the unintended consequences of every piece of regulation seem to create preferential treatment for some elite group rather than actually solve any problems,
Apple is willing to bet that existing Mac users aren't going to find Windows attractive enough to give up Mac OS X. I sure wouldn't want to bet the other way!
I don't have an iPod either, but I am an iTMS customer. Granted, I'm on the cheapskate end of the curve and I've never paid them for music, but I bought Multipass subscriptions to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, because I don't have cable TV, don't have a TiVo, have had really bad luck recently dealing with my VCR, and after using BitTorrent for awhile I finally decided it's just more hassle than it's worth. So yeah, I'm paying for ease-of-use.
How do you get it to last that long? I don't think I've ever been able to use Win9x for more than about 6-8 hours (depending on what I was doing) before things started crashing.
Don't forget where Mozilla came from. That stuff you're talking about that should have been done at the start of the project? Completely irrelevant now, because the start of the project was at least 15 years ago, and most of what Firefox does now hadn't even been dreamed of then.
Have you tried Slackware 10.2? It should still run just about as well on an old 486 as old versions used to. It's a modern distro, unless by "modern" you mean "has a point-and-click GUI installer and WinXP-style automatic updates".
Speaking of updates, though, try the slackpkg package in the "extras" directory (on the second CD I think). PIck a mirror, uncomment it from/etc/slackpkg/mirrors, run slackpkg update, then slackpkg upgrade-all. Not point-and-click, but perhaps good enough? And while you're in the extras directory, grab the bash-completion package too.
I've heard that for an extra $10 or so they'll include a real Windows install disk. Normally all you get is a hidden partition on the hard drive that you can restore from if you completely break things (which isn't much help if your hard drive dies, which happened to a friend of mine).
I will give you that it's a fact that is stated in wording so broad, ambiguous, and poorly selected that it comes off as an opinion.
My point was that broad, ambiguous and poorly-selected wording have nothing to do with the distinction between fact and opinion.
I notice how you infer that I imply the stupidity of the small business that signed a contract that put them out of business, when I intended no such thing.
I was listing whatever possible related opinions I could think of; I did not mean to imply that either you or I hold any of these opinions ourselves.
Should I infer that you'll be upset by this inferrence and reply with a scathing deconstruction of my psyche, as I have so subtly and non-commitally done with yours?
No, it's not an opinion. It's a statement of fact, presented with colorful wording. That fact may be wrong, but that doesn't make it an opinion.
Walmart "has crushed suppliers into a [sic] no-win situations" - sure, "crushed" is a strong emotional word, but is generally understood in this context to mean "rendered them unable to make enough money to cover their expenses, thus forcing them to go out of business." The "no-win situations" referred to here aren't explained, because it's assumed that the reader already understands what is meant by this (I would assume it's talking about Walmart convincing a supplier to do business with them, then changing their demands in ways the supplier can't keep up with, forcing the supplier to neglect their other customers, then dropping that supplier altogether and leaving them without enough revenue to cover their costs).
Whether or not this happens is a matter of fact (true or false), not a matter of opinion.
Whether the supplier was stupid for getting into such a situation in the first place is a matter of opinion (remember the story about Snapper lawn mowers; they chose to say no). Whether these suppliers should still be in business or not is a matter of opinion. Whether Walmart has done the wrong thing in these situations is a matter of opinion.
Nobody's having problems with open-source stuff, the problem is closed-source proprietary apps that require RedHat 7.2 or whatever, and won't run on anything else.
Anyone... repeat... anyone who would view pics or even cartoons of child porn have the inherent tendencies to go out and molest a child. It is so pervasive in our society today, from priests to boy scout leaders to teachers to coaches... its time we start executing these preverts. And anyone who defends their actions should be ashamed.
Anyone... repeat... anyone who would view movies or even cartoons that depict bank robberies have the inherit tendencies to go out and rob banks. So, to protect our economy, we should subpoena Blockbuster for a list of people who rented The Italian Job, and lock them up.
