Apparently (after a cursory web search) it seems that that's exactly what someone's done... there's a "NFR" release of the Logic 7.0 app floating around. I haven't tested it, tho.
Yeah, it's not impossible, just improbably hard. Finding the "correct" jump destination is not easy, because the dongle does not return an exact value, but rather an encoded value based on previous jumps. It'll jump into the same segment of code from two different places, do some app-specific stuff, query the dongle, and then jump back out again to two (or more) different places. The dongle seems to contain a piece of the app's functionality itself.
The app also contains self-modifying code that is descrambled and then patched at launch time to require specific responses from the dongle, and every so often those responses need to change or the app will "lose communication" with the key and cease to function. If you want to cut all this out, you need to extract the decoded/patched app from memory after it's launched, and then trace through it with specialized tools and a log of every response from the dongle (and when you got it.)
Leave the app running for "a couple days"? That log file becomes SIXTY GIGABYTES LONG, if you write it in a non-compressed form! There are tens of thousands of places that would require patching, even in the fully extracted app, and THEN you'd have to reverse-build the app back into it's own launcher!!
Believe me, it's not easy. People have been trying to crack Logic Pro for YEARS. There are forums around full of people who've tried, and are probably still trying. Now that Apple owns Logic, I wouldn't be surprised if they leveraged some of the guys who wrote that crazy tar-pit to help shore up OS X.
Actually I think that right is waived at the "EULA" screen.:/
Personally, I think that's crap, like more EULAs are, but there ya go.
Are they pirates? No, but once again, either they install it on Apple-branded hardware with no problems and full support, or they install it (plus patches) on unsupported hardware. The grand majority of users (think: people who don't know what slashdot is) are more likely to do the former, and never even consider the latter.
Yes, but in the case of Logic Pro and a couple other apps, the dongle is actually queried for a value that immediately becomes a JUMP ADRESS to a point elsewhere in the app!
Bits is bits is bits, so no, there's no way to make it impossible... just improbably hard.
(Apple Logic Pro for example, uses a USB dongle with a keycode generator in it, and the application queries the dongle hundreds of times per second, in obscure ways, with hand-crafted assembly language calls. Exceedingly hard to reverse engineer, but theoretically possible, and eventually you'll end up with a software dongle emulator.)
Apple is banking on good old end-user sloth to keep piracy in check... The general public just isn't sophisticated enough to install a pirated and patched OS on their hardware, when they can shell out a reasonable chunk of change and get a nice integrated system with a year of free tech support. They key word, of course, is reasonable. Apple's also banking on the Intel switch to reduce the cost of their hardware even more.
You make good points, but consider that perhaps your own qualifications are not the best yardstick for evaluating the usefulness of a CS college education: You differ from your students most definitely in age, and quite possibly in the type of background.
I started programming in Machine Language, and collaborating with others in a forum via dial-up modem (which developed EXTREMELY important technical writing skills) when I was eleven years old. It was the only way to accomplish my goals on a computer as "slow" as the Apple II. I transitioned to C and C++ in about a month, when I took up a summer job for a DoD contractor and bought a PC. Finally, three years later, I bootstrapped my way into the UC system as a CS major... and was greatly annoyed.
Why? In college, my fellow CS students were being fed the theory and the details as though both were new, and running off on all kinds of bizarre tangents because, on a fundamental level, they still didn't really know what the computer was actually doing with the instructions they gave it. Upper-division compiler design and basic circuit engineering courses were supposed to correct this... I think... but when I encountered them (and breezed through them) I was struck by how far out of sequence the knowledge was, relative to the supposedly "easier" CS 101 stuff (where students were asked to make an object-oriented version of that ancient data structure, the doubly-linked list, before they could really appreciate the reasons for using an object-oriented approach in the first place.)
Because my immersion in computers had occurred during a period when "high level" languages were inaccessible, this had forced me to drill down and cultivate a thorough understanding of the details of computer architecture, and paradoxically, that created such a solid foundation that the overarching theory became obvious - second nature - to me. For example, I picked up object-oriented programming in a week - secure in my understanding of exactly what exceptions to the rules the advanced compiler was allowing me to make in my programs, which illuminated the unique ways in which object-oriented languages could and should be leveraged.
Based on this anecdotal evidence, I think that in Computer Science as a field, the only difference between teaching "theory" and teaching "details" is in THE AGE OF THE STUDENT.
