I used to fall into this trap from time to time myself. See, whenever somebody on Slashdot says "standard," they mean one of very specific thing: a specification entangled in draconian license terms that make commercial use impossible. No standard created and promoted by a company can be a "standard" in the Slashdot sense. So Flash is not a "standard" for the same reason that the QuickTime file format is not a "standard:" because, despite the fact that they are fully documented and readily available for any to use, both of those formats were developed by companies. And companies, of course, are inherently bad, according to Slashdot collectivist groupthink.
It's an easy mistake to make, misunderstanding the common usage of the word "standard" on Slashdot. The same problem arises with the word "open," and don't even get me started on the word "free."
First, I'd like to mention that your posting history shows you to be a paid shill of Apple.
I wish! I could use the extra money. Anybody who reads this who wants to hire me to be their paid shill, contact twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com immediately.
If you hadn't screwed up your </i> tag and made the rest of your post impossible to read, we might have had a conversation. As it is, I see little point in expending the effort necessary to decipher your post and construct a reply. Thanks for playing, though.
If they were confident that their hardware was the best, they'd sell iTunes to everybody, Mac, PC, and Linux.
Man, you just don't understand, do you? Apple wants people to buy Macs. They are not interested in people who don't buy Macs. So spending money to port iTunes to another OS, like Windows or Linux or whatever else, makes NO sense whatsoever. None.
And if Apple had won the desktop war, the world would be a LOT less free than it is now.
Congratulations. You win the award for most meaningless comment on Slashdot. What the hell is "less free" supposed to mean, anyway?
And would Apple still innovate if it could sit on its ass and force you to upgrade 33 Mhz at a time because they ruled both hardware AND software?
Seeing as how that was the case just a few short years ago, and how Apple innovated like hell in the time since then, I would say that the answer to this question is "yes."
And about your "communist" remark, since when has FREEDOM been COMMUNIST?
"Apple is the enemy because they dare to keep secrets." That's communist. Saying that Apple is bad because they maintain an advantage over their competition is communist. What you call "freedom" I call oppression.
Hiding source code from paying customers is a bad point.
Wrong. What else can I say? Wrong. It's not your source code; it's Apple's. So the fact that they're not giving it to you does not mean that they're "hiding" it. It simply means that you're not entitled to it.
Do you remember when many users Mac OS X systems started dialing out to littlebuddy.apple.com without permission from the user? What was that?
It was a one-time registration connection that happens during an installation of Mac OS 9. If the connection fails-- if your computer is not connected to the Internet when Mac OS 9 is being installed, or if you're behind a firewall-- then the connection attempt is retried until it succeeds. You would know this if you stopped to read anything at all about what you're talking about. As it is, you're just spreading communist, collectivist anti-Mac rhetoric, and that's not cool.
Not making Quicktime for Linux is communist, because real capitalists want to sell each individual product to everybody in the world.
Wrong. Apple sells Macs. That's basically all they sell. Their business plan is based entirely around selling Macs. So Apple will do whatever they feel necessary to get you to buy a Mac. And that includes not releasing QuickTime for Linux. What's communist is when people climb on message boards like this one and demand QuickTime for Linux, and accuse Apple of being evil because they don't (1) port their software to other platforms, or (2) release their source code.
File format lock-in (like Quicktime) is communist, because it's a barrier to competition.
God, you just don't understand communism or QuickTime, do you? The QuickTime file format is completely documented. Anybody who wants to can download the documentation from Apple's developer site and write their own software for reading and writing QuickTime movie files. Like the OS 9 thing above, this is just another sign of your ignorance.
Bundling is communist, because it prevents true and open competition
Again, you don't get it. Apple wants you to buy Macs. They don't care how many people use iTunes, or whatever else. They just want you to buy Macs. So they'll do whatever they feel is necessary and appropriate to make people want to buy a Mac, including bundling iLife applications and whatnot.
