Apple is acting like a company that wants to
stick with a business model of making most of
its profits from hardware sales. These profits
subsidize many interesting applications, which
Apple gives away to its customers freely because
they've already paid.
Now, should Apple not count on hardware profits
and charge $500 for a copy of MacOS X? What
difference would that really make in your
opinion? How about if they raised the prices
of their replacement parts, so that any clone
built from those parts will cost even more
than Apple branded computers? (Think a little
and realize that both of these alternatives
hurt Apple customers.)
Or did you just want Apple to lose hardware
sales, but still provide the high quality
applications for free?
I admit, I don't know much about Apple, their computers or their business model. But their corporate policies sure do not seem to be in line with the same ideals associated with Open Source.
It's very simple, really.
Apple sells hardware at a premium price. The
profits go on to fund interesting software
like the iLife apps, iCal, iSync, Safari,
Quicktime, a full development suite, and even
an accelerated X11 Server. These software
are made available for free to Mac users,
because they already paid for it. In fact,
if you use many of these applications, you'll
realize that the original hardware price tag
isn't that much steeper when you consider
software costs.
Now, allowing people to buy parts and build
cheaper Apple clones messes this up somewhat.
Who will pay for the free software? The
alternative for Apple must then be either to
charge for the software, or to charge so
much for replacement parts that it's impossible
to build a cheaper clone. Realize that
both alternatives are bad for loyal customers
who actually buy from Apple. Additionally,
it keeps the resale value of Macs high, which
is also good for the Apple customer.
Apple's involvement in open source is among
the best, but it is very carefully limited to
areas that Apple isn't competing in. For
example, Apple doesn't feel that there is
any competition in the OS kernel space, so
Darwin is open source. Safari is a capable
browser, but Apple is not planning to win any
browser wars, so Apple's chose to participate
in KHTML development. However, Apple is
holding back core technologies so that nobody
can build a OS X clone for x86, which would
put Apple customers back in the same situation
of paying for people who would rather not pay
Apple.
You may disagree with their business plan, but
all in all, Apple's strategy is internally
coherent, and appears to still work.
Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone
on
Platform Evangelism
·
· Score: 1
So are we seeing a similar limitation with capitalism? Or is Wally World really just so clearly superior to anything else with a cash register?
Capitalism has an inherent flaw, in that the
accumulation of capital is only an approximation
of success. I define success here both as the
financial success of the companies in question,
as well as the success of their customers,
employees, and neighbors.
That is, under pure capitalism, it's a good
thing to cut down all the trees in a forest
to sell it, or to pollute the river if that's
the cheapest way of getting rid of waste,
or to force employees to work as much as
possible for as little pay as possible.
It's plainly obvious that if unchecked, pure
capitalism will destroy so much that it
eventually implodes.
Which is why all capitalist countries today
exercise a modified form, where corporations
are subject to regulation. There are
financial regulations (to protect the
shareholder), environmental regulations (to
protect the neighbors), labor regulations
(to protect the employees), and so on. A
corporation is not permitted to pursue
profits past the limitations of these
regulations. In fact, many countries have
pro-competition laws that restrict the
business actions of monopolies.
The problem with this is that corporations
are not willingly limited. Because they
are founded on and driven by boundless greed,
they are naturally in conflict with any
regulation against their practices. You
will therefore see company after company
trying to cross the lines from time to time,
or even try to influence lawmakers in
outrageous ways. What you are seeing is,
IMHO, a lapse in the counteracting regulations
that expose this inherent weakness of the
capitalist system.
You don't want to accidently read a book
for obvious reasons.
In the academe, for example, attribution is
very important, because it is what separates
quoting from plagiarism. If you can't
distinguish whether something is an original
idea or just something you read somewhere,
you'll be in a world of hurt when the facts
come out. If you just read lots of stuff
("accidentally") and write your own work
carelessly, you'll probably end up including
somebody else's material unknowingly (and
irresponsibly).
The easiest way to achieve that is to avoid
"accidentally" reading something. These
things are very hard to separate out once
they are in your head.
Similarly, for software development, you
should avoid looking at competing code unless
the license in question is compatible. This
is because sometimes the competing code gets
it right on, and then you'll be torn between
using (now "copying", because you've read it)
that approach or deliberately avoiding a good
solution.
The idea that some random geek, or even a big company, is going to sue you on a legal platform as wobbly as "judge, he looked at it, so the rest of his work is clearly based on ours" is somewhere slightly above absolute zero and in any case applies just as equally to proprietary code, as the case of SCO shows.
Yes, it applies equally to proprietary code,
which is why you need to negotiate an appropriate
license before looking at another company's
code.
As a professional developer, I will not look
at the source code of a competing product
unless it has an appropriate (i.e. BSD)
license. While the threat of a lawsuit is
remote, it is my responsibility to protect
my employer from it.
