Newton was ahead of its time. Translation: it didn't quite work (or should I say: "Transexual: it died a quiet wok") although it was hugely influential. iPhone takes a lot of not particularly new ideas - but which have not been well implemented to date (*cough* Windows Mobile *cough*) - and will stand or fall on whether it can make them "just work". Which we'll find out when it launches.
We don't know what the price, or contract terms, will be until it launches. The figures announced by SJ are likely "upper limits" - there are lots of obvious strategic reasons for overstating the price when you're forced to pre-announce a product (e.g. easier to reduce the price than raise it, keep competitors in the dark, avoid "Osbourning" iPod sales...)
...and (although the OP doesn't mention it it always comes up) if the European version launches without 3G/UTMS/HTwhateveritis it will be laughed out of court. But maybe, just maybe, those smart guys at Apple have worked that one out for themselves and only left the "do 3G" link off the circuit board because their US carrier doesn't support it.
(That is - Read the Fine Previous Paragraph in Your Own Post)
One thing I didn't consider earlier is the number of people I know who won't get one because its too big.
It needs to be fairly wide and tall to make the touch screen work. Adding a removable battery (hatch, internal compartment, contacts, rigid case for the battery...) would make it wide, tall and thick. At least it is (presumably) charge-by-USB, so you won't need multiple power adaptors.
Worse, the iPhone is designed to do things other than just being a phone, hence I will need to use it more often.
Well, before Apple did a phone this was a strong argument as to why they didn't need one - you'd feel a right wally walking around in the rain looking for the last payphone in the county because you'd used up your phone battery playing Tetris and listening to music. Its not as if a RAZR, an iPod Nano and a DS Lite are going to overload the typical manbag.
Now, Steve Jobs could have bet the farm on the general public agreeing with this, and that Sony et. al. will fail with Walkman phones etc. but hedging your bets never hurts. In any case, if the iPhone flops, Apple just take out the transmitter, drop the price and you're left with a pretty cute iPod Video DeLuxe - which wouldn't have been possible if they'd made a more "phone-y" phone.
When Apple discourages virtual machines running OSX, this is reluctantly accepted [slashdot.org] because, well... gee, they're Apple and we won't do this unless they say we can.
Yes there is a double standard - one standard for a small/medium player in a competetive market, and another standard for a company with a near-total monopoly.
Yes, Apple have a restrictive license that only allows you to run OSX on genuine, non-virtual Apple iron.
BUT If you don't like that then you are perfectly free to vote with your feet and buy one of the 95%+ of other computer systems available that don't run come with OSX.
Except... nearly all of those other 95% of systems are running MS software. Even if you complete the uphill struggle to buy one without MS Windows included and run Linux/*BSD/BeOS then sooner or later the 95% of the world who didn't bother will oblige you to use Windows for some task or other.
Are you saying that Apple, with a few % of the market, should be subject to anti-monopoly rules because their only competetor has a near-monopoly??
In short, if Apple ever gain 50%+ of the desktop computing market they'll have to face the same anti-trust responsibilities as Microsoft. The only area Apple are within a sniff of that is with iTMS, and then only if you don't count CD sales as digital music distribution. Until then, every time they decide on a restrictive license, impose a lock in, or piss off a software house by incorporating an application they have to balance the benefits to them against a genuine risk of losing customers to the competition.
In the meantime, MS have - through their Vista licenses and the ridiculous premium charged for "stand alone" copies of Windows - made it extremely expensive to legally run Windows as anything other than your primary operating system.
Sometime, Apple will have to support virtualization on OSX Server in order to compete with Linux and Windows. Currently, I don't think there is a significant demand (personally, I don't even see why you'd want to use OSX as a server, when its USP is its user interface).
The dirty secret, the Truth Which Dare Not Speak Its Name, in all this, is that the chuckleheads lip-synching to "Barbie Girl"...
...which would probably be enough to prompt a takedown notice from the MAFIAA (and probably the manufacturers of Barbie too)
The problem is not the (quite reasonable) desire to stop flagrent mass distribution of entire copyrighted works. I have little sympathy for the demise of original Napster et. al. - which doesn't mean that I do have sympathy for the record labels, who should be doing more to provide a legitimate, reasonably-priced alternative.
The problem is the conceit that any breach of copyright, however small and technical, somehow does irreperable harm to the copyright holder and justifies lawyers at dawn; and the tendency for the full weight of the law (and the whole DRM circus) to be focussed on such infringements because they are "softer" targets than the organised, large-scale operations that might actually have a commercial impact (and have the resources to work-around DRM).
Just like everyone moved to OSX and shut out the Classic Mac OS 9 and under crowd, so too will everyone move to Vista and shut out the XP and under crowd.
Not sure that this is comparing, er... apples to apples:->
OS X didn't really get usable until 10.2 or thereabouts. Never mind - Vista SP1 is already in the pipeline!
For a decent interval, new macs came configured to dual-boot OSX or OS9, and support for running OS9 in a "compatibility box" hung around until the switch to intel.
