4 websites constitute half the internet? And I very much doubt she submitted the article to Slashdot, so make that 3...
What sort of grudge do you have against her? Getting her side of the story out there would seem prudent, lest her fans assume her silence is complicity.
Re:Well, there was another choice.
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NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Copland was pretty much dead in the water.
Copland failed for reasons entirely within Apple's own control: it had the unrealistic goal of providing modern OS features to existing binaries; in other words exsiting Mac apps would be first class citizens on Copland. OS X of course requires at the bare minimum a recompile, and practically speaking a Mac app of that era required months of engineering to port over to OS X. Very different goals.
The other reason was the unruly nature of Apple engineering at that time. Technology teams were using Copland as an excuse to go on wholesale rewrites and add a slew of unnecessary features. (OpenDoc, CyberDog, QuickDraw GX, the list goes on and on)
Had the Copland steering committee had the discipline to keep the technology teams in line, and the management had the flexibility to realize that binary compatibility with full features was unattainable, Copland might have succeeded. A Blue box approach to binary compatibility could've alone made the difference in the success of the project. But then, maybe Copland's failure was a blessing in disguise. Its a matter of opinion I guess..
If you would have actually read my fucking post you wouldn't be so confused. Here, let me quote the relevant part for you:
... the Mac platform well suited for the task described in this article.... Linux is great at the things it was built to excel at, Windows (gasp!) does some things very well, too....
If you were a true computing enthusiast you would have one of each. I do.
Note I specifically mentioned three platforms (the 3 that generate 99.9999% of the advocacy flames on the internet) and mentioned that I have one of each.
Clue for you, when someone enumerates 3 things, then says they have one of each, that means they have those 3 things, NOT something that was not enumerated.
But as it happens, I have numerous other (less zealously advocated) machines but I didn't feel the need to enumerate them specifically in a response to a platform war thread.
True64 - aka OSF/1 - aka Digital Unix - did in fact run on the VAX. I said if I had one I would run whichever version of that OS I could find for that hardware. Does my lack of interest in that particular hardware platform mean I'm somehow half-a-geek? Gimme a break. Or was it the fact that I used the most current name for that OS make what I said so fundamentally flawed that you felt the need to flame me a second time? Thanks!
Ehhh... I didn't mention VAX anywhere in my previous post, but if I had one I guess I'd run True64 on it (or whatever version of Digital Unix ran on that hardware)
Are you offering to donate one to my collection?:-P
Only people then invest their own personality in something refer to themselves as "literati"
A computer is a tool. A mac just happens to be a good video tool because it was built that way. Calling someone illiterate because they chose a good tool for the job is just assinine.
A really good vector unit, vectorizing compiler, vector libraries, and a host of system and application software make the Mac platform well suited for the task described in this article. Why people feel so threatened by this fact is beyond me. Linux is great at the things it was built to excel at, Windows (gasp!) does some things very well, too. BIG FUCKING DEAL.
If you were a true computing enthusiast you would have one of each. I do.
You have all three: -faltivec turns on vector optimizations in Apple's GCC. Also there are the vImage and vecLib frameworks (contained under the Accelerate.framework umbrella) for a set of altivec optimized library routines. Finally there is -mabi=altivec in gcc to turn on support for vector keywords and altivec asm (this switch is implied when -faltivec is given)
My wife has been a teacher for 10 years, has her Master's degree (required - at her own expense - in order to maintain her teaching certificate) and is a reading specialist in our midwestern state.
She makes 26k and change. The pay scale is fixed and only takes seniority and level of education into account.
Please, please tell me that you don't think it acceptable that a professional with a Master's degree should be making less than a shift manager at WalMart.
She does this job because she loves it; its the only career she's ever considered for herself. But in effect I am subsidizing the education system by supporting her (which I do without question because I love her.) But hell no she isn't being fairly compensated for her work.
First off, the 9 month thing. Its true teachers get more time off than the average american, but its not 3 months, its more like 2. After the student summer break starts, most school districts keep teachers around for an extra week, and then teachers start planning and training 2-3 weeks before school starts back up.
Secondly, during the school year teachers work some incredible hours. Arrive early (my wife has to be to school by 7:20), teach a full day, then take homework home to grade. Then there is report card writing, parent-teacher conferences, staff meetings, etc etc. Its a very full 9 months.
Next up, i'd like to address some other items that have been brought up in this thread, e.g. private schools.
From what I have seen, private schools are a failure. They skim the cream of the crop off the public schools. The religious schools often waste class hours on religious study. And if your kid needs a special service, most of them don't offer it and their staff aren't trained to identify the problem anyways. Example: our neice is in a church school and had a serious speech impediment. We had to talk her parents (my wife's sister and her husband) into getting her into a speech therapy program because the church school (that they pay obscene amounts of money to send her to) doesn't offer this service. Public school districts are required by law to offer services like this. All that money goes into these schools, they take the cream of the crop from the public schools, and their kids still score the same on aptitude tests as the public school kids. What a scam.
