ability to protect themselves from abuse -- that will end up in this database.
But those people are all criminals anyway, right?
I am too drunk to sum it up in any less cheesy way. But you get the point.
iUniverse tends to nickle/dime you with extras, like using images inside the book and a custom book cover
These are extras?
My perspective:
I imagine the "extra" category also includes having a competent professional print designer present your customers' information, and assemble a package with the kind of crucial shelf-appeal and feeling of substance ("I paid what for this?") you'll need to survive.
With this business model, and with the quality of output you're likely to acheive cutting so many corners, the wholesale price of these books is unlikely to be adequate to cover my invoice for laying out an entire book, in addition to all your other costs (printing, marketing, etc etc).
So I guess the answer is, "Yes, you're an extra." It's also, "Packaging and communicative display of information is either (a) unimportant, or (b) trivial for amateurs to accomplish effectively."
Browsing at a threshold of 3, there are currently 14 posts displayed. More than half of them are responses to CmdrTaco's jibe about mouse buttons. Moderation gone awry!
Please go look at this article, posted on Slashdot a few days ago. Read Taco's off-the-cuff jibe about mouse buttons. Read the responses. Ponder Taco's thought process, as he posts today's story with those responses in mind. Wouldn't it be funny if he made a crack about mouse buttons again?
His tongue was in his cheek. He was being a smartass. As a Mac user, I'd like to read about LinuxPPC booting on new PowerBooks now. Look up; see the joke; discuss the issue at hand. Thank you.:)
I've been using a LaCie USB hard drive for about a year with no problems.
One thing to keep in mind is the speed of USB. If you're just shuttling around a few small files, it's no big deal. If you need to take home several GB every day, look elsewhere; you're now looking at hours of transfer time.
As an offline backup solution (ie plug in, dump working files for safekeeping, unplug) it's not bad, and it's why I bought the drive. You should weigh file-size against your patience, though, before purchasing.;)
Forget the word "over" and it'll be relatively pain-free. I have 8.6 running on one partition, OS X on another. You can't try out Classic mode without OS 9, but I don't feel that's a big loss, since I never intended to get any work done with OS X anyway...:P
So... set up two partitions. Install 8.6 on the second, OS X on the first, and make sure you grab the System Disk control panel for booting from 8.6 --> OS X. Once in a while, when I'm attempting to boot back into 8.6, it will reboot OS X, though I've instructed it otherwise, but that's the only problem I've encountered so far.
[W]ork is being done (by TTimo's team at QERadiant.com) to make the existing Q3 tools cross-platform with a common code-base by porting the Linux GTKRadiant port Loki developed back to Win32 (they just recently made their first Alpha release)
Until TTimo's team includes a Mac programmer (these people are making some noise about it), and until someone can work out the uncertain ground between GTK and OS X (here's one step in the right direction), this should probably read "somewhat cross-platform.";-)
Yeah, I missed the disclaimer ("I don't just mean commercially") the first time around...:)
I imagine, though, that some of the same reasoning applies. Since OS X will ship on every Mac at some point, people willing to go to the trouble of replacing the UI are probably a pretty small subset of Apple consumers. As I pointed out below, the real curmudgeons will run OS 9 for the next fifty years if they can. I mean, nothing can please those people.
At any rate, from what I can tell, the state of the GUI art in the *nix world has a long way to go before it produces something that can compete for Apple's core market (the non-hacker). And even the hackers will have to contend with the fact that Aqua goes into certain depths that may or may not be accessible to third parties, making UI replacements that much less desirable.
But who knows? It is for sure an interesting shift, regardless of the eventual impact.
There's been plenty of press on the subject. Most of it pointed toward an article at MacAddict which explained how to strip the dev tools out of Darwin.
I believe less drastic measures are being shipped to developers as we speak, or at least will be in the near future.
The majority of Mac users don't give a damn about the techy details slashdotters hold so near and dear - they just want to get their email, surf the web, print pictures of their newest nephew, and maybe edit a newsletter or two.
