A CompUSA on Dorsett in St. Louis Missouri had them in stock this week. They were giving a price of something like $358 (?) for the machine and a warranty. No price for the machine alone.:(
This deal might be good for Sony and the consumer, if Sony helps to add PS2 emulation to the program. Given their current problems with getting their machines out, having an emulator would help them at least sell the PS2 games. As it is now, they are selling games to a very tiny audience. That has got to be hurting them big time.
Homage to Mothra, Queen of Monsters, on the occasion of her fortieth anniversary!
People, it is really sad to see so many Slashdotters so blinded by Apple hatred that they fall for FUD hook, line and sinker.
1) This comes from MSNBC. We all know what the letters MS stand for. Can you really trust their journalistic integrity when reporting on a non-Microsoft OS? Don't you think there might be a wee bit of bias here?
2) They quote unnamed sources for most of their stuff. Apple is refusing to dignify their silliness with a reply.
3) It has been well known for months that the March 24th release date was for OSX alone, and that the apps and machines with OS X preinstalled were not coming out until July. This is *not* news, except perhaps to Microsoft who is still working on the stuff (merged Windows and networked lite Office apps) they were bragging about back in 1995. It is actually caution and common sense on Apple's part to make the first release of a brand new operating system to bleeding edge early adapters to give it a final shakeout before the big rollout in July. If they didn't and there were bugs, you'd all be flaming them for that.
4) For all of you who do not keep up with Apple's product line, they are moving away from offering DVD drives (except for the SuperDrive) and toward CD burners. That makes DVD a lower priority that other things. iDVD is a very new program, which is given away for free or bundled with their machines. Again, making available freebee programs for OSX is a lower priority than core operating system functionality. Being Slashdotters, I assume you know core operating system functionality from a hole in the ground.
5) Why are so many of you who wouldn't spend a dime on Apple hardware or OS X, caring about whether one can play a DVD with it or not?
Mary Leibach
Apple's biggest fans: Godzilla and Mothra
(Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 2, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Destroyah, Mothra 2, Godzilla 2000)
Please, do! To have the install fests, you have to buy the hardware, and Apple could really use the sales right now!
Apple is a hardware company. They might like you to use their OS, but it doesn't hurt them one bit if you don't. Don't they pay people to help make the very Linux that you want to punish them with?;)
I can think of a lot of reasons why Godzilla 2000 would have been written up on Slashdot. After all, it was the first theatrical showing in America in fifteen years of one of the world's best loved science fiction movie series. It is also the first Godzilla to attempt a combination of suitmation and CGI, using the techniques developed in the Mothra series. The villain is none other than a personification of the Y2K bug: the Millenium Monster (later refered to as Orga -- short for Organizer G -- when it developed an organic body). Most of all, only in a Toho kaiju eiga will you have the pleasure of seeing a Windows user called an "imbecile" (while the dubbing made a running joke of it, the sentiment is there in the early part of the movie), not to mention the sole WinCE user being portrayed as the bad guy!;) This is because Godzilla and Mothra are Mac loving monsters, and without a doubt, Apple's biggest fans (since the mid 1990's at least).
In Godzilla vs. Destroyah, Dr. Yamane's grandson proudly displayed an Apple poster in his dorm room. In the 1996 Mothra, Apple was in serious trouble, and Toho was reduced to using Windows. But they blurred the telling parts of the screen so you have to look very carefully to recognize it. At the end of the movie, Mothra resurrects the badly scorched forests of Hokkaido, and apparently there must have been an apple tree in there somewhere. By the next year, with a bit of help from Steve Jobs (okay, lots of help from Jobs), Apple was strong enough again that Toho perched Fairy atop a Performa to celebrate. (I wonder when Apple is going to reintroduce that experimental telepathic feature into their modern lineup?;) When the King of Monsters returned to Tokyo Bay in G2K, it was to an Apple dominated city, where Apple banners hung in the streets and iMacs and G4s waited for Godzilla to come and save them.
Speaking of miracles, G2K had almost no advertising, and yet managed to rank somewhere around 84/300 this past summer, and 26th during its second run this past December. It made 10.1 million in the box office, which is.1 million over what would cause TriStar to consider releasing the next G film in theaters. It is now out on DVD. The next G film is currently running in Japan, and in about fifth place, which is considered good for a G film. G2K is now out on DVD to buy and on VHS to rent. If you want to see G back on the big screen again, vote with your wallets at your favorite video place.
Homage to Mothra, Goddess of Peace and peerless Queen of the Monsters, on the occasion of her 40th aniversary year!
Well, after all, it is *their* design. They paid to develop it. They came up with it in the first place. It's not like they ripped it off from someone else, as seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. It seems to me that if anyone is being selfish, it is those people who want to be able to rip off anyone else's work and get away with it, who seem to think it is some kind of "right" to be able to do so. That applies to Microsoft (silly them, they think it is "innovation"). That also often (and unfortunately) applies to the Open Source community. If OS is so much better, why can't the community originate its own ideas and designs instead of copying others? Why doesn't Linux have an original, drop-dead-gorgeous, and easy to use GUI that's so intuitive your average technophobe can sit down and be immediately productive? Next year there will be a consumer UNIX based OS with a GUI like that, and a ton of big name desktop developers bowing down to worship it, but it won't be Linux. It will be Apple and BSD.
You OS types have a choice here. You can sit about griping at Apple for taking your toys away. Or you can get off your duffs, and make a GUI for Linux that will blow Apple and Aqua away. If you do the former, you are no better than Microsoft and their assinine blather about "right to innovate". If you do the latter, Linux wins. Either way, consumers have a good alternative to Windows, and Microsoft looses. It's your choice whether that alternative includes Linux.
As for the iMac clones, they came complete with salesmen that diverted people, brought in to the store by Apple ads, into buying the clones. That is not very honest.
;) Even without CueCat's "unbreakable Base 64 encoding scheme", insecure database, and penchant for emailing their entire database of email addresses to each of their customers, CreditCards.com *is* using Microsoft server products. And we all know how secure Microsoft servers are!;)
Even the four months figure is perfect. "Russian" crackers only had access to MS's servers for three months (later whittled down to "five seconds and they only downloaded a virus we designed to stop intruders" by MS's crack PR/damage control team). We have to assume that MS is slightly more expert in the non application of patches than the rest of the world is when it comes to their own products.
Last year about this time, the world was awaiting doom as Y2K approached. Now it's evil crackers and internet piracy of precious IP that are to blame for the world's ills. Why can't these idiot companies see where the real problem lies, fix their internal security, and come up with business models that work? Actually caring about their customers (and in this case, their customers' customers) wouldn't hurt either.
