The thing that makes this ruling by the Supreme Court so outrageous on its face is that corporations simply don't have "rights". They have the legal privilege of acting in business matters as a person. That is all. They do not have a "right" to vote, they do not have a "right" to bear arms, they do not have a "right" to free speech! Sure, individuals within corporations have the right of free speech, but that is not the same thing, and restricting corporate donations does not infringe on that right.
No, the fundamental problem here is that campaign donations are not speech. The basic premise is wrong, and until it is rectified no amount of trying to remedy the consequences will help.
Mac OSX 10.6 Snow leopard costs 29.00 at the Mac website
Yes, it's one of the exceptions. The other one being 10.1 (though as with 10.6, only if you were upgrading from the immediately previous version - 10.0).
Note also that 10.6 is only licensed as an upgrade from 10.5. Which means if you have 10.4, you technically need to buy both 10.5 *and* 10.6 to upgrade.
Mac Box set costs 129.00 - That includes ILife, and IWork as well as OSX Snow Leopard.
I'm not talking about the box sets. All other releases of OS X except 10.1 and 10.6 (assuming you're coming from 10.0 and 10.5 respectively) have had a price of $129.
What does Windows seven cost with a copy of Premiere, (don't even try to compare Moviemaker to IMovie) and Office Suite?
Your comparison is invalid.
Where on earth did you get the idea that OSX leopard cost 129.00?
No one from the military ever came out and gave that exact quote that you demand, but the language has been sugar coated for decades.
No, those are terms of relativity. Compared to firebombing a whole city, taking out just a neighbourhood *is* a surgical strike. Compared to dropping 50 bombs on a neighbourhood, dropping a single smart bomb down an air intake *is* precision (though perhaps not accuracy).
In context, the language is accurate.
Personally I disagree with the Iraq war. However, I'm with the GGP - I've never seen anyone actually in the military try to pretend war isn't messy and that innocent people won't die. That's what politicians do.
How should we as geeks try to convince the public that consoles' restrictions aren't worth the loss of an end user's right to do what he wants with what he owns?
You can't because for most people it's not.
The typical person cares primarily about WHAT they get.
Which brings me to tablets: If Microsoft makes a tablet that isn't some bastardized copy of Windows, I'll take a look. Until then, no thank you. Buying an overpriced one use computing device to me seem silly, and trying to shoehorn Windows into a tablet type device is just as pointless.
At which point does it stop being "some bastardised copy of Windows" ? After all, iOS is just OSX with most of the functionality ripped out and a new GUI on top.
Balmer was the schmuck who decided to break antitrust laws and murder Netscape while calling it "lively proof of the viability of the software industry" and forcing them into a war of attrition on the browser and the server.
"Forcing them" ? You do realise Netscape's basic business plan was to tie together their web server and browser products with proprietary extensions, right ? They very much fired the first shots in that battle.
Netscape couldn't out last Microsoft's deeper cash reserves.
Explorer went through revision after revision until Netscape was dead, starved for funds while the antitrust trial was happening.
Netscape couldn't improve their products fast enough. They were basically killed by the Navigator 4.x debacle, and IE clearly won on quality in that race.
Of the various problems Netscape had, lack of developers and funding for their browser was not one of them. Though reliance on a revenue stream from a software product that was clearly going to transition from "expensive and third party" to "free and integrated" as surely as file managers, GUIs and network stacks had before it, was stupid enough in and of itself to have killed the company.
While it does that, it should make Windows 8 the first release that breaks with the past by moving all legacy technologies into a sandbox a la what OS X originally did.
Actually the first release that did this was Windows NT 3.1, waaay back in 1993, with NTVDM and WoW. In fact, arguably, one could even say Windows/386 did it earlier still by running VDMs in protected mode.
Finally, they should work on extending whatever POSIX compatibility they still have left until Windows 8 can reliably run code originally written on Linux and OS X. Why? Because it would bridge one of the last gaps between Windows 7 and OS X.
The vast majority of code than runs on OSX - and practically ALL of the code that anyone cares about - is most certainly not POSIX compliant. This is also true (albeit to a lesser extent from the perspective of "cares about") on Linux.
