Drudge's reporting is fairly centrist. That's why I use him as my "quick jump off" source for news during the day.
However, the way he reports it is distinctly biased. He will link to a left leaning article with link text that derides the article or makes it out to be fantasy. Furthermore, he often links to a right leaning nutjob article with the OPPOSITE intent. Search the archives for his links to some of Coulter's nuttier editorials (like the one where she advocates going in to all Muslim nations and forcibly converting them to Christianity).
As a self proclaimed guy who thinks too much, I tend to ignore Drudge's spin in either direction (after all, one of the best editorials I've read in recent years was an indictment of the Iraq war written by Pat Freakin' Robinson, negatively linked from Drudge). But as is often claimed, 90% of the message is how you say it, and if you say "Look at this insanity from those liberal courts, upholding porno as free speech [appointed by Reagan and Bush]," many people will hear "insanity" and "porno" and never analyze it further.
Apple ceased using SDRAM with the G3, the last of which left production in September of last year. The G4 has had DDR since 2002, which, incidentally, is the same year Intel debuted it.
Wait -- you're claiming that slashdot, the community which buys every consumer device regardless of its original intent solely to take it apart and install Linux on it, knows the "true value of things?"
I'm sorry man, but in a capitalist society, the "true value of things" is set by how much people will pay for them. People will pay more than the selling price to get their hands on an iPod Mini. Most people won't even pay MSRP for a Creative Zen. This is because the iPod Mini is not, as you suggest, "worse" than most major mp3 players, but because it is better in every way the counts for a consumer device. It is easy and quick to learn, load and use. It has sufficiently long life and sufficiently good sound quality. It is small but sturdy and controllable with one hand. There are only two connectors to hook up and few external controls to break. It looks clean and nice(and isn't the least bit shiny, mind you). And it has a great warranty.
How is it worse than other players? Each of its competitors fails in one or more of the above strengths. Some have more features but a hideous interface. Some have a nice interface, but are too delicate. Only the cost, which enough people seem willing to pay to make it foolish for them to charge less, is consistantly "worse" than its competitors...but if you care so much about cost that you're willing to buy inferior goods, go get whatever RCA device they're selling at WalMart and give up the pretense that you want a hi-tech device. Price and quality are, aside from some really good deals, mutually exclusive -- because any company that cares enough to make real quality gear should be smart enough to charge for it.
I disagree. We have the source code. We can do what we like with it. We can hand each other anything we like. We can ask our contractors to do it for us.
The only thing we can't do is sell or license the source. Meaning that only our company can release binaries based on our hybrid codebase. You want to extend our product? You'll need to license the shared source, too. It's viral too I guess, but in a distinctly different way.
Apple's had a bunch of failures. It's called "research and development." Whenever things get too complex and wierd to support the current appbase, they get the kuybosh and whatever's left is folded into the mainstream. In fact, I'm sure in about ten years we'll start hearing tales of all the cool OSX/iLife/iTMS/iTunes related functionality we'll never see, because it was just too wierd.
By your argument, then, there's no difference between a Tyan server motherboard and a PC Chips. I mean, it does the same thing, right? No difference in essential functionality.
But there is something different. Something they don't list on the spec sheet, because they can't. Quality.
Apple can toot their horn however they like -- they're a different company offering a different product. Shit, one of the features in Tiger is "improved SMB" support...can you tell me which OS had that first? As for the multitasking dig...cooperative and preemptive multitasking are two separate and valid ways of performing the same task. In an ideal world, where you could rely on the foreground app always being well written and knowing to execute background tasks during halt cycles, cooperative multitasking worked quite well. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal.
I think during the 1990s, most of Apples' choices were merely "do the opposite of the mainstream." So we got RISC instead of CISC, SCSI instead of IDE, PCI instead of AGP, a single mouse button paradigm, ADP instead of serial, etc. Everybody else did preemptive, so apple went cooperative. All about thinking different(ly) I guess.
NEWSFLASH!!! Most consumer goods come out of the same plants as other goods. And yet, the quality is vastly different between them. The VALUE is in the design, not just of the outside, but of the inside. If you spec out a monitor with substandard parts in an inefficient layout, your Chinese fab will deliver a monitor with those parts in that layout whether it's right or not. After all, they have your reconditioning contract, too.
