I'm glad the supreme court is finally taking the correct steps to defend the individual's liberties in this country
The court did not "take any steps" to that effect. It simply denied the appeal. That means it prefers not to render an opinion on either side. The sentiment you are expressing is more applicable to the lower court that made the ruling.
Hopefully this will bring an end to frivilous lawsuits against people that are mere pawns in the scheme of warez and piracy.
Don't count on it. If anything this will probably increase them. Now that the RIAA's hopes of outlawing P2P software seem to be vanishing, mass lawsuits are the only legal mechanism they currently have to continue their crusade.
Actually, I dont think people realise that even if it is ported, that it wouldn't run official MAC OS X G5 programs, so until stuff was ported, it would be useless, and would have less compatibility anyway.
Yeah I do realize that but it's just one more reason why it won't be ported.
Ah but what if I sell it as an ebook under a different title and I don't make the text available to anyone accept purchasers who probably won't know better?
The article claims that the LOC stored as image data would take up 1 TB.
That's wildly underestimated IMO. The LOC has 26 million books. If we conservatively assume that they each have at least 100 pages, that is 2.6 billion images. That equals 0.03 kb per image. That's some REAL good compression for an image as large as a full page of text.
In a traditional library it's not really easy to...
1. walk in and pick up a book
2. strike the author's name from it and replace it with your own
3. replace the copyright notice with your own
4. Make one thousand perfect copies
5. Offer it for sale, start taking orders, and PROFIT!
they can copy and paste the text into a translator. So yes, it would benefit society as a whole.
Subjecting the world to the Babelfish translator would actually detract from knowledge considering the horrible linguistic bastardizations that people would then take as fact.
If it were stored as text (scanned in with OCR), then you might be able to assume 5k or so per page. Sometimes it's lower than that but it depends.
Then multiply that by the number of pages in a book. I don't know what the average is but just taking 200 pages as a WAG that would mean 1 MB per book. 26 million books would then be 26 million MB == 26 TB.
If on the other hand the pages were stored as images, I think you can safely assume a 10-20x increase. If each page was say a 100kb JPEG, then that would be over 500 TB using the 200 page average for a book.
It's like saying sony vaio's line will send sony into the red, because they cost more than cheap pc's, but can run windows like any other PC.
It's not anything like saying that. Sony has thousands of products in very broad categories. If they stop selling Vaios, they aren't going to go under. They have plenty of other stuff to fall back on. Apple on the other hand is dependent on Mac hardware sales for almost all its operating revenue. If they lose that, they would have to create an entirely new business to stay alive. Basically, they wouldn't be the same Apple they are today.
You are right that some people might still choose Mac hardware for its superiority. But I suspect that the number would be minor. I am a Mac user and I know many others that are as well. Most of us don't care what processor our computers run on. The important thing is what we can get done with it. OS X lets us work more efficiently and effectively than Windows. If I could do that for $1,000 less I probably would. Think about it, with all the praise OS X has gotten and for all its acknowledged superiority over Windows, why is Apple's market share still very minimal. The answer is price. It is still the paramount factor for a lot of people.
But remember that it's not just cranking out copies if Apple ports OS X to x86. They would have an enormous new support load to deal with. They would probably have to do significant restructuring and hire different hardware people, etc.
And besides it doesn't really matter what the margin would end up being. They would be taking a huge risk and betting the future of the company on a vague uncertainty. It's just dumb, shareholders would scream bloody murder, and it's just not going to happen.
Well Apple has about a 30% margin on their hardware. Even if they could do a lot better with software, let's say they could double it to 60%, that would still mean they would have to sell 7 million units a quarter. There's no guarantee OS X would see that kind of migration.
Are you insane? M$ doesn't even sell 14 million copies of Windows per quarter. Are you seriously implying that you think just by entering the x86 space OS X will completely surpass Windows immediately?
I suppose I shouldn't expect any more intelligence from an AC.
Apple is already turning into a media company b/c of iPod.
What nonsense. The iPod has formed a nice accessory to their core business. That is all. They are by no means a "media company."
Mac sales are not all that great.
You keep sinking further. Last quarter Apple reported total Mac sales of 876,000 units, a year over year increase of 105,000 units. In addition, Mac sales comprise ~90% of Apple's total revenue. Taking any step to cut down their core business would be insanely stupid.
Selling Mac OS to PC owners would be a CASH COW if they kept the price reasonable.
