These cd images you speak of either include cracks or are pre-cracked.
NO THEY WEREN'T. when I go to my favorite warez site, the images are straight copies of the CDs.
Furthermore, you ignored my proposed solution-- how is the cracker supposed to emulate teh code I wrote? He'd have to re-write it, thereby re-writing a major part of the functionality of the product.
Re:You are not stealing BITS you are stealing LABO
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This would make sense if every piece of software were custome constructed.
But software has a zero marginal value-- you spent all the money on the first one. Each copy is free.
When someone pirates the software, tehy are making free copies-- it didn't cost you any more to make the software because they made free copies-- it cost you the same.
Maybe the argument can be made that you make less revenue due to decreased sales- but I don't buy it-- most software I've pirated in the past has resulted in a sale in the future for the company and at the time I wouldn't have afforded to buy it, but by using the pirated copy, I learned ot love it and did buy it. Eventually, though eventually is sometimes only a matter of days or weeks.
The problem is the sales boost from piracy has not been calculated, and the sales loss has not been shown.
Prosecutors decide what to prosecute, and don't need the victim's permission. Usually they won't bother when the victim objects to a prosecution (why waste the time), but they can if they want to.
Yes, that is exactly the problem with the system. There is no moral justification (using objective morality) for this... and it leads to prosecuters executing vendettas against people which is actually pretty widespread-- some prosecuters are executing vendettas against whole classes of people.
This just shows the fundamental corruption of the prosecutors and thep olice-- the police work for the prosecutors, so they have no objectivity, their agenda is to get the "bad guy" whether or not he's really the bad guy. How is it that these agents of the prosecution have the right to sully the crimce scene without oversight when they "collecting" evidence?
And prosecutors can prosecute people based on crimes that are not rational, and often do.
The only people who ahve a right to complain are the victims. If they need legal help to press their case, provide that as you do for defendants.
But Prosecutors going out and persecuting people because they want a judgeship (Where they can persecute more people) is why we have so much crime and so little justice here.
In the case of victimless crimes- there is no crime to prosecute-- which shows their inanity.
In the case of crimes where the victim is dead, then friends, family or other private parties (such as charitis formed for the purporse) can take the case to court and pursue the criminal and get retribution.
Crime is not the creation of debt to the STATE-- but to the VICTIM.
Unfortunately, criminals, like everyone else in the US is viewed by the state as their slaves to extract money from, or to incarcerate for the mildest excuse (And this piracy ring is a mild excuse) of misbehaviour.
1. It's only appropriate for software packages that already require a network connection.
If you're paying $10,000 requiring a net connection is not inappropriate. Who doesn't have net connections to their desks anyway? IF you want to run it standalonw iwthout internet connectivity, you can, in my example, almost all the time. you just have to connect to the net to authenticate every 90 days.
3. Would you be upset if a company was grabbing information about your hardware and sending it off to a mysterious remote server periodically?
If I'm prirating, then I'm fair game. If I'm a legitimate user, then no- the serial numbers being transmitted are identifying. Its not like customers are anonymous-- they bought your software- you have a relationship with them. If you don't trust the company, don't run their software!
The point is, no technical solution to digital copyright violation will ever be failsafe, and many of the possible solutions just make things worse for the legitimate users.
My solution does not make it works for legitimate users-- you're nit picking. Yes, its not failsafe but it doesn't need to be.
The only solution that makes sense is to revise commercial software licensing and sales pricing structures so that there's no incentive not to pay for the software that you use.
Except that many of the people pirating software are not doing so because the software is overpriced, but are doing so because they are TOO CHEAP.
Its a fair deal: You want this for this amount? No? Ok, then you don't get to use it. That you decide not to buy it does not make it overpriced--if you don't like it, go write your own alternative, or join an open source group writing an alternative.
Maybe you're reading comprehension isn't what it should be.
In this case, a key part of the logic is downloaded from the server. The client, on its own, cannot run.
I never said it was foolproof, just that most all the warez out there are unmodified because it only takes a serial number to activate them.
If the program won't run without checking in with the mother ship, the crackers woudl be forced to re-write the missing code in order to get that running-- this means that tehy would probably have better spent their time writing a replacement for your app because the critical code doesn't exist in the distribution.
Yet another example of government screwups...
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This article shows just how out of control our government is, when 40 armed agents "bust" a guy who's pirating software.
