"I mean, we have TONS of nuclear weapons [...] who is to say that a 100 year or so effort to put that much firepower into space to avert such an object wouldnt come to not?"
Actually, for the first time in the history of the planet, a species is now on the verge of being able to influence such events - and within less than 100 years (basically NOW in geological/astronomical terms). Humans probably couldn't do much more than duck & cover if an imminent strike was discovered in the next few decades, but in 50-75 years there is a high likelyhood will have developed the necessary tools to change the inevitable (eg. a permanent extra-earth presence ensuring survival, much better propulsion systems, and better technologies than near-useless nuclear weapons for such a situation, etc)
More than almost anything, this ability would really show that we've "arived"
Yes, as you mention a book making a very strong case for the open source model has already been published. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Marting Fink, HP's Linux evangelist and author of "The Business & Economics of Open Source" when he gave the keynote speech to the OSW/Business of Open Source Conference in Ottawa two weeks ago. Mr Fink's book sounds very similar to parts of the one the NZOSS is trying to create; perhaps they could ask him to write the Economics and When not to Migrate sections?
BTW, Mr Fink was an engaging speaker and there was good Conference attendance all 'round, even though this was only the first year for the OSW event (2nd for BOSS). Perhaps because it was in Ottawa, there seemed to be many more government/business types than computer types at the Conference. Good sign or Bad sign? Maybe it's time Canada considered more of a paltform-neutral stance à la other governments?
By Staff Writer ablair November 18, 2002, 10:30 PM EST
Ottawa - Recently, an online movie download service backed by five major studios opened for business, marking one of the industry's biggest moves to date into Internet distribution. Movielink is a the joint project by MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Studios
Canadian users will have to wait for a sequel to the initial Movielink service, however, since the service only works on computers with US IP addresses.
Last week's slight from Hollywood is an embarrassing rebuff for Canada, which has positioned itself as one of the leading countries for broadband adoption per capita. It also has a large contingent of early adopters, who likely would be interested in trying out technologies such as video-on-demand.
This is just the latest example of the challenges facing Canada. For years, many developers have ignored Canadian users entirely or forced them to wait months for region-specific versions of products, citing its relatively small market share. Canadians account for less than 5 percent of total desktop computing sales, according to industry research.
Movielink isn't the only online video service to dis the Mac. CinemaNow, an Internet movie site backed by studio Lion's Gate Entertainment, offers its wares to Windows customers only. In addition, Yahoo's Launch music video service also does not support the Mac, according to a recent test of the site by CNET News.com.
Canada clearly covets the market that the download service is meant to attract, having recently launched CA*net 4.
But if Canada has sometimes broken new ground, it has also frequently been left on the sidelines in the fast-evolving field of entertainment convergence.
In related news, Movieline.com reportedly does not allow connections from anywhere other than within the US, effectively rebuffing most of the world's online users.
There are a few alternatives (having just opened a retail business, I've looked). We couldn't find a commercial Linux solution for our business that could handle what we needed our POS system to do, but for that matter the solutions that did exist on the Windows side were very expensive per site, and for us not cost-effective. So like many companies, we had to get a custom-made POS system up & running. Unfortunately, the programmers I knew were only comfortable with Windows systems - and therefore that's what we went with. I'm sure this situation has happened for many businesses: despite us being aware of the cost benefits of non-Windows systems (and quite frankly, most busness decision makers are not) and actively looking for an OSS solution, we had to roll our own on Windows.
Some of the best *nix POS solutions out there:
Viewtouch, the original makers or touchscreens, with FreeBSD/Linux systems
IBM, with some Linux-based solutions (mostly for medium to larger businesses), but recently successful
Quasar POS from Linux Canada - a great, professional & full-featured POS solution with integrated accounting (based on the OS Firebird db). Growing fast.
MacPOS with so many solutions on the Mac platform to choose from (and many being migrated to MacOS X) it's almost as bewidering as looking for a Windows solution.
We would have gone with a MacOSX or Linux solution if we had only found a programmer that was comfortable working with them. Long-term, either would have been cost-effective.
I hate to point out nitpicky but important points (OK, well no I don't) but:
"a transition away from UNIX and toward MacOS X"
That's sort of like a transition away from birds but towards ducks. Here the author is assuming MacOS X is somehow not a *NIX... an assumption that's been proved wrong here many times before. MacOS X is a subset of UNIX, just look up any UNIX history.
Sadly, even the original story submitter made this mistake: "There are big differences between Mac OS X and Unix machines." Sorry, that's not correct unless it's specified what other type of UNIX we're comparing OS X to.
After all, even the O'Reilly article author himself says "These tips will show you the differences between Mac OS X and other flavors of Unix" (my emphasis) MacOS X is a UNIX. Let's get it straight.
Interesting that this story should be posted on/. since I have recently become embroiled in a linking controversy with my university. I and another student have started a small business where students can sell their used textbooks on consignment near campus (off campus because the university's bookstore, owned by Follett has been granted a monopoly on the university grounds). We needed to "deep link" to a university webpage explaining changes in the class numbering system, but are reportedly on the verge of being served with legal action against us for doing so.
As students, we obviously cannot afford a protracted legal action against us by a university intent on defending Follett's monopoly. Should we copy the content of the university page onto a page of our own (with modifications), or continue linking? We have looked but not found the university's linking policy. Do we actually need permission to link?
There's currently a discussion on this very topic on MacSlash, but a few/. people may be interested in some Apple ramblings too:
Strategy: Buy Low, Sell High. How low can the stock values of companies go? Since last fall, many in the tech sector have certainly been trying to find out. This is a great time to buy companies or technologies and lately Apple has been wisely acting when opportunities arise. Even if Emagic GmbH, Spruce Technologies, Nothing Real, and Zayante in the last year had all been privately held, they would have still been sold at a favourable price compared to buying them before the.bomb bubble burst.
Strategy: Niche Market Growth. It's clear that Apple wants to defend the Macintosh strength as a music & audio creation tool in the long term. Since pro audio software has been lagging on the march to MacOS X, Apple is at least applying heat to developers if not exactly lighting a fire under them. Logic and associated software & hardware on the Mac will mean that Digidesign, Twelve Tone Systems(Cakewalk), MOTU and Steinberg will have to take the market segment more seriously (although MOTU & Digidesign have historically been great friends of the Mac already). The way it's looking is that a larger majority of pro audio will be done on the Mac. Can Steinberg, Twelve Tone et al. risk being caught with their pants around their ankles if this happens?
Strategy: Technology Cross-Pollination.
Now that Apple has a substantial video-production, streaming, compression, audio & other technologies, they may consider adding many good features from one to another and developing truly feature-rich packages. It dosen't take a dreamer to see the possibilities, from unheard-of professional solutions to trickle-down pro capabilities in new iSoftware (eg. look how technologies purchased from Marcromedia were crafted into Final Cut Pro & iMovie). This is one area that users, down the road, can really cash out with if Apple encourages the flow of technologies between it's new divisions.
