When Apple started the MkLinux project they cited the academic demand for the ability to run Linux as a key factor. I imagine that this demand has only gotten stronger with time, so Apple is going to continue to face this issue, and thus provide ways for Linux to work on the Mac.
Otherwise, I can't really see why a normal Mac user would want to run Linux after the release of Mac OS X. Mac OS X generally provides far better hardware support plus the large (certainly compared to Linux) base of MacOS application software all running on a BSD kernel. Mac OS X will be bundled in with the machine, too.
Distance learning was all the rage a few years ago when school,administrators thought it would be a way to save money or enlarge their paying pupil base. Now that several schools have tried it, it is widely viewed as as being a complete flop. The fact of the matter is that Socrates had it right when he said that the ideal classroom is a log with the instructor on one end and the student on the other.
I actually took a course that way once - Graduate scool at Yale University, Statistical Mechanics with Professor R. Vaisnys, class size of 1. I learned more in that one course than in any 5 others I ever had.
A few months ago Apple was advertising a job opening for a 'Linux evangalist', that is someone who would be the go-between representing Apple to the Linux community.
I was kind of disappointed that the authors of this article seemed to make no serious attempt to contact Apple to get their reaction, and made up the story by talking only to Linux developers. I think it would very interesting to call Cupertino and ask to speak to the Linux Evangalist.
Your example is WRONG. A patent FUNDAMENTALLY does NOT give you the right to practice your invention, only the right to prevent someone else from practicing it!! Your spray paint patent is only good for preventing the Joe Mega Corp from using a paint sprayer, it does not give you the rights to use his prior patented process to make wedges. Joe Mega may want to license your patent for cash, or may want to cross-license so you can both now make wedges with spray paint, but if you go into the wedge business using the Joe Mega process, you are infringing on their patent.
The problem with your theory is that you don't weight the number of people with the per capita income. The US is perhaps 5% of the world poplation, but it represents 25% of the world's economic activity. It is also the technology leader in just about all important aress Thus it is a far larger market than China is likely to be in the forseeable future. A peasant pulling plow through a rice paddy isn't going to care about the internet. Right now the US has a higher percentage of people that finish advanced degrees than China has people that finish the first grade. (Direct quote from Chinese prime minister during recent visit to US).
Did you forget the meaning of the word discover? Simply, it means finding soemthing that was always there. Discovery is one of the two main modes of Research; and it can entail a huge investment in time and money to conduct. If a drug company spends a billion bucks to discovers a new protien in a pine tree that cures cancer, why shouldn't they be able to patent it???? Don't you want drug companies to look for cancer cures???????
Clearly, this is not the case any longer. Patents are only enforcable by the rich, meaning large corporations. If you don't believe me ask any individual that has any kind of a patent. Unless the patent holder can afford a small army or posse of lawyers, any IP instruments are unenforcable.
Clearly, you are wrong. Look at the example of Stc vs. Microsoft for example. Whithout patent law Microsoft could have just rolled over these Stac without any punishment. There are plenty of law firms that will take an infringement case on contingency if it looks good enough.
Patents can, and DO protect the little guy from the large corporation.
This article is a crock. Plant patents on hybrids have been allowed for decades. There is nothing new about this for GM Ag products except the methods involve an improved technoque (genetic engineering) to develop the plant.
Next time read the patent. It's NOT for a wheel barrow, but a device that allow lowering the bin of the wheel barrow for easier loading. Perfectly legitamate as far as I can tell.
Mathematical equations are not patentable under current law. Patents cover the implementation, not the idea.
The main reason we have patents is to encourage publication of technology so that after some period of time an invention becomes available to all. When patent systems were developed there was a big problem with companies keeping trade secrets thus restricting the availability of ideas. Any patent lawyer will tell you that a patent is a contract between you and the governemnt - you agree to publish your technology in exchange for an exclusive right to practice it for 20 years.
Take the Bridgestone example - suppose this guy gets killed in a traffic accident and we lose his technology forever. Who would suffer? Society as a whole.
Regarding the time of invention - your example has several problems - US Patent law gives priority to the first inventor, not the first person to make it to the Patent Office. This is because something like this DID happen once. Alexander Graham Bell only beat his competitiors to the Patent Office with the telephone by 1/2 hour.
