THe Mac Mini isn't cheap, except as a Mac. It's at least $150 more expensive than a comparably crippled entry-level PC. It's only "cheap" because that's less than half the "Mac Tax" you'd have to pay on anything else.
Why do you think going to Intel is going to make Macs cheaper? The G4 is not a horribly expensive chip - you can't buy it retail but quantity prices are under $100, and comparable Intel chips aren't any cheaper than that.
I had no idea. Microsoft's currently got a handheld os for handhelds, and a desktop OS for handhelds and desktops and servers, but they haven't released a server OS that I know of... or are they counting Interix?
Oh no, VIM is an evil sham even without the cosmetics added.
I'm not sure I get what you mean by it not really being modal.
If it was modal, then when you type "i" you would just change mode. You would then type a bunch of stuff and then hit "ESC". At this point if you hit "u" for undo it would undo the last character you typed. Instead, it undoes everything between the "i" and the "esc". Because what really happened is you executed an "insert this text" command, that started with the "i" and went on to the "ESC".
You can hit "redo" and redo the insert command.
You can enter "3i...ESC" and insert "..." 3 times.
They have plenty of competition. The majority of the markets are served by multiple broadband vendors (Cable, Satellite, wireless, fiber) . So, it's not all DSL.
Yes.
I know.
I already said "cable is competition".
The point is that these "DSL companies" are not "competition", they are "customers".
Just like all the other fantasy-baseball style "competition" that deregulation fans are so enamored of.
Most notable amongst all of this is how they brought the computer into the home and to everyone and his grandmother.
You really think that Microsoft Basic was that important a part of the success of the Apple-][ and TRS-80 and the rest? I mean, it was OK for a Basic, and Applesoft was more capable than Integer, but most users never used Basic... they just ran canned software... particularly on the Commodore-64 and Atari-800s that really brought the computer into the home to everyone and his grandmother... and I'm not sure they were using Microsoft Basic anyway...
I'm sorry, I just get so many damn idiots cracking wise about vi that I get really tired of it.
The thing about vi is that it's not really a modal editor. That is, the way the editing commands work don't really match very well to the idea of a "mode". If you think of it as being a command-based editor like TECO, but with better feedback, it's a lot more comfortable to use.
So you don't hit "i" to go into "insert mode", and "ESC" to go to "command mode", you enter a single command "iwhatever the text isESC".
When I'm using vim, every now and then... maybe as often as every few minutes when I'm doing a lot of little changes, it doesn't quite model this properly... it acts like it's doing modal stuff. I don't know exactly where it does it, I'm not watching for it... I just find myself with my fingers out of sync with vim.
Ov the "vi" clones, only "elvis" has avoided this kind of problem.
I prefer "nvi", I've gotten used to it, I really like the way its undo stack works. It's real "vi". But "vim" just isn't. It's like, oh, a Casiotone next to a Yamaha DX-7. Neither of them is a modern synth, but you wouldn't mistake one for the other.
I'm not sure how someone buying DSL from the telco and selling it to you counts as "competition".
Competition is what you get when you've got multiple vendors selling comparable services. Cable is in competition with DSL. Someone buying DSL from SBC is not in competition with SBC, they're in competition with the other people buying DSL from SBC.
The whole telco deregulation effort has been a process of creating one illusion of some imaginary competitive market after another. If there's effective competition for the telco, great. If there isn't, it should be a regulated monopoly.
1. Macintosh. Until the early '90s, Mac OS was a lot cheaper than Windows, simply because until the '386 Intel didn't make a processor that could handle big (for the time) bitmapped graphics screens. When you're operating on objects larger than 64k using a CPU that had to perform MMU operations every time you reloaded a segment register the whole idea of bitmapped graphics is a joke.
2. Amiga. Real-time microkernel, accelerated graphics in 1985. Bit of a problem with the game machine rep, but it was a killer video engine.
3. Mini and workstation: Xerox, Sun, AT&T, IBM, DEC, SGI, Intel,...
4. GEM on Atari, PC, etc...
Microsoft wasn't even vaguely "the man on the white horse". They had lots of great marketing, but their implementation was worthless until the 386 got down to an affordable price and they came up with a 32-bit API. Yes, I know people were running Windows on 286 and even 8088, but you had to be dedicated.
If you don't change the default settings it pretty much acts as dumb as vi.
If your understanding of vi is so shallow that you think "it pretty much acts as dumb as vi" is an amusing bon-mot, you probably wouldn't understand the answer.
I got modded "offtopic" for posting a link to the actual Sony offhand mention of running Tiger on the PS3.