Taking from BSD and giving nothing (or nearly nothing) back is communist, because real capitalists instinctively repay those who have helped them equal to what they received.
What the fuck are you talking about? First, Apple has given tons back to the BSD community; I'm not even going to bother debating this with you, because it's already a dead horse. But whether or not this is the case, the BSD license lays out the terms under which people are allowed to use the software. Apple has followed those terms to the letter. And finally, I don't know where you get this whacked-out idea about "paying back." That's just nuts.
Thus, Linux is forced capitalism, not communism.
Yes, and work shall set you free. Keep the insane doublethink coming, Sparky.
Apple takes but does not repay, except to further their own cause.
Except for all the stuff they've released as open source. Conveniently forgetting that, are we?
You mistake corporatism for capitalism, a common mistake, furthered by George W. Bush's misinterpretation of capitalism in order to benefit his personal interests and further his own wealth and the wealth of his billionaire friends.
Ah, now we're getting to the truth of this matter. You are (a) ignorant, as demonstrated by your statements above. You are also (b) confused, as demonstrated by your statement about "forced capitalism," above. And finally you are (c) anti-American.
In short, friend, you are an idiot. If I hadn't already taken the time to write this reply, I wouldn't even bother with it. You're just not worth it.
No, it doesn't break down that way at all. It breaks down this way: reasonable people who look at the situation objectively, without consideration of the content at all, will conclude that no censorship-- which is obviously an attempt to suppress a message-- is taking place. Rather, this is simply a case of a group's being unable to find a media outlet that is interested in taking their money.
The same reasonable people will then look at the ads and say to themselves, "Oh, no wonder. Idiots."
This is in the same category as accusing Slashdot of censoring because they didn't run the article you submitted. The message-- crackpot article, whacko anti-war agitprop, whatever-- has not been supressed. It's just that one particular media outlet refused to carry that message.
Because our country has a system of private media outlets, this is an entirely reasonable state of affairs. Each outlet is free to decide whether to take your (or anybody else's) money and run your (or anybody else's) ad. Couldn't be any other way, really. It's not censorship in any meaningful definition of the term.
Of course, anybody who would spread the kind of shameless agitprop as was contained in those ads probably isn't concerned about meaningful definitions of terms. They're probably more concerned with advancing their "workers of the world unite" agenda.
I think you need a better understanding of what "censorship" means. A cable company refusing to run an ad is not censorship, no matter what the motivation.
Can you really be that inaccurate with a short range NUCLEAR WEAPON!?!?
Don't get the wrong idea about these guys. Actual explosive yield of the weapon is on the order of 20 tons-- not kilotons, tons. That's a big boom, but not one so big that you don't have to aim.
If I recall, they used a munition of about the same size in the SADM. I forget what the acronym stands for-- something like Special Atomic Demolition Munition-- but it was basically an atomic fission land mine. Probably would have been very effective if Russian tanks had ever come plowing through the Fulda Gap. Fortunately we never got to find out for sure.
You seem to be missing my point. There's no good reason to run KDE or Gnome on your Mac. KDE and Gnome are very, very poor imitations of the Mac OS X desktop (WindowServer, SystemUIServer, et cetera).
If you want to run UNIX with real applications like Photoshop and Office, then by all means a Mac is the right tool for you. But don't screw it up by putting KDE or Gnome on it. That's just wrong.
Why didn't Apple just release the code? That's what is done with open source, yes?
That's what is done with open source, no. Apple is not trying to create a fork of KJS/KHTML. They're doing exactly what they're required to do by the LGPL: submitting their changes back to the maintainers of the project. See, there's no "KDE KHTML" and "Apple KHTML." There's just KHTML. So Apple sends their changes back to the project maintainers, instead of (well, in addition to, actually) just releasing them.
And of course, the larger point is that Apple makes prolific use of open source while taking liberties with the licenses they are released under
Apple has never taken liberties with any licenses. Ever.
while open source efforts that make even tangential reference to Apple's work merits legal action.
