You list some facts, but they're all sort of beside the point. We're talking about the theories of manmade global warming, which are more concerning for the drastic rates of change and implications thereof, rather than resulting temperature in the short term.
Are we in any significant way affecting the climate with our emmissions[sic]
The scientific consensus is that we're introduced unprecedented rates of change most likely as the result of mankind's introduction of pollutants to the system. That's what is troubling to actual climate scientists if you bother to read the journals. Here's an analogy. You're in a car and it has just accelerated from 0 mph to 20 mph in a tenth of a second. We have a good idea why and based upon this we can predict we'll be going 60 in just a few more tenths of a second, but that isn't really the issue so much as the danger of such rapid acceleration on us and the car. Will the tires light on fire? Will the engine fail? Will we crash? Will we black out from the G force? The press gets ahold of this story and runs with it, but they present the concern as being we might crash or get a ticket because we'll soon be going 60 in a 25 mph zone. Marketers who stand to profit write about how we've gone 60 in the car before so it is not unexpected and we can just ignore the problem.
Are these effects more negative than positive?
There are a lot of theories as to potential results of rapid, manmade climate change, but whenever we upset the status quo like this, there is real risk. Further, while humans will likely survive any change, some of the potential results supported by real evidence, are catastrophic. A change for a few degrees in some areas has lead to changes in weather patterns that created droughts in one place and floods in another and forced people to relocate en masse which in turn resulted in a war and a whole lot of pain and suffering and death for the people involved.
Now all of a sudden we have an even greater level of co2, but a temperature that declines. None of the models that IPCC is using can handle this...
From what I've read, none of the climactic models taken seriously are granular enough that they make any predictions on the scale of a single decade. Almost all of them predict fluctuations in both directions in the short term.
With regards to not understanding the scientific method, as long as the IPCC refuses to release their model definitions and the data they base their predictions on, I think I rest my case.
Then you absolutely do not understand the scientific method. If you can't verify the data used in one study, it is not scientific or rational to conclude that the opposite of that study must be the truth. A scientist believes the most supported scientific theory and works to develop better theories which either refine or replace the prevailing theory by performing experiments and gathering data and making predictions and subjecting methodology to peer review. That's the method and it works better than any other process we've tried.
Cite please. You lambast the GP for his unsupported assertions but fail to support any of your own.
Please be more specific. Do you want a citation for my explanation of how the scientific method works or do you want a meta study showing the consensus of peer reviewed, scientific journals on the topic of global warming or do you want scientific studies of marketing in global warming and creationism?
This is an informal discussion, I'm not going to footnote and source everything I write, just specifics. Please, by the way, do a 3 second Google search for any information in doubt before asking for a citation. Pretty much everything I said can be quickly demonstrated in such a way.
Exactly. There is still very little _EVIDENCE_ of mankind-created global warming.
I don't think you understand the scientific method. Global warming with manmade causes as a major factor, is the most supported scientific theory by a large margin. As far as actual scientific theories go, it has been supported by more evidence and testing than any other theory and that is reflected in peer reviewed scientific journals.
If you're truly looking at this scientifically you need to do more than attack the methodology of one or two studies or a meta study. That's already been done as part of the peer review process. You actually have to present an alternative theory and perform experiments and gather data in a falsifiable way showing that your theory has more predictive ability to better match data you haven't yet seen. I haven't seen any other theory with anything close to the support for global warming influenced by man and, in fact, all the leading theories seem to be variations on that model.
You make a slew of unsupported assertions and inherent statements in the rest of your post, but I won't go through and address them individually. People seem to be approaching global warming with the same mindset as creationism. If we can just attack the prevailing theory, we can assume whatever other thing we want is true. That's not science, but I suppose it is understandable because both topics are the result of marketing reaching the public directly, and we all know marketing has nothing to do with rational decision making.
Do you subscribe to any general or climate related scientific journals? Because the consensus seems quite clear to me. Where we're lacking a consensus is in marketing material directed at the general public, but that will remain the case so long as there is money to be made. Don't mistake one for the other.
Apple has screenshots of the Security preference pane on their Snow Leopard Web site and it shows no configuration options for malware detection. So maybe this screenshot is fake or maybe it is ClamAV in OS X server or maybe Apple's screenshots are incorrect or maybe they put it somewhere other than security... but is seems pretty doubtful from where I'm sitting.
