maybe this is a case where the private sector will eventually take care of this. it took a ton of tax dollars from the USA and USSR to get their space programs to where they are now, but maybe something like the shuttle should be picked up by 3rd parties?
i might be oversimplifying things, but all the data on the space shuttle exists, after 20 years there is enough info that another country, corporation, whatever could pick it up and run with it. i realize it is an incredibly complicated and dangerous thing to do, but maybe they need fresh blood to attack the current issues.
maybe NASA should focus the bulk of their efforts on breaking new ground? that's what they traditionally were great at. use tax dollars to do something groundbreaking and get people excited about space exploration again.
it may sound crappy, but how many medicines have their early research funded by tax dollars, then the product ALWAYS ends up in the hands of a private corporation. i don't know if that's right, but maybe the same idea could be applied here?
i too was wondering where those were. there has been a question if they were still too hot for a laptop. the fact is that there will not be a G5 ibook before a powerbook. at this point i doubt we will see a G5 portable at all, there are also some interesting new G4 chips coming that will tide things over. the theory is that the portables will be among the first to go Intel since they have been lagging the most. that thinking means they should be out in less than a year. maybe 1 more powerbook revision till then? possibly 2? i would guess those newer chips will be in the next powerbook revision.
the new G5 chips would maybe go into Xserves and iMacs where there is still some heat issues (though i doubt we will see a dual-processor imac soon). the towers could make nice use of them too, the fans are variable so the cooler the chips the quieter the machine.
... that i read the actual chip that Apple will be using does not publicly exist yet. i don't know much of anything about Intel's roadmap and if it will be based on the M series but i thought it was supposed to be a chip that was slated for release Spring 2006.
are people are getting hung up on the fact that the developer machines are not the new Apple machines 1 or 2 years early. in theory everything rewritten for these test machines will work fine on the new ones. would that mean that software may not be fully optimized if these newer chips are something crazy? i have no idea. i guess they will be in the same boat as the rest of the software writing world that wants their products to work on Intel chips.
i am pretty sure the 14" models actually outsell the 12". i don't think Apple releases such specific info like that. granted the 14" machines are faster (more room for cooling?).
the 12" powerbooks are missing a lot of features of the bigger models so it is hard to compare the models and say it is just popularity of screen size.
*if* the ibooks really go wide screen that will make quite a change to the dimensions. remember the G4 iMacs? when they made the 17" widescreen, it was the same height of the 15" but just a little wider.
i like the size my 12" ibook. if something was the same width but not as deep, i would like that too. i think one major size constraint issue is the keyboard. Apple portable keyboards are all the same size. unless they really made a major change, then that's the width we will have.
what? they are called developers for a reason
on
New Apples Next Week
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· Score: 2, Insightful
you realize the reason developers can get the intel based Mac today is so that when you, the consumer, gets one it will run your software. if Apple released it Tuesday there will be a lot of software not working. i think a lot of people would be pissed if they bought a new Mac and the only software it could run were most of the stock Apple apps and maybe firefox. granted that is all a lot of people use, but still. even the companies that are "ready" for the switch have not released the software to the public yet.
i honestly can not remember if it was in the Mac OS or Windows but a few years ago i remember hearing about this as an upcoming feature. i think it was on a Mac rumors site.
iifc what made it cool was the idea to do it for laptops. kind of an extended sleep mode. when you went into hibernation it would save the current status to some flash memory kind of thing and then when you powered back up it would resume as is. i am guessing there was some major issue with this or we would have seen it get released.
in general i guess rebooting is good because it takes care of little maintenance tasks. memory leaks or secret processes get reset, a lot of systems scan for spyware or viruses at startup/login. that could be changed but yeah.
i honestly do not know enough about computer systems from an electrical engineering or programming standpoint to know if it is possible to freeze the software and restart it like that. i am guessing not. it need some sort of intermediate state where it goes to sleep then wakes back up.
