Apple has stated up and down that they never want to see OS X on commodity hardware. I haven't really looked into it, but I'm betting, that there's some teeth in the EULA to that effect.
That said, $600 for a dual-proc Mac Mini is a pretty awesome deal, and you can probably find a used G4 tower or Imac for way cheaper than that.
*that* said, I'm already in the own-too-many-computers club. For web development reasons (right now I work on Linux and test on Windows) I'd like a mac, I'd probably use it basically as a second monitor, using a USB switch to switch between my linux/windows desktop and the mac.
Not interesting from a technological standpoint, but clever from an end-user standpoint.
You'd open yourself to spamming if you took arbitrary emails, but gmail is reasonably spammer-proof. And from the perspective of the end user, it's one less login to remember.
Actually... that's pretty damn clever, really. I'm going to rip it off.
Have you ever been, or know anyone who has been hunting? In the south?
All hunting accidents, as well as all accident-free hunting trips are at least semi-drunken affairs.
Cheney has definitely received some special protection by not having to talk to the cops for half a day. But honestly, in any situation where there's an accident, no witnesses, and nobody wants to press charges, the cops tend to step back.
And this is a good thing. If there's a problem of some sort between me and a friend, and we can resolve it ourselves, what business do the cops have of being there?
As I am the grandparent poster, you can sure as hell bet I'm not a Cheney fan. But it was a stupid accident. In a similar situation, I sure as hell wouldn't want the cops hassling me. This is a big case of "he's guilty because he's a bad person and we all REALLY REALLY REALLY want him to be guilty." Which is dangerous.
No, let's get Dick for the endless list of actually horrible and immoral things he has done to our society.
I don't like MS, but in retrospect the monopoly case was kind of B.S. wasn't it?
I mean, they were being charged primarily for bundling a browser with their OS. It's 8 years later, can you find an OS without at least one built-in browser?
Microsoft had some bad business practices, but it never was a monopoly. Their customers and developers were always totally free to move to another platform. Microsoft simply made sure there were compelling - but never overwhelming - reasons to stay.
It's very different from owning all the oil pipelines in a country.
Similary, nothing Apple is doing is preventing anyone from making another MP3 player nor iPod accessories.
Being the market leader doesn't make you a monopoly.
hell, why not informally contact the company. they're probably not Microsoft. if you say to them "Hey, I've worked out this solution. I haven't made it public yet, but I feel like I could help some people and not hurt you if I did. What's your opinion?"
The lawyers win by making us think that they are the only way of communicating between interested parties.
There's an old saying that you can measure the freedom of a society by counting the laws. (This isn't true of course, a society in which the only law is "Obey Leader and his Enforcers at all times" isn't terribly free, but there's a point to the saying anyway.)
Once you hit a critical threshold in the number of laws and complexity of the situations they govern, then it's impossible for any citizen, even any lawyer, to know the law, even just the areas of the law that affect "normal" day to day life. We've long since passed this point.
Under such a system, you may know of many individual specific things that are illegal, but in general when presented with an unkown situation, there's a moment of vertigo. You don't know how to act. Now in a free society with limited, known, laws, you'd always know what you can and can't do. There's a list out there of prohibited actions and their associated penalties. You know these actions, and as long as you aren't doing them, you're in the clear. However in a society with millions of laws, you can't think this way. You either have to carefully research an unfamiliar action or (much more commonly) just behave like everyone else is behaving and assume, since they aren't getting arrested, that you're acting in accordance with the law.
For example: last weekend I was in a state park, walking around off the trail. I came across an old, decaying building (probably pre-1900) and went in and explored, opening what doors an cupboards were left, looking into the exposed rooms, checking out the rusting fixtures etc. Was I in violation of some law or park rule? I'll never know. Perhaps if an official had come along, they could have given me some ticket. Hell, it could have been a $50,000 fine and a year in jail. I'd have contested, but if the law was on the books, ultimately I'd have no defense. Ignorance of the law is not an alibi.
Further complicating things, consider that there are tons of laws on the books that aren't enforced. Little things you'd never think of. Even things that make for amusing trivia. There are a whole lot of places in the country where using dirty language around a female is illegal. Pornography is still *very* illegal in the US. The supreme court basically decided that the law couldn't be enforced, but it's still on the books. It would only take a fall of the gavel in washington, and suddenly every adolescent boy with an internet connection is a felon.
Combine this with pervasive surveilance and you have a very scary situation. When most people, whether they know it or not are guilty of imprisonable crimes, and the government has eyes everywhere, then it doesn't take any actual voted-upon action for your society to transform swiftly and suddenly into a very different kind of place. No law has to change, and suddenly you're living in a very different society.
It's effectively illegal to leave your house without a government issued ID anymore. A friend of mine (a republican no less) was riding her bike during the 2004 RNC in New York City. She wasn't part of, or even close to the protests, but she looks "weird" she's young, she's not white, and she has tatoos. She ran a stopsign on her bike (pretty much standard practice for cyclists at 4-way stops) and got stopped by a cop. He would have let her go, but she didn't have an ID on her. As a result, she spent 18 hours sitting on a hard cement floor with her hands plastic-tied behind her, with no access to food, water, or legal counsel.
