Everyone who is doing the dollar per GB calculation and complaining about how the mini is SO much less cost effective than the low end iPod is missing the point. You've already decided what's important to you, and it's the biggest capacity you can get for whatever your price point is. The 15MB looks so much more your style at the price you want to pay, and guess what, that's exactly what Apple wants to sell you.
I, however, am not in the market for the regular iPods. While my music collection would mostly fit on a 20GB iPod, I can't see myself carrying around something that big. It's not the size of the iPod itself, it's everything else I have to lug around in my pockets.
The new iPod mini, though, is almost perfect for me. I can carry it around without significantly adding to the pocket bulk. Of course, in a perfect world it would come in a 20GB capacity, but 4GB is enough for my out-of-home listening patterns.
Is $250 too much? If I were comparing it to the regular iPod, sure, but the comparison doesn't make sense for me. And that means that I get the iPod's terrific user interface, the tiny size, and almost three days of continuous music for ONLY $250. That's a tough combination to beat.
Not quite right. While the shareholders of a corporation are not liable in case of corporate wrongdoing, its officers and board are. And they can be individually prosecuted if they were party to criminal activities, either in terms of making decisions or in terms of intentional execution. And they can go to jail as a result.
In the case of Enron, for example, Andrew Fastow is being criminally prosecuted.
However, many argue he's just a fall guy, since people that high up in a corporation often as far as they can to maintain plausible deniability. Like Ken Lay for example. But, this happens in politics, too. Say, Reagan and Iran-Contra.
It's my opinion that Darl et al will argue that: because the GPL requires a licensee of GPL code to give up the rights they have under copyright law to their additions/derivatives (instead of giving up money) then it is not an allowable license. [aug24]
The argument is fanciful in some respects but there is a legal grey area here. First, the copyright law does not grant creators of derivative works the right to distribute those works without prior authorization from the copyright holder of the orginal work. In the the case of GPLed software, the GPL provides the terms of this authorization. In this sense, the GPL takes away no rights such creators of derived works would have under copyright law at all, but grants them additional rights as long as they choose to abide by the GPL.
The grey area here has to do with the definition of derived works. If I understand correctly, under the FSF definition, patches--binary or source, and dynamic linking of libraries would be considered derived works for purposes of the GPL, even when the creator of such works does not distribute the original work.
I can see a case for for binary patches to be considered derivative works. Source patches and dynamic linking, on the other hand, would seem to me to be exemptible under fair use guidelines.
The question has to do with the definition of derivative work and limitations of fair use.
2. Volari appears to be closer to volare, meaning "to fly"
3. Velocity comes from the Latin velocitas (meaning quickness), which is derived from velox (meaning quick)
While the fact that the two stems (velo- and vol- for velox and volare) share initial consonants suggests that there is a relationship between these stems, this relationship is more likely to have arisen in some proto- or pre-Latin than Latin itself.
This all strikes me as dot-com redux: Let's sell stuff, and figure out later how we're going to make money from it.
I can see why Apple is in the music download business, even given the terms that pretty much limit profitability to the labels. For them, music downloads are sort of a loss leader/tailer to extremely profitable iPod sales. Other music download companies, unless they own the music they're selling and thus can keep the royalties, are going to have a very hard time making any money on this.
Let's say they are able to squeeze maximum efficiency out of the business, and somehow are able to attain marginal profits of about 10 cents a song (US). If they manage to sell 100 million songs a year, that comes out to a measly $10 million profit. That's not nothing, but what's the investment required to get here, and what're the ongoing costs to maintain that level of sales?
The numbers I've seen bandied about in the press don't look so promising.
The problem is downloads are essentially a commodity product. Yes, they could compete on quality and levels of DRM, but that's up to the labels, not the download companies. For Apple, downloads help sales of their non-commodity product, the iPod. For AOL, downloads will drive sales of their service. For Microsoft, they will drive sales of WMA licenses.
