...and move all air travel over to the Mr T model: dope the passengers senseless at the airport, pack the unconscious bodies in like sides of meat and wake 'em up at the destination airport.
Oh, wait - you wouldn't be able to sell them duty free & Skymall would go out of business. Darn.
When was the last time you looked at php? The "php is ugly but useful for the web because of its built-in functions" meme is from 2 releases ago (php3).
Yes, PHP5 is a vastly better language - particularly in terms of OOP - than PHP3, and the newer libraries like PDO and XML are more object oriented.
However - this thread is about success and it was the "ugly-but useful" PHP of 2-3 releases ago which won the popularity contest and ensured that PHP was a fixture of any half-decent web hosting service.
An issue with both PHP and MySQL is that there's the version with all the nice features and new libraries or there is the old-fangled "flawed but useful" version with the ubiquitous support. If you "don't got root" on your target system you can often find yourself stuck with the latter.
Obviously there's more than one factor to a language's success, but the breadth and quality of the libraries and application frameworks is a huge factor - if you "know a bit" about programming then I'd say that learning your way around a new API is just as much work as learning a new language.
A big plus for C was that it always came with a substantial standard ("de-facto" to start with, then ISO) library based on the Unix API so it was great for writing portable programs - c.f. Pascal where ISTR the core language couldn't even open a named file. C++ was largely popularized by application frameworks like MFC and OWL, and Delphi did the same for Pascal.
PHP is pretty fugly as a language but comes with a huge library of functions and add-ons that are just what the doctor ordered for web scripting - and when people talk about Ruby, do they really mean Ruby or do they mean Rails?
I don't know about Python - it seems to be a secret society rather than a language and you can't join unless you pass this initiation test where someone tells you a corny joke (stolen from an ancient email circular about Unix and Makefiles) about a language which uses leading whitespace to delineate blocks. I always laugh and fail the test, so I've no idea what the real language is like.:-)
Time Machine uses Unix/HFS filesystem-only features such as "hard links" to achieve its time-travel tricks and these features don't work (or don't work reliably) via networks.
Apple and Microsoft must have attained Mutually Assured IP Destruction by now - if they open the silo doors on their patent portfolios and press the red buttons then it won't be over until its Microsoft's patent on the universal Turing machine vs. Apple's patent on "representing information via a system of symbols"** and there's nothing left but the cockroaches. (What's that? the cockroaches have been nibbling on GM grain and are now owned by Monsanto? Darn!)
(** I seriously hope that I am making this shit up, but the way things are going...)
Whether you lose money due to "theft of IP" or "copyright infringement", you are out the same ammount of money.
But the issue is not whether "theft of IP" is the same as "copyright infringement" - the issue is that big copyright holders are engaged in a campaign to equate "theft of IP" with theft of tangible property - witness the cinema ads along the lines of "You wouldn't steal a car - why would you steal a movie?" and the music industry's conceit that every downloaded CD costs them every penny they would have made from selling it. In this context, substituting the term "theft of intellectual property" for "copyright violation" is rather a significant change. Its even worse when applied to patents (which it is possible to infringe in complete innocence).
Its not like calling "theft" "embezzlement" to make a subtle distinction between ways of stealing money - its like re-branding "embezzlement" as "financial assault" or "asset murder" in order to exaggerate its impact on the victim and justify more draconian enforcement. (Actually, I'm sure some people would argue that the term "embezzlement" is mainly used to make theft by middle-class people with BMWs and nice houses sound less serious than theft by working class oiks).
As for my.sig, it's an attempt to push the most grammar-nazi hot-buttons in the smallest space. Using the common corruption of "intents and purposes"
Ah. I must have had a sheltered life, because I've never seen that particular crime against the language (at least not written down). In that spirit, I think you meant to say "who care's?":-)
Apparently by ignoring options A and B and going straight for the Chewbacca defense in which you try to refute an argument by citing a non-sequitur. If you do have some wonderful logical argument that goes from "embezzlement has the same effect as theft" to "therefore copyright violation has the same effect as theft" then I think you skipped a few too many steps.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"
Have I missed the joke or should that not be "for all intents and purposes..."?
I always like to counter this with something like, "would you rather I steal $50,000 from you or embezzle it?". It is readily apparent that the effect is the same.
Lets follow your logic:
I say, A is not equal to B
You say, aha! but C (which has nothing to do with A) is equal to B, therefore A must be equal to B too!
I pity your math teacher.
If I take $50 worth of your money or physical goods - be it via theft, fraud, embezzlement, robbery, burglary, pickpocketing, nicking, pilfering, shoplifting, mugging, larceny, piracy (as in theft by force at sea, not the *AA's definition), extortion, blackmail or whatever else your thesaurus throws up then you end up with exactly $50 less money or physical goods than you had before and are quite likely to face consequential losses when, as a result, you (e.g.) can't pay your mortgage that month.
If 100 people steal (or any of the other words) $50 from you then you are $5000 out of pocket.
If 1000 people steal (or any of the other words) $50,000 from you then you are $50,000 out of pocket.
If I illegally download a copy of your "intellectual property" which you normally sell for $50 then all you have lost is the hypothetical opportunity to charge me $50 for it - which makes the huge assumption that I would have been prepared to pay that much for it.
If 100 people illegally download a copy, then you have not lost $5,000 because it is hugely implausible that every one of those 100 people would have been prepared to pay $50 if they hadn't been able to get it for "free". The "Radiohead" experiment showed that plenty of people will voluntarily pay for music if they genuinely feel it is supporting the artist - that was only a failure if you count up all the people who downloaded and didn't pay and pretend that, somehow, each one of those has "cost" something.
