All I can say is, you lucked out. I know of a place where there is an entire room -- we're talking one of those rooms full of sliding library-esque shelves -- full of what's essentially garbage, stored there because of one person who decided they didn't trust computers because they kicked their own powerstrip one day while working on a ginormous spreadsheet that they hadn't saved. Everything got printed out related to this project; we're talking emails, individual employees' timesheets, drafts of stuff that had been revised dozens of times, memos about who's bringing what to the company picnic and when the refrigerator in the break room gets cleaned out. All of it stuffed into file boxes and stored.
Last time I checked it's still piling up; they're getting on about 10 years worth of crap now.
There are more people around like that than I think most tech people realize; it's not even technophobia in some cases as much as borderline OCD that's allowed to express itself through random paper hoarding. Give them the power to do it, and people will squirrel away just about anything.
I think it means that it is more important to get a new product out the door on time and working properly than to deliver an upgrade to an already mature and polished product.
When you put it that way, it sounds like a really horrible way to do business. I mean, "gee, let's roll another product out, not fix the one we have out there already... that way, we'll have two products out there, neither of which deliver the true user experience that we're capable of!"
Frankly I think the iPhone is a big risk for Apple. It's going to really prove whether Apple Inc. (the personal electronics design house) is really a step up from Apple Computer Inc. (the late, historically occasionally great, personal computer company).
I don't really understand the decision to slip 10.5. I can't believe that it's really due to limited resources; I mean, I'm sure they know about mythical man-months and all that. It doesn't seem like it would really do any good, if the iPhone project is in trouble, to pull staff from the 10.5 teams and shove them over there to get the iPhone out the door. So I think the real reason is about publicity; they don't want to risk overshadowing their iPhone announcement with a computer upgrade; they want to emphasize this whole "new Apple" thing (which as you may have detected, I'm not exactly sure is a bright idea, but hey, I'm not named Steve either).
Here's what I think they figure: if the iPhone is a flop, they'll be able to do damage control and follow it up with 10.5, proving they can still produce a solid core product. If the iPhone is good, then it'll overshadow Leopard, but that's fine, because they don't seem to regard the Mac OS as a place they can expand much. The alternative -- Leopard before the 'phone -- puts them in the unenviable position of having Leopard steal the fire from the iPhone, if media outlets decide they've had enough Apple stories after the first round. (Which I think is unlikely; after school shootings and sex scandals, the media seems to love a good Apple story.)
Although if there's one company where it's probably safe to let the PR department dictate policy, it's Apple, in general I think it's a bit dangerous to start messing around with stuff like this in order to play the media.
I'm not sure that's quite true... I read some of the FAQs/HOWTOs there and it seems like all you need is an Intel processor based system that's SSE3 compatible, which basically means a P4 Prescott or newer. That doesn't rule out that many systems these days.
Now, networking and display might be a bigger issue, but it's not like Apple really uses any hardware that's too exotic on their own motherboards. They're just very fancy, generally well engineered x86 boxes after all.
All you have to do to create standard Unix "mbox" files from Apple Mail is select the messages you want to export, and choose File > Save As, and choose Raw Source. Name the file something like "messages.mbox" and hit save. Thunderbird or any other decent MUA should import them just fine.
I suspect you could also just concatenate the individual emlx (individual message files) stored in the Library folder together, but it's unnecessary, since Mail will just do that on save, for any arbitrary group of messages you specify.
Saying that Apple Mail used lots of incompatible formats really blows the issue out of proportion. For the first few versions, it stored each mailbox in a "mbox" file, basically a long text file of messages. This is the standard format used by most other mailreaders (the ones which don't use a proprietary system or a database backend). In the most recent version, Apple changed from the one-file-per-mailbox "mbox" file to a one-file-per-message "emlx" format. This lets utilities like Spotlight or Quicksilver search them without parsing the files by hand. Either way, your messages are still stored, in their entirety, including MIME attachments, as plain text.
[Just as a slight digression: That, in itself, is worth a hell of a lot more than some 'Export' option buried in the software -- even if the software is no longer available; even if the architecture to run the software is no longer available, the messages themselves, in the as-stored format, will still be readable. (So when making a backup you don't have to worry about trying to put some sort of a reader or file-parser on there too, which I think is mandatory for backing up proprietary formats.) So you can do a full backup of your mail just by burning ~/Library/Mail to a DVD.]
Certainly one can choose to use only applications that will run on multiple platforms, but that is going to eliminate any advantage of selecting a particular platform and give you only the least common denominator functionality.... The real issue of lock-in concerns applications that take advantage of the platform they're written for. Linux and Windows can't run standard OS X GUI applications. Macs and Windows can't run GNOME apps etc.
I don't get what you're asking for. It seems to be two mutually-incompatible things. You can't tweak for a particular hardware/software configuration, and its particular idiosyncrasies, while also retaining broad compatibility. In the past, this usually meant either having compatibility, or having speed (because most optimizations were speed or memory/footprint related). Now, I think it's generally compatibility or features, because most platform/vendor-specific tweaks involve proprietary ways of doing things in order to make certain tasks easier. But it's the choice of the developer in each case. As you pointed out, it's possible to have compatibility, but most developers choose not to.
There are applications which run, and work well, under Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows; Python with Tk GUIs for instance, I've seen in real-world applications. But they don't offer some of the features of a "native" app on each platform -- you're not going to get integration with Quartz and WebKit on OS X, or do cool stuff with KDE on Linux, or... whatever Windows developers do with Windows. At any rate, when you start straying from the path of the least-common, most-accepted standards, you're going to get a product that's not compatible and requires your users to be using a certain set of software and/or hardware.
This really isn't the fault of the OS developers either. It's silly to require than an OS maker not insert any features that aren't also present in all other OSes -- that would just discourage native software development for that platform. If Apple had said that the only applications you could write for OS X would be command-line POSIX-compatible ones, what kind of reaction do you think they would have gotten from the Mac-only development houses (and there are quite a few); they don't care about Linux/UNIX compatibility, and neither do their users (as evidenced by them being customers of software houses that only produce Mac software). They want features.
All operating systems, and on a broader scale, toolkits and programming languages, provide software developers with a palette of options that they can do anything they want with. We're past the time when developing on a particular platform meant that you software will only run there. It's trivial, if you really want to, to produce software that can be run basically anywhere. But it requires making compatibility a priority, and in most software development that just isn't at the top of the list.
