So why do games not have similar levels of preventative measures?
In the US, games, movies, and magazines all are treated the same way. The industry rates itself and retailers usually voluntarily place restrictions based upon those ratings. Pornography laws apply equally to all these mediums.
And if you believe that games should be freely buyable, would you consider allowing porn and any rated movie to also be freely buyable?
The same laws apply now. There is no law stopping a ten year old from going to the store and buying a horribly violent, rated-r movie and the government is specifically forbidden from restricting this. If the industry itself or retailers want to restrict it (as they do) well good for them.
What about cigerettes and alcohol?
Cigarettes and alcohol are scientifically proven to cause damage to the health and development of minors. They are not a free speech issue. Thus, the government restricts them legally until a person is deemed able to make decisions for themselves. The scientific community has not yet shown that violence or pornography is "damaging" to children and certainly not to their physical health.
It seems that we keep on having specific rules/laws per each individual "substance"
We have one set of laws for free speech and expression which the government is forbidden from interfering with. We have one set of laws for substances. You are misinformed.
The real issue is much simpler than everyone here is used to. It is the same issue parents in the US face when they run into japanese animation. Parents assume all games and animated video is appropriate for young children because all the games and animated video they saw when they were younger was aimed at children. Their parents did not let them play "leisure suit larry" if their parents knew what it was and they didn't let them watch dirty, porno cartoons everyone laughed at, at grandpa's masonic temple. When parents realize they are wrong, or they may have made a mistake in this assumption they do the currently American thing and try to figure out how it can be someone else's fault and responsibility. What, not all games are little pixelated blobs anymore, well why didn't someone else step in and make sure my kids aren't doing anything I don't want them to? What that cartoon is full of tentacle porn rape? I didn't know that, even though it is unrated or rated-x I just assumed it did not. Why didn't the government tell me this rated-x movie might not be appropriate for my kids?
Parents need to grow up and take responsibility for raising their own kids. The industry is already voluntarily rating these games as possibly inappropriate and almost every store will refuse to sell them to minors without a parent's approval. Parents who did not pay attention and other people who want to make decisions on behalf of people who are parents don't care. Half are looking for a way to shift blame for their inattention and stupidity on someone else. The other half just want to make sure parents who do decide a violent game is appropriate for their kid are somehow prevented from making that decision by force of law. It makes me sad to see what the US has come to.
'm not quite sure what your point is there. Clearly, on a scale of unethical behaviour, the former is not as bad as the latter. But that is like saying "beating someone up is not as bad as murdering them, so it's OK to beat people up", which is illogical (unless you were somehow faced with an unambiguous either/or situation).
We can logically conclude, not that burning cars is right, but that if someone trying to stop the latter crime that ends up doing the former in the process it is still hypocritical to punish the former and not the latter. If we're judging ethics, we can't do so based solely upon the assumption that existing laws are always ethical as enforced by our government, as implied by the previous post.
What ever happened to the reporters a number of years ago that video taped the murder of someone tied to a tree (yes, really happened!)? Would we be arguing about whether or not they should have to turn over the tape to the authorities?
Is murder a more serious crime than burning a car? Did this murder happen at a political rally? Is it likely other people were present at this murder, but not taking part in said murder who members of the government have a vested interest in identifying for reasons unrelated to the murder? Was it video known to be of the murder, or just video at the same location as the murder that the people who filmed it and numerous other individuals claim does not actually show film of the murder?
Period.
Don't you think typing the word "period" followed by the punctuation symbol is more than a little redundant, especially following another period?
I don't expect that this fellow should have attempted to stop the riot, or stop people from torching the police car. But to refuse to turn over evidence because he thinks the government may use it to identify other people IN A RIOT is specious.
Did you even read the article? The fact that this tape contains evidence of the crime is seriously in doubt and claiming that this should be under federal jurisdiction not because it was a federal crime or because federal officials were involved, but because some of the funding for the car may or may not have come from federal grants the state used to fund it is absurd. It is a ridiculous abuse of our legal system to try to avoid the law, rather than uphold it. This is a state matter, involving the violation of a state law, and should be handled by the state according to the other laws of that state. The interference by the feds in this matter makes it even more likely that they want this tape to further their illegal interference with political expression and to break the law as they have been caught doing again and again.
...has Apple removed the hard disk icon from the Desktop ?
Hard disks, removable media, and remote servers will all show up or not show up on the desktop, depending upon your Finder preferences in 10.4 and I believe all previous versions of OS X. These are probably just screenshots from a system that has them turned off.
Only 10 Leopard features were demoed for a developer conference, and the rest was kept "Top Secret."
They pulled in DTrace from Solaris and added a cool UI to it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they are also pulling in containers and doing the same thing. I'd kill for that functionality, especially combined with VM, but I'm sadly not expecting it. If they were moving to containers, they probably would have wanted to give developers more of a head start on making sure their apps run smoothly with them, and would have announced them. Still, I can hope.
While I agree with you in principle, I really don't think it's Subversion in particular.