There are sound reasons for this policy - the basic reason for the patent is to encourage people to publish their discoveries; in some sense it contains OpenSource principles because without Patent law we whould not have this publication.
I also agree with the last comment in the article about the DOJ trial being used by Netscape as a last ditch effort because they couldn't compete in a real market.
Nonsense. What kind of 'real market' is it when your competitor gives away the product for free just to drive you out of business? Or sets up ties in deals that make use iof monopoly power to prevent you from distributing your product??
Sooner or later Steve Jobs is going to buy them. 3com fought Apple off more than once, but now, if they are publically traded, all it takes is some money, and Apple has lots of cash right now.
Balderdash. One of the key functions of a real university is to provide a forum for diverse opinions aka academic freedom. "The University is the Watchdog of Society" This is why we have the tenure system, for example. Without these sort of freedoms society as a whole becomes endangered from 'mob rule' and being perverted into a totally consumeristic way of life. When University administrators start cutting deals for specific teaching tools at the behest of commercial interests our society as a whole is in danger. Unfortunately in publicly funded universities this is often a real problem. What is REALLY alarming to me is that we see similar trends in secondary and primary schools; for example companies providing free visual aids in exchange for the school requiring the students to watch commercials for the companies goods and services. The is Very Very bad stuff.
I am really sickened by latter day 'free market' advocates that seem to have forgotten the history of the free market in the US. The free market brought us the Pinkerton's assassination of union organizers, the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire, J. P. Morgan trying to face down the President of the United States (thank God it was TR) on the imposition of controls on large scale monopolies, Upton Sinclair's expose of food adulteration, a variety of environmental disasters, Company Towns, you name it. The fact of the matter is that Free Enterprise has been tried in this country and it Just Does Not Work for the simple reason that what is good for a company is not necessarily always good for the society as a whole. If you don't believe me, get any decent text on micro economics and look up the term "external diseconomy".
It seems to me that I saw an article describing RedHat's use of IPO money to set up offices in Europe and Japan. Betch they have the money to file an objection. Ditto SuSe, SGI, VA Research, and most any other commercial Linux firm.
I think it's high time that somebody started certifying hardware for Linux. The fact of the matter is that a certification program is an excellent way to get vendors to cough up the drivers or support needed to get hardware working with Linux. As soon as 3dfx is 'Linux Certified', other video card vendors will want a little sticker on their box too.
The laptop I use with Linux has all sorts of problems. Sound? Forget About It.The BIOS *requires* that a bootable DOS partition exist on the hard disk. The video card requires all sorts of framebuffer tom-foolery to get to work decently (of course NOT including 3D acceleration).
Sure, I wish that there were a generic Linux compatabibility test and body to administer it. But until such a thing exists, RedHat is the logical choice. Who else has the commercial clout to beat on hardware vendors with? In my opinion, the effort by IBM to get their laptop certified is the best thing that could happen because the rest of the laptop world is likely to follow IBM's lead here. And we all know that if it's Red Hat compatable, it will work with any other distro, too.
IMHO, we all ought to ask 'is it Linux Certified' every time we make a hardware purchase, regardless if we actually know if it's going to work.
Sooner or later this will get the marketdroids attention.
So if watching TV is illegal while driving, what is the point of a comment like the chairman of Nokia made about the standard being stupid because Americans drive everywhere? Not to mention that the range of a TV broadcast is rather limited (line of sight and all). So you aren't going to get good reception in most cases anyway. No different from the problems associated with mobile reception of FM radio which is crap too. More than 10 miles from the station you don't even get enough signal strength to get stereo.
Seems like the Chairman of Nokia should be moderated down (flamebait) for his comment.
Personally I think the whole concept of a DTV handheld is questionable. I mean, what is the point of delivering 5000 lines of resolution to a 3" screen? Hasn't anybody seen what a Watchman looks like? Even with a good clear signal the tiny screen makes the whole experience laughable.
I also have to wonder about the practicality of multiple DTV channels? Aren't you going to chew up a HELL of a lot of precious broadcast bandwidth with that? In a big city with a lot of stations it seems to me that this would be VERY impractical. Myself, I'd MUCH rather devote that bandwidth to wireless networks than a broadcast media like DTV. Just think - high resolution DTV crowding out wireless networks, giving you 57 channels of High-Res Married With Children Reruns!!! I can't wait to expeerience the thrill of watching I Dream of Genie on my portable phone!!!!! Just imagine catching Jerry Springer on your cross town Taxi ride during Lunch!!!!!!! Or better yet, Melrose Place!!! What next, DTV with a tiny TiVo built in to a handset so you don't have to miss General Hospital on your 2" screen?????????
