"I'm not saying Europeans are going to be particularly intelligent buyers; it's just that they aren't as snobbish"
There are vast numbers of snobs in Europe, hence the fact that it's the home of so many overpriced fashion houses, overpriced car makers, overpriced watch makers, overpriced hi-fi and TV makers, overpriced furniture makers, overpriced perfume makers, overpriced department stores, and overpriced restaurants.
"skip major brands and go for cheap, Taiwanese ones, is that the big three - Apple's shit, Microsoft's shit and Creative's shit - are defective by design. They are worthless little toys."
Strange then that Apple have a (far) bigger share of the European MP3 player market than anyone else. Must be all those snobs that you claim we don't have...
"I have to use a Python script every time I copy audio files in order for the thing to play it (and of course, I'm not installing Apple's iTunes malware which will spam me, try to sell me their bullshit, delete my private files, and turn my computer into a vending and surveillance machine for the mafiaa)"
The list you've given of your reasons for not using iTunes sounds a lot like your claims that we Europeans are less snobbish than Americans, i.e. a load of tripe.
That's because MS don't sell it in Europe due to licensing restrictions on content in the Zune Store. They're currently talking about a worldwide release in 2009 for the Zune 3, but they've been talking about worldwide releases for other versions of the Zune since it was launched, so it's difficult to say whether it will actually happen then (or at all).
"There are limits to fanboyism and that one is far far far over it."
What did I write to indicate that I was a "fan boy"? If the best you can do to refute my points is write fuckwitted cliches, then why not try shutting up and saving some Internet bandwidth so your school friends have a little more available for pirating games, music, and superhero movies.
"Jesus fucking christ"
I stand in awe of your originality.
"this is about OOo ported to Aqua as the X11 version was not good enough for Mac users."
Which does not change the fact that _Apple support X11_ one whit or iota.
"The implication by GP"
I wasn't answering the GP, so what the GP said has no relevance whatsoever to my post.
"Of course it is still the retail copy. modifications to something don't mean it is not based on the original."
"Based on the original" and "is the original" aren't the same.
"A Volkswagen Beetle is still a Volkswagen Beetle, even if you put aftermarket accessories on it."
I suggest you check the classic and antique car market before saying things like this, because buyers distinguish between vehicles that are in original retail condition and modified ones, and pay significantly more for the originals.
"The same applies to the hacks to get the OS to run on the generic hardware. You aren't significantly altering the software - you are just allowing the retail version to be installed."
Any changes made to the retail version end up with something that's not the retail version. The reasons for the changes are irrelevant-- it's still been changed.
"So tell me, if I install a retail copy of Mac OS on my Mac, and then install some software that makes system modifications (not for "hacking") am I somehow not running the retail version of Mac OS? "
If you re-install the retail version on a Mac, you will lose those changes, so the changed version clearly isn't the retail version, and if it's an official Apple patch to the OS itself, it will result in a different version number to ensure people know this. The retail copy of OS X is what ships on the disk in the box -- anything else isn't the retail version.
"Suddenly that ceases to exist because I added software or changed settings?"
Changing settings or installing software that doesn't modify the OS itself doesn't affect the OS version, but changes to the OS or its user-land utilities that result in files which are different from those on the retail disks are clearly not the same version as the equivalent ones on those disks. So (for example) installing a utility on a generic Intel box that convinced the retail copy it was being installed and run on a Mac would count as using the retail copy, whereas a program that modified OS X itself to run on said box would not be running the retail copy, just as Macs which have applied Apple's updates to the retail copy are no longer running the retail copy.
Note that the above isn't specific to OS X. A hacked version of Windows Vista clearly isn't the retail copy of Windows Vista, and neither is Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 or any other Microsoft patches applied to it. The retail copy is what comes on the disks in the box, period.
"you insist on writing everything in horrible languages like Objective-C and AppleScript to hideous APIs like Cocoa and Quartz. Makes it hard to port Apple crap to other platforms, you know."
It's actually fairly easy to write Cocoa apps that can be ported to Linux and the BSDs via GNUStep (it has a few extensions to Cocoa, but these can be installed on Macs without the rest of GNUStep). It doesn't support AppleScript, but Objective-C is part of GCC (which Apple themselves use), so there isn't any need to install extra compilers on Linux / BSD systems.
