We may export our goods, but as has been suggested by some economists and politicians, we import a lot as well - so instead of crying about how our manufacturing profits are gone, we should take advantage of the strong dollar and use it to modernize our industry, manufacturing and otherwise. Are we really a nation of whiners, complaining because we suddenly have to compete against American companies instead of just getting a handicap via our weak dollar?
Buy more technology! Modernize industry, automate factories, train workers upwards. Now that our dollar is worth more, we can bring in skill and tech from around the world much easier. One would think that on Slashdot, that would be a noble goal.
From the content of your post, I'm assuming you're referring to Videotron in Quebec. If you're in the Montreal area, try out Colba-Net - ADSL2+ in areas of Montreal and expanding fairly quickly (their techs even post on the DSLReports forums).
I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that Adobe making a phenomenal image editing program like Photoshop meant I should throw tea into the Boston harbour, or maybe protest int the streets. Get over it, it's software. When I read the likes of what was just posted, it makes me wonder how these people live in the world we have today without being singled out as crazies and loonies - Stallman often is, but he's very public, so that tends to happen.
I would point out that the most successful open-source endeavours have large companies behind them, and of those that don't, they are often run by a single unified leadership. I would point out MySQL (MySQL AB), Apache (the Apache Foundation), Firefox (Mozilla Corporation), KDE (Trolltech, via QT), WebKit (Apple, Inc), MediaWiki (the WikiMedia Foundation), OpenOffice (Sun Microsystems), and so on. For a more interesting example, look at Mono, a project to re-implement Microsoft's.NET framework, funded by Novell. Even look at the Linux kernel, a huge portion of which is written by employees of hardware companies (SGI, IBM, RedHat, etc.) and led by a single all-powerful dictator (Linus).
For that matter, with few exceptions, the major Linux distributions are corporately-sponsored; most notable are RedHat, a corporation that dumps a ton of money into open-source, and SuSE, now owned by Novell, a company which is obviously starting to see the benefit. You may notice that in your precious open-source world, a lot of the innovation, power, and impetus comes not from the community, but from the corporations that people are paying millions of dollars to.
This is all well and good, but look at that list and take a look at what's missing: a good groupware suite, a good image editor, a good video editor, a good audio editor, a decent office suite (I'm sorry, OpenOffice doesn't compare), and so on. Are we to expect all of our needs to be met by open-source? Am I to assume that if no sufficient open-source alternative exists, then I should simply not do the task I had intended to do? Or should I wait, and tell my clients 'I'm sorry, but no one has written a free version of this application yet, so you'll have to wait ten years for someone to do so - unless you pay me a few million dollars up front so I can fund an open-source alternative, in which case it might only take five years.'
Now, there are some alternatives, like the GIMP, a project famous among the open-source community for completely ignoring its users needs, refusing patches, and generally being a bunch of dicks to anyone who suggests change. Their solution to everything seems to be 'If you don't like it, fix it yourself', which is a common theme lately, though not as common as it once was. You see, not everyone has the programming skill to implement the changes they want (and in the case of the GIMP, even if they did, the patch would be refused for some reason or another). Of those who can't, that being the vast majority, very few are willing to fund a programmer to do the work that needs doing. If my choices are to pay someone a few thousand dollars (minimum) for a few weeks' work to implement a feature in the GIMP, or to pay $600 for a copy of Photoshop that has hundreds of features and capabilities that I just can't get from the GIMP.
You say the only reason that Linux exists is because of freedom - no, the only reason Linux exists is because of curiosity and experimentation. The reason Linux became popular is because people could adapt it to their needs. If this were possible without it being open-source (and theoretically, it is), then the same thing might well have happened. In reality, the only reason society has advanced to the point is has is because of two things - capitalism and war - and those two things are the source of the vast majority of our current level of technological advancement. Consider the long list of revolutionary products or services in the last few years even, and then ask yourself which of them are open-source, and which are not?
The problem with RMS is that he makes blanket statements, some of which are preposterously untenable. People do this all the time - hell, I do it on IRC every day - but what makes RMS dangerous is that he actually believes the shit he's saying.