That's why I predict that only Apple, AOL, and possibly Microsoft are going to be long term players in the market, and that's because they don't need music downloads to be profitable, but to drive sales of their other products. The others will stay niche players or eventually get swallowed up, perhaps Roxio-Napster by Samsung, and MusicMatch by Dell.
And even though MTV, unlike those two, doesn't actually need to make money on downloads, I don't see what they gain that they can't get by just partnering with one of the other services, like AOL is doing with Apple.
However, it's not quite as easy for minority shareholders to sue to have their way as you suggest and actually be successful. They pretty much have to prove fraud or gross negligence, though by the lesser "preponderance of evidence" standard that is active in civil suits.
Disagreeing with a business decision by itself won't cut it in court.
Otherwise, if they can control enough shares (say over 20%), they can gain a board seat and attempt to influence the company that way. Depending on what percentage of the shares of the company are externally held, they may even be able to wage a proxy fight. However, with only 10-15% being IPO'ed, it doesn't look like Google is going to be very vulnerable.
Still, anyone know what percentage of Google is currently held by venture capital firms?
IANAL, but this is my understanding: Like other non-compulsory licenses, it is a contract that grants rights. In this case, it is one you implictly agree to by taking advantage of rights it grants you above and beyond rights you would otherwise have.
You don't, of course, have to agree to this contract. If so, however, you would have no right to copy and distribute beyond what is provided for by fair use exemptions to Copyright law.
While IANAL either, US law is not based on Napoleonic civil law but English common law. While the standards are different in civil and criminal trials, in either case, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The standard of proof is however different. In civil law it is "preponderance of evidence," while in criminal law it is "beyond a reasonable doubt." The burden of proof is still on the plaintiff, it just isn't as great a burden in civil cases.
So, SCO still has to do the heavy lifting and provide reasonable grounds for expecting infringement to even compel discovery. And thus, they can't go on fishing expeditions like it seems to be trying to do here.
Regarding the assertion: We've had full support for all the Indic (Devanagari-based) languages since Windows 2000 and Office 2000 shipped. [YU Nicks NE Way]
I seem to recall that only a subset of Indic languages use the Devanagari script. I know Bengali doesn't and I don't believe any of the Dravidian languages do. My uninformed guess would be this knocks out half of India. So, I can see what MS may have to gain from this kind of deal.
Actually this isn't quite true. Though IANAA (accountant), I seem to remember two rules:
1. Revenue cannot be recognized unless it's earned 2. Revenue cannot be recognized unless you're likelier than not to get paid
Thus, unless SCO wants to get into really hot water really quickly, with the SEC, and with stockholders, they could not recognize the invoices as revenue. If a court says that they actually have rights on Linux, that's another story. But keep in mind that so far, they haven't asked a court to rule on that matter. Their suit so far is entirely about IBM's alleged Sys V contract violation.
I'm actually happy both with what Apple has done and with FSF's response.
I credit Apple with the work they did with FSF to come up with a license that can be called Free, and consider significant the set of software they have released under the license.
However, I also understand why they haven't release the whole of Mac OS X under the license. While Apple may be mostly a hardware company in terms of revenue, I don't know a lot of Mac users, myself included, who would buy the hardware if it weren't for the software that goes along with it. And who, conversely, would be happy to buy hardware from a different vendor if the software were available for it.
Thus, though reasonably up to date hardware doesn't hurt, it's the software that keeps the hardware selling. Just imagine where Apple would be if they had to compete with Sony or Dell systems running Mac OS X.
So, I'm glad Apple keeps some significant things (like Quartz) close to its vest, even though I would love to run Quartz on Linux instead of X11. This is what keeps Apple alive as a company that can continue to be creative and innovative in both hardware and software.
And, on the other side, I'm glad that FSF is taking the line it is. I think the GPL is a great thing and without it and the contributions RMS and the FSF have brought to both free software and the cause of free software, the software world would be a far more proprietary place today. And I'm grateful that they continue to push this cause, even if in this case this means they would prefer a course of action that I would prefer Apple not to follow.
So, I like the tension. I'm glad the FSF is the FSF and the hard pull they provide to the cause of Free software. And I'm glad Apple takes a more nuanced and evolutionary approach that helps them survive as a company and the Mac as a compelling platform.
