ESR is now quite happy with the latest version of Apple's license, which was released in direct response to his complaints about it.
The open source community (as opposed to the Free-As-In-What-I-Say-Is-Free software community) complains, Apple revises, and then ESR, at least, is happy. But people like you have to go back to his INITIAL complaints in order to find something to complain about.
That's annoying. Also (possibly intentionally, possibly not) intellectually dishonest.
Well, Motorola has one that turns out code from 5% to... 20%? 40%? I can't honestly remember. Anyway, that much faster. It's kind of expensive and only runs on AIX, though, as I recall. Apple used to do all their compilation on this one before they sent out the final binaries. Then when X popped up, everyone was told that they'd have to take a large performance hit and use gcc, and if it was a really big problem they should optimize their code. Oh and by the way gcc optimization level three doesn't work for the forseeable future, have a nice day.
MrC is almost as fast as the Motorola one. It's probably still available on Apple's web site. I think it's a MPW plugin, and isn't available for running on MacOS X. Pity, that.
> It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way,
This is the way cost is always analyzed, and it irks me. If you have a bunch of boxes that require 10% as much administration, and 10% as much training to administrate, and cost $2000 each, compared to the other ones which cost $1500 each, then clearly the $1500 ones are less expensive.
I'm not saying that xServes DO, mind you. But your analysis of the situation is hopelessly naive... as is just about everyone else's.
If you have a stable of IT people around, and you're not interested in laying any of them off, then I guess it makes sense to get a high-maintenance solution. And more power to you... jobs are hard to come by these days. But if you're not adding your support costs into the equation, then you're doing your company a disservice.
Again, I'm not saying the xServes *ARE* that much easier to administrate. I'm just saying that it clearly didn't even enter your worldview that the subject might be pertinent.
I use these regularly, both on my main machine and on the router/firewall/server machine with dual ethernet ports and so forth. Never seen a seg fault.
Perhaps you have an UNUSUAL problem and haven't bothered to report it to Apple, and therefore they haven't seen it?
> Define "property" in colloquial terms so as to include copyrights. Most people I surveyed did > not believe that "Happy Birthday to You" was morally the "property" of Warner Chappell music publishing.
Defining morality in terms of the prevailing view is just as dangerous as defining it in terms of the current legal system. If I go to a country where slavery is commonly accepted by the populace but not legal, is it my obligation to agitate for the legalization of slavery? This is an extreme example, of course, but so is the 'Happy Birthday' thing.
Basically, if you go around to people and ask them if they think that music has any value, they will tend to say yes. If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after it leaves his or her mouth, most of them will say yes. If you go around and ask them if they think they should be able to sing 'Happy Birthday' in public, they'll tend to say yes. Believe it or not. There might be some kind of cognitive dissonance going on there, but such is life.
You never did answer the 'theft of services' point, which I think is a perfectly good one. If you sneak into a concert without paying, even if they don't sell all of the seats, that's still illegal.
The idea of having a computer, for you, is obviously to have something to play with. That's fine, if you like toys. But don't look down at the people who don't WANT to spend their days and nights learning how to recompile kernels, dick with video card drivers, try to figure out why the install floppy can't find their ethernet card, et al.
If you postulate that there are some people that want to get a Mac on the cheap, and who are willing to spend a day putting together their computer, but who don't then want to spend the rest of their lives screwing around with it... who might, ohmygod, actually want to get something useful done on it and NOT have to worry about dicking around with it, your argument goes right on our the window. Linux and BSD aren't hard to get, but they're a decision that a person like that will regret for a long time to come.
If you patent something and then issue a license saying 'Anyone can use this freely, and if I change the terms of my license then you can choose which version, the old or the new, to use', then anyone can use your work freely without any chance that you will change your mind, because you cannot legally 'unsign' that contract once you've signed it.
There are only two barriers to doing things like this: one, it costs money to patent something, though not as much as people think. Two, most of the software patents that people are worried about come FROM the commercial software industry, and what free software advocates really want is to be able to use this work whenever they want to without paying for it.
Admittedly, a lot of the time the things that are patented are obvious or silly, and/or were come up with independantly. And that's bad. But don't make it out to be the heroic Linux kernel hacker coming up with something really cool and then having a corporation see it, copy it, and patent it, because that's a pretty rare phenomenon.
One of the ways that people are taking this is 'scared the bejeezus out of me'. I'm personally not sure that counts as 'affected' in any material sense, really. I mean, if you do, I'd have to go back to the original Castle Wolfenstein... walking into a room to find an SS trooper blazing away at you got my heart into my throat.
