Apple makes mistakes. Everybody does. But unlike other companies, Apple FIXES them without a hassle.
I bought a refurb laptop in May. It showed up, and was repeatedly crashing. Oops. So I brought it to the Apple Store...even though it wouldn't crash for me, the guy trusted me. He would have traded it for an identical machine on the spot, but he didn't have any refurbs in stock. He took the laptop, and three days later I got it back. Worked fine.
Except: come to realize two weeks later, the new logic board they dropped in it had the wrong speed processor! I never noticed the speed drop until I ran profiler to show off the goods. I called Apple, and though everybody on the phone said they had NEVER heard of a machine getting the wrong logic board, they believed me. They set up the repair...I sent it in on Thursday, and Tuesday I had it back in my hands. Plus, they had tightened the display hinge, cleaned the screen and replaced the bottom plate I had scratched.
I suppose I should be upset that I bought a computer and it took two repairs to fix it. But keep in mind, I saved $400 by risking a refurb, and they made it PAINLESS to fix everything. I'm sure as shit gonna get Applecare next April.
I also had my iPod in twice for repairs (once cos it was freezing, once cos I wanted a new battery before I went out of warranty). Each time I got a brand new one back in three days. That's pretty awesome.
1) What you're talking about is liability. Liability is a result of accountability, it isn't synonomous with it. Accountability has PLENTY to do with preventing and fixing problems. How many times have you seen a problem or deficiency in an Open Source package and been told to fix it yourself? It's happened plenty to me. With closed source packages, I rarely have to invest any work in the repair -- and since government workloads are budgeted (e.g. you can't just pull money out of nowhere to fix an unexpected problem), accountability for repairs is essential. Liability is important, too...being able to hurt a person financially DOES give them incentive to do you right, especially in the contract field. Shit, around here a contractor could get fined a million dollars a day if software crashes...you better be damned sure they don't take a long weekend if the IP stack is vulnerable. I know many OSS developers are dedicated...but handshake dedication isn't worth fuck all, and you certainly can't base your government on it.
2) The point I was trying to lake is that having many "authorities" is not authoritarian at all. There is no concrete "checks and balances" system in Open Source, only the possibility for one. Many, many, many Open Source projects, especially those in obscure arenas, get no eyes at all. And as an OSS user, your choices have to be informed, because Open Source programs are rarely tolerant of configuration errors. This could be good or bad, depending on whether you're an NSA whiz kid or some army grunt.
3) I have indeed seen many government systems with "backdoors" or hard coded passwords in the field of government software, and I rage every time I do. Most of the time, these aren't "hidden" backdoors -- instead, they're engineered to assist in supportability. I have been asked on numerous occasions by customers "can't you just get into my system? That's what company X does!" Still: this is quite a different story from outside agents purposely inserting a backdoor into a program. That could never happen in our program, because no outside agent could ever get in to our system or our source repository, etc. In an OSS program? It's quite possible. All it would take is one trusted developer and one trusted maintainer to sign off on a spot of deadly code, and there's a good chance it would spread before anybody would notice.
4) Really? You know the identity of a guy who supplied a patch? What's his address? What's his phone number? What's his real name? In this age of internet anonymity, you can't trust an IP or email address for shit. Now, if somebody in my company inserted a backdoor into a program, I could tell you how to contact him -- physically -- in seconds. Which is what's important when you're worried about national security. You don't want to have to send an email "RE: That Backdoor You Put in the Missile Code"...you want to be able to bring the guy in for questioning. What you're talking about -- being able to call a guy up and ask him to fix something -- is counterproductive anyway. Shit, I don't want customers emailing ME if the program doesn't work...that's what my product manager is for!
Hey, it's slashdot. Use the iPod anywhere, it gets front page status.
Incidentally, I control my life with the iPod. See, some days I just don't want to get up in the morning. Playing the second Queens of the Stone Age album on my iPod every morning at 7:30 makes sure I get to to work on time. Wow, what an amazing hack!
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Your sig is complete bullshit. The only person who should have the right to decide what "too many rewards" are for a work is the copyright/patent holder. Otherwise we're talking about censorship and government control of industry.
Or do you think Congress should decide that "640k copies of Windows should be enough for everybody?"
IP law is FINE. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do...it's keeping people inventing new things to get around other people's patents. Choice in solutions is a good thing...and having a dozen solutions that do the same thing is NOT a choice!
