The pentagon and camp David are obviously legitimate military targets for a militant group.
Fine... Semantics. Then they are merely war criminals and just as reprehensible.
It is therefore possible to view the world trade centre as a legitimate military target and the employees as agents of the state. the attacks then become military not terrorist.
By this argument EVERYONE is an "Agent of the state" and a military target. Since there are no civillians in your accounting you would be fine if we stopped trying to avoid "civillian" deaths in war zones. I think the US should continue to try to avoid civilian deaths in war but it is good to see that you at least won't be protesting the occasional accident since there are no "civillians"
OK about $1100 for the components and one day of labor. Is that one day a valid time estimate for someone who has never done it before? How much time to install and configure the software? What kind of warranty am I getting?
Assuming Apple is positioning this as the "server for the rest of us" how much will your time estimates above be affected if the person putting it together has never used a command line before? How much time will they have to spend learning about computers (not their real job) before this monster is useful for them? I would wager that the actual time for a graphic designer or school administrator who has never used a CLI before but wants a server for their growing firm/school is something more than a day and that the $3000 they save in initial costs will evaporate quickly in their own lost time learning skills that are irrelevant to their business or in hiring people that already possess those skills.
The person referred to as the one who has no real knowledge of "how to go about it" must include yoursel
Yes, that is right. It also includes most people. And it includes most people that want to use computer technology to benefit their businesses but may not have the budget to afford the expertise of those who know "how to go about it". What a business opportunity for a technology company that caters to making technologies easy enough that even those who "don't know how to go about it" to "go about it" anyway.
No I suppose not directly BUT that "infinite height" obviously has the advantages of large size that (more than? partially?) compensates for the lack of proximity under Fitt's law.
It is certainly not emperical research but I just spent a few minutes experimenting with hitting screen-top menu items as opposed to window-top menu items (the home and back buttons on my browser) And I played around with my mouse settings. I found that unless my mouse was set to be quite slow or I was at the very bottom of the screen a single careless flick of the wrist got me onto the top menu and usually right onto the menu I was aiming for. By contrast unless I was painfully slow and deliberate in my movements I always overshoot the window-top buttons which take up twice as much screen real-estate. And if my window was near the top of the screen (where they usually are) that overshot was almost always onto the screen-top menu bar (recalling the billboards saying - "if you lived here you'd be home by now")
Changing my mouse settings to be much "slower" than I usually set them or disabling acceleration I did lose much of the advantage of a screen-top menu. It took two or more mouse movements to hit the top menu bar. The slow speed also seemed to help a little in not overshooting the window-top elements. So certainly mouse settings & screen size could destroy any "Fitt's law" size advantage the screen-top menu has by making the proximity effectively much farther away. However for me at least the easiest of all combinations was to hit a screen-top menu with the mouse configured fast enough to do so. I found a mouse that was set so slow as to decrease the edge menu's "proximity" enough to negate the edge menu's "size" advantage was also inconvenient on a large screen for other reasons. I suppose If you are using a large screen for many different apps that you are NOT working with at the same time - each one in it's own quadrant there might be advantages to setting you mouse slower and having all your menu's at the top of each window. My guess is that this is a relatively rare way of using computers but I could be wrong, my own use of a large screen is so I can use all of that screen at once not a piece of it at a time - a situation for which multiple smaller monitors seems better suited than a single large monitor.
I don't have multiple monitors at the moment BUT I think this is the one scenario that Apple does NOT address well. But that has nothing to do with the placement of the menu bar at the top of the screen but that it is only at the top of ONE of the screens - duplicating the screen-top menu at the top of each screen would work nicely.
For $2,999.00 DIY you can buy THREE systems consisting of Dual Athlon 2000 @ 1.67Ghz, 120 gig drive,1 Gig ram and dual gigabit ethernet (2 will fit in 1u)
The only conclusion that one can glean from the posts on this particular thread is that the target market for XServe is people who want to administer their own servers but have no real knowledge of how to go about it.
That is probably EXACTLY right. A large component of Apples target market is smaller businesses, & schools who want a decent UNIX server but don't have the budget for a UNIX guru. Or possibly larger businesses and schools that want to keep such costs down. Spending $3000 and being able to maintain it yourself can be a lot cheaper than spending $1000 and having to hire a UNIX administrator.
First off, if you include Windows as your OS you've pretty much lost most of your "price advantage". If you include a windows license with unlimited clients the xServe has the price advantage. Linux is great for those with the skills and know-how to set it up and maintain it but for a small company or school with a negligible IT budget ease-of-use is important.
But Windows licensing fees aside these two machines aren't really all that comperable. You are definitely getting more machine for more money if you get the xServe. In almost every particular in the tech specs the Xserve is the better machine: 4 drive bays vs 2; Two 64-bit 66Mhz PCI slots & an AGP slot vs Two 32-bit 33Mhz PCI slots; 3 FireWire ports vs 0; Arguabley a faster CPU with a larger cache, 10/100/1000 ethernet as opposed to 10/100. etc. etc. etc.
