Anybody want to make a list of all the sites that announced that Darwin was now "closed source" because of the delay in releasing xnu source for Intel?
Any of those sites now care to print a retraction, and admit they actually had no solid information whatsoever, that they were building their stories up from the fact of this delay plus rampant speculation?
For a few weeks there it seemed every tech site on the planet was decrying how Apple had abandoned Open Source, was not giving anything back, was closing the kernel, and how this was going to negatively impact Apple's customers and benefit Linux on the desktop.
And now, at Apple's own developer conference (of all places) they release that source code. Isn't anyone pointing that out to the sites who said it wasn't going to happen? Or are they already claiming that the only reason Apple did it was because of their articles?
Fermi's Paradox only asks why, if life is so common, no proof has yet been found.
Perhaps no proof will ever be found in the entire life cycle of our solar system, but the absence of such proof is not proof that life exists nowhere else.
The real "hard truth" here is that it's likely that even if such life exists, we will likely never contact or know of it in any way.
I'm watching the original series now with my 20something wife, who had never seen them before now.
All she wanted to know is, given the advances in technology, why can't anybody make a TV series as good as that now?
I don't think I follow.
The rights of the school, acting in loco parentis, do not exceed the parents. Neither do they have to in order to search a telephone on a student's person, unless you are saying that even the parents do not have that right.
If what you are suggesting is that the school should not or cannot exercise their rights for such activity when acting in loco parentis if the parent has expressly objected to it, then I think the school's answer would be quite simple: either parental permission for such searches is to be given or the student is not allowed to bring the phone on school grounds.
While I can imagine perhaps the potential embarassment caused to child and parent as a result of such a search, I have difficulty imagining how such a search, or permission for such a search, would interfere with your reasons for giving the child a telephone.
I would not go so far as to suggest that students who are doing nothing wrong fear nothing from such a search, I would go so far as to say it would be typical of most parents to believe that their child would not be engaged in any improper behavior, evidence of which might appear on a telephone given to them for reasons of safety. Yet this is demonstrably not true, or else all school children would be impeccably well-behaved, and doubtless the school would not bother wasting time and administrative resources searching student cell phones.
Then let's be clear about this: the purchase of Bungie by Microsoft and the subsequent shift of the Halo franchise from a cross-platform title by a well-known and well-respected Mac game developer to the must-have title for the Xbox and a subsequent mediocre Mac/PC port years later all but killed any chance of an Apple-sponsored renaissance in gaming on the Mac platform.
Because Apple won't pay for product placement.
If a studio that is producing a TV show or movie wants to take product placement fees from other companies, but puts Macs in the shot without Apple paying, then they are ripping off their product placement clients.
In other words, when you see an obscured Apple logo, you know that any other logo you see in that show or film is product placement, and that those companies paid-- but Apple didn't, as they say they do not.
When you see the Apple logo, it means whomever put it there wanted it there whether Apple paid or not, and most likely they aren't trying to get product placement fees from Apple or anyone else.
Those aren't headlines. Those are section headers. Headlines are the titles of individual articles, not whole pages or sections.
All this means is lifestyle editors have one less outlet for creative expression when doing a redesign, and in return the newspaper becomes marginally more comprehensible, especially for people who don't read it on a regular basis, ie, users who find it through search engines because of interest in a topic rather than an interest in a region, which is what local newspapers are organized by.
Big deal.
Short of inventing a new kind of application, I'm not sure what you could be expecting.
Apple already has a nice collection of apps. Let's take a look, shall we?
iPhoto. A decent, easy-to-use photo collector and editor. Organizes well and has built-in functions for ordering calendars, books, and other things. One can argue that FastStone and Picasa are just as good, but that's largely a question of preference.
iTunes. The world's largest legal online music store, made expressly to support the world's single most popular series of hardware MP3 players (which now also support photos and videos, at least the models that have a color screen, that is). Also cleanly designed and easy to use, it runs on OS X or Windows and is free for either platform.
iMovie. For my money, hands-down better than the closest comparable product, which is Windows Movie Maker.
iDVD. An excellent complement for iMovie, a great, easy-to-use apps that puts authoring DVDs within the reach of your grandmother.
