Oh goody, yet another non-programmer with a Great Concern for the Well-Being of the Open Source Community. Just what the world needed.
Have you considered getting a real hobby? Or at least one that you're actually good at?
I think the key point here is that there is a lot of DRM that ships with "Mac OS X", not just iTunes.
For values of "a lot" that apparently encompass...one example that you've been able to come up with other than iTunes. You're not exactly wowing us with Apple's constant perfidy here. (Please do not waste our time here by shocking us with the news that iDVD uses CSS.) My suggestion: stop reading Andrew Orlowski's columns and start reading more manpages.
Also: the distinction between DRM at the OS level and the application is not at all a trivial one. If I buy a Macintosh with the intention of running MacOS X, I don't have any choice about using, say, the Mach kernel: it's part and parcel of the OS, and it won't function without it. I do have a choice about using iTunes, iDVD and DVDPlayer: they're applications, I can delete or ignore them if I want, and if they don't suit my needs, I can install replacements that do.
And so could you, but apparently spreading FUD on slashdot is more to your taste.
So far, Apple has taken far more from the open source community than they have given back
Fascinating. I'd ask what sort of metric you're using to measure this, and how much in terms of man-hours and dollar-value Apple would have to "give back" to make up the "balance", but that would indicate a level of interest in your thought on this matter that I just don't have.
Here's a free hint, though: you can't "take" (in the sense that you're using the verb) something that's offered as a gift. Not all OSS is the GNU project.
There are many ways DRM pops its ugly head up on Mac. For instance, Apple decided not to enable screen captures so that you can't grab still frames of a DVD movie. Not even even your own DVD movie shot with your own camcorder.
Once again: an application is not an OS. An OS is not an application. This has nothing to do with any all-encompassing "DRM system"; it's a function of dvdplayer.app. Yes, it's annoying. 10 seconds with google would have found you the workaround for it.
And of course, if you don't have Apple's DRM system running, you cannot play back the MP4 AAC files you purchase from the iTunes store as they are encrypted and have DRM access controls.
Which part of "so don't buy from iTMS if you don't like their terms of sale" is hard for you to grasp here?
When it comes to Darwin, Apple only released the code because Darwin is comprised of much open source code that likely has licensing requirements to maintain the openness of the code.
Again: no. The open source portions of OSX are BSD, not GPL. Apple was under no obligation beyond acknowledging that portions of the OS were copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California.
I cannot do so, that is what I already said.
That's your problem, not mine, and not Apples. RTFM on "strings" and "md5" if you want to solve that problem.
ll in all, I believe I've been accurate in my comments regarding Apple and Mac OS X.
You may believe that as much as you want, but it is not so.
And as far as I have read, there is no way to know if what you run as Mac OS X was even built from the published Darwin sources....except for compiling the sources yourself and comparing the size and content of the binaries. But that would require actually knowing what the hell you're talking about, which you do not.
I noticed the author didn't mention Apple's closed source DRM system, for instance. It doesn't exist in his model of Mac OS X.
Apple's "closed source DRM system" is a function of (and only of) iTunes.app. It's an application. It has nothing to do with the functionality of the core OS.
If you don't like it, rm -rf/Applications/iTunes.app, then find a more useful way to spend your free time than trolling on slashdot.
Go to Toshiba with an order for 100K HDs in hand with cash to back it up and the promise of regular orders and they will give you prices far under what the retailers pay.
Duh.
My point wasn't that Apple wasn't making a marginal profit: my point is that their margins are not in any way "inflated". The iPod contains substantial value-add in terms of integration and software, yet they are selling it for very little more than the aggregate retail cost of the parts alone. That's called "reasonable."
Between these utilities you can do pretty much everything ghost can and much much more....unless the system you want to modify uses NTFS as its filesystem and you want to do anything other than a bitwise copy.
Will Apple stay a winner? How long can they sustain the iPod at the current inflated margins?
An question based on an incorrect premise, and a really silly misconception to labor under now 2+ years after the ipod was introduced.
