When Apple released a new iBook, it was with a G3; it was upgraded to the G4 with no real changes, and then when they moved to the Intel CPU it remained essentially the same, with only the keyboard being brand new.
I'm probably misreading this, I didn't sleep very well last night, but wasn't the move to an Intel accompanied by a fairly drastic change of case design? It was the obvious answer to the GP.
Have to agree. Virtual Desktops wasn't even the only "borrowed feature." Half of the stuff being added to Mail was in Microsoft Exchange/Outlook in the mid-nineties. Wow, so I can put notes to myself in my mail huh? Oh! Oh! And it's integrated with the calendar huh? And then there's "Time Machine", weren't we just complaining the other day about one or two of the implementation details in Vista's "version", which itself is an evolution of technologies that go back to W2K?
Not Apple's most impressive performance.
And what's the deal with the Mac Pro? The holes in Apple's desktop line seen to be getting bigger, not smaller. One has to hope there's an unreleased product that'll sit between the iMac/Mac minis and the Mac Pros.
I think Linus is more like half the geeks on Slashdot, slightly embarassed by the whole idea of politics and wanting desperately to appear "reasonable" to the point of making a point of criticising the FSF and similar political groups when he can.
Nothing about his criticisms of the DRM provision of GPL3 make any sense, it's certainly inconsistant - you're either in favour of people being able to do what they wish with their own copies code to the point of supporting the GPL or you're not. If you don't care, why the fuck are you using it at all? I mean, why has Torvalds chosen the GPL over, say, the BSD license?
This is the second time he's come out against the principles he signed up for when he chose the GPL for Linux. The first time was the BitKeeper fiasco, where even after BitKeeper's authors prove they were completely untrustworthy, he condemned the very developers that have been a part of making Linux successful instead of admitting his decision to entrust a Free Software project to a proprietary source manager might just have been both inappropriate and, actually, not very "pragmatic".
Sometimes, when you have 99% of a group describing the other 1% as "zealots", and doing so over and over again, loudly, as if they feel the need they have to prove something, you need to listen to the so-called zealots. They're very often the few people who actually know what they're talking about.
In the mean time, it's time Linus put his money where his mouth is. If he really believes it's immoral to place restrictions on what restrictions third parties can be put on his software, then he needs to re-release Linux under the BSD or X11 licenses. The GPL2 is a half-way house that places restrictions on companies that rerelease binaries but do nothing to limit the use of those binaries, but places few restrictions on organizations that release source code that can never be modified and compiled into anything usable thanks to a signing process that ties particular binaries to the hardware they need to run on. It's time to be clear in what's wanted.
Like we did with DVDs. We can buy the DRM free hardware and DRM free DVDs of our favorite movies, or we can buy the DRM'd versions of both. Except we can't. Because in the vast majority of cases, the content we want is only available in a DRM'd form.
With the greatest of respect, the argument that this can be dealt with by "consumers" is utter and complete crap. The choices that need to be available for consumers to deal with this issue are non-existant. In order for DRM to be dealt with, it has to be dealt with at every level. This means consumers avoiding it where possible. It means Free Software authors chosing licenses that ensure DRM proponents can't leverage the work of the Free Software community when building their content prisons. It means constant advocacy. It means lobbying politicians against DMCA like laws and in favour of liberalizations.
No one single system is going to prevent DRM from taking hold. We already have one source of media, movies, now completely locked up by DRM schemes and where the only workarounds are illegal. This will spread. It will get worse. The laws are getting worse. Consumers are getting less choices. Companies like TiVo are benefiting from the same communities they're undermining, using GNU and Linux to create their products while simultaneously undermining the freedom of their users. For anyone to claim that this can be dealt with using one single simple solution "Duh, let market forces fix it! Consumers rulez, they are always informed enough to make the right choices and will always have the choices to begin with" is being desperately naive.
And, personally, I cannot see how DRM is consistant with Free Software. The GPL is not the BSD license. It does take pro-active steps to ensure the software so-licensed remains Free. Allowing DRM would be a bug in the GPL, it's not something that can be allowed, because it amounts to a loophole. By all means, argue against these kinds of things being added to the BSD license, but there absolutely must be provisions against DRM in the GPL, otherwise the GPL ceases to have any meaning.
Interesting. I didn't realise it was MOSR, and yeah, they have a history of just engaging in not particularly intelligent speculation rather than having actual sources, or smart people.
If be-fan had argued that it was BS on that basis, rather than "Mac OS X doesn't do good multithreading therefore it's bullshit Apple would try to improve it" I'd probably have agreed with him. As it is, I think it's probably true that Apple will be improving multithreading in Leopard, though whether it's to this extent is obviously questionable.
It's certainly not as stupid as the iPhone, which has even taken in a few Wall Street analysts. But yeah, if all we have to go on is MOSR, I'll give this one a pass and simply assume the most basic (improved multithreading performance in Leopard) without anything else.
I'm not really sure I understand this. Are you saying that if Mac OS X has a (perceived) deficiency, it's absolute bullshit to claim Apple would do anything about it?
The comment you're responding to is not talking about Tiger. It's talking about Leopard. We don't know a lot about Leopard, and there are some fairly outrageous rumours out there about the kernel (largely stemming from Apple's closing of the XNU for Intel source which despite all the bullshit about new features and obsession with the word "yet" from the apologists, I suspect is, actually, due to PHBish fears of OS X being ported to non-Macintoshes) but even allowing for the exaggerations, it's far from impossible that Apple is redeveloping the kernel. Indeed, with a move to the ix86 architecture, where context switches are supposedly relatively expensive compared to other CPU architectures, I suspect that this has been a number one priority amongst those at Apple working on XNU.