I agree. It looks like this offers a combination of spotlight's insight into file types (including binaries) with the versioning, which would be difficult to manage with subversion. I think the subversion and Time machine features are separate ones. Apple uses subversion internally and the new OpenSource project site they set up uses it as well. It would be really cool if subversion integrated with the Time Machine versioning in some way, but I'm not expecting it for the first release.
Umm, this is California. It is in no way paranoid to think that government agents are going to illegally act against people for their political beliefs, because they are caught doing so over and over and over again. How long has it been since it was revealed that government agents illegally infiltrated and took control of anti-war protest groups, planned illegal acts for that group, and then planned a mass arrest with the police? Three whole weeks huh? Yeah, you'd have to be crazy to think the government would illegally persecute people for their political beliefs. That's just paranoid.
In the government's case, at least, they at least have proof that a crime was committed and that Wolf, with his camera, was there videotaping events.
That's not good enough. The burden of proof on the government to seize property is much higher than "we think he might have," especially when the potential for abuse is so high.
What evidence - not proof, just evidence of any sort - does Wolf have to back up his claims?
Since when do you need evidence to not have your basic human rights violated?
Anyone who witnesses a crime and does nothing is not a citizen, and is not entitled to treatment as a citizen.
Have you ever seen anyone speeding and not called it in? If you saw a 90 year old man in horrible pain attempt to stop the pain through suicide would you physically force him to continue to suffer?
Who is to say what is a crime even, let alone what is "evil" or unethical? Is the crime of burning a police car any less ethical than the crime of intentionally keeping an entire nation on the brink or starvation for your own personal profit? No one who is not a police officer has any obligation to try to stop crimes that they don't object to or just don't feel like doing. Even police officers have the right to renounce their position instead of enforcing unjust laws. Our entire nation and way of life was based upon standing up and refusing to obey unjust laws.
If evil doers know that the press is watching and that the information gathered will be used to stop them, they may think twice before acting.
Yes, but if those doing good know that anyone watching or participating can be compelled to provide information about their activities to corrupt and abusive authorities, then they two may reconsider doing good. That is why we have due process and enumerated rights. Vandals burning a car are nowhere near the threat to freedom and the citizenry that a corrupt government is, which is why the law is designed to protect us from an authoritarian government even if it means a few vandals get away.
There should be no special legal benefits given to a citizen over another citizen based on their profession. I find it amazing that most people here are happy with giving special legal shelter to a "special class" of citizen.
While I agree with this, I disagree that most shield laws do that. Shield laws in California being an exception, most shield laws protect reporters and whistle blowers based upon the fact that they are journalists, which is defined as a citizen who is gathering information and forming opinions and expressing them to the public. If you're walking down the street and see a guy in a clown suit and then post that on this blog, you're a journalist according to federal law and most state laws. This isn't a special protection for a "special class" of citizen it is a protection for citizens who are behaving in a certain, important and beneficial way.
The moment an OS X box appears on shelves at your local Best Buy that Apple intends for you to install on your Dell, HP or Lenovo, that wall is down.
In terms of the market for desktop OSs, this is not enough. The pre-installed market makes up probably 90% of said market. Unless Apple can get several major manufacturers to pre-install OS X, they will not be successfully entering that market. What they will be doing is gutting their hardware business.
The reason you arent going to see OS X for PCs any time soon has little to do with profit, and a lot to do with the fact that doing so means a fight to the death with Microsoftand no, I dont think Im engaging in hyperbole.
While MS might do all they can to kill OS X in said situation and Apple likewise for Windows, that does not mean it is a fight "to the death." There is room in the market for multiple, competing systems. Both would probably continue to exist and in fact would likely get better as they are forced to compete with one another. Thus, all the tactics that involve screwing over users would backfire.
All of this, however, is academic. No one risks a successful PC business by gambling the whole thing on one roll of the dice and pre-installing OS X, unless they have MS's blessing, which would only be given if it was a planned double cross. Apple knows it and so does Dell and Lenovo and everyone else in the space.
My time is so valuable that I moved to Linux. Maybe OS X is up there with Linux in terms of usability and application support.
Sorry, I use Linux every day, but OS X isn't "up there" with Linux in terms of usability and application support for a workstation, it is head and shoulders beyond Linux. I'd rather use a free and fully open source OS, but I am much more productive on OS X. It requires less messing around. Upgrading to a new laptop entails plugging a firewire cable between the old machine and the new and clicking a button. I can IM or e-mail working applications to people or run almost any program off of a USB drive. I can use my spell checker, grammar checker, scripts, encryption, language translations and other services in all my programs and use the best one for everything rather than a different implementation for every program. I can run both GIMP and photoshop easily. Sorry, but unless Linux catches up on these and many other fronts or until Apple does something that affects my everyday work, Linux is a distant second or third choice as a workstation.
I don't use the mouse for the start menu, neither do most of the Windows users I know.
From all the usability studies I've seen, you and everyone you know are a huge abnormality. I've seen hundreds or even thousands of users navigate to programs in Windows and one or two use the keyboard.
Windows key + "P" (for programs) + first letter of program (category folder if you've got it organized like I do) + first letter of program again. Hit enter.
