Okay, let's try that one again, without hitting "Submit" when I mean "Preview":
There are a whole lot of Taiwanese people who would disagree with your characterization of Mainland (PRC) China's "ownership" of any part of the political system of Taiwan.
Just as one example, the presidential party in Taiwan, the Progressive Democrats, are officially pro-independence. (And depending on who you ask, so is the other major party at least on paper; they're just more conciliatory towards the PRC.)
There are a whole lot of Taiwanese people who would agree with your characterization of Mainland (PRC) China's "ownership" of any part of the political system of Taiwan.
The question is whether their target for this year is to reduce Microsoft products by 25%, measured in dollars, or in userbase/systems-installed. If it's in dollars, then MS could discount their products by 25%, and business would go on as usual. Obviously I'm sure that would not be Microsoft's preferred outcome, but given that the marginal cost of each install is essentially zero (assuming that they're using the same media over and over) they're still making a ridiculous profit.
Look, I like hating Microsoft as much as anyone else. Probably more. If I really thought that they had gotten busted putting a backdoor into Windows, I'd stand up and do a happy jig, right here and now.
But they didn't. The article isn't very convincing, any more than the "NSAKEY" thing was a few years back. It just doesn't make sense as a backdoor; there are far better ways to do it, if indeed that was your goal.
What I could believe it is, was some sort of code initally created for some other purpose, and left there (maybe for testing, or debugging, or who knows) because of sloppy practices. That seems totally plausible.
As Schneier said in relation to the NSAKEY controversy, "[I]t's not an NSA key so they can secretly inflict weak cryptography on the unsuspecting masses. There are just too many smarter things they can do to the unsuspecting masses."
Actually I thought the cryptography was about the only thing that was even vaguely believable in that book. It was the whole "secret underground NSA supercomputer lair" that didn't quite wash for me. Same with the characters and their motivations, although that's obviously subjective.
The cryptography came across to me as basically not much more than you'd get by reading Bruce Schneier's book, adding some imagination, and simplifying the whole thing down about two orders of magnitude.
If there's anything in the book that's worth discussing it would be rolling cleartext.
Unfortunately the free version doesn't let you transcode/export either. You have to pay $29 to transcode to another format, and around fifty bucks or so if you want the dubious pleasure of encoding your content into WMV. They even have some "pro" versions to encumber--I mean encode your HD content.
So the free version just lets you play it. If you want to do anything useful with WMV besides that (like, put it in a container that doesn't suck) you'll pay $30.
Kudos to them for charging extra to encode. I'm all for anything that discourages that.
Well personally I just read the title of the article, "Microsoft Ends Windows Media Player on the Mac," and figured that 'for Macintosh' was pretty much implied in the description.
So much for encouraging people to read the article -- are we going to have to tell people to Read the F***ing Title now, too?
Just out of curiosity (I'd test this myself and answer my own question, but I'm not near my Linux box) do any of the 'big name' Linux video players handle Quicktime files out of the box? It seems like a no-brainer move. I just stumbled across all the developer documentation for the QT ".mov" file format with a few minutes of Googling, and it seems pretty easy to understand even to an admitted non-developer like me. The benefit is that you can chuck pretty much anything you want into a Quicktime file, and the player (depending on how smart it is) will know what codec to use or skip parts that it can't handle. So you can easily have multiple audio tracks, subtitles, vector elements, etc.
Research before you talk. The Quicktime file format is fully documented, and Apple's licensing is quite open. According to Digital Preservation, "Licensing by Apple appears to be limited to the software and other technology elements." The Wikipedia entry on Quicktime claims that the "the QuickTime file format itself [is] openly documented and available for anyone to use royalty-free."
If you want to be very sure, you could always ask Apple directly, via their Quicktime Software Licensing page (which is related more to bundling actual Quicktime software with products, and using the Quicktime and Apple logo). Their email address is sw.license@apple.com.
That said, here's the actual Apple documentation for the Quicktime File Format, from the developer site. I think this is what you'd want; in its introduction it reads "if you are developing a non-QuickTime application that imports QuickTime files or works with QuickTime VR, you need to understand the material in this book."
So basically, it's nothing like the situation with ASF or WMV at all. Apple has lots of reasons to want people to implement the Quicktime file format -- in digital cameras, third-party software, wherever. A version of it is used in the ISO spec for MPEG-4 video, as well. The more people use it, the more interoperable Macs become; to encourage that, the spec is open. Obviously there are licensing issues on the codecs themselves, but in terms of the container format there don't seem to be any deal-breaking restrictions. It's only if you wanted to use Apple code to play the content of the containers/streams, or use any of their logos that there'd be a problem.
