In WWII, the Battle of Britain is widely regarded as a turning point. Not the end, but a critical point, when German attacks were rebuffed and their war machine failed to cow the British.
That was largely due to the British air force (RAF).
A number of the ace pilots from the time had spent time in India, strafing the villages that were giving problems for the British Raj. That gave them valuable practice and improved their skills greatly.
We see the RAF as the 'good guys', but how do we reconcile the two? Is it as simple as black and white?
A better example: Hitler started the Battle of Britain by bombing the UK industries and war machine as a prelude to invasion. Churchill knew that without these two, they would lose in short order, so he sent the British bombers over the cities of the Germans, bombing the civilian targets. Some cities, such as Dresden, were reduced to ash.
Hitler was so enraged that he ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb London, to reduce it to rubble. The breathing space that created allowed the British war machine to rise to the challenge, and win the Battle of Britain.
Terrible choices, but they proved right.
So - who's the wolf, and who's the sheep here? Your model is far too simplistic, and seems to be one of those "with us or against us" things, when in fact most people are neither, or both.
For years now, I've been asking for levitating PowerBooks and Segway-mounted towers from Apple.
And now, with the prospect of Pentium-based PowerBooks, I'll be able to have the former.
Just pop the case off and turn the unit upside down. The air blasting out of that sucker should keep a few kilograms airborne....
You know... after about five years, my wishes from Apple seem a little dated. Maybe I should get back onto waiting for that up-and-coming game company, Bungie, to finish Halo so I can play it on my Mac first!
Just being picky, but what about web-based email clients? Aren't Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and others accessed through a browser?
And... I hate saying this, but... Access can do a lot of simple spreadsheet things. It's not good, and definitely not pretty, but you can do it. After a few years as a spreadsheet, database and general data gimp, I know this (but wish I didn't).
The core of OS X is open sourced. You can download it and look through the code, if you like. If you want to know, you can.
The hardware is hardly anything magical, despite the advertising. It's just about all standard stuff - ATA, DDR RAM, HyperTransport, PCI, PCI Express, USB, FireWire and so on. If you want to know, it's pretty simple to find out.
But if you want to change these things, you're in the black box world. But that wasn't your complaint, and I don't see many people who care about hacking inside their computer. A few geeks maybe (and I'm one, to some degree) but most people want to sit down, turn it on and use the thing. They don't want to pull it apart, recompile the OS, overclock the CPU or any other arcane process.
Apple's philosophy would be better put as "We're making it easier for you" rather than "You don't need to know." As we all learned in computer programming, hiding complexity is a *good thing* as it simplifies the processes that build upon it. Apple hide complexity, and don't try to appeal to all people.
Want a truly free OS? Go Linux. Want an OS that covers about 90% of the market? Go Windows. Want an OS that looks cool and seems fairly easy to get to grips with? Go Mac OS X.
Want an OS that is all things to all people? There is no such beast. Apple gives it a shot with Darwin, OS X, Aqua, Java, Unix development and porting, OS X development, a slew of 'big' apps and even some games. But will it appeal to everyone, from Slashdot to grandmothers?
I wonder if he owns the trademark to utterly craptacular web design?
And some of the words?
Renaissance Name of a period in history. A common word.
Stradivarius Surname of a family of violin makers. Can you trademark someone else's name? And really expect them to licence it back from you?
Tirade Hmm... I feel like going on one right now...
This guy is a total and utter bastard (is that one of his?) and his trademarking of words *and then going after people in unrelated industries* is even less convincing as a business tactic than anything SCO ever came up with.
Why Northrop Grumman caved in, I'll never know. They should have nailed his arse to the court documents and filed it under 'F' for...
Press the F12 key for about a second, and the disk ejects. There's a little eject icon printed on the keyboard to make this clear.
or
Drag the CD to the Dock, and the Trash icon has become an eject icon. Drop the CD on it, and it'll eject. (In fact, while you're dragging removable media, the Trash icon in the Dock cannot be seen - it must appear as an eject icon. Apple finally fixed that weird UI issue that existed since 1984.)
or
Right-click (or control-click if you've only got one button) and 'Eject' is in the contextual menu.
or
From any Finder window which shows the disk (if you show removable media in the left-hand bar, you'll always see it) click the little eject icon that sits on top of the disk's icon.
or
Ferret around the system and install the eject menu widget thingy that you can just click to eject.
