I don't know why Oracle replication suddenly qualifies a software for enterprise class
\{machiavelli}
Any feature that allows you to move your data off of my platform is an "enterprise" feature.
You can pay me a little ransom, and we'll make sure nothing happens to your precious data, or you can pay us a ton upfront, and you can have it back (mostly) unharmed.
all they have to do is download a copy of mediawiki, add some custom templates for "persons of interest" and "known criminals", and then they can rename it Okhrana.
I can't find the citation, I read it originally in Nabokov i think, but the Okhrana at the turn of the century had what could be called the first wiki. They had index cards about the size of a sheet of A4, one per person. On the card they would have the person's name in the center, and then branching out would be lines to other names, and these would branch out to others on that card if they were relevant to the subject. The lines were color coded; red would be "politically subversive relationship" or green would be "casual relationship" etc. Every time they observed a relationship between 2 people, they'd note it on the cards and look for connections.
So, what you're saying is that the brain isn't like a truck, but it's actually a bunch of tubes? You can't just pull your brain up and load it and drive it away, 'cause it's tubes.
Ha ha only serious. The reason you can't buy the golden record as a multimedia CD-ROM (or anything else) is because the music and images on it are under copyright, and the selections were only released to NASA for use by alien audiences only.:p
As someone who recently had his HD replaced on AppleCare (a four-day turnaround), I think Apple puts some very lame hard disks in its computers. My super-duper top-of-the-line G5 shipped with with a Western Digital crapfactory, and of course the applecare replacement was another WD. At lest they stopped putting DeathStars in them. OTOH, my old Performa 6200 had a Quatum in it from the factory, it was in use for about four years with nary a problem.
Why will the dust changing from white to black make a difference?
A defect on the film itself is always black, regardless of what kind of film it is (we're talking about stuff that happens to the film after it's been removed from the camera). If you have a black defect on the neg, and then reverse it, it goes white. A positive doesn't have to be reversed, so the dust on it stays black. Think about it: take a photo with your lens cap on, and then sprinkle some dust on the negative, and then print it. The negative is clear, and the dust effectively dodges the positive. Meanwhile, sprinkling dust on the positive has zero effect, since the positive already has 100% density.
Does Super 35 only occupy what had been the optical audio, and not the magnetic audio?
Couple things: first, there are no magnetic 35mm processes in current circulation. The only (theatrical) processes that used magnetic 35mm film (like Fox CinemaScope) exposed full aperture and it was very trouble-prone (oxide would flake off prints, prints could only be made at real-time, etc.) 70mm always used magnetic tracks on the print, but the existing number of 70mm projection booths is probably in the bare hundreds at this point, and these all presently use the Dolby Digital or DTS. When I say 35mm mag, I mean a piece of audio tape, 35mm wide with some perfs so that it can travel through a film mechanism. Such was the gold standard audio recording format from 1950 until 1998 or so (we still make mag film for archival, but our first choice when storing the mixes is MO disks, DLT, AIT, LTO, pick your poison).
Second: Super 35 is a camera format, or really a family of camera formats, which is to say, film exposed with a Super 35 aperture is not meant to be delivered on a release print. Again if memory serves, Super 35 is full aperture, and then matted, optically printed and anamorphosed to fit in the space on the release print allotted to image. There are really only two kinds of prints in theaters, "FLAT" (which is 1.85, spherical, matted to fit) and "SCOPE" (which is 2.35-2.4, anamorphic). Super 35, Vistavision, Cinemascope etc. all get the squeeze. I am not a DP, and I'm getting this all from my old ASC manual, so take it with a grain of salt.
Super 35 is a silent format; film exposed Super 35 cannot hold an analogue optical sound track, so it gets matted/squeezed into a format that can. Theoretically, you could ship prints without an analogue track and just have Dolby Digital (between the perfs) and SDDS (another one of those pesky Sony formats that started strong but faded in the stretch). But, most of the theaters on Earth can only show analogue optical sound, Dolby SR at best, so the optical track is retained for compatibility.
Lastly, what's up with Panasonic mastering Blu-ray with MPEG-4 before Sony?
It's a very big company, and the people who work for SPE really have zero interaction with the people from SCE, so I couldn't tell you. I would observe that Sony Pictures always has this independent feel -- it's much more Columbia Pictures than a division of Sony, just as Warners is very much it's own thing, and not a subsidiary of a magazine-internet service company. FWIW, I have a Quad G5 under my desk (just like all sound designers, regardless of their studio), and not a Vaio (as all the corporate employees seem to).