To me this sounds like a technology whose time has NOT come.
You will see that baglunch got it badly wrong. All that is being discussed is a plan to create such an organism. While Dr. Ventner is a good scientist, he is also a notorious publicity hound, and what he has is more likely a list of problems that have to be solved before an organism can be created, rather than an actual method for creating such a thing.
As far as higher organisms any time soon, I am VERY doubful. After all, the great breakthrough of mammalian cloning was later shown to have a number of flaws, like the fact that Dolly wasn't actually a true clone because the mitochondrial DNA wasn't duplicated. It's a FAR FAR bigger step to actually making such a creature from scratch.
Personally I think this is a puff piece triggered by the fact that Dr. Ventner likes to see his name in print, and he suckered in a couple of unwitting journalists.
This is hilarious. You guys are suggesting that Sony drop a proven technology for something that is in the FUD and press release stage, and isn't suitable for this application anyway?? Juat because it's backed by Intel?? Intel doesn't have clue one about video, graphics, etc. They sell chips for Wintel desktops used by suits and other BusinessDroids. Where the hell is Sony going to get the chipsets to implement USB 2? They won't be available for a year yet! By that time HDTV, digital VCRs and loads of other IEEE 1394 equiped consumer products will be on the market in volume. Are you going to have USB 2.0 on your HDTV? NO!! Fact is USB 2.0 won't work in that kind of environment at all because it not isochronous and it's not peer-to-peer.
In my opinion Intel is making a severe boner by not adopting 1394 for it's base hardware. It's going to delay integration of PC's into the HDTV world severely. Apple at least has this right - by making Firewire a part of their world they are making a much better machine for consumers, and potentially the integration of computers with TV.
To me this site is everything that is wrong with the web. This thing is a grossly graphics intensive site gives the user a very small amount of information per byte downloaded. If you want to see a GOOD web site, look at photo.net.
My phones were knocked out for 30 minutes this morning. I am SURE this is a Y2k warning. Gotta go out any buy a generator this morning, and make sure I've got a years worth of gold bars in the basement.
The Space Shuttle coding team is famous for doing things very carefully. There was an article published in SciAm on software reliability a couple of years ago that quoted a variety institutes studying the problem; they ranked the Space Shuttle team as having the best practices of any programming team IN THE WORLD. That team actually does a detailed failure analysis whenever they discover a bug so as to ensure whatever flaw in their procedures that allowed the bug to slip through is corrected.
Maybe only one or two other organizations in existance even approaches what they are doing.
Roe v. Wade was decided largely on an assumed right to privacy. While there is no explicit 'Right To Privacy' delineated in the US Constitution, the Supreme Court has long held that there does exist a defacto right to privacy. The problem with this is that conservative judges, generally appointed by Republican Presidents don't like this level of constructive interpitation and often reject this argument as grounds for more contentious decisions. The fact is that we really should have a right to privacy in the constitution to eliminate this sort of interpitation.
Conservatives often like to use arguments like taxation is a assualt on personal freedom - well, it is. But the fact of the matter is that conservatives are also the people who promulgate proposed restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of religion (and the concept that religous beliefs should become societal norms, but it is MY religion that we use as a benchmark). These are important assaults on basic freedoms, too.
The fact of the matter is that people need to adopt a more libertarian point of view when dealing with government.
The Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department. They have a lot to do with tracking drug gangs via money flow. As far as terrorists, that's pretty obvious as they are responsible for the safety of the President.
Nah. Steve Jobs has always hated floppies. The NeXT didn't have a floppy drive either, and that was years ago.
Personally I think it is really LAME that the PC industry hasn't been able to come up with anything better than a floppy as a standard for removable R/W media. Many many files just don't FIT on a floppy - you really need something with larger capacity.
This is really up to the PC industry to fix, but they won't because whatever the possibilities are it going to cost at least 0.02 cents more than that cheap floppy drive.
Apple has it right. Leave out the floppy and let the industry come up with a new defacto standard which they can later incorporate into their machines.