Multiple web sites have now disassembled iPods and examined their parts manifest. You can check them yourself: between the bleeding-edge Toshiba 1.8" hard drives and the moldable li-ion batteries, the retail cost of an ipod is has generally been accounted at 10-20% less than the retail cost of its component parts.
Apple's margins on the iPod are probably no better than 10% at the very best.
My understanding is that very few Iranians actually speak fluent Arabic, and that the Arabic/Persian lingustic divide is somewhat analogous to the English/French one in terms of national pride and pissiness.:)
The Opteron is exactly the same cpu core as the Athlon 64. Depending on which model Opteron is in question, it then adds some number of additional hypertransport links (to support 2-, 4- or 8-way multiprocessing), memory controllers and onboard cache memory.
Translated into english: The Opterons are, at worst, exactly as fast as the Athlon64, and in most cases are faster. Using an Athlon64 in the same test will not produce faster results.
Okay, "Ride with the Devil" was not exactly a rousing success, but "The Ice Storm" was a critical success, and as much of a commercial success as a tiny-budget film about 1970s suburban ennui could ever be.:)
The cutting out of Tom Bombadil, for one example, was a perfect example of mass-marketing(it would helped to understand the world of Tolkien better, the mythology, and the role the Ring had with regards to the powers that be). It didn't include a fight scene, and the potential for special effects was minimal, so it was cut.
It didn't hurt that it was also the most deadly boring part of the first book: a complete narrative non-sequitor that served only to drag out the story's opening act by about a hundred pages too many.
There are plenty of edits that Jackson(s) and Boyens made that are in questionable judgement, but I really can't fault them for this one. A Fellowship with the Bombadil scenes intact would have been a full 30 minutes longer to no visual or narrative benefit.
I imagine that Saruman's invasion of The Shire(my term for it) was cut because it was hard getting that many male hobbits in uniform as to compose two opposing army units.
No, the Scouring got cut because Jackson felt it added little to the story, and didn't think the movie could support an additional 60-minute (or more) conflict after the destruction of the Ring. This is certainly arguable, but Jackson has been saying it repeatedly since the movies entered production.
There actually was a full-size old 'toaster' model Cylon Centurian standing in a display case in the "Museum" section of the Galactica: the camera panned by it briefly, I think during the decomissioning ceremony.
But if you missed it, it's okay: it just means you blinked.:)
I've actually been following the Karma's progress quite avidly on the riovolution forums. In theory, it's the player I want to own: ipod-sized, ogg support, involved developer community, ethernet interface.
But let's be honest here: Rio released the Karma several months and QA cycles too early, and the early buyers got used as unwitting beta testers of an unready product. The original ipod had its share of issues, but they didn't include regularly restarting in the middle of song playback.
The 1.25 firmware looks like it might actually be of production quality, but I'm gonna wait a few more weeks before risking my money on it. I'm sympathetic to the corporate upheavals that the Rio team has been through lately, but their QA process is just not trustworthy right now.
Ah, it's a lovely thought, but let's get real: that HP is long dead, and the bits they didn't spin off with Aligent got taken out behind the woodshed and shot.
No, this thing will be designed by ex-Compaq engineers. It'll be bigger than the Creative Nomad, flakier than the Rio Karma, heavier than the Zen, and more expensive than the iPod.
How in the name of god did you manage to make a post several hours after the posting of the story and not notice any of the dozen or so 4+ moderated posts pointing out that the "brothers" are full of it?
To recap: Li-Ion batteries die, and Apple cannot change the laws of physics on your account. Replacement batteries for iPods cost $99 from Apple, $50 from third parties. Extended warranties for iPods are available from both Apple and third parties which cover battery replacement. Not all or even the majority of iPod batteries die after 18 months. One tech support droid who quoted the full-device replacement cost instead of the battery replacement cost is not a "scandal", it's just the nature of low-paid phone support jobs. You are not very observant.
You've probably heard this before, but guys? When you sit down to design the Karma v2, or for that matter any other product of this sort?
Please don't ever do that again.
