Which is exactly the same reasoning used by jack thompson in his argument against violent video games.
Not really. Thompson's argument is that violent video games will make the consumer more likely to commit violent acts. The kiddie porn argument is that downloading it will encourage the *producer* to continue or increase production, abusing more children in the process.
Yes. You spend time doing paperwork, they spend time processing paperwork, and the result is a transfer with a net benefit of zero. They benefit from price discrimination, but consumers collectively lose more.
but I'm not going to shell out $$$ for new hardware that is exactly the same as what I currently have
And you would have paid Apple for hardware that's *worse*?
And to those Mac users who say that the point of a Mac is OS X, what if you're using OS X on your Dell or eMachines box (especially if the drivers work well)? Is that the Macintosh experience?
Sure. It would be nice if the machine isn't ugly, but I'll gladly take OS X on a beige box over Windows in a pretty case.
The x86 architecture sucks from a architectural standpoint compared to most of the other architectures out there
Yes, but that's increasingly irrelevant. If it's any consolation, Intel's CPUs have a RISC-like internal architecture, for which the x86 instruction set is just a front end.
Look, they couldn't convince them the premium was worth it before, how are they going to do it now when "smart consumers" can not compare Apples to Apples?
Smart consumers already knew that if they bought a Mac they were paying more for a machine with a slower CPU. Now they can pay more for a machine with an equal CPU. This is an unqualified improvement, and will attract some users that want to run OS X but weren't willing to accept the previous price/performance tradeoff.
if anything it'll start a war between the OSS guys and DRM guys.
Start?
If Microsoft start screaming "The new GPL prohibits all use of DRM type software on ANYTHING you make", then Microsoft may well kill off a lot of them Linux machines.
OSS opponents have always spouted FUD like "if you use Linux then the FSF zealots will make you release all your code"; this would be no different.
The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5
There's not nearly enough evidence to reach a conclusion either way. QuickTime export is one of Altivec's strongest areas, and Xbench scores are notoriously bad at having any relationship to reality. Let's wait and see how they do in real life; perhaps you'll find Apple really does have a clue.
Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents.
Yeah, all they had to do was put quad G5s in the iMac and Powerbook enclosures...
I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year:
Because we get faster Macs for the same cost, and in the case of Powerbooks, *much* faster. Desktop PPC is dead; deal with it. Yes, it's a fundamentally better architecture, but IBM and Freescale have repeatedly shown they have no interest in developing products suitable for Apple unless they're bribed heavily. I'd much rather have Apple focus on their software.
Now you only have rights to "privately" run the software (whatever that means, since there's no apparently caselaw covering "public performance" of software) -- and the author has the right to stick EULA-equese provisions on code covering how you may use it.
See the "Not a Contract" section:
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive a copy of the Program. However, nothing else grants you permission to propagate or modify the Program or any covered works. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating the Program (or any covered work), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions.
I don't think the second sentence is entirely correct, since private modifications could fall under fair use. But it appears that the GPL still doesn't claim to remove any of your existing rights under copyright law.
The biggest problem with the GPL, even the new version, is that it doesn't really address enforceability.
IANAL, but I don't think it has to. If Bob takes Alice's GPLed app and distributes a modified version while refusing to provide the source, Alice doesn't sue Bob for "violating the GPL", she sues him for copyright infringement. Bob can't claim the GPL as a defense since he hasn't fulfilled its conditions, and nothing else grants him permission to redistribute the copyrighted work, so he loses.
The lost revenue associated with specialists hacking the os on to PCs should be little or nothing
In fact, one could easily argue the loss will be negative. Geeks playing with OS X on commodity PCs->increased recommendations to non-geeks to buy Mac hardware.
The cost of the employee is mostly absorbed by the store so it has almost no impact on gas prices.
Very unlikely. And if it's true, it means that some gas stations are driven out of business (or prevented from opening in the first place) due to the extra costs.
Man, the crap those companies do to the owners of the stations is amazing.
In which case I fail to see why government should compound their difficulties by forcing them to pay gas pumpers regardless of whether customers actually want them.
Many may say, yes, but Mactel will run OSX. So what?
So what? That's the entire reason people have been buying Macs. It really wasn't for the blazing speed of the G4 and its 167MHz FSB. Even the G5 only achieved parity with Intel. For Mac buyers, it's always been about the OS, and it will continue to be.
In fact, OSX hasn't caused any noticible increase in Apple's computer marketshare in the last 5 years.
