No offense, johnos... I'm not trying to call you a liar. But if you don't know Hinkley, then that means you presumably weren't around when all this went down; you're a new guy. So what makes you think that you really heard the full story from your employer? I'm not saying that Hinkley reacted correctly; obviously he didn't. But I don't think he thought he was going to get a better deal; I think he felt he was losing control (or had already lost control) of the company.
And the false promises that Roks and others made to Hinkley, LONG before your time at HLC, are quite relevant to this.
Ok, I have to get in one little dig - I hope you're looking for a new job, because it doesn't look like HLC has much of a business model these days!;-)
Re:OSX has more jewlery hanging on it than Mr. T
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
If you DO enable root via NetInfo Manager, which you can do (it's just not a great idea) then you CAN log in as root via the GUI.
It's not necessary to CREATE a root account, as it already exists; it's just got login disabled by default, which is a good thing. If you try to be all 'l33t' and make your user account called 'root' then you may be shooting yourself in the foot, yes.
I'm just tired of cleaning up after idiots who insist on doing EVERYTHING as root - I'm talking, they want to be "root@mystupidlinuxbox" so they have their damn mail forwarded to the root account on their linux box. Gimme a break!
It's kind of interesting that it seems the "geeks" who have long hated Apple for many reasons (some good, most bad, IMHO) will now be seeing Apple more in the Linux/Open Source camp as far as fair use rights and the freedom to be able to do what you're supposed to be able to do with information (that's not to say pirate it, but no artificial fair use restrictions).
Meanwhile, Microsoft is further entrenching itself in the camp of "we're the only game in town, so we don't have to attract users; they're stuck with us. Now we can attract record companies."
I can only hope that this'll backfire on Microsoft when it turns out that the general public DOES indeed care about fair use.
Re:OSX has more jewlery hanging on it than Mr. T
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
"One thing that I don't like about OS X is the root account is not active right off the start. They are afraid that if traditional MAC users are able to change/etc/motd, then the system will crash or something."
This really is a GOOD thing... if you actually did your research and knew anything at all about the system (or even the fact that "Mac" is not an acronym, and thus is properly capitalized "Mac" rather than "MAC") you'd realize that disabling root access is a great security feature. After all, sudo is configured by default to allow the Administrative account (essentially, the first one you set up) to do anything via sudo, including opening up a shell as root.
What Apple's doing is trying to reduce security vulnerabilities by not even allowing anyone to log in as root, not even locally.
Of course, you can change this rather easily, but the only reason to is if you wanted to log into the GUI as root. And if you know enough about what you're doing to be root, you shouldn't need to do anything via the gui.
Or are you one of those idiots who uses their linux box as root all the time and wonders why they keep hosing their system every time some shitty app decides to call unlink() on/etc or something?
"NeXT eventually quit making hardware and implemented NeXTStep for other operating systems, changing the name to OpenStep. "
Actually, NeXTSTEP was the OS, as i recall, and its name was changed to OPENSTEP when it was ported to Intel hardware. NeXTStep was the set of frameworks for rapid app development, which was called OpenStep on OPENSTEP as well as on the other operating systems on which it ran, such as Solaris and Windows NT.
This is pure nitpicking, and I don't mean to detract from a really excellent article. But NeXT Inc's product line was always a bizarre confusion of different capitalizations; I may not have it quite right either.
I don't know what you can really do. But I know why this happened.
Verizon did the usual Bell Atlantic thing and made like they were going to buy out Northpoint... and then dropped it, causing Northpoint to look really bad and be unable to get other investors (as the other investors had already been scared away by Verizon). So Northpoint was screwed, and Verizon gets rid of a competitor.
From what I've heard from a reliable source (a friend of mine whose business used Northpoint until 3 days ago), MSN DSL customers are really screwed - MSN didn't give them ANY warning at all about the cutoff, and MSN contracts through Northpoint (err, that should be past tense, no?) in the New England area.
I would say "serves em right for using MSN," but MSN knew for days at least about this; I can't imagine an ISP not notifying its customers about this kind of cutoff.
It's a shame... Northpoint seems like they provided a good, reasonably priced, reliable service, especially when compared with, say, Verizon.
