No... Apple would be more than happy not to be "scarce". They'd be pleased as punch if eveyone went out and bought a Mac. And thats the key. They dont want you running OSX on your eMachines Wal-Mart special. I recall hearing something about them not even making a boxed version of OSX intel (thus tying the OS to the machine you bought it with). For the umpteenth time... Apple is a hardware company. Apple makes the bulk of their money selling computers and iPods. Steve Jobs has been down the road of killing a hardware platform before in order to sell its software (which is just what many here are calling for, those too young to remember). I would not expect it to happen again. Would you pay $400 for a student license for OSX? Well, very few did. When Apple kills its hardware business to focus on sales of OSX, you'd be wise to consider selling your Apple stock.
This is largely seen as a positive thing in the mac community. Windows Media Player for Mac has always sucked. Sure it played some files QuickTime didnt, but its always been slow and buggy. Distributing the flip4mac player free is a HUGE improvement. I would agree that less competition is usually bad, but like the defunct Mac Explorer... a stagnating product is NOT competition.
As a mac/unix geek from the 80's, I thought nothing would be cooler than merging sun and apple duing the mid-late 90's when these rumors cropped up. Apple was struggling and unable to find a suitable replacement for MacOS "classic". How cool would it have been to Appleize Solaris with Mac UI on top and solaris underpants! That was then.... High flying sun stock from those days is now worth about 10% of what it was. Sun is clinging to life in a dying market and Apple is now one of the biggest unix vendors on the planet. The iPod is on the verge off turning apple's declining computer business around.
Now Sun has nothing to offer Apple other than brand recognition which really dosent count for much in a market with computer proffesionals influencing purchasing decisions. People buy Sun for Solaris and Mac's for OSX. Replacing either one with the other would kill the product. Sun's developers would balk at having to port their software to a new OS with no guarantee of its success or longevity. About the only thing Sun could offer is expertise in the server business, which Apple could get much more cheaply simply by hiring the right people. Besides, the server market is far different than it was in 1997 and if Apple wants to be successul they need new ideas, not old ones from a dying age.
Apple could buy up Sun and attempt to "fix" its existing business, but the stuff that Apple is good at, aint the stuff Sun needs. As for what might have been... Knowing what we know now and how good Jobs and OSX have been for Apple.... I am not getting a pretty picture from an Amelio/McNealy Apple/Sun.
Speaking as a father, a gamer and someone who has watched both South Park and Porn. I would far rather have my kids watching South Park or looking a naked people on the internet than playing excessively violent video games. When I say exessive violence I mean excessive. I've been teaching my 8 year old how to play Warcraft III.
The US Govt is likely using that rule to have backdoors installed in software, but you wont see Americans being arrested for using privacy software unless they were using it to do something really bad (in which case a citation for use of outlaw software is the least of their problems). Arresting law abiding citizens for wanting to keep their conversation private is REALLY bad publicity.
I'm making a wild guess... but... The French in general and the French Canadians as well, are very concious of perserving french culture in an atmosphere of americanization. Despite the US Govt's recent buffoonery on the international scene, the USA is a HUGE cultural exporter. Movies, music, fashion, food, you name it. The French, in particular, pride themselves on being good at that culture stuff and take issue with Eminem, McDonalds and Coke stealing the brains of its children. Consequently they make all sorts of laws and regulations intended to keep France "French". I'm not sure if its still the case, but back in the mid 90's French scientists recieving govt funds were required to publish all work in French first (This was a HUGE! issue because nearly all important international journals are in English... The lingua Franca of science and culture). In Quebec there are all sorts of requlations regarding signeage. IIRC, business signs must be in French and english translations have to be in much smaller text.
The ACLU isnt defending Neonazis who march through black neighborhoods. They are defending my (and yours) right to say things the majority dosent agree with. The armed services defends our freedom against foreign threats and the ACLU defends our freedom against domestic ones.
>Ever try to get a laptop serviced UNDER WARRANTY?
Sure... I've had two warranty issues with Apple laptops. In both cases turnaround was less than 4 days from the time the laptop left my house (picked up by *express guy) till it was back in my hands. Both times the laptops were fixed and completely functional. Who are you dealing with that kept your laptop for 52 days? I have no doubt that every company has their share of service nightmares in the closet, but most customers come off just fine.