No, nobody bothers to do it now, because as a society we spend an awful lot of resources enforcing a framework of laws which allow them to produce art on speculation and then sell it like aspirin tablets, over and over, and prohibit people from making further copies of something they've already purchased. With a framework like that in place, there's no reason to try and build an audience and sell serials. You'd be a fool to, particularly if you're a publisher (where starving writers will send you manuscripts for free on the sheer hope that you'll decide to read a page while blowing your nose or wiping up a coffee spill with it and maybe give them a contract).
But that doesn't mean it's a good system, or that on the whole -- when you include the costs of the current system, generally taken for granted -- that an alternative system that was more directly market-driven wouldn't be preferable.
And it's not as though direct-patronage systems don't work, they've obviously worked fairly well in the past; it's also well understood that subscription services work very well in many media, where you pay less for any individual unit of information than to a continuous stream of information -- the value of such services would likewise be unaffected.
Any chance you want to mention what the brand and source were on the $30 USB dongle?
I'm always looking for more known-good Linux wireless hardware that's actually being sold in stores (as opposed to the vast majority of models that are known to be working and which you can't find except for inflated prices on eBay...grrr).
I had just written off all USB wireless peripherals as a vast sea of Windows-only non-standards-compliance...
The only difference between the two is what is admissible and what is not, the requirements of preponderance and validity of the evidence is exactly the same.
I'm not quite sure if you're implying this or not, but the requirements for guilt in criminal court and civil court are not the same. The standard used in most criminal cases is "beyond a reasonable doubt," while in civil court, the standard is "preponderance of the evidence," basically 51% percent.
To put it bluntly, you can be in no danger of guilt in a criminal court, but still be found responsible for damages in civil court, on far shakier evidence.
These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago. Socializing goods/services for the purposes of making them "free" to the people who want them has rarely demonstrated anything but disaster for those goods/services. Forcing companies to relinquish ownership of goods (even if technology has made them intangible) will have side effects that go far beyond sticking it to the very rich and getting stuff for free.
I disagree fundamentally. There is no pro-"subsidization" at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The entire concept of intellectual "property" requires that a society enforce certain totally artificial rules in order to encourage people to do things that they would, presumably, otherwise not do. They are demanding that everyone pay money to the government, in the form of taxes, for enforcing restrictions on individuals' physical-property rights that only benefit a very small number of content monopolies.
You have no fundamental right to control what another person can do with information. There is an essential difference between someone breaking into your house and stealing a bunch of manuscripts on your desk, and between copying something that they bought legitimately from a publisher. The idea that I can publish and sell you a printed sheet with something written on it, but at the same time prohibit you from photocopying it (or, for that matter, making it into a collage or papering your catbox with it) is completely artificial. It represents an assault on one right -- that of being secure and having control over one's own possessions -- in exchange for a vaporous goal of engineering society in a way that a minority feel is beneficial. Sounds a lot like communism to me.
That some of the same political parties who support a re-evaluation of intellectual "property" laws also support other measures, some of which are redistributive or socialist, does not necessarily imply that anyone who is anti-IP is a communist. To say that is dishonest and discourages meaningful discourse; frankly it borders on McCarythism. There are many people, myself included, who are unconvinced of the merits of the current IP law framework and system, but who are sharply critical of redistributive ideologies.
There are business models that can allow for the production of books without DRM or copyright, but they're different than the systems we're used to. You can write and publish serials, rather than books, and use the free publicity that copying gives you to your advantage: tell your audience that if you don't get paid x, the next installment won't be released. There are a few authors (notably, Steven King) who have experimented with approaches like this (although his was slightly different). Writing in such an environment is less of a solitary activity, where the writer closets him or herself away and returns after some time with a book to hawk, than an interactive one, where the writer needs to constantly maintain the relationship with his benefactors.
In truth, there probably wouldn't be as many books written, but I'm not sure that's necessarily bad per se; I think our current system encourages the overproduction of many forms of "art" basically on speculation, far more than the market really demands and is willing to pay for, which is why there are so many out-of-work artists of various stripes, e.g. authors who have written books that nobody wants to buy. An approach that resulted in nothing being written without a market for it would result in less pages produced annually, but it would lead to only the stuff that people were actually willing to pay for getting written.
Uh, and how many of us at work are perpetualy online, work related or otherwise?
This is another good point -- I wonder what the gender distribution is of "online jobs," not necessarily jobs that you do online, but jobs that you can be online continually during. Many tech jobs -- judging from the Slashdot crowd -- allow this, although most "traditional" jobs don't. (Auto mechanic, most healthcare jobs, classroom teaching, manufacturing, etc.)
I really don't know if occupations would tend towards more men or women online, but it seems like an interesting question for some sociologist.
Outside of the U.S., MSN is overwhelmingly popular, with AIM sometimes not even in he #2 slot. MSN, worldwide, is the most used IM service.
I'm not sure exactly why this is. Since I have been to Europe and can attest to the fact that they're not all complete gibbering retards, as this evidence might cause you to suspect, one must consider alternate explanations.
The best explanation I've heard is that AOL took its terribly sweet time getting Unicode support into AIM, so that cost them a lot of users. Other theory is that the IM market in EMEA is somewhat newer than that in N. America, and while many of the critical "early adopter" users in the U.S. got onto IM systems like AIM before MS started pushing MSN through pre-installs, by the time people in other parts of the world started getting onto IM (which was later than in the U.S. -- there's a hilarious BBC article around somewhere asking "Is IM the new texting?" while in the U.S. you'd be better to ask "Are text messages the new IM?") Microsoft had already started to pre-install MSN on every PC, and captured the userbase before there was a critical mass of users on another network.
Were you trying to rip it as a straight ISO, using Disk Utility or something? Or were you using a specialized DVD ripping program?
I'm really curious as to whether HandBrake works with these broken DVDs, because at least for most Mac users I know, that's their primary ripping tool (and IMO the best all-in-one, free, GPLed, ripper I've worked with).
Agreed. It would be kinda nice to be able to download un-DRMed high resolution music, but I think it's a niche market at best. The only thing I'd buy from such a service would be some acoustic and classical recordings, and even then the classical stuff is iffy because so many of the really good recordings (in terms of performances) were made onto media that aren't that great by today's standards (analog tape without noise-reduction, mostly). And given a choice between a good recording of a crappy performance, and an old recording of a great performance, I'll usually go for the better performance. (My favorite Beethoven recordings are all from the 1950s, although to be fair there are some good performances since then.)
