The point is that neither you nor anyone else knows which US citizens were spied on because the Bush administration didn't even bother to get warrants after the fact as the law allows. They are completely alone in this regard. Previous administrations always acquired warrants even if these were obtained after the fact as is permitted when dealing with foreign intelligence.
We have only Bush's word that all of these warrant-less taps involved foreign intelligence. If this were the case then why not obey the law? Time is not an issue because the warrant can be obtained afterwards. So the argument that "we couldn't wait - it was too vital to national security," is a lie. The law specifically allows for a wiretap now when you need it as long as you file the paperwork afterward.
There can be only one reason why Bush would not get the warrants - because he did not think they would be approved. This is saying quite a lot when you consider that virtually every such request made in the past has been rubber stamped by the special court exercising oversight.
Why did Bush think these taps would not be approved? Because some of them involved only US citizens. That's right, some of these taps were of US citizens talking to other US citizens and so would have been completely illegal. That means that they are impeachable offenses. If there is a full investigation into this matter the facts will almost certainly show that the Bush administration conducted wiretaps that no court would ever grant a warrant for - taps of US citizens talking to other US citizens without any probable cause. For this Bush should be impeached.
Humor is quite often a statement that someone or something is not a threat. That's why seeing someone slip on a banana peel is funny - you laugh because he has suddenly gone from potential social superior/threat to non-threat. That's why so much humor has an element of cruelty - in effect the joke says "look at these dopes, they're no threat at all to us."
Not directed just at you, though I am replying to you, but I think the definitions of introvert and extravert as used in psychology need to be clarified here.
First put forward by Freud and greatly elaborated by Jung neither introvert nor extravert necessarily determines skills at either thinking or socializing. Both have to do with which mode of behavior a person finds energizing and which s/he finds draining. Because of this energizing/draining aspect it is likely, though by no means guaranteed that introverts will be drawn more to reflection and therefore become more skilled thinkers, planners, visualizers, etc than they are socializers. Conversely it is more likely, though not assured, that extraverts will become more skilled socializers than they are thinkers, visualizers, etc.
An introvert finds that directing attention inwardly (hence the term into (inward) vert (to turn)) comes easily and is energizing, while directing attention outward (for example, in social gatherings) is draining. This does not mean that introverts cannot be good at socializing. It is just that doing so is an effort. They then need alone time to recover from the socializing.
An extrovert finds that directing attention outward (hence the term extro (outward) vert (to turn)) comes easily and is energizing, but directing attention inwardly (for example reflecting on feelings or past experiences) is draining. The extrovert can become quite skilled at this interior focus but s/he will need some social time to recover from it, just as the introvert will need alone time to recover from the perceived drain of socializing.
So both types can behave in both ways. Their behavior is not what defines them as introverts or extroverts. What defines them as one type or the other is how they respond to these two spheres of activity - inward looking and outward looking - by finding one energizing, one draining, one coming easily and one requiring an effort.
"The fact that Microsoft funded the "study" means that you MUST look at the assumptions and process."
No it doesn't. Examining the study in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as every other study will reveal its flaws. Nothing else is necessary.
The fact that you think the funder matters means you MUST look up "circumstantial ad hominem", because you used one and don't even know it.
An argument is only ad hominem if it attacks the person when such an attack is irrelevant to the argument at hand. Such is not the case here because the study criteria where chosen by Dr. Herb. When a researcher is contracted to conduct research by an interested party it is perfectly legitimate to question the motives and objectivity of the researcher when evaluating the research. The fact that MS paid for the study puts the burden of proof of the objectivity of the study criteria on MS's paid researcher, Dr. Herb. The standard is most definitely not that of treating the study as if it were neutral.
When we deal with real people pure logic is not all that is necessary. Dr. Herb has done studies for MS in the past. Do you think he would like to do them in the future? The study criteria did not fall from the sky on stone tablets from God. They were chosen by Dr. Herb. Do you think these criteria may have included some bias, whether conscious or otherwise on the part of Dr. Herb?
Numerous readers have already pointed out that the study criteria chosen by Dr. Herb required some pretty goofy behavior on the part of the Linux sysadmins, specifically, backporting patches and doing a glibc upgrade on a production system rather than simply doing a full OS upgrade. These odd "requirements" alone are enough to call into significant question any claim of research objectivity. I'd say, along with many slashdot readers that Dr. Herb has failed to prove that his study criteria are truly fair.
After eEye mistakenly posted a note on its Web site saying the iTunes flaw affected "all operating systems," the security firm updated its warning to indicate that the flaw had been found only on the Windows operating system so far.
from the corrected advisory:
Operating Systems Affected: All Microsoft Operatins Systems
No other OSes listed, just MS. So Mac OS X is not known to be affected.
No they wouldn't. Apple is not a monopoly. A monopoly has monopoly market power - the ability to set prices without regard for competitors' offerings. It is a misuse of the term monopoly to say that Apple has a monopoly on Mac OS X. This is (as an earlier poster pointed out) like saying that Coca Cola has a monopoly on Coke or that Pepsico has a monopoly on Pepsi. The relevant fact is that neither Cocoa Cola nor Pepsi has a monopoly on cola soda. Similarly, Apple does not have a monopoly on personal computer operating systems.
