The BSA is akin to a racket organization: Instead of "You pay us up or we get fat Tony to break your legs" it's "You pay us to do an audit and pay whatever licence fees we decide you should pay or we sue you". Same tactics, but in better suits.
Or the cops. They're like rackets too: "You obey the law or we'll arrest you." Or the teachers. They're running rackets too. They're all, like, "You do your homework, or you'll get detention". Or the restaurants. They're all "Hey, you better pay for that meal, or we'll call the police and/or get you to do the washing up."
Bastards. It's exactly like the Mafia I tell you, exactly!
You've never felt the mereist twing of terror seeing a huge block toppling from the sky, crashing down onto a large pile of such blocks with such force that every block in the same row is instantly vapourized?
For that, my friend, is the horror that awaits you in Tetris, the most frightening game known to human kind.
Microsoft's dominance, for the most part, comes from the network effect - that fact everyone else uses Windows means that everyone has to use Windows. (Has is a strong term, given the degree to which commoditization of standards has occurred over the last few years, but it's still pretty much the case)
If Microsoft were to withdraw from the EU, the net effect would be that that network effect would disappear. As people are forced to use GNU/Linux and other alternatives, interoperability would be forced.
There is practically no downside for the EU in Microsoft withdrawing. There is every downside for Microsoft. They cannot threaten this.
Not that it matters much, but Cocoa is arguably older than Carbon. Carbon dates back to the Windows port of Quicktime in the early nineties, where it started out as a compatibility library before becoming a more general purpose Mac OS-like API for Mac OS X. Cocoa, on the other hand, is simply the name given to the most recent revisions of the OpenStep API, dating back to NEXTSTEP in the late eighties.
Both APIs have equal access to the operating system. Apple's attempts to make Cocoa a little more language generic haven't been entirely successful, with the Java APIs deprecated. Carbon still seems to be largely C++ specific though I can see that if someone wanted to, they could make Carbon a little more available to other languages than it is now (the will is lacking, not the capability.) I guess you should make your choice on the basis of the language you want to use.
No, the first way was fine, even if it invalidated the second sentence. The Supreme Court does, on occasion, make rulings that really can't be applied to anything.
The two examples that actualyl spring to mind are, interestingly enough, quite infamous. One was the 2000 election ruling, where the majority ruling included language that made it explicit that their decisions were setting no precedents whatsoever. The other was a recent case where a local government was planning to sieze private land and give it to a developer, where SCOTUS actually said (to much (deliberate?) misunderstandings later), that it, a national body, isn't in a position to judge what is locally in the public interest, and therefore determine whether this particular siezure was constitutional or not.
In one case SCOTUS was saying "You can't second guess us in future about these issues, we might rule the other way if it happens again, nuh nuh", in the other "How the fuck should we know? Stop asking us these questions, take some responsibility for once."
I'm a big fan of T-Mobile, one of the only quality mobile networks in the US (even if they're restricted to the crappy 1900MHz band), so I'm disappointed you apparently are getting bad customer service from them.
I do recommend being careful about how you word it, when you talk about "phone cloning" and stuff then you're getting ahead of yourself. Let's address that first though:
Phone cloning is possible with GSM, but improbable, someone would be going to great lengths, buying equipment worth thousands of dollars, just to save a few dollars to make outgoing calls (the cloned cell is going to be unusable for incoming calls, after all.) While mobile phone cloning was a great business in the mid-nineties, that was when it was easier (plenty of analog phones, which could be cloned just be reflashing a second phone), and when mobile phones weren't exactly accessable to a sizable portion of the population.
Today, you can pretty much anonymously buy a prepaid mobile phone from any store, with a wide variety of minimum costs, generally of less than $10 a month from at least two major brands (T-Mobile and Cingular.) There aren't many people who'd want to clone phones, with the risks associated and the costs of doing the cloning to begin with, and the limitations on receiving calls, given the circumstances.
Your example isn't that convincing either as such circumstances would occur during call waiting or conference calling. I use both regularly, so my bill is full of these things.
The two most realistic circumstances are that there's a software error on T-Mobile's side, or that you're simply mistaken (possibly in terms of receiving the calls, or possibly in terms of how you're interpreting the bill.) Stop talking in terms of "My phone has been cloned!" and tell them that you and your partner believe these calls to be non-existant. Explain that they appear on your side of the bill, under your number, and you know you didn't receive them. Ask them to investigate.
If the user interface is designed well, you'll know exactly what to do, just as you'll know intuitively how to really redact text.