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When Apple started the MkLinux project they cited the academic demand for the ability to run Linux as a key factor. I imagine that this demand has only gotten stronger with time, so Apple is going to continue to face this issue, and thus provide ways for Linux to work on the Mac.
Otherwise, I can't really see why a normal Mac user would want to run Linux after the release of Mac OS X. Mac OS X generally provides far better hardware support plus the large (certainly compared to Linux) base of MacOS application software all running on a BSD kernel. Mac OS X will be bundled in with the machine, too.
Distance learning was all the rage a few years ago when school ,administrators thought it would be a way to save money or enlarge their paying pupil base. Now that several schools have tried it, it is widely viewed as as being a complete flop. The fact of the matter is that Socrates had it right when he said that the ideal classroom is a log with the instructor on one end and the student on the other.
I actually took a course that way once - Graduate scool at Yale University, Statistical Mechanics with Professor R. Vaisnys, class size of 1. I learned more in that one course than in any 5 others I ever had.
A few months ago Apple was advertising a job opening for a 'Linux evangalist', that is someone who would be the go-between representing Apple to the Linux community.
I was kind of disappointed that the authors of this article seemed to make no serious attempt to contact Apple to get their reaction, and made up the story by talking only to Linux developers. I think it would very interesting to call Cupertino and ask to speak to the Linux Evangalist.
There are already two hardware vendors offering G3 to G4 upgrades. A bit of firmware code isn't exactly a major impediment.
Your example is WRONG. A patent FUNDAMENTALLY does NOT give you the right to practice your invention, only the right to prevent someone else from practicing it!! Your spray paint patent is only good for preventing the Joe Mega Corp from using a paint sprayer, it does not give you the rights to use his prior patented process to make wedges. Joe Mega may want to license your patent for cash, or may want to cross-license so you can both now make wedges with spray paint, but if you go into the wedge business using the Joe Mega process, you are infringing on their patent.
The problem with your theory is that you don't weight the number of people with the per capita income. The US is perhaps 5% of the world poplation, but it represents 25% of the world's economic activity. It is also the technology leader in just about all important aress Thus it is a far larger market than China is likely to be in the forseeable future. A peasant pulling plow through a rice paddy isn't going to care about the internet. Right now the US has a higher percentage of people that finish advanced degrees than China has people that finish the first grade. (Direct quote from Chinese prime minister during recent visit to US).
Did you forget the meaning of the word discover? Simply, it means finding soemthing that was always there. Discovery is one of the two main modes of Research; and it can entail a huge investment in time and money to conduct. If a drug company spends a billion bucks to discovers a new protien in a pine tree that cures cancer, why shouldn't they be able to patent it???? Don't you want drug companies to look for cancer cures???????
Clearly, this is not the case any longer. Patents are only enforcable by the rich, meaning large corporations. If you don't believe me ask any individual that has any kind of a patent. Unless the patent holder can afford a small army or posse of lawyers, any IP instruments are unenforcable.
Clearly, you are wrong. Look at the example of Stc vs. Microsoft for example. Whithout patent law Microsoft could have just rolled over these Stac without any punishment. There are plenty of law firms that will take an infringement case on contingency if it looks good enough.
Patents can, and DO protect the little guy from the large corporation.
This article is a crock. Plant patents on hybrids have been allowed for decades. There is nothing new about this for GM Ag products except the methods involve an improved technoque (genetic engineering) to develop the plant.
Next time read the patent. It's NOT for a wheel barrow, but a device that allow lowering the bin of the wheel barrow for easier loading. Perfectly legitamate as far as I can tell.
Mathematical equations are not patentable under current law. Patents cover the implementation, not the idea.
The main reason we have patents is to encourage publication of technology so that after some period of time an invention becomes available to all. When patent systems were developed there was a big problem with companies keeping trade secrets thus restricting the availability of ideas. Any patent lawyer will tell you that a patent is a contract between you and the governemnt - you agree to publish your technology in exchange for an exclusive right to practice it for 20 years.
Take the Bridgestone example - suppose this guy gets killed in a traffic accident and we lose his technology forever. Who would suffer? Society as a whole.
Regarding the time of invention - your example has several problems - US Patent law gives priority to the first inventor, not the first person to make it to the Patent Office. This is because something like this DID happen once. Alexander Graham Bell only beat his competitiors to the Patent Office with the telephone by 1/2 hour.