What if a person contributed weekly to a project a front-company for six months.. what level of scrutiny would that patch receive?
Many of these "Peer review r0x0r" comments also seem to ignore the possibility of collusion between code maintainers and reviewers. If "everybody" tells you code X is safe and reliable, are you really going to check it yourself? There are millions of lines of code underlying the framework used by the average developer, and to read and understand what every integral function is doing is impossible. This is why you trust other people in the first place!
What this article is claiming -- and everybody seems to be ignoring -- is that open source, being a wild system with no accountability (liability) nor authority, is more prone to dangerous bugs and backdoors that closed software developers don't have to worry about. This is the key -- not that hacker X is going to put a backdoor in that won't get caught by peers, but that hacker X's identity and location are completely unknown (not true for employees of a closed software developer) and that there is nobody whose lifestyle is in jeopardy should such a backdoor be found. I would never build a back door into the software that I write, because I'd go to jail. But if I could submit nearly anonymous patches...well, I still wouldn't, but more would. Anonymity and lack of accountability can turn a normal person into an asshole.
Accountability is a crucial element of government contracts, and the lack of it in OSS is a deterrant to adoption. Whether or not it's worth a big to do (after all, once somebody's willing to accept accountability for a branch of OSS in exchange for a support fee, it's a moot point) is open to argument. And that's what we should be arguing.
The Quicktake 200 Camera was a Fuji DS7 camera - they were no different. The Apple Quicktake however used a better JPEG compression technology
Alright. Any digital device is half hardware, and half software. If the hardware is the same, but the software different, these are two different devices. Saying "they're no different except the software" is like saying my car is no different from the GLX model except the leather seats, GPS and improved stereo.
I think most of the time, people on Slashdot like to discount the importance of software. The Canon Rebel debacle is a good example...here we have a camera whose major difference is stripped down software, and folks act like it's a crime. Why? If people are willing to pay more for the features on the pro model, and more people are willing to buy the camera with a dumbed down feature set, then the difference in software isn't trivial -- it's integral. I paid extra for my Mac because it had good software -- better software than anything offered by the Open Source community or Microsoft. Software which enabled me to do what I want easily and pleasantly.
Anyhow, Apple isn't releasing a cobranded cell phone because they want more cell phone companies to work hand in hand with iSync. If they tried to take marketshare from these companies, I doubt they'd be so fortunate.
Some of these companies have put millions of dollars into research and development of their programs which do useful things. All it takes to destroy the marketability and the return on that investment is a handful of OSS developers who decide they don't want to pay a lot for that muffler and clone the interface.
It's happened -- already -- to iTunes with Linspire's clone. It took Apple years to build a really great jukebox utility, one that's driving the sales of their most profitable ventures. And it took Linspire a couple months to rip it off. Fair? No. That's why patents were invented!
The Open Source community seems to think that because they CAN do a thing, that they should be legally justified in DOING that thing. This is bullshit. A development philosophy does not give you the right to ruin peoples' businesses through unfair anti-competetive practices, nor does it give you the right to use other peoples ideas just because you want to. Sharing of code and ideas is great -- when they're your ideas and your code. The sharing of OTHER people's IP is, and always will be, wrong. Isn't that why the GPL is viral -- to prevent people from stealing your ideas without giving something back?
Well, one of Google's trademarks is the elongated "oo." Purposely misspelling a word to include somebody else's trademark would certainly be claimworthy, though it's a long shot.
There's also a chance that they'll win solely based on name similarity...if Froogles.com is primarily a search engine, it surely infringes on the name Google as the two are nearly identical. It's be like starting a shoe company called Kneebock, or a car company called Chevrolait.
No, we get it, we just didn't laugh at it. Know why? Because prospective casting jokes are only funny if they are a) topical and b) made before the movie comes out and is insanely successful. I mean, gah! The whole reason this joke is funny is because there's a chance that one or two of the folks mentioned might actually make it into the movie (Patrick Stewart used to be on a joke casting list for Professor X, for example). Since there's no way they're going to remake the LotR trilogy, this list isn't funny anymore. And come on, Mama Cass jokes? The poor woman has been dead for 30 years this Friday, and it wasn't that funny thirty years ago.
I have no idea what this drivel is doing on Slashdot and feel the editors should be ashamed of themselves for including it. I certainly feel ashamed for RESPONDING to it.