I don't believe it, but I don't quite disbelieve it either.
Wouldn't hat put the cat among the pigeons? Both Apple and Microsoft driving game engines and using a different CPU to keep the console and desktop market separate. Works better than DRM, too...
I can't build PowerPC whitebox and insert a OS X CD and click install.
You could if you had the right hardware and you had a boot PROM that knew how to load an OS from an HFS+ CDROM.
Calling a file system and partitioning format "DRM" is stretching the name out of all recognition.
Or, in my case, "the CDROM image didn't have the drivers for my hardware". If that's the case, every new motherboard from Intel has DRM that someone has to "break" before you can install Linux on it.
If the new OS is going to refuse to boot if it doesn't find the right keys in the motherboard, that's a whole different kettle of fish. Running Mac OS 10.9 (Cheshire Cat) on a no-longer-supported Intel Mac from 1996 may actually become a federal crime under the DMCA.:-(
Apple uses DRM today to lock OSX to Apple computers. They been doing it for years and have publicly stated they will do it for the Mactel computers.
No, they haven't been doing it for years and years. There's no copy protection in Mac OS or Mac OS X, no certificates, CD keys, authentication codes, or other mechanisms to explicitly check if you're running on a GenuineMac. The computer itself was the dongle, and if you were using an unsupported Mac, or using a newer PROM, or you replaced your CPU or anything else on the motherboard and took wirecutters and soldersuckers to it and added piggyback RAM sockets... you could do that.
Even if they don't abuse the DRM, the fact that there's now a dongle-chip in the Mac makes it more likely that it won't stay usable over the years. I'm only using a Mac now because I could run Mac OS X on a machine that Apple NEVER supported OS X on. I couldn't justify the cost of a newer Mac just to see if it was really what it sounded like, but I could afford a junker machine and a few bits to upgrade it. I had to replace the CPU with a G3, and use XPostFacto to patch the boot so it would work. None of that is likely to be possible when your Intel Mac gets old and grey.
The question you must ask yourself is this: "Are my fears consistent with the past and current behavior of Apple with regard to DRM and usage rights?"
No, that's not it.
See, strong DRM doesn't imply highly restrictive rights. Apple could implement strong DRM in iTunes without changing the policies they implement using strong DRM. They could (for example) complete shut out applications like HYMN... and still let you "Mix, Burn, Rip" the DRM off the music itself. The stringth of the DRM mechanism and the restrictiveness of the DRM policies are unrelated.
So the fact that Apple has historically treated DRM as nothing more than a bone to toss to the labels isn't really an answer. It's a great answer to the question "How likely is it for Apple to create a general purpose TPM framework?"... and in fact I've made that same argument myself, but it doesn't answer "How likely is it for Apple to use this general purpose TPM framework to implement strong DRM?" at all.
I'm not saying "People are concerned about this because they're afraid of Apple implementing a draconian DRM policy". Some people may be, but as you say they've not done that in the past so I don't believe that's likely.
I'm saying "People are concerned about this because they're afraid of Apple implementing a strong DRM implementation". Because no matter what policy Apple applies, a strong DRM implementation can only work if the OS is far more locked down and controlled than Mac OS X has been up to now.
And while Apple is currently very open about the OS and hardware, and letting people run OS X on unsupported hardware using the Darwin sources to replace components Apple left out, Apple is very controlling in other areas and has been more controlling in the past.
So it's not as unreasonable a fear as you're making out, honest.
It violates compartmentalization. It should not be possible for anything in a web page to cause a document to be passed off to any application that has not specifically registered itself as a handler for web content.
In the case of Firefox on the Mac, that means it shouldn't trust LaunchServices, because LaunchServices includes any application that wants to handle local content. It should only trust "Library/Internet Plugins", and then when necessary (such as for itms:) add specific cases of LaunchServices entries that are known to be intended for web content. So if YOU want to allow TextEdit to be usable as a handler, YOU should be able to _explicitly_ add it to the list firefox maintains.
If this isn't done, then they haven't learned the lesson of the help: hole and the x-man-page: hole. There will be more holes like that in the future, and a web browser that's supposed to be "secure" should simply close of that whole avenue of attack.
Well, for starters, someone (Blex86r from the OSX86 project) got OS X for x86 running in VMWare.
That doesn't mean Apple isn't using a DRM chip, it just means that they're not using it in an effective way to implement a boot lock. As I noted in a previous comment, it would really make most sense for Apple to use DRM for this if they had implemented TPM drivers anyway for some other purpose.
I've got an Intel motherboard awaiting FreeBSD 5.4.
