In fact, I also don't see how someone can be a Windows "hater" (since hating something is different from simply disliking it).
I suggest you spend a few weeks full of 15-hour days trying to support a company full of Windows desktop machines, a Windows/Exchange 2000 email server (EEeeEEeeeeEeeeeegh), a few Windows file servers, and a plethora of other Windows servers, after spending an equal amount of time (weeks, not hours, since the hours are much better) supporting a group with a bunch of Mac desktops and a couple Windows boxes, with Linux (and a couple Mac OS X) servers, and see what kind of feelings you develop.
Interesting comparison, considering that the Mac Mini is a little more than 1/10 the size (by volume) of the Shuttle.
Mac Mini: 6.5" * 6.5" * 2", vs Shuttle: 12" x 8" x 7". If you put a Mini next to a Shuttle, you think, 'Wow, that must be the external DVD drive.' But as it turns out, the mini is significantly smaller than the external DVD-RW I had hooked up to my shuttle, too. (By the way, I'm being generous to the Shuttle there, by rounding in the conversion of millimeters to inches.) I've owned a Shuttle (until two months ago, when the motherboard finally went pfft), and I have a mini at work. The size difference is so big as to be a difference in kind, not just of degree. With the Mini, you don't have to worry about where to put it. With the Shuttle, you do. It's that simple.
Of course, there was the PowerMac G4 Cube... which came out before the shuttle. And is still noticeably smaller than the Shuttle, but at least is close. But hey, who's counting, right?
Of course, if you don't actually want a small computer, then a Shuttle is exactly the same size: 'whatever'.
Not quite right. They weren't required to replace it, they were just required to fix it. The fact that it didn't have to be sent back to get fixed or replaced by a refurb, but was instead replaced by a new one, is entirely Apple's option. Now, that said, yes, it's nice, but i don't see it as so exciting as to warrant a comment.
Come to think of it, if it's not exciting enough to warrant a comment, it's certainly not exciting enough to warrant a response, is it?
Nobody likes the RIAA, except for the record labels. I doubt even the people who work at Apple like them, or like having to basically cripple their hardware and software because of them.
I can tell you from firsthand experience that the people at Apple, up to and including quite high-level people, are not fans of copy protection in any way, shape, or form. (I can't speak for the lawyers, because I didn't interact with them much while I was there.) If it weren't forced on them, they wouldn't be doing it. However, it was the general opinion among most of them (there were certainly dissenters) that if that was what it took to get a real, honest-to-goodness music store onto the internet, with digital delivery and everything, that actually had music that people wanted, then it was worth the price.
Most of them expected the copy protection to 'wither away' (much like Marx's state, I guess), but not all of them were that optimistic. Many of them basically said, 'If we have to live with it, let's just try and make sure it's as unobjectionable as we can make it.'
-fred
Re:The Real Pity Is: Titans fight, and we don't ca
on
On Apple vs Apple
·
· Score: 1
> "We" as in technology savvy people know the difference.
Apple, as measured by business journals, reliably has one of the most reliably recognizable trademarks, not just in the United States, but in the world. It is literally up near MacDonalds and Nike, often in the top ten, and generally significantly higher than (for example) Microsoft. I suspect that the chances of there being someone out there who is aware enough to recognize Apple Corps but not aware enough to recognize Apple Computer as distinct from Apple Corps is, perhaps, not sufficiently miniscule that there couldn't be ONE person out there like that, but I doubt there are many more than that.
That's very interesting. And, sadly, assuming that's the case, the most profitable thing for Apple to do under the circumstances would be to entirely stop selling its products in Brazil. If this were the law in the rest of the world, Apple would have had no choice but to stay with a non-Intel platform, or making the OS rely upon, for example, some sort of digital media chip on the motherboard that it wouldn't run properly without. (That would have been very easy to do, of course, and not too expensive.)
