If you want to watch a film that I have funded a part of the price I want you to pay is to be exposed to the ideas and values I seek to promote.
That may be what you want, but you have no moral or legal claim to make it so. Once someone buys a copy of your movie, they can use it however they want as long as they don't violate copyright law, and splicing out what they consider objectionable material does not. Nor does paying someone else to splice those sections, nor does leaving the room when those sections come on.
Like you, I have no use for a company who is offering to protect me from content they think I shouldn't see. But if they have customers willing to pay for self-censorship, more power to them.
There are half a dozen different kinds of executables, with entirely different behaviors.
Such as? There are command-line apps, which "normal" users don't use directly, and then there are GUI apps that users launch by double-clicking. They may be Cocoa, Carbon, Classic, or Java, but they all appear the same (except for classic apps not having the Aqua interface).
Quartz is an enormous resource hog and rather sluggish.
Not as much of a problem in 10.2. Quartz is just slightly ahead of the hardware, like the original Mac UI was in 1984.
The Cocoa API requires lots of manual storage management and manual layout management.
Not at all. Cocoa uses semi-automatic reference counting; it's not quite as transparent as Java's garbage collection but it's far better than the nonexistent memory management in C/C++.
it was a nice idea in 1985, now we have better systems
Objective C is the best language for Cocoa development; use it and you'll see why. But Java is fully supported for both Cocoa and standard Java apps.
In the medium term, they might even be well advised to drop Quartz and Objective-C
Um, no. If anything they should be funding GNUstep.
I think Apple won't be able to keep up with Gnome, KDE, Ximian
Keep up? They've already done what those efforts have failed to do: produce a Unix-based system usable by mortals.
"No Office for you." And Apple goes down in a wonderful pallete of red-yellow flame.
Not necessarily. Apple's response would be to release Mac OS X for x86, and invest heavily in OpenOffice, giving them a chance at dismantling the Windows monopoly (which is fundamentally based on Office). Not a great chance, but still one Microsoft probably doesn't want to take.
I worry about it ruining the screen with the lid closed while using it as a desk-side workstation.
Why do you have the lid closed? Keep it open and you have an extra 1280x854 screen, which is great for development.
Slows noticably if disk-io is sky-high. Though, my brother who has an iBook said that putting disk-intensive apps on a fire-wire drive run fantastic. Probably the small form-factor of a laptop hard disk.
Right. You can go to a gig of RAM for $200, I found that makes a significant difference.
I'd rather live in a place with occasional suicide bomber then in 1984land, personally.
I agree completely, and this is an important point to make against the "if it saves just one life" sheep. China has less crime than the US, but I don't see much support for emulating their "justice" system. CAPPS might end up slightly improving detection of terrorists, but it's still not worth it. First, terrorists won't be hijacking planes again because the passengers know to fight back now, and second, the massive data collected on innocent people *will* be misused.
The best security would be gained by "spending" all your checks doing random checks. Any other system unevenly distributes the chances of being checked, and decreases security.
As I pointed out when Bruce Schneier made this claim, this assumes that terrorists have a pool of every possible demographic group that can be sent on missions, which is not the case. If you're recruiting for a suicide bombing mission against Americans, you're going to have a much easier time getting a 25 year old Saudi male than a 70 year old female from Nebraska.
The optimal solution is to always have some possibility of a random search, but to increase the chance of a search for passengers fitting certain profiles (e.g. male, age 16-50, Middle Eastern, probably in that order of importance). This is like the minimax solution in game theory; ideally any lowered risk of detection the terrorists achieve by using "innocent" looking agents will be balanced by their increased costs of obtaining those agents in the first place.
This means that if GNUstep ever took off, any Cocoa application could be very easily ported to GNUstep without a rewrite.
And why wait for it to take off? My latest Mac OS X app Gridlock was an easy port to GNUstep. The non-UI code worked perfectly with zero changes; there were a few UI issues but they were simple to work around.
However, the real value is in the laptops, and they are -across-the-board- at least $1k too expensive.
You're arguably right about the Powerbooks (which are rumored to be updated soon), but the iBooks which start at $1200 are a much better value in most cases.
