The idea of Apple giving away OS X 10.5 with iPods and iTunes is certainly amusing but completely implausible.
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of OS X sales are to current Mac users who are upgrading; this has to be paying for the development of OS X. If they start giving it away, the R&D money will dry up or have to be taken from iPod sales and I doubt that's a financial position Apple wants to be in.
The drive/support issue has also been brought up by others here; why would Apple want to have to support all the weird mongrel hardware that might exist in any random PC?
Finally, some technical issues: the iPod's little hard drive simply wasn't built for continuous use and would probably diie fairly quickly if you tried running your OS off it. The PC would have to have be able to boot from USB and new ones all seem to be able to do that, there are many, many PCs just a few years old that are powerful enough to run OS X well, but whose BIOS's don't suppoort USB booting.
Trying to tie OS X to the iPos would just be silly; it'd take no time at all for someone to make an DVD ISO image of it and out it on all the toorrent sites.
If you're car-less here in San Diego, CA, then unless you're lucky enough to live next to your job or a stop on the limited commuter train line, you're looking at riding a bicycle or taking the bus.
Riding a bike is great as long as you're in shape for it, the distance is doable, and you have shower facilities at work. (Of course, you have to worry about hostile drivers and becoming the next victim in the current spate of hit-and-run bicycle deaths.)
Taking the bus means either being lucky enough to be on the express line, or sitting though an extra hour or two of endless stops and transfers. Oh, and learning the latest gang signs.
System 7.1 (maybe 7.0 too - it was a long time ago now) had virtual memory and built-in Multifinder. I remember it being far more stable than 7.5; I suffered through that thing as the one-person tech support for the Mac-only newspaper for whom I worked at the time.
The word "viral" itself has a negative connotation, when all it really is is "word-of-mouth" advertising. Although the seed is planted intentionally by marketers, the word can only spread due to the idea's own merit.
BTW, please note the distinction between the idea's merit and the actual movie's merit; many things sound good until you actually experience them, although in this case I expect Firefly to live up to expectations (there I go contributing to the "viral" spread:).
Anyway, the phrase "viral marketing" is far more negative-sounding than is justified by what is probably the most honest form of advertising possible.
As an added bonus it looks like the analysis was done on a Linux box too.
Back in college I had an Amiga 500 that I loved hacking on (dating myself here), but a guy I knew was not only really into the Amiga, he had to work it into practically every sentence. He'd raise his hand in Compsci classes and brag about how "My Amiga can do that better" and "That's so much easier on My Amiga". Even I grew sick of hearing the word "Amiga". He earned the derisive nickname "Amiga Man".
Apparently he's now "Linux Man"and works for Slashdot.
If they grow what may eventually become a significant part of the world's food supply from a single cell, as described in the article, won't the lack of genetic diversity set us up for a huge disaster due to disease or mutation? I hope they use a large number of cell lines for this when they do it for real.
I would also like to know how they plan to keep the culture (when it's grown industrially and not in well-controlled laboratory conditions) from getting infected. I have a feeling that antibiotics will be present in this meat, maybe even in greater amounts than in meat from livestock.
At least it'll take some wind out of PETA's sails. While I agree in principal that animals shouldn't be treated cruelly, their tactics do more harm than good by pissing everyone off.
I haven't been paying close attention to Sun lately, but aren't they now on good terms with Microsoft? Now that you mention it, this whole OpenSolaris "thing" does smell a little bit like a legal trap for open source developers.
Linux kernel developers in particular had better steer well clear of the OpenSolaris source to avoid jeopordizing Linux with another IP lawsuit. It's especially dangerous if the patented sections of code are unknown.
Replace "processor" with "neuron" and I think you've pretty much described the nervous system (the sensory side of it at least). Sounds like you're on the right track.
So sorry to hear that. I wasn't sure because your previous post and this one are well-written and you certainly seem to have your intellect intact.
It's interesting that what you describe reminds me of ADHD, which I and one of my daughters have. I wonder if approaching your learning difficulties thusly (and I don't necessarily mean with medication) would be helpful at all?
I wish you the best of luck; I bet you'll do well even if you have to work a little harder at it.
I don't know anybody who rides a bike on a regular basis who hasn't been stuck by a vehicle at least once (myself included). Sometimes they actually aim for you! I often think that a Class B license should be required to drive those damn SUVs.
Once the topic of drive failure regarding a particular brand comes up in a thread, it tends to gain momentum. Everyone who had that brand of drive fail on them (understandably) wants to complain, while those who've had no problem lose interest in the thread and don't post.
What that leads to is a thread with almost nothing but complaints about that brand. This happens with every brand of drive; they all produce some duds, it's inevitable.
