I'm sure there are many end-users who want to encode broadcast-flagged TV episodes and upload them to friends across the internet. Can they do this too? If so, the whole TCPA is meaningless and I withdraw my objections.
Oh, I get it. Your objection to trusted computing all centers around the fact that "many end-users" (i.e., you) want to steal content and traffic in stolen content.
Thanks for finally laying that out for us. I kinda wish you'd said so right up front, though. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time. We all could have just flagged you as an idiot and a thief and called it a day.
That whole blah-blah -- apart from being wrong in substance, as already explained in a whole assload of other replies -- is predicated on the assumption that the Gnu license is a legally binding document. Anybody who's taken contract law can tell you that, at best, the Gnu license is right on the bubble. In order for a contract to be binding, there has to be an overt act of acceptance. Unless there's a piece of paper somewhere with your signature on it saying that you accept the terms of the license in return for some tangible consideration, you're not bound.
Ah, but if he'd come out strongly opposed to rights management, you would have crowed about how great it is that he's sticking up for the little guy. As it is, since he's in favor of rights management, you say his opinion doesn't count.
Way to demonstrate the principle of selective dismissal.
EvilCorp(tm) wants to use DRM to cripple computers, but the PR guy will say "it's for the user". Of course their intent is nothing of the sort
No? Here's the very, very simple math:
Due to the current epidemic of piracy, content creators refuse to offer their wares in electronic form unless strong encryption is used to protect their creations. If strong encryption isn't included, content will simply not be available. Therefore, in order to make content available to users, products must include strong encryption.
Yeah. It's for the users. It's to give users what they want: content.
Of course, this really pisses off users whose preferred solution to the problem is "I stealz me some stuffz!"
All Ford did was introduce mass production methods to the automaking process
All Ford did was turn the car from an experiment into a product that was soon owned by millions and that changed literally every aspect of life in the developed world. That's all. Nothing important there. Right?
Apple really didn't invent the hard drive based MP3 player.
For practical purposes, they did. They invented the music player that people actually bought.
Your blah-blah about the "Hango PJB-100" is just about the funniest thing I've read all day. Because, you know, when you say "portable music player," the first thing to pop into everybody's mind is "Hango PJB-100."
How different is this new-for-2005 device in concept than the original portable MP3 players of 1998?
Benz beat Daimler and Maybach by more than a year, and got the patent. But if you expand your definition to include other types of engines, Anderson had an electric carriage in 1832, and Cugnot had a steam-powered tractor in 1769!
And none of them are remembered as the father of the automobile, because their inventions were neither practical nor widely adopted. Not until Henry Ford came along were cars both useful and popular.
No, the math is right. If 80% of 25,000 people own a music player, that's 20,000. If 80% of 20,000 people own an iPod, that's 16,000. The math is right on.
Whether the facts are right or not is another question entirely.
-1GB is enough for a day's worth of music, right? When you get bored, reload the PDA.
Hence the iPod shuffle, which is smaller and easier to use --and cheaper --than any PDA.
Here's the thing: most people don't carry PDAs. Of those who do, very few are interested in listening to their headphones while they have their PDAs on them. They're interested in listening to music while, for example, they run. It's a royal pain to carry a PDF around with you when you run, not least of which because if you drop it, you are going to break the screen, which means buying a new one.
So now Apple has a $150 music player that's smaller than small and so easy to use it's almost like magic. Plug in to computer...wait briefly...unplug...plug into ears...hear music. Poof.
Basically, a PDA makes a lousy iPod because it's not got nearly enough storage, and it makes a lousy iPod shuffle because it's far too big and expensive.
So apple invented the hard drive based mp3 player?
Basically, yeah.
You know who invented the automobile? Depending on how you define the term, there are as many as half a dozen possible answers, none of them later than 1893.
But do you know who really invented the automobile, for all practical purposes? That's right. Henry Ford, in 1908.