A few of us also actually make a living with our Macs. But we do all those other things too.:P
I imagine that the people disgusted enough with Aqua to even consider the kind of thing proposed by the original commentator will instead hold onto OS 9 until they drown with it. It won't be pretty, but so far it looks like they will be few and far between.
I don't quite see how, at least given your scenario.
If a decent cheap/free X server is running on top of OS X, then it is running on top of an OS built by Apple (revenue source number one) on a PPC box built by Apple (revenue source number two). That changes exactly nothing. If someone decides to forego OS X and, say, run XFree86 on top of Darwin, this removes only revenue source number one. If they decide to forgoe OS X and a PPC box built by Apple and run XFree86 on top of an Intelized Darwin, this removes both revenue sources, but is so far removed from the mainstream Mac user (in terms of skill-set and desired outcomes) that it still fails to be a threat. Anyway, at that point, there are plenty of solutions that would probably make more sense for most people looking to do such a thing.
Ah the brawny Soviet, sweating under the lash to make... Chernoble or Kurst or a Moscow tower. I'm not sure why anyone outside the former Soviet Union would use such language. Misguided ethnic pride? Underneath the great graphics, which stagnated in the 30s, was a nighmare of badness for most.
So, those posters represented a.... romantic ideal? And you wonder why I chose that imagery... Sheesh.:)
The Mac also benifits from it's small user base. People unfamiliar with Macs might not have experienced some of the things that I've gotten to see some Mac people deal with. Stable it was, till it crashed. Then there would be days of bare metal and cursting from the tech staff. They did well, but bugs there were.
It's true! We can say anything.... my Mac hasn't crashed in sixteen years.
Unix needs no myth. Reasonable people will move to it as it solves more of their problems and the alternatives extinguish themselves.
Everything needs myth. All those Mac-stuffed ad firms would go outta business otherwise...:)
"I'd wager that most of the folks who care about OS-X as end-users don't care that it is based on a UNIX-like OS: they just want thier Mac to run. The credit for the stability of OS-X will go to Apple, not to BSD, for the most part (even if that is inaccurate)."
This is true, up to a point. But in some ways, a general ignorance of Unix seems to help drive a certain romantic ideal -- an ideal that keeps the word "Unix" in very active circulation even outside of geek circles. To the typical Mac end-user, Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old. Unix is like a brawny Soviet on a Constructivist poster, swinging his hammer for his comrades. We don't know why it's good, but damn if our hearts aren't stirred by the weighty, solidly angular goodness of it all.
For Unix to become "consumer-ready," it must first create for itself a certain popular mythos, the same way computers themselves did in the eighties. That's already happened among Mac people... it remains to be seen how far it spreads beyond.
Holland Michigan is actually sitting on a similar network, though it's currently only accessible to large companies [that's the best link I can find at the moment... sorry]. Within the next year AT&T ought to be using it to serve CATV and (hopefully) @home service to residences. Word is that phone service is running on fiber on the rapidly developing north side of town (a lack of copper is the standard justification there for the unavailability of DSL, which just made an appearance in town this summer).
Though growing rapidly, Holland is still in many ways a backwater... I can't imagine the presence of a fiber network is an isolated situation in the US as a whole. IOW, we may be far from Japan, but I suspect there's a growing infrastructure in the US for this kind of thing, even if it's still rare.
I grew up in Holland, a few blocks from the small inlet of Lake Michigan known as Lake Macatawa. Any number of times, I could have wandered down the street, fallen into the lake and drowned.
Of course, I didn't, though people die in the waterways around here all the time. Why didn't I succumb to this very real threat to my well-being? Because my parents were directly involved in my life -- they knew where I was and what I was doing, and taught me things like, "Don't fall in the lake."
If local censorware advocates can convince me that a giant brick wall should be built around the lake, and that use of sidewalks should require a license only available to adults, then they can convince me that Herrick Library should have filters on the internet terminals.
Strangely, I don't see any one proposing such measures, though they would undoubtedly save lives. I keep thinking someone will realize that common-sense (and no-cost!) solutions in the real world can apply to the internet, but I have the feeling I will continue to be disappointed.
it would be very beneficial if not only coders worked on such projects, but also people from GUI design (and I am sure that there are people with experience in this area reading/.)