If you're asking me to tell you how such a properly designed UI will work, you're asking the wrong person. It'd be interesting to get someone like Bruce Tognazzini to give their take on it. Right now, all we can be fairly sure of is that the UI isn't working because people are constantly choosing the wrong tool for the job.
Alternatively, perhaps the technology is at fault. If the same mistake is made over, and over, and over again, many user interface experts would start investigating whether it's the UI, not the user that's at fault. The argument is that the mistake is being made because the correct solution is not intuitively obvious.
I'd be curious to know what tool the users are using to black out the text. Are they just exporting from Word but, before exporting, "blocking it out" in Word? If so, how? Are they putting black blocks over text, or setting attributes of the relevent text? If these are the wrong techniques, what can be done to make the right techniques obvious (and the wrongness of these techniques equally obvious)?
I've designed enough crappy UIs in the past and justified them with "It's user error! All they have to do is hit the OK or CANCEL buttons, of course it's not going to work if they close the window instead!" and other such stuff that, with hindsight, was utterly wrong and elitist of me, to know that technically skilled people are not the best judge of intuitiveness. The fact is, I'm a programmer. You're probably technically minded too. The average user isn't. We can't avoid making assumptions about what the user thinks works that are, on occasion, completely, 180 degrees, wrong. What we can do is own up to them and try to determine how to steer the user in the right direction.
That wasn't prepackaged software. they contributed to a port (and to some extent a refactoring) of Linux but that's not quite the same thing. Apple has released some code as open source, notably Quicktime Streaming Server, for Linux, but in terms of the prepackaged, shrink-wrapped, stuff I don't recall Apple ever doing it.
When I first read this, I thought it was a joke. After checking the System Requirements page, I'm absolutely amazed.
Has Apple done prepackaged software for GNU/Linux before? Why Shake? (I'm guessing the type of customer who wants Shake demanded it, but on the other hand, when has Apple used that as a reason to produce it, rather than "encourage" users to switch to Mac)? Wouldn't those same customers want a Windows version?
Well done Apple... I think... any chance of an official version of Quicktime or iTunes while you're at it?
I didn't say it will appear "in" Mac OS X, I said that Mac OS X will be run under the system. And, leaving aside the fact I pointed out Apple will want to be testing this right now, why on Earth would they limit themselves to supporting only Leopard if they don't have to? What makes you think that they want to wait until next year to release this technology?
There's no reason not to implement the technology in current kernels. Implementing it this way means the technology can be tested now, in the real world, by actual users of real world applications. Apple is unlikely to want this tested with betas of an unreleased operating system, where errors could be the result of virtualization, kernel problems, or API changes, and can't easily be tracked down.
Suppose Apple wants to release a virtualization system for Mac OS X. The changes would be CPU specific, and would almost certainly only be released for Intel, as that's the only place anyone wants the changes. If Mac OS X is to run under the virtualization system, that is, as a client under a hosted system similar to Xen, then it would need changes throughout the XNU kernel.
Because it's a new feature, Apple would want to keep development of the project secret until its announced, however it's probable it would want kernel changes now so it can test the system internally and ensure out of the box compatibility when the product's released.
We know that Apple's interested in virtualization technologies. We know they want to make running Windows on a Mac a viable and pleasant (well, as pleasant as running Windows can be) experience. We know such a technology will be X86 specific. And we know that it will require many kernel changes, including changes to the core. So here's "one other plausible explanation", other than piracy.
I'm not saying it isn't piracy, I suspect the real reason why Apple's engineers are being vague about the possibility of a future release of the source code is that there's a battle within Apple over whether to withhold source code to combat "piracy" or whether that causes more harm than good. But it's not the only possibility, other, plausable, explanations exist.
Recent versions of Intel XNU are currently closed and have been for six months now. If and when they release the source, we'll talk about it being open, but let's not pretend it's open simply because they might release the source in the future.
The fact that it's closed isn't in dispute by anyone but the most hardcore Apple apologist. The only questions are (1) Will this be reversed? (Signs appear to point to "yes", but nothing is definite) and (2) Why has Apple withheld the source.
XNU was one of the few components of Darwin that wasn't already open source - that is, most of the rest of Darwin is actually directly ported from the BSDs, GNU, Apache foundation, and other open source/Free Software systems. So its closing is a big deal.
