I'm a longtime Mac user, but I also use a WinXP machine (work), and I've been toying with Linux since the early Slackware days, although I never really gave it a fair shot until a few months ago. Right now, at home, I have a P4 and a G5 hooked up through a KVMP switch so I can A/B them. I use the Mac as my primary machine, but I play around with the PC as well.
I run Kubuntu. I use it instead of straight Ubuntu, because Gnome is retarded when it comes to menus and seems incapable of putting them at the top of the screen. KDE is nice in that you can configure this. And with Baghira, you can put the close-window box back at the left side of the title bar (where God intended, clearly).
I did all this because I'm switching back and forth between the two systems -- sometimes I'll run Firefox on the Linux machine while doing heavy FCP work on the Mac -- and it was too disorienting to have the close boxes moving back and forth from left to right. I wanted a consistent visual metaphor.
But if you were switching platforms completely, and found yourself doing all this, I really question if you were ready to switch platforms. It's not complicated, but it's not trivial, either. To get everything Mac-like (and you'll never get it 100% -- there will always be little annoyances, like my current one: 'how do I get the mounted-drive icons to appear on the right of the desktop?') takes a while, and if you're anything but unemployed, I question the value proposition at this point. Why are you switching again, if the first thing you're doing is making your new system look exactly like the old one?
I've read the reasons why the columnists in question in this article switched, and I'm not going to debate them. Choosing a platform is, at best, a very personal decision. Although sometimes when I get my blood up I try anyway, it's really not worth debating Mac versus PC any more than it's worth debating boxers versus briefs. Some things work for some people, others work for other people -- that's why they make both.
Too often, particularly here on Slashdot, there seems to be this mindset that there is an ongoing "OS War" from which there can be only one victor. Or that computing, in general, is on a steady, linear path towards a Single Unified Operating System, and that we're waiting with baited breath to see who will win. This just isn't how things work. There shouldn't be just one choice for everyone, and even though I think my choice (Mac and Linux) works great for me, I'm not naive enough to think it works for everyone.
{{Playstation Games}+{PS2 Games}+{DOS Games}+{Native Linux Games}}>{Windows Games}
Probably because I suspect {Playstation Games}>{Windows Games}, or is at least pretty close.
Actually, I've wondered whether there isn't a market for a bootable Linux distro that could run off of a removable disk that would contain a minimalist system set up with emulators for a lot of other games platforms (if you don't mind the questionable legality, with loads of ROMs?). All the older consoles, up through NES/SNES/PS1/PS2. I think there are a lot of people who would like to be able to just stick something like that into a Windows computer's drive and play, without having to worry about installing all the emulators onto their system.
Regarding changing the names of files, it sounds like you need to adjust your double-click rate.
Perhaps your wife has never changed it, because she doesn't rename files. But OS X has an adjustable delay for determining the difference between "click, click" (two single clicks) and "doubleclick."
As a general rule, inexperienced users need this set slowly, while more experienced users want it set shorter. This is because new users seem to hesitate between their clicks, while more experienced users do the double-click as a single motion (once it's ingrained into muscle memory, I guess).
If you find yourself double clicking on icons and not having them open, then the click delay is set too fast (you are clicking too slowly for the machine to recognize it -- thus the delay must be increased).
If you are doing things that should be interpreted as two distinct clicks (say, clicking on the file to highlight it, and then clicking again on its name to rename) and are opening the file by mistake, then the delay is set too long, and you need to shorten it.
I think it's changed through System Preferences: Mouse.
If Apple has a marketshare of 3% (and has been around there for quite a while), do you really think that their installed base is as much as 15%?
For that to be the case, the longevity of a Mac would have to be, on average, 5x longer than a PC.
Most Mac users I know have a somewhat slower upgrade cycle than most PC users, but not that much slower.
Or am I missing something about how you're comparing market share and installed base? (Market share, their revenue expressed as a percentage of the total revenues of all operating system sales; installed base being the percentage of current running systems that have their OS installed.) For their marketshare to be low and installed base to be high, the systems must be lasting longer. Right?
Everyone here seems to be concentrating on FreeDOS running on x86. Which is fine -- x86 is the dominant architecture, after all, but I'd be really interested in a stable, minimalist OS that would run on other architectures as well -- perhaps architectures that there aren't any open-source OSes available for right now.
I'm thinking particularly about the old Apple machines (II series); it would be cool to get an OSS operating system and application stack (compiler, etc.) for some of the platforms that wouldn't comfortably run Linux.
