Intel Macs use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS, so the versions of GRUB and/or LILO shipping with any current Linux distros do not work
Not entirely true; Ubuntu Edgy works with GRUB if you follow these directions, specifically steps 6 and 7 where you sync the partition tables while the installation is in progress, which allows GRUB to install successfully. Edgy works great on my MBP, except no wireless support. (And Beryl is *slick*).
What Boot Camp does is it provides BIOS emulation
BIOS emulation is provided by the firmware, not Boot Camp itself; see here. Also, Boot Camp's partitioning tool is just a GUI wrapper for "diskutil resizeVolume"
You don't need Boot Camp to boot or install Linux. It's just a set of Windows drivers for Mac hardware, and a front end to the existing nondestructive partitioning capabilities in Tiger. My Core 2 MacBook Pro arrived Friday, and yesterday I installed Ubuntu using these directions, except I created the partitions manually using diskutil (see the "resizeVolume" option) instead of Boot Camp.
Develop a format whereby the decryption of the video is stored in the ads.
That would force the player software to read the ads, but not to actually display them in real time. And once the software has extracted the keys from the ads the first time, it can just cache them for future use.
People who hack into your computer can fuck up your life a lot worse than just stealing your videos.
Exactly. If they just want to screw you over, sending threatening emails from "you" to various.gov accounts would be at least equally effective. I don't see your typical botnet masters or identity thieves doing either though; there's no profit in it for them.
Even more to the point, the GPL does exactly this, using a license to control how the end user distributes software that he received from the original copyright holder.
The GPL is not a EULA; it covers distribution, not use, and it doesn't claim to take away recipients' existing rights.
What they are probably "on to" is an attempt to generate a grass-roots campaign against Sarb-Ox. Wall-Street has been moaning about how anti-business Sarb-Ox is since before it was even implemented. All kinds of terrible doom and gloom have been predicted and blamed on Sarb-Ox. Which was itself a reaction to the various accounting scandals like Enron, Worldcomm and in retrospect - games like options back-dating.
but what room does anyone have to complain about this?
I'm complaining because (assuming the story is accurate) it isn't Apple's decision. The government is forcing Apple to charge for something it would prefer to give away, in the name of "protecting" us, and that is asinine.
All this whining about SOX, and possible even what Apple's doing, is an attempt to get people upset at a law requiring companies to be honest
Just like how people are upset about the PATRIOT Act when it's just trying to stop terrorists? The stated intentions of legislation are often wildly different from both its actual intentions and its effects in practice.
They spent their money/resources to produce the work, they should be able to sell it and restrict it's use how they want.
No. Copyright gives you the exclusive right to distribute copies. It gives you no rights whatsoever to control how recipients use those copies. Or rather, it didn't until some Congresspeople got bought.
That doesn't suddenly mean that you'll be able to buy any media from any store and play it on any player. All that will happen is that some products will lose their DRM and others will be taken off of the market and online stores will close because the media companies wont be happy to allow their wares to be out there unprotected regardless.
Fine. Given a choice between no online media sales and the elimination of general purpose computing that the **AAs want, I choose the former.
So who will win from this? A bunch of evangelistic techie nerds who put their own principles over pragmatism.
Techie nerds like Steve Wozniak. If the **AAs have their way, guys like him won't be able to get the hardware and software they could use to create the next big thing. Sorry, I'm not prepared to reduce the chances of technological breakthroughs that benefit all of humanity so that you can have an easier time buying Shakira albums.
The world isn't getting any bigger, there's a finite amount of stuff we can pull out of the ground, etc.
Resources are finite, but productivity, i.e. what we can achieve with those resources, can keep increasing. (Well, possibly until we hit various computational and quantum mechanical limits, but we're not quite there yet). We use far fewer natural resources per (inflation-adjusted) dollar of GDP today than we did 100 years ago.
Yes, because that person earning $110,000 needs to compete with people earning $200,000 if he/she wants to buy a home. If everyone else earns $200,000, the price of housing will increase so much that someone earning $110,000 won't be able to afford a home.
Right, these sorts of hypotheticals are almost always poorly phrased. They should find a way to put the scenarios in terms of purchasing power parity, to make it clear that in the second scenario you'd be able to afford more stuff (including housing) than in the first, but your neighbors would be able to afford even more. I suspect that would push more people to the second.