Microsoft is a monopoly because they can price their personal computer operating system without regard for the price of competitors' offerings. For example, one can purchase a linux distro for just a few dollars including shipping. One cannot purchase Windows for 3.95 even if one is an OEM. This proves that Microsoft can price their offering without regard for the price of competitors' offerings, and thus that Microsoft has a monopoly in PC OSes. This is now a matter of law in the US, the case having been advanced to the SCOTUS and the finding of fact that Microsoft is a monopoly in this market has been upheld.
What made Microsoft's tying of internet explorer to Windows illegal was the fact that Microsoft was a monopoly. Such practices are not illegal when done by other firms since they don't have any monopoly power to wield. If they want to tie two products let them - consumers will have the choice to go elsewhere. The market deals easily with product tying - consumers either like it or they don't and make their purchasing choices accordingly.
The problem only arises when there is effectively no other choice. Consumers who need Windows (because of a combination of inter-firm compatibility, Office, legacy apps, etc.) must buy Windows. If Microsoft ties explorer to Windows then the market has no choice - the market must choose explorer. It is this use of monopoly market power in one market (PC OSes) to force control of another market (internet browsers) that made Microsoft's tying of internet Explorer to Windows illegal.
Finally the argument that Apple prices it's OS without regard for competitors offerings is based on the notion that there exist open source OSes that are comparable in functionality to Mac OS X. A few days' use of the applications that are bundled with Mac OS X will quickly disprove this notion. As others in this thread have written, one would have to pay up to $1000.00 for commercial software to get applications of the quality and integration that come bundled with Mac OS X.
I'd argue that the current Mac userbase is SO devoted to the brand, that they wouldn't make the jump even if it did save them money.
This is demonstrably false. When Apple allowed cloning in the mid-late 90s lifelong mac users abandoned ship by the tens of thousands to buy PowerComputing and other clones. I have good friend who is a professional photographer. He has never owned any computer that did not run Mac OS, and this is going back twenty years. When the clones came out, he simply bought based on price, nothing else. People can be mac loyalists and still be quite price sensitive. If Apple allowed Dell to make cheaper boxes that ran Mac OS Apple's sales would be devastated. Steve Jobs knows this well. That's why he killed the clones immediately upon returning to Apple.
In practice when the SCOTUS refuses to hear a case the highest appellate court ruling is treated as controlling law by other federal courts. If the SCOTUS lets a ruling stand then other federal courts, even in other districts will look long and hard before handing down a decision that goes against the ruling that the SCOTUS let stand. Federal judges do not like to be reversed by higher courts - its professionally humiliating. Essentially what's going on when a decision is overturned is that the SCOTUS or other appellate court is saying *BZZT* WRONG! What were you thinking when you made this ruling? It's BACKWARDS! Therefore, when the SCOTUS lets a ruling stand it becomes in practice controlling law on that/those issue/s because federal judges really don't like the public humiliation of having their decisions overruled by higher courts.
There is no evidence that central planning is a bad system. In the Soviet Union it worked spectacularly well, turning a backwards agricultural country with poor climate, no industry and illiterate population into the world's superpower with top-notch science, every conceivable industry, including high-tech ones, educated well-fed healthy people living in equality without poverty and in comfort, being able to work in good conditions, develop themselves intellectually and culturally and otherwise enjoying themselves. All that without having media-forced stupidity, consumerism and other ills of the Western society. All of that using internal resources without resorting to exploitation of other countries, like capitalist countries must do.
First human rights - I really doubt that the Czechs Poles and Hungarians (among others) would agree that what the Soviet Union achieved was accomplished "without resorting to exploitation of other countries." Mass murder and repression were also rampant insde the former Soviet union. It was no paradise.
Second, economics - the problem with a planned economy is that there is no competition, so if the central political directorate gets something wrong, there is no competing firm to offer an alternative. Yes corporations are each mini planned economies, but if one giant corporation makes a bad call, there are others with different plans offering alternatives. In a centrally planned state economy when the planners make a bad call, you're screwed with no recourse. The constant shortages and failures to keep up with advancing technologies in the West were the result of this lack of competition.
The GPL is a license to copy and modify. In a world without copyright there are no licenses, everyone copies freely and there is no need for the GPL or any other license to copy or modify. Your parent is absolutely correct, the GPL is based in, and only works because of, copyright law.
Even more important in the context of this discussion is the fact that you don't understand the distinction between software on the one hand and fixed documents on the other hand. The most obvious proof of this is the fact that the GPL itself is not licensed under the GPL. That's right, you may not modify your copy of the GPL. You may merely copy it unmodified. This is in direct and stark contrast to software licensed under the GPL which you may both copy and modify. From the GPL itself:
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Publishing scientific papers under the GPL is precisely the sort of thing that even the authors of the GPL consider unreasonable, since they have chosen *not* to license the GPL itself under the GPL. Some documents are meant to be fixed. A license that allows modification, such as the GPL does, is completely inappropriate for such documents. There is a long standing and accepted process for correcting or challenging the statements in a scientific paper. It consists in authoring a new paper, not modifying the existing one.
So stop using diaper epithets until you yourself actually understand the issues involved.