The issues, as I see them, are two: number one, that would be letting Microsoft set the price of the OS for Apple. If Apple sells 10% of the number that Microsoft does (and, being realistic, that's a very high expectation for, say, the first year or two), since the entire cost of developing an OS is up-front and basically none of it is per unit, then that means that Apple makes 10% of the income that MS does, and is highly unlikely to make a profit at all. (Assuming equal development costs, which isn't quite the case but isn't far off.) So you end up with Apple being forced to sell an OS that can run on whatever machine you want it to run on, and forced to charge whatever its main competitor is charging, and then, in short order, forced out of business.
The second issue is software support. If you can't predicate offering a service based on whether you have purchased something else, that means that Apple is required by law to offer software support for use of Mac OS X on a beige box. Which basically means what? That they are suddenly required to be in Windows Hardware Hell, or to not offer any software support at all to anyone. Neither of those are tenable positions.
Just as a bonus on top of those, there's the case of what happens if the world all had laws like this: Microsoft lowers its OS price to $20. It could do that; it makes most of its money on applications anyway. Suddenly, Apple's price for selling unbundled software is ten times what MS's is. I suspect it wouldn't be long before some judge found that Apple's price for unbundled software was violating that law, and Apple would be forced to lower it. (You can't bring anti-dumping statutes in, because all of the ones that I'm familiar with relate to manufacturing costs, not development costs, and the manufacturing costs for Windows are less than $2 a box.) So unless Brazil has very rigidly-enforced anti-trust laws (far more rigidly enforced than, for example, the US anti-trust laws), that's a perfectly good, absolutely legal way of completely driving Apple out of business, with no more than a year-or-two inconvenience on the part of Microsoft.
Those two laws, in combination, seem very anti-competitive and short-sighted to me.
Do you think that software upgrade licenses should be legal? (That is to say, should MS be able to sell Office to me cheaper just because I have the previous version, and at full price otherwise?
If not, you're right. If so, it's not even a technicality... it's just wrong.
Interesting. Because, of course, there are no Apple Stores in China. There are Apple Authorized Resellers, but they don't belong to Apple and aren't very heavily policed by them, especially in China. So really, what you've got there is someone who is an Apple reseller in the same way that they're a Sony reseller if they have Sony digital cameras.
So basically, y'know, it's fine that they're doing that, but don't mistake that for Apple doing that. Apple would prefer they not do that.
There's a list of all the Apple stores in the world here:
Actually, use of the word 'stealing' to describe copyright infringement is a at least a hundred years old. Gilbert & Sullivan did it, for example, in around 1900, and I've seen older citations that I can't, off the top of my head, recall. So you're really the one trying to artificially narrow the term.
And a practical question: is buying an upgrade copy, say for $200, of a $2000 program, and then installing it and using it even though you don't have a copy of the program to begin with, just fine? Because the practical consequence of that is to make people stop selling upgrades at all. I guess if that's something that you're bang alongside, then that's perfectly self-consistent, but I suspect that most of society would consider the requirement to pay $2000 for each version of the software to be less of an evil than having the option to pay $200 for the upgrade, in return for agreeing to only buy the upgrade if they have the original software.
I mean, from your arguments you sound like someone who doesn't pay for software (it's not stealing, after all) so perhaps you simply consider all these people dupes?
But if, in fact, upgrade licenses are a good thing, then why shouldn't Apple be able to sell an upgrade license, and only an upgrade license, for its OS? Or is this one of those 'I don't like where reason takes me so I'll ignore it' sorts of things?
Of course, under your argument about licenses (which I still don't buy, but let's assume) this would mean that you could buy a MacBook, install Linux on it, install Mac OS X on your Dell, and then upgrade it later buy buying upgrades. (You do, after all, have the requirements for the upgrade license: a Mac, and a copy of a previous version of Mac OS X.) But I suspect the number of people who would do that are small enough that Apple would feel comfortable with that level of problems.
