Cato is not the sort of group to be "bought by interest groups." There are certainly some groups out there which are willing to change their principles for donations, but Cato isn't one of them Whether you agree with them or not, they are one of the most principled groups out there. Their positions do NOT change to follow changing whims of their contributors.
Anybody who would call the Cato Institute a "right wing" group is terribly, terribly ignorant. Cato is very pro-individual rights. On economic issues, they tend to agree with conservatives. On social issues, they tend to agree with liberals.
Contrary to what some people believe, it's possible to have positions other than what most people understand to be left wing or right wing. That two-dimensional scale is terribly inadequate for explaining the range of possible political positions. See the following quiz from Advocates for Self Government for a more useful way to look at the choices:
Conventional wisdom is that devices converge, but the opposite has actually tended to be true. For instance, when the computer first appeared on the scene as a mainframe, it didn't converge with other office devices such as copiers or time clocks. Instead, computer categories divided -- into mini-computers and then personal computers and then further divided into laptops and desktops. There are all sorts of specialty devices now, and we STILL have the old mainframes around in various forms.
Going back to what an example of convergence would have been if we were looking at it long ago, you could make a technical argument that the computer and the copier DID converge, because today's copier IS a sophisticated computer in many ways. (Even a time clock is a simple computer instead of an old-fashioned mechanical device.) But just because computer technology is incorporated into a copier, that doesn't mean it's a general-purpose converged device. Instead, it's a copier and we don't even think about the computing power instead.
Devices are defined by what users believe they are, not what they're actually capable of. Just because a cell phone can take a picture doesn't mean that the customer thinks he's buying a camera when he gets one. To him, it's still a phone. Over time, people might come to think of a camera as being a natural feature of a phone, but it's STILL going to be considered a phone.
In the same way, it would be natural -- if convergence were really the way the market worked -- that we would all have one device that was a television, radio, CD player, DVD player, speakers, etc. Instead, we tend to have a separate TV, receiver, maybe an amplifier, a CD player, a DVD player and separate speakers -- all wired together. (I suspect the distinction between a DVD player and CD player might eventually go away, but only because they use the same form factor as far as the user is concerned. The user would just consider it is disc player.)
Convergence sounds like such a reasonable idea when you hear companies laying out their grand strategies, but it just doesn't seem to work that way in the real world. Iconoclastic marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout have written a lot about this subject from the viewpoint of marketing and have explained why divergence is a more natural direction for markets than convergence. Although their arguments were counter-intuitive to me from a technical perspective, I believe they're right based on both history and human psychology.
Read the first line of what I replied to. The AC said, "Apple was the first to steal the GUI from Xerox...." Did you somehow overlook that? Or did you just not understand the connection between his charge of Apple stealing and my pointing out that Xerox was paid?
I know this is difficult when you're in the middle of a mindless rant, but you might want to try to get the facts before you embarrass yourself next time (even if you ARE posting as an AC).
Apple PAID for the rights to the stuff from Xerox. The facts are covered in numerous places if you'd like to trouble yourself to get a clue about this incident in computer history.
Much of the rest of what you have to say is too self-contradictory to be worth responding to.
You can reasonably argue about whether an iPod is worth the money or not. I have one and it's worth the money to me. Another person can make a reasonable argument that it's not a good value for him. But this article is bizarre. It's almost as though some editor told this dude to write an article slamming the iPod's weaknesses in some situations, but he had an attack of honesty at the end where he said it was the best MP3 player to buy -- after he had spent the article pointing people to other players based on various iPod shortcomings. Overall, it seems to be really bad journalism, because the whole article suggests one thing which is contradicted by the conclusion of the piece.
I suspect Apple is willing to do without the ability to target the people running Win 98/ME for two reasons. First, the numbers using it will continue to head downward. Second, people who are using something that old are unlikely to be the sort of people who are early adopters of technology -- and the early adopters are a better market for the iTunes music store. So I think it makes sense for the people at Apple to target resources where they have the best potential customers.
There's no contradiction in what I'm saying. The guy who made the post has two choices. He can accept what the profession pays or he can get another job. In another post in this thread, I addressed the overall issue of education quality just a bit, although that wasn't really my intention in my first post. The choice faced by an individual teacher is one thing. The choice faced by society is an entirely different thing.