You learn your first language, that's almost all details. You graduate to upper division, OR get a different job, OR get a new computer -- that compels you to learn a second language. From then on, the ratio of details to theory shrinks. My "official" CS education only served to fill in gaps of an understanding I'd already cultivated. In the job world outside and beyond college, I continued to rely mostly on the flexibility I'd developed before stepping into that first college class. I DIDN'T LEARN that flexibility in a classroom, nor am I convinced that the classrooms I sat in could ever adequately instill it.
However, if I was to point the finger in any one direction, to identify what made that flexibility possible, it would be the time I spent learning Assembly Language, and learning how to use it to do everything from graphics to sound to databases. That's the point where the actual hardware meets the actual programming logic, after all. Go up and down from that point and you're entering separate universes.
So why isn't the first CS class we take, an assembly language course in an emulated Apple II? (Aside from the whining voices of the students declaring its obsolescence?)
I'm glad you guys are all ripping on TFA. See, this is why I spent six months writing my update to "In The Beginning Was The Command Line", BEFORE submitting it to Slashdot. (And I still got ripped a new one by many of you for the effort.) It's called making multiple drafts, and refining the piece. Along comes captain Juicability with his blog: He spews a list of half-baked complaints leavened with cutesy pop-geek-culture references in a snide, bitchy voice, and submits it as an "editorial". Bombs away, gentlemen.
Sometimes I think we should be allowed to vote for a particular user comment that will appear at the TOP of an article submission, INSTEAD of the actual article itself - because what we have here is another case of slashdot commenting (and the moderation system) turning out higher qualitycontent than the original article contains.
My own retorts (I'll be using OS X as the example):
1. Screen Corners
TFA claims that screen corners are both under-used and not specific enough. But the alternatives offered suffer the fate of being:
A. Context Sensitive ("get info" would be different depending on what app you're in)
or
B. Inconsistent (Say you launch Mail with a flick to the screen corner. Now, how do you QUIT Mail?)
Screen corners are ALWAYS THERE, so they need to invoke actions that are always useful. That's why we have corner-activated searching, preferences, and file management. What's more, they are part of THE SCREEN, and a user will tend to consider them in that context. That's why we get screen-corner activated window managers, screen savers, screen locking, and task-switching. If I wanted to I could probably assign some bizarre Automator-based sequence to a screen corner... but frankly, even the corner is too far to travel. I have Expose assigned to a fourth mouse button, and I don't even use screen corners for anything automatic: All the actions that occur there require a click to invoke, which is the way I like it.
Verdict: TFA is complaining about nothing.
2. OS GUI's are Designed for Beginners. The OS GUI is only about as "designed for beginners" as the automatic transmission in a modern car is. It's easier for a "beginner" to learn how to drive a car with an automatic transmission, because he or she doesn't have to worry about grinding the gears or destroying the car by accident. But the automatic transmission was not invented to make driving easy for beginners. It was invented to make driving easy, PERIOD.
This conceptual difference applies just as well to the computer interface. Customization and automation features have become quite advanced - and we have also culled the worthless customizations from the useful ones. That's why the OS X UI is not "skinnable" out of the box, but you can change the layout in the scrollbars the instant you first log in.
Verdict: TFA is whining for no reason.
3. Visual Attention - Sine Qua Non
Kazoo the Clown put this better, nine months ago. As for the resizing window example, sorry - I don't resize my windows very much at all. Even if there were keyboard shortcuts for it, I probably wouldn't know them. (Note: There are, for general actions like "hide" and "minimize".) OS X has managed to find away to avoid stealing context from the user in almost all cases, excluding messages that are extreme emergencies like the sudden failure of a device, or an imminent battery death. (And even that just appears
"Diablo model"? (How old is Diablo now?) "Very close to Dungeon Seige I"? (DS I was good but that was years ago.) Those games are both archaic at this point when we have WOW and other MMORPGS, the game needs to offer something that those other games don't.
"You're quite the self-righteous little prick aren't you"
Yes, you are. Read back through your posts. You're pulling the same tired forum crap that narcissists have been doing for years - busting up parent messages into arbitrary excerpts and then "refuting" the pieces without context, in order to sound "right", and feed your ego. The internet is chock full of it, and Slashdot is no exception. Say what you mean and then get out of the forum.
You can go ahead and put your hoity-toity words into my mouth about my supposedly irrational choice of hardware and software, if it make you feel like a big boy. Speaking as a hardcore PC user who "switched" to an Apple PowerBook four years ago and has enjoyed every minute of it, my Mac fanboy opinion is that you should shut the hell up. >:)
The crux of what I said is that depictions of sex available to people are massively of the brutal, emotionless, subjgating type. If you find this so hard to believe have a look for some porn on the Internet (the primary delivery method of sexually explicit material) and see what you find.
