Obviously Apple is silly to be angry at ThinkSecret.
They can only be angry because TS reports are sufficiently accurate to be believable, and this can only happen if there is some kind of inside source close enough to Apple blowing the whistle.
What Apple really wants are the names of the whistleblowers, so they can be at least fired, if not slapped with a lawsuit themselves so that no further leak ever happens.
Unfortunately this will not work. At the very worst TS will be compelled to reveal their sources. They can only be found "guilty" of conveying a message. AFAIK TS have not signed any contract with Apple and are therefore breaking no law in publicizing what they know (or think they now).
If the TS sources were smart, they were anonymous, and therefore no data at all for Apple at the end of this rigmarole.
If the sources are not anonymous then Apple will indeed fire and sue a couple of guys, and promptly the next round of leaks (for leaks will not stop, indeed they will become hotter and more valuable each time Apple tries to squash them) will indeed be anonymous, encrypted, whatever. Apple will be back to square one only this time when they sue the next round of leak sites those people will be better armed to tell Apple to take a walk.
There is no way Apple will end up doing something productive about this business. In the meantime they are burying themselves into a nice PR hole.
Why don't everybody who think Apple is making a mistake tell that to Apple?
That is a somewhat optimistic interpretation of an Eolas win on your part. Remember that the law itself in on trial every time.
If Eolas wins, this means the judge and the jury have decided that the law makes sense. Software patent litigation would thereby gains wide recognition, the definition of what constitutes prior art would be narrowed, and this case would make jurisprudence.
Use VLC as your software DVD player on any of your macs. As it reads the DVD like a data source and uses the DeCSS algorithm, you'll never have to worry about regions ever again.
Every non-ideal computing device is subject to resource starvation. The abacus is no exception.
When you run out of beads the computation stops, which is the right and expected behaviour.
Buffer overflow refers to the situation when an exhausted resource is used as if it were available, leading to bugs and generally incorrect computations. According to this definition the abacus is not subject to them, unless operators try to continue using imaginary beads in their head for example, in which case no guarantee is given.
OK I stand corrected for desktop P-IVs, however I have a hard time believing you for P-M.
With clock modulation on, laptop endurance is much longer. This is only obvious since max speed is limited and so are consumption and temperature.
Clock modulation is still useful for desktop because hardware underclocking usually requires at least rebooting, if not twidling with jumpers. With software throttling you can completely and safely stop the fan if what you want is watch TV or listen to music, which would be most of the time, but if once in a while you decide that you need to do some fast movie encoding, you still can. Kick the fan into play and unthrottle the processor, nothing else is involved.
Note that while decoding a DVD or music the processor is not idle, but that the throttled speed of the processor is high enough to get the job done without overheating.
Fedora was a PR disaster, but at its heart, technically, Fedora is still quite an OK distro.
None of the ones I've tried (Mandrake, Ubuntu, Debian) are really any better (some things work better and some worse) and their yum/rpm combination works really well now. I find that in general Fedora is pretty much the usable latest-and-greatest, usually in need of some debugging but with versionning present. Right now it's udev, SE-linux, making USB work right and other assorted bits.
Fedora is still 100% Free, which isn't true for many other distro, and they push both Gnome and KDE, trying to make them work better together, which is the right approach. Under which other distro would you get Inkscape (gnome vector drawing app) and Scribus (kde DTP app) working so well together ?
Myself I would be happy to play the debugger to some extent, in exchange for functionality and responsiveness to problems. So far I found that it is possible to get stuck for long on little problems (for me it was syncing problems with my Zire 71, a recurring nightmare. No sooner was it fixed that a new release made it impossible again). The RH engineers are pretty good at giving an answer, but not so great at fixing the problems in the current distros.
What RH needs to do is slow down the pace of Fedora just a bit and maintain the distro they do have instead of replying things like "wait for FC(n+1), it will be fixed then". Right now this is the stock answer if things get sticky and this is not really acceptable.
Perhaps instead of forcing a new distro down the throat of users every 4-6 months they should move to a 9-month schedule which would insure people would only have to upgrade every 18 months or so, instead of every year right now (FC releases are only supported for 2 releases by RH, and legacy support hasn't really kicked in). Either that or they should support 3 releases at the same time instead of only 2.
