Vista was going to be a new generation of OS, but as time's gone on the requirements have been scaled back, and now it's more of an evoluntionary upgrade. It certainly will not require hardware that's substantially more powerful than was common a few years years ago.
When Microsoft does release what it originally intended Vista to be, I don't think it's going to be particularly pushing the hardware requirements. Fundamentally, the intention was to get.NET the primary focus of all development, and.NET isn't particularly bad in terms of resource usage. It's better than Java, and even Java isn't as bad as Java any more - the technology has improved and the performance has also improved.
I think getting Vista out sooner not later will generally be a good thing. Vista is going to be more secure and more friendly than XP. It's still not the OS *I* want to use, but from what I've seen of it, it'll be a big improvement on XP, for me (because like everyone, I have to use it at work) and everyone else. We need more of the security issues of the NT OSes front-ends fixed. We need less of a mono-culture, and having different versions of Windows out there will help too.
According to Nintendo's Wii pages (click on Hardware), the answer is yes, it will accept Gamecube disks. (It also appears to allow the use of Gamecube memory cards and controllers.) I didn't see any surprises, to be honest.
In fairness, the only thing that's definitely been announced about the Wii are:
1. The name.
2. The look.
And the look hasn't been criticised for either machine.
When Nintendo does its presentation, and announces what the Wii actually is, and how much it'll cost, then we'll have a better idea. If it costs $299 and is a 50% faster Gamecube, with Wifi and a compatibility system, then, well, many of us may be underwhelmed.
Do not hate the companies that use the laws in their favor, hate the government that enforces the laws.
I hate people who come up with this crap. Why the hell not? If something's immoral, it's immoral. The fact the government has allowed it to happen is only one issue.
That said, in this case, I'm not sure Apple Corps did anything immoral. Most people have concentrated on the fact Apple Corps isn't a big computer company, as if the situation was that Apple Computers was suing Apple Corps and not vice-versa. Apple Corps clearly thought there Apple Computer's decision to enter the music selling market may cause brand confusion given they're a company called Apple who're involved in selling music (albeit at a higher level.) Whether the decision was right or wrong, I believe Apple Corps had legitimate reasons to be concerned, and they had every right to bring the courts into it.
The sole argument against Apple Corps, so far as I can see, which wasn't raised by the defense, is that they're not really expanding in any serious way. They've limited themselves to periodic re-releases of a handful of back-numbers. As such, their "market" mostly knows who they are, being a small number of retail executives, and the handful who doesn't can be easily availed of their misapprehension with a one line disclaimer at the end of their letters. If Apple Corps was a little more active, signing on new talent, then I think there'd be a greater risk of confusion.
Trademark law is a legitimate buffer against confusion and fraud. So I'm not going to hate either Apple Corps or the government over this. But if it wasn't, and Apple Corps was just trying to extract money from Apple Computer and we lived in a perfect world where similarly named entities operating in similar markets never cause confusion, I would consider Apple Corps just at much at fault as the government who let them sue. Just as I dislike patent trolls, overly proprietary software makers, and telemarketers.
I've had my disagreements with Dave Schroeder before, and he is generally pro-Apple, but the article you're commenting upon is hardly a love-fest, with some very real criticism of Apple's practices. About the only thing I got out of it that could be considered "pro-Apple" was the implication that other manufacturers are worse.
All the speculation is centered around the idea that as Apple has a large presence at E3, and looks set to announce something there, and as the MacBook is a high profile product most believe they have to release soon, that Apple is going to launch the MacBook at E3.
I generally agree with you, so I'm going to be interested to see if the MacBook is:
1. An iMac in a 13" laptop.
2. A Mac mini Core Duo in a 13" laptop.
Signs until now have pointed at 2. If Apple does release (2) at E3 rather than (1), then your point still stands. However, E3 is a gaming show. So if they launch (2), especially at $1,000 (you can get 17" laptops from my local branch of Staples with proper ATI graphics for $1,000), then they're going to be laughed at. Seriously. It's not that the machine is necessarily bad value, it's that they'd be releasing a machine totally unsuited to playing games in front of hundreds of journalists, analysts, and others whose primary focus is, erm, games.
