I was a Mac-only guy back in the late 90's. I had a subscription to MacAddict magazine for several years. My first computer was a beige G3/300 running MacOS 8.1. I eventually upgraded that box to 224MB of RAM and added a Voodoo3 3000 card (with the firmware flashed for the Mac).
I hated Windows and everything it stood for. But I started using white-box hardware running Windows when I wanted to make Unreal Tournament maps in 2002.
When I got over that phase (in 2005 or so), I started running Linux. But it was annoying and limiting and didn't play any good games. So I went back to Windows.
Not too long after that, I switched from being a primarily PHP/Java developer to a.Net/C# developer. This was around the 2007 to 2008 time-frame, so a good, solid, paying job was nothing to scoff at just for requiring the use of Microsoft software. As I began to learn more about.Net, I found that it's the "it just works" of software development ecosystems. When Windows 7 came along, I jumped on it. Windows 8.1 was good on a tablet. Windows 10 has been just fine. And through it all,.Net has been great. I've made a comfortable living for most of the last decade doing.Net development.
Sure, I kept buying Macs up until about 2007 or so. I had an iPhone (original model) for a while. But Apple's shit just gets on my nerves. Over and over they promised things that never happened. They produced shiny hardware that never performed. They kept nerfing the software. And when OSX 10.5 came out and replaced the normal IP firewall with an application firewall, I knew it was over. I haven't bothered with a new Mac since. I have actively pushed people away from Apple products. When people ask for help with esoteric Apple issues, I tell them "I don't know anything about Apple products", which, funny enough, is what I used to say about Windows.
So I've been there, and I've done that. Your journey away from Apple is just beginning. Mine has finished, and I have no regrets about it. And Apple should take it to heart if they want to survive.
Having been a user of all three, and a developer on all three, systems for many years, I actually know what I'm talking about.
I would readily recommend Windows workstations and, for some tasks, servers. I would readily recommend Linux for servers. I have written software for both. I would not recommend Macs for anything, as the hardware is unimpressive and not different from anything any other PC manufacturer makes, and the software is stifling and foam-padded so as not to be "unfriendly". Personally, I find that exact quality to be rather unfriendly in and of itself.
So if you need a Fisher-Price computer, and you feel you need to pay double the market rate for it, by all means, buy an Apple. And don't be too sad when your "new" computer is poorly supported, gets cut off from necessary updates, and bogs down under the "burden" of minor software updates over the course of the next two years. Everyone who has ever bought a Mac certainly understands your pain.
I used to be a fanboi like you, and if you don't believe me, check my username.
Actually, I read a story about the current solar minimum just today, and how that has reduced the solar wind pressure. Perhaps that's the cause of the red spot on Jupiter.
Of course, that story's comments had similar "the economy is shrinking the sun" stupidity, and that's what made me think of it just now.
I'm guessing that since it runs Linux, you might be able to find a copy of gcc for the OLPC (it doesn't include it out of the box) and compile OTTD. Alternatively, maybe one of the precompiled binaries on the OTTD site would work. The requisite TTDWin assets are "available", though it would be nice of Chris Sawyer to release them freely to the world now. And hey, you never know when they'll actually finish the 32-bit graphics pack for OTTD. It could be tomorrow (but probably not).
I noticed an intriguing possibility over a year ago when I pointed out to my gamer friends that the Wii was full of drop-in components. They won't release a new console. They'll "speed-bump" the Wii.
Faster CPU? Drop in a 750 FX in place of the 750 CX (or some of those Freescale knockoffs). Better graphics? I'm sure a pin-compatible version of a better GPU can be made, or simply add a driver shim to the firmware and put in a completely different GPU. Needs more on-board flash memory? Add some. None of these are things that require a radical redesign of the entire system to accomodate. In fact, they've already done it once, going from Gamecube to Wii. The worst thing they'd have to deal with is a slight redrawing of the circuit board for a new GPU pinout or making space in the Wii form-factor for a larger heatsink. If they're careful, neither of those will be necessary.
The revised Wii will come in a box with a different color border (blue instead of white, for instance), will be marked with "Wii 2.0", will play all Wii (1.0) and Gamecube games as usual, and will be the new requirement for playing "Wii 2.0" games. Games will have the same color-coded borders as the minimum required Wii version needed to play them. Game devs will have to target the lowest hardware they can get away with using, but other than that, there will be few headaches. You don't need anything more powerful than a Wii 1.0 to play Bejeweled 12, but you'll need a Wii 3.0 to play Resident Evil 7.