This is a "common" example only in the sense of "lowest common denominator" - congratulations, you've succeeded in reducing the power of lisp to the lameness of BASIC. In real life, lisp programmers do not write code with numbered tags a-la numbered source lines in BASIC.
Your infinite loop would be rendered in common lisp as:
(loop (print "hello") (print "world"))
or even
(loop (print "hello world"))
since newlines are allowed in literal strings.
But really, one probably doesn't want the quotes in the output, so you'd really see:
(loop (format t "hello~%world~%"))
But this is still more punctuation marks than BASIC, thus proving that when trying to accomplish something so simple even a severely retarded chimpanzee would not be challenged by the task, BASIC requires fewer punctuation marks than lisp, c, or java. Unfortunately, when the task is quite complex BASIC isn't up to the job at all, no matter how many (or few) punctuation marks you use.
I think it is more likely to be dependent on how many of the desirable things built on top of Darwin Apple chooses to keep closed and off Linux. iTunes comes to mind. No matter how free Linux is many users will not choose it if you can't use it properly with your iPod. I know that this is possible now, but Apple could change this at any time if they felt sufficiently threatened by the growth of desktop Linux.
If Apple has enough popular features that simply can't be accessed from Linux - even if only because Apple chooses to do an explicit OS license check when you try to access the iTunes Music store for example- then it really will be Linux which needs to look out for Mac OS X and not the other way round.
I could write a perl equivalent to MyDoom that would have the same behavior, and not require user interaction past the original running, and not require a password.
But requiring a user with admin privileges to actively run a program is *not* a virus. A virus is an executable that propagates (i.e., copies) itself and executes itself *without* user knowledge or explicit user permission.
What you are talking about is a trojan horse program and there is really no way to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot if he actively chooses to run some random executable with admin privileges. At least Mac OS X throws up an alert notifying the user when opening a document will cause an executable to run for the first time.
Only tards who can't touch type could ever hope to use a computer with one hand. People with brains have always known that one can only use a computer effectively with two hands.
Zappa (and is philosophical predecessor Duchamp) was wrong about this. Only ignorant people can be fooled into thinking that a piece of dog sh*t in a frame is art. Those with a modicum of knowledge about art will simply say "what is that sh*t in the frame on the wall?"
Let me tell you a secret about Art: no-one knows what it is.
People differ over what they consider art, but there is very broad agreement on what is not art. The contents of your local municipal sewage system are not art. If someone fishes said contents out, slaps them on a piece of plywood, installs them in a gallery, and claims they are art, they are implicitly arguing that context determines art/not-art. This was Duchamp's game. Wise people have figured out that Duchamp was wrong - a turd on a gallery wall is still a turd, not a work of art.
Since people with brains have now moved beyond the juvenile "let's upset mommy and daddy" stage of art-as-mere-rebellion, we can get an idea of what art really is.
First, it involves some skill. Mere emotion will not no it - neither on the part of the artist, nor on the part of the viewer/listener. Otherwise every time a baby cried it would be a poem - after all the baby quite clearly is feeling very strongly, and the kid's parents are probably pretty worked up too.
Second, that skill must be used to convey some meaning. That's pretty broad, but then art is quite all-encompassing when it comes to what meanings it can convey. Often that meaning cannot be more precisely characterized in words than merely saying "beauty." But that's why we have visual arts, music,etc. - to convey that which is not easily conveyed in words with the same intensity or nuance. Could we translate Michelangelo's David into words? Trivially, we could digitize it, but it loses an awful lot of it's power and intensity in the translation - no string of 1s and 0s is really going to have the same impact on a human viewer as seeing the sculpture itself.
What distinguishes art from craft is that art's principal purpose is to convey this meaning, while a craft's principal purpose it its use. If a craft item ceases to exist principally for its use, and if it exhibits sufficient skill, it becomes art. That's why particularly skillfully made quilts can be art - their principal purpose is no longer keeping someone warm at night, but conveying the meaning that their design conveys.
Apple is no longer a hardware company. You're living in the past, like they have been for the last 5 years. Think about it. They don't make their own processors, graphics cards, memory, hard drives, fans, cords, peripherals, etc. They get companies to make this stuff for them, they package it up, and sell it for a decent profit.
Then I guess Dell isn't a hardware company either, since they operate the same way;^)
Both Apple and Dell are hardware integrators who wisely outsource the manufacture of components to low margin outfits in Taiwan and China. Both design their own packages - Apple just does a much better job of it.
Neither Dell nor Apple is a software company. Dell has MS to do software for them, and Apple does software in house. But make no mistake, both Dell and Apple make their profit from hardware sales.
This comment might carry a bit more weight if you hadn't referred to the head of the MS Mac business unit as "he" - she's a woman.
Now back to reality. Nobody running a major business unit of any public corporation makes any sort of public statement - much less a stage appearance - without clearing it with superiors. Corporate representatives do not get to express their personal "opinions" on matters involving their public company. Everything they say publicly carries legal consequences for their corporation and they are fully aware of that fact. So when Roz Ho, the head of the MS Mac BU said:
The Mac BU is already hard at work on the next versions of Office for Mac and Virtual PC for Mac. An important part of that work includes collaboration with Apple engineers on Xcode to create Universal Binaries of future versions of Office so that it will run natively on Apple's future hardware
she was legally speaking as a representative of MS not expressing her personal "opinion."