OS9 was hopelessly out-of-date, with kludgey multitasking and laughable memory management. Shifting to a industrial-strength *nix-based system was a pretty compelling idea. The lack of major incentives to upgrade from Windows XP to Vista have been discussed here ad nauseum - and the jury is still out on how much the major one (security) has really improved (security won't really be fixed until third party applications stop assuming administrator rights - otherwise you could have run XP from an unprivileged account).
Apple has a smaller, more flexible user base - MS are dependent on big corporates who have to regression test 50,000 PCs before changing the default screensaver. Hence Apple have been able to go "back to the drawing board" several times (Apple ][ to Mac; 68k to PPC; OS9 to OSX/Unix; PPC to Intel) and rapidly dump "legacy" features (e.g. floppy discs) whereas MS is a history of conservative,incremental changes all the way back to CP/M, and failed to get people to shift from 2.1/95/98 to the vastly superior NT/2000
MS have to worry about a substantial and technically demanding gaming userbase. Apple... don't.
If only Python didn't require the use of whitespace for defining blocks. It is indeed tragic that an otherwise fine language is so goddamn retarded in that one aspect.
Count me in with the people who tossed the Python book out of the window as soon as I read that line.
Years ago, there was an old-chestnut "funny" doing the rounds about how Thompson & Richie made up the UNIX operating system as a joke - one of the bits of "evidence" there was that makefiles used whitespaces to deliniate blocks. Hmm.
Trouble is, anybody who has used the broad C/Java genre of languages (of which even Perl is a peripheral member) - or HTML/XML for that matter - is used to mentally "collapsing" any combination of spaces, newlines and tabs. Heck, using spaces for indentation is even bad practice in a wordprocessor.
I can see that a nicely indented Python program would be perfectly readable provided you always edited it in the same text editor, preferably a nice language-aware IDE, with the same tab and indentation settings. Then you change IDEs, or make a quick "in the field" patch in a different editor, set to use hard tabs or with the "indent" setting different from the "tab" setting and you've suddenly broken the code. I'm sure many people have wasted ages faffing about with indentation styles to pretty up their code - now imagine you had to do that to get the program to run!
Have a long-term plan involving permanent habitats, looking for exploitable resources, building staging posts etc...
Long term goal: instead of only sending test pilots with the Right Stuff, work towards being able to send scientists and engineers who have the OK stuff and know which rock to pick up.
Build hardware to suit the missions - don't plan the missions around the hardware that you'd like to build.
As for Mars - an Apollo style "go, grab some rocks, come back" would be a complete waste of time and a tragedy waiting to happen. Don't go unless you're planning to build a sustainable habitat before you unwrap your descent stage and see if it survived the landing. Its not like the moon, where you can get back into space by lighting a fart. Might want to get a better hit rate with robot probes before sending people, too.
Do whatever is possible to lock in long term funding, get cross-party support etc. so that the funding doesn't get canned when the ratings drop.
Talking of ratings - learn from SciFi and put some big fricking laser guns on it. Look at the evidence: Starship Enterprise: big fricking guns = 4 spinoff series and 10 movies. Battlestar Galactica : big fricking guns = 3+ seasons (plus the original) and maybe a spinoff; Star Wars: big fricking guns - even the holiday special and Ep 1 didn't kill the series; Babylon 5? Big Fricking Guns = 5 series and 4 TVMs. Firefly: guy hanging out of airlock with a rifle = canned after 12 episodes and a movie that no one went to. Apollo: No guns, got beaten by "I Love Lucy" in the ratings - the movie was great but didn't run to a sequel. QED. Fit big fricking guns!
(or carry a sonic screwdriver - that only seems to work if you're British)
Plus, assuming that FTL travel is indeed out, any civilization capable of building long-haul space arks implicitly has the technology to completely exploit and colonise their solar system and nearby space. Even if you stop short of the more fanciful ideas of Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds, that's a lot of space and resources to squander before takling the immense task of travelling on to the next system.
The doomsday argument says that if we are going to eventually spread out and colonize the universe, future human population will be enormously larger than today, perhaps billions or trillions of times larger. In that case the chance that we as random humans would find ourselves existing today at such an infinitesimally early stage of human progress is virtually nil.
If, while parked outside of the space-time continuum in the TARDIS, the Doctor randombly plucked 10 humans from the whole of eternity and they all turned out to be from the early 21st century, then it would indeed indicate that our civilization shouldn't start reading any long books.
If, however, you are firmly rooted in the 21st century, plodding along at 1 second per 1000 milliseconds, have no knowledge about anybody who may or may not be born in the future and your time machine is off for repairs then try looking up biassed sample in any reputable book on statistics (and maybe cross reference with solipsism if you still think that you are the definitive representitve sample of humankind).
Or, to put it another way - even if we have a glorious billion-year future of exponential expansion into the boundless cosmos - any person at any point in past or future history applying your test would come to the conclusion that the end was nigh.