Remember that one kilometer isn't some measurement derived from an impartial mathematical measurement of nature -- it's the distance from the North Pole to Paris divided by 1,000.
I've often heard different "hard measurements" that the meter (and multiples) were supposedly based on, but this one actually seems accurate. (Whereas "The distance between the north and south pole divided by 1,000,000" did not.)
It also gives me a real reason why "SI" isn't "IS" (seeing how English has been the "lingua franca" for a while now), and where, exactly, the USA got its hubris (the French were best-buddy allies of the US until 30 years ago or so). Maybe that's why the US gets so pissy about the French. They are the French, but less smelly and fatter.
kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte are stupid sounding words and I refuse to use them for that reason alone.
If they'd just have named them "kbyte", "mbyte", and "gbyte", we'd be just fine with it, right? We could keep our prefixes, too, and tell the SI people to stuff it.
Speaking of which, how did International Standard units get named "SI"? Oh, yeah. Frenchies. Not only do they want to screw up our computer jargon (Our jargon, dammit! You don't mess with a man's jargon!), they also want to rearrange words so they make sense in their backwards-ass middle-ages language. Lingua Franca is so 1100 AD. Welcome to the 21st century, where we speak English and Spanish in most of the world (with shout-outs to Chinese, our up-and-coming buddy) and SI units are actually IS units.
Now let's keep using Kilo as 1024 when talking about bits or bytes. The Frenchies can have their "it means 1000 zomg!" the rest of the time. Let the baby have his bottle.
What's hilarious here is that most, if not all, of the supporters of SI+RetardedBi prefixes are pointing to what the US Government says about the "standard". Things to think about here include (but are not limited to):
1) The US Government is in the pocket of any company willing to pay up, including HDD manufacturers that ponied up a bit-o'-cash to get this "standardized". 2) This is made more hilarious by the fact that the US Government and its citizenry don't use SI units at all. Oh, except for 2-liter soda bottles, which are, surprisingly, about 2 fl. oz. more than a 2-quart bottle would be.
Here's my suggestion: When talking about non-byte-based values (liters, grams, rods, hogsheads, LoC's, AU's, VW Beetles, etc.), understand the prefixes to be multiples of 1000. When talking about byte-based values (bits, bytes, words, nibbles, long words, etc.), understand that the context means multiples of 1024. The human brain is a wonderful thing, and languages are too. Both are very complex and context-sensitive. Use your brain to understand context. It's not that hard.
If you're in the USA (and, by the description of your local lawyers, you're probably not), file a complaint with the EEOC and the state attorney general's office. They don't care how little your wife made as a salary, they're the government. They don't have to care.
Document everything. The employer in this situation wants nothing on paper. Get it all on paper.
If you can document a pattern of abuse, the payout can be huge. So huge, in fact, that you may not need to work ever again. I don't normally condone litigation, but when something so obviously unjust is perpetrated, I think it's warranted.
I hate having to explain it, but the joke wasn't finished. It still needed the requisite bitching about missing poll options. Just because they're missing doesn't mean that that will suffice for the bitching.
"I won't lie to you, but I also won't lie for you. I will not violate company policy. I will not violate the law. And, no, I will not resign."
The manger, and possibly the entire company, is up the proverbial creek if your wife is let go for that statement and the stand it represents. Plus, you'd have grounds for a lawsuit. It's called "wrongful termination" in most places, and there are several variants of it. In this case, it would probably hinge on either the policy violation (employer self-contradiction) or the violation of law (crime).
Actually, for light-rail systems, this would be great.
- 40kph is enough. That's approximately 25mph, which is just right for light-rail.
- 15km is not quite enough. Many light-rail systems have stops that are farther apart than that. Double that number and it's golden. (15km = approx. 9 mi. 18 mi. should be enough for 90% of light-rail systems.)
Recharging at each stop is not unfeasible if the wait is only 60 seconds.
Now for the real problems: - What does it cost? - What does it cost to maintain?
If either of those numbers is large, it won't work in the US until mass transit catches on with the masses it's named after. Gasoline will have to be $10/gallon before that will happen.
