Privacy is not a basic human right. Not like freedom to not be murdered, beaten, or starved. There are a lot of human rights violations going on right now, but certain levels of tracking don't even show up on the human-rights-violations radar.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Ok, so this new alternative may not be as fast as Virtual PC. But you know what really impresses me? Look at how quickly an alternative to this Virtual PC problem was produced.
Uh, not really. OpenOSX is selling WinTel since December 2001. So it's more like a "look how quickly someone got the idea to use the VPC/G5 incompatibility to get some free PR". For a public relations stunt, it was not really quick.
In fact, sir, the Krauts were at it long before the Brits. The had an interesting 4x4 volkswagen type 166 aka Schwimmwagen. I always wondered how the SUV's would look like in the "Nazis won WW2" alternative history. Since the Allies won, most 4x4 vehicles are more or less jeep-like. In the "Vaterland"/"Man From The High Castle" worlds, 4x4 vehicles would probably resemble the military volkswagens. And thus would have amphibious capability as early as in 1940's.
Remember when Michael Jackson didn't have an ugly nose? Yes, I am talking about the eighties. I think we ought to shutter ourselves from the greed grab that is the 2000's corporate culture for a moment every day to meditate, reflect, or just simply relax
Yeah, back in the eighties at least trolls had some integrity. Are you trying to say that the decade of porsche-driving-yuppies, reaganomics, Wall Street boom and nascence of Bill Gates empire was less greedy that the 2000's? Just because of *one* song? If you want to capture the spirit of the 1980's, read the "American Psycho" and watch the "Wall Street" (or even better the Brit TV-series "Capital City", the most shamelessly pro-yuppie manifesto I ever saw).
I wonder if anyone traced back the sources of the most popular slashdotisms, like the "Dear Apple" or "I am sitting here with my freelance gig" trollings or the "In Soviet Russia" jokes? Anyone knows when the first "First post!" post was posted?
How about this report? I'm still waiting, nearly a fortnight later, after they said "one Apple retail source said the new 15-inch and 17-inch models are expected to arrive later this week".
But please observe they accurately noted that this particular information is nothing but an expectation of one retail source. In fact it's quite obvious that no new releases are to be announced just a fortnight before Expo in Paris. Your long-awaited powerbook is most likely to be the Steve's Fabulous "One More Thing" (TM) during the keynote.
yeah, I agree, but I wasn't talking about managers, I was talking about the journos that talk about OSS.
You are right. And this brings me a certain crazy idea. OSS advocates shound no longer preach to the IT guys. They are already convinced. To reach Mr Joe Average you have to capture the guy who writes a tech column in a newspaper Mr Average reads. He will write a column "Linux rocks", and Mr Average will agree. Now, it is quite easy to find die-hard Windows fans or die-hard Mac fans among the journalist crew, but in most newsrooms the only person likely to know that the Linux exists at all (not to mention actually use it and like it) is some poor helpdesk employee, once again called to replace the bloody toner.
So the crazy idea is: why not create a special Linux distro as a gift for the journalist community? It could be some slimmed-down Mandrake or RedHat, capable only of doing things journalists want to do on their desktops/laptops (MS Office compatibility, good suite of Internet applications, some games; everything extremely easy to install and use). Jettison or disable everything a journalist does not need and could confuse him (excessive choice of window managers, obscure Unix services, maybe the whole CLI at all). Just send it to major tech columnists with a kind note like "guys, here is a software package that gives you everything your Wintel or iBook does, but it's also rock-solid, guaranteed virus-proof and absolutely free". Wouldn't that be a good PR move?
Trademarks exist to help protect both the consumer and the company from confusion.
Exactly, but that's why you can open a Macintosh Restaurant or sell Apple Jeans. When you operate in a completely different business, there can be no confusion and hence no trademark infringement. Now, it's up to the jury to decide whether "business messaging" and "zero-configuration networking" are completely different - or not. Methinks they are.