If by "make tangential reference" you mean desktop themes that use the Apple logo, or projects that use Apple's trademarked names, then yes. Apple protects the intellectual property they want to keep (their trademarks, their look-and-feel, and core technologies), and shares what they want to share (Rendezvous, XNU, and so on).
Don't like it? Don't use Apple's products, ideas, or technologies. Nobody's forcing you to play.
Oh, and please quit bitching now about Chess.app. The fact that you're too stupid to go to the web site and click the "Chess" link says more about you than it does about Apple, okay?
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this is simply wrong.
Um... what? I'm sitting here looking at WebCore, and you're telling me that I'm wrong about what it includes? That takes some pretty serious balls, friend.
Also, is Apple going to sue KDE for lookie likie themes
I sure as hell hope so. One, stealing somebody else's look-and-feel is wrong. Two, UI themes, as a feature, suck, and anybody that opposes their creation and use in any way is okay in my book.
Oh, for cryin' out loud. Dude, there's this thing called Google. Try it out some time.
That said, I'll give you a hint: non-uniform memory access. If you've got a computer that uses different banks of memory as a single physical address space, then that computer has a NUMA architecture.
If you want to maintain cache coherency across a NUMA system, you have to employ some tricks. These tricks are sufficiently complex to warrant their own name: ccNUMA.
But I would most certainly prefer a society where everything possible were free. In fact, I _want_ a utopian society where everything is free.
No, you wouldn't, and no, you don't. See, there's this idea called the profit motive. Maybe you've heard of it. It's what drives people to create new things. A world in which everything were free would be a world in which hardly anybody would bother creating anything new. That would be bad. You don't want that.
QuickTime is a media framework. It's not a codec. It's not a player. It's an entire software library for dealing with all kinds of digital media, from audio to images to movie files.
There is no longer much need of Quicktime decoders of any sort on Linux... However, what is needed is the quicktime decoders.
Friend, WebCore includes KHTML and KJS with tons of fixes and optimizations-- all of which have been submitted back to the project, as per the LGPL-- Kwq, the QT adapter library, and the Objective-C SPI. Apple improved the hell out of KHTML and KJS, sent their changes back to the project maintainers, and then released the whole shebang in an OS X-style package. What more do you want, exactly?
Key parts of OS X are still proprietary. Until they are free (or at least open), I still consider Apple an enemy.
Ugh. Enough with the communist ideology, okay? Apple spends a fortune developing wonderful things. If they were to simply give those things away for free, they would be unable to stay in business. I, for one, like what Apple produces, and I like the way they influence the rest of the computer industry-- indeed, the entire consumer products industry. I don't want Apple to go away, so I don't want Apple to make any of their core products "free" or "open." I want them to stay as proprietary as possible, forever.
I have no idea what that means. Apple does a fairly good job of keeping their public CVS server in sync with OS X.
and where is the updates for freebsd?!
As far as I know, Apple hasn't made any. They just take a good chunk of the FreeBSD userland and ship it with OS X, without modification.
Also we give them X11 support but would they ever give us Aqua support?
:sigh: I've about had it with all the "Aqua"-related ignorance out there. Guys, Aqua is an appearance. It's a collection of graphical elements, okay? That's all. It's not software, in any meaningful sense of the phrase. When you say "Aqua," what you're really talking about is the combination of Quartz, which is the OS X display system, and WindowServer/SystemUIServer, which is the OS X equivalent of the X server, the window manager, and the desktop in your operating environment of choice.
Is Apple going to release the source for WindowServer/SystemUIServer? No. Get over it.
Tell me in what ways Apple has been beneficial to the opensource movement
Well, for starters Apple has done more to increase positive public awareness of open source than anybody else. A hundred thousand non-hacker Apple fans saw Steve Jobs stand up at the last Macworld keynote and declare that he thinks open source is great. There has been no better act of PR for the open source community.
