Wow. That was a quick read, and you know what? Assuming that this guy's completely on the level (and considering his pro-IP stance, I'm willing to do that), SCO really has fuck-all. Up until now, I was ready to give them a chance, mostly due to their sabre rattling about protecting the little guy from the cloning behavior inherent in OSS. But Davis' observations, if substantiated, prove exactly what the OSS community was talking about: the code similarities are largely trivial, and SCO's "code theft" claims are bunkum.
Whether they still have any patents or copyrights on the functionality of UNIX remains to be seen, and such a case wouldn't necessarily NEED code theft to go forward. Any idiot can see that Linux is a UNIX clone -- the question at that point would be the legality of the cloning process and the layers of licensing that surround it.
This Windows PC I'm on right now has been running for 5 months without a reboot. My Win2k machine at home hasn't been reboot since last Christmas. There's been no slowdown, no problems I couldn't clean up. I'm sorry your mileage varies, but it's entirely due to your software loadout. Do you maybe have a lot of hardware tweaks running on it, or such? I had some trouble keeping high uptimes with Win98 and again when I was really trying to push 5% performance enhancements. Since I gave up (what's the point when you're running a three year old machine anyway), I've had plenty stability. I don't even know where my Win2k install disk is, I haven't needed it in so long.
And speaking as somebody in the software industry, the whole "restart your computer" thing has been a support prevention dialog for YEARS. I just wrote an installer for our software, which doesn't write ANYTHING to the system directories, and was told to put a restart button on the last page. Head of support wants to eliminate the variable of other software before people open ours for the first time.
If people made games for Linux, you'd see more that required reboots. Heck, if people needed to alter system files at all, you'd see reboot demands. You can't even change video settings in KDE without restarting the X-server (and thus losing the context of your session). How's that better than rebooting?
Uh, retard? I just SAID that I, a lowly developer, can fix the majority of such problems myself with no IT department. It is EASY shit. A simple understanding of what important services do and how to use Task Manager is all you need.
For example, the other day my machine stopped looking up domain names. I went into services and restarted the DNS client. Machine worked fine. As another example, my machine used to get really slow in the middle of the day. I opened up Task Manager, and notice Inotask.exe was using 99% of the processor. Stopping it was as easy as clicking the End Process button (and fixing it permanently took little effort, just had to turn off virus checking during work hours).
Neither of these is the LEAST bit different from how you'd solve a problem with Linux...except that the explanations of what programs and services do are much better and more immediate in Windows.
Really? What can I do in a single day to impress upon foreign nations critical of our government's activities my own innocence in said policies, so terrorists will say "We must bring down America -- except dasmegabyte, who proved to use that one day he's pretty cool."
What can I do, in one day, to get GE to clean the Hudson River of the chemicals they dumped into it that prevent me from eating the beautiful but deadly catfish I pull out of it?
What can I do, in one day, to ensure that the thousands of dollars I have taken out of my paycheck every year for Social Security will come back to me when I'm old enough to collect it?
What can I do, in one day, to protect the brother the Air Force sent to Qatar, or the four friends I have getting shelled in the desert of Iraq?
And what can I do, in one day, to ensure that my government isn't using old superstitions and skewed information to make policy decisions that effect my access to possibly beneficial treatments and my protection from dangerous environmental hazards?
Shit, man. We don't vote for a president to do shit we can do ourselves. We vote for one for stuff we can't do a damn thing about on our own.
Comparing Windows 98 -- a 6 year old deprecated piece of windowing software running on old DOS technology -- to modern Linux is completely unfair. Better to compare DOS 7 to Linux, and WIndows 98 to an X-server and user environment from 1998. You'll probably discover that neither Linux nor DOS ever crashes...but the X-server crashes instantly like it's going out of style, while Windows 98 will get slower and slower until it needs to be restarted. Both are unacceptable but then again, both have been FIXED in later versions. Oh, and you *CAN* restart Win98 without rebooting the machine. You *CAN* still drop to DOS and restart Windows. It's just hidden from you -- and it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
Compare apples to apples, man. Modern Linux to Windows XP.