If you looked at a GPLd algorithm and reimplemented it, somebody would have a hell of a time arguing in court that it was "derived".
I don't want to be in court at all.
Note also that the damages can be more than
legal. If word gets out that a commercial
product has "copied" lots of stuff (enough to
provoke a lawsuit, for example), it is likely
to suffer in public opinions, regardless of
whether the definition of "copy" legally
violated the license or not. Look at SCO:
nobody outside SCO and IBM really has any
real evidence one way or another, yet the
company is already condemned to the depths of
hell as far as Slashdot is concerned.
This is doubly the case for the vast majority of GPLd code, which is written by people who don't have huge piles of cash and who probably have a disdain for the legal system as well.
Irrelevant. The ability of a plaintiff to sue
does not affect my need to work within legal
limits. Besides, it almost sounds like you're
saying we might as well really violate the GPL
anyway since they're so unlikely to sue.
this FUD should not be propogated any further regardless.
Are you a lawyer, and has a case of this sort
been prosecuted in court?
Macro kernels are pretty much like turtles and sharks, very well adapted to living today, but dinosaurs nonetheless. Let's give this one the attention it deserves and see how it stacks up against the 'hurd', time to evolve!
First of all, there's no need to evolve unless
there are dramatic changes in your environment.
While hardware has become many many times bigger
and faster over the three decades of Unix,
computer architecture issues (for example,
memory hierarchy, CPU scheduling, I/O) have
remained mostly the same. This is the main
reason why a 30-year old design still works
so well today, on hardware thousands of times
more powerful.
Secondly, even monolithic kernels evolve.
Take file systems, for example. Linux started,
IIRC, with a Minix file system. ext2 is
probably the most popular one today, but may
be taken over in the future by a (and there
are several in competition) journaling file
system. There are patches to reduce the
latency of the kernel, and there are
constantly new device drivers being added,
extending the range of environments Linux can
run on.
Plan 9 is interesting, but Linux is a survivor
for a reason.
If there ever was a viable alternative to the monolithic unices then Plan 9 is probably it.
I hate to break it to you, but Windows NT is
a "viable alternative" to Unix. Yes, I'm aware
of security bugs and such, but the point is
that NT boxes exist and are in fact preferred
by many. In fact, NT was probably a better
desktop OS than any Unix descendant until MacOS
X.
it's like my dad always said, "a little
competition never hurt anyone."
Depends on the nature of the competition.
For example, insanely stockpiling nuclear
weapons nearly destroyed all of us. Even
the Space Race involved fatalities that might
have been averted if it wasn't a race.
Today, any number of faulty products are
shipped before they are ready in the name
of competition. Athletes destroy their own
bodies to seek a little bit of competitive
edge.
Point is, history has indeed shown that
humans perform well under competitive
pressure. However, competition doesn't
always bring out the best behavior among
humans.
I'm not really sure this is what you meant, but please,
for everybody else's sake, apply only to jobs that
you're qualified to do. Flooding every real employer
with useless resumes only ensures that the people
who really are qualified don't get the job, either.
I understand this is hard to resist. Why should you
have to play nice and obey the speed limit when
everybody else is breaking the rule? But do try
anyway. One reason you don't even get a "we got
your resume" response is because they are inundated
with thousands of resumes from people who have
no hope of getting the job.
more developers means a better product made in a shorter amount of time
Uh, no.
If one developer can do it in ten months, two
developers might be able to do it in six or seven.
Ten developers will almost certainly not do it in one.
One hundred developers will probably take thirty
months. Software development simply doesn't work
the way you state.
Safari always had the feel of a side project, a "just in case" plan.
What gave you that impression? This announcement
is not news to Apple. IE on the Mac has not been
seriously updated for years now.
With the recent declines in the dot com sector, employers have chosen to sacrifice quality programmers for cheaper/faster ones.
My understanding is that a number of companies,
including Adobe Systems, has taken to replacing
their employees with higher quality (as far
as they're concerned) candidates freed up by
the dot com bust. I believe I read this in a
Fortune magazine report, but I cannot find the
article at the moment.
Can you cite actual instances where employers
knowingly sacrificed quality this way? I
would expect that they didn't know they were
sacrificing quality when they outsource or
hire cheaper labor, but just expected to get
the same quality for less money.
Give me a seasoned vet [...] over some young, fast coder who has yet to learn these lessons.
I don't think this should be a zero-sum game.
Seasoned programmers obviously bring important
contributions to the table, but it becomes
increasingly difficult for them to justify
the pay increases they expect. This is
because productivity is really asymptotic,
and one person can only pump out so much code.
On the other hand, novice programmers bring a
lot to the table, too. They can be more
experimentative, more energetic, or even
more open-minded.
Point is, a successful organization should
allow the seasoned programmer to generate
more value (for himself and the company) by
saving the novices from costly mistakes.