Oh, that and the whole thing with Rendezvous and WebCore and Darwin Streaming Server and CDSA and OpenPlay and Open Directory and whatnot. Can't forget those.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking too small. An hour with Project Builder and even a moderately experienced programmer could whip up a native Cocoa UI that would plug right into Slashdot's MySQL back-end, using libmysqlclient. Spell-checking for free, sure. Duplicate story checking would be a small matter of SQL programming. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could get pretty close.
Actually, I assumed he meant the QuickTime libraries themselves, represented by QuickTime.framework under OS X. (They're available for Windows, too, but I have no idea how they're packaged for Windows.) Having QuickTime for Linux would mean Linux software could take advantage of the QuickTime API's for dealing with file formats and media playback. That would be very handy for things like homegrown processing farms. Lucas Digital uses that sort of thing a lot, as do many other media-type companies.
Of course, Apple's (understandable, and mostly correct) position is that anything you can do with Linux you can do better with OS X, so it's easy to see why they haven't bothered porting QuickTime.framework.
:shudder: You say that like it's a good thing. Given that Macs are generally slower than PC's, and generally more expensive, the only reason to own one-- and I own three-- is to run Mac OS X, Finder and all. If you want to run KDE or Gnome, buy a PC instead.
Sorry, wrong. It's in the Chicago Manual of Style, although I don't have my copy in front of me at the moment. Abbreviations which are pronounced as letters form plurals with the apostrophe.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to fall into this trap from time to time myself. See, whenever somebody on Slashdot says "standard," they mean one of very specific thing: a specification entangled in draconian license terms that make commercial use impossible. No standard created and promoted by a company can be a "standard" in the Slashdot sense. So Flash is not a "standard" for the same reason that the QuickTime file format is not a "standard:" because, despite the fact that they are fully documented and readily available for any to use, both of those formats were developed by companies. And companies, of course, are inherently bad, according to Slashdot collectivist groupthink.
It's an easy mistake to make, misunderstanding the common usage of the word "standard" on Slashdot. The same problem arises with the word "open," and don't even get me started on the word "free."
First, I'd like to mention that your posting history shows you to be a paid shill of Apple.
I wish! I could use the extra money. Anybody who reads this who wants to hire me to be their paid shill, contact twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com immediately.
If you hadn't screwed up your </i> tag and made the rest of your post impossible to read, we might have had a conversation. As it is, I see little point in expending the effort necessary to decipher your post and construct a reply. Thanks for playing, though.
If they were confident that their hardware was the best, they'd sell iTunes to everybody, Mac, PC, and Linux.
Man, you just don't understand, do you? Apple wants people to buy Macs. They are not interested in people who don't buy Macs. So spending money to port iTunes to another OS, like Windows or Linux or whatever else, makes NO sense whatsoever. None.
And if Apple had won the desktop war, the world would be a LOT less free than it is now.
Congratulations. You win the award for most meaningless comment on Slashdot. What the hell is "less free" supposed to mean, anyway?
And would Apple still innovate if it could sit on its ass and force you to upgrade 33 Mhz at a time because they ruled both hardware AND software?
Seeing as how that was the case just a few short years ago, and how Apple innovated like hell in the time since then, I would say that the answer to this question is "yes."
And about your "communist" remark, since when has FREEDOM been COMMUNIST?
"Apple is the enemy because they dare to keep secrets." That's communist. Saying that Apple is bad because they maintain an advantage over their competition is communist. What you call "freedom" I call oppression.
Hiding source code from paying customers is a bad point.
Wrong. What else can I say? Wrong. It's not your source code; it's Apple's. So the fact that they're not giving it to you does not mean that they're "hiding" it. It simply means that you're not entitled to it.
Do you remember when many users Mac OS X systems started dialing out to littlebuddy.apple.com without permission from the user? What was that?
