Marketing has an idea, then they *leak* the information to some site. Then Steve and the marketing watch/. Depending on our reaction, they decide if they should proceed, what features they should or shouldn't include... and save a bundle of money on actual market research.
That's how almost any place that cares about public opinion works, not just Apple. Including the government. Think about how many bills, laws, budgets, reforms, etc you hear about on the news. Then think about how many of those become law. Yes, the government is inefficient, but not *that* inefficient. A fair bit of public policy is "leaking" things to the newspaper and seeing what public reaction is. Any intro political science/public policy textbook will back me up.
Was the quote blown out of proportion? You bet. But Gore should have been clever and said "funding the Internet" or "creating the Internet community'" or anything like that.
These pesticide thingies sound evil. Are you also against antibiotics?
Seriously - that parenthetical statement in the summary was unprofessional and unnecessary. Most people know what pesticides are. And, for those who don't, a dictionary definition would have sufficed (which, according to Webster, is "an agent or chemical used to kill pests"). The Bhopal story is already pretty grim, and the facts speak for themselves. Adding petty statements such as "they were making a chemical deadly to life" that are clearly biased only serves to make readers doubt the veracity of anything else in the article. I know it's hard to be objective when reporting on things like Microsoft and Linux, but can Slashdot at least try and show *some* professionalism?
Why aren't they just blocking those users from Half-Life 2 instead of revoking (shall we say "stealing" since they like to mis-use the word too) ligitemately purchased licenses for other products too?
More importantly, why aren't more people telling this company to fuck off? When TurboTax tried the activation bullshit, there was a huge public outcry, people applied for refunds in droves (and got them in states where the laws allow them), and rushed to H&R Block's TaxCut. TurboTax got the message big time and took out a full page ad in the NY Times and other major newspapers apologizing for the incident and as a result TurboTax for this year has no activation required.
Of course, I can answer my own question: because there are other ways to do your taxes, but Half-Life 2 is shiny and game addicts need their fix. If you hate a company's product, you shouldn't support them. People need to be stronger and stop buying movies and DVDs and software that impose restrictions. Only then will the companies wake up.
Exactly how are people taking "illicit" pictures with cell phones, that they couldn't take with ordinary digital cameras?
I think instead of "permission", the original post meant "attracting attention. Come on, even though requiring flashes might be overreacting, since this is pretty obvious. Say you're on the subway, and you see some guy sitting on a seat, and next to him is a woman standing with a skirt on. The guy has his cell phone in his hand - it's pointing with the cover facing down, but so what, lots of people hang on to their cell phones. That's not real suspicious. Picture the same scene with a guy holding a camera in his hand. You can clearly see it's pointed up the woman's skirt. That's pretty obvious.
Also, plenty of workplaces do in fact ban cameras (or would at least start asking questions if you walked around with a camera) - the Dilbert comic strip is the exception, not the rule.
Personally, I'd like to see camera phones banned not because of the legal issues, but because I want to be able to buy a damn cell phone that isn't loaded with useless features.
This may be another example of people just hitting "AGREE" (effectively signing) without actually reading the EULA (a legally binding agrement).
Legally binding? I don't think so. EULAs have questionable legal status at best (I'm sure some lawyer could argue for the fact that the fact that the EULA is not printed on the box and the fact that some say "If you do not agree, you cannot install this software" could very well amount to coercion or something. EULAs have never been tested in court.
I would love to see a EULA with some seemingly innocuous yet annoying clause such as "By agreeing to this license, you give everyone the right to call you 'butthead' for the rest of your life." and then have that tested in court. Ideally, there would be one of two outcomes: EULAs become illega or software vendors are legally obligated to accepted returned opened software if the user did not agree to the EULA. (Which means many software vendors would stop stocking software with crap EULAs, and maybe the software industry would get a wake-up call.
And the older crowd here will remember that EULAs didn't always used to suck. They used to be printed in fine print on envelopes containing the CD or floppies, and said in big letters "If you open this envelope, you agree to the license". Which is much better, because if you didn't agree to the license, you could take the software back and if the diskettes were unopened, the place would almost always accept returns.
Yes, it is, mostly. It's how it worked even back in the day before RedHat pissed off the world. RHEL 2.x was RHL 7.x. RHEL 3 was RHL 9. And since the RHL product line became FC, RHEL 4 is in fact FC2.
Now, when a distribution 'becomes' RHEL, they add/remove a few features, do some packports, etc. But it's basically the same distribution. In fact, the up2date configuration for RHEL includes the Fedora repositories, just commented out.
It is true that RHEL has it's own beta process, and FC is not a "beta" of RHEL. But RHEL is very much based on FC (and, prior to that, RHL).
This is yet another reason why this man (and by extension, increasingly America) is reviled the world over. How can one job be more important than the environment? It's a truly ludicrous statement.
