are you saying apple is in some way better than microsoft? apple is even more restrictive than microsoft. they don't just push a proprietary OS, but hardware too. not to mention they are now one of the biggest users of DRM in the market today.
i would argue microsoft is much better at listening to their customers, which is why they own 98% of this market. they produced their software for the hardware people chose. choice is the key, not just feeding them whatever they unilaterally decide is best (only took what 10-20 years on that multi-button mouse? congratulations! you now have a standard feature windows users have been enjoying for over a decade now. cutting edge those macs.)
microsoft wins over and over again for one simple reason. when something happens or comes out that people want/like microsoft embraces it. apple tells you for 10+ years you don't really need it, then has a media hay-day announcing they are now going to carry standard hardware everyone else has had forever. and you guys wonder why you own 2% of this market? i'd bet there are more heroine addicts in today's world than mac users.
why would i give apple credit for going down the path every other vendor was smart enough to go down in the first place? economies of scale have always been on the side of x86 because more people were there. it was apple's elitest attitude that got them here in the first place.
and i'm not a microsoft junkie. i'm a person who always chooses the best tool for any job i do. microsoft provides me with more choices. choices for hardware, and a giant library of software for all different needs. an OS without software is just worthless. there is so much available for windows that you just can't get on a mac.
the point is i'm not choosing microsoft first. the hardware vendor and software vendor (should) have nothing to do with each other. i choose the hardware i wanted, and then i choose the best tools available for that hardware. clearly you didn't do the same, since you are now so happy about having hardware, that again, windows users have always had. and i'm as of yet to meet the mac owner who complained he couldn't install windows on his mac.
apple has gotten one thing right, and that's marketing. they sold over-priced machines that were incompatable with everyone else in the industry, and now they are going to resell it to you with magical new features that everyone else has always had. it's the multi-button mouse all over again. and i'm supposed to be excited?
how does someone who has been running intel hardware for most of his adult life get excited that someone is making pc's using intel chips? i read the press release for this and and thought, wow, now we're being offered this great new feature that the hated microsoft has always provided. then i just sat back and waited for the mac users to start lamentig the hardware that they had spent forever deriding.
and i'm the drone? the mac people praise ANYTHING apple does.
i did find those program packages pretty nifty (it would be nice in windows, but a god send on linux). i would have preferred they spend that time on a wine like tool.
i understand that games wouldn't have been very good. but there are just so many small tools that aren't available in any format anywhere on mac, and would have run fine through an emulator.
and i "sample" all software before i buy anything. and in mac i had so much trouble finding these "sample" versions online.:)
it's just that except for the basics: browsing websites and checking email, i had to switch to my windows pc for just about everything else i did.
these new pc's do sorta solve this problem. especially for you, requiring it for that special piece of software. i would probably just spend all my time in windows on the intel-mac because the crux is there's nothing i personally could do with osX that i couldn't do with windows. the reverse isn't true.
since that's the case for the vast majority of users, why get a mac when there are lots of perfectly viable, cheaper, alternatives?
that's part of why this move is so puzzling to me. they needed an emulator way more than they needed an architecture shift. never in my life have i met a person who looked at a mac and said, "huh, shame i can't install windows on it."
But the government also doesn't have the right to restrict your livlihood by taxing you to support others.
or the right to tax us so banks can take our money and then invest the money poorly, and get the federal government to bail them out (FDCA insured i think it's called).
but it's better for us as a whole to have a little socialization like that. if it makes you feel better think of it as insurance you should be buying anyway:)
i'm against the prohibitions of gambling, drugs, and prostitution. i'm not sure that abolishing our social programs is a good idea. these were created in reaction to some pretty horrific events in our national history.
oklahoma city bombing was by a white guy. i wish we would just make white people illegal -- that way those people would stop blowing stuff up.
nobody kills their mother over tobacco because it's legal and easily available. all the problems with drugs, prostitution and gambling are directly related to the fact that we have made perfectly legit businesses illegal. i'm an adult who works for a living. who is my government to dictate to me how i can choose to spend my time and money with other consenting adults?
who are these people that would be free-loading coming from? if i wanted to gamble i can go to my local indian reservation or dog track. so i can legally gamble today. despite a $20 billion a year prohibition on drugs i could still buy just about anything i wanted fairly quickly in certain locations in my town. the same with prostitution.
imagine what we could do with $20 billion a year (maybe give it back to us). instead of sending pot-heads to do hard jail time (and then spending money to keep them in jail), our cops could do things like catch violent criminals. a person is more likely to get caught selling pot then robbing a house.
and finally, who is the most corrupt, crazy, lying sob president you can think of in our history? would it be nixon? i'll give you 1 guess who started the noble "war on drugs".
I was saying i had a laptop and a dual-core athlon system.
really my argument was that with the 2 side by side, i don't really see a difference. hardly anything is coded to take advantage of the extra core right now. it makes far more sense to get a single high speed processor, then 2 mid-range ones . and even that is not the point.
you are still paying a lot more for that machine than you would for any x86 box with similar specs just to get an OS that has far fewer software options.
i have many windows machines, they all have been running for years, and none of them have ever had a corrupted registry. i'm not saying it doesn't happen, but don't try and tell me MacOSX boxes don't have problems (just google it sometime).
to me an operating system is just an enabler. it's not a religion, it doesn't make me feel good or bad, it just does what i tell it to. it turns all that silicon and wiring in the machine into tools that i can use. as with any tool in life i look around for the one with the most options. by that definition the most useful OS is windows hands-down because it is the biggest enabler. i view this like buying a tool box, the tool-box with the most pieces for sizes of screws and what-not wins.
