....There's no telling where those hands have been, and anything on the fingers ends up on the keys......
Since I am the only one who uses my computer, at least those germs are MINE and I know where my hands have been. I would think that is the case for many computer users, especially those who use laptops.
So wash your hands after you have used the toilet or someone else's computer keyboard and mouse before touching your food.
In current Windows systems, many programs will only work correctly if the user is granted administrator rights. Will MS lean on developers to write their software such, that a normal user status is sufficient? Much malware today silently installs itself without so much as a warning to the user. Will VISTA incorporate some sort of warning and ask for a password before ANY executable file can run for the first time or install itself deep in the system? Will users be told NOT to type password unless they are SURE the file comes from a trusted source?
.....I do believe that it is useful socially for citizens to be able to defend themselves......
In nazi Germany, many, if not most, arrests of Jews and other "undesireables" were done at night by the secret police. If only 1% of the 6 million or so, who were later exterminated, had managed to shoot and kill one gestapo agent before their arrest, at least 60,000 of said agents would have been eliminated. To prevent that, the nazi goons would have had stop arresting people in secret, but risk doing so in open gun battles. This would have caused more publicity that might have turned many Germans against Hitler. Evildoers generally like to have as little light cast on their activities as possible.
The writers of the constitution knew about secret unlawful arrests and mandated that citizens have the right to defend themselves against a Government that does that sort of thing. If a large group say 5% or more of a country's population is subject to persecution by the government, it becomes very difficult for the government police to arrest and eliminate them. But this is only true if the "undesireables" have weapons and are willing to use them to defend themselves. If they all don't just meekly go and let themselves be arrested, there simply are not enough police.
.....Is it any real surprise that means we've released almost 300 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the industrial era.....
One question that is seldom, if ever even asked, let alone answered is "Where did all this carbon bound energy we are now liberating come from in the first place?"
We call these things "fossil" fuels, implying that these come from things that were once alive. We know that all living things get their energy ultimately from the sun. Since the sun light only acts on the surface of the earth, the carbon that is now locked up in these fuels must have been in the sea and atmosphere at one time where living things could use it to make the energy bearing hydrocarbons we now burn. The very presence of fossils and fossil fuels in now cold places is evidence that it was it was very warm there. Whether these now arctic regions where these fossils are found were warm in situ or drifted there by means of shifts in the crust of the earth is really irrelevant to the fact that the carbon was once on the surface of the earth.
The fact that the beds of many major rivers continue across the continental shelves shows that the water level of the oceans were once much lower and from these continental shelves we now pump oil. The Amazon river, for example, once ran accross the continental shelf until it cascaded in an immense waterfall, far greater and higher than any we know of today, into the abysmal plain of the south atlantic basin.
We cannot predict the future, but there is plenty of evidence that there were both much warmer and much colder periods in the immense epochs of time past, long before man came on the scene.
.....Factors such as solar radiation, ocean current cycles......
So what do we really KNOW about solar cycles other than the short term 11 year one? How long, even theoretically, for example, does it take for the energy from the fusing atoms in the solar interior take to finally get to earth? Is this reaction rate and subsequent energy flow subject to long term cycles? Solar energy flow is only one of many unknown variables that affect long term climate conditions on our planet.
We are trying to extrapolate to the future from presently unknown information. Our presence here is so fleeting compared to the huge spans of time, yet we presume to predict what will take place long after we have disappeared from here. It is like trying to predict or grasp the behavior of a complex computer program from the knowledge of a few clock cycles. How many times in the past were so called scientists sure they had it right and later it turned out to be incomplete at best or dead wrong at worst. Two of the hardest thing for any human to do is to admit we don't know and that we were wrong.
....The modelling of climate over periods of decades and centuries has nothing to do with the chaos of weather over days......
So you are saying that mechanisms that drive the daily weather are totally different than what drives the long term climate? On what KNOWN obervations do you base such an assertion? Why should the same hitherto unknown factors that control the daily weather, also not control the weather over many days? Where is the cut-off time between the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and ever longer peroiods of time where the laws by which the weather operates suddenly become known and predictable? If short term weather is chaotic, by what mechanism is long term weather prevented from being so also?
......All but a fanatic few are sure humans are causing some kind of effect in the environment,.....
