You sure happen to know a lot about "the courts." What are you 15?
And is what you think the courts should rule even relevant?
Consider Apple's scuffle with attempts to patch out iTune's DRM. Were courts involved? Nope.
It's a little to obvious that if Apple really doesn't want Mac OS X running on PCs, they can easily make Aqua apps fail to run in ways that will be very difficult to work around. Mac OS X is not some DOS shell or Linux variant.
Anybody wanting to run Mac OS X does so because of the slickness of the Aqua level apps, Cocoa/Carbon, Quartz and other non-open technologies that would be very easy to tie to hardware in a way that would be impossible to sort out.
But Exchange Server and Exchange Server Enterprise are not. And there are plenty of other examples of software that are identical code licensed for different numbers of users or 'unlocking' or allowing use of certain features, including being able to run on certain hardware. Ever heard of per processor licensing?
You can license MS products per server or seat, or per site, all of which involve a different type of agreement and sometimes offer different features or support agreements.
If software were a durable good, every corporation could just obtain a single retail box and distribute it throughout the company. The point of licensing is to create a method to fairly pay software creators for their work in proportion to its use, and ensure they continue to develop and support the software.
Duh.
You need to lay off the absolutes when denying the possibility of things that... happen everyday.
License restrictions and copyrights are balanced by fair use rights.
Letting somebody read your book, or citing an idea from a book in your blog would generally be recognized as fair use.
OCR scanning your book and distributing it on P2P networks wouldn't be fair use, since that would effectively destroy the book market, and would be showing gross disregard for the book's copyright holder.
Attempts to reconcile piracy with the ideas of free speech and open source just hurts free and open ideas.
The thing is, if you don't own the IP, you can't decide how it gets used.
You don't even know what you're arguing Hamburgerman.
There is no market for non-Apple PPC machines, and haven't been any around since 1997. At the same time, I'm sure I could dig up a device with a x86 processor that can't run Windows. WTF is your point?
There is no restriction on viewing movies because there is no reason to; copyright applies to copying. WTF is your point?
Copyright doesn't grant users anything. It protect the owner of the copyright from infringing use.
Apple making their next OS run only on their own hardware has nothing to do with copyright. Trying to run it on a PC would not be a copyright infringement, it would be a licensing infringement.
A EULA is only "not recognized as a contract" by the same reality-free kooks who don't recognize the IRS.
And in any event, a EULA doesn't rescind your rights, because you don't have inalienable rights to use others' intellectual property to start with. You only gain the use rights you contract for by agreeing to purchase it, and the EULA spells out what limited rights you get.
Handing money for a box at CompUSA isn't a contract use agreement, the EULA is. The EULA doesn't magically jump in and limit your rights when you open the package, it spells out the buyer's agreement in using the software. If you can't live by the EULA, you take it back.
Where did you get the idea that copyright has anything to do with anything apart from the rights to copy?
Stop saying that word, because you obviously have no idea what it means.
When you license intellectual property, you do so at the mercy of the owner of the work. If you don't like their terms and conditions and price, you go elsewhere or write your own software.
If you are buying a hamburger, and decide that Burger King is selling their burgers for too much money, you don't have any inalienable rights to get a burger anyway, at whatever price you like. You'll have to try Wendys or make your own sandwich at home.
If you want to rent an apartment, and find they don't allow pets, you don't have inalienable rights to breed puppies there either. You find another place.
What is so hard to figure out? What are you, seven?
Dishonest? and do you even know what disingenuous means?
Here's an example of disingenuous: "are you arguing that when someone pays for a product, they don't have the right to make use of it?"
You are ridiculous and ignorant, Mr Hamburger Jackass.
Copyright is the right to copy. When you pay for something under copyright, you don't "gain rights" from some "copyright system", but rather your ability to "do whatever you like" is restricted by the fact that someone else holds the copyright.
You can't copy it, you can't sell or offer rights to it. You can only use or resell your license.
This isn't complex stuff.
And yeah, somebody who has no contract with Apple, but who is using their software, is a thief.
And nobody to date has EVER bought OS X and ran it on non-Apple hardware, because there is not a version of OS X you can buy that runs on PCs. Stealing the developer preview to demo the parts of OS X that do run on PCs is a different thing to prattle about.
There is plenty of room to dislike EULAs and sloppy software licenses that deny fitness for a particular purpose, and disavow any responsibility for liability, and restrict fair use, among other things. But all the comments you make are just non-sensical gibberish, and your replies are absolutely irrational mind dumps.
The A in EULA is for agreement. A contract is an agreement. You can argue whether you think shrink wrap EULAs are enforceable, or binding or ethical, but you can't argue that it isn't a contract.
As a society, we license the use of intellectual property because it is not real property. It's a convention of reality. You can dislike paying people for their creative work, engineering or whatever, but it's how the world works.
When you buy a hamburger, you are paying for a tangible good, not intellectual property. You can't digitally duplicate your hamburger and resell it (or give it away) and destroy the market for hamburgers, so your ketchup story is stupid.
TVs and Fords are tangible goods. Apple doesn't license how you can use your iPod or PowerBook, because, like TVs, Fords and Hamburgers, their hardware isn't something you can duplicate and flood the market with, at no cost to yourself.
Software, music, movies, books and other intellectual property *can* be mass duplicated and have a value that is used, perceived and sold differently, for that reason.
