In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it. Where is the RED CROSS? Where is anyone with food or water or medicine? The National Guard is tooling around in empty trucks. The cops are too busy keeping people from leaving the city, and herding them at gunpoint. This is not libertarianism-- this is fascist socialism.
500 tourists were stopped by the police as they tried to exit the city tonight. One was interviewed on CNN. They were stopped at gunpoint. Their busses, which they had paid for, were commandered. And not to pick up people who needed them-- there are thousands standing outside the superdome, who have been there for 3 days, and have gotten ZERO busses. No, the police just stole them, and forced the tourists back into the city at gunpoint. Wouldn't let them walk out. If some of those tourists had had firearms and the sense to use them, less of them would die than will now die because of this police action. THIS IS THE SOCIALIST POLICE STATE IN ACTION.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
You're a fucking idiot, and you know everything you say is a lie, but you are so fucking pathetic all you can do is run around and smear your betters because your bullshit theories don't play in the real world. Fortunately, reality is pretty good at keeping score, and all the pain you're spewing in this thread is well earned. Try being a decent human sometime.
No. Coercion means you signed the contract because I have a gun to your head.
It doesn't mean you signed the contract because it was the best deal you could get.
If you couldn't, or wouldn't, get a better deal elsewhere, then you weren't coerced.
YOU are the one who wants to enslave everyone by saying that they can only enter into deals you agree with, no matter whether they agree with them or not. This is what minimum wage is-- more people have starved because of minimum wage than would have without it.
You socialists would rather people be unemployed for the whole week at $5 an hour and make $0 that week, than employed at less than minimum wage and make $150 that week.
I believe you have never met a libertarian, or you are not being honest about what they believe .
for instance, in a free market, there would be no monopolies-- because the only way monopolies can exist is when government creates them.
In a free market, if someone got monopoly power, they would quickly lose it because their prices would be above market rates.
Hell, even opec wasn't able to keep pricing power.
Libertarians don't believe in slavery. Democrats do. They just call it "taxes".
Libertarians don't want to seize power-- because doing so would be to violate others rights.
Libertarians believe in capitalism which, unlike the communism you seem to espouse, DOES WORK in the real world.
Libertarians in the area would be in New Orleans right now sellign food at cost and water at cost and getting people fed and hydrated... but the socialists will not let them in. Hell, the socialist police state you lvoe so much will not even let the red cross in.
On the contrary-- this is exactly what you socialists want. The government is in charge, didn't let people get out, has been running around stealing property....
In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it. Where is the RED CROSS? Where is anyone with food or water or medicine? The National Guard is tooling around in empty trucks. The cops are too busy keeping people from leaving the city, and herding them at gunpoint. This is not libertarianism-- this is fascist socialism.
500 tourists were stopped by the police as they tried to exit the city tonight. One was interviewed on CNN. They were stopped at gunpoint. Their busses, which they had paid for, were commandered. And not to pick up people who needed them-- there are thousands standing outside the superdome, who have been there for 3 days, and have gotten ZERO busses. No, the police just stole them, and forced the tourists back into the city at gunpoint. Wouldn't let them walk out. If some of those tourists had had firearms and the sense to use them, less of them would die than will now die because of this police action. THIS IS THE SOCIALIST POLICE STATE IN ACTION.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
Congratulations. Thousands dead. You happy?
-- its very interesting that the troll posts are getting modded up and anyone who disagrees is getting modded down. Proof that the slashdot moderation system is totally broken.
On the contrary-- this is exactly what you socialists want. The government is in charge, didn't let people get out, has been running around stealing property....
In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it.
500 tourists were stopped by the police as they tried to exit the city tonight. One was interviewed on CNN. They were stopped at gunpoint. Their busses, which they had paid for, were commandered. And not to pick up people who needed them-- there are thousands standing outside the superdome, who have been there for 3 days, and have gotten ZERO busses. No, the police just stole them, and forced the tourists back into the city at gunpoint. Wouldn't let them walk out. If some of those tourists had had firearms and the sense to use them, less of them would die than will now die because of this police action. THIS IS THE SOCIALIST POLICE STATE IN ACTION.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
This is not anarchy-- this is what happens when you have police prevent anyone from leaving the city-- at gunpoint.. have the polcie barge in and start looting, and have the police herding people and denying them access to food or water,
This is a storm ravaged city under siege from the police!
