I specifically was looking for someone who made the point you did, and would have modded you up if you had not already been at +5.
Who the fuck do Microsoft think they are to say what parts of a court decision they accept or not?
Basically, while I realise that asking a lawyer to admit guilt is like asking a lion to become a vegetarian, I think Microsoft is treading a very fine line of how far they can go. I know a lot of Americans think the EU is just another banana republic where the Marines go and clean up before breakfast (And the EU commissioners sometimes don't do all that much to dispell the notion either), but I think that Microsoft could land itself in a huge pile of shit if they try to play the arrogant American card too much with the Commission.
The EU could do whatever they please with Microsoft's European business, and there would be nothing, short of Microsoft bribing Bush and co into starting a trade war with the EU, that Microsoft could do. The EU could declare Microsoft's code public domain in the EU, and you can be sure that that will kill Microsoft faster than anything else would as that code would find its way across the Atlantic very quickly.
At the moment, as far as I know, both the European ESA, with their ATV and the Russians, with their Progress do this same thing, i.e. autonomously meeting and docking with ships in orbit (the ISS mainly). Apart from that, I can't imagine that the technology is all that spectacular that NASA wasn't able to do this in the past. Or is this a case of NASA wasting money in trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak?
I should also add that if Apple had bought Be, there would have been no Steve Jobs today, the clone market would still be running full force (which would make many slashdotters happy, but possibly not Apple's shareholders) and the likelyhood would be that Apple would have transitioned from a hardware to a software company, which would have put it in direct competition with Microsoft, and history shows that the market is not kind to direct Microsoft competitors.
Considering the fact that Gassee apparently wanted $400 million in the end, I think it was a wise move.
Not only that, but the NeXT system had a significant userbase, and, more importantly, software. There was a large amount of software that was available on NeXT, some of which is still being added to OSX now (Apple's Pages software, for example, was once a NeXT app called, wait for it, Pages). Also, Next had the advantage of being used in research institutions (The WWW was developed on a NeXT by Tim Berners-Lee) and was one of the very first systems to offer a fully fledged web application server (WebObjects). The fact that NeXT also had the advantage of some 8 or 9 years of experience and development behind it didn't hurt its chances either.
Possibly, one of the additional factors in Apple's decision was the fact that basing the next Apple OS on BeOS would have meant using a completely untested system. Untested in the market, I mean. Given that Apple really was in dire straights at the time (1995-1996), I think Apple made a wise decision.
But who knows, perhaps BeOS would have made apple become the absolute killer in the OS world.
BeOS was only available for the PowerPC up to the 604 series. Apple refused to give Be the G3 information, and because of that BeOS could never run on any newer Mac.
Thanks slashdot for posting a nice geeky article for a change.
You're right.... and wrong
on
EU to Ban Macs
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The real problem is that the slashdot editors have absolutely no sense or ability to coordinate articles. So what happens on a day like to today is that every slashdot editor and his mother, and possibly his aunt Maggy in the trailer park in NC as well, thinks he'll post a couple of April 1st joke articles for a lark.
The result is the utter chaos and even a good round of the usual duping that make slashdot so unique.
I don't believe this. Not only is this article a dupe of an article posted yesterday, but now even posts are being duplicated. In other words you actually went and copied my post word for word, aka verbatim, the whole hog. Not only that but you actually managed to get a higher modding (not that I really worry about that) for my own post than I did.
While this is slashdot and rips in time and a certain amount of, uhm, deja vue, is to be expected, it does however raise interesting questions about copyright, don't you think?
I just thought that this might be a good moment to write in stating that I'm typing all of this on a Powerbook.:D
I started off on PCs back in 1989, fighting my way through DOS and Win2.11 and Win3.0. Then I switched to Macs in prepress until I left IT entirely for a few years. During that time I worked occasionally on Win95. Later I did a multimedia course that required Macs even though everybody was saying at the time that Apple was dead and even our school was considering switching to WinNT. The next few jobs I had were all based on WinNT, Win2k and WinXP, but, after having gotten a free old Powerbook from a dead dotcom and using OSX on it, I was sold.