The next Dell up is much closer comparison, it has some advantages the xServe lacks (most notably SCSI drives) and vice versa (the xServe still has more drive bays, FireWire, etc.) Since they don't match up feature for feature it can be harder to compare prices (it all depends on the features you find important) but they seem comparable in price running Linux and the xServe is clearly cheaper if you are running windows.
There's no "war", which usually involves military conflict, or at least two diametrically opposed agendas. It's just a geek or two running around with wireless stuff, delighting in the poor security of wireless networks.
I take it you are a non-geek who accidently stumbled onto/.;)
It's an extension of the term "war dialing" (dialing numbers and logging those where a modem answers) which comes from the 1983 movie WarGames where the geek protagonist uses the method to modem into NORAD.
The movie by the way is perhaps STILL one of the best hacker movie out there. All the hacking is realistic, the hacker has no magic powers over computers (as most hackers in movies do) - he wardials to find computers, he finds or makes educated guesses for passwords, etc.
Re:As a former wedding photographer,
on
Robotic Photographer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Points 1-3 are engineering problems and solvable. Point 4 is quite valid. Until artificial intelligence is much more human I can't imagine something like this being able to do a good job of this task. Unfortunatly there are MANY very bad photographers doing wedding photography. I've been to weddings where a walking red trashcan would be less obtrusive and would probably take better pictures to boot.
Your final note about getting a GOOD photographer is the real solution. (at least until we are ALL replaced by robots). I had a great photographer at my wedding, totally unobtrusive and a real artist. We also had some friends who where good photographers that we asked to take B&W candid shots. Admittedly as art students we had a lot more knowledge of photographers (and friends with BFA's in photography) but there are good photographers out there. For candid shots, if there is an art school nearby getting a student who is really interested in street photography (probably most of them) to do candids would probably get you some really nice candid shots for very little money (If you want unobtrusive just pick one without too many piercings & maybe pay them extra wear something that *isn't* making a statement;)
Well it still wouldn't be "invisibility". In your example of a sphere imagine it in a real life situation. You are standing in front of a line of trees (from my POV), blue sky above, purplish/blue mountains in the distance behind you to the left and yellowish green grass below you. When I look at you I will see the tree's in the direct center of the sphere as advertised. BUT I will also see at an oblique angle a glimpse of the purplish blue mountains at the RIGHT and a glimpse of the green grass at the top and worse bright blue sky at the lower edge of the sphere (or much worse the blindingly bright sun - so much for going undetected)
Still a pretty cool trick probably decent cammo in that the constantly changing image would break up the outline. Still you would sure as hell know something was there, though it would probably "hurt your eyes" the way an op-art poster does.
It was more than just using his name without permission. All the code names for that generation of computers were named for scientific hoaxes: Cold Fusion, Piltdown Man, and Sagan. Something of a slight of Sagan's work;)
As you mentioned when Sagan sued they changed the name to BHA (Butt Head Astronomer) and when he sued yet again the changed the name to LAW (Lawyers Are Wimps)
Unfortunately xTunes/sumi is not all that witty because it is just as unoriginal as Apple is claiming their product is. Apple has a system sound named Sosumi (So sue me) to tweak Apple Records of Beatles fame which had sued them over the name "Apple". Apple won the suit because at the time you couldn't do sound recording on an Apple computer. When Apple included that ability they included the sound Sosumi. It seems to me a decent part of wit is originality. The xTunes folks are coming across as the bore at a party which finds the same old joke hilarious every time he repeats it.
Sorry, wrong lawsuit. You are thinking of the patent infringement lawsuit over windows 95 (and quicktime code? I forget and can't be bothered - google for it yourself if you are interested). The "look and feel" lawsuit was in the 80's and was over windows 3.1 stealing the Mac "look and feel" (a lot vaguer than the later patent infringement suit you are thinking of) and it DID go to court and Apple lost.
closer observation reveals sumi sounds alot like "sue me", I think all their wit is perfectly intact.
The poster realizes that. That's why he noted their name was "witty".
He was pointing out that name and the "wit" that inspired it was an imitation of Apples system sound sosumi (So sue me) that was Apples jab at Apple Records which sued them over the name "apple" but their suit failed because at the time Apple computers couldn't (or couldn't very well) record music. When Apple added that ability they also added the "so sue me" sound.
Exactly. That is what I mean by "the Mac way". The computer should work for you, not the other way around. I've been a mac user since my dad bought a 128K mac in 1984, back when PC users where mired in DOS and cryptic commands the whole point of the Mac was to be "the computer for the rest of us" You don't NEED to be a geek to get the computer to do what you want it to do.
The kind of self-configuraton that Rendezvous brings to TCP/IP networks is the way Apple's networking has always worked. The first Appletalk network I set up was almost by accident. I just plugged two different Macs into a laserprinter. All I wanted was for both of them to be able to print, but they also recognized each other and could mount each other's drives etc. Unfortunately Appletalk is old and has technical problems and it is not a cross platform standard. It's great to see that Apple is able to bring the easy networking of their old proprietary protocol to a technically superior (but not-so-easy) industry standard.