Even modified in this manner, there are still arguments for the first, because sometimes relative wealth really does matter and not just because of envy. The obvious example is that all else being equal the guy in the first scenario is going to have better results with women than the guy in the second.
You see if you haven't been paying attention the US economy has gone from 25% financial 75% industrial to 75% finacial to 25% industrial in our economy.
Sure, because manufacturing has become far more efficient. Even China is losing manufacturing jobs due to increasing automation.
Really... How much work does it take to leave your money in the bank?
Well, it takes the discipline to not spend every dollar you make, which is beyond many people.
Or maybe buy a few thousand shares and wait till it rises in price?
Assuming it does. Sure, day trading is essentially a zero-sum game. But real investing is positive-sum; the combined actions of investors direct capital to where it can be most effectively used, and society as a whole benefits from that.
Sometimes I even feel guilty when I set limit order sells on stocks that I only bought a few days ago because I know I'm just playing this system to vampire blood out of actual working people at that company.
How does buying and selling a company's stock have any impact at all on its employees? If anything, buying stock may help them since they're more likely to be stockholders, and you're increasing the demand for shares and thus raising the market price. Of course if you sell two days later the effect is canceled, but they're still not hurt.
Wouldn't it be more efficient just to provide the capital investments directly from the Government Treasury
Nope. Even unrealistically assuming no corruption, central planners can't allocate resources efficiently. See Hayek et al, or any history book covering the 20th century.
But would the person who lives longer and does not smoke be in better health and require less medical care in theory?
Yes and no. The smoker is more likely to get lung cancer at 60, with large medical expenses and death as a common result. The nonsmoker will have fewer expenses at 60, but may live 30 more years and have more of an opportunity to have even more expensive conditions, plus they'll receive more Social Security and other government payments. From the New England Journal of Medicine: "If people stopped smoking, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs."
(Apropos to my sig, this is yet another reason to cure aging; the economic benefits alone would be enormous).
Taxes should be for raising money, not social engineering.
Depends on what you mean by "social engineering". My definition of it is trying to change people's behavior because you think it's good for them, like raising taxes on cigarettes. I oppose these taxes as well. But gas is different; it should be taxed not because it's bad for the buyer, but because it's bad for everyone else who has to pay for the increased pollution and dependence on unstable nations. That's why I'm an unofficial member of the Pigou Club.
(As an aside, one might try to argue that cigarette taxes compensate society because smokers tend to have higher medical bills that are often picked up by taxpayers. While this is true, they also die earlier which ends up being a net savings due to lower lifetime costs).
In addition, a straight fuel tax would be regressive
So is taxing by weight or miles. You can always cut other taxes or have transfer programs to compensate.
it would penalize people who CAN'T afford purchasing a new hybrid vehicle, as well as those who can but DON'T.
That's exactly the point. A tax on gas corrects the negative externalities of pollution and dependence on terrorist-infested hellholes. It's *supposed* to encourage people to change their behavior by making them pay the true costs of their choices. Note that taxing by weight or mileage doesn't do this; driving a hybrid 20,000 miles is more harmful than driving an SUV 3,000 miles, and thus should be taxed more.
It's true that the G4 mini is underpowered for general purpose work, although mine does great as an HTPC running EyeTV and VLC and some custom Java and Python to control them. I'm actually surprised I haven't needed to upgrade from 256MB. The Intel minis should have more than enough CPU power for most users, although I hope they get a Core 2 upgrade soon.
If Apple was serious about this space they'd come out with a ~$1000 expandable box, or even a Mini that you could easily open and upgrade (poping the case open with a pair of putty knives and voiding the warranty isn't a viable option most places)
Opening the mini doesn't void the warranty unless you break something, but I completely agree that there needs to be an expandable Mac under $2000.
All these people are trying to do is fuck over people who might actually want a system
There are not enough systems to satisfy demand. Thus, the price is going to rise. Some people pay this additional price in time tracking down shipments and waiting for hours outside stores, others pay in money to scalpers (who themselves paid in time). I fail to see why one is worse than the other.
Maybe Sony could have gotten $700 or $800 out of the die-hard, but the idea that those long lines would have remained no matter the price Sony put on their console is just silly.