TFA mentions a service called MusicGiants, which offers downloads of high-res and multichannel music. Sadly though it uses WMA and a ton of DRM:
"MusicGiants is a company that offers high-definition music downloads including CD lossless quality downloads and SuperHD multi-channel 5.1 downloads which are comparable to DVD-Audio in quality.... [In response to whether they're iPod compatible:] No. Well, maybe it is, but you'd have to ask iTunes how compatible it is with the DRM for WMA.... We are the only company right now that is licensed by all of the majors for lossless downloads. Everyone else is focused on quantity and we are focused on quality. We are much more focused on home audio; we are the only source for full-resolution downloads, and most of our customers are not being drawn up in the music being driven by that 14-24-year-old group."
Pity about the DRM, if it weren't for that I might be pretty interested. I wonder how their business is going to be affected by the un-DRMed tracks from Apple? If Apple were to start selling DRM-free lossless tracks, particularly out of the back catalog they presumably have access to, they could do some neat stuff for the high-end market. But I think it's a limited market and I doubt it'll happen.
What really interests me is not the ability to download the same content that you can get on CD, but downloading content that's better than a CD. While I agree that 44.1kHz PCM is fine for most pop and rock (actually I maintain that cassette would be fine for 90% of that, too), high-res PCM or the non-PCM formats (like SACD or even its long forgotten predecessor the DBX700) sound really, really good for live recordings of more traditional instruments. Unfortunately SACD is never going anywhere, and there's not really a digital-file equivalent that's widely supported, so we're stuck with PCM/PCM-like formats. But there's no reason why you can't download stuff that's better than the 44.1kHz de facto standard.
To be perfectly honest, except in cars that are really well-insulated from the outside world, most of the quality on a CD or a decently-encoded digital file is going to be lost.
If your threshold for music listening is around 95 dB (which is only safe for 4 hrs/day anyway), and the road noise in the car at highway speeds is 60-75dB (the latter is allegedly the figure for my car as-built, a VW GTI, from an auto magazine) then you only have at most 35dB between the noise floor and max while driving.
That's already worse than most cassette tapes, particularly decent ones with Dolby NR. (I don't think they even sell the metal tapes anymore, but my recollection is that they were 30+ dB right out of the package without any noise reduction at all.)
In a way, it explains why so much popular music and FM radio is compressed: there's no reason to offer more than 40dB of dynamic range, because (assuming your listeners don't turn it up to unsafe/painful volumes) they'll never hear the quiet parts because of all the noise in the listening environment.
Frankly, I think the biggest single thing you can do, in terms of improving the sound system in your car, is to install a lot of Dynamat or other sound-insulating material. Most car stereos, even the factory ones, have far more resolution than you'll hear except when sitting in a parking lot. If you can drop that noise floor even 5dB, you'll get that much more "loudness" out of your stereo without upping the volume to dangerous levels.
I'm not a Mac user, and I have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone would want a case-insensitive, non-journaled filesystem.
Short answer: the Mac's filesystem was traditionally (like, forever, and the Apple II filesystem before it) case-insensitive. This led both users and software authors to make certain assumptions about file naming, and selecting/finding files. A lot of older Mac software would break if run on a case-sensitive filesystem. IIRC, some of the early versions of OS X even had problems if you tried to run them on a case-sensitive volume.
The case-sensitive flavors of HFS and HFS+ are fairly new, I think, and they've really only come out because people want to be more compatible with Unix and Linux (and NTFS, which is case-sensitive, although I don't think that Win32 really supports them).
The only reasons you wouldn't want journaling would probably be performance-related. If you wanted to extract peak read/write performance from a drive, say for temporary space while doing DV work or something, you might want an un-journaled drive. But I think it's pretty atypical. I'm actually surprised that Lacie's don't come out of the box formatted with journaling.
So the evolution of the filesystems went something like this, based on my recollection:
HFS - old, fixed-block size, barely used anymore except perhaps on removable media HFS+ - aka "Mac OS Extended" which updated HFS, implemented 32-bit block addresses, longer file names (with Unicode I think). OS 8? HFS+ Journaled - aka "Mac OS Extended Journaled" added journaling. Sometime after OS X came out? This was the default formatting on PPC OS X Macs, at least the last one I purchased back in early 2005. HFSX v5 - aka "Mac OS Extended Journaled Case-Sensitive" adds case-sensitivity to HFS Plus, and apparently the format allows for additional features to follow in the future.
Fax machines were designed for POTS lines, and minimal amounts of digitization (basically a 64kbit/s DS0, 8kHz samples at 8 bits/sample), or compression that retains equivalent bandwidth.
The compression used by VOIP, in contrast, is usually psychoacoustic, similar to MP3 or other modern audio codecs. It's optimized specifically for pushing human speech through at a minimum bitrate. There's a lot more aggressive clipping and rolloff, and it's not uncommon to compress a voice channel down to 10-13 kbit/s, sometimes even lower.
When you try to use a digital device which expects the full POTS bandwidth on a VOIP circuit, it's going to either fail completely or work at a very, very reduced speed.
This isn't just a VOIP thing, either -- if you try to send an analog fax or make an analog modem connection over a modern digital cellphone, it won't work very well, either. I've tried using my GSM phone as an analog device and using it to dial in through, and it's very, very painful. 9600 baud, painful (and I remember when that was fast, too, but sadly the Internet has moved on and bloated up a lot since then).
It's not as if the people who designed cellphone and VOIP systems didn't realize this. It's a tradeoff. The bandwidth saved by using modern compression is more than enough of a savings to justify inconveniencing a few people who still want to use analog devices.
What the VOIP providers need to do, is create something for their systems that's similar to the CSD (Circuit Switched Data) connections available on cellphones. (It's almost never used anymore, but basically it's like ISDN for a cellphone; it gives you a direct digital connection into the POTS network that you can push data through, without ever converting down to analog.)
But then again, providing a special "digital mode" that would let you push data into a voice channel, that's running on top of a digital data network (the Internet) does seem like a lot of redundancy. Maybe it's just time for telephone-based fax systems to die. They were a pretty cool hack while they lasted, but there are better ways of moving data around then converting it into whistles and sending it over a voice communications network.
Well except the sub pixel anti-aliasing they claim as their invention was invented by Steve Wozniak a couple of decades earlier.
