If declare that the BSD license or the GPL are not "proper licenses", that'll really put the cat among the pigeons... and it'll be pecked to death. Later versions of Windows Server 2003 already ship with Interix included, and Vista will include it as well. The majority of the programs shipped with Interix are open source applications and tools distributed under the GPL or the BSD license, and most of the libraries are from OpenBSD.
If they can't use FreeBSD or Linux, then they won't be able to use use Windows Vista either.
The Mac Clones lost money because Apple couldn't charge anything like a cost-recovery price to license generic Mac OS for the clones, because they had to entice companies to spend engineering money on a product that could only be sold as a Mac OS box. There wasn't a commodity market of Power PC boxes that they could sell into... they had to subsidise that market by selling Mac OS license for a fraction of the profit that they'd make on a comparable Mac.
The current situation is completely different. It's a win-win situation for Apple. Since they really don't have to spend a penny until after someone actually takes them up on it, they can charge as much for a license as they want... for example they could match their net profit on selling a comparable Mac. If someone takes them up on it they make as much as they would from selling the Mac and they don't have to worry about the production pipeline and shortages and inventory and hardware support. If nobody takes them up on it (unlikely, unless the license is really draconian) they can say "see, we're really not overpriced, nobody else can REALLY make a Mac any cheaper than we do".
Having Darwin available as Open Source has opened the door for running Mac OS X on just about any hardware, because most of Mac OS X is really just applications running on top of Darwin. There's one exception, and that exception actually works in Apple's favor.
Drivers for Darwin for a huge number of cards and motherboards are already there. There's no reason there can't be more. The only drivers that are likely to be a problem are video card drivers, because the biggest part of OS X that isn't in Darwin is Quartz... Apple's video subsystem.
And that's in Apple's favor. They can get royalties off the video drivers to supplement the loss of sales from computers.
One of Apple's strengths is its control of the hardware its OS runs on. Throw this away and you're also throwing away a large chunk of OSX's stability.
Classic Mac OS never had a reputation for stability, even though Apple controlled the hardware and Apple controlled the drivers.
Contrariwise... free UNIX running on the same hardware as Windows already has a well-deserved reputation for stability compared with Windows. And Free UNIX running on Apple's own hardware was more stable than classic Mac OS and more stable than the early releases of OS X. Even now, though my Mac Mini at home is reasonably good, the servers at work we have most trouble with are XServes... not the FreeBSD systems running on cast-off desktops next to them.
the programs I want to run are in the windows side of things
Then use Windows.
For me, the programs I want to run are UNIX and Macintosh programs. There's a few programs I *have* to run occasionally on the Windows side, but they're rare enough I might boot to Windows once a week.
What this does is that it gives me an opportunity to get a Mac for my next work laptop. Now, I'd rather have a Thinkpad running OS X, but putting up with the quirky Mac hardware to get away from the dorky Microsoft software is worth it.
Foot in the door for corporate America.
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
Yeh, I talked about getting a Macbook when I ran into my boss yesterday, since basically there's like 3 programs I ever run on Windows... but I *have* to run them to get my timecard in and create purchase orders.
He laughed.
But he didn't say no. Yet, anyway.
This is like Netscape vs IIS...
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
GMAIL vs PINE?
One's a mail server that includes a web interface.
One's a mail client that you can use with the server.
Comparing GMAIL and PINE is like comparing a web browser with a web server.
I'm so glad this is a "we must use open formats" bill, and not a "we must use open source" bill. Open Source software can lock you in to closed formats almost as badly as proprietary software can, simply by putting an undocumented format/interface/protocol behind a complex API.
It's a depressingly common situation to find oneself in: Reverse-engineering a protocol or format by playing with inputs and looking at outputs because that's easier than decoding (hah) the source that generates it.
The ability to boot Windows makes Mac hardware more relevant, not less.
Apple isn't a hardware company.
Apple's a design and software company that makes their money off hardware sales, like Palm was before they forgot what their product was. Licensing PalmOS, that was fine, that was playing off their strengths. Spinning off the software company and then trying to develop a replacement for something that wasn't broken... uh-huh.
I'm faster with the Apple PB/MBP keyboards than the ThinkPad one.