We don't know why XNU was closed. Apple has said nothing on the subject, except to hint they may reverse the decision (something their shills have consistantly claimed means it's still open source, kind of like Windows is open source because it might be released under the GPL one day. This is why I have a massive dislike for Apple's shills.) There are various proposed reasons, from technologies that affect XNU they want to announce at a later date, to the anti-piracy stuff you comment upon. Until Apple makes a real, public, statement one way or another, it's not really justified to say anything other than "As of now, XNU for Intel is proprietary." It's not absolutely certain it's the pirates that "caused" this.
Microsoft starts writing a new high performance core from the ground up or takes the FreeBSD core or the Darwin core (since they can reuse the Mach experience) and adds its new and improved Windows API layer above it (that API might even be completely written in.NET so it can be backported to Vista to easy the migration)
Why the hell would they do this?
The best part of Windows is the core, the NT Kernel. It's a fairly high-performance, modular, cleanly designed system that's extendable, scalable, and based upon relatively modern design techniques. It uses the excellent VMS security model. What sucks about Windows is the front end, or more specifically the user-space, that's where the security holes exist, where the flexibility is in the wrong places, where butt-ugly hacks like the IE-Explorer integration are.
The worst part of the *BSDs and Darwin is the core. Darwin's Mach-based kernel isn't bad, but it's neither one thing nor the other as far as kernel designs go and it has a poor reputation as a result. The FreeBSD kernel is a classic, 1970s, monolithic design with few redeeming qualities except performance. Both start with Unix as a foundation and then graft "modern" features like rights-based security upon them, clumsily. I have enormous respect for the developers of both systems, but we're talking about kernels designed, fundamentally, to support a 1970s operating system (and a specific operating system at that, Unix), not a modern desktop/server system.
What's great about both systems, yet again, is the user-land. It's flexible and modular, and uses discrete "do one thing, and do it well" tools to build a powerful, flexible, system that, alas, most people seem to be ignoring these days in favour of Perl (can someone tell me why the hell GNU decided to change the syntax of the head and tail commands? Do they think these aren't used or something? "Oh, if you use head in a script, well, that's because you're using an obsolete system, you should be writing everything in Python" - hey, if you don't understand something, leave it well alone.)
You want to combine the worst of Windows with the worst of *ix, instead of the best of each. Why?
Too true. If it wasn't for the activities of the various unions of computer programmers, including the infamous Federated Union of Computer programmers and Keyboardmen, and the Association of System Specialists, programming jobs wouldn't be being outsourced to India all the time. If only computer programmers were, as a group, more anti-union, and didn't keep joining trade unions at the drop of a hat, maybe some of these jobs would stay in America.
I suspect all that's going to happen is that the move to India will slow, not stop. After all, if the so-called out-sourced jobs are removed from India, wages will drop, and it will become economic to move back, making use of the relatively skilled (I don't want to hear the insults, thank you. I've seen pretty bad code from all parts of the world, and consultants are by far the worst. It's not a country-thing, it's a "Do it by us or for us" thing) labour there.
This is a positive story. India's economy has clearly benefitted, and other countries are about to have their economies raised by the same process. Jobs in America have not gone noticably down (though wages have decreased in some areas.) Perhaps global trade will result in a massive decrease in global poverty in the long run, as its proponents have always argued, to much scepticism from left and right alike.
Avie Tevanian left Apple in March. Rumors are that before he left, he was overruled by Jobs on three major issues:
Tevanian was against the whole "Mac OS W" thing, where the whole of Mac OS X would be rebuilt upon Windows Vista
Tevanian wanted Carbon, file system metadata, and menus at the top of the screen, removed from future builds of Mac OS X.
Tevanian wanted Apple moved to India, because he likes Indian food. He's infamous for his home-made Chicken Korma, and the entire office loved his vegetable samosas.
I didn't see anything in TFA about the MPAA except maybe in passing. I don't see why the MPAA would care - it's the movie industry that's bothered about pricing issues, their representative doesn't actually sell movies and certainly isn't going to micromanage the pricing decisions of individual studios. (If you wrote MPAA as shorthand for "Movie industry" then learn to write "MI" instead or something. MPAA is an actual organization. You're just confusing things. It's almost as dumb as the "Teh RIAA" BS we read all the time on Slashbot, the RIAA doesn't even represent half the organizations that Slashbots hate so much.)
