Actually the reason my father had Wikipedia bookmarked was because it had been used to end a few vicious dinner-table debates over the holidays. I don't think anyone ever thought of just going in and editing it... (Actually I'm not sure that my family has realized that they can edit Wikipedia. I should probably clue them in sometime.)
My father also seems to like the IMDB, mostly because it lets you search for a movie, click on an actor, and get a list of everything else they've been in. This to me is just a sign that sometimes it's not even the information, but the presentation / indexing that's most important.
Google is pretty good in its rankings, I'd suggest picking one out of the top five.
An example: suppose I want to learn how my car's transmission works. I go into Google and type "how does manual transmission work". It returns 6 million plus hits. Fine -- but that's irrelevant, everything I want is in the top five or ten results.
The top two hits are both from HowStuffWorks (and are pages within the same excellent article), the next two are from Edmunds and are fairly good, and then one from AnswerBag. There's probably more than enough to satisfy my curiosity right there.
The fact that there are six million results returned to the query is irrelevant. Although I've not seen published statistics, I would bet that the number of people who even click through to the second page of results from a query is fairly small, and declines all the time as the engines get better. Anyone who's used Google (or one of its predecessors) more than a handful of times knows that it's possible to get millions of results, but that generally you can tell if your query was good by looking at the top few. If they're not relating to what you searched for, then you probably need to re-enter your terms and try again.
Having a lot of information out there is a strength, not a weakness, as long as it's searchable and organized. Personally I feel that something like Wikipedia (say what you will about its accuracy on controversial topics; I wouldn't recommend it for that anyway) with its plethora of links that allow a person to jump from one article to the next, has strengths which greatly outweigh the risk of overwhelming the user with information, and put it miles ahead of a paper encyclopedia. Just in terms of the effort involved (typing a query into a toolbar versus getting a book off a shelf, looking through it, etc.) to say nothing of the expense (who can afford a whole paper encyclopedia in their home, anyway?), I believe puts the internet ahead of other resources for casual information browsing.
It bothers me when people don't actually read the article - they just post a comment on it based on the summary.
New here, are you?
The summary probably should have made it more clear that the pill really doesn't "erase memories"...it just prevents PTSD-like obsessing over them. However had they done that, they would have avoided the low drama that is manufactured controversy.
PETER: But is there any way that you, you could just sock me out so there's no way that I'll know I'm at work? Right here? (points to his head) Can I just come home and think I've been fishing all day or something?
Rote memorizing of facts is stupid, because you'll forget them sooner or later.
Rote memorization of facts can be incredibly useful, if all you want to do is get through an examination or something.
There's a lot of "education" which doesn't require learning at all, just memorizing stuff. It's obnoxious, and arguably a waste of your time as a student, but it exists. Sometimes if you want to get ahead in the world you have to play that game, and realize people are going to judge you by how well you can play it.
A pill that gave you near photographic recall for even a few hours, even if it didn't integrate that information with your existing knowledge, and even if it resulted in you forgetting all of it in a few hours or days, could still be extremely useful.
Actually I disagree. I think most people are curious, at some level, about computers. (Actually I think most people are curious about a whole lot of things.) However they find that asking them questions usually doesn't get them anywhere, and so they learn to treat the computer as a sort of 'magic box' and ignore whatever curious impulses they might have over how it works.
Think of what most people get if they ask a question about computers. If they don't outright get told that there's 'no reason for them to know,' or 'it's too complicated for me to explain,' either they get some sort of patronizing explanation that they themselves know isn't true, or one so loaded with technical detail that they feel like an imbecile for asking. It's either the children's book or the technical manual; there's no middle ground. And it really only takes one bad experience to throw someone off a subject that they're only peripherally interested in.
I don't think this is necessarily specific to computers, though. Most people don't really know how their television, automobile transmission, or microwave works. Every once in a while they might get curious and wonder what's going on inside, but they know that if they ask a really knowledgable person a question (e.g. if they ask a mechanic about a transmission) they'll probably either get brushed off or get an incomprehensible response. So they shrug and go on in ignorance.
Personally I think the internet is very slowly beginning to change that. When you have immediate access to information on practially anything -- and especially technical topics -- it becomes a lot less painful to fulfill that momentary impulse to learn. You don't have to go to a library, you don't have to find an expert, and you can read as much or as little as you like. "More than you want to know about just about anything" is just a HowStuffWorks, Wikipedia, or Google query away.
Just as a personal anecdote, I've noticed that my father (who is in his late 60s, and was until recently of the ardent conviction that typing was for secretaries) uses the internet constantly when he's watching television. The last time I was home, we were watching a movie he saw as a young man (Ben Hur, I believe) and he recalled that when the movie had originally been released, a big deal had been made of how it was shot in "Panavision"; however he'd never been totally clear what Panavision was. So as we were sitting there he grabbed his laptop, typed "Panavision" into wikipedia, and answered a 47-year-long 'mild curiosity' in about ten minutes.
My point in all this is that you have to present information to people in a way that's easily -- perhaps instanly -- accessible. Start simply, and work up from there. Don't try to force anything on them; if and when they want to know something (if you do your job right) they'll find you and satisfy themselves. I think Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks are great because it lets someone who's just mildly curious about something to find an answer to their question in a satisfying way, so that the next time they're curious about something, they won't repress the urge to find out. Plus if they're more than just mildly curious, they both provide ways to learn more about a topic, or about related topics.
It's been a while since I read that story. I guess I had forgotten the details, but that sounds like the same thing. It makes sense if it's an image as opposed to a string, and especially a compressed one, it's a lot harder to find.
I agree, it seems like it would be logical for a company with a vested interest in Linux on the desktop to either start manufacturing/rubberstamping hardware under a brand name... and the fact that we don't see that I think is indicative of the fact that there really isn't any company with a big interest in seeing Linux on the desktop. At least not that has the resources to do something like that. (Except perhaps Novell/SuSE, but they're pretty occupied with their merger right now.)
You're right, the US based companies won't touch Linux except as an afterthought for fear of provoking Microsoft and effectively being driven out of business if they had their discounts terminated. Plus, I'm not sure there's really demand in the States for Linux desktops yet; it's probably ready as an OS for corporate-desktop use (limited number of applications, tech people on call) but companies are afraid of being un-interoperable, and it's perceived as being too complicated and "different" by most home users.
I think the biggest possibility is Lenovo -- they have strong ties to IBM, a big Linux proponent (I recall IBM at one point was going to dump Windows for Linux, but then backed away from it) and are Chinese, where they could potentially get a lot of government support for a solution that doesn't pay a tithe to Redmond. If some Chinese corporation came to them and said it wanted to equip itself with new Lenovo laptops running RedHat, it would be pretty easy for them to put it together -- since a RedHat based IBM Linux distro already exists for ThinkPads. (I don't know what its Chinese language support is like, but I'd bet it's probably pretty good.) From there, they could put together a whole line of Linux-compatible hardware and accessories to support their customers with. It just depends on whether there's any demand/interest in a non-Windows corporate/governmental solution for the desktop.