"Unfortunately, Apple refuses to support nice languages, like Python, Smalltalk, or C#"
Apple doesn't need to support everything itself. Here's a list of Cocoa bridges for all the languages you list, as well as various others you didn't mention:
"or nice APIs, in order to keep the Macintosh platform separate and proprietary"
Apple support POSIX, X-Windows, and OpenGL (to name but three), none of which is proprietary, and as as GNUStep proves, there's nothing preventing third parties from writing Cocoa-compatible systems for other platforms. After all, why should Apple do all the work when Open Source supporters keep telling the rest os to write stuff for ourselves if there isn't a FOSS solution that does what we want?
If you read the text from Blizzard's claim, then it's pretty clear that their lawyers are using the very common tactic of making a whole bunch of different accusations in the hope that one or more of them will be accepted by the judge. The bit about copyright violation is therefore (a) quite a small part, and (b) entirely predicated on a specific EULA prohibition of using unauthorised third party launchers to copy the software into memory, so it's by no means as broad as the writer of the blog being quoted claims it is.
Note that I'm not defending Blizzard, their tactics, or any claims they've made in their court documents.
"No, it's not correct. You can install that retail copy, with appropriate hacking."
A hacked version isn't the retail copy because there are differences between it and what Apple put on the disk in the box. Versions of OS X that have been patched by Apple's updating procedures aren't retail copies either.
"Where the hell else are people who are installing this on their generic PCs getting the data from?"
A more interesting question would be where you get the idea that something which differs from the original counts as a copy of it.
The article you cite concentrates on the US market, but all three consoles (and many, but not all games for them) are sold internationally, and Wii games have been steady sellers in Europe and Japan (PS3 games also sell well in Japan, but aren't anything like as popular elsewhere).
It's quite frequent for games companies to target a specific region or country with certain titles that end up being extremely profitable despite not being designed to appeal to people in other regions. There are for example many adventure-style console games intended specifically for the Japanese market that aren't (officially) offered for sale elsewhere, while sports titles can be best sellers in some places, and virtually ignored elsewhere (baseball games for example appeal to the US and japan, but most other places want soccer simulations because baseball isn't played professionally anywhere else).
"On Windows the best development tools are moving away from C++."
The.NET stuff is largely aimed at corporate developers, who were never big C++ users anyway. Shrink-wrap Windows software (including all Microsoft's shrink-wrap stuff) is however still developed in compiled languages, with C++ being by far the most popular.
"Many Mac users, myself included, are very finicky about apps that do not look or feel like Mac apps."
While others are like me, and don't give two hoots if the app does something we want or need. I'm far more worried about the ability to paste information between apps, use of standard centralised resources such as the dictionary / thesaurus, support for drag-and-drop conventions, and Mac-style installation and removal mechanisms than whether it's a little ugly or uses a few non-standard keystrokes.
"Using an app that looks significantly out of place in an otherwise consistent UI is very annoying"
Unless of course it's from Apple, who, like MS, seem to be quite happy to break their own look-and-feel guidelines.
"I fully understand why some developers steer clear of Mac support for that very reason, but it is a reality, and it's not going away"
It will however become less significant as Apple's market share grows, because there are more and more new users who're running Windows apps on their Macs via dual-boot or virtualisation, and they're a lot less Mac-like than QT-based ports (even Java stuff is more Mac-like than software written specifically for Windows).
I fail to see what your point is, because I've already said that people are running OS X on non-Apple hardware. None of this changes the fact that what I said in my original post was correct, i.e. that you cannot buy a retail boxed OS X and install it on something that isn't made by Apple.
"why exactly were the BIOS text routines so slow anyhow?"
They used a software interrupt to output each character, which made them extremely inefficient (strings had to be fed to them character by character because they lacked the capability to handle more than one character at a time).
The fact that there are several hacked versions of OS X out there means some people obviously do want to run it on non-Apple hardware. I'm not one of them, but that doesn't mean I can't think of several reasons why they might want to do so:
1. They already have a decent PC with the requisite components, and would like to run some Mac-only software such as Logic Studio without shelling out for another computer.
2. Some people enjoy building their own machines.
3. Apple don't currently offer what they want (e.g. an expandable box without the Mac Pro's high price tag and large size -- the Shuttle PC comes to mind here).
4. They've heard good things about OS X, and would like to test it for themselves at home before committing (possibly a lot of) money to a Mac.
5. Family members have Macs, and they'd like to help support them without shelling out for a dedicated machine.
6. Some people get a kick from tinkering with things.
"I am sitting here looking at my office-mate's Dell running OS X right now. Runs like a champ too."
Hacked versions of OS X will indeed run on certain combinations of generic hardware (i.e. not all of it, but a reasonable subset that more or less corresponds with what's in various Intel Macs). The ones on the DVDs that ship in retail boxes have not however been hacked, so they can't be installed on, and won't run on machines not made by Apple.
