Agreed. . . I don't think that Apple should get the right to defend things that way. If they win in court, I can see there being no end to the lawsuits that could be made. M$ suing the KDE and Gnome teams, everyone suing Be, Jeep (or whoever made the first SUV) suing everyone. . . a huge pile of inane lawsuits of tenuous substance that should never have existed in the first place.
I wasn't trying to defend Apple, I was just speculating as to why they are acting the way they are.
If you look on TV, you'll notice that everything about an Apple computer is easily recognizable. Apple's computer designs are one big marketing ploy, turning the owner him/herself into an advertisement. Much like Abercrombie&Fitch t-shirts.
If you see a PC across the room, you barely notice it. If you see a Mac across a room, you notice. Nothing else looks like an iMac, a G3/G4 tower, an iBook, etc. Apple wants to be visible, and that makes sense.
The same goes for Aqua. Aqua looks like nothing else - and Apple wants to keep it that way. If Aqua themes became popular, then screenshots from Apple computers would not stand out as much - and therefore, Apple would not burn itself into peoples heads nearly as clearly.
Eh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner. I know that I have been planning on moving to a country where I am allowed to distribute OpenBSD to other countries as soon as I'm on my own.
hmm, how about a web server that emails the admin saying "This web server will shut down in 15 days unless you run the up2date tool" or something similar? To force people to check for upgrades.
I doubt it.
At my school, we made a script that watches for students with computers infected by nimda and sends them an e-mail threatening to shut them off the network unless they either clear the virus off their computer or call the helpdesk so we can clear it off. . . kids would still not phone in until they were shut off long enough to figure out that all the pr0n went away. ..
I admit, I have my prejudices, but I still don't think much more highly of point-and-click admins than I do the average student computer user.
I realize that, using chords, you can get more functions into one hand without forcing the user to look at the keyboard than you can with a standard keyboard. . . but you can still do it with a QWERTY (or similar style of keyboard, regardless of key layout) keyboard. I use Blender, and they did a good job of making sure all the hotkeys were within easy reach of my left hand's fingertips. If people were willing to use hotkeys optimized for position rather than mnemonic(sp) value, we could get the best of both worlds.
I don't know much about how this bill would be interpreted were it to come to law, but it seems to me that making security bugs known to the general public could be construed as giving advice to a hacker since, well, it alerts the general public to security problems.
Big thing you forgot: Joe Sixpack doesn't choose what OS he runs. He is probably only dimly aware that there is one other choice (linux), and he is uneasy about the Penguin, because the people he knows who run linux are his console jockey friends who always succeed in making him feel inferior by fixing his computer from the DOS prompt, a creature which he is terrified of.
Joe Sixpack got his computer with Windows pre-installed. That was the only option he had, because he bought his computer at Best Buy. Incidentally, he also has 6 months' worth of bills left on MSN service that he wants to get rid of so he can switch to cable modem service. He has seen Best Buy selling copies of Mandrake and Red Hat linux, but is uneasy about getting them - nobody told him that you don't have to uninstall Windows to try linux. He's never read that on the box, because the copies of linux are miles (4 aisles, at least!) away from the shoot-em-up games.
So Joe Sixpack will still use XP. Microsoft will get Dell and Compaq and eMachines to package it with all new computers they make, because Microsoft can. Joe Sixpack will stick to Windows, because he is afraid of linux, and because he has never even heard of BSD, AtheOS, or BeOS. And frankly, none of them meet his needs, anyway - what home user wants an OS without ATAPI support, or a very hardcore Unix? Or an OS that is no longer even being made or supported? Nope, Windows is still the only option for the desktop, and if people go anywhere, they will go to Apple - which is why I evangelize Apple rather than Linux even though I am a linux nerd.
I'm not so sure that's a good thing. . .
IANAL, but to me, it would seem that it would make it illegal to have employees sign non-disclosure agreements which, though they have been used for purposes I don't like (think: 80586 & probe mode), I can also see where it may be useful. If companies can't keep their employees from releasing trade secrets, they might be less inclined to develop new technologies. Same for other contracts ensuring peoples' privacy.
Re:Broad band Shmodband!
on
Working Nerve Chip
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The idea of connecting my brain to the net is fascinating, but I can't imagine it being a usable technology within my lifetime. We still don't really have much skill with artifical neural networks, let alone the knowledge it would take to figure out how to get abstract information into a human brain. . .
In the near future, I see this technology as being more usable in fields related to bionics; I don't know a whole lot about the capabilites we could get from a microchip being linked directly to neurons, but I can imagine that it would provide a person much greater control of artifical limbs, and help a lot with artificial sensory organs. We have a rudimentary understanding of how the visual cortex works, so regrettably I have a feeling that the first widescale applications of this technology will be in attempts to link digital cameras to the brains of blind people or the like.