Since then I've bought two more Powerbooks and I am incredibly happy with this decision. My Windows machine hardly ever gets used anymore.
The financing you're talking about comes with 2% interest, and a lot of attached conditions, and it's not Dell in any case. It's ABN-AMRO bank in Brazil (Dutch bank), which, in effect, is like applying for a small credit from a bank, since it has the same stipulations and limitations.
So, technically, you're wrong. Dell does not offer financing. It merely has an arrangment with a bank to deal with small credit applications.
However, considering that your grammar is as bad as your spelling, I'm not surprised that your ability to think is limited.
With 2% interest, and a lot of attached conditions, and it's not Dell in any case. It's ABN-AMRO bank in Brazil (Dutch bank), which, in effect, is like applying for a small credit from a bank, since it has the same stipulations and limitations.
So, technically, you're wrong. Dell does not offer financing. It merely has an arrangment with a bank to deal with small credit applications.
Jesus, just read the article for once. You already posted this exact same sentence further up as if you found something you could complain about and ran with it without actually thinking.
Again, I repeat FTA: "Buyers will be able to pay in 24 installments of 50 to 60 reais, or about $18 to $21.80 a month,"
Does Dell allow you to pay over 24 months? No, I didn't think so. Is the Brazillian government forcing people to buy these cheap computers? No, you can buy HPs, Dells and even Macs in Brazil, and the government certainly doesn't care about those who can afford it, but is offering a cheap solution for poor people, of which there are a lot in Brazil. It's not the USA and American principles don't reign supreme everywhere, much to the chagrin of people like you.
In case you didn't notice, the article also talks about HOW people will pay for this, i.e. FTA: "Buyers will be able to pay in 24 installments of 50 to 60 reais, or about $18 to $21.80 a month,"
Do you think Dell is willing to accept payments over 24 months? I seriously doubt it.
FTA: But the preference for open-source software has been controversial, with critics inside and outside the government saying Mr. da Silva's administration is letting leftist ideology trump the laws of supply and demand.
I really fucking hate this. This is the typical newspeak propaganda used by companies terrified of losing their stranglehold on consumers by loudly bleating "Communist" into the air in order to get support from the more paranoid fringes of society, such as politicians who get kick backs from such companies.
What Supply and Demand is this guy talking about? Does he mean to infer that all those people should remain uneducated because they can't afford to buy some bullshit company's overpriced product? Tell that to the people yourself, you cunt. Also tell them that buying Microsoft's Windows will make them even poorer than they currently are, since the only way Microsoft is ever going to sell Windows at a low price is to sell some ultra crippled piece of shit such as the Starter Edition which no one wants.
I don't think it was right to mod you down as a troll, but since this article is about Macs, a lot of Mac users with mod points will take exception to your obviously flawed comments.
That said, the bulk of your comment refers to old Classic Mac OS, not Mac OSX, which is now in its 4th year of existence. The rest is just plain ignorance and proves you know almost nothing about Macs in general, even less about Mac OSX, and have never heard of the $400 Mac mini or the fact that you can plug any 3 button mouse into OSX and get all the usual functionality.
In fact, the only part of your comment which might have a point is about maximising windows, but given that all apps at least maximise to fit the current content, I think it boils down to a matter of taste.
And when you make a comment complaining about how the Mac zealots modded you down, think about how you would respond if someone posted a comment comparing modern Macs to Win 3.1.
Very well put! What really shocks me is that the cowboy mentality is even so prevalent here on slashdot, where many people interested in technology seem to believe that science is of no worth, but God and bombs are.
I find it simply frightening, because I think it poses a very significant threat to the future of the USA, which is heading down the road of becoming a military power without the brains needed to steer it in a wise direction.
Next time you're in Europe, get away from the popular (among tourists) cities. You'll find very large numbers of people living in what amount to shacks.
I beg your pardon? Shacks? Please do tell me in which country you saw this. I have lived and worked in no less than 5 European countries and visited nearly all the western ones. I have never seen anyone living in shacks.
If you weren't trolling, which I think you were, I would have thought you were referring to the so called gardening colony shacks that exist in large numbers in Northern Europe. They are simply a sort of garden that is not attached to your house, which you can rent or buy. Historically they exist because the settlement patterns and lack of land limit gardens in cities.
