People hacking OS X to run on their non-apple machines is not a real threat to Apples.
COMPANIES selling non-Apple machines running OS X are a real threat to Apple.
The legal issues won't stop the first crowd (but then again, Apple won't have lost a great deal), but the people who actually buy computers and work with them as well as Joe home user will not go to any lengths to save a few bucks just to run OS X on a non-Apple box.
That's where Apple gets its money -- and it's pretty well protected.
Apple does make the entire computer, which is much more than a sum of its parts.
I'm not sure how many of the components that go into a car (I'm not a car nut) are actually made by the car company themselves, but let's for the sake of argument say that the car company doesn't make any of the components in the car. But the design of the car and putting the car together is still something the car company does, and that is the value they add.
This is basically what Apple does, to make a product you don't neccecarilly have to make your components yourself.
You still need a licence to run Mac OS X, and I think it would be trivial for Apple to add a clause (if it's not already there) that would forbid installing the software on non-apple hardware.
There is also a port of Mac OS X for Intel processors being maintained in parallell, mainly because it CAN be done very easilly with minimal effort. Covering all bases...
Remember, Apple is a hardware company, and will protect their core business, which currently is and always has been hardware.
Re:In Car Firewire or USB ?
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 2, Funny
This combined with electrical servo steering systems would allow you to steer the car using the jog wheel on the iPod.
First of all, I'm assuming you're the Anonymous Coward I responded to in the grandparent.
If you want to make fun of a language's bizarre counting, I suggest you take a look at how they do it in Denmark. I am biased of course, being Swedish.:-)
The French use soixante-dix, quatre-vignts, and quatre-vignts-dix, true. The Swiss have rationalized this and use septante, huitante, and nonante. Belgians are in between. They use septante, quatre-vignts, and nonante. Yes, I also think saying quatre-vignts-dix (four-twenties-and-ten) is funny. Although even funnier is the danish equivalent, halvfems (half-five... (5 - 1/2) * 20 == 4.5 * 20 == 90). But I digress. The point is that French is open to reform on this particular ideosyncracy.
You claim that you're not pleading for a single word-language -- but you could see how your post could be misunderstood as such, I quote:
That's pretty silly. Why don't the French just speak English like everyone else? Americans, Canadians, AND the U.K. speak English. What better language to adopt as the world common language?
Next time, consider tossing in a smiley to mark that you're not being serious.:-)
I have myself not studied neither Japanese or Chinese (although I might take a gander at one of them when I get the time), so I'll take your word for it that the language is intricately tied to the culture.
Either way, English today has the potential of becoming a world language, whether we like it or not, mainly because of American domination of the world. But English is definitely not the ideal world language -- and it itself has its fair share of quirks.
Take "ough" for example. How many ways can that be pronounced?
tough
bough
dough
trough
rough
through
cough
thorough
nought
English spelling and pronounciation. is less than consistent, and you can find more examples, countless more, if you care to read the dictionary some time.:-)
Now, for a consistent language in spelling and pronounciation, from what I've heard (I don't speak the language myself), is Finnish. Basically, if you read the letters out without trying to invent lots of weird rules about them, you sound finnish. I'm able to read out Finnish texts without understanding what they mean with near-perfect pronounciation.
This is not to say that Finnish is without quirks. The difficulty in Finnish lies in conjugating nouns. "Under the table", "on the table", "by the table" etc etc are all differently conjugated words with lots of exceptions.
The only hope then for a sane world language is an invented one -- but then we lose the soul of a language. The language is an integral part of the culture of a country. This is not to say that languages can't change as cultures intermix, and morph.
My point in conclusion? Probably no language in widespread use today is a worthy contender to replace all other languages, even ignoring cultural aspects. As a second-language, English has already become the 'lingua franca' (ironic, isn't it?) of the world, merely on the merit that it's spoken in the USA.
But don't count on the USA-dominance of the world to continue indefinitely. Nothing is forever, and somewhere along the line, another language will take the place of English as a world language.
