Please stop calling things you don't agree with "propaganda."
Whether this makes you happy or not, the majority of Americans are not amenable to the idea of killing undeveloped babies for medical research.
This should not come as a surprise to you. Remember the national outcry when the cosmetics industry was using live animals for testing things like hairspray and eye makeup? Those were rabbits and dogs. These are human babies. Of course the public is squeamish about slaughtering them, even if it were for the best of causes.
When you add to this the fact that embryonic stem cell research is not a promising branch of medical research, the idea of using taxpayer dollars to pay for experiments on babies becomes a pretty hard sell. The only approaches that even come close to working are downplaying the fact that we're talking about undeveloped human children (the "it's just a bunch of cells" approach) and making false promises (the "Christopher Reeve will walk!" approach).
I appreciate the fact that you wish the government were funding embryonic stem cell research. Would it kill you to, in turn, appreciate the fact that most Americans disagree with you?
Can it be scripted? Are you operating under the mistaken assumption that Core Image is a program? It's not. It's an API, a part of the operating system. Its purpose is to be called by developers writing programs and scripts.
And again, you're comparing it to Avalon. Stop doing that. The two things do not do the same thing. They are completely different. Core Image will not "blow away Avalon" any more than it will "blow away" the baked potato I had for dinner.
Index Server did just what it says: It indexed file contents. Every operating system can do that. The Mac, the platform with which I'm most familiar, has been doing that for at least five years now, and probably longer; I can't remember exactly.
It's not useful, and here's why: The days when most files were plain text are long gone. There are still plain text files out there, sure, but they're the vast minority. Most computer users probably don't create them at all, in fact.
Instead, people have e-mail messages (which are stored in plain-text files, but which are not plain text; they are in fact filled with what looks like gibberish to the casual reader), audio files, photographs, PDF documents, and application files. Most of your application files these days are being written in XML format which, like e-mail, is stored as plain text on the disk, but is filled with lots of stuff that's not related to the contents.
So merely indexing the contents of text files is not useful.
That's why Spotlight does things completely differently.
It's kind of hard to imagine that there's somebody out there who doesn't already know exactly how Spotlight works -- Apple's only been talking about it incessantly since last summer -- but I guess I have to concede the possibility. So let me explain it.
There's a program that runs in the background all the time. It's called "mds," for "metadata server." It's a system service; people don't interact with it directly. The purpose of mds is to store all the metadata on the computer and to respond to queries.
The mds program gets its metadata from another background task, mdimport, or "metadata import." The mdimport program reads files, extracts all the information from them it can, then passes that information off to the mds program.
The mdimport program is extensible through modules called metadata importers. Each metadata importer corresponds to a file type. When the mdimport program examines a file of a given type, it fires the relevant metadata importer module(s) to extract information from that file. Each metadata importer implements exactly one C function: GetMetadataForFile. This function receives a path to the file to be examined, a file type and a pointer to a key-value-pair data structure called a "dictionary."
GetMetadataForFile populates the dictionary with metadata stored as key-value pairs. When it returns, the mdimport program passes that information off to the mds program for storage.
The important idea here is that GetMetadataForFile can do anything to the file to extract metadata from it. A metadata importer might pull ID3 tags out of an M4A music file. Another one might extract EXIF metadata from a digital photograph. Another might parse a word-processing file in XML format, discard everything irrelevant, and return just the names of the fonts used in that file. Another might pull the date stamps out of a chat transcript and store them as start-time, end-time and duration metadata. Another might pull key frames from a QuickTime movie and store them as thumbnail data. Another might find e-mail messages with attachments and store the type and size of the attachment as metadata. The sky's the limit.
Spotlight is way more than just simple content indexing. It does content indexing, of course, using a new version of Search Kit, but that's just a part of it. (It's also not really that new. It's just a slightly optimized version of what's already in Mac OS X.)
As usual, the casual dismissal of something fairly revolutionary can be blamed on a high degree of ignorance on the part of the person doing the dismissing.