Is this a joke? You dont have school age children do you? I eat just as healthy as you, take good stuff, drink and eat lots of soy... etc I'm a cat 3 bicycle racer with 5 wins last year, so I'm in fairly decent shape too... I guess sick AT LEAST three or four times a year from something my kids bring home from school. Eating good and taking your vitamins WILL NOT keep you from getting sick any more than praying alot will.
Apple dosent want to prevent people from running Windows on Apple hardware, they want to prevent people from running MacOSX on "Tiger Direct" hardware.
They probably couldn't make them that high back then because they licensees had to make computers that ONLY ran Mac OS. This time around they could make generic computers and sell OS X as an option...
This is where things turn sour for Apple... If apple allowed Dell to make their generic computers mac compatible and charged only for OS copies sold, then people would buy Dells with Windows and buy MacOS seperately (or copy it) and install it on the generic dell. For your plan to work Dell would have to tie the mac compaibility ONLY to PC's sold with MacOS OR Apple would have to pull a microsoft and charge the licensing fee for ALL computers Dell sold capable of running MacOS whether they were sold with MacOS or not. Which puts us back in the situation Apple was in before with its clone makers.
BTW, MacOS is not and was not ever the only OS that ran on Apple clones. Linux, BeOS (before there was a PC version), *BSD, and others run on mac clones. And from outset the PowerPC platform was designed to allow for multiple OS's, including OS2, AIX and even Windows NT (which was an actual product for a very short time).
My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that if Dell manufactured and sold Apple clones, the OS X license fees would make up lost hardware revenue.
History would disagree... Apple licensed the MacOS for years. Apple saw its market share constantly cannibalized by companies who sold mac compatible main boards in cheap cases for some fraction less than an equivalent Apple machine. The licensing fee in didnt even come close to making up for lost sales. Apple lost its fanny and refused to license MacOS for the G3 at ANY price (which killed mac clones).
If the licensing fee DID make the cost of the machines guess which one people would buy? Just in the past couple of years HP rebranded iPods and sold them for the same price as the Apple ones. HP no longer sells rebranded iPods (noone wanted them at the same price as the Apple branded ones).
>Making it impossible for the casual user to install (via a simple hardware check) will take a fraction > of the effort and accomplish nearly all the benefits of a supposedly airtight copy protection scheme that will be cracked the next day anyway.
I'm inclined to disagree... In the beginning, hacking into computers required some knowledge, as did copying DVD's. Today rootkits allow those with minimal technical knowledge to command armies of zombies and even the most cluless can download software that will automatically copy DVD's. If they manage to break the lock on OSX a simple gui based installer will follow shortly to allow anyone to install it on their Wal Mart Gateways.
Allowing OSX to run poorly on non-apple machines as free advertising is insane. What kind of slogan would go with that? "Hey, we know it sucks! Honestly, it works great if you buy an Apple machine!"
>If someone figures out how to reverse entropy without increasing it somewhere else, please share it with the world.
What pamphlet did you get that from. Entropy increases overall... local variations are permitted. Applying physical laws operating on atoms to systems as complex as living beings is extremely problematic and far beyond any computer available today or in the foreseeable future. Evolution is the GUT of life science, without it Biology makes no sense and its impossible to make the jump from chemistry to biology.
I have friends who work in the operating room... they tell some very interesting and hilarious stories of what goes on when the (patients) lights go out. And "rocking out" is common enough that they dont consider it worthy of telling unless they play bad music.
>Scammer2: What if we... hum... say we're from Niger? It's not like the stupid Americans can figure it out
Fortunately for us, were TOO stupid for this one to work. How many Americans could tell you the difference between Niger and Nigeria or even that they were two seperate countries? Now you might have a point on the others... Sierra Leone (A mountain range in New Mexico?) and Ivory Coast (isnt that in Florida?).
When carbon composites fail, they do so spectacularly, as opposed to Al, steel or Ti which usually just crumple a bit. They are also prone to directional issues. A teammate of mine slammed on the brakes hard in a race to avoid a crash and the lateral forces on his fishtailing rear wheel snapped his Zipp 303 (a carbon rimmed bicycle wheel) in half. The wheel was stronger than an aluminum rim in one direction, but weak under minor lateral forces that an Al rim would easily have weathered. As for laptops on your lap.... Carbon isnt known for spontaneous failure under no load at all... Unless you're sitting on it I wouldnt worry. BTW, what is it with cyclists and good beer? Nothing like a bomber of Dreadnaught to recover after an 80 mi race.