...
Children should be presented with an accurate view of life and the world. And right now, it's either gang-banging subjugation of women or ignorance.
When I type 'sex' into google and hit search, I get two pages of very helpful links. What do you type? 'gang bang'?
If your argument is that 'gang bang' sites simply outnumber 'sex' sites, then the explanation is obvious: those sites are more profitable. Then the immediate question becomes, 'Why?'. To which the most general response is, 'They're popular'. Asking 'Why?' to that leads us to, 'Because they're exotic."
Perhaps -- or perhaps not -- in the same way that large breasts, foot fetishists, cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, felching, blah blah etc are 'exotic'.... they're interesting departures from the norm.
Trust me, if they became the norm -- something that everyone sought and found in their own bedrooms -- then they'd drop off the internet proportionally. Maybe this is why 'regular plain normal consensual sex' doesn't get very many helpful hits.
You know what else is popular on the internet? Violent online gaming. When I was a teenager, I played 'Doom', and went rampaging around a martian base with a shotgun, fragging my best friend, while he tried to dismember me with a chainsaw. That was something that he and I sought out, in fact we had to agonize over COM port settings for hours to get it to work properly. But we laughed and laughed and had a great old time. If a game of scrabble won't send us to "hell", then neither will that. And if a nice picture of a girl won't destroy my community-instilled sense of values, then why would anything else?
You're arguing some strange semantics. I'm a secular humanist. You know what that entails? It means my belief is thus: "The entire spiritual realm, including the question of whether or not there is a god, is IRRELEVANT in all human affairs - whether economic, scientific, moral, political, etc." You can call it a "religion" if you like, but if you ask "the man on the street(tm)" the answer you're more likely to get is that it's an "anti-religion".
Honestly ask yourself - which label seems more appropriate?
That's an interesting involvement of the Ten Commandments in an anthropological case study, but you're making the same mistake the previous poster made, and that is in assuming that there even is a default set of common behaviors in the first place.
In response, consider this post, by a different user.
That's an interesting scenario, actually. I wonder how many people would go in the other direction, and be driven away from the church, by confronting the idea that the place they go to for 'spiritual' and 'personal' reasons, that they hand out money to voluntarily on Sundays, is primarily a propaganda machine for promoting the interests of it's members? Just how much would that tarnish their claim to divinity?
Sure, the church would be more prominent in its capacity as a community outreach center, a political party, and a property holder -- but then, what would that do to its pretense of infallible spiritual guidance? If "Catholicism, Wow!(tm)" were no different from "MTV's Rock The Vote!", wouldn't a lot of infighting erupt?
Tell your friend to call you on your cellphone, after waiting a random amount of time between 30 seconds and a minute. Open your eyes and find some object with a relaxed focal point. Hold your phone straight up, off to the side of your head. Not quite against your ear, but out a ways.
Wait, and relax.
I don't know about you, but after trying this experiment a couple of times, I found that I could tell when my phone was about to ring, because I felt a very slight stinging sensation near the front of my eyes a few seconds beforehand.
Businesses all over the world use chairs every day, too. And copper wire, and whiteboards, and sticky notes. If TFA was a story about a rise in sales of Brand A whiteboards versus Brand B whiteboards, my response would still be the same. There are committees in large corporations that analyze hardware on its merits and make purchases accordingly, but Slashdot is not one of those committees, and even if it were, relative sales figures would not be very important. Whether the topic be wrestling or computers or whiteboards, this discussion amounts to bickering on the sidelines between hobbyists. Admit it.
Seems like every day we hear conflicting reports about Mac sales figures, especially when compared to sales of computers in general. Then where was that article a few days back about how Apple itself doesn't care about Mac sales, and of course the Cringley reply to that... And there's the distortion of the "Mac fan base", which may or may not be living inside its own insulated bubble of filtered opinion...
How about if we all just relax, take a stress pill, and buy the computer we personally prefer?
Even the guys who sit around the TV and argue the superiority of their favorite pro wrestlers admit that it's just a pastime. How many of us are willing to admit the same about our computer advocacy?
Apple bundles iTunes and Quicktime with OS X. Does this not "stiffle innovation" nd decrease competition in the Mac market?
Correct. It does not.
In fact, there's a serious lack of a decent alternative to iTunes for OS X: ie an regular good ol' winamp-like MP3 player,
"Audion 3: The ultimate Macintosh MP3 player / encoder". Probably the best of the bunch, and it was recently discontinued for OS X. Why? Various reasons, but mainly because an arguably superior product is now available for free. (Oh, us poor, poor consumers.)
and a lack of a decent alternative to Quicktime (VLC doesn't count, im talking things like Zoom Player).
