I agree with the premise of your post and with calling out the logical fallacy. I disagree, however, with your attempt at a definition and I think it simply muddies the waters by allowing the prevalent common opinions and ideas of the day to corrupt the meaning of the word.
The widely accepted definition for "Christian" covers only a few key points -- believe in God the father, belief in Jesus the son, Jesus was crusified by the Romans, died and was resurrected, etc.
I thought the widely accepted definition for a "christian" was a person who followed the teachings of Jesus. It is sort of implicit in the word, isn't it? I can understand the view that to be a christian a person would have to believe Jesus was a god or son of a god, but even that is stretching it a bit in my mind.
Almost all (not all, but "enough") people who call themselves Christian agree with these points that it can be considered generally accepted.
Almost all the people who call themselves Christians also believe Jesus wore robes, but I don't see that as a criteria for being a christian. Almost all people who call themselves christians believe Jesus had a follower named Judas, but again I would not say a sect that disbelieved that were not christians. If a sect believes Jesus was actually burned and not crucified as the story commonly has it, I would not say that sect were not christians.
I think you're confusing arbitrary, common traits of most people who call themselves christians, with a definition for a christian.
Laptops are one thing since you cannot build them yourself, but even so, they do not come in cheaper. Anyone who has priced comparable laptops knows this to be true... the writing is on the wall, or at least on the bottom line.
From the numbers I've seen, Apple laptops tend to run about 10-20% more than average, for a given set of hardware. They tend to run just a little less than a laptop with the same specs, from a company who gets similar support and reliability ratings instead of using the cheapest components they can find.
The difference becomes glaring in the desktop sector though. Especially to us here, where we build our own machines.
Lets see, I bill about $100 an hour for contract work. The cost for me to research which hardware is compatible with each other and my OS's of choice, unpack and assemble hardware, download the driver, and install the software, is probably getting up to 4 or 5 hours. I think I'd rather buy from Apple and let someone who makes a little less per hour do the work, while I spend the time at the pub.
They make great machines, but they are over priced, to most people, for what they offer.
Most people don't assemble their own hardware. For most people the cost of a mac is less than a comparable machine from another vendor, if Apple offers exactly what they want. If not, then it depends if someone else offers exactly what they want. For me, I'm sort of partial to OS X for my primary desktop since it saves me a lot of time and, hence, money. The author of the article (aside from leaving component quality, reliability, service and support, and included software out of the comparison) makes a perfectly valid point. You can't go to the store and buy a machine with the same specs as a Mac, for much less, if any.
They compared to Dell and Sony -- both notoriously overpriced.
Dell is usually average or a little below the average, not overpriced. Sony sells at above average prices, but also has better reliability and support ratings than most vendors because they tend to use a little better parts and don't skimp on the support. In fact, Sony usually is one of the few vendors with ratings in line with Apple in those categories.
Your assertions are baseless. This article did not cover all the information it should have, but ti did make some very good points that are often overlooked by people who would rather rely upon what they think they know rather than real numbers.
By definition, "everyone" includes giving me freedom, but the GPL doesn't do that, it specifically restricts me.
Freedom is not unlimited. Your freedom does not trump the freedom of others. Thus when I'm free to walk down the sidewalk and you're free to walk down the sidewalk, there needs to be mediation for when we meet. A law that says when we meet the older person goes first, is not removing your freedom, it is mitigating the conflict of two people' individual freedoms.
As for the GPL, it does not restrict you in any way. Copyright law restricts your actions. The GPL offers to remove some of those restrictions in exhchange for something else.
So we're not talking about "everyone" and with the GPL, we never were.
Freedom applies on more than an individual basis. Should one person be free to enslave and remove the freedom of another? After all, if I'm free, why can't I beat the snot out of you and put you in chains and beat you if you don't serve me? From the point of view of the the individual, that is freedom for me. From an objective point of view, that is not freedom overall. Not having a law to stop me from enslaving you is more freedom than having such a law, from my point of view as an individual. It is not more free from the perspective of a society. The GPL is designed to grant some freedom in exchange for a promise from the individual to grant freedom to others, thus it serves societal freedom above individual freedom. Without it, however, you have less individual and societal freedom, so it serves both more than the lack of it does.
Next, PD offers more freedom than the GPL does.
PD offers more freedom to an individual, but less freedom to society as a whole.
Maximum freedom, minimum restrictions.
Your definition of freedom is too narrow, or perhaps your perspective is too self centered. The rest of your post is simply repeating what you already said, so I shall not address it specifically.
No there weren't. The competition was basically Rio
The players I know were on the market and selling when the iPod cam out out in 2001 were: Sensory Science's Rave MP2300, the I-Jam IJ-100, Creative Labs Nomad, Compaq PJB, Rio, and iRiver. That is six different players on the market prior to the iPod. How can a Slashdot reader not remember the Nomad, given the infamous quote that has been recirculating here ever since?
Apple initially succeeded in the market because they used a hard drive and had an established brand. The brand from a fairly unrelated market helped the general public realize that mp3 players (as they were called at the time) even existed.
That is not enough. There were already hardware based players and Sony entered the market shortly after Apple. Compaq entered before them and had an established brand.
The market still would have grown quickly as small size, large capacity hard drives and flash memory were introduced. Apple joined at the right time.
I disagree. The market was waiting for someone to make the functionality easy enough for the common man to use. Ripping music from CD may seem easy to you, but I know numerous people who could not figure out how to rip a CD before iTunes. Bigger, cheaper drives don't matter if there is no way for a normal person to get music onto the device. The iTunes software and the iTMS were Apple addressing that part of the problem and making it possible for normal users instead of just geeks to use such a device.
Right now, that is the situation with smartphones too. They are too complex and hard to use and no one has addressed the workflow to make it simple and easy and fast. If Apple can do so, they can open up the smartphone market to more than just the geeks that use them now (there are also some non-geeks now who ignore 90% of the features).
If I bought a phone that required 5 key presses to get into the phone book, I'd take it back. That's simply pathetic. Free phone that came with my service, like 90% of people have. The method is left: down: left: 2: call - in order to call the first person on my list. I can call people faster if they are in my speed dial list, but I think last time I paid attention my average button press for other calls was 8. My last phone was actually worse and the one before that better at only 4. Those are about par for the course with average, current phones and operations that are less common are often much worse. There is a lot of room for the iPhone to blow away the average phone for usability and features people can actually use.
This covers the case where you are taking an existing Free project and modifying it. What is the motivation between releasing a new project, that your business is responsible for creating, under a Free licence - there is no guarantee that you will receive any free improvements from others since noone may decide to take advantage of the Free licence?
There is never a guarantee, just a good possibility. If it is software you are using, what is the drawback to opening it up and hoping for the best? Note, my company just developed a project internally and released it under the GPL. It is good for PR and our reputation and several smart people have already contacted the maintainer about contributing. We get to use those contributions without paying a dime in development fees for them.