Strategy: Sorry, Mac-Only.
One thing that is a bit sad about this, ironically enough, is the immediate cancellation of the Windows versions of some software (notably Shake & Logic) with this strategy. While perhaps more upfront than an MS-style purchase and feature-deprivation in non-Windows versions, Apple still isn't making any friends (and perhaps losing potentially loyal customers & money) by doing this. Still, one cannot say that it's not what happened to Mac users through the late 1990s (even now - look at Bungie) but it would be better karma to be more merciful once the shoe is on the other foot. Apple would be smart to mitigate the anger of Windows users by offering discounts on upgrades to the next Mac version.
Next Strategy: More Vertical Markets.
The Macintosh still has a real chance at gaining significant market share if it can be a strong alternative in enough vertical market segments. Apple is rightly building on it's strenghts, but should diversify enough so that the Macintosh is not pegged as only good for those niches (remember what happened to the Amiga? Games machine!)
A Holy Grail almost as worthy as dominating the business market for Apple is the scientific & engineering markets, often with high software margins all around. A purchase or substantial investment in Autodesk à la the MS $150M in Apple would make Apple a huge player in the professional engineering, architecture, and manufacturing industries overnight. Considering Autodesk is not the most expensive stock right now, with a market cap of approximately USD$1.4B, Apple could conceivably purchase the entire operations in cash and still have about $2B in the bank. Autodesk's Design Segment develops AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Mechanical Desktop, Autodesk Architectural Desktop, Architectural Studio, Autodesk Map, Lightscape, and Autodesk Land Desktop, to name a few (most industry-standard in their fields) and the Discreet Segment develops 3D Studio MAX, Animator Studio, flame, inferno, smoke, combustion, cinestream, plasma, cleaner, MPEG supercharger, Topper, and many others.
With a stable of industry-dominating software products as great as this, such a purchase (or even investment ensuring MacOS X compatibility) would send massive shockwaves across the engineering & architectural markets, and ripples in the scientific & pro graphics markets who are by now used to this. No immediate cancellation of the Windows version would be posible here, rather a years-long strategy to ensure first Mac versions and then Mac feature-parity. A purchase like this too rich for Apple's blood? Try something smaller like privatley-held ESRI (makers of ArcINFO, ArcView, ArcGIS & associated imaging systems), or continue to add strength in the crucial areas of coming scientific importance such as biotech and bioinformatics, in which Macs already have a growing following as you can see.
It's not yet easy to manually remap keys in OSX, (many do with XDarwin) but you can do it by text-editing the appropriate xmodmap file you're using (Warning: the DMCA may seriously repercussions if you live in the US and try to do this... check out the scary disclaimer on this how-to for remapping keys with XDarwin!!) This really should be something user-changeable in the System Prefs itself, under "Keyboard" and hopefully will be in Jaguar or not too long after.
In OSX, you could manually re-map the modmap file for the appropriate keymap you want to change out of the list of keymaps in the/System/Library/Keyboards/ directory (pick yours, though I think there are even more now with 10.1.5):
But of course, there's will soon be an easier way if you don't want to muck about. Michael Baltak's GPL'd DoubleCommand Deluxe, under development and hopefully to be released soon should offer a good amount of flexibility in custom keymapping for free. Or, to kill the bug with a sledgehammer you could get a macro utility like Quickeys from CE Software and map the Caps Lock key to trigger a one-key "shortcut" of your choosing (ie: map it to another key)
I wouldn't worry too much about paying to upgrade the OS to Jaguar, Apple so far has been fairly good about this sort of stuff. You could also wait a few months until Jaguar comes out and you might not need a keymapping utility at all, if you can bear to wait.
Maybe I'm a bit paranoid (I probably fit right in on/.) but when I read news subheadlines like "Nvidia, the dominant PC graphics chip maker, has teamed up with Microsoft and developed a new cross-platform graphic language called Cg that it hopes becomes an industry standard" I don't really feel all warm & fuzzy inside. CG Channel states "NVIDIA's compiler toolkit would be more optimized for their own hardware owing to greater understanding of their own technology. ATI would have the option of writing their own backend compiler to support their hardware more optimally, but the exisiting NVIDIA toolkit should generate working code on ATI's part. [...] NVIDIA are hoping that Cg will be the industry's defacto standard simply due to its time on the market [...]" If NVIDIA can't be reasonably criticized for supporting their own chipset more with optimized code (and leaving it open to others with competing chipsets), can co-developer Microsoft be criticized for favouring their own software in this? Couldn't MS solutions (DirectX, XBox-specific tools, etc) be favoured under Cg merely by them investing more in Cg development and (as one of the two developers controlling the standard) updating compilers and shader functions for their software sooner or more completely than for others? If this was the case, Cg could just end up being another "embrace, extend, etc" scenario, this time in the graphics market to push MS & Nvidia techologies.
Nvidia has been fair to good in their cross-platform support so far, but of course MS has not been. To the relief of many CG Channel reports that "Interestingly, key components of NVIDIA's Cg compiler will be open-sourced and will work on Linux, Mac OS X and Xbox platforms. [...] Compiled code for Direct3D will be cross-platform (well, as cross platform as Microsoft might expect). OpenGL code should work much the same as long as the OpenGL extensions are supported on the target. NVIDIA says it will provide compiler binaries for all of the major platforms." The real proof will be in how Nvidia supports Cg on other platforms and OpenGL over the long term. Will these binaries be released at the same time and with the same feature sets? And will this continue to be the case or will full cross-platform support only exist in the beginning until Cg becomes a de facto standard?
I'm skeptical at this point, since we all know there's a world of difference between being merely compatible and being optimized. There's some evidence so far of how Cg is being implemented. For instance, it looks like there isn't an OpenGL fragment program profile for the Cg toolkit while there is one for Direct3D8. Nvidia says that the reason Cg has for no OpenGL ARB vertex_program extension while there are both dx8ps and dx8vs profiles is that OpenGL is dragging it's heels with the standard, perhaps valid but nonetheless the result is Cg is better implemented under DX8 than the OGL side. While it's theoretically possible to program Cg textureShaders and regcombiners in OpenGL, it's not currently supported. Much of the feature set in Cg looks like that announced so far for OpenGL2 - could nVidia just be trying to repeat OpenGL2 functions using their own identical and properitary Cg extentions instead? Finally, Nvidia announced support for Windows, MacOSX and Linux; the first and last platforms should have native Cg compilers (Linux soon apparently) but what about MacOSX?
"Many Americans probably do not realise or care how offensive Kopel's language is to people in other countries"
>Frankly, who gives a fuck.