Another thing: the athletic programs. No, high school athletics do not pull in more with admissions and concessions than the programs cost. Not around here at least. But forget about the high school level for a moment; one of the greatest tragedies in the last decade is that the budget cuts have fallen hardest on elementary art and phys. ed. programs. Many elementary schools nowadays have no P.E. or perhaps an hour a week of P.E., the burden of which falls on the regular teaching staff, because as P.E. teachers have retired they aren't replaced. Imagine in a country where childhood obesity is an epidemic, we're cutting back physical education at the elementary level!
The greatest indictment that I can make of the modern american education system is that the parents are failing in their responsibilities. Kids come to school these days having never seen the inside of a book. Hell forget the book, parents are sending their kids to school unfed, with inadequate winter clothing, no writing materials, no lunch.. the list goes on. Its disgusting. They let them stay up to ridiculous hours watching TV, so that they are exhausted the next day and can't pay attention. But they sure know all about South Park (these are second graders!)
The whole thing just makes me question where our society is headed:-\
So if you really think being a teacher is all that, by all means get your certificate and start teaching. Please! I'm serious too: we need our best and brightest teaching these kids.
Yes that was the point, consumers don't buy operating systems. For them, it isn't a product category. They buy computers, and expect an operating system to come with it. Take it back to the DOS days and every computer shipped with its manufacturer's own OS. Take it back to mini- and mainframes and you get hardware the comes with an OS.
If Be wanted to succeed they should've stuck with their unique hardware and carved out a niche for themselves. NeXT dropped their hardware and it nearly killed them. Apple would be absolutely insane to not learn this lesson.
To the extent that Microsoft tries to cut illegal deals (exclusionary, or per unit royalties even when the unit ships without MS software) they should be punished, but it isn't their fault that the OS is not a standalone product category.
Heck, Steve Jobs and Co. have firsthand experience with this; NeXTStep was available for years on the x86 platform and NeXT still nearly wen't bankrupt.
If there was a market for a better mousetrap one of the above would've caught on.
Microsoft makes money from deals with the hardware manufacturers. Apple IS the hardware manufacturer. Linux is free; the commercial Linux distros are not making money at retail. Any attempt by Apple to sell a shrinkwrap Mac OS X on the PC platform would be going against 25 years of history that it can't be done.
The 2-4% is overall market share. You have to consider that an awful lot of WinTel PCs end up as cash registers or some other single-purpose vertical market application. In the market for "i'm going to buy a computer, sit it on my desk, and interact with it" I think Apple's share is probably higher. Would you buy a Mac to use it as a cash register? Unlikely unless you happen to be Apple. Would you buy a Mac for office productivity, email, web browsing, and maybe a game or two? Reasonable people can and do say yes.
First of all, we buy exclusively Dell servers now, because we can get them off Refurb quite cheaply... Then we get into the fact that Mac servers just aren't enterprise-class (no, not even the XServe -- no redundant power and uses IDE drives).
You're worried about XServes not being "enterprise class" and you're buying refurb equipment? LOL
Re:I've experienced the complete opposite
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 1
I'm sorry to hear about your wife's experience with the French waiter. What your story demonstrates is that every corner of the globe has it's share of jackasses.
In my experience, the French are wonderful, warm, friendly people. Especially the French that don't live in Paris. When I made the effort to speak in French, didn't expect any special treatment, and took the time to smile and say 'bonjour' before asking for something, I was treated very kindly. At that time I spoke conversational French somewhat well (having taken 8 years of it in school), but even just looking up what you want to say in an English->French dictionary *before* occupying someone's time will do wonders.
Even in Paris this is true, but of course you do run into more rude people there (just as you do in NY City - it isn't hard at all to imagine a NYC waiter making fun of someone's accent)
I'm a liberal and I love the USA, btw. I hate stereotypes based on political persuasion. As a liberal I want to export what's best about our country, and not what's worst. I can't imagine that the conservatives would disagree with that?
Regarding policing the world, I don't consider that our job or jurisdiction. That's what the U.N.'s for. Of course the U.N. needs our support to do that job, but police actions should be done through the U.N. to give them the multilateral flavor that eases the world's concern about U.S. imperialism. Just imagine how Americans would feel if Russia or China were to start sending troops into Central America to 'police' them.
In the right circumstances, I fully support preemptive war, just as I endorse police officers not waiting until they're shot at to shoot back (as a former SWAT officer, I've personal experience with this one).
