As I mentioned in another comment, just because you can doesn't inherently mean you should.
Would you really want to see a precedent set where people start charging arbitrary amounts just for the luxury of acquiring compiled binaries for OSS applications in Windows, Android, iOS, or anywhere else? It seems like that attitude would go against the spirit of the law, so to speak...
Not quite. In this specific case, the three currently-maintained DOSBox ports available on Google Play for a fee are all forked off of the original aDOSBox port, which is released under GPL v2 - including the Java helper part.
It's not at all that I "can't afford $4". My interest was more over the price relative to the average price of apps on Google Play. Most simple applications (e.g. those that are not highly specialized or released through large commercial entities like Adobe, who has things like Photoshop Touch for $10) are very inexpensive - around a dollar and change.
If the developer's rationale behind his price is to cover the cost of his efforts in compiling DOSBox for Android and adding a few new options in the application preferences, then yes, $4 is pretty high relative to what the customer base expects of Google Play pricing. Remember when Apple announced that the most popular tracks in iTunes were going up to $1.29 instead of $0.99? It's not a big price increase, but it was still thirty cents more than anyone expected to pay, which in the context of individual music tracks, adds up pretty quickly.
If all you're doing is compiling someone else's source for your chosen platform, particularly if minimal effort is involved, then how much is too much to reasonably charge for your efforts? If it costs you nothing to release your binaries, then is it in the spirit of the FOSS community to charge as much as $4 just for the privilege of obtaining those binaries?
There was some good discussion on the firehose article prior to this making the front page.
While I will absolutely agree that I misunderstood my initial reading of the GPL v2 text, I think there does seem to maybe be a gap in licensing options for FOSS developers. I do a little software development for fun (I am by no means a programmer; I know a little C# and used to actively develop a number of addons for a popular MMO using Lua), but that's it. Even then, I don't personally like the idea that someone else might take my weeks or months of work, tweak it a bit, and start turning a profit on it.
Obviously, the easiest solution is to just not release your source code - but there's a lot to be gained from letting others see your source, learn from it, make suggestions or patches, etc. So are there any open source licensing models currently in use in the real world that allow for source and binary distribution but prohibit profiting off of doing so? Can such a license (essentially a contract) be legally enforced?
Even if it's legally permissible to charge for compilation, distribution, or even modification of GPLed source, up to and including putting DRM or other anti-piracy measures in the compiled binaries, does that necessarily make it okay? OSS is very much community-driven. Is the general consensus that because people can profit off someone else's work, they should? I'm more interested in these aspects of the original question. I've already had an interesting enough e-mail exchange with the developer of DOSBox Turbo and learned enough about his perspective on the matter. I think the bigger question is how we as developers and users look at GPL in general and whether or not it's the open source panacea I more or less believed it was (whoops).
One of the things that has drastically changed since the industrial revolution is the distribution of blue-collar vs. white-collar jobs. As others have pointed out, society's industrialization made the average desk job much more common, rather than reserved for the wealthy elite in business.
As rote, tedious, manual work is automated, there will be even more of a need for positions requiring education. Rather than dropping out of high school in a podunk town in northern Indiana just to go work at an auto factory for the rest of your life, it will be much more valuable to go to college, get a real degree (that is, an education that promotes critical thinking, math and science, and the skills required in those who will design and support and troubleshoot all this new automation technology, not a liberal arts degree that succeeds in little more than teaching you how to be politically correct and "feel" more), and make yourself useful as the world around you continues to evolve.
It is absolutely logical that businesses are going to move more and more toward automation. The cost of labor is high - not just the paychecks, but the benefits, the insurance, the constant evaluations by OSHA to ensure save work environments (not a bad thing, but even a small accidental slip-up can be costly to a large business), and unionization. Machines will never demand a raise, they'll never demand "collective bargaining rights", and they'll never insist on a pension plan. All these are pervasive in the world of manual labor employment - far more than what is commonly seen in white-collar desk jobs.
I think that Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory makes a very good point - Charlie Bucket's father loses his job assembling tubes of toothpaste after his employer buys a robot to do the work. However, the company quickly realizes that they need people who can support and repair those robots, and they hire Mr. Bucket with a better job and better pay, doing something that a robot can't do.
