SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative together have 1/7th of the market, with 6/7ths being iPods.
It does? You might want to tell Apple. They seem to be under the impression that they hold slightly less than 3/4 of the US market, with similar in Europe, but substantially less in Asia (you know, where Samsung and Sony hail?).
Okay... even given 75% for Apple and 25% for the rest of the companies on the planet combined, with Sony still something like 2%, how does that substantially change my point? There's no such thing as "Windows-based MP3 players", most iPods are used with Windows, and Apple is the *only* "big" player in the MP3 market, so to come up with some sort of metric by which they're not "one of" the "big" ones is just silly. Dell ceeded the market to Apple, period.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the attached article just because I really don't give a flying fsck.
Well then what the heck are you blathering on about? The article was a well-written critique bringing up very valid points. In other words, to directly answer your question, Person A. Some advice... don't get starry-eyed because someone has letters after their name-- try to judge ideas and methods on their own merits.
Dell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
"Windows-based player market"? What does that even mean? SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative together have 1/7th of the market, with 6/7ths being iPods. And most iPods are used with Windows. And how can Sony, with, what, a 2% market share, count as a "big player"?
Do you mean Microsoft "Plays For Sure"-based, perhaps?
As the person who made the original comment about the lack of "root", I apologize on behalf of Mac users everywhere who would rather use their virus-free computers than learn about its underpinnings, and thus annoy you.
In any case, yes, processes can run as "root": [G5:~] samkass% sudo -s Password: [G5:~] root# ps aux USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 1 0.0 0.0 28344 524 ?? S<s Sun12AM 0:01.22/sbin/launchd root 31 0.0 0.0 27260 428 ?? Ss Sun12AM 0:00.00/sbin/dynamic_pager -F/private/var/vm/swapfile [...]
However, no one can log in as root, and generally everything is sudo'ed instead of sticky-bitted or such. The logging is very accessible and thorough, the standard UNIXy security and TCP/IP tracing mechanisms are available or installable, and the system is very transparent. (Wondering why your HD is going nuts? Run "sudo fs_usage" and it will tell you every access to any file descriptor and what process is doing it... I often wish I had this on Windows or other UNIXes. Network access is also easy to monitor with a few utilities, although a better built-in one would be nice.)
But IE is part of the OS... just ask Microsoft. Seriously, though, back when my previous company had to deal with IIS before moving to a more secure/sane server, one of the server bugs was fixed by upgrading IE on the server, so IE-is-fundamental-to-the-OS is frighteningly close to actual truth with Windows.
Also, I'd like to see the statistics you cite that say that Windows hasn't been hit statistically more than MacOS. There are no MacOS-specific worms or viruses "in the wild", so it's hard to come up with the sigmas for what would be "expected" for what a comparable OS should expect.
Indeed, a default install of MacOS X has no root user. You can add/enable a root user, but it would be awfully silly to do so. MacOS does everything that needs special privs to run through sudo and thus can easily be logged or restricted. Even if you're logged in as an "Administrator" (the GUI equivalent of the most powerful kind of user), it just means you're in the sudoers file, not that you're always running as root.
you're really not utilizing a tiny fraction of the benefit of having a large group of interested people assembled on the topic.
That is to say, you are utilizing all but a tiny fraction of the benefit, and thus your software only adds a tiny fraction of benefit.
Heh, depends how you parse it. But in any case, we're really talking about the same thing, I think (perhaps the site isn't as descriptive as it should be?)
For instance, suppose I'm doing a presentation on some software. I should be showing you not bullets, not screenshots, but the actual software, live. For parts that aren't ready, do a video mockup.
That's exactly it. With CPOF, everyone participating has a full, live workspace. The presenter's view (and VOIP feed) is one part of that. But everything in the presenter's view is "live", and the data can be dragged out and into other charts, maps, or visualizations on your own workspace. There are live markup tools (ink, fading flashlight, etc), and if/when people jump in, they can be given permission to manipulate the data in the presentation live.
Fighting against the static slides, or even the canned speech (PowerPoint-ization doesn't have to be visual), is definitely an uphill but worthwhile battle.