The refocus on vector supercomputing is interesting. I wonder if it might have a side-effect of helping scientists take advantage of the Altivec units on PowerPC G4s. Yes, I know the Altivec can't do double-precision floats, but you don't ALWAYS need that, and companies like GCG in the biotech industry are excited about taking advantage of OS X on G4 hardware for bioinformatics. For tasks that don't need the full power of a Cray, but are nonetheless vectorizable, I hope the cross-pollination of vectorization in algorithm design will benefit everyone.
The refocus on vector supercomputing is interesting. I wonder if it might have a side-effect of helping scientists take advantage of the Altivec units on PowerPC G4s. Yes, I know the Altivec can't do double-precision floats, but you don't ALWAYS need that, and companies like GCG in the biotech industry are excited about taking advantage of OS X on G4 hardware for bioinformatics. For tasks that don't need the full power of a Cray, but are nonetheless vectorizable, I hope the cross-pollination of vectorization in algorithm design will benefit everyone.
Piracy (as opposed to theft; they are NOT exactly the same) hurts copyright owners not because they no longer have as many copies they can sell (that's how theft hurts the victim) but because they no longer sell as many copies because some people pirate rather than buying. This is why copy protection of software SOMETIMES works, especially protection that makes copying impossible but doesn't keep the software from working. But more importantly, most heavily protected software (like, say, Quark or Media100) is the way its users make a living, so they WILL accept limitations (such as needing a computer with certain free ports for a hardware dongle) to be able to use the software.
On the other hand, nobody buying a CD is making a living from that CD (usually; I'm talking about consumers here). People who find that these new CDs don't work in their new $500 car player, or worse, their $2500 laptop, are NOT going to replace those devices. They're going to return the CD, and certainly not buy any more CDs with that copy protection. Thus, the goal of the copyright holders, namely, to sell more CDs by not having people pirate them, is not going to be accomplished. Instead, people are going to not buy CDs EVEN if they might have bought them without the copy protection. While some may now buy the CDs (if they work in their players) who might have pirated before, some other people are going to NOT buy the CD when they might have before. I, for example, often buy CDs and then rip them to mp3 so I can play them in my livingroom mp3 'jukebox' (headless computer) or my car mp3 player, not to give pirate copies to other people. However, if I could no longer do this form of fair use, I WOULD NOT buy the CDs.
Thus, rather than selling more CDs, the industry will sell fewer CDs.
This same thing will happen if the industry tries to push new secure formats like DataPlay. Some users will like the new players and thus buy the new format, but if the old format is still available, more people will stick with it. And if the old format is NOT available, many people will simply not buy the music.
A hardware manufacturer selling, say, shovels, will probably make more money (with their thin margins) with 1000 people buying shovels and nobody stealing them, than with 10,000 people buying shovels and 10,000 more stealing shovels. On the other hand, a music company will make MORE money with 10,000 copies being sold and 10,000 copies being made of those (50% piracy) than they would with 1000 copies being sold and NO piracy.
In other words, for a company that is selling something that's copyable, like music, the amount of money they make has NOTHING to do with piracy and EVERYTHING to do with how many copies they sell. Piracy only hurts them in so far as it is an alternative to purchasing. I am assuming that the number of actual physical CDs that get stolen via shoplifting is irrelevant here.
So it is not in the industry's interest to ensure that nobody pirates their music, if that means fewer people buy it. Stopping piracy without gaining new buyers will not benefit the industry; stopping piracy while at the same time losing would-be customers because of incompatibilities will destroy the industry.
"This rings true to me. Much of Comp Sci (my chosen profession, though I suck at it) seems to have a lack of discovery and / or innovation these days, with the exception of nanocomputing. Much of the rest of it is innovation, not invention / discovery. How many Turings do we have in Comp Sci now? "
I disagree. Computer science is about to get much more interesting in the way you mention, when quantum computing starts getting taken seriously. The entire field of algorithms needs to be rewritten for quantum computers. The fields of cryptography, compiler design, languages, and even theory of computation need to be rewritten. NP-hard doesn't necessarily mean what it used to (it doesn't make a problem intractable with quantum computers). The whole heirarchy of decidability has to be looked at a litle differently.