Indeed there are. But imagine yourself looking at all of this from the outside in. How does someone with a firm grasp of information-organization, communicative principles and UI psychology but no coding experience contribute? Especially since credibility in the community is based on coding chops?
Certainly, we can't take source code and make direct contributions to it in our spare time, as coders can. What, then, do you suggest? As it stands, I feel like I can contribute only to theory; I can write a paper on UI and hope people read it, and that's about it.
Point out a place to begin to contribute in practice, and I think non-coders will indeed begin to do what they can.
Slashdot Mirror
Iomega is already pioneering media storage copy protection schemes with its "HipZip Digital Audio Player" ... From the corporate profile:
;)
"The HipZip player recognizes MP3 format and Microsoft Windows Media(TM) Format (WMA) actively and is upgradeable to additional formats. It supports digital rights management (DRM) technology to secure commercial music content to PocketZip disks, offering artists and publishers protection from the unauthorized distribution of commercial content."
This is "phase one" in a larger project. Take a look at a document from InterTrust outlining the plan it is implementing along with Iomega.
(Don't know InterTrust? Read what CEO Victor Shear had to say to the US Senate just yesterday in this pressrelease.)
While the claim is made in that document that "Iomega and InterTrust are removing the roadblocks for consumers," it's clear that they're really just building their own roadblock around the corner: the consumer will download an mp3 or whatever from an InterTrust-enabled service directly to a Zip disk; the consumer is then free to carry that mp3 around from device to device on that disk; the consumer is NOT free to copy the mp3 to any other storage medium. Once all the "good" music is safely stored away behind InterTrust-enabled walls, an Iomega-branded disk then becomes the carrier-medium of choice (the LP or CD of the future!), and Iomega cleans up on the digital-content revolution. That would seem to be the long-term vision anyway.
So: Iomega benefits from increased sales to end users (Bob needs an Iomega disk to store his download of Britney Spears' latest hit and play it in his ZipWalkman, his ZipCarstereo, etc). Iomega benefits from industry kickbacks which reward this kind of stuff, directly or not. Iomega benefits from sales of "solutions" to other companies. Iomega benefits from CPRM adoption because it makes the whole Iomega/InterTrust scheme that much easier to implement.
In short, Iomega wants to position itself as a "key component" in the "civilizing" of digital distribution networks, and CPRM and similar initiatives would seem to be crucial to achieving that end.
I imagine that many of the others in the yay column have similar vested interests.
Well, take this line for example:
:)
Anyone else think that we are getting closer and closer to EVERYTHING being about marketing?
Does it occur to anyone else that even "legitimate" fansites -- sites built and run by people unaffilliated with the movie studios etc -- are themselves " about marketing"?
Just because you're not getting paid to hype a product doesn't mean you aren't marketing it.
.... to get this stuff from the source (more or less), instead of from some rambling osOpinions editorial. ;-)
jefraskin.com
The rules indicate that the logo will be used on product boxes, and at a variety of sizes. A bitmapped image will neither scale well nor necessarily be of an adequate resolution to go to press.
:)
I'm probably showing my ignorance, but is there a Gimp of the Illustrators/Freehands out there? And if not, why not?
It was not.
;) But I wasn't pulled over for that violation. I was pulled over for things the cop hoped I was doing. Were they actually wishing that crime was happening on their watch? And where's the line between vigilance and assumption of guilt? Hey, this is on topic, isn't it... :)
And not because of some triumph of principle, but because after a while it just wasn't entertaining for them anymore, and there were other things to occupy their time.
I keep reading the sentence that I just wrote, and each time I get a little more frustrated. In both cases, I was pulled over for trivial things, like failing to use a turn signal at 1AM on a deserted street. Technically, I guess, I broke the law. But you know... why should I ever be in a position in which I am forced to defend myself like that? We all know I was pulled over not because of an exceedingly minor traffic violation, but because the cop harbored hopes that something more significant would arise. Yes, his job is to enforce even exceedingly minor traffic violations. But if I were a 50 year old woman driving a brand new Cadillac... who here thinks that violation would have been enforced? (You caught me! I'm a twenty-something male in a not-so-new vehicle...)
