I can vouch for this in my personal case. I've had jobs, editing photos, making graphics and web sites, all on legally purchased software from Adobe and Macromedia. I've purchased these programs myself for my personal/business use.
How did I learn? On a pirated version of Photoshop, making desktop wallpaper for my own use. I sure thought they were wicked cool, too. Lots of lens flares, bezels, and drop shadows.
...but you can be sure that they don't like having any sort of middle man.
I don't think it's so much of a problem of the RIAA/MPAA not liking middle men. It's that they want to be as many of the middle-men as possible. Their whole business lies in being the "middle man".
The problem with downloads, legal or not, is it makes it so much easier to cut out the middle-men, distributing your music as directly as you like.
Bittorrent is anywhere, I can post a torrent link here and have 1000s of people all getting the latest and greatest(!?) version of Windows.
Forget the latest and greatest version of Windows; how about the latest/greatest version of Fedora Core?
I don't necessarily buy that this is a Microsoft conspiracy, but if it were, it might make sense that they would attack what is quickly becoming the preferred method of distributing Linux distributions. Bittorrent allows projects to distribute multi-gigabyte ISOs without spending tons for the bandwidth.
Well, I would think it depends on how you count "traffic". Maybe the number of transfers/connections initiated through HTTP and SMTP would be more, but if you're talking about the amount of data transfered, well.....
Think about it. When you load a page from/., what is the whole thing, 100 KB? And people are downloading 4 GB ISOs through bittorrent. It's not too surprising that a lot of internet traffic moves through bittorrent if that's the preferred method for moving large files.
Whatever it is that you're missing, I think we're all missing it.
Ok, so it's true that the success for OSX or any other desktop OS is, in some ways, "bad for Linux's prospects for the desktop". Still, there is a need as well as desire for a high-quality open-sourced desktop OS, so... something is going to fill that void.
However, insofar as we're comparing OSX to Windows, OSX probably serves as a better compliment to Linux desktops/servers. They use a lot of the same tools and protocols, and seem to have an easier time interoperating. Plus, Apple seems more willing to use open standards and file formats than Microsoft. So in that way, Apple's success could be good for Linux in general.
But it seems to me that the only effect on Linux that Apple's switch to Intel is likely to have is, it'll probably be easier for all the various Linux distros to support Macintoshes.
But I predict we'll keep hearing about how Apple moving to Intel will destroy Linux, as though Apple was going to open source OSX and make it run on generic hardware.
In my experience (and maybe this isn't entirely fair) many of the people who haven't liked the Spiderman movies simply fail to get caught up by Raimi's sensibilities about these things. People complain that it's cliched and cheesy and over-the-top in places, but it's all pretty purposefully crafted as a means to capture a certain feel to it. Keep in mind that this is the same guy as behind the "Evil Dead" movies. He created the Hercules and Xena shows, which for some reason a lot of the mainstream thought was "serious and stupid" rather than "whimsical and comedic".
In short, he's trying to blend reality with the silliness and over-the-top-edness of the comic books. The cheesiness is necessary to make the whole thing work. To make the movie ultra-realistic would be to fail to respect the Spiderman's world as we're all used to seeing it. I mean, the spider-suit itself is ridiculously flamboyant, but what are you going to do, drop it? Yeah, and swinging around Manhattan by shooting webs out of your arms doesn't.... really.... make sense either.... when you really think about it. In fact, no comic book stuff really makes sense. It's all a little silly on over-the-top. But that doesn't make it "mindless fun".
Is everything that doesn't take itself super-seriously, everything that's not ultra-realistic, is it all "mindless fun". Maybe it's very mindful about not taking itself seriously or mindful of not being ultra realistic. Was the Illiad "mindless fun" because it had gods in it? Don Quixote is "mindless fun" because it's comedic and those things would never happen? And what about "Million Dollar Baby"? Is that mindless fun, because it's just fiction?
You don't think it did too well commercially? You must be kidding.
"Like a comic book, but on film"....? I think that's why people liked it (myself included). It was probably the first example of someone making a movie based on a comic book which actually manages to capture what's good and interesting and fun about the comic book, and it still works as a movie. That it works at all is impressive, given how silly an idea it is to translate a comic book to film.
