And that reverse engineering process was significantly aided by the fact that all of the hardware was built using off the shelf components, and the only thing they actually had to reverse engineer was the BIOS.
Aside from the lack of custom chips, Apple machines were generally higher end than the common Amiga and Atari models... While Commodore made low cost models like the A500, A600 and A1200, Apple were only making higher end models with faster processors, more memory. scsi hard drives, flicker free monitor vs tv etc, and they weren't unreasonably priced compared to the similar specced Amiga models like the A3000 and A4000.
From my (somewhat hazy) recollection, when the A1200 came with 2mb ram, a 14mhz 68020, dd floppy drive and could be used with a flickery tv set, the lowest end mac had a 25mhz 68030, 4mb ram, scsi hdd and came with a proper monitor.
Same thing happened with computers, Apple only really competed at the higher end with SCSI drives and color screens, while crude ibm-compatible clones could be had for a fraction of the price. People are quite ok with inferior so long as its cheaper and "good enough", especially during tougher economic times. And once you've bought into one system, the cost of escaping it for another incompatible system is high because you'd need to reacquire all your applications.
People can already redistribute binaries, and do so widely, even making modifications to the binaries to bypass copy protection schemes etc... And there are already shared source licenses which preclude both redistribution and reuse of the code in a competing product. There were a few vendors which would give you the source under such terms, but most of today's vendors would never even consider doing this.
One of the key interests of software vendors is hiding the sourcecode from the users... They will usually have many reasons for this, but none of them really benefit the users.
To hide poorly written code, to hide code which infringes upon others' copyrights, to keep the customer beholden to the vendor etc...
I tend to agree that software should be free, but on the importance scale i'd much rather have the core os and applications which i require for communication and editing/storage of my own data were free...
Games are far less important in this instance, they might be fun for a little light entertainment but you don't need them and they aren't holding any of your important data captive by being closed source. I would be perfectly happy with a free os, free application software and non-free games.
Windows succeeded because it was cheaper, and were it not for the lock-in and heavy marketing linux would have supplanted windows by now for the same reason.
You're comparing a device which is nearly a year old, with a device that's not even released yet, and which is a significantly different spec and also has a fairly significant price difference.
Not to mention the biggest problem of private medical research - its more profitable to keep someone sick and treat their symptoms for the rest of their life than it is to cure them once up front.
The fact is there are far too many people in the UK who are fit and able to work, and yet they claim government handouts. While some of these are immigrants, a lot if not most are of entirely british descent. These people often have lots of kids (because this brings more handouts), and will usually teach their kids to behave the same way. Many have NEVER worked, and any taxes they pay are done so with the money they got from the government anyway. Of all the long term benefits claimants i've met, ALL of them were smokers and drinkers, using the money given to them by the taxpayer to buy nonessential luxury items.
What they need to do is sort this system out... Don't give out cash, give out benefits in kind so people are fed and sheltered but don't have the ability to buy nonessential items. If you want luxury items, go and earn them. Require people to work, if you want your handout you have to earn it by doing unpaid work in the community like cleaning up graffiti and picking up litter, make the conditions tougher than the standard minimum wage so that taking on a minimum wage job becomes attractive. Make payments out proportional to the payments in, eg if you've been working and paying tax for 20 years and suddenly lose your job you get treated well for the short time it takes you to find a new job... If you've never worked a day in your life you get the absolute bare minimum.
Living off the government should not be a comfortable long term existence, it should be an uncomfortable stop gap measure that people seek to get out of as quickly as they can.
As for the NHS... Charge people who come to A&E for frivolous reasons, work on the efficiency of the organisation, don't provide unnecessary operations for free (people have gotten boob jobs and sex change operations on the nhs!).
While the idea of tendering to the lowest bidder sounds good on paper, in practice all manner of things go wrong...
The requirements to bid on the tender often get distorted, so you end up with a small cartel of providers who can then push the prices up and service down. Companies often under bid to get the contract, and then inflate the prices later, or just fail to provide a usable service causing the government to pay twice. Profit margins are more important than anything else, so quality of service will be cut as much as possible to preserve margin.
64bit MIPS has been around a lot longer than 1999, SGI were using them in the early 90s... Availability of current designs to play with however is a problem, i tried very hard to buy one of the loongson mips designs from china and i just couldn't get one anywhere.
Which is in most cases just stupid... Most of the branded versions of android (and other similar systems) that i've seen have been considerably worse than the stock version, especially the carrier branded versions. OEM versions of windows are just as bad too.
By creating a branded version you are differentiating yourself as being inferior, thats not a good "difference" at all as in many cases people will actively seek out devices which don't have the branded software versions.