This is the company that organized a medium-sized press conference, with hundreds of attendees, to launch some stereo speakers (with leather cases and the Intelized Mac mini playing second fiddle), so I wouldn't put it past them to do this, but at the same time, am I the only person who thinks this is wierd, to say the least? I know there are some Mac fanbois who, ignoring all the benchmarks to the contrary, are insisting the GMA950 must be better than the Radeon 9200 because, well, the 9200 is old and crappy (it kind-of is) and Apple must know what it's doing (erm, yeah, but do you know why they're doing that? Just because they know what they're doing doesn't mean your agenda is the same as their's), but for the rest of us, I can't see this working as a product announcement. The people at E3 are not Mac fanbois. They know if something's impressive or not.
...so, as Apple wasn't planning to sell the manual, that strengthens the "fair use" defense (when judges weigh up whether someone's "fair use", they tend to include this as part of the criteria.)
So, to recap: a small excerpt was published for the sake of commenting upon it (fair use already), the manual isn't even for sale (strengthens case), and the commenting was actually concerned with making public a defect, in this case in Apple procedures, that was causing damage to user's products.
I think sitting upon this information and refusing to report it would have been unethical, not the other way around. And I have little doubt it was legal. The fact Apple views the information as proprietary is neither here nor there.
BearShare almost certainly knew exactly what it was doing.
A better analogy would be with a getaway driver in a robbery. Would it be fair to for such a driver to be punished for helping those stealing from a bank? Damn straight it would, especially if the driver was the one who showed the robbers how to do the robbery, and encouraged them to do it every step of the way.
Neither of these are perfect analogies, but mine's better than your's. There is no way Bearshare were unaware that the primary use of their product would be piracy. They would have known full well they stood a gnat's chance in a Nuclear fireball of surviving if the majority of their customers didn't pirate music. They knew that, by producing their product, they'd be showing people how exactly to do it, and facilitating its use.
They're scum, and while the "OMG THE RIAA SUX0RZ" mob that inhabit Slashdot these days will doubtless bitch and moan about their downfall, the rest of us will hope that the bad rap Bearshare and its ilk give P2P will not damage more legitimate technologies, like BitTorrent.
911 is not a valid number to merely report criminal trespass. If you have reason to believe a person is in danger because of the trespass, then yeah, otherwise you should call the police directly.
911 is for genuine emergencies. Trespass is not, by itself, an emergency. It's tempting to think that because 911 calls the various emergency services, that anything you would involve a cop, fire house, or hospital in, is a valid use for the service. That's just not the case. You can call the cops directly, and they appreciate that, for non-emergencies, even ones that need to be dealt with in real time. They have their own dispatchers, it's just calls to 911 are prioritised differently.
As long as they turn off the administrator account and back up their personal files it doesn't matter.
Apple users are not encouraged to turn off the administrator account, indeed, as the system is configured by default, they're encouraged to use it as their main account. No warnings are given that this is bad practice, and no user manual that might document this is provided with the operating system.
Backing up your files periodically is good practice, but few people do it.
It is incredibly hard to write a Mac virus that does anything malicious, especially to the system.
When your Software Update icon last started bouncing in the dock, and you typed in your administrator password to install that critical update it said you needed, when was the last time you checked it really is Software Update, the official, real, Software Update, that was asking for that password?
Don't you think there would be some prestige for any writer who could create the first malicious Mac virus?
There is, but they're going to have difficulty because of the Macs LOW MARKET SHARE. Until a large percentage of machines your Mac would communicate with when transfering the virus are Macs too, a Mac virus isn't going to get off the ground.
Or do you think the low market share thing means there are less people who want to write one or target the platform? That's true too, but it doesn't change the simple logistical fact that a virus needs a large enough culture to grow in.
You're not wrong and the toast analogy is a good one, TSRs are a life saver. I don't know about you, but I generally find Windows to be too slow on the few machines I can find that are powerful enough to run it. GEM barely runs on my 256k Portable. In practice, if it wasn't for Sidekick, I wouldn't get anything done. And let's be honest - if you have a TSR like Sidekick, who needs multitasking anyway?