Let me guess: VLC doesn't count because it's existence contradicts your argument. VLC is a fine program, with much broader format support, and terrific support for subtitles. Between that and Mplayer, I don't need to use Quicktime at all, nor do I need an [expletive] "pro" key to go full-screen.
On the Windows front, there's a whole wackload of alternatives for Windows Media Player that goes on and on and on.
Yeah, a bigger user base will do that for ya. Thanks, Captain Observo.
In that respect, there's no decent photo viewer other than iPhoto (Picasa is there for PC),
Come on, perform at least a cursory search before opening your mouth. Shoebox is an excellent program.
no decent consumer video editor other than iMovie (plenty for PC)
Depending on how you cut the difference between 'pro' and 'consumer', the numbers change. How about Hyperengine AV, and Avid Free DV? But more to the point:
and so on and so forth. No one has competed with Apple on this front. Why? Because it's their by default? Why isn't Apple getting sued?
Because, in case you're forgotten, the "sue your platform" tactic was already tried by Netscape, and THEY LOST. Even the much more sinister bundling and OEM contracts cases amounted to almost nothing in the end.
Suffice to say Microsoft is doing absolutely nothing to stop others from installing other browsers/media players or whatever people want.
I don't know about absolutely nothing, but at least they are now forbidden to enter into exclusive bundling contracts with OEMs with obvious intent to crush a competitor. That policy has changed, to eliminate the middleman. That policy now reads, "Just buy the competitor."
So Real Player has every opportunity to gather attention, and in fact their player used to be quite popular. Then it started to be spyware ridden, over-bloated interface and horribly slow player, and they lost it.
A perfect example of a media delivery middleman doing exactly the wrong thing: Making it harder for people to get what they're after, instead of easier. (That's why the Quicktime interface consists of: A row of navigation buttons, and a volume control. No hippy-dippy "skins" to apply, no grating 'bonus content' area, and the 'favorites' in a simple, detached, closable window that most people never see.)
If you're still wondering why Apple isn't being sued while Microsoft was, take note that you're comparing Apples to oranges. If you don't want iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iChat, Mail, Safari, and Terminal on your machine, you can just drag them to the trash, and empty it. And third-party apps continue to work just fine. If you don't want Internet Explorer, WMP, or Outlook Express as part of Windows, you're facing a very different uphill battle. For a while, your 'best' solution was to download an
Ahh, I see your point then - as far as the computer industry [emphasis added] is concerned, it's all electronics manufacturing, and while it used to take place in garages and basements, it's now in the territory of factories and fabrication plants. It may have created a new space for "markets" to germinate beneath and around it, but a market is not the same as an industry.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't mature markets serve as an umbrella for the creation of new markets, and the same for new technology?
Economic history is absolutely stuffed with examples of this - The maturation of the companies creating automobiles created a high barrier-to-entry for new auto makers, but also stabilized brand new markets for gas stations, in-dash radios, fancy tires, sign builders, pavers, and fuzzy dice. The maturation of the computer industry triggered a hurricane of new markets, as software and hardware developers built products that integrated computers with practically every other business model and market on the planet. Now the maturation of the internet (thanks to the maturation of its subsidiary markets in router and switching equipment, cable installation, protocols software, etc) has created another buttload of markets, from which big players have emerged - eBay, Amazon, AOL, Yahoo, Google. Not to mention the buttload of smaller niches filled by a style of commerce that would never be feasible without the internet - shareware development. And there's the entertainment sites that are making a decent buck just by putting up flash animations and selling T-shirts and DVDs, and the medical and real-estate databases that charge membership fees to specialists wishing to connect....
Seems to me that we're still in an excellent position as new innovators. What caused the last economic downturn was not a sudden reduction of new markets, it was a sudden end to the exhaustive, rampant, brain-dead speculation of people who expected the heavens to open up and golden coins to rain down upon anything with a ".com" domain name on the letterhead. But now that the lunacy is behind us, this appears to be just like any other maturing market: Rife with opportunities for specialization and subsidiary services.
The army of cr4ck3rs and h4x()rs out there will surely find some way to circumvent whatever protection Apple devises to keep OS X off a standard PC. In fact, they've already succeeded. It's just a matter of speeding things up.
Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel is only feasible because of the work that Transitive Technologies has done in creating a dynamic recompiler. But that technology, too, is actually old news. Check out this PC Nintendo 64 emulator, from 2001, for example.
