Because currently you can only buy that Mac compatibility layer from one place. If Apple goes bankrupt, or drops it, then your left out in the cold. Similarly if Apple don't move it in the directions you want, then your stuck. (think very cheap lowend hardware, or very tiny laptops)
I run Kismac, it's a very nice wireless sniffer similar to Kismet on Linux, but graphical and with good gps integration including downloadable maps. I would like to run this on a tablet or a PDA, but Apple don't make such devices, so i have to run Kismet instead (text based) and then import the data into a mapping program later.
Some people like to buy a package of hardware known to work together well... The beauty of the hardware market as it stands, is that we do have that choice. The biggest problem people have with proprietary software is that most of it tries to prevent people having that same choice over software. Laptops are also much harder to build from bare components.
I'm advocating choice in all areas... So long as it has no effect on me (the prevalence of proprietary protocols/formats does) i don't care what other people run, so long as i'm free to make my own choices.
You can virtualize OSX... You might need to download a "dodgy" version to do it, but as far as the legal implications go, you *do* have a legal copy and you *are* running it on apple hardware, the license agreement doesn't state that you must run it on the bare hardware and not under a virtualization environment.
A wine-like system for OSX would actually be a lot easier to accomplish... There is already something iBCS, which lets Linux run binaries from other x86 unix-like systems (SCO, Xenix etc... old stuff), and various BSD's have the ability to execute Linux binaries... You only need to emulate the kernel interfaces, and then the user mode programs/libraries should run atop a Linux kernel just like they run on OSX's existing kernel. Then you can begin reimplementing the proprietary libraries one by one. Those libraries which are BSD licensed you can directly port the source. All in all, a much easier job than wine.
Boasting? Or qualifying his position, demonstrating that he isn't a 15 year old with no experience, and listing those experiences so you can evaluate his opinion more thoroughly.
Donating to AIDS research isn't such a good thing in microsoft's case once you look at it more closely... Yes, they donate a lot of money, but it often comes with strings. A lot of that money comes back, because the gates foundation also owns stakes in many of the drugs companies producing them. These companies also keep drug prices artificially high through the use of patents, to the detriment of the AIDS sufferers. So effectively (not sure of the exact numbers, this is a generalisation to make the point) for every $10 "donated", $9 goes to a drug company owned by the foundation, $8 of which is profit which comes back and $1 goes on the raw materials to make the drugs, so they only "lose" $2. Also there are often preconditions of the donations, such as where they will buy drugs from, so real charities (that is ones funded by donations from the general public and non profits) will end up spending their money with the same companies.
All of this buys a lot of good PR, relatively cheaply. If they were truly charitable, the donations could be made anonymously.
Giving the 3 year warrantee wasn't a bad thing in itself, however the fact that their product was so unreliable in the first place that it forced a for-profit company to extend the warrantee period than lose potentially more.
The only reason they would have increased the warrantee period, is because they analysed the situation and came to the conclusion that the lost business from having such an unreliable product would cost them a lot more than offering a 3 year warrantee and repairing large numbers of the faulty products. It certainly wouldn't ever have been done for the good of the customers.
The story was that their product is so much less reliable than other products in the same market.
The login screen should be customiseable, so the system admin can define exactly how it looks. A lot of companies would want to customise the login screen, so that it displays their logo and displays an appropriate message, and perhaps a clock too. Also remove the vendor advertising.
Similarly, on a remote login, there should be no indication of what OS is running for security reasons.. It should display a warning banner stating that the system is private and that unauthorised access is prohibited etc, but should not give away potentially useful information like the OS type and version. This is another area where standard protocols are good, a telnet banner saying "login:" could be anything, but a remote desktop service will always be windows, even if it doesnt say so specifically or disclose the version.
As they already do with HTTP proxies... That's the beauty of standard protocols, you can cache it... Someone needs to work out a way of transparently proxying bittorrent, so that if several users of an ISP download the same chunk, it only goes through the backbone link once...