In case you missed that, Rendezvous/Zeroconf currently works with Ethernet only. No Airport/802.11 yet.
Bzzt. you're wrong. 802.11b is specifically mentioned on the zeroconf site " With current Macs with IEEE 802.11 "AirPort" networking built-in, you don't even need the cables and the hub.". Steve Jobs was using it for the Rendezvous demo the original poster was talking about. Jobs had his machine playing music in iTunes, the other guy (forgot his name) opened up his *unplugged* PowerBook and his playlist appeared in Jobs' iTunes.
awhile back apple took what appeared to be some abandonware from the old mac Sprockets system, and released it as openplay... what makes Rendezvous so useful that we think the open-source community will pick it up and run with it?
I think the key difference is the word Abandonware. In the case of OpenPlay Apple took an old basically dead piece of software they no longer cared about & weren't really using themselves and realesed it as open source. "Who knows" they figured, "maybe somebody will find a use for it."
Rendezvous on the other hand is a new technology that they use themselves and will continue to develop for their own uses whether the open source community picks it up or not. They intend to push it to third party developers & peripheral manufacturers in a way they didn't bother with OpenPlay.
If you are talking about the decision to open source it here is how Apple benefits. This is a technology to make networking easier. If only Apple implements it they only get a small benefit from the technology (networking macs is easy for the user but other devices still must be configured manually). If other devices on the network also implement this standard the benefit to Apple (or rather their users) is even greater. So Apple is pushing the standard by making an open source implementation that anyone can use for their device or software. Also Apple benefits by getting their code developed & new features added for free by the open-source community.
If you are talking about what advantages Rendezvous/ZeroConf itself has. Well it makes setting up and maintaining a network easier. Devices on the network negotiate with each other to assign their own IP addresses & names and advertise the services they offer without any human intervention or DHCP servers, DNS servers, directory servers etc. Just plug in that ethernet cable (or turn on your wireless machine) and your machine is on the network & aware of every other machine and service offered on that network.
How does Apple benefit? Well that kind of ease-of-use is their hallmark selling point to consumers. Also new network services or application may become available that would have been much too difficult to implement before. Sure other platforms will also benefit but being the desktop OS underdog Apple benefits from open standards and will likely stay on the cutting edge of this technology and will reap the benefits that come from it sooner than it's competitors.
I wrote this piece to
criticize the Apple Public
Source License version 1.0, and the Debian project leader and the president
of Software in the Public Interest, who asked me to write it, also signed
it. Apple incorporated all of the changes I asked for into version 1.1 of
their license, which thus is unquestionably an Open Source license.
Emphasis mine
I'm sure others still aren't satisfied. But at least the responded to some of the initial complaints.
I don't know enough to be sure, but I THINK this is wrong.
I dont think Apple has enough marketing muscle to push it assuming Microsoft could not.
Actually Apple has a much better track record in pushing technologies than Microsoft does. Part of this is due to the fact that it is often a higher priority at Apple than at Microsoft. Microsoft makes money day in and day out just selling their products whether vendors & consumers adopt a new technology or not. Apple's business model seems almost more like a movie studio. They scratch by day in and day out and reap a windfall by producing "blockbuster" products (Like the iMac or the recent launch of 10.2 which produced more sales in two days at Apple stores than they had in the entire preceeding Quarter). Often these blockbusters are built on the backs of new technologies which Apple is consequently more commited to pushing on third party vendors.
Another part of it is that mac users have higher standards for consistency from app to app & from peripheral to peripheral. They expect things to work "the mac way". So Mac users are much more likely than windows users to reward a manufacturer who follows Apples lead and adopts ZeroConf (for instance) and will avoid a manufacturer who doesn't. Since the market is small to begin with manufacturers intending to sell to it take greater pains not to alienate any significant percentage of it. If half the windows market wouldn't even consider your peripheral because you don't support the newest most snazzy technology - you still have a huge market in the other half to make your money off of. If half the mac market won't even consider your product you might as well not bother (which many don't). These two dynamics reinforce each other - the vendors that actually DO decide to sell to the mac market are more slavish in following Apples lead and so the users come to expect the consequential consistency even more.
Of course Apples success in pushing new technologies is initially confined to the Mac market but that sheltered niche seems just large enough for the new technology to gain a critical mass that allows it to burst on to the larger PC scene.
I'm really confused. Are you criticising Apple or Windows (or Linux)? From the context it looks like your criticising Apple since you are responding to someone making claims about the Mac Platform. Yet all your criticisms seem to apply to windows but not to Apple.
Maybe I just misunderstood the question.
Must be my mistake.
It's not possible to release a software product into the public domain such that modified versions of the product must also be public domain.
Umm.. read the second part of my post.
GPL is a pretty good approximation to the situation where copyright doesn't exist,
Umm.. Again, read the second part of my post.
In case you are too lazy to go back and read my post again (you apparantly didn't get past first paragraph) The GPL is NOT a good aproximation to a situation where copyright doesn't exist because it has an "open source" clause. Get rid of that and you would have a much more accurate emulation of the situation. Without intellecual property rights you would have no way of forcing someone to provide the source along with the binary.