That is, an increasing portion of the
seasoned programmer's time should be spent
teaching. The novices should do increasing
amounts of the "grunt work", until they are
ready to teach.
You want to pay a fresh graduate $50K a
year to give you $75K in profits from their
code. You need less experienced programmers
because this kind of 50% margin cannot be
achieved even with the increased productivity
of senior programmers. You also want to pay
the 30-year veteran $200K a year to save you
$1M just once every four years. You need
them because the novice programmers don't
have the experience to foresee and avert
these big disasters. They should not be
competing for the same job!
I don't know too many people who do FCE level video editing at home in the first place. iMovie is powerful enough for the average home user editing video of the kids.
There are really three classes of users here.
There's the consumer, who indeed will probably
be happy with a G3 and iMovie. There's the
professional, who will demand the 970 be on
the high end PowerBook, at least. There's
also the pro-sumer (the folks who buy $1,000
video cameras that are too good for baby
videos, but useless for professionals), who
would want a G4 with Final Cut Express. So,
ideally, Apple can ship three laptops, but
they can also combine two of these classes
into one laptop. Where we differ is which
way Apple will classify this group in the
middle.
They could conceivably tack an Altivec unit onto the 750 and have quite a processor.
Yes, that would satisfy the need that I
identified in the meantime. The reason I
guessed G4 iBook is mainly the fact that
Apple already has it in the current crop
of PowerBooks.
If Sun were smart they would slap together cheap parts (may be but don't have to be x86), put KDE (not GNOME) and Linux on it and offer it at a good price.
It sounds like you want Sun to compete against
Apple. Here's the downside:
Apple had a large loyal following at the
time it switched to MacOS X. Sun is starting
a desktop business from scratch.
Linux lacks crucial bits of application
software, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe
Photoshop. (I'm know about equivalents.
Even ignoring technical differences, they are
simply a lot less known.) MacOS X has most
major applications now in place.
MacOS X has a Classic mode where many
old applications can be used, which reduces
the immediate investment needed (for a Mac
user) to upgrade. It's not clear what legacy
applications (by that I mean big, expensive,
and important applications an adopter already
owns) a Sun desktop would leverage,
especially if it doesn't come with an x86 CPU.
The Macintosh platform has a good number
of commercial developers. There are fewer
big developers supporting Linux.
That's not all they'll be facing. There
are already vendors shipping cheap boxes with
Linux or Lindows, which presumably would be
more competitive in price with Sun's box.
Consider also that a lot of Linux users would
rather build their own boxes.
Sun has a very good trademark so I have no doubt that Sun could sell a lot of those machines.
Using cheap parts will quickly erode that
reputation. Their failure rates will
(necessarily) be comparable to other desktops.
I think your reliance on the Sun brandname,
ignoring important factors like applications
and price, is rather optimistic.
Now, I wouldn't mind seeing a desktop offering
from Sun. They are likely to have a different
focus than Apple, and competition is always
interesting. I just don't see how this would
be viable.
Consider the market of the iBook. It is an average user's laptop. It doesn't have too much power, but it has enough to browse the web, listen to MP3s, and type documents quite comfortably. The G3 is much cheaper and it runs on a lot less power than the G4 or the 970. It's still a perfect fit for the iBook.
You also need to look toward the future. A
good example is Final Cut Express, which requires
a G4 for real-time effects. It's not a bad
strategy to eventually target FCE at the
iBooks and big brother Final Cut Pro at the
PowerBooks. Similarly, the iBook should run
other little brother applications like Photoshop
Elements*, while a PowerBook is where you
would run Photoshop. By bumping the abilities
of the iBook up a bit, Apple can have a neat
stratified product line: the iBook, low cost
and suitable for running low cost applications;
and PowerBook the premium product, suitable
for running the most demanding applications.
Now, this is all speculation. I'm merely
countering your assertion that:
I see no reason whatsoever to upgrade the iBooks to G4s
by giving you a possible motive.
* I'm not actually sure that Elements is
G4-optimized.
The 970 is already being produced en masse. Because of Apple's contract with IBM, they get a bunch of them pretty early.
If I'm not utterly mistaken, the rumored
contract has not been confirmed by Apple or
IBM officially.
In all likelihood, Apple is going to keep the G3 in the iBook and just start using IBM chips instead of Motorola ones.
That would be silly. First of all, as stable
as IBM is, it's always better to have more
suppliers than not. Apple's current predicament
is precisely because their sole high end CPU
provider isn't very interested in them.
Secondly, the G3 doesn't have an Altivec unit,
and cannot take advantage of the G4
optimizations that this current situation has
forced many software vendors to make.
I find it far more likely that Apple retires
the G3 soon, replacing it with low-end G4s on
the iBook line. The PowerBooks could then
either host high-end G4s, or move to the 970,
depending on how quickly they can get it
working. Put another way, who'd want to buy
a G3 if Apple is retiring the G4?