But I think you were simply doing the brain dead american routine there, but monty python is on another channel, thank you.
Perhaps because the same would be true for Powerpoint, where people definitely do put videos in.
Electricity, cheaply, made with bathroom mirrors
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
It's sometimes sad that simple devices like this are not used on a large scale to generate electricity. Focusing the light on a tank of water would generate a lot of steam, and, if the steam passed through a simple closed circuit where the water could condense and flow back into the tank, you'd have a minimal maintenance generator for all those sunny days. And you could use large ones to power pumps to push water uphill into dams to generate electricty during cold months and the proverbial rainy day.
I have to agree. Symantec's products in for the Mac have been the bane of many web support forums, where both AV and Utilities seem to cause more damage than they actually solve.
On Windows, SAV mainly pissed the hell out of me with its insanely complex and buggy bullshit routine of updating and scanning. There's also a good reason that Winternals and Syternals are by far more popular Windows system tools than Symantec Utilities for Windows ever were.
This is just Symantec trying to push a product that fewer and fewer people want.
While I doubt that a notebook is an ideal platform for this type of gaming, mainly because the keyboard is difficult to hit while tilting the notebook (you need both hands), I can see that Amit Singh has already thought about either selling the idea, the software, or patenting it, since his licence is only for a 10 minute demo preview. Apple might be wanting to include this software, or possibly even games that use it, in future macs.
Also, from the original submitter's story: Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor be standard issue in all future laptops?"
I think that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have more to gain by making game controllers that use this technology. A lot of people, me included, don't like the tiny joysticks or pads on standard controllers. A controller using this technology would be much more natural. In fact, I'm postive that it will end up being used pretty soon.
Apple, or Amit Singh would be crazy not to patent the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I specifically was looking for someone who made the point you did, and would have modded you up if you had not already been at +5.
Who the fuck do Microsoft think they are to say what parts of a court decision they accept or not?
Basically, while I realise that asking a lawyer to admit guilt is like asking a lion to become a vegetarian, I think Microsoft is treading a very fine line of how far they can go. I know a lot of Americans think the EU is just another banana republic where the Marines go and clean up before breakfast (And the EU commissioners sometimes don't do all that much to dispell the notion either), but I think that Microsoft could land itself in a huge pile of shit if they try to play the arrogant American card too much with the Commission.
The EU could do whatever they please with Microsoft's European business, and there would be nothing, short of Microsoft bribing Bush and co into starting a trade war with the EU, that Microsoft could do. The EU could declare Microsoft's code public domain in the EU, and you can be sure that that will kill Microsoft faster than anything else would as that code would find its way across the Atlantic very quickly.
You just didn't get what the grandparent was talking about did you?
He was refering to popular media conceptions of a country, not what is necesarily bad about a place.
Or have you heard anything much else about Africa in the news apart from Zimbabwe or Dafur?
At the moment, as far as I know, both the European ESA, with their ATV and the Russians, with their Progress do this same thing, i.e. autonomously meeting and docking with ships in orbit (the ISS mainly). Apart from that, I can't imagine that the technology is all that spectacular that NASA wasn't able to do this in the past. Or is this a case of NASA wasting money in trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak?
Is there some aspect to this that really is new?
I should also add that if Apple had bought Be, there would have been no Steve Jobs today, the clone market would still be running full force (which would make many slashdotters happy, but possibly not Apple's shareholders) and the likelyhood would be that Apple would have transitioned from a hardware to a software company, which would have put it in direct competition with Microsoft, and history shows that the market is not kind to direct Microsoft competitors.
Considering the fact that Gassee apparently wanted $400 million in the end, I think it was a wise move.
Not only that, but the NeXT system had a significant userbase, and, more importantly, software. There was a large amount of software that was available on NeXT, some of which is still being added to OSX now (Apple's Pages software, for example, was once a NeXT app called, wait for it, Pages). Also, Next had the advantage of being used in research institutions (The WWW was developed on a NeXT by Tim Berners-Lee) and was one of the very first systems to offer a fully fledged web application server (WebObjects). The fact that NeXT also had the advantage of some 8 or 9 years of experience and development behind it didn't hurt its chances either.