She never got her bike back, and her suit against the NYPD was thrown out of court, as apparently, they were acting 100% within the Patriot act.
When the Soviet Union was still around, some people (generally people losing a political debate) would say things like "So why don't you move to Russia where you'll get thrown in a cell for not carrying your goddamn papers."
Your comment pretty well illustrates why anything "VB" sends off all kinds of bells and whistles and alarms.
There's nothing wrong with VB per se. It's a decent language for prototyping and quick fixes. And it's flexibility is an asset that might make it a reasonable consideration for some large projects.
But as anyone who has ever written code for a living will tell you. There's not actually such a thing as a "quick hack" or "quick fix" and all too frequently, a prototype becomes a release product when the deadline hits. VB is a programming language for people who don't want to become real programmers. Now, there's nothing actually wrong with that... really. But the culture surrounding the language is one that encourages laziness, cut-and-paste solutions, and a general throw together whatever works mentality. Now if it were my hobby to sit around on message boards and debate the abstract advantages of language X over language Y, this would probably piss me off more than it does. In the real world, people who aren't software engineers have to write code.
The problem with VB seems to me to be that something in the culture strongly discourages people from learning the "right" way to do things after they've done the quick fix to get things in on time. VB developers, more so than those in just about any other language (well... maybe not Perl, but that's a smiliar problem that comes from a very different angle though) seem to be happy to leave unmaintainable code sitting around and never learning better practices to write better code in the future, to say nothing of fixing what they've done.
Of course there's a million counter examples. But there's still a highly disproportionate amount of ugly VB code in production environments out there, and someone will (and already does) have to maintain it. Other side of the coin: really learning your shit in VB.net will probably guarantee you work for the next two decades. Microsoft will move on, or their power will decline. The amateurs will learn a later version, or something new, and yet, there's still going to be this mountain of bad code doing work out there, and they're going to need to hire someone, and probably someone local, to fix it up and keep it running.
Same reason COBOL and FORTRAN can still land you a nice job.
Of course my other major objection to VB.net, and.net in general is that it encourages vendor lock-in. not to even go in to debating the specific vendor here, any language that's going to leave you up a creek when someone buys your employer out and tells you to move everything onto their machines which are not only on another OS, but on another hardware base alltogether should just simply not be used. For anything other than coding end-user applications and processor specific tasks (compilers, kernels...) you're asking for trouble if you're working in a language that isn't supported on many platforms. Really in any situation where you can write in a language that either has cross-platform support for interpereters or bytecode execution, you should go with that language even when there are large reasons to consider something else. VB, and.net in general, is badly future-vulnerable.
Your response doesn't make sense. How exactly can anyone but the government change a law?
Part of the government's function is to protect the public domain. They've failed, badly, and in increasingly specatular fashion, but that doesn't mean that the job needs to be farmed out to self-interested parties.
The current IP laws are the result of private interest colluding with government. Many of the same companies that would likely replace NASA are the very same ones who *purchased* the current, broken, laws.
I'm a free-market liberal. One thing that constantly makes me scratch my head is the way that conservatives who wave the free-market banner consistantly ignore the fact that the vast and overwhelming majority of anti-trade laws are enacted not for the "welfare state" but at the bequest of and for the sole benefit of a small number of well-connected *private* interests.
It's a sad and in some ways fundamental inconsistency between democracy and free-market capitalism. The voters (or more likely their representatives) are quite likely to decide against the market, and this is their right in a democracy. This could possibly only be a minor problem if our electorate were more like (say) Canada's and had less tolerance for the open bribery of public officials. You can call campaign contributions "free-speach" all you want, but your ignoring reality if you don't admit that they most frequently result in direct government mangling of markets. Having a voting process that helped untie the legislature from private interest (of course it can never be completely "disinterested") would be the single biggest step our society could take toward a fair, free market economy.
In summary free-market != the government legislating with only a small number of pre-existing corporate interests in mind. Property is protected by law. The government and no one else can create and inforce laws. Incorrect laws can only be fixed by the government. When a systematic problem is resulting in many laws being poorly written, a fundamental problem is at work. IP is one of those cases, and the root problem is the bribery of our officials, on both sides of the isle -- both parties currently advocate an ugly and sloppy brand of socialism. Republicans don't spend a dime less on social programs than Democrats do. The only difference between the parties at this point is that the Democrats seem slightly more willing to actually pay the bills of their socialism. That and they aren't trying to enforce someone's religion on me. Until IP law is fixed, privatizing research - a potentially good idea, cannot help but be against the interests of science, as science (rather than "product development" or "marketing research") is conducted in the public domain -- it's the only way that peer review can occur. Thus, no thank you on private scientific space missions replacing government space missions.
That said, the moment I can afford to charter myself a private space tourist trip, I'm there.
The problem with having private industry do the smaller missions is that NASA's smaller missions are (in general) the good ones - less about publicity and symbolism and more about real and useful scientific research. Private industry tends to not publish its research in journals and will hold its findings in secret or, worse, in patent.
