If Viruses are a user problem, not a security problem, how would anyone who is unable to keep Mac OS X safe going to benefit from a move to Linux?
Is Linux plagued by viruses and adware and popups, despite having more exposure to crackers than OS X? After all, people writing Windows malware for PCs are more likely to try exploiting Linux than an OS on an entirely different hardware platform.
But no, we don't have a massive spyware/adware/virus problem on Linux. Linux and OS X aren't protected from attacks because they are minority platforms, but because they provide a better security model.
A loose, sloppy Mac OS X admin is about as safe as the most dedicated Windows admin, who is on top of the latest exploit patches and knows how to set up firewalls securely.
In fact, I've worked in a number of highly competent, proactive Windows shops who still suffered virus outbreaks from time to time, and suffered frequently from adware nuisances. Mac OS X simply does not have these problems, primarilly because of a better security model, but partly because of the Mac culture.
If Apple gains substantial market share, there may be more adware targeted at Mac users, but the platform won't suffer from widely distributed virus attacks that disable machines in ways the user is helpless to repair.
Microsoft's security problem was caused by Window's mixing their security free, dittohead office LAN environment with the PC hacker community, as part of an initive to join an internetworked world. They were simply unprepared to deal with security because it was never considered necessary before.
Mac OS X comes directly from NeXTSTEP, which was used by the CIA and NSA, and draws its security model from Unix and the BSD community. Security was not an afterthought.
So if every key were a self contained computer unit with a serial port/powersupply interfacing with a main logic board, it would be similar in complexity to a standard keyboard, which uses simple buttons to close switches?
Right now, the computation going on in a keyboard is a unit that decodes signals across a matrix of ~100 key switches and send them out over USB. This keyboard would be a main unit interfacing, powering and providing a display signal for 100 key switches and 100 seperate displays, each of which would either need to be controlled externally (requiring really complex signaling) or have the logic to drive the screen built into each key!
Illuminated keyboards, like the one in the newer PowerBooks, use fiber optics to spread a light source into all those keys. I'd imagine that just running a set of wires to power lamps (or LEDs) for each key would be rather expensive and complex
The signaling needed to control and display as many little screens would be orders of magnitude more complex.
Perhaps we could just use electroluminescent bacteria, with a single circulatory system that provided food, oxygen, waste removal and a hormone signalling system that arrange them and lit them as necessary.
Have you bought a printer recently? Printers are disposable devices!
They have become the handle the holds the razor. While I'm a little nostalgic for printers that were built like tanks and lasted forever, they also cost quite a bit, and can't incorporate new technology that comes out every week.
It's going nowhere for you because you have nothing to tear down. Anyway, it looks like we agree on much of what you just wrote.
However, a completely undetectable god, would not "be equivalent to no god at all."
It doesn't matter if Schrodinger's cat is alive or not, because the the cat doesn't matter.
However, if you were say, playing with a CRT tube and don't have the means to detect whether it is charged, knowing or choosing not to know (or refusing to believe) that it could be dangerous simply because you lack the ability to detect the electricity, is a different matter.
One could logically decide that since it's been sitting idle for a long time, there is no chance that it has any charge left and is therefore safe to play with; that 'rational' decision could be lethal.
All through history there are examples of things that scientists could not detect at the time: radioactivity, electric current, viruses. That didn't mean they did not exist until they could be measured. So the fact that you can't perceive a higher power does not mean no higher power can exist.
A true scientist looks for truth and tries to better understand the world, but in reality, there is a huge amount of "science" that invents data to support a hypothesis (particularly when money in involved), or destroys or omits data that doesn't fit what they wish to believe, or skews information to back up political views. Every age of science has compiled a dogma of things one must believe in order to be considered fashionably intellectual.
There are so many people who simply subscribe to the current scientific doctrines, with no first hand knowledge, simply because they feel it makes them superior to believe what they're told and what they want to hear.
That's a flaw I see a lot in the church of atheism. Hearing atheists say they aren't religious is just painful. If you wish to use "religion" as a negative word (which is more often than not is), atheism needs to be included as a religion, simply because it shares so much with other destructive, fundamentalist, narrow, arrogant sects.
I'm commenting on a thread the demanded to know when atheists ever caused wars.
Your reply suggested that atheism is somehow vastly different that other belief systems, simply because no belief in god is involved, and then added that lacking faith automatically made atheists superior.
I commented that first, the world has "religions" that don't include a belief in god, and really atheism is no better than any another religion in that it's just a belief system that gets people militant and divides the world, and has been involved in (and directed) plenty of war and atrocities.
Second, I said your definition of faith failed to describe how faith can be exercised. I gave both a definition from a religious authority (a definition that would be better suited in a religious discussion than a general purpose dictionary, but nice try), and a secular example of how society exercises faith outside the realm of spirituality.
I think you have problems understanding abstract ideas. You get lost in the simple analogy of a document backed by the "full faith of the government," and somehow confuse the value of a title deed with the idea it represents.
A title deed is indeed a worthless bit a paper if the entity that issues it cannot be trusted to back up the idea of private property ownership rights. That's why we exercise faith in a system that makes currency, securities and title deeds worth something abstract that is of far more value than the simple paper fibers and ink that comprise them.
Are you too simple to understand that defining words is a prerequisite to having a meaningful discussion of ideas, or are you just trying to be a jackass?
As long as you insist that faith can only be credulity, and that secular faith in abstract ideas is somehow an entirely separate idea, I'll have to let you return to your self congratulatory throne of pretentious ignorance.
I'm not defending religiousness, and certainly, as I noted, belief systems have often been used to do horrible wrongs. The thing is that atheism has done nothing to reform humanity, bring civility or peace, or elevate morality or solve anything.
As you demonstrate, it is just another religion that enables simple people to march in step and look down on fellow humans.
Athiest is to agnostic what right wing fanatic jesus freak is to mainstream casually religious America, or what jihad terrorist is to the greater Islamic world.
Loud, obnoxious and arrogant extremist minority.
Thanks for looking up NSF's proof that the world is mostly stupid, because we didn't know that before.
Also, no you are wrong; there are plenty of options in science, and everything isn't a fact. If it were, we wouldn't have to research and apply the scientific method looking for truth, as we'd just know everything. Science is our understanding of the world around us, not the power to define reality.
As much as I can't stand religious nuts, I have to say that atheists are nearly as fucking annoying in their fundamentalist, narrow, ignorant and arrogant view of the world.
Your circular reasoning conveniently ignored much of what I said about how faith is defined by those who have faith.
You also conveniently ignore that much of what we understand about our Universe, we are unable to actually test. We create models for understanding things we can't actually observe, and infer much of what we know about them by the perceived effects they have on other things. We believe we know lots of things, based on reasoning and inferrance.
Using my previous analogy, if you buy a house, there is "no test you can do to conclusively prove" that your title will maintain ownership of that property for your grandchildren after you die; you can only exercise faith in the rule of law to have the hope that the work you did while alive will survive to benefit your heirs.
I have no business or interest in trying to get you to exercise faith in anything. I'm merely saying you are foolish to regard faith as the opposite of rational thought, and suggest that faith is never based on knowledge but is only a result of ignorance.
My original point was that showing hatred for things you don't understand is the core reason for much of the violence and bloodshed in our world. The fact that you step around that order to reaffirm for yourself that your contented and enlightened existence is entirely due to your superiority over people who view the world differently doesn't refute that; it rather makes it more obvious.
It's like suggesting to the KKK that maybe they are missing something, and having them, in their defense, just spew out the same garbage again about their superiority, citing circular definitions of what being the master race is all about.
I fail to see any point in further explaining the nature of faith, as a trust based upon knowledge and experience, when you simply ignore rather than refute my definition, and reiterate what your faithless peers want it to mean so as to protect your illusion of the world.
Also, thanks for the distracting straw man argument, but most people don't "seem to miss what science is," because it is pretty simple to understand most concrete ideas. What most people 'fail to understand' are abstract concepts that require higher reasoning skills, that can't be reduced to a simple sound byte.
As for Einstein, I said he believed in a supreme being, not in a Christian God. This was because he appreciated the order in nature. He also quite famously said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
And you can make Newton a puppet for whatever you like to believe, but the fact is that he was fervently religious and expressed his discoveries quite obviously in that context.