You do name some good examples. However, Outlook, Access, Excel and PowerPoint are not among them. These are good names. Names don't have to be purely descriptive. They can also be evocative, or even just whimsical. "Macintosh" is a good name despite the fact that it does not meaningfully describe what it refers to. It's good because it's distinctive and memorable. Ditto Outlook, Access, Excel and PowerPoint.
(In fact, the names are the best things about three out of four of those. As much as the other three stink, Excel is a very good program.)
However, most of the names you give are bad examples. The names "regedit32" and "winipcfg" are low-level system utilities that aren't meant to be used by typical users, so they don't count. "NTFS" and "FAT32" are file systems, low-level components of the computer, so again, they don't count. And "IIS" is slang; the proper name is Internet Information Services.
So the only example you gave that really fits is "cmd.com"... which is twenty-five years old. Which kind of proves my point, if you see what I mean.
And no, I'm sorry to break it to you, but Foss (whatever the hell that means) is not catching on. Open-source stuff has an enthusiastic, almost rabid following among hobbyists and other aficionados, but it's not even making a dent out there in the consumer market. It's got zero branding, zero momentum and zero name recognition... in no small part because people like yourself keep making up new names for it. First it was Linux, then it was Gnu Linux, then it was Red Hat, then it was some other hat-related name that I can't remember right now, and now you're calling it Foss. It's not catching on because nobody knows what the hell you're talking about.
The fact that you think you have learned to game the system persuades no one. The system is fundamentally broken. Anybody who looks around can see that.
Incidentally, your posting history only shows two comments that have received positive moderation, not counting one which got a "funny" and is therefore obviously not applicable. That means that not only does your assertion about how rockin' cool you are prove nothing, it's not even true!
See? You're completely out of touch with the way things are done today. You say that "most people turn on their computers to do some work, then turn them off." That hasn't been true for five years or more. People put their computers to sleep, they don't turn them off.
Inst predates not only tools released by companies called Slackware or Red Hat, it predates the companies themselves. By a decade or more. It's been around since God was a boy, and it's still the standard by which these things are judged. I think Sun had one too, but I forget the name. The command-line program was called "pkgadd" or something like that.
And boot-loader programs like Lilo merely simulate firmware boot prompts that, again, have been around since God was a boy. The standard three-phase boot process -- firmware, a stand-alone bootstrap program, the kernel -- is not new. It's just that the PC world never had proper firmware, so the interactive and diagnostic aspects had to be shoved one step up the chain to the bootstrap program.
The disadvantages are legion. You can't do basic things like control power to the system's components from Lilo. You can't even enable or disable CPUs or memory, because Lilo runs in the CPUs and main memory. It's an incredibly poor substitute for a real firmware command monitor, really.
Curious as to why open-source stuff isn't catching on? Go back and re-read your own post. It's complete gibberish. Many of the names you listed aren't even words, so not only can one guess what they mean, one can't even speak them aloud to ask somebody!
Names are important. There's a reason why pros sweat for months and sometimes spend thousands of dollars deciding on a name. A name can make or break a project.
I don't know a lot about Avalon, but I don't think it does what you think it does. Or maybe it's Core Image that you've been misled about. Whichever. Let me see if I can help.
Core Image is a set of modular, hardware-accelerated image processing routines. It does things like scaling, color-correcting, blurring or sharpening and compositing raster image data. The modules, called Image Units, are written in a C-like language called CIKernel that's derived from the OpenGL Shading Language. Image Units are hardware-agnostic, meaning they can either run on the CPU or an available GPU, depending on what hardware is available. Core Image is smart enough to know whether the GPU or the CPU is faster, so if you have a fast CPU and an entry-level GPU, Core Image will pull the Image Units back into the CPU so they'll run faster. That kind of thing. It's a lot like SGI's ImageVision, according to this blogger who seems to have a clue.
Avalon, as I understand it, is more like a 3D version of Quartz 2D. I've heard it described as Direct X gone way out of control.
According to a not-for-attribution conversation I had with an Apple employee some months ago, Apple hasn't invested any money in developing a 3D version of Quartz 2D because there's simply no demand for it. People who want to do actual 3D programming are already using OpenGL and it's working spectacularly. Quartz 2D is for the other 99% of developers who draw 2-dimensional things to the screen, and those guys don't give a flip about 3D.
