What should change about copyright law to avoid the copyright infringement and still allow the using of 20+millions of mullah to develop a game?
The problem here isn't copyright law, it's economics.
It seems a lot of people have misunderstood me here. I did not mean the monkey island (original game) remake or something like that; I meant another good, funny and stunning graphical adventure. They have gotten very rare, and I fear it is because such games are almost impossible to properly protect from copyright infringement. At least, that is what my contacts in the game industry tells me, and I have no reason to doubt them.
It is a struggle to see any reason why the genre of a [single-player, standalone, not online] game should have the slightest bearing on how easy it is to 'protect' from piracy. It's like arguing that engine immobilisers are only useful for four-door sedans, and won't work on sports cars or SUVs.
In what industry? In the majority of industries, piracy is NOT the norm, and it is only the minority who are doing it. The only industry where I've seen any respectable figures that measure piracy is the games industry, and they are quite alarming.
I doubt you'll find many people under 30 (possibly even 35) who think downloading music or movies from the internet is "wrong".
Considering that your opinion is not shared by the courts, who have repeatedly hammered the RIAA on legal grounds, among others, I think your opinion is somewhat flawed. If the RIAA really did represent the letter or spirit of the law, they would have won more cases, and a class-action suit would not have been filed against them.
I was under the impression that the RIAA was losing because of evidence-gathering methods, and the like, not because the courts had decided sharing music and movies you don't hold the copyright for was A-OK.
Aside from which, you've made another leap of logic here - you're assuming that the distribution industry doesn't impact the creative end. You can have the most wonderful book, painting, song, or film in the world, and it doesn't mean squat if you can't get it out to people. Content distribution itself isn't necessarily cheap - trust me on this one, I have to do it. It certainly isn't often easy.
There's no reason, today, for content distribution [of things like music, etc] to end users to be expensive. This would be especially true if those monopolising major distribution channels were to suddenly go out of business.
And I think you just proved my point about misinformation and the difficulties in making people understand what copyright really is and does.
Perhaps, then, you can offer some justification for the incredibly generous privileges that benefit those on the copyright gravy train ? Perhaps you can explain why you deserve to continue receiving income in perpetuity from work you have already completed ? Perhaps you can give a reason why your family (and their families, and likely their families' families) should receive compensation for work they didn't do ? Maybe you can even explain how a system designed to still be paying your descendants 3-4 generations after you've died could possibly offer any incentive to work more ?
No other member of society has receives benefits remotely as generous for their work. Even the packages given to politicians (and their families), or "negotiated" by unions, pale into insignificance beside the ability to do some work at twenty years old, and still have your great-grandchildren receiving compensation for that work.
The only people who need "re-education" are the ones who think they should be freeloading off the rest of society for 150 years.
here is a hypothetical: I am an artist. I spent most of my adult life poor, my family is also poor because of this. Right around the age of 50 I make a hit. It is going to sell and I am going to get paid like a rockstar. I tragically die. Should my family not get the money from my hardwork?
Here is another hypothetical. I am a labourer. I spent most of my adult life poor, my family is also poor because of this. Right around 45 I decided to start part-time University and get an economics degree. At 50, I start my first job and 2 months later I have provided an order of magnitude higher returns than any of my peers. My boss recognises this and gives me a fat raise, doubling my salary. The next day I tragically die.
Should my family be paid out my higher salary for the rest of their lives (and their families lives) ? Why should they not enjoy that money that I worked for
Yes, but in Linux or OS X, whenever I try to perform an action to which I have no privileges, by mere fact that I am in the Adminstrators group (or sudoers file), I get prompted for my password immediately. I do not have to ask special permission to "run as admin"; if it requires to be "admin" to run, then run the damn thing as admin already and demand authentication or confirmation from the user, and then abort if they fail to respond accordingly.
This is exactly how Vista works (and it does a better job of detecting when elevated privileges are needed than either OS X or Linux).
Ah. Well from the looks of it, now it's Ctrl+Alt+Del, Alt+T.
I suspect the need for Alt+T is related to the setting that disables the underlining of shortcut keys, but I can't seem to find the toggle that turns that on and off.
No. It's not. UAC is expressly designed to shift the responsibility for security onto the user. "Are you sure?" User clicks yes and Microsoft has shifted accountability to the user. It is brilliant in an evil way.
