What part of "All Rights Reserved" do you not understand? Yes, it sucks that we can't get most music and movies for free. Yes, it sucks that the DMCA exists. But all this grasping for loopholes in IP law is really pathetic. Until the IP is handed to you by the "owner" it's not yours to borrow or steal regardless of how easy it was to obtain. No, "fair use" does not apply here.
Well, it doesn't especially matter if people KNOW or CARE about OSS. They will be affected by it nevertheless, and that's ultimately what matters. If the Darwin kernel sucked ass people wouldn't use it. It is much more important for those in the know to be aware of OSS; people in enterprise and development. The only thing that should matter to the end-user is whether it works well, and whether its cost is reasonable. OSS accomplishes both, so its reputation is assured among developers and within enterprise.
I do believe most people are aware of at least the gross differences between Windows XP and Mac OS X, such as the fact the XP will run a hoard of games that Mac OS X won't, and that it runs on a wider variety of inexpensive computers.
The main point of the article is not that Mac OS X will help the "political" cause of Open Source, but that it exposes more users to software which originated within the Open Source movement. Thus it imbues a stronger reputation on those *titles*. As more OSS *titles* gain wider recognition the OSS Movement gains mind-share, regardless of whether any of those minds know or care about OSS.
By way of example, a vast number of long-time Mac OS users have suddenly become aware of the power-trio of Apache / PHP / MySQL (or PostGres). I'm constantly helping newbies configure and compile these services. A large number of people - through projects like Fink - have installed X-Windows on their Macs along with The GIMP and other well-known GNU applications. These folks are excited about OSS in a way that XP users will never know. They're excited because they can sample so many exotic domains, even running Windows and Linux through VirtualPC if they desire.
The down-side to all this exposure to OSS is that an awful lot of it seems to suck when compared to tightly-managed closed-source apps like Photoshop. In order for open source applications to gain acceptance on the Mac desktop they need to be polished and enhanced to meet the expectations of users weaned on professionally designed products. Which essentially means they need an Aqua branch in the source tree.
You might want to do a more scientific sampling of images. Various formats and sizes, number of colors, levels of noise, and compression levels would be a good place to start. Generally images are compressed to be of a reasonable file-size without too much lossiness, not necessarily to be compressed down to as few bytes as possible. You'll find that most compression algorithms have a diminishing level of return at smaller and larger image sizes.
Douglas, who wrote "Gödel Escher Bach," has been working on a very promising project for some time, attempting to get a hold of the "atoms" that compose our ability to process analogies. As concerns "true A.I." this seems like the right approach to me: to solve general problems within a very limited scope rather than simply building "expert systems" and the like.
I spoke to some guys from the DoD at a game developer conference a few years ago, and they seemed very gung-ho about finite-state machines but had no enthusiasm for the kind of deep background research that DRH is doing.
Do you see AI as just another kind of computation, or do you imagine, as many of us do, that there is a "soul in the circuits" waiting to be born?
Apple said "It will be free for life." Apple was mistaken: this stuff costs money. Most people probably don't need dot-mac. Fine, don't buy it. Get a free email address someplace else.
Personally, I use several Macs in several locations, so I like the idea of central dot-net-like services. I work for a Mac software development house, so I need to keep up with Apple's various offerings and learn to incorporate them in our software. This is worth $0.33 a day to me.
(Of course this year I basically got dot-mac for free and a discounted copy of Virex. Good for me, because I've never bothered to get virus protection before.)
I'm sure Apple could have tied ads to their services and offered them for free, but that's another level of management they'd have to deal with - and Apple doesn't like to pollute their desktop and web site with ads. Besides, ads have been universally proven to be a poor revenue source on the net.
It bothers me a lot more that so many people are complaining about this. This is the reality of the internet. Everything costs money, and more and more sites are moving to a pay model. Wake up: All such web services are luxury items. Nobody really needs them. It's amazing how many people are willing to sacrifice their dignity (assuming they had it in the first place) to save a few dollars for things they don't need, just because they *want* it for free. Sad.
IT is not out of the question for Apple to make their own computers utilizing Intel processors. They would only support the OEM hardware, avoiding the pitfalls of Windows, which must support zillions of configurations.
The most challenging hurdle I can see is dealing with big versus little-endian issues.
However an individual intent on flying his plane into a building should be considered even more suspicious if he says nothing in an attempt to keep his intentions secret.