And what do you think Apple's market share would be if they stuck with OS 9? If both you and your competitors are improving your products, the fact that your market share remains the same doesn't mean that your improvements were a waste of resources.
People will lose interest in OSX and once people realize they are paying more for the same thing they can get cheaper from Dell and HP
Absolutely ludicrous. Those Mac buyers who actually cared about CPU power always knew that they were paying more for a slower machine. Now we can pay slightly more for a machine of equal speed. This is a pure improvement.
What do these customers think of Apple becoming a PC Clone?
That would suck. Fortunately it bears no relationship to reality. Intel!="PC".
What I always found fascinating and really enjoy, is when you wake up in the morning, are half asleep, and time seems to be stretched so that when you close your eyes for 2 minutes, it seems like 10.
Yeah, that's great. It doesn't happen for me if I wake up and just close my eyes again; I have to get up and do something that takes some amount of energy. Then if I go back to bed I can rest for an hour of subjective time in 10 minutes. When I was in college having to go to a boring early morning class would do it.
Am I the only person who thinks that 1440x900 is a pretty low resolution for a 15" laptop?
The previous 15" Powerbooks had 1280x854, so it's actually an increase. Not everybody has perfect eyes, so Apple's making compromises. Hopefully they'll get OS X's resolution-independent UI working soon and then go with as many pixels as possible.
iMac that's as powerful as a PowerMac? Who's gonna wanna buy PowerMacs for the next couple months?
People who need bigger screens or expansion. Also, the quad G5 will still be much faster than the iMac in threadable tasks. But really, tower sales in general have been weak the last few years anyway. Laptops are the future, and it's much better for Apple to have competitive laptops even at the risk of cannibalizing some towers.
And a MacBook Pro that's 10x more powerful than a iBook?!? There goes the iBook market...
The iBook market doesn't care much about performance.
Anybody else see the logic of transitioning the consumer desktop and pro laptop first
Sort of. The PB was a no-brainer; it's a "pro" machine that has been hobbled by the G4 for years. The towers are probably waiting for Conroe this summer; one reason would be that Apple wouldn't want to "downgrade" from the 64-bit G5 to the 32-bit Yonah. (It doesn't matter for the iMac, since not many people are running heavy scientific apps on them).
WebObjects performed poorly in the marketplace due to Apple's stunning inability to market it's strengths - the exact same strengths the article is describing. Many people, including Apple employees - (myself in the past) - lobbied for WO to be made open source.
Yeah. I remember 5 years ago telling my manager and 50 other people in the room that WebObjects needed to be free, and the $700 that they had just dropped it to wasn't going to help. Amazingly they declined to take business advice from a random CE, oh well. We still use WO at my current job, but if we were starting from scratch today there's no way we could go with it due to the lack of any support or direction. Cayenne+Tapestry comes closest as a replacement, but there's still lots of cool EOF stuff missing.
I have seen several people fired from my company for saying anti-China things (not anti-Chinese mind you, it was aimed directly at the gov't not the people). In an effort to conduct "consistent" business processes, and "comply with global standards" however, even our US facilities are regulated China-style.
I don't suppose you'd want to name that company, so I can avoid buying from such spineless bootlickers.
Almost all employed poor people pay social security taxes
Quite true. In fact, a large percentage of workers (it may even be a majority, not sure) pay more in SS than income taxes. We could acknowledge that Social Security is just a convoluted welfare program, abolish the payroll tax, means-test benefits and pay them out of general revenues. That would make the tax system much more progressive, but oddly liberals tend to howl in protest whenever anyone even thinks about touching SS.
According to the "enemy of my enemy" theory, A and B are friends, because they are both enemies of C, A and C are friends because both are enemies of B, and B and C are friends because they are both enemies of A. So everyone is both friends and enemies.
Well, yes. This happens all the time in hearts and international diplomacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it looks like nonsense, but that's only if you don't understand Perl.
That's the point. In Python I'd do:
print [f for f in files if os.path.exists(f)]
which is semantically equivalent and much more readable.
People who think Perl is messy should take the time to learn it before slagging it off.
I know Perl. I like Perl. But it is messy.
...throw the book at the sick bastard.
I agree, but let's do it with existing law, rather than twisting words to create bizarre interpretations that can easily be abused in other cases.
Which is exactly the same reasoning used by jack thompson in his argument against violent video games.