It works on Firefox and Safari for me; not sure what the problem is. But if you care enough and figure it out, definitely submit something to the webmaster about it. Although GD in general may not be as particular about its siteS, the Viz group is full of designers and tends to be very picky.
If you needed it to create the working executable, then it is part of the source and you must include it.
My understanding is that TiVO distributes source code that is 100% operational and fully functional-- just not functional on their hardware. The GPL makes no guarantee about what hardware the software must run on, and it shouldn't as it has nothing to do with hardware. In TiVO's case the source code is fully open, but the hardware is closed. While that may piss you off, it really doesn't violate GPLv2, and those portions of GPLv3 that it may violate are probably unenforceable, which is irrelevant since Linux isn't going to use GPLv3 anyway. And now every single GPL'ed project is probably going to branch into a GPLv2 and a GPLv3 edition, which helps us all how, exactly?
These guys claim to be doing exactly what a layman should do when he thinks he has discovered technology which challenges a fundamental scientific principle.
Invite as many credible scientific experts as you can find to test it and report the results of such testing in peer reviewed scientific publications and on the Internet.
I would propose that a layman who thinks he's stumbled on something that challenges a fundamental scientific principle should not do as you say, but rather first research as deep as they can, then try to talk to some folks at the nearest university, then see if they can find *one* credible scientific expert to test for results. Throwing unsubstantiated theories out on the internet is great for crackpots and Slashdot articles.
Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: Get a Mac and use Keynote.
Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: get a workstation and use General Dynamics Viz' Command Post of the Future. A blatant plug, of course, because I work for the group that writes it, but the entire concept of a series of static, throw-away slides is so 20th century. If you can't manipulate and dig into information live, and have those viewing the presentation doing the same, then you're really not utilizing a tiny fraction of the benefit of having a large group of interested people assembled on the topic.
Indeed, there is no such thing as "proof" in science. Merely observations that support a current theory. I guess "we observed phenomena consistent with a theory that claims dark matter's existence" even less headline-worthy.
That said, it's just perplexing to me that Apple doesn't provide an iTunes app for Linux, presumably binary for the DRM.
You don't get out much, do you? Can you seriously imagine Linux users being happy with Apple adding DRM to their platform, then providing a way for them to buy DRM-locked music? Fortunately Linux is not likely to go to GPLv3, but half the point of that new license is to kill DRM and intellectual property in general, so why should any of these companies care about Linux?
Whether or not 64-bit operating systems are an inflection point in the market, Linux is rapidly being locked out of the mainstream by stupid moves like GPLv3, and I think Eric Raymond is trying to be the voice of moderation here that keeps FOSS viable in the marketplace. I personally don't see desktop Linux ever catching on-- the system under which it's developed doesn't promote the right priorities for desktop adoption-- but every time someone is forced to transition something and they stay with Windows another opportunity is lost. Vista is going to force millions of hardware upgrades, and what if Linux shipped as the default OS on all of those machines as a cheaper alternative? Most would get wiped, but a lot of install CDs would get out there and Linux would have taken another step towards acceptance.
This is not going to happen without Linux embracing some proprietary solutions so that it (gasp!) does what people want it to do. Until the Linux community puts more importance on their product making their customers happy than on some ideological religious argument, it's can't possibly gain mainstream acceptance.
The last sentence of the poster's comment is unsupported by all available evidence. Intel is scheduled to go quad-core this year, while AMD has a chip "taped out", which means probably sometime in the middle of next year. Thus, Core appears, in fact, to be at least maintaining its lead over AMD, if not expanding it.
If they've done wrong, even in the past, shouldn't they have to answer for it?
I think there are a few issues with this: 1. It wasn't clear that this was wrong at the time. The law isn't 100% clear-cut, and this was apparently a pretty common practice at one point. 2. The purpose of these deals was to acquire and retain key people who presumably added significant shareholder value. If the shareholders are the party that is "wronged" by these actions, but the stock price has gone nothing but up, who's the injured party? 3. If you want to claim that these deals devalued shareholder equity by X amount (the difference between the price at grant date and the back-dated price), to be fair you should really also discount the contribution of the people you retained in this manner. I suspect some of these deals improved net shareholder value. 4. So, then, what's the appropriate "penalty" for doing nothing but good for your company, their shareholders, and the employees?