Well, yeah. At the "correct" price, demand exactly equals supply so they'd still sell out but there would be no lines. Not that Sony should have done this; they probably figured that the bad will they'd get from initially higher prices would more than offset the increased revenue.
Those are particularly hard to fix because they're safety-net programs
That's the problem; they're not safety nets. Wealthy retirees (who had higher incomes when they were working) get higher SS payments than the poor, which is ludicrous. Means-testing SS and Medicare would solve a lot of problems (of course it would have to be phased in so as not to screw those close to retirement who relied on the government's dubious promises). Welfare for the poor is a necessary evil; welfare for the rich is just evil.
Those programs are paid for by separate taxes, though, which is allocated specifically to them.
But as you allude to, that's just an accounting fiction. Money is fungible; a dollar from income taxes goes into the same pile as a dollar from FICA. The problem is that the net present value of the government's future obligations vastly exceeds future revenue; whether you treat this shortfall as a single account or split it into boxes labeled "entitlements" and "discretionary" is irrelevant. There are exactly two ways to solve this: raise taxes, or cut benefits. Since there is no reason for Warren Buffett to be receiving a monthly stipend and free prescription drugs from taxpayers, I'd start with option 2.
Apple "Switched" not because Intel was faster or better or had a "better roadmap" as they claim. It's because IBM couldnt get the heat down on the chips.
The second sentence is the reason for the first, not a refutation of it. Neither IBM nor Freescale had a reasonable competitor to Core for what Apple needed, and this remains true today.
IBM just couldnt make a cool + powerful chip like Intel could.. but.. that looks like thats in the past now..
"Under 100 watts" is still nowhere near the requirements for laptops, or even iMacs.
Slashdot Mirror
Is $29 more or less than every other manufacturer charges for Windows drivers?
It's less than the typical $infinity that other manufacturers charge for OS X and Linux drivers.
Is $29 more or less than every other bootloader?
Boot Camp isn't a bootloader.
Is $29 a reasonable price for the ability to install another OS on the hardware you already paid a premium for?
No, but you don't need Boot Camp to install other OSes. See above link.
Intel Macs use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS, so the versions of GRUB and/or LILO shipping with any current Linux distros do not work
Not entirely true; Ubuntu Edgy works with GRUB if you follow these directions, specifically steps 6 and 7 where you sync the partition tables while the installation is in progress, which allows GRUB to install successfully. Edgy works great on my MBP, except no wireless support. (And Beryl is *slick*).
What Boot Camp does is it provides BIOS emulation
BIOS emulation is provided by the firmware, not Boot Camp itself; see here. Also, Boot Camp's partitioning tool is just a GUI wrapper for "diskutil resizeVolume"
You don't need Boot Camp to boot or install Linux. It's just a set of Windows drivers for Mac hardware, and a front end to the existing nondestructive partitioning capabilities in Tiger. My Core 2 MacBook Pro arrived Friday, and yesterday I installed Ubuntu using these directions, except I created the partitions manually using diskutil (see the "resizeVolume" option) instead of Boot Camp.
Develop a format whereby the decryption of the video is stored in the ads.
That would force the player software to read the ads, but not to actually display them in real time. And once the software has extracted the keys from the ads the first time, it can just cache them for future use.
People who hack into your computer can fuck up your life a lot worse than just stealing your videos.
.gov accounts would be at least equally effective. I don't see your typical botnet masters or identity thieves doing either though; there's no profit in it for them.
Exactly. If they just want to screw you over, sending threatening emails from "you" to various
Even more to the point, the GPL does exactly this, using a license to control how the end user distributes software that he received from the original copyright holder.
The GPL is not a EULA; it covers distribution, not use, and it doesn't claim to take away recipients' existing rights.
What they are probably "on to" is an attempt to generate a grass-roots campaign against Sarb-Ox. Wall-Street has been moaning about how anti-business Sarb-Ox is since before it was even implemented. All kinds of terrible doom and gloom have been predicted and blamed on Sarb-Ox. Which was itself a reaction to the various accounting scandals like Enron, Worldcomm and in retrospect - games like options back-dating.
s/Wall Street/civil libertarians/
s/SarbOx/PATRIOT Act/
s/accounting scandals/9\/11/
Amazing how so many people unquestioningly support greatly expanded government power in one area and simultaneously rail against it in the other.
but what room does anyone have to complain about this?
