"How do I get pictures off my camera?" Just plug it in, iPhoto does the rest.
"How do I get video off my camera?" Just plug it in, open iMovie, it does the rest.
"How do I install this printer?" Chances are: plug it in, and choose "Add printer" and it will work. But the setup disk will probably do that for you.
It's a shame it's not really like that, and that in practice, yes, someone like my mother, and presumably the OP's mother, would indeed call up and want to be hand-held through all these operations. iMovie is fine for someone who understands the basic concepts and/or has a basic smattering of computer knowledge to begin with, but seriously that's not true for many otherwise smart people.
A Mac (or at least, the non-laptops given they don't seem to be having the major hardware problems at the moment) certainly means less calls to the "go-to" guy, with the (current) lack of spyware and virusses, and the general lack of operating system corruption produced by adding or removing an application compared to certain other platforms. But it certainly doesn't mean no calls to the go-to guy. That's an absurd and ridiculous exaggeration outside of the most technically inclined families.
My apologies for forgetting the extra $5, which, as you said, probably just about covered the cost of materials, shipping and handling, the other $25ish really going towards Apple's general bottom line.
I wonder if Microsoft will offer a $1.50 discount to people who bought the Office beta, or whether they figure it's largely unnecessary given the tiny amount it is, and the fact most Office buyers will be getting it bundled with new computers anyway.
The operating system might have been, to some extent, in one area, ie user friendliness. The rest of the machine was a tiny black and white monitor, 128k of RAM, a floppy drive, mouse, and a substandard keyboard. There was a mono single channel sound system and a serial port that doubled as a slow networking system if you're counting. There were plenty of computers in 1984 that beat that spec, and did it for much less. The thing wasn't even expandable so the bulk of its features were stuff you were stuck with. The OS was user friendly, but limited. Early versions of Windows, while less friendly, beat it for features. Remember - early versions of Mac OS didn't even support hierarchical file systems. There was no shell beyond the GUI, and the GUI was so anti-keyboard many people found it unusable and anti-productivity.
One year after the Mac, the Amiga came out. Better operating system (once it was debugged. Remember, we're comparing early versions of Mac OS here. Workbench 1 was argubly uglier, and many applications routed around it, but otherwise it was feature complete, faster, and multitasking) Expandable architecture. More memory. Colour. Four channel sound. Accelerated, higher resolution graphics. All that jazz. About half the price. The Atari ST also came out about that time. While not as sophisticated, and with an arguably poorer OS, it easily beat the Mac and Amiga's price points while being a more powerful, feature complete, expandable, machine.
I wouldn't say the Mac was a particularly pleasant machine until the Mac II, where the first colour, expandable, Macintosh systems started to come out. They were still absurdly expensive, and it wasn't until System 6 that useful multitasking arrived (albeit cooperative), but even at that point, it wasn't "leaps and bounds" ahead of anything.
It would be better to describe the 1984 Mac as "different" rather than "better". For some people, the differences mattered. The Mac was inferior to many systems at its price point in every respect other than user friendliness. It took a long time to get to a system that was "right for everyone", and even when it got there, most people saw some other system as having advantages.
That works as long as most people are providing quality feedback on their experiences and are using it to usefully prepare for future upgrades to the real thing (especially in a corporate environment), and as long as the beta isn't competing with the "real" product.
As it is, I suspect 90% of the people downloading the beta are not providing quality feedback, and the beta is being used as a substitute for Office, not to augment it, in the majority of cases. So Microsoft does need to do something to deter people from just getting it for the sake of getting it.
FWIW, this isn't without precedent. Apple sold betas of Mac OS X for $25 back in 2000. Personally, I think both Microsoft and Apple see betas more as a technology preview than anything that helps them directly. Technology previews are products that help out the end user, but rarely provide significantly useful information to their makers. So charging for them actually makes sense, regardless of any "deterring time-wasters" argument.
I'm sorry but I don't buy either explanation, both because of experience, and because it doesn't make sense.
"I could care less" on the face of it is a sentence that underplays what it technically means. The logical phrase thing to say in its place is "I care completely", or something similar.
Using it sarcastically or ironically would be equivalent to saying something like "He's in the middle of a field with a sheet, some butter, knives, forks, and plates, and some glasses of wine" rather than "One sandwich short of a picnic". One of these comments is direct, the other infers a meaning.