Of course it will be legal to copy the binary so the commercial software (probably including a large amount of code from open source projects, why reinvent the wheel after all) will be tied to much more closed and proprietary hardware as a technological protection to replace the loss of legal protection. Companies like Apple will do OK since they use software to sell hardware. Open source will also do OK though as I noted their code will be used extensivly as the starting point for the closed software tied to closed systems.
There is a lot of room for reform of intellectual property laws but what is forgoten by the zealots is that the purpose of those laws is to open up information that would otherwise be jeolously guarded. Information may "want to be free" but people that develop/invent/create want to derive their livings from it first. If the law does not allow them to "own" that information once it becomes public most creators will find a way to do so in which it does NOT become public. Look at Zildjian's business plan (which was the common one before intellectual property laws). They chose to keep their metalurgical processes secret in order to make their living off of it and have successfully kept the secret (and make a living from it) for hundreds of years. Just think what other uses could have been found for their inventions other than pretty sounding cymbals if they could have been persuaded to disclose the secret of it in return for legal protection rather than the protection that comes from being a secret. That kind of secrecy & extreme of "closed source" is the realistic alternative to Intellectual Property laws.
People who support the GPL would prefer if there were NO software licenses, including the GPL.
But that's just not true. There IS a way to release software without a license - release it into the public domain. The GPL folks choose not to do so because after you have their software they still want to control what you do with it, just like Apple (though the motivation is different).
Or perhaps it is true but is hopelessly naive. If the GPL folks wanted to emulate a world without licenses they would have written their license to guarantee that derivtative works can't be released under any other license thus emulating a world without IP. But if they were honest they WOULD NOT have included a clause that says you must release the source code for derivitave works. By including that open source clause they are using the IP laws they want to abolish to make you do something you would not have to do absent that law. They, like Apple, are using IP laws to disallow a using technology in a way that they would be free to without IP laws. Because lets face it, if IP laws were all struck down tommorow closed-source, binary-only and copy-protected versions of Linux and Apache et al. would pop up almost immediately. And if in our fit of completely freeing developers from artificial legal constraints is complete the copy-restrictions could be a whole lot nastier than are currently allowed by law. Hey that series of 1's & 0's that comprises my "black ICE" copy protection scheme "wants to be free" just like any other series of 1's & 0's who is the government to tell me it can't be free?
I will undoubtedly be flamed for it, but I fail to see how Apple isn't a monopoly on Apple hardware.
As others have already pointed out everybody has a "monopoly" on their own product but that is not what the word "monopoly" means. Micro$oft is not a monopoly because they are the only company that produces Windows, they are a monopoly because their product (windows) has 95% of the desktop OS market.
If a 3rd party developer writes exclusively for Mac platform, and Apple comes out with a bundled, "free" version of the same app, how would that not put the competitor out of business?
Well they can pursue the obvious option of developing the same product for that other OS with 95% of the market. A windows developer in the same situation is obviously a little more stuck, even if they successfully dominate the alternative OS they are still looking at bankruptcy.
Ah, so if by some miracle Apple achieved the market share that Microsoft now have then they would be a monopoly?
Umm... Yes. If you have 100% (or real close) you are a monopoly. That is after all what the word means.
So a big company doing this kind of thing is wrong, but a company with small market share is allowed. Is that what Slashdotters really hate? Success?
It's not the/.ers whose opinions count on this. Anti-trust laws are designed to stop monopolies from using the power that comes from being a monopoly to perpetuate that monopoly and extending it into other areas. The effect is that many business deals or practices that are perfectly legal for someone with 5% market share become illegal when you have 95% market share.
As I said that is just the legal side of things, legality is not the final arbiter of ethics. Lots of unethical behaviour is legal.
There is only one difference. Apple is not a monopoly. Everything that Microsoft did is perfectly legal EXCEPT if you are a monopoly. That is a legal distinction you are still free to judge them on the ethics of it.
Perhaps I was wrong and there is one other subtle difference between Apple including free apps with the OS and Microsoft. Appple is not doing it to drive a competitor out of business. Microsoft was threatened by Netscape & by Sun's Java (& the internet in general) with the rumbling of crossplatform compatibility and open standards threatening to make the PC world competitive for other OS's. So they buried Netscape by including a free browser (& making it *part* of the OS) they cut off the cross platform threat of Java by "embracing & extending (& extinguishing) it, so it would no longer be crossplatform.
Apple on the other hand is not threatened by Watson or or Adobe or any of the other developers their iApps compete with. Their motivation is not to create a "good enough" free product to drive a competitor out of business but to create superior products to compete more effectively with that other OS. Inadvertantly it hurts (some) developers they 'compete' with on the mac but that is not their intent - they want as many apps on the mac as possible. And in most cases they are not scaring away developers, for every developer that stays away from the Mac because they dont want to run the risk of competing with a bundled iApp there is probably another developer that come to the mac hoping his little App will be bought by Apple to become that bundled iApp - like SoundJam MP (iTunes) Macromedia FinalCut Pro (iMovie and Apple FinalCut Pro) & all the audio & video developers Apple is buying up right and left.
