Many of those professional designers use Apple's Pro apps like FCP and Aperture, which won't be ported to Windows. If Adobe stopped supporting OS X, Apple would just release its own pro app to replace it (and I daresay it would probably be better than Photoshop, and would integrate better with the system tools).
Why would Apple trash all the R&D they have put into their OS and pro apps in recent years? These things are profitable. It's not like Apple is doing this out of desperation - the company is in the best position it has been for years.
The people who will probably be hit hardest are those who port games to OS X. There will be no need for this any more.
I just bought one of the Core Duo iMacs for my home machine. I brought it back from the Apple Store and booted it up. Everything was fine until I did a software update and then the thing just died. This was the first technical problem with an Apple product I had had in ten years of being an Apple customer.
So I was rather disappointed.
However, after talking to Apple's online live help I was advised to return it, so I took it back to the store and they tried it. They immediately gave me a brand new unit, and then they kept their help desk open for an hour past closing so that I could boot the new mac, do the software update and make sure I was happy with it.
I don't think I could have reasonably asked for anything more than that. A small number of products from any manufacturer will always be bad, but it's what the company does about it that counts. In this case, they replaced it, and then went out of their way to make sure that I was satisfied with the new one. I'm a happy camper now.
"Now what I don't understand is that if I'm a student, I'm paying to take a course, I'm paying to learn the material in the course, and I'm paying to be taught by a teacher. How is this not a service? And how is it that if I pay for something and have a certain level of expectation as to what I receive translate into "entitlement"? If I'm paying a lot of money for something, you better believe that I want it done well (and by "done well" I mean either stellar teaching or a solid ass kicking that brings me to a new level of knowledge)."
The fact is that most students are incompetent when it comes to rating teachers. I have been through many such student evaluations and the easiest ways to increase your ratings are well-known. Dress well. Use overheads or slides. Give students copies of the overheads or slides (this is usually worth a full point). Have multiple choice tests. Make things easy. Don't make the students read too much. The point is that you'll get accurate ratings from the portion of the class that is actually academically inclined, and the rest will simply rate you based on irrelevant factors like the ones I just listed.
A "bad teacher" more often than not means someone who won't pander to lazy students. One of my finest teachers gets terrible ratings from many students because he decided once he got tenure that he would no longer put up with any of their crap (turning up late, talking in class, not doing the readings before seminars).
There are thousands many more "bad students" than there are "bad teachers" at university. And for every professor who has an inflated sense of self, there are 50 students with the same thing.
IMHO the public would be better served by having tertiary education publicly funded. That way professors no longer have to pander and can make the students do some real work for a change. To be fair though, students need to get some kind of state allowance to keep them from having to take jobs to support themselves (many of my students work 20 hours a week, which is ridiculous if you are trying to make a good job of college).
The current market focused system does nothing but encourage laziness and substandard work from everyone.
Fair enough. People should use the OS they feel most comfortable with.
Personally, I am a refugee from Windows. I used it for years until I was given a Power Mac at work. Since that day I have refused to use Windows. I prefer the Mac interface and it is much easier for me to work in multiple languages (some with non-Roman scripts) on my Mac than it is in Windows.
I also enjoy the fact that my Macs have been plug and play for every single peripheral I have used. I can't say the same about my time with Windows.
And some of us just like Apple's design. Some people don't care about that sort of thing, but that's up to them. I'd rather live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house than one of those new McMansions even though the latter might be technically superior in every respect. If you don't feel this way, that's OK. Having a limited aesthetic sensibility is not a crime.
Having said that, if the DRM becomes too odious, then I am going to buy a new box and switch to Ubuntu (or whatever the current standard of "GNU/Linux for normal people" is at the time).
Applications has always been writable by the admin group since 10.0. I should know, I've used every version of OS X other than OS X Server since it was launched.
The iChat trojan shows that running as admin is probably not a good idea. Personally, I have a separate admin account. In most cases when I want to install something, I am merely prompted for the admin account name and password. On odd occasions I have had to switch to the admin account, but with fast user switching (yes, I know Apple "borrowed" this from Windows) it isn't much of a problem.
No matter what manufacturers do, there will always be the possibility of malicious code being able to disrupt your computer, if only because it can always exploit the human being operating the system. OS X is about as secure as you are going to get. If you don't run as admin, then the only damage you can do is to your home folder. Sure, that's bad, but it's a lot better than nuking the whole system.
If Apple is at fault here, it is because they do not inform let alone guide all users to run ordinary user accounts as the norm. I imagine they won't do anything about it, since most computer users would find the very notion of user privileges perplexing.