Obviously it hasn't been all roses at all involved companies, but this really isn't an Enron type of situation. This didn't cause power failures that got a democratic election overturned, or eat up tens of thousands of folks retirement accounts, or even hurt a lot of the shareholders in any way. The SEC investigation is more likely to cause damage than the original acts. It's just an accounting snafu that might merit a little fine, but not a huge overreaction.
Would you really want to live in a world so devoid of passion, original thought, and striving for change that no one is ever willing to put their life on the line for what they believe? I personally would prefer war to simply become precise and high-tech enough that the civilians don't suffer so much, and military targets can be eliminated with less collateral damage... therefore, I see this no-military GPL as a huge step backwards for civilians in warzones everywhere. If it catches on, it would dramatically increase the potential suffering in the world.
The ToastyTech one is a little sparse on the mainstream screenshots and heavy on the obscure ones. At the same time, the Room 101 one is almost exclusively focused on the Windows vs. MacOS comparison. (Wow, did pre-Windows 95 really look THAT ugly? It didn't seem quite so bad at the time, although back then Apple clearly had a dramatic GUI lead.)
With enough damage, we could kill all but the simplest marine life around vents; there probably wouldn't be enough time for multicellular photosynthesizers to re-evolve before either the sun turned into the red giant or the planet's core cooled enough for the oceans to sink into the mantle.
I think this is highly unlikely. Unless our measurements are way, way off, life sprung from nothing to an ocean-full of diverse organisms within a billion years of Earth's formation. Scientific consensus is that the Sun is about halfway through its current phase, so has about 5 billion years to go before it starts running low on hydrogen and becomes a red giant. How fast the Earth is cooling is open for debate (obviously we have a magnetic field around the planet, so it is actively cooling), but I'd be surprised if anything too dramatic happened within a couple billion years, which considering life will have a head-start this time around should be plenty of time.
The "least capable bundle" is indeed arguable and most definitely comes down to what the needs are. If your favorites are unsuitable, it's game over. With open source, not necessarily so.
You act like MacOS X doesn't have a free, included IDE with every copy, or distributes all its developer documentation for free, with free updates over the 'net. Or that MacOS X doesn't have most of its basic services, compiler, and (once again) kernel as open-source. It would have been a really, really great things for these people to have been able to use. Instead, they're stuck with RedHat for, again, religious reasons (unless you have a pointer to that data showing open-source to be a demonstrably better criteria.)
I'm sorry, but anyone who simply calls Time Machine an "incremental backup" solution has lost all credibility. Yes, it's BASED ON an incremental backup solution, and it certainly offers that. But the real revolutionary concept here is that it provides a way for applications to look into their own past. You can go back in time WITHIN iPhoto, and look around at what your collection looked like a month ago. You can do queries in Address Book, and if you don't find a record you expect, go back in time and have it automatically find the first time the query returned something... WITHIN the Address Book application. And while browsing in the past, the application's UI is functional. Then, you can record just one record of the address book-- you don't need to pull an entire file to the present. And, of course, it'll be built in to every copy of their consumer OS with an auto-configured simple setup.
Thus, both Thurrott and this article appear to have largely missed the point in their attempt to show prior art here.
knowing that it was unsuitable due to lack of source
Only if you believe that lack of source makes any difference. I personally believe that if these $100 laptops are generally used to hack operating system code, they're wasting all their potential. And that it's what you DO with the operating system that's the real revolution these machines could have brought. Instead, we're stuck with arguably the least capable software bundle just because of the religious (ie. "it must be open-source") beliefs of the project's director. Bleah.
And if you want to argue that the "it must be open-source" belief isn't a religious one, then show me the data that says these machines will help these people more if its operating system is open source rather than if its operating system is easy to use with a large application base.