> Just because it is open source, doesn't mean it
> is written by the public, or just by anyone, it
> just means that people can view it.
No, the OS licenses that I have heard about do include the right to modify and redistribute. Of course the government is perfectly free to only use versions developed by trusted programmers (don't want the buddy of some terrorist sticking in an obscure bit that results in a 500 plane mid-air collision, do we;). But there is nothing stopping the average citizen from getting the sources to an air traffic control system, and modifying them to his/her own needs, say traffic control for setting and clearing the dinner table:
"Sally, you are cleared for a 119er approach to the kitchen sink with those dirty salad plates. Little Billy, are you *sure* you don't need Daddy to help with that big pot roast? Okay, you are cleared to head for the table. John, I need you to take up a holding pattern in the hallway with those forks. John, did you hear me? Billy, watch out, you are going to hit...CRASH! Don't cry, Little Billy, I'm sure the boss and his wife are going to love the pot roast so attractively decorated like a porcupine with all the forks. It's so, er, festive! John, you are soooo grounded."
Yep, this family desperately needs their government to adopt open source.
[That I wrote:]
> > Anyway, I'm sick of companies that think they
> > can charge innocent users good money for buggy
> > releases that should still be in alpha or
> > beta, and then think they can show their faces
> > in public.
> I now feel compelled to inform you that GPL
> licensed software, such as Red Hat Linux, is
> available for free download. Sorry that I
> couldn't let you know until after you make such
> a weak argument.
1) Go to any store selling Linux products. Usually there are boxes marked Redhat 7.0. Note that these boxes have prices on them and that sometimes people actually pay these prices to take the box home. Believe it or not, this actually qualifies as "charge innocent users good money". The fact that others download the software does not change the fact that there are people paying for it.
2) I am not ignorant of Linux or the ways in which it is distributed. The machine I am typing this on is not the first one I have built, nor is SuSE the first distribution I have tried.
3) Not all Linux programs in a given distribution are under the GPL. Some are even, gasp, proprietary!
4) I'm also not so happy about companies that make users sit thru long downloads for software that is supposed to be a major release, and instead is a buggy beta. Feel better?;)
> Large scale software products alway have bugs
> and always will.
In a certain sense, you are right. Bugs are caused by human error, and as a project increases in size and complexity, the number of bugs and the difficulty in finding them go up. However, especially for highly critical applications, an intensive testing effort can have results that approach 100% bug removal. On the other hand, an intensely antsy marketing department, in their rush to get the product out the door, can have results that approach or exceed 0% bug removal. A company's commitment to quality is what makes the difference.
> The difference is the business model which i
> think in Redhat's case is heads above M$.
Open source is Redhat's "business model". Interesting choice of terms. Why not "philosophy", or "dream", or "reason for existance"? Because Redhat is a business. The way they make money is to grab a bunch of open source software, wrap it up, and sell it. Saying they are great, wonderful, better than the other guy because they sell open source is called "marketing". In response, good little open source Linux drones are supposed to salivate profusely, forget anything bad they ever heard about Redhat, and go out and buy more Redhat products.;)
> Dot 0 releases in almost any product have
> general problems and it is not until the product
> has been put through the extensive tests of
> production do most of these bugs show up.
Gee, whatever happened to alpha and beta tests? That is where these bugs are supposed to show up, if not earlier. Finding bugs at each stage of a product's life cycle is progressively more expensive, with production being the most expensive (and embarassing) of all. It's idiotic, even from the company's point of view, to let so many bugs go until version *.1. Anyway, I'm sick of companies that think they can charge innocent users good money for buggy releases that should still be in alpha or beta, and then think they can show their faces in public.
> If you want bug free code wait for 7.1 or 7.2.
If I want bug free code, I'll find a company that cares enough to do some decent quality control.
> But just quit busting on a company that is
> working hard to do the right thing.
Which right thing is that: 1) making money off open source, or 2) make you pay full price for a(n allegedly) buggy beta? MS is a old hand at #2, and probably wouldn't mind embracing and extending #1 as soon as they get around to it. As for Redhat, they are just a company. That neither automatically makes them evil, nor does it automatically grant sainthood just because they intone the holy mantra "open source". What matters is quality, how they treat their customers, and how honorably they conduct themselves. Answering serious quality concerns with a rousing cheer of "We're the open source good guys, Rah, Rah, Rah!" and threats to send people to the blackboard (oh, so mature!) do not cut the muster.
I too learned Basic on my TS 1000, which was my first computer. I wrote a black jack game as I recall. I taught myself C, Assembler, and GUI programming (Geos) on my Commodore 64 when I got out of college and found that Fortran, PL1, Pascal, etc. jobs were not to be found. These old microcomputers may not have been much compared to a Linux PC today, but they were good ways to get one's feet wet with computers. I still have both of them.
BTW, the solution to the RAM pack wobble is to get a big rubber band about an inch wide and big enough to go around the RAM pack and the whole computer. In the front it looks something like a chin strap. It isn't pretty, and it doesn't work perfectly, but it is a big help, and a rather cheap fix. Of course the more hardware minded might take the computer and RAM pack apart, and mount them together inside a case with a handheld TV and some sort of battery driven power supply to make a portable that could be carried around. Check eBay and other sources of old hardware for some of the accessories they had for it. As I recall, toward the end they were making hard drives and stuff for it to beef it up.
> Why shouldn't they be discarded? They're just
> human tissue, little different than a severed
> finger or an apendix that has been removed.
Ah, but what were they severed from? Each embryo has a complete genetic structure that is totally unique. A severed finger or an apendix has the same genetic structure as the human it was removed from, and if discarded (and the human properly treated) the human it came from can go on with life. In the case of the eighth cell removed for testing, the cell can be discarded, but the embryo goes on (if it is allowed to and not discarded itself). In the case of twins, a separated cell can itself go on and become another baby.
Also, not only can an embryo survive as a living organism in its proper environment (its mother's womb), but it can grow into a human being with a complete set of organs and rights. I'd love to see a severed finger do that!;)
Personally, I'm not a troll, nor a Christian, nor particularly right wing. But I have trouble seeing a sharp dividing point between embryo, fetus, baby, child, and adult. To me, everything after the formation of a unique genetic code is kind of a continuum. (Though dividing into two organisms, as in twins, does seem a rather sharp division.) How then can we say it is cool to "discard", "abort", or whatever at one stage of developement, but that it is murder at another?
It is a question that requires some serious thought and consideration. Unfortunately, it looks like such decisions are going to be made based on profit, convenience, or who screams "bloody murder" the loudest.
Mostly, DC likes hackers to use their database and pay them $20 for the priviledge. We are just lucky that MS is not as innovative, or we'd face legal action for writing programs that can accept input for Microsoft mouses and keyboards using non-MS tools like gcc or Perl (not to mention non-MS OS's like Linux).
