One space left in the Mac product matrix...
on
Apple Cube Confirmed
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· Score: 3
First off, the G4 Cube -- unlike the iMac, it's got a flat horizontal top surface. What happens when you stack 3 inches of paper on the heat vent?
Second, the buttonless mouse. Weird. Cool. Still, I'd rather have my scroll wheel.
No 17" iMac. I guess the Cube is supposed to fill this niche? Too expensive.
No improvements to the video cards. What happened to ATI's press release about 4XL and Radeon?
Last, some speculation: Steve's revised product matrix (including Cube) was drawn with 6 squares. Apple's design group could have drawn it as a pentagon or some other shape with exactly 5 parts, but they chose a 6 part rectangle, with a blank space in between iBook and PowerBook.
Apple designers may be evil sometimes (e.g. QT Player 4, hall of shame) but they don't do accidents. There's only one product that would make sense in that gap -- SUBNOTEBOOK! 4 pounds or less, a competitor for the Sony Vaio 505 SuperSlim. I'm gonna keep on wishing til it comes true...
For example, high-end G4 Macs already come with DVD-RAM drives. The article claims the Tracer drivers will work with any "standard" DVD-RAM drive. So hopefully support in LinuxPPC isn't too far away...
It is definitely not stupid for eBay to block outside spiders. Here's an example that shows why.
I want to upgrade a 3 year old tower that requires very non-standard RAM. Ordering direct from a vendor or manufacturer would cost about $200. Searches on meta-store engines didn't do much better. When I checked most auction sites and meta-auction engines, I got zero hits. The sellers just aren't there.
But at eBay, I find a half-dozen new listings of them every goddam week, selling around $130. All of the other sites put together can't touch eBay's volume of sellers.
So what would eBay have to gain from allowing meta engines to spider them? Nothing! They dominate the auction market. If you really want to find something at the lowest price, you have to include eBay in your search. And if you already have to go to eBay, why bother with the meta engines or the other smaller auction sites at all?
Simple ruthless competition. Remind you of any monopoly that we know?
my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book.
Bingo. The key factor is that 12th century Europe was The Dark Ages, when the Church was Life and knowledge was scarce. Paper was a terribly difficult and expensive commodity to manufacture, so recycling old non-religious (i.e. non-useful) paper to make more hymnals was a brilliant move at the time.
I saw the Archimedes Palimpsest last year at The Walters Art Gallery. Note that the paper was not written directly by Archimedes, or even by his students. It's a (presumably) good copy made by later scribes which seems authentic.
The pages had been washed, scraped, cut in half, and rotated 90 degress to make a relatively clean surface for the prayers, then bound with stitching. When you reassemble the parts in the right order and look at it with UV light, the original is mostly visible. If only the ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations had survived and continued their scientific progress, we'd be on interstellar colony ships by now.
It was a robot story, so you should be able to guess the author -- he's one of the all time top 10 masters. That particular story (starring robots ZZ-1, 2 & 3) is a followup to a previous story about the discovery of forcefields, and both are available in at least two different anthologies.
Time out. Did anyone notice that EPIC's press release does not include the URL of the offending site? I went back a few levels and found their link to Freevibe.com. But a strange thing happened -- I went to Freevibe, and it did not try to place any cookies on me, and did not have any links to Doubleclick. Just to be sure, I sent an automated spider to index their site, and doing GREPs for doubleclick or cookie turned up Zero hits.
Some further background info: Freevibe is registered with NetworkSolutions. It is not owned by the federal government, but instead by:
SHS Network Operations Center (SN533-ORG) shs-ops@SHS.NET
Social & Health Services, Ltd. 11426 Rockville Pike, Suite 100 Rockville, MD 20852
SHS is apparently one of the numerous "Beltway Bandits" -- subcontractors in the DC area who do federal outsourcing. Freevibe is part of the Anti-Drug Media Campaign -- "hey kids, this KEWL web site says don't do drugs!" It's certainly ineffective, uses sloppy DHTML, and is a waste of money, but I don't see it violating any privacy laws.
putting up material to be downloaded in order to finger people would ammount to entrapment
IANAL, but entrapment would be if NetPD actively contacted individuals and offered them bootlegs unsolicited (imagine the concept -- poison pill spam). Simply posting fake files and waiting for people to find and download them doesn't count. Compare to police officers posing as prostitutes or drug dealers. If they come up to you and initiate the deal, it's entrapment. If you go to them first, it's an arrest.
But I do agree that Media Enforcer isn't going to get very far against Gnutella. Perhaps they could try and get individual servers booted off their ISPs, but that's like fighting fire with a teaspoon.
gee, microsoft puchases the one game developer who was historically sympathetic to the mac platform. what a shock. i wonder whom microsoft will try to buy next
I actually know the answer to that question. M$ is in the process of buying a hot strategy game company. This is another aspect of the M$ philosophy -- buy 3rd party developers to choke off support for other platforms.