It's a myth that the plebes in society are incapable of getting an education and a real career. Start working on computers. Start working on cars. Learn a trade and become a plumber or an electrician. These jobs aren't going anywhere. We will always need people to fix our toilets and our laptops and our vehicles. We will see an increasing need for people who can engineer new technology, market it, and support it. These are the skills we should be encouraging the next generation of workers to focus on.
Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale.
Oh yes, because Apple cares so very much. They want more money in addition to their little ménage-à-trois they've developed with the FairPlay/iTunes/iPod monopoly - apparently being #1 in digital music and PMP/DAP sales isn't quite enough billions annually for Stevie and his buddies.
I had a friend tell me that he'll still buy music because he wants to support the artists. As long as people have that mentality, all they are doing is reconfirming to the RIAA that the way they handle things is ok, acceptable, and successful.
The only way this is going to stop is if artists stop dropping indie labels for the RIAA, and consumers stop buying music produced by the RIAA. Until that happens, all we do is passively approve of this utter bullshit.
There are moderators on Apple forums, for all we know one of them removed it then notified management of the problem
...then a much more customer-friendly way of handling such a thing (if that's what really happened) would be to post that the problem is being looked into, and lock the thread so that customers are aware that Apple isn't censoring them. At this point, it just looks like Apple's pulling the censor-ignore-and-run method of "customer service" that they have certainly been guilty of in the past.
That's great and all, but it doesn't change the fact that (a) any web interface with confidential or private information should have an obvious method of logging out that doesn't require specific knowledge about how to delete cookies for a certain browser/applicationn, and (b) Apple is yet again ignoring and censoring users who are pointing out this flaw.
Yet another incident where Apple blatantly ignores the customers they claim to value so much...and they will likely continue to do so until there's such a shitstorm about this that they have no choice but to respond.
Apple used to be a good company...ten years ago. Now they're just as bad (if not worse, in many regards) as every other IT giant out there. Sad.
Engaging in nothing but passive entertainment during any downtime for a child is a bad thing. It does not develop higher brain functions. It does not encourage cognitive development or improvement. When a child watches television for many hours a day, and does not participate in any playtime that encourages creativity or higher brain function or social skills (reading, playing pretend, building things with Legos, running around outside with other kids), that child is very, very likely to have stunted brain development, which manifests itself in general stupidity and lack of critical thinking skills as the child gets older.
I don't think that TV is evil. I don't think that watching TV (in moderation) is evil. Your kid wants to watch an hour of cartoons in the morning? Fine. But if your kid is watching eight or nine hours of television a day (thereby doing just about nothing else, aside from eating and going to the bathroom once in awhile), that's not going to have any real positive impact on the child or his development.
So you think a five-year-old should be "responsible for [his] own education"?
This idea that parents should take themselves out of the schooling picture is asinine. It's up to the parents to make sure the kids are doing their homework. It's up to the parents to make sure that their child has enough ability to read, write, and perform basic math functions. Ultimately, the parents are responsible for the child. Not the school. You can't blame the school for your child's stupidity if you take zero active interest in your child's academic and intellectual development. Sure, the school is there to teach the kid, but the parents are there to make sure the kid is developing properly. If you send your child to school (any school, public or private) but never make them do homework and never expect them to pass a class, they're going to go to college with the idea that they don't need to learn and that it's ok to fail and anything and everything...and they're going to end up failing and finding themselves unable to get a decent job.
Failure makes us stronger. But if you only ever fail, and you never learn how to succeed, you're going to lead one miserable life.
As far as "forcing kids to learn what they don't want to learn" - it's great practice for the real world, where you constantly have to do things you don't want to do (mow the lawn, fix the toilet, deal with a child who won't stop vomiting at two o'clock in the morning, go to work, wake up early, etc.).
Yes, and there are children who succeed with the whole "unschooling" thing, because they have a serious desire to learn everything they can about everything.