Please explain how this is any different to a sudo prompt that pops up in OS X when, say, an installer is run.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "shift the responsibility for security onto the user", etc. The responsibility for security (in this context) is *always* on the end user, and always has been. UAC (along with sudo, and similar tools) just make it easier for them.
helloworld.c is automated and intelligent too. That doesn't make it equivalent to sudo. Please stop trolling.
I've done more than enough large-scale sudo implementations to know what it is and how it works (and how it doesn't work).
Actually, Word was dirt cheap/'free' with PC and only good enough.
For a significant number of people, Word was substantially superior. Not needing a keyboard overlay cheat-sheet to perform basic tasks and WYSIWYG (in Word for Windows) were two fairly high-profile advantages to the average end user.
Microsoft put a *massive* amount of effort into making Word better than Wordperfect by talking to end users and asking them what they wanted. It's a textbook example of a product winning because more people wanted it.
2. UAC. After the first complaint I disabled it. Nevermind that UAC isn't sudo. Security is NOT shifting the responsibility of security onto the user. "Are you sure?" is not security. It's a blame-shifting mechanism and they paid handsomely for it.
UAC is essentially identical in concept and implementation to sudo (albeit somewhat more automated and intelligent). Why do you think it's different ?
Huh ? Starting Task Manager is Ctrl+Shift+Esc in Vista, just like it's been since (at least) Windows NT 4.0. I see the right-click Taskbar -> Task Manager item is also still there.
* If your account is a local admin then should you be prompted to do some things?
Yes, because being an "admin" just means you can elevate your privileges, it doesn't make them (much) higher by default.
* Why does an admin need to choose "Run as admin" for some things?
See above.
* If the system is going to prompt me then make sure I will see it. Sometimes the security prompts pop-under. If I go off to another program while waiting for something to finish only to later find the unanswered prompt still waiting for my response.
You need to be fairly quick to beat a UAC request before it darkens the screen, but even if you do it will sit flashing in the taskbar.
* If a program requires admin access or "Run as admin" then clearly give the user direction to do so. Try pathping for instance and you get "0 No resources". Launch cmd "as admin" and it works fine.
This is an application issue, not an OS issue. The OS tries to detect when admin privileges might be necessary (which is more than any of its peers), but by the nature of this it cannot be 100% accurate.
The Vista security model is horrible IMHO.
It's using the same security model as OS X and modern Linux distros. "Admin" means you have the ability to raise your privileges on demand, NOT that you are running with Administrator privileges all the time. It's just like being an "Admin" in OS X or Linux (which means you can sudo, not that you're root).
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality.
If that were true, copyright infringement wouldn't be considered a significant problem because only a tiny minority of people would be doing it.
When lots of people are breaking law, or do not consider others breaking it to be particularly "wrong", that's nearly always a good indication that the law is bad. The most obvious problem with copyright is term lengths. That copyright lasts an instant past the death of the owner at all, is unjustifiable, but even the fixed multi-decade terms of yesteryear are still too long in today's world.
But since the RIAA began their lawsuit campaign, they've taken their interpretation of copyright law, which was against both the letter and spirit of the law, and shoved it down the public's throat.
I think the RIAA's "interpretation" to be quite in line with both the general principles behind copyright (control over a work by its "creator") and the letter of the law (term extensions, DMCA, etc).
Considering what most of copyright actually does, imagine what would happen to the creative arts if its legal framework suddenly disappeared. A creative artist trying to get his or her material to market would be caught trying to navigate a minefield, similar for anybody trying to be a distributor. Everybody would be having to protect their work however they could, which could translate into contracts being required before a submission even could be made, and for the end user, extremely restrictive DRM - after all, there would be nothing but DRM to protect a distributor's work from other distributors. It would be a crippling blow to the creative industry.
It would certainly be a major blow to the distribution industry, and several other hangers-on, but about the only creative industry I could see really suffering would be books (which are already in significant trouble due to several other factors).
Now, the public is very aware of copyright, and they've got the wrong idea of what it is and what it does. Re-educating people is going to be a long road.
I think people now have a much more accurate idea of what copyright does and why, and just how far away that is from the struggling inventor or artist that is offered up as a justification for it. Further, I think that is finally helping them realise that the extraordinary privileges (both in scope and generosity) society heaps upon "creative artists" is rarely provides a worthwhile ROI.
Piracy was already rampant when monkey island came out. It came on floppies which were easily copied.
It also came with the little copy-protection wheel you had to match the faces up on. Although that wasn't particularly hard to copy, either (I seem to vaguely recall there was a wrist-smacking anti-piracy message printed on the inside of the wheel that could only be seen when you took it apart to photocopy, but it's a struggle to remember that far back).