Even when we finally figure out how to get abstract ideas into peoples' heads, I imagine something much greater than the Net - I am thinking of a system where all the knowledge of the world is available to a person in a similar way to that of their long-term memory, so that if I wanted to "remember" how to use some obscure API call or somesuch, a hundred years in the future, all I would have to do is think about it, and the chip would link into a network of somesuch and pump the knowledge straight into my brain, as if I had always known what it is I was trying to find out.
I have seen the prices. And I went, "ouch!" for a while, too, until someone pointed something out to me that makes the price seem just fine to me - longeivity.
Ya see, I work for the computer center at a college. We provide the students and faculty with both PC's and Macs to use. About two years ago, all the PC's were upgraded to Pentium 3 500's and now we have quite a few 700's, too. At the same time, the school is still using quite a few poewermac 7100's in addition to all the various and sundry iThis and iThat. I was bitching about the age of the mac hardware one day when someone pointed out to me the reason/why/ we still have so many old macs -- they don't need to be upgraded yet!
Yup, kids. While all the PC's of the same age had either become hopelessly obsolete for their tasks or had simply broken down beyond the point of it being worth it to fix them, the Powermacs were still chugging along, getting a memory or hard drive upgrade here or there.
To me, this makes owning a Mac cheaper - yeah, it costs more in the short run, but since I don't need to do any major upgrades as often, I'm happy paying the (slightly, when you consider price/performance in the equation) higher initial cost, because I'm convinced I'm really not throwing away my money because I know the machine won't poop out on me the way my 486 and my Pentium did.
But who ever checks the Windows Update page?
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
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· Score: 1
I do. My mom doesn't know it exists. My dad is pretty sure it's just a myth. My older brother does. My little brother doesn't. My professors got frustrated with the.005k/sec download rates and don't even bother. The head of my school's computer center couldn't be bothered to. My other roommate does. My neighbour couldn't figure out how to work the damn thing.
Common strain among all of us who do? We're *NOT* in Microsoft's target market for XP, and are the kinds of people who are still using Win95 if we can get away with it, and paid for the triple-digit-price-tag-driver-update that Win98 is if we happened to have a use for USB.
Whatever anyone thinks morally about WinXP including java support, I see this more as an issue of getting "iMacs have no floppy drives" style bad press (albeit in a much smaller form). I have a feeling lots of people who end up using XP at work will notice their stock tickers and AIM QuickBuddy and all that don't work when they are using Windows XP and from that alone will by wary of making the upgrade.
Again, there is a difference between 4WD and AWD. My vehicle is both 4WD and AWD. 99.9% of the time that I am driving it, the differential is not locked, allowing the wheels to spin at different speeds (and thus keeping me from breaking my car when I turn). This is known as all wheel drive. The other.1% of the time, I can lock the differential, forcing all four wheels to spin at the same speed, which proves good for getting through mud or pulling cars out of ditches in the winter or other such jobs. Then, the car is in four wheel drive.
Read the article, kids
on
Got Tracks?
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· Score: 1
They are designed so that you can take them off for normal use and put them on only when you need them. . . apparently the changeover takes 30 minutes. (I'm guessing they just bolt onto the wheel the same way a normal tire rim does)
What I want to know is, they are built for 4x4 vehicles. . . how do you steer a truck with these things without trashing your differential if you're on something that would provide too much traction, say, grass.
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Ye gods, the view Linux users have about their OS in relation to everyone else's OS reminds me immensely of the way some Java programmers feel about Java. "Sure, it does xxx shittily because it was never meant to do that and should never be used to do that, but hey, I'm going to use it to do that anyway because it's Linux and Linux is Perfect."
my laptop actually uses less power when running linux because I could tweak the APM settings to handle the system much more efficiently.. . . on my laptop the interface was s dumbed down (even in the BIOS) that the only two options were full-power and system-throttled-so-low-they-even-clock-the-proces sor-down-to-100-mhz.
My understanding is that a negative index of refraction is a property of materials that would result not from the light speeding up, per se, but instead by a wave traveling in the opposite direction and modifying the properties of the original wave - one of the results of a negative index of refraction is that the Doppler Effect will be reversed.
Index of refraction is not a function of density - there is a correlation between the two, in that denser objects do tend to have higher indices of refraction, but that doesn't mean you can measure one based on the other.
& if I were to go to any site of this kind using an SAP, it'd probably be/. With it's simple mode for people who use lynx or have low bandwidth, it is very screen access program friendly.
I don't know about you, but if I saw that happening, I'd go and grab the source, remove all the advertisements, and redistribute it. Even if it were stuff for other OSS projects, I'd probably still do it just because adverts are annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. . . I don't think that Apple should get the right to defend things that way. If they win in court, I can see there being no end to the lawsuits that could be made. M$ suing the KDE and Gnome teams, everyone suing Be, Jeep (or whoever made the first SUV) suing everyone. . . a huge pile of inane lawsuits of tenuous substance that should never have existed in the first place.