Does anybody else think that Steve was saving the name "Leopard" for the version in which Apple switched to Intel just for the irony value - as in "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" from Jeremiah 13:23 - more commonly quoted as "The leopard cannot change its spots."
I'll give you a simple example which is typical. The big picture concept is that Apple has traditionally designed the Mac user interface on the basis of real user studies, not merely what a group of engineers think would be best. The result is objectively superior usability - you can measure the improvement for all users, even those who don't realize that they're now working faster. Now to the example:
Mac OS computers have always had a single menu bar. Mac window title bars do not have, and have never had menus in native Mac OS applications. The reason is user testing. Fitt's law states that the time to acquire a target - in this case the menu - is directly proportional to the distance from the mouse pointer to the target, and inversely proportional to the size of the target:
T = k distance/size where k is some per-user constant
This law has been backed up by numerous real user tests. It turns out that there are 8 screen targets that are effectively infinite in size - the top, bottom, right and left sides, and the four corners. Why? Because they can be acquired by simply slamming the mouse in one of these 8 directions without regard for overshooting the target - it simply isn't possible to overshoot these 8 targets.
This means that the time to acquire the menu can be reduced to almost 0 if you put the menu in one of these 8 locations. The 4 corners are impractical - not enough area to present many menus. Since most roman scripts read left to right, top to bottom, this leaves only the top of the screen. The bottom would force the listing of the items in each menu in reverse order since you obviously want the most commonly used menu items first - they're faster to acquire that way.
Now notice how Windows gets this wrong.
1. Window title bars have menus. Some engineers at MS might have thought that this would make them easier to use - after all they're closer that way. But it turns out that menu acquisition time is longer for window menus than for a single screen top menu bar. This is why you do real user tests - users' perceptions of what is or might be faster are often counter-intuitively wrong.
2. The early versions of Windows had a task bar whose buttons did not extend to the bottom of the screen. This defeats the whole purpose of putting a click target on a screen edge - you can no longer acquire the target by simply slamming the mouse down to the bottom. You must slow down and make sure you don't overshoot the button's bottom on the task bar. You've now effectively pessimized click target acquisition - you've put the click target as far as possible from the center of the screen, but made it impossible to acquire by simply pushing the mouse all the way to the bottom.
I can't tell you how many Windows users insist nevertheless that window menus are faster - that's their perception. But when I time them with a stopwatch they're all surprised to learn that they actually acquire the menu faster on a Mac than on Windows.
Mac OS computers are objectively more usable because the Mac UI has always been based on real world user testing, not some engineers' notion of what would work best.
Re:Jobs vision: multiple cores!! let's get them to
on
Apple Switching to Intel
·
· Score: 2, Informative
with no indication of whether that's legal, technical, or both
Most likely both. The legal bit is a given - it's been true of Mac OS for years - maybe even a decade. It is a violation of the EULA to run Mac OS on anything other than an Apple Mac.
They'll undoubtedly put some technical stumbling blocks in the way too. And they'll aggressively pursue any open source efforts to circumvent their EULA restrictions - don't put it past Apple to invoke the DMCA here. Expect a lot of nascent "Mac on Intel" sourceforge projects to experience court ordered takedowns.
Even if some fringe project succeeds there won't be many stock intel boxes running Mac OS X - if the people building and/or selling them become too visible they'll become targets for police raids and lawsuits.
Technically there is process called WindowServer and every GUI process is a child process of WindowServer (run Activity Monitor and select All Processes, Hierarchically to see this for yourself). Aqua is Apple's name for the look and feel of their WindowServer. It is *not* X windows.
Apple also has a version of X11 which has an Aqua look and feel (sort of) window manager called quartz-wm. If you launch X11.app you'll see that it is a child of WindowServer, and quartz-wm is, in turn a child of X11.app.
In other words, Apple's version of X11 tries to play nice with Apple's native GUI WindowServer by putting on Aqua clothes provided by quartz-wm. X11 is almost never used by ordinary Mac users - commercial apps are all written to Mac APIs which are designed to run under WindowServer. X11 is only used by ported *nix apps - GIMP for example.
Unfortunately I have no idea how to actually implement that in a usable manner.
Neither does anyone else, which is why such "exploits" are completely uninteresting.
As long as users need the power to do potentially harmful things such as modify or delete files in order to get work done, it will be possible to trick them into doing so. Any "exploit" that relies on tricking the user is not a flaw in the OS, but relies on the gullibility of users.
There is nothing that can possibly stop social engineering of this sort short of an OS that prevents users from ever deleting or modifying files. Maybe one day storage will become so inexpensive that a file system that archives all previous versions of all files will be implemented. Until then, it will always be possibly to trick the user into deleting important files, because the user needs the ability to modify and delete important files (i.e., his own user data) in order to get any work done.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that neither you nor anyone else knows which US citizens were spied on because the Bush administration didn't even bother to get warrants after the fact as the law allows. They are completely alone in this regard. Previous administrations always acquired warrants even if these were obtained after the fact as is permitted when dealing with foreign intelligence.