The trouble is, due to Windows' ubiquity, people don't realize that Windows isn't what they want. It's simply what they are used to.
I'm well aware of the alternatives because I use them regularly, and for my computers I choose Windows first, OS X second, and Linux a distant third. At no point in the last decade would my ranking have been different.
If the instance gets compromised. malware can happily scribble on the Registry, drop files into SYSTEM32, etc. However, those changes are mapped to a temp directory and as soon as that window is closed, those changes all drop. Of course, saved files that the user wants would be set aside somewhere so they don't get erased on the VM shutdown.
If it were that easy to identify the difference between malware and deliberate user behaviour, we'd never have had a malware problem in the first place.
Windows NT was 32 bit from the start, developed straight for the i386 architecture.
Actually NT was first developed on the intel i860, then ported to x86 (amongst others). Ongoing development was done in a similar fashion, specifically so as to keep it portable and not create any dependencies on x86 in the codebase.
Far higher then OSX's point upgrades and of course far more expensive then Ubuntu releases. About a gazillion times more.
OS X upgrades typically cost $129. There have been a couple of exceptions to this but the pattern is clear. Windows upgrades typically cost slightly less than than (about $120).
Of course, the cost of a Windows upgrade is largely irrelevant, since the vast, vast bulk of Windows users get new versions of Windows either a) when they buy a new PC or b) when their corporate IT department puts it on their PC (which, due to how volume licensing works, costs "nothing").
Despite Google and Firefox and Apple and Opera being able to code fast and up-to-date browsers for XP, MS can't code IE9 to work on XP, because they are to lazy/inept (some MS fanboy will no doubt insist that IE9 depends on some fancy thing that no other browser needs to run fast, this is kinda like saying you need a 3D card to run a MS text adventure when text adventures have run on text only machines for decades).
Hilarious you offer Apple up as a counterexample when the minimum requirement for Safari on OS X is 10.5.8, released only a bit more than a year ago, and it's pretty much a given that the next major release of Safari, whenever it hits, will only be supported on Snow Leopard and newer.
Is that 20% of computers over $1000 sold at retail, like it was last time ? Because that's a pretty meaningless statistic when most PCs cost well under $1000 and probably more than half aren't bought through retail channels.
"Just because it's on your Facebook status, doesn't mean you want the whole world to know." Wait. (looks ^ at address bar) It says yro.slahsdot.org up there. Damn, I thought maybe it was portal.twilight.zone or some such. DAMMIT man! Have you been paying attention, or not? EVERYTHING ON FACEBOOK is accessibly by anyone with the will to snoop. It doesn't even require much skill - just the will to snoop. One more time: if it's on the intartubez, it ain't private. Go to the blackboard, and write that one thousand times for the class, please.
There is a difference between walking around 24/7 with a sign that says "I am X", and being prepared to confirm "I am X" if someone specifically asks about it.
So if Apple wants to release a netbook without it being a netbook, all they have to do is jack the price up. It's a netbook with a stupid high price tag. Putting a C2D in a netbook a couple years ago would have made it too expensive, today, those chips are cheap and can fit the bill the atom did before.
Can you point to any "NetBooks" similarly specced to the MBA but substantially cheaper ?
Now, here's some facts: we've been doing this "progressive taxation" thing for quite a while now, at least a few generations or so. Yet the gap between the rich and the poor in the USA has only increased. In fact, what's happening is that the middle class is shrinking, the upper class is staying relatively stable, and the poor are growing.
The tax rates on the rich in the US have been dropping dramatically for decades. You *used* to practice progressive taxation, but you've been doing your best to get away from it. Hence the rapidly increasing income disparity and collapsing middle class.
Any regressive tax regime (flat income tax, sales tax, etc) will only increase the speed at which that happens. If you play your cards right, US society could be back to a system of serfs and lords (sorry, wage slaves and CxOs) within half a century !
(and yes, rich people will still pay more in taxes. Even if they just put the money in the bank, it will be spent eventually.)