It boggles my mind why Apple insists on pricing
their equipment as they do. I STILL own an
Apple II+, IIe, IIc and IIgs, so I am NOT
anti-Apple. But I also own a business, and
I know that you increase sales, and profit, by
lowering price and CAPTURING MORE OF THE MARKET.
It boils down to a simple choice - do you want to have 3% of the market and 300% profit margins or have 20% of the market and 10% profit margins. The former quite often turns out to be a better bussiness model. If you manufacture a roadster or SUV, you don't really need to capture the market share of ford escort.
I'm not sure how much of the proprietary code loads outside darwin...
Enough. MacOS X uses proprietary graphics layer called Quartz (long descendant of the NeXT/OpenStep Display Postscript). So if you have pure Darwin with no Quartz, you can run only CLI tools. You can also run XFree and place some Aqua-like window manager on it, but no MacOS X application will run in this environment (no Photoshop, no MS Office, no Max Payne, no Starcraft;-)). Running Linux with X11 will probably be a better choice then.
Apple's Darwin *is* open source... if you could somehow hack the Darwin kernel to recognize and boot on that hardware, then it should be able to work. The problem is, that would probably take a serious amount of work, not to mention the possible legal snares with Apple
Frankly, I don't see such possibility. APSL allows you to modify Darwin code in a manner quite similar to the GPL - you can modify all you want, provided that you will distribute the modified code with all due copyright notices and disclamiers and will clearly mark all your amendments.
The important parts of the APSL are:
You may modify Covered Code and use, reproduce, display, perform, internally distribute within Your organization, and Externally Deploy Your Modifications and Covered Code, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, provided that in each instance. You also meet all of these conditions: (...) cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files and the date of any change (...) You must make Source Code of all Your Externally Deployed Modifications either available to those to whom You have Externally Deployed Your Modifications, or publicly available.
Please don't confuse Darwin with MacOS X. Darwin is free (as in beer and actually as in GPL) but Darwin itself is nothing but Yet Another Un*x Clone. MacOS X is proprietary and that's the one with all that eye-candy and iApps:-)
A well-known class of Win-Mac viruses are the Microsoft Office macro viruses. MS Office is available for both Windows and Macintosh, and the versions for both platforms accept the same documents and viruses. With so few Mac-specific viruses available, these macro viruses were once the biggest threats to Mac users, but only those who had certain Microsoft programs. Now these viruses are forgotten as newer Office versions protect against macro viruses.
However, even that was actually a potential threat rather than real one. Virii are rarely truly portable. The (in)famous Melissa was probably the closest to be a cross-platform virus. It could infect MacOS Office documents, but still it could not affect MS Outlook for MacOS (and thus could not spread further). So yes, theoretically you could write a cross-platform virus that would achieve exactly the same effect on Windows and MacOS (provided that both will have Microsoft Office), but the guys who write this stuff rarely put portability on the top of their priority list. They are really screwed, no question about it, but not that much...
But seriously though it is pretty cool but I still can not help but think, when will we ever just acceot the fact that we get old and die?
Don't confuse it with plastic surgery. Exosceleton is not about accepting that you get old. It's about accepting that you can't walk. I wonder how well you'd accept that, regardless your age (yes, it may happen sooner than you think).
Spoken by someone who obviously hasn't used OS X or a Mac very much or at all. The whole reason the Mac interface is so good is subtle features and deep use of use (some of which was lost in the move to X, but will return at some point, no doubt).
I disagree (myself being a person who uses OS X a lot; I type these very words on an iBook 800). Indeed, the guy does not capitalize Mac correctly, but his point remains valid. Power users usually require extensive customization of their working environment. They just know what the want and they don't need any wisecrack from Redmond or Cupertino telling them what they can or cannot do. Customization options of a vanilla MacOS X installation are next to nonexistant. Yes, there are some third party hacks like Tinker Tool, but even with them, MacOS X is still less flexible than MS Windows. It's not important for Joe Shmoe, but I can understand the frustration of a power user, who can't even customize a bloody desktop theme. KDE for MacOS X could be a Holy Grail for these people - OS of their choice running on a machine of their choice WITH A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT OF THEIR CHOICE.