You know what's really funny about that idea? I mean, apart from the fact that it presumes a bunch of people in a room are somehow smarter than any of them individually.
What's really funny about that idea is that if it were to be carried out perfectly, if it were to work perfectly, the end result would be...the iPod.
Is it possible that somebody, someday, might come up with a better music player? Sure, anything's possible. But the iPod is so good, so far ahead of anything else, that for most of us it kind of defines what a good music player should be. It sets the bar, and everything else is just copying.
There is one excellent reason to write a Cocoa front-end instead of using Qt: Qt applications don't work like real Mac applications. There are subtle differences that make for a diminished user experience. For instances, in Qt, drag-and-drop doesn't work unless the programmer explicitly implements it, which either means there's gonna be one application on the customer's computer that mysteriously doesn't do drag-and-drop, or it's gonna be more work for the developers.
Easier to just write the front-end in Cocoa. Much easier.
Mach 3.0 was developed around 1991. XNU, the Mac OS X kernel which evolved from Mach, was created over a period of several years in the late 1990s.
Quartz is a "PDF engine"
That's marketing-speak, and it's not really accurate. Quartz 2D is a 2D display-list rendering engine that just happens to be conceptually similar to PDF. PDF is a native file type, and Quartz 2D display lists can be converted to PDF trivially.
which replaces DisplayPostscript in NeXTStep
Not really. To the extent that both Display PostScript and Quartz 2D have to do with drawing shapes on the screen, yes. But that's where the similarity ends.
it has many of the same problems.
Problems? What problems?
Programs you write in 2005 for Cocoa look almost identical to the programs you would have written in the 80's for NeXT.
Um. Yes, to the extent that they use the same syntax: interfaces, implementations, protocols and so on. But other than that, no, completely wrong. In particular, Mac OS X includes something called bindings, which obviate the need for a separate controller object. Model objects are directly bound to view objects, and the runtime itself is responsible for updating one when the other changes. This is fundamentally different from the NeXT programming model, which included three separate objects: a model, a view and an autonomous controller.
That ignores basic things like NSNetService, advanced text rendering, Web Kit, Search Kit (and soon, Spotlight), Address Book and, as mentioned, Quartz 2D. These and other important core technologies are entirely new in Mac OS X, not legacy tech from NeXT.
Basically, any Mac OS X program more sophisticated than "Hello, World" is going to be fundamentally different from the same program written for NEXTSTEP.
GNUStep, which followed the NeXTStep/OpenStep programming model closely, is also very close to Cocoa.
Completely false. Gnustep makes a decent attempt at creating a copycat implementation of App Kit and Foundation Kit, but that's all. That's only the tiniest part of Cocoa.
Mac OS X is basically NeXTStep with a few tweaks and theming.
Analogy time again: "A car is basically a wagon with a few tweaks." (You're completely wrong in every way about themes. Copland was going to include support for themes. Mac OS X doesn't support themes. There are third-party hacks that replace system bitmaps with custom bitmaps, but that's hardly the same thing.)
For you to imply that OS X is brand new technology is just ridiculous.
Do us both a favor and educate yourself, okay? Let's run down the list, in the order that they popped into my head.
Message Framework Apple Help Address Book AppleScript Key-Value Coding and data binding Serialization (XML hadn't even been invented when NeXT was in business, remember) Search Kit (and Spotlight) Property Lists NSUserDefaults the Undo architecture Cocoa Drag and Drop Quartz 2D Distributed Objects Cocoa XML-RPC and SOAP APIs the various NSURL interfaces Web Kit Core Audio (soon Core Image, Core Video, Core Data) Rendezvous CFNetwork the printing API QuickTime Keychain Certificate services Authorization services the entire massive text subsystem
Every single one of these things is brand new technology developed for Mac OS X (except QuickTime and AppleScript, which are Mac OS X implementations of existing Apple technologies). Even the ones that might seem familiar to you -- like drag and drop --are completely new implementations. Compare implementing drag-and-drop in X11 to "implementing" drag-and-drop in Cocoa. I put "implementing" in quotes because compared to X11, you don't have to do hardly anything at all. While new Apple technologies like Rendezvous and Search Kit and Core Audio are huge, the real power of Cocoa is the ability to do things that are possible under old systems with little or no effort at all. That's where it really shines.