Why do all these router vendors even bother producing their own nonstandard firmware? Most of the hardware is based around a small set of common chipsets anyway, so why not use an existing firmware such as dd-wrt or openwrt.
You won't be able to make a binary application work on OSX 10.1 through 10.8, 10.1 - 10.3 were PPC only, and 10.6+ is x86 only with 10.7 dropping support for PPC emulation...
And more importantly, the so called "ddos mitigation" and other complicated firewall rules the router is doing will actually just be increasing the cpu load on the router and thus degrading the speed of your connection. These routers are generally not very powerful, they might be fast enough to route traffic at line speed but once you force them to do extra processing on all the traffic they start to choke.
That's the biggest problem with libreoffice... It's not more buggy than msoffice, its just that people are already familiar with all the kludgy workarounds required.
Same problems also occur with word, if you have a slightly different version (especially the mac version) or you have your system configured differently such as for a different printer then all manner of weird formatting bugs can occur. I've never seen a job application that required word, only third party recruiters who didn't want pdf because they want to edit your resume. I've always sent PDF and refused to send proprietary formats and never had any problems aside from the odd recruiter complaining.
Similar experience for me.. When i telecommute i just get a lot more done, when i'm in the office i waste time and money on travel, spend half the day gossiping, or being distracted by someone else who wants to gossip, find myself unable to concentrate due to background noise and can't wait to leave and do so as early as i can, have to keep going out to buy drinks or lunch because theres not enough space in the shared fridge etc.
In terms of actual results, i can get a lot more done at home with no distractions and a ready supply of food and drink.
Lots of people spend all day "in the office" and "staring at their computer screen" but they're not working, they're on facebook, slashdot, playing games or something else. Just because someone's in an office doesn't mean they're working.
And it least in my experience, communicate is exactly what they will do... By the end of the day every employee will know exactly what every other employee was doing over the weekend, and none of them will have got any work done.
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And that reverse engineering process was significantly aided by the fact that all of the hardware was built using off the shelf components, and the only thing they actually had to reverse engineer was the BIOS.
Aside from the lack of custom chips, Apple machines were generally higher end than the common Amiga and Atari models... While Commodore made low cost models like the A500, A600 and A1200, Apple were only making higher end models with faster processors, more memory. scsi hard drives, flicker free monitor vs tv etc, and they weren't unreasonably priced compared to the similar specced Amiga models like the A3000 and A4000.
From my (somewhat hazy) recollection, when the A1200 came with 2mb ram, a 14mhz 68020, dd floppy drive and could be used with a flickery tv set, the lowest end mac had a 25mhz 68030, 4mb ram, scsi hdd and came with a proper monitor.
Same thing happened with computers, Apple only really competed at the higher end with SCSI drives and color screens, while crude ibm-compatible clones could be had for a fraction of the price. People are quite ok with inferior so long as its cheaper and "good enough", especially during tougher economic times. And once you've bought into one system, the cost of escaping it for another incompatible system is high because you'd need to reacquire all your applications.
People can already redistribute binaries, and do so widely, even making modifications to the binaries to bypass copy protection schemes etc...
And there are already shared source licenses which preclude both redistribution and reuse of the code in a competing product. There were a few vendors which would give you the source under such terms, but most of today's vendors would never even consider doing this.
One of the key interests of software vendors is hiding the sourcecode from the users... They will usually have many reasons for this, but none of them really benefit the users.
To hide poorly written code, to hide code which infringes upon others' copyrights, to keep the customer beholden to the vendor etc...
I tend to agree that software should be free, but on the importance scale i'd much rather have the core os and applications which i require for communication and editing/storage of my own data were free...
Games are far less important in this instance, they might be fun for a little light entertainment but you don't need them and they aren't holding any of your important data captive by being closed source. I would be perfectly happy with a free os, free application software and non-free games.
Windows succeeded because it was cheaper, and were it not for the lock-in and heavy marketing linux would have supplanted windows by now for the same reason.
You're comparing a device which is nearly a year old, with a device that's not even released yet, and which is a significantly different spec and also has a fairly significant price difference.
Not to mention the biggest problem of private medical research - its more profitable to keep someone sick and treat their symptoms for the rest of their life than it is to cure them once up front.
The fact is there are far too many people in the UK who are fit and able to work, and yet they claim government handouts. While some of these are immigrants, a lot if not most are of entirely british descent.
These people often have lots of kids (because this brings more handouts), and will usually teach their kids to behave the same way. Many have NEVER worked, and any taxes they pay are done so with the money they got from the government anyway.