I have to ask: does that mean that anyone who buys a copy of the MS Office upgrade, and borrows a CD with an old version of Office on it from a friend (or hacks it to get around the check), can legally use the upgrade copy of Office? I'm not sure that's what you want: is it really a good idea to basically make software upgrades illegal?
Does that also mean that, for example, since I own seven computers, which are currently admittedly used by six different people, but I own them, I can buy one copy of MS Office and install it on all of them? After all, I can perfectly well do that, and I have some reasonable reason for wanting to do it. (I'm a cheap bastard.) Heck, why not go farther? A company is an entity. Why can't I buy one copy of Office and put it on all 20,000 machines in my company?
I'm not sure your standard quite holds up to scrutiny.
And then there's the question of whether a software license is a 'sale of goods contract' (are 'licenses to use' considered 'goods' in the EC? And if not, is it illegal to sell a 'license to use'?) And is 'I have the right to do anything I want to with what I buy no matter what' really a legal right in the EC? (Well, clearly not, you can't sell photocopies of the book you just bought, for example. But where are the limits?)
It's amazing how many lawyers we have around here.
"It is prohibited, to any supplier of products and services: I - to condition the supply of any product or service to the supply of another product or service"
How exactly does that work? 'I'd like to buy the top half of a Ferrari, please. No, it's no fair selling me the whole thing. I just want the top half.' 'I'd like the middle 30 seconds out of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, please. No, I don't want the rest. That would be bundling.'
Okay, okay, those aren't products in and of themselves. (Although I might argue that the second is just as coherent as most of the other cuts of any arbitrary length off of that CD.) Very well: I'd like to buy the BIOS from an IBM machine, please. Clearly that's software, which by your obvious definition is different from hardware, so it's got to be a separate product, because clearly Mac OS X, which is software, must be a separate product from the hardware. Oh and by the way I'd like to buy all the software for my thermostat, and my oven, and my car. Thanks. Also, I don't think it's very fair that I can only get a cat's instincts (or for that matter, its digestive tract) from the pet store by buying the entire cat.
Can you buy Notepad from Microsoft, in Brazil? Not Windows, just Notepad? How about Minesweeper? Clearly that's not a part of the OS, right? Perhaps you can, I don't know. If so, is Microsoft allowed to charge $20,000 for a copy? Because that seems like the obvious way around this law.
But, to speak seriously for just a second, one absolutely real consequence of that law is that selling software upgrades is illegal in Brazil. (Or, more accurately, you can sell them, but you can't require people to have a copy of the old software in order to use the upgrade... or can you? It just says 'sell', it doesn't say that you can necessarily legally use what you have bought. But we'll assume so.) Is this something you think is a good idea? That a company is not legally allowed to encourage people to upgrade from their old versions of software by reducing the price for upgrades?
Also seriously, in general courts in the US have held that if the product you are buying does not operate without the second 'product' that you are including with it (such as a computer without an OS), that does not constitute bundling (in anti-trust terms) any more than not selling your spark plugs separately from your car constitutes illegal bundling. Has Brazil got a different opinion on that sort of thing?
It is NOT infringement to the rights of the author of a computer program: (...) IV - to integrate it, maintaining its characteristics, to an operating or application system, if it's technically indispensable to the use of the software, and it's promoted by the user.
Your translation loses something in the, erm, translation. What does 'technically indispensable' mean? What does 'maintaining its characteristics' mean? And, finally, you wouldn't be integrating it to an operating or application system, unless you mean to run it in a virtual machine somehow; you'd be integrating an operating system to hardware. Which, unless this law says something else somewhere else, or the law in Brazil is generally taken to mean whatever the person who is reading it wants it to mean, says to me that this is totally inapplicable.
You mean "morals"? That's a great pet-peeve of mine. The two words do not mean the same thing.