You might be faster, but my RSI doesn't like them any better than the iBook keyboards or the tiny keyboard on my Libretto. I need sculpted keys with a better action than Apple provides.
don't have DVI (what, it isn't 2001 yet?) and therefore can't drive big monitors well
It's on the docking station. You know, the thing you leave connected to your big monitor, keyboard, mouse, network, and power so you just have to drop the laptop in the dock and you're set. It's a shame that Apple still makes you wire all that stuff up yourself (what, it isn't 1995 yet?).
and are housed in ugly angular cases made of 1992-look shiny black plastic
Matte black plastic. They're good looking in a stealth-fighter kind of way.
Plus, they have two buttons on the trackpad, both a trackpad and a trackpoint controller, a hard drive and battery you can replace with a total of one screw between them, and an LED illuminating the whole keyboard from the top of the screen instead of gimmicky glowing keycaps.
Oh, and the best keyboard on any laptop made by anyone, instead of something with flat wobbly keys that feels like you're tying on a dead alligator.
I'd pay Apple three times the price of Tiger if I could get a copy that'd run on a Thinkpad instead of Apple's lousy hardware.
Cellphones won't replace iPods until Nokia manages to invent the Zero Point Energy battery that taps the quantum vacuum for power.
My old Nokia "bar" phone, with its black-and-white display and big fat battery pack could go a week on standby. My new phone is smaller, cuter, and if I forget to drop it in its cradle Friday night it's dead by Monday... even if I don't place a single call on it.
Unless you don't actually care whether your cellphone is actually usable as a cellphone, you're not going to be listening to music on it the way you can listen to music for hours on an iPod. It's a completely different market.
If all the documentation was in MSDN and Technet we wouldn't have to have people reverse-engineering (and re-reverse-engineering) CIFS and other interfaces on a regular bases.
Making the source code available is 100% useless unless it's available royalty-free, freely redistributable, and with no NDA. If they don't want to do that, then they need to document *and* maintain the documentation to a level that it can be used without additional resources to implement an interoperable client and server (or application and emulator).
ROMS is a clearinghouse which forwards the royalties on to artists
You mean like this?
ASCAP licenses the right to perform songs and musical works created and owned by the songwriters, composers, lyricists and music publishers who are ASCAP members and also those members of foreign performing rights organizations who are represented by ASCAP in the United States.
Can you cite a US artist who has actually received money from ROMS?
AllofMP3's affiliates in Italy and Germany have been shut down as illegal. Their compulsory licensing even if legal under Russian law isn't legal outside Russia - the only comparable licensing in the US is for covers, so downloading music from them into the US is no more legal than downloading it from Kazaa or Grokster. And how long it remains legal in Russia is going to depend on how long other world governments are too distracted by bigger fish to turn up the heat on the Russians again over copyright violations.
What is the benefit of the design decision you are making?
You get a standard, stable API for kernel components that can be used from user applications or kernel applications. It makes the design and implementation of kernel components thousands of times easier. It allows you to move trusted user applications into the kernel simply by loading them as kernel modules. Contrariwise, when you have a user application calling some kernel component repeatedly you may be able to duplicate that component into that application's user space and avoid context switches. It makes the whole distinction between user and kernel a matter of policy rather than implementation.
Those things "that people think of when they think of microkernels" are the academic things that the MIT Mach papers were all about. They're not the kinds of things that the real-time world had already been using microkernels for when Mach was conceived.
It's like the way people have gone gaga over object-oriented languages and then use languages like C++ and Java that miss the point of object orientation in so many ways.
I'm sure they don't, the point is that if Microsoft's leaving design flaws unfixed for 10 years then trusting Microsoft seems more desperate than trusting third parties.
The article on the indian voting system quotes the "NASA space pen vs Russian Pencil" story.
NASA didn't develop the "space pen", it was developed by Fisher (a private company) who made a huge profit off it. NASA paid the same price per pen that any other customer did.
Before Fisher developed the "Space Pen", both space programs used pencils. Afterwards, both programs used "Space Pens".
And the reason they don't use pencils is that conductive graphite dust and flammable pencil shavings are a really really bad idea in a pure oxygen atmosphere.
Sure, some kind of countable paper might be nice, but it leads to silly things. If you sit five people down to count marks on 100,000 pieces of paper you will not get one result. At best, you will get two or three. And, it is not repeatable.
That's why sane electoral systems hold a runoff when an election is "too close to call", or use a transferrable vote system that counts all the ballots when there's not a clear winner.
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If declare that the BSD license or the GPL are not "proper licenses", that'll really put the cat among the pigeons... and it'll be pecked to death. Later versions of Windows Server 2003 already ship with Interix included, and Vista will include it as well. The majority of the programs shipped with Interix are open source applications and tools distributed under the GPL or the BSD license, and most of the libraries are from OpenBSD.