I've found that by the time the distro is abandonned by RH it has only been running well enough for a few short months, and that if you want to move to a distro which will be supported for a while you have to move *two* distributions ahead (i.e FC1 to FC3), which is a bit risky, as RH makes significant changes along the way. Packages disappear, new ones come in their place (or not). You have to relearn how your distro works in non-trivial ways and you don't have much time to learn.
This is a poor way to reward all the users who've been doing all the free debugging for them, I reckon.
On the other hand it is very nice to see the pace of (positive) change in Linux. There is simply no comparison in functionality between RH9 and FC3.
I'm throwing away my mod points to respond to this.
What you are saying is simply false, you haven't done the experiment yourself.
My desktop AMD64 system runs at 35C when throttled with cool'n quiet at 1GHz (equiv speedstep) and at 54C when unthrottled at 2GHz, even when idle. The cpuspeed daemon under Linux does what you describe, as soon as the load goes up it sets the CPU at full speed, so there is *no* downside.
These techs are *very* useful. You can set cpuspeed to only allow the CPU to run at the lowest speed no matter the load, and then you can stop the CPU fan *completely*. The CPU stays cool around 40-45C with passive cooling only under the heaviest load. Complete silence.
The way Pentium-M and mobile amd-64 achieve their efficiency is through the speedstep/C'nQ technologies. So much so that if it is not enabled on your laptop for some reason (e.g. lack of support in the kernel) the autonomy of your wonderful P-M machine drops from 4h to just 90 minutes.
I know this because I used to have such a laptop in my very hands.
In other words you should check your facts, with all due respects.
You don't need 100% of people to tune into these debates to make a difference.
Indeed even if a small or even tiny proportion register their displeasure with Apple in one way or another, they will take notice.
There are many reasons for this. If sufficiently many people protest it is an indicator that Apple's original policy was perhaps morally wrong, and they didn't realize it at first. In concrete terms it means that if thing turn really sour and they find themselves in a court of law in front of a jury, they are not unlikely to lose, because a jury is always involved and will tune into the same emotional issues that the protesters do.
Also even a small band of protestors can have a really noticeable effect on the bottom line. If sufficiently many people decide to hold off on Apple's purchases even only for a few weeks this will get noticed and the shareholders may ask questions. Apple's market share is not so huge that they can get away with things like that.
Examples of PR disasters in recent years following unwise court actions are the {MP,RI}AA and MacDonald's. Perhaps you've seen the documentary "McLibel"? If not research it. These companies are still alive and relatively well because they are huge, but have lost a lot of their image.
Apple's image as an independent free-thinking company doesn't gel with this court action. They had to stop.
Sure, great, wait, of course. Holding on to a purchase you don't really need is nearly always the thing to do.
Dell is probably only going to do that if the mac mini does a killing though, and it will be ugly for sure. If they put a pentium M inside it will be good and interesting, but can they pull it off?
It's simple. You cannot find a PC that is both as small and as cheap as the Mini, even if you build it yourself. Even ITX boards are bigger (and they are slower, amazingly).
You *can* find faster and (not much) cheaper PCs, but it will be large, ugly, and loud.
Hi, I'm a linux fan with an iBook, MacOS/X is more than just pretty.
I've found that you can run all the Linux apps on MacOS/X after a recompile (or direct install via fink), including all the KDE stuff. It comes with X, so there is no problem, and the price for those apps is the same as with Linux.
The iLife products suck, I agree (I'm not using any of them, replaced piece by piece with FOSS equivalents with better functionality) but I've kept MacOS/X because it saves me most hardware-related headaches.
It's nice to be able to run photoshop elements instead of the Gimp sometimes as well.
It works relatively well but I've found the XLC code to be less reliable than the FSF GCC one (i.e more compiler-related bugs). The code it produces is not very much better than the one produced by Apple's GCC. Apple's GCC also has reliability problems.
If you search for "linux" on MSN, you get at the top a "sponsored link" which invites you to compare Windows and Linux servers through the "Get the facts" page.
