If you want me to take the hypothesis of anthrogenic global warming seriously, show me some ANOVA figures. Statistics is a subtle business, and it's easy to move from hard, provable fact to absolute fallacy without noticing it.
Let's say we're dropping water balloons off a 10-story building and measuring the width of the splash pattern. That value correlates well with the force of impact, and force of impact depends directly on the baloon's speed at the moment of impact. That speed, in turn, depends directly on the force of gravity.
Now.. the force of gravity acting on an earthbound object changes relative to the position of the moon. If the moon is directly overhead, its gravitational pull cancels some of the Earth's gravity. If the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth, its gravitational pull adds to that of the Earth.
So.. basic physics tell us that a water balloon dropped from 100' will be moving faster or slower at the time of impact relative to the position of the moon, and that the difference in speeds will be reflected in the size of the splash patterns. The correlations are theoretically indisputable, and each effect can be demonstrated, repeatably, in the lab.
That incredibly solid grounding does not give us the power to say, "this splash pattern is wider than that one, so the difference must be due to lunar influence," though. The actual difference in speeds will be very small, and its effect on the width of any given splash pattern will be much smaller than the natural variance in the samples from a given day.
ANOVA gives us the tools to look at an effect and make meaningful statements about its probable cause. It also gives us the tools to decide whether the provable difference between two causes us worth talking about at all.
We have plenty of data to show that teenage boys score about 5% higher on math and science tests than teenage girls, but an ANOVA analysis says that the difference is basically meaningless. We certainly can't say, "the top 5% of test scores were boys," or "the lowest 5% of test scores were girls." Nor can we take two tests scores and reliably say, "the higher one was a boy, and the lower one was a girl." When it comes right down to it, we can't use that indisputable fact to prove much of anything at all.
Superficially, the hypothesis of anthrogenic global warming has all the earmarks of being in the same boat as the water balloons and the difference in test scores between teenage boys and girls. Yes, we can prove a chain of causation; no, the effects of that chain aren't large enough to exceed the margin of observational error. And broadly speaking, there's no set of global weather conditions that can occur in the next twenty-five years that proponents of anthrogenic global warming will accept as a refutation of their hypothesis.
Science is a process of testing refutable predictions against observable fact. As far as I can tell, the preliminary hypothesis that 'this period of global warming is completely unlike any other period of global warming in terrestrial history' in unproven and will remain conveniently irrefutable for a few centuries. The secondary hypothesis that 'the anomaly (if it exists) is the effect of anthrogenic causes' seems even less provable, and equally difficult to refute.
When I took stat in college, the professor told us three things:
Be VERY cautious of data that 'proves' something lots of people want to believe.
Never discuss causation unless you have a good, solid discriminant.
Never trust 'science' that doesn't doesn't state its conditions of refutability up front.
By my count, most public discussion of anthrogenic global warming scores zero-for-three on that scale. That's not to say I reject the hypothesis out of hand, but I don't respect a lot of the information that's made it to street level.
Then why in hell do you expect it out of a rendering engine???
Several reasons.
First of all, it's very hard to write a language that's powerful enough to be useful for interesting real-world problems, but still strict enough to make 'well formed' versus 'badly formed' a simple binary decision. Second, and more important, a language spec not only contains a syntax definition -- the rules that say how statements should be written -- it also defines the semantics of the language: the rules that say what a given statement means.
Take C's famous:
x = 3; x = x++ * x--;
for instance. It's well-formed code, but the semantics are undefined. Officially, x can contain any value after that snippet executes, and it can legally contain a different value every time the snippet executes. BNF (the language used to write syntax defnitions) isn't powerful enough to define that as a syntax error while leaving "x = y++ * z--;" alone, because BNF doesn't have any way to identify specific variables. OTOH, mandating a specific result in the semantic definition imposes all sorts of subtle order-of-execution constraints, which create all sorts of problems for any programmer who wants to write a compiler.
In the world of HTML semantics, there was the big "is a paragraph a container, or just something that sits between blocks of text (like a break)?" debate back in the mid-90s. Choosing the 'container' option made CSS possible, but it broke the (then) standard rule that <P> was semantically equal to <BR><BR>.
On top of that, HTML is a structural language, not a layout language. There's no universal 'standard' that says the bullet points in a list have to be indented, or that paragraphs should have a blank line between them. Those are formatting conventions that graphical rendering engines have more or less agreed upon, but which aural web browsers (for instance) can't render at all.
Bottom line, an HTML document is not and was never intended to be handcuffed to one specific page rendering. There are an infinite number of equally valid renderings for any HTML document, so declaring one 'right' and another 'wrong' is a tricky business indeed. Plus, there are about ten different, legal, W3C-approved versions of HTML, based on at least three different syntactic and/or semantic models. <P>text</P> is valid HTML-3.2, for instance, but invalid XHTML-anything, because in XHTML, all tag identifiers MUST be lowercase.
Under those conditions, a browser that chokes on pages that don't conform to one specific set of syntax rules, one specific semantic model, and one specific set of rendering conventions would be roughly useless.
Yes, we know crowds don't understand and don't want to understand unix vs windows architecture differences, they need to see "comparisons" and security "studies" performed by "independents".
No, they don't. To the average person, independent security studies sound like the "wah-WAH-wah" teacher from _You're a Good Man Charlie Brown_.
What people need is to see their friends who have Winboxen struggling for hours to make Microsoft's patches work and play nicely with the mission-critical third-party software they use. They need to see hordes of people running their AV software -- every morning -- and seeing a couple dozen new virus/worm/trojan/malware warnings -- every morning. They need to hear friend-of-a-friend stories about another Windows network trashed or hijacked by some script kiddie in Amsterdam, in spite of all the time and effort an expensive Microsoft-certified tech invested in it (because the mission-critical software wouldn't work unless they opened port X in their wah-WAH-wah).
Then they need to see Mac folks coasting along, not having to put up with any of that crap.
People build their expectations out of what they see in daily life. And broadly speaking, what people see is lots of hassle on the Windows side and no problems to speak of on the Mac side.
If this round of "The Mac must be insecure" FUD continues, it will end up in the same public meme-wastebasket as "will MP3 player X be the iPod-killer?" unless the doomsayers can actually find something in the real world to back up their, "paranoia and pessimism are prudent" abstractions.
Screw the Security Czar, let Apple launch a big-ass campaign on the theme, "Tell us your Mac Security horror stories":
We here at Apple take security very seriously, and we appreciate Microsoft's (indirect) success in making "computer security" a household term. But we feel it's only fair to take our turn in the spotlight, so we want to hear from anyone whose 30,000 seat OS X network was taken down by a virus like Melissa. Or any network administrators whose connections have been DOS'd by propagation chatter from a Mac virus like Sobig. Or.. well.. anyone who's experienced the same kind of terrible, horrible, really bad day Windows users have 'enjoyed' over the past few years, but has us to blame.
The whole point of unregulated speech is that people are free to abuse it. Some will be trolls, some will be corporate shills, some will be flat-out wackos, and almost all of them will be biased as hell. For all the crap some Slashdotters like to talk about bloggers being 'journalists', there's no set of standards or ethics that bloggers are required -- or even expected -- to obey.