No, he isn't talking about games. Text screen updates using BIOS calls were so slow on the IBM PC and most clones that it felt like using CP/M with a 9K6 baud serial terminal, so just about anyone who wrote professional shrink-wrapped software built their own libraries for putting characters directly into text screen memory. There were two base memory areas that text buffers mapped to, each of which was up to 32K in size:
The monochrome text buffer lay between B000 and B7FF, although only the first 4K was significant in the most common 80x25 mode. A colour buffer was also present between B800 and BFFF; the use of two separate buffers was intentional, because it allowed both monochrome and colour cards to be present in the same machine, with each being connected to a different monitor.
"There is a tacit assumption in science fiction that other species would stumble onto language, mathematics, and advanced technology, even if their brains were organized in a manner totally different from ours."
I think you do science fiction a disservice, because there have been many, many excellent books and short stories that don't make that assumption.
The problem many scientists on the other hand seem to have is their ignorance of the fact that our conceptual models of the universe and therefore the technological routes we've taken are due to the limitations in our own sensory apparatus, which not only lacks entire sets of capabilities that other animals have, but also their acuity.
Imagine for example if our eyes were capable of similar resolution to those of an eagle. We'd have seen the moons of our companion planets without the need for any visual aids, and could therefore have developed extremely advanced models of the universe (including gravity) while still living in caves. Another minor optical modification would have permitted us to see micro-organisms and develop germ theories of disease and discover vaccination and antibiotics instead of dancing around shaking gourds to frighten the bad spirits away.
Humans with the sense of smell that dogs and bears have would have been able to distinguish between the various chemicals in complex substances, thus permitting us to develop a sophisticated science of chemistry thousands of years before we did.
Many aquatic animals can sense extremely small electrical differences. Intelligent creatures with a similar capability would have no trouble detecting the fact that some combinations of materials produce electricity, while others change it in subtle ways, so the basics of electronics would be as obvious to them as "hit head with rock, head hurts" was to us.
There are plenty of other senses animals on our planet have that we either lack completely, or have much more limited versions of, so it's probable that alien life would have a similar variety of them, plus some exotic ones that haven't evolved here. It's therefore likely that any alien technologies which do exist would have gone in entirely different directions to our own, so those that are at roughly our level of development could well be thousands of years ahead of us in some areas, while being thousands of years behind in others.
With the above in mind, there is the distinct possibility that the lack if radio signals from other cultures could be due to the fact that we're extremely unusual among intelligent species in not having a particular sense or set of senses that led to conceptual models and resultant technologies which are far better for communicating over long distances, leaving radio to a few sad conceptually crippled races who listen for communications over it from the outside in the forlorn hope that somebody else was silly enough to develop such a ludicrously slow and interference-prone method of sending information.
"The first Eukaryotes (complex life) didn't show up until about 2 billion years ago and multicellular life about a billion years after that."
We don't actually know when multicellular life began because soft-bodied animals and multicellular plants without cell walls don't leave fossils. This means that 70% or more of the animal species alive today (and a good many plants such as algae and intermediates like fungi) would be unknown to future palaeontologists because there will be no fossils of them whatsoever.
"The human race at one point was reduced to 5000 individuals. Perhaps lack of genetic diversity in an advanced species was a precondition for intelligence."
That genetic bottleneck happened when we were already humans, i.e. Homo Sapiens, so a lack of genetic diversity wasn't a factor in us becoming what we already were.
"Sharks are the most evolutionarily advanced species because they are perfectly fit for their environment and have not changed significantly in millions of years"
If being perfectly fitted to one's environment and not changing for millions of years is the definition of being evolutionarily advanced, then the microbes that form stromatolites must be by far the most advanced organisms on the planet, because they've been around for 3.5 billion years.
"Perhaps intelligent life cannot develop without a geologically young planet that has mountains and shifting land masses because in a mono-ocean world, a single predatory non-intelligent species would dominate."
There have been times when the ocean levels on Earth were so high that the tallest mountain peaks were small islands, others when there was a single large land mass in a world-encompassing ocean, yet none of these resulted in a situation where a single predator dominated when there was any notable degree of biodiversity in the Earth's seas.
"A carbon-dioxide rich environment is slowly transformed by plantlife to an oxygen rich environment that allows oxygen respiratory systems to develop. Perhaps having all of our carbon trapped in crude oil for millions of years allowed us to breathe the air."
If richness of oxygen were a factor in evolving intelligence, then it would have appeared several hundreds of millions of years ago when oxygen levels were significantly higher than they are today.