But you cannot deny that there is an ever-increasing population of children today who have no interest in learning, cannot add without a calculator, and have an incredibly difficult time understand how to use proper words in sentences (such as then/than, you're/your, their/there/they're). Basic math, critical thinking, and grammar and spelling are things that every person with average intelligence should be able to grasp. This is no longer the case, and I'm guessing that a big factor in this increase in stupid people in our society is our obsession with video games, television, and the internet. If you spend every minute of your free time participating in activities that do not require higher brain function, that part of your brain isn't going to get a workout and won't develop at the rate it's supposed to.
However, the majority of children today have no interest in anything that does not provide instant gratification. When a child is raised on utterly passive entertainment (watching television), where the parents are uninvolved in the child's development, and the child is uninvolved in his or her development, you're in a sticky situation. There is no reason for a twenty-one-year-old to be incapable of writing complete sentences or understanding basic rules of grammar (e.g. when to use a period or a comma). When a kid is raised on screen-based entertainment (which requires no reading), they're never going to have an inclination to read, which means they never see enough written word to gain true comprehension of the language.
There are obviously those who are born very smart or very stupid. They have unusual brain functions. The average person who is born with average intelligence is capable of being more intelligent through learning...but if the parents never teach their child that learning can be interesting, and instead sit them in front of Teletubbies DVDs when they're three years old, do you really think that, as he gets older, kid's going to take it upon himself to participate in any activity that requires him to think? It's unlikely, to say the least.
I went to a private school, K-12. Some of the dumbest kids on the planet were at my school, and it was because their parents didn't take an active interest in their education, so they were allowed to slack off.
There were guys in my graduating class who could barely multiply two numbers or spell words containing more than five letters.
Public school has nothing to do with it, really. If you want to learn, you'll learn, no matter where you are. The parenting side has everything to do with it. If you raise your kids to slack off and just seek instant gratification/entertainment, they'll never be interested in learning, and even sending them to Harvard isn't going to make them smart (or even average).
...at least as far as how to make your kids smarter from the start.
QUIT LETTING THEM WATCH INORDINATE AMOUNTS OF TELEVISION, MOVIES, AND VIDEO GAMES. Make them read. The more they read, the better their critical thinking skills, the better their grasp of grammar and spelling, and the more knowledge they will gain.
I wasn't allowed to watch TV when I was a kid. Period. We owned an Atari 2600 (when N64 was the newest console), but that was it. While banning your children from the television entirely isn't the best idea, I read a ton, and now I'm generally more intelligent than most people my age - not just book smart; I just comprehend things better than most of the kids who were in my classes in college and whatnot.
Raising your kids to never fail is bad, but raising your kids to never do any mentally-intensive work is bad, too. Playing Call of Duty for ten hours on a Saturday isn't going to do a whole lot for your cognitive development.
I love my laptop desk...
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have a Laptop Desk (www.laptopdesk.net). I really do love it, too. It doubles as a laptop riser when I use it on my coffee table or at my desk at home, and it's really quite sturdy and portable. Totally worth the $30. Don't get the Futura; get the original one - it's definitely better.
...if you actually think that Stevie is just a good person and that Apple didn't plan this, at minimum, weeks in advance.
The RIAA has the stripper mentality. Apple has the pimp mentality - how many people can we get to suck our dicks in adoration? What can we do to make them suck harder? I know! Calculated PR moves like letters about how much we actually hate our proprietary monopolistic DRM policies and about how we really want to hook up our customers with $100 credits to buy more shiny white shit in our overpriced stores with archaic return policies!
Marketing is marketing, even if it's coming from Apple. If anything, Apple's marketing is more sleazy than that of other corporations.
And it's because of this that I despise Apple.
The fanboys are going to scream about how much Apple cares about their customers, and what a great and generous guy Stevie is, when in reality all it comes down to is PR and marketing. Jobs is a slimy guy, and it's crap like this that feeds the fanboys worship of him as a great, wonderful, perfect person and the messiah of the computer industry.
A $100 store credit isn't shit. Give the consumers their extra $200 back - in cash or check - if you really care about keeping your customers happy.
"By charging for the 'upgrade' they can file current accounting documents saying that the products were upgraded with new functionality."
