First of all, minors are human beings with human rights.
Secondly, "My house, my rules" = totalitarian dictatorship. The kids who live in such households learn to hate their parents and any/all authority figures.
REASONABLE authority with REASONABLE rules is what earns respect. Showing so little level of trust in your own child is a sure way to ensure that your child will show no trust in you.
...Why couldn't an OEM hide behind a subsidiary or spinoff marque that they could use to sell hardware without the M$ tax.
Suppose that, OK, Gateway computers HAVE to have Windows, because Gateway must follow the Way of Gates. But what's to stop Gateway from spinning off a tiny company called "Freeway, a subsidiary of Gateway" or whatever, and have *that* company sell all the non-M$ OSes they want? So M$ strips Freeway of any license to bundle M$ software. Freeway thumbs its nose and says, "So what?" Meanwhile, Gateway mocks sympathy for M$ and says, "You know, I really do wish we could better control those rogues down at Freeway. But our organization just doesn't have that level of control over our subsidiaries."
Well, that's a very good point... I guess I'd clarify what I was trying to say by saying that there's a difference between the idea of contracts and what purpose they serve in civilized society, and the actual implementation of a particular contract in practice.
Face it, contracts exist to protect BOTH signatories. If a contract protects one but not the other, it's not a very good contract for the "not the other" party to enter into.
Seriously, Apple: Way to shoot yourselves in the foot. You think this brilliant young hacker is going to forget about this? If it were I, I'd work twice as hard now... at stomping Apple into the ground for a competitor.
What was finally delivered in OS X was first promised to be in Copeland (OS 8). NeXT and Be technologies that were years ahead of their time and could/should have been integrated into the new Mac OS *weren't* when doing so might have been enough to demonstrate a massive superiority to Windows 95.
After buying a Centris 610 (LC 68040/4MB RAM/80 MB HDD/Mac OS 7.1) I waited and waited and waited for things like protected memory and preemptive multitasking to be incorporated into the OS. Apple kept promising, but IT NEVER CAME. Eventually, when I bit the bullet and HAD to upgrade, I went with Wintel, who by that time at least had *some* of that.
Now that I've been working in a Windows environment, I like multibutton mice. Get some! Another thing I really like about the Windows GUI is the fact that if I really want to, I never even have to touch my mouse. There's keyboard shortcuts that allow me to navigate to any part of an open window and select whatever option I want to. You don't quite get this in Mac OS releases before OS X. (Is it there in X? I haven't used it so I don't know.) It makes things a lot faster if you don't have to keep moving your hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back again, over and over. And holding down a key on the keyboard while clicking or dragging with the mouse to simulate stuff that could be implemented much more gracefully with a 2 button mouse is... well, crappy. But nothing's more annoying to me than coming up against a "Yes|No|Cancel" dialog window, where [Enter] is "Yes" but "No" and "Cancel" can be activated ONLY through the mouse. Lack of keyboard navigation options is RAMPANT in pre-OS X.
Another habit I enjoy thanks to becoming a Windows user is tinkering around with my hardware. Apple is good at making cases that look pretty, and with the G4 line they got good at making cases that are easy to open up, but what they still need to do is get good at making cases that have lots of bays where I can stick stuff in like extra CD/DVD drives or Zip drives or what have you... without it spoiling the beauty of the stock case.
Improving the cost/performance, as many no doubt have said, wouldn't hurt either. If I could build my own G4 architecture box for sub-$1000 I'd do it and be using OS X as my primary operating system in a heartbeat. Failing a cheap DIY G4 option, it'd be almost as good to be able to build an Althlon-based system that could run OS X... which brings me to...
Port Mac OS to other hardware or at least make the source code available so that other people can do it if you aren't willing to put forth the effort. If you're not willing to do go so far as to do this with your latest and greatest, at least consider releasing outdated versions of the OS to the opensource community so we can tinker with it. Getting your OS into the hands of the widest possible user base would pay off very well in the long run, especially once we get hooked and decide we need to have the latest and greatest.