10+ cyclists per year die in crashes while racing, many more die in training accidents. When was the last time you saw a newspaper headline on the topic? I'm sure the figures for Auto and motorcycle racing are comparable yet these deaths are hardly noticed at all by the media. There will probably be far fewer deaths in rocket racing due to the numbers involved. Any shmo with a bicycle, motorcycle or car can race those things. How many of us will be joining the amatuer rocket racing league?
Minutes of Warnambool City Council meeting: 1. Make up BS story about "static" man 2. Put Warnambool on map. 3. Tourism 4. Profit
If someone will travel to bumphuk, nowhere to see the virgin mary in someones month old pea soup, they might travel to Warnambool to meet "static man".
While the Ecuadoran family may have appeared to have nothing, they were actually living well beyond the natural state for humans. Most of human past was spent moving from place to place, hunting, gathering and gardening (not farming). Humans lived in temporary huts or caves.
Ironically, it is the "modernization" by missionaries and others which leads people to abandon perfectly self sustaining hunter gatherer lifestyles for untenable and unsuitable positions as farmers and "workers" in permanent villages that often causes so much misery. Being a peasant is an awful way to earn a living.
What if the guy adding that little bit of HTML to make the counters on each page work (presumably from the marketing company) dosent know squat about apple computers and simply put "_G5_ " on ALL the pages, not realizing (or caring) that the powerbook was a G4 and not a G5. Seems more likley than Apple playing spooky head games with people desperate enough to dig through the HTML for leads.
Which helps explain why my friends and I were using "Duh" in middle school (the "duh" years). As a thirtysomething my middle school days predate Homer Simpson. I'm not sure how Homer can lay any claim to the word, except perhaps as the OP's first exposure to it.
A Tailor is skilled labor. Some stores still offer in store tailoring but thats the kind of place where $150 shirts are the norm. I doubt you'll find a tailor for your $20 shirt at Old Navy. Most places make things simple and just offer enough sizes to cover *most* people and they send the rest to Big and Tall (or Plus Size) stores. Your average store clerk probably makes close to minimum wage and has no sewing skills whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
No... Apple would be more than happy not to be "scarce". They'd be pleased as punch if eveyone went out and bought a Mac. And thats the key. They dont want you running OSX on your eMachines Wal-Mart special. I recall hearing something about them not even making a boxed version of OSX intel (thus tying the OS to the machine you bought it with). For the umpteenth time... Apple is a hardware company. Apple makes the bulk of their money selling computers and iPods. Steve Jobs has been down the road of killing a hardware platform before in order to sell its software (which is just what many here are calling for, those too young to remember). I would not expect it to happen again. Would you pay $400 for a student license for OSX? Well, very few did. When Apple kills its hardware business to focus on sales of OSX, you'd be wise to consider selling your Apple stock.
This is largely seen as a positive thing in the mac community. Windows Media Player for Mac has always sucked. Sure it played some files QuickTime didnt, but its always been slow and buggy. Distributing the flip4mac player free is a HUGE improvement. I would agree that less competition is usually bad, but like the defunct Mac Explorer... a stagnating product is NOT competition.
As a mac/unix geek from the 80's, I thought nothing would be cooler than merging sun and apple duing the mid-late 90's when these rumors cropped up. Apple was struggling and unable to find a suitable replacement for MacOS "classic". How cool would it have been to Appleize Solaris with Mac UI on top and solaris underpants! That was then.... High flying sun stock from those days is now worth about 10% of what it was. Sun is clinging to life in a dying market and Apple is now one of the biggest unix vendors on the planet. The iPod is on the verge off turning apple's declining computer business around.
Now Sun has nothing to offer Apple other than brand recognition which really dosent count for much in a market with computer proffesionals influencing purchasing decisions. People buy Sun for Solaris and Mac's for OSX. Replacing either one with the other would kill the product. Sun's developers would balk at having to port their software to a new OS with no guarantee of its success or longevity. About the only thing Sun could offer is expertise in the server business, which Apple could get much more cheaply simply by hiring the right people. Besides, the server market is far different than it was in 1997 and if Apple wants to be successul they need new ideas, not old ones from a dying age.
Apple could buy up Sun and attempt to "fix" its existing business, but the stuff that Apple is good at, aint the stuff Sun needs. As for what might have been... Knowing what we know now and how good Jobs and OSX have been for Apple.... I am not getting a pretty picture from an Amelio/McNealy Apple/Sun.