They both provide an important service, and I think the state of software today would be much poorer without them both. So, Apple and FSF, keep it up. Please.
But copyright law is quite explicit about who owns the copyright to derivative works of some original work -- namely, the holder of the copyright to the original work.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. Under copyright law, the copyrights to derivative works are shared. Neither the copyright holder on the base work nor the creator of the derived work (or assignees) can distribute the derivative without permission.
However, the creator of the derived work could distribute a patch to the original work as long as the patch itself did not contain any substantive portions of the original work.
A P J Abdul Kalam led the nuclear weapons program in India prior to being tapped to be titular head of state as President. (Note that the President of India is largely a ceremonial post, like the Queen of England. However, it does offer a bit more of a bully pulpit. As in England, the head of government is the Prime Minister.)
When India tested its first nuclear weapons (both fission and fusion), Abdul Kalam crowed with pride about how it was an indigenous effort. And this was largely true: They figured out, based on published materials, and with some Russian help and some reverse-engineering, how to build the facilities to generate weapons-grade uranium and plutonium and make heavy water, and constructed the facilities themselves, the latter with very little outside help. This was because they didn't want to be dependent on anyone else for such a critical national security matter.
It's about India being master of her own destiny.
So, it must really grate on Abdul Kalam that so much of software developmetn work in India is focussed on proprietary, and externally controlled, technologies. For him, the OSS model offers a perfect way out, sharing with the rest of the world, but leaving no chance that the rug can be pulled away without India's acceptance.
That said, all he has is the bully pulpit. Hopefully, he will be able to get some of the relevant people, whether in the universities or in government, to listen and take the issue seriously.
How is it acceptable?
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 4, Insightful
While one can quibble with the arithmatic, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact that 1 in 56.5 is a horrendous statistic for failure, particularly for a program with a mission cost of $640 million in current dollars.
The story was, with all this expense (though NASA has been lying about the program expense from the very beginning, claiming it would be less expensive per mission than single-use rockets), you would be able to increase reliability and safety.
It hasn't turned out that way. The Russian Soyuz single-use rocket, for example, has a far higher safety rating (no accidents on manned flights since 1971), and costs about 30 TIMES LESS per flight.
There's something obviously wrong here, and you don't have to be an opponent of the space program to see it.
And I'm very much a proponent of the space program as a whole, and want to see a concerted effort towards a mission to Mars. But I don't see how the Shuttle program gets us there. It's a boondoggle only justifiable with really really bad math (read NASA math).
Thus, the biggest reason to be opposed to the Shuttle program: It's astronomic expense crowds out money for any meaningful space exploration.
Even if it means a five to ten years hiatus in the manned space program (though Russian launch vehicles could still be used), I'm all for using the money to build a manned space program that actually makes sense.
AAC support on MP3 players? Since when? Can you point out one player?
There is the iPod for a reasonably popular one. Old iPods will also support AAC via an already available firmware upgrade.
You make it sound as if AAC is "more widely supported" than Ogg. That is not true.
I'm guessing you're aware that AAC is the MPEG-4 audio layer format. That in and of itself ensures and will continue to ensure a lot of device compatibility. Recent Sony CLIEs support it for example.
I don't argue that AAC is better than Vorbis, but arguing that AAC is not/will not have wide device support is a little silly. It already does.
You're a little off. The mach-o binary format that NeXT used and that Mac OS X still uses (though not exclusively) supports multi-architecture binaries in the same file. In the NEXTSTEP days, it was not uncommon to have binaries that supported NEXTSTEP/OpenStep on PA-RISC, SPARC, x86, and 680x0 in the same file. These were commonly referred to as objese binaries. Someone can corrent me if I'm wrong, but I believe the PEF binary format (used for Classic PPC and Carbon applications) can support similar multi-architecture binaries in the same file.