Lets say you are a start-up company trying to break into a market that's dominated by one or more well established propriatory companies. You base your product on Free software which allows a more rapid development and you release all your code and have a product that's much more advanced than the competition's.
You've failed. OSS should never be your product only your tool. Selling OSS is not a sustainable business model.
How do you protect yourself from the competition taking your work and using it for themselves whilest using their established market position to maintain their large customer base - you have put development resources into the project and your competition is benefitting more than you.
You don't stop competitors from using it. You have reputation and prestige from having developed it, but the whole point is to get others using it so when they need an improvement they either hire you to write code for them (a service) or do it themselves, in which case you get the improvement for free to use yourself.
From the customers' point of view, why would they buy their solution from a relatively unknown business rather than a more well established one that is offering a comparable (the same) product?
Again, you should never, ever, ever open source your product and try to sell it. That does not work. You should open source tools and software outside your core competency. An OSS license is a feature of a product. Features benefit the user, not the developer. If you're contributing to OSS it should be because you're a user of the software or because you were paid to do the programming, not deliver the product. If you code OSS, expect to be paid once and make sure you don't publish until you're paid.
There are tough choices to be made when balancing the wish to contribute code to the Free software community against the need to protect your business.
Not really. If you're in the mapping software sales business, it is stupid to OSS your product and try to stay in the same business. It may, however, make a lot of sense to open the source to your map navigating and searching code and move into the map sales business (content) thus undercutting the costs of all the companies that are trying to be in the map software business and forcing them to try to quickly follow suit or die.
You should never be a businessman wanting to contribute to OSS for altruistic reasons and trying to decide what you can afford. You should always be using OSS as part of your business plan in order to make more money, or kill the competition.
Another point is that, if you're taking over a project, unless you have permission from every developer that put a line of code there to change the license (or forget the code and start over), you can't even change that license.
I don't think this is true. If I take BSD licensed code and make a change to it and then license this new group of code as GPL, I don't think there is any problem. The GPL meets all the requirements of the BSD license. I can do anything with the BSD code I want so long as it is in compliance with the BSD license. The BSD license does not restrict me from not prividing the source, or selling the code, or licensing the code in some new way. MS took the entire TCP stack and so long as they keep the original credit in it, they can release it under their proprietary Windows license. The same is true for releasing it under GPL (as far as I know). Now if I have GPL code and I want to release it under the BSD license, I have a problem, because that does not meet all the criteria for the GPL license. To do that I do need permission from all the copyright holders who contributed.
On your first point, regarding GPL2 and 3, I agree by the way. I just believe you are incorrect about moving BSD code to GPL, which I think is perfectly legal.
I thought autoconf was available by default in most Linux distros now. I don't know if it's to the point that you could call it 'ubiquitous', but it's gotta be close.
My kubuntu install does not find my printer when I plug it in. My OS X install finds my printer and shared, streaming music and local IM users and shared collaborative editing sessions and file shares. I think most Linux distros now have some support for zeroconf, but I don't see it applied to all those useful network services and devices that OS X users have access to. Hopefully that will change in the future.
Very good anti-virus and personal firewall software does exist for Linux so there's another win for you.
I suppose I should have posted more explanation for "the list." For features, it covers the default installed applications. Beagle and Google desktop don't count for indexed search because they are not installed/working by default. Likewise ClamAV does not apply to OS X or more linux distros because it is not installed and running by default (not that I think it should be in its current incarnation).
As far as UI wins go, I'm one of those people who just can't get comfortable with Macs.
Which UI a particular person prefers is often more a matter of their past experience than anything else. I certainly prefer some aspects of Kubuntu to OS X. Judging the UIs objectively, however, (and I have worked as a UI designer and usability tester) shows a whole range of things that Apple obviously spent a lot of time testing and rigorously applying fundamental HCI principals upon. Dialogue boxes have buttons that are verbs and which are different from one another instead of OK/Cancel which is common in both Windows and Linux. Apple has fewer moving targets and more feedback for actions. Apple makes sure everything works with a 1 button mouse, so novices and alternate interfaces work smoothly and all items that require a second mouse button are optional, shortcuts to functions instead of the only way to get to them. Both Windows and Linux are getting a little better as time goes on, but OS X is a clear winner in my mind. It is nowhere near perfect and makes plenty of mistakes, just not as many as the competition.
...I don't think the iPhone is going to be big at all. The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years. The tie-in with iTunes helped too.
You have to think about markets in terms of consumers and uses. When the iPod came out there were already a lot of people trying to sell digital players, but none of them were very well designed, none of them did a good job of accommodating the entire workflow, none of them were really easy to learn and use. There were players with better stats and more features, but the adoption was very limited. Most people were sticking with portable CD players as a result. The iPod changed that both by providing the right package and through good marketing.
Now take a look at the market the iPod is targeting. It is aimed at the smartphone market, which has a lot of existing products, but fairly small adoption of those products. Most people are sticking with cheap, low end cell phones and a lot of people are not happy with those either. For the iPhone to be huge they need to repeat what they did with the iPod. Apple needs to provide the entire workflow and they need to do it so it is learnable and easy and they need to market it right. I think the marketing is working so far. The question is, can Apple provide a good user experience and will AT&T hold up their end of that experience?
The mobile phone market is completely different to this.
Apple is aiming at the smartphone market, not just the phone market. As with the iPod they hope to take a significant chunk of that market and they hope to pull people in from the lower end phone market, much as the iPod pulled in people from the Discman market.
I haven't paid more than $100 US for a new phone in eight years, and I'm a technophile who upgrades every year, ususally to a high-end just-released model.
In 2001, how many people had paid more than $100 for their portable music player (usually a CD player)? I'm guessing less than 1% of the market.
Apple have no experience at making phones.
They had no experience at making portable music players.
They make stuff which can be good to use, but that's hard in the phone world.
It is hard in the music player market too, which is why it is still really hard to find an iPod competitor that is as easy or nice to use. I don't even own an iPod, but I've used them without a problem. Apple is good at UIs and usability testing to create a polished user experience.
Above all, phones have to be good phones first, then be good ipods, then have other stuff they do well.
To not be a flop, they need to be a better phone. That shouldn't be hard. It takes a minimum of 5 key presses to call a number in my phonebook using my very "simple, just a phone" cell phone. To do well they need to be as good an iPod as the iPod with a permissible slightly larger learning curve. To revolutionize the market, they need to perform a few other functions just as well and just as easily and they need to keep the user experience clean and easy (AT&T may be a problem here).
My SonyEricsson W850 is a very good phone, a great walkman, and also lets me browse the Internet at broadband speeds in a decent way, has good Java games available, a decent-enough camera, a torch, alarm clock and so on.