My point exactly.
>Why should we even care about people in other countries, do they care about us ?
Yes, a lot. Or haven't you noticed the world media interest with all things American?
>This is not a piece about notion of "humanity" etc (which btw doesn't exist) but about what's best for US.
And that's the entire problem; the framing of arguments in terms of what is best for the Self instead of the Whole. By this same perspective, for instance, we should all pollute as much as we need so long as we're not the ones to suffer the consequences. It's an ethos where NIMBY reigns, where everyone passes the buck and and Might makes Right. And that definitely isn't the real world (except for the maladjusted criminal mindset)
...with the vocabulary of "US interests" and underneath sounds disturbingly similar to the musings of the old 19-th century US imperialists, "manifest destiny" and all that. He gives no apologies for - and even encourages - ripping up treaties the US has signed (ABM, now the Outer Space Treaty) because they limit the signatories. This is exactly what these treaties were designed for: so that no one signatory would take advantage of military strength or position to cause conflicts with the others. Kopel states:
"The Bush administration has shown that it is willing to reject politically correct international agreements which harm America's interests -- such as the recently repudiated agreement creating an International Criminal Court, and the ABM treaty."
The ideas of "political correctness" that he's referring to here are the prosecution of genocide, the escalation of a nuclear weapons arms race, and the competitive militarization of outer space. If these ideals are mere "political correctness" then count me PC any day.
The rest of his article is rife with examples of his thinly-shrouded desire for American expansionism instead of a co-operative & unifying space effort by humanity, like "Far better for the settlers of Mars to enjoy the protections of the Constitution of the United States -- as did the settlers of the American Territories in North America in the years before they achieved statehood." and unilateralism "[...] the United States could simply undertake an ambitious program of human space exploration [...] without viewing Article 2 as an impediment -- but this approach might prove problematic in the long run."
Additionally Kopel's view of countries and respected international organisations outside of the US could hardly be lower "Given the Bush administration's commendable interest in favoring American interests over the opinions of the post-national bureaucrats and chattering classes" [we can only imagine he is referring to the United Nations and supporters of treaties here] and "[...] ban appropriation by some super-national body -- such as the United Nations. Surely the settlers of Mars would gain little from being placed under the thumb of an infamously corrupt and self-serving collection of dictatorships none of which (Russia excepted) have contributed anything to the exploration of space." Noting that he also referrs to the State Department as a "kleptocracy", it is hard to imagine he likes any group or nation outside of the US military or who is in favour with the Bush Administration.
His arguments that the US should scrap the Outer Space Treaty except for a few Articles does not hold water either. Usually scrapping a treaty a nation has signed involves scrapping the whole thing or keeping it whole. Anything else would require re-negotiation with the other signatories (95 in the case of the Outer Space Treaty) and it's hard to see any situation where they would be willing to - in effect - gut it. The other disturbing assumption to Kopel's arguments is that it is perfectly OK (he used the term "commendable") for a US administration to unilaterally tear up lawful international agreements whenever they become inconvenient. If the Bush Administration continued this trend, how credible would the US be if it ever wanted to conclude trade, military, or political agreements with other nations in the future?
Many Americans probably do not realise or care how offensive Kopel's language is to people in other countries, like Canada who has historically experienced first hand the effects of Manifest Destiny policies. Nor how offensive it is to probably the majority of informed readers of Slashdot, who intelligently see humanity's exploration of space as something greater and more inspiring than a dangerously militarized land grab.
Well, I live in Canada too, and I think the ridiculous costs of ratifying Kyoto estimated by the energy industry and Alberta are on at least as shaky ground as the estimated climactic effects of not ratifying that are often criticized. It's natural for Ralph Klein, the the Canadian Petroluem Producers Association & Chamber of Commerce, and George "Big-Oil" Bush to spread worst-case scenario estimates on the costs of Kyoto, but these scaremongering tactics just muddy an already difficult discussion. An economic meltdown certainly didn't happen when the state of California introduced stringent vehicle emissions standards and it's not in the cards with California's much greater planned controls, for example. Also, the jurisdictions that adopt such controls early will have a head start on building clean energy business and technologies that the rest of the world will inevitably have to adopt.
Two things nobody can deny: the climate is warming and further warming will have serious consequences. Further, the writing is on the wall that limits on carbon output is the way things are moving, whether we ratify Kyoto or not. We can either choose to join with the rest of the developed world and show some leadership, or not and point the finger to countries that cannot afford to adopt Kyoto as the reason we won't either. If Canada can't even take a (relatively) modest step now, how will we make the much larger necessary cuts in the future?
What seems to have happened is the owners of macslash.com let their registration expire (the Dotster e-mail warning them of this was filtered out as spam on their mac.com e-mail account apparently), and Vicente Peiro Crespo of Valencia, Spain registered and paid for it legally at expiry. According to what he's said on the macslash.org thread about this, he does this with expired domains and redirects them through Commission Junction for a little extra money from ad revenue. Not exactly the most honorable thing for a moonlighting hobby, but perfectly legal.
However, he has said that when owners ask for their domains back (eg. when the domain is still in use) he gives it to them sans profit; and further he has stopped advertising on macslash.com as soon as he found out the domain was still near & dear to people's hearts and he's stopped advertising. He's also put up a link from macslash.com to macslash.org as of this posting, as you can see. This dosen't sound like the work of a beligerent opportunist nor is this a "hijacking" as the title of this thread implies. His first post on Macslash about it mentioned that he was willing to return the domain if the former owner contacted him. But now Vincente says that he, Dotster, and Commission Junction have recieved so many flames about this that they've cut off his account and he's no longer making any money off of anything.
Somehow this seems like a simple mistake (on both the part of Vincenete and Macslash's owners for letting it expire) that could have been easily corrected but now exacerbated by a lot of flamers. So stop sending nasty e-mails to everyone on the planet about this and maybe Vincente will give the domain back if he's still inclined. Otherwise MacSlash will have to get used to permanently being at MacSlash.org
... the only problem is that ThinkCycle has been implemented already in a more effective manner: it's called volunteerism. No, it dosen't have fancy buzzwords like "distributed brainpower" or "open-source", but it has already proven it's success for centuries across many continents. People have been part of "distributed efforts" working on some of the world's larger problems by volunteering internationally, for the United Nations, or in their own communities. I have to say that Thinkcycle has their hearts in the right place, but good people with expertise have already thought of a more effective, old-fashioned implementation. Want global interconnectivity for using spare brain-cycles of professionals on far-away problems? Medecins Sans Frontières and Engineers Without Borders have been consulting like this for years with amazing technologies such as the 'telephone' and through 'mail' and even on the 'internet'
Indeed, right-to-left language support is currently very weak on OS X but this is rumored to change with Jaguar. Certainly there's been talk of it already from Apple people before (eg. Peter Lofting @ the ATypI Conference Copenhagen last year) You can of course use many right-to-left languages on MacOS 9 and with XWindows on OSX already (eg. AbiWord). From an implementation perspective, because of system-wide Unicode support it's certainly easier than ever - just get the language sets out the door at Apple. Additional language support should be quicker than with pre-OSX systems, and more uniform. Nice to see an another international ISO technology that Apple and Xerox started coming back to help them. I never cease to be amazed at how innovative those two companies really were back in the 'day. And to a greater or lesser extent still are.