I don't defend the actions of people who support the exploitation of children. But I do support the right of an artist to DRAW PICTURES of whatever they want, I don't care if it's a cartoon of children having sex with Mohammed. Don't show it to me, I'm not interested... but so what if somebody else wants to see it? Why should I get to decide whether that's OK or not? Why should the government get to decide?
Spam filtering technology works well enough that I only get an average of one spam every seven hours in my inbox. The rest are filtered - which of course I have to verify to make sure I didn't miss anything.
Several cases of spammers getting arrested and sent to jail (usually for crimes other then sending spam) have been reported on Slashdot; maybe you just weren't paying attention?
But you're right anyway. It hasn't been enough to make a difference.
I remember hearing somewhere about a girl who had been raised in a nudist colony, then attended a public junior high school. Her class watched a documentary about some third-world country in which the native women were topless, and she felt like she had to snicker with everyone else whenever this was shown in the documentary so her classmates wouldn't think she was weird.
For a typical home user, malware that wipes out the user's home directory can be absolutely devastating, while malware that only wipes out the operating system isn't really a big deal. The OS can be reinstalled fairly easily. Most of your personal data probably isn't backed up.
I got into various levels of trouble when I suggested that Apple was going to gravitate towards Windows since it would be easy to do and there was some evidence that the company might want to do it.
No there wasn't.
Getting OS X onto PCs might be even more doable today, since researchers are reporting that as many as half of the business-owned PCs in operation now may not be capable of running Microsoft Vista.
And any random crap hardware that can't run Vista should have no trouble running Mac OS X! Piece of cake.
The Boot Camp product is pure test marketing. It's so obviously test marketing that it's hard to believe that people are foolish enough to get worked up about it.
Yes, Apple announced that this functionality will be built into the next version of Mac OS X, because they want to wait and see how people react before they decide whether it's a good idea. Because if they had already decided it was a good idea, they would have done something differently.
Does Windows works well on Mac hardware, or not? The idea here is to put it into the wild and see what happens in a support-free environment where Apple has no responsibility to help make it work.
Does Windows work well on PC hardware, or not? That's debatable, but obviously Apple thinks they can make it work just as well on Mac hardware. Does it yet? No. That's why Boot Camp is in beta. There are bugs they need to work out. Some of them are documented.
Apple needs to analyze the reaction to Windows on a Mac. This includes seeing whether there is massive rejection of the idea--protests, picketing, egg-throwing, and flaming. In other words, can the community at large live with the idea of Windows running on a Mac? That cannot be known or assumed without this test.
Nope, it can't be known. Absolutely no way to even guess. It's not like you could ask people. You know, take a survey. And I mean a real one, not PC Magazine's equivalent of a Slashdot poll.
Much of the positive reaction, though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X.
Really? That's not the reaction I've been hearing. The two reactions I've been hearing are:
I've never used Mac OS X and I don't know if I'll like it; now if I buy a Mac and don't like the OS, I can rest assured that I can switch back to Windows without ditching the hardware.
I prefer Mac OS X but I have to use Windows for work (or gaming); now instead of buying a PC to get my work done (or play my games) and being stuck in XP all the time, I can buy a Mac instead, run XP when I need to work (or want to play), then spend the rest of my time running a better OS.
Here in Australia it is customary for people who have serious accidents in their cars to get breath tested to see if alcohol was a contributing factor. Perhaps the police should pull the phone records of the driver (happens all the time on law and order, shouldn't be that hard to do) and charge them appropriately if they were shown to be on the phone at the time of the crash.
Driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII) or driving while drunk (DWI) is already illegal (0.08% BAL is the legal limit here). This is why the police do a breath test. If it shows you were above the legal limit for alcohol, that would be illegal even if you hadn't crashed.
Driving while talking on a cell phone is not currently illegal (except in certain cases). That's why they don't do this.
The police are enforcing the law. If you're suggesting that talking on a cell phone while driving should be illegal, petition the appropriate legislative body to change the law. If you're suggesting that it should only be illegal if you get in an accident... well, good luck making that work out.