2. Use PCI-e NIC's, onboard or PCI just can't deliver the speeds offered by GigE. You can find smiple intel PCI-e nics for under $20.
It's not at all unusual these days for onboard NICs to be hang directly off the chipset, which is going to give you far better performance than a PCIe-based card.
Certainly you can do decent Raid via software, but (normall) why would you want to? That is to say, why load down the CPU when you can offload the task to dedicated hardware?
Because the general purpose CPU will do it faster and cheaper.
To say nothing of the overall performance, reliability and flexibility advantages of software RAID.
There are times and places to use hardware RAID. Booting from (for simplicity) and when the machine is bus-limited are the two major ones, but with modern PCIe machines the latter is rapidly becoming irrelevant unless you have massive numbers of spindles connected to a single box.
But RAID-5 and RAID-6 do tend to become CPU-bottlenecked given enough spindles.
Even a 10+ year old 300Mhz Pentium 2 class CPU has a RAID5/6 checksumming speed well into the hundreds of MB/sec. It's not going to be a limiting factor.
So if you're going with RAID-5 or RAID-6, makes sure to purchase a CPU with a high single-core performance (Linux Software RAID is currently not multi-threaded enough to split the calculations across multiple cores yet for a single array). The last RAID-6 box that I built, we made the mistake of going with a 1.8GHz CPU instead of a 2.4GHz or 2.6GHz CPU, which cut our performance by about 1/4 to 1/3 of what it could have been.
The checksumming speed of the CPU was almost certainly not the problem (unless you were seriously loading down the machine with other processing). You don't mention what kind of CPU, but even a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4 will be able to compute RAID5/6 checksums in excess of a couple of gigabytes/sec. Most likely you were bus-limited, or had crappy disk controllers that couldn't shift data fast enough or were generating storms of interrupts.
The "high CPU usage" of parity-based RAID is a myth that needs to be laid to rest (although it is good for identifying which people really do know what they're talking about when it comes to RAID - I often use it as an interview question).
The only valid complaint you make, in my opinion, is obnoxious UAC prompts.
Which is also pretty groundless, since generally speaking UAC prompts appear for the same reasons, and with similar frequency, as sudo prompts on Linux or Windows.
And you can even turn them off, if you want to expose yourself to more risk.
I remember there being docking stations for the 12" Powerbook G4s, since they had all the ports on one side too.
I've seen those things before. They're a fragile, kludgy, joke - and they sure as hell aren't going to let me hook up a pair of big screens to a MB.:(
I will never understand why a company that prides itself so much on design, has such a passive-aggressive approach to cable management, spawning such inelegant and kludgy "solutions".
I guess I'm missing the point of this. At work I plug my laptop into my docking stataion, with a 26" monitor attached (with the same setup at home - the two monitors cost far less than this silly laptop!). I *don't* want to lug the monitor around with me! If I have a desk where I work frequently, I can provide it a much bigger monitor. If I'm just walking around, I want my laptop to be as light as possible.
Seconded. Particularly with the new Dell Latitudes having docking stations with dual-DVI connections, I can have a couple of 27" LCDs' worth of screen real estate at home and at work, but still only have to carry around a couple of kilos worth of hardware.
I really wish Apple had built docking stations for the new MB range. The lack of them was the single biggest reason I didn't buy one.
Yet, anyway. Rest assured that when the time comes, Microsoft will give Windows away for free before they start conceding significant marketshare to Linux.
Anyway, for most people Windows *is* "free". They get it as part of their computer and they only "upgrade" when they get a newer version with a new computer. The proportion of end users who buy Windows at retail is vanishingly small.
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What should change about copyright law to avoid the copyright infringement and still allow the using of 20+millions of mullah to develop a game?
The problem here isn't copyright law, it's economics.
It seems a lot of people have misunderstood me here. I did not mean the monkey island (original game) remake or something like that; I meant another good, funny and stunning graphical adventure. They have gotten very rare, and I fear it is because such games are almost impossible to properly protect from copyright infringement. At least, that is what my contacts in the game industry tells me, and I have no reason to doubt them.
It is a struggle to see any reason why the genre of a [single-player, standalone, not online] game should have the slightest bearing on how easy it is to 'protect' from piracy. It's like arguing that engine immobilisers are only useful for four-door sedans, and won't work on sports cars or SUVs.
In what industry? In the majority of industries, piracy is NOT the norm, and it is only the minority who are doing it. The only industry where I've seen any respectable figures that measure piracy is the games industry, and they are quite alarming.