But you're right. It's so much easier to reboot and hold the mouse button down. With that in mind, try banging the keyboard into your nose as a way to type. It gets a bit painful with longer documents, but it works!
Of course, it wasn't meant that way. It was a way of opening up discussion as to why a few people seem to insist upon Ogg Vorbis support when the entire industry seems to be deeming it irrelevant, or at best an afterthought.
A *real* troll comment would have been to question whether Ogg Vorbis is any good, or to use some sort of hackneyed crap about standards.
I can only assume that the people who moderated me are hair-trigger personalities with no interest in either explaining their positions or in allowing any questioning.
So to please them (because I'm a lovely person), I'll get on board the Ogg Vorbis train. Sieg heil Ogg Vorbis! Ve shall not qvestion its superiority or allow anyvone to do so! Qvestioners vill be tied up viz piano vire unt slapped vis a vet fish!
I did think of that, but then I couldn't find a compelling reason to buy video content, put it on an expensive iPod and transport that to somewhere I can plug into a TV when instead I could just buy a DVD of the content and take that with me.
It's not hard to think of specific uses, but I can't think of good, general uses that show reasonable value.
The colour interface looks so good on the iPod Photo models that there's just no excuse for it not to be across the whole line.
Sure, you don't actually *need* colour if you just want to listen to music, but it's more vibrant, more dynamic and fits better with the look of OS X.
And the brick game looks a little nicer too. I was hoping for Arkanoid, but there you go.... but a video player? I don't want the iPod in its current form to play video. I just can't imagine anything looking good on a miniscule screen like that, but I can imagine what that'd do to a hard drive that relies on large RAM caching rather than sustained reads.
A video iPod would have to be very large to be worthwhile (I'm more than doubtful of the video success of the new Sony PSP, but it'll take a while for the results to come in on that). A large unit contradicts what the iPod is all about - a small, convenient device for a single purpose.
Lastly - I don't see why people want video while they're out and about. Audio I can understand - you can easily walk around and listen to music. Video? I look forward to the first hysterical warnings brought on by teens walking accidentally into traffic while watching their PSPs. You just can't watch video and do other things. It's too intrusive.
Your second paragraph isn't well based in reality.
The reason there are so many viruses for Windows machines is not that they are the most popular (although that is a factor), but that they historically shipped with all ports open and responding, with email and internet apps that happily responded to scripting and with many, many buffer overflows in the OS.
For previous versions of Windows, security was added afterwards, not built in.
Mac OS X is not the pinnacle of security either, but it doesn't ship with any ports open and listening and it is a lot harder for an AppleScript to maliciously do anything (let alone run).
I hope that the next version of Windows has a real, solid security layer built right into the core of the OS. As someone who runs both (and still don't have a virus checker for my PC, but haven't suffered yet) I want viruses and malware to be non-issues in future. "Trusted Computing" has yet to inspire confidence though...
The official standard that Apple supports across iTunes and the iPods, and the rest of the industry is picking up on or is already using?
That one?
Or do you mean the DRM addition (FairPlay) to AAC that is Apple-specific, and that no-one else uses? The one you see in all iTunes and the iPods, but only when you buy from the online music store?
First up - every single format for recording music, from CDs to Ogg to anything in reality today - is lossy. Every one of them.
You *always* lose something in the process.
You lose positioning information that your ears pick up.
You lose frequencies outside the range of your recording equipment.
The frequencies that you can capture are not captured perfectly - some are, others are not, losses are uneven across the response range.
You then lose more data if you go digital, because only a near infinite sample rate can match reality.
Even then you have to have a near-infinite resolution. 16, 24 or 1024 bits is not enough. Not even a gigabyte of data per recorded instant captures the waveform perfectly. You just can't do it.
You always lose.
The only actual non-lossy method of data is to have the musicians sit around you and play. Anythings else - anything at all - involves some loss.
Can we drop the whole 'lossy' point as irrelevant then? Please?
Sadly, Ogg Vorbis support is unlikely in the iPod. Outside of Slashdot, it's unheard of, and even inside Slashdot people generally don't care. What does it matter if you lose some quality when you're walking along outside, with all the background noise that entails? Only if you use your iPod in a stable room environment will this matter, and you can just use your computer there.
The final nail in the iPod/Ogg Vorbis thing is that apparently the iPod's processor can't work fast enough for Ogg Vorbis decoding. I don't know really - I've not looked into it.