There are plenty of implied contracts in use in the world. Saying that you are not bound by a licensing agreement because you didn't sign anything is meaningless.
You don't sign a contract when going to see a movie either, but if you pull out your camcorder to bootleg it, you might end up in jail. And crying about hamburgers and ketchup isn't going to do you any good there either.
After they get your money for a license, you own a license to use the software as per the EULA.
Or did you think paying Apple $99 for Tiger ceded the development and distribution rights to you?
Apple licensing their forthcoming OS for use only on their own hardware is no different than Microsoft licensing their OS in Pro and Server versions, which differ only in the licensing agreement and a few registry settings. Or any licensing that is sold per seat, per user or per site.
A contract is about giving something in consideration for something else. If you don't like restrictive commercial licensing for software, stick with BSD exclusively.
The point of putting a G4 on a card would make even less sense. While the G5 is fairly competitive in performance and architecture, the G4 is seriously old technology. It sits on a sub 200 MHz MHz bus!
No amount of Altivec magic is going to help out the saggy ass G4. A despite the marketspeak, Altivec on the G4 isn't in a different class than SSE, and it would not benefit any class of user to outfit an Intel Mac with a G4.
As far as obsolete hardware and ports go, there aren't ANY machines with ADB, LocalTalk, etc that CAN EVEN RUN Mac OS X Panther, let alone Tiger.
More power to anybody hacking away on old machines and having fun with them, but Apple customers who haven't upgraded Mac hardware past 1996 ARE NOT CUSTOMERS WORTH THINKING ABOUT.
A G4 on a PCI card is not going to help somebody trying to figure out how to integrate an Intel Mac into their LocalTalk network or plug in their 1993 ADB graphics tablet anyway, so that line of logic boggles the mind.
You are right about the//e card: it had the Mega II from the IIGS onboard, which basically was the entire Apple II architecture in a VLSI chip, so it supported all the wacky hardware and ports for software. However, trying to draw an analogy between it and Intel Macs, as a reason for Apple to want a G4 supply, is quite a stretch!
Problem is that Freescale (formerly Motorolla) makes G4s, not the IBM G5.
Of course, it would make no sense to put a G5 processor in an Intel Mac, because if the G5 were faster, they could simply just ship a G5 Mac instead. Which is exactly what they announced: replacing the G4 with mobile Pentium M first, and transistioning the G5s later. If it were cost effective and/or technically practical to put a G5 onto a little card, they'd probably be using the G5 where the G4s are now. But they're not, so they aren't and won't.
Schools weren't holding on to old//e hardware, but rather wanting to run their//e software on those Mac LCs. The PDS card was required because the Mac wasn't really fast enough to emulate the//e hardware in software. Neither problem exists in WRT the Intel Macs. OS X software runs fine natively or via Rosetta, so no hardware is necessary.
If you haven't been paying attention, the Inquirer is one of a new pile of pseudo-news websites posting ridiculous garbage with sensationalist headlines and plenty of ads.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
Should Apple have predicted that rolling out a bunch of Apple Stores with glass windows would result in thieves breaking those windows and stealing iPods?
And should such a postulated inevitability make breaking in to Apple Stores to steal goods socially acceptable?
The "OS X on x86 thing" is not "a far cry from theft," if you define theft as 'taking something that does does not belong to you, without payment, solely for your own amusement'.
We are not talking about getting Darwin code that has been released as open source running on PCs, we are talking about people trying to steal a pirate copy of the OS X Intel developer preview, and trying to make it run on PCs that were purchased with Windows (in most cases).
These people are paying Microsoft to run OS X, which is kind of lame. If you want to see innovation, you need to support innovative companies. If you want all software to be free, you should use free software exclusively.
Running Linux on an Xbox is repurposing hardware (despite MS' losing money on the deal through speculative loss leader pricing). Running pirate commercial software on your cheap PC is not really a comparable endeavor.
The major environmental problem with electric vehicles isn't that electricity isn't necessarily cleaner, but that battery technology isn't there yet.
So while an electric car will likely run more efficiently and may generate less pollution (certainly less pollution where it's being operated, if not less when the electricity source is factored in), those huge banks of batteries will eventually need to be disposed of, resulting in a massive amount of toxic heavy metals to deal with.
Until battery technology can improve, or we develop a mass market system of recycling all those massive batteries, we might need to keep looking at alternatives to battery operated electric vehicles.
Once environmentalism embraces nuclear power, perhaps electric vehicles might become a real factor in clean transportation.
Steve Jobs once commented that Apple, like Microsoft, can "print money" in a way that its hardware competitors (like Dell) can't.
But before you get carried away suggesting that Apple throw away their existing computer company and become a software company, consider this:
1) Microsoft isn't rich and powerful because they deliver the best OS technology, or because they compete in software value, but rather because they own a monopoly in the PC OS Software market, a monopoly they built through predatory marketing and anti-competitive deals with hardware makers that killed rivals. Microsoft does not compete in software sales, they have imposed a tax on every PC sold in the last two decades.
2) Free/OSS software is frequently based upon a support business plan. If the world was ready to pay money for software, this might not have been necessary. Nobody is really excited about buying software, unless it is being expertly sold to them with some handholding. As noted above, Microsoft got around this by making Windows sales invisible to hardware buyers.