There are sound reasons for this policy - the basic reason for the patent is to encourage people to publish their discoveries; in some sense it contains OpenSource principles because without Patent law we whould not have this publication.
I also agree with the last comment in the article about the DOJ trial being used by Netscape as a last ditch effort because they couldn't compete in a real market.
Nonsense. What kind of 'real market' is it when your competitor gives away the product for free just to drive you out of business? Or sets up ties in deals that make use iof monopoly power to prevent you from distributing your product??
This is as illegal as it gets.
Sooner or later Steve Jobs is going to buy them. 3com fought Apple off more than once, but now, if they are publically traded, all it takes is some money, and Apple has lots of cash right now.
Balderdash. One of the key functions of a real university is to provide a forum for diverse opinions aka academic freedom. "The University is the Watchdog of Society" This is why we have the tenure system, for example. Without these sort of freedoms society as a whole becomes endangered from 'mob rule' and being perverted into a totally consumeristic way of life. When University administrators start cutting deals for specific teaching tools at the behest of commercial interests our society as a whole is in danger. Unfortunately in publicly funded universities this is often a real problem. What is REALLY alarming to me is that we see similar trends in secondary and primary schools; for example companies providing free visual aids in exchange for the school requiring the students to watch commercials for the companies goods and services. The is Very Very bad stuff.
I am really sickened by latter day 'free market' advocates that seem to have forgotten the history of the free market in the US. The free market brought us the Pinkerton's assassination of union organizers, the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire, J. P. Morgan trying to face down the President of the United States (thank God it was TR) on the imposition of controls on large scale monopolies, Upton Sinclair's expose of food adulteration, a variety of environmental disasters, Company Towns, you name it. The fact of the matter is that Free Enterprise has been tried in this country and it Just Does Not Work for the simple reason that what is good for a company is not necessarily always good for the society as a whole. If you don't believe me, get any decent text on micro economics and look up the term "external diseconomy".
It seems to me that I saw an article describing RedHat's use of IPO money to set up offices in Europe and Japan. Betch they have the money to file an objection. Ditto SuSe, SGI, VA Research, and most any other commercial Linux firm.
Trust me, this has no chance.
I think it's high time that somebody started certifying hardware for Linux. The fact of the matter is that a certification program is an excellent way to get vendors to cough up the drivers or support needed to get hardware working with Linux. As soon as 3dfx is 'Linux Certified', other video card vendors will want a little sticker on their box too.
The laptop I use with Linux has all sorts of problems. Sound? Forget About It.The BIOS *requires* that a bootable DOS partition exist on the hard disk. The video card requires all sorts of framebuffer tom-foolery to get to work decently (of course NOT including 3D acceleration).
Sure, I wish that there were a generic Linux compatabibility test and body to administer it. But until such a thing exists, RedHat is the logical choice. Who else has the commercial clout to beat on hardware vendors with? In my opinion, the effort by IBM to get their laptop certified is the best thing that could happen because the rest of the laptop world is likely to follow IBM's lead here. And we all know that if it's Red Hat compatable, it will work with any other distro, too.
IMHO, we all ought to ask 'is it Linux Certified' every time we make a hardware purchase, regardless if we actually know if it's going to work.
Sooner or later this will get the marketdroids attention.
So if watching TV is illegal while driving, what is the point of a comment like the chairman of Nokia made about the standard being stupid because Americans drive everywhere? Not to mention that the range of a TV broadcast is rather limited (line of sight and all). So you aren't going to get good reception in most cases anyway. No different from the problems associated with mobile reception of FM radio which is crap too. More than 10 miles from the station you don't even get enough signal strength to get stereo.
Seems like the Chairman of Nokia should be moderated down (flamebait) for his comment.
Personally I think the whole concept of a DTV handheld is questionable. I mean, what is the point of delivering 5000 lines of resolution to a 3" screen? Hasn't anybody seen what a Watchman looks like? Even with a good clear signal the tiny screen makes the whole experience laughable.
I also have to wonder about the practicality of multiple DTV channels? Aren't you going to chew up a HELL of a lot of precious broadcast bandwidth with that? In a big city with a lot of stations it seems to me that this would be VERY impractical. Myself, I'd MUCH rather devote that bandwidth to wireless networks than a broadcast media like DTV. Just think - high resolution DTV crowding out wireless networks, giving you 57 channels of High-Res Married With Children Reruns!!! I can't wait to expeerience the thrill of watching I Dream of Genie on my portable phone!!!!! Just imagine catching Jerry Springer on your cross town Taxi ride during Lunch!!!!!!! Or better yet, Melrose Place!!! What next, DTV with a tiny TiVo built in to a handset so you don't have to miss General Hospital on your 2" screen?????????