It would not be nearly enough to equal Macintosh hardware sales. Apple grosses about 1.8 billion per quarter selling hardware. To equate that with just selling OS X at $129, they would need to sell 14 million units a quarter. Even if a lot of people would switch, that is an unrealistic expectation.
I suspect the actual reason this hasn;t alredy happened is some hidden clause in an agreemnt with Microsoft.
Not trying to whore here but if my "google for it" suggestion was too vague for some, here are some articles on why porting OS X would be a very bad idea from Apple's perspective.
I can't count the number of times that I've heard this asked. The obvious answer is that yes a lot of people would switch if OS X was ported to x86. But I also can't count the number of times the people who keep asking this question have been told how irrelevant it is to do so. OS X is not going to be ported, for the simple reason that if it were Apple would go under and then OS X would no longer exist.
If you need to know why that is, just google for "if os x were ported" and you'll find the same explanation on thousands of pages. I don't feel like rehashing it here.
You are an Apple employee and you "just switched"?????
That's it. Upon order of the field of distorting forces of reality, you are hereby commanded to turn yourself in to ye Supreme Ruler of the Universe and Master of All to receive your severance package.
I agree with this. I like the ability to have hundreds of views on one story instantly accessible. It seems to me that the "stories from outside their specialty" peeve is a small one. Usually you can tell relatively quickly from glancing at a site what kind of stories it usually does. And Google usually doesn't link to sites that are too far out there with tabloid style news.
I've gotten so sick of the mainstream media's useless regurgitation of political bias that I'll take anything over it. It's getting to the point where all the democrats watch CBS and all the Republicans watch Fox and because that's all they hear it just reinforces everyone's notion that all their own views are logical and correct and everyone else's are wrong. We need more news services that use a model like Google News.
Slashdot Mirror
there haven't been any significant advancements in technology for about 40 years.
/.
That is quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever read on
I'm glad the supreme court is finally taking the correct steps to defend the individual's liberties in this country
The court did not "take any steps" to that effect. It simply denied the appeal. That means it prefers not to render an opinion on either side. The sentiment you are expressing is more applicable to the lower court that made the ruling.
Hopefully this will bring an end to frivilous lawsuits against people that are mere pawns in the scheme of warez and piracy.
Don't count on it. If anything this will probably increase them. Now that the RIAA's hopes of outlawing P2P software seem to be vanishing, mass lawsuits are the only legal mechanism they currently have to continue their crusade.
I have no clue what Blue and Red is
That's because your UID is too low to understand it.
Actually, I dont think people realise that even if it is ported, that it wouldn't run official MAC OS X G5 programs, so until stuff was ported, it would be useless, and would have less compatibility anyway.
Yeah I do realize that but it's just one more reason why it won't be ported.
Will it see dead people?
Ah but what if I only accept payment through Paypal registered as an alias from a public terminal and then I dump the money to a maildrop, and then...
Ok I'll stop now. I do see your point. It might work, but I think the "visionary" skimped on the details a little bit.
Ah but what if I sell it as an ebook under a different title and I don't make the text available to anyone accept purchasers who probably won't know better?
The article claims that the LOC stored as image data would take up 1 TB.
That's wildly underestimated IMO. The LOC has 26 million books. If we conservatively assume that they each have at least 100 pages, that is 2.6 billion images. That equals 0.03 kb per image. That's some REAL good compression for an image as large as a full page of text.
In a traditional library it's not really easy to...
...all within 30 minutes.
1. walk in and pick up a book
2. strike the author's name from it and replace it with your own
3. replace the copyright notice with your own
4. Make one thousand perfect copies
5. Offer it for sale, start taking orders, and PROFIT!
I could easily do that on the internet.
they can copy and paste the text into a translator.
So yes, it would benefit society as a whole.
Subjecting the world to the Babelfish translator would actually detract from knowledge considering the horrible linguistic bastardizations that people would then take as fact.
If it were stored as text (scanned in with OCR), then you might be able to assume 5k or so per page. Sometimes it's lower than that but it depends.
Then multiply that by the number of pages in a book. I don't know what the average is but just taking 200 pages as a WAG that would mean 1 MB per book. 26 million books would then be 26 million MB == 26 TB.
If on the other hand the pages were stored as images, I think you can safely assume a 10-20x increase. If each page was say a 100kb JPEG, then that would be over 500 TB using the 200 page average for a book.
Yes, in fact the vast majority of it is copyrighted.
I can't see how this could be done with any kind of public access to most of the content.
It's like saying sony vaio's line will send sony into the red, because they cost more than cheap pc's, but can run windows like any other PC.