The company I know about is already Windows-only and uses DirectPlay, so their impact on Mac/Linux is minor. But Bungie is a big huge loss to the cross-platform game world.
By the way, in the unlikely event that the M$ breakup goest through, which half would get DirectX & friends?
By being post #19 instead of #499. A mildly informative, semi-provocative EARLY remark will always score higher than a brilliant& thorough answer a few hours later.
third party memory modules are a LOT cheaper than getting it through Apple
To be fair, that's true of almost any major label computer maker. When I had to order a Dell PowerEdge for my office, the RAM was marked up insanely -- the differential was something like $4 per Mb beyond the base setup. Additional drives and other components were similarly overpriced compared to buying them 3rd party.
The article was edited after the fact. It initially said A HREF="totl.net/Spud" and left out the http:// part. Pretty easy to figure out, but annoying to click on.
If you're on a Mac, and you clicked that link, did your Help Viewer open
Mac IE5 gave the matter a few seconds of thought, then astonishingly decided NOT to open the help viewer. Mac IE5 has some interesting twists -- it allows you to run executables by clicking on links, but presents you with a confirm box first. However, it allowed a self-mounting disk image to open without confirmation when I made a link to it.
Mac NN 4 has no idea what the help URL style means, and sent me to /. 404 page. Mac NN 4 will not run executables or unrecognized file types at all -- it tries to open their data forks as text files instead.
About the general security issue: MacOS has many features similar to Clippy, most notably AppleScript (which gained remote connectivity in OS 9). I haven't seen any real exploits yet, but that's probably because H4X0Rs disproportionately use Windows. If Steve Jobs were the evil overlord instead of Bill Gates, we'd probably have AppleSkript Kiddies.
I don't use Hotmail. Does it automatically display HTML attachments?
Using an HTML file to execute malicious javascript seems pretty straightforward. Are any of the other web-based email services (Yahoo, Eudoramail, Mac.com, etc) vulnerable to similar attacks?
I'd like to see them as a watchdog for public domain software
The problem is -- how do they do that for software with which they have no legal connection? Party C can't just march into court and demand that Party A stop hassling Party B. For illustration, use A = Juan Miguel, B = Elian, C = Marisleysis. It's up to A & B to work things out. Therefore, the FSF can help more effectively if they are (in whole or in part) Party B.
The big problem is that it's not just the dumb Outlook users who are being shut down by this. JHU's email server stopped sending outgoing messages early this morning. Now it's 6 hours later, and not only is send mail still down, but the mail receiver is dead too. So my Powerbook with Eudora is taking collateral damage from those tightly integrated bastards in Redmond.
I challenge anyone to name one instance where a "Copyright" has helped a consumer
Easy. I'll name three right now, sitting here on my desk.
_Dynamic HTML_, by Danny Goodman, published by O'Reilly.
Fireworks 3.0, by Dennis Griffin et al, published by Macromedia
Bounty Hunter Leia figure, by George Lucas et al, published by Kenner
None of these consumer products would exist without copyright law. If outside groups could freely copy & distribute O'Reilly's text, how would Danny Goodman eat during the months of work to type up his manuscript? If all software were free (like beer), how would the folks at Macromedia pay their rent while writing upgrades? If everyone (including movie theaters) could make pirate copies and not pay the studio, how would any big-budget movie ever get produced?
Stiletto, you're proposing a world view (all property is theft) that has already been tried and simply did not work.
otherwise there will be a lawsuit that will be THE famous GPL lawsuit, oh yeah.
People keep speculating about this bold event, when the GPL will finally be tested in court. Which makes me think -- why wait?
I realize there are some potentially criminal issues here about collusion, and abuse of the legal system. But... it might be a really GOOD thing if some small company would violate the GPL in a deep and egregious fashion. The FSF and/. would politely ask them to stop, and they would refuse. So it goes to court, and the FSF fields a strong legal team. Unfortunately the small company can't afford a really hotshot lawyer. They do "their best" to defend a case, but in the end they lose.
Result: the GPL is affirmed to have legal standing in a US court decision, setting a precedent that holds weight for all future cases.
the real killer application for the next generation of wireless palm devices should be is
wireless communication over about a 10-100m radius.
You mean . . . like AirPort? Its range is several times wider than Bluetooth. Lucent makes an Airport-compatible card. Hmm . . . how long until a Springboard module is available?
It's so damn funny how Apple could have been Palm. An ARM based Palm would be Newton Jr in all respects -- less flexible, less expandable, less recognition capability, but most importantly SMALLER. The handwriting stuff was annoying, but the real reason Newton failed is that you can't fit it in a normal-to-small pocket.