So maybe the regime does want to disable home VCR use
"The regime"? This whole HDTV mess started under the Clinton administration. And what party does Hollings belong to again?
like claiming they never campaigned for social security privatization
Huh? As far as I know, Republicans still rightly support Social Security privatization. Anyone with a halfway decent knowledge of math and economics should realize that's a far better plan than continuing to cut benefits and raise taxes as the current Ponzi scheme requires. (Yes, even with the state of the stock market today. Think long term.)
This it a regime that very much wants to control the media. They are people for whom no power is sufficient. Even the US Presidency does not give them enough power, they want more.
Right, as opposed to the great defender of free speech Bill Clinton, who signed the CDA and blamed the OKC bombing on talk radio.
Instead of mandating a state-wide recount, the Supreme Court ended recount
Yes, in accordance with Florida law, which the Florida Supreme Court ignored. SCOTUS did not "hand the election" to Bush, they simply prevented SCOFLA from rewriting Florida election law after the fact. Under the law as it existed at the time of the election, Bush won.
Please don't lump all conservatives in with idiots like McCollum. His articles are frequently posted on Free Republic, and they are swiftly discredited by the many posters there with technical knowledge.
I really hope they're happy now... as they are creating a gigantic number of criminals by persuing their current path.
I know Ayn Rand isn't popular around here, but this seems appropriate:
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." - Ayn Rand,
Atlas Shrugged
??AA and BSA types want there to be lots of "criminals"; this gives them more ammunition for anti-consumer laws "needed to stop piracy". These laws in turn create more criminals; rinse and repeat.
Yes, and DRM has nothing to do with security, at least as the term has traditionally been used. A secure system is one to which the owner controls access. A DRM-enabled system is one in which control has been removed from the owner. Microsoft is pretending these concepts are identical, when they are nearly complete opposites.
it has the Rage Mobility video card built in, so I don't imagine it to be a very solid "game machine"
Actually the current iBooks have a Radeon Mobility (not 7500) with 16 MB VRAM, which is decent for games, and also supports Quartz Extreme. I agree that right now the iBook is a better buy than the Powerbook, the PBs are supposedly going to be updated fairly soon. I also agree that right now the dual 867 is the best value available today. I just barely decided to not replace my G4/400 tower, waiting for the revision next year where hopefully Apple will dump Motorola and switch to a halfway competent processor vendor.
Because looking at the quality of software produced now, it seems that the only way to get reliable software is to regulate it.
Maybe you should look at different software. Linux pretty much works. Mac OS X pretty much works. Perl, Apache, vi and emacs pretty much work. I would much rather have the freedom to use these software packages with the understanding that they may have bugs than have someone like you prevent software from being released without official approval "for my own good".
I want to get your customers to buy good quality software.
A noble goal. Unfortunately after spending thousands or millions of dollars dealing with the regulations you would impose, many fewer potential customers would be able to afford it. And forget about open source software.
Complex applications with complex interactions? Break it into component pieces. Write interface specs, follow those specs, publish those specs, and if you use them, read those specs.
Well, I'm glad you've got this all figured out. I look forward to using the bug-free software you will produce.
We regulate building contractors because it is a multi-billion dollar industry, and quality matters.
And because land is scarce, and because improperly designed buildings can kill people. If software is used in a situation where people can die as a result of failure, it is more strictly designed, as such it is more expensive. You have no right to decide for everyone the proper balance between cost, time to market, and reliability.
And don't give me any of this crap about how hard software development is. Designing bridges so they don't fall down is hard.
I disagree. Not that designing bridges is easy, but neither is software development. A bridge has a single goal: to stay up. Furthermore, it is deployed in a single known environment with specific load requirements (which of course should be padded with a large safety factor). Software is generally run in a tremendous variety of environments, is often used in ways not considered by its creators, and interacts with countless other pieces of software, many of which didn't exist when it was originally written.
Saying "but it's hard" is another way of saying "I don't want to be bothered doing it right".
Actually it's saying that the costs of mathematically rigorous verification that software is bug-free would result in nobody being able to afford to buy it, and thus nobody willing to produce it.
If your justification is "the industry is immature" then the solution is to either outlaw use of your products until they are mature, or to force manufacturers to offer additional protections for this immature product, not fewer protections.
Or we could let people decide for themselves via the free market. Of course Microsoft currently does not operate in a free market due to the abuse of their monopoly, but that's a separate issue.
