Games can continue to be proprietary if they simply intall and run fairly under Linux.
The unfortunate reality here is that this is often not the case. I have a stack of Loki games from a few years ago that will not run on modern Linux systems. Some of them will, but often with lots of screwing around with libraries and stuff. Contrast this to Windows and Mac - one way or another, the vast majority of software released for those platforms over the last decade will work, often without much fussing. It may not be pretty, but it will work!
This highlights an ugly fact about Linux development that lies at the heart of why proprietary adoption is not as fast as some people might prefer: it is a pain in the ass to make a product of any complexity and have it install easily and run reliably on the majority of Linux systems. This is not much of a problem for OSS projects, since you usually just get the source code handed to you, or someone will build an RPM/DEB file for you.
But what is Company X to do? Libraries, kernel guts, etc. change so rapidly, and often have virtually no backwards compatibility. Even if you do get your complicated proprietary app to work on the majority of Linux distros, who's to say that in a year something won't change and you'll have a bunch of users banging on your door complaining about broken dependencies.
This is assuming that said company is even around to fix or is interested in fixing such problems. In the case of my Loki games, they will likely spend the rest of their lives gathering dust - no modern system will play them, and there's nobody around with the resources or interest to fix the problems.
And here's the free version for use on Darwin (or an OS X desktop machine). I have it set up on my G4 Mac here, and it works really nice. Very slick interface for managing everything. Definitely give it a try if you want to stream MP3s easily from a Mac.
That's definitely not the case. iPhoto, while it has been great for organizing my photos and doing really basic operations (rotate, crop, output to QuickTime movie, etc.), is no replacement for Photoshop Elements. For any significant retouching or color correction, iPhoto (in its current incarnation, I don't know about the '04 version yet) definitely cannot touch Elements.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Elements is basically Photoshop 7 without CMYK and a handful of other professional features that grandma and grandpa Mac user won't miss. It also has some handy built-in stuff for novices, like the 'recipes' that tell you how to perform various retouching and enhancement options that might not be obvious to Photoshop newcomers.
I love iPhoto, and with the upcoming performance enhancements I'll love it even more. But it is first and foremost a photo album app, skilled at keeping your pictures organized and making them available to the other iLife apps. It is definitely not a Photoshop killer on even the novice level.
Somebody already thought of that: DigiMarc. Quoth the web page: This program detects a digital watermark in a printed piece, and routes the user to a web page.
For ITunes, I personally don't care for the DRM. It doesn't do anything to stop a pirate
It also doesn't keep me from enjoying my music in any way. Thus I, personally, don't care about it. I get to buy the songs I want for 99 cents a pop, picking and choosing as I go. Sounds like a winner to me.
I don't see how or Why Apple would do it to "Keep the RIAA" happy.
So they can distribute their music?
It again suggests to me the Apple assumes that their customers are theives
It suggests to me that Apple had to make some concessions to the RIAA in order to make their music available for 99 cents a track. It also suggests to me that Apple believes its customer base will not mind the rather minor restrictions placed on the purchased music. For me, and many, many others, that assumption would seem to be accurate.
What is wrong with the idea of just having a music service that lets the user use ANY OS and pick from a few different download formats? You know, a service from some copany that did not assume that their customers are theives.
"What is wrong" is that that company will get the right to distribute the music most people want around the same time as you see icicles forming in Hell. Sure, services like EMusic offer unrestricted MP3s, but they also don't carry a ton of major labels. That's their niche, and it works for them. But Apple wanted the big boys of music, and so some concessions had to be made. They're not unreasonable ones to me.
Though they over look all of the proprietary Apple formats that are attempts to lock comsumers into Apple. Quicktime, Apple's AAC, their restrictive iPod and iTunes, and just about every product they put out
Well to be fair, Quicktime and AAC are not proprietary formats. Quicktime is rather open, it's the individual codecs that may or may not be free/Free (such as Sorenson). You can stick pretty much any ol' video or audio stream in a Quicktime file that you like. AAC also is not proprietary to Apple, it is standardized by a number of key industry players. Whether or not that is much better is, of course, up for debate.