First off, let me point out that I'm a software developer, and I'm in the process of creating a shrink wrapped application which I intend to charge for and which I expect a number of people are going to try to pirate. Since I am a one man startup in this situation, if piracy affects anyone, it affects me directly in my pocket book.
But this situation is absurd. Teh government should not be wasting time going after people who are pirating software who aren't profiting from it.
If someone steals my software, then they are liable to me under the law-- not to the feds. The feds have no rights to my code and no rights to lock people up for violating my rights in this way.
If someone pirates my software, then I should be able to take them to civil court and sue them for damages-- possibly twice actual damages, but I have to show damages to recover the money.
The Feds are busting people, claiming that "millions of dollars" have been stolen when this is a bald faced lie-- millions of dollars have NOT been stolen.
The only way a pirated piece of software is "theft" is if the person who uses it would have OTHERWISE bought the product. IF someone tries it out and then discards it and never would have bought the product, then the software company has not experienced damage-- they got some free advertising and didn't happen to pick up a customer.
IF someone pirates your software and then sells it, well then that would be theft. But those who give it away a guilty of mischief, but do not belong in a federal prison.
As for the guy who claims his software costs $9,500 but lost out because it was pirated-- make your software not work without authentication with the mothership. This is really easy these days-- get the MAC address, and send it in, and return a cryptographically signed authorization code that the program needs to run-- if the MAC address changes too much, or you['re getting identical requests from dozens of IP addresses, then don't return the key. Hell, make it such that a key set of code for the App is stored in an external runtime-loaded framework, and encrypt that bit with the key so that it never exists on the CD or hard drive in decrypted form... and of course keys have an expiry so that the program has to check in every 90 days or so. Or whatever less draconian version of this works for you, hell dongles are cheap enough.
Yes this can be defeated, but my experience with warez sites is that they just have CD images, the programs security hasn't been defeated, and people just share license keys-- in this case reporting the key to a central server and the ability to turn it off when it becomes obviously shared is easy.
This seems to be working for ambrosia and idsoftware.
But sending the feds in is NOT the solution-- we cannot tolerate this. MS has sent teams of armed men into small offices where they suspect the people are not licensing all their copies of windows. This is unacceptable.
As long as we accept government stormtroopers doing the bidding of private companies we will not be free-- it will just get worse and worse.
What's next- 40 armed marshalls bust some 13 year old for sharing MP3s?
All the while real crimes are going on and are ignored.
These are civil issues and belong in the civil courts. And anyone who doesn't protect their IP is just asking for it.
This is the equivalent of cops busting down dorm room doors because 20 kids in the same class photocopied pages from a library book to study from.
But because its computers they're "pirates" and the idiot press and public go along. Who's to stand up to the invasion of police in what should be civil matters? If anyone- US. Don't tolerate your company using stormtroopers-- protest loudly if they do. And protest to anyone who has the ability to affect change in this area-- such as your congressman (though I don't hold out much hope that they will listen, idiots that they are.)
Civil disobedience is going to be what this comes down to eventually-- sooner or later, they will be tightening the noose. who here doesn't have an MP3 that they can't prove legal ownership of?
Yeah, the fact that unless you spend more than $10,000 there are no computers as fast as the apple equivilents is NOT ENOUGH! WE need serious performance improvements.
I've been watching the Apple store and the iMac availiblity went down to immediate shipment, but has again increased to 1-2 days. So, they are selling them a little faster than they can make them.
They may be selling fewer than they expected, but they're making even fewer then (Which means profitabiltiy should be good-- profits really hurt when you have to eat machines that won't sell.)
Remember, the Pentium has a much much bigger die than the PowerPC and thus draws a LOT more power (like 10 times).
Thus when you run on battery power with a PC, the chip cuts its clock rate by 6... so that 2GHz pentium which is slower than a 800MHZ powerPC actually is running at 400MHz on battery power.
So, when comparing a titanium to any PC laptop, there's no comparison-- the PCs are dramatically slower on battery power.
Unfortunately, most people don't understand pipelines, branch prediction, what having a 386 co-processor for compatibility on there implies, what Risc processing really does, and that floating point is a major part of CPU intensive applications leaves us with people doing what you're doing...
claiming that anything with a higher clockrate is faster.
Never mine that a G4 can do 2-6 times as much work in a given clock cycle.
Lets not forget that Apple's product IS open sourced, and in fact, is the most successful open source OS out there in terms of number of installations (maybe not yet, but certainly will be in a couple years, as Linux cannot match Apples volume.)