But whether we like it or not, more and more languages in the world will take in new words from English, just as English in the past has taken in words from other languages. It's this mixage of cultures that has shaped the languages we have today, and if a language is to continue to flourish, it must be allowed to develop, and not stagnate like the French Academy is trying to promote.
The largest language in the world is Mandarin Chinese, mainly since there are so many chinese people in the world. (Duh.)
By your logic, that there should be only one language, and the language should be the most common in the world as to inconvenience as few people as possible, we'd all be speaking Chinese.
I can only guess that your ideas don't seem quite as compelling any more.:-)
Natural language passwords = dictionary attacks
on
Inkblot Passwords
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Sounds like a cool idea, but I'd usually associate an ink blots with a word or two, not with a random series of letters and numbers.
Doesn't this make the system vulnerable to a dictionary attack?
Re:further, since you seem to be memory-deficient.
on
Freenet 0.5.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
All right, it may be possible to find stuff on freenet, and if you read the other parts of this thread, I've effectively conceded the argument that it's impossible to post content on freenet anonymously and have other people find it.
Also, there's a different between something being usable, compared to it being usable by the "masses". A system such as frost seems to have the potential to bring freenet to the masses.
It's good that there are some people out there who are willing to drop their personal judgement of information in order not to censor it, but the question is whether we can rely on them to always be this impartial.
For all we know, them linking to kitty porn to appear impartial may be just a smokescreen hiding that they don't link to Falun Gong information, or whatever.
I was told about frost earlier, which allows you to anonymously post messages on freenet for all to see.
With this capability, the possibility of bias is gone, which needless to say is a good thing, so my argument that freenet is inherently biased, effectively falls down there.:-)
The goal of bittorrent is to distribute content quickly. Anonymity is not an issue, you can easilly get IP addresses of lots of people downloading, as well as find the source of the.torrent file of the tracker.
The goal of freenet is to distribute content anonymously.
What's your point? They are two different tools, with different issues involved.
Note, for the length of this post I am assuming that these index pages are human-maintained. It was a while since I last used freenet. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Does the fact that the indices are maintained by humans not create a form of bias in the network?
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment. Let's say I want to use freenet to distribute kitty porn.
Now, the index maintainer will not like this, and will refuse to allow the submission.
This leaves the index maintainer with having to draw a line, of where acceptable and unacceptable content lies, and effectively allows the supression of "evil" web pages, which is precisely what we want to prevent.
A machine of today has no potential for ethical judgement, and neither should it. Therefore, it is the prime method for creating an index that is completely unbiased.
This means that freenet today effectively does not provide completely anonymous free speech, unless you're willing to take the risk of distributing the key to your freesite out-of-band, via the web for example.
This, in essense, leaves me unable to post my kitty porn on freenet without exposing my identity.
(Substitute "kitty porn" with whatever you like or hate.)
As far as I've understood, freenet is designed to be somewhere where you can access content, as long as somebody has given you the exact address to the file.
The problem I see here, is that there are no easy ways to search for content, except for out-of-band stuff like the web or e-mail, which mostly defeats the entire concept.
What Freenet needs in order to be a viable platform for not only publishing content anonymously, but also for finding it, is a search mechanism built into freenet. Before that happens, there is no way that it will become any popular with the file sharing masses -- it's just too find to hard something to download.
At risk of being moderated as redundant here, I'll just attempt to clarify this.
Finding positions through time measurements is much more practical in a wireless solution than using directional antennas, mostly since you don't want to get the packet loss incurred by using a rotating directional antenna, although it might look cool.:-)
Signal/Noise ratio measurements, that the people mentioned in the article is doing, is problematic becuase the unpredictable nature of radio wave signal weakening (I don't know the technical term), although they seem to have tackled that problem to some degree of accuracy.
However, the speed of light is constant never mind how weakened the signal is, making it an excellent way to determine distance from the base station. This is in essence what GPS does, and also why it needs to carry along precise atomic clocks.