This brings up an interesting point. On Windows, it's customary to reboot rather than try and fix a problem like a stopped service or a locked up program hogging resources. On Linux, such an event would drive the user into the command line, and a couple of ps and kill commands later the machine would be fine. Of course, modern Windows makes it pretty easy to visually detect and heal such failures, but I'm betting a lot of people just don't know how. I mean, if you already know a solution (reboot), why would you learn a new one?
I haven't reboot my Windows session in weeks. But I have to clear out a misbehaving program nearly every day. This isn't Windows' fault, I've seen the same shit under Linux and OS X as well...people just don't put a lot of effort into streamling the CLOSING of their programs. I mean, if you get an exception at that point, who cares, it's not interrupting the flow. So I'm sure there's a lot of sloppy shutdown code, resulting in the occasional zombie or unclaimed handle. Rebooting will definitely fix this...but goddamn it, I keep 10-15 programs running with open files at all times. I don't have the time to reboot and open them all up again, even though my boot time is pretty quick. So, I had to learn how to heal the machine.
I think it's more an issue of the amount needed to produce the desired effect. To get a decent buzz on, I need to drink three 12 oz cans or two 16 oz pints of the average 5% alcohol beer. This is 510 calories, the equivalent of eating a large order of French Fries. Light beer is 330 calories, the equivalent of a medium order of french fries. Now, to maintain said buzz, I would need to consume a minimum of 16 oz of beer per hour, which means three hours of drinking is the equivalent of a McDonalds extra-value meal.
On the other hand, I only need to drink 15 oz of wine to get the same buzz. Wine only has 106 calories per glass, so I'd be about as well off with wine as I would with light beer, though I'd probably enjoy it more as light beer doesn't hit the spot the way nice glass of Merlot would. Shit, drinking a whole bottle of wine is only 500 calories. So drink up, man...5 drinks for the caloric intake of 3, that's my idea of a party.
I dunno. I think the interface is clean, and I like that the graphics are down the side. Most of the time when I search google, I wind up switching to images.google to see what's up as well. Sometimes I hit up froogle to check prices on things I'm looking for.
Combining three searches in one easy-to-view interface is the same sort of revolution Google made over AltaVista.
This was 5 years ago that I worked in the labs, man. I would not let them use floppy disks with such options available; but many of these were not at the time. Even samba-on-unix was sort of a new idea at the time.
Either way, it's a matter of percentages. If 90% of your user base wants to use floppies, you use floppies. If 20% want floppies, and the rest don't care...you start restricting them.
Oh, and I did have to allow 5 1/4 discs. Which I didn't mind...5 1/4 discs rock. They have lesser magnetic density, meaning they were a lot more resistant to the sort of problems that plagued 3 1/5s. Stick one in an envelope in the back of your testbook and you didn't have to worry about it.
Heh. That's how things went down in our iMac lab (being that iMacs didn't come with floppy drives, anyway), but those users were generally smarter than your average graduate student anyway. ("Let's see...shorter wait to get a machine plus newer machines plus more software minus the second mouse button minus a little extra time to learn the OS equals an enhanced public computing experience...GOAL!")
Otherwise, we couldn't restrict floppy use...because acadmic computing, just like other IT departments, exists to serve its userbase. If the userbase wants to use floppies, it's up to us to educate and assist them in this process, not prevent them from doing it. That'd be like hiring a bodyguard who forced you to stay home all the time.
Everybody uses Access, which does what Hypercard did. Remember, these tools were Apple only; other people couldn't adopt it but they COULD clone the idea. Dylan, as well, came up with a ton of good ideas that were borrowed by modern IDEs...VS.NET has a class viewer which is essentally Dylan without the management, and Netbeans' document selector is, again, Dylan on steroids.
I should have mentioned this -- technologies that Apple selects that aren't available elsewhere can indeed die out. Open technologies Apple selects rarely do. I have high hopes for AAC, not so many for ALC.