Apple Spotlight still has a "FS" (index store) component
It's a file on the hard drive. It's called ".metadata."
Spotlight won't do much for older apps unless they are written to support it.
Applications don't have to support Spotlight. The normal open-and-save paradigms aren't going anywhere, and metadata generation is done by a background task. Writing Spotlight file format plug-ins is incredibly simple -- you only need to implement one function -- so expect to see those suckers come flying out of the woodwork.
Putting a "Search" box in the File + Open window isn't worth writing how about.
It is if the mechanism behind that "search" box allows results to be returned instantly and searches metadata and content instead of just file names. That's most definitely something to write home about.
Let's take a step back here, shall we? The whole notion of booting a computer is starting to disappear. Macs have been designed for several years now to be rebooted only when necessary to upgrade the kernel or similar drastic changes. Windows is (gradually, slowly, as always) catching up. The whole notion of booting a computer is going the way of the dodo.
So it would be a giant step backwards for users if somebody were to suggest that they reboot their computer to use different software.
The idea of a system that can be booted into two different operating systems is fine for geeks. It's not relevant to actual users, however.
Don't blame somebody else for the "Slashdot only has one opinion" thing. That's built right into the system. Have you looked at the way comment moderation works around here? Comments that don't toe the party line are moderated down until they get filtered right off the page.
Also, I don't think you know what "troll" means. Hint: It doesn't mean "he keeps saying something I disagree with, which infuriates me because I am disinclined to tolerate opinions which differ from my own."
HOWEVER, if you are going to quote figures like that at least back them up with sources.
Lame. This isn't a term paper, and I'm not going to provide you a bibliography.
I'd suggest that you are also paying for all the people injured car accidents, do you begrudge people their privilege to drive?
You're not getting it, are you? What are your odds, as a driver, of getting into an accident that requires medical attention? They are very small. What are the odds, as a smoker, that you are going to get sick and die from a smoking-induced disease? Three out of four, which is very high.
If you have to build four libraries before your application, then you're SOL.
They're not called libraries. They're called frameworks. And there's no reason why you should have to build them before you build your application, because they will link at run time, not compile time. So just put the frameworks in your project and let Xcode decide what order to build them.
Xcode is, indeed, a terrible development tool... if you haven't the foggiest idea how to write Mac software.
If you buy a Mac and ditch OSX in favor of Linux, they have still made a sale of exactly the same value.
That's not right.
If you buy a Mac, Apple has made a hardware sale, yes, but that's not all. They've also created a customer for other Apple and third-party products. If you buy a Mac, you're instantly in the market for Final Cut Express, for instance. You may or may not buy it, but you're in the market. Same with all other Mac applications.
Not to mention the fact that you also become a customer for future releases of Mac OS X. The vast majority of Mac users choose to upgrade their computers every year or two with a new release of Mac OS X. (The reason, of course, is because every release of Mac OS X to date, up to and including Tiger, has been light-years ahead of the previous release.)
But if you buy a Mac and then strip off the operating system, leaving the computer as just a bare piece of metal on which you can run home-brewed hobby kernels or whatever, then you're not an Apple customer any more. You're just another PC user who happens to have written Apple a check for $X,000.
If a bunch of Mac buyers started running Linux on their computers, Apple would be apoplectic, and would respond by kicking their software group into gear and releasing an operating system that puts Linux to shame in every respect.
Come to think of it, this seems already to have happened.
Saying that a Mac without OS X isn't a Mac just isn't true.
It is, though. If you want to buy a computer made by Apple, that's fine, but unless you're running Mac OS X on it, don't call it a Mac. Because it most definitely is not.
I tried to read the article. I really did. But when I got to the end of the second paragraph, my natural aversion to incredibly bad writing kicked in and my mouse-hand clicked the window's close box without my conscious intent.
Peering out from under his de rigueur cap, music-industry veteran Sandy Pearlman, a former producer of the Clash and now a visiting scholar at McGill, spoke with a kind of nervous glee while describing his idea at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto last week.