If it were a libertarian situation, people would be trucking in supplies by ton.
But what would happen if you wnt to Baton Rouge and loaded up a truck with supplies and water and drove into New Orleans right now? You'd be stopped at hte border of town and forced to LEAVE!
IF you managed to make it in and sell the food and wwater, you'd be arrested.
WHERE is the Red Cross? Where is anyone giving out or selling food and water in New Orleans?
On the contrary-- this is exactly what you socialists want. The government is in charge, didn't let people get out, has been running around stealing property....
In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
"Looting: The police are looting. This has been confirmed by several independent sources. Some of the looting might be "legitimate" in as much as that word has any meaning in this context. They have broken into ATMs and safes: confirmed. We have eyewitnesses to this. They have taken dozens of SUVs from dealerships ostensibly for official use. They have also looted gun stores and pawn shops for all the small arms, supposedly to prevent "criminals" from doing so. But who knows their true intentions. We have an inside source in the NOPD who says that command and control is in chaos. He reports that command lapses more than 24 hours between check-ins, and that most of the force are "like deer in the headlights." NOPD already had a reputation for corruption, but I am telling you now that the people we've been talking to say they are not recognizing the NOPD as a legitimate authority anymore, since cops have been seen looting in Walmarts and forcing people out of stores so they could back up SUVs and loot them. Don't shoot the messenger...."
Its very interesting that this disaster is also showing what others have--- those with guns are able to protect their property. The police bugged out and are doing nothing.
Last night on CNN, I saw some storeowner holding a pistol (correctly, unlike the cop they showed in the previous shot, who aimed a shotgun at someone looking at debris)... and the comentator said "while some are taking the law into their own hands". JESUS. That's not the law, that's called self defense.
Yes, we should all be sheep and depend on the government to protect us--- and what do we get? A world class screwup, every time. Just look at New Orleans.
Hell, the dikes wouldn't have overflowed if the repair money to fix them hadn't been diverted to the dept of homeland "security" last summer.
It was interesting to see in that blog that what I've heard elsewhere is confirmed: Police are doing much of the looting.
Its unfortunate that government sweeps in during disasters and starts making mandates that make things worse. Like prohibitions against price "gauging". What, they htink things get cheaper when the infrastructure is destroyed?
Gauging actually helps-- it brings in more supply to service that demand, and ultimately prices go down FASTER when the free market is allowed.
I find it amazing that GTA has been out in a variety of versions, and far more violent games are out there as well, with little complaint.
But someone manages to unlock some code showing tits and suddenly all hell is breaking loose?
Its boob-gate all over again.
Bottom line is, if Rockstar wants to release a game with really kinky sex, its their right. This is the very definition of free speech.
All this whining over some boobs (or is the real outrage that it shows a black man and a white woman?) just shows how out of line people's priorities are... and how much people seem to want to control other people.
You don't like it, don't buy it. It should end with that.
The reality is, in a case like this (And probably in more serious cases as well) %90 of the time a cop giving "testimony" is committing perjury.
Cops lie, on the stand, ALL the time. The reason they do this is that they are immune from prosecution. The DA and the judges all work for the same employer as the cops, that is to say, the government. So, since they all see each toher all the time, there is no way in hell anyone of them is going to testify against the other.
Which means cops can, and do, get away with murder, and perjur themselves about it.
Its a screwed up system. This guy got off because he made it embarassing by revealing the reality of the situation in open court.
Mac market share has always been bigger than was generally reported in the press. Not bigger than windows, but bigger than it was reported.
This diminishing of the Mac's market share has gone on since at least 1990. It was particularly bad when Apple was selling so many machines with CD-ROMs (because you couldn't get PCs with CD Roms) that they had %26 of annual sales and %50 of the addressable household market... yet PC Week was reporting things like "Analyst so and so says that Windows has %80 market share."
Macs have always been the number 2 platform, but for a long time they were a close number 2. Its just never been reported accurately, or to be truthful, honestly.
When making a decision as to whether to write an application for a given platform, you want the market share of that platform, or the Total Addressable Market. These are correct uses of the term. Installed Base is another figure, which is not a percentage, but a quantity.