The W850 is maybe a bit better than par for the course, which is to say 99% of all people do not want to spend the time messing around with it even enough to learn to use the browser, e-mail, or alarm clock. 50% of people probably do not even want to take the time to learn to use SMS or the camera on it and most people just buy a cheaper phone or ignore all those features you talk about. This is
I was under the impression that the GPL license is mostly meant for "hobby" developers that want to make sure no one abuses their code to earn money on time they donate for the good of mankind.
Most hobbyist do choose the GPL from what I've seen, but I doubt they make up the bulk of GPL developers.
Not industry developers that want to earn money from their code. I might just have gotten it all wrong though.
Well, there are 50-100 developers in my office today and most of them work on GPL code at some point, paid by the company. I don't think we're unusual in that regard. When commercial developers release code as open source they do so with a motive of making money. You're not going to make money directly from OSS. You make money using OSS and getting free improvements from others and interoperability with other tools is the main benefit. The GPL insures you get those improvements and the competition does not grab all your code, and start a closed fork of it. The only time we use BSD licenses is when it is a vital infrastructure component we're trying to get widely adopted as a standard. In those instances, getting people to use and integrate it into closed software is more important than getting the improvements back.
Any developers willing to comment on what they want out of a license?
I think I just did. This is the situation as I see it and I think it has been stable for quite a while. I see more OSS development happening lately, but if anything it is code that old school people would release as BSD, now being released as GPL (and often failing to be adopted widely as a result). I guess I have to disagree with the article on that point (sort of). I see more code being released as GPL (both code that would otherwise have been less permissive like a closed license and code that would have been more permissive, like a BSD license). I see more LGPL code, which is a bit more permissive, I suppose, but I see that more as increased granularity rather than a move towards more permissive licensing in general.
I personally can see why. I want a phone to be a phone nothing more nothing less. I've has a treo [great palm pilot - lousy phone) and was bought a p800 (lousy PDA, lousy phone).
You have bought devices that had functionality you did not use. I suspect a lot of us have. I have a very basic phone right now and it still does not do a very good job as a phone. The iPhone will succeed if it works really well as a phone and is easier to use than other phones. The iPhone will crush the competition and be an enormous success if works really well as a phone and for 5-10 other common tasks that currently suck balls to do on other phones. I know a dozen people right off the top of my head who don't use SMS, or e-mail, mp3 playing, web browsing, or maps on their phone/PDA not because they aren't willing to pay for those features, but because learning them and using them every day is a pain in the ass because of the poorly designed interfaces. Hell, to call a number from the phonebook in my current phone is 5 button presses at the very minimum. That is terrible usability.
I doubt I'll be buying an iPhone anytime soon because of my phone contract and expense, but if Apple has managed another really polished UI, a lot of people will be buying it and a whole lot more than that in a few more years.
I don't want "just a phone" because I'm cheap. I want something that works as a phone really, really well and if it works as other things really really well too, I'll pay for that. If it does other things kinda sorta the way many phones and PDAs do now, I don't really care to pay for it.
I haven't used many operating systems (only Windows and several unix based OS) and I've never used a Mac, but as far as I have seen, Windows' clipboard functions are second to none.
Don't you think you should actually try using other clipboards rather than just assuming Windows must be better than others? I don't understand your reasoning at all. From my own experience, Windows clipboards are behind in several ways. Support for drag and drop operations is way behind OS X. Support for multiple, chorded clipboards is behind several Linux distros. Also, I still see the occasional unicode copying bug with Windows XP, which I don't see anywhere else and haven't for a long time.
I reckon the vast majority of users don't have a problem with them
True, but it is a real annoyance to power users, people using multiple OS's, and systems administrators. It was a stupid, arbitrary decision from MS back in the day.
I'm not going to go through your list and argue which ones are real usability issues and which ones are your own issues being projected. The best way to determine the usability of an application is by usability testing which it is clear Apple does in abundance (for most apps) and which neither Windows nor Linux seem to do much of. (Actually I suspect MS does a lot of usability testing and then ignores it for marketing/internal politics reasons.)
I like OSX, but I'm tired of hearing it described as the epitome of UI design.
OS X is absolutely not the epitome of UI design. They just seem that way when compared to Windows and most Linux distros. There is room for improvement all around, but as something of a usability professional myself, I can tell you there is not a lot of contest for this point.
Monad -> Windows PowerShell, and has been available for ages.
Yes I know about Monad (although I only played with it briefly). My list is geared towards items included by default with the OS. If you want to start going with all the add-in functionality provided by other software downloads, we'll never get anywhere. Does Google desktop count as indexed search? Do the numerous package management systems for OS X mean we can ignore that lack on the platform?
This issue is worth revisiting once Monad is shipped by default (Vista SP2 is the rumor) and it comes into general use and can be compared to bash, etc.
Whenever these discussions come up, I like to forestall some of the repetition by posting my list of wins for OS X, Windows, and Linux. This is a list of the things each OS does better than some others, not a list of problems. Feel free to post and suggest other items, but please know what you;re talking about. I hate getting posts from people who clearly have never used two of the OS's in question and are simply assuming their favorite OS must do it better.
OS X Wins:
Sane UI choices - OS X does not ignore the last two decades worth of human/computer interaction research.
System services - global (nearly) spellchecking, dictionary/thesaurus, and plug-in functionality like grammar checking, language translation, only reference lookups, bibliography formatting, etc.
OpenStep application bundles - drag and drop installation and uninstallation of most applications, e-mail or IM working programs without having to save installers, run software off an ipod or thumb drive without having to install (including remembering per-machine preferences), easy binaries for multiple platforms, finding resources in packages is much easier and requires no tools.
Security - for a variety of reasons that don't matter to most end users, OS X users have never had to worry about malware or worms and probably will not have to in the foreseeable future.
Usable shell environment - bash, tcsh, whatever; the CLI on OS X is very usable and powerful and a first class citizen. We'll see if this comparison changes when Monad is released.
Automater - scripting usable by secretaries. This is the easiest tool for some tasks and the only automation/scripting I've seen that some novices can quickly learn and use.
Included applications - both CLI tools, GUI utilities, and GUI applications, OS X has more and nicer ones than Windows you include iTunes, iPhoto, Preview, etc., etc.
Upgrading hardware - upgrading a mac to a mac is as easy as plugging in a firewire cable clicking a button. This saves a lot of time and effort, amazingly better
Ubiquitous zeroconf - automatically and instantly finds printers, local chat, streaming music, file shares, and collaborative documents
PDF support - create PDFs from everywhere and viewing is fast, fast, fast compared to Vista.
Emulation/ports/virtualization/compatability - it is easier to run Linux and Windows software on OS X and there are more options to do so on OS X, than there are to run Linux and OS X apps on Windows (yeah I know about cygwin and Apple's licensing and the relative number of apps)
Easier support of third party devices, plug them in and they just work much more often.
No Registration - never worry about entering serial numbers or tracking them or you computer deciding you're a dirty pirate.