Parent post is a troll, getting moderators on crack to mod me down. (This claim is just as substantiated as the one in the parent post.)
Except, I invite any moderators to take a look at page 13 of the PDF file and note that they seem to be using the exact same method of positioning (signal strength) as I assumed in my grandparent post.
Granted, the word triangulation may be incorrect, but it's also the word the slashdot writeup used.
There is no way for the base station to know what direction the signal is coming from, since the antenna is omnidirectional, so I assumed it was using SNR's.
I was under impression that the word triangulation could be used for both techniques, both using directional antennas, and by determining the distance to the receiver from several points and checking where circles intersect.
A troll? Or just someone thinking too fast? Either way I'll bite.
They provide any information you put in it. You could conceivably put an RFID tag on the hospital bed that said "I AM BED NUMBER 37" and the RFID receiver would get this information and know where it was.
The signal gets weaker as it passes through walls. Therefore, the signal strength can not be easilly be correlated to a distance from the base station for purposes of triangulation.
Triangulation traditionally relies on measuring distance through signal strengths and so is limited to an outdoor environment, where the signal loss per kilometer can be predicted with much greater accuracy than in an indoor environment.
The article is short on technical details -- did they somehow also enter a 3D-model of how the building weakens radio signals, and use that in order to create three 3D-shapes at the point of intersection the transmitter can be located? Just like traditional triangulation, but with weirder shapes than simple spheres...
Perhaps a better way would be to use "ping" to check the travel times, rather than the signal strength, compensating for any delays imposed by TCP/IP-stacks and hardware etc. Is this even possible, or is the Signal/Noise ratio just too low?
Slashdot Mirror
People hacking OS X to run on their non-apple machines is not a real threat to Apples.
COMPANIES selling non-Apple machines running OS X are a real threat to Apple.
The legal issues won't stop the first crowd (but then again, Apple won't have lost a great deal), but the people who actually buy computers and work with them as well as Joe home user will not go to any lengths to save a few bucks just to run OS X on a non-Apple box.
That's where Apple gets its money -- and it's pretty well protected.
Apple does make the entire computer, which is much more than a sum of its parts.
I'm not sure how many of the components that go into a car (I'm not a car nut) are actually made by the car company themselves, but let's for the sake of argument say that the car company doesn't make any of the components in the car. But the design of the car and putting the car together is still something the car company does, and that is the value they add.
This is basically what Apple does, to make a product you don't neccecarilly have to make your components yourself.
Apple doesn't want you to buy OS X, they want you to buy a Mac.
I repeat, Apple is a hardware company.
Not legally.
You still need a licence to run Mac OS X, and I think it would be trivial for Apple to add a clause (if it's not already there) that would forbid installing the software on non-apple hardware.
There is also a port of Mac OS X for Intel processors being maintained in parallell, mainly because it CAN be done very easilly with minimal effort. Covering all bases...
Remember, Apple is a hardware company, and will protect their core business, which currently is and always has been hardware.
This combined with electrical servo steering systems would allow you to steer the car using the jog wheel on the iPod.
Excellent for back seat driving.
If you want to make fun of a language's bizarre counting, I suggest you take a look at how they do it in Denmark. I am biased of course, being Swedish.
The French use soixante-dix, quatre-vignts, and quatre-vignts-dix, true. The Swiss have rationalized this and use septante, huitante, and nonante. Belgians are in between. They use septante, quatre-vignts, and nonante. Yes, I also think saying quatre-vignts-dix (four-twenties-and-ten) is funny. Although even funnier is the danish equivalent, halvfems (half-five
You claim that you're not pleading for a single word-language -- but you could see how your post could be misunderstood as such, I quote:
Next time, consider tossing in a smiley to mark that you're not being serious.
I have myself not studied neither Japanese or Chinese (although I might take a gander at one of them when I get the time), so I'll take your word for it that the language is intricately tied to the culture.