Ostensibly, the difference is that Apple won't support your ram. Apple's high prices are generally due to their awesome guarantees and stellar support...they have to add in the annuitized cost of having to perform service or a recall, which I'm sure is expensive (they next day EVERYTHING, even those battery replacements)! If it costs $300 in shipping and labor costs to repair a single stick of ram, and there's a one-in-twenty chance that a piece of ram will develop a problem over the life of the warranty, you'd need to add $15 to the cost of the stick to cover this. This is a much greater cost to support than the ram companies have -- they don't have to deal with shipping, opening or diagnosing the machine, they just have to swap the product. Therefore, they don't have to charge as much for their "lifetime warranty."
Plus, a lot of times they can "get" the extra cost for their ram upgrades because people are buying the PC on a loan and want a single charge. Since there's such a low margin on ram anyway, why not let the people in the know order their ram from somewhere else and charge the others a price that makes it worth selling and installing the occasional ram upgrade.
If you don't want the guarantee, don't need the fast shipping or the assurance that it Will Not Fuck Up Your Machine, order your Apple computer from somewhere other than the Apple Store. There are tons of players in the Apple sales market that will stick on cutrate extended warranties, additional ram, free printers, discounted shipping, cool accesories, etc to get you to buy from them. They're forced by contract to not undersell Apple on identical loadouts, but they can play around with the default setup while keeping the same cost. Small Dog is notorious for this: exploiting their discount on aftermarket hardware to add-on to existing setups to bring them up to a higher level of value with a lower cost than apple, e.g. a 256 meg, 60 gig model of PowerBook upgraded with an additional stick of 256 and a bigger hard drive and then charging $100 less than Apple for the equivalent of the next model up.
Actually, it's been historically proven that the adoption of a format or technology by Apple is the first step to towards its success. I won't list them, because you know them, but they're numerous. It doesn't matter that Apple only has X% of the market (where X= a single digit number between 3 and 7 that changes depending how much the speaker hates Apple) -- the fact that they say "This format is pretty cool" gets PC and Linux authors who are fans of Apple to take another look at it, in an attempt to mooch off of Apple's trend radar.
FireFox has yet to prove itself in this respect. Give it another year or two (and let's see how it faces pressure from the next MS browser).
I use iChat on my mac, because I like the integration with Address Book. Trillian is good -- support for AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, MSN and when you add a contact from any of these, it adds it to the server list. Uses its own collapsable groups, so you can mix contacts from different messaging systems/IRC. The only problem with it is that it's heavily skinnable, so the interface is balls slow.
ATTN ALL UTILITY SOFTWARE AUTHORS: Microsoft/Apple/X.org is much, much better than you are at writing fast, responsive GUI hooks. Don't reinvent the wheel just so some clown can make his AIM client look like those screens in Star Trek. Use the default windowing API and be done with it, skinning is chicken legs.
Still worth a couple bucks though, if only for the fact that I can dock it to the side of the screen, put an extra teeny tiny skin on it (still rather have a standard window with an 8 pt font) and then show/hide it with a keyboard command. Really helps increase the screen real estate for my IDE (you can NEVER have enough real estate for an IDE, man, not even with that ridiculous new Apple monitor).
Signs don't help. For many people, it takes an accident to realize how stupid it is to keep the only copy of their 40 page doctoral thesis folded at the bottom of a purse. After that, they get a little nuts. This is where stories are useful. People come in, ask for some help, and while you're helping them out, tell them the Meat Grinder story. Or the story about the lady who lost her disc and closed without saving, meaning the only remaining copy of her thesis was currently printing on a dot matrix printer (which began to come out of alignment at page 5).
We used to (try) to train people to use their email account and their mainframe storage (which most people didn't even know they had) to save files to. Even set up Samba so users could mount their mainframe space as a drive and save directly to it. The Mainframe, we explained, was backed up incrementally throughout the day and periodically virus scanned. It couldn't be wrecked or stolen. It couldn't be read by other students unless you set it that way. It was like sealing your files in a sterile vault (which, indeed, was where the server was stored) and it was no harder than using a disk.
But most people just ignored us. After all, what could happen to the disk? It was inside of a little red plastic case with a metal shutter! Never mind that it was stuffed into crummy pockets or inside a backpack along with a collection of rare earth magnets...it was in a PLASTIC CASE!
A backup would have been of an older infected file which, in this case, would not have released the timed payload. I could also CLEAN the file without running the script.