you have work that you need to get done and that's great. more you've found a tool that you enjoy using to do that work more than the previous tool you had, great. but don't try to sell to the rest of the world that this is magically better for everyones problems. i'm willing to bet that for most people getting a mac working in the work place would be way more hasle than it was worth (same for linux). i do a lot of consulting and i'm as of yet to meet a business that doesn't have it's own weird windows apps for various tasks. since the rest of your office is using windows obviously they saw some value there. the windows/x86 market is around what? 50x's bigger than the osX market? there's a lot there that the mac just never sees.
you are paying a lot of money for a tool that is awefully limited. maybe not for what you do at work, but i do lots of non-work related activities on my pc's. i had a mac and no-doubt what it did it was good at. but it didn't do so much that i eventually gave it up. what's the point of having a computer that doesn't do everything i want it to do? i shouldn't have to choose which laptop to take with me based on what i think i might do with it that day.
i'm not going to change your mind and i get that. i just find it confusing that your feelings have anything to do with this. you said something about installing/uninstalling apps as a major feature of your OS? wow, osX does that!?! that's some major features there! next they'll be telling us that people may want more than one button on their mouse. always on the bleeding edge those mac guys. Mac: bringing you yesterdays' technology at tomorrows prices!
yeah, i can see why cutting edge hardware availability, tons of extra software, and all for less money, would look pretty unapitizing.
the gap may even be reversed now.
i bought a 3.2ghz, 1gig RAM laptop from hp around a year ago for less than these "cutting edge" 2.16ghz mac's. (and i have a dual core amd machine, unless you do lots of heavy multi-tasking, it doesn't make 1 iota of difference).
so I still know what it feels to be a Windows user
After reading your post i'm asking myself why you would use OSX if those were your requirements?
I had a mac. i spent most of my time wondering why i couldn't get a particular behavior to change. the other half the time i was trying to find some mundane piece of software that would do something all my windows pc's could do with about 100 different products, some of which would be freeware (i still have gps-software nightmares).
then my windows pc's all had over double the specs, and cost on average about 1/2 as much.
and everyone is always touting mac hardware. all i can say is i have never had such a fickle wireless device in any machine ever. whenever i went somewhere i had say a 50/50 chance that the laptop would connect to it. i even had one d-link product that connecting the mac would actually crash the router. in fairness i don't know if that was apple or the routers fault, but every single windows machine i threw at it worked fine. so regardless of who's fault it was, i can tell you who's fault i perceive it to be (how can all my other pc's be wrong?).
windows used to have problems, but those days are long past. everyone releases windows versions of everything. i can dual boot to any OS but OSX (and now even that is changing). i can run virtual machines if i really need something unixy and don't want to dual-boot.
if someone tried to sell me a car that only ran on OSX roads (of which there were say 4 nation wide), had no features, and was incompatable with everyone else's gas pumps, roads, tires, etc... i'd tell them to take a hike. why is your computer any different?
they managed to sell you a slower pc that doesn't run lots of standard software for more money than any x86 vendor could dream and you smiled all the way home. THAT my friend, is marketing at it's finest.
unfortunately i think with the mind set of the content industry today (let's face it, these industries always have wanted to do this, they just lacked the technological capability until now) it's naive to think this isn't going to have to play out. i believe this is about the best way it could happen because lots of things are lining up against it. if they had tried this on dvd's it'd be a bigger concern, that was enough of an upgrade that they could have handed the average customer just about anything and we would have bought it. but divx (the products, not codec) proves that this market is pretty resistant to the kind of nonsense we're talking about here.
this upgrade is more like the next gen audio discs they are trying to peddle (i don't even remember what the formats are called). people don't need this. i think they are vastly over-estimating what the demand for this is going to be. they need to make this the easiest most friendly technology ever to try and entice us to it, not throwing up road blocks. i for one will just stick to dvd until i can get the same capabilities in these new products. and i know most the morons shopping at best buy are going to buy dvd's because they are cheaper for at least years to come.
personally i feel the computer industry should just outright refuse to get into this game (i'm a little disapointed by ms, intel, nvidia and the gang). they want hardware chips on cards requiring this? then we should just reject the format.
computers are taking over everything. if we just reject the format it won't be on laptops, pc's, or media centers. people won't buy it.
and i think that agreeing to this is actually crippling us. the thing holding back media centers from exploding into the living room is that they can't do all the things that they should be able to do to be cool; like archive my dvd's onto hard-discs and download new content from the internet. this is just more of the same. trying to create some artifical restrictions where none exist. i look at media centers and scratch my head wondering what need exactly this is trying to fill (i mean is time-displacing tv really worth $2500 to that many people?). i like the idea, but don't buy one because my regular computer can do everythng it can plus the other cool stuff i want.
that's the project i've always wanted to start. if only it wouldn't make me a criminal i'd start writing code for that media center myself.
anyone who payed money for drm'd music deserves what they get no matter which service they use imo. any of your friends who have experienced this now understand the problems with drm. it is no longer their music. they now only have the ability to listen to the music at a time and place of the right holders choosing. don't like those terms? stop buying the music then! by buying it you are only encouraging this whole mess.
with DRM every time you switch players and/or services you now have to re-buy your entire collection. this isn't by accident, this is a music industry wet dream.
ipod does not require the iTunes store to put music on it, and iTunes does not require an iPod to play music you buy. you need neither to listen to or buy music. so where's the leverage? in this case your friends are only being screwed because they choose to be.
so educate your friends and family. show them options (like allofmp3.com) for getting music that they will be able to move around however they might like between players. if iTunes isn't doing well and allofmp3.com was making money by the truckloads eventually the industry would change (if only because everyone who fights the change eventually just runs out of money).
i agree with another poster i read. if this is a monopoly what isn't? samsung can't make sony tv's! monopoly!
here's the part i get lost. i see 2 possible scenarios (understanding i haven't read the spec):
1. every device produced has it's own unique key. then 1 of 2 things happens. either we figure out a way to guess keys. effectively breaking products sitting on store shelves, or funnier, guessing already sold products and just randomly breaking players all over the world. or people will start taking keys from other people/devices (think virii) and using those. then in reaction they will break the legal person's device from future releases. the hacker doesn't get screwed here, the actual law abiding customer does.