This is why mastering is done with 24-, 32-, and 48-bit samples now. The CD ("red book") audio standard was decided upon largely because of the limitations of VHS tape and D/A converters of the time. Now that we're rid of it, we can move on and use better audio technology now. Every decent PC since 2000 or so has had 48kHz/24-bit audio capabilities, and most have had 96-192kHz/32-48-bit audio for years now. The extensible PCM formats (WAVE and AIFF/AIFC) are quite capable of handling these sample rates and sizes. The CD needs to die, and the DVD needs to take its place. The encoding should be some sort of RedBook++ format with no allowance for DRM, but every allowance for various sample rates, sizes, channel counts.
Note to record company execs: I'd love to be able to buy music on a DVD in this type of format and get 96kHz, 32-bit, 6-channel sound. DRM is a deal-breaker. So is bad mastering.
The skin wasn't zinc, and it wasn't zinc that caused it to burn.
The skin was cotton, and they painted it with aluminum/iron-oxide paint. Basically, liquid thermite. Poof!
From the Wikipedia entry: The duralumin frame was covered by cotton varnished with iron oxide and cellulose acetate butyrate impregnated with aluminium powder. The aluminum was added to reflect both ultraviolet, which damaged the fabric, and infrared light, which caused heating of the gas.
The explosion happened when it was trying to land during an electric storm. The cotton panels were held to the frame with rope cords which were not painted with the same metal-saturated varnish as the panels themselves. When they dropped the grounding cable during the landing approach, all built-up static from the panels jumped to the frame, sparking the "thermite" varnish. The rest is history.
And you're right about how the use of hydrogen likely saved lives.
That would mean 100,000 Mb/s or 100 Gb/s of potential bandwidth usage if every customer fully saturated his link. The only common protocol that does that is BitTorrent. When you saturate your connection with BitTorrent you can and do take bandwidth away from other customers.
You're forgetting that if all 10,000 users used BitTorrent, there's a high likelihood that a good portion of that 100Gb/s would be internal to the ISP's network and would never breach the internet gateway. In fact, BitTorrent will favor connections like that, since they more capably produce the desired result (shared file segments, faster, with less latency introduced into other connections).
Bottom line: BitTorrent is a tool to achieve a result, and it does its own QoS shaping. ISP's like Comcast want to do different QoS shaping and break BitTorrent in the process. I say to hell with the jackass ISP. They're supposed to be selling a functioning service, and if that means throttling, fine. But if that means flat out banning a particular tool, they can meet with my lawyer.
A nearly non-existent minority actually thought that MacOS 9 was better than Mac OS X at first. This minority survived until the release of Mac OS X 10.2.
A large majority of MacOS 9 users migrating to Mac OS X thought that, while pretty, the Aqua UI was slow, bloated, and annoyingly shiny. They also gave most of the organizational features of the Finder a complete fail as well. Gone were spring-loaded folders, pop-up-tray tabs on the desktop, hierarchic menus, the app-switcher menu, and a host of other things that made MacOS 9 seem like a good OS. These would've made Mac OS X a knockout hit. (It's already a good OS, and if OS9 could be made to seem like one, just think what OSX could be with those features!) But Apple cut them out in favor of the abomination we all know as The Dock. It moves, it magnifies, it even slides off the screen if you have too much stuff. It's an absolute UI nightmare. That's the real gripe that made people complain that "OS9 is better than OSX". It had nothing to do with the "unix-like underpinnings" or "preemptive multitasking" or any of the other functional stuff. The Mac, to many people, has always been about the "better UI". Mac OS X is just now catching up to MacOS 9 in that regard.
Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
I'm fairly certain that if I want more bandwidth than what I already have (which BT can soak up to it's heart's content, for all I care), I have to call up my ISP and order a faster connection. I can't just magically take bandwidth from my neighbors.
Then again, I have DSL. But I thought they had solved the everyone-on-the-same-subnet-sharing-the-same-6-megabits issue with cable back in, say, 2001 or so. So exactly how is it possible to sustain your connection at burst speeds for long periods of time? And where do I sign up?
What I'm surprised at is the total lack of other companies advertising, "screw Apple and AT&T, come to ${GSMCarrier} with an iPhone and we'll unlock it and support it if you sign a contract with us." Sure, T-mobile might not do it, but the smaller carriers would probably make a good buck from it.