It always has disappointed me that IBM didn't carry through on their threat (or proposal, whatever you want to call it) to dump Windows as their desktop client and switch to RedHat. They came really close, as close as any large US organization has come (that I've seen), but they stepped back. If they had, it would have been huge -- 300,000+ employees, many client-facing, each running "IBM Desktop Linux" (or whatever it was called)? The increased demand for Linux-supported hardware alone would have been huge, not to mention the exposure to a lot of powerful people.
Is this actually true? I can't believe that it is... but that said, it does raise an interesting question -- who does hold the copyright to Third Reich government works? Anyone in particular? Or are they all just considered public domain now? How about the early stuff of Hitler's (e.g. paintings)? It would be rather twisted if someone still had an enforceable copyright on them.
I know after World War I, part of the postwar settlement was that a bunch of german corporations had to give up patent and trademark protection on important inventions of the time (the story goes that Aspirin and Heroin were both I.G. Farben trademarks, although I have no idea if that's true), including pharmaceuticals and synthetic dyes. I wonder if anything similar happened after WWII, or if there's any legal precident for voiding the copyrights filed under a government which is later defeated / found illegitimate.
I suppose since the copyright status (in the US) of foreign works is defined by treaty there is probably a treaty with Germany which would answer these questions, but I have no idea where to go to look for it.
I see your point, however if you have a choice between some key technology being patented by IBM or by Microsoft, trust me you want IBM to get it. At least Big Blue has opened some of their patent portfolio to FOSS developers. IBM has a vested interest in the open source community in general and Linux in particular. They see themselves, I believe, as becoming more and more of a service-based business that also happens to sell hardware and software, rather than a hardware and software company that sells services. So if other people can help them make their software better, and let them sell more services, it's money in the bank to them. And us little guys, who don't need (and can't afford) IBM services, get better software as a result of their contributions.
They may not be great, but they're a lot better than the competition. From my perspective, anyway.
This is true, OTR doesn't do validation in the same way that PGP/GPG does. It's actually at least partially by design; the idea is for a conversation to be both secure and deniable after the fact. By not performing strong validation, there's no way for someone later (after they'd brute-forced the encryption, perhaps) to use the encryption to prove that anyone in particular was involved, or that the conversation hadn't been modified after the fact.
This isn't a particular concern for me so I haven't really investigated how it's implemented, but I think that anything which did strong key validation (as opposed to OTR's strategy, where you're presented with the key and can call the other party up on the phone or something and see if they match) would break the "deniability" part which is one of their goals.
From the description of the OTR Protocol (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/Protocol-v2-3.0.0.h tml) "The general idea is that Alice and Bob do an unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman (D-H) key exchange to set up an encrypted channel, and then do mutual authentication inside that channel."... "If all of the verifications succeeded, Alice and Bob now know each other's Diffie-Hellman public keys, and share the value s. Alice is assured that s is known by someone with access to the private key corresponding to pubB, and similarly for Bob."
So after you get everything set up and the channel negotiated, you end up with the other person's public key. You can call them (or email, whatever) and share the public key values, and if they match then you're good to go. Of course your level of trust that there's not a man-in-the-middle depends on how well you trust the verification of that public key -- if you call them up and recognize their voice and they read the key to you, you're probably okay. (However if this mode of keysharing is monitored -- say via a phone tap -- and "they" catch you sharing the keys, you may give up deniability. I'm not sure.)
It's (at least in my reading) something of a tradeoff -- you don't get trust infrastructure and identity authentication, but instead get forward secrecy and deniability. Personally I think the OTR people have the right idea for IM encryption, although I'm not sure if it would be a good model for email.
My point was just that we're very close to making encrypted communications easy enough for The Rest Of Us, it's just that the pieces haven't been but together quite right yet. I think Sente's GPGMail for OS X Mail is the easiest mail-encryption setup yet, and with some polish could be easy enough for my mother. I was bringing up Adium as the gold standard, IMHO, for ease of use in communications security so far.
I stand corrected insofar as to the necessity of using Divx Doctor anymore; I was not aware of Divx 6 or that it replaced the built-in AVI handling of Quicktime and fixed the longstanding VBR-MP3-in-AVI problem. That's quite a codec.
However as a limitation of Quicktime itself it still stands, and it was quite true up until Divx 6 was released. (And is still true if you use 3ivx or an older video-only Divx codec.) So really the credit should go to the Divx people and not to Quicktime.
Regardless, I'm glad to hear that the problem has finally been solved.
The Iridium system is for mobile voice and data usage, not fixed data service like the GP was speaking about.
You're correct that it's two-way, however it's a very different style of system. Iridium uses a constellation of 66 low-earth-orbit satellites (similar to how GPS works) and small handheld transcievers; satellite internet is much more like satellite television: "pizza box" dishes aimed at geosyncronous satellites (much higher orbits than the LEO Iridiums) that just bounce a signal from the remote earth station to a gateway somewhere else. The Iridium system by contrast features satellites that actually talk to each other, and relay a signal down to the ground station.
Iridium allows for very compact devices, typically battery powered, and worldwide availability, but low bandwidth. Satellite internet requires more hardware and requires a directional antenna (i.e. dish) but provides much more transfer.
Trust me: you wouldn't want to try and bittorrent the latest "24" episode via your Iridium phone. Neat as the system is -- and I think Iridium is cool as hell -- it's not high-speed internet.
He's talking about Yahoo webmail, and Google (GMail) webmail. There's no SMTP involved.
On GMail, the whole HTTP session is secured with SSL, on Yahoo only the login page is, so anyone can sniff the rest of the session and read your messages. With GMail that's not possible (assuming you trust 128-bit SSL). Everything, at least as it was being discussed, is being done through the browser, not through a regular email client. So at least if you use GMail, there is end-to-end encryption. With Yahoo there is not; they only protect your login info.
However the major question there becomes whether you trust Yahoo! or Google to keep your messages secure on the server, since I doubt they're stored in any sort of an encrypted form.
Also, enencrypted SMTP would make outgoing messages vunerable to sniffing, but GMail at least uses POP secured with SSL for incoming messages. I believe Yahoo uses either POP or IMAP; since I don't use it I can't comment on the security. But POP over SSL is the recommended way of using GMail through a "regular" mail program.
However you are correct in saying that PGP is definitely the way to go -- it's a pity that it's still a PITA to set up; with the exception of HushMail, there isn't a way to start using it that's not fairly intimidating to new users. I've always been very disappointed that Apple hasn't ever bought Sente's GPGMail for the OS X "Mail" program and rolled it in offically, since it's the easiest thing I've come across (still not something I could have my mother start using though).