His use of the word 'ethics' is perfectly correct. You're welcome to post your own definitions: for example, many people on slashdot have some idea that everyone else in the world is wrong and that 'stealing' should not include 'copying software illegally'.
Doesn't matter though, because it's convenient, arguably fun, and interesting to do. Just the whole novelty factor of saying "I can run OS X on my non-Mac PC" is enough motivation required for some people to look for it on TorrentSpy. Which reminds me to ask, anyone got a link to the ".torrent"?
Fortunately, most people do at least consider whether what they are about to do breaks their society's code of ethics before they do it. We have a word for people who don't do that at all: they're called 'sociopaths'. Admittedly, copying software doesn't make you a sociopath, but saying that just because something is wrong it shouldn't be any deterrent to doing it does, in fact, make you a sociopath.
Personally, I try to live my life according to Kant's Universal Imperative, at least to a certain extent. But then, I'm a strange sort. (And yes, this means I don't drive, I eat sparsely, I work hard, I live fairly simply, and I have lots of heavily-protected sex.)
...which could easily have been exploited to grant a non-privileged user with admin rights the capability to create and remove 'root' user accounts.
Why... how awful. Or the user could have gone to the command line and typed 'sudo foo' and run anything as root that he wanted, including creating and deleting users or whatever else he wants to do, if he has admin rights.
You could at least have chosen an example that wasn't totally useless on 99.9% of Macs. (Those which allow admins to sudo. Most people aren't dumb enough to explicitly grant admin privs to people they don't want to run as root, either because they know they know what it means and choose not to or because they don't and they don't just randomly check every check-box that comes along.)
We now have a permanent oppressed underclass who have been so successfully brainwashed that they think that tax cuts for the wealthy are the most important thing on the agenda. Public education funding is cut, social safety nets are removed, and the middle class is shrinking at an alarming rate. And 'class victimhood' is dated? I don't usually say it on a first introduction, sir, but you're either a totally oblivious dittohead or a part of the problem.
Even funnier if you remember that, in the dark, 'Apple-is-dying' late nineties, there was an Apple information email list (with tens of thousands of members) called the 'Evange-list'. And that there is actually a position at Apple called 'Chief Product Evangelist'.
Sadly, most engineers don't know the difference between crap and actual good HID. Many programmers still use CLIs with bizarre, incomprehensible commands, which is fine if you want to put in the considerable effort required to figure out how a computer works and then learn all the commands and such. And many of them still, after how many years, think that that's perfectly reasonable and that a CLI is a perfectly good way to make a program that people who don't do that sort of thing for a living would use.
Engineers suck at usability, unless they're trained in it. Even then, most of them can't be relied upon to produce something that is better than adequate. And even the few who can, can't be relied upon to produce something that is similar in usage and theme to a related set of products. If you don't have a unifying mind behind it all, you end up with a collection of widgets that don't look like they came from the same company.
I recall hearing that the iPod went back to the drawing board four or five times before they came out with the first generation model. I wonder what the first four or five of them looked like? Perhaps they really were just as good as the model that was eventually picked, and they were just rejected because of some obscure phobias on the part of Jobs.
We can use any java we like, but we aren't going to tell our customers to use one specific brand of java, and if we were to do that it would be Sun's. (For example, the government has specific approved software for particular tasks, and Sun Java 1.5 probably won't be approved for the tasks we're deployed for for another six months to a year. There's no way we could get them to use BEA's.) It's nice that there is one out there that would solve our problem [maybe] but it doesn't actually help us. Also, when you say it's free to deploy, it says 'for internal use only' in the license. I'm not sure what that means, but a naive reading of it would exclude the dramatic majority of our customers.