Windows Vista Wins:
Application availability - more developers target Windows and eventually a lot of people want to run some niche software that does not work without Windows
Not tied to one hardware vendor - If you run Windows you have more hardware choices and likely get a machine that meets your needs more cheaply than a Mac, as a result.
Package manager - Windows has a pretty lame software install/uninstall manager, but it is still better than nothing
Antivirus/phishing features - OS X and Linux don't have a lot of need, but this is still not a bad precaution
Remote desktop features - have clients for more platforms than OS X's comparable feature, and is better than Linux for a few tasks, but worse for others.
Wider support for third party devices, everyone makes a Windows driver, not everyone makes an OS X or Linux driver
Easier to find unofficial support from random people you know
Indexed searching is useable by default, unlike most Linux distros
Default color support has poorer management and accuracy, but wider range
Application level granularity of sound controls is usefu
Probably never. The primary requirement is for a 1-button default both for novice users and to encourage developers not to use improper design methods. That means if Apple were to added a second button to the trackpad, it would have to be a feature you could enable and disable (probably in software) like the mighty mouse. So who is it for? Novices prefer 1 button and it is easier for them. Usability studies show expert users are faster using a single button trackpad and chording once they've conquered the learning curve (since it requires fewer fingers to be moved from the keyboard). Who does that leave? Just sort-of-power users who have not taken the time to learn chording. I don't really see that as a pressing market for Apple to address, especially considering the expense involved. Don't hold your breath.
P.S. learn to use the trackpad with chording. After you pass the learning curve, it is significantly faster than using a two button trackpad.
I can understand using a laptop for a couple simple games, but if you're really hardcore into games, then why wouldn't you get a full sized computer.
Well for me it is so I can use the same computer at work and home. Most of our LAN parties of the last 5 years have been dominated by laptops since they are so much easier to move. Carrying a tower and monitor over to friends houses is so 1995. Until they perfect a way to thow cheetos at people over the network, they are ideal.
If you buy a MAC desktop then you will have to spend a minimum of $2499 to get a machine with a case that allows easy modifications.
Do hear how stained your argument is? If you want a machine for "easy" modifications (which most people don't) and you want a new instead of a used machine and you want i from company X, then you must pay a minimum $Y. Yeah, that is pretty obvious. If you're buying from Apple, you're limited by the hardware options they have, which will never be as varied and granular as all the rest of PC manufacturers put together. What is your point? How does this make a difference for a trial of OS X? Does anyone care about people with a weird set of criteria like yours? Computers for sort of competent people who want to change hardware but are not very good at it and can't find a Web page and follow the instructions. Who cares about said losers?
Can you point me to any references to back those assertions up?
Here is a brief article on the subject. For more in depth information on the current subsidies in place and the economics of them, check out "Internet Economics" By Lee W. Macknight and Joseph P. Bailey. There are a number of other books, but this one has better references and avoids sensationalism.
I was under the impression that the current backbone infrastructure was all privately funded pretty much since NSFNet went out of the picture.
I can assure you, that has not been the case. A whole lot of the dark fiber in the ground was laid by the US government and then sold at much less than cost, to hide the subsidy. In fact, we've paid more per citizen than other countries that completely funded government owned infrastructure and have similar or worse population densities.
This is one of the problems we have in America. Corporate chiefs lean on the cry of the "free market," which is a concept that many Americans (myself included) do embrace. BUT, unfortunately we don't have a *true* free market, we have this bastardized hyrid of government + corporation.
The idea of the free market is a good one and one that works, but extremists take it too far. It is not a panacea and it does not work well in some situations. Healthcare, for example, is a situation where the buyer is under extreme duress with impending death and pain and that does not make for a logical, self-interested transaction between equals. A true free market cannot persist because of the wealth condensation principal. As wealth disparity becomes greater and greater we move to feudalism and eventually most people are born poor and a few are born rich and make money by lending to the poor. This disparity of station due to birth leads to justified anger and eventually violent revolt and the system is destroyed (as it always has been historically).
I do support the free market and generally believe that private companies should not be regulated (much) in how the profit from their investments.
Network operators are a special case. In exchange for being impartial common carriers, they are less regulated than even private citizens (in some ways). If I transmit child porn or make copies of disney films, I'm subject to a lengthy jail sentence, while ISPs are protected from such because they are providing a common good. Without net neutrality, they are no longer providing that common good, so why should they be more protected than I am?
Let's say that your company spent BILLIONS of dollars rolling out new Fibre across the nation and then you were told that you cannot charge for access to that net?
Do you know what network neutrality is? Why would network neutrality prevent someone for charging for use of their network (which by the way was subsidized by our tax dollars to the tune of billions)? All the network neutrality proposals ever to see any support in congress call for a ban on charging different prices for traffic based upon who is sending the traffic... and that is it. You can still charge for traffic. You can still charge different amounts for different types of traffic. You just can't charge different amounts based upon where the traffic came from. This is to prevent AT&T from asking for money from some company who buys access from AT&T's peer's peer's peer, in exchange for not intentionally slowing down that traffic as it crosses their network. I might mention, in the situation I just mentioned AT&T has already been paif by their peer to carry the traffic, so it is not a question of them not being able to charge for it.
I work with a lot of ISPs and big network providers. Their side of the story is that they want to be able to charge people with lots of money extra for the same service they supply to other people, by using their location as a gateway and by telling their peering router "sure I'm the best way to get that traffic there" and then intentionally slowing the traffic down so their previous claim to the router was a lie. Quite simply, they want to be able to gouge people by ignoring the responsibility of a common carrier. It is a lot easier to do this, than to actually add real value through faster connections or services where they have to be competitive. I mean if you build out a DDoS filter service it might not be as good as Sprint's. They'd have to work hard and take risks. They'd much rather abuse their location in the network in order to collect money for nothing. It is extortion, plain and simple.
Deregulation isn't always a bad thing but in this case i think it will destroy many a business that can't or won't pay to play with the big-boys.
I'm glad you're in favor of net neutrality, but I think your reasons are a bit off. We gave the network operators billions of our tax dollars. That is what prevents little companies from entering the market. We give them special protections from prosecution for the traffic they carry under the auspice that they are impartial, common carriers, not responsible for what crosses their network. Both of these were done for the common good. If they want to be mercenary and be unregulated let them, right after they pay the money back and after we start prosecuting them for transporting child pornography and contributing to copyright infringement. If they want to eb treated like any other company we should oblige them, but if they want to be supported and protected by special laws, we should be getting something back for the american people.
PC desktops in general can be modified by someone...
This is untrue. Towers, in general can be modified by anyone, just as Apple towers can be. Laptops, all-in-one machines, and small form factor systems usually require more detailed instructions. Apple just happens to sell more of those more revolutionary and specialized form factors than the PC industry in general. You'll have just as many problems with the average Apex as you will a mac mini.
I understand how the president is responsible for the actions of the FCC. My question is why does this particular case fall into the "Bush is evil" category? What administration allowed "Shit" and "Fuck" to appear on the airwaves?
