I like how you included the entire production chain for the electric, but completely ignored that for gas. 'm pretty sure gasoline doesn't magically appear in the underground tanks at the gas stations.
Nor do coal, oil, natural gas or uranium magically appear at the power station. The power generation and distribution network doesn't build and maintain itself, and would almost certainly need serious upgrading to support widespread use of electric cars.
Both of my "chains" start from the point where you liberate the energy from a useful energy source (e.g. by burning a fossil fuel) and end with it making your wheels go round. They both omit the extraction, refining and transport of the original source. Ok, coal doesn't need much refining but it has lower energy density than gasoline and doesn't pump along pipes too well:-) Anyway, some power stations run on oil or natural gas anyway. Oh, and there's nothing to stop you building more gasoline pipelines to get the tankers off the road.
Does anyone know how much more/less polution is put into the atmosphere by using these coal powered cars as opposed to gas powered ones?
Follow the energy:
Gas engine: Chemical Energy (gas) -> heat -> mechanical energy
Electric engine: Chemical energy (coal) -> heat -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy -> (step up transformer) -> (power line) -> (step down transformer) -> (charger) -> chemical energy (in the battery) -> electrical energy -> mechanical energy
Each link in that chain is less than perfectly efficient and wastes energy, so even if the last two or three steps (the actual car engine) are more efficient for electric, there's a lot of catching up to do.
So, while electric cars might make cities more pleasant, unless the upstream source of the energy is either renewable or nuclear* its not going to solve the problems associated with burning fossil fuels (i.e. global warming or - if you don't believe in that - the self-evident fact that we're consuming a finite resource at an accelerating rate).
They may, however make cities cleaner, and once they're in place at least you have the flexibility to change the energy source at will. However, you also need to factor in the cost of manufacturing enough electric cars to get everybody driving one (not just those kind people who buy a new car every 2 years, but all the sensible people who buy 2-year-old cars and run them until they fall apart).
No one gizmo is going to solve our energy & pollution problems unless its part of a coherent system.
(* nuclear is, of course, safer and cleaner than fossil fuels unless (a) it goes wrong, (b) the current sources of easily extractable fissile material run out , or (c) some asshat uses the byproducts for making bombs. Of course there's absolutely no reason to believe that a massive expansion of nuclear power would make any of those more likely, so that's OK then. However, its probably the only route out of our current hole).
To bad that standard couldn't be broadly used, actually.
Well, the huge advantage in the case of medicine is that it could piggy-back on an existing system and might even save money by removing duplication of effort ( just a few details missing, of course...:-) ). Maybe there are other "special case" solutions for particular sectors.
Quick disclaimer that I know nothing much about the pharmaceutical industry except the self-evident fact that proving a new drug is an expensive and (hopefully) scientifically rigorous process that has to be regulated.
Many people believe that patenting drugs shouldn't be allowed, what should be allowed are patents on the method of making the drug.
In the case of the drugs industry (frequently raised as a pro-patent argument) - where you need mandatory regulation anyway to ensure drugs are safe and effective, surely it would be quite straightforward to grant a fixed-term exclusive license as part of the (expensive) approval process? No need to get bogged down with lawyers trying to decide who "owns" the underlying knowledge - you pay to get something licensed in a particular country, you get a N year monopoly.
The finder asked me something, I clicked OK. I was dismayed to find that the dialog had asked me "Would you like to replace directory C, with A?"
I think the designer's intention was that you should read the warning before pressing OK. PEBKAC.
- Why on earth would that ever be the default option for a directory move? From the users perspective you aren't really moving the directory, the intention is to move the files, thus the sane response would be to merge A with C not replace it.
Ignoring philosophies about "spatial design" the more pragmatic justification is that the Mac method produces a predictable result whereas the "merge" method leaves you with no clue about what has been added or replaced in the destination - and if something stops the copy half way through (often something non-catastrophic like a file permission) then the destination is in a totally indeterminate state. Merging directories really needs a proper "sync" tool.
TFA sounds like something that should be fixed, though - even so, "don't do that then" is pretty good advice, just copy & then delete the original - hardly rocket science. (I don't suppose the "missing" files simply got moved to the Trash?)
For the record I hated Buffy,and if I had realized the same person did firefly I never would have bothered.
Yeah, its a pity the publicity for Serenity went out of its way to make it look like "From the creator of Buffy... Buffy in spaaace!!!" (UK posters & DVD cover all featured Summer doing her best Buffy/Faith impression). Pity it didn't occur to Universal that quite a lot of people who were turned off by the idea of a teen comedy-drama about a vampire-slaying ex-cheerleader** might actually be open to a space western.