From what I can recall, here is a pretty comprehensive list the the basic possibilities with time travel that cohere with our understanding:
Null theory- the only time travel that can be accomplished is traveling forward in time by passing through all the moments between now and the future.
Single timeline, no changes possible- Everything is predestined in such a way that anything you do in the past will have already been taken into account. Your actions in the past will bring about the future you're familiar with.
Single timeline, changes possible- You can change things in the past, but be careful making any changes that would prevent you from going back in time and making those changes. That would lead to a paradox, and who knows what happens then. Maybe the universe is destroyed? (a popular theory for something so speculative) Another lesser explored possibility here is that of spontaneous creation/destruction within a time loop (i.e. I go back in time and give myself something that I have because I went back in time and gave it to myself. That object then only exists within the loop of time, and is already infinitely old.)
Multiple timelines, creational- traveling back in time automatically creates a new timeline, and all the changes you make go into the events in the new timeline. Since you're from the old timeline, which isn't being changed, no paradox is possible.
Multiple timelines, preexisting- This model is the same as the last, but supposes that every possible timeline "already" exists, so when you travel back in time, you're not "changing" anything. The distinction is minor, since talking about in what form a timeline "already" exists treats timelines as though they exist "in time". But it might make a difference if you wanted to talk about jumping into an alternate timeline without traveling backwards in time.
Most science fiction mixes these models haphazardly, so instead you get an inconsistent model of time travel.
Re:So is this movie actually good?
on
How the Batsuit Works
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I disagree with you (no insult intended). People tend to dismiss movies that are action-packed and funny as being somehow "without content". Critics and laymen both would tend to dismiss a superhero flick as being "that sort of movie" and therefore not warranting serious consideration and thought.
But if you ask me, both Spiderman movies pretty much have it all. They're actually pretty deep and interesting on the emotional level, if you're willing to take the risk of taking them seriously. They're also very funny, very exciting, etc. But don't think the fact that an idiot can appreciate a thing on one level procludes a deep thinking individual from appreciating the same thing on a deeper level. In fact, the sign of a true master is to make something that can be appreciated on many levels.
If you asked me, Raimi has shown himself to be brilliant by making the films approachable and enjoyable by the set of people who enjoy "mindless fun" types of movies without bringing any harm to the movie on a deeper critical level.
But then again, I'm something of a teenage boy when it comes to superhero movies.
That works so long as the keylogger (or whatever) is software-based. There are also hardware-based loggers that sit between the keyboard and ps/2 port, for example.
I'll probably get flammed to death for this, but I'm very sympathetic to groups that think 'net porn it too accessible and goes too far.
I'm sympathetic as well, but it seems to me that there's a difference between saying, "a problem exists" and saying "the government should fix it." For example, there are lots of things that people say that I don't want to hear, and lots of things I wouldn't want my kids to hear, but I certainly don't think that the government (federal or state) should take on the job of keeping people from saying it.
Sometimes I think kids are going to grow up completely messed us with the crazy stuff they can see on the web just by typing "sex" in google.
There are worse things. Seeing video of a sex act when you're twelve isn't so bad as having a crack-addicted mother who beats you, just to keep a perspective on these things. Luckily kids do have a way of dealing with these things. Often when they're really little, they aren't aware enough to think to look for it. Then for a little while, they're curious, but they think it's gross. By the time they really want to see it, they're pretty much ready for it, and you can't stop them anyhow.
And when kids really aren't ready for something, often it just goes over their heads anyway. I remember watching movies when I was a kid with dirty jokes in them, for example, but at the time, I didn't get what was going on. It wasn't until I went back and saw the same films as an adult that I realized what anything meant.
Personally, I'd like to see a law that makes it illegal for adult context to appear on a URL unless is has a special extension, something like ".xxx".
As others have said, there's the issue with ip addresses, and the question of who decides what should go into that ".xxx" domain. Any thought that the government should do it should be ruled unconstitutional. Plus, how would the US government enforce such things for the whole world?....
Personally, I wouldn't mind so much if there were some law that forced ISPs to provide a means to filter content on whatever people want (not just "porn") as a regulatory thing as opposed to criminal, but I don't see the need. Good ISPs who can afford to develop such solutions will provide them for competitive reasons anyway.