The key piece of this puzzle, you seem to be missing is that Bush can be evil while doing the exact same thing as other administrations, because pretty much all the presidents for the last 50 years have been evil bastards.
By "native" I mean Aqua apps that live in Mac OS land rather than Unix land.
Why is that your definition of native? What about Java apps designed just for OS X, but which don't use Aqua? What about Carbon apps? The finder is not aqua, but I don't think many would claim it is not "native." OS X is built on a robust command line. I'd argue CLI applications are just as native as GUI ones.
m not saying they don't exist - but they're harder to find (jEdit is swing-based and isn't really native, and bbEdit is very definitely non-free).
Interestingly enough, my favorite OS X software tracking site filters on (word processor/text editor)(Aqua) and (Freeware). The search returns 22 results, from the Cocoa Abiword to xPad. They don't seem to be that hard to find, even using your weird criteria for what is "native."
Yes, but to a "hardcore BSD or Linux or Solaris geek" a GUI has always been just a device for running 16 copies of vim side-by-side while looking as much like NeXTStep as possible
Actually, NextStep fans and BSD people seem to have trouble getting along from what I've seen. I'm amazed Apple has managed to contain both of them.
Anybody who has ever tried to get anything else done on a *nix desktop environment will quickly deduce that *nix developers never actually use them...
Ever tried using IRIX?
Seriously, there's no doubt that OS X is very well served for *nix shell-based and X11 software
Okay, so where is your support for Windows having more of other kinds of freeware then?
However, DVD Ripping, BitTorrenting, and IRC chatting are all secondary compared to WordProcessing and Graphics Editing - and NeoOffice/AbiWord/OpenOffice(X11)/GIMP all had significant problems with either stability or ease of use.
Word processing and graphics freeware eh? Well, going to my favorite Mac freeware site comes up with 84 freeware word processors and 1504 graphics applications. It sure seems like there's a real problem with there being any of those, huh?
That's the lack of quality freeware I was talking about.
What would you call "quality?" OpenOffice on Windows is dog slow, especially for large documents. I work as a professional writer upon occasion and I know more than one user who has balked at trying to make use of it. What quality, free word processor on Windows should we be using as a comparison for quality? As for graphics, there are more free graphics tools on OS X than any other platform I've used. I sit down in front of OS X, Linux, and Windows XP every day, so I'm fairly familiar with the offerings on all of them.
I don't know what you're referring to here. I say that there is no consumer-priced model from Apple that has easily accessed components
You're right. Of course 99.9999999% of the people who buy consumer priced desktops never access the components, so that is not really a big issue for many people. If you are accessing the components and you can't figure out how to get to them on an imac or a mini, maybe you should rethink messing with the inside of computers since you're probably not very clever at it.
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I agree with the premise of your post and with calling out the logical fallacy. I disagree, however, with your attempt at a definition and I think it simply muddies the waters by allowing the prevalent common opinions and ideas of the day to corrupt the meaning of the word.
The widely accepted definition for "Christian" covers only a few key points -- believe in God the father, belief in Jesus the son, Jesus was crusified by the Romans, died and was resurrected, etc.I thought the widely accepted definition for a "christian" was a person who followed the teachings of Jesus. It is sort of implicit in the word, isn't it? I can understand the view that to be a christian a person would have to believe Jesus was a god or son of a god, but even that is stretching it a bit in my mind.
Almost all (not all, but "enough") people who call themselves Christian agree with these points that it can be considered generally accepted.Almost all the people who call themselves Christians also believe Jesus wore robes, but I don't see that as a criteria for being a christian. Almost all people who call themselves christians believe Jesus had a follower named Judas, but again I would not say a sect that disbelieved that were not christians. If a sect believes Jesus was actually burned and not crucified as the story commonly has it, I would not say that sect were not christians.
I think you're confusing arbitrary, common traits of most people who call themselves christians, with a definition for a christian.
From the numbers I've seen, Apple laptops tend to run about 10-20% more than average, for a given set of hardware. They tend to run just a little less than a laptop with the same specs, from a company who gets similar support and reliability ratings instead of using the cheapest components they can find.
The difference becomes glaring in the desktop sector though. Especially to us here, where we build our own machines.Lets see, I bill about $100 an hour for contract work. The cost for me to research which hardware is compatible with each other and my OS's of choice, unpack and assemble hardware, download the driver, and install the software, is probably getting up to 4 or 5 hours. I think I'd rather buy from Apple and let someone who makes a little less per hour do the work, while I spend the time at the pub.
They make great machines, but they are over priced, to most people, for what they offer.Most people don't assemble their own hardware. For most people the cost of a mac is less than a comparable machine from another vendor, if Apple offers exactly what they want. If not, then it depends if someone else offers exactly what they want. For me, I'm sort of partial to OS X for my primary desktop since it saves me a lot of time and, hence, money. The author of the article (aside from leaving component quality, reliability, service and support, and included software out of the comparison) makes a perfectly valid point. You can't go to the store and buy a machine with the same specs as a Mac, for much less, if any.
Dell is usually average or a little below the average, not overpriced. Sony sells at above average prices, but also has better reliability and support ratings than most vendors because they tend to use a little better parts and don't skimp on the support. In fact, Sony usually is one of the few vendors with ratings in line with Apple in those categories.
Your assertions are baseless. This article did not cover all the information it should have, but ti did make some very good points that are often overlooked by people who would rather rely upon what they think they know rather than real numbers.
Freedom is not unlimited. Your freedom does not trump the freedom of others. Thus when I'm free to walk down the sidewalk and you're free to walk down the sidewalk, there needs to be mediation for when we meet. A law that says when we meet the older person goes first, is not removing your freedom, it is mitigating the conflict of two people' individual freedoms.
As for the GPL, it does not restrict you in any way. Copyright law restricts your actions. The GPL offers to remove some of those restrictions in exhchange for something else.
So we're not talking about "everyone" and with the GPL, we never were.Freedom applies on more than an individual basis. Should one person be free to enslave and remove the freedom of another? After all, if I'm free, why can't I beat the snot out of you and put you in chains and beat you if you don't serve me? From the point of view of the the individual, that is freedom for me. From an objective point of view, that is not freedom overall. Not having a law to stop me from enslaving you is more freedom than having such a law, from my point of view as an individual. It is not more free from the perspective of a society. The GPL is designed to grant some freedom in exchange for a promise from the individual to grant freedom to others, thus it serves societal freedom above individual freedom. Without it, however, you have less individual and societal freedom, so it serves both more than the lack of it does.
Next, PD offers more freedom than the GPL does.PD offers more freedom to an individual, but less freedom to society as a whole.
Maximum freedom, minimum restrictions.Your definition of freedom is too narrow, or perhaps your perspective is too self centered. The rest of your post is simply repeating what you already said, so I shall not address it specifically.