When people decide to turn off their critical thinking skills and just accept whatever they read on some blog they've never seen before, they're stupid. End of story. Making a big deal out of the fact that bloggers don't self-organize into an ethical and reliable news system is equally stupid. Both these principles fall on the 'obvious' scale somewhere near, "hey look: air."
So.. we have someone ranting that AAC and FairPlay might become obsolete at some unspecified time in the future.
That makes perfect sense if we ignore the facts that:
if Apple falls off the face of the Earth tomorrow, I'll still have all the songs I paid for.
AAC is an open standard.
As of today, there are tools that will strip the DRM off the files.
Meanwhile, we have competing services that run on a subscription model, where everything I've paid for disappears:
if the company goes out of business or just shuts down the music service
if I want to move to a different company
if I miss a subscription payment
Wow.. those Apple bastards.
No wonder they only have.. uh, what was that market share again?
Microsoft sees 'legal issues tied to software' as a place where it needs to guide consumer thought. Why? Because FOSS kicks proprietary software's ass when it comes to legal encumbrances.
Seriously, take a look at the ridiculous and downright insulting terms of sale that have been associated with proprietary software over the past few years: We've seen EULA terms that boil down to, "we own your computer, we're just letting you use it," spyware, rootkits, data tagging, terms of sale that demand holes in network security so the software can call home to snitch on you, and the occasional ABA software license compliance audit.
Frankly, in objective terms, buying proprietary software puts the user in a lousy legal position.
FOSS, on the other hand, lacks the power to impose any of that nonsense on consumers. You get a nonexclusive right to use the software, and the freedom to bypass or remove any pieces you dislike. You don't have to agree to bend over and lube up just to install the stuff.
This whole 'indemnity' issue is misdirection. Micorosoft wants to keep people so busy worring about the (overall very good) legal status of FOSS that they ignore the (overall rotten) legal status of Microsoft's own products.
This is a big-ass hint, gang.. Microsoft is telling us what it fears. It fears a world where corporate lawyers shoot down potential deals with Microsoft because the legal encumbrances on the software are unacceptable.
We need to counter this FUD by making lots of noise about how good the FOSS legal package is. We need to see Microsoft's:
"if you use FOSS, you MIGHT get sued"
and raise it with:
"if you use proprietary software, you WILL get EULA terms roughly equivalent to a full body-cavity search, you'll PROBABLY get spyware, you COULD get a rootkit, and you MIGHT get a software audit from the ABA. (and by the way: the number of ABA audits every year is larger than the number of lawsuits against FOSS)"
I suppose then you would agree with a provision being placed on your PS2 which reads:
"by purchasing this ps2 you hereby agree never to purchase, borrow, or use gaming products produced my microsoft or nintendo, or any subsidiary thereof".
No, I wouldn't. And if we stick to the doctrine that people don't buy products if they don't accept the terms of sale, such a condition would lead to a massive drop in PS2 sales. Then Sony would have to weigh its desire to sell the PS2 against its desire to put silly-ass restrictions into its terms of sale. If they want the money, they'll drop the restriction. If they want the control, they lose market share, and open a niche for console vendors who don't want that restriction.
But you want it both ways, don't you? You want to buy the PS2 now, and still have a moral/legal right to ignore any terms you don't like.
You clearly believe in a definition of copyright that goes far beyond what even the (rather broad) US copyright statutes cover. That's your right, but I think that you will find that your view is far out of the mainstream.
And you're trying to push the effects of market forces into the realm of law.
A vendor does have the right to set any limits on the sale and use of his product that he wants. And consumers are bound to obey the terms of the sale. If consumers dislike the terms enough that they abandon the vendor, that vendor will go out of business. Then another one will start serving the market, probably on terms that consumers like better.
Over time, the markets establish a working balance of interests between the vendors and the consumers. You seem to be trying to short-circuit that process by putting artifical restrictions on how vendors can do business.
What if the sole supplier of milk in your town says "I will sell you this milk on the condition that you don't give any of it to a baby. I hate babies". What is the moral thing to do?
Translation: If the biggest milk vendor in an area goes out of his way to define a market where he absolutely will not compete, is it immoral to start a new company to serve that market?
Now, if the milk vendor uses his power in the markets he does serve to kill any company that tries to move into the market he doesn't serve, that's abuse of a monopoly, which is illegal for a completely different body of law. But AFAIK, there's no law that prevents the milk vendor from limiting his market any way he chooses, as long as he sticks to the market he does choose.
You like the book so much that you decide to make a movie out of it. Does 'buying the book' give you the right to use it as a script?
Oh.. and you're going to make some changes to the plot, because you really think a few things should have been done differently. But you're still going to post your product to the internet with the author's name and the original title on it.
Care to make a bet on your chances of winning when the author sues you?
Imagine that a company like shell told you what you could and could not do with the fuel bought at their points of sale. Oh you want to put our petrol in a lawnmower? You can't do that, we developed it only to be put into V8's.
Your argument would be just fine if people didn't put high-test rocket fuel into their lawnmowers then sue both the lawnmower manufacturer and the fuel vendor when the damn things blow up.
Your talk of general liberty is all well and good, but where do you stand on the question of "whose fault is it when something goes wrong?" If you hack OSX and run it on unsupported hardware, then find that the user experience is crap, are you going to be diligent about telling the world that it's your own fault, or are you going to blame Apple for not making a product that better fits you needs? If Apple should release OSX for a reference PC platform, would you pay the extra money for a whitebox that meets Apple's spec, or would you lowball it with marginal hardware and once again blame Apple for not going out of its way to meet your own personal needs?
Now I have no grudge against you, so I'll assume here and now that you, personally, would do the ethical thing in all those cases. But can you give me some reason to believe that everyone else would be ethical too? And when the weasels start complaining, will you risk being called an 'Apple fanboi' to fight their FUD?
If not, what's the basis for your ethical position other than a generic sense of entitlement?
Apple probably isn't all that worried about people having 'the Apple Experience' for free, either. If it's a good experience, it will probably lead to a sale sometime down the line.
What Apple doesn't want is to see tons of people having a lousy Apple Experience on under-spec'd generic PC hardware. If tens of thousands of people are sitting around having kernel panics and plug-and-pray driver issues with the Apple logo on the screen, that amounts to a massive grass-roots brand-killing campaign.
As long as Apple keeps OSX fairly well tied to Apple hardware, the people running a hacked version on an unsupported platform don't have anyone else to blame if the system's performance is crap.
Where's the morality in forcing your wills upon another person?
So what are you doing when you tell Apple that you want something they've produced but don't want to pay for it or otherwise meet their terms? You're forcing your will upon them.
The difference is that Apple has actually put some time, money, and effort into making something that you want to use. You're just sitting there talking about morality, and hoping that you can sneak a justification for forcing your will upon Apple under the wire.
There's also a huge market for products with all sorts of gee-whiz features that people end up hating once they've tried to live with them for a while.
Consumers are irrational, if not downright stupid. At the point of purchase, they look for the best possible price-per-feature ratio. At home and in daily life, they want a product that does a few things simply and well. That cognitive dissonance creates a lucrative market for products with huge checklists of features on the box, which then sit in a closet and are never used at home.