Then again, we might just have some similar trouble coming up with MS. Don't forget.NET. Gates is probably watching this little cat fight with great interest. I just bet he'd go for giving away cheap PC's to rope people into.NET. ISPs are already doing deep discounts on PC's to get people to sign up for three years, but at least it is a voluntary thing. What kind of rights do you think we'd have to write and run our own software on a free PC obtained in a.NET agreement?
Cuecat is our nice little test case. It is the same basic concept as my.NET worry: free hardware that we don't really own (according to DC), a server (in this case tracking demographic info) that is the real profit, and a company slapping people (legal sense only) if they dare do anything but use the free hardware with their software and server. If hackers win this one, we have something for the legal types to use if MS gets cocky with.NET.
I know this issue is getting old, and people are getting tired of it, but stick with it. Slashdot is right to carry this kind of stuff, it is important. The more I hear about.NET, the scarier it gets. The Corel alliance just makes it sound worse. We can laugh at DC. Can we laugh as easily at MS if they create a world where new PC's are free (but can only be gotten with five years of.NET) and any software development using non-MS approved tools for non.NET purposes calls down the wrath of MS's legal department?
Granted, the DoJ wouldn't go for this scenario. But barring a miracle, legal remedies would be years away. By then, MS might just have turned themselves into a monopolistic utility company, and software into another utility like cable or cell phones.
> Steve Jobs would undoubtedly earn a spot in the
> top 5 in a list covering the 1970s or the 1980s.
> But in the 1990s?
> Jobs turned Apple around,
Perhaps not in the 1990s. Though bringing Apple back from near death and thus giving customers a viable commercial alternative to the Wintel monopoly is nothing to be sneezed at. I think, that with OS X coming next year, we really haven't seen the full impact of Jobs' return. Yet. He may well be flying high on next decade's list.
> but Apple isn't really important to computing as
> a whole anymore, not with an 8% market share.
Neither is Linux, if we are going by market share, as the two are in the same neighborhood, with the one in the lead depending on who you talk to. If you want to go by CompUSA floor space, Linux is a distant third, with Apple #2 and MS #1 (and still idiotic). And I'm writing this on a Linux box, so don't think me a MS troll.
> but with the exception of case design,
> Apple--and Steve Jobs--don't shape computing
> anymore.
No, MS shapes it, by ripping off Apple, Next, and now their own viruses! But wait till OS X comes out. If Apple doesn't seriously drop the ball, they will have a stable, easy to use, modern OS. On top of really cool hardware, and a bunch of well known apps, it will be seriously attractive to the masses. Then, the only things that will save Linux is that Apple is *not* out to rule the world, and Linux is free and runs on anything. It isn't impossible that OS X will be able to make some serious dents in both Linux and Windows, especially at the end user level. That is Linux' weak point, and MS is too busy with their five year old strategy of merging Win 9.x with Win 2000/NT to notice.
> Palm should get props for making the handheld
> computer into something for the masses back in
> '97.
Indeed. However, it would be nice if Palm continued to innovate, rather than just multiplying its models.
Logic has nothing to do with it. The actual number of mouse clicks a buyer makes has nothing to do with it. It is a marketing warm fuzzy ploy:
Amazon has One Click (TM, patents, etc.), the coolest way to buy stuff on the planet. It's even *PATENTED*!!! Oooh! Wow! (other expressions of extreme hipness included here)
Apple makes the iMac (TM, patents, etc.), iBook (TM, patents, etc.), iCube (TM, patents, etc.) and all the really iCoolest computers on the planet. But Apple doesn't have One Click (TM, patents, etc.). So the Apple Store (TM, patents, etc.) has a serious lack of coolness going on. iBoo iHoo. iSob. (other expressions of extreme iUnHappiness included here)
So Steve Jobs, our iHero, steps in. One quick icall on the iphone, and the Apple Store has officially licensed the (now i)One Click (TM, patents, etc.). iJoy! iJoy! All is now iCool again! (TM, patents, etc.)
See, it is all one big marketing game. Anyone can play. All it takes is either offically licensing the coolness, or coming up with something cooler.
Of course, the US Patent Office does need its head examined for patenting marketing ploys (One Click should be a service mark, not a patent). Then again, since when has the government been catering to the wishes of the terminally logical?
> VC++ is targetted more at less experienced
> developers. There was an interview linked to
> from slashdot at some point where the project
> lead for VC++ said as much.
Never used VC++, have you? I have. I've also had a few years of experience with UNIX programming (before Linux was born), and Windows SDK programming with the Microsoft C compiler. Of the three, I would definitely say that VC++ Windows programming (not the DOS) is the hardest, most convoluted of all. To do anything as simple as a hello world window for MFC, you have to customize four big objects, one of which is a "document" class (where is the document in simply displaying "hello world"?). And what you get is a window complete with menus and stuff, not a simple window with "hello world" in it. I won't even get into COM or any of the other MS acronyms of the week. The entire mess is market driven, with new "technologies" invented at the drop of the hat, not to help the developer, but to achieve dominance for MS. It is no wonder most Windows developers who believe they have no other choices, go for Visual Basic. Linux developers have it easy with good tools, and libraries like qt that actually make some sense. Heck, you can do a "hello world" in only a few lines with gcc and qt!
Let's face it, Microsoft is a worst case scenario of a market driven company. The latest thing with the Explorer spam is just one symptom of that, the messed up developement environment is another. Now, ideally, market driven is supposed to mean that the marketing department is keeping the products on track with consumer wants. In this case, market driven means that every feature, every part of every product is designed with one thing in mind: Microsoft world domination. And of course it all crashes, fixing bugs only helps the user, and MS doesn't give a heck for the user. Even if that user is a developer.
If I were the NSA (and I'm not), except for something big and common like Windows 2000, I wouldn't bother sticking backdoors in every bit of software out there. For one thing, it's too likely that someone will open their big mouth, and the general public won't like it much.
I'd go online, and find me a small group of talented crackers and script kiddies, and offer them the job of their dreams: cracking into every bit of software and computer system on the planet and getting paid for it. Not to mention the added perk of being cool spys. Even open source software has the occasional security hole, and if the hole is patched, my team could simply find another one. Microsoft's software is so riddled with silly security holes, and so popular, that it would not be difficult to have an in on most of the computers in the nation, if not the world. Plus, Microsoft sometimes never fixes known bugs because fixing bugs doesn't give them market dominance, so the holes might stay open longer.
As for the "ex-NSA employee", I pretty much take what he is saying with a grain of salt the size of Utah. Ex-employees shoot off their mouths for two reasons: to make the former employer look bad, or because the former employer wants them to say what they are saying. Sometimes it is just as effective to make people think you are watching them, and it is certainly easier on the budget.