Yes, they will, because the software base for Mac OS is there (to some extent). If Apple announced Mac OS for commodity PCs, every software company would produce a version of their software within months. People use applications, not operating systems, which is why Linux is a non-starter. You can't get shrink-wrapped Linux software.
You can't get much shrink-wrapped Mac OS software either, except at the Apple store and that one half-aisle at the few remaining CompUSA stores. If Apple announced Mac OS for commodity PC's, every software company would shrug and write Apple off as dead. And rightly so.
Exactly how can Apple "lose" money? Are they selling the software below the cost of the CD-ROM it was supplied on?
Developers don't work for free. The Mac OS is a feature packed in with Macintosh hardware. Apple would lose money because sales of Macs weren't (and still aren't) high enough to justify dropping the hardware division, meanwhile, the hardware division was struggling against the clones. That means that every clone sale was a missed Apple sale. And it would be today, too.
The part where Apple sells 10x more copies of Mac OS to the general market, and it's 100% profit! Sheesh, do you think the 10s of billions of dollars Microsoft has socked away fell from a tree? Somehow they managed to make a small profit, yet they don't sell their own PCs.
Apple wouldn't sell 10x more copies of Mac OS (see my first argument above). It wouldn't be 100% profit (see my second argument above). And Microsoft's billions came from locking OEM's into only selling Windows then ratcheting up the price to a hair below the breaking point, and repeating that for every OEM they could find. That's slowly drying up, too. Microsoft is soon to be in a world of hurt. I give them 10 years of relevance, and a further 10 years of death throes. Apple, OTOH, has a longer future ahead of it, assuming they continue to keep up the good work they've been doing for the last 10 years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
This right here.
Look at my username. LOOK AT IT.
I was a Mac-only guy back in the late 90's. I had a subscription to MacAddict magazine for several years. My first computer was a beige G3/300 running MacOS 8.1. I eventually upgraded that box to 224MB of RAM and added a Voodoo3 3000 card (with the firmware flashed for the Mac).
I hated Windows and everything it stood for. But I started using white-box hardware running Windows when I wanted to make Unreal Tournament maps in 2002.
When I got over that phase (in 2005 or so), I started running Linux. But it was annoying and limiting and didn't play any good games. So I went back to Windows.
Not too long after that, I switched from being a primarily PHP/Java developer to a .Net/C# developer. This was around the 2007 to 2008 time-frame, so a good, solid, paying job was nothing to scoff at just for requiring the use of Microsoft software. As I began to learn more about .Net, I found that it's the "it just works" of software development ecosystems. When Windows 7 came along, I jumped on it. Windows 8.1 was good on a tablet. Windows 10 has been just fine. And through it all, .Net has been great. I've made a comfortable living for most of the last decade doing .Net development.
Sure, I kept buying Macs up until about 2007 or so. I had an iPhone (original model) for a while. But Apple's shit just gets on my nerves. Over and over they promised things that never happened. They produced shiny hardware that never performed. They kept nerfing the software. And when OSX 10.5 came out and replaced the normal IP firewall with an application firewall, I knew it was over. I haven't bothered with a new Mac since. I have actively pushed people away from Apple products. When people ask for help with esoteric Apple issues, I tell them "I don't know anything about Apple products", which, funny enough, is what I used to say about Windows.
So I've been there, and I've done that. Your journey away from Apple is just beginning. Mine has finished, and I have no regrets about it. And Apple should take it to heart if they want to survive.
Windows is far superior to Mac OS X. So is Linux.
Having been a user of all three, and a developer on all three, systems for many years, I actually know what I'm talking about.
I would readily recommend Windows workstations and, for some tasks, servers. I would readily recommend Linux for servers. I have written software for both. I would not recommend Macs for anything, as the hardware is unimpressive and not different from anything any other PC manufacturer makes, and the software is stifling and foam-padded so as not to be "unfriendly". Personally, I find that exact quality to be rather unfriendly in and of itself.
So if you need a Fisher-Price computer, and you feel you need to pay double the market rate for it, by all means, buy an Apple. And don't be too sad when your "new" computer is poorly supported, gets cut off from necessary updates, and bogs down under the "burden" of minor software updates over the course of the next two years. Everyone who has ever bought a Mac certainly understands your pain.