Lastly, I'm still bitter about losing Bungie to their fate of becoming little more than friggin' XBox whores. How many consecutive MacWorld Expos did we get to drool over Halo, only to have it yanked away by the greener pastures over at M$FT? Bungie supposedly still has the rights to release games on other platforms beside the XBox, so get Bungie to at least put a version out that runs on Macs (and PCs for that matter!)
As long as people are willing to code to the bare metal to squeeze as much performance out of their hardware as possible (and then achieve a few miracles beyond that) this won't catch on. Sure, the development costs will be lessened, but at a substantial hit to performance. This will kill any company's hope in an industry where everyone's convinced that graphics is more important than gameplay. It isn't, but that's still the marketing angle that everyone uses.
Because creating a cheapo lite version of an existing product costs MORE money in development costs. Once you've got your App developed, just sell it to as many people as you can. If you're only selling a "commercial grade" product, charge a high price to recoup your costs. If you're selling to consumers, greater economies of scale set in, and you can lower your price for EVERYONE while still providing the original, full-strength product.
It's not like making cars, where, if you're building 20 a year they can be of the quality of a lamborghini, but if you have to build 2,000,000 a year you have to make some concessions to quality and you end up with something like a Ford Taurus.
The war on drugs is only one example... it's well known that the FBI tracked people they considered politically dangerous, like Martin Luther King and Abbie Hoffman... and it wasn't because they were interseted in protecting them!
"It's the same information as the front of the license," said Frank Mandelbaum, chairman and chief executive of Intelli- Check, a manufacturer of license-scanning equipment based in Woodbury, N.Y. "If I were to go into a bar and they had a photocopier, they could photocopy the license or they could write it down. They are not giving us any information that violates privacy."
It's not my name, address, height, weight, and social security number that are violations of my privacy, it's that they're collecting information about what bars I like to hang out at. Say I go to a bar regularly and a few months later a major drug bust happens. "They" check the records and find out I went there every week. Now all of a sudden They think I'm a drug user, and start tracking my other transactions more closely...
Develop multiple personality disorder. Then name your alter ego your 1337 H4x0r handle, and credit all your GPL'd work to *that* guy. The guy who earns your paychecks can find his name on his Social Security Card and possibly also his birth certificate.
And at the rate we're going, the number of species on the planet will have dwindled to around 3 million or so by then. This will make the job much easier.
IF this tool (morpheus, napster, etc.) is to be blamed for piracy, then it must necessarily follow that ALL THESE OTHER TOOLS (http, ftp, tcp/ip, the various IEEE ethernet standards, hard drives, the copy/paste commands, etc.) are also guilty.
Any sane person would see that you can't blame the latter set of technologies, so therefore if the above reasoning is correct, then it would seem to follow that the first set is also not guilty.
Thus, the sane course to take would be to not prosecute the p2p filesharing tools, but to (perhaps) prosecute actual criminal misues of these tools.
Or perhaps begin to see that the laws are ridiculous and in dire need of updating.
If that's true, then why the hell aren't we getting any royalties for licensing the Idea of Free Speech to other countries?
Dammit, if these rogue nations aren't going to pay up for the privilege of using our idea, we'd damn well better shut them up until they do! Otherwise all our intellectual properties will become vulnerable to the idea thieves!
But not if it only applied to this current release of Windows. If the next release gets to be closed-source again, there's absolutely no teeth to the ruling.
Slashdot Mirror
They'd get a LOT of press if the car crashed as much as the OS.
I'm thinking that a Blue Airbag of Death would be do-able...
And unlike this case mod, they're very pretty and functional. And you can build one yourself.
www.monolithicdome.com
First of all, minors are human beings with human rights.
Secondly, "My house, my rules" = totalitarian dictatorship. The kids who live in such households learn to hate their parents and any/all authority figures.
REASONABLE authority with REASONABLE rules is what earns respect. Showing so little level of trust in your own child is a sure way to ensure that your child will show no trust in you.
...Why couldn't an OEM hide behind a subsidiary or spinoff marque that they could use to sell hardware without the M$ tax.