It's still a far cry from Windows. As far as I know, you can run all your applications from an ordinary user account. IIRC some Windows applications cannot be used unless you run as admin. That makes Windows worse than OS X in a crucial respect.
It's not like God (even if he/she/it exists at all) has made it a rule that people who create replicable content must be compensated. You have no inherent moral right to charge people for listening to music you make, or jokes you tell. As everyone knows, the state grants you a legal right to do so in order to foster more content creation, so there's your real power. If people are downloading it without paying, just stop making it and find another job. Lawsuits won't stop them -- it's like if the makers of traction engines tried to make gasoline powered tractors illegal. The technology is simply too powerful and useful to be stopped.
What many people haven't considered is that some of us might quite like it if the dominant role content creation was taken away from Informational Empires like Sony and returned to ordinary Joes. I personally wouldn't miss it at all. We suffer from information pollution as it is -- I cannot walk anywhere without continuously being assaulted by propaganda for the consumer society. I hate it -- I'd love nothing better than to see it destroyed.
So if someone said to me "Hey, if you pirate movies through Bittorrent, Sony and Universal and all the other big media companies will go bust and stop making content", I'd reply "Awesome! Where do I sign up?"
Jobs is very good at taking technology and simplifying it for everyday people. I guess he just has a knack for this.
For example: the iPod is a pretty nifty piece of kit that anyone can use. It's simplicity is a major part of its appeal. From what I have read the engineers brought him prototypes (one was housed in a shoebox IIRC) and he kept sending them back saying things like "I want to be able to play any song on the device in three key presses).
I read somewhere that when Apple wanted a consumer DVD authoring app (now iDVD) the designers were ordered to meet with Jobs and show him their plans for the app. They had come up with all sorts of traditionally complicated applications with "tortured user interfaces" (to use one of Jobs' favorite phrases). He told them their designs sucked, and drew a square on the whiteboard. "This is your app. You drag the movies into here. Go back and do it like this". Looking at iDVD now, he was absolutely right. That's all you really need for a consumer DVD authoring app.
He also tends to be very market savvy. When Apple started its own retail stores I thought they were going to be an expensive disaster. I couldn't have been more wrong. The Apple Store at my local mall has easily the highest amount of traffic in the mall, and it is perpetually busy (the counter queues are really annoying. I thought that it was only packed during weekends and at other peak times, so I made a point of going early in the morning the last time I went to buy some peripherals. It was packed out. I asked the guy whether it was always this busy during the day, and he said that this counted as really quiet for them.
If Apple could make money by selling its OS to use on generic hardware, I'm sure they would. But the last experiment in cloning was a terrible failure and showed everyone that there is, at least for the present, no future for Apple in allowing their OS to run on other hardware. Even with the money that iPod is raking in, it would probably damage the company significantly if such a practice became widespread, and that might mean no more OS X, which would be a terrible shame.
As far as I know, that's the reality of the situation.
In any case, I thought that a large part of the point of Free Software (and correct me if I am wrong) is that it is voluntary. If you aren't violating the GPL in doing so, you aren't forced to use the GPL for your software if you don't want to. Apple wants to use OS X as an incentive to buy its computers as its primary business model, and Apple has every legal, and from what I can see, moral, right to do this. The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that, while both have the right to copyright their software, Microsoft is using its monopoly position to attack the very possibility of a GPL alternative, while Apple isn't.
I guess Apple is in a difficult position. I doubt that they care that a few hobbyists are trying to get OS X to run on different hardware just for the fun of doing it, but if they allow it to happen my understanding is that they will open themselves up to having to allow other people with less idealistic aspirations to do it. I imagine that if you do this in your shed and succeed and don't make a huge noise about it, they won't care at all.
Government funded projects are just things that we need that we pay for collectively, without using the market. The rest of the stuff we need we leave up to each individual to decide to fund.
The reason that every advanced society splits its spending like this is because markets fail to provide some things that we need at all, provide others inadequately, while working very well to provide a decent supply of many other things. The state has to coerce us to pay for many things we need, because if it didn't, we wouldn't get them. It's no argument to say that we should leave everything up to the market, because market failure is a reality -- it is a reality because the very same reasons that make markets wonderful at providing some things we need, makes them hopeless at providing others. If we left everything up to individual consumption decisions (the market), life would be nasty, brutish and short.
That's what the guy in TFA means when he calls himself a "market socialist". He's also right.