There are several ways this is different. First, you still have to know the organization of your folders within the start menu if you have things sorted so they can be easily found. Second, the start menu excludes files by default, whereas spotlight includes them by default. In Spotlight I can hit cmd-space f-o-o and enter to open up a file in Users/me/Documents/Work/cvs_checkouts/Documentatio n/reeasename/codename/version401/foobar.pdf. Better yet, if foobar.pdf is a document all about MPLS that has that acronym in it numerous times, I can type cmd-space m-p-l-s enter to open it, even if I don't remember the name of the file. Finally, assuming I have a hundred files about MPLS, none of which I've opened for months, doing the last operation in Leopard with the feature we are discussing will still pull them up, with the few most recently accessed ones at the top of the list, whereas Windows will only present it if it is one of the most recent 10 or so documents out of all my documents.
It's not much of a time machine if it can't go into the future and retrieve the documents I haven't written yet.
It can do that using the CLI, but they haven't enabled it in the UI version yet because only CLI users are careful enough to make sure to later write the documents and avoid a time paradox that will destroy all of the universe and mankind, upsetting Apple's marketing plans. This is also a feature of vi, but the only docs are written in Klingon and hidden in a pornographic JPEG.
Bundling IE doesn't prevent OEMs from doing their customers a favor by installing Firefox and making it the default browser. There's no good reason not to bundle it.
The following are incentives not to bundle Firefox:
It costs money and effort to add another browser and keep it up to date.
It increases support costs to support multiple browsers and IE can't really be removed.
Not working with IE only Websites increases support costs.
Kickbacks from IE toolbar spyware would no longer provide extra money.
Installing Firefox as default may anger MS, who has them by the short hairs with differential pricing of Windows.
Plus, I'd rather be able to download and install Firefox on a newly-built computer using IE, than have to download it from another computer and copy it across the network or burn it onto a CD.
To be in technical compliance with the law, MS would have allow OEMs to place Firefox or another browser on the install disk. Even if they don't OEMs can include an install disk for the browser. You can use the old version of the browser to download a newer copy of whatever you want.
Seriously, they're complaining about the Acid2? The most irrelevant web standards test ever devised?
Acid2 is a bunch of random CSS and other standards tests to see if certain often broken parts of the standard actually work right. It is a reasonable torture test, but certainly nothing IE is ready to try for. It is like entering a Yugo in a monster truck contest.
IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6.
Well, for my own personal test the standards compliant markup I maintain looks pretty much the same in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konquerer, and every other non-IE browser I could find. In IE 6, it shows none of the formatting. In IE 7 it shows none of the formatting. Thus, they both fall into the same category for me, broken MS crap that with all their money and developers can't manage what several commercial companies and several community projects managed years ago.
Like how both Spotlight and Time Machine were/are (respectively) features known to be planned for Vista before they were released in OS X. Apple is much quicker to release, but MS surely aren't the only ones "photocopying".
Just because the features were announced for Vista before they were released for OS X, in no way implies they were copied. It takes some time to develop features, and Apple was almost certainly working on both of them long before MS announced they would be in Vista. In any case, both spotlight and Time machine are just updated versions of features that were demoed or even on production systems long ago, but implemented in a more newbie workstation friendly way. Not that Apple doesn't copy from MS. For example, fast user switching was almost certainly put in OS X because it was so popular in Windows (not that it was not in Linux long before). But MS does have a habit of making bad copies of Mac features, beyond what is normal in the industry. That is fine with me. I hope they learn a lot more from Apple and provide feature parity. It would benefit everyone.
Okay I don't know what level of expertise you have with non-Windows OS's so I'll assume none and go from there. Say you want to launch photoshop. In Windows you go to the start menu or the Windows explorer, navigate to it and run it. To do this you use the mouse. It takes more time than you think, since when you're using the mouse, you concentration is focused. If you actually watch someone else do it, this takes a little time, but nothing to unreasonable, unless they actually have to hunt through menus to find it, like they sometimes do. For the few programs you use most frequently, say top 10, Windows has them right there for you. And maybe you remember the locations of the next ten most common. Then there are the ones you rarely use which you actually have to hunt for in the start menu, maybe in Start->Programs->Utilities->Ubisoft->Monkey.exe or something.
On OS X the search feature is fast enough that it is easier to just use it for everything including launching most applications. Sort of the way Google is faster than trying 3 URLs before finding some company's fairly obvious domain name. You hit cmd-space and type the first few letters of the application or file name. then you use the arrow keys to select it (usually the top item) and hit enter. The whole thing is really, really fast when you try it, much faster than using the start menu in Windows. The recent items feature refines this slightly, so that if you have say 15 images beginning with the same letters, it will pull them up, but put the most recent ones on top. This is not the most recent 10 items you've used, but the most recent 10 items beginning with whatever letters you entered. The granularity and the interface mechanism are the difference.
All in all this is pretty cool, unless you don't have any idea what the name or contents of the file or program you are looking for are, then you have to fall back to using it like a traditional search (with content) or use the hierarchical directories for organization. I personally find it useful to organize my files and folders in a start menu like way, for when I want to launch that audio editing app whose name I don't recall at all. Then I just right-click on the icon on my dock and navigate to Audio and select it. Both methods are better for different instances, but they are not the same thing by any means. I hope that helps to clarify it for you.
i think it is gnustep that needs to become compatible with OSX and not the other way around.