As for the iPod and iTunes, I'm not sure what you mean by 'restrictive'. The iPod lets you do pretty much anything you want, except you can't copy music back to a computer from it. It's a shame such a restriction is necessary to keep the RIAA somewhat happy, but it's not really a significant one IMO. And as for iTunes, what are these 'restrictions' that so upset you? I can play pretty much any music file or CD I wish, rip it, burn it, buy music, play it on any 3 computers I wish, burn it too, and so forth. Yes, I can barely breathe for all the restrictions in iTunes!
OmniWeb may use the same underlying rendering and scripting engine that Safari uses but it is actually quite different than Safari.
I came very close to buying OmniWeb 4.x, but two things really killed it for me: the lack of tabbed browsing, and the lack of integration with the keychain. There are a few very bad crashers, too.
The absence of tabbed browsing isn't a huge deal when combined with Expose, but having a great window manager doesn't make having duplicate windows with duplicate controls any less cluttered or resource wasteful. Combine that with the fact that the dozens of logins, passwords, etc. I have in my keychain can't be used in OmniWeb. I hear that both tabs and keychain access will be in OmniWeb 5, at which time I will give it a serious look again.
Don't get me wrong - Safari is not perfect. I miss some of the nicer features of OmniWeb, like the very flexible useragent settings and keyword shortcuts. I also miss the better performance on pages with Flash and, for that matter, the ability to disable the various plugins easily if I want to. Contrast this with Safari's pitiful performance on pages with embedded Flash, especially sites that make obscene use of Flash ads (yeah, I'm talking about you, IGN). Anyway, that's my 2 cents...
any plans of a Linux version of iTunes? Since Mac OS X kernel is BSD, I guess porting to Linux wouldn't be that hard.
This is kinda like saying it would not be hard to port Internet Explorer to DOS. There are a number of problems with porting iTunes to Linux, mainly:
iTunes relies heavily on QuickTime for playback and importing/encoding audio. Since QuickTime does not (officially) exist for Linux, this would be a big problem.
It would be a pain in the neck for Apple to support even just the major Linux distributions. Odds are they are not going to just release a source tarball for people to compile for their distro. Different kernel versions, libraries, etc. would complicate things a lot, especially with regards to burning CDs from inside iTunes.
Granted, iTunes was successfully ported to an OS that has no real UNIX underpinnings in common with OS X (Windows), but the fact that QuickTime already existed in a mature state for that platform eased things a great deal I'm sure. It's not impossible, but there is little incentive for Apple to put the rather gargantuan effort required into porting iTunes Linux.
We once again apologize for the fault in the patch process. Those responsible for patching the patchers who have patched the patch process, have now been patched.
None of the major Linux distributions rely on Java for any desktop applications; in fact, most don't even bother installing it by default. Neither does Macintosh or Windows.
You probably only meant that Macintosh and Windows systems don't rely on Java, but I wanted to clarify: Mac OS X does install Java by default. You can run Java apps and applets out of the box on a stock OS X system, and you'll even get nice Aquafied controls when you do. And I'm not sure if it's because I have the developer tools installed, or if it is included in OS X anyway, but the JDK (javac, etc.) is included as well. Apple has the details here.
Re:20 years and a little analogy to biology
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Two decades is not significant in itself, but it should be a stark warning that viruses are not going to go away, that the Net is turning "wild", and that we need something other than daily antivirus updates to keep our systems safe.
I agree completely. And I think this "something" fits into your analogy of the net being like an organic system. If you have any realistic expectation of staying alive and healthy, chances are you do not go around licking stairway railings or sticking your finger into electrical sockets. Knowing that these are not things one wants to do if one wants to stay alive, the average person consciously avoids doing such stupid things.
And so it will need to be in the online world as well. If you have any reasonable expectation of keeping your computer running well (and keeping your data/privacy under your control), you cannot just go around running random programs with purple cartoon apes as mascots, and you cannot just go around opening every e-mail you receive. People will need to learn such things, just as we have learned what things are conducive to staying alive. Granted, many of the problems we experience today are the result of technology failing to protect people and their computers (automatically executing attachments, anyone?)... But a significant part of it is also a lack of education (or responsibility) when it comes to being a safe citizen on the net.
