Re:Let me be the first to say...
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
No word if it comes free with new G5s yet.
I would expect something similar to last summer where people who purchased Macs in the month or two before Jaguar were given rebates that let them buy Jaguar for $20 when it came out. However, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Apple gave away Panther for free to G5 owners so they could show off the 64-bit OS on a 64-bit CPU.
The code is all there for your viewing, compiling, and porting pleasure. I suggest you either fire up emacs and start hacking up the cygwin version you want or stop whining about people who are providing the Mac community with some great apps for free.
...but running standard unix apps under X on top of OSX doesn't take advantage of OSX's strong points.
Unless I'm alone here, being able to run X11 apps and native OS X apps at the same time is one of the best features of my OS X boxen. The availability of diverse software from two almost totally separate camps is awesome.
Of course, the real star of the show is not going to be speed-bumped hardware, but the Panther upgrade for OS X.
I gotta disagree with you on this one. I am a diehard Mac user, and virtually all the Mac users I know are way more excited about the 970s than Panther. From our perspective, Jaguar is a damn fine OS, (far) ahead of anything else out there. On the other hand, the G4 offerings from Motorola fall further and further behind every day. In one fell swoop, the 970s could bring us instant credibility on the hardware side. We could finally have the speed bump that we have jealously watched x86 users experience. Panther, while it may be a big improvement, isn't needed in such a dire manner.
To date, there have been 26 Splash hits. There have also been 5 home runs hit into McCovey Cove by visiting players which don't count as splash hits but are relevant to our discussion. Of these 31 prodigous shots, 23 were blasted by Barry Bonds.
Barry has had 1549 ABs and 2143 Plate Appearances since Pac Bell opened in 2000. Assuming a 50/50 split between road and home ABs (I couldn't find the exact stats), that translates into a splash hit every 46.58 PAs and every 33.67 ABs.
From 2000-2002, NL teams averaged 33.96 ABs/game. (http://www.baseballreference.com/leagues/NL.shtml ) I couldn't find a stat about the percentage of lefthanded hitters, so I will use 50% unless someone corrects me. So by throwing out the ABs of righties who have virtually no chance of hitting it into the Cove, that is an average of 33.96 ABs/game by lefthanded hitters in a game at Pac Bell Park. That means 9406.92 ABs by lefthanded hitters in the 277 games in Pac Bell's history. This translates into a hit into the Cove 1 for every 1175.87 ABs by mere mortals.
Seeing as how Bonds is 35x more likely to hit a home run into the Cove than your average baseball player, don't you feel just downright silly for trying to use Barry Bonds' stats of home vs road production to argue against Pac Bell being a pitcher's park? It is blatantly obvious to anyone who watches baseball that he is in a league of his own. It is also painfully obvious that Pac Bell is a great park for pitchers as it essentially shuts down half the lineup while the righties don't face an easy shot either.
A good friend of mine has pretty bad ADHD. When you are around him and he isn't taking his medicine (and to a lesser degree when he is), it is pretty damn obvious that he is ADHD. He will go on about any subject at any time, and he shows a general hyperactivity. When he gets really tired and doesn't have medication, he just gets plain weird. I don't know how to explain it really. Sometimes it is like he is drunk, although he is totally sober. All in all, people can be a little uncomfortable around him when they first meet him, but once you get to know him I think the ADHD makes him more interesting to be around. Never a dull moment.
However, as far as technical things go, I think that it has helped him a lot. He is a mechnical engineer, and he possesses the creative knack that all good engineers have. I think part of this is that he can think about problems in many different ways trying to find the best solution. He still manages to get his work done, but I think he is able to concentrate on it more because it is what he truly enjoys doing. He has problems focusing on stuff that doesn't interest him.
But what happens when you try and use your Linux box to visit an Internet Explorer-only website, such as an online bank. Or what happens when you try and get your Linux box connected to the Exchange server at your office. What happens if you want to code something in Java and actually want it to run properly on the JVM that ships with Windows?
