Its a tech site. Go visit businessweek or something.
If you want my opinion, 25 years old is not experienced enough to do it because it's not experienced enough to realise its a bad idea.
Don't think I was trolling. If I was I would have been a lot more forthright (and you would have ignored me).
I'm not convicting them, but lets face it, most are guilty of file sharing, I don't know many people who've been using the internet for a while who haven't downloaded at least 1 MP3 illegally (this is not an invitation to reply with a lot of 'I haven't' posts).
The thing is, its really hard to prove, which is why the RIAA's cases are mostly rubbish. In the UK at least though if you copy a CD, even if its just on to your iPod to listen to, you are breaking the law, never mind downloading.
Still don't see what any of this has to do with the FSF though. IMHO, DRM is self defeating, it will die of its own accord (actually).
In all honesty, why? Admittedly, the FSF is more of a political organisation than a technical one, but why are they interested in defending file sharers? They should be promoting free software development with that money, not attempting to get people off (the admittedly ridiculous) fines imposed by the US courts the got because they were too lazy and / or tight to go down the record store and pay money for the (admittedly overpriced) music.
I quote "The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs.". Thats computer programs, not MP3z. FFS, people donate money to the FSF for their work, if I had and found out they were spending it on this I'm be pretty miffed.
As a mac fanboy (typing this in my Macbook Pro), I can tell you that IMHO, being locked to only one network is not the problem with the iPhone, the problems are:
- Only 8Gb of storage - that is not enough for all my music so I'll still have to carry my iPod around - No 3G - whats the point of putting Safari on it if your internet is slow - No 3rd party apps - I regularly run TomTom mobile on my N70 - Too expensive £280 + an 18 month contract is crazy (although you expect that from Apple). - The Sony Erricson w960i, which has better features and will probably be cheaper.
Fair point, but there really aren't that many applications tha fit into that category (mainly scientific I would imagine).
If you develop in Java, as I do, this is not an issue anyway because your application will run on Mac OS or Linux without any changes. Obviously Java is not suitable for all applications, especially in the scientific community who have vast amounts of fortran they would like to reuse but as someone who develops webapps most of the time, its never been a problem for me.
A major reason why everything just works on Mac OS is because they only have a limited subset of hardware to support.
My reasons for using a Mac are simple, I don't have to set it up, my hardware just works, it has MS Office for work as well as being a unix platform for running my code in the right environment. Also the GUI works well, simple things like expose and spotlight are really useful day to day.
Package management is also nice, in most cases installing an app is a case of dragging it into applications and to uninstall you just drag it into the bin. Where setup programs are required that are pretty straighforward and consistent. Windows could learn a lot from this, most Windows installer are overcomplex and unnecessary. I really don't understand why having an MSI installer package is part of the Vista logo requirements.
That would depend on what country you're in. Ripping is definitely illegal in the UK, unless you have a license that expressly permits it. The law has been reviewed however and should be changed soon as its never enforced.
I'm surprised nobody has commented on O2 as a phone provider. I've been a customer of O2, Vodafone and one2one/T-Mobile and I'd have to say O2 were easily the worst of the three in my experience. I think if the rumours turn out to be true I would be put off the iPhone by having to have an O2 contract.
What if (say) Microsoft was including some Apple products in Vista - and hadn't responded to Apple's questions for 22 days. Would you be saying "Calm down, give Microsoft some more time to seek legal advice"? The same thing. 22 days is not a long time for legal people. Thats a whole different siuation anyway because nobody here is asking Paralles to recall all their software and pay a billlion dollar fine. All we're asking is that the release the source to a few libraries.
Well, I can see why that would upset Parallels fans - but please explain wtf wine should care. Because that is the whole point of open source. When you LGPL (or GPL) something you're sharing th develpment with the the world and allloing anyone to contribute. This is exactly wha Parallels are doing. This is great for wine because they get a team of paid developers fixing bugs and adding new features to their code which can be encorporated back into wine. If we piss Parallels off over this then they'll ditch wine and write their own proprietry version.