You can't install the same damn app on 98, 2000, and XP.
Sure you can. I'm sure you can find applications that require one of those or the other, but these are the exception rather than the rule.
If you think it competes with Mac in the PC space, you clearly have no idea.
Sigh. Keep sliding those goalposts around all you want. If you want to alter the parameters until we get to a point where there's simply no way to discuss the question, fine. Go ahead.
A better question to ask is why Apple uprooted their O/S and went to a Unix-based system.
What does that have to do with anything? That doesn't relate in any way to what we were talking about.
To the two guys who jumped my shit for not knowing that this research was publicly funded: Duh. That wasn't my point. I thought that was pretty clear from the context of my comment.
It's appropriate that you titled your comment "Economics 101," because the very first thing in it was a repetition of what my thesis advisor in graduate school used to call the "freshman fallacy."
No, prices are not set by supply and demand. That's a radical oversimplification of what actually happens in the real world. You might enjoy a physics analogy: Newton's laws of motion do not actually predict what real moving bodies will do. The answers Newton's formulae give are close, on a short enough time line, but they're off. Newton's formulae are a radical oversimplification, ignoring factors like friction, relativity and other piddly details.
You don't have to be a genius or have a degree in economics to understand how the supply/demand thing is basically fallacious. You said it youself: "the supply curve is infinitely long at a zero price." Except it's not. Despite the fact that Linux is available for free, the vast majority of computer users choose one of the higher priced alternatives.
My suggestion to you is that you study something past Economics 101. Because trying to even understand, much less predict, how the world works based solely on the theory of supply and demand will result in your being wrong pretty much all the time.
Windows is not the standard, and indeed, it never really was.
What planet are you from, exactly? Here on Earth, you can't throw a rock without hitting two Windows computers, an embedded point-of-sale system and a guy who gets paid to take care of Windows computers. If we're going to talk about the standard, simple intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge that Windows is it.
Don't like it? Fine. Neither do I, particularly. Doesn't mean it isn't so.
Windows came into being because it was cheaper than mainframes.
Wow. You are completely from outer space, aren't you? Windows "came into being" (you make it sound like it hatched from an egg or burst forth fully formed from the forehead of Mighty Zeus) because there was a demand for an easier-to-use personal computer. We had the Apple II and we had computers that ran DOS, and both of those were pretty darned popular, thanks in no small part to the advent of the spreadsheet. But as time went on, the realization dawned on a bunch of guys at Apple that maybe DOS-like operating systems aren't the be-all, end-all. So they started working on the Lisa and the Macintosh. Then, when Microsoft got their first Mac demo, they sprinted off and started working on Windows.
Mainframes had nothing to do with it.
It became popular because it was pirated.
Um. It became popular because it was what was bundled. Practically nobody pirated Windows because every non-Apple computer shipped with it. There was no reason to pirate it.
Now with online phone home registration making Windows effectively impossible to pirate, look at what is happening. Linux is growing like wildfire.
Yes, "like wildfire." Didn't we just learn a few weeks ago that unit sales went up by something like 30% for the last quarter year-over-year? Good for Linux... until you read the article and discover that total unit sales still only accounted for something like 9% of the worldwide market. That's less than the Mac, man, and all anybody talks about is how marginalized that platform is. Linux is small compared to the thing that everybody thinks of as small.
How many people actually pay money for Windows itself? I would wager that it is a hell of a lot less than the number of people who run Linux.
Well, given that you don't know either statistic, I don't particularly put any faith in your assumption. You have no idea what the retail sales for Windows were last quarter, and you have no idea how many people adopted Linux last quarter, so why even go there? Unless your sole purpose was to yell "Linux ruuuuules!" and then go "Bababooie!" like some demented Howard Stern fan who managed to slip past a screener.
Slashdot Mirror
Please stop calling things you don't agree with "propaganda."
Whether this makes you happy or not, the majority of Americans are not amenable to the idea of killing undeveloped babies for medical research.