As for the first part of your comment: yes, and though it took us bloody forever, we finally managed to do so in 1.4. And now in 1.5 we have had to start over again. The 'stop the world' collector isn't, in fact, the problem... the problem is enormous amounts of disk swapping when it uses the parallel collector.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you spend a few weeks full of 15-hour days trying to support a company full of Windows desktop machines, a Windows/Exchange 2000 email server (EEeeEEeeeeEeeeeegh), a few Windows file servers, and a plethora of other Windows servers, after spending an equal amount of time (weeks, not hours, since the hours are much better) supporting a group with a bunch of Mac desktops and a couple Windows boxes, with Linux (and a couple Mac OS X) servers, and see what kind of feelings you develop.
Yeeeeeccch.
-fred
So, for the curious among us... were you lying?
-fred
Heh. You've never seen mine. Mine is so packed that the Mini disappeared thirty minutes after I put it down on it. No worry!
Seriously, though, bolting the mini to the bottom of the desk works nicely too. Try that with yer shuttle, boyo!
-fred
Interesting comparison, considering that the Mac Mini is a little more than 1/10 the size (by volume) of the Shuttle.
Mac Mini: 6.5" * 6.5" * 2", vs Shuttle: 12" x 8" x 7". If you put a Mini next to a Shuttle, you think, 'Wow, that must be the external DVD drive.' But as it turns out, the mini is significantly smaller than the external DVD-RW I had hooked up to my shuttle, too. (By the way, I'm being generous to the Shuttle there, by rounding in the conversion of millimeters to inches.) I've owned a Shuttle (until two months ago, when the motherboard finally went pfft), and I have a mini at work. The size difference is so big as to be a difference in kind, not just of degree. With the Mini, you don't have to worry about where to put it. With the Shuttle, you do. It's that simple.
Of course, there was the PowerMac G4 Cube... which came out before the shuttle. And is still noticeably smaller than the Shuttle, but at least is close. But hey, who's counting, right?
Of course, if you don't actually want a small computer, then a Shuttle is exactly the same size: 'whatever'.
-fred
Not quite right. They weren't required to replace it, they were just required to fix it. The fact that it didn't have to be sent back to get fixed or replaced by a refurb, but was instead replaced by a new one, is entirely Apple's option. Now, that said, yes, it's nice, but i don't see it as so exciting as to warrant a comment.
Come to think of it, if it's not exciting enough to warrant a comment, it's certainly not exciting enough to warrant a response, is it?
--Adam
I can tell you from firsthand experience that the people at Apple, up to and including quite high-level people, are not fans of copy protection in any way, shape, or form. (I can't speak for the lawyers, because I didn't interact with them much while I was there.) If it weren't forced on them, they wouldn't be doing it. However, it was the general opinion among most of them (there were certainly dissenters) that if that was what it took to get a real, honest-to-goodness music store onto the internet, with digital delivery and everything, that actually had music that people wanted, then it was worth the price.
Most of them expected the copy protection to 'wither away' (much like Marx's state, I guess), but not all of them were that optimistic. Many of them basically said, 'If we have to live with it, let's just try and make sure it's as unobjectionable as we can make it.'
-fred
> "We" as in technology savvy people know the difference.
Apple, as measured by business journals, reliably has one of the most reliably recognizable trademarks, not just in the United States, but in the world. It is literally up near MacDonalds and Nike, often in the top ten, and generally significantly higher than (for example) Microsoft. I suspect that the chances of there being someone out there who is aware enough to recognize Apple Corps but not aware enough to recognize Apple Computer as distinct from Apple Corps is, perhaps, not sufficiently miniscule that there couldn't be ONE person out there like that, but I doubt there are many more than that.
-fred
That's very interesting. And, sadly, assuming that's the case, the most profitable thing for Apple to do under the circumstances would be to entirely stop selling its products in Brazil. If this were the law in the rest of the world, Apple would have had no choice but to stay with a non-Intel platform, or making the OS rely upon, for example, some sort of digital media chip on the motherboard that it wouldn't run properly without. (That would have been very easy to do, of course, and not too expensive.)