That doesn't mean that people who illegally download copyrighted material should get a pat on the back and a lollipop - it just means that "copyright violation" is not "theft" in the same way that "theft" isn't "murder" and "murder" isn't "genocide". What the *AA is trying to do by confusing copyright violation with theft is a bit like the chamber of commerce trying to get "theft" re-defined as "property murder" and then deriding anybody who felt that people shouldn't be sent to the chair for nicking a can of cola as "supporter of shoplifting" (or even "pro murder").
New technology has made copying very easy - to stamp it out will require draconian, intrusive laws and restrictive technologies. The danger is that these will be ineffective at tackling serious, large scale counterfeiting (if they're all gangsters and terrorists anyway a few new copyright laws aren't going to faze them!) while criminalizing people who just want to play the new album they've bought in the car.
The big loss to the music industry is that, when CDs came out, they made a shitload of money from people replacing their vinyl collections. A few decades on, they were ready for the next big money-spinner. But, MP3 came along and everyone didn't "have to buy the White Album again" - you could just convert your existing copy! Oh, the humanity! The danger is that the "threat" of "piracy" will be used as a pretext to shut down this loophole. Of course, they could have launched a properly sanctioned version of "AllOfMP3" and made respectable money, but they've grown fat off the CD market and only a shitload would do.
The only way Apple could get any kind of toe-hold in the average household is if their stuff is cheaper than anyone else's. That's all it takes, just low price.
Funny, because they've been very successfully growing their market share over the last 5 years - and dominated the portable music player market - by staying out of the high volume, low-end of the market and positioning themselves as a "designer label".
Outside the U.S. an Apple PC/lappy is about as common as a tandem bicycle - you know they exist, but see maybe one or two a year.
That's partly historical - I'd debate whether Macs are overpriced now (if you compare like-for-like in terms of form factor) but back in the 80s & 90s Apple really did price itself out of, e.g, the UK market with the 'ol £1=$1 trick - at a time when the actual exchange rate was £1>$2, Sinclair were selling cheap'n'cheerful computers for ~£100 and Acorn were selling BBC Micros (which kicked sand in the face of the aging Apple II) for £300 - and a few years later the cheap home-grown/far East PC clones came along and swept up. The only real presence was in the DTP/Graphics/Video industry where, for a while, only Macs could cut the mustard.
So, whereas in the US Apple always had enclaves (e.g. in education - I work in Math Ed and many - probably most - of my US colleagues use Macs) in the UK and elsewhere they're starting from zero.
Until iTunes can be used as a media player AND a bittorrent client, I don't think it'll happen (at least not for me)
Bittorrent? What's that? Isn't that something that pirates and terrorists use to exploit poor starving artists?
iTunes and the iPod have been successful because of the public perception that they just work - now, you can debate how true that is if you like, but that's the line. Part of that ease of use is exactly because they force you to use iTunes (the software*) - which annoys slashdotters who want to mount their mp3 player under Debian and copy.ogg files to it, but is a matter of sheer indifference to the mass market, who like the seamlessness that comes from the monolithic approach.
As for the AppleTV: at the moment, whereas the iTunes store is there to sell iPods, the AppleTV is there to sell iTunes video, and to "tick a box" so that people buying video for their iPods know there's an Apple-branded solution to show them on the big screen. Once the online video market has "come of age" (which will also need a bit of a revolution in broadband availability & capacity) Apple might get serious about the AppleTV.
(*Of course, iTunes the software doesn't force you to buy your media from iTunes, the store - it will happily rip audio CDs, accept MP3s and unprotected AACs from any source - legal or otherwise - and a google for "rip DVD to iTunes" produces a heap of solutions: if you know Bittorrent you probably know Google)
No - but whereas in your analogue home you can sit back and look at the damp patch slowly spreading on the wall and think "I must get that fixed before it starts sprouting fungus" your Digital home will stay crisp and pristine up until the day when it suddenly, without warning, dissolves into a mess of pixels.
Actually you've completely missed my point. It's not that country land is less valuable than city land by force of nature (think: what would happen if we turned the world into a city? We'd all starve...)
Yes, but the guy who ended up owning the last cornfield would make a fortune! Meanwhile, people in the developing world are in danger starving because farmers who are free to "capitalize on their own assets" are growing high-value cash crops for the west (or have effectively sold out to western firms) rather than food for the locals.
The point I was making was that when people are allowed to capitalise on their assets they can exploit their talents and do amazing things.
Funny - back in the real world, people who have been free to capitalize on their assets (e.g. homeowners in the UK) have chosen to sell them back to the banks so they effectively don't own them any more and - come the credit crunch - can no longer afford to live in them.
As for farmland -farming is a risky, low-profit-margin business - the most economically prudent thing you can do with a cornfield is to sell it for building.
Example? The only bail out of which I'm aware is the Bear Stearns bail out. That wasn't a cash deal. There is talk about doing a larger bail out where mortgages are guaranteed by the government, but that also would not be a cash deal (and it is unclear how much taxpayers might pay to support it if it is done).
Well, in the UK, Northern Rock bank was effectively nationalized.
As for the US cases - it doesn't matter if cash changes hands - if the state guarantees mortgages then its underwriting it with taxpayer's money and state assets (initially paid for by the taxpayer).
The main action that the government has taken so far is to release more money into the economy. This isn't taxpayer money.
Yes it is. Where else did it come from? Little green leprechauns? The government can print money but it can't print wealth. If the government prints money then it dilutes the value of existing money (hey! look! food and fuel prices are shooting up! Why do you think that is?) - yes folks, the government has re-distributed some of the spending power of the money in your wallet to bail out the banks just as surely as if they'd sent the tax man around to grab a wad.
You can see the outcome of this kind of "property-is-theft" attitude in china. There land in the countryside for farming is state owned and city land is privately owned.
