If I'm running custom firmware that pushes the hardware beyond its specs then I would certainly expect the warranty to be voided.
It's a computer. It just runs software. That said "software" might happen to reside on a some manner of flash EEPROM instead of spinning rust does not change this relationship.
So if I flash firmware onto my GPU that overclocks it and fries it that should be covered under warranty?
So now you're assuming such people also have a list of your credit card purchases, that you always use a credit card and it's always the same one and that it's yours and not somebody elses (my wife and I often use the same card which means the MAC address correlation fails). And then you also have the fact that most people turn over their phones at 2 years max (though more often sooner, the apple store near me is always full of people warrantying their phones) so the data would be awfully noisy and untimely at best...and even then - assuming you get the southpark joke you referenced - the question of 'Why?' still stands.
Jailbreaking my iPhone, rooting my Galaxy and hacking my original XBox probably voided those warranties too
No, it probably didn't.
If I'm running custom firmware that pushes the hardware beyond its specs then I would certainly expect the warranty to be voided.
And you do care: When EVGA replaced your board for you, were you either happy or unhappy with the outcome?
No, just because they replaced it doesn't mean I suddenly care whether I've voided the warranty. When my GPU RAM failed they didn't replace that even though it wasn't necessarily due to overclocking, but I'm not going to go through some process of forcing them to prove that.
Maybe so, but not in LongHorn. The bastardization that followed? Yes.
So in the end they did deliver on that.
It started with the XP kernel. You knew this, why ask?
Huh? So you're saying they had originally planned to diverge the kernels and have different ones for client and server? I thought the 2003 kernel was the evolution of the XP one and all longhorn+ work came from that.
Who the fuck even cares? People who want to hack and tweak devices don't give a shit about whether they could potentially void the warranty on their devices, that's something asshat lawyer-types care about. I've overclocked a heap of CPUs, RAM and GPUs and don't give crap that I've most likely voided the warranty by doing so, I've hacked and flashed new BIOSes onto graphics cards that may well push the hardware beyond its - and its cooling system's - limits causing irreparable damage to that hardware, doing this voids the warranty and rightly so and I don't care. Jailbreaking my iPhone, rooting my Galaxy and hacking my original XBox probably voided those warranties too but I'm more concerned with actually doing stuff with them than sifting through warranty act documents, court precedents and license agreements to work out if what I'm doing might void the warranty.
Software can damage hardware but I'd rather them be happy for my to change it at my own risk than lockdown and idiot-proof everything because some legal doucher forced them to warrant everything no matter what you did. I overclocked an eVGA motherboard at one point and it blew a cap, I figured I'd contact their support team anyway and told them what happened and they were quite happy to replace it, yes there was an off chance that overclocking it may have caused the blown cap but more than likely it was a faulty board, was I legally entitled to a replacement? I dunno, I don't read that shit.
There are plenty of ways around this issue, but if Qualcomm won't play nice, then it is time to start playing hardball. Believe me, a very loud "name and shame" Campaign would work.
Why bother? If openness is so advantageous then people will buy open devices for their advantages and companies will realise they need to fall in line, so better to spend your time actually doing something with the existing open devices to prove your point.
Instead of trying to bully and shame those corporations (which won't work anyway) how about showing them why what you want is so good, in the end 'it's open' isn't an argument or a feature, it's just a means to a tangible benefit that you cannot get on closed devices. So whatever that tangible benefit is, provide it on existing open devices and - assuming it's as good as you believe it to be - people will follow.
You don't understand what innovation is because it seems you have fixed definitions of what (in this case) 'a desktop computer' means. When your referencepoint of things is only 'what they used to be', you can hardly come up with fresh new approaches.
Wrong, the iPhone and iPad were innovative (the former more so than the latter), the pixel-doubling approach to retina display compatibility was innovative, the new mac pro isn't an innovative product (the cooling system, yes, but that comes at the cost of everything else), we already have a system - which Apple even make - that is self-contained, virtually non-upgradeable and uses external ports for expansion, it's called a Macbook Pro!
About the time they discovered that.NET wasn't a good choice for OS level development. About 3+ years of development got tossed out (You've heard of LongHorn, right? The original LongHorn? The managed codebase OS?)
I remember Singularity, which was the managed kernel research project from 2003-2008, I didn't think that was ever meant to be the Windows kernel though.
iOS 7 isn't flat. It's just got rid of 3D effects hardcoded into bitmaps. (Shadows and highlights). It's 3D is truer now, making greater and more logical use of layered OpenGL textures.
