There are a lot of people, myself included (at first), who used the store without owning an iPod. If Apple had wanted to restrict the store to iPod owners, they could easily have done so, but they didn't. In short, you can't assume that.m4p file implies iPod.
Well, how good is your physical security?. If the system will be accessed from an environment where there are likely to be unauthorized people wandering around all the time (large office, public area, etc), then don't write it down. If the system will be accessed from a place that only people you trust have access to (home), then it's not a danger- and if your home is ever compromised, having your router password in plain sight is the least of your worries.
The obvious answer: These machines bear no resemblance internally to the machines Apple will release to end users in 2006. They're just dev kits hacked together to let developers get a crack at the x86 architecture and get their apps ported in time, like the Yikes machines were hacked together to ship more G4s while working out the kinks in the next-generation Sawtooth motherboards. The final x86 Macs will probably use EFI, for one thing, and other custom parts that Apple hasn't developed yet and will never be available on the open market.
What is the attraction of case lights? They look hideous (especially the ones in this article) and I can't imagine they don't generate heat. Why do people use these things?
It had been well known that Apple was maintaining an Intel version of Darwin. The fact that they had also been maintaining Intel versions of the entire OS and presumably all their other in-house software was the surprise.
You only listed all the reasons Batman doesn't actually exist in the real world, but none of them are as implausible as typical superpowers. There are sound scientific reasons why it is absolutely impossible for a human to fly unassisted, shoot lasers out of his eyes, pick up a cruise ship with his bare hands, vibrate through walls, or any of a dozen other typical feats. There is no reason why one man could not be one of the top martial artists in the world, or carry a good deal of concealed equipment on his person, or own a high-performance aircraft. The barriers to all of Batman's abilities could theoretically be lifted (even if not by you or me), the barriers to Superman's cannot.
Superman has to be portrayed with human aspects because stories about a being with infinite power and zero weaknesses are not interesting. If humans can't relate to him and understand his decisions then it's a literary (and, more importantly to DC, commercial) failure.
Interestingly, the major improvements in Tiger, such as core video and so on, move all the graphically intensive stuff into the GPU. The cleverness of this is that the lack of the altivec units aren't such a big issue if you use the OS X core API's - everything is done in the graphics card, altivec is much less important, and this means that emulation of the PPC code will work fairly fast on their software emulator (rosetta). So your legacy code isn't going to suffer too much, and newer code even less so using the core API's even if you don't use fat binaries, which you will.
Apple's thinking bigger than that. It's not just about the graphics card or altivec, it's about providing abstracted system libraries for just about anything. If you write a program that uses the system libraries, Apple will ship an implementation that runs fast on a sufficiently advanced GPU, one that runs fast on AltiVec, one that runs fast on SSE3, one that runs fast on whatever the next step is. If you use this library, you get the benefits on all platforms.
As for the robots, perhaps innovation in robot designed leveled off long ago and even 100 year old droid are useful. Or AI requires some rare material that is now in short supply so even old droids must be maintained.
A better (and possibly even more plausible) idea is that since droids are sentient beings, destroying one is closer to murder than scrapping (e.g.) an inanimate microwave oven. Destroying them for no good reason might be frowned upon or outright illegal. The droids could also be given enough self-determination to handle their own maintenance, and so never end up in a state where they're useless.
Defunct? There won't be an alternative to PPC Macs for a year, and Apple will likely be selling PPC Macs for another year after that. And there will be tons of PPC hardware lying around that's still useful. Does the fact that kernel 2.7 will be released at some point in the future mean that 2.6 is "defunct"?
OS X cannot be run on x86 today because there's no way to convert the proprietary parts of it (everything above what you get with Darwin) to x86 code.
I expect Leopard will not run on beige boxes because Apple will still be putting custom hardware on the motherboard (which will probably itself be a custom design), and using Open Firmware.
The preview 10.4.1 for x86 will run on the x86-based machines Apple will make available to ADC members at the same time. RTFA.