When the "analysts" talk about "market share" and go off of the last years sales data, they are using it incorrectly. Don't let their consistent use of it in this way convince you that they are right.
As an aside, its amazing how pathetic the analysis in this industry is. Its about as poor as the reporing in the media, both in this industry and outside of it.
Those who want to support the Windows Dominance Theory will always frame their statements in such a way to imply they mean more than they do-- which is kinda pathetic when you think about it-- there's no doubt that all forms of windows make up over %50 of the market.
But the misdirection goes further. The vast majority of OSX capable Macs have switched over (I think its %80 for Panther) and do so each year... while the Windows "market" is fractured, with signficant numbers of users still using Win98 and Win95 (And actually even DOS for the people who actually bother to track it.)
This means that in terms of the installed base, there may well be more OS X Panther machines in US homes than Windows machines that are up to date. But I don't have recent (accurate) numbers to back that up.
Yes. There is no contradiction there. Apple is, and since 1984, has been an Operating System provider.
They sell their OS in a metal and plastic box, rather than a cardboard one like Microsoft... but that is what they do. The ipod and the Mac are just two product lines in their core business of making operating systems.
I don't see how you can't build oyur own mac. You can pick the amount of memory you want and the hard drive size, etc. What is it you want that you can't get from Build-To-Order?
As for price, you're not really saving anything-- if you're comparing using first tier products. Apple's machines are competitive with dells on price. And while you can go use random cheap parts to build a PC, you're not getting the same quality you get with a first tier manufacturer.
Now, if building your own machine is something you jsut enjoy, then I can understand that. (Though I don't know anybody laying out mother board circuits these days.:-) so its not really like building anymore.)
If you buy a desktop G5, you can put wahtever cards in it you want. Building a machine these days is merely a selection of parts that are assembled... I don't know what parts you can't get for a mac.
This has been a long time coming, and is less dramatic than I think people will realize.
The numbers of mac users have long been under-reported for a number of reasons: 1- The "independant" research agencies don't reports sales apple makes directly or thru apple specific retailers. 2- The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total Addressable Market (TAM) 3- Macs last a lot longer than PCs and are useful a lot longer 4- Windows is counted twice- once when the PC is sold and once when an upgrade is bought, meaning that many of the "new PC sales" are actually windows upgrades.
They don't go into their methodology for a reason-- because the goal is to market windows as the dominant platform. (How many linux boxes were shipped with windows and count as "windows marketshare"? A large percentage.)
Recently I heard that an independant survey had been done to find the TAM, and that this survey found that %16 of the household machines currently in use were Macintoshes.
I'm glad to see Apple has been growing Mac shipments. I hope that software developers will realize that the Mac market is much larger, and vastly under-served compared to windows. But then, again, I think maybe I should shut up and go write some software to sell, and hope nobody shows up to compete with me.:-)
I wonder if the intel switch will affect sales for Apple... but I don't think so. Most people don't realize that Macs don't already use Intel chips (believe it or not!) and it seems amazing to believe, but I think mainstream america thinks that Apple makes windows boxes and doesn't really see what the difference is.
This would explain teh failure of the switch campaign-- people think Apples are just another form of PC like Dell, and why would you care? They just buy what the salesman at the local store tells them to buy.
This brings up the third factor for Apple. The halo effect helps, and the ipod store brings people in.... but these average, mainstream amercians, then end up asking the salesman what computer to buy, and since they are in an Apple store, he sells them a Mac.
So, while I think computer retailing is on the decline, Apple's stores strategy will prove to be brilliant. When the others won't carry your product or market it, do it yourself.
And I'm glad to see Apple showing the haters to be wrong-- when given a chance to know about them, people will buy Macintoshes.
I like how you're sayin the current intel CPU is faster than an IBM CPU that's a couple generations old, and then saying that the future intel CPU will be the CPU that's about to come out from IBM.
Typical pc weenie apples-to-oranges comparison.
At any rate, my post stands. While the G5 in LAPTOPS that's just been announced is better than Intel, there is more to the roadmap than the next CPU.
And apparently the average slashdot poster gets all tehir information about CPU performance from anandtech (Which means, they get it from people who know nothing either... blind leading the blind.)
And since slashdot rewards being politically correct (Eg pro intel and pro linux) the misinformation is reinforced by the moderation system.