I doubt you'll find many people under 30 (possibly even 35) who think downloading music or movies from the internet is "wrong".
Considering that your opinion is not shared by the courts, who have repeatedly hammered the RIAA on legal grounds, among others, I think your opinion is somewhat flawed. If the RIAA really did represent the letter or spirit of the law, they would have won more cases, and a class-action suit would not have been filed against them.
I was under the impression that the RIAA was losing because of evidence-gathering methods, and the like, not because the courts had decided sharing music and movies you don't hold the copyright for was A-OK.
Aside from which, you've made another leap of logic here - you're assuming that the distribution industry doesn't impact the creative end. You can have the most wonderful book, painting, song, or film in the world, and it doesn't mean squat if you can't get it out to people. Content distribution itself isn't necessarily cheap - trust me on this one, I have to do it. It certainly isn't often easy.
There's no reason, today, for content distribution [of things like music, etc] to end users to be expensive. This would be especially true if those monopolising major distribution channels were to suddenly go out of business.
And I think you just proved my point about misinformation and the difficulties in making people understand what copyright really is and does.
Perhaps, then, you can offer some justification for the incredibly generous privileges that benefit those on the copyright gravy train ? Perhaps you can explain why you deserve to continue receiving income in perpetuity from work you have already completed ? Perhaps you can give a reason why your family (and their families, and likely their families' families) should receive compensation for work they didn't do ? Maybe you can even explain how a system designed to still be paying your descendants 3-4 generations after you've died could possibly offer any incentive to work more ?
No other member of society has receives benefits remotely as generous for their work. Even the packages given to politicians (and their families), or "negotiated" by unions, pale into insignificance beside the ability to do some work at twenty years old, and still have your great-grandchildren receiving compensation for that work.
The only people who need "re-education" are the ones who think they should be freeloading off the rest of society for 150 years.
here is a hypothetical: I am an artist. I spent most of my adult life poor, my family is also poor because of this. Right around the age of 50 I make a hit. It is going to sell and I am going to get paid like a rockstar. I tragically die. Should my family not get the money from my hardwork?
Here is another hypothetical. I am a labourer. I spent most of my adult life poor, my family is also poor because of this. Right around 45 I decided to start part-time University and get an economics degree. At 50, I start my first job and 2 months later I have provided an order of magnitude higher returns than any of my peers. My boss recognises this and gives me a fat raise, doubling my salary. The next day I tragically die.
Should my family be paid out my higher salary for the rest of their lives (and their families lives) ? Why should they not enjoy that money that I worked for
Perhaps this is a difference between base Vista and SP1?
Quite possibly. Mine is the standard Dell install that came with my E4300, but it is SP1.
The equivalent of sudo mkdir "c:\Program Files\MyDir" in Vista is this:
Something's wrong with your Vista install. On my system it prompts once, and the directory's name can be changed immediately.
Yes, but in Linux or OS X, whenever I try to perform an action to which I have no privileges, by mere fact that I am in the Adminstrators group (or sudoers file), I get prompted for my password immediately. I do not have to ask special permission to "run as admin"; if it requires to be "admin" to run, then run the damn thing as admin already and demand authentication or confirmation from the user, and then abort if they fail to respond accordingly.
This is exactly how Vista works (and it does a better job of detecting when elevated privileges are needed than either OS X or Linux).
ctrl-alt-del, t
Ah. Well from the looks of it, now it's Ctrl+Alt+Del, Alt+T.
I suspect the need for Alt+T is related to the setting that disables the underlining of shortcut keys, but I can't seem to find the toggle that turns that on and off.
Erm. No.
Yes, it is. Or are you somehow trying to argue the responsibility for running 'sudo rm -rf /' does NOT fall on the user doing it ?
Please stop comparing sudo and UAC as being somehow alike. Retelling this lie is disingenuous and dangerously misleads consumers and employers.
Then explain how they're different, if you're so sure they are.
No. It's not. UAC is expressly designed to shift the responsibility for security onto the user. "Are you sure?" User clicks yes and Microsoft has shifted accountability to the user. It is brilliant in an evil way.
Please explain how this is any different to a sudo prompt that pops up in OS X when, say, an installer is run.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "shift the responsibility for security onto the user", etc. The responsibility for security (in this context) is *always* on the end user, and always has been. UAC (along with sudo, and similar tools) just make it easier for them.
helloworld.c is automated and intelligent too. That doesn't make it equivalent to sudo. Please stop trolling.