The primary thing to be gained by travel to space is intellectual property, which is why, until IP law gets the enormous overhaul it will need to properly balance return on investment and the good of the market as a whole, the privitization of space is a great big red flag for me.
Imagine if the Hubble images had been available only with a giant fee, and a license that more or less prevented further open academic research, the way that published findings from (for just one instance) the pharmaceutical industry do.
No, I'm a big believer in free interprize, but IP law is so fsck'd up at the moment, that sadly, I have to say I want to see as much research in the clumsy and innefficient hands of the government, if it means it will at least remain public domain.
... not to mention that a large amount of the ice in question (even more when you start counting Greenland, and northern Canada & Russia) isn't floating.
Ok, I'm about as far left as they come, but drop a *bit* of the hyperbole, eh?
The fact that: 1) You're free to make that kind of statement and, 2) There is an opposition party to elect who could oppose Mr. Bush
Mean he isn't a Dictator. My girlfriend has two coworkers who lived in China under Mao. We have no idea.
Bush is a shitty president with some damn dangerous leanings and scary ideas as to the rights and powers of the executive branch, but he's no dictator.
Google Desktop - Boxed edition, $49.99, with install/live DVD, Google manual, and 1 year customer support.
Charge a small fee for OEMs selling their computers with the "Google Supported" logo.
Google as default homepage, with pre-installed google applications. Google gets to develop for a client that is completely open to it, none of the B.S. that comes with writing software on a closed platform.
Frankly I'd love to see this. If my mom, friends, and siblings were all on an easy to use Linux distribution (and thus installing applications only from a package repository rather than downloading whatever free app has the biggest flashing banner) my life would be many times better.
No more Outlook worms, no more closed Office files, no more...
I mean just imagine what it would mean for the workings of the market if a big chunk of home users were on an open & free platform? If the majority of the software on the desktop was GPL?
My favorite would be no more 90% IE users on the web. Those of us out there who write DHTML have been waiting for this since that dark day in oh... was it 97 or 98 when IE 3 became the standard browser for AOL, and suddenly your job involved writing documents that you know would be read by BROKEN software. Well it's almost 10 years later and the damn thing is still a broken standards incompliant mess, and I still have to write around its bullshit instead of using the nicer CSS2 features. When the IE userbase becomes small enough that I can start just posting an "Internet Explorer is broken, please download a working browser to properly view this webpage" disclaimer, I will be a happy happy man.
What you're arguing is that commercial news broadcasters are no more responsible for the truth of their commentators' opinions than the WWF is for the truth of what they depict. Unfortunately this seems to be the case, as the omnipresent opinion and argument shows give them the out of "well it's just what so and so said, it wasn't *reporting*. But then why are we accepting this crap as news? And by we, I mean those of you who keep their ratings so goddamned high. I stopped watching TV news in the 2000 election when I noticed that I'd gone for over a week without seeing an actual instance of reporting.
Michael Moore, while occasionally interviewed, is not a regular commentator on any television network that claims to be "News," he is not being presented. He's an editorialist, and furthermore, if you investigate, his fact-checking is quite good (you won't find more factual errors - that is errors in statistics, dates, names etc. in one of his movies than in a typical issue of Time or US News), and if you're listening critically, he does make it pretty apparent what are facts and what are opinions and generalizations. The same can not be said for Coulter. Hell, The Daily Show, which openly calls itself fake news, does a better job than many TV News talking heads of letting the viewer know when they're being factual and when they're not.
To get the liberal equivalent of Coulter, you need to read opinion pieces in Indymedia or similar shrill screeds. Of course, nobody is validating their claims by placing them on national "news."
The new chips will be out in more machines than just Apple. Why does Apple not release the mini on lower spec processors? Well first off, just because they didn't announce it the *day* they revealed their first Intel machines, doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. Second off, they aren't in the bottom-end business in general. The mini is a transition machine for geeks. It's meant to make OS X appeal to the homebrew crowd, who don't account for many sales, but do generate a lot of buzz. It's an important product, but it's not their top priority. Secondly, the mini is a little engineering feat. There is a very much non-zero cost in assembling a new one and testing it. Their first two machines seem to address the biggest hole in their product line (badly lagging top-end laptop) and the most friendly product for the early adopter crowd (medium cost & big cool factor iMac)
Apple also wants to avoid getting mired in the jargon and infinitely fractured product lines of the PC world. I imagine their negotiations with Intel are a big reason that Yonah isn't being called Pentium-Y etc. I doubt they will ever have more than two processor families going in their active line of computers (2 laptops, 2 desktops + eMac, mini, server)
Thinking that Apple is overly concerned about piracy ignores the company's history of not using any kind of restriction or guard against software copying. Most apple applications STILL can be copied from one computer on a network to another, simply by dragging the application icon. No apple product has ever had a CD Key or anything similar. They're aware of their market and demographics. They sell to professionals and high-end users who don't mind buying software. It's the same reason they can drop support for old OS X releases the moment the new one comes out. Their market doesn't mind paying, and it enables them to push new technologies with a much greater ease than if they had to maintain the roughly 5-year backwards compatibility that Microsoft does. The first time Apple ever had ANY copy control on anything they've done is when they started getting in bed with the media industry. That just goes with that territory, but their power over Apple isn't so great as to affect the design of their computing systems, otherwise you'd have seen much more significant changes to the way things like Appletalk and Safari handle files by now.