Possibly, one of the additional factors in Apple's decision was the fact that basing the next Apple OS on BeOS would have meant using a completely untested system. Untested in the market, I mean. Given that Apple really was in dire straights at the time (1995-1996), I think Apple made a wise decision.
But who knows, perhaps BeOS would have made apple become the absolute killer in the OS world.
BeOS was only available for the PowerPC up to the 604 series. Apple refused to give Be the G3 information, and because of that BeOS could never run on any newer Mac.
Thanks slashdot for posting a nice geeky article for a change.
The real problem is that the slashdot editors have absolutely no sense or ability to coordinate articles. So what happens on a day like to today is that every slashdot editor and his mother, and possibly his aunt Maggy in the trailer park in NC as well, thinks he'll post a couple of April 1st joke articles for a lark.
The result is the utter chaos and even a good round of the usual duping that make slashdot so unique.
And it's making you Americans the laughing stock of the scientific world.
I don't believe this. Not only is this article a dupe of an article posted yesterday, but now even posts are being duplicated. In other words you actually went and copied my post word for word, aka verbatim, the whole hog. Not only that but you actually managed to get a higher modding (not that I really worry about that) for my own post than I did.
While this is slashdot and rips in time and a certain amount of, uhm, deja vue, is to be expected, it does however raise interesting questions about copyright, don't you think?
I just thought that this might be a good moment to write in stating that I'm typing all of this on a Powerbook. :D
I started off on PCs back in 1989, fighting my way through DOS and Win2.11 and Win3.0. Then I switched to Macs in prepress until I left IT entirely for a few years. During that time I worked occasionally on Win95. Later I did a multimedia course that required Macs even though everybody was saying at the time that Apple was dead and even our school was considering switching to WinNT. The next few jobs I had were all based on WinNT, Win2k and WinXP, but, after having gotten a free old Powerbook from a dead dotcom and using OSX on it, I was sold.
Since then I've bought two more Powerbooks and I am incredibly happy with this decision. My Windows machine hardly ever gets used anymore.
The financing you're talking about comes with 2% interest, and a lot of attached conditions, and it's not Dell in any case. It's ABN-AMRO bank in Brazil (Dutch bank), which, in effect, is like applying for a small credit from a bank, since it has the same stipulations and limitations.
So, technically, you're wrong. Dell does not offer financing. It merely has an arrangment with a bank to deal with small credit applications.
However, considering that your grammar is as bad as your spelling, I'm not surprised that your ability to think is limited.
With 2% interest, and a lot of attached conditions, and it's not Dell in any case. It's ABN-AMRO bank in Brazil (Dutch bank), which, in effect, is like applying for a small credit from a bank, since it has the same stipulations and limitations.
So, technically, you're wrong. Dell does not offer financing. It merely has an arrangment with a bank to deal with small credit applications.
Jesus, just read the article for once. You already posted this exact same sentence further up as if you found something you could complain about and ran with it without actually thinking.
Again, I repeat FTA: "Buyers will be able to pay in 24 installments of 50 to 60 reais, or about $18 to $21.80 a month,"
Does Dell allow you to pay over 24 months? No, I didn't think so. Is the Brazillian government forcing people to buy these cheap computers? No, you can buy HPs, Dells and even Macs in Brazil, and the government certainly doesn't care about those who can afford it, but is offering a cheap solution for poor people, of which there are a lot in Brazil. It's not the USA and American principles don't reign supreme everywhere, much to the chagrin of people like you.
In case you didn't notice, the article also talks about HOW people will pay for this, i.e. FTA: "Buyers will be able to pay in 24 installments of 50 to 60 reais, or about $18 to $21.80 a month,"
Do you think Dell is willing to accept payments over 24 months? I seriously doubt it.
FTA: But the preference for open-source software has been controversial, with critics inside and outside the government saying Mr. da Silva's administration is letting leftist ideology trump the laws of supply and demand.
I really fucking hate this. This is the typical newspeak propaganda used by companies terrified of losing their stranglehold on consumers by loudly bleating "Communist" into the air in order to get support from the more paranoid fringes of society, such as politicians who get kick backs from such companies.