OS X has a better system than fat binaries- the bundle format allows an application to contain multiple separate executable files and select the most appropriate one for the platform it's being launched on.
Bluetooth is also useful for multiple computers. I've paired my laptop and workstation, so I can send a file between them with a single command- no login/disconnect process, no navigation, just completely ad-hoc click and go. The only limitation is that it tops out around 30K/sec, so it can't be used with really large files.
Most PCs are used in places where people will not be buying games for them- education and business. Look at real sales figures; they're on completely different scales (with the console world being far larger). A PC game that reaches a million copies sold is considered a smashing success, a console game that sells only a million copies is considered a failure.
This is a common illustration of the canyon-like divide between the common/.er and logic. You missed the reason the vast, vast majority of users prefer BitTorrent- IT IS FREE. If this was not true, BT would never have taken off. If it suddenly became not true, it would die.
Unfortunately, offering content for free is not compatible with large-scale media production, which brings us to the current situation.
Wrong. The consumer realizes that there is no reason to pay anyone for the crap that is currently out there if it is possible to pay less. They couldn't give a rat's ass about unencumbered media formats or DRM chips or whether you can run unsigned code on your new PC.
In a true free market, the only alternatives to buying a product are to buy a similar product from a competitor or to do without all products in that category. That's what your "other method" should be. "Obtain without paying" is not an economic operation and short-circuits the whole system.
It's not so much "myth" as "really hard to make quantitative statements about", because it's so difficult to research or get a look at the big picture. Neither extreme - every pirate would have paid, or no pirate would have paid - is true; the truth is somewhere in the middle but there's no way to find it so the argument continues.
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Macs haven't been limited to playing one sound at a time since 1993 or so.
And if he releases the formula he uses under the GPL, is that free as in speech or beer?
There are a lot of people, myself included (at first), who used the store without owning an iPod. If Apple had wanted to restrict the store to iPod owners, they could easily have done so, but they didn't. In short, you can't assume that .m4p file implies iPod.
We can at least be sure all of those things will *almost* happen at least once in the movie, just to yank everyone's chains.
Yeah, I saw a documentary about this once. Pretty frightening stuff.
Well, how good is your physical security?. If the system will be accessed from an environment where there are likely to be unauthorized people wandering around all the time (large office, public area, etc), then don't write it down. If the system will be accessed from a place that only people you trust have access to (home), then it's not a danger- and if your home is ever compromised, having your router password in plain sight is the least of your worries.
The obvious answer: These machines bear no resemblance internally to the machines Apple will release to end users in 2006. They're just dev kits hacked together to let developers get a crack at the x86 architecture and get their apps ported in time, like the Yikes machines were hacked together to ship more G4s while working out the kinks in the next-generation Sawtooth motherboards. The final x86 Macs will probably use EFI, for one thing, and other custom parts that Apple hasn't developed yet and will never be available on the open market.
What is the attraction of case lights? They look hideous (especially the ones in this article) and I can't imagine they don't generate heat. Why do people use these things?
It had been well known that Apple was maintaining an Intel version of Darwin. The fact that they had also been maintaining Intel versions of the entire OS and presumably all their other in-house software was the surprise.
You only listed all the reasons Batman doesn't actually exist in the real world, but none of them are as implausible as typical superpowers. There are sound scientific reasons why it is absolutely impossible for a human to fly unassisted, shoot lasers out of his eyes, pick up a cruise ship with his bare hands, vibrate through walls, or any of a dozen other typical feats. There is no reason why one man could not be one of the top martial artists in the world, or carry a good deal of concealed equipment on his person, or own a high-performance aircraft. The barriers to all of Batman's abilities could theoretically be lifted (even if not by you or me), the barriers to Superman's cannot.
Superman has to be portrayed with human aspects because stories about a being with infinite power and zero weaknesses are not interesting. If humans can't relate to him and understand his decisions then it's a literary (and, more importantly to DC, commercial) failure.