And that's the problem - if you're going to do communism/socialism you need to apply it to everything but what tends to happen - even in supposedly communist countries - is that capitalism is allowed to cherry pick the profitable areas, leaving the state with all the liabilities and none of the assets. If this doesn't happen overtly it happens covertly via corruption and the black market.
That's why communism/socialism doesn't work as a way of running countries here on Earth - human nature means that there's no workable way of stopping capitalism from pissing in the swimming pool. However, bear in mind that western capitalism would currently be drowning in its own piss if the state hadn't stepped in with lots of cashy money from the taxpayers to rescue the banking industry from the consequences of their own greed. How capitalist is that?
Communism might just work in some areas - it seems to work quite nicely for Free Software (probably because its a microcosm in which there is virtually no "cost of production" so freeloaders and profiteers don't actually do any damage) and maybe, just maybe, it's worth giving it a go for space colonization.
Dude, I'm not complaining about the higher prices of the Mac. I accept it. I'm willing to pay for that profit margin for Apple because that profit margin is what pays for Apple's software development, and that's what I'm paying for.
Then you're probably in a minority - and a minority of which enough members will succumb to buying a Mac Pro to offset any loss to Apple.
But the size, shape, weight, and design? They have negative value.
I would pay *more* for a Mac mini that had exactly the same specs but was in a mini-ITX case and had the power provisioning and port complement of a Mini-ITX PC.
You might, but I think you're at odds with Apple's target market - you're asking them to go back to the business model which was failing for them in the 90s. The turning point for Apple was when they dumped the beige boxes and launched the all-in-one iMac which eschewed internal expansion for USB peripherals and came in a fancy designer case.
I'd predict (and no-one can know unless they tried) that an Apple mini-tower would get lousy reviews on the basis of poor price comparison with comparable PCs. At the moment, Macs are getting pretty good reviews, even in the PC press, because they are reasonably competitive with other SFFs and high-end laptops.
Virtually nobody is *buying* the AOpen mini clone, or the Dell iMac clone, because virtually nobody really *wants* that stuff enough to pay for
No - the problem with these systems is that Dell and AOpen (or the AOpen resellers) are "utility" brands trying to compete with Apple's "designer label". To do that you need a product which is significantly cheaper but which looks just as good as the "designer" one: most of the iMac/Mini clones to date have failed miserably on both counts.
So don't tell me that making a laptop without a screen is value added over making a desktop PC, because it's not. It's dross.
Or only if you compare "like for like" by absolutely insisting that the Wintel box have every feature of the Mac, and discount everything that the "like" Wintel box has (once you get done with it) as having no value.
As opposed to comparing the numbers for CPU speed, RAM and graphics specs and completely ignoring the size, shape, weight and design?
the way they're selling a $350 desktop for $600 with the Mac mini, or a $700 desktop for $1100 with the iMac.
The Mac mini isn't a "$350 desktop" - its an ultra-small form factor, near-silent PC which has usually been very competitive with similar "mini PCs" - lets see, there is a Mac-mini-sized PC from AOpen for $350 - oh, wait, that's excluding processor, RAM and hard drive!
Likewise, the iMac isn't a $700 desktop - its an all-in-one PC like the Dell XPS One which is... lets see... £999 for a 20" display, 2.2GHz Core 2 with Intel integrated graphics versus £949 for a 20" iMac with a 2.6GHz Core 2 duo and a 2456MB Radeon 2600 (sorry about the UK prices).
Once the copy is actually made and sold, first sale doctrine applies to that copy; the copyright holder has limited influence over what is done with it. As long as it isn't copied.
But it is copied - they copy it to the hard disc of the machines they sell - and they're not making that copy for the purpose of personally using the software they've just paid for as a consumer, they're making that copy for the purpose of re-selling it as part of a business. Its all getting a long way from selling on a second-hand book.
Its one thing if courts don't find EULAs enforceable against end users - but if they found that they couldn't even enforce them against OEMs I suspect that we'd see some frantic lobbying from Certain Large Software Companies.
Not necessarily. Apple concentrate on small-form-factor, mid/high-end laptops and workstation-class towers for good reasons: high margins, longer product cycles and more emphasis on style. Since the Intel switch, Macs have been reasonably competitive provided you compare like-for-like (i.e. SFF with SFF; high-end laptop with high-end laptop; Xeon workstation with Xeon workstation). The "Apple premium" is pretty much the same as what other manufacturers charge for their "executive" range over their "budget" range.
Apple would have a hard time creating a budget mini-tower that competed with the offerings that the big box-shifters throw together each month from whatever components they have a surplus of - they don't have a big corporate market for economies of scale and they are more constrained in what components they can use. The nightmare scenario is that a "cheap" Apple would still be too expensive to lure the penny-pinchers away from Dell and Walmart, but would decimate sales of the high-end, high-margin systems to existing Apple users.
More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.
No, all they have to do is stamp the words "Upgrade: for computers with OS X 10.3 or earlier only" on the box - which is effectively what they're selling anyway. If a court decided to rule that illegal it would set some very interesting precedents for Microsoft et. al.
Wasn't the ruling in the recent Skype vs. the GPL case (where they tried to use antitrust law) something along the lines that, if a copyright holder wanted to specify that their software should only be distributed in a green envelope, such was their right?
Plus, this bunch are re-distributing the software in a "new binding" (i.e. on a shiny new Psystar computer rather than an Apple CD) so I doubt they would have the same potential "one sided contract/first sale" defenses against a EULA as a regular punter might.
Just put headphones on the victim and feed their voice back to them with a 1-second delay for instant speech impediment fun and frolics. No danger of erasing your victims credit card or being sued 10 years later when they blame you for giving them a brain tumor.
(I guess people who work in the TV and radio industry or who spend long periods talking on echoey long-distance phone calls will have developed immunity, though).