The move to the Intel architecture and the increased importance of SMP in the post GHz world, tells me it's quite probable Apple will (a) release improvements to Mac OS X's multithreading and (b) encourage developers to use it. Macrumors may or may not be full of crap, but this seems a "rumor" based upon intelligent speculation. I've no idea if Merom will be the next CPU used in the iMac but I think it's a pretty safe bet it will be. I have no inside info on whether Apple plans to improve multithreading now every machine they sell (Mac mini CS excepting) is dual core, but I bet they will.
Is left wing fascism like right wing socialism? And since when has anarchism been considered either "not left wing" or "authoritarian"? Since when has theologicalism been considered left wing?
You might want to learn a little about these terms before you use them.
I've never really understood why people think that those who play fewer games play no games. That's a conflation that doesn't make any sense. I'm a heavy GNU/Linux and Mac OS X user, I don't play many games, but I definitely don't want to buy a whole new computer, or else reboot - clearing my sessions, losing my web histories, etc - for the two or three I do play.
I'd rather play poorer versions of games under GNU/Linux then reboot and/or buy new hardware to play them under Windows. I'm not sure why that's so hard to understand.
The DVD-CCA is the body in question, not the copyright holder, but yes, the DVD-CCA can give permission. Whether an individual copyright holder can give permission pertaining to a access control that affects works not owned by him, her, or itself is something for the lawyers to answer.
But in essence, yes, the DVD-CCA can. If they couldn't, it'd be illegal to make DVD players. There'd be no body in existance that could legally authorize you to make a DVD player. The whole point of the DMCA and ACMs is to distinguish between "authorized" and "unauthorized" uses of content, and to provide copyright owners with a legal mechanism (via the act of creating an "access control mechanism" and then permitting people to make devices that circumvent it subject to the copyright holder's restrictions) to enforce the difference.
However, why would the phone alone need to surpass all other phone sales? It would not, it would simply have to continue to grow the space ITMS audio and video could be sold into. If the combination of standalone iPods plus iPod phones is still the lions share of MP3 players in the market, Apple has succeeded - even if the iPod phones are not the leader in that single segment of the market.
You're so close. So very close. And yet you ignore all the facts that answer your own question for you.
As I said earlier, MP3 playing phones are a direct threat to the iPod's (and other standalone MP3 players) continued existance. Sooner or later, most people will own phones that play MP3s and have capabilities that match those of the iPod. If Apple doesn't take steps now, those phones will not be locked to Apple's multimedia business.
Standalone MP3 players will become a very small market in a very small number of years. If by 2008, the primary method of listening to music switches from dedicated MP3 players to mobile phones, then Apple must control that market by 2008, or face irrelevence. There's no way in hell, whether you paste my comments on the wall or not, that Apple can do that by selling mobile phones.
They can, however, get there by licensing the technology - Fairplay, the iPod interface, the iPod and iTunes names - as an already proven interface to music that consumers are familiar with that will drive sales for those who use it.
If they do this, then media companies will continue to sell via the iTMS, and their own hardware will not be tied to the standards and requirements of third parties. They'll continue to be able to sell music systems and profit from the market.
Your proposal is that instead of Apple doing this, they should go into competition with Nokia, Motorola, and Sony-Ericsson, the companies they could be licensing the technology to. They stand no hope in hell of being the major player if they do that. Their dedicated MP3 players will become irrelevent and obsolete, their cellphones will become boutique items with limited compatibility and a failing support infrastructure. What do you think Apple wants to do, make their music business like their computer business, or avoid making the same mistakes?
Format shifting for money is "making money off someone else's work without their permission", which by itself isn't necessarily wrong, but point is that the GP is technically correct.
In any case, this isn't format shifting. It's copying. It's format shifting if, and only if, CC are destroying the original copy.
And, regardless of the above, nobody's actually proven so far that what CC is doing is illegal under the DMCA or anything else. We don't actually know if CC has authorization from the DVD-CCA. And for all we know, they're making the copies by pointing a camera at a plasma TV, something that remains legal if the copying process falls under fair use.
Of course, we don't know if it does fall under fair use. If MP3.com wasn't legal when they were providing MP3 rips of CDs people were able to show they owned copies of, then it's quite possible that CC's similar third party copying doesn't fall under fair use either.
My guess: CC has almost certainly got permission to do this.
The assumption keeps being made that Circuit City hasn't actually been authorized to do this.
I'd like to know where that assumption comes from.
The unauthorized circumventing of access controls isn't even just a mere civil offense, it's criminal. People can go to jail for that. Exactly why are people assuming that CC hasn't actually done their homework and at the very least got some kind of permission from the DVD-CCA to go ahead with this project. Given the prices they're charging, and the nature of the service, it looks to me like something the DVD-CCA would approve. All we have is an article from an increasingly dumber Ars Technica (they're not what they were.) which infers that they don't have permission only from the fact that the service exists.
The high expensive, and the intended use (which may even involve converting DVDs to another DRM'd format, we don't know at this stage) certainly suggests that the service wouldn't have been veto'd automatically on presentation to the DVD-CCA. And we're assuming at this stage that Circuit City aren't pointing a miniDV camera at a plasma TV.
In this case, bear in mind that Apple has to retain market share. If it doesn't, services like the iTMS no longer become relevent to the rest of the music industry.
There is no way in hell Apple is going to be able to make phones and be the maker of MP3 playing phones that has a higher market share than everyone else put together. They can license the iPod/iTunes names, and software to present an iPod experience, and even hardware, to all the other phone manufacturers and have that hold on the market. But there's no way they can make and sell a cellphone that would end up being the most popular cellphone in the US, let alone the rest of the world.
They can't enter the cellphone market any more. They have too much to lose.