So when will they actually implement something genuinely useful against real security threats, like package management?
If you don't think Apple has been adding useful technologies to stop security threats, you haven't been paying attention. Of course most people don't they just assume because Apple doesn't advertise their security technologies to the mainstream public, such technologies they don't exist. You remember that vulnerability in Apple's ZerConf implementation (one of the few enabled by default services on OS X)? No? That's because Apple had sandboxed the entire service in Leopard making the vulnerability impossible to exploit without another exploit for the sandbox, which never materialized. Maybe you remember that said vulnerability did exist on several Linux distros and was exploitable?
And also unfortunately, Parrallels does not have proper hardware level GPU access from systems running in the virtual machine. So no 3D hardware acceleration or CUDA programming support, which happens to usually be the reason(s) for me to try the other OS's.
Actually, Parallels does work with BootCamp though, so you can use the VM from within OS X when that is acceptable and roll it back to previous snapshots for security reasons, and still boot from the partition for those instances when you need to access the GPU directly, like for certain games. Of course it also costs money and it the security is not a concern for you, there's not a lot of reason to bother with it.
I agree, but I don't necessarily think that means destroying competition and the existing industry. For the practical reason of encouraging better results through competition and for legal reasons in most jurisdictions, I think OS vendors should be building a plug-in anti-malware architecture that allows end users to subscribe to multiple security feeds, each of which provides whitelists, blacklists, greylists, and potentially ACLs for software.The OS should handle acquiring and verifying the source of the feed and merging the results of multiple feeds as well as the UI and execution. Thus, there is still room for commercial competition on top of what is provided by the OS vendor.
Problem with having a single, unified anti-virus (if ever such a thing is reliably possible), programmers will have an easier time guessing what protections they'll face when creating a virus.
I agree, to some extent. In terms of attacks on the antivirus system itself a single system may be more vulnerable. In terms of bypassing signatures, however, there is no reason centralized anti-malware cannot draw signatures from disparate feeds, the user subscribes to, be they supplied by Apple, open projects, or commercial companies, for free, or charge.
That said, Apple including malware detection doesn't mean users can't install other malware detection services as well. ClamAV isn't going away just because Apple ships a built in competitor.
End users aren't encouraged to practice personal responsibility, they pay and trust... pay for trust...
From Apple's Snow Leopard Web site:
Security Advice
The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box. However, since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, antivirus software may offer additional protection.
Here are some other ways to help keep your information as safe as possible:
Download files only from known and trusted websites.
Use FileVault to encrypt your most important documents.
Control access to your Mac by locking your screen after a period of inactivity.
Securely delete outdated sensitive files with the Secure Empty Trash command.
That sounds to me like end users are being encouraged to practice personal responsibility.
Apple has been light on details they have made public about Snow Leopard. We know they implemented a CDSA security architecture, expanded use of the sandboxing, and now there is this report of actual malware scanning, but the info on Apple.com is basically nonexistent. I surmise this is intentional. Security people either have developer accounts or will read up on this stuff in technical papers when NDA's expire next week. For regular users, Apple doesn't even want to bring up security as an issue. They will make blanket marketing statements about it, but they would rather leave all the details to more technical venues. This was their policy for Leopard too, with most users having no clue that a full port of TrustedBSD's mandatory access controls was included and being used to sandbox certain potentially vulnerable services.
Since when did an Address Book/Calendaring application become required system components?
Right after it became incredibly useful because people started using multiple applications all of which wanted use and synch the same data. That's what the OS is for, to handle underlying needs of applications.
It's like spelling and grammar checking. Sure you can just copy text out of whatever application you're using and into MSWord, check the spelling and grammar and then copy the text back into the application you're using, but that's a pretty dumb way for a function needed by dozens of different applications to be implemented. More modern OS's implement the functionality directly and let applications plug into it, which incidentally saves all the hassle of synching the training you put into different spelling and grammar checkers. These are the fairly obvious kinds of OS improvement that should have been implemented in Windows a decade ago, but due to the market being uncompetitive, most real innovation was sidelined and most people are stuck using slightly updated versions of a really old OS that ignores these basic user needs.