The issues, as I see them, are two: number one, that would be letting Microsoft set the price of the OS for Apple. If Apple sells 10% of the number that Microsoft does (and, being realistic, that's a very high expectation for, say, the first year or two), since the entire cost of developing an OS is up-front and basically none of it is per unit, then that means that Apple makes 10% of the income that MS does, and is highly unlikely to make a profit at all. (Assuming equal development costs, which isn't quite the case but isn't far off.) So you end up with Apple being forced to sell an OS that can run on whatever machine you want it to run on, and forced to charge whatever its main competitor is charging, and then, in short order, forced out of business.
The second issue is software support. If you can't predicate offering a service based on whether you have purchased something else, that means that Apple is required by law to offer software support for use of Mac OS X on a beige box. Which basically means what? That they are suddenly required to be in Windows Hardware Hell, or to not offer any software support at all to anyone. Neither of those are tenable positions.
Just as a bonus on top of those, there's the case of what happens if the world all had laws like this: Microsoft lowers its OS price to $20. It could do that; it makes most of its money on applications anyway. Suddenly, Apple's price for selling unbundled software is ten times what MS's is. I suspect it wouldn't be long before some judge found that Apple's price for unbundled software was violating that law, and Apple would be forced to lower it. (You can't bring anti-dumping statutes in, because all of the ones that I'm familiar with relate to manufacturing costs, not development costs, and the manufacturing costs for Windows are less than $2 a box.) So unless Brazil has very rigidly-enforced anti-trust laws (far more rigidly enforced than, for example, the US anti-trust laws), that's a perfectly good, absolutely legal way of completely driving Apple out of business, with no more than a year-or-two inconvenience on the part of Microsoft.
Those two laws, in combination, seem very anti-competitive and short-sighted to me.
-fred
Do you think that software upgrade licenses should be legal? (That is to say, should MS be able to sell Office to me cheaper just because I have the previous version, and at full price otherwise?
If not, you're right. If so, it's not even a technicality... it's just wrong.
-fred
Interesting. Because, of course, there are no Apple Stores in China. There are Apple Authorized Resellers, but they don't belong to Apple and aren't very heavily policed by them, especially in China. So really, what you've got there is someone who is an Apple reseller in the same way that they're a Sony reseller if they have Sony digital cameras.
So basically, y'know, it's fine that they're doing that, but don't mistake that for Apple doing that. Apple would prefer they not do that.
There's a list of all the Apple stores in the world here:
http://www.apple.com/retail/
US, England, Canada, and Japan.
-fred
Actually, use of the word 'stealing' to describe copyright infringement is a at least a hundred years old. Gilbert & Sullivan did it, for example, in around 1900, and I've seen older citations that I can't, off the top of my head, recall. So you're really the one trying to artificially narrow the term.
And a practical question: is buying an upgrade copy, say for $200, of a $2000 program, and then installing it and using it even though you don't have a copy of the program to begin with, just fine? Because the practical consequence of that is to make people stop selling upgrades at all. I guess if that's something that you're bang alongside, then that's perfectly self-consistent, but I suspect that most of society would consider the requirement to pay $2000 for each version of the software to be less of an evil than having the option to pay $200 for the upgrade, in return for agreeing to only buy the upgrade if they have the original software.
I mean, from your arguments you sound like someone who doesn't pay for software (it's not stealing, after all) so perhaps you simply consider all these people dupes?
But if, in fact, upgrade licenses are a good thing, then why shouldn't Apple be able to sell an upgrade license, and only an upgrade license, for its OS? Or is this one of those 'I don't like where reason takes me so I'll ignore it' sorts of things?
Of course, under your argument about licenses (which I still don't buy, but let's assume) this would mean that you could buy a MacBook, install Linux on it, install Mac OS X on your Dell, and then upgrade it later buy buying upgrades. (You do, after all, have the requirements for the upgrade license: a Mac, and a copy of a previous version of Mac OS X.) But I suspect the number of people who would do that are small enough that Apple would feel comfortable with that level of problems.