Great idea, the only problem is that both sides (ie the Anglo-American Axis and the Pan-Islamic fundamentalists) want everyone else in the world to adopt their respective cultural values and to cooperate, unilateraly in a very one-sided, one-way, master-slave arrangement.
While perhaps true on a national level, I have not found this to be true of most individuals not directly affected by the national actions (ie. having been bombed in retaliation for something they had no control over). And the more individuals travel and interact with each other's culture, the less this is true. Eventually those folks become leaders and change the system.
I don't think it's coincidence that Bush was one of the least-traveled presidents in recent history and is making so many horrible blunders. I've known and worked with plenty of muslims, and none of them particularly cared if America or I adopted their cultural values. And I sure don't care if they do. I would prefer they (and us) generally respect all of their citizens, and recognize basic human rights, but I think in general a "survival of the fittest" system will take care of that in the long term. (ie. Countries with more racism, sexism, and inequality will under-utilize their citizen's talents and get worse "return on investment" per citizen trained/fed/supported. Maybe I've played too many Civ-style simulation games:). )
What were we talking about again? Oh, right... airline security. Insta-bombing campaigns is unlikely to help with that, either.
Searching on "air taxi" may turn up more palatable rates than "charter". Air taxis generally charge per seat-mile, while charter tend to charge for the pilot and planes hours and fuel consumed. For a lot of "semi-scheduled" service, the taxi construct works better for the flier, and depending on the airport's setup can sometimes still offer less security hassles.
...Because if there's one thing better than folks whose government dislikes us but whose population is ambivalent, it's a country with a desperate, starving population with nothing to lose and whose brothers, sisters, parents and babies we've killed.
Seriously, the only way to stop this stuff in the long term is cooperation and a sharing of cultures. The amount of energy at the disposal of each person on Earth is becoming more massive each year, and we're never going to catch everyone. We need to begin the process of stopping them from wanting to attack us. That means marginalizing the radical elements of both their culture and ours (people such as yourself), and eliminating those people's support among their peers (that's us, modding you down).
Slashdot Mirror
SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative together have 1/7th of the market, with 6/7ths being iPods.
It does? You might want to tell Apple. They seem to be under the impression that they hold slightly less than 3/4 of the US market, with similar in Europe, but substantially less in Asia (you know, where Samsung and Sony hail?).
Okay... even given 75% for Apple and 25% for the rest of the companies on the planet combined, with Sony still something like 2%, how does that substantially change my point? There's no such thing as "Windows-based MP3 players", most iPods are used with Windows, and Apple is the *only* "big" player in the MP3 market, so to come up with some sort of metric by which they're not "one of" the "big" ones is just silly. Dell ceeded the market to Apple, period.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the attached article just because I really don't give a flying fsck.
Well then what the heck are you blathering on about? The article was a well-written critique bringing up very valid points. In other words, to directly answer your question, Person A. Some advice... don't get starry-eyed because someone has letters after their name-- try to judge ideas and methods on their own merits.
Dell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
"Windows-based player market"? What does that even mean? SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative together have 1/7th of the market, with 6/7ths being iPods. And most iPods are used with Windows. And how can Sony, with, what, a 2% market share, count as a "big player"?
Do you mean Microsoft "Plays For Sure"-based, perhaps?
As the person who made the original comment about the lack of "root", I apologize on behalf of Mac users everywhere who would rather use their virus-free computers than learn about its underpinnings, and thus annoy you.
/sbin/launchd /sbin/dynamic_pager -F /private/var/vm/swapfile
In any case, yes, processes can run as "root":
[G5:~] samkass% sudo -s
Password:
[G5:~] root# ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 28344 524 ?? S<s Sun12AM 0:01.22
root 31 0.0 0.0 27260 428 ?? Ss Sun12AM 0:00.00
[...]
However, no one can log in as root, and generally everything is sudo'ed instead of sticky-bitted or such. The logging is very accessible and thorough, the standard UNIXy security and TCP/IP tracing mechanisms are available or installable, and the system is very transparent. (Wondering why your HD is going nuts? Run "sudo fs_usage" and it will tell you every access to any file descriptor and what process is doing it... I often wish I had this on Windows or other UNIXes. Network access is also easy to monitor with a few utilities, although a better built-in one would be nice.)