Suppose that, OK, Gateway computers HAVE to have Windows, because Gateway must follow the Way of Gates. But what's to stop Gateway from spinning off a tiny company called "Freeway, a subsidiary of Gateway" or whatever, and have *that* company sell all the non-M$ OSes they want? So M$ strips Freeway of any license to bundle M$ software. Freeway thumbs its nose and says, "So what?" Meanwhile, Gateway mocks sympathy for M$ and says, "You know, I really do wish we could better control those rogues down at Freeway. But our organization just doesn't have that level of control over our subsidiaries."
Why couldn't this work?
Well, that's a very good point... I guess I'd clarify what I was trying to say by saying that there's a difference between the idea of contracts and what purpose they serve in civilized society, and the actual implementation of a particular contract in practice.
Then why have contracts for ANYONE?
Face it, contracts exist to protect BOTH signatories. If a contract protects one but not the other, it's not a very good contract for the "not the other" party to enter into.
I now have a reason to want children...
Seriously, Apple: Way to shoot yourselves in the foot. You think this brilliant young hacker is going to forget about this? If it were I, I'd work twice as hard now... at stomping Apple into the ground for a competitor.
I know Bungie *announced* Halo for PC and Mac, but I haven't SEEN it. And we all know what announcements are worth.
As long as people are willing to code to the bare metal to squeeze as much performance out of their hardware as possible (and then achieve a few miracles beyond that) this won't catch on. Sure, the development costs will be lessened, but at a substantial hit to performance. This will kill any company's hope in an industry where everyone's convinced that graphics is more important than gameplay. It isn't, but that's still the marketing angle that everyone uses.
I think they got it wrong... 1000x better isn't plausible PlayStation 3. Perhaps PlayStation x10^3 would be more appropriate.
Why not?
Because creating a cheapo lite version of an existing product costs MORE money in development costs. Once you've got your App developed, just sell it to as many people as you can. If you're only selling a "commercial grade" product, charge a high price to recoup your costs. If you're selling to consumers, greater economies of scale set in, and you can lower your price for EVERYONE while still providing the original, full-strength product.
It's not like making cars, where, if you're building 20 a year they can be of the quality of a lamborghini, but if you have to build 2,000,000 a year you have to make some concessions to quality and you end up with something like a Ford Taurus.
The war on drugs is only one example... it's well known that the FBI tracked people they considered politically dangerous, like Martin Luther King and Abbie Hoffman... and it wasn't because they were interseted in protecting them!
Yay, google! I wish I could own stock in you!!!
It's creepy
Anyone else find the author's middle name to be unusual?
Develop multiple personality disorder. Then name your alter ego your 1337 H4x0r handle, and credit all your GPL'd work to *that* guy. The guy who earns your paychecks can find his name on his Social Security Card and possibly also his birth certificate.
What? Gygax doesn't have a staff? Quick, someone go get a nice walking stick while I prepare to cast "Enchant an Item"...
Perhaps they should strategically rename themselves "Mission Impossible".
Just wait 25 years...
And at the rate we're going, the number of species on the planet will have dwindled to around 3 million or so by then. This will make the job much easier.
I'll just be sure to wear my golf cleats.
and here I am, working as a computer technician.
That's kindof the point isn't it?
IF this tool (morpheus, napster, etc.) is to be blamed for piracy, then it must necessarily follow that ALL THESE OTHER TOOLS (http, ftp, tcp/ip, the various IEEE ethernet standards, hard drives, the copy/paste commands, etc.) are also guilty.
Any sane person would see that you can't blame the latter set of technologies, so therefore if the above reasoning is correct, then it would seem to follow that the first set is also not guilty.
Thus, the sane course to take would be to not prosecute the p2p filesharing tools, but to (perhaps) prosecute actual criminal misues of these tools.
Or perhaps begin to see that the laws are ridiculous and in dire need of updating.
If that's true, then why the hell aren't we getting any royalties for licensing the Idea of Free Speech to other countries?
Dammit, if these rogue nations aren't going to pay up for the privilege of using our idea, we'd damn well better shut them up until they do! Otherwise all our intellectual properties will become vulnerable to the idea thieves!
But not if it only applied to this current release of Windows. If the next release gets to be closed-source again, there's absolutely no teeth to the ruling.