Which is why slashdot is amusing to watch and sometimes a quicker update on news than other sources... the forums remain worthless.
Its pathetic how strong anti-intellectualism and the bias against science is in the Linux community.
Actually, calling them "retinal scan" implies something they aren't even though it is literally true.
These devices have been around for about a decade, they work really well, and they HAVE been mass produced, just not economically... though that has always been the goal of the company.
If the company has developed a full color display (it was green when I tried it) and worked out production problems, theres absolutely no reason it can't be mass produced.
Not saying Apple is goign to use it... but its the kind of just-cutting-edge technology they have adopted in the past.
The reason for the conspiracy theories is that your assertion about G5s being slow is just false.
But I think the truth is obvious and was given to us by Apple: The ROADMAP for intel is superior for thier needs, possibly including DRM or other features.
People look at IBMs recent announcements of processors and assume Apple was making a decision about the next 10 months, not the next 10 years.
Even with IBM releasing chips significantly faster than intel, what the next 10 years holds is more important for the mac platform.
So, it seems, that because a small minority of companies are immoral, you think we should hand over power to an organization that is unelected, unaccountable, and made up *exclusively* of people who will trade their morals for more power?
Government will always be more corrupt than corporations-- the reason being is that when corporations rip people off, people tend to stop doing business with them, stop working for them, or stop holding their stock.
Government, on the other hand, is not accountable to people, and backs up all of its actions with force. Thus government attracts those who want to put guns in other people's faces to get their way.
I don't know why you think human nature is so bad that corporations have to be regulated-- but it just makes no sense to say that human nature is so bad that we need to give power to humans who have no accountability to regulate the ones you're afraid of.
I understand most people reading slashdot are coders rather than businessmen. So, you may not see things the way businesses do.
Absolutely NO Business, that wants to stay in business, is going to depend on a critical piece of software from outside that it is not involved in.
If businesses are using BSD code and not contributing, then they either are just getting started and can't yet contribute, OR (as is usually the case I think) they are contributing more than you realize.
Frankly, its a major move forward for businesses to be even relying on BSD or GPLed code-- 15 years ago, businesses would not have trusted it at all, and would have insisted on writing the functionality themselves or buying it from someone who they have to pay-- because if they pay for it, then someone's likely to be around to support it.
Now that businesses are accepting open source software, it shows they have the development staff to do their own support-- and by definition that's going to be bug reports at he very least.
Basically, its impossible for a business to seriously use any outside software without contributing to the project. The only concievable way this could happen is if the code is perfectly bug free and feature complete already, or its being used in such a trivial way that the business isn't really relying on it (And thus its not providing a business critical functionality.)
This is why BSD is the way to go-- businesses can freely use and contribut to the code. BSD is free software. The GPL tries to force people to be "good" by imposing stallman's greedy will on people who have different goals and agendas. Naturally businesses generally don't use GPL'ed software, unless its part of something of theirs they have released open source (like Apple did with Darwin.)
The GPL hinders development. It undermines the business model for paying developers to contribute to public source software. --- It ensures that nobody will ever be paid for their work, which eliminates the model of getting paid for work you contribute to the public.
In my business, I will not use GPL... and when there's some functionality there that we could have used, and contributed to, but its GPL licensed, we won't use it. We'll write code from scratch ourselves, rather than use GPL.
Why? Its very simple: We're a business. The goal of the GPL is to undermine business. Stallman wants programmers to starve.
We do use BSD, and for the stuff that we work closely with, we contribute improvements back. There's some stuff I'm sure that we haven't touched because it either works, or isn't relevant enough to our application to need new features.
With BSD, you contribute your improvements back to the community, because if you don't, others will and eventually your code base and the community code base will be different. Keeping them in sync lets you benefit from others work, and ensures that new features work with the changes you've made.
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In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it. Where is the RED CROSS? Where is anyone with food or water or medicine? The National Guard is tooling around in empty trucks. The cops are too busy keeping people from leaving the city, and herding them at gunpoint. This is not libertarianism-- this is fascist socialism.