What would be really ideal for Apple is if people get a version of OSX running POORLY on generic x86 machines. Like, you know, it works well enough to see what's nice about the OS, but there are enough problems and bugs that most people will say, "screw this, I'll just buy an Apple."
After all, once Apple makes the switch to Intel, people should be able to run Windows and Linux on them. So you'll get everything you'll get from buying any other x86 machine, but you'll also be able to run OSX trouble-free.
But I'll bet on "getting in bed together", "sleeping together", so on and so forth.
I was thinking about this earlier today. Because, well... it's strange, Intel showing that prototype of the Mac-mini-alike a little while ago, especially if they were in negotiations with Apple.
It seems like Intel does tend to show off kind of interesting prototype devices to show developers, "Hey, look, you could do this!" and none of the developers really take the bait. Maybe part of the deal was that Apple and Intel could share some R&D or something.
The deserved it in no small degree when they made it difficult for KHTML developers to reintegrate their changes into the mainline tree.
They didn't make it difficult, they just didn't make it easy either. At least, I haven't heard allegations that Apple purposefully obfuscated code or anything of the sort.
This transition would be great by any other name. If, for instance, they continued G5 harware on the high-end, at least for a year or two...
And what do you think they're going to do? They've said they are going to release the first Intel-based Mac in a year, and the transition should be complete in 2 years. So there's your "year or two", unless you're under the impression that Apple plans to stop selling computers in the meantime.
Plus, my guess is that you'll see G5 workstations around for most of that transition year. I would think that a large motivating factor in Apple going to Intel was IBM's failure to make the G5 fit into a Powerbook, and that the first Intel systems you'll see are cool-running and energy-efficient Centrino-based Powerbooks.
Then again, don't listen to me. I didn't think Apple would actually switch to Intel.
I don't know... given the easy malleability of statistics, I'd often prefer to take a best guesstimate by someone who's semi-informed and who I trust to be impartial rather than a scientific study from anyone who might have even the slightest vested interest.
Or, what would have made a whole lot of sense would be to put BOTH a Mac running Linux and one running OSX in the tests. Like, Redhat vs. YellowDog vs. OSX. That way, we could draw out better what's an issue of hardware and what's an issue of software.
This works out extremely well for the developer, who doesn't need to spend money advertising, and gets a large amount of revenue they wouldn't have seen before.
Of course, this assumes that the product is good enough that seeing it will be enough to fuel consumer interest. If your product stinks, you have no marketing to push consumers into liking it.
And that's a problem for companies selling it. Marketing is more of a sure science than any means of coming up with good products that people will actually use.
You can only thrust so much work at kids, but the REAL learning starts happening when the kids start LEARNING FOR THEMSELVES and feel comfortable coming to the teacher with all sorts of difficult questions.
This also reminds me of an old Platonic idea that the best way to keep someone from truly understand something is to keep telling them. Think about that very sensible thing you mom kept telling you for your entire life, and as sensible as it was, when you were a teenager, for you it was the furthest thing from the truth. Maybe even now you haven't caught on. It's not until you've learned to stop listening and then learned to stop ignoring that the truth of these things start to filter in.
Now I'm not saying we shouldn't try to teach our kids, but there comes a point when thoughtlessly pushing a kid towards something is only going to push them away from that very thing. The harder you push, the worse that thing looks in their eyes, and the more they run.
I know I was one of those kids. In high school, I stopped doing my homework. If I couldn't get it done in class, I just wasn't going to bother. Teachers kept threatening to flunk me, my parents threatened to ground me, and I dug my heals in deeper. Finally, some brilliant teacher told me, "Look, I'm not going to try to force you to do your homework, but I'm interested in what you said in class the other day. Could you write a paper explaining that idea?" I worked my ass off for him, because he treated me like I was an adult capable of making decisions. He asked questions as though my thoughts and opinions were worth something. And he didn't give several hours of homework per night, as each of my other teachers did (meaning I doing all my homework meant having no time for anything else).
And this, too, is an interesting point worth mentioning. I went through a well respected school system, and you were given (literally) more homework per night than you could do in a night. Even if you weren't in honors classes. The students who "did it all", i.e. the honors students, the good students-- they cheated. I was friends with them, and they sat around the lunch table, copying each other's homework. Sometimes they even planned it, breaking up the homework, as in, "you do chemistry today, and I'll do the trig."