I agree, they are not do-gooders but I wish every business was getting a BSA visit every year.
They get BSA visits because they sign contract with their members which let them open to random visits. The only way to stop them would be to not sign them, i.e. look at alternatives. The BSA gets away with the tactics they use because their users allow themselves to be abused in this way through the contracts they *sign*.
The BSA is not a maffia, they use *legal* tactics.
Linux, BSD and even Apple products don't get a look in because individuals and businesses don't factor in the real cost of Windows and associated software. They mostly get away with pirating.
If everyone I know who is using Word & Excel at home were forced to actually pay for the software they use they would simply not do it.
When I write that the BSA works for Linux I don't mean that they support it in a positive way, but that they are making the alternative OS look better, because these by definition don't come with a bully when you use them.
With all due respect, that's exactly what I meant. Of course the BSA is a bully. Let the bully build its own grave with its teeth.
The worse the BSA behaves the better for Free Software.
If your business was 100% FreeBSD (For a change) you could show the BSA bullies through, show them your 100% legal, empty license cabinet and let them inspect you to death with nothing to fear.
Some smart business are realizing this and might actually be looking forward to the day the BSA inspects them so they can have a good chuckle.
1. Beta had a better image but with VHS you could record more than 60 minutes at a time. Everyone forgets this little point BTW. Case closed.
2. Mac vs IBM. Cost as soon as clones came in. Still the same issue BTW by and large. IBMs had IBM behind it, and that's why it became a success with business, thanks to Lotus as well). Who cares about the OS, it's all about the applications, even today.
3. Cars are status symbols and a lot of irrational issue surround them. Few people buy cars on technical terms, otherwise no one would have ever bought an Alfa Romeo for instance.
4. Ogg originally required a floating point unit, and so wouldn't run on low-end players. MP3 was first to market. Few people can actually hear the difference between MP3 and Ogg and most don't care. The quality of either is much much better than either FM radio or tapes.
5. Extended warranties are popular with many products such as Apple computers for instance, where it does make sense because after 3 years the computer is still worth something.
Marketing works to some extent but are not the be-all and end-all of everything. Perhaps you've heard of the term "hype" ?
You really want to compare Word and (La)TeX, they are both document preparation systems that provide you with outlines, tables, figures, indexes, tables of content, equations and general typesetting facilities (styles, fonts, etc).
MS-Word is the archetypal "WYSIWYG" typesetting system, with all of its seemingly low-barrier-of-entry appeal. It is completely state of the art. The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.
People have written whole books in Word and even swear by its facilities (e.g. indexing, outline view, etc)
In contrast TeX is more of a "what you mean is what you get" system. It enforces the rules of the Chicago Book of Style for you in a relatively straighforward manner. You enter the data structure of the document, it produces something up to publishing standards immediately. It is incredibly productive but not of obvious usage to anyone. In TeX to produce a document you have to find an editor, a command line and invoke the TeX compiler (yes I do know about things like LyX, TeXShop and the like, they are but a crutch to the TeX afficionado, although they might lower the barrier of entry somewhat).
In Word you just type away. You *will* make stylistic mistakes that TeX would not allow you to get away with, but it does look easier at first glance, and even long-time TeX users have to fight with the system to sometime get the result they would like to see (like "put that damn figure on *this* page, not the other page, dammit!") although what TeX does is usually the correct,proper way.
No prize for deciding which is the eventual winner however, except in the category of "ease of use for single-page, no frills documents", and even then...
TeX is not meant for desktop publishing though. You would not be able to put together a glossy magazine in TeX without considerable efforts, and so doesn't really compare with Quark or Indesign.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously Apple is silly to be angry at ThinkSecret.
They can only be angry because TS reports are sufficiently accurate to be believable, and this can only happen if there is some kind of inside source close enough to Apple blowing the whistle.
What Apple really wants are the names of the whistleblowers, so they can be at least fired, if not slapped with a lawsuit themselves so that no further leak ever happens.
Unfortunately this will not work. At the very worst TS will be compelled to reveal their sources. They can only be found "guilty" of conveying a message. AFAIK TS have not signed any contract with Apple and are therefore breaking no law in publicizing what they know (or think they now).