Sending pictures is pretty cool, but again it's very rare that I need to send someone a photo RIGHT NOW! I'll just get my digital camera, snap a photo, and e-mail it.
Technology has a way of creeping up on people.
Here's an example: a tech I know once had to
wire up some equipment in really tight space,
and he can't really squeeze his head in behind
the rack to see the connectors. He takes out
a digital camera from his pocket, reaches
behind, and snaps a picture. This allows him
to finish the job without having to move a
heavy rack of equipment. Before this
innovative use, who really needs to see
vacation pictures RIGHT NOW? You can wait a
day or two for your photo shop to develop the
pictures.
Ever seen a person on a cell phone in a
supermarket, asking about what brand of peas
to buy? This would not have happened unless
people were very comfortable with their
phones, and were not really concerned about
how much the call will cost. Extrapolate
this to sending pictures, and it's easy to
see the stereotypical husband sending his
wife a picture of a can of peas to make sure
it's the right brand. It's these mundane
uses that tell us a technology has arrived.
Because what makes one kid
uncomfortable may not make another
uncomfortable.
Are you saying that a kid doesn't know
when he/she is uncomfortable?
No, I'm saying that what makes one kid
uncomfortable may not make another kid
uncomfortable. Just like I wrote
the first time.
Point is, when you say, "ban what makes kids
uncomfortable," what does it take to ban a
particular item? If 9 out of 10 kids are
uncomfortable? 1 out of 10? If 9 out of 10
kids tested find something offensive, would
you get the same percentage if you replaced
them with 10 different kids? Can you
imagine a court of law deciding based on
this criterion?
Worse, who are "kids"? Most laws lump 17
year olds and 7 year olds in the same class.
It should be obvious to anybody that they
will have very different sensibilities and
tolerance to adult imagery. What if a spam
contained a picture of a monster that could
make a kid uncomfortable?
The kind that are grossly wrong are the kind that let it all hang out the minute you open the message.
Try reading back a couple of posts. I was
not objecting to a ban. I was objecting to
people thinking it's easy to define precisely
what to ban. Note that people have been
offended (enough to launch a hostile workplace
lawsuit) by a bikini picture of a co-worker's
wife.
Being a professional layout application, I would think it does! Basically a layout app is doing rendering of fonts and graphics to a page
in very precise ways - it's why you'd use Quark
or InDesign instead of Word.
Quark never has to be more precise than its
actual output device. That is, the "precision"
you're talking about here is on the order of
thousandths of an inch, well within the abilities
of 32-bit CPUs (which can have 48-bit or
better FPUs). The "high precision" that the
original post was talking about is on the
order of astronomical distances measured
in meters.
Also, it needs to work with very large media and high color depths.
At 1,000 dpi, 32 bits can address about 4
million inches. The color depth you need
to process is limited by your input and
output devices (camera or scanner color
resolution). None of these are things for
a 32-bit CPU to lose sleep over.
This is not to say Quark can't benefit from
64-bit optimizations, especially if it takes
on some image processing duties. As it is
today, however, it's unlikely to be
dramatically improved on 64-bit CPUs.
Daddy giving Mommy a hug and a kiss is appropriate sexual behavior.
Some pouty-faced bimbo stuffing a camera up her crotch is not appropriate sexual behavior.
It's easy to enumerate instances of what is or
is not pornographic. It's hard to draw a line
down the middle where the two are separable.
The definition is important because what you
are advocating is restricting imagery on one
side of that line.
My main point is, when people talk about
protecting kids from sex, violence, tobacco,
or alcohol, the mental image they get is an
eight year old smoking, shooting up the
school, and drinking whiskey. This makes
them (rightfully) indignant, but the problem
is that when the law passes, it's minors
who are all classified together. As you know,
minors can be as old as nearly 18 (in the case
of alcohol in the US, 21), and it really
isn't sensible to apply to them the laws we
imagine will protect eight year olds.
If it makes the kid unfortable to look at then they shouldn't have to suffer through it. What's so hard about that?
Because what makes one kid uncomfortable may
not make another uncomfortable. Because what
you think makes kids uncomfortable may not be
what I think makes kids uncomfortable. Don't
think of "mutilated bodies" and "aborted
fetuses", because those are easy calls. Think
of the gray area in the middle and how you
would separate appropriate from inappropriate.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying
that you've picked the easy cases, and then
called the problem "simple".
Is my definition wrong in some gapingly obvious way? I know that that would make Maxim or the Victoria's Secret catalog or a medical textbook pornography, but I think they fit the definition if they are used for a certain purpose.
That's the problem. The definition of "pornography"
is most often used to classify imagery that are either
banned outright, or made unavailable to minors.
Your definition takes the most perverted view of all
such imagery (that is, you consider something that
sexually arouses the most perverted person to be
pornography), and includes a lot of things that most
people will probably not consider pornographic.