Most (if not all) sciences now use computers as tools, but that's no different from using calculators as tools, or calculus as a tool, or statistical analysis as a tool. That does not mean that all sciences are mathematics or engineering. Physicists now need to be able to write code and use computers in fairly sophisticated ways, but they do NOT need to be computer scientists. Computer scientists do NOT just write code; they're generally developing more theoretical stuff, such as the theory of computation, or artificial intelligence, or advanced operating system design. It would be like calling someone who uses physics on a daily basis (gee, pretty much everyone, though I had in mind someone like a radiologist) a physicist.
The difference is between using tools and theories (which does not make someone a scientist in that discipline, in this case computer science), and DEVELOPING those tools and theories, which is the job of scientists in various disciplines.
Knowing Sony, and the fact that they sell their own PCs, and are somewhat competition for Apple, I'm rather concerned that they'll only continue development on a Mac OS version of VGS, which would be a real shame. After all, they took the wonderfully Mac-compatible Palm and made their own Windows-only (at first) Clie... it was up to a third party USB driver to allow it to interface w/ the Mac, and for no good reason.
As disgusted as I am by my own country's kowtowing towards organized religion, the OBLIGATORY question of religion allows you to specify "none" as I recall. Though I do see your point - it's not a question you should have to answer.
But then, every country is backwards in some way. I.e. cryptography being illegal in France (and the wonderful domesticated pets known as ferrets also being illegal in france, as they are considered wild animals). My point is not to pick on France, but simply to state that EVERY country, being a large organization run by many people, some of whom are entirely self-serving, is backwards in some ways.
Since the farce of Scientology is illegal in Germany, wouldn't this guy be pretty well protected if he moved to Germany, and then continued to disseminate this crap from there? Although the EU laws cover all of the EU, don't local laws override that?
I suppose you're right about what some company like Intel could pull. This really is scary... while I still don't think the days of the general-purpose computer are numbered at all, I do find CPRM very scary. All I can hope is that some drive manufacturers DO NOT implement it. All it takes is one, really...
As for Bush... ugh, don't even get me started. His administration makes me sick.
Linux wouldn't be circumventing copy protection, unless it were taking copy-protected data and breaking the protection on it. All it would be doing is not IMPLEMENTING copy protection.
That's like the difference between a VCR (illegally) ignoring Macrovision, and simply recording a copy of something that was never Macrovision-protected in the first place.
Well, for example, look at this line from the article:
"And why is Intel doing a "wireless 1394"? What is wrong with BlueTooth? Answer: BlueTooth is not a specification controller by Intel."
Well, 1394 isn't controlled by intel, so it's doubtful that the same protocol run over RF would be controlled by intel either. For example, Apple heavily influences 1394, and given Apple's recent direction (with iTunes, the digital hub stuff) it's doubtful Apple would favor any sort of digital "rights" protection in the 1394 spec.
Furthermore, if an OS doesn't support CPRM, then it'll just ignore the CPRM parts of a drive, and render the copy protection useless. Linux, Mac OS X, and to my knowledge Windows, have no provisions for supporting CPRM, and it would take a fair amount of work to put it in. And certainly Linux would never support it. Indeed, OS X would probably never support it, as the parts of the OS concerning hardware and storage are open-source as well.
Essentially, I fail to see how any new developments would render existing computers unable to rip, trade, etc. mp3s and such. Furthermore, I fail to see how anything T13 does will make it so that an open-source OS on any kind of hardware will be required to respect any form of digital rights management. There will always be an underground for this stuff.
Also, eventually the public backlash against the complete loss of fair use provisions ("You have the right to fair use, but it's illegal to exercise that right!") would end up dismantling parts of the DMCA. As the Tobacco Industry has shown, eventually public outrage can overcome the most powerful lobbies in the world.
Of course, the fact that in this case the lobbies would BE the media industry is a little more worrisome.
Actually, the answer is the unmentioned 3rd possibility, if the new machines are anything like the previous (current before today) machines:
There's a proprietary connector on the motherboard, into which plugs a daughterboard with one or two processors (depending on the system). Thus, you can't just ADD a processor, but you could swap your single-CPU board for a dual-CPU board. I'm assuming Apple hasn't done anything TRULY thoughtful and given us a free ZIF socket to drop a 2nd G4 into, but at least it IS upgradeable... however, Apple has the benefit you mentioned of manufacturing all G4 motherboards the same, and simply dropping different daughtercards into them.