I don't like the way you conflated preemptory bombing of another nation with police action on the street. Presumably the officer is in a situation where there is elevated tension and has to make split second decisions. I can't think of a single situation where we need to bomb another nation that hasn't made any offensive moves toward us where we need split second decision making. No, in the case of one nation making war on another, the utmost care and thought should go into this decision.
In the case of Iraq, what threat was being preempted?
Intelligence is often nothing more than a best guess.
No, actually, in the intelligence gathering community of the U.S. government things are a good deal more scientific than that. The problem is that the intelligence community was giving answers that the recipients didn't like. The administration had already chosen their objectives and were looking for anything to support this predetermined outcome. Intelligence doesn't work like that.
Avoid torturing? Good advice, and probably followed by the vast, overwhelming majority. But defining torture
No, actually, torture is very well defined by treaties of which the U.S. is a signatory, is illegal, and the MP corps is very well trained on what they are not allowed to do.
The US Justice Department, at the behest of the administration, was seeking legal justification to suspend those treaties. Donald Rumsfeld is of the opinion that authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."
Rumsfeld approved of 14 torture methods in various memos. Too bad that our 'leaders' are letting the peons in this situation take all the heat. What ever happened with the buck stopping at the commander in chief?
Now I don't know about you, but when the highest levels of our government are approving of torture and using the Nuremberg trials as precedent, it disgusts me. This shouldn't even be something that needs to be on the table. It certainly isn't something that I expect from the "leader of the free world".
Remember, my whole point was that we create more hatred for ourselves when we act badly. How many little Osamas have been created by our atrocities?
Hmm. Maybe the U.S. could, I don't know, improve its relationship with the rest of the world to the point that they don't want to kill us all?
Some ideas:
1. Avoid installing or supporting despotic dictators that repress their own citizenry and exploit the resources of their nation for personal gain.
2. Avoid bombing the crap out of countries that haven't attacked us.
3. Avoid making up intelligence about other countries and then using that fake intelligence as an excuse to invade them.
4. (It really amazes me as an American that it has come to the point where we have to even talk about this, but) avoid torturing citizens of other nations.
Just a few pointers, hopefully that will get us started in the right direction. Maybe its time to get back to that whole idea of making the world a better place and promoting liberty and democracy by setting an example?
Yes, well, the military people may want me and the rest of the citizenry to give them a blank check to fight an endless, undefined, unwinnable conflict with 'ideological factions', but I certainly am not ready to do so. Years of worth of white papers and justifications notwithstanding.
Yes I said unwinnable. As I said in my previous post, you can't kill a cultural phenomenon. The war department can't solve this problem no matter how many groups they declare war on.
A terrorist is an enemy soldier. He is fighting a war
On what nation's behalf are these soldiers fighting? What is their chain of command, where is their home territory, and what are the criteria to be used for measuring progress, achieving goals, and WINNING the war? What is the endgame?
No, we can declare war on terrorism all we want, but it is just empty rhetoric as was the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty". One cannot 'kill' a cultural phenomenon.
In fact, so long as we pursue a course of war, we are at best delaying and at worst escalating the problem. The right strategy is to discover and ameliorate or solve the root causes, (inconsistent U.S. middle east/israel policy in the case of terrorism, treating addiction as a crime rather than an illness in the case of drugs.) As long as we continue to bury our heads in the sand on these issues, they will continue to plague us. Rattling sabers and blustering on about "that's it, we declare war" is poppycock.
(--U.S. citizen and patriot that understands that patriotism doesn't simply mean blind obedience to the current administration)
The point of Doctorow's talk was that yes of course copying the bits is cheap and so people will do so. BUT in the past, faced with changing technology, the artists, authors, musicians, etc. have always found a way to adapt to the new environment and prosper even more than before. Today's artists are faced with the same challenge, and must not stick their heads in the sand and try to DRM away all the changes to the world and return to yesterday's status quo. We (society) may need to poke and prod them along a bit to get them to go down the right path.
Here is how I see this playing out, take musicians: lets imagine a world where musicians realize that they don't need publishers anymore (at least, not old guard publishers); instead, they put their own copies of their studio recorded music out on the filesharing networks free for anyone to download. They make their living by doing a combination of other things a) live concerts INCLUDING streaming broadcasts on the internet b) limited runs of collector's editions a.k.a. box sets, artistic packages, etc. c) any number of new ways to do things that I can't imagine because they haven't been invented/popularized yet.
Regarding A: yes anyone can rip the stream and make it available for download. But what you're attempting to do is to get society back into a mode where it appreciates live musical performances and values them accordingly. In other words, going back to the pre-piano player days. But this time you aren't limited to only being able to play in front of a roomful of people at a time. The challenge will be keeping the performances interesting and entertaining. Today's artists (Britney) aren't simply going to be able to take a road-show from city to city doing the exact same choreographed dance moves and expect people to tune in to broadcast after broadcast. Fortunately there are musicians out there that actually play music and know how to improvise. Hey I know its a crazy idea but there once was a time when people actually enjoyed music like jazz that by its very nature is changing.