Pornography is what we don't want innocent
seven year old children looking at.
Utterly useless definition. Given a photograph,
how do you determine if it's pornographic or
not? Would another person determine differently?
You offer a variant of the usual "I'll know
it when I see it" criterion, which is not
sufficiently well defined to use in a legal
setting.
Also, note that pornography is usually
restricted to minors, which for the sake of
simplicity we'll say is age 18. Why would
you prevent a 17 year old from seeing things
you don't want innocent 7 year olds to look
at?
Like I said, your first five answers are
probably all wrong.
(Note that a good usable definition of the word
has eluded many smart and knowledgeable people,
including judges, so the first five answers you
come up with are probably going to have big
loopholes. Hint: anything that involves a
subjective human judgement is likely to be a
bad definition.)
For any of those other examples, there are programs (government and otherwise) in place to help them out. There is foster care for the parent less (as crappy as that is, it's likely better than living on the street), scholarships and student loans for the non-well-off, libraries (with internet access) for everyone.
Oh, I'm not saying they shouldn't be helped.
I was just commenting on your apparent assertion
that kids should be free of the consequences
of their parents' actions. For example, as
you noted, foster care can often be a poor
alternative to a loving family environment,
and a kid sent to foster care because of
criminal parents is in fact suffering those
consequences. That's what I mean by "to a
certain extent, kids have to suffer the
choices their parents make." That "extent"
is the extent to which government is willing
to use public power (parental abuse, etc) and
money (scholarships, etc) to help them.
Oh, please bestow upon us simple country folk more of your urban intellect.
The point of the statement you quoted was that
there are many ways parents can really mess up
their children's chances in life, and we don't
have legislation to fix all of them. Therefore,
even if "moving to a rural area" really
has that effect, it's still not necessarily a
situation where the government should get
involved in.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't actually have an opinion on the Freecraft issue, but if you can keep it out of just one aspect of your life, then it's not a principle.
Apple is acting like a company that wants to stick with a business model of making most of its profits from hardware sales. These profits subsidize many interesting applications, which Apple gives away to its customers freely because they've already paid.
Now, should Apple not count on hardware profits and charge $500 for a copy of MacOS X? What difference would that really make in your opinion? How about if they raised the prices of their replacement parts, so that any clone built from those parts will cost even more than Apple branded computers? (Think a little and realize that both of these alternatives hurt Apple customers.)
Or did you just want Apple to lose hardware sales, but still provide the high quality applications for free?
It's very simple, really.
Apple sells hardware at a premium price. The profits go on to fund interesting software like the iLife apps, iCal, iSync, Safari, Quicktime, a full development suite, and even an accelerated X11 Server. These software are made available for free to Mac users, because they already paid for it. In fact, if you use many of these applications, you'll realize that the original hardware price tag isn't that much steeper when you consider software costs.
Now, allowing people to buy parts and build cheaper Apple clones messes this up somewhat. Who will pay for the free software? The alternative for Apple must then be either to charge for the software, or to charge so much for replacement parts that it's impossible to build a cheaper clone. Realize that both alternatives are bad for loyal customers who actually buy from Apple. Additionally, it keeps the resale value of Macs high, which is also good for the Apple customer.
Apple's involvement in open source is among the best, but it is very carefully limited to areas that Apple isn't competing in. For example, Apple doesn't feel that there is any competition in the OS kernel space, so Darwin is open source. Safari is a capable browser, but Apple is not planning to win any browser wars, so Apple's chose to participate in KHTML development. However, Apple is holding back core technologies so that nobody can build a OS X clone for x86, which would put Apple customers back in the same situation of paying for people who would rather not pay Apple.
You may disagree with their business plan, but all in all, Apple's strategy is internally coherent, and appears to still work.
Capitalism has an inherent flaw, in that the accumulation of capital is only an approximation of success. I define success here both as the financial success of the companies in question, as well as the success of their customers, employees, and neighbors.
That is, under pure capitalism, it's a good thing to cut down all the trees in a forest to sell it, or to pollute the river if that's the cheapest way of getting rid of waste, or to force employees to work as much as possible for as little pay as possible. It's plainly obvious that if unchecked, pure capitalism will destroy so much that it eventually implodes.
Which is why all capitalist countries today exercise a modified form, where corporations are subject to regulation. There are financial regulations (to protect the shareholder), environmental regulations (to protect the neighbors), labor regulations (to protect the employees), and so on. A corporation is not permitted to pursue profits past the limitations of these regulations. In fact, many countries have pro-competition laws that restrict the business actions of monopolies.
The problem with this is that corporations are not willingly limited. Because they are founded on and driven by boundless greed, they are naturally in conflict with any regulation against their practices. You will therefore see company after company trying to cross the lines from time to time, or even try to influence lawmakers in outrageous ways. What you are seeing is, IMHO, a lapse in the counteracting regulations that expose this inherent weakness of the capitalist system.