What I find fascinating is that on Apple's web site, buried in the specs, is the fact that the 667 (c'mon, shoulda been 666!) MHz and 733MHz G4s are somewhat DIFFERENT from the 466 and 533:)
The 466 and 533, like the older 350, 400, 450, 500 G4s, have 1MB of backside L2 cache at 1/2 the CPU speed.
The new 667 and 733 have 256KB of on-chip L2 cache at full CPU speed (like the P4) but ALSO 1MB of backside L3 cache at 1/3 CPU speed. Thus, these are the newer G4s (G4e/G4+????) with onchip cache. That makes me wonder, do they have dual Altivec units?? If so, software that's compiled right might get an even further boost on these. It remains to be seen what these new chips really are (once they ship).
iDVD. If you don't think it's cool, watch the keynote stream. It's friggin amazing. And you can get that on a $3500 system. In time, that SUperdrive will probably be available on much cheaper Macs. Sure, that drive could be put in a PC, but there's no software out there remotely like iDVD yet.
Well, Ogg Vorbis is great, but still too immature and the format is still in flux, so it wouldn't make sense to include it in a standard format yet.
However, it seems like this CDA spec is really a filesystem and layout standard - substituting the mp3 files for vorbis files if a given player could decode the vorbis files should not pose too much of a problem.
"There's actually some pretty clever stuff in there, but the marketing droids messed it all up by naming the BSD-kernel "MACH" and the brand new NEXT-ish stuff "COCOA". "
Actually, Mach is the name of the kernel, which was developed at Carnegie Mellon in the 80s (originally) and sits underneath the BSD kernel. Basically, the architecture is:
Cocoa - Carbon - Classic - Java - BSD/X (with 3rd party X Server)
BSD kernel
Mach kernel
maybe the cocoa name is silly, but the name Mach didn't come from Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct URL for the story is: http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id =1690
punching a hole in the firewall.
No offense, johnos... I'm not trying to call you a liar. But if you don't know Hinkley, then that means you presumably weren't around when all this went down; you're a new guy. So what makes you think that you really heard the full story from your employer? I'm not saying that Hinkley reacted correctly; obviously he didn't. But I don't think he thought he was going to get a better deal; I think he felt he was losing control (or had already lost control) of the company.
;-)
And the false promises that Roks and others made to Hinkley, LONG before your time at HLC, are quite relevant to this.
Ok, I have to get in one little dig - I hope you're looking for a new job, because it doesn't look like HLC has much of a business model these days!
If you DO enable root via NetInfo Manager, which you can do (it's just not a great idea) then you CAN log in as root via the GUI.
It's not necessary to CREATE a root account, as it already exists; it's just got login disabled by default, which is a good thing. If you try to be all 'l33t' and make your user account called 'root' then you may be shooting yourself in the foot, yes.
I'm just tired of cleaning up after idiots who insist on doing EVERYTHING as root - I'm talking, they want to be "root@mystupidlinuxbox" so they have their damn mail forwarded to the root account on their linux box. Gimme a break!
It's kind of interesting that it seems the "geeks" who have long hated Apple for many reasons (some good, most bad, IMHO) will now be seeing Apple more in the Linux/Open Source camp as far as fair use rights and the freedom to be able to do what you're supposed to be able to do with information (that's not to say pirate it, but no artificial fair use restrictions).
Meanwhile, Microsoft is further entrenching itself in the camp of "we're the only game in town, so we don't have to attract users; they're stuck with us. Now we can attract record companies."
I can only hope that this'll backfire on Microsoft when it turns out that the general public DOES indeed care about fair use.
"One thing that I don't like about OS X is the root account is not active right off the start. They are afraid that if traditional MAC users are able to change /etc/motd, then the system will crash or something."
/etc or something?
:)
This really is a GOOD thing... if you actually did your research and knew anything at all about the system (or even the fact that "Mac" is not an acronym, and thus is properly capitalized "Mac" rather than "MAC") you'd realize that disabling root access is a great security feature. After all, sudo is configured by default to allow the Administrative account (essentially, the first one you set up) to do anything via sudo, including opening up a shell as root.