To me this sounds like a technology whose time has NOT come.
You will see that baglunch got it badly wrong. All that is being discussed is a plan to create such an organism. While Dr. Ventner is a good scientist, he is also a notorious publicity hound, and what he has is more likely a list of problems that have to be solved before an organism can be created, rather than an actual method for creating such a thing.
As far as higher organisms any time soon, I am VERY doubful. After all, the great breakthrough of mammalian cloning was later shown to have a number of flaws, like the fact that Dolly wasn't actually a true clone because the mitochondrial DNA wasn't duplicated. It's a FAR FAR bigger step to actually making such a creature from scratch.
Personally I think this is a puff piece triggered by the fact that Dr. Ventner likes to see his name in print, and he suckered in a couple of unwitting journalists.
This is hilarious. You guys are suggesting that Sony drop a proven technology for something that is in the FUD and press release stage, and isn't suitable for this application anyway?? Juat because it's backed by Intel?? Intel doesn't have clue one about video, graphics, etc. They sell chips for Wintel desktops used by suits and other BusinessDroids. Where the hell is Sony going to get the chipsets to implement USB 2? They won't be available for a year yet! By that time HDTV, digital VCRs and loads of other IEEE 1394 equiped consumer products will be on the market in volume. Are you going to have USB 2.0 on your HDTV? NO!! Fact is USB 2.0 won't work in that kind of environment at all because it not isochronous and it's not peer-to-peer.
In my opinion Intel is making a severe boner by not adopting 1394 for it's base hardware. It's going to delay integration of PC's into the HDTV world severely. Apple at least has this right - by making Firewire a part of their world they are making a much better machine for consumers, and potentially the integration of computers with TV.
To me this site is everything that is wrong with the web. This thing is a grossly graphics intensive site gives the user a very small amount of information per byte downloaded. If you want to see a GOOD web site, look at photo.net.
Pagh.
My phones were knocked out for 30 minutes this morning. I am SURE this is a Y2k warning. Gotta go out any buy a generator this morning, and make sure I've got a years worth of gold bars in the basement.
The Space Shuttle coding team is famous for doing things very carefully. There was an article published in SciAm on software reliability a couple of years ago that quoted a variety institutes studying the problem; they ranked the Space Shuttle team as having the best practices of any programming team IN THE WORLD. That team actually does a detailed failure analysis whenever they discover a bug so as to ensure whatever flaw in their procedures that allowed the bug to slip through is corrected.
Maybe only one or two other organizations in existance even approaches what they are doing.
Roe v. Wade was decided largely on an assumed right to privacy. While there is no explicit 'Right To Privacy' delineated in the US Constitution, the Supreme Court has long held that there does exist a defacto right to privacy. The problem with this is that conservative judges, generally appointed by Republican Presidents don't like this level of constructive interpitation and often reject this argument as grounds for more contentious decisions. The fact is that we really should have a right to privacy in the constitution to eliminate this sort of interpitation.
Conservatives often like to use arguments like taxation is a assualt on personal freedom - well, it is. But the fact of the matter is that conservatives are also the people who promulgate proposed restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of religion (and the concept that religous beliefs should become societal norms, but it is MY religion that we use as a benchmark). These are important assaults on basic freedoms, too.
The fact of the matter is that people need to adopt a more libertarian point of view when dealing with government.
The Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department. They have a lot to do with tracking drug gangs via money flow. As far as terrorists, that's pretty obvious as they are responsible for the safety of the President.
Nah. Steve Jobs has always hated floppies. The NeXT didn't have a floppy drive either, and that was years ago.
Personally I think it is really LAME that the PC industry hasn't been able to come up with anything better than a floppy as a standard for removable R/W media. Many many files just don't FIT on a floppy - you really need something with larger capacity.
This is really up to the PC industry to fix, but they won't because whatever the possibilities are it going to cost at least 0.02 cents more than that cheap floppy drive.
Apple has it right. Leave out the floppy and let the industry come up with a new defacto standard which they can later incorporate into their machines.