The thing I don't like about it is the pointless gimmicky stuff that they've added that slows it down, like in iOS pre-7 you pressed the button and it came on, same deal when you locked it. Now you press it and there's this delay and it fades in, it's pointless and just slower (like the window fade-in on Windows 7, which at least you can turn off). It also does a fallback animation of the icons when you hit the home button, reminiscent of the Windows 8 metro screen, again another unnecessary slowdown animation.
Aside from that i'm actually liking it now, the first beta was pretty awful (way worse than other versions' first betas) but they've made a lot of changes since then which seem to work well.
Because most computers are replaced before they have their motherboards/cpu's upgraded.
But certainly not graphics cards (or RAM for that matter, but it seems you can replace that).
but 80-90% of the market just doesn't care.
Which is why the iMac was created to serve that market.
Being able to drive three 4k displays isn't enough? More if you use the expansion capabilities of Thunderbolt?
There's more to graphics cards than how many displays they can drive. And using thunderbolt just means more cables and more boxes on the desk which of course creates a cluttered nightmare when the only ports are at the back and you have to rotate it around pulling all the plugged in cables with it.
A central heat sync is an amazingly good idea that should help keep the whole system much cooler.
That's it's one decent feature.
It's so small, and it rotates, that I really don't see that as a problem.
You didn't think that people might, you know, have things plugged in? Then have to haul a heap of slack cable up when rotating? That's an awful and terribly clumsy design choice. Seriously the mechanics of why that is stupid aren't that hard to fathom.
It comes with two already
So what if I want ATI cards? I always had the option to just swap GPUs if I needed or wanted to. Or perhaps a GPU compatible with the latest version of OpenGL? They've moved to a throwaway device design.
There's a lot to be said for a very powerful and portable desktop that doesn't have a screen attached, because lots of places have extra screens now...
Its only expansion means all your devices are external, so you then have to lug them too because it's not all in one package not to mention it creates a mess of cables on your desk rather than having it all neatly confined within a case.
If you don't like the product that's fine, but to a lot of people, myself included the Mac Pro is one of the best desktop designs in years.
It's not that i don't like it, it's that compared to its predecessor the only real benefit is that it's smaller and it might be quieter, but at the cost of being less accessible, less convenient and less upgradeable. It's not that it's a bad product, it's just that in all but the superficial areas its design is worse than its predecessor, if the superficial things are all you're worried about and you don't care about its compromises then maybe it's fine for you. I was hoping to replace my ancient mac pro with a new one but the inability to swap the graphics cards is deal breaker.
So the mac pro is innovative, despite your assertion, it just doesn't innovate in a way you would want.
You've set the bar for 'innovation' pretty low, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any product that isn't innovative by your standard, I don't think the idea that 'new mac pro is likely to be very quiet' is particularly innovative, even if it is true. My new HP workstation is a lot quieter than my old one and my new macbook pro is a lot quieter than my old one, I don't consider that particularly innovative.
a fantastic reboot of the Mac Pro which looks like a really great system that lots of people will buy.
Really? Aside from one fan to cool everything (which is a potential advantage) I can't see anything particularly good about it. Removal of front ports is a terrible idea and inability to upgrade things like graphics card might be ok for some people but even then where's the advantage? Sure it's smaller, but it's a desktop so who the hell cares about that? The mini is brilliant as I wanted a quite HTPC, their laptops are great and personally I prefer iOS to Android (personal preference, even iOS7 is slowly starting to grow on me) but the new mac pro really is a triumph of form over function.
Frankly the new Mac Pro says to me that they are just about out of innovation (at least in that space). It's a desktop computer where the core components are virtually non-upgradeable, now maybe that's ok but what do you get in return for that compromise? Not much, sure it's smaller but when has that been a problem for desktops? It's basically a more powerful mac mini.
It sacrifices front-facing ports in the name of aesthetics and deals with that compromise by giving you the ability to rotate it to get to the back, now that is assuming you actually enough slack sitting on your desk to pull the cables of all your peripherals around.
That product really is an exercise in being different for the sake of it with virtually no measurable advantage.
Kind of, yes. There were always guidelines around where applications could store their data and what they could access but this was never actually enforced, so often developers just took the easiest route and ignored those guidelines. So once these practices were enforced things stopped working.