Though I suppose this IS good training for "real life", that the ambitious who are willing to cheat will be the most successful. Still, I wonder if that's really how we want our schools to work.
If I understand this "prime mover" idea, you're saying that every event has a cause, and that only God could have started the ball rolling by causing the first event.
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event.
Actually, the idea of a "prime mover" is an older philosophic idea, the oldest recorded discussion being from Aristotle. Aristotle actually argues that time must be infinite in both directions, but this doesn't hamper the existence of a prime mover. In order to understand the prime mover, you have to understand Aristotle's ideas about "cause".
The prime mover is the formal cause of everything, but not the efficient cause of anything. In modern times, we've forgotten such distinctions and only talk about efficient causes.
Having 40 billion distros simply is not helping Linux's push to the desktop.
I wouldn't be so sure. If you have 40 different distros, that doesn't stop a couple from being really good. Like, why would you suppose that Redhat is any worse of an OS for the existence of some little project you've never heard of? Would MacOS X be worse if someone started a new project off of the Darwin base?
I don't want to get in a whole thing here though... arguments abound on/. for the evolutionary "survival of the fittest" approach, so you don't need me to spout off.
I mostly agree that people are overly gadget-happy, but I don't think this case is too ridiculous. I know I can't stay organized with a pen and paper nearly as well as using something as simple as MacJournal. Even simple text files are searchable and copy/paste-able. I mean, it's no fun to have to go home and transcribe something when your handwriting is as bad as mine.
I end up carrying my laptop around all the time. I write a lot, and I've tried a pen and notepad, and it drives me nuts.
Now, especially when you consider the advances with digital paper, would it be so insane to come up with a small simple word-processing device (doesn't really need to be more than B&W) with a decent fold-out or slide-out keyboard? Though, with laptops, PDAs, and such, I'm not sure there's much room in the market.
Re:let the user choose...
on
Just a Phone?
·
· Score: 1
Honestly, yes, I think it would be good if there were some more choice. For example, I simply don't want a web browser or IM on my phone. If I could remove those from my menu system and get easier access to other things, I would. However, I would like a 2MP camera in my phone. If they could remove all the circuitry and whatnot for data transmission and make it cheaper and/or smaller, I'd be happy about that, but I doubt it would make a difference.
On the other hand, I know a friend at work who scoffs at the idea of a camera phone, but likes browsing the web on his tiny little screen, which I think seems silly. Go figure, different strokes and all.
Anyway, what really annoys me about the whole thing is the general feeling that the feature creep is really just a ploy by carriers to snare you into getting hooked on other "services". My $30 a month that I agreed to isn't enough, and neither is the $15 extra dollars they collect for "taxes" and "fees" every month. No, they want my to pay for e-mail and IM and sending pictures to friends and downloading ringtones and crap. I mean, I guess there are people that want all that, but just don't push it on me.
Maybe it's just paranoid, but every time I look at my phone and see that the menu system I have to go through has 7 items on the top level, only 2 are of any use (the "phone book" and the "settings") and all the rest are pay services that I don't want-- well, I get the same sinking feeling I get as when I check my e-mail and find that I've received 20 spam e-mails in one day.
$700 is a very reasonable price for people who actually NEED Photoshop...If you make your living as a graphic artist $700 once every couple of years is nothing...
So, just to state outright what you're obviously implying, "only people making their living as professional graphic artists NEED Photoshop." Now, in what sense do you mean "NEED". Is this in the hunter/gather sense of the word, like you NEED a base level of nutrition to stay alive? No. Do you mean that, only for these people will Photoshop be useful? No. So what do you mean?
I can only guess that you mean, only people who make enough of their profit from Photoshop work to justify spending $700 on Photoshop NEED Photoshop, and those people don't have a problem spending that much money on Photoshop, so no worries. All the rest of us who could really use some decent tools, TS. Because there aren't any amateurs who could possibly use any of Photoshop's advanced features, right? Like, there aren't tons of people making graphics for personal web pages, and there aren't people trying to learn Photoshop for the sake of one day becoming a Pro graphic designer, nope. I couldn't possibly find Photoshop's new "Vanishing Point" feature useful for removing unwanted portions of my personal photo collection, right? Right?