It's pretty clear that, even if Apple didn't make it easier for h4x0rs by moving to Intel chips, we would all eventually be able to emulate OS X in software no matter what. It would be a bit slower, perhaps, but it would be possible.
So what?
Apple is still a hardware company. If they can produce a great looking low-end box, a great looking mid-range box, and a great looking high-end box, where will the attack on their revenue stream come from? The only market segment they would lose by rampant piracy of their OS is the segment of "switchers", and though I don't have hard data, I suspect that group is tiny compared to the group of people who buy new computers year by year.
We all wail menacingly about a future where John Q. Public buys a Dell machine, downloads a cracked copy of OS X with a bunch of open-source driver patches and a dongle emulator, burns it, and wipes his machine with it, thereby completely divesting himself of all warranty service and tech support from either Dell or Apple. How likely is this, really? (If you DON'T factor yourself, as the helpful nerd-on-hand, into the picture?) Is the couple of hundred dollars saved worth the extra trouble, present and future? Just how many end-users, as a percentage, are willing to deal with that?
Does Apple really produce superior hardware, and do people really care enough about superior hardware? In two years we'll find out once and for all.
Heh. And even our dads are a borderline statistical group -- my dad can't get enough of bittorrent ever since I showed him a link to the collected episodes of "Briscoe County Jr.".
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently (after a cursory web search) it seems that that's exactly what someone's done ... there's a "NFR" release of the Logic 7.0 app floating around. I haven't tested it, tho.
The app also contains self-modifying code that is descrambled and then patched at launch time to require specific responses from the dongle, and every so often those responses need to change or the app will "lose communication" with the key and cease to function. If you want to cut all this out, you need to extract the decoded/patched app from memory after it's launched, and then trace through it with specialized tools and a log of every response from the dongle (and when you got it.)
Leave the app running for "a couple days"? That log file becomes SIXTY GIGABYTES LONG, if you write it in a non-compressed form! There are tens of thousands of places that would require patching, even in the fully extracted app, and THEN you'd have to reverse-build the app back into it's own launcher!!
Believe me, it's not easy. People have been trying to crack Logic Pro for YEARS. There are forums around full of people who've tried, and are probably still trying. Now that Apple owns Logic, I wouldn't be surprised if they leveraged some of the guys who wrote that crazy tar-pit to help shore up OS X.
Of course, it'd get cracked anyway. >:)
Actually I think that right is waived at the "EULA" screen. :/
:)
Personally, I think that's crap, like more EULAs are, but there ya go.
Are they pirates? No, but once again, either they install it on Apple-branded hardware with no problems and full support, or they install it (plus patches) on unsupported hardware. The grand majority of users (think: people who don't know what slashdot is) are more likely to do the former, and never even consider the latter.
I see no piracy problem here.
Yes, but in the case of Logic Pro and a couple other apps, the dongle is actually queried for a value that immediately becomes a JUMP ADRESS to a point elsewhere in the app!
It's pretty screwed up.
(Apple Logic Pro for example, uses a USB dongle with a keycode generator in it, and the application queries the dongle hundreds of times per second, in obscure ways, with hand-crafted assembly language calls. Exceedingly hard to reverse engineer, but theoretically possible, and eventually you'll end up with a software dongle emulator.)
Apple is banking on good old end-user sloth to keep piracy in check... The general public just isn't sophisticated enough to install a pirated and patched OS on their hardware, when they can shell out a reasonable chunk of change and get a nice integrated system with a year of free tech support. They key word, of course, is reasonable. Apple's also banking on the Intel switch to reduce the cost of their hardware even more.
I started programming in Machine Language, and collaborating with others in a forum via dial-up modem (which developed EXTREMELY important technical writing skills) when I was eleven years old. It was the only way to accomplish my goals on a computer as "slow" as the Apple II. I transitioned to C and C++ in about a month, when I took up a summer job for a DoD contractor and bought a PC. Finally, three years later, I bootstrapped my way into the UC system as a CS major ... and was greatly annoyed.
Why? In college, my fellow CS students were being fed the theory and the details as though both were new, and running off on all kinds of bizarre tangents because, on a fundamental level, they still didn't really know what the computer was actually doing with the instructions they gave it. Upper-division compiler design and basic circuit engineering courses were supposed to correct this ... I think ... but when I encountered them (and breezed through them) I was struck by how far out of sequence the knowledge was, relative to the supposedly "easier" CS 101 stuff (where students were asked to make an object-oriented version of that ancient data structure, the doubly-linked list, before they could really appreciate the reasons for using an object-oriented approach in the first place.)