But there have been a couple of games that really affected me, left me moved. Let me see...
Alternate Reality. Way back when, I illegally copied a disk of this for my Apple IIe clone. For the uninitiated among you, it was sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure book, except that you basically led a normal life from a different perspective. I found it endlessly more facinating than the books, because it was REAL life, and it was less about action and more about life choices. Sadly, it's a lot easier to make the right choices in a computer game than it is in real life, sometimes, but I've never forgotten this game.
Photopia: Much more recent, this is a facinating and moving exercise in directed text adventure, with only a little more lattitude than Alternate Reality. Still, it's very moving, in its way, and an effective use of the medium.
A Change in the Weather: Another text adventure. Don't know why this affected me so much, but it did. The cute little fox might have had something to do with it. It just made me feel good, out of all proportion to the actual challenge of the game.
> Why does brand new stuff cost the same as old stuff?
Hey... that's right! Because after all, we all know that music degrades over time, until all you're left with after a hundred years or so is a bunch of hisses and pops.
As evidence, listen to any recording from the 1930s. It was crystal clear when it came out of the musician's instruments, right? And now it's all hissy and crackly and just generally icky. See? Proof positive! The older the music is, the less it's worth!
The Mikado: 2 CD set. On Amazon: $21.98 Apple: $14.99 The Chieftains: The Celtic Harp: Amazon $16.98 Apple $9.99 Verve : Coleman Hawkins Amazon $11.99, Apple $9.99 David Wilcox: Big Horizon Amazon $14.98 Apple $9.99
And that's not counting shipping and suchlike. Mind you, there was one counterexample, where the album was more expensive on Apple's service, and two that I looked for that weren't on Apple's site at all... although one of those two wasn't available from Amazon either.
Of course, you could buy used. And hope it was in decent shape when you got it. If, indeed, you got it.
> That's a better value than iTunes, if I can act like an adult and wait 3 days to get my music.
Ooh... act like an adult, is it? If you're REALLY an adult, why do you need music at all? I mean, it's obviously just pandering to those infantile urges. Grow up and be a real man... deny yourself pleasure!
But for the rest of us, who like music that doesn't get marked down to $7 six weeks after it is released and who don't mind shelling out LESS money to get MORE value FASTER...
Damn! Apple has been working on this that long? And here I thought computers were a recent invention... this service has been in the works millions of years longer than human beings have!
> How many people are still listening to American Pie after all these years?
A good example of what HE said. Vincent? The Grave? Babylon? Damn, I haven't listened to that album in 15 years (it's on vinal, sigh) and I still remember the rest of the music on there. Never would have heard it at all if I hadn't bought the album for that one song.
Hell, I still know most of the words to Vincent... more by percentage than I do for American Pie, that's for sure.
I think you forget you're free to take alternate transportation if you don't like the price of a car, the price of gas, or the rules of the road.
Presumably you can eventually figure out, with some trial and error, that you're NOT free to go out and steal someone's car, and siphon gas out of a tank every time you run low.
> There are plenty of so called "standards". Doesn't mean anyone uses them or that they are relevant.
And yet, if this were Ogg, which is really only used by a tiny subset of the population, you'd be fine with it, I'm sure.
Basically, you decided you didn't want to like this, and came up with some reasons why. Someone challenged a main reason, and it was completely indefensible, so you tried to defend it anyway, and just made yourself sound dumb.
You want everything to be in an established, well-known spec... you don't want anything new to be invented? Or maybe you don't want competition, so that the only new things that should ever be released are the things that are so much better than the old version that the old one will just disappear immediately, so that there's only ever one thing out there?
Or perhaps you don't mind new things like AAC being introduced, as long as no big projects ever use them until they're already thoroughly accepted? Well, surprise, they aren't thoroughly accepted until some big projects use them.
Well, it's pretty straightforward WHY this is only available in the US... distribution of the same music is different between different countries. Basically, to distribute in the UK it would require the same amount of negotiation, arm-twisting, yelling and screaming, and payoffs that it required in the US.
I think they'll wait to see how the pilot program does before they commit to other countries. If it works out, then I bet it happens.
...as people who spend more than two thousand dollars a year on CDs, and who think that if the music isn't worth anything unless the waveform is indistinguishable from the original.
Clearly I'm not a music fan... after all, I only have a couple hundred CDs, and am a performing amateur musician. And obviously my professional musician friends couldn't possibly be 'real music fans', since they all mostly have cheap stereos that couldn't tell the difference between a 160kbps mp3 and vinyl, though admittedly they listen to them a lot.