I think it was even earlier than that, there were some links in yesterday's discussion to what looks like exactly the same feature, being investigated by Xerox even earlier. The prior art on at least the most general concepts of this (subpixel rendering by switching on individual Red, Green, or Blue color elements in a display) seems pretty damning.
But then again, the prior art against Microsoft's FAT patents was pretty damning too, and it even went through two USPTO reviews that said the patents should be invalidated, but at the 11th hour there was an additional review and suddenly they were "novel and non-obvious" again. Makes you wonder exactly Microsoft has by the short hairs that made a phone call to smooth things over... If they really need these patents, they'll never be overturned regardless of the obviousness of the prior art; the patent system is too thoroughly corrupt.
Well, if it's designed for a Mac, it's possible that it's not formatted on purpose: first, because it's trivial to format a drive when you connect it up the first time (plug drive in, dialog comes up saying that it's not formatted, would you like to format it, click yes... etc.), and also because there are a few filesystems that people might want.
Apple's Disk Utility offers six options to format a disk into: Mac OS Extended (HFS+), Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Journaled, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive Journaled, MS-DOS File System (FAT32), UNIX File System (EXT2?).
I guess I would assume that a "high end" HW manufacturer like Lacie would pre-format the drives to Mac OS Extended Journaled, because that's what Apple recommends as a default these days, but particularly if it's a product that's being aimed at non-clueless users, they might have just decided it wasn't worth it.
Okay, but just to play the devil's advocate here, why should that be part of the page design, and not a feature of the user's reader, perhaps as a configurable option?
It used to be pretty standard for people to customize their browsers in order to change the text, link, followed-link, background, hightlight, and other colors; why does the page designer necessarily know better than the users themselves what the user wants?
We've moved a long way over the past few years towards making the browser into a generic 'portal' that simply displays whatever the web developer wants to toss up on it for the user to look at; frankly it's very television-like.
However, there is a completely different conception of the internet where the pages should be marked up as generally as possible, and the user's browser should then choose how to display the information in a way that's meaningful to the user. It would probably mean that "your Internet" wouldn't look anything like "my Internet," but there's no inherent reason why that's bad. We've grown to treat it as if it is, but that's only because we want the web experience to be like flipping channels on a TV, where your Discovery Channel looks exactly like mine.
Maybe that's because they've been better lately?
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AACS Cracked Again
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I think you definitely have a point, but I think it may be like debating the relative merits of the poem versus a 1,000 page novel. They both have their place.
One of the reasons I think serialized TV shows have become popular lately is because they're not controlled by the big movie studios, at least not as directly. (Yeah, they're mostly bankrolled by the networks, and they're mostly owned by the same handful of media companies, but they're further from the centers of power.) There have been opportunities for and evidence of creativity in mainstream TV that just hasn't been seen in mainstream cinema in a while, and I don't think it's really because of the format itself. That probably helps, but really I don't think there's any fundamental superiority between a short film (think 5-10 mins), a traditional picture (90-120 mins), and a serialized show (as many hours as you want, usually in 20 or 45 minute semi-contained chunks, with seasonal plot arcs of ~10 hrs).
There's a lot of pretty dreadful TV out there, too (daytime soaps?), underlining the point that length may give you a bigger canvas, but it doesn't really make the painting any better. And not to mention the very good movies made over the past century, many of which probably wouldn't be good as serials.
After reading the first sentence I thought someone was making a good point, but the signature line negates it.
My signature or the GP's?
Anyway, I think it's important to work on both fronts. First, I agree that the best bet is just to not purchase anything that's DRMed at all. But since that means basically bowing out of a large portion of our culture -- I mean, no late-model VCRs (macrovision) or tapes, no DVD players or discs, no TiVO -- I think you're going to have trouble getting enough people to follow you to make it significant. There's no point in throwing yourself in front of a tank if they're just going to run over you and nobody else is going to notice or care.
Continually breaking the DRM schemes costs the studios a lot of money. It ensures that DRM is never "fire and forget;" and it turns DRM from being a one-time cost into a continual cost center, a black hole that they need to keep pouring money into. If you can make the cost of maintaining an effective DRM system higher than the cost of the piracy that it allegedly prevents, then it will eventually go away -- either the companies will see the light, or they'll be run out of business by other companies who do, and who are more profitable as a result.
The major remaining problem is that the entertainment industry in particular has so much political influence that it's going to require a lot of vigilance and advocacy to keep them from trying to use the law to buoy themselves as they start to sink -- or barring that, pull everyone else down with them. We haven't had much luck in this in the past, hence we've seen the AHRA, the DMCA, and lately the Mickey Mouse Protection Act go through. But if we can keep the visibility of their actions high -- which is aided by putting pressure on them and forcing them to be more and more outlandish and openly anti-consumer -- while at the same time denying them revenue by boycotting DRMed products and sucking their revenue through a guerrilla campaign against the DRM systems themselves, they'll eventually be forced to quit.
That really wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. There's a huge demand for movies, but they're expensive to make and the current movie industry sucks up most of the available investment dollars. There's no "secret sauce" involved in making a movie; it's just very, very expensive, and the people with enough cash to bankroll a film would rather go with an established, sure bet, rather than taking a chance on someone or something new.
If the current players just decided to pack up and go home, the new industry that would rise up in its place would doubtless be a lot more creative -- at least in the short term -- and we'd probably see a lot of new material out of it. In time, it would probably stagnate, too, because that's the way of things.
The main problem with the current situation is that the dinosaur companies have bought protection for their business models from the government, and essentially have propped themselves up. There's nothing bad with companies getting big, but there's also nothing that says they have a "right" to stay in business, either. Failing business models deserve to die, and the companies that rely on them deserve to die, too; when they don't, you're stopping what ought to be a natural economic progression.
But your objection to HTML/CSS doing what javascript used to be necessary for? Really? You prefer writing little-stupid javascript functions to just putting a:hover rule in your CSS? Really?
I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that the GP would probably be against:hover rules generally.
The problem isn't the implementation of the useless eye candy, the problem is the useless eye candy.
Who doesn't consider Taiwan "free"?
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I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of freedom comes out of countries you don't really consider "free". Boggles the mind.
Taiwan, speaking broadly here, isn't that "unfree." It's not like PRC/mainland China, anyway.