Don't have any awaiting Vista.
Reminds me of an old campfire song I remember from summers in the '70s...
Flea Flea Fly Flea Fly Flo Vista! Coomalah, coomalah, coomalah Vista! Oh, no no, no not the Vista! Beat dillee oten doten bo ho be deten daten. Shhhh....
There's a proof I am right: here. Windows XP running on a apple developer intel machine.
What does that prove? DRM isn't there to keep you from using unprotected content on protected hardware, it's there to prevent you from using protected content on unprotected hardware.
The crux of the biscuit is whether Apple uses the TPM support they've implemented in the OSX kernel to protect audiovisual media... that is, whether they were implementing DRM support anyway and that just made this a convenient way to build the dongle.
I don't understand what all of the excitement surrounding these rumors of Apple including DRM technology on the Macintels is about.
It's got very little to do with boot protection, and everything to do with the restrictions that Apple would have to impose on OS X to make the kind of strong DRM that Microsoft uses and promotes realistic.
If Apple were to meaningfully use DRM for more than boot protection, which is what is implied by the presence of a DRM chip and a TPM module in the kernel (because DRM is a really bizarre method of implementing boot protection... they could do it much easier and more effectively in other ways), then they would need to close the kernel and driver kits, go to signed drivers, all the **** that Microsoft's pushing.
My understanding from the time was that they did it that way (multiple booster segments instead of one massive piece) was because of curing issues.
They did it that way because of the limits on what they could ship between Utah and Florida by rail: the size of the segments was determined by the width of railway cuts and the strength of bridges and the radius of turns. There was a huge flap when Morton Thiokol got the contract because that meant they couldn't ship the boosters on barges.
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We need to go back to the original real-time multitasking game OS... AmigaDOS!
THe Mac Mini isn't cheap, except as a Mac. It's at least $150 more expensive than a comparably crippled entry-level PC. It's only "cheap" because that's less than half the "Mac Tax" you'd have to pay on anything else.
Why do you think going to Intel is going to make Macs cheaper? The G4 is not a horribly expensive chip - you can't buy it retail but quantity prices are under $100, and comparable Intel chips aren't any cheaper than that.
I don't think most consumers who have WinXP use or need it.
Well, they certainly don't need Windows XP, and shouldn't use it. They'd be more than adequately served by a PS/2.
I not so sure a consumer version really needs a command line utility anyway.
Microsoft's consumer OS ships with... COMMAND.COM.
Apple's consumer OS ships with... Applescript, bash, tcsh, Perl, PHP, and Automator. At least.
I had no idea. Microsoft's currently got a handheld os for handhelds, and a desktop OS for handhelds and desktops and servers, but they haven't released a server OS that I know of... or are they counting Interix?
Oh no, VIM is an evil sham even without the cosmetics added.
I'm not sure I get what you mean by it not really being modal.
If it was modal, then when you type "i" you would just change mode. You would then type a bunch of stuff and then hit "ESC". At this point if you hit "u" for undo it would undo the last character you typed. Instead, it undoes everything between the "i" and the "esc". Because what really happened is you executed an "insert this text" command, that started with the "i" and went on to the "ESC".
You can hit "redo" and redo the insert command.
You can enter "3i...ESC" and insert "..." 3 times.
They have plenty of competition. The majority of the markets are served by multiple broadband vendors (Cable, Satellite, wireless, fiber) . So, it's not all DSL.
Yes.
I know.
I already said "cable is competition".
The point is that these "DSL companies" are not "competition", they are "customers".
Just like all the other fantasy-baseball style "competition" that deregulation fans are so enamored of.
Most notable amongst all of this is how they brought the computer into the home and to everyone and his grandmother.
You really think that Microsoft Basic was that important a part of the success of the Apple-][ and TRS-80 and the rest? I mean, it was OK for a Basic, and Applesoft was more capable than Integer, but most users never used Basic... they just ran canned software... particularly on the Commodore-64 and Atari-800s that really brought the computer into the home to everyone and his grandmother... and I'm not sure they were using Microsoft Basic anyway...
I'm sorry, I just get so many damn idiots cracking wise about vi that I get really tired of it.
The thing about vi is that it's not really a modal editor. That is, the way the editing commands work don't really match very well to the idea of a "mode". If you think of it as being a command-based editor like TECO, but with better feedback, it's a lot more comfortable to use.
So you don't hit "i" to go into "insert mode", and "ESC" to go to "command mode", you enter a single command "iwhatever the text isESC".