Maybe even cooler than the Apple IIs (for which it's not terribly hard to find software for anyway) would be something that would run on some of the old minicomputers. Not sure how practical/possible it would be to target something designed for x86 for them, but if it's anywhere near feasible, it would be neat (if only from a geek perspective).
Well if you own the copyright, you can do whatever you want with it, and release it under whatever license you'd like.
However, you can't say that you're releasing it under the GPL, and then choose not to provide source code. If you don't provide source, then it's not really GPLed.
If you are being contracted to produce code under the GPL, but then don't release the code concurrently with the binaries, then in my mind, you're probably breaching your contract with the person paying you to produce the code.
Thank you for responding; it's good to hear from someone involved. I'm sure you all had your reasons for doing what you did, I guess the problem is that from an outsider's perspective, it's not really clear what went on, and all we see is the end result: that freedb got shut down.
These are anti-tank mines, not anti-personnel mines.
The U.S., although not a signatory to the formal ban, doesn't use AP mines in combat (with the exception of on the Korean peninsula). Anti-tank mines and command-detonated anti-personnel devices (aka Claymores) are still allowed, provided that the AT mines are not equipped with anti-handling devices.
AT mines still serve a distinct purpose in warfare, and they're not likely to be dropped from the world's arsenals anytime soon.
The problem is that even driving a car or tank (remotely) over large areas, back and forth so you get 100% coverage, is pretty effort-intensive. Certainly it requires a lot more effort than planting the minefield in the first place.
There's really no "easy way" to clean up mines, except maybe by carpet-bombing the whole area from the air.
Although the exact same argument would go for Transmit (which is FTP instead of BT), since there are numerous free tools available that do the same thing. What you're paying for is the frontend; I make no comment as to whether it's worthwhile or not, since that's a personal decision which depends on how you work.
Anyway, I think you're way off base. There's no "copying Windows freeware concepts and selling them as crippleware" going on here. None.
There are a host of free Mac Bittorrent clients out there -- this is what the GP was alluding to when he was saying that he wasn't going to pay $18 for Transmit. Azureus, for one, runs fine on OS X and doesn't cost anything.
The complaint about Transmit is that what you're essentially paying $18 for is not the functionality, but the interface.
So really, I'd argue the on the Mac platform, you generally have a choice: do you want to use the spartan-but-functional-and-free program (often a port from another platform, if not a direct recompile), or do you want to pay extra for the eye candy? Perhaps there's something about Mac users that makes them more likely to value appearance enough to pay for it, and keep such a cottage 'beautification' industry in business.
You beat me to it. Exactly how am I supposed to trust the aesthetic judgements of someone who thinks that putting blue text on a blue background is a good idea?
Get what you paid for?
on
Freedb.org Ending
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
On one hand, I guess I can't criticize them too harshly, because it's not as though many of us (myself included) who are using the service were paying the developers any for their time, on the other hand, it seems a little unfortunate that the one developer decided to just abruptly pull the plug on the service when it was in use by so many people, without trying to see if there were others in the community of users willing to take over the project, if he no longer wanted to manage it.
It seems like there were three people on the project, and two of them wanted to take it non-free, one didn't; although I'm glad the remaining developer didn't go along with the other guys if they really wanted to make it non-free, I can't really understand why he would choose to just kill it outright rather than find people who were willing to maintain it, if nothing else.
I'm not sure whether this shows a shortcoming of the collaborative development model or not. It seems like it might be -- although I suppose projects managed by a "benevolent dictator" are also prone to shutting down if the person moves on / dies / whatever; however it seems like the a not insignificant number of projects that are run by teams without a clear leader close due to 'personality conflicts' over time.
On the other hand -- what is it with CD meta-databases and going non-free? Is it just that they seem like tempting revenue sources or what?
Well, I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
I don't believe that information should be automatically preserved or kept, just on the off chance that the police should need it; such a policy seems to be dangerously close to guilty-until-innocent. Certainly, I don't think it's right or proper to design networks in order to make this easier, particularly at the expense of people's privacy and when it will certainly have a chilling effect (the knowledge that what you're doing is being recorded).
The job of law enforcement is to find things out; not to engineer society so that information is handed to them automatically.
Your logic would seem to dictate that any amount of true anonymity is inherently bad, and there I fundamentally disagree. Only in a society where the authorities were absolutely trustworthy and absolutely responsible would there not be a place for truly anonymous communication, and that is not the world we live in.