I have five 40GB maxtors, two are old 5400RPM drives, the others are 7200RPM. A couple of them have developed noisy bearings (after years of use) but no errors among any of them, and three of them were running 24x7 for years.
I've had only one Western Digital drive die on me, an ancient 1GB drive whose time had come.
Seagate drives have been good to me, although I remember back in the mid to late 80's when they had "sticktion" problems; I had one of those, a 47GB SCSI drive that I'd have to give a quick "twist" to start up. Surprisingly, I got years of use out of it.
The only brand that screwed me over was IBM. I had bought them because of their reputation for quality, but that went out the window with the Deskstars. Had two 60GB desktop drives, a 12GB laptop drive, and a 40GB laptop drive fail on me. I'd bought them all at around the same time, except for one of the 60GB drives which was an RMA replacement for the first, so I didn't have a chance to learn-and-avoid.
I was under the impression that Intel was going to concentrate their efforts on beefing up the Pentium M, by adding SSE3, 64-bit extensions, dual cores, hopefully a faster bus.
Sure the 686 architecture certainly has been around for a while, but the PM is a pretty damn good chip.
It's sad, but the era of exotic CPU's in servers and workstations seems to be ending; X86 is just better "bang for the buck", so much so that even Intel can't compete with it (Itanium)! I hope they know what they're doing.
I'm just guessing here; I have no idea if any police station actually does this, but I can think of a scenario where Word templates are used in filling out standard "paperwork" forms. I'm sure that StarOffice (and probably OpenOffice too) can do this, but it's the kind of thing that I could see suffering from compatability issues with Word. Maybe that's why they had to switch back?
There are other word processor features such as tables, various types of formatting, and probably other things that I don't know about because I personally rarely use word processors anymore, that police may find useful in typing reports and doing other paperwork. Certain formatting may even be legally required.
The point is that it's assuming way too much that police officers don't need the formatting capabilities of a work processor.
Agreed; the situation is very bad - I peronally consider it dire - with commercial software. A lot of commercial apps only support a very short list of distributions, and versions within that distribution; if you wish to use another distro, or even stay up to date with the latest verision, then you'll lose support. That can be a very big deal.
Were I work there are a lot of Linux boxes, commonly runnng some version of Redhat, with scientific instruments attached. The software for those instruments is closed-source and proprietary, and tied to a specific version of Redhat. Upgrading is a huge gamble and as a result, we have lots of Redhat 7.x - Redhat 9 boxes that cannot be upgraded! The labs are completely at the mercy of the vendors; there's either no competetion, or the competition does the same thing.
The Sun and Windows boxes don't suffer from this nearly as much; Solaris and Windows have both retained remarkable binary compatability with past versions over the years, so the vendors are willing to support more versions and those systems can be kept up to date.
Whining about open source instrument software is pointless; it doesn't exist, and the science must be done.
If Linus & Co. don't get over their aversion to maintaining binary compatability, Linux's growth in the business sector will be stunted.
...most of the core utilities are bloated, poorly documented
GNU junk.
Thanks for reminding me of something: whoever it is within Gnu that thought it'd be a great idea to deprecate man pages in favor of info documents, even if it's Stallman himself, I seriously want to kick his ass!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of OS X sales are to current Mac users who are upgrading; this has to be paying for the development of OS X. If they start giving it away, the R&D money will dry up or have to be taken from iPod sales and I doubt that's a financial position Apple wants to be in.
The drive/support issue has also been brought up by others here; why would Apple want to have to support all the weird mongrel hardware that might exist in any random PC?
Finally, some technical issues: the iPod's little hard drive simply wasn't built for continuous use and would probably diie fairly quickly if you tried running your OS off it. The PC would have to have be able to boot from USB and new ones all seem to be able to do that, there are many, many PCs just a few years old that are powerful enough to run OS X well, but whose BIOS's don't suppoort USB booting.
Trying to tie OS X to the iPos would just be silly; it'd take no time at all for someone to make an DVD ISO image of it and out it on all the toorrent sites.
When obtaining accolades replaces quality of work as your chief motivation, your project is doomed.
(For another example, look up what Jeffrey Katzenberg did to Pocahontas.)
(Will this post survive the political-correctness police? Lets watch...)
Riding a bike is great as long as you're in shape for it, the distance is doable, and you have shower facilities at work. (Of course, you have to worry about hostile drivers and becoming the next victim in the current spate of hit-and-run bicycle deaths.)
Taking the bus means either being lucky enough to be on the express line, or sitting though an extra hour or two of endless stops and transfers. Oh, and learning the latest gang signs.
But your way isn't funny.
System 7.1 (maybe 7.0 too - it was a long time ago now) had virtual memory and built-in Multifinder. I remember it being far more stable than 7.5; I suffered through that thing as the one-person tech support for the Mac-only newspaper for whom I worked at the time.