I'm complaining because (assuming the story is accurate) it isn't Apple's decision. The government is forcing Apple to charge for something it would prefer to give away, in the name of "protecting" us, and that is asinine.
Further, I would think that Sarbanes-Oxley would include a provision for things like hardware that could be updated through software.
Your estimate of Congress's technical aptitude seems a tad optimistic...
All this whining about SOX, and possible even what Apple's doing, is an attempt to get people upset at a law requiring companies to be honest
Just like how people are upset about the PATRIOT Act when it's just trying to stop terrorists? The stated intentions of legislation are often wildly different from both its actual intentions and its effects in practice.
They spent their money/resources to produce the work, they should be able to sell it and restrict it's use how they want.
No. Copyright gives you the exclusive right to distribute copies. It gives you no rights whatsoever to control how recipients use those copies. Or rather, it didn't until some Congresspeople got bought.
Maybe, if DRM was actually a law.
Thanks to the DMCA, it is.
That doesn't suddenly mean that you'll be able to buy any media from any store and play it on any player. All that will happen is that some products will lose their DRM and others will be taken off of the market and online stores will close because the media companies wont be happy to allow their wares to be out there unprotected regardless.
Fine. Given a choice between no online media sales and the elimination of general purpose computing that the **AAs want, I choose the former.
So who will win from this? A bunch of evangelistic techie nerds who put their own principles over pragmatism.
Techie nerds like Steve Wozniak. If the **AAs have their way, guys like him won't be able to get the hardware and software they could use to create the next big thing. Sorry, I'm not prepared to reduce the chances of technological breakthroughs that benefit all of humanity so that you can have an easier time buying Shakira albums.
The world isn't getting any bigger, there's a finite amount of stuff we can pull out of the ground, etc.
Resources are finite, but productivity, i.e. what we can achieve with those resources, can keep increasing. (Well, possibly until we hit various computational and quantum mechanical limits, but we're not quite there yet). We use far fewer natural resources per (inflation-adjusted) dollar of GDP today than we did 100 years ago.
Yes, because that person earning $110,000 needs to compete with people earning $200,000 if he/she wants to buy a home. If everyone else earns $200,000, the price of housing will increase so much that someone earning $110,000 won't be able to afford a home.
Right, these sorts of hypotheticals are almost always poorly phrased. They should find a way to put the scenarios in terms of purchasing power parity, to make it clear that in the second scenario you'd be able to afford more stuff (including housing) than in the first, but your neighbors would be able to afford even more. I suspect that would push more people to the second.
Even modified in this manner, there are still arguments for the first, because sometimes relative wealth really does matter and not just because of envy. The obvious example is that all else being equal the guy in the first scenario is going to have better results with women than the guy in the second.
You see if you haven't been paying attention the US economy has gone from 25% financial 75% industrial to 75% finacial to 25% industrial in our economy.
Sure, because manufacturing has become far more efficient. Even China is losing manufacturing jobs due to increasing automation.
Really... How much work does it take to leave your money in the bank?
Well, it takes the discipline to not spend every dollar you make, which is beyond many people.
Or maybe buy a few thousand shares and wait till it rises in price?
Assuming it does. Sure, day trading is essentially a zero-sum game. But real investing is positive-sum; the combined actions of investors direct capital to where it can be most effectively used, and society as a whole benefits from that.
Sometimes I even feel guilty when I set limit order sells on stocks that I only bought a few days ago because I know I'm just playing this system to vampire blood out of actual working people at that company.
How does buying and selling a company's stock have any impact at all on its employees? If anything, buying stock may help them since they're more likely to be stockholders, and you're increasing the demand for shares and thus raising the market price. Of course if you sell two days later the effect is canceled, but they're still not hurt.
Wouldn't it be more efficient just to provide the capital investments directly from the Government Treasury
Nope. Even unrealistically assuming no corruption, central planners can't allocate resources efficiently. See Hayek et al, or any history book covering the 20th century.
But would the person who lives longer and does not smoke be in better health and require less medical care in theory?