So how are they able to include the upgrade for "free" with the $179 new N-capable Aiport Extreme base station? What if I only own non-N hardware (before the switch to Intel), but want to buy the new base station? Does that $179 include the cost of the upgrade for Apple's accounting documents? How does that account for every machine upgraded, and why should I pay $179 for something that includes upgrade fees for an upgrade that isn't compatible with my hardware?
That seems a little unfair. Charge them all the same rate, or charge nobody. Or, next time, announce that your hardware has a dormant functionality that will be enabled in the near future, pending the release of some new hardware (the new Airport Extreme base). I'm sure that goes against Apple's attempts at generating more revenue by keeping everything secret before the day it's released, but it sure would prevent them from pissing off their customers so much.
So, you're basically pointing out that Apple is able to scam more money out of their cultist followers by, instead of announcing upcoming features, hiding them from the public until another MacWorld conference or other event. Since they like to make such a big brouhaha over new features, they hide them, then release them, then charge their customers for the new features on existing, already-purchased hardware.
That's not unethical at all.
Is Apple going to be raising the prices of ALL their airport-extreme hardware an extra $5 or $10 to compensate for the N capability in newly shipped machines?
I wonder if people realize that many campuses don't provide student access to I2. Indiana University's Indianapolis campus is one of the primary I2 nodes, and is where the Abeline NOC is located, and WE don't even grant access to I2 to just anyone. i2hub works, but it works on commodity internet that's just like any other company broadband connection.
I doubt the RIAA is that concerned with I2 abuse, anyhow. They're more concerned that OH NO someone might download a song and THEN go out and buy the album.:P
And it's the first.org site I've seen (ever or in awhile, I don't know) with blantant ads across two sides of the page.
Go to www.belchfire.net if you want good themes. You have to register, but there are a ton of bootscreens and good themes if you're into that sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
As I mentioned in another comment, just because you can doesn't inherently mean you should.
Would you really want to see a precedent set where people start charging arbitrary amounts just for the luxury of acquiring compiled binaries for OSS applications in Windows, Android, iOS, or anywhere else? It seems like that attitude would go against the spirit of the law, so to speak...
Not quite. In this specific case, the three currently-maintained DOSBox ports available on Google Play for a fee are all forked off of the original aDOSBox port, which is released under GPL v2 - including the Java helper part.
It's not at all that I "can't afford $4". My interest was more over the price relative to the average price of apps on Google Play. Most simple applications (e.g. those that are not highly specialized or released through large commercial entities like Adobe, who has things like Photoshop Touch for $10) are very inexpensive - around a dollar and change.
If the developer's rationale behind his price is to cover the cost of his efforts in compiling DOSBox for Android and adding a few new options in the application preferences, then yes, $4 is pretty high relative to what the customer base expects of Google Play pricing. Remember when Apple announced that the most popular tracks in iTunes were going up to $1.29 instead of $0.99? It's not a big price increase, but it was still thirty cents more than anyone expected to pay, which in the context of individual music tracks, adds up pretty quickly.
If all you're doing is compiling someone else's source for your chosen platform, particularly if minimal effort is involved, then how much is too much to reasonably charge for your efforts? If it costs you nothing to release your binaries, then is it in the spirit of the FOSS community to charge as much as $4 just for the privilege of obtaining those binaries?
There was some good discussion on the firehose article prior to this making the front page.
While I will absolutely agree that I misunderstood my initial reading of the GPL v2 text, I think there does seem to maybe be a gap in licensing options for FOSS developers. I do a little software development for fun (I am by no means a programmer; I know a little C# and used to actively develop a number of addons for a popular MMO using Lua), but that's it. Even then, I don't personally like the idea that someone else might take my weeks or months of work, tweak it a bit, and start turning a profit on it.
Obviously, the easiest solution is to just not release your source code - but there's a lot to be gained from letting others see your source, learn from it, make suggestions or patches, etc. So are there any open source licensing models currently in use in the real world that allow for source and binary distribution but prohibit profiting off of doing so? Can such a license (essentially a contract) be legally enforced?