If you've had it more than 20 days you should have already been given a set of bug fixes for free. You can pay for performance optimizations, updated apps, some new underlying technologies and some UI improvements if you feel like it, otherwise don't. I don't see anyone forcing you to upgrade.
You're mistaken, since upgrade versions have not always cost $129. For example, the 10.0 to 10.1 upgrade was free or $10 if you wanted a hard copy. See my post to the same question for details.
this is clearly a play to prevent any competitor from offering the service-unifying technology Google is offering.
Does Apple provide a competing service to that and are they doing something illegal in the way they;re competing? Preventing people from competing with you on your own platform is only illegal if there is a regulation preventing it or if you're abusing a dominant position in another market.
specifically, they will permit apps that violate this EULA clause only as long as they don't interfere with Apple/AT&T's ability to restrain trade.
You need to present evidence of this claim. What apps duplicate core functionality and are allowed?
AT&T Unified Messaging is not exactly the same thing as Google Voice, but you'd have to try pretty hard to convince yourself that this isn't a brazen attempt to protect that service against competition.
That may be the case, but that would be AT&T's market dominance that would be an issue. That would make Apple a company in an unrelated market being pressured into taking action against their own best interests. That is to say, like trying to blame Dell and charge them because they ship IE as the default browser on all computers. That doesn't fly.
these actions are federal felonies under the sherman act.
The Sherman act deals only with monopolies and trusts that have overwhelming influence in a given market. For Apple to be violating it, they would need to have overwhelming influence in a relevant market. What market do you think Apple is leveraging here and what market is undermined?
What would someone have spent on all OSX and all it's updates thus far?
Your question is hard to answer. You see, the most money you could have spent on upgrades would be $29 for the beta plus $129 for 10.0 plus $10 for a hard copy of the 10.1 upgrade plus $129 for each of 10.2+10.3+10.4+10.5 plus $29 for 10.6 as of friday. That totals up to $713. The problem with this is, of course, that no computer that was available at the time of the beta is still capable of running Leopard (or the last several versions) so realistically (even if you're fanatical about spending as much as possible) at some point you would have had to bought new hardware which would have come with a full version of the OS somewhere in there.
How necessary/optional are the updates?
Updates are fairly optional and running a version that is one or two releases behind for a while is no big deal. Many users who are on a budget just buy every other release. This ends up following a release schedule on par with how often Windows is released. Still others, never upgrade, they just buy a new computer every now an again. Geeks usually buy a new system regularly enough it is not a big deal.
You have a Mac notebook, but can't afford $70 to buy a bigger hard drive for it?
Plus forty bucks for an eternal drive enclosure so I can transfer my data back onto it, plus an hour to swap the drives, plus shipping, plus my machine being out of commission another couple of hours while the data transfers. How much do you bill for an hour of work?
I'm not saying it's a huge deal, and I actually do have an external drive enclosure laying around. I'm saying, the feature is worth a shitload more to me than $.70, especially because my time is not worthless.
I had problems with utorrent's updates and for some reason could not do a full uninstall to be rid of it, user settings were preserved. I later found out that there were configuration files stored under my user folder in applications and libraries.
This is by design. It means multiple versions of a program can share configuration info or they can have separate as the user chooses. Further, it means you can drag an application onto a flash drive and whether you plug it in at home, school, or the library you can run it, but if you're run it on a given machine it can have different preferences based upon the capabilities of that machine.
It is very useful in certain instances. That said, your problem with uninstall shows a lack in OS X. It should not be up to an application to have an uninstaller to clear out user configs. Apple should include an application manager to handle "clean" uninstallation and updates for all apps.
"It sounds like a deal to me for $29, especially reclaiming 7G of hard drive space."
You really care about 7GB of hard drive space? That is literally 70 CENTS worth of hard drive space. With today's hard drive sizes and prices, you shouldn't even be worried about the size of any given piece of data until it's up into the hundreds of gigabytes range.
Really? Where can I go and for $.70 have them pull my laptop's hard drive, swap in one that has 7 gig more space, and transfer my data onto the new drive?
Sometimes the convenience of getting 7 gig of space back on a portable device that is near its limit is worth a lot more than it costs to buy 7 gig worth of hard drive space.
The real reason Apple doesn't want another VOIP app is that it would have the potential to turn the iPod Touch into a viable competitor to their own iPhone.
Cell phones that only work where you have wi-fi aren't much of a competitor.