Regarding B: there is a market right now for art books. Books that tell a story but do so with a collage of words, pictures, and tactile experiences. These are generally expensive to produce, especially the ones with hand-made art. So the print run is limited. But that's a good thing. You can sell them for $100 or $200 to a limited audience of really enthusiastic fans. How about a box set of a new CD release from your favorite band that has hand copied liner notes, or maybe hand copies of the original sheets that the song was written on (scribbles and all), would you buy it? Maybe not, but I'm guessing there are fans that would.
Regarding C: I don't have a magic crystal ball but I'm still confident that artists and musicians will come up with new and interesting ways to display their art to society and hopefully these new models will not be so dependent on owning a stranglehold on disseminating the actual bits. Just as player pianos begat pre-recorded publishing in the first place, the internet will beget new ways of disseminating art that we may not have thought of yet at this early stage of the game. The fellow (or gal) that comes up with this new scheme stands to make a pretty penny selling it to the artists.
The entire premise of today's movie and music business is that you can make a fortune by controlling a stranglehold on dissemination. Well, that stranglehold has been loosened, time to find some other way. The stranglehold on distribution itself is a relatively modern happenstance, so this idea that its an artist's god given right to be paid handsomely for each note of his or her creation every time it gets played is a strange one, historically speaking. This evolution will require some effort on the part of the artists, but also some changes in society. Re-acquiring appreciation for live performances and musical improvisation and substance over style. Am I optimistic? Maybe overly so, time will tell.
(I'm probably pegging myself as an anime nerd here.:) )
Almost all of the anime that I've seen was garbage except the anime that was intended to be enjoyed by both children and adults (miyazaki)
Anime fans seem to suffer from the mistaken belief that just because its directed at an adult audience automatically makes it mature. The adult anime that I've seen has almost all been puerile and appeals to a juvenile sensibility of violence and sex.
I truly would not want a 'mature' Pixar movie. I love the innocent sense of humor that they inject into their movies. Maybe you have to have kids of your own to truly appreciate it, but there is something special about Pixar movies that you just have to 'get' or not.
Now I don't want to start an anime war because as I've already said there is some good anime (all genres of creativity are 90% garbage and 10% gems anyways, nothing special about anime)
Other sources of music without DRM will eventually appear
No they won't. Not without a massive upheaval in the way that professional music is recorded and sold (e.g. all the record labels go belly up simultaneously and all the musicians sign deals directly with online distributors)
That is such an unlikely scenario that we can safely ignore the possibility of it happening (and if it does, we can all be pleasantly surprised)
Instead, Apple, Napster, and the other legitimate services need to establish that there is demand for buying (note that word, buying, as in an exchange of money for goods/services) music online. Then slowly as more and more music is sold online and less is sold by pressing little discs out of petrochemicals Apple et. al. can start applying pressure to the industry to lower prices etc.
Or the industry can decide that piracy makes digital distribution a lost cause and they can go back to physical distribution only. And by physical distribution I mean their previously hatched plan of designed obsolescence, by phasing out CDs and forcing everyone to upgrade to SACD.
Reading the parent, there is no conflict. He said the GPL doesn't require X, but that the GPL philosophy is un-free. It would've been better worded to say the GNU philosophy or the Free Software movement's philosophy, but whatever.
I happen to agree. There is this attitude in the free community that one has to say the right things, do things the right way, and in short think the same as others in the movement. This sort of RightThink political correctness irks many.
Computers and software are tools, not political issues. If you want to get political, get involved with a civil liberties or environmental group, or hell even a gun-rights group if thats the way you lean.
Its as if someone decided to create a political movement around auto parts, with the Flooble/Tire group disdaining the Brozzle engines group. WHO CARES!
"...so yes, even Microsoft makes mistakes"
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The War Of The Word
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· Score: 1
Hah.. As if thats just so hard to imagine. Of course Microsoft makes mistakes. They have made too many mistakes to count. Its a testament to the scope and breadth of their monopoly that it has kept them afloat through blunders that would've been the end of lesser companies.
Its telling that someone on the 'inside' is of the opinion that his employer is (nearly) infallible. Gimme a break. I'm no Microsoft hater (I'm mostly ambivalent) but that kind of attitude gives me an idea of how myopic the people there must be.
Slashdot Mirror
4 websites constitute half the internet? And I very much doubt she submitted the article to Slashdot, so make that 3...
What sort of grudge do you have against her? Getting her side of the story out there would seem prudent, lest her fans assume her silence is complicity.
Copland was pretty much dead in the water.