Wow, so I guess anyone who believes there's room for improvement in the federal government is a terrorist! Wow, how can we trust a government or a culture that labels reformers as terrorists? They don't trust us, we don't trust them, so they don't trust us.... Something's got to give.
Sounds like the government is trying to co-opt faith for itself.
Isn't it bad enough that they've started using the word "terrorist" for anything and everything that disagrees with the status-quo?
I don't see how searching through the hard drive to find a program is any easier than a big button that says "start."
You can drop a folder on the Dock. The folder can contain aliases to your programs. When you click on the folder you get a popup menu just like the START menu on Windows. But you're right, Mac installers don't install shortcuts anyplace for you.
However all programs are installed in the "Applications" folder by default, and there is a shortcut to this folder in the Finder's toolbar. It is thus very easy for users to find the installed application and drag its icon to the dock, or make shortcuts (aliases) wherever they'd like.
One of the key features of the Mac OS has always been to leave such things up to the user. Software vendors are discouraged from putting aliases on the user's desktop or auto-launching the installed software, leaving it up to the owner of the computer to decide in what manner they want to access and launch their software. It's one thing about the Mac I've always appreciated.
The START Menu - in contrast - ends up being messy very quickly. Not to mention the fact that most vendors install their software in a folder named after the vendor and not the software title. So if you want to find a program you need to remember that it was published by McAffee or Microsoft, or whoever. That is certainly NOT an intuitive thing, but a marketing thing.
So on my Windows boxes I've always ended up reorganizing it to suit my needs. Unfortunately, such innocent customization is often enough to confound Uninstallers and thwart software updates.
As a highly-literate computer user and programmer I find Windows to be obtrusive and controlling, and lacking simplicity and elegance virtually everywhere. Obviously your post is a troll, calling people who dislike Windows "nimrods." Obviously there is a lot you need to learn about the various systems out there and end-users' motivations for choosing one platform over another. Sometimes it comes down to aesthetics. Mac OS is simply more elegant.
Another novel that was prescient in its time is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Though in the present we hear a lot of moralizing against society, the norms of our culture are much as Aldous Huxley describes. Encouraged to be promiscuous, to worship youth and vanity, and to use mind-altering substances (i.e., caffeine, prozac, alcohol...) the city-dwellers are very much the young adults of our present age. Even a would-be messiah in the person of a "primitive" is just another quaint distraction in the eyes of these poor humans spoon-fed on the distractions of pop-culture, which is why the Social Engineers aren't concerned about him.
I got an XClaim VR (Rage 128) when ATI was closing them out, and I got an external TV Tuner with it. As you mention, it works under 9 but the Mac OS X drivers don't recognize the TV Tuner. Too bad, because if ATI had offered some decent Mac OS X software to support this tuner I'd certainly buy it. Heck, they could simply give specs to the creator of BTV and he'd be happy to do it.
This is always the strongest argument for OSS for me: When hardware makers stop supporting their hardware. I've got a nice little pile of perfectly good hardware that simply needs driver support. Everytime I look at my pile I'm reminded which vendors don't support me - and I avoid supporting them right back.
By the way, USB has enough bandwidth for MPEG-1 compressed video. According to the specs I've read, an hour of the smaller video size takes up about 650MB. That's about 185K bytes per second which USB can easily handle.
No, people buy Macs because they run the Mac OS, which despite a number of issues has always provided a superior user experience to Microsoft's offerings.
Funny you should ask, because Apple has answered that exact question. On the download page for the update you will find instructions on how to verify the SHA checksum of the installer.
The "Installer" application has a bug in which it miscalculates the space required for an update or install. It's a silly bug, but since most new Macs have a hard drive of 30GB or more even 300MB is hardly anything.
Certainly no-brains were applied to considering ease-of-use, total-cost-of-ownership, resale value, or the amazing potential of Unix on the desktop. So for many people of whatever level of education, not knowing any better is just a matter of not having the knowledge or insight to make a better long-term choice. They are being as elitist an anyone: preferring the luxury of saving a few dollars up-front and the self-image that comes with having made the popular choice.
Some of the smartest people I know don't even use computers at all. Maybe they realized - as we are slowly learning - that their heads would get so filled up with information there'd be hardly any room left for themselves to think.
... And anyone who thinks this study has anything to do with the attitudes of Mac users please bend over.