No, frankly, the only people who really worry about quality to that extent are those who have way too much time on their hands and a need to brag to all and sundry about how cool their stereo system is. I guess it beats bragging about your computer...but only just.
Really, it's funny, because you're here claiming CDs as the be-all and end-all of civilization. I'm sure that if you had any real LP collection you'd be trumpeting that, but I'm guessing you came along too late to ride the 'CDs suck, LPs are the One True Music Source' bandwagon.
And your little diatribe, claiming that the only true music lovers are the ones who are completely anal about precision music reproduction, will slide down the tubes just like LPs did.
Hell, I can reproduce the Brandenburg Concerti in my head accurately enough that when I lost that CD, I didn't even bother to replace it... all I have to do is close my eyes and hear the music. Clearly, that's the lowest of low fidelity... no sound at all! I must be a real music-hater, huh?
You are right in many of the particulars of the case, while, I think, being somewhat wrong in your conclusions.
First of all, they started calling their system software releases 'MacOS Number' at MacOS 8. The moniker had been used before then; though 7 was still officially 'System 7', a lot of people referred to it as MacOS 7 or 7.5 or whatever, because 'System 7' couldn't be used unless you had a context... it's too broad. Likewise it's not patentable.
Second, the Macintosh operating systems after 7.x were always called, not Mac OS9, but 'MacOS 9'. The dramatic majority of sites, based on a little check I just did via Google, do indeed call it that way. In fact, if you run a search for the following on Google, the top 8 sites you get are sites that talk about the OS-9 operating system, not the Macintosh in any way, shape, or form.
"OS 9" "OS9" -"MacOS 9" -"Mac OS9"
So, the pages that talk about OS-9 are, by and large, pages that talk about OS-9. In fact, I, as a Mac programmer and sysadmin, have very rarely heard of people calling MacOS 9 'OS-9'... I can't think of a single instance. When people are talking about it without bringing up the Mac beforehand, it's always 'MacOS 9'... when you're already talking about the Mac, it's almost *invariably* just 'nine'. As in, "Well, it runs under ten just fine, but it just crashes to the desktop when you try to run it on nine. I even tried it on nine-two-two.'
Ultrascience did indeed sell OS-9 for 68000-based Macintoshes. However, by the time MacOS 9 came out, Ultrascience had discontinued their product quite a long time hence, so there was no danger of their being harmed.
Finally, I have not read the decision, but as I understand it the judge didn't have to claim that there would be no confusion. What he needed to claim was that that Apple's trademark was sufficiently different from OS-9 that such confusion was unlikely to occur, OR that the two products were in sufficiently different categories that they did not compete with one another.
Personally, I would have to say that anyone who needed OS-9 would be able to understand the difference between the two, and that therefore the judge was absolutely correct. Especially since OS-9 was treading on pretty thin ground as it was... it is hard to see how 'OS-9' was defensible, in a lot of ways. It is, and was, a generic industry term IN THE INDUSTRY IN WHICH IT IS REGISTERED, followed by a number that sounds very much like a version number. It would be kind of like me suggesting that I should be able to make 'OS/2' a trademark... oh... wait... uh, a better example might be 'DB/2'... oh, no... uh...
It's just dumb. It's like... say you open a restaurant called 'Sam's BBQ'. It's popular, and you open another one across town called 'Sam's BBQ 2' Only you find out that someone else has a trademark on 'BBQ-2'. Taking a common and accepted generic term and adding a number to it is a questionable way to create a trademark. At best.
You know, that little argument of yours makes me really nauseous.
What you're saying here is, "These people have a hidden agenda: they are using a stance that is against scientific progress for their own personal profit." You are thus accusing them of the highest form of hypocracy.
On the basis of what evidence? Someone told you, or you read somewhere, that 'groups such as this' sometimes do this for personal advantage. You've never actually done any research on this particular group. You've almost certainly never done any research on 'groups such as this', or you'd realize that whether they are misguided or not, the vast majority of people who start such groups believe in what they're doing.
But you don't want to debate them on the merits of their science. Oh, no, that would be boring, and a lot of work. Much easier to just say that they're only in this for the money. And there's a bonus, too: even if they're proved to have been absolutely right in all their claims, years down the road, you can say that you didn't listen to them because they were clearly only in it for the money, and the fact that they were right was mere coincidence. And you can pretend that you don't have egg all over your face.