Interestingly, the major improvements in Tiger, such as core video and so on, move all the graphically intensive stuff into the GPU. The cleverness of this is that the lack of the altivec units aren't such a big issue if you use the OS X core API's - everything is done in the graphics card, altivec is much less important, and this means that emulation of the PPC code will work fairly fast on their software emulator (rosetta). So your legacy code isn't going to suffer too much, and newer code even less so using the core API's even if you don't use fat binaries, which you will.
Apple's thinking bigger than that. It's not just about the graphics card or altivec, it's about providing abstracted system libraries for just about anything. If you write a program that uses the system libraries, Apple will ship an implementation that runs fast on a sufficiently advanced GPU, one that runs fast on AltiVec, one that runs fast on SSE3, one that runs fast on whatever the next step is. If you use this library, you get the benefits on all platforms.
As for the robots, perhaps innovation in robot designed leveled off long ago and even 100 year old droid are useful. Or AI requires some rare material that is now in short supply so even old droids must be maintained.
A better (and possibly even more plausible) idea is that since droids are sentient beings, destroying one is closer to murder than scrapping (e.g.) an inanimate microwave oven. Destroying them for no good reason might be frowned upon or outright illegal. The droids could also be given enough self-determination to handle their own maintenance, and so never end up in a state where they're useless.
the now-defunct power-PC platform
Defunct? There won't be an alternative to PPC Macs for a year, and Apple will likely be selling PPC Macs for another year after that. And there will be tons of PPC hardware lying around that's still useful. Does the fact that kernel 2.7 will be released at some point in the future mean that 2.6 is "defunct"?
No. The Intel roadmap was more promising than the PPC roadmap. That doesn't mean the P4, that means the Pentium M and other future chips.
And one of the major stumbling blocks for the G5 was how long it took IBM to get their 90nm process working.
You do realize that that premium is what pays for OS X in the first place, right?
The x86-based Macs Apple will be making available to developers only at the same time as the preview version of OS X. RTFA.
OS X cannot be run on x86 today because there's no way to convert the proprietary parts of it (everything above what you get with Darwin) to x86 code.
I expect Leopard will not run on beige boxes because Apple will still be putting custom hardware on the motherboard (which will probably itself be a custom design), and using Open Firmware.
The preview 10.4.1 for x86 will run on the x86-based machines Apple will make available to ADC members at the same time. RTFA.
OS X has a better system than fat binaries- the bundle format allows an application to contain multiple separate executable files and select the most appropriate one for the platform it's being launched on.
You forgot one: Which common household object may be killing your children?? We'll tell you in 4 hours!
Bluetooth is also useful for multiple computers. I've paired my laptop and workstation, so I can send a file between them with a single command- no login/disconnect process, no navigation, just completely ad-hoc click and go. The only limitation is that it tops out around 30K/sec, so it can't be used with really large files.
Most PCs are used in places where people will not be buying games for them- education and business. Look at real sales figures; they're on completely different scales (with the console world being far larger). A PC game that reaches a million copies sold is considered a smashing success, a console game that sells only a million copies is considered a failure.
This is a common illustration of the canyon-like divide between the common /.er and logic. You missed the reason the vast, vast majority of users prefer BitTorrent- IT IS FREE. If this was not true, BT would never have taken off. If it suddenly became not true, it would die.
Unfortunately, offering content for free is not compatible with large-scale media production, which brings us to the current situation.
Wrong. The consumer realizes that there is no reason to pay anyone for the crap that is currently out there if it is possible to pay less. They couldn't give a rat's ass about unencumbered media formats or DRM chips or whether you can run unsigned code on your new PC.
In a true free market, the only alternatives to buying a product are to buy a similar product from a competitor or to do without all products in that category. That's what your "other method" should be. "Obtain without paying" is not an economic operation and short-circuits the whole system.
It's not so much "myth" as "really hard to make quantitative statements about", because it's so difficult to research or get a look at the big picture. Neither extreme - every pirate would have paid, or no pirate would have paid - is true; the truth is somewhere in the middle but there's no way to find it so the argument continues.