There's too much indirection in the term "I could care less" being used in place of "I couldn't care less" for it to be used in any intentionally ironic or sarcastic way.
(Plus, there's the very real fact that it sounds very similar to "I couldn't care less" as listened to and repeated without any thought about the words used. "I couldn't care less" is a common set of words, and frequently sentence fragments that are frequently repeated seem to be reworded as time goes by using words that no longer make any sense but sound similar. "Should of" instead of "Should have" would be one example, "for all intensive purposes" being another.
Nobody's stopping you from writing applications that "only plays(sic) legitamately(sic2) obtained music", the GPLv3 simply prevents you from preventing someone else from restricting how others use the information in your program - and then only if you've chosen to use someone else's GPLv3'd code in your program.
If you're truly "pro-freedom", you're not going to object to someone extending your code, even if the purpose of their modifications is to *gasp* allow someone to burn a playlist more than 10 times, or share their music collection amongst SIX computers, and other horrors.
This may come as a shock to you, but 802.11 isn't a long range protocol. The chances of the person whose network it is being more than a few feet away from you is pretty close to non-existant. It's fractionally possible that someone a mile away is using a well aimed Pringles Can to give you wireless access, but not very. Also, FWIW,astonishingly enough, as you get closer to a signal's source, the signal gets stronger! If the signal's stronger on one side of the house than the other, there's a very good chance that the signal belongs to your neighbour on that side. Either way, the number of possibilities is so small that simply knocking on two or three doors at the most should get you to the right person.
As far as the "Freely braodcasting(sic) for connections" thing goes: that's the default setting of every off-the-shelf router. When that changes, and users setting up routers find they come with WEP/WPA preconfigured and have to manually turn off security, then things may be different, but the situation, right now, is that you shouldn't assume anything. If someone wants to give you access, they can easily find ways to ensure you know about it. They can make their SSID "FREEUSEALLOWED", they can put a sign up on their lawn.
Few people actually want their networks open. Those who leave them open have many motivations, and I doubt that 10% actually want people using their network. There are those who simply don't know it's necessary, the archetypal "grandma", though it covers the vast majority of computer users. There are those who have archaic equipment that cannot handle unusual network configurations. The vast majority of Internet users aren't even allowed, by the ToS of their ISP, to share their 'net connection to begin with.
Thus assuming the default is "no" makes sense on every level. The chances are that the answer probably is no. Whether it is or not is easy to check (Just. F'ing. Ask.) And if you do decide to go ahead and connect, and it turns out the owner of the network didn't actually want you using it, then you're legally in the wrong and subject to criminal penalties anyway. Why is this a problem?
It's only a problem if you think they're going to say no. And if I had to bet on it, I'd say that's why most Slashdotters are convincing themselves of this ludicrous "I have permission because they use the default settings" argument. Underneath, you really know they're likely to say no.
The DS supports WEP. While WEP is immeasurably inferior to WPA, it does at least make your intentions absolutely 100% clear.
While some in the tech community continue to believe they have implied "permission" to use your network if it's not secured, that isn't how the courts see it. Nonetheless, you can satisfy both schools of thought by securing your network even if it's just with WEP. Anyone who persists in connecting to your network will not merely have difficulty using the non-existant permission argument, but they can't pretend they used it by accident either.
At the same time, as you've taken reasonable precautions to prevent misuse of your network, your liability for anything the person who broke in did will be considerably lower too.
No, it's not implied. As the law stands, it's illegal unless you get something more explicit in terms of permission. Yes, illegal. Yes, people have lost in court. No, not civil court, criminal.
(And it makes sense that no implied permission is given by simply having your router be unsecured, given "unsecured" is the default configuration of most off-the-shelf routers.)
It really isn't an issue in practice. If you want to use someone else's network, all you have to do is ask them. With 802.11, you're close enough to be able to do so. There's no reason not to ask, other than knowing that "no" is likely to be the answer. And I think that's why people tell themselves the myth that somehow they have implied permission simply because the "door" was left unlocked.
Nope. That's complete nonsense. Free Software is purely about freedom. Open Source is a the marketing of Free Software as a development methodology. OpenBSD is Free Software, and Theo would not take kindly to you arguing that it isn't, and likewise he'd not take kindly to you claiming that he's in favour of "embrace and extend".