(And, as with all Doomesday predictions, eventually one of them would be right...)
but you forget you only need a very small number of curious species.... Then 500 years to prepare the mark II colonizers. So every 1000 years explored space is growing by 10 lyr in an expanding sphere of mark n+1 colonizers.
So, curious as monkeys but with the dedication and industry of ants, loyally pusing out the frontiers instead of flying about in rickety spaceships, swearing in Chinese and shooting each other with archaic projectile weapons or - more likely - having devastating wars with their neighboring colonies and ancestors.
Seriously, even if you deal with the inclination towards viral colonisation, you're still basing a theory of the existence of a technology we don't have yet, don't yet know the limitations of (how many "replications" are possible before errors/changes creep in?) and for all we know might not exist.
Its one thing to stop dreaming about something because we can't do it yet - its another to try and make predictions based on "unknown unknown unknowns"*
(*Rumsfeldt said that there are things that you know that you don't know, and things that you don't know that you don't know. He forgot the things that you don't KNOW that you don't know that you don't know).
I would just take billions of pill sized coctails of bacteria from all extreme regions of the earth and fire them off semi randomly throughout the galaxy, wait a billion years for them to evolve and contact us back.
Meanwhile, first contact with alien life has taken place on a farm in England, but tragically the message: Gobblegobble wark! gobblegobble, gobblegobble, cro..aaaa...kkkk..."* was not translated in time to prevent the entire landing party from being turned into turkey twizzlers.
* Trans: "Greetings Earthicans. I/we come in geese. I/we am H5N1 from the planet Phlegm. Hurry, this host is weak. I/we must meet with your great leader Jamie Oliver before I/we arrgh..."
Trouble is, if you have the technology to build a generation ship, then you also have the technology to build indefinitely sustainable space colonies and park them in more convenient locations with all the services (solar energy) and convinient for the shops (asteroids and comets) - solving the "population pressure" incentive for space colonization.
Also, if you have the "long view" needed to see your great^N grandchildren walk on another planet, you can probably settle for your great^N grandchildren receiving the data from a robot probe and/or - as the first post suggested - fire off Earth's DNA into space.
This is the flaw in the whole Fermi Paradox "where are the aliens?" argument: it assumes that (a) interstellar travel is feasible and (b) a critical mass of alien races share our "because its there" monkey curiosity and would make the effort with no practical motive.
And the moment you begin selling what it is you made, Walmart will purchase one and copy it, undercut your prices, selling at a loss until your company's flat broke and out of business, then raise the prices back to yours to make a profit again. Walmart hence makes the big bucks, while you go deep into debt.
...whereas, with the patent system, you can sue, and after 4 of years enduring (and paying for) every legal delaying tactic in the book, including counter-suits for every patent in your advereries massive portfolio remotely relevant to your product, the asset-stripping company that has bought the smoking remains of your company might just get a payout.
Y'know, its hard to see where the big overlap in potential customer base between homebrew MythTV boxes and AppleTV lies...
What MythTV does for me is near-perfect timeshifting of free-to-air (modulo UK TV license fees) digital terrestrial TV, with all sorts of auto-scheduling goodness. Unless I've missed something, this is not what AppleTV is offering.
Now, if AppleTV (if/when it launches in the UK) offers me a reasonably-priced way of seeing (say) individual episodes of US Sci-Fi shows or recent movies without (a) subscribing to MurdochVision or (b) waiting 18 months and buying the whole series on DVD I might just buy one and sit it alongside my MythBox.
TV isn't like music - I've a shelf full of DVDs but only a select few get watched repeatedly - so I've no particular objection to paying a reasonable fee to see a show once (bit like going to the cinema, but with comfy seats and better food) - if it turns out to be a keeper then I'll be about ready to watch it again when the DVDs come out.
Meanwhile, when there isn't anything good on TV I can always hack around with my MythBox to see if I can fix the 50% chance that the video starts playing with the frame order reversed, or even try and archive some shows to DVD (which now seems to work until it hits some subtleties in the audio stream). If, however, demuxing a stubborn MPEG2 file in ProjectX (whimper!) is not your idea of entertainment there are plenty of imperfect-but-usable-by-mortals video streaming boxen and DVB-T recorders on the market.
Perhaps, if Apple produced the proverbial good DVB-T recorder (hint: like a Topfield but with Ethernet and E-SATA) I'd wake up.
If you live in a universe where there is only one widely known operating system, then you have an expectation that everything else will work the same way and zero tolerance for anything different. Switch operating systems suddenly and, after any initial "wow factor" the next response will always be frustration and disorientation.
Now, if you've just dropped $2000 for a new Mac, you have a pretty strong incentive (plus a dose of new-computer-smell intoxication) to get over that hump.
If, however, Joe User has acquired a copy of OSX "have a go with" then - even assuming it runs reliably on a 3-year-old Dell - he is likely to "have a go" for ten minutes, get frustrated (which includes discovering that - oh noes - the Finder sucks a bit) and dismiss Apple entirely. At least with DRM that copy will have to be an obviously hacked DVD-R.