That's the real reason slashdotters bash apple-- that and the fact that pre-linux they were stuck with windows and were jealous of the superior usabiltiy and cost benefit of Apple products.
Its the only thing I can think of. Certainly a lot of the comments don't make sense.
Hell, they all assuemd that teh ipod had a 2.5 inch drive, and ignored the superior battery technology, etc.
This prejudice is annoying, but I think jealousy is its root.
Is the quote in The Nation by one of the members of the Doors saying that Apple had called him recently wanting to license one of their songs for Apples new "Cube computer software".
That's pretty much what he said-- so it sounds like he doesn't really know what the product is, so it could be a re-emergence of the cube, or it could be a software application that he somehow stuck the word "cube" to.
As to Think Secret (And most all the rest of the rumor sites) they are useless-- often they just post wild speculation when a reasonable person could figure out what's likely to happen.
For instance, since PowerMacs are long in the Tooth and iMacs are rather new, its more likely PowerMacs will be refreshed than iMacs.
I would never say that this is what's going to happen-- cause it could be the reverse as the sites claim, but other than knowing about key components (17 inch displays are cheaper, G5 isn't ready yet) and apple's previous history and overall strategy, you can't say much other than the obvious implications of these bits of info.
Apple really has closed the leaks and frankly, I'm much happier being surprised... not that the rumor sites were ever that accurate anyway.
The low carb diets have SCIENCE at their root. They come from an understanding of the blood sugar mechanisms, and what causes the body to burn fat.
The "low fat" died it not at ALL based on science, but based on the food pyramid that the government made the way it is BECAUSE of heavy lobbying from the food industry. They pyramid, if I remember correctly, started out as a private recommendation from one of the industry groups, and the government later adopted it. It was NEVER based on any science.
And the "low fat" idea is simply that "fat is what causes the problem, therefore you shouldn't eat it."
And of course, this ignores the fact that your body needs fat in its diet-- not getting fat in its diet causes it to retain fat, not burn it.
So, the "low fat" diet isn't even *logical* if you know how the body processes food.
This is why we need to get the government COMPLETELY out of the medical business (And I include quasi government groups like the AMA.)
The FDA has destroyed drug research, and blocked people from getting good drugs for their desieses. (For instance, a drug may be approved for people with a heart problem, its safe in humans, but its ILLEGAL to proscribe that drug to someone for depression, without going thru another 10 years to get approval for that, despite the fact that there's no evidence that the drug is harmful and has been used for decades by a wide variety of people, etc.) People have the right to take the drugs they think will help them. Its a HUMAN RIGHT.
And the AMA destroyed the medical industry by making it impossible to tell anyone whether you liked your doctor or not without getting sued-- so bad doctors don't get a bad rap and malpractice suits are the result.
this is more evidence that the government fucks up everything it touches, and the only solution for liberty-- including your rights online, and the right to write your own software-- is to get a smaller government and get it out of the business of controlling peoples lives.
The fact that they've been giving us bad dietary advice for the last 50 years is inexcusable. (The "Low Carb" diet was discovered and researched in the lat 1800s.)
Its time to get the government out of science and let people do what's right for them, based on science.
I thought the people upset with Paypal were a small minority until I tried to use the service. I sold a friend something. PayPal screwed it up. The amount of the transaction was $5. But they managed to take the money from my friends credit card, claim they never took it, charge my friends account for it, giving it a negative balance, and reverse the charge on my account.
So over this $5 transaction PayPal grabbed $15 for itself-- $5 from me, $5 from the friends bank and $5 in a charge to the friends paypal account that they have to pay to fix it.
Then they decided this friend was committing fraud and suspended their account.
This is totally unacceptable. This was the FIRST TRANSACTION for all of us, after we both became verified members, etc. The bank is clear that the money went to paypal, and paypal wouldn't say a peep about what went wrong.
I wouldn't say PayPal was a fraudulent company, but in my experience, they have a %300 failure rate-- 1 transaction and they took money from three entities.
In the end my friend and I both closed our paypal accounts and settled up face to face.
Having spent most of the last year using IE under OSX (and suffering). When Mozilla 1.0 was released, I switched, and other than some minor stability issues I'm happy.
So, there's no longer a reason to use IE on the mac, and its reign should be at its end.
Requiring you to quit other applications is unacceptable for an application install, absolutely unacceptable.
As to security, I simply don't trust MS anymore. And I'm happy to be pretty much MS free.