Copland failed for reasons entirely within Apple's own control: it had the unrealistic goal of providing modern OS features to existing binaries; in other words exsiting Mac apps would be first class citizens on Copland. OS X of course requires at the bare minimum a recompile, and practically speaking a Mac app of that era required months of engineering to port over to OS X. Very different goals.
The other reason was the unruly nature of Apple engineering at that time. Technology teams were using Copland as an excuse to go on wholesale rewrites and add a slew of unnecessary features. (OpenDoc, CyberDog, QuickDraw GX, the list goes on and on)
Had the Copland steering committee had the discipline to keep the technology teams in line, and the management had the flexibility to realize that binary compatibility with full features was unattainable, Copland might have succeeded. A Blue box approach to binary compatibility could've alone made the difference in the success of the project. But then, maybe Copland's failure was a blessing in disguise. Its a matter of opinion I guess..
If you would have actually read my fucking post you wouldn't be so confused. Here, let me quote the relevant part for you:
... the Mac platform well suited for the task described in this article. ... Linux is great at the things it was built to excel at, Windows (gasp!) does some things very well, too....
If you were a true computing enthusiast you would have one of each. I do.
Note I specifically mentioned three platforms (the 3 that generate 99.9999% of the advocacy flames on the internet) and mentioned that I have one of each.
Clue for you, when someone enumerates 3 things, then says they have one of each, that means they have those 3 things, NOT something that was not enumerated.
But as it happens, I have numerous other (less zealously advocated) machines but I didn't feel the need to enumerate them specifically in a response to a platform war thread.
True64 - aka OSF/1 - aka Digital Unix - did in fact run on the VAX. I said if I had one I would run whichever version of that OS I could find for that hardware. Does my lack of interest in that particular hardware platform mean I'm somehow half-a-geek? Gimme a break. Or was it the fact that I used the most current name for that OS make what I said so fundamentally flawed that you felt the need to flame me a second time? Thanks!
Ehhh... I didn't mention VAX anywhere in my previous post, but if I had one I guess I'd run True64 on it (or whatever version of Digital Unix ran on that hardware)
:-P
Are you offering to donate one to my collection?
Only people then invest their own personality in something refer to themselves as "literati"
A computer is a tool. A mac just happens to be a good video tool because it was built that way. Calling someone illiterate because they chose a good tool for the job is just assinine.
A really good vector unit, vectorizing compiler, vector libraries, and a host of system and application software make the Mac platform well suited for the task described in this article. Why people feel so threatened by this fact is beyond me. Linux is great at the things it was built to excel at, Windows (gasp!) does some things very well, too. BIG FUCKING DEAL.
If you were a true computing enthusiast you would have one of each. I do.
You have all three: -faltivec turns on vector optimizations in Apple's GCC. Also there are the vImage and vecLib frameworks (contained under the Accelerate.framework umbrella) for a set of altivec optimized library routines. Finally there is -mabi=altivec in gcc to turn on support for vector keywords and altivec asm (this switch is implied when -faltivec is given)
My wife has been a teacher for 10 years, has her Master's degree (required - at her own expense - in order to maintain her teaching certificate) and is a reading specialist in our midwestern state.
:-\
She makes 26k and change. The pay scale is fixed and only takes seniority and level of education into account.
Please, please tell me that you don't think it acceptable that a professional with a Master's degree should be making less than a shift manager at WalMart.
She does this job because she loves it; its the only career she's ever considered for herself. But in effect I am subsidizing the education system by supporting her (which I do without question because I love her.) But hell no she isn't being fairly compensated for her work.
First off, the 9 month thing. Its true teachers get more time off than the average american, but its not 3 months, its more like 2. After the student summer break starts, most school districts keep teachers around for an extra week, and then teachers start planning and training 2-3 weeks before school starts back up.
Secondly, during the school year teachers work some incredible hours. Arrive early (my wife has to be to school by 7:20), teach a full day, then take homework home to grade. Then there is report card writing, parent-teacher conferences, staff meetings, etc etc. Its a very full 9 months.
Next up, i'd like to address some other items that have been brought up in this thread, e.g. private schools.
From what I have seen, private schools are a failure. They skim the cream of the crop off the public schools. The religious schools often waste class hours on religious study. And if your kid needs a special service, most of them don't offer it and their staff aren't trained to identify the problem anyways. Example: our neice is in a church school and had a serious speech impediment. We had to talk her parents (my wife's sister and her husband) into getting her into a speech therapy program because the church school (that they pay obscene amounts of money to send her to) doesn't offer this service. Public school districts are required by law to offer services like this. All that money goes into these schools, they take the cream of the crop from the public schools, and their kids still score the same on aptitude tests as the public school kids. What a scam.