If I had been stopped and simply reminded to use my signal -- or even ticketed for it -- and left to go on my way, I wouldn't be writing an enormous diatribe on Slashdot right now.
The "Why are you nervous?" question both cracks me up and infuriates me. Yes, when I'm driving down the street doing nothing horrendously wrong, transporting nothing illegal, minding my own business, and a person with a gun (and the power to do, ultimately, pretty much anything they want) forces me to stop and begins questioning me with the clear presumption that I must be a criminal, using rhetorical techniques and body language and other actions expressly designed to intimidate, I'm probably not going to be reacting to things "normally." Especially when I'm trying really hard to exercise my rights in the face of someone who ought to understand them better than me, and yet is pretending not to in hopes of an entertaining bust. And of course, all the while I have to work equally hard not to be the irritating smartass I want to be, to prevent the situation from escalating. Best of all, this all plays nicely into their game: sufficient "nervousness" or "hostility" can probably be construed as probable cause, if they want it to be. And then I'm going to have to open my mouth for that swab if eight cops have to hold me down to do it.
"Britain recently made it legal for insurance companies to discriminate on the basis of the results of a genetic test for Parkinson's Disease."
:)
I poked around a little but no luck... do you have a reference handy for this?
It's now standard procedure to append "Do you mind if I search your vehicle?" to routine traffic stop dialogue.
:P
If the police have reasonable cause to do so, they don't need your permission.... yet refusing to allow a search on principle leads to a confrontational situation that may or may not end in a citizen's favor.
Twice now I have been through this conversation:
"Do you mind if I search your vehicle?"
"No, I see no need to search my vehicle."
"Do you have something to hide?"
"No, but you have no cause to search my vehicle."
"If you have nothing to hide, why do you mind if I search your vehicle?"
"Because there is no reason for you to be searching my vehicle."
"You seem nervous. Are you nervous?"
*repeat ad nauseum (for 20 or 30 minutes)*
Of course the cop knows better than the citizen that they have no right to search the vehicle without cause. But still this conversational tactic persists.
A swab in the mouth is arguably less intrusive in the short term than a cop digging McDonald's cartons from under the seat, yet in the long term... the possibility for abuse is terrifying, far more than the possibilities that exist in relation to your car.
"Do you mind if I swab your mouth for the database?" will only escalate the already contentious relationship between the citizenry and the police. And here, we have a situation where it's not only, "Do you have something to hide?" but, "Will you have something to hide in the future?" From the start, such a confrontation will not only set up the citizen as a potential perp at the moment, but a potential long-term criminal....
It has taken a great deal of strength not to look at that gun, get out of my car and say, "Fine. Whatever the fuck you wanna do. I have nothing to hide." People who (a) don't know better, or (b) have less contempt for law enforcement officers are probably at some disadvantage. And it's those people -- people with far less ability to protect themselves from abuse -- that will end up in this database.
But those people are all criminals anyway, right?
I am too drunk to sum it up in any less cheesy way. But you get the point.
And no, I'm not driving tonight.
"I know they're going to be adding (not at the local stores yet, damnit) "true binding" which from the fliers looks like typical softcover binding."
:)
;) (And you know I'd be protesting Kinko's-style output anyway...)
That's very cool! I hadn't heard that. Should beat those ugly plastic rings for most any purpose.
But even so.... he still won't save enough to hire me.
iUniverse tends to nickle/dime you with extras, like using images inside the book and a custom book cover
:)
These are extras?
My perspective:
I imagine the "extra" category also includes having a competent professional print designer present your customers' information, and assemble a package with the kind of crucial shelf-appeal and feeling of substance ("I paid what for this?") you'll need to survive.
With this business model, and with the quality of output you're likely to acheive cutting so many corners, the wholesale price of these books is unlikely to be adequate to cover my invoice for laying out an entire book, in addition to all your other costs (printing, marketing, etc etc).
So I guess the answer is, "Yes, you're an extra." It's also, "Packaging and communicative display of information is either (a) unimportant, or (b) trivial for amateurs to accomplish effectively."