If it did people might start taking responsibility for their actions and they might start looking where they are going when they drive their car. That would make life a lot safer for bike riders like me.
Best advice I've heard, from another Slashdotter:
If you're on a motorcycle, assume that other drivers cannot see you.
If you're on a bicycle, assume that they can see you, and they're trying to kill you.
They have pathetic battery life after all the bragging Jobs did at last years WWDC.
The impression I got was that Jobs was trying really hard to avoid mentioning the battery life; the MacBook Pro was still in development and all they had were prototype models, so they actually didn't know what the battery life would be; they were guessing it should be "about the same" (as the PowerBook G4).
They are slow. My old G4 laptops kick the shit out it for media type tasks, about the same for single thread performance, and of course are slower for multi-threaded tasks.
Are you running all native applications? If not, it's not a fair comparison (and if you really need apps that aren't available natively yet, maybe you shouldn't have bought one yet). If you are running native apps, your experience seems to disagree with most reports I've heard.
It seems the speed most people are claiming for the MacBook Pros is due more to the faster video cards and the silky smooth desktop acceleration people weren't use to with their old G4 machines.
I'm really looking forward to this.
It is depressing to think that if Apple hadn't pissed off IBM that we could be running much faster/cooler dual core 970 PowerBooks right now.
If Apple hadn't pissed off IBM? When the G5 was released, Apple announced that they had 2GHz then, but would have 3GHz in one year. What was Apple supposed to do when that never happened? Just wait and hope that IBM figured out how to make something work?
Instead dual boot AMD Windows/Linux systems are looking like the only option for people who don't want to pay twice as much for x86 hardware.
Show me a laptop with comparable specs for half the price of a MacBook Pro. I think you're trolling.
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the unintended consequences of every piece of regulation seem to create preferential treatment for some elite group rather than actually solve any problems,
What do you mean "unintended"?
What makes it a "Skype clone"? The user interface? The protocol? The marketing?
Apple is willing to bet that existing Mac users aren't going to find Windows attractive enough to give up Mac OS X. I sure wouldn't want to bet the other way!
...No.
Seriously, why would I want to participate in this?
I don't have an iPod either, but I am an iTMS customer. Granted, I'm on the cheapskate end of the curve and I've never paid them for music, but I bought Multipass subscriptions to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, because I don't have cable TV, don't have a TiVo, have had really bad luck recently dealing with my VCR, and after using BitTorrent for awhile I finally decided it's just more hassle than it's worth. So yeah, I'm paying for ease-of-use.
How do you get it to last that long? I don't think I've ever been able to use Win9x for more than about 6-8 hours (depending on what I was doing) before things started crashing.
Don't forget where Mozilla came from. That stuff you're talking about that should have been done at the start of the project? Completely irrelevant now, because the start of the project was at least 15 years ago, and most of what Firefox does now hadn't even been dreamed of then.
Um, Ctrl-W anyone?
Have you tried Slackware 10.2? It should still run just about as well on an old 486 as old versions used to. It's a modern distro, unless by "modern" you mean "has a point-and-click GUI installer and WinXP-style automatic updates".
/etc/slackpkg/mirrors, run slackpkg update, then slackpkg upgrade-all. Not point-and-click, but perhaps good enough? And while you're in the extras directory, grab the bash-completion package too.
Speaking of updates, though, try the slackpkg package in the "extras" directory (on the second CD I think). PIck a mirror, uncomment it from
I've heard that for an extra $10 or so they'll include a real Windows install disk. Normally all you get is a hidden partition on the hard drive that you can restore from if you completely break things (which isn't much help if your hard drive dies, which happened to a friend of mine).
I will give you that it's a fact that is stated in wording so broad, ambiguous, and poorly selected that it comes off as an opinion.
My point was that broad, ambiguous and poorly-selected wording have nothing to do with the distinction between fact and opinion.