I'm going to take the industry at its word on this. I think they want to sell some movies for more, yes. I also think they want to sell a lot of movies for a great deal less than $10. Like most industries, they want to sell stuff for the going rate. If "Nine To Five" or "Overboard" is priced at $10, few will buy them (or so few that the revenues will be tiny); if they're priced at $5, it may be a movie a large number of people buy, certainly far more than suggested the ratio of revenues. If you make 50c profit at $1, and $9.50 profit at $10, and cashflow isn't a problem, then it's better to sell 100,000 copies at $1 than 1,000 at $10.
Let's be honest: flat rate pricing is a stupid idea, especially applied to movies. With songs it was semi-justifiable, but only because the rate was so low for all music that most people didn't care if, occasionally, they bought something they didn't consider a millionth of the value of the best song in their collection. When you're going up to DVD prices though, then it's just silly. I'm not about to spend $10 on some Goldie Hawn movie I can't back-up or play on equipment 20 years from now.
FYI: I nearly decided to handicap my joke by overwording it for people like yourself, but I decided against it since even the average Mac user compares Macs to PCs, or "Peecees" as some hilariously render it (Oh My God! How funny! That's almost as good as "Crapintosh")
Personal Computer is personal computer. PC is short for "IBM PC compatible or direct descendant." That's the way it works. If you don't like that, take it up with God or something.
Tom isn't "speculating", it's quite honestly a fact that Apple has not released the source to Intel XNU. Claiming this is false, or "speculation", because they "haven't yet" released the source, as a multitude of Apple apologists have done so far, is sophistry. The binaries are out. The source is not. Apple has given no indication it intends to recant and release that source code. It is, very clearly, a reversal of policy. Prabhakar's comments do not add anything whatsoever to the discussion, other than to dismiss a statement of fact (all recent releases of XNU for Intel are closed right now) as "speculation", a meaningless and, dare I say, moronic statement to make.
In any case, get your story straight. Either this "doesn't matter", because "nobody needs source code anyway", or "Apple has hit a problem releasing the source code but will do shortly, but cannot dare say such a thing in public because, erm, yeah, RDF! RDF! Our refusal to release source needs no justification, it "just works". Insert hypnotoad here".
I'm tired of hearing pretty much every excuse from the insulting to the flat-out false. Maybe they will release XNU for Intel in the near future. Hey, guess what, MAYBE MICROSOFT WILL RELEASE THE SOURCE TO WINDOWS IN THE FUTURE TOO! Yeah, that's it! We can all start describing MICROSOFT as a FUCKING OPEN SOURCE COMPANY because they MIGHT release the source code under the GPL in a few hours!!!
When Apple realizes that free (as in beer) investment into their business (by the OSS community) actually has a bottom dollar impact on capital, the lock on the kernel will fly open pretty quickly.
That's not really the way it's ever worked in Darwin's case. The amount of "OSS community" involvement in Darwin was relatively low, and Apple did what they could do to keep it that way. Apple was happy to extract code from existing OSS projects to put into Darwin, but once put together, pretty much all development on Darwin was internal, and Apple did little to encourage (arguably they actively discouraged) outsides to contribute.
With Darwin an APSL project, the contributions will continue to come largely from other projects with extremely liberal licenses, namely the BSDs. Pretty much by definition, if a project has a license compatible with the APSL, then there's no reason for Apple to open it up. As time's gone on, we've seen a deprecation of openness for code that Apple's not obligated to open, the most extreme being the closing of the x86 kernel.
I don't think there's any incentive beyond wanting to use the occasional bit of GPL'd code for Apple to continue to release its changes. Apple is one half of the "Open Source (the alternative marketing strategy for Free Software) is Bullshit" argument. They "open sourced" everything, and found they didn't appreciate the results. Perhaps open sourcers didn't want to go in the same direction Apple did, perhaps there weren't enough people remotely interested in improving Darwin. Either way, Darwin is not, and never has been, an "Open Source" - that is, community-lead development, project. And Apple's death grip on the free software part of it isn't difficult to understand.
As has been pointed out, no, the salary and conditions are not the norm. But, leaving that aside, the zero privacy thing is, objectively, abusive. Saying "Oh, I'd like to know if everyone else does that" before judging is missing the point. At what point do you draw the line? If the factory workers were beaten with whips, would you make the same argument? If their children have their arms amputated as punishment for their parent's misbehaviour (don't think this is improbable, it happened to diamond miners in Sierra Leone), is that ok if all the other companies in the same area are doing the same thing?
Might it even be worse if it is common practice? I mean, where the fuck do you escape to? It's funny listening to the apologists here, here's a job nobody in their right mind would want, and people are working it, and we're being told "No, it's their choice, they must want to do this"; but either the jobs available are significantly better, in which case what the hell are they doing working in this hell-hole - what is being missed here?, or they're not, in which case where's the choice?