...I'd encourage you to go out and buy CDs like these and return them the next day to the store for a refund, and make sure they know it's because they won't work in your computer or other device. If enough people annoy enough retailers, the large buyers will figure out it's not worth the hassle and this trial period for copy-protected (non)-CDs will show the record companies standardising on these won't fly. If you all do nothing now, these will be standard in a year or two and we won't be able to do a thing about it. If you don't like it, do something about it.
This is just a continuation of the general IT-manger hostility to Mac and other non-Windows solutions. It's the *culture* that's been built around IT professionals: As has been said many times before, nobody every got fired for recommending Windows. This will be a very difficult culture bias to overcome everywhere, and in the hyper-critical world of politics where everything is under scrutiny (and perhaps rightly so) would you use an often-criticised platform when you've constantly got lots of other attacks to parry?
Even so, I would have at least expected some California reps to use a few more Macs, supporting their home state industries and all.
Isn't demonstrating a modular Windows key to the States' case showing it can be done? Maybe they had problems with their version and didn't want to shoot themselves in the foot...
The award nomination is great for the Samba team, congrats! The more important question to this story is about Microsoft's intensified attacks on Samba and whether Samba will be able to continue in the future. From the article:
"In late March, Microsoft published a document that outlines how third-party developers can use Common Internet File Sharing (CIFS) [...]
Specifically, Microsoft requires programmers to sign an agreement that prohibits using information in the document when building software governed by the General Public License (GPL). Among the products affected by the restriction is Samba, widely used software that competes with file sharing technology in Microsoft's Windows operating system. Samba uses CIFS to communicate with client systems."
With this and other such inevitable moves by MS on the horizon, will Samba be able to continue meaningfully with an increasingly hostile Microsoft?
This is all very well except we are dealing wiith a starting pool of substantially more than the 20,000 US microbiology researchers... deaths from the UK, Russia, and Australia are also included. Adding the pool of research microbiologists from these countries would more than double the starting number, and the 5,000 "important" ones as well. Using the same 200/10,000 death rate as in the US (probably higher in Russia and lower in the UK and Australia), we could therefore expect at least 8.4 deaths in a 5 month period using the same logic. This is not so far off from the 11 reported, and certainly nothing to write home about.
Well, despite the sensationalism of this article, the Globe and Mail is still a top-rate newspaper.
I think it's actually good news for *BSD that Hubbard has quit core. Besides wasting his talents on administrative tasks, he obviously didn't like the squabbling anymore. Now someone with managerial enthusiasm can move into his core position, and Jordan can focus on what he does best for *BSD - contribute good code. A good deal all around.
...of the article was the software ratings compared with the user survey:
What is the most important aspect of a video stream?
Low Bandwidth 27% Quality 73%
Video Quality Report Card:
QuickTime 4.1
Real 3.7 WMP 2.5
In what format do you provide content to your users?
QuickTime 22%
Real 31% WMP 42%
In other words, with quality being the most important factor, WMP wins - despite being the lowest quality of all. (Both QuickTime and Windows Media solutions are free) Hmmm... sounds like other familiar Microsoftian stories.
OK, this MacOS-on-Intel topic is re-warmed on the internet so often it's cliché, and Timothy's submitting it as an article is close to being flamebait, but I'll bite.
Let's all repeat: Apple is a Hardware Company. Cringley is deepley mistaken in thinking "Macintosh users will always buy Macs." - as evidenced by their quick adoption of UMAX, Motorola, DayStar and PowerComputing clones they obviously will not. Mac users buy whatever will run their operating system on, and as has been pointed out 1000 times in this endless debate the vast majority of Apple's sales come from hardware. Think of this: if you could get OS X running smoothly on your Intel machine, would you consider trying it out? So would most Mac users.
Still, if Apple thought they had a chance with this, they might have considered it. It's often been accepted that they already had a rudimentary OSX-Intel version deep in the vault. The fact is, without a structural rememdy to the MS Antitrust Case, there is no hope - MS could yank MacOffice, IE, and drive little Apple into the ground forever. And that's the lynch pin in Apple's decision not to consider releasing OSX for Intel.
The surviors fight the fights they can win and run from those they can't - and live to fight another day. Apple is nothing if not a survior.
MPEG 4 is an open industry standard, set in part by the International Standards Association. The alternatives to MPEG 4 (and we're not talking about Ogg here) that would take over in the near term if MPEG 4 failed would be RealVideo and more likely Windows Media Format. Would these be better from an 'open vs. proprietary' viewpoint? Not by half, and Ogg Video is only in the planning stages and too many years away from being viable to have any effect. So choose your Player, and choose wisely. Letting MPEG 4 fade away would only mean that 2 years from now we'd all be using Windows Media Player / Corona (except on open source systems for which MS would probably give us nothing)
Let's not blindly hate everything that isn't open source merely on the grounds of "Intellectual Property bull$hit" OK? I'm sure you wouldn't begrude book authors from getting something back for the efforts they put into writing, so don't begrudge others either.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, for the first time in the history of the planet, a species is now on the verge of being able to influence such events - and within less than 100 years (basically NOW in geological/astronomical terms). Humans probably couldn't do much more than duck & cover if an imminent strike was discovered in the next few decades, but in 50-75 years there is a high likelyhood will have developed the necessary tools to change the inevitable (eg. a permanent extra-earth presence ensuring survival, much better propulsion systems, and better technologies than near-useless nuclear weapons for such a situation, etc)
More than almost anything, this ability would really show that we've "arived"
Yes, as you mention a book making a very strong case for the open source model has already been published. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Marting Fink, HP's Linux evangelist and author of "The Business & Economics of Open Source" when he gave the keynote speech to the OSW/Business of Open Source Conference in Ottawa two weeks ago. Mr Fink's book sounds very similar to parts of the one the NZOSS is trying to create; perhaps they could ask him to write the Economics and When not to Migrate sections?
BTW, Mr Fink was an engaging speaker and there was good Conference attendance all 'round, even though this was only the first year for the OSW event (2nd for BOSS). Perhaps because it was in Ottawa, there seemed to be many more government/business types than computer types at the Conference. Good sign or Bad sign? Maybe it's time Canada considered more of a paltform-neutral stance à la other governments?