I've actually used this plugin before, and thought I'd point out that they've changed their pricing.
It used to be that they didn't have a free version that wasn't crippleware -- their freebie would only play the first half of any given file, and then cut to a black screen. Plus there was a crawl across the top reminding you that it wasn't paid. Really obnoxious.
Now they have a free version that let's you play WMV (not DRMed stuff, but it does support the uber-annoying WMV3); a $29 version that lets you import WMV and transcode it to other formats; a $49 version that lets you export to WMV (why would anyone want to do that? Ugh); plus some high-end options that let you do custom encoding profiles and HD audio.
It's kind of nice that MS decided to support a Mac developer -- I can only assume that they gave them some compensation in return for freeing -- as in beer -- their play-only version. It's still annoying that you have to pay $30 to get even basic importing functionality, but I guess they need to support themselves somehow.
Oh, and the other nice thing about Flip4Mac is that it will let you play WMVs that are embedded in web sites from within your browser, using a Quicktime interface. Big plus in my book since I could never get the Mac Windows Media Player to work correctly with my browser. Plus, it's interface sucked.
It's not really Quicktime's fault, but has something to do with either how AVI deals with MP3 audio tracks, or how people put MP3 audio into them. I've never been entirely clear.
But the great majority of Divx AVIs that you download (theoretically, or so I'm told, by some guy down at the 7-11 who knows such things) will not play in Quicktime "off the shelf." You'll get a black screen and no audio, or sometimes you'll get video and no audio, or desynced audio and video.
The fix is to run them through a little program called "Divx Doctor," which takes the AVI as an input and produces a Quicktime MOV file, either standalone or as a pointer to the content of the AVI, that you can play with. They work just fine.
Or you can just play the AVIs as-is in VLC, which also has the benefit of supporting playlists and some WMV codecs.
Quicktime technically has the ability to play AVIs, but it's a useless feature because of the way that 90% of the ones you'll find online are put together (Divx video with MP3 audio).
Unfortunately though, there are a lot of WMV3 codec videos floating around out there. I'm not sure why, perhaps it's the default codec used by something, but I'd guess that 60-70% of the WMV files I've come across lately have refused to play in VLC. And they're not DRMed files either, just random stuff I've had sent to me.
The real problem in my mind is why people are encoding their content with such a stupid format, given the vast number of better alternatives. I pretty much delete anything that gets sent to me in a format that I can't read, and so far my life hasn't suffered for it. But it is frustrating -- it recalls a time when people started sending ASF files around instead of AVIs, for no particular reason that I could decipher.
I'm not sure how we do it, but we need to try to educate users that WMV3 isn't a codec that's acceptable (or even usable) for a non-insignificant number of users. If the elimination of official Microsoft support for Windows Media Player on the Mac makes this fraction bigger and more noticeable, then all the better. Mac users are a notoriously noisy bunch given their marketshare, maybe the web site operators will get a clue and pick a different codec (Divx, etc.) in the future.
If that happened, not only Mac users but also Linux users (and any other platform besides Windows) could also stand to benefit. WMV3 doesn't do a damn for anyone except Microsoft.
Messenger is basically unnecessary, because there are third-party products that do what it does (MSN support) better, and with better system integration. Messenger as it exists right now would have been a fine program in 2002, but today it's lame. Plus, very few Mac users I know want to only use MSN for Instant Messenging, and that's what the program is geared to. Most people who want to talk to people who use MSN are going to use Adium or one of the other multi-protocol IM clients.
There might be a small niche of users who haven't discovered the joy that is Adium (I'm now a total convert since they built in Address Book integration and encryption) and are still using the standalone MSN client, but I think they'll find that they're better off once they make the switch to another product.
The real MS product that it would be detrimental to the Mac platform to lose is Entourage. Without that, I can't think of an easy way to interact with an Exchange Server (Apple Mail will do the email part, but it won't do the calendaring or PIM functions). Granted I think Exchange is stupid, but it's popular.
What did you possibly do to your Mac to get it to kernel panic?
I've been using OS X since the public beta, and I haven't had one do the old black-scrolling-text-screen-of-death in years now. And when it did happen back a while ago, it was mostly because I was using some (at the time) very shady drivers.
Whatever software you were running... you should submit a bug report to the developer. That shouldn't be happening with production code.
So I did some research and there is a project doing just this, right now. It's called "Darwine," and they have a developer preview for Darwin-PPC, and are working on a Darwin-x86 version. They seem to be in need of people running Darwin-x86 for testing and development purposes. I can only imagine such people will not be in short supply once the new Intel iMacs start shipping. Mac OS X is not even strictly required, OpenDarwin on x86 will do.