Don't worry; any time now, they'll be outsourcing the contract to spy on you to the lowest bidder. They'll make up their profit margin by cutting corners on insignificant things like accuracy.
(Actually, Linuxcare got a story, the first in 5 years, last month...maybe this is a start of a comeback for disused Topics. The big question: when will we have a new "story" in Geeks In Space?)
Just out of curiosity, and I'm not sure you can answer this, but how do you think Xandros compares to other Linux distros? Not in terms of a feature list, I can get that from Wikipedia, but how does it feel to use?
I've been toying with the idea of using Xandros for a while, because I kept getting annoyed with the rough edges of some of the free distros, and I wanted something that was more polished. (Actually, a lot of the complaints that I had with the distro I was using -- Kubuntu Breezy -- disappeared with the upgrade to Dapper.)
Guess I'm just looking for a 'holistic' comparison as to how it's different to use versus other OSes, Linux and otherwise, from someone who uses it as a primary desktop.
No; because whether or not you read the Anarchist's Cookbook shouldn't be a major part of their case. If it is, something's wrong.
If somebody is actually making bombs, there should be more than enough evidence to implicate them, regardless of what they were reading; just reading it or possessing the information alone should never be a crime by itself. So either they just are reading something -- no harm, no foul -- or they're making bombs, in which case the crime is the bombmaking itself, not reading abut it.
I'd say the same thing about unpopular political websites: just because someone is reading jihadist propaganda doesn't mean they're automatically a terrorist.
Any system which makes the simple possession of certain information a crime is, in my opinion, flawed (outside of some narrow exemptions for classified data that would have serious adverse security consequences if disclosed -- e.g., critical aspects of nuclear weapons design that are not publicly known).
I don't care what my gear costs, I don't care what name is one the lable of the box or the disc; I know one thing only- it MUST work.
If this is the case, you're making a mistake running Windows in the first place. You'd be better off running an RTOS.
Anyone trying to get High Availability out of Windows is, IMO, foolish. (I'd say the same thing if they were using an unstable/desktop Linux distro, too.)
Actually Freenet is designed to cope with monitoring of the backbones; there's no way to keep the authorities from knowing that you're connecting to Freenet, generally, but that can't tell what you're downloading from the network. That's its whole point and what makes it secure from just using HTTP or HTTPS. When you're connected to the network, it's very difficult to see what "site" (freenode) you're getting content from. So even if you sniffed the whole network and pulled all the ISP logs, you still wouldn't be able to tell whether I was reading the Anarchist's Cookbook or the Betty Crocker Cookbook via Freenet.
The question is how do you get enough users on the network to make it both usably fast, but also to have a 'critical mass' of people, enough to keep a government from simply making use of the network prima facie evidence of a crime?
When you release too much information, everybody on the Street decides they can play Monday-morning quarterback, and tear you apart with second-guessing.
What Apple is basically saying, by only releasing the minimum amount of information is, "we're going to run this business as best we know how, and you can trust us or not, based on our past performance." Some people -- a lot of people, apparently -- are willing to trust them and buy the stock. Some people aren't; which is fine. This guy apparently falls into the second camp. (I don't think I have to point out though that if he says 'sell' when he should have said 'buy,' he's going to be out of a job.)
However I think Apple's recent past performance is enough to justify to a lot of people that they're a 'buy,' without trying to micromanage or out-guess the management team.
Plus, there is always the issue of competition. If I was a major Apple shareholder, I'm not sure I'd want them to disclose to me a lot of information just to satisfy my curiosity, if it would also mean disclosing that information to the competition, and affecting the long-term profitability of the company. Maybe if I was just in it for the short term, and didn't give a shit if the company went under in a year, I'd still want to know, but those aren't the sort of investors that Apple wants to attract anyway.
Actually I thought of XCCR -- whatever the heck you want to call it (social experiment? game? random website?) when I read this article... I had never heard of the site mentioned in TFA, and I think people are pretty stupid to jump to the conclusion of "terrorist!" (although I can't say I'm really surprised). I would like to hear what the story is on xccr.com, though.
As was I. Otherwise I thought the list was pretty good... but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. Jumpman was a pretty good name for what it was.
I mean, what else would you have called it? You're a guy, and you jump. That's what you do. That's the entire game. And it's not that bad a game, either. But I kind of like the direct-but-obvious names, rather than something idiotic.
Slashdot Mirror
I just thought I'd toss in my experiences here.