I can't think of a single, legitimate, non-sleazy reason to collect information from anyone under 13
I'll provide my data point, and ask for/. advice. My organization provides online courses to K-12 students. Aside from the obvious issue about who is filling out our application form, I also have a "say hello to your Instructor" page which asks registered students about their hobbies and interests.
Our application forms require payment, which implicitly blocks out small children. But the hello form...suggestions?
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Last, some speculation: Steve's revised product matrix (including Cube) was drawn with 6 squares. Apple's design group could have drawn it as a pentagon or some other shape with exactly 5 parts, but they chose a 6 part rectangle, with a blank space in between iBook and PowerBook.
Apple designers may be evil sometimes (e.g. QT Player 4, hall of shame) but they don't do accidents. There's only one product that would make sense in that gap -- SUBNOTEBOOK! 4 pounds or less, a competitor for the Sony Vaio 505 SuperSlim. I'm gonna keep on wishing til it comes true...
Sheesh, Ryan just scored some HUGE credibility points. I want to see pictures of the MacJunkie guy eating his mouse.
Oh my fucking God, that's just nuts.
It's only 8 inches on a side, and the entire internal pops out of the plastic case.
For example, high-end G4 Macs already come with DVD-RAM drives. The article claims the Tracer drivers will work with any "standard" DVD-RAM drive. So hopefully support in LinuxPPC isn't too far away...
I want to upgrade a 3 year old tower that requires very non-standard RAM. Ordering direct from a vendor or manufacturer would cost about $200. Searches on meta-store engines didn't do much better. When I checked most auction sites and meta-auction engines, I got zero hits. The sellers just aren't there.
But at eBay, I find a half-dozen new listings of them every goddam week, selling around $130. All of the other sites put together can't touch eBay's volume of sellers.
So what would eBay have to gain from allowing meta engines to spider them? Nothing! They dominate the auction market. If you really want to find something at the lowest price, you have to include eBay in your search. And if you already have to go to eBay, why bother with the meta engines or the other smaller auction sites at all?
Simple ruthless competition. Remind you of any monopoly that we know?Bingo. The key factor is that 12th century Europe was The Dark Ages, when the Church was Life and knowledge was scarce. Paper was a terribly difficult and expensive commodity to manufacture, so recycling old non-religious (i.e. non-useful) paper to make more hymnals was a brilliant move at the time.
I saw the Archimedes Palimpsest last year at The Walters Art Gallery. Note that the paper was not written directly by Archimedes, or even by his students. It's a (presumably) good copy made by later scribes which seems authentic.
The pages had been washed, scraped, cut in half, and rotated 90 degress to make a relatively clean surface for the prayers, then bound with stitching. When you reassemble the parts in the right order and look at it with UV light, the original is mostly visible. If only the ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations had survived and continued their scientific progress, we'd be on interstellar colony ships by now.
I was away from my Mac earlier this week, so I didn't get to post in the previous discussion. Here's my $.02 :
Why is everyone saying there is no open source on the Mac?- My favorite NNTP client is a descendant of NewsWatcher, open source for Mac
- My favorite Telnet client is a descendant of NSCA Telnet, open source for Mac
- Want other examples? Try VersionTracker. And here's some more.
- Want to write your own? Apple gives you the tools.
So just what is up with these articles?It was a robot story, so you should be able to guess the author -- he's one of the all time top 10 masters. That particular story (starring robots ZZ-1, 2 & 3) is a followup to a previous story about the discovery of forcefields, and both are available in at least two different anthologies.
Time out. Did anyone notice that EPIC's press release does not include the URL of the offending site? I went back a few levels and found their link to Freevibe.com. But a strange thing happened -- I went to Freevibe, and it did not try to place any cookies on me, and did not have any links to Doubleclick. Just to be sure, I sent an automated spider to index their site, and doing GREPs for doubleclick or cookie turned up Zero hits.
Some further background info: Freevibe is registered with NetworkSolutions. It is not owned by the federal government, but instead by:SHS is apparently one of the numerous "Beltway Bandits" -- subcontractors in the DC area who do federal outsourcing. Freevibe is part of the Anti-Drug Media Campaign -- "hey kids, this KEWL web site says don't do drugs!" It's certainly ineffective, uses sloppy DHTML, and is a waste of money, but I don't see it violating any privacy laws.
IANAL, but entrapment would be if NetPD actively contacted individuals and offered them bootlegs unsolicited (imagine the concept -- poison pill spam). Simply posting fake files and waiting for people to find and download them doesn't count. Compare to police officers posing as prostitutes or drug dealers. If they come up to you and initiate the deal, it's entrapment. If you go to them first, it's an arrest.
But I do agree that Media