Your in a poor area... A lot of us are much better off, the telco may provide a physical cable but another ISP provides the actual service... I have a choice of many different ISPs offering different speeds, service levels, prices etc... Really you should campaign for your area to get the same level of freedom enjoyed elsewhere. Why should someone suffer because of where they live?
Try a different ISP then, your current one clearly doesn't service your needs. I'd suggest you leave, and tell them why. So long as there is local competition among ISPs, make use of it!
It's beaten in usage because it's not been open for as long... A couple of years ago, you had to download (and before that, buy) binary blobs from a single source. There weren't choices of distributions, and hardware support was fairly poor. Contrast to that, Linux has support for a large array of hardware, in some areas better than windows, is available in many different forms to try out, and from several different commercial vendors. Solaris also, was primarily targetting Sparc until fairly recently... If you run it on sparc then it's not only faster, but your hardware support problems just disappear, and you don't have any problems with unstable drivers.
Give it a couple of years, and preferably a GPL'ing, and Solaris will start to be a real contender.
As i understand it... There is the scheduler made by CK, which has been developed for months, maybe even years in the -ck patchsets... Then there is the scheduler made by Ingo, which performs about the same and is designed in much the same way, but which was developed in under a week...
Does this not strike you as wrong? Firstly, that something would be merged into the mainline kernel with so little testing... Second that Ingo would develop a new scheduler, rather than modifying the existing and fairly similar one by ck? Or is that one somehow so flawed it needed to be junked?
Ext2 is natively supported by Linux, and third party drivers exist for windows and OSX. There is also UFS, which is natively supported by OSX and linux has support for it too, tho i'm not sure how good it is (insane how it would be so bad, considering how open the ufs specs and implementations from several systems are).
HFS+ also has a case sensetive version since OSX 10.4, tho i'm not sure if linux supports it, linux's HFS+ support does need some improvement.
I find it hard to believe that windows backdoors were used against Iraq in 1992 and 2003... Windows was far less widespread in 1992, and surely if they got stung back then they'd have learned and deployed something else by the time the fighting started in 2003. If it was done in 2003 tho, i'd like to see some evidence of that.
Then you won't mind pointing me to the specifications for this "open standard", as well as a reference implementation that fully complies with this spec, and a list of caveats which detail where currently implementations fail to implement all of the specs.
It's good for everyone (except microsoft) for ODF to "win" as you put it... Other companies will benefit, because it's easier/possible for them to compete. Customers will benefit because there's competition, lower prices, higher quality, competition forces innovation etc. OEMs will benefit because they wont be at the mercy of one supplier.
Are there any email accounts which you can't check online? I dont think my mail server needs to be disconnected from the internet before it will let me read the mail that's on it...
How many intermediaries? Usually when i receive mail from hotmail, one of the hotmail servers has made a direct SMTP connection to the receiving mailserver. No intermediaries unless theyre packet sniffing on the routers.
But hotmail aren't really a commercial email provider... They are intentionally providing a low grade without-cost service. The user agreement even says so, and gives you no guarantee of mail delivery. If you want a reliable mail service, use something else. If you just want a throwaway account to sign up for some pointless website, well hotmail is reasonable i guess.
A lot of spams have small attachments containing the actual spam... They used to be images (gif, jpeg) but spam filters started getting wise and running OCR software, now PDF files are all the rage because most of the OCR programs can't handle PDF yet. Those of us using text based mailers don't even see the actual spam.
Not only that, but it's a free service... And it never guaranteed to deliver all your mail, or even *any* mail at all. Infact, you have absoloutely no guarantee of service. Didn't you read the signup agreement?
Better maybe not, but necessary yes... If everyone else plays dirty, you have to aswell, otherwise you lose. If we get to a position where browsers are standards compliant, and compete on product quality... It benefits everyone in the end.
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Because currently you can only buy that Mac compatibility layer from one place.
If Apple goes bankrupt, or drops it, then your left out in the cold.