That strategy works just fine in commodity markets, because the vendors of such products aren't looking for repeat business. In the computer market, you want repeat sales.
For all the talk about demand, I haven't heard anyone claim that opening OSX up for generic x86 hardware will make it run better and more smoothly. Most people agree that it won't, they just say that they're willing to live with the problems in exchange for a cheaper bite at the Apple. In practice, they probably won't. They'll just kill Apple's reputation for good vertical integration and then demand that the OSX source code be put in the public domain once the company folds.
Pretty much, if Apple started selling OS X for vanilla PCs, their hardware sales will come down, because the only thing that Apple can compete on now is quality of the hardware. Then there is also the issue of piracy (even though pirates already have access to developer releases to OS X for x86, so that issue is already out there).
Apple competes on vertical integration. It's a service industry.. the same one RedHat and IBM are in.
Mac hardware is only one piece of Apple's product stack. The stack starts down at the board-design level and works its way up through firmware, OS, middleware, userland, and network services. That range of control gives Apple the power to tweak iTMS performance down in the hardware if that's the best, most cost-effective solution.
The 'Apple Tax' is the price people are willing to pay to make all those pieces work together. You can pay it to Apple at the time when you purchase the computer, you can pay it to a Windows support tech, you can pay it in time and labor as you tinker with your Linux box, or you can pay it in wasted time and effort as you continue to live with something that doesn't work right and really ought to be fixed. But pay it you will, one way or another.
Thing is, most consumers are willing to trade 'living with potential problems' for a price break at the point of purchase, but then they hate the product and consider it a waste of money after they try to live with it for a while. And of course they blame the manufacturer for making a crappy product, rather than accepting responsibility for their own decision to buy a crappy product based on a whiff of false economy.
Apple owes its current profit margins to the fact that it has a good reputation for vertical integration. Opening OSX up to generic PC hardware would rip an important layer out of the bottom of Apple's integration stack, forcing all the layers on top to adapt to that new instability. That would damage Apple's reputation for selling well-integrated products, and chip away at its real business.
Companies that sell vertical integration have to learn how to ignore what consumers say they want at the point of purchase, and pay attention to what people actually like to use over time. Thus, Apple will probably continue to ignore all the "I'd buy a worse product if it were cheaper" blather and stick to selling products people actually like to use.
And how many of those existing x86 drivers happen to be written in compliance with the Darwin kernel extension I/O standards? Strangely enough, not all driver code is immediately portable between operating systems, even when those OSes run on the same hardware.
It always amazes me when people go on about non-human factors.
Well, that's what happens when 99% of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from non-human sources.
Yes, human CO2 emissions have gone up dramatically in industrial times, compared to previous human CO2 emissions. I think we're around.3% these days, up from.15% before industrial times. That's a 200% increase from previous levels, but a notably small fraction of the whole. But '200% growth' has more emotional impact for the average person than '.15% of the whole', and the former has gotten a lot more emphasis in public discussion of global warming than the latter.
If we use the standard scientific tools to examine the subject, 'human-forced global warming' is still a fairly weak proposition. Yes, we have observations that show an increase in average global temperatures over the last few centuries. Yes, we have lab data to show that CO2 absorbs energy from sunlight and can contribute to a greenhouse effect. But the actual correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and average global temperature is moderate, and even then over a reasonably long term. An X% change in CO2 today doesn't imply a Y% change in global temperature tomorrow. Over decades and centuries, maybe.. but other factors are obviously at work too.
Nor do we have really solid proof that a change in CO2 levels causes a change in average global temperature. The lab results tell us it's possible, but we don't have solid evidence to show that the CO2 came first, the temperature change came second, and no other mechanism could reasonably account for the change. We haven't clearly ruled out the possibility of reverse causation -- the idea that a change in global temperature forces a change in CO2 levels, not vice-versa -- nor have we ruled out the possibility that both CO2 and global temperature are forced by some third factor.
None of this is a reactionary refusal to accept facts. It's just basic scientific skepticism. CO2-forced global warming is an acceptable hypothesis, but we have to rule out all the counter-arguments before we accept it as 'scientific fact'. And doing that will be hard, because the period of time for which we have really good observations is much smaller than the observed period for correlations between CO2 and global temperature.
But even if we do accept the idea that CO2 forces a change in global temperature, we still have to deal with the fact that human-produced CO2 is only a small fraction of the total. There are individual volcanos in the Pacific Rim that pump out more CO2 per year than the US. And unless human-generated CO2 has vastly more effect on the environment than any other kind of CO2, a.5% fluctuation in non-human CO2 emissions will have more effect on global temperature than all the human-generated CO2 combined.
So let's be clear that 'human-forced, CO2-based global warming' is two hypotheses removed from 'hard scientific fact'. 'CO2-based global warming' is one hypothesis, which is reasonable but still subject to debate. 'Human-forced global warming' is a second hypothesis, with very little objective, or even theoretical, support.
OSX supplies adequate and novelty and separation of concerns.
Safari doesn't actually launch programs you download. It simply checks downloaded zipfiles and disk images for executables, and warns you if it finds anything. At worst, it will automatically extract the contents of such a file into your specified downloads directory, and that behavior can be turned off. Downloading files is a fairly rare event compared to simply surfing webpages, and many of the files people download contain pure data. The 'this download contains a program' dialog is rare enough to keep most people from clicking 'Yes' out of pure habit.
The 'this program is launching for the first time' dialog belongs to the Finder. Again, it's fairly rare, since most people don't install new software on a daily basis. If anything, I'd expect people to associate it with "I've just installed a new program or upgraded the OS," so having it pop up unexpectedly would be something of a shock.
This article is what happens when someone gets so carried away with general principles that they lose touch with observed reality.
I'm a Mac user. I know that any OS can be cracked with sufficient effort. I know that viruses, trojans, and malware are a risk, in the general, theoretical sense. I also know that the number of actual, observed OSX exploits has been very low for a good long time.
I don't assume OSX's security is perfect, but I do know that it has a history of being pretty darned good. I know that Apple has built two or three layers of security into OSX (unix access controls and best practices, easy automated patching, and GUI-level alerts like, "The file you're downloading contains a program, are you sure you want it?" and "This program is trying to launch for the first time, do you want it to?"), and history suggests that their strategy works.
I also know that most security software breaks down into two basic feature sets: one set maintains a collection of best practices, access controls, and patch automation that keeps machines from getting infected in the first place, and the other set scans for known viruses to catch anything that got past the 'prevention' layer.
Well, the 'prevention' stuff already built into OSX, and since there are no known viruses for OSX currently in the wild, installing a signature checker would be a waste of time. And once again, history suggests that Apple's prevention strategy seems to be working pretty well.
If you want to talk about improving a Mac's security, don't just wave the "Oooh, it's coming.. booga booga" FUD-stick in my face. Show me how the current set of OSX tools and policies can be beaten, or show me some other set of tools or policies that have a better track-record at preventing infection. As of today, the risk of getting a virus under OSX is significantly lower than the risk of getting hit with a Windows virus before the AV vendors publish a signature that will catch it.