** P.S. Don't shoot me - I liked BTVS (because of the dryly witty dialogue and nothing to do with Alyslon Hannigan, of course).
P.P.S. I guess "From the writer of Alien, Resurrection! No, Wait! Yeah the Alien/human hybrid sucked but the mercenary crew were cool weren't they and the guys in this film are a bit like them..." wasn't snappy enough.
When Apple releases Leopart and it didn't work out of the gate with Java
Didn't happen! What actually happened is that a few people were using a beta of Java 1.6 (instead of Apple's released 1.5) - and it turns out that this beta doesn't work with Leopard. This is only a big issue for a few people who require the relatively new Java 1.6 instead of 1.5 and had assumed that it would be part of Leopard. Describing this as "Leopard doesn't work with Java" is exaggerating somewhat.
This hardly compares with MS' past attempts at embrace/extend/extinguish, and vassilation over support in IE, with Java. (What version does IE come with these days?)
Microsoft screws Java: they're LAZY and EVIL and BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT.
Apple screws Java: they're very busy.
Oh ye gods and little fishes! How hard can this be:
Apple does not have a near-monopoly on desktop operating systems and web browsers - if they fail to support Java, Java users and developers have another excuse for not buying Macs. Boo hoo. You are free to use Linux instead. If they promote Mac-only APIs and extensions for Java at the expense of the cross-platform ones then the only takers will be developers who are happy to target a few % of the market.
Microsoft have a near-monopoly on desktop operating systems and web browsers - developers can't afford to ignore Windows, so if MS fail to support Java - or promotes windows-only extensions and APIs at the expense of the cross-platform APIs then that jeapordizes Java's future on all platforms.
The UK, USA, EU and (as far as I know) most other developed countries' legal systems recognise the fact that if a "free market" is to be maintained then companies with monopolies or near-monopolies must be subject to stricter standards than smaller players.
And yes, replacing the MS monopoly with an Apple monopoly would be a serious case of "out of the frying pan into the fire". However, that ain't gonna happen soon. Meanwhile a healthy, high-profile Mac market increases the pressure on "decision makers" to avoid Windows-only technologies, which often indirectly benefits Linux and other minority platforms.
So, drivers for the mainstream components would be more than enough to cover 90% of the market.
...and the remaining 10% would be more than enough to create major support headaches and bad press for Apple.
When I bought BeOS 4.5, I double-checked that it worked with my computer. It did not work with my soundcard...
But unlike you, a large part of the target OSX market does not know or care what soundcard they have, nor would they get any useful advice from the salesdroid at Kwik-E-PC-mart.
Look, this isn't about whether you could make sensible use of "OS X for PC" - its about the risk/benefit balance for Apple who are currently doing very nicely thank you selling hardware - several percent of the PC hardware market is a nice little earner. The big, huge, stonking risk of "OS X for PC" is that it would attract existing potential Mac buyers - decimating sales of Apple hardware - without attracting enough Windows "switchers" to compensate for that loss. All of the snags I raise could be tackled without changing the laws of Physics, but at a cost and with any failures and consequent bad press jeopardizing the chance of success.
The wikipedia article says NeXTStep run on black boxes.
Its not so obvious now that we're used to iMacs and anything with a CRT screen looks archaic, but the original NeXT cubes were serious nerd porn at the time, but they were hideously expensive and only sold to serious nerds with deep pockets. But the argument was still the same "Oh, I've heard so much about how wonderful NeXTStep is - but the cubes are sooo expensive - if only I could buy the software for the PC". They released a PC version (check the wikipedia articles) and - it didn't sell. (by then, the serious nerds had just customised X Window to look a bit like NeXTStep - didn't work like nextstep, but you could run 8 copies of vim on a cool background so who cares?)
Jobs went back to Apple and soon demonstrated that cool hardware designs really do shift computers provided you make them affordable.
Was the point of OLPC to provide low cost computers to needy children or to promote Mandriva/OSS ??
It certainly wasn't to promote MS Windows to the developing world or to lock them into proprietary standards. Plus, I think, a certain amount of thought went into tailoring the Linux distro and user interface for the target market.
All Apple has to do is to support the major manufacturers. It does not have to support every little shop in Asia which produces hardware components.
Unless they want OS X to "just work" on typical generic PCs built by OEMs using components and peripherals from whatever little shop in Asia had a surplus that month.
It's not that of a big deal to support the major peripherals in this day an age, with USB/firewire and PCI-express.