While I know that you could use Camino (or your flavor of Gecko) much of the time to access IE-only sites, and I believe there are open-source workarounds for Exchange, the point is that M$ has illegally used their monopoly in the desktop OS market to try and establish monopolies of other sorts. Under United States antitrust laws, this constitutes an abusive monopoly. Unfortunately, the DOJ has no balls to give them the legal smiting they deserve, so we must continue to work around the problems that Redmond creates in an effort to get everybody to use their products.
On the other hand, Apple doesn't want anyone else selling Apple computers, just as Ford doesn't want anyone else selling Ford cars. Of course, I don't suppose that Ford has a monopoly on the automobile market, do they?
But please, try to temper the ole "lazy sys admin" criticism. It's most likely not warranted.
I don't know about your experience, but as someone who has had to support both Wintel and Mac boxes, it takes a really incompetent/lazy sys admin to not be able to support a bunch of Macs in this environment. Any sys admin worth his weight in O'Reilly books should be able to get those Macs running just fine in a day or two.
Think about the needs of a high school. You have to get them connected to the network. This is a breeze under OS X. You need web browsing. Take your pick from Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Omniweb, or even IE if you must. For an office suite, you could go with M$ Office or Appleworks. (OpenOffice just isn't ready yet for the masses on OS X, although it is looking promising.) For a graphic design class you will need Photoshop and maybe some other Adobe products, all of which are readily available for OS X. For a computer science course, you have gcc built in. Additionally, you could install the Developer Tools, which I must say are quite nice. The only thing I could possibly imagine being a problem is the grading system teachers use, but as the article says that teachers are currently using Macs, this is a moot point.
I can't think of much else you would need from a high school computer. Getting the items above up and running should take a day, two at tops.
In reality, the reason they will not accept this comes down to one of two reasons. Either they are truly bureaucratic morons who are too set in their ways to take such a nice grant, or they are influenced too much by Microsoft given their proximity to Redmond. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a combination of both.
Considering that one of the most notorious American spammers, Alan Ralsky, receives mountains of physical mail daily, I think the Nigerian spammers got off easy with a mock website that touches on some racial stereotypes.
I've yet to find someone that wouldn't trade their box for my Mac in an instant.
That said, I use Safari despite being a Chimera/Camino since a near its inital usable release. Say what you want, but when Apple puts its mind to it they produce damn fine softwarel
I don't really want to rag on Opera as it is given for free (assuming you don't mind a small ad), but there really is no room/place for it in the Mac market. Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Omniweb... the list goes on. While the OS X browser scene was once so barren that IE was one of the best choices (thank you Omniweb for saving me from IE), I would use any of those browsers I mentioned for daily use if I needed to. (I'm basically using Safari, with a little Camino still.) Hell, even Phoenix/Firebird is coming. It renders like none other, although the dev team has violated certain unbreakable rules at this time. (COMMAND-H SHALL HIDE THY CURRENT APPLICATION!!)
On the other hand, Opera for Mac is a piece of shit. I admit having never tried it on Linux or Windows, but I can't see how anything related to its Mac version could be considered a passable browser, let alone one worth paying for. The UI is neither intuitive or graphically pleasing. The customization in other browsers is not present. There are no tabs. It renders well most of the time, but fails miserably on some tables in my experience.
If they were smart, they would quit whining at Apple for releasing a superior product and stick to the Linux/Windows market. Until there, I'm just happy it is their money being thrown away, not mine.
I'm hoping that they slide IP over FireWire in as a standard feature on Panther. I've been using it since January, and I must say that it is excellent. The speed isn't quite there yet, but it is good enough. By this, I mean that target disk mode still gives noticeably faster transfers, but this feels faster than 100mbps ethernet. (I haven't run numbers, sue me.)
For the people out there questioning "Why?", here goes. For machines with built in ethernet and no PCI slots, this is a godsend. I have my Cube and my TiBook on a little LAN using IP over FireWire and Internet Sharing. Since the Cube's ethernet port is dedicated to the network connection, the only other way I would have been able to do this would be AirPort, and this obviously blows that away for bandwidth. With AirPort, large file transfers would take forever, and I probably couldn't max out my connection. (Gotta love college hookups!)