2. there are pools of keys, and as they get figured out and deactivated legit devices will stop working. again, hackers laugh, legit buyers are screwed.
either way i don't see how this is going to work. i honestly believe all this is going to do is increase the value of pirated software and hacked hardware. i own tens of thousands of dollars of really nice equipment i've spent years buying. do they really think i'm going to throw that all away so i can buy hardware that tells me what i can and can't do? are they high? do they think my 50 year old parents are gonna just toss that $1000 dollar pc and rush right out and buy this stuff so they can check email? where's the market?
conversely i can say that while today i buy movies on dvd that i really like, if those movies aren't going to play on my current machines, i won't buy them. then my ONLY source of videos is news groups, etc...
you are increasing the value of pirated products. this is going to do to movies what mp3's did to music. when there is no reasonable replacement more and more people will turn to piracy to get what they want the way they want it.
i whole heartedly endorse all of this. i think it will be funny to watch unfold.
in the long run i suspect this is going to get so hacked that they won't be able to exercise this deactivation feature. meaning effectively it will just be a more complicated version of what we have today in dvd's...
this stuff just makes me laugh. this whole thing will just make pirated content even more desirable. releasing a new high-end spec that works on no current machines will just increase how hard people will be willing to work to get the pirated content. this will only serve to increase the value of pirated goods. free was a pretty good motivator. free AND is the only tech that will work on my pc is just a no-brainer.
like jumping off a cliff and being surprised when you start to fall...
honestly i think they're going to have trouble pushing this new tech anyway so hot on the heels of dvd. i'm not convinced that the average joe is going to buy into this. how many of us actually own $5000 tv's anyway? unless this tech debuts at the exact same price as dvd's (and you know it won't) i don't really see why the majority of people will buy into this.
Except to bloat and slow down your applications that is, remember kids, reducing languages to the lowest level a computer can understand it can speed up your applications 100s
ok i understand why i want that for some of the core pieces of my OS and drivers and such. but for general business apps does that actually make any sense to you? i code in.NET all the time and the apps respond instantly (or so close that i can't tell the difference anyway).
i never understand people with this attitude. everything is not a nail. i wouldn't code drivers in.NET and i wouldn't build quick business apps in C++. I used java until.NET came out and i hate to say i think the tools for.NET are just that much better. i'm not religious about either. i choose the best tool for a job. i guarantee someone who knows what they are doing in.NET can build a quick windows app way faster than in just about any other language. and no one would ever notice the speed difference.
to me.NET is the greatest example of what many (especially open source) coders just don't get.
-under the hood.NET and java are almost identical.
-java runs on just about any OS,.net only windows.
-the.net development environment costs a lot, java can be gotten for free.
so why is there competition? the only thing left is integration and environment. apparently.NET is so much better that even for free java has serious competition.
microsoft makes lots of really cool tools that can integrate into.NET and give coders even more power and your problem is i'm not writing it in assembly?
with this post you have hit home the point here and just missed it. the development environment has become so powerful that as a coder your job is to arrange the pieces to get the desired results. you don't need to custom code SQL connections, custom sort lists, and manage memory. all those pieces have been written and tested. you just need to put them together to get the results you desire. i'm not going to write a text to speech program. but now i can easily write code that can do it.
it's just going to get more and more like this. your style of coding will always exist for under the hood stuff. the vast majority of coders arent' doing that kind of work. and most coders are never going to see those days again.
we just need to figure out a way to work in the words "copyrights", "terrorism", "piracy", and "p2p" to this whole thing; it'd be gold, GOLD, i tell you...
Take your story to the next level. 2 lawyers the same yada yada, and one of them has an employee talking to the press taking a view opposite what you are paying them to argue.
i'm not saying it's right, but i can see why that might irk said pocket book. that firm was paid to argue the belief regardless of how it felt. releasing information to the press that is the opposite of what i'm paying you to argue makes pocket book look silly.
i doubt she got fired for holding the view, otherwise they would have asked her in the interview for her position. i suspect they feel exactly the same way you do, that her personal opinion shouldn't really matter. she probably got fired because it's bad form to take someone's money to argue one thing and then say the opposite to the press.
if she'd refrained from either releasing the article or attaching her name to it, she could have continued holding her opinions on whatever she wanted and continued working with this company.
the law firm was being the good lawyer here. she was the one bringing her personal beliefs into it. you can't have your cake and eat it too...