In 1992, GNU/Linux made it possible for the first time to use a PC and keep your freedom.
This outlines one of RMS's opinions - if I'm not using open-source software, I'm a serf, a wage-slave for the evil overlords. I'm sorry, but if running Windows or Mac OS X or QNX lets me do my job, then as far as I'm concerned, I have *more* freedom.
By 2000, ironically, every version of GNU/Linux included non-free software and thus invited users to surrender their freedom by installing some.
'Surrender their freedom'? Give me a break! RMS needs to understand that while hobbyists can spend five years working on a PDF reader that kind of mostly works a lot of the time, real people need to get real work done, and using Acrobat might be a necessity. By all means, keep working on the open-source versions, and when they're ready, I'll use them; until then, don't trash on my distro because it gives me the tools I need to get my job done.
If I used Linux exclusively in 2000 (and I did), then that would have significantly reduced what I was able to do - no Word documents, no Excel, no solid PDF creation, no decent image editing. By using a proprietary platform like Mac or Windows, my options open up dramatically, allowing me to choose from several different programs that can each do the job, as opposed to several different half-started programs, none of which are capable of all the functionality I need.
I use non-free software because that frees my time and my creativity. Using 'Free Softweare' limits me dramatically, and significantly reduces the amount and type of work I can do, and the quality of work that I can accomplish. Being able to express yourself and get the job done on time is the greatest freedom of all.
I'd suggest Transmission as a Mac-native, usable, featureful client that everyone seems to use. It's missing some of the 'crazy' features that the advanced torrent clients have (like encryption), but it's still pretty slick, does the job well, and integrates well (Growl notifications, for one). Among other things, it can watch a folder for torrents (so when your browser downloads a torrent, it adds automatically), it can download to a temporary directory, and it can move to the main directory when downloading is complete. It supports file selection and priorities, and it looks pretty slick too.
Give all your customers your fastest residential speed. Set your rate so 90% of your customers don't exceed the "monthly allowance" for your low-end rate plan.
This is actually what my company does. Our biggest package is 60G of transfer per month, and our biggest bandwidth 'abuser' transfers about 300G per month. The company has never said anything, though, because since we buy a fixed amount of bandwidth at a fixed price, and most users don't use their share, the end-users that blow past their cap by five times are golden.
I dunno, the Macbook Pro has a GeForce 8600M GT with 256M of GDDR3 SDRAM (whatever that means), which leads to a relatively bitchin' gaming experience. Sure, it's not nearly what you can get on the desktop, but the people who really, REALLY care about power above and beyond that are the 'power user' holdouts that the article makes reference to.
Compared to Rogers' and Fido's prices in Canada ($5/mo for 2MB of transfer, $30 per additional megabyte), I'll take an arbitrarily limited 'unlimited' plan. I hope that part of Apple's deal with Rogers involves a data plan that doesn't try to fuck customers over like Rogers seems keen on doing.
Sorry, do people actually do this? I have a hard enough time justifying taking time off work for anything less than medical issues, and people are taking time off work to play a *video game*? That's even more sad and pathetic than people who take off work to go see the latest Star Wars, LOTR, or Harry Potter. No wonder the US is going to hell.:/
So, how long before Sun convinces Apple to include JavaFX in their version of the JRE? Last I looked you couldn't just download a JRE for MacOS X.
You can't, but it works by default in Mac OS X Tiger if you've updated. If you have the latest 1.5 or 1.6 JRE (I've got 1.5.0_07 without doing anything fancy to get it). Sun doesn't have to convince anyone.
I guess I should probably jump in and say something here.
We currently use Open-Xchange at work for our calendaring/contacts/groupware solution, and boy howdy does it suck. Setting up events is a pain, the interface doesn't work in most browsers (FF/IE work though), and everything I ever do with it is a hassle and a chore.