The time for Apple to release a cellphone was five years ago. Not because it would have been a roaring success - its success would probably have been identical then to a release today, moderate sales, sitting as an overpriced niche product next to the phone enabled Treos and the Nokia 9000 series. Maybe higher - the RAZR proved people still value aesthetics and will pay a premium for it. But what was then is not now. Today Apple has the iPod. The iPod is of critical importance to Apple's medium term future.
And the iPod is facing a competitor, the MP3 playing mobile phone. They're not that good right now, but capacities are going through the roof, so they will be soon. Indeed, get something like a Motorola V635 (which has a transflash port) and you can get a gigabyte card for it today and store a significant amount of music with you, listening to it on bluetooth headphones. iPods in this environment become a way of playing iTMS tracks, and pretty much nothing else. As long as the interfaces in these phones are "good enough", and they have enough capacity, there's no compelling reason for someone to buy a separate MP3 player.
Now, here's the problem. If Apple enters that market with a phone, they're fucked, because whether it's 2001 or 2006, their phone will be the niche - or at most "significant player amongst ten others" - product I mentioned. RAZRs are doing well, but they're not 3/4 of the market. So Apple's percentage of the MP3 player market will plummet. This has direct consequences for the long term viability of their multimedia business.
Apple's one chance at continuing to control the market the way it does today is to license the technology. If they act as a neutral party (rather than a competitor), they can continue to profit from the lion's share of the MP3 players out there, and can continue to grow and control their multimedia business.
If they sell a phone, they become a competitor. They will have problems licensing the technology, and they will become an also-ran.
Everything you're seeing that "points" towards Apple involvement in cellphones points equally at licensing schemes, and often points away from standalone phones. Nobody's (Apple or anyone else) going to make the iPod nano firmware the basis of a mobile phone operating system, but they may be willing to incorporate an iPod nano's core into a mobile phone.
Apple's one try out in this area was the ROKR. The ROKR was a stop-gap, and by all accounts Apple, not Motorola, deliberately crippled it (the 100 song limit, for example.) This should not be judged as "what Apple will do if they take licensing seriously", instead it should be seen as Apple trying to delay mass consumer acceptance of MP3 playing cellphones until the technology is good enough the things just can't be resisted any more.
No Apple cellphone will come from Apple. You'll see cellphones "with iPod(tm) technology" from a variety of manufacturers, but Apple is not in a position to make cellphones and almost certainly doesn't want to enter that particular snake pit of a market. If Apple releases a cellphone over the next few months, an Apple designed and branded unit not mostly owned by Nokia, Motorola, or some other manufacturer, I'd advise selling whatever AAPL stock you have, because it'll be their XBox: a product they'll be subsidizing for years trying to get into a market they have little experience of.
Quadrophonic sound is widely seen as a gimmic, but it does sometimes add to the music listening experience for certain types of audio. Also it's rather nice not to be limited to 80 minutes of music. A whole Wagner opera ought to fit on one DVD, rather than 4-6 CDs as is more the norm.
Neither of these are possible (well, ok, quadrophonic can be done with that Dolby Surround encoding, but then we get to questions of quality) with a standard "red-book" CD. I think it would have been nice for one of the next-gen CD formats to have taken off, or at least would have been a shame had they not been DRM encumbered.
ash is a self contained Bourne shell clone which is easily statically linked. bash is (a) relatively large (most compiled versions wiegh in in the megabytes) and generally not usually that self-contained. So yeah, he probably did mean ash, not bash.
The initrds I've seen have used other shells such as nash (RedHat/Federoa) and dash (recent Debian kernels), bash really is overkill, especially when you consider you want the initrd to be as small as possible.
I'm fine with it. Of the "big three" (Windows Media, Quicktime, and Real), Real is closest to actually having an open, Free Software, system (Helix.) It's not perfect, they're still insisting on "binary blobs" for supporting some codecs, but it's far closer to what's wanted than the other two.
On top of that, Real's the only one of the three that officially supports GNU/Linux. Windows Media and Quicktime survive under GNU/Linux because of reverse engineering efforts and DLL-wrapping, not thanks to support from the multimedia system's inventor.
Real has a poor reputation only because their Windows client was once a hotbed of malware and kludges. It isn't today, hasn't been for years, and it's hardly the only benchmark you can judge them by.
Something tells me that if this was Apple, there'd be none of the bitching and moaning about how Apple's "not a good net citizen". Real is certainly a better citizen today than Apple.
Just curious, but how do you feel yum compares to apt-get? As I understand it, apt-get is to yum as dpkg is to rpm, but I've not had much experience using yum yet.
Sounds like Microsoft circa 1990. I can honestly say I never expected, even later in 1995, Windows to make a dent on the server side. Yet it did.
In the end, Red Hat have their "We don't expect any money from this" distro (Fedora), and their "We plan to make a fortune from this" (RHEL); and Ubuntu seems to be following that (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server.)
I welcome this. I didn't think much of Ubuntu when I installed it, it's not the environment for me, but that said the installation process was very, very, good. Fedora could do with a "non-free" directory given that was the only serious issue I had with the Fedora install when I tried it (I'm still fighting it, as Fedora's lack of libc++5 is preventing fglrx from working.)
Hmmm, that reminds me, I need some technical support:
Y'know, Fedora sucks. It'll never be ready for the desktop until someone ensures that you can get accellerated ATI drivers for it and all the associated dependencies and whatnot. It's just impossible to find libc++5 anywhere, how is anyone supposed to make it work? Windows is much better.
(Let's see if that works. I've never tried it before.)
Nah, neither of these technologies will become "the next betamax".
They're more likely to both become the next SACDs and DVD-Audios...
Right now, I'm not seeing either being a roaring success. Sony's insistance on basing the PS3 on Blu-ray may help ensure the format isn't lost completely, but I'm seeing two scenarios playing out here.