Because my immersion in computers had occurred during a period when "high level" languages were inaccessible, this had forced me to drill down and cultivate a thorough understanding of the details of computer architecture, and paradoxically, that created such a solid foundation that the overarching theory became obvious - second nature - to me. For example, I picked up object-oriented programming in a week - secure in my understanding of exactly what exceptions to the rules the advanced compiler was allowing me to make in my programs, which illuminated the unique ways in which object-oriented languages could and should be leveraged.
Based on this anecdotal evidence, I think that in Computer Science as a field, the only difference between teaching "theory" and teaching "details" is in THE AGE OF THE STUDENT.
You learn your first language, that's almost all details. You graduate to upper division, OR get a different job, OR get a new computer -- that compels you to learn a second language. From then on, the ratio of details to theory shrinks. My "official" CS education only served to fill in gaps of an understanding I'd already cultivated. In the job world outside and beyond college, I continued to rely mostly on the flexibility I'd developed before stepping into that first college class. I DIDN'T LEARN that flexibility in a classroom, nor am I convinced that the classrooms I sat in could ever adequately instill it.
However, if I was to point the finger in any one direction, to identify what made that flexibility possible, it would be the time I spent learning Assembly Language, and learning how to use it to do everything from graphics to sound to databases. That's the point where the actual hardware meets the actual programming logic, after all. Go up and down from that point and you're entering separate universes.
So why isn't the first CS class we take, an assembly language course in an emulated Apple II? (Aside from the whining voices of the students declaring its obsolescence?)
Sometimes I think we should be allowed to vote for a particular user comment that will appear at the TOP of an article submission, INSTEAD of the actual article itself - because what we have here is another case of slashdot commenting (and the moderation system) turning out higher quality content than the original article contains.
My own retorts (I'll be using OS X as the example):
1. Screen Corners
TFA claims that screen corners are both under-used and not specific enough. But the alternatives offered suffer the fate of being:
Screen corners are ALWAYS THERE, so they need to invoke actions that are always useful. That's why we have corner-activated searching, preferences, and file management. What's more, they are part of THE SCREEN, and a user will tend to consider them in that context. That's why we get screen-corner activated window managers, screen savers, screen locking, and task-switching. If I wanted to I could probably assign some bizarre Automator-based sequence to a screen corner ... but frankly, even the corner is too far to travel. I have Expose assigned to a fourth mouse button, and I don't even use screen corners for anything automatic: All the actions that occur there require a click to invoke, which is the way I like it.
Verdict: TFA is complaining about nothing.
2. OS GUI's are Designed for Beginners.
The OS GUI is only about as "designed for beginners" as the automatic transmission in a modern car is. It's easier for a "beginner" to learn how to drive a car with an automatic transmission, because he or she doesn't have to worry about grinding the gears or destroying the car by accident. But the automatic transmission was not invented to make driving easy for beginners. It was invented to make driving easy, PERIOD.
This conceptual difference applies just as well to the computer interface. Customization and automation features have become quite advanced - and we have also culled the worthless customizations from the useful ones. That's why the OS X UI is not "skinnable" out of the box, but you can change the layout in the scrollbars the instant you first log in.
Verdict: TFA is whining for no reason.
3. Visual Attention - Sine Qua Non
Kazoo the Clown put this better, nine months ago. As for the resizing window example, sorry - I don't resize my windows very much at all. Even if there were keyboard shortcuts for it, I probably wouldn't know them. (Note: There are, for general actions like "hide" and "minimize".) OS X has managed to find away to avoid stealing context from the user in almost all cases, excluding messages that are extreme emergencies like the sudden failure of a device, or an imminent battery death. (And even that just appears
"Very close to Dungeon Seige I"? (DS I was good but that was years ago.)
Those games are both archaic at this point when we have WOW and other MMORPGS, the game needs to offer something that those other games don't.
How about: No [expletive] monthly fee? ;)
"You're quite the self-righteous little prick aren't you"
Yes, you are. Read back through your posts. You're pulling the same tired forum crap that narcissists have been doing for years - busting up parent messages into arbitrary excerpts and then "refuting" the pieces without context, in order to sound "right", and feed your ego. The internet is chock full of it, and Slashdot is no exception. Say what you mean and then get out of the forum.
You can go ahead and put your hoity-toity words into my mouth about my supposedly irrational choice of hardware and software, if it make you feel like a big boy. Speaking as a hardcore PC user who "switched" to an Apple PowerBook four years ago and has enjoyed every minute of it, my Mac fanboy opinion is that you should shut the hell up. >:)
...