Keep in mind that you're talking to someone who learned enough graphic design on a stolen copy of Photoshop while in high school to have had a couple of paying jobs since then. In fact, I've had a total of 3 copies of Photoshop purchased either by me or for me that simply wouldn't have been purchased if I hadn't learned on a stolen copy first. And I've taught a couple others how to use these sorts of tools, probably accounting for at least another purchase or two.
Now, was it really so bad for Adobe that I had access to an illegal copy at 15, when I would never have been able to afford even $100 to spend on Photoshop? I don't think so. Now that I'm not working professionally, would Adobe be out anything if I found myself an updated (illegal) version of photoshop to play around with? I don't see how. I'm certainly not going to buy a copy when I don't make any money off of it. At least, I'm not going to spend $700 (or even $150) just to play with the features they've added in the latest version when I already own an older copy. And yet "Vanishing Point" seems like it could come in handy for me.
To sum up, I don't think things are as simple as you make them seem.
What are you talking about? I've bought 3 pieces of shareware from small developers in the past 2 months. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and Macromedia all distribute time-limited or feature-crippled trial-versions of their software.
People don't pay for crappy shareware... well, because it's crappy. Maybe some people sometimes download cracks or serial numbers to get around registration schemes, but that's really not different from normal "piracy".
I think what really happened is you saw a shareware explosion around 10 years ago right when computers were getting popular and everyone tried their hand at writing software. A lot of the crappy developers died off and a lot of the developers making good/successful software got more professional (or bought out by bigger companies, or bigger companies made competing products and drove them out of business).
Additionally, I'd guess many of the developers who had been writing shareware (but didn't care much about profits) probably switched over to open-source models so that they could attract other developers to help them. Also, there were some who realized their products weren't really worth enough to try to force people to pay anything, and switched themselves over to "donationware".
But I don't see how the shareware model "fizzled out" or why that's "a perfect example of what piracy can do to innovation".
Slashdot Mirror
How did I learn? On a pirated version of Photoshop, making desktop wallpaper for my own use. I sure thought they were wicked cool, too. Lots of lens flares, bezels, and drop shadows.
I don't think it's so much of a problem of the RIAA/MPAA not liking middle men. It's that they want to be as many of the middle-men as possible. Their whole business lies in being the "middle man".
The problem with downloads, legal or not, is it makes it so much easier to cut out the middle-men, distributing your music as directly as you like.
Forget the latest and greatest version of Windows; how about the latest/greatest version of Fedora Core?
I don't necessarily buy that this is a Microsoft conspiracy, but if it were, it might make sense that they would attack what is quickly becoming the preferred method of distributing Linux distributions. Bittorrent allows projects to distribute multi-gigabyte ISOs without spending tons for the bandwidth.
Think about it. When you load a page from /., what is the whole thing, 100 KB? And people are downloading 4 GB ISOs through bittorrent. It's not too surprising that a lot of internet traffic moves through bittorrent if that's the preferred method for moving large files.
Ok, so it's true that the success for OSX or any other desktop OS is, in some ways, "bad for Linux's prospects for the desktop". Still, there is a need as well as desire for a high-quality open-sourced desktop OS, so... something is going to fill that void.
However, insofar as we're comparing OSX to Windows, OSX probably serves as a better compliment to Linux desktops/servers. They use a lot of the same tools and protocols, and seem to have an easier time interoperating. Plus, Apple seems more willing to use open standards and file formats than Microsoft. So in that way, Apple's success could be good for Linux in general.
But it seems to me that the only effect on Linux that Apple's switch to Intel is likely to have is, it'll probably be easier for all the various Linux distros to support Macintoshes.
But I predict we'll keep hearing about how Apple moving to Intel will destroy Linux, as though Apple was going to open source OSX and make it run on generic hardware.
In short, he's trying to blend reality with the silliness and over-the-top-edness of the comic books. The cheesiness is necessary to make the whole thing work. To make the movie ultra-realistic would be to fail to respect the Spiderman's world as we're all used to seeing it. I mean, the spider-suit itself is ridiculously flamboyant, but what are you going to do, drop it? Yeah, and swinging around Manhattan by shooting webs out of your arms doesn't.... really.... make sense either.... when you really think about it. In fact, no comic book stuff really makes sense. It's all a little silly on over-the-top. But that doesn't make it "mindless fun".