Offtopic: At the moment I think it's actually significantly easier to get encrypted instant messenging than it is to get encrypted email. Adium (multiprotocol IM client for OS X) ships with OTR encryption support and it turns it on automatically if one party requests it and the other party accepts. Totally brainless; this is how everything should work. (You hearing me, Gaim developers?) Gaim on the PC still requires you to install the OTR package separately, then turn it on and generate a key. Not bad, but still too much user intervention required -- IMO one click on either side of the conversation should be all that's required. (One party clicks "Secure," other party gets request to begin secured chat and clicks "Accept," done.)
2. Is it possible to completely diversify the Internet away from IP-based hosting to a new swarm-network of anonymous users all hosting little pieces of various forms of information? 2b. Is anyone working on this swarm idea?
IIRC, but this was the concept behind Freenet. At least I think it was Freenet. I remember playing with a very early version of a peer-to-peer system that was at least in theory quite secure, and allowed anybody to publish information up onto the network, and then distributed and retained that information based on popularity. It was quite neat, but this being back when I had a 56k modem, also dead slow. I'm not sure if it's still going on or not. Plus, most people just saw it as a Napster replacement, and it had never been set up to host or share a lot of MP3 files.
Let's face it, the ratio of people who want to share porn/music/movies to people who want to distribute the "smoking gun" photo of Chinese government oppression or the giant corporate dumping activity is huge. So any system that you're going to set up with the latter type of user in mind, is in the short run going to have to tolerate a lot of the former (unless you yourself as the operator want to selectively censor different types of usage).
I just did some research and I think the system I tried was defintely Freenet. It seems it's still alive, although quite cash-strapped and seeking donations. Perhaps now that broadband has become more popular it's easier to use than it was before. http://freenetproject.org/index.php?page=faq
Although it is a little out of date now, there is an interesting discussion of anonymous peer-to-peer networks in the O'Reilly book "Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies"; it's a collection of essays about different networks which various people all thought were going to be the 'next big thing' circa 2001. There is defintely a chapter on Freenet in there, and several others besides.
The Nazis went after intellectuals that they thought were not "useful" to the society they wanted to create, or who espoused views contrary to them.
If you were a philosopher with any sort of leftist tendencies, you were probably in trouble; if you were a philosopher who could somehow come up with a nice explanation of why the Aryan race was inherently superior to all others, you were probably safe.
As long as it was constrained within political doctrine, the Nazis tolerated -- some might even say encouraged -- 'intellectual' pursuits, although one could argue that they were motivated almost entirely for political or social reasons rather than the pursuit of knowledge. In particular, I'm thinking about Ernst Schäfer and the "anthropological" expedition to Tibet in 1938.
Although I'm not particularly familiar with the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution, I think it could be said that the Soviet Union throughout much of its existence was much the same way -- 'anti-intellectual' in the sense that only the explanations consistent with political doctrine were acceptable, and anyone espousing ideas other than that ran the risk of ending up in a gulag or a shallow hole, or at the very least of losing their position/tenure/etc.
When I think of true "anti-intellectualism," the most extreme example that comes to mind is the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the wholesale liquidation of basically the entire educated populace.
While you are correct that "the Internet" (by which I take that you mean TCP/IP) is an end-to-end protocol, email is not. It's a store-and-forward protocol, which means that you are potentially leaving a copy of your message at every intermediate point along the network, and assuming that the servers will purge that message later without allowing anyone to read it.
In fact I wouldn't liken email to regular 'snail mail' at all. It's much more like the old Western Union telegram service. You prepare your message and give it to someone who transmits it to someone else, who copies it down, and then passes it off for delivery to the recipient at some later time. People trust email because the machinery isn't very visible, and the whole thing seems very direct; the telegraph system in contrast is rather obviously not private even to someone unfamiliar with the technology because of the human interaction involved.
People have to divorce the idea of "no human interaction" from "privacy." Just because a system is automated doesn't mean that you should have or make any assumption of privacy. You have no way of knowing whether the recipient's mailserver is retaining copies of all their messages, or forwarding them to a third party, or many third parties. In fact in many corporate environments it's safe to assume that all email is being saved (although it's probably not being looked over immediately by a person) for a number of years -- yet because there's no obvious and constant reminder of the openness of the system (i.e. the telegraph clerk) people forget that it's not private.
As much as I despise the law in its current incarnation, I think the DMCA is an interesting model for the future of privacy in the digital age. If you send unencrpyted conversations over the wire, using any communication model where the messages do not flow directly from one client to the other over TCP/IP (or other network fabric which is commonly known to be end to end, or where the message is not stored and forwarded as a whole, e.g. only as packets), then there should not be any assumption of privacy. The exception is if the owners/operators of all the intermediate servers used in the communication (email servers, IM relays) have explicitly agreed not to retain copies or otherwise retain traffic. (In which case if they do retain copies, it becomes a breach-of-contract case.) If you desire any privacy, either use an end-to-end communication model, which could be as easy as clicking on the other person in AIM and choosing Direct Connect, or use some form of encrpytion on your messages. I don't care if your "encrpytion" is ROT-13, just something so that the person doing the interception has to expend some amount of directed effort to read your message, and that they know the contents were sent with the assumption of privacy.
By encrypting the message you as the communicator are attempting to create a more private channel of communication, and it means that to read your message, someone has to purposely decrypt the message and therefore cannot defend themselves by saying that the message was not sent as a private one. In the same way that the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent a device meant to protect copyrighted data, a new privacy law could make it illegal for anyone to decrypt a communication that they are not the sender or intended recipient of, without due process and authority (e.g. warrant, or existing agreement with one party).
The point is that nobody with a basic understanding of the technology makes the assumption that email or instant messaging is private; although I understand the feelings of people who don't want privacy to be an "opt in" deal, it's also fair that people should have to take a certain amount of responsibility and consideration of how they communicate. If they desire privacy, it's easy enough to do. What we need to do is make sure that we have a legal framework for protecting people, once they make the decision to attempt to secure their channels of communication, so that there is not an open 'arms race' that will leave all but the most technically adept behind.
the size of the intersection of Linux users who want to play WoW, have a fast enough computer, have a supported 3D card and can get the drivers installed, don't already have a Windows/Mac install and would be prepared to pay for it
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the best summary of the reason why you don't see a Linux version.
Many -- if not most -- Mac users don't have a PC. Therefore if there's no Mac version, they don't play or buy the game. However a lot of Linux users either dual-boot or own a second computer that has either MacOS or Windows. So the number of users that you would actually get to buy the game, who absolutely wouldn't buy it without a Linux version, is quite small.
Mac gamers have a proven track record of spending money
This, I think, is not brought up enough. Mac users have a long track record (I remember reading an article in MacWorld or MacUser, back during some of the really bad years, that quantified it) of being ready to plunk down money for just about anything. It's no surprise -- until the Mac Mini, every Mac user had paid close to a thousand dollars for their computer by itself, and probably more for accessories: they're used to spending money on stuff.