Re:We are talking about purchace cost,not manufact
on
Mac Users May Be Smarter
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
$999 is less money then $1500.
Yes, and ten-plus days a year of frustration and lost productivity dealing with a poorly integrated system is more than no days of lost productivity. How much is your time and peace-of-mind worth?
he/she minimizes his/her risk of feeling/seeming dumb by purchasing a mac
Your argument is foolishly complicated. Ease-of-use is important in its own right. It leads to better work, less frustration, and a better mood at the end of the day. It could be said that those who buy Macs are able to more fully cognizant of the real personal consequences of their decisions, while PC users can only see as far as their wallets or their membership in a large safe majority. Maybe PC-buyers are so elated by their saving of a few dollars that they are able to convince themselves that endless frustration is no big deal.
Viruses are going to be extremely useful as vectors for genetic and cellular therapies in the future, to deliver therapeutic genetic material directly to the cells that need it.
While it is certainly possible that a designer virus might escape the laboratory, unless the virus was designed specifically as a deadly agent and endowed with the kind of viability inherent in naturally-evolved viruses there is no reason to believe that such viruses can or will be worse than those already existing "in the wild" which have had complete freedom to evolve for millennia.
In the future this technology can and likely will become a weapon in the hands of power-hungry individuals. Whether that future is near or far seems to me rather irrelevant. Humanity's lessons come in their due time, no sooner and no later. There might be some comfort in the fact that these technologies are being pursued, at least initially, in consideration of their benefits, by individuals in relatively free and rational non-hostile nations.
The cliche holds true: With great power (and knowledge) comes great responsibility! Those of use who do not control these technologies must learn to exercise faith. Not faith in mankind to act infallibly (or even responsibly) but faith that whatever comes is ultimately for our benefit in this continuum.
The Mac version is a Carbon application, so it doesn't have the characteristic speedy feel of a true Unix application, but hey it's still POV so I can't really disparage it. Hopefully the developers will see fit to make a Cocoa version of the program for a future release.
Slashdot Mirror
They may be cheaper but PC's still only run Butt-Ugly-Time-Waster-OS.
What part of "All Rights Reserved" do you not understand? Yes, it sucks that we can't get most music and movies for free. Yes, it sucks that the DMCA exists. But all this grasping for loopholes in IP law is really pathetic. Until the IP is handed to you by the "owner" it's not yours to borrow or steal regardless of how easy it was to obtain. No, "fair use" does not apply here.
Well, it doesn't especially matter if people KNOW or CARE about OSS. They will be affected by it nevertheless, and that's ultimately what matters. If the Darwin kernel sucked ass people wouldn't use it. It is much more important for those in the know to be aware of OSS; people in enterprise and development. The only thing that should matter to the end-user is whether it works well, and whether its cost is reasonable. OSS accomplishes both, so its reputation is assured among developers and within enterprise.
I do believe most people are aware of at least the gross differences between Windows XP and Mac OS X, such as the fact the XP will run a hoard of games that Mac OS X won't, and that it runs on a wider variety of inexpensive computers.
The main point of the article is not that Mac OS X will help the "political" cause of Open Source, but that it exposes more users to software which originated within the Open Source movement. Thus it imbues a stronger reputation on those *titles*. As more OSS *titles* gain wider recognition the OSS Movement gains mind-share, regardless of whether any of those minds know or care about OSS.
By way of example, a vast number of long-time Mac OS users have suddenly become aware of the power-trio of Apache / PHP / MySQL (or PostGres). I'm constantly helping newbies configure and compile these services. A large number of people - through projects like Fink - have installed X-Windows on their Macs along with The GIMP and other well-known GNU applications. These folks are excited about OSS in a way that XP users will never know. They're excited because they can sample so many exotic domains, even running Windows and Linux through VirtualPC if they desire.
The down-side to all this exposure to OSS is that an awful lot of it seems to suck when compared to tightly-managed closed-source apps like Photoshop. In order for open source applications to gain acceptance on the Mac desktop they need to be polished and enhanced to meet the expectations of users weaned on professionally designed products. Which essentially means they need an Aqua branch in the source tree.
No matter how loud I holler the cow won't go into the slaughterhouse. What am I doing wrong?
Any time an update is displayed with a left-pointing-triangle-in-a-circle next to it it requires a reboot.