I completely agree. I think the big thing here is money. Right now Linux developers have to deal with the fact that microsoft pays people to work on windows 8+ hours a day. Like it or not, using linux i often get a sense that they are always struggling to release features that i've had in windows for quite a while, and by the time they get there, the rest of us have already moved on.
google could provide the financial means to be pro-active in this game. i always imagine that the tipping point where linux would become a serious competitor would be if/when an average user sits down and thinks "wow, i wish windows could do that."
command lines and multiple desktops are great for the power user. but the average user *obviously* doesn't really care.
we could debate endlessly every side of this issue, but it wouldn't reflect reality. the fact is piracy is occuring. the fact is every copy of almost any song is easily and readily available to anyone without any encumbering drm for free.
we live in a capitalist society, and like it or not this is a reality that has to be competed with. no amount of suing or wishing is going to change this. if you give them a reasonable product at a reasonable price people will use it. most p2p networks are notoriously bad to use nowadays anyway. just make a descent allofmp3 type service and give me the music i buy in the format i want, without drm (and for the love of all that is holy lower the price to a point where i don't ever really think about the purchase). make the downloads and searches really convenient and easy (iTunes). people will and do pay to avoid the hassle (and some extent do the right thing, though i think this isn't much of a motivator in capitalism).
this make believe world i'm expected to live in just doesn't exist. i don't think p2p users are the ones disconnected from reality.
how about instead of calling p2p users free loaders and washing our hands of it, we ask the billion dollar industry with thousands of employees and basically endless resources to compete in the digital age? when most businesses find a situation that doesn't work they change up the strategy.
I want to download the content. That I am given no legal way to do that means now i need to steel it to get it in my preferred medium.:)
that was meant as a joke, but seriously, is offering me a free download with commercials and a non-free commercial free version really that much to ask? There are people out there than can do this without too much hassle for FREE. Try giving me nice, easy-to-find, legal links. As long as you don't try to take advantage of customers (hint: pricing) there is plenty of money to be made.
A big part of the problem in my mind is our politicians love to make laws that are otherwise unenforceable; which leads people to ignore or underestimate consequences (which is the biggest part of what would be preventing you from commiting crimes in the first place).
example: The music and movie industries bombard us with posters, websites, and even in the previews of movies, that copying music and movies is illegal and the consequences are dire (especially monetarily). I don't know of a single person, young or old, i have contact with anymore that has not commited this crime. You hear the argument all the time "copying music is like walking into a store and stealing a cd." Well we do it all the time and get away with it. You just spent millions of dollars convincing us they were the same.
That message is blatant: Everybody breaks the law all the time so it's ok, getting caught is what you need to avoid.
You answered your own question. The jury is the finder of fact, not the interpretor of the law. The jury's role is to determine what happened and if it violated the law as it is written.
isn't a judge way more qualified to do that? if that's all there is to it we managed to construct the most piss-ant poor way of getting that job done. the most qualified person in the room, theoretically, is the judge. but we're just gonna ignore him and bring in 12 random people with no law experience whatsoever and let them make the shot... why... well... because it's better of course!! that just doesn't make any sense. if that's all there is to it you don't need a jury. a judge can do that much, much better.
the law isn't and never has been about truth. that almost never comes out anyway. it's what each side can prove occured, and whether you can convince 12 people that either what they said didn't happen, or that it was justified.
No he's not. There is a big difference between murder and killing someone. Killing someone in self defense, or the defense of others (such as your children) is not murder.
what if the kid was already dead when the father arrived. he saw the situation, and acted on anger and sorrow. now it's not self defense. there is no longer any immediate threat to anyone.
the point is there are always situations that will arise for which there is no law. situations will always arise for which there is a law, but it's not right/fair. situations will arise for which 12 reasonable people feel you violated the law but was justified in doing so. THAT is why you have juries. The beauty of "not guilty" is it doesn't change law. it's still illegal to violate copyright. they're just saying she didn't do it. finding someone not guilty of murder doesn't mean murder is now legal. it's a neat side-step that allows a system of absolutes to opperate in a real world that has a nearly infinite number of conditions that law-makers can't foresee.
I always had a sense that this is exactly why we have a jury.
Someone is toruting a man's child. Man kills said assailant. Is he guilty of murder? Absolutely. He killed him. Maybe the particular facts of this case were never considered by law makers, so there is no exception for them torturing your child. Since law makers cannot make laws for every possible weird situation that may arise, it's the jury's job to apply a little humanity in the execution of law.
I think jury's have the power to come back with "not guilty" in this case for that reason. Otherwise the whole idea of a jury doesn't make sense. Why not just have the judge weigh the facts and pass judgement? The whole court proceeding is a play intended to give the opportunity for the defendant to justify his/her actions to fellow human beings (in a "you obviously did it" sort of case).
this is a perfect example of that. maybe the law has gotten a little out of touch with what the actual "value" of this theft was. maybe it shouldn't be considered theft at all. maybe this woman just honestly didn't know it was going on, but the law and value are spot on. it would be really hard (more probably impossible) to write law to catch these things. but a jury can weigh the facts of this particular case and decide if the system just went wrong here, and say "not guilty".
this system was designed specifically to allow our judicial system to enter your 4 points into the equation.
i have an honest question. could you tell me a good book to look at for building Java/Linux apps? i've been playing with it for years (java coding in both windows and linux) and buying various books that look interesting and every time i play with it for a few hours i keep feeling like i'm fighting the system rather than actually getting work done.
with.NET i've never actually bought a book and i can build large complex projects fairly intuitively (google for help from time to time).
i'm not trying to start anything, i'm honestly curious if someone can point me to something to show me what i've been doing wrong.