Mac users don't balk when they walk into CompUSA and see that their version of a game is $20 more than a PC version, they're just glad it exists.
Although you don't hear it too much on Slashdot, there at least a few Linux users out there who basically refuse to pay for software. Their attitude is "if I wanted to pay for software, I'd be running Windows." Even though that may only represent a very, very small minority of Linux users, it's very representative of software developers' opinion of Linux users. The failure of Loki and the admission of ID Games that their Linux division doesn't turn a profit just substantiate the idea that there's no money to be made marketing commercial software to the Linux-using home market.
To bring back the oft-abused car analogy for another round, it's as if you were making car stereos, and you had a choice whether to make a version for expensive, upscale cars mostly owned by people with cash to burn, or kit-built cars built from scrap favored by technical people and hobbyists. It's a no-brainer, you go where the money is, and the Macintosh market has a proven history of being profitable, if you can deliver a good product to it. Linux is still perceived as a gamble, and one at which nobody has currently been successful.
It is even much easier to get a Linux PC, than an Intel Mac.
Erm, no. It's cheaper to get a Linux PC, certainly, but I don't know about easier. I can walk down to my choice of CompUSA or the nearest large shopping mall with an Apple store, plunk down my American Express, and walk away with an iMac under my arm. And I can plug that sucker into the wall and into my router and be online, playing WoW, today, with basically zero effort.
You can't do that with Linux, at least not right now. You can get a preinstalled Linux machine mail-order, if you know where to order it from (I would suggest that most people probably do not, while pretty much anybody could point you towards a place to buy a Mac), but Linux machines aren't very accessible to most people.
I say this as a person who plays WoW using Cedega on a x86 Linux box -- mostly because it was cheaper for me to get a PC and load Linux and Cedega on it, than it was to either upgrade my Mac's processor and video card or buy a new Mac. The biggest advantage Linux has is that it's cheap, both in terms of licensing costs and that it runs on commodity hardware. They're not something that you just walk down to your local mall and buy, though. And it's still more intimidating to use than a Mac.
Linux has a long way to go before it can realistically be said to be "easier to get" than a Mac.
You can't really blame it on the Linux developers though, they've really fixed the problems on the software end of the installation difficulties, the real problem is just with the bizarre variety of hardware that's out there, and the utter lack of open documentation or driver support for anything but Windows.
I put Ubuntu relatively painlessly onto a HP Workstation -- this was a machine that was designed from the factory to run Linux (RedHat, granted, but Linux just the same) -- and have no complaints. But when I went down to Best Buy and tried to get a wireless card, I wasn't able to find a single one that was compatible with Linux. I ended up getting some Linksys one and using ndiswrapper drivers that won't change SSIDs without forcing a reboot.
Is this the Ubuntu developers' fault? No way. Is it Linksys'? Probably. Does it matter to me as an end user? Not really -- the point is the experience sucks, and this reflects poorly on the OS, even though it might be outside of the developers' control.
You don't have problems like this on the Mac, because Apple controls the hardware. You want wireless on your Mac? Get an Airport card -- there's only one, this is what it's going to cost you, take it or leave it. It costs 3x as much as a PC wireless card, but it works all the time and without any configuration, or even any user-installed drivers. And this in turn makes the whole operating system seem almost magical: things always "just work."
The whole "Apple experience" is Apple's greatest asset. It's worth more to them than their hardware architecture, Mac OS X, or anything else. Those are just components which work together to produce the net effect. Obviously they're going to guard it jealously, and one of the things that maintains this experience is a rigid control of the hardware.
I wouldn't want Apple to have the kind of marketshare that Microsoft does. (I wouldn't want anyone to have the marketshare that Microsoft does.) But they don't, they have their 10% and they run it as a sort of "benevolent dictatorship." You pay your money and you get your experience.
Apple isn't going to let you easily move their OS to other hardware, because they don't want to have the same problem that Linux has: hardware problems completely outside of their control will reflect poorly on their product.
In any case, if I recall correctly the ROM wasn't even used directly... you could obtain a ROM image on the net if you didn't have one to rip with the card.
I think this is actually a good lead-in to the topic of TFA -- part of the ROM contained a specific string, I think it was "Stolen from Apple Computer" that could be searched for and found in an image. So let's say you make a Mac emulator, and claim that it doesn't contain Apple's intellectual property in any way. A quick search can reveal whether it has the whole ROM image embedded in it somewhere.
There's probably some checksumming I assume to keep you from just removing the "Stolen from Apple Computer" or changing 'Apple Computer' to 'Joe's Computer', but the basic idea is very simple. It's just a little marker that they stuck in their code to make it easier to identify later.
Given that the x86 Macs are basically going to put Apple back in a situation not dissimilar to the one they were in 20 years ago with Amiga hardware (or maybe even the Apple II clones before that), it doesn't surprise me at all that they'd do something like this again. I'm sure they have more modern, sophisticated security measures to keep you from moving the OS easily to commodity hardware as well.
Interesting point. However, I'd point out that where I was this summer/fall, a baseball ticket was about the cheapest entertainment option going. Day-of-game outfield tickets were about $9, cheaper than a movie in the same area. And the concession food was about the same price or cheaper than a movie theater, and you could buy beer, yell, and throw peanut shells on the floor (which tend to be frowned on in all but the seediest movie theaters). My friends and I used to go over if we didn't have anything better to do after work. I had co-workers -- perhaps not "joe sixpack," but also not rich people in the slighest -- who had 18 or 22-game season tickets.
I don't go to the hockey or football games in this area because they're just too expensive. I just checked, and seats roughly equivalent to by $9 baseball ticket would be $35; good seats $90. It's about the same multipier for season tickets as well, which puts them well out of the range of the 'average working guy.' It's no wonder that most of them are bought up by corporations, lobbyists and influence peddlers, and the wealthy.
Perhaps this situation is reversed and baseball tickets might be hard to get in other areas; I guess I'm just lucky to have lived near a really terrible team last season.:)
Although I'm not sure where the statistics in question are actually coming from, let's assume that they're from MLB analysts.
If they want to copyright their statistics, fine; I don't think they could stop me from going to a game, taking notes on how many pitches/balls/strikes/etc. there were, and then posting that information on a web site. Suppose a whole lot of people did that, and you would have a separate, uncopyrighted repository of statistics, independent of the MLB ones. I'm not sure how accurate they would be, but I can't see how they could stop you from doing this. I think any attempt to block you would be a pretty clear First Amendment issue.
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Actually the reason my father had Wikipedia bookmarked was because it had been used to end a few vicious dinner-table debates over the holidays. I don't think anyone ever thought of just going in and editing it... (Actually I'm not sure that my family has realized that they can edit Wikipedia. I should probably clue them in sometime.)
