Why don't we put this clown in the stocks in the public square of his hometown, and let anyone who's received a spam from his customers slap him upside the head?
Sure, it might result in a fatal concussion sometime around the fourth of fifth hour of people lining up to smack him, but them's the breaks.
This seems way too obvious not to have been thought of - so what is the flaw in my reasoning?
Basically, it's cheaper to stripe your data over multiple drives or have massive RAM caches than to build special-purpose drives.
I remember one drive from about ten years ago that was built for video instant replay use, which actually accessed both sides of nine platters in parallel. Cool idea, but it didn't take more than a year or two before ordinary drives could match the data rate.
But it's not for sale, leaving anyone who wants to try it the options of not using it or pirating it, ARRRRG!
Why do you omit the third option, namely, getting your hands on a Mac? You don't have to buy a tricked-out brand-new dual CPU PowerMac, you can try it out on a Mini or a used Powerbook.
Hmm... could Apple not simply re-instate mac clones with good quality control and limited hardware?
Look how well cloning of the IBM PC worked out for IBM. It made it impossible for them to improve the platform (remember MicroChannel and OS/2?), and it made it impossible to stay in business selling quality hardware, with the Dells and the Gateways of the world racing each other to the bottom of the quality barrel.
Now, if there were three or four cloners making Macs, and Apple wanted to (say), change CPUs, and the other guys were perfectly happy to continue shipping PPC machines running OS 9 for the next 20 years, Apple loses the ability to improve the product and win customers away from the Dark Side.
you're making the same flawed assumption the RIAA and MPAA are, which is that you would have paid for it if you couldn't have pirated it.
No, I'm suggesting that when one has the option of paying for it or not, many people will not. Probably enough to make a serious dent in Apple's hardware sales.
what it does do (and what microsoft correctly understands) is that piracy grows a userbase, which in turn grows demand for legitimate product
Depends on the product, and the userbase. Piracy worked out well for MS, since the pirated MS BASIC on Altair got all the microcomputer vendors to come to MS for a BASIC for the machines they were building. It also worked out well for Autodesk, but the opportunities for pirated apps to establish themselves as a standard doesn't come along all that often.
For every AutoCAD or MS-DOS, I could probably point out hundreds of apps whose publishers went out of business, because they couldn't get people to pay for their product.
you're assuming there's no profit from stamping OSX on a circular piece of polycarbonate plastic and putting it in a cardboard box and selling it for $129.
You're assuming that people will pay for the OS, instead of pirating it.
Piracy doesn't dent MS's revenues, since they get the Dells and HPs of the world to pay them for every box they ship. Apple doesn't have that luxury.
Apple is going to have YEARS of this ahead of them...
Maybe, but I doubt it. Running a shipping version of OS X on a generic PC isn't going to be as easy as using the old "Magic Sack", which let you plug Mac ROMS into an Atari ST.
They can tie it to encryption keys on their mother boards, they can use custom microcode in the GPU, they could even get Intel to make them slightly modified CPUs that are only available to Apple.
The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said.
That sounds like good news to me.
Umm.. As long as it doesn't do the same to ordinary human cells..
This is a very sad thing. It's terrible to see people behave like this, and I also fault the authorities for failing to provide adequate crowd control.
I believe MS claims they invented one aspect of the ipod's interface before Apple released the iPod.
If so, then it would place the invention squarely within the period of Apple and MS's five-year patent cross-license agreement, which they signed in 1998.
I just checked... The cross-license agreement was for five years, and it started in 1997. The iPod shipped in 2001. Whatever the upshot of MS's race to the patent office, Apple will not be paying royalties on the iPod.
I once ported a program called "QuickTOP" to the Macintosh, back in the Mac OS 6.0.2 days. It was a NASA trajectory optimization program, which let you choose what planet you were going from and where you wanted to go, the dates of the window in which you wanted to leave or arrive, whether to optimize for least time or least reaction mass, whether you were using rockets, nuclear ion drive or solar ion drive, and many many other things you could tweak.
The program also included an ephemeris table for all the planets, and several well-known asteroids and comets that covered the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
I didn't do the math, but I know that the underlying calculation engine was solving Chebyshev polynomials to converge on the solutions. FWIW, a typical Earth-to-Mars solution took about an hour to calculate on a Mac II CI.
Slashdot Mirror
One message isn't spam.
I disagree. If the message is 1) unsolicited, and 2) trying to sell me something, then it's spam.
-jcr
Now that Apple is moving to X86 it would be nice to see how it would work on the hardware I already have
Well, if you want to see that happen, then show Steve Jobs a convincing business case for it.
-jcr
But you don't know it's a dupe until you RTFA
Maybe you don't, but I can figure it out from the title...
-jcr
And you've also chosen space over speed.
-jcr
Why don't we put this clown in the stocks in the public square of his hometown, and let anyone who's received a spam from his customers slap him upside the head?
Sure, it might result in a fatal concussion sometime around the fourth of fifth hour of people lining up to smack him, but them's the breaks.
-jcr
This seems way too obvious not to have been thought of - so what is the flaw in my reasoning?
Basically, it's cheaper to stripe your data over multiple drives or have massive RAM caches than to build special-purpose drives.