Proportionally vastly less, however. Regressive taxes (like a flat income tax, or sales taxes) always benefit the rich because they have to spend a relatively tiny proportion of their income on necessities.
All regressive taxes achieve is accelerating the concentration of wealth into the "elite".
Actually, most countries that assess corporate and personal income taxes do so on global income for resident/locally headquartered individuals and corporations, and on local income for nonresident individuals and foreign corporations.
The US is the only country that I'm aware of that expects you to actually pay tax on foreign income. Others merely use that foreign income to set your "base" before calculating their own tax rates.
Eg:
You earn $20k overseas and $50k locally:
In the US, you will be taxed on all $70k (potentially minus a credit if you paid tax on the $20k in another country).
In other countries, you will only pay tax on the $50k, but the tax bracket(s) that $50k falls into will be calculated starting from $20k rather than $0 (ie: you will pay tax on $50k, but at a rate as if your income was actually $70k).
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The thing that makes this ruling by the Supreme Court so outrageous on its face is that corporations simply don't have "rights". They have the legal privilege of acting in business matters as a person. That is all. They do not have a "right" to vote, they do not have a "right" to bear arms, they do not have a "right" to free speech! Sure, individuals within corporations have the right of free speech, but that is not the same thing, and restricting corporate donations does not infringe on that right.
No, the fundamental problem here is that campaign donations are not speech. The basic premise is wrong, and until it is rectified no amount of trying to remedy the consequences will help.
Math and physics don't require a computer? True, until you get an actual job that is.
What "Math and Physics" job [that requires a computer] do you think a 17 year old is going to get straight out of High School ?
And if people rely on video game consoles and other appliances, then they are limited in WHAT they get.
Not in any way they really care about.
How should we as geeks try to let the public know what they're missing due to the intervention of the appliances' respective gatekeepers?
Tell them. Chances are high - as shown by evidence - they don't care about the same things you do.
Mac OSX 10.6 Snow leopard costs 29.00 at the Mac website
Yes, it's one of the exceptions. The other one being 10.1 (though as with 10.6, only if you were upgrading from the immediately previous version - 10.0).
Note also that 10.6 is only licensed as an upgrade from 10.5. Which means if you have 10.4, you technically need to buy both 10.5 *and* 10.6 to upgrade.
Mac Box set costs 129.00 - That includes ILife, and IWork as well as OSX Snow Leopard.
I'm not talking about the box sets. All other releases of OS X except 10.1 and 10.6 (assuming you're coming from 10.0 and 10.5 respectively) have had a price of $129.
What does Windows seven cost with a copy of Premiere, (don't even try to compare Moviemaker to IMovie) and Office Suite?
Your comparison is invalid.
Where on earth did you get the idea that OSX leopard cost 129.00?
Evidence.
You can just as easily argue that not showing up is a vote of confidence in the incumbents.
No one from the military ever came out and gave that exact quote that you demand, but the language has been sugar coated for decades.
No, those are terms of relativity. Compared to firebombing a whole city, taking out just a neighbourhood *is* a surgical strike. Compared to dropping 50 bombs on a neighbourhood, dropping a single smart bomb down an air intake *is* precision (though perhaps not accuracy).
In context, the language is accurate.
Personally I disagree with the Iraq war. However, I'm with the GGP - I've never seen anyone actually in the military try to pretend war isn't messy and that innocent people won't die. That's what politicians do.
How should we as geeks try to convince the public that consoles' restrictions aren't worth the loss of an end user's right to do what he wants with what he owns?
You can't because for most people it's not.
The typical person cares primarily about WHAT they get.
The geek cares primarily about HOW they get it.
Which brings me to tablets: If Microsoft makes a tablet that isn't some bastardized copy of Windows, I'll take a look. Until then, no thank you. Buying an overpriced one use computing device to me seem silly, and trying to shoehorn Windows into a tablet type device is just as pointless.
At which point does it stop being "some bastardised copy of Windows" ? After all, iOS is just OSX with most of the functionality ripped out and a new GUI on top.
Balmer was the schmuck who decided to break antitrust laws and murder Netscape while calling it "lively proof of the viability of the software industry" and forcing them into a war of attrition on the browser and the server.