It would be a good thing for the project, I agree. Whether spearheaded by the GNUStep project or by Apple, what would be ideal is a cross-platform development toolset that builds for both OS X/Aqua and Gnome and/or KDE. And, get it adopted by a major Linux distro. This framework provides some real benefits for a workstation, but most people who recognize and care about those benefits have already moved to OS X. Unless GNUStep can convince a major distro to adopt it, I don't see it going anywhere because it won't get the application developers on board.
The solution to outrageously priced high-speed access is not to spend yet more tax money on setting up and maintaining a wireless network, it's to allow competing phone and cable companies.
Yeah, because we'll get those laws passed in michigan anytime now, just as soon as said companies forget to pay their campaign contribution bribes. Sorry but it just isn't going to happen. The phone company legally has to allow other companies to sell DSL across their lines. Realistically, they ignore the law and no one had the money to take them to court over it. We've already paid billions of dollars subsidizing running the lines on the poles and to the houses so it is not cost effective for another company to run their own even if they were allowed to, unless we spend billions more subsidizing them. For all these reasons and many other reasons of practicality, wireless is a lot better and cheaper option. The wireless option is cheap, easily sustainable, and quick to deploy. Whatever it costs in tax dollars to set up, it won't be $20 a month for every resident like the entrenched monopolies cost, so it is a win for citizens. I'd rather we had public utility fiber to the premises that any company could sell access across, but I just don't see it happening, so I'm willing to take what I can get and weaken the monopolies in the process. Once people see a better option and these bloodsuckers have less money, their influence with politicians will wane.
To be clear, in principal, I agree with you, but I don't think it is going to happen so I'll take what improvements I can get.
Well they have also been asked to support Solaris x86 as a host platform since it's also a supported guest but it seems like thats not going to happen. So having a OS X client just because OS X is now on Intel was not a foregone conclusion.
The OS X market is much bigger than the Solaris market. Also, there were plenty of comments from the developers that they were working on an OS X version, even months ago. Finally, While Solaris is a pretty cool workstation OS, a whole lot of the more influential people in the market are sitting in from of Mac laptops these days and carrying them into server rooms. If they let Xen grab the OS X part of the market, then regardless of the feature by feature comparison on other platforms, they'd be losing a significant mindshare.
...it shows that a business needs a solid base of popular sales and a ever expanding long tail of indie, cult, and oldie stuff that serve as loss leaders and marginal profit makers.
A lot of people are just not getting this. You can make a certain amount of money selling the top hits and your business can be profitable in the current market. If you carry less popular content as well, it will sell more poorly, per title. If it costs you a significant amount per title, then this is poor business. The issue is, the cheaper your cost per title, the less popular a title can be and still be profitable. With online distribution models, it can cost basically nothing to carry these titles, thus everything is profitable. If you're making a million bucks selling the 100 biggest hits and you can make another 100 million selling the less popular catalogue of 100,000 titles, well you just doubled your profit and that means you can cut your margins in half driving out of business those who haven't caught on yet.
My Merit account was still accessible for years after I had graduated and left school. It was very convenient. Amusingly, it lasted right up until I got a job working for a Merit spin-off in the Merit building. As for the Wireless, Merit will probably be providing the pipes. I've been rooting for this project for a while and that it is being implemented by local guys from down the street is a big plus. The fact that it does an end run around the local monopolies stranglehold on the last mile is also good for the local economy and they should be able to undercut the entrenched players or bring prices down to nearly half what they currently are, all while providing free low speed connections to those of us trying to solve arguments at the bar using wikipedia. It is a big win for the whole area.
I think, that as soon as both products will get both reliable (Parallels?) and fast (VMware?) enough, then it will be just a question of price what to chose.
I expect this product to be free from VMWare. They have been building a model of free workstation level software to promote their high-end server and management tools. Parallels is doing okay right now, but if they want to continue to sell against several free solutions (VMWare, WINE, Xen) for the long haul they need to either get into the high-end market or concentrate on a niche. VMWare supports 3D graphics in a limited way, less than ideal for gaming. If Parallels were to go head to head with Cedega, on the other hand, they might be able to win over a lot of the Windows games on OS X market as it is just being born. From their Website, it seems like they are aiming at that market.
I don't understand why VMware would have a released Workstation for Linux sooner than for OSX (given the Linux-to-Apple Marketshare conundrum).
Only recently has OS X started running on top of x86 and only recently has VM hardware functions been built into x86 chips. These two things both make an OS X implementation a whole lot less work. Running VMWare on PPC would be a lot harder to manage. As soon as Apple moved to x86, this became easy and VMWare started work on getting it to market.
If so, that'd mean they are virtualizing the treacherous computing hardware (TPM) and foiling Apple's copy protection.
