I can think of two basic ways this could happen. First, it could be sabotage. Some guy might be infecting these things with a virus for some reason. It doesn't seem like an effective way to spread viruses, though. But you know, maybe there's just some guy at the iPod factory who is a dick and thinks it's funny to put viruses on them.
The other way I can imagine this could easily happen to a small number of iPods is if there's a QA process that involves hooking a random sample of iPods to Windows machines, and some worker was using one of these machines had managed to get it infected with a virus. It could even come from a machine that is supposed to scan for viruses, if the virus scanner was compromised or out-of-date.
If you RTFA (which is short), it indicates which of the two Apple believes happened.
There really is a lot to this. Steve Jobs seems to have a knack for attracting talented people and getting them to make good stuff. Right after Jobs comes back to Apple, they come out with the iMac, iPod, and OSX. How's that for a hat-trick?
With OS X and hardware which is merely moderately expensive, they might stand a better chance, but it's hard to see how they'll ever really compete with MS Windows
Maybe if Microsoft spends 5 years developing a new OS that offers no real benefit to users, but has tons of new painful anti-piracy and DRM?
Then again, Apple isn't really competing with Microsoft as much as they're competing with Dell. OSX is mostly another feature to sell the hardware.
I personally loved the Mac's back in the 90's. I built a very successful commercial retouching business where our primary software/hardware was Photoshop on OS9 Mac's. OS9 performed well as you could lock down memory and dedicate it to Photoshop (no OS swapping). This is something that is sorely missing from OS/X and Windows.
You hear that complaint a lot from people using Macs at that time, but I assure you, this was largely a problem of MacOS's memory management stinking royally, so much so that virtual memory just didn't work properly. This feature is not missing from other operating systems, as the memory management works in other operating systems.
Really, I've supported both the old MacOS and OSX, and I get questions all the time, "How can I turn off virtual memory?" The answer is, you don't. You don't need to.
I don't see how it's less simple or more cluttered than those other DEs. If you ask me, Gnome is simple and uncluttered, just about on-par with OSX, with the others being less-so. But anyway I was responding to someone who was implying that OSX was not simple, uncluttered, saturated with useless eye candy, and didn't have access to a terminal window.
I, on the other hand, would be inclined to say that OSX is simple and uncluttered, with the interface really using no more space than necessary. I do like to change the toolbars, though, to either be small icons or text-only, but not large icons and text, but that's a mistake most DEs make, enough so that I assume many people want it that way. The "eye candy" is generally used well, so that the effects give useful visual cues about what's going on. They're also used sparingly enough and efficiently enough that it doesn't end up being a meaningful draw on system resources.
And I assure you, it's quite easy to get to a bash prompt in OSX.
Are you implying that it's impossible for users to do that with Linux? I don't see any reason why, if you put the same users on Gnome or KDE, you wouldn't end up with loads of icons on the desktop.
simple..............check
uncluttered.......check
low color...........most interface elements are black/white/grey, so check
high contrast.....if not enough so, you can increase the contrast, I suppose, so check
has a terminal...check
I disagree. It's true that the term "web 2.0" gets thrown around a little too much, but it seems to me that it is an attempt to label real changes happening to the way people use the internet.
The first thing going on is that people are making web applications that actually work, without using dumb plugins. That's the cool thing about AJAX. It's not he fade-in and fade-out techniques; It's about Gmail and Basecamp. Real web applications that can load/save data in sensible ways, process the data without full-page refreshes every time, and show sensible transitions between tasks, without using something like Flash. It's just HTML, Javascript, XML, which is standard and open, meaning pretty much everyone can use it. No, the technology itself isn't new, but the technology is being used in new ways, which is notable.
And this development has been one of the things that seems to have lead to increased participation on the internet. Not so long ago, most people on the web were still passive observers. The Usenet and IRC networks were a place people could participate, but Joe Sixpack didn't really use them. The web itself was largely a place for companies to send a signal one-way. These days, however, there are web applications (sometimes using AJAX) which allow Joe Sixpack to be more participatory. You're seeing more weblogs, social networking, and media sharing sites, and this time non-geeks are getting in on the act.