Sure, they're not exactly a libertarian data haven, but I don't think you should be tarring them with the Russia/China brush. (I mean, they didn't get medieval and had a basically rational, collected response, when they had a bunch of Neo-Nazis hold a rally, which would probably land you in prison in many "free" countries in Europe.)
They're a secular, representative democracy, with a strong respect for individual rights. Yeah, as a nation they have some not-too-savory stuff in their collective past involving the treatment of the native population, but you could say the same thing about the U.S. or Australia or any number of other nations. Frankly, I think Taiwan deserves a lot more U.S. support than it gets (although, I suppose these days, they might not want it).
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is, you lucked out. I know of a place where there is an entire room -- we're talking one of those rooms full of sliding library-esque shelves -- full of what's essentially garbage, stored there because of one person who decided they didn't trust computers because they kicked their own powerstrip one day while working on a ginormous spreadsheet that they hadn't saved. Everything got printed out related to this project; we're talking emails, individual employees' timesheets, drafts of stuff that had been revised dozens of times, memos about who's bringing what to the company picnic and when the refrigerator in the break room gets cleaned out. All of it stuffed into file boxes and stored.
Last time I checked it's still piling up; they're getting on about 10 years worth of crap now.
There are more people around like that than I think most tech people realize; it's not even technophobia in some cases as much as borderline OCD that's allowed to express itself through random paper hoarding. Give them the power to do it, and people will squirrel away just about anything.
I think it means that it is more important to get a new product out the door on time and working properly than to deliver an upgrade to an already mature and polished product.
... that way, we'll have two products out there, neither of which deliver the true user experience that we're capable of!"
When you put it that way, it sounds like a really horrible way to do business. I mean, "gee, let's roll another product out, not fix the one we have out there already
Frankly I think the iPhone is a big risk for Apple. It's going to really prove whether Apple Inc. (the personal electronics design house) is really a step up from Apple Computer Inc. (the late, historically occasionally great, personal computer company).
I don't really understand the decision to slip 10.5. I can't believe that it's really due to limited resources; I mean, I'm sure they know about mythical man-months and all that. It doesn't seem like it would really do any good, if the iPhone project is in trouble, to pull staff from the 10.5 teams and shove them over there to get the iPhone out the door. So I think the real reason is about publicity; they don't want to risk overshadowing their iPhone announcement with a computer upgrade; they want to emphasize this whole "new Apple" thing (which as you may have detected, I'm not exactly sure is a bright idea, but hey, I'm not named Steve either).
Here's what I think they figure: if the iPhone is a flop, they'll be able to do damage control and follow it up with 10.5, proving they can still produce a solid core product. If the iPhone is good, then it'll overshadow Leopard, but that's fine, because they don't seem to regard the Mac OS as a place they can expand much. The alternative -- Leopard before the 'phone -- puts them in the unenviable position of having Leopard steal the fire from the iPhone, if media outlets decide they've had enough Apple stories after the first round. (Which I think is unlikely; after school shootings and sex scandals, the media seems to love a good Apple story.)
Although if there's one company where it's probably safe to let the PR department dictate policy, it's Apple, in general I think it's a bit dangerous to start messing around with stuff like this in order to play the media.
I'm not sure that's quite true ... I read some of the FAQs/HOWTOs there and it seems like all you need is an Intel processor based system that's SSE3 compatible, which basically means a P4 Prescott or newer. That doesn't rule out that many systems these days.
Now, networking and display might be a bigger issue, but it's not like Apple really uses any hardware that's too exotic on their own motherboards. They're just very fancy, generally well engineered x86 boxes after all.
All you have to do to create standard Unix "mbox" files from Apple Mail is select the messages you want to export, and choose File > Save As, and choose Raw Source. Name the file something like "messages.mbox" and hit save. Thunderbird or any other decent MUA should import them just fine.
0 706201156481
I suspect you could also just concatenate the individual emlx (individual message files) stored in the Library folder together, but it's unnecessary, since Mail will just do that on save, for any arbitrary group of messages you specify.
Saying that Apple Mail used lots of incompatible formats really blows the issue out of proportion. For the first few versions, it stored each mailbox in a "mbox" file, basically a long text file of messages. This is the standard format used by most other mailreaders (the ones which don't use a proprietary system or a database backend). In the most recent version, Apple changed from the one-file-per-mailbox "mbox" file to a one-file-per-message "emlx" format. This lets utilities like Spotlight or Quicksilver search them without parsing the files by hand. Either way, your messages are still stored, in their entirety, including MIME attachments, as plain text.
[Just as a slight digression: That, in itself, is worth a hell of a lot more than some 'Export' option buried in the software -- even if the software is no longer available; even if the architecture to run the software is no longer available, the messages themselves, in the as-stored format, will still be readable. (So when making a backup you don't have to worry about trying to put some sort of a reader or file-parser on there too, which I think is mandatory for backing up proprietary formats.) So you can do a full backup of your mail just by burning ~/Library/Mail to a DVD.]
If you want more info here's a "hint" about the process:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006
Certainly one can choose to use only applications that will run on multiple platforms, but that is going to eliminate any advantage of selecting a particular platform and give you only the least common denominator functionality. ... The real issue of lock-in concerns applications that take advantage of the platform they're written for. Linux and Windows can't run standard OS X GUI applications. Macs and Windows can't run GNOME apps etc.
... whatever Windows developers do with Windows. At any rate, when you start straying from the path of the least-common, most-accepted standards, you're going to get a product that's not compatible and requires your users to be using a certain set of software and/or hardware.
I don't get what you're asking for. It seems to be two mutually-incompatible things. You can't tweak for a particular hardware/software configuration, and its particular idiosyncrasies, while also retaining broad compatibility. In the past, this usually meant either having compatibility, or having speed (because most optimizations were speed or memory/footprint related). Now, I think it's generally compatibility or features, because most platform/vendor-specific tweaks involve proprietary ways of doing things in order to make certain tasks easier. But it's the choice of the developer in each case. As you pointed out, it's possible to have compatibility, but most developers choose not to.
There are applications which run, and work well, under Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows; Python with Tk GUIs for instance, I've seen in real-world applications. But they don't offer some of the features of a "native" app on each platform -- you're not going to get integration with Quartz and WebKit on OS X, or do cool stuff with KDE on Linux, or
This really isn't the fault of the OS developers either. It's silly to require than an OS maker not insert any features that aren't also present in all other OSes -- that would just discourage native software development for that platform. If Apple had said that the only applications you could write for OS X would be command-line POSIX-compatible ones, what kind of reaction do you think they would have gotten from the Mac-only development houses (and there are quite a few); they don't care about Linux/UNIX compatibility, and neither do their users (as evidenced by them being customers of software houses that only produce Mac software). They want features.
