"Mac OS X does not stand out as particularly more secure than the competition, according to Secunia."
So, the article says that OS X had 36 advisories last year, compared to 46 for Windows XP Professional. But somehow, the article opens with:
"The Micorsoft Windows application is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined."
I don't see how, given that XP had more exploits than OS X, XP is "more secure than I think". Admittedly, OS X has had more security advisories than normal this year, but they've fixed them in short order. It seems to me that this article is taking a relatively small sample size (2003-2004) and suggesting that the problems during that sample (which were still significantly fewer than XP) are indicative of some long-term problem that we should "beware" of. This is bunk. It's easy to lie with statistics - suggesting that XP is magically "more secure" by counting advisories (which doesn't even support that claim!) is bogus because it doesn't take into consideration the length of time between the exploit being revealed and the patch becoming available nor the exposure to in-the-wild exploits. For instance, how many MS exploits are only fixed after lengthy exposure to real-world exploits (many of which you can probably find on my dad's computer?) Now, how often does the same thing happen on OS X (I can't think of this ever happening, but I won't say "never"). Furthermore, while my anecdotal experiences at a major university may be just that (anecdotal), the constant problems with zombie machines and exploited holes used for adware/malware strongly disputes their claim that XP is "more secure than I ever imagined" - likewise, the rather large Mac contingent at the university has no such problems. Give me a call when panicky mac users start bitching about adware on their computers. Until then, I think it's safe to file this article with all the other "Apple is dying" troll articles that we've seen since the early 1980s.
The quality of education isn't the problem, either. "impoverished nobodys", as you call them, are doing their best to get into American universities - that's the place of choice. I hear people bash the educational system in the US, and I agree that k-12 is pretty pathetic. However, you can't say that our university system is anything less than the best (or among the best) - I don't see people leaving the United States to go overseas for university because the quality is better there. In fact, I see the exact opposite.
Maybe all americans are simply overpaid and we're in for a BIG correction in the coming years?
We've already had the correction. When some schmuck finishing his sophomore year of college made $80,000 for making web pages with Frontpage, that was a bubble that needed correction. We're on the other side of that now - when reasonably skilled programmers out of top-tier universities can't get jobs that pay over $30,000 (and they're lucky to have that). It's obscene to say that someone who gets a four-year degree developing a fairly technical skill deserves to barely gets paid enough to get by and make payments on their university debt. There's something wrong with this picture. Quite honestly, we're crossing the threshhold where going to college may no longer be the financially "best" option out there - trade school and a good apprenticeship in auto repair gets you a more marketable skill that actually pays better, with far less education (and cost thereof.) Again - something is wrong with this picture, and it ain't that programmers are "overpaid".
Hilarious. 128.253.145.99 is apparently the alumni website for cornell. Hmmmm, either this list is just as suspect as the previous accusations, someone's been 0wn3d, or they managed to find speeches or something by professor Usher or Dr. Spears. Way to go, guys!
then the average (read stupid again)
american's think these things are a waste of money.
Look, genius, you can't even figure out how to properly use an apostrophe - you must be one of these stupid people I should be ignoring, right? Because you're misinformed, right?
This is probably a troll, but honestly, there seems to be an increase in "average people are idiots; I took a class or three in physics, so I know what's best for everyone!" attitude around here lately - witness the disussion about the nuclear propelled rocket where claiming "this is all wonderfully safe - people are just ignorant and afraid; they should all listen to me, and forget any concerns you may hear, because they're just idiots" was moderated +5 over and over and over. You are not 3l33t, and not everyone who thinks NASA spending is wasteful is "misinformed" or otherwise stupid. Stop looking down your nose at everyone else, and try listening to the other side once and a while - you could learn something.
In 2001...
We found out FreeBSD scales 3 times better than windows 2000 advanced server.
I find this highly suspect. Even now, FreeBSD-STABLE doesn't scale well at all due to the locking mechanism employed by the kernel. Any and all system calls must obtain a single lock (giant), which means no 2 (or more) processes can use the kernel at once, affecting such "high" level things like IO access all the way down to really subtle low level things like memory mapping and allocation. It's been widely known FreeBSD's MP implementation was (until 5.x... WAY after 2001) simplistic at best.