Apple doesn't use the bundle architecture so much to support different processor architectures as to support different operating systems. For example, currently, some application bundles contain both binaries for both MacOS (X) and MacOSClassic. This allows the application to run natively on both operating systems (Mac OS X and Mac OS 9) while allowing it to take advantage of features of each that are unavailable in the other, which can be a problem for Carbon binaries intedend for both OSes.
"It wasn't about standard Java breaking on Windows."
You're off a little bit. It was about standard Java breaking on Windows, namely JDK 1.1. When Sun released JDK 1.1, the first non-toy version of Java, Microsoft decided that they would take bits and pieces of new JDK, but substitute their own incompatible pieces for the rest. The trademark fight, the first legal battle between Microsoft and Sun on the matter, was whether Microsoft could still call the result Java. The court said they couldn't. And so they called it J++.
For example, Microsoft refused to use JNI, using their own RNI instead. Of course, they claimed RNI was easier to use, and perhaps in some ways it was. However, it meant that if you wanted to integrate native code and support the Microsoft VM, you either had to do dual development, or code to MSVM only.
Interestingly, Apple has had their own native interface too, called JDirect, which was even easier than RNI. But they fully suppored JNI as well, and you could mix the two. (The interface has changed since then, but there are still dual-supported interfaces.)
Why didn't Microsoft take this approach if they really thought they could do better? That's the crux of the matter. Sun and others would argue that Microsoft was trying to break cross-platform Java. I would argue they have a point.
You would disclude theologians from the discussion because they aren't dealing from the empirical deck and still argue that your position is not a materialist one?
The current G4 yields from Motorola do have the potential to freeze when run at 500 MHz. These are the chips that are spec'ed by Motorola to run at 500 MHz. That and along with Motorola's spectacularly bad yields from their fab, seems to make it clear they overpromised and underdelivered. I can't see blaming Apple for this. Their primary blame, prior to this debacle, was to have been overly hopeful.
WRT MkLinux, Apple not only provided space for the web site, but they also financed its creation, and for a while its support. They provided funds for the OSF to port Mach 3.0 to the PPC, and had at least one engineer in house for about two years to port Linux to Mach 3.0. (There was one full time engineer to lead the project and others as proved necessary.) Apple's motivation for doing this was to sell Macintoshes into environments where a low cost Un*x option was necessary, such as university campuses. When the MacOS X effort got underway, the MkLinux team pretty much went to that project full time.
Actually the Ultra IDE implementations on the G4s, with the factory drives, apparently do sustained reads and writes at about 20 MB/s. At least according to Macintouch.
Apple may have have had on board support for SCSI in older computers but that was SCSI 1, and anyone who needed higher performance bought PCI SCSI cards anyway. This is why the have gotten rid of SCSI on board. They either needed to have support for higher performace SCSI or go to IDE which was significantly cheaper to implement and whose performance was comparable, and with the G4s crushes, the old SCSI implementations. 20 MB/s sustained read AND write? Now, that ain't bad. (See for some independent benchmarks. Of course, if you have higher and/or more reliable performance requirements, such as for complex imaging or video work, Ultra2 SCSI is also an option, and necessary if you want to use RAID.
This IMHO is as it should be. (The old on board SCSI was a good thing when they first introduced it. But it didn't keep up with the market and in the end it was was an added expence that was only really good for slow devices like CD-ROMs. And even in those cases when they offered faster SCSI on the internal bus, the OS wasn't really up to taking advantage of it, particularly as faster IDE implementations began appearing in the Wintel world.)
Well, it depends on what you want to run on OS X. As long as you don't require X, the porting is hardly brain surgery, particularly if what you're porting already supports xBSD. There are issues, such as assumptions about directory structures, but these are pretty minor.
X client applicationss on the other hand are a different matter. There isn't yet an X server for the Quartz imaging model of MacOS X, and probably won't be one for a while after the OS ships. I must say, however, the Quartz imaging model is pretty sexy. And I imagine a lot of the stuff that was already ported to NEXTSTEP/OpenStep will find their way to MacOS X as well.