17th Century atheists had no more to hide than present day academics who have faith.
Atheists are just fundamentalist agnostics, following the pattern of all tenants of belief: the many are ringed by a loud, obnoxious and arrogant extremist minority.
But laptop CPU upgrades are too expensive to even develop. There isn't even a market for PC laptop upgrades.
If you paid $2500 for a 2003 G4 PowerBook, and used it for 3 years until you feel it needs an upgrade, it makes a lot more sense to sell it for $900 and buy a new 2006 $2500 PowerBook than to pay $500 to upgrade your old PowerBook and still have a 2003 PowerBook with a slightly faster CPU, that is still worth $900.
It sometimes makes sense to upgrade components in the PC world, but CPU accelerators for Macs haven't made any sense since the days when new Macs cost $8000.
The G5 PowerMac was so much better than the G4 PowerMac on so many levels, that it simply doesn't make sense to buff up a G4 rather than getting a new G5.
PowerBooks upgrades make even less sense. They depreciate faster. Laptop parts are small and light and get banged around more than a desktop, so they don't hold up as well.
An upgraded PoweBook CPU wouldn't be nearly as fast as a new one, it would likely not work right, and the rest of your PB would still be 3 years old.
If you can't afford a new PowerBook, stick with what you got, and maybe throw in a new HD and more RAM if it makes sense. But the idea of putting in a faster CPU is just throwing money down a hole.
Anyway, the original comment sounded more like they wanted to cling to a PowerPC out of misplaced emotional attachment, not because they wanted to make the most of an investment.
Not only is putting a faster processor in your existing PowerBook impractical and technically challenging, but it would be pointless because all of the G4 Macs all have a very slow bus.
Your theoretically faster processor would want more power and generate more heat than your PowerBook was designed for, but it would also be starving at the end of a tight bottleneck.
The G5 has a much better architecture, with a bus nearly 10x as fast. Even so, Apple purposely killed the third party accelerator market toward the end of the G4 line, and it looks like there isn't much possibility of any G5 upgrades either.
Beyond nostalgia, what's the allure, to an end user, of a PowerPC architecture over one using an Intel x86? A programmer writing assembly, maybe, but who cares what Photoshop is running on?
Do you wax nostalgic for the Mac IIfx's 6502 run serial ports? Or the AT&T DSP that never got much use in the AV Macs? Do you know anything about the vendors who build wireless chipsets, USB controllers or any other components in your PowerMac?
The make of the processor is as important as whether you have an NVidia or ATI graphics card. As long as it works, and is competitive, and does what you want, your decision making is all based in marketing garbage.
When you describe faith as a logic-less leap off a cliff, then yes, faith is rather irrational.
when you define faith as trust in something abstract that you know to exist, even if it is not visible or tangible, then it changes your view of what religion might mean.
for example, we commonly refer to currency and other securities being backed by the "full faith and credit of the government."
This "faith" is not an irrational, baseless and ignorant belief in something without any proof or logic behind it. It is based on the very real security people put in the abstract idea of the thousands of people who work in concert to perform the functions of government, and the financial institutions and other players who create monetary policy, enforce a system of laws and other tasks that make certain bits of paper worth more than other bits of paper.
the definition of faith in the first century writings of christianity is "an assured expectation of things not beheld," and is clearly different than the simple credulity you seem to equate it with. It is actually defined in the bible using a word derived from the guarantee of a property title deed.
While a child may see the value of coins without realizing why they have any worth, an adult has a long experience in working within a structure of law and order and those experiences provide a basis for faith in the system. That faith gives money value.
If you pay off a mortgage, you have faith that your title deed guarantees you ownership of property. Faith plays a huge role in making things work in our society.
You can chose not to put faith in the tenants of religion, but suggesting that faith is something with no evidence, logic or rational is simply wrong.
Thinking that you are on an elite plane when you simply don't understand the things you disagree with makes you no less ignorant and foolish as an anarchist teenager who attacks the society that provided them with everything they have.
Einstein and Newton had certain faith in supreme being, so religious faith is not the sole property of the ignorant, uneducated or irrational.
The fact that dictators, terrorists, and other evils have used the natural human desire to express faith to their own ends, and have perverted all sorts of systems of belief and ideologies to back up their support, says nothing about the value of religion.
It is in this context that I described atheism as a system of belief that is no better than any other system of belief, when viewed solely in terms of what those who practice them have done.
So in the topic of religion supporting atrocities, it's not the absence or presence of faith in a god that matters. If that were the problem, as the original poster suggested, we wouldn't have a long history of atrocities committed by people who professed to have no faith in any god (see Russia, China, Cambodia).
It really doesn't matter if you believe in a god, what matters is whether you have the capacity to understand things you don't agree with. I think that's where you fail.
You think you are better than others because you have an obscured, self-righteous, and arrogant disdain of people you disagree with, not because you truly understand anything or possess some special knowledge.
Thinking you know something isn't the same as knowing something. And when you use what you think you know to hate others and belittle them, you have a world where the USA wants to bomb Iraq because they "hate freedom," and atheists smugly suggest that faith is the reason for war.
I'm sure when you talk of "Athiests" you are thinking about the affluent, content, liberal minded collegues you know, who rationally type in their blogs about the woes of war-mongering religious fanatics.
But extremely religious groups like the Amish, Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses aren't inciting terrorism. They are confortable in their space, just as you are with your Athests friends.
The desperate people who get involved in terrorist activities of blowing things up and attempting to destroy the status quo may be religious, but don't need to be.
Some of the worlds most horrific bloodshed, from Pott's Cambodia to Stalin's Russia to Red China, has been enacted by fervently athiest regimes.
While churches enflame warfare, they do so simply because they are a ubitiquous social structure that can be put to various uses.
The real reason people do horrible things is to enact change when they see no other alternative.
The patriots who killed the British to set up an American state resorted to terrorism because they felt unrepresented and powerless against foreign control. They were religious people, but they were motivated by democratic ideals to kill, not by their belief in a god.
Its easy to identify Islamic religion as the difference between the West and Middle East, and certainly it is the tool being used by Saudis, bin Laden, and related terror groups to create support for their ideals, but the motivation for attacking the West comes from a desire to rid their area of unwanted Western influence and determine their own course, not because of their religious beliefs.
Religion fueled Hitler's rise to power, but it was a desire for power and national grandeur that drove Nazis, not the Protestant and Catholic churches that waved the Nazi flag. Those same churches were waving Allied flags and drumming up support to attack the Nazis in opposing countries. Hitler wasn't fervently religious, he just used churches as a tool.
Bush is doing the same today. Obviously all the hand wrenching Godism he practices is not some genuine religious belief, he's just playing the righ wing powerbase in the US to drum up ignorant support for failed political goals.
The fact that the less religious parts of America are far more anti-war has less to do with their lack of religion and more to do with their comfortable position. People got behind war awful quickly after the WTC bombing, not because they believed in God, but because they were threatened.
If you enter a content country and bomb things and accidently kill people at random intervals, it doesn't matter if they are religious or not, they will pretty quickly want to kill you back. And if they are unarmed, and you have tanks and guns, they will do what the American founders did - resort to terrorism.
Sit back, sip on a fine wine, and pat yourself on the back for not believing in a god, but that isn't the reason you are anti-war.
If you were robbed of your wealth, position, your family and friends, and left in dirt with a gun to your head by an foreign power, you'd be ready to blow shit up too.
"Armegeddon" and "War of the Worlds" are tales painting that very picture.
Religious people can be stupid, but as you demonstrate, so can athiests. Not believing in a god doesn't make you smarter, just because you surround yourself with other people telling you the same thing.
How exactly is atheism any different that any other religion? The world has religions that have no god. Nationism, atheism, and other ideologies that have no god are indestinguishable in the way they can be used from "religions that believe in a god," so suggesting that athiesm is somehow an elite plane above the religious is just as ignorant, self righteous, and rediculous as the Red States who thing they are favored by God for not being athiest.
The cliche of "not pissing on someone if they were on fire" suggests, colorfully, one's disdain for someone else, to the extreme of not wanting to help them out even insultingly, in the worst emergency.