Now, if there was free competition in the desktop OS market then maybe:
Component and peripheral manufacturers would support multiple OSs; use higher-level, published, standards and not rely on prorietary windows-only drivers
Software houses would have more incentive to make their applications cross-platform, and their customers would require robust and standard data exchange features
Customers could - and would expect to - choose which OS they wanted installed on their new PC
Customers would be familliar with the concept that not everything worked exatly like windows
...meaning that someone like Apple could sell an operating system that would run reliably on all "PCs" and actually stand a ghost of a chance of getting some market share. As it is, well, BeOS is dead for practical purposes, Linux - successful in a few niches, but crap marketshare considering its free, then there's NextStep, which showed what happened last time Steve Jobs tried selling a stand-alone operating system.
For pitys sake, even Windows Version N can't compete with Windows Version N-1 without breaking a sweat...
This Jobs invented "hating DRM" bullshit is as tiresome as all the other Apple "invented X" bullshit.
Apple have a pretty poor track record at actually inventing stuff, but they've got an excellent track record of turning existing but underused ideas into decent implementations and carving out a market for them (Graphical user interfaces, laser printers & DTP, local area networks, the modern laptop, MP3 players, USB & legacy-free computers, small form factor computers...)
Heck, if you had to endure DRM I think most people would choose Apple's "if all else fails you can make a CD and rip it" over Microsoft's "plays-for-a-given-value-of-sure until we pull the rug".
Jobs may have had ulterior motives for putting his mouth where his money is, but the end result is that he's got the anti-DRM issue a lot of coverage outside of slashdot and off-the-record industry whingeing.
Hey! I just upgraded to Slashdot Vasta "Bedroom Premium" edition and your post came out:
It's (premium content blocked) something like that. It was only a matter of time. If it takes Steve Jobs to kick start an industry wide backlash against DRM, then (premium content blocked).
(The second one was a false positive for "Let it be")
...Apple couldn't collaborate with VMWare or Parallels to add some sort of hook to their Mac products that would allow OSX to verify that it was running on a Mac.
However, whatever they say about wanting to virtualize OS X, at the moment, Parallels and VMWare are initially pitching their Mac products at people who need to run Windows applications on a Mac. Those people are never going to want to virtualise OS X. Wait for the equivalents of VMWare Server and VMWare Workstation - plus graphics acceleration (which both VMWare and Parallels promise Real Soon Now and which OSX will proably need).
Actually, a more Apple-y thing to happen would be for simple-to-use virtualization to crop up in a future version of OS X. "Click here to create a sandbox for your kids".
There are... many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them...
Indies are perfectly free (individually or co-operatively) get a paypal account and a website and sell their own DRM-free music. Maybe there will be fewer sales, but the profit margins should be rather better. I listen to one group that bankrolls the production of each new album by asking fans to pay for it in advance (currently CDs, though - but its prog, so not very download friendly anyway).
There seems to be a circular argument here that iTMS is the only game in town. The whole point about internet sales is that its easy(er) for little guys to sell to the world. If you want a lock-in then I'm pretty sure that if most indies could only get some fricking airplay then enough people would google for their webshop.
Only if you measure "decent" by today's standards. In 1983, A Commodore 64 cost $400, a Tandy CoCo $199, a Texas Instruments 99/4A $100, and a Sinclair ZX81 $49, according to this page [atarimagazines.com].
Computers are a bad example because its hard to compare apples with apples (or even Apples with Apples). The specifications of computers have gone up exponentially while the prices have, at least, failed to grow with inflation. Meanwhile, the specially designed low cost "home computer" (a la C64, Sinclair etc) has been replaced by bargain bucket versions of "office PCs" essentially built from surplus components from an overcrowded industry...
In the case of CDs - which are still the same product as in 1983 - what should have happened is that the initially high "early adopter" price should plummeted in the first few years until it hit the old LP price point, then followed inflation.
Personally, I don't have any great problems with the current price of a CD (although it would be nice if much more of the profit went to the artist) - but they were overpriced during the 90s.
Big problem for the music industry is that they would love us to all "buy the white album again" on SACD or some new format, but the pesky techies have decided that the 12cm optical disc is "just right" and keep making the new players backwards-compatable, then MP3 comes along and is huge, but (whimper!) you can just convert your existing CDs! Oh, the humanity!!!
As I understand it, M$ and Novell have signed a sort of IP non-agression treaty, but that although this has enormous FUD value it does not specifically identify any M$ IP present in any specific GPL software. If it did Novell would be in fairly clear breach of GPL2 - no improvements needed - but it doesn't, so they aren't (IANAL of course).
The problem with trying to "fix" this and other "spirit of the agreement" annoyances is the risk of unintended consequences.