500 tourists were stopped by the police as they tried to exit the city tonight. One was interviewed on CNN. They were stopped at gunpoint. Their busses, which they had paid for, were commandered. And not to pick up people who needed them-- there are thousands standing outside the superdome, who have been there for 3 days, and have gotten ZERO busses. No, the police just stole them, and forced the tourists back into the city at gunpoint. Wouldn't let them walk out. If some of those tourists had had firearms and the sense to use them, less of them would die than will now die because of this police action. THIS IS THE SOCIALIST POLICE STATE IN ACTION.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
Congratulations. Thousands dead. You happy?
You're a fucking idiot, and you know everything you say is a lie, but you are so fucking pathetic all you can do is run around and smear your betters because your bullshit theories don't play in the real world. Fortunately, reality is pretty good at keeping score, and all the pain you're spewing in this thread is well earned. Try being a decent human sometime.
Hey, at least you picked an accurate handle.
No. Coercion means you signed the contract because I have a gun to your head.
It doesn't mean you signed the contract because it was the best deal you could get.
If you couldn't, or wouldn't, get a better deal elsewhere, then you weren't coerced.
YOU are the one who wants to enslave everyone by saying that they can only enter into deals you agree with, no matter whether they agree with them or not. This is what minimum wage is-- more people have starved because of minimum wage than would have without it.
You socialists would rather people be unemployed for the whole week at $5 an hour and make $0 that week, than employed at less than minimum wage and make $150 that week.
I believe you have never met a libertarian, or you are not being honest about what they believe .
for instance, in a free market, there would be no monopolies-- because the only way monopolies can exist is when government creates them.
In a free market, if someone got monopoly power, they would quickly lose it because their prices would be above market rates.
Hell, even opec wasn't able to keep pricing power.
Libertarians don't believe in slavery. Democrats do. They just call it "taxes".
Libertarians don't want to seize power-- because doing so would be to violate others rights.
Libertarians believe in capitalism which, unlike the communism you seem to espouse, DOES WORK in the real world.
Libertarians in the area would be in New Orleans right now sellign food at cost and water at cost and getting people fed and hydrated... but the socialists will not let them in. Hell, the socialist police state you lvoe so much will not even let the red cross in.
On the contrary-- this is exactly what you socialists want. The government is in charge, didn't let people get out, has been running around stealing property....
In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it. Where is the RED CROSS? Where is anyone with food or water or medicine? The National Guard is tooling around in empty trucks. The cops are too busy keeping people from leaving the city, and herding them at gunpoint. This is not libertarianism-- this is fascist socialism.
500 tourists were stopped by the police as they tried to exit the city tonight. One was interviewed on CNN. They were stopped at gunpoint. Their busses, which they had paid for, were commandered. And not to pick up people who needed them-- there are thousands standing outside the superdome, who have been there for 3 days, and have gotten ZERO busses. No, the police just stole them, and forced the tourists back into the city at gunpoint. Wouldn't let them walk out. If some of those tourists had had firearms and the sense to use them, less of them would die than will now die because of this police action. THIS IS THE SOCIALIST POLICE STATE IN ACTION.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
Congratulations. Thousands dead. You happy?
-- its very interesting that the troll posts are getting modded up and anyone who disagrees is getting modded down. Proof that the slashdot moderation system is totally broken.
On the contrary-- this is exactly what you socialists want. The government is in charge, didn't let people get out, has been running around stealing property....
In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it.
500 tourists were stopped by the police as they tried to exit the city tonight. One was interviewed on CNN. They were stopped at gunpoint. Their busses, which they had paid for, were commandered. And not to pick up people who needed them-- there are thousands standing outside the superdome, who have been there for 3 days, and have gotten ZERO busses. No, the police just stole them, and forced the tourists back into the city at gunpoint. Wouldn't let them walk out. If some of those tourists had had firearms and the sense to use them, less of them would die than will now die because of this police action. THIS IS THE SOCIALIST POLICE STATE IN ACTION.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
Congratulations. Thousands dead. You happy?
This is not anarchy-- this is what happens when you have police prevent anyone from leaving the city-- at gunpoint.. have the polcie barge in and start looting, and have the police herding people and denying them access to food or water,
This is a storm ravaged city under siege from the police!
If it were a libertarian situation, people would be trucking in supplies by ton.
But what would happen if you wnt to Baton Rouge and loaded up a truck with supplies and water and drove into New Orleans right now? You'd be stopped at hte border of town and forced to LEAVE!
IF you managed to make it in and sell the food and wwater, you'd be arrested.