GarageBand. Endless toys for playing with audio; great for tinkering, podcasts, or for getting your feet wet with digital audio before moving on to more professional tools.
Many of these programs are also well integrated with one another; you are offered simple ways of using audio from iTunes and video from iMovie and pictures from iPhoto when using iDVD to author a DVD with interactive menus, slideshows, the works.
What's more, when you buy a new Mac you get all of these programs for free, and updates (usually yearly) cost less than $100 bucks for the programs that you have to buy.
When you combine that with all the other apps you can easily find for other common tasks, such as Safari, Firefox, Opera or Camino for web browsing, Apple's own free Mail client or alternatives such as Eudora or Entourage, Microsoft Office or Open Office or even Apple's own new iWork suite that includes the PowerPoint competitor, Keynote, and the new Pages program that straddles the line between word processor and page layout, other than gaming there are really few things an average person needs a computer for where there aren't at least one or two options on the Mac that are as good or better than their Windows equivalents. Outside of gaming, the stuff that doesn't exist or can't be found is usually fairly niche stuff.
Short of giving its owner a blowjob or making a cup of coffee, I have difficulty imagining what kind of "killer app" would absolutely compel users to migrate to a Mac. Perhaps that is simply my lack of imagination. However, I tend to think that for the vast majority of users, computers running OS X or computers running Windows tend to perform the tasks required of them with nearly equal facility. It can perhaps be said that Windows computers, for various reasons, require more attention in certain areas, namely in terms of applying patches in a timely manner to prevent virus infections and other intrusions.
There are those, like myself, who find that what makes up the difference is that the experience of using Mac OS X to perform those tasks is logically satisfying, even pleasurable, in a way that we don't find using Windows and that even those who voluntarily (or compulsorily) use Windows don't find it to be.
Boot Camp simply offers users the choice to use either system at the time of their choice on the same hardware. Since Apple makes its money off its hardware, even if the software is the primary incentive for purchase, this is still a good move for Apple. The real obstacle to Apple increasing its marketshare at this juncture is not Microsoft. It is other PC makers.
Apple makes its money from selling hardware, not from licensing software. That makes them a software company.
Apple is making positive steps towards allowing the product of a direct competitor in the OS business (Microsoft) to run on their hardware, while taking positive steps towards prohibiting their own operating system from running on the products of direct competitors in the hardware business.
This not only underscores that Apple is a hardware company, but that they know it, and intend to continue being a hardware company. If they did not, they would shed the expensive R&D they do on hardware designs, remove any code preventing OS X from running on non-Mac hardware, and instead put in place copy protection so that installing OS X requires a license code. Right now, there is no license code needed to install OS X. They don't have to have one, because until OS X for Intel was released, OS X would only run on Apple hardware.
While they do sell software upgrades, there was absolutely no technical methods in place for enforcing upgrade pricing. Since those users were already Apple customer, there was no compelling reason to do so.
Apple may still yet change direction in this way, but I doubt they will do so at all, and if they do, it will have to be when OS X has a much larger market share than it does now. Fees for software licensing cannot possibly replace Apple's historically fat hardware profit margins without assuming an increase of five to ten times OS X's market share.
Having said that, although you underpinned it with the wrong reason, I think your conclusion is correct. People do buy Apple computers for the hardware. They are generally well made and stylish, regardless of the OS it runs.
That Intel-based Macs can now run Windows XP as well is an incentive to switchers who will have XP to fall back on if and when they need to. Should either Apple or Microsoft offer official support for such use, I think we could easily see large increases in Apple's marketshare. The MacBook Pro is a world-class laptop, and compares favorably to other high-end laptops such as those made by Sony. You might very well see executives toting MacBooks even though they run Windows XP all the time. And if Apple already has their money, who cares if they run OS X or not? They could, and perhaps one day they will.
I see the real advantage of Boot Camp being for users of laptops. For nearly anyone else, a cheap PC is a reasonable alternative to dual booting, emulation, or virtualization.