And really, you don't lose privacy unless you're "sharing" with 50,000 of your best friends via Gnutella or something. I could live with a system like this; it seems to be one of the few cases where "if you're not guilty, you have nothing to fear" is actually true.
Of course there would still be problems, as the RIAA would continue to try to censor software and research that could possibly be used to defeat the protection, but overall I think it would be an improvement.
I'm glad this article showed up here, I tried to post a reply on igeek when I saw it yesterday but it wouldn't let me for some reason. Anyway, Every has some good points, but also seems to have a strange hostility toward NeXT technologies which causes him to make some odd statements. Specifically this:
So Carbon on a new kernel (NuKernal) was done long before the rest of OSX was ready. It took years to get NeXTSTEP and Cocoa and the rest of the OS time to catch up
This is just absolutely false. The NeXT kernel (Mach/BSD) and Cocoa were ported very quickly. Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the first Rhapsody developer release was ready less than a year later, and Mac OS X Server 1.0 shipped in early 1999. The reasons why the "real" Mac OS X took longer were that Apple had to implement Carbon for developers unwilling to convert to Cocoa, and write a brand new display system (Quartz) after Adobe dropped Display PostScript.
NeXT delivered on its promises, it's just that Apple's requirements changed. And it's also worth pointing out that Mac OS X is a far better system than what was envisioned for Copland. Aside from the much better adherence to standards, it is a much cleaner architecture. From what I remember of Copland's documentation, it had a weird form of partial memory protection where the entire GUI ran in a single process, so any app could take down all other UI apps, although server processes would be protected. The transition to a fully buzzword-compliant OS wasn't going to happen until Gershwin, and I seriously doubt that could have shipped by now.
Many people on Slashdot just don't seem to understand how having completely free markets in the USA leads to companies supplying the best possible products for their customers.
You're mostly right, even though you don't think you are. DRM cannot succeed in a free market. If the free market were allowed to function, there would be no DVD region coding, because the demand for region-free players would be supplied. But thanks to anti-capitalist laws like the DMCA, attempting to fulfill that demand can get you arrested. Likewise, if Palladium succeeds it will only be because of laws that effectively mandate it; unfortunately the DMCA may already be sufficient for this.
Because Microsoft owns a significant part of Apple
No they don't, and they never did. Many years ago they bought around $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, which they've since sold for a tidy profit.
They just take what they need from Open Source projects and then we can sell our products without regard for publishing the source.
Excellent plan, unfortunately they'll still be guilty of copyright infringement.
It's unfortunate that the term "license" is used for both the one-sided removal of rights of commercial EULAs, as well as the grant of rights in free software licenses. Not "agreeing" to the GPL means your rights revert to what they are under standard copyright, which are strictly less your rights with the GPL.
why don't doc-writers just save their stuff as PDFs and let people open them in Preview?
Because PDFs suck for reading on screen. The author doesn't know how big my monitor is or how much screen real estate I want to devote to his file, and having separate pages just gets in the way. Using HTML or RTF gives the user much more flexibility.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be what you want, but you have no moral or legal claim to make it so. Once someone buys a copy of your movie, they can use it however they want as long as they don't violate copyright law, and splicing out what they consider objectionable material does not. Nor does paying someone else to splice those sections, nor does leaving the room when those sections come on.
Like you, I have no use for a company who is offering to protect me from content they think I shouldn't see. But if they have customers willing to pay for self-censorship, more power to them.
Such as? There are command-line apps, which "normal" users don't use directly, and then there are GUI apps that users launch by double-clicking. They may be Cocoa, Carbon, Classic, or Java, but they all appear the same (except for classic apps not having the Aqua interface).
Quartz is an enormous resource hog and rather sluggish.
Not as much of a problem in 10.2. Quartz is just slightly ahead of the hardware, like the original Mac UI was in 1984.
The Cocoa API requires lots of manual storage management and manual layout management.
Not at all. Cocoa uses semi-automatic reference counting; it's not quite as transparent as Java's garbage collection but it's far better than the nonexistent memory management in C/C++.
it was a nice idea in 1985, now we have better systems
Objective C is the best language for Cocoa development; use it and you'll see why. But Java is fully supported for both Cocoa and standard Java apps.
In the medium term, they might even be well advised to drop Quartz and Objective-C
Um, no. If anything they should be funding GNUstep.