PS- to anyone who thinks about running Entourage, it has a 2G mail limit. Their integer actually wraps at 2G so you reach that much mail (and it caches EVERYTHING- news, mail, images, even deleted stuff, so it doesn't take that long) and you're SOL. The app tries to open the file, then starts seeking at a negative index into it and crashes. Serves me right for using an MS product, forewarning to everyone else. (Yes, Mail.app crashed one too many times for me. Still looking for a good mail client.)
When there's no browser competition, IE was good. But now there's everything- Mozilla, Chimera (really promising), Opera, iCab, OmniWeb and probably other lesser known browsers. That's quite a selection with Mozilla being actually usable, Chimera coming quickly and Opera, iCab and OmniWeb being late "beta" quality. OmniWeb 4.1 might actually be usable, but its too early to say. (Usable to me is a browser that goes a week regularly without crashing, beta is one that can't.)
Why do people continue to pretend that Apple isn't providing machines with better performance at lower cost than Intel machines?
The price myth, like the megahertz myth (which are related) hasn't been true since 1990, if it ever was.
Yes, you can buy an XBOX for $200 (but ony because its sold for less than it costs to make it) and a G3 iMac costs $800, but that iMac beats most intel PCs on the market up to $2,000.
No it isn't. This has been repeatedly demonstrated to be false. Take a reasonable app such as photoshop...
If you use Intel benchmarks, of course, your results will be different.... oh, and you got to exclude floating point performance, yeah, that's a requirement. IF you do all this, you can pretend that you aren't paying way too much for too little processor when you buy an x86 machine.
(Actually too much for too much processor as the size of the x86-- HUGE-- is why it draws absurd amounts of power, costs so much (fewer per die) and runs so slow (386 emulation processor) and has such a crappy pipelining system.) Oh, and when you talk about laptops its even worse-- on battery power, Intel processors run at 1/4th or 1/6th the rated clock speed cause otherwise battery performance would be zilch. Which means that a powerbook is actually something like 20-30 times the speed of a PC laptop on battery power, when fully utilizing the processor (say playing back a DVD while flying cross country.)
hell, they've already obsolesced my _NEW_ powerbook with their new os x 10.2 release.
You can't say shit like this without being called on it.
I run Warcraft 3 on an iMac G4 at 1024x768 with all graphics options turned on and it runs great.
10.2 HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED. And when it is, ALL titanium powerbooks, even my first generation one, are going to be supported.
Yes, newer hardware will see fuller use of the graphics chips for greater UI quality-- but thats not "obsoleting" the older hardware-- the OS works fine on older hardware (it also runs fine on my PowerMac 9500 from, what, 1996?)
I don't see 10.2 taking better use of the graphics card as making your older graphics card obsolete. Sheesh, even the older machines will get a significant graphics boost, in the new OS.
And, of course, the ultimate proof that you're a lowdown troll who is making this crap up is the claim that Mac hardware costs three times as much-- actually, Mac hardware is consistently cheaper than comparable PC hardware.
The people who think it costs three times as much are comparing an Xbox to an iMac G3 and claiming they are "comparable".
Actually, Geeks prefer OSX. Those who actually create code, do engineering- hardware and software- and are technically proficient prefer OS X.
The linux community is composed of a small group of geeks (many of whom are transitioning to OS X) and a large group of people who can't differentiate between an XBOX and an iMac in hardware value and wanted "free software d00d" to replace windows.
Oh, and *all* the effing idiots who poll my webserver for outdated IIS exploits seem to be running Linux.
Geeks like cool, high tech, high performance tools, and the penultimate example of that right now is OS X. And its pulling ahead- as the Unix underpinnings are allowing Apple to innovate faster than they were previously able to.
I do agree with you in one sense-- those who like to style themselves geeks, but really aren't, *do* perfer Linux.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
These cd images you speak of either include cracks or are pre-cracked.
NO THEY WEREN'T. when I go to my favorite warez site, the images are straight copies of the CDs.
Furthermore, you ignored my proposed solution-- how is the cracker supposed to emulate teh code I wrote? He'd have to re-write it, thereby re-writing a major part of the functionality of the product.
This would make sense if every piece of software were custome constructed.
But software has a zero marginal value-- you spent all the money on the first one. Each copy is free.
When someone pirates the software, tehy are making free copies-- it didn't cost you any more to make the software because they made free copies-- it cost you the same.