Someone who has opted for a laptop computer obviously has put a premium on size, weight, and mobility. Dual booting, emulation, or virtualization are all preferable in this case to a second computer. I can't think of too many people who want to carry around two laptops. I certainly don't.
Dual Booting is the most straightforward way to address this. When booted into the alternate OS, the machine should behave as much as possible like a real PC would. Which is no surprise, since with the exception of the BIOS/EFI issue, it is a PC; a well-made, stylish and attractive PC built by Apple, a company with consistently high consumer satisfaction ratings.
From the perspective of Apple pursuing not only a hardware sales marketshare agenda but also an OS useage marketshare agenda, I think that virtualization is the eventual goal. Although probably more resource-intensive, it removes the inconvenience of rebooting, and firmly positions customers as users of OS X. They might run Windows in a window, or even Windows apps in a window, but they'd be using OS X to do it. Dual booting is just a way of weaning Mac switchers off it.
Think of Boot Camp as methodone for Windows users.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that if this company is sophisticated enough to have a non-compete agreement in place, there's probably an agreement in place that covers what you should and should not have on a company laptop.
You say that if they can't prove violation of the non-compete then hte data is his to do with what he pleases. This is almost certainly not so. I'd be willing to bet that ANYTHING on that company computer is company property. The company has a right to look at any of it at any time, and the individual's use of the computer is tactit agreement to that policy.
Therefore, if he has deleted ANYTHING the company wants to see he is likely in violation of the company's data policy.
If any data recovered was unrelated to his work, he's again violated the company's data policy.
If any data recovered was related to a private business he was running using company property, then he's in violation of the company's data policy AND his non-compete agreement.
If it's company hardware then everything on it is uncontestedly their data. They don't need to prove it.
Taipei 101 is a building. A skyscraper. A structure in which there are offices and places of business.
The CN tower is a tower; a radio mast with an elevator, a stairway, and an observation deck.
I won't even get into the arguments about the real height of buildings that have spires compared with those that don't.
Then it would need to be "spoofs", at least in American English, since "Star Trek" would be considered a collective singular noun.
In British English, if the rule for referring to collective nouns as plural even when the word itself seems singular, such as in the names of sporting teams, applies in this case, then I suppose the line could be misconstrued as you mention.
Even in formal English it is possible to have an 'understood' form of the verb 'to be' in a sentence. In journalism, while copy and desk editors are usually exhorted to have active verbs in headlines whenever possible, sometimes using a weak, passive verb such as a form of 'to be' is unavoidable, and in those circumstances, many simply opt to use an understood form of it. This is more common in narrow columns of newspaper text where headline space is at a premium, but obviously some people have just gotten used to writing heds this way and have carried those habits over to other media, or have gotten so used to seeing newspaper headlines written that way that they have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, to emulate it.
Lighten up. It's entirely correct and quite a common practice.
I think it has to do with simplicity.
The iPod started out as an elegantly designed single-purpose device that was stylish as well as functional. It became popular to the point of indispensability. It was easy to figure out how to use, because it only did one thing: play music.
Gradually, to continue to provide reasons to buy new models and to differentiate itself from the competition, it added features: Contacts, calendar, photos, movies.
This is in contrast to many other MP3 players that were on the market even before the iPod that had more storage and features at the same price point, but were not as easy to use or as pleasing to the eye. I'm thinking of the old Diamond Rio I used to own, as well as most of the devices by Archos and their ilk. They worried about how the list of features would look on the spec sheet and whether that seemed to justify the price point.
I think the same is true in the PDA and PDA/phone market. I've always been unable to explain the popularity of the Blackberry. I've never owned one, having started out with Palm devices in the late 90s, moving up through the Treo 650 I have now, which is much as you describe your PocketPC. It's a phone, an organizer, it has thousands of third party software packages, can read and edit Microsoft Word documents, can play music and video, and can access the Internet.
When the Blackberry came out, all it did was store addresses and send text messages. Slowly they added other features, just like Palm started out with a simple organizer and then added features to become what it is.