The first is CD (DVD) and SACD (HDDVD) and DVD-Audio. (Blu-ray)
The other is VHS (DVD) and Laserdisc (one of these formats, probably Blu-ray.)
Most consumers, either way, will stick with DVD. It works. We already have large movie collections on DVD. The quality of DVD is fine - not perfect, but largely acceptable. There are no substantial operational improvements the new formats have over DVD. The user friendliness of the technology is the same. And the equipment needed for the new formats, for now, looks to be substantially more expensive.
Much as I would love you to be right, you're wrong.
The part of the US constitution quoted does not use the word copyright. Copyright is a subset of the powers that that part of the constitution allows Congress to create. Congress is explicitly authorized to give Authors and Inventors any monopolies they wish ("exclusive Right") with regards to their writings and discoveries.
That, unfortunately, would appear to include reverse engineering and, for what it's worth, control over mechanisms they've created (directly or by proxy) designed to limit access to their other works.
The only part of the DMCA I can see that could be argued to be unconstitutional is the fact there's no time limit on the ban on circumventing ACMs and CCMs. And that's a hard one to argue given "limited times" could be interpreted in a myriad of different ways.
That's not entirely true. Xen 3 can use Intel's VT-x technology for operating systems like Windows. As long as Windows is a guest OS under the system, you should be able to get it to work.
That turns out not to be the case. Anyone familiar with VMS internals found the NT internals practically identical in many cases, to an extent that was quite laughable. Moreover, established VMS internals experts were able to start teaching and writing about NT within months - they had very little new to learn.
They're not practically identical, no. I'm familiar with both, and I can't say they resemble each other except that at a kernel level they frequently use the same concepts.
But then Linux often uses the same concepts too. I mean, it's a kernel. And you'd expect it to be designed around similar concepts given the fact it's supposed to have roughly the same functionality, and was designed by the same guy.
I've used VMS a lot. I can honestly say it bares little or no resemblance to Windows NT except in areas you're unlikely to ever see. It has one or two similar features, notably the ACL system, and that's it. The file system is entirely different. The APIs are entirely different. The shells are entirely different. The higher level features implemented by the operating system are entirely different, even those intended to support the same end-user features (compare NT printing to VMS queues, for example.)
I wish Windows NT was based upon VMS. A desktop VMS would have been a great thing. Exceptionally secure, an excellent shell and set of features. File versioning from NT3.1, not bolted on today using what sounds like a pretty convoluted mechanism. Real, indexed, tables in the file system. Multiple data types in the file system (not just character streams with cr/lf line terminators) supported by the file system directly. It's a powerful thing.
That said, as I understand it, Cutler was never happy about the direction Microsoft took NT in.
That's what the Amiga did. Autoconfig included ROMs whose libraries and devices would be added to the system upon boot. Come to think of it, my old Sinclair QL also supported ROM OS extensions on each expansion card. It was pretty normal in the 1980s for non-PC computers to work this way.
Much as it helped give you an out-of-the-box "it just works" experience, it was flawed for a number of reasons. First, these things are, by necessity, operating system specific, unless you really want to dictate the architecture of every operating system. AmigaOS users found it useful, but those running MINIX or even AmigaUNIX were out of luck. You can probably find a way to build something akin to NDIS style wrappers, but that does mean either significant architectural or performance compromises need to be made in terms of how your other OSes work.
Note that this even applies to "cross platform" solutions like OpenFirmware. OF uses FORTH-based bytecode device drivers, and yes, display cards are part of that.
The other major problem is that the device drivers tend to be whatever was current went you put the device in a box and shipped it. As hardware manufacturers seem to be relatively incompetent when it comes to creating device drivers, it's hard to see how that's a bonus. The author is talking about ATI sticking OpenGL on their cards. Has you use4 fglrx? The most recent version is the first moderately reliable implementation I've seen (that is, it's been running for a few days now on my laptop without any kernel warnings about NMIs), and the previous version, apparently, was the first to support my graphics card (an X1300), six months after the X1300's launch.
ATI isn't the only vendor that appears to be utterly clueless when creating device drivers. Microsoft actually gave up and generally ships its own in-house drivers for everything it knows about out of the box. Most GNU/Linux users will tell you that their systems are generally stable unless they are obliged to include some binary blob based driver, or just an "independent" project maintained and written by a hardware vendor due to some licensing issue.
The bottom line is that expansion-card based device drivers just aren't dynamic enough.
I expected to get half way down the page and find at least one person disagreeing with the premise but, nah. Of course, it's all a matter of taste, but then if you're avoiding pop-culture, you're asking the wrong questions and blaming the wrong people. Notably, most people are talking about Hollywood's output, and it's simply nonsense to argue that Hollywood's output is worse now than ever before.
1. Hollywood always sucks. Every few years, there's a few movies that are genuinely good, and a small number that are good, not original or brilliant or anything like that, but good. And then there's most of their output which is always vacuous. Quite why you all are singling out this year or "recently" or anything like that is beyond me. Name three films last year that were "any good". Go on. You can't? Then you're being bloody minded. I'm not asking for masterpieces, but last year saw, just off the top of my head, "Madagascar", "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "Narnia", "The Brother's Grimm", "Mr and Mrs Smith", and "Wedding Crashers". You must have enjoyed at least one of those films, right? They certainly weren't "bad" right? Now tell me: what films in 1995 and 1985 would you have compiled in a similar list? You can't remember? Well, I bet you'd have come up with a little list about the same length as your own personal list for 2005 for each of those.
I can certainly think of films I really liked in 2004 and 2003 too. Monster was very good in 2004. As was Collateral. 2003... well, I believe Secretary came out that year. I can't be bothered to get the full list of "films I liked in 2004", and I didn't make one for 2003.