By Staff Writer ablair
November 18, 2002, 10:30 PM EST
Ottawa - Recently, an online movie download service backed by five major studios opened for business, marking one of the industry's biggest moves to date into Internet distribution. Movielink is a the joint project by MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Studios
Canadian users will have to wait for a sequel to the initial Movielink service, however, since the service only works on computers with US IP addresses.
Last week's slight from Hollywood is an embarrassing rebuff for Canada, which has positioned itself as one of the leading countries for broadband adoption per capita. It also has a large contingent of early adopters, who likely would be interested in trying out technologies such as video-on-demand.
This is just the latest example of the challenges facing Canada. For years, many developers have ignored Canadian users entirely or forced them to wait months for region-specific versions of products, citing its relatively small market share. Canadians account for less than 5 percent of total desktop computing sales, according to industry research.
Movielink isn't the only online video service to dis the Mac. CinemaNow, an Internet movie site backed by studio Lion's Gate Entertainment, offers its wares to Windows customers only. In addition, Yahoo's Launch music video service also does not support the Mac, according to a recent test of the site by CNET News.com.
Canada clearly covets the market that the download service is meant to attract, having recently launched CA*net 4.
But if Canada has sometimes broken new ground, it has also frequently been left on the sidelines in the fast-evolving field of entertainment convergence.
In related news, Movieline.com reportedly does not allow connections from anywhere other than within the US, effectively rebuffing most of the world's online users.
There are a few alternatives (having just opened a retail business, I've looked). We couldn't find a commercial Linux solution for our business that could handle what we needed our POS system to do, but for that matter the solutions that did exist on the Windows side were very expensive per site, and for us not cost-effective. So like many companies, we had to get a custom-made POS system up & running. Unfortunately, the programmers I knew were only comfortable with Windows systems - and therefore that's what we went with. I'm sure this situation has happened for many businesses: despite us being aware of the cost benefits of non-Windows systems (and quite frankly, most busness decision makers are not) and actively looking for an OSS solution, we had to roll our own on Windows.
Some of the best *nix POS solutions out there:
Viewtouch, the original makers or touchscreens, with FreeBSD/Linux systems
IBM, with some Linux-based solutions (mostly for medium to larger businesses), but recently successful
Quasar POS from Linux Canada - a great, professional & full-featured POS solution with integrated accounting (based on the OS Firebird db). Growing fast.
MacPOS with so many solutions on the Mac platform to choose from (and many being migrated to MacOS X) it's almost as bewidering as looking for a Windows solution.
We would have gone with a MacOSX or Linux solution if we had only found a programmer that was comfortable working with them. Long-term, either would have been cost-effective.
I hate to point out nitpicky but important points (OK, well no I don't) but:
"a transition away from UNIX and toward MacOS X"
That's sort of like a transition away from birds but towards ducks. Here the author is assuming MacOS X is somehow not a *NIX... an assumption that's been proved wrong here many times before. MacOS X is a subset of UNIX, just look up any UNIX history.
Sadly, even the original story submitter made this mistake: "There are big differences between Mac OS X and Unix machines." Sorry, that's not correct unless it's specified what other type of UNIX we're comparing OS X to.
After all, even the O'Reilly article author himself says "These tips will show you the differences between Mac OS X and other flavors of Unix" (my emphasis) MacOS X is a UNIX. Let's get it straight.
Interesting that this story should be posted on /. since I have recently become embroiled in a linking controversy with my university. I and another student have started a small business where students can sell their used textbooks on consignment near campus (off campus because the university's bookstore, owned by Follett has been granted a monopoly on the university grounds). We needed to "deep link" to a university webpage explaining changes in the class numbering system, but are reportedly on the verge of being served with legal action against us for doing so.
As students, we obviously cannot afford a protracted legal action against us by a university intent on defending Follett's monopoly. Should we copy the content of the university page onto a page of our own (with modifications), or continue linking? We have looked but not found the university's linking policy. Do we actually need permission to link?
There's currently a discussion on this very topic on MacSlash, but a few /. people may be interested in some Apple ramblings too:
.bomb bubble burst.
Strategy: Buy Low, Sell High.
How low can the stock values of companies go? Since last fall, many in the tech sector have certainly been trying to find out. This is a great time to buy companies or technologies and lately Apple has been wisely acting when opportunities arise. Even if Emagic GmbH, Spruce Technologies, Nothing Real, and Zayante in the last year had all been privately held, they would have still been sold at a favourable price compared to buying them before the
Strategy: Niche Market Growth.
It's clear that Apple wants to defend the Macintosh strength as a music & audio creation tool in the long term. Since pro audio software has been lagging on the march to MacOS X, Apple is at least applying heat to developers if not exactly lighting a fire under them. Logic and associated software & hardware on the Mac will mean that Digidesign, Twelve Tone Systems(Cakewalk), MOTU and Steinberg will have to take the market segment more seriously (although MOTU & Digidesign have historically been great friends of the Mac already). The way it's looking is that a larger majority of pro audio will be done on the Mac. Can Steinberg, Twelve Tone et al. risk being caught with their pants around their ankles if this happens?
Strategy: Technology Cross-Pollination.
Now that Apple has a substantial video-production, streaming, compression, audio & other technologies, they may consider adding many good features from one to another and developing truly feature-rich packages. It dosen't take a dreamer to see the possibilities, from unheard-of professional solutions to trickle-down pro capabilities in new iSoftware (eg. look how technologies purchased from Marcromedia were crafted into Final Cut Pro & iMovie). This is one area that users, down the road, can really cash out with if Apple encourages the flow of technologies between it's new divisions.
Strategy: Sorry, Mac-Only.
One thing that is a bit sad about this, ironically enough, is the immediate cancellation of the Windows versions of some software (notably Shake & Logic) with this strategy. While perhaps more upfront than an MS-style purchase and feature-deprivation in non-Windows versions, Apple still isn't making any friends (and perhaps losing potentially loyal customers & money) by doing this. Still, one cannot say that it's not what happened to Mac users through the late 1990s (even now - look at Bungie) but it would be better karma to be more merciful once the shoe is on the other foot. Apple would be smart to mitigate the anger of Windows users by offering discounts on upgrades to the next Mac version.
Next Strategy: More Vertical Markets.
The Macintosh still has a real chance at gaining significant market share if it can be a strong alternative in enough vertical market segments. Apple is rightly building on it's strenghts, but should diversify enough so that the Macintosh is not pegged as only good for those niches (remember what happened to the Amiga? Games machine!)