Children should be presented with an accurate view of life and the world. And right now, it's either gang-banging subjugation of women or ignorance.
When I type 'sex' into google and hit search, I get two pages of very helpful links. What do you type? 'gang bang'?
If your argument is that 'gang bang' sites simply outnumber 'sex' sites, then the explanation is obvious: those sites are more profitable. Then the immediate question becomes, 'Why?'. To which the most general response is, 'They're popular'. Asking 'Why?' to that leads us to, 'Because they're exotic."
Perhaps -- or perhaps not -- in the same way that large breasts, foot fetishists, cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, felching, blah blah etc are 'exotic'. ... they're interesting departures from the norm.
Trust me, if they became the norm -- something that everyone sought and found in their own bedrooms -- then they'd drop off the internet proportionally. Maybe this is why 'regular plain normal consensual sex' doesn't get very many helpful hits.
You know what else is popular on the internet? Violent online gaming. When I was a teenager, I played 'Doom', and went rampaging around a martian base with a shotgun, fragging my best friend, while he tried to dismember me with a chainsaw. That was something that he and I sought out, in fact we had to agonize over COM port settings for hours to get it to work properly. But we laughed and laughed and had a great old time. If a game of scrabble won't send us to "hell", then neither will that. And if a nice picture of a girl won't destroy my community-instilled sense of values, then why would anything else?
Honestly ask yourself - which label seems more appropriate?
In response, consider this post, by a different user.
Sure, the church would be more prominent in its capacity as a community outreach center, a political party, and a property holder -- but then, what would that do to its pretense of infallible spiritual guidance? If "Catholicism, Wow!(tm)" were no different from "MTV's Rock The Vote!", wouldn't a lot of infighting erupt?
Wait, and relax.
I don't know about you, but after trying this experiment a couple of times, I found that I could tell when my phone was about to ring, because I felt a very slight stinging sensation near the front of my eyes a few seconds beforehand.
That cannot be healthy.
Businesses all over the world use chairs every day, too. And copper wire, and whiteboards, and sticky notes. If TFA was a story about a rise in sales of Brand A whiteboards versus Brand B whiteboards, my response would still be the same. There are committees in large corporations that analyze hardware on its merits and make purchases accordingly, but Slashdot is not one of those committees, and even if it were, relative sales figures would not be very important. Whether the topic be wrestling or computers or whiteboards, this discussion amounts to bickering on the sidelines between hobbyists. Admit it.
How about if we all just relax, take a stress pill, and buy the computer we personally prefer?
Even the guys who sit around the TV and argue the superiority of their favorite pro wrestlers admit that it's just a pastime. How many of us are willing to admit the same about our computer advocacy?
Correct. It does not.
In fact, there's a serious lack of a decent alternative to iTunes for OS X: ie an regular good ol' winamp-like MP3 player,
"Audion 3: The ultimate Macintosh MP3 player / encoder". Probably the best of the bunch, and it was recently discontinued for OS X. Why? Various reasons, but mainly because an arguably superior product is now available for free. (Oh, us poor, poor consumers.)
and a lack of a decent alternative to Quicktime (VLC doesn't count, im talking things like Zoom Player).
Let me guess: VLC doesn't count because it's existence contradicts your argument. VLC is a fine program, with much broader format support, and terrific support for subtitles. Between that and Mplayer, I don't need to use Quicktime at all, nor do I need an [expletive] "pro" key to go full-screen.
On the Windows front, there's a whole wackload of alternatives for Windows Media Player that goes on and on and on.
Yeah, a bigger user base will do that for ya. Thanks, Captain Observo.
In that respect, there's no decent photo viewer other than iPhoto (Picasa is there for PC),
Come on, perform at least a cursory search before opening your mouth. Shoebox is an excellent program.
no decent consumer video editor other than iMovie (plenty for PC)
Depending on how you cut the difference between 'pro' and 'consumer', the numbers change. How about Hyperengine AV, and Avid Free DV? But more to the point:
and so on and so forth. No one has competed with Apple on this front. Why? Because it's their by default? Why isn't Apple getting sued?
Because, in case you're forgotten, the "sue your platform" tactic was already tried by Netscape, and THEY LOST. Even the much more sinister bundling and OEM contracts cases amounted to almost nothing in the end.
Suffice to say Microsoft is doing absolutely nothing to stop others from installing other browsers/media players or whatever people want.