I remember one drive from about ten years ago that was built for video instant replay use, which actually accessed both sides of nine platters in parallel. Cool idea, but it didn't take more than a year or two before ordinary drives could match the data rate.
-jcr
I for one, welcome our new 128-bit turtle overlords!
-jcr
But it's not for sale, leaving anyone who wants to try it the options of not using it or pirating it, ARRRRG!
Why do you omit the third option, namely, getting your hands on a Mac? You don't have to buy a tricked-out brand-new dual CPU PowerMac, you can try it out on a Mini or a used Powerbook.
-jcr
Hmm... could Apple not simply re-instate mac clones with good quality control and limited hardware?
Look how well cloning of the IBM PC worked out for IBM. It made it impossible for them to improve the platform (remember MicroChannel and OS/2?), and it made it impossible to stay in business selling quality hardware, with the Dells and the Gateways of the world racing each other to the bottom of the quality barrel.
Now, if there were three or four cloners making Macs, and Apple wanted to (say), change CPUs, and the other guys were perfectly happy to continue shipping PPC machines running OS 9 for the next 20 years, Apple loses the ability to improve the product and win customers away from the Dark Side.
-jcr
you're making the same flawed assumption the RIAA and MPAA are, which is that you would have paid for it if you couldn't have pirated it.
No, I'm suggesting that when one has the option of paying for it or not, many people will not. Probably enough to make a serious dent in Apple's hardware sales.
what it does do (and what microsoft correctly understands) is that piracy grows a userbase, which in turn grows demand for legitimate product
Depends on the product, and the userbase. Piracy worked out well for MS, since the pirated MS BASIC on Altair got all the microcomputer vendors to come to MS for a BASIC for the machines they were building. It also worked out well for Autodesk, but the opportunities for pirated apps to establish themselves as a standard doesn't come along all that often.
For every AutoCAD or MS-DOS, I could probably point out hundreds of apps whose publishers went out of business, because they couldn't get people to pay for their product.
-jcr
A simple co-processor that implements some essential function could be a way to do this without restarting their CPU supply issues.
I'm not suggesting an entirely different CPU, just one that can be recognized.
-jcr
you're assuming there's no profit from stamping OSX on a circular piece of polycarbonate plastic and putting it in a cardboard box and selling it for $129.
You're assuming that people will pay for the OS, instead of pirating it.
Piracy doesn't dent MS's revenues, since they get the Dells and HPs of the world to pay them for every box they ship. Apple doesn't have that luxury.
-jcr
Apple is going to have YEARS of this ahead of them...
Maybe, but I doubt it. Running a shipping version of OS X on a generic PC isn't going to be as easy as using the old "Magic Sack", which let you plug Mac ROMS into an Atari ST.
They can tie it to encryption keys on their mother boards, they can use custom microcode in the GPU, they could even get Intel to make them slightly modified CPUs that are only available to Apple.
-jcr
The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said.
That sounds like good news to me.
Umm.. As long as it doesn't do the same to ordinary human cells..
-jcr
Even Scientology doesn't say "Trust us, arsenic is good for you."
Maybe not, but hubbard did say that smoking protects you from cancer..
-jcr
Don't they teach English in schools anymore?
No, they needed the class time to teach pomposity.
-jcr
This is a very sad thing. It's terrible to see people behave like this, and I also fault the authorities for failing to provide adequate crowd control.
-jcr
I believe MS claims they invented one aspect of the ipod's interface before Apple released the iPod.
If so, then it would place the invention squarely within the period of Apple and MS's five-year patent cross-license agreement, which they signed in 1998.
-jcr
I just checked... The cross-license agreement was for five years, and it started in 1997. The iPod shipped in 2001. Whatever the upshot of MS's race to the patent office, Apple will not be paying royalties on the iPod.
-jcr
Didn't anybody notice that Apple and MS had a patent cross-license agreement in effect when the iPod shipped?
Nothing to see here, guys. Really.
-jcr
Umm.. Dude, didn't you notice the obvious sarcasm?
-jcr
I once ported a program called "QuickTOP" to the Macintosh, back in the Mac OS 6.0.2 days. It was a NASA trajectory optimization program, which let you choose what planet you were going from and where you wanted to go, the dates of the window in which you wanted to leave or arrive, whether to optimize for least time or least reaction mass, whether you were using rockets, nuclear ion drive or solar ion drive, and many many other things you could tweak.
The program also included an ephemeris table for all the planets, and several well-known asteroids and comets that covered the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
I didn't do the math, but I know that the underlying calculation engine was solving Chebyshev polynomials to converge on the solutions. FWIW, a typical Earth-to-Mars solution took about an hour to calculate on a Mac II CI.
-jcr
That's what lawyers do.
Some lawyers actually decline clients who are up to no good. If this guy represented the CoS, then I would consider him less than ethical.
-jcr
bet you feel like an idiot now.
I stand corrected, but no: I don't feel like an idiot. Piggybacking on Linux's popularity is precisely the sort of thing I wouldn't put past a clam.
-jcr
He's not trolling, he's correct, as a quick check of google will show you.
-jcr