That's it, pure and simple. The BSD license is a recognized Free Software license and does not do any "embrace and extend" or any other nonsense. The GPL is a recognized, and popular, Open Source license, as is the MPL which is, like the GPL, copyleft. If you take a look at both the FSF and OSI's lists of licenses, you'll see they're more or less the same, with an even mixture of copyleft and non-copyleft licenses alike.
If you don't like it, tough. That's the way things are. If you want to make some point about copyleft vs non-copyleft, make it, but don't make unsubstantiatable claims about "what open source is" and "what free software is" that are demonstrably, provably, false.
Ah, so BSD-style licenses explain why Apache, the various Mozilla projects, and Python have been total flops that nobody uses for anything.
None of the examples you cite are developed under the BSD license.
Further, Mozilla is GPL'd (the MPL is also available, which is also copyleft), Apache is also under a copyleft license (see 4. Redistribution) which is effectively viral as any licensing must not conflict with the APL. Only Python has a non-copyleft license.
In a sense, this was NeXT's most significant contribution to Free Software. They pretty much confirmed that the GPL wasn't a joke license, and that you can't get around it simply by distributing your binary components separately, or other similar tricks.
ATI and other makers of binary or non-GPL'd kernel modules (non-GPL'd in ATI's fglrx case), please note.
This is the kind of nit-picking I hate on Slashdot. He didn't say "while avoiding giving anything back to the gcc project", he said "while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project". He qualified the word "anything", and you've responded as if he didn't.
Objective C was close to useless for the longest time in GCC, which adopted Apple's changes largely, I think, in the hope someone would make it a viable system in the future. A crude object framework consisting of just the Object class was added (note: not NSObject) and a small run-time, by independent (non-Apple) developers, but until GNUstep came along there was nothing you could really do with all of that unless you spent a few months developing a basic class library. Basic meaning pretty much "everything". No string classes, IO classes, or anything else, existed unless you chose to write it.
Apple doesn't appear to be discriminating against GPL'd software. The GCC compiler and (a snapshot of) the KHTML HTML rendering system are but two major components of Mac OS X that fall under it.
Secondly, GPL'd software is open source, and BSD is free software, and vice-versa. The difference between open source and free software is, essentially, that open source concentrates on the ability of free software to form the basis of an open development process. Apple's development processes are far from open. It's difficult to contribute to Apple projects without forking them, and Apple has a tendency to fork other people's projects (KHTML to WebKit, GCC to Apple's version, various BSDs and Mach to Darwin, etc) rather than contribute back to them directly.
In short, Apple has never used an open source development strategy, but it has on various occasions used free software, and released code as free software.
They were still doing this in 1991, when I bought my A500+. And I remember thinking "Damn, this thing's barely documented" when I got it. Full circuit diagrams, and a guide to Workbench 2.
I don't think I got a printed manual at all with the Thinkpad I bought a few months ago, just a fold-out set-up card.
It's a shame this article is about the mobile phone industry, which as we know contains no competition whatsoever, with, y'know, just one national cellular provider in the entire world and no competition whatsoever. Otherwise we'd have an example of more or less unfettered competition in front of us with which we could judge whether competition forces network neutrality.
So ENOUGH with the linux fanboy shit. They don't support linux for good reason, because it doesnt make good economic sense. How many games run natively on linux anyways? So exactly how many sales will that drive? How much will it cost to develop those drivers? It will certainly cost more to develop those drivers than the benefit they'll get from sales.
Except you've gotten it so screwed up it's not funny.
What the Free Software community has been asking for is for ATI and nVidia to quit developing their own proprietary drivers, and release the documentation necessary for us to develop our own. If they want to release the source to their own, then that's great, but we're not impressed by them.
So actually, ATI and NV are doing the exact thing you're suggesting is too expensive for them, and not going the cheap route. They are developing drivers. The Free Software community ("linux fanboy shit") is asking the exact opposite: we're asking for the information we need to develop the drivers ourselves. We don't want them to develop proprietary garbage (or rather, we don't care if they do), we want our own drivers.
That's complete bollocks. Nothing related to copyrights and patents prevents ATI and nVidia from releasing the specs to the X.org/XFree developers. Nobody's ever said "ATI must release the code to fglrx", not least because we know it's so awful we would want to start from scratch. ATI and nVidia's poor reputation in the Free Software community has to do with their refusal to provide non-NDA-encumbered documentation.
It's a funny thing in some ways. There are two problems with worshiping God:
1. The lack of evidence that He exists.
2. The fact the major piece of literature that describes who God is, namely The Bible, describes Him, quite frankly, as an utter and complete arsehole.