If they can't use FreeBSD or Linux, then they won't be able to use use Windows Vista either.
The Mac Clones lost money because Apple couldn't charge anything like a cost-recovery price to license generic Mac OS for the clones, because they had to entice companies to spend engineering money on a product that could only be sold as a Mac OS box. There wasn't a commodity market of Power PC boxes that they could sell into... they had to subsidise that market by selling Mac OS license for a fraction of the profit that they'd make on a comparable Mac.
The current situation is completely different. It's a win-win situation for Apple. Since they really don't have to spend a penny until after someone actually takes them up on it, they can charge as much for a license as they want... for example they could match their net profit on selling a comparable Mac. If someone takes them up on it they make as much as they would from selling the Mac and they don't have to worry about the production pipeline and shortages and inventory and hardware support. If nobody takes them up on it (unlikely, unless the license is really draconian) they can say "see, we're really not overpriced, nobody else can REALLY make a Mac any cheaper than we do".
Having Darwin available as Open Source has opened the door for running Mac OS X on just about any hardware, because most of Mac OS X is really just applications running on top of Darwin. There's one exception, and that exception actually works in Apple's favor.
Drivers for Darwin for a huge number of cards and motherboards are already there. There's no reason there can't be more. The only drivers that are likely to be a problem are video card drivers, because the biggest part of OS X that isn't in Darwin is Quartz... Apple's video subsystem.
And that's in Apple's favor. They can get royalties off the video drivers to supplement the loss of sales from computers.
One of Apple's strengths is its control of the hardware its OS runs on. Throw this away and you're also throwing away a large chunk of OSX's stability.
Classic Mac OS never had a reputation for stability, even though Apple controlled the hardware and Apple controlled the drivers.
Contrariwise... free UNIX running on the same hardware as Windows already has a well-deserved reputation for stability compared with Windows. And Free UNIX running on Apple's own hardware was more stable than classic Mac OS and more stable than the early releases of OS X. Even now, though my Mac Mini at home is reasonably good, the servers at work we have most trouble with are XServes... not the FreeBSD systems running on cast-off desktops next to them.
the programs I want to run are in the windows side of things
Then use Windows.
For me, the programs I want to run are UNIX and Macintosh programs. There's a few programs I *have* to run occasionally on the Windows side, but they're rare enough I might boot to Windows once a week.
What this does is that it gives me an opportunity to get a Mac for my next work laptop. Now, I'd rather have a Thinkpad running OS X, but putting up with the quirky Mac hardware to get away from the dorky Microsoft software is worth it.
Yeh, I talked about getting a Macbook when I ran into my boss yesterday, since basically there's like 3 programs I ever run on Windows... but I *have* to run them to get my timecard in and create purchase orders.
He laughed.
But he didn't say no. Yet, anyway.
GMAIL vs PINE?
One's a mail server that includes a web interface.
One's a mail client that you can use with the server.
Comparing GMAIL and PINE is like comparing a web browser with a web server.
I'm so glad this is a "we must use open formats" bill, and not a "we must use open source" bill. Open Source software can lock you in to closed formats almost as badly as proprietary software can, simply by putting an undocumented format/interface/protocol behind a complex API.
It's a depressingly common situation to find oneself in: Reverse-engineering a protocol or format by playing with inputs and looking at outputs because that's easier than decoding (hah) the source that generates it.
It makes me glad we also paid all that money to brake up AT&T in the first place.
SBC is AT&T again.
It's like the scene where the Terminator pulls itself together again out of shattered chips of
frozen mercury.
The ability to boot Windows makes Mac hardware more relevant, not less.
Apple isn't a hardware company.
Apple's a design and software company that makes their money off hardware sales, like Palm was before they forgot what their product was. Licensing PalmOS, that was fine, that was playing off their strengths. Spinning off the software company and then trying to develop a replacement for something that wasn't broken... uh-huh.
And this would be different from a native Intel SoftWindows how?
I'm faster with the Apple PB/MBP keyboards than the ThinkPad one.