Even if it's legally permissible to charge for compilation, distribution, or even modification of GPLed source, up to and including putting DRM or other anti-piracy measures in the compiled binaries, does that necessarily make it okay? OSS is very much community-driven. Is the general consensus that because people can profit off someone else's work, they should? I'm more interested in these aspects of the original question. I've already had an interesting enough e-mail exchange with the developer of DOSBox Turbo and learned enough about his perspective on the matter. I think the bigger question is how we as developers and users look at GPL in general and whether or not it's the open source panacea I more or less believed it was (whoops).
One of the things that has drastically changed since the industrial revolution is the distribution of blue-collar vs. white-collar jobs. As others have pointed out, society's industrialization made the average desk job much more common, rather than reserved for the wealthy elite in business.
As rote, tedious, manual work is automated, there will be even more of a need for positions requiring education. Rather than dropping out of high school in a podunk town in northern Indiana just to go work at an auto factory for the rest of your life, it will be much more valuable to go to college, get a real degree (that is, an education that promotes critical thinking, math and science, and the skills required in those who will design and support and troubleshoot all this new automation technology, not a liberal arts degree that succeeds in little more than teaching you how to be politically correct and "feel" more), and make yourself useful as the world around you continues to evolve.
It is absolutely logical that businesses are going to move more and more toward automation. The cost of labor is high - not just the paychecks, but the benefits, the insurance, the constant evaluations by OSHA to ensure save work environments (not a bad thing, but even a small accidental slip-up can be costly to a large business), and unionization. Machines will never demand a raise, they'll never demand "collective bargaining rights", and they'll never insist on a pension plan. All these are pervasive in the world of manual labor employment - far more than what is commonly seen in white-collar desk jobs.
I think that Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory makes a very good point - Charlie Bucket's father loses his job assembling tubes of toothpaste after his employer buys a robot to do the work. However, the company quickly realizes that they need people who can support and repair those robots, and they hire Mr. Bucket with a better job and better pay, doing something that a robot can't do.
It's a myth that the plebes in society are incapable of getting an education and a real career. Start working on computers. Start working on cars. Learn a trade and become a plumber or an electrician. These jobs aren't going anywhere. We will always need people to fix our toilets and our laptops and our vehicles. We will see an increasing need for people who can engineer new technology, market it, and support it. These are the skills we should be encouraging the next generation of workers to focus on.
Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale.
Oh yes, because Apple cares so very much. They want more money in addition to their little ménage-à-trois they've developed with the FairPlay/iTunes/iPod monopoly - apparently being #1 in digital music and PMP/DAP sales isn't quite enough billions annually for Stevie and his buddies.
I had a friend tell me that he'll still buy music because he wants to support the artists. As long as people have that mentality, all they are doing is reconfirming to the RIAA that the way they handle things is ok, acceptable, and successful.
The only way this is going to stop is if artists stop dropping indie labels for the RIAA, and consumers stop buying music produced by the RIAA. Until that happens, all we do is passively approve of this utter bullshit.
There are moderators on Apple forums, for all we know one of them removed it then notified management of the problem
...then a much more customer-friendly way of handling such a thing (if that's what really happened) would be to post that the problem is being looked into, and lock the thread so that customers are aware that Apple isn't censoring them. At this point, it just looks like Apple's pulling the censor-ignore-and-run method of "customer service" that they have certainly been guilty of in the past.
That's great and all, but it doesn't change the fact that (a) any web interface with confidential or private information should have an obvious method of logging out that doesn't require specific knowledge about how to delete cookies for a certain browser/applicationn, and (b) Apple is yet again ignoring and censoring users who are pointing out this flaw.
Yet another incident where Apple blatantly ignores the customers they claim to value so much...and they will likely continue to do so until there's such a shitstorm about this that they have no choice but to respond. Apple used to be a good company...ten years ago. Now they're just as bad (if not worse, in many regards) as every other IT giant out there. Sad.
Ah, yes...that's it. Misread what I've said.