I don't know about absolutely nothing, but at least they are now forbidden to enter into exclusive bundling contracts with OEMs with obvious intent to crush a competitor. That policy has changed, to eliminate the middleman. That policy now reads, "Just buy the competitor."
So Real Player has every opportunity to gather attention, and in fact their player used to be quite popular. Then it started to be spyware ridden, over-bloated interface and horribly slow player, and they lost it.
A perfect example of a media delivery middleman doing exactly the wrong thing: Making it harder for people to get what they're after, instead of easier. (That's why the Quicktime interface consists of: A row of navigation buttons, and a volume control. No hippy-dippy "skins" to apply, no grating 'bonus content' area, and the 'favorites' in a simple, detached, closable window that most people never see.)
If you're still wondering why Apple isn't being sued while Microsoft was, take note that you're comparing Apples to oranges. If you don't want iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iChat, Mail, Safari, and Terminal on your machine, you can just drag them to the trash, and empty it. And third-party apps continue to work just fine. If you don't want Internet Explorer, WMP, or Outlook Express as part of Windows, you're facing a very different uphill battle. For a while, your 'best' solution was to download an
The above post should correctly read:
"science seeks the FACTS and religion claims to be the truth."
Ahh, I see your point then - as far as the computer industry [emphasis added] is concerned, it's all electronics manufacturing, and while it used to take place in garages and basements, it's now in the territory of factories and fabrication plants. It may have created a new space for "markets" to germinate beneath and around it, but a market is not the same as an industry.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't mature markets serve as an umbrella for the creation of new markets, and the same for new technology?
Economic history is absolutely stuffed with examples of this - ...
The maturation of the companies creating automobiles created a high barrier-to-entry for new auto makers, but also stabilized brand new markets for gas stations, in-dash radios, fancy tires, sign builders, pavers, and fuzzy dice.
The maturation of the computer industry triggered a hurricane of new markets, as software and hardware developers built products that integrated computers with practically every other business model and market on the planet.
Now the maturation of the internet (thanks to the maturation of its subsidiary markets in router and switching equipment, cable installation, protocols software, etc) has created another buttload of markets, from which big players have emerged - eBay, Amazon, AOL, Yahoo, Google. Not to mention the buttload of smaller niches filled by a style of commerce that would never be feasible without the internet - shareware development.
And there's the entertainment sites that are making a decent buck just by putting up flash animations and selling T-shirts and DVDs, and the medical and real-estate databases that charge membership fees to specialists wishing to connect.
Seems to me that we're still in an excellent position as new innovators. What caused the last economic downturn was not a sudden reduction of new markets, it was a sudden end to the exhaustive, rampant, brain-dead speculation of people who expected the heavens to open up and golden coins to rain down upon anything with a ".com" domain name on the letterhead. But now that the lunacy is behind us, this appears to be just like any other maturing market: Rife with opportunities for specialization and subsidiary services.
If "barriers to entry are small in new markets", and "there are, of course, always new markets", then why the gloomy forecast?
That phenomenon is generally due to the fact that Microsoft releases swiss-cheese shit, and Apple releases decent products.
Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel is only feasible because of the work that Transitive Technologies has done in creating a dynamic recompiler. But that technology, too, is actually old news. Check out this PC Nintendo 64 emulator, from 2001, for example.
It's pretty clear that, even if Apple didn't make it easier for h4x0rs by moving to Intel chips, we would all eventually be able to emulate OS X in software no matter what. It would be a bit slower, perhaps, but it would be possible.
So what?
Apple is still a hardware company. If they can produce a great looking low-end box, a great looking mid-range box, and a great looking high-end box, where will the attack on their revenue stream come from? The only market segment they would lose by rampant piracy of their OS is the segment of "switchers", and though I don't have hard data, I suspect that group is tiny compared to the group of people who buy new computers year by year.
We all wail menacingly about a future where John Q. Public buys a Dell machine, downloads a cracked copy of OS X with a bunch of open-source driver patches and a dongle emulator, burns it, and wipes his machine with it, thereby completely divesting himself of all warranty service and tech support from either Dell or Apple. How likely is this, really? (If you DON'T factor yourself, as the helpful nerd-on-hand, into the picture?) Is the couple of hundred dollars saved worth the extra trouble, present and future? Just how many end-users, as a percentage, are willing to deal with that?
Does Apple really produce superior hardware, and do people really care enough about superior hardware? In two years we'll find out once and for all.
Heh. And even our dads are a borderline statistical group -- my dad can't get enough of bittorrent ever since I showed him a link to the collected episodes of "Briscoe County Jr.".