When you use it to apply to "admins" not "pissing on a linux server" if it were on fire, you lose the effect of the expression.
I imagine nobody would pee on a server in flames. First off, it wouldn't really help, but even more so, it would likely fry your wiener (to bring this back on subject).
And as long as I'm playing grammar nazi (no offense Austria!) here's some reminders:
- a lot is NEVER alot
- if you can't remember which to use, "its" is generally safer than "it's" because if you use no apostrophe when you should have, you just look lazy, but if you error on using it when you shouldn't have, you look stupid.
When Apple aquired NeXT, NeXTSTEP for Mach was Mach+4.2 BSD. Apple used their experience with mkLinux (which was also a Mach kernel combined with a *nix userland) to modernize the kernel.
Part of this effort involved bringing 4.2 BSD up to date with more modern developments from all of the BSD projects, but primarily FreeBSD. Apple continues to incorporate technologies from *BSD projects, despite Darwin being separately maintained.
Clearly, FreeBSD has a lot more in common with OS X / Darwin than Windows NT does, even if some parts (the kernel obviously, and Darwin's driver IO Kit) are significantly different.
The reason Microsoft is pushing toward "trusted computing" is to gain control over the chaotic PC hardware platform. Microsoft only controls the upper software bit of things, so nothing they can do can stop pirate copies of Windows, and they have to compete against Linux being installed instead.
Since they lost their previous business lockout practice of threatening to yank licenses from hardware manufacturers who even thought about bundling non-microsoft software (Linux, any other commercial OS, no OS at all), they had to come up with another way of ensuring that 1) every PC in the world automatically sold them a copy of Windows, and 2) defended against competition from Linux being installed on server hardware where Windows Server and all the related CALs could instead be generating Microsoft income.
Incidentlally, they can also use Trusted Computing hardware to lock down the media market so that all copyright material can be tied to the sale and use of WMP.
The only way for Microsoft to accomplish these goals is by gaining control over PC hardware, which they currently lack. Microsoft can't do anything to lock down a generic PC. They need Trusted Computing hardware to restrict what gets installed, and to tie their software and media control to additional profits. If Microsoft suddenly stops selling a copy of Windows, the CALs and all the other automatic sales for ANY new PCs, they will be making less than they are now.
Apple has none of these goals in common. Yes, Apple is interested in making all the money they can. But since Apple makes money in hardware and controls 100% of Mac hardware, and does NOT risk losing any automatic sales on third party hardware, Apple has NO need of Trusted Computing inititives.
Apple owns the platform! They could have added their own version of trusted computing to Macs for the last decade that Microsoft has been thinking about it. They also own a similar platform in the iPod. But as everyone knows, Apple doesn't care if you plug in your iPod and copy off the hidden music files.
They aren't interested in DRM beyond the "consumer guideline" steps of making it less obvious how to create more than a handful of open CDs to share, or otherwise use and share music you buy from iTMS.
Why? Because Apple is making their money in hardware sales, with some software sales to boot (OS X, iTMS, iLife, Pro software). Their software sells their hardware.
If Apple were interested in putting a serial number on each Mac (they do by the way; every Mac can tell you when it was built, and its hardware serial number; PC's can't do this) in order to create a locked down DRM system, they sure as hell don't need Intel technology to do this.
Anyone repeating the story that Apple ran to Intel to get ahold of a scary DRM platform control is ignorant, seriouly lacking in basic logic skills, or spreading FUD.
Isn't it also considered weak to have a headline with a be verb? A headline is supposed to have a punchy verb to draw your attention to the action going on, not passively state that something "is."
Newspapers here in SF are really bad, and I see be verbs, or like this article, implied be verbs, all the time. It makes it look like they aren't even trying to be interesting.
So "Apple picked as," or "Apple named," would at least be an active verb, and something like "Steve Jobs dominates brand list" would suggest something of interest was going on.
Saying "Apple [is] blah blah" is a easy headline but not very interesting.
Yeah remember when Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia and destroyed the market for Adobe Premier? And then how they introduced Motion, a fairly direct competitor to AfterEffects? And Pages, which competes against Adobe PageMaker, and then built PDF creation into Mac OS X print dialog boxes, eliminating the casual market for Adobe Acrobat?
Adobe retaliated by dropping Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, and InDesign for the Macintosh!
That's what all companies do when you compete with them: throw away all their profits to teach you a lesson.
Or maybe not...the giddy marketing and regular software releases from Microsoft's Mac Buisness Unit would suggest Microsoft is making money off the Macintosh, and a product offering on the level of AppleWorks isn't going to vaporize Office sales.
The "HP iPod" is an Apple iPod that HP sells.
HP didn't get a "reference design," which is what Dell would want. You might ahve noticed that Dell isn't reselling the iPod, they are using a WMA reference design from Microsoft to design their own Dell DJ product.
Apple's last experience in handing out "reference specs" to the Mac platform was pretty traumatic.
I find it equally unlikely that Dell would be excited to resell Apple's Intel Mac with their own name stuck on it, and "innovate" (like HP) in the area of "tatoo" case stickers
Oooh, maybe Dell could invent "piercings" for Macs the resell.
Unlikely.
Saying "with the other systems" you neglect to realize that my primary example was NeXTSTEP.
Mac OS X is a newer version of NeXTSTEP, and Cocoa's ease of deployment cross platform comes directly from NeXT's frameworks.
NeXTSTEP 1 NeXTSTEP 2 NeXTSTEP 3 NeXTSTEP 4 - Rhapsody - Mac OS X beta - 10.0 Mac OS X 10.1 = Darwin 5 Mac OS X Jaguar 10.2 = Darwin 6 Mac OS X Panther 10.3 = Darwin 7 Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 = Darwin 8
Being technically able to do something is not the same as having a business case, nor having a market.
Apple had OpenStep cross platform in 1997. But the REASON NeXT had gone cross-platform from the beginning was that NeXT couldn't sell black hardware approaching the level needed to maintain a viable platform, as Apple was doing.
They later found it was just as difficult to sell NeXTSTEP for Intel, and nearly as difficult to sell the NeXT frameworks (OpenStep = YellowBox = Cocoa) to run on Windows (and Solaris).
Apple is returing to sell the 'new NeXTStep' on what is essentially the 'new NeXT hardware'. Actually they've been doing this for some time now.
Moving to Intel simply leverages NeXT's portability. Intel does not suddenly make the Windows PC market attractive, attainable or preferable to Apple selling far more modern, innovative and profitable hardware of their own, in a ecosystem where they control the whole platform.
All the people clammoring for Mac OS X on regular PCs are basically the same set of people who thought Mac cloning would be a great idea.
It turned out to be fun for Mac users who wanted to save $100 by getting a cheap PC with a Mac logic board, but it was not a sustainable plan for Apple or the Mac OS. Nor has it been for any other hardware platform that I can think of - again: Be, Palm, Amiga (I think they tried near the end), who else?
As for relying on "l33t haxxors" to port Mac OS X across the spectrum of PC trash hardware, look at Linux hardware support. Pretty fair for an enormous array of hardware after 15 years, but OSS can't write drivers for closed, unpublished hardware, and many vendors are slow to even release binaries. OSS is limited in what they can do because they don't control 'the platform' either.
I don't think that the OSS community will drop their work on Linux and *BSDs to write drivers for Mac OS X, partly because writing drivers for Darwin is significantly different.
While the IO Kit easier to develop for, it is not a simple port from existing driver code. Servers (like apache) and higer level libraries (khtml in Safari's WebKit) are getting ported to Mac OS X rather painlessly, but drivers are a different story.
Please also explain how members the Linux commnity, who are working to replace Windows with a non commercial OS and free software, will suddenly want to invest huge efforts into shoreing up support for Mac OS X, a commercial product.
Linux users who buy Mac hardware today either end up switching to Mac OS X to have a non-experimental machine to work on, or erase the OS to install Linux to run on nice hardware (PowerBooks). Are they going to suddenly drop Linux to have an experimental, but not free, Mac OS X experience on crap hardware?
Being able to run Mac OS X on 2005 PCs is not unlikely (hey they have Linux working on the iPod), but the phrase Apple used was "we won't allow it," which sounds like Microsoft's stance on running Linux on their XBox.