I used to be a fanboi like you, and if you don't believe me, check my username.
Actually, I read a story about the current solar minimum just today, and how that has reduced the solar wind pressure. Perhaps that's the cause of the red spot on Jupiter.
Of course, that story's comments had similar "the economy is shrinking the sun" stupidity, and that's what made me think of it just now.
Not if they hand you the decoder and you run it, since that's what they expect you to do anyway.
Circumvention is when you bypass their protection by making your own decrypter. Playback is when you use their decrypter for the exact same purpose.
Only circumvention is named in the DMCA.
Watch out, he might start using a Heisenberg Compensator. Then you're screwed.
Of course, if he uses one, he'll have to build it first, and if he can build one, he'll have earned the card back anyway.
I'm guessing that since it runs Linux, you might be able to find a copy of gcc for the OLPC (it doesn't include it out of the box) and compile OTTD. Alternatively, maybe one of the precompiled binaries on the OTTD site would work. The requisite TTDWin assets are "available", though it would be nice of Chris Sawyer to release them freely to the world now. And hey, you never know when they'll actually finish the 32-bit graphics pack for OTTD. It could be tomorrow (but probably not).
I noticed an intriguing possibility over a year ago when I pointed out to my gamer friends that the Wii was full of drop-in components. They won't release a new console. They'll "speed-bump" the Wii.
Faster CPU? Drop in a 750 FX in place of the 750 CX (or some of those Freescale knockoffs). Better graphics? I'm sure a pin-compatible version of a better GPU can be made, or simply add a driver shim to the firmware and put in a completely different GPU. Needs more on-board flash memory? Add some. None of these are things that require a radical redesign of the entire system to accomodate. In fact, they've already done it once, going from Gamecube to Wii. The worst thing they'd have to deal with is a slight redrawing of the circuit board for a new GPU pinout or making space in the Wii form-factor for a larger heatsink. If they're careful, neither of those will be necessary.
The revised Wii will come in a box with a different color border (blue instead of white, for instance), will be marked with "Wii 2.0", will play all Wii (1.0) and Gamecube games as usual, and will be the new requirement for playing "Wii 2.0" games. Games will have the same color-coded borders as the minimum required Wii version needed to play them. Game devs will have to target the lowest hardware they can get away with using, but other than that, there will be few headaches. You don't need anything more powerful than a Wii 1.0 to play Bejeweled 12, but you'll need a Wii 3.0 to play Resident Evil 7.
Hey, it could happen.
Remember that one kilometer isn't some measurement derived from an impartial mathematical measurement of nature -- it's the distance from the North Pole to Paris divided by 1,000.
I've often heard different "hard measurements" that the meter (and multiples) were supposedly based on, but this one actually seems accurate. (Whereas "The distance between the north and south pole divided by 1,000,000" did not.)
It also gives me a real reason why "SI" isn't "IS" (seeing how English has been the "lingua franca" for a while now), and where, exactly, the USA got its hubris (the French were best-buddy allies of the US until 30 years ago or so). Maybe that's why the US gets so pissy about the French. They are the French, but less smelly and fatter.
kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte are stupid sounding words and I refuse to use them for that reason alone.
If they'd just have named them "kbyte", "mbyte", and "gbyte", we'd be just fine with it, right? We could keep our prefixes, too, and tell the SI people to stuff it.
Speaking of which, how did International Standard units get named "SI"? Oh, yeah. Frenchies. Not only do they want to screw up our computer jargon (Our jargon, dammit! You don't mess with a man's jargon!), they also want to rearrange words so they make sense in their backwards-ass middle-ages language. Lingua Franca is so 1100 AD. Welcome to the 21st century, where we speak English and Spanish in most of the world (with shout-outs to Chinese, our up-and-coming buddy) and SI units are actually IS units.
Now let's keep using Kilo as 1024 when talking about bits or bytes. The Frenchies can have their "it means 1000 zomg!" the rest of the time. Let the baby have his bottle.
What's hilarious here is that most, if not all, of the supporters of SI+RetardedBi prefixes are pointing to what the US Government says about the "standard". Things to think about here include (but are not limited to):
1) The US Government is in the pocket of any company willing to pay up, including HDD manufacturers that ponied up a bit-o'-cash to get this "standardized".