Maybe the argument can be made that you make less revenue due to decreased sales- but I don't buy it-- most software I've pirated in the past has resulted in a sale in the future for the company and at the time I wouldn't have afforded to buy it, but by using the pirated copy, I learned ot love it and did buy it. Eventually, though eventually is sometimes only a matter of days or weeks.
The problem is the sales boost from piracy has not been calculated, and the sales loss has not been shown.
Prosecutors decide what to prosecute, and don't need the victim's permission. Usually they won't bother when the victim objects to a prosecution (why waste the time), but they can if they want to.
Yes, that is exactly the problem with the system. There is no moral justification (using objective morality) for this... and it leads to prosecuters executing vendettas against people which is actually pretty widespread-- some prosecuters are executing vendettas against whole classes of people.
This just shows the fundamental corruption of the prosecutors and thep olice-- the police work for the prosecutors, so they have no objectivity, their agenda is to get the "bad guy" whether or not he's really the bad guy. How is it that these agents of the prosecution have the right to sully the crimce scene without oversight when they "collecting" evidence?
And prosecutors can prosecute people based on crimes that are not rational, and often do.
The only people who ahve a right to complain are the victims. If they need legal help to press their case, provide that as you do for defendants.
But Prosecutors going out and persecuting people because they want a judgeship (Where they can persecute more people) is why we have so much crime and so little justice here.
In the case of victimless crimes- there is no crime to prosecute-- which shows their inanity.
In the case of crimes where the victim is dead, then friends, family or other private parties (such as charitis formed for the purporse) can take the case to court and pursue the criminal and get retribution.
Crime is not the creation of debt to the STATE-- but to the VICTIM.
Unfortunately, criminals, like everyone else in the US is viewed by the state as their slaves to extract money from, or to incarcerate for the mildest excuse (And this piracy ring is a mild excuse) of misbehaviour.
No damages- no crime.
That's an excellent idea.
1. It's only appropriate for software packages that already require a network connection.
If you're paying $10,000 requiring a net connection is not inappropriate. Who doesn't have net connections to their desks anyway? IF you want to run it standalonw iwthout internet connectivity, you can, in my example, almost all the time. you just have to connect to the net to authenticate every 90 days.
3. Would you be upset if a company was grabbing information about your hardware and sending it off to a mysterious remote server periodically?
If I'm prirating, then I'm fair game. If I'm a legitimate user, then no- the serial numbers being transmitted are identifying. Its not like customers are anonymous-- they bought your software- you have a relationship with them. If you don't trust the company, don't run their software!
The point is, no technical solution to digital copyright violation will ever be failsafe, and many of the possible solutions just make things worse for the legitimate users.
My solution does not make it works for legitimate users-- you're nit picking. Yes, its not failsafe but it doesn't need to be.
The only solution that makes sense is to revise commercial software licensing and sales pricing structures so that there's no incentive not to pay for the software that you use.
Except that many of the people pirating software are not doing so because the software is overpriced, but are doing so because they are TOO CHEAP.
Its a fair deal: You want this for this amount? No? Ok, then you don't get to use it. That you decide not to buy it does not make it overpriced--if you don't like it, go write your own alternative, or join an open source group writing an alternative.
"Bzzt. Wrong."
Maybe you're reading comprehension isn't what it should be.
In this case, a key part of the logic is downloaded from the server. The client, on its own, cannot run.
I never said it was foolproof, just that most all the warez out there are unmodified because it only takes a serial number to activate them.
If the program won't run without checking in with the mother ship, the crackers woudl be forced to re-write the missing code in order to get that running-- this means that tehy would probably have better spent their time writing a replacement for your app because the critical code doesn't exist in the distribution.
This article shows just how out of control our government is, when 40 armed agents "bust" a guy who's pirating software.
First off, let me point out that I'm a software developer, and I'm in the process of creating a shrink wrapped application which I intend to charge for and which I expect a number of people are going to try to pirate. Since I am a one man startup in this situation, if piracy affects anyone, it affects me directly in my pocket book.
But this situation is absurd. Teh government should not be wasting time going after people who are pirating software who aren't profiting from it.
If someone steals my software, then they are liable to me under the law-- not to the feds. The feds have no rights to my code and no rights to lock people up for violating my rights in this way.
If someone pirates my software, then I should be able to take them to civil court and sue them for damages-- possibly twice actual damages, but I have to show damages to recover the money.
The Feds are busting people, claiming that "millions of dollars" have been stolen when this is a bald faced lie-- millions of dollars have NOT been stolen.