2. As far as sequels go, you're wrong. Sequels often suck, but often don't. It depends on who's making them. Ocean's 12 is awful compared to Ocean's 11. But The Bourne Supremecy was a much more enjoyable, rounded, slick film than its predecessor. Shrek 2 beats Shrek likewise. Then there's the most famous example, where The Empire Strikes Back - while poorly received at the time - is today generally considered a better film than "A New Hope".
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Have to agree. Virtual Desktops wasn't even the only "borrowed feature." Half of the stuff being added to Mail was in Microsoft Exchange/Outlook in the mid-nineties. Wow, so I can put notes to myself in my mail huh? Oh! Oh! And it's integrated with the calendar huh? And then there's "Time Machine", weren't we just complaining the other day about one or two of the implementation details in Vista's "version", which itself is an evolution of technologies that go back to W2K?
Not Apple's most impressive performance.
And what's the deal with the Mac Pro? The holes in Apple's desktop line seen to be getting bigger, not smaller. One has to hope there's an unreleased product that'll sit between the iMac/Mac minis and the Mac Pros.
I think Linus is more like half the geeks on Slashdot, slightly embarassed by the whole idea of politics and wanting desperately to appear "reasonable" to the point of making a point of criticising the FSF and similar political groups when he can.
Nothing about his criticisms of the DRM provision of GPL3 make any sense, it's certainly inconsistant - you're either in favour of people being able to do what they wish with their own copies code to the point of supporting the GPL or you're not. If you don't care, why the fuck are you using it at all? I mean, why has Torvalds chosen the GPL over, say, the BSD license?
This is the second time he's come out against the principles he signed up for when he chose the GPL for Linux. The first time was the BitKeeper fiasco, where even after BitKeeper's authors prove they were completely untrustworthy, he condemned the very developers that have been a part of making Linux successful instead of admitting his decision to entrust a Free Software project to a proprietary source manager might just have been both inappropriate and, actually, not very "pragmatic".
Sometimes, when you have 99% of a group describing the other 1% as "zealots", and doing so over and over again, loudly, as if they feel the need they have to prove something, you need to listen to the so-called zealots. They're very often the few people who actually know what they're talking about.
In the mean time, it's time Linus put his money where his mouth is. If he really believes it's immoral to place restrictions on what restrictions third parties can be put on his software, then he needs to re-release Linux under the BSD or X11 licenses. The GPL2 is a half-way house that places restrictions on companies that rerelease binaries but do nothing to limit the use of those binaries, but places few restrictions on organizations that release source code that can never be modified and compiled into anything usable thanks to a signing process that ties particular binaries to the hardware they need to run on. It's time to be clear in what's wanted.
Right, because we're going to get a choice.
Like we did with DVDs. We can buy the DRM free hardware and DRM free DVDs of our favorite movies, or we can buy the DRM'd versions of both. Except we can't. Because in the vast majority of cases, the content we want is only available in a DRM'd form.
With the greatest of respect, the argument that this can be dealt with by "consumers" is utter and complete crap. The choices that need to be available for consumers to deal with this issue are non-existant. In order for DRM to be dealt with, it has to be dealt with at every level. This means consumers avoiding it where possible. It means Free Software authors chosing licenses that ensure DRM proponents can't leverage the work of the Free Software community when building their content prisons. It means constant advocacy. It means lobbying politicians against DMCA like laws and in favour of liberalizations.
No one single system is going to prevent DRM from taking hold. We already have one source of media, movies, now completely locked up by DRM schemes and where the only workarounds are illegal. This will spread. It will get worse. The laws are getting worse. Consumers are getting less choices. Companies like TiVo are benefiting from the same communities they're undermining, using GNU and Linux to create their products while simultaneously undermining the freedom of their users. For anyone to claim that this can be dealt with using one single simple solution "Duh, let market forces fix it! Consumers rulez, they are always informed enough to make the right choices and will always have the choices to begin with" is being desperately naive.
And, personally, I cannot see how DRM is consistant with Free Software. The GPL is not the BSD license. It does take pro-active steps to ensure the software so-licensed remains Free. Allowing DRM would be a bug in the GPL, it's not something that can be allowed, because it amounts to a loophole. By all means, argue against these kinds of things being added to the BSD license, but there absolutely must be provisions against DRM in the GPL, otherwise the GPL ceases to have any meaning.
Interesting. I didn't realise it was MOSR, and yeah, they have a history of just engaging in not particularly intelligent speculation rather than having actual sources, or smart people.
If be-fan had argued that it was BS on that basis, rather than "Mac OS X doesn't do good multithreading therefore it's bullshit Apple would try to improve it" I'd probably have agreed with him. As it is, I think it's probably true that Apple will be improving multithreading in Leopard, though whether it's to this extent is obviously questionable.
It's certainly not as stupid as the iPhone, which has even taken in a few Wall Street analysts. But yeah, if all we have to go on is MOSR, I'll give this one a pass and simply assume the most basic (improved multithreading performance in Leopard) without anything else.
I'm not really sure I understand this. Are you saying that if Mac OS X has a (perceived) deficiency, it's absolute bullshit to claim Apple would do anything about it?
The comment you're responding to is not talking about Tiger. It's talking about Leopard. We don't know a lot about Leopard, and there are some fairly outrageous rumours out there about the kernel (largely stemming from Apple's closing of the XNU for Intel source which despite all the bullshit about new features and obsession with the word "yet" from the apologists, I suspect is, actually, due to PHBish fears of OS X being ported to non-Macintoshes) but even allowing for the exaggerations, it's far from impossible that Apple is redeveloping the kernel. Indeed, with a move to the ix86 architecture, where context switches are supposedly relatively expensive compared to other CPU architectures, I suspect that this has been a number one priority amongst those at Apple working on XNU.