Except that Qt is C++ and Cocoa is Objective-C, and ne'er the twain shall meet. There's no evidence that the C++ runtime is linked into the Skype binary.
So I'm gonna go ahead and say no, here: Skype for the Mac is not in any way related to Qt.
The OS X designers made OSX work with a 2nd mouse button. So the OS designers at Apple think the 2nd mouse button is a good idea.
There's a really kick-ass word to describe what you did just there. Seriously, it rocks. Makes you sound incredibly sophisticated at parties. Makes chicks weak in the knees.
The term is "non sequitur."
Google it. You might learn something.
Re:Pricing has been much the same for 20 years
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 1
I know someone who just bought a dual G5 and 30" and the total system cost was US$10,000.
You do know, don't you, that the 30" Cinema Display costs as much as the top-of-the-line G5? You can literally buy two dual-2.5 GHz G5s for the same price as one plus a 30" display. And if you want something more modest, say a dual-1.8 GHz, you can buy three for that price.
The 30" Cinema Display is a thing of beauty. Working in front of one is like working in front of a billboard. You have to actually turn your head to see the edges of the screen. It totally fills your peripheral vision. It's the most incredible computer display I've ever seen in my life.
But fuck, it's expensive.
Re:Pricing has been much the same for 20 years
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 1
Since 1985 or so, an entry level system has always been about A$3500 and a decent production system around $A5-7,000.
Yes, but those are Aussie bucks you're talking about. For sake of comparison, in Australia a cup of coffee costs $28, a pack of cigarettes costs $130 and a mid-sized car costs $350,000.
(I kid my Aussie friends. I have about AUD$75 in my wallet right now. I keep them around in case I forget to carry a handkerchief. They're plastic, so they wash out real nice.)
Even OS X technologies are technologies (UNIX, Postscript, Objective-C) from around the time when the original Mac was created
Wow. That's a pretty wild interpretation. It's kind of like saying that because cars have wheels and we've had wheels since before the beginning of recorded history that cars aren't all that big a deal.
Let's start at the beginning: Yes, elements of the Mac OS are based on UNIX. But only stuff like the scheduler and the process model. The kernel itself and fundamental things like interprocess communication are based on Mach, not UNIX. And, of course, none of the user experience has anything to do with UNIX.
Mac OS X really has nothing to do with PostScript. The Quartz 2D drawing model was deliberately designed to be very similar to PDF, making it trivial to translate from PDF to Quartz 2D and back, but that's really where it ends. The window-drawing subsystem -- Quartz Compositor, now Quartz Extreme --has nothing to do with either PDF or PostScript. And, of course, Quartz 2D is just one way of putting lines on the screen. OpenGL is another, and even QuickDraw is still supported, though no new work is being done on it.
Yes, the Objective-C language dates back quite a ways, but programs written for the Mac have about as little to do with the Objective-C language itself as programs written for Windows have to do with the C language itself. What makes the Mac unique are the Cocoa application programming interfaces which were based on work done at NeXT in the late 80s and early 90s, but which go way, way, way beyond that.
So you see, to imply that Mac OS X is based on 80s-era technologies is just plain misleading. In fact, Mac OS X was the culmination of decades of work in all sorts of areas. It's not like somebody in Cupertino just decided one day that everything invented since 1988 was crap and that the wave of the future would be retro-innovation. Not at all.
I help manage 21,000 desktops for a global financial services company.