A Holy Grail almost as worthy as dominating the business market for Apple is the scientific & engineering markets, often with high software margins all around. A purchase or substantial investment in Autodesk à la the MS $150M in Apple would make Apple a huge player in the professional engineering, architecture, and manufacturing industries overnight. Considering Autodesk is not the most expensive stock right now, with a market cap of approximately USD$1.4B, Apple could conceivably purchase the entire operations in cash and still have about $2B in the bank. Autodesk's Design Segment develops AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Mechanical Desktop, Autodesk Architectural Desktop, Architectural Studio, Autodesk Map, Lightscape, and Autodesk Land Desktop, to name a few (most industry-standard in their fields) and the Discreet Segment develops 3D Studio MAX, Animator Studio, flame, inferno, smoke, combustion, cinestream, plasma, cleaner, MPEG supercharger, Topper, and many others.
With a stable of industry-dominating software products as great as this, such a purchase (or even investment ensuring MacOS X compatibility) would send massive shockwaves across the engineering & architectural markets, and ripples in the scientific & pro graphics markets who are by now used to this. No immediate cancellation of the Windows version would be posible here, rather a years-long strategy to ensure first Mac versions and then Mac feature-parity. A purchase like this too rich for Apple's blood? Try something smaller like privatley-held ESRI (makers of ArcINFO, ArcView, ArcGIS & associated imaging systems), or continue to add strength in the crucial areas of coming scientific importance such as biotech and bioinformatics, in which Macs already have a growing following as you can see.
...and the final step in our glorious plan for Canadian World Domination!!
It's not yet easy to manually remap keys in OSX, (many do with XDarwin) but you can do it by text-editing the appropriate xmodmap file you're using (Warning: the DMCA may seriously repercussions if you live in the US and try to do this... check out the scary disclaimer on this how-to for remapping keys with XDarwin!!) This really should be something user-changeable in the System Prefs itself, under "Keyboard" and hopefully will be in Jaguar or not too long after.
/System/Library/Keyboards/ directory (pick yours, though I think there are even more now with 10.1.5):
/System/Library/Keyboards
/System/Library/Keyboards/ACE.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/ACE_102.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/Apple.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleAdjJIS.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleExt.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleII.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleISO.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleISOExt.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleJIS.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/Belge.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Canadian-CSA.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Canadian-ISO.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Canadien.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Dansk.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Deutsch.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Espanol.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Francais.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/HIL.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/HIL_ITF_JAPANESE.keyboa rd
/System/Library/Keyboards/HIL_JIS.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/HP_MiniDIN_JIS.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/Italiano.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Japanese.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/LatinoAmericano.keymapp ing
/System/Library/Keyboards/MSN.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/Netherlands.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/NeXT.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/Norsk.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/OADG_A01.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/OADG_AX.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/OADG_J3100.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/Portugues.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Schweizer.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Suisse.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/Svenska.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_Compact.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_Compact_JAPANESE. keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_Compact_UNIX.keyb oard
/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_JAPANESE.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_PC.keyboard
/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_TUV_EUROPEAN.keyb oard
/System/Library/Keyboards/UK.keymapping
/System/Library/Keyboards/USA.keymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/ACE.keyboar d
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/ACE_102.key board
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Apple.keybo ard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleAdjJIS . eyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleExt.ke yboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleII.key board
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleISO.ke yboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleISOExt . eyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/AppleJIS.ke yboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Belge.keyma pping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Canadian-CS A.keymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Canadian-IS O.keymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Canadien.ke ymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Dansk.keyma pping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Deutsch.key mapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Espanol.key mapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Francais.ke ymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/HIL.keyboar d
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/HIL_ITF_JAP ANESE.keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/HIL_JIS.key board
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/HP_MiniDIN_ JIS.keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Italiano.ke ymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Japanese.ke ymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/LatinoAmeri cano.keymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/MSN.keyboar d
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Netherlands . eymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/NeXT.keyboa rd
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Norsk.keyma pping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/OADG_A01.ke yboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/OADG_AX.key board
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/OADG_J3100. keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Portugues.k eymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Schweizer.k eymapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Suisse.keym apping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/Svenska.key mapping
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5.keybo ard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_Compa ct.keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_Compa ct_JAPANESE.keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_Compa ct_UNIX.keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_JAPAN ESE.keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_PC.ke yboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/TYPE5_TUV_E UROPEAN.keyboard
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/UK.keymappi ng
/Volumes/Mac/System/Library/Keyboards/USA.keymapp ing
In OSX, you could manually re-map the modmap file for the appropriate keymap you want to change out of the list of keymaps in the
But of course, there's will soon be an easier way if you don't want to muck about. Michael Baltak's GPL'd DoubleCommand Deluxe, under development and hopefully to be released soon should offer a good amount of flexibility in custom keymapping for free. Or, to kill the bug with a sledgehammer you could get a macro utility like Quickeys from CE Software and map the Caps Lock key to trigger a one-key "shortcut" of your choosing (ie: map it to another key)
I wouldn't worry too much about paying to upgrade the OS to Jaguar, Apple so far has been fairly good about this sort of stuff. You could also wait a few months until Jaguar comes out and you might not need a keymapping utility at all, if you can bear to wait.
Maybe I'm a bit paranoid (I probably fit right in on /.) but when I read news subheadlines like "Nvidia, the dominant PC graphics chip maker, has teamed up with Microsoft and developed a new cross-platform graphic language called Cg that it hopes becomes an industry standard" I don't really feel all warm & fuzzy inside. CG Channel states "NVIDIA's compiler toolkit would be more optimized for their own hardware owing to greater understanding of their own technology. ATI would have the option of writing their own backend compiler to support their hardware more optimally, but the exisiting NVIDIA toolkit should generate working code on ATI's part. [...] NVIDIA are hoping that Cg will be the industry's defacto standard simply due to its time on the market [...]" If NVIDIA can't be reasonably criticized for supporting their own chipset more with optimized code (and leaving it open to others with competing chipsets), can co-developer Microsoft be criticized for favouring their own software in this? Couldn't MS solutions (DirectX, XBox-specific tools, etc) be favoured under Cg merely by them investing more in Cg development and (as one of the two developers controlling the standard) updating compilers and shader functions for their software sooner or more completely than for others? If this was the case, Cg could just end up being another "embrace, extend, etc" scenario, this time in the graphics market to push MS & Nvidia techologies.
Nvidia has been fair to good in their cross-platform support so far, but of course MS has not been. To the relief of many CG Channel reports that "Interestingly, key components of NVIDIA's Cg compiler will be open-sourced and will work on Linux, Mac OS X and Xbox platforms. [...] Compiled code for Direct3D will be cross-platform (well, as cross platform as Microsoft might expect). OpenGL code should work much the same as long as the OpenGL extensions are supported on the target. NVIDIA says it will provide compiler binaries for all of the major platforms." The real proof will be in how Nvidia supports Cg on other platforms and OpenGL over the long term. Will these binaries be released at the same time and with the same feature sets? And will this continue to be the case or will full cross-platform support only exist in the beginning until Cg becomes a de facto standard?