I think Apple won't be able to keep up with Gnome, KDE, Ximian
Keep up? They've already done what those efforts have failed to do: produce a Unix-based system usable by mortals.
Not necessarily. Apple's response would be to release Mac OS X for x86, and invest heavily in OpenOffice, giving them a chance at dismantling the Windows monopoly (which is fundamentally based on Office). Not a great chance, but still one Microsoft probably doesn't want to take.
Why do you have the lid closed? Keep it open and you have an extra 1280x854 screen, which is great for development.
Slows noticably if disk-io is sky-high. Though, my brother who has an iBook said that putting disk-intensive apps on a fire-wire drive run fantastic. Probably the small form-factor of a laptop hard disk.
Right. You can go to a gig of RAM for $200, I found that makes a significant difference.
I agree completely, and this is an important point to make against the "if it saves just one life" sheep. China has less crime than the US, but I don't see much support for emulating their "justice" system. CAPPS might end up slightly improving detection of terrorists, but it's still not worth it. First, terrorists won't be hijacking planes again because the passengers know to fight back now, and second, the massive data collected on innocent people *will* be misused.
Only if terrorists are distributed over all demographic groups with equal frequency, which is obviously not the case.
As I pointed out when Bruce Schneier made this claim, this assumes that terrorists have a pool of every possible demographic group that can be sent on missions, which is not the case. If you're recruiting for a suicide bombing mission against Americans, you're going to have a much easier time getting a 25 year old Saudi male than a 70 year old female from Nebraska.
The optimal solution is to always have some possibility of a random search, but to increase the chance of a search for passengers fitting certain profiles (e.g. male, age 16-50, Middle Eastern, probably in that order of importance). This is like the minimax solution in game theory; ideally any lowered risk of detection the terrorists achieve by using "innocent" looking agents will be balanced by their increased costs of obtaining those agents in the first place.
And why wait for it to take off? My latest Mac OS X app Gridlock was an easy port to GNUstep. The non-UI code worked perfectly with zero changes; there were a few UI issues but they were simple to work around.
You're arguably right about the Powerbooks (which are rumored to be updated soon), but the iBooks which start at $1200 are a much better value in most cases.
"The regime"? This whole HDTV mess started under the Clinton administration. And what party does Hollings belong to again?
like claiming they never campaigned for social security privatization
Huh? As far as I know, Republicans still rightly support Social Security privatization. Anyone with a halfway decent knowledge of math and economics should realize that's a far better plan than continuing to cut benefits and raise taxes as the current Ponzi scheme requires. (Yes, even with the state of the stock market today. Think long term.)
This it a regime that very much wants to control the media. They are people for whom no power is sufficient. Even the US Presidency does not give them enough power, they want more.
Right, as opposed to the great defender of free speech Bill Clinton, who signed the CDA and blamed the OKC bombing on talk radio.
Yes, in accordance with Florida law, which the Florida Supreme Court ignored. SCOTUS did not "hand the election" to Bush, they simply prevented SCOFLA from rewriting Florida election law after the fact.
Under the law as it existed at the time of the election, Bush won.
Please don't lump all conservatives in with idiots like McCollum. His articles are frequently posted on Free Republic, and they are swiftly discredited by the many posters there with technical knowledge.
I know Ayn Rand isn't popular around here, but this seems appropriate:
??AA and BSA types want there to be lots of "criminals"; this gives them more ammunition for anti-consumer laws "needed to stop piracy". These laws in turn create more criminals; rinse and repeat.
Yes, and DRM has nothing to do with security, at least as the term has traditionally been used. A secure system is one to which the owner controls access. A DRM-enabled system is one in which control has been removed from the owner. Microsoft is pretending these concepts are identical, when they are nearly complete opposites.
Actually the current iBooks have a Radeon Mobility (not 7500) with 16 MB VRAM, which is decent for games, and also supports Quartz Extreme. I agree that right now the iBook is a better buy than the Powerbook, the PBs are supposedly going to be updated fairly soon. I also agree that right now the dual 867 is the best value available today. I just barely decided to not replace my G4/400 tower, waiting for the revision next year where hopefully Apple will dump Motorola and switch to a halfway competent processor vendor.
Maybe you should look at different software. Linux pretty much works. Mac OS X pretty much works. Perl, Apache, vi and emacs pretty much work. I would much rather have the freedom to use these software packages with the understanding that they may have bugs than have someone like you prevent software from being released without official approval "for my own good".