I'm not saying these people are right. However, in justice, I do them the honor of assuming that they actually mean what they say, until proven otherwise.
I extend the same courtesy to corporations as well. Unfortunately, one of the things that the trade group representing American industry has said, flat out, is that companies should not take moral and ethical constraints into consideration when drawing up business plans; the only things that should constrain a company are dedication to profit, and (a distant second) legal issues. So if it's legal to ship a (profitable) product that kills hundreds of thousands of people, it is not only allowed... it is REQUIRED.
But of course, you would much rather trust the corporations than the people who are concerned about what the corporations are doing, or the government which (up until recently) has been trying to keep said corporations from killing more people than is reasonably necessary.
> I'll restate my hypothesis : If fewer people switch from the Safari (than they did > when IE was default), it will because the Safari is better.
Touche. Assuming that Apple continues playing nice and keeping the browser separate from the rest of the OS and stuff like that, I'll certainly accept your assertion. However, bear in mind that this doesn't mean that Camino isn't still 'better' (whatever that means) than Safari... it just means that fewer people found Safari objectionable enough to get over the inertia invovled in getting another browser.
> a group that has an extremely vested interest in getting a certain answer.
A vested interest is: 3) A special interest in protecting or promoting that which is to ones own personal advantage. 4) vested interests: Those groups that seek to maintain or control an existing system or activity from which they derive private benefit.
Know your terms before you use them... that one is loaded. What you said there was that these people gain some direct personal benefit, generally financial, from opposing nanotechnology development, a statement which I sincerely doubt.
You could instead have said, 'But I do know I become a little more suspicious when the science is done at the behest of a group that has already formed an opinion in the matter.' Or something similar to that.
Unless you consider them to have a vested interest because they think they'll all die of nanoparticle inhalation if they don't stop the research. Although that technically falls under the definition of a vested interest, it's not how the term is typically used.
> All technology comes with consequences. We usually accept these risks freely.
Translation: we usually don't bother to assess these risks until we've already deployed the technology.
> The only types of nanomachines that are dangerous are those that perform only a minimal > amount of precautions as to what specific things they can operate on.
Translation: I am incapible of coming up with any possible risks from other kinds of nanomachines in 15 seconds of thought, so clearly there aren't any.
Translation of the entire post: Listen to me! I didn't read the article!
Basically, if you have a bunch of really tiny stuff and you breathe it in, it doesn't matter what function it's performing at the time... it can screw up your lungs. If you have a bunch of pieces of a defunct nanomachine wandering around in your bloodstream, it can cause truly entertaining effects in a truly entertaining variety of places. If you absorb interestingly coherant nanomachine parts through your skin, interesting things can happen.
Parallels have already been drawn to asbestos and fibreglass.
And here you are, saying that the only kind of nanomachine that is at all dangerous is a self-replicating one. Oh, wait, maybe that's the only thing that Ben Bova thought were dangerous... he's a sci-fi writer, he must be right, huh?
Well, there's always Neil Stephenson... remember the 'toner' in one of his books? How much good d'ya suppose that does your lungs?
For example, let's say that Apple, in Europe, told repair centers that in order to buy a motherboard from them, they had to send back the bad motherboard that it replaced.
How exactly is that restraint of trade? That's what a lot of Apple's repair contracts actually look like.
This guy is buying large lots of motherboards from eBay or something, not from repair centers. Repair centers pay too much for the motherboards, and/or have the contract where a bad mobo is returned for each new one sent out, and/or are too large to piss Apple off in this way.
I just bought a lot of 8 G4 motherboards... and found out I can't test them, because they don't fit in my G4. *sigh* Maybe someone will buy them 'as-is'.
> You seem to be saying that if nobody uses Camino, then Camino will not be used. Yes, indeed. > If people stop using Caminio, it will be because they are using something better.
Well, no. Ninety-some percent of people will never switch from their default browser, better, worse, or indifferent. If you define 'better' as 'requires no effort to obtain', then your hypothesis becomes true. Otherwise it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
ESR is now quite happy with the latest version of Apple's license, which was released in direct response to his complaints about it.
The open source community (as opposed to the Free-As-In-What-I-Say-Is-Free software community) complains, Apple revises, and then ESR, at least, is happy. But people like you have to go back to his INITIAL complaints in order to find something to complain about.
That's annoying. Also (possibly intentionally, possibly not) intellectually dishonest.