My father also seems to like the IMDB, mostly because it lets you search for a movie, click on an actor, and get a list of everything else they've been in. This to me is just a sign that sometimes it's not even the information, but the presentation / indexing that's most important.
Google is pretty good in its rankings, I'd suggest picking one out of the top five.
An example: suppose I want to learn how my car's transmission works. I go into Google and type "how does manual transmission work". It returns 6 million plus hits. Fine -- but that's irrelevant, everything I want is in the top five or ten results.
The top two hits are both from HowStuffWorks (and are pages within the same excellent article), the next two are from Edmunds and are fairly good, and then one from AnswerBag. There's probably more than enough to satisfy my curiosity right there.
The fact that there are six million results returned to the query is irrelevant. Although I've not seen published statistics, I would bet that the number of people who even click through to the second page of results from a query is fairly small, and declines all the time as the engines get better. Anyone who's used Google (or one of its predecessors) more than a handful of times knows that it's possible to get millions of results, but that generally you can tell if your query was good by looking at the top few. If they're not relating to what you searched for, then you probably need to re-enter your terms and try again.
Having a lot of information out there is a strength, not a weakness, as long as it's searchable and organized. Personally I feel that something like Wikipedia (say what you will about its accuracy on controversial topics; I wouldn't recommend it for that anyway) with its plethora of links that allow a person to jump from one article to the next, has strengths which greatly outweigh the risk of overwhelming the user with information, and put it miles ahead of a paper encyclopedia. Just in terms of the effort involved (typing a query into a toolbar versus getting a book off a shelf, looking through it, etc.) to say nothing of the expense (who can afford a whole paper encyclopedia in their home, anyway?), I believe puts the internet ahead of other resources for casual information browsing.
It bothers me when people don't actually read the article - they just post a comment on it based on the summary.
New here, are you?
The summary probably should have made it more clear that the pill really doesn't "erase memories"...it just prevents PTSD-like obsessing over them. However had they done that, they would have avoided the low drama that is manufactured controversy.
PETER: But is there any way that you, you could just sock me out so there's no way that I'll know I'm at work? Right here? (points to his head) Can I just come home and think I've been fishing all day or something?
Let me know when they have a pill for that.
Rote memorizing of facts is stupid, because you'll forget them sooner or later.
Rote memorization of facts can be incredibly useful, if all you want to do is get through an examination or something.
There's a lot of "education" which doesn't require learning at all, just memorizing stuff. It's obnoxious, and arguably a waste of your time as a student, but it exists. Sometimes if you want to get ahead in the world you have to play that game, and realize people are going to judge you by how well you can play it.
A pill that gave you near photographic recall for even a few hours, even if it didn't integrate that information with your existing knowledge, and even if it resulted in you forgetting all of it in a few hours or days, could still be extremely useful.
Actually I disagree. I think most people are curious, at some level, about computers. (Actually I think most people are curious about a whole lot of things.) However they find that asking them questions usually doesn't get them anywhere, and so they learn to treat the computer as a sort of 'magic box' and ignore whatever curious impulses they might have over how it works.
Think of what most people get if they ask a question about computers. If they don't outright get told that there's 'no reason for them to know,' or 'it's too complicated for me to explain,' either they get some sort of patronizing explanation that they themselves know isn't true, or one so loaded with technical detail that they feel like an imbecile for asking. It's either the children's book or the technical manual; there's no middle ground. And it really only takes one bad experience to throw someone off a subject that they're only peripherally interested in.
I don't think this is necessarily specific to computers, though. Most people don't really know how their television, automobile transmission, or microwave works. Every once in a while they might get curious and wonder what's going on inside, but they know that if they ask a really knowledgable person a question (e.g. if they ask a mechanic about a transmission) they'll probably either get brushed off or get an incomprehensible response. So they shrug and go on in ignorance.
Personally I think the internet is very slowly beginning to change that. When you have immediate access to information on practially anything -- and especially technical topics -- it becomes a lot less painful to fulfill that momentary impulse to learn. You don't have to go to a library, you don't have to find an expert, and you can read as much or as little as you like. "More than you want to know about just about anything" is just a HowStuffWorks, Wikipedia, or Google query away.
Just as a personal anecdote, I've noticed that my father (who is in his late 60s, and was until recently of the ardent conviction that typing was for secretaries) uses the internet constantly when he's watching television. The last time I was home, we were watching a movie he saw as a young man (Ben Hur, I believe) and he recalled that when the movie had originally been released, a big deal had been made of how it was shot in "Panavision"; however he'd never been totally clear what Panavision was. So as we were sitting there he grabbed his laptop, typed "Panavision" into wikipedia, and answered a 47-year-long 'mild curiosity' in about ten minutes.
My point in all this is that you have to present information to people in a way that's easily -- perhaps instanly -- accessible. Start simply, and work up from there. Don't try to force anything on them; if and when they want to know something (if you do your job right) they'll find you and satisfy themselves. I think Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks are great because it lets someone who's just mildly curious about something to find an answer to their question in a satisfying way, so that the next time they're curious about something, they won't repress the urge to find out. Plus if they're more than just mildly curious, they both provide ways to learn more about a topic, or about related topics.
It's been a while since I read that story. I guess I had forgotten the details, but that sounds like the same thing. It makes sense if it's an image as opposed to a string, and especially a compressed one, it's a lot harder to find.
I agree, it seems like it would be logical for a company with a vested interest in Linux on the desktop to either start manufacturing/rubberstamping hardware under a brand name ... and the fact that we don't see that I think is indicative of the fact that there really isn't any company with a big interest in seeing Linux on the desktop. At least not that has the resources to do something like that. (Except perhaps Novell/SuSE, but they're pretty occupied with their merger right now.)
You're right, the US based companies won't touch Linux except as an afterthought for fear of provoking Microsoft and effectively being driven out of business if they had their discounts terminated. Plus, I'm not sure there's really demand in the States for Linux desktops yet; it's probably ready as an OS for corporate-desktop use (limited number of applications, tech people on call) but companies are afraid of being un-interoperable, and it's perceived as being too complicated and "different" by most home users.
I think the biggest possibility is Lenovo -- they have strong ties to IBM, a big Linux proponent (I recall IBM at one point was going to dump Windows for Linux, but then backed away from it) and are Chinese, where they could potentially get a lot of government support for a solution that doesn't pay a tithe to Redmond. If some Chinese corporation came to them and said it wanted to equip itself with new Lenovo laptops running RedHat, it would be pretty easy for them to put it together -- since a RedHat based IBM Linux distro already exists for ThinkPads. (I don't know what its Chinese language support is like, but I'd bet it's probably pretty good.) From there, they could put together a whole line of Linux-compatible hardware and accessories to support their customers with. It just depends on whether there's any demand/interest in a non-Windows corporate/governmental solution for the desktop.