This is dangerous stuff, folks. If this is a precedent, then all the employers of people who have contributed to the Linux kernal, and to various GPL's and BSD licensed products can step forward and claim their chunk of code, too.
Precedent is pretty much irrelevant in this case - the law (linked to in the posting) says that company claims to an employee's invention will not apply except "for those inventions that [...] relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business." This is a piece of software, written by an employee for a software company.
It sucks, but it's right there in the California labor code, and it seems pretty cut-and-dry to me...
As it stands, when things like this happen, it just demonstrates that the United States still thinks that it's the center of the Universe.
Err, wow. Talk about pent-up aggression. It's not that Apple doesn't give a sh#$ about the rest of the world (they do sell hardware and software outside of the US, you know), nor is it the USA's fault per se (although I agree, much of what we do has a center-of-the-world attitude to it). I think the real issue here is that the RIAA simply does not want to deal with the "other" countries, currencies, laws, etc. at this point. Apple has to negotiate with the RIAA, and so their hands are tied.
I don't like the all-too-common American arrogance and exclusionist ways anymore than you do, but try to keep perspective on things like this. It's just like the internet sales tax thing - there's so many variables and differing jurisdictions to take into account, you can't just make a blanket statement about it.
However, it would be nice if there were an upgrade priced package
This doesn't make any sense! Consider how many people have Macs that do not have a copy of Mac OS to upgrade from. No doubt this is a very small percentage of Apple's small percentage of the computer market. Why on earth would they have an 'upgrade' version at a lower price - probably 99% of their users are 'upgrading'! This is like offering an 'upgrade' discount on brakes for cars. How many cars do not have brakes?
It may be "obvious" to you in retrospect, but how many music services have offered such a thing? How many times have legit music service models been discussed on here without the allowance idea coming up? Indeed, how many online for-pay services in general have ever used such an idea? I'd say Apple deserves this particular patent much more than your average "patent everything in sight" obvious patent we see on Slashdot every week.
It's widely warez'd, and I think that's part of the reason it's the industry standard. So many people get their start using photoshop on a pirated copy. If that weren't the case, I don't think Adobe would have the market share that they have now.
IMO, Adobe should do something like Alias|Wavefront does with Maya - release a free, 90% functionality version so people can learn the tools. I can't tell you how many graphics classes I've been in where the instructors say "Yeah, most people just warez [insert product here] until they get their first gig and can buy it legit." I think it's ridiculous that a student should have to pay $400(!) for Adobe After Effects with the educational discount. There should be a free (or insanely cheap) learning edition for such software.
The best way to get marketshare is to get the software into the hands of the students easily and cheaply. Then when they get scooped up by some company who wants to make use of their talents, that's another copy of Photoshop/Illustrator/etc sold.
[...] the damn thing stops playing because I'm no longer on the playlist that I was on when I started playing. WTF? Why can't I have it continue to play songs in the background while I'm doing other shit in the foreground?
That's what the "repeat playlist" button is for (bottom, third button from the left). I don't know about iTunes for Windows, but I've never had iTunes on the Mac spontaneously stop playing songs while I'm dorking around with the iTMS or other playlists, as long as that button is turned on.
That is probably a hardware/OS problem. Your sound card IRQ is being shared with your video card's IRQ. You can check this by running MSINFO32 --> hardware resources --> conflicts/sharing.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Apple will not sell OS X for PCs.
I do wish people would stop opening these sites and saying that only people from one particular country are allowed to use them.
That's all well and good, but there's the matter of dealing with legal issues for every country you support, financial issues such as currency, and (if you ship a physical product) customs, shipping contracts to different parts of the world, etc. Not to mention that they probably only got the deal with Warner for use in Australia.
What a load of rubbish, just public disclosure is enough to make anything prior art
Load of rubbish? Do you see how many stupid and exploitive patents that are mentioned on Slashdot each (week|month|year)? Prior art has done such a great job of curbing those patents, I'd certainly stake my business's financial future on prior art.
Slashdot Mirror
Games can continue to be proprietary if they simply intall and run fairly under Linux.