I've done more than enough large-scale sudo implementations to know what it is and how it works (and how it doesn't work).
Microsoft is as always very expensive, even though the cost of their development has been largely returned.
As far as software prices go, most of Microsoft's stuff (and has always been) dirt cheap. That's one of the reasons it's become so common.
Price out a SAP or Oracle implementation, or even an office full of Red Hat machines, then come back to me about Microsoft being "expensive".
Actually, Word was dirt cheap/'free' with PC and only good enough.
For a significant number of people, Word was substantially superior. Not needing a keyboard overlay cheat-sheet to perform basic tasks and WYSIWYG (in Word for Windows) were two fairly high-profile advantages to the average end user.
Microsoft put a *massive* amount of effort into making Word better than Wordperfect by talking to end users and asking them what they wanted. It's a textbook example of a product winning because more people wanted it.
2. UAC. After the first complaint I disabled it. Nevermind that UAC isn't sudo. Security is NOT shifting the responsibility of security onto the user. "Are you sure?" is not security. It's a blame-shifting mechanism and they paid handsomely for it.
UAC is essentially identical in concept and implementation to sudo (albeit somewhat more automated and intelligent). Why do you think it's different ?
[...] or starting task manager.
Huh ? Starting Task Manager is Ctrl+Shift+Esc in Vista, just like it's been since (at least) Windows NT 4.0. I see the right-click Taskbar -> Task Manager item is also still there.
How did you used to do it in XP ?
* If your account is a local admin then should you be prompted to do some things?
Yes, because being an "admin" just means you can elevate your privileges, it doesn't make them (much) higher by default.
* Why does an admin need to choose "Run as admin" for some things?
See above.
* If the system is going to prompt me then make sure I will see it. Sometimes the security prompts pop-under. If I go off to another program while waiting for something to finish only to later find the unanswered prompt still waiting for my response.
You need to be fairly quick to beat a UAC request before it darkens the screen, but even if you do it will sit flashing in the taskbar.
* If a program requires admin access or "Run as admin" then clearly give the user direction to do so. Try pathping for instance and you get "0 No resources". Launch cmd "as admin" and it works fine.
This is an application issue, not an OS issue. The OS tries to detect when admin privileges might be necessary (which is more than any of its peers), but by the nature of this it cannot be 100% accurate.
The Vista security model is horrible IMHO.
It's using the same security model as OS X and modern Linux distros. "Admin" means you have the ability to raise your privileges on demand, NOT that you are running with Administrator privileges all the time. It's just like being an "Admin" in OS X or Linux (which means you can sudo, not that you're root).
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality.
If that were true, copyright infringement wouldn't be considered a significant problem because only a tiny minority of people would be doing it.
When lots of people are breaking law, or do not consider others breaking it to be particularly "wrong", that's nearly always a good indication that the law is bad. The most obvious problem with copyright is term lengths. That copyright lasts an instant past the death of the owner at all, is unjustifiable, but even the fixed multi-decade terms of yesteryear are still too long in today's world.
But since the RIAA began their lawsuit campaign, they've taken their interpretation of copyright law, which was against both the letter and spirit of the law, and shoved it down the public's throat.
I think the RIAA's "interpretation" to be quite in line with both the general principles behind copyright (control over a work by its "creator") and the letter of the law (term extensions, DMCA, etc).
Considering what most of copyright actually does, imagine what would happen to the creative arts if its legal framework suddenly disappeared. A creative artist trying to get his or her material to market would be caught trying to navigate a minefield, similar for anybody trying to be a distributor. Everybody would be having to protect their work however they could, which could translate into contracts being required before a submission even could be made, and for the end user, extremely restrictive DRM - after all, there would be nothing but DRM to protect a distributor's work from other distributors. It would be a crippling blow to the creative industry.
It would certainly be a major blow to the distribution industry, and several other hangers-on, but about the only creative industry I could see really suffering would be books (which are already in significant trouble due to several other factors).
Now, the public is very aware of copyright, and they've got the wrong idea of what it is and what it does. Re-educating people is going to be a long road.
I think people now have a much more accurate idea of what copyright does and why, and just how far away that is from the struggling inventor or artist that is offered up as a justification for it. Further, I think that is finally helping them realise that the extraordinary privileges (both in scope and generosity) society heaps upon "creative artists" is rarely provides a worthwhile ROI.
Piracy was already rampant when monkey island came out. It came on floppies which were easily copied.