So again, it's not so much about being a wholly new thing. If it were supposed to be a new thing, maybe they'd call it a new thing, instead of old-thing 2.0. It's just someone's attempt to take note of a rapid change of the sorts of services offered on the net, and a rapid shift in how web technologies are being used.
Research dollars are hard to come by, and when it's confirmed that Vista totally breaks standard Office suite PC/applications, only then will it be only a matter of time until it will replace XP.
Unless it hinders Vista adoption. Seriously, if you have to replace all your software when you upgrade to Vista, a lot of IT people will be asking, "Why should we update to Vista?" and maybe even, "Why shouldn't we switch to Mac?"
I guess it makes some difference whether they are, in fact, tracking web-use data. If Opera chooses, they could respond to requests without logging user information or IP addresses.
What I don't understand is that I thought GPUs were made to offload a lot of graphics computations from the CPU. So why are we merging them again? Isn't a GPU supposed to be an auxillary CPU only for graphics? I'm so confused.
You've already gotten some good answers here, but I'll throw in something that I haven't seen anyone else mention explicitly: GPUs aren't only being used for 3D animation anymore. GPUs started because, in order to make graphics for games better, you needed a specialized processor to handle the 3D calculations. However, GPUs have become, in some ways, more complex and powerful than the CPU, and as that has happened, other uses have been found for all that power. turns out that there are lots of mathematical transformations that are more efficient on the specialized graphics processors, including audio/video processing and some data analysis. Some clever programmers have already started offloading some of their complex calculations from the CPU to the GPU.
This has lead many people to wonder, why don't we bring some of the GPU advancements back to the CPU somehow, so that we aren't swapping data back and forth between the CPU and GPU, the system RAM and video RAM? Apparently, it's not a stupid question.
The appropriate analogy would be if you shipped a version of Debian that had a few of the configuration files renamed but otherwise was identical.
No, its most like if I wanted to ship a version of Debian with my own backports, alterations, and modifications and still call it "Debian".
The browser Debian had been calling Firefox used the exact same source as the official Firefox - it just had security patches back-ported to versions Mozilla was no longer supporting, along with a few patches to use Debian's directory layout and to use Debian's existing system libraries versus statically linking copies of them.
Yeah, so... it's not exactly the same source as Firefox. Basically, Mozilla said they don't want people to call the program "Firefox" unless they use approved/official builds. Debian wants to be able to use their own patches and backports without Mozilla approval.
Both positions seem completely reasonable to me, and it sounds like the whole thing has reached a reasonable conclusion.
Basically, the codebase ceases to be Open Source if any product compiled from it is to be called Firefox. Very few other projects engage in this sort of control freakery and branding. If all Open Source projects behaved as Mozilla does, we'd have a real problem on our hands.
Not really. Trademark enforcement is separate issue than whether something is open-sourced. See, many open-sourced products have trademarks that they don't want other people using. You think the Debian people would like it if someone else put out something called "Debian Linux" that was not made from the real/authorized Debian packages or codebase? Really, think about it. If I started distributing my own version of "Debian Linux", which was really a rebranded copy of Redhat with spyware installed, don't you think the Debian people would want me to stop using that name?
But if it's open-sourced, no matter what trademark issues there are, you can always take the code and rebrand it. You rebrand it with your own trademarks, which you can then protect or not. But keep in mind that if you don't protect your trademarks, you lose rights to them.
Yeah, I'm just saying that USB isn't recent. It's been commonplace for what, 10 years now? So more than 10 years ago when Apple was under different management, using totally different hardware and a totally different operating system, they had a couple ports that were not the same as what most computer manufacturers used.
No, I know, but these things are still a bit problematic. Let's say I come up with a theory where there are 4 intelligences and you come up with another where there are 4, but the 4 are different. Or let's say another guy comes up with 5. How do you know you're capturing all the different ways of being "intelligent". How do you know for sure that your groupings/divisions are the best? And finally, how do you compare a score on interpersonal skills to a score on a mathematical skill? I think these decisions are going to be fairly arbitrary no matter what, even if there's *some* good sense or science behind it.