3) There is a long list of OS efforts that have failed to survive as software only companies: DR-DOS, NeXTStep, BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS. They didn't succeed, even though they were "printing money" and enjoying those 'high margin profits' on every unit sold.
4) Apple has sucessfully made money selling their own computers as long as they've been around. They currently make higher margins than PC makers. Risking that sucess to take a shot at a software sales business plan with a very high mortality rate does not sound sensible.
5) While common sense suggests the way to make money is by giving away razor handles and selling blades, Apple has managed to sell Macs (handles) at a good profit, while also selling blades (Mac OS X) to their customers better than Microsoft. In 5 years, Apple has sold 4 paid versions of OS X, compared to 2 paid upgrades of Windows from Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft doens't sell their customers many upgrade copies of Windows, they just collect taxes in the form of site licenses and new hardware tariffs. Hard to compete with that.
So do the math. Will Apple benefit from gutting their low end Mac market, and handing their iBook and iMac sales to HP and Dell, on the gamble that users will buy paid upgrades to OS X, rather than pirate it? They would be likely to lose their high end market as well, to Dell, AlienWare and whoever else. And their XServes. Yeah, that sounds bad.
Why not keep those home Mac buyers at the Apple Store, sell them new iBooks and iMacs, and then show them why they also might want iWork, iLife, a printer, an iPod and a new version of OS X, as well as AppleCare and.Mac, and then another iBook and then the next version of OS X?
Or how about education customers, who buy labs of laptops and Airports and XServes and XS RAIDS, should Apple send their customers to Dell for all that gear, and then try to sell them OS X in place of the Windows they already licensed through Dell?
Fucking Duh, yeah they'd be better off just selling an OS X license to a few schlumps who decided not to bother with the torrent download. Of the 100,000 Slashdotters who'd check out OS X on their PC, how many would pay for it in a retail box? A whole lot less than would consider buying a Mac Mini or PowerBook, if the PC wasn't an option.
You better bet Apple will do everything possible to make OS X run clumsily on PCs, and break hacks with every software update. Do you supose Apple will spare PC pirates the indignation they launched upon Real's for their Harmony AAC copy protection designed to play music on the iPod?
6) Apple recently complimented their sucessful hardware and software sales on the Mac platform with the iPod platform, which similarly sells higher margin hardware along with supplementary software sales (iTMS) and peripherals. In the case of the iPod, free software (iTunes) drives hardware sales. Do you think Apple could have sold iTunes and made as much profit as they do now with the iPod? What if they sold iTunes for all the WMA players out there, would that make them lots of money?
Stated Obviousness: Car is short for carriage
on
When Pigs Wifi
·
· Score: 1
The reason we don't call cars "horseless carriages" any more is the same reason we call a tarpaulin a tarp and a personal computer a PC. It's easier to say.
Wireless used to mean radio back when the most common and obvious example of unwired communications (as opposed to a using a telephone line link) was a radio set.
Radios have been wireless so long that the idea of a radio set is no longer connected with wired communications of some sort, so "wireless" today is used in the context of "information services that don't require ethernet cabling," since everything that isn't wireless wi-fi is tethered to ethernet.
Since you probably couldn't tell by looking at a cable what the conduit material is, it is a bit retarded to suggest fiber cables are wireless, since the point of being wireless is being untethered, not being metal free.
Wireless headsets are wireless because there isn't a wire from the phone to the headset, and is wholly unrelated to the wirelessness of the phone.
Mercury vapor is in... mercury vapor lamps, the stale white lamps used in street lighting. Sodium vapor lamps replaced some of them them, since they provide warmer light.
Fluorescent lighting runs an arc through a tube of noble gas; it generally refers to argon white light tubes in commercial light fixtures, but is the same principle as neon lighting.
Look at how MS does coop advertising. Remember Windows 98's most obvious feature, 'push' ads that turned your desktop into an ad for Disney and whoever else? MS only abandoned the idea after it was laughed at. Microsoft is like Yahoo: crass and lame.
Google's ads, which are everywhere in their products, are by design subtle, useful and relevant to the information you are searching. Google is like Apple: classy and sharp.
User Interface
Microsoft creates Wizards that put you on a dummy stool and start reading you a boring script (next) asking you to push obvious buttons (next) and step through (next) several (next) pages of blah blah (next) to get anything done (finish). Other interfaces are cluttered but simplistic. Yahoo!
Google's products attempt to be obvious and simple enough to figure out without reading a manual. Apple!
Business Style
Microsoft attempts to poison innovations to prevent them from threatening their control of markets. They pollute standards to make everything proprietary, buy technologies to catch up, and after dominating an industry, they leave it to rot rather than continue to cultivate innovation (web browsers). Microsoft attempts to get money out of everything they do, charging for the client, the server and the client accessing the server. Yahoo!
Google presents innovations as future products, even when it is not clear how they will profit. They employ open standards and encourage interoperability. They provide free public services. Apple!
History
Microsoft sprang from being a software middle man. Their value comes more from marketing than technology. They make vaporous promises that kill competition and innovation. Yahoo?
Google sprang from a technology implementation. Their value comes from finding ways to profit from new technologies. They introduce products the market puts to use and that competitors copy. Apple.
Google wears the white hat of the new Apple.
Microsoft wears the black hat of Yahoo.