This is just one of the many reasons why I love Apple so much. For all the things in OS X that get big press, there are so many little treasures such as IP over FireWire. Even for a preview release, it's pretty damn well polished. (Disclaimer: Many have complained that is has trashed prefs on install, but in two installs and two upgrades I've never had this problem.) Keep up the good work Apple, and make this a part of the standard install ASAP.
Near the end (I started at about page 50), he states that accessing a computer "without authorization" should only be considered true in cases where a cracker has circumvented code-based restrictions, not contract-based restrictions. Part of me things this is a great idea conceptually, but part of me is worried about the implications it would have for the vast majority of home computer users.
By saying that only when you break code-based restrictions are you committing unauthorized access, this puts the responsiblity on the user to secure their box. For most/.'ers, this is already a given. Be it with firewalls, NIDS, or whatnot, I'm sure everyone on here is doing something to make sure that people aren't getting access to your system. I think of one of the best points he makes is that as long as you implement code that is intended to stop malicious attacks, that is enough legally to build your case. I'm sure many average users have misconfigured firewalls or something that would allow someone knowledgeable to crack their machine. I'm sure there are stupid sysadmins out there who have unsecure networks. While I don't think this excuses you from not keeping up to date, patching, etc., I think it is a good step to take.
My biggest worry is that the definition of code-based restrictions could be misconstrued. Say for example you lock down everything except Apache/IIS running on port 80. Since both these two have had security exploits in the past (not trying to start a holy war here), what happens if someone exploits your webserver to gain more access? Obviously you have given access to the webserver on port 80. If one of the "features" of the webserver is a buffer exploit, would it still be considered circumventing a code-based restriction to exploit it? I think most here would agree that it is, but as we all have seen, most judges are not your averager/.'er and make rulings that seem ignorant of the technologies.
Even those of us who don't use a mac for our bread and butter (I'm guessing you are meaning graphics professionals and the like) will keep buying our boxes from Cupertino. The hardware engineering on Macs is quite nice. I'm posting this from a Cube, which has a cultish following due to its elegance even if the masses didn't get it. I'm probably one of the more geeky Mac users you will find, but I'm not going to be building a DIY Mac anytime in the forseeable future. Steve and friends do too nice of a job for me to consider straying from the pack.
You and I may not like it, but we don't control the end user market.
Are you so sure about that? I don't know about you, but whenever my family or friends go to buy a new computer, I know exactly who they are coming to for advice: me. While ultimately it is their decision, I will not hesitate to explain to them in full the evils of whatever crap Microsoft is throwing at them or plans to throw at them in the future.
The video card is also at the bare minimum for OS X with the ATI 7500
I run OS X with either an AGP Rage 128 with 16 MB VRAM or a Rage 128 Mobility with 8 MB VRAM. It runs just fine on those without Quartz Extreme, so I'm sure that a Radeon 7500 running QE will be quite nice. It's not like a 17" CRT is that monstrous.
I do agree that you need more RAM, but as another poster has already pointed out, it is nice to be forced to buy as little RAM as possible because of Apple's prices on memory. I would always spec out from the Apple store with the least memory and then go buy what RAM you need from somewhere else. It will save you a bundle.
If you want a truly usable *nix desktop OS, are you going to go with OS X or some Linux distro? If you need a massive database, are you going to go with Oracle or MySQL?
While I'm sure that Free/Open Source software will eat into some of the profits of proprietary software companies, there will always be people willing to pay for a higher quality product. Up to now, while we have seen some really great products from the Free/Open Source community, there are many places where proprietary systems are still much nicer. OpenOffice, for example, is a great product but they are constantly trying to copy M$ Office, which as much as it pains me to say this, is a nice Office suite.
Another interesting angle is the companies who have learned to embrace open source software and use it to their advantage. Apple looked at the software community and saw a bunch of great open source kernels where their attempts at a next generation kernel had failed. So they took an open kernel and put their proprietary system on top of it for a wonderful system. They took KHTML, made it a lot nicer, and then used it as the foundation for Safari. I would argue that open source has helped Apple more than it has hurt them.