Apple has been using USB for a long time. Ever since the original iMac in the late '90s, Apple has been using USB as the standard port for keyboard/mouse at least.
Also, it certainly won't happen until we come to a common idea of what "intelligence" is. I've met plenty of people who are good at math who can't string a sentence together. I've known people who are good at math and writing, and just do the stupidest things. So what's intelligence made up of? Quick computer-like operations? Clear thinking and deep analysis? Good judgement?
It seems to me that many people have various levels of all sorts of different mental capabilities, all of which we lump into "intelligence", without really distinguishing. Any test you come up with will arbitrarily choose a subset of these capabilities and rate them to an arbitrary level of importance, and that's the best-case scenario, assuming everything is accurate. And what about people who are lacking specifically in the mental capabilities that make a person a good test-taker?
Non-standard? Maybe, I guess it depends on what "standard" you're alluding to. "Doesn't come with Windows pre-installed" could be considered "non-standard", just because it's unusual. But "missing parts"?
Well, you and the guy you're responding to are making two different statements which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Lots of huge corporations could be buying lots of crap. In fact, I'd probably hazard to say that this is probably the case.
However, Dell machines aren't all crap. Their low-end machines are, the Dimensions you can get for $300 including monitor. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone unless you really can't afford better. but even in that case, they're the best crap computers you can get for $300, so it's not really worth complaining about.
Their business-line desktop computers are actually really good. The Optiplex and Precision workstations, for example. High-quality. Not necessarily the cheapest way to go, but generally worth the added expense. And part of the reason businesses go with Dell is that they have good business-level support. Their consumer level support might be a bit dense sometimes, but if I have a component die on me, I can get a new one shipped to me, to arrive within 4 hours of calling Dell and talking to an English speaking American who knows some things about computers.
I have no connection to Dell other than being a pleased customer, and I'm an Apple user (typing this on a MacBook Pro right now). Dell computers aren't as pretty as Apple's, but the only real problem with them is the OS that most of them ship with.
Eventually apple will announce the costs of maintaining OSX doesn't meet the interest of the public, and they will start going to head to head with Dell selling windows desktops.
Funny, I'd be more inclined to think the opposite. It seems more likely to me that, as Vista crashes and burns and IT departments reject it for it's insane piracy-protection measures, Dell and other PC vendors will look at Apple's success and wonder if they should start offering their own optimized versions of open-sourced software. Not that I think it's entirely likely right now, but more likely than Apple dropping OSX.
Developers haven't rejected OSX. Some developers just haven't been releasing OSX software because OSX lacked the market share to be a profitable platform for them. That appears to be changing, as Apple is getting more and more mainstream attention. In fact, I've heard a lot of developers say that Apple is a great platform to develop for, and that Xcode is a great environment (can't vouch for that, since I'm not a programmer).
Finally, I just can't imagine Steve Jobs will ever, so long as he's in control of the company, ship Macintoshes booting into Windows by default. I know, people doubted the Intel switch, said it would never happen, etc. But this is different. You're talking about Steve Jobs and Microsoft Windows here.
Mac OS X is a decent OS, but not good enough to convince companies and schools around the world to spend thousands on software to make the transition away from the more commonly used Windows OS.
I'm not sure it's an issue of OSX being "good enough". I'm sure if they offered it for generic PCs, I'm sure they could make sales on it. I would bet that Apple would make more retail sales on that first day they sold OSX for generic computers than Microsoft will sell retail versions of Vista on its first day of release.
The problem is that it doesn't seem to be the business Apple wants to be in. They get a lot of benefits from their solutions being end-to-end. If you have a Mac running iTunes on OSX connecting to an iPod, then Apple has a lot of control over the user experience, and they can offer integration, compatibility, and reliability that Dell can't match. That seems to be the business that the people at Apple want to be in, and given their recent success, I can see why.
Licensees may not ship timely updates to hardware to run the latest releases of MacOSX. Look at how many PCs are still shipped with Intel integrated graphics which will suck on Vista
Of course, that's not such a problem with Apple, as most recent versions of OSX are getting faster on older hardware, and OSX isn't an immense resource hog (at least not compared to comparable desktop environments like Windows, Gnome, and KDE).