So you are appealing to the majority opinion? There have been numerous instances where a small minority, even sometimes only one, disagreed and in the end it turned out that the majority was wrong. Just looking at a globe should tell you that mankind's presence on the earth is barely preceptible. Three fourths of the planet is water and of the land area, man occupies only a small portion. All the energy mankind has ever used since the dawn of time would not keep the earth warm, even for a day. The sun's output is remarkably steady, but it does vary some. Evidence from many sciences show that most things in nature are cyclical. Some of these shorter cycles, such as the 11 year solar cycles have been well charted. What about longer variations, centuries or millenia, of solar radiance? Has solar output other variations? Let's not give ourselves airs of how important we are and that we can have any, except perhaps local short term effects on this planet.
One of the prime characteristics of any LIVING organism is that it can make a reasonable good copy of itself and these copies in turn have that capability. Living things also have the ability to adapt to and in some cases change their environment. The earth as such has no influence in the space it orbits through. If the sun for some reason changed its energy output dramatically there is nothing the earth nor anything on it could do to change that.
AFAIK there is still only one earth. The earth itself SUPPORTS living organisms, but in itself is just a piece of rock gyrating through space. The GAIA theory is just a bunch of BS, but it has made its promulgator a bundle of money.
.....The sciences have come a long way from the days of using a slide rule for calculations.....
With a slide rule or a computer, you still have to have the correct models and above all the right data. Computers can spew forth mountains of results which can be all wrong if the inputs are based on incorrect or insufficient data. Extrapolating scanty short time observation to long term climate changes is iffy, even with the fastest computers. Much of science is based on assumptions, which may seem reasonable, but nevertheless may be way off base. If predicting the weather, especially long term were such a sure thing, why is it that even in short term predicitions, the people who predict the weather are so often wrong? I'll believe these climate scientists more when they can predict the place, intensity and time of a hurricane more accurately, say only a week in advance even, than they do now. Chicken little note this: The sky is NOT falling even if your 100Ghz 1000 processor computer says it is.
Screwing up our entire economy on conjecture, even conjecture based on fancy computer calculations, is not sound public policy.
....The end of civilization has already begun with the first of the oil wars.....
Wars have always been part of humanity, long before anyone used even a drop of oil. Modern technology, especially atomic energy and more recently biological advances have made possible the contruction of weapons that could exterminate all life. This is a much more immediate threat than anything like global warming, cooling or whatever. Anyone who takes a shortcut to obtaining something he/she wants because of selfish desires is a cause of war. If such a person happens to gain control of a nation, such as Hitler or Stalin, the consequences can affect every human on earth. An individual or corporation who uses the machinery of government to achieve their goals at the expense of the public is no different. In the absence of true love and respect for one another and obedience to the golden rule, the only thing left is raw force. Let's hope that this raw force doesn't fall into the hands of an individual or group who would use that force, even if it means the destruction of the human race. During the cold war, the MAD ( mutually assured destruction) doctrine seemed to keep an uneasy peace because both sides wanted to live. If such force ever gets into the hands of the kind of people who fly airplanes into buildings, they will not care and would unleash all weapons under their control. That IMHO is the biggest threat that should be addressed.
.....It could mean the end of modern civilization and the death of billions.....
It is much more likely that the modern weapons of war, the WMD's mankind has developed, will do humanity in. Historically, human actions through wars, hatred and murders have killed far more people than all natural catastrophes. Just in the century past, the skills of humans at mass exterminations have risen dramatically and have caused orders of magnitude more misery than anything nature dished out. At one point there were over 80,000 nuclear devices distributed around the world. I don't know how many of them are still useable right now, but even if ony 10% of these are ever used in anger, by terrorists or terrorist nations, the danger to our survival as a species is greater than anything nature might do. Even a large asteroid hitting the earth wouldn't leave long lasting radioactivity behind. In addition to the nuclear threat there are the biological and chemical weapons that could kill additional vast numbers of people. Man's worst enemy has always been man and not nature and this is increasingly true.
Jesus Christ predicted that terrible times will come in connection with a one world government, such that if God Himself did not personally intervene, no life would survive on this planet. Whether He is believed or not, the fact is that mankind presently has the ability to fulfill this prophecy.
.....Apple management will fail in its attempts to thwart the hackers. The hackers are clever......
I don't think Apple will care much if a few hackers manage to run OSX on the cheap Dell or other no-name beige box. These hackers will also have to supply the missing drivers for all the myriad of different PC boxes. If Windows will also run well on the new Macs, very few ordinary people will care whether their old boxes can be made to run OSX. Hackers will get satisfaction out of getting to run OSX on whatever box they happen to have, but Apple will likely consider that as part of the noise for now.