I'm skeptical at this point, since we all know there's a world of difference between being merely compatible and being optimized. There's some evidence so far of how Cg is being implemented. For instance, it looks like there isn't an OpenGL fragment program profile for the Cg toolkit while there is one for Direct3D8. Nvidia says that the reason Cg has for no OpenGL ARB vertex_program extension while there are both dx8ps and dx8vs profiles is that OpenGL is dragging it's heels with the standard, perhaps valid but nonetheless the result is Cg is better implemented under DX8 than the OGL side. While it's theoretically possible to program Cg textureShaders and regcombiners in OpenGL, it's not currently supported. Much of the feature set in Cg looks like that announced so far for OpenGL2 - could nVidia just be trying to repeat OpenGL2 functions using their own identical and properitary Cg extentions instead? Finally, Nvidia announced support for Windows, MacOSX and Linux; the first and last platforms should have native Cg compilers (Linux soon apparently) but what about MacOSX?
"Many Americans probably do not realise or care how offensive Kopel's language is to people in other countries"
>Frankly, who gives a fuck.
My point exactly.
>Why should we even care about people in other countries, do they care about us ?
Yes, a lot. Or haven't you noticed the world media interest with all things American?
>This is not a piece about notion of "humanity" etc (which btw doesn't exist) but about what's best for US.
And that's the entire problem; the framing of arguments in terms of what is best for the Self instead of the Whole. By this same perspective, for instance, we should all pollute as much as we need so long as we're not the ones to suffer the consequences. It's an ethos where NIMBY reigns, where everyone passes the buck and and Might makes Right. And that definitely isn't the real world (except for the maladjusted criminal mindset)
...with the vocabulary of "US interests" and underneath sounds disturbingly similar to the musings of the old 19-th century US imperialists, "manifest destiny" and all that. He gives no apologies for - and even encourages - ripping up treaties the US has signed (ABM, now the Outer Space Treaty) because they limit the signatories. This is exactly what these treaties were designed for: so that no one signatory would take advantage of military strength or position to cause conflicts with the others. Kopel states:
"The Bush administration has shown that it is willing to reject politically correct international agreements which harm America's interests -- such as the recently repudiated agreement creating an International Criminal Court, and the ABM treaty."
The ideas of "political correctness" that he's referring to here are the prosecution of genocide, the escalation of a nuclear weapons arms race, and the competitive militarization of outer space. If these ideals are mere "political correctness" then count me PC any day.
The rest of his article is rife with examples of his thinly-shrouded desire for American expansionism instead of a co-operative & unifying space effort by humanity, like "Far better for the settlers of Mars to enjoy the protections of the Constitution of the United States -- as did the settlers of the American Territories in North America in the years before they achieved statehood." and unilateralism "[...] the United States could simply undertake an ambitious program of human space exploration [...] without viewing Article 2 as an impediment -- but this approach might prove problematic in the long run."
Additionally Kopel's view of countries and respected international organisations outside of the US could hardly be lower "Given the Bush administration's commendable interest in favoring American interests over the opinions of the post-national bureaucrats and chattering classes" [we can only imagine he is referring to the United Nations and supporters of treaties here] and "[...] ban appropriation by some super-national body -- such as the United Nations. Surely the settlers of Mars would gain little from being placed under the thumb of an infamously corrupt and self-serving collection of dictatorships none of which (Russia excepted) have contributed anything to the exploration of space." Noting that he also referrs to the State Department as a "kleptocracy", it is hard to imagine he likes any group or nation outside of the US military or who is in favour with the Bush Administration.
His arguments that the US should scrap the Outer Space Treaty except for a few Articles does not hold water either. Usually scrapping a treaty a nation has signed involves scrapping the whole thing or keeping it whole. Anything else would require re-negotiation with the other signatories (95 in the case of the Outer Space Treaty) and it's hard to see any situation where they would be willing to - in effect - gut it. The other disturbing assumption to Kopel's arguments is that it is perfectly OK (he used the term "commendable") for a US administration to unilaterally tear up lawful international agreements whenever they become inconvenient. If the Bush Administration continued this trend, how credible would the US be if it ever wanted to conclude trade, military, or political agreements with other nations in the future?
Many Americans probably do not realise or care how offensive Kopel's language is to people in other countries, like Canada who has historically experienced first hand the effects of Manifest Destiny policies. Nor how offensive it is to probably the majority of informed readers of Slashdot, who intelligently see humanity's exploration of space as something greater and more inspiring than a dangerously militarized land grab.
A. Blair
Well, I live in Canada too, and I think the ridiculous costs of ratifying Kyoto estimated by the energy industry and Alberta are on at least as shaky ground as the estimated climactic effects of not ratifying that are often criticized. It's natural for Ralph Klein, the the Canadian Petroluem Producers Association & Chamber of Commerce, and George "Big-Oil" Bush to spread worst-case scenario estimates on the costs of Kyoto, but these scaremongering tactics just muddy an already difficult discussion. An economic meltdown certainly didn't happen when the state of California introduced stringent vehicle emissions standards and it's not in the cards with California's much greater planned controls, for example. Also, the jurisdictions that adopt such controls early will have a head start on building clean energy business and technologies that the rest of the world will inevitably have to adopt.
Two things nobody can deny: the climate is warming and further warming will have serious consequences. Further, the writing is on the wall that limits on carbon output is the way things are moving, whether we ratify Kyoto or not. We can either choose to join with the rest of the developed world and show some leadership, or not and point the finger to countries that cannot afford to adopt Kyoto as the reason we won't either. If Canada can't even take a (relatively) modest step now, how will we make the much larger necessary cuts in the future?
What seems to have happened is the owners of macslash.com let their registration expire (the Dotster e-mail warning them of this was filtered out as spam on their mac.com e-mail account apparently), and Vicente Peiro Crespo of Valencia, Spain registered and paid for it legally at expiry. According to what he's said on the macslash.org thread about this, he does this with expired domains and redirects them through Commission Junction for a little extra money from ad revenue. Not exactly the most honorable thing for a moonlighting hobby, but perfectly legal.
However, he has said that when owners ask for their domains back (eg. when the domain is still in use) he gives it to them sans profit; and further he has stopped advertising on macslash.com as soon as he found out the domain was still near & dear to people's hearts and he's stopped advertising. He's also put up a link from macslash.com to macslash.org as of this posting, as you can see. This dosen't sound like the work of a beligerent opportunist nor is this a "hijacking" as the title of this thread implies. His first post on Macslash about it mentioned that he was willing to return the domain if the former owner contacted him. But now Vincente says that he, Dotster, and Commission Junction have recieved so many flames about this that they've cut off his account and he's no longer making any money off of anything.