2) This is made more hilarious by the fact that the US Government and its citizenry don't use SI units at all. Oh, except for 2-liter soda bottles, which are, surprisingly, about 2 fl. oz. more than a 2-quart bottle would be.
Here's my suggestion: When talking about non-byte-based values (liters, grams, rods, hogsheads, LoC's, AU's, VW Beetles, etc.), understand the prefixes to be multiples of 1000. When talking about byte-based values (bits, bytes, words, nibbles, long words, etc.), understand that the context means multiples of 1024. The human brain is a wonderful thing, and languages are too. Both are very complex and context-sensitive. Use your brain to understand context. It's not that hard.
If you're in the USA (and, by the description of your local lawyers, you're probably not), file a complaint with the EEOC and the state attorney general's office. They don't care how little your wife made as a salary, they're the government. They don't have to care.
Politicians cause fear.
Welcome to the war on terror, bitches.
Document everything. The employer in this situation wants nothing on paper. Get it all on paper.
If you can document a pattern of abuse, the payout can be huge. So huge, in fact, that you may not need to work ever again. I don't normally condone litigation, but when something so obviously unjust is perpetrated, I think it's warranted.
I hate having to explain it, but the joke wasn't finished. It still needed the requisite bitching about missing poll options. Just because they're missing doesn't mean that that will suffice for the bitching.
For your wife, the correct answer is:
"I won't lie to you, but I also won't lie for you. I will not violate company policy. I will not violate the law. And, no, I will not resign."
The manger, and possibly the entire company, is up the proverbial creek if your wife is let go for that statement and the stand it represents. Plus, you'd have grounds for a lawsuit. It's called "wrongful termination" in most places, and there are several variants of it. In this case, it would probably hinge on either the policy violation (employer self-contradiction) or the violation of law (crime).
It's not a poll without...
Missing option: Nice, round, perfect-handful boobs.
Actually, for light-rail systems, this would be great.
- 40kph is enough. That's approximately 25mph, which is just right for light-rail.
- 15km is not quite enough. Many light-rail systems have stops that are farther apart than that. Double that number and it's golden. (15km = approx. 9 mi. 18 mi. should be enough for 90% of light-rail systems.)
Recharging at each stop is not unfeasible if the wait is only 60 seconds.
Now for the real problems:
- What does it cost?
- What does it cost to maintain?
If either of those numbers is large, it won't work in the US until mass transit catches on with the masses it's named after. Gasoline will have to be $10/gallon before that will happen.
This is why mastering is done with 24-, 32-, and 48-bit samples now. The CD ("red book") audio standard was decided upon largely because of the limitations of VHS tape and D/A converters of the time. Now that we're rid of it, we can move on and use better audio technology now. Every decent PC since 2000 or so has had 48kHz/24-bit audio capabilities, and most have had 96-192kHz/32-48-bit audio for years now. The extensible PCM formats (WAVE and AIFF/AIFC) are quite capable of handling these sample rates and sizes. The CD needs to die, and the DVD needs to take its place. The encoding should be some sort of RedBook++ format with no allowance for DRM, but every allowance for various sample rates, sizes, channel counts.
Note to record company execs: I'd love to be able to buy music on a DVD in this type of format and get 96kHz, 32-bit, 6-channel sound. DRM is a deal-breaker. So is bad mastering.
The skin wasn't zinc, and it wasn't zinc that caused it to burn.
The skin was cotton, and they painted it with aluminum/iron-oxide paint. Basically, liquid thermite. Poof!
From the Wikipedia entry:
The duralumin frame was covered by cotton varnished with iron oxide and cellulose acetate butyrate impregnated with aluminium powder. The aluminum was added to reflect both ultraviolet, which damaged the fabric, and infrared light, which caused heating of the gas.
The explosion happened when it was trying to land during an electric storm. The cotton panels were held to the frame with rope cords which were not painted with the same metal-saturated varnish as the panels themselves. When they dropped the grounding cable during the landing approach, all built-up static from the panels jumped to the frame, sparking the "thermite" varnish. The rest is history.
And you're right about how the use of hydrogen likely saved lives.
Bond: What you say!!