I thought the same thing when I bought an iPod for my fiancee as a birthday present.
I was over here in Australia, looking around in a consumer electronics shop and *Steve Jobs* came up to me and sold the thing.
I was as surprised as anyone. I mean - Steve Jobs? Here? Selling to me?
It was a real ego boost.
But then I realised that he must do this for every single iPod all over the planet. How many is that now - 10 or 20 million?
Steve Jobs makes Santa look like a slacker as far as global travel goes.
Still, it was a good example of the parent post's point. He personally gets you to buy an iPod. Even people who've never heard of him are convinced that they need an iPod by the subliminal messages in Apple's advertising campaign. Think those are women dancing? Think again! It's Steve Jobs all the time!
Is the line "But until musician's stop caring about the bottom line" synonymous with "But until musicians stop feeling the need to eat or sleep somewhere"?
Sure, you can do this as a hobby, but what if it's something that consumes you, takes over your life in a quest to produce something truly great? Who feeds you? Who pays for your living arrangements?
It's not the greed of musicians that's the problem. It's the attitude that everything based in the digital world must be free when things just don't work like that in real life.
People need money to live. If you disagree with that, what's the better alternative that can be a reality today, in this world, with the current cost of living?
I won't argue with your point, but I take great issue with statements like "the country that has provided them with the most freedom and liberty of ANY government in the history of man."
What about England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many, many others.
Your statement implies that at *no time* in the history of any other nation has the freedom of the individual been as great as that in the USA.
If you can explicitly define what you mean by "freedom" (it's quite a nebulous concept) then it's trivial to show examples in pretty much any country where the freedoms enjoyed by the masses were as great as in your own country.
Certainly the freedom I have in Australia is at least equal to what you have in the US. I'd argue it was greater, but I'm biased;)
In many ways, I agree with your point that every nation owes a debt of gratitude to the military forces that protect it. These people are willing to go out and die in our name, and they believe that the leaders have the moral authority to ask them to do that.
That's powerful stuff.
While I may disagree with the political decisions, I can't fault the Australian soldiers over there for what they do. That takes a lot of bravery and skill.
I use MS Access in my workplace to manage about 5 GB of data, spread over four databases (the largest two are 1.5GB each).
The only way this is at all stable is that I'm the only one putting data in, I do it in a certain manner and I don't remove data (creating 'holes' in the database file that must be later removed). And I'm working on migrating this to SQL Server.
Access is not a solution for large scale, multi-user data requirements. It will fail unless you spend a lot of time keeping it working. There are too many conditions in which the database will become corrupted, and when it's used by many people, these conditions multiply.
Any business that uses it in that manner is wasting money in support. It will fall over catastrophically one day. If the data is critical to business function, it should be migrated to a better DBMS platform, such as SQL Server, Oracle, Postgre SQL or just about anything other than Access. Just about every other platform has support for transactions, database file management, files being split over RAID drives and more.
Seriously - why should Apple *not* use a technology that protects their core business?
It doesn't restrict user choice - users will have the same choices as now. It doesn't noticably affect users at all. I'm yet to see anything in support of Apple going to a software model other than "I'd buy a copy" and I am extremely sceptical about how many of those statements would translate to reality.
It's a 35 billion dollar business. Would you bet the whole thing on what a bunch of guys from Slashdot say?
Hmm... so what processor has that machine got? And the hard drive?
Or did you just pick out a stick of RAM when the conversation was actually about the whole computer? Have you completely and utterly missed the point here, or are you intentionally trying to obfuscate it?
You know, Apple RAM *is* expensive (how much do Dell charge, or HP?), and you'll be hard pressed to find a single person here who either defends that or justifies it. My iBook has third-party RAM and I'd love to see Apple sell machines with no RAM and no hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
In WWII, the Battle of Britain is widely regarded as a turning point. Not the end, but a critical point, when German attacks were rebuffed and their war machine failed to cow the British.
That was largely due to the British air force (RAF).
A number of the ace pilots from the time had spent time in India, strafing the villages that were giving problems for the British Raj. That gave them valuable practice and improved their skills greatly.
We see the RAF as the 'good guys', but how do we reconcile the two? Is it as simple as black and white?
A better example: Hitler started the Battle of Britain by bombing the UK industries and war machine as a prelude to invasion. Churchill knew that without these two, they would lose in short order, so he sent the British bombers over the cities of the Germans, bombing the civilian targets. Some cities, such as Dresden, were reduced to ash.