I notice how you infer that I imply the stupidity of the small business that signed a contract that put them out of business, when I intended no such thing.
I was listing whatever possible related opinions I could think of; I did not mean to imply that either you or I hold any of these opinions ourselves.
Should I infer that you'll be upset by this inferrence and reply with a scathing deconstruction of my psyche, as I have so subtly and non-commitally done with yours?
You probably shouldn't.
That sounds like an opinion to me.
No, it's not an opinion. It's a statement of fact, presented with colorful wording. That fact may be wrong, but that doesn't make it an opinion.
Walmart "has crushed suppliers into a [sic] no-win situations" - sure, "crushed" is a strong emotional word, but is generally understood in this context to mean "rendered them unable to make enough money to cover their expenses, thus forcing them to go out of business." The "no-win situations" referred to here aren't explained, because it's assumed that the reader already understands what is meant by this (I would assume it's talking about Walmart convincing a supplier to do business with them, then changing their demands in ways the supplier can't keep up with, forcing the supplier to neglect their other customers, then dropping that supplier altogether and leaving them without enough revenue to cover their costs).
Whether or not this happens is a matter of fact (true or false), not a matter of opinion.
Whether the supplier was stupid for getting into such a situation in the first place is a matter of opinion (remember the story about Snapper lawn mowers; they chose to say no). Whether these suppliers should still be in business or not is a matter of opinion. Whether Walmart has done the wrong thing in these situations is a matter of opinion.
Please try to learn the difference.
So would Google be on the BETA INTERNET? So much of their stuff seems to already be labeled appropriately...
Nobody's having problems with open-source stuff, the problem is closed-source proprietary apps that require RedHat 7.2 or whatever, and won't run on anything else.
My own code, and most code that I'm familiar with, checks for particular features using autoconf, not distributions.
Doesn't autoconf have something to do with compiling source code, which you wouldn't be doing with closed-source proprietary apps?
One of the key datums in marketing is...
The plural of datum is data.
Anyone... repeat... anyone who would view pics or even cartoons of child porn have the inherent tendencies to go out and molest a child. It is so pervasive in our society today, from priests to boy scout leaders to teachers to coaches... its time we start executing these preverts. And anyone who defends their actions should be ashamed.
Anyone... repeat... anyone who would view movies or even cartoons that depict bank robberies have the inherit tendencies to go out and rob banks. So, to protect our economy, we should subpoena Blockbuster for a list of people who rented The Italian Job, and lock them up.
I don't defend the actions of people who support the exploitation of children. But I do support the right of an artist to DRAW PICTURES of whatever they want, I don't care if it's a cartoon of children having sex with Mohammed. Don't show it to me, I'm not interested... but so what if somebody else wants to see it? Why should I get to decide whether that's OK or not? Why should the government get to decide?
Spam filtering technology works well enough that I only get an average of one spam every seven hours in my inbox. The rest are filtered - which of course I have to verify to make sure I didn't miss anything.
Several cases of spammers getting arrested and sent to jail (usually for crimes other then sending spam) have been reported on Slashdot; maybe you just weren't paying attention?
But you're right anyway. It hasn't been enough to make a difference.
I remember hearing somewhere about a girl who had been raised in a nudist colony, then attended a public junior high school. Her class watched a documentary about some third-world country in which the native women were topless, and she felt like she had to snicker with everyone else whenever this was shown in the documentary so her classmates wouldn't think she was weird.
...crushing every business within their grasp, and forcing everyone to play by their rules.
You're forgetting an important point: generally, Google's rules kick ass.
For a typical home user, malware that wipes out the user's home directory can be absolutely devastating, while malware that only wipes out the operating system isn't really a big deal. The OS can be reinstalled fairly easily. Most of your personal data probably isn't backed up.
No there wasn't.
Getting OS X onto PCs might be even more doable today, since researchers are reporting that as many as half of the business-owned PCs in operation now may not be capable of running Microsoft Vista.
And any random crap hardware that can't run Vista should have no trouble running Mac OS X! Piece of cake.