You can't deny other nations a voice and still expect them to participate on your terms, it's an international resource that only has the value it has because it is singular.
anyone who doesn't like it is more than welcome to go create their own "better" internet imo.
this *singularity* you're so fond of is only possible because one benevolent dictator forces everyone else to play fairly. besides, what exactly is the problem? i've never heard anyone complain about the open nature of the system...
this concept is so simple, yet seems to mystify so many. every year we are in the red is that much less you get next year for the same money.
we are deep in the red this year. so next year you will have to pay just as much tax, and get less from your government for it, because in reality you already spent this years money last year (leaving interest on the debt out of it entirely).
if the government stopped spending any money tomorrow, you would need to continue paying high tax levels for the rest of your life just to begin working off the debt we have attained up to this point. hopefully you would have children so they could also work their entire lives to pay off a debt we and our parents created.
it's always best to have a little extra money in a budget for things like hurricane relief, starting wars with other nations, research, etc...
money doesn't just appear out of nowhere to pay for this stuff. that $100 billion for katrina was taken out as a loan against your future income. It was done that way b/c if they told you this year we need to seriously hike your taxes to go to war with Sadam, they would have been laughed right out the door. But, they take out loans against your future earnings and suddenly everyone is on board. It's just your childrens income after all...
if it was going to pass anyway, why bother with this? the only logical reason to pass it again as a rider on a bill you know people will have problems voting against, is to avoid letting them vote on it on its own merits.
just because this is business as usual doesn't make it right. i'm not even saying i have a problem with it. there could be some advantages to me as a citizen to have a centralized system. conversely i am horrified that my representatives are too chicken sh@#@ to discuss this in the open with the people whom they are supposedly protecting.
to me the funniest part is that in the next breath we will be talking tax cuts again. how far up your butt does your head have to be to try and lower taxes while dramatically increasing spending on pet projects that you did not have the balls to discuss with the people who will pay for it in the first place? we NEED a national id system? we have only functioned without one for the entire span of american history. are you offering to pay more taxes for it?
i already regret every dollar i pay, last thing i need is some new inept beauracracy to funnel money into. maybe we could just divert some money from education. stupid liberals are just using it to teach this crazy "evolution" theory anyway...
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i would argue microsoft is much better at listening to their customers, which is why they own 98% of this market. they produced their software for the hardware people chose. choice is the key, not just feeding them whatever they unilaterally decide is best (only took what 10-20 years on that multi-button mouse? congratulations! you now have a standard feature windows users have been enjoying for over a decade now. cutting edge those macs.)
microsoft wins over and over again for one simple reason. when something happens or comes out that people want/like microsoft embraces it. apple tells you for 10+ years you don't really need it, then has a media hay-day announcing they are now going to carry standard hardware everyone else has had forever. and you guys wonder why you own 2% of this market? i'd bet there are more heroine addicts in today's world than mac users.
why would i give apple credit for going down the path every other vendor was smart enough to go down in the first place? economies of scale have always been on the side of x86 because more people were there. it was apple's elitest attitude that got them here in the first place.
and i'm not a microsoft junkie. i'm a person who always chooses the best tool for any job i do. microsoft provides me with more choices. choices for hardware, and a giant library of software for all different needs. an OS without software is just worthless. there is so much available for windows that you just can't get on a mac.
the point is i'm not choosing microsoft first. the hardware vendor and software vendor (should) have nothing to do with each other. i choose the hardware i wanted, and then i choose the best tools available for that hardware. clearly you didn't do the same, since you are now so happy about having hardware, that again, windows users have always had. and i'm as of yet to meet the mac owner who complained he couldn't install windows on his mac.
apple has gotten one thing right, and that's marketing. they sold over-priced machines that were incompatable with everyone else in the industry, and now they are going to resell it to you with magical new features that everyone else has always had. it's the multi-button mouse all over again. and i'm supposed to be excited?
how does someone who has been running intel hardware for most of his adult life get excited that someone is making pc's using intel chips? i read the press release for this and and thought, wow, now we're being offered this great new feature that the hated microsoft has always provided. then i just sat back and waited for the mac users to start lamentig the hardware that they had spent forever deriding.
and i'm the drone? the mac people praise ANYTHING apple does.
i understand that games wouldn't have been very good. but there are just so many small tools that aren't available in any format anywhere on mac, and would have run fine through an emulator.
and i "sample" all software before i buy anything. and in mac i had so much trouble finding these "sample" versions online. :)
it's just that except for the basics: browsing websites and checking email, i had to switch to my windows pc for just about everything else i did.
these new pc's do sorta solve this problem. especially for you, requiring it for that special piece of software. i would probably just spend all my time in windows on the intel-mac because the crux is there's nothing i personally could do with osX that i couldn't do with windows. the reverse isn't true.
since that's the case for the vast majority of users, why get a mac when there are lots of perfectly viable, cheaper, alternatives?
that's part of why this move is so puzzling to me. they needed an emulator way more than they needed an architecture shift. never in my life have i met a person who looked at a mac and said, "huh, shame i can't install windows on it."
or the right to tax us so banks can take our money and then invest the money poorly, and get the federal government to bail them out (FDCA insured i think it's called).
but it's better for us as a whole to have a little socialization like that. if it makes you feel better think of it as insurance you should be buying anyway :)
i'm against the prohibitions of gambling, drugs, and prostitution. i'm not sure that abolishing our social programs is a good idea. these were created in reaction to some pretty horrific events in our national history.
oklahoma city bombing was by a white guy. i wish we would just make white people illegal -- that way those people would stop blowing stuff up.
nobody kills their mother over tobacco because it's legal and easily available. all the problems with drugs, prostitution and gambling are directly related to the fact that we have made perfectly legit businesses illegal. i'm an adult who works for a living. who is my government to dictate to me how i can choose to spend my time and money with other consenting adults?
who are these people that would be free-loading coming from? if i wanted to gamble i can go to my local indian reservation or dog track. so i can legally gamble today. despite a $20 billion a year prohibition on drugs i could still buy just about anything i wanted fairly quickly in certain locations in my town. the same with prostitution.
imagine what we could do with $20 billion a year (maybe give it back to us). instead of sending pot-heads to do hard jail time (and then spending money to keep them in jail), our cops could do things like catch violent criminals. a person is more likely to get caught selling pot then robbing a house.
and finally, who is the most corrupt, crazy, lying sob president you can think of in our history? would it be nixon? i'll give you 1 guess who started the noble "war on drugs".