Likewise, try to imagine the type of person that would be downloading a torrent of OS X, burning it to a CD, and installing on unsupported and undocumented hardware. That person is not a potential apple customer. They're clearly not willing to fork over the Apple premium (yes it does exist, Apple has nothing in competition with $300 and $400 desktop with monitor and $600 laptops, even though those give performance roughly equivalent -- where it matters to that market anyway -- to the lowest end ibook and the emac and mini) so why should Apple care? Their tech support will hang up as soon as the "customer" says they are on non-apple hardware, it's only a small core of nerds looking to brag about accomplishing something illicit that will be doing this. Mom, Joe Dormroom, Suzy Designer, and Vic Corporate would never bother.
Apple's entire market strategy is about maintaining a large niche with heavy profit margins. I really doubt they want to dominate the PC world. If Apple had Microsoft's market share, they'd have to do things very differently (not for the least of reasons that many of their practices such as hardware exclusivity and software bundling would make Microsoft look angelic in comparason if OS X were the "default" operating system of the masses.
If they *are* making significant product design decisions based on the fear of OS X getting onto some Dell somewhere, then they're fools.
I don't think Apple is very paranoid about OS X winding up on a few Dells. They're the worlds only authorized retailer of OS X, so you couldn't start a legitimate mac-clone business. And given that 90% of the home market never installs a new OS on a purchased machine, and 100% of the corporate market uses at least some degree of vender support, they aren't likely to lose much hardware market share over a few clever people doing installs on completely un-supported hardware. The bittorrent crowd is unlikely to spend even the $400-$500 on a mac mini anyway, since there are even cheaper beige boxes out there, and the mini doesn't allow for 1337 upgrades.
These releases are for the early adopter Mac loyalists. The processors are in the two sexiest products (the white plastic iBook and big clunky tower are less appealing designs)
Alternate thought: the new powermac makes practical sense, since it's by far the most overdue product, and the iMac makes sense since it's the cheapest way to push a headline technology into eager brand fans' hands.
The iBooks are probably too low a profit margin to make up for the cost of brand new engineering, and their reliability-dependant corporate market relies too heavily on Powermac towers to migrate those first (likewise, expect their servers to be the last to make the switch.)
I generally like Apple and OS X a great deal, but I'd definitely wait for the second generation here. It'll come down in price, up in power, and no matter what Apple claims, and Apple edited and approved statements by developers claim, there's no way that the migration to a completely new processor is going to go off without a hitch. If you've got spare change and want to be first on the block, go ahead, but if you're purchasing for practical considerations and are on anything resembling a budget, wait.
All of that said, I'm excited by what I've read about the new chip. It's definitely in line with Apple's general philosophy of designing for all-around usability and flexibility rather than just a small number of testosterone parameters like meaningless graphics benchmarks.
Also, this virtually guarantees that nearly all games will be released for Apple, which would be great if EA hadn't murdered the PC Gaming industry.
For a lot of people, the free part of Linux matters as much as the Unix-based. It's understandable that Apple keeps most of its software closed, but I do wish they'd stop using hardware vendors who don't open up their specs. Anyone who's tried to install Linux on a recent iBook or Powerbook and had to deal with the wireless card can attest to the fact that big-A isn't always being free software friendly.
Also, OS X is entirely too easy to use to be as geeky as it gets. As geeky as it gets is coding by pencil, hand translating to machine language and viewing the output on a dot-matrix printout.
That said, at work we are entirely standardized around OS X servers and terminals, and I have never seen a network so easy to maintain.
From the article it seems like an interesting solution to a specific problem. Imagine the way running works in bipeds, you create imbalance so you're always falling forward and catching yourself. It's a good way of maintaining momentum over rough terrain.
It reminds me of the 90s when it seemed like everyone was jumping on silly clever domains. (It's been a bit of fun watching the empty business plans sitting at www.com over the years, and cnet still has com.com)
Yeah, from all the complaining and naysaying going on in this discussion, you'd think that the only things Lego sells are Bionicle and Harry Potter. They still have a very good lineup of Technic, city, and box-o-generic brick sets (alas there's nothing really like the old space, pirate, and castle sets)
Why do people not realize that these products exist?
Because they don't sell. Lego advertises the licensed products and puts them on their limited shelf space at places like Wal-Mart because those are the fast-sellers.
The worst things that ever happened to childhood was when they figured out how to really successfully market things to kids as well as they do to adults. Kids are much more impressionable and easily manipulated. Advertising to kids is really kind of messed up if you think about it.
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Apple has stated up and down that they never want to see OS X on commodity hardware. I haven't really looked into it, but I'm betting, that there's some teeth in the EULA to that effect.
That said, $600 for a dual-proc Mac Mini is a pretty awesome deal, and you can probably find a used G4 tower or Imac for way cheaper than that.