This should not come as a surprise to you. Remember the national outcry when the cosmetics industry was using live animals for testing things like hairspray and eye makeup? Those were rabbits and dogs. These are human babies. Of course the public is squeamish about slaughtering them, even if it were for the best of causes.
When you add to this the fact that embryonic stem cell research is not a promising branch of medical research, the idea of using taxpayer dollars to pay for experiments on babies becomes a pretty hard sell. The only approaches that even come close to working are downplaying the fact that we're talking about undeveloped human children (the "it's just a bunch of cells" approach) and making false promises (the "Christopher Reeve will walk!" approach).
I appreciate the fact that you wish the government were funding embryonic stem cell research. Would it kill you to, in turn, appreciate the fact that most Americans disagree with you?
Can it be scripted? Are you operating under the mistaken assumption that Core Image is a program? It's not. It's an API, a part of the operating system. Its purpose is to be called by developers writing programs and scripts.
And again, you're comparing it to Avalon. Stop doing that. The two things do not do the same thing. They are completely different. Core Image will not "blow away Avalon" any more than it will "blow away" the baked potato I had for dinner.
You don't understand Spotlight.
Index Server did just what it says: It indexed file contents. Every operating system can do that. The Mac, the platform with which I'm most familiar, has been doing that for at least five years now, and probably longer; I can't remember exactly.
It's not useful, and here's why: The days when most files were plain text are long gone. There are still plain text files out there, sure, but they're the vast minority. Most computer users probably don't create them at all, in fact.
Instead, people have e-mail messages (which are stored in plain-text files, but which are not plain text; they are in fact filled with what looks like gibberish to the casual reader), audio files, photographs, PDF documents, and application files. Most of your application files these days are being written in XML format which, like e-mail, is stored as plain text on the disk, but is filled with lots of stuff that's not related to the contents.
So merely indexing the contents of text files is not useful.
That's why Spotlight does things completely differently.
It's kind of hard to imagine that there's somebody out there who doesn't already know exactly how Spotlight works -- Apple's only been talking about it incessantly since last summer -- but I guess I have to concede the possibility. So let me explain it.
There's a program that runs in the background all the time. It's called "mds," for "metadata server." It's a system service; people don't interact with it directly. The purpose of mds is to store all the metadata on the computer and to respond to queries.
The mds program gets its metadata from another background task, mdimport, or "metadata import." The mdimport program reads files, extracts all the information from them it can, then passes that information off to the mds program.
The mdimport program is extensible through modules called metadata importers. Each metadata importer corresponds to a file type. When the mdimport program examines a file of a given type, it fires the relevant metadata importer module(s) to extract information from that file. Each metadata importer implements exactly one C function: GetMetadataForFile. This function receives a path to the file to be examined, a file type and a pointer to a key-value-pair data structure called a "dictionary."
GetMetadataForFile populates the dictionary with metadata stored as key-value pairs. When it returns, the mdimport program passes that information off to the mds program for storage.
The important idea here is that GetMetadataForFile can do anything to the file to extract metadata from it. A metadata importer might pull ID3 tags out of an M4A music file. Another one might extract EXIF metadata from a digital photograph. Another might parse a word-processing file in XML format, discard everything irrelevant, and return just the names of the fonts used in that file. Another might pull the date stamps out of a chat transcript and store them as start-time, end-time and duration metadata. Another might pull key frames from a QuickTime movie and store them as thumbnail data. Another might find e-mail messages with attachments and store the type and size of the attachment as metadata. The sky's the limit.
Spotlight is way more than just simple content indexing. It does content indexing, of course, using a new version of Search Kit, but that's just a part of it. (It's also not really that new. It's just a slightly optimized version of what's already in Mac OS X.)
As usual, the casual dismissal of something fairly revolutionary can be blamed on a high degree of ignorance on the part of the person doing the dismissing.
You do name some good examples. However, Outlook, Access, Excel and PowerPoint are not among them. These are good names. Names don't have to be purely descriptive. They can also be evocative, or even just whimsical. "Macintosh" is a good name despite the fact that it does not meaningfully describe what it refers to. It's good because it's distinctive and memorable. Ditto Outlook, Access, Excel and PowerPoint.