Presumably you feel the same way about Clinton, since while he signed it, he refused to submit it to the Senate for ratification. (Regardless of whether or not the president signs any contract, it means nothing until the Senate ratifies it).
Which is better - a president who refuses to sign it, or a president who signs it merely to look good, and then quietly drops it on the floor? The end result is the same - the country is not bound by the Kyoto treaty.
People need to understand that neither party truly gives a shit about the environment, since they're all in bed with the auto industry and heavy manufacturing and the chemical industry. The only difference is that the Republicans come right out and say it. The Republicans want to drill for oil in Alaska; the Democrats exempted SUVs from the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that were designed to increase overall MPG on US cars, which were set in place by Nixon. Both of these actions are equally bad, and are part of a downward spiral. Neither party will care about the environment, as long as big corporations continue to contribute shitloads of money to their campaigns. The last president to actually care about preserving untouched land was Teddy Roosevelt (who was running as an Independent at that time)
He did, but apparently there was some debate over the matter. Some of the invention forms were incorrectly postmarked, others had pieces missing out of them, and still others claimed that Pat Buchanan invented the Internet. There was a big spectacle, but a Supreme Court decision called a halt to the deliberations and awarded creation of the Internet to Microsoft.
It seems like this might be the first time that something being plugged as an "iPod killer" might actually compete with the iPod Mini (as in get a noticeable amount of market share, there are plenty of other devices that 'compete'). It's about the same size (0.2" thicker, and 0.3" shorter than the iPod Mini), which is nicely done. And it does have that extra 1GB of space. And comes in shiny colors. However, I can think of two things that could kill this device:
Interface: Apple's 'click wheel' is great, and very compact. If there's one thing they get right, it's human interface (well except for those god-awful early iMac mice) This has buttons, and from what I can tell, has ridges between the buttons, meaning your finger doesn't move seamlessly over the interface. This may seem like a nitpick, but it's not when you're manipulating it in your pocket. Apple's click wheel also has a concept of speed. When you're scrolling through an audiobook, if you run your finger around the wheel slowly, it moves slowly, if you run it fast, you can skip through hours of the book at a time. (Useful if you lost your place, or accidentally hit the "|
Doesn't play iTMS or Audible (.aa) tracks. Yes, we know Apple's not licensing iTMS widely - I'm not blaming Creative for omitting this feature. But iTMS *is* the dominant legal music download store at the moment, and that alone may push people towards an iPod Mini instead of this). It also appears to not play Audible audiobooks (though I may be missing some specs, since Creative's MuVo does play them).
But all in all, looks to be a very nice device - let's see what the general public thinks.
That's not even a little bit true. Google caches PostScript, PDF, Word, Excel, just to name a few. In fact, according to their FAQ, they cache 12 file types, and plan to add more.
Now, that's not to say that Google will replace BitTorrent, but they cache a heck of a lot more than HTML.
And, to her, no, I still won't watch F.9/11, thank you very much. I don't need any extra propoganda in my life.
Why not? It's important to know the arguments on both sides of an issue, no matter how ridiculous or even offensive they might seem. There was a case a while back where a professor was admonished for including passages from Mein Kampf in the reading for a history class on Nazi Germany, and he rightly pointed out that it's impossible to begin to understand the issues in Nazi Germany unless you know what was driving Hitler (it's a little more complicated than 'hatred').
I just watched Fahrenheit 9/11 back-to-back with Fahrenhype 9/11, and it was interesting to compare and contrast the two movies. And though I wasn't pleased at the idea of watching the latter, it did raise some interesting counter-questions to the ones raised by Moore's film. A film is only propaganda if you let it be propaganda. If you take it with a grain of salt, you'll get a lot more out of it.
Perhaps I missed something, where is the article that says ATMs are susceptible to Windows Viruses? All I see is a pointer to an article on battleships, and someone's speculation.
Now, ATMs running Windows could very well be susceptible to viruses, but something backing that up would be nice.
I think they've handled this in a most professional, and logical manner. Something that cannot be said for most large entertainment companies these days.
Seriously. They didn't even blame it on an intern, or outsourcing, or anything. They didn't try to pull the "Well, we know we were right, but we're going to do you a favor and back down anyway" thing. And in offering one of their products, they're letting the person choose what they want. As opposed to the RIAA, which dumps poorly selling albums in inner-city schools and calls it good.
ICANN has become little more than a mouthpiece for certain well healed industrial segments; the public interest, as well as the public itself, has been ejected from ICANN's policymaking and policies.
What's sad is it's not just ICANN. It's any organization that used to work for the people and now either ignores or flat out harms the public interest. s/ICANN/FCC/; and your statement is still true.