We have only Bush's word that all of these warrant-less taps involved foreign intelligence. If this were the case then why not obey the law? Time is not an issue because the warrant can be obtained afterwards. So the argument that "we couldn't wait - it was too vital to national security," is a lie. The law specifically allows for a wiretap now when you need it as long as you file the paperwork afterward.
There can be only one reason why Bush would not get the warrants - because he did not think they would be approved. This is saying quite a lot when you consider that virtually every such request made in the past has been rubber stamped by the special court exercising oversight.
Why did Bush think these taps would not be approved? Because some of them involved only US citizens. That's right, some of these taps were of US citizens talking to other US citizens and so would have been completely illegal. That means that they are impeachable offenses. If there is a full investigation into this matter the facts will almost certainly show that the Bush administration conducted wiretaps that no court would ever grant a warrant for - taps of US citizens talking to other US citizens without any probable cause. For this Bush should be impeached.
Humor is quite often a statement that someone or something is not a threat. That's why seeing someone slip on a banana peel is funny - you laugh because he has suddenly gone from potential social superior/threat to non-threat. That's why so much humor has an element of cruelty - in effect the joke says "look at these dopes, they're no threat at all to us."
Not directed just at you, though I am replying to you, but I think the definitions of introvert and extravert as used in psychology need to be clarified here.
First put forward by Freud and greatly elaborated by Jung neither introvert nor extravert necessarily determines skills at either thinking or socializing. Both have to do with which mode of behavior a person finds energizing and which s/he finds draining. Because of this energizing/draining aspect it is likely, though by no means guaranteed that introverts will be drawn more to reflection and therefore become more skilled thinkers, planners, visualizers, etc than they are socializers. Conversely it is more likely, though not assured, that extraverts will become more skilled socializers than they are thinkers, visualizers, etc.
An introvert finds that directing attention inwardly (hence the term into (inward) vert (to turn)) comes easily and is energizing, while directing attention outward (for example, in social gatherings) is draining. This does not mean that introverts cannot be good at socializing. It is just that doing so is an effort. They then need alone time to recover from the socializing.
An extrovert finds that directing attention outward (hence the term extro (outward) vert (to turn)) comes easily and is energizing, but directing attention inwardly (for example reflecting on feelings or past experiences) is draining. The extrovert can become quite skilled at this interior focus but s/he will need some social time to recover from it, just as the introvert will need alone time to recover from the perceived drain of socializing.
So both types can behave in both ways. Their behavior is not what defines them as introverts or extroverts. What defines them as one type or the other is how they respond to these two spheres of activity - inward looking and outward looking - by finding one energizing, one draining, one coming easily and one requiring an effort.
"The fact that Microsoft funded the "study" means that you MUST look at the assumptions and process."
No it doesn't. Examining the study in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY as every other study will reveal its flaws. Nothing else is necessary.
The fact that you think the funder matters means you MUST look up "circumstantial ad hominem", because you used one and don't even know it.
An argument is only ad hominem if it attacks the person when such an attack is irrelevant to the argument at hand. Such is not the case here because the study criteria where chosen by Dr. Herb. When a researcher is contracted to conduct research by an interested party it is perfectly legitimate to question the motives and objectivity of the researcher when evaluating the research. The fact that MS paid for the study puts the burden of proof of the objectivity of the study criteria on MS's paid researcher, Dr. Herb. The standard is most definitely not that of treating the study as if it were neutral.
When we deal with real people pure logic is not all that is necessary. Dr. Herb has done studies for MS in the past. Do you think he would like to do them in the future? The study criteria did not fall from the sky on stone tablets from God. They were chosen by Dr. Herb. Do you think these criteria may have included some bias, whether conscious or otherwise on the part of Dr. Herb?
Numerous readers have already pointed out that the study criteria chosen by Dr. Herb required some pretty goofy behavior on the part of the Linux sysadmins, specifically, backporting patches and doing a glibc upgrade on a production system rather than simply doing a full OS upgrade. These odd "requirements" alone are enough to call into significant question any claim of research objectivity. I'd say, along with many slashdot readers that Dr. Herb has failed to prove that his study criteria are truly fair.
The advisory has been corrected.
After eEye mistakenly posted a note on its Web site saying the iTunes flaw affected "all operating systems," the security firm updated its warning to indicate that the flaw had been found only on the Windows operating system so far.
from the corrected advisory:
Operating Systems Affected:
All Microsoft Operatins Systems
No other OSes listed, just MS. So Mac OS X is not known to be affected.
No they wouldn't. Apple is not a monopoly. A monopoly has monopoly market power - the ability to set prices without regard for competitors' offerings. It is a misuse of the term monopoly to say that Apple has a monopoly on Mac OS X. This is (as an earlier poster pointed out) like saying that Coca Cola has a monopoly on Coke or that Pepsico has a monopoly on Pepsi. The relevant fact is that neither Cocoa Cola nor Pepsi has a monopoly on cola soda. Similarly, Apple does not have a monopoly on personal computer operating systems.