Similarly if Apple don't move it in the directions you want, then your stuck. (think very cheap lowend hardware, or very tiny laptops)
I run Kismac, it's a very nice wireless sniffer similar to Kismet on Linux, but graphical and with good gps integration including downloadable maps. I would like to run this on a tablet or a PDA, but Apple don't make such devices, so i have to run Kismet instead (text based) and then import the data into a mapping program later.
Some people like to buy a package of hardware known to work together well...
The beauty of the hardware market as it stands, is that we do have that choice. The biggest problem people have with proprietary software is that most of it tries to prevent people having that same choice over software.
Laptops are also much harder to build from bare components.
I'm advocating choice in all areas... So long as it has no effect on me (the prevalence of proprietary protocols/formats does) i don't care what other people run, so long as i'm free to make my own choices.
You can virtualize OSX...
You might need to download a "dodgy" version to do it, but as far as the legal implications go, you *do* have a legal copy and you *are* running it on apple hardware, the license agreement doesn't state that you must run it on the bare hardware and not under a virtualization environment.
A wine-like system for OSX would actually be a lot easier to accomplish...
There is already something iBCS, which lets Linux run binaries from other x86 unix-like systems (SCO, Xenix etc... old stuff), and various BSD's have the ability to execute Linux binaries...
You only need to emulate the kernel interfaces, and then the user mode programs/libraries should run atop a Linux kernel just like they run on OSX's existing kernel. Then you can begin reimplementing the proprietary libraries one by one. Those libraries which are BSD licensed you can directly port the source.
All in all, a much easier job than wine.
Boasting? Or qualifying his position, demonstrating that he isn't a 15 year old with no experience, and listing those experiences so you can evaluate his opinion more thoroughly.
Donating to AIDS research isn't such a good thing in microsoft's case once you look at it more closely...
Yes, they donate a lot of money, but it often comes with strings.
A lot of that money comes back, because the gates foundation also owns stakes in many of the drugs companies producing them. These companies also keep drug prices artificially high through the use of patents, to the detriment of the AIDS sufferers.
So effectively (not sure of the exact numbers, this is a generalisation to make the point) for every $10 "donated", $9 goes to a drug company owned by the foundation, $8 of which is profit which comes back and $1 goes on the raw materials to make the drugs, so they only "lose" $2. Also there are often preconditions of the donations, such as where they will buy drugs from, so real charities (that is ones funded by donations from the general public and non profits) will end up spending their money with the same companies.
All of this buys a lot of good PR, relatively cheaply. If they were truly charitable, the donations could be made anonymously.
Giving the 3 year warrantee wasn't a bad thing in itself, however the fact that their product was so unreliable in the first place that it forced a for-profit company to extend the warrantee period than lose potentially more.
The only reason they would have increased the warrantee period, is because they analysed the situation and came to the conclusion that the lost business from having such an unreliable product would cost them a lot more than offering a 3 year warrantee and repairing large numbers of the faulty products. It certainly wouldn't ever have been done for the good of the customers.
The story was that their product is so much less reliable than other products in the same market.
The login screen should be customiseable, so the system admin can define exactly how it looks.
A lot of companies would want to customise the login screen, so that it displays their logo and displays an appropriate message, and perhaps a clock too. Also remove the vendor advertising.
Similarly, on a remote login, there should be no indication of what OS is running for security reasons.. It should display a warning banner stating that the system is private and that unauthorised access is prohibited etc, but should not give away potentially useful information like the OS type and version. This is another area where standard protocols are good, a telnet banner saying "login:" could be anything, but a remote desktop service will always be windows, even if it doesnt say so specifically or disclose the version.
As they already do with HTTP proxies...
That's the beauty of standard protocols, you can cache it...
Someone needs to work out a way of transparently proxying bittorrent, so that if several users of an ISP download the same chunk, it only goes through the backbone link once...
Your in a poor area...