I have installed Microsoft products numerous times on hardware that was well below Microsoft's specified minimum. I have Office 2000 on a 486DX-2 50Mhz laptop. It works adequately for some purposes. When Microsoft says 'it works on this machine' it generally means it works adequately.
...but only "for some purposes", in your own words. This is exactly the case of MacOS X on iMac 233. You can run Microsof Office on it (in fact, I did run it on a 300 MHz iBook - it was adequate for some purposes). The claim is not that MacOS X does not work at all - the claim is that it runs sluggish, there is no graphics acceleration and no DVD playback. How is the DVD playback and 3D acceleration working on your 486 laptop?
Apple doesn't have an excuse. They claimed that OS X would work on all the G3s. They should have written the drivers or refunded the $$$, or never wrote checks that their body couldn't cash. MS never claimed that Windows XP would work on your 386, 8086, 8088. IIRC, MS said that many would need to upgrade.
But please note that whenever MS says "it works on this machine", it never means "it works flawlessly with every feature you'd want to have". The Microsoft understanding of "it works" is actually something like "it works most of the time with most of the features". MacOS X _does_ work on the Macs that are eligible for the refund, in the Microsoft understanding of that term. It's not that the system refuses to run or runs unstable - it's just the graphics are not blinding fast (big surprise for a 1998 computer, eh?), newer games won't run (again, what a shock!) and you can't use hardware accelerated DVD display. That's all. Now please tell me, did Microsoft ever give a dime to anybody who has purchased Windows 95 that was promised to have the USB support, but never really had one?
Is it cheaper for Apple to pay for the software returns, or to write some drivers for the video and DVD issues?
It's not just drivers. Quartz Extreme is a quite complex graphics layer, using Postscript, OpenGL and QuickTime for all those fancy animations. It could be that this simply cannot be achieved on an old Rage card (at least not with satisfactory results).
I've been looking at getting a PB, but stories like this where Apple just drops support on a whim, or doesn't 'make it right', make me look for a Latitude or Thinkpad.
If you want to run Microsoft Windows on it, you could end up with similar situations (a newer version of MS Windows will not be supported fully on your legacy machine). With one difference: there will be no refund.
Couple that with hearing stories about the $500+ repairs on Apple laptops, and I'm getting more leery. I rarely hear about problems with other laptop makers.
Strange. The problem is that laptops just are expensive, even if their value on a second-hand market drops to $100 with age. The LCD display is expensive. The motherboard is expensive (and most circuits are integrated with the motherboard, so you have to exchange the whole motherboard even if just your USB chip went down). Most laptops repairs indeed cost a lot - and there's nothing any vendor can do about it. All you can do is purchase extended warranty, like many Apple laptop owners do.
Let me remind you the sad and long story of the USB support in Windows 95. To cut the long story short, it never went beyond alpha quality, even in the last OSR patch for Win 95. Microsoft's only answer for all the complaints was: upgrade to Windows 98! And they did what Apple never did with OpenGL for the older ATI cards - they promised explicitly it will work. I can still remember a Windows 95 CD with "USB support" written explicitly on the label...
Slashdot Mirror
Privacy is not a basic human right. Not like freedom to not be murdered, beaten, or starved. There are a lot of human rights violations going on right now, but certain levels of tracking don't even show up on the human-rights-violations radar.
;-)
The guys who wrote the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights almost half century ago seemed to have different opinion than yours
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Cute girls in London???? Are you sure you're in the right city? ;-)
Ok, so this new alternative may not be as fast as Virtual PC. But you know what really impresses me? Look at how quickly an alternative to this Virtual PC problem was produced.