Another thing: the athletic programs. No, high school athletics do not pull in more with admissions and concessions than the programs cost. Not around here at least. But forget about the high school level for a moment; one of the greatest tragedies in the last decade is that the budget cuts have fallen hardest on elementary art and phys. ed. programs. Many elementary schools nowadays have no P.E. or perhaps an hour a week of P.E., the burden of which falls on the regular teaching staff, because as P.E. teachers have retired they aren't replaced. Imagine in a country where childhood obesity is an epidemic, we're cutting back physical education at the elementary level!
The greatest indictment that I can make of the modern american education system is that the parents are failing in their responsibilities. Kids come to school these days having never seen the inside of a book. Hell forget the book, parents are sending their kids to school unfed, with inadequate winter clothing, no writing materials, no lunch.. the list goes on. Its disgusting. They let them stay up to ridiculous hours watching TV, so that they are exhausted the next day and can't pay attention. But they sure know all about South Park (these are second graders!)
The whole thing just makes me question where our society is headed
So if you really think being a teacher is all that, by all means get your certificate and start teaching. Please! I'm serious too: we need our best and brightest teaching these kids.
Yes that was the point, consumers don't buy operating systems. For them, it isn't a product category. They buy computers, and expect an operating system to come with it. Take it back to the DOS days and every computer shipped with its manufacturer's own OS. Take it back to mini- and mainframes and you get hardware the comes with an OS.
If Be wanted to succeed they should've stuck with their unique hardware and carved out a niche for themselves. NeXT dropped their hardware and it nearly killed them. Apple would be absolutely insane to not learn this lesson.
To the extent that Microsoft tries to cut illegal deals (exclusionary, or per unit royalties even when the unit ships without MS software) they should be punished, but it isn't their fault that the OS is not a standalone product category.
Many have tried, all shrinkwrap OSes have failed:
BeOS
OS/2
GEOS
GEM
Heck, Steve Jobs and Co. have firsthand experience with this; NeXTStep was available for years on the x86 platform and NeXT still nearly wen't bankrupt.
If there was a market for a better mousetrap one of the above would've caught on.
Microsoft makes money from deals with the hardware manufacturers. Apple IS the hardware manufacturer. Linux is free; the commercial Linux distros are not making money at retail. Any attempt by Apple to sell a shrinkwrap Mac OS X on the PC platform would be going against 25 years of history that it can't be done.
Yeah! Down with "Da Man"! Death to copyright!
Oh wait, what's that you say? The GPL is based on copyright law?
ALL YOUR SOURCE ARE BELONG TO BIG BIDNESS!
The 2-4% is overall market share. You have to consider that an awful lot of WinTel PCs end up as cash registers or some other single-purpose vertical market application. In the market for "i'm going to buy a computer, sit it on my desk, and interact with it" I think Apple's share is probably higher. Would you buy a Mac to use it as a cash register? Unlikely unless you happen to be Apple. Would you buy a Mac for office productivity, email, web browsing, and maybe a game or two? Reasonable people can and do say yes.
First of all, we buy exclusively Dell servers now, because we can get them off Refurb quite cheaply... Then we get into the fact that Mac servers just aren't enterprise-class (no, not even the XServe -- no redundant power and uses IDE drives).
You're worried about XServes not being "enterprise class" and you're buying refurb equipment? LOL
I'm sorry to hear about your wife's experience with the French waiter. What your story demonstrates is that every corner of the globe has it's share of jackasses.
In my experience, the French are wonderful, warm, friendly people. Especially the French that don't live in Paris. When I made the effort to speak in French, didn't expect any special treatment, and took the time to smile and say 'bonjour' before asking for something, I was treated very kindly. At that time I spoke conversational French somewhat well (having taken 8 years of it in school), but even just looking up what you want to say in an English->French dictionary *before* occupying someone's time will do wonders.
Even in Paris this is true, but of course you do run into more rude people there (just as you do in NY City - it isn't hard at all to imagine a NYC waiter making fun of someone's accent)
I'm a liberal and I love the USA, btw. I hate stereotypes based on political persuasion. As a liberal I want to export what's best about our country, and not what's worst. I can't imagine that the conservatives would disagree with that?
Regarding policing the world, I don't consider that our job or jurisdiction. That's what the U.N.'s for. Of course the U.N. needs our support to do that job, but police actions should be done through the U.N. to give them the multilateral flavor that eases the world's concern about U.S. imperialism. Just imagine how Americans would feel if Russia or China were to start sending troops into Central America to 'police' them.
I prefer the alternative spin, that 'NeXT Computer' was the Redwood City skunkworks division of Apple that got rolled back into the mothership :-P
In the right circumstances, I fully support preemptive war, just as I endorse police officers not waiting until they're shot at to shoot back (as a former SWAT officer, I've personal experience with this one).