Obviously doesn't have the same neurological implications as the zapper - but that's not to say its not interesting.
Its the reason people believe that 100 years of industrial evolution on this planet can corrupt over 4.5 billion years of naturally occuring weather cycles.
...and during those 100 years we have dug up and burned a significant proportion of the fossil fuel deposits that originally built up over a ~ 100 million year period ~ 300 million years in the past (ballpark figures) - when the climate was considerably different to today. That's a geological-scale intervention - you have to be pretty blinkered to deny even the possibility that it could have geological-scale consequences.
And no, that's not intended to be an evidence-backed scientific argument - just a plausibility argument, responding in kind to the parent's (im)plausibility argument.
PS: the state of the climate isn't caused by either CO2 or the Sun or algae in the sea or continental drift - its caused by all those factors and many more interacting in a complex and poorly understood equlibrium - changing any of those factors can shift the equilibrium, and in some types of equilibrium changing the wrong factor by just a little bit too much can destroy that equilibrium.
The human race is now so large and has such power to change the environment that we need to stop assuming that our activities are insignificant until proven otherwise. Trees affect the climate (you think that's air your breathing? its tree fart!) and they just sit there doing nothing.
I think a lot of us really hoped that eventually people would really get what a mess Microsoft's products are and then OSS would really take off. Instead what I think is happening is that Apple may really see some growth.
I suspect that the reason/problem is that MS's real stranglehold is not so much Windows as MS Office - which runs on Macs too (albeit in a slightly knobbled version) and, unfortunately, support for OpenOffice has been patchy (but NeoOffice seems perfectly good, albeit a version behind OO, the X Windows version of OO is there, and there's a proper OS X OpenOffice in the pipeline).
Apart from that, any move away from the Windows monoculture should benefit Linux and OSS in the long term. OS X may not be open source but it uses and promotes a lot of FOSS components (Apache, Samba, CUPS, GCC, WebKit). Safari may be a few million miles from perfect, but at least its not Internet Explorer...
However - I tried for the first time to get something done on Vista the other day. Ye gods! Forget bugs/security pop-ups whatever, the user interface is just a visually confusing blur. Despite having "switched" I'm still perfectly familiar with the XP interface (and actually quite like it) - this was completely alien. Someone actually looked over my shoulder and asked "is that a Mac, then?":-) I think MS may actually have risked their Unique Selling Point - familiarity - this time.
First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative.
That totally ignores the vital third leg to the bias issue: the bias of virtually all media towards telling a story which will attract readers/viewers rather than presenting the facts.
Couple of general examples:
Headline bias: The overall article is fairly objective if you read it all the way through, but the headline and preamble is misleading. E.g. this one is all over the UK media at the moment: Father fined for overfilling bin "A father-of-four has been left with a criminal record for overfilling his wheelie bin by four inches" (for our US viewers, a wheelie bin is a small, domestic dumpster in which one puts out the trash) - now, you'd think that this meant some poor guy had overfilled his bin and got hit with a $500 fine and a criminal record, but after assimilating various versions of this story it becomes clear that (a) the guy had already recieved warnings, a large bin etc. from the council (b) part of the fine (and probably the "criminal record") came from failing to pay the initial fine and (c) some reports suggest that he made matters worse by not turning up for the court case.
Now the problem with this is not that this incident isn't of interest/concern - it is - but that the disingenuous reporting undermines the issue: if you're going to challenge authority figures on whether this is an appropriate use of the criminal justice system, it doesn't help to hand them a ready made straw man and a box of matches. This happened on a much larger scale with the whole BBC vs Blair and the "sexed up" dossier affair: the BBC had pretty important evidence, but scenting the chance to nail a few ministerial scalps to the mantlepiece they "sexed up" their own story so much that, ultimately, the story became more important than the issue.
One dissenting voice=controversy: you gotta have "balance" so lets go out and find someone with extreme views who will promote a "lively debate".
On the radio, a woman who worked with the victims of domestic violence was describing how some of her clients were "serial" victims, and seemed to be attracted to the sort of aggressive males who were prone to violence. She was calling for proper research into what she admitted was currently only anecdotal evidence, with the pretty clear intent of helping empower these serial victims to break the cycle. The journos decided to "balance" this by rolling out some hard-line feminist who could only seem to interpret this as part of the great male conspiracy to blame all domestic violence on women,. So was that right of left bias? Maybe there were serious flaws in the hypothesis. Maybe the first woman *was* some sort of auto-misogynist, but the sort of critical questioning which might have reveled that certainly wasn't going to come from the disputant (assuming, of course, that the interview wasn't edited to hell).
Similarly, when there were attempts to set up the UK equivalent of the EFF, the media kept rolling out a "balancing opinion" who kept dismissing electronic privacy issues as "a middle class issue". Is that pro-right or pro-left?
Don't use the same word twice - its bad literary style, especially if its a nicely technical word like "percent". E.g "1/5 of people surveyed thought X, 45,000 thought Y and 17% thought Z". I really wish I'd grabbed the best example when it flashed by in the ether (it was to do with graduates pay and job satisfaction I think. Of course, that brings us on to the whole media misunderstanding statistics thing. Did you know that chewing gum increases the chance of the Loch Ness Monster falling on your head by 250%?
Gosh, darn we didn't mean that - people won't misunderstand ambiguous language w
A $1200 MacBook has a 13" screen vs a 14 or 15.4" TP R61i which costs about $720 or perhaps as much as $880 for CPU parity.
So forget Apple for the moment and explain why Lenovo makes (and presumably sells) the T-series, which are knocking on twice the price of R-series for, as you put it, "CPU parity"...
What you are talking about is not the "Apple price premium": its pretty much the same price differential that separates the "economy" and "premium" ranges from Lenovo, Dell or any other PC manufacturer. Its not simply raw processor grunt that distinguishes those ranges - especially with laptops where size, weight and style are a big factor. It just so happens that Apple choses not to compete in the "economy" sector.