Take the hook off a Mac desktop and compare the internals to any PC desktop. Looks the same -- from three feet away. Get any closer and you realize how different the "commodities" really are.
If you don't care about such things, fine. Use what you want to use. Just realize that you can throw together eggs, ham and butter and still make a shitty omelette.
Really? Abandoning the midrange never hurt BMW, Rolex or Tiffany's.
And Apple didn't abandon the midrange. They keep reducing the price on last year's best until it's at the midrange level. I can't speak for their LCD prices ( I dunno what a good price is for an LCD with the warranty, connector, refresh rate, footprint, power draw, resolution and viewing angle of a mac LCD ), but their laptops and desktops are very competetively priced. Not "cheap," certainly not on par with slim margin commodities market PC offerings that you might find at New Egg, but comparable with what you'd get from other sources.
Even so, innovation drives prices down, not vica versa. There is no reason to charge less for high end goods unless there is a HIGHER end good people care putting their money towards. And since the demand for things like "big fucking LCDs" exists regardless of the price, Apple can almost print their own money with this stuff.
What, you mean like the indexing of all content based on meta data?
Of course, Longhorn's implementation of this by filesystem is completely different from Apple's implementation of it (creation of XML files which are then compiled into a fast, easy to read database)...but the end result will be transparent to the user. It's a chicken-and-egg thing. Apple started indexing content by metadata in Sherlock and the iLife apps. Microsoft says, "yeah, well we're gonna build it into our OS!" So Apple breaks out the Sherlock system and integrates it into the GUI...thus making it LOOK like an OS.
Off topic, check out which site they chose for the screenshot of RSS in Safari. Cowboy Neal is famous once again!
Somebody as bit as Microsoft *IS* getting behind it. Specifically, Microsoft themselves. They're slowly rebuilding the OS and their applications in.NET, using managed code and protected memory and forcing others to do the same.
And it's a great idea, too! Let's extrapolate it, and have gun manufacturers asking gun owners to get safeties for their fingers. After all, it's not the gun's problem if you've got shaky hands! It's not the car's problem if the road is icy and people don't know how to pump the brakes...let's get rid of ABS!
Seriously...if after soo many years and soo many exploits programmers still haven't got it, they probably never will -- they'll just ignore the warning or throw in lip service methods (the way some Java developers perform exception handling by declaring all methods throws Exception). I've even heard people use the automatic bounds checking in C# or Java as an argument against them. Never mind that bounds checking is optimized to be predictive by the JIT, so it is rarely the cause of a bottleneck. When developers are so stupid that they consider essential security a bottleneck -- and the feature is trivial to add in hardware without slowing down I/O -- add the failsafe and be done with it. At worst, the bounds get checked twice, and that's not a bad thing.
IDEs for both Visual C++ and VB for CE 4.0 Pocket PC 2000/2003 are free-as-in-beer. The new CE 5.0/CE.NET tools are for-pay, but only because they're included with the REST of VS.NET.
The compilers and SDKs for CE and Pocket PC always have been and still are completely free (again, as in beer) with free documentation and great examples.
No, it doesn't. You've come to assume open implies free because this is often the case with OSS, but it doesn't. Remember, there are at least three definitions of the word free, and Open only applies to one of them.
Free means "not for charge." Shared Source is NOT free of charge. Free means "in the wild." Shared source is NOT in the wild. It is only available for pay and you can't change it and put your code back on the server. It is, essentially, consume-only source. Free means "unrestricted." This is where the Open comes in. Shared Source now allows you unrestricted use of the code, wheras before it was basically only useful as an example. Find a bug? You can fix it -- you can give it to your customers -- you just can't REPLACE the one available from Microsoft. This ensures that the MS codebase is managed by MS, thus allowing them to warranty it. A very different model from that of the GPL, but I can see validity in it.