I'm not arguing that the level of popularity, success, or quality is even among these three devices, just that the approach was the same, in contrast to PocketPC, which came right out of the starting gate advertising a laundry list of capabilities, attempting to out-feature Palm devices to death. That might finally be working now, but still, these are complex devices that do lots of things fairly well, as compared to the iPod, which does a few things very well.
The other thing I always wondered about was storage. Today's 30Gb iPod with video isn't much different in form factor than my Treo 650. But all the iPod does is play music and video, and a few other things.
My Treo, on the other hand, has a lot more features, but much less storage. I've often wondered what is it about the market that hard drives came so quickly to music players and so slowly to organizers-- even when those phones and organizers now tout music and video capabilities, but shackle you to a couple of gigabytes of storage, maximum, through various card slots.
At the moment the LifeDrive is the only exception I can think of, and it isn't interesting to me because it isn't a phone. I'm waiting for a good organizer/phone/media player that has a HD for storage, but I'm betting it's going to be awhile longer.
If you can't sell it or release it, in what possible way can you be said to own it?
Sounds to me like you have a license to use this code in your own projects, so long as such use does not involve sale or release.
Vonage doesn't allow direct calls?
You think they route calls between Vonage users through the PSTN, so they can pay the telco for traffic between their own customers?
What I think you mean to say is that you can't call, say, a Skype user using their Skype ID.
But then again, you can't Skype to a Vonage phone except through the PSTN either. There are lots of SIP clients that are connected to other networks, and even though the clients themselves are interoperable the networks aren't. For instance, I don't think you'll be able to Google Talk to a Skype user directly for free.
This is especially true of clients like Skype that allow free direct IP connections. The free service is an incentive to get you signed up on their network, and hopefully for some value-added services like for-pay PSTN connectivity.
If the same thing happens to SIP that has happened to IM-- that now there are free, open-source multiprotocal clients, that allow free communication amongst various networks, with the only one making any profit out of it the ISP you pay for your traffic-- I think we'll see SIP network operators like Vonage as well as developers like Skype do what AIM, ICQ and MSN have tried to do in the past-- block "unofficial" clients.
This, to me, is what is interesting about Google Talk. I'm interested to see if their attempts at "federating" apply just to IM, or whether they intend to try and to that for SIP as well.
I assume they will have to become at least as good if not better. Right now, OS X has no copy protection to speak of-- not even a registration code.
Up until now, there's been no incentive for Apple to have any; anyone who can use a copy of OS X by definition owns a Mac and therefore is already a client. All Apple is losing if you pirate new copies of OS X is your upgrade purchase, which is not nearly as significant as Apple's margin on hardware.
However, I think at least to keep the majority of vanilla PC users who might otherwise have switched to an x86 Mac from using a hacked copy, Apple will have to put in some rudimentary protection schemes.
I think they'll benefit from the positive buzz surrounding the hobbyists that make OS X work on white box PCs and like what they see, but as long as the process is not too easy, it won't cost Apple hardware sales.
Despite recent advances, I don't think the market for 'counterfeit' OS copies for OS X is large enough to warrant the entry of serious counterfeiters, like the ones in Russia, China, and many other places that produce packages that look quite a bit like legitimate copies of Windows and sell them with a nod and a wink at rock-bottom prices.
I actually did see copies of OS X like that in Moscow back in 2001, but not since then.
I've spent a good amount of time this week trying to talk to end-users about this issue, and found there's a lot of background to fill in so people understand why they should care about this. Once you get through that, most have wanted to do something to at least prevent themselves from being affected. But it's a lot of work explaining the background over and over again. In some cases, to people who should know better, including CEOs of medium sized telcos.
What I did do is put up a really short explanation of the problem and of three recourses-- the petition, the ISC patch for BIND, and reconfiguring a PC for using OpenNIC DNS servers. I'm open to revising and/or expanding it if people can provide more information that I've left out, although I've tried to keep it short.
The item is here:
What Is SiteFinder, And Why Should I Care?
I did this primarily for my own clients, but it may be of use to others. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody want to make a list of all the sites that announced that Darwin was now "closed source" because of the delay in releasing xnu source for Intel?