"Dinosaurs were wiped out, paving the way for mammals. Who knows what the implications are here?"
The implications could have been that the emergence of intelligence was set back by millions of years. Several species of dinosaurs that were around near the end of their reign had larger and more complex brains than the mammals of the period, and mammals continued to have more restricted brains for several millions of years after the dinosaurs disappeared, so it's just as likely that their extinction was a setback for intelligence on Earth as being a prerequisite for it.
"Just recognize that mass extinctions in which some life still survives and thrives is rare"
The fact that we've been through several mass extinctions without life itself being wiped out means that it's actually very common for life to survive and thrive after them (at least on Earth up until now).
"Rapid reproduction and rapid metabolism. Let's face it. As creatures we are very fast compared to geological or cosmological time."
We're still significantly slower in both reproduction rate and metabolism than many other mammals (e.g. rodents), and positively glacial in both respects compared with vast numbers of non-mammals. So once again, if this was a prerequisite, intelligence would have evolved in one of the many life forms that goes through tens or hundreds of generation for every human one.
"This lets us get this far in the wink of a cosmological eye--- before any of the common cosmological events have a chance to hit us."
There are actually three things conspire to protect us from common cosmological events, so they're much rarer on Earth than could easily be the case if any one of these factors differed:
1) We're near the tip of a galactic arm where the density of stars is low.
2) Jupiter's massive gravity field "hoovers up" a lot of the junk that poses a potential danger to the Earth (Jupiter is pretty close to us in astronomical terms. We'd be a lot worse off if it was out past Neptune, or nearer to the sun than us).
3) Our moon (which is believed to have been produced by an early cosmological event) is so large that we should probably be considered a binary planet, and it r
"There is a world of difference between instantaneous life arising in thermal vents on the sea bottom and life evolving to survive there."
All sorts of animals have evolved to survive around hydrothermal vents. Chemosynthetic bacteria are the bottom of a food chain that we only discovered a couple of decades ago, but they indirectly support everything up to and including fish and octopi, in addition to unique organisms such as tube worms, which derive their sustenance directly from colonies of chemosynthetic bacteria living in their bodies.
"Some things don't happen at 100 degrees Celsius"
At standard pressure, because the water that (Earth-based) biological organisms are largely composed of boils at 100C, thus causing their cells to explode. The life around hydrothermal vents does not however exist at standard pressures, so the water in cells has a much higher boiling point.
"some things ONLY happen at STP"
Many, many organisms live in pressures far above 1 atmosphere, and we're constantly discovering new ones that tolerate several hundred C given sufficient pressures, while others can survive extreme cold, high doses of radiation, etc.
"There aren't that many ways to perceive the world around you"
Many creatures on Earth have senses that we either don't possess at all (e.g. the electrical, magnetic, and gravitometric ones present in many aquatic creatures, sonar in cetaceans and bats, heat imaging in some reptiles), or are extremely poorly developed (smell, touch). The likelihood that there are other senses we've yet to discover means that we don't even know how all the life forms on our own planet perceive their environment, so it's utterly ludicrous to assume that intelligent aliens would have primary sensory apparatus remotely similar to a specific subset that is largely the result of a set of unlikely-to-be-repeated accidents which led to us having ones that suited a tree-dwelling simian mammal.
"ey're (presumably) reselling legally-purchased copies of Mac OS, so there's no IP violation either."
If you RTFM, they're pre-installing hacked copies of OS X that aren't the same as the ones in the box, and users can't install the licensed software in the boxed set on the Psystar machine. Pre-installing is copying, so Apple can get Psystar for both commercial copyright violation, and commercial DMCA violation (bypassing a security measure for profit -- whether Psystar wrote the software to do this is irrelevant, because the act of distributing it is a contravention of the DMCA).
"IBM wasn't able to take out Compaq, either."
They did however take out a number of companies who were manufacturing machines with direct copies of the IBM PC ROMs in them without having IBM's permission to do so.
"I thought Slashdot was meant to push out stories other places would not"
The fact that most Slashdot stories are lifted directly from The Register, Ars Technica, and Gizmodo would seem to indicate that they not only publish stories others _would_ publish, but storiees that others have _already_ published (including Slashdot itself in the all too frequent cases of "dupes").
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not saying Europeans are going to be particularly intelligent buyers; it's just that they aren't as snobbish"
There are vast numbers of snobs in Europe, hence the fact that it's the home of so many overpriced fashion houses, overpriced car makers, overpriced watch makers, overpriced hi-fi and TV makers, overpriced furniture makers, overpriced perfume makers, overpriced department stores, and overpriced restaurants.