Just because you are happy with an R61 (or that's the best your boss will spring for) doesn't mean that there isn't a significant section of the market who will spring for a more upmarket laptop - be it a T61 or a MacBook.
Now, looking at the ThinkPad T-series list, the first thing that is clear is that its one of those perplexing lists of obscurely-numbered models with random permutations of specs that, like mobile phone tariffs, are explicitly designed to prevent like-for-like comparisons - but it looks to me like the prices are in the same ballpark as comparable MacBooks and Pros, and certainly within haggle range of one another for a large purchase of (possibly) custom specced machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope he got good mileage out of that surname during his short life as a nerd.
(Although it does add some weight to the Photoshop theory)
I hope he remembered to 'nohup' before the big Ctrl-D...
...and move all air travel over to the Mr T model: dope the passengers senseless at the airport, pack the unconscious bodies in like sides of meat and wake 'em up at the destination airport.
Oh, wait - you wouldn't be able to sell them duty free & Skymall would go out of business. Darn.
Yes, PHP5 is a vastly better language - particularly in terms of OOP - than PHP3, and the newer libraries like PDO and XML are more object oriented.
However - this thread is about success and it was the "ugly-but useful" PHP of 2-3 releases ago which won the popularity contest and ensured that PHP was a fixture of any half-decent web hosting service.
An issue with both PHP and MySQL is that there's the version with all the nice features and new libraries or there is the old-fangled "flawed but useful" version with the ubiquitous support. If you "don't got root" on your target system you can often find yourself stuck with the latter.
Obviously there's more than one factor to a language's success, but the breadth and quality of the libraries and application frameworks is a huge factor - if you "know a bit" about programming then I'd say that learning your way around a new API is just as much work as learning a new language.
A big plus for C was that it always came with a substantial standard ("de-facto" to start with, then ISO) library based on the Unix API so it was great for writing portable programs - c.f. Pascal where ISTR the core language couldn't even open a named file. C++ was largely popularized by application frameworks like MFC and OWL, and Delphi did the same for Pascal.
PHP is pretty fugly as a language but comes with a huge library of functions and add-ons that are just what the doctor ordered for web scripting - and when people talk about Ruby, do they really mean Ruby or do they mean Rails?
I don't know about Python - it seems to be a secret society rather than a language and you can't join unless you pass this initiation test where someone tells you a corny joke (stolen from an ancient email circular about Unix and Makefiles) about a language which uses leading whitespace to delineate blocks. I always laugh and fail the test, so I've no idea what the real language is like. :-)
Time Machine uses Unix/HFS filesystem-only features such as "hard links" to achieve its time-travel tricks and these features don't work (or don't work reliably) via networks.
Apple and Microsoft must have attained Mutually Assured IP Destruction by now - if they open the silo doors on their patent portfolios and press the red buttons then it won't be over until its Microsoft's patent on the universal Turing machine vs. Apple's patent on "representing information via a system of symbols"** and there's nothing left but the cockroaches. (What's that? the cockroaches have been nibbling on GM grain and are now owned by Monsanto? Darn!)
(** I seriously hope that I am making this shit up, but the way things are going...)
Whether you lose money due to "theft of IP" or "copyright infringement", you are out the same ammount of money.
But the issue is not whether "theft of IP" is the same as "copyright infringement" - the issue is that big copyright holders are engaged in a campaign to equate "theft of IP" with theft of tangible property - witness the cinema ads along the lines of "You wouldn't steal a car - why would you steal a movie?" and the music industry's conceit that every downloaded CD costs them every penny they would have made from selling it. In this context, substituting the term "theft of intellectual property" for "copyright violation" is rather a significant change. Its even worse when applied to patents (which it is possible to infringe in complete innocence).
Its not like calling "theft" "embezzlement" to make a subtle distinction between ways of stealing money - its like re-branding "embezzlement" as "financial assault" or "asset murder" in order to exaggerate its impact on the victim and justify more draconian enforcement. (Actually, I'm sure some people would argue that the term "embezzlement" is mainly used to make theft by middle-class people with BMWs and nice houses sound less serious than theft by working class oiks).
As for my .sig, it's an attempt to push the most grammar-nazi hot-buttons in the smallest space. Using the common corruption of "intents and purposes"
Ah. I must have had a sheltered life, because I've never seen that particular crime against the language (at least not written down). In that spirit, I think you meant to say "who care's?" :-)
Guess how I tend to resolve that dilemma.
Apparently by ignoring options A and B and going straight for the Chewbacca defense in which you try to refute an argument by citing a non-sequitur. If you do have some wonderful logical argument that goes from "embezzlement has the same effect as theft" to "therefore copyright violation has the same effect as theft" then I think you skipped a few too many steps.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"Have I missed the joke or should that not be "for all intents and purposes..."?
I always like to counter this with something like, "would you rather I steal $50,000 from you or embezzle it?". It is readily apparent that the effect is the same.
Lets follow your logic:
I say, A is not equal to B
You say, aha! but C (which has nothing to do with A) is equal to B, therefore A must be equal to B too!
I pity your math teacher.
If I take $50 worth of your money or physical goods - be it via theft, fraud, embezzlement, robbery, burglary, pickpocketing, nicking, pilfering, shoplifting, mugging, larceny, piracy (as in theft by force at sea, not the *AA's definition), extortion, blackmail or whatever else your thesaurus throws up then you end up with exactly $50 less money or physical goods than you had before and are quite likely to face consequential losses when, as a result, you (e.g.) can't pay your mortgage that month.
If 100 people steal (or any of the other words) $50 from you then you are $5000 out of pocket.