-Fred
Well, Motorola has one that turns out code from 5% to ... 20%? 40%? I can't honestly remember. Anyway, that much faster. It's kind of expensive and only runs on AIX, though, as I recall. Apple used to do all their compilation on this one before they sent out the final binaries. Then when X popped up, everyone was told that they'd have to take a large performance hit and use gcc, and if it was a really big problem they should optimize their code. Oh and by the way gcc optimization level three doesn't work for the forseeable future, have a nice day.
MrC is almost as fast as the Motorola one. It's probably still available on Apple's web site. I think it's a MPW plugin, and isn't available for running on MacOS X. Pity, that.
-Fred
> It wouldn't be cost effective for any company other than Apple to use Xserver's in this way,
This is the way cost is always analyzed, and it irks me. If you have a bunch of boxes that require 10% as much administration, and 10% as much training to administrate, and cost $2000 each, compared to the other ones which cost $1500 each, then clearly the $1500 ones are less expensive.
I'm not saying that xServes DO, mind you. But your analysis of the situation is hopelessly naive... as is just about everyone else's.
If you have a stable of IT people around, and you're not interested in laying any of them off, then I guess it makes sense to get a high-maintenance solution. And more power to you... jobs are hard to come by these days. But if you're not adding your support costs into the equation, then you're doing your company a disservice.
Again, I'm not saying the xServes *ARE* that much easier to administrate. I'm just saying that it clearly didn't even enter your worldview that the subject might be pertinent.
-fred
I use these regularly, both on my main machine and on the router/firewall/server machine with dual ethernet ports and so forth. Never seen a seg fault.
Perhaps you have an UNUSUAL problem and haven't bothered to report it to Apple, and therefore they haven't seen it?
Sheesh.
-fred
> Define "property" in colloquial terms so as to include copyrights. Most people I surveyed did
> not believe that "Happy Birthday to You" was morally the "property" of Warner Chappell music publishing.
Defining morality in terms of the prevailing view is just as dangerous as defining it in terms of the current legal system. If I go to a country where slavery is commonly accepted by the populace but not legal, is it my obligation to agitate for the legalization of slavery? This is an extreme example, of course, but so is the 'Happy Birthday' thing.
Basically, if you go around to people and ask them if they think that music has any value, they will tend to say yes. If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after it leaves his or her mouth, most of them will say yes. If you go around and ask them if they think they should be able to sing 'Happy Birthday' in public, they'll tend to say yes. Believe it or not. There might be some kind of cognitive dissonance going on there, but such is life.
You never did answer the 'theft of services' point, which I think is a perfectly good one. If you sneak into a concert without paying, even if they don't sell all of the seats, that's still illegal.
-fred
The idea of having a computer, for you, is obviously to have something to play with. That's fine, if you like toys. But don't look down at the people who don't WANT to spend their days and nights learning how to recompile kernels, dick with video card drivers, try to figure out why the install floppy can't find their ethernet card, et al.
If you postulate that there are some people that want to get a Mac on the cheap, and who are willing to spend a day putting together their computer, but who don't then want to spend the rest of their lives screwing around with it... who might, ohmygod, actually want to get something useful done on it and NOT have to worry about dicking around with it, your argument goes right on our the window. Linux and BSD aren't hard to get, but they're a decision that a person like that will regret for a long time to come.
-fred
If you patent something and then issue a license saying 'Anyone can use this freely, and if I change the terms of my license then you can choose which version, the old or the new, to use', then anyone can use your work freely without any chance that you will change your mind, because you cannot legally 'unsign' that contract once you've signed it.
There are only two barriers to doing things like this: one, it costs money to patent something, though not as much as people think. Two, most of the software patents that people are worried about come FROM the commercial software industry, and what free software advocates really want is to be able to use this work whenever they want to without paying for it.
Admittedly, a lot of the time the things that are patented are obvious or silly, and/or were come up with independantly. And that's bad. But don't make it out to be the heroic Linux kernel hacker coming up with something really cool and then having a corporation see it, copy it, and patent it, because that's a pretty rare phenomenon.
-fred
I'd like to put this on a web page I'm setting up, and I'd like to credit you with it. Is that okay?
Also, if you want me to include a link or an email address or something, that'd be fine too.
-fred
One of the ways that people are taking this is 'scared the bejeezus out of me'. I'm personally not sure that counts as 'affected' in any material sense, really. I mean, if you do, I'd have to go back to the original Castle Wolfenstein... walking into a room to find an SS trooper blazing away at you got my heart into my throat.
But there have been a couple of games that really affected me, left me moved. Let me see...
