I'm not quite sure why everyone keeps mentioning "Mail". Mail.app's been in OS X since it was called NEXTSTEP. They keep improving it, but it's part of the OS, not some office suite.
You're why sysdadmins and blacklists have a bad name. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should or even that it's particularly intelligent to do so.
If I can't receive email from a friend because my mail provider, who I pay money to, is as stupid as some of the BL-supporters here, you can bet I'll yell at them. They can whine as long as they like about how it's their equipment, *I* pay their wages.
In fact, that's such a brilliant approach, I'm going to use it to cure cancer. It's quite simple: I'll get my friend to sign a contract saying he'll cure cancer next week. And then when he doesn't achieve it, I'll sue him. Bingo, cancer is cured!
That's right, huh? Because if an ISP has a minimum service level promised in their contract, and they're suddenly unable to keep to it because one third party hates another third party that happened to be a customer, then the downtime required by a switch, or merely implied by the boycott itself, will not happen, correct?
The ISP? The ISP hasn't done anything illegal. At best (and it's a poor argument), it's provided access facilities, probably unknowingly, to a spammer. The spammer has left, but the blacklists remain.
The blacklisters? It's been done. You generally can't.
The spammers? They've almost certainly already left.
Lawsuits are as dumb as blacklists. In the end, my solution is pretty much the solution anyone should take - encourage those on ISPs who use blacklists that prevent them from receiving email from you (that they want to read, obviously) to switch to a different ISP. One or other will happen in most cases. The victims short term are always the customers, and long term both the idiot ISPs who misuse a discredited form of spam control and the the ISPs who are unfortunate enough to have a spammer sneak under the radar.
Moreover, the court found that the purpose of this use served the public interest in increasing access to television programming, an interest that "is consistent with the First Amendment policy of providing the fullest possible access to information through the public airwaves. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. v. Democratic National Committee, 412 U.S. 94, 102."
Ouch. I suspect that's the major attack point for most of the "fair use" arguments people have about "space shifting".
Which is a shame because ethically there shouldn't be an issue with something that someone does privately to copy a work they 'own' for their own personal use. I hope Boucher recognizes the limitations of fair use and seeks to extend them, a little.
I say that Fair Use has generally found to be not applicable to entire works except under certain exceptions such as incidental copying or judicial copying.
The BetaMax case (time shifting) also seems to be an example, or is this not fair use? (I'm genuinely asking. This morning I had an epithany about copyright law which made me realise I've misunderstood it for years. So I'm curious to know, for example, whether time shifting and "space shifting" are generally considered fair use or are/are not covered by something else.
That's not what he said though (and I can't see anyone reading this "interpretation" into what he did say unless they're deliberately trying to be an arsehole, which makes me think you skim read it as a slightly different sentence), his sentence was this:
You do realise that 'Fair Use' rarely if ever extends to sharing copyrighted material that you dont own copyright to?
By that he means some people seem to think that "sharing", that is the placing on a network of a file to provide it to potentially millions of anonymous strangers, is Fair Use even if you don't own the copyright. It isn't. That's why people are being fined for doing exactly that.
Fair use is a defense against a claim of infringement, but certain types of infringement are exactly what copyright exists to prevent, not fair use. There are people I read regularly who think that fair use means any kind of copying, as long as it's not for profit, or as long as you can make some tortured argument that it's analoguous to something that might possibly be fair use, kind of. ie the "How is me making a back-up of a CD and letting a friend borrow it any different to me putting it on Kazaa and allowing anyone who also happens to be on Kazaa download it?" argument.
There are literally hundreds of people on Slashdot who'll post a jolly-stern reply to a thread about P2P and/or CD prices if Congress mandates the death penalty for people who sneak camcorders into cinemas.
So I think we have a pretty big group of supporters actually, and there's no reason to worry.
Except the other side started this (the right came up with the whole idea that the party in power would do this), so yes, actually.
When one party, completely irrationally, claims X, Y, and Z about the other party, gets into office, and then actually does X and Y, it is entirely rational and reasonable to believe there's a strong chance they're going to do Z too.
They're not. Amazon has them on sale right now (most iPods seem to be on sale, I've linked to the $449 60G model, Amazon's selling it for $426.55 right now.)
Yes, but then Dell doesn't really get anything out of the deal. If Dell's going to sell expensive computers, they want to them to have decent profit margins. Otherwise they're selling niche market machines with commodity profits. Not good.
The author speculates also that Apple would probably demand certain specifications. Having OS X would probably require a higher price point--this both Apple and Dell would probably like."