Another thought: did you ever consider that this might be a big piece of FUD against proprietary software? Perhaps the NSA prefers open source.;)
> How is TNEF superior to ASCII for conveying
> information?
TNEF is just another of Microsoft's "Acronyms of the Week"(tm). It isn't inherently superior to anything, and like all MSAoWs(tm) is only useful for conveying one message: "Buy Microsoft"(tm). Oh, the joys of a market driven company.:b
> The fact is that ASCII is pretty much the common
> denominator as far as interpersonal
> communications.
For programmer types, expecially on the UNIX/Linux side of things, that is certainly true. A WYSIWYG word processor is usually a dark netherworld of fonts, rulers, and non-standard file formats we only encounter when required to produce a resume in print form, or documentation for ASCII-unenlightened management.
For most computer users, it is a different story. If they want to write anything, they pull up their trusty word processors, and start typing, with an occasional tweak of the font settings ("gee, I wonder what this Juniper font looks like"), or maybe a table or two. I have a friend who has had a few programming classes and one on HTML. She's been browsing the web for quite some time, and is a very savvy computer user (various micro computers, Dos, OS/2, and Windows). However, most of the work she has done has been clerical or purchasing agent stuff. Until I showed her the wonders of Notepad a few weeks ago, she had never even thought to create an ASCII file to story anything! She uses Word Perfect (and hates MS Office with a fiery passion). She even keeps databases in Word Perfect. Not the database program that came in her WP office suite, but WP itself. She uses WP for practically everything, even composing email messages which she then pastes into her email program. Thank goodness I have programs that can read her files.
BTW, I am assuming you meant computer based interpersonal communications. I have yet to meet anyone who physically speaks ASCII, except as an ocassional joke.;)
> I don't have the time to be bothered with petty
> 'law'. If it becomes useless to me I'll
> uninstall the software and dump the reader in
> the trash. Or maybe I'll just keep it and use it
> for something else later... What's the problem?
The problem is that DC is trying to claim that the thing is still their property. Theirs to sue you for vandalism if you have trashed the device when they recall it. Theirs to write you a cease and desist letter if you do something with it they don't like. In the mean time, your personal information and private property is theirs to make money off of by selling demographic info to the highest bidder.
Your only protection from all of this: a certain "petty law" and the people who "waste" their time fighting for it.
I may be wrong, but I was understanding from their privacy policy that registering the 'cat opted you in to their database (and having your info sold all over the globe), and opting out opted out of using the 'cat with their web site. In short, you have privacy if you aren't using their service. Which is quite an innovative twist to privacy policies. How their PR people and web content writers keep a straight face, I'll never know.
> DC have actually got a really, really good
> business plan. It goes like this: give people
> free barcode scanners, get them to scan their
> stuff in, then they go to our website (via our
> software) and we redirect them to the company
> that "owns" the barcode.
> So Digital Convergence's real money-spinner is
> not the cuecat at all, it's SELLING SPACE TO
> ADVERTISERS.
That is what they want the public to think. Their real plan is far more sinister. They want John Q. Public to run around the house, frantically scanning all his belongings. You see, each 'cat has its own ID, which is linked with your personal info by the software registration process. Then each time you scan something, the ID goes out to them along with the UPC code. This secret info they had been filing in their publicly readable plain text file to sell as demographics info to whoever wants to pay. Hence, the Hyde of DC/DD, Digital Demographics. Unfortunately, their top secret plain text file was accidentally, (or not so accidentally) stumbled across by person or persons unknown. To apologize to their dear victims, er members, they emailed them each a gift certificate for $10. Unfortunately, according to one slashdotter, the person doing the emailing CCed instead of BCCed, granting email recipients a free list of all their victims, er members, along with the $10. No word yet as to whether another email is planned to apologize for the apology.
> Since that's their main asset, then, I simply DO
> NOT UNDERSTAND why they care about people
> reversing their hardware.
Well, if their main asset is the demographics, not the advertising, they would care because Linux hackers toss the privacy invading ID away, and write their own book (or whatever) cataloging software. That, and their silly management somehow think a common simple encryption of a public domain UPC symbol equals intellectual property. Then again, they also think they are some divinely appointed guardian of the link between UPC symbols and the web. And that all the hacked software has somehow disappeared. Not to mention that they can put a page on the web stating that it is a EULA and anyone who opened one of their unmarked (from the outside) packages is bound by it, and that it applies to the hardware, which is not free, but actually still owned by them. Silly, silly, silly.
> I say that the OS movement should make a rival
> site - www.qcat.com - and write software to send
> people there from *every* OS.
IANAL, but I would imagine that the proceeds from that, if you name it qcat and do the same thing with their hardware, would go to lawyers fees, because those involved would find themselves at the pointy end of a trademark infringement case. They are extremely lawyer happy, and their lawyers are letterhead happy.
But your online UPC/website database idea is cool. It might be okay if you rigged it to work with any UPC scanner, and didn't use a name similar to cue cat. Otherwise, I guess it is back to the usual:
collecting the whole set of cats from RS using assumed identities,
writing new and unusual cat apps (is there one in Prolog for BeOS that can be attached to a Mindstorms robot and used as a scanner yet?),
> I wished they hadn't honored a criminal
> By naming this after Malcolm X.
The "X" in "OS X" is the roman numeral ten (used by those wacky roman dudes who counted: "I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X,..."). Malcolm X, criminal or not, has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple's new OS. As a matter of fact, I have never even heard of the roman numeral ten being accused or convicted of any crime whatsoever. I highly suspect it was chosen for this great honor because it comes after the roman numeral nine, and that they switched to roman numerals for a coolness factor.
> If you've never read the Autobiography of
> Malcom X, I suggest you do so. [snip]
If you believe this person to have been a common street thug and a drug dealer, why do you believe anything he wrote?
> If only Apple had named their new OS after a
> modern American hero like George Bush.
"OS Bush"? "OS George"? Oh, please! Anyway, if they named it after a political figure, they wouldn't be able to sell it to members of the other political party in the US. Kinda dumb in a marketing sense.
Me, I'm holding out for "OS Mothra". She's the most heroic kaiju deity of them all. And the Aqua desktop just matches her beautiful blue eyes.;)
Slashdot Mirror
An AC wrote:
:(
> Dude! Somebody's selling PS2s? Where?
A CompUSA on Dorsett in St. Louis Missouri had them in stock this week. They were giving a price of something like $358 (?) for the machine and a warranty. No price for the machine alone.