"Forcing them" ? You do realise Netscape's basic business plan was to tie together their web server and browser products with proprietary extensions, right ? They very much fired the first shots in that battle.
Netscape couldn't out last Microsoft's deeper cash reserves.
Explorer went through revision after revision until Netscape was dead, starved for funds while the antitrust trial was happening.
Netscape couldn't improve their products fast enough. They were basically killed by the Navigator 4.x debacle, and IE clearly won on quality in that race.
Of the various problems Netscape had, lack of developers and funding for their browser was not one of them. Though reliance on a revenue stream from a software product that was clearly going to transition from "expensive and third party" to "free and integrated" as surely as file managers, GUIs and network stacks had before it, was stupid enough in and of itself to have killed the company.
While it does that, it should make Windows 8 the first release that breaks with the past by moving all legacy technologies into a sandbox a la what OS X originally did.
Actually the first release that did this was Windows NT 3.1, waaay back in 1993, with NTVDM and WoW. In fact, arguably, one could even say Windows/386 did it earlier still by running VDMs in protected mode.
Finally, they should work on extending whatever POSIX compatibility they still have left until Windows 8 can reliably run code originally written on Linux and OS X. Why? Because it would bridge one of the last gaps between Windows 7 and OS X.
The vast majority of code than runs on OSX - and practically ALL of the code that anyone cares about - is most certainly not POSIX compliant. This is also true (albeit to a lesser extent from the perspective of "cares about") on Linux.
The trouble is, due to Windows' ubiquity, people don't realize that Windows isn't what they want. It's simply what they are used to.
I'm well aware of the alternatives because I use them regularly, and for my computers I choose Windows first, OS X second, and Linux a distant third. At no point in the last decade would my ranking have been different.
My XP machine, on a far weaker system than my Windows 7 laptop, runs about 30x faster.
With which benchmarks ?
If the instance gets compromised. malware can happily scribble on the Registry, drop files into SYSTEM32, etc. However, those changes are mapped to a temp directory and as soon as that window is closed, those changes all drop. Of course, saved files that the user wants would be set aside somewhere so they don't get erased on the VM shutdown.
If it were that easy to identify the difference between malware and deliberate user behaviour, we'd never have had a malware problem in the first place.
There are only 2 real reasons to upgrade an OS:
You forgot: New features I want or benefit from.
I'm still waiting for the year that MS has a GUI that doesn't suck, aka tab Window Title Bars, ala Be OS, let alone being able to customize it.
Wow. Of all the things to pick on, that's pretty obscure. Just what productivity enhancement do you think tabbed title bars is going to deliver ?
Windows NT was 32 bit from the start, developed straight for the i386 architecture.
Actually NT was first developed on the intel i860, then ported to x86 (amongst others). Ongoing development was done in a similar fashion, specifically so as to keep it portable and not create any dependencies on x86 in the codebase.
Far higher then OSX's point upgrades and of course far more expensive then Ubuntu releases. About a gazillion times more.
OS X upgrades typically cost $129. There have been a couple of exceptions to this but the pattern is clear. Windows upgrades typically cost slightly less than than (about $120).
Of course, the cost of a Windows upgrade is largely irrelevant, since the vast, vast bulk of Windows users get new versions of Windows either a) when they buy a new PC or b) when their corporate IT department puts it on their PC (which, due to how volume licensing works, costs "nothing").
Despite Google and Firefox and Apple and Opera being able to code fast and up-to-date browsers for XP, MS can't code IE9 to work on XP, because they are to lazy/inept (some MS fanboy will no doubt insist that IE9 depends on some fancy thing that no other browser needs to run fast, this is kinda like saying you need a 3D card to run a MS text adventure when text adventures have run on text only machines for decades).
Hilarious you offer Apple up as a counterexample when the minimum requirement for Safari on OS X is 10.5.8, released only a bit more than a year ago, and it's pretty much a given that the next major release of Safari, whenever it hits, will only be supported on Snow Leopard and newer.
2000 was a *professional* OS. XP was a consumer OS.
You've never heard of "Windows XP Professional" ?