support the indies! and they profit
on
Sci-Fi on the Cheap
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· Score: 2, Insightful
they make a better return on the slew of low budget movies. people will watch them. there is that certain acceptance of lo-fi effects and whatever of a low budget movie... where as with Spiderman or something really expensive people always expect more.
it is also way cool because they get to give money to unknown people to create these movies. there is a lot less risk. i think the coolest effect of this is that they will bankroll projects that may never happen otherwise. some of the movies might suck, but that happens anyway. even brilliant filmmakers have to start somewhere. this can be the launch pad to a lot of writers, directors, actors etc etc etc. it keeps more people working on new stuff.
by making 28 films for $21million they realized they are making a far safer bet than making 3 $7million movies. they also are going right on TV and i guess to DVD. they also have the ability to promote them endlessly to their core fans. they will own the broadcast rights forever. it's a brilliant business model.
well, NYC is the biggest city in the country. NYC also has its share of gridlock and stop and start driving. isn't that the kind of driving that can be handled well by a hybrid? i realize the cabbies will have to be instructed on the techniques that optimize efficiency of a hybrid. when you spend your working hours driving a car around and when the high cost of gas effects your bottom line, you will probably do what you can to get that extra mileage. at the same time it will help the rest of the population by lowering pollution.
often an orchestra is recorded in their home base, or one they travel to. a lot of purists feel the optimum way to record a piece of classical music is with an orchestra in a hall they know using one really really really good microphone (yes, mono). i am not trying to oversimplify it, but that is the way a lot of people like it. it also gives a unique sound, a lot of halls are well known for the sound they have, and it can take years for the orchestra, director etc to learn how to get the optimum sound for that space.
recording may not be as complicated as pop artists that can not actually sing in key and need 55 takes of a guitar solo, but it is a different beast.
also of note, the orchestra often will count on the revenue from those recordings to keep going.
the local indymedia groups are pretty autonomous from what i understand. they use the same servers for obvious reasons (money, theoretically not having to find a good host etc). i suppose there is a common thinking between them, but that is mostly a left leaning media outlet.
for example the Philly or NYC IMC group will have ongoing coverage of protests or demonstrations. i guess they all do, but i have gone to those two during big events to get some play by play info instead of a 30 second blurb in the news.
just because they choose to give coverage to radical politics or activists does not mean that they lose their rights to publish news. read about the previous seizure and it is really shady.
yeah Fox will make a bundle (relatively speaking) on the DVDs..... but they would have made a lot more if the series lasted a few seasons. they would have had a DVD set for each season. Buffy took more than a season to take off, at first it also had crappy time slots. look how big that got, and how well the DVD sets do, same with Angel.
really, somebody at Fox never liked this show. Fox started Firefly out on Friday nights, which is not a prime slot for a hip new show. it's often saved for shows they are phasing out. then add that they showed the pilot last and ran the show out of sequence. maybe the sequence made sense to them, but not to me as a viewer. maybe it was a scam to get the people that watched it to get the DVDs so they could see it in sequence? whatever the thinking, it was a bad call.
as other people pointed out, Fox has a weird way of scrapping shows it does not understand. if it is not american idol or some half season thing (like simple life, wife swap) they will ride it hard and fast straight into the ground.... then try something new. do they have any long running series besides the simpsons? i don't really watch the channel much so maybe i don't know.
the comparison to "if Star Wars was based around Han Solo" is a good analogy.... but take out the aliens and super advanced droids.
if you have watched Buffy or Angel, you will be familiar with the dialog style. that being said i know some people that never watched Buffy or Angel and loved Firefly (they own the DVDs).
basically the earth is dead or something and people are expanding to far planets. a lot of the story has to do with the low tech settlers that live like people on the frontier. think space movie without any aliens. a lot of people don't even seem to realize they watched a space based sci-fi show and every living thing is from earth (humans, horses, dogs etc). comparing it to star trek or star wars may be a mistake. it does not have the same Sci-Fi geek factor of aliens and crazy technology. i guess in a way it does not have the learning curve that other Sci-Fi shows do? you do not need to know anything about different aliens or the abilities of certain ships. there is not a lot about space that you do not already know from high school.... except that is is bigger and more inhabitable planets.