Uh, not really. OpenOSX is selling WinTel since December 2001. So it's more like a "look how quickly someone got the idea to use the VPC/G5 incompatibility to get some free PR". For a public relations stunt, it was not really quick.
In fact, sir, the Krauts were at it long before the Brits. The had an interesting 4x4 volkswagen type 166 aka Schwimmwagen. I always wondered how the SUV's would look like in the "Nazis won WW2" alternative history. Since the Allies won, most 4x4 vehicles are more or less jeep-like. In the "Vaterland"/"Man From The High Castle" worlds, 4x4 vehicles would probably resemble the military volkswagens. And thus would have amphibious capability as early as in 1940's.
Uhm, you forgot the "I don't want to start the holy war here" line. It's not that funny without it.
Remember when Michael Jackson didn't have an ugly nose? Yes, I am talking about the eighties. I think we ought to shutter ourselves from the greed grab that is the 2000's corporate culture for a moment every day to meditate, reflect, or just simply relax
Yeah, back in the eighties at least trolls had some integrity. Are you trying to say that the decade of porsche-driving-yuppies, reaganomics, Wall Street boom and nascence of Bill Gates empire was less greedy that the 2000's? Just because of *one* song? If you want to capture the spirit of the 1980's, read the "American Psycho" and watch the "Wall Street" (or even better the Brit TV-series "Capital City", the most shamelessly pro-yuppie manifesto I ever saw).
We can't find a comment with that ID (1) in this discussion (1). If this comment was posted moments ago, please wait 60 seconds for it to appear.
:-)))))))
C'mon guys, what are we doing here? Slashdot hasn't yet started
I wonder if anyone traced back the sources of the most popular slashdotisms, like the "Dear Apple" or "I am sitting here with my freelance gig" trollings or the "In Soviet Russia" jokes? Anyone knows when the first "First post!" post was posted?
--
In Soviet Russia... jokes trace back you.
How about this report? I'm still waiting, nearly a fortnight later, after they said "one Apple retail source said the new 15-inch and 17-inch models are expected to arrive later this week".
But please observe they accurately noted that this particular information is nothing but an expectation of one retail source. In fact it's quite obvious that no new releases are to be announced just a fortnight before Expo in Paris. Your long-awaited powerbook is most likely to be the Steve's Fabulous "One More Thing" (TM) during the keynote.
yeah, I agree, but I wasn't talking about managers, I was talking about the journos that talk about OSS.
You are right. And this brings me a certain crazy idea. OSS advocates shound no longer preach to the IT guys. They are already convinced. To reach Mr Joe Average you have to capture the guy who writes a tech column in a newspaper Mr Average reads. He will write a column "Linux rocks", and Mr Average will agree. Now, it is quite easy to find die-hard Windows fans or die-hard Mac fans among the journalist crew, but in most newsrooms the only person likely to know that the Linux exists at all (not to mention actually use it and like it) is some poor helpdesk employee, once again called to replace the bloody toner.
So the crazy idea is: why not create a special Linux distro as a gift for the journalist community? It could be some slimmed-down Mandrake or RedHat, capable only of doing things journalists want to do on their desktops/laptops (MS Office compatibility, good suite of Internet applications, some games; everything extremely easy to install and use). Jettison or disable everything a journalist does not need and could confuse him (excessive choice of window managers, obscure Unix services, maybe the whole CLI at all). Just send it to major tech columnists with a kind note like "guys, here is a software package that gives you everything your Wintel or iBook does, but it's also rock-solid, guaranteed virus-proof and absolutely free". Wouldn't that be a good PR move?
Trademarks exist to help protect both the consumer and the company from confusion.
Exactly, but that's why you can open a Macintosh Restaurant or sell Apple Jeans. When you operate in a completely different business, there can be no confusion and hence no trademark infringement. Now, it's up to the jury to decide whether "business messaging" and "zero-configuration networking" are completely different - or not. Methinks they are.