We're evaluating other options, and the first one we tried was Zimbra... Nice package, polished, but the problem is that it's so Ajaxy... which means that pretty much anything you do requires a round-trip to the server. On a high-latency connection, you spend a lot of time staring at that pretty interface waiting for it to update (if it's actually going to...) and hoping that the server hasn't just given up on you entirely. A nice package, but not feature-complete for what we need, and not 100% the best solution out there... but still better than Open-Xchange.
Microsoft still gets money, sure, but if no one wants Vista, then the umpteen billions they spent on R&D and marketing for Vista was a waste... So yeah, I'd say it hurts them.
I can second this. I've got cable internet through the cable company, running me $74.95 for 10 megabit (unmetered). My former roommate is working with a local ISP on rolling out ADSL2+, which would give 24 megabit (theoretically) for about $40/mo, give or take (depending on distance from the CO). Better than most prices I've seen in the US. I happened to check another cable provider (for another locality), and their best offering is 25 megabit for $93/mo, with 150G download limit. Not bad.
My parents live in a small town in Saskatchewan, and as well, they used to have dial-up at best, though recently they've switched to satellite-backed WiFi that a local ISP set up in their area. They pay less than I do, much closer to the parent's quoted price, for a pretty decent connection.
As for maxing out one's pipe, I'd suggest downloading one of the demos available of the Adobe CS package (e.g. the Photoshop CS3 Demo, if there is one). Downloading the CS2 demo got me a reported 1.1MB/s in Safari, which is the theoretical maximum of my connection.
OS X Tiger Server has functionality which allows you to dish out a particular disk image to a particular class of machine (e.g. one image for Mac Pros, one for iMacs, etc.). Create a bootable image which, when booted, writes the disk image from the network to the local disk. Then all you have to do is go to each system and boot it from the network, and it'll take care of everything else. All guified and easy, if you know what you're doing.
I'll second greylisting. I set up a new mail system on our mail server last year to replace our crufty and pathetic qmail installation. I started with RBLs in postfix and spamassassin/clamav via amavisd, and that was all well and good. A week after adding in greylisting, however, I took out spamassassin filtering by default (users can still enable it on a per-account basis). The reason? RBLs block out the most prolific hosts, and greylisting blocks the vast majority of everything else. The only mail that was ever hitting spamassassin was all legitimate (and was slowing the server down immensely).
Spamassasin may win this contest or it may not, but either way, I don't need it anymore. Sorry guys.
At my job, my department is basically a team of linux administrators, responding to client issues with their various servers (twelve of us managing over a thousand servers for over a hundred clients). When I was first hired, I was told that my department was standardized on Linux on workstations as well as servers (the internal tools we use come as RPMs even). It's nice enough and beats the heck out of Windows, but then again, there's always something to complain about.
We're standardized on RPM-based distros, specifically Fedora, and so there's no end of griping about e.g. yum, broken RPMs, dependencies, and so on. Lately, the most recent trend has been complaining about the non-Macness of our workstations, to the point where I've been tempted to bring in my Mac Mini to replace my Linux workstation, just so I can get some work done (though in fairness, this is because my workstation is underpowered for what I need to do).
Amusingly enough, our UNIX sysadmin himself uses Windows, just as does the administrative staff and some of the other employees. Support, deployment, and R&D all get Linux though, and however much I might complain, it's a lot better than Windows.
I personally prefer "alias rm='rm -iv'" in root's.bashrc (or equivalent for your shell). Suddenly you get that benefit everywhere, and can override with -f if you so choose.
You forgot my personal favourite, PartitionMagic. A sad day it was when they announced that they were going to discontinue it after buying out PowerQuest.:/
Alternately, you could use FFMpegX (or similar) to transcode video from its source format to h.264, or rip DVDs directly to h.264 using e.g. Handbrake. The thing doesn't support your pirated bittorrent downloads of TV shows, but that's hardly something that would make sense for them to bother doing anyway.
If you can import video into iTunes, it'll play on the AppleTV. Nothing wrong with that.
unless you're using the classic theme, the lower-left (or upper-left, depending on taskbar position) corner is an active area of the start menu button. The upper-left corner of the menu bar is NOT an active location to click on the apple menu
I don't know about you, but when I click on the top-left corner of my menu bar, the apple menu comes down. Same with the top-right corner and the Spotlight menu.