Right now, my observed risk of infection is practically nil. Right now, OSX's default security policies give better results than anything in the Windows market. Right now, I don't know of any products that will lower my risk of infection so much further that they'll be worth the time, money, effort, or computing resources I'd devote to them.
And I remain steadfastly unimpressed by abstract "if you think your security is good enough, it isn't good enough" lines of reasoning. Every security policy accepts some level of risk. Every security policy ends up saying, "well, I guess that's good enough," somewhere. If you don't like where I've drawn the line, show me a better place to draw it, and show me that doing so will be cost-effective in some way. If you can't, I'm gonna call FUD.
Imagine a world where food can be made in an inexpensive solar powered replicator but people still starve because the software used by these devices is "protected" by copyright and DRM.
Okay, I'll give you points for one of the most spectacularly contrived, contrary-to-fact, oversimplified, emotionally overloaded straw-man arguments I've ever seen.
The argument itself is crap, though. It falls apart as soon as one person in the world decides to release a food-synthesis recipe under a noncommercial-use Creative Commons License. That person still holds IP rights over the recipe, and can use them to prevent anyone else from taking that recipe out of the hands of those poor, starving children (who will then breed like rats until their expansion is constrained by the next limiting resource, or die in a massive plague).
In your IP-free utopia, the big information distributor would make Microsoft look warm and fuzzy. There are always constraints on the creation and distribution of information, and most of those constraints are subject to economies of scale. That means the rich have the power to control the distribution of information, with or without a concept of 'intellectual property'. The factories that press CDs, the trucks that deliver them, the millions of tons of copper and glass stretched across the countryside, all of those are physical property. And it only takes half an ounce more brains than a ping-pong ball to think of ways to extend 'physical property' rights in ways that more or less boil down to "intellectual property for me, but none for you."
Going back to your own example, those free-food-machines have to come from somewhere. Presumably there will be a factory of some kind making them. But there probably won't be any competition, because whoever has the most money will be able to build the most machines and cut all their competitors out of the market, and don't even think about telling me that someone will come up with a better machine, because that's just free R&D for the big guy.
So once there's a monopoly on free-food-machines, what's to stop the manufacturer from designing one that refuses to accept that 'nourishment for everyone' recipe?
Granted the GP uses some loaded words, but I just got done working with a guy who got some kind of low-end knockoff MP3 player in a promotional deal.
Whatever it was, it was junk. It locked up at random times, he couldn't copy his music over from his computer because of bitchiness between the DRM and Windows Media Player, he had to install a new version of WMP to make something work and his registry got trashed in the process, etcetera. All in all, it was a shining example of how badly things can suck in the wonderful world of Win-based MP3 players.
And all the while, he kept wandering around shouting, "Aaah, my iPod fucked up again.. worthless piece of crap!"
GP has a point that most people on the street are not very good at brand-identification when it comes to computer technology, and the confusion can lead to good products getting bad word-of-mouth while bad products escape in the confusion.
If that handful of hackers and tech savvy users along with a few engineers [pbs.org] can show that running OS X on commodity hardware works well and a community builds up around it, Apple may have the best opportunity it has ever had to sharply swing it's market share.
So the engineers do their dance, the beancounters make their decision, and Apple sells five $49 copies of OSX. Meanwhile, Dell gets its cut of five $1200 boxes because the beancounters find those more 'cost effective' than an equal number of $2000 Macs. Apple's 'market share' leaps upward, on a total revenue of $245.
Given that Apple management has embraced the x86, Jobs and his ilk should just admit that the value of Apple is its OS and jettison the hardware business.
Look, Apple doesn't have a 'hardware business'. Nor does it have a 'software business'. Apple is in the business of selling a service called 'vertical integration'. It controls a techology stack that starts down at the level of board design, then moves up through firmware, OS, middleware and userland applications, all the way up to tethered peripherals and network services.
'Hardware' and 'software' are commodities. Selling commodities is a lousy business strategy in computer technology, because the technologies evolve so quickly. The companies that make money in computer tech sell services:
IBM sells vertical integration to the enterprise market.
Red Hat sells vertical integration to the Linux market.
Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft sell software on what amounts to a subscription model.. you don't pay for a single version of the product, you buy into an ever-evolving stream of product upgrades and bug-fixes.
On top of that, Microsoft owes a lot of its revenue to the vertical integration between Windows and Office.
Service is a major part of Dell's sales appeal.
Amazon provides an aggregation service that puts zillions of different products at the user's fingertips, all wrapped up in a 'click the button and it will arrive on your doorstep in a few days' model.
Google provides search as a service, and is working to vertically integrate 'search' into the middleware and userland layers.
Operating systems are worthless. People give the darned things away these days. And the hardware/OS/software 'platform' loses relevance as AJAX makes network computing and applications service vendors (there's that 's'-word again) more viable. Sure, there will always be hardware, OSes and software, but as time goes on it make less and less difference what particular kind of hardware, OS, and software you're using.
In the long run, 'hardware' and 'software' are losing business propositions when taken on their own. 'Hardware and software that work well together' is a lucrative and highly sustainable business, OTOH.
From that point of view, there's no reason for Apple to make it easy for people to DIY up their own OSX boxes with off-the-shelf x86 hardware. Yeah, slashdotters are willing to do their own vertical integration, but in doing so, they'd be cutting into Apple's true market.
Of course, that doesn't stop some slashdotters from demanding that Apple simply hand over the technology they aren't capable of building for themselves.
Actually, Apple gets value from the combination of style and solidity.
Consumers resent a crappy product in a pretty box. They feel, with justification, that the company should have spent more money on "making the damn thing work" rather than just slapping on a few go-faster stripes.
That makes style a big market advantage for Apple. It doesn't matter how much you case-mod your Winbox, you'll still be on the patch-and-virus treadmill, and still have the same risk of BSODs as someone using a POS white box. Likewise, a KDE box in a gorgeous enclosure will have exactly the same function set as a built-in-the-basement wonder.
Apple's products are solid enough that their style is worth considering. People freaked out over the Nano because you could scratch the screen if you put it in a pocket full of change, not because it randomly locked up, or because they couldn't transfer some of their files, or because it stopped working in cold weather, or any other basic function issue.
Once you hit the point of diminishing returns on 'making it just work', style is the next playing field on which you compete. But you can't play in the 'style' arena until you've aced the 'it just works' level.
Every suggested 'improvement' I've seen so far in this discussion involves making the service more complicated or more annoying.
Some people want free.Mac with ads. Others want tiered services. Others want bandwidth fees. Your suggestion assumes that the upsell potential from a free limited version would outweigh the loss of revenue from currently paying customers dropping back to the 'free' tier and the increased costs of all the new free riders.
None of these proposals passes a basic Apple marketing principle: "Don't ask your customers to do something you wouldn't want to do yourself."
Do people want advertising? No. At best it's a necessary evil that funds other services that people do want. Do people want to figure their way through a tiered rate plan to get the best cost/benefit ratio for their personal needs? No. They'll lowball their estimate of what they think they'll need, then resent the thought of having to pay "even more" for what they really want. Do people want "hey, you got slashdotted, you owe us $950" messages? No. Do people want [Slashdot Subscribers, click here to give feedback] upsell messages? No. It's just another form of advertising. Do people want "limited services"? No. They'll just separate into factions who'd be willing to trade some of X which they don't use for more of Y which they really like but aren't willing to [Slashdot Subscribers, click here to give feedback] upsell to.