Microsoft isn't lame and evil because they are big, but because they are lame and evil. Some big monopolies are benevolent (Ma Bell?) and plenty of small underdog companies are evil.
I agree that the business case behind malware obviously picks targets that commercially attractive, and Windows is obviously the thing to attack for that reason.
Still, if Linux were easy to exploit, there would be far more exploits targeted at the markets Linux is used in: web servers, firewalls, and the like. If you look at the web logs of any server, the attacks you get daily are 1) guessing bad SSH passwords and 2) attempts to own IIS boxes by exploiting bad code. The first is an attempt to see if the lock was left open, while the second is simply kicking down a door that was never built with functional locks in mind.
Back on the desktop, if Windows employed basic security, it would still be attacked disproportionately higher because of its ubiquity, but perhaps we wouldn't have such an after market for basic security products, and spammers would actually have to own and operate their own machines to send out their spam rather than harvesting acres of Windows boxen that willingly offer their services as so much low hanging fruit.
Nobody is selling Internet Security in a box for Linux.
We don't tolerate similar behavior in our cars, entertainment devices and other electronics, but PCs seem to be immune from public scrutiny and minimal quality regulation. Imagine if your car pulled over randomly and made you sit through an ad before continuing down the road? That wouldn't last long.
Security becomes rather nebulously abstract when you talk about it as an idea, but it's pretty obvious to look at the woeful mess that is killing productivity and creating massive problems with spam and see that Microsoft is to blame for much of it simply through their incompetence.
If Microsoft were replaced in the marketplace, security would still require vigilance, but it does not follow that the problem would necessarily continue on whatever platform replaced Windows. There are ways to provide basic protection from such rampant viral embarrassments.
Yes it is interesting to look at the state of security from a decade ago or more, but I originally replied to the comment that viruses are a user problem, not a security issue. That's just not the case. While users can bung anything, having a security model in place stops the rampant spread of self replicating malware (viruses).
I noted that adware/spyware is a different issue, as there isn't a lot you can do to stop poorly written stuff from getting installed. Being able to uninstall things, and have some control of how things can get reinstalled is a security model issue however.
There really isn't much to discuss about Windows lack of security. Even competent Windows shops get entirely fubared from spyware and viruses sometimes.
My point about lineage is that Mac OS X comes from NeXTSTEP, which had many modern security features at a time when Microsoft was selling Windows 3.11. Microsoft didn't sell a version of Windows with any real security for regular users prior to the initial release of Mac OS X, and they continued to sell OS with ports wide open long after it was painfully apparent that Microsoft's products were a major security problem.
We aren't talking about security in 1995; even from 2000, Microsoft sloppily took 5 years to begin offering an OS that didn't immediately begin trading infections within moments of gaining network access.
So yes, there is no 100% security anywhere, but Apple obviously thinks about security as a way to make their products better, while Microsoft thinks about talking about security when they start to look ridiculously incompetent.
Another factor to consider is that Mac OS X, like Linux, is based on open source foundation and networking stack that has been built with security in mind and peer reviewed. Microsoft's code is a big black box. In that context, Unix has benefited from a refined security model over decades of use because it has been refined, not just resold.
With all that in mind, I don't think Mac OS X will be suffering from IE/Outlook style virus/adware zombification just as soon as they hit some notch of market share. Microsoft isn't suffering security headaches from owning the PC OS market, they are suffering from bad security design.
The question: "If the sky is orange, why does it appear blue?"... does not prove the point that the sky is orange. It questions it.
Yes, security models are no better than their weakest link. If the user is a weak link, there has to be a security model that limits what the user can do, moving that link out of the chain. That's what a security model does: takes options away from the user, so they can no longer be the weak link.
File permissions prevent users from editing things they shouldn't, and keep them from inadvertanly creating security holes.
Windows has a problem because it historically did not limit anything in the name of security, thereby giving users full opportunity to blow off their own feet.
Windows has a history of no security, and that legacy was carried along into the present with security bandaids as Microsoft's customers began to suffer. MS shipped an OS with open communication ports accepting outside commands (Messenger) up into the last couple years. This feature came from an office environment where it seemed good to allow admins to popup messages to users. Tured out anyone could pop up anything whenever they liked.
Internet Explorer was designed to be extended into application development platform to counter Java and Netscape's release of platforms that rivaled Win32 desktop applications, but security was only slopped on as an afterthought, leaving IE users at the mercy of whoever wanted to execute whatever on their PC.
SMB is another example of finding a way to do something without thinking about security enough.
All those are examples of Microsoft technology that employed lax security because it was destined to run in a office unconnected to a hostile network.
Unix systems originated on worldwide networks, and have benefitted from a refined security model over decades of use.
My point is that Mac OS X and other Unix systems come from a mindset of not trusting outside information and not allowing unnecessary communications ports by default. Windows comes from a mentality of letting PCs work together without strong security in place. Security = the opposite of convenience.
Slashdot Mirror
You sure happen to know a lot about "the courts." What are you 15?
And is what you think the courts should rule even relevant?
Consider Apple's scuffle with attempts to patch out iTune's DRM. Were courts involved? Nope.
It's a little to obvious that if Apple really doesn't want Mac OS X running on PCs, they can easily make Aqua apps fail to run in ways that will be very difficult to work around. Mac OS X is not some DOS shell or Linux variant.