WHERE is the Red Cross? Where is anyone giving out or selling food and water in New Orleans?
Anyone seen this on TV?
On the contrary-- this is exactly what you socialists want. The government is in charge, didn't let people get out, has been running around stealing property....
In a libertarian society, there would be massive amounts of aid there. But say you live in Baton Rouge and want to drive a truck down with water and food. Can you? Hell no- the police won't let you in... and if the do, they certainly won't let you sell the food and water. So, less people are doing it.
You socialists want people disarmed and dependant on the state-- and this is what you get.
Congratulations. Thousands dead. You happy?
Here's his quote on the looting:
... and the comentator said "while some are taking the law into their own hands". JESUS. That's not the law, that's called self defense.
"Looting: The police are looting. This has been confirmed by several independent sources. Some of the looting might be "legitimate" in as much as that word has any meaning in this context. They have broken into ATMs and safes: confirmed. We have eyewitnesses to this. They have taken dozens of SUVs from dealerships ostensibly for official use. They have also looted gun stores and pawn shops for all the small arms, supposedly to prevent "criminals" from doing so. But who knows their true intentions. We have an inside source in the NOPD who says that command and control is in chaos. He reports that command lapses more than 24 hours between check-ins, and that most of the force are "like deer in the headlights." NOPD already had a reputation for corruption, but I am telling you now that the people we've been talking to say they are not recognizing the NOPD as a legitimate authority anymore, since cops have been seen looting in Walmarts and forcing people out of stores so they could back up SUVs and loot them. Don't shoot the messenger...."
Its very interesting that this disaster is also showing what others have--- those with guns are able to protect their property. The police bugged out and are doing nothing.
Last night on CNN, I saw some storeowner holding a pistol (correctly, unlike the cop they showed in the previous shot, who aimed a shotgun at someone looking at debris)
Yes, we should all be sheep and depend on the government to protect us--- and what do we get? A world class screwup, every time. Just look at New Orleans.
Hell, the dikes wouldn't have overflowed if the repair money to fix them hadn't been diverted to the dept of homeland "security" last summer.
It was interesting to see in that blog that what I've heard elsewhere is confirmed: Police are doing much of the looting.
Its unfortunate that government sweeps in during disasters and starts making mandates that make things worse. Like prohibitions against price "gauging". What, they htink things get cheaper when the infrastructure is destroyed?
Gauging actually helps-- it brings in more supply to service that demand, and ultimately prices go down FASTER when the free market is allowed.
Here's an economists take on the issue:
Price Gauging saves lives: http://www.mises.org/story/1593
And another: http://www.lewrockwell.com/akers/akers16.html
Plus, since Apple computers are cheaper than comperable PCs, the "cheap machine" is most likely going to be a Mac anyway.
I find it amazing that GTA has been out in a variety of versions, and far more violent games are out there as well, with little complaint.
But someone manages to unlock some code showing tits and suddenly all hell is breaking loose?
Its boob-gate all over again.
Bottom line is, if Rockstar wants to release a game with really kinky sex, its their right. This is the very definition of free speech.
All this whining over some boobs (or is the real outrage that it shows a black man and a white woman?) just shows how out of line people's priorities are... and how much people seem to want to control other people.
You don't like it, don't buy it. It should end with that.
The reality is, in a case like this (And probably in more serious cases as well) %90 of the time a cop giving "testimony" is committing perjury.
Cops lie, on the stand, ALL the time. The reason they do this is that they are immune from prosecution. The DA and the judges all work for the same employer as the cops, that is to say, the government. So, since they all see each toher all the time, there is no way in hell anyone of them is going to testify against the other.
Which means cops can, and do, get away with murder, and perjur themselves about it.
Its a screwed up system. This guy got off because he made it embarassing by revealing the reality of the situation in open court.
I think the parent should be modded up.
nslu2-linux.org is the center for work on these devices.
Glad to see someone has another hack for it, but that site is the nexus of the developer community that's sprung up around it.
Yeah, the mini is pretty amazing... part of it could be Tiger, but its snappy and capable and cheap.
Mac market share has always been bigger than was generally reported in the press. Not bigger than windows, but bigger than it was reported.