i watched what they showed on TV, and enjoyed it. my housemate bought the DVD set and it made things a lot easier to follow if you saw the pilot. the episode you saw, as i recall, was kind of unusual how it was done. it might have been the worst to see as your first exposure. it was the only one shot like that. it seems like every tv series does that once.
as the article says, Sci-Fi will run the whole series, in sequence, before the movie opens. that is probably the best promotion for the movie (or people renting or buying the box set). the show was aired on a friday night with is not really a good place to put a show, especially not a quirky one with a target audience that may leave their houses on the weekends (as opposed to pre-teens or younger parents).
i know for digital cameras there is enough difference with some brands of flash memory that it will effect how long you wait between shots (at least for cameras without internal memory to buffer it). if you figure the transfer of one JPEG is that noticeable, then transferring real data would matter too.
i guess if you have the buffer of internal memory in your camera, you will not notice. so the cheaper, slower flash cards are effectively the same.
but still, wouldn't they possibly be selling Mac people boxed versions of M$ Windows that would not normally be a possibility.
if i remember right you are supposed to buy a retail version of windows with virtual PC right? or is it included now that M$ owns virtual PC. i still don't see why it would scare or bother Microsoft one bit.
why did they wait 5 years or whatever to go after iTunes? why do all these compu-related lawsuits wait till the product is out for years before they speak up. is it only because they are waiting till it is established and they can get more money? you can't tell me they did not notice iTunes till now (let alone any other similar software for playing music). you would think the judges would be aware of this. if it is an infringement they should have done something in a timely manner. i realize lawyers have to earn a years worth of prep before filing this lawsuit but what the hell. same thing with all the lawsuits over PDAs..... didn't palm get sued something like 2 years ago over grafiti? who snoozed through the palm pilot boom of the 90s?
i guess Apple should have waited to sue Microsoft over a windows based GUI till 1998 or something. they could have gotten a much better settlement.
am i missing some obvious tactic? Apple went after those knock off fruit flavored iMac things right away. they went after the totally ripped off iPod shuffle even before it hit stores. they got it removed from the display table at the expo. i guess those were more trademark issues than patents? maybe somebody should consider how you have to be prepared to actively defend a trademark as opposed to sit and wait then sue the crap out of somebody if the product makes some cash.
obviously balance is key. i think the downfall we will see is crappy parenting more than the evils of technology. too may parents are too busy, just suck or are too paranoid and would rather the kids are in the den with a playstation then outside with kidnappers and drugs and terrorists.
i think most kids WANT to play outdoors. the thing is to find something THEY like. for example if you keep trying to play baseball and the kid would really rather ride a bike, they are going to resist. kids generally have an abundance of energy and if they don't get that out, they will end up overweight and/or medicated for having no attention span in the classroom.
if the kids show too much interest in technology you can always work that into outdoor fun. something like http://www.geocaching.com/ is total nrrd fun, and requires leaving the house and poking around.
i guess as much as i was not outdoors, i was not sitting in front of video games or a computer. i was taking things apart and making things. that seems to be lost on a lot of young kids today. the nerdlier ones are more likely to be computer kids. they will look up something online instead of taking things apart to see how they work. hopefully things like Make Magazine will spark a resurgence in DIY gadgetry? that seems to be vital to mechanical creativity. it's like reading about how to ride a bike instead of getting one one and doing it.
Apple said 10.5 will not be out till late 2006 or early 2007. that's almost 2 years away. that OS will come out while Apple is roughly half way into the switch to Intel. Jobs said in the keynote: first machines around mid 2006, last ones by mid 2007 or the end of 2007 maybe.
so if the OS comes out while Apple's product line is still half PPC the next OS will totally support PPC AND Intel. then another 2 years or so till 10.6 that should still have PPC support in it (since some machines will be about 1 year since they went intel). if you figure when PPC will really not be supported, the machines will be very old by then.
then at some point even if the new OS was supported, you machine will be slow or something. 10.4 is installing fine on 4 or 5+ year old machines, but i don't know how much more those machines will support.
yes, even some/all of the Apple ][ machines shipped with DOS written my microsoft. i did not know this till relatively recently. crazy considering i have one (and had it back in the day).
i guess they blew up when they ripped off err... released (?) windows.