Of all the long term benefits claimants i've met, ALL of them were smokers and drinkers, using the money given to them by the taxpayer to buy nonessential luxury items.
What they need to do is sort this system out...
Don't give out cash, give out benefits in kind so people are fed and sheltered but don't have the ability to buy nonessential items. If you want luxury items, go and earn them.
Require people to work, if you want your handout you have to earn it by doing unpaid work in the community like cleaning up graffiti and picking up litter, make the conditions tougher than the standard minimum wage so that taking on a minimum wage job becomes attractive.
Make payments out proportional to the payments in, eg if you've been working and paying tax for 20 years and suddenly lose your job you get treated well for the short time it takes you to find a new job... If you've never worked a day in your life you get the absolute bare minimum.
Living off the government should not be a comfortable long term existence, it should be an uncomfortable stop gap measure that people seek to get out of as quickly as they can.
As for the NHS...
Charge people who come to A&E for frivolous reasons, work on the efficiency of the organisation, don't provide unnecessary operations for free (people have gotten boob jobs and sex change operations on the nhs!).
Even if you use private healthcare, it will still be the NHS that scrapes you off the road and takes you to hospital.
While the idea of tendering to the lowest bidder sounds good on paper, in practice all manner of things go wrong...
The requirements to bid on the tender often get distorted, so you end up with a small cartel of providers who can then push the prices up and service down.
Companies often under bid to get the contract, and then inflate the prices later, or just fail to provide a usable service causing the government to pay twice.
Profit margins are more important than anything else, so quality of service will be cut as much as possible to preserve margin.
But this is the password to your *apple id*... Apple clearly already have that password so sending it to them again is irrelevant.
That's a loongson 2F, ie an old model.. I wanted the loongson 3 or more specifically i was looking at this:
http://www.loongson.cn/product_info.php?id=36
Another problem is down to deadlines... Closed source developers are more likely to be under time pressure, and thus cut corners.
64bit MIPS has been around a lot longer than 1999, SGI were using them in the early 90s...
Availability of current designs to play with however is a problem, i tried very hard to buy one of the loongson mips designs from china and i just couldn't get one anywhere.
Which is in most cases just stupid...
Most of the branded versions of android (and other similar systems) that i've seen have been considerably worse than the stock version, especially the carrier branded versions.
OEM versions of windows are just as bad too.
By creating a branded version you are differentiating yourself as being inferior, thats not a good "difference" at all as in many cases people will actively seek out devices which don't have the branded software versions.
Why do all these router vendors even bother producing their own nonstandard firmware?
Most of the hardware is based around a small set of common chipsets anyway, so why not use an existing firmware such as dd-wrt or openwrt.
You won't be able to make a binary application work on OSX 10.1 through 10.8, 10.1 - 10.3 were PPC only, and 10.6+ is x86 only with 10.7 dropping support for PPC emulation...
And more importantly, the so called "ddos mitigation" and other complicated firewall rules the router is doing will actually just be increasing the cpu load on the router and thus degrading the speed of your connection.
These routers are generally not very powerful, they might be fast enough to route traffic at line speed but once you force them to do extra processing on all the traffic they start to choke.
That's the biggest problem with libreoffice... It's not more buggy than msoffice, its just that people are already familiar with all the kludgy workarounds required.
Same problems also occur with word, if you have a slightly different version (especially the mac version) or you have your system configured differently such as for a different printer then all manner of weird formatting bugs can occur.
I've never seen a job application that required word, only third party recruiters who didn't want pdf because they want to edit your resume. I've always sent PDF and refused to send proprietary formats and never had any problems aside from the odd recruiter complaining.
Similar experience for me.. When i telecommute i just get a lot more done, when i'm in the office i waste time and money on travel, spend half the day gossiping, or being distracted by someone else who wants to gossip, find myself unable to concentrate due to background noise and can't wait to leave and do so as early as i can, have to keep going out to buy drinks or lunch because theres not enough space in the shared fridge etc.
In terms of actual results, i can get a lot more done at home with no distractions and a ready supply of food and drink.
Lots of people spend all day "in the office" and "staring at their computer screen" but they're not working, they're on facebook, slashdot, playing games or something else. Just because someone's in an office doesn't mean they're working.
And it least in my experience, communicate is exactly what they will do...
By the end of the day every employee will know exactly what every other employee was doing over the weekend, and none of them will have got any work done.
But bean-counters rarely seem to have the capacity to understand that argument.
Bean counters see only the cost of employee vs the paper certifications they hold... Any individual traits never get factored into the calculations.