The players I know were on the market and selling when the iPod cam out out in 2001 were: Sensory Science's Rave MP2300, the I-Jam IJ-100, Creative Labs Nomad, Compaq PJB, Rio, and iRiver. That is six different players on the market prior to the iPod. How can a Slashdot reader not remember the Nomad, given the infamous quote that has been recirculating here ever since?
Apple initially succeeded in the market because they used a hard drive and had an established brand. The brand from a fairly unrelated market helped the general public realize that mp3 players (as they were called at the time) even existed.That is not enough. There were already hardware based players and Sony entered the market shortly after Apple. Compaq entered before them and had an established brand.
The market still would have grown quickly as small size, large capacity hard drives and flash memory were introduced. Apple joined at the right time.I disagree. The market was waiting for someone to make the functionality easy enough for the common man to use. Ripping music from CD may seem easy to you, but I know numerous people who could not figure out how to rip a CD before iTunes. Bigger, cheaper drives don't matter if there is no way for a normal person to get music onto the device. The iTunes software and the iTMS were Apple addressing that part of the problem and making it possible for normal users instead of just geeks to use such a device.
Right now, that is the situation with smartphones too. They are too complex and hard to use and no one has addressed the workflow to make it simple and easy and fast. If Apple can do so, they can open up the smartphone market to more than just the geeks that use them now (there are also some non-geeks now who ignore 90% of the features).
There is never a guarantee, just a good possibility. If it is software you are using, what is the drawback to opening it up and hoping for the best? Note, my company just developed a project internally and released it under the GPL. It is good for PR and our reputation and several smart people have already contacted the maintainer about contributing. We get to use those contributions without paying a dime in development fees for them.
Lets say you are a start-up company trying to break into a market that's dominated by one or more well established propriatory companies. You base your product on Free software which allows a more rapid development and you release all your code and have a product that's much more advanced than the competition's.You've failed. OSS should never be your product only your tool. Selling OSS is not a sustainable business model.
How do you protect yourself from the competition taking your work and using it for themselves whilest using their established market position to maintain their large customer base - you have put development resources into the project and your competition is benefitting more than you.You don't stop competitors from using it. You have reputation and prestige from having developed it, but the whole point is to get others using it so when they need an improvement they either hire you to write code for them (a service) or do it themselves, in which case you get the improvement for free to use yourself.
From the customers' point of view, why would they buy their solution from a relatively unknown business rather than a more well established one that is offering a comparable (the same) product?Again, you should never, ever, ever open source your product and try to sell it. That does not work. You should open source tools and software outside your core competency. An OSS license is a feature of a product. Features benefit the user, not the developer. If you're contributing to OSS it should be because you're a user of the software or because you were paid to do the programming, not deliver the product. If you code OSS, expect to be paid once and make sure you don't publish until you're paid.
There are tough choices to be made when balancing the wish to contribute code to the Free software community against the need to protect your business.Not really. If you're in the mapping software sales business, it is stupid to OSS your product and try to stay in the same business. It may, however, make a lot of sense to open the source to your map navigating and searching code and move into the map sales business (content) thus undercutting the costs of all the companies that are trying to be in the map software business and forcing them to try to quickly follow suit or die.
You should never be a businessman wanting to contribute to OSS for altruistic reasons and trying to decide what you can afford. You should always be using OSS as part of your business plan in order to make more money, or kill the competition.
I don't think this is true. If I take BSD licensed code and make a change to it and then license this new group of code as GPL, I don't think there is any problem. The GPL meets all the requirements of the BSD license. I can do anything with the BSD code I want so long as it is in compliance with the BSD license. The BSD license does not restrict me from not prividing the source, or selling the code, or licensing the code in some new way. MS took the entire TCP stack and so long as they keep the original credit in it, they can release it under their proprietary Windows license. The same is true for releasing it under GPL (as far as I know). Now if I have GPL code and I want to release it under the BSD license, I have a problem, because that does not meet all the criteria for the GPL license. To do that I do need permission from all the copyright holders who contributed.
On your first point, regarding GPL2 and 3, I agree by the way. I just believe you are incorrect about moving BSD code to GPL, which I think is perfectly legal.
My kubuntu install does not find my printer when I plug it in. My OS X install finds my printer and shared, streaming music and local IM users and shared collaborative editing sessions and file shares. I think most Linux distros now have some support for zeroconf, but I don't see it applied to all those useful network services and devices that OS X users have access to. Hopefully that will change in the future.
Very good anti-virus and personal firewall software does exist for Linux so there's another win for you.I suppose I should have posted more explanation for "the list." For features, it covers the default installed applications. Beagle and Google desktop don't count for indexed search because they are not installed/working by default. Likewise ClamAV does not apply to OS X or more linux distros because it is not installed and running by default (not that I think it should be in its current incarnation).
As far as UI wins go, I'm one of those people who just can't get comfortable with Macs.Which UI a particular person prefers is often more a matter of their past experience than anything else. I certainly prefer some aspects of Kubuntu to OS X. Judging the UIs objectively, however, (and I have worked as a UI designer and usability tester) shows a whole range of things that Apple obviously spent a lot of time testing and rigorously applying fundamental HCI principals upon. Dialogue boxes have buttons that are verbs and which are different from one another instead of OK/Cancel which is common in both Windows and Linux. Apple has fewer moving targets and more feedback for actions. Apple makes sure everything works with a 1 button mouse, so novices and alternate interfaces work smoothly and all items that require a second mouse button are optional, shortcuts to functions instead of the only way to get to them. Both Windows and Linux are getting a little better as time goes on, but OS X is a clear winner in my mind. It is nowhere near perfect and makes plenty of mistakes, just not as many as the competition.
...I don't think the iPhone is going to be big at all. The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years. The tie-in with iTunes helped too.
You have to think about markets in terms of consumers and uses. When the iPod came out there were already a lot of people trying to sell digital players, but none of them were very well designed, none of them did a good job of accommodating the entire workflow, none of them were really easy to learn and use. There were players with better stats and more features, but the adoption was very limited. Most people were sticking with portable CD players as a result. The iPod changed that both by providing the right package and through good marketing.
Now take a look at the market the iPod is targeting. It is aimed at the smartphone market, which has a lot of existing products, but fairly small adoption of those products. Most people are sticking with cheap, low end cell phones and a lot of people are not happy with those either. For the iPhone to be huge they need to repeat what they did with the iPod. Apple needs to provide the entire workflow and they need to do it so it is learnable and easy and they need to market it right. I think the marketing is working so far. The question is, can Apple provide a good user experience and will AT&T hold up their end of that experience?
The mobile phone market is completely different to this.
Apple is aiming at the smartphone market, not just the phone market. As with the iPod they hope to take a significant chunk of that market and they hope to pull people in from the lower end phone market, much as the iPod pulled in people from the Discman market.