Hitler was so enraged that he ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb London, to reduce it to rubble. The breathing space that created allowed the British war machine to rise to the challenge, and win the Battle of Britain.
Terrible choices, but they proved right.
So - who's the wolf, and who's the sheep here? Your model is far too simplistic, and seems to be one of those "with us or against us" things, when in fact most people are neither, or both.
It *would* be great news for Safari, if Apple hadn't already ported it, and if it wasn't based on KHTML.
I like Safari too!
For years now, I've been asking for levitating PowerBooks and Segway-mounted towers from Apple.
...
And now, with the prospect of Pentium-based PowerBooks, I'll be able to have the former.
Just pop the case off and turn the unit upside down. The air blasting out of that sucker should keep a few kilograms airborne.
You know... after about five years, my wishes from Apple seem a little dated. Maybe I should get back onto waiting for that up-and-coming game company, Bungie, to finish Halo so I can play it on my Mac first!
Just being picky, but what about web-based email clients? Aren't Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and others accessed through a browser?
And... I hate saying this, but... Access can do a lot of simple spreadsheet things. It's not good, and definitely not pretty, but you can do it. After a few years as a spreadsheet, database and general data gimp, I know this (but wish I didn't).
I wonder about these sort of posts.
The core of OS X is open sourced. You can download it and look through the code, if you like. If you want to know, you can.
The hardware is hardly anything magical, despite the advertising. It's just about all standard stuff - ATA, DDR RAM, HyperTransport, PCI, PCI Express, USB, FireWire and so on. If you want to know, it's pretty simple to find out.
But if you want to change these things, you're in the black box world. But that wasn't your complaint, and I don't see many people who care about hacking inside their computer. A few geeks maybe (and I'm one, to some degree) but most people want to sit down, turn it on and use the thing. They don't want to pull it apart, recompile the OS, overclock the CPU or any other arcane process.
Apple's philosophy would be better put as "We're making it easier for you" rather than "You don't need to know." As we all learned in computer programming, hiding complexity is a *good thing* as it simplifies the processes that build upon it. Apple hide complexity, and don't try to appeal to all people.
Want a truly free OS? Go Linux.
Want an OS that covers about 90% of the market? Go Windows.
Want an OS that looks cool and seems fairly easy to get to grips with? Go Mac OS X.
Want an OS that is all things to all people? There is no such beast. Apple gives it a shot with Darwin, OS X, Aqua, Java, Unix development and porting, OS X development, a slew of 'big' apps and even some games. But will it appeal to everyone, from Slashdot to grandmothers?
Never.
You just can't win with some people.
Argh! My eyes! My retinas are *bleeding*!
...
I wonder if he owns the trademark to utterly craptacular web design?
And some of the words?
Renaissance
Name of a period in history. A common word.
Stradivarius
Surname of a family of violin makers. Can you trademark someone else's name? And really expect them to licence it back from you?
Tirade
Hmm... I feel like going on one right now...
This guy is a total and utter bastard (is that one of his?) and his trademarking of words *and then going after people in unrelated industries* is even less convincing as a business tactic than anything SCO ever came up with.
Why Northrop Grumman caved in, I'll never know. They should have nailed his arse to the court documents and filed it under 'F' for
Let's see...
Press the F12 key for about a second, and the disk ejects. There's a little eject icon printed on the keyboard to make this clear.
or
Drag the CD to the Dock, and the Trash icon has become an eject icon. Drop the CD on it, and it'll eject. (In fact, while you're dragging removable media, the Trash icon in the Dock cannot be seen - it must appear as an eject icon. Apple finally fixed that weird UI issue that existed since 1984.)
or
Right-click (or control-click if you've only got one button) and 'Eject' is in the contextual menu.
or
From any Finder window which shows the disk (if you show removable media in the left-hand bar, you'll always see it) click the little eject icon that sits on top of the disk's icon.
or
Ferret around the system and install the eject menu widget thingy that you can just click to eject.
But you're right. It's so much easier to reboot and hold the mouse button down. With that in mind, try banging the keyboard into your nose as a way to type. It gets a bit painful with longer documents, but it works!
Wow. My first comment to be moderated as a troll.