The unfortunate reality here is that this is often not the case. I have a stack of Loki games from a few years ago that will not run on modern Linux systems. Some of them will, but often with lots of screwing around with libraries and stuff. Contrast this to Windows and Mac - one way or another, the vast majority of software released for those platforms over the last decade will work, often without much fussing. It may not be pretty, but it will work!
This highlights an ugly fact about Linux development that lies at the heart of why proprietary adoption is not as fast as some people might prefer: it is a pain in the ass to make a product of any complexity and have it install easily and run reliably on the majority of Linux systems. This is not much of a problem for OSS projects, since you usually just get the source code handed to you, or someone will build an RPM/DEB file for you.
But what is Company X to do? Libraries, kernel guts, etc. change so rapidly, and often have virtually no backwards compatibility. Even if you do get your complicated proprietary app to work on the majority of Linux distros, who's to say that in a year something won't change and you'll have a bunch of users banging on your door complaining about broken dependencies.
This is assuming that said company is even around to fix or is interested in fixing such problems. In the case of my Loki games, they will likely spend the rest of their lives gathering dust - no modern system will play them, and there's nobody around with the resources or interest to fix the problems.
And here's the free version for use on Darwin (or an OS X desktop machine). I have it set up on my G4 Mac here, and it works really nice. Very slick interface for managing everything. Definitely give it a try if you want to stream MP3s easily from a Mac.
iPhoto kills Photoshop Elements
That's definitely not the case. iPhoto, while it has been great for organizing my photos and doing really basic operations (rotate, crop, output to QuickTime movie, etc.), is no replacement for Photoshop Elements. For any significant retouching or color correction, iPhoto (in its current incarnation, I don't know about the '04 version yet) definitely cannot touch Elements.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Elements is basically Photoshop 7 without CMYK and a handful of other professional features that grandma and grandpa Mac user won't miss. It also has some handy built-in stuff for novices, like the 'recipes' that tell you how to perform various retouching and enhancement options that might not be obvious to Photoshop newcomers.
I love iPhoto, and with the upcoming performance enhancements I'll love it even more. But it is first and foremost a photo album app, skilled at keeping your pictures organized and making them available to the other iLife apps. It is definitely not a Photoshop killer on even the novice level.
> And reading fiction.
So load up Slashdot while you're out in the forest.
Or the latest claims from SCO. :)
Somebody already thought of that: DigiMarc. Quoth the web page: This program detects a digital watermark in a printed piece, and routes the user to a web page.
For ITunes, I personally don't care for the DRM. It doesn't do anything to stop a pirate
It also doesn't keep me from enjoying my music in any way. Thus I, personally, don't care about it. I get to buy the songs I want for 99 cents a pop, picking and choosing as I go. Sounds like a winner to me.
I don't see how or Why Apple would do it to "Keep the RIAA" happy.
So they can distribute their music?
It again suggests to me the Apple assumes that their customers are theives
It suggests to me that Apple had to make some concessions to the RIAA in order to make their music available for 99 cents a track. It also suggests to me that Apple believes its customer base will not mind the rather minor restrictions placed on the purchased music. For me, and many, many others, that assumption would seem to be accurate.
What is wrong with the idea of just having a music service that lets the user use ANY OS and pick from a few different download formats? You know, a service from some copany that did not assume that their customers are theives.
"What is wrong" is that that company will get the right to distribute the music most people want around the same time as you see icicles forming in Hell. Sure, services like EMusic offer unrestricted MP3s, but they also don't carry a ton of major labels. That's their niche, and it works for them. But Apple wanted the big boys of music, and so some concessions had to be made. They're not unreasonable ones to me.
Though they over look all of the proprietary Apple formats that are attempts to lock comsumers into Apple. Quicktime, Apple's AAC, their restrictive iPod and iTunes, and just about every product they put out
Well to be fair, Quicktime and AAC are not proprietary formats. Quicktime is rather open, it's the individual codecs that may or may not be free/Free (such as Sorenson). You can stick pretty much any ol' video or audio stream in a Quicktime file that you like. AAC also is not proprietary to Apple, it is standardized by a number of key industry players. Whether or not that is much better is, of course, up for debate.