I haven't paid more than $100 US for a new phone in eight years, and I'm a technophile who upgrades every year, ususally to a high-end just-released model.
In 2001, how many people had paid more than $100 for their portable music player (usually a CD player)? I'm guessing less than 1% of the market.
Apple have no experience at making phones.
They had no experience at making portable music players.
They make stuff which can be good to use, but that's hard in the phone world.
It is hard in the music player market too, which is why it is still really hard to find an iPod competitor that is as easy or nice to use. I don't even own an iPod, but I've used them without a problem. Apple is good at UIs and usability testing to create a polished user experience.
Above all, phones have to be good phones first, then be good ipods, then have other stuff they do well.
To not be a flop, they need to be a better phone. That shouldn't be hard. It takes a minimum of 5 key presses to call a number in my phonebook using my very "simple, just a phone" cell phone. To do well they need to be as good an iPod as the iPod with a permissible slightly larger learning curve. To revolutionize the market, they need to perform a few other functions just as well and just as easily and they need to keep the user experience clean and easy (AT&T may be a problem here).
My SonyEricsson W850 is a very good phone, a great walkman, and also lets me browse the Internet at broadband speeds in a decent way, has good Java games available, a decent-enough camera, a torch, alarm clock and so on.
The W850 is maybe a bit better than par for the course, which is to say 99% of all people do not want to spend the time messing around with it even enough to learn to use the browser, e-mail, or alarm clock. 50% of people probably do not even want to take the time to learn to use SMS or the camera on it and most people just buy a cheaper phone or ignore all those features you talk about. This is
Most hobbyist do choose the GPL from what I've seen, but I doubt they make up the bulk of GPL developers.
Not industry developers that want to earn money from their code. I might just have gotten it all wrong though.Well, there are 50-100 developers in my office today and most of them work on GPL code at some point, paid by the company. I don't think we're unusual in that regard. When commercial developers release code as open source they do so with a motive of making money. You're not going to make money directly from OSS. You make money using OSS and getting free improvements from others and interoperability with other tools is the main benefit. The GPL insures you get those improvements and the competition does not grab all your code, and start a closed fork of it. The only time we use BSD licenses is when it is a vital infrastructure component we're trying to get widely adopted as a standard. In those instances, getting people to use and integrate it into closed software is more important than getting the improvements back.
Any developers willing to comment on what they want out of a license?I think I just did. This is the situation as I see it and I think it has been stable for quite a while. I see more OSS development happening lately, but if anything it is code that old school people would release as BSD, now being released as GPL (and often failing to be adopted widely as a result). I guess I have to disagree with the article on that point (sort of). I see more code being released as GPL (both code that would otherwise have been less permissive like a closed license and code that would have been more permissive, like a BSD license). I see more LGPL code, which is a bit more permissive, I suppose, but I see that more as increased granularity rather than a move towards more permissive licensing in general.
You have bought devices that had functionality you did not use. I suspect a lot of us have. I have a very basic phone right now and it still does not do a very good job as a phone. The iPhone will succeed if it works really well as a phone and is easier to use than other phones. The iPhone will crush the competition and be an enormous success if works really well as a phone and for 5-10 other common tasks that currently suck balls to do on other phones. I know a dozen people right off the top of my head who don't use SMS, or e-mail, mp3 playing, web browsing, or maps on their phone/PDA not because they aren't willing to pay for those features, but because learning them and using them every day is a pain in the ass because of the poorly designed interfaces. Hell, to call a number from the phonebook in my current phone is 5 button presses at the very minimum. That is terrible usability.
I doubt I'll be buying an iPhone anytime soon because of my phone contract and expense, but if Apple has managed another really polished UI, a lot of people will be buying it and a whole lot more than that in a few more years.
I don't want "just a phone" because I'm cheap. I want something that works as a phone really, really well and if it works as other things really really well too, I'll pay for that. If it does other things kinda sorta the way many phones and PDAs do now, I don't really care to pay for it.
Don't you think you should actually try using other clipboards rather than just assuming Windows must be better than others? I don't understand your reasoning at all. From my own experience, Windows clipboards are behind in several ways. Support for drag and drop operations is way behind OS X. Support for multiple, chorded clipboards is behind several Linux distros. Also, I still see the occasional unicode copying bug with Windows XP, which I don't see anywhere else and haven't for a long time.
I reckon the vast majority of users don't have a problem with themTrue, but it is a real annoyance to power users, people using multiple OS's, and systems administrators. It was a stupid, arbitrary decision from MS back in the day.
I'm not going to go through your list and argue which ones are real usability issues and which ones are your own issues being projected. The best way to determine the usability of an application is by usability testing which it is clear Apple does in abundance (for most apps) and which neither Windows nor Linux seem to do much of. (Actually I suspect MS does a lot of usability testing and then ignores it for marketing/internal politics reasons.)
I like OSX, but I'm tired of hearing it described as the epitome of UI design.OS X is absolutely not the epitome of UI design. They just seem that way when compared to Windows and most Linux distros. There is room for improvement all around, but as something of a usability professional myself, I can tell you there is not a lot of contest for this point.
Yes I know about Monad (although I only played with it briefly). My list is geared towards items included by default with the OS. If you want to start going with all the add-in functionality provided by other software downloads, we'll never get anywhere. Does Google desktop count as indexed search? Do the numerous package management systems for OS X mean we can ignore that lack on the platform?
This issue is worth revisiting once Monad is shipped by default (Vista SP2 is the rumor) and it comes into general use and can be compared to bash, etc.
Whenever these discussions come up, I like to forestall some of the repetition by posting my list of wins for OS X, Windows, and Linux. This is a list of the things each OS does better than some others, not a list of problems. Feel free to post and suggest other items, but please know what you;re talking about. I hate getting posts from people who clearly have never used two of the OS's in question and are simply assuming their favorite OS must do it better.
OS X Wins:
Windows Vista Wins:
Probably never. The primary requirement is for a 1-button default both for novice users and to encourage developers not to use improper design methods. That means if Apple were to added a second button to the trackpad, it would have to be a feature you could enable and disable (probably in software) like the mighty mouse. So who is it for? Novices prefer 1 button and it is easier for them. Usability studies show expert users are faster using a single button trackpad and chording once they've conquered the learning curve (since it requires fewer fingers to be moved from the keyboard). Who does that leave? Just sort-of-power users who have not taken the time to learn chording. I don't really see that as a pressing market for Apple to address, especially considering the expense involved. Don't hold your breath.
P.S. learn to use the trackpad with chording. After you pass the learning curve, it is significantly faster than using a two button trackpad.
Well for me it is so I can use the same computer at work and home. Most of our LAN parties of the last 5 years have been dominated by laptops since they are so much easier to move. Carrying a tower and monitor over to friends houses is so 1995. Until they perfect a way to thow cheetos at people over the network, they are ideal.