Anyone who doesn't understand market failure has no place in a discussion about the organization of modern society. Sadly, that set includes most Libertarians.
Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean 10.0 here.
10.1 (a free upgrade for all users) was the first generally usable version of OS X, there was nothing wrong with it, and it was certainly on a par with, if not better than the first version of Windows XP.
I've exchanged posts with the person who started all this (who seems perfectly nice to me), and I think for the sake of the topic it is worth clearing up some misconceptions.
The guild OZ was advertised as "not GLBT only, but GLBT friendly". According to the guildmaster (who is the person who was warned by Blizzard) roughly half of the guild are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered and the rest are straights. As far as I know, and I've read a lot of what she has written, she has never asked for permission to form a "gays only" guild, so any posts claiming that this is about "gay only" guilds are off topic.
This was never about agressively promoting a homosexual "agenda" in game. Rather the point of the GLBT friendly guild was to provide a guild for people who don't like in-game discrimination against homosexuals. This includes: people posting things like "ZOMG!!! some fag ganked me!!11111 TEH GHEY!!11one", defamatory statements about homosexuals and sex practices perceived as homosexual (primarily anal sex), and actions caused by prejudice against homosexuals (being removed from guilds or parties when people find out someone is gay). Having avidly played the game up until recently (I suspended my account because of technical issues) I know for a fact that the first two are endemic in World of Warcraft, and I have read about many instances of the latter (I generally only group with guildmates, and our guild was run on anarchist principles [everyone had equal powers, guild participation was entirely voluntary, and there was absolutely no censorship] so I never experienced this myself).
Blizzard does try to deal with people who say derogatory things about homosexuals, but they are snowed under. A while back my server was down, so, having never played a warlock or an undead character, I rolled an undead warlock on one of the new servers. While roaming around the starting area, I saw a pile of about ten corpses on a grave. They had names like "cuminmyanus"; "diefags"; "burnalljews" and so on. So I opened a ticket and reported it (something I rarely do). A few days later I logged that character on, and they were still there. A couple of days after that I got an email from Blizzard saying that they had cleaned it up. If it took them that long to deal with one problem, imagine how bad it would be if everyone reported every single instance of homophobic speech in WoW.
It's sad, but there are a great many players who engage in such behaviour and I'm not surprised that gay players would rather seek like minded people in order to get away from it as best they can. That's all that was happening in this case: players were trying to enjoy the game free of harassment.
For those people who think that RL stuff should be kept out of the game, you must either play on RP servers or have not played the game. On non-RP servers there is lots of RL stuff discussed all the time. It's not really a fantasy role playing game, but an online community where people are represented by fantasy avatars. THAT'S WHAT THE GAME IS REALLY LIKE! Some people might prefer to keep their RL stuff out of the game, but a significant proportion of the population do not. My guildmates and I would discuss it all the time. If other guilds and players do not, that's up to them - it simply means that they play the game in a different way than other people do. If you made everyone keep their RL stuff out of the game, it wouldn't be as much fun for most players. RL stuff will stay because real people play the game, and some of them are gay, just like the real world.
Keeping one's sexual identity out of the game would be fine, if it was enforceable. But it isn't. People inadvertently identify themselves as straight all the time. The problem with Blizzard's policy was that gay people were punished for doing the same thing - not for describing in detail their sexual practices, but simply for saying they were gay if someone asked. That was what was discriminatory. It was a terrible policy: one that treated the victims of harassment th
This policy is odious and in every way shameful. I will not be returning to World of Warcraft, and I'm not even gay myself.
I don't think that any player has ever asked for the right to argue and discuss such controversial matters in general chat. But the policy as stated does not allow a person to even mention these things in general chat. Yet straight people like myself are allowed to mention their orientation and related issues with no sanction. Many times I have regaled the denizens of Ironforge with amusing tales of my wife's hatred of everything WoW; many others have participated in similar discussions (I don't play on RP servers).
If I was gay, I would get banned for this. It seems I would even get banned if someone asked me if I was gay and I said "yes".
If gay players aren't allowed the same freedoms as straight players with regard to their sexual orientation, then it is plainly discrimination. Trying to dress it up as "protecting" the gay players is simply blaming the victim for the actions and attitudes of their harassers. The original policy was the sensible one: punish players for using these terms as a means to insult or degrade others, and ban people from arguing about this stuff in general chat. The new policy is just a boon to homophobes and assholes.