Any of those sites now care to print a retraction, and admit they actually had no solid information whatsoever, that they were building their stories up from the fact of this delay plus rampant speculation?
For a few weeks there it seemed every tech site on the planet was decrying how Apple had abandoned Open Source, was not giving anything back, was closing the kernel, and how this was going to negatively impact Apple's customers and benefit Linux on the desktop.
And now, at Apple's own developer conference (of all places) they release that source code. Isn't anyone pointing that out to the sites who said it wasn't going to happen? Or are they already claiming that the only reason Apple did it was because of their articles?
... is not evidence of absence.
Fermi's Paradox only asks why, if life is so common, no proof has yet been found.
Perhaps no proof will ever be found in the entire life cycle of our solar system, but the absence of such proof is not proof that life exists nowhere else.
The real "hard truth" here is that it's likely that even if such life exists, we will likely never contact or know of it in any way.
I'm watching the original series now with my 20something wife, who had never seen them before now. All she wanted to know is, given the advances in technology, why can't anybody make a TV series as good as that now?
I don't think I follow. The rights of the school, acting in loco parentis, do not exceed the parents. Neither do they have to in order to search a telephone on a student's person, unless you are saying that even the parents do not have that right. If what you are suggesting is that the school should not or cannot exercise their rights for such activity when acting in loco parentis if the parent has expressly objected to it, then I think the school's answer would be quite simple: either parental permission for such searches is to be given or the student is not allowed to bring the phone on school grounds. While I can imagine perhaps the potential embarassment caused to child and parent as a result of such a search, I have difficulty imagining how such a search, or permission for such a search, would interfere with your reasons for giving the child a telephone. I would not go so far as to suggest that students who are doing nothing wrong fear nothing from such a search, I would go so far as to say it would be typical of most parents to believe that their child would not be engaged in any improper behavior, evidence of which might appear on a telephone given to them for reasons of safety. Yet this is demonstrably not true, or else all school children would be impeccably well-behaved, and doubtless the school would not bother wasting time and administrative resources searching student cell phones.
Then let's be clear about this: the purchase of Bungie by Microsoft and the subsequent shift of the Halo franchise from a cross-platform title by a well-known and well-respected Mac game developer to the must-have title for the Xbox and a subsequent mediocre Mac/PC port years later all but killed any chance of an Apple-sponsored renaissance in gaming on the Mac platform.
Because Apple won't pay for product placement. If a studio that is producing a TV show or movie wants to take product placement fees from other companies, but puts Macs in the shot without Apple paying, then they are ripping off their product placement clients. In other words, when you see an obscured Apple logo, you know that any other logo you see in that show or film is product placement, and that those companies paid-- but Apple didn't, as they say they do not. When you see the Apple logo, it means whomever put it there wanted it there whether Apple paid or not, and most likely they aren't trying to get product placement fees from Apple or anyone else.
Those aren't headlines. Those are section headers. Headlines are the titles of individual articles, not whole pages or sections. All this means is lifestyle editors have one less outlet for creative expression when doing a redesign, and in return the newspaper becomes marginally more comprehensible, especially for people who don't read it on a regular basis, ie, users who find it through search engines because of interest in a topic rather than an interest in a region, which is what local newspapers are organized by. Big deal.
Like what, really?
Short of inventing a new kind of application, I'm not sure what you could be expecting.
Apple already has a nice collection of apps. Let's take a look, shall we?
iPhoto. A decent, easy-to-use photo collector and editor. Organizes well and has built-in functions for ordering calendars, books, and other things. One can argue that FastStone and Picasa are just as good, but that's largely a question of preference.
iTunes. The world's largest legal online music store, made expressly to support the world's single most popular series of hardware MP3 players (which now also support photos and videos, at least the models that have a color screen, that is). Also cleanly designed and easy to use, it runs on OS X or Windows and is free for either platform.
iMovie. For my money, hands-down better than the closest comparable product, which is Windows Movie Maker.
iDVD. An excellent complement for iMovie, a great, easy-to-use apps that puts authoring DVDs within the reach of your grandmother.