This deal might be good for Sony and the consumer, if Sony helps to add PS2 emulation to the program. Given their current problems with getting their machines out, having an emulator would help them at least sell the PS2 games. As it is now, they are selling games to a very tiny audience. That has got to be hurting them big time.
Homage to Mothra, Queen of Monsters, on the occasion of her fortieth anniversary!
People, it is really sad to see so many Slashdotters so blinded by Apple hatred that they fall for FUD hook, line and sinker.
1) This comes from MSNBC. We all know what the letters MS stand for. Can you really trust their journalistic integrity when reporting on a non-Microsoft OS? Don't you think there might be a wee bit of bias here?
2) They quote unnamed sources for most of their stuff. Apple is refusing to dignify their silliness with a reply.
3) It has been well known for months that the March 24th release date was for OSX alone, and that the apps and machines with OS X preinstalled were not coming out until July. This is *not* news, except perhaps to Microsoft who is still working on the stuff (merged Windows and networked lite Office apps) they were bragging about back in 1995. It is actually caution and common sense on Apple's part to make the first release of a brand new operating system to bleeding edge early adapters to give it a final shakeout before the big rollout in July. If they didn't and there were bugs, you'd all be flaming them for that.
4) For all of you who do not keep up with Apple's product line, they are moving away from offering DVD drives (except for the SuperDrive) and toward CD burners. That makes DVD a lower priority that other things. iDVD is a very new program, which is given away for free or bundled with their machines. Again, making available freebee programs for OSX is a lower priority than core operating system functionality. Being Slashdotters, I assume you know core operating system functionality from a hole in the ground.
5) Why are so many of you who wouldn't spend a dime on Apple hardware or OS X, caring about whether one can play a DVD with it or not?
Mary Leibach
Apple's biggest fans: Godzilla and Mothra
(Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 2, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Destroyah, Mothra 2, Godzilla 2000)
Please, do! To have the install fests, you have to buy the hardware, and Apple could really use the sales right now!
;)
Apple is a hardware company. They might like you to use their OS, but it doesn't hurt them one bit if you don't. Don't they pay people to help make the very Linux that you want to punish them with?
Mothra 1961-2001: Her heart can reach!
I can think of a lot of reasons why Godzilla 2000 would have been written up on Slashdot. After all, it was the first theatrical showing in America in fifteen years of one of the world's best loved science fiction movie series. It is also the first Godzilla to attempt a combination of suitmation and CGI, using the techniques developed in the Mothra series. The villain is none other than a personification of the Y2K bug: the Millenium Monster (later refered to as Orga -- short for Organizer G -- when it developed an organic body). Most of all, only in a Toho kaiju eiga will you have the pleasure of seeing a Windows user called an "imbecile" (while the dubbing made a running joke of it, the sentiment is there in the early part of the movie), not to mention the sole WinCE user being portrayed as the bad guy! ;) This is because Godzilla and Mothra are Mac loving monsters, and without a doubt, Apple's biggest fans (since the mid 1990's at least).
;) When the King of Monsters returned to Tokyo Bay in G2K, it was to an Apple dominated city, where Apple banners hung in the streets and iMacs and G4s waited for Godzilla to come and save them.
.1 million over what would cause TriStar to consider releasing the next G film in theaters. It is now out on DVD. The next G film is currently running in Japan, and in about fifth place, which is considered good for a G film. G2K is now out on DVD to buy and on VHS to rent. If you want to see G back on the big screen again, vote with your wallets at your favorite video place.
In Godzilla vs. Destroyah, Dr. Yamane's grandson proudly displayed an Apple poster in his dorm room. In the 1996 Mothra, Apple was in serious trouble, and Toho was reduced to using Windows. But they blurred the telling parts of the screen so you have to look very carefully to recognize it. At the end of the movie, Mothra resurrects the badly scorched forests of Hokkaido, and apparently there must have been an apple tree in there somewhere. By the next year, with a bit of help from Steve Jobs (okay, lots of help from Jobs), Apple was strong enough again that Toho perched Fairy atop a Performa to celebrate. (I wonder when Apple is going to reintroduce that experimental telepathic feature into their modern lineup?
Speaking of miracles, G2K had almost no advertising, and yet managed to rank somewhere around 84/300 this past summer, and 26th during its second run this past December. It made 10.1 million in the box office, which is
Homage to Mothra, Goddess of Peace and peerless Queen of the Monsters, on the occasion of her 40th aniversary year!
Mary Leibach
Well, after all, it is *their* design. They paid to develop it. They came up with it in the first place. It's not like they ripped it off from someone else, as seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. It seems to me that if anyone is being selfish, it is those people who want to be able to rip off anyone else's work and get away with it, who seem to think it is some kind of "right" to be able to do so. That applies to Microsoft (silly them, they think it is "innovation"). That also often (and unfortunately) applies to the Open Source community. If OS is so much better, why can't the community originate its own ideas and designs instead of copying others? Why doesn't Linux have an original, drop-dead-gorgeous, and easy to use GUI that's so intuitive your average technophobe can sit down and be immediately productive? Next year there will be a consumer UNIX based OS with a GUI like that, and a ton of big name desktop developers bowing down to worship it, but it won't be Linux. It will be Apple and BSD.
You OS types have a choice here. You can sit about griping at Apple for taking your toys away. Or you can get off your duffs, and make a GUI for Linux that will blow Apple and Aqua away. If you do the former, you are no better than Microsoft and their assinine blather about "right to innovate". If you do the latter, Linux wins. Either way, consumers have a good alternative to Windows, and Microsoft looses. It's your choice whether that alternative includes Linux.
As for the iMac clones, they came complete with salesmen that diverted people, brought in to the store by Apple ads, into buying the clones. That is not very honest.
;) Even without CueCat's "unbreakable Base 64 encoding scheme", insecure database, and penchant for emailing their entire database of email addresses to each of their customers, CreditCards.com *is* using Microsoft server products. And we all know how secure Microsoft servers are! ;)
Even the four months figure is perfect. "Russian" crackers only had access to MS's servers for three months (later whittled down to "five seconds and they only downloaded a virus we designed to stop intruders" by MS's crack PR/damage control team). We have to assume that MS is slightly more expert in the non application of patches than the rest of the world is when it comes to their own products.
Last year about this time, the world was awaiting doom as Y2K approached. Now it's evil crackers and internet piracy of precious IP that are to blame for the world's ills. Why can't these idiot companies see where the real problem lies, fix their internal security, and come up with business models that work? Actually caring about their customers (and in this case, their customers' customers) wouldn't hurt either.
joshooah18 wrote:
;). But there is nothing stopping the average citizen from getting the sources to an air traffic control system, and modifying them to his/her own needs, say traffic control for setting and clearing the dinner table:
> Just because it is open source, doesn't mean it
> is written by the public, or just by anyone, it
> just means that people can view it.