For the record, I don't see anything wrong with advertising for minority friendly guilds.. If a group of Christian players would rather not have smutty talk and blasphemy in their guild chat, then it is only right and proper that they tell prospective members about their policy. If female players want to make a guild that does not permit sexist behaviour, then it is only right and proper to allow them to. In both these cases everyone benefits from the existence of such guilds: people who want to play in that sort of atmosphere have somewhere to go, and people who don't know that that particular guild is not for them. It's a lot different from having a "white male-friendly" guild, since the game is by default white male friendly. The only reason for having such a guild would be to troll.
It's disappointing that such a good game should be marred by such a terrible policy. Blizzard has basically told gay players that they ought to strive for invisibility. I wonder what the gay employees of Vivendi-Universal think of this policy.
This game is on borrowed time. (1) The game is currently unstable and people are having to queue for a long time to actually get to play (even on medium pop servers); (2) The end game content forces you to raid if you want to progress, even if you don't like that playstyle and would prefer 10-15 person content - the expansion will give you another 10 whole levels of play if you don't like to raid; (3) The recent anti-gay "blaming the victims" stuff is the last straw.
Some people may like this, but personally, I'm done with it, and so are the friends I used to play with.
Oh and (4): Blizzard's CMs are arrogant and ignorant cretins (except for the Mac Support people, who are awesome).
Except that you are completely mistaken. The point of government is to restrict our freedom in certain respects. Of course that sounds bad, but in fact it improves our lives immeasurably.
You assume that just because everyone has an interest in promoting an outcome, that this outcome will be achieved. Please Google "The Prisoner's Dilemma" for information as to why this is not the case. Then think about how many of the good things we enjoy would be subject to the same problem as the Prisoner's Dilemma if we didn't have the government to compel us to fund them.
My PhD dissertation was on Plato. Strauss is regarded as a nutjob by everyone in the Plato business that I know, even the conservative people (and my dissertation supervisor was uber conservative). And this from a university which had and still has some prominent Straussians (although none in the philosophy department).
...the Bush bashing comes from the students. Admittedly, this is Canada, but I've been teaching in one way or another for ten years now, and Bush is the only contemporary political figure that inspires almost universal loathing from students of all backgrounds. Sometimes their papers veer off into Bush bashing for no apparent reason. It's weird. FTR I hate him too, but I don't make a point of telling students this, so it's not like they are fishing for higher grades.
I don't know. It has less stuff. I hate Microsoft as much as the next person, but I happen to like Mac Office. Sure, I had to buy 2004 to get unicode support so I could type in Classical Greek, but I got a better student discount than I did for Office X, and I got three licenses for it. Although I don't use Entourage or Powerpoint, both Word and Excel have worked perfectly and neither has ever crashed, and the Mac BU has put a lot of work into making it a "Mac" application. qua Office for Mac, I am a happy and loyal Microsoft customer.
Surely you jest.
Windows is a nightmare for ordinary users (I don't mean/. readers... I mean real people). Just works my ass.
My parents and all their friends have Windows PCs (no, they wouldn't listen) and when I am staying I get a constant flow of help requests, reports of strange errors, and various arcane system messages. Since I don't use Windows at all, it often takes me a while to work out just what is going on since the system messages appear to have been written by someone who lacked the normal facility for human communication. My favorite was my uncle's machine that simply stopped working and refused to start unless he reinstalled and downloaded some massive update (he had dialup) to stop it failing again.
On the other hand, my wife, who hates "technical" things and who in addition emits ethereal gadget-wrecking energies, has not managed to crash or damage OS X in over four years of heavy use - hell, she even insisted on installing it herself (out of pique). Computers for regular folks should be like that, not MS's mess.
"It is a fundamental principle of law that everyone knows the law".
So the fundamental principle of law is a demonstrable falsehood?
Don't they mean: "It is a fundamental principle of law that everyone ought to know the law"?
That would at least make sense.
On both Safari and Firefox.
A poster mentioned that you can stop them by disabling the Tabbrowser Extension. I'd like to share that this worked for me, or at least it has worked so far (OS X.3.8; Firefox 1.0).
I hope it works for you.
Damn these advertiser scum and their insidious ways.
What does any of this have to do with Heraclitus?
Are programmers setting themselves on fire in frustration? Have they been listening to Britney instead of the logos?
If this is something to do with "all things constantly change" then Heraclitus doesn't really say that - although it is mistakenly attributed to him by later authors
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt Apple is "losing faith" in their OS.
Many of those professional designers use Apple's Pro apps like FCP and Aperture, which won't be ported to Windows. If Adobe stopped supporting OS X, Apple would just release its own pro app to replace it (and I daresay it would probably be better than Photoshop, and would integrate better with the system tools).