If the TS sources were smart, they were anonymous, and therefore no data at all for Apple at the end of this rigmarole.
If the sources are not anonymous then Apple will indeed fire and sue a couple of guys, and promptly the next round of leaks (for leaks will not stop, indeed they will become hotter and more valuable each time Apple tries to squash them) will indeed be anonymous, encrypted, whatever. Apple will be back to square one only this time when they sue the next round of leak sites those people will be better armed to tell Apple to take a walk.
There is no way Apple will end up doing something productive about this business. In the meantime they are burying themselves into a nice PR hole.
Why don't everybody who think Apple is making a mistake tell that to Apple?
The Australian Wiggles are not the same as those in America. In Australia they are pretty watchable, at least my 4-yo thinks so.
This sounds eminently sensible. I wish I had mod points.
That is a somewhat optimistic interpretation of an Eolas win on your part. Remember that the law itself in on trial every time.
If Eolas wins, this means the judge and the jury have decided that the law makes sense. Software patent litigation would thereby gains wide recognition, the definition of what constitutes prior art would be narrowed, and this case would make jurisprudence.
In other words this would be terrible.
Really? I have yet to see one of mine that doesn't play, and I've got dozens, but I believe you.
What about mplayer then? Same deal?
Use VLC as your software DVD player on any of your macs. As it reads the DVD like a data source and uses the DeCSS algorithm, you'll never have to worry about regions ever again.
BTW it is Free and Open-Source.
Hello,
*still* is the operative word here. As in "it works why change it?".
You don't see banks investing in new shiny systems for a brand new application purchasing Vax/VMS systems, even if it were possible.
Whoossh...
Every non-ideal computing device is subject to resource starvation. The abacus is no exception.
When you run out of beads the computation stops, which is the right and expected behaviour.
Buffer overflow refers to the situation when an exhausted resource is used as if it were available, leading to bugs and generally incorrect computations. According to this definition the abacus is not subject to them, unless operators try to continue using imaginary beads in their head for example, in which case no guarantee is given.
OK I stand corrected for desktop P-IVs, however I have a hard time believing you for P-M.
With clock modulation on, laptop endurance is much longer. This is only obvious since max speed is limited and so are consumption and temperature.
Clock modulation is still useful for desktop because hardware underclocking usually requires at least rebooting, if not twidling with jumpers. With software throttling you can completely and safely stop the fan if what you want is watch TV or listen to music, which would be most of the time, but if once in a while you decide that you need to do some fast movie encoding, you still can. Kick the fan into play and unthrottle the processor, nothing else is involved.
Note that while decoding a DVD or music the processor is not idle, but that the throttled speed of the processor is high enough to get the job done without overheating.
Fedora was a PR disaster, but at its heart, technically, Fedora is still quite an OK distro.
None of the ones I've tried (Mandrake, Ubuntu, Debian) are really any better (some things work better and some worse) and their yum/rpm combination works really well now. I find that in general Fedora is pretty much the usable latest-and-greatest, usually in need of some debugging but with versionning present. Right now it's udev, SE-linux, making USB work right and other assorted bits.
Fedora is still 100% Free, which isn't true for many other distro, and they push both Gnome and KDE, trying to make them work better together, which is the right approach. Under which other distro would you get Inkscape (gnome vector drawing app) and Scribus (kde DTP app) working so well together ?
Myself I would be happy to play the debugger to some extent, in exchange for functionality and responsiveness to problems. So far I found that it is possible to get stuck for long on little problems (for me it was syncing problems with my Zire 71, a recurring nightmare. No sooner was it fixed that a new release made it impossible again). The RH engineers are pretty good at giving an answer, but not so great at fixing the problems in the current distros.
What RH needs to do is slow down the pace of Fedora just a bit and maintain the distro they do have instead of replying things like "wait for FC(n+1), it will be fixed then". Right now this is the stock answer if things get sticky and this is not really acceptable.
Perhaps instead of forcing a new distro down the throat of users every 4-6 months they should move to a 9-month schedule which would insure people would only have to upgrade every 18 months or so, instead of every year right now (FC releases are only supported for 2 releases by RH, and legacy support hasn't really kicked in). Either that or they should support 3 releases at the same time instead of only 2.