In the academe, for example, attribution is very important, because it is what separates quoting from plagiarism. If you can't distinguish whether something is an original idea or just something you read somewhere, you'll be in a world of hurt when the facts come out. If you just read lots of stuff ("accidentally") and write your own work carelessly, you'll probably end up including somebody else's material unknowingly (and irresponsibly).
The easiest way to achieve that is to avoid "accidentally" reading something. These things are very hard to separate out once they are in your head.
Similarly, for software development, you should avoid looking at competing code unless the license in question is compatible. This is because sometimes the competing code gets it right on, and then you'll be torn between using (now "copying", because you've read it) that approach or deliberately avoiding a good solution.
Yes, it applies equally to proprietary code, which is why you need to negotiate an appropriate license before looking at another company's code.
As a professional developer, I will not look at the source code of a competing product unless it has an appropriate (i.e. BSD) license. While the threat of a lawsuit is remote, it is my responsibility to protect my employer from it.
If you looked at a GPLd algorithm and reimplemented it, somebody would have a hell of a time arguing in court that it was "derived".
I don't want to be in court at all.
Note also that the damages can be more than legal. If word gets out that a commercial product has "copied" lots of stuff (enough to provoke a lawsuit, for example), it is likely to suffer in public opinions, regardless of whether the definition of "copy" legally violated the license or not. Look at SCO: nobody outside SCO and IBM really has any real evidence one way or another, yet the company is already condemned to the depths of hell as far as Slashdot is concerned.
This is doubly the case for the vast majority of GPLd code, which is written by people who don't have huge piles of cash and who probably have a disdain for the legal system as well.
Irrelevant. The ability of a plaintiff to sue does not affect my need to work within legal limits. Besides, it almost sounds like you're saying we might as well really violate the GPL anyway since they're so unlikely to sue.
this FUD should not be propogated any further regardless.
Are you a lawyer, and has a case of this sort been prosecuted in court?
First of all, there's no need to evolve unless there are dramatic changes in your environment. While hardware has become many many times bigger and faster over the three decades of Unix, computer architecture issues (for example, memory hierarchy, CPU scheduling, I/O) have remained mostly the same. This is the main reason why a 30-year old design still works so well today, on hardware thousands of times more powerful.
Secondly, even monolithic kernels evolve. Take file systems, for example. Linux started, IIRC, with a Minix file system. ext2 is probably the most popular one today, but may be taken over in the future by a (and there are several in competition) journaling file system. There are patches to reduce the latency of the kernel, and there are constantly new device drivers being added, extending the range of environments Linux can run on.
Plan 9 is interesting, but Linux is a survivor for a reason.
If there ever was a viable alternative to the monolithic unices then Plan 9 is probably it.
I hate to break it to you, but Windows NT is a "viable alternative" to Unix. Yes, I'm aware of security bugs and such, but the point is that NT boxes exist and are in fact preferred by many. In fact, NT was probably a better desktop OS than any Unix descendant until MacOS X.
Depends on the nature of the competition.
For example, insanely stockpiling nuclear weapons nearly destroyed all of us. Even the Space Race involved fatalities that might have been averted if it wasn't a race. Today, any number of faulty products are shipped before they are ready in the name of competition. Athletes destroy their own bodies to seek a little bit of competitive edge.
Point is, history has indeed shown that humans perform well under competitive pressure. However, competition doesn't always bring out the best behavior among humans.
I'm not really sure this is what you meant, but please, for everybody else's sake, apply only to jobs that you're qualified to do. Flooding every real employer with useless resumes only ensures that the people who really are qualified don't get the job, either.
I understand this is hard to resist. Why should you have to play nice and obey the speed limit when everybody else is breaking the rule? But do try anyway. One reason you don't even get a "we got your resume" response is because they are inundated with thousands of resumes from people who have no hope of getting the job.
Uh, no. If one developer can do it in ten months, two developers might be able to do it in six or seven. Ten developers will almost certainly not do it in one. One hundred developers will probably take thirty months. Software development simply doesn't work the way you state.
Safari always had the feel of a side project, a "just in case" plan.
What gave you that impression? This announcement is not news to Apple. IE on the Mac has not been seriously updated for years now.
My understanding is that a number of companies, including Adobe Systems, has taken to replacing their employees with higher quality (as far as they're concerned) candidates freed up by the dot com bust. I believe I read this in a Fortune magazine report, but I cannot find the article at the moment.
Can you cite actual instances where employers knowingly sacrificed quality this way? I would expect that they didn't know they were sacrificing quality when they outsource or hire cheaper labor, but just expected to get the same quality for less money.
I don't think this should be a zero-sum game. Seasoned programmers obviously bring important contributions to the table, but it becomes increasingly difficult for them to justify the pay increases they expect. This is because productivity is really asymptotic, and one person can only pump out so much code. On the other hand, novice programmers bring a lot to the table, too. They can be more experimentative, more energetic, or even more open-minded.