If you remove things like IE
But IE is part of the OS... just ask Microsoft. Seriously, though, back when my previous company had to deal with IIS before moving to a more secure/sane server, one of the server bugs was fixed by upgrading IE on the server, so IE-is-fundamental-to-the-OS is frighteningly close to actual truth with Windows.
Also, I'd like to see the statistics you cite that say that Windows hasn't been hit statistically more than MacOS. There are no MacOS-specific worms or viruses "in the wild", so it's hard to come up with the sigmas for what would be "expected" for what a comparable OS should expect.
Indeed, a default install of MacOS X has no root user. You can add/enable a root user, but it would be awfully silly to do so. MacOS does everything that needs special privs to run through sudo and thus can easily be logged or restricted. Even if you're logged in as an "Administrator" (the GUI equivalent of the most powerful kind of user), it just means you're in the sudoers file, not that you're always running as root.
you're really not utilizing a tiny fraction of the benefit of having a large group of interested people assembled on the topic.
That is to say, you are utilizing all but a tiny fraction of the benefit, and thus your software only adds a tiny fraction of benefit.
Heh, depends how you parse it. But in any case, we're really talking about the same thing, I think (perhaps the site isn't as descriptive as it should be?)
For instance, suppose I'm doing a presentation on some software. I should be showing you not bullets, not screenshots, but the actual software, live. For parts that aren't ready, do a video mockup.
That's exactly it. With CPOF, everyone participating has a full, live workspace. The presenter's view (and VOIP feed) is one part of that. But everything in the presenter's view is "live", and the data can be dragged out and into other charts, maps, or visualizations on your own workspace. There are live markup tools (ink, fading flashlight, etc), and if/when people jump in, they can be given permission to manipulate the data in the presentation live.
Fighting against the static slides, or even the canned speech (PowerPoint-ization doesn't have to be visual), is definitely an uphill but worthwhile battle.
It works on Firefox and Safari for me; not sure what the problem is. But if you care enough and figure it out, definitely submit something to the webmaster about it. Although GD in general may not be as particular about its siteS, the Viz group is full of designers and tends to be very picky.
If you needed it to create the working executable, then it is part of the source and you must include it.
My understanding is that TiVO distributes source code that is 100% operational and fully functional-- just not functional on their hardware. The GPL makes no guarantee about what hardware the software must run on, and it shouldn't as it has nothing to do with hardware. In TiVO's case the source code is fully open, but the hardware is closed. While that may piss you off, it really doesn't violate GPLv2, and those portions of GPLv3 that it may violate are probably unenforceable, which is irrelevant since Linux isn't going to use GPLv3 anyway. And now every single GPL'ed project is probably going to branch into a GPLv2 and a GPLv3 edition, which helps us all how, exactly?
These guys claim to be doing exactly what a layman should do when he thinks he has discovered technology which challenges a fundamental scientific principle.
Invite as many credible scientific experts as you can find to test it and report the results of such testing in peer reviewed scientific publications and on the Internet.
I would propose that a layman who thinks he's stumbled on something that challenges a fundamental scientific principle should not do as you say, but rather first research as deep as they can, then try to talk to some folks at the nearest university, then see if they can find *one* credible scientific expert to test for results. Throwing unsubstantiated theories out on the internet is great for crackpots and Slashdot articles.
Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: Get a Mac and use Keynote.
Here's a hint for those of you Powerpoint addicts in the DOD: get a workstation and use General Dynamics Viz' Command Post of the Future. A blatant plug, of course, because I work for the group that writes it, but the entire concept of a series of static, throw-away slides is so 20th century. If you can't manipulate and dig into information live, and have those viewing the presentation doing the same, then you're really not utilizing a tiny fraction of the benefit of having a large group of interested people assembled on the topic.
Indeed, there is no such thing as "proof" in science. Merely observations that support a current theory. I guess "we observed phenomena consistent with a theory that claims dark matter's existence" even less headline-worthy.