I've found that by the time the distro is abandonned by RH it has only been running well enough for a few short months, and that if you want to move to a distro which will be supported for a while you have to move *two* distributions ahead (i.e FC1 to FC3), which is a bit risky, as RH makes significant changes along the way. Packages disappear, new ones come in their place (or not). You have to relearn how your distro works in non-trivial ways and you don't have much time to learn.
This is a poor way to reward all the users who've been doing all the free debugging for them, I reckon.
On the other hand it is very nice to see the pace of (positive) change in Linux. There is simply no comparison in functionality between RH9 and FC3.
I'm throwing away my mod points to respond to this.
What you are saying is simply false, you haven't done the experiment yourself.
My desktop AMD64 system runs at 35C when throttled with cool'n quiet at 1GHz (equiv speedstep) and at 54C when unthrottled at 2GHz, even when idle. The cpuspeed daemon under Linux does what you describe, as soon as the load goes up it sets the CPU at full speed, so there is *no* downside.
These techs are *very* useful. You can set cpuspeed to only allow the CPU to run at the lowest speed no matter the load, and then you can stop the CPU fan *completely*. The CPU stays cool around 40-45C with passive cooling only under the heaviest load. Complete silence.
The way Pentium-M and mobile amd-64 achieve their efficiency is through the speedstep/C'nQ technologies. So much so that if it is not enabled on your laptop for some reason (e.g. lack of support in the kernel) the autonomy of your wonderful P-M machine drops from 4h to just 90 minutes.
I know this because I used to have such a laptop in my very hands.
In other words you should check your facts, with all due respects.
Can you boot over something else than the graphical console under MacOS/X? Maybe you can but with Debian I know it's possible.
You don't need 100% of people to tune into these debates to make a difference.
Indeed even if a small or even tiny proportion register their displeasure with Apple in one way or another, they will take notice.
There are many reasons for this. If sufficiently many people protest it is an indicator that Apple's original policy was perhaps morally wrong, and they didn't realize it at first. In concrete terms it means that if thing turn really sour and they find themselves in a court of law in front of a jury, they are not unlikely to lose, because a jury is always involved and will tune into the same emotional issues that the protesters do.
Also even a small band of protestors can have a really noticeable effect on the bottom line. If sufficiently many people decide to hold off on Apple's purchases even only for a few weeks this will get noticed and the shareholders may ask questions. Apple's market share is not so huge that they can get away with things like that.
Examples of PR disasters in recent years following
unwise court actions are the {MP,RI}AA and MacDonald's. Perhaps you've seen the documentary "McLibel"? If not research it. These companies are still alive and relatively well because they are huge, but have lost a lot of their image.
Apple's image as an independent free-thinking company doesn't gel with this court action. They had to stop.
Sure, great, wait, of course. Holding on to a purchase you don't really need is nearly always the thing to do.
Dell is probably only going to do that if the mac mini does a killing though, and it will be ugly for sure. If they put a pentium M inside it will be good and interesting, but can they pull it off?
Run a headless server, perhaps?
It's simple. You cannot find a PC that is both as small and as cheap as the Mini, even if you build it yourself. Even ITX boards are bigger (and they are slower, amazingly).
You *can* find faster and (not much) cheaper PCs, but it will be large, ugly, and loud.
Hi, I'm a linux fan with an iBook, MacOS/X is more than just pretty.
I've found that you can run all the Linux apps on MacOS/X after a recompile (or direct install via fink), including all the KDE stuff. It comes with X, so there is no problem, and the price for those apps is the same as with Linux.
The iLife products suck, I agree (I'm not using any of them, replaced piece by piece with FOSS equivalents with better functionality) but I've kept MacOS/X because it saves me most hardware-related headaches.
It's nice to be able to run photoshop elements instead of the Gimp sometimes as well.
XLC is actually available for MacOS/X.
It works relatively well but I've found the XLC code to be less reliable than the FSF GCC one (i.e more compiler-related bugs). The code it produces is not very much better than the one produced by Apple's GCC. Apple's GCC also has reliability problems.