I think Apple missed the boat here. The killer function they should add to the iPod is a camera- which goes along nicely with the photo storage features. Nothing flashy or expensive, but for another $50 they could add a lens that's better than the cell phone cams
I don't think that would have worked. There's no market for a low-quality digital camera add-on, I think. You can get a "real" no-frills digital camera (ie: the equivalent of a 35mm point-n-shoot) for just about $100 at BestBuy, and probably for a lot cheaper with rebate. Or you can sometimes get one for free with a new computer or printer. That pretty much covers the price range of the cell phone cams.
The iPod appeals to people who already have a lot of gadgets. It's like a Sharper Image/Brookstone version of the walkman (yes, oversimplification, I know). That audience probably either has a real digital camera or a cell phone camera, and addding $50 for a decent camera lens on the iPod isn't going to help.
What I think they're doing here is offering a neat little feature that will be a plus when comparing models. It also plays up the "more than just a music player" aspect of the iPod (I've been using mine to backup my HD for a while now, but the average person probably doesn't).
If they're clever, they had a little chat with Belkin when coming up with the idea for this, since the photo feature evokes thoughts of the CameraLink. Currently, all it does is provide a USB port to hook up a camera and function as a mass storage device. Assuming Apple and Belkin were smart, the new version of the CameraLink will copy the images to the iPod along with the relevant metadata to have them displayed by the Photo feature. Now *that* would be pretty darn cool. Except that my digital camera speaks serial, not USB:-(
Also, Raskin's complaints about Windows and OS X being similar could come down to other explanations: 1) convergent evolution or 2) Microsoft blatantly ripped off Apple in look and feel and continues to do so. I am inclined to believe both options as there are simply efficient ways of interfacing with computers in a GUI paradigm.
Seriously. The fact is, user interfaces are rapidly standardizing on all platforms, simply because people are gravitating towards what consumers like.
And really, wanking about the user interface is pointless. The average consumer doesn't give a rat's ass, they just want to know whether it can run "The Internet" and maybe the latest first person shooter game.
The power users also don't give a rat's ass about the interface, because they can probably customize it to look how they want it to look.
The biggest thing OS X has going for it that no other OS has is Xcode. How many other operating systems come with a full-featured extensible IDE with a built-in API reference for a bunch of languages (no more firing up Google, or digging out an O'Reilly book), auto-completition/"CodeSense", object modeling, seamless GUI debugging, and much much more? Certainly not XP - VisualStudio is still insanely expensive. And none of the GUI IDEs I've seen on Linux come even close to what Xcode can do. And it's free.
I have started doing all my C/C++/ObjC/Java development in Xcode, now that CodeSense works in Java. I can develop Java apps with two targets - one that creates a JAR to run anywhere, the other that creates a native OS X application bundle that uses the Aqua PLAF for Swing. The learning curve is a little steep, but it's well worth it. And it's flexible - if I can't find a way to do something in the IDE, I can write a "Shell Script" build phase that does anything I can do in a shell script (it uses a shebang to execute the shell, so you can use shells other than bash if you want). And while it has a shiny GUI debugger, which can be very helpful, if you're one of those "real men don't use IDEs" types, you just open up the log window, and you're right there at a GDB (or JDB, if you're using Java) prompt.
For the first time since 1984, MacOS is the easiest platform in the world to develop for. By making all their customizations as layers on top of standard APIs, they make it trivial to transition code. Any project using gcc/ld/make or autoconf will "just work" on OS X (assuming the code is portable to begin with, but that's a different problem). But with a little effort, you can import it into Xcode if you want a better development environment. Any Java Swing/AWT application will look and feel just like it does on other platforms, however by passing a few directives to the JRE, you can give it an Aqua look and feel, and with a bit of effort, you can add MacOS specific things like Spell Checking and Speech in such a way as to keep your code portable. (Those featuers just won't be available elsewhere).
And by giving away the developer tools for free, they've removed the entry barriers for that market (CodeWarrior was non-cheap). I'm sure some people will say it's bait-and-switch, and Apple will start charging for Xcode soon while giving gcc away for free. I sincerely hope that won't be the case, but the.mac precedent was not encouraging. OTOH, developing Xcode can be looked at as a one-time cost each year/each new version, whereas.mac was actually costing bandwidth everytime someone used it.
Something thats always bothered me about OSX is how easy it is to write a program that prompts the user to enter their Admin password, and how many users just enter it when requested, for any old program.
Well, it's not like it's real hard for me to spoof a Windows dialog box asking for your administrator password (and I bet most users would give it, even though Windows has no concept of 'sudo'), or even telling you that your Internet Connection is too slow.
But it's not just OS X - any OS that has a GUI equivalent of sudo (which now includes FC2, RHEL, SuSE, among others) is easy enough to spoof with a dialog box. FC2 and RHEL just have some python libraries you import, and you're all set, and you get a userhelper dialog, just like the one displayed by the system utilities (system-config-packages, for example), and off you go.