Re:That's a pretty massive attack
on
SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 5, Funny
Real poetic justic would have been to DDoS them with SCO Linux-running zombies controlled by Red Hat, SuSe, etc. masters. However, this planned would fail as the 42 boxes worldwide running SCO Linux don't have nearly enough bandwidth.
Why do you automatically assume that I support piracy because I question the ethics of the RIAA and their cronies? All the mp3's on my computer are ripped from my personal CD collection, and there isn't a single warezed application. I respect IP, but I don't think that you should use unethical tactics to protect it.
Unless the RIAA has proof enough to get a warrant to search my computer, their right to protect their IP stops at the edge of my network as far as I am concerned. The minute they do something in the name of fighting piracy that would normally be considered illegally, they can kiss my ass as they deserve the criticism I gave them. And yes, what they are proposing would be totally illegal.
Some of the methods you describe are legal and pretty good ideas in my opinion. If someone has a P2P client running and the port open, that implies that they are allowing data to be shared. Leech the hell out of their bandwidth so that no pirates can get any. File up all their download slots. However, the RIAA plans to do more than this.
If you want to get a job helping them, so be it. I wish you or anyone else the worst at such a job. Help them write the trojan they want, but just remember that you are innocent until proven guilty.
What kind of geek in his right mind would actually take a job like this? Seriously, who in good conscience would take a job where you are supposed to crack computers so Hilary Rosen can have her way?
If the RIAA is allowed to follow through on this, I wish nothing but the worst of geek hell to whoever does their bidding. Yes, I mean the worst: having the maintain someone else's Perl code.
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No word if it comes free with new G5s yet.
I would expect something similar to last summer where people who purchased Macs in the month or two before Jaguar were given rebates that let them buy Jaguar for $20 when it came out. However, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Apple gave away Panther for free to G5 owners so they could show off the 64-bit OS on a 64-bit CPU.
The code is all there for your viewing, compiling, and porting pleasure. I suggest you either fire up emacs and start hacking up the cygwin version you want or stop whining about people who are providing the Mac community with some great apps for free.
...but running standard unix apps under X on top of OSX doesn't take advantage of OSX's strong points.
Unless I'm alone here, being able to run X11 apps and native OS X apps at the same time is one of the best features of my OS X boxen. The availability of diverse software from two almost totally separate camps is awesome.
Of course, the real star of the show is not going to be speed-bumped hardware, but the Panther upgrade for OS X.
I gotta disagree with you on this one. I am a diehard Mac user, and virtually all the Mac users I know are way more excited about the 970s than Panther. From our perspective, Jaguar is a damn fine OS, (far) ahead of anything else out there. On the other hand, the G4 offerings from Motorola fall further and further behind every day. In one fell swoop, the 970s could bring us instant credibility on the hardware side. We could finally have the speed bump that we have jealously watched x86 users experience. Panther, while it may be a big improvement, isn't needed in such a dire manner.
To date, there have been 26 Splash hits. There have also been 5 home runs hit into McCovey Cove by visiting players which don't count as splash hits but are relevant to our discussion. Of these 31 prodigous shots, 23 were blasted by Barry Bonds.
l ) I couldn't find a stat about the percentage of lefthanded hitters, so I will use 50% unless someone corrects me. So by throwing out the ABs of righties who have virtually no chance of hitting it into the Cove, that is an average of 33.96 ABs/game by lefthanded hitters in a game at Pac Bell Park. That means 9406.92 ABs by lefthanded hitters in the 277 games in Pac Bell's history. This translates into a hit into the Cove 1 for every 1175.87 ABs by mere mortals.
Barry has had 1549 ABs and 2143 Plate Appearances since Pac Bell opened in 2000. Assuming a 50/50 split between road and home ABs (I couldn't find the exact stats), that translates into a splash hit every 46.58 PAs and every 33.67 ABs.