Oh wow, a comparison of a 6 year old OS to a modern one on their ability to support obscure hardware. One of the reasons for a new operating system, Windows or Linux, is to add new driver support. If you install any Linux distro from 6 years ago, I guarantee that it will not detect all or even most of your hardware. In fact, when I installed RedHat in '99, it supported two of my cards. Luckily, they were the network and video cards...
Also, 6 years ago not all cards were bus mastering. Most of them still required an interrupt. Most motherboards did not have a separate interrupt for each card...they would share interrupts, and unless both the hardware AND your drivers supported this, neither card on a shared IRQ would work.
It was tough. But this wasn't Windows 98's fault! If anything, fault Windows for not knowing what the problem was when it was all too common.
Not necessarily a good way to judge "market trends." I have bought at least ten books on Linux and Open Source technologies. I have only bought one for Windows (C# in a Nutshell) and none at all for the Mac OS.
I have only two machines running Linux and no desire to get any more. I have four macs and twenty five PCs. The reason for the discrepancy in book sales? I can figure out what I want to do in Windows very easily with no books. If I forget a command, I'll probably find it just by clicking on menus. And the Mac -- including the Objective C language and the Core Framework -- is so well documented by Apple themselves, most of the books I've seen are a step down in terms of accuracy and cogency. O'reilly's Carbon books are a good example.
I buy Linux books because I learned long ago that trying to deal with the hodge podge quick fix documentation of the majority of UNIX and Linux software packages is a time killer. If I have the option of buying a $35 book or spending three hours figuring out how to get Samba authentication from our AD server to work under PAM, guess which one I take?
If anything, book sales should measure usability trends, not market trends. If a program I write ever has a "Missing Manual" or "Inna Nutshell" published for it, I will consider this the biggest insult ever.
No, Apple still gives schools heavy discounts, but because the price of extremely basic PCs has fallen so much lower than extremely basic Apples, it's just not prudent to install Macs if your goal is to get the most machines for your money.
Of course, there are tons of other considerations, such as uptime, interoperability, ease of networking, availability of gimmick software, etc. But any way you look at it, when I was in school not so long ago, the school expected to pay $2000-$3000 per computer, and a lab of 20 machines was considered massive. Networking these would cost at least another grand, probably more. Nowadays, you can get 2-4 eMacs or 3-5 PCs for this price. Have schools really gotten so much space -- or budgets gotten so decimated -- that they opt for Microsoft-only to get 25% more computer?
Or, maybe, did the school in question get a hefty grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Muahbhahahahaha.
No...see, the prototype delivered has NOTHING to do with its final implementation. Prospective patenters would just use one of the many un-licensed programming languages out there. I can't even fathom the difficulty of building an interface in Fortran 77...but if it meant being able to receive an enforcable patent rather than a flabby, uesless copyright, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Those of us who have enough experience with gentoo to learn not to trust portage will probably have to worry. Emerge -up offers a "menu" of what's to be updated...
Ha! I block the http protocol itself! Yes, it's gopher or nothing for me. I don't want any of this new technology enabling me to do what I want or something!
that microsoft merely wants to go through the motions of open source, while not being open at all.
Fucking duh. Microsoft doesn't want to be "OPEN" source any more than we Microsoft developers want to write the OS or programs we pay for. But they do want to benefit from getting eyeballs into their code, allowing for peace of mind an enhanced security. And we want to benefit from being able to finally figure out what's going on in Function X that's always been a bit twitchy.
If Microsoft can satisfy the security and customizability needs of their customers with Shared Source, then Shared Source WILL "work" for Microsoft. Not all software has to be Open Source, you know. There's this thing called "choice" which is quite popular with purchasers, and some of them may "choose" to go with a controlled source solution.
The hassle and lack of interest probably had nothing at all to do with the porting process. It's the testing and support process that's more costly. It means each new release must be tested and supported on yet another platform...and I'm sure the volume of OS/2 sales wouldn't come close to covering the costs of supporting it.
You'll notice that, quite often, companies that release software for Windows/Mac/Linux drop support for one or more of these after the product reaches a certain age. In fact, other than Blizzard, I can't think of a game manufacturer who treats either Linux or Mac with the same seriousness as the PC platform. UT2k4 was unplayable for the first few weeks after its release, due to a massive sound bug and only one guy supporting the entirety of the Mac population. It's still inordinately slow, though Ryan does great work for one guy.