I would also observe that Panasonic/Matsushita does not (or no longer does) own a movie studio (they had controlling interest in Universal thru the 90s). Since the consumer electronics div isn't afraid of goring any oxes in a media division, and isn't still trying to sell the ATRACS coder (the basis of MiniDisk, true, but also the basis of SDDS), they may have more freedom to maneuver. Just an observation.
Funny you ask, we recently had a special edition of The Natural in the shop...
For picture, the best you can get is either an interpositive (which is just one generation down from the camera negative), or the camera negative itself. The camera neg is often in not great shape, though, since it's been cut and A-B rolled. Also dust on the interpositive looks black, whereas dust on the cam neg looks white, and camera neg doesn't have the printer lights from timing I recall (I'm a sound guy, if someone at a lab is reading, please correct me). Interpositives are low-contrast prints of the camera negative, on one strip, and they're usually only run thru a printer a few times, once to strike the IP itself, and once to strike a few internegatives (these are what release prints are struck from).
For sound, the sound optical is usually contact printed onto the IP, but we almost always go back to the original Dialogue/Music/FX stems, which are recorded on 35mm magnetic film. 35mm mag film actually has quite high fidelity, nearly 70dB dynamic range and at least 15 kHz on the high end, so often the the mag sounds a bit better than what is on the optical. As well, the stems will have the discrete speaker channels (particularly the center speaker and surround), which are derived from the optical but do not actually exist on it, so we can "widen" the original mix from it's original format (either 4-channel Dolby Stereo or less) into a true 5.1.
If the filmmaker is still alive, he/she'll often sit thru the mix (my end of it) and have some new sound FX cut to modernize the sound, and maybe even try to rearrange some dialogue he didn't like or tweak the music levels (since we have separated stems, he can change either DIA, MX or FX without affecting the other two.) The Superman DVD WB has out right now is a good example of this from a sound point of view (also a great movie).
Coincidentally, The Natural was released and is owned by TriStar Pictures, which was bought in the late 80s by Columbia, which was itself bought in the early 1990s by... Sony. (fair disclosure: Sony PIctures Entertainment is my current employer).
He was sure that if men traversed the Van Allen Belts, they would become poisoned by radioactivity and die. If he and Jerome Wiesner had their way, there would have been no manned space program, only robot probes.
Total flame: Without acknowledging the accuracy of your "remembrance," imagine how much money we could have saved for a Superconducting Supercollider if we hadn't gone and built a damn space station to help us sort tiny screws in space.
OT: the new comment system should strip leading blackquote and cite elements from the one-liner preview.
I think Apple is sticking with a good thing until people get comfortable with Intel being in a Mac
Oh how oh how I wish they had stuck with the "good things" like PCIx and PATA controllers on the motherboard, such that my last 3 upgrades didn't require me buying either completely new Pro Tools cards or storage for every upgrade.
Yes I know they had their reasons, but I'm one of those few mac users that actually uses the extra drive bays and peripheral slots, and they've been very cruel to my kind over the last three years.
One has to hope there's an unreleased product that'll sit between the iMac/Mac minis and the Mac Pros.
Targetting what market? There's the pros who do video and design and creative stuff, where the CPU, even at these rates, is the cheapest part of their setup. Then there's the home users, who do emails and edit DV movies with the iMac and mini for around a grand.
You seem to be positing a large group of unserved consumers who use their machines at home for high-speed graphically-intensive applications. Who on earth would need a home system for real-time simulations, with digital audio, physics modelling and high frame-per-second...
You got a link for that particular feature, er what? I've never seen a Windows user use such a thing (and I know many rather proficient ones), so even if it exists, it might be unreliable or poorly exposed.
I suspect they may still be gnawing on ZFS for a future version, but for now it would appear the "Time Machine" is built on top of HFS+, since there is no talk of reformatting your drives to take advantage of the new feature.
As well, the keynote mentioned that Time Machine could also be used to back up a file system to another hard drive, which is not exactly what ZFS is or does, and will be interesting to see how they implement it-- I've been looking for a Retrospect replacement for quite a while, and if Time Machine can do the backups to/dev/sa0, then I'm done.
