Ah, but as far as I know, no American ever wrote a book-length poem on the subject of a VW Beetle. On the other hand, a certain Brit named William Cowper...
Begun in the summer of 1783 and completed by the autumn of 1784. First published in 1785. Asked by Cowper to suggest a subject for a poem, his friend Lady Austen submitted that he take a lighter subject than had been his custom, and facetiously set him the "task" of composing one about a sofa. His earlier poetry had, for the most part, been written in rhymed couplets, but The Task is Cowper's major work in blank verse. The poem is divided into six books, and comprises 5,185 lines. Starting with a mock-Miltonic narrative of the evolution of the sofa, Cowper soon turned to rural descriptions, the pleasures of gardening, the joys of domestic life, and other related topics. In addition, the poem is remarkable for its numerous meditative, reflective, and intensely moral didactic passages as the poet sets down, more or less at random, his comments upon the social, religious, and economic evils of his day. He had suffered throughout his life from severe melancholia, and in the early 70's had been close to insanity.
Bill Gates's money was made on the basis of his business model, not the software in and of itself. Two things happened: 1. he got a licensing fee from every piece of IBM and clone hardware - so that chunk of his money came from hardware sales, not direct software sales - it was a captive market, and so isn't comprable to a putative OS X business plan, and 2. he came up with some brilliant marketing ideas for MS Office - the Office bundle itself being the key one - while his competitors made serious mis-steps (e.g., WordPerfect 9 was a dog). A question (maybe the answer will reinforce your argument, but I'd be surprised): if you take MS entirely out of the equation, which makes more money: software or hardware? Who has more money, Dell or the #2 profitable software company?
Good point. You'd have to track down the culprit and fine him; and you'd probably have to have some kind of insurance system to resolve that. But yeah, a good counterargument to the feasibility of a nano-payment system.
Windows has Cygwin,, as well as AT&T's commercial Unix environment. Linux/BSD have WINE, to run the Windows apps. I admit, that might not exactly be "native", but it's no less "native" than running Unix apps under OSX.
If you think that running X on Cygwin is comparable to running X on OS X, or that running Office on Wine is comparable to running Office v.X (which is a Carbon and therefore native app) on OS X, you haven't spent much time comparing. OS X is a BSD with a Mach kernel. Cygwin is a POSIX environment running on a non-POSIX operating system. Wine is a very, very, very good but nowhere near complete reimplementation of the Windows APIs for Linux/x86. When you run FCP, Office v.X, Quicken, etc. on the Mac, you are running COTS apps native, not with a reverse-engineered API that almost but not exactly replicates the characteristics of the OS the software was intended for. When you run XEphem, or Gimp, or ssh on OS X (which by the way comes with ssh and sshd, with emacs, with tsch, with gcc, with apache and samba, and to which you can easily add bash, lynx, wget, etc.), you are running on libraries that were written as part of the operating system, not add-ons. I can't call either Cygwin or Wine "as" native as running UNIX in OS X - it's not something that Windows was intended to do or that LInux was intended to do in the way OS X was intended to run the things it does. Key thing is you can expect the average OS X box to have certain UNIX features, which you can't expect on the average Windows box, and there are COTS programs written with the Mac in mind that perform functions you can't find in COTS software for Linux or the other BSDs. It's the best of both worlds argument.
And the hardware is pretty slick on its own.
You can with a lot of thought and effort configure a dual-boot Debian/XP Alienware box that I would admit is probably superior in many ways (speed, software availability, overall functionality) to anything Apple sells - though I'd be surprised if you found it sitting on a shelf configured that way for you by the manufacturer. And you'll have to dual-boot to get the benefits of the *nix and the consumer OS, which you won't have to do on the Apple.
I'd say that the main arguments in favor of using FreeBSD and Linux for a primary geek desktop are philosophical/ideological, vocational, or aesthetic: either you do it because you have a dedication to the ideal of free software, or because you enjoy working to improve the software all the time, or because you like the incredible amount of control free operating systems give you over every detail of your work environment. I can respect all those reasons, but they don't add up to superiority in any absolute sense over OS X. There are things OS X can do that they can't do as easily - not yet, anyway.
(Admittedly, I think Office v.X is overrated in comparison to Office for Windows, which, like it or not, is the better product; but Office for Mac is a far different experience than emulation via Wine.)