By your line of reasoning, Microsoft "could sell a lot of XBoxes to Linux enthusiasts!" Instead, MS is currently losing money on XBox hardware in order to create and control a hardware platform of their own, so they can make money selling software.
If software is 'where it's at,' why is Microsoft is trying to break into gaming console hardware? Surely they have experience in developing software for other's hardware, no? But they are tired of writing s
Steve Jobs knows about competing in the PC OS market.
NeXT did exactly what analysts thought Apple should do: stop making hardware and move to selling their OS as a retail product.
It didn't work out well for NeXT then, nor Be, nor OS/2, nor Solaris/x86, and Apple had earlier given up on System7/x86. Perhaps this is difficult more to pull off than to simply suggest?
If Apple thought it was a ripe time to jump from hardware sales (which are currently selling very well) to broadly offering Mac OS X as PC OS software, why didn't they announce at WWDC that Mac OS X was going mainstream, and would be available in a few months on PCs (perhaps with some missing functionality that still made Apple hardware a compelling reason for existing Mac users, such is the case with OS 9/Classic)?
Instead, Apple made a point to remark that Mac OS X would not be sold for other hardware than Apple's own Intel Macs.
Maybe competing with Microsoft isn't the point. Maybe Jobs has his sights on being something better than Microsoft's entrenched stranglehold on the PC OS market, and intends on leaving the PC world behind. That was the original vision of the Mac, and certainly of the NeXT. Both tried licensing only as a last ditch effort.
For the last 20 years, Apple has been the only viable alternative platform. Back in the 80s there were Atari, Commodore, and others who had their own platform, but they didn't last long. Apple has been the only company able to keep their own platform going.
The Wintel market is only mostly under the control of Microsoft on the software side, and various PC makers (who occasionally come and go, but are always collectively compared to Apple, which is a bit unfair) on the hardware side.
Dell can't innovate in hardware more than Windows allows them to, and Microsoft can't innovate in software more than all the PC makers will allow (or implement). That's why PCs are still running BIOS and have legacy ports from 20 years ago.
Does Apple want to join Microsoft in this hampered and stunted market, and then fight them for sales? No fucking way.
Apple has clearly stated they are simply making new Macs with different processors, and have the technology (from NeXT) to allow developers to compile their apps to run on both Mac hardware platforms.
Apple had the ability to ship OpenStep cross platform in 1997. They even took a stab at it before realizing that a better option would be moving back a step and merging Mac technologies with NeXT's, effectively ending up where the world might have been in 1989 if Steve Jobs had been able to pull off NeXT within Apple.
Of course, all that struggling and pain and the near death experiences at both NeXT and Apple between 1990-1999 really paid off in making Mac OS X something innovative, competitive and focused.
Actually Diamlier swooped in and bought up Chrysler.
So Dodge isn't selling Mercedes IP, but rather a big German megacorp bought a struggling large American company on the cheap.
A better example is Volkswagon buying Audi, and using Audi developed chassis and technology in their mass market cars. A reverse example is Ford buying Jaguar and making the Jaguar into a fancy chromed-up Lincoln.
Of course, all these examples are companies buying each other, not licensing another's reference designs or running their software (or something analgous to that).
So unless Apple buys Dell in order to turn their luxury cars into a mass market commodity vehicle, the comparison is lacking.
Building an OS that had higher requirements for the hardware it ran on is not an example of price fixing.
Price fixing is agreeing with your competitors to sell all your products at the same artificially higher price.
None of this matters, since we already know that:
a) Apple will obviously not just be selling a standard 2005 PC b) Apple is clearly not interested in sharing their hardware sales with third parties
The only people licensing their IP to run on other's hardware are either not in the hardware business (as Microsoft never made PCs) or are making desperate moves to shore up market share on a failing platform (NeXT, Be, Palm, Apple in 1995, etc).
Since 1) Apple now sells all the Macs running OS X, and 2) Apple faces brighter prospects (not risky uncertainty) with Intel Macs, and 3) Apple demonstrated no interest in licensing away their control of.MP4 sales, even when that might (MIGHT) have appeared to help build their iPod hardware market, and 4) Apple's only partnership in iPod hardware involves HP selling Apple iPods, not HP built iPod clones, it appears possible that Apple might, at some future point, consider reselling Macs through other companies.
However it is highly unlikely that Apple would chose to give away hardware sales to competing manufacturers, because this would 1) dillute their brand and standard for quality as the 1995 Mac clones did, 2) erode their own hardware sales as the 1995 Mac clones did, 3) complicate their OS software development efforts as the 1995 Mac clones did, and possibly 4) derail their control of the Mac OS X hardware platform, as happened to IBM when their PC was cloned, or 5) create confusion between what the difference in Mac hardware and software was, as happened with PalmOne/PalmSource and licensees.
Which is exactly what I was suggesting: anyone happy with Linux would be happy with the GIMP, and anyone who might "run screaming when they see the GIMP" would do the same with Linux.
The effort required to port the closed bits of Mac OS X, from CoreFoundation to Carbon to Aqua would be far more than the effort to drop $99 on Tiger.
A better phrasing of my question might be, "Why would anyone who spent $900 on Photoshop be trying to save money putting Linux on a desktop?"
And if you have a hot copy of Photoshop, why not steal OS X (or Windows)?
Linux make sense as a server. And running a work-alike Office on a work-alike Windows to save money on Linux based desktop PCs for drone workers makes sense. Trying to reinvent OS X frameworks to get high end commercial apps from OS X on Linux does not. Suddenly you are no longer "saving money."
What's the point of OSS efforts on the desktop aiming at making what amounts to a free knock off version of Windows, when you don't have the applications of a desktop platform? Creating an alternative desktop OS just to run warez software solves a non existing problem while wasting significant efforts.
But, importantly, it did not ship as just a DVD. It costs $1000 to sign up to get that DVD, along with PC inside a G5 tower, to use it for the next six months. You also have to sign for it.
The difference is, rather than anyone with a seed key (many nearly anonymous thousands of developers, including students) getting their hands on a Tiger/x86 installer, only a very select few of serious developers are getting it.
The fact that someone may have filmed Tiger/x86 running on a different PC (which we pretty much knew was possible for this build already) does not prove that anyone outside the developer program has a copy.
Additionally, the fact that everyone doesn't already have a copy pretty much indicates nobody does.
Are you suggesting natively running OpenStep on Linux?
OpenStep (essentially Cocoa, the OO dev environment frameworks) did once run on top of Windows and Solaris, in addition to Mach, but things have changed.
Apple's original strategy for using NeXT (from 1997) included selling YellowBox (cocoa) for Windows NT and NeXTStep for Intel. Both efforts only fizzled with a lack of interest.
Continued development of NeXTStep for PPC, (which resulted in Mac OS X), added in System 7 compatibility (Classic) as well as a cleaned up version of the Mac OS development frameworks (Carbon) to NeXT's Cocoa (OpenStep) enviromnent.
So to run Mac software on Linux (along the lines of WINE), far more would be required that 'simply' duplicating OpenStep.
Not only does Cocoa have nearly a decade of new technology engineered in (1997-2005) over the last release of OpenStep, but Mac OS X is more than Cocoa. You'd also need to duplicate Apple's development efforts in rewriting System 7 to run on NeXTStep for PPC.
Photoshop is not a Cocoa app. Even iTunes is not a Cocoa app. Are you wanting to port Carbon to Linux? Parts of Cocoa are just wrappers for Carbon, so you'd have to anyway.
If Apple spent 8 years engineering the Carbon and Cocoa in Mac OS X, imagine how long it would take to replicate this in a non profit 'because we maybe can' opensource effort?
Yes X Window runs on OS X; X Window is a simple windowing environment, not a series of development frameworks.
Heck, why not write Photoshop for Linux yourself? Why not buy OS X and run it in a virtual machine?
Why would anyone running Linux be interested in Photoshop anyway?
Another thing I find amusing is when people suggest Apple mix and match parts of the OS, such as moving Mac OS X's Mach (Darwin) to Linux. "Just write a middle layer!"
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If Viruses are a user problem, not a security problem, how would anyone who is unable to keep Mac OS X safe going to benefit from a move to Linux?