Point is, a successful organization should allow the seasoned programmer to generate more value (for himself and the company) by saving the novices from costly mistakes. That is, an increasing portion of the seasoned programmer's time should be spent teaching. The novices should do increasing amounts of the "grunt work", until they are ready to teach.
You want to pay a fresh graduate $50K a year to give you $75K in profits from their code. You need less experienced programmers because this kind of 50% margin cannot be achieved even with the increased productivity of senior programmers. You also want to pay the 30-year veteran $200K a year to save you $1M just once every four years. You need them because the novice programmers don't have the experience to foresee and avert these big disasters. They should not be competing for the same job!
There are really three classes of users here. There's the consumer, who indeed will probably be happy with a G3 and iMovie. There's the professional, who will demand the 970 be on the high end PowerBook, at least. There's also the pro-sumer (the folks who buy $1,000 video cameras that are too good for baby videos, but useless for professionals), who would want a G4 with Final Cut Express. So, ideally, Apple can ship three laptops, but they can also combine two of these classes into one laptop. Where we differ is which way Apple will classify this group in the middle.
They could conceivably tack an Altivec unit onto the 750 and have quite a processor.
Yes, that would satisfy the need that I identified in the meantime. The reason I guessed G4 iBook is mainly the fact that Apple already has it in the current crop of PowerBooks.
It sounds like you want Sun to compete against Apple. Here's the downside:
- Apple had a large loyal following at the
time it switched to MacOS X. Sun is starting
a desktop business from scratch.
- Linux lacks crucial bits of application
software, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe
Photoshop. (I'm know about equivalents.
Even ignoring technical differences, they are
simply a lot less known.) MacOS X has most
major applications now in place.
- MacOS X has a Classic mode where many
old applications can be used, which reduces
the immediate investment needed (for a Mac
user) to upgrade. It's not clear what legacy
applications (by that I mean big, expensive,
and important applications an adopter already
owns) a Sun desktop would leverage,
especially if it doesn't come with an x86 CPU.
- The Macintosh platform has a good number
of commercial developers. There are fewer
big developers supporting Linux.
That's not all they'll be facing. There are already vendors shipping cheap boxes with Linux or Lindows, which presumably would be more competitive in price with Sun's box. Consider also that a lot of Linux users would rather build their own boxes.Sun has a very good trademark so I have no doubt that Sun could sell a lot of those machines.
Using cheap parts will quickly erode that reputation. Their failure rates will (necessarily) be comparable to other desktops. I think your reliance on the Sun brandname, ignoring important factors like applications and price, is rather optimistic.
Now, I wouldn't mind seeing a desktop offering from Sun. They are likely to have a different focus than Apple, and competition is always interesting. I just don't see how this would be viable.
You also need to look toward the future. A good example is Final Cut Express, which requires a G4 for real-time effects. It's not a bad strategy to eventually target FCE at the iBooks and big brother Final Cut Pro at the PowerBooks. Similarly, the iBook should run other little brother applications like Photoshop Elements*, while a PowerBook is where you would run Photoshop. By bumping the abilities of the iBook up a bit, Apple can have a neat stratified product line: the iBook, low cost and suitable for running low cost applications; and PowerBook the premium product, suitable for running the most demanding applications.
Now, this is all speculation. I'm merely countering your assertion that:
I see no reason whatsoever to upgrade the iBooks to G4s
by giving you a possible motive.
* I'm not actually sure that Elements is G4-optimized.
If I'm not utterly mistaken, the rumored contract has not been confirmed by Apple or IBM officially.
In all likelihood, Apple is going to keep the G3 in the iBook and just start using IBM chips instead of Motorola ones.
That would be silly. First of all, as stable as IBM is, it's always better to have more suppliers than not. Apple's current predicament is precisely because their sole high end CPU provider isn't very interested in them. Secondly, the G3 doesn't have an Altivec unit, and cannot take advantage of the G4 optimizations that this current situation has forced many software vendors to make.
I find it far more likely that Apple retires the G3 soon, replacing it with low-end G4s on the iBook line. The PowerBooks could then either host high-end G4s, or move to the 970, depending on how quickly they can get it working. Put another way, who'd want to buy a G3 if Apple is retiring the G4?
Technology has a way of creeping up on people. Here's an example: a tech I know once had to wire up some equipment in really tight space, and he can't really squeeze his head in behind the rack to see the connectors. He takes out a digital camera from his pocket, reaches behind, and snaps a picture. This allows him to finish the job without having to move a heavy rack of equipment. Before this innovative use, who really needs to see vacation pictures RIGHT NOW? You can wait a day or two for your photo shop to develop the pictures.
