I understand that DLO (Digital Lifestyle Outfitters) is using patent #6,591,085 to keep a PodBuddy, designed by DVForge, a product, competing with DLO's TransPod, off the market.
I would like to say that because of these actions, I will never purchase a single product from your company. Furthermore, I will do everything in my power to inform everyone I come in contact with to also avoid purchasing anything from your company in the future. Word of mouth advertising can work both ways. It can be a powerful tool to advance the name of your company in its products but a negative reputation can also produce significant harm.
I understand that DVForge had offered to sell their designs and molds for the PodBuddy for a reasonable price but your company refused the offer. Had you chosen to accept the offer, perhaps I would have reconsidered becoming a customer of yours despite your business tactics through use of patents to limit competition.
I fear that your greed and short-sightedness will be your undoing. These sorts of actions do not reflect favourably upon your company and will most likely cause your firm to lose a great deal of potential business.
Regards,
Aristotle
PS. I look forward to your company's bankruptcy liquidation sale in the near future.
Why would the developers of "new" software which depended on providing "native performace" care about supporting 10.3.x when Tiger is one of the fastest growing segments of the OS X userbase?
Any software that does not "require" native performance on X86 can continue in maintanence mode as a 10.3.x compatible PPC binary which will run on X86 machines through Rosetta.
Look around at most shareware software, they are abandoning Support for Panther as they are starting to leverage Core Data in their apps.
Demand of Legacy support is dropping right now as we speak. I would expect that any new software will be Tiger only and in the form of a universal binary.
*SARCASM*
Yeah, that is a lot faster and easier for a noob to figure out than copying an app with a fat binary a.k.a. universal binary over to the/Applications directory through a drag and drop operation in the GUI.
*END OF SARCASM*
Honestly, do us all a favour and avail yourself of either using google to find out this information in the future or try watching the keynote where Steve Jobs explained all this quite well.
Apple came out with Quicktime back in the 80's. Hypercard could be used to control devices via serial ports and all the plethora of MIDI devices predate the filing of this "patent".
I'm not spreading FUD. Look at the majority of projects. Very few of them have a lot of outside contributors. Most people consume the projects and don't go beyond compiling binaries if even that since most projects also provide compiled binaries.
It may be possible to enhance the code base but that is not likely to happen if nobody bothered to contribute while it was open source and if the community lacks the skills/time/will to enhance it.
The problem is that if it was not being maintained by anyone else outside of the company, you are not going to have anyone readily available to maintain it.
That is true, however most open source projects are poorly documented. If a project like the one I had in my example only had documentation of the code changes within the company, only the copyright holders would have the understanding of how the code worked.
Anyone wishing to continue a fork of the project would have to get up to speed on the source code and be able to continue development.
Many open source projects started up by individuals or a small group of people seldom have outside contributions or interest from other developers. Those kind of projects could also go closed source and there would be very little the "community" could do in the short term.
You are at the same risk with open source projects where only have code contributions from company employees. Copyright owners always have the right to change licence terms.
Open source licenses are not the panecea some make it out to be.
I'm sorry but how do contract, rules and regulations promote freedom?
Restrictions, restrict freedom. Do you have a different dictionary than the rest of the world?
I respect that it is your right to shackle yourself with whatever rules/social contract etc... you want but that has nothing to do with promoting "freedom".
If your analogy was true, there were be no market for Alienware or other players and everyone would be buying a Dell.
I switched to get away from the generic crap boxes. Intel made this deal to have partner which would not create a generic crap box with the same features mom and pop shops sell.
You can keep your "cheap" crap boxes. I'm not interested.
Recognizing a motherboard chipset is a small part of the hardware recognition process. It is either supported or not supported. I believe the OP was referring to things like GFX cards and other expansion cards.
Most people do not have any issues with the support of a motherboard because there are only three chipset manufacturers in the X86 world with any credibility which are Intel, Via and SiS.
What the hell are you talking about? All of the standard System V directories are there but it is prefered that the base install remain pristine so unix package tools like Fink etc... are supposed to use/sw instead of littering unstable version across the/bin,/usr/bin,/sbin and/usr/sbin directories.
Drag and drop installers? Have you used OS X? When you drag and drop.app packages, you are not "installing" the application in the sense that linux packages are installed but rather you are just copying the entire package including dependencies into the/Applications folder.
Excuse me, but you asked about SATA drives and old video cards. You said nothing about motherboards.
What is your point exactly?
As far as hardware peripherals and internal add-on components such as drive controllers, drives, port expander cards, video cards and sound cards, OS X has considerable support for a variety of hardware.
About the only thing you might have trouble with are some video cards (firmware issues).
The motherboard issue is largely moot since until intel version ships, OS X is restricted to PPC based motherboards with Firmware anyway.
You are confused. It can make use of SATA drives just fine, had support for bluetooth "before" windows and can handle some older video cards. But the question would be why bother with an 8 year old video card when newer cards are so damn cheap?
About the only thing it cannot do is run on diverse motherboards/CPUs but there is nothing wrong with peripheral support. Stop spreading the FUD already.