I'm a longtime Mac user, but I also use a WinXP machine (work), and I've been toying with Linux since the early Slackware days, although I never really gave it a fair shot until a few months ago. Right now, at home, I have a P4 and a G5 hooked up through a KVMP switch so I can A/B them. I use the Mac as my primary machine, but I play around with the PC as well.
I run Kubuntu. I use it instead of straight Ubuntu, because Gnome is retarded when it comes to menus and seems incapable of putting them at the top of the screen. KDE is nice in that you can configure this. And with Baghira, you can put the close-window box back at the left side of the title bar (where God intended, clearly).
I did all this because I'm switching back and forth between the two systems -- sometimes I'll run Firefox on the Linux machine while doing heavy FCP work on the Mac -- and it was too disorienting to have the close boxes moving back and forth from left to right. I wanted a consistent visual metaphor.
But if you were switching platforms completely, and found yourself doing all this, I really question if you were ready to switch platforms. It's not complicated, but it's not trivial, either. To get everything Mac-like (and you'll never get it 100% -- there will always be little annoyances, like my current one: 'how do I get the mounted-drive icons to appear on the right of the desktop?') takes a while, and if you're anything but unemployed, I question the value proposition at this point. Why are you switching again, if the first thing you're doing is making your new system look exactly like the old one?
I've read the reasons why the columnists in question in this article switched, and I'm not going to debate them. Choosing a platform is, at best, a very personal decision. Although sometimes when I get my blood up I try anyway, it's really not worth debating Mac versus PC any more than it's worth debating boxers versus briefs. Some things work for some people, others work for other people -- that's why they make both.
Too often, particularly here on Slashdot, there seems to be this mindset that there is an ongoing "OS War" from which there can be only one victor. Or that computing, in general, is on a steady, linear path towards a Single Unified Operating System, and that we're waiting with baited breath to see who will win. This just isn't how things work. There shouldn't be just one choice for everyone, and even though I think my choice (Mac and Linux) works great for me, I'm not naive enough to think it works for everyone.
Actually I can almost guarantee that:
{{Playstation Games}+{PS2 Games}+{DOS Games}+{Native Linux Games}}>{Windows Games}
Probably because I suspect {Playstation Games}>{Windows Games}, or is at least pretty close.
Actually, I've wondered whether there isn't a market for a bootable Linux distro that could run off of a removable disk that would contain a minimalist system set up with emulators for a lot of other games platforms (if you don't mind the questionable legality, with loads of ROMs?). All the older consoles, up through NES/SNES/PS1/PS2. I think there are a lot of people who would like to be able to just stick something like that into a Windows computer's drive and play, without having to worry about installing all the emulators onto their system.
Oh, you just clean them up with an atomic bomb.
Regarding changing the names of files, it sounds like you need to adjust your double-click rate.
Perhaps your wife has never changed it, because she doesn't rename files. But OS X has an adjustable delay for determining the difference between "click, click" (two single clicks) and "doubleclick."
As a general rule, inexperienced users need this set slowly, while more experienced users want it set shorter. This is because new users seem to hesitate between their clicks, while more experienced users do the double-click as a single motion (once it's ingrained into muscle memory, I guess).
If you find yourself double clicking on icons and not having them open, then the click delay is set too fast (you are clicking too slowly for the machine to recognize it -- thus the delay must be increased).
If you are doing things that should be interpreted as two distinct clicks (say, clicking on the file to highlight it, and then clicking again on its name to rename) and are opening the file by mistake, then the delay is set too long, and you need to shorten it.
I think it's changed through System Preferences: Mouse.
If Apple has a marketshare of 3% (and has been around there for quite a while), do you really think that their installed base is as much as 15%?
For that to be the case, the longevity of a Mac would have to be, on average, 5x longer than a PC.
Most Mac users I know have a somewhat slower upgrade cycle than most PC users, but not that much slower.
Or am I missing something about how you're comparing market share and installed base? (Market share, their revenue expressed as a percentage of the total revenues of all operating system sales; installed base being the percentage of current running systems that have their OS installed.) For their marketshare to be low and installed base to be high, the systems must be lasting longer. Right?
Everyone here seems to be concentrating on FreeDOS running on x86. Which is fine -- x86 is the dominant architecture, after all, but I'd be really interested in a stable, minimalist OS that would run on other architectures as well -- perhaps architectures that there aren't any open-source OSes available for right now.
I'm thinking particularly about the old Apple machines (II series); it would be cool to get an OSS operating system and application stack (compiler, etc.) for some of the platforms that wouldn't comfortably run Linux.