Apple makes a lot of money from boxes of OS X. if you look at the quarterly earnings, especially right after they release a new copy of OS X, you will see the money is pretty significant. they also make cash from iLife, iWork etc and of course the higher priced software.
Umax kicked ass because they were the first people to be able to manufacture a sub $1000 Macintosh. that was what really got people to pay attention to their hardware. when the clones were ceased a bunch of the Umax people got hired by Apple. they may have worked on making the iMac a reality too (IIRC).
if Apple ever got into clones again (in this x86 future) they would have to require a lot of specs. motherboards that will support their security, specific components (driver issues) etc etc etc..... and we would end up with a bunch of ugly ass boxes.
there is seriously NO reason for Apple to do it. they will be able to get manufacturing up to speed, their R&D people are up to snuff, they can make cheap machines (Mac Mini) as well as decent servers and everything in between. what would anyone else bring to the table except risk of poorly made ugly computers?
i don't have a super plan and it just counts as minutes on my phone. free nights and weekends means free web browsing. that being said the browser in my phone is not so good.
i do have the USB cable to connect to my laptop and that counts as minutes even though it is on their data network (i don't actually dial into an ISP... it's faster than that). same deal, free nights and weekends on data use too.
those scanners exist, but i don't know how cheap they are. if you look in the back of any mac magazine there are often little ads for POS (point of sale, not the other meaning) Mac based systems.
if i remember right you can get scanners for $150. i understand the pen/wand ones are far crappier than the gun ones. though at that price you can buy an isight. it may not work as easily, but it has a lot more uses. maybe ebay has old scanners that will run on OS X? all the scanner really does is convert the code to a serial number and enters it in the selected field. delicious library just has a nice database and a system of looking up that bar code (via amazon.com i think) to get the info on it.
i started to look into Mac based bar code scanners for a project that never really got moving. it was going to be for an inventory kind of think.
they are worth that much? they were giving them away at Radio Shacks...
i got one unrequested from Wired that also had cables to connect my TV to my computer so when special commercials came on it would automagically take me to the product's web page (OH THAT SOUNDS FUN!). did that part of the plan ever happen?
not that i intended to look up internet ads for soap or whatever, i have a Mac so the PS/2 cuecat lives somewhere in the random old hardware boxes (probably near a nubus video card and appletalk boxes). silly me has trouble throwing things like that out... as worthless as they seem.
i would guess that even if Apple can not physically supress it they will legally hold it back. there will be no commercial rollout of that. Apple legal will be on the hunt for people that do it. if nothing else they will use some proprietary code that has to be breached to boot Aqua/OS X and that will give them legal footing.
a small amount of people hacking OS X onto their boxes is not a big deal, it's the masses installing OS X onto some eMachines box that would be a big problem.
i can only assume Apple has evaluated the threat of this?
if you never installed OS X you may not know there is NO copy protection. no serial number on the box or anything (at least not as of 10.4). the iLife suite (iPhoto, iDVD, Garage Band etc) has no serial number either. the garage band expansion Jam Packs require nothing more than the disk. yes, it will only run on hardware you buy from Apple, but Apple has unusually honest users. if you think i am wrong, remember when iTunes music store did not exist for windows? iTunes sold something like 9 of 10 legally downloaded songs on the internet, and what percentage of people use Macs? do windows users not listen to music? did they not have a good legal option? are they most all thieves?
Apple is kind of weird with what has serial numbers. quicktime pro does, but that is to unlock features that are already in there. iWork requires a serial number. Final cut and those other high end apps require serial numbers or some sort of registration thing.