First, we're not just talking printers and USB memory sticks here - we're talking Ethernet cards, WiFi cards, sound cards, (or their on-board equivalents), Laptop trackpads, "extended" keyboards, TV tuner cards, webcams, cup warmers, missile launchers etc. Now, someone who buys a Mac is going to buy Mac-compatible stuff to go with it. Someone who buys an aftermarket OS will expect it to work with the components that they have. There are standard protocols for some things like storage (so most flash and hard drives work on PC/Mac/Linux) and power (so your cup warmer stands a good chance - but your PC might not play Java Jive when you stand your cup on it) but other things (e.g. WiFi and all but a few modems) still rely on custom drivers.
Today if my NVIDIA card does not work, I don't phone Microsoft, I phone NVIDIA.
Who, last time I looked, refer you to Apple for OS X support (for their small range of EFI-compatible cards that work in Macs).
NeXTStep never run on average 80x86 PCs.
Hint - when you supply a link it is customary to choose one that supports your argument rather than completely contradicts it: [from the linked article] "3.3, was released in early 1995, by which time it ran not only on Motorola 68000 family processors, but also IBM PC compatible x86, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC"
...and if it did have exacting hardware requirements that meant it didn't run on the average PC then that kinda illustrates my whole point!
Bottom line is, if you have a superior product, you will eventually win.
Greetings traveller, and welcome to this strange and confusing world we call "Earth".
Be Inc. was screwed by Microsoft because MS did not allow manufacturers to ship BeOS with their computers;
Whereas MS will absolutely shower them with incentives to ship OS X
NeXTStep run only on Black Boxes,
No, Black Boxes ran CP/M (I'm that old!) - NeXTStep initially ran on elegantly brutalist cubes of ribbed mangnesium alloy that could in no way be demeaned by the term "box", was later released for x86 PCs, tanked, spawned an open source version, and later evolved into Mac OS X.
and Netware was not a real O/S.
...but it was a competitor to Windows NT (...and AFAIK its Linux-based now, which makes it fairly real...)
What law would be violated by installing OS X on unsupported hardware?
Whatever law the software publishers think entitles them to impose their EULA and/or whatever local equivalent of the Digital 1984 Copyright Act vis. circumventing a protection measure you are subject to. One or both of these may or may not be a bone fide "law" but that depends where you live and how much justice you can afford.
Apple needs to drop the laptop in a desktop idea and come out with a real desktop not a $2200+ workstation with high cost FB-dimms and dual cpus or a over priced mini with slow laptop parts and a higher price tag a desktop with on board video and pci-e slots can fit in with lower priced mini for people who want one below it and it fitting in between the mini and the mac pro
Business plan:
Enter the most price-sensitive, competitive sector of the PC market where companies survive by revising their product range weekly to use the cheapest commodity components and rely on warranties, adware bundling and sales tactics just short of bait-and-switch to actually make a margin.
Compete with your own lucrative and booming sales of high-margin SFF, premium laptop and workstation-class machines
Erode your reputation (deserved or not) as a "prestige" manufacturer
Even at say $200/copy, with the same support I'd get from Microsoft if I were running Windows (read that as "none")....
Bug in that logic: its not only MS that supports your PC - its also the hardware manufacturers. Every component, peripheral and driver on your PC is compatible with - and has been tested with - one or more flavours of MS Windows by the manufacturer. PC component manufacturers have to do that in order to survive in a MS-dominated market. Their customer support lines may be crap but they've still invested serious dosh ensuring that they work with MS Windows. Unfortunately, the OS monoculture often means that they've eschewed platform-independent interface protocols in favor of cheaper "soft hardware" solutions that depend on windows-specific drivers. Even the mfrs that do support OS X may only bother on their higher-end products (e.g. the cheapest printers that don't have PCL or Postscript on-board are usually WIndows only).
Now, if you try and sell a "minority" OS product then - until you reach a critical mass and convince hardware mfrs to invest in supporting you - all of that behind-the-scenes support becomes your problem. Linux can scrape by because its got a lot of free labour backed up by multiple sources of commercial backing - but even that has had a hard time. You also have the problem that the vast mass of users buy a PC with Windows installed and are pretty much incapable of installing an OS.
So, say you get the hack and illegally install OS X. The motherboard, WiFi card, ethernet, bluetooth, video card, sound card, web cam etc. in your PC may or may not work with OS X and if the answer is "not" then tough titty - who ya gonna call? Pay $200 to Apple for a copy of OS X and you're going to expect Apple to support your hardware.
Basically, its going to cost Apple a lot of money to break into the "aftermarket OS" market - something that Jobs has already tried and failed at once (NeXTStep) and which, even if successful, would risk eroding Apple's hardware sales.
Bottom line - the MS Monoculture means that there is no "aftermarket OS" market (see: BeOS, NeXTStep, Netware). Even the Linux movement is having an uphill struggle giving away a desktop operating system (not so much in the internet server market, but what with the whole Internet being built on free *nix-oriented code its bloody amazing that anybody even considers Windows).