In particular, many of the companies currently investing in Free/OS software inevitably have various cross-licensing agreements with other companies - not a problem as long as none of the licensed IP fetches up in GPL code they distribute. How are these distinct from the Novell/M$ deal - apart from the allegation that the latter was part of an anti-Linux FUD campaign - and how do you incorporate that distinction in a license?
What would the future of FOSS be if no entity holding any sort of license for IP that could even arguably find its way into GPL could contribute?
I'm worried that the outcome of this might be to goad the FSF into inserting all sorts of new self-destructive micro-management clauses into the GPL3, making it too complex, open-to-interpretation and risky for anybody to get past their (already skeptical) legal department. I'm worried that the Novell deal - although a serious concern - is being used as a bogeyman for "selling" GPL3 to its critics.
Apparently Dreamworks feels they lost money on 'Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit'
Did any decent movie released in 2005 make money?
Anyway, "Wererabbit" was brilliant, but not noticably more so than the preceeding shorts - in fact, although I've watched the DVD several times I can't even remember whether I went to see it in the cinema or not. More half-hour shorts for TV/DVD, guys! Cinema is just a rather cost-innefective way of advertising DVDs.
As any Word(tm) user knows, page layout and text formatting should be done Visually.
What any Word(tm) user with any experience knows, is page layout and text formatting should be done in anything other than fricking Word, except you have to send in a fricking Word file and exporting Word from any other applications almost works. At least OpenOffice is annoying and buggy for free.
Bearing in mind the web was invented by a bunch of physicists its a wonder that it uses HTML and not LaTeX Now, that would be fun: a default page design reflecting the acme of the typographers art (LaTeX output is really beautiful) and a vertical learning curve if you wanted to change that style.
I've often wondered how people would react and criticise if microsoft ran itunes, and microsoft made ipods, with all the success and the restrictions in place. Would people who give apple slack now, nail microsoft for such restrictive and anti-competitive practises?
What do you mean "if"? Remember M$ have been having a little spot of bother with the EU* over (amongst other things) bundling their media player with Windows. I'm sure the EU would take a great interest if they launched Zune in the EU. You also seem to have missed all the glowing testimonials on/. about the wonderfulness of Zune (Not!)
The big differnce is that Microsoft have a near-monopoly in the personal computing OS market - and the most serious worry is that they could use tie-ins with Windows to bully their way into any emerging, computer-related market. No one is making much noise about XBox because Sony and Nintendo are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves and M$ hasn't really tried anything that would force windows users to buy an XBox instead of a Wii or PS3.
Apple didn't have any monopolistic base from which to spawn iTunes - a few percent of the PC market does not a monopoly make and iTunes isn't tied to OSX anyway - so this whole argument hinges on the proposition that iTunes and/or the iPod have become a monopoly. That idea hinges on the conceit that the "legal commercial music downloads" market is distinct from general music sales, and that all the non-iPod MP3 players (including all the in-car units, smartphones, PDAs, network streamers and mini-HiFi systems that play MP3/WMA) you see in the shops are figments of your imagination.
Don't know about you, but most of my MP3 collection has been ripped from legally-purchased CD and works just fine across my iPod, WM5 phone, car MP3/CD player, Windows PC and Linux PC.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFPPIYOP
(That is - Read the Fine Previous Paragraph in Your Own Post)
It needs to be fairly wide and tall to make the touch screen work. Adding a removable battery (hatch, internal compartment, contacts, rigid case for the battery...) would make it wide, tall and thick. At least it is (presumably) charge-by-USB, so you won't need multiple power adaptors.
Well, before Apple did a phone this was a strong argument as to why they didn't need one - you'd feel a right wally walking around in the rain looking for the last payphone in the county because you'd used up your phone battery playing Tetris and listening to music. Its not as if a RAZR, an iPod Nano and a DS Lite are going to overload the typical manbag.
Now, Steve Jobs could have bet the farm on the general public agreeing with this, and that Sony et. al. will fail with Walkman phones etc. but hedging your bets never hurts. In any case, if the iPhone flops, Apple just take out the transmitter, drop the price and you're left with a pretty cute iPod Video DeLuxe - which wouldn't have been possible if they'd made a more "phone-y" phone.
Yes there is a double standard - one standard for a small/medium player in a competetive market, and another standard for a company with a near-total monopoly.
Yes, Apple have a restrictive license that only allows you to run OSX on genuine, non-virtual Apple iron.
BUT If you don't like that then you are perfectly free to vote with your feet and buy one of the 95%+ of other computer systems available that don't run come with OSX.
Except... nearly all of those other 95% of systems are running MS software. Even if you complete the uphill struggle to buy one without MS Windows included and run Linux/*BSD/BeOS then sooner or later the 95% of the world who didn't bother will oblige you to use Windows for some task or other.
Are you saying that Apple, with a few % of the market, should be subject to anti-monopoly rules because their only competetor has a near-monopoly??