... which is twenty-five years old. Which kind of proves my point, if you see what I mean.
... in no small part because people like yourself keep making up new names for it. First it was Linux, then it was Gnu Linux, then it was Red Hat, then it was some other hat-related name that I can't remember right now, and now you're calling it Foss. It's not catching on because nobody knows what the hell you're talking about.
(In fact, the names are the best things about three out of four of those. As much as the other three stink, Excel is a very good program.)
However, most of the names you give are bad examples. The names "regedit32" and "winipcfg" are low-level system utilities that aren't meant to be used by typical users, so they don't count. "NTFS" and "FAT32" are file systems, low-level components of the computer, so again, they don't count. And "IIS" is slang; the proper name is Internet Information Services.
So the only example you gave that really fits is "cmd.com"
And no, I'm sorry to break it to you, but Foss (whatever the hell that means) is not catching on. Open-source stuff has an enthusiastic, almost rabid following among hobbyists and other aficionados, but it's not even making a dent out there in the consumer market. It's got zero branding, zero momentum and zero name recognition
The fact that you think you have learned to game the system persuades no one. The system is fundamentally broken. Anybody who looks around can see that.
Incidentally, your posting history only shows two comments that have received positive moderation, not counting one which got a "funny" and is therefore obviously not applicable. That means that not only does your assertion about how rockin' cool you are prove nothing, it's not even true!
See? You're completely out of touch with the way things are done today. You say that "most people turn on their computers to do some work, then turn them off." That hasn't been true for five years or more. People put their computers to sleep, they don't turn them off.
Inst predates not only tools released by companies called Slackware or Red Hat, it predates the companies themselves. By a decade or more. It's been around since God was a boy, and it's still the standard by which these things are judged. I think Sun had one too, but I forget the name. The command-line program was called "pkgadd" or something like that.
And boot-loader programs like Lilo merely simulate firmware boot prompts that, again, have been around since God was a boy. The standard three-phase boot process -- firmware, a stand-alone bootstrap program, the kernel -- is not new. It's just that the PC world never had proper firmware, so the interactive and diagnostic aspects had to be shoved one step up the chain to the bootstrap program.
The disadvantages are legion. You can't do basic things like control power to the system's components from Lilo. You can't even enable or disable CPUs or memory, because Lilo runs in the CPUs and main memory. It's an incredibly poor substitute for a real firmware command monitor, really.
Curious as to why open-source stuff isn't catching on? Go back and re-read your own post. It's complete gibberish. Many of the names you listed aren't even words, so not only can one guess what they mean, one can't even speak them aloud to ask somebody!
Names are important. There's a reason why pros sweat for months and sometimes spend thousands of dollars deciding on a name. A name can make or break a project.
Open-source stuff has shitty names.
I don't know a lot about Avalon, but I don't think it does what you think it does. Or maybe it's Core Image that you've been misled about. Whichever. Let me see if I can help.
Core Image is a set of modular, hardware-accelerated image processing routines. It does things like scaling, color-correcting, blurring or sharpening and compositing raster image data. The modules, called Image Units, are written in a C-like language called CIKernel that's derived from the OpenGL Shading Language. Image Units are hardware-agnostic, meaning they can either run on the CPU or an available GPU, depending on what hardware is available. Core Image is smart enough to know whether the GPU or the CPU is faster, so if you have a fast CPU and an entry-level GPU, Core Image will pull the Image Units back into the CPU so they'll run faster. That kind of thing. It's a lot like SGI's ImageVision, according to this blogger who seems to have a clue.
Avalon, as I understand it, is more like a 3D version of Quartz 2D. I've heard it described as Direct X gone way out of control.
According to a not-for-attribution conversation I had with an Apple employee some months ago, Apple hasn't invested any money in developing a 3D version of Quartz 2D because there's simply no demand for it. People who want to do actual 3D programming are already using OpenGL and it's working spectacularly. Quartz 2D is for the other 99% of developers who draw 2-dimensional things to the screen, and those guys don't give a flip about 3D.
Apple Spotlight still has a "FS" (index store) component
It's a file on the hard drive. It's called ".metadata."