From 2000-2002, NL teams averaged 33.96 ABs/game. (http://www.baseballreference.com/leagues/NL.shtm
Seeing as how Bonds is 35x more likely to hit a home run into the Cove than your average baseball player, don't you feel just downright silly for trying to use Barry Bonds' stats of home vs road production to argue against Pac Bell being a pitcher's park? It is blatantly obvious to anyone who watches baseball that he is in a league of his own. It is also painfully obvious that Pac Bell is a great park for pitchers as it essentially shuts down half the lineup while the righties don't face an easy shot either.
A good friend of mine has pretty bad ADHD. When you are around him and he isn't taking his medicine (and to a lesser degree when he is), it is pretty damn obvious that he is ADHD. He will go on about any subject at any time, and he shows a general hyperactivity. When he gets really tired and doesn't have medication, he just gets plain weird. I don't know how to explain it really. Sometimes it is like he is drunk, although he is totally sober. All in all, people can be a little uncomfortable around him when they first meet him, but once you get to know him I think the ADHD makes him more interesting to be around. Never a dull moment.
However, as far as technical things go, I think that it has helped him a lot. He is a mechnical engineer, and he possesses the creative knack that all good engineers have. I think part of this is that he can think about problems in many different ways trying to find the best solution. He still manages to get his work done, but I think he is able to concentrate on it more because it is what he truly enjoys doing. He has problems focusing on stuff that doesn't interest him.
But what happens when you try and use your Linux box to visit an Internet Explorer-only website, such as an online bank. Or what happens when you try and get your Linux box connected to the Exchange server at your office. What happens if you want to code something in Java and actually want it to run properly on the JVM that ships with Windows?
While I know that you could use Camino (or your flavor of Gecko) much of the time to access IE-only sites, and I believe there are open-source workarounds for Exchange, the point is that M$ has illegally used their monopoly in the desktop OS market to try and establish monopolies of other sorts. Under United States antitrust laws, this constitutes an abusive monopoly. Unfortunately, the DOJ has no balls to give them the legal smiting they deserve, so we must continue to work around the problems that Redmond creates in an effort to get everybody to use their products.
On the other hand, Apple doesn't want anyone else selling Apple computers, just as Ford doesn't want anyone else selling Ford cars. Of course, I don't suppose that Ford has a monopoly on the automobile market, do they?
But please, try to temper the ole "lazy sys admin" criticism. It's most likely not warranted.
I don't know about your experience, but as someone who has had to support both Wintel and Mac boxes, it takes a really incompetent/lazy sys admin to not be able to support a bunch of Macs in this environment. Any sys admin worth his weight in O'Reilly books should be able to get those Macs running just fine in a day or two.
Think about the needs of a high school. You have to get them connected to the network. This is a breeze under OS X. You need web browsing. Take your pick from Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Omniweb, or even IE if you must. For an office suite, you could go with M$ Office or Appleworks. (OpenOffice just isn't ready yet for the masses on OS X, although it is looking promising.) For a graphic design class you will need Photoshop and maybe some other Adobe products, all of which are readily available for OS X. For a computer science course, you have gcc built in. Additionally, you could install the Developer Tools, which I must say are quite nice. The only thing I could possibly imagine being a problem is the grading system teachers use, but as the article says that teachers are currently using Macs, this is a moot point.
I can't think of much else you would need from a high school computer. Getting the items above up and running should take a day, two at tops.
In reality, the reason they will not accept this comes down to one of two reasons. Either they are truly bureaucratic morons who are too set in their ways to take such a nice grant, or they are influenced too much by Microsoft given their proximity to Redmond. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a combination of both.
I am 22 - I was 8 = That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.
I think your school system is more screwed than you know...
(Emphasis mine)
Maybe the system is screwed, but at least he uses and recognizes proper pronouns.
Considering that one of the most notorious American spammers, Alan Ralsky, receives mountains of physical mail daily, I think the Nigerian spammers got off easy with a mock website that touches on some racial stereotypes.
Mac != everyone's favorite OS
I've yet to find someone that wouldn't trade their box for my Mac in an instant.