The "move" bit was supposed to be funny. I was trying to make the point that because you don't live near an Apple retailer, doesn't mean that everyone is in that situation.
/me splits hairs: It's as good a definition of "consumer desktop" as any I can think of. Alienware trumpets its products as "custom built," so that is an interesting part of the issue.
I would like to see some benchmarks using the same OS and the same software, though - saying that Word for Windows is faster than Word for Mac, given how little in the way of resources MS has put into Word for Mac lately (still no RTL support, no real Unicode support, etc. - stuff that matters to at least half the planet that uses languages that really need to have Unicode support to work properly), isn't a good test. Neither is Premiere, for reasons other people have mentioned. Real benchmarks for the processors would be to use Debian with 64-bit code and run software that we know is about equally optimized for both platforms.
On the other hand, there aren't many malls that carry Apples, either. I know of one mall in my area that has the so-bright-it-makes-your-eyes-hurt Apple Store.
Well, you ought to move, then. There are three Apple stores within 30 minutes of me, as well as 4 CompUSAs that sell G5s, and a Microcenter, and that's not counting the handful of Apple resellers that have survived Apple's retail anchluss. I've never seen a 64-bit AMD box at a retail store.
The Alienware boxes do look good, for Wintels. If I wanted to spend that kind of money on an x86 box, I'd consider them, though I wonder how their service compares to Apple's (there's a point at which you no longer want to have to tinker with your own computer to get it working right, and just want to get work done). But the quality of the Mac boxes has improved so much since the NeXTicization of Apple that I haven't been tempted.
Where else can you find an OS that can run a great video editing package like Final Cut, can run Photoshop, etc., and can also run all of your favorite *nix apps, natively?
Right now, OS X beats Linux's best desktop. That won't be true forever - just one more reason for a big enough hard drive to dual boot - but it's true right now. And as for Windows XP, all it really has going for it at the moment is a gaggle of software.
Exactly. Show me where I can buy an AMD64-based home computer at the mall, which gets the same kind of results as we're seeing in these benchmarks, and then you can say that you've beaten Apple.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
a "pay to send, get paid to receive" model. Think of it this way: you get a particular quota of outgoing and incoming email bandwidth per month. For each email you send, you pay $0.001 per recipient copy. For each you receive, you receive $0.001. For non-commercial users, the cost would cancel out. For commercial users, it would be part of the cost of doing business, and would still be cheaper than direct mail (1/370th the cost to send, and no paper, envelope costs, and far less labor). The only people it would really kill would be spammers.
They HAVE ported OS X to x86, they simply won't release it, because within months of releasing it, Apple dies the death of a thousand cuts. Apple makes all of their money from hardware, not software. The people who want Apple buy Apple boxes anyway. Maybe Apple would double, or even triple, their OS marketshare overnight by releasing on x86; but their hardware marketshare would drop like a stone.
Here's a question for you: why don't you switch from Intel to the G5? I can tell you that my single-processor G5 beats the pants off my P4. The reason you don't want to switch is probably cost: Apples cost more than Dells. But that's how Apple makes their money, that's their business model. A software-only Apple couldn't survive.
NAIAL (nor am I a lawyer), but it is possible (any lawyer want to answer this as an Anonymous Coward?) that the simple fact of being sued under the DMCA will allow him to include the unconstitutionality of the DMCA in his defense, if not at trial at least at the appellate level (before he actually has to pay any money beyond the expensive court costs).
The EFF and ALCU should offer to pay his lawyer bills.
You just wanted to see it so bad that it magically appeared on your screen only.
Then I suppose I'm just imagining
this.
Using the word "politically correct" is not some magical talisman that makes a racist comment acceptable "dissent." And you'd better learn how to read threads that jump up and down your score threshold.
I find it ever so amusing that all of my interlocutors in this discussion are posting as Anonymous Coward while I'm risking karma on it.
I'm an idiot because I called someone a racist because he said he'd use a $1 coin if they didn't have an Indian or a "Negro" on it? In other words, he WON'T use a coin with a "Negro" or an "Indian" on it. That pretty much sounds like the definition of racist to me.