"skip major brands and go for cheap, Taiwanese ones, is that the big three - Apple's shit, Microsoft's shit and Creative's shit - are defective by design. They are worthless little toys."
Strange then that Apple have a (far) bigger share of the European MP3 player market than anyone else. Must be all those snobs that you claim we don't have...
"I have to use a Python script every time I copy audio files in order for the thing to play it (and of course, I'm not installing Apple's iTunes malware which will spam me, try to sell me their bullshit, delete my private files, and turn my computer into a vending and surveillance machine for the mafiaa)"
The list you've given of your reasons for not using iTunes sounds a lot like your claims that we Europeans are less snobbish than Americans, i.e. a load of tripe.
"In Europe, no one knows about Zune."
That's because MS don't sell it in Europe due to licensing restrictions on content in the Zune Store. They're currently talking about a worldwide release in 2009 for the Zune 3, but they've been talking about worldwide releases for other versions of the Zune since it was launched, so it's difficult to say whether it will actually happen then (or at all).
"There are limits to fanboyism and that one is far far far over it."
What did I write to indicate that I was a "fan boy"? If the best you can do to refute my points is write fuckwitted cliches, then why not try shutting up and saving some Internet bandwidth so your school friends have a little more available for pirating games, music, and superhero movies.
"Jesus fucking christ"
I stand in awe of your originality.
"this is about OOo ported to Aqua as the X11 version was not good enough for Mac users."
Which does not change the fact that _Apple support X11_ one whit or iota.
"The implication by GP"
I wasn't answering the GP, so what the GP said has no relevance whatsoever to my post.
"Of course it is still the retail copy. modifications to something don't mean it is not based on the original."
"Based on the original" and "is the original" aren't the same.
"A Volkswagen Beetle is still a Volkswagen Beetle, even if you put aftermarket accessories on it."
I suggest you check the classic and antique car market before saying things like this, because buyers distinguish between vehicles that are in original retail condition and modified ones, and pay significantly more for the originals.
"The same applies to the hacks to get the OS to run on the generic hardware. You aren't significantly altering the software - you are just allowing the retail version to be installed."
Any changes made to the retail version end up with something that's not the retail version. The reasons for the changes are irrelevant-- it's still been changed.
"So tell me, if I install a retail copy of Mac OS on my Mac, and then install some software that makes system modifications (not for "hacking") am I somehow not running the retail version of Mac OS? "
If you re-install the retail version on a Mac, you will lose those changes, so the changed version clearly isn't the retail version, and if it's an official Apple patch to the OS itself, it will result in a different version number to ensure people know this. The retail copy of OS X is what ships on the disk in the box -- anything else isn't the retail version.
"Suddenly that ceases to exist because I added software or changed settings?"
Changing settings or installing software that doesn't modify the OS itself doesn't affect the OS version, but changes to the OS or its user-land utilities that result in files which are different from those on the retail disks are clearly not the same version as the equivalent ones on those disks. So (for example) installing a utility on a generic Intel box that convinced the retail copy it was being installed and run on a Mac would count as using the retail copy, whereas a program that modified OS X itself to run on said box would not be running the retail copy, just as Macs which have applied Apple's updates to the retail copy are no longer running the retail copy.
Note that the above isn't specific to OS X. A hacked version of Windows Vista clearly isn't the retail copy of Windows Vista, and neither is Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 or any other Microsoft patches applied to it. The retail copy is what comes on the disks in the box, period.
"you insist on writing everything in horrible languages like Objective-C and AppleScript to hideous APIs like Cocoa and Quartz. Makes it hard to port Apple crap to other platforms, you know."
It's actually fairly easy to write Cocoa apps that can be ported to Linux and the BSDs via GNUStep (it has a few extensions to Cocoa, but these can be installed on Macs without the rest of GNUStep). It doesn't support AppleScript, but Objective-C is part of GCC (which Apple themselves use), so there isn't any need to install extra compilers on Linux / BSD systems.
"Unfortunately, Apple refuses to support nice languages, like Python, Smalltalk, or C#"
Apple doesn't need to support everything itself. Here's a list of Cocoa bridges for all the languages you list, as well as various others you didn't mention:
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaBridges
"or nice APIs, in order to keep the Macintosh platform separate and proprietary"
Apple support POSIX, X-Windows, and OpenGL (to name but three), none of which is proprietary, and as as GNUStep proves, there's nothing preventing third parties from writing Cocoa-compatible systems for other platforms. After all, why should Apple do all the work when Open Source supporters keep telling the rest os to write stuff for ourselves if there isn't a FOSS solution that does what we want?