This doesn't mean Apple should design and build everything in house.
And they don't. They exert a lot of control over their computers' designs, but they don't design and build everything in-house.
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I can think of two basic ways this could happen. First, it could be sabotage. Some guy might be infecting these things with a virus for some reason. It doesn't seem like an effective way to spread viruses, though. But you know, maybe there's just some guy at the iPod factory who is a dick and thinks it's funny to put viruses on them.
The other way I can imagine this could easily happen to a small number of iPods is if there's a QA process that involves hooking a random sample of iPods to Windows machines, and some worker was using one of these machines had managed to get it infected with a virus. It could even come from a machine that is supposed to scan for viruses, if the virus scanner was compromised or out-of-date.
If you RTFA (which is short), it indicates which of the two Apple believes happened.
The iMac wasn't an accident, though.
There really is a lot to this. Steve Jobs seems to have a knack for attracting talented people and getting them to make good stuff. Right after Jobs comes back to Apple, they come out with the iMac, iPod, and OSX. How's that for a hat-trick?
Maybe if Microsoft spends 5 years developing a new OS that offers no real benefit to users, but has tons of new painful anti-piracy and DRM?
Then again, Apple isn't really competing with Microsoft as much as they're competing with Dell. OSX is mostly another feature to sell the hardware.
I personally loved the Mac's back in the 90's. I built a very successful commercial retouching business where our primary software/hardware was Photoshop on OS9 Mac's. OS9 performed well as you could lock down memory and dedicate it to Photoshop (no OS swapping). This is something that is sorely missing from OS/X and Windows.
You hear that complaint a lot from people using Macs at that time, but I assure you, this was largely a problem of MacOS's memory management stinking royally, so much so that virtual memory just didn't work properly. This feature is not missing from other operating systems, as the memory management works in other operating systems.
Really, I've supported both the old MacOS and OSX, and I get questions all the time, "How can I turn off virtual memory?" The answer is, you don't. You don't need to.
I don't see how it's less simple or more cluttered than those other DEs. If you ask me, Gnome is simple and uncluttered, just about on-par with OSX, with the others being less-so. But anyway I was responding to someone who was implying that OSX was not simple, uncluttered, saturated with useless eye candy, and didn't have access to a terminal window.
I, on the other hand, would be inclined to say that OSX is simple and uncluttered, with the interface really using no more space than necessary. I do like to change the toolbars, though, to either be small icons or text-only, but not large icons and text, but that's a mistake most DEs make, enough so that I assume many people want it that way. The "eye candy" is generally used well, so that the effects give useful visual cues about what's going on. They're also used sparingly enough and efficiently enough that it doesn't end up being a meaningful draw on system resources.
And I assure you, it's quite easy to get to a bash prompt in OSX.
Are you implying that it's impossible for users to do that with Linux? I don't see any reason why, if you put the same users on Gnome or KDE, you wouldn't end up with loads of icons on the desktop.
Let's see, OSX's interface is...
simple..............check
uncluttered.......check
low color...........most interface elements are black/white/grey, so check
high contrast.....if not enough so, you can increase the contrast, I suppose, so check
has a terminal...check
So you're an OSX fan, then?
I disagree. It's true that the term "web 2.0" gets thrown around a little too much, but it seems to me that it is an attempt to label real changes happening to the way people use the internet.
The first thing going on is that people are making web applications that actually work, without using dumb plugins. That's the cool thing about AJAX. It's not he fade-in and fade-out techniques; It's about Gmail and Basecamp. Real web applications that can load/save data in sensible ways, process the data without full-page refreshes every time, and show sensible transitions between tasks, without using something like Flash. It's just HTML, Javascript, XML, which is standard and open, meaning pretty much everyone can use it. No, the technology itself isn't new, but the technology is being used in new ways, which is notable.