In short, if Apple ever gain 50%+ of the desktop computing market they'll have to face the same anti-trust responsibilities as Microsoft. The only area Apple are within a sniff of that is with iTMS, and then only if you don't count CD sales as digital music distribution. Until then, every time they decide on a restrictive license, impose a lock in, or piss off a software house by incorporating an application they have to balance the benefits to them against a genuine risk of losing customers to the competition.
In the meantime, MS have - through their Vista licenses and the ridiculous premium charged for "stand alone" copies of Windows - made it extremely expensive to legally run Windows as anything other than your primary operating system.
Sometime, Apple will have to support virtualization on OSX Server in order to compete with Linux and Windows. Currently, I don't think there is a significant demand (personally, I don't even see why you'd want to use OSX as a server, when its USP is its user interface).
...which would probably be enough to prompt a takedown notice from the MAFIAA (and probably the manufacturers of Barbie too)
The problem is not the (quite reasonable) desire to stop flagrent mass distribution of entire copyrighted works. I have little sympathy for the demise of original Napster et. al. - which doesn't mean that I do have sympathy for the record labels, who should be doing more to provide a legitimate, reasonably-priced alternative.
The problem is the conceit that any breach of copyright, however small and technical, somehow does irreperable harm to the copyright holder and justifies lawyers at dawn; and the tendency for the full weight of the law (and the whole DRM circus) to be focussed on such infringements because they are "softer" targets than the organised, large-scale operations that might actually have a commercial impact (and have the resources to work-around DRM).
Not sure that this is comparing, er... apples to apples :->
Er... maybe "Winona" was bigger and frickinger than "Vera"?
Or perhaps having the ship get pregnant attracted the female demographic?
No? Darn! So make that "Big fricking guns, a sonic screwdriver or Muppets" then (hey, yes, "pigs in space" did well!).
Count me in with the people who tossed the Python book out of the window as soon as I read that line.
Years ago, there was an old-chestnut "funny" doing the rounds about how Thompson & Richie made up the UNIX operating system as a joke - one of the bits of "evidence" there was that makefiles used whitespaces to deliniate blocks. Hmm.
Trouble is, anybody who has used the broad C/Java genre of languages (of which even Perl is a peripheral member) - or HTML/XML for that matter - is used to mentally "collapsing" any combination of spaces, newlines and tabs. Heck, using spaces for indentation is even bad practice in a wordprocessor.
I can see that a nicely indented Python program would be perfectly readable provided you always edited it in the same text editor, preferably a nice language-aware IDE, with the same tab and indentation settings. Then you change IDEs, or make a quick "in the field" patch in a different editor, set to use hard tabs or with the "indent" setting different from the "tab" setting and you've suddenly broken the code. I'm sure many people have wasted ages faffing about with indentation styles to pretty up their code - now imagine you had to do that to get the program to run!
Couple of IFs:
Plus, assuming that FTL travel is indeed out, any civilization capable of building long-haul space arks implicitly has the technology to completely exploit and colonise their solar system and nearby space. Even if you stop short of the more fanciful ideas of Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds, that's a lot of space and resources to squander before takling the immense task of travelling on to the next system.
If, while parked outside of the space-time continuum in the TARDIS, the Doctor randombly plucked 10 humans from the whole of eternity and they all turned out to be from the early 21st century, then it would indeed indicate that our civilization shouldn't start reading any long books.
If, however, you are firmly rooted in the 21st century, plodding along at 1 second per 1000 milliseconds, have no knowledge about anybody who may or may not be born in the future and your time machine is off for repairs then try looking up biassed sample in any reputable book on statistics (and maybe cross reference with solipsism if you still think that you are the definitive representitve sample of humankind).
Or, to put it another way - even if we have a glorious billion-year future of exponential expansion into the boundless cosmos - any person at any point in past or future history applying your test would come to the conclusion that the end was nigh.
(And, as with all Doomesday predictions, eventually one of them would be right...)
So, curious as monkeys but with the dedication and industry of ants, loyally pusing out the frontiers instead of flying about in rickety spaceships, swearing in Chinese and shooting each other with archaic projectile weapons or - more likely - having devastating wars with their neighboring colonies and ancestors.
Seriously, even if you deal with the inclination towards viral colonisation, you're still basing a theory of the existence of a technology we don't have yet, don't yet know the limitations of (how many "replications" are possible before errors/changes creep in?) and for all we know might not exist.
Its one thing to stop dreaming about something because we can't do it yet - its another to try and make predictions based on "unknown unknown unknowns"* (*Rumsfeldt said that there are things that you know that you don't know, and things that you don't know that you don't know. He forgot the things that you don't KNOW that you don't know that you don't know).
Meanwhile, first contact with alien life has taken place on a farm in England, but tragically the message: Gobblegobble wark! gobblegobble, gobblegobble, cro..aaaa...kkkk..."* was not translated in time to prevent the entire landing party from being turned into turkey twizzlers.
* Trans: "Greetings Earthicans. I/we come in geese. I/we am H5N1 from the planet Phlegm. Hurry, this host is weak. I/we must meet with your great leader Jamie Oliver before I/we arrgh..."