Ultimately, everyone accepts the fact that there will have to be some kind of tradeoff between what you give.Mac subscribers and what you make them put up with. Nobody has offered a version of that tradeoff more consumer-friendly than Apple's "pay this much for these services if you think they're worth it" model.
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If you want me to take the hypothesis of anthrogenic global warming seriously, show me some ANOVA figures. Statistics is a subtle business, and it's easy to move from hard, provable fact to absolute fallacy without noticing it.
Let's say we're dropping water balloons off a 10-story building and measuring the width of the splash pattern. That value correlates well with the force of impact, and force of impact depends directly on the baloon's speed at the moment of impact. That speed, in turn, depends directly on the force of gravity.
Now.. the force of gravity acting on an earthbound object changes relative to the position of the moon. If the moon is directly overhead, its gravitational pull cancels some of the Earth's gravity. If the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth, its gravitational pull adds to that of the Earth.
So.. basic physics tell us that a water balloon dropped from 100' will be moving faster or slower at the time of impact relative to the position of the moon, and that the difference in speeds will be reflected in the size of the splash patterns. The correlations are theoretically indisputable, and each effect can be demonstrated, repeatably, in the lab.
That incredibly solid grounding does not give us the power to say, "this splash pattern is wider than that one, so the difference must be due to lunar influence," though. The actual difference in speeds will be very small, and its effect on the width of any given splash pattern will be much smaller than the natural variance in the samples from a given day.
ANOVA gives us the tools to look at an effect and make meaningful statements about its probable cause. It also gives us the tools to decide whether the provable difference between two causes us worth talking about at all.
We have plenty of data to show that teenage boys score about 5% higher on math and science tests than teenage girls, but an ANOVA analysis says that the difference is basically meaningless. We certainly can't say, "the top 5% of test scores were boys," or "the lowest 5% of test scores were girls." Nor can we take two tests scores and reliably say, "the higher one was a boy, and the lower one was a girl." When it comes right down to it, we can't use that indisputable fact to prove much of anything at all.
Superficially, the hypothesis of anthrogenic global warming has all the earmarks of being in the same boat as the water balloons and the difference in test scores between teenage boys and girls. Yes, we can prove a chain of causation; no, the effects of that chain aren't large enough to exceed the margin of observational error. And broadly speaking, there's no set of global weather conditions that can occur in the next twenty-five years that proponents of anthrogenic global warming will accept as a refutation of their hypothesis.
Science is a process of testing refutable predictions against observable fact. As far as I can tell, the preliminary hypothesis that 'this period of global warming is completely unlike any other period of global warming in terrestrial history' in unproven and will remain conveniently irrefutable for a few centuries. The secondary hypothesis that 'the anomaly (if it exists) is the effect of anthrogenic causes' seems even less provable, and equally difficult to refute.
When I took stat in college, the professor told us three things:
By my count, most public discussion of anthrogenic global warming scores zero-for-three on that scale. That's not to say I reject the hypothesis out of hand, but I don't respect a lot of the information that's made it to street level.
Then why in hell do you expect it out of a rendering engine???
Several reasons.
First of all, it's very hard to write a language that's powerful enough to be useful for interesting real-world problems, but still strict enough to make 'well formed' versus 'badly formed' a simple binary decision. Second, and more important, a language spec not only contains a syntax definition -- the rules that say how statements should be written -- it also defines the semantics of the language: the rules that say what a given statement means.
Take C's famous:
x = 3;
x = x++ * x--;
for instance. It's well-formed code, but the semantics are undefined. Officially, x can contain any value after that snippet executes, and it can legally contain a different value every time the snippet executes. BNF (the language used to write syntax defnitions) isn't powerful enough to define that as a syntax error while leaving "x = y++ * z--;" alone, because BNF doesn't have any way to identify specific variables. OTOH, mandating a specific result in the semantic definition imposes all sorts of subtle order-of-execution constraints, which create all sorts of problems for any programmer who wants to write a compiler.
In the world of HTML semantics, there was the big "is a paragraph a container, or just something that sits between blocks of text (like a break)?" debate back in the mid-90s. Choosing the 'container' option made CSS possible, but it broke the (then) standard rule that <P> was semantically equal to <BR><BR>.
On top of that, HTML is a structural language, not a layout language. There's no universal 'standard' that says the bullet points in a list have to be indented, or that paragraphs should have a blank line between them. Those are formatting conventions that graphical rendering engines have more or less agreed upon, but which aural web browsers (for instance) can't render at all.
Bottom line, an HTML document is not and was never intended to be handcuffed to one specific page rendering. There are an infinite number of equally valid renderings for any HTML document, so declaring one 'right' and another 'wrong' is a tricky business indeed. Plus, there are about ten different, legal, W3C-approved versions of HTML, based on at least three different syntactic and/or semantic models. <P>text</P> is valid HTML-3.2, for instance, but invalid XHTML-anything, because in XHTML, all tag identifiers MUST be lowercase.
Under those conditions, a browser that chokes on pages that don't conform to one specific set of syntax rules, one specific semantic model, and one specific set of rendering conventions would be roughly useless.
Yes, we know crowds don't understand and don't want to understand unix vs windows architecture differences, they need to see "comparisons" and security "studies" performed by "independents".
No, they don't. To the average person, independent security studies sound like the "wah-WAH-wah" teacher from _You're a Good Man Charlie Brown_.
What people need is to see their friends who have Winboxen struggling for hours to make Microsoft's patches work and play nicely with the mission-critical third-party software they use. They need to see hordes of people running their AV software -- every morning -- and seeing a couple dozen new virus/worm/trojan/malware warnings -- every morning. They need to hear friend-of-a-friend stories about another Windows network trashed or hijacked by some script kiddie in Amsterdam, in spite of all the time and effort an expensive Microsoft-certified tech invested in it (because the mission-critical software wouldn't work unless they opened port X in their wah-WAH-wah).
Then they need to see Mac folks coasting along, not having to put up with any of that crap.
People build their expectations out of what they see in daily life. And broadly speaking, what people see is lots of hassle on the Windows side and no problems to speak of on the Mac side.
If this round of "The Mac must be insecure" FUD continues, it will end up in the same public meme-wastebasket as "will MP3 player X be the iPod-killer?" unless the doomsayers can actually find something in the real world to back up their, "paranoia and pessimism are prudent" abstractions.
Screw the Security Czar, let Apple launch a big-ass campaign on the theme, "Tell us your Mac Security horror stories":
We here at Apple take security very seriously, and we appreciate Microsoft's (indirect) success in making "computer security" a household term. But we feel it's only fair to take our turn in the spotlight, so we want to hear from anyone whose 30,000 seat OS X network was taken down by a virus like Melissa. Or any network administrators whose connections have been DOS'd by propagation chatter from a Mac virus like Sobig. Or.. well.. anyone who's experienced the same kind of terrible, horrible, really bad day Windows users have 'enjoyed' over the past few years, but has us to blame.