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maybe this is a case where the private sector will eventually take care of this. it took a ton of tax dollars from the USA and USSR to get their space programs to where they are now, but maybe something like the shuttle should be picked up by 3rd parties?
i might be oversimplifying things, but all the data on the space shuttle exists, after 20 years there is enough info that another country, corporation, whatever could pick it up and run with it. i realize it is an incredibly complicated and dangerous thing to do, but maybe they need fresh blood to attack the current issues.
maybe NASA should focus the bulk of their efforts on breaking new ground? that's what they traditionally were great at. use tax dollars to do something groundbreaking and get people excited about space exploration again.
it may sound crappy, but how many medicines have their early research funded by tax dollars, then the product ALWAYS ends up in the hands of a private corporation. i don't know if that's right, but maybe the same idea could be applied here?
i too was wondering where those were. there has been a question if they were still too hot for a laptop. the fact is that there will not be a G5 ibook before a powerbook. at this point i doubt we will see a G5 portable at all, there are also some interesting new G4 chips coming that will tide things over. the theory is that the portables will be among the first to go Intel since they have been lagging the most. that thinking means they should be out in less than a year. maybe 1 more powerbook revision till then? possibly 2? i would guess those newer chips will be in the next powerbook revision.
the new G5 chips would maybe go into Xserves and iMacs where there is still some heat issues (though i doubt we will see a dual-processor imac soon). the towers could make nice use of them too, the fans are variable so the cooler the chips the quieter the machine.
... that i read the actual chip that Apple will be using does not publicly exist yet. i don't know much of anything about Intel's roadmap and if it will be based on the M series but i thought it was supposed to be a chip that was slated for release Spring 2006.
are people are getting hung up on the fact that the developer machines are not the new Apple machines 1 or 2 years early. in theory everything rewritten for these test machines will work fine on the new ones. would that mean that software may not be fully optimized if these newer chips are something crazy? i have no idea. i guess they will be in the same boat as the rest of the software writing world that wants their products to work on Intel chips.
i am pretty sure the 14" models actually outsell the 12". i don't think Apple releases such specific info like that. granted the 14" machines are faster (more room for cooling?).
the 12" powerbooks are missing a lot of features of the bigger models so it is hard to compare the models and say it is just popularity of screen size.
*if* the ibooks really go wide screen that will make quite a change to the dimensions. remember the G4 iMacs? when they made the 17" widescreen, it was the same height of the 15" but just a little wider.
i like the size my 12" ibook. if something was the same width but not as deep, i would like that too. i think one major size constraint issue is the keyboard. Apple portable keyboards are all the same size. unless they really made a major change, then that's the width we will have.
you realize the reason developers can get the intel based Mac today is so that when you, the consumer, gets one it will run your software. if Apple released it Tuesday there will be a lot of software not working. i think a lot of people would be pissed if they bought a new Mac and the only software it could run were most of the stock Apple apps and maybe firefox. granted that is all a lot of people use, but still. even the companies that are "ready" for the switch have not released the software to the public yet.
CDs are still far worse sounding than vinyl.
CDs may sound better than most MP3 files "find", but CDs sound worse than records.
i honestly can not remember if it was in the Mac OS or Windows but a few years ago i remember hearing about this as an upcoming feature. i think it was on a Mac rumors site.
iifc what made it cool was the idea to do it for laptops. kind of an extended sleep mode. when you went into hibernation it would save the current status to some flash memory kind of thing and then when you powered back up it would resume as is. i am guessing there was some major issue with this or we would have seen it get released.
in general i guess rebooting is good because it takes care of little maintenance tasks. memory leaks or secret processes get reset, a lot of systems scan for spyware or viruses at startup/login. that could be changed but yeah.
i honestly do not know enough about computer systems from an electrical engineering or programming standpoint to know if it is possible to freeze the software and restart it like that. i am guessing not. it need some sort of intermediate state where it goes to sleep then wakes back up.