MS created many of the problems themselves; they didn't need help.
They certainly created some, for example the culture they fostered around everybody running as Administrator and everything having admin rights. But removing that was a good thing, even if it did break some applications. Yes UAC was annoying but if most 3rd party linux applications were written to abuse the system then having to elevate privileges all the time there would be annoying too. Certainly if they had've enforced such a security model in earlier versions of Windows this wouldn't have been such an issue.
The new driver model is better too, but naturally changing the driver model is going to require new drivers and thus create incompatibility.
They didn't cause MS to throw out everything after years of development and start from scratch using a different kernel.
When did that happen? I'm pretty sure Windows Vista used an evolution of the XP kernel (which came from the NT kernel).
In which case wouldn't that mean the natural order of things would cause this to either come around and bite them in the ass with low rate and low quality or work out just fine and show that the lower rate provided a perfectly acceptable level of quality?
Years ago when I worked in a computer shop I saw a lot with tape over the camera, and sometimes offered to disconnect the camera and microphone internally while doing other work.
Really? So the conspiracy theory here is that somebody has remote access to your system and could then conceivably access all your information but the only thing people are really worried about is the potential for somebody to take a photo of them staring at the screen?
Which option do you think every successful attempt uses?
Just to clarify, what you're saying is that projects like Noveau, openiboot, XBMC, etc... are all illegal?
* not legal in the United States. Most of these projects get around that by not being based in the United States.
Well I'm not in the US, most people are not in the US, the problem is with the US legal system and the unwillingness of its population to do anything about it.
Sorry I won't bother with the rest of your post since it seems we are clearly both on different paths but given this line "People who care about open hardware are a niche." we are both arguing the same thing. I'm not interested in what games are available where (because that availability isn't a technical limitation), my point is that very few people care about about open-ness and for those few who do there isn't really any reason to choose a console over a PC because for all the the things that open-ness makes possible a PC is going to be a better choice anyway.
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It's a computer. It just runs software. That said "software" might happen to reside on a some manner of flash EEPROM instead of spinning rust does not change this relationship.
So if I flash firmware onto my GPU that overclocks it and fries it that should be covered under warranty?
So now you're assuming such people also have a list of your credit card purchases, that you always use a credit card and it's always the same one and that it's yours and not somebody elses (my wife and I often use the same card which means the MAC address correlation fails). And then you also have the fact that most people turn over their phones at 2 years max (though more often sooner, the apple store near me is always full of people warrantying their phones) so the data would be awfully noisy and untimely at best...and even then - assuming you get the southpark joke you referenced - the question of 'Why?' still stands.
At some point, if there does not exist already, there will be a market for MAC addresses and information that is linked to them.
Why? What are you going to do with a MAC address and a bunch of tracking data? Are you going to assume that MAC address represents a person?
How about an app that changes the MAC to something new and random every time the interface has been disconnected longer than three minutes?
MAC address filtering would be great fun then.
No, it probably didn't.
If I'm running custom firmware that pushes the hardware beyond its specs then I would certainly expect the warranty to be voided.
And you do care: When EVGA replaced your board for you, were you either happy or unhappy with the outcome?
No, just because they replaced it doesn't mean I suddenly care whether I've voided the warranty. When my GPU RAM failed they didn't replace that even though it wasn't necessarily due to overclocking, but I'm not going to go through some process of forcing them to prove that.
Maybe so, but not in LongHorn. The bastardization that followed? Yes.
So in the end they did deliver on that.
It started with the XP kernel. You knew this, why ask?
Huh? So you're saying they had originally planned to diverge the kernels and have different ones for client and server? I thought the 2003 kernel was the evolution of the XP one and all longhorn+ work came from that.
Who the fuck even cares? People who want to hack and tweak devices don't give a shit about whether they could potentially void the warranty on their devices, that's something asshat lawyer-types care about. I've overclocked a heap of CPUs, RAM and GPUs and don't give crap that I've most likely voided the warranty by doing so, I've hacked and flashed new BIOSes onto graphics cards that may well push the hardware beyond its - and its cooling system's - limits causing irreparable damage to that hardware, doing this voids the warranty and rightly so and I don't care. Jailbreaking my iPhone, rooting my Galaxy and hacking my original XBox probably voided those warranties too but I'm more concerned with actually doing stuff with them than sifting through warranty act documents, court precedents and license agreements to work out if what I'm doing might void the warranty.