The USB mass storage protocol exists for a reason. Use it.
If the architectural wheel-reengineering madness (with attendant support nightmares) of designing your own file transfer regime doesn't give you pause, the fact that this gives your competitors (who include little companies like Apple and Dell fer chrissakes) a feature bullet-point which you don't have damn well should.
Although you may have had a bad experience or you may just be trolling, I've not had any of the experiences you've had so far after 2 weeks of heavy use.
He's not trolling. The Karma is an interesting product, but spend a little time poking through the unofficial support forums on riovolution.com, and it becomes very obvious that their development/QA process still needs some work. There are a lot of crippling bugs in the currently available firmware revisions.
Some people, to be sure, don't seem to have any problems at all, but power users who don't feel like playing the early-adopter/public-beta game might want to give the Karma a few months for the software to mature.
There are, conservative estimate, probably several hundreds of thousands of RedHat 7.1-7.3 boxes in service at various semi-managed hosting facilities around the globe.
If I had, say, $1 Million in angel money to play around with, I'd be hiring QA droids like there was no tomorrow, in order to put together a replacement for up2date to keep those boxes usable.
Would you pay $150/year/box to avoid having to migrate to Fedora or RHEL3 for another few years? I bet you would, and so would a lot of other people.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for doing some actual research rather than spouting off yet another knee-jerk "nukes are evil" and/or "anti-nuke luddites are idiots" post.
Don't panic, it's not just you: the first 5-8 episodes were mostly pretty lame. The show didn't really hit its stride until about 2/3 of the way through the first season.
Episode 16, "A Human Reaction", was where they started firing on all cylinders.
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Oh goody, yet another non-programmer with a Great Concern for the Well-Being of the Open Source Community. Just what the world needed.
Have you considered getting a real hobby? Or at least one that you're actually good at?
I think the key point here is that there is a lot of DRM that ships with "Mac OS X", not just iTunes.
For values of "a lot" that apparently encompass...one example that you've been able to come up with other than iTunes. You're not exactly wowing us with Apple's constant perfidy here. (Please do not waste our time here by shocking us with the news that iDVD uses CSS.) My suggestion: stop reading Andrew Orlowski's columns and start reading more manpages.
Also: the distinction between DRM at the OS level and the application is not at all a trivial one. If I buy a Macintosh with the intention of running MacOS X, I don't have any choice about using, say, the Mach kernel: it's part and parcel of the OS, and it won't function without it. I do have a choice about using iTunes, iDVD and DVDPlayer: they're applications, I can delete or ignore them if I want, and if they don't suit my needs, I can install replacements that do.
And so could you, but apparently spreading FUD on slashdot is more to your taste.
So far, Apple has taken far more from the open source community than they have given back
Fascinating. I'd ask what sort of metric you're using to measure this, and how much in terms of man-hours and dollar-value Apple would have to "give back" to make up the "balance", but that would indicate a level of interest in your thought on this matter that I just don't have.
Here's a free hint, though: you can't "take" (in the sense that you're using the verb) something that's offered as a gift. Not all OSS is the GNU project.
There are many ways DRM pops its ugly head up on Mac. For instance, Apple decided not to enable screen captures so that you can't grab still frames of a DVD movie. Not even even your own DVD movie shot with your own camcorder.
Once again: an application is not an OS. An OS is not an application. This has nothing to do with any all-encompassing "DRM system"; it's a function of dvdplayer.app. Yes, it's annoying. 10 seconds with google would have found you the workaround for it.
And of course, if you don't have Apple's DRM system running, you cannot play back the MP4 AAC files you purchase from the iTunes store as they are encrypted and have DRM access controls.
Which part of "so don't buy from iTMS if you don't like their terms of sale" is hard for you to grasp here?
When it comes to Darwin, Apple only released the code because Darwin is comprised of much open source code that likely has licensing requirements to maintain the openness of the code.
Again: no. The open source portions of OSX are BSD, not GPL. Apple was under no obligation beyond acknowledging that portions of the OS were copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California.
I cannot do so, that is what I already said.
