As far as I'm concerned they got nothing to worry about.
I don't think Apple is generally suing clone makers because they are scared, or because they are afraid of competition. After all, Microsoft with low end components built into shabby plastic packages for $400 is always going to be more competitive on price alone. And if you even exclude MS out of the picture and go for Linux the price drops even more. Apple is simply not in that market.
But, I think anyone sane would have a problem with someone blatantly stealing their OS and shipping it on generic hardware, since the only value proposition by the clone makers is the OS. And this is even worse if you consider that it is Apple who managed to build significant user base and third party software vendor support around their OS.
and it talks about Power Mac (and it also says that up to that point they were making their own motherboards:D).
The point is that Apple designs most of the computer, including the motherboard. They can (and often do) outsource the actual production of the part to third party.
If you look at most apple hardware you will see something like "Designed by Apple" and not "Made by Apple".
Yes, that's true for electronics inside the box. It's all commodity hardware. Apple does not make their own memory or CPU or hard drive.
But they do make their own motherboards, they make their own cooling solutions, they often meticulously design power supplies to be quiet, they will often times design the battery. They design the cases to be sturdy, have excellent heat conduction and they are quiet.
I was amazed when I first opened my Mac Pro how simple and elegant it is inside and how amazingly quiet (for heavy aluminum case that's quite a feat). As you can see I value quiet quite a bit:D.
And things like these are important to a select few users that choose to buy Apple. When it comes to notebook computers, case and tactile feel matters even more.
And in the end it is the integrated package that matters as well. User experience and expectation is well managed from the moment you receive the box, from opening it, to using the computer (hardware part) to using the OS.
Just providing OS X for users to buy and install on whatever hardware would not lead to comparable or even similar user experience. But if you ship your OS on your designed hardware you know that every user has the minimum accepted standard and same experience as others. This is why Apple leads the user satisfaction surveys.
Well, automatic garbage collection means exactly that. It does not mean automatic resource collection nor does it mean that object ownership is automatic.
Of course Java and C# has memory or resource (more common) leaks. It's always the responsibility of the programmer to know what they are doing:D.
Nice, now try couple of million lines of code, maintained by 50 or so developers of various levels of experience and see how many memory leaks there are then.
When I first got my mac pro (2 times 4 core Xeon 2.8 GHz with 8GB of RAM) I installed XP in Virtual Box, just for kicks. That was the fastest install of Windows XP I have ever witnessed and it ran way faster that on my previous PC (3.2 GHz Pentium IV with 2 GB of RAM).
I don't really need XP for anything, so I didn't keep that setup, but it was good to know that running XP in VM is a viable option for all but the most power hungry apps (I would not run video processing apps like that for example). But then again, Windows in general has no software that I use that is not available for OS X as well.
vi can't be compared to emacs at all. Emacs has way more functionality and it extensible.
VIM however is something else. VIM has its own Turing complete language that you can pretty much do anything in. It may not be the easiest or most intuitive language, but you can do a lot of things to extend VIM.
No, I don't think there is such a thing. In vi/vim you usually either search for what you want to rename, make one replacement, then do n to move to the next match, . to do last edit or n again to skip it. Alternatively you do:%s/for_string/replace_string/gc so it will ask you each time if you want to replace. It still requires you to know if the replacement should happen or not. The plain text editor does not have insight into code like say Eclipse does for Java (or technically any language that supports reflection).
Yes, for certain things (like find me all callers of this method) or for refactoring good IDE for certain languages (like Eclipse for Java) will do certain things a lot better. But the shear speed of editing is still much slower in each of these IDEs.
Now, if the two could be combined (with a good VI/VIM plugin) then you could have best of both worlds. And Netbeans has an excellent vim plugin which is almost 99% VIM. Eclipse unfortunately does not.
How is this a flamebait. I have (an old version) Notepad++ installed on my system here, and it does not have a single command to navigate the source code. Not even a command to move to the next function/method, nothing. Let alone to move over more complex text objects, like sentences, paragraphs, words, inner words etc.
I think the "goodness" of editor can be measured a little more objectively, than what most assume here. I'm not out to flame anyone, but if someone is asking me for a good editor, I will suggest what I think is best.
Now, what I'm suggesting will involve commitment to learning, but it's one of those worthwhile, lifelong skills to have (like touch typing or speaking a foreign language). You learn a good editor once and edit text efficiently for the rest of your life.
UNIX world is slightly different. Advanced UNIX users live in the shell. They navigate their file system there, they manage their files there, they search for things, they edit their files there, and some even choose to browse internet there.
This already involves pretty much all a developer does too (except the knowledge of programming and writing actual code).