.....since the OS was capable for running on other hardware......
That is the big IF it will run on other hardware. I doubt that any court would force Apple to support all those millions of PCs out there. If some manufacturer were to make a clone PC that could run OSX and not run afoul of any of Apple's IP, then Apple might not have such a strong case. However, if that manufacturer had to buy a copy of OSX at retail cost from Apple, they would be at a strong disadvantage to compete with Apple. MS sells their software at substantial discounts to OEM computer makers. It is not likely that any court would force Apple to give anybody a discount on their software.
......But this is not about Internet broadcasts......
I subscribe to XM radio to be able to listen to commercial free music in my car and also now over our Direc TV system. Any XM subscriber can also listen via the Internet for nothing extra. Radio has been recordable for decades. So why should the recording companies suddenly worry now? When I hear a new song or exceptional performance over XM, I make a note of that and then look for a CD on Amazon that has that piece. If there are other selection on that CD by that artist, I often order it. If the CD has only that one song I really like, I buy it from iTunes if they have it. When FM radio and consumer tape recorders first came out, the same kinds of sentiment was expressed in fear that recording sales would suffer. Nobody can accurately predict the future, but the record companies ought to be able to look at the past and see that their earlier fears were groundless and radio is and always has been to their benefit.
.....Britney Spears, I hear, has emptied a lot of wallets as well.......
She has got nothing out of my wallet. Evidently, these is a demand for what she produces however. Bill Gates got his money from willing customers, of which I am one also. MS makes crap, but they also make some good things. Each customer decides whether to exchange a certain amount of $$$ for something they need or want.
How about all the users who already have a Windows license? Throw that old PC into the trash and use your existing Windows in an Intel Mac. VPC allows the running of several versions of Windows and even old DOS simultaneously. With the emulation speed penalty removed, a VPC equipped Mac should meet the vast majority of Mac user's need for sometimes running Windows. Even now, on a fast PPC Mac, VPC is quite useable for many purposes. The ability to share files with the Mac side is a very useful feature of VPC.
.....since Virtual PC translates x86 instructions to PowerPC instructions.....
Unless MS comes up with a new Intel version of VPC that simply drops the translation part of the program, if it detects that it is running on an Intel processor. In that case, the virtualization penalty should be small, especially in light of the fact that the new Intel Macs are faster anyway than the previous PPC based Macs. A new Intel powered Mac running an updated version of VPC should be almost as good as such a Mac being booted up directly in Windows.
....Is there going to be enough Mac hardware out there to make it worth it?.....
Most likely MS will make an updated Intel version of Virtual PC which should run very well on the new Macs since emulation of the processor is no longer a slow-down issue. Any version of Windows can be installed in VPC for the PPC Macs, but unless you have a top of line PPC PPC Mac, there is a significant speed penalty in the processor emulation.
.....As far as I know with Virtual PC, you won't get any accelerated video.....
On the PPC Macs, VPC uses whatever video hardware the Mac has. Any games that run on an average PC should work well on these faster dual processor Intel Macs if the updated Intel version of VPC is at least as well done as the present PPC version. Of course a fully tricked out Alienware machine will likely be better for some games. For most users, an X-box or other console will likely be better, especially the price.
Why not in addition to? For example, there are STILL some web sites that will only work with Windows and IE. I use Virtual PC on my PPC Mac to access these. It works quite well for this. Now I would never even attempt to play a PC game this way, but an Intel Mac should run an updated VPC at an acceptable speed, even for some games.
Macs are not cheap, but then they are designed, not thrown together. Besides, a decent Windows laptop is no cheaper than the new Intel MacPro. The Mac is actually less expensive, if you factor in the cool software that comes with it. OSX give you today what is still vapor ware, VISTA, from MS.
......And it's good news for Mac users who will be able to dual boot between OSX and Windows.....
Why bother booting Windows instead of using an updated version of Microsoft's Virtual PC? It works great on PPC based Macs, albeit slowly because of the emulation needed. With the new Intel Macs, there is no reason why a virtual PC should be much slower than a booted Windows since there is no emulation. MS sells software and they will just add the Intel Macs to a long list of computers they have Windows running on. If these new Intel Macs sell well, Mr. Gates & Co. will just make more money yet on the coattails of Apple. They already make a very nice version of Office for the Mac which has been adding nicely to their bottom line.