The thing is, there is no good way around this. "Certification" is a problem, since getting your program certified (well, getting the CA) costs a *shitload* of money (yes, yes, CAcert, I saw them at USENIX too, except I wasn't real comfortable having my driver's license scanned by a bunch of people I'd never met), and that would rule out the smaller developers. Plus, it's not like the CA used to sign the programs can ever get stolen, or anything (*cough* Microsoft/VeriSign *cough*).
A key combination (like how XP claims pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in makes your computer "more secure") is a pretty stupid idea, and anything will be able to intercept it before the OS does if it tries hard enough.
The best thing I can think of is that unless the software is produced by Apple (verified via some key), the dialog box to request the admin password says something that says "Admin privileges are being requsted by foo.pkg/bar.app located at/Users/joeuser/Desktop/downloadz. According to the metadata, this is required in order to install the following files or do the following operation. This software claims to be produced by FooCorp, at the URL www.foocorp.com". And then maybe that might make the user think harder about what they're doing. Sure, there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to fake it to look like Word or iDVD or something, but hopefully users might take a second or to and think "But, wait, I *have* iDVD, why am I installing a new version". And those that don't are going to get screwed anyway by giving all their money to the son of the former president of Nigeria, or by replying to "Citibank"'s request for their account number and PIN.
Really, I'm convinced education is the only way to fix this. What would be kind of cool would be like what the Justice Department did with online pyramid schemes - setting up fake web pages that lured people in and then told them that they could have been duped and lost millions if they clicked on the "Click here to sign up" link. Apple or someone could make a package that purports to be 10.4 preview release, yet has spelling errors and l33t-speak in the installer text, and then when you give it your admin password, it tells you why you're a moron and how not to do that in the future. But I suspect that wouldn't go over well - people don't like having stupidity pointed out to them.
It does allow movie theaters to implement something, and the public will decide if they prefer going to a theater that allow cells or not.
They better damn well inform me in big letters on the back of my ticket that my cell phone is jammed. I've taken my phone into theaters (on vibrate), and I've had to leave in the middle of shows because I've gotten a call or SMS, but that's something I'm prepared to do, and plenty of people used to have pagers and also had to leave in the middle of the show, so it's nothing new.
Why should I be penalized just because some retard either can't figure out how to turn his phone to vibrate or thinks everyone should hear Mozart's "Ode to the Piezoeletric Buzzer"?
In fact, I'm confused. Everyone gets all up in arms when some big mean company tries to restrict 802.11b, or blocks local hotspots by installing their own for-pay system, or whatever, but when the *movie theaters* (I thought we hated big media and the MPAA?) start jamming cell phone tranmissions (which are more useful than 802.11b to the average user), it's suddenly a great idea? I don't get it.
People with ringtones on in theaters is a social problem. Social problems cannot be solved by technical means. Even if you jam cellphones, they're still going to be talking loudly, or having some kid playing his gameboy, or crying, or throwing popcorn, or whatever. It won't solve anything. What they should do is take the money they were going to use for this, hire a couple of bouncers, and if your cell phone rings, you are asked to leave and you get your money back (or maybe a gift card, to prevent people from getting calls in the last frame of the movie and then getting money back), as per the back of your ticket. End of story.
Cell phone goes off in class. Okay, three seconds later it's off and we can continue. Big deal.
It's still annoying. A much more effective technique (which was used at my school) was for the teacher to answer the kid's phone, explain that he's in class, and then turn the phone off and keep it on his desk for the rest of class. If it was an emergency, that could trivially be communicated to the teacher, or the parent/whoever could call the school office, like they did for the past 50 years if there was a problem.
Those articles are really only valid if you are stuck between buying an Apple and a Dell. And who wants a Dell?
People who want a company standing behind the product and tech support. (I'm not saying Dell's tech support is great, read on)
The cheapest eMac runs about $800 - for that amount of money I can piece together a pretty nice PC system that's going to be far better than that eMac. Even better, that PC system is going to be exactly how I want it, unlike that eMac which would need a ram upgrade and a new mouse right away.
Sure, but you're in the minority. Most people who own computers do not build them. (Customizing your online order from Dell or IBM doesn't count) Most people pay money to a company which can offer support and warranty service, etc. So you build your computer for less than $800 and give it to a friend. The hard drive dies in two months. Yes, ok, there's probably a manufacturer's warranty, but you have to pull it out, box it up, send it to Mexico (Seagate) or wherever, and get it back, and put all the apps back on there that were installed when you gave it to your friend. Compare with Dell/IBM/HP/whoever, where you call them, maybe spend some time arguing with a phone monkey, and in a fairly short amount of time you have a new HD configured exactly the same as when you first got the machine. No re-installing Windows, or anything.