You might be faster, but my RSI doesn't like them any better than the iBook keyboards or the tiny keyboard on my Libretto. I need sculpted keys with a better action than Apple provides.
don't have DVI (what, it isn't 2001 yet?) and therefore can't drive big monitors well
It's on the docking station. You know, the thing you leave connected to your big monitor, keyboard, mouse, network, and power so you just have to drop the laptop in the dock and you're set. It's a shame that Apple still makes you wire all that stuff up yourself (what, it isn't 1995 yet?).
and are housed in ugly angular cases made of 1992-look shiny black plastic
Matte black plastic. They're good looking in a stealth-fighter kind of way.
Plus, they have two buttons on the trackpad, both a trackpad and a trackpoint controller, a hard drive and battery you can replace with a total of one screw between them, and an LED illuminating the whole keyboard from the top of the screen instead of gimmicky glowing keycaps.
Oh, and the best keyboard on any laptop made by anyone, instead of something with flat wobbly keys that feels like you're tying on a dead alligator.
I'd pay Apple three times the price of Tiger if I could get a copy that'd run on a Thinkpad instead of Apple's lousy hardware.
Aye, I don't even want a color display.
Cellphones won't replace iPods until Nokia manages to invent the Zero Point Energy battery that taps the quantum vacuum for power.
My old Nokia "bar" phone, with its black-and-white display and big fat battery pack could go a week on standby. My new phone is smaller, cuter, and if I forget to drop it in its cradle Friday night it's dead by Monday... even if I don't place a single call on it.
Unless you don't actually care whether your cellphone is actually usable as a cellphone, you're not going to be listening to music on it the way you can listen to music for hours on an iPod. It's a completely different market.
If all the documentation was in MSDN and Technet we wouldn't have to have people reverse-engineering (and re-reverse-engineering) CIFS and other interfaces on a regular bases.
Making the source code available is 100% useless unless it's available royalty-free, freely redistributable, and with no NDA. If they don't want to do that, then they need to document *and* maintain the documentation to a level that it can be used without additional resources to implement an interoperable client and server (or application and emulator).
You mean like this?
Can you cite a US artist who has actually received money from ROMS?
AllofMP3's affiliates in Italy and Germany have been shut down as illegal. Their compulsory licensing even if legal under Russian law isn't legal outside Russia - the only comparable licensing in the US is for covers, so downloading music from them into the US is no more legal than downloading it from Kazaa or Grokster. And how long it remains legal in Russia is going to depend on how long other world governments are too distracted by bigger fish to turn up the heat on the Russians again over copyright violations.
maybe a new iPod so small you need an electron microscope to see it...
You mean the iPod Flea?
... my daughter's iPod mini doesn't have this option. Any hacks to back-port this to previous iPods?
Hrm. But you wrote "I download the official patches just in case".
What is the benefit of the design decision you are making?
You get a standard, stable API for kernel components that can be used from user applications or kernel applications. It makes the design and implementation of kernel components thousands of times easier. It allows you to move trusted user applications into the kernel simply by loading them as kernel modules. Contrariwise, when you have a user application calling some kernel component repeatedly you may be able to duplicate that component into that application's user space and avoid context switches. It makes the whole distinction between user and kernel a matter of policy rather than implementation.
Those things "that people think of when they think of microkernels" are the academic things that the MIT Mach papers were all about. They're not the kinds of things that the real-time world had already been using microkernels for when Mach was conceived.
It's like the way people have gone gaga over object-oriented languages and then use languages like C++ and Java that miss the point of object orientation in so many ways.
Unless they're just distributing music oned by ROMS members who the hell cares whether they're paying ROMS royalties?
I'm sure they don't, the point is that if Microsoft's leaving design flaws unfixed for 10 years then trusting Microsoft seems more desperate than trusting third parties.
I'd have to be pretty desperate to install an unofficial patch.
After almost 10 years without a fix for the cross-zone attack problem, desperation is only rational.
The article on the indian voting system quotes the "NASA space pen vs Russian Pencil" story.
NASA didn't develop the "space pen", it was developed by Fisher (a private company) who made a huge profit off it. NASA paid the same price per pen that any other customer did.
Before Fisher developed the "Space Pen", both space programs used pencils. Afterwards, both programs used "Space Pens".
And the reason they don't use pencils is that conductive graphite dust and flammable pencil shavings are a really really bad idea in a pure oxygen atmosphere.
Sure, some kind of countable paper might be nice, but it leads to silly things. If you sit five people down to count marks on 100,000 pieces of paper you will not get one result. At best, you will get two or three. And, it is not repeatable.
That's why sane electoral systems hold a runoff when an election is "too close to call", or use a transferrable vote system that counts all the ballots when there's not a clear winner.