I like Linux as a server and I admit that it performs better than OS X as a server when running multi-threaded POSIX apps like MySQL but it is no competition for OS X on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to say that because of these actions, I will never purchase a single product from your company. Furthermore, I will do everything in my power to inform everyone I come in contact with to also avoid purchasing anything from your company in the future. Word of mouth advertising can work both ways. It can be a powerful tool to advance the name of your company in its products but a negative reputation can also produce significant harm.
I understand that DVForge had offered to sell their designs and molds for the PodBuddy for a reasonable price but your company refused the offer. Had you chosen to accept the offer, perhaps I would have reconsidered becoming a customer of yours despite your business tactics through use of patents to limit competition.
I fear that your greed and short-sightedness will be your undoing. These sorts of actions do not reflect favourably upon your company and will most likely cause your firm to lose a great deal of potential business.
Regards,
Aristotle
PS. I look forward to your company's bankruptcy liquidation sale in the near future.
X11 sucks. I'm waiting for a native port. X11 is too primitive.
Only a "fanboy" geek would give a shit about Mhz,SPEC scores etc... Regular people care about whether it gets the job done.
Any software that does not "require" native performance on X86 can continue in maintanence mode as a 10.3.x compatible PPC binary which will run on X86 machines through Rosetta.
Look around at most shareware software, they are abandoning Support for Panther as they are starting to leverage Core Data in their apps.
Demand of Legacy support is dropping right now as we speak. I would expect that any new software will be Tiger only and in the form of a universal binary.
Yeah, that is a lot faster and easier for a noob to figure out than copying an app with a fat binary a.k.a. universal binary over to the
*END OF SARCASM*
Honestly, do us all a favour and avail yourself of either using google to find out this information in the future or try watching the keynote where Steve Jobs explained all this quite well.
There is no need for an compiles or installers.
Apple came out with Quicktime back in the 80's. Hypercard could be used to control devices via serial ports and all the plethora of MIDI devices predate the filing of this "patent".
It may be possible to enhance the code base but that is not likely to happen if nobody bothered to contribute while it was open source and if the community lacks the skills/time/will to enhance it.
The problem is that if it was not being maintained by anyone else outside of the company, you are not going to have anyone readily available to maintain it.
Anyone wishing to continue a fork of the project would have to get up to speed on the source code and be able to continue development.
Many open source projects started up by individuals or a small group of people seldom have outside contributions or interest from other developers. Those kind of projects could also go closed source and there would be very little the "community" could do in the short term.
They did look at AMD but they do not have the capacity and sometimes have used IBM's FABs for some production runs.
Open source licenses are not the panecea some make it out to be.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore/
Now what does that URL tell you?
You are a fucking troll. The processor alone costs $400 USD. Then add ram, the case, the motherboard, harddrive and optical drive.
FYI. Beer is not "free" outside of academia a.k.a the "real world".
Restrictions, restrict freedom. Do you have a different dictionary than the rest of the world?
I respect that it is your right to shackle yourself with whatever rules/social contract etc... you want but that has nothing to do with promoting "freedom".
A mac mini comes with more than OS X. It also comes with iLife and other bundled third-party apps.
I switched to get away from the generic crap boxes. Intel made this deal to have partner which would not create a generic crap box with the same features mom and pop shops sell.
You can keep your "cheap" crap boxes. I'm not interested.
Most people do not have any issues with the support of a motherboard because there are only three chipset manufacturers in the X86 world with any credibility which are Intel, Via and SiS.
Drag and drop installers? Have you used OS X? When you drag and drop .app packages, you are not "installing" the application in the sense that linux packages are installed but rather you are just copying the entire package including dependencies into the /Applications folder.
What is your point exactly?
As far as hardware peripherals and internal add-on components such as drive controllers, drives, port expander cards, video cards and sound cards, OS X has considerable support for a variety of hardware.
About the only thing you might have trouble with are some video cards (firmware issues).
The motherboard issue is largely moot since until intel version ships, OS X is restricted to PPC based motherboards with Firmware anyway.
About the only thing it cannot do is run on diverse motherboards/CPUs but there is nothing wrong with peripheral support. Stop spreading the FUD already.
Dia is also available for OS X although an easier to use alternative would be http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/ 4/.
Linux lacks a proper low latency audio framework like Core Audio http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreaudio/.
Tiger introduces Core Image http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/ which makes image editors a breeze to create.
I like Linux as a server and I admit that it performs better than OS X as a server when running multi-threaded POSIX apps like MySQL but it is no competition for OS X on the desktop.
PS. iMovie HD is about the cheapest entry into HD video you will find in the market right now http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/.
You might want to check out http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreaudio/
Ah but the simplest widgets is what you would want on your cell phone. Imagine Weather widgets, RSS news widgets or a webcam widget.
I was talking about people ragging on Jamie Zawinski for his decision to switch to the mac.
Does this decision all of a sudden make his past contributions less valuable? Ingrates, the lot of you.