The only way a pirated piece of software is "theft" is if the person who uses it would have OTHERWISE bought the product. IF someone tries it out and then discards it and never would have bought the product, then the software company has not experienced damage-- they got some free advertising and didn't happen to pick up a customer.
IF someone pirates your software and then sells it, well then that would be theft. But those who give it away a guilty of mischief, but do not belong in a federal prison.
As for the guy who claims his software costs $9,500 but lost out because it was pirated-- make your software not work without authentication with the mothership. This is really easy these days-- get the MAC address, and send it in, and return a cryptographically signed authorization code that the program needs to run-- if the MAC address changes too much, or you['re getting identical requests from dozens of IP addresses, then don't return the key. Hell, make it such that a key set of code for the App is stored in an external runtime-loaded framework, and encrypt that bit with the key so that it never exists on the CD or hard drive in decrypted form... and of course keys have an expiry so that the program has to check in every 90 days or so. Or whatever less draconian version of this works for you, hell dongles are cheap enough.
Yes this can be defeated, but my experience with warez sites is that they just have CD images, the programs security hasn't been defeated, and people just share license keys-- in this case reporting the key to a central server and the ability to turn it off when it becomes obviously shared is easy.
This seems to be working for ambrosia and idsoftware.
But sending the feds in is NOT the solution-- we cannot tolerate this. MS has sent teams of armed men into small offices where they suspect the people are not licensing all their copies of windows. This is unacceptable.
As long as we accept government stormtroopers doing the bidding of private companies we will not be free-- it will just get worse and worse.
What's next- 40 armed marshalls bust some 13 year old for sharing MP3s?
All the while real crimes are going on and are ignored.
These are civil issues and belong in the civil courts. And anyone who doesn't protect their IP is just asking for it.
This is the equivalent of cops busting down dorm room doors because 20 kids in the same class photocopied pages from a library book to study from.
But because its computers they're "pirates" and the idiot press and public go along. Who's to stand up to the invasion of police in what should be civil matters? If anyone- US. Don't tolerate your company using stormtroopers-- protest loudly if they do. And protest to anyone who has the ability to affect change in this area-- such as your congressman (though I don't hold out much hope that they will listen, idiots that they are.)
Civil disobedience is going to be what this comes down to eventually-- sooner or later, they will be tightening the noose. who here doesn't have an MP3 that they can't prove legal ownership of?
And when I worked there we used "Slime" for version control, VisualC as the IDE (Though some people chose to use another IDE).
MS has good people but a completely fscked development process.
One of only two jobs where I've been criticized for commenting my code. (Not lack of comments, but too many.)
" Fact: Apple is dead"
Which explains why their market share keeps doubling.
Did you notice that Netcraft shows more people run Apache than any other server combined? OS X runs Apache.
Therefore, Apple has a monopoly on the market.
Sheesh
Yeah, the fact that unless you spend more than $10,000 there are no computers as fast as the apple equivilents is NOT ENOUGH! WE need serious performance improvements.
Yawn.
iMacs have not stalled, that's bullhockey.
I've been watching the Apple store and the iMac availiblity went down to immediate shipment, but has again increased to 1-2 days. So, they are selling them a little faster than they can make them.
They may be selling fewer than they expected, but they're making even fewer then (Which means profitabiltiy should be good-- profits really hurt when you have to eat machines that won't sell.)
Remember, the Pentium has a much much bigger die than the PowerPC and thus draws a LOT more power (like 10 times).
Thus when you run on battery power with a PC, the chip cuts its clock rate by 6... so that 2GHz pentium which is slower than a 800MHZ powerPC actually is running at 400MHz on battery power.
So, when comparing a titanium to any PC laptop, there's no comparison-- the PCs are dramatically slower on battery power.
True, but that is twice a year when they really have everyone's attention, so it makes it a good time to announce new products.
But I think you're correct in pointing out the trend.
Yeah, clearly they aren't rumors sites! Sheesh.
All the bullshit you see running around is annoying-- people with rumors in their name claiming not to be about rumors
and people claiming apple employees won't talk to the press-- that's absurd.
Its rampant paranoia.
Unfortunately the people who run these sites are like your average slashdot linux whiner-- probably 15 and not quite yet mature.
A 1GHz G4 IS faster than a 2GHz P4.
Unfortunately, most people don't understand pipelines, branch prediction, what having a 386 co-processor for compatibility on there implies, what Risc processing really does, and that floating point is a major part of CPU intensive applications leaves us with people doing what you're doing...
claiming that anything with a higher clockrate is faster.