A developer might know in detail a few more commands and their more esoteric options, and of course be more proficient in writing a regular expression to find that source file that contains some line of code. But advanced UNIX users do that too anyway. And of course developer will know the language they develop in and libraries unlike plain user.
So demanding that someone knows UNIX and bash, is not an impossible requirement if you develop on UNIX. That is, we assume if you develop on UNIX that you know how to use UNIX.
It would be the same as saying that a Windows developer has to know how to use Windows.
As far as magic buttons go, there are no magic buttons. That magic button does something to automate in less general way something you could do yourself easily in more general way. And if you have 3000 UNIX command line utilities available to you that do simple specialized tasks really well, it's not hard to combine them to do pretty much anything.
UNIX users (let alone developers) are creative and know how to do this already, and will script away complex repetitive tasks.
Building your source code is one of those tasks, and make is used to script the build process, etc.
You mean it's the best primitive editor that does not require learning? You do know that gVim is available for windows right? And I can guarantee it's better than Notepad++.
I'll say this. There is nothing more powerful, faster, and productive than standard UNIX tools (bash with find, grep, sed, awk, perl, tail, sort etc) good editor either VIM (faster actual editing) or emacs.
Of course, learn to touch type, learn and use regular expressions where appropriate.
Yes, it takes couple of years to learn all this stuff (of active learning each day. Touch typing will take 6 months alone. VIM alone will take a year or so to get really proficient). UNIX tools can take a couple of years to get familiar with and proficient with. But once the UNIX way sinks in, it gets easier.
But once you do it's like nirvana, and you just can't believe how much more productive you are. Then you will look back at your current world view and smile quietly "oh, boy how naive I was". (if you don't do that regularly you are not growing as fast as you should by the way).
And the nice thing, this power of UNIX is available everywhere (Linux, OS X, Windows (either cygwin or MKS Toolkit), and any traditional UNIX like Solaris, HPUX, AIX etc).
Aha, I work on over 2 million lines of code base, and all the new guys that come in and use their IDEs, can't match the speed of old farts with bash and vim. As matter of fact, they can't even follow what is going on looking over the shoulder. The bash screen just flashes too fast for them, and text flies around and things magically happen.
Then, they shut up pretty fast about their IDE. And when you go over to their desk to help them out, you are frustrated by how slow it takes to find a file to edit and make a simple change. You just want to take the keyboard from them and "bash" their head with it.
Yes, because in VIM CTRL+] is really hard. And CTRL+o to go back where you came from. It's just like Eclipse, navigate to the definition of what ever you are on, and go back to where you came from.
Of course you need to use ctags to build the tags file for your entire source code base, and the nice thing is ctags works for a lot more languages than your average IDE, and is quite fast too.
Yes, indeed. Personally I would not hire a UNIX developer if they didn't work (or know or prefer to) this way. Specialized IDE is of course always an option, esp. if you are developing in say Java, but I would seriously question someone's ability if they eschewed the shell tool chain.
Now, a lot of people are working like that on Windows too, using either cygwin or MKS Toolkit.
Well, maybe for hardware that is true. But it definitely is not true for software support.
I don't know of a single person that ever called Microsoft for support with their Windows problem. But as soon as people find out you are software developer, they will expect you to work for Microsoft for free and provide support for their shitty product and create value of Microsoft.
And the funny thing is I used to help people, until I switched to OS X. After that I outright refuse, quoting how I left the broken platform exactly so I don't have to keep fixing it all the time and they should too, to one of the alternatives that works for them.
I switched to OS X 13 months ago, and I honestly don't see a point in switching to Linux as my primary system (I'm a software developer, mostly working in Java).
The only reason one would do that would be philosophical, rather than practical. I use Linux of course, but I don't miss anything available on Linux using OS X. But if I were to switch to Linux I would miss quite a few things (mostly having to do with images and video and Nikon and Canon software support for Linux in particular. Of course there is the issue of Photoshop and Adobe video suite).
is that simulating brains of mammals or AI is not a hardware problem, and is not bound by the speed of the CPUs currently available.
It is a modeling problem, it is a software problem. If we had a good understanding how things work, and could model them, it might take 5 years to compute a thought instead of an instant, but it would still work.
On the other hand, we don't even know if a brain or consciousness (what ever that is) can be modeled with a digital computer, or Turing machine in general. There are some schools of thought claiming that consciousness is not computational in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
slashdotters start bragging they have compiled custom Linux kernel that runs on their kid?
As far as I'm concerned they got nothing to worry about.
I don't think Apple is generally suing clone makers because they are scared, or because they are afraid of competition. After all, Microsoft with low end components built into shabby plastic packages for $400 is always going to be more competitive on price alone. And if you even exclude MS out of the picture and go for Linux the price drops even more. Apple is simply not in that market.