There really aren't many reasons being given to suggest that people would want, unless there are strong external factors, to work at a factory like this. Given the factory pays nowhere near the median income, given the conditions are, on the face of it, worse than many prisons, and given there are still people working there, you can judge for yourself how many people are working because they love the idea, and how many people are working there because of screwy labour laws affecting non-local labourers combined with extreme poverty in certain areas of China. Exploitation, as the average free-marketeer will constantly remind us, has a light side, but you're seeing the dark side of it here. You're seeing the worst excesses, where employers pay the bare minimum, treat their employees like animals, and care little or not at all for improving the local economy.
It is absolutely right that people put pressure on the decision makers that encourage such resources to be used in this way. If that means boycotting the products made in such conditions, including iPods, than so be it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the cops. They're like rackets too: "You obey the law or we'll arrest you." Or the teachers. They're running rackets too. They're all, like, "You do your homework, or you'll get detention". Or the restaurants. They're all "Hey, you better pay for that meal, or we'll call the police and/or get you to do the washing up."
Bastards. It's exactly like the Mafia I tell you, exactly!
You've never felt the mereist twing of terror seeing a huge block toppling from the sky, crashing down onto a large pile of such blocks with such force that every block in the same row is instantly vapourized?
For that, my friend, is the horror that awaits you in Tetris, the most frightening game known to human kind.
If Microsoft were to withdraw from the EU, the net effect would be that that network effect would disappear. As people are forced to use GNU/Linux and other alternatives, interoperability would be forced.
There is practically no downside for the EU in Microsoft withdrawing. There is every downside for Microsoft. They cannot threaten this.
Not that it matters much, but Cocoa is arguably older than Carbon. Carbon dates back to the Windows port of Quicktime in the early nineties, where it started out as a compatibility library before becoming a more general purpose Mac OS-like API for Mac OS X. Cocoa, on the other hand, is simply the name given to the most recent revisions of the OpenStep API, dating back to NEXTSTEP in the late eighties.
Both APIs have equal access to the operating system. Apple's attempts to make Cocoa a little more language generic haven't been entirely successful, with the Java APIs deprecated. Carbon still seems to be largely C++ specific though I can see that if someone wanted to, they could make Carbon a little more available to other languages than it is now (the will is lacking, not the capability.) I guess you should make your choice on the basis of the language you want to use.
No, the first way was fine, even if it invalidated the second sentence. The Supreme Court does, on occasion, make rulings that really can't be applied to anything.
The two examples that actualyl spring to mind are, interestingly enough, quite infamous. One was the 2000 election ruling, where the majority ruling included language that made it explicit that their decisions were setting no precedents whatsoever. The other was a recent case where a local government was planning to sieze private land and give it to a developer, where SCOTUS actually said (to much (deliberate?) misunderstandings later), that it, a national body, isn't in a position to judge what is locally in the public interest, and therefore determine whether this particular siezure was constitutional or not.
In one case SCOTUS was saying "You can't second guess us in future about these issues, we might rule the other way if it happens again, nuh nuh", in the other "How the fuck should we know? Stop asking us these questions, take some responsibility for once."
BTW, IANAL.
I'm a big fan of T-Mobile, one of the only quality mobile networks in the US (even if they're restricted to the crappy 1900MHz band), so I'm disappointed you apparently are getting bad customer service from them.
I do recommend being careful about how you word it, when you talk about "phone cloning" and stuff then you're getting ahead of yourself. Let's address that first though:
Phone cloning is possible with GSM, but improbable, someone would be going to great lengths, buying equipment worth thousands of dollars, just to save a few dollars to make outgoing calls (the cloned cell is going to be unusable for incoming calls, after all.) While mobile phone cloning was a great business in the mid-nineties, that was when it was easier (plenty of analog phones, which could be cloned just be reflashing a second phone), and when mobile phones weren't exactly accessable to a sizable portion of the population.
Today, you can pretty much anonymously buy a prepaid mobile phone from any store, with a wide variety of minimum costs, generally of less than $10 a month from at least two major brands (T-Mobile and Cingular.) There aren't many people who'd want to clone phones, with the risks associated and the costs of doing the cloning to begin with, and the limitations on receiving calls, given the circumstances.
Your example isn't that convincing either as such circumstances would occur during call waiting or conference calling. I use both regularly, so my bill is full of these things.