Before anyone thinks I'm being blasphemous, I'm merely pointing out what The Bible says, whether it's a legitimate portrayal is open to question (especially by us atheists, who doesn't actually believe in Him), but if the Bible is saying, for example, that all women are punished because of something one woman did, then that doesn't exactly paint a picture of a just, rational, decent being. It paints a picture of a 14 year old boy with a copy of "SimUniverse" and no responsibilities.
But on the other hand, the Bible says that man was created in God's image. You can interpret that many ways. Humanity isn't exactly perfect.
How the fuck did the parent get moderated informative?
Probably because it represents the prevailing consensus and is by and large true.
As a car gets older, it does not need higher octane fuel. The idea that even a severe case of combustion-chamber carbon buildup could cause a measurable increase in compression ratio is silly. As a car ages, its compression ratio tends to decrease due to ring blow-by, and carbon buildup preventing the valves from sealing well.
Don't knock sensors make it hard to tell when an old car needs higher-octane gas? Years ago, when your beater started pinging on grades or under acceleration, that was the sign that carbon had built up in the cylinders, increasing compression, and it was time to switch to high-test
As I don't know you from Adam, I'll go with the above. Older cars with carbon build-up will need higher octane fuel. (This doesn't mean I think you should immediately start sticking high octane gas in your '97 Corolla, it means I think if your engine's knocking in your 1971 Dodge, you should be using a higher octane gas, and the reason it pings now and didn't years ago is almost certainly carbon build-up.
3-Higher performance cars often need higher octane fuel because they run at a higher compression ratio, run hotter, and therefore have an increased likelihood of pre-ignition
That's probably correct, and doesn't contradict anything I said.
4-If you car was designed for 87 octane, and it is knocking during acceleration, that is NOT good, and is often a sign of a timing issue you should fix, not mask with higher octane fuel.
While this may be the case, again, the prevailing consensus seems to be use the minimum octane fuel that doesn't result in knocking.
Bullshit, not if your engine is designed so that it needs high octane.
I'm trying to work out why I've just been mod-bombed when the only replies to my comment are by three people who clearly didn't read it (or else just want an argument.) So you're saying engines specifically designed for high octane fuels require high octane fuels and don't get carbon build-up huh?
Well you could knock me down with a feather. I'd never have guessed that in a million years. Thanks Captain Obvious.
Next up: how it's completely incorrect to say a standard US 100W lightbulb needs a little under 1A of power , Because some lightbulbs are built for 220V.
High octane fuels reduce knock but at the expense of creating carbon build-up, which in turn causes knock.
The rule of thumb when chosing gas is to use the lowest octane fuel available that, when used, allows your engine to operate without knock except occasionally during accelleration and going up-hill. Too high an octane is damaging for your engine in the long run.
The problem is that most people don't seem to know that, and think "High octane" means "High quality". It doesn't. They're all of equal quality, at most gas stations, it's just some older cars require higher octane gas because their engines are have too much carbon build-up, and as such the gas is being compressed to a higher pressure before deliberate ignition.
If Ferraris really "need" higher octane fuel, then that's a deliberate design decision, akin to chosing between diesel and gasoline (which, actually, in some ways is an extreme version of the whole octane thing), not something that's a result of higher octane fuel being better quality.
But there are the patents. And yes, you can design patents such that they eliminate the possibility of implementing a certain API without being in breach. As I understood it, that's one reason why the Free Software community hasn't been that enthusiastic about OpenGL.
Slashdot Mirror
A Mac (or at least, the non-laptops given they don't seem to be having the major hardware problems at the moment) certainly means less calls to the "go-to" guy, with the (current) lack of spyware and virusses, and the general lack of operating system corruption produced by adding or removing an application compared to certain other platforms. But it certainly doesn't mean no calls to the go-to guy. That's an absurd and ridiculous exaggeration outside of the most technically inclined families.
My apologies for forgetting the extra $5, which, as you said, probably just about covered the cost of materials, shipping and handling, the other $25ish really going towards Apple's general bottom line.
I wonder if Microsoft will offer a $1.50 discount to people who bought the Office beta, or whether they figure it's largely unnecessary given the tiny amount it is, and the fact most Office buyers will be getting it bundled with new computers anyway.