...there's also the danger of the guy he doesn't recognize and challenges being an asshole that goes to the same golf club at the CEO. It only takes a few SIPs* to throw a hissy fit after being rightly denied entry and the security staff, unless adequately defended by the management, will stop bothering and/or just hassle anybody that doesn't look like a big shot.
Sadly that's not really possible anymore, as each of the three desktop offerings is made less versatile than a standard desktop PC by design decisions.
Well, yeah, the LCD issue is what puts me off iMacs (hey Apple - why not put a DVI-in so that people could buy a new iMac and use their old one as a monitor? The iMac is compact enough to make that non-stupid).
Apart from that, though, Macs still use "standard" RAM, standard CPUs, standard HDDs etc. just maybe not the cheapest standard. OK, the FB-DIMMS in the Pro have beefed-up heatsinks c.f. the standard versions (but there are at least two non-Apple sources). There are tons of instructions on teh interweb for upgrading your Mini's CPU or upgrading your Pro to 8 cores. The "tragedy" is that Microsoft wimped out of EFI support for 32-bit Vista (and/or going 64 bit-only) otherwise we might be seeing more PCI Express cards that would work in the Mac Pro (although AFAIK standard cards will work under WIndows in the Pro...)
Plus, internal expansion (beyond RAM) is getting less important to the typical "general purpose" PC user. The MHz war has eased off for CPUs, a single internal hard drive now provides more than enough storage for day-to-day use and an external USB or NAS hard drive is often a better solution for your video collection. Internal sound cards are mostly good enough for regular use, and if you're an audio pro you may prefer an external box anyway. Even onboard video is usually good enough for anything short of serious gaming or pro visualisation.
The usefulness of upgrading PC CPUs is overrated - I've used built-from-component PCs in the past and it usually turns out that a significant CPU upgrade also entails a new motherboard and RAM. By upgrade time, better hard drives, video etc. are also available & you could really do with a bigger PSU and quite frankly its easier to build a new PC and keep the old one working.
Yes - some people still have a good reason for wanting a pick-n-mix tower PC but they are getting more and more niche.
OK - I have two macs with different versions of Logitech drivers installed:
Logitech Control Center 2.1.4: Sure enough - APE present in/Library/Frameworks and incriminating ape_install files inside the Logitech pref pane.
Logitech Control Center 2.0: No sign of APE.
Any idea what APE is actually doing in these - since the 2.0 version appears to work perfectly well?
Traditionally the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery, a concept which altered during the Romantic period, when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science".
The "Bachelor of Science" (BSc) is a relatively recent invention by modern universities. "Modern" in this context means "Not already 600 years old when those Romantic trendies re-wrote the dictionary". Certainly the University of Oxford (est. 1069 give or take a few decades) doesn't have any truck with this sort of newspeak and awards BA for everything.
Funny but a few years ago we had a relative from the UK come for his first visit to the US. He wanted to see Disney World, the Grand Cayon, Hollywood, New York City, and the Kenndy Space Center. They wanted to know if we thought a week would be enough time...
I don't think any of us UKians really appreciate the size of the USA until we've watched it grind by through an airplane window or discovered that, if you fly from London to California, when you cross the N American coast you're not even half way there. Even when you're on the ground everything is three times as far apart as you think it should be (usually when your legs are giving out about halfway to that place that you were sure was about 10 minutes walk away when you saw it from the car).
This is because the Americans can't cope with the frankly ludicrous size of their country so they deliberately build all their cars, houses, trains and teenagers to 150% scale so that the land looks smaller than it really is (especially when seen on TV).
However, the stereotypical perception of USAians of the UK - that every city that anybody has ever heard of (including Edinburgh) is basically a suburb of London is forgivable in the light of the iconic London Tube Map which is only topologically accurate and exaggerates the distance between the central London stations - so once you've found out that it is invariably quicker to walk from Kings Cross to Euston its easy to mistakenly extrapolate that (e.g.) Nottingham must be a 20 minute bus ride.
That's what's known in the web design world as Mystery Meat navigation
Nonsense - we're not talking about a website where you are expected to master a unique-to-that-site user interface in order to have a five minute browse, we're talking about the interface to a general purpose computer that has to present a vast and diverse range of information and operations and can quite reasonably demand that the user take two fricking minutes to learn the basics (like the big blue W is the word processor and that you right-click or control-click on an icon to reveal more information). Now, Mac does have a slight problem due to the cult of irrational monobuttonism which probably explains the Dock's inconsistently implemented click-hold=right click convention.
You generally start losing credibility if you think that a few 4-byte registry entries clog up a machine.
Sorry. I should have known that it was the little purple goblins with point hats that make an XP installation grind to a crawl after 6 months' heavy use.