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Everyone who is doing the dollar per GB calculation and complaining about how the mini is SO much less cost effective than the low end iPod is missing the point. You've already decided what's important to you, and it's the biggest capacity you can get for whatever your price point is. The 15MB looks so much more your style at the price you want to pay, and guess what, that's exactly what Apple wants to sell you.
I, however, am not in the market for the regular iPods. While my music collection would mostly fit on a 20GB iPod, I can't see myself carrying around something that big. It's not the size of the iPod itself, it's everything else I have to lug around in my pockets.
The new iPod mini, though, is almost perfect for me. I can carry it around without significantly adding to the pocket bulk. Of course, in a perfect world it would come in a 20GB capacity, but 4GB is enough for my out-of-home listening patterns.
Is $250 too much? If I were comparing it to the regular iPod, sure, but the comparison doesn't make sense for me. And that means that I get the iPod's terrific user interface, the tiny size, and almost three days of continuous music for ONLY $250. That's a tough combination to beat.
Not quite right. While the shareholders of a corporation are not liable in case of corporate wrongdoing, its officers and board are. And they can be individually prosecuted if they were party to criminal activities, either in terms of making decisions or in terms of intentional execution. And they can go to jail as a result.
In the case of Enron, for example, Andrew Fastow is being criminally prosecuted.
However, many argue he's just a fall guy, since people that high up in a corporation often as far as they can to maintain plausible deniability. Like Ken Lay for example. But, this happens in politics, too. Say, Reagan and Iran-Contra.
It's my opinion that Darl et al will argue that: because the GPL requires a licensee of GPL code to give up the rights they have under copyright law to their additions/derivatives (instead of giving up money) then it is not an allowable license. [aug24]
The argument is fanciful in some respects but there is a legal grey area here. First, the copyright law does not grant creators of derivative works the right to distribute those works without prior authorization from the copyright holder of the orginal work. In the the case of GPLed software, the GPL provides the terms of this authorization. In this sense, the GPL takes away no rights such creators of derived works would have under copyright law at all, but grants them additional rights as long as they choose to abide by the GPL.
The grey area here has to do with the definition of derived works. If I understand correctly, under the FSF definition, patches--binary or source, and dynamic linking of libraries would be considered derived works for purposes of the GPL, even when the creator of such works does not distribute the original work.
I can see a case for for binary patches to be considered derivative works. Source patches and dynamic linking, on the other hand, would seem to me to be exemptible under fair use guidelines.
The question has to do with the definition of derivative work and limitations of fair use.
Anyone have examples of case law on this?
THG is a little off on the Latin:
1. Volatus means flight, not velocity
2. Volari appears to be closer to volare, meaning "to fly"
3. Velocity comes from the Latin velocitas (meaning quickness), which is derived from velox (meaning quick)
While the fact that the two stems (velo- and vol- for velox and volare) share initial consonants suggests that there is a relationship between these stems, this relationship is more likely to have arisen in some proto- or pre-Latin than Latin itself.
This all strikes me as dot-com redux: Let's sell stuff, and figure out later how we're going to make money from it.
I can see why Apple is in the music download business, even given the terms that pretty much limit profitability to the labels. For them, music downloads are sort of a loss leader/tailer to extremely profitable iPod sales. Other music download companies, unless they own the music they're selling and thus can keep the royalties, are going to have a very hard time making any money on this.
Let's say they are able to squeeze maximum efficiency out of the business, and somehow are able to attain marginal profits of about 10 cents a song (US). If they manage to sell 100 million songs a year, that comes out to a measly $10 million profit. That's not nothing, but what's the investment required to get here, and what're the ongoing costs to maintain that level of sales?
The numbers I've seen bandied about in the press don't look so promising.
The problem is downloads are essentially a commodity product. Yes, they could compete on quality and levels of DRM, but that's up to the labels, not the download companies. For Apple, downloads help sales of their non-commodity product, the iPod. For AOL, downloads will drive sales of their service. For Microsoft, they will drive sales of WMA licenses.
That's why I predict that only Apple, AOL, and possibly Microsoft are going to be long term players in the market, and that's because they don't need music downloads to be profitable, but to drive sales of their other products. The others will stay niche players or eventually get swallowed up, perhaps Roxio-Napster by Samsung, and MusicMatch by Dell.