Maybe even cooler than the Apple IIs (for which it's not terribly hard to find software for anyway) would be something that would run on some of the old minicomputers. Not sure how practical/possible it would be to target something designed for x86 for them, but if it's anywhere near feasible, it would be neat (if only from a geek perspective).
Well if you own the copyright, you can do whatever you want with it, and release it under whatever license you'd like.
However, you can't say that you're releasing it under the GPL, and then choose not to provide source code. If you don't provide source, then it's not really GPLed.
If you are being contracted to produce code under the GPL, but then don't release the code concurrently with the binaries, then in my mind, you're probably breaching your contract with the person paying you to produce the code.
Just my $0.02.
Thank you for responding; it's good to hear from someone involved. I'm sure you all had your reasons for doing what you did, I guess the problem is that from an outsider's perspective, it's not really clear what went on, and all we see is the end result: that freedb got shut down.
These are anti-tank mines, not anti-personnel mines.
The U.S., although not a signatory to the formal ban, doesn't use AP mines in combat (with the exception of on the Korean peninsula). Anti-tank mines and command-detonated anti-personnel devices (aka Claymores) are still allowed, provided that the AT mines are not equipped with anti-handling devices.
AT mines still serve a distinct purpose in warfare, and they're not likely to be dropped from the world's arsenals anytime soon.
The problem is that even driving a car or tank (remotely) over large areas, back and forth so you get 100% coverage, is pretty effort-intensive. Certainly it requires a lot more effort than planting the minefield in the first place.
There's really no "easy way" to clean up mines, except maybe by carpet-bombing the whole area from the air.
Oops -- change "Transmit" to "Acquisition."
Although the exact same argument would go for Transmit (which is FTP instead of BT), since there are numerous free tools available that do the same thing. What you're paying for is the frontend; I make no comment as to whether it's worthwhile or not, since that's a personal decision which depends on how you work.
I can't really tell if this is a troll or not.
Anyway, I think you're way off base. There's no "copying Windows freeware concepts and selling them as crippleware" going on here. None.
There are a host of free Mac Bittorrent clients out there -- this is what the GP was alluding to when he was saying that he wasn't going to pay $18 for Transmit. Azureus, for one, runs fine on OS X and doesn't cost anything.
The complaint about Transmit is that what you're essentially paying $18 for is not the functionality, but the interface.
So really, I'd argue the on the Mac platform, you generally have a choice: do you want to use the spartan-but-functional-and-free program (often a port from another platform, if not a direct recompile), or do you want to pay extra for the eye candy? Perhaps there's something about Mac users that makes them more likely to value appearance enough to pay for it, and keep such a cottage 'beautification' industry in business.
You beat me to it. Exactly how am I supposed to trust the aesthetic judgements of someone who thinks that putting blue text on a blue background is a good idea?
On one hand, I guess I can't criticize them too harshly, because it's not as though many of us (myself included) who are using the service were paying the developers any for their time, on the other hand, it seems a little unfortunate that the one developer decided to just abruptly pull the plug on the service when it was in use by so many people, without trying to see if there were others in the community of users willing to take over the project, if he no longer wanted to manage it.
It seems like there were three people on the project, and two of them wanted to take it non-free, one didn't; although I'm glad the remaining developer didn't go along with the other guys if they really wanted to make it non-free, I can't really understand why he would choose to just kill it outright rather than find people who were willing to maintain it, if nothing else.
I'm not sure whether this shows a shortcoming of the collaborative development model or not. It seems like it might be -- although I suppose projects managed by a "benevolent dictator" are also prone to shutting down if the person moves on / dies / whatever; however it seems like the a not insignificant number of projects that are run by teams without a clear leader close due to 'personality conflicts' over time.
On the other hand -- what is it with CD meta-databases and going non-free? Is it just that they seem like tempting revenue sources or what?
Well, I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
I don't believe that information should be automatically preserved or kept, just on the off chance that the police should need it; such a policy seems to be dangerously close to guilty-until-innocent. Certainly, I don't think it's right or proper to design networks in order to make this easier, particularly at the expense of people's privacy and when it will certainly have a chilling effect (the knowledge that what you're doing is being recorded).
The job of law enforcement is to find things out; not to engineer society so that information is handed to them automatically.
Your logic would seem to dictate that any amount of true anonymity is inherently bad, and there I fundamentally disagree. Only in a society where the authorities were absolutely trustworthy and absolutely responsible would there not be a place for truly anonymous communication, and that is not the world we live in.