...because price fixing is legal, and has never been challenged by any anti-monopoly/fair trade enforcement division of any government anywhere.
This is the one part of the story that makes no sense. If Apple outright made part of the contract, written, spoken, or implied, that Dell cannot sell a machine lower than a certain price, they would be jumped upon by the EU and US quicker than you can say "unfair competition".
And you can bet that Apple is aware of this, as they've been creatively circumventing these laws for years. Early ads for the Apple II had an asterisk by the price with a disclaimer "from our lawyers" saying that you might be able to buy it cheaper than that. Later techniques included barring sellers from advertising prices lower than those Apple set, a practice that continues to today. Retailers can sell Apple computers for lower than Apple's declared prices, but if they do, they can't advertise those prices (hence Amazon will regularly have a message in the price box saying "Price too low to display. Add to your shopping card to find out how much it costs."
Dell cannot legally be required by Apple to set its prices for a product containing an Apple component to whatever Apple wishes. Dell's retailers cannot legally be required by Apple or Dell to set its prices for a product containing an Apple component to whatever Apple and Dell wishes. The best they'll do is continue with the advertising of prices ban. This may mean Dell doesn't get to bite the Apple. Or it may mean Apple has to be more flexible.
Maybe certain right wingers thought left wingers would do this, because it's exactly what those right wingers would do and there's a belief that the left has a similar mindset?
And in response, perhaps the fears of left wingers here is because we've realised that, because it follows a pattern. Right wingers complain about extremists possibly putting in left wing judges, and then immediately go in and put the most cuckoo right-wing nutballs in the judge's seat the first chance they get. They complain about left wingers using the government to infringe on civil liberties (as they did over the somewhat complicated case of Elian Gonzalez), then rush through the PATRIOT Act.
The right may well do this coup thing, thinking they're (a) justified and (b) just getting in before the left would. Given the average right-winger's contemptious view of democracy (look at the efforts they go through to discourage voting in this country), I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm sure they meant it "will not be available" in the developer test systems.
There is absolutely nothing about any of the comments they've made or documentation that's come out that implies that anything they've said is relevent only to the development systems. Apple's comments are explicit:
Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware. Although many parts of the IO registry are present and work as expected, information that is provided by Open Firmware on a Macintosh using a PowerPC microprocessor (such as a complete device tree) is not available in the IO registry on a Macintosh using an Intel microprocessor. You can obtain some of the information from IODeviceTree by using the sysctlbyname or sysctl commands.
There is nothing about that or the universal binary notes themselves implying or inferring that the documentation applies only to development machines. And that's a good thing, because the documentation would be competely, 100%, useless if that were the case. If we assume the final boxes might have Open Firmware in them, we might also just as well assume that the final boxes might have Itaniums or XScale CPUs.
Whatever hardware Apple chooses to use, I don't think it will be difficult at all for Microsoft to get it working with Windows. The vast majority of the hardware will be pretty standard.
Unless it's non-standard, which is what I was refering to. You and the grandparent can't get away with "No, Apple will make something completely non-standard, but Microsoft will port Windows to it" and then say "No, Microsoft will, because it will be standard enough."
The problem with Gambas is you can't use it to develop proprietary software without purchasing a Qt licence
Hardly a problem. If you want to develop proprietary software, why shouldn't you contribute in some other way to the developers of the software that you're building upon?
which is currently very expensive for the kinds of people who would want to use it for commercial development.
Presumably it's very expensive for the kinds of people who would want to use it for non-commercial development. I doubt Microsoft would have a problem forking over the cash for a license, some how.
It's a barrier, but not a serious one. Someone expecting to earn a living from proprietary, sold, software isn't going to have an issue paying for the QT license fee. For all but the cheapest, they'll spend far more on hardware over five years than on QT. This, for the most part, leaves the odd hobbyist expecting to supplement their income with $5 here and there from some kind of shareware. Realistically, they're not actually going to supplement their income at all, they're just producing stuff that's infinitely less valuable to end users than it could be, while exploiting TrollTech's code. I don't think there's a real problem in practice with the license being just as high for these people. It discourages stupid decisions.
No, it couldn't have, as realsoftware didn't exist ten years ago.
I remember reading a review of an early version of "REAL Basic" in Personal Computer World. Back when I read PCW. In the 1980s. The company was founded by the original inventors of BASIC from what I remember, and beyond that I can't remember much about the review.
Whether the company selling it was "RealSoftware" or not I can't comment upon, but at worst, this'd be like saying that I couldn't have gotten my cellphone service from Cingular five years ago because Cingular didn't exist five years ago.