Software can damage hardware but I'd rather them be happy for my to change it at my own risk than lockdown and idiot-proof everything because some legal doucher forced them to warrant everything no matter what you did. I overclocked an eVGA motherboard at one point and it blew a cap, I figured I'd contact their support team anyway and told them what happened and they were quite happy to replace it, yes there was an off chance that overclocking it may have caused the blown cap but more than likely it was a faulty board, was I legally entitled to a replacement? I dunno, I don't read that shit.
Now please open source the actual interesting part - your GPU drivers.
What are you even proposing to do with that?
There are plenty of ways around this issue, but if Qualcomm won't play nice, then it is time to start playing hardball. Believe me, a very loud "name and shame" Campaign would work.
Why bother? If openness is so advantageous then people will buy open devices for their advantages and companies will realise they need to fall in line, so better to spend your time actually doing something with the existing open devices to prove your point.
Instead of trying to bully and shame those corporations (which won't work anyway) how about showing them why what you want is so good, in the end 'it's open' isn't an argument or a feature, it's just a means to a tangible benefit that you cannot get on closed devices. So whatever that tangible benefit is, provide it on existing open devices and - assuming it's as good as you believe it to be - people will follow.
You don't understand what innovation is because it seems you have fixed definitions of what (in this case) 'a desktop computer' means. When your referencepoint of things is only 'what they used to be', you can hardly come up with fresh new approaches.
Wrong, the iPhone and iPad were innovative (the former more so than the latter), the pixel-doubling approach to retina display compatibility was innovative, the new mac pro isn't an innovative product (the cooling system, yes, but that comes at the cost of everything else), we already have a system - which Apple even make - that is self-contained, virtually non-upgradeable and uses external ports for expansion, it's called a Macbook Pro!
That was the original point of LongHorn - it was to be managed code throughout, as much as possible
Ultimately most of the userland did end up that way didn't it?
although the core was still to be NT
So when you say they "fell back to the server 2003 kernel" what were they using?
About the time they discovered that .NET wasn't a good choice for OS level development. About 3+ years of development got tossed out (You've heard of LongHorn, right? The original LongHorn? The managed codebase OS?)
I remember Singularity, which was the managed kernel research project from 2003-2008, I didn't think that was ever meant to be the Windows kernel though.
iOS 7 isn't flat. It's just got rid of 3D effects hardcoded into bitmaps. (Shadows and highlights). It's 3D is truer now, making greater and more logical use of layered OpenGL textures.
The thing I don't like about it is the pointless gimmicky stuff that they've added that slows it down, like in iOS pre-7 you pressed the button and it came on, same deal when you locked it. Now you press it and there's this delay and it fades in, it's pointless and just slower (like the window fade-in on Windows 7, which at least you can turn off). It also does a fallback animation of the icons when you hit the home button, reminiscent of the Windows 8 metro screen, again another unnecessary slowdown animation.
Aside from that i'm actually liking it now, the first beta was pretty awful (way worse than other versions' first betas) but they've made a lot of changes since then which seem to work well.
Because most computers are replaced before they have their motherboards/cpu's upgraded.
But certainly not graphics cards (or RAM for that matter, but it seems you can replace that).
but 80-90% of the market just doesn't care.
Which is why the iMac was created to serve that market.
Being able to drive three 4k displays isn't enough? More if you use the expansion capabilities of Thunderbolt?
There's more to graphics cards than how many displays they can drive. And using thunderbolt just means more cables and more boxes on the desk which of course creates a cluttered nightmare when the only ports are at the back and you have to rotate it around pulling all the plugged in cables with it.
A central heat sync is an amazingly good idea that should help keep the whole system much cooler.
That's it's one decent feature.
It's so small, and it rotates, that I really don't see that as a problem.
You didn't think that people might, you know, have things plugged in? Then have to haul a heap of slack cable up when rotating? That's an awful and terribly clumsy design choice. Seriously the mechanics of why that is stupid aren't that hard to fathom.
It comes with two already
So what if I want ATI cards? I always had the option to just swap GPUs if I needed or wanted to. Or perhaps a GPU compatible with the latest version of OpenGL? They've moved to a throwaway device design.
There's a lot to be said for a very powerful and portable desktop that doesn't have a screen attached, because lots of places have extra screens now...
Its only expansion means all your devices are external, so you then have to lug them too because it's not all in one package not to mention it creates a mess of cables on your desk rather than having it all neatly confined within a case.