Exporting to RTF is a ridiculous non-solution which doesn't preserve stylesheets or many of the other important features in MS Word. In the time it took to teach her to export to RTF, import back to word, and clean the file, you could just as easily taught her how to strip macros from a word file.
It doesn't matter anyway...the point is, she received no training and that wasn't her fault. She was dropped into a "do it yourself" environment and she did it poorly. Many people do, that's why it's so important to be trained or mentored.
The RIAA is doing the only thing that copyright owners CAN do to protect their copyrights: they're pursuing legal damages for material copied without permission. They don't know whether it's 13 year old girls or the fucking mafia...all they have is a list of IP addresses of people serving one or more copyrighted songs. What are they supposed to do when it turns out that some of these file sharers are young kids or grand parents or the handicapped? Say, "oops, sorry, you're allowed to infringe however you like, it's only infringement if you're a healthy white male aged 18-35?"
The RIAA is doing what I'd do if I saw a threat to my business: they're trying to curb the threat with the only means available to them by law. Complain about the cost if you like, or the tactics, or the copyright laws themselves, but you can't complain about them trying to protect their business in a legal way. That's ridiculous.
Just about as ridiculous as wishing for them to be inconvenienced by hackers, really. I mean, what you're talking about is called a protection racket in the Real World(tm), and it's fucking illegal.
I saw a few nasty viruses back in college...Empire Monkey was one, wrecked your MBR and just enough data to mean a reinstall was inevitable. One that manipulated the MBR and the lock-up bug on the Pentium processor. Finally, there was a notorious Word virus called Meat Grinder. Did nothing for the first few dozen saves, then overwrote your file on disk with complete gibberish.
Saw a graduate student reduced to sobbing over that last one...her teacher was a real prick and wouldn't take anything late for any reason and she had not been educated on the importance of multiple backups. It was 2 am the day before it was due and no amount of Norton Disk Doctor was going to save her (luckily, she'd been on a machine the day before and just shut it down, we had 13 of 20 pages autosaved). I had to call him the next day, and he didn't believe me. I wound up refering him to the head of academic computing, who essentially told the guy that this was the worst virus he'd ever seen and it would be utterly heartless not to give the girl an extension. Dr. Wolf was the MAN.
All of these spread via diskettes and public terminals. Be glad nobody's applied these concepts to an internet worm. We'd be fucked.
I used to use an encryption program that attempted to get around keystroke loggers...by remapping your keyboard when you were in the password box. A keystroke logger would see gobbeltygook...granted, it was a simple cipher, but since there isn't enough information in a single 16 character password to generate a key for such a cipher, it was still pretty secure.
I stopped using it when I got my mac, because built in AES-128 is just easier than mucking about with encrypted disk drivers and suchlike. I don't have that much to keep secure anyway...just some receipts, beer recipes and incriminating photos
Your post would be true if the dispute were over a business, and not over a name. Apple isn't using their business trademark to market their iTunes Music Store, not are they using the logo. They've been very careful to maintain the separation...if you go to the iTunes marketing page or the iTunes store itself, the Apple logo is nowhere to be seen -- except on links to their main page or on computer equipment.
It's an essential difference...it's a different functional arm of a larger company, the way NBC is a part of GE or Nullsoft is a part of AOL. Therefore, the issue in dispute is not whether Apple is wrong to have a music arm, but whether they did a good enough job abstracting said service from the name Apple to have there be little room for confusion between the two.
Incidentally, if Apple Corps. wanted to make computers and call them "The Beatle Computer," with no Apple logo on it, I'm sure that would be fine. We'll see if the courts agree.
Nobody with any sense at all is working on the Win 98 version of anything.
Supporting deprecated and crummy operating systems is asking for a support nightmare. You'd doubtless have to charge more than the cost of WinXP for it.
Sure it's infinitely large. It's also finitely dense. So we haven't quite filled it all yet. Some people might consider the effective universe to be just the space that's filled so far, but I think that's like calling a football field just the area surrounding the players before the snap.