So, either you believe Microsoft Win2k AS scales 3x worse than a bad MP implementation, or the parent poster meant "scaling" in a nontraditional (hence misleading) way (such as scaling number of threads or processes on a uniprocessor machine), or the parent poster is a troll that fed the masses exactly what they wanted to hear... Take your pick.
BTW, in academia, Microsoft funds all sorts of things that show open-source alternatives are better (though obviously they don't advertise such results - but they don't pull funding, either.) In fact, there's a lab at my university full of machines that all run Linux - and the lab is paid for with Microsoft money. I can believe a company (especially Microsoft) attempted to manipulate results in the manner described, but what the parent describes does not add up.
But it seems to me we should NOT ever underestimate the incredible skills of the men and women that create our wealth and keep our companies running.
Indeed. Give your workers a raise.
It seems to me this is about balance. You say that "life is a bit more complicated" than what the parent made it out to be. The economy has slowed down. Companies are making less money. Employees are getting fired. And executives are making more money? Excuse me? You're right, something must be a hell of a lot more complicated than anyone has made it out to be - or maybe the executives are just overpaid and are exploiting the weak economy and their workers for their own gain. I'm all for turning a profit (hey, gotta pay the bills & keep the power on!) but life would be a tad less disillusioning if, matched with the executive pay raises, we saw worker pay raises or worker benefit raises, rather than cut after cut after cut... all while the threat of global outsourcing looms.
In other words, you want some cheese with that whine, Mr. Executive?
You know, the funny thing is, non-mac users kept telling you all how much MacOS sucked and was behind the times, but mac users would defend it to the death.
I suppose it would be funny, if it were true. (I don't ever remember being told how much MacOS sucked - considering I was the one doing the "MacOS sucks!" complaining during the pre-OS X days.) However, the homogenous community of "mac users" you seem to imply isn't the real picture. You may (or may not) be aware that there generally are 2 (maybe 3) camps here: 1) OS 9 die-hards (the "original" mac zealots who would tell you that cooperative multitasking was plenty good, and macs are awesome - don't you know!) are largely in the background right now - they still proclaim OS 9's goodness, however ("The new finder sucks! OS 9 forever!"), or have converted to the 2) middle ground - the ones who have converted and realize OS X's goodness. However, I think the most vocal mac advocates right now are the 3) people who are new to macs & have chosen them on technical merit *now*. For instance, I wouldn't have dreamed of buying a mac pre-OS X. Now I wouldn't dream of going to a PC. Just as I used to feel about macs (what's the point of blowing cash on an inferior product that doesn't do what I want?), I feel exactly the same about PCs now. Do you really think that all the unix geeks on slashdot who have turned into rabid mac fans were rabid mac fans in the OS 9 days...?
To clarify: MacOS before OS X was pure crap, and there are a whole lot of current mac users out there who feel the same way - and have, since well before OS X. The others are still somehow stuck in Steve Jobs' reality distortion field.
Regarding "booting back into 9" - you're comparing apples (no pun intended) & oranges. Booting back into 9 is a great reminder as to how AWFUL 9 was. I booted my tibook 867 into 9 not long ago to do some disk maintenance. Yeah, 9 is super-fast - as long as you only ever want to do one thing at a time (I'm not talking about disk-only utilities - we're talking anything here) and don't mind the occasional crash. Face it, running 9 on a modern mac is like running Win 3.1 on a p4 with a gig of ram. It sure is speedy without that annoying overhead of real virtual memory or a useful scheduler, right? - thanks, but no thanks. All the speed in the world is useless if it's an insecure, cobbled-together OS that can't multitask without barfing.
Regarding 10.3, I didn't notice a speed increase from 10.2.8. XBench reported increased scores in text scrolling (definitely a plus) but that's about it. The killer feature of 10.3 is definitely expose - worth my $69 (academic), for sure. The new mail client is nice, too.
I picked up a used "broken" rev b. imac (had a dead hard drive) for $20. It's only got 96M as well, and though the jaguar requirement is 128M, it does run (although not with fantastic performance, granted.) I am seriously eyeing panther for her in the hopes that it, with some more RAM, will make it such that mah-jong doesn't give her the spinning beachball of death after she passes level 3.
64-bit, 66 Mhz PCI-X can saturate that link, even with bus arbitration overhead (though the bus itself has to be virtually unused during such activity.) On the exact same system, Linux tops out at about 65% of theoretical maximum - FreeBSD hits the maximum. The point of using such a card is that high-performance NICs (and high-performance network stack code) directly and measurably impact the performance of server applications by wide (+-150%) margins.