But, I think anyone sane would have a problem with someone blatantly stealing their OS and shipping it on generic hardware, since the only value proposition by the clone makers is the OS. And this is even worse if you consider that it is Apple who managed to build significant user base and third party software vendor support around their OS.
and it talks about Power Mac (and it also says that up to that point they were making their own motherboards :D).
The point is that Apple designs most of the computer, including the motherboard. They can (and often do) outsource the actual production of the part to third party.
If you look at most apple hardware you will see something like "Designed by Apple" and not "Made by Apple".
Yes, that's true for electronics inside the box. It's all commodity hardware. Apple does not make their own memory or CPU or hard drive.
But they do make their own motherboards, they make their own cooling solutions, they often meticulously design power supplies to be quiet, they will often times design the battery. They design the cases to be sturdy, have excellent heat conduction and they are quiet.
I was amazed when I first opened my Mac Pro how simple and elegant it is inside and how amazingly quiet (for heavy aluminum case that's quite a feat). As you can see I value quiet quite a bit :D.
And things like these are important to a select few users that choose to buy Apple. When it comes to notebook computers, case and tactile feel matters even more.
And in the end it is the integrated package that matters as well. User experience and expectation is well managed from the moment you receive the box, from opening it, to using the computer (hardware part) to using the OS.
Just providing OS X for users to buy and install on whatever hardware would not lead to comparable or even similar user experience. But if you ship your OS on your designed hardware you know that every user has the minimum accepted standard and same experience as others. This is why Apple leads the user satisfaction surveys.
Well, automatic garbage collection means exactly that. It does not mean automatic resource collection nor does it mean that object ownership is automatic.
Of course Java and C# has memory or resource (more common) leaks. It's always the responsibility of the programmer to know what they are doing :D.
Nice, now try couple of million lines of code, maintained by 50 or so developers of various levels of experience and see how many memory leaks there are then.
When I first got my mac pro (2 times 4 core Xeon 2.8 GHz with 8GB of RAM) I installed XP in Virtual Box, just for kicks. That was the fastest install of Windows XP I have ever witnessed and it ran way faster that on my previous PC (3.2 GHz Pentium IV with 2 GB of RAM).
I don't really need XP for anything, so I didn't keep that setup, but it was good to know that running XP in VM is a viable option for all but the most power hungry apps (I would not run video processing apps like that for example). But then again, Windows in general has no software that I use that is not available for OS X as well.
vi can't be compared to emacs at all. Emacs has way more functionality and it extensible.
VIM however is something else. VIM has its own Turing complete language that you can pretty much do anything in. It may not be the easiest or most intuitive language, but you can do a lot of things to extend VIM.
No, I don't think there is such a thing. In vi/vim you usually either search for what you want to rename, make one replacement, then do n to move to the next match, . to do last edit or n again to skip it. Alternatively you do :%s/for_string/replace_string/gc
so it will ask you each time if you want to replace. It still requires you to know if the replacement should happen or not. The plain text editor does not have insight into code like say Eclipse does for Java (or technically any language that supports reflection).
Yes, for certain things (like find me all callers of this method) or for refactoring good IDE for certain languages (like Eclipse for Java) will do certain things a lot better. But the shear speed of editing is still much slower in each of these IDEs.
Now, if the two could be combined (with a good VI/VIM plugin) then you could have best of both worlds. And Netbeans has an excellent vim plugin which is almost 99% VIM. Eclipse unfortunately does not.
How is this a flamebait. I have (an old version) Notepad++ installed on my system here, and it does not have a single command to navigate the source code. Not even a command to move to the next function/method, nothing. Let alone to move over more complex text objects, like sentences, paragraphs, words, inner words etc.
I think the "goodness" of editor can be measured a little more objectively, than what most assume here. I'm not out to flame anyone, but if someone is asking me for a good editor, I will suggest what I think is best.
Now, what I'm suggesting will involve commitment to learning, but it's one of those worthwhile, lifelong skills to have (like touch typing or speaking a foreign language). You learn a good editor once and edit text efficiently for the rest of your life.
Yes, but it seems most people here don't get that.
UNIX world is slightly different. Advanced UNIX users live in the shell. They navigate their file system there, they manage their files there, they search for things, they edit their files there, and some even choose to browse internet there.
This already involves pretty much all a developer does too (except the knowledge of programming and writing actual code).
A developer might know in detail a few more commands and their more esoteric options, and of course be more proficient in writing a regular expression to find that source file that contains some line of code. But advanced UNIX users do that too anyway. And of course developer will know the language they develop in and libraries unlike plain user.
So demanding that someone knows UNIX and bash, is not an impossible requirement if you develop on UNIX. That is, we assume if you develop on UNIX that you know how to use UNIX.