What Apple's doing is trying to reduce security vulnerabilities by not even allowing anyone to log in as root, not even locally.
Of course, you can change this rather easily, but the only reason to is if you wanted to log into the GUI as root. And if you know enough about what you're doing to be root, you shouldn't need to do anything via the gui.
Or are you one of those idiots who uses their linux box as root all the time and wonders why they keep hosing their system every time some shitty app decides to call unlink() on
A tip for future software installations:
>./configure; make; sudo make install
is a HELL of a lot safer than
>su
>./configure; make; make install
Apple's just being smart
a minor correction...
"NeXT eventually quit making hardware and implemented NeXTStep for other operating systems, changing the name to OpenStep. "
Actually, NeXTSTEP was the OS, as i recall, and its name was changed to OPENSTEP when it was ported to Intel hardware. NeXTStep was the set of frameworks for rapid app development, which was called OpenStep on OPENSTEP as well as on the other operating systems on which it ran, such as Solaris and Windows NT.
This is pure nitpicking, and I don't mean to detract from a really excellent article. But NeXT Inc's product line was always a bizarre confusion of different capitalizations; I may not have it quite right either.
I don't know what you can really do. But I know why this happened.
Verizon did the usual Bell Atlantic thing and made like they were going to buy out Northpoint... and then dropped it, causing Northpoint to look really bad and be unable to get other investors (as the other investors had already been scared away by Verizon). So Northpoint was screwed, and Verizon gets rid of a competitor.
This kind of crap should be examined by the feds.
From what I've heard from a reliable source (a friend of mine whose business used Northpoint until 3 days ago), MSN DSL customers are really screwed - MSN didn't give them ANY warning at all about the cutoff, and MSN contracts through Northpoint (err, that should be past tense, no?) in the New England area.
I would say "serves em right for using MSN," but MSN knew for days at least about this; I can't imagine an ISP not notifying its customers about this kind of cutoff.
It's a shame... Northpoint seems like they provided a good, reasonably priced, reliable service, especially when compared with, say, Verizon.
The refocus on vector supercomputing is interesting. I wonder if it might have a side-effect of helping scientists take advantage of the Altivec units on PowerPC G4s. Yes, I know the Altivec can't do double-precision floats, but you don't ALWAYS need that, and companies like GCG in the biotech industry are excited about taking advantage of OS X on G4 hardware for bioinformatics. For tasks that don't need the full power of a Cray, but are nonetheless vectorizable, I hope the cross-pollination of vectorization in algorithm design will benefit everyone.
The refocus on vector supercomputing is interesting. I wonder if it might have a side-effect of helping scientists take advantage of the Altivec units on PowerPC G4s. Yes, I know the Altivec can't do double-precision floats, but you don't ALWAYS need that, and companies like GCG in the biotech industry are excited about taking advantage of OS X on G4 hardware for bioinformatics. For tasks that don't need the full power of a Cray, but are nonetheless vectorizable, I hope the cross-pollination of vectorization in algorithm design will benefit everyone.
Piracy (as opposed to theft; they are NOT exactly the same) hurts copyright owners not because they no longer have as many copies they can sell (that's how theft hurts the victim) but because they no longer sell as many copies because some people pirate rather than buying. This is why copy protection of software SOMETIMES works, especially protection that makes copying impossible but doesn't keep the software from working. But more importantly, most heavily protected software (like, say, Quark or Media100) is the way its users make a living, so they WILL accept limitations (such as needing a computer with certain free ports for a hardware dongle) to be able to use the software.
:)
On the other hand, nobody buying a CD is making a living from that CD (usually; I'm talking about consumers here). People who find that these new CDs don't work in their new $500 car player, or worse, their $2500 laptop, are NOT going to replace those devices. They're going to return the CD, and certainly not buy any more CDs with that copy protection. Thus, the goal of the copyright holders, namely, to sell more CDs by not having people pirate them, is not going to be accomplished. Instead, people are going to not buy CDs EVEN if they might have bought them without the copy protection. While some may now buy the CDs (if they work in their players) who might have pirated before, some other people are going to NOT buy the CD when they might have before. I, for example, often buy CDs and then rip them to mp3 so I can play them in my livingroom mp3 'jukebox' (headless computer) or my car mp3 player, not to give pirate copies to other people. However, if I could no longer do this form of fair use, I WOULD NOT buy the CDs.