The major companies also offer extended warranty coverage, so for 5 years (a long time in the computing world, think of what your machine was like in 1999) you can be completely covered if you want to pay a little extra. You can't do that with generic hardware. Try asking some Pricewatch vendor for a 5 year warranty on your OEM video card.
The fact is, you have to compare name-brand to name-brand. Most consumers want something that comes with a phone number to call if it breaks and a place to return or exchange it. And even if you want to ignore that, there's still the corporate market. No company is going to buy a ton of computers from some guy putting them together from random parts. Yes, there are some larger "generic" vendors (PCConnection.com's "Epiq" brand, CompUSA's now defunct 'Compudyne' line, etc), but for the most part the large companies deal with Dell, IBM, or HPaq, and possibly Gateway. Therefore, those are the brands to be compared with Apple (or Sun, or SGI, or whoever).
If you start watching the baby on your video-phone, you'll get unhealthily paranoid.
Plus, the kid will find a way around it. He'll hook up a VCR to the video camera playing a tape of him sleeping in a continuous loop. By the time you get suspicious and notice this, he's long gone thanks to Keanu Reeves' daring high-speed chase under the crib.
>I dont see this message from Gartner as Anti-Linux.
Bullshit. Then they should have said "40% of PCs sold without MS Windows pre-installed are used to run pirate copies of Windows". That would still make the "Windows must be pre-installed on all machines or the world will end" argument. They didn't have to specifically target Linux if they didn't want to. There are plenty of places that sell "business computers" that come without an OS. I bought one recently, and since I already had a retail copy of Win2K, I put it on there, and I didn't need to pay the MS tax.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how almost any place that cares about public opinion works, not just Apple. Including the government. Think about how many bills, laws, budgets, reforms, etc you hear about on the news. Then think about how many of those become law. Yes, the government is inefficient, but not *that* inefficient. A fair bit of public policy is "leaking" things to the newspaper and seeing what public reaction is. Any intro political science/public policy textbook will back me up.
Now, most intelligent people know he was talking about funding. But that quote is exactly what he said in an interview with Wolf Blitzer. Read the transcript here: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/ president.2000/transcript.gore/index.html
Was the quote blown out of proportion? You bet. But Gore should have been clever and said "funding the Internet" or "creating the Internet community'" or anything like that.
Seriously - that parenthetical statement in the summary was unprofessional and unnecessary. Most people know what pesticides are. And, for those who don't, a dictionary definition would have sufficed (which, according to Webster, is "an agent or chemical used to kill pests"). The Bhopal story is already pretty grim, and the facts speak for themselves. Adding petty statements such as "they were making a chemical deadly to life" that are clearly biased only serves to make readers doubt the veracity of anything else in the article. I know it's hard to be objective when reporting on things like Microsoft and Linux, but can Slashdot at least try and show *some* professionalism?
More importantly, why aren't more people telling this company to fuck off? When TurboTax tried the activation bullshit, there was a huge public outcry, people applied for refunds in droves (and got them in states where the laws allow them), and rushed to H&R Block's TaxCut. TurboTax got the message big time and took out a full page ad in the NY Times and other major newspapers apologizing for the incident and as a result TurboTax for this year has no activation required.
Of course, I can answer my own question: because there are other ways to do your taxes, but Half-Life 2 is shiny and game addicts need their fix. If you hate a company's product, you shouldn't support them. People need to be stronger and stop buying movies and DVDs and software that impose restrictions. Only then will the companies wake up.
So *that*'s who is really going to replace Ashcroft as AG. The whole Alberto Gonzales thing was just a red herring.
I think instead of "permission", the original post meant "attracting attention. Come on, even though requiring flashes might be overreacting, since this is pretty obvious. Say you're on the subway, and you see some guy sitting on a seat, and next to him is a woman standing with a skirt on. The guy has his cell phone in his hand - it's pointing with the cover facing down, but so what, lots of people hang on to their cell phones. That's not real suspicious. Picture the same scene with a guy holding a camera in his hand. You can clearly see it's pointed up the woman's skirt. That's pretty obvious.
Also, plenty of workplaces do in fact ban cameras (or would at least start asking questions if you walked around with a camera) - the Dilbert comic strip is the exception, not the rule.
Personally, I'd like to see camera phones banned not because of the legal issues, but because I want to be able to buy a damn cell phone that isn't loaded with useless features.
How could you forget this movie?
Legally binding? I don't think so. EULAs have questionable legal status at best (I'm sure some lawyer could argue for the fact that the fact that the EULA is not printed on the box and the fact that some say "If you do not agree, you cannot install this software" could very well amount to coercion or something. EULAs have never been tested in court.