And even though MTV, unlike those two, doesn't actually need to make money on downloads, I don't see what they gain that they can't get by just partnering with one of the other services, like AOL is doing with Apple.
However, it's not quite as easy for minority shareholders to sue to have their way as you suggest and actually be successful. They pretty much have to prove fraud or gross negligence, though by the lesser "preponderance of evidence" standard that is active in civil suits.
Disagreeing with a business decision by itself won't cut it in court.
Otherwise, if they can control enough shares (say over 20%), they can gain a board seat and attempt to influence the company that way. Depending on what percentage of the shares of the company are externally held, they may even be able to wage a proxy fight. However, with only 10-15% being IPO'ed, it doesn't look like Google is going to be very vulnerable.
Still, anyone know what percentage of Google is currently held by venture capital firms?
IANAL, but this is my understanding: Like other non-compulsory licenses, it is a contract that grants rights. In this case, it is one you implictly agree to by taking advantage of rights it grants you above and beyond rights you would otherwise have.
You don't, of course, have to agree to this contract. If so, however, you would have no right to copy and distribute beyond what is provided for by fair use exemptions to Copyright law.
While IANAL either, US law is not based on Napoleonic civil law but English common law. While the standards are different in civil and criminal trials, in either case, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The standard of proof is however different. In civil law it is "preponderance of evidence," while in criminal law it is "beyond a reasonable doubt." The burden of proof is still on the plaintiff, it just isn't as great a burden in civil cases.
So, SCO still has to do the heavy lifting and provide reasonable grounds for expecting infringement to even compel discovery. And thus, they can't go on fishing expeditions like it seems to be trying to do here.
Regarding the assertion: We've had full support for all the Indic (Devanagari-based) languages since Windows 2000 and Office 2000 shipped. [YU Nicks NE Way]
I seem to recall that only a subset of Indic languages use the Devanagari script. I know Bengali doesn't and I don't believe any of the Dravidian languages do. My uninformed guess would be this knocks out half of India. So, I can see what MS may have to gain from this kind of deal.
Anyone have any information on this?
Actually this isn't quite true. Though IANAA (accountant), I seem to remember two rules:
1. Revenue cannot be recognized unless it's earned
2. Revenue cannot be recognized unless you're likelier than not to get paid
Thus, unless SCO wants to get into really hot water really quickly, with the SEC, and with stockholders, they could not recognize the invoices as revenue. If a court says that they actually have rights on Linux, that's another story. But keep in mind that so far, they haven't asked a court to rule on that matter. Their suit so far is entirely about IBM's alleged Sys V contract violation.
I'm actually happy both with what Apple has done and with FSF's response.
I credit Apple with the work they did with FSF to come up with a license that can be called Free, and consider significant the set of software they have released under the license.
However, I also understand why they haven't release the whole of Mac OS X under the license. While Apple may be mostly a hardware company in terms of revenue, I don't know a lot of Mac users, myself included, who would buy the hardware if it weren't for the software that goes along with it. And who, conversely, would be happy to buy hardware from a different vendor if the software were available for it.
Thus, though reasonably up to date hardware doesn't hurt, it's the software that keeps the hardware selling. Just imagine where Apple would be if they had to compete with Sony or Dell systems running Mac OS X.
So, I'm glad Apple keeps some significant things (like Quartz) close to its vest, even though I would love to run Quartz on Linux instead of X11. This is what keeps Apple alive as a company that can continue to be creative and innovative in both hardware and software.
And, on the other side, I'm glad that FSF is taking the line it is. I think the GPL is a great thing and without it and the contributions RMS and the FSF have brought to both free software and the cause of free software, the software world would be a far more proprietary place today. And I'm grateful that they continue to push this cause, even if in this case this means they would prefer a course of action that I would prefer Apple not to follow.
So, I like the tension. I'm glad the FSF is the FSF and the hard pull they provide to the cause of Free software. And I'm glad Apple takes a more nuanced and evolutionary approach that helps them survive as a company and the Mac as a compelling platform.