Isn't there some number-of-connection limit that's been imposed in iTunes, in the recent versions? Like each client can only take seven remote connections per day or something like that?
I used to really like the DAAP server functions in iTunes, but Apple (at the behest of the music companies, I am fairly certain) pared the usefulness down and down, until they imposed this limit. I was never clear on whether it was a seven-client limit, or a seven-connection limit.
Anyone care to clear this up? Because you're right, iTunes is really neat in terms of a household music sharing / music server application. Pity there's no Linux version though.
I don't think it solves this guy's question, at least as I understand it, because he can't be connected to the server (using it as his main desktop implied to me his mouse/keyboard/monitor are hooked up to it directly) and be controlling the output at the client. If I turn on sharing of my music library, and you connect to it, I can't control what you play on your end. That's what he's trying to do.
Effectively what he wants (I think) is to use the remote PC as a very overbuilt Airport Express. Frankly I'd think about just buying one of those.
I think the Wine on OS X86 has huge potential; the whole dual-boot thing, while interesting, is a kludge. If you want to run Windows applications -- which is assumedly the only reason anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac anyway (you're not doing it for the OS, or you wouldn't have gotten the Mac in the first place, right?) -- let's just work on a way to run Windows applications from within Mac OS X. We're already partway there with Wine/Cedega. Granted it's buggy and doesn't always work, but you have to give them credit for being pretty slick. Depending on which application is being used, sometimes people claim performance that's better than Windows.
I have no idea of how the actual underpinnings of Wine works, other than it does some very high-level emulation and virtualization (much higher than, say, VPC), but the WineHQ is open source, and in theory it should be able to be ported to OS X86 now. Can anyone familiar with WineHQ comment on what would need to be done, or how big an effort would be required?
To me, that would be pretty close to the perfect solution. A compatibility environment for running Windows applications without rebooting into (or even buying) Windows, and without the performance overhead of emulation or translation (however it is how you define Virtual PC).
TransGaming doesn't seem as though they have the resources or interest to do it, which I think is a mistake because there could be a big market for a Windows gaming emulator on Macintosh, but they seem to be totally occupied with maintainance and improvement on the Linux-x86 side. So it seems as though the WineHQ project would be the logical port choice.
Well.... yeah, you wouldn't want to use the SAME VERSION of VPC that you're using now. That would be missing the point, since you'd be going:
x86 --(VPC)--> PPC --(Rosetta)--> x86
Now assuming that each time you take a 20% hit due to emulation, you've lost 40% speed. The solution is for Microsoft to make a VPC version for x86 Mac and rip out the first instruction conversion, and just provide the hardware abstraction.
What we really need is a port of Wine to Mac OS X86 -- a wrapper around the Windows DLLs and system calls, but that doesn't do any microcode conversion. That way you wouldn't need Windows. I have read this idea on the Cedega and WineHQ forums several times, but a lot of the regular Linux Wine/Cedega users aren't interested because they don't want the resources diverted from "their" platform.
However if you could do this, even if it didn't involve any VM functionality, it would be huge. Virtual PC's problem (to me) was always twofold: one it was slow, and two it required buying a Windows license. The first one is problem for games and the second just a problem for me personally, and I'm sure many other users would prefer not buying Windows, if not for ethical or preference reasons than just for financial ones. It's always a game of catch-up between the Wine people and Microsoft to reverse engineer the new features and keep compatibility, but it's one that the developer community seems to be up to, at least on Linux. Given the potential benefit to Mac users everywhere, I think at least equal support could be mustered as well.
Ever since I started playing around with Linux x86, I've been very impressed with what Wine/Cedega does. If we could implement that on the Mac x86 platform, we'd really have a killer app on our hands. Potentially it could offer all the benefits of Virtual PC or a dual-boot install, at nearly full speed without rebooting, and without having to buy or run Windows.
If you don't trust Apple... why are you running their closed-source software? Who knows what it could be doing to your machine. Maybe it's keylogging you. Maybe it's sending the contents of your hard drive back to them, byte by byte.
Are you running a Mac? Maybe the kernel has been intentionally backdoored. You'd never know -- unless you've audited their source, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you probably haven't.
The point here is that there are two roads you can take. You can decide that a company is basically trustworthy, and take what Jobs (or whomever) said at face value. Or you can not trust them, and assume everything they do is tainted.
If you're in that second camp, I'd hope you're using only open-source software that you've either reviewed yourself or has been reviewed and signed by other people you trust, because that's the only way you're ever going to guarantee the security of your data, without at some point just implicitly trusting the word of some corporation.