All operating systems, and on a broader scale, toolkits and programming languages, provide software developers with a palette of options that they can do anything they want with. We're past the time when developing on a particular platform meant that you software will only run there. It's trivial, if you really want to, to produce software that can be run basically anywhere. But it requires making compatibility a priority, and in most software development that just isn't at the top of the list.
No, nobody bothers to do it now, because as a society we spend an awful lot of resources enforcing a framework of laws which allow them to produce art on speculation and then sell it like aspirin tablets, over and over, and prohibit people from making further copies of something they've already purchased. With a framework like that in place, there's no reason to try and build an audience and sell serials. You'd be a fool to, particularly if you're a publisher (where starving writers will send you manuscripts for free on the sheer hope that you'll decide to read a page while blowing your nose or wiping up a coffee spill with it and maybe give them a contract).
But that doesn't mean it's a good system, or that on the whole -- when you include the costs of the current system, generally taken for granted -- that an alternative system that was more directly market-driven wouldn't be preferable.
And it's not as though direct-patronage systems don't work, they've obviously worked fairly well in the past; it's also well understood that subscription services work very well in many media, where you pay less for any individual unit of information than to a continuous stream of information -- the value of such services would likewise be unaffected.
Any chance you want to mention what the brand and source were on the $30 USB dongle?
I'm always looking for more known-good Linux wireless hardware that's actually being sold in stores (as opposed to the vast majority of models that are known to be working and which you can't find except for inflated prices on eBay...grrr).
I had just written off all USB wireless peripherals as a vast sea of Windows-only non-standards-compliance...
The only difference between the two is what is admissible and what is not, the requirements of preponderance and validity of the evidence is exactly the same.
I'm not quite sure if you're implying this or not, but the requirements for guilt in criminal court and civil court are not the same. The standard used in most criminal cases is "beyond a reasonable doubt," while in civil court, the standard is "preponderance of the evidence," basically 51% percent.
To put it bluntly, you can be in no danger of guilt in a criminal court, but still be found responsible for damages in civil court, on far shakier evidence.
These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago. Socializing goods/services for the purposes of making them "free" to the people who want them has rarely demonstrated anything but disaster for those goods/services. Forcing companies to relinquish ownership of goods (even if technology has made them intangible) will have side effects that go far beyond sticking it to the very rich and getting stuff for free.
I disagree fundamentally. There is no pro-"subsidization" at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The entire concept of intellectual "property" requires that a society enforce certain totally artificial rules in order to encourage people to do things that they would, presumably, otherwise not do. They are demanding that everyone pay money to the government, in the form of taxes, for enforcing restrictions on individuals' physical-property rights that only benefit a very small number of content monopolies.
You have no fundamental right to control what another person can do with information. There is an essential difference between someone breaking into your house and stealing a bunch of manuscripts on your desk, and between copying something that they bought legitimately from a publisher. The idea that I can publish and sell you a printed sheet with something written on it, but at the same time prohibit you from photocopying it (or, for that matter, making it into a collage or papering your catbox with it) is completely artificial. It represents an assault on one right -- that of being secure and having control over one's own possessions -- in exchange for a vaporous goal of engineering society in a way that a minority feel is beneficial. Sounds a lot like communism to me.
That some of the same political parties who support a re-evaluation of intellectual "property" laws also support other measures, some of which are redistributive or socialist, does not necessarily imply that anyone who is anti-IP is a communist. To say that is dishonest and discourages meaningful discourse; frankly it borders on McCarythism. There are many people, myself included, who are unconvinced of the merits of the current IP law framework and system, but who are sharply critical of redistributive ideologies.
There are business models that can allow for the production of books without DRM or copyright, but they're different than the systems we're used to. You can write and publish serials, rather than books, and use the free publicity that copying gives you to your advantage: tell your audience that if you don't get paid x, the next installment won't be released. There are a few authors (notably, Steven King) who have experimented with approaches like this (although his was slightly different). Writing in such an environment is less of a solitary activity, where the writer closets him or herself away and returns after some time with a book to hawk, than an interactive one, where the writer needs to constantly maintain the relationship with his benefactors.
In truth, there probably wouldn't be as many books written, but I'm not sure that's necessarily bad per se; I think our current system encourages the overproduction of many forms of "art" basically on speculation, far more than the market really demands and is willing to pay for, which is why there are so many out-of-work artists of various stripes, e.g. authors who have written books that nobody wants to buy. An approach that resulted in nothing being written without a market for it would result in less pages produced annually, but it would lead to only the stuff that people were actually willing to pay for getting written.
Uh, and how many of us at work are perpetualy online, work related or otherwise?
This is another good point -- I wonder what the gender distribution is of "online jobs," not necessarily jobs that you do online, but jobs that you can be online continually during. Many tech jobs -- judging from the Slashdot crowd -- allow this, although most "traditional" jobs don't. (Auto mechanic, most healthcare jobs, classroom teaching, manufacturing, etc.)
I really don't know if occupations would tend towards more men or women online, but it seems like an interesting question for some sociologist.
Outside of the U.S., MSN is overwhelmingly popular, with AIM sometimes not even in he #2 slot. MSN, worldwide, is the most used IM service.
I'm not sure exactly why this is. Since I have been to Europe and can attest to the fact that they're not all complete gibbering retards, as this evidence might cause you to suspect, one must consider alternate explanations.
The best explanation I've heard is that AOL took its terribly sweet time getting Unicode support into AIM, so that cost them a lot of users. Other theory is that the IM market in EMEA is somewhat newer than that in N. America, and while many of the critical "early adopter" users in the U.S. got onto IM systems like AIM before MS started pushing MSN through pre-installs, by the time people in other parts of the world started getting onto IM (which was later than in the U.S. -- there's a hilarious BBC article around somewhere asking "Is IM the new texting?" while in the U.S. you'd be better to ask "Are text messages the new IM?") Microsoft had already started to pre-install MSN on every PC, and captured the userbase before there was a critical mass of users on another network.
Were you trying to rip it as a straight ISO, using Disk Utility or something? Or were you using a specialized DVD ripping program?