That's your problem, not mine, and not Apples. RTFM on "strings" and "md5" if you want to solve that problem.
ll in all, I believe I've been accurate in my comments regarding Apple and Mac OS X.
You may believe that as much as you want, but it is not so.
And as far as I have read, there is no way to know if what you run as Mac OS X was even built from the published Darwin sources. ...except for compiling the sources yourself and comparing the size and content of the binaries. But that would require actually knowing what the hell you're talking about, which you do not.
/Applications/iTunes.app, then find a more useful way to spend your free time than trolling on slashdot.
I noticed the author didn't mention Apple's closed source DRM system, for instance. It doesn't exist in his model of Mac OS X.
Apple's "closed source DRM system" is a function of (and only of) iTunes.app. It's an application. It has nothing to do with the functionality of the core OS.
If you don't like it, rm -rf
Go to Toshiba with an order for 100K HDs in hand with cash to back it up and the promise of regular orders and they will give you prices far under what the retailers pay.
Duh.
My point wasn't that Apple wasn't making a marginal profit: my point is that their margins are not in any way "inflated". The iPod contains substantial value-add in terms of integration and software, yet they are selling it for very little more than the aggregate retail cost of the parts alone. That's called "reasonable."
Between these utilities you can do pretty much everything ghost can and much much more. ...unless the system you want to modify uses NTFS as its filesystem and you want to do anything other than a bitwise copy.
Will Apple stay a winner? How long can they sustain the iPod at the current inflated margins?
An question based on an incorrect premise, and a really silly misconception to labor under now 2+ years after the ipod was introduced.
Multiple web sites have now disassembled iPods and examined their parts manifest. You can check them yourself: between the bleeding-edge Toshiba 1.8" hard drives and the moldable li-ion batteries, the retail cost of an ipod is has generally been accounted at 10-20% less than the retail cost of its component parts.
Apple's margins on the iPod are probably no better than 10% at the very best.
...how will we justify our bloated salaries and budgets?
:)
I mean...Open Firmware is mature, stable and tested. It works for Sun, Apple and IBM. Right there, that's reason enough not to use it.
My understanding is that very few Iranians actually speak fluent Arabic, and that the Arabic/Persian lingustic divide is somewhat analogous to the English/French one in terms of national pride and pissiness. :)
The Opteron is exactly the same cpu core as the Athlon 64. Depending on which model Opteron is in question, it then adds some number of additional hypertransport links (to support 2-, 4- or 8-way multiprocessing), memory controllers and onboard cache memory.
Translated into english: The Opterons are, at worst, exactly as fast as the Athlon64, and in most cases are faster. Using an Athlon64 in the same test will not produce faster results.
How many Soyuz capsules could we throw for the cost of maintaining the great white space elephant again?
NASA really has learned nothing.
Okay, "Ride with the Devil" was not exactly a rousing success, but "The Ice Storm" was a critical success, and as much of a commercial success as a tiny-budget film about 1970s suburban ennui could ever be. :)
The cutting out of Tom Bombadil, for one example, was a perfect example of mass-marketing(it would helped to understand the world of Tolkien better, the mythology, and the role the Ring had with regards to the powers that be). It didn't include a fight scene, and the potential for special effects was minimal, so it was cut.
It didn't hurt that it was also the most deadly boring part of the first book: a complete narrative non-sequitor that served only to drag out the story's opening act by about a hundred pages too many.
There are plenty of edits that Jackson(s) and Boyens made that are in questionable judgement, but I really can't fault them for this one. A Fellowship with the Bombadil scenes intact would have been a full 30 minutes longer to no visual or narrative benefit.
I imagine that Saruman's invasion of The Shire(my term for it) was cut because it was hard getting that many male hobbits in uniform as to compose two opposing army units.
No, the Scouring got cut because Jackson felt it added little to the story, and didn't think the movie could support an additional 60-minute (or more) conflict after the destruction of the Ring. This is certainly arguable, but Jackson has been saying it repeatedly since the movies entered production.