I'm actually a little surprised that there wasn't such a dialog. I'm used to getting dialogs from programs on first-run asking what I want them to do -- in fact iTunes itself has several, if you don't have an existing music Library (I believe something to the effect of "Do you want me to scan your hard drive looking for music?" and then "Do you want this music moved into your library and kept organized by iTunes?" At least this is the very dim recollection I have of it, the last time I did a fresh install of it anywhere.)
I think the recommendation feature is actually a cool thing. I would be slightly weirded out if it was sending my entire music library up to some central server, but probably less weirded out than I am about CVS tracking people's purchases under the guise of a discount program. As it's been now clarified that it doesn't do any such thing, and only sends information about the currently playing song, I'm not very concerned.
However you're right, they could have saved themselves a world of shit if they had just put an option in there from the beginning. I wonder if maybe they were hurrying to make a release date by Macworld and didn't have a chance for Legal to review it, or it slipped through the cracks. It seems like a no-brainer sort of recommendation.
How much do you want to bet there's somebody in Apple right now polishing their resume for the "other opportunity" that they're about to "leave the company" for, after their exit interview with Mr. Jobs?
I'm not sure exactly how some of the more advanced features of iTunes works, but I can think of several reasons.
1) It's checking for software updates. 2) It's looking for other iTunes users on your subnet, using Rendezvous (or whatever they're calling it this week) so you can browse them. 3) It's prefetching iTMS stuff, or doing a 'keep alive' ping once in a while to keep you from being logged out, if you're logged into the store.
I'm sure I could come up with a few others. The fact is, iTunes is basically a web browser in addition to an MP3 player at this point, it's fairly normaly that it would be making outbound network connections to your proxy. Without looking at the content of the packets it seems to be jumping to quite a conclusion to assume that it's spying on you.
Sure, maybe it's a keystroke logger or it's sending everything on your hard drive to Major Leage Baseball's secret satellite. More than likely it's not though. (And if you use a Mac, how do you know the OS kernel isn't spying on you itself? Why stop being paranoid with iTunes?)
This is categorically untrue. It looks at the playing song only, makes a recommendation, and then discards the data. That's what TFA says -- if you have reliable information contrary to this, of course you are welcome to post it. But saying that "itunes scans your library" or something to that effect is totally unsubstantiated by anything I've seen, other than a bunch of other hotheaded slashdot posts. I think it's just a groupthink meme that's popped up and people are taking as fact.
but as long as it's easier than getting and enriching fissile material, it's worth the effort.
That's just the point. It's not. Getting and enriching fissile material is markedly easier than doing a lot of very basic scientific research which may or may not lead anywhere, could well consume millions of dollars, and could take decades to produce anything.
If you really wanted a bomb, it would probably be easier to go and buy the fissile material or dig it up out of the ground in central Africa (or heck pick one up off of the ocean floor -- there are a number of them laying around, you can even find a list if you Google it) than it would be to try to build some entirely new inititator technology.
This technology is so far away from weaponizability that it really reeks of FUD to start talking about it at this point. Having an abundance of caution is one thing, but jumping at shadows is another entirely, and this is definitely of the latter sort.
If you wanted to produce neutrons, whether for good or evil, there are a lot easier ways too -- ways that are known to actually produce neutrons, even used commercially for that purpose, and would be a lot more reliable. The Farnsworth fusor comes to mind (somewhere above in the comments is a link). It's state-of-the-art 1950s technology, certainly more practical than some device which the best scientists in the world aren't sure if even works.
Let's not scare the living bejeezus out of everone with what The Terrorists might do with some invention that doesn't even exist yet. That sounds like a great way to make sure that it never actually exists at all -- "cutting off your nose to spite your face," as my mother probably would have said.
So, forgive me for asking the obvious, but who has the copyright in this case? It's the Linux kernel sources that are in question -- therefore the copyrights are held by whom? Linus Torvalds? Or just by the innumerable individual authors?
The GNU people seem to have the enforcement stuff pretty well taken care of, but if they don't hold the copyright to the kernel their hands are pretty much tied. Given that the kernel is fairly important to the GNU/Linux OS, and as a piece of Free Software just in general, I would have thought that somebody had put some thought into how to enforce the GPL in regards to it before.
Anyone want to fill me in on what the story is? I just scanned around kernel.org and there's nothing there that I can find about license enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, let's try that one again, without hitting "Submit" when I mean "Preview":
There are a whole lot of Taiwanese people who would disagree with your characterization of Mainland (PRC) China's "ownership" of any part of the political system of Taiwan.