Thus, rather than selling more CDs, the industry will sell fewer CDs.
This same thing will happen if the industry tries to push new secure formats like DataPlay. Some users will like the new players and thus buy the new format, but if the old format is still available, more people will stick with it. And if the old format is NOT available, many people will simply not buy the music.
A hardware manufacturer selling, say, shovels, will probably make more money (with their thin margins) with 1000 people buying shovels and nobody stealing them, than with 10,000 people buying shovels and 10,000 more stealing shovels. On the other hand, a music company will make MORE money with 10,000 copies being sold and 10,000 copies being made of those (50% piracy) than they would with 1000 copies being sold and NO piracy.
In other words, for a company that is selling something that's copyable, like music, the amount of money they make has NOTHING to do with piracy and EVERYTHING to do with how many copies they sell. Piracy only hurts them in so far as it is an alternative to purchasing. I am assuming that the number of actual physical CDs that get stolen via shoplifting is irrelevant here.
So it is not in the industry's interest to ensure that nobody pirates their music, if that means fewer people buy it. Stopping piracy without gaining new buyers will not benefit the industry; stopping piracy while at the same time losing would-be customers because of incompatibilities will destroy the industry.
Which I hope happens
"This rings true to me. Much of Comp Sci (my chosen profession, though I suck at it) seems to have a lack of discovery and / or innovation these days, with the exception of nanocomputing. Much of the rest of it is innovation, not invention / discovery. How many Turings do we have in Comp Sci now? "
I disagree. Computer science is about to get much more interesting in the way you mention, when quantum computing starts getting taken seriously. The entire field of algorithms needs to be rewritten for quantum computers. The fields of cryptography, compiler design, languages, and even theory of computation need to be rewritten. NP-hard doesn't necessarily mean what it used to (it doesn't make a problem intractable with quantum computers). The whole heirarchy of decidability has to be looked at a litle differently.
Most (if not all) sciences now use computers as tools, but that's no different from using calculators as tools, or calculus as a tool, or statistical analysis as a tool. That does not mean that all sciences are mathematics or engineering. Physicists now need to be able to write code and use computers in fairly sophisticated ways, but they do NOT need to be computer scientists. Computer scientists do NOT just write code; they're generally developing more theoretical stuff, such as the theory of computation, or artificial intelligence, or advanced operating system design. It would be like calling someone who uses physics on a daily basis (gee, pretty much everyone, though I had in mind someone like a radiologist) a physicist.
The difference is between using tools and theories (which does not make someone a scientist in that discipline, in this case computer science), and DEVELOPING those tools and theories, which is the job of scientists in various disciplines.
Knowing Sony, and the fact that they sell their own PCs, and are somewhat competition for Apple, I'm rather concerned that they'll only continue development on a Mac OS version of VGS, which would be a real shame. After all, they took the wonderfully Mac-compatible Palm and made their own Windows-only (at first) Clie... it was up to a third party USB driver to allow it to interface w/ the Mac, and for no good reason.
As disgusted as I am by my own country's kowtowing towards organized religion, the OBLIGATORY question of religion allows you to specify "none" as I recall. Though I do see your point - it's not a question you should have to answer.
But then, every country is backwards in some way. I.e. cryptography being illegal in France (and the wonderful domesticated pets known as ferrets also being illegal in france, as they are considered wild animals). My point is not to pick on France, but simply to state that EVERY country, being a large organization run by many people, some of whom are entirely self-serving, is backwards in some ways.
Since the farce of Scientology is illegal in Germany, wouldn't this guy be pretty well protected if he moved to Germany, and then continued to disseminate this crap from there? Although the EU laws cover all of the EU, don't local laws override that?
I suppose you're right about what some company like Intel could pull. This really is scary... while I still don't think the days of the general-purpose computer are numbered at all, I do find CPRM very scary. All I can hope is that some drive manufacturers DO NOT implement it. All it takes is one, really...
As for Bush... ugh, don't even get me started. His administration makes me sick.
Linux wouldn't be circumventing copy protection, unless it were taking copy-protected data and breaking the protection on it. All it would be doing is not IMPLEMENTING copy protection.