I'm not sure it's necessary. I thought it was around 20 years ago, but then I bought a Compaq Portable 1, and I've never looked back.
The Compaq Portable actually solved most of my problems. It runs all the software I need, and I also carry around a cellular modem (plugs into any AMPS phone, has connectivity throughout the country thanks to the Federally Mandated AMPS mobile phone system) which enables me to dial into my computer system at home and access my files. I use a program called Kermit to transfer files to and from the home PC - the only problem I've noticed is with binary files, sometimes you have to convert them using something called uuencode first before transmitting them. I've been told a package called UUCP might be better for my needs, though it's less secure.
I run a simple BAT script to keep my files at home up to date while I'm on the road.
The Portable runs pretty much everywhere. The screen is excellent and crisp. I can use it on the train (as long as there's a 110V socket around), and I have an invertor to make it work OK when I'm in a hired car. It's only a problem on planes, so far.
I run a bunch of different programs. Probably the best is Borland's Sidekick, which has calender functions and a clock. This means no need to carry around a large personal organizer or a watch.
Best of all, it's small and light. At 28lbs it's usually lighter than the briefcase I use to store my clothes and papers. When you consider it does pretty much everything such that the only other three gadgets I have to carry around are the modem, mobile phone, and a printer (an Epson LX400), you can imagine how much time and effort it saves me.
The fact that brits like the name is just one more strike against it. Don't they eat something called spotted dick? And yea, I learn all my international culture from John Goodman flicks.
Well, yeah, Brits do. On the other hand, Americans buy furnature from a chain called "Badcock", and "Gaylord" is considered a reasonable name for a maker of packaging materials.
Normally this would be some nationality bashing thing, but actually I think it proves the point: Wii is fine. Given only one of its meanings is the one people are taking the...erm, wii, out of, and that in practice, you're more likely to hear the phoneme used to describe "A group of us" than "Urine", I'm still baffled about the hysterical reaction to it.
Having read a second person think I'm suggesting there's no difference between Han shooting first and Greedo shooting first, I reread my comment. Other than a complete, and deliberate, decision to ignore what I wrote, possibly in the belief that there are no changes between the nineties version and 2004 version, I cannot fathom how anyone would think:
The Han and Greedo shoot each other simultaneously is, really, nothing. It doesn't matter. It would never have been an issue, nor changed anyone's view of Han as a character, had it been that way in 1977.
can be characterised as refering to a change where Han can "be shot at and react". In the 2004 version, they shoot simultaneously. While one can complain "That's not how it was originally", there is nothing about that scene that fundamentally changes Han's character from the original in 1977.
In the 2004 version, Han and Greedo shoot each other at once: Greedo doesn't shoot first. It was the nineties version where Greedo shot first. Had the 90s version not come out, I don't think the change would have been seen as significant.
It's all about trying to maximise available stocks. As most people know, red is about twice as heavy as white, so it makes sense to delay red units as you can ship twice as many white ones for the same price.
As for black DS Lites, you don't want to know how heavy they are.
I agree. I was refering to the entire scene as "Jabba's tail", largely because that's the worst aspect of the whole thing, but I'm bewildered that Lucas thinks it's a remotely useful scene to begin with.
I suspect this was one of those things where you film something, and get it in your head you want to include it, without ever stepping back and asking yourself "Why?" Had the SFX been available in 1977 to complete it, I wonder if Lucas would have kept it after seeing it in the early cuts of the movie at an early stage.
When I revealed that I (a) bought the 2004 versions and (b) liked them... a lot, there were people I knew who didn't want to talk to me, and I got some barbed comments against the notion in my journal.
There are a lot of people who have a particular memory of how things were, and want that memory respected. I think, in all seriousness, there's only one serious flaw in the 2004 remakes, the whole Han-on-Jabba's-tail thing. The Han and Greedo shoot each other simultaneously is, really, nothing. It doesn't matter. It would never have been an issue, nor changed anyone's view of Han as a character, had it been that way in 1977. It only matters because it's a change, and because it replaced an even bigger change in the (awful) 1990s releases. For the most part, the 2004 versions fixed the ugliness of the 1990s versions. The CGI is fixed. There are no serious characterization issues (beyond Jabba's tail.)