*that* said, I'm already in the own-too-many-computers club. For web development reasons (right now I work on Linux and test on Windows) I'd like a mac, I'd probably use it basically as a second monitor, using a USB switch to switch between my linux/windows desktop and the mac.
Not interesting from a technological standpoint, but clever from an end-user standpoint.
You'd open yourself to spamming if you took arbitrary emails, but gmail is reasonably spammer-proof. And from the perspective of the end user, it's one less login to remember.
Actually... that's pretty damn clever, really. I'm going to rip it off.
Well, she never was a Bush republican. I think in 2004 she wrote in "Newt" or "Reagan" or something like that to express her dissatisfaction.
Have you ever been, or know anyone who has been hunting? In the south?
All hunting accidents, as well as all accident-free hunting trips are at least semi-drunken affairs.
Cheney has definitely received some special protection by not having to talk to the cops for half a day. But honestly, in any situation where there's an accident, no witnesses, and nobody wants to press charges, the cops tend to step back.
And this is a good thing. If there's a problem of some sort between me and a friend, and we can resolve it ourselves, what business do the cops have of being there?
As I am the grandparent poster, you can sure as hell bet I'm not a Cheney fan. But it was a stupid accident. In a similar situation, I sure as hell wouldn't want the cops hassling me. This is a big case of "he's guilty because he's a bad person and we all REALLY REALLY REALLY want him to be guilty." Which is dangerous.
No, let's get Dick for the endless list of actually horrible and immoral things he has done to our society.
I don't like MS, but in retrospect the monopoly case was kind of B.S. wasn't it?
I mean, they were being charged primarily for bundling a browser with their OS. It's 8 years later, can you find an OS without at least one built-in browser?
Microsoft had some bad business practices, but it never was a monopoly. Their customers and developers were always totally free to move to another platform. Microsoft simply made sure there were compelling - but never overwhelming - reasons to stay.
It's very different from owning all the oil pipelines in a country.
Similary, nothing Apple is doing is preventing anyone from making another MP3 player nor iPod accessories.
Being the market leader doesn't make you a monopoly.
hell, why not informally contact the company. they're probably not Microsoft. if you say to them "Hey, I've worked out this solution. I haven't made it public yet, but I feel like I could help some people and not hurt you if I did. What's your opinion?"
The lawyers win by making us think that they are the only way of communicating between interested parties.
More or less, yes.
There's an old saying that you can measure the freedom of a society by counting the laws. (This isn't true of course, a society in which the only law is "Obey Leader and his Enforcers at all times" isn't terribly free, but there's a point to the saying anyway.)
Once you hit a critical threshold in the number of laws and complexity of the situations they govern, then it's impossible for any citizen, even any lawyer, to know the law, even just the areas of the law that affect "normal" day to day life. We've long since passed this point.
Under such a system, you may know of many individual specific things that are illegal, but in general when presented with an unkown situation, there's a moment of vertigo. You don't know how to act. Now in a free society with limited, known, laws, you'd always know what you can and can't do. There's a list out there of prohibited actions and their associated penalties. You know these actions, and as long as you aren't doing them, you're in the clear. However in a society with millions of laws, you can't think this way. You either have to carefully research an unfamiliar action or (much more commonly) just behave like everyone else is behaving and assume, since they aren't getting arrested, that you're acting in accordance with the law.
For example: last weekend I was in a state park, walking around off the trail. I came across an old, decaying building (probably pre-1900) and went in and explored, opening what doors an cupboards were left, looking into the exposed rooms, checking out the rusting fixtures etc. Was I in violation of some law or park rule? I'll never know. Perhaps if an official had come along, they could have given me some ticket. Hell, it could have been a $50,000 fine and a year in jail. I'd have contested, but if the law was on the books, ultimately I'd have no defense. Ignorance of the law is not an alibi.
Further complicating things, consider that there are tons of laws on the books that aren't enforced. Little things you'd never think of. Even things that make for amusing trivia. There are a whole lot of places in the country where using dirty language around a female is illegal. Pornography is still *very* illegal in the US. The supreme court basically decided that the law couldn't be enforced, but it's still on the books. It would only take a fall of the gavel in washington, and suddenly every adolescent boy with an internet connection is a felon.
Combine this with pervasive surveilance and you have a very scary situation. When most people, whether they know it or not are guilty of imprisonable crimes, and the government has eyes everywhere, then it doesn't take any actual voted-upon action for your society to transform swiftly and suddenly into a very different kind of place. No law has to change, and suddenly you're living in a very different society.
It's effectively illegal to leave your house without a government issued ID anymore. A friend of mine (a republican no less) was riding her bike during the 2004 RNC in New York City. She wasn't part of, or even close to the protests, but she looks "weird" she's young, she's not white, and she has tatoos. She ran a stopsign on her bike (pretty much standard practice for cyclists at 4-way stops) and got stopped by a cop. He would have let her go, but she didn't have an ID on her. As a result, she spent 18 hours sitting on a hard cement floor with her hands plastic-tied behind her, with no access to food, water, or legal counsel.