I'm really curious as to whether HandBrake works with these broken DVDs, because at least for most Mac users I know, that's their primary ripping tool (and IMO the best all-in-one, free, GPLed, ripper I've worked with).
TFA mentions a service called MusicGiants, which offers downloads of high-res and multichannel music. Sadly though it uses WMA and a ton of DRM:Pity about the DRM, if it weren't for that I might be pretty interested. I wonder how their business is going to be affected by the un-DRMed tracks from Apple? If Apple were to start selling DRM-free lossless tracks, particularly out of the back catalog they presumably have access to, they could do some neat stuff for the high-end market. But I think it's a limited market and I doubt it'll happen.
What really interests me is not the ability to download the same content that you can get on CD, but downloading content that's better than a CD. While I agree that 44.1kHz PCM is fine for most pop and rock (actually I maintain that cassette would be fine for 90% of that, too), high-res PCM or the non-PCM formats (like SACD or even its long forgotten predecessor the DBX700) sound really, really good for live recordings of more traditional instruments. Unfortunately SACD is never going anywhere, and there's not really a digital-file equivalent that's widely supported, so we're stuck with PCM/PCM-like formats. But there's no reason why you can't download stuff that's better than the 44.1kHz de facto standard.
To be perfectly honest, except in cars that are really well-insulated from the outside world, most of the quality on a CD or a decently-encoded digital file is going to be lost.
If your threshold for music listening is around 95 dB (which is only safe for 4 hrs/day anyway), and the road noise in the car at highway speeds is 60-75dB (the latter is allegedly the figure for my car as-built, a VW GTI, from an auto magazine) then you only have at most 35dB between the noise floor and max while driving.
That's already worse than most cassette tapes, particularly decent ones with Dolby NR. (I don't think they even sell the metal tapes anymore, but my recollection is that they were 30+ dB right out of the package without any noise reduction at all.)
In a way, it explains why so much popular music and FM radio is compressed: there's no reason to offer more than 40dB of dynamic range, because (assuming your listeners don't turn it up to unsafe/painful volumes) they'll never hear the quiet parts because of all the noise in the listening environment.
Frankly, I think the biggest single thing you can do, in terms of improving the sound system in your car, is to install a lot of Dynamat or other sound-insulating material. Most car stereos, even the factory ones, have far more resolution than you'll hear except when sitting in a parking lot. If you can drop that noise floor even 5dB, you'll get that much more "loudness" out of your stereo without upping the volume to dangerous levels.
I'm not a Mac user, and I have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone would want a case-insensitive, non-journaled filesystem.
Short answer: the Mac's filesystem was traditionally (like, forever, and the Apple II filesystem before it) case-insensitive. This led both users and software authors to make certain assumptions about file naming, and selecting/finding files. A lot of older Mac software would break if run on a case-sensitive filesystem. IIRC, some of the early versions of OS X even had problems if you tried to run them on a case-sensitive volume.
The case-sensitive flavors of HFS and HFS+ are fairly new, I think, and they've really only come out because people want to be more compatible with Unix and Linux (and NTFS, which is case-sensitive, although I don't think that Win32 really supports them).
The only reasons you wouldn't want journaling would probably be performance-related. If you wanted to extract peak read/write performance from a drive, say for temporary space while doing DV work or something, you might want an un-journaled drive. But I think it's pretty atypical. I'm actually surprised that Lacie's don't come out of the box formatted with journaling.
So the evolution of the filesystems went something like this, based on my recollection:
HFS - old, fixed-block size, barely used anymore except perhaps on removable media
HFS+ - aka "Mac OS Extended" which updated HFS, implemented 32-bit block addresses, longer file names (with Unicode I think). OS 8?
HFS+ Journaled - aka "Mac OS Extended Journaled" added journaling. Sometime after OS X came out? This was the default formatting on PPC OS X Macs, at least the last one I purchased back in early 2005.
HFSX v5 - aka "Mac OS Extended Journaled Case-Sensitive" adds case-sensitivity to HFS Plus, and apparently the format allows for additional features to follow in the future.
Yes, that's about the crux of it.
Fax machines were designed for POTS lines, and minimal amounts of digitization (basically a 64kbit/s DS0, 8kHz samples at 8 bits/sample), or compression that retains equivalent bandwidth.
The compression used by VOIP, in contrast, is usually psychoacoustic, similar to MP3 or other modern audio codecs. It's optimized specifically for pushing human speech through at a minimum bitrate. There's a lot more aggressive clipping and rolloff, and it's not uncommon to compress a voice channel down to 10-13 kbit/s, sometimes even lower.
When you try to use a digital device which expects the full POTS bandwidth on a VOIP circuit, it's going to either fail completely or work at a very, very reduced speed.
This isn't just a VOIP thing, either -- if you try to send an analog fax or make an analog modem connection over a modern digital cellphone, it won't work very well, either. I've tried using my GSM phone as an analog device and using it to dial in through, and it's very, very painful. 9600 baud, painful (and I remember when that was fast, too, but sadly the Internet has moved on and bloated up a lot since then).
It's not as if the people who designed cellphone and VOIP systems didn't realize this. It's a tradeoff. The bandwidth saved by using modern compression is more than enough of a savings to justify inconveniencing a few people who still want to use analog devices.
What the VOIP providers need to do, is create something for their systems that's similar to the CSD (Circuit Switched Data) connections available on cellphones. (It's almost never used anymore, but basically it's like ISDN for a cellphone; it gives you a direct digital connection into the POTS network that you can push data through, without ever converting down to analog.)
But then again, providing a special "digital mode" that would let you push data into a voice channel, that's running on top of a digital data network (the Internet) does seem like a lot of redundancy. Maybe it's just time for telephone-based fax systems to die. They were a pretty cool hack while they lasted, but there are better ways of moving data around then converting it into whistles and sending it over a voice communications network.
Well except the sub pixel anti-aliasing they claim as their invention was invented by Steve Wozniak a couple of decades earlier.
I think it was even earlier than that, there were some links in yesterday's discussion to what looks like exactly the same feature, being investigated by Xerox even earlier. The prior art on at least the most general concepts of this (subpixel rendering by switching on individual Red, Green, or Blue color elements in a display) seems pretty damning.