...apple are very obviously engaging in illegal anticompetitive behavior here.
I don't think that is clear at all. It is possible, but certainly not clear. What law is it you think Apple is breaking and how are they breaking it? What specific market has been undermined by this action?
So you're saying Apple is being anti-competitive and if they don't do what you as a customer wants, you'll patronize a competitor with your consumer dollars? Are you aware that "anticompetitive" is not a synonym for "bad"?
...why is another Windows PC considered Slashdot front page material?
Probably because it is a large company moving into the market from the low end and bringing expertise for inexpensive mobile devices into said market. I find it interesting, even if I'm not thrilled with all of their choices. The GPS and cell receiver/transmitter are interesting choices for a low end device, for example, which reflect their expertise in cell phones.
Maybe this won't spur Linux adoption or undermine MS, but that doesn't mean it won't drive changes in the industry or spur adoption of other technologies.
How does having iPhone users receive calls via their Google Voice number affect the iPhone overall at all?
Apple walked into this market out of the blue and to get anywhere they had to make serious concessions to AT&T. Right now, Apple is getting ready to renegotiate, this time from a position of strength. Apple gets hardware sales from the iPhone and a strategic influence that can help their other products. So what do they have to offer phone companies in order to make the iPhone more functional and thus sell more handsets? Basically, they're offering to bring in new customers and get those customers to pay for services. Every service that is not used by iPhone users, weakens Apple's pitch to cellular phone service providers. So enabling users to bypass AT&T's SMS and thus AT&T's SMS revenue, may sell more iPhones to end users, but also makes AT&T and others less interested in selling iPhones and less likely to make concessions to Apple to get that to happen. Before the iPhone was a success all Apple had was promises and the offer of an exclusive deal where users would be banned from bypassing certain moneymaking services of the cell service provider. Even offering to cut out all other providers they had a hard time getting anyone on board willing to make a good package deal for service given that it needed network tweaks to make it work as nicely as Apple wanted.
People still read the WSJ? Ever since Fox bought it, the slow decline of the quality and bizarre right wing biases introduced into the articles and editorials began driving me away. It hasn't been readable as a news source for at least a year now.
She's not acting in the manner of a journalist, by which I mean that there is no goal to her coverage, no public interest being served, no story being pieced together. She's simply taking private information about private individuals who happen to work for the local government (albeit in a very private capacity) and making it public.
First, I don't think you're in any position to judge whether or not she's acting in the capacity of journalist or if the free speech she is exercising is worthwhile. The whole point of free speech is that no one gets to judge what is and is not worthwhile. The only criteria is if the speech is infringing upon someone else's human rights as protected under the law. Second, isn't all the information she gathered public information. She just followed people around in public and gathered together public records that a lot of people don't know are public.
The question here is simply, I think, whether stalking laws are meant to cover people who are public employees. If a racist who advocates violent rebellion against black Americans starts following the a black secretary who works in the county office building, documenting her every move publicly, can the police intervene?
That partly depends upon if said stalker is judged by the courts to constitute a threat against the secretary. For example, if the stalker was a quadriplegic being driven around by a taxi driver there is no demonstrable threat in just following them. But there's a lot of ambiguity here. We still don't know if she was arrested for stalking or for posting information on a blog. Those are very different things. When an investigative news agency follows around the local sheriff and reports that he spends all day at home playing video games instead of working, under the same laws can they be arrested for "stalking" him? This is important because the law must treat this woman and the reporter the same way. As public figures with unusual authority, police should have less protection against this sort of intrusion, rather than more. But then, equating a secretary at a courthouse and police officer in this instance is slightly disingenuous as they have different levels of authority and pose different levels of risk to the people from abuse of that authority. Further your selection of a position of secretary and pronouns indicating it is a woman while the stalker is a man seems like something of an emotional, fear based appeal.
That's because patents are inherently anti-competitive.
Technically speaking, patents can be unfairly anti-competitive or part of a healthy market.
That's a matter of opinion, but patents certainly are anti-competitive. The important thing to realize is that "anti-competitive" is not always a bad thing depending on the market. It isn't a synonym for "bad" it just means there isn't competition. Lack of competition can be a very bad thing in many economic situations, but it is not necessarily a bad thing in all cases. People with the opinion that it is tend to be those with oversimplified understandings of economics.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the earth has gotten warmer...