She never got her bike back, and her suit against the NYPD was thrown out of court, as apparently, they were acting 100% within the Patriot act.
When the Soviet Union was still around, some people (generally people losing a political debate) would say things like "So why don't you move to Russia where you'll get thrown in a cell for not carrying your goddamn papers."
And here we are.
Your comment pretty well illustrates why anything "VB" sends off all kinds of bells and whistles and alarms.
.net in general is that it encourages vendor lock-in. not to even go in to debating the specific vendor here, any language that's going to leave you up a creek when someone buys your employer out and tells you to move everything onto their machines which are not only on another OS, but on another hardware base alltogether should just simply not be used. For anything other than coding end-user applications and processor specific tasks (compilers, kernels...) you're asking for trouble if you're working in a language that isn't supported on many platforms. Really in any situation where you can write in a language that either has cross-platform support for interpereters or bytecode execution, you should go with that language even when there are large reasons to consider something else. VB, and .net in general, is badly future-vulnerable.
There's nothing wrong with VB per se. It's a decent language for prototyping and quick fixes. And it's flexibility is an asset that might make it a reasonable consideration for some large projects.
But as anyone who has ever written code for a living will tell you. There's not actually such a thing as a "quick hack" or "quick fix" and all too frequently, a prototype becomes a release product when the deadline hits. VB is a programming language for people who don't want to become real programmers. Now, there's nothing actually wrong with that... really. But the culture surrounding the language is one that encourages laziness, cut-and-paste solutions, and a general throw together whatever works mentality. Now if it were my hobby to sit around on message boards and debate the abstract advantages of language X over language Y, this would probably piss me off more than it does. In the real world, people who aren't software engineers have to write code.
The problem with VB seems to me to be that something in the culture strongly discourages people from learning the "right" way to do things after they've done the quick fix to get things in on time. VB developers, more so than those in just about any other language (well... maybe not Perl, but that's a smiliar problem that comes from a very different angle though) seem to be happy to leave unmaintainable code sitting around and never learning better practices to write better code in the future, to say nothing of fixing what they've done.
Of course there's a million counter examples. But there's still a highly disproportionate amount of ugly VB code in production environments out there, and someone will (and already does) have to maintain it. Other side of the coin: really learning your shit in VB.net will probably guarantee you work for the next two decades. Microsoft will move on, or their power will decline. The amateurs will learn a later version, or something new, and yet, there's still going to be this mountain of bad code doing work out there, and they're going to need to hire someone, and probably someone local, to fix it up and keep it running.
Same reason COBOL and FORTRAN can still land you a nice job.
Of course my other major objection to VB.net, and
Your response doesn't make sense. How exactly can anyone but the government change a law?
Part of the government's function is to protect the public domain. They've failed, badly, and in increasingly specatular fashion, but that doesn't mean that the job needs to be farmed out to self-interested parties.
The current IP laws are the result of private interest colluding with government. Many of the same companies that would likely replace NASA are the very same ones who *purchased* the current, broken, laws.
I'm a free-market liberal. One thing that constantly makes me scratch my head is the way that conservatives who wave the free-market banner consistantly ignore the fact that the vast and overwhelming majority of anti-trade laws are enacted not for the "welfare state" but at the bequest of and for the sole benefit of a small number of well-connected *private* interests.
It's a sad and in some ways fundamental inconsistency between democracy and free-market capitalism. The voters (or more likely their representatives) are quite likely to decide against the market, and this is their right in a democracy. This could possibly only be a minor problem if our electorate were more like (say) Canada's and had less tolerance for the open bribery of public officials. You can call campaign contributions "free-speach" all you want, but your ignoring reality if you don't admit that they most frequently result in direct government mangling of markets. Having a voting process that helped untie the legislature from private interest (of course it can never be completely "disinterested") would be the single biggest step our society could take toward a fair, free market economy.
In summary free-market != the government legislating with only a small number of pre-existing corporate interests in mind. Property is protected by law. The government and no one else can create and inforce laws. Incorrect laws can only be fixed by the government. When a systematic problem is resulting in many laws being poorly written, a fundamental problem is at work. IP is one of those cases, and the root problem is the bribery of our officials, on both sides of the isle -- both parties currently advocate an ugly and sloppy brand of socialism. Republicans don't spend a dime less on social programs than Democrats do. The only difference between the parties at this point is that the Democrats seem slightly more willing to actually pay the bills of their socialism. That and they aren't trying to enforce someone's religion on me. Until IP law is fixed, privatizing research - a potentially good idea, cannot help but be against the interests of science, as science (rather than "product development" or "marketing research") is conducted in the public domain -- it's the only way that peer review can occur. Thus, no thank you on private scientific space missions replacing government space missions.
That said, the moment I can afford to charter myself a private space tourist trip, I'm there.
The problem with having private industry do the smaller missions is that NASA's smaller missions are (in general) the good ones - less about publicity and symbolism and more about real and useful scientific research. Private industry tends to not publish its research in journals and will hold its findings in secret or, worse, in patent.