The Dock resizes and warps around so that you cannot utilize muscle memory to click on dock items.
The dock resizes to fit on the screen, which is a Good Thing. The Windows taskbar starts hiding windows on you, forcing you to scroll, etc. after too many windows show up.
On the mac, my "Macintosh HD" icon appears in a new location on my desktop on every boot
I've never seen this happen either - do you have auto-arrange enabled for your desktop? If not, sounds like a bug.
To me, it sounds like you're coming up with trivialities to justify an aversion to change. I see it a surprising amount though, so it's not that shocking.
I was even luckier. Early adopter of flickr, I have a yahoo account as well. I 'merged' my two accounts so now I use my Yahoo! account to login to flickr. Total changes? None. My yahoo account name is the same as my flickr account, and the e-mail address on both is the same. The 'Are you sure you want to do this?' page was quite amusing, listing all my information off twice.
Total changes to my login procedures? None whatsoever.
This is what it really comes down to for me. I could pirate Serenity off the intarweb now, but really, given the price of HD-DVDs, it makes more sense for me to just go to work. The time it would take to download this far surpasses the time it would take for me to earn the thirty bucks the DVD would cost me.
Congratulations, MPAA, piracy has just become impractical.
First, it's not a Microkernel. It's a Macrokernel with microkernelish features - namely, it can load drivers in userspace (great for USB devices). The userspaceness is the only major change from Linux's macrokernelness.
It *is* an open-licensed kernel, but Apple's the copyright holder, so they can relicense it however they want. Their license only applies to people who use the code under that license. Apple does not have to do this, and can thus do whatever they want with the kernel.
It's never been called 'OS X running on BSD'. BSD refers both to the UNIXy userspace environment as well as code from the kernel (merged with Mach code as well).
The fact that OS X (the GUI) runs on XNU (the kernel) makes up the operating system experience that we have. There's no real reason that the layers in the middle couldn't be rewritten to take advantage of a new kernel; that said, there's even less reason for them to do so.
In the case of a kernel swap though, it would still be OS X though, as you say.
Considering that the only thing people knew about it was 'iPhone, maybe', I'd say they kept it pretty well. Not a single source reported anything solid about the device (except one report that it would be exclusive to Cingular, but that story also reported a 3 megapixel camera and 2.5" screen). Seems to me they did it pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
We may export our goods, but as has been suggested by some economists and politicians, we import a lot as well - so instead of crying about how our manufacturing profits are gone, we should take advantage of the strong dollar and use it to modernize our industry, manufacturing and otherwise. Are we really a nation of whiners, complaining because we suddenly have to compete against American companies instead of just getting a handicap via our weak dollar?
Buy more technology! Modernize industry, automate factories, train workers upwards. Now that our dollar is worth more, we can bring in skill and tech from around the world much easier. One would think that on Slashdot, that would be a noble goal.
From the content of your post, I'm assuming you're referring to Videotron in Quebec. If you're in the Montreal area, try out Colba-Net - ADSL2+ in areas of Montreal and expanding fairly quickly (their techs even post on the DSLReports forums).
If not, my bad.
I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that Adobe making a phenomenal image editing program like Photoshop meant I should throw tea into the Boston harbour, or maybe protest int the streets. Get over it, it's software. When I read the likes of what was just posted, it makes me wonder how these people live in the world we have today without being singled out as crazies and loonies - Stallman often is, but he's very public, so that tends to happen.
.NET framework, funded by Novell. Even look at the Linux kernel, a huge portion of which is written by employees of hardware companies (SGI, IBM, RedHat, etc.) and led by a single all-powerful dictator (Linus).