You list some facts, but they're all sort of beside the point. We're talking about the theories of manmade global warming, which are more concerning for the drastic rates of change and implications thereof, rather than resulting temperature in the short term.
Are we in any significant way affecting the climate with our emmissions[sic]
The scientific consensus is that we're introduced unprecedented rates of change most likely as the result of mankind's introduction of pollutants to the system. That's what is troubling to actual climate scientists if you bother to read the journals. Here's an analogy. You're in a car and it has just accelerated from 0 mph to 20 mph in a tenth of a second. We have a good idea why and based upon this we can predict we'll be going 60 in just a few more tenths of a second, but that isn't really the issue so much as the danger of such rapid acceleration on us and the car. Will the tires light on fire? Will the engine fail? Will we crash? Will we black out from the G force? The press gets ahold of this story and runs with it, but they present the concern as being we might crash or get a ticket because we'll soon be going 60 in a 25 mph zone. Marketers who stand to profit write about how we've gone 60 in the car before so it is not unexpected and we can just ignore the problem.
Are these effects more negative than positive?
There are a lot of theories as to potential results of rapid, manmade climate change, but whenever we upset the status quo like this, there is real risk. Further, while humans will likely survive any change, some of the potential results supported by real evidence, are catastrophic. A change for a few degrees in some areas has lead to changes in weather patterns that created droughts in one place and floods in another and forced people to relocate en masse which in turn resulted in a war and a whole lot of pain and suffering and death for the people involved.
Now all of a sudden we have an even greater level of co2, but a temperature that declines. None of the models that IPCC is using can handle this...
From what I've read, none of the climactic models taken seriously are granular enough that they make any predictions on the scale of a single decade. Almost all of them predict fluctuations in both directions in the short term.
With regards to not understanding the scientific method, as long as the IPCC refuses to release their model definitions and the data they base their predictions on, I think I rest my case.
Then you absolutely do not understand the scientific method. If you can't verify the data used in one study, it is not scientific or rational to conclude that the opposite of that study must be the truth. A scientist believes the most supported scientific theory and works to develop better theories which either refine or replace the prevailing theory by performing experiments and gathering data and making predictions and subjecting methodology to peer review. That's the method and it works better than any other process we've tried.
Cite please. You lambast the GP for his unsupported assertions but fail to support any of your own.
Please be more specific. Do you want a citation for my explanation of how the scientific method works or do you want a meta study showing the consensus of peer reviewed, scientific journals on the topic of global warming or do you want scientific studies of marketing in global warming and creationism?
This is an informal discussion, I'm not going to footnote and source everything I write, just specifics. Please, by the way, do a 3 second Google search for any information in doubt before asking for a citation. Pretty much everything I said can be quickly demonstrated in such a way.
Exactly. There is still very little _EVIDENCE_ of mankind-created global warming.
I don't think you understand the scientific method. Global warming with manmade causes as a major factor, is the most supported scientific theory by a large margin. As far as actual scientific theories go, it has been supported by more evidence and testing than any other theory and that is reflected in peer reviewed scientific journals.
If you're truly looking at this scientifically you need to do more than attack the methodology of one or two studies or a meta study. That's already been done as part of the peer review process. You actually have to present an alternative theory and perform experiments and gather data in a falsifiable way showing that your theory has more predictive ability to better match data you haven't yet seen. I haven't seen any other theory with anything close to the support for global warming influenced by man and, in fact, all the leading theories seem to be variations on that model.
You make a slew of unsupported assertions and inherent statements in the rest of your post, but I won't go through and address them individually. People seem to be approaching global warming with the same mindset as creationism. If we can just attack the prevailing theory, we can assume whatever other thing we want is true. That's not science, but I suppose it is understandable because both topics are the result of marketing reaching the public directly, and we all know marketing has nothing to do with rational decision making.
Did I miss a meeting?
Do you subscribe to any general or climate related scientific journals? Because the consensus seems quite clear to me. Where we're lacking a consensus is in marketing material directed at the general public, but that will remain the case so long as there is money to be made. Don't mistake one for the other.
Have you even bothered looking for it?