As to your other comment, I think the "self-righteous indignation" is worse with teachers. You don't generally see illogical bumper stickers for other professions on the order of, "If you can read this, thank a teacher."
Overall, I suspect we would agree about the cause of problem (based on some of what you said). As I said in another post, government schools don't have a market mechanism to force them to change. Personally, I wish there was no such thing as government schools (euphemistically called "public schools"). If we had grocery stores that were operated as government monopolies and we had to buy from wherever we were "zoned" for, we would have the same lousy quality and lousy service and lousy results that we get from government schools. Nobody would put up with that, but most people are willing to put up with lousy schools because it's become something like religious dogma in this country that government schools are sacred.
There appears to be some truth to this, at least subjectively. When I was in college, the least intelligent students I knew tended to be the ones in elementary education. That's not to say that ALL of them were that way, but a LOT of them were (in disproportionate numbers).
I was primarily interested in addressing the issue from the point of view of the guy doing the complaining, as opposed to outlining how to fix American education. From the point of view of the teacher, the choice is pretty simple. Accept the pay or find something else to do.
If you want to address the overall problem, though, I'd say the problem lies primarily in management. Government-run schools have no incentive to become any better, because there's no market mechanism to force them to. The system squeezes out many of the really good teachers, because they don't want to put up with the garbage that goes on in most schools. Some of them end up doing other things and others end up in private schools with better management (where they make less money).
If you look at teacher salaries over the past 40 years or so (and the rate of increase), I think you'd have to conclude that low pay isn't the problem. Relative teacher salaries are higher now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. (I can't cite inflation-adjusted figures, but I think the facts would bear me out on that very readily.) I think there are plenty of decent people who would be willing to teach at the salaries that teachers make -- IF they were allowed to teach and not be made into babysitters AND if the incompetent boobs were weeded out. (One of the biggest frustrations among teachers I know is the quality level of many of the teachers around them. I'm currently dating a teacher who has very interesting stories about that.)
There are plenty of jobs that pay less than teachers are paid (and that also require college degrees). For instance, I used to be a newspaper editor. You'd be shocked how little reporters at small newspapers make. TV producers in many, many markets make less than teachers, too. These are just a couple of examples I'm familiar with. The point is that there are PLENTY of well-educated people who make less than teachers. It's the management structure that's destroyed education, IMO, not the salaries paid to teachers.
Look, you knew what teachers made when you chose the profession. (If you didn't, you have an even bigger problem, but we're going to assume that you did.) You chose to become a teacher and you chose to accept the salary. Why is it that teachers are about the only group in this society who are constantly whining about being underpaid, as though their pay is some sort of moral issue? You don't hear people in any other profession whine about their pay with the same sort of self-righteous indignation that we hear from teachers.
If you don't like the pay as a teacher, get out of the profession. Go find something for which the pay is higher. It's YOUR choice.
And another thing. Teacher unions have led the whining for years that we need lower student/teacher ratios (so the unions can have more jobs for their members). In my state, the current ratio is 15-1. When I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, it was typical to have 25 to 30 kids in each class, yet the quality of instruction continues to go DOWN, in spite of the lower student/teacher ratios. If teachers would do a better job of educating kids in classes of the old size, that WOULD leave more money to pay the decent teachers better.
My mother was a teacher for her entire career and my father started as a teacher, so I have respect for many of the people who choose to do it. But the truth is that the profession is LOADED with many, many incompetent boobs (being administrered by other incompetent boobs) who would rather whine than figure out how to do the job they're being paid to do.
The price of an item is NOT all about the cost of producing it. You're taking the simplistic view that the price "should be" cost plus X fixed profit. That's not reality. The price of an item is set by what the market is willing to pay. If the market is willing to pay $100 for a widget (because it seems worth that to the purchasers, for reasons of either utility or pleasure), it doesn't matter whether the cost of producing each item is $1 or $95. An item with a high profit margin will tend to attract competition and the price will eventually fall (possibly over a period of YEARS), and an item with a low profit margin will tend to be sold by an industry dominated by slow, lumbering companies that are not innovating. (Of course, if it's possible to produce a product for $100, but the consumer is only willing to give $95 for it, the product simply isn't produced at any price over the long term unless the cost or consumer demand changes.)