The two most realistic circumstances are that there's a software error on T-Mobile's side, or that you're simply mistaken (possibly in terms of receiving the calls, or possibly in terms of how you're interpreting the bill.) Stop talking in terms of "My phone has been cloned!" and tell them that you and your partner believe these calls to be non-existant. Explain that they appear on your side of the bill, under your number, and you know you didn't receive them. Ask them to investigate.
If the user interface is designed well, you'll know exactly what to do, just as you'll know intuitively how to really redact text.
If you're asking me to tell you how such a properly designed UI will work, you're asking the wrong person. It'd be interesting to get someone like Bruce Tognazzini to give their take on it. Right now, all we can be fairly sure of is that the UI isn't working because people are constantly choosing the wrong tool for the job.
Alternatively, perhaps the technology is at fault. If the same mistake is made over, and over, and over again, many user interface experts would start investigating whether it's the UI, not the user that's at fault. The argument is that the mistake is being made because the correct solution is not intuitively obvious.
I'd be curious to know what tool the users are using to black out the text. Are they just exporting from Word but, before exporting, "blocking it out" in Word? If so, how? Are they putting black blocks over text, or setting attributes of the relevent text? If these are the wrong techniques, what can be done to make the right techniques obvious (and the wrongness of these techniques equally obvious)?
I've designed enough crappy UIs in the past and justified them with "It's user error! All they have to do is hit the OK or CANCEL buttons, of course it's not going to work if they close the window instead!" and other such stuff that, with hindsight, was utterly wrong and elitist of me, to know that technically skilled people are not the best judge of intuitiveness. The fact is, I'm a programmer. You're probably technically minded too. The average user isn't. We can't avoid making assumptions about what the user thinks works that are, on occasion, completely, 180 degrees, wrong. What we can do is own up to them and try to determine how to steer the user in the right direction.
That wasn't prepackaged software. they contributed to a port (and to some extent a refactoring) of Linux but that's not quite the same thing. Apple has released some code as open source, notably Quicktime Streaming Server, for Linux, but in terms of the prepackaged, shrink-wrapped, stuff I don't recall Apple ever doing it.
When I first read this, I thought it was a joke. After checking the System Requirements page, I'm absolutely amazed.
Has Apple done prepackaged software for GNU/Linux before? Why Shake? (I'm guessing the type of customer who wants Shake demanded it, but on the other hand, when has Apple used that as a reason to produce it, rather than "encourage" users to switch to Mac)? Wouldn't those same customers want a Windows version?
Well done Apple... I think... any chance of an official version of Quicktime or iTunes while you're at it?
*sigh*
I didn't say it will appear "in" Mac OS X, I said that Mac OS X will be run under the system. And, leaving aside the fact I pointed out Apple will want to be testing this right now, why on Earth would they limit themselves to supporting only Leopard if they don't have to? What makes you think that they want to wait until next year to release this technology?
There's no reason not to implement the technology in current kernels. Implementing it this way means the technology can be tested now, in the real world, by actual users of real world applications. Apple is unlikely to want this tested with betas of an unreleased operating system, where errors could be the result of virtualization, kernel problems, or API changes, and can't easily be tracked down.
Virtualization.
Suppose Apple wants to release a virtualization system for Mac OS X. The changes would be CPU specific, and would almost certainly only be released for Intel, as that's the only place anyone wants the changes. If Mac OS X is to run under the virtualization system, that is, as a client under a hosted system similar to Xen, then it would need changes throughout the XNU kernel.
Because it's a new feature, Apple would want to keep development of the project secret until its announced, however it's probable it would want kernel changes now so it can test the system internally and ensure out of the box compatibility when the product's released.
We know that Apple's interested in virtualization technologies. We know they want to make running Windows on a Mac a viable and pleasant (well, as pleasant as running Windows can be) experience. We know such a technology will be X86 specific. And we know that it will require many kernel changes, including changes to the core. So here's "one other plausible explanation", other than piracy.
I'm not saying it isn't piracy, I suspect the real reason why Apple's engineers are being vague about the possibility of a future release of the source code is that there's a battle within Apple over whether to withhold source code to combat "piracy" or whether that causes more harm than good. But it's not the only possibility, other, plausable, explanations exist.
Recent versions of Intel XNU are currently closed and have been for six months now. If and when they release the source, we'll talk about it being open, but let's not pretend it's open simply because they might release the source in the future.