The Boot Camp product is pure test marketing. It's so obviously test marketing that it's hard to believe that people are foolish enough to get worked up about it.
Yes, Apple announced that this functionality will be built into the next version of Mac OS X, because they want to wait and see how people react before they decide whether it's a good idea. Because if they had already decided it was a good idea, they would have done something differently.
Does Windows works well on Mac hardware, or not? The idea here is to put it into the wild and see what happens in a support-free environment where Apple has no responsibility to help make it work.
Does Windows work well on PC hardware, or not? That's debatable, but obviously Apple thinks they can make it work just as well on Mac hardware. Does it yet? No. That's why Boot Camp is in beta. There are bugs they need to work out. Some of them are documented.
Apple needs to analyze the reaction to Windows on a Mac. This includes seeing whether there is massive rejection of the idea--protests, picketing, egg-throwing, and flaming. In other words, can the community at large live with the idea of Windows running on a Mac? That cannot be known or assumed without this test.
Nope, it can't be known. Absolutely no way to even guess. It's not like you could ask people. You know, take a survey. And I mean a real one, not PC Magazine's equivalent of a Slashdot poll.
Much of the positive reaction, though, seems to stem from the mistaken supposition that having Windows on a Mac will make OS X look better by comparison, so people will flock to OS X.
Really? That's not the reaction I've been hearing. The two reactions I've been hearing are:
I didn't bother continuing to the next page.
Here in Australia it is customary for people who have serious accidents in their cars to get breath tested to see if alcohol was a contributing factor. Perhaps the police should pull the phone records of the driver (happens all the time on law and order, shouldn't be that hard to do) and charge them appropriately if they were shown to be on the phone at the time of the crash.
Driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII) or driving while drunk (DWI) is already illegal (0.08% BAL is the legal limit here). This is why the police do a breath test. If it shows you were above the legal limit for alcohol, that would be illegal even if you hadn't crashed.
Driving while talking on a cell phone is not currently illegal (except in certain cases). That's why they don't do this.
The police are enforcing the law. If you're suggesting that talking on a cell phone while driving should be illegal, petition the appropriate legislative body to change the law. If you're suggesting that it should only be illegal if you get in an accident... well, good luck making that work out.
If it did people might start taking responsibility for their actions and they might start looking where they are going when they drive their car. That would make life a lot safer for bike riders like me.
Best advice I've heard, from another Slashdotter:
If you're on a motorcycle, assume that other drivers cannot see you.
If you're on a bicycle, assume that they can see you, and they're trying to kill you.
They have pathetic battery life after all the bragging Jobs did at last years WWDC.
The impression I got was that Jobs was trying really hard to avoid mentioning the battery life; the MacBook Pro was still in development and all they had were prototype models, so they actually didn't know what the battery life would be; they were guessing it should be "about the same" (as the PowerBook G4).
They are slow. My old G4 laptops kick the shit out it for media type tasks, about the same for single thread performance, and of course are slower for multi-threaded tasks.
Are you running all native applications? If not, it's not a fair comparison (and if you really need apps that aren't available natively yet, maybe you shouldn't have bought one yet). If you are running native apps, your experience seems to disagree with most reports I've heard.
It seems the speed most people are claiming for the MacBook Pros is due more to the faster video cards and the silky smooth desktop acceleration people weren't use to with their old G4 machines.
I'm really looking forward to this.
It is depressing to think that if Apple hadn't pissed off IBM that we could be running much faster/cooler dual core 970 PowerBooks right now.
If Apple hadn't pissed off IBM? When the G5 was released, Apple announced that they had 2GHz then, but would have 3GHz in one year. What was Apple supposed to do when that never happened? Just wait and hope that IBM figured out how to make something work?
Instead dual boot AMD Windows/Linux systems are looking like the only option for people who don't want to pay twice as much for x86 hardware.
Show me a laptop with comparable specs for half the price of a MacBook Pro. I think you're trolling.