Engaging in nothing but passive entertainment during any downtime for a child is a bad thing. It does not develop higher brain functions. It does not encourage cognitive development or improvement. When a child watches television for many hours a day, and does not participate in any playtime that encourages creativity or higher brain function or social skills (reading, playing pretend, building things with Legos, running around outside with other kids), that child is very, very likely to have stunted brain development, which manifests itself in general stupidity and lack of critical thinking skills as the child gets older.
I don't think that TV is evil. I don't think that watching TV (in moderation) is evil. Your kid wants to watch an hour of cartoons in the morning? Fine. But if your kid is watching eight or nine hours of television a day (thereby doing just about nothing else, aside from eating and going to the bathroom once in awhile), that's not going to have any real positive impact on the child or his development.
So you think a five-year-old should be "responsible for [his] own education"?
This idea that parents should take themselves out of the schooling picture is asinine. It's up to the parents to make sure the kids are doing their homework. It's up to the parents to make sure that their child has enough ability to read, write, and perform basic math functions. Ultimately, the parents are responsible for the child. Not the school. You can't blame the school for your child's stupidity if you take zero active interest in your child's academic and intellectual development. Sure, the school is there to teach the kid, but the parents are there to make sure the kid is developing properly. If you send your child to school (any school, public or private) but never make them do homework and never expect them to pass a class, they're going to go to college with the idea that they don't need to learn and that it's ok to fail and anything and everything...and they're going to end up failing and finding themselves unable to get a decent job.
Failure makes us stronger. But if you only ever fail, and you never learn how to succeed, you're going to lead one miserable life.
As far as "forcing kids to learn what they don't want to learn" - it's great practice for the real world, where you constantly have to do things you don't want to do (mow the lawn, fix the toilet, deal with a child who won't stop vomiting at two o'clock in the morning, go to work, wake up early, etc.).
Yes, and there are children who succeed with the whole "unschooling" thing, because they have a serious desire to learn everything they can about everything.
But you cannot deny that there is an ever-increasing population of children today who have no interest in learning, cannot add without a calculator, and have an incredibly difficult time understand how to use proper words in sentences (such as then/than, you're/your, their/there/they're). Basic math, critical thinking, and grammar and spelling are things that every person with average intelligence should be able to grasp. This is no longer the case, and I'm guessing that a big factor in this increase in stupid people in our society is our obsession with video games, television, and the internet. If you spend every minute of your free time participating in activities that do not require higher brain function, that part of your brain isn't going to get a workout and won't develop at the rate it's supposed to.
Yes, being intelligent makes you read.
However, the majority of children today have no interest in anything that does not provide instant gratification. When a child is raised on utterly passive entertainment (watching television), where the parents are uninvolved in the child's development, and the child is uninvolved in his or her development, you're in a sticky situation. There is no reason for a twenty-one-year-old to be incapable of writing complete sentences or understanding basic rules of grammar (e.g. when to use a period or a comma). When a kid is raised on screen-based entertainment (which requires no reading), they're never going to have an inclination to read, which means they never see enough written word to gain true comprehension of the language.
There are obviously those who are born very smart or very stupid. They have unusual brain functions. The average person who is born with average intelligence is capable of being more intelligent through learning...but if the parents never teach their child that learning can be interesting, and instead sit them in front of Teletubbies DVDs when they're three years old, do you really think that, as he gets older, kid's going to take it upon himself to participate in any activity that requires him to think? It's unlikely, to say the least.
Oh, that's not true.
I went to a private school, K-12. Some of the dumbest kids on the planet were at my school, and it was because their parents didn't take an active interest in their education, so they were allowed to slack off.
There were guys in my graduating class who could barely multiply two numbers or spell words containing more than five letters.
Public school has nothing to do with it, really. If you want to learn, you'll learn, no matter where you are. The parenting side has everything to do with it. If you raise your kids to slack off and just seek instant gratification/entertainment, they'll never be interested in learning, and even sending them to Harvard isn't going to make them smart (or even average).