Neither of which is true, IMHO.
Browsing at a threshold of 3, there are currently 14 posts displayed. More than half of them are responses to CmdrTaco's jibe about mouse buttons. Moderation gone awry!
:)
Please go look at this article, posted on Slashdot a few days ago. Read Taco's off-the-cuff jibe about mouse buttons. Read the responses. Ponder Taco's thought process, as he posts today's story with those responses in mind. Wouldn't it be funny if he made a crack about mouse buttons again?
His tongue was in his cheek. He was being a smartass. As a Mac user, I'd like to read about LinuxPPC booting on new PowerBooks now. Look up; see the joke; discuss the issue at hand. Thank you.
Right here.
;)
That should get you started.
I've been using a LaCie USB hard drive for about a year with no problems.
;)
One thing to keep in mind is the speed of USB. If you're just shuttling around a few small files, it's no big deal. If you need to take home several GB every day, look elsewhere; you're now looking at hours of transfer time.
As an offline backup solution (ie plug in, dump working files for safekeeping, unplug) it's not bad, and it's why I bought the drive. You should weigh file-size against your patience, though, before purchasing.
Forget the word "over" and it'll be relatively pain-free. I have 8.6 running on one partition, OS X on another. You can't try out Classic mode without OS 9, but I don't feel that's a big loss, since I never intended to get any work done with OS X anyway... :P
So... set up two partitions. Install 8.6 on the second, OS X on the first, and make sure you grab the System Disk control panel for booting from 8.6 --> OS X. Once in a while, when I'm attempting to boot back into 8.6, it will reboot OS X, though I've instructed it otherwise, but that's the only problem I've encountered so far.
Good luck
[W]ork is being done (by TTimo's team at QERadiant.com) to make the existing Q3 tools cross-platform with a common code-base by porting the Linux GTKRadiant port Loki developed back to Win32 (they just recently made their first Alpha release)
;-)
Until TTimo's team includes a Mac programmer (these people are making some noise about it), and until someone can work out the uncertain ground between GTK and OS X (here's one step in the right direction), this should probably read "somewhat cross-platform."
Yeah, I missed the disclaimer ("I don't just mean commercially") the first time around... :)
I imagine, though, that some of the same reasoning applies. Since OS X will ship on every Mac at some point, people willing to go to the trouble of replacing the UI are probably a pretty small subset of Apple consumers. As I pointed out below, the real curmudgeons will run OS 9 for the next fifty years if they can. I mean, nothing can please those people.
At any rate, from what I can tell, the state of the GUI art in the *nix world has a long way to go before it produces something that can compete for Apple's core market (the non-hacker). And even the hackers will have to contend with the fact that Aqua goes into certain depths that may or may not be accessible to third parties, making UI replacements that much less desirable.
But who knows? It is for sure an interesting shift, regardless of the eventual impact.
There's been plenty of press on the subject. Most of it pointed toward an article at MacAddict which explained how to strip the dev tools out of Darwin.
I believe less drastic measures are being shipped to developers as we speak, or at least will be in the near future.
The majority of Mac users don't give a damn about the techy details slashdotters hold so near and dear - they just want to get their email, surf the web, print pictures of their newest nephew, and maybe edit a newsletter or two.
:P
A few of us also actually make a living with our Macs. But we do all those other things too.
I imagine that the people disgusted enough with Aqua to even consider the kind of thing proposed by the original commentator will instead hold onto OS 9 until they drown with it. It won't be pretty, but so far it looks like they will be few and far between.
If you keep reading through this conversation, you'll eventually come across several instances of this link.
I don't quite see how, at least given your scenario.
If a decent cheap/free X server is running on top of OS X, then it is running on top of an OS built by Apple (revenue source number one) on a PPC box built by Apple (revenue source number two). That changes exactly nothing. If someone decides to forego OS X and, say, run XFree86 on top of Darwin, this removes only revenue source number one. If they decide to forgoe OS X and a PPC box built by Apple and run XFree86 on top of an Intelized Darwin, this removes both revenue sources, but is so far removed from the mainstream Mac user (in terms of skill-set and desired outcomes) that it still fails to be a threat. Anyway, at that point, there are plenty of solutions that would probably make more sense for most people looking to do such a thing.