Alternate Reality. Way back when, I illegally copied a disk of this for my Apple IIe clone. For the uninitiated among you, it was sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure book, except that you basically led a normal life from a different perspective. I found it endlessly more facinating than the books, because it was REAL life, and it was less about action and more about life choices. Sadly, it's a lot easier to make the right choices in a computer game than it is in real life, sometimes, but I've never forgotten this game.
Photopia: Much more recent, this is a facinating and moving exercise in directed text adventure, with only a little more lattitude than Alternate Reality. Still, it's very moving, in its way, and an effective use of the medium.
A Change in the Weather: Another text adventure. Don't know why this affected me so much, but it did. The cute little fox might have had something to do with it. It just made me feel good, out of all proportion to the actual challenge of the game.
> Why does brand new stuff cost the same as old stuff?
Hey... that's right! Because after all, we all know that music degrades over time, until all you're left with after a hundred years or so is a bunch of hisses and pops.
As evidence, listen to any recording from the 1930s. It was crystal clear when it came out of the musician's instruments, right? And now it's all hissy and crackly and just generally icky. See? Proof positive! The older the music is, the less it's worth!
-fred
> Or perhaps you're more a fan of the hammered dulcimer?
Hey! Don't you fuck with my dulcimer.
-fred
> I haven't paid more than $7 for a CD.
Then perhaps you like trash?
The Mikado: 2 CD set. On Amazon: $21.98 Apple: $14.99
The Chieftains: The Celtic Harp: Amazon $16.98 Apple $9.99
Verve : Coleman Hawkins Amazon $11.99, Apple $9.99
David Wilcox: Big Horizon Amazon $14.98 Apple $9.99
And that's not counting shipping and suchlike. Mind you, there was one counterexample, where the album was more expensive on Apple's service, and two that I looked for that weren't on Apple's site at all... although one of those two wasn't available from Amazon either.
Of course, you could buy used. And hope it was in decent shape when you got it. If, indeed, you got it.
> That's a better value than iTunes, if I can act like an adult and wait 3 days to get my music.
Ooh... act like an adult, is it? If you're REALLY an adult, why do you need music at all? I mean, it's obviously just pandering to those infantile urges. Grow up and be a real man... deny yourself pleasure!
But for the rest of us, who like music that doesn't get marked down to $7 six weeks after it is released and who don't mind shelling out LESS money to get MORE value FASTER...
-fred
> it's tens of millions of dollars and years.
Damn! Apple has been working on this that long? And here I thought computers were a recent invention... this service has been in the works millions of years longer than human beings have!
-fred
> How many people are still listening to American Pie after all these years?
A good example of what HE said. Vincent? The Grave? Babylon? Damn, I haven't listened to that album in 15 years (it's on vinal, sigh) and I still remember the rest of the music on there. Never would have heard it at all if I hadn't bought the album for that one song.
Hell, I still know most of the words to Vincent... more by percentage than I do for American Pie, that's for sure.
-fred
Let's try a different one:
I think you forget you're free to take alternate transportation if you don't like the price of a car, the price of gas, or the rules of the road.
Presumably you can eventually figure out, with some trial and error, that you're NOT free to go out and steal someone's car, and siphon gas out of a tank every time you run low.
-fred
> There are plenty of so called "standards". Doesn't mean anyone uses them or that they are relevant.
And yet, if this were Ogg, which is really only used by a tiny subset of the population, you'd be fine with it, I'm sure.
Basically, you decided you didn't want to like this, and came up with some reasons why. Someone challenged a main reason, and it was completely indefensible, so you tried to defend it anyway, and just made yourself sound dumb.
You want everything to be in an established, well-known spec... you don't want anything new to be invented? Or maybe you don't want competition, so that the only new things that should ever be released are the things that are so much better than the old version that the old one will just disappear immediately, so that there's only ever one thing out there?
Or perhaps you don't mind new things like AAC being introduced, as long as no big projects ever use them until they're already thoroughly accepted? Well, surprise, they aren't thoroughly accepted until some big projects use them.
Silly.
-fred
Well, it's pretty straightforward WHY this is only available in the US... distribution of the same music is different between different countries. Basically, to distribute in the UK it would require the same amount of negotiation, arm-twisting, yelling and screaming, and payoffs that it required in the US.
I think they'll wait to see how the pilot program does before they commit to other countries. If it works out, then I bet it happens.
-fred
...as people who spend more than two thousand dollars a year on CDs, and who think that if the music isn't worth anything unless the waveform is indistinguishable from the original.