I wasn't trying to defend Apple, I was just speculating as to why they are acting the way they are.
If you look on TV, you'll notice that everything about an Apple computer is easily recognizable. Apple's computer designs are one big marketing ploy, turning the owner him/herself into an advertisement. Much like Abercrombie&Fitch t-shirts.
If you see a PC across the room, you barely notice it. If you see a Mac across a room, you notice. Nothing else looks like an iMac, a G3/G4 tower, an iBook, etc. Apple wants to be visible, and that makes sense.
The same goes for Aqua. Aqua looks like nothing else - and Apple wants to keep it that way. If Aqua themes became popular, then screenshots from Apple computers would not stand out as much - and therefore, Apple would not burn itself into peoples heads nearly as clearly.
I like my control key. It does me wonders. Except when I'm trying to play Quake.
Eh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner. I know that I have been planning on moving to a country where I am allowed to distribute OpenBSD to other countries as soon as I'm on my own.
I doubt it.
At my school, we made a script that watches for students with computers infected by nimda and sends them an e-mail threatening to shut them off the network unless they either clear the virus off their computer or call the helpdesk so we can clear it off. . . kids would still not phone in until they were shut off long enough to figure out that all the pr0n went away. .
I admit, I have my prejudices, but I still don't think much more highly of point-and-click admins than I do the average student computer user.
I realize that, using chords, you can get more functions into one hand without forcing the user to look at the keyboard than you can with a standard keyboard. . . but you can still do it with a QWERTY (or similar style of keyboard, regardless of key layout) keyboard. I use Blender, and they did a good job of making sure all the hotkeys were within easy reach of my left hand's fingertips. If people were willing to use hotkeys optimized for position rather than mnemonic(sp) value, we could get the best of both worlds.
I don't know much about how this bill would be interpreted were it to come to law, but it seems to me that making security bugs known to the general public could be construed as giving advice to a hacker since, well, it alerts the general public to security problems.
Big thing you forgot: Joe Sixpack doesn't choose what OS he runs. He is probably only dimly aware that there is one other choice (linux), and he is uneasy about the Penguin, because the people he knows who run linux are his console jockey friends who always succeed in making him feel inferior by fixing his computer from the DOS prompt, a creature which he is terrified of.
Joe Sixpack got his computer with Windows pre-installed. That was the only option he had, because he bought his computer at Best Buy. Incidentally, he also has 6 months' worth of bills left on MSN service that he wants to get rid of so he can switch to cable modem service. He has seen Best Buy selling copies of Mandrake and Red Hat linux, but is uneasy about getting them - nobody told him that you don't have to uninstall Windows to try linux. He's never read that on the box, because the copies of linux are miles (4 aisles, at least!) away from the shoot-em-up games.
So Joe Sixpack will still use XP. Microsoft will get Dell and Compaq and eMachines to package it with all new computers they make, because Microsoft can. Joe Sixpack will stick to Windows, because he is afraid of linux, and because he has never even heard of BSD, AtheOS, or BeOS. And frankly, none of them meet his needs, anyway - what home user wants an OS without ATAPI support, or a very hardcore Unix? Or an OS that is no longer even being made or supported? Nope, Windows is still the only option for the desktop, and if people go anywhere, they will go to Apple - which is why I evangelize Apple rather than Linux even though I am a linux nerd.
I'm not so sure that's a good thing. . .
IANAL, but to me, it would seem that it would make it illegal to have employees sign non-disclosure agreements which, though they have been used for purposes I don't like (think: 80586 & probe mode), I can also see where it may be useful. If companies can't keep their employees from releasing trade secrets, they might be less inclined to develop new technologies. Same for other contracts ensuring peoples' privacy.
The idea of connecting my brain to the net is fascinating, but I can't imagine it being a usable technology within my lifetime. We still don't really have much skill with artifical neural networks, let alone the knowledge it would take to figure out how to get abstract information into a human brain. . .
In the near future, I see this technology as being more usable in fields related to bionics; I don't know a whole lot about the capabilites we could get from a microchip being linked directly to neurons, but I can imagine that it would provide a person much greater control of artifical limbs, and help a lot with artificial sensory organs. We have a rudimentary understanding of how the visual cortex works, so regrettably I have a feeling that the first widescale applications of this technology will be in attempts to link digital cameras to the brains of blind people or the like.
Even when we finally figure out how to get abstract ideas into peoples' heads, I imagine something much greater than the Net - I am thinking of a system where all the knowledge of the world is available to a person in a similar way to that of their long-term memory, so that if I wanted to "remember" how to use some obscure API call or somesuch, a hundred years in the future, all I would have to do is think about it, and the chip would link into a network of somesuch and pump the knowledge straight into my brain, as if I had always known what it is I was trying to find out.