I would point out that the most successful open-source endeavours have large companies behind them, and of those that don't, they are often run by a single unified leadership. I would point out MySQL (MySQL AB), Apache (the Apache Foundation), Firefox (Mozilla Corporation), KDE (Trolltech, via QT), WebKit (Apple, Inc), MediaWiki (the WikiMedia Foundation), OpenOffice (Sun Microsystems), and so on. For a more interesting example, look at Mono, a project to re-implement Microsoft's
For that matter, with few exceptions, the major Linux distributions are corporately-sponsored; most notable are RedHat, a corporation that dumps a ton of money into open-source, and SuSE, now owned by Novell, a company which is obviously starting to see the benefit. You may notice that in your precious open-source world, a lot of the innovation, power, and impetus comes not from the community, but from the corporations that people are paying millions of dollars to.
This is all well and good, but look at that list and take a look at what's missing: a good groupware suite, a good image editor, a good video editor, a good audio editor, a decent office suite (I'm sorry, OpenOffice doesn't compare), and so on. Are we to expect all of our needs to be met by open-source? Am I to assume that if no sufficient open-source alternative exists, then I should simply not do the task I had intended to do? Or should I wait, and tell my clients 'I'm sorry, but no one has written a free version of this application yet, so you'll have to wait ten years for someone to do so - unless you pay me a few million dollars up front so I can fund an open-source alternative, in which case it might only take five years.'
Now, there are some alternatives, like the GIMP, a project famous among the open-source community for completely ignoring its users needs, refusing patches, and generally being a bunch of dicks to anyone who suggests change. Their solution to everything seems to be 'If you don't like it, fix it yourself', which is a common theme lately, though not as common as it once was. You see, not everyone has the programming skill to implement the changes they want (and in the case of the GIMP, even if they did, the patch would be refused for some reason or another). Of those who can't, that being the vast majority, very few are willing to fund a programmer to do the work that needs doing. If my choices are to pay someone a few thousand dollars (minimum) for a few weeks' work to implement a feature in the GIMP, or to pay $600 for a copy of Photoshop that has hundreds of features and capabilities that I just can't get from the GIMP.
You say the only reason that Linux exists is because of freedom - no, the only reason Linux exists is because of curiosity and experimentation. The reason Linux became popular is because people could adapt it to their needs. If this were possible without it being open-source (and theoretically, it is), then the same thing might well have happened. In reality, the only reason society has advanced to the point is has is because of two things - capitalism and war - and those two things are the source of the vast majority of our current level of technological advancement. Consider the long list of revolutionary products or services in the last few years even, and then ask yourself which of them are open-source, and which are not?
The iPod has changed t
This outlines one of RMS's opinions - if I'm not using open-source software, I'm a serf, a wage-slave for the evil overlords. I'm sorry, but if running Windows or Mac OS X or QNX lets me do my job, then as far as I'm concerned, I have *more* freedom.
'Surrender their freedom'? Give me a break! RMS needs to understand that while hobbyists can spend five years working on a PDF reader that kind of mostly works a lot of the time, real people need to get real work done, and using Acrobat might be a necessity. By all means, keep working on the open-source versions, and when they're ready, I'll use them; until then, don't trash on my distro because it gives me the tools I need to get my job done.
If I used Linux exclusively in 2000 (and I did), then that would have significantly reduced what I was able to do - no Word documents, no Excel, no solid PDF creation, no decent image editing. By using a proprietary platform like Mac or Windows, my options open up dramatically, allowing me to choose from several different programs that can each do the job, as opposed to several different half-started programs, none of which are capable of all the functionality I need.
I use non-free software because that frees my time and my creativity. Using 'Free Softweare' limits me dramatically, and significantly reduces the amount and type of work I can do, and the quality of work that I can accomplish. Being able to express yourself and get the job done on time is the greatest freedom of all.
I'd suggest Transmission as a Mac-native, usable, featureful client that everyone seems to use. It's missing some of the 'crazy' features that the advanced torrent clients have (like encryption), but it's still pretty slick, does the job well, and integrates well (Growl notifications, for one). Among other things, it can watch a folder for torrents (so when your browser downloads a torrent, it adds automatically), it can download to a temporary directory, and it can move to the main directory when downloading is complete. It supports file selection and priorities, and it looks pretty slick too.