I think this release is a good thing. There are people who'll watch both and will say "1977's for me, it's the real deal, I'm never going to like anything else", and there are others who'll watch both and say "You know, now I've seen it, I don't think my fears about the 2004 version are realised." We'll see.
Hopefully the number of valueless idiots who keep comparing Lucas's wish to keep his movies true to his vision to an act of terrible violence perpetuating largely against women will dwindle too. There's no excuse any more for it.
Why? Adobe is the only one of those companies that's actually had someone imprisoned for working on a program that interoperated with their products (albeit not a free software developer.)
They're allowed to sell whatever they want. All that's being asked for is that they provide information about their products so that end users aren't screwed.
I'm sure you get pissed about the "Ingredients" list on food too. But the rest of us aren't, we think disclosure is often a necessary part of avoiding a one-sided seller-buyer relationship.
But they didn't... Kind of the point isn't it? Yes, there probably are bad names, but the very idea you can claim the principle wouldn't work for something called "Poo" proves that Wii is not in the same category. Wii means many things. Poo doesn't.
That's an Urban Legend. As Snopes.com pointed out, GM would have the same problems marketing the Nova to a Spanish-speaking audience as a maker of Dining Room Furniture sets would have selling one called "Notable" ("No table") to an English speaking audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Happy Birthday Rob, many happy dups! *ducks*
When Microsoft does release what it originally intended Vista to be, I don't think it's going to be particularly pushing the hardware requirements. Fundamentally, the intention was to get .NET the primary focus of all development, and .NET isn't particularly bad in terms of resource usage. It's better than Java, and even Java isn't as bad as Java any more - the technology has improved and the performance has also improved.
I think getting Vista out sooner not later will generally be a good thing. Vista is going to be more secure and more friendly than XP. It's still not the OS *I* want to use, but from what I've seen of it, it'll be a big improvement on XP, for me (because like everyone, I have to use it at work) and everyone else. We need more of the security issues of the NT OSes front-ends fixed. We need less of a mono-culture, and having different versions of Windows out there will help too.
Why not? It's the obvious name for the sequel to Super Mario 127.
According to Nintendo's Wii pages (click on Hardware), the answer is yes, it will accept Gamecube disks. (It also appears to allow the use of Gamecube memory cards and controllers.) I didn't see any surprises, to be honest.
1. The name.
2. The look.
And the look hasn't been criticised for either machine.
When Nintendo does its presentation, and announces what the Wii actually is, and how much it'll cost, then we'll have a better idea. If it costs $299 and is a 50% faster Gamecube, with Wifi and a compatibility system, then, well, many of us may be underwhelmed.
On the other hand, if it's all that and $150...
That said, in this case, I'm not sure Apple Corps did anything immoral. Most people have concentrated on the fact Apple Corps isn't a big computer company, as if the situation was that Apple Computers was suing Apple Corps and not vice-versa. Apple Corps clearly thought there Apple Computer's decision to enter the music selling market may cause brand confusion given they're a company called Apple who're involved in selling music (albeit at a higher level.) Whether the decision was right or wrong, I believe Apple Corps had legitimate reasons to be concerned, and they had every right to bring the courts into it.
The sole argument against Apple Corps, so far as I can see, which wasn't raised by the defense, is that they're not really expanding in any serious way. They've limited themselves to periodic re-releases of a handful of back-numbers. As such, their "market" mostly knows who they are, being a small number of retail executives, and the handful who doesn't can be easily availed of their misapprehension with a one line disclaimer at the end of their letters. If Apple Corps was a little more active, signing on new talent, then I think there'd be a greater risk of confusion.
Trademark law is a legitimate buffer against confusion and fraud. So I'm not going to hate either Apple Corps or the government over this. But if it wasn't, and Apple Corps was just trying to extract money from Apple Computer and we lived in a perfect world where similarly named entities operating in similar markets never cause confusion, I would consider Apple Corps just at much at fault as the government who let them sue. Just as I dislike patent trolls, overly proprietary software makers, and telemarketers.