Even if your model of "cost plus" were an accurate way to model economics, the cost of the equipment for the recording studio is a tiny fraction of the real cost of producing, marketing and distributing music, so falling equipment costs wouldn't make a substantial difference for major-label artists. That's because they already have access to high-end equipment. The real value of the low-cost equipment for recording is that it brings that same production quality (or close to it) to people who don't have money, but DO have the musical skills and technical skills to make it happen.
Of course, the reality is that there aren't really that many people who have this level of musical and technical skills who will benefit from access to cheaper equipment (on a percentage basis). For most people who now have access to professional-grade equipment, it will be a way to do better recordings of bad music (because of lack of writing or playing talent) or mediocre recordings of bad music (because of lack of musical OR technical skills). It's the same way with digital video. The equipment is there to produce broadcast-quality productions very inexpensively, but the real barrier to producing good work is and always will be lack of talent more so than lack of access to equipment.
The blind and unthinking fervor with which many people pursue this belief makes it seem much more like religion. For some people who favor free software, it's ideological. But for MANY others -- including a lot of posters on this board -- it's religion. They simply believe because they've been told it's good, but they have no idea why -- beyond the fact that they like the idea of "something for nothing."
It's a metaphor that seems very apt to me. Sorry if you don't like it, but I stand by it.
As I said -- since you clearly didn't read what I wrote -- the fact that you just implied this was true of CAGW isn't an excuse. It just means you're too lazy to get the facts. If you WEREN'T implying it, there would be no reason to post your comment in the context of this story, would there?
It would be like me saying, "Whenever I see someone with a user name like 'mabu,' it makes me think the person might be stupid," and then claim that I wasn't saying that about you.
If you'd check out the history of this organization, you'd find out that that's not the case. Please get the facts before making charges like that. The fact that you only imply suggest that it might be true means you're too lazy to get the facts, but you're willing to smear a decent organization without having a clue what you're talking about.
CAGW was founded in 1984 by Peter Grace and Jack Anderson. Grace was a business exec who headed the Grace Commission, which was charged with finding ways of reducing waste in the federal government. Anderson was one of the most muckraking newspaper columnists of all time. You might find it hard to believe, but people CAN disagree with you without being paid off.
The position taken by Citizens Against Government Waste makes sense. They simply believe that it's wrong to mandate one particular system. As much as I dislike MS and its products, I agree with that. In MANY cases, it makes sense to use something other than Linux or other free software. The total cost of ownership and use are what should matter to taxpayers, NOT the religious issues which are so important to many in the free-software movement.
You're right. I couldn't recall what the other two were. I was thinking that these were the original three PPC models -- the 6100, 7100 and 8100. Do you know whether that's right?
I believe you're thinking of when Apple was using "Carl Sagan" as a code name for one of the early PPC Macs. After the legal problems with Sagan, the code name was changed to BHA, which was supposed to stand for "Butt head astronomer."
The previous poster is right about "sosumi" being a reference to the Beatles record company's threat.
First, I called Cygwin an emulator/environment (or something like that), because it's not the actual OS running on the computer. It's a layer allowing Unix commands to run on top of Windows. In another response, someone else did an excellent job of explaining why Cygwin is radically different from Mac OS X. But since you seen uninterested in facts which don't support your position, you're probably not interested.
Second, you're clearly very uninformed about Mac OS X. You really should know much more about it before you go making such dogmatic and uninformed assertions. Others here have laid out the facts about why it's Unix, but you'll certainly ignore those facts, too. The fact that it has "a ton of proprietary, closed-source, closed-spec stuff like Quartz" is totally irrelevant to whether it's Unix or not. Your religious bias is showing badly. You can debate about whether closed source is good or back, but that has nothing to do with this debate. Unix and open source are not synonymous, contrary to what you seem to think.
Third, you're utterly and completely wrong about NEXTSTEP not being Unix (or being called Unix). Anybody with even passing familiarity with the history of NeXT would be embarrassed to make such a laughably wrong statement.