Apple has screenshots of the Security preference pane on their Snow Leopard Web site and it shows no configuration options for malware detection. So maybe this screenshot is fake or maybe it is ClamAV in OS X server or maybe Apple's screenshots are incorrect or maybe they put it somewhere other than security... but is seems pretty doubtful from where I'm sitting.
So when will they actually implement something genuinely useful against real security threats, like package management?
If you don't think Apple has been adding useful technologies to stop security threats, you haven't been paying attention. Of course most people don't they just assume because Apple doesn't advertise their security technologies to the mainstream public, such technologies they don't exist. You remember that vulnerability in Apple's ZerConf implementation (one of the few enabled by default services on OS X)? No? That's because Apple had sandboxed the entire service in Leopard making the vulnerability impossible to exploit without another exploit for the sandbox, which never materialized. Maybe you remember that said vulnerability did exist on several Linux distros and was exploitable?
And also unfortunately, Parrallels does not have proper hardware level GPU access from systems running in the virtual machine. So no 3D hardware acceleration or CUDA programming support, which happens to usually be the reason(s) for me to try the other OS's.
Actually, Parallels does work with BootCamp though, so you can use the VM from within OS X when that is acceptable and roll it back to previous snapshots for security reasons, and still boot from the partition for those instances when you need to access the GPU directly, like for certain games. Of course it also costs money and it the security is not a concern for you, there's not a lot of reason to bother with it.
AV should be part of the operating system
I agree, but I don't necessarily think that means destroying competition and the existing industry. For the practical reason of encouraging better results through competition and for legal reasons in most jurisdictions, I think OS vendors should be building a plug-in anti-malware architecture that allows end users to subscribe to multiple security feeds, each of which provides whitelists, blacklists, greylists, and potentially ACLs for software.The OS should handle acquiring and verifying the source of the feed and merging the results of multiple feeds as well as the UI and execution. Thus, there is still room for commercial competition on top of what is provided by the OS vendor.
Problem with having a single, unified anti-virus (if ever such a thing is reliably possible), programmers will have an easier time guessing what protections they'll face when creating a virus.
I agree, to some extent. In terms of attacks on the antivirus system itself a single system may be more vulnerable. In terms of bypassing signatures, however, there is no reason centralized anti-malware cannot draw signatures from disparate feeds, the user subscribes to, be they supplied by Apple, open projects, or commercial companies, for free, or charge.
That said, Apple including malware detection doesn't mean users can't install other malware detection services as well. ClamAV isn't going away just because Apple ships a built in competitor.
End users aren't encouraged to practice personal responsibility, they pay and trust... pay for trust...
From Apple's Snow Leopard Web site:
Security Advice The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box. However, since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, antivirus software may offer additional protection. Here are some other ways to help keep your information as safe as possible:
That sounds to me like end users are being encouraged to practice personal responsibility.
Apple has been light on details they have made public about Snow Leopard. We know they implemented a CDSA security architecture, expanded use of the sandboxing, and now there is this report of actual malware scanning, but the info on Apple.com is basically nonexistent. I surmise this is intentional. Security people either have developer accounts or will read up on this stuff in technical papers when NDA's expire next week. For regular users, Apple doesn't even want to bring up security as an issue. They will make blanket marketing statements about it, but they would rather leave all the details to more technical venues. This was their policy for Leopard too, with most users having no clue that a full port of TrustedBSD's mandatory access controls was included and being used to sandbox certain potentially vulnerable services.
Since when did an Address Book/Calendaring application become required system components?
Right after it became incredibly useful because people started using multiple applications all of which wanted use and synch the same data. That's what the OS is for, to handle underlying needs of applications.
It's like spelling and grammar checking. Sure you can just copy text out of whatever application you're using and into MSWord, check the spelling and grammar and then copy the text back into the application you're using, but that's a pretty dumb way for a function needed by dozens of different applications to be implemented. More modern OS's implement the functionality directly and let applications plug into it, which incidentally saves all the hassle of synching the training you put into different spelling and grammar checkers. These are the fairly obvious kinds of OS improvement that should have been implemented in Windows a decade ago, but due to the market being uncompetitive, most real innovation was sidelined and most people are stuck using slightly updated versions of a really old OS that ignores these basic user needs.
If you've had it more than 20 days you should have already been given a set of bug fixes for free. You can pay for performance optimizations, updated apps, some new underlying technologies and some UI improvements if you feel like it, otherwise don't. I don't see anyone forcing you to upgrade.