It always has disappointed me that IBM didn't carry through on their threat (or proposal, whatever you want to call it) to dump Windows as their desktop client and switch to RedHat. They came really close, as close as any large US organization has come (that I've seen), but they stepped back. If they had, it would have been huge -- 300,000+ employees, many client-facing, each running "IBM Desktop Linux" (or whatever it was called)? The increased demand for Linux-supported hardware alone would have been huge, not to mention the exposure to a lot of powerful people.
Is this actually true? I can't believe that it is ... but that said, it does raise an interesting question -- who does hold the copyright to Third Reich government works? Anyone in particular? Or are they all just considered public domain now? How about the early stuff of Hitler's (e.g. paintings)? It would be rather twisted if someone still had an enforceable copyright on them.
I know after World War I, part of the postwar settlement was that a bunch of german corporations had to give up patent and trademark protection on important inventions of the time (the story goes that Aspirin and Heroin were both I.G. Farben trademarks, although I have no idea if that's true), including pharmaceuticals and synthetic dyes. I wonder if anything similar happened after WWII, or if there's any legal precident for voiding the copyrights filed under a government which is later defeated / found illegitimate.
I suppose since the copyright status (in the US) of foreign works is defined by treaty there is probably a treaty with Germany which would answer these questions, but I have no idea where to go to look for it.
Anyone familiar with the area care to comment?
I see your point, however if you have a choice between some key technology being patented by IBM or by Microsoft, trust me you want IBM to get it. At least Big Blue has opened some of their patent portfolio to FOSS developers. IBM has a vested interest in the open source community in general and Linux in particular. They see themselves, I believe, as becoming more and more of a service-based business that also happens to sell hardware and software, rather than a hardware and software company that sells services. So if other people can help them make their software better, and let them sell more services, it's money in the bank to them. And us little guys, who don't need (and can't afford) IBM services, get better software as a result of their contributions.
They may not be great, but they're a lot better than the competition. From my perspective, anyway.
This is true, OTR doesn't do validation in the same way that PGP/GPG does. It's actually at least partially by design; the idea is for a conversation to be both secure and deniable after the fact. By not performing strong validation, there's no way for someone later (after they'd brute-forced the encryption, perhaps) to use the encryption to prove that anyone in particular was involved, or that the conversation hadn't been modified after the fact.
h tml) "The general idea is that Alice and Bob do an unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman (D-H) key exchange to set up an encrypted channel, and then do mutual authentication inside that channel." ... "If all of the verifications succeeded, Alice and Bob now know each other's Diffie-Hellman public keys, and share the value s. Alice is assured that s is known by someone with access to the private key corresponding to pubB, and similarly for Bob."
This isn't a particular concern for me so I haven't really investigated how it's implemented, but I think that anything which did strong key validation (as opposed to OTR's strategy, where you're presented with the key and can call the other party up on the phone or something and see if they match) would break the "deniability" part which is one of their goals.
From the description of the OTR Protocol (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/Protocol-v2-3.0.0.
So after you get everything set up and the channel negotiated, you end up with the other person's public key. You can call them (or email, whatever) and share the public key values, and if they match then you're good to go. Of course your level of trust that there's not a man-in-the-middle depends on how well you trust the verification of that public key -- if you call them up and recognize their voice and they read the key to you, you're probably okay. (However if this mode of keysharing is monitored -- say via a phone tap -- and "they" catch you sharing the keys, you may give up deniability. I'm not sure.)
It's (at least in my reading) something of a tradeoff -- you don't get trust infrastructure and identity authentication, but instead get forward secrecy and deniability. Personally I think the OTR people have the right idea for IM encryption, although I'm not sure if it would be a good model for email.
My point was just that we're very close to making encrypted communications easy enough for The Rest Of Us, it's just that the pieces haven't been but together quite right yet. I think Sente's GPGMail for OS X Mail is the easiest mail-encryption setup yet, and with some polish could be easy enough for my mother. I was bringing up Adium as the gold standard, IMHO, for ease of use in communications security so far.
I stand corrected insofar as to the necessity of using Divx Doctor anymore; I was not aware of Divx 6 or that it replaced the built-in AVI handling of Quicktime and fixed the longstanding VBR-MP3-in-AVI problem. That's quite a codec.
However as a limitation of Quicktime itself it still stands, and it was quite true up until Divx 6 was released. (And is still true if you use 3ivx or an older video-only Divx codec.) So really the credit should go to the Divx people and not to Quicktime.
Regardless, I'm glad to hear that the problem has finally been solved.
The Iridium system is for mobile voice and data usage, not fixed data service like the GP was speaking about.
You're correct that it's two-way, however it's a very different style of system. Iridium uses a constellation of 66 low-earth-orbit satellites (similar to how GPS works) and small handheld transcievers; satellite internet is much more like satellite television: "pizza box" dishes aimed at geosyncronous satellites (much higher orbits than the LEO Iridiums) that just bounce a signal from the remote earth station to a gateway somewhere else. The Iridium system by contrast features satellites that actually talk to each other, and relay a signal down to the ground station.
Iridium allows for very compact devices, typically battery powered, and worldwide availability, but low bandwidth. Satellite internet requires more hardware and requires a directional antenna (i.e. dish) but provides much more transfer.
Trust me: you wouldn't want to try and bittorrent the latest "24" episode via your Iridium phone. Neat as the system is -- and I think Iridium is cool as hell -- it's not high-speed internet.
Two-way, high speed internet via satellite is the stock in trade of Starband, you can read a very vague "how it works" article here:
http://www.starband.com/whatis/howdoesitwork.asp
Huh?
He's talking about Yahoo webmail, and Google (GMail) webmail. There's no SMTP involved.
On GMail, the whole HTTP session is secured with SSL, on Yahoo only the login page is, so anyone can sniff the rest of the session and read your messages. With GMail that's not possible (assuming you trust 128-bit SSL). Everything, at least as it was being discussed, is being done through the browser, not through a regular email client. So at least if you use GMail, there is end-to-end encryption. With Yahoo there is not; they only protect your login info.
However the major question there becomes whether you trust Yahoo! or Google to keep your messages secure on the server, since I doubt they're stored in any sort of an encrypted form.
Also, enencrypted SMTP would make outgoing messages vunerable to sniffing, but GMail at least uses POP secured with SSL for incoming messages. I believe Yahoo uses either POP or IMAP; since I don't use it I can't comment on the security. But POP over SSL is the recommended way of using GMail through a "regular" mail program.
However you are correct in saying that PGP is definitely the way to go -- it's a pity that it's still a PITA to set up; with the exception of HushMail, there isn't a way to start using it that's not fairly intimidating to new users. I've always been very disappointed that Apple hasn't ever bought Sente's GPGMail for the OS X "Mail" program and rolled it in offically, since it's the easiest thing I've come across (still not something I could have my mother start using though).