Clearly I'm not a music fan... after all, I only have a couple hundred CDs, and am a performing amateur musician. And obviously my professional musician friends couldn't possibly be 'real music fans', since they all mostly have cheap stereos that couldn't tell the difference between a 160kbps mp3 and vinyl, though admittedly they listen to them a lot.
No, frankly, the only people who really worry about quality to that extent are those who have way too much time on their hands and a need to brag to all and sundry about how cool their stereo system is. I guess it beats bragging about your computer...but only just.
Really, it's funny, because you're here claiming CDs as the be-all and end-all of civilization. I'm sure that if you had any real LP collection you'd be trumpeting that, but I'm guessing you came along too late to ride the 'CDs suck, LPs are the One True Music Source' bandwagon.
And your little diatribe, claiming that the only true music lovers are the ones who are completely anal about precision music reproduction, will slide down the tubes just like LPs did.
Hell, I can reproduce the Brandenburg Concerti in my head accurately enough that when I lost that CD, I didn't even bother to replace it... all I have to do is close my eyes and hear the music. Clearly, that's the lowest of low fidelity... no sound at all! I must be a real music-hater, huh?
Sheesh.
-Fred
You are right in many of the particulars of the case, while, I think, being somewhat wrong in your conclusions.
First of all, they started calling their system software releases 'MacOS Number' at MacOS 8. The moniker had been used before then; though 7 was still officially 'System 7', a lot of people referred to it as MacOS 7 or 7.5 or whatever, because 'System 7' couldn't be used unless you had a context... it's too broad. Likewise it's not patentable.
Second, the Macintosh operating systems after 7.x were always called, not Mac OS9, but 'MacOS 9'. The dramatic majority of sites, based on a little check I just did via Google, do indeed call it that way. In fact, if you run a search for the following on Google, the top 8 sites you get are sites that talk about the OS-9 operating system, not the Macintosh in any way, shape, or form.
"OS 9" "OS9" -"MacOS 9" -"Mac OS9"
So, the pages that talk about OS-9 are, by and large, pages that talk about OS-9. In fact, I, as a Mac programmer and sysadmin, have very rarely heard of people calling MacOS 9 'OS-9'... I can't think of a single instance. When people are talking about it without bringing up the Mac beforehand, it's always 'MacOS 9'... when you're already talking about the Mac, it's almost *invariably* just 'nine'. As in, "Well, it runs under ten just fine, but it just crashes to the desktop when you try to run it on nine. I even tried it on nine-two-two.'
Ultrascience did indeed sell OS-9 for 68000-based Macintoshes. However, by the time MacOS 9 came out, Ultrascience had discontinued their product quite a long time hence, so there was no danger of their being harmed.
Finally, I have not read the decision, but as I understand it the judge didn't have to claim that there would be no confusion. What he needed to claim was that that Apple's trademark was sufficiently different from OS-9 that such confusion was unlikely to occur, OR that the two products were in sufficiently different categories that they did not compete with one another.
Personally, I would have to say that anyone who needed OS-9 would be able to understand the difference between the two, and that therefore the judge was absolutely correct. Especially since OS-9 was treading on pretty thin ground as it was... it is hard to see how 'OS-9' was defensible, in a lot of ways. It is, and was, a generic industry term IN THE INDUSTRY IN WHICH IT IS REGISTERED, followed by a number that sounds very much like a version number. It would be kind of like me suggesting that I should be able to make 'OS/2' a trademark... oh... wait... uh, a better example might be 'DB/2'... oh, no... uh...
It's just dumb. It's like... say you open a restaurant called 'Sam's BBQ'. It's popular, and you open another one across town called 'Sam's BBQ 2' Only you find out that someone else has a trademark on 'BBQ-2'. Taking a common and accepted generic term and adding a number to it is a questionable way to create a trademark. At best.
-fred
You know, that little argument of yours makes me really nauseous.
What you're saying here is, "These people have a hidden agenda: they are using a stance that is against scientific progress for their own personal profit." You are thus accusing them of the highest form of hypocracy.
On the basis of what evidence? Someone told you, or you read somewhere, that 'groups such as this' sometimes do this for personal advantage. You've never actually done any research on this particular group. You've almost certainly never done any research on 'groups such as this', or you'd realize that whether they are misguided or not, the vast majority of people who start such groups believe in what they're doing.