With a taskbar, I can at a glance see which programs are open as well as which WINDOWS in said programs are open,
Running programs in the dock have an arrow under them (subtle but easy enough to see). Click-hold or right-click on one of them and you'll get a menu of open windows.
However, I'd generally conceed the point: I like the Windows XP GUI a lot - most of the issues are "under the hood": security, everybody running as "root" (or having to confirm every action in Vista), registry decay, drive letters, the "shell" filing system not showing up as files, standards (non)compliance, ahh... where to stop...
Come on - every time Slashdot posts an article on a patent troll, some wag suggests taking out a business model patent on patent trolling - its the law!
I can assure you that Canonical (Makers of Ubuntu) And Red Hat won't be bought out,
I think taking on a Linux distro would be too big a can'o'worms for Microsoft - far too many copyright holders to allow a closed-source fork, probably including some GPLv3 components in the mix.
I think even GPLv2 goes far enough to undermine the IP FUD argument if MS actually became the "owner" of an active Linux distro.
I'd look to the more self-contained, FOSS products that have been substantially developed by a single company and are already distributed under dual licenses.
The worrying scenario would be if a highly FOSS-hostile company acquired key FOSS projects with a view to "trolling" downstream users over minutiae and questionable interpretations of GPL, BSD etc. (witness the recent rows over mixing BSD and GPL, or some of the criticisms of GPLv3 - and before you bother to refute those, remember that you apparently don't need a valid argument in order to tie people up in expensive litigation for years, and that actually owning the IP that you're suing over puts you comfortably ahead of the game:-) ).
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Nor do coal, oil, natural gas or uranium magically appear at the power station. The power generation and distribution network doesn't build and maintain itself, and would almost certainly need serious upgrading to support widespread use of electric cars.
Both of my "chains" start from the point where you liberate the energy from a useful energy source (e.g. by burning a fossil fuel) and end with it making your wheels go round. They both omit the extraction, refining and transport of the original source. Ok, coal doesn't need much refining but it has lower energy density than gasoline and doesn't pump along pipes too well :-) Anyway, some power stations run on oil or natural gas anyway. Oh, and there's nothing to stop you building more gasoline pipelines to get the tankers off the road.
Follow the energy:
Gas engine: Chemical Energy (gas) -> heat -> mechanical energy
Electric engine: Chemical energy (coal) -> heat -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy -> (step up transformer) -> (power line) -> (step down transformer) -> (charger) -> chemical energy (in the battery) -> electrical energy -> mechanical energy
Each link in that chain is less than perfectly efficient and wastes energy, so even if the last two or three steps (the actual car engine) are more efficient for electric, there's a lot of catching up to do.
So, while electric cars might make cities more pleasant, unless the upstream source of the energy is either renewable or nuclear* its not going to solve the problems associated with burning fossil fuels (i.e. global warming or - if you don't believe in that - the self-evident fact that we're consuming a finite resource at an accelerating rate).
They may, however make cities cleaner, and once they're in place at least you have the flexibility to change the energy source at will. However, you also need to factor in the cost of manufacturing enough electric cars to get everybody driving one (not just those kind people who buy a new car every 2 years, but all the sensible people who buy 2-year-old cars and run them until they fall apart).
No one gizmo is going to solve our energy & pollution problems unless its part of a coherent system.
(* nuclear is, of course, safer and cleaner than fossil fuels unless (a) it goes wrong, (b) the current sources of easily extractable fissile material run out , or (c) some asshat uses the byproducts for making bombs. Of course there's absolutely no reason to believe that a massive expansion of nuclear power would make any of those more likely, so that's OK then. However, its probably the only route out of our current hole).
Well, the huge advantage in the case of medicine is that it could piggy-back on an existing system and might even save money by removing duplication of effort ( just a few details missing, of course... :-) ). Maybe there are other "special case" solutions for particular sectors.
Quick disclaimer that I know nothing much about the pharmaceutical industry except the self-evident fact that proving a new drug is an expensive and (hopefully) scientifically rigorous process that has to be regulated.
Darn! I should have patented it! Does Slashdot count as prior art? :-)
In the case of the drugs industry (frequently raised as a pro-patent argument) - where you need mandatory regulation anyway to ensure drugs are safe and effective, surely it would be quite straightforward to grant a fixed-term exclusive license as part of the (expensive) approval process? No need to get bogged down with lawyers trying to decide who "owns" the underlying knowledge - you pay to get something licensed in a particular country, you get a N year monopoly.
I think the designer's intention was that you should read the warning before pressing OK. PEBKAC.