Offtopic: At the moment I think it's actually significantly easier to get encrypted instant messenging than it is to get encrypted email. Adium (multiprotocol IM client for OS X) ships with OTR encryption support and it turns it on automatically if one party requests it and the other party accepts. Totally brainless; this is how everything should work. (You hearing me, Gaim developers?) Gaim on the PC still requires you to install the OTR package separately, then turn it on and generate a key. Not bad, but still too much user intervention required -- IMO one click on either side of the conversation should be all that's required. (One party clicks "Secure," other party gets request to begin secured chat and clicks "Accept," done.)
2. Is it possible to completely diversify the Internet away from IP-based hosting to a new swarm-network of anonymous users all hosting little pieces of various forms of information? 2b. Is anyone working on this swarm idea?
IIRC, but this was the concept behind Freenet. At least I think it was Freenet. I remember playing with a very early version of a peer-to-peer system that was at least in theory quite secure, and allowed anybody to publish information up onto the network, and then distributed and retained that information based on popularity. It was quite neat, but this being back when I had a 56k modem, also dead slow. I'm not sure if it's still going on or not. Plus, most people just saw it as a Napster replacement, and it had never been set up to host or share a lot of MP3 files.
Let's face it, the ratio of people who want to share porn/music/movies to people who want to distribute the "smoking gun" photo of Chinese government oppression or the giant corporate dumping activity is huge. So any system that you're going to set up with the latter type of user in mind, is in the short run going to have to tolerate a lot of the former (unless you yourself as the operator want to selectively censor different types of usage).
I just did some research and I think the system I tried was defintely Freenet. It seems it's still alive, although quite cash-strapped and seeking donations. Perhaps now that broadband has become more popular it's easier to use than it was before.
http://freenetproject.org/index.php?page=faq
Although it is a little out of date now, there is an interesting discussion of anonymous peer-to-peer networks in the O'Reilly book "Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies"; it's a collection of essays about different networks which various people all thought were going to be the 'next big thing' circa 2001. There is defintely a chapter on Freenet in there, and several others besides.
The Nazis went after intellectuals that they thought were not "useful" to the society they wanted to create, or who espoused views contrary to them.
If you were a philosopher with any sort of leftist tendencies, you were probably in trouble; if you were a philosopher who could somehow come up with a nice explanation of why the Aryan race was inherently superior to all others, you were probably safe.
As long as it was constrained within political doctrine, the Nazis tolerated -- some might even say encouraged -- 'intellectual' pursuits, although one could argue that they were motivated almost entirely for political or social reasons rather than the pursuit of knowledge. In particular, I'm thinking about Ernst Schäfer and the "anthropological" expedition to Tibet in 1938.
Although I'm not particularly familiar with the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution, I think it could be said that the Soviet Union throughout much of its existence was much the same way -- 'anti-intellectual' in the sense that only the explanations consistent with political doctrine were acceptable, and anyone espousing ideas other than that ran the risk of ending up in a gulag or a shallow hole, or at the very least of losing their position/tenure/etc.
When I think of true "anti-intellectualism," the most extreme example that comes to mind is the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the wholesale liquidation of basically the entire educated populace.
While you are correct that "the Internet" (by which I take that you mean TCP/IP) is an end-to-end protocol, email is not. It's a store-and-forward protocol, which means that you are potentially leaving a copy of your message at every intermediate point along the network, and assuming that the servers will purge that message later without allowing anyone to read it.
In fact I wouldn't liken email to regular 'snail mail' at all. It's much more like the old Western Union telegram service. You prepare your message and give it to someone who transmits it to someone else, who copies it down, and then passes it off for delivery to the recipient at some later time. People trust email because the machinery isn't very visible, and the whole thing seems very direct; the telegraph system in contrast is rather obviously not private even to someone unfamiliar with the technology because of the human interaction involved.
People have to divorce the idea of "no human interaction" from "privacy." Just because a system is automated doesn't mean that you should have or make any assumption of privacy. You have no way of knowing whether the recipient's mailserver is retaining copies of all their messages, or forwarding them to a third party, or many third parties. In fact in many corporate environments it's safe to assume that all email is being saved (although it's probably not being looked over immediately by a person) for a number of years -- yet because there's no obvious and constant reminder of the openness of the system (i.e. the telegraph clerk) people forget that it's not private.
As much as I despise the law in its current incarnation, I think the DMCA is an interesting model for the future of privacy in the digital age. If you send unencrpyted conversations over the wire, using any communication model where the messages do not flow directly from one client to the other over TCP/IP (or other network fabric which is commonly known to be end to end, or where the message is not stored and forwarded as a whole, e.g. only as packets), then there should not be any assumption of privacy. The exception is if the owners/operators of all the intermediate servers used in the communication (email servers, IM relays) have explicitly agreed not to retain copies or otherwise retain traffic. (In which case if they do retain copies, it becomes a breach-of-contract case.) If you desire any privacy, either use an end-to-end communication model, which could be as easy as clicking on the other person in AIM and choosing Direct Connect, or use some form of encrpytion on your messages. I don't care if your "encrpytion" is ROT-13, just something so that the person doing the interception has to expend some amount of directed effort to read your message, and that they know the contents were sent with the assumption of privacy.
By encrypting the message you as the communicator are attempting to create a more private channel of communication, and it means that to read your message, someone has to purposely decrypt the message and therefore cannot defend themselves by saying that the message was not sent as a private one. In the same way that the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent a device meant to protect copyrighted data, a new privacy law could make it illegal for anyone to decrypt a communication that they are not the sender or intended recipient of, without due process and authority (e.g. warrant, or existing agreement with one party).
The point is that nobody with a basic understanding of the technology makes the assumption that email or instant messaging is private; although I understand the feelings of people who don't want privacy to be an "opt in" deal, it's also fair that people should have to take a certain amount of responsibility and consideration of how they communicate. If they desire privacy, it's easy enough to do. What we need to do is make sure that we have a legal framework for protecting people, once they make the decision to attempt to secure their channels of communication, so that there is not an open 'arms race' that will leave all but the most technically adept behind.
Mod parent up.
the size of the intersection of Linux users who want to play WoW, have a fast enough computer, have a supported 3D card and can get the drivers installed, don't already have a Windows/Mac install and would be prepared to pay for it
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the best summary of the reason why you don't see a Linux version.
Many -- if not most -- Mac users don't have a PC. Therefore if there's no Mac version, they don't play or buy the game. However a lot of Linux users either dual-boot or own a second computer that has either MacOS or Windows. So the number of users that you would actually get to buy the game, who absolutely wouldn't buy it without a Linux version, is quite small.
Mac gamers have a proven track record of spending money
This, I think, is not brought up enough. Mac users have a long track record (I remember reading an article in MacWorld or MacUser, back during some of the really bad years, that quantified it) of being ready to plunk down money for just about anything. It's no surprise -- until the Mac Mini, every Mac user had paid close to a thousand dollars for their computer by itself, and probably more for accessories: they're used to spending money on stuff.