The primary thing to be gained by travel to space is intellectual property, which is why, until IP law gets the enormous overhaul it will need to properly balance return on investment and the good of the market as a whole, the privitization of space is a great big red flag for me.
Imagine if the Hubble images had been available only with a giant fee, and a license that more or less prevented further open academic research, the way that published findings from (for just one instance) the pharmaceutical industry do.
No, I'm a big believer in free interprize, but IP law is so fsck'd up at the moment, that sadly, I have to say I want to see as much research in the clumsy and innefficient hands of the government, if it means it will at least remain public domain.
... not to mention that a large amount of the ice in question (even more when you start counting Greenland, and northern Canada & Russia) isn't floating.
Ok, I'm about as far left as they come, but drop a *bit* of the hyperbole, eh?
The fact that:
1) You're free to make that kind of statement and,
2) There is an opposition party to elect who could oppose Mr. Bush
Mean he isn't a Dictator. My girlfriend has two coworkers who lived in China under Mao. We have no idea.
Bush is a shitty president with some damn dangerous leanings and scary ideas as to the rights and powers of the executive branch, but he's no dictator.
Halo 2 for the PC will be delayed until 2010 at least.
Vista: the new Daikatana.
Google Desktop - Boxed edition, $49.99, with install/live DVD, Google manual, and 1 year customer support.
Charge a small fee for OEMs selling their computers with the "Google Supported" logo.
Google as default homepage, with pre-installed google applications. Google gets to develop for a client that is completely open to it, none of the B.S. that comes with writing software on a closed platform.
Frankly I'd love to see this. If my mom, friends, and siblings were all on an easy to use Linux distribution (and thus installing applications only from a package repository rather than downloading whatever free app has the biggest flashing banner) my life would be many times better.
No more Outlook worms, no more closed Office files, no more...
I mean just imagine what it would mean for the workings of the market if a big chunk of home users were on an open & free platform? If the majority of the software on the desktop was GPL?
My favorite would be no more 90% IE users on the web. Those of us out there who write DHTML have been waiting for this since that dark day in oh... was it 97 or 98 when IE 3 became the standard browser for AOL, and suddenly your job involved writing documents that you know would be read by BROKEN software. Well it's almost 10 years later and the damn thing is still a broken standards incompliant mess, and I still have to write around its bullshit instead of using the nicer CSS2 features. When the IE userbase becomes small enough that I can start just posting an "Internet Explorer is broken, please download a working browser to properly view this webpage" disclaimer, I will be a happy happy man.
What you're arguing is that commercial news broadcasters are no more responsible for the truth of their commentators' opinions than the WWF is for the truth of what they depict. Unfortunately this seems to be the case, as the omnipresent opinion and argument shows give them the out of "well it's just what so and so said, it wasn't *reporting*. But then why are we accepting this crap as news? And by we, I mean those of you who keep their ratings so goddamned high. I stopped watching TV news in the 2000 election when I noticed that I'd gone for over a week without seeing an actual instance of reporting.
Michael Moore, while occasionally interviewed, is not a regular commentator on any television network that claims to be "News," he is not being presented. He's an editorialist, and furthermore, if you investigate, his fact-checking is quite good (you won't find more factual errors - that is errors in statistics, dates, names etc. in one of his movies than in a typical issue of Time or US News), and if you're listening critically, he does make it pretty apparent what are facts and what are opinions and generalizations. The same can not be said for Coulter. Hell, The Daily Show, which openly calls itself fake news, does a better job than many TV News talking heads of letting the viewer know when they're being factual and when they're not.
To get the liberal equivalent of Coulter, you need to read opinion pieces in Indymedia or similar shrill screeds. Of course, nobody is validating their claims by placing them on national "news."
i doubt there are more than one or two 10^12 digit *mersenne* primes, i'll be enjoying root access to your system shortly...
Doubtful.
The new chips will be out in more machines than just Apple. Why does Apple not release the mini on lower spec processors? Well first off, just because they didn't announce it the *day* they revealed their first Intel machines, doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. Second off, they aren't in the bottom-end business in general. The mini is a transition machine for geeks. It's meant to make OS X appeal to the homebrew crowd, who don't account for many sales, but do generate a lot of buzz. It's an important product, but it's not their top priority. Secondly, the mini is a little engineering feat. There is a very much non-zero cost in assembling a new one and testing it. Their first two machines seem to address the biggest hole in their product line (badly lagging top-end laptop) and the most friendly product for the early adopter crowd (medium cost & big cool factor iMac)
Apple also wants to avoid getting mired in the jargon and infinitely fractured product lines of the PC world. I imagine their negotiations with Intel are a big reason that Yonah isn't being called Pentium-Y etc. I doubt they will ever have more than two processor families going in their active line of computers (2 laptops, 2 desktops + eMac, mini, server)
Thinking that Apple is overly concerned about piracy ignores the company's history of not using any kind of restriction or guard against software copying. Most apple applications STILL can be copied from one computer on a network to another, simply by dragging the application icon. No apple product has ever had a CD Key or anything similar. They're aware of their market and demographics. They sell to professionals and high-end users who don't mind buying software. It's the same reason they can drop support for old OS X releases the moment the new one comes out. Their market doesn't mind paying, and it enables them to push new technologies with a much greater ease than if they had to maintain the roughly 5-year backwards compatibility that Microsoft does. The first time Apple ever had ANY copy control on anything they've done is when they started getting in bed with the media industry. That just goes with that territory, but their power over Apple isn't so great as to affect the design of their computing systems, otherwise you'd have seen much more significant changes to the way things like Appletalk and Safari handle files by now.