You're mistaken, since upgrade versions have not always cost $129. For example, the 10.0 to 10.1 upgrade was free or $10 if you wanted a hard copy. See my post to the same question for details.
this is clearly a play to prevent any competitor from offering the service-unifying technology Google is offering.
Does Apple provide a competing service to that and are they doing something illegal in the way they;re competing? Preventing people from competing with you on your own platform is only illegal if there is a regulation preventing it or if you're abusing a dominant position in another market.
specifically, they will permit apps that violate this EULA clause only as long as they don't interfere with Apple/AT&T's ability to restrain trade.
You need to present evidence of this claim. What apps duplicate core functionality and are allowed?
AT&T Unified Messaging is not exactly the same thing as Google Voice, but you'd have to try pretty hard to convince yourself that this isn't a brazen attempt to protect that service against competition.
That may be the case, but that would be AT&T's market dominance that would be an issue. That would make Apple a company in an unrelated market being pressured into taking action against their own best interests. That is to say, like trying to blame Dell and charge them because they ship IE as the default browser on all computers. That doesn't fly.
these actions are federal felonies under the sherman act.
The Sherman act deals only with monopolies and trusts that have overwhelming influence in a given market. For Apple to be violating it, they would need to have overwhelming influence in a relevant market. What market do you think Apple is leveraging here and what market is undermined?
What would someone have spent on all OSX and all it's updates thus far?
Your question is hard to answer. You see, the most money you could have spent on upgrades would be $29 for the beta plus $129 for 10.0 plus $10 for a hard copy of the 10.1 upgrade plus $129 for each of 10.2+10.3+10.4+10.5 plus $29 for 10.6 as of friday. That totals up to $713. The problem with this is, of course, that no computer that was available at the time of the beta is still capable of running Leopard (or the last several versions) so realistically (even if you're fanatical about spending as much as possible) at some point you would have had to bought new hardware which would have come with a full version of the OS somewhere in there.
How necessary/optional are the updates?
Updates are fairly optional and running a version that is one or two releases behind for a while is no big deal. Many users who are on a budget just buy every other release. This ends up following a release schedule on par with how often Windows is released. Still others, never upgrade, they just buy a new computer every now an again. Geeks usually buy a new system regularly enough it is not a big deal.
You have a Mac notebook, but can't afford $70 to buy a bigger hard drive for it?
Plus forty bucks for an eternal drive enclosure so I can transfer my data back onto it, plus an hour to swap the drives, plus shipping, plus my machine being out of commission another couple of hours while the data transfers. How much do you bill for an hour of work?
I'm not saying it's a huge deal, and I actually do have an external drive enclosure laying around. I'm saying, the feature is worth a shitload more to me than $.70, especially because my time is not worthless.
I had problems with utorrent's updates and for some reason could not do a full uninstall to be rid of it, user settings were preserved. I later found out that there were configuration files stored under my user folder in applications and libraries.
This is by design. It means multiple versions of a program can share configuration info or they can have separate as the user chooses. Further, it means you can drag an application onto a flash drive and whether you plug it in at home, school, or the library you can run it, but if you're run it on a given machine it can have different preferences based upon the capabilities of that machine.
It is very useful in certain instances. That said, your problem with uninstall shows a lack in OS X. It should not be up to an application to have an uninstaller to clear out user configs. Apple should include an application manager to handle "clean" uninstallation and updates for all apps.
"It sounds like a deal to me for $29, especially reclaiming 7G of hard drive space."
You really care about 7GB of hard drive space? That is literally 70 CENTS worth of hard drive space. With today's hard drive sizes and prices, you shouldn't even be worried about the size of any given piece of data until it's up into the hundreds of gigabytes range.
Really? Where can I go and for $.70 have them pull my laptop's hard drive, swap in one that has 7 gig more space, and transfer my data onto the new drive?
Sometimes the convenience of getting 7 gig of space back on a portable device that is near its limit is worth a lot more than it costs to buy 7 gig worth of hard drive space.
The real reason Apple doesn't want another VOIP app is that it would have the potential to turn the iPod Touch into a viable competitor to their own iPhone.
Cell phones that only work where you have wi-fi aren't much of a competitor.