really my argument was that with the 2 side by side, i don't really see a difference. hardly anything is coded to take advantage of the extra core right now. it makes far more sense to get a single high speed processor, then 2 mid-range ones . and even that is not the point.
you are still paying a lot more for that machine than you would for any x86 box with similar specs just to get an OS that has far fewer software options.
i have many windows machines, they all have been running for years, and none of them have ever had a corrupted registry. i'm not saying it doesn't happen, but don't try and tell me MacOSX boxes don't have problems (just google it sometime).
to me an operating system is just an enabler. it's not a religion, it doesn't make me feel good or bad, it just does what i tell it to. it turns all that silicon and wiring in the machine into tools that i can use. as with any tool in life i look around for the one with the most options. by that definition the most useful OS is windows hands-down because it is the biggest enabler. i view this like buying a tool box, the tool-box with the most pieces for sizes of screws and what-not wins.
you have work that you need to get done and that's great. more you've found a tool that you enjoy using to do that work more than the previous tool you had, great. but don't try to sell to the rest of the world that this is magically better for everyones problems. i'm willing to bet that for most people getting a mac working in the work place would be way more hasle than it was worth (same for linux). i do a lot of consulting and i'm as of yet to meet a business that doesn't have it's own weird windows apps for various tasks. since the rest of your office is using windows obviously they saw some value there. the windows/x86 market is around what? 50x's bigger than the osX market? there's a lot there that the mac just never sees.
you are paying a lot of money for a tool that is awefully limited. maybe not for what you do at work, but i do lots of non-work related activities on my pc's. i had a mac and no-doubt what it did it was good at. but it didn't do so much that i eventually gave it up. what's the point of having a computer that doesn't do everything i want it to do? i shouldn't have to choose which laptop to take with me based on what i think i might do with it that day.
i'm not going to change your mind and i get that. i just find it confusing that your feelings have anything to do with this. you said something about installing/uninstalling apps as a major feature of your OS? wow, osX does that!?! that's some major features there! next they'll be telling us that people may want more than one button on their mouse. always on the bleeding edge those mac guys. Mac: bringing you yesterdays' technology at tomorrows prices!
the gap may even be reversed now.
i bought a 3.2ghz, 1gig RAM laptop from hp around a year ago for less than these "cutting edge" 2.16ghz mac's. (and i have a dual core amd machine, unless you do lots of heavy multi-tasking, it doesn't make 1 iota of difference).
so I still know what it feels to be a Windows user
and what does that feel like exactly?
haha. you made me spit up coffee.
I had a mac. i spent most of my time wondering why i couldn't get a particular behavior to change. the other half the time i was trying to find some mundane piece of software that would do something all my windows pc's could do with about 100 different products, some of which would be freeware (i still have gps-software nightmares).
then my windows pc's all had over double the specs, and cost on average about 1/2 as much.
and everyone is always touting mac hardware. all i can say is i have never had such a fickle wireless device in any machine ever. whenever i went somewhere i had say a 50/50 chance that the laptop would connect to it. i even had one d-link product that connecting the mac would actually crash the router. in fairness i don't know if that was apple or the routers fault, but every single windows machine i threw at it worked fine. so regardless of who's fault it was, i can tell you who's fault i perceive it to be (how can all my other pc's be wrong?).
windows used to have problems, but those days are long past. everyone releases windows versions of everything. i can dual boot to any OS but OSX (and now even that is changing). i can run virtual machines if i really need something unixy and don't want to dual-boot.
if someone tried to sell me a car that only ran on OSX roads (of which there were say 4 nation wide), had no features, and was incompatable with everyone else's gas pumps, roads, tires, etc... i'd tell them to take a hike. why is your computer any different?
they managed to sell you a slower pc that doesn't run lots of standard software for more money than any x86 vendor could dream and you smiled all the way home. THAT my friend, is marketing at it's finest.
this upgrade is more like the next gen audio discs they are trying to peddle (i don't even remember what the formats are called). people don't need this. i think they are vastly over-estimating what the demand for this is going to be. they need to make this the easiest most friendly technology ever to try and entice us to it, not throwing up road blocks. i for one will just stick to dvd until i can get the same capabilities in these new products. and i know most the morons shopping at best buy are going to buy dvd's because they are cheaper for at least years to come.
personally i feel the computer industry should just outright refuse to get into this game (i'm a little disapointed by ms, intel, nvidia and the gang). they want hardware chips on cards requiring this? then we should just reject the format.
computers are taking over everything. if we just reject the format it won't be on laptops, pc's, or media centers. people won't buy it.
and i think that agreeing to this is actually crippling us. the thing holding back media centers from exploding into the living room is that they can't do all the things that they should be able to do to be cool; like archive my dvd's onto hard-discs and download new content from the internet. this is just more of the same. trying to create some artifical restrictions where none exist. i look at media centers and scratch my head wondering what need exactly this is trying to fill (i mean is time-displacing tv really worth $2500 to that many people?). i like the idea, but don't buy one because my regular computer can do everythng it can plus the other cool stuff i want.
that's the project i've always wanted to start. if only it wouldn't make me a criminal i'd start writing code for that media center myself.
with DRM every time you switch players and/or services you now have to re-buy your entire collection. this isn't by accident, this is a music industry wet dream.
ipod does not require the iTunes store to put music on it, and iTunes does not require an iPod to play music you buy. you need neither to listen to or buy music. so where's the leverage? in this case your friends are only being screwed because they choose to be.
so educate your friends and family. show them options (like allofmp3.com) for getting music that they will be able to move around however they might like between players. if iTunes isn't doing well and allofmp3.com was making money by the truckloads eventually the industry would change (if only because everyone who fights the change eventually just runs out of money).
i agree with another poster i read. if this is a monopoly what isn't? samsung can't make sony tv's! monopoly!