Technically, you've been able to run OS X in a VMWare VM on top of Linux or Windows for a while, but VMWare does not support the hacks needed. This announcement is about running Windows or Linux or whatever in a VM on top of OS X, which is what most of us are more interested in anyways. I don't see how Apple would justify legal action or any reason why they would bother. This just makes OSX a better, more versatile platform.
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So why do games not have similar levels of preventative measures?
In the US, games, movies, and magazines all are treated the same way. The industry rates itself and retailers usually voluntarily place restrictions based upon those ratings. Pornography laws apply equally to all these mediums.
And if you believe that games should be freely buyable, would you consider allowing porn and any rated movie to also be freely buyable?
The same laws apply now. There is no law stopping a ten year old from going to the store and buying a horribly violent, rated-r movie and the government is specifically forbidden from restricting this. If the industry itself or retailers want to restrict it (as they do) well good for them.
What about cigerettes and alcohol?
Cigarettes and alcohol are scientifically proven to cause damage to the health and development of minors. They are not a free speech issue. Thus, the government restricts them legally until a person is deemed able to make decisions for themselves. The scientific community has not yet shown that violence or pornography is "damaging" to children and certainly not to their physical health.
It seems that we keep on having specific rules/laws per each individual "substance"
We have one set of laws for free speech and expression which the government is forbidden from interfering with. We have one set of laws for substances. You are misinformed.
The real issue is much simpler than everyone here is used to. It is the same issue parents in the US face when they run into japanese animation. Parents assume all games and animated video is appropriate for young children because all the games and animated video they saw when they were younger was aimed at children. Their parents did not let them play "leisure suit larry" if their parents knew what it was and they didn't let them watch dirty, porno cartoons everyone laughed at, at grandpa's masonic temple. When parents realize they are wrong, or they may have made a mistake in this assumption they do the currently American thing and try to figure out how it can be someone else's fault and responsibility. What, not all games are little pixelated blobs anymore, well why didn't someone else step in and make sure my kids aren't doing anything I don't want them to? What that cartoon is full of tentacle porn rape? I didn't know that, even though it is unrated or rated-x I just assumed it did not. Why didn't the government tell me this rated-x movie might not be appropriate for my kids?
Parents need to grow up and take responsibility for raising their own kids. The industry is already voluntarily rating these games as possibly inappropriate and almost every store will refuse to sell them to minors without a parent's approval. Parents who did not pay attention and other people who want to make decisions on behalf of people who are parents don't care. Half are looking for a way to shift blame for their inattention and stupidity on someone else. The other half just want to make sure parents who do decide a violent game is appropriate for their kid are somehow prevented from making that decision by force of law. It makes me sad to see what the US has come to.
'm not quite sure what your point is there. Clearly, on a scale of unethical behaviour, the former is not as bad as the latter. But that is like saying "beating someone up is not as bad as murdering them, so it's OK to beat people up", which is illogical (unless you were somehow faced with an unambiguous either/or situation).
We can logically conclude, not that burning cars is right, but that if someone trying to stop the latter crime that ends up doing the former in the process it is still hypocritical to punish the former and not the latter. If we're judging ethics, we can't do so based solely upon the assumption that existing laws are always ethical as enforced by our government, as implied by the previous post.
What ever happened to the reporters a number of years ago that video taped the murder of someone tied to a tree (yes, really happened!)? Would we be arguing about whether or not they should have to turn over the tape to the authorities?
Is murder a more serious crime than burning a car? Did this murder happen at a political rally? Is it likely other people were present at this murder, but not taking part in said murder who members of the government have a vested interest in identifying for reasons unrelated to the murder? Was it video known to be of the murder, or just video at the same location as the murder that the people who filmed it and numerous other individuals claim does not actually show film of the murder?
Period.
Don't you think typing the word "period" followed by the punctuation symbol is more than a little redundant, especially following another period?
I don't expect that this fellow should have attempted to stop the riot, or stop people from torching the police car. But to refuse to turn over evidence because he thinks the government may use it to identify other people IN A RIOT is specious.
Did you even read the article? The fact that this tape contains evidence of the crime is seriously in doubt and claiming that this should be under federal jurisdiction not because it was a federal crime or because federal officials were involved, but because some of the funding for the car may or may not have come from federal grants the state used to fund it is absurd. It is a ridiculous abuse of our legal system to try to avoid the law, rather than uphold it. This is a state matter, involving the violation of a state law, and should be handled by the state according to the other laws of that state. The interference by the feds in this matter makes it even more likely that they want this tape to further their illegal interference with political expression and to break the law as they have been caught doing again and again.
Hard disks, removable media, and remote servers will all show up or not show up on the desktop, depending upon your Finder preferences in 10.4 and I believe all previous versions of OS X. These are probably just screenshots from a system that has them turned off.
Only 10 Leopard features were demoed for a developer conference, and the rest was kept "Top Secret."
They pulled in DTrace from Solaris and added a cool UI to it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they are also pulling in containers and doing the same thing. I'd kill for that functionality, especially combined with VM, but I'm sadly not expecting it. If they were moving to containers, they probably would have wanted to give developers more of a head start on making sure their apps run smoothly with them, and would have announced them. Still, I can hope.
While I agree with you in principle, I really don't think it's Subversion in particular.