Anybody wanting to run Mac OS X does so because of the slickness of the Aqua level apps, Cocoa/Carbon, Quartz and other non-open technologies that would be very easy to tie to hardware in a way that would be impossible to sort out.
Yeah XP an 2000 Server are different products.
But Exchange Server and Exchange Server Enterprise are not. And there are plenty of other examples of software that are identical code licensed for different numbers of users or 'unlocking' or allowing use of certain features, including being able to run on certain hardware. Ever heard of per processor licensing?
You can license MS products per server or seat, or per site, all of which involve a different type of agreement and sometimes offer different features or support agreements.
If software were a durable good, every corporation could just obtain a single retail box and distribute it throughout the company. The point of licensing is to create a method to fairly pay software creators for their work in proportion to its use, and ensure they continue to develop and support the software.
Duh.
You need to lay off the absolutes when denying the possibility of things that... happen everyday.
That was perhaps the most misguided bunch of ridiculousness I have read all year.
Painful to read.
License restrictions and copyrights are balanced by fair use rights.
Letting somebody read your book, or citing an idea from a book in your blog would generally be recognized as fair use.
OCR scanning your book and distributing it on P2P networks wouldn't be fair use, since that would effectively destroy the book market, and would be showing gross disregard for the book's copyright holder.
Attempts to reconcile piracy with the ideas of free speech and open source just hurts free and open ideas.
The thing is, if you don't own the IP, you can't decide how it gets used.
You don't even know what you're arguing Hamburgerman.
There is no market for non-Apple PPC machines, and haven't been any around since 1997. At the same time, I'm sure I could dig up a device with a x86 processor that can't run Windows. WTF is your point?
There is no restriction on viewing movies because there is no reason to; copyright applies to copying. WTF is your point?
Copyright doesn't grant users anything. It protect the owner of the copyright from infringing use.
Apple making their next OS run only on their own hardware has nothing to do with copyright. Trying to run it on a PC would not be a copyright infringement, it would be a licensing infringement.
A EULA is only "not recognized as a contract" by the same reality-free kooks who don't recognize the IRS.
And in any event, a EULA doesn't rescind your rights, because you don't have inalienable rights to use others' intellectual property to start with. You only gain the use rights you contract for by agreeing to purchase it, and the EULA spells out what limited rights you get.
Handing money for a box at CompUSA isn't a contract use agreement, the EULA is. The EULA doesn't magically jump in and limit your rights when you open the package, it spells out the buyer's agreement in using the software. If you can't live by the EULA, you take it back.
Where did you get the idea that copyright has anything to do with anything apart from the rights to copy?
Stop saying that word, because you obviously have no idea what it means.
When you license intellectual property, you do so at the mercy of the owner of the work. If you don't like their terms and conditions and price, you go elsewhere or write your own software.
If you are buying a hamburger, and decide that Burger King is selling their burgers for too much money, you don't have any inalienable rights to get a burger anyway, at whatever price you like. You'll have to try Wendys or make your own sandwich at home.
If you want to rent an apartment, and find they don't allow pets, you don't have inalienable rights to breed puppies there either. You find another place.
What is so hard to figure out? What are you, seven?
Dishonest? and do you even know what disingenuous means?
Here's an example of disingenuous: "are you arguing that when someone pays for a product, they don't have the right to make use of it?"
You are ridiculous and ignorant, Mr Hamburger Jackass.
Copyright is the right to copy. When you pay for something under copyright, you don't "gain rights" from some "copyright system", but rather your ability to "do whatever you like" is restricted by the fact that someone else holds the copyright.
You can't copy it, you can't sell or offer rights to it. You can only use or resell your license.
This isn't complex stuff.
And yeah, somebody who has no contract with Apple, but who is using their software, is a thief.
And nobody to date has EVER bought OS X and ran it on non-Apple hardware, because there is not a version of OS X you can buy that runs on PCs. Stealing the developer preview to demo the parts of OS X that do run on PCs is a different thing to prattle about.
There is plenty of room to dislike EULAs and sloppy software licenses that deny fitness for a particular purpose, and disavow any responsibility for liability, and restrict fair use, among other things. But all the comments you make are just non-sensical gibberish, and your replies are absolutely irrational mind dumps.
The A in EULA is for agreement. A contract is an agreement. You can argue whether you think shrink wrap EULAs are enforceable, or binding or ethical, but you can't argue that it isn't a contract.
As a society, we license the use of intellectual property because it is not real property. It's a convention of reality. You can dislike paying people for their creative work, engineering or whatever, but it's how the world works.
When you buy a hamburger, you are paying for a tangible good, not intellectual property. You can't digitally duplicate your hamburger and resell it (or give it away) and destroy the market for hamburgers, so your ketchup story is stupid.
TVs and Fords are tangible goods. Apple doesn't license how you can use your iPod or PowerBook, because, like TVs, Fords and Hamburgers, their hardware isn't something you can duplicate and flood the market with, at no cost to yourself.
Software, music, movies, books and other intellectual property *can* be mass duplicated and have a value that is used, perceived and sold differently, for that reason.
There are plenty of implied contracts in use in the world. Saying that you are not bound by a licensing agreement because you didn't sign anything is meaningless.
You don't sign a contract when going to see a movie either, but if you pull out your camcorder to bootleg it, you might end up in jail. And crying about hamburgers and ketchup isn't going to do you any good there either.