The fact that it's closed isn't in dispute by anyone but the most hardcore Apple apologist. The only questions are (1) Will this be reversed? (Signs appear to point to "yes", but nothing is definite) and (2) Why has Apple withheld the source.
XNU was one of the few components of Darwin that wasn't already open source - that is, most of the rest of Darwin is actually directly ported from the BSDs, GNU, Apache foundation, and other open source/Free Software systems. So its closing is a big deal.
We don't know why XNU was closed. Apple has said nothing on the subject, except to hint they may reverse the decision (something their shills have consistantly claimed means it's still open source, kind of like Windows is open source because it might be released under the GPL one day. This is why I have a massive dislike for Apple's shills.) There are various proposed reasons, from technologies that affect XNU they want to announce at a later date, to the anti-piracy stuff you comment upon. Until Apple makes a real, public, statement one way or another, it's not really justified to say anything other than "As of now, XNU for Intel is proprietary." It's not absolutely certain it's the pirates that "caused" this.
The best part of Windows is the core, the NT Kernel. It's a fairly high-performance, modular, cleanly designed system that's extendable, scalable, and based upon relatively modern design techniques. It uses the excellent VMS security model. What sucks about Windows is the front end, or more specifically the user-space, that's where the security holes exist, where the flexibility is in the wrong places, where butt-ugly hacks like the IE-Explorer integration are.
The worst part of the *BSDs and Darwin is the core. Darwin's Mach-based kernel isn't bad, but it's neither one thing nor the other as far as kernel designs go and it has a poor reputation as a result. The FreeBSD kernel is a classic, 1970s, monolithic design with few redeeming qualities except performance. Both start with Unix as a foundation and then graft "modern" features like rights-based security upon them, clumsily. I have enormous respect for the developers of both systems, but we're talking about kernels designed, fundamentally, to support a 1970s operating system (and a specific operating system at that, Unix), not a modern desktop/server system.
What's great about both systems, yet again, is the user-land. It's flexible and modular, and uses discrete "do one thing, and do it well" tools to build a powerful, flexible, system that, alas, most people seem to be ignoring these days in favour of Perl (can someone tell me why the hell GNU decided to change the syntax of the head and tail commands? Do they think these aren't used or something? "Oh, if you use head in a script, well, that's because you're using an obsolete system, you should be writing everything in Python" - hey, if you don't understand something, leave it well alone.)
You want to combine the worst of Windows with the worst of *ix, instead of the best of each. Why?
"Caution: Do not look at movie theater screen with remaining eye."
Too true. If it wasn't for the activities of the various unions of computer programmers, including the infamous Federated Union of Computer programmers and Keyboardmen, and the Association of System Specialists, programming jobs wouldn't be being outsourced to India all the time. If only computer programmers were, as a group, more anti-union, and didn't keep joining trade unions at the drop of a hat, maybe some of these jobs would stay in America.
I suspect all that's going to happen is that the move to India will slow, not stop. After all, if the so-called out-sourced jobs are removed from India, wages will drop, and it will become economic to move back, making use of the relatively skilled (I don't want to hear the insults, thank you. I've seen pretty bad code from all parts of the world, and consultants are by far the worst. It's not a country-thing, it's a "Do it by us or for us" thing) labour there.
This is a positive story. India's economy has clearly benefitted, and other countries are about to have their economies raised by the same process. Jobs in America have not gone noticably down (though wages have decreased in some areas.) Perhaps global trade will result in a massive decrease in global poverty in the long run, as its proponents have always argued, to much scepticism from left and right alike.
Avie Tevanian left Apple in March. Rumors are that before he left, he was overruled by Jobs on three major issues:
I didn't see anything in TFA about the MPAA except maybe in passing. I don't see why the MPAA would care - it's the movie industry that's bothered about pricing issues, their representative doesn't actually sell movies and certainly isn't going to micromanage the pricing decisions of individual studios. (If you wrote MPAA as shorthand for "Movie industry" then learn to write "MI" instead or something. MPAA is an actual organization. You're just confusing things. It's almost as dumb as the "Teh RIAA" BS we read all the time on Slashbot, the RIAA doesn't even represent half the organizations that Slashbots hate so much.)
I'm going to take the industry at its word on this. I think they want to sell some movies for more, yes. I also think they want to sell a lot of movies for a great deal less than $10. Like most industries, they want to sell stuff for the going rate. If "Nine To Five" or "Overboard" is priced at $10, few will buy them (or so few that the revenues will be tiny); if they're priced at $5, it may be a movie a large number of people buy, certainly far more than suggested the ratio of revenues. If you make 50c profit at $1, and $9.50 profit at $10, and cashflow isn't a problem, then it's better to sell 100,000 copies at $1 than 1,000 at $10.