Microsoft is a monopoly because they can price their personal computer operating system without regard for the price of competitors' offerings. For example, one can purchase a linux distro for just a few dollars including shipping. One cannot purchase Windows for 3.95 even if one is an OEM. This proves that Microsoft can price their offering without regard for the price of competitors' offerings, and thus that Microsoft has a monopoly in PC OSes. This is now a matter of law in the US, the case having been advanced to the SCOTUS and the finding of fact that Microsoft is a monopoly in this market has been upheld.
What made Microsoft's tying of internet explorer to Windows illegal was the fact that Microsoft was a monopoly. Such practices are not illegal when done by other firms since they don't have any monopoly power to wield. If they want to tie two products let them - consumers will have the choice to go elsewhere. The market deals easily with product tying - consumers either like it or they don't and make their purchasing choices accordingly.
The problem only arises when there is effectively no other choice. Consumers who need Windows (because of a combination of inter-firm compatibility, Office, legacy apps, etc.) must buy Windows. If Microsoft ties explorer to Windows then the market has no choice - the market must choose explorer. It is this use of monopoly market power in one market (PC OSes) to force control of another market (internet browsers) that made Microsoft's tying of internet Explorer to Windows illegal.
Finally the argument that Apple prices it's OS without regard for competitors offerings is based on the notion that there exist open source OSes that are comparable in functionality to Mac OS X. A few days' use of the applications that are bundled with Mac OS X will quickly disprove this notion. As others in this thread have written, one would have to pay up to $1000.00 for commercial software to get applications of the quality and integration that come bundled with Mac OS X.
I'd argue that the current Mac userbase is SO devoted to the brand, that they wouldn't make the jump even if it did save them money.
This is demonstrably false. When Apple allowed cloning in the mid-late 90s lifelong mac users abandoned ship by the tens of thousands to buy PowerComputing and other clones. I have good friend who is a professional photographer. He has never owned any computer that did not run Mac OS, and this is going back twenty years. When the clones came out, he simply bought based on price, nothing else. People can be mac loyalists and still be quite price sensitive. If Apple allowed Dell to make cheaper boxes that ran Mac OS Apple's sales would be devastated. Steve Jobs knows this well. That's why he killed the clones immediately upon returning to Apple.
In practice when the SCOTUS refuses to hear a case the highest appellate court ruling is treated as controlling law by other federal courts. If the SCOTUS lets a ruling stand then other federal courts, even in other districts will look long and hard before handing down a decision that goes against the ruling that the SCOTUS let stand. Federal judges do not like to be reversed by higher courts - its professionally humiliating. Essentially what's going on when a decision is overturned is that the SCOTUS or other appellate court is saying *BZZT* WRONG! What were you thinking when you made this ruling? It's BACKWARDS! Therefore, when the SCOTUS lets a ruling stand it becomes in practice controlling law on that/those issue/s because federal judges really don't like the public humiliation of having their decisions overruled by higher courts.
There is no evidence that central planning is a bad system. In the Soviet Union it worked spectacularly well, turning a backwards agricultural country with poor climate, no industry and illiterate population into the world's superpower with top-notch science, every conceivable industry, including high-tech ones, educated well-fed healthy people living in equality without poverty and in comfort, being able to work in good conditions, develop themselves intellectually and culturally and otherwise enjoying themselves. All that without having media-forced stupidity, consumerism and other ills of the Western society. All of that using internal resources without resorting to exploitation of other countries, like capitalist countries must do.
First human rights - I really doubt that the Czechs Poles and Hungarians (among others) would agree that what the Soviet Union achieved was accomplished "without resorting to exploitation of other countries." Mass murder and repression were also rampant insde the former Soviet union. It was no paradise.
Second, economics - the problem with a planned economy is that there is no competition, so if the central political directorate gets something wrong, there is no competing firm to offer an alternative. Yes corporations are each mini planned economies, but if one giant corporation makes a bad call, there are others with different plans offering alternatives. In a centrally planned state economy when the planners make a bad call, you're screwed with no recourse. The constant shortages and failures to keep up with advancing technologies in the West were the result of this lack of competition.
The GPL is a license to copy and modify. In a world without copyright there are no licenses, everyone copies freely and there is no need for the GPL or any other license to copy or modify. Your parent is absolutely correct, the GPL is based in, and only works because of, copyright law.
Even more important in the context of this discussion is the fact that you don't understand the distinction between software on the one hand and fixed documents on the other hand. The most obvious proof of this is the fact that the GPL itself is not licensed under the GPL. That's right, you may not modify your copy of the GPL. You may merely copy it unmodified. This is in direct and stark contrast to software licensed under the GPL which you may both copy and modify. From the GPL itself:
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Publishing scientific papers under the GPL is precisely the sort of thing that even the authors of the GPL consider unreasonable, since they have chosen *not* to license the GPL itself under the GPL. Some documents are meant to be fixed. A license that allows modification, such as the GPL does, is completely inappropriate for such documents. There is a long standing and accepted process for correcting or challenging the statements in a scientific paper. It consists in authoring a new paper, not modifying the existing one.
So stop using diaper epithets until you yourself actually understand the issues involved.