Why would Apple trash all the R&D they have put into their OS and pro apps in recent years? These things are profitable. It's not like Apple is doing this out of desperation - the company is in the best position it has been for years.
The people who will probably be hit hardest are those who port games to OS X. There will be no need for this any more.
OK... I'll bite..
I just bought one of the Core Duo iMacs for my home machine. I brought it back from the Apple Store and booted it up. Everything was fine until I did a software update and then the thing just died. This was the first technical problem with an Apple product I had had in ten years of being an Apple customer.
So I was rather disappointed.
However, after talking to Apple's online live help I was advised to return it, so I took it back to the store and they tried it. They immediately gave me a brand new unit, and then they kept their help desk open for an hour past closing so that I could boot the new mac, do the software update and make sure I was happy with it.
I don't think I could have reasonably asked for anything more than that. A small number of products from any manufacturer will always be bad, but it's what the company does about it that counts. In this case, they replaced it, and then went out of their way to make sure that I was satisfied with the new one. I'm a happy camper now.
"Now what I don't understand is that if I'm a student, I'm paying to take a course, I'm paying to learn the material in the course, and I'm paying to be taught by a teacher. How is this not a service? And how is it that if I pay for something and have a certain level of expectation as to what I receive translate into "entitlement"? If I'm paying a lot of money for something, you better believe that I want it done well (and by "done well" I mean either stellar teaching or a solid ass kicking that brings me to a new level of knowledge)."
The fact is that most students are incompetent when it comes to rating teachers. I have been through many such student evaluations and the easiest ways to increase your ratings are well-known. Dress well. Use overheads or slides. Give students copies of the overheads or slides (this is usually worth a full point). Have multiple choice tests. Make things easy. Don't make the students read too much. The point is that you'll get accurate ratings from the portion of the class that is actually academically inclined, and the rest will simply rate you based on irrelevant factors like the ones I just listed.
A "bad teacher" more often than not means someone who won't pander to lazy students. One of my finest teachers gets terrible ratings from many students because he decided once he got tenure that he would no longer put up with any of their crap (turning up late, talking in class, not doing the readings before seminars).
There are thousands many more "bad students" than there are "bad teachers" at university. And for every professor who has an inflated sense of self, there are 50 students with the same thing.
IMHO the public would be better served by having tertiary education publicly funded. That way professors no longer have to pander and can make the students do some real work for a change. To be fair though, students need to get some kind of state allowance to keep them from having to take jobs to support themselves (many of my students work 20 hours a week, which is ridiculous if you are trying to make a good job of college).
The current market focused system does nothing but encourage laziness and substandard work from everyone.
Sorry, we can. Cry more... or take another class.
Fair enough. People should use the OS they feel most comfortable with.
Personally, I am a refugee from Windows. I used it for years until I was given a Power Mac at work. Since that day I have refused to use Windows. I prefer the Mac interface and it is much easier for me to work in multiple languages (some with non-Roman scripts) on my Mac than it is in Windows.
I also enjoy the fact that my Macs have been plug and play for every single peripheral I have used. I can't say the same about my time with Windows.
And some of us just like Apple's design. Some people don't care about that sort of thing, but that's up to them. I'd rather live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house than one of those new McMansions even though the latter might be technically superior in every respect. If you don't feel this way, that's OK. Having a limited aesthetic sensibility is not a crime.
Having said that, if the DRM becomes too odious, then I am going to buy a new box and switch to Ubuntu (or whatever the current standard of "GNU/Linux for normal people" is at the time).
Applications has always been writable by the admin group since 10.0. I should know, I've used every version of OS X other than OS X Server since it was launched.
The iChat trojan shows that running as admin is probably not a good idea. Personally, I have a separate admin account. In most cases when I want to install something, I am merely prompted for the admin account name and password. On odd occasions I have had to switch to the admin account, but with fast user switching (yes, I know Apple "borrowed" this from Windows) it isn't much of a problem.
No matter what manufacturers do, there will always be the possibility of malicious code being able to disrupt your computer, if only because it can always exploit the human being operating the system. OS X is about as secure as you are going to get. If you don't run as admin, then the only damage you can do is to your home folder. Sure, that's bad, but it's a lot better than nuking the whole system.
If Apple is at fault here, it is because they do not inform let alone guide all users to run ordinary user accounts as the norm. I imagine they won't do anything about it, since most computer users would find the very notion of user privileges perplexing.