As for the iPod and iTunes, I'm not sure what you mean by 'restrictive'. The iPod lets you do pretty much anything you want, except you can't copy music back to a computer from it. It's a shame such a restriction is necessary to keep the RIAA somewhat happy, but it's not really a significant one IMO. And as for iTunes, what are these 'restrictions' that so upset you? I can play pretty much any music file or CD I wish, rip it, burn it, buy music, play it on any 3 computers I wish, burn it too, and so forth. Yes, I can barely breathe for all the restrictions in iTunes!
OmniWeb may use the same underlying rendering and scripting engine that Safari uses but it is actually quite different than Safari.
I came very close to buying OmniWeb 4.x, but two things really killed it for me: the lack of tabbed browsing, and the lack of integration with the keychain. There are a few very bad crashers, too.
The absence of tabbed browsing isn't a huge deal when combined with Expose, but having a great window manager doesn't make having duplicate windows with duplicate controls any less cluttered or resource wasteful. Combine that with the fact that the dozens of logins, passwords, etc. I have in my keychain can't be used in OmniWeb. I hear that both tabs and keychain access will be in OmniWeb 5, at which time I will give it a serious look again.
Don't get me wrong - Safari is not perfect. I miss some of the nicer features of OmniWeb, like the very flexible useragent settings and keyword shortcuts. I also miss the better performance on pages with Flash and, for that matter, the ability to disable the various plugins easily if I want to. Contrast this with Safari's pitiful performance on pages with embedded Flash, especially sites that make obscene use of Flash ads (yeah, I'm talking about you, IGN). Anyway, that's my 2 cents...
I don't know about you, but after 1/1/2000, I went back to using 2 digits.
You mean after 1/1/1900, right? :)
any plans of a Linux version of iTunes? Since Mac OS X kernel is BSD, I guess porting to Linux wouldn't be that hard.
This is kinda like saying it would not be hard to port Internet Explorer to DOS. There are a number of problems with porting iTunes to Linux, mainly:
Granted, iTunes was successfully ported to an OS that has no real UNIX underpinnings in common with OS X (Windows), but the fact that QuickTime already existed in a mature state for that platform eased things a great deal I'm sure. It's not impossible, but there is little incentive for Apple to put the rather gargantuan effort required into porting iTunes Linux.
We once again apologize for the fault in the patch process. Those responsible for patching the patchers who have patched the patch process, have now been patched.
And with great dispatch, might I add. :) *groan*
None of the major Linux distributions rely on Java for any desktop applications; in fact, most don't even bother installing it by default. Neither does Macintosh or Windows.
You probably only meant that Macintosh and Windows systems don't rely on Java, but I wanted to clarify: Mac OS X does install Java by default. You can run Java apps and applets out of the box on a stock OS X system, and you'll even get nice Aquafied controls when you do. And I'm not sure if it's because I have the developer tools installed, or if it is included in OS X anyway, but the JDK (javac, etc.) is included as well. Apple has the details here.
Two decades is not significant in itself, but it should be a stark warning that viruses are not going to go away, that the Net is turning "wild", and that we need something other than daily antivirus updates to keep our systems safe.
I agree completely. And I think this "something" fits into your analogy of the net being like an organic system. If you have any realistic expectation of staying alive and healthy, chances are you do not go around licking stairway railings or sticking your finger into electrical sockets. Knowing that these are not things one wants to do if one wants to stay alive, the average person consciously avoids doing such stupid things.
And so it will need to be in the online world as well. If you have any reasonable expectation of keeping your computer running well (and keeping your data/privacy under your control), you cannot just go around running random programs with purple cartoon apes as mascots, and you cannot just go around opening every e-mail you receive. People will need to learn such things, just as we have learned what things are conducive to staying alive. Granted, many of the problems we experience today are the result of technology failing to protect people and their computers (automatically executing attachments, anyone?)... But a significant part of it is also a lack of education (or responsibility) when it comes to being a safe citizen on the net.
This is dangerous stuff, folks. If this is a precedent, then all the employers of people who have contributed to the Linux kernal, and to various GPL's and BSD licensed products can step forward and claim their chunk of code, too.