It boggles my mind why Apple insists on pricing their equipment as they do. I STILL own an Apple II+, IIe, IIc and IIgs, so I am NOT anti-Apple. But I also own a business, and I know that you increase sales, and profit, by lowering price and CAPTURING MORE OF THE MARKET.
It boils down to a simple choice - do you want to have 3% of the market and 300% profit margins or have 20% of the market and 10% profit margins. The former quite often turns out to be a better bussiness model. If you manufacture a roadster or SUV, you don't really need to capture the market share of ford escort.
Makes me wonder when "Hello world!" will eventually be replaced by "Hello SCO!"...
Really? How exactly does a default shell in an OS relate to that again?
They like to bash each other.
But its all the same kernel underneath, right?
;-)). Running Linux with X11 will probably be a better choice then.
Yes.
I'm not sure how much of the proprietary code loads outside darwin...
Enough. MacOS X uses proprietary graphics layer called Quartz (long descendant of the NeXT/OpenStep Display Postscript). So if you have pure Darwin with no Quartz, you can run only CLI tools. You can also run XFree and place some Aqua-like window manager on it, but no MacOS X application will run in this environment (no Photoshop, no MS Office, no Max Payne, no Starcraft
Apple's Darwin *is* open source... if you could somehow hack the Darwin kernel to recognize and boot on that hardware, then it should be able to work. The problem is, that would probably take a serious amount of work, not to mention the possible legal snares with Apple
:-)
Frankly, I don't see such possibility. APSL allows you to modify Darwin code in a manner quite similar to the GPL - you can modify all you want, provided that you will distribute the modified code with all due copyright notices and disclamiers and will clearly mark all your amendments.
The important parts of the APSL are:
You may modify Covered Code and use, reproduce, display, perform, internally distribute within Your organization, and Externally Deploy Your Modifications and Covered Code, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, provided that in each instance. You also meet all of these conditions: (...) cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files and the date of any change (...) You must make Source Code of all Your Externally Deployed Modifications either available to those to whom You have Externally Deployed Your Modifications, or publicly available.
Please don't confuse Darwin with MacOS X. Darwin is free (as in beer and actually as in GPL) but Darwin itself is nothing but Yet Another Un*x Clone. MacOS X is proprietary and that's the one with all that eye-candy and iApps
Dobro pozhalovat', tovaristch :-). Thanks for the link. Seeing you writing:
:-)))
In Russia we do enjoy black humour and we find it important to laugh about the problems that we (or others) face.
couldn't help but write: In Soviet Russia... black humour enjoys you
Macs won't be "immune" to Mac-based viruses, when they come along.
:-)
True. But they don't. And that's the point
A well-known class of Win-Mac viruses are the Microsoft Office macro viruses. MS Office is available for both Windows and Macintosh, and the versions for both platforms accept the same documents and viruses. With so few Mac-specific viruses available, these macro viruses were once the biggest threats to Mac users, but only those who had certain Microsoft programs. Now these viruses are forgotten as newer Office versions protect against macro viruses.
However, even that was actually a potential threat rather than real one. Virii are rarely truly portable. The (in)famous Melissa was probably the closest to be a cross-platform virus. It could infect MacOS Office documents, but still it could not affect MS Outlook for MacOS (and thus could not spread further). So yes, theoretically you could write a cross-platform virus that would achieve exactly the same effect on Windows and MacOS (provided that both will have Microsoft Office), but the guys who write this stuff rarely put portability on the top of their priority list. They are really screwed, no question about it, but not that much...
But seriously though it is pretty cool but I still can not help but think, when will we ever just acceot the fact that we get old and die?
Don't confuse it with plastic surgery. Exosceleton is not about accepting that you get old. It's about accepting that you can't walk. I wonder how well you'd accept that, regardless your age (yes, it may happen sooner than you think).
Spoken by someone who obviously hasn't used OS X or a Mac very much or at all. The whole reason the Mac interface is so good is subtle features and deep use of use (some of which was lost in the move to X, but will return at some point, no doubt).