It's still a far cry from Windows. As far as I know, you can run all your applications from an ordinary user account. IIRC some Windows applications cannot be used unless you run as admin. That makes Windows worse than OS X in a crucial respect.
It's actually a reasonable position.
It's not like God (even if he/she/it exists at all) has made it a rule that people who create replicable content must be compensated. You have no inherent moral right to charge people for listening to music you make, or jokes you tell. As everyone knows, the state grants you a legal right to do so in order to foster more content creation, so there's your real power. If people are downloading it without paying, just stop making it and find another job. Lawsuits won't stop them -- it's like if the makers of traction engines tried to make gasoline powered tractors illegal. The technology is simply too powerful and useful to be stopped.
What many people haven't considered is that some of us might quite like it if the dominant role content creation was taken away from Informational Empires like Sony and returned to ordinary Joes. I personally wouldn't miss it at all. We suffer from information pollution as it is -- I cannot walk anywhere without continuously being assaulted by propaganda for the consumer society. I hate it -- I'd love nothing better than to see it destroyed.
So if someone said to me "Hey, if you pirate movies through Bittorrent, Sony and Universal and all the other big media companies will go bust and stop making content", I'd reply "Awesome! Where do I sign up?"
Jobs is very good at taking technology and simplifying it for everyday people. I guess he just has a knack for this.
For example: the iPod is a pretty nifty piece of kit that anyone can use. It's simplicity is a major part of its appeal. From what I have read the engineers brought him prototypes (one was housed in a shoebox IIRC) and he kept sending them back saying things like "I want to be able to play any song on the device in three key presses).
I read somewhere that when Apple wanted a consumer DVD authoring app (now iDVD) the designers were ordered to meet with Jobs and show him their plans for the app. They had come up with all sorts of traditionally complicated applications with "tortured user interfaces" (to use one of Jobs' favorite phrases). He told them their designs sucked, and drew a square on the whiteboard. "This is your app. You drag the movies into here. Go back and do it like this". Looking at iDVD now, he was absolutely right. That's all you really need for a consumer DVD authoring app.
He also tends to be very market savvy. When Apple started its own retail stores I thought they were going to be an expensive disaster. I couldn't have been more wrong. The Apple Store at my local mall has easily the highest amount of traffic in the mall, and it is perpetually busy (the counter queues are really annoying. I thought that it was only packed during weekends and at other peak times, so I made a point of going early in the morning the last time I went to buy some peripherals. It was packed out. I asked the guy whether it was always this busy during the day, and he said that this counted as really quiet for them.
Folks...
If Apple could make money by selling its OS to use on generic hardware, I'm sure they would. But the last experiment in cloning was a terrible failure and showed everyone that there is, at least for the present, no future for Apple in allowing their OS to run on other hardware. Even with the money that iPod is raking in, it would probably damage the company significantly if such a practice became widespread, and that might mean no more OS X, which would be a terrible shame.
As far as I know, that's the reality of the situation.
In any case, I thought that a large part of the point of Free Software (and correct me if I am wrong) is that it is voluntary. If you aren't violating the GPL in doing so, you aren't forced to use the GPL for your software if you don't want to. Apple wants to use OS X as an incentive to buy its computers as its primary business model, and Apple has every legal, and from what I can see, moral, right to do this. The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that, while both have the right to copyright their software, Microsoft is using its monopoly position to attack the very possibility of a GPL alternative, while Apple isn't.
I guess Apple is in a difficult position. I doubt that they care that a few hobbyists are trying to get OS X to run on different hardware just for the fun of doing it, but if they allow it to happen my understanding is that they will open themselves up to having to allow other people with less idealistic aspirations to do it. I imagine that if you do this in your shed and succeed and don't make a huge noise about it, they won't care at all.
Just my ten cents..
Sorry, this is just ignorant.
Government funded projects are just things that we need that we pay for collectively, without using the market. The rest of the stuff we need we leave up to each individual to decide to fund.
The reason that every advanced society splits its spending like this is because markets fail to provide some things that we need at all, provide others inadequately, while working very well to provide a decent supply of many other things. The state has to coerce us to pay for many things we need, because if it didn't, we wouldn't get them. It's no argument to say that we should leave everything up to the market, because market failure is a reality -- it is a reality because the very same reasons that make markets wonderful at providing some things we need, makes them hopeless at providing others. If we left everything up to individual consumption decisions (the market), life would be nasty, brutish and short.
That's what the guy in TFA means when he calls himself a "market socialist". He's also right.