Give it a try, it's pretty rockin'.
This is actually what my company does. Our biggest package is 60G of transfer per month, and our biggest bandwidth 'abuser' transfers about 300G per month. The company has never said anything, though, because since we buy a fixed amount of bandwidth at a fixed price, and most users don't use their share, the end-users that blow past their cap by five times are golden.
I dunno, the Macbook Pro has a GeForce 8600M GT with 256M of GDDR3 SDRAM (whatever that means), which leads to a relatively bitchin' gaming experience. Sure, it's not nearly what you can get on the desktop, but the people who really, REALLY care about power above and beyond that are the 'power user' holdouts that the article makes reference to.
Compared to Rogers' and Fido's prices in Canada ($5/mo for 2MB of transfer, $30 per additional megabyte), I'll take an arbitrarily limited 'unlimited' plan. I hope that part of Apple's deal with Rogers involves a data plan that doesn't try to fuck customers over like Rogers seems keen on doing.
Sorry, do people actually do this? I have a hard enough time justifying taking time off work for anything less than medical issues, and people are taking time off work to play a *video game*? That's even more sad and pathetic than people who take off work to go see the latest Star Wars, LOTR, or Harry Potter. No wonder the US is going to hell. :/
You can't, but it works by default in Mac OS X Tiger if you've updated. If you have the latest 1.5 or 1.6 JRE (I've got 1.5.0_07 without doing anything fancy to get it). Sun doesn't have to convince anyone.
I guess I should probably jump in and say something here.
We currently use Open-Xchange at work for our calendaring/contacts/groupware solution, and boy howdy does it suck. Setting up events is a pain, the interface doesn't work in most browsers (FF/IE work though), and everything I ever do with it is a hassle and a chore.
We're evaluating other options, and the first one we tried was Zimbra... Nice package, polished, but the problem is that it's so Ajaxy... which means that pretty much anything you do requires a round-trip to the server. On a high-latency connection, you spend a lot of time staring at that pretty interface waiting for it to update (if it's actually going to...) and hoping that the server hasn't just given up on you entirely. A nice package, but not feature-complete for what we need, and not 100% the best solution out there... but still better than Open-Xchange.
Microsoft still gets money, sure, but if no one wants Vista, then the umpteen billions they spent on R&D and marketing for Vista was a waste... So yeah, I'd say it hurts them.
I can second this. I've got cable internet through the cable company, running me $74.95 for 10 megabit (unmetered). My former roommate is working with a local ISP on rolling out ADSL2+, which would give 24 megabit (theoretically) for about $40/mo, give or take (depending on distance from the CO). Better than most prices I've seen in the US. I happened to check another cable provider (for another locality), and their best offering is 25 megabit for $93/mo, with 150G download limit. Not bad.
My parents live in a small town in Saskatchewan, and as well, they used to have dial-up at best, though recently they've switched to satellite-backed WiFi that a local ISP set up in their area. They pay less than I do, much closer to the parent's quoted price, for a pretty decent connection.
As for maxing out one's pipe, I'd suggest downloading one of the demos available of the Adobe CS package (e.g. the Photoshop CS3 Demo, if there is one). Downloading the CS2 demo got me a reported 1.1MB/s in Safari, which is the theoretical maximum of my connection.
OS X Tiger Server has functionality which allows you to dish out a particular disk image to a particular class of machine (e.g. one image for Mac Pros, one for iMacs, etc.). Create a bootable image which, when booted, writes the disk image from the network to the local disk. Then all you have to do is go to each system and boot it from the network, and it'll take care of everything else. All guified and easy, if you know what you're doing.
I'll second greylisting. I set up a new mail system on our mail server last year to replace our crufty and pathetic qmail installation. I started with RBLs in postfix and spamassassin/clamav via amavisd, and that was all well and good. A week after adding in greylisting, however, I took out spamassassin filtering by default (users can still enable it on a per-account basis). The reason? RBLs block out the most prolific hosts, and greylisting blocks the vast majority of everything else. The only mail that was ever hitting spamassassin was all legitimate (and was slowing the server down immensely).