A far better source of real information about what both sides are claiming in their summary judgement filings is here:
http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/03/23/mdy-blizzard-motions/
If you read the text from Blizzard's claim, then it's pretty clear that their lawyers are using the very common tactic of making a whole bunch of different accusations in the hope that one or more of them will be accepted by the judge. The bit about copyright violation is therefore (a) quite a small part, and (b) entirely predicated on a specific EULA prohibition of using unauthorised third party launchers to copy the software into memory, so it's by no means as broad as the writer of the blog being quoted claims it is.
Note that I'm not defending Blizzard, their tactics, or any claims they've made in their court documents.
"No, it's not correct. You can install that retail copy, with appropriate hacking."
A hacked version isn't the retail copy because there are differences between it and what Apple put on the disk in the box. Versions of OS X that have been patched by Apple's updating procedures aren't retail copies either.
"Where the hell else are people who are installing this on their generic PCs getting the data from?"
A more interesting question would be where you get the idea that something which differs from the original counts as a copy of it.
The article you cite concentrates on the US market, but all three consoles (and many, but not all games for them) are sold internationally, and Wii games have been steady sellers in Europe and Japan (PS3 games also sell well in Japan, but aren't anything like as popular elsewhere).
It's quite frequent for games companies to target a specific region or country with certain titles that end up being extremely profitable despite not being designed to appeal to people in other regions. There are for example many adventure-style console games intended specifically for the Japanese market that aren't (officially) offered for sale elsewhere, while sports titles can be best sellers in some places, and virtually ignored elsewhere (baseball games for example appeal to the US and japan, but most other places want soccer simulations because baseball isn't played professionally anywhere else).
"On Windows the best development tools are moving away from C++."
.NET stuff is largely aimed at corporate developers, who were never big C++ users anyway. Shrink-wrap Windows software (including all Microsoft's shrink-wrap stuff) is however still developed in compiled languages, with C++ being by far the most popular.
The
"Many Mac users, myself included, are very finicky about apps that do not look or feel like Mac apps."
While others are like me, and don't give two hoots if the app does something we want or need. I'm far more worried about the ability to paste information between apps, use of standard centralised resources such as the dictionary / thesaurus, support for drag-and-drop conventions, and Mac-style installation and removal mechanisms than whether it's a little ugly or uses a few non-standard keystrokes.
"Using an app that looks significantly out of place in an otherwise consistent UI is very annoying"
Unless of course it's from Apple, who, like MS, seem to be quite happy to break their own look-and-feel guidelines.
"I fully understand why some developers steer clear of Mac support for that very reason, but it is a reality, and it's not going away"
It will however become less significant as Apple's market share grows, because there are more and more new users who're running Windows apps on their Macs via dual-boot or virtualisation, and they're a lot less Mac-like than QT-based ports (even Java stuff is more Mac-like than software written specifically for Windows).
"I had no idea Microsoft were licencing out the Win32 API on Linux and OS X for a flat-rate fee..."
I had no idea that they'd implemented the Win32 API on OS X...
I fail to see what your point is, because I've already said that people are running OS X on non-Apple hardware. None of this changes the fact that what I said in my original post was correct, i.e. that you cannot buy a retail boxed OS X and install it on something that isn't made by Apple.
"why exactly were the BIOS text routines so slow anyhow?"
They used a software interrupt to output each character, which made them extremely inefficient (strings had to be fed to them character by character because they lacked the capability to handle more than one character at a time).
The fact that there are several hacked versions of OS X out there means some people obviously do want to run it on non-Apple hardware. I'm not one of them, but that doesn't mean I can't think of several reasons why they might want to do so:
1. They already have a decent PC with the requisite components, and would like to run some Mac-only software such as Logic Studio without shelling out for another computer.
2. Some people enjoy building their own machines.
3. Apple don't currently offer what they want (e.g. an expandable box without the Mac Pro's high price tag and large size -- the Shuttle PC comes to mind here).
4. They've heard good things about OS X, and would like to test it for themselves at home before committing (possibly a lot of) money to a Mac.
5. Family members have Macs, and they'd like to help support them without shelling out for a dedicated machine.
6. Some people get a kick from tinkering with things.
"Depends on your definition of "generic"."
My definition of generic should be clear from the context of my comments, i.e. stuff that's not made by Apple.
"I am sitting here looking at my office-mate's Dell running OS X right now. Runs like a champ too."