GarageBand. Endless toys for playing with audio; great for tinkering, podcasts, or for getting your feet wet with digital audio before moving on to more professional tools.
Many of these programs are also well integrated with one another; you are offered simple ways of using audio from iTunes and video from iMovie and pictures from iPhoto when using iDVD to author a DVD with interactive menus, slideshows, the works.
What's more, when you buy a new Mac you get all of these programs for free, and updates (usually yearly) cost less than $100 bucks for the programs that you have to buy.
When you combine that with all the other apps you can easily find for other common tasks, such as Safari, Firefox, Opera or Camino for web browsing, Apple's own free Mail client or alternatives such as Eudora or Entourage, Microsoft Office or Open Office or even Apple's own new iWork suite that includes the PowerPoint competitor, Keynote, and the new Pages program that straddles the line between word processor and page layout, other than gaming there are really few things an average person needs a computer for where there aren't at least one or two options on the Mac that are as good or better than their Windows equivalents. Outside of gaming, the stuff that doesn't exist or can't be found is usually fairly niche stuff.
Short of giving its owner a blowjob or making a cup of coffee, I have difficulty imagining what kind of "killer app" would absolutely compel users to migrate to a Mac. Perhaps that is simply my lack of imagination. However, I tend to think that for the vast majority of users, computers running OS X or computers running Windows tend to perform the tasks required of them with nearly equal facility. It can perhaps be said that Windows computers, for various reasons, require more attention in certain areas, namely in terms of applying patches in a timely manner to prevent virus infections and other intrusions.
There are those, like myself, who find that what makes up the difference is that the experience of using Mac OS X to perform those tasks is logically satisfying, even pleasurable, in a way that we don't find using Windows and that even those who voluntarily (or compulsorily) use Windows don't find it to be.
Boot Camp simply offers users the choice to use either system at the time of their choice on the same hardware. Since Apple makes its money off its hardware, even if the software is the primary incentive for purchase, this is still a good move for Apple. The real obstacle to Apple increasing its marketshare at this juncture is not Microsoft. It is other PC makers.
Apple makes its money from selling hardware, not from licensing software. That makes them a software company.
Apple is making positive steps towards allowing the product of a direct competitor in the OS business (Microsoft) to run on their hardware, while taking positive steps towards prohibiting their own operating system from running on the products of direct competitors in the hardware business.
This not only underscores that Apple is a hardware company, but that they know it, and intend to continue being a hardware company. If they did not, they would shed the expensive R&D they do on hardware designs, remove any code preventing OS X from running on non-Mac hardware, and instead put in place copy protection so that installing OS X requires a license code. Right now, there is no license code needed to install OS X. They don't have to have one, because until OS X for Intel was released, OS X would only run on Apple hardware.
While they do sell software upgrades, there was absolutely no technical methods in place for enforcing upgrade pricing. Since those users were already Apple customer, there was no compelling reason to do so.
Apple may still yet change direction in this way, but I doubt they will do so at all, and if they do, it will have to be when OS X has a much larger market share than it does now. Fees for software licensing cannot possibly replace Apple's historically fat hardware profit margins without assuming an increase of five to ten times OS X's market share.
Having said that, although you underpinned it with the wrong reason, I think your conclusion is correct. People do buy Apple computers for the hardware. They are generally well made and stylish, regardless of the OS it runs.
That Intel-based Macs can now run Windows XP as well is an incentive to switchers who will have XP to fall back on if and when they need to. Should either Apple or Microsoft offer official support for such use, I think we could easily see large increases in Apple's marketshare. The MacBook Pro is a world-class laptop, and compares favorably to other high-end laptops such as those made by Sony. You might very well see executives toting MacBooks even though they run Windows XP all the time. And if Apple already has their money, who cares if they run OS X or not? They could, and perhaps one day they will.
I see the real advantage of Boot Camp being for users of laptops. For nearly anyone else, a cheap PC is a reasonable alternative to dual booting, emulation, or virtualization.