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The pentagon and camp David are obviously legitimate military targets for a militant group.
Fine... Semantics. Then they are merely war criminals and just as reprehensible.
It is therefore possible to view the world trade centre as a legitimate military target and the employees as agents of the state. the attacks then become military not terrorist.
By this argument EVERYONE is an "Agent of the state" and a military target. Since there are no civillians in your accounting you would be fine if we stopped trying to avoid "civillian" deaths in war zones. I think the US should continue to try to avoid civilian deaths in war but it is good to see that you at least won't be protesting the occasional accident since there are no "civillians"
OK about $1100 for the components and one day of labor. Is that one day a valid time estimate for someone who has never done it before? How much time to install and configure the software? What kind of warranty am I getting?
Assuming Apple is positioning this as the "server for the rest of us" how much will your time estimates above be affected if the person putting it together has never used a command line before? How much time will they have to spend learning about computers (not their real job) before this monster is useful for them? I would wager that the actual time for a graphic designer or school administrator who has never used a CLI before but wants a server for their growing firm/school is something more than a day and that the $3000 they save in initial costs will evaporate quickly in their own lost time learning skills that are irrelevant to their business or in hiring people that already possess those skills.
The person referred to as the one who has no real knowledge of "how to go about it" must include yoursel
Yes, that is right. It also includes most people. And it includes most people that want to use computer technology to benefit their businesses but may not have the budget to afford the expertise of those who know "how to go about it". What a business opportunity for a technology company that caters to making technologies easy enough that even those who "don't know how to go about it" to "go about it" anyway.
"Fitts's Law" is not about infinite height
No I suppose not directly BUT that "infinite height" obviously has the advantages of large size that (more than? partially?) compensates for the lack of proximity under Fitt's law.
It is certainly not emperical research but I just spent a few minutes experimenting with hitting screen-top menu items as opposed to window-top menu items (the home and back buttons on my browser) And I played around with my mouse settings. I found that unless my mouse was set to be quite slow or I was at the very bottom of the screen a single careless flick of the wrist got me onto the top menu and usually right onto the menu I was aiming for. By contrast unless I was painfully slow and deliberate in my movements I always overshoot the window-top buttons which take up twice as much screen real-estate. And if my window was near the top of the screen (where they usually are) that overshot was almost always onto the screen-top menu bar (recalling the billboards saying - "if you lived here you'd be home by now")
Changing my mouse settings to be much "slower" than I usually set them or disabling acceleration I did lose much of the advantage of a screen-top menu. It took two or more mouse movements to hit the top menu bar. The slow speed also seemed to help a little in not overshooting the window-top elements. So certainly mouse settings & screen size could destroy any "Fitt's law" size advantage the screen-top menu has by making the proximity effectively much farther away. However for me at least the easiest of all combinations was to hit a screen-top menu with the mouse configured fast enough to do so. I found a mouse that was set so slow as to decrease the edge menu's "proximity" enough to negate the edge menu's "size" advantage was also inconvenient on a large screen for other reasons. I suppose If you are using a large screen for many different apps that you are NOT working with at the same time - each one in it's own quadrant there might be advantages to setting you mouse slower and having all your menu's at the top of each window. My guess is that this is a relatively rare way of using computers but I could be wrong, my own use of a large screen is so I can use all of that screen at once not a piece of it at a time - a situation for which multiple smaller monitors seems better suited than a single large monitor.
I don't have multiple monitors at the moment BUT I think this is the one scenario that Apple does NOT address well. But that has nothing to do with the placement of the menu bar at the top of the screen but that it is only at the top of ONE of the screens - duplicating the screen-top menu at the top of each screen would work nicely.
For $2,999.00 DIY you can buy THREE systems consisting of Dual Athlon 2000 @ 1.67Ghz, 120 gig drive,1 Gig ram and dual gigabit ethernet (2 will fit in 1u)
Where can I order these? I'm interested.
The only conclusion that one can glean from the posts on this particular thread is that the target market for XServe is people who want to administer their own servers but have no real knowledge of how to go about it.
That is probably EXACTLY right. A large component of Apples target market is smaller businesses, & schools who want a decent UNIX server but don't have the budget for a UNIX guru. Or possibly larger businesses and schools that want to keep such costs down. Spending $3000 and being able to maintain it yourself can be a lot cheaper than spending $1000 and having to hire a UNIX administrator.
A few of mitigating factors.
First off, if you include Windows as your OS you've pretty much lost most of your "price advantage". If you include a windows license with unlimited clients the xServe has the price advantage. Linux is great for those with the skills and know-how to set it up and maintain it but for a small company or school with a negligible IT budget ease-of-use is important.
But Windows licensing fees aside these two machines aren't really all that comperable. You are definitely getting more machine for more money if you get the xServe. In almost every particular in the tech specs the Xserve is the better machine: 4 drive bays vs 2; Two 64-bit 66Mhz PCI slots & an AGP slot vs Two 32-bit 33Mhz PCI slots; 3 FireWire ports vs 0; Arguabley a faster CPU with a larger cache, 10/100/1000 ethernet as opposed to 10/100. etc. etc. etc.