Hacked versions of OS X will indeed run on certain combinations of generic hardware (i.e. not all of it, but a reasonable subset that more or less corresponds with what's in various Intel Macs). The ones on the DVDs that ship in retail boxes have not however been hacked, so they can't be installed on, and won't run on machines not made by Apple.
"you can go out and buy Mac OS X and run it on generic hardware."
The version in retail boxes won't install or run on generic hardware.
"Are you talking about games?"
No, he isn't talking about games. Text screen updates using BIOS calls were so slow on the IBM PC and most clones that it felt like using CP/M with a 9K6 baud serial terminal, so just about anyone who wrote professional shrink-wrapped software built their own libraries for putting characters directly into text screen memory. There were two base memory areas that text buffers mapped to, each of which was up to 32K in size:
The monochrome text buffer lay between B000 and B7FF, although only the first 4K was significant in the most common 80x25 mode. A colour buffer was also present between B800 and BFFF; the use of two separate buffers was intentional, because it allowed both monochrome and colour cards to be present in the same machine, with each being connected to a different monitor.
"There is a tacit assumption in science fiction that other species would stumble onto language, mathematics, and advanced technology, even if their brains were organized in a manner totally different from ours."
I think you do science fiction a disservice, because there have been many, many excellent books and short stories that don't make that assumption.
The problem many scientists on the other hand seem to have is their ignorance of the fact that our conceptual models of the universe and therefore the technological routes we've taken are due to the limitations in our own sensory apparatus, which not only lacks entire sets of capabilities that other animals have, but also their acuity.
Imagine for example if our eyes were capable of similar resolution to those of an eagle. We'd have seen the moons of our companion planets without the need for any visual aids, and could therefore have developed extremely advanced models of the universe (including gravity) while still living in caves. Another minor optical modification would have permitted us to see micro-organisms and develop germ theories of disease and discover vaccination and antibiotics instead of dancing around shaking gourds to frighten the bad spirits away.
Humans with the sense of smell that dogs and bears have would have been able to distinguish between the various chemicals in complex substances, thus permitting us to develop a sophisticated science of chemistry thousands of years before we did.
Many aquatic animals can sense extremely small electrical differences. Intelligent creatures with a similar capability would have no trouble detecting the fact that some combinations of materials produce electricity, while others change it in subtle ways, so the basics of electronics would be as obvious to them as "hit head with rock, head hurts" was to us.
There are plenty of other senses animals on our planet have that we either lack completely, or have much more limited versions of, so it's probable that alien life would have a similar variety of them, plus some exotic ones that haven't evolved here. It's therefore likely that any alien technologies which do exist would have gone in entirely different directions to our own, so those that are at roughly our level of development could well be thousands of years ahead of us in some areas, while being thousands of years behind in others.
With the above in mind, there is the distinct possibility that the lack if radio signals from other cultures could be due to the fact that we're extremely unusual among intelligent species in not having a particular sense or set of senses that led to conceptual models and resultant technologies which are far better for communicating over long distances, leaving radio to a few sad conceptually crippled races who listen for communications over it from the outside in the forlorn hope that somebody else was silly enough to develop such a ludicrously slow and interference-prone method of sending information.
"The first Eukaryotes (complex life) didn't show up until about 2 billion years ago and multicellular life about a billion years after that."
We don't actually know when multicellular life began because soft-bodied animals and multicellular plants without cell walls don't leave fossils. This means that 70% or more of the animal species alive today (and a good many plants such as algae and intermediates like fungi) would be unknown to future palaeontologists because there will be no fossils of them whatsoever.
"The human race at one point was reduced to 5000 individuals. Perhaps lack of genetic diversity in an advanced species was a precondition for intelligence."
That genetic bottleneck happened when we were already humans, i.e. Homo Sapiens, so a lack of genetic diversity wasn't a factor in us becoming what we already were.
"Sharks are the most evolutionarily advanced species because they are perfectly fit for their environment and have not changed significantly in millions of years"
If being perfectly fitted to one's environment and not changing for millions of years is the definition of being evolutionarily advanced, then the microbes that form stromatolites must be by far the most advanced organisms on the planet, because they've been around for 3.5 billion years.
"Perhaps intelligent life cannot develop without a geologically young planet that has mountains and shifting land masses because in a mono-ocean world, a single predatory non-intelligent species would dominate."
There have been times when the ocean levels on Earth were so high that the tallest mountain peaks were small islands, others when there was a single large land mass in a world-encompassing ocean, yet none of these resulted in a situation where a single predator dominated when there was any notable degree of biodiversity in the Earth's seas.