Not really. Thompson's argument is that violent video games will make the consumer more likely to commit violent acts. The kiddie porn argument is that downloading it will encourage the *producer* to continue or increase production, abusing more children in the process.
Senseless?: No.
Yes. You spend time doing paperwork, they spend time processing paperwork, and the result is a transfer with a net benefit of zero. They benefit from price discrimination, but consumers collectively lose more.
Somehow this whole process disturbs me.
As it should. It's a textbook example of deadweight loss.
but I'm not going to shell out $$$ for new hardware that is exactly the same as what I currently have
And you would have paid Apple for hardware that's *worse*?
And to those Mac users who say that the point of a Mac is OS X, what if you're using OS X on your Dell or eMachines box (especially if the drivers work well)? Is that the Macintosh experience?
Sure. It would be nice if the machine isn't ugly, but I'll gladly take OS X on a beige box over Windows in a pretty case.
The x86 architecture sucks from a architectural standpoint compared to most of the other architectures out there
Yes, but that's increasingly irrelevant. If it's any consolation, Intel's CPUs have a RISC-like internal architecture, for which the x86 instruction set is just a front end.
Look, they couldn't convince them the premium was worth it before, how are they going to do it now when "smart consumers" can not compare Apples to Apples?
Smart consumers already knew that if they bought a Mac they were paying more for a machine with a slower CPU. Now they can pay more for a machine with an equal CPU. This is an unqualified improvement, and will attract some users that want to run OS X but weren't willing to accept the previous price/performance tradeoff.
if anything it'll start a war between the OSS guys and DRM guys.
Start?
If Microsoft start screaming "The new GPL prohibits all use of DRM type software on ANYTHING you make", then Microsoft may well kill off a lot of them Linux machines.
OSS opponents have always spouted FUD like "if you use Linux then the FSF zealots will make you release all your code"; this would be no different.
The Intel iMac isn't significantly faster than the iMac G5
There's not nearly enough evidence to reach a conclusion either way. QuickTime export is one of Altivec's strongest areas, and Xbench scores are notoriously bad at having any relationship to reality. Let's wait and see how they do in real life; perhaps you'll find Apple really does have a clue.
Indeed, if the iMac G5 had undergone the same revisions that the PowerMac line had a few months ago, the chances are they'd be faster than the Pentium equivalents.
Yeah, all they had to do was put quad G5s in the iMac and Powerbook enclosures...
I really don't understand why people reacted with such enthusiasm to the Stevenote this year:
Because we get faster Macs for the same cost, and in the case of Powerbooks, *much* faster. Desktop PPC is dead; deal with it. Yes, it's a fundamentally better architecture, but IBM and Freescale have repeatedly shown they have no interest in developing products suitable for Apple unless they're bribed heavily. I'd much rather have Apple focus on their software.
See the "Not a Contract" section:
I don't think the second sentence is entirely correct, since private modifications could fall under fair use. But it appears that the GPL still doesn't claim to remove any of your existing rights under copyright law.
The biggest problem with the GPL, even the new version, is that it doesn't really address enforceability.
IANAL, but I don't think it has to. If Bob takes Alice's GPLed app and distributes a modified version while refusing to provide the source, Alice doesn't sue Bob for "violating the GPL", she sues him for copyright infringement. Bob can't claim the GPL as a defense since he hasn't fulfilled its conditions, and nothing else grants him permission to redistribute the copyrighted work, so he loses.
The lost revenue associated with specialists hacking the os on to PCs should be little or nothing
In fact, one could easily argue the loss will be negative. Geeks playing with OS X on commodity PCs->increased recommendations to non-geeks to buy Mac hardware.
The cost of the employee is mostly absorbed by the store so it has almost no impact on gas prices.
Very unlikely. And if it's true, it means that some gas stations are driven out of business (or prevented from opening in the first place) due to the extra costs.
Man, the crap those companies do to the owners of the stations is amazing.
In which case I fail to see why government should compound their difficulties by forcing them to pay gas pumpers regardless of whether customers actually want them.
Many may say, yes, but Mactel will run OSX. So what?
So what? That's the entire reason people have been buying Macs. It really wasn't for the blazing speed of the G4 and its 167MHz FSB. Even the G5 only achieved parity with Intel. For Mac buyers, it's always been about the OS, and it will continue to be.
In fact, OSX hasn't caused any noticible increase in Apple's computer marketshare in the last 5 years.
And what do you think Apple's market share would be if they stuck with OS 9? If both you and your competitors are improving your products, the fact that your market share remains the same doesn't mean that your improvements were a waste of resources.