...apple are very obviously engaging in illegal anticompetitive behavior here.
I don't think that is clear at all. It is possible, but certainly not clear. What law is it you think Apple is breaking and how are they breaking it? What specific market has been undermined by this action?
So you're saying Apple is being anti-competitive and if they don't do what you as a customer wants, you'll patronize a competitor with your consumer dollars? Are you aware that "anticompetitive" is not a synonym for "bad"?
...why is another Windows PC considered Slashdot front page material?
Probably because it is a large company moving into the market from the low end and bringing expertise for inexpensive mobile devices into said market. I find it interesting, even if I'm not thrilled with all of their choices. The GPS and cell receiver/transmitter are interesting choices for a low end device, for example, which reflect their expertise in cell phones.
Maybe this won't spur Linux adoption or undermine MS, but that doesn't mean it won't drive changes in the industry or spur adoption of other technologies.
How does having iPhone users receive calls via their Google Voice number affect the iPhone overall at all?
Apple walked into this market out of the blue and to get anywhere they had to make serious concessions to AT&T. Right now, Apple is getting ready to renegotiate, this time from a position of strength. Apple gets hardware sales from the iPhone and a strategic influence that can help their other products. So what do they have to offer phone companies in order to make the iPhone more functional and thus sell more handsets? Basically, they're offering to bring in new customers and get those customers to pay for services. Every service that is not used by iPhone users, weakens Apple's pitch to cellular phone service providers. So enabling users to bypass AT&T's SMS and thus AT&T's SMS revenue, may sell more iPhones to end users, but also makes AT&T and others less interested in selling iPhones and less likely to make concessions to Apple to get that to happen. Before the iPhone was a success all Apple had was promises and the offer of an exclusive deal where users would be banned from bypassing certain moneymaking services of the cell service provider. Even offering to cut out all other providers they had a hard time getting anyone on board willing to make a good package deal for service given that it needed network tweaks to make it work as nicely as Apple wanted.
People still read the WSJ? Ever since Fox bought it, the slow decline of the quality and bizarre right wing biases introduced into the articles and editorials began driving me away. It hasn't been readable as a news source for at least a year now.
She's not acting in the manner of a journalist, by which I mean that there is no goal to her coverage, no public interest being served, no story being pieced together. She's simply taking private information about private individuals who happen to work for the local government (albeit in a very private capacity) and making it public.
First, I don't think you're in any position to judge whether or not she's acting in the capacity of journalist or if the free speech she is exercising is worthwhile. The whole point of free speech is that no one gets to judge what is and is not worthwhile. The only criteria is if the speech is infringing upon someone else's human rights as protected under the law. Second, isn't all the information she gathered public information. She just followed people around in public and gathered together public records that a lot of people don't know are public.
The question here is simply, I think, whether stalking laws are meant to cover people who are public employees. If a racist who advocates violent rebellion against black Americans starts following the a black secretary who works in the county office building, documenting her every move publicly, can the police intervene?
That partly depends upon if said stalker is judged by the courts to constitute a threat against the secretary. For example, if the stalker was a quadriplegic being driven around by a taxi driver there is no demonstrable threat in just following them. But there's a lot of ambiguity here. We still don't know if she was arrested for stalking or for posting information on a blog. Those are very different things. When an investigative news agency follows around the local sheriff and reports that he spends all day at home playing video games instead of working, under the same laws can they be arrested for "stalking" him? This is important because the law must treat this woman and the reporter the same way. As public figures with unusual authority, police should have less protection against this sort of intrusion, rather than more. But then, equating a secretary at a courthouse and police officer in this instance is slightly disingenuous as they have different levels of authority and pose different levels of risk to the people from abuse of that authority. Further your selection of a position of secretary and pronouns indicating it is a woman while the stalker is a man seems like something of an emotional, fear based appeal.
That's because patents are inherently anti-competitive.
Technically speaking, patents can be unfairly anti-competitive or part of a healthy market.
That's a matter of opinion, but patents certainly are anti-competitive. The important thing to realize is that "anti-competitive" is not always a bad thing depending on the market. It isn't a synonym for "bad" it just means there isn't competition. Lack of competition can be a very bad thing in many economic situations, but it is not necessarily a bad thing in all cases. People with the opinion that it is tend to be those with oversimplified understandings of economics.