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Wow. That was a quick read, and you know what? Assuming that this guy's completely on the level (and considering his pro-IP stance, I'm willing to do that), SCO really has fuck-all. Up until now, I was ready to give them a chance, mostly due to their sabre rattling about protecting the little guy from the cloning behavior inherent in OSS. But Davis' observations, if substantiated, prove exactly what the OSS community was talking about: the code similarities are largely trivial, and SCO's "code theft" claims are bunkum.
Whether they still have any patents or copyrights on the functionality of UNIX remains to be seen, and such a case wouldn't necessarily NEED code theft to go forward. Any idiot can see that Linux is a UNIX clone -- the question at that point would be the legality of the cloning process and the layers of licensing that surround it.
This Windows PC I'm on right now has been running for 5 months without a reboot. My Win2k machine at home hasn't been reboot since last Christmas. There's been no slowdown, no problems I couldn't clean up. I'm sorry your mileage varies, but it's entirely due to your software loadout. Do you maybe have a lot of hardware tweaks running on it, or such? I had some trouble keeping high uptimes with Win98 and again when I was really trying to push 5% performance enhancements. Since I gave up (what's the point when you're running a three year old machine anyway), I've had plenty stability. I don't even know where my Win2k install disk is, I haven't needed it in so long.
And speaking as somebody in the software industry, the whole "restart your computer" thing has been a support prevention dialog for YEARS. I just wrote an installer for our software, which doesn't write ANYTHING to the system directories, and was told to put a restart button on the last page. Head of support wants to eliminate the variable of other software before people open ours for the first time.
If people made games for Linux, you'd see more that required reboots. Heck, if people needed to alter system files at all, you'd see reboot demands. You can't even change video settings in KDE without restarting the X-server (and thus losing the context of your session). How's that better than rebooting?
Uh, retard? I just SAID that I, a lowly developer, can fix the majority of such problems myself with no IT department. It is EASY shit. A simple understanding of what important services do and how to use Task Manager is all you need.
For example, the other day my machine stopped looking up domain names. I went into services and restarted the DNS client. Machine worked fine. As another example, my machine used to get really slow in the middle of the day. I opened up Task Manager, and notice Inotask.exe was using 99% of the processor. Stopping it was as easy as clicking the End Process button (and fixing it permanently took little effort, just had to turn off virus checking during work hours).
Neither of these is the LEAST bit different from how you'd solve a problem with Linux...except that the explanations of what programs and services do are much better and more immediate in Windows.
Really? What can I do in a single day to impress upon foreign nations critical of our government's activities my own innocence in said policies, so terrorists will say "We must bring down America -- except dasmegabyte, who proved to use that one day he's pretty cool."
What can I do, in one day, to get GE to clean the Hudson River of the chemicals they dumped into it that prevent me from eating the beautiful but deadly catfish I pull out of it?
What can I do, in one day, to ensure that the thousands of dollars I have taken out of my paycheck every year for Social Security will come back to me when I'm old enough to collect it?
What can I do, in one day, to protect the brother the Air Force sent to Qatar, or the four friends I have getting shelled in the desert of Iraq?
And what can I do, in one day, to ensure that my government isn't using old superstitions and skewed information to make policy decisions that effect my access to possibly beneficial treatments and my protection from dangerous environmental hazards?
Shit, man. We don't vote for a president to do shit we can do ourselves. We vote for one for stuff we can't do a damn thing about on our own.
Comparing Windows 98 -- a 6 year old deprecated piece of windowing software running on old DOS technology -- to modern Linux is completely unfair. Better to compare DOS 7 to Linux, and WIndows 98 to an X-server and user environment from 1998. You'll probably discover that neither Linux nor DOS ever crashes...but the X-server crashes instantly like it's going out of style, while Windows 98 will get slower and slower until it needs to be restarted. Both are unacceptable but then again, both have been FIXED in later versions. Oh, and you *CAN* restart Win98 without rebooting the machine. You *CAN* still drop to DOS and restart Windows. It's just hidden from you -- and it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
Compare apples to apples, man. Modern Linux to Windows XP.
This brings up an interesting point. On Windows, it's customary to reboot rather than try and fix a problem like a stopped service or a locked up program hogging resources. On Linux, such an event would drive the user into the command line, and a couple of ps and kill commands later the machine would be fine. Of course, modern Windows makes it pretty easy to visually detect and heal such failures, but I'm betting a lot of people just don't know how. I mean, if you already know a solution (reboot), why would you learn a new one?