I have seen the prices. And I went, "ouch!" for a while, too, until someone pointed something out to me that makes the price seem just fine to me - longeivity.
/why/ we still have so many old macs -- they don't need to be upgraded yet!
Ya see, I work for the computer center at a college. We provide the students and faculty with both PC's and Macs to use. About two years ago, all the PC's were upgraded to Pentium 3 500's and now we have quite a few 700's, too. At the same time, the school is still using quite a few poewermac 7100's in addition to all the various and sundry iThis and iThat. I was bitching about the age of the mac hardware one day when someone pointed out to me the reason
Yup, kids. While all the PC's of the same age had either become hopelessly obsolete for their tasks or had simply broken down beyond the point of it being worth it to fix them, the Powermacs were still chugging along, getting a memory or hard drive upgrade here or there.
To me, this makes owning a Mac cheaper - yeah, it costs more in the short run, but since I don't need to do any major upgrades as often, I'm happy paying the (slightly, when you consider price/performance in the equation) higher initial cost, because I'm convinced I'm really not throwing away my money because I know the machine won't poop out on me the way my 486 and my Pentium did.
I do. My mom doesn't know it exists. My dad is pretty sure it's just a myth. My older brother does. My little brother doesn't. My professors got frustrated with the .005k/sec download rates and don't even bother. The head of my school's computer center couldn't be bothered to. My other roommate does. My neighbour couldn't figure out how to work the damn thing.
Common strain among all of us who do? We're *NOT* in Microsoft's target market for XP, and are the kinds of people who are still using Win95 if we can get away with it, and paid for the triple-digit-price-tag-driver-update that Win98 is if we happened to have a use for USB.
Whatever anyone thinks morally about WinXP including java support, I see this more as an issue of getting "iMacs have no floppy drives" style bad press (albeit in a much smaller form). I have a feeling lots of people who end up using XP at work will notice their stock tickers and AIM QuickBuddy and all that don't work when they are using Windows XP and from that alone will by wary of making the upgrade.
We aim all sorts of games at you by giving them female characters! Just look at the Tomb Raider games!
Again, there is a difference between 4WD and AWD. My vehicle is both 4WD and AWD. 99.9% of the time that I am driving it, the differential is not locked, allowing the wheels to spin at different speeds (and thus keeping me from breaking my car when I turn). This is known as all wheel drive. The other .1% of the time, I can lock the differential, forcing all four wheels to spin at the same speed, which proves good for getting through mud or pulling cars out of ditches in the winter or other such jobs. Then, the car is in four wheel drive.
They are designed so that you can take them off for normal use and put them on only when you need them. . . apparently the changeover takes 30 minutes. (I'm guessing they just bolt onto the wheel the same way a normal tire rim does) What I want to know is, they are built for 4x4 vehicles. . . how do you steer a truck with these things without trashing your differential if you're on something that would provide too much traction, say, grass.
Repeat after me
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Linux is not the solution to everyone's problems.
Ye gods, the view Linux users have about their OS in relation to everyone else's OS reminds me immensely of the way some Java programmers feel about Java. "Sure, it does xxx shittily because it was never meant to do that and should never be used to do that, but hey, I'm going to use it to do that anyway because it's Linux and Linux is Perfect."
my laptop actually uses less power when running linux because I could tweak the APM settings to handle the system much more efficiently.. . . on my laptop the interface was s dumbed down (even in the BIOS) that the only two options were full-power and system-throttled-so-low-they-even-clock-the-proces sor-down-to-100-mhz.
My understanding is that a negative index of refraction is a property of materials that would result not from the light speeding up, per se, but instead by a wave traveling in the opposite direction and modifying the properties of the original wave - one of the results of a negative index of refraction is that the Doppler Effect will be reversed.
Index of refraction is not a function of density - there is a correlation between the two, in that denser objects do tend to have higher indices of refraction, but that doesn't mean you can measure one based on the other.
What a snazzy combination! I've NEVER seen all those great features in a sub-$1000 computer before!
& if I were to go to any site of this kind using an SAP, it'd probably be /. With it's simple mode for people who use lynx or have low bandwidth, it is very screen access program friendly.
Well, except for cmdrtaco's typos. . .
when comes the famous flip-flop?
Oh, probably about the same time Mir's fate gets decided.
I don't know about you, but if I saw that happening, I'd go and grab the source, remove all the advertisements, and redistribute it. Even if it were stuff for other OSS projects, I'd probably still do it just because adverts are annoying.
The answer's in the story, kids.
Since we are a small non-commercial free software project (core team of 5 members, and a few other developers), we cannot get a trademark.
Considering people who use their surnames as domain names have ended up in lawsuits with firms of the same name, I doubt it'd be good for anything.