I didn't mean to quabble with the point of using Linux for the desktop - it's vastly superior to FreeBSD in that regard. However, the original post suggested that it was somehow bogus to claim that FreeBSD is faster than Gentoo - as with everything, it depends on what you're measuring (and what you care about), and in the domain of things I work on, using Linux isn't really an option because of its relatively crappy network stack. (Relative to FreeBSD, that is.) What's the point of having an uber-expensive box if the network stack code itself is the bottleneck (even on an athlon 2800+)? There are good reasons to use Linux - in some (but not all) respects, speed is not one of them.
Put in a gigabit nic (it had better be a good one - the intel ones are quite good) in your Gentoo box & tell me if you can saturate the link (full duplex) using a bidirectional load - here's a hint: you had better make sure that the loading/receiving box on the other end of this test is FreeBSD, because Linux can't do it.
Yes, Linux is easier to use, and Linux's multiprocessor support is better - I could go on & on about features & performance that Linux provides that FreeBSD doesn't. However, it's fallacious to claim that one is "faster" than the other across the board, though, because it isn't true - FreeBSD's IP stack is far superior, and for some of us, that actually matters more than chatting on gaim, reading email in a gui, or browsing the web.
At 32 nanometers, Intel could put tens of HT pentium cores on a single chip, achieving the same result.
No, they couldn't, because HT pentium cores use way too much power to be packed in at that density. This (and other similar) research is based on using many simple (but fast) low-power cores, usually in an adaptive fashion. (e.g., for one app I use certain processor cores for one portion of processing, for another I use them for something else entirely - and the mapping is usually done explicitly either by the programmer or the compiler.)
All the dynamic scheduling/out-of-order logic that modern processors use consumes massive amounts of power. Current trends in computer architecture are such that an HT pentium (or similar) processor will dissipate more heat per surface area than the surface of the sun (if you follow the roadmap guidelines for projected clock speeds). In other words, it's time to examine new architectures (which is exactly what this and many other projects are doing.)
"allow an attacker to take control of computers running any version of Windows except for Windows ME."
all you people who said i was stupid for running windows me, look who's laughing now!
Well, umm, everybody? Besides, everyone knows the real reason there isn't a risk of anyone taking control of a Windows ME box is because nobody wants to take over a Windows ME box.;) Cheers.
orange-white, orange, green-white, blue, blue-white, green, brown-white, brown. (reading left-to-right on your rj-45, top-up).
Regarding all the wired vs wireless discussion so far, why not both? (After all, I thought networking overkill was the slashdot way...) You can pick up an airport base station for around $100 on ebay, and if you don't need a router, a simple wifi bridge will do the trick - bam, wired (for higher speed) + wireless (for convenience when you feel like sitting in the recliner or out on the patio.)
Re:Perhaps the success of the Apple Music Store ..
on
PressPlay + Roxio?
·
· Score: 1
A big roadblock for Apple's successful creation & deployment of a Windows client is probably hardware support. Making a client capable of browsing, purchasing, and playing music at their store is relatively trivial. The hard part is making sure that the key element to all this (write as many CDs as you like) actually works smoothly. With all the flaky cd writing hardware "supported" under windows, Apple has to do some serious development & testing to make sure they don't get millions of angry emails (and thus negative buzz) from proud Magnetbox or Sorny CDR owners. Deploying on the Mac platform only ensured a positive experience for all users with no, "I downloaded 40 songs and it was really cool, but I can't burn any of them!" anecdotes floating around out there. Nod to apple for taking the time to get this right - unfortunately WMP has a head-start in this (cd writing on windows) arena. Hopefully apple won't take too long getting this thing off the ground.
Look, we can go round & round with this - we just happen to disagree, and that's fine. I understand your argument - sorry you don't seem to understand mine. Anyhow, my point is that you have to perturb the system of information (assuming it exists at all) to copy & spread it. Absolutely no perturbation of an electron is required to make it tend toward its lowest energy level. Hence, no such equilibrium system relationship exists for information, as much as you (or many others) may want it to. The analogy is flawed. C'mon, give it up.;)
The problem with the "information wants to be free" crowd is the same as with religious nuts who go around blowing up buses full of people, shooting abortion doctors, or ordering helicopter strikes of civillian areas of "the enemy." Claiming "see, science says I'm right!" and putting on the blinders to the rest of the world (especially when science says no such thing) just seems foolish to me. Science isn't about zealotry - this argument about information wanting to be free largely is. Again, information doesn't spread & doesn't even exist without people. Hence, this is a people issue - not an information issue.