Ah, so you're a racist, then. Hopefully you will soon be appropriately modded -1 troll. Sacagewea was very significant to the Lewis and Clark expedition, as a guide for the earlier part, and a translator (sometimes, I think, one in a double-translation team) for the later part. And there are in fact no African Americans on US coins, though I think Thurgood Marshall would be a good choice. But since you're so damned ignorant I'm surprised you know how read, let alone how to use the go button on your Internet Explorer toolbar (racists don't use Linux or Mozilla; I think they're prevented by one of the clauses in the GPL, after all), so I can't say it surprises me that you didn't know there were no African Americans on US currency or coins.
We have had $2 bills. No one used them. We do have $1 coins, actually I like them quite a lot, though I wish they'd kept the Apollo 11 seal on the back from the old Ike and Susan B. dollars. No one uses them, either, except as tokens in roadside vending machines at rest stops (along the interstate highways) and a few other specialized locations. You can, of course, and I have, but statistically it's quite rare for someone to use one as everyday currency.
Pillars of Hercules: the name refers to Gibraltar and one or two mountains around Ceuta. The ancient Greeks believed that Hercules had set up the mountains as a warning not to pass out of the Med into the Ocean.
As far as the strength or weakness of the dollar or euro, the euro has all the benefits of the mark and all the liabilities of the lira going for it. Right now it seems to be in a mark phase; eventually we may see it hit a lira phase.
With OS X and Windows, "Point releases" refers not to the second number (the one after the first point), but the third. As you probably know, if you know what AIX is.
1. You're talking about RedHat 9, which is based upon Linux 2.4, not Linux 9, which won't come out until some time in the 2010s or even 2020s.
2. Some Linux developers at SGI and IBM may, MAY have had access to Sys V code under a license from SCO.
3. Meaningless. They're not talking about drivers.
4. No, actually SCO's trying to be enough of a pest for either MS to buy them out to continue the pestering, or IBM to buy them out and shut them up.
God help anyone who 1. speaks English above an 8th grade level, and 2. actually had to look for the origin of "To be or not to be"
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing, end them.
Slashdot Mirror
Begun in the summer of 1783 and completed by the autumn of 1784. First published in 1785. Asked by Cowper to suggest a subject for a poem, his friend Lady Austen submitted that he take a lighter subject than had been his custom, and facetiously set him the "task" of composing one about a sofa. His earlier poetry had, for the most part, been written in rhymed couplets, but The Task is Cowper's major work in blank verse. The poem is divided into six books, and comprises 5,185 lines. Starting with a mock-Miltonic narrative of the evolution of the sofa, Cowper soon turned to rural descriptions, the pleasures of gardening, the joys of domestic life, and other related topics. In addition, the poem is remarkable for its numerous meditative, reflective, and intensely moral didactic passages as the poet sets down, more or less at random, his comments upon the social, religious, and economic evils of his day. He had suffered throughout his life from severe melancholia, and in the early 70's had been close to insanity.
Bill Gates's money was made on the basis of his business model, not the software in and of itself. Two things happened: 1. he got a licensing fee from every piece of IBM and clone hardware - so that chunk of his money came from hardware sales, not direct software sales - it was a captive market, and so isn't comprable to a putative OS X business plan, and 2. he came up with some brilliant marketing ideas for MS Office - the Office bundle itself being the key one - while his competitors made serious mis-steps (e.g., WordPerfect 9 was a dog). A question (maybe the answer will reinforce your argument, but I'd be surprised): if you take MS entirely out of the equation, which makes more money: software or hardware? Who has more money, Dell or the #2 profitable software company?
Good point. You'd have to track down the culprit and fine him; and you'd probably have to have some kind of insurance system to resolve that. But yeah, a good counterargument to the feasibility of a nano-payment system.
Windows has Cygwin,, as well as AT&T's commercial Unix environment. Linux/BSD have WINE, to run the Windows apps. I admit, that might not exactly be "native", but it's no less "native" than running Unix apps under OSX.