They both provide an important service, and I think the state of software today would be much poorer without them both. So, Apple and FSF, keep it up. Please.
But copyright law is quite explicit about who owns the copyright to derivative works of some original work -- namely, the holder of the copyright to the original work.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. Under copyright law, the copyrights to derivative works are shared. Neither the copyright holder on the base work nor the creator of the derived work (or assignees) can distribute the derivative without permission.
However, the creator of the derived work could distribute a patch to the original work as long as the patch itself did not contain any substantive portions of the original work.
A P J Abdul Kalam led the nuclear weapons program in India prior to being tapped to be titular head of state as President. (Note that the President of India is largely a ceremonial post, like the Queen of England. However, it does offer a bit more of a bully pulpit. As in England, the head of government is the Prime Minister.)
When India tested its first nuclear weapons (both fission and fusion), Abdul Kalam crowed with pride about how it was an indigenous effort. And this was largely true: They figured out, based on published materials, and with some Russian help and some reverse-engineering, how to build the facilities to generate weapons-grade uranium and plutonium and make heavy water, and constructed the facilities themselves, the latter with very little outside help. This was because they didn't want to be dependent on anyone else for such a critical national security matter.
It's about India being master of her own destiny.
So, it must really grate on Abdul Kalam that so much of software developmetn work in India is focussed on proprietary, and externally controlled, technologies. For him, the OSS model offers a perfect way out, sharing with the rest of the world, but leaving no chance that the rug can be pulled away without India's acceptance.
That said, all he has is the bully pulpit. Hopefully, he will be able to get some of the relevant people, whether in the universities or in government, to listen and take the issue seriously.
While one can quibble with the arithmatic, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact that 1 in 56.5 is a horrendous statistic for failure, particularly for a program with a mission cost of $640 million in current dollars.
The story was, with all this expense (though NASA has been lying about the program expense from the very beginning, claiming it would be less expensive per mission than single-use rockets), you would be able to increase reliability and safety.
It hasn't turned out that way. The Russian Soyuz single-use rocket, for example, has a far higher safety rating (no accidents on manned flights since 1971), and costs about 30 TIMES LESS per flight.
There's something obviously wrong here, and you don't have to be an opponent of the space program to see it.
And I'm very much a proponent of the space program as a whole, and want to see a concerted effort towards a mission to Mars. But I don't see how the Shuttle program gets us there. It's a boondoggle only justifiable with really really bad math (read NASA math).
Thus, the biggest reason to be opposed to the Shuttle program: It's astronomic expense crowds out money for any meaningful space exploration.
Even if it means a five to ten years hiatus in the manned space program (though Russian launch vehicles could still be used), I'm all for using the money to build a manned space program that actually makes sense.
AAC support on MP3 players? Since when? Can you point out one player?
There is the iPod for a reasonably popular one. Old iPods will also support AAC via an already available firmware upgrade.
You make it sound as if AAC is "more widely supported" than Ogg. That is not true.
I'm guessing you're aware that AAC is the MPEG-4 audio layer format. That in and of itself ensures and will continue to ensure a lot of device compatibility. Recent Sony CLIEs support it for example.
I don't argue that AAC is better than Vorbis, but arguing that AAC is not/will not have wide device support is a little silly. It already does.
You're a little off. The mach-o binary format that NeXT used and that Mac OS X still uses (though not exclusively) supports multi-architecture binaries in the same file. In the NEXTSTEP days, it was not uncommon to have binaries that supported NEXTSTEP/OpenStep on PA-RISC, SPARC, x86, and 680x0 in the same file. These were commonly referred to as objese binaries. Someone can corrent me if I'm wrong, but I believe the PEF binary format (used for Classic PPC and Carbon applications) can support similar multi-architecture binaries in the same file.