In case you're wondering, that's exactly why Microsoft has no incentive to make a better Windows: because there are literally millions of people like you out there who are making a comfortable living doing a job that, if you really think about it, nobody should have to do.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but economically speaking, you guys are elevator operators. The only reason your jobs exist is because the Otis elevator company (i.e., Microsoft) hasn't yet seen fit to put buttons on the inside of the elevator.
This status quo is changing, and it's changing rapidly, but even rapid change makes a barely noticeable blip when we're talking about a market this big. There's really only one company out there making computers that work the way they should. Microsoft, as I said, has no incentive to improve their product, and in fact has a disincentive because there are so many elevator operators whose livelihoods are dependent on Microsoft's continuing to build creaky elevators. And of course, as you mentioned, Linux is a disaster.
So the only vector for change has to be Apple. Nobody else has a financial incentive to do it.
Btw, the way they achieve cross platform is they use the QT libraries from Trolltech, of KDE fame.
Hm. Doesn't appear to be the case.
Skype: /System/Library/Frameworks/Cocoa.framework/Version s/A/Cocoa (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 9.0.0) /System/Library/Frameworks/AudioToolbox.framework/ Versions/A/AudioToolbox (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0) /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreAudio.framework/Ver sions/A/CoreAudio (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0) /System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/Vers ions/A/Security (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 176.0.0) /System/Library/Frameworks/SystemConfiguration.fra mework/Versions/A/SystemConfiguration (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 84.6.0) /System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBook.framework/V ersions/A/AddressBook (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 321.0.0) /System/Library/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versio ns/A/vecLib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 152.0.0) /System/Library/Frameworks/IOKit.framework/Version s/A/IOKit (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 182.0.0) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 71.1.1)
It appears that Skype for the Mac is a Cocoa application.
Downloaded their version from skype.com. Ran it. It instantly hung on the registration screen. Ran it as root, and that worked. Then realized that it was in Gentoo's portage. Emerged it. It started OK, but crashed immediately upon trying to make a call.
If you're wondering, this is why people prefer Macs. You know, if you're wondering.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure there are many end-users who want to encode broadcast-flagged TV episodes and upload them to friends across the internet. Can they do this too? If so, the whole TCPA is meaningless and I withdraw my objections.
Oh, I get it. Your objection to trusted computing all centers around the fact that "many end-users" (i.e., you) want to steal content and traffic in stolen content.
Thanks for finally laying that out for us. I kinda wish you'd said so right up front, though. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of time. We all could have just flagged you as an idiot and a thief and called it a day.
That whole blah-blah -- apart from being wrong in substance, as already explained in a whole assload of other replies -- is predicated on the assumption that the Gnu license is a legally binding document. Anybody who's taken contract law can tell you that, at best, the Gnu license is right on the bubble. In order for a contract to be binding, there has to be an overt act of acceptance. Unless there's a piece of paper somewhere with your signature on it saying that you accept the terms of the license in return for some tangible consideration, you're not bound.
Ah, but if he'd come out strongly opposed to rights management, you would have crowed about how great it is that he's sticking up for the little guy. As it is, since he's in favor of rights management, you say his opinion doesn't count.
Way to demonstrate the principle of selective dismissal.
EvilCorp(tm) wants to use DRM to cripple computers, but the PR guy will say "it's for the user". Of course their intent is nothing of the sort
No? Here's the very, very simple math:
Due to the current epidemic of piracy, content creators refuse to offer their wares in electronic form unless strong encryption is used to protect their creations. If strong encryption isn't included, content will simply not be available. Therefore, in order to make content available to users, products must include strong encryption.
Yeah. It's for the users. It's to give users what they want: content.
Of course, this really pisses off users whose preferred solution to the problem is "I stealz me some stuffz!"
All Ford did was introduce mass production methods to the automaking process
All Ford did was turn the car from an experiment into a product that was soon owned by millions and that changed literally every aspect of life in the developed world. That's all. Nothing important there. Right?