I can imagine the exchange... "Hi, Flip. This is Bill Gates. We'd like to buy a site license for flip4mac. Which site? umm... Earth."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client =safari&rls=en&q=applescript+isight&spell=1
Wonder away... Generally OSX is highly scriptable
Speaking as a father, a gamer and someone who has watched both South Park and Porn. I would far rather have my kids watching South Park or looking a naked people on the internet than playing excessively violent video games. When I say exessive violence I mean excessive. I've been teaching my 8 year old how to play Warcraft III.
The US Govt is likely using that rule to have backdoors installed in software, but you wont see Americans being arrested for using privacy software unless they were using it to do something really bad (in which case a citation for use of outlaw software is the least of their problems). Arresting law abiding citizens for wanting to keep their conversation private is REALLY bad publicity.
I'm making a wild guess... but... The French in general and the French Canadians as well, are very concious of perserving french culture in an atmosphere of americanization. Despite the US Govt's recent buffoonery on the international scene, the USA is a HUGE cultural exporter. Movies, music, fashion, food, you name it. The French, in particular, pride themselves on being good at that culture stuff and take issue with Eminem, McDonalds and Coke stealing the brains of its children. Consequently they make all sorts of laws and regulations intended to keep France "French". I'm not sure if its still the case, but back in the mid 90's French scientists recieving govt funds were required to publish all work in French first (This was a HUGE! issue because nearly all important international journals are in English... The lingua Franca of science and culture). In Quebec there are all sorts of requlations regarding signeage. IIRC, business signs must be in French and english translations have to be in much smaller text.
The ACLU isnt defending Neonazis who march through black neighborhoods. They are defending my (and yours) right to say things the majority dosent agree with. The armed services defends our freedom against foreign threats and the ACLU defends our freedom against domestic ones.
>Ever try to get a laptop serviced UNDER WARRANTY?
Sure... I've had two warranty issues with Apple laptops. In both cases turnaround was less than 4 days from the time the laptop left my house (picked up by *express guy) till it was back in my hands. Both times the laptops were fixed and completely functional. Who are you dealing with that kept your laptop for 52 days? I have no doubt that every company has their share of service nightmares in the closet, but most customers come off just fine.
Is this a joke? You dont have school age children do you? I eat just as healthy as you, take good stuff, drink and eat lots of soy... etc I'm a cat 3 bicycle racer with 5 wins last year, so I'm in fairly decent shape too... I guess sick AT LEAST three or four times a year from something my kids bring home from school. Eating good and taking your vitamins WILL NOT keep you from getting sick any more than praying alot will.
Apple dosent want to prevent people from running Windows on Apple hardware, they want to prevent people from running MacOSX on "Tiger Direct" hardware.
This is where things turn sour for Apple... If apple allowed Dell to make their generic computers mac compatible and charged only for OS copies sold, then people would buy Dells with Windows and buy MacOS seperately (or copy it) and install it on the generic dell. For your plan to work Dell would have to tie the mac compaibility ONLY to PC's sold with MacOS OR Apple would have to pull a microsoft and charge the licensing fee for ALL computers Dell sold capable of running MacOS whether they were sold with MacOS or not. Which puts us back in the situation Apple was in before with its clone makers.
BTW, MacOS is not and was not ever the only OS that ran on Apple clones. Linux, BeOS (before there was a PC version), *BSD, and others run on mac clones. And from outset the PowerPC platform was designed to allow for multiple OS's, including OS2, AIX and even Windows NT (which was an actual product for a very short time).
History would disagree... Apple licensed the MacOS for years. Apple saw its market share constantly cannibalized by companies who sold mac compatible main boards in cheap cases for some fraction less than an equivalent Apple machine. The licensing fee in didnt even come close to making up for lost sales. Apple lost its fanny and refused to license MacOS for the G3 at ANY price (which killed mac clones).
If the licensing fee DID make the cost of the machines guess which one people would buy? Just in the past couple of years HP rebranded iPods and sold them for the same price as the Apple ones. HP no longer sells rebranded iPods (noone wanted them at the same price as the Apple branded ones).
>Making it impossible for the casual user to install (via a simple hardware check) will take a fraction
> of the effort and accomplish nearly all the benefits of a supposedly airtight copy protection scheme that will be cracked the next day anyway.