I don't like the way you conflated preemptory bombing of another nation with police action on the street. Presumably the officer is in a situation where there is elevated tension and has to make split second decisions. I can't think of a single situation where we need to bomb another nation that hasn't made any offensive moves toward us where we need split second decision making. No, in the case of one nation making war on another, the utmost care and thought should go into this decision.
In the case of Iraq, what threat was being preempted?
Intelligence is often nothing more than a best guess.
No, actually, in the intelligence gathering community of the U.S. government things are a good deal more scientific than that. The problem is that the intelligence community was giving answers that the recipients didn't like. The administration had already chosen their objectives and were looking for anything to support this predetermined outcome. Intelligence doesn't work like that.
Avoid torturing? Good advice, and probably followed by the vast, overwhelming majority. But defining torture
No, actually, torture is very well defined by treaties of which the U.S. is a signatory, is illegal, and the MP corps is very well trained on what they are not allowed to do.
The US Justice Department, at the behest of the administration, was seeking legal justification to suspend those treaties. Donald Rumsfeld is of the opinion that authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."
Rumsfeld approved of 14 torture methods in various memos. Too bad that our 'leaders' are letting the peons in this situation take all the heat. What ever happened with the buck stopping at the commander in chief?
Now I don't know about you, but when the highest levels of our government are approving of torture and using the Nuremberg trials as precedent, it disgusts me. This shouldn't even be something that needs to be on the table. It certainly isn't something that I expect from the "leader of the free world".
Remember, my whole point was that we create more hatred for ourselves when we act badly. How many little Osamas have been created by our atrocities?
Hmm. Maybe the U.S. could, I don't know, improve its relationship with the rest of the world to the point that they don't want to kill us all?
Some ideas:
1. Avoid installing or supporting despotic dictators that repress their own citizenry and exploit the resources of their nation for personal gain.
2. Avoid bombing the crap out of countries that haven't attacked us.
3. Avoid making up intelligence about other countries and then using that fake intelligence as an excuse to invade them.
4. (It really amazes me as an American that it has come to the point where we have to even talk about this, but) avoid torturing citizens of other nations.
Just a few pointers, hopefully that will get us started in the right direction. Maybe its time to get back to that whole idea of making the world a better place and promoting liberty and democracy by setting an example?
Yes, well, the military people may want me and the rest of the citizenry to give them a blank check to fight an endless, undefined, unwinnable conflict with 'ideological factions', but I certainly am not ready to do so. Years of worth of white papers and justifications notwithstanding.
Yes I said unwinnable. As I said in my previous post, you can't kill a cultural phenomenon. The war department can't solve this problem no matter how many groups they declare war on.
A terrorist is an enemy soldier. He is fighting a war
On what nation's behalf are these soldiers fighting? What is their chain of command, where is their home territory, and what are the criteria to be used for measuring progress, achieving goals, and WINNING the war? What is the endgame?
No, we can declare war on terrorism all we want, but it is just empty rhetoric as was the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty". One cannot 'kill' a cultural phenomenon.
In fact, so long as we pursue a course of war, we are at best delaying and at worst escalating the problem. The right strategy is to discover and ameliorate or solve the root causes, (inconsistent U.S. middle east/israel policy in the case of terrorism, treating addiction as a crime rather than an illness in the case of drugs.) As long as we continue to bury our heads in the sand on these issues, they will continue to plague us. Rattling sabers and blustering on about "that's it, we declare war" is poppycock.
(--U.S. citizen and patriot that understands that patriotism doesn't simply mean blind obedience to the current administration)
The point of Doctorow's talk was that yes of course copying the bits is cheap and so people will do so. BUT in the past, faced with changing technology, the artists, authors, musicians, etc. have always found a way to adapt to the new environment and prosper even more than before. Today's artists are faced with the same challenge, and must not stick their heads in the sand and try to DRM away all the changes to the world and return to yesterday's status quo. We (society) may need to poke and prod them along a bit to get them to go down the right path.
Here is how I see this playing out, take musicians: lets imagine a world where musicians realize that they don't need publishers anymore (at least, not old guard publishers); instead, they put their own copies of their studio recorded music out on the filesharing networks free for anyone to download. They make their living by doing a combination of other things a) live concerts INCLUDING streaming broadcasts on the internet b) limited runs of collector's editions a.k.a. box sets, artistic packages, etc. c) any number of new ways to do things that I can't imagine because they haven't been invented/popularized yet.