Of course, it wasn't meant that way. It was a way of opening up discussion as to why a few people seem to insist upon Ogg Vorbis support when the entire industry seems to be deeming it irrelevant, or at best an afterthought.
A *real* troll comment would have been to question whether Ogg Vorbis is any good, or to use some sort of hackneyed crap about standards.
I can only assume that the people who moderated me are hair-trigger personalities with no interest in either explaining their positions or in allowing any questioning.
So to please them (because I'm a lovely person), I'll get on board the Ogg Vorbis train. Sieg heil Ogg Vorbis! Ve shall not qvestion its superiority or allow anyvone to do so! Qvestioners vill be tied up viz piano vire unt slapped vis a vet fish!
I know - my comment was the parent of his one, and even then I was wondering where he was.
He may have been an Apple guy or he may have been someone posing as an Apple guy, but he seemed to know his stuff and put his points well.
If only we had our resident Apple 'insider' around to give some info...
As Seen on TV has been strangely quiet since the x86 announcement...
I did think of that, but then I couldn't find a compelling reason to buy video content, put it on an expensive iPod and transport that to somewhere I can plug into a TV when instead I could just buy a DVD of the content and take that with me.
It's not hard to think of specific uses, but I can't think of good, general uses that show reasonable value.
What is it with OGG Vorbis anyway?
The colour interface looks so good on the iPod Photo models that there's just no excuse for it not to be across the whole line.
... but a video player? I don't want the iPod in its current form to play video. I just can't imagine anything looking good on a miniscule screen like that, but I can imagine what that'd do to a hard drive that relies on large RAM caching rather than sustained reads.
Sure, you don't actually *need* colour if you just want to listen to music, but it's more vibrant, more dynamic and fits better with the look of OS X.
And the brick game looks a little nicer too. I was hoping for Arkanoid, but there you go.
A video iPod would have to be very large to be worthwhile (I'm more than doubtful of the video success of the new Sony PSP, but it'll take a while for the results to come in on that). A large unit contradicts what the iPod is all about - a small, convenient device for a single purpose.
Lastly - I don't see why people want video while they're out and about. Audio I can understand - you can easily walk around and listen to music. Video? I look forward to the first hysterical warnings brought on by teens walking accidentally into traffic while watching their PSPs. You just can't watch video and do other things. It's too intrusive.
Your second paragraph isn't well based in reality.
The reason there are so many viruses for Windows machines is not that they are the most popular (although that is a factor), but that they historically shipped with all ports open and responding, with email and internet apps that happily responded to scripting and with many, many buffer overflows in the OS.
For previous versions of Windows, security was added afterwards, not built in.
Mac OS X is not the pinnacle of security either, but it doesn't ship with any ports open and listening and it is a lot harder for an AppleScript to maliciously do anything (let alone run).
I hope that the next version of Windows has a real, solid security layer built right into the core of the OS. As someone who runs both (and still don't have a virus checker for my PC, but haven't suffered yet) I want viruses and malware to be non-issues in future. "Trusted Computing" has yet to inspire confidence though...
You mean the MPEG-4 AAC standard?
The official standard that Apple supports across iTunes and the iPods, and the rest of the industry is picking up on or is already using?
That one?
Or do you mean the DRM addition (FairPlay) to AAC that is Apple-specific, and that no-one else uses? The one you see in all iTunes and the iPods, but only when you buy from the online music store?
That one?
First up - every single format for recording music, from CDs to Ogg to anything in reality today - is lossy. Every one of them.
You *always* lose something in the process.
You lose positioning information that your ears pick up.
You lose frequencies outside the range of your recording equipment.
The frequencies that you can capture are not captured perfectly - some are, others are not, losses are uneven across the response range.
You then lose more data if you go digital, because only a near infinite sample rate can match reality.
Even then you have to have a near-infinite resolution. 16, 24 or 1024 bits is not enough. Not even a gigabyte of data per recorded instant captures the waveform perfectly. You just can't do it.
You always lose.
The only actual non-lossy method of data is to have the musicians sit around you and play. Anythings else - anything at all - involves some loss.
Can we drop the whole 'lossy' point as irrelevant then? Please?
Sadly, Ogg Vorbis support is unlikely in the iPod. Outside of Slashdot, it's unheard of, and even inside Slashdot people generally don't care. What does it matter if you lose some quality when you're walking along outside, with all the background noise that entails? Only if you use your iPod in a stable room environment will this matter, and you can just use your computer there.