Apple really didn't invent the hard drive based MP3 player.
For practical purposes, they did. They invented the music player that people actually bought.
Your blah-blah about the "Hango PJB-100" is just about the funniest thing I've read all day. Because, you know, when you say "portable music player," the first thing to pop into everybody's mind is "Hango PJB-100."
How different is this new-for-2005 device in concept than the original portable MP3 players of 1998?
It's incredibly easy to use, and it's $99.
Benz beat Daimler and Maybach by more than a year, and got the patent. But if you expand your definition to include other types of engines, Anderson had an electric carriage in 1832, and Cugnot had a steam-powered tractor in 1769!
And none of them are remembered as the father of the automobile, because their inventions were neither practical nor widely adopted. Not until Henry Ford came along were cars both useful and popular.
Thanks for demonstrating my analogy, though.
Yes, $99 is way too much to pay for a 512 MB music player that's so small you could conceivably swallow it.
No, the math is right. If 80% of 25,000 people own a music player, that's 20,000. If 80% of 20,000 people own an iPod, that's 16,000. The math is right on.
Whether the facts are right or not is another question entirely.
-1GB is enough for a day's worth of music, right? When you get bored, reload the PDA.
...wait briefly ...unplug ...plug into ears ...hear music. Poof.
Hence the iPod shuffle, which is smaller and easier to use --and cheaper --than any PDA.
Here's the thing: most people don't carry PDAs. Of those who do, very few are interested in listening to their headphones while they have their PDAs on them. They're interested in listening to music while, for example, they run. It's a royal pain to carry a PDF around with you when you run, not least of which because if you drop it, you are going to break the screen, which means buying a new one.
So now Apple has a $150 music player that's smaller than small and so easy to use it's almost like magic. Plug in to computer
Basically, a PDA makes a lousy iPod because it's not got nearly enough storage, and it makes a lousy iPod shuffle because it's far too big and expensive.
So apple invented the hard drive based mp3 player?
Basically, yeah.
You know who invented the automobile? Depending on how you define the term, there are as many as half a dozen possible answers, none of them later than 1893.
But do you know who really invented the automobile, for all practical purposes? That's right. Henry Ford, in 1908.
Apple is to the iPod as Henry Ford is to the car.
You know what's really funny about that idea? I mean, apart from the fact that it presumes a bunch of people in a room are somehow smarter than any of them individually.
...the iPod.
What's really funny about that idea is that if it were to be carried out perfectly, if it were to work perfectly, the end result would be
Is it possible that somebody, someday, might come up with a better music player? Sure, anything's possible. But the iPod is so good, so far ahead of anything else, that for most of us it kind of defines what a good music player should be. It sets the bar, and everything else is just copying.
It would have been a good investment if they'd held on to it. They sold it off years ago.
There is one excellent reason to write a Cocoa front-end instead of using Qt: Qt applications don't work like real Mac applications. There are subtle differences that make for a diminished user experience. For instances, in Qt, drag-and-drop doesn't work unless the programmer explicitly implements it, which either means there's gonna be one application on the customer's computer that mysteriously doesn't do drag-and-drop, or it's gonna be more work for the developers.
Easier to just write the front-end in Cocoa. Much easier.
Yes, and when do you think Mach was created?
Mach 3.0 was developed around 1991. XNU, the Mac OS X kernel which evolved from Mach, was created over a period of several years in the late 1990s.
Quartz is a "PDF engine"
That's marketing-speak, and it's not really accurate. Quartz 2D is a 2D display-list rendering engine that just happens to be conceptually similar to PDF. PDF is a native file type, and Quartz 2D display lists can be converted to PDF trivially.
which replaces DisplayPostscript in NeXTStep
Not really. To the extent that both Display PostScript and Quartz 2D have to do with drawing shapes on the screen, yes. But that's where the similarity ends.
it has many of the same problems.
Problems? What problems?