I want to get your customers to buy good quality software.
A noble goal. Unfortunately after spending thousands or millions of dollars dealing with the regulations you would impose, many fewer potential customers would be able to afford it. And forget about open source software.
Complex applications with complex interactions? Break it into component pieces. Write interface specs, follow those specs, publish those specs, and if you use them, read those specs.
Well, I'm glad you've got this all figured out. I look forward to using the bug-free software you will produce.
We regulate building contractors because it is a multi-billion dollar industry, and quality matters.
And because land is scarce, and because improperly designed buildings can kill people. If software is used in a situation where people can die as a result of failure, it is more strictly designed, as such it is more expensive. You have no right to decide for everyone the proper balance between cost, time to market, and reliability.
I disagree. Not that designing bridges is easy, but neither is software development. A bridge has a single goal: to stay up. Furthermore, it is deployed in a single known environment with specific load requirements (which of course should be padded with a large safety factor). Software is generally run in a tremendous variety of environments, is often used in ways not considered by its creators, and interacts with countless other pieces of software, many of which didn't exist when it was originally written.
Saying "but it's hard" is another way of saying "I don't want to be bothered doing it right".
Actually it's saying that the costs of mathematically rigorous verification that software is bug-free would result in nobody being able to afford to buy it, and thus nobody willing to produce it.
If your justification is "the industry is immature" then the solution is to either outlaw use of your products until they are mature, or to force manufacturers to offer additional protections for this immature product, not fewer protections.
Or we could let people decide for themselves via the free market. Of course Microsoft currently does not operate in a free market due to the abuse of their monopoly, but that's a separate issue.
And really, you don't lose privacy unless you're "sharing" with 50,000 of your best friends via Gnutella or something. I could live with a system like this; it seems to be one of the few cases where "if you're not guilty, you have nothing to fear" is actually true.
Of course there would still be problems, as the RIAA would continue to try to censor software and research that could possibly be used to defeat the protection, but overall I think it would be an improvement.
You're right, I misspoke. From what I recall Apple and Adobe were in negotiations to for free or very cheap royalties for DPS, but that fell through.
So Carbon on a new kernel (NuKernal) was done long before the rest of OSX was ready. It took years to get NeXTSTEP and Cocoa and the rest of the OS time to catch up
This is just absolutely false. The NeXT kernel (Mach/BSD) and Cocoa were ported very quickly. Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the first Rhapsody developer release was ready less than a year later, and Mac OS X Server 1.0 shipped in early 1999. The reasons why the "real" Mac OS X took longer were that Apple had to implement Carbon for developers unwilling to convert to Cocoa, and write a brand new display system (Quartz) after Adobe dropped Display PostScript.
NeXT delivered on its promises, it's just that Apple's requirements changed. And it's also worth pointing out that Mac OS X is a far better system than what was envisioned for Copland. Aside from the much better adherence to standards, it is a much cleaner architecture. From what I remember of Copland's documentation, it had a weird form of partial memory protection where the entire GUI ran in a single process, so any app could take down all other UI apps, although server processes would be protected. The transition to a fully buzzword-compliant OS wasn't going to happen until Gershwin, and I seriously doubt that could have shipped by now.
You're mostly right, even though you don't think you are. DRM cannot succeed in a free market. If the free market were allowed to function, there would be no DVD region coding, because the demand for region-free players would be supplied. But thanks to anti-capitalist laws like the DMCA, attempting to fulfill that demand can get you arrested. Likewise, if Palladium succeeds it will only be because of laws that effectively mandate it; unfortunately the DMCA may already be sufficient for this.
No they don't, and they never did. Many years ago they bought around $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, which they've since sold for a tidy profit.
Excellent plan, unfortunately they'll still be guilty of copyright infringement.
It's unfortunate that the term "license" is used for both the one-sided removal of rights of commercial EULAs, as well as the grant of rights in free software licenses. Not "agreeing" to the GPL means your rights revert to what they are under standard copyright, which are strictly less your rights with the GPL.
Ok, but that's hardly conclusive. After all, L. Ron Hubbard existed.
Because PDFs suck for reading on screen. The author doesn't know how big my monitor is or how much screen real estate I want to devote to his file, and having separate pages just gets in the way. Using HTML or RTF gives the user much more flexibility.