After they get your money for a license, you own a license to use the software as per the EULA.
Or did you think paying Apple $99 for Tiger ceded the development and distribution rights to you?
Apple licensing their forthcoming OS for use only on their own hardware is no different than Microsoft licensing their OS in Pro and Server versions, which differ only in the licensing agreement and a few registry settings. Or any licensing that is sold per seat, per user or per site.
A contract is about giving something in consideration for something else. If you don't like restrictive commercial licensing for software, stick with BSD exclusively.
The point of putting a G4 on a card would make even less sense. While the G5 is fairly competitive in performance and architecture, the G4 is seriously old technology. It sits on a sub 200 MHz MHz bus!
//e card: it had the Mega II from the IIGS onboard, which basically was the entire Apple II architecture in a VLSI chip, so it supported all the wacky hardware and ports for software. However, trying to draw an analogy between it and Intel Macs, as a reason for Apple to want a G4 supply, is quite a stretch!
No amount of Altivec magic is going to help out the saggy ass G4. A despite the marketspeak, Altivec on the G4 isn't in a different class than SSE, and it would not benefit any class of user to outfit an Intel Mac with a G4.
As far as obsolete hardware and ports go, there aren't ANY machines with ADB, LocalTalk, etc that CAN EVEN RUN Mac OS X Panther, let alone Tiger.
More power to anybody hacking away on old machines and having fun with them, but Apple customers who haven't upgraded Mac hardware past 1996 ARE NOT CUSTOMERS WORTH THINKING ABOUT.
A G4 on a PCI card is not going to help somebody trying to figure out how to integrate an Intel Mac into their LocalTalk network or plug in their 1993 ADB graphics tablet anyway, so that line of logic boggles the mind.
You are right about the
Problem is that Freescale (formerly Motorolla) makes G4s, not the IBM G5. Of course, it would make no sense to put a G5 processor in an Intel Mac, because if the G5 were faster, they could simply just ship a G5 Mac instead. Which is exactly what they announced: replacing the G4 with mobile Pentium M first, and transistioning the G5s later. If it were cost effective and/or technically practical to put a G5 onto a little card, they'd probably be using the G5 where the G4s are now. But they're not, so they aren't and won't. Schools weren't holding on to old //e hardware, but rather wanting to run their //e software on those Mac LCs. The PDS card was required because the Mac wasn't really fast enough to emulate the //e hardware in software. Neither problem exists in WRT the Intel Macs. OS X software runs fine natively or via Rosetta, so no hardware is necessary.
If you haven't been paying attention, the Inquirer is one of a new pile of pseudo-news websites posting ridiculous garbage with sensationalist headlines and plenty of ads. Nothing to see here, please move along.
You mean like BeOS? Amiga? Palm? Apple '94 licensing? Yeah the road to giving your OS away is paved with such stellar sucesses.
Should Apple have predicted that rolling out a bunch of Apple Stores with glass windows would result in thieves breaking those windows and stealing iPods?
And should such a postulated inevitability make breaking in to Apple Stores to steal goods socially acceptable?
The "OS X on x86 thing" is not "a far cry from theft," if you define theft as 'taking something that does does not belong to you, without payment, solely for your own amusement'.
We are not talking about getting Darwin code that has been released as open source running on PCs, we are talking about people trying to steal a pirate copy of the OS X Intel developer preview, and trying to make it run on PCs that were purchased with Windows (in most cases).
These people are paying Microsoft to run OS X, which is kind of lame. If you want to see innovation, you need to support innovative companies. If you want all software to be free, you should use free software exclusively.
Running Linux on an Xbox is repurposing hardware (despite MS' losing money on the deal through speculative loss leader pricing). Running pirate commercial software on your cheap PC is not really a comparable endeavor.
I think you meant, "And yes, it's you," unless you were speaking of a you possesed by an it.
The major environmental problem with electric vehicles isn't that electricity isn't necessarily cleaner, but that battery technology isn't there yet.
So while an electric car will likely run more efficiently and may generate less pollution (certainly less pollution where it's being operated, if not less when the electricity source is factored in), those huge banks of batteries will eventually need to be disposed of, resulting in a massive amount of toxic heavy metals to deal with.
Until battery technology can improve, or we develop a mass market system of recycling all those massive batteries, we might need to keep looking at alternatives to battery operated electric vehicles.
Once environmentalism embraces nuclear power, perhaps electric vehicles might become a real factor in clean transportation.
I like happy endings, you Insensitive Cl
Steve Jobs once commented that Apple, like Microsoft, can "print money" in a way that its hardware competitors (like Dell) can't.
.Mac, and then another iBook and then the next version of OS X?
But before you get carried away suggesting that Apple throw away their existing computer company and become a software company, consider this:
1) Microsoft isn't rich and powerful because they deliver the best OS technology, or because they compete in software value, but rather because they own a monopoly in the PC OS Software market, a monopoly they built through predatory marketing and anti-competitive deals with hardware makers that killed rivals. Microsoft does not compete in software sales, they have imposed a tax on every PC sold in the last two decades.
2) Free/OSS software is frequently based upon a support business plan. If the world was ready to pay money for software, this might not have been necessary. Nobody is really excited about buying software, unless it is being expertly sold to them with some handholding. As noted above, Microsoft got around this by making Windows sales invisible to hardware buyers.