Mac users don't balk when they walk into CompUSA and see that their version of a game is $20 more than a PC version, they're just glad it exists.
Although you don't hear it too much on Slashdot, there at least a few Linux users out there who basically refuse to pay for software. Their attitude is "if I wanted to pay for software, I'd be running Windows." Even though that may only represent a very, very small minority of Linux users, it's very representative of software developers' opinion of Linux users. The failure of Loki and the admission of ID Games that their Linux division doesn't turn a profit just substantiate the idea that there's no money to be made marketing commercial software to the Linux-using home market.
To bring back the oft-abused car analogy for another round, it's as if you were making car stereos, and you had a choice whether to make a version for expensive, upscale cars mostly owned by people with cash to burn, or kit-built cars built from scrap favored by technical people and hobbyists. It's a no-brainer, you go where the money is, and the Macintosh market has a proven history of being profitable, if you can deliver a good product to it. Linux is still perceived as a gamble, and one at which nobody has currently been successful.
I remember a company that tried that, once ... it was called Be, Inc.
Somebody else can finish the story.
(Anyone? Anyone...? Bueller?)
It is even much easier to get a Linux PC, than an Intel Mac.
Erm, no. It's cheaper to get a Linux PC, certainly, but I don't know about easier. I can walk down to my choice of CompUSA or the nearest large shopping mall with an Apple store, plunk down my American Express, and walk away with an iMac under my arm. And I can plug that sucker into the wall and into my router and be online, playing WoW, today, with basically zero effort.
You can't do that with Linux, at least not right now. You can get a preinstalled Linux machine mail-order, if you know where to order it from (I would suggest that most people probably do not, while pretty much anybody could point you towards a place to buy a Mac), but Linux machines aren't very accessible to most people.
I say this as a person who plays WoW using Cedega on a x86 Linux box -- mostly because it was cheaper for me to get a PC and load Linux and Cedega on it, than it was to either upgrade my Mac's processor and video card or buy a new Mac. The biggest advantage Linux has is that it's cheap, both in terms of licensing costs and that it runs on commodity hardware. They're not something that you just walk down to your local mall and buy, though. And it's still more intimidating to use than a Mac.
Linux has a long way to go before it can realistically be said to be "easier to get" than a Mac.
It's still a painful experience.
You can't really blame it on the Linux developers though, they've really fixed the problems on the software end of the installation difficulties, the real problem is just with the bizarre variety of hardware that's out there, and the utter lack of open documentation or driver support for anything but Windows.
I put Ubuntu relatively painlessly onto a HP Workstation -- this was a machine that was designed from the factory to run Linux (RedHat, granted, but Linux just the same) -- and have no complaints. But when I went down to Best Buy and tried to get a wireless card, I wasn't able to find a single one that was compatible with Linux. I ended up getting some Linksys one and using ndiswrapper drivers that won't change SSIDs without forcing a reboot.
Is this the Ubuntu developers' fault? No way. Is it Linksys'? Probably. Does it matter to me as an end user? Not really -- the point is the experience sucks, and this reflects poorly on the OS, even though it might be outside of the developers' control.
You don't have problems like this on the Mac, because Apple controls the hardware. You want wireless on your Mac? Get an Airport card -- there's only one, this is what it's going to cost you, take it or leave it. It costs 3x as much as a PC wireless card, but it works all the time and without any configuration, or even any user-installed drivers. And this in turn makes the whole operating system seem almost magical: things always "just work."
The whole "Apple experience" is Apple's greatest asset. It's worth more to them than their hardware architecture, Mac OS X, or anything else. Those are just components which work together to produce the net effect. Obviously they're going to guard it jealously, and one of the things that maintains this experience is a rigid control of the hardware.
I wouldn't want Apple to have the kind of marketshare that Microsoft does. (I wouldn't want anyone to have the marketshare that Microsoft does.) But they don't, they have their 10% and they run it as a sort of "benevolent dictatorship." You pay your money and you get your experience.
Apple isn't going to let you easily move their OS to other hardware, because they don't want to have the same problem that Linux has: hardware problems completely outside of their control will reflect poorly on their product.
In any case, if I recall correctly the ROM wasn't even used directly... you could obtain a ROM image on the net if you didn't have one to rip with the card.
I think this is actually a good lead-in to the topic of TFA -- part of the ROM contained a specific string, I think it was "Stolen from Apple Computer" that could be searched for and found in an image. So let's say you make a Mac emulator, and claim that it doesn't contain Apple's intellectual property in any way. A quick search can reveal whether it has the whole ROM image embedded in it somewhere.
There's probably some checksumming I assume to keep you from just removing the "Stolen from Apple Computer" or changing 'Apple Computer' to 'Joe's Computer', but the basic idea is very simple. It's just a little marker that they stuck in their code to make it easier to identify later.
Given that the x86 Macs are basically going to put Apple back in a situation not dissimilar to the one they were in 20 years ago with Amiga hardware (or maybe even the Apple II clones before that), it doesn't surprise me at all that they'd do something like this again. I'm sure they have more modern, sophisticated security measures to keep you from moving the OS easily to commodity hardware as well.
Interesting point. However, I'd point out that where I was this summer/fall, a baseball ticket was about the cheapest entertainment option going. Day-of-game outfield tickets were about $9, cheaper than a movie in the same area. And the concession food was about the same price or cheaper than a movie theater, and you could buy beer, yell, and throw peanut shells on the floor (which tend to be frowned on in all but the seediest movie theaters). My friends and I used to go over if we didn't have anything better to do after work. I had co-workers -- perhaps not "joe sixpack," but also not rich people in the slighest -- who had 18 or 22-game season tickets.
:)
I don't go to the hockey or football games in this area because they're just too expensive. I just checked, and seats roughly equivalent to by $9 baseball ticket would be $35; good seats $90. It's about the same multipier for season tickets as well, which puts them well out of the range of the 'average working guy.' It's no wonder that most of them are bought up by corporations, lobbyists and influence peddlers, and the wealthy.
Perhaps this situation is reversed and baseball tickets might be hard to get in other areas; I guess I'm just lucky to have lived near a really terrible team last season.
Actually, this might not be a bad idea.
Although I'm not sure where the statistics in question are actually coming from, let's assume that they're from MLB analysts.
If they want to copyright their statistics, fine; I don't think they could stop me from going to a game, taking notes on how many pitches/balls/strikes/etc. there were, and then posting that information on a web site. Suppose a whole lot of people did that, and you would have a separate, uncopyrighted repository of statistics, independent of the MLB ones. I'm not sure how accurate they would be, but I can't see how they could stop you from doing this. I think any attempt to block you would be a pretty clear First Amendment issue.