When I'm using vim, every now and then... maybe as often as every few minutes when I'm doing a lot of little changes, it doesn't quite model this properly... it acts like it's doing modal stuff. I don't know exactly where it does it, I'm not watching for it... I just find myself with my fingers out of sync with vim.
Ov the "vi" clones, only "elvis" has avoided this kind of problem.
I prefer "nvi", I've gotten used to it, I really like the way its undo stack works. It's real "vi". But "vim" just isn't. It's like, oh, a Casiotone next to a Yamaha DX-7. Neither of them is a modern synth, but you wouldn't mistake one for the other.
I'm not sure how someone buying DSL from the telco and selling it to you counts as "competition".
Competition is what you get when you've got multiple vendors selling comparable services. Cable is in competition with DSL. Someone buying DSL from SBC is not in competition with SBC, they're in competition with the other people buying DSL from SBC.
The whole telco deregulation effort has been a process of creating one illusion of some imaginary competitive market after another. If there's effective competition for the telco, great. If there isn't, it should be a regulated monopoly.
1. Macintosh. Until the early '90s, Mac OS was a lot cheaper than Windows, simply because until the '386 Intel didn't make a processor that could handle big (for the time) bitmapped graphics screens. When you're operating on objects larger than 64k using a CPU that had to perform MMU operations every time you reloaded a segment register the whole idea of bitmapped graphics is a joke.
...
2. Amiga. Real-time microkernel, accelerated graphics in 1985. Bit of a problem with the game machine rep, but it was a killer video engine.
3. Mini and workstation: Xerox, Sun, AT&T, IBM, DEC, SGI, Intel,
4. GEM on Atari, PC, etc...
Microsoft wasn't even vaguely "the man on the white horse". They had lots of great marketing, but their implementation was worthless until the 386 got down to an affordable price and they came up with a 32-bit API. Yes, I know people were running Windows on 286 and even 8088, but you had to be dedicated.
What's wrong with vim?
It's a superficial emulation of vi at best.
If you don't change the default settings it pretty much acts as dumb as vi.
If your understanding of vi is so shallow that you think "it pretty much acts as dumb as vi" is an amusing bon-mot, you probably wouldn't understand the answer.
I got modded "offtopic" for posting a link to the actual Sony offhand mention of running Tiger on the PS3.
I don't believe it, but I don't quite disbelieve it either.
Wouldn't hat put the cat among the pigeons? Both Apple and Microsoft driving game engines and using a different CPU to keep the console and desktop market separate. Works better than DRM, too...
Was it an Apple or a Mac Clone?
:-(
Powermac 7500.
I can't build PowerPC whitebox and insert a OS X CD and click install.
You could if you had the right hardware and you had a boot PROM that knew how to load an OS from an HFS+ CDROM.
Calling a file system and partitioning format "DRM" is stretching the name out of all recognition.
Or, in my case, "the CDROM image didn't have the drivers for my hardware". If that's the case, every new motherboard from Intel has DRM that someone has to "break" before you can install Linux on it.
If the new OS is going to refuse to boot if it doesn't find the right keys in the motherboard, that's a whole different kettle of fish. Running Mac OS 10.9 (Cheshire Cat) on a no-longer-supported Intel Mac from 1996 may actually become a federal crime under the DMCA.
Apple uses DRM today to lock OSX to Apple computers. They been doing it for years and have publicly stated they will do it for the Mactel computers.
No, they haven't been doing it for years and years. There's no copy protection in Mac OS or Mac OS X, no certificates, CD keys, authentication codes, or other mechanisms to explicitly check if you're running on a GenuineMac. The computer itself was the dongle, and if you were using an unsupported Mac, or using a newer PROM, or you replaced your CPU or anything else on the motherboard and took wirecutters and soldersuckers to it and added piggyback RAM sockets... you could do that.
Even if they don't abuse the DRM, the fact that there's now a dongle-chip in the Mac makes it more likely that it won't stay usable over the years. I'm only using a Mac now because I could run Mac OS X on a machine that Apple NEVER supported OS X on. I couldn't justify the cost of a newer Mac just to see if it was really what it sounded like, but I could afford a junker machine and a few bits to upgrade it. I had to replace the CPU with a G3, and use XPostFacto to patch the boot so it would work. None of that is likely to be possible when your Intel Mac gets old and grey.
The question you must ask yourself is this: "Are my fears consistent with the past and current behavior of Apple with regard to DRM and usage rights?"
No, that's not it.