Anyone? Anyone?
This is news?
The whole point of unregulated speech is that people are free to abuse it. Some will be trolls, some will be corporate shills, some will be flat-out wackos, and almost all of them will be biased as hell. For all the crap some Slashdotters like to talk about bloggers being 'journalists', there's no set of standards or ethics that bloggers are required -- or even expected -- to obey.
When people decide to turn off their critical thinking skills and just accept whatever they read on some blog they've never seen before, they're stupid. End of story. Making a big deal out of the fact that bloggers don't self-organize into an ethical and reliable news system is equally stupid. Both these principles fall on the 'obvious' scale somewhere near, "hey look: air."
So.. we have someone ranting that AAC and FairPlay might become obsolete at some unspecified time in the future. That makes perfect sense if we ignore the facts that:
Meanwhile, we have competing services that run on a subscription model, where everything I've paid for disappears:
Wow.. those Apple bastards. No wonder they only have.. uh, what was that market share again?
Microsoft sees 'legal issues tied to software' as a place where it needs to guide consumer thought. Why? Because FOSS kicks proprietary software's ass when it comes to legal encumbrances.
Seriously, take a look at the ridiculous and downright insulting terms of sale that have been associated with proprietary software over the past few years: We've seen EULA terms that boil down to, "we own your computer, we're just letting you use it," spyware, rootkits, data tagging, terms of sale that demand holes in network security so the software can call home to snitch on you, and the occasional ABA software license compliance audit.
Frankly, in objective terms, buying proprietary software puts the user in a lousy legal position.
FOSS, on the other hand, lacks the power to impose any of that nonsense on consumers. You get a nonexclusive right to use the software, and the freedom to bypass or remove any pieces you dislike. You don't have to agree to bend over and lube up just to install the stuff.
This whole 'indemnity' issue is misdirection. Micorosoft wants to keep people so busy worring about the (overall very good) legal status of FOSS that they ignore the (overall rotten) legal status of Microsoft's own products.
This is a big-ass hint, gang.. Microsoft is telling us what it fears. It fears a world where corporate lawyers shoot down potential deals with Microsoft because the legal encumbrances on the software are unacceptable.
We need to counter this FUD by making lots of noise about how good the FOSS legal package is. We need to see Microsoft's:
"if you use FOSS, you MIGHT get sued"
and raise it with:
"if you use proprietary software, you WILL get EULA terms roughly equivalent to a full body-cavity search, you'll PROBABLY get spyware, you COULD get a rootkit, and you MIGHT get a software audit from the ABA. (and by the way: the number of ABA audits every year is larger than the number of lawsuits against FOSS)"
Loudly. And frequently.
I suppose then you would agree with a provision being placed on your PS2 which reads:
"by purchasing this ps2 you hereby agree never to purchase, borrow, or use gaming products produced my microsoft or nintendo, or any subsidiary thereof".
No, I wouldn't. And if we stick to the doctrine that people don't buy products if they don't accept the terms of sale, such a condition would lead to a massive drop in PS2 sales. Then Sony would have to weigh its desire to sell the PS2 against its desire to put silly-ass restrictions into its terms of sale. If they want the money, they'll drop the restriction. If they want the control, they lose market share, and open a niche for console vendors who don't want that restriction.
But you want it both ways, don't you? You want to buy the PS2 now, and still have a moral/legal right to ignore any terms you don't like.
You clearly believe in a definition of copyright that goes far beyond what even the (rather broad) US copyright statutes cover. That's your right, but I think that you will find that your view is far out of the mainstream.
And you're trying to push the effects of market forces into the realm of law.
A vendor does have the right to set any limits on the sale and use of his product that he wants. And consumers are bound to obey the terms of the sale. If consumers dislike the terms enough that they abandon the vendor, that vendor will go out of business. Then another one will start serving the market, probably on terms that consumers like better.
Over time, the markets establish a working balance of interests between the vendors and the consumers. You seem to be trying to short-circuit that process by putting artifical restrictions on how vendors can do business.
What if the sole supplier of milk in your town says "I will sell you this milk on the condition that you don't give any of it to a baby. I hate babies". What is the moral thing to do?
Translation: If the biggest milk vendor in an area goes out of his way to define a market where he absolutely will not compete, is it immoral to start a new company to serve that market?
Now, if the milk vendor uses his power in the markets he does serve to kill any company that tries to move into the market he doesn't serve, that's abuse of a monopoly, which is illegal for a completely different body of law. But AFAIK, there's no law that prevents the milk vendor from limiting his market any way he chooses, as long as he sticks to the market he does choose.
Try this analogy on for size:
You like the book so much that you decide to make a movie out of it. Does 'buying the book' give you the right to use it as a script?
Oh.. and you're going to make some changes to the plot, because you really think a few things should have been done differently. But you're still going to post your product to the internet with the author's name and the original title on it.
Care to make a bet on your chances of winning when the author sues you?
Imagine that a company like shell told you what you could and could not do with the fuel bought at their points of sale. Oh you want to put our petrol in a lawnmower? You can't do that, we developed it only to be put into V8's.
Your argument would be just fine if people didn't put high-test rocket fuel into their lawnmowers then sue both the lawnmower manufacturer and the fuel vendor when the damn things blow up.
Your talk of general liberty is all well and good, but where do you stand on the question of "whose fault is it when something goes wrong?" If you hack OSX and run it on unsupported hardware, then find that the user experience is crap, are you going to be diligent about telling the world that it's your own fault, or are you going to blame Apple for not making a product that better fits you needs? If Apple should release OSX for a reference PC platform, would you pay the extra money for a whitebox that meets Apple's spec, or would you lowball it with marginal hardware and once again blame Apple for not going out of its way to meet your own personal needs?
Now I have no grudge against you, so I'll assume here and now that you, personally, would do the ethical thing in all those cases. But can you give me some reason to believe that everyone else would be ethical too? And when the weasels start complaining, will you risk being called an 'Apple fanboi' to fight their FUD?
If not, what's the basis for your ethical position other than a generic sense of entitlement?
Apple probably isn't all that worried about people having 'the Apple Experience' for free, either. If it's a good experience, it will probably lead to a sale sometime down the line.
What Apple doesn't want is to see tons of people having a lousy Apple Experience on under-spec'd generic PC hardware. If tens of thousands of people are sitting around having kernel panics and plug-and-pray driver issues with the Apple logo on the screen, that amounts to a massive grass-roots brand-killing campaign.
As long as Apple keeps OSX fairly well tied to Apple hardware, the people running a hacked version on an unsupported platform don't have anyone else to blame if the system's performance is crap.
Caveat HAXX0RZ.
Where's the morality in forcing your wills upon another person?
So what are you doing when you tell Apple that you want something they've produced but don't want to pay for it or otherwise meet their terms? You're forcing your will upon them.
The difference is that Apple has actually put some time, money, and effort into making something that you want to use. You're just sitting there talking about morality, and hoping that you can sneak a justification for forcing your will upon Apple under the wire.
There's obviously a huge market for this.
There's also a huge market for products with all sorts of gee-whiz features that people end up hating once they've tried to live with them for a while.