It's as if nobody pay attention to the features and only focuses on the Windows name.
Welcome to Slashdot !
Is that 20% of computers over $1000 sold at retail, like it was last time ? Because that's a pretty meaningless statistic when most PCs cost well under $1000 and probably more than half aren't bought through retail channels.
"Just because it's on your Facebook status, doesn't mean you want the whole world to know." Wait. (looks ^ at address bar) It says yro.slahsdot.org up there. Damn, I thought maybe it was portal.twilight.zone or some such. DAMMIT man! Have you been paying attention, or not? EVERYTHING ON FACEBOOK is accessibly by anyone with the will to snoop. It doesn't even require much skill - just the will to snoop. One more time: if it's on the intartubez, it ain't private. Go to the blackboard, and write that one thousand times for the class, please.
There is a difference between walking around 24/7 with a sign that says "I am X", and being prepared to confirm "I am X" if someone specifically asks about it.
So if Apple wants to release a netbook without it being a netbook, all they have to do is jack the price up. It's a netbook with a stupid high price tag. Putting a C2D in a netbook a couple years ago would have made it too expensive, today, those chips are cheap and can fit the bill the atom did before.
Can you point to any "NetBooks" similarly specced to the MBA but substantially cheaper ?
My Acer Aspire has an Atom processor -- a dual core 1.8 gHz processor. The new Apple's runs at 1.4 gHz.
But is something like twice as fast per clock cycle. The MBA's CPU will destroy your Atom.
Funny, I'll trust the plastic case on the Acer (quite sturdy and well built) before I'd trust a case that's made of thin aluminum like a beer can.
It's not made out of "thin aluminium like a beer can".
[citation needed] -- there's no way you're going to fit a full size keyboard in 11 inches.
It's the same size keyboard as every other MacBook [Pro] model, and the new iMacs.
And as my netbook has three USB ports as opposed to Apple's one, I can easily plug a real keyboard and mouse into it.
Plug in ? Why wouldn't you be using Bluetooth ?
Oh, it has an SVGA port as well, I can use a big monitor with it, too.
The MBA can drive a 30" LCD screen at 2560x1600. Pretty sure your NetBook won't do that.
Sorry, I still don't see the distinction, only minor asthetic differences and a huge price difference.
NetBooks are slow, cheap, small and light. The MBA is small and light. It's not a NetBook, it's an Ulralight laptop.
Now, here's some facts: we've been doing this "progressive taxation" thing for quite a while now, at least a few generations or so. Yet the gap between the rich and the poor in the USA has only increased. In fact, what's happening is that the middle class is shrinking, the upper class is staying relatively stable, and the poor are growing.
The tax rates on the rich in the US have been dropping dramatically for decades. You *used* to practice progressive taxation, but you've been doing your best to get away from it. Hence the rapidly increasing income disparity and collapsing middle class.
Any regressive tax regime (flat income tax, sales tax, etc) will only increase the speed at which that happens. If you play your cards right, US society could be back to a system of serfs and lords (sorry, wage slaves and CxOs) within half a century !
(and yes, rich people will still pay more in taxes. Even if they just put the money in the bank, it will be spent eventually.)
Proportionally vastly less, however. Regressive taxes (like a flat income tax, or sales taxes) always benefit the rich because they have to spend a relatively tiny proportion of their income on necessities.
All regressive taxes achieve is accelerating the concentration of wealth into the "elite".
Actually, most countries that assess corporate and personal income taxes do so on global income for resident/locally headquartered individuals and corporations, and on local income for nonresident individuals and foreign corporations.
The US is the only country that I'm aware of that expects you to actually pay tax on foreign income. Others merely use that foreign income to set your "base" before calculating their own tax rates.
Eg:
You earn $20k overseas and $50k locally:
In the US, you will be taxed on all $70k (potentially minus a credit if you paid tax on the $20k in another country).
In other countries, you will only pay tax on the $50k, but the tax bracket(s) that $50k falls into will be calculated starting from $20k rather than $0 (ie: you will pay tax on $50k, but at a rate as if your income was actually $70k).