Is everything that doesn't take itself super-seriously, everything that's not ultra-realistic, is it all "mindless fun". Maybe it's very mindful about not taking itself seriously or mindful of not being ultra realistic. Was the Illiad "mindless fun" because it had gods in it? Don Quixote is "mindless fun" because it's comedic and those things would never happen? And what about "Million Dollar Baby"? Is that mindless fun, because it's just fiction?
"Like a comic book, but on film"....? I think that's why people liked it (myself included). It was probably the first example of someone making a movie based on a comic book which actually manages to capture what's good and interesting and fun about the comic book, and it still works as a movie. That it works at all is impressive, given how silly an idea it is to translate a comic book to film.
- Null theory- the only time travel that can be accomplished is traveling forward in time by passing through all the moments between now and the future.
- Single timeline, no changes possible- Everything is predestined in such a way that anything you do in the past will have already been taken into account. Your actions in the past will bring about the future you're familiar with.
- Single timeline, changes possible- You can change things in the past, but be careful making any changes that would prevent you from going back in time and making those changes. That would lead to a paradox, and who knows what happens then. Maybe the universe is destroyed? (a popular theory for something so speculative) Another lesser explored possibility here is that of spontaneous creation/destruction within a time loop (i.e. I go back in time and give myself something that I have because I went back in time and gave it to myself. That object then only exists within the loop of time, and is already infinitely old.)
- Multiple timelines, creational- traveling back in time automatically creates a new timeline, and all the changes you make go into the events in the new timeline. Since you're from the old timeline, which isn't being changed, no paradox is possible.
- Multiple timelines, preexisting- This model is the same as the last, but supposes that every possible timeline "already" exists, so when you travel back in time, you're not "changing" anything. The distinction is minor, since talking about in what form a timeline "already" exists treats timelines as though they exist "in time". But it might make a difference if you wanted to talk about jumping into an alternate timeline without traveling backwards in time.
Most science fiction mixes these models haphazardly, so instead you get an inconsistent model of time travel.But if you ask me, both Spiderman movies pretty much have it all. They're actually pretty deep and interesting on the emotional level, if you're willing to take the risk of taking them seriously. They're also very funny, very exciting, etc. But don't think the fact that an idiot can appreciate a thing on one level procludes a deep thinking individual from appreciating the same thing on a deeper level. In fact, the sign of a true master is to make something that can be appreciated on many levels.
If you asked me, Raimi has shown himself to be brilliant by making the films approachable and enjoyable by the set of people who enjoy "mindless fun" types of movies without bringing any harm to the movie on a deeper critical level.
But then again, I'm something of a teenage boy when it comes to superhero movies.
That works so long as the keylogger (or whatever) is software-based. There are also hardware-based loggers that sit between the keyboard and ps/2 port, for example.
I'm sympathetic as well, but it seems to me that there's a difference between saying, "a problem exists" and saying "the government should fix it." For example, there are lots of things that people say that I don't want to hear, and lots of things I wouldn't want my kids to hear, but I certainly don't think that the government (federal or state) should take on the job of keeping people from saying it.
Sometimes I think kids are going to grow up completely messed us with the crazy stuff they can see on the web just by typing "sex" in google.
There are worse things. Seeing video of a sex act when you're twelve isn't so bad as having a crack-addicted mother who beats you, just to keep a perspective on these things. Luckily kids do have a way of dealing with these things. Often when they're really little, they aren't aware enough to think to look for it. Then for a little while, they're curious, but they think it's gross. By the time they really want to see it, they're pretty much ready for it, and you can't stop them anyhow.
And when kids really aren't ready for something, often it just goes over their heads anyway. I remember watching movies when I was a kid with dirty jokes in them, for example, but at the time, I didn't get what was going on. It wasn't until I went back and saw the same films as an adult that I realized what anything meant.
Personally, I'd like to see a law that makes it illegal for adult context to appear on a URL unless is has a special extension, something like ".xxx".
As others have said, there's the issue with ip addresses, and the question of who decides what should go into that ".xxx" domain. Any thought that the government should do it should be ruled unconstitutional. Plus, how would the US government enforce such things for the whole world?....
Personally, I wouldn't mind so much if there were some law that forced ISPs to provide a means to filter content on whatever people want (not just "porn") as a regulatory thing as opposed to criminal, but I don't see the need. Good ISPs who can afford to develop such solutions will provide them for competitive reasons anyway.