Regarding A: yes anyone can rip the stream and make it available for download. But what you're attempting to do is to get society back into a mode where it appreciates live musical performances and values them accordingly. In other words, going back to the pre-piano player days. But this time you aren't limited to only being able to play in front of a roomful of people at a time. The challenge will be keeping the performances interesting and entertaining. Today's artists (Britney) aren't simply going to be able to take a road-show from city to city doing the exact same choreographed dance moves and expect people to tune in to broadcast after broadcast. Fortunately there are musicians out there that actually play music and know how to improvise. Hey I know its a crazy idea but there once was a time when people actually enjoyed music like jazz that by its very nature is changing.
Regarding B: there is a market right now for art books. Books that tell a story but do so with a collage of words, pictures, and tactile experiences. These are generally expensive to produce, especially the ones with hand-made art. So the print run is limited. But that's a good thing. You can sell them for $100 or $200 to a limited audience of really enthusiastic fans. How about a box set of a new CD release from your favorite band that has hand copied liner notes, or maybe hand copies of the original sheets that the song was written on (scribbles and all), would you buy it? Maybe not, but I'm guessing there are fans that would.
Regarding C: I don't have a magic crystal ball but I'm still confident that artists and musicians will come up with new and interesting ways to display their art to society and hopefully these new models will not be so dependent on owning a stranglehold on disseminating the actual bits. Just as player pianos begat pre-recorded publishing in the first place, the internet will beget new ways of disseminating art that we may not have thought of yet at this early stage of the game. The fellow (or gal) that comes up with this new scheme stands to make a pretty penny selling it to the artists.
The entire premise of today's movie and music business is that you can make a fortune by controlling a stranglehold on dissemination. Well, that stranglehold has been loosened, time to find some other way. The stranglehold on distribution itself is a relatively modern happenstance, so this idea that its an artist's god given right to be paid handsomely for each note of his or her creation every time it gets played is a strange one, historically speaking. This evolution will require some effort on the part of the artists, but also some changes in society. Re-acquiring appreciation for live performances and musical improvisation and substance over style. Am I optimistic? Maybe overly so, time will tell.
That isn't a filesystem that is a tape. Any number of tape systems exist, pick whichever one you like.
(I'm probably pegging myself as an anime nerd here. :) )
Almost all of the anime that I've seen was garbage except the anime that was intended to be enjoyed by both children and adults (miyazaki)
Anime fans seem to suffer from the mistaken belief that just because its directed at an adult audience automatically makes it mature. The adult anime that I've seen has almost all been puerile and appeals to a juvenile sensibility of violence and sex.
I truly would not want a 'mature' Pixar movie. I love the innocent sense of humor that they inject into their movies. Maybe you have to have kids of your own to truly appreciate it, but there is something special about Pixar movies that you just have to 'get' or not.
Now I don't want to start an anime war because as I've already said there is some good anime (all genres of creativity are 90% garbage and 10% gems anyways, nothing special about anime)
it would be great if Mail joined the rest of the world in finally supporting TLS
s xm ailapp.html
It already does. See this:
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/helpdesk/mac/email/o
Maybe try Google next time instead of ranting?
Other sources of music without DRM will eventually appear
No they won't. Not without a massive upheaval in the way that professional music is recorded and sold (e.g. all the record labels go belly up simultaneously and all the musicians sign deals directly with online distributors)
That is such an unlikely scenario that we can safely ignore the possibility of it happening (and if it does, we can all be pleasantly surprised)
Instead, Apple, Napster, and the other legitimate services need to establish that there is demand for buying (note that word, buying, as in an exchange of money for goods/services) music online. Then slowly as more and more music is sold online and less is sold by pressing little discs out of petrochemicals Apple et. al. can start applying pressure to the industry to lower prices etc.
Or the industry can decide that piracy makes digital distribution a lost cause and they can go back to physical distribution only. And by physical distribution I mean their previously hatched plan of designed obsolescence, by phasing out CDs and forcing everyone to upgrade to SACD.
Reading the parent, there is no conflict. He said the GPL doesn't require X, but that the GPL philosophy is un-free. It would've been better worded to say the GNU philosophy or the Free Software movement's philosophy, but whatever.
I happen to agree. There is this attitude in the free community that one has to say the right things, do things the right way, and in short think the same as others in the movement. This sort of RightThink political correctness irks many.
Computers and software are tools, not political issues. If you want to get political, get involved with a civil liberties or environmental group, or hell even a gun-rights group if thats the way you lean.
Its as if someone decided to create a political movement around auto parts, with the Flooble/Tire group disdaining the Brozzle engines group. WHO CARES!
Hah.. As if thats just so hard to imagine. Of course Microsoft makes mistakes. They have made too many mistakes to count. Its a testament to the scope and breadth of their monopoly that it has kept them afloat through blunders that would've been the end of lesser companies.
Its telling that someone on the 'inside' is of the opinion that his employer is (nearly) infallible. Gimme a break. I'm no Microsoft hater (I'm mostly ambivalent) but that kind of attitude gives me an idea of how myopic the people there must be.