Trouble is, if you have the technology to build a generation ship, then you also have the technology to build indefinitely sustainable space colonies and park them in more convenient locations with all the services (solar energy) and convinient for the shops (asteroids and comets) - solving the "population pressure" incentive for space colonization.
Also, if you have the "long view" needed to see your great^N grandchildren walk on another planet, you can probably settle for your great^N grandchildren receiving the data from a robot probe and/or - as the first post suggested - fire off Earth's DNA into space.
This is the flaw in the whole Fermi Paradox "where are the aliens?" argument: it assumes that (a) interstellar travel is feasible and (b) a critical mass of alien races share our "because its there" monkey curiosity and would make the effort with no practical motive.
...whereas, with the patent system, you can sue, and after 4 of years enduring (and paying for) every legal delaying tactic in the book, including counter-suits for every patent in your advereries massive portfolio remotely relevant to your product, the asset-stripping company that has bought the smoking remains of your company might just get a payout.
Y'know, its hard to see where the big overlap in potential customer base between homebrew MythTV boxes and AppleTV lies...
What MythTV does for me is near-perfect timeshifting of free-to-air (modulo UK TV license fees) digital terrestrial TV, with all sorts of auto-scheduling goodness. Unless I've missed something, this is not what AppleTV is offering.
Now, if AppleTV (if/when it launches in the UK) offers me a reasonably-priced way of seeing (say) individual episodes of US Sci-Fi shows or recent movies without (a) subscribing to MurdochVision or (b) waiting 18 months and buying the whole series on DVD I might just buy one and sit it alongside my MythBox.
TV isn't like music - I've a shelf full of DVDs but only a select few get watched repeatedly - so I've no particular objection to paying a reasonable fee to see a show once (bit like going to the cinema, but with comfy seats and better food) - if it turns out to be a keeper then I'll be about ready to watch it again when the DVDs come out.
Meanwhile, when there isn't anything good on TV I can always hack around with my MythBox to see if I can fix the 50% chance that the video starts playing with the frame order reversed, or even try and archive some shows to DVD (which now seems to work until it hits some subtleties in the audio stream). If, however, demuxing a stubborn MPEG2 file in ProjectX (whimper!) is not your idea of entertainment there are plenty of imperfect-but-usable-by-mortals video streaming boxen and DVB-T recorders on the market.
Perhaps, if Apple produced the proverbial good DVB-T recorder (hint: like a Topfield but with Ethernet and E-SATA) I'd wake up.
If you live in a universe where there is only one widely known operating system, then you have an expectation that everything else will work the same way and zero tolerance for anything different. Switch operating systems suddenly and, after any initial "wow factor" the next response will always be frustration and disorientation.
Now, if you've just dropped $2000 for a new Mac, you have a pretty strong incentive (plus a dose of new-computer-smell intoxication) to get over that hump.
If, however, Joe User has acquired a copy of OSX "have a go with" then - even assuming it runs reliably on a 3-year-old Dell - he is likely to "have a go" for ten minutes, get frustrated (which includes discovering that - oh noes - the Finder sucks a bit) and dismiss Apple entirely. At least with DRM that copy will have to be an obviously hacked DVD-R.
Now, if there was free competition in the desktop OS market then maybe:
...meaning that someone like Apple could sell an operating system that would run reliably on all "PCs" and actually stand a ghost of a chance of getting some market share. As it is, well, BeOS is dead for practical purposes, Linux - successful in a few niches, but crap marketshare considering its free, then there's NextStep, which showed what happened last time Steve Jobs tried selling a stand-alone operating system.
For pitys sake, even Windows Version N can't compete with Windows Version N-1 without breaking a sweat...
Apple have a pretty poor track record at actually inventing stuff, but they've got an excellent track record of turning existing but underused ideas into decent implementations and carving out a market for them (Graphical user interfaces, laser printers & DTP, local area networks, the modern laptop, MP3 players, USB & legacy-free computers, small form factor computers...)
Heck, if you had to endure DRM I think most people would choose Apple's "if all else fails you can make a CD and rip it" over Microsoft's "plays-for-a-given-value-of-sure until we pull the rug".
Jobs may have had ulterior motives for putting his mouth where his money is, but the end result is that he's got the anti-DRM issue a lot of coverage outside of slashdot and off-the-record industry whingeing.
Hey! I just upgraded to Slashdot Vasta "Bedroom Premium" edition and your post came out:
(The second one was a false positive for "Let it be")
However, whatever they say about wanting to virtualize OS X, at the moment, Parallels and VMWare are initially pitching their Mac products at people who need to run Windows applications on a Mac. Those people are never going to want to virtualise OS X. Wait for the equivalents of VMWare Server and VMWare Workstation - plus graphics acceleration (which both VMWare and Parallels promise Real Soon Now and which OSX will proably need).