No, the OS licenses that I have heard about do include the right to modify and redistribute. Of course the government is perfectly free to only use versions developed by trusted programmers (don't want the buddy of some terrorist sticking in an obscure bit that results in a 500 plane mid-air collision, do we
"Sally, you are cleared for a 119er approach to the kitchen sink with those dirty salad plates. Little Billy, are you *sure* you don't need Daddy to help with that big pot roast? Okay, you are cleared to head for the table. John, I need you to take up a holding pattern in the hallway with those forks. John, did you hear me? Billy, watch out, you are going to hit...CRASH! Don't cry, Little Billy, I'm sure the boss and his wife are going to love the pot roast so attractively decorated like a porcupine with all the forks. It's so, er, festive! John, you are soooo grounded."
Yep, this family desperately needs their government to adopt open source.
;)
electricmonk wrote:
;)
[That I wrote:]
> > Anyway, I'm sick of companies that think they
> > can charge innocent users good money for buggy
> > releases that should still be in alpha or
> > beta, and then think they can show their faces
> > in public.
> I now feel compelled to inform you that GPL
> licensed software, such as Red Hat Linux, is
> available for free download. Sorry that I
> couldn't let you know until after you make such
> a weak argument.
1) Go to any store selling Linux products. Usually there are boxes marked Redhat 7.0. Note that these boxes have prices on them and that sometimes people actually pay these prices to take the box home. Believe it or not, this actually qualifies as "charge innocent users good money". The fact that others download the software does not change the fact that there are people paying for it.
2) I am not ignorant of Linux or the ways in which it is distributed. The machine I am typing this on is not the first one I have built, nor is SuSE the first distribution I have tried.
3) Not all Linux programs in a given distribution are under the GPL. Some are even, gasp, proprietary!
4) I'm also not so happy about companies that make users sit thru long downloads for software that is supposed to be a major release, and instead is a buggy beta. Feel better?
billwashere wrote:
;)
> Large scale software products alway have bugs
> and always will.
In a certain sense, you are right. Bugs are caused by human error, and as a project increases in size and complexity, the number of bugs and the difficulty in finding them go up. However, especially for highly critical applications, an intensive testing effort can have results that approach 100% bug removal. On the other hand, an intensely antsy marketing department, in their rush to get the product out the door, can have results that approach or exceed 0% bug removal. A company's commitment to quality is what makes the difference.
> The difference is the business model which i
> think in Redhat's case is heads above M$.
Open source is Redhat's "business model". Interesting choice of terms. Why not "philosophy", or "dream", or "reason for existance"? Because Redhat is a business. The way they make money is to grab a bunch of open source software, wrap it up, and sell it. Saying they are great, wonderful, better than the other guy because they sell open source is called "marketing". In response, good little open source Linux drones are supposed to salivate profusely, forget anything bad they ever heard about Redhat, and go out and buy more Redhat products.
> Dot 0 releases in almost any product have
> general problems and it is not until the product
> has been put through the extensive tests of
> production do most of these bugs show up.
Gee, whatever happened to alpha and beta tests? That is where these bugs are supposed to show up, if not earlier. Finding bugs at each stage of a product's life cycle is progressively more expensive, with production being the most expensive (and embarassing) of all. It's idiotic, even from the company's point of view, to let so many bugs go until version *.1. Anyway, I'm sick of companies that think they can charge innocent users good money for buggy releases that should still be in alpha or beta, and then think they can show their faces in public.
> If you want bug free code wait for 7.1 or 7.2.
If I want bug free code, I'll find a company that cares enough to do some decent quality control.
> But just quit busting on a company that is
> working hard to do the right thing.
Which right thing is that: 1) making money off open source, or 2) make you pay full price for a(n allegedly) buggy beta? MS is a old hand at #2, and probably wouldn't mind embracing and extending #1 as soon as they get around to it. As for Redhat, they are just a company. That neither automatically makes them evil, nor does it automatically grant sainthood just because they intone the holy mantra "open source". What matters is quality, how they treat their customers, and how honorably they conduct themselves. Answering serious quality concerns with a rousing cheer of "We're the open source good guys, Rah, Rah, Rah!" and threats to send people to the blackboard (oh, so mature!) do not cut the muster.
An AC wrote:
;)
> Hm... Sony releases a networking cable for
> Aibo units... and calls it "Beowolf"...
Er... Don't you mean "Beo woof"
I too learned Basic on my TS 1000, which was my first computer. I wrote a black jack game as I recall. I taught myself C, Assembler, and GUI programming (Geos) on my Commodore 64 when I got out of college and found that Fortran, PL1, Pascal, etc. jobs were not to be found. These old microcomputers may not have been much compared to a Linux PC today, but they were good ways to get one's feet wet with computers. I still have both of them.
BTW, the solution to the RAM pack wobble is to get a big rubber band about an inch wide and big enough to go around the RAM pack and the whole computer. In the front it looks something like a chin strap. It isn't pretty, and it doesn't work perfectly, but it is a big help, and a rather cheap fix. Of course the more hardware minded might take the computer and RAM pack apart, and mount them together inside a case with a handheld TV and some sort of battery driven power supply to make a portable that could be carried around. Check eBay and other sources of old hardware for some of the accessories they had for it. As I recall, toward the end they were making hard drives and stuff for it to beef it up.
B'Trey writes:
;)
> Why shouldn't they be discarded? They're just
> human tissue, little different than a severed
> finger or an apendix that has been removed.
Ah, but what were they severed from? Each embryo has a complete genetic structure that is totally unique. A severed finger or an apendix has the same genetic structure as the human it was removed from, and if discarded (and the human properly treated) the human it came from can go on with life. In the case of the eighth cell removed for testing, the cell can be discarded, but the embryo goes on (if it is allowed to and not discarded itself). In the case of twins, a separated cell can itself go on and become another baby.
Also, not only can an embryo survive as a living organism in its proper environment (its mother's womb), but it can grow into a human being with a complete set of organs and rights. I'd love to see a severed finger do that!
Personally, I'm not a troll, nor a Christian, nor particularly right wing. But I have trouble seeing a sharp dividing point between embryo, fetus, baby, child, and adult. To me, everything after the formation of a unique genetic code is kind of a continuum. (Though dividing into two organisms, as in twins, does seem a rather sharp division.) How then can we say it is cool to "discard", "abort", or whatever at one stage of developement, but that it is murder at another?
It is a question that requires some serious thought and consideration. Unfortunately, it looks like such decisions are going to be made based on profit, convenience, or who screams "bloody murder" the loudest.