It was a one-time registration connection that happens during an installation of Mac OS 9. If the connection fails-- if your computer is not connected to the Internet when Mac OS 9 is being installed, or if you're behind a firewall-- then the connection attempt is retried until it succeeds. You would know this if you stopped to read anything at all about what you're talking about. As it is, you're just spreading communist, collectivist anti-Mac rhetoric, and that's not cool.
Not making Quicktime for Linux is communist, because real capitalists want to sell each individual product to everybody in the world.
Wrong. Apple sells Macs. That's basically all they sell. Their business plan is based entirely around selling Macs. So Apple will do whatever they feel necessary to get you to buy a Mac. And that includes not releasing QuickTime for Linux. What's communist is when people climb on message boards like this one and demand QuickTime for Linux, and accuse Apple of being evil because they don't (1) port their software to other platforms, or (2) release their source code.
File format lock-in (like Quicktime) is communist, because it's a barrier to competition.
God, you just don't understand communism or QuickTime, do you? The QuickTime file format is completely documented. Anybody who wants to can download the documentation from Apple's developer site and write their own software for reading and writing QuickTime movie files. Like the OS 9 thing above, this is just another sign of your ignorance.
Bundling is communist, because it prevents true and open competition
Again, you don't get it. Apple wants you to buy Macs. They don't care how many people use iTunes, or whatever else. They just want you to buy Macs. So they'll do whatever they feel is necessary and appropriate to make people want to buy a Mac, including bundling iLife applications and whatnot.
Taking from BSD and giving nothing (or nearly nothing) back is communist, because real capitalists instinctively repay those who have helped them equal to what they received.
What the fuck are you talking about? First, Apple has given tons back to the BSD community; I'm not even going to bother debating this with you, because it's already a dead horse. But whether or not this is the case, the BSD license lays out the terms under which people are allowed to use the software. Apple has followed those terms to the letter. And finally, I don't know where you get this whacked-out idea about "paying back." That's just nuts.
Thus, Linux is forced capitalism, not communism.
Yes, and work shall set you free. Keep the insane doublethink coming, Sparky.
Apple takes but does not repay, except to further their own cause.
Except for all the stuff they've released as open source. Conveniently forgetting that, are we?
You mistake corporatism for capitalism, a common mistake, furthered by George W. Bush's misinterpretation of capitalism in order to benefit his personal interests and further his own wealth and the wealth of his billionaire friends.
Ah, now we're getting to the truth of this matter. You are (a) ignorant, as demonstrated by your statements above. You are also (b) confused, as demonstrated by your statement about "forced capitalism," above. And finally you are (c) anti-American.
In short, friend, you are an idiot. If I hadn't already taken the time to write this reply, I wouldn't even bother with it. You're just not worth it.
No, it doesn't break down that way at all. It breaks down this way: reasonable people who look at the situation objectively, without consideration of the content at all, will conclude that no censorship-- which is obviously an attempt to suppress a message-- is taking place. Rather, this is simply a case of a group's being unable to find a media outlet that is interested in taking their money.
The same reasonable people will then look at the ads and say to themselves, "Oh, no wonder. Idiots."
That's how it breaks down.
How bad does it have to be before it's dismal?
Uh... I would say "dismal." Before being called dismal, it has to be dismal. Do you need a dictionary?
This is in the same category as accusing Slashdot of censoring because they didn't run the article you submitted. The message-- crackpot article, whacko anti-war agitprop, whatever-- has not been supressed. It's just that one particular media outlet refused to carry that message.
Because our country has a system of private media outlets, this is an entirely reasonable state of affairs. Each outlet is free to decide whether to take your (or anybody else's) money and run your (or anybody else's) ad. Couldn't be any other way, really. It's not censorship in any meaningful definition of the term.
Of course, anybody who would spread the kind of shameless agitprop as was contained in those ads probably isn't concerned about meaningful definitions of terms. They're probably more concerned with advancing their "workers of the world unite" agenda.
I think you need a better understanding of what "censorship" means. A cable company refusing to run an ad is not censorship, no matter what the motivation.