Ignoring philosophies about "spatial design" the more pragmatic justification is that the Mac method produces a predictable result whereas the "merge" method leaves you with no clue about what has been added or replaced in the destination - and if something stops the copy half way through (often something non-catastrophic like a file permission) then the destination is in a totally indeterminate state. Merging directories really needs a proper "sync" tool.
TFA sounds like something that should be fixed, though - even so, "don't do that then" is pretty good advice, just copy & then delete the original - hardly rocket science. (I don't suppose the "missing" files simply got moved to the Trash?)
Yeah, its a pity the publicity for Serenity went out of its way to make it look like "From the creator of Buffy... Buffy in spaaace!!!" (UK posters & DVD cover all featured Summer doing her best Buffy/Faith impression). Pity it didn't occur to Universal that quite a lot of people who were turned off by the idea of a teen comedy-drama about a vampire-slaying ex-cheerleader** might actually be open to a space western.
** P.S. Don't shoot me - I liked BTVS (because of the dryly witty dialogue and nothing to do with Alyslon Hannigan, of course).
P.P.S. I guess "From the writer of Alien, Resurrection! No, Wait! Yeah the Alien/human hybrid sucked but the mercenary crew were cool weren't they and the guys in this film are a bit like them..." wasn't snappy enough.
Didn't happen! What actually happened is that a few people were using a beta of Java 1.6 (instead of Apple's released 1.5) - and it turns out that this beta doesn't work with Leopard. This is only a big issue for a few people who require the relatively new Java 1.6 instead of 1.5 and had assumed that it would be part of Leopard. Describing this as "Leopard doesn't work with Java" is exaggerating somewhat.
This hardly compares with MS' past attempts at embrace/extend/extinguish, and vassilation over support in IE, with Java. (What version does IE come with these days?)
Oh ye gods and little fishes! How hard can this be:
Apple does not have a near-monopoly on desktop operating systems and web browsers - if they fail to support Java, Java users and developers have another excuse for not buying Macs. Boo hoo. You are free to use Linux instead. If they promote Mac-only APIs and extensions for Java at the expense of the cross-platform ones then the only takers will be developers who are happy to target a few % of the market.
Microsoft have a near-monopoly on desktop operating systems and web browsers - developers can't afford to ignore Windows, so if MS fail to support Java - or promotes windows-only extensions and APIs at the expense of the cross-platform APIs then that jeapordizes Java's future on all platforms.
The UK, USA, EU and (as far as I know) most other developed countries' legal systems recognise the fact that if a "free market" is to be maintained then companies with monopolies or near-monopolies must be subject to stricter standards than smaller players.
And yes, replacing the MS monopoly with an Apple monopoly would be a serious case of "out of the frying pan into the fire". However, that ain't gonna happen soon. Meanwhile a healthy, high-profile Mac market increases the pressure on "decision makers" to avoid Windows-only technologies, which often indirectly benefits Linux and other minority platforms.
...and the remaining 10% would be more than enough to create major support headaches and bad press for Apple.
But unlike you, a large part of the target OSX market does not know or care what soundcard they have, nor would they get any useful advice from the salesdroid at Kwik-E-PC-mart.
Look, this isn't about whether you could make sensible use of "OS X for PC" - its about the risk/benefit balance for Apple who are currently doing very nicely thank you selling hardware - several percent of the PC hardware market is a nice little earner. The big, huge, stonking risk of "OS X for PC" is that it would attract existing potential Mac buyers - decimating sales of Apple hardware - without attracting enough Windows "switchers" to compensate for that loss. All of the snags I raise could be tackled without changing the laws of Physics, but at a cost and with any failures and consequent bad press jeopardizing the chance of success.
Its not so obvious now that we're used to iMacs and anything with a CRT screen looks archaic, but the original NeXT cubes were serious nerd porn at the time, but they were hideously expensive and only sold to serious nerds with deep pockets. But the argument was still the same "Oh, I've heard so much about how wonderful NeXTStep is - but the cubes are sooo expensive - if only I could buy the software for the PC". They released a PC version (check the wikipedia articles) and - it didn't sell. (by then, the serious nerds had just customised X Window to look a bit like NeXTStep - didn't work like nextstep, but you could run 8 copies of vim on a cool background so who cares?)
Jobs went back to Apple and soon demonstrated that cool hardware designs really do shift computers provided you make them affordable.
(Read's own post... glances at TFA)... Hang on. we're talking Classmate not OLPC - but the principle is the same.
It certainly wasn't to promote MS Windows to the developing world or to lock them into proprietary standards. Plus, I think, a certain amount of thought went into tailoring the Linux distro and user interface for the target market.
Unless they want OS X to "just work" on typical generic PCs built by OEMs using components and peripherals from whatever little shop in Asia had a surplus that month.