I was running OS 9 and had installed a particular shareware program that would sequence text of a fixed vocabulary into speech - it used a sampled voice to generate air-traffic-control style messages for a flight simulator. It had audio files named after each word in the vocabulary, such as "hold short", "alpha" , "bravo", etc. It had numbers, and it had the word "point", which was cleverly named with ASCII character 46, also known as ".".
One day, I upgrade to OSX, and the program doesn't work anymore, so I put it and its resources in the trash and try to empty it. The trash won't empty, but the Finder doesn't emit a message, either, so it's a mystery. I find that a path of folders leading to an empty folder that once held the samples was, and it showed this folder as empty. I, being clever, did this:
And while they're looking at the catalogue, the first store manager points at him and screams "LOOK LOOOK! HE'S FINDING WHAT HE STOLE FROM MY STORE!" and then "IF YOU BUY THINGS FROM HIS STORE, YOU'RE RECEVING STOLEN MERCHANDISE AND I'LL CALL THE MAN ON YOU!"
Well, it does foil sniffing, but it is also supposed to give you positive authentication of the HTTP sender, so that if you see "www.ebay.com." in Latin1 in the location bar and a padlock in the corner, you can be certain that you're actually talking to "ebay.com.", and not some guy in Novosibirsk that got some rogue records inserted into your DNS server.
SSL was absolutely supposed to prevent spoofing, which is a major tool in the toolbag of spammers and phishers.
let alone any "latest version" - because one of the apps we use, Media 100i, wouldn't work properly on OSX
Two things:
Media 100i version 8 runs on OS X, and quite well.
If cost is an issue, look into Final Cut Pro or Avid Xpress DV unless there is some astonishingly specific workflow you have that requires a Media 100. I know the operator probably loves Media 100, but FCP and Avid are much more compatible with the modern tech, like OMFs, AAFs, XML, Quicktime, etc.
Apple does not believe in backward compatibility
Aye, it's a fair cop. But you don't have to wait 5 years for your next OS to not arrive, either. Take the good with the bad. The sort of problems you're having with Media 100 are akin the the guy who can't upgrade his Mac II FX because he uses it to drive his mass spectrometer- it's hard for the customer, but has zero effect on people in an office running Word, and those are the business customers they really care about.
Arguably, Debian developers are acting in much more harmony and conjuction than Vista devlopers, because the low overall communication between the individual developers makes the code and the interfaces between the modules all that cleaner, and encourages good code documentation.
TFA: Windows code is too complicated. It's not the components themselves, it's their interdependencies. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them.
If you have 50 dependency layers, wheras Linux or Mac OS X have something like 10 (in the most pessimal case, for things like desktop Widgets), you've probably been spending most of your time writing new ways of doing old things, over and over and over, and you do this cuz
Your original API was no good (I find this difficult to believe in a few cases)
You are ignorant of the original API (bad documentation)
Adding new features to add value (some of this in Vista, not as much as were promised, tho)
Introducing dependencies helps sell products (hmm, I think you might have something there)
Also, the author puts a bit of attention into "number of lines written". This metric is worthless - if you pay people to code, you will end up with LOTS of code. Debian developers are working for free, are therefore lazy, and therefore write as little as possible to solve as many problems as possible.
Wow. This post seems so on-topic, yet strangley makes no specific statement about Apple's actions. Almost as if Mr kronnek had this in a clipboard buffer and pastes it into every "Apple did something bad" story.
Look, I've been a window user for years... I just don't understand Apple
The second, hence the first. Many people do not understand Apple, particularly her fans.
They have vision, ideas and a damn good OS. Why do they keep shooting themselves in the foot? Mac users must be frusterated because of the one step forward and then five steps back Apple keeps taking.
s/Apple/Microsoft.. Or even s/Apple/Linux sometimes.
Why not keep it open, what are they afraid of, people actually using their desktop?
Yes, the WAVES OF USERS just waiting for Apple to open their source code so they can use their OS would surely end any financial or marketing problem Apple has never had.
I just wish Apple would realize that there is a secondary OS niche that needs to be filled and if they just jump into it they might come up as winners...
They're right there, in the secondary OS niche you speak of. They make a bit of money with it, its users are very happy and loyal. No one switches back.
When there's an opportunity to be taken they back off. They avoid conflict.... WHY?!?!?
This opportunity you speak of is a chimera.
Damn you Apple! I want to use your OS! STOP MAKING IT HARD TO SWITCH!!!!!