That's like the difference between a VCR (illegally) ignoring Macrovision, and simply recording a copy of something that was never Macrovision-protected in the first place.
Well, for example, look at this line from the article:
"And why is Intel doing a "wireless 1394"? What is wrong with BlueTooth? Answer: BlueTooth is not a specification controller by Intel."
Well, 1394 isn't controlled by intel, so it's doubtful that the same protocol run over RF would be controlled by intel either. For example, Apple heavily influences 1394, and given Apple's recent direction (with iTunes, the digital hub stuff) it's doubtful Apple would favor any sort of digital "rights" protection in the 1394 spec.
Furthermore, if an OS doesn't support CPRM, then it'll just ignore the CPRM parts of a drive, and render the copy protection useless. Linux, Mac OS X, and to my knowledge Windows, have no provisions for supporting CPRM, and it would take a fair amount of work to put it in. And certainly Linux would never support it. Indeed, OS X would probably never support it, as the parts of the OS concerning hardware and storage are open-source as well.
Essentially, I fail to see how any new developments would render existing computers unable to rip, trade, etc. mp3s and such. Furthermore, I fail to see how anything T13 does will make it so that an open-source OS on any kind of hardware will be required to respect any form of digital rights management. There will always be an underground for this stuff.
Also, eventually the public backlash against the complete loss of fair use provisions ("You have the right to fair use, but it's illegal to exercise that right!") would end up dismantling parts of the DMCA. As the Tobacco Industry has shown, eventually public outrage can overcome the most powerful lobbies in the world.
Of course, the fact that in this case the lobbies would BE the media industry is a little more worrisome.
Actually, the answer is the unmentioned 3rd possibility, if the new machines are anything like the previous (current before today) machines:
:)
There's a proprietary connector on the motherboard, into which plugs a daughterboard with one or two processors (depending on the system). Thus, you can't just ADD a processor, but you could swap your single-CPU board for a dual-CPU board. I'm assuming Apple hasn't done anything TRULY thoughtful and given us a free ZIF socket to drop a 2nd G4 into, but at least it IS upgradeable... however, Apple has the benefit you mentioned of manufacturing all G4 motherboards the same, and simply dropping different daughtercards into them.
What I find fascinating is that on Apple's web site, buried in the specs, is the fact that the 667 (c'mon, shoulda been 666!) MHz and 733MHz G4s are somewhat DIFFERENT from the 466 and 533
The 466 and 533, like the older 350, 400, 450, 500 G4s, have 1MB of backside L2 cache at 1/2 the CPU speed.
The new 667 and 733 have 256KB of on-chip L2 cache at full CPU speed (like the P4) but ALSO 1MB of backside L3 cache at 1/3 CPU speed. Thus, these are the newer G4s (G4e/G4+????) with onchip cache. That makes me wonder, do they have dual Altivec units?? If so, software that's compiled right might get an even further boost on these. It remains to be seen what these new chips really are (once they ship).
Umm... one thing that's available only on a Mac:
;-)
iDVD. If you don't think it's cool, watch the keynote stream. It's friggin amazing. And you can get that on a $3500 system. In time, that SUperdrive will probably be available on much cheaper Macs. Sure, that drive could be put in a PC, but there's no software out there remotely like iDVD yet.
As for other things, well, Mac OS X, for one
Well, Ogg Vorbis is great, but still too immature and the format is still in flux, so it wouldn't make sense to include it in a standard format yet.
However, it seems like this CDA spec is really a filesystem and layout standard - substituting the mp3 files for vorbis files if a given player could decode the vorbis files should not pose too much of a problem.
only decent browser from Microsoft?? Try OmniWeb before you spout off again, you might be pleasantly surprised.
"There's actually some pretty clever stuff in there, but the marketing droids messed it all up by naming the BSD-kernel "MACH" and the brand new NEXT-ish stuff "COCOA". "
Actually, Mach is the name of the kernel, which was developed at Carnegie Mellon in the 80s (originally) and sits underneath the BSD kernel. Basically, the architecture is:
Cocoa - Carbon - Classic - Java - BSD/X (with 3rd party X Server)
BSD kernel
Mach kernel
maybe the cocoa name is silly, but the name Mach didn't come from Apple.