3) There is a long list of OS efforts that have failed to survive as software only companies: DR-DOS, NeXTStep, BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS. They didn't succeed, even though they were "printing money" and enjoying those 'high margin profits' on every unit sold.
4) Apple has sucessfully made money selling their own computers as long as they've been around. They currently make higher margins than PC makers. Risking that sucess to take a shot at a software sales business plan with a very high mortality rate does not sound sensible.
5) While common sense suggests the way to make money is by giving away razor handles and selling blades, Apple has managed to sell Macs (handles) at a good profit, while also selling blades (Mac OS X) to their customers better than Microsoft. In 5 years, Apple has sold 4 paid versions of OS X, compared to 2 paid upgrades of Windows from Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft doens't sell their customers many upgrade copies of Windows, they just collect taxes in the form of site licenses and new hardware tariffs. Hard to compete with that.
So do the math. Will Apple benefit from gutting their low end Mac market, and handing their iBook and iMac sales to HP and Dell, on the gamble that users will buy paid upgrades to OS X, rather than pirate it? They would be likely to lose their high end market as well, to Dell, AlienWare and whoever else. And their XServes. Yeah, that sounds bad.
Why not keep those home Mac buyers at the Apple Store, sell them new iBooks and iMacs, and then show them why they also might want iWork, iLife, a printer, an iPod and a new version of OS X, as well as AppleCare and
Or how about education customers, who buy labs of laptops and Airports and XServes and XS RAIDS, should Apple send their customers to Dell for all that gear, and then try to sell them OS X in place of the Windows they already licensed through Dell?
Fucking Duh, yeah they'd be better off just selling an OS X license to a few schlumps who decided not to bother with the torrent download. Of the 100,000 Slashdotters who'd check out OS X on their PC, how many would pay for it in a retail box? A whole lot less than would consider buying a Mac Mini or PowerBook, if the PC wasn't an option.
You better bet Apple will do everything possible to make OS X run clumsily on PCs, and break hacks with every software update. Do you supose Apple will spare PC pirates the indignation they launched upon Real's for their Harmony AAC copy protection designed to play music on the iPod?
6) Apple recently complimented their sucessful hardware and software sales on the Mac platform with the iPod platform, which similarly sells higher margin hardware along with supplementary software sales (iTMS) and peripherals. In the case of the iPod, free software (iTunes) drives hardware sales. Do you think Apple could have sold iTunes and made as much profit as they do now with the iPod? What if they sold iTunes for all the WMA players out there, would that make them lots of money?
The reason we don't call cars "horseless carriages" any more is the same reason we call a tarpaulin a tarp and a personal computer a PC. It's easier to say.
Wireless used to mean radio back when the most common and obvious example of unwired communications (as opposed to a using a telephone line link) was a radio set.
Radios have been wireless so long that the idea of a radio set is no longer connected with wired communications of some sort, so "wireless" today is used in the context of "information services that don't require ethernet cabling," since everything that isn't wireless wi-fi is tethered to ethernet.
Since you probably couldn't tell by looking at a cable what the conduit material is, it is a bit retarded to suggest fiber cables are wireless, since the point of being wireless is being untethered, not being metal free.
Wireless headsets are wireless because there isn't a wire from the phone to the headset, and is wholly unrelated to the wirelessness of the phone.
Mercury vapor is in... mercury vapor lamps, the stale white lamps used in street lighting. Sodium vapor lamps replaced some of them them, since they provide warmer light.
Fluorescent lighting runs an arc through a tube of noble gas; it generally refers to argon white light tubes in commercial light fixtures, but is the same principle as neon lighting.
Maybe you can wrap it around yourself to keep warm - and fuzzy.
Why they chose to clone it with an Afgan is anyone's guess.
I don't think it means what you think it means.
NYT makes money from reporting news, so they want to make sure their news sources will keep providing them news, hence the need for anonymity.
NYT makes money from readership, and knowing who those readers are, hence the registration.
It would be ironic if a NYT reporter spent a lot of effort facilitating anonmous sources and then...
couldn't look up his source because he'd hidden it too well.
or
absent mindedly published the source anyway.
That's ironic. Having a use for both anonymous sources and registered readers is not ironic. It's obvious and expected.
Advertising
Look at how MS does coop advertising. Remember Windows 98's most obvious feature, 'push' ads that turned your desktop into an ad for Disney and whoever else? MS only abandoned the idea after it was laughed at. Microsoft is like Yahoo: crass and lame.
Google's ads, which are everywhere in their products, are by design subtle, useful and relevant to the information you are searching. Google is like Apple: classy and sharp.
User Interface
Microsoft creates Wizards that put you on a dummy stool and start reading you a boring script (next) asking you to push obvious buttons (next) and step through (next) several (next) pages of blah blah (next) to get anything done (finish). Other interfaces are cluttered but simplistic. Yahoo!
Google's products attempt to be obvious and simple enough to figure out without reading a manual. Apple!
Business Style
Microsoft attempts to poison innovations to prevent them from threatening their control of markets. They pollute standards to make everything proprietary, buy technologies to catch up, and after dominating an industry, they leave it to rot rather than continue to cultivate innovation (web browsers). Microsoft attempts to get money out of everything they do, charging for the client, the server and the client accessing the server. Yahoo!
Google presents innovations as future products, even when it is not clear how they will profit. They employ open standards and encourage interoperability. They provide free public services. Apple!