At least they didn't have a robot-dog-koala-thingy this time around.
I've seen a lot of what made DS9 the best Trek ever in Galactica
:)
There's a very good reason for that.
There actually was a full-size old 'toaster' model Cylon Centurian standing in a display case in the "Museum" section of the Galactica: the camera panned by it briefly, I think during the decomissioning ceremony.
:)
But if you missed it, it's okay: it just means you blinked.
Would it have actually killed you to mention the MAKES, MODELS and REVISIONS of the players you've allegedly had such poor experiences with?
Oh wait, you're trolling.
I've actually been following the Karma's progress quite avidly on the riovolution forums. In theory, it's the player I want to own: ipod-sized, ogg support, involved developer community, ethernet interface.
But let's be honest here: Rio released the Karma several months and QA cycles too early, and the early buyers got used as unwitting beta testers of an unready product. The original ipod had its share of issues, but they didn't include regularly restarting in the middle of song playback.
The 1.25 firmware looks like it might actually be of production quality, but I'm gonna wait a few more weeks before risking my money on it. I'm sympathetic to the corporate upheavals that the Rio team has been through lately, but their QA process is just not trustworthy right now.
Ah, it's a lovely thought, but let's get real: that HP is long dead, and the bits they didn't spin off with Aligent got taken out behind the woodshed and shot.
No, this thing will be designed by ex-Compaq engineers. It'll be bigger than the Creative Nomad, flakier than the Rio Karma, heavier than the Zen, and more expensive than the iPod.
Apple really blew it - again.
How in the name of god did you manage to make a post several hours after the posting of the story and not notice any of the dozen or so 4+ moderated posts pointing out that the "brothers" are full of it?
To recap: Li-Ion batteries die, and Apple cannot change the laws of physics on your account. Replacement batteries for iPods cost $99 from Apple, $50 from third parties. Extended warranties for iPods are available from both Apple and third parties which cover battery replacement. Not all or even the majority of iPod batteries die after 18 months. One tech support droid who quoted the full-device replacement cost instead of the battery replacement cost is not a "scandal", it's just the nature of low-paid phone support jobs. You are not very observant.
You've probably heard this before, but guys? When you sit down to design the Karma v2, or for that matter any other product of this sort?
Please don't ever do that again.
The USB mass storage protocol exists for a reason. Use it.
If the architectural wheel-reengineering madness (with attendant support nightmares) of designing your own file transfer regime doesn't give you pause, the fact that this gives your competitors (who include little companies like Apple and Dell fer chrissakes) a feature bullet-point which you don't have damn well should.
Although you may have had a bad experience or you may just be trolling, I've not had any of the experiences you've had so far after 2 weeks of heavy use.
He's not trolling. The Karma is an interesting product, but spend a little time poking through the unofficial support forums on riovolution.com, and it becomes very obvious that their development/QA process still needs some work. There are a lot of crippling bugs in the currently available firmware revisions.
Some people, to be sure, don't seem to have any problems at all, but power users who don't feel like playing the early-adopter/public-beta game might want to give the Karma a few months for the software to mature.
There are, conservative estimate, probably several hundreds of thousands of RedHat 7.1-7.3 boxes in service at various semi-managed hosting facilities around the globe.
If I had, say, $1 Million in angel money to play around with, I'd be hiring QA droids like there was no tomorrow, in order to put together a replacement for up2date to keep those boxes usable.
Would you pay $150/year/box to avoid having to migrate to Fedora or RHEL3 for another few years? I bet you would, and so would a lot of other people.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for doing some actual research rather than spouting off yet another knee-jerk "nukes are evil" and/or "anti-nuke luddites are idiots" post.
Don't panic, it's not just you: the first 5-8 episodes were mostly pretty lame. The show didn't really hit its stride until about 2/3 of the way through the first season.
Episode 16, "A Human Reaction", was where they started firing on all cylinders.
Of course it does. So does every drug under development: if the internal trials aren't promising, they pull the funding.
This means: exactly squat. When they publish their final results and undergo peer review, then we'll have something to talk about.