It would be the same as saying that a Windows developer has to know how to use Windows.
As far as magic buttons go, there are no magic buttons. That magic button does something to automate in less general way something you could do yourself easily in more general way. And if you have 3000 UNIX command line utilities available to you that do simple specialized tasks really well, it's not hard to combine them to do pretty much anything.
UNIX users (let alone developers) are creative and know how to do this already, and will script away complex repetitive tasks.
Building your source code is one of those tasks, and make is used to script the build process, etc.
So, I don't really understand the objection.
You mean it's the best primitive editor that does not require learning? You do know that gVim is available for windows right? And I can guarantee it's better than Notepad++.
I'll say this. There is nothing more powerful, faster, and productive than standard UNIX tools (bash with find, grep, sed, awk, perl, tail, sort etc) good editor either VIM (faster actual editing) or emacs.
Of course, learn to touch type, learn and use regular expressions where appropriate.
Yes, it takes couple of years to learn all this stuff (of active learning each day. Touch typing will take 6 months alone. VIM alone will take a year or so to get really proficient). UNIX tools can take a couple of years to get familiar with and proficient with. But once the UNIX way sinks in, it gets easier.
But once you do it's like nirvana, and you just can't believe how much more productive you are. Then you will look back at your current world view and smile quietly "oh, boy how naive I was". (if you don't do that regularly you are not growing as fast as you should by the way).
And the nice thing, this power of UNIX is available everywhere (Linux, OS X, Windows (either cygwin or MKS Toolkit), and any traditional UNIX like Solaris, HPUX, AIX etc).
Aha, I work on over 2 million lines of code base, and all the new guys that come in and use their IDEs, can't match the speed of old farts with bash and vim. As matter of fact, they can't even follow what is going on looking over the shoulder. The bash screen just flashes too fast for them, and text flies around and things magically happen.
Then, they shut up pretty fast about their IDE. And when you go over to their desk to help them out, you are frustrated by how slow it takes to find a file to edit and make a simple change. You just want to take the keyboard from them and "bash" their head with it.
Yes, because in VIM CTRL+] is really hard. And CTRL+o to go back where you came from. It's just like Eclipse, navigate to the definition of what ever you are on, and go back to where you came from.
Of course you need to use ctags to build the tags file for your entire source code base, and the nice thing is ctags works for a lot more languages than your average IDE, and is quite fast too.
Yes, indeed. Personally I would not hire a UNIX developer if they didn't work (or know or prefer to) this way. Specialized IDE is of course always an option, esp. if you are developing in say Java, but I would seriously question someone's ability if they eschewed the shell tool chain.
Now, a lot of people are working like that on Windows too, using either cygwin or MKS Toolkit.
Well, maybe for hardware that is true. But it definitely is not true for software support.
I don't know of a single person that ever called Microsoft for support with their Windows problem. But as soon as people find out you are software developer, they will expect you to work for Microsoft for free and provide support for their shitty product and create value of Microsoft.
And the funny thing is I used to help people, until I switched to OS X. After that I outright refuse, quoting how I left the broken platform exactly so I don't have to keep fixing it all the time and they should too, to one of the alternatives that works for them.
I switched to OS X 13 months ago, and I honestly don't see a point in switching to Linux as my primary system (I'm a software developer, mostly working in Java).
The only reason one would do that would be philosophical, rather than practical. I use Linux of course, but I don't miss anything available on Linux using OS X. But if I were to switch to Linux I would miss quite a few things (mostly having to do with images and video and Nikon and Canon software support for Linux in particular. Of course there is the issue of Photoshop and Adobe video suite).
Same old pattern really. First gather users and their support, then start fucking with them.
Why can't people learn. I guess it's time to start making the alternative to AdBlock Plus.
Are you saying that Windows 7 does not have new DRM features? How about this:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257
And people still continue to use that MS steaming pile of shit for whatever reason. And largely they deserve the experience they get out of.
No, but there is a switch to turn on all kinds of DRM in release version.
I know. This guy's been searching for immortality for a long time now. And the sad thing is he has managed to attract followers to his religion.
is that simulating brains of mammals or AI is not a hardware problem, and is not bound by the speed of the CPUs currently available.
It is a modeling problem, it is a software problem. If we had a good understanding how things work, and could model them, it might take 5 years to compute a thought instead of an instant, but it would still work.
On the other hand, we don't even know if a brain or consciousness (what ever that is) can be modeled with a digital computer, or Turing machine in general. There are some schools of thought claiming that consciousness is not computational in nature.
Studying math with some concrete career in mind is like marrying for money.
If you are going to study math, study it for the love of it, and your own soul.
Your degree will prove useful to you in what ever career you choose for yourself later.