Of which 42 million have been sold, mostly to non-geeks. People vote for products with their wallets, whereas some here on/. just make disparaging noises. No man-made products are perfect, especially technological ones, but Apple though having made lemons at times, take more care in actually DESIGNING products the "just work" and also look much better than those of their competitors. At Apple they practice "Intelligent Design", whereas most businesses that make similar products, such as Dell, just "evolve" their stuff. Apple takes similar components, such as hard drives, various chips, LCD panels and other common industry components that are also available to everyone else and just does more with them than some of the others. How can the HD in competing players last any longer, since these drives are all made by the same one or two manufactureres. Sony used to and in some areas still makes very well designed good products.
.....The DMCA protects against breaking encryption systems,.....
No more than prohibition protected people from obtaining and drinking alcohol. No laws have EVER prevented people from getting what they want. There are many programs available on the Internet that allow anyone who wants to copy anything to copy it. Software companies realized that copy protection was futile and it is not often used any more. Most people will buy something they perceive to be valuable and useful if it can be gotten for a fair price and conveniently. Maybe in time, music and film makers will realize this and change their business models.
....Well, instead of gold discs for the general public, why not provide a cheap and easy method for everyone to press their own CDs?.....
Gold disks stored under good conditions should last at least 10 years, maybe longer. With machine readable media, it is not so much the media themselves that are the problem, but with the machines that read them being still available after many years. Will there still be a reader for these disks in 50 years, when all digital storage is done on holographic crystals? Even if the data of ones and zeros can still be read, with there still be software than can make sense out of them, especially if the bits have been encrypted for "security"?
I have some 50 year old 8mm films from my parents, stored in taped shut metal cans, that appears to be just fine, but nothing to view them with. So I taped them shut again. I bet those reel to reel audio tapes would also still play if I found a working player for them. Analog storage may deteriorate slowly, but it likely to be more recoverable than binary bits that have been flipped or become indeterminate as to whether it is a one or zero.
Up until the modern age, all data was recorded and played back by humans in human readable formats. Some of that is thousands of years old.
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....There's no telling where those hands have been, and anything on the fingers ends up on the keys......
Since I am the only one who uses my computer, at least those germs are MINE and I know where my hands have been. I would think that is the case for many computer users, especially those who use laptops.
So wash your hands after you have used the toilet or someone else's computer keyboard and mouse before touching your food.
In current Windows systems, many programs will only work correctly if the user is granted administrator rights. Will MS lean on developers to write their software such, that a normal user status is sufficient? Much malware today silently installs itself without so much as a warning to the user. Will VISTA incorporate some sort of warning and ask for a password before ANY executable file can run for the first time or install itself deep in the system? Will users be told NOT to type password unless they are SURE the file comes from a trusted source?
.....I do believe that it is useful socially for citizens to be able to defend themselves......
In nazi Germany, many, if not most, arrests of Jews and other "undesireables" were done at night by the secret police. If only 1% of the 6 million or so, who were later exterminated, had managed to shoot and kill one gestapo agent before their arrest, at least 60,000 of said agents would have been eliminated. To prevent that, the nazi goons would have had stop arresting people in secret, but risk doing so in open gun battles. This would have caused more publicity that might have turned many Germans against Hitler. Evildoers generally like to have as little light cast on their activities as possible.
The writers of the constitution knew about secret unlawful arrests and mandated that citizens have the right to defend themselves against a Government that does that sort of thing. If a large group say 5% or more of a country's population is subject to persecution by the government, it becomes very difficult for the government police to arrest and eliminate them. But this is only true if the "undesireables" have weapons and are willing to use them to defend themselves. If they all don't just meekly go and let themselves be arrested, there simply are not enough police.
.....Is it any real surprise that means we've released almost 300 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the industrial era.....
One question that is seldom, if ever even asked, let alone answered is "Where did all this carbon bound energy we are now liberating come from in the first place?"
We call these things "fossil" fuels, implying that these come from things that were once alive. We know that all living things get their energy ultimately from the sun. Since the sun light only acts on the surface of the earth, the carbon that is now locked up in these fuels must have been in the sea and atmosphere at one time where living things could use it to make the energy bearing hydrocarbons we now burn. The very presence of fossils and fossil fuels in now cold places is evidence that it was it was very warm there. Whether these now arctic regions where these fossils are found were warm in situ or drifted there by means of shifts in the crust of the earth is really irrelevant to the fact that the carbon was once on the surface of the earth.