That said, I use Safari despite being a Chimera/Camino since a near its inital usable release. Say what you want, but when Apple puts its mind to it they produce damn fine softwarel
One of my CS professors this past semester has one of my favorite lines ever about computer science:
"Is it any coincidence that programmers and drug dealers are the only people that call their customers 'users'?"
I don't really want to rag on Opera as it is given for free (assuming you don't mind a small ad), but there really is no room/place for it in the Mac market. Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Omniweb... the list goes on. While the OS X browser scene was once so barren that IE was one of the best choices (thank you Omniweb for saving me from IE), I would use any of those browsers I mentioned for daily use if I needed to. (I'm basically using Safari, with a little Camino still.) Hell, even Phoenix/Firebird is coming. It renders like none other, although the dev team has violated certain unbreakable rules at this time. (COMMAND-H SHALL HIDE THY CURRENT APPLICATION!!)
On the other hand, Opera for Mac is a piece of shit. I admit having never tried it on Linux or Windows, but I can't see how anything related to its Mac version could be considered a passable browser, let alone one worth paying for. The UI is neither intuitive or graphically pleasing. The customization in other browsers is not present. There are no tabs. It renders well most of the time, but fails miserably on some tables in my experience.
If they were smart, they would quit whining at Apple for releasing a superior product and stick to the Linux/Windows market. Until there, I'm just happy it is their money being thrown away, not mine.
I'm hoping that they slide IP over FireWire in as a standard feature on Panther. I've been using it since January, and I must say that it is excellent. The speed isn't quite there yet, but it is good enough. By this, I mean that target disk mode still gives noticeably faster transfers, but this feels faster than 100mbps ethernet. (I haven't run numbers, sue me.)
For the people out there questioning "Why?", here goes. For machines with built in ethernet and no PCI slots, this is a godsend. I have my Cube and my TiBook on a little LAN using IP over FireWire and Internet Sharing. Since the Cube's ethernet port is dedicated to the network connection, the only other way I would have been able to do this would be AirPort, and this obviously blows that away for bandwidth. With AirPort, large file transfers would take forever, and I probably couldn't max out my connection. (Gotta love college hookups!)
This is just one of the many reasons why I love Apple so much. For all the things in OS X that get big press, there are so many little treasures such as IP over FireWire. Even for a preview release, it's pretty damn well polished. (Disclaimer: Many have complained that is has trashed prefs on install, but in two installs and two upgrades I've never had this problem.) Keep up the good work Apple, and make this a part of the standard install ASAP.
Near the end (I started at about page 50), he states that accessing a computer "without authorization" should only be considered true in cases where a cracker has circumvented code-based restrictions, not contract-based restrictions. Part of me things this is a great idea conceptually, but part of me is worried about the implications it would have for the vast majority of home computer users.
/.'ers, this is already a given. Be it with firewalls, NIDS, or whatnot, I'm sure everyone on here is doing something to make sure that people aren't getting access to your system. I think of one of the best points he makes is that as long as you implement code that is intended to stop malicious attacks, that is enough legally to build your case. I'm sure many average users have misconfigured firewalls or something that would allow someone knowledgeable to crack their machine. I'm sure there are stupid sysadmins out there who have unsecure networks. While I don't think this excuses you from not keeping up to date, patching, etc., I think it is a good step to take.
/.'er and make rulings that seem ignorant of the technologies.
By saying that only when you break code-based restrictions are you committing unauthorized access, this puts the responsiblity on the user to secure their box. For most
My biggest worry is that the definition of code-based restrictions could be misconstrued. Say for example you lock down everything except Apache/IIS running on port 80. Since both these two have had security exploits in the past (not trying to start a holy war here), what happens if someone exploits your webserver to gain more access? Obviously you have given access to the webserver on port 80. If one of the "features" of the webserver is a buffer exploit, would it still be considered circumventing a code-based restriction to exploit it? I think most here would agree that it is, but as we all have seen, most judges are not your averager
I got it just fine (OS X/Safari), and I read a portion of it.