Actually, a more Apple-y thing to happen would be for simple-to-use virtualization to crop up in a future version of OS X. "Click here to create a sandbox for your kids".
Indies are perfectly free (individually or co-operatively) get a paypal account and a website and sell their own DRM-free music. Maybe there will be fewer sales, but the profit margins should be rather better. I listen to one group that bankrolls the production of each new album by asking fans to pay for it in advance (currently CDs, though - but its prog, so not very download friendly anyway).
There seems to be a circular argument here that iTMS is the only game in town. The whole point about internet sales is that its easy(er) for little guys to sell to the world. If you want a lock-in then I'm pretty sure that if most indies could only get some fricking airplay then enough people would google for their webshop.
Computers are a bad example because its hard to compare apples with apples (or even Apples with Apples). The specifications of computers have gone up exponentially while the prices have, at least, failed to grow with inflation. Meanwhile, the specially designed low cost "home computer" (a la C64, Sinclair etc) has been replaced by bargain bucket versions of "office PCs" essentially built from surplus components from an overcrowded industry...
In the case of CDs - which are still the same product as in 1983 - what should have happened is that the initially high "early adopter" price should plummeted in the first few years until it hit the old LP price point, then followed inflation.
Personally, I don't have any great problems with the current price of a CD (although it would be nice if much more of the profit went to the artist) - but they were overpriced during the 90s.
Big problem for the music industry is that they would love us to all "buy the white album again" on SACD or some new format, but the pesky techies have decided that the 12cm optical disc is "just right" and keep making the new players backwards-compatable, then MP3 comes along and is huge, but (whimper!) you can just convert your existing CDs! Oh, the humanity!!!
As I understand it, M$ and Novell have signed a sort of IP non-agression treaty, but that although this has enormous FUD value it does not specifically identify any M$ IP present in any specific GPL software. If it did Novell would be in fairly clear breach of GPL2 - no improvements needed - but it doesn't, so they aren't (IANAL of course).
The problem with trying to "fix" this and other "spirit of the agreement" annoyances is the risk of unintended consequences.
In particular, many of the companies currently investing in Free/OS software inevitably have various cross-licensing agreements with other companies - not a problem as long as none of the licensed IP fetches up in GPL code they distribute. How are these distinct from the Novell/M$ deal - apart from the allegation that the latter was part of an anti-Linux FUD campaign - and how do you incorporate that distinction in a license?
What would the future of FOSS be if no entity holding any sort of license for IP that could even arguably find its way into GPL could contribute?
I'm worried that the outcome of this might be to goad the FSF into inserting all sorts of new self-destructive micro-management clauses into the GPL3, making it too complex, open-to-interpretation and risky for anybody to get past their (already skeptical) legal department. I'm worried that the Novell deal - although a serious concern - is being used as a bogeyman for "selling" GPL3 to its critics.
Did any decent movie released in 2005 make money?
Anyway, "Wererabbit" was brilliant, but not noticably more so than the preceeding shorts - in fact, although I've watched the DVD several times I can't even remember whether I went to see it in the cinema or not. More half-hour shorts for TV/DVD, guys! Cinema is just a rather cost-innefective way of advertising DVDs.
What any Word(tm) user with any experience knows, is page layout and text formatting should be done in anything other than fricking Word, except you have to send in a fricking Word file and exporting Word from any other applications almost works. At least OpenOffice is annoying and buggy for free.
Bearing in mind the web was invented by a bunch of physicists its a wonder that it uses HTML and not LaTeX Now, that would be fun: a default page design reflecting the acme of the typographers art (LaTeX output is really beautiful) and a vertical learning curve if you wanted to change that style.
What do you mean "if"? Remember M$ have been having a little spot of bother with the EU* over (amongst other things) bundling their media player with Windows. I'm sure the EU would take a great interest if they launched Zune in the EU. You also seem to have missed all the glowing testimonials on /. about the wonderfulness of Zune (Not!)
The big differnce is that Microsoft have a near-monopoly in the personal computing OS market - and the most serious worry is that they could use tie-ins with Windows to bully their way into any emerging, computer-related market. No one is making much noise about XBox because Sony and Nintendo are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves and M$ hasn't really tried anything that would force windows users to buy an XBox instead of a Wii or PS3.
Apple didn't have any monopolistic base from which to spawn iTunes - a few percent of the PC market does not a monopoly make and iTunes isn't tied to OSX anyway - so this whole argument hinges on the proposition that iTunes and/or the iPod have become a monopoly. That idea hinges on the conceit that the "legal commercial music downloads" market is distinct from general music sales, and that all the non-iPod MP3 players (including all the in-car units, smartphones, PDAs, network streamers and mini-HiFi systems that play MP3/WMA) you see in the shops are figments of your imagination.
Don't know about you, but most of my MP3 collection has been ripped from legally-purchased CD and works just fine across my iPod, WM5 phone, car MP3/CD player, Windows PC and Linux PC.
(* OB disclaimer: I know EU != Norway )