Never mine that a G4 can do 2-6 times as much work in a given clock cycle.
Feldsteins-- you're right on.
Lets not forget that Apple's product IS open sourced, and in fact, is the most successful open source OS out there in terms of number of installations (maybe not yet, but certainly will be in a couple years, as Linux cannot match Apples volume.)
That's the real reason slashdotters bash apple-- that and the fact that pre-linux they were stuck with windows and were jealous of the superior usabiltiy and cost benefit of Apple products.
Its the only thing I can think of. Certainly a lot of the comments don't make sense.
Hell, they all assuemd that teh ipod had a 2.5 inch drive, and ignored the superior battery technology, etc.
This prejudice is annoying, but I think jealousy is its root.
Is the quote in The Nation by one of the members of the Doors saying that Apple had called him recently wanting to license one of their songs for Apples new "Cube computer software".
That's pretty much what he said-- so it sounds like he doesn't really know what the product is, so it could be a re-emergence of the cube, or it could be a software application that he somehow stuck the word "cube" to.
As to Think Secret (And most all the rest of the rumor sites) they are useless-- often they just post wild speculation when a reasonable person could figure out what's likely to happen.
For instance, since PowerMacs are long in the Tooth and iMacs are rather new, its more likely PowerMacs will be refreshed than iMacs.
I would never say that this is what's going to happen-- cause it could be the reverse as the sites claim, but other than knowing about key components (17 inch displays are cheaper, G5 isn't ready yet) and apple's previous history and overall strategy, you can't say much other than the obvious implications of these bits of info.
Apple really has closed the leaks and frankly, I'm much happier being surprised... not that the rumor sites were ever that accurate anyway.
Fruits and vegetables are healthy? Well, you're half right.
People eating fruit to loose weight might as well be eating hershy bars... they taste better and are the same thing, dietetically.
That you don't know this shows how "obvious" it really is, and why the "common knowledge" is actually anti-scientific.
The low carb diets have SCIENCE at their root. They come from an understanding of the blood sugar mechanisms, and what causes the body to burn fat.
The "low fat" died it not at ALL based on science, but based on the food pyramid that the government made the way it is BECAUSE of heavy lobbying from the food industry. They pyramid, if I remember correctly, started out as a private recommendation from one of the industry groups, and the government later adopted it. It was NEVER based on any science.
And the "low fat" idea is simply that "fat is what causes the problem, therefore you shouldn't eat it."
And of course, this ignores the fact that your body needs fat in its diet-- not getting fat in its diet causes it to retain fat, not burn it.
So, the "low fat" diet isn't even *logical* if you know how the body processes food.
This is why we need to get the government COMPLETELY out of the medical business (And I include quasi government groups like the AMA.)
The FDA has destroyed drug research, and blocked people from getting good drugs for their desieses. (For instance, a drug may be approved for people with a heart problem, its safe in humans, but its ILLEGAL to proscribe that drug to someone for depression, without going thru another 10 years to get approval for that, despite the fact that there's no evidence that the drug is harmful and has been used for decades by a wide variety of people, etc.) People have the right to take the drugs they think will help them. Its a HUMAN RIGHT.
And the AMA destroyed the medical industry by making it impossible to tell anyone whether you liked your doctor or not without getting sued-- so bad doctors don't get a bad rap and malpractice suits are the result.
this is more evidence that the government fucks up everything it touches, and the only solution for liberty-- including your rights online, and the right to write your own software-- is to get a smaller government and get it out of the business of controlling peoples lives.
The fact that they've been giving us bad dietary advice for the last 50 years is inexcusable. (The "Low Carb" diet was discovered and researched in the lat 1800s.)
Its time to get the government out of science and let people do what's right for them, based on science.
I thought the people upset with Paypal were a small minority until I tried to use the service. I sold a friend something. PayPal screwed it up. The amount of the transaction was $5. But they managed to take the money from my friends credit card, claim they never took it, charge my friends account for it, giving it a negative balance, and reverse the charge on my account.
So over this $5 transaction PayPal grabbed $15 for itself-- $5 from me, $5 from the friends bank and $5 in a charge to the friends paypal account that they have to pay to fix it.
Then they decided this friend was committing fraud and suspended their account.
This is totally unacceptable. This was the FIRST TRANSACTION for all of us, after we both became verified members, etc. The bank is clear that the money went to paypal, and paypal wouldn't say a peep about what went wrong.