History
Microsoft sprang from being a software middle man. Their value comes more from marketing than technology. They make vaporous promises that kill competition and innovation. Yahoo?
Google sprang from a technology implementation. Their value comes from finding ways to profit from new technologies. They introduce products the market puts to use and that competitors copy. Apple.
Google wears the white hat of the new Apple.
Microsoft wears the black hat of Yahoo.
Microsoft isn't lame and evil because they are big, but because they are lame and evil. Some big monopolies are benevolent (Ma Bell?) and plenty of small underdog companies are evil.
I agree that the business case behind malware obviously picks targets that commercially attractive, and Windows is obviously the thing to attack for that reason.
Still, if Linux were easy to exploit, there would be far more exploits targeted at the markets Linux is used in: web servers, firewalls, and the like. If you look at the web logs of any server, the attacks you get daily are 1) guessing bad SSH passwords and 2) attempts to own IIS boxes by exploiting bad code. The first is an attempt to see if the lock was left open, while the second is simply kicking down a door that was never built with functional locks in mind.
Back on the desktop, if Windows employed basic security, it would still be attacked disproportionately higher because of its ubiquity, but perhaps we wouldn't have such an after market for basic security products, and spammers would actually have to own and operate their own machines to send out their spam rather than harvesting acres of Windows boxen that willingly offer their services as so much low hanging fruit.
Nobody is selling Internet Security in a box for Linux.
We don't tolerate similar behavior in our cars, entertainment devices and other electronics, but PCs seem to be immune from public scrutiny and minimal quality regulation. Imagine if your car pulled over randomly and made you sit through an ad before continuing down the road? That wouldn't last long.
Security becomes rather nebulously abstract when you talk about it as an idea, but it's pretty obvious to look at the woeful mess that is killing productivity and creating massive problems with spam and see that Microsoft is to blame for much of it simply through their incompetence.
If Microsoft were replaced in the marketplace, security would still require vigilance, but it does not follow that the problem would necessarily continue on whatever platform replaced Windows. There are ways to provide basic protection from such rampant viral embarrassments.
Yes it is interesting to look at the state of security from a decade ago or more, but I originally replied to the comment that viruses are a user problem, not a security issue. That's just not the case. While users can bung anything, having a security model in place stops the rampant spread of self replicating malware (viruses).
I noted that adware/spyware is a different issue, as there isn't a lot you can do to stop poorly written stuff from getting installed. Being able to uninstall things, and have some control of how things can get reinstalled is a security model issue however.
There really isn't much to discuss about Windows lack of security. Even competent Windows shops get entirely fubared from spyware and viruses sometimes.
My point about lineage is that Mac OS X comes from NeXTSTEP, which had many modern security features at a time when Microsoft was selling Windows 3.11. Microsoft didn't sell a version of Windows with any real security for regular users prior to the initial release of Mac OS X, and they continued to sell OS with ports wide open long after it was painfully apparent that Microsoft's products were a major security problem.
We aren't talking about security in 1995; even from 2000, Microsoft sloppily took 5 years to begin offering an OS that didn't immediately begin trading infections within moments of gaining network access.
So yes, there is no 100% security anywhere, but Apple obviously thinks about security as a way to make their products better, while Microsoft thinks about talking about security when they start to look ridiculously incompetent.
Another factor to consider is that Mac OS X, like Linux, is based on open source foundation and networking stack that has been built with security in mind and peer reviewed. Microsoft's code is a big black box. In that context, Unix has benefited from a refined security model over decades of use because it has been refined, not just resold.
With all that in mind, I don't think Mac OS X will be suffering from IE/Outlook style virus/adware zombification just as soon as they hit some notch of market share. Microsoft isn't suffering security headaches from owning the PC OS market, they are suffering from bad security design.
The question: "If the sky is orange, why does it appear blue?" ... does not prove the point that the sky is orange. It questions it.
Yes, security models are no better than their weakest link. If the user is a weak link, there has to be a security model that limits what the user can do, moving that link out of the chain. That's what a security model does: takes options away from the user, so they can no longer be the weak link.
File permissions prevent users from editing things they shouldn't, and keep them from inadvertanly creating security holes.
Windows has a problem because it historically did not limit anything in the name of security, thereby giving users full opportunity to blow off their own feet.
Windows has a history of no security, and that legacy was carried along into the present with security bandaids as Microsoft's customers began to suffer. MS shipped an OS with open communication ports accepting outside commands (Messenger) up into the last couple years. This feature came from an office environment where it seemed good to allow admins to popup messages to users. Tured out anyone could pop up anything whenever they liked.
Internet Explorer was designed to be extended into application development platform to counter Java and Netscape's release of platforms that rivaled Win32 desktop applications, but security was only slopped on as an afterthought, leaving IE users at the mercy of whoever wanted to execute whatever on their PC.
SMB is another example of finding a way to do something without thinking about security enough.
All those are examples of Microsoft technology that employed lax security because it was destined to run in a office unconnected to a hostile network.
Unix systems originated on worldwide networks, and have benefitted from a refined security model over decades of use.
My point is that Mac OS X and other Unix systems come from a mindset of not trusting outside information and not allowing unnecessary communications ports by default. Windows comes from a mentality of letting PCs work together without strong security in place. Security = the opposite of convenience.