If you don't like the product that's fine, but to a lot of people, myself included the Mac Pro is one of the best desktop designs in years.
It's not that i don't like it, it's that compared to its predecessor the only real benefit is that it's smaller and it might be quieter, but at the cost of being less accessible, less convenient and less upgradeable. It's not that it's a bad product, it's just that in all but the superficial areas its design is worse than its predecessor, if the superficial things are all you're worried about and you don't care about its compromises then maybe it's fine for you. I was hoping to replace my ancient mac pro with a new one but the inability to swap the graphics cards is deal breaker.
So the mac pro is innovative, despite your assertion, it just doesn't innovate in a way you would want.
You've set the bar for 'innovation' pretty low, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any product that isn't innovative by your standard, I don't think the idea that 'new mac pro is likely to be very quiet' is particularly innovative, even if it is true. My new HP workstation is a lot quieter than my old one and my new macbook pro is a lot quieter than my old one, I don't consider that particularly innovative.
a fantastic reboot of the Mac Pro which looks like a really great system that lots of people will buy.
Really? Aside from one fan to cool everything (which is a potential advantage) I can't see anything particularly good about it. Removal of front ports is a terrible idea and inability to upgrade things like graphics card might be ok for some people but even then where's the advantage? Sure it's smaller, but it's a desktop so who the hell cares about that? The mini is brilliant as I wanted a quite HTPC, their laptops are great and personally I prefer iOS to Android (personal preference, even iOS7 is slowly starting to grow on me) but the new mac pro really is a triumph of form over function.
Frankly the new Mac Pro says to me that they are just about out of innovation (at least in that space). It's a desktop computer where the core components are virtually non-upgradeable, now maybe that's ok but what do you get in return for that compromise? Not much, sure it's smaller but when has that been a problem for desktops? It's basically a more powerful mac mini.
It sacrifices front-facing ports in the name of aesthetics and deals with that compromise by giving you the ability to rotate it to get to the back, now that is assuming you actually enough slack sitting on your desk to pull the cables of all your peripherals around.
That product really is an exercise in being different for the sake of it with virtually no measurable advantage.
3rd Party developers were all to blame?
Kind of, yes. There were always guidelines around where applications could store their data and what they could access but this was never actually enforced, so often developers just took the easiest route and ignored those guidelines. So once these practices were enforced things stopped working.
MS created many of the problems themselves; they didn't need help.
They certainly created some, for example the culture they fostered around everybody running as Administrator and everything having admin rights. But removing that was a good thing, even if it did break some applications. Yes UAC was annoying but if most 3rd party linux applications were written to abuse the system then having to elevate privileges all the time there would be annoying too. Certainly if they had've enforced such a security model in earlier versions of Windows this wouldn't have been such an issue.
The new driver model is better too, but naturally changing the driver model is going to require new drivers and thus create incompatibility.
They didn't cause MS to throw out everything after years of development and start from scratch using a different kernel.
When did that happen? I'm pretty sure Windows Vista used an evolution of the XP kernel (which came from the NT kernel).
Obviously, you get what you pay for
In which case wouldn't that mean the natural order of things would cause this to either come around and bite them in the ass with low rate and low quality or work out just fine and show that the lower rate provided a perfectly acceptable level of quality?
Your phone requires a microphone. Your TV does not.
So? Your phone doesn't require a camera or an internet connection but the vast majority have them.
Years ago when I worked in a computer shop I saw a lot with tape over the camera, and sometimes offered to disconnect the camera and microphone internally while doing other work.
Really? So the conspiracy theory here is that somebody has remote access to your system and could then conceivably access all your information but the only thing people are really worried about is the potential for somebody to take a photo of them staring at the screen?
Which option do you think every successful attempt uses?
Just to clarify, what you're saying is that projects like Noveau, openiboot, XBMC, etc... are all illegal?
* not legal in the United States. Most of these projects get around that by not being based in the United States.
Well I'm not in the US, most people are not in the US, the problem is with the US legal system and the unwillingness of its population to do anything about it.
Sorry I won't bother with the rest of your post since it seems we are clearly both on different paths but given this line "People who care about open hardware are a niche." we are both arguing the same thing. I'm not interested in what games are available where (because that availability isn't a technical limitation), my point is that very few people care about about open-ness and for those few who do there isn't really any reason to choose a console over a PC because for all the the things that open-ness makes possible a PC is going to be a better choice anyway.