Information only wants to be as free as I want to make it. This is a glass half empty/glass half full argument and is philosophical, not scientific. Trying to claim it as a scientific argument is a fallacious distraction. You see information as fundamentally free. I claim that information isn't anything (free or otherwise) without its creator - the creator, if they so choose (with no magic DMCA laws or anything like that) can simply withhold it if they want to. The information doesn't "want" to pop out of my head onto the network.
Information does not tend toward freedom in the same manner that physical phenomenon tend toward equilibrium. It takes my active intervention to prevent equilibrium - on the other hand, it takes my active participation to spread (and thus "free") any information. Hence, I can just as easily (by your fallacious 'science' argument) claim that information does not want to be free. Neither of us would be right. It can easily be said that it takes more work to make work free than non-free, since I have to actually do something (create & spread) to make it free, whereas if I write it in my book & don't share it with you, that's a whole lot easier - or if I just keep it to myself in my little brain, that's easier still.
Put another way, which "takes more work": distributing a binary only with super-annoying copy protection licensed from some 3-man development shop (un-free) or distributing a binary with the exact snapshot of the source that binary was created with? Kind of shoots a hole in your argument that "closing" information somehow goes against the fundamental state of information, which requires it to be "free."
BTW, people aren't "stupid" because they don't agree with your "clever" philosophy. Maybe they just disagree - or furthermore you could be *gasp* wrong. Or not. But it's worth consideration.
Information doesn't want anything. It's information.
You may want to use it certain ways, and we can wax philosophical about the pros and cons of free information in an environment of instantaneous global communication. (positive effects, negative effects, what they mean, etc, etc.) However, certainly it can't be said that information wants diddly squat. You can't even say that all creators of information want their information to be free - that certainly isn't the case. It's up to me, as the creator, to decide if I want to "free" information (code, music, hardware specs, etc) that I create or not. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
Furthermore, it's entirely natural for me to want to have some control over the reproduction of my work. It's all about striking the right balance. That's the point of this entire debate. Claiming that there shouldn't even be a debate because you want free information no matter what (and authors who disagree with you are against "natural law") is entirely unreasonable. I see this argument all over slashdot ("information wants to be free"); if someone knocked off your life's work without consulting you & thus stole a fair portion of your livelihood, I think you'd sing a different tune. (However, if on the other hand you choose to release your work freely, more power to you - that's your choice. That's the whole point - choice.)
OSDN should dock Taco and them a week of pay every time they post a dupe...
These guys get paid? I always assumed it was a run-from-my-mom's-basement operation - what else could explain the poor spelling, frequent dupes (god help you if it's +-5 days from April Fool's), and the ho'ing out of the site to Microsoft advertisements?
Yeah... thank god there's no overloading! (hint: this is just an illustration - I know I can use builtin doubles rather than BigDecimal.) Forbidding operator overloading is just silly. To claim that "java is simple - see, no overloading!" while ignoring the pain it causes is equally silly.
Cool your jets there... I think (?) the point that some of us are trying to make is that disks aren't getting faster at anywhere close to the rate that microprocessors are. One fallacy in your argument is that only throughput matters - that's hogwash. If I want throughput only, I can use a network-striped disk array with hundreds of disks with aggregate throughput that will smoke ultra-scsi-48 or whatever it is they're on now. That ain't gonna help the real problem, which is latency on a random seek (oh, believe me, I know that a network storage system will have crappy seek times - that wasn't the comparison I was trying to make.)
Considering that microprocessor operating frequency has improved roughly 500 fold in the time that disk latency has only improved by 20 or so (rough numbers, I know), the microprocessor is leaving the storage in the dust. This latency gap is at all levels of the storage hierarchy - wire delay in memories (and inside microprocessors) is getting so bad that access times (measured in cycles *and* in raw time - thinner wires have greater delay) are getting out of control with respect to the microprocessor. This is a real problem.