You might want to do a more scientific sampling of images. Various formats and sizes, number of colors, levels of noise, and compression levels would be a good place to start. Generally images are compressed to be of a reasonable file-size without too much lossiness, not necessarily to be compressed down to as few bytes as possible. You'll find that most compression algorithms have a diminishing level of return at smaller and larger image sizes.
Douglas, who wrote "Gödel Escher Bach," has been working on a very promising project for some time, attempting to get a hold of the "atoms" that compose our ability to process analogies. As concerns "true A.I." this seems like the right approach to me: to solve general problems within a very limited scope rather than simply building "expert systems" and the like.
I spoke to some guys from the DoD at a game developer conference a few years ago, and they seemed very gung-ho about finite-state machines but had no enthusiasm for the kind of deep background research that DRH is doing.
Do you see AI as just another kind of computation, or do you imagine, as many of us do, that there is a "soul in the circuits" waiting to be born?
Apple said "It will be free for life." Apple was mistaken: this stuff costs money. Most people probably don't need dot-mac. Fine, don't buy it. Get a free email address someplace else.
Personally, I use several Macs in several locations, so I like the idea of central dot-net-like services. I work for a Mac software development house, so I need to keep up with Apple's various offerings and learn to incorporate them in our software. This is worth $0.33 a day to me.
(Of course this year I basically got dot-mac for free and a discounted copy of Virex. Good for me, because I've never bothered to get virus protection before.)
I'm sure Apple could have tied ads to their services and offered them for free, but that's another level of management they'd have to deal with - and Apple doesn't like to pollute their desktop and web site with ads. Besides, ads have been universally proven to be a poor revenue source on the net.
It bothers me a lot more that so many people are complaining about this. This is the reality of the internet. Everything costs money, and more and more sites are moving to a pay model. Wake up: All such web services are luxury items. Nobody really needs them. It's amazing how many people are willing to sacrifice their dignity (assuming they had it in the first place) to save a few dollars for things they don't need, just because they *want* it for free. Sad.
IT is not out of the question for Apple to make their own computers utilizing Intel processors. They would only support the OEM hardware, avoiding the pitfalls of Windows, which must support zillions of configurations.
The most challenging hurdle I can see is dealing with big versus little-endian issues.
However an individual intent on flying his plane into a building should be considered even more suspicious if he says nothing in an attempt to keep his intentions secret.
Wow, so I guess anyone who believes there's room for improvement in the federal government is a terrorist! Wow, how can we trust a government or a culture that labels reformers as terrorists? They don't trust us, we don't trust them, so they don't trust us.... Something's got to give.
Sounds like the government is trying to co-opt faith for itself.
Isn't it bad enough that they've started using the word "terrorist" for anything and everything that disagrees with the status-quo?
I don't see how searching through the hard drive to find a program is any easier than a big button that says "start."
You can drop a folder on the Dock. The folder can contain aliases to your programs. When you click on the folder you get a popup menu just like the START menu on Windows. But you're right, Mac installers don't install shortcuts anyplace for you.
However all programs are installed in the "Applications" folder by default, and there is a shortcut to this folder in the Finder's toolbar. It is thus very easy for users to find the installed application and drag its icon to the dock, or make shortcuts (aliases) wherever they'd like.
One of the key features of the Mac OS has always been to leave such things up to the user. Software vendors are discouraged from putting aliases on the user's desktop or auto-launching the installed software, leaving it up to the owner of the computer to decide in what manner they want to access and launch their software. It's one thing about the Mac I've always appreciated.
The START Menu - in contrast - ends up being messy very quickly. Not to mention the fact that most vendors install their software in a folder named after the vendor and not the software title. So if you want to find a program you need to remember that it was published by McAffee or Microsoft, or whoever. That is certainly NOT an intuitive thing, but a marketing thing.
So on my Windows boxes I've always ended up reorganizing it to suit my needs. Unfortunately, such innocent customization is often enough to confound Uninstallers and thwart software updates.
As a highly-literate computer user and programmer I find Windows to be obtrusive and controlling, and lacking simplicity and elegance virtually everywhere. Obviously your post is a troll, calling people who dislike Windows "nimrods." Obviously there is a lot you need to learn about the various systems out there and end-users' motivations for choosing one platform over another. Sometimes it comes down to aesthetics. Mac OS is simply more elegant.