BTW, please note the distinction between the idea's merit and the actual movie's merit; many things sound good until you actually experience them, although in this case I expect Firefly to live up to expectations (there I go contributing to the "viral" spread :).
Anyway, the phrase "viral marketing" is far more negative-sounding than is justified by what is probably the most honest form of advertising possible.
Back in college I had an Amiga 500 that I loved hacking on (dating myself here), but a guy I knew was not only really into the Amiga, he had to work it into practically every sentence. He'd raise his hand in Compsci classes and brag about how "My Amiga can do that better" and "That's so much easier on My Amiga". Even I grew sick of hearing the word "Amiga". He earned the derisive nickname "Amiga Man".
Apparently he's now "Linux Man"and works for Slashdot.
You can find a study proving just about anything you want to if you look hard enough. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
So they're having an open bar? I'm in!
I would also like to know how they plan to keep the culture (when it's grown industrially and not in well-controlled laboratory conditions) from getting infected. I have a feeling that antibiotics will be present in this meat, maybe even in greater amounts than in meat from livestock.
At least it'll take some wind out of PETA's sails. While I agree in principal that animals shouldn't be treated cruelly, their tactics do more harm than good by pissing everyone off.
Linux kernel developers in particular had better steer well clear of the OpenSolaris source to avoid jeopordizing Linux with another IP lawsuit. It's especially dangerous if the patented sections of code are unknown.
I also remember reading the original book by Keith Laumer.
"The Dinochrome Brigade Salutes You!"
Not only that, but it'll be the BEST PROM EVER!
Replace "processor" with "neuron" and I think you've pretty much described the nervous system (the sensory side of it at least). Sounds like you're on the right track.
Where's my flying car, dammit!?
It's interesting that what you describe reminds me of ADHD, which I and one of my daughters have. I wonder if approaching your learning difficulties thusly (and I don't necessarily mean with medication) would be helpful at all?
I wish you the best of luck; I bet you'll do well even if you have to work a little harder at it.
You can always go into managment (just kidding!)
Any lasting effects from the injury?
Nobody's been going through the convoluted method based on the original Developer CD, since someone wrote that VMWare file.
I have five 40GB maxtors, two are old 5400RPM drives, the others are 7200RPM. A couple of them have developed noisy bearings (after years of use) but no errors among any of them, and three of them were running 24x7 for years.
I've had only one Western Digital drive die on me, an ancient 1GB drive whose time had come.
Seagate drives have been good to me, although I remember back in the mid to late 80's when they had "sticktion" problems; I had one of those, a 47GB SCSI drive that I'd have to give a quick "twist" to start up. Surprisingly, I got years of use out of it.
The only brand that screwed me over was IBM. I had bought them because of their reputation for quality, but that went out the window with the Deskstars. Had two 60GB desktop drives, a 12GB laptop drive, and a 40GB laptop drive fail on me. I'd bought them all at around the same time, except for one of the 60GB drives which was an RMA replacement for the first, so I didn't have a chance to learn-and-avoid.
Sure the 686 architecture certainly has been around for a while, but the PM is a pretty damn good chip.
It's sad, but the era of exotic CPU's in servers and workstations seems to be ending; X86 is just better "bang for the buck", so much so that even Intel can't compete with it (Itanium)! I hope they know what they're doing.
There are other word processor features such as tables, various types of formatting, and probably other things that I don't know about because I personally rarely use word processors anymore, that police may find useful in typing reports and doing other paperwork. Certain formatting may even be legally required.
The point is that it's assuming way too much that police officers don't need the formatting capabilities of a work processor.
Boy, do you have things backwards.
Were I work there are a lot of Linux boxes, commonly runnng some version of Redhat, with scientific instruments attached. The software for those instruments is closed-source and proprietary, and tied to a specific version of Redhat. Upgrading is a huge gamble and as a result, we have lots of Redhat 7.x - Redhat 9 boxes that cannot be upgraded! The labs are completely at the mercy of the vendors; there's either no competetion, or the competition does the same thing.
The Sun and Windows boxes don't suffer from this nearly as much; Solaris and Windows have both retained remarkable binary compatability with past versions over the years, so the vendors are willing to support more versions and those systems can be kept up to date.
Whining about open source instrument software is pointless; it doesn't exist, and the science must be done.
If Linus & Co. don't get over their aversion to maintaining binary compatability, Linux's growth in the business sector will be stunted.
Thanks for reminding me of something: whoever it is within Gnu that thought it'd be a great idea to deprecate man pages in favor of info documents, even if it's Stallman himself, I seriously want to kick his ass!
There. That felt better.
BTW, I agree with the rest of your post as well.