People will lose interest in OSX and once people realize they are paying more for the same thing they can get cheaper from Dell and HP
Absolutely ludicrous. Those Mac buyers who actually cared about CPU power always knew that they were paying more for a slower machine. Now we can pay slightly more for a machine of equal speed. This is a pure improvement.
What do these customers think of Apple becoming a PC Clone?
That would suck. Fortunately it bears no relationship to reality. Intel!="PC".
What I always found fascinating and really enjoy, is when you wake up in the morning, are half asleep, and time seems to be stretched so that when you close your eyes for 2 minutes, it seems like 10.
Yeah, that's great. It doesn't happen for me if I wake up and just close my eyes again; I have to get up and do something that takes some amount of energy. Then if I go back to bed I can rest for an hour of subjective time in 10 minutes. When I was in college having to go to a boring early morning class would do it.
including re-writing the entire EULA without notification or consent.
IANAL, but my understanding is that ridiculously open-ended and unbalanced clauses like that aren't enforceable.
That's wacky. Depending on customs fees and such, there could be nice arbitrage opportunities...
Am I the only person who thinks that 1440x900 is a pretty low resolution for a 15" laptop?
The previous 15" Powerbooks had 1280x854, so it's actually an increase. Not everybody has perfect eyes, so Apple's making compromises. Hopefully they'll get OS X's resolution-independent UI working soon and then go with as many pixels as possible.
iMac that's as powerful as a PowerMac? Who's gonna wanna buy PowerMacs for the next couple months?
People who need bigger screens or expansion. Also, the quad G5 will still be much faster than the iMac in threadable tasks. But really, tower sales in general have been weak the last few years anyway. Laptops are the future, and it's much better for Apple to have competitive laptops even at the risk of cannibalizing some towers.
And a MacBook Pro that's 10x more powerful than a iBook?!? There goes the iBook market...
The iBook market doesn't care much about performance.
Anybody else see the logic of transitioning the consumer desktop and pro laptop first
Sort of. The PB was a no-brainer; it's a "pro" machine that has been hobbled by the G4 for years. The towers are probably waiting for Conroe this summer; one reason would be that Apple wouldn't want to "downgrade" from the 64-bit G5 to the 32-bit Yonah. (It doesn't matter for the iMac, since not many people are running heavy scientific apps on them).
So they did have to take two very interesting -- can we say essential?
Not really. Firewire 800 never went anywhere, and there's an ExpressCard slot for expansion.
What could have the MacBook been if they had stayed with Power
Um, a lot slower?
So this launched has killed the Mac for me.
That makes no sense whatsoever, but ok.
Hey Barry, fancy seeing you here.
WebObjects performed poorly in the marketplace due to Apple's stunning inability to market it's strengths - the exact same strengths the article is describing. Many people, including Apple employees - (myself in the past) - lobbied for WO to be made open source.
Yeah. I remember 5 years ago telling my manager and 50 other people in the room that WebObjects needed to be free, and the $700 that they had just dropped it to wasn't going to help. Amazingly they declined to take business advice from a random CE, oh well. We still use WO at my current job, but if we were starting from scratch today there's no way we could go with it due to the lack of any support or direction. Cayenne+Tapestry comes closest as a replacement, but there's still lots of cool EOF stuff missing.
Well, we all here seem to think it is immoral, but apparently the Chinese see it differently.
Um no, the gang of murderous tyrants calling themselves the Chinese government see it differently.
I have seen several people fired from my company for saying anti-China things (not anti-Chinese mind you, it was aimed directly at the gov't not the people). In an effort to conduct "consistent" business processes, and "comply with global standards" however, even our US facilities are regulated China-style.
I don't suppose you'd want to name that company, so I can avoid buying from such spineless bootlickers.
Almost all employed poor people pay social security taxes
Quite true. In fact, a large percentage of workers (it may even be a majority, not sure) pay more in SS than income taxes. We could acknowledge that Social Security is just a convoluted welfare program, abolish the payroll tax, means-test benefits and pay them out of general revenues. That would make the tax system much more progressive, but oddly liberals tend to howl in protest whenever anyone even thinks about touching SS.
According to the "enemy of my enemy" theory, A and B are friends, because they are both enemies of C, A and C are friends because both are enemies of B, and B and C are friends because they are both enemies of A. So everyone is both friends and enemies.
Well, yes. This happens all the time in hearts and international diplomacy.