That said, it's just perplexing to me that Apple doesn't provide an iTunes app for Linux, presumably binary for the DRM.
You don't get out much, do you? Can you seriously imagine Linux users being happy with Apple adding DRM to their platform, then providing a way for them to buy DRM-locked music? Fortunately Linux is not likely to go to GPLv3, but half the point of that new license is to kill DRM and intellectual property in general, so why should any of these companies care about Linux?
Whether or not 64-bit operating systems are an inflection point in the market, Linux is rapidly being locked out of the mainstream by stupid moves like GPLv3, and I think Eric Raymond is trying to be the voice of moderation here that keeps FOSS viable in the marketplace. I personally don't see desktop Linux ever catching on-- the system under which it's developed doesn't promote the right priorities for desktop adoption-- but every time someone is forced to transition something and they stay with Windows another opportunity is lost. Vista is going to force millions of hardware upgrades, and what if Linux shipped as the default OS on all of those machines as a cheaper alternative? Most would get wiped, but a lot of install CDs would get out there and Linux would have taken another step towards acceptance.
This is not going to happen without Linux embracing some proprietary solutions so that it (gasp!) does what people want it to do. Until the Linux community puts more importance on their product making their customers happy than on some ideological religious argument, it's can't possibly gain mainstream acceptance.
The last sentence of the poster's comment is unsupported by all available evidence. Intel is scheduled to go quad-core this year, while AMD has a chip "taped out", which means probably sometime in the middle of next year. Thus, Core appears, in fact, to be at least maintaining its lead over AMD, if not expanding it.
If they've done wrong, even in the past, shouldn't they have to answer for it?
I think there are a few issues with this:
1. It wasn't clear that this was wrong at the time. The law isn't 100% clear-cut, and this was apparently a pretty common practice at one point.
2. The purpose of these deals was to acquire and retain key people who presumably added significant shareholder value. If the shareholders are the party that is "wronged" by these actions, but the stock price has gone nothing but up, who's the injured party?
3. If you want to claim that these deals devalued shareholder equity by X amount (the difference between the price at grant date and the back-dated price), to be fair you should really also discount the contribution of the people you retained in this manner. I suspect some of these deals improved net shareholder value.
4. So, then, what's the appropriate "penalty" for doing nothing but good for your company, their shareholders, and the employees?
Obviously it hasn't been all roses at all involved companies, but this really isn't an Enron type of situation. This didn't cause power failures that got a democratic election overturned, or eat up tens of thousands of folks retirement accounts, or even hurt a lot of the shareholders in any way. The SEC investigation is more likely to cause damage than the original acts. It's just an accounting snafu that might merit a little fine, but not a huge overreaction.
Would you really want to live in a world so devoid of passion, original thought, and striving for change that no one is ever willing to put their life on the line for what they believe? I personally would prefer war to simply become precise and high-tech enough that the civilians don't suffer so much, and military targets can be eliminated with less collateral damage... therefore, I see this no-military GPL as a huge step backwards for civilians in warzones everywhere. If it catches on, it would dramatically increase the potential suffering in the world.
The ToastyTech one is a little sparse on the mainstream screenshots and heavy on the obscure ones. At the same time, the Room 101 one is almost exclusively focused on the Windows vs. MacOS comparison. (Wow, did pre-Windows 95 really look THAT ugly? It didn't seem quite so bad at the time, although back then Apple clearly had a dramatic GUI lead.)
With enough damage, we could kill all but the simplest marine life around vents; there probably wouldn't be enough time for multicellular photosynthesizers to re-evolve before either the sun turned into the red giant or the planet's core cooled enough for the oceans to sink into the mantle.
I think this is highly unlikely. Unless our measurements are way, way off, life sprung from nothing to an ocean-full of diverse organisms within a billion years of Earth's formation. Scientific consensus is that the Sun is about halfway through its current phase, so has about 5 billion years to go before it starts running low on hydrogen and becomes a red giant. How fast the Earth is cooling is open for debate (obviously we have a magnetic field around the planet, so it is actively cooling), but I'd be surprised if anything too dramatic happened within a couple billion years, which considering life will have a head-start this time around should be plenty of time.