You can meander around irrelevant points all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that you're mistaken when you claim that Mac OS X isn't Unix. It's as much Unix as any other Unix derivative.
It has nothing to do with pride. It's just a simple fact. Mac OS X is as much Unix as Linux or BSD or Xenix or AIX or any other Unix variant. If Mac OS X isn't Unix, then neither are the others. They're all slightly different from the "real" Unix, so they can't be Unix, either, if you think there's only one "standard" Unix. Your comparison of Cygwin running on Win95 is really weak, because it's not the OS, but rather an emulator/environment on top of Windows.
That is just plain stupid. Some versions of Unix -- including the original -- are still proprietary, and that doesn't make them non-Unix. You clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about. Either that or your religious attachment to open source is getting in the way of your ability to think rationally. Trying running Mac OS X and pop open a terminal window. You'll find that it's Unix, whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately, we don't HAVE capitalism in the United States. We have an economy that is controlled more and more by various levels of government. The trappings of economic freedom are still there, but government controls things to a greater and greater degree with both carrots and sticks. It's a system that forces companies and individuals to be dishonest in order to survive. When it suits the purpose of government, bits and pieces of that dishonesty are exposed and punished. This system keeps the power in the hands of government and away from private citizens or companies that don't play the political game.
And the only thing that prevents BMW from grabbing a serious share of the market are THEIR prices. While there are certainly exceptions to the norm, you TEND to get what you pay for.
I'm the one who pointed out that the cost of a Mac wasn't relevant to this discussion. If you had merely asserted that a high-end PC (of whatever kind) might cost thousands of dollars, you would have been accurate and I wouldn't have objected. I'm merely trying to keep others from being misled by your incorrect assertion about the cost of Macs. There are a LOT of people who believe what you said about the cost of Apple hardware until they get the facts. Something that keeps getting repeated tends to be believed, even if it's false.
I couldn't care less whether you own a Mac or not. Correcting a false statement isn't trolling.
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Cato is not the sort of group to be "bought by interest groups." There are certainly some groups out there which are willing to change their principles for donations, but Cato isn't one of them Whether you agree with them or not, they are one of the most principled groups out there. Their positions do NOT change to follow changing whims of their contributors.
Anybody who would call the Cato Institute a "right wing" group is terribly, terribly ignorant. Cato is very pro-individual rights. On economic issues, they tend to agree with conservatives. On social issues, they tend to agree with liberals.
Contrary to what some people believe, it's possible to have positions other than what most people understand to be left wing or right wing. That two-dimensional scale is terribly inadequate for explaining the range of possible political positions. See the following quiz from Advocates for Self Government for a more useful way to look at the choices:
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
Conventional wisdom is that devices converge, but the opposite has actually tended to be true. For instance, when the computer first appeared on the scene as a mainframe, it didn't converge with other office devices such as copiers or time clocks. Instead, computer categories divided -- into mini-computers and then personal computers and then further divided into laptops and desktops. There are all sorts of specialty devices now, and we STILL have the old mainframes around in various forms.
Going back to what an example of convergence would have been if we were looking at it long ago, you could make a technical argument that the computer and the copier DID converge, because today's copier IS a sophisticated computer in many ways. (Even a time clock is a simple computer instead of an old-fashioned mechanical device.) But just because computer technology is incorporated into a copier, that doesn't mean it's a general-purpose converged device. Instead, it's a copier and we don't even think about the computing power instead.
Devices are defined by what users believe they are, not what they're actually capable of. Just because a cell phone can take a picture doesn't mean that the customer thinks he's buying a camera when he gets one. To him, it's still a phone. Over time, people might come to think of a camera as being a natural feature of a phone, but it's STILL going to be considered a phone.
In the same way, it would be natural -- if convergence were really the way the market worked -- that we would all have one device that was a television, radio, CD player, DVD player, speakers, etc. Instead, we tend to have a separate TV, receiver, maybe an amplifier, a CD player, a DVD player and separate speakers -- all wired together. (I suspect the distinction between a DVD player and CD player might eventually go away, but only because they use the same form factor as far as the user is concerned. The user would just consider it is disc player.)