If you think that running X on Cygwin is comparable to running X on OS X, or that running Office on Wine is comparable to running Office v.X (which is a Carbon and therefore native app) on OS X, you haven't spent much time comparing. OS X is a BSD with a Mach kernel. Cygwin is a POSIX environment running on a non-POSIX operating system. Wine is a very, very, very good but nowhere near complete reimplementation of the Windows APIs for Linux/x86. When you run FCP, Office v.X, Quicken, etc. on the Mac, you are running COTS apps native, not with a reverse-engineered API that almost but not exactly replicates the characteristics of the OS the software was intended for. When you run XEphem, or Gimp, or ssh on OS X (which by the way comes with ssh and sshd, with emacs, with tsch, with gcc, with apache and samba, and to which you can easily add bash, lynx, wget, etc.), you are running on libraries that were written as part of the operating system, not add-ons. I can't call either Cygwin or Wine "as" native as running UNIX in OS X - it's not something that Windows was intended to do or that LInux was intended to do in the way OS X was intended to run the things it does. Key thing is you can expect the average OS X box to have certain UNIX features, which you can't expect on the average Windows box, and there are COTS programs written with the Mac in mind that perform functions you can't find in COTS software for Linux or the other BSDs. It's the best of both worlds argument.
And the hardware is pretty slick on its own. You can with a lot of thought and effort configure a dual-boot Debian/XP Alienware box that I would admit is probably superior in many ways (speed, software availability, overall functionality) to anything Apple sells - though I'd be surprised if you found it sitting on a shelf configured that way for you by the manufacturer. And you'll have to dual-boot to get the benefits of the *nix and the consumer OS, which you won't have to do on the Apple.
I'd say that the main arguments in favor of using FreeBSD and Linux for a primary geek desktop are philosophical/ideological, vocational, or aesthetic: either you do it because you have a dedication to the ideal of free software, or because you enjoy working to improve the software all the time, or because you like the incredible amount of control free operating systems give you over every detail of your work environment. I can respect all those reasons, but they don't add up to superiority in any absolute sense over OS X. There are things OS X can do that they can't do as easily - not yet, anyway.
(Admittedly, I think Office v.X is overrated in comparison to Office for Windows, which, like it or not, is the better product; but Office for Mac is a far different experience than emulation via Wine.)
The "move" bit was supposed to be funny. I was trying to make the point that because you don't live near an Apple retailer, doesn't mean that everyone is in that situation.
/me splits hairs: It's as good a definition of "consumer desktop" as any I can think of. Alienware trumpets its products as "custom built," so that is an interesting part of the issue.
I would like to see some benchmarks using the same OS and the same software, though - saying that Word for Windows is faster than Word for Mac, given how little in the way of resources MS has put into Word for Mac lately (still no RTL support, no real Unicode support, etc. - stuff that matters to at least half the planet that uses languages that really need to have Unicode support to work properly), isn't a good test. Neither is Premiere, for reasons other people have mentioned. Real benchmarks for the processors would be to use Debian with 64-bit code and run software that we know is about equally optimized for both platforms.
On the other hand, there aren't many malls that carry Apples, either. I know of one mall in my area that has the so-bright-it-makes-your-eyes-hurt Apple Store.
Well, you ought to move, then. There are three Apple stores within 30 minutes of me, as well as 4 CompUSAs that sell G5s, and a Microcenter, and that's not counting the handful of Apple resellers that have survived Apple's retail anchluss. I've never seen a 64-bit AMD box at a retail store.
The Alienware boxes do look good, for Wintels. If I wanted to spend that kind of money on an x86 box, I'd consider them, though I wonder how their service compares to Apple's (there's a point at which you no longer want to have to tinker with your own computer to get it working right, and just want to get work done). But the quality of the Mac boxes has improved so much since the NeXTicization of Apple that I haven't been tempted.
And why should I even want OS X?
Where else can you find an OS that can run a great video editing package like Final Cut, can run Photoshop, etc., and can also run all of your favorite *nix apps, natively?
Right now, OS X beats Linux's best desktop. That won't be true forever - just one more reason for a big enough hard drive to dual boot - but it's true right now. And as for Windows XP, all it really has going for it at the moment is a gaggle of software.
Exactly. Show me where I can buy an AMD64-based home computer at the mall, which gets the same kind of results as we're seeing in these benchmarks, and then you can say that you've beaten Apple.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
a "pay to send, get paid to receive" model. Think of it this way: you get a particular quota of outgoing and incoming email bandwidth per month. For each email you send, you pay $0.001 per recipient copy. For each you receive, you receive $0.001. For non-commercial users, the cost would cancel out. For commercial users, it would be part of the cost of doing business, and would still be cheaper than direct mail (1/370th the cost to send, and no paper, envelope costs, and far less labor). The only people it would really kill would be spammers.