If 1000 people steal (or any of the other words) $50,000 from you then you are $50,000 out of pocket.
If I illegally download a copy of your "intellectual property" which you normally sell for $50 then all you have lost is the hypothetical opportunity to charge me $50 for it - which makes the huge assumption that I would have been prepared to pay that much for it.
If 100 people illegally download a copy, then you have not lost $5,000 because it is hugely implausible that every one of those 100 people would have been prepared to pay $50 if they hadn't been able to get it for "free". The "Radiohead" experiment showed that plenty of people will voluntarily pay for music if they genuinely feel it is supporting the artist - that was only a failure if you count up all the people who downloaded and didn't pay and pretend that, somehow, each one of those has "cost" something.
That doesn't mean that people who illegally download copyrighted material should get a pat on the back and a lollipop - it just means that "copyright violation" is not "theft" in the same way that "theft" isn't "murder" and "murder" isn't "genocide". What the *AA is trying to do by confusing copyright violation with theft is a bit like the chamber of commerce trying to get "theft" re-defined as "property murder" and then deriding anybody who felt that people shouldn't be sent to the chair for nicking a can of cola as "supporter of shoplifting" (or even "pro murder").
New technology has made copying very easy - to stamp it out will require draconian, intrusive laws and restrictive technologies. The danger is that these will be ineffective at tackling serious, large scale counterfeiting (if they're all gangsters and terrorists anyway a few new copyright laws aren't going to faze them!) while criminalizing people who just want to play the new album they've bought in the car.
The big loss to the music industry is that, when CDs came out, they made a shitload of money from people replacing their vinyl collections. A few decades on, they were ready for the next big money-spinner. But, MP3 came along and everyone didn't "have to buy the White Album again" - you could just convert your existing copy! Oh, the humanity! The danger is that the "threat" of "piracy" will be used as a pretext to shut down this loophole. Of course, they could have launched a properly sanctioned version of "AllOfMP3" and made respectable money, but they've grown fat off the CD market and only a shitload would do.
Funny, because they've been very successfully growing their market share over the last 5 years - and dominated the portable music player market - by staying out of the high volume, low-end of the market and positioning themselves as a "designer label".
Outside the U.S. an Apple PC/lappy is about as common as a tandem bicycle - you know they exist, but see maybe one or two a year.That's partly historical - I'd debate whether Macs are overpriced now (if you compare like-for-like in terms of form factor) but back in the 80s & 90s Apple really did price itself out of, e.g, the UK market with the 'ol £1=$1 trick - at a time when the actual exchange rate was £1>$2, Sinclair were selling cheap'n'cheerful computers for ~£100 and Acorn were selling BBC Micros (which kicked sand in the face of the aging Apple II) for £300 - and a few years later the cheap home-grown/far East PC clones came along and swept up. The only real presence was in the DTP/Graphics/Video industry where, for a while, only Macs could cut the mustard.
So, whereas in the US Apple always had enclaves (e.g. in education - I work in Math Ed and many - probably most - of my US colleagues use Macs) in the UK and elsewhere they're starting from zero.
Bittorrent? What's that? Isn't that something that pirates and terrorists use to exploit poor starving artists?
iTunes and the iPod have been successful because of the public perception that they just work - now, you can debate how true that is if you like, but that's the line. Part of that ease of use is exactly because they force you to use iTunes (the software*) - which annoys slashdotters who want to mount their mp3 player under Debian and copy .ogg files to it, but is a matter of sheer indifference to the mass market, who like the seamlessness that comes from the monolithic approach.
As for the AppleTV: at the moment, whereas the iTunes store is there to sell iPods, the AppleTV is there to sell iTunes video, and to "tick a box" so that people buying video for their iPods know there's an Apple-branded solution to show them on the big screen. Once the online video market has "come of age" (which will also need a bit of a revolution in broadband availability & capacity) Apple might get serious about the AppleTV.
(*Of course, iTunes the software doesn't force you to buy your media from iTunes, the store - it will happily rip audio CDs, accept MP3s and unprotected AACs from any source - legal or otherwise - and a google for "rip DVD to iTunes" produces a heap of solutions: if you know Bittorrent you probably know Google)
No - but whereas in your analogue home you can sit back and look at the damp patch slowly spreading on the wall and think "I must get that fixed before it starts sprouting fungus" your Digital home will stay crisp and pristine up until the day when it suddenly, without warning, dissolves into a mess of pixels.
Yes, but the guy who ended up owning the last cornfield would make a fortune! Meanwhile, people in the developing world are in danger starving because farmers who are free to "capitalize on their own assets" are growing high-value cash crops for the west (or have effectively sold out to western firms) rather than food for the locals.
The point I was making was that when people are allowed to capitalise on their assets they can exploit their talents and do amazing things.Funny - back in the real world, people who have been free to capitalize on their assets (e.g. homeowners in the UK) have chosen to sell them back to the banks so they effectively don't own them any more and - come the credit crunch - can no longer afford to live in them.
As for farmland -farming is a risky, low-profit-margin business - the most economically prudent thing you can do with a cornfield is to sell it for building.
Well, in the UK, Northern Rock bank was effectively nationalized.
As for the US cases - it doesn't matter if cash changes hands - if the state guarantees mortgages then its underwriting it with taxpayer's money and state assets (initially paid for by the taxpayer).
The main action that the government has taken so far is to release more money into the economy. This isn't taxpayer money.Yes it is. Where else did it come from? Little green leprechauns? The government can print money but it can't print wealth. If the government prints money then it dilutes the value of existing money (hey! look! food and fuel prices are shooting up! Why do you think that is?) - yes folks, the government has re-distributed some of the spending power of the money in your wallet to bail out the banks just as surely as if they'd sent the tax man around to grab a wad.