Convergence sounds like such a reasonable idea when you hear companies laying out their grand strategies, but it just doesn't seem to work that way in the real world. Iconoclastic marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout have written a lot about this subject from the viewpoint of marketing and have explained why divergence is a more natural direction for markets than convergence. Although their arguments were counter-intuitive to me from a technical perspective, I believe they're right based on both history and human psychology.
Read the first line of what I replied to. The AC said, "Apple was the first to steal the GUI from Xerox...." Did you somehow overlook that? Or did you just not understand the connection between his charge of Apple stealing and my pointing out that Xerox was paid?
I know this is difficult when you're in the middle of a mindless rant, but you might want to try to get the facts before you embarrass yourself next time (even if you ARE posting as an AC).
Apple PAID for the rights to the stuff from Xerox. The facts are covered in numerous places if you'd like to trouble yourself to get a clue about this incident in computer history.
Much of the rest of what you have to say is too self-contradictory to be worth responding to.
You can reasonably argue about whether an iPod is worth the money or not. I have one and it's worth the money to me. Another person can make a reasonable argument that it's not a good value for him. But this article is bizarre. It's almost as though some editor told this dude to write an article slamming the iPod's weaknesses in some situations, but he had an attack of honesty at the end where he said it was the best MP3 player to buy -- after he had spent the article pointing people to other players based on various iPod shortcomings. Overall, it seems to be really bad journalism, because the whole article suggests one thing which is contradicted by the conclusion of the piece.
I suspect Apple is willing to do without the ability to target the people running Win 98/ME for two reasons. First, the numbers using it will continue to head downward. Second, people who are using something that old are unlikely to be the sort of people who are early adopters of technology -- and the early adopters are a better market for the iTunes music store. So I think it makes sense for the people at Apple to target resources where they have the best potential customers.
Cars want to be free, too, but I'll still be arrested if I steal one. :-)
There's no contradiction in what I'm saying. The guy who made the post has two choices. He can accept what the profession pays or he can get another job. In another post in this thread, I addressed the overall issue of education quality just a bit, although that wasn't really my intention in my first post. The choice faced by an individual teacher is one thing. The choice faced by society is an entirely different thing.
As to your other comment, I think the "self-righteous indignation" is worse with teachers. You don't generally see illogical bumper stickers for other professions on the order of, "If you can read this, thank a teacher."
Overall, I suspect we would agree about the cause of problem (based on some of what you said). As I said in another post, government schools don't have a market mechanism to force them to change. Personally, I wish there was no such thing as government schools (euphemistically called "public schools"). If we had grocery stores that were operated as government monopolies and we had to buy from wherever we were "zoned" for, we would have the same lousy quality and lousy service and lousy results that we get from government schools. Nobody would put up with that, but most people are willing to put up with lousy schools because it's become something like religious dogma in this country that government schools are sacred.
There appears to be some truth to this, at least subjectively. When I was in college, the least intelligent students I knew tended to be the ones in elementary education. That's not to say that ALL of them were that way, but a LOT of them were (in disproportionate numbers).
I was primarily interested in addressing the issue from the point of view of the guy doing the complaining, as opposed to outlining how to fix American education. From the point of view of the teacher, the choice is pretty simple. Accept the pay or find something else to do.
If you want to address the overall problem, though, I'd say the problem lies primarily in management. Government-run schools have no incentive to become any better, because there's no market mechanism to force them to. The system squeezes out many of the really good teachers, because they don't want to put up with the garbage that goes on in most schools. Some of them end up doing other things and others end up in private schools with better management (where they make less money).
If you look at teacher salaries over the past 40 years or so (and the rate of increase), I think you'd have to conclude that low pay isn't the problem. Relative teacher salaries are higher now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. (I can't cite inflation-adjusted figures, but I think the facts would bear me out on that very readily.) I think there are plenty of decent people who would be willing to teach at the salaries that teachers make -- IF they were allowed to teach and not be made into babysitters AND if the incompetent boobs were weeded out. (One of the biggest frustrations among teachers I know is the quality level of many of the teachers around them. I'm currently dating a teacher who has very interesting stories about that.)