That's all well and fine, but let's look at a more common example:
Common Lisp: 12 punctuation marks
(tagbody
10 (print "hello")
20 (print "world")
30 (go 10))
This is a "common" example only in the sense of "lowest common denominator" - congratulations, you've succeeded in reducing the power of lisp to the lameness of BASIC. In real life, lisp programmers do not write code with numbered tags a-la numbered source lines in BASIC.
Your infinite loop would be rendered in common lisp as:
(loop (print "hello") (print "world"))
or even
(loop (print "hello
world"))
since newlines are allowed in literal strings.
But really, one probably doesn't want the quotes in the output, so you'd really see:
(loop (format t "hello~%world~%"))
But this is still more punctuation marks than BASIC, thus proving that when trying to accomplish something so simple even a severely retarded chimpanzee would not be challenged by the task, BASIC requires fewer punctuation marks than lisp, c, or java. Unfortunately, when the task is quite complex BASIC isn't up to the job at all, no matter how many (or few) punctuation marks you use.
What would it take to make a useful, functional grammar checker?
You'd have to find programmers who actually knew correct English grammar.
I think it is more likely to be dependent on how many of the desirable things built on top of Darwin Apple chooses to keep closed and off Linux. iTunes comes to mind. No matter how free Linux is many users will not choose it if you can't use it properly with your iPod. I know that this is possible now, but Apple could change this at any time if they felt sufficiently threatened by the growth of desktop Linux.
If Apple has enough popular features that simply can't be accessed from Linux - even if only because Apple chooses to do an explicit OS license check when you try to access the iTunes Music store for example- then it really will be Linux which needs to look out for Mac OS X and not the other way round.
I could write a perl equivalent to MyDoom that would have the same behavior, and not require user interaction past the original running, and not require a password.
But requiring a user with admin privileges to actively run a program is *not* a virus. A virus is an executable that propagates (i.e., copies) itself and executes itself *without* user knowledge or explicit user permission.
What you are talking about is a trojan horse program and there is really no way to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot if he actively chooses to run some random executable with admin privileges. At least Mac OS X throws up an alert notifying the user when opening a document will cause an executable to run for the first time.
Only tards who can't touch type could ever hope to use a computer with one hand. People with brains have always known that one can only use a computer effectively with two hands.
Zappa (and is philosophical predecessor Duchamp) was wrong about this. Only ignorant people can be fooled into thinking that a piece of dog sh*t in a frame is art. Those with a modicum of knowledge about art will simply say "what is that sh*t in the frame on the wall?"
Let me tell you a secret about Art: no-one knows what it is.
People differ over what they consider art, but there is very broad agreement on what is not art. The contents of your local municipal sewage system are not art. If someone fishes said contents out, slaps them on a piece of plywood, installs them in a gallery, and claims they are art, they are implicitly arguing that context determines art/not-art. This was Duchamp's game. Wise people have figured out that Duchamp was wrong - a turd on a gallery wall is still a turd, not a work of art.
Since people with brains have now moved beyond the juvenile "let's upset mommy and daddy" stage of art-as-mere-rebellion, we can get an idea of what art really is.
First, it involves some skill. Mere emotion will not no it - neither on the part of the artist, nor on the part of the viewer/listener. Otherwise every time a baby cried it would be a poem - after all the baby quite clearly is feeling very strongly, and the kid's parents are probably pretty worked up too.
Second, that skill must be used to convey some meaning. That's pretty broad, but then art is quite all-encompassing when it comes to what meanings it can convey. Often that meaning cannot be more precisely characterized in words than merely saying "beauty." But that's why we have visual arts, music,etc. - to convey that which is not easily conveyed in words with the same intensity or nuance. Could we translate Michelangelo's David into words? Trivially, we could digitize it, but it loses an awful lot of it's power and intensity in the translation - no string of 1s and 0s is really going to have the same impact on a human viewer as seeing the sculpture itself.
What distinguishes art from craft is that art's principal purpose is to convey this meaning, while a craft's principal purpose it its use. If a craft item ceases to exist principally for its use, and if it exhibits sufficient skill, it becomes art. That's why particularly skillfully made quilts can be art - their principal purpose is no longer keeping someone warm at night, but conveying the meaning that their design conveys.
Apple is no longer a hardware company. You're living in the past, like they have been for the last 5 years.
;^)
Think about it. They don't make their own processors, graphics cards, memory, hard drives, fans, cords, peripherals, etc.
They get companies to make this stuff for them, they package it up, and sell it for a decent profit.
Then I guess Dell isn't a hardware company either, since they operate the same way
Both Apple and Dell are hardware integrators who wisely outsource the manufacture of components to low margin outfits in Taiwan and China. Both design their own packages - Apple just does a much better job of it.
Neither Dell nor Apple is a software company. Dell has MS to do software for them, and Apple does software in house. But make no mistake, both Dell and Apple make their profit from hardware sales.
This comment might carry a bit more weight if you hadn't referred to the head of the MS Mac business unit as "he" - she's a woman.
Now back to reality. Nobody running a major business unit of any public corporation makes any sort of public statement - much less a stage appearance - without clearing it with superiors. Corporate representatives do not get to express their personal "opinions" on matters involving their public company. Everything they say publicly carries legal consequences for their corporation and they are fully aware of that fact. So when Roz Ho, the head of the MS Mac BU said:
The Mac BU is already hard at work on the next versions of Office for Mac and Virtual PC for Mac. An important part of that work includes collaboration with Apple engineers on Xcode to create Universal Binaries of future versions of Office so that it will run natively on Apple's future hardware
she was legally speaking as a representative of MS not expressing her personal "opinion."