The next Dell up is much closer comparison, it has some advantages the xServe lacks (most notably SCSI drives) and vice versa (the xServe still has more drive bays, FireWire, etc.) Since they don't match up feature for feature it can be harder to compare prices (it all depends on the features you find important) but they seem comparable in price running Linux and the xServe is clearly cheaper if you are running windows.
There's no "war", which usually involves military conflict, or at least two diametrically opposed agendas. It's just a geek or two running around with wireless stuff, delighting in the poor security of wireless networks.
/. ;)
I take it you are a non-geek who accidently stumbled onto
It's an extension of the term "war dialing" (dialing numbers and logging those where a modem answers) which comes from the 1983 movie WarGames where the geek protagonist uses the method to modem into NORAD.
The movie by the way is perhaps STILL one of the best hacker movie out there. All the hacking is realistic, the hacker has no magic powers over computers (as most hackers in movies do) - he wardials to find computers, he finds or makes educated guesses for passwords, etc.
Points 1-3 are engineering problems and solvable. Point 4 is quite valid. Until artificial intelligence is much more human I can't imagine something like this being able to do a good job of this task. Unfortunatly there are MANY very bad photographers doing wedding photography. I've been to weddings where a walking red trashcan would be less obtrusive and would probably take better pictures to boot.
;)
Your final note about getting a GOOD photographer is the real solution. (at least until we are ALL replaced by robots). I had a great photographer at my wedding, totally unobtrusive and a real artist. We also had some friends who where good photographers that we asked to take B&W candid shots. Admittedly as art students we had a lot more knowledge of photographers (and friends with BFA's in photography) but there are good photographers out there. For candid shots, if there is an art school nearby getting a student who is really interested in street photography (probably most of them) to do candids would probably get you some really nice candid shots for very little money (If you want unobtrusive just pick one without too many piercings & maybe pay them extra wear something that *isn't* making a statement
Well it still wouldn't be "invisibility". In your example of a sphere imagine it in a real life situation. You are standing in front of a line of trees (from my POV), blue sky above, purplish/blue mountains in the distance behind you to the left and yellowish green grass below you. When I look at you I will see the tree's in the direct center of the sphere as advertised. BUT I will also see at an oblique angle a glimpse of the purplish blue mountains at the RIGHT and a glimpse of the green grass at the top and worse bright blue sky at the lower edge of the sphere (or much worse the blindingly bright sun - so much for going undetected)
Still a pretty cool trick probably decent cammo in that the constantly changing image would break up the outline. Still you would sure as hell know something was there, though it would probably "hurt your eyes" the way an op-art poster does.
After they got sued for using the name
;)
It was more than just using his name without permission. All the code names for that generation of computers were named for scientific hoaxes: Cold Fusion, Piltdown Man, and Sagan. Something of a slight of Sagan's work
As you mentioned when Sagan sued they changed the name to BHA (Butt Head Astronomer) and when he sued yet again the changed the name to LAW (Lawyers Are Wimps)
Unfortunately xTunes/sumi is not all that witty because it is just as unoriginal as Apple is claiming their product is. Apple has a system sound named Sosumi (So sue me) to tweak Apple Records of Beatles fame which had sued them over the name "Apple". Apple won the suit because at the time you couldn't do sound recording on an Apple computer. When Apple included that ability they included the sound Sosumi. It seems to me a decent part of wit is originality. The xTunes folks are coming across as the bore at a party which finds the same old joke hilarious every time he repeats it.
Sorry, wrong lawsuit. You are thinking of the patent infringement lawsuit over windows 95 (and quicktime code? I forget and can't be bothered - google for it yourself if you are interested). The "look and feel" lawsuit was in the 80's and was over windows 3.1 stealing the Mac "look and feel" (a lot vaguer than the later patent infringement suit you are thinking of) and it DID go to court and Apple lost.
closer observation reveals sumi sounds alot like "sue me", I think all their wit is perfectly intact.
The poster realizes that. That's why he noted their name was "witty".
He was pointing out that name and the "wit" that inspired it was an imitation of Apples system sound sosumi (So sue me) that was Apples jab at Apple Records which sued them over the name "apple" but their suit failed because at the time Apple computers couldn't (or couldn't very well) record music. When Apple added that ability they also added the "so sue me" sound.
Or perhaps that is "The Mac Way"
Exactly. That is what I mean by "the Mac way". The computer should work for you, not the other way around. I've been a mac user since my dad bought a 128K mac in 1984, back when PC users where mired in DOS and cryptic commands the whole point of the Mac was to be "the computer for the rest of us" You don't NEED to be a geek to get the computer to do what you want it to do.
The kind of self-configuraton that Rendezvous brings to TCP/IP networks is the way Apple's networking has always worked. The first Appletalk network I set up was almost by accident. I just plugged two different Macs into a laserprinter. All I wanted was for both of them to be able to print, but they also recognized each other and could mount each other's drives etc. Unfortunately Appletalk is old and has technical problems and it is not a cross platform standard. It's great to see that Apple is able to bring the easy networking of their old proprietary protocol to a technically superior (but not-so-easy) industry standard.