But you don't want to debate them on the merits of their science. Oh, no, that would be boring, and a lot of work. Much easier to just say that they're only in this for the money. And there's a bonus, too: even if they're proved to have been absolutely right in all their claims, years down the road, you can say that you didn't listen to them because they were clearly only in it for the money, and the fact that they were right was mere coincidence. And you can pretend that you don't have egg all over your face.
I'm not saying these people are right. However, in justice, I do them the honor of assuming that they actually mean what they say, until proven otherwise.
I extend the same courtesy to corporations as well. Unfortunately, one of the things that the trade group representing American industry has said, flat out, is that companies should not take moral and ethical constraints into consideration when drawing up business plans; the only things that should constrain a company are dedication to profit, and (a distant second) legal issues. So if it's legal to ship a (profitable) product that kills hundreds of thousands of people, it is not only allowed... it is REQUIRED.
But of course, you would much rather trust the corporations than the people who are concerned about what the corporations are doing, or the government which (up until recently) has been trying to keep said corporations from killing more people than is reasonably necessary.
Hope you like the world you're building.
-fred
> I'll restate my hypothesis : If fewer people switch from the Safari (than they did
> when IE was default), it will because the Safari is better.
Touche. Assuming that Apple continues playing nice and keeping the browser separate from the rest of the OS and stuff like that, I'll certainly accept your assertion. However, bear in mind that this doesn't mean that Camino isn't still 'better' (whatever that means) than Safari... it just means that fewer people found Safari objectionable enough to get over the inertia invovled in getting another browser.
> And it doesn't suck eggs.
But emacs does!
M-x suckeggs
-fred
> a group that has an extremely vested interest in getting a certain answer.
A vested interest is:
3) A special interest in protecting or promoting that which is to ones own personal advantage.
4) vested interests: Those groups that seek to maintain or control an existing system or activity from which they derive private benefit.
Know your terms before you use them... that one is loaded. What you said there was that these people gain some direct personal benefit, generally financial, from opposing nanotechnology development, a statement which I sincerely doubt.
You could instead have said, 'But I do know I become a little more suspicious when the science is done at the behest of a group that has already formed an opinion in the matter.' Or something similar to that.
Unless you consider them to have a vested interest because they think they'll all die of nanoparticle inhalation if they don't stop the research. Although that technically falls under the definition of a vested interest, it's not how the term is typically used.
-fred
> All technology comes with consequences. We usually accept these risks freely.
Translation: we usually don't bother to assess these risks until we've already deployed the technology.
> The only types of nanomachines that are dangerous are those that perform only a minimal
> amount of precautions as to what specific things they can operate on.
Translation: I am incapible of coming up with any possible risks from other kinds of nanomachines in 15 seconds of thought, so clearly there aren't any.
Translation of the entire post: Listen to me! I didn't read the article!
Basically, if you have a bunch of really tiny stuff and you breathe it in, it doesn't matter what function it's performing at the time... it can screw up your lungs. If you have a bunch of pieces of a defunct nanomachine wandering around in your bloodstream, it can cause truly entertaining effects in a truly entertaining variety of places. If you absorb interestingly coherant nanomachine parts through your skin, interesting things can happen.
Parallels have already been drawn to asbestos and fibreglass.
And here you are, saying that the only kind of nanomachine that is at all dangerous is a self-replicating one. Oh, wait, maybe that's the only thing that Ben Bova thought were dangerous... he's a sci-fi writer, he must be right, huh?
Well, there's always Neil Stephenson... remember the 'toner' in one of his books? How much good d'ya suppose that does your lungs?
-fred
For example, let's say that Apple, in Europe, told repair centers that in order to buy a motherboard from them, they had to send back the bad motherboard that it replaced.
How exactly is that restraint of trade? That's what a lot of Apple's repair contracts actually look like.
This guy is buying large lots of motherboards from eBay or something, not from repair centers. Repair centers pay too much for the motherboards, and/or have the contract where a bad mobo is returned for each new one sent out, and/or are too large to piss Apple off in this way.
I just bought a lot of 8 G4 motherboards... and found out I can't test them, because they don't fit in my G4. *sigh* Maybe someone will buy them 'as-is'.
-fred
...as when they said it about Microsoft.
> You seem to be saying that if nobody uses Camino, then Camino will not be used. Yes, indeed.
> If people stop using Caminio, it will be because they are using something better.
Well, no. Ninety-some percent of people will never switch from their default browser, better, worse, or indifferent. If you define 'better' as 'requires no effort to obtain', then your hypothesis becomes true. Otherwise it is not.
-fred