They HAVE ported OS X to x86, they simply won't release it, because within months of releasing it, Apple dies the death of a thousand cuts. Apple makes all of their money from hardware, not software. The people who want Apple buy Apple boxes anyway. Maybe Apple would double, or even triple, their OS marketshare overnight by releasing on x86; but their hardware marketshare would drop like a stone.
Here's a question for you: why don't you switch from Intel to the G5? I can tell you that my single-processor G5 beats the pants off my P4. The reason you don't want to switch is probably cost: Apples cost more than Dells. But that's how Apple makes their money, that's their business model. A software-only Apple couldn't survive.
+5 if that username refers to the Suda.
NAIAL (nor am I a lawyer), but it is possible (any lawyer want to answer this as an Anonymous Coward?) that the simple fact of being sued under the DMCA will allow him to include the unconstitutionality of the DMCA in his defense, if not at trial at least at the appellate level (before he actually has to pay any money beyond the expensive court costs).
The EFF and ALCU should offer to pay his lawyer bills.
And Zaphod was from Betelgeuse, which is in Orion. No?
Either that, or it's the Blight trying to infect Earth's Slowness networks.
You just wanted to see it so bad that it magically appeared on your screen only.
Then I suppose I'm just imagining this. Using the word "politically correct" is not some magical talisman that makes a racist comment acceptable "dissent." And you'd better learn how to read threads that jump up and down your score threshold.
I find it ever so amusing that all of my interlocutors in this discussion are posting as Anonymous Coward while I'm risking karma on it.
I'm an idiot because I called someone a racist because he said he'd use a $1 coin if they didn't have an Indian or a "Negro" on it? In other words, he WON'T use a coin with a "Negro" or an "Indian" on it. That pretty much sounds like the definition of racist to me.
Reread the post I was responding to. He played the race card, not me.
Ah, so you're a racist, then. Hopefully you will soon be appropriately modded -1 troll. Sacagewea was very significant to the Lewis and Clark expedition, as a guide for the earlier part, and a translator (sometimes, I think, one in a double-translation team) for the later part. And there are in fact no African Americans on US coins, though I think Thurgood Marshall would be a good choice. But since you're so damned ignorant I'm surprised you know how read, let alone how to use the go button on your Internet Explorer toolbar (racists don't use Linux or Mozilla; I think they're prevented by one of the clauses in the GPL, after all), so I can't say it surprises me that you didn't know there were no African Americans on US currency or coins.
We have had $2 bills. No one used them. We do have $1 coins, actually I like them quite a lot, though I wish they'd kept the Apollo 11 seal on the back from the old Ike and Susan B. dollars. No one uses them, either, except as tokens in roadside vending machines at rest stops (along the interstate highways) and a few other specialized locations. You can, of course, and I have, but statistically it's quite rare for someone to use one as everyday currency.
Pillars of Hercules: the name refers to Gibraltar and one or two mountains around Ceuta. The ancient Greeks believed that Hercules had set up the mountains as a warning not to pass out of the Med into the Ocean.
As far as the strength or weakness of the dollar or euro, the euro has all the benefits of the mark and all the liabilities of the lira going for it. Right now it seems to be in a mark phase; eventually we may see it hit a lira phase.
With OS X and Windows, "Point releases" refers not to the second number (the one after the first point), but the third. As you probably know, if you know what AIX is.
1. You're talking about RedHat 9, which is based upon Linux 2.4, not Linux 9, which won't come out until some time in the 2010s or even 2020s.
2. Some Linux developers at SGI and IBM may, MAY have had access to Sys V code under a license from SCO.
3. Meaningless. They're not talking about drivers.
4. No, actually SCO's trying to be enough of a pest for either MS to buy them out to continue the pestering, or IBM to buy them out and shut them up.
100% photoshop or gimp. Look at the page in real-life: it actually says " There are currently no job openings at SCO."
God help anyone who 1. speaks English above an 8th grade level, and 2. actually had to look for the origin of "To be or not to be"
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing, end them.
Ham. III.i, from memory