Remember, at no point have they said they're not planning on releasing the code, but companies have obligations to shareholders and legal hoops to jump through and these things can take time.
They've certainly pulled that trick before. Where are:
* MS Core fonts for the web * IE for Mac / UNIX * Windows Media Player for Mac
Microsoft's idea of cross platform is do it till its popular and then EOL everything but Windows. The only reason they're doing this at all is that Flash video is killing WMV.
As a porofessional developer, I find swearing at the monitor and ranting at my coworkers to be pretty effective and as yet, it hasn't got me fired. I have recently joined an XP shop (the company formally known as Connextra) so I could now try the extreme approach you describe.
If you're not flamebaiting then you probably want a serious answer. My guess is twofold:
- Mac has a culture of charging small amounts of money for software released commercially rather than open sourcing things (e.g. TextMate). This dates to before the OSX days.
- People writing code for Macs tend to use Cocoa because its the easiest way to do it and this doesn't port easily to other systems.
Somebody within Apple (strongly rumored to be Jobs) who has a lot of power has exceptionally high standards for design an usability, and this is why we get iPod+iTunes from Apple (killer app - even my little sister can rip CDs onto it) and Media Player+Some strange OLED WMA player from others.
Thats the key, somebody who will say no to an average product which would make a fair amount of money until its even better. If they lose that, they're the same as everyone else and they can't command premium prices anymore.
Queries per second is a meaningless number. It depends on what the queries are doing and how much data you have. Single row selects on primary keys are cheap, 1000 rows accross 8 tables with an order by is less so, it really depends what you're doing.
This story has been annoying me all day. Fibre does indeed have a much greater upper limit, so this whole story is complete fud. The following is a direct quote from Professor Andrew Tanenbaum (and he knows stuff) from his book 'Computer Networks' (3rd Edition, Prentice-Hall 1996):
"With current fibre technilogy, the achievable bandwidth is in excess of 50, 000 Gbps (50Tbps) and many people are looking very hard for better materials. The current practical limit of about 1Gbps is due to our inability to convert between electrical and optical signals any faster."
This was written in 1996. We've come a long way since then. Copper is simply not in the game.
Slashdot Mirror
guest@goosh.org:/web> translate en fr dog | search translating "dog | search" from "en" to "fr": "chien | Rechercher" Doesn't quite work as it should.
Its a tech site. Go visit businessweek or something. If you want my opinion, 25 years old is not experienced enough to do it because it's not experienced enough to realise its a bad idea.
Doesn't sound like a sustainable pace.
The Nvidia official drivers were pretty good last time I checked.
No to mention the keyboard freeze bug that appears to be affecting MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/21/macbook_macbook_pro_owners_suffer_keyboard_freezing_with_leopard.html
Don't think I was trolling. If I was I would have been a lot more forthright (and you would have ignored me).
I'm not convicting them, but lets face it, most are guilty of file sharing, I don't know many people who've been using the internet for a while who haven't downloaded at least 1 MP3 illegally (this is not an invitation to reply with a lot of 'I haven't' posts).
The thing is, its really hard to prove, which is why the RIAA's cases are mostly rubbish. In the UK at least though if you copy a CD, even if its just on to your iPod to listen to, you are breaking the law, never mind downloading.
Still don't see what any of this has to do with the FSF though. IMHO, DRM is self defeating, it will die of its own accord (actually).
In all honesty, why? Admittedly, the FSF is more of a political organisation than a technical one, but why are they interested in defending file sharers? They should be promoting free software development with that money, not attempting to get people off (the admittedly ridiculous) fines imposed by the US courts the got because they were too lazy and / or tight to go down the record store and pay money for the (admittedly overpriced) music.
I quote "The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs.". Thats computer programs, not MP3z. FFS, people donate money to the FSF for their work, if I had and found out they were spending it on this I'm be pretty miffed.
Right, tin hat on...
As a mac fanboy (typing this in my Macbook Pro), I can tell you that IMHO, being locked to only one network is not the problem with the iPhone, the problems are:
- Only 8Gb of storage - that is not enough for all my music so I'll still have to carry my iPod around
- No 3G - whats the point of putting Safari on it if your internet is slow
- No 3rd party apps - I regularly run TomTom mobile on my N70
- Too expensive £280 + an 18 month contract is crazy (although you expect that from Apple).