In case you missed that, Rendezvous/Zeroconf currently works with Ethernet only. No Airport/802.11 yet.
Bzzt. you're wrong. 802.11b is specifically mentioned on the zeroconf site " With current Macs with IEEE 802.11 "AirPort" networking built-in, you don't even need the cables and the hub.". Steve Jobs was using it for the Rendezvous demo the original poster was talking about. Jobs had his machine playing music in iTunes, the other guy (forgot his name) opened up his *unplugged* PowerBook and his playlist appeared in Jobs' iTunes.
awhile back apple took what appeared to be some abandonware from the old mac Sprockets system, and released it as openplay... what makes Rendezvous so useful that we think the open-source community will pick it up and run with it?
I think the key difference is the word Abandonware. In the case of OpenPlay Apple took an old basically dead piece of software they no longer cared about & weren't really using themselves and realesed it as open source. "Who knows" they figured, "maybe somebody will find a use for it."
Rendezvous on the other hand is a new technology that they use themselves and will continue to develop for their own uses whether the open source community picks it up or not. They intend to push it to third party developers & peripheral manufacturers in a way they didn't bother with OpenPlay.
but what advantage is this to Apple?
If you are talking about the decision to open source it here is how Apple benefits. This is a technology to make networking easier. If only Apple implements it they only get a small benefit from the technology (networking macs is easy for the user but other devices still must be configured manually). If other devices on the network also implement this standard the benefit to Apple (or rather their users) is even greater. So Apple is pushing the standard by making an open source implementation that anyone can use for their device or software. Also Apple benefits by getting their code developed & new features added for free by the open-source community.
If you are talking about what advantages Rendezvous/ZeroConf itself has. Well it makes setting up and maintaining a network easier. Devices on the network negotiate with each other to assign their own IP addresses & names and advertise the services they offer without any human intervention or DHCP servers, DNS servers, directory servers etc. Just plug in that ethernet cable (or turn on your wireless machine) and your machine is on the network & aware of every other machine and service offered on that network.
How does Apple benefit? Well that kind of ease-of-use is their hallmark selling point to consumers. Also new network services or application may become available that would have been much too difficult to implement before. Sure other platforms will also benefit but being the desktop OS underdog Apple benefits from open standards and will likely stay on the cutting edge of this technology and will reap the benefits that come from it sooner than it's competitors.
I'm sure others still aren't satisfied. But at least the responded to some of the initial complaints.
They are similar because they are one in the same
I don't know enough to be sure, but I THINK this is wrong.
I dont think Apple has enough marketing muscle to push it assuming Microsoft could not.
Actually Apple has a much better track record in pushing technologies than Microsoft does. Part of this is due to the fact that it is often a higher priority at Apple than at Microsoft. Microsoft makes money day in and day out just selling their products whether vendors & consumers adopt a new technology or not. Apple's business model seems almost more like a movie studio. They scratch by day in and day out and reap a windfall by producing "blockbuster" products (Like the iMac or the recent launch of 10.2 which produced more sales in two days at Apple stores than they had in the entire preceeding Quarter). Often these blockbusters are built on the backs of new technologies which Apple is consequently more commited to pushing on third party vendors.
Another part of it is that mac users have higher standards for consistency from app to app & from peripheral to peripheral. They expect things to work "the mac way". So Mac users are much more likely than windows users to reward a manufacturer who follows Apples lead and adopts ZeroConf (for instance) and will avoid a manufacturer who doesn't. Since the market is small to begin with manufacturers intending to sell to it take greater pains not to alienate any significant percentage of it. If half the windows market wouldn't even consider your peripheral because you don't support the newest most snazzy technology - you still have a huge market in the other half to make your money off of. If half the mac market won't even consider your product you might as well not bother (which many don't). These two dynamics reinforce each other - the vendors that actually DO decide to sell to the mac market are more slavish in following Apples lead and so the users come to expect the consequential consistency even more.
Of course Apples success in pushing new technologies is initially confined to the Mac market but that sheltered niche seems just large enough for the new technology to gain a critical mass that allows it to burst on to the larger PC scene.
I'm really confused. Are you criticising Apple or Windows (or Linux)? From the context it looks like your criticising Apple since you are responding to someone making claims about the Mac Platform. Yet all your criticisms seem to apply to windows but not to Apple.
Maybe I just misunderstood the question. Must be my mistake.
Either you did, or I did.
It's not possible to release a software product into the public domain such that modified versions of the product must also be public domain.
Umm.. read the second part of my post.
GPL is a pretty good approximation to the situation where copyright doesn't exist,
Umm.. Again, read the second part of my post.
In case you are too lazy to go back and read my post again (you apparantly didn't get past first paragraph) The GPL is NOT a good aproximation to a situation where copyright doesn't exist because it has an "open source" clause. Get rid of that and you would have a much more accurate emulation of the situation. Without intellecual property rights you would have no way of forcing someone to provide the source along with the binary.