Precedent is pretty much irrelevant in this case - the law (linked to in the posting) says that company claims to an employee's invention will not apply except "for those inventions that [...] relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business." This is a piece of software, written by an employee for a software company.
It sucks, but it's right there in the California labor code, and it seems pretty cut-and-dry to me...
As it stands, when things like this happen, it just demonstrates that the United States still thinks that it's the center of the Universe.
Err, wow. Talk about pent-up aggression. It's not that Apple doesn't give a sh#$ about the rest of the world (they do sell hardware and software outside of the US, you know), nor is it the USA's fault per se (although I agree, much of what we do has a center-of-the-world attitude to it). I think the real issue here is that the RIAA simply does not want to deal with the "other" countries, currencies, laws, etc. at this point. Apple has to negotiate with the RIAA, and so their hands are tied.
I don't like the all-too-common American arrogance and exclusionist ways anymore than you do, but try to keep perspective on things like this. It's just like the internet sales tax thing - there's so many variables and differing jurisdictions to take into account, you can't just make a blanket statement about it.
Why is this modded "Funny"? This is damn insightful! I wish I still had the mod points I wasted yesterday...
Novell 7 SuSe In Link Up?
Looks like they succeeded in outlawing the shift key after all.However, it would be nice if there were an upgrade priced package
This doesn't make any sense! Consider how many people have Macs that do not have a copy of Mac OS to upgrade from. No doubt this is a very small percentage of Apple's small percentage of the computer market. Why on earth would they have an 'upgrade' version at a lower price - probably 99% of their users are 'upgrading'! This is like offering an 'upgrade' discount on brakes for cars. How many cars do not have brakes?
It may be "obvious" to you in retrospect, but how many music services have offered such a thing? How many times have legit music service models been discussed on here without the allowance idea coming up? Indeed, how many online for-pay services in general have ever used such an idea? I'd say Apple deserves this particular patent much more than your average "patent everything in sight" obvious patent we see on Slashdot every week.
It's widely warez'd, and I think that's part of the reason it's the industry standard. So many people get their start using photoshop on a pirated copy. If that weren't the case, I don't think Adobe would have the market share that they have now.
IMO, Adobe should do something like Alias|Wavefront does with Maya - release a free, 90% functionality version so people can learn the tools. I can't tell you how many graphics classes I've been in where the instructors say "Yeah, most people just warez [insert product here] until they get their first gig and can buy it legit." I think it's ridiculous that a student should have to pay $400(!) for Adobe After Effects with the educational discount. There should be a free (or insanely cheap) learning edition for such software.
The best way to get marketshare is to get the software into the hands of the students easily and cheaply. Then when they get scooped up by some company who wants to make use of their talents, that's another copy of Photoshop/Illustrator/etc sold.
[...] the damn thing stops playing because I'm no longer on the playlist that I was on when I started playing. WTF? Why can't I have it continue to play songs in the background while I'm doing other shit in the foreground?
That's what the "repeat playlist" button is for (bottom, third button from the left). I don't know about iTunes for Windows, but I've never had iTunes on the Mac spontaneously stop playing songs while I'm dorking around with the iTMS or other playlists, as long as that button is turned on.
That is probably a hardware/OS problem. Your sound card IRQ is being shared with your video card's IRQ. You can check this by running MSINFO32 --> hardware resources --> conflicts/sharing.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Apple will not sell OS X for PCs.
This newfangled "horseless carriage" is bad news for the horse and buggy industry.
I do wish people would stop opening these sites and saying that only people from one particular country are allowed to use them.
That's all well and good, but there's the matter of dealing with legal issues for every country you support, financial issues such as currency, and (if you ship a physical product) customs, shipping contracts to different parts of the world, etc. Not to mention that they probably only got the deal with Warner for use in Australia.
What a load of rubbish, just public disclosure is enough to make anything prior art
Load of rubbish? Do you see how many stupid and exploitive patents that are mentioned on Slashdot each (week|month|year)? Prior art has done such a great job of curbing those patents, I'd certainly stake my business's financial future on prior art.