1. every device produced has it's own unique key. then 1 of 2 things happens. either we figure out a way to guess keys. effectively breaking products sitting on store shelves, or funnier, guessing already sold products and just randomly breaking players all over the world. or people will start taking keys from other people/devices (think virii) and using those. then in reaction they will break the legal person's device from future releases. the hacker doesn't get screwed here, the actual law abiding customer does.
2. there are pools of keys, and as they get figured out and deactivated legit devices will stop working. again, hackers laugh, legit buyers are screwed.
either way i don't see how this is going to work. i honestly believe all this is going to do is increase the value of pirated software and hacked hardware. i own tens of thousands of dollars of really nice equipment i've spent years buying. do they really think i'm going to throw that all away so i can buy hardware that tells me what i can and can't do? are they high? do they think my 50 year old parents are gonna just toss that $1000 dollar pc and rush right out and buy this stuff so they can check email? where's the market?
conversely i can say that while today i buy movies on dvd that i really like, if those movies aren't going to play on my current machines, i won't buy them. then my ONLY source of videos is news groups, etc...
you are increasing the value of pirated products. this is going to do to movies what mp3's did to music. when there is no reasonable replacement more and more people will turn to piracy to get what they want the way they want it.
i whole heartedly endorse all of this. i think it will be funny to watch unfold.
in the long run i suspect this is going to get so hacked that they won't be able to exercise this deactivation feature. meaning effectively it will just be a more complicated version of what we have today in dvd's...
like jumping off a cliff and being surprised when you start to fall...
honestly i think they're going to have trouble pushing this new tech anyway so hot on the heels of dvd. i'm not convinced that the average joe is going to buy into this. how many of us actually own $5000 tv's anyway? unless this tech debuts at the exact same price as dvd's (and you know it won't) i don't really see why the majority of people will buy into this.
ok i understand why i want that for some of the core pieces of my OS and drivers and such. but for general business apps does that actually make any sense to you? i code in .NET all the time and the apps respond instantly (or so close that i can't tell the difference anyway).
i never understand people with this attitude. everything is not a nail. i wouldn't code drivers in .NET and i wouldn't build quick business apps in C++. I used java until .NET came out and i hate to say i think the tools for .NET are just that much better. i'm not religious about either. i choose the best tool for a job. i guarantee someone who knows what they are doing in .NET can build a quick windows app way faster than in just about any other language. and no one would ever notice the speed difference.
to me .NET is the greatest example of what many (especially open source) coders just don't get.
-under the hood .NET and java are almost identical. .net only windows. .net development environment costs a lot, java can be gotten for free.
-java runs on just about any OS,
-the
so why is there competition? the only thing left is integration and environment. apparently .NET is so much better that even for free java has serious competition.
microsoft makes lots of really cool tools that can integrate into .NET and give coders even more power and your problem is i'm not writing it in assembly?
with this post you have hit home the point here and just missed it. the development environment has become so powerful that as a coder your job is to arrange the pieces to get the desired results. you don't need to custom code SQL connections, custom sort lists, and manage memory. all those pieces have been written and tested. you just need to put them together to get the results you desire. i'm not going to write a text to speech program. but now i can easily write code that can do it.
it's just going to get more and more like this. your style of coding will always exist for under the hood stuff. the vast majority of coders arent' doing that kind of work. and most coders are never going to see those days again.
finally someone who gets it!
we just need to figure out a way to work in the words "copyrights", "terrorism", "piracy", and "p2p" to this whole thing; it'd be gold, GOLD, i tell you...
Take your story to the next level. 2 lawyers the same yada yada, and one of them has an employee talking to the press taking a view opposite what you are paying them to argue.
i'm not saying it's right, but i can see why that might irk said pocket book. that firm was paid to argue the belief regardless of how it felt. releasing information to the press that is the opposite of what i'm paying you to argue makes pocket book look silly.
i doubt she got fired for holding the view, otherwise they would have asked her in the interview for her position. i suspect they feel exactly the same way you do, that her personal opinion shouldn't really matter. she probably got fired because it's bad form to take someone's money to argue one thing and then say the opposite to the press.
if she'd refrained from either releasing the article or attaching her name to it, she could have continued holding her opinions on whatever she wanted and continued working with this company.
the law firm was being the good lawyer here. she was the one bringing her personal beliefs into it. you can't have your cake and eat it too...
google could provide the financial means to be pro-active in this game. i always imagine that the tipping point where linux would become a serious competitor would be if/when an average user sits down and thinks "wow, i wish windows could do that."
command lines and multiple desktops are great for the power user. but the average user *obviously* doesn't really care.
aren't iTunes sales, way, way, way up?
we could debate endlessly every side of this issue, but it wouldn't reflect reality. the fact is piracy is occuring. the fact is every copy of almost any song is easily and readily available to anyone without any encumbering drm for free.
we live in a capitalist society, and like it or not this is a reality that has to be competed with. no amount of suing or wishing is going to change this. if you give them a reasonable product at a reasonable price people will use it. most p2p networks are notoriously bad to use nowadays anyway. just make a descent allofmp3 type service and give me the music i buy in the format i want, without drm (and for the love of all that is holy lower the price to a point where i don't ever really think about the purchase). make the downloads and searches really convenient and easy (iTunes). people will and do pay to avoid the hassle (and some extent do the right thing, though i think this isn't much of a motivator in capitalism).
this make believe world i'm expected to live in just doesn't exist. i don't think p2p users are the ones disconnected from reality.
how about instead of calling p2p users free loaders and washing our hands of it, we ask the billion dollar industry with thousands of employees and basically endless resources to compete in the digital age? when most businesses find a situation that doesn't work they change up the strategy.