The move to the Intel architecture and the increased importance of SMP in the post GHz world, tells me it's quite probable Apple will (a) release improvements to Mac OS X's multithreading and (b) encourage developers to use it. Macrumors may or may not be full of crap, but this seems a "rumor" based upon intelligent speculation. I've no idea if Merom will be the next CPU used in the iMac but I think it's a pretty safe bet it will be. I have no inside info on whether Apple plans to improve multithreading now every machine they sell (Mac mini CS excepting) is dual core, but I bet they will.
Is left wing fascism like right wing socialism? And since when has anarchism been considered either "not left wing" or "authoritarian"? Since when has theologicalism been considered left wing?
You might want to learn a little about these terms before you use them.
I've never really understood why people think that those who play fewer games play no games. That's a conflation that doesn't make any sense. I'm a heavy GNU/Linux and Mac OS X user, I don't play many games, but I definitely don't want to buy a whole new computer, or else reboot - clearing my sessions, losing my web histories, etc - for the two or three I do play.
I'd rather play poorer versions of games under GNU/Linux then reboot and/or buy new hardware to play them under Windows. I'm not sure why that's so hard to understand.
The DVD-CCA is the body in question, not the copyright holder, but yes, the DVD-CCA can give permission. Whether an individual copyright holder can give permission pertaining to a access control that affects works not owned by him, her, or itself is something for the lawyers to answer.
But in essence, yes, the DVD-CCA can. If they couldn't, it'd be illegal to make DVD players. There'd be no body in existance that could legally authorize you to make a DVD player. The whole point of the DMCA and ACMs is to distinguish between "authorized" and "unauthorized" uses of content, and to provide copyright owners with a legal mechanism (via the act of creating an "access control mechanism" and then permitting people to make devices that circumvent it subject to the copyright holder's restrictions) to enforce the difference.
You're so close. So very close. And yet you ignore all the facts that answer your own question for you.
As I said earlier, MP3 playing phones are a direct threat to the iPod's (and other standalone MP3 players) continued existance. Sooner or later, most people will own phones that play MP3s and have capabilities that match those of the iPod. If Apple doesn't take steps now, those phones will not be locked to Apple's multimedia business.
Standalone MP3 players will become a very small market in a very small number of years. If by 2008, the primary method of listening to music switches from dedicated MP3 players to mobile phones, then Apple must control that market by 2008, or face irrelevence. There's no way in hell, whether you paste my comments on the wall or not, that Apple can do that by selling mobile phones.
They can, however, get there by licensing the technology - Fairplay, the iPod interface, the iPod and iTunes names - as an already proven interface to music that consumers are familiar with that will drive sales for those who use it.
If they do this, then media companies will continue to sell via the iTMS, and their own hardware will not be tied to the standards and requirements of third parties. They'll continue to be able to sell music systems and profit from the market.
Your proposal is that instead of Apple doing this, they should go into competition with Nokia, Motorola, and Sony-Ericsson, the companies they could be licensing the technology to. They stand no hope in hell of being the major player if they do that. Their dedicated MP3 players will become irrelevent and obsolete, their cellphones will become boutique items with limited compatibility and a failing support infrastructure. What do you think Apple wants to do, make their music business like their computer business, or avoid making the same mistakes?
Format shifting for money is "making money off someone else's work without their permission", which by itself isn't necessarily wrong, but point is that the GP is technically correct.
In any case, this isn't format shifting. It's copying. It's format shifting if, and only if, CC are destroying the original copy.
And, regardless of the above, nobody's actually proven so far that what CC is doing is illegal under the DMCA or anything else. We don't actually know if CC has authorization from the DVD-CCA. And for all we know, they're making the copies by pointing a camera at a plasma TV, something that remains legal if the copying process falls under fair use.
Of course, we don't know if it does fall under fair use. If MP3.com wasn't legal when they were providing MP3 rips of CDs people were able to show they owned copies of, then it's quite possible that CC's similar third party copying doesn't fall under fair use either.
My guess: CC has almost certainly got permission to do this.
The assumption keeps being made that Circuit City hasn't actually been authorized to do this.
I'd like to know where that assumption comes from.
The unauthorized circumventing of access controls isn't even just a mere civil offense, it's criminal. People can go to jail for that. Exactly why are people assuming that CC hasn't actually done their homework and at the very least got some kind of permission from the DVD-CCA to go ahead with this project. Given the prices they're charging, and the nature of the service, it looks to me like something the DVD-CCA would approve. All we have is an article from an increasingly dumber Ars Technica (they're not what they were.) which infers that they don't have permission only from the fact that the service exists.
The high expensive, and the intended use (which may even involve converting DVDs to another DRM'd format, we don't know at this stage) certainly suggests that the service wouldn't have been veto'd automatically on presentation to the DVD-CCA. And we're assuming at this stage that Circuit City aren't pointing a miniDV camera at a plasma TV.
Virgin Mobile has what share of the market?
In this case, bear in mind that Apple has to retain market share. If it doesn't, services like the iTMS no longer become relevent to the rest of the music industry.
There is no way in hell Apple is going to be able to make phones and be the maker of MP3 playing phones that has a higher market share than everyone else put together. They can license the iPod/iTunes names, and software to present an iPod experience, and even hardware, to all the other phone manufacturers and have that hold on the market. But there's no way they can make and sell a cellphone that would end up being the most popular cellphone in the US, let alone the rest of the world.
They can't enter the cellphone market any more. They have too much to lose.
The time for Apple to release a cellphone was five years ago. Not because it would have been a roaring success - its success would probably have been identical then to a release today, moderate sales, sitting as an overpriced niche product next to the phone enabled Treos and the Nokia 9000 series. Maybe higher - the RAZR proved people still value aesthetics and will pay a premium for it. But what was then is not now. Today Apple has the iPod. The iPod is of critical importance to Apple's medium term future.