- The Sony Erricson w960i, which has better features and will probably be cheaper.
So no iPhone for me.
Speak for yourself. My parents never had a basement.
Or even Slashdot posts?
Cos I don't know what a Space compnay is.
Fair point, but there really aren't that many applications tha fit into that category (mainly scientific I would imagine).
If you develop in Java, as I do, this is not an issue anyway because your application will run on Mac OS or Linux without any changes. Obviously Java is not suitable for all applications, especially in the scientific community who have vast amounts of fortran they would like to reuse but as someone who develops webapps most of the time, its never been a problem for me.
A major reason why everything just works on Mac OS is because they only have a limited subset of hardware to support.
My reasons for using a Mac are simple, I don't have to set it up, my hardware just works, it has MS Office for work as well as being a unix platform for running my code in the right environment. Also the GUI works well, simple things like expose and spotlight are really useful day to day.
Package management is also nice, in most cases installing an app is a case of dragging it into applications and to uninstall you just drag it into the bin. Where setup programs are required that are pretty straighforward and consistent. Windows could learn a lot from this, most Windows installer are overcomplex and unnecessary. I really don't understand why having an MSI installer package is part of the Vista logo requirements.
That would depend on what country you're in. Ripping is definitely illegal in the UK, unless you have a license that expressly permits it. The law has been reviewed however and should be changed soon as its never enforced.
I'm surprised nobody has commented on O2 as a phone provider. I've been a customer of O2, Vodafone and one2one/T-Mobile and I'd have to say O2 were easily the worst of the three in my experience. I think if the rumours turn out to be true I would be put off the iPhone by having to have an O2 contract.
I don't think that was what he was asking.
Cringely is starting to lose it, I think.
I dont recall him ever having it in the first place.
They've certainly pulled that trick before. Where are:
* MS Core fonts for the web
* IE for Mac / UNIX
* Windows Media Player for Mac
Microsoft's idea of cross platform is do it till its popular and then EOL everything but Windows. The only reason they're doing this at all is that Flash video is killing WMV.
As a porofessional developer, I find swearing at the monitor and ranting at my coworkers to be pretty effective and as yet, it hasn't got me fired. I have recently joined an XP shop (the company formally known as Connextra) so I could now try the extreme approach you describe.
If you're not flamebaiting then you probably want a serious answer. My guess is twofold:
- Mac has a culture of charging small amounts of money for software released commercially rather than open sourcing things (e.g. TextMate). This dates to before the OSX days.
- People writing code for Macs tend to use Cocoa because its the easiest way to do it and this doesn't port easily to other systems.
Somebody within Apple (strongly rumored to be Jobs) who has a lot of power has exceptionally high standards for design an usability, and this is why we get iPod+iTunes from Apple (killer app - even my little sister can rip CDs onto it) and Media Player+Some strange OLED WMA player from others.
Thats the key, somebody who will say no to an average product which would make a fair amount of money until its even better. If they lose that, they're the same as everyone else and they can't command premium prices anymore.
Queries per second is a meaningless number. It depends on what the queries are doing and how much data you have. Single row selects on primary keys are cheap, 1000 rows accross 8 tables with an order by is less so, it really depends what you're doing.
I think you've been misinformed.
My powerbook has had its RAM upgraded and its HD replaced and neither of those parts came from Apple.
This story has been annoying me all day. Fibre does indeed have a much greater upper limit, so this whole story is complete fud. The following is a direct quote from Professor Andrew Tanenbaum (and he knows stuff) from his book 'Computer Networks' (3rd Edition, Prentice-Hall 1996):
"With current fibre technilogy, the achievable bandwidth is in excess of 50, 000 Gbps (50Tbps) and many people are looking very hard for better materials. The current practical limit of about 1Gbps is due to our inability to convert between electrical and optical signals any faster."
This was written in 1996. We've come a long way since then. Copper is simply not in the game.