Spotlight won't do much for older apps unless they are written to support it.
Applications don't have to support Spotlight. The normal open-and-save paradigms aren't going anywhere, and metadata generation is done by a background task. Writing Spotlight file format plug-ins is incredibly simple -- you only need to implement one function -- so expect to see those suckers come flying out of the woodwork.
Putting a "Search" box in the File + Open window isn't worth writing how about.
It is if the mechanism behind that "search" box allows results to be returned instantly and searches metadata and content instead of just file names. That's most definitely something to write home about.
Let's take a step back here, shall we? The whole notion of booting a computer is starting to disappear. Macs have been designed for several years now to be rebooted only when necessary to upgrade the kernel or similar drastic changes. Windows is (gradually, slowly, as always) catching up. The whole notion of booting a computer is going the way of the dodo.
So it would be a giant step backwards for users if somebody were to suggest that they reboot their computer to use different software.
The idea of a system that can be booted into two different operating systems is fine for geeks. It's not relevant to actual users, however.
You're an ass. I've filed this away so I won't waste time reading your comments in the future.
Also, you don't seem to know the difference between "lame" and "lamé."
Don't blame somebody else for the "Slashdot only has one opinion" thing. That's built right into the system. Have you looked at the way comment moderation works around here? Comments that don't toe the party line are moderated down until they get filtered right off the page.
Also, I don't think you know what "troll" means. Hint: It doesn't mean "he keeps saying something I disagree with, which infuriates me because I am disinclined to tolerate opinions which differ from my own."
HOWEVER, if you are going to quote figures like that at least back them up with sources.
Lame. This isn't a term paper, and I'm not going to provide you a bibliography.
I'd suggest that you are also paying for all the people injured car accidents, do you begrudge people their privilege to drive?
You're not getting it, are you? What are your odds, as a driver, of getting into an accident that requires medical attention? They are very small. What are the odds, as a smoker, that you are going to get sick and die from a smoking-induced disease? Three out of four, which is very high.
Stupid comparison.
Dude, you just perfectly illustrated his point. Even down to the shrill tone.
And you did it without a hint of irony, too.
What's a clue moron?
If you have to build four libraries before your application, then you're SOL.
... if you haven't the foggiest idea how to write Mac software.
They're not called libraries. They're called frameworks. And there's no reason why you should have to build them before you build your application, because they will link at run time, not compile time. So just put the frameworks in your project and let Xcode decide what order to build them.
Xcode is, indeed, a terrible development tool
If you buy a Mac and ditch OSX in favor of Linux, they have still made a sale of exactly the same value.
That's not right.
If you buy a Mac, Apple has made a hardware sale, yes, but that's not all. They've also created a customer for other Apple and third-party products. If you buy a Mac, you're instantly in the market for Final Cut Express, for instance. You may or may not buy it, but you're in the market. Same with all other Mac applications.
Not to mention the fact that you also become a customer for future releases of Mac OS X. The vast majority of Mac users choose to upgrade their computers every year or two with a new release of Mac OS X. (The reason, of course, is because every release of Mac OS X to date, up to and including Tiger, has been light-years ahead of the previous release.)
But if you buy a Mac and then strip off the operating system, leaving the computer as just a bare piece of metal on which you can run home-brewed hobby kernels or whatever, then you're not an Apple customer any more. You're just another PC user who happens to have written Apple a check for $X,000.
If a bunch of Mac buyers started running Linux on their computers, Apple would be apoplectic, and would respond by kicking their software group into gear and releasing an operating system that puts Linux to shame in every respect.
Come to think of it, this seems already to have happened.
Saying that a Mac without OS X isn't a Mac just isn't true.
It is, though. If you want to buy a computer made by Apple, that's fine, but unless you're running Mac OS X on it, don't call it a Mac. Because it most definitely is not.
I tried to read the article. I really did. But when I got to the end of the second paragraph, my natural aversion to incredibly bad writing kicked in and my mouse-hand clicked the window's close box without my conscious intent.