It also came with the little copy-protection wheel you had to match the faces up on. Although that wasn't particularly hard to copy, either (I seem to vaguely recall there was a wrist-smacking anti-piracy message printed on the inside of the wheel that could only be seen when you took it apart to photocopy, but it's a struggle to remember that far back).
These days (naturally) you can do it online.
2. Use PCI-e NIC's, onboard or PCI just can't deliver the speeds offered by GigE. You can find smiple intel PCI-e nics for under $20.
It's not at all unusual these days for onboard NICs to be hang directly off the chipset, which is going to give you far better performance than a PCIe-based card.
Certainly you can do decent Raid via software, but (normall) why would you want to? That is to say, why load down the CPU when you can offload the task to dedicated hardware?
Because the general purpose CPU will do it faster and cheaper.
To say nothing of the overall performance, reliability and flexibility advantages of software RAID.
There are times and places to use hardware RAID. Booting from (for simplicity) and when the machine is bus-limited are the two major ones, but with modern PCIe machines the latter is rapidly becoming irrelevant unless you have massive numbers of spindles connected to a single box.
But RAID-5 and RAID-6 do tend to become CPU-bottlenecked given enough spindles.
Even a 10+ year old 300Mhz Pentium 2 class CPU has a RAID5/6 checksumming speed well into the hundreds of MB/sec. It's not going to be a limiting factor.
So if you're going with RAID-5 or RAID-6, makes sure to purchase a CPU with a high single-core performance (Linux Software RAID is currently not multi-threaded enough to split the calculations across multiple cores yet for a single array). The last RAID-6 box that I built, we made the mistake of going with a 1.8GHz CPU instead of a 2.4GHz or 2.6GHz CPU, which cut our performance by about 1/4 to 1/3 of what it could have been.
The checksumming speed of the CPU was almost certainly not the problem (unless you were seriously loading down the machine with other processing). You don't mention what kind of CPU, but even a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4 will be able to compute RAID5/6 checksums in excess of a couple of gigabytes/sec. Most likely you were bus-limited, or had crappy disk controllers that couldn't shift data fast enough or were generating storms of interrupts.
The "high CPU usage" of parity-based RAID is a myth that needs to be laid to rest (although it is good for identifying which people really do know what they're talking about when it comes to RAID - I often use it as an interview question).
As a legal user of P2P, and as a PC gamer (linux only, though), I really hate all the copyright infringements going on.
If copyright law were a more reasonable reflection of reality, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much copyright infringement going on.
I'd bet that the reason we don't see another monkey island or similar is due to piracy.
And you'd be wrong.
That's gotta be my biggest gripe with UAC: without the use of a password, it can't even secure a PC from a click-happy granny from out of town.
Which is not what it's meant to do.
If you really want to, you can configure UAC to prompt for a password (and even a username). In typical scenarios, however, it adds nothing.
The only valid complaint you make, in my opinion, is obnoxious UAC prompts.
Which is also pretty groundless, since generally speaking UAC prompts appear for the same reasons, and with similar frequency, as sudo prompts on Linux or Windows.
And you can even turn them off, if you want to expose yourself to more risk.
I remember there being docking stations for the 12" Powerbook G4s, since they had all the ports on one side too.
I've seen those things before. They're a fragile, kludgy, joke - and they sure as hell aren't going to let me hook up a pair of big screens to a MB. :(
I will never understand why a company that prides itself so much on design, has such a passive-aggressive approach to cable management, spawning such inelegant and kludgy "solutions".
I guess I'm missing the point of this. At work I plug my laptop into my docking stataion, with a 26" monitor attached (with the same setup at home - the two monitors cost far less than this silly laptop!). I *don't* want to lug the monitor around with me! If I have a desk where I work frequently, I can provide it a much bigger monitor. If I'm just walking around, I want my laptop to be as light as possible.
Seconded. Particularly with the new Dell Latitudes having docking stations with dual-DVI connections, I can have a couple of 27" LCDs' worth of screen real estate at home and at work, but still only have to carry around a couple of kilos worth of hardware.
I really wish Apple had built docking stations for the new MB range. The lack of them was the single biggest reason I didn't buy one.
Frankly, I've always wondered why they don't.
Because they don't need to.
Yet, anyway. Rest assured that when the time comes, Microsoft will give Windows away for free before they start conceding significant marketshare to Linux.
Anyway, for most people Windows *is* "free". They get it as part of their computer and they only "upgrade" when they get a newer version with a new computer. The proportion of end users who buy Windows at retail is vanishingly small.