See, strong DRM doesn't imply highly restrictive rights. Apple could implement strong DRM in iTunes without changing the policies they implement using strong DRM. They could (for example) complete shut out applications like HYMN... and still let you "Mix, Burn, Rip" the DRM off the music itself. The stringth of the DRM mechanism and the restrictiveness of the DRM policies are unrelated.
So the fact that Apple has historically treated DRM as nothing more than a bone to toss to the labels isn't really an answer. It's a great answer to the question "How likely is it for Apple to create a general purpose TPM framework?"... and in fact I've made that same argument myself, but it doesn't answer "How likely is it for Apple to use this general purpose TPM framework to implement strong DRM?" at all.
I'm not saying "People are concerned about this because they're afraid of Apple implementing a draconian DRM policy". Some people may be, but as you say they've not done that in the past so I don't believe that's likely.
I'm saying "People are concerned about this because they're afraid of Apple implementing a strong DRM implementation". Because no matter what policy Apple applies, a strong DRM implementation can only work if the OS is far more locked down and controlled than Mac OS X has been up to now.
And while Apple is currently very open about the OS and hardware, and letting people run OS X on unsupported hardware using the Darwin sources to replace components Apple left out, Apple is very controlling in other areas and has been more controlling in the past.
So it's not as unreasonable a fear as you're making out, honest.
It violates compartmentalization. It should not be possible for anything in a web page to cause a document to be passed off to any application that has not specifically registered itself as a handler for web content.
In the case of Firefox on the Mac, that means it shouldn't trust LaunchServices, because LaunchServices includes any application that wants to handle local content. It should only trust "Library/Internet Plugins", and then when necessary (such as for itms:) add specific cases of LaunchServices entries that are known to be intended for web content. So if YOU want to allow TextEdit to be usable as a handler, YOU should be able to _explicitly_ add it to the list firefox maintains.
If this isn't done, then they haven't learned the lesson of the help: hole and the x-man-page: hole. There will be more holes like that in the future, and a web browser that's supposed to be "secure" should simply close of that whole avenue of attack.
Sony is expected to offer optional hard drives for the PS3 with potential memory capacity of 80 or 120 GB. It remains to be decided whether the standard version of the PS3 will come complete with a hard drive. The operating system has also yet to be clarified. The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger).
If they breach their contract with Apple, what makes you think they would tell _you_ the truth?
Obviously their man'chi is towards the computer community rather than Apple.
Well, for starters, someone (Blex86r from the OSX86 project) got OS X for x86 running in VMWare.
That doesn't mean Apple isn't using a DRM chip, it just means that they're not using it in an effective way to implement a boot lock. As I noted in a previous comment, it would really make most sense for Apple to use DRM for this if they had implemented TPM drivers anyway for some other purpose.
And that is where this becomes interesting.
I've got an Intel motherboard awaiting FreeBSD 5.4.
Don't have any awaiting Vista.
Reminds me of an old campfire song I remember from summers in the '70s...
Flea
Flea Fly
Flea Fly Flo
Vista!
Coomalah, coomalah, coomalah Vista!
Oh, no no, no not the Vista!
Beat dillee oten doten bo ho be deten daten.
Shhhh....
There's a proof I am right: here. Windows XP running on a apple developer intel machine.
What does that prove? DRM isn't there to keep you from using unprotected content on protected hardware, it's there to prevent you from using protected content on unprotected hardware.
The crux of the biscuit is whether Apple uses the TPM support they've implemented in the OSX kernel to protect audiovisual media... that is, whether they were implementing DRM support anyway and that just made this a convenient way to build the dongle.
I don't understand what all of the excitement surrounding these rumors of Apple including DRM technology on the Macintels is about.
It's got very little to do with boot protection, and everything to do with the restrictions that Apple would have to impose on OS X to make the kind of strong DRM that Microsoft uses and promotes realistic.
If Apple were to meaningfully use DRM for more than boot protection, which is what is implied by the presence of a DRM chip and a TPM module in the kernel (because DRM is a really bizarre method of implementing boot protection... they could do it much easier and more effectively in other ways), then they would need to close the kernel and driver kits, go to signed drivers, all the **** that Microsoft's pushing.
I can't get Firefox to open the file in TextEdit.
Save to disk.
Open in Finder.
Open in TextEdit from Firefox? Please tell me that isn't possible.
My understanding from the time was that they did it that way (multiple booster segments instead of one massive piece) was because of curing issues.
They did it that way because of the limits on what they could ship between Utah and Florida by rail: the size of the segments was determined by the width of railway cuts and the strength of bridges and the radius of turns. There was a huge flap when Morton Thiokol got the contract because that meant they couldn't ship the boosters on barges.