The type you'd use to (by itself) replace a VHS system arguably should. (Of course, there are those who'd buy a TiVo and DVD player in combination to replace a VHS system, which is a reasonable alternative, but then one would expect the TiVo to have a clock.)
Well, yeah, it's possibly true, but they do make a big deal of the fact Open Firmware et al will not be available, so it's highly unlikely they're considering keeping it. I'd expect language along the lines of "Don't expect this to be available" if it was still an option on the table. I do think anyone seriously thinking Open Firmware will make a showing is pretty much lining themselves up for disappointment. The comments I've read from Apple pretty much suggest the decision has already been made. If it's in favour of Open Firmware, then there's no reason for them to deprecate that firmware.
Apple's PowerMacs, especially those from the late nineties, generally are "close enough" in terms of PREP/CHRP compatability for the PowerPC version of Windows NT 4.0 to work. I've certainly heard of people who installed it. I think Microsoft would avoid touching the Mac unless it has a significant amount of momentum if the Mac was a significantly non-standard architecture. In many ways, there's less reason for them to support it than there was for them to support generic PowerPCs, as they still had reason to want the workstation market to sign up.
Thank you (and the AC!) I'll update the JE with the new information. What's In The Developer's Machine is kind of minor compared to Apple's public statements, but it's still useful in some ways.
This doesn't mean that final shipping Intel-based Macs won't use OF and Mac partitions, it just means they don't right now, for obvious reasons.
No, the final shipping Intel-based Macs will not be running Open Firmware for some other reason. I don't know the reason, I just know, because that's what Apple has said, they'll not have it. Likewise, as Apple has explicitly said too, I know that they will not have Apple's Mac disk partioning. Again, I don't know the reasons why Apple has decided this, I just know they will not.
I can speculate. I can also draw obvious conclusions, the major one being that if they're not keeping the old disk partitioning system, then there's got to be a reason. The most obvious is that they intend to use off-the-shelf standardized firmware, not custom firmware. If they were writing their own custom firmware, they can keep the old Mac partitioning scheme, and why wouldn't they? It'd certainly ease with the transition.
If Apple designs a motherboard that is very similar to current Macs, uses OpenFirmware, has a proprietary chipset that doesn't use a northbridge and southbridge, etc. etc.... what's to stop Microsoft from getting Windows to run on it?
I'm not sure why you're hypothesising about a motherboard with Open Firmware. Leaving that aside, what's to stop Microsoft from getting Windows to run on a PowerPC Mac? They used to ship Windows NT 4.0 for Mac, but XP, for some reason, isn't available.
Realistically, Apple loses far too much by making a completely non-standard machine. Given the decisions they're making, no Open Firmware, changed disk partitions, etc, we can safely deduce a number of things about the eventual shape of the machine. The likelihood of it being a radically different system with custom firmware which, for no reason whatsoever, uses disk partitioning formats incompatable with the rest of the world including Apple's previous systems, is incomprehensible. It gains Apple nothing but possibly minor, short-lived, performance enhancements. It means Apple doesn't get to benefit from the massive R&D and mass-production savings/quality improvements that Dell et al benefit from. Switchers would still be in the same boat as they are today. It'd be incompatability for the sake of incompatability. What's the point?
The way the developer boxes are currently looking, together with the way existing Apple Macs are designed (PCI, USB, et al), suggests to me that we're looking at something that will be a PC from Apple in less than a year. There will be differences between a Dell device and an Apple device, much as there is between Dell and Gateway.
My guess, if I had to put money on it, would be:
- It'll be "legacy free", that is, no PS/2 or serial ports. It will have USB High Speed, IDE, and maybe Firewire, just like their current line up.
- They'll do several single board machines without PCI, similar to the motherboard in a PC laptop in hardware spec.
- The architecture will essentially be that of a PC clone. This'll ensure they can use off-the-shelf components for lower cost machines.
- They'll probably use EFI instead of BIOS.
For reasons why, see the JE linked to in my.sig.
There are a lot of comments that have come out of Apple, together with actual actions, that demonstrate where this is heading. If they wanted to produce a non-standard machine that just happened to have an Intel CPU in it, they wouldn't be making a lot of the decisions they're making. There'd be no reason to abandon Open Firmware. There'd be no reason to change the disk partition format. There'd be comments from Apple to the effect Windows is unlikely to run. What you'll have in a year will be a machine that may well run many industry standard PC operating systems out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not quite sure why everyone keeps mentioning "Mail". Mail.app's been in OS X since it was called NEXTSTEP. They keep improving it, but it's part of the OS, not some office suite.