First, we're not just talking printers and USB memory sticks here - we're talking Ethernet cards, WiFi cards, sound cards, (or their on-board equivalents), Laptop trackpads, "extended" keyboards, TV tuner cards, webcams, cup warmers, missile launchers etc. Now, someone who buys a Mac is going to buy Mac-compatible stuff to go with it. Someone who buys an aftermarket OS will expect it to work with the components that they have. There are standard protocols for some things like storage (so most flash and hard drives work on PC/Mac/Linux) and power (so your cup warmer stands a good chance - but your PC might not play Java Jive when you stand your cup on it) but other things (e.g. WiFi and all but a few modems) still rely on custom drivers.
Who, last time I looked, refer you to Apple for OS X support (for their small range of EFI-compatible cards that work in Macs).
Hint - when you supply a link it is customary to choose one that supports your argument rather than completely contradicts it: [from the linked article] "3.3, was released in early 1995, by which time it ran not only on Motorola 68000 family processors, but also IBM PC compatible x86, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC"
...and if it did have exacting hardware requirements that meant it didn't run on the average PC then that kinda illustrates my whole point!
Greetings traveller, and welcome to this strange and confusing world we call "Earth".
Whereas MS will absolutely shower them with incentives to ship OS X
No, Black Boxes ran CP/M (I'm that old!) - NeXTStep initially ran on elegantly brutalist cubes of ribbed mangnesium alloy that could in no way be demeaned by the term "box", was later released for x86 PCs, tanked, spawned an open source version, and later evolved into Mac OS X.
...but it was a competitor to Windows NT (...and AFAIK its Linux-based now, which makes it fairly real...)
Whatever law the software publishers think entitles them to impose their EULA and/or whatever local equivalent of the Digital 1984 Copyright Act vis. circumventing a protection measure you are subject to. One or both of these may or may not be a bone fide "law" but that depends where you live and how much justice you can afford.
Business plan:
Bug in that logic: its not only MS that supports your PC - its also the hardware manufacturers. Every component, peripheral and driver on your PC is compatible with - and has been tested with - one or more flavours of MS Windows by the manufacturer. PC component manufacturers have to do that in order to survive in a MS-dominated market. Their customer support lines may be crap but they've still invested serious dosh ensuring that they work with MS Windows. Unfortunately, the OS monoculture often means that they've eschewed platform-independent interface protocols in favor of cheaper "soft hardware" solutions that depend on windows-specific drivers. Even the mfrs that do support OS X may only bother on their higher-end products (e.g. the cheapest printers that don't have PCL or Postscript on-board are usually WIndows only).
Now, if you try and sell a "minority" OS product then - until you reach a critical mass and convince hardware mfrs to invest in supporting you - all of that behind-the-scenes support becomes your problem. Linux can scrape by because its got a lot of free labour backed up by multiple sources of commercial backing - but even that has had a hard time. You also have the problem that the vast mass of users buy a PC with Windows installed and are pretty much incapable of installing an OS.
So, say you get the hack and illegally install OS X. The motherboard, WiFi card, ethernet, bluetooth, video card, sound card, web cam etc. in your PC may or may not work with OS X and if the answer is "not" then tough titty - who ya gonna call? Pay $200 to Apple for a copy of OS X and you're going to expect Apple to support your hardware.
Basically, its going to cost Apple a lot of money to break into the "aftermarket OS" market - something that Jobs has already tried and failed at once (NeXTStep) and which, even if successful, would risk eroding Apple's hardware sales.
Bottom line - the MS Monoculture means that there is no "aftermarket OS" market (see: BeOS, NeXTStep, Netware). Even the Linux movement is having an uphill struggle giving away a desktop operating system (not so much in the internet server market, but what with the whole Internet being built on free *nix-oriented code its bloody amazing that anybody even considers Windows).
...there's also the danger of the guy he doesn't recognize and challenges being an asshole that goes to the same golf club at the CEO. It only takes a few SIPs* to throw a hissy fit after being rightly denied entry and the security staff, unless adequately defended by the management, will stop bothering and/or just hassle anybody that doesn't look like a big shot.
(* Self-Important-Persons)
Well, yeah, the LCD issue is what puts me off iMacs (hey Apple - why not put a DVI-in so that people could buy a new iMac and use their old one as a monitor? The iMac is compact enough to make that non-stupid).
Apart from that, though, Macs still use "standard" RAM, standard CPUs, standard HDDs etc. just maybe not the cheapest standard. OK, the FB-DIMMS in the Pro have beefed-up heatsinks c.f. the standard versions (but there are at least two non-Apple sources). There are tons of instructions on teh interweb for upgrading your Mini's CPU or upgrading your Pro to 8 cores. The "tragedy" is that Microsoft wimped out of EFI support for 32-bit Vista (and/or going 64 bit-only) otherwise we might be seeing more PCI Express cards that would work in the Mac Pro (although AFAIK standard cards will work under WIndows in the Pro...)