Just as one example, the presidential party in Taiwan, the Progressive Democrats, are officially pro-independence. (And depending on who you ask, so is the other major party at least on paper; they're just more conciliatory towards the PRC.)
There are a whole lot of Taiwanese people who would agree with your characterization of Mainland (PRC) China's "ownership" of any part of the political system of Taiwan.
Frankly, I smell a troll.
Yes I expect this is probably true.
The question is whether their target for this year is to reduce Microsoft products by 25%, measured in dollars, or in userbase/systems-installed. If it's in dollars, then MS could discount their products by 25%, and business would go on as usual. Obviously I'm sure that would not be Microsoft's preferred outcome, but given that the marginal cost of each install is essentially zero (assuming that they're using the same media over and over) they're still making a ridiculous profit.
Mod up.
Look, I like hating Microsoft as much as anyone else. Probably more. If I really thought that they had gotten busted putting a backdoor into Windows, I'd stand up and do a happy jig, right here and now.
But they didn't. The article isn't very convincing, any more than the "NSAKEY" thing was a few years back. It just doesn't make sense as a backdoor; there are far better ways to do it, if indeed that was your goal.
What I could believe it is, was some sort of code initally created for some other purpose, and left there (maybe for testing, or debugging, or who knows) because of sloppy practices. That seems totally plausible.
As Schneier said in relation to the NSAKEY controversy, "[I]t's not an NSA key so they can secretly inflict weak cryptography on the unsuspecting masses. There are just too many smarter things they can do to the unsuspecting masses."
Actually I thought the cryptography was about the only thing that was even vaguely believable in that book. It was the whole "secret underground NSA supercomputer lair" that didn't quite wash for me. Same with the characters and their motivations, although that's obviously subjective.
The cryptography came across to me as basically not much more than you'd get by reading Bruce Schneier's book, adding some imagination, and simplifying the whole thing down about two orders of magnitude.
If there's anything in the book that's worth discussing it would be rolling cleartext.
Unfortunately the free version doesn't let you transcode/export either. You have to pay $29 to transcode to another format, and around fifty bucks or so if you want the dubious pleasure of encoding your content into WMV. They even have some "pro" versions to encumber--I mean encode your HD content.
So the free version just lets you play it. If you want to do anything useful with WMV besides that (like, put it in a container that doesn't suck) you'll pay $30.
Kudos to them for charging extra to encode. I'm all for anything that discourages that.
Well personally I just read the title of the article, "Microsoft Ends Windows Media Player on the Mac," and figured that 'for Macintosh' was pretty much implied in the description.
:)
So much for encouraging people to read the article -- are we going to have to tell people to Read the F***ing Title now, too?
(Not to be hard on you or anything.
Just out of curiosity (I'd test this myself and answer my own question, but I'm not near my Linux box) do any of the 'big name' Linux video players handle Quicktime files out of the box? It seems like a no-brainer move. I just stumbled across all the developer documentation for the QT ".mov" file format with a few minutes of Googling, and it seems pretty easy to understand even to an admitted non-developer like me. The benefit is that you can chuck pretty much anything you want into a Quicktime file, and the player (depending on how smart it is) will know what codec to use or skip parts that it can't handle. So you can easily have multiple audio tracks, subtitles, vector elements, etc.
Research before you talk. The Quicktime file format is fully documented, and Apple's licensing is quite open. According to Digital Preservation, "Licensing by Apple appears to be limited to the software and other technology elements." The Wikipedia entry on Quicktime claims that the "the QuickTime file format itself [is] openly documented and available for anyone to use royalty-free."
If you want to be very sure, you could always ask Apple directly, via their Quicktime Software Licensing page (which is related more to bundling actual Quicktime software with products, and using the Quicktime and Apple logo). Their email address is sw.license@apple.com.
That said, here's the actual Apple documentation for the Quicktime File Format, from the developer site. I think this is what you'd want; in its introduction it reads "if you are developing a non-QuickTime application that imports QuickTime files or works with QuickTime VR, you need to understand the material in this book."
So basically, it's nothing like the situation with ASF or WMV at all. Apple has lots of reasons to want people to implement the Quicktime file format -- in digital cameras, third-party software, wherever. A version of it is used in the ISO spec for MPEG-4 video, as well. The more people use it, the more interoperable Macs become; to encourage that, the spec is open. Obviously there are licensing issues on the codecs themselves, but in terms of the container format there don't seem to be any deal-breaking restrictions. It's only if you wanted to use Apple code to play the content of the containers/streams, or use any of their logos that there'd be a problem.
I've actually used this plugin before, and thought I'd point out that they've changed their pricing.