That would mean 100,000 Mb/s or 100 Gb/s of potential bandwidth usage if every customer fully saturated his link. The only common protocol that does that is BitTorrent. When you saturate your connection with BitTorrent you can and do take bandwidth away from other customers.
You're forgetting that if all 10,000 users used BitTorrent, there's a high likelihood that a good portion of that 100Gb/s would be internal to the ISP's network and would never breach the internet gateway. In fact, BitTorrent will favor connections like that, since they more capably produce the desired result (shared file segments, faster, with less latency introduced into other connections).
Bottom line: BitTorrent is a tool to achieve a result, and it does its own QoS shaping. ISP's like Comcast want to do different QoS shaping and break BitTorrent in the process. I say to hell with the jackass ISP. They're supposed to be selling a functioning service, and if that means throttling, fine. But if that means flat out banning a particular tool, they can meet with my lawyer.
A nearly non-existent minority actually thought that MacOS 9 was better than Mac OS X at first. This minority survived until the release of Mac OS X 10.2.
A large majority of MacOS 9 users migrating to Mac OS X thought that, while pretty, the Aqua UI was slow, bloated, and annoyingly shiny. They also gave most of the organizational features of the Finder a complete fail as well. Gone were spring-loaded folders, pop-up-tray tabs on the desktop, hierarchic menus, the app-switcher menu, and a host of other things that made MacOS 9 seem like a good OS. These would've made Mac OS X a knockout hit. (It's already a good OS, and if OS9 could be made to seem like one, just think what OSX could be with those features!) But Apple cut them out in favor of the abomination we all know as The Dock. It moves, it magnifies, it even slides off the screen if you have too much stuff. It's an absolute UI nightmare. That's the real gripe that made people complain that "OS9 is better than OSX". It had nothing to do with the "unix-like underpinnings" or "preemptive multitasking" or any of the other functional stuff. The Mac, to many people, has always been about the "better UI". Mac OS X is just now catching up to MacOS 9 in that regard.
Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
I'm fairly certain that if I want more bandwidth than what I already have (which BT can soak up to it's heart's content, for all I care), I have to call up my ISP and order a faster connection. I can't just magically take bandwidth from my neighbors.
Then again, I have DSL. But I thought they had solved the everyone-on-the-same-subnet-sharing-the-same-6-megabits issue with cable back in, say, 2001 or so. So exactly how is it possible to sustain your connection at burst speeds for long periods of time? And where do I sign up?
What I'm surprised at is the total lack of other companies advertising, "screw Apple and AT&T, come to ${GSMCarrier} with an iPhone and we'll unlock it and support it if you sign a contract with us." Sure, T-mobile might not do it, but the smaller carriers would probably make a good buck from it.
Yes, they will, because the software base for Mac OS is there (to some extent). If Apple announced Mac OS for commodity PCs, every software company would produce a version of their software within months. People use applications, not operating systems, which is why Linux is a non-starter. You can't get shrink-wrapped Linux software.
You can't get much shrink-wrapped Mac OS software either, except at the Apple store and that one half-aisle at the few remaining CompUSA stores. If Apple announced Mac OS for commodity PC's, every software company would shrug and write Apple off as dead. And rightly so.
Exactly how can Apple "lose" money? Are they selling the software below the cost of the CD-ROM it was supplied on?
Developers don't work for free. The Mac OS is a feature packed in with Macintosh hardware. Apple would lose money because sales of Macs weren't (and still aren't) high enough to justify dropping the hardware division, meanwhile, the hardware division was struggling against the clones. That means that every clone sale was a missed Apple sale. And it would be today, too.
The part where Apple sells 10x more copies of Mac OS to the general market, and it's 100% profit! Sheesh, do you think the 10s of billions of dollars Microsoft has socked away fell from a tree? Somehow they managed to make a small profit, yet they don't sell their own PCs.
Apple wouldn't sell 10x more copies of Mac OS (see my first argument above). It wouldn't be 100% profit (see my second argument above). And Microsoft's billions came from locking OEM's into only selling Windows then ratcheting up the price to a hair below the breaking point, and repeating that for every OEM they could find. That's slowly drying up, too. Microsoft is soon to be in a world of hurt. I give them 10 years of relevance, and a further 10 years of death throes. Apple, OTOH, has a longer future ahead of it, assuming they continue to keep up the good work they've been doing for the last 10 years or so.