Another novel that was prescient in its time is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Though in the present we hear a lot of moralizing against society, the norms of our culture are much as Aldous Huxley describes. Encouraged to be promiscuous, to worship youth and vanity, and to use mind-altering substances (i.e., caffeine, prozac, alcohol...) the city-dwellers are very much the young adults of our present age. Even a would-be messiah in the person of a "primitive" is just another quaint distraction in the eyes of these poor humans spoon-fed on the distractions of pop-culture, which is why the Social Engineers aren't concerned about him.
The Entire Text is Here
I got an XClaim VR (Rage 128) when ATI was closing them out, and I got an external TV Tuner with it. As you mention, it works under 9 but the Mac OS X drivers don't recognize the TV Tuner. Too bad, because if ATI had offered some decent Mac OS X software to support this tuner I'd certainly buy it. Heck, they could simply give specs to the creator of BTV and he'd be happy to do it.
This is always the strongest argument for OSS for me: When hardware makers stop supporting their hardware. I've got a nice little pile of perfectly good hardware that simply needs driver support. Everytime I look at my pile I'm reminded which vendors don't support me - and I avoid supporting them right back.
By the way, USB has enough bandwidth for MPEG-1 compressed video. According to the specs I've read, an hour of the smaller video size takes up about 650MB. That's about 185K bytes per second which USB can easily handle.
people buy Macs because of the Apple brand
No, people buy Macs because they run the Mac OS, which despite a number of issues has always provided a superior user experience to Microsoft's offerings.
Funny you should ask, because Apple has answered that exact question. On the download page for the update you will find instructions on how to verify the SHA checksum of the installer.
The "Installer" application has a bug in which it miscalculates the space required for an update or install. It's a silly bug, but since most new Macs have a hard drive of 30GB or more even 300MB is hardly anything.
the PC is a no-brainer
Certainly no-brains were applied to considering ease-of-use, total-cost-of-ownership, resale value, or the amazing potential of Unix on the desktop. So for many people of whatever level of education, not knowing any better is just a matter of not having the knowledge or insight to make a better long-term choice. They are being as elitist an anyone: preferring the luxury of saving a few dollars up-front and the self-image that comes with having made the popular choice.
Some of the smartest people I know don't even use computers at all. Maybe they realized - as we are slowly learning - that their heads would get so filled up with information there'd be hardly any room left for themselves to think.
... And anyone who thinks this study has anything to do with the attitudes of Mac users please bend over.
$999 is less money then $1500.
Yes, and ten-plus days a year of frustration and lost productivity dealing with a poorly integrated system is more than no days of lost productivity. How much is your time and peace-of-mind worth?
he/she minimizes his/her risk of feeling/seeming dumb by purchasing a mac
Your argument is foolishly complicated. Ease-of-use is important in its own right. It leads to better work, less frustration, and a better mood at the end of the day. It could be said that those who buy Macs are able to more fully cognizant of the real personal consequences of their decisions, while PC users can only see as far as their wallets or their membership in a large safe majority. Maybe PC-buyers are so elated by their saving of a few dollars that they are able to convince themselves that endless frustration is no big deal.
Viruses are going to be extremely useful as vectors for genetic and cellular therapies in the future, to deliver therapeutic genetic material directly to the cells that need it.
While it is certainly possible that a designer virus might escape the laboratory, unless the virus was designed specifically as a deadly agent and endowed with the kind of viability inherent in naturally-evolved viruses there is no reason to believe that such viruses can or will be worse than those already existing "in the wild" which have had complete freedom to evolve for millennia.
In the future this technology can and likely will become a weapon in the hands of power-hungry individuals. Whether that future is near or far seems to me rather irrelevant. Humanity's lessons come in their due time, no sooner and no later. There might be some comfort in the fact that these technologies are being pursued, at least initially, in consideration of their benefits, by individuals in relatively free and rational non-hostile nations.
The cliche holds true: With great power (and knowledge) comes great responsibility! Those of use who do not control these technologies must learn to exercise faith. Not faith in mankind to act infallibly (or even responsibly) but faith that whatever comes is ultimately for our benefit in this continuum.
The Mac version is a Carbon application, so it doesn't have the characteristic speedy feel of a true Unix application, but hey it's still POV so I can't really disparage it. Hopefully the developers will see fit to make a Cocoa version of the program for a future release.
MacOS X doesn't use the hosts file except in single-user mode, but once you've changed the /etc/hosts file you can update the NetInfo database like so:
/etc/hosts
sudo niload hosts /