OK. Just want to really quickly disspell some inaccuracies in your post, probably the result of believing Slashdot anti-Microsoft FUD.
try again - longhorn won't be out until at least 2007, and many are saying 2008 or later
Many on Slashdot are saying this -- many who have absolutely no frame of reference and no idea what they're talking about. Microsoft has always said Longhorn would be out in 2006. As far as I know, they're still saying 2006 and they're right on track for 2006, based on the work they've been showing. Expecting a machine to run two years from now is NOT absurd.
the "suggested" specs for a longhorn machine,
What you're talking about...the absurd specs of 4 GHz, terabyte of hard drive, etc...were disspelled as soon as Slashdot "reported" them. Right now, the recommended specs for a development build of Longhorn -- DEVELOPMENT, mind you, not "just running it" but actively writing, debugging and profiling software -- are 1.6GHz and 1GB of RAM, and suggested DirectX 9 support with 64MB of VRAM. Nearly identical speed to the Doom 3 requirements with a nice ram boost.
Let's just hope that DIII also runs on OGL for easy porting to MacOS and Linux.
It does. Linux and MacOS were specifically mentioned at all stages of development, but so was the Xbox, which I'm sure doesn't have as good OGL support as it has DirectX9.
But you write your own wrapper to the API when you make your engine. I'm sure API flexibility was Job 1 for Carmack et al.
I'm crossing my fingers that the Mac system requirements will say "G4 1.25 GHz." And I'm sure Id is too...Mac users are much less likely to dump their systems for a game, and 1.25 was the top end model from a year ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple makes mistakes. Everybody does. But unlike other companies, Apple FIXES them without a hassle.
I bought a refurb laptop in May. It showed up, and was repeatedly crashing. Oops. So I brought it to the Apple Store...even though it wouldn't crash for me, the guy trusted me. He would have traded it for an identical machine on the spot, but he didn't have any refurbs in stock. He took the laptop, and three days later I got it back. Worked fine.
Except: come to realize two weeks later, the new logic board they dropped in it had the wrong speed processor! I never noticed the speed drop until I ran profiler to show off the goods. I called Apple, and though everybody on the phone said they had NEVER heard of a machine getting the wrong logic board, they believed me. They set up the repair...I sent it in on Thursday, and Tuesday I had it back in my hands. Plus, they had tightened the display hinge, cleaned the screen and replaced the bottom plate I had scratched.
I suppose I should be upset that I bought a computer and it took two repairs to fix it. But keep in mind, I saved $400 by risking a refurb, and they made it PAINLESS to fix everything. I'm sure as shit gonna get Applecare next April.
I also had my iPod in twice for repairs (once cos it was freezing, once cos I wanted a new battery before I went out of warranty). Each time I got a brand new one back in three days. That's pretty awesome.
1) What you're talking about is liability. Liability is a result of accountability, it isn't synonomous with it. Accountability has PLENTY to do with preventing and fixing problems. How many times have you seen a problem or deficiency in an Open Source package and been told to fix it yourself? It's happened plenty to me. With closed source packages, I rarely have to invest any work in the repair -- and since government workloads are budgeted (e.g. you can't just pull money out of nowhere to fix an unexpected problem), accountability for repairs is essential. Liability is important, too...being able to hurt a person financially DOES give them incentive to do you right, especially in the contract field. Shit, around here a contractor could get fined a million dollars a day if software crashes...you better be damned sure they don't take a long weekend if the IP stack is vulnerable. I know many OSS developers are dedicated...but handshake dedication isn't worth fuck all, and you certainly can't base your government on it.
2) The point I was trying to lake is that having many "authorities" is not authoritarian at all. There is no concrete "checks and balances" system in Open Source, only the possibility for one. Many, many, many Open Source projects, especially those in obscure arenas, get no eyes at all. And as an OSS user, your choices have to be informed, because Open Source programs are rarely tolerant of configuration errors. This could be good or bad, depending on whether you're an NSA whiz kid or some army grunt.