Is Linux plagued by viruses and adware and popups, despite having more exposure to crackers than OS X? After all, people writing Windows malware for PCs are more likely to try exploiting Linux than an OS on an entirely different hardware platform.
But no, we don't have a massive spyware/adware/virus problem on Linux. Linux and OS X aren't protected from attacks because they are minority platforms, but because they provide a better security model.
A loose, sloppy Mac OS X admin is about as safe as the most dedicated Windows admin, who is on top of the latest exploit patches and knows how to set up firewalls securely.
In fact, I've worked in a number of highly competent, proactive Windows shops who still suffered virus outbreaks from time to time, and suffered frequently from adware nuisances. Mac OS X simply does not have these problems, primarilly because of a better security model, but partly because of the Mac culture.
If Apple gains substantial market share, there may be more adware targeted at Mac users, but the platform won't suffer from widely distributed virus attacks that disable machines in ways the user is helpless to repair.
Microsoft's security problem was caused by Window's mixing their security free, dittohead office LAN environment with the PC hacker community, as part of an initive to join an internetworked world. They were simply unprepared to deal with security because it was never considered necessary before.
Mac OS X comes directly from NeXTSTEP, which was used by the CIA and NSA, and draws its security model from Unix and the BSD community. Security was not an afterthought.
So if every key were a self contained computer unit with a serial port/powersupply interfacing with a main logic board, it would be similar in complexity to a standard keyboard, which uses simple buttons to close switches?
Right now, the computation going on in a keyboard is a unit that decodes signals across a matrix of ~100 key switches and send them out over USB. This keyboard would be a main unit interfacing, powering and providing a display signal for 100 key switches and 100 seperate displays, each of which would either need to be controlled externally (requiring really complex signaling) or have the logic to drive the screen built into each key!
Illuminated keyboards, like the one in the newer PowerBooks, use fiber optics to spread a light source into all those keys. I'd imagine that just running a set of wires to power lamps (or LEDs) for each key would be rather expensive and complex
The signaling needed to control and display as many little screens would be orders of magnitude more complex.
Perhaps we could just use electroluminescent bacteria, with a single circulatory system that provided food, oxygen, waste removal and a hormone signalling system that arrange them and lit them as necessary.
And bacteria are nearly free! Hehe
Have you bought a printer recently? Printers are disposable devices!
They have become the handle the holds the razor. While I'm a little nostalgic for printers that were built like tanks and lasted forever, they also cost quite a bit, and can't incorporate new technology that comes out every week.
It's going nowhere for you because you have nothing to tear down. Anyway, it looks like we agree on much of what you just wrote.
However, a completely undetectable god, would not "be equivalent to no god at all."
It doesn't matter if Schrodinger's cat is alive or not, because the the cat doesn't matter.
However, if you were say, playing with a CRT tube and don't have the means to detect whether it is charged, knowing or choosing not to know (or refusing to believe) that it could be dangerous simply because you lack the ability to detect the electricity, is a different matter.
One could logically decide that since it's been sitting idle for a long time, there is no chance that it has any charge left and is therefore safe to play with; that 'rational' decision could be lethal.
All through history there are examples of things that scientists could not detect at the time: radioactivity, electric current, viruses. That didn't mean they did not exist until they could be measured. So the fact that you can't perceive a higher power does not mean no higher power can exist.
A true scientist looks for truth and tries to better understand the world, but in reality, there is a huge amount of "science" that invents data to support a hypothesis (particularly when money in involved), or destroys or omits data that doesn't fit what they wish to believe, or skews information to back up political views. Every age of science has compiled a dogma of things one must believe in order to be considered fashionably intellectual.
There are so many people who simply subscribe to the current scientific doctrines, with no first hand knowledge, simply because they feel it makes them superior to believe what they're told and what they want to hear.
That's a flaw I see a lot in the church of atheism. Hearing atheists say they aren't religious is just painful. If you wish to use "religion" as a negative word (which is more often than not is), atheism needs to be included as a religion, simply because it shares so much with other destructive, fundamentalist, narrow, arrogant sects.
I'm not interested in a religious discussion.
I'm commenting on a thread the demanded to know when atheists ever caused wars.
Your reply suggested that atheism is somehow vastly different that other belief systems, simply because no belief in god is involved, and then added that lacking faith automatically made atheists superior.
I commented that first, the world has "religions" that don't include a belief in god, and really atheism is no better than any another religion in that it's just a belief system that gets people militant and divides the world, and has been involved in (and directed) plenty of war and atrocities.
Second, I said your definition of faith failed to describe how faith can be exercised. I gave both a definition from a religious authority (a definition that would be better suited in a religious discussion than a general purpose dictionary, but nice try), and a secular example of how society exercises faith outside the realm of spirituality.
I think you have problems understanding abstract ideas. You get lost in the simple analogy of a document backed by the "full faith of the government," and somehow confuse the value of a title deed with the idea it represents.
A title deed is indeed a worthless bit a paper if the entity that issues it cannot be trusted to back up the idea of private property ownership rights. That's why we exercise faith in a system that makes currency, securities and title deeds worth something abstract that is of far more value than the simple paper fibers and ink that comprise them.
Are you too simple to understand that defining words is a prerequisite to having a meaningful discussion of ideas, or are you just trying to be a jackass?
As long as you insist that faith can only be credulity, and that secular faith in abstract ideas is somehow an entirely separate idea, I'll have to let you return to your self congratulatory throne of pretentious ignorance.
I'm not defending religiousness, and certainly, as I noted, belief systems have often been used to do horrible wrongs. The thing is that atheism has done nothing to reform humanity, bring civility or peace, or elevate morality or solve anything.
As you demonstrate, it is just another religion that enables simple people to march in step and look down on fellow humans.
Athiest is to agnostic what right wing fanatic jesus freak is to mainstream casually religious America, or what jihad terrorist is to the greater Islamic world.
Loud, obnoxious and arrogant extremist minority.
Thanks for looking up NSF's proof that the world is mostly stupid, because we didn't know that before.
Also, no you are wrong; there are plenty of options in science, and everything isn't a fact. If it were, we wouldn't have to research and apply the scientific method looking for truth, as we'd just know everything. Science is our understanding of the world around us, not the power to define reality.
As much as I can't stand religious nuts, I have to say that atheists are nearly as fucking annoying in their fundamentalist, narrow, ignorant and arrogant view of the world.
Sounds like a fanatical religion to me.
Your circular reasoning conveniently ignored much of what I said about how faith is defined by those who have faith.
You also conveniently ignore that much of what we understand about our Universe, we are unable to actually test. We create models for understanding things we can't actually observe, and infer much of what we know about them by the perceived effects they have on other things. We believe we know lots of things, based on reasoning and inferrance.
Using my previous analogy, if you buy a house, there is "no test you can do to conclusively prove" that your title will maintain ownership of that property for your grandchildren after you die; you can only exercise faith in the rule of law to have the hope that the work you did while alive will survive to benefit your heirs.
I have no business or interest in trying to get you to exercise faith in anything. I'm merely saying you are foolish to regard faith as the opposite of rational thought, and suggest that faith is never based on knowledge but is only a result of ignorance.
My original point was that showing hatred for things you don't understand is the core reason for much of the violence and bloodshed in our world. The fact that you step around that order to reaffirm for yourself that your contented and enlightened existence is entirely due to your superiority over people who view the world differently doesn't refute that; it rather makes it more obvious.
It's like suggesting to the KKK that maybe they are missing something, and having them, in their defense, just spew out the same garbage again about their superiority, citing circular definitions of what being the master race is all about.
I fail to see any point in further explaining the nature of faith, as a trust based upon knowledge and experience, when you simply ignore rather than refute my definition, and reiterate what your faithless peers want it to mean so as to protect your illusion of the world.
Also, thanks for the distracting straw man argument, but most people don't "seem to miss what science is," because it is pretty simple to understand most concrete ideas. What most people 'fail to understand' are abstract concepts that require higher reasoning skills, that can't be reduced to a simple sound byte.
As for Einstein, I said he believed in a supreme being, not in a Christian God. This was because he appreciated the order in nature. He also quite famously said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
And you can make Newton a puppet for whatever you like to believe, but the fact is that he was fervently religious and expressed his discoveries quite obviously in that context.