Consumers are irrational, if not downright stupid. At the point of purchase, they look for the best possible price-per-feature ratio. At home and in daily life, they want a product that does a few things simply and well. That cognitive dissonance creates a lucrative market for products with huge checklists of features on the box, which then sit in a closet and are never used at home.
That strategy works just fine in commodity markets, because the vendors of such products aren't looking for repeat business. In the computer market, you want repeat sales.
For all the talk about demand, I haven't heard anyone claim that opening OSX up for generic x86 hardware will make it run better and more smoothly. Most people agree that it won't, they just say that they're willing to live with the problems in exchange for a cheaper bite at the Apple. In practice, they probably won't. They'll just kill Apple's reputation for good vertical integration and then demand that the OSX source code be put in the public domain once the company folds.
Pretty much, if Apple started selling OS X for vanilla PCs, their hardware sales will come down, because the only thing that Apple can compete on now is quality of the hardware. Then there is also the issue of piracy (even though pirates already have access to developer releases to OS X for x86, so that issue is already out there).
Apple competes on vertical integration. It's a service industry.. the same one RedHat and IBM are in.
Mac hardware is only one piece of Apple's product stack. The stack starts down at the board-design level and works its way up through firmware, OS, middleware, userland, and network services. That range of control gives Apple the power to tweak iTMS performance down in the hardware if that's the best, most cost-effective solution.
The 'Apple Tax' is the price people are willing to pay to make all those pieces work together. You can pay it to Apple at the time when you purchase the computer, you can pay it to a Windows support tech, you can pay it in time and labor as you tinker with your Linux box, or you can pay it in wasted time and effort as you continue to live with something that doesn't work right and really ought to be fixed. But pay it you will, one way or another.
Thing is, most consumers are willing to trade 'living with potential problems' for a price break at the point of purchase, but then they hate the product and consider it a waste of money after they try to live with it for a while. And of course they blame the manufacturer for making a crappy product, rather than accepting responsibility for their own decision to buy a crappy product based on a whiff of false economy.
Apple owes its current profit margins to the fact that it has a good reputation for vertical integration. Opening OSX up to generic PC hardware would rip an important layer out of the bottom of Apple's integration stack, forcing all the layers on top to adapt to that new instability. That would damage Apple's reputation for selling well-integrated products, and chip away at its real business.
Companies that sell vertical integration have to learn how to ignore what consumers say they want at the point of purchase, and pay attention to what people actually like to use over time. Thus, Apple will probably continue to ignore all the "I'd buy a worse product if it were cheaper" blather and stick to selling products people actually like to use.
And how many of those existing x86 drivers happen to be written in compliance with the Darwin kernel extension I/O standards? Strangely enough, not all driver code is immediately portable between operating systems, even when those OSes run on the same hardware.
It always amazes me when people go on about non-human factors.
.3% these days, up from .15% before industrial times. That's a 200% increase from previous levels, but a notably small fraction of the whole. But '200% growth' has more emotional impact for the average person than '.15% of the whole', and the former has gotten a lot more emphasis in public discussion of global warming than the latter.
.5% fluctuation in non-human CO2 emissions will have more effect on global temperature than all the human-generated CO2 combined.
Well, that's what happens when 99% of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from non-human sources.
Yes, human CO2 emissions have gone up dramatically in industrial times, compared to previous human CO2 emissions. I think we're around
If we use the standard scientific tools to examine the subject, 'human-forced global warming' is still a fairly weak proposition. Yes, we have observations that show an increase in average global temperatures over the last few centuries. Yes, we have lab data to show that CO2 absorbs energy from sunlight and can contribute to a greenhouse effect. But the actual correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and average global temperature is moderate, and even then over a reasonably long term. An X% change in CO2 today doesn't imply a Y% change in global temperature tomorrow. Over decades and centuries, maybe.. but other factors are obviously at work too.
Nor do we have really solid proof that a change in CO2 levels causes a change in average global temperature. The lab results tell us it's possible, but we don't have solid evidence to show that the CO2 came first, the temperature change came second, and no other mechanism could reasonably account for the change. We haven't clearly ruled out the possibility of reverse causation -- the idea that a change in global temperature forces a change in CO2 levels, not vice-versa -- nor have we ruled out the possibility that both CO2 and global temperature are forced by some third factor.
None of this is a reactionary refusal to accept facts. It's just basic scientific skepticism. CO2-forced global warming is an acceptable hypothesis, but we have to rule out all the counter-arguments before we accept it as 'scientific fact'. And doing that will be hard, because the period of time for which we have really good observations is much smaller than the observed period for correlations between CO2 and global temperature.
But even if we do accept the idea that CO2 forces a change in global temperature, we still have to deal with the fact that human-produced CO2 is only a small fraction of the total. There are individual volcanos in the Pacific Rim that pump out more CO2 per year than the US. And unless human-generated CO2 has vastly more effect on the environment than any other kind of CO2, a
So let's be clear that 'human-forced, CO2-based global warming' is two hypotheses removed from 'hard scientific fact'. 'CO2-based global warming' is one hypothesis, which is reasonable but still subject to debate. 'Human-forced global warming' is a second hypothesis, with very little objective, or even theoretical, support.
OSX supplies adequate and novelty and separation of concerns.
Safari doesn't actually launch programs you download. It simply checks downloaded zipfiles and disk images for executables, and warns you if it finds anything. At worst, it will automatically extract the contents of such a file into your specified downloads directory, and that behavior can be turned off. Downloading files is a fairly rare event compared to simply surfing webpages, and many of the files people download contain pure data. The 'this download contains a program' dialog is rare enough to keep most people from clicking 'Yes' out of pure habit.
The 'this program is launching for the first time' dialog belongs to the Finder. Again, it's fairly rare, since most people don't install new software on a daily basis. If anything, I'd expect people to associate it with "I've just installed a new program or upgraded the OS," so having it pop up unexpectedly would be something of a shock.
This article is what happens when someone gets so carried away with general principles that they lose touch with observed reality.
I'm a Mac user. I know that any OS can be cracked with sufficient effort. I know that viruses, trojans, and malware are a risk, in the general, theoretical sense. I also know that the number of actual, observed OSX exploits has been very low for a good long time.
I don't assume OSX's security is perfect, but I do know that it has a history of being pretty darned good. I know that Apple has built two or three layers of security into OSX (unix access controls and best practices, easy automated patching, and GUI-level alerts like, "The file you're downloading contains a program, are you sure you want it?" and "This program is trying to launch for the first time, do you want it to?"), and history suggests that their strategy works.
I also know that most security software breaks down into two basic feature sets: one set maintains a collection of best practices, access controls, and patch automation that keeps machines from getting infected in the first place, and the other set scans for known viruses to catch anything that got past the 'prevention' layer.
Well, the 'prevention' stuff already built into OSX, and since there are no known viruses for OSX currently in the wild, installing a signature checker would be a waste of time. And once again, history suggests that Apple's prevention strategy seems to be working pretty well.
If you want to talk about improving a Mac's security, don't just wave the "Oooh, it's coming.. booga booga" FUD-stick in my face. Show me how the current set of OSX tools and policies can be beaten, or show me some other set of tools or policies that have a better track-record at preventing infection. As of today, the risk of getting a virus under OSX is significantly lower than the risk of getting hit with a Windows virus before the AV vendors publish a signature that will catch it.