It used to be that they didn't have a free version that wasn't crippleware -- their freebie would only play the first half of any given file, and then cut to a black screen. Plus there was a crawl across the top reminding you that it wasn't paid. Really obnoxious.
Now they have a free version that let's you play WMV (not DRMed stuff, but it does support the uber-annoying WMV3); a $29 version that lets you import WMV and transcode it to other formats; a $49 version that lets you export to WMV (why would anyone want to do that? Ugh); plus some high-end options that let you do custom encoding profiles and HD audio.
It's kind of nice that MS decided to support a Mac developer -- I can only assume that they gave them some compensation in return for freeing -- as in beer -- their play-only version. It's still annoying that you have to pay $30 to get even basic importing functionality, but I guess they need to support themselves somehow.
Oh, and the other nice thing about Flip4Mac is that it will let you play WMVs that are embedded in web sites from within your browser, using a Quicktime interface. Big plus in my book since I could never get the Mac Windows Media Player to work correctly with my browser. Plus, it's interface sucked.
QuickTime plays avi's just fine.
Er, no it doesn't.
It's not really Quicktime's fault, but has something to do with either how AVI deals with MP3 audio tracks, or how people put MP3 audio into them. I've never been entirely clear.
But the great majority of Divx AVIs that you download (theoretically, or so I'm told, by some guy down at the 7-11 who knows such things) will not play in Quicktime "off the shelf." You'll get a black screen and no audio, or sometimes you'll get video and no audio, or desynced audio and video.
The fix is to run them through a little program called "Divx Doctor," which takes the AVI as an input and produces a Quicktime MOV file, either standalone or as a pointer to the content of the AVI, that you can play with. They work just fine.
Or you can just play the AVIs as-is in VLC, which also has the benefit of supporting playlists and some WMV codecs.
Quicktime technically has the ability to play AVIs, but it's a useless feature because of the way that 90% of the ones you'll find online are put together (Divx video with MP3 audio).
Unfortunately though, there are a lot of WMV3 codec videos floating around out there. I'm not sure why, perhaps it's the default codec used by something, but I'd guess that 60-70% of the WMV files I've come across lately have refused to play in VLC. And they're not DRMed files either, just random stuff I've had sent to me.
The real problem in my mind is why people are encoding their content with such a stupid format, given the vast number of better alternatives. I pretty much delete anything that gets sent to me in a format that I can't read, and so far my life hasn't suffered for it. But it is frustrating -- it recalls a time when people started sending ASF files around instead of AVIs, for no particular reason that I could decipher.
I'm not sure how we do it, but we need to try to educate users that WMV3 isn't a codec that's acceptable (or even usable) for a non-insignificant number of users. If the elimination of official Microsoft support for Windows Media Player on the Mac makes this fraction bigger and more noticeable, then all the better. Mac users are a notoriously noisy bunch given their marketshare, maybe the web site operators will get a clue and pick a different codec (Divx, etc.) in the future.
If that happened, not only Mac users but also Linux users (and any other platform besides Windows) could also stand to benefit. WMV3 doesn't do a damn for anyone except Microsoft.
Messenger is basically unnecessary, because there are third-party products that do what it does (MSN support) better, and with better system integration. Messenger as it exists right now would have been a fine program in 2002, but today it's lame. Plus, very few Mac users I know want to only use MSN for Instant Messenging, and that's what the program is geared to. Most people who want to talk to people who use MSN are going to use Adium or one of the other multi-protocol IM clients.
There might be a small niche of users who haven't discovered the joy that is Adium (I'm now a total convert since they built in Address Book integration and encryption) and are still using the standalone MSN client, but I think they'll find that they're better off once they make the switch to another product.
The real MS product that it would be detrimental to the Mac platform to lose is Entourage. Without that, I can't think of an easy way to interact with an Exchange Server (Apple Mail will do the email part, but it won't do the calendaring or PIM functions). Granted I think Exchange is stupid, but it's popular.
What did you possibly do to your Mac to get it to kernel panic?
... you should submit a bug report to the developer. That shouldn't be happening with production code.
I've been using OS X since the public beta, and I haven't had one do the old black-scrolling-text-screen-of-death in years now. And when it did happen back a while ago, it was mostly because I was using some (at the time) very shady drivers.
Whatever software you were running
So I did some research and there is a project doing just this, right now. It's called "Darwine," and they have a developer preview for Darwin-PPC, and are working on a Darwin-x86 version. They seem to be in need of people running Darwin-x86 for testing and development purposes. I can only imagine such people will not be in short supply once the new Intel iMacs start shipping. Mac OS X is not even strictly required, OpenDarwin on x86 will do.