Anyone who doesn't understand market failure has no place in a discussion about the organization of modern society. Sadly, that set includes most Libertarians.
Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean 10.0 here.
10.1 (a free upgrade for all users) was the first generally usable version of OS X, there was nothing wrong with it, and it was certainly on a par with, if not better than the first version of Windows XP.
I've exchanged posts with the person who started all this (who seems perfectly nice to me), and I think for the sake of the topic it is worth clearing up some misconceptions.
The guild OZ was advertised as "not GLBT only, but GLBT friendly". According to the guildmaster (who is the person who was warned by Blizzard) roughly half of the guild are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered and the rest are straights. As far as I know, and I've read a lot of what she has written, she has never asked for permission to form a "gays only" guild, so any posts claiming that this is about "gay only" guilds are off topic.
This was never about agressively promoting a homosexual "agenda" in game. Rather the point of the GLBT friendly guild was to provide a guild for people who don't like in-game discrimination against homosexuals. This includes: people posting things like "ZOMG!!! some fag ganked me!!11111 TEH GHEY!!11one", defamatory statements about homosexuals and sex practices perceived as homosexual (primarily anal sex), and actions caused by prejudice against homosexuals (being removed from guilds or parties when people find out someone is gay). Having avidly played the game up until recently (I suspended my account because of technical issues) I know for a fact that the first two are endemic in World of Warcraft, and I have read about many instances of the latter (I generally only group with guildmates, and our guild was run on anarchist principles [everyone had equal powers, guild participation was entirely voluntary, and there was absolutely no censorship] so I never experienced this myself).
Blizzard does try to deal with people who say derogatory things about homosexuals, but they are snowed under. A while back my server was down, so, having never played a warlock or an undead character, I rolled an undead warlock on one of the new servers. While roaming around the starting area, I saw a pile of about ten corpses on a grave. They had names like "cuminmyanus"; "diefags"; "burnalljews" and so on. So I opened a ticket and reported it (something I rarely do). A few days later I logged that character on, and they were still there. A couple of days after that I got an email from Blizzard saying that they had cleaned it up. If it took them that long to deal with one problem, imagine how bad it would be if everyone reported every single instance of homophobic speech in WoW.
It's sad, but there are a great many players who engage in such behaviour and I'm not surprised that gay players would rather seek like minded people in order to get away from it as best they can. That's all that was happening in this case: players were trying to enjoy the game free of harassment.
For those people who think that RL stuff should be kept out of the game, you must either play on RP servers or have not played the game. On non-RP servers there is lots of RL stuff discussed all the time. It's not really a fantasy role playing game, but an online community where people are represented by fantasy avatars. THAT'S WHAT THE GAME IS REALLY LIKE! Some people might prefer to keep their RL stuff out of the game, but a significant proportion of the population do not. My guildmates and I would discuss it all the time. If other guilds and players do not, that's up to them - it simply means that they play the game in a different way than other people do. If you made everyone keep their RL stuff out of the game, it wouldn't be as much fun for most players. RL stuff will stay because real people play the game, and some of them are gay, just like the real world.
Keeping one's sexual identity out of the game would be fine, if it was enforceable. But it isn't. People inadvertently identify themselves as straight all the time. The problem with Blizzard's policy was that gay people were punished for doing the same thing - not for describing in detail their sexual practices, but simply for saying they were gay if someone asked. That was what was discriminatory. It was a terrible policy: one that treated the victims of harassment th
This policy is odious and in every way shameful. I will not be returning to World of Warcraft, and I'm not even gay myself.
I don't think that any player has ever asked for the right to argue and discuss such controversial matters in general chat. But the policy as stated does not allow a person to even mention these things in general chat. Yet straight people like myself are allowed to mention their orientation and related issues with no sanction. Many times I have regaled the denizens of Ironforge with amusing tales of my wife's hatred of everything WoW; many others have participated in similar discussions (I don't play on RP servers).
If I was gay, I would get banned for this. It seems I would even get banned if someone asked me if I was gay and I said "yes".
If gay players aren't allowed the same freedoms as straight players with regard to their sexual orientation, then it is plainly discrimination. Trying to dress it up as "protecting" the gay players is simply blaming the victim for the actions and attitudes of their harassers. The original policy was the sensible one: punish players for using these terms as a means to insult or degrade others, and ban people from arguing about this stuff in general chat. The new policy is just a boon to homophobes and assholes.