I agree. It looks like this offers a combination of spotlight's insight into file types (including binaries) with the versioning, which would be difficult to manage with subversion. I think the subversion and Time machine features are separate ones. Apple uses subversion internally and the new OpenSource project site they set up uses it as well. It would be really cool if subversion integrated with the Time Machine versioning in some way, but I'm not expecting it for the first release.
In that case, Wolf's unsubstantiated paranoia,
Umm, this is California. It is in no way paranoid to think that government agents are going to illegally act against people for their political beliefs, because they are caught doing so over and over and over again. How long has it been since it was revealed that government agents illegally infiltrated and took control of anti-war protest groups, planned illegal acts for that group, and then planned a mass arrest with the police? Three whole weeks huh? Yeah, you'd have to be crazy to think the government would illegally persecute people for their political beliefs. That's just paranoid.
In the government's case, at least, they at least have proof that a crime was committed and that Wolf, with his camera, was there videotaping events.
That's not good enough. The burden of proof on the government to seize property is much higher than "we think he might have," especially when the potential for abuse is so high.
What evidence - not proof, just evidence of any sort - does Wolf have to back up his claims?
Since when do you need evidence to not have your basic human rights violated?
Anyone who witnesses a crime and does nothing is not a citizen, and is not entitled to treatment as a citizen.
Have you ever seen anyone speeding and not called it in? If you saw a 90 year old man in horrible pain attempt to stop the pain through suicide would you physically force him to continue to suffer?
Who is to say what is a crime even, let alone what is "evil" or unethical? Is the crime of burning a police car any less ethical than the crime of intentionally keeping an entire nation on the brink or starvation for your own personal profit? No one who is not a police officer has any obligation to try to stop crimes that they don't object to or just don't feel like doing. Even police officers have the right to renounce their position instead of enforcing unjust laws. Our entire nation and way of life was based upon standing up and refusing to obey unjust laws.
If evil doers know that the press is watching and that the information gathered will be used to stop them, they may think twice before acting.
Yes, but if those doing good know that anyone watching or participating can be compelled to provide information about their activities to corrupt and abusive authorities, then they two may reconsider doing good. That is why we have due process and enumerated rights. Vandals burning a car are nowhere near the threat to freedom and the citizenry that a corrupt government is, which is why the law is designed to protect us from an authoritarian government even if it means a few vandals get away.
There should be no special legal benefits given to a citizen over another citizen based on their profession. I find it amazing that most people here are happy with giving special legal shelter to a "special class" of citizen.
While I agree with this, I disagree that most shield laws do that. Shield laws in California being an exception, most shield laws protect reporters and whistle blowers based upon the fact that they are journalists, which is defined as a citizen who is gathering information and forming opinions and expressing them to the public. If you're walking down the street and see a guy in a clown suit and then post that on this blog, you're a journalist according to federal law and most state laws. This isn't a special protection for a "special class" of citizen it is a protection for citizens who are behaving in a certain, important and beneficial way.
The moment an OS X box appears on shelves at your local Best Buy that Apple intends for you to install on your Dell, HP or Lenovo, that wall is down.
In terms of the market for desktop OSs, this is not enough. The pre-installed market makes up probably 90% of said market. Unless Apple can get several major manufacturers to pre-install OS X, they will not be successfully entering that market. What they will be doing is gutting their hardware business.
The reason you arent going to see OS X for PCs any time soon has little to do with profit, and a lot to do with the fact that doing so means a fight to the death with Microsoftand no, I dont think Im engaging in hyperbole.
While MS might do all they can to kill OS X in said situation and Apple likewise for Windows, that does not mean it is a fight "to the death." There is room in the market for multiple, competing systems. Both would probably continue to exist and in fact would likely get better as they are forced to compete with one another. Thus, all the tactics that involve screwing over users would backfire.
All of this, however, is academic. No one risks a successful PC business by gambling the whole thing on one roll of the dice and pre-installing OS X, unless they have MS's blessing, which would only be given if it was a planned double cross. Apple knows it and so does Dell and Lenovo and everyone else in the space.
My time is so valuable that I moved to Linux. Maybe OS X is up there with Linux in terms of usability and application support.
Sorry, I use Linux every day, but OS X isn't "up there" with Linux in terms of usability and application support for a workstation, it is head and shoulders beyond Linux. I'd rather use a free and fully open source OS, but I am much more productive on OS X. It requires less messing around. Upgrading to a new laptop entails plugging a firewire cable between the old machine and the new and clicking a button. I can IM or e-mail working applications to people or run almost any program off of a USB drive. I can use my spell checker, grammar checker, scripts, encryption, language translations and other services in all my programs and use the best one for everything rather than a different implementation for every program. I can run both GIMP and photoshop easily. Sorry, but unless Linux catches up on these and many other fronts or until Apple does something that affects my everyday work, Linux is a distant second or third choice as a workstation.
I don't use the mouse for the start menu, neither do most of the Windows users I know.
From all the usability studies I've seen, you and everyone you know are a huge abnormality. I've seen hundreds or even thousands of users navigate to programs in Windows and one or two use the keyboard.