Right now, my observed risk of infection is practically nil. Right now, OSX's default security policies give better results than anything in the Windows market. Right now, I don't know of any products that will lower my risk of infection so much further that they'll be worth the time, money, effort, or computing resources I'd devote to them.
And I remain steadfastly unimpressed by abstract "if you think your security is good enough, it isn't good enough" lines of reasoning. Every security policy accepts some level of risk. Every security policy ends up saying, "well, I guess that's good enough," somewhere. If you don't like where I've drawn the line, show me a better place to draw it, and show me that doing so will be cost-effective in some way. If you can't, I'm gonna call FUD.
Imagine a world where food can be made in an inexpensive solar powered replicator but people still starve because the software used by these devices is "protected" by copyright and DRM.
Okay, I'll give you points for one of the most spectacularly contrived, contrary-to-fact, oversimplified, emotionally overloaded straw-man arguments I've ever seen.
The argument itself is crap, though. It falls apart as soon as one person in the world decides to release a food-synthesis recipe under a noncommercial-use Creative Commons License. That person still holds IP rights over the recipe, and can use them to prevent anyone else from taking that recipe out of the hands of those poor, starving children (who will then breed like rats until their expansion is constrained by the next limiting resource, or die in a massive plague).
In your IP-free utopia, the big information distributor would make Microsoft look warm and fuzzy. There are always constraints on the creation and distribution of information, and most of those constraints are subject to economies of scale. That means the rich have the power to control the distribution of information, with or without a concept of 'intellectual property'. The factories that press CDs, the trucks that deliver them, the millions of tons of copper and glass stretched across the countryside, all of those are physical property. And it only takes half an ounce more brains than a ping-pong ball to think of ways to extend 'physical property' rights in ways that more or less boil down to "intellectual property for me, but none for you."
Going back to your own example, those free-food-machines have to come from somewhere. Presumably there will be a factory of some kind making them. But there probably won't be any competition, because whoever has the most money will be able to build the most machines and cut all their competitors out of the market, and don't even think about telling me that someone will come up with a better machine, because that's just free R&D for the big guy.
So once there's a monopoly on free-food-machines, what's to stop the manufacturer from designing one that refuses to accept that 'nourishment for everyone' recipe?
Granted the GP uses some loaded words, but I just got done working with a guy who got some kind of low-end knockoff MP3 player in a promotional deal.
Whatever it was, it was junk. It locked up at random times, he couldn't copy his music over from his computer because of bitchiness between the DRM and Windows Media Player, he had to install a new version of WMP to make something work and his registry got trashed in the process, etcetera. All in all, it was a shining example of how badly things can suck in the wonderful world of Win-based MP3 players.
And all the while, he kept wandering around shouting, "Aaah, my iPod fucked up again.. worthless piece of crap!"
GP has a point that most people on the street are not very good at brand-identification when it comes to computer technology, and the confusion can lead to good products getting bad word-of-mouth while bad products escape in the confusion.
If that handful of hackers and tech savvy users along with a few engineers [pbs.org] can show that running OS X on commodity hardware works well and a community builds up around it, Apple may have the best opportunity it has ever had to sharply swing it's market share.
So the engineers do their dance, the beancounters make their decision, and Apple sells five $49 copies of OSX. Meanwhile, Dell gets its cut of five $1200 boxes because the beancounters find those more 'cost effective' than an equal number of $2000 Macs. Apple's 'market share' leaps upward, on a total revenue of $245.
Whoo.. doggy-daddy, hold me back from that fun.
Look, Apple doesn't have a 'hardware business'. Nor does it have a 'software business'. Apple is in the business of selling a service called 'vertical integration'. It controls a techology stack that starts down at the level of board design, then moves up through firmware, OS, middleware and userland applications, all the way up to tethered peripherals and network services.
'Hardware' and 'software' are commodities. Selling commodities is a lousy business strategy in computer technology, because the technologies evolve so quickly. The companies that make money in computer tech sell services:
Operating systems are worthless. People give the darned things away these days. And the hardware/OS/software 'platform' loses relevance as AJAX makes network computing and applications service vendors (there's that 's'-word again) more viable. Sure, there will always be hardware, OSes and software, but as time goes on it make less and less difference what particular kind of hardware, OS, and software you're using.
In the long run, 'hardware' and 'software' are losing business propositions when taken on their own. 'Hardware and software that work well together' is a lucrative and highly sustainable business, OTOH.
From that point of view, there's no reason for Apple to make it easy for people to DIY up their own OSX boxes with off-the-shelf x86 hardware. Yeah, slashdotters are willing to do their own vertical integration, but in doing so, they'd be cutting into Apple's true market.
Of course, that doesn't stop some slashdotters from demanding that Apple simply hand over the technology they aren't capable of building for themselves.
Actually, Apple gets value from the combination of style and solidity.
Consumers resent a crappy product in a pretty box. They feel, with justification, that the company should have spent more money on "making the damn thing work" rather than just slapping on a few go-faster stripes.
That makes style a big market advantage for Apple. It doesn't matter how much you case-mod your Winbox, you'll still be on the patch-and-virus treadmill, and still have the same risk of BSODs as someone using a POS white box. Likewise, a KDE box in a gorgeous enclosure will have exactly the same function set as a built-in-the-basement wonder.
Apple's products are solid enough that their style is worth considering. People freaked out over the Nano because you could scratch the screen if you put it in a pocket full of change, not because it randomly locked up, or because they couldn't transfer some of their files, or because it stopped working in cold weather, or any other basic function issue.
Once you hit the point of diminishing returns on 'making it just work', style is the next playing field on which you compete. But you can't play in the 'style' arena until you've aced the 'it just works' level.
Every suggested 'improvement' I've seen so far in this discussion involves making the service more complicated or more annoying.
.Mac with ads. Others want tiered services. Others want bandwidth fees. Your suggestion assumes that the upsell potential from a free limited version would outweigh the loss of revenue from currently paying customers dropping back to the 'free' tier and the increased costs of all the new free riders.
.Mac subscribers and what you make them put up with. Nobody has offered a version of that tradeoff more consumer-friendly than Apple's "pay this much for these services if you think they're worth it" model.
Some people want free
None of these proposals passes a basic Apple marketing principle: "Don't ask your customers to do something you wouldn't want to do yourself."
Do people want advertising? No. At best it's a necessary evil that funds other services that people do want. Do people want to figure their way through a tiered rate plan to get the best cost/benefit ratio for their personal needs? No. They'll lowball their estimate of what they think they'll need, then resent the thought of having to pay "even more" for what they really want. Do people want "hey, you got slashdotted, you owe us $950" messages? No. Do people want [Slashdot Subscribers, click here to give feedback] upsell messages? No. It's just another form of advertising. Do people want "limited services"? No. They'll just separate into factions who'd be willing to trade some of X which they don't use for more of Y which they really like but aren't willing to [Slashdot Subscribers, click here to give feedback] upsell to.
Ultimately, everyone accepts the fact that there will have to be some kind of tradeoff between what you give