And the iPod is facing a competitor, the MP3 playing mobile phone. They're not that good right now, but capacities are going through the roof, so they will be soon. Indeed, get something like a Motorola V635 (which has a transflash port) and you can get a gigabyte card for it today and store a significant amount of music with you, listening to it on bluetooth headphones. iPods in this environment become a way of playing iTMS tracks, and pretty much nothing else. As long as the interfaces in these phones are "good enough", and they have enough capacity, there's no compelling reason for someone to buy a separate MP3 player.
Now, here's the problem. If Apple enters that market with a phone, they're fucked, because whether it's 2001 or 2006, their phone will be the niche - or at most "significant player amongst ten others" - product I mentioned. RAZRs are doing well, but they're not 3/4 of the market. So Apple's percentage of the MP3 player market will plummet. This has direct consequences for the long term viability of their multimedia business.
Apple's one chance at continuing to control the market the way it does today is to license the technology. If they act as a neutral party (rather than a competitor), they can continue to profit from the lion's share of the MP3 players out there, and can continue to grow and control their multimedia business.
If they sell a phone, they become a competitor. They will have problems licensing the technology, and they will become an also-ran.
Everything you're seeing that "points" towards Apple involvement in cellphones points equally at licensing schemes, and often points away from standalone phones. Nobody's (Apple or anyone else) going to make the iPod nano firmware the basis of a mobile phone operating system, but they may be willing to incorporate an iPod nano's core into a mobile phone.
Apple's one try out in this area was the ROKR. The ROKR was a stop-gap, and by all accounts Apple, not Motorola, deliberately crippled it (the 100 song limit, for example.) This should not be judged as "what Apple will do if they take licensing seriously", instead it should be seen as Apple trying to delay mass consumer acceptance of MP3 playing cellphones until the technology is good enough the things just can't be resisted any more.
No Apple cellphone will come from Apple. You'll see cellphones "with iPod(tm) technology" from a variety of manufacturers, but Apple is not in a position to make cellphones and almost certainly doesn't want to enter that particular snake pit of a market. If Apple releases a cellphone over the next few months, an Apple designed and branded unit not mostly owned by Nokia, Motorola, or some other manufacturer, I'd advise selling whatever AAPL stock you have, because it'll be their XBox: a product they'll be subsidizing for years trying to get into a market they have little experience of.
Quadrophonic sound is widely seen as a gimmic, but it does sometimes add to the music listening experience for certain types of audio. Also it's rather nice not to be limited to 80 minutes of music. A whole Wagner opera ought to fit on one DVD, rather than 4-6 CDs as is more the norm.
Neither of these are possible (well, ok, quadrophonic can be done with that Dolby Surround encoding, but then we get to questions of quality) with a standard "red-book" CD. I think it would have been nice for one of the next-gen CD formats to have taken off, or at least would have been a shame had they not been DRM encumbered.
ash is a self contained Bourne shell clone which is easily statically linked. bash is (a) relatively large (most compiled versions wiegh in in the megabytes) and generally not usually that self-contained. So yeah, he probably did mean ash, not bash.
The initrds I've seen have used other shells such as nash (RedHat/Federoa) and dash (recent Debian kernels), bash really is overkill, especially when you consider you want the initrd to be as small as possible.
I'm fine with it. Of the "big three" (Windows Media, Quicktime, and Real), Real is closest to actually having an open, Free Software, system (Helix.) It's not perfect, they're still insisting on "binary blobs" for supporting some codecs, but it's far closer to what's wanted than the other two.
On top of that, Real's the only one of the three that officially supports GNU/Linux. Windows Media and Quicktime survive under GNU/Linux because of reverse engineering efforts and DLL-wrapping, not thanks to support from the multimedia system's inventor.
Real has a poor reputation only because their Windows client was once a hotbed of malware and kludges. It isn't today, hasn't been for years, and it's hardly the only benchmark you can judge them by.
Something tells me that if this was Apple, there'd be none of the bitching and moaning about how Apple's "not a good net citizen". Real is certainly a better citizen today than Apple.
Just curious, but how do you feel yum compares to apt-get? As I understand it, apt-get is to yum as dpkg is to rpm, but I've not had much experience using yum yet.
Sounds like Microsoft circa 1990. I can honestly say I never expected, even later in 1995, Windows to make a dent on the server side. Yet it did.
In the end, Red Hat have their "We don't expect any money from this" distro (Fedora), and their "We plan to make a fortune from this" (RHEL); and Ubuntu seems to be following that (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server.)
I welcome this. I didn't think much of Ubuntu when I installed it, it's not the environment for me, but that said the installation process was very, very, good. Fedora could do with a "non-free" directory given that was the only serious issue I had with the Fedora install when I tried it (I'm still fighting it, as Fedora's lack of libc++5 is preventing fglrx from working.)
Hmmm, that reminds me, I need some technical support:
Y'know, Fedora sucks. It'll never be ready for the desktop until someone ensures that you can get accellerated ATI drivers for it and all the associated dependencies and whatnot. It's just impossible to find libc++5 anywhere, how is anyone supposed to make it work? Windows is much better.
(Let's see if that works. I've never tried it before.)
Nah, neither of these technologies will become "the next betamax".
They're more likely to both become the next SACDs and DVD-Audios...
Right now, I'm not seeing either being a roaring success. Sony's insistance on basing the PS3 on Blu-ray may help ensure the format isn't lost completely, but I'm seeing two scenarios playing out here.
The first is CD (DVD) and SACD (HDDVD) and DVD-Audio. (Blu-ray)
The other is VHS (DVD) and Laserdisc (one of these formats, probably Blu-ray.)