Does anybody else think that Steve was saving the name "Leopard" for the version in which Apple switched to Intel just for the irony value - as in "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" from Jeremiah 13:23 - more commonly quoted as "The leopard cannot change its spots."
alternatively how will they prevent the people from running darwin (already working) and adding the proprietary pieces of osx?
With lawyers. Seriously. Think DMCA.
I'll give you a simple example which is typical. The big picture concept is that Apple has traditionally designed the Mac user interface on the basis of real user studies, not merely what a group of engineers think would be best. The result is objectively superior usability - you can measure the improvement for all users, even those who don't realize that they're now working faster. Now to the example:
Mac OS computers have always had a single menu bar. Mac window title bars do not have, and have never had menus in native Mac OS applications. The reason is user testing. Fitt's law states that the time to acquire a target - in this case the menu - is directly proportional to the distance from the mouse pointer to the target, and inversely proportional to the size of the target:
T = k distance/size where k is some per-user constant
This law has been backed up by numerous real user tests.
It turns out that there are 8 screen targets that are effectively infinite in size - the top, bottom, right and left sides, and the four corners. Why? Because they can be acquired by simply slamming the mouse in one of these 8 directions without regard for overshooting the target - it simply isn't possible to overshoot these 8 targets.
This means that the time to acquire the menu can be reduced to almost 0 if you put the menu in one of these 8 locations. The 4 corners are impractical - not enough area to present many menus. Since most roman scripts read left to right, top to bottom, this leaves only the top of the screen. The bottom would force the listing of the items in each menu in reverse order since you obviously want the most commonly used menu items first - they're faster to acquire that way.
Now notice how Windows gets this wrong.
1. Window title bars have menus. Some engineers at MS might have thought that this would make them easier to use - after all they're closer that way. But it turns out that menu acquisition time is longer for window menus than for a single screen top menu bar. This is why you do real user tests - users' perceptions of what is or might be faster are often counter-intuitively wrong.
2. The early versions of Windows had a task bar whose buttons did not extend to the bottom of the screen. This defeats the whole purpose of putting a click target on a screen edge - you can no longer acquire the target by simply slamming the mouse down to the bottom. You must slow down and make sure you don't overshoot the button's bottom on the task bar. You've now effectively pessimized click target acquisition - you've put the click target as far as possible from the center of the screen, but made it impossible to acquire by simply pushing the mouse all the way to the bottom.
I can't tell you how many Windows users insist nevertheless that window menus are faster - that's their perception. But when I time them with a stopwatch they're all surprised to learn that they actually acquire the menu faster on a Mac than on Windows.
Mac OS computers are objectively more usable because the Mac UI has always been based on real world user testing, not some engineers' notion of what would work best.
For more on the basics of usability see Bruce "Tog" Tognazini's site.
with no indication of whether that's legal, technical, or both
Most likely both. The legal bit is a given - it's been true of Mac OS for years - maybe even a decade. It is a violation of the EULA to run Mac OS on anything other than an Apple Mac.
They'll undoubtedly put some technical stumbling blocks in the way too. And they'll aggressively pursue any open source efforts to circumvent their EULA restrictions - don't put it past Apple to invoke the DMCA here. Expect a lot of nascent "Mac on Intel" sourceforge projects to experience court ordered takedowns.
Even if some fringe project succeeds there won't be many stock intel boxes running Mac OS X - if the people building and/or selling them become too visible they'll become targets for police raids and lawsuits.
Technically there is process called WindowServer and every GUI process is a child process of WindowServer (run Activity Monitor and select All Processes, Hierarchically to see this for yourself). Aqua is Apple's name for the look and feel of their WindowServer. It is *not* X windows.
Apple also has a version of X11 which has an Aqua look and feel (sort of) window manager called quartz-wm. If you launch X11.app you'll see that it is a child of WindowServer, and quartz-wm is, in turn a child of X11.app.
In other words, Apple's version of X11 tries to play nice with Apple's native GUI WindowServer by putting on Aqua clothes provided by quartz-wm. X11 is almost never used by ordinary Mac users - commercial apps are all written to Mac APIs which are designed to run under WindowServer. X11 is only used by ported *nix apps - GIMP for example.
Unfortunately I have no idea how to actually implement that in a usable manner.
Neither does anyone else, which is why such "exploits" are completely uninteresting.
As long as users need the power to do potentially harmful things such as modify or delete files in order to get work done, it will be possible to trick them into doing so. Any "exploit" that relies on tricking the user is not a flaw in the OS, but relies on the gullibility of users.
There is nothing that can possibly stop social engineering of this sort short of an OS that prevents users from ever deleting or modifying files. Maybe one day storage will become so inexpensive that a file system that archives all previous versions of all files will be implemented. Until then, it will always be possibly to trick the user into deleting important files, because the user needs the ability to modify and delete important files (i.e., his own user data) in order to get any work done.