If this is the case, then Apple may be counting on E3 for cover.
I've had my disagreements with Dave Schroeder before, and he is generally pro-Apple, but the article you're commenting upon is hardly a love-fest, with some very real criticism of Apple's practices. About the only thing I got out of it that could be considered "pro-Apple" was the implication that other manufacturers are worse.
I generally agree with you, so I'm going to be interested to see if the MacBook is:
1. An iMac in a 13" laptop.
2. A Mac mini Core Duo in a 13" laptop.
Signs until now have pointed at 2. If Apple does release (2) at E3 rather than (1), then your point still stands. However, E3 is a gaming show. So if they launch (2), especially at $1,000 (you can get 17" laptops from my local branch of Staples with proper ATI graphics for $1,000), then they're going to be laughed at. Seriously. It's not that the machine is necessarily bad value, it's that they'd be releasing a machine totally unsuited to playing games in front of hundreds of journalists, analysts, and others whose primary focus is, erm, games.
This is the company that organized a medium-sized press conference, with hundreds of attendees, to launch some stereo speakers (with leather cases and the Intelized Mac mini playing second fiddle), so I wouldn't put it past them to do this, but at the same time, am I the only person who thinks this is wierd, to say the least? I know there are some Mac fanbois who, ignoring all the benchmarks to the contrary, are insisting the GMA950 must be better than the Radeon 9200 because, well, the 9200 is old and crappy (it kind-of is) and Apple must know what it's doing (erm, yeah, but do you know why they're doing that? Just because they know what they're doing doesn't mean your agenda is the same as their's), but for the rest of us, I can't see this working as a product announcement. The people at E3 are not Mac fanbois. They know if something's impressive or not.
So, to recap: a small excerpt was published for the sake of commenting upon it (fair use already), the manual isn't even for sale (strengthens case), and the commenting was actually concerned with making public a defect, in this case in Apple procedures, that was causing damage to user's products.
I think sitting upon this information and refusing to report it would have been unethical, not the other way around. And I have little doubt it was legal. The fact Apple views the information as proprietary is neither here nor there.
A better analogy would be with a getaway driver in a robbery. Would it be fair to for such a driver to be punished for helping those stealing from a bank? Damn straight it would, especially if the driver was the one who showed the robbers how to do the robbery, and encouraged them to do it every step of the way.
Neither of these are perfect analogies, but mine's better than your's. There is no way Bearshare were unaware that the primary use of their product would be piracy. They would have known full well they stood a gnat's chance in a Nuclear fireball of surviving if the majority of their customers didn't pirate music. They knew that, by producing their product, they'd be showing people how exactly to do it, and facilitating its use.
They're scum, and while the "OMG THE RIAA SUX0RZ" mob that inhabit Slashdot these days will doubtless bitch and moan about their downfall, the rest of us will hope that the bad rap Bearshare and its ilk give P2P will not damage more legitimate technologies, like BitTorrent.
911 is for genuine emergencies. Trespass is not, by itself, an emergency. It's tempting to think that because 911 calls the various emergency services, that anything you would involve a cop, fire house, or hospital in, is a valid use for the service. That's just not the case. You can call the cops directly, and they appreciate that, for non-emergencies, even ones that need to be dealt with in real time. They have their own dispatchers, it's just calls to 911 are prioritised differently.
Backing up your files periodically is good practice, but few people do it.
When your Software Update icon last started bouncing in the dock, and you typed in your administrator password to install that critical update it said you needed, when was the last time you checked it really is Software Update, the official, real, Software Update, that was asking for that password? There is, but they're going to have difficulty because of the Macs LOW MARKET SHARE. Until a large percentage of machines your Mac would communicate with when transfering the virus are Macs too, a Mac virus isn't going to get off the ground.Or do you think the low market share thing means there are less people who want to write one or target the platform? That's true too, but it doesn't change the simple logistical fact that a virus needs a large enough culture to grow in.