Let's be honest: flat rate pricing is a stupid idea, especially applied to movies. With songs it was semi-justifiable, but only because the rate was so low for all music that most people didn't care if, occasionally, they bought something they didn't consider a millionth of the value of the best song in their collection. When you're going up to DVD prices though, then it's just silly. I'm not about to spend $10 on some Goldie Hawn movie I can't back-up or play on equipment 20 years from now.
Personal Computer is personal computer. PC is short for "IBM PC compatible or direct descendant." That's the way it works. If you don't like that, take it up with God or something.
This new development means that, finally, it's possible to run Mac OS X legally on a Beige-box PC.
Tom isn't "speculating", it's quite honestly a fact that Apple has not released the source to Intel XNU. Claiming this is false, or "speculation", because they "haven't yet" released the source, as a multitude of Apple apologists have done so far, is sophistry. The binaries are out. The source is not. Apple has given no indication it intends to recant and release that source code. It is, very clearly, a reversal of policy. Prabhakar's comments do not add anything whatsoever to the discussion, other than to dismiss a statement of fact (all recent releases of XNU for Intel are closed right now) as "speculation", a meaningless and, dare I say, moronic statement to make.
In any case, get your story straight. Either this "doesn't matter", because "nobody needs source code anyway", or "Apple has hit a problem releasing the source code but will do shortly, but cannot dare say such a thing in public because, erm, yeah, RDF! RDF! Our refusal to release source needs no justification, it "just works". Insert hypnotoad here".
I'm tired of hearing pretty much every excuse from the insulting to the flat-out false. Maybe they will release XNU for Intel in the near future. Hey, guess what, MAYBE MICROSOFT WILL RELEASE THE SOURCE TO WINDOWS IN THE FUTURE TOO! Yeah, that's it! We can all start describing MICROSOFT as a FUCKING OPEN SOURCE COMPANY because they MIGHT release the source code under the GPL in a few hours!!!
Apple: put up or shut up.
That's not really the way it's ever worked in Darwin's case. The amount of "OSS community" involvement in Darwin was relatively low, and Apple did what they could do to keep it that way. Apple was happy to extract code from existing OSS projects to put into Darwin, but once put together, pretty much all development on Darwin was internal, and Apple did little to encourage (arguably they actively discouraged) outsides to contribute.
With Darwin an APSL project, the contributions will continue to come largely from other projects with extremely liberal licenses, namely the BSDs. Pretty much by definition, if a project has a license compatible with the APSL, then there's no reason for Apple to open it up. As time's gone on, we've seen a deprecation of openness for code that Apple's not obligated to open, the most extreme being the closing of the x86 kernel.
I don't think there's any incentive beyond wanting to use the occasional bit of GPL'd code for Apple to continue to release its changes. Apple is one half of the "Open Source (the alternative marketing strategy for Free Software) is Bullshit" argument. They "open sourced" everything, and found they didn't appreciate the results. Perhaps open sourcers didn't want to go in the same direction Apple did, perhaps there weren't enough people remotely interested in improving Darwin. Either way, Darwin is not, and never has been, an "Open Source" - that is, community-lead development, project. And Apple's death grip on the free software part of it isn't difficult to understand.
Might it even be worse if it is common practice? I mean, where the fuck do you escape to? It's funny listening to the apologists here, here's a job nobody in their right mind would want, and people are working it, and we're being told "No, it's their choice, they must want to do this"; but either the jobs available are significantly better, in which case what the hell are they doing working in this hell-hole - what is being missed here?, or they're not, in which case where's the choice?
There really aren't many reasons being given to suggest that people would want, unless there are strong external factors, to work at a factory like this. Given the factory pays nowhere near the median income, given the conditions are, on the face of it, worse than many prisons, and given there are still people working there, you can judge for yourself how many people are working because they love the idea, and how many people are working there because of screwy labour laws affecting non-local labourers combined with extreme poverty in certain areas of China. Exploitation, as the average free-marketeer will constantly remind us, has a light side, but you're seeing the dark side of it here. You're seeing the worst excesses, where employers pay the bare minimum, treat their employees like animals, and care little or not at all for improving the local economy.
It is absolutely right that people put pressure on the decision makers that encourage such resources to be used in this way. If that means boycotting the products made in such conditions, including iPods, than so be it.