As for there being no community -- it is again your implication that all communities must free as well as open. I'm a member of several communities of Microsoft developers, some of which as open as you expect it, and others of which are only accessible if you are a customer. Is it a community? Yes, it is a group of developers working together and sharing code. It is open? It's "open" to anybody who pays for the software...it doesn't cost extra to join in discussions, read posts or take examples. But it's not "open" to non-customers who want to come in, grab source code, and contribute nothing to the development cost of the source. Obviously, they have to keep out people who don't have the right to view the source. But once you obtain that right, you are unrestricted in your use of it.
Remember: the people in your town are a community. I'm not a member. If I moved to your town, I would be. Does this mean your town isn't "open?" Or does it mean that sometimes communities have membership requirements?
Really, it's a communal license. Communism is inherently philosophical, economical and political (hence the -ism). The GPL is not inherently none of these, though many people certainly treat it that way. A communal license would mean that all changes are for the good of the community, but that all changes are also the property of the community.
Not that it matters. The model you describe is not appealing to all software companies. For one thing, it means that each new installation of your software would need to be completely custom, raising the pricetag. For another, people don't like to pay for "services." They like to pay for products. Products are usually cheaper, besides -- by generalizing the code, you're able to install and support the same binary for many different systems, reducing the cost to support and thus the selling cost. By eliminating the ability to release the software as a product, you're essentially reducing the size of your potential market while increasing the amount of work.
Of course, if your market already *IS* in services, as in the case with IBM and Sun, then Open Source makes perfect sense. For the rest of us...it's just one more licensing hassle. Don't tell me how I can use a toolkit and then tell me it's free. From a business standpoint, I'm better off going with a heavy handed license (like LeadTools) that gives me no restrictions on commercial use than having to tiptoe around a community.
If you're really talking about Windows CE, you're probably right. I guess this is sort of confusing to outsiders, but Win CE != PocketPC. CE is a kernel slash toolkit intended for all embedded devices that lacks a lot of the higher level management functions in PocketPC.
PocketPC on the other hand, is an OS for consumer devices. At its core is CE. Besides the basics of program installation and process management, I'm not sure what's different between the two. But they are NOT the same platform, and haven't been since (I think) 2000.
If you were to write a program "for CE devices," your market would be limited to hackers, embedded users and those people who owned the Casio BE 300. If you wrote a program for PocketPC, you'd have a massive market. So if you're a software company looking to expand into the embedded market, your choices are: write a consumer app for Pocket PC, or write a useful utility app for other embedded software companies.
This is some FUD. You do not *need* to use Microsoft anything if you develop for CE...there are several third party toolkits as well as the Java Micro Edition.
However, Microsoft's tools are very good, and have classically cut develoment time significantly. We have one guy working in CE.NET doing the work that three guys did for our Palm OS port. Is that worth a one time charge of $995? Sure is.
3dFx's drivers were always terrible compared to nVidia's, partly because of the way they treated 3d and 2d as two separate devices. Which in the early days of P&P, when most people still had a ton of ISA and non-bus mastering devices, adding a Voodoo card to a system that already had a sound card, 4 IDE channels, serial ports, USB and an ethernet card meant juggling a bunch of settings in Device Mangler. Furthermore, I saw my share of screw-ups in the video overlay code, occasionally resulting in a ghost image from a game that had crashed being overlayed over all black text on the screen. Oh, and if you wanted to use 3d in a window, forget about it. May as well just reboot the machine and get it over with.
But one of the keys to their death in my opinion was the announcement that they wouldn't be supporting legacy products in Windows 2000. They took the position that the NT kernel was for BUSINESS only, at a time when many gamers were looking to drop the memory leaks and chronic stability issues of the DOS-based kernel in Windows 98. Shit, for a while the only thing keeping me from using full time Windows NT was the lack of directx 3d support. And here's a company telling me I didn't WANT 3d support?
Screw that. NVidia had working 3d drivers a few weeks after windows 2000's release (if I remember, the ones that shipped with the original win2k didn't have 3d, but updating them was a snap).
Slashdot Mirror
No, but plenty of MLM companies are doing far worse: they're getting millions of people to PAY THEM to advertise their product.
Especially since it's in the box in the basement right now
Come on. We all know "security through obscurity" doesn't work.
Drudge's reporting is fairly centrist. That's why I use him as my "quick jump off" source for news during the day.