17th Century atheists had no more to hide than present day academics who have faith.
Atheists are just fundamentalist agnostics, following the pattern of all tenants of belief: the many are ringed by a loud, obnoxious and arrogant extremist minority.
But laptop CPU upgrades are too expensive to even develop. There isn't even a market for PC laptop upgrades.
If you paid $2500 for a 2003 G4 PowerBook, and used it for 3 years until you feel it needs an upgrade, it makes a lot more sense to sell it for $900 and buy a new 2006 $2500 PowerBook than to pay $500 to upgrade your old PowerBook and still have a 2003 PowerBook with a slightly faster CPU, that is still worth $900.
It sometimes makes sense to upgrade components in the PC world, but CPU accelerators for Macs haven't made any sense since the days when new Macs cost $8000.
The G5 PowerMac was so much better than the G4 PowerMac on so many levels, that it simply doesn't make sense to buff up a G4 rather than getting a new G5.
PowerBooks upgrades make even less sense. They depreciate faster. Laptop parts are small and light and get banged around more than a desktop, so they don't hold up as well.
An upgraded PoweBook CPU wouldn't be nearly as fast as a new one, it would likely not work right, and the rest of your PB would still be 3 years old.
If you can't afford a new PowerBook, stick with what you got, and maybe throw in a new HD and more RAM if it makes sense. But the idea of putting in a faster CPU is just throwing money down a hole.
Anyway, the original comment sounded more like they wanted to cling to a PowerPC out of misplaced emotional attachment, not because they wanted to make the most of an investment.
Not only is putting a faster processor in your existing PowerBook impractical and technically challenging, but it would be pointless because all of the G4 Macs all have a very slow bus.
Your theoretically faster processor would want more power and generate more heat than your PowerBook was designed for, but it would also be starving at the end of a tight bottleneck.
The G5 has a much better architecture, with a bus nearly 10x as fast. Even so, Apple purposely killed the third party accelerator market toward the end of the G4 line, and it looks like there isn't much possibility of any G5 upgrades either.
Beyond nostalgia, what's the allure, to an end user, of a PowerPC architecture over one using an Intel x86? A programmer writing assembly, maybe, but who cares what Photoshop is running on?
Do you wax nostalgic for the Mac IIfx's 6502 run serial ports? Or the AT&T DSP that never got much use in the AV Macs? Do you know anything about the vendors who build wireless chipsets, USB controllers or any other components in your PowerMac?
The make of the processor is as important as whether you have an NVidia or ATI graphics card. As long as it works, and is competitive, and does what you want, your decision making is all based in marketing garbage.
Well, how you define words does matter.
When you describe faith as a logic-less leap off a cliff, then yes, faith is rather irrational.
when you define faith as trust in something abstract that you know to exist, even if it is not visible or tangible, then it changes your view of what religion might mean.
for example, we commonly refer to currency and other securities being backed by the "full faith and credit of the government."
This "faith" is not an irrational, baseless and ignorant belief in something without any proof or logic behind it. It is based on the very real security people put in the abstract idea of the thousands of people who work in concert to perform the functions of government, and the financial institutions and other players who create monetary policy, enforce a system of laws and other tasks that make certain bits of paper worth more than other bits of paper.
the definition of faith in the first century writings of christianity is "an assured expectation of things not beheld," and is clearly different than the simple credulity you seem to equate it with. It is actually defined in the bible using a word derived from the guarantee of a property title deed.
While a child may see the value of coins without realizing why they have any worth, an adult has a long experience in working within a structure of law and order and those experiences provide a basis for faith in the system. That faith gives money value.
If you pay off a mortgage, you have faith that your title deed guarantees you ownership of property. Faith plays a huge role in making things work in our society.
You can chose not to put faith in the tenants of religion, but suggesting that faith is something with no evidence, logic or rational is simply wrong.
Thinking that you are on an elite plane when you simply don't understand the things you disagree with makes you no less ignorant and foolish as an anarchist teenager who attacks the society that provided them with everything they have.
Einstein and Newton had certain faith in supreme being, so religious faith is not the sole property of the ignorant, uneducated or irrational.
The fact that dictators, terrorists, and other evils have used the natural human desire to express faith to their own ends, and have perverted all sorts of systems of belief and ideologies to back up their support, says nothing about the value of religion.
It is in this context that I described atheism as a system of belief that is no better than any other system of belief, when viewed solely in terms of what those who practice them have done.
So in the topic of religion supporting atrocities, it's not the absence or presence of faith in a god that matters. If that were the problem, as the original poster suggested, we wouldn't have a long history of atrocities committed by people who professed to have no faith in any god (see Russia, China, Cambodia).
It really doesn't matter if you believe in a god, what matters is whether you have the capacity to understand things you don't agree with. I think that's where you fail.
You think you are better than others because you have an obscured, self-righteous, and arrogant disdain of people you disagree with, not because you truly understand anything or possess some special knowledge.
Thinking you know something isn't the same as knowing something. And when you use what you think you know to hate others and belittle them, you have a world where the USA wants to bomb Iraq because they "hate freedom," and atheists smugly suggest that faith is the reason for war.
I'm sure when you talk of "Athiests" you are thinking about the affluent, content, liberal minded collegues you know, who rationally type in their blogs about the woes of war-mongering religious fanatics.
But extremely religious groups like the Amish, Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses aren't inciting terrorism. They are confortable in their space, just as you are with your Athests friends.
The desperate people who get involved in terrorist activities of blowing things up and attempting to destroy the status quo may be religious, but don't need to be.
Some of the worlds most horrific bloodshed, from Pott's Cambodia to Stalin's Russia to Red China, has been enacted by fervently athiest regimes.
While churches enflame warfare, they do so simply because they are a ubitiquous social structure that can be put to various uses.
The real reason people do horrible things is to enact change when they see no other alternative.
The patriots who killed the British to set up an American state resorted to terrorism because they felt unrepresented and powerless against foreign control. They were religious people, but they were motivated by democratic ideals to kill, not by their belief in a god.
Its easy to identify Islamic religion as the difference between the West and Middle East, and certainly it is the tool being used by Saudis, bin Laden, and related terror groups to create support for their ideals, but the motivation for attacking the West comes from a desire to rid their area of unwanted Western influence and determine their own course, not because of their religious beliefs.
Religion fueled Hitler's rise to power, but it was a desire for power and national grandeur that drove Nazis, not the Protestant and Catholic churches that waved the Nazi flag. Those same churches were waving Allied flags and drumming up support to attack the Nazis in opposing countries. Hitler wasn't fervently religious, he just used churches as a tool.
Bush is doing the same today. Obviously all the hand wrenching Godism he practices is not some genuine religious belief, he's just playing the righ wing powerbase in the US to drum up ignorant support for failed political goals.
The fact that the less religious parts of America are far more anti-war has less to do with their lack of religion and more to do with their comfortable position. People got behind war awful quickly after the WTC bombing, not because they believed in God, but because they were threatened.
If you enter a content country and bomb things and accidently kill people at random intervals, it doesn't matter if they are religious or not, they will pretty quickly want to kill you back. And if they are unarmed, and you have tanks and guns, they will do what the American founders did - resort to terrorism.
Sit back, sip on a fine wine, and pat yourself on the back for not believing in a god, but that isn't the reason you are anti-war.
If you were robbed of your wealth, position, your family and friends, and left in dirt with a gun to your head by an foreign power, you'd be ready to blow shit up too.
"Armegeddon" and "War of the Worlds" are tales painting that very picture.
Religious people can be stupid, but as you demonstrate, so can athiests. Not believing in a god doesn't make you smarter, just because you surround yourself with other people telling you the same thing.
How exactly is atheism any different that any other religion? The world has religions that have no god. Nationism, atheism, and other ideologies that have no god are indestinguishable in the way they can be used from "religions that believe in a god," so suggesting that athiesm is somehow an elite plane above the religious is just as ignorant, self righteous, and rediculous as the Red States who thing they are favored by God for not being athiest.
The cliche of "not pissing on someone if they were on fire" suggests, colorfully, one's disdain for someone else, to the extreme of not wanting to help them out even insultingly, in the worst emergency.