Likewise, try to imagine the type of person that would be downloading a torrent of OS X, burning it to a CD, and installing on unsupported and undocumented hardware. That person is not a potential apple customer. They're clearly not willing to fork over the Apple premium (yes it does exist, Apple has nothing in competition with $300 and $400 desktop with monitor and $600 laptops, even though those give performance roughly equivalent -- where it matters to that market anyway -- to the lowest end ibook and the emac and mini) so why should Apple care? Their tech support will hang up as soon as the "customer" says they are on non-apple hardware, it's only a small core of nerds looking to brag about accomplishing something illicit that will be doing this. Mom, Joe Dormroom, Suzy Designer, and Vic Corporate would never bother.
Apple's entire market strategy is about maintaining a large niche with heavy profit margins. I really doubt they want to dominate the PC world. If Apple had Microsoft's market share, they'd have to do things very differently (not for the least of reasons that many of their practices such as hardware exclusivity and software bundling would make Microsoft look angelic in comparason if OS X were the "default" operating system of the masses.
If they *are* making significant product design decisions based on the fear of OS X getting onto some Dell somewhere, then they're fools.
I don't think Apple is very paranoid about OS X winding up on a few Dells. They're the worlds only authorized retailer of OS X, so you couldn't start a legitimate mac-clone business. And given that 90% of the home market never installs a new OS on a purchased machine, and 100% of the corporate market uses at least some degree of vender support, they aren't likely to lose much hardware market share over a few clever people doing installs on completely un-supported hardware. The bittorrent crowd is unlikely to spend even the $400-$500 on a mac mini anyway, since there are even cheaper beige boxes out there, and the mini doesn't allow for 1337 upgrades.
These releases are for the early adopter Mac loyalists. The processors are in the two sexiest products (the white plastic iBook and big clunky tower are less appealing designs)
Alternate thought: the new powermac makes practical sense, since it's by far the most overdue product, and the iMac makes sense since it's the cheapest way to push a headline technology into eager brand fans' hands.
The iBooks are probably too low a profit margin to make up for the cost of brand new engineering, and their reliability-dependant corporate market relies too heavily on Powermac towers to migrate those first (likewise, expect their servers to be the last to make the switch.)
I generally like Apple and OS X a great deal, but I'd definitely wait for the second generation here. It'll come down in price, up in power, and no matter what Apple claims, and Apple edited and approved statements by developers claim, there's no way that the migration to a completely new processor is going to go off without a hitch. If you've got spare change and want to be first on the block, go ahead, but if you're purchasing for practical considerations and are on anything resembling a budget, wait.
All of that said, I'm excited by what I've read about the new chip. It's definitely in line with Apple's general philosophy of designing for all-around usability and flexibility rather than just a small number of testosterone parameters like meaningless graphics benchmarks.
Also, this virtually guarantees that nearly all games will be released for Apple, which would be great if EA hadn't murdered the PC Gaming industry.
For a lot of people, the free part of Linux matters as much as the Unix-based. It's understandable that Apple keeps most of its software closed, but I do wish they'd stop using hardware vendors who don't open up their specs. Anyone who's tried to install Linux on a recent iBook or Powerbook and had to deal with the wireless card can attest to the fact that big-A isn't always being free software friendly.
Also, OS X is entirely too easy to use to be as geeky as it gets. As geeky as it gets is coding by pencil, hand translating to machine language and viewing the output on a dot-matrix printout.
That said, at work we are entirely standardized around OS X servers and terminals, and I have never seen a network so easy to maintain.
Dual boot?
One little two little three little...
From the article it seems like an interesting solution to a specific problem. Imagine the way running works in bipeds, you create imbalance so you're always falling forward and catching yourself. It's a good way of maintaining momentum over rough terrain.
Agreed agreed agreed.
It reminds me of the 90s when it seemed like everyone was jumping on silly clever domains. (It's been a bit of fun watching the empty business plans sitting at www.com over the years, and cnet still has com.com)
Yeah, from all the complaining and naysaying going on in this discussion, you'd think that the only things Lego sells are Bionicle and Harry Potter. They still have a very good lineup of Technic, city, and box-o-generic brick sets (alas there's nothing really like the old space, pirate, and castle sets)
Why do people not realize that these products exist?
Because they don't sell. Lego advertises the licensed products and puts them on their limited shelf space at places like Wal-Mart because those are the fast-sellers.
The worst things that ever happened to childhood was when they figured out how to really successfully market things to kids as well as they do to adults. Kids are much more impressionable and easily manipulated. Advertising to kids is really kind of messed up if you think about it.