I would love to see a EULA with some seemingly innocuous yet annoying clause such as "By agreeing to this license, you give everyone the right to call you 'butthead' for the rest of your life." and then have that tested in court. Ideally, there would be one of two outcomes: EULAs become illega or software vendors are legally obligated to accepted returned opened software if the user did not agree to the EULA. (Which means many software vendors would stop stocking software with crap EULAs, and maybe the software industry would get a wake-up call.
And the older crowd here will remember that EULAs didn't always used to suck. They used to be printed in fine print on envelopes containing the CD or floppies, and said in big letters "If you open this envelope, you agree to the license". Which is much better, because if you didn't agree to the license, you could take the software back and if the diskettes were unopened, the place would almost always accept returns.
Yes, it is, mostly. It's how it worked even back in the day before RedHat pissed off the world. RHEL 2.x was RHL 7.x. RHEL 3 was RHL 9. And since the RHL product line became FC, RHEL 4 is in fact FC2.
Now, when a distribution 'becomes' RHEL, they add/remove a few features, do some packports, etc. But it's basically the same distribution. In fact, the up2date configuration for RHEL includes the Fedora repositories, just commented out.
It is true that RHEL has it's own beta process, and FC is not a "beta" of RHEL. But RHEL is very much based on FC (and, prior to that, RHL).
Presumably you feel the same way about Clinton, since while he signed it, he refused to submit it to the Senate for ratification. (Regardless of whether or not the president signs any contract, it means nothing until the Senate ratifies it).
Which is better - a president who refuses to sign it, or a president who signs it merely to look good, and then quietly drops it on the floor? The end result is the same - the country is not bound by the Kyoto treaty.
People need to understand that neither party truly gives a shit about the environment, since they're all in bed with the auto industry and heavy manufacturing and the chemical industry. The only difference is that the Republicans come right out and say it. The Republicans want to drill for oil in Alaska; the Democrats exempted SUVs from the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that were designed to increase overall MPG on US cars, which were set in place by Nixon. Both of these actions are equally bad, and are part of a downward spiral. Neither party will care about the environment, as long as big corporations continue to contribute shitloads of money to their campaigns. The last president to actually care about preserving untouched land was Teddy Roosevelt (who was running as an Independent at that time)
He did, but apparently there was some debate over the matter. Some of the invention forms were incorrectly postmarked, others had pieces missing out of them, and still others claimed that Pat Buchanan invented the Internet. There was a big spectacle, but a Supreme Court decision called a halt to the deliberations and awarded creation of the Internet to Microsoft.
But all in all, looks to be a very nice device - let's see what the general public thinks.
That's not even a little bit true. Google caches PostScript, PDF, Word, Excel, just to name a few. In fact, according to their FAQ, they cache 12 file types, and plan to add more.
Now, that's not to say that Google will replace BitTorrent, but they cache a heck of a lot more than HTML.
Why not? It's important to know the arguments on both sides of an issue, no matter how ridiculous or even offensive they might seem. There was a case a while back where a professor was admonished for including passages from Mein Kampf in the reading for a history class on Nazi Germany, and he rightly pointed out that it's impossible to begin to understand the issues in Nazi Germany unless you know what was driving Hitler (it's a little more complicated than 'hatred').
I just watched Fahrenheit 9/11 back-to-back with Fahrenhype 9/11, and it was interesting to compare and contrast the two movies. And though I wasn't pleased at the idea of watching the latter, it did raise some interesting counter-questions to the ones raised by Moore's film. A film is only propaganda if you let it be propaganda. If you take it with a grain of salt, you'll get a lot more out of it.
Now, ATMs running Windows could very well be susceptible to viruses, but something backing that up would be nice.
Seriously. They didn't even blame it on an intern, or outsourcing, or anything. They didn't try to pull the "Well, we know we were right, but we're going to do you a favor and back down anyway" thing. And in offering one of their products, they're letting the person choose what they want. As opposed to the RIAA, which dumps poorly selling albums in inner-city schools and calls it good.
What's sad is it's not just ICANN. It's any organization that used to work for the people and now either ignores or flat out harms the public interest. s/ICANN/FCC/; and your statement is still true.
I don't think that would have worked. There's no market for a low-quality digital camera add-on, I think. You can get a "real" no-frills digital camera (ie: the equivalent of a 35mm point-n-shoot) for just about $100 at BestBuy, and probably for a lot cheaper with rebate. Or you can sometimes get one for free with a new computer or printer. That pretty much covers the price range of the cell phone cams.
The iPod appeals to people who already have a lot of gadgets. It's like a Sharper Image/Brookstone version of the walkman (yes, oversimplification, I know). That audience probably either has a real digital camera or a cell phone camera, and addding $50 for a decent camera lens on the iPod isn't going to help.
What I think they're doing here is offering a neat little feature that will be a plus when comparing models. It also plays up the "more than just a music player" aspect of the iPod (I've been using mine to backup my HD for a while now, but the average person probably doesn't).