And that's the problem - if you're going to do communism/socialism you need to apply it to everything but what tends to happen - even in supposedly communist countries - is that capitalism is allowed to cherry pick the profitable areas, leaving the state with all the liabilities and none of the assets. If this doesn't happen overtly it happens covertly via corruption and the black market.
That's why communism/socialism doesn't work as a way of running countries here on Earth - human nature means that there's no workable way of stopping capitalism from pissing in the swimming pool. However, bear in mind that western capitalism would currently be drowning in its own piss if the state hadn't stepped in with lots of cashy money from the taxpayers to rescue the banking industry from the consequences of their own greed. How capitalist is that?
Communism might just work in some areas - it seems to work quite nicely for Free Software (probably because its a microcosm in which there is virtually no "cost of production" so freeloaders and profiteers don't actually do any damage) and maybe, just maybe, it's worth giving it a go for space colonization.
Then you're probably in a minority - and a minority of which enough members will succumb to buying a Mac Pro to offset any loss to Apple.
But the size, shape, weight, and design? They have negative value. I would pay *more* for a Mac mini that had exactly the same specs but was in a mini-ITX case and had the power provisioning and port complement of a Mini-ITX PC.You might, but I think you're at odds with Apple's target market - you're asking them to go back to the business model which was failing for them in the 90s. The turning point for Apple was when they dumped the beige boxes and launched the all-in-one iMac which eschewed internal expansion for USB peripherals and came in a fancy designer case.
I'd predict (and no-one can know unless they tried) that an Apple mini-tower would get lousy reviews on the basis of poor price comparison with comparable PCs. At the moment, Macs are getting pretty good reviews, even in the PC press, because they are reasonably competitive with other SFFs and high-end laptops.
Virtually nobody is *buying* the AOpen mini clone, or the Dell iMac clone, because virtually nobody really *wants* that stuff enough to pay forNo - the problem with these systems is that Dell and AOpen (or the AOpen resellers) are "utility" brands trying to compete with Apple's "designer label". To do that you need a product which is significantly cheaper but which looks just as good as the "designer" one: most of the iMac/Mini clones to date have failed miserably on both counts.
So don't tell me that making a laptop without a screen is value added over making a desktop PC, because it's not. It's dross.Well 70% of customers at brick-and-mortar PC stores seem to disagree with you - seriously, I wouldn't set much store by those figures but Apple do seem to be doing something right.
As opposed to comparing the numbers for CPU speed, RAM and graphics specs and completely ignoring the size, shape, weight and design?
the way they're selling a $350 desktop for $600 with the Mac mini, or a $700 desktop for $1100 with the iMac.The Mac mini isn't a "$350 desktop" - its an ultra-small form factor, near-silent PC which has usually been very competitive with similar "mini PCs" - lets see, there is a Mac-mini-sized PC from AOpen for $350 - oh, wait, that's excluding processor, RAM and hard drive!
Likewise, the iMac isn't a $700 desktop - its an all-in-one PC like the Dell XPS One which is... lets see... £999 for a 20" display, 2.2GHz Core 2 with Intel integrated graphics versus £949 for a 20" iMac with a 2.6GHz Core 2 duo and a 2456MB Radeon 2600 (sorry about the UK prices).
But it is copied - they copy it to the hard disc of the machines they sell - and they're not making that copy for the purpose of personally using the software they've just paid for as a consumer, they're making that copy for the purpose of re-selling it as part of a business. Its all getting a long way from selling on a second-hand book.
Its one thing if courts don't find EULAs enforceable against end users - but if they found that they couldn't even enforce them against OEMs I suspect that we'd see some frantic lobbying from Certain Large Software Companies.
Not necessarily. Apple concentrate on small-form-factor, mid/high-end laptops and workstation-class towers for good reasons: high margins, longer product cycles and more emphasis on style. Since the Intel switch, Macs have been reasonably competitive provided you compare like-for-like (i.e. SFF with SFF; high-end laptop with high-end laptop; Xeon workstation with Xeon workstation). The "Apple premium" is pretty much the same as what other manufacturers charge for their "executive" range over their "budget" range.
Apple would have a hard time creating a budget mini-tower that competed with the offerings that the big box-shifters throw together each month from whatever components they have a surplus of - they don't have a big corporate market for economies of scale and they are more constrained in what components they can use. The nightmare scenario is that a "cheap" Apple would still be too expensive to lure the penny-pinchers away from Dell and Walmart, but would decimate sales of the high-end, high-margin systems to existing Apple users.
More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.
No, all they have to do is stamp the words "Upgrade: for computers with OS X 10.3 or earlier only" on the box - which is effectively what they're selling anyway. If a court decided to rule that illegal it would set some very interesting precedents for Microsoft et. al.
Wasn't the ruling in the recent Skype vs. the GPL case (where they tried to use antitrust law) something along the lines that, if a copyright holder wanted to specify that their software should only be distributed in a green envelope, such was their right?
Plus, this bunch are re-distributing the software in a "new binding" (i.e. on a shiny new Psystar computer rather than an Apple CD) so I doubt they would have the same potential "one sided contract/first sale" defenses against a EULA as a regular punter might.
Just put headphones on the victim and feed their voice back to them with a 1-second delay for instant speech impediment fun and frolics. No danger of erasing your victims credit card or being sued 10 years later when they blame you for giving them a brain tumor.
(I guess people who work in the TV and radio industry or who spend long periods talking on echoey long-distance phone calls will have developed immunity, though).
Obviously doesn't have the same neurological implications as the zapper - but that's not to say its not interesting.
...and during those 100 years we have dug up and burned a significant proportion of the fossil fuel deposits that originally built up over a ~ 100 million year period ~ 300 million years in the past (ballpark figures) - when the climate was considerably different to today. That's a geological-scale intervention - you have to be pretty blinkered to deny even the possibility that it could have geological-scale consequences.