However, the way he reports it is distinctly biased. He will link to a left leaning article with link text that derides the article or makes it out to be fantasy. Furthermore, he often links to a right leaning nutjob article with the OPPOSITE intent. Search the archives for his links to some of Coulter's nuttier editorials (like the one where she advocates going in to all Muslim nations and forcibly converting them to Christianity).
As a self proclaimed guy who thinks too much, I tend to ignore Drudge's spin in either direction (after all, one of the best editorials I've read in recent years was an indictment of the Iraq war written by Pat Freakin' Robinson, negatively linked from Drudge). But as is often claimed, 90% of the message is how you say it, and if you say "Look at this insanity from those liberal courts, upholding porno as free speech [appointed by Reagan and Bush]," many people will hear "insanity" and "porno" and never analyze it further.
That's okay. Apparently, you can't make all that much money off Open Source products, either.
No, it's like taking your telephone number with you when you quit your provider.
I think this is a great idea which, while taking some doing to correctly route, will result in far less work for people moving ISPs.
Apple ceased using SDRAM with the G3, the last of which left production in September of last year. The G4 has had DDR since 2002, which, incidentally, is the same year Intel debuted it.
NEXT!
Wait -- you're claiming that slashdot, the community which buys every consumer device regardless of its original intent solely to take it apart and install Linux on it, knows the "true value of things?"
I'm sorry man, but in a capitalist society, the "true value of things" is set by how much people will pay for them. People will pay more than the selling price to get their hands on an iPod Mini. Most people won't even pay MSRP for a Creative Zen. This is because the iPod Mini is not, as you suggest, "worse" than most major mp3 players, but because it is better in every way the counts for a consumer device. It is easy and quick to learn, load and use. It has sufficiently long life and sufficiently good sound quality. It is small but sturdy and controllable with one hand. There are only two connectors to hook up and few external controls to break. It looks clean and nice(and isn't the least bit shiny, mind you). And it has a great warranty.
How is it worse than other players? Each of its competitors fails in one or more of the above strengths. Some have more features but a hideous interface. Some have a nice interface, but are too delicate. Only the cost, which enough people seem willing to pay to make it foolish for them to charge less, is consistantly "worse" than its competitors...but if you care so much about cost that you're willing to buy inferior goods, go get whatever RCA device they're selling at WalMart and give up the pretense that you want a hi-tech device. Price and quality are, aside from some really good deals, mutually exclusive -- because any company that cares enough to make real quality gear should be smart enough to charge for it.
I disagree. We have the source code. We can do what we like with it. We can hand each other anything we like. We can ask our contractors to do it for us.
The only thing we can't do is sell or license the source. Meaning that only our company can release binaries based on our hybrid codebase. You want to extend our product? You'll need to license the shared source, too. It's viral too I guess, but in a distinctly different way.
Apple's had a bunch of failures. It's called "research and development." Whenever things get too complex and wierd to support the current appbase, they get the kuybosh and whatever's left is folded into the mainstream. In fact, I'm sure in about ten years we'll start hearing tales of all the cool OSX/iLife/iTMS/iTunes related functionality we'll never see, because it was just too wierd.
By your argument, then, there's no difference between a Tyan server motherboard and a PC Chips. I mean, it does the same thing, right? No difference in essential functionality.
But there is something different. Something they don't list on the spec sheet, because they can't. Quality.
These guys, among others, would be shocked to hear that it's impossible to build an x86 OS based on a VM.
Apple can toot their horn however they like -- they're a different company offering a different product. Shit, one of the features in Tiger is "improved SMB" support...can you tell me which OS had that first? As for the multitasking dig...cooperative and preemptive multitasking are two separate and valid ways of performing the same task. In an ideal world, where you could rely on the foreground app always being well written and knowing to execute background tasks during halt cycles, cooperative multitasking worked quite well. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal.
I think during the 1990s, most of Apples' choices were merely "do the opposite of the mainstream." So we got RISC instead of CISC, SCSI instead of IDE, PCI instead of AGP, a single mouse button paradigm, ADP instead of serial, etc. Everybody else did preemptive, so apple went cooperative. All about thinking different(ly) I guess.