And this development has been one of the things that seems to have lead to increased participation on the internet. Not so long ago, most people on the web were still passive observers. The Usenet and IRC networks were a place people could participate, but Joe Sixpack didn't really use them. The web itself was largely a place for companies to send a signal one-way. These days, however, there are web applications (sometimes using AJAX) which allow Joe Sixpack to be more participatory. You're seeing more weblogs, social networking, and media sharing sites, and this time non-geeks are getting in on the act.
So again, it's not so much about being a wholly new thing. If it were supposed to be a new thing, maybe they'd call it a new thing, instead of old-thing 2.0. It's just someone's attempt to take note of a rapid change of the sorts of services offered on the net, and a rapid shift in how web technologies are being used.
Research dollars are hard to come by, and when it's confirmed that Vista totally breaks standard Office suite PC/applications, only then will it be only a matter of time until it will replace XP.
Unless it hinders Vista adoption. Seriously, if you have to replace all your software when you upgrade to Vista, a lot of IT people will be asking, "Why should we update to Vista?" and maybe even, "Why shouldn't we switch to Mac?"
That's why I think it should be optional as well.
I guess it makes some difference whether they are, in fact, tracking web-use data. If Opera chooses, they could respond to requests without logging user information or IP addresses.
What I don't understand is that I thought GPUs were made to offload a lot of graphics computations from the CPU. So why are we merging them again? Isn't a GPU supposed to be an auxillary CPU only for graphics? I'm so confused.
You've already gotten some good answers here, but I'll throw in something that I haven't seen anyone else mention explicitly: GPUs aren't only being used for 3D animation anymore. GPUs started because, in order to make graphics for games better, you needed a specialized processor to handle the 3D calculations. However, GPUs have become, in some ways, more complex and powerful than the CPU, and as that has happened, other uses have been found for all that power. turns out that there are lots of mathematical transformations that are more efficient on the specialized graphics processors, including audio/video processing and some data analysis. Some clever programmers have already started offloading some of their complex calculations from the CPU to the GPU.
This has lead many people to wonder, why don't we bring some of the GPU advancements back to the CPU somehow, so that we aren't swapping data back and forth between the CPU and GPU, the system RAM and video RAM? Apparently, it's not a stupid question.
No, its most like if I wanted to ship a version of Debian with my own backports, alterations, and modifications and still call it "Debian".
Yeah, so... it's not exactly the same source as Firefox. Basically, Mozilla said they don't want people to call the program "Firefox" unless they use approved/official builds. Debian wants to be able to use their own patches and backports without Mozilla approval.
Both positions seem completely reasonable to me, and it sounds like the whole thing has reached a reasonable conclusion.
Not really. Trademark enforcement is separate issue than whether something is open-sourced. See, many open-sourced products have trademarks that they don't want other people using. You think the Debian people would like it if someone else put out something called "Debian Linux" that was not made from the real/authorized Debian packages or codebase? Really, think about it. If I started distributing my own version of "Debian Linux", which was really a rebranded copy of Redhat with spyware installed, don't you think the Debian people would want me to stop using that name?
But if it's open-sourced, no matter what trademark issues there are, you can always take the code and rebrand it. You rebrand it with your own trademarks, which you can then protect or not. But keep in mind that if you don't protect your trademarks, you lose rights to them.
Yeah, I'm just saying that USB isn't recent. It's been commonplace for what, 10 years now? So more than 10 years ago when Apple was under different management, using totally different hardware and a totally different operating system, they had a couple ports that were not the same as what most computer manufacturers used.
No, I know, but these things are still a bit problematic. Let's say I come up with a theory where there are 4 intelligences and you come up with another where there are 4, but the 4 are different. Or let's say another guy comes up with 5. How do you know you're capturing all the different ways of being "intelligent". How do you know for sure that your groupings/divisions are the best? And finally, how do you compare a score on interpersonal skills to a score on a mathematical skill? I think these decisions are going to be fairly arbitrary no matter what, even if there's *some* good sense or science behind it.
Apple has been using USB for a long time. Ever since the original iMac in the late '90s, Apple has been using USB as the standard port for keyboard/mouse at least.
So you're complaining about Apple now based on what their hardware was like before PCI and USB?