Do hear how stained your argument is? If you want a machine for "easy" modifications (which most people don't) and you want a new instead of a used machine and you want i from company X, then you must pay a minimum $Y. Yeah, that is pretty obvious. If you're buying from Apple, you're limited by the hardware options they have, which will never be as varied and granular as all the rest of PC manufacturers put together. What is your point? How does this make a difference for a trial of OS X? Does anyone care about people with a weird set of criteria like yours? Computers for sort of competent people who want to change hardware but are not very good at it and can't find a Web page and follow the instructions. Who cares about said losers?
Here is a brief article on the subject. For more in depth information on the current subsidies in place and the economics of them, check out "Internet Economics" By Lee W. Macknight and Joseph P. Bailey. There are a number of other books, but this one has better references and avoids sensationalism.
I was under the impression that the current backbone infrastructure was all privately funded pretty much since NSFNet went out of the picture.I can assure you, that has not been the case. A whole lot of the dark fiber in the ground was laid by the US government and then sold at much less than cost, to hide the subsidy. In fact, we've paid more per citizen than other countries that completely funded government owned infrastructure and have similar or worse population densities.
This is one of the problems we have in America. Corporate chiefs lean on the cry of the "free market," which is a concept that many Americans (myself included) do embrace. BUT, unfortunately we don't have a *true* free market, we have this bastardized hyrid of government + corporation.The idea of the free market is a good one and one that works, but extremists take it too far. It is not a panacea and it does not work well in some situations. Healthcare, for example, is a situation where the buyer is under extreme duress with impending death and pain and that does not make for a logical, self-interested transaction between equals. A true free market cannot persist because of the wealth condensation principal. As wealth disparity becomes greater and greater we move to feudalism and eventually most people are born poor and a few are born rich and make money by lending to the poor. This disparity of station due to birth leads to justified anger and eventually violent revolt and the system is destroyed (as it always has been historically).
I do support the free market and generally believe that private companies should not be regulated (much) in how the profit from their investments.Network operators are a special case. In exchange for being impartial common carriers, they are less regulated than even private citizens (in some ways). If I transmit child porn or make copies of disney films, I'm subject to a lengthy jail sentence, while ISPs are protected from such because they are providing a common good. Without net neutrality, they are no longer providing that common good, so why should they be more protected than I am?
Do you know what network neutrality is? Why would network neutrality prevent someone for charging for use of their network (which by the way was subsidized by our tax dollars to the tune of billions)? All the network neutrality proposals ever to see any support in congress call for a ban on charging different prices for traffic based upon who is sending the traffic... and that is it. You can still charge for traffic. You can still charge different amounts for different types of traffic. You just can't charge different amounts based upon where the traffic came from. This is to prevent AT&T from asking for money from some company who buys access from AT&T's peer's peer's peer, in exchange for not intentionally slowing down that traffic as it crosses their network. I might mention, in the situation I just mentioned AT&T has already been paif by their peer to carry the traffic, so it is not a question of them not being able to charge for it.
I work with a lot of ISPs and big network providers. Their side of the story is that they want to be able to charge people with lots of money extra for the same service they supply to other people, by using their location as a gateway and by telling their peering router "sure I'm the best way to get that traffic there" and then intentionally slowing the traffic down so their previous claim to the router was a lie. Quite simply, they want to be able to gouge people by ignoring the responsibility of a common carrier. It is a lot easier to do this, than to actually add real value through faster connections or services where they have to be competitive. I mean if you build out a DDoS filter service it might not be as good as Sprint's. They'd have to work hard and take risks. They'd much rather abuse their location in the network in order to collect money for nothing. It is extortion, plain and simple.
Deregulation isn't always a bad thing but in this case i think it will destroy many a business that can't or won't pay to play with the big-boys.I'm glad you're in favor of net neutrality, but I think your reasons are a bit off. We gave the network operators billions of our tax dollars. That is what prevents little companies from entering the market. We give them special protections from prosecution for the traffic they carry under the auspice that they are impartial, common carriers, not responsible for what crosses their network. Both of these were done for the common good. If they want to be mercenary and be unregulated let them, right after they pay the money back and after we start prosecuting them for transporting child pornography and contributing to copyright infringement. If they want to eb treated like any other company we should oblige them, but if they want to be supported and protected by special laws, we should be getting something back for the american people.
This is untrue. Towers, in general can be modified by anyone, just as Apple towers can be. Laptops, all-in-one machines, and small form factor systems usually require more detailed instructions. Apple just happens to sell more of those more revolutionary and specialized form factors than the PC industry in general. You'll have just as many problems with the average Apex as you will a mac mini.
The key piece of this puzzle, you seem to be missing is that Bush can be evil while doing the exact same thing as other administrations, because pretty much all the presidents for the last 50 years have been evil bastards.
Why is that your definition of native? What about Java apps designed just for OS X, but which don't use Aqua? What about Carbon apps? The finder is not aqua, but I don't think many would claim it is not "native." OS X is built on a robust command line. I'd argue CLI applications are just as native as GUI ones.
m not saying they don't exist - but they're harder to find (jEdit is swing-based and isn't really native, and bbEdit is very definitely non-free).Interestingly enough, my favorite OS X software tracking site filters on (word processor/text editor)(Aqua) and (Freeware). The search returns 22 results, from the Cocoa Abiword to xPad. They don't seem to be that hard to find, even using your weird criteria for what is "native."
Yes, but to a "hardcore BSD or Linux or Solaris geek" a GUI has always been just a device for running 16 copies of vim side-by-side while looking as much like NeXTStep as possibleActually, NextStep fans and BSD people seem to have trouble getting along from what I've seen. I'm amazed Apple has managed to contain both of them.
Anybody who has ever tried to get anything else done on a *nix desktop environment will quickly deduce that *nix developers never actually use them...Ever tried using IRIX?
Seriously, there's no doubt that OS X is very well served for *nix shell-based and X11 softwareOkay, so where is your support for Windows having more of other kinds of freeware then?
Word processing and graphics freeware eh? Well, going to my favorite Mac freeware site comes up with 84 freeware word processors and 1504 graphics applications. It sure seems like there's a real problem with there being any of those, huh?
That's the lack of quality freeware I was talking about.What would you call "quality?" OpenOffice on Windows is dog slow, especially for large documents. I work as a professional writer upon occasion and I know more than one user who has balked at trying to make use of it. What quality, free word processor on Windows should we be using as a comparison for quality? As for graphics, there are more free graphics tools on OS X than any other platform I've used. I sit down in front of OS X, Linux, and Windows XP every day, so I'm fairly familiar with the offerings on all of them.
I don't know what you're referring to here. I say that there is no consumer-priced model from Apple that has easily accessed componentsYou're right. Of course 99.9999999% of the people who buy consumer priced desktops never access the components, so that is not really a big issue for many people. If you are accessing the components and you can't figure out how to get to them on an imac or a mini, maybe you should rethink messing with the inside of computers since you're probably not very clever at it.