...at least as far as how to make your kids smarter from the start. QUIT LETTING THEM WATCH INORDINATE AMOUNTS OF TELEVISION, MOVIES, AND VIDEO GAMES. Make them read. The more they read, the better their critical thinking skills, the better their grasp of grammar and spelling, and the more knowledge they will gain. I wasn't allowed to watch TV when I was a kid. Period. We owned an Atari 2600 (when N64 was the newest console), but that was it. While banning your children from the television entirely isn't the best idea, I read a ton, and now I'm generally more intelligent than most people my age - not just book smart; I just comprehend things better than most of the kids who were in my classes in college and whatnot. Raising your kids to never fail is bad, but raising your kids to never do any mentally-intensive work is bad, too. Playing Call of Duty for ten hours on a Saturday isn't going to do a whole lot for your cognitive development.
I have a Laptop Desk (www.laptopdesk.net). I really do love it, too. It doubles as a laptop riser when I use it on my coffee table or at my desk at home, and it's really quite sturdy and portable. Totally worth the $30. Don't get the Futura; get the original one - it's definitely better.
...if you actually think that Stevie is just a good person and that Apple didn't plan this, at minimum, weeks in advance. The RIAA has the stripper mentality. Apple has the pimp mentality - how many people can we get to suck our dicks in adoration? What can we do to make them suck harder? I know! Calculated PR moves like letters about how much we actually hate our proprietary monopolistic DRM policies and about how we really want to hook up our customers with $100 credits to buy more shiny white shit in our overpriced stores with archaic return policies! Marketing is marketing, even if it's coming from Apple. If anything, Apple's marketing is more sleazy than that of other corporations.
And it's because of this that I despise Apple. The fanboys are going to scream about how much Apple cares about their customers, and what a great and generous guy Stevie is, when in reality all it comes down to is PR and marketing. Jobs is a slimy guy, and it's crap like this that feeds the fanboys worship of him as a great, wonderful, perfect person and the messiah of the computer industry. A $100 store credit isn't shit. Give the consumers their extra $200 back - in cash or check - if you really care about keeping your customers happy.
"has axed it's Anti-Linux campaign"
Grammatical errors FTW. It should be "its" since it's possessive and not a contraction of "it" and "is".
"By charging for the 'upgrade' they can file current accounting documents saying that the products were upgraded with new functionality." So how are they able to include the upgrade for "free" with the $179 new N-capable Aiport Extreme base station? What if I only own non-N hardware (before the switch to Intel), but want to buy the new base station? Does that $179 include the cost of the upgrade for Apple's accounting documents? How does that account for every machine upgraded, and why should I pay $179 for something that includes upgrade fees for an upgrade that isn't compatible with my hardware? That seems a little unfair. Charge them all the same rate, or charge nobody. Or, next time, announce that your hardware has a dormant functionality that will be enabled in the near future, pending the release of some new hardware (the new Airport Extreme base). I'm sure that goes against Apple's attempts at generating more revenue by keeping everything secret before the day it's released, but it sure would prevent them from pissing off their customers so much.
So, you're basically pointing out that Apple is able to scam more money out of their cultist followers by, instead of announcing upcoming features, hiding them from the public until another MacWorld conference or other event. Since they like to make such a big brouhaha over new features, they hide them, then release them, then charge their customers for the new features on existing, already-purchased hardware.
That's not unethical at all.
Is Apple going to be raising the prices of ALL their airport-extreme hardware an extra $5 or $10 to compensate for the N capability in newly shipped machines?
I did all the config changes listed in the comments, and nothing makes Firefox not hog my RAM. Something with 1.5.0.1 perhaps..?
I wonder if people realize that many campuses don't provide student access to I2. Indiana University's Indianapolis campus is one of the primary I2 nodes, and is where the Abeline NOC is located, and WE don't even grant access to I2 to just anyone. i2hub works, but it works on commodity internet that's just like any other company broadband connection. I doubt the RIAA is that concerned with I2 abuse, anyhow. They're more concerned that OH NO someone might download a song and THEN go out and buy the album. :P
And it's the first .org site I've seen (ever or in awhile, I don't know) with blantant ads across two sides of the page.
Go to www.belchfire.net if you want good themes. You have to register, but there are a ton of bootscreens and good themes if you're into that sort of thing.