3) I have indeed seen many government systems with "backdoors" or hard coded passwords in the field of government software, and I rage every time I do. Most of the time, these aren't "hidden" backdoors -- instead, they're engineered to assist in supportability. I have been asked on numerous occasions by customers "can't you just get into my system? That's what company X does!" Still: this is quite a different story from outside agents purposely inserting a backdoor into a program. That could never happen in our program, because no outside agent could ever get in to our system or our source repository, etc. In an OSS program? It's quite possible. All it would take is one trusted developer and one trusted maintainer to sign off on a spot of deadly code, and there's a good chance it would spread before anybody would notice.
4) Really? You know the identity of a guy who supplied a patch? What's his address? What's his phone number? What's his real name? In this age of internet anonymity, you can't trust an IP or email address for shit. Now, if somebody in my company inserted a backdoor into a program, I could tell you how to contact him -- physically -- in seconds. Which is what's important when you're worried about national security. You don't want to have to send an email "RE: That Backdoor You Put in the Missile Code"...you want to be able to bring the guy in for questioning. What you're talking about -- being able to call a guy up and ask him to fix something -- is counterproductive anyway. Shit, I don't want customers emailing ME if the program doesn't work...that's what my product manager is for!
Hey, it's slashdot. Use the iPod anywhere, it gets front page status.
Incidentally, I control my life with the iPod. See, some days I just don't want to get up in the morning. Playing the second Queens of the Stone Age album on my iPod every morning at 7:30 makes sure I get to to work on time. Wow, what an amazing hack!
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Your sig is complete bullshit. The only person who should have the right to decide what "too many rewards" are for a work is the copyright/patent holder. Otherwise we're talking about censorship and government control of industry.
Or do you think Congress should decide that "640k copies of Windows should be enough for everybody?"
IP law is FINE. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do...it's keeping people inventing new things to get around other people's patents. Choice in solutions is a good thing...and having a dozen solutions that do the same thing is NOT a choice!
Holy firewalls!
Maybe Osama's the reason that KDE is still a piece of shit! He's bringing it down from within!
We're through the looking glass!
What if a person contributed weekly to a project a front-company for six months.. what level of scrutiny would that patch receive?
Many of these "Peer review r0x0r" comments also seem to ignore the possibility of collusion between code maintainers and reviewers. If "everybody" tells you code X is safe and reliable, are you really going to check it yourself? There are millions of lines of code underlying the framework used by the average developer, and to read and understand what every integral function is doing is impossible. This is why you trust other people in the first place!
What this article is claiming -- and everybody seems to be ignoring -- is that open source, being a wild system with no accountability (liability) nor authority, is more prone to dangerous bugs and backdoors that closed software developers don't have to worry about. This is the key -- not that hacker X is going to put a backdoor in that won't get caught by peers, but that hacker X's identity and location are completely unknown (not true for employees of a closed software developer) and that there is nobody whose lifestyle is in jeopardy should such a backdoor be found. I would never build a back door into the software that I write, because I'd go to jail. But if I could submit nearly anonymous patches...well, I still wouldn't, but more would. Anonymity and lack of accountability can turn a normal person into an asshole.
Accountability is a crucial element of government contracts, and the lack of it in OSS is a deterrant to adoption. Whether or not it's worth a big to do (after all, once somebody's willing to accept accountability for a branch of OSS in exchange for a support fee, it's a moot point) is open to argument. And that's what we should be arguing.
Microsoft is to OSS as Evian is to tap water.
I beg to differ. Microsoft is to OSS as Coca-cola is to tap water. When you're really thirsty, sometimes you don't want the sugar or the carbonation.
Incidentally, Apple is a really cheap wine. Bully Hill. Drink a little, and you want more. Drink too much and you're zonked out of your gourd.
The Quicktake 200 Camera was a Fuji DS7 camera - they were no different. The Apple Quicktake however used a better JPEG compression technology
Alright. Any digital device is half hardware, and half software. If the hardware is the same, but the software different, these are two different devices. Saying "they're no different except the software" is like saying my car is no different from the GLX model except the leather seats, GPS and improved stereo.
I think most of the time, people on Slashdot like to discount the importance of software. The Canon Rebel debacle is a good example...here we have a camera whose major difference is stripped down software, and folks act like it's a crime. Why? If people are willing to pay more for the features on the pro model, and more people are willing to buy the camera with a dumbed down feature set, then the difference in software isn't trivial -- it's integral. I paid extra for my Mac because it had good software -- better software than anything offered by the Open Source community or Microsoft. Software which enabled me to do what I want easily and pleasantly.