The final nail in the iPod/Ogg Vorbis thing is that apparently the iPod's processor can't work fast enough for Ogg Vorbis decoding. I don't know really - I've not looked into it.
I thought the same thing when I bought an iPod for my fiancee as a birthday present.
I was over here in Australia, looking around in a consumer electronics shop and *Steve Jobs* came up to me and sold the thing.
I was as surprised as anyone. I mean - Steve Jobs? Here? Selling to me?
It was a real ego boost.
But then I realised that he must do this for every single iPod all over the planet. How many is that now - 10 or 20 million?
Steve Jobs makes Santa look like a slacker as far as global travel goes.
Still, it was a good example of the parent post's point. He personally gets you to buy an iPod. Even people who've never heard of him are convinced that they need an iPod by the subliminal messages in Apple's advertising campaign. Think those are women dancing? Think again! It's Steve Jobs all the time!
He's everywhere!
Is the line "But until musician's stop caring about the bottom line" synonymous with "But until musicians stop feeling the need to eat or sleep somewhere"?
Sure, you can do this as a hobby, but what if it's something that consumes you, takes over your life in a quest to produce something truly great? Who feeds you? Who pays for your living arrangements?
It's not the greed of musicians that's the problem. It's the attitude that everything based in the digital world must be free when things just don't work like that in real life.
People need money to live. If you disagree with that, what's the better alternative that can be a reality today, in this world, with the current cost of living?
I won't argue with your point, but I take great issue with statements like "the country that has provided them with the most freedom and liberty of ANY government in the history of man."
;)
What about England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many, many others.
Your statement implies that at *no time* in the history of any other nation has the freedom of the individual been as great as that in the USA.
If you can explicitly define what you mean by "freedom" (it's quite a nebulous concept) then it's trivial to show examples in pretty much any country where the freedoms enjoyed by the masses were as great as in your own country.
Certainly the freedom I have in Australia is at least equal to what you have in the US. I'd argue it was greater, but I'm biased
In many ways, I agree with your point that every nation owes a debt of gratitude to the military forces that protect it. These people are willing to go out and die in our name, and they believe that the leaders have the moral authority to ask them to do that.
That's powerful stuff.
While I may disagree with the political decisions, I can't fault the Australian soldiers over there for what they do. That takes a lot of bravery and skill.
If you haven't seen it yet, have a look at the Australian film "The Castle"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118826/
It's about a government-sanctioned corporate grab for land (buying up houses to allow for an expansion to the airport).
The film is a classic here in Australia. Worth seeing.
I use MS Access in my workplace to manage about 5 GB of data, spread over four databases (the largest two are 1.5GB each).
The only way this is at all stable is that I'm the only one putting data in, I do it in a certain manner and I don't remove data (creating 'holes' in the database file that must be later removed). And I'm working on migrating this to SQL Server.
Access is not a solution for large scale, multi-user data requirements. It will fail unless you spend a lot of time keeping it working. There are too many conditions in which the database will become corrupted, and when it's used by many people, these conditions multiply.
Any business that uses it in that manner is wasting money in support. It will fall over catastrophically one day. If the data is critical to business function, it should be migrated to a better DBMS platform, such as SQL Server, Oracle, Postgre SQL or just about anything other than Access. Just about every other platform has support for transactions, database file management, files being split over RAID drives and more.
In Safari, the page renders with some text past the right edge of the window. Resizing the window doesn't help either.
A little unfortunate, when it's a case study of a web site.
Why shouldn't they use a hardware locki-in?
Seriously - why should Apple *not* use a technology that protects their core business?
It doesn't restrict user choice - users will have the same choices as now. It doesn't noticably affect users at all. I'm yet to see anything in support of Apple going to a software model other than "I'd buy a copy" and I am extremely sceptical about how many of those statements would translate to reality.
It's a 35 billion dollar business. Would you bet the whole thing on what a bunch of guys from Slashdot say?
Hmm... so what processor has that machine got? And the hard drive?
Or did you just pick out a stick of RAM when the conversation was actually about the whole computer? Have you completely and utterly missed the point here, or are you intentionally trying to obfuscate it?
You know, Apple RAM *is* expensive (how much do Dell charge, or HP?), and you'll be hard pressed to find a single person here who either defends that or justifies it. My iBook has third-party RAM and I'd love to see Apple sell machines with no RAM and no hard drive.