I disagree (myself being a person who uses OS X a lot; I type these very words on an iBook 800). Indeed, the guy does not capitalize Mac correctly, but his point remains valid. Power users usually require extensive customization of their working environment. They just know what the want and they don't need any wisecrack from Redmond or Cupertino telling them what they can or cannot do. Customization options of a vanilla MacOS X installation are next to nonexistant. Yes, there are some third party hacks like Tinker Tool, but even with them, MacOS X is still less flexible than MS Windows. It's not important for Joe Shmoe, but I can understand the frustration of a power user, who can't even customize a bloody desktop theme. KDE for MacOS X could be a Holy Grail for these people - OS of their choice running on a machine of their choice WITH A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT OF THEIR CHOICE.
I have installed Microsoft products numerous times on hardware that was well below Microsoft's specified minimum. I have Office 2000 on a 486DX-2 50Mhz laptop. It works adequately for some purposes. When Microsoft says 'it works on this machine' it generally means it works adequately.
...but only "for some purposes", in your own words. This is exactly the case of MacOS X on iMac 233. You can run Microsof Office on it (in fact, I did run it on a 300 MHz iBook - it was adequate for some purposes). The claim is not that MacOS X does not work at all - the claim is that it runs sluggish, there is no graphics acceleration and no DVD playback. How is the DVD playback and 3D acceleration working on your 486 laptop?
Apple doesn't have an excuse. They claimed that OS X would work on all the G3s. They should have written the drivers or refunded the $$$, or never wrote checks that their body couldn't cash. MS never claimed that Windows XP would work on your 386, 8086, 8088. IIRC, MS said that many would need to upgrade.
But please note that whenever MS says "it works on this machine", it never means "it works flawlessly with every feature you'd want to have". The Microsoft understanding of "it works" is actually something like "it works most of the time with most of the features". MacOS X _does_ work on the Macs that are eligible for the refund, in the Microsoft understanding of that term. It's not that the system refuses to run or runs unstable - it's just the graphics are not blinding fast (big surprise for a 1998 computer, eh?), newer games won't run (again, what a shock!) and you can't use hardware accelerated DVD display. That's all. Now please tell me, did Microsoft ever give a dime to anybody who has purchased Windows 95 that was promised to have the USB support, but never really had one?
Is it cheaper for Apple to pay for the software returns, or to write some drivers for the video and DVD issues?
It's not just drivers. Quartz Extreme is a quite complex graphics layer, using Postscript, OpenGL and QuickTime for all those fancy animations. It could be that this simply cannot be achieved on an old Rage card (at least not with satisfactory results).
I've been looking at getting a PB, but stories like this where Apple just drops support on a whim, or doesn't 'make it right', make me look for a Latitude or Thinkpad.
If you want to run Microsoft Windows on it, you could end up with similar situations (a newer version of MS Windows will not be supported fully on your legacy machine). With one difference: there will be no refund.
Couple that with hearing stories about the $500+ repairs on Apple laptops, and I'm getting more leery. I rarely hear about problems with other laptop makers.
Strange. The problem is that laptops just are expensive, even if their value on a second-hand market drops to $100 with age. The LCD display is expensive. The motherboard is expensive (and most circuits are integrated with the motherboard, so you have to exchange the whole motherboard even if just your USB chip went down). Most laptops repairs indeed cost a lot - and there's nothing any vendor can do about it. All you can do is purchase extended warranty, like many Apple laptop owners do.
Microsoft would NEVER do this.
Let me remind you the sad and long story of the USB support in Windows 95. To cut the long story short, it never went beyond alpha quality, even in the last OSR patch for Win 95. Microsoft's only answer for all the complaints was: upgrade to Windows 98! And they did what Apple never did with OpenGL for the older ATI cards - they promised explicitly it will work. I can still remember a Windows 95 CD with "USB support" written explicitly on the label...