I haven't reboot my Windows session in weeks. But I have to clear out a misbehaving program nearly every day. This isn't Windows' fault, I've seen the same shit under Linux and OS X as well...people just don't put a lot of effort into streamling the CLOSING of their programs. I mean, if you get an exception at that point, who cares, it's not interrupting the flow. So I'm sure there's a lot of sloppy shutdown code, resulting in the occasional zombie or unclaimed handle. Rebooting will definitely fix this...but goddamn it, I keep 10-15 programs running with open files at all times. I don't have the time to reboot and open them all up again, even though my boot time is pretty quick. So, I had to learn how to heal the machine.
I think it's more an issue of the amount needed to produce the desired effect. To get a decent buzz on, I need to drink three 12 oz cans or two 16 oz pints of the average 5% alcohol beer. This is 510 calories, the equivalent of eating a large order of French Fries. Light beer is 330 calories, the equivalent of a medium order of french fries. Now, to maintain said buzz, I would need to consume a minimum of 16 oz of beer per hour, which means three hours of drinking is the equivalent of a McDonalds extra-value meal.
On the other hand, I only need to drink 15 oz of wine to get the same buzz. Wine only has 106 calories per glass, so I'd be about as well off with wine as I would with light beer, though I'd probably enjoy it more as light beer doesn't hit the spot the way nice glass of Merlot would. Shit, drinking a whole bottle of wine is only 500 calories. So drink up, man...5 drinks for the caloric intake of 3, that's my idea of a party.
I dunno. I think the interface is clean, and I like that the graphics are down the side. Most of the time when I search google, I wind up switching to images.google to see what's up as well. Sometimes I hit up froogle to check prices on things I'm looking for.
Combining three searches in one easy-to-view interface is the same sort of revolution Google made over AltaVista.
Hey, me too. Plus it offered a deal on my upcoming autobiography (Das Megabyte: Anatomy of a Troll) if I bought it with Bill Gate's The Road Ahead.
This was 5 years ago that I worked in the labs, man. I would not let them use floppy disks with such options available; but many of these were not at the time. Even samba-on-unix was sort of a new idea at the time.
Either way, it's a matter of percentages. If 90% of your user base wants to use floppies, you use floppies. If 20% want floppies, and the rest don't care...you start restricting them.
Oh, and I did have to allow 5 1/4 discs. Which I didn't mind...5 1/4 discs rock. They have lesser magnetic density, meaning they were a lot more resistant to the sort of problems that plagued 3 1/5s. Stick one in an envelope in the back of your testbook and you didn't have to worry about it.
Heh. That's how things went down in our iMac lab (being that iMacs didn't come with floppy drives, anyway), but those users were generally smarter than your average graduate student anyway. ("Let's see...shorter wait to get a machine plus newer machines plus more software minus the second mouse button minus a little extra time to learn the OS equals an enhanced public computing experience...GOAL!")
Otherwise, we couldn't restrict floppy use...because acadmic computing, just like other IT departments, exists to serve its userbase. If the userbase wants to use floppies, it's up to us to educate and assist them in this process, not prevent them from doing it. That'd be like hiring a bodyguard who forced you to stay home all the time.
Everybody uses Access, which does what Hypercard did. Remember, these tools were Apple only; other people couldn't adopt it but they COULD clone the idea. Dylan, as well, came up with a ton of good ideas that were borrowed by modern IDEs...VS.NET has a class viewer which is essentally Dylan without the management, and Netbeans' document selector is, again, Dylan on steroids.
I should have mentioned this -- technologies that Apple selects that aren't available elsewhere can indeed die out. Open technologies Apple selects rarely do. I have high hopes for AAC, not so many for ALC.
Ostensibly, the difference is that Apple won't support your ram. Apple's high prices are generally due to their awesome guarantees and stellar support...they have to add in the annuitized cost of having to perform service or a recall, which I'm sure is expensive (they next day EVERYTHING, even those battery replacements)! If it costs $300 in shipping and labor costs to repair a single stick of ram, and there's a one-in-twenty chance that a piece of ram will develop a problem over the life of the warranty, you'd need to add $15 to the cost of the stick to cover this. This is a much greater cost to support than the ram companies have -- they don't have to deal with shipping, opening or diagnosing the machine, they just have to swap the product. Therefore, they don't have to charge as much for their "lifetime warranty."