Can you really be that inaccurate with a short range NUCLEAR WEAPON!?!?
Don't get the wrong idea about these guys. Actual explosive yield of the weapon is on the order of 20 tons-- not kilotons, tons. That's a big boom, but not one so big that you don't have to aim.
If I recall, they used a munition of about the same size in the SADM. I forget what the acronym stands for-- something like Special Atomic Demolition Munition-- but it was basically an atomic fission land mine. Probably would have been very effective if Russian tanks had ever come plowing through the Fulda Gap. Fortunately we never got to find out for sure.
You seem to be missing my point. There's no good reason to run KDE or Gnome on your Mac. KDE and Gnome are very, very poor imitations of the Mac OS X desktop (WindowServer, SystemUIServer, et cetera).
If you want to run UNIX with real applications like Photoshop and Office, then by all means a Mac is the right tool for you. But don't screw it up by putting KDE or Gnome on it. That's just wrong.
Why didn't Apple just release the code? That's what is done with open source, yes?
That's what is done with open source, no. Apple is not trying to create a fork of KJS/KHTML. They're doing exactly what they're required to do by the LGPL: submitting their changes back to the maintainers of the project. See, there's no "KDE KHTML" and "Apple KHTML." There's just KHTML. So Apple sends their changes back to the project maintainers, instead of (well, in addition to, actually) just releasing them.
And of course, the larger point is that Apple makes prolific use of open source while taking liberties with the licenses they are released under
Apple has never taken liberties with any licenses. Ever.
while open source efforts that make even tangential reference to Apple's work merits legal action.
If by "make tangential reference" you mean desktop themes that use the Apple logo, or projects that use Apple's trademarked names, then yes. Apple protects the intellectual property they want to keep (their trademarks, their look-and-feel, and core technologies), and shares what they want to share (Rendezvous, XNU, and so on).
Don't like it? Don't use Apple's products, ideas, or technologies. Nobody's forcing you to play.
Oh, and please quit bitching now about Chess.app. The fact that you're too stupid to go to the web site and click the "Chess" link says more about you than it does about Apple, okay?
That's the problem of all non-GPL open-source software
KJS and KHTML are licensed under the LGPL. In accordance, Apple has released their patches back to the maintainers.
It's time to remind again: GPL doesn't restrict the freedom. GPL restricts the people who wants to restrict the freedom. Got it?
Yes, I've got it. GPL restricts freedoms that you don't want people to have. Check.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this is simply wrong.
Um... what? I'm sitting here looking at WebCore, and you're telling me that I'm wrong about what it includes? That takes some pretty serious balls, friend.
Also, is Apple going to sue KDE for lookie likie themes
I sure as hell hope so. One, stealing somebody else's look-and-feel is wrong. Two, UI themes, as a feature, suck, and anybody that opposes their creation and use in any way is okay in my book.
Oh, for cryin' out loud. Dude, there's this thing called Google. Try it out some time.
That said, I'll give you a hint: non-uniform memory access. If you've got a computer that uses different banks of memory as a single physical address space, then that computer has a NUMA architecture.
If you want to maintain cache coherency across a NUMA system, you have to employ some tricks. These tricks are sufficiently complex to warrant their own name: ccNUMA.
But I would most certainly prefer a society where everything possible were free. In fact, I _want_ a utopian society where everything is free.
No, you wouldn't, and no, you don't. See, there's this idea called the profit motive. Maybe you've heard of it. It's what drives people to create new things. A world in which everything were free would be a world in which hardly anybody would bother creating anything new. That would be bad. You don't want that.
QuickTime is a media framework. It's not a codec. It's not a player. It's an entire software library for dealing with all kinds of digital media, from audio to images to movie files.
There is no longer much need of Quicktime decoders of any sort on Linux... However, what is needed is the quicktime decoders.
Do what now?