Yes and no. The smoker is more likely to get lung cancer at 60, with large medical expenses and death as a common result. The nonsmoker will have fewer expenses at 60, but may live 30 more years and have more of an opportunity to have even more expensive conditions, plus they'll receive more Social Security and other government payments. From the New England Journal of Medicine: "If people stopped smoking, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs."
(Apropos to my sig, this is yet another reason to cure aging; the economic benefits alone would be enormous).
Taxes should be for raising money, not social engineering.
Depends on what you mean by "social engineering". My definition of it is trying to change people's behavior because you think it's good for them, like raising taxes on cigarettes. I oppose these taxes as well. But gas is different; it should be taxed not because it's bad for the buyer, but because it's bad for everyone else who has to pay for the increased pollution and dependence on unstable nations. That's why I'm an unofficial member of the Pigou Club.
(As an aside, one might try to argue that cigarette taxes compensate society because smokers tend to have higher medical bills that are often picked up by taxpayers. While this is true, they also die earlier which ends up being a net savings due to lower lifetime costs).
In addition, a straight fuel tax would be regressive
So is taxing by weight or miles. You can always cut other taxes or have transfer programs to compensate.
it would penalize people who CAN'T afford purchasing a new hybrid vehicle, as well as those who can but DON'T.
That's exactly the point. A tax on gas corrects the negative externalities of pollution and dependence on terrorist-infested hellholes. It's *supposed* to encourage people to change their behavior by making them pay the true costs of their choices. Note that taxing by weight or mileage doesn't do this; driving a hybrid 20,000 miles is more harmful than driving an SUV 3,000 miles, and thus should be taxed more.
It's true that the G4 mini is underpowered for general purpose work, although mine does great as an HTPC running EyeTV and VLC and some custom Java and Python to control them. I'm actually surprised I haven't needed to upgrade from 256MB. The Intel minis should have more than enough CPU power for most users, although I hope they get a Core 2 upgrade soon.
If Apple was serious about this space they'd come out with a ~$1000 expandable box, or even a Mini that you could easily open and upgrade (poping the case open with a pair of putty knives and voiding the warranty isn't a viable option most places)
Opening the mini doesn't void the warranty unless you break something, but I completely agree that there needs to be an expandable Mac under $2000.
All these people are trying to do is fuck over people who might actually want a system
There are not enough systems to satisfy demand. Thus, the price is going to rise. Some people pay this additional price in time tracking down shipments and waiting for hours outside stores, others pay in money to scalpers (who themselves paid in time). I fail to see why one is worse than the other.
Maybe Sony could have gotten $700 or $800 out of the die-hard, but the idea that those long lines would have remained no matter the price Sony put on their console is just silly.
Well, yeah. At the "correct" price, demand exactly equals supply so they'd still sell out but there would be no lines. Not that Sony should have done this; they probably figured that the bad will they'd get from initially higher prices would more than offset the increased revenue.
Those are particularly hard to fix because they're safety-net programs
That's the problem; they're not safety nets. Wealthy retirees (who had higher incomes when they were working) get higher SS payments than the poor, which is ludicrous. Means-testing SS and Medicare would solve a lot of problems (of course it would have to be phased in so as not to screw those close to retirement who relied on the government's dubious promises). Welfare for the poor is a necessary evil; welfare for the rich is just evil.
Those programs are paid for by separate taxes, though, which is allocated specifically to them.
But as you allude to, that's just an accounting fiction. Money is fungible; a dollar from income taxes goes into the same pile as a dollar from FICA. The problem is that the net present value of the government's future obligations vastly exceeds future revenue; whether you treat this shortfall as a single account or split it into boxes labeled "entitlements" and "discretionary" is irrelevant. There are exactly two ways to solve this: raise taxes, or cut benefits. Since there is no reason for Warren Buffett to be receiving a monthly stipend and free prescription drugs from taxpayers, I'd start with option 2.
Apple "Switched" not because Intel was faster or better or had a "better roadmap" as they claim. It's because IBM couldnt get the heat down on the chips.
The second sentence is the reason for the first, not a refutation of it. Neither IBM nor Freescale had a reasonable competitor to Core for what Apple needed, and this remains true today.
IBM just couldnt make a cool + powerful chip like Intel could.. but.. that looks like thats in the past now..
"Under 100 watts" is still nowhere near the requirements for laptops, or even iMacs.