This diminishing of the Mac's market share has gone on since at least 1990. It was particularly bad when Apple was selling so many machines with CD-ROMs (because you couldn't get PCs with CD Roms) that they had %26 of annual sales and %50 of the addressable household market... yet PC Week was reporting things like "Analyst so and so says that Windows has %80 market share."
Macs have always been the number 2 platform, but for a long time they were a close number 2. Its just never been reported accurately, or to be truthful, honestly.
When making a decision as to whether to write an application for a given platform, you want the market share of that platform, or the Total Addressable Market. These are correct uses of the term. Installed Base is another figure, which is not a percentage, but a quantity.
When the "analysts" talk about "market share" and go off of the last years sales data, they are using it incorrectly. Don't let their consistent use of it in this way convince you that they are right.
As an aside, its amazing how pathetic the analysis in this industry is. Its about as poor as the reporing in the media, both in this industry and outside of it.
Those who want to support the Windows Dominance Theory will always frame their statements in such a way to imply they mean more than they do-- which is kinda pathetic when you think about it-- there's no doubt that all forms of windows make up over %50 of the market.
But the misdirection goes further. The vast majority of OSX capable Macs have switched over (I think its %80 for Panther) and do so each year... while the Windows "market" is fractured, with signficant numbers of users still using Win98 and Win95 (And actually even DOS for the people who actually bother to track it.)
This means that in terms of the installed base, there may well be more OS X Panther machines in US homes than Windows machines that are up to date. But I don't have recent (accurate) numbers to back that up.
Yes. There is no contradiction there. Apple is, and since 1984, has been an Operating System provider.
They sell their OS in a metal and plastic box, rather than a cardboard one like Microsoft... but that is what they do. The ipod and the Mac are just two product lines in their core business of making operating systems.
I don't see how you can't build oyur own mac. You can pick the amount of memory you want and the hard drive size, etc. What is it you want that you can't get from Build-To-Order?
As for price, you're not really saving anything-- if you're comparing using first tier products. Apple's machines are competitive with dells on price. And while you can go use random cheap parts to build a PC, you're not getting the same quality you get with a first tier manufacturer.
Now, if building your own machine is something you jsut enjoy, then I can understand that. (Though I don't know anybody laying out mother board circuits these days.
If you buy a desktop G5, you can put wahtever cards in it you want. Building a machine these days is merely a selection of parts that are assembled... I don't know what parts you can't get for a mac.
This has been a long time coming, and is less dramatic than I think people will realize.
The numbers of mac users have long been under-reported for a number of reasons:
1- The "independant" research agencies don't reports sales apple makes directly or thru apple specific retailers.
2- The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total Addressable Market (TAM)
3- Macs last a lot longer than PCs and are useful a lot longer
4- Windows is counted twice- once when the PC is sold and once when an upgrade is bought, meaning that many of the "new PC sales" are actually windows upgrades.
They don't go into their methodology for a reason-- because the goal is to market windows as the dominant platform. (How many linux boxes were shipped with windows and count as "windows marketshare"? A large percentage.)
Recently I heard that an independant survey had been done to find the TAM, and that this survey found that %16 of the household machines currently in use were Macintoshes.
I'm glad to see Apple has been growing Mac shipments. I hope that software developers will realize that the Mac market is much larger, and vastly under-served compared to windows. But then, again, I think maybe I should shut up and go write some software to sell, and hope nobody shows up to compete with me.
I wonder if the intel switch will affect sales for Apple... but I don't think so. Most people don't realize that Macs don't already use Intel chips (believe it or not!) and it seems amazing to believe, but I think mainstream america thinks that Apple makes windows boxes and doesn't really see what the difference is.
This would explain teh failure of the switch campaign-- people think Apples are just another form of PC like Dell, and why would you care? They just buy what the salesman at the local store tells them to buy.
This brings up the third factor for Apple. The halo effect helps, and the ipod store brings people in.... but these average, mainstream amercians, then end up asking the salesman what computer to buy, and since they are in an Apple store, he sells them a Mac.
So, while I think computer retailing is on the decline, Apple's stores strategy will prove to be brilliant. When the others won't carry your product or market it, do it yourself.
And I'm glad to see Apple showing the haters to be wrong-- when given a chance to know about them, people will buy Macintoshes.
I like how you're sayin the current intel CPU is faster than an IBM CPU that's a couple generations old, and then saying that the future intel CPU will be the CPU that's about to come out from IBM.