Even those of us who don't use a mac for our bread and butter (I'm guessing you are meaning graphics professionals and the like) will keep buying our boxes from Cupertino. The hardware engineering on Macs is quite nice. I'm posting this from a Cube, which has a cultish following due to its elegance even if the masses didn't get it. I'm probably one of the more geeky Mac users you will find, but I'm not going to be building a DIY Mac anytime in the forseeable future. Steve and friends do too nice of a job for me to consider straying from the pack.
And when Apple introduces this into their OS (which is inevitable), what will you do then?
Watch Red Sox and Cubs fans celebrate winning the World Series.
You and I may not like it, but we don't control the end user market.
Are you so sure about that? I don't know about you, but whenever my family or friends go to buy a new computer, I know exactly who they are coming to for advice: me. While ultimately it is their decision, I will not hesitate to explain to them in full the evils of whatever crap Microsoft is throwing at them or plans to throw at them in the future.
The video card is also at the bare minimum for OS X with the ATI 7500
I run OS X with either an AGP Rage 128 with 16 MB VRAM or a Rage 128 Mobility with 8 MB VRAM. It runs just fine on those without Quartz Extreme, so I'm sure that a Radeon 7500 running QE will be quite nice. It's not like a 17" CRT is that monstrous.
I do agree that you need more RAM, but as another poster has already pointed out, it is nice to be forced to buy as little RAM as possible because of Apple's prices on memory. I would always spec out from the Apple store with the least memory and then go buy what RAM you need from somewhere else. It will save you a bundle.
Quit confusing Apple's attempts at vertical integration with a monopoly.
(I know it isn't true vertical integration, but from a hardware -> operating system -> software -> peripheral standpoint it is.)
If you want a truly usable *nix desktop OS, are you going to go with OS X or some Linux distro? If you need a massive database, are you going to go with Oracle or MySQL?
While I'm sure that Free/Open Source software will eat into some of the profits of proprietary software companies, there will always be people willing to pay for a higher quality product. Up to now, while we have seen some really great products from the Free/Open Source community, there are many places where proprietary systems are still much nicer. OpenOffice, for example, is a great product but they are constantly trying to copy M$ Office, which as much as it pains me to say this, is a nice Office suite.
Another interesting angle is the companies who have learned to embrace open source software and use it to their advantage. Apple looked at the software community and saw a bunch of great open source kernels where their attempts at a next generation kernel had failed. So they took an open kernel and put their proprietary system on top of it for a wonderful system. They took KHTML, made it a lot nicer, and then used it as the foundation for Safari. I would argue that open source has helped Apple more than it has hurt them.
Real poetic justic would have been to DDoS them with SCO Linux-running zombies controlled by Red Hat, SuSe, etc. masters. However, this planned would fail as the 42 boxes worldwide running SCO Linux don't have nearly enough bandwidth.
Why do you automatically assume that I support piracy because I question the ethics of the RIAA and their cronies? All the mp3's on my computer are ripped from my personal CD collection, and there isn't a single warezed application. I respect IP, but I don't think that you should use unethical tactics to protect it.
Unless the RIAA has proof enough to get a warrant to search my computer, their right to protect their IP stops at the edge of my network as far as I am concerned. The minute they do something in the name of fighting piracy that would normally be considered illegally, they can kiss my ass as they deserve the criticism I gave them. And yes, what they are proposing would be totally illegal.
Some of the methods you describe are legal and pretty good ideas in my opinion. If someone has a P2P client running and the port open, that implies that they are allowing data to be shared. Leech the hell out of their bandwidth so that no pirates can get any. File up all their download slots. However, the RIAA plans to do more than this.
If you want to get a job helping them, so be it. I wish you or anyone else the worst at such a job. Help them write the trojan they want, but just remember that you are innocent until proven guilty.
What kind of geek in his right mind would actually take a job like this? Seriously, who in good conscience would take a job where you are supposed to crack computers so Hilary Rosen can have her way?
If the RIAA is allowed to follow through on this, I wish nothing but the worst of geek hell to whoever does their bidding. Yes, I mean the worst: having the maintain someone else's Perl code.