When you use it to apply to "admins" not "pissing on a linux server" if it were on fire, you lose the effect of the expression.
I imagine nobody would pee on a server in flames. First off, it wouldn't really help, but even more so, it would likely fry your wiener (to bring this back on subject).
And as long as I'm playing grammar nazi (no offense Austria!) here's some reminders:
- a lot is NEVER alot
- if you can't remember which to use, "its" is generally safer than "it's" because if you use no apostrophe when you should have, you just look lazy, but if you error on using it when you shouldn't have, you look stupid.
Hardly.
When Apple aquired NeXT, NeXTSTEP for Mach was Mach+4.2 BSD. Apple used their experience with mkLinux (which was also a Mach kernel combined with a *nix userland) to modernize the kernel.
Part of this effort involved bringing 4.2 BSD up to date with more modern developments from all of the BSD projects, but primarily FreeBSD. Apple continues to incorporate technologies from *BSD projects, despite Darwin being separately maintained.
Clearly, FreeBSD has a lot more in common with OS X / Darwin than Windows NT does, even if some parts (the kernel obviously, and Darwin's driver IO Kit) are significantly different.
The reason Microsoft is pushing toward "trusted computing" is to gain control over the chaotic PC hardware platform. Microsoft only controls the upper software bit of things, so nothing they can do can stop pirate copies of Windows, and they have to compete against Linux being installed instead.
Since they lost their previous business lockout practice of threatening to yank licenses from hardware manufacturers who even thought about bundling non-microsoft software (Linux, any other commercial OS, no OS at all), they had to come up with another way of ensuring that 1) every PC in the world automatically sold them a copy of Windows, and 2) defended against competition from Linux being installed on server hardware where Windows Server and all the related CALs could instead be generating Microsoft income.
Incidentlally, they can also use Trusted Computing hardware to lock down the media market so that all copyright material can be tied to the sale and use of WMP.
The only way for Microsoft to accomplish these goals is by gaining control over PC hardware, which they currently lack. Microsoft can't do anything to lock down a generic PC. They need Trusted Computing hardware to restrict what gets installed, and to tie their software and media control to additional profits. If Microsoft suddenly stops selling a copy of Windows, the CALs and all the other automatic sales for ANY new PCs, they will be making less than they are now.
Apple has none of these goals in common. Yes, Apple is interested in making all the money they can. But since Apple makes money in hardware and controls 100% of Mac hardware, and does NOT risk losing any automatic sales on third party hardware, Apple has NO need of Trusted Computing inititives.
Apple owns the platform! They could have added their own version of trusted computing to Macs for the last decade that Microsoft has been thinking about it. They also own a similar platform in the iPod. But as everyone knows, Apple doesn't care if you plug in your iPod and copy off the hidden music files.
They aren't interested in DRM beyond the "consumer guideline" steps of making it less obvious how to create more than a handful of open CDs to share, or otherwise use and share music you buy from iTMS.
Why? Because Apple is making their money in hardware sales, with some software sales to boot (OS X, iTMS, iLife, Pro software). Their software sells their hardware.
If Apple were interested in putting a serial number on each Mac (they do by the way; every Mac can tell you when it was built, and its hardware serial number; PC's can't do this) in order to create a locked down DRM system, they sure as hell don't need Intel technology to do this.
Anyone repeating the story that Apple ran to Intel to get ahold of a scary DRM platform control is ignorant, seriouly lacking in basic logic skills, or spreading FUD.
Isn't it also considered weak to have a headline with a be verb? A headline is supposed to have a punchy verb to draw your attention to the action going on, not passively state that something "is."
Newspapers here in SF are really bad, and I see be verbs, or like this article, implied be verbs, all the time. It makes it look like they aren't even trying to be interesting.
So "Apple picked as," or "Apple named," would at least be an active verb, and something like "Steve Jobs dominates brand list" would suggest something of interest was going on.
Saying "Apple [is] blah blah" is a easy headline but not very interesting.
aka the "Whole Paycheck," as various people around here like to call it
If somebody said the sky was orange, would you wonder how to peel it?
Yeah remember when Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia and destroyed the market for Adobe Premier? And then how they introduced Motion, a fairly direct competitor to AfterEffects? And Pages, which competes against Adobe PageMaker, and then built PDF creation into Mac OS X print dialog boxes, eliminating the casual market for Adobe Acrobat?
Adobe retaliated by dropping Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, and InDesign for the Macintosh!
That's what all companies do when you compete with them: throw away all their profits to teach you a lesson.
Or maybe not...the giddy marketing and regular software releases from Microsoft's Mac Buisness Unit would suggest Microsoft is making money off the Macintosh, and a product offering on the level of AppleWorks isn't going to vaporize Office sales.
The "HP iPod" is an Apple iPod that HP sells. HP didn't get a "reference design," which is what Dell would want. You might ahve noticed that Dell isn't reselling the iPod, they are using a WMA reference design from Microsoft to design their own Dell DJ product. Apple's last experience in handing out "reference specs" to the Mac platform was pretty traumatic. I find it equally unlikely that Dell would be excited to resell Apple's Intel Mac with their own name stuck on it, and "innovate" (like HP) in the area of "tatoo" case stickers Oooh, maybe Dell could invent "piercings" for Macs the resell. Unlikely.
Saying "with the other systems" you neglect to realize that my primary example was NeXTSTEP.
Mac OS X is a newer version of NeXTSTEP, and Cocoa's ease of deployment cross platform comes directly from NeXT's frameworks.
NeXTSTEP 1
NeXTSTEP 2
NeXTSTEP 3
NeXTSTEP 4 - Rhapsody - Mac OS X beta - 10.0
Mac OS X 10.1 = Darwin 5
Mac OS X Jaguar 10.2 = Darwin 6
Mac OS X Panther 10.3 = Darwin 7
Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 = Darwin 8
Being technically able to do something is not the same as having a business case, nor having a market.
Apple had OpenStep cross platform in 1997. But the REASON NeXT had gone cross-platform from the beginning was that NeXT couldn't sell black hardware approaching the level needed to maintain a viable platform, as Apple was doing.
They later found it was just as difficult to sell NeXTSTEP for Intel, and nearly as difficult to sell the NeXT frameworks (OpenStep = YellowBox = Cocoa) to run on Windows (and Solaris).
Apple is returing to sell the 'new NeXTStep' on what is essentially the 'new NeXT hardware'. Actually they've been doing this for some time now.
Moving to Intel simply leverages NeXT's portability. Intel does not suddenly make the Windows PC market attractive, attainable or preferable to Apple selling far more modern, innovative and profitable hardware of their own, in a ecosystem where they control the whole platform.
All the people clammoring for Mac OS X on regular PCs are basically the same set of people who thought Mac cloning would be a great idea.
It turned out to be fun for Mac users who wanted to save $100 by getting a cheap PC with a Mac logic board, but it was not a sustainable plan for Apple or the Mac OS. Nor has it been for any other hardware platform that I can think of - again: Be, Palm, Amiga (I think they tried near the end), who else?
As for relying on "l33t haxxors" to port Mac OS X across the spectrum of PC trash hardware, look at Linux hardware support. Pretty fair for an enormous array of hardware after 15 years, but OSS can't write drivers for closed, unpublished hardware, and many vendors are slow to even release binaries. OSS is limited in what they can do because they don't control 'the platform' either.
I don't think that the OSS community will drop their work on Linux and *BSDs to write drivers for Mac OS X, partly because writing drivers for Darwin is significantly different.
http://developer.apple.com/devicedrivers/
While the IO Kit easier to develop for, it is not a simple port from existing driver code. Servers (like apache) and higer level libraries (khtml in Safari's WebKit) are getting ported to Mac OS X rather painlessly, but drivers are a different story.
Please also explain how members the Linux commnity, who are working to replace Windows with a non commercial OS and free software, will suddenly want to invest huge efforts into shoreing up support for Mac OS X, a commercial product.
Linux users who buy Mac hardware today either end up switching to Mac OS X to have a non-experimental machine to work on, or erase the OS to install Linux to run on nice hardware (PowerBooks). Are they going to suddenly drop Linux to have an experimental, but not free, Mac OS X experience on crap hardware?