The fact that the beds of many major rivers continue across the continental shelves shows that the water level of the oceans were once much lower and from these continental shelves we now pump oil. The Amazon river, for example, once ran accross the continental shelf until it cascaded in an immense waterfall, far greater and higher than any we know of today, into the abysmal plain of the south atlantic basin.
We cannot predict the future, but there is plenty of evidence that there were both much warmer and much colder periods in the immense epochs of time past, long before man came on the scene.
.....Factors such as solar radiation, ocean current cycles......
So what do we really KNOW about solar cycles other than the short term 11 year one? How long, even theoretically, for example, does it take for the energy from the fusing atoms in the solar interior take to finally get to earth? Is this reaction rate and subsequent energy flow subject to long term cycles? Solar energy flow is only one of many unknown variables that affect long term climate conditions on our planet.
We are trying to extrapolate to the future from presently unknown information. Our presence here is so fleeting compared to the huge spans of time, yet we presume to predict what will take place long after we have disappeared from here. It is like trying to predict or grasp the behavior of a complex computer program from the knowledge of a few clock cycles. How many times in the past were so called scientists sure they had it right and later it turned out to be incomplete at best or dead wrong at worst. Two of the hardest thing for any human to do is to admit we don't know and that we were wrong.
....The modelling of climate over periods of decades and centuries has nothing to do with the chaos of weather over days......
So you are saying that mechanisms that drive the daily weather are totally different than what drives the long term climate? On what KNOWN obervations do you base such an assertion? Why should the same hitherto unknown factors that control the daily weather, also not control the weather over many days? Where is the cut-off time between the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and ever longer peroiods of time where the laws by which the weather operates suddenly become known and predictable? If short term weather is chaotic, by what mechanism is long term weather prevented from being so also?
......All but a fanatic few are sure humans are causing some kind of effect in the environment,.....
So you are appealing to the majority opinion? There have been numerous instances where a small minority, even sometimes only one, disagreed and in the end it turned out that the majority was wrong. Just looking at a globe should tell you that mankind's presence on the earth is barely preceptible. Three fourths of the planet is water and of the land area, man occupies only a small portion. All the energy mankind has ever used since the dawn of time would not keep the earth warm, even for a day. The sun's output is remarkably steady, but it does vary some. Evidence from many sciences show that most things in nature are cyclical. Some of these shorter cycles, such as the 11 year solar cycles have been well charted. What about longer variations, centuries or millenia, of solar radiance? Has solar output other variations? Let's not give ourselves airs of how important we are and that we can have any, except perhaps local short term effects on this planet.
....the earth acting like a living organism....
One of the prime characteristics of any LIVING organism is that it can make a reasonable good copy of itself and these copies in turn have that capability. Living things also have the ability to adapt to and in some cases change their environment. The earth as such has no influence in the space it orbits through. If the sun for some reason changed its energy output dramatically there is nothing the earth nor anything on it could do to change that.
AFAIK there is still only one earth. The earth itself SUPPORTS living organisms, but in itself is just a piece of rock gyrating through space. The GAIA theory is just a bunch of BS, but it has made its promulgator a bundle of money.
.....The sciences have come a long way from the days of using a slide rule for calculations.....
With a slide rule or a computer, you still have to have the correct models and above all the right data. Computers can spew forth mountains of results which can be all wrong if the inputs are based on incorrect or insufficient data. Extrapolating scanty short time observation to long term climate changes is iffy, even with the fastest computers. Much of science is based on assumptions, which may seem reasonable, but nevertheless may be way off base. If predicting the weather, especially long term were such a sure thing, why is it that even in short term predicitions, the people who predict the weather are so often wrong? I'll believe these climate scientists more when they can predict the place, intensity and time of a hurricane more accurately, say only a week in advance even, than they do now. Chicken little note this: The sky is NOT falling even if your 100Ghz 1000 processor computer says it is.
Screwing up our entire economy on conjecture, even conjecture based on fancy computer calculations, is not sound public policy.
....The end of civilization has already begun with the first of the oil wars.....