XFree86 on Darwin and OS X
Ah the brawny Soviet, sweating under the lash to make... Chernoble or Kurst or a Moscow tower. I'm not sure why anyone outside the former Soviet Union would use such language. Misguided ethnic pride? Underneath the great graphics, which stagnated in the 30s, was a nighmare of badness for most.
:)
:)
So, those posters represented a.... romantic ideal? And you wonder why I chose that imagery... Sheesh.
The Mac also benifits from it's small user base. People unfamiliar with Macs might not have experienced some of the things that I've gotten to see some Mac people deal with. Stable it was, till it crashed. Then there would be days of bare metal and cursting from the tech staff. They did well, but bugs there were.
It's true! We can say anything.... my Mac hasn't crashed in sixteen years.
Unix needs no myth. Reasonable people will move to it as it solves more of their problems and the alternatives extinguish themselves.
Everything needs myth. All those Mac-stuffed ad firms would go outta business otherwise...
"I'd wager that most of the folks who care about OS-X as end-users don't care that it is based on a UNIX-like OS: they just want thier Mac to run. The credit for the stability of OS-X will go to Apple, not to BSD, for the most part (even if that is inaccurate)."
This is true, up to a point. But in some ways, a general ignorance of Unix seems to help drive a certain romantic ideal -- an ideal that keeps the word "Unix" in very active circulation even outside of geek circles. To the typical Mac end-user, Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old. Unix is like a brawny Soviet on a Constructivist poster, swinging his hammer for his comrades. We don't know why it's good, but damn if our hearts aren't stirred by the weighty, solidly angular goodness of it all.
For Unix to become "consumer-ready," it must first create for itself a certain popular mythos, the same way computers themselves did in the eighties. That's already happened among Mac people... it remains to be seen how far it spreads beyond.
Holland Michigan is actually sitting on a similar network, though it's currently only accessible to large companies [that's the best link I can find at the moment... sorry]. Within the next year AT&T ought to be using it to serve CATV and (hopefully) @home service to residences. Word is that phone service is running on fiber on the rapidly developing north side of town (a lack of copper is the standard justification there for the unavailability of DSL, which just made an appearance in town this summer).
Though growing rapidly, Holland is still in many ways a backwater... I can't imagine the presence of a fiber network is an isolated situation in the US as a whole. IOW, we may be far from Japan, but I suspect there's a growing infrastructure in the US for this kind of thing, even if it's still rare.
I grew up in Holland, a few blocks from the small inlet of Lake Michigan known as Lake Macatawa. Any number of times, I could have wandered down the street, fallen into the lake and drowned.
Of course, I didn't, though people die in the waterways around here all the time. Why didn't I succumb to this very real threat to my well-being? Because my parents were directly involved in my life -- they knew where I was and what I was doing, and taught me things like, "Don't fall in the lake."
If local censorware advocates can convince me that a giant brick wall should be built around the lake, and that use of sidewalks should require a license only available to adults, then they can convince me that Herrick Library should have filters on the internet terminals.
Strangely, I don't see any one proposing such measures, though they would undoubtedly save lives. I keep thinking someone will realize that common-sense (and no-cost!) solutions in the real world can apply to the internet, but I have the feeling I will continue to be disappointed.
it would be very beneficial if not only coders worked on such projects, but also people from GUI design (and I am sure that there are people with experience in this area reading /.)
Indeed there are. But imagine yourself looking at all of this from the outside in. How does someone with a firm grasp of information-organization, communicative principles and UI psychology but no coding experience contribute? Especially since credibility in the community is based on coding chops?
Certainly, we can't take source code and make direct contributions to it in our spare time, as coders can. What, then, do you suggest? As it stands, I feel like I can contribute only to theory; I can write a paper on UI and hope people read it, and that's about it.
Point out a place to begin to contribute in practice, and I think non-coders will indeed begin to do what they can.