Being able to run Mac OS X on 2005 PCs is not unlikely (hey they have Linux working on the iPod), but the phrase Apple used was "we won't allow it," which sounds like Microsoft's stance on running Linux on their XBox.
By your line of reasoning, Microsoft "could sell a lot of XBoxes to Linux enthusiasts!" Instead, MS is currently losing money on XBox hardware in order to create and control a hardware platform of their own, so they can make money selling software.
If software is 'where it's at,' why is Microsoft is trying to break into gaming console hardware? Surely they have experience in developing software for other's hardware, no? But they are tired of writing s
Steve Jobs knows about competing in the PC OS market.
NeXT did exactly what analysts thought Apple should do: stop making hardware and move to selling their OS as a retail product.
It didn't work out well for NeXT then, nor Be, nor OS/2, nor Solaris/x86, and Apple had earlier given up on System7/x86. Perhaps this is difficult more to pull off than to simply suggest?
If Apple thought it was a ripe time to jump from hardware sales (which are currently selling very well) to broadly offering Mac OS X as PC OS software, why didn't they announce at WWDC that Mac OS X was going mainstream, and would be available in a few months on PCs (perhaps with some missing functionality that still made Apple hardware a compelling reason for existing Mac users, such is the case with OS 9/Classic)?
Instead, Apple made a point to remark that Mac OS X would not be sold for other hardware than Apple's own Intel Macs.
Maybe competing with Microsoft isn't the point. Maybe Jobs has his sights on being something better than Microsoft's entrenched stranglehold on the PC OS market, and intends on leaving the PC world behind. That was the original vision of the Mac, and certainly of the NeXT. Both tried licensing only as a last ditch effort.
For the last 20 years, Apple has been the only viable alternative platform. Back in the 80s there were Atari, Commodore, and others who had their own platform, but they didn't last long. Apple has been the only company able to keep their own platform going.
The Wintel market is only mostly under the control of Microsoft on the software side, and various PC makers (who occasionally come and go, but are always collectively compared to Apple, which is a bit unfair) on the hardware side.
Dell can't innovate in hardware more than Windows allows them to, and Microsoft can't innovate in software more than all the PC makers will allow (or implement). That's why PCs are still running BIOS and have legacy ports from 20 years ago.
Does Apple want to join Microsoft in this hampered and stunted market, and then fight them for sales? No fucking way.
Apple has clearly stated they are simply making new Macs with different processors, and have the technology (from NeXT) to allow developers to compile their apps to run on both Mac hardware platforms.
Apple had the ability to ship OpenStep cross platform in 1997. They even took a stab at it before realizing that a better option would be moving back a step and merging Mac technologies with NeXT's, effectively ending up where the world might have been in 1989 if Steve Jobs had been able to pull off NeXT within Apple.
Of course, all that struggling and pain and the near death experiences at both NeXT and Apple between 1990-1999 really paid off in making Mac OS X something innovative, competitive and focused.
Actually Diamlier swooped in and bought up Chrysler.
So Dodge isn't selling Mercedes IP, but rather a big German megacorp bought a struggling large American company on the cheap.
A better example is Volkswagon buying Audi, and using Audi developed chassis and technology in their mass market cars. A reverse example is Ford buying Jaguar and making the Jaguar into a fancy chromed-up Lincoln.
Of course, all these examples are companies buying each other, not licensing another's reference designs or running their software (or something analgous to that).
So unless Apple buys Dell in order to turn their luxury cars into a mass market commodity vehicle, the comparison is lacking.
Building an OS that had higher requirements for the hardware it ran on is not an example of price fixing.
.MP4 sales, even when that might (MIGHT) have appeared to help build their iPod hardware market, and 4) Apple's only partnership in iPod hardware involves HP selling Apple iPods, not HP built iPod clones, it appears possible that Apple might, at some future point, consider reselling Macs through other companies.
Price fixing is agreeing with your competitors to sell all your products at the same artificially higher price.
None of this matters, since we already know that:
a) Apple will obviously not just be selling a standard 2005 PC
b) Apple is clearly not interested in sharing their hardware sales with third parties
The only people licensing their IP to run on other's hardware are either not in the hardware business (as Microsoft never made PCs) or are making desperate moves to shore up market share on a failing platform (NeXT, Be, Palm, Apple in 1995, etc).
Since 1) Apple now sells all the Macs running OS X, and 2) Apple faces brighter prospects (not risky uncertainty) with Intel Macs, and 3) Apple demonstrated no interest in licensing away their control of
However it is highly unlikely that Apple would chose to give away hardware sales to competing manufacturers, because this would 1) dillute their brand and standard for quality as the 1995 Mac clones did, 2) erode their own hardware sales as the 1995 Mac clones did, 3) complicate their OS software development efforts as the 1995 Mac clones did, and possibly 4) derail their control of the Mac OS X hardware platform, as happened to IBM when their PC was cloned, or 5) create confusion between what the difference in Mac hardware and software was, as happened with PalmOne/PalmSource and licensees.
Which is exactly what I was suggesting: anyone happy with Linux would be happy with the GIMP, and anyone who might "run screaming when they see the GIMP" would do the same with Linux. The effort required to port the closed bits of Mac OS X, from CoreFoundation to Carbon to Aqua would be far more than the effort to drop $99 on Tiger. A better phrasing of my question might be, "Why would anyone who spent $900 on Photoshop be trying to save money putting Linux on a desktop?" And if you have a hot copy of Photoshop, why not steal OS X (or Windows)? Linux make sense as a server. And running a work-alike Office on a work-alike Windows to save money on Linux based desktop PCs for drone workers makes sense. Trying to reinvent OS X frameworks to get high end commercial apps from OS X on Linux does not. Suddenly you are no longer "saving money." What's the point of OSS efforts on the desktop aiming at making what amounts to a free knock off version of Windows, when you don't have the applications of a desktop platform? Creating an alternative desktop OS just to run warez software solves a non existing problem while wasting significant efforts.
Yes it sure does ship on a DVD.
But, importantly, it did not ship as just a DVD. It costs $1000 to sign up to get that DVD, along with PC inside a G5 tower, to use it for the next six months. You also have to sign for it.
The difference is, rather than anyone with a seed key (many nearly anonymous thousands of developers, including students) getting their hands on a Tiger/x86 installer, only a very select few of serious developers are getting it.
The fact that someone may have filmed Tiger/x86 running on a different PC (which we pretty much knew was possible for this build already) does not prove that anyone outside the developer program has a copy.
Additionally, the fact that everyone doesn't already have a copy pretty much indicates nobody does.
Are you suggesting natively running OpenStep on Linux?
OpenStep (essentially Cocoa, the OO dev environment frameworks) did once run on top of Windows and Solaris, in addition to Mach, but things have changed.
Apple's original strategy for using NeXT (from 1997) included selling YellowBox (cocoa) for Windows NT and NeXTStep for Intel. Both efforts only fizzled with a lack of interest.
Continued development of NeXTStep for PPC, (which resulted in Mac OS X), added in System 7 compatibility (Classic) as well as a cleaned up version of the Mac OS development frameworks (Carbon) to NeXT's Cocoa (OpenStep) enviromnent.
So to run Mac software on Linux (along the lines of WINE), far more would be required that 'simply' duplicating OpenStep.
Not only does Cocoa have nearly a decade of new technology engineered in (1997-2005) over the last release of OpenStep, but Mac OS X is more than Cocoa. You'd also need to duplicate Apple's development efforts in rewriting System 7 to run on NeXTStep for PPC.
Photoshop is not a Cocoa app. Even iTunes is not a Cocoa app. Are you wanting to port Carbon to Linux? Parts of Cocoa are just wrappers for Carbon, so you'd have to anyway.
If Apple spent 8 years engineering the Carbon and Cocoa in Mac OS X, imagine how long it would take to replicate this in a non profit 'because we maybe can' opensource effort?
Yes X Window runs on OS X; X Window is a simple windowing environment, not a series of development frameworks.
Heck, why not write Photoshop for Linux yourself? Why not buy OS X and run it in a virtual machine?
Why would anyone running Linux be interested in Photoshop anyway?
Another thing I find amusing is when people suggest Apple mix and match parts of the OS, such as moving Mac OS X's Mach (Darwin) to Linux. "Just write a middle layer!"