Wars have always been part of humanity, long before anyone used even a drop of oil. Modern technology, especially atomic energy and more recently biological advances have made possible the contruction of weapons that could exterminate all life. This is a much more immediate threat than anything like global warming, cooling or whatever. Anyone who takes a shortcut to obtaining something he/she wants because of selfish desires is a cause of war. If such a person happens to gain control of a nation, such as Hitler or Stalin, the consequences can affect every human on earth. An individual or corporation who uses the machinery of government to achieve their goals at the expense of the public is no different. In the absence of true love and respect for one another and obedience to the golden rule, the only thing left is raw force. Let's hope that this raw force doesn't fall into the hands of an individual or group who would use that force, even if it means the destruction of the human race. During the cold war, the MAD ( mutually assured destruction) doctrine seemed to keep an uneasy peace because both sides wanted to live. If such force ever gets into the hands of the kind of people who fly airplanes into buildings, they will not care and would unleash all weapons under their control. That IMHO is the biggest threat that should be addressed.
.....It could mean the end of modern civilization and the death of billions.....
It is much more likely that the modern weapons of war, the WMD's mankind has developed, will do humanity in. Historically, human actions through wars, hatred and murders have killed far more people than all natural catastrophes. Just in the century past, the skills of humans at mass exterminations have risen dramatically and have caused orders of magnitude more misery than anything nature dished out. At one point there were over 80,000 nuclear devices distributed around the world. I don't know how many of them are still useable right now, but even if ony 10% of these are ever used in anger, by terrorists or terrorist nations, the danger to our survival as a species is greater than anything nature might do. Even a large asteroid hitting the earth wouldn't leave long lasting radioactivity behind. In addition to the nuclear threat there are the biological and chemical weapons that could kill additional vast numbers of people. Man's worst enemy has always been man and not nature and this is increasingly true.
Jesus Christ predicted that terrible times will come in connection with a one world government, such that if God Himself did not personally intervene, no life would survive on this planet. Whether He is believed or not, the fact is that mankind presently has the ability to fulfill this prophecy.
.....Apple management will fail in its attempts to thwart the hackers. The hackers are clever......
I don't think Apple will care much if a few hackers manage to run OSX on the cheap Dell or other no-name beige box. These hackers will also have to supply the missing drivers for all the myriad of different PC boxes. If Windows will also run well on the new Macs, very few ordinary people will care whether their old boxes can be made to run OSX. Hackers will get satisfaction out of getting to run OSX on whatever box they happen to have, but Apple will likely consider that as part of the noise for now.
.....since the OS was capable for running on other hardware......
That is the big IF it will run on other hardware. I doubt that any court would force Apple to support all those millions of PCs out there. If some manufacturer were to make a clone PC that could run OSX and not run afoul of any of Apple's IP, then Apple might not have such a strong case. However, if that manufacturer had to buy a copy of OSX at retail cost from Apple, they would be at a strong disadvantage to compete with Apple. MS sells their software at substantial discounts to OEM computer makers. It is not likely that any court would force Apple to give anybody a discount on their software.
......But this is not about Internet broadcasts......
I subscribe to XM radio to be able to listen to commercial free music in my car and also now over our Direc TV system. Any XM subscriber can also listen via the Internet for nothing extra. Radio has been recordable for decades. So why should the recording companies suddenly worry now? When I hear a new song or exceptional performance over XM, I make a note of that and then look for a CD on Amazon that has that piece. If there are other selection on that CD by that artist, I often order it. If the CD has only that one song I really like, I buy it from iTunes if they have it. When FM radio and consumer tape recorders first came out, the same kinds of sentiment was expressed in fear that recording sales would suffer. Nobody can accurately predict the future, but the record companies ought to be able to look at the past and see that their earlier fears were groundless and radio is and always has been to their benefit.
.....Britney Spears, I hear, has emptied a lot of wallets as well.......
She has got nothing out of my wallet. Evidently, these is a demand for what she produces however. Bill Gates got his money from willing customers, of which I am one also. MS makes crap, but they also make some good things. Each customer decides whether to exchange a certain amount of $$$ for something they need or want.
..... it required buying a Windows license......
How about all the users who already have a Windows license? Throw that old PC into the trash and use your existing Windows in an Intel Mac. VPC allows the running of several versions of Windows and even old DOS simultaneously. With the emulation speed penalty removed, a VPC equipped Mac should meet the vast majority of Mac user's need for sometimes running Windows. Even now, on a fast PPC Mac, VPC is quite useable for many purposes. The ability to share files with the Mac side is a very useful feature of VPC.
.....since Virtual PC translates x86 instructions to PowerPC instructions.....