Windows key + "P" (for programs) + first letter of program (category folder if you've got it organized like I do) + first letter of program again. Hit enter.
There are several ways this is different. First, you still have to know the organization of your folders within the start menu if you have things sorted so they can be easily found. Second, the start menu excludes files by default, whereas spotlight includes them by default. In Spotlight I can hit cmd-space f-o-o and enter to open up a file in Users/me/Documents/Work/cvs_checkouts/Documentatio n/reeasename/codename/version401/foobar.pdf. Better yet, if foobar.pdf is a document all about MPLS that has that acronym in it numerous times, I can type cmd-space m-p-l-s enter to open it, even if I don't remember the name of the file. Finally, assuming I have a hundred files about MPLS, none of which I've opened for months, doing the last operation in Leopard with the feature we are discussing will still pull them up, with the few most recently accessed ones at the top of the list, whereas Windows will only present it if it is one of the most recent 10 or so documents out of all my documents.
It's not much of a time machine if it can't go into the future and retrieve the documents I haven't written yet.
It can do that using the CLI, but they haven't enabled it in the UI version yet because only CLI users are careful enough to make sure to later write the documents and avoid a time paradox that will destroy all of the universe and mankind, upsetting Apple's marketing plans. This is also a feature of vi, but the only docs are written in Klingon and hidden in a pornographic JPEG.
Bundling IE doesn't prevent OEMs from doing their customers a favor by installing Firefox and making it the default browser. There's no good reason not to bundle it.
The following are incentives not to bundle Firefox:
Plus, I'd rather be able to download and install Firefox on a newly-built computer using IE, than have to download it from another computer and copy it across the network or burn it onto a CD.
To be in technical compliance with the law, MS would have allow OEMs to place Firefox or another browser on the install disk. Even if they don't OEMs can include an install disk for the browser. You can use the old version of the browser to download a newer copy of whatever you want.
Seriously, they're complaining about the Acid2? The most irrelevant web standards test ever devised?
Acid2 is a bunch of random CSS and other standards tests to see if certain often broken parts of the standard actually work right. It is a reasonable torture test, but certainly nothing IE is ready to try for. It is like entering a Yugo in a monster truck contest.
IE7 is waaaaaaaaaaaaay closer to Firefox and Opera than IE6.
Well, for my own personal test the standards compliant markup I maintain looks pretty much the same in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konquerer, and every other non-IE browser I could find. In IE 6, it shows none of the formatting. In IE 7 it shows none of the formatting. Thus, they both fall into the same category for me, broken MS crap that with all their money and developers can't manage what several commercial companies and several community projects managed years ago.
Like how both Spotlight and Time Machine were/are (respectively) features known to be planned for Vista before they were released in OS X. Apple is much quicker to release, but MS surely aren't the only ones "photocopying".
Just because the features were announced for Vista before they were released for OS X, in no way implies they were copied. It takes some time to develop features, and Apple was almost certainly working on both of them long before MS announced they would be in Vista. In any case, both spotlight and Time machine are just updated versions of features that were demoed or even on production systems long ago, but implemented in a more newbie workstation friendly way. Not that Apple doesn't copy from MS. For example, fast user switching was almost certainly put in OS X because it was so popular in Windows (not that it was not in Linux long before). But MS does have a habit of making bad copies of Mac features, beyond what is normal in the industry. That is fine with me. I hope they learn a lot more from Apple and provide feature parity. It would benefit everyone.
Okay I don't know what level of expertise you have with non-Windows OS's so I'll assume none and go from there. Say you want to launch photoshop. In Windows you go to the start menu or the Windows explorer, navigate to it and run it. To do this you use the mouse. It takes more time than you think, since when you're using the mouse, you concentration is focused. If you actually watch someone else do it, this takes a little time, but nothing to unreasonable, unless they actually have to hunt through menus to find it, like they sometimes do. For the few programs you use most frequently, say top 10, Windows has them right there for you. And maybe you remember the locations of the next ten most common. Then there are the ones you rarely use which you actually have to hunt for in the start menu, maybe in Start->Programs->Utilities->Ubisoft->Monkey.exe or something.
On OS X the search feature is fast enough that it is easier to just use it for everything including launching most applications. Sort of the way Google is faster than trying 3 URLs before finding some company's fairly obvious domain name. You hit cmd-space and type the first few letters of the application or file name. then you use the arrow keys to select it (usually the top item) and hit enter. The whole thing is really, really fast when you try it, much faster than using the start menu in Windows. The recent items feature refines this slightly, so that if you have say 15 images beginning with the same letters, it will pull them up, but put the most recent ones on top. This is not the most recent 10 items you've used, but the most recent 10 items beginning with whatever letters you entered. The granularity and the interface mechanism are the difference.
All in all this is pretty cool, unless you don't have any idea what the name or contents of the file or program you are looking for are, then you have to fall back to using it like a traditional search (with content) or use the hierarchical directories for organization. I personally find it useful to organize my files and folders in a start menu like way, for when I want to launch that audio editing app whose name I don't recall at all. Then I just right-click on the icon on my dock and navigate to Audio and select it. Both methods are better for different instances, but they are not the same thing by any means. I hope that helps to clarify it for you.
i think it is gnustep that needs to become compatible with OSX and not the other way around.