they make a better return on the slew of low budget movies. people will watch them. there is that certain acceptance of lo-fi effects and whatever of a low budget movie... where as with Spiderman or something really expensive people always expect more.
it is also way cool because they get to give money to unknown people to create these movies. there is a lot less risk. i think the coolest effect of this is that they will bankroll projects that may never happen otherwise. some of the movies might suck, but that happens anyway. even brilliant filmmakers have to start somewhere. this can be the launch pad to a lot of writers, directors, actors etc etc etc. it keeps more people working on new stuff.
by making 28 films for $21million they realized they are making a far safer bet than making 3 $7million movies. they also are going right on TV and i guess to DVD. they also have the ability to promote them endlessly to their core fans. they will own the broadcast rights forever. it's a brilliant business model.
well, NYC is the biggest city in the country.
NYC also has its share of gridlock and stop and start driving. isn't that the kind of driving that can be handled well by a hybrid? i realize the cabbies will have to be instructed on the techniques that optimize efficiency of a hybrid. when you spend your working hours driving a car around and when the high cost of gas effects your bottom line, you will probably do what you can to get that extra mileage.
at the same time it will help the rest of the population by lowering pollution.
often an orchestra is recorded in their home base, or one they travel to. a lot of purists feel the optimum way to record a piece of classical music is with an orchestra in a hall they know using one really really really good microphone (yes, mono). i am not trying to oversimplify it, but that is the way a lot of people like it. it also gives a unique sound, a lot of halls are well known for the sound they have, and it can take years for the orchestra, director etc to learn how to get the optimum sound for that space.
recording may not be as complicated as pop artists that can not actually sing in key and need 55 takes of a guitar solo, but it is a different beast.
also of note, the orchestra often will count on the revenue from those recordings to keep going.
the local indymedia groups are pretty autonomous from what i understand. they use the same servers for obvious reasons (money, theoretically not having to find a good host etc). i suppose there is a common thinking between them, but that is mostly a left leaning media outlet.
for example the Philly or NYC IMC group will have ongoing coverage of protests or demonstrations. i guess they all do, but i have gone to those two during big events to get some play by play info instead of a 30 second blurb in the news.
just because they choose to give coverage to radical politics or activists does not mean that they lose their rights to publish news. read about the previous seizure and it is really shady.
yeah Fox will make a bundle (relatively speaking) on the DVDs..... but they would have made a lot more if the series lasted a few seasons. they would have had a DVD set for each season. Buffy took more than a season to take off, at first it also had crappy time slots. look how big that got, and how well the DVD sets do, same with Angel.
really, somebody at Fox never liked this show. Fox started Firefly out on Friday nights, which is not a prime slot for a hip new show. it's often saved for shows they are phasing out. then add that they showed the pilot last and ran the show out of sequence. maybe the sequence made sense to them, but not to me as a viewer. maybe it was a scam to get the people that watched it to get the DVDs so they could see it in sequence? whatever the thinking, it was a bad call.
as other people pointed out, Fox has a weird way of scrapping shows it does not understand. if it is not american idol or some half season thing (like simple life, wife swap) they will ride it hard and fast straight into the ground.... then try something new. do they have any long running series besides the simpsons? i don't really watch the channel much so maybe i don't know.
the comparison to "if Star Wars was based around Han Solo" is a good analogy.... but take out the aliens and super advanced droids.
if you have watched Buffy or Angel, you will be familiar with the dialog style. that being said i know some people that never watched Buffy or Angel and loved Firefly (they own the DVDs).
basically the earth is dead or something and people are expanding to far planets. a lot of the story has to do with the low tech settlers that live like people on the frontier. think space movie without any aliens. a lot of people don't even seem to realize they watched a space based sci-fi show and every living thing is from earth (humans, horses, dogs etc). comparing it to star trek or star wars may be a mistake. it does not have the same Sci-Fi geek factor of aliens and crazy technology. i guess in a way it does not have the learning curve that other Sci-Fi shows do? you do not need to know anything about different aliens or the abilities of certain ships. there is not a lot about space that you do not already know from high school.... except that is is bigger and more inhabitable planets.