And yet Jobs tries to compete at every opportunity. Cheaper Macs, a better browser (Safari), office components (iWork), etc.
The battle was won by MS but not the war. The war will end when we don't use computers anymore.
If you search for "linux" on MSN, you get at the top a "sponsored link" which invites you to compare Windows and Linux servers through the "Get the facts" page.
Biased? I think not.
I agree, they are not do-gooders but I wish every business was getting a BSA visit every year.
They get BSA visits because they sign contract with their members which let them open to random visits. The only way to stop them would be to not sign them, i.e. look at alternatives. The BSA gets away with the tactics they use because their users allow themselves to be abused in this way through the contracts they *sign*.
The BSA is not a maffia, they use *legal* tactics.
Linux, BSD and even Apple products don't get a look in because individuals and businesses don't factor in the real cost of Windows and associated software. They mostly get away with pirating.
If everyone I know who is using Word & Excel at home were forced to actually pay for the software they use they would simply not do it.
When I write that the BSA works for Linux I don't mean that they support it in a positive way, but that they are making the alternative OS look better, because these by definition don't come with a bully when you use them.
With all due respect, that's exactly what I meant. Of course the BSA is a bully. Let the bully build its own grave with its teeth.
The worse the BSA behaves the better for Free Software.
If your business was 100% FreeBSD (For a change) you could show the BSA bullies through, show them your 100% legal, empty license cabinet and let them inspect you to death with nothing to fear.
Some smart business are realizing this and might actually be looking forward to the day the BSA inspects them so they can have a good chuckle.
1. Beta had a better image but with VHS you could record more than 60 minutes at a time. Everyone forgets this little point BTW. Case closed.
2. Mac vs IBM. Cost as soon as clones came in. Still the same issue BTW by and large. IBMs had IBM behind it, and that's why it became a success with business, thanks to Lotus as well). Who cares about the OS, it's all about the applications, even today.
3. Cars are status symbols and a lot of irrational issue surround them. Few people buy cars on technical terms, otherwise no one would have ever bought an Alfa Romeo for instance.
4. Ogg originally required a floating point unit, and so wouldn't run on low-end players. MP3 was first to market. Few people can actually hear the difference between MP3 and Ogg and most don't care. The quality of either is much much better than either FM radio or tapes.
5. Extended warranties are popular with many products such as Apple computers for instance, where it does make sense because after 3 years the computer is still worth something.
Marketing works to some extent but are not the be-all and end-all of everything. Perhaps you've heard of the term "hype" ?
You really want to compare Word and (La)TeX, they are both document preparation systems that provide you with outlines, tables, figures, indexes, tables of content, equations and general typesetting facilities (styles, fonts, etc).
MS-Word is the archetypal "WYSIWYG" typesetting system, with all of its seemingly low-barrier-of-entry appeal. It is completely state of the art. The limitations of word are not so much due to the model (what you see is *only* what you get) than the implementation.
People have written whole books in Word and even swear by its facilities (e.g. indexing, outline view, etc)
In contrast TeX is more of a "what you mean is what you get" system. It enforces the rules of the Chicago Book of Style for you in a relatively straighforward manner. You enter the data structure of the document, it produces something up to publishing standards immediately. It is incredibly productive but not of obvious usage to anyone. In TeX to produce a document you have to find an editor, a command line and invoke the TeX compiler (yes I do know about things like LyX, TeXShop and the like, they are but a crutch to the TeX afficionado, although they might lower the barrier of entry somewhat).
In Word you just type away. You *will* make stylistic mistakes that TeX would not allow you to get away with, but it does look easier at first glance, and even long-time TeX users have to fight with the system to sometime get the result they would like to see (like "put that damn figure on *this* page, not the other page, dammit!") although what TeX does is usually the correct,proper way.
No prize for deciding which is the eventual winner however, except in the category of "ease of use for single-page, no frills documents", and even then...
TeX is not meant for desktop publishing though. You would not be able to put together a glossy magazine in TeX without considerable efforts, and so doesn't really compare with Quark or Indesign.
For DTP the free alternative is Scribus.