Plus, a lot of times they can "get" the extra cost for their ram upgrades because people are buying the PC on a loan and want a single charge. Since there's such a low margin on ram anyway, why not let the people in the know order their ram from somewhere else and charge the others a price that makes it worth selling and installing the occasional ram upgrade.
If you don't want the guarantee, don't need the fast shipping or the assurance that it Will Not Fuck Up Your Machine, order your Apple computer from somewhere other than the Apple Store. There are tons of players in the Apple sales market that will stick on cutrate extended warranties, additional ram, free printers, discounted shipping, cool accesories, etc to get you to buy from them. They're forced by contract to not undersell Apple on identical loadouts, but they can play around with the default setup while keeping the same cost. Small Dog is notorious for this: exploiting their discount on aftermarket hardware to add-on to existing setups to bring them up to a higher level of value with a lower cost than apple, e.g. a 256 meg, 60 gig model of PowerBook upgraded with an additional stick of 256 and a bigger hard drive and then charging $100 less than Apple for the equivalent of the next model up.
Technically speaking, there wouldn't have been such dipshits until he was bored.
Incidentally, the quality of flames here is going down. You cats have to try harder.
Actually, it's been historically proven that the adoption of a format or technology by Apple is the first step to towards its success. I won't list them, because you know them, but they're numerous. It doesn't matter that Apple only has X% of the market (where X= a single digit number between 3 and 7 that changes depending how much the speaker hates Apple) -- the fact that they say "This format is pretty cool" gets PC and Linux authors who are fans of Apple to take another look at it, in an attempt to mooch off of Apple's trend radar.
FireFox has yet to prove itself in this respect. Give it another year or two (and let's see how it faces pressure from the next MS browser).
I use iChat on my mac, because I like the integration with Address Book. Trillian is good -- support for AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, MSN and when you add a contact from any of these, it adds it to the server list. Uses its own collapsable groups, so you can mix contacts from different messaging systems/IRC. The only problem with it is that it's heavily skinnable, so the interface is balls slow.
ATTN ALL UTILITY SOFTWARE AUTHORS: Microsoft/Apple/X.org is much, much better than you are at writing fast, responsive GUI hooks. Don't reinvent the wheel just so some clown can make his AIM client look like those screens in Star Trek. Use the default windowing API and be done with it, skinning is chicken legs.
Still worth a couple bucks though, if only for the fact that I can dock it to the side of the screen, put an extra teeny tiny skin on it (still rather have a standard window with an 8 pt font) and then show/hide it with a keyboard command. Really helps increase the screen real estate for my IDE (you can NEVER have enough real estate for an IDE, man, not even with that ridiculous new Apple monitor).
Signs don't help. For many people, it takes an accident to realize how stupid it is to keep the only copy of their 40 page doctoral thesis folded at the bottom of a purse. After that, they get a little nuts. This is where stories are useful. People come in, ask for some help, and while you're helping them out, tell them the Meat Grinder story. Or the story about the lady who lost her disc and closed without saving, meaning the only remaining copy of her thesis was currently printing on a dot matrix printer (which began to come out of alignment at page 5).
We used to (try) to train people to use their email account and their mainframe storage (which most people didn't even know they had) to save files to. Even set up Samba so users could mount their mainframe space as a drive and save directly to it. The Mainframe, we explained, was backed up incrementally throughout the day and periodically virus scanned. It couldn't be wrecked or stolen. It couldn't be read by other students unless you set it that way. It was like sealing your files in a sterile vault (which, indeed, was where the server was stored) and it was no harder than using a disk.
But most people just ignored us. After all, what could happen to the disk? It was inside of a little red plastic case with a metal shutter! Never mind that it was stuffed into crummy pockets or inside a backpack along with a collection of rare earth magnets...it was in a PLASTIC CASE!