-fred
I have to ask: does that mean that anyone who buys a copy of the MS Office upgrade, and borrows a CD with an old version of Office on it from a friend (or hacks it to get around the check), can legally use the upgrade copy of Office? I'm not sure that's what you want: is it really a good idea to basically make software upgrades illegal?
Does that also mean that, for example, since I own seven computers, which are currently admittedly used by six different people, but I own them, I can buy one copy of MS Office and install it on all of them? After all, I can perfectly well do that, and I have some reasonable reason for wanting to do it. (I'm a cheap bastard.) Heck, why not go farther? A company is an entity. Why can't I buy one copy of Office and put it on all 20,000 machines in my company?
I'm not sure your standard quite holds up to scrutiny.
And then there's the question of whether a software license is a 'sale of goods contract' (are 'licenses to use' considered 'goods' in the EC? And if not, is it illegal to sell a 'license to use'?) And is 'I have the right to do anything I want to with what I buy no matter what' really a legal right in the EC? (Well, clearly not, you can't sell photocopies of the book you just bought, for example. But where are the limits?)
It's amazing how many lawyers we have around here.
-fred
So I've got a couple questions:
How exactly does that work? 'I'd like to buy the top half of a Ferrari, please. No, it's no fair selling me the whole thing. I just want the top half.' 'I'd like the middle 30 seconds out of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, please. No, I don't want the rest. That would be bundling.'
Okay, okay, those aren't products in and of themselves. (Although I might argue that the second is just as coherent as most of the other cuts of any arbitrary length off of that CD.) Very well: I'd like to buy the BIOS from an IBM machine, please. Clearly that's software, which by your obvious definition is different from hardware, so it's got to be a separate product, because clearly Mac OS X, which is software, must be a separate product from the hardware. Oh and by the way I'd like to buy all the software for my thermostat, and my oven, and my car. Thanks. Also, I don't think it's very fair that I can only get a cat's instincts (or for that matter, its digestive tract) from the pet store by buying the entire cat.
Can you buy Notepad from Microsoft, in Brazil? Not Windows, just Notepad? How about Minesweeper? Clearly that's not a part of the OS, right? Perhaps you can, I don't know. If so, is Microsoft allowed to charge $20,000 for a copy? Because that seems like the obvious way around this law.
But, to speak seriously for just a second, one absolutely real consequence of that law is that selling software upgrades is illegal in Brazil. (Or, more accurately, you can sell them, but you can't require people to have a copy of the old software in order to use the upgrade... or can you? It just says 'sell', it doesn't say that you can necessarily legally use what you have bought. But we'll assume so.) Is this something you think is a good idea? That a company is not legally allowed to encourage people to upgrade from their old versions of software by reducing the price for upgrades?
Also seriously, in general courts in the US have held that if the product you are buying does not operate without the second 'product' that you are including with it (such as a computer without an OS), that does not constitute bundling (in anti-trust terms) any more than not selling your spark plugs separately from your car constitutes illegal bundling. Has Brazil got a different opinion on that sort of thing?
Your translation loses something in the, erm, translation. What does 'technically indispensable' mean? What does 'maintaining its characteristics' mean? And, finally, you wouldn't be integrating it to an operating or application system, unless you mean to run it in a virtual machine somehow; you'd be integrating an operating system to hardware. Which, unless this law says something else somewhere else, or the law in Brazil is generally taken to mean whatever the person who is reading it wants it to mean, says to me that this is totally inapplicable.
-fred
I always preferred this quote:
'Nothing Sucks Like a VAX'.
-fred
And the limitations of the current iPod are going to continue into the next generation because...?
-fred
Your post says a lot more about you than it does about the parent.
Who, I suspect, probably hasn't downloaded any. I know it's possible... I do it every month.