I'm inclined to disagree... In the beginning, hacking into computers required some knowledge, as did copying DVD's. Today rootkits allow those with minimal technical knowledge to command armies of zombies and even the most cluless can download software that will automatically copy DVD's. If they manage to break the lock on OSX a simple gui based installer will follow shortly to allow anyone to install it on their Wal Mart Gateways.
Allowing OSX to run poorly on non-apple machines as free advertising is insane. What kind of slogan would go with that? "Hey, we know it sucks! Honestly, it works great if you buy an Apple machine!"
>If someone figures out how to reverse entropy without increasing it somewhere else, please share it with the world.
What pamphlet did you get that from. Entropy increases overall... local variations are permitted. Applying physical laws operating on atoms to systems as complex as living beings is extremely problematic and far beyond any computer available today or in the foreseeable future. Evolution is the GUT of life science, without it Biology makes no sense and its impossible to make the jump from chemistry to biology.
I have friends who work in the operating room... they tell some very interesting and hilarious stories of what goes on when the (patients) lights go out. And "rocking out" is common enough that they dont consider it worthy of telling unless they play bad music.
>Scammer2: What if we... hum... say we're from Niger? It's not like the stupid Americans can figure it out
Fortunately for us, were TOO stupid for this one to work. How many Americans could tell you the difference between Niger and Nigeria or even that they were two seperate countries? Now you might have a point on the others... Sierra Leone (A mountain range in New Mexico?) and Ivory Coast (isnt that in Florida?).
When carbon composites fail, they do so spectacularly, as opposed to Al, steel or Ti which usually just crumple a bit. They are also prone to directional issues. A teammate of mine slammed on the brakes hard in a race to avoid a crash and the lateral forces on his fishtailing rear wheel snapped his Zipp 303 (a carbon rimmed bicycle wheel) in half. The wheel was stronger than an aluminum rim in one direction, but weak under minor lateral forces that an Al rim would easily have weathered. As for laptops on your lap.... Carbon isnt known for spontaneous failure under no load at all... Unless you're sitting on it I wouldnt worry. BTW, what is it with cyclists and good beer? Nothing like a bomber of Dreadnaught to recover after an 80 mi race.
10+ cyclists per year die in crashes while racing, many more die in training accidents. When was the last time you saw a newspaper headline on the topic? I'm sure the figures for Auto and motorcycle racing are comparable yet these deaths are hardly noticed at all by the media. There will probably be far fewer deaths in rocket racing due to the numbers involved. Any shmo with a bicycle, motorcycle or car can race those things. How many of us will be joining the amatuer rocket racing league?
Minutes of Warnambool City Council meeting:
1. Make up BS story about "static" man
2. Put Warnambool on map.
3. Tourism
4. Profit
If someone will travel to bumphuk, nowhere to see the virgin mary in someones month old pea soup, they might travel to Warnambool to meet "static man".
While the Ecuadoran family may have appeared to have nothing, they were actually living well beyond the natural state for humans. Most of human past was spent moving from place to place, hunting, gathering and gardening (not farming). Humans lived in temporary huts or caves.
Ironically, it is the "modernization" by missionaries and others which leads people to abandon perfectly self sustaining hunter gatherer lifestyles for untenable and unsuitable positions as farmers and "workers" in permanent villages that often causes so much misery. Being a peasant is an awful way to earn a living.
What if the guy adding that little bit of HTML to make the counters on each page work (presumably from the marketing company) dosent know squat about apple computers and simply put "_G5_ " on ALL the pages, not realizing (or caring) that the powerbook was a G4 and not a G5. Seems more likley than Apple playing spooky head games with people desperate enough to dig through the HTML for leads.
Which helps explain why my friends and I were using "Duh" in middle school (the "duh" years). As a thirtysomething my middle school days predate Homer Simpson. I'm not sure how Homer can lay any claim to the word, except perhaps as the OP's first exposure to it.
Re: In store hemming...
A Tailor is skilled labor. Some stores still offer in store tailoring but thats the kind of place where $150 shirts are the norm. I doubt you'll find a tailor for your $20 shirt at Old Navy. Most places make things simple and just offer enough sizes to cover *most* people and they send the rest to Big and Tall (or Plus Size) stores. Your average store clerk probably makes close to minimum wage and has no sewing skills whatsoever.