Of course it will be legal to copy the binary so the commercial software (probably including a large amount of code from open source projects, why reinvent the wheel after all) will be tied to much more closed and proprietary hardware as a technological protection to replace the loss of legal protection. Companies like Apple will do OK since they use software to sell hardware. Open source will also do OK though as I noted their code will be used extensivly as the starting point for the closed software tied to closed systems.
There is a lot of room for reform of intellectual property laws but what is forgoten by the zealots is that the purpose of those laws is to open up information that would otherwise be jeolously guarded. Information may "want to be free" but people that develop/invent/create want to derive their livings from it first. If the law does not allow them to "own" that information once it becomes public most creators will find a way to do so in which it does NOT become public. Look at Zildjian's business plan (which was the common one before intellectual property laws). They chose to keep their metalurgical processes secret in order to make their living off of it and have successfully kept the secret (and make a living from it) for hundreds of years. Just think what other uses could have been found for their inventions other than pretty sounding cymbals if they could have been persuaded to disclose the secret of it in return for legal protection rather than the protection that comes from being a secret. That kind of secrecy & extreme of "closed source" is the realistic alternative to Intellectual Property laws.
People who support the GPL would prefer if there were NO software licenses, including the GPL.
But that's just not true. There IS a way to release software without a license - release it into the public domain. The GPL folks choose not to do so because after you have their software they still want to control what you do with it, just like Apple (though the motivation is different).
Or perhaps it is true but is hopelessly naive. If the GPL folks wanted to emulate a world without licenses they would have written their license to guarantee that derivtative works can't be released under any other license thus emulating a world without IP. But if they were honest they WOULD NOT have included a clause that says you must release the source code for derivitave works. By including that open source clause they are using the IP laws they want to abolish to make you do something you would not have to do absent that law. They, like Apple, are using IP laws to disallow a using technology in a way that they would be free to without IP laws. Because lets face it, if IP laws were all struck down tommorow closed-source, binary-only and copy-protected versions of Linux and Apache et al. would pop up almost immediately. And if in our fit of completely freeing developers from artificial legal constraints is complete the copy-restrictions could be a whole lot nastier than are currently allowed by law. Hey that series of 1's & 0's that comprises my "black ICE" copy protection scheme "wants to be free" just like any other series of 1's & 0's who is the government to tell me it can't be free?
I will undoubtedly be flamed for it, but I fail to see how Apple isn't a monopoly on Apple hardware.
As others have already pointed out everybody has a "monopoly" on their own product but that is not what the word "monopoly" means. Micro$oft is not a monopoly because they are the only company that produces Windows, they are a monopoly because their product (windows) has 95% of the desktop OS market.
If a 3rd party developer writes exclusively for Mac platform, and Apple comes out with a bundled, "free" version of the same app, how would that not put the competitor out of business?
Well they can pursue the obvious option of developing the same product for that other OS with 95% of the market. A windows developer in the same situation is obviously a little more stuck, even if they successfully dominate the alternative OS they are still looking at bankruptcy.
Ah, so if by some miracle Apple achieved the market share that Microsoft now have then they would be a monopoly?
/.ers whose opinions count on this. Anti-trust laws are designed to stop monopolies from using the power that comes from being a monopoly to perpetuate that monopoly and extending it into other areas. The effect is that many business deals or practices that are perfectly legal for someone with 5% market share become illegal when you have 95% market share.
Umm... Yes. If you have 100% (or real close) you are a monopoly. That is after all what the word means.
So a big company doing this kind of thing is wrong, but a company with small market share is allowed. Is that what Slashdotters really hate? Success?
It's not the
As I said that is just the legal side of things, legality is not the final arbiter of ethics. Lots of unethical behaviour is legal.
There is only one difference. Apple is not a monopoly. Everything that Microsoft did is perfectly legal EXCEPT if you are a monopoly. That is a legal distinction you are still free to judge them on the ethics of it.
Perhaps I was wrong and there is one other subtle difference between Apple including free apps with the OS and Microsoft. Appple is not doing it to drive a competitor out of business. Microsoft was threatened by Netscape & by Sun's Java (& the internet in general) with the rumbling of crossplatform compatibility and open standards threatening to make the PC world competitive for other OS's. So they buried Netscape by including a free browser (& making it *part* of the OS) they cut off the cross platform threat of Java by "embracing & extending (& extinguishing) it, so it would no longer be crossplatform.
Apple on the other hand is not threatened by Watson or or Adobe or any of the other developers their iApps compete with. Their motivation is not to create a "good enough" free product to drive a competitor out of business but to create superior products to compete more effectively with that other OS. Inadvertantly it hurts (some) developers they 'compete' with on the mac but that is not their intent - they want as many apps on the mac as possible. And in most cases they are not scaring away developers, for every developer that stays away from the Mac because they dont want to run the risk of competing with a bundled iApp there is probably another developer that come to the mac hoping his little App will be bought by Apple to become that bundled iApp - like SoundJam MP (iTunes) Macromedia FinalCut Pro (iMovie and Apple FinalCut Pro) & all the audio & video developers Apple is buying up right and left.