LOL! ;)
.NET. Gates is probably watching this little cat fight with great interest. I just bet he'd go for giving away cheap PC's to rope people into .NET. ISPs are already doing deep discounts on PC's to get people to sign up for three years, but at least it is a voluntary thing. What kind of rights do you think we'd have to write and run our own software on a free PC obtained in a .NET agreement?
.NET worry: free hardware that we don't really own (according to DC), a server (in this case tracking demographic info) that is the real profit, and a company slapping people (legal sense only) if they dare do anything but use the free hardware with their software and server. If hackers win this one, we have something for the legal types to use if MS gets cocky with .NET.
.NET, the scarier it gets. The Corel alliance just makes it sound worse. We can laugh at DC. Can we laugh as easily at MS if they create a world where new PC's are free (but can only be gotten with five years of .NET) and any software development using non-MS approved tools for non.NET purposes calls down the wrath of MS's legal department?
Mostly, DC likes hackers to use their database and pay them $20 for the priviledge. We are just lucky that MS is not as innovative, or we'd face legal action for writing programs that can accept input for Microsoft mouses and keyboards using non-MS tools like gcc or Perl (not to mention non-MS OS's like Linux).
Then again, we might just have some similar trouble coming up with MS. Don't forget
Cuecat is our nice little test case. It is the same basic concept as my
I know this issue is getting old, and people are getting tired of it, but stick with it. Slashdot is right to carry this kind of stuff, it is important. The more I hear about
Granted, the DoJ wouldn't go for this scenario. But barring a miracle, legal remedies would be years away. By then, MS might just have turned themselves into a monopolistic utility company, and software into another utility like cable or cell phones.
hatless wrote:
> Steve Jobs would undoubtedly earn a spot in the
> top 5 in a list covering the 1970s or the 1980s.
> But in the 1990s?
> Jobs turned Apple around,
Perhaps not in the 1990s. Though bringing Apple back from near death and thus giving customers a viable commercial alternative to the Wintel monopoly is nothing to be sneezed at. I think, that with OS X coming next year, we really haven't seen the full impact of Jobs' return. Yet. He may well be flying high on next decade's list.
> but Apple isn't really important to computing as
> a whole anymore, not with an 8% market share.
Neither is Linux, if we are going by market share, as the two are in the same neighborhood, with the one in the lead depending on who you talk to. If you want to go by CompUSA floor space, Linux is a distant third, with Apple #2 and MS #1 (and still idiotic). And I'm writing this on a Linux box, so don't think me a MS troll.
> but with the exception of case design,
> Apple--and Steve Jobs--don't shape computing
> anymore.
No, MS shapes it, by ripping off Apple, Next, and now their own viruses! But wait till OS X comes out. If Apple doesn't seriously drop the ball, they will have a stable, easy to use, modern OS. On top of really cool hardware, and a bunch of well known apps, it will be seriously attractive to the masses. Then, the only things that will save Linux is that Apple is *not* out to rule the world, and Linux is free and runs on anything. It isn't impossible that OS X will be able to make some serious dents in both Linux and Windows, especially at the end user level. That is Linux' weak point, and MS is too busy with their five year old strategy of merging Win 9.x with Win 2000/NT to notice.
> Palm should get props for making the handheld
> computer into something for the masses back in
> '97.
Indeed. However, it would be nice if Palm continued to innovate, rather than just multiplying its models.
Logic has nothing to do with it. The actual number of mouse clicks a buyer makes has nothing to do with it. It is a marketing warm fuzzy ploy:
Amazon has One Click (TM, patents, etc.), the coolest way to buy stuff on the planet. It's even *PATENTED*!!! Oooh! Wow! (other expressions of extreme hipness included here)
Apple makes the iMac (TM, patents, etc.), iBook (TM, patents, etc.), iCube (TM, patents, etc.) and all the really iCoolest computers on the planet. But Apple doesn't have One Click (TM, patents, etc.). So the Apple Store (TM, patents, etc.) has a serious lack of coolness going on. iBoo iHoo. iSob. (other expressions of extreme iUnHappiness included here)
So Steve Jobs, our iHero, steps in. One quick icall on the iphone, and the Apple Store has officially licensed the (now i)One Click (TM, patents, etc.). iJoy! iJoy! All is now iCool again! (TM, patents, etc.)
See, it is all one big marketing game. Anyone can play. All it takes is either offically licensing the coolness, or coming up with something cooler.
Of course, the US Patent Office does need its head examined for patenting marketing ploys (One Click should be a service mark, not a patent). Then again, since when has the government been catering to the wishes of the terminally logical?
An AC wrote:
> VC++ is targetted more at less experienced
> developers. There was an interview linked to
> from slashdot at some point where the project
> lead for VC++ said as much.
Never used VC++, have you? I have. I've also had a few years of experience with UNIX programming (before Linux was born), and Windows SDK programming with the Microsoft C compiler. Of the three, I would definitely say that VC++ Windows programming (not the DOS) is the hardest, most convoluted of all. To do anything as simple as a hello world window for MFC, you have to customize four big objects, one of which is a "document" class (where is the document in simply displaying "hello world"?). And what you get is a window complete with menus and stuff, not a simple window with "hello world" in it. I won't even get into COM or any of the other MS acronyms of the week. The entire mess is market driven, with new "technologies" invented at the drop of the hat, not to help the developer, but to achieve dominance for MS. It is no wonder most Windows developers who believe they have no other choices, go for Visual Basic. Linux developers have it easy with good tools, and libraries like qt that actually make some sense. Heck, you can do a "hello world" in only a few lines with gcc and qt!
Let's face it, Microsoft is a worst case scenario of a market driven company. The latest thing with the Explorer spam is just one symptom of that, the messed up developement environment is another. Now, ideally, market driven is supposed to mean that the marketing department is keeping the products on track with consumer wants. In this case, market driven means that every feature, every part of every product is designed with one thing in mind: Microsoft world domination. And of course it all crashes, fixing bugs only helps the user, and MS doesn't give a heck for the user. Even if that user is a developer.
If I were the NSA (and I'm not), except for something big and common like Windows 2000, I wouldn't bother sticking backdoors in every bit of software out there. For one thing, it's too likely that someone will open their big mouth, and the general public won't like it much.
;)
I'd go online, and find me a small group of talented crackers and script kiddies, and offer them the job of their dreams: cracking into every bit of software and computer system on the planet and getting paid for it. Not to mention the added perk of being cool spys. Even open source software has the occasional security hole, and if the hole is patched, my team could simply find another one. Microsoft's software is so riddled with silly security holes, and so popular, that it would not be difficult to have an in on most of the computers in the nation, if not the world. Plus, Microsoft sometimes never fixes known bugs because fixing bugs doesn't give them market dominance, so the holes might stay open longer.