"A carbon-dioxide rich environment is slowly transformed by plantlife to an oxygen rich environment that allows oxygen respiratory systems to develop. Perhaps having all of our carbon trapped in crude oil for millions of years allowed us to breathe the air."
If richness of oxygen were a factor in evolving intelligence, then it would have appeared several hundreds of millions of years ago when oxygen levels were significantly higher than they are today.
"Dinosaurs were wiped out, paving the way for mammals. Who knows what the implications are here?"
The implications could have been that the emergence of intelligence was set back by millions of years. Several species of dinosaurs that were around near the end of their reign had larger and more complex brains than the mammals of the period, and mammals continued to have more restricted brains for several millions of years after the dinosaurs disappeared, so it's just as likely that their extinction was a setback for intelligence on Earth as being a prerequisite for it.
"Just recognize that mass extinctions in which some life still survives and thrives is rare"
The fact that we've been through several mass extinctions without life itself being wiped out means that it's actually very common for life to survive and thrive after them (at least on Earth up until now).
"Rapid reproduction and rapid metabolism. Let's face it. As creatures we are very fast compared to geological or cosmological time."
We're still significantly slower in both reproduction rate and metabolism than many other mammals (e.g. rodents), and positively glacial in both respects compared with vast numbers of non-mammals. So once again, if this was a prerequisite, intelligence would have evolved in one of the many life forms that goes through tens or hundreds of generation for every human one.
"This lets us get this far in the wink of a cosmological eye--- before any of the common cosmological events have a chance to hit us."
There are actually three things conspire to protect us from common cosmological events, so they're much rarer on Earth than could easily be the case if any one of these factors differed:
1) We're near the tip of a galactic arm where the density of stars is low.
2) Jupiter's massive gravity field "hoovers up" a lot of the junk that poses a potential danger to the Earth (Jupiter is pretty close to us in astronomical terms. We'd be a lot worse off if it was out past Neptune, or nearer to the sun than us).
3) Our moon (which is believed to have been produced by an early cosmological event) is so large that we should probably be considered a binary planet, and it r
"There is a world of difference between instantaneous life arising in thermal vents on the sea bottom and life evolving to survive there."
All sorts of animals have evolved to survive around hydrothermal vents. Chemosynthetic bacteria are the bottom of a food chain that we only discovered a couple of decades ago, but they indirectly support everything up to and including fish and octopi, in addition to unique organisms such as tube worms, which derive their sustenance directly from colonies of chemosynthetic bacteria living in their bodies.
"Some things don't happen at 100 degrees Celsius"
At standard pressure, because the water that (Earth-based) biological organisms are largely composed of boils at 100C, thus causing their cells to explode. The life around hydrothermal vents does not however exist at standard pressures, so the water in cells has a much higher boiling point.
"some things ONLY happen at STP"
Many, many organisms live in pressures far above 1 atmosphere, and we're constantly discovering new ones that tolerate several hundred C given sufficient pressures, while others can survive extreme cold, high doses of radiation, etc.
"There aren't that many ways to perceive the world around you"
Many creatures on Earth have senses that we either don't possess at all (e.g. the electrical, magnetic, and gravitometric ones present in many aquatic creatures, sonar in cetaceans and bats, heat imaging in some reptiles), or are extremely poorly developed (smell, touch). The likelihood that there are other senses we've yet to discover means that we don't even know how all the life forms on our own planet perceive their environment, so it's utterly ludicrous to assume that intelligent aliens would have primary sensory apparatus remotely similar to a specific subset that is largely the result of a set of unlikely-to-be-repeated accidents which led to us having ones that suited a tree-dwelling simian mammal.
"ey're (presumably) reselling legally-purchased copies of Mac OS, so there's no IP violation either."
If you RTFM, they're pre-installing hacked copies of OS X that aren't the same as the ones in the box, and users can't install the licensed software in the boxed set on the Psystar machine. Pre-installing is copying, so Apple can get Psystar for both commercial copyright violation, and commercial DMCA violation (bypassing a security measure for profit -- whether Psystar wrote the software to do this is irrelevant, because the act of distributing it is a contravention of the DMCA).
"IBM wasn't able to take out Compaq, either."
They did however take out a number of companies who were manufacturing machines with direct copies of the IBM PC ROMs in them without having IBM's permission to do so.
"I thought Slashdot was meant to push out stories other places would not"
The fact that most Slashdot stories are lifted directly from The Register, Ars Technica, and Gizmodo would seem to indicate that they not only publish stories others _would_ publish, but storiees that others have _already_ published (including Slashdot itself in the all too frequent cases of "dupes").