Ever seen a person on a cell phone in a supermarket, asking about what brand of peas to buy? This would not have happened unless people were very comfortable with their phones, and were not really concerned about how much the call will cost. Extrapolate this to sending pictures, and it's easy to see the stereotypical husband sending his wife a picture of a can of peas to make sure it's the right brand. It's these mundane uses that tell us a technology has arrived.
Are you saying that a kid doesn't know when he/she is uncomfortable?
No, I'm saying that what makes one kid uncomfortable may not make another kid uncomfortable. Just like I wrote the first time.
Point is, when you say, "ban what makes kids uncomfortable," what does it take to ban a particular item? If 9 out of 10 kids are uncomfortable? 1 out of 10? If 9 out of 10 kids tested find something offensive, would you get the same percentage if you replaced them with 10 different kids? Can you imagine a court of law deciding based on this criterion?
Worse, who are "kids"? Most laws lump 17 year olds and 7 year olds in the same class. It should be obvious to anybody that they will have very different sensibilities and tolerance to adult imagery. What if a spam contained a picture of a monster that could make a kid uncomfortable?
The kind that are grossly wrong are the kind that let it all hang out the minute you open the message.
Try reading back a couple of posts. I was not objecting to a ban. I was objecting to people thinking it's easy to define precisely what to ban. Note that people have been offended (enough to launch a hostile workplace lawsuit) by a bikini picture of a co-worker's wife.
Quark never has to be more precise than its actual output device. That is, the "precision" you're talking about here is on the order of thousandths of an inch, well within the abilities of 32-bit CPUs (which can have 48-bit or better FPUs). The "high precision" that the original post was talking about is on the order of astronomical distances measured in meters.
Also, it needs to work with very large media and high color depths.
At 1,000 dpi, 32 bits can address about 4 million inches. The color depth you need to process is limited by your input and output devices (camera or scanner color resolution). None of these are things for a 32-bit CPU to lose sleep over.
This is not to say Quark can't benefit from 64-bit optimizations, especially if it takes on some image processing duties. As it is today, however, it's unlikely to be dramatically improved on 64-bit CPUs.
Daddy giving Mommy a hug and a kiss is appropriate sexual behavior.
Some pouty-faced bimbo stuffing a camera up her crotch is not appropriate sexual behavior.
It's easy to enumerate instances of what is or is not pornographic. It's hard to draw a line down the middle where the two are separable. The definition is important because what you are advocating is restricting imagery on one side of that line.
My main point is, when people talk about protecting kids from sex, violence, tobacco, or alcohol, the mental image they get is an eight year old smoking, shooting up the school, and drinking whiskey. This makes them (rightfully) indignant, but the problem is that when the law passes, it's minors who are all classified together. As you know, minors can be as old as nearly 18 (in the case of alcohol in the US, 21), and it really isn't sensible to apply to them the laws we imagine will protect eight year olds.
If it makes the kid unfortable to look at then they shouldn't have to suffer through it. What's so hard about that?
Because what makes one kid uncomfortable may not make another uncomfortable. Because what you think makes kids uncomfortable may not be what I think makes kids uncomfortable. Don't think of "mutilated bodies" and "aborted fetuses", because those are easy calls. Think of the gray area in the middle and how you would separate appropriate from inappropriate.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that you've picked the easy cases, and then called the problem "simple".
That's the problem. The definition of "pornography" is most often used to classify imagery that are either banned outright, or made unavailable to minors. Your definition takes the most perverted view of all such imagery (that is, you consider something that sexually arouses the most perverted person to be pornography), and includes a lot of things that most people will probably not consider pornographic.
Utterly useless definition. Given a photograph, how do you determine if it's pornographic or not? Would another person determine differently? You offer a variant of the usual "I'll know it when I see it" criterion, which is not sufficiently well defined to use in a legal setting.
Also, note that pornography is usually restricted to minors, which for the sake of simplicity we'll say is age 18. Why would you prevent a 17 year old from seeing things you don't want innocent 7 year olds to look at?
Like I said, your first five answers are probably all wrong.
What is pornography?
(Note that a good usable definition of the word has eluded many smart and knowledgeable people, including judges, so the first five answers you come up with are probably going to have big loopholes. Hint: anything that involves a subjective human judgement is likely to be a bad definition.)
Oh, I'm not saying they shouldn't be helped. I was just commenting on your apparent assertion that kids should be free of the consequences of their parents' actions. For example, as you noted, foster care can often be a poor alternative to a loving family environment, and a kid sent to foster care because of criminal parents is in fact suffering those consequences. That's what I mean by "to a certain extent, kids have to suffer the choices their parents make." That "extent" is the extent to which government is willing to use public power (parental abuse, etc) and money (scholarships, etc) to help them.
The point of the statement you quoted was that there are many ways parents can really mess up their children's chances in life, and we don't have legislation to fix all of them. Therefore, even if "moving to a rural area" really has that effect, it's still not necessarily a situation where the government should get involved in.
Not everyone is out to insult you.