As for the "ex-NSA employee", I pretty much take what he is saying with a grain of salt the size of Utah. Ex-employees shoot off their mouths for two reasons: to make the former employer look bad, or because the former employer wants them to say what they are saying. Sometimes it is just as effective to make people think you are watching them, and it is certainly easier on the budget.
Another thought: did you ever consider that this might be a big piece of FUD against proprietary software? Perhaps the NSA prefers open source.
rongen wrote:
:b
;)
> How is TNEF superior to ASCII for conveying
> information?
TNEF is just another of Microsoft's "Acronyms of the Week"(tm). It isn't inherently superior to anything, and like all MSAoWs(tm) is only useful for conveying one message: "Buy Microsoft"(tm). Oh, the joys of a market driven company.
> The fact is that ASCII is pretty much the common
> denominator as far as interpersonal
> communications.
For programmer types, expecially on the UNIX/Linux side of things, that is certainly true. A WYSIWYG word processor is usually a dark netherworld of fonts, rulers, and non-standard file formats we only encounter when required to produce a resume in print form, or documentation for ASCII-unenlightened management.
For most computer users, it is a different story. If they want to write anything, they pull up their trusty word processors, and start typing, with an occasional tweak of the font settings ("gee, I wonder what this Juniper font looks like"), or maybe a table or two. I have a friend who has had a few programming classes and one on HTML. She's been browsing the web for quite some time, and is a very savvy computer user (various micro computers, Dos, OS/2, and Windows). However, most of the work she has done has been clerical or purchasing agent stuff. Until I showed her the wonders of Notepad a few weeks ago, she had never even thought to create an ASCII file to story anything! She uses Word Perfect (and hates MS Office with a fiery passion). She even keeps databases in Word Perfect. Not the database program that came in her WP office suite, but WP itself. She uses WP for practically everything, even composing email messages which she then pastes into her email program. Thank goodness I have programs that can read her files.
BTW, I am assuming you meant computer based interpersonal communications. I have yet to meet anyone who physically speaks ASCII, except as an ocassional joke.
An AC wrote:
> I don't have the time to be bothered with petty
> 'law'. If it becomes useless to me I'll
> uninstall the software and dump the reader in
> the trash. Or maybe I'll just keep it and use it
> for something else later... What's the problem?
The problem is that DC is trying to claim that the thing is still their property. Theirs to sue you for vandalism if you have trashed the device when they recall it. Theirs to write you a cease and desist letter if you do something with it they don't like. In the mean time, your personal information and private property is theirs to make money off of by selling demographic info to the highest bidder.
Your only protection from all of this: a certain "petty law" and the people who "waste" their time fighting for it.
I may be wrong, but I was understanding from their privacy policy that registering the 'cat opted you in to their database (and having your info sold all over the globe), and opting out opted out of using the 'cat with their web site. In short, you have privacy if you aren't using their service. Which is quite an innovative twist to privacy policies. How their PR people and web content writers keep a straight face, I'll never know.
NaughtyEddie wrote:
> DC have actually got a really, really good
> business plan. It goes like this: give people
> free barcode scanners, get them to scan their
> stuff in, then they go to our website (via our
> software) and we redirect them to the company
> that "owns" the barcode.
> So Digital Convergence's real money-spinner is
> not the cuecat at all, it's SELLING SPACE TO
> ADVERTISERS.
That is what they want the public to think. Their real plan is far more sinister. They want John Q. Public to run around the house, frantically scanning all his belongings. You see, each 'cat has its own ID, which is linked with your personal info by the software registration process. Then each time you scan something, the ID goes out to them along with the UPC code. This secret info they had been filing in their publicly readable plain text file to sell as demographics info to whoever wants to pay. Hence, the Hyde of DC/DD, Digital Demographics. Unfortunately, their top secret plain text file was accidentally, (or not so accidentally) stumbled across by person or persons unknown. To apologize to their dear victims, er members, they emailed them each a gift certificate for $10. Unfortunately, according to one slashdotter, the person doing the emailing CCed instead of BCCed, granting email recipients a free list of all their victims, er members, along with the $10. No word yet as to whether another email is planned to apologize for the apology.
> Since that's their main asset, then, I simply DO
> NOT UNDERSTAND why they care about people
> reversing their hardware.
Well, if their main asset is the demographics, not the advertising, they would care because Linux hackers toss the privacy invading ID away, and write their own book (or whatever) cataloging software. That, and their silly management somehow think a common simple encryption of a public domain UPC symbol equals intellectual property. Then again, they also think they are some divinely appointed guardian of the link between UPC symbols and the web. And that all the hacked software has somehow disappeared. Not to mention that they can put a page on the web stating that it is a EULA and anyone who opened one of their unmarked (from the outside) packages is bound by it, and that it applies to the hardware, which is not free, but actually still owned by them. Silly, silly, silly.
> I say that the OS movement should make a rival
> site - www.qcat.com - and write software to send
> people there from *every* OS.
IANAL, but I would imagine that the proceeds from that, if you name it qcat and do the same thing with their hardware, would go to lawyers fees, because those involved would find themselves at the pointy end of a trademark infringement case. They are extremely lawyer happy, and their lawyers are letterhead happy.
But your online UPC/website database idea is cool. It might be okay if you rigged it to work with any UPC scanner, and didn't use a name similar to cue cat. Otherwise, I guess it is back to the usual:
collecting the whole set of cats from RS using assumed identities,
writing new and unusual cat apps (is there one in Prolog for BeOS that can be attached to a Mindstorms robot and used as a scanner yet?),
writing any company involved,
and a lot of slashdot discussion.
Did I leave anything out?
An "anonymous coward" wrote:
..."). Malcolm X, criminal or not, has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple's new OS. As a matter of fact, I have never even heard of the roman numeral ten being accused or convicted of any crime whatsoever. I highly suspect it was chosen for this great honor because it comes after the roman numeral nine, and that they switched to roman numerals for a coolness factor.
;)
> I wished they hadn't honored a criminal
> By naming this after Malcolm X.
The "X" in "OS X" is the roman numeral ten (used by those wacky roman dudes who counted: "I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X,
> If you've never read the Autobiography of
> Malcom X, I suggest you do so. [snip]
If you believe this person to have been a common street thug and a drug dealer, why do you believe anything he wrote?
> If only Apple had named their new OS after a
> modern American hero like George Bush.
"OS Bush"? "OS George"? Oh, please! Anyway, if they named it after a political figure, they wouldn't be able to sell it to members of the other political party in the US. Kinda dumb in a marketing sense.
Me, I'm holding out for "OS Mothra". She's the most heroic kaiju deity of them all. And the Aqua desktop just matches her beautiful blue eyes.