Unless MS comes up with a new Intel version of VPC that simply drops the translation part of the program, if it detects that it is running on an Intel processor. In that case, the virtualization penalty should be small, especially in light of the fact that the new Intel Macs are faster anyway than the previous PPC based Macs. A new Intel powered Mac running an updated version of VPC should be almost as good as such a Mac being booted up directly in Windows.
....Is there going to be enough Mac hardware out there to make it worth it?.....
Most likely MS will make an updated Intel version of Virtual PC which should run very well on the new Macs since emulation of the processor is no longer a slow-down issue. Any version of Windows can be installed in VPC for the PPC Macs, but unless you have a top of line PPC PPC Mac, there is a significant speed penalty in the processor emulation.
.....As far as I know with Virtual PC, you won't get any accelerated video.....
On the PPC Macs, VPC uses whatever video hardware the Mac has. Any games that run on an average PC should work well on these faster dual processor Intel Macs if the updated Intel version of VPC is at least as well done as the present PPC version. Of course a fully tricked out Alienware machine will likely be better for some games. For most users, an X-box or other console will likely be better, especially the price.
.....decide that you want Windows instead.....
Why not in addition to? For example, there are STILL some web sites that will only work with Windows and IE. I use Virtual PC on my PPC Mac to access these. It works quite well for this. Now I would never even attempt to play a PC game this way, but an Intel Mac should run an updated VPC at an acceptable speed, even for some games.
Macs are not cheap, but then they are designed, not thrown together. Besides, a decent Windows laptop is no cheaper than the new Intel MacPro. The Mac is actually less expensive, if you factor in the cool software that comes with it. OSX give you today what is still vapor ware, VISTA, from MS.
......And it's good news for Mac users who will be able to dual boot between OSX and Windows.....
Why bother booting Windows instead of using an updated version of Microsoft's Virtual PC? It works great on PPC based Macs, albeit slowly because of the emulation needed. With the new Intel Macs, there is no reason why a virtual PC should be much slower than a booted Windows since there is no emulation. MS sells software and they will just add the Intel Macs to a long list of computers they have Windows running on. If these new Intel Macs sell well, Mr. Gates & Co. will just make more money yet on the coattails of Apple. They already make a very nice version of Office for the Mac which has been adding nicely to their bottom line.
....The iPod really is a crappy device.....
/. just make disparaging noises. No man-made products are perfect, especially technological ones, but Apple though having made lemons at times, take more care in actually DESIGNING products the "just work" and also look much better than those of their competitors. At Apple they practice "Intelligent Design", whereas most businesses that make similar products, such as Dell, just "evolve" their stuff. Apple takes similar components, such as hard drives, various chips, LCD panels and other common industry components that are also available to everyone else and just does more with them than some of the others. How can the HD in competing players last any longer, since these drives are all made by the same one or two manufactureres. Sony used to and in some areas still makes very well designed good products.
Of which 42 million have been sold, mostly to non-geeks. People vote for products with their wallets, whereas some here on
.....The DMCA protects against breaking encryption systems,.....
No more than prohibition protected people from obtaining and drinking alcohol. No laws have EVER prevented people from getting what they want. There are many programs available on the Internet that allow anyone who wants to copy anything to copy it. Software companies realized that copy protection was futile and it is not often used any more. Most people will buy something they perceive to be valuable and useful if it can be gotten for a fair price and conveniently. Maybe in time, music and film makers will realize this and change their business models.
....Well, instead of gold discs for the general public, why not provide a cheap and easy method for everyone to press their own CDs?.....
Gold disks stored under good conditions should last at least 10 years, maybe longer. With machine readable media, it is not so much the media themselves that are the problem, but with the machines that read them being still available after many years. Will there still be a reader for these disks in 50 years, when all digital storage is done on holographic crystals? Even if the data of ones and zeros can still be read, with there still be software than can make sense out of them, especially if the bits have been encrypted for "security"?
I have some 50 year old 8mm films from my parents, stored in taped shut metal cans, that appears to be just fine, but nothing to view them with. So I taped them shut again. I bet those reel to reel audio tapes would also still play if I found a working player for them. Analog storage may deteriorate slowly, but it likely to be more recoverable than binary bits that have been flipped or become indeterminate as to whether it is a one or zero.
Up until the modern age, all data was recorded and played back by humans in human readable formats. Some of that is thousands of years old.
.....why haven't they already done a universal virus......
I was doing a fascetious little word-play on the 'universal binaries' that are supposed to run well on Intel and PowerPC processors!