There are plenty of jobs that pay less than teachers are paid (and that also require college degrees). For instance, I used to be a newspaper editor. You'd be shocked how little reporters at small newspapers make. TV producers in many, many markets make less than teachers, too. These are just a couple of examples I'm familiar with. The point is that there are PLENTY of well-educated people who make less than teachers. It's the management structure that's destroyed education, IMO, not the salaries paid to teachers.
Look, you knew what teachers made when you chose the profession. (If you didn't, you have an even bigger problem, but we're going to assume that you did.) You chose to become a teacher and you chose to accept the salary. Why is it that teachers are about the only group in this society who are constantly whining about being underpaid, as though their pay is some sort of moral issue? You don't hear people in any other profession whine about their pay with the same sort of self-righteous indignation that we hear from teachers.
If you don't like the pay as a teacher, get out of the profession. Go find something for which the pay is higher. It's YOUR choice.
And another thing. Teacher unions have led the whining for years that we need lower student/teacher ratios (so the unions can have more jobs for their members). In my state, the current ratio is 15-1. When I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, it was typical to have 25 to 30 kids in each class, yet the quality of instruction continues to go DOWN, in spite of the lower student/teacher ratios. If teachers would do a better job of educating kids in classes of the old size, that WOULD leave more money to pay the decent teachers better.
My mother was a teacher for her entire career and my father started as a teacher, so I have respect for many of the people who choose to do it. But the truth is that the profession is LOADED with many, many incompetent boobs (being administrered by other incompetent boobs) who would rather whine than figure out how to do the job they're being paid to do.
The price of an item is NOT all about the cost of producing it. You're taking the simplistic view that the price "should be" cost plus X fixed profit. That's not reality. The price of an item is set by what the market is willing to pay. If the market is willing to pay $100 for a widget (because it seems worth that to the purchasers, for reasons of either utility or pleasure), it doesn't matter whether the cost of producing each item is $1 or $95. An item with a high profit margin will tend to attract competition and the price will eventually fall (possibly over a period of YEARS), and an item with a low profit margin will tend to be sold by an industry dominated by slow, lumbering companies that are not innovating. (Of course, if it's possible to produce a product for $100, but the consumer is only willing to give $95 for it, the product simply isn't produced at any price over the long term unless the cost or consumer demand changes.)
Even if your model of "cost plus" were an accurate way to model economics, the cost of the equipment for the recording studio is a tiny fraction of the real cost of producing, marketing and distributing music, so falling equipment costs wouldn't make a substantial difference for major-label artists. That's because they already have access to high-end equipment. The real value of the low-cost equipment for recording is that it brings that same production quality (or close to it) to people who don't have money, but DO have the musical skills and technical skills to make it happen.
Of course, the reality is that there aren't really that many people who have this level of musical and technical skills who will benefit from access to cheaper equipment (on a percentage basis). For most people who now have access to professional-grade equipment, it will be a way to do better recordings of bad music (because of lack of writing or playing talent) or mediocre recordings of bad music (because of lack of musical OR technical skills). It's the same way with digital video. The equipment is there to produce broadcast-quality productions very inexpensively, but the real barrier to producing good work is and always will be lack of talent more so than lack of access to equipment.
The blind and unthinking fervor with which many people pursue this belief makes it seem much more like religion. For some people who favor free software, it's ideological. But for MANY others -- including a lot of posters on this board -- it's religion. They simply believe because they've been told it's good, but they have no idea why -- beyond the fact that they like the idea of "something for nothing."
It's a metaphor that seems very apt to me. Sorry if you don't like it, but I stand by it.
As I said -- since you clearly didn't read what I wrote -- the fact that you just implied this was true of CAGW isn't an excuse. It just means you're too lazy to get the facts. If you WEREN'T implying it, there would be no reason to post your comment in the context of this story, would there?
It would be like me saying, "Whenever I see someone with a user name like 'mabu,' it makes me think the person might be stupid," and then claim that I wasn't saying that about you.
If you'd check out the history of this organization, you'd find out that that's not the case. Please get the facts before making charges like that. The fact that you only imply suggest that it might be true means you're too lazy to get the facts, but you're willing to smear a decent organization without having a clue what you're talking about.