What Supply and Demand is this guy talking about? Does he mean to infer that all those people should remain uneducated because they can't afford to buy some bullshit company's overpriced product? Tell that to the people yourself, you cunt. Also tell them that buying Microsoft's Windows will make them even poorer than they currently are, since the only way Microsoft is ever going to sell Windows at a low price is to sell some ultra crippled piece of shit such as the Starter Edition which no one wants.
I don't think it was right to mod you down as a troll, but since this article is about Macs, a lot of Mac users with mod points will take exception to your obviously flawed comments.
That said, the bulk of your comment refers to old Classic Mac OS, not Mac OSX, which is now in its 4th year of existence. The rest is just plain ignorance and proves you know almost nothing about Macs in general, even less about Mac OSX, and have never heard of the $400 Mac mini or the fact that you can plug any 3 button mouse into OSX and get all the usual functionality.
In fact, the only part of your comment which might have a point is about maximising windows, but given that all apps at least maximise to fit the current content, I think it boils down to a matter of taste.
And when you make a comment complaining about how the Mac zealots modded you down, think about how you would respond if someone posted a comment comparing modern Macs to Win 3.1.
Very well put! What really shocks me is that the cowboy mentality is even so prevalent here on slashdot, where many people interested in technology seem to believe that science is of no worth, but God and bombs are.
I find it simply frightening, because I think it poses a very significant threat to the future of the USA, which is heading down the road of becoming a military power without the brains needed to steer it in a wise direction.
Jesus, fuckwad, you're comparing continents! Europe consists of everything from Switzerland to Albania, Holland to Russia.
As for those numbers, which only give 3 million slum dwellers for the whole North American continent, including Mexico, I simply do not believe it.
Next time you're in Europe, get away from the popular (among tourists) cities. You'll find very large numbers of people living in what amount to shacks.
I beg your pardon? Shacks? Please do tell me in which country you saw this. I have lived and worked in no less than 5 European countries and visited nearly all the western ones. I have never seen anyone living in shacks.
If you weren't trolling, which I think you were, I would have thought you were referring to the so called gardening colony shacks that exist in large numbers in Northern Europe. They are simply a sort of garden that is not attached to your house, which you can rent or buy. Historically they exist because the settlement patterns and lack of land limit gardens in cities.
But I think you were simply doing the brain dead american routine there, but monty python is on another channel, thank you.
The CIA doesn't calculate any numbers. It just tallies them. The GDP values are gained from other freely avaialble sources, such as central banks.
Perhaps because the same would be true for Powerpoint, where people definitely do put videos in.
It's sometimes sad that simple devices like this are not used on a large scale to generate electricity. Focusing the light on a tank of water would generate a lot of steam, and, if the steam passed through a simple closed circuit where the water could condense and flow back into the tank, you'd have a minimal maintenance generator for all those sunny days. And you could use large ones to power pumps to push water uphill into dams to generate electricty during cold months and the proverbial rainy day.
I have to agree. Symantec's products in for the Mac have been the bane of many web support forums, where both AV and Utilities seem to cause more damage than they actually solve.
On Windows, SAV mainly pissed the hell out of me with its insanely complex and buggy bullshit routine of updating and scanning. There's also a good reason that Winternals and Syternals are by far more popular Windows system tools than Symantec Utilities for Windows ever were.
This is just Symantec trying to push a product that fewer and fewer people want.
While I doubt that a notebook is an ideal platform for this type of gaming, mainly because the keyboard is difficult to hit while tilting the notebook (you need both hands), I can see that Amit Singh has already thought about either selling the idea, the software, or patenting it, since his licence is only for a 10 minute demo preview. Apple might be wanting to include this software, or possibly even games that use it, in future macs.
Also, from the original submitter's story:
Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor be standard issue in all future laptops?"
I think that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have more to gain by making game controllers that use this technology. A lot of people, me included, don't like the tiny joysticks or pads on standard controllers. A controller using this technology would be much more natural. In fact, I'm postive that it will end up being used pretty soon.
Apple, or Amit Singh would be crazy not to patent the idea.