The project:
http://darwine.opendarwin.org/
Isn't there some number-of-connection limit that's been imposed in iTunes, in the recent versions? Like each client can only take seven remote connections per day or something like that?
I used to really like the DAAP server functions in iTunes, but Apple (at the behest of the music companies, I am fairly certain) pared the usefulness down and down, until they imposed this limit. I was never clear on whether it was a seven-client limit, or a seven-connection limit.
Anyone care to clear this up? Because you're right, iTunes is really neat in terms of a household music sharing / music server application. Pity there's no Linux version though.
I don't think it solves this guy's question, at least as I understand it, because he can't be connected to the server (using it as his main desktop implied to me his mouse/keyboard/monitor are hooked up to it directly) and be controlling the output at the client. If I turn on sharing of my music library, and you connect to it, I can't control what you play on your end. That's what he's trying to do.
Effectively what he wants (I think) is to use the remote PC as a very overbuilt Airport Express. Frankly I'd think about just buying one of those.
I'm glad somebody else thought of this.
I think the Wine on OS X86 has huge potential; the whole dual-boot thing, while interesting, is a kludge. If you want to run Windows applications -- which is assumedly the only reason anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac anyway (you're not doing it for the OS, or you wouldn't have gotten the Mac in the first place, right?) -- let's just work on a way to run Windows applications from within Mac OS X. We're already partway there with Wine/Cedega. Granted it's buggy and doesn't always work, but you have to give them credit for being pretty slick. Depending on which application is being used, sometimes people claim performance that's better than Windows.
I have no idea of how the actual underpinnings of Wine works, other than it does some very high-level emulation and virtualization (much higher than, say, VPC), but the WineHQ is open source, and in theory it should be able to be ported to OS X86 now. Can anyone familiar with WineHQ comment on what would need to be done, or how big an effort would be required?
To me, that would be pretty close to the perfect solution. A compatibility environment for running Windows applications without rebooting into (or even buying) Windows, and without the performance overhead of emulation or translation (however it is how you define Virtual PC).
TransGaming doesn't seem as though they have the resources or interest to do it, which I think is a mistake because there could be a big market for a Windows gaming emulator on Macintosh, but they seem to be totally occupied with maintainance and improvement on the Linux-x86 side. So it seems as though the WineHQ project would be the logical port choice.
Thoughts?
Well .... yeah, you wouldn't want to use the SAME VERSION of VPC that you're using now. That would be missing the point, since you'd be going:
x86 --(VPC)--> PPC --(Rosetta)--> x86
Now assuming that each time you take a 20% hit due to emulation, you've lost 40% speed. The solution is for Microsoft to make a VPC version for x86 Mac and rip out the first instruction conversion, and just provide the hardware abstraction.
What we really need is a port of Wine to Mac OS X86 -- a wrapper around the Windows DLLs and system calls, but that doesn't do any microcode conversion. That way you wouldn't need Windows. I have read this idea on the Cedega and WineHQ forums several times, but a lot of the regular Linux Wine/Cedega users aren't interested because they don't want the resources diverted from "their" platform.
However if you could do this, even if it didn't involve any VM functionality, it would be huge. Virtual PC's problem (to me) was always twofold: one it was slow, and two it required buying a Windows license. The first one is problem for games and the second just a problem for me personally, and I'm sure many other users would prefer not buying Windows, if not for ethical or preference reasons than just for financial ones. It's always a game of catch-up between the Wine people and Microsoft to reverse engineer the new features and keep compatibility, but it's one that the developer community seems to be up to, at least on Linux. Given the potential benefit to Mac users everywhere, I think at least equal support could be mustered as well.
Ever since I started playing around with Linux x86, I've been very impressed with what Wine/Cedega does. If we could implement that on the Mac x86 platform, we'd really have a killer app on our hands. Potentially it could offer all the benefits of Virtual PC or a dual-boot install, at nearly full speed without rebooting, and without having to buy or run Windows.
If you don't trust Apple ... why are you running their closed-source software? Who knows what it could be doing to your machine. Maybe it's keylogging you. Maybe it's sending the contents of your hard drive back to them, byte by byte.
Are you running a Mac? Maybe the kernel has been intentionally backdoored. You'd never know -- unless you've audited their source, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you probably haven't.
The point here is that there are two roads you can take. You can decide that a company is basically trustworthy, and take what Jobs (or whomever) said at face value. Or you can not trust them, and assume everything they do is tainted.
If you're in that second camp, I'd hope you're using only open-source software that you've either reviewed yourself or has been reviewed and signed by other people you trust, because that's the only way you're ever going to guarantee the security of your data, without at some point just implicitly trusting the word of some corporation.