I agree that disks have improved... but compared to microprocessors, they're dragging ass. By the way, your argument about increased density helping speed is fallacious - seek time dwarfs (by several orders of magnitude) any benefit of denser storage elements in quasi-random access patterns. And as previously noted, if you want throughput, you can get obscene amounts of it from better (granted, more expensive) architectures. Did you just start examining computer architecture last week, or have you been guessing all this time?;) Man, those gnomes inside your disk really need to get to work!
Slashdot Mirror
So, the article says that OS X had 36 advisories last year, compared to 46 for Windows XP Professional. But somehow, the article opens with:
I don't see how, given that XP had more exploits than OS X, XP is "more secure than I think". Admittedly, OS X has had more security advisories than normal this year, but they've fixed them in short order. It seems to me that this article is taking a relatively small sample size (2003-2004) and suggesting that the problems during that sample (which were still significantly fewer than XP) are indicative of some long-term problem that we should "beware" of. This is bunk. It's easy to lie with statistics - suggesting that XP is magically "more secure" by counting advisories (which doesn't even support that claim!) is bogus because it doesn't take into consideration the length of time between the exploit being revealed and the patch becoming available nor the exposure to in-the-wild exploits. For instance, how many MS exploits are only fixed after lengthy exposure to real-world exploits (many of which you can probably find on my dad's computer?) Now, how often does the same thing happen on OS X (I can't think of this ever happening, but I won't say "never"). Furthermore, while my anecdotal experiences at a major university may be just that (anecdotal), the constant problems with zombie machines and exploited holes used for adware/malware strongly disputes their claim that XP is "more secure than I ever imagined" - likewise, the rather large Mac contingent at the university has no such problems. Give me a call when panicky mac users start bitching about adware on their computers. Until then, I think it's safe to file this article with all the other "Apple is dying" troll articles that we've seen since the early 1980s.
The quality of education isn't the problem, either. "impoverished nobodys", as you call them, are doing their best to get into American universities - that's the place of choice. I hear people bash the educational system in the US, and I agree that k-12 is pretty pathetic. However, you can't say that our university system is anything less than the best (or among the best) - I don't see people leaving the United States to go overseas for university because the quality is better there. In fact, I see the exact opposite.
We've already had the correction. When some schmuck finishing his sophomore year of college made $80,000 for making web pages with Frontpage, that was a bubble that needed correction. We're on the other side of that now - when reasonably skilled programmers out of top-tier universities can't get jobs that pay over $30,000 (and they're lucky to have that). It's obscene to say that someone who gets a four-year degree developing a fairly technical skill deserves to barely gets paid enough to get by and make payments on their university debt. There's something wrong with this picture. Quite honestly, we're crossing the threshhold where going to college may no longer be the financially "best" option out there - trade school and a good apprenticeship in auto repair gets you a more marketable skill that actually pays better, with far less education (and cost thereof.) Again - something is wrong with this picture, and it ain't that programmers are "overpaid".
Hilarious. 128.253.145.99 is apparently the alumni website for cornell. Hmmmm, either this list is just as suspect as the previous accusations, someone's been 0wn3d, or they managed to find speeches or something by professor Usher or Dr. Spears. Way to go, guys!
Look, genius, you can't even figure out how to properly use an apostrophe - you must be one of these stupid people I should be ignoring, right? Because you're misinformed, right?
This is probably a troll, but honestly, there seems to be an increase in "average people are idiots; I took a class or three in physics, so I know what's best for everyone!" attitude around here lately - witness the disussion about the nuclear propelled rocket where claiming "this is all wonderfully safe - people are just ignorant and afraid; they should all listen to me, and forget any concerns you may hear, because they're just idiots" was moderated +5 over and over and over. You are not 3l33t, and not everyone who thinks NASA spending is wasteful is "misinformed" or otherwise stupid. Stop looking down your nose at everyone else, and try listening to the other side once and a while - you could learn something.
So, either you believe Microsoft Win2k AS scales 3x worse than a bad MP implementation, or the parent poster meant "scaling" in a nontraditional (hence misleading) way (such as scaling number of threads or processes on a uniprocessor machine), or the parent poster is a troll that fed the masses exactly what they wanted to hear... Take your pick.
BTW, in academia, Microsoft funds all sorts of things that show open-source alternatives are better (though obviously they don't advertise such results - but they don't pull funding, either.) In fact, there's a lab at my university full of machines that all run Linux - and the lab is paid for with Microsoft money. I can believe a company (especially Microsoft) attempted to manipulate results in the manner described, but what the parent describes does not add up.