Peering out from under his de rigueur cap, music-industry veteran Sandy Pearlman, a former producer of the Clash and now a visiting scholar at McGill, spoke with a kind of nervous glee while describing his idea at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto last week.
Awful, vapid writing? You're soaking in it.
You can't install the same damn app on 98, 2000, and XP.
Sure you can. I'm sure you can find applications that require one of those or the other, but these are the exception rather than the rule.
If you think it competes with Mac in the PC space, you clearly have no idea.
Sigh. Keep sliding those goalposts around all you want. If you want to alter the parameters until we get to a point where there's simply no way to discuss the question, fine. Go ahead.
A better question to ask is why Apple uprooted their O/S and went to a Unix-based system.
What does that have to do with anything? That doesn't relate in any way to what we were talking about.
To the two guys who jumped my shit for not knowing that this research was publicly funded: Duh. That wasn't my point. I thought that was pretty clear from the context of my comment.
Sigh.
It's appropriate that you titled your comment "Economics 101," because the very first thing in it was a repetition of what my thesis advisor in graduate school used to call the "freshman fallacy."
No, prices are not set by supply and demand. That's a radical oversimplification of what actually happens in the real world. You might enjoy a physics analogy: Newton's laws of motion do not actually predict what real moving bodies will do. The answers Newton's formulae give are close, on a short enough time line, but they're off. Newton's formulae are a radical oversimplification, ignoring factors like friction, relativity and other piddly details.
You don't have to be a genius or have a degree in economics to understand how the supply/demand thing is basically fallacious. You said it youself: "the supply curve is infinitely long at a zero price." Except it's not. Despite the fact that Linux is available for free, the vast majority of computer users choose one of the higher priced alternatives.
My suggestion to you is that you study something past Economics 101. Because trying to even understand, much less predict, how the world works based solely on the theory of supply and demand will result in your being wrong pretty much all the time.
Windows is not the standard, and indeed, it never really was.
... until you read the article and discover that total unit sales still only accounted for something like 9% of the worldwide market. That's less than the Mac, man, and all anybody talks about is how marginalized that platform is. Linux is small compared to the thing that everybody thinks of as small.
What planet are you from, exactly? Here on Earth, you can't throw a rock without hitting two Windows computers, an embedded point-of-sale system and a guy who gets paid to take care of Windows computers. If we're going to talk about the standard, simple intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge that Windows is it.
Don't like it? Fine. Neither do I, particularly. Doesn't mean it isn't so.
Windows came into being because it was cheaper than mainframes.
Wow. You are completely from outer space, aren't you? Windows "came into being" (you make it sound like it hatched from an egg or burst forth fully formed from the forehead of Mighty Zeus) because there was a demand for an easier-to-use personal computer. We had the Apple II and we had computers that ran DOS, and both of those were pretty darned popular, thanks in no small part to the advent of the spreadsheet. But as time went on, the realization dawned on a bunch of guys at Apple that maybe DOS-like operating systems aren't the be-all, end-all. So they started working on the Lisa and the Macintosh. Then, when Microsoft got their first Mac demo, they sprinted off and started working on Windows.
Mainframes had nothing to do with it.
It became popular because it was pirated.
Um. It became popular because it was what was bundled. Practically nobody pirated Windows because every non-Apple computer shipped with it. There was no reason to pirate it.
Now with online phone home registration making Windows effectively impossible to pirate, look at what is happening. Linux is growing like wildfire.
Yes, "like wildfire." Didn't we just learn a few weeks ago that unit sales went up by something like 30% for the last quarter year-over-year? Good for Linux
How many people actually pay money for Windows itself? I would wager that it is a hell of a lot less than the number of people who run Linux.
Well, given that you don't know either statistic, I don't particularly put any faith in your assumption. You have no idea what the retail sales for Windows were last quarter, and you have no idea how many people adopted Linux last quarter, so why even go there? Unless your sole purpose was to yell "Linux ruuuuules!" and then go "Bababooie!" like some demented Howard Stern fan who managed to slip past a screener.
Yes, because we all know how much it sucks when people who fund private research selfishly expect to get their money back.
Even on the most innocuous topic, the trademark Slashdot myopia is everywhere.