Most consumers, either way, will stick with DVD. It works. We already have large movie collections on DVD. The quality of DVD is fine - not perfect, but largely acceptable. There are no substantial operational improvements the new formats have over DVD. The user friendliness of the technology is the same. And the equipment needed for the new formats, for now, looks to be substantially more expensive.
Much as I would love you to be right, you're wrong.
The part of the US constitution quoted does not use the word copyright. Copyright is a subset of the powers that that part of the constitution allows Congress to create. Congress is explicitly authorized to give Authors and Inventors any monopolies they wish ("exclusive Right") with regards to their writings and discoveries.
That, unfortunately, would appear to include reverse engineering and, for what it's worth, control over mechanisms they've created (directly or by proxy) designed to limit access to their other works.
The only part of the DMCA I can see that could be argued to be unconstitutional is the fact there's no time limit on the ban on circumventing ACMs and CCMs. And that's a hard one to argue given "limited times" could be interpreted in a myriad of different ways.
That's not entirely true. Xen 3 can use Intel's VT-x technology for operating systems like Windows. As long as Windows is a guest OS under the system, you should be able to get it to work.
They're not practically identical, no. I'm familiar with both, and I can't say they resemble each other except that at a kernel level they frequently use the same concepts.
But then Linux often uses the same concepts too. I mean, it's a kernel. And you'd expect it to be designed around similar concepts given the fact it's supposed to have roughly the same functionality, and was designed by the same guy.
I've used VMS a lot. I can honestly say it bares little or no resemblance to Windows NT except in areas you're unlikely to ever see. It has one or two similar features, notably the ACL system, and that's it. The file system is entirely different. The APIs are entirely different. The shells are entirely different. The higher level features implemented by the operating system are entirely different, even those intended to support the same end-user features (compare NT printing to VMS queues, for example.)
I wish Windows NT was based upon VMS. A desktop VMS would have been a great thing. Exceptionally secure, an excellent shell and set of features. File versioning from NT3.1, not bolted on today using what sounds like a pretty convoluted mechanism. Real, indexed, tables in the file system. Multiple data types in the file system (not just character streams with cr/lf line terminators) supported by the file system directly. It's a powerful thing.
That said, as I understand it, Cutler was never happy about the direction Microsoft took NT in.
That's what the Amiga did. Autoconfig included ROMs whose libraries and devices would be added to the system upon boot. Come to think of it, my old Sinclair QL also supported ROM OS extensions on each expansion card. It was pretty normal in the 1980s for non-PC computers to work this way.
Much as it helped give you an out-of-the-box "it just works" experience, it was flawed for a number of reasons. First, these things are, by necessity, operating system specific, unless you really want to dictate the architecture of every operating system. AmigaOS users found it useful, but those running MINIX or even AmigaUNIX were out of luck. You can probably find a way to build something akin to NDIS style wrappers, but that does mean either significant architectural or performance compromises need to be made in terms of how your other OSes work.
Note that this even applies to "cross platform" solutions like OpenFirmware. OF uses FORTH-based bytecode device drivers, and yes, display cards are part of that.
The other major problem is that the device drivers tend to be whatever was current went you put the device in a box and shipped it. As hardware manufacturers seem to be relatively incompetent when it comes to creating device drivers, it's hard to see how that's a bonus. The author is talking about ATI sticking OpenGL on their cards. Has you use4 fglrx? The most recent version is the first moderately reliable implementation I've seen (that is, it's been running for a few days now on my laptop without any kernel warnings about NMIs), and the previous version, apparently, was the first to support my graphics card (an X1300), six months after the X1300's launch.
ATI isn't the only vendor that appears to be utterly clueless when creating device drivers. Microsoft actually gave up and generally ships its own in-house drivers for everything it knows about out of the box. Most GNU/Linux users will tell you that their systems are generally stable unless they are obliged to include some binary blob based driver, or just an "independent" project maintained and written by a hardware vendor due to some licensing issue.
The bottom line is that expansion-card based device drivers just aren't dynamic enough.
I expected to get half way down the page and find at least one person disagreeing with the premise but, nah. Of course, it's all a matter of taste, but then if you're avoiding pop-culture, you're asking the wrong questions and blaming the wrong people. Notably, most people are talking about Hollywood's output, and it's simply nonsense to argue that Hollywood's output is worse now than ever before.
1. Hollywood always sucks. Every few years, there's a few movies that are genuinely good, and a small number that are good, not original or brilliant or anything like that, but good. And then there's most of their output which is always vacuous. Quite why you all are singling out this year or "recently" or anything like that is beyond me. Name three films last year that were "any good". Go on. You can't? Then you're being bloody minded. I'm not asking for masterpieces, but last year saw, just off the top of my head, "Madagascar", "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "Narnia", "The Brother's Grimm", "Mr and Mrs Smith", and "Wedding Crashers". You must have enjoyed at least one of those films, right? They certainly weren't "bad" right? Now tell me: what films in 1995 and 1985 would you have compiled in a similar list? You can't remember? Well, I bet you'd have come up with a little list about the same length as your own personal list for 2005 for each of those.
I can certainly think of films I really liked in 2004 and 2003 too. Monster was very good in 2004. As was Collateral. 2003... well, I believe Secretary came out that year. I can't be bothered to get the full list of "films I liked in 2004", and I didn't make one for 2003.
2. As far as sequels go, you're wrong. Sequels often suck, but often don't. It depends on who's making them. Ocean's 12 is awful compared to Ocean's 11. But The Bourne Supremecy was a much more enjoyable, rounded, slick film than its predecessor. Shrek 2 beats Shrek likewise. Then there's the most famous example, where The Empire Strikes Back - while poorly received at the time - is today generally considered a better film than "A New Hope".