But then again, the prior art against Microsoft's FAT patents was pretty damning too, and it even went through two USPTO reviews that said the patents should be invalidated, but at the 11th hour there was an additional review and suddenly they were "novel and non-obvious" again. Makes you wonder exactly Microsoft has by the short hairs that made a phone call to smooth things over... If they really need these patents, they'll never be overturned regardless of the obviousness of the prior art; the patent system is too thoroughly corrupt.
Well, if it's designed for a Mac, it's possible that it's not formatted on purpose: first, because it's trivial to format a drive when you connect it up the first time (plug drive in, dialog comes up saying that it's not formatted, would you like to format it, click yes ... etc.), and also because there are a few filesystems that people might want.
Apple's Disk Utility offers six options to format a disk into: Mac OS Extended (HFS+), Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Journaled, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive Journaled, MS-DOS File System (FAT32), UNIX File System (EXT2?).
I guess I would assume that a "high end" HW manufacturer like Lacie would pre-format the drives to Mac OS Extended Journaled, because that's what Apple recommends as a default these days, but particularly if it's a product that's being aimed at non-clueless users, they might have just decided it wasn't worth it.
Okay, but just to play the devil's advocate here, why should that be part of the page design, and not a feature of the user's reader, perhaps as a configurable option?
It used to be pretty standard for people to customize their browsers in order to change the text, link, followed-link, background, hightlight, and other colors; why does the page designer necessarily know better than the users themselves what the user wants?
We've moved a long way over the past few years towards making the browser into a generic 'portal' that simply displays whatever the web developer wants to toss up on it for the user to look at; frankly it's very television-like.
However, there is a completely different conception of the internet where the pages should be marked up as generally as possible, and the user's browser should then choose how to display the information in a way that's meaningful to the user. It would probably mean that "your Internet" wouldn't look anything like "my Internet," but there's no inherent reason why that's bad. We've grown to treat it as if it is, but that's only because we want the web experience to be like flipping channels on a TV, where your Discovery Channel looks exactly like mine.
I think you definitely have a point, but I think it may be like debating the relative merits of the poem versus a 1,000 page novel. They both have their place.
One of the reasons I think serialized TV shows have become popular lately is because they're not controlled by the big movie studios, at least not as directly. (Yeah, they're mostly bankrolled by the networks, and they're mostly owned by the same handful of media companies, but they're further from the centers of power.) There have been opportunities for and evidence of creativity in mainstream TV that just hasn't been seen in mainstream cinema in a while, and I don't think it's really because of the format itself. That probably helps, but really I don't think there's any fundamental superiority between a short film (think 5-10 mins), a traditional picture (90-120 mins), and a serialized show (as many hours as you want, usually in 20 or 45 minute semi-contained chunks, with seasonal plot arcs of ~10 hrs).
There's a lot of pretty dreadful TV out there, too (daytime soaps?), underlining the point that length may give you a bigger canvas, but it doesn't really make the painting any better. And not to mention the very good movies made over the past century, many of which probably wouldn't be good as serials.
After reading the first sentence I thought someone was making a good point, but the signature line negates it.
My signature or the GP's?
Anyway, I think it's important to work on both fronts. First, I agree that the best bet is just to not purchase anything that's DRMed at all. But since that means basically bowing out of a large portion of our culture -- I mean, no late-model VCRs (macrovision) or tapes, no DVD players or discs, no TiVO -- I think you're going to have trouble getting enough people to follow you to make it significant. There's no point in throwing yourself in front of a tank if they're just going to run over you and nobody else is going to notice or care.
Continually breaking the DRM schemes costs the studios a lot of money. It ensures that DRM is never "fire and forget;" and it turns DRM from being a one-time cost into a continual cost center, a black hole that they need to keep pouring money into. If you can make the cost of maintaining an effective DRM system higher than the cost of the piracy that it allegedly prevents, then it will eventually go away -- either the companies will see the light, or they'll be run out of business by other companies who do, and who are more profitable as a result.
The major remaining problem is that the entertainment industry in particular has so much political influence that it's going to require a lot of vigilance and advocacy to keep them from trying to use the law to buoy themselves as they start to sink -- or barring that, pull everyone else down with them. We haven't had much luck in this in the past, hence we've seen the AHRA, the DMCA, and lately the Mickey Mouse Protection Act go through. But if we can keep the visibility of their actions high -- which is aided by putting pressure on them and forcing them to be more and more outlandish and openly anti-consumer -- while at the same time denying them revenue by boycotting DRMed products and sucking their revenue through a guerrilla campaign against the DRM systems themselves, they'll eventually be forced to quit.
That really wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. There's a huge demand for movies, but they're expensive to make and the current movie industry sucks up most of the available investment dollars. There's no "secret sauce" involved in making a movie; it's just very, very expensive, and the people with enough cash to bankroll a film would rather go with an established, sure bet, rather than taking a chance on someone or something new.
If the current players just decided to pack up and go home, the new industry that would rise up in its place would doubtless be a lot more creative -- at least in the short term -- and we'd probably see a lot of new material out of it. In time, it would probably stagnate, too, because that's the way of things.
The main problem with the current situation is that the dinosaur companies have bought protection for their business models from the government, and essentially have propped themselves up. There's nothing bad with companies getting big, but there's also nothing that says they have a "right" to stay in business, either. Failing business models deserve to die, and the companies that rely on them deserve to die, too; when they don't, you're stopping what ought to be a natural economic progression.
But your objection to HTML/CSS doing what javascript used to be necessary for? Really? You prefer writing little-stupid javascript functions to just putting a :hover rule in your CSS? Really?
:hover rules generally.
I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that the GP would probably be against
The problem isn't the implementation of the useless eye candy, the problem is the useless eye candy.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of freedom comes out of countries you don't really consider "free". Boggles the mind.
Taiwan, speaking broadly here, isn't that "unfree." It's not like PRC/mainland China, anyway.
Sure, they're not exactly a libertarian data haven, but I don't think you should be tarring them with the Russia/China brush. (I mean, they didn't get medieval and had a basically rational, collected response, when they had a bunch of Neo-Nazis hold a rally, which would probably land you in prison in many "free" countries in Europe.)
They're a secular, representative democracy, with a strong respect for individual rights. Yeah, as a nation they have some not-too-savory stuff in their collective past involving the treatment of the native population, but you could say the same thing about the U.S. or Australia or any number of other nations. Frankly, I think Taiwan deserves a lot more U.S. support than it gets (although, I suppose these days, they might not want it).