Don't worry; any time now, they'll be outsourcing the contract to spy on you to the lowest bidder. They'll make up their profit margin by cutting corners on insignificant things like accuracy.
Not to mention a topic for the CDA and LinuxCare!
(Actually, Linuxcare got a story, the first in 5 years, last month...maybe this is a start of a comeback for disused Topics. The big question: when will we have a new "story" in Geeks In Space?)
Just out of curiosity, and I'm not sure you can answer this, but how do you think Xandros compares to other Linux distros? Not in terms of a feature list, I can get that from Wikipedia, but how does it feel to use?
I've been toying with the idea of using Xandros for a while, because I kept getting annoyed with the rough edges of some of the free distros, and I wanted something that was more polished. (Actually, a lot of the complaints that I had with the distro I was using -- Kubuntu Breezy -- disappeared with the upgrade to Dapper.)
Guess I'm just looking for a 'holistic' comparison as to how it's different to use versus other OSes, Linux and otherwise, from someone who uses it as a primary desktop.
No; because whether or not you read the Anarchist's Cookbook shouldn't be a major part of their case. If it is, something's wrong.
If somebody is actually making bombs, there should be more than enough evidence to implicate them, regardless of what they were reading; just reading it or possessing the information alone should never be a crime by itself. So either they just are reading something -- no harm, no foul -- or they're making bombs, in which case the crime is the bombmaking itself, not reading abut it.
I'd say the same thing about unpopular political websites: just because someone is reading jihadist propaganda doesn't mean they're automatically a terrorist.
Any system which makes the simple possession of certain information a crime is, in my opinion, flawed (outside of some narrow exemptions for classified data that would have serious adverse security consequences if disclosed -- e.g., critical aspects of nuclear weapons design that are not publicly known).
I don't care what my gear costs, I don't care what name is one the lable of the box or the disc; I know one thing only- it MUST work.
If this is the case, you're making a mistake running Windows in the first place. You'd be better off running an RTOS.
Anyone trying to get High Availability out of Windows is, IMO, foolish. (I'd say the same thing if they were using an unstable/desktop Linux distro, too.)
Actually Freenet is designed to cope with monitoring of the backbones; there's no way to keep the authorities from knowing that you're connecting to Freenet, generally, but that can't tell what you're downloading from the network. That's its whole point and what makes it secure from just using HTTP or HTTPS. When you're connected to the network, it's very difficult to see what "site" (freenode) you're getting content from. So even if you sniffed the whole network and pulled all the ISP logs, you still wouldn't be able to tell whether I was reading the Anarchist's Cookbook or the Betty Crocker Cookbook via Freenet.
The question is how do you get enough users on the network to make it both usably fast, but also to have a 'critical mass' of people, enough to keep a government from simply making use of the network prima facie evidence of a crime?
Bingo.
When you release too much information, everybody on the Street decides they can play Monday-morning quarterback, and tear you apart with second-guessing.
What Apple is basically saying, by only releasing the minimum amount of information is, "we're going to run this business as best we know how, and you can trust us or not, based on our past performance." Some people -- a lot of people, apparently -- are willing to trust them and buy the stock. Some people aren't; which is fine. This guy apparently falls into the second camp. (I don't think I have to point out though that if he says 'sell' when he should have said 'buy,' he's going to be out of a job.)
However I think Apple's recent past performance is enough to justify to a lot of people that they're a 'buy,' without trying to micromanage or out-guess the management team.
Plus, there is always the issue of competition. If I was a major Apple shareholder, I'm not sure I'd want them to disclose to me a lot of information just to satisfy my curiosity, if it would also mean disclosing that information to the competition, and affecting the long-term profitability of the company. Maybe if I was just in it for the short term, and didn't give a shit if the company went under in a year, I'd still want to know, but those aren't the sort of investors that Apple wants to attract anyway.
Actually I thought of XCCR -- whatever the heck you want to call it (social experiment? game? random website?) when I read this article ... I had never heard of the site mentioned in TFA, and I think people are pretty stupid to jump to the conclusion of "terrorist!" (although I can't say I'm really surprised). I would like to hear what the story is on xccr.com, though.
As was I. Otherwise I thought the list was pretty good ... but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. Jumpman was a pretty good name for what it was.
I mean, what else would you have called it? You're a guy, and you jump. That's what you do. That's the entire game. And it's not that bad a game, either. But I kind of like the direct-but-obvious names, rather than something idiotic.
Well, it could have been worse ... you could have spent hours of your youth playing "Ass Kong."