Anyhow, Apple isn't releasing a cobranded cell phone because they want more cell phone companies to work hand in hand with iSync. If they tried to take marketshare from these companies, I doubt they'd be so fortunate.
Or he could have looked in the folder marked Applications. Terminal's in a folder under that one called Utilities.
Real fucking difficult. Use Google if that's what's easy for you...but it's hardly a hidden tool.
And why shouldn't they?
Some of these companies have put millions of dollars into research and development of their programs which do useful things. All it takes to destroy the marketability and the return on that investment is a handful of OSS developers who decide they don't want to pay a lot for that muffler and clone the interface.
It's happened -- already -- to iTunes with Linspire's clone. It took Apple years to build a really great jukebox utility, one that's driving the sales of their most profitable ventures. And it took Linspire a couple months to rip it off. Fair? No. That's why patents were invented!
The Open Source community seems to think that because they CAN do a thing, that they should be legally justified in DOING that thing. This is bullshit. A development philosophy does not give you the right to ruin peoples' businesses through unfair anti-competetive practices, nor does it give you the right to use other peoples ideas just because you want to. Sharing of code and ideas is great -- when they're your ideas and your code. The sharing of OTHER people's IP is, and always will be, wrong. Isn't that why the GPL is viral -- to prevent people from stealing your ideas without giving something back?
Well, one of Google's trademarks is the elongated "oo." Purposely misspelling a word to include somebody else's trademark would certainly be claimworthy, though it's a long shot.
There's also a chance that they'll win solely based on name similarity...if Froogles.com is primarily a search engine, it surely infringes on the name Google as the two are nearly identical. It's be like starting a shoe company called Kneebock, or a car company called Chevrolait.
No, we get it, we just didn't laugh at it. Know why? Because prospective casting jokes are only funny if they are a) topical and b) made before the movie comes out and is insanely successful. I mean, gah! The whole reason this joke is funny is because there's a chance that one or two of the folks mentioned might actually make it into the movie (Patrick Stewart used to be on a joke casting list for Professor X, for example). Since there's no way they're going to remake the LotR trilogy, this list isn't funny anymore. And come on, Mama Cass jokes? The poor woman has been dead for 30 years this Friday, and it wasn't that funny thirty years ago.
I have no idea what this drivel is doing on Slashdot and feel the editors should be ashamed of themselves for including it. I certainly feel ashamed for RESPONDING to it.
Oh wow, a comparison of a 6 year old OS to a modern one on their ability to support obscure hardware. One of the reasons for a new operating system, Windows or Linux, is to add new driver support. If you install any Linux distro from 6 years ago, I guarantee that it will not detect all or even most of your hardware. In fact, when I installed RedHat in '99, it supported two of my cards. Luckily, they were the network and video cards...
Also, 6 years ago not all cards were bus mastering. Most of them still required an interrupt. Most motherboards did not have a separate interrupt for each card...they would share interrupts, and unless both the hardware AND your drivers supported this, neither card on a shared IRQ would work.
It was tough. But this wasn't Windows 98's fault! If anything, fault Windows for not knowing what the problem was when it was all too common.
Not necessarily a good way to judge "market trends." I have bought at least ten books on Linux and Open Source technologies. I have only bought one for Windows (C# in a Nutshell) and none at all for the Mac OS.
I have only two machines running Linux and no desire to get any more. I have four macs and twenty five PCs. The reason for the discrepancy in book sales? I can figure out what I want to do in Windows very easily with no books. If I forget a command, I'll probably find it just by clicking on menus. And the Mac -- including the Objective C language and the Core Framework -- is so well documented by Apple themselves, most of the books I've seen are a step down in terms of accuracy and cogency. O'reilly's Carbon books are a good example.
I buy Linux books because I learned long ago that trying to deal with the hodge podge quick fix documentation of the majority of UNIX and Linux software packages is a time killer. If I have the option of buying a $35 book or spending three hours figuring out how to get Samba authentication from our AD server to work under PAM, guess which one I take?
If anything, book sales should measure usability trends, not market trends. If a program I write ever has a "Missing Manual" or "Inna Nutshell" published for it, I will consider this the biggest insult ever.
No, Apple still gives schools heavy discounts, but because the price of extremely basic PCs has fallen so much lower than extremely basic Apples, it's just not prudent to install Macs if your goal is to get the most machines for your money.