i watched what they showed on TV, and enjoyed it. my housemate bought the DVD set and it made things a lot easier to follow if you saw the pilot. the episode you saw, as i recall, was kind of unusual how it was done. it might have been the worst to see as your first exposure. it was the only one shot like that. it seems like every tv series does that once.
as the article says, Sci-Fi will run the whole series, in sequence, before the movie opens. that is probably the best promotion for the movie (or people renting or buying the box set). the show was aired on a friday night with is not really a good place to put a show, especially not a quirky one with a target audience that may leave their houses on the weekends (as opposed to pre-teens or younger parents).
i know for digital cameras there is enough difference with some brands of flash memory that it will effect how long you wait between shots (at least for cameras without internal memory to buffer it). if you figure the transfer of one JPEG is that noticeable, then transferring real data would matter too.
i guess if you have the buffer of internal memory in your camera, you will not notice. so the cheaper, slower flash cards are effectively the same.
oh?
but still, wouldn't they possibly be selling Mac people boxed versions of M$ Windows that would not normally be a possibility.
if i remember right you are supposed to buy a retail version of windows with virtual PC right? or is it included now that M$ owns virtual PC. i still don't see why it would scare or bother Microsoft one bit.
seriously... not a troll posting.
why did they wait 5 years or whatever to go after iTunes? why do all these compu-related lawsuits wait till the product is out for years before they speak up. is it only because they are waiting till it is established and they can get more money? you can't tell me they did not notice iTunes till now (let alone any other similar software for playing music).
you would think the judges would be aware of this. if it is an infringement they should have done something in a timely manner. i realize lawyers have to earn a years worth of prep before filing this lawsuit but what the hell.
same thing with all the lawsuits over PDAs..... didn't palm get sued something like 2 years ago over grafiti? who snoozed through the palm pilot boom of the 90s?
i guess Apple should have waited to sue Microsoft over a windows based GUI till 1998 or something. they could have gotten a much better settlement.
am i missing some obvious tactic? Apple went after those knock off fruit flavored iMac things right away. they went after the totally ripped off iPod shuffle even before it hit stores. they got it removed from the display table at the expo. i guess those were more trademark issues than patents? maybe somebody should consider how you have to be prepared to actively defend a trademark as opposed to sit and wait then sue the crap out of somebody if the product makes some cash.
obviously balance is key. i think the downfall we will see is crappy parenting more than the evils of technology. too may parents are too busy, just suck or are too paranoid and would rather the kids are in the den with a playstation then outside with kidnappers and drugs and terrorists.
i think most kids WANT to play outdoors. the thing is to find something THEY like. for example if you keep trying to play baseball and the kid would really rather ride a bike, they are going to resist. kids generally have an abundance of energy and if they don't get that out, they will end up overweight and/or medicated for having no attention span in the classroom.
if the kids show too much interest in technology you can always work that into outdoor fun. something like http://www.geocaching.com/ is total nrrd fun, and requires leaving the house and poking around.
i guess as much as i was not outdoors, i was not sitting in front of video games or a computer. i was taking things apart and making things. that seems to be lost on a lot of young kids today. the nerdlier ones are more likely to be computer kids. they will look up something online instead of taking things apart to see how they work. hopefully things like Make Magazine will spark a resurgence in DIY gadgetry? that seems to be vital to mechanical creativity. it's like reading about how to ride a bike instead of getting one one and doing it.
Apple said 10.5 will not be out till late 2006 or early 2007. that's almost 2 years away. that OS will come out while Apple is roughly half way into the switch to Intel. Jobs said in the keynote: first machines around mid 2006, last ones by mid 2007 or the end of 2007 maybe.
so if the OS comes out while Apple's product line is still half PPC the next OS will totally support PPC AND Intel. then another 2 years or so till 10.6 that should still have PPC support in it (since some machines will be about 1 year since they went intel). if you figure when PPC will really not be supported, the machines will be very old by then.
then at some point even if the new OS was supported, you machine will be slow or something. 10.4 is installing fine on 4 or 5+ year old machines, but i don't know how much more those machines will support.
yes, even some/all of the Apple ][ machines shipped with DOS written my microsoft. i did not know this till relatively recently. crazy considering i have one (and had it back in the day).
i guess they blew up when they ripped off err... released (?) windows.