After all, once Apple makes the switch to Intel, people should be able to run Windows and Linux on them. So you'll get everything you'll get from buying any other x86 machine, but you'll also be able to run OSX trouble-free.
I was thinking about this earlier today. Because, well... it's strange, Intel showing that prototype of the Mac-mini-alike a little while ago, especially if they were in negotiations with Apple.
It seems like Intel does tend to show off kind of interesting prototype devices to show developers, "Hey, look, you could do this!" and none of the developers really take the bait. Maybe part of the deal was that Apple and Intel could share some R&D or something.
They didn't make it difficult, they just didn't make it easy either. At least, I haven't heard allegations that Apple purposefully obfuscated code or anything of the sort.
And what do you think they're going to do? They've said they are going to release the first Intel-based Mac in a year, and the transition should be complete in 2 years. So there's your "year or two", unless you're under the impression that Apple plans to stop selling computers in the meantime.
Plus, my guess is that you'll see G5 workstations around for most of that transition year. I would think that a large motivating factor in Apple going to Intel was IBM's failure to make the G5 fit into a Powerbook, and that the first Intel systems you'll see are cool-running and energy-efficient Centrino-based Powerbooks.
Then again, don't listen to me. I didn't think Apple would actually switch to Intel.
I don't know... given the easy malleability of statistics, I'd often prefer to take a best guesstimate by someone who's semi-informed and who I trust to be impartial rather than a scientific study from anyone who might have even the slightest vested interest.
Or, what would have made a whole lot of sense would be to put BOTH a Mac running Linux and one running OSX in the tests. Like, Redhat vs. YellowDog vs. OSX. That way, we could draw out better what's an issue of hardware and what's an issue of software.
Of course, this assumes that the product is good enough that seeing it will be enough to fuel consumer interest. If your product stinks, you have no marketing to push consumers into liking it.
And that's a problem for companies selling it. Marketing is more of a sure science than any means of coming up with good products that people will actually use.
This also reminds me of an old Platonic idea that the best way to keep someone from truly understand something is to keep telling them. Think about that very sensible thing you mom kept telling you for your entire life, and as sensible as it was, when you were a teenager, for you it was the furthest thing from the truth. Maybe even now you haven't caught on. It's not until you've learned to stop listening and then learned to stop ignoring that the truth of these things start to filter in.
Now I'm not saying we shouldn't try to teach our kids, but there comes a point when thoughtlessly pushing a kid towards something is only going to push them away from that very thing. The harder you push, the worse that thing looks in their eyes, and the more they run.
I know I was one of those kids. In high school, I stopped doing my homework. If I couldn't get it done in class, I just wasn't going to bother. Teachers kept threatening to flunk me, my parents threatened to ground me, and I dug my heals in deeper. Finally, some brilliant teacher told me, "Look, I'm not going to try to force you to do your homework, but I'm interested in what you said in class the other day. Could you write a paper explaining that idea?" I worked my ass off for him, because he treated me like I was an adult capable of making decisions. He asked questions as though my thoughts and opinions were worth something. And he didn't give several hours of homework per night, as each of my other teachers did (meaning I doing all my homework meant having no time for anything else).
And this, too, is an interesting point worth mentioning. I went through a well respected school system, and you were given (literally) more homework per night than you could do in a night. Even if you weren't in honors classes. The students who "did it all", i.e. the honors students, the good students-- they cheated. I was friends with them, and they sat around the lunch table, copying each other's homework. Sometimes they even planned it, breaking up the homework, as in, "you do chemistry today, and I'll do the trig."
Though I suppose this IS good training for "real life", that the ambitious who are willing to cheat will be the most successful. Still, I wonder if that's really how we want our schools to work.
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event.
Actually, the idea of a "prime mover" is an older philosophic idea, the oldest recorded discussion being from Aristotle. Aristotle actually argues that time must be infinite in both directions, but this doesn't hamper the existence of a prime mover. In order to understand the prime mover, you have to understand Aristotle's ideas about "cause".
The prime mover is the formal cause of everything, but not the efficient cause of anything. In modern times, we've forgotten such distinctions and only talk about efficient causes.