Indeed. Give your workers a raise.
It seems to me this is about balance. You say that "life is a bit more complicated" than what the parent made it out to be. The economy has slowed down. Companies are making less money. Employees are getting fired. And executives are making more money? Excuse me? You're right, something must be a hell of a lot more complicated than anyone has made it out to be - or maybe the executives are just overpaid and are exploiting the weak economy and their workers for their own gain. I'm all for turning a profit (hey, gotta pay the bills & keep the power on!) but life would be a tad less disillusioning if, matched with the executive pay raises, we saw worker pay raises or worker benefit raises, rather than cut after cut after cut... all while the threat of global outsourcing looms.
In other words, you want some cheese with that whine, Mr. Executive?
To clarify: MacOS before OS X was pure crap, and there are a whole lot of current mac users out there who feel the same way - and have, since well before OS X. The others are still somehow stuck in Steve Jobs' reality distortion field.
Regarding 10.3, I didn't notice a speed increase from 10.2.8. XBench reported increased scores in text scrolling (definitely a plus) but that's about it. The killer feature of 10.3 is definitely expose - worth my $69 (academic), for sure. The new mail client is nice, too.
I picked up a used "broken" rev b. imac (had a dead hard drive) for $20. It's only got 96M as well, and though the jaguar requirement is 128M, it does run (although not with fantastic performance, granted.) I am seriously eyeing panther for her in the hopes that it, with some more RAM, will make it such that mah-jong doesn't give her the spinning beachball of death after she passes level 3.
d'oh, i meant otherwise unused - the NIC has to have the bus pretty much to itself. Sorry about the lame replying-to-self thing.
I didn't mean to quabble with the point of using Linux for the desktop - it's vastly superior to FreeBSD in that regard. However, the original post suggested that it was somehow bogus to claim that FreeBSD is faster than Gentoo - as with everything, it depends on what you're measuring (and what you care about), and in the domain of things I work on, using Linux isn't really an option because of its relatively crappy network stack. (Relative to FreeBSD, that is.) What's the point of having an uber-expensive box if the network stack code itself is the bottleneck (even on an athlon 2800+)? There are good reasons to use Linux - in some (but not all) respects, speed is not one of them.
Yes, Linux is easier to use, and Linux's multiprocessor support is better - I could go on & on about features & performance that Linux provides that FreeBSD doesn't. However, it's fallacious to claim that one is "faster" than the other across the board, though, because it isn't true - FreeBSD's IP stack is far superior, and for some of us, that actually matters more than chatting on gaim, reading email in a gui, or browsing the web.
That does sound fun. All I get is a measly:
Could not write to counter file: /docs/cgi-bin/Counter/data/dcarpeneto.dat
Not quite as thrilling as watching the numbers fly by...
No, they couldn't, because HT pentium cores use way too much power to be packed in at that density. This (and other similar) research is based on using many simple (but fast) low-power cores, usually in an adaptive fashion. (e.g., for one app I use certain processor cores for one portion of processing, for another I use them for something else entirely - and the mapping is usually done explicitly either by the programmer or the compiler.)
All the dynamic scheduling/out-of-order logic that modern processors use consumes massive amounts of power. Current trends in computer architecture are such that an HT pentium (or similar) processor will dissipate more heat per surface area than the surface of the sun (if you follow the roadmap guidelines for projected clock speeds). In other words, it's time to examine new architectures (which is exactly what this and many other projects are doing.)
Well, umm, everybody? Besides, everyone knows the real reason there isn't a risk of anyone taking control of a Windows ME box is because nobody wants to take over a Windows ME box. ;) Cheers.
Regarding all the wired vs wireless discussion so far, why not both? (After all, I thought networking overkill was the slashdot way...) You can pick up an airport base station for around $100 on ebay, and if you don't need a router, a simple wifi bridge will do the trick - bam, wired (for higher speed) + wireless (for convenience when you feel like sitting in the recliner or out on the patio.)