If I can't receive email from a friend because my mail provider, who I pay money to, is as stupid as some of the BL-supporters here, you can bet I'll yell at them. They can whine as long as they like about how it's their equipment, *I* pay their wages.
In fact, that's such a brilliant approach, I'm going to use it to cure cancer. It's quite simple: I'll get my friend to sign a contract saying he'll cure cancer next week. And then when he doesn't achieve it, I'll sue him. Bingo, cancer is cured!
That's right, huh? Because if an ISP has a minimum service level promised in their contract, and they're suddenly unable to keep to it because one third party hates another third party that happened to be a customer, then the downtime required by a switch, or merely implied by the boycott itself, will not happen, correct?
The ISP? The ISP hasn't done anything illegal. At best (and it's a poor argument), it's provided access facilities, probably unknowingly, to a spammer. The spammer has left, but the blacklists remain.
The blacklisters? It's been done. You generally can't.
The spammers? They've almost certainly already left.
Lawsuits are as dumb as blacklists. In the end, my solution is pretty much the solution anyone should take - encourage those on ISPs who use blacklists that prevent them from receiving email from you (that they want to read, obviously) to switch to a different ISP. One or other will happen in most cases. The victims short term are always the customers, and long term both the idiot ISPs who misuse a discredited form of spam control and the the ISPs who are unfortunate enough to have a spammer sneak under the radar.
Which is a shame because ethically there shouldn't be an issue with something that someone does privately to copy a work they 'own' for their own personal use. I hope Boucher recognizes the limitations of fair use and seeks to extend them, a little.
Why do I keep misspelling "epiphany"? I'm such a doofus. I don't even pronounce it "th". Gah.
Fair use is a defense against a claim of infringement, but certain types of infringement are exactly what copyright exists to prevent, not fair use. There are people I read regularly who think that fair use means any kind of copying, as long as it's not for profit, or as long as you can make some tortured argument that it's analoguous to something that might possibly be fair use, kind of. ie the "How is me making a back-up of a CD and letting a friend borrow it any different to me putting it on Kazaa and allowing anyone who also happens to be on Kazaa download it?" argument.
So I think we have a pretty big group of supporters actually, and there's no reason to worry.
When one party, completely irrationally, claims X, Y, and Z about the other party, gets into office, and then actually does X and Y, it is entirely rational and reasonable to believe there's a strong chance they're going to do Z too.
They're not. Amazon has them on sale right now (most iPods seem to be on sale, I've linked to the $449 60G model, Amazon's selling it for $426.55 right now.)
Yes, but then Dell doesn't really get anything out of the deal. If Dell's going to sell expensive computers, they want to them to have decent profit margins. Otherwise they're selling niche market machines with commodity profits. Not good.
This is the one part of the story that makes no sense. If Apple outright made part of the contract, written, spoken, or implied, that Dell cannot sell a machine lower than a certain price, they would be jumped upon by the EU and US quicker than you can say "unfair competition".
And you can bet that Apple is aware of this, as they've been creatively circumventing these laws for years. Early ads for the Apple II had an asterisk by the price with a disclaimer "from our lawyers" saying that you might be able to buy it cheaper than that. Later techniques included barring sellers from advertising prices lower than those Apple set, a practice that continues to today. Retailers can sell Apple computers for lower than Apple's declared prices, but if they do, they can't advertise those prices (hence Amazon will regularly have a message in the price box saying "Price too low to display. Add to your shopping card to find out how much it costs."
Dell cannot legally be required by Apple to set its prices for a product containing an Apple component to whatever Apple wishes. Dell's retailers cannot legally be required by Apple or Dell to set its prices for a product containing an Apple component to whatever Apple and Dell wishes. The best they'll do is continue with the advertising of prices ban. This may mean Dell doesn't get to bite the Apple. Or it may mean Apple has to be more flexible.
'7B56B841C38BF38C'? That's amazing! I've got the same thing on my luggage!
And in response, perhaps the fears of left wingers here is because we've realised that, because it follows a pattern. Right wingers complain about extremists possibly putting in left wing judges, and then immediately go in and put the most cuckoo right-wing nutballs in the judge's seat the first chance they get. They complain about left wingers using the government to infringe on civil liberties (as they did over the somewhat complicated case of Elian Gonzalez), then rush through the PATRIOT Act.
The right may well do this coup thing, thinking they're (a) justified and (b) just getting in before the left would. Given the average right-winger's contemptious view of democracy (look at the efforts they go through to discourage voting in this country), I wouldn't be surprised.
You are correct, and I'm an idiot. Sorry about that.
Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware. Although many parts of the IO registry are present and work as expected, information that is provided by Open Firmware on a Macintosh using a PowerPC microprocessor (such as a complete device tree) is not available in the IO registry on a Macintosh using an Intel microprocessor. You can obtain some of the information from IODeviceTree by using the sysctlbyname or sysctl commands.
There is nothing about that or the universal binary notes themselves implying or inferring that the documentation applies only to development machines. And that's a good thing, because the documentation would be competely, 100%, useless if that were the case. If we assume the final boxes might have Open Firmware in them, we might also just as well assume that the final boxes might have Itaniums or XScale CPUs.
Unless it's non-standard, which is what I was refering to. You and the grandparent can't get away with "No, Apple will make something completely non-standard, but Microsoft will port Windows to it" and then say "No, Microsoft will, because it will be standard enough."It's a barrier, but not a serious one. Someone expecting to earn a living from proprietary, sold, software isn't going to have an issue paying for the QT license fee. For all but the cheapest, they'll spend far more on hardware over five years than on QT. This, for the most part, leaves the odd hobbyist expecting to supplement their income with $5 here and there from some kind of shareware. Realistically, they're not actually going to supplement their income at all, they're just producing stuff that's infinitely less valuable to end users than it could be, while exploiting TrollTech's code. I don't think there's a real problem in practice with the license being just as high for these people. It discourages stupid decisions.
Whether the company selling it was "RealSoftware" or not I can't comment upon, but at worst, this'd be like saying that I couldn't have gotten my cellphone service from Cingular five years ago because Cingular didn't exist five years ago.
The type you'd use to (by itself) replace a VHS system arguably should. (Of course, there are those who'd buy a TiVo and DVD player in combination to replace a VHS system, which is a reasonable alternative, but then one would expect the TiVo to have a clock.)
Apple's PowerMacs, especially those from the late nineties, generally are "close enough" in terms of PREP/CHRP compatability for the PowerPC version of Windows NT 4.0 to work. I've certainly heard of people who installed it. I think Microsoft would avoid touching the Mac unless it has a significant amount of momentum if the Mac was a significantly non-standard architecture. In many ways, there's less reason for them to support it than there was for them to support generic PowerPCs, as they still had reason to want the workstation market to sign up.
Thank you (and the AC!) I'll update the JE with the new information. What's In The Developer's Machine is kind of minor compared to Apple's public statements, but it's still useful in some ways.
I can speculate. I can also draw obvious conclusions, the major one being that if they're not keeping the old disk partitioning system, then there's got to be a reason. The most obvious is that they intend to use off-the-shelf standardized firmware, not custom firmware. If they were writing their own custom firmware, they can keep the old Mac partitioning scheme, and why wouldn't they? It'd certainly ease with the transition.
I'm not sure why you're hypothesising about a motherboard with Open Firmware. Leaving that aside, what's to stop Microsoft from getting Windows to run on a PowerPC Mac? They used to ship Windows NT 4.0 for Mac, but XP, for some reason, isn't available.Realistically, Apple loses far too much by making a completely non-standard machine. Given the decisions they're making, no Open Firmware, changed disk partitions, etc, we can safely deduce a number of things about the eventual shape of the machine. The likelihood of it being a radically different system with custom firmware which, for no reason whatsoever, uses disk partitioning formats incompatable with the rest of the world including Apple's previous systems, is incomprehensible. It gains Apple nothing but possibly minor, short-lived, performance enhancements. It means Apple doesn't get to benefit from the massive R&D and mass-production savings/quality improvements that Dell et al benefit from. Switchers would still be in the same boat as they are today. It'd be incompatability for the sake of incompatability. What's the point?
Cool. Do you have a link to something relatively authorative I can use? I'll link to this comment in the mean time.
My guess, if I had to put money on it, would be:
- It'll be "legacy free", that is, no PS/2 or serial ports. It will have USB High Speed, IDE, and maybe Firewire, just like their current line up.
- They'll do several single board machines without PCI, similar to the motherboard in a PC laptop in hardware spec.
- The architecture will essentially be that of a PC clone. This'll ensure they can use off-the-shelf components for lower cost machines.
- They'll probably use EFI instead of BIOS.
For reasons why, see the JE linked to in my .sig.
There are a lot of comments that have come out of Apple, together with actual actions, that demonstrate where this is heading. If they wanted to produce a non-standard machine that just happened to have an Intel CPU in it, they wouldn't be making a lot of the decisions they're making. There'd be no reason to abandon Open Firmware. There'd be no reason to change the disk partition format. There'd be comments from Apple to the effect Windows is unlikely to run. What you'll have in a year will be a machine that may well run many industry standard PC operating systems out of the box.