I wouldn't say PayPal was a fraudulent company, but in my experience, they have a %300 failure rate-- 1 transaction and they took money from three entities.
In the end my friend and I both closed our paypal accounts and settled up face to face.
Sheesh.
Having spent most of the last year using IE under OSX (and suffering). When Mozilla 1.0 was released, I switched, and other than some minor stability issues I'm happy.
So, there's no longer a reason to use IE on the mac, and its reign should be at its end.
Requiring you to quit other applications is unacceptable for an application install, absolutely unacceptable.
As to security, I simply don't trust MS anymore. And I'm happy to be pretty much MS free.
PS- to anyone who thinks about running Entourage, it has a 2G mail limit. Their integer actually wraps at 2G so you reach that much mail (and it caches EVERYTHING- news, mail, images, even deleted stuff, so it doesn't take that long) and you're SOL. The app tries to open the file, then starts seeking at a negative index into it and crashes. Serves me right for using an MS product, forewarning to everyone else. (Yes, Mail.app crashed one too many times for me. Still looking for a good mail client.)
When there's no browser competition, IE was good. But now there's everything- Mozilla, Chimera (really promising), Opera, iCab, OmniWeb and probably other lesser known browsers. That's quite a selection with Mozilla being actually usable, Chimera coming quickly and Opera, iCab and OmniWeb being late "beta" quality. OmniWeb 4.1 might actually be usable, but its too early to say. (Usable to me is a browser that goes a week regularly without crashing, beta is one that can't.)
Why do people continue to pretend that Apple isn't providing machines with better performance at lower cost than Intel machines?
The price myth, like the megahertz myth (which are related) hasn't been true since 1990, if it ever was.
Yes, you can buy an XBOX for $200 (but ony because its sold for less than it costs to make it) and a G3 iMac costs $800, but that iMac beats most intel PCs on the market up to $2,000.
Dude! You're getting a dud.
No it isn't. This has been repeatedly demonstrated to be false. Take a reasonable app such as photoshop...
If you use Intel benchmarks, of course, your results will be different.... oh, and you got to exclude floating point performance, yeah, that's a requirement. IF you do all this, you can pretend that you aren't paying way too much for too little processor when you buy an x86 machine.
(Actually too much for too much processor as the size of the x86-- HUGE-- is why it draws absurd amounts of power, costs so much (fewer per die) and runs so slow (386 emulation processor) and has such a crappy pipelining system.) Oh, and when you talk about laptops its even worse-- on battery power, Intel processors run at 1/4th or 1/6th the rated clock speed cause otherwise battery performance would be zilch. Which means that a powerbook is actually something like 20-30 times the speed of a PC laptop on battery power, when fully utilizing the processor (say playing back a DVD while flying cross country.)
hell, they've already obsolesced my _NEW_ powerbook with their new os x 10.2 release.
You can't say shit like this without being called on it.
I run Warcraft 3 on an iMac G4 at 1024x768 with all graphics options turned on and it runs great.
10.2 HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED. And when it is, ALL titanium powerbooks, even my first generation one, are going to be supported.
Yes, newer hardware will see fuller use of the graphics chips for greater UI quality-- but thats not "obsoleting" the older hardware-- the OS works fine on older hardware (it also runs fine on my PowerMac 9500 from, what, 1996?)
I don't see 10.2 taking better use of the graphics card as making your older graphics card obsolete. Sheesh, even the older machines will get a significant graphics boost, in the new OS.
And, of course, the ultimate proof that you're a lowdown troll who is making this crap up is the claim that Mac hardware costs three times as much-- actually, Mac hardware is consistently cheaper than comparable PC hardware.
The people who think it costs three times as much are comparing an Xbox to an iMac G3 and claiming they are "comparable".
Actually, Geeks prefer OSX. Those who actually create code, do engineering- hardware and software- and are technically proficient prefer OS X.
The linux community is composed of a small group of geeks (many of whom are transitioning to OS X) and a large group of people who can't differentiate between an XBOX and an iMac in hardware value and wanted "free software d00d" to replace windows.
Oh, and *all* the effing idiots who poll my webserver for outdated IIS exploits seem to be running Linux.
Geeks like cool, high tech, high performance tools, and the penultimate example of that right now is OS X. And its pulling ahead- as the Unix underpinnings are allowing Apple to innovate faster than they were previously able to.
I do agree with you in one sense-- those who like to style themselves geeks, but really aren't, *do* perfer Linux.
Thus endith the "geekier than thou" sermon.