One year after the Mac, the Amiga came out. Better operating system (once it was debugged. Remember, we're comparing early versions of Mac OS here. Workbench 1 was argubly uglier, and many applications routed around it, but otherwise it was feature complete, faster, and multitasking) Expandable architecture. More memory. Colour. Four channel sound. Accelerated, higher resolution graphics. All that jazz. About half the price. The Atari ST also came out about that time. While not as sophisticated, and with an arguably poorer OS, it easily beat the Mac and Amiga's price points while being a more powerful, feature complete, expandable, machine.
I wouldn't say the Mac was a particularly pleasant machine until the Mac II, where the first colour, expandable, Macintosh systems started to come out. They were still absurdly expensive, and it wasn't until System 6 that useful multitasking arrived (albeit cooperative), but even at that point, it wasn't "leaps and bounds" ahead of anything.
It would be better to describe the 1984 Mac as "different" rather than "better". For some people, the differences mattered. The Mac was inferior to many systems at its price point in every respect other than user friendliness. It took a long time to get to a system that was "right for everyone", and even when it got there, most people saw some other system as having advantages.
That works as long as most people are providing quality feedback on their experiences and are using it to usefully prepare for future upgrades to the real thing (especially in a corporate environment), and as long as the beta isn't competing with the "real" product.
As it is, I suspect 90% of the people downloading the beta are not providing quality feedback, and the beta is being used as a substitute for Office, not to augment it, in the majority of cases. So Microsoft does need to do something to deter people from just getting it for the sake of getting it.
FWIW, this isn't without precedent. Apple sold betas of Mac OS X for $25 back in 2000. Personally, I think both Microsoft and Apple see betas more as a technology preview than anything that helps them directly. Technology previews are products that help out the end user, but rarely provide significantly useful information to their makers. So charging for them actually makes sense, regardless of any "deterring time-wasters" argument.
I'm sorry but I don't buy either explanation, both because of experience, and because it doesn't make sense.
"I could care less" on the face of it is a sentence that underplays what it technically means. The logical phrase thing to say in its place is "I care completely", or something similar.
Using it sarcastically or ironically would be equivalent to saying something like "He's in the middle of a field with a sheet, some butter, knives, forks, and plates, and some glasses of wine" rather than "One sandwich short of a picnic". One of these comments is direct, the other infers a meaning.
There's too much indirection in the term "I could care less" being used in place of "I couldn't care less" for it to be used in any intentionally ironic or sarcastic way.
(Plus, there's the very real fact that it sounds very similar to "I couldn't care less" as listened to and repeated without any thought about the words used. "I couldn't care less" is a common set of words, and frequently sentence fragments that are frequently repeated seem to be reworded as time goes by using words that no longer make any sense but sound similar. "Should of" instead of "Should have" would be one example, "for all intensive purposes" being another.
If you're truly "pro-freedom", you're not going to object to someone extending your code, even if the purpose of their modifications is to *gasp* allow someone to burn a playlist more than 10 times, or share their music collection amongst SIX computers, and other horrors.
This may come as a shock to you, but 802.11 isn't a long range protocol. The chances of the person whose network it is being more than a few feet away from you is pretty close to non-existant. It's fractionally possible that someone a mile away is using a well aimed Pringles Can to give you wireless access, but not very. Also, FWIW,astonishingly enough, as you get closer to a signal's source, the signal gets stronger! If the signal's stronger on one side of the house than the other, there's a very good chance that the signal belongs to your neighbour on that side. Either way, the number of possibilities is so small that simply knocking on two or three doors at the most should get you to the right person.
As far as the "Freely braodcasting(sic) for connections" thing goes: that's the default setting of every off-the-shelf router. When that changes, and users setting up routers find they come with WEP/WPA preconfigured and have to manually turn off security, then things may be different, but the situation, right now, is that you shouldn't assume anything. If someone wants to give you access, they can easily find ways to ensure you know about it. They can make their SSID "FREEUSEALLOWED", they can put a sign up on their lawn.
Few people actually want their networks open. Those who leave them open have many motivations, and I doubt that 10% actually want people using their network. There are those who simply don't know it's necessary, the archetypal "grandma", though it covers the vast majority of computer users. There are those who have archaic equipment that cannot handle unusual network configurations. The vast majority of Internet users aren't even allowed, by the ToS of their ISP, to share their 'net connection to begin with.