The comet goes around the sun every 133 years.
The Earth goes around the sun about once every year.
The "least capable bundle" is indeed arguable and most definitely comes down to what the needs are. If your favorites are unsuitable, it's game over. With open source, not necessarily so.
You act like MacOS X doesn't have a free, included IDE with every copy, or distributes all its developer documentation for free, with free updates over the 'net. Or that MacOS X doesn't have most of its basic services, compiler, and (once again) kernel as open-source. It would have been a really, really great things for these people to have been able to use. Instead, they're stuck with RedHat for, again, religious reasons (unless you have a pointer to that data showing open-source to be a demonstrably better criteria.)
I'm sorry, but anyone who simply calls Time Machine an "incremental backup" solution has lost all credibility. Yes, it's BASED ON an incremental backup solution, and it certainly offers that. But the real revolutionary concept here is that it provides a way for applications to look into their own past. You can go back in time WITHIN iPhoto, and look around at what your collection looked like a month ago. You can do queries in Address Book, and if you don't find a record you expect, go back in time and have it automatically find the first time the query returned something... WITHIN the Address Book application. And while browsing in the past, the application's UI is functional. Then, you can record just one record of the address book-- you don't need to pull an entire file to the present. And, of course, it'll be built in to every copy of their consumer OS with an auto-configured simple setup.
Thus, both Thurrott and this article appear to have largely missed the point in their attempt to show prior art here.
knowing that it was unsuitable due to lack of source
Only if you believe that lack of source makes any difference. I personally believe that if these $100 laptops are generally used to hack operating system code, they're wasting all their potential. And that it's what you DO with the operating system that's the real revolution these machines could have brought. Instead, we're stuck with arguably the least capable software bundle just because of the religious (ie. "it must be open-source") beliefs of the project's director. Bleah.
And if you want to argue that the "it must be open-source" belief isn't a religious one, then show me the data that says these machines will help these people more if its operating system is open source rather than if its operating system is easy to use with a large application base.
Great idea, the only problem is that both sides (ie the Anglo-American Axis and the Pan-Islamic fundamentalists) want everyone else in the world to adopt their respective cultural values and to cooperate, unilateraly in a very one-sided, one-way, master-slave arrangement.
:). )
While perhaps true on a national level, I have not found this to be true of most individuals not directly affected by the national actions (ie. having been bombed in retaliation for something they had no control over). And the more individuals travel and interact with each other's culture, the less this is true. Eventually those folks become leaders and change the system.
I don't think it's coincidence that Bush was one of the least-traveled presidents in recent history and is making so many horrible blunders. I've known and worked with plenty of muslims, and none of them particularly cared if America or I adopted their cultural values. And I sure don't care if they do. I would prefer they (and us) generally respect all of their citizens, and recognize basic human rights, but I think in general a "survival of the fittest" system will take care of that in the long term. (ie. Countries with more racism, sexism, and inequality will under-utilize their citizen's talents and get worse "return on investment" per citizen trained/fed/supported. Maybe I've played too many Civ-style simulation games
What were we talking about again? Oh, right... airline security. Insta-bombing campaigns is unlikely to help with that, either.
Searching on "air taxi" may turn up more palatable rates than "charter". Air taxis generally charge per seat-mile, while charter tend to charge for the pilot and planes hours and fuel consumed. For a lot of "semi-scheduled" service, the taxi construct works better for the flier, and depending on the airport's setup can sometimes still offer less security hassles.
...Because if there's one thing better than folks whose government dislikes us but whose population is ambivalent, it's a country with a desperate, starving population with nothing to lose and whose brothers, sisters, parents and babies we've killed.
Seriously, the only way to stop this stuff in the long term is cooperation and a sharing of cultures. The amount of energy at the disposal of each person on Earth is becoming more massive each year, and we're never going to catch everyone. We need to begin the process of stopping them from wanting to attack us. That means marginalizing the radical elements of both their culture and ours (people such as yourself), and eliminating those people's support among their peers (that's us, modding you down).