A lot of us are much better off, the telco may provide a physical cable but another ISP provides the actual service... I have a choice of many different ISPs offering different speeds, service levels, prices etc...
Really you should campaign for your area to get the same level of freedom enjoyed elsewhere. Why should someone suffer because of where they live?
Try a different ISP then, your current one clearly doesn't service your needs.
I'd suggest you leave, and tell them why. So long as there is local competition among ISPs, make use of it!
It's beaten in usage because it's not been open for as long... A couple of years ago, you had to download (and before that, buy) binary blobs from a single source. There weren't choices of distributions, and hardware support was fairly poor. Contrast to that, Linux has support for a large array of hardware, in some areas better than windows, is available in many different forms to try out, and from several different commercial vendors.
Solaris also, was primarily targetting Sparc until fairly recently... If you run it on sparc then it's not only faster, but your hardware support problems just disappear, and you don't have any problems with unstable drivers.
Give it a couple of years, and preferably a GPL'ing, and Solaris will start to be a real contender.
As i understand it...
There is the scheduler made by CK, which has been developed for months, maybe even years in the -ck patchsets...
Then there is the scheduler made by Ingo, which performs about the same and is designed in much the same way, but which was developed in under a week...
Does this not strike you as wrong?
Firstly, that something would be merged into the mainline kernel with so little testing...
Second that Ingo would develop a new scheduler, rather than modifying the existing and fairly similar one by ck? Or is that one somehow so flawed it needed to be junked?
Ext2 is natively supported by Linux, and third party drivers exist for windows and OSX.
There is also UFS, which is natively supported by OSX and linux has support for it too, tho i'm not sure how good it is (insane how it would be so bad, considering how open the ufs specs and implementations from several systems are).
HFS+ also has a case sensetive version since OSX 10.4, tho i'm not sure if linux supports it, linux's HFS+ support does need some improvement.
I find it hard to believe that windows backdoors were used against Iraq in 1992 and 2003... Windows was far less widespread in 1992, and surely if they got stung back then they'd have learned and deployed something else by the time the fighting started in 2003.
If it was done in 2003 tho, i'd like to see some evidence of that.
Bittorrent is your friend.
Then you won't mind pointing me to the specifications for this "open standard", as well as a reference implementation that fully complies with this spec, and a list of caveats which detail where currently implementations fail to implement all of the specs.
It's good for everyone (except microsoft) for ODF to "win" as you put it...
Other companies will benefit, because it's easier/possible for them to compete.
Customers will benefit because there's competition, lower prices, higher quality, competition forces innovation etc.
OEMs will benefit because they wont be at the mercy of one supplier.
Are there any email accounts which you can't check online?
I dont think my mail server needs to be disconnected from the internet before it will let me read the mail that's on it...
How many intermediaries? Usually when i receive mail from hotmail, one of the hotmail servers has made a direct SMTP connection to the receiving mailserver. No intermediaries unless theyre packet sniffing on the routers.
But hotmail aren't really a commercial email provider...
They are intentionally providing a low grade without-cost service. The user agreement even says so, and gives you no guarantee of mail delivery.
If you want a reliable mail service, use something else.
If you just want a throwaway account to sign up for some pointless website, well hotmail is reasonable i guess.
A lot of spams have small attachments containing the actual spam...
They used to be images (gif, jpeg) but spam filters started getting wise and running OCR software, now PDF files are all the rage because most of the OCR programs can't handle PDF yet.
Those of us using text based mailers don't even see the actual spam.
Not only that, but it's a free service...
And it never guaranteed to deliver all your mail, or even *any* mail at all. Infact, you have absoloutely no guarantee of service. Didn't you read the signup agreement?
Better maybe not, but necessary yes...
If everyone else plays dirty, you have to aswell, otherwise you lose.
If we get to a position where browsers are standards compliant, and compete on product quality... It benefits everyone in the end.
Do you need ISP-supplied software?
Does the OS not come with everything necessary already?