Either way, English today has the potential of becoming a world language, whether we like it or not, mainly because of American domination of the world. But English is definitely not the ideal world language -- and it itself has its fair share of quirks.
Take "ough" for example. How many ways can that be pronounced?
English spelling and pronounciation. is less than consistent, and you can find more examples, countless more, if you care to read the dictionary some time.
Now, for a consistent language in spelling and pronounciation, from what I've heard (I don't speak the language myself), is Finnish. Basically, if you read the letters out without trying to invent lots of weird rules about them, you sound finnish. I'm able to read out Finnish texts without understanding what they mean with near-perfect pronounciation.
This is not to say that Finnish is without quirks. The difficulty in Finnish lies in conjugating nouns. "Under the table", "on the table", "by the table" etc etc are all differently conjugated words with lots of exceptions.
The only hope then for a sane world language is an invented one -- but then we lose the soul of a language. The language is an integral part of the culture of a country. This is not to say that languages can't change as cultures intermix, and morph.
My point in conclusion? Probably no language in widespread use today is a worthy contender to replace all other languages, even ignoring cultural aspects. As a second-language, English has already become the 'lingua franca' (ironic, isn't it?) of the world, merely on the merit that it's spoken in the USA.
But don't count on the USA-dominance of the world to continue indefinitely. Nothing is forever, and somewhere along the line, another language will take the place of English as a world language.
But whether we like it or not, more and more languages in the world will take in new words from English, just as English in the past has taken in words from other languages. It's this mixage of cultures that has shaped the languages we have today, and if a language is to continue to flourish, it must be allowed to develop, and not stagnate like the French Academy is trying to promote.
They have more to lose, since their profit margins aren't as high.
They didn't ban the word per se... they only banned it from use in government texts.
I submitted this story and it got rejected, but in my writeup I pointed that very fact up.
Veering slightly offtopic here...
:-)
The largest language in the world is Mandarin Chinese, mainly since there are so many chinese people in the world. (Duh.)
By your logic, that there should be only one language, and the language should be the most common in the world as to inconvenience as few people as possible, we'd all be speaking Chinese.
I can only guess that your ideas don't seem quite as compelling any more.
There is Versiontracker, which is very popular in the Macintosh community.
I'm not sure if it's free to list there, but with the amount of low-quality software on there I can image it is.
Oh, and there's Freshmeat too.
Sounds like a cool idea, but I'd usually associate an ink blots with a word or two, not with a random series of letters and numbers.
Doesn't this make the system vulnerable to a dictionary attack?
All right, it may be possible to find stuff on freenet, and if you read the other parts of this thread, I've effectively conceded the argument that it's impossible to post content on freenet anonymously and have other people find it.
The solution is called frost.
Also, there's a different between something being usable, compared to it being usable by the "masses". A system such as frost seems to have the potential to bring freenet to the masses.
On this point, I stand corrected.
I was never on the "bittorrent is only for legitimate content line". The only thing I said was that it was not anonymous.
.torrent files, since there is no anonymity to protect in the first place.
This makes it less of a problem to use out-of-band methods for distributing
The same can not be said about freenet.
It's good that there are some people out there who are willing to drop their personal judgement of information in order not to censor it, but the question is whether we can rely on them to always be this impartial.
:-)
For all we know, them linking to kitty porn to appear impartial may be just a smokescreen hiding that they don't link to Falun Gong information, or whatever.
I was told about frost earlier, which allows you to anonymously post messages on freenet for all to see.
With this capability, the possibility of bias is gone, which needless to say is a good thing, so my argument that freenet is inherently biased, effectively falls down there.
Interesting little program. I'm going to have to take a closer look at it.
Thanks for pointing me at it.
The goal of bittorrent is to distribute content quickly. Anonymity is not an issue, you can easilly get IP addresses of lots of people downloading, as well as find the source of the .torrent file of the tracker.
The goal of freenet is to distribute content anonymously.