When you have to upgrade your laptop next year, buy a MacBook. They'll have all there technical issues worked out by then and should be pretty slick, as well as competitive with any laptop you might want to buy from Dell or Sony (excluding those bizzare coupon deals). Oh and it'll run the Windows you seem to be invested in, despite your exaspiration with the closed-source OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
\{machiavelli}
Any feature that allows you to move your data off of my platform is an "enterprise" feature.
You can pay me a little ransom, and we'll make sure nothing happens to your precious data, or you can pay us a ton upfront, and you can have it back (mostly) unharmed.
all they have to do is download a copy of mediawiki, add some custom templates for "persons of interest" and "known criminals", and then they can rename it Okhrana.
I can't find the citation, I read it originally in Nabokov i think, but the Okhrana at the turn of the century had what could be called the first wiki. They had index cards about the size of a sheet of A4, one per person. On the card they would have the person's name in the center, and then branching out would be lines to other names, and these would branch out to others on that card if they were relevant to the subject. The lines were color coded; red would be "politically subversive relationship" or green would be "casual relationship" etc. Every time they observed a relationship between 2 people, they'd note it on the cards and look for connections.
Clever and monstrous.
So, what you're saying is that the brain isn't like a truck, but it's actually a bunch of tubes? You can't just pull your brain up and load it and drive it away, 'cause it's tubes.
You left out "cappucino-drinking" and "bree-eating".
And they call America is a one-class society ;)
Ha ha only serious. The reason you can't buy the golden record as a multimedia CD-ROM (or anything else) is because the music and images on it are under copyright, and the selections were only released to NASA for use by alien audiences only. :p
As someone who recently had his HD replaced on AppleCare (a four-day turnaround), I think Apple puts some very lame hard disks in its computers. My super-duper top-of-the-line G5 shipped with with a Western Digital crapfactory, and of course the applecare replacement was another WD. At lest they stopped putting DeathStars in them. OTOH, my old Performa 6200 had a Quatum in it from the factory, it was in use for about four years with nary a problem.
Stupid question: You're using DiskWarrior, right?
A defect on the film itself is always black, regardless of what kind of film it is (we're talking about stuff that happens to the film after it's been removed from the camera). If you have a black defect on the neg, and then reverse it, it goes white. A positive doesn't have to be reversed, so the dust on it stays black. Think about it: take a photo with your lens cap on, and then sprinkle some dust on the negative, and then print it. The negative is clear, and the dust effectively dodges the positive. Meanwhile, sprinkling dust on the positive has zero effect, since the positive already has 100% density.
Couple things: first, there are no magnetic 35mm processes in current circulation. The only (theatrical) processes that used magnetic 35mm film (like Fox CinemaScope) exposed full aperture and it was very trouble-prone (oxide would flake off prints, prints could only be made at real-time, etc.) 70mm always used magnetic tracks on the print, but the existing number of 70mm projection booths is probably in the bare hundreds at this point, and these all presently use the Dolby Digital or DTS. When I say 35mm mag, I mean a piece of audio tape, 35mm wide with some perfs so that it can travel through a film mechanism. Such was the gold standard audio recording format from 1950 until 1998 or so (we still make mag film for archival, but our first choice when storing the mixes is MO disks, DLT, AIT, LTO, pick your poison).
Second: Super 35 is a camera format, or really a family of camera formats, which is to say, film exposed with a Super 35 aperture is not meant to be delivered on a release print. Again if memory serves, Super 35 is full aperture, and then matted, optically printed and anamorphosed to fit in the space on the release print allotted to image. There are really only two kinds of prints in theaters, "FLAT" (which is 1.85, spherical, matted to fit) and "SCOPE" (which is 2.35-2.4, anamorphic). Super 35, Vistavision, Cinemascope etc. all get the squeeze. I am not a DP, and I'm getting this all from my old ASC manual, so take it with a grain of salt.
Super 35 is a silent format; film exposed Super 35 cannot hold an analogue optical sound track, so it gets matted/squeezed into a format that can. Theoretically, you could ship prints without an analogue track and just have Dolby Digital (between the perfs) and SDDS (another one of those pesky Sony formats that started strong but faded in the stretch). But, most of the theaters on Earth can only show analogue optical sound, Dolby SR at best, so the optical track is retained for compatibility.