I wouldn't be so sure. If you have 40 different distros, that doesn't stop a couple from being really good. Like, why would you suppose that Redhat is any worse of an OS for the existence of some little project you've never heard of? Would MacOS X be worse if someone started a new project off of the Darwin base?
I don't want to get in a whole thing here though... arguments abound on /. for the evolutionary "survival of the fittest" approach, so you don't need me to spout off.
I end up carrying my laptop around all the time. I write a lot, and I've tried a pen and notepad, and it drives me nuts.
Now, especially when you consider the advances with digital paper, would it be so insane to come up with a small simple word-processing device (doesn't really need to be more than B&W) with a decent fold-out or slide-out keyboard? Though, with laptops, PDAs, and such, I'm not sure there's much room in the market.
On the other hand, I know a friend at work who scoffs at the idea of a camera phone, but likes browsing the web on his tiny little screen, which I think seems silly. Go figure, different strokes and all.
Anyway, what really annoys me about the whole thing is the general feeling that the feature creep is really just a ploy by carriers to snare you into getting hooked on other "services". My $30 a month that I agreed to isn't enough, and neither is the $15 extra dollars they collect for "taxes" and "fees" every month. No, they want my to pay for e-mail and IM and sending pictures to friends and downloading ringtones and crap. I mean, I guess there are people that want all that, but just don't push it on me.
Maybe it's just paranoid, but every time I look at my phone and see that the menu system I have to go through has 7 items on the top level, only 2 are of any use (the "phone book" and the "settings") and all the rest are pay services that I don't want-- well, I get the same sinking feeling I get as when I check my e-mail and find that I've received 20 spam e-mails in one day.
So, just to state outright what you're obviously implying, "only people making their living as professional graphic artists NEED Photoshop." Now, in what sense do you mean "NEED". Is this in the hunter/gather sense of the word, like you NEED a base level of nutrition to stay alive? No. Do you mean that, only for these people will Photoshop be useful? No. So what do you mean?
I can only guess that you mean, only people who make enough of their profit from Photoshop work to justify spending $700 on Photoshop NEED Photoshop, and those people don't have a problem spending that much money on Photoshop, so no worries. All the rest of us who could really use some decent tools, TS. Because there aren't any amateurs who could possibly use any of Photoshop's advanced features, right? Like, there aren't tons of people making graphics for personal web pages, and there aren't people trying to learn Photoshop for the sake of one day becoming a Pro graphic designer, nope. I couldn't possibly find Photoshop's new "Vanishing Point" feature useful for removing unwanted portions of my personal photo collection, right? Right?
Keep in mind that you're talking to someone who learned enough graphic design on a stolen copy of Photoshop while in high school to have had a couple of paying jobs since then. In fact, I've had a total of 3 copies of Photoshop purchased either by me or for me that simply wouldn't have been purchased if I hadn't learned on a stolen copy first. And I've taught a couple others how to use these sorts of tools, probably accounting for at least another purchase or two.
Now, was it really so bad for Adobe that I had access to an illegal copy at 15, when I would never have been able to afford even $100 to spend on Photoshop? I don't think so. Now that I'm not working professionally, would Adobe be out anything if I found myself an updated (illegal) version of photoshop to play around with? I don't see how. I'm certainly not going to buy a copy when I don't make any money off of it. At least, I'm not going to spend $700 (or even $150) just to play with the features they've added in the latest version when I already own an older copy. And yet "Vanishing Point" seems like it could come in handy for me.
To sum up, I don't think things are as simple as you make them seem.
People don't pay for crappy shareware... well, because it's crappy. Maybe some people sometimes download cracks or serial numbers to get around registration schemes, but that's really not different from normal "piracy".
I think what really happened is you saw a shareware explosion around 10 years ago right when computers were getting popular and everyone tried their hand at writing software. A lot of the crappy developers died off and a lot of the developers making good/successful software got more professional (or bought out by bigger companies, or bigger companies made competing products and drove them out of business).
Additionally, I'd guess many of the developers who had been writing shareware (but didn't care much about profits) probably switched over to open-source models so that they could attract other developers to help them. Also, there were some who realized their products weren't really worth enough to try to force people to pay anything, and switched themselves over to "donationware".
But I don't see how the shareware model "fizzled out" or why that's "a perfect example of what piracy can do to innovation".