CAGW was founded in 1984 by Peter Grace and Jack Anderson. Grace was a business exec who headed the Grace Commission, which was charged with finding ways of reducing waste in the federal government. Anderson was one of the most muckraking newspaper columnists of all time. You might find it hard to believe, but people CAN disagree with you without being paid off.
The position taken by Citizens Against Government Waste makes sense. They simply believe that it's wrong to mandate one particular system. As much as I dislike MS and its products, I agree with that. In MANY cases, it makes sense to use something other than Linux or other free software. The total cost of ownership and use are what should matter to taxpayers, NOT the religious issues which are so important to many in the free-software movement.
You're right. I couldn't recall what the other two were. I was thinking that these were the original three PPC models -- the 6100, 7100 and 8100. Do you know whether that's right?
I believe you're thinking of when Apple was using "Carl Sagan" as a code name for one of the early PPC Macs. After the legal problems with Sagan, the code name was changed to BHA, which was supposed to stand for "Butt head astronomer."
The previous poster is right about "sosumi" being a reference to the Beatles record company's threat.
First, I called Cygwin an emulator/environment (or something like that), because it's not the actual OS running on the computer. It's a layer allowing Unix commands to run on top of Windows. In another response, someone else did an excellent job of explaining why Cygwin is radically different from Mac OS X. But since you seen uninterested in facts which don't support your position, you're probably not interested.
Second, you're clearly very uninformed about Mac OS X. You really should know much more about it before you go making such dogmatic and uninformed assertions. Others here have laid out the facts about why it's Unix, but you'll certainly ignore those facts, too. The fact that it has "a ton of proprietary, closed-source, closed-spec stuff like Quartz" is totally irrelevant to whether it's Unix or not. Your religious bias is showing badly. You can debate about whether closed source is good or back, but that has nothing to do with this debate. Unix and open source are not synonymous, contrary to what you seem to think.
Third, you're utterly and completely wrong about NEXTSTEP not being Unix (or being called Unix). Anybody with even passing familiarity with the history of NeXT would be embarrassed to make such a laughably wrong statement.
You can meander around irrelevant points all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that you're mistaken when you claim that Mac OS X isn't Unix. It's as much Unix as any other Unix derivative.
It has nothing to do with pride. It's just a simple fact. Mac OS X is as much Unix as Linux or BSD or Xenix or AIX or any other Unix variant. If Mac OS X isn't Unix, then neither are the others. They're all slightly different from the "real" Unix, so they can't be Unix, either, if you think there's only one "standard" Unix. Your comparison of Cygwin running on Win95 is really weak, because it's not the OS, but rather an emulator/environment on top of Windows.
That is just plain stupid. Some versions of Unix -- including the original -- are still proprietary, and that doesn't make them non-Unix. You clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about. Either that or your religious attachment to open source is getting in the way of your ability to think rationally. Trying running Mac OS X and pop open a terminal window. You'll find that it's Unix, whether you like it or not.
Unfortunately, we don't HAVE capitalism in the United States. We have an economy that is controlled more and more by various levels of government. The trappings of economic freedom are still there, but government controls things to a greater and greater degree with both carrots and sticks. It's a system that forces companies and individuals to be dishonest in order to survive. When it suits the purpose of government, bits and pieces of that dishonesty are exposed and punished. This system keeps the power in the hands of government and away from private citizens or companies that don't play the political game.
And the only thing that prevents BMW from grabbing a serious share of the market are THEIR prices. While there are certainly exceptions to the norm, you TEND to get what you pay for.
I'm the one who pointed out that the cost of a Mac wasn't relevant to this discussion. If you had merely asserted that a high-end PC (of whatever kind) might cost thousands of dollars, you would have been accurate and I wouldn't have objected. I'm merely trying to keep others from being misled by your incorrect assertion about the cost of Macs. There are a LOT of people who believe what you said about the cost of Apple hardware until they get the facts. Something that keeps getting repeated tends to be believed, even if it's false.
I couldn't care less whether you own a Mac or not. Correcting a false statement isn't trolling.