And no, that's not intended to be an evidence-backed scientific argument - just a plausibility argument, responding in kind to the parent's (im)plausibility argument.
PS: the state of the climate isn't caused by either CO2 or the Sun or algae in the sea or continental drift - its caused by all those factors and many more interacting in a complex and poorly understood equlibrium - changing any of those factors can shift the equilibrium, and in some types of equilibrium changing the wrong factor by just a little bit too much can destroy that equilibrium.
The human race is now so large and has such power to change the environment that we need to stop assuming that our activities are insignificant until proven otherwise. Trees affect the climate (you think that's air your breathing? its tree fart!) and they just sit there doing nothing.
I suspect that the reason/problem is that MS's real stranglehold is not so much Windows as MS Office - which runs on Macs too (albeit in a slightly knobbled version) and, unfortunately, support for OpenOffice has been patchy (but NeoOffice seems perfectly good, albeit a version behind OO, the X Windows version of OO is there, and there's a proper OS X OpenOffice in the pipeline).
Apart from that, any move away from the Windows monoculture should benefit Linux and OSS in the long term. OS X may not be open source but it uses and promotes a lot of FOSS components (Apache, Samba, CUPS, GCC, WebKit). Safari may be a few million miles from perfect, but at least its not Internet Explorer...
However - I tried for the first time to get something done on Vista the other day. Ye gods! Forget bugs/security pop-ups whatever, the user interface is just a visually confusing blur. Despite having "switched" I'm still perfectly familiar with the XP interface (and actually quite like it) - this was completely alien. Someone actually looked over my shoulder and asked "is that a Mac, then?" :-) I think MS may actually have risked their Unique Selling Point - familiarity - this time.
First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative.
That totally ignores the vital third leg to the bias issue: the bias of virtually all media towards telling a story which will attract readers/viewers rather than presenting the facts.
Couple of general examples:
Headline bias: The overall article is fairly objective if you read it all the way through, but the headline and preamble is misleading. E.g. this one is all over the UK media at the moment: Father fined for overfilling bin "A father-of-four has been left with a criminal record for overfilling his wheelie bin by four inches" (for our US viewers, a wheelie bin is a small, domestic dumpster in which one puts out the trash) - now, you'd think that this meant some poor guy had overfilled his bin and got hit with a $500 fine and a criminal record, but after assimilating various versions of this story it becomes clear that (a) the guy had already recieved warnings, a large bin etc. from the council (b) part of the fine (and probably the "criminal record") came from failing to pay the initial fine and (c) some reports suggest that he made matters worse by not turning up for the court case.
Now the problem with this is not that this incident isn't of interest/concern - it is - but that the disingenuous reporting undermines the issue: if you're going to challenge authority figures on whether this is an appropriate use of the criminal justice system, it doesn't help to hand them a ready made straw man and a box of matches. This happened on a much larger scale with the whole BBC vs Blair and the "sexed up" dossier affair: the BBC had pretty important evidence, but scenting the chance to nail a few ministerial scalps to the mantlepiece they "sexed up" their own story so much that, ultimately, the story became more important than the issue.
One dissenting voice=controversy: you gotta have "balance" so lets go out and find someone with extreme views who will promote a "lively debate".
On the radio, a woman who worked with the victims of domestic violence was describing how some of her clients were "serial" victims, and seemed to be attracted to the sort of aggressive males who were prone to violence. She was calling for proper research into what she admitted was currently only anecdotal evidence, with the pretty clear intent of helping empower these serial victims to break the cycle. The journos decided to "balance" this by rolling out some hard-line feminist who could only seem to interpret this as part of the great male conspiracy to blame all domestic violence on women,. So was that right of left bias? Maybe there were serious flaws in the hypothesis. Maybe the first woman *was* some sort of auto-misogynist, but the sort of critical questioning which might have reveled that certainly wasn't going to come from the disputant (assuming, of course, that the interview wasn't edited to hell).
Similarly, when there were attempts to set up the UK equivalent of the EFF, the media kept rolling out a "balancing opinion" who kept dismissing electronic privacy issues as "a middle class issue". Is that pro-right or pro-left?
Don't use the same word twice - its bad literary style, especially if its a nicely technical word like "percent". E.g "1/5 of people surveyed thought X, 45,000 thought Y and 17% thought Z". I really wish I'd grabbed the best example when it flashed by in the ether (it was to do with graduates pay and job satisfaction I think. Of course, that brings us on to the whole media misunderstanding statistics thing. Did you know that chewing gum increases the chance of the Loch Ness Monster falling on your head by 250%?
Gosh, darn we didn't mean that - people won't misunderstand ambiguous language w
So forget Apple for the moment and explain why Lenovo makes (and presumably sells) the T-series, which are knocking on twice the price of R-series for, as you put it, "CPU parity"...
What you are talking about is not the "Apple price premium": its pretty much the same price differential that separates the "economy" and "premium" ranges from Lenovo, Dell or any other PC manufacturer. Its not simply raw processor grunt that distinguishes those ranges - especially with laptops where size, weight and style are a big factor. It just so happens that Apple choses not to compete in the "economy" sector.
Just because you are happy with an R61 (or that's the best your boss will spring for) doesn't mean that there isn't a significant section of the market who will spring for a more upmarket laptop - be it a T61 or a MacBook.
Now, looking at the ThinkPad T-series list, the first thing that is clear is that its one of those perplexing lists of obscurely-numbered models with random permutations of specs that, like mobile phone tariffs, are explicitly designed to prevent like-for-like comparisons - but it looks to me like the prices are in the same ballpark as comparable MacBooks and Pros, and certainly within haggle range of one another for a large purchase of (possibly) custom specced machines.