Apple doesn't use the bundle architecture so much to support different processor architectures as to support different operating systems. For example, currently, some application bundles contain both binaries for both MacOS (X) and MacOSClassic. This allows the application to run natively on both operating systems (Mac OS X and Mac OS 9) while allowing it to take advantage of features of each that are unavailable in the other, which can be a problem for Carbon binaries intedend for both OSes.
"It wasn't about standard Java breaking on Windows."
You're off a little bit. It was about standard Java breaking on Windows, namely JDK 1.1. When Sun released JDK 1.1, the first non-toy version of Java, Microsoft decided that they would take bits and pieces of new JDK, but substitute their own incompatible pieces for the rest. The trademark fight, the first legal battle between Microsoft and Sun on the matter, was whether Microsoft could still call the result Java. The court said they couldn't. And so they called it J++.
For example, Microsoft refused to use JNI, using their own RNI instead. Of course, they claimed RNI was easier to use, and perhaps in some ways it was. However, it meant that if you wanted to integrate native code and support the Microsoft VM, you either had to do dual development, or code to MSVM only.
Interestingly, Apple has had their own native interface too, called JDirect, which was even easier than RNI. But they fully suppored JNI as well, and you could mix the two. (The interface has changed since then, but there are still dual-supported interfaces.)
Why didn't Microsoft take this approach if they really thought they could do better? That's the crux of the matter. Sun and others would argue that Microsoft was trying to break cross-platform Java. I would argue they have a point.
Or public education, or national defense, or the police, or civil rights, or ...
You would disclude theologians from the discussion because they aren't dealing from the empirical deck and still argue that your position is not a materialist one?
The current G4 yields from Motorola do have the potential to freeze when run at 500 MHz. These are the chips that are spec'ed by Motorola to run at 500 MHz. That and along with Motorola's spectacularly bad yields from their fab, seems to make it clear they overpromised and underdelivered. I can't see blaming Apple for this. Their primary blame, prior to this debacle, was to have been overly hopeful.
Apple's latest firmware upgrade, for Mac OS 9, also supposedly gets rid of the block.
WRT MkLinux, Apple not only provided space for the web site, but they also financed its creation, and for a while its support. They provided funds for the OSF to port Mach 3.0 to the PPC, and had at least one engineer in house for about two years to port Linux to Mach 3.0. (There was one full time engineer to lead the project and others as proved necessary.) Apple's motivation for doing this was to sell Macintoshes into environments where a low cost Un*x option was necessary, such as university campuses. When the MacOS X effort got underway, the MkLinux team pretty much went to that project full time.
Actually the Ultra IDE implementations on the G4s, with the factory drives, apparently do sustained reads and writes at about 20 MB/s. At least according to Macintouch.
Apple may have have had on board support for SCSI in older computers but that was SCSI 1, and anyone who needed higher performance bought PCI SCSI cards anyway. This is why the have gotten rid of SCSI on board. They either needed to have support for higher performace SCSI or go to IDE which was significantly cheaper to implement and whose performance was comparable, and with the G4s crushes, the old SCSI implementations. 20 MB/s sustained read AND write? Now, that ain't bad. (See for some independent benchmarks. Of course, if you have higher and/or more reliable performance requirements, such as for complex imaging or video work, Ultra2 SCSI is also an option, and necessary if you want to use RAID.
This IMHO is as it should be. (The old on board SCSI was a good thing when they first introduced it. But it didn't keep up with the market and in the end it was was an added expence that was only really good for slow devices like CD-ROMs. And even in those cases when they offered faster SCSI on the internal bus, the OS wasn't really up to taking advantage of it, particularly as faster IDE implementations began appearing in the Wintel world.)
Well, it depends on what you want to run on OS X. As long as you don't require X, the porting is hardly brain surgery, particularly if what you're porting already supports xBSD. There are issues, such as assumptions about directory structures, but these are pretty minor.
X client applicationss on the other hand are a different matter. There isn't yet an X server for the Quartz imaging model of MacOS X, and probably won't be one for a while after the OS ships. I must say, however, the Quartz imaging model is pretty sexy. And I imagine a lot of the stuff that was already ported to NEXTSTEP/OpenStep will find their way to MacOS X as well.