NEWSFLASH!!! Most consumer goods come out of the same plants as other goods. And yet, the quality is vastly different between them. The VALUE is in the design, not just of the outside, but of the inside. If you spec out a monitor with substandard parts in an inefficient layout, your Chinese fab will deliver a monitor with those parts in that layout whether it's right or not. After all, they have your reconditioning contract, too.
Take the hook off a Mac desktop and compare the internals to any PC desktop. Looks the same -- from three feet away. Get any closer and you realize how different the "commodities" really are.
If you don't care about such things, fine. Use what you want to use. Just realize that you can throw together eggs, ham and butter and still make a shitty omelette.
Really? Abandoning the midrange never hurt BMW, Rolex or Tiffany's.
And Apple didn't abandon the midrange. They keep reducing the price on last year's best until it's at the midrange level. I can't speak for their LCD prices ( I dunno what a good price is for an LCD with the warranty, connector, refresh rate, footprint, power draw, resolution and viewing angle of a mac LCD ), but their laptops and desktops are very competetively priced. Not "cheap," certainly not on par with slim margin commodities market PC offerings that you might find at New Egg, but comparable with what you'd get from other sources.
Even so, innovation drives prices down, not vica versa. There is no reason to charge less for high end goods unless there is a HIGHER end good people care putting their money towards. And since the demand for things like "big fucking LCDs" exists regardless of the price, Apple can almost print their own money with this stuff.
If Slashdot thinks that nobody will buy it, it is almost guaranteed that the display will be on backorder for the next six months.
This is because Slashdot is a community for people who don't realize that "doing something nobody else does" is worth it to many consumers.
What, you mean like the indexing of all content based on meta data?
Of course, Longhorn's implementation of this by filesystem is completely different from Apple's implementation of it (creation of XML files which are then compiled into a fast, easy to read database)...but the end result will be transparent to the user. It's a chicken-and-egg thing. Apple started indexing content by metadata in Sherlock and the iLife apps. Microsoft says, "yeah, well we're gonna build it into our OS!" So Apple breaks out the Sherlock system and integrates it into the GUI...thus making it LOOK like an OS.
Off topic, check out which site they chose for the screenshot of RSS in Safari. Cowboy Neal is famous once again!
Somebody as bit as Microsoft *IS* getting behind it. Specifically, Microsoft themselves. They're slowly rebuilding the OS and their applications in .NET, using managed code and protected memory and forcing others to do the same.
And it's a great idea, too! Let's extrapolate it, and have gun manufacturers asking gun owners to get safeties for their fingers. After all, it's not the gun's problem if you've got shaky hands! It's not the car's problem if the road is icy and people don't know how to pump the brakes...let's get rid of ABS!
Seriously...if after soo many years and soo many exploits programmers still haven't got it, they probably never will -- they'll just ignore the warning or throw in lip service methods (the way some Java developers perform exception handling by declaring all methods throws Exception). I've even heard people use the automatic bounds checking in C# or Java as an argument against them. Never mind that bounds checking is optimized to be predictive by the JIT, so it is rarely the cause of a bottleneck. When developers are so stupid that they consider essential security a bottleneck -- and the feature is trivial to add in hardware without slowing down I/O -- add the failsafe and be done with it. At worst, the bounds get checked twice, and that's not a bad thing.
IDEs for both Visual C++ and VB for CE 4.0 Pocket PC 2000/2003 are free-as-in-beer. The new CE 5.0/CE.NET tools are for-pay, but only because they're included with the REST of VS.NET.
The compilers and SDKs for CE and Pocket PC always have been and still are completely free (again, as in beer) with free documentation and great examples.
Open implies free
No, it doesn't. You've come to assume open implies free because this is often the case with OSS, but it doesn't. Remember, there are at least three definitions of the word free, and Open only applies to one of them.
Free means "not for charge." Shared Source is NOT free of charge.
Free means "in the wild." Shared source is NOT in the wild. It is only available for pay and you can't change it and put your code back on the server. It is, essentially, consume-only source.
Free means "unrestricted." This is where the Open comes in. Shared Source now allows you unrestricted use of the code, wheras before it was basically only useful as an example. Find a bug? You can fix it -- you can give it to your customers -- you just can't REPLACE the one available from Microsoft. This ensures that the MS codebase is managed by MS, thus allowing them to warranty it. A very different model from that of the GPL, but I can see validity in it.