It's a very big company, and the people who work for SPE really have zero interaction with the people from SCE, so I couldn't tell you. I would observe that Sony Pictures always has this independent feel -- it's much more Columbia Pictures than a division of Sony, just as Warners is very much it's own thing, and not a subsidiary of a magazine-internet service company. FWIW, I have a Quad G5 under my desk (just like all sound designers, regardless of their studio), and not a Vaio (as all the corporate employees seem to).
I would also observe that Panasonic/Matsushita does not (or no longer does) own a movie studio (they had controlling interest in Universal thru the 90s). Since the consumer electronics div isn't afraid of goring any oxes in a media division, and isn't still trying to sell the ATRACS coder (the basis of MiniDisk, true, but also the basis of SDDS), they may have more freedom to maneuver. Just an observation.
Funny you ask, we recently had a special edition of The Natural in the shop...
For picture, the best you can get is either an interpositive (which is just one generation down from the camera negative), or the camera negative itself. The camera neg is often in not great shape, though, since it's been cut and A-B rolled. Also dust on the interpositive looks black, whereas dust on the cam neg looks white, and camera neg doesn't have the printer lights from timing I recall (I'm a sound guy, if someone at a lab is reading, please correct me). Interpositives are low-contrast prints of the camera negative, on one strip, and they're usually only run thru a printer a few times, once to strike the IP itself, and once to strike a few internegatives (these are what release prints are struck from).
For sound, the sound optical is usually contact printed onto the IP, but we almost always go back to the original Dialogue/Music/FX stems, which are recorded on 35mm magnetic film. 35mm mag film actually has quite high fidelity, nearly 70dB dynamic range and at least 15 kHz on the high end, so often the the mag sounds a bit better than what is on the optical. As well, the stems will have the discrete speaker channels (particularly the center speaker and surround), which are derived from the optical but do not actually exist on it, so we can "widen" the original mix from it's original format (either 4-channel Dolby Stereo or less) into a true 5.1.
If the filmmaker is still alive, he/she'll often sit thru the mix (my end of it) and have some new sound FX cut to modernize the sound, and maybe even try to rearrange some dialogue he didn't like or tweak the music levels (since we have separated stems, he can change either DIA, MX or FX without affecting the other two.) The Superman DVD WB has out right now is a good example of this from a sound point of view (also a great movie).
Coincidentally, The Natural was released and is owned by TriStar Pictures, which was bought in the late 80s by Columbia, which was itself bought in the early 1990s by... Sony. (fair disclosure: Sony PIctures Entertainment is my current employer).
Total flame: Without acknowledging the accuracy of your "remembrance," imagine how much money we could have saved for a Superconducting Supercollider if we hadn't gone and built a damn space station to help us sort tiny screws in space.
OT: the new comment system should strip leading blackquote and cite elements from the one-liner preview.
Oh how oh how I wish they had stuck with the "good things" like PCIx and PATA controllers on the motherboard, such that my last 3 upgrades didn't require me buying either completely new Pro Tools cards or storage for every upgrade.
Yes I know they had their reasons, but I'm one of those few mac users that actually uses the extra drive bays and peripheral slots, and they've been very cruel to my kind over the last three years.
Targetting what market? There's the pros who do video and design and creative stuff, where the CPU, even at these rates, is the cheapest part of their setup. Then there's the home users, who do emails and edit DV movies with the iMac and mini for around a grand.
You seem to be positing a large group of unserved consumers who use their machines at home for high-speed graphically-intensive applications. Who on earth would need a home system for real-time simulations, with digital audio, physics modelling and high frame-per-second...
... Oh, wait...
You got a link for that particular feature, er what? I've never seen a Windows user use such a thing (and I know many rather proficient ones), so even if it exists, it might be unreliable or poorly exposed.
I suspect they may still be gnawing on ZFS for a future version, but for now it would appear the "Time Machine" is built on top of HFS+, since there is no talk of reformatting your drives to take advantage of the new feature.
As well, the keynote mentioned that Time Machine could also be used to back up a file system to another hard drive, which is not exactly what ZFS is or does, and will be interesting to see how they implement it-- I've been looking for a Retrospect replacement for quite a while, and if Time Machine can do the backups to /dev/sa0, then I'm done.
Don't want to be too much of a pedant, but did they
Contradiction in terms?
I've got you beat.
I was running OS 9 and had installed a particular shareware program that would sequence text of a fixed vocabulary into speech - it used a sampled voice to generate air-traffic-control style messages for a flight simulator. It had audio files named after each word in the vocabulary, such as "hold short", "alpha" , "bravo", etc. It had numbers, and it had the word "point", which was cleverly named with ASCII character 46, also known as ".".