Plus, internal expansion (beyond RAM) is getting less important to the typical "general purpose" PC user. The MHz war has eased off for CPUs, a single internal hard drive now provides more than enough storage for day-to-day use and an external USB or NAS hard drive is often a better solution for your video collection. Internal sound cards are mostly good enough for regular use, and if you're an audio pro you may prefer an external box anyway. Even onboard video is usually good enough for anything short of serious gaming or pro visualisation.
The usefulness of upgrading PC CPUs is overrated - I've used built-from-component PCs in the past and it usually turns out that a significant CPU upgrade also entails a new motherboard and RAM. By upgrade time, better hard drives, video etc. are also available & you could really do with a bigger PSU and quite frankly its easier to build a new PC and keep the old one working.
Yes - some people still have a good reason for wanting a pick-n-mix tower PC but they are getting more and more niche.
OK - I have two macs with different versions of Logitech drivers installed: Logitech Control Center 2.1.4: Sure enough - APE present in /Library/Frameworks and incriminating ape_install files inside the Logitech pref pane.
Logitech Control Center 2.0: No sign of APE.
Any idea what APE is actually doing in these - since the 2.0 version appears to work perfectly well?
Quoth Wikipedia:
The "Bachelor of Science" (BSc) is a relatively recent invention by modern universities. "Modern" in this context means "Not already 600 years old when those Romantic trendies re-wrote the dictionary". Certainly the University of Oxford (est. 1069 give or take a few decades) doesn't have any truck with this sort of newspeak and awards BA for everything.
I don't think any of us UKians really appreciate the size of the USA until we've watched it grind by through an airplane window or discovered that, if you fly from London to California, when you cross the N American coast you're not even half way there. Even when you're on the ground everything is three times as far apart as you think it should be (usually when your legs are giving out about halfway to that place that you were sure was about 10 minutes walk away when you saw it from the car).
This is because the Americans can't cope with the frankly ludicrous size of their country so they deliberately build all their cars, houses, trains and teenagers to 150% scale so that the land looks smaller than it really is (especially when seen on TV).
However, the stereotypical perception of USAians of the UK - that every city that anybody has ever heard of (including Edinburgh) is basically a suburb of London is forgivable in the light of the iconic London Tube Map which is only topologically accurate and exaggerates the distance between the central London stations - so once you've found out that it is invariably quicker to walk from Kings Cross to Euston its easy to mistakenly extrapolate that (e.g.) Nottingham must be a 20 minute bus ride.
Nonsense - we're not talking about a website where you are expected to master a unique-to-that-site user interface in order to have a five minute browse, we're talking about the interface to a general purpose computer that has to present a vast and diverse range of information and operations and can quite reasonably demand that the user take two fricking minutes to learn the basics (like the big blue W is the word processor and that you right-click or control-click on an icon to reveal more information). Now, Mac does have a slight problem due to the cult of irrational monobuttonism which probably explains the Dock's inconsistently implemented click-hold=right click convention.
Sorry. I should have known that it was the little purple goblins with point hats that make an XP installation grind to a crawl after 6 months' heavy use.
Running programs in the dock have an arrow under them (subtle but easy enough to see). Click-hold or right-click on one of them and you'll get a menu of open windows.
However, I'd generally conceed the point: I like the Windows XP GUI a lot - most of the issues are "under the hood": security, everybody running as "root" (or having to confirm every action in Vista), registry decay, drive letters, the "shell" filing system not showing up as files, standards (non)compliance, ahh... where to stop...
Come on - every time Slashdot posts an article on a patent troll, some wag suggests taking out a business model patent on patent trolling - its the law!
I think taking on a Linux distro would be too big a can'o'worms for Microsoft - far too many copyright holders to allow a closed-source fork, probably including some GPLv3 components in the mix. I think even GPLv2 goes far enough to undermine the IP FUD argument if MS actually became the "owner" of an active Linux distro.
I'd look to the more self-contained, FOSS products that have been substantially developed by a single company and are already distributed under dual licenses.
The worrying scenario would be if a highly FOSS-hostile company acquired key FOSS projects with a view to "trolling" downstream users over minutiae and questionable interpretations of GPL, BSD etc. (witness the recent rows over mixing BSD and GPL, or some of the criticisms of GPLv3 - and before you bother to refute those, remember that you apparently don't need a valid argument in order to tie people up in expensive litigation for years, and that actually owning the IP that you're suing over puts you comfortably ahead of the game :-) ).