What's your point? They are two different tools, with different issues involved.
Note, for the length of this post I am assuming that these index pages are human-maintained. It was a while since I last used freenet. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Does the fact that the indices are maintained by humans not create a form of bias in the network?
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment. Let's say I want to use freenet to distribute kitty porn.
Now, the index maintainer will not like this, and will refuse to allow the submission.
This leaves the index maintainer with having to draw a line, of where acceptable and unacceptable content lies, and effectively allows the supression of "evil" web pages, which is precisely what we want to prevent.
A machine of today has no potential for ethical judgement, and neither should it. Therefore, it is the prime method for creating an index that is completely unbiased.
This means that freenet today effectively does not provide completely anonymous free speech, unless you're willing to take the risk of distributing the key to your freesite out-of-band, via the web for example.
This, in essense, leaves me unable to post my kitty porn on freenet without exposing my identity.
(Substitute "kitty porn" with whatever you like or hate.)
As far as I've understood, freenet is designed to be somewhere where you can access content, as long as somebody has given you the exact address to the file.
The problem I see here, is that there are no easy ways to search for content, except for out-of-band stuff like the web or e-mail, which mostly defeats the entire concept.
What Freenet needs in order to be a viable platform for not only publishing content anonymously, but also for finding it, is a search mechanism built into freenet. Before that happens, there is no way that it will become any popular with the file sharing masses -- it's just too find to hard something to download.
Thanks for clearing that up. (Mod parent up.)
Moderate parent up.
:-)
At risk of being moderated as redundant here, I'll just attempt to clarify this.
Finding positions through time measurements is much more practical in a wireless solution than using directional antennas, mostly since you don't want to get the packet loss incurred by using a rotating directional antenna, although it might look cool.
Signal/Noise ratio measurements, that the people mentioned in the article is doing, is problematic becuase the unpredictable nature of radio wave signal weakening (I don't know the technical term), although they seem to have tackled that problem to some degree of accuracy.
However, the speed of light is constant never mind how weakened the signal is, making it an excellent way to determine distance from the base station. This is in essence what GPS does, and also why it needs to carry along precise atomic clocks.
Parent post is a troll, getting moderators on crack to mod me down. (This claim is just as substantiated as the one in the parent post.)
Except, I invite any moderators to take a look at page 13 of the PDF file and note that they seem to be using the exact same method of positioning (signal strength) as I assumed in my grandparent post.
Granted, the word triangulation may be incorrect, but it's also the word the slashdot writeup used.
Then the slashdot article is also wrong.
There is no way for the base station to know what direction the signal is coming from, since the antenna is omnidirectional, so I assumed it was using SNR's.
I was under impression that the word triangulation could be used for both techniques, both using directional antennas, and by determining the distance to the receiver from several points and checking where circles intersect.
A troll? Or just someone thinking too fast? Either way I'll bite.
They provide any information you put in it. You could conceivably put an RFID tag on the hospital bed that said "I AM BED NUMBER 37" and the RFID receiver would get this information and know where it was.
And an LCD display showing ESSID's...
The signal gets weaker as it passes through walls. Therefore, the signal strength can not be easilly be correlated to a distance from the base station for purposes of triangulation.
Triangulation traditionally relies on measuring distance through signal strengths and so is limited to an outdoor environment, where the signal loss per kilometer can be predicted with much greater accuracy than in an indoor environment.
The article is short on technical details -- did they somehow also enter a 3D-model of how the building weakens radio signals, and use that in order to create three 3D-shapes at the point of intersection the transmitter can be located? Just like traditional triangulation, but with weirder shapes than simple spheres...
Perhaps a better way would be to use "ping" to check the travel times, rather than the signal strength, compensating for any delays imposed by TCP/IP-stacks and hardware etc. Is this even possible, or is the Signal/Noise ratio just too low?
Actually, I was being half-serious. :-P
Obviously another case of moderators pushing their own agenda.