A backup would have been of an older infected file which, in this case, would not have released the timed payload. I could also CLEAN the file without running the script.
Exporting to RTF is a ridiculous non-solution which doesn't preserve stylesheets or many of the other important features in MS Word. In the time it took to teach her to export to RTF, import back to word, and clean the file, you could just as easily taught her how to strip macros from a word file.
It doesn't matter anyway...the point is, she received no training and that wasn't her fault. She was dropped into a "do it yourself" environment and she did it poorly. Many people do, that's why it's so important to be trained or mentored.
The RIAA is doing the only thing that copyright owners CAN do to protect their copyrights: they're pursuing legal damages for material copied without permission. They don't know whether it's 13 year old girls or the fucking mafia...all they have is a list of IP addresses of people serving one or more copyrighted songs. What are they supposed to do when it turns out that some of these file sharers are young kids or grand parents or the handicapped? Say, "oops, sorry, you're allowed to infringe however you like, it's only infringement if you're a healthy white male aged 18-35?"
The RIAA is doing what I'd do if I saw a threat to my business: they're trying to curb the threat with the only means available to them by law. Complain about the cost if you like, or the tactics, or the copyright laws themselves, but you can't complain about them trying to protect their business in a legal way. That's ridiculous.
Just about as ridiculous as wishing for them to be inconvenienced by hackers, really. I mean, what you're talking about is called a protection racket in the Real World(tm), and it's fucking illegal.
I saw a few nasty viruses back in college...Empire Monkey was one, wrecked your MBR and just enough data to mean a reinstall was inevitable. One that manipulated the MBR and the lock-up bug on the Pentium processor. Finally, there was a notorious Word virus called Meat Grinder. Did nothing for the first few dozen saves, then overwrote your file on disk with complete gibberish.
Saw a graduate student reduced to sobbing over that last one...her teacher was a real prick and wouldn't take anything late for any reason and she had not been educated on the importance of multiple backups. It was 2 am the day before it was due and no amount of Norton Disk Doctor was going to save her (luckily, she'd been on a machine the day before and just shut it down, we had 13 of 20 pages autosaved). I had to call him the next day, and he didn't believe me. I wound up refering him to the head of academic computing, who essentially told the guy that this was the worst virus he'd ever seen and it would be utterly heartless not to give the girl an extension. Dr. Wolf was the MAN.
All of these spread via diskettes and public terminals. Be glad nobody's applied these concepts to an internet worm. We'd be fucked.
I used to use an encryption program that attempted to get around keystroke loggers...by remapping your keyboard when you were in the password box. A keystroke logger would see gobbeltygook...granted, it was a simple cipher, but since there isn't enough information in a single 16 character password to generate a key for such a cipher, it was still pretty secure.
I stopped using it when I got my mac, because built in AES-128 is just easier than mucking about with encrypted disk drivers and suchlike. I don't have that much to keep secure anyway...just some receipts, beer recipes and incriminating photos
Your post would be true if the dispute were over a business, and not over a name. Apple isn't using their business trademark to market their iTunes Music Store, not are they using the logo. They've been very careful to maintain the separation...if you go to the iTunes marketing page or the iTunes store itself, the Apple logo is nowhere to be seen -- except on links to their main page or on computer equipment.
It's an essential difference...it's a different functional arm of a larger company, the way NBC is a part of GE or Nullsoft is a part of AOL. Therefore, the issue in dispute is not whether Apple is wrong to have a music arm, but whether they did a good enough job abstracting said service from the name Apple to have there be little room for confusion between the two.
Incidentally, if Apple Corps. wanted to make computers and call them "The Beatle Computer," with no Apple logo on it, I'm sure that would be fine. We'll see if the courts agree.
Nobody with any sense at all is working on the Win 98 version of anything.
Supporting deprecated and crummy operating systems is asking for a support nightmare. You'd doubtless have to charge more than the cost of WinXP for it.
Sure. Also Cygwin for Linux and Pear for Mac OS. It'll be a grand time, self emulation for all!
Sure it's infinitely large. It's also finitely dense. So we haven't quite filled it all yet. Some people might consider the effective universe to be just the space that's filled so far, but I think that's like calling a football field just the area surrounding the players before the snap.