Someone who has opted for a laptop computer obviously has put a premium on size, weight, and mobility. Dual booting, emulation, or virtualization are all preferable in this case to a second computer. I can't think of too many people who want to carry around two laptops. I certainly don't.
Dual Booting is the most straightforward way to address this. When booted into the alternate OS, the machine should behave as much as possible like a real PC would. Which is no surprise, since with the exception of the BIOS/EFI issue, it is a PC; a well-made, stylish and attractive PC built by Apple, a company with consistently high consumer satisfaction ratings.
From the perspective of Apple pursuing not only a hardware sales marketshare agenda but also an OS useage marketshare agenda, I think that virtualization is the eventual goal. Although probably more resource-intensive, it removes the inconvenience of rebooting, and firmly positions customers as users of OS X. They might run Windows in a window, or even Windows apps in a window, but they'd be using OS X to do it. Dual booting is just a way of weaning Mac switchers off it.
Think of Boot Camp as methodone for Windows users.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that if this company is sophisticated enough to have a non-compete agreement in place, there's probably an agreement in place that covers what you should and should not have on a company laptop. You say that if they can't prove violation of the non-compete then hte data is his to do with what he pleases. This is almost certainly not so. I'd be willing to bet that ANYTHING on that company computer is company property. The company has a right to look at any of it at any time, and the individual's use of the computer is tactit agreement to that policy. Therefore, if he has deleted ANYTHING the company wants to see he is likely in violation of the company's data policy. If any data recovered was unrelated to his work, he's again violated the company's data policy. If any data recovered was related to a private business he was running using company property, then he's in violation of the company's data policy AND his non-compete agreement. If it's company hardware then everything on it is uncontestedly their data. They don't need to prove it.
Actually, since the North Pole is the northernmost point there is, no matter what direction it moves in, it's going south. So it was inevitable.
Taipei 101 is a building. A skyscraper. A structure in which there are offices and places of business. The CN tower is a tower; a radio mast with an elevator, a stairway, and an observation deck. I won't even get into the arguments about the real height of buildings that have spires compared with those that don't.
Then it would need to be "spoofs", at least in American English, since "Star Trek" would be considered a collective singular noun. In British English, if the rule for referring to collective nouns as plural even when the word itself seems singular, such as in the names of sporting teams, applies in this case, then I suppose the line could be misconstrued as you mention.
Even in formal English it is possible to have an 'understood' form of the verb 'to be' in a sentence. In journalism, while copy and desk editors are usually exhorted to have active verbs in headlines whenever possible, sometimes using a weak, passive verb such as a form of 'to be' is unavoidable, and in those circumstances, many simply opt to use an understood form of it. This is more common in narrow columns of newspaper text where headline space is at a premium, but obviously some people have just gotten used to writing heds this way and have carried those habits over to other media, or have gotten so used to seeing newspaper headlines written that way that they have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, to emulate it. Lighten up. It's entirely correct and quite a common practice.
I think it has to do with simplicity. The iPod started out as an elegantly designed single-purpose device that was stylish as well as functional. It became popular to the point of indispensability. It was easy to figure out how to use, because it only did one thing: play music. Gradually, to continue to provide reasons to buy new models and to differentiate itself from the competition, it added features: Contacts, calendar, photos, movies. This is in contrast to many other MP3 players that were on the market even before the iPod that had more storage and features at the same price point, but were not as easy to use or as pleasing to the eye. I'm thinking of the old Diamond Rio I used to own, as well as most of the devices by Archos and their ilk. They worried about how the list of features would look on the spec sheet and whether that seemed to justify the price point. I think the same is true in the PDA and PDA/phone market. I've always been unable to explain the popularity of the Blackberry. I've never owned one, having started out with Palm devices in the late 90s, moving up through the Treo 650 I have now, which is much as you describe your PocketPC. It's a phone, an organizer, it has thousands of third party software packages, can read and edit Microsoft Word documents, can play music and video, and can access the Internet. When the Blackberry came out, all it did was store addresses and send text messages. Slowly they added other features, just like Palm started out with a simple organizer and then added features to become what it is. I'm not arguing that the level of popularity, success, or quality is even among these three devices, just that the approach was the same, in contrast to PocketPC, which came right out of the starting gate advertising a laundry list of capabilities, attempting to out-feature Palm devices to death. That might finally be working now, but still, these are complex devices that do lots of things fairly well, as compared to the iPod, which does a few things very well. The other thing I always wondered about was storage. Today's 30Gb iPod with video isn't much different in form factor than my Treo 650. But all the iPod does is play music and video, and a few other things. My Treo, on the other hand, has a lot more features, but much less storage. I've often wondered what is it about the market that hard drives came so quickly to music players and so slowly to organizers-- even when those phones and organizers now tout music and video capabilities, but shackle you to a couple of gigabytes of storage, maximum, through various card slots. At the moment the LifeDrive is the only exception I can think of, and it isn't interesting to me because it isn't a phone. I'm waiting for a good organizer/phone/media player that has a HD for storage, but I'm betting it's going to be awhile longer.