Of course, there are tons of other considerations, such as uptime, interoperability, ease of networking, availability of gimmick software, etc. But any way you look at it, when I was in school not so long ago, the school expected to pay $2000-$3000 per computer, and a lab of 20 machines was considered massive. Networking these would cost at least another grand, probably more. Nowadays, you can get 2-4 eMacs or 3-5 PCs for this price. Have schools really gotten so much space -- or budgets gotten so decimated -- that they opt for Microsoft-only to get 25% more computer?
Or, maybe, did the school in question get a hefty grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Muahbhahahahaha.
No...see, the prototype delivered has NOTHING to do with its final implementation. Prospective patenters would just use one of the many un-licensed programming languages out there. I can't even fathom the difficulty of building an interface in Fortran 77...but if it meant being able to receive an enforcable patent rather than a flabby, uesless copyright, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Plus, patents don't last as long as copyrights.
Those of us who have enough experience with gentoo to learn not to trust portage will probably have to worry. Emerge -up offers a "menu" of what's to be updated...
His point being:
Many Linux afficianados don't know the first thing about the software industry or how it works.
I thought this was fairly well communicated.
Yeah! Because when you view a website, you're ALSO viewing every website that's referred to that website!
Ha! I block the http protocol itself! Yes, it's gopher or nothing for me. I don't want any of this new technology enabling me to do what I want or something!
that microsoft merely wants to go through the motions of open source, while not being open at all.
Fucking duh. Microsoft doesn't want to be "OPEN" source any more than we Microsoft developers want to write the OS or programs we pay for. But they do want to benefit from getting eyeballs into their code, allowing for peace of mind an enhanced security. And we want to benefit from being able to finally figure out what's going on in Function X that's always been a bit twitchy.
If Microsoft can satisfy the security and customizability needs of their customers with Shared Source, then Shared Source WILL "work" for Microsoft. Not all software has to be Open Source, you know. There's this thing called "choice" which is quite popular with purchasers, and some of them may "choose" to go with a controlled source solution.
The hassle and lack of interest probably had nothing at all to do with the porting process. It's the testing and support process that's more costly. It means each new release must be tested and supported on yet another platform...and I'm sure the volume of OS/2 sales wouldn't come close to covering the costs of supporting it.
You'll notice that, quite often, companies that release software for Windows/Mac/Linux drop support for one or more of these after the product reaches a certain age. In fact, other than Blizzard, I can't think of a game manufacturer who treats either Linux or Mac with the same seriousness as the PC platform. UT2k4 was unplayable for the first few weeks after its release, due to a massive sound bug and only one guy supporting the entirety of the Mac population. It's still inordinately slow, though Ryan does great work for one guy.
OK. Just want to really quickly disspell some inaccuracies in your post, probably the result of believing Slashdot anti-Microsoft FUD.
try again - longhorn won't be out until at least 2007, and many are saying 2008 or later
Many on Slashdot are saying this -- many who have absolutely no frame of reference and no idea what they're talking about. Microsoft has always said Longhorn would be out in 2006. As far as I know, they're still saying 2006 and they're right on track for 2006, based on the work they've been showing. Expecting a machine to run two years from now is NOT absurd.
the "suggested" specs for a longhorn machine,
What you're talking about...the absurd specs of 4 GHz, terabyte of hard drive, etc...were disspelled as soon as Slashdot "reported" them. Right now, the recommended specs for a development build of Longhorn -- DEVELOPMENT, mind you, not "just running it" but actively writing, debugging and profiling software -- are 1.6GHz and 1GB of RAM, and suggested DirectX 9 support with 64MB of VRAM. Nearly identical speed to the Doom 3 requirements with a nice ram boost.
Let's just hope that DIII also runs on OGL for easy porting to MacOS and Linux.
It does. Linux and MacOS were specifically mentioned at all stages of development, but so was the Xbox, which I'm sure doesn't have as good OGL support as it has DirectX9.
But you write your own wrapper to the API when you make your engine. I'm sure API flexibility was Job 1 for Carmack et al.
I'm crossing my fingers that the Mac system requirements will say "G4 1.25 GHz." And I'm sure Id is too...Mac users are much less likely to dump their systems for a game, and 1.25 was the top end model from a year ago.