Typical pc weenie apples-to-oranges comparison.
At any rate, my post stands. While the G5 in LAPTOPS that's just been announced is better than Intel, there is more to the roadmap than the next CPU.
And apparently the average slashdot poster gets all tehir information about CPU performance from anandtech (Which means, they get it from people who know nothing either... blind leading the blind.)
And since slashdot rewards being politically correct (Eg pro intel and pro linux) the misinformation is reinforced by the moderation system.
Which is why slashdot is amusing to watch and sometimes a quicker update on news than other sources... the forums remain worthless.
Its pathetic how strong anti-intellectualism and the bias against science is in the Linux community.
Actually, calling them "retinal scan" implies something they aren't even though it is literally true.
These devices have been around for about a decade, they work really well, and they HAVE been mass produced, just not economically... though that has always been the goal of the company.
If the company has developed a full color display (it was green when I tried it) and worked out production problems, theres absolutely no reason it can't be mass produced.
Not saying Apple is goign to use it... but its the kind of just-cutting-edge technology they have adopted in the past.
The reason for the conspiracy theories is that your assertion about G5s being slow is just false.
But I think the truth is obvious and was given to us by Apple: The ROADMAP for intel is superior for thier needs, possibly including DRM or other features.
People look at IBMs recent announcements of processors and assume Apple was making a decision about the next 10 months, not the next 10 years.
Even with IBM releasing chips significantly faster than intel, what the next 10 years holds is more important for the mac platform.
So, it seems, that because a small minority of companies are immoral, you think we should hand over power to an organization that is unelected, unaccountable, and made up *exclusively* of people who will trade their morals for more power?
Government will always be more corrupt than corporations-- the reason being is that when corporations rip people off, people tend to stop doing business with them, stop working for them, or stop holding their stock.
Government, on the other hand, is not accountable to people, and backs up all of its actions with force. Thus government attracts those who want to put guns in other people's faces to get their way.
I don't know why you think human nature is so bad that corporations have to be regulated-- but it just makes no sense to say that human nature is so bad that we need to give power to humans who have no accountability to regulate the ones you're afraid of.
I understand most people reading slashdot are coders rather than businessmen. So, you may not see things the way businesses do.
Absolutely NO Business, that wants to stay in business, is going to depend on a critical piece of software from outside that it is not involved in.
If businesses are using BSD code and not contributing, then they either are just getting started and can't yet contribute, OR (as is usually the case I think) they are contributing more than you realize.
Frankly, its a major move forward for businesses to be even relying on BSD or GPLed code-- 15 years ago, businesses would not have trusted it at all, and would have insisted on writing the functionality themselves or buying it from someone who they have to pay-- because if they pay for it, then someone's likely to be around to support it.
Now that businesses are accepting open source software, it shows they have the development staff to do their own support-- and by definition that's going to be bug reports at he very least.
Basically, its impossible for a business to seriously use any outside software without contributing to the project. The only concievable way this could happen is if the code is perfectly bug free and feature complete already, or its being used in such a trivial way that the business isn't really relying on it (And thus its not providing a business critical functionality.)
This is why BSD is the way to go-- businesses can freely use and contribut to the code. BSD is free software. The GPL tries to force people to be "good" by imposing stallman's greedy will on people who have different goals and agendas. Naturally businesses generally don't use GPL'ed software, unless its part of something of theirs they have released open source (like Apple did with Darwin.)
The GPL hinders development. It undermines the business model for paying developers to contribute to public source software. --- It ensures that nobody will ever be paid for their work, which eliminates the model of getting paid for work you contribute to the public.
In my business, I will not use GPL... and when there's some functionality there that we could have used, and contributed to, but its GPL licensed, we won't use it. We'll write code from scratch ourselves, rather than use GPL.
Why? Its very simple: We're a business. The goal of the GPL is to undermine business. Stallman wants programmers to starve.
We do use BSD, and for the stuff that we work closely with, we contribute improvements back. There's some stuff I'm sure that we haven't touched because it either works, or isn't relevant enough to our application to need new features.
With BSD, you contribute your improvements back to the community, because if you don't, others will and eventually your code base and the community code base will be different. Keeping them in sync lets you benefit from others work, and ensures that new features work with the changes you've made.