Spamassasin may win this contest or it may not, but either way, I don't need it anymore. Sorry guys.
Perspective
At my job, my department is basically a team of linux administrators, responding to client issues with their various servers (twelve of us managing over a thousand servers for over a hundred clients). When I was first hired, I was told that my department was standardized on Linux on workstations as well as servers (the internal tools we use come as RPMs even). It's nice enough and beats the heck out of Windows, but then again, there's always something to complain about.
We're standardized on RPM-based distros, specifically Fedora, and so there's no end of griping about e.g. yum, broken RPMs, dependencies, and so on. Lately, the most recent trend has been complaining about the non-Macness of our workstations, to the point where I've been tempted to bring in my Mac Mini to replace my Linux workstation, just so I can get some work done (though in fairness, this is because my workstation is underpowered for what I need to do).
Amusingly enough, our UNIX sysadmin himself uses Windows, just as does the administrative staff and some of the other employees. Support, deployment, and R&D all get Linux though, and however much I might complain, it's a lot better than Windows.
I personally prefer "alias rm='rm -iv'" in root's .bashrc (or equivalent for your shell). Suddenly you get that benefit everywhere, and can override with -f if you so choose.
You forgot my personal favourite, PartitionMagic. A sad day it was when they announced that they were going to discontinue it after buying out PowerQuest. :/
Alternately, you could use FFMpegX (or similar) to transcode video from its source format to h.264, or rip DVDs directly to h.264 using e.g. Handbrake. The thing doesn't support your pirated bittorrent downloads of TV shows, but that's hardly something that would make sense for them to bother doing anyway.
If you can import video into iTunes, it'll play on the AppleTV. Nothing wrong with that.
I don't know about you, but when I click on the top-left corner of my menu bar, the apple menu comes down. Same with the top-right corner and the Spotlight menu.
The dock resizes to fit on the screen, which is a Good Thing. The Windows taskbar starts hiding windows on you, forcing you to scroll, etc. after too many windows show up.
I've never seen this happen either - do you have auto-arrange enabled for your desktop? If not, sounds like a bug.
To me, it sounds like you're coming up with trivialities to justify an aversion to change. I see it a surprising amount though, so it's not that shocking.
I was even luckier. Early adopter of flickr, I have a yahoo account as well. I 'merged' my two accounts so now I use my Yahoo! account to login to flickr. Total changes? None. My yahoo account name is the same as my flickr account, and the e-mail address on both is the same. The 'Are you sure you want to do this?' page was quite amusing, listing all my information off twice.
Total changes to my login procedures? None whatsoever.
This is what it really comes down to for me. I could pirate Serenity off the intarweb now, but really, given the price of HD-DVDs, it makes more sense for me to just go to work. The time it would take to download this far surpasses the time it would take for me to earn the thirty bucks the DVD would cost me.
Congratulations, MPAA, piracy has just become impractical.
Ugh, where do I start?
First, it's not a Microkernel. It's a Macrokernel with microkernelish features - namely, it can load drivers in userspace (great for USB devices). The userspaceness is the only major change from Linux's macrokernelness.
It *is* an open-licensed kernel, but Apple's the copyright holder, so they can relicense it however they want. Their license only applies to people who use the code under that license. Apple does not have to do this, and can thus do whatever they want with the kernel.
It's never been called 'OS X running on BSD'. BSD refers both to the UNIXy userspace environment as well as code from the kernel (merged with Mach code as well).
The fact that OS X (the GUI) runs on XNU (the kernel) makes up the operating system experience that we have. There's no real reason that the layers in the middle couldn't be rewritten to take advantage of a new kernel; that said, there's even less reason for them to do so.
In the case of a kernel swap though, it would still be OS X though, as you say.
Considering that the only thing people knew about it was 'iPhone, maybe', I'd say they kept it pretty well. Not a single source reported anything solid about the device (except one report that it would be exclusive to Cingular, but that story also reported a 3 megapixel camera and 2.5" screen). Seems to me they did it pretty well.