Also, it certainly won't happen until we come to a common idea of what "intelligence" is. I've met plenty of people who are good at math who can't string a sentence together. I've known people who are good at math and writing, and just do the stupidest things. So what's intelligence made up of? Quick computer-like operations? Clear thinking and deep analysis? Good judgement?
It seems to me that many people have various levels of all sorts of different mental capabilities, all of which we lump into "intelligence", without really distinguishing. Any test you come up with will arbitrarily choose a subset of these capabilities and rate them to an arbitrary level of importance, and that's the best-case scenario, assuming everything is accurate. And what about people who are lacking specifically in the mental capabilities that make a person a good test-taker?
Non-standard? Maybe, I guess it depends on what "standard" you're alluding to. "Doesn't come with Windows pre-installed" could be considered "non-standard", just because it's unusual. But "missing parts"?
Well, you and the guy you're responding to are making two different statements which aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Lots of huge corporations could be buying lots of crap. In fact, I'd probably hazard to say that this is probably the case.
However, Dell machines aren't all crap. Their low-end machines are, the Dimensions you can get for $300 including monitor. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone unless you really can't afford better. but even in that case, they're the best crap computers you can get for $300, so it's not really worth complaining about.
Their business-line desktop computers are actually really good. The Optiplex and Precision workstations, for example. High-quality. Not necessarily the cheapest way to go, but generally worth the added expense. And part of the reason businesses go with Dell is that they have good business-level support. Their consumer level support might be a bit dense sometimes, but if I have a component die on me, I can get a new one shipped to me, to arrive within 4 hours of calling Dell and talking to an English speaking American who knows some things about computers.
I have no connection to Dell other than being a pleased customer, and I'm an Apple user (typing this on a MacBook Pro right now). Dell computers aren't as pretty as Apple's, but the only real problem with them is the OS that most of them ship with.
Eventually apple will announce the costs of maintaining OSX doesn't meet the interest of the public, and they will start going to head to head with Dell selling windows desktops.
Funny, I'd be more inclined to think the opposite. It seems more likely to me that, as Vista crashes and burns and IT departments reject it for it's insane piracy-protection measures, Dell and other PC vendors will look at Apple's success and wonder if they should start offering their own optimized versions of open-sourced software. Not that I think it's entirely likely right now, but more likely than Apple dropping OSX.
Developers haven't rejected OSX. Some developers just haven't been releasing OSX software because OSX lacked the market share to be a profitable platform for them. That appears to be changing, as Apple is getting more and more mainstream attention. In fact, I've heard a lot of developers say that Apple is a great platform to develop for, and that Xcode is a great environment (can't vouch for that, since I'm not a programmer).
Finally, I just can't imagine Steve Jobs will ever, so long as he's in control of the company, ship Macintoshes booting into Windows by default. I know, people doubted the Intel switch, said it would never happen, etc. But this is different. You're talking about Steve Jobs and Microsoft Windows here.
Mac OS X is a decent OS, but not good enough to convince companies and schools around the world to spend thousands on software to make the transition away from the more commonly used Windows OS.
I'm not sure it's an issue of OSX being "good enough". I'm sure if they offered it for generic PCs, I'm sure they could make sales on it. I would bet that Apple would make more retail sales on that first day they sold OSX for generic computers than Microsoft will sell retail versions of Vista on its first day of release.
The problem is that it doesn't seem to be the business Apple wants to be in. They get a lot of benefits from their solutions being end-to-end. If you have a Mac running iTunes on OSX connecting to an iPod, then Apple has a lot of control over the user experience, and they can offer integration, compatibility, and reliability that Dell can't match. That seems to be the business that the people at Apple want to be in, and given their recent success, I can see why.
Licensees may not ship timely updates to hardware to run the latest releases of MacOSX. Look at how many PCs are still shipped with Intel integrated graphics which will suck on Vista
Of course, that's not such a problem with Apple, as most recent versions of OSX are getting faster on older hardware, and OSX isn't an immense resource hog (at least not compared to comparable desktop environments like Windows, Gnome, and KDE).
This doesn't mean Apple should design and build everything in house.
And they don't. They exert a lot of control over their computers' designs, but they don't design and build everything in-house.