It's not anything like saying that. Sony has thousands of products in very broad categories. If they stop selling Vaios, they aren't going to go under. They have plenty of other stuff to fall back on. Apple on the other hand is dependent on Mac hardware sales for almost all its operating revenue. If they lose that, they would have to create an entirely new business to stay alive. Basically, they wouldn't be the same Apple they are today.
You are right that some people might still choose Mac hardware for its superiority. But I suspect that the number would be minor. I am a Mac user and I know many others that are as well. Most of us don't care what processor our computers run on. The important thing is what we can get done with it. OS X lets us work more efficiently and effectively than Windows. If I could do that for $1,000 less I probably would. Think about it, with all the praise OS X has gotten and for all its acknowledged superiority over Windows, why is Apple's market share still very minimal. The answer is price. It is still the paramount factor for a lot of people.
But remember that it's not just cranking out copies if Apple ports OS X to x86. They would have an enormous new support load to deal with. They would probably have to do significant restructuring and hire different hardware people, etc.
And besides it doesn't really matter what the margin would end up being. They would be taking a huge risk and betting the future of the company on a vague uncertainty. It's just dumb, shareholders would scream bloody murder, and it's just not going to happen.
Well Apple has about a 30% margin on their hardware. Even if they could do a lot better with software, let's say they could double it to 60%, that would still mean they would have to sell 7 million units a quarter. There's no guarantee OS X would see that kind of migration.
Yes, it is.
Are you insane? M$ doesn't even sell 14 million copies of Windows per quarter. Are you seriously implying that you think just by entering the x86 space OS X will completely surpass Windows immediately?
The problem with that argument is it is WRONG.
I suppose I shouldn't expect any more intelligence from an AC.
Apple is already turning into a media company b/c of iPod.
What nonsense. The iPod has formed a nice accessory to their core business. That is all. They are by no means a "media company."
Mac sales are not all that great.
You keep sinking further. Last quarter Apple reported total Mac sales of 876,000 units, a year over year increase of 105,000 units. In addition, Mac sales comprise ~90% of Apple's total revenue. Taking any step to cut down their core business would be insanely stupid.
Selling Mac OS to PC owners would be a CASH COW if they kept the price reasonable.
It would not be nearly enough to equal Macintosh hardware sales. Apple grosses about 1.8 billion per quarter selling hardware. To equate that with just selling OS X at $129, they would need to sell 14 million units a quarter. Even if a lot of people would switch, that is an unrealistic expectation.
I suspect the actual reason this hasn;t alredy happened is some hidden clause in an agreemnt with Microsoft.
Ok, I don't even think I need to touch this.
Next time, try bringing more facts to the table.
Not trying to whore here but if my "google for it" suggestion was too vague for some, here are some articles on why porting OS X would be a very bad idea from Apple's perspective.
No Intel On OS X Part I: Economics 101
Porting Mac OS X to Intel
I can't count the number of times that I've heard this asked. The obvious answer is that yes a lot of people would switch if OS X was ported to x86. But I also can't count the number of times the people who keep asking this question have been told how irrelevant it is to do so. OS X is not going to be ported, for the simple reason that if it were Apple would go under and then OS X would no longer exist.
If you need to know why that is, just google for "if os x were ported" and you'll find the same explanation on thousands of pages. I don't feel like rehashing it here.
A recent switcher... :)
disclaimer: apple employee
You are an Apple employee and you "just switched"?????
That's it. Upon order of the field of distorting forces of reality, you are hereby commanded to turn yourself in to ye Supreme Ruler of the Universe and Master of All to receive your severance package.
Apple never said the G5 was as fast as the Opteron. They did say it was comparable to the Xeon, which it is in many cases.
I mean, just look at the type of content they are trying to pass off as "news."
Headline slightly misleading
On Slashdot? Surely there must be some mistake.
I agree with this. I like the ability to have hundreds of views on one story instantly accessible. It seems to me that the "stories from outside their specialty" peeve is a small one. Usually you can tell relatively quickly from glancing at a site what kind of stories it usually does. And Google usually doesn't link to sites that are too far out there with tabloid style news.
I've gotten so sick of the mainstream media's useless regurgitation of political bias that I'll take anything over it. It's getting to the point where all the democrats watch CBS and all the Republicans watch Fox and because that's all they hear it just reinforces everyone's notion that all their own views are logical and correct and everyone else's are wrong. We need more news services that use a model like Google News.
Can it get you laid?