Somehow this seems like a simple mistake (on both the part of Vincenete and Macslash's owners for letting it expire) that could have been easily corrected but now exacerbated by a lot of flamers. So stop sending nasty e-mails to everyone on the planet about this and maybe Vincente will give the domain back if he's still inclined. Otherwise MacSlash will have to get used to permanently being at MacSlash.org
... the only problem is that ThinkCycle has been implemented already in a more effective manner: it's called volunteerism. No, it dosen't have fancy buzzwords like "distributed brainpower" or "open-source", but it has already proven it's success for centuries across many continents. People have been part of "distributed efforts" working on some of the world's larger problems by volunteering internationally, for the United Nations, or in their own communities. I have to say that Thinkcycle has their hearts in the right place, but good people with expertise have already thought of a more effective, old-fashioned implementation. Want global interconnectivity for using spare brain-cycles of professionals on far-away problems? Medecins Sans Frontières and Engineers Without Borders have been consulting like this for years with amazing technologies such as the 'telephone' and through 'mail' and even on the 'internet'
Indeed, right-to-left language support is currently very weak on OS X but this is rumored to change with Jaguar. Certainly there's been talk of it already from Apple people before (eg. Peter Lofting @ the ATypI Conference Copenhagen last year) You can of course use many right-to-left languages on MacOS 9 and with XWindows on OSX already (eg. AbiWord). From an implementation perspective, because of system-wide Unicode support it's certainly easier than ever - just get the language sets out the door at Apple. Additional language support should be quicker than with pre-OSX systems, and more uniform. Nice to see an another international ISO technology that Apple and Xerox started coming back to help them. I never cease to be amazed at how innovative those two companies really were back in the 'day. And to a greater or lesser extent still are.
...I'd encourage you to go out and buy CDs like these and return them the next day to the store for a refund, and make sure they know it's because they won't work in your computer or other device. If enough people annoy enough retailers, the large buyers will figure out it's not worth the hassle and this trial period for copy-protected (non)-CDs will show the record companies standardising on these won't fly. If you all do nothing now, these will be standard in a year or two and we won't be able to do a thing about it. If you don't like it, do something about it.
This is just a continuation of the general IT-manger hostility to Mac and other non-Windows solutions. It's the *culture* that's been built around IT professionals: As has been said many times before, nobody every got fired for recommending Windows. This will be a very difficult culture bias to overcome everywhere, and in the hyper-critical world of politics where everything is under scrutiny (and perhaps rightly so) would you use an often-criticised platform when you've constantly got lots of other attacks to parry?
Even so, I would have at least expected some California reps to use a few more Macs, supporting their home state industries and all.
Isn't demonstrating a modular Windows key to the States' case showing it can be done? Maybe they had problems with their version and didn't want to shoot themselves in the foot...
The award nomination is great for the Samba team, congrats! The more important question to this story is about Microsoft's intensified attacks on Samba and whether Samba will be able to continue in the future. From the article:
"In late March, Microsoft published a document that outlines how third-party developers can use Common Internet File Sharing (CIFS) [...]
Specifically, Microsoft requires programmers to sign an agreement that prohibits using information in the document when building software governed by the General Public License (GPL). Among the products affected by the restriction is Samba, widely used software that competes with file sharing technology in Microsoft's Windows operating system. Samba uses CIFS to communicate with client systems."
With this and other such inevitable moves by MS on the horizon, will Samba be able to continue meaningfully with an increasingly hostile Microsoft?
This is all very well except we are dealing wiith a starting pool of substantially more than the 20,000 US microbiology researchers... deaths from the UK, Russia, and Australia are also included. Adding the pool of research microbiologists from these countries would more than double the starting number, and the 5,000 "important" ones as well. Using the same 200/10,000 death rate as in the US (probably higher in Russia and lower in the UK and Australia), we could therefore expect at least 8.4 deaths in a 5 month period using the same logic. This is not so far off from the 11 reported, and certainly nothing to write home about.
Well, despite the sensationalism of this article, the Globe and Mail is still a top-rate newspaper.
I think it's actually good news for *BSD that Hubbard has quit core. Besides wasting his talents on administrative tasks, he obviously didn't like the squabbling anymore. Now someone with managerial enthusiasm can move into his core position, and Jordan can focus on what he does best for *BSD - contribute good code. A good deal all around.
...of the article was the software ratings compared with the user survey:
What is the most important aspect of a video stream?
Low Bandwidth 27%
Quality 73%
Video Quality Report Card:
QuickTime 4.1
Real 3.7
WMP 2.5
In what format do you provide content to your users?
QuickTime 22%
Real 31%
WMP 42%
In other words, with quality being the most important factor, WMP wins - despite being the lowest quality of all. (Both QuickTime and Windows Media solutions are free) Hmmm... sounds like other familiar Microsoftian stories.
OK, this MacOS-on-Intel topic is re-warmed on the internet so often it's cliché, and Timothy's submitting it as an article is close to being flamebait, but I'll bite.
Let's all repeat: Apple is a Hardware Company. Cringley is deepley mistaken in thinking "Macintosh users will always buy Macs." - as evidenced by their quick adoption of UMAX, Motorola, DayStar and PowerComputing clones they obviously will not. Mac users buy whatever will run their operating system on, and as has been pointed out 1000 times in this endless debate the vast majority of Apple's sales come from hardware. Think of this: if you could get OS X running smoothly on your Intel machine, would you consider trying it out? So would most Mac users.
Still, if Apple thought they had a chance with this, they might have considered it. It's often been accepted that they already had a rudimentary OSX-Intel version deep in the vault. The fact is, without a structural rememdy to the MS Antitrust Case, there is no hope - MS could yank MacOffice, IE, and drive little Apple into the ground forever. And that's the lynch pin in Apple's decision not to consider releasing OSX for Intel.
The surviors fight the fights they can win and run from those they can't - and live to fight another day. Apple is nothing if not a survior.
MPEG 4 is an open industry standard, set in part by the International Standards Association. The alternatives to MPEG 4 (and we're not talking about Ogg here) that would take over in the near term if MPEG 4 failed would be RealVideo and more likely Windows Media Format. Would these be better from an 'open vs. proprietary' viewpoint? Not by half, and Ogg Video is only in the planning stages and too many years away from being viable to have any effect. So choose your Player, and choose wisely. Letting MPEG 4 fade away would only mean that 2 years from now we'd all be using Windows Media Player / Corona (except on open source systems for which MS would probably give us nothing)
Let's not blindly hate everything that isn't open source merely on the grounds of "Intellectual Property bull$hit" OK? I'm sure you wouldn't begrude book authors from getting something back for the efforts they put into writing, so don't begrudge others either.