If they're clever, they had a little chat with Belkin when coming up with the idea for this, since the photo feature evokes thoughts of the CameraLink. Currently, all it does is provide a USB port to hook up a camera and function as a mass storage device. Assuming Apple and Belkin were smart, the new version of the CameraLink will copy the images to the iPod along with the relevant metadata to have them displayed by the Photo feature. Now *that* would be pretty darn cool. Except that my digital camera speaks serial, not USB :-(
Seriously. The fact is, user interfaces are rapidly standardizing on all platforms, simply because people are gravitating towards what consumers like.
And really, wanking about the user interface is pointless. The average consumer doesn't give a rat's ass, they just want to know whether it can run "The Internet" and maybe the latest first person shooter game.
The power users also don't give a rat's ass about the interface, because they can probably customize it to look how they want it to look.
The biggest thing OS X has going for it that no other OS has is Xcode. How many other operating systems come with a full-featured extensible IDE with a built-in API reference for a bunch of languages (no more firing up Google, or digging out an O'Reilly book), auto-completition/"CodeSense", object modeling, seamless GUI debugging, and much much more? Certainly not XP - VisualStudio is still insanely expensive. And none of the GUI IDEs I've seen on Linux come even close to what Xcode can do. And it's free.
I have started doing all my C/C++/ObjC/Java development in Xcode, now that CodeSense works in Java. I can develop Java apps with two targets - one that creates a JAR to run anywhere, the other that creates a native OS X application bundle that uses the Aqua PLAF for Swing. The learning curve is a little steep, but it's well worth it. And it's flexible - if I can't find a way to do something in the IDE, I can write a "Shell Script" build phase that does anything I can do in a shell script (it uses a shebang to execute the shell, so you can use shells other than bash if you want). And while it has a shiny GUI debugger, which can be very helpful, if you're one of those "real men don't use IDEs" types, you just open up the log window, and you're right there at a GDB (or JDB, if you're using Java) prompt.
For the first time since 1984, MacOS is the easiest platform in the world to develop for. By making all their customizations as layers on top of standard APIs, they make it trivial to transition code. Any project using gcc/ld/make or autoconf will "just work" on OS X (assuming the code is portable to begin with, but that's a different problem). But with a little effort, you can import it into Xcode if you want a better development environment. Any Java Swing/AWT application will look and feel just like it does on other platforms, however by passing a few directives to the JRE, you can give it an Aqua look and feel, and with a bit of effort, you can add MacOS specific things like Spell Checking and Speech in such a way as to keep your code portable. (Those featuers just won't be available elsewhere). And by giving away the developer tools for free, they've removed the entry barriers for that market (CodeWarrior was non-cheap). I'm sure some people will say it's bait-and-switch, and Apple will start charging for Xcode soon while giving gcc away for free. I sincerely hope that won't be the case, but the .mac precedent was not encouraging. OTOH, developing Xcode can be looked at as a one-time cost each year/each new version, whereas .mac was actually costing bandwidth everytime someone used it.
Well, it's not like it's real hard for me to spoof a Windows dialog box asking for your administrator password (and I bet most users would give it, even though Windows has no concept of 'sudo'), or even telling you that your Internet Connection is too slow.
But it's not just OS X - any OS that has a GUI equivalent of sudo (which now includes FC2, RHEL, SuSE, among others) is easy enough to spoof with a dialog box. FC2 and RHEL just have some python libraries you import, and you're all set, and you get a userhelper dialog, just like the one displayed by the system utilities (system-config-packages, for example), and off you go.
The thing is, there is no good way around this. "Certification" is a problem, since getting your program certified (well, getting the CA) costs a *shitload* of money (yes, yes, CAcert, I saw them at USENIX too, except I wasn't real comfortable having my driver's license scanned by a bunch of people I'd never met), and that would rule out the smaller developers. Plus, it's not like the CA used to sign the programs can ever get stolen, or anything (*cough* Microsoft/VeriSign *cough*).
A key combination (like how XP claims pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in makes your computer "more secure") is a pretty stupid idea, and anything will be able to intercept it before the OS does if it tries hard enough.
The best thing I can think of is that unless the software is produced by Apple (verified via some key), the dialog box to request the admin password says something that says "Admin privileges are being requsted by foo.pkg/bar.app located at /Users/joeuser/Desktop/downloadz. According to the metadata, this is required in order to install the following files or do the following operation. This software claims to be produced by FooCorp, at the URL www.foocorp.com". And then maybe that might make the user think harder about what they're doing. Sure, there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to fake it to look like Word or iDVD or something, but hopefully users might take a second or to and think "But, wait, I *have* iDVD, why am I installing a new version". And those that don't are going to get screwed anyway by giving all their money to the son of the former president of Nigeria, or by replying to "Citibank"'s request for their account number and PIN.