You're not wrong and the toast analogy is a good one, TSRs are a life saver. I don't know about you, but I generally find Windows to be too slow on the few machines I can find that are powerful enough to run it. GEM barely runs on my 256k Portable. In practice, if it wasn't for Sidekick, I wouldn't get anything done. And let's be honest - if you have a TSR like Sidekick, who needs multitasking anyway?
The Compaq Portable actually solved most of my problems. It runs all the software I need, and I also carry around a cellular modem (plugs into any AMPS phone, has connectivity throughout the country thanks to the Federally Mandated AMPS mobile phone system) which enables me to dial into my computer system at home and access my files. I use a program called Kermit to transfer files to and from the home PC - the only problem I've noticed is with binary files, sometimes you have to convert them using something called uuencode first before transmitting them. I've been told a package called UUCP might be better for my needs, though it's less secure.
I run a simple BAT script to keep my files at home up to date while I'm on the road.
The Portable runs pretty much everywhere. The screen is excellent and crisp. I can use it on the train (as long as there's a 110V socket around), and I have an invertor to make it work OK when I'm in a hired car. It's only a problem on planes, so far.
I run a bunch of different programs. Probably the best is Borland's Sidekick, which has calender functions and a clock. This means no need to carry around a large personal organizer or a watch.
Best of all, it's small and light. At 28lbs it's usually lighter than the briefcase I use to store my clothes and papers. When you consider it does pretty much everything such that the only other three gadgets I have to carry around are the modem, mobile phone, and a printer (an Epson LX400), you can imagine how much time and effort it saves me.
I can't recommend it enought.
Normally this would be some nationality bashing thing, but actually I think it proves the point: Wii is fine. Given only one of its meanings is the one people are taking the...erm, wii, out of, and that in practice, you're more likely to hear the phoneme used to describe "A group of us" than "Urine", I'm still baffled about the hysterical reaction to it.
Still, if it does end up being a marketing disaster, it'll not be the first.
In the 2004 version, Han and Greedo shoot each other at once: Greedo doesn't shoot first. It was the nineties version where Greedo shot first. Had the 90s version not come out, I don't think the change would have been seen as significant.
As for black DS Lites, you don't want to know how heavy they are.
I suspect this was one of those things where you film something, and get it in your head you want to include it, without ever stepping back and asking yourself "Why?" Had the SFX been available in 1977 to complete it, I wonder if Lucas would have kept it after seeing it in the early cuts of the movie at an early stage.
There are a lot of people who have a particular memory of how things were, and want that memory respected. I think, in all seriousness, there's only one serious flaw in the 2004 remakes, the whole Han-on-Jabba's-tail thing. The Han and Greedo shoot each other simultaneously is, really, nothing. It doesn't matter. It would never have been an issue, nor changed anyone's view of Han as a character, had it been that way in 1977. It only matters because it's a change, and because it replaced an even bigger change in the (awful) 1990s releases. For the most part, the 2004 versions fixed the ugliness of the 1990s versions. The CGI is fixed. There are no serious characterization issues (beyond Jabba's tail.)
I think this release is a good thing. There are people who'll watch both and will say "1977's for me, it's the real deal, I'm never going to like anything else", and there are others who'll watch both and say "You know, now I've seen it, I don't think my fears about the 2004 version are realised." We'll see.
Hopefully the number of valueless idiots who keep comparing Lucas's wish to keep his movies true to his vision to an act of terrible violence perpetuating largely against women will dwindle too. There's no excuse any more for it.
Why? Adobe is the only one of those companies that's actually had someone imprisoned for working on a program that interoperated with their products (albeit not a free software developer.)
I'm sure you get pissed about the "Ingredients" list on food too. But the rest of us aren't, we think disclosure is often a necessary part of avoiding a one-sided seller-buyer relationship.
But they didn't... Kind of the point isn't it? Yes, there probably are bad names, but the very idea you can claim the principle wouldn't work for something called "Poo" proves that Wii is not in the same category. Wii means many things. Poo doesn't.
ie. no problems whatsoever.