As for there being no community -- it is again your implication that all communities must free as well as open. I'm a member of several communities of Microsoft developers, some of which as open as you expect it, and others of which are only accessible if you are a customer. Is it a community? Yes, it is a group of developers working together and sharing code. It is open? It's "open" to anybody who pays for the software...it doesn't cost extra to join in discussions, read posts or take examples. But it's not "open" to non-customers who want to come in, grab source code, and contribute nothing to the development cost of the source. Obviously, they have to keep out people who don't have the right to view the source. But once you obtain that right, you are unrestricted in your use of it.
Remember: the people in your town are a community. I'm not a member. If I moved to your town, I would be. Does this mean your town isn't "open?" Or does it mean that sometimes communities have membership requirements?
Really, it's a communal license. Communism is inherently philosophical, economical and political (hence the -ism). The GPL is not inherently none of these, though many people certainly treat it that way. A communal license would mean that all changes are for the good of the community, but that all changes are also the property of the community.
Not that it matters. The model you describe is not appealing to all software companies. For one thing, it means that each new installation of your software would need to be completely custom, raising the pricetag. For another, people don't like to pay for "services." They like to pay for products. Products are usually cheaper, besides -- by generalizing the code, you're able to install and support the same binary for many different systems, reducing the cost to support and thus the selling cost. By eliminating the ability to release the software as a product, you're essentially reducing the size of your potential market while increasing the amount of work.
Of course, if your market already *IS* in services, as in the case with IBM and Sun, then Open Source makes perfect sense. For the rest of us...it's just one more licensing hassle. Don't tell me how I can use a toolkit and then tell me it's free. From a business standpoint, I'm better off going with a heavy handed license (like LeadTools) that gives me no restrictions on commercial use than having to tiptoe around a community.
If you're really talking about Windows CE, you're probably right. I guess this is sort of confusing to outsiders, but Win CE != PocketPC. CE is a kernel slash toolkit intended for all embedded devices that lacks a lot of the higher level management functions in PocketPC.
PocketPC on the other hand, is an OS for consumer devices. At its core is CE. Besides the basics of program installation and process management, I'm not sure what's different between the two. But they are NOT the same platform, and haven't been since (I think) 2000.
If you were to write a program "for CE devices," your market would be limited to hackers, embedded users and those people who owned the Casio BE 300. If you wrote a program for PocketPC, you'd have a massive market. So if you're a software company looking to expand into the embedded market, your choices are: write a consumer app for Pocket PC, or write a useful utility app for other embedded software companies.
This is some FUD. You do not *need* to use Microsoft anything if you develop for CE...there are several third party toolkits as well as the Java Micro Edition.
However, Microsoft's tools are very good, and have classically cut develoment time significantly. We have one guy working in CE.NET doing the work that three guys did for our Palm OS port. Is that worth a one time charge of $995? Sure is.
3dFx's drivers were always terrible compared to nVidia's, partly because of the way they treated 3d and 2d as two separate devices. Which in the early days of P&P, when most people still had a ton of ISA and non-bus mastering devices, adding a Voodoo card to a system that already had a sound card, 4 IDE channels, serial ports, USB and an ethernet card meant juggling a bunch of settings in Device Mangler. Furthermore, I saw my share of screw-ups in the video overlay code, occasionally resulting in a ghost image from a game that had crashed being overlayed over all black text on the screen. Oh, and if you wanted to use 3d in a window, forget about it. May as well just reboot the machine and get it over with.
But one of the keys to their death in my opinion was the announcement that they wouldn't be supporting legacy products in Windows 2000. They took the position that the NT kernel was for BUSINESS only, at a time when many gamers were looking to drop the memory leaks and chronic stability issues of the DOS-based kernel in Windows 98. Shit, for a while the only thing keeping me from using full time Windows NT was the lack of directx 3d support. And here's a company telling me I didn't WANT 3d support?
Screw that. NVidia had working 3d drivers a few weeks after windows 2000's release (if I remember, the ones that shipped with the original win2k didn't have 3d, but updating them was a snap).