Thus assuming the default is "no" makes sense on every level. The chances are that the answer probably is no. Whether it is or not is easy to check (Just. F'ing. Ask.) And if you do decide to go ahead and connect, and it turns out the owner of the network didn't actually want you using it, then you're legally in the wrong and subject to criminal penalties anyway. Why is this a problem?
It's only a problem if you think they're going to say no. And if I had to bet on it, I'd say that's why most Slashdotters are convincing themselves of this ludicrous "I have permission because they use the default settings" argument. Underneath, you really know they're likely to say no.
The DS supports WEP. While WEP is immeasurably inferior to WPA, it does at least make your intentions absolutely 100% clear.
While some in the tech community continue to believe they have implied "permission" to use your network if it's not secured, that isn't how the courts see it. Nonetheless, you can satisfy both schools of thought by securing your network even if it's just with WEP. Anyone who persists in connecting to your network will not merely have difficulty using the non-existant permission argument, but they can't pretend they used it by accident either.
At the same time, as you've taken reasonable precautions to prevent misuse of your network, your liability for anything the person who broke in did will be considerably lower too.
No, it's not implied. As the law stands, it's illegal unless you get something more explicit in terms of permission. Yes, illegal. Yes, people have lost in court. No, not civil court, criminal.
(And it makes sense that no implied permission is given by simply having your router be unsecured, given "unsecured" is the default configuration of most off-the-shelf routers.)
It really isn't an issue in practice. If you want to use someone else's network, all you have to do is ask them. With 802.11, you're close enough to be able to do so. There's no reason not to ask, other than knowing that "no" is likely to be the answer. And I think that's why people tell themselves the myth that somehow they have implied permission simply because the "door" was left unlocked.
Nope. That's complete nonsense. Free Software is purely about freedom. Open Source is a the marketing of Free Software as a development methodology. OpenBSD is Free Software, and Theo would not take kindly to you arguing that it isn't, and likewise he'd not take kindly to you claiming that he's in favour of "embrace and extend".
That's it, pure and simple. The BSD license is a recognized Free Software license and does not do any "embrace and extend" or any other nonsense. The GPL is a recognized, and popular, Open Source license, as is the MPL which is, like the GPL, copyleft. If you take a look at both the FSF and OSI's lists of licenses, you'll see they're more or less the same, with an even mixture of copyleft and non-copyleft licenses alike.
If you don't like it, tough. That's the way things are. If you want to make some point about copyleft vs non-copyleft, make it, but don't make unsubstantiatable claims about "what open source is" and "what free software is" that are demonstrably, provably, false.
Can't you, y'know, at least try to blame the government and/or "socialism" for this?
None of the examples you cite are developed under the BSD license.
Further, Mozilla is GPL'd (the MPL is also available, which is also copyleft), Apache is also under a copyleft license (see 4. Redistribution) which is effectively viral as any licensing must not conflict with the APL. Only Python has a non-copyleft license.
In a sense, this was NeXT's most significant contribution to Free Software. They pretty much confirmed that the GPL wasn't a joke license, and that you can't get around it simply by distributing your binary components separately, or other similar tricks.
ATI and other makers of binary or non-GPL'd kernel modules (non-GPL'd in ATI's fglrx case), please note.
This is the kind of nit-picking I hate on Slashdot. He didn't say "while avoiding giving anything back to the gcc project", he said "while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project". He qualified the word "anything", and you've responded as if he didn't.
Objective C was close to useless for the longest time in GCC, which adopted Apple's changes largely, I think, in the hope someone would make it a viable system in the future. A crude object framework consisting of just the Object class was added (note: not NSObject) and a small run-time, by independent (non-Apple) developers, but until GNUstep came along there was nothing you could really do with all of that unless you spent a few months developing a basic class library. Basic meaning pretty much "everything". No string classes, IO classes, or anything else, existed unless you chose to write it.
That would be false on many levels.
Apple doesn't appear to be discriminating against GPL'd software. The GCC compiler and (a snapshot of) the KHTML HTML rendering system are but two major components of Mac OS X that fall under it.
Secondly, GPL'd software is open source, and BSD is free software, and vice-versa. The difference between open source and free software is, essentially, that open source concentrates on the ability of free software to form the basis of an open development process. Apple's development processes are far from open. It's difficult to contribute to Apple projects without forking them, and Apple has a tendency to fork other people's projects (KHTML to WebKit, GCC to Apple's version, various BSDs and Mach to Darwin, etc) rather than contribute back to them directly.
In short, Apple has never used an open source development strategy, but it has on various occasions used free software, and released code as free software.