Programs you write in 2005 for Cocoa look almost identical to the programs you would have written in the 80's for NeXT.
Um. Yes, to the extent that they use the same syntax: interfaces, implementations, protocols and so on. But other than that, no, completely wrong. In particular, Mac OS X includes something called bindings, which obviate the need for a separate controller object. Model objects are directly bound to view objects, and the runtime itself is responsible for updating one when the other changes. This is fundamentally different from the NeXT programming model, which included three separate objects: a model, a view and an autonomous controller.
That ignores basic things like NSNetService, advanced text rendering, Web Kit, Search Kit (and soon, Spotlight), Address Book and, as mentioned, Quartz 2D. These and other important core technologies are entirely new in Mac OS X, not legacy tech from NeXT.
Basically, any Mac OS X program more sophisticated than "Hello, World" is going to be fundamentally different from the same program written for NEXTSTEP.
GNUStep, which followed the NeXTStep/OpenStep programming model closely, is also very close to Cocoa.
Completely false. Gnustep makes a decent attempt at creating a copycat implementation of App Kit and Foundation Kit, but that's all. That's only the tiniest part of Cocoa.
Mac OS X is basically NeXTStep with a few tweaks and theming.
Analogy time again: "A car is basically a wagon with a few tweaks." (You're completely wrong in every way about themes. Copland was going to include support for themes. Mac OS X doesn't support themes. There are third-party hacks that replace system bitmaps with custom bitmaps, but that's hardly the same thing.)
For you to imply that OS X is brand new technology is just ridiculous.
Do us both a favor and educate yourself, okay? Let's run down the list, in the order that they popped into my head.
Message Framework
Apple Help
Address Book
AppleScript
Key-Value Coding and data binding
Serialization (XML hadn't even been invented when NeXT was in business, remember)
Search Kit (and Spotlight)
Property Lists
NSUserDefaults
the Undo architecture
Cocoa Drag and Drop
Quartz 2D
Distributed Objects
Cocoa XML-RPC and SOAP APIs
the various NSURL interfaces
Web Kit
Core Audio (soon Core Image, Core Video, Core Data)
Rendezvous
CFNetwork
the printing API
QuickTime
Keychain
Certificate services
Authorization services
the entire massive text subsystem
Every single one of these things is brand new technology developed for Mac OS X (except QuickTime and AppleScript, which are Mac OS X implementations of existing Apple technologies). Even the ones that might seem familiar to you -- like drag and drop --are completely new implementations. Compare implementing drag-and-drop in X11 to "implementing" drag-and-drop in Cocoa. I put "implementing" in quotes because compared to X11, you don't have to do hardly anything at all. While new Apple technologies like Rendezvous and Search Kit and Core Audio are huge, the real power of Cocoa is the ability to do things that are possible under old systems with little or no effort at all. That's where it really shines.
Except that Qt is C++ and Cocoa is Objective-C, and ne'er the twain shall meet. There's no evidence that the C++ runtime is linked into the Skype binary.
So I'm gonna go ahead and say no, here: Skype for the Mac is not in any way related to Qt.
The OS X designers made OSX work with a 2nd mouse button. So the OS designers at Apple think the 2nd mouse button is a good idea.
There's a really kick-ass word to describe what you did just there. Seriously, it rocks. Makes you sound incredibly sophisticated at parties. Makes chicks weak in the knees.
The term is "non sequitur."
Google it. You might learn something.
I know someone who just bought a dual G5 and 30" and the total system cost was US$10,000.
You do know, don't you, that the 30" Cinema Display costs as much as the top-of-the-line G5? You can literally buy two dual-2.5 GHz G5s for the same price as one plus a 30" display. And if you want something more modest, say a dual-1.8 GHz, you can buy three for that price.
The 30" Cinema Display is a thing of beauty. Working in front of one is like working in front of a billboard. You have to actually turn your head to see the edges of the screen. It totally fills your peripheral vision. It's the most incredible computer display I've ever seen in my life.