Really, I'm convinced education is the only way to fix this. What would be kind of cool would be like what the Justice Department did with online pyramid schemes - setting up fake web pages that lured people in and then told them that they could have been duped and lost millions if they clicked on the "Click here to sign up" link. Apple or someone could make a package that purports to be 10.4 preview release, yet has spelling errors and l33t-speak in the installer text, and then when you give it your admin password, it tells you why you're a moron and how not to do that in the future. But I suspect that wouldn't go over well - people don't like having stupidity pointed out to them.
They better damn well inform me in big letters on the back of my ticket that my cell phone is jammed. I've taken my phone into theaters (on vibrate), and I've had to leave in the middle of shows because I've gotten a call or SMS, but that's something I'm prepared to do, and plenty of people used to have pagers and also had to leave in the middle of the show, so it's nothing new.
Why should I be penalized just because some retard either can't figure out how to turn his phone to vibrate or thinks everyone should hear Mozart's "Ode to the Piezoeletric Buzzer"?
In fact, I'm confused. Everyone gets all up in arms when some big mean company tries to restrict 802.11b, or blocks local hotspots by installing their own for-pay system, or whatever, but when the *movie theaters* (I thought we hated big media and the MPAA?) start jamming cell phone tranmissions (which are more useful than 802.11b to the average user), it's suddenly a great idea? I don't get it.
People with ringtones on in theaters is a social problem. Social problems cannot be solved by technical means. Even if you jam cellphones, they're still going to be talking loudly, or having some kid playing his gameboy, or crying, or throwing popcorn, or whatever. It won't solve anything. What they should do is take the money they were going to use for this, hire a couple of bouncers, and if your cell phone rings, you are asked to leave and you get your money back (or maybe a gift card, to prevent people from getting calls in the last frame of the movie and then getting money back), as per the back of your ticket. End of story.
It's still annoying. A much more effective technique (which was used at my school) was for the teacher to answer the kid's phone, explain that he's in class, and then turn the phone off and keep it on his desk for the rest of class. If it was an emergency, that could trivially be communicated to the teacher, or the parent/whoever could call the school office, like they did for the past 50 years if there was a problem.
People who want a company standing behind the product and tech support. (I'm not saying Dell's tech support is great, read on)
The cheapest eMac runs about $800 - for that amount of money I can piece together a pretty nice PC system that's going to be far better than that eMac. Even better, that PC system is going to be exactly how I want it, unlike that eMac which would need a ram upgrade and a new mouse right away.
Sure, but you're in the minority. Most people who own computers do not build them. (Customizing your online order from Dell or IBM doesn't count) Most people pay money to a company which can offer support and warranty service, etc. So you build your computer for less than $800 and give it to a friend. The hard drive dies in two months. Yes, ok, there's probably a manufacturer's warranty, but you have to pull it out, box it up, send it to Mexico (Seagate) or wherever, and get it back, and put all the apps back on there that were installed when you gave it to your friend. Compare with Dell/IBM/HP/whoever, where you call them, maybe spend some time arguing with a phone monkey, and in a fairly short amount of time you have a new HD configured exactly the same as when you first got the machine. No re-installing Windows, or anything.
The major companies also offer extended warranty coverage, so for 5 years (a long time in the computing world, think of what your machine was like in 1999) you can be completely covered if you want to pay a little extra. You can't do that with generic hardware. Try asking some Pricewatch vendor for a 5 year warranty on your OEM video card.
The fact is, you have to compare name-brand to name-brand. Most consumers want something that comes with a phone number to call if it breaks and a place to return or exchange it. And even if you want to ignore that, there's still the corporate market. No company is going to buy a ton of computers from some guy putting them together from random parts. Yes, there are some larger "generic" vendors (PCConnection.com's "Epiq" brand, CompUSA's now defunct 'Compudyne' line, etc), but for the most part the large companies deal with Dell, IBM, or HPaq, and possibly Gateway. Therefore, those are the brands to be compared with Apple (or Sun, or SGI, or whoever).
Plus, the kid will find a way around it. He'll hook up a VCR to the video camera playing a tape of him sleeping in a continuous loop. By the time you get suspicious and notice this, he's long gone thanks to Keanu Reeves' daring high-speed chase under the crib.
>I dont see this message from Gartner as Anti-Linux. Bullshit. Then they should have said "40% of PCs sold without MS Windows pre-installed are used to run pirate copies of Windows". That would still make the "Windows must be pre-installed on all machines or the world will end" argument. They didn't have to specifically target Linux if they didn't want to. There are plenty of places that sell "business computers" that come without an OS. I bought one recently, and since I already had a retail copy of Win2K, I put it on there, and I didn't need to pay the MS tax.