For the record, I don't see anything wrong with advertising for minority friendly guilds.. If a group of Christian players would rather not have smutty talk and blasphemy in their guild chat, then it is only right and proper that they tell prospective members about their policy. If female players want to make a guild that does not permit sexist behaviour, then it is only right and proper to allow them to. In both these cases everyone benefits from the existence of such guilds: people who want to play in that sort of atmosphere have somewhere to go, and people who don't know that that particular guild is not for them. It's a lot different from having a "white male-friendly" guild, since the game is by default white male friendly. The only reason for having such a guild would be to troll.
It's disappointing that such a good game should be marred by such a terrible policy. Blizzard has basically told gay players that they ought to strive for invisibility. I wonder what the gay employees of Vivendi-Universal think of this policy.
This game is on borrowed time. (1) The game is currently unstable and people are having to queue for a long time to actually get to play (even on medium pop servers); (2) The end game content forces you to raid if you want to progress, even if you don't like that playstyle and would prefer 10-15 person content - the expansion will give you another 10 whole levels of play if you don't like to raid; (3) The recent anti-gay "blaming the victims" stuff is the last straw.
Some people may like this, but personally, I'm done with it, and so are the friends I used to play with.
Oh and (4): Blizzard's CMs are arrogant and ignorant cretins (except for the Mac Support people, who are awesome).
Except that you are completely mistaken. The point of government is to restrict our freedom in certain respects. Of course that sounds bad, but in fact it improves our lives immeasurably.
You assume that just because everyone has an interest in promoting an outcome, that this outcome will be achieved. Please Google "The Prisoner's Dilemma" for information as to why this is not the case. Then think about how many of the good things we enjoy would be subject to the same problem as the Prisoner's Dilemma if we didn't have the government to compel us to fund them.
Look up "market failure" and "collective action problems". Then, if you can master your emotions, change your ridiculous politics.
My PhD dissertation was on Plato. Strauss is regarded as a nutjob by everyone in the Plato business that I know, even the conservative people (and my dissertation supervisor was uber conservative). And this from a university which had and still has some prominent Straussians (although none in the philosophy department).
...the Bush bashing comes from the students. Admittedly, this is Canada, but I've been teaching in one way or another for ten years now, and Bush is the only contemporary political figure that inspires almost universal loathing from students of all backgrounds. Sometimes their papers veer off into Bush bashing for no apparent reason. It's weird. FTR I hate him too, but I don't make a point of telling students this, so it's not like they are fishing for higher grades.
I don't know. It has less stuff. I hate Microsoft as much as the next person, but I happen to like Mac Office. Sure, I had to buy 2004 to get unicode support so I could type in Classical Greek, but I got a better student discount than I did for Office X, and I got three licenses for it. Although I don't use Entourage or Powerpoint, both Word and Excel have worked perfectly and neither has ever crashed, and the Mac BU has put a lot of work into making it a "Mac" application. qua Office for Mac, I am a happy and loyal Microsoft customer.
Surely you jest. Windows is a nightmare for ordinary users (I don't mean /. readers... I mean real people). Just works my ass.
My parents and all their friends have Windows PCs (no, they wouldn't listen) and when I am staying I get a constant flow of help requests, reports of strange errors, and various arcane system messages. Since I don't use Windows at all, it often takes me a while to work out just what is going on since the system messages appear to have been written by someone who lacked the normal facility for human communication. My favorite was my uncle's machine that simply stopped working and refused to start unless he reinstalled and downloaded some massive update (he had dialup) to stop it failing again.
On the other hand, my wife, who hates "technical" things and who in addition emits ethereal gadget-wrecking energies, has not managed to crash or damage OS X in over four years of heavy use - hell, she even insisted on installing it herself (out of pique). Computers for regular folks should be like that, not MS's mess.
Is it me, or is the worst formatted PDF ever? That two pages in one thing is really annoying. What is wrong with people?
Yeah - that means it's OK to use words longer than five letters. ;)
"It is a fundamental principle of law that everyone knows the law". So the fundamental principle of law is a demonstrable falsehood? Don't they mean: "It is a fundamental principle of law that everyone ought to know the law"? That would at least make sense.
On both Safari and Firefox. A poster mentioned that you can stop them by disabling the Tabbrowser Extension. I'd like to share that this worked for me, or at least it has worked so far (OS X.3.8; Firefox 1.0). I hope it works for you. Damn these advertiser scum and their insidious ways.
What does any of this have to do with Heraclitus? Are programmers setting themselves on fire in frustration? Have they been listening to Britney instead of the logos? If this is something to do with "all things constantly change" then Heraclitus doesn't really say that - although it is mistakenly attributed to him by later authors