But fuck, it's expensive.
Since 1985 or so, an entry level system has always been about A$3500 and a decent production system around $A5-7,000.
Yes, but those are Aussie bucks you're talking about. For sake of comparison, in Australia a cup of coffee costs $28, a pack of cigarettes costs $130 and a mid-sized car costs $350,000.
(I kid my Aussie friends. I have about AUD$75 in my wallet right now. I keep them around in case I forget to carry a handkerchief. They're plastic, so they wash out real nice.)
Even OS X technologies are technologies (UNIX, Postscript, Objective-C) from around the time when the original Mac was created
Wow. That's a pretty wild interpretation. It's kind of like saying that because cars have wheels and we've had wheels since before the beginning of recorded history that cars aren't all that big a deal.
Let's start at the beginning: Yes, elements of the Mac OS are based on UNIX. But only stuff like the scheduler and the process model. The kernel itself and fundamental things like interprocess communication are based on Mach, not UNIX. And, of course, none of the user experience has anything to do with UNIX.
Mac OS X really has nothing to do with PostScript. The Quartz 2D drawing model was deliberately designed to be very similar to PDF, making it trivial to translate from PDF to Quartz 2D and back, but that's really where it ends. The window-drawing subsystem -- Quartz Compositor, now Quartz Extreme --has nothing to do with either PDF or PostScript. And, of course, Quartz 2D is just one way of putting lines on the screen. OpenGL is another, and even QuickDraw is still supported, though no new work is being done on it.
Yes, the Objective-C language dates back quite a ways, but programs written for the Mac have about as little to do with the Objective-C language itself as programs written for Windows have to do with the C language itself. What makes the Mac unique are the Cocoa application programming interfaces which were based on work done at NeXT in the late 80s and early 90s, but which go way, way, way beyond that.
So you see, to imply that Mac OS X is based on 80s-era technologies is just plain misleading. In fact, Mac OS X was the culmination of decades of work in all sorts of areas. It's not like somebody in Cupertino just decided one day that everything invented since 1988 was crap and that the wave of the future would be retro-innovation. Not at all.
I help manage 21,000 desktops for a global financial services company.
In case you're wondering, that's exactly why Microsoft has no incentive to make a better Windows: because there are literally millions of people like you out there who are making a comfortable living doing a job that, if you really think about it, nobody should have to do.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but economically speaking, you guys are elevator operators. The only reason your jobs exist is because the Otis elevator company (i.e., Microsoft) hasn't yet seen fit to put buttons on the inside of the elevator.
This status quo is changing, and it's changing rapidly, but even rapid change makes a barely noticeable blip when we're talking about a market this big. There's really only one company out there making computers that work the way they should. Microsoft, as I said, has no incentive to improve their product, and in fact has a disincentive because there are so many elevator operators whose livelihoods are dependent on Microsoft's continuing to build creaky elevators. And of course, as you mentioned, Linux is a disaster.
So the only vector for change has to be Apple. Nobody else has a financial incentive to do it.
One hundred percent, because no Mac minis were ever actually shipped at the higher price. They were all shipped at the revised price.
Hm. Doesn't appear to be the case.It appears that Skype for the Mac is a Cocoa application.
Downloaded their version from skype.com. Ran it. It instantly hung on the registration screen. Ran it as root, and that worked. Then realized that it was in Gentoo's portage. Emerged it. It started OK, but crashed immediately upon trying to make a call.
If you're wondering, this is why people prefer Macs. You know, if you're wondering.
Only if you use a Mac.
So, if I make copies, then there is no stealing going on, because Mick and Co. still possess the work --- I do not.
Stealing is the act of unlawfully taking something. Whether or not you're depriving someone of that thing is not part of the question.
What you thought was a clever logical trick turned out to be based on your misunderstanding what what "stealing" means.