One day, I upgrade to OSX, and the program doesn't work anymore, so I put it and its resources in the trash and try to empty it. The trash won't empty, but the Finder doesn't emit a message, either, so it's a mystery. I find that a path of folders leading to an empty folder that once held the samples was, and it showed this folder as empty. I, being clever, did this:
Yes, that's two "." links in that folder. I had to reboot in OS9 to throw the file away.
When Bush wants to wink at his political base, he quotes from Romans.
When a slashdotter wants to wink at his, he quotes from the other holy trinity.
And while they're looking at the catalogue, the first store manager points at him and screams "LOOK LOOOK! HE'S FINDING WHAT HE STOLE FROM MY STORE!" and then "IF YOU BUY THINGS FROM HIS STORE, YOU'RE RECEVING STOLEN MERCHANDISE AND I'LL CALL THE MAN ON YOU!"
Not enough parts
So all those corporate customers that need Exchange integration with their MP3 players will buy the MS-Pod, thus Profit.
Well, it does foil sniffing, but it is also supposed to give you positive authentication of the HTTP sender, so that if you see "www.ebay.com." in Latin1 in the location bar and a padlock in the corner, you can be certain that you're actually talking to "ebay.com.", and not some guy in Novosibirsk that got some rogue records inserted into your DNS server.
SSL was absolutely supposed to prevent spoofing, which is a major tool in the toolbag of spammers and phishers.
A Search for "Montauk Project" returns nothing on the secret Time Tunnel. So much for comprehensive information :p
let alone any "latest version" - because one of the apps we use, Media 100i, wouldn't work properly on OSX
Two things:
Apple does not believe in backward compatibility
Aye, it's a fair cop. But you don't have to wait 5 years for your next OS to not arrive, either. Take the good with the bad. The sort of problems you're having with Media 100 are akin the the guy who can't upgrade his Mac II FX because he uses it to drive his mass spectrometer- it's hard for the customer, but has zero effect on people in an office running Word, and those are the business customers they really care about.
Arguably, Debian developers are acting in much more harmony and conjuction than Vista devlopers, because the low overall communication between the individual developers makes the code and the interfaces between the modules all that cleaner, and encourages good code documentation.
TFA: Windows code is too complicated. It's not the components themselves, it's their interdependencies. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them.
If you have 50 dependency layers, wheras Linux or Mac OS X have something like 10 (in the most pessimal case, for things like desktop Widgets), you've probably been spending most of your time writing new ways of doing old things, over and over and over, and you do this cuz
Also, the author puts a bit of attention into "number of lines written". This metric is worthless - if you pay people to code, you will end up with LOTS of code. Debian developers are working for free, are therefore lazy, and therefore write as little as possible to solve as many problems as possible.
Wow. This post seems so on-topic, yet strangley makes no specific statement about Apple's actions. Almost as if Mr kronnek had this in a clipboard buffer and pastes it into every "Apple did something bad" story.
Look, I've been a window user for years... I just don't understand AppleThe second, hence the first. Many people do not understand Apple, particularly her fans.
They have vision, ideas and a damn good OS. Why do they keep shooting themselves in the foot? Mac users must be frusterated because of the one step forward and then five steps back Apple keeps taking.s/Apple/Microsoft .. Or even s/Apple/Linux sometimes.
Why not keep it open, what are they afraid of, people actually using their desktop?Yes, the WAVES OF USERS just waiting for Apple to open their source code so they can use their OS would surely end any financial or marketing problem Apple has never had.
I just wish Apple would realize that there is a secondary OS niche that needs to be filled and if they just jump into it they might come up as winners...They're right there, in the secondary OS niche you speak of. They make a bit of money with it, its users are very happy and loyal. No one switches back.
When there's an opportunity to be taken they back off. They avoid conflict.... WHY?!?!?This opportunity you speak of is a chimera.
Damn you Apple! I want to use your OS! STOP MAKING IT HARD TO SWITCH!!!!!When you have to upgrade your laptop next year, buy a MacBook. They'll have all there technical issues worked out by then and should be pretty slick, as well as competitive with any laptop you might want to buy from Dell or Sony (excluding those bizzare coupon deals). Oh and it'll run the Windows you seem to be invested in, despite your exaspiration with the closed-source OS X.