They were still doing this in 1991, when I bought my A500+. And I remember thinking "Damn, this thing's barely documented" when I got it. Full circuit diagrams, and a guide to Workbench 2.
I don't think I got a printed manual at all with the Thinkpad I bought a few months ago, just a fold-out set-up card.
It's a shame this article is about the mobile phone industry, which as we know contains no competition whatsoever, with, y'know, just one national cellular provider in the entire world and no competition whatsoever. Otherwise we'd have an example of more or less unfettered competition in front of us with which we could judge whether competition forces network neutrality.
Except you've gotten it so screwed up it's not funny.
What the Free Software community has been asking for is for ATI and nVidia to quit developing their own proprietary drivers, and release the documentation necessary for us to develop our own. If they want to release the source to their own, then that's great, but we're not impressed by them.
So actually, ATI and NV are doing the exact thing you're suggesting is too expensive for them, and not going the cheap route. They are developing drivers. The Free Software community ("linux fanboy shit") is asking the exact opposite: we're asking for the information we need to develop the drivers ourselves. We don't want them to develop proprietary garbage (or rather, we don't care if they do), we want our own drivers.
That's complete bollocks. Nothing related to copyrights and patents prevents ATI and nVidia from releasing the specs to the X.org/XFree developers. Nobody's ever said "ATI must release the code to fglrx", not least because we know it's so awful we would want to start from scratch. ATI and nVidia's poor reputation in the Free Software community has to do with their refusal to provide non-NDA-encumbered documentation.
1. The lack of evidence that He exists.
2. The fact the major piece of literature that describes who God is, namely The Bible, describes Him, quite frankly, as an utter and complete arsehole.
Before anyone thinks I'm being blasphemous, I'm merely pointing out what The Bible says, whether it's a legitimate portrayal is open to question (especially by us atheists, who doesn't actually believe in Him), but if the Bible is saying, for example, that all women are punished because of something one woman did, then that doesn't exactly paint a picture of a just, rational, decent being. It paints a picture of a 14 year old boy with a copy of "SimUniverse" and no responsibilities.
But on the other hand, the Bible says that man was created in God's image. You can interpret that many ways. Humanity isn't exactly perfect.
Don't knock sensors make it hard to tell when an old car needs higher-octane gas? Years ago, when your beater started pinging on grades or under acceleration, that was the sign that carbon had built up in the cylinders, increasing compression, and it was time to switch to high-test
As I don't know you from Adam, I'll go with the above. Older cars with carbon build-up will need higher octane fuel. (This doesn't mean I think you should immediately start sticking high octane gas in your '97 Corolla, it means I think if your engine's knocking in your 1971 Dodge, you should be using a higher octane gas, and the reason it pings now and didn't years ago is almost certainly carbon build-up.
That's probably correct, and doesn't contradict anything I said. While this may be the case, again, the prevailing consensus seems to be use the minimum octane fuel that doesn't result in knocking.I'm trying to work out why I've just been mod-bombed when the only replies to my comment are by three people who clearly didn't read it (or else just want an argument.) So you're saying engines specifically designed for high octane fuels require high octane fuels and don't get carbon build-up huh?
Well you could knock me down with a feather. I'd never have guessed that in a million years. Thanks Captain Obvious.
Next up: how it's completely incorrect to say a standard US 100W lightbulb needs a little under 1A of power , Because some lightbulbs are built for 220V.
High octane fuels reduce knock but at the expense of creating carbon build-up, which in turn causes knock.
The rule of thumb when chosing gas is to use the lowest octane fuel available that, when used, allows your engine to operate without knock except occasionally during accelleration and going up-hill. Too high an octane is damaging for your engine in the long run.
The problem is that most people don't seem to know that, and think "High octane" means "High quality". It doesn't. They're all of equal quality, at most gas stations, it's just some older cars require higher octane gas because their engines are have too much carbon build-up, and as such the gas is being compressed to a higher pressure before deliberate ignition.
If Ferraris really "need" higher octane fuel, then that's a deliberate design decision, akin to chosing between diesel and gasoline (which, actually, in some ways is an extreme version of the whole octane thing), not something that's a result of higher octane fuel being better quality.
But there are the patents. And yes, you can design patents such that they eliminate the possibility of implementing a certain API without being in breach. As I understood it, that's one reason why the Free Software community hasn't been that enthusiastic about OpenGL.