-fred
His use of the word 'ethics' is perfectly correct. You're welcome to post your own definitions: for example, many people on slashdot have some idea that everyone else in the world is wrong and that 'stealing' should not include 'copying software illegally'.
Fortunately, most people do at least consider whether what they are about to do breaks their society's code of ethics before they do it. We have a word for people who don't do that at all: they're called 'sociopaths'. Admittedly, copying software doesn't make you a sociopath, but saying that just because something is wrong it shouldn't be any deterrent to doing it does, in fact, make you a sociopath.
Personally, I try to live my life according to Kant's Universal Imperative, at least to a certain extent. But then, I'm a strange sort. (And yes, this means I don't drive, I eat sparsely, I work hard, I live fairly simply, and I have lots of heavily-protected sex.)
-fred
Cygwin in Wine! Gawd, I would love to see that. It's so... twisted.
-fred
Why... how awful. Or the user could have gone to the command line and typed 'sudo foo' and run anything as root that he wanted, including creating and deleting users or whatever else he wants to do, if he has admin rights.
You could at least have chosen an example that wasn't totally useless on 99.9% of Macs. (Those which allow admins to sudo. Most people aren't dumb enough to explicitly grant admin privs to people they don't want to run as root, either because they know they know what it means and choose not to or because they don't and they don't just randomly check every check-box that comes along.)
-fred
Perhaps, and this is just a guess, the universe is not entirely composed of people like you?
Get over yourself.
-fred
Aimed, one presumes, at the one person on slashdot with a sense of humor.
(No, not me.)
-fred
We now have a permanent oppressed underclass who have been so successfully brainwashed that they think that tax cuts for the wealthy are the most important thing on the agenda. Public education funding is cut, social safety nets are removed, and the middle class is shrinking at an alarming rate. And 'class victimhood' is dated? I don't usually say it on a first introduction, sir, but you're either a totally oblivious dittohead or a part of the problem.
-fred
Even funnier if you remember that, in the dark, 'Apple-is-dying' late nineties, there was an Apple information email list (with tens of thousands of members) called the 'Evange-list'. And that there is actually a position at Apple called 'Chief Product Evangelist'.
Perfect name for the place, really.
-fred
Sadly, most engineers don't know the difference between crap and actual good HID. Many programmers still use CLIs with bizarre, incomprehensible commands, which is fine if you want to put in the considerable effort required to figure out how a computer works and then learn all the commands and such. And many of them still, after how many years, think that that's perfectly reasonable and that a CLI is a perfectly good way to make a program that people who don't do that sort of thing for a living would use.
Engineers suck at usability, unless they're trained in it. Even then, most of them can't be relied upon to produce something that is better than adequate. And even the few who can, can't be relied upon to produce something that is similar in usage and theme to a related set of products. If you don't have a unifying mind behind it all, you end up with a collection of widgets that don't look like they came from the same company.
I recall hearing that the iPod went back to the drawing board four or five times before they came out with the first generation model. I wonder what the first four or five of them looked like? Perhaps they really were just as good as the model that was eventually picked, and they were just rejected because of some obscure phobias on the part of Jobs.
Wouldn't bet on it, though.
-fred
We can use any java we like, but we aren't going to tell our customers to use one specific brand of java, and if we were to do that it would be Sun's. (For example, the government has specific approved software for particular tasks, and Sun Java 1.5 probably won't be approved for the tasks we're deployed for for another six months to a year. There's no way we could get them to use BEA's.) It's nice that there is one out there that would solve our problem [maybe] but it doesn't actually help us. Also, when you say it's free to deploy, it says 'for internal use only' in the license. I'm not sure what that means, but a naive reading of it would exclude the dramatic majority of our customers.
As for the first part of your comment: yes, and though it took us bloody forever, we finally managed to do so in 1.4. And now in 1.5 we have had to start over again. The 'stop the world' collector isn't, in fact, the problem... the problem is enormous amounts of disk swapping when it uses the parallel collector.
-fred