It would be a good thing for the project, I agree. Whether spearheaded by the GNUStep project or by Apple, what would be ideal is a cross-platform development toolset that builds for both OS X/Aqua and Gnome and/or KDE. And, get it adopted by a major Linux distro. This framework provides some real benefits for a workstation, but most people who recognize and care about those benefits have already moved to OS X. Unless GNUStep can convince a major distro to adopt it, I don't see it going anywhere because it won't get the application developers on board.
The solution to outrageously priced high-speed access is not to spend yet more tax money on setting up and maintaining a wireless network, it's to allow competing phone and cable companies.
Yeah, because we'll get those laws passed in michigan anytime now, just as soon as said companies forget to pay their campaign contribution bribes. Sorry but it just isn't going to happen. The phone company legally has to allow other companies to sell DSL across their lines. Realistically, they ignore the law and no one had the money to take them to court over it. We've already paid billions of dollars subsidizing running the lines on the poles and to the houses so it is not cost effective for another company to run their own even if they were allowed to, unless we spend billions more subsidizing them. For all these reasons and many other reasons of practicality, wireless is a lot better and cheaper option. The wireless option is cheap, easily sustainable, and quick to deploy. Whatever it costs in tax dollars to set up, it won't be $20 a month for every resident like the entrenched monopolies cost, so it is a win for citizens. I'd rather we had public utility fiber to the premises that any company could sell access across, but I just don't see it happening, so I'm willing to take what I can get and weaken the monopolies in the process. Once people see a better option and these bloodsuckers have less money, their influence with politicians will wane.
To be clear, in principal, I agree with you, but I don't think it is going to happen so I'll take what improvements I can get.
Well they have also been asked to support Solaris x86 as a host platform since it's also a supported guest but it seems like thats not going to happen. So having a OS X client just because OS X is now on Intel was not a foregone conclusion.
The OS X market is much bigger than the Solaris market. Also, there were plenty of comments from the developers that they were working on an OS X version, even months ago. Finally, While Solaris is a pretty cool workstation OS, a whole lot of the more influential people in the market are sitting in from of Mac laptops these days and carrying them into server rooms. If they let Xen grab the OS X part of the market, then regardless of the feature by feature comparison on other platforms, they'd be losing a significant mindshare.
A lot of people are just not getting this. You can make a certain amount of money selling the top hits and your business can be profitable in the current market. If you carry less popular content as well, it will sell more poorly, per title. If it costs you a significant amount per title, then this is poor business. The issue is, the cheaper your cost per title, the less popular a title can be and still be profitable. With online distribution models, it can cost basically nothing to carry these titles, thus everything is profitable. If you're making a million bucks selling the 100 biggest hits and you can make another 100 million selling the less popular catalogue of 100,000 titles, well you just doubled your profit and that means you can cut your margins in half driving out of business those who haven't caught on yet.
My Merit account was still accessible for years after I had graduated and left school. It was very convenient. Amusingly, it lasted right up until I got a job working for a Merit spin-off in the Merit building. As for the Wireless, Merit will probably be providing the pipes. I've been rooting for this project for a while and that it is being implemented by local guys from down the street is a big plus. The fact that it does an end run around the local monopolies stranglehold on the last mile is also good for the local economy and they should be able to undercut the entrenched players or bring prices down to nearly half what they currently are, all while providing free low speed connections to those of us trying to solve arguments at the bar using wikipedia. It is a big win for the whole area.
I think, that as soon as both products will get both reliable (Parallels?) and fast (VMware?) enough, then it will be just a question of price what to chose.
I expect this product to be free from VMWare. They have been building a model of free workstation level software to promote their high-end server and management tools. Parallels is doing okay right now, but if they want to continue to sell against several free solutions (VMWare, WINE, Xen) for the long haul they need to either get into the high-end market or concentrate on a niche. VMWare supports 3D graphics in a limited way, less than ideal for gaming. If Parallels were to go head to head with Cedega, on the other hand, they might be able to win over a lot of the Windows games on OS X market as it is just being born. From their Website, it seems like they are aiming at that market.
I don't understand why VMware would have a released Workstation for Linux sooner than for OSX (given the Linux-to-Apple Marketshare conundrum).
Only recently has OS X started running on top of x86 and only recently has VM hardware functions been built into x86 chips. These two things both make an OS X implementation a whole lot less work. Running VMWare on PPC would be a lot harder to manage. As soon as Apple moved to x86, this became easy and VMWare started work on getting it to market.
If so, that'd mean they are virtualizing the treacherous computing hardware (TPM) and foiling Apple's copy protection.
Technically, you've been able to run OS X in a VMWare VM on top of Linux or Windows for a while, but VMWare does not support the hacks needed. This announcement is about running Windows or Linux or whatever in a VM on top of OS X, which is what most of us are more interested in anyways. I don't see how Apple would justify legal action or any reason why they would bother. This just makes OSX a better, more versatile platform.