Friend, WebCore includes KHTML and KJS with tons of fixes and optimizations-- all of which have been submitted back to the project, as per the LGPL-- Kwq, the QT adapter library, and the Objective-C SPI. Apple improved the hell out of KHTML and KJS, sent their changes back to the project maintainers, and then released the whole shebang in an OS X-style package. What more do you want, exactly?
Key parts of OS X are still proprietary. Until they are free (or at least open), I still consider Apple an enemy.
Ugh. Enough with the communist ideology, okay? Apple spends a fortune developing wonderful things. If they were to simply give those things away for free, they would be unable to stay in business. I, for one, like what Apple produces, and I like the way they influence the rest of the computer industry-- indeed, the entire consumer products industry. I don't want Apple to go away, so I don't want Apple to make any of their core products "free" or "open." I want them to stay as proprietary as possible, forever.
And so do you. You just may not realize it yet.
I have no idea what that means. Apple does a fairly good job of keeping their public CVS server in sync with OS X.
and where is the updates for freebsd?!
As far as I know, Apple hasn't made any. They just take a good chunk of the FreeBSD userland and ship it with OS X, without modification.
Also we give them X11 support but would they ever give us Aqua support?
:sigh: I've about had it with all the "Aqua"-related ignorance out there. Guys, Aqua is an appearance. It's a collection of graphical elements, okay? That's all. It's not software, in any meaningful sense of the phrase. When you say "Aqua," what you're really talking about is the combination of Quartz, which is the OS X display system, and WindowServer/SystemUIServer, which is the OS X equivalent of the X server, the window manager, and the desktop in your operating environment of choice.
Is Apple going to release the source for WindowServer/SystemUIServer? No. Get over it.
Tell me in what ways Apple has been beneficial to the opensource movement
Well, for starters Apple has done more to increase positive public awareness of open source than anybody else. A hundred thousand non-hacker Apple fans saw Steve Jobs stand up at the last Macworld keynote and declare that he thinks open source is great. There has been no better act of PR for the open source community.
Oh, that and the whole thing with Rendezvous and WebCore and Darwin Streaming Server and CDSA and OpenPlay and Open Directory and whatnot. Can't forget those.
I could build an x86 box with the same power for 1/4 of the price.
Dual processors? DDR RAM? ATI Radeon 9000 (or GeForce 4 Ti) graphics? Audio I/O? Gigabit Ethernet? FireWire 800 and FireWire 400? DVD-RW burner? Built-in 802.11g and Bluetooth?
Maybe you could build a machine like that for $500. But it wouldn't be easy, no sir.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking too small. An hour with Project Builder and even a moderately experienced programmer could whip up a native Cocoa UI that would plug right into Slashdot's MySQL back-end, using libmysqlclient. Spell-checking for free, sure. Duplicate story checking would be a small matter of SQL programming. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could get pretty close.
Actually, I assumed he meant the QuickTime libraries themselves, represented by QuickTime.framework under OS X. (They're available for Windows, too, but I have no idea how they're packaged for Windows.) Having QuickTime for Linux would mean Linux software could take advantage of the QuickTime API's for dealing with file formats and media playback. That would be very handy for things like homegrown processing farms. Lucas Digital uses that sort of thing a lot, as do many other media-type companies.
Of course, Apple's (understandable, and mostly correct) position is that anything you can do with Linux you can do better with OS X, so it's easy to see why they haven't bothered porting QuickTime.framework.
:shudder: You say that like it's a good thing. Given that Macs are generally slower than PC's, and generally more expensive, the only reason to own one-- and I own three-- is to run Mac OS X, Finder and all. If you want to run KDE or Gnome, buy a PC instead.
What... you don't like reference books? Sorry, bub, but if it's all the same to you I'll just keep following the rules as they're written.
Sorry, wrong. It's in the Chicago Manual of Style, although I don't have my copy in front of me at the moment. Abbreviations which are pronounced as letters form plurals with the apostrophe.