Apple makes a lot of money from boxes of OS X. if you look at the quarterly earnings, especially right after they release a new copy of OS X, you will see the money is pretty significant. they also make cash from iLife, iWork etc and of course the higher priced software.
Umax kicked ass because they were the first people to be able to manufacture a sub $1000 Macintosh. that was what really got people to pay attention to their hardware. when the clones were ceased a bunch of the Umax people got hired by Apple. they may have worked on making the iMac a reality too (IIRC).
if Apple ever got into clones again (in this x86 future) they would have to require a lot of specs. motherboards that will support their security, specific components (driver issues) etc etc etc..... and we would end up with a bunch of ugly ass boxes.
there is seriously NO reason for Apple to do it. they will be able to get manufacturing up to speed, their R&D people are up to snuff, they can make cheap machines (Mac Mini) as well as decent servers and everything in between. what would anyone else bring to the table except risk of poorly made ugly computers?
i don't have a super plan and it just counts as minutes on my phone. free nights and weekends means free web browsing. that being said the browser in my phone is not so good.
i do have the USB cable to connect to my laptop and that counts as minutes even though it is on their data network (i don't actually dial into an ISP... it's faster than that). same deal, free nights and weekends on data use too.
those scanners exist, but i don't know how cheap they are. if you look in the back of any mac magazine there are often little ads for POS (point of sale, not the other meaning) Mac based systems.
if i remember right you can get scanners for $150. i understand the pen/wand ones are far crappier than the gun ones. though at that price you can buy an isight. it may not work as easily, but it has a lot more uses. maybe ebay has old scanners that will run on OS X? all the scanner really does is convert the code to a serial number and enters it in the selected field. delicious library just has a nice database and a system of looking up that bar code (via amazon.com i think) to get the info on it.
i started to look into Mac based bar code scanners for a project that never really got moving. it was going to be for an inventory kind of think.
they are worth that much? they were giving them away at Radio Shacks...
i got one unrequested from Wired that also had cables to connect my TV to my computer so when special commercials came on it would automagically take me to the product's web page (OH THAT SOUNDS FUN!). did that part of the plan ever happen?
not that i intended to look up internet ads for soap or whatever, i have a Mac so the PS/2 cuecat lives somewhere in the random old hardware boxes (probably near a nubus video card and appletalk boxes). silly me has trouble throwing things like that out... as worthless as they seem.
i would guess that even if Apple can not physically supress it they will legally hold it back. there will be no commercial rollout of that. Apple legal will be on the hunt for people that do it. if nothing else they will use some proprietary code that has to be breached to boot Aqua/OS X and that will give them legal footing.
a small amount of people hacking OS X onto their boxes is not a big deal, it's the masses installing OS X onto some eMachines box that would be a big problem.
i can only assume Apple has evaluated the threat of this?
if you never installed OS X you may not know there is NO copy protection. no serial number on the box or anything (at least not as of 10.4). the iLife suite (iPhoto, iDVD, Garage Band etc) has no serial number either. the garage band expansion Jam Packs require nothing more than the disk. yes, it will only run on hardware you buy from Apple, but Apple has unusually honest users. if you think i am wrong, remember when iTunes music store did not exist for windows? iTunes sold something like 9 of 10 legally downloaded songs on the internet, and what percentage of people use Macs? do windows users not listen to music? did they not have a good legal option? are they most all thieves?
Apple is kind of weird with what has serial numbers. quicktime pro does, but that is to unlock features that are already in there. iWork requires a serial number. Final cut and those other high end apps require serial numbers or some sort of registration thing.