I want to download the content. That I am given no legal way to do that means now i need to steel it to get it in my preferred medium. :)
that was meant as a joke, but seriously, is offering me a free download with commercials and a non-free commercial free version really that much to ask? There are people out there than can do this without too much hassle for FREE. Try giving me nice, easy-to-find, legal links. As long as you don't try to take advantage of customers (hint: pricing) there is plenty of money to be made.
example: The music and movie industries bombard us with posters, websites, and even in the previews of movies, that copying music and movies is illegal and the consequences are dire (especially monetarily). I don't know of a single person, young or old, i have contact with anymore that has not commited this crime. You hear the argument all the time "copying music is like walking into a store and stealing a cd." Well we do it all the time and get away with it. You just spent millions of dollars convincing us they were the same.
That message is blatant: Everybody breaks the law all the time so it's ok, getting caught is what you need to avoid.
isn't a judge way more qualified to do that? if that's all there is to it we managed to construct the most piss-ant poor way of getting that job done. the most qualified person in the room, theoretically, is the judge. but we're just gonna ignore him and bring in 12 random people with no law experience whatsoever and let them make the shot... why... well... because it's better of course!! that just doesn't make any sense. if that's all there is to it you don't need a jury. a judge can do that much, much better.
the law isn't and never has been about truth. that almost never comes out anyway. it's what each side can prove occured, and whether you can convince 12 people that either what they said didn't happen, or that it was justified.
No he's not. There is a big difference between murder and killing someone. Killing someone in self defense, or the defense of others (such as your children) is not murder.
what if the kid was already dead when the father arrived. he saw the situation, and acted on anger and sorrow. now it's not self defense. there is no longer any immediate threat to anyone.
the point is there are always situations that will arise for which there is no law. situations will always arise for which there is a law, but it's not right/fair. situations will arise for which 12 reasonable people feel you violated the law but was justified in doing so. THAT is why you have juries. The beauty of "not guilty" is it doesn't change law. it's still illegal to violate copyright. they're just saying she didn't do it. finding someone not guilty of murder doesn't mean murder is now legal. it's a neat side-step that allows a system of absolutes to opperate in a real world that has a nearly infinite number of conditions that law-makers can't foresee.
Someone is toruting a man's child. Man kills said assailant. Is he guilty of murder? Absolutely. He killed him. Maybe the particular facts of this case were never considered by law makers, so there is no exception for them torturing your child. Since law makers cannot make laws for every possible weird situation that may arise, it's the jury's job to apply a little humanity in the execution of law.
I think jury's have the power to come back with "not guilty" in this case for that reason. Otherwise the whole idea of a jury doesn't make sense. Why not just have the judge weigh the facts and pass judgement? The whole court proceeding is a play intended to give the opportunity for the defendant to justify his/her actions to fellow human beings (in a "you obviously did it" sort of case).
this is a perfect example of that. maybe the law has gotten a little out of touch with what the actual "value" of this theft was. maybe it shouldn't be considered theft at all. maybe this woman just honestly didn't know it was going on, but the law and value are spot on. it would be really hard (more probably impossible) to write law to catch these things. but a jury can weigh the facts of this particular case and decide if the system just went wrong here, and say "not guilty".
this system was designed specifically to allow our judicial system to enter your 4 points into the equation.
with .NET i've never actually bought a book and i can build large complex projects fairly intuitively (google for help from time to time).
i'm not trying to start anything, i'm honestly curious if someone can point me to something to show me what i've been doing wrong.
anyone who doesn't like it is more than welcome to go create their own "better" internet imo.
this *singularity* you're so fond of is only possible because one benevolent dictator forces everyone else to play fairly. besides, what exactly is the problem? i've never heard anyone complain about the open nature of the system...
we are deep in the red this year. so next year you will have to pay just as much tax, and get less from your government for it, because in reality you already spent this years money last year (leaving interest on the debt out of it entirely).
if the government stopped spending any money tomorrow, you would need to continue paying high tax levels for the rest of your life just to begin working off the debt we have attained up to this point. hopefully you would have children so they could also work their entire lives to pay off a debt we and our parents created.
it's always best to have a little extra money in a budget for things like hurricane relief, starting wars with other nations, research, etc...
money doesn't just appear out of nowhere to pay for this stuff. that $100 billion for katrina was taken out as a loan against your future income. It was done that way b/c if they told you this year we need to seriously hike your taxes to go to war with Sadam, they would have been laughed right out the door. But, they take out loans against your future earnings and suddenly everyone is on board. It's just your childrens income after all...
cute, but flawed logic.
if it was going to pass anyway, why bother with this? the only logical reason to pass it again as a rider on a bill you know people will have problems voting against, is to avoid letting them vote on it on its own merits.
just because this is business as usual doesn't make it right. i'm not even saying i have a problem with it. there could be some advantages to me as a citizen to have a centralized system. conversely i am horrified that my representatives are too chicken sh@#@ to discuss this in the open with the people whom they are supposedly protecting.
to me the funniest part is that in the next breath we will be talking tax cuts again. how far up your butt does your head have to be to try and lower taxes while dramatically increasing spending on pet projects that you did not have the balls to discuss with the people who will pay for it in the first place? we NEED a national id system? we have only functioned without one for the entire span of american history. are you offering to pay more taxes for it?
i already regret every dollar i pay, last thing i need is some new inept beauracracy to funnel money into. maybe we could just divert some money from education. stupid liberals are just using it to teach this crazy "evolution" theory anyway...