I'm actually a little surprised that there wasn't such a dialog. I'm used to getting dialogs from programs on first-run asking what I want them to do -- in fact iTunes itself has several, if you don't have an existing music Library (I believe something to the effect of "Do you want me to scan your hard drive looking for music?" and then "Do you want this music moved into your library and kept organized by iTunes?" At least this is the very dim recollection I have of it, the last time I did a fresh install of it anywhere.)
I think the recommendation feature is actually a cool thing. I would be slightly weirded out if it was sending my entire music library up to some central server, but probably less weirded out than I am about CVS tracking people's purchases under the guise of a discount program. As it's been now clarified that it doesn't do any such thing, and only sends information about the currently playing song, I'm not very concerned.
However you're right, they could have saved themselves a world of shit if they had just put an option in there from the beginning. I wonder if maybe they were hurrying to make a release date by Macworld and didn't have a chance for Legal to review it, or it slipped through the cracks. It seems like a no-brainer sort of recommendation.
How much do you want to bet there's somebody in Apple right now polishing their resume for the "other opportunity" that they're about to "leave the company" for, after their exit interview with Mr. Jobs?
I'm not sure exactly how some of the more advanced features of iTunes works, but I can think of several reasons.
1) It's checking for software updates.
2) It's looking for other iTunes users on your subnet, using Rendezvous (or whatever they're calling it this week) so you can browse them.
3) It's prefetching iTMS stuff, or doing a 'keep alive' ping once in a while to keep you from being logged out, if you're logged into the store.
I'm sure I could come up with a few others. The fact is, iTunes is basically a web browser in addition to an MP3 player at this point, it's fairly normaly that it would be making outbound network connections to your proxy. Without looking at the content of the packets it seems to be jumping to quite a conclusion to assume that it's spying on you.
Sure, maybe it's a keystroke logger or it's sending everything on your hard drive to Major Leage Baseball's secret satellite. More than likely it's not though. (And if you use a Mac, how do you know the OS kernel isn't spying on you itself? Why stop being paranoid with iTunes?)
This is categorically untrue. It looks at the playing song only, makes a recommendation, and then discards the data. That's what TFA says -- if you have reliable information contrary to this, of course you are welcome to post it. But saying that "itunes scans your library" or something to that effect is totally unsubstantiated by anything I've seen, other than a bunch of other hotheaded slashdot posts. I think it's just a groupthink meme that's popped up and people are taking as fact.
but as long as it's easier than getting and enriching fissile material, it's worth the effort.
That's just the point. It's not. Getting and enriching fissile material is markedly easier than doing a lot of very basic scientific research which may or may not lead anywhere, could well consume millions of dollars, and could take decades to produce anything.
If you really wanted a bomb, it would probably be easier to go and buy the fissile material or dig it up out of the ground in central Africa (or heck pick one up off of the ocean floor -- there are a number of them laying around, you can even find a list if you Google it) than it would be to try to build some entirely new inititator technology.
This technology is so far away from weaponizability that it really reeks of FUD to start talking about it at this point. Having an abundance of caution is one thing, but jumping at shadows is another entirely, and this is definitely of the latter sort.
If you wanted to produce neutrons, whether for good or evil, there are a lot easier ways too -- ways that are known to actually produce neutrons, even used commercially for that purpose, and would be a lot more reliable. The Farnsworth fusor comes to mind (somewhere above in the comments is a link). It's state-of-the-art 1950s technology, certainly more practical than some device which the best scientists in the world aren't sure if even works.
Let's not scare the living bejeezus out of everone with what The Terrorists might do with some invention that doesn't even exist yet. That sounds like a great way to make sure that it never actually exists at all -- "cutting off your nose to spite your face," as my mother probably would have said.
So, forgive me for asking the obvious, but who has the copyright in this case? It's the Linux kernel sources that are in question -- therefore the copyrights are held by whom? Linus Torvalds? Or just by the innumerable individual authors?
The GNU people seem to have the enforcement stuff pretty well taken care of, but if they don't hold the copyright to the kernel their hands are pretty much tied. Given that the kernel is fairly important to the GNU/Linux OS, and as a piece of Free Software just in general, I would have thought that somebody had put some thought into how to enforce the GPL in regards to it before.
Anyone want to fill me in on what the story is? I just scanned around kernel.org and there's nothing there that I can find about license enforcement.
I know of no such country; but if anybody really wants to set up an Independent Sovereign State, then they could pass such a law.
There's always Sealand.
I haven't heard much about them recently, and their web site hasn't changed in a while. Wonder what they're up to.