If you can't sell it or release it, in what possible way can you be said to own it? Sounds to me like you have a license to use this code in your own projects, so long as such use does not involve sale or release.
Vonage doesn't allow direct calls? You think they route calls between Vonage users through the PSTN, so they can pay the telco for traffic between their own customers? What I think you mean to say is that you can't call, say, a Skype user using their Skype ID. But then again, you can't Skype to a Vonage phone except through the PSTN either. There are lots of SIP clients that are connected to other networks, and even though the clients themselves are interoperable the networks aren't. For instance, I don't think you'll be able to Google Talk to a Skype user directly for free. This is especially true of clients like Skype that allow free direct IP connections. The free service is an incentive to get you signed up on their network, and hopefully for some value-added services like for-pay PSTN connectivity. If the same thing happens to SIP that has happened to IM-- that now there are free, open-source multiprotocal clients, that allow free communication amongst various networks, with the only one making any profit out of it the ISP you pay for your traffic-- I think we'll see SIP network operators like Vonage as well as developers like Skype do what AIM, ICQ and MSN have tried to do in the past-- block "unofficial" clients. This, to me, is what is interesting about Google Talk. I'm interested to see if their attempts at "federating" apply just to IM, or whether they intend to try and to that for SIP as well.
I assume they will have to become at least as good if not better. Right now, OS X has no copy protection to speak of-- not even a registration code.
Up until now, there's been no incentive for Apple to have any; anyone who can use a copy of OS X by definition owns a Mac and therefore is already a client. All Apple is losing if you pirate new copies of OS X is your upgrade purchase, which is not nearly as significant as Apple's margin on hardware.
However, I think at least to keep the majority of vanilla PC users who might otherwise have switched to an x86 Mac from using a hacked copy, Apple will have to put in some rudimentary protection schemes.
I think they'll benefit from the positive buzz surrounding the hobbyists that make OS X work on white box PCs and like what they see, but as long as the process is not too easy, it won't cost Apple hardware sales.
Despite recent advances, I don't think the market for 'counterfeit' OS copies for OS X is large enough to warrant the entry of serious counterfeiters, like the ones in Russia, China, and many other places that produce packages that look quite a bit like legitimate copies of Windows and sell them with a nod and a wink at rock-bottom prices.
I actually did see copies of OS X like that in Moscow back in 2001, but not since then.
I've spent a good amount of time this week trying to talk to end-users about this issue, and found there's a lot of background to fill in so people understand why they should care about this. Once you get through that, most have wanted to do something to at least prevent themselves from being affected. But it's a lot of work explaining the background over and over again. In some cases, to people who should know better, including CEOs of medium sized telcos. What I did do is put up a really short explanation of the problem and of three recourses-- the petition, the ISC patch for BIND, and reconfiguring a PC for using OpenNIC DNS servers. I'm open to revising and/or expanding it if people can provide more information that I've left out, although I've tried to keep it short. The item is here: What Is SiteFinder, And Why Should I Care? I did this primarily for my own clients, but it may be of use to others. YMMV.