A big roadblock for Apple's successful creation & deployment of a Windows client is probably hardware support. Making a client capable of browsing, purchasing, and playing music at their store is relatively trivial. The hard part is making sure that the key element to all this (write as many CDs as you like) actually works smoothly. With all the flaky cd writing hardware "supported" under windows, Apple has to do some serious development & testing to make sure they don't get millions of angry emails (and thus negative buzz) from proud Magnetbox or Sorny CDR owners. Deploying on the Mac platform only ensured a positive experience for all users with no, "I downloaded 40 songs and it was really cool, but I can't burn any of them!" anecdotes floating around out there. Nod to apple for taking the time to get this right - unfortunately WMP has a head-start in this (cd writing on windows) arena. Hopefully apple won't take too long getting this thing off the ground.
The problem with the "information wants to be free" crowd is the same as with religious nuts who go around blowing up buses full of people, shooting abortion doctors, or ordering helicopter strikes of civillian areas of "the enemy." Claiming "see, science says I'm right!" and putting on the blinders to the rest of the world (especially when science says no such thing) just seems foolish to me. Science isn't about zealotry - this argument about information wanting to be free largely is. Again, information doesn't spread & doesn't even exist without people. Hence, this is a people issue - not an information issue.
Information does not tend toward freedom in the same manner that physical phenomenon tend toward equilibrium. It takes my active intervention to prevent equilibrium - on the other hand, it takes my active participation to spread (and thus "free") any information. Hence, I can just as easily (by your fallacious 'science' argument) claim that information does not want to be free. Neither of us would be right. It can easily be said that it takes more work to make work free than non-free, since I have to actually do something (create & spread) to make it free, whereas if I write it in my book & don't share it with you, that's a whole lot easier - or if I just keep it to myself in my little brain, that's easier still.
Put another way, which "takes more work": distributing a binary only with super-annoying copy protection licensed from some 3-man development shop (un-free) or distributing a binary with the exact snapshot of the source that binary was created with? Kind of shoots a hole in your argument that "closing" information somehow goes against the fundamental state of information, which requires it to be "free."
BTW, people aren't "stupid" because they don't agree with your "clever" philosophy. Maybe they just disagree - or furthermore you could be *gasp* wrong. Or not. But it's worth consideration.
You may want to use it certain ways, and we can wax philosophical about the pros and cons of free information in an environment of instantaneous global communication. (positive effects, negative effects, what they mean, etc, etc.) However, certainly it can't be said that information wants diddly squat. You can't even say that all creators of information want their information to be free - that certainly isn't the case. It's up to me, as the creator, to decide if I want to "free" information (code, music, hardware specs, etc) that I create or not. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
Furthermore, it's entirely natural for me to want to have some control over the reproduction of my work. It's all about striking the right balance. That's the point of this entire debate. Claiming that there shouldn't even be a debate because you want free information no matter what (and authors who disagree with you are against "natural law") is entirely unreasonable. I see this argument all over slashdot ("information wants to be free"); if someone knocked off your life's work without consulting you & thus stole a fair portion of your livelihood, I think you'd sing a different tune. (However, if on the other hand you choose to release your work freely, more power to you - that's your choice. That's the whole point - choice.)
These guys get paid? I always assumed it was a run-from-my-mom's-basement operation - what else could explain the poor spelling, frequent dupes (god help you if it's +-5 days from April Fool's), and the ho'ing out of the site to Microsoft advertisements?
determinant = (b.multiply(b)).subtract( ((new BigDecimal(4.0)).multiply(a)).multiply(c));
than this:
determinant = b*b - 4*a*c;
Yeah... thank god there's no overloading! (hint: this is just an illustration - I know I can use builtin doubles rather than BigDecimal.) Forbidding operator overloading is just silly. To claim that "java is simple - see, no overloading!" while ignoring the pain it causes is equally silly.
Considering that microprocessor operating frequency has improved roughly 500 fold in the time that disk latency has only improved by 20 or so (rough numbers, I know), the microprocessor is leaving the storage in the dust. This latency gap is at all levels of the storage hierarchy - wire delay in memories (and inside microprocessors) is getting so bad that access times (measured in cycles *and* in raw time - thinner wires have greater delay) are getting out of control with respect to the microprocessor. This is a real problem.
I agree that disks have improved... but compared to microprocessors, they're dragging ass. By the way, your argument about increased density helping speed is fallacious - seek time dwarfs (by several orders of magnitude) any benefit of denser storage elements in quasi-random access patterns. And as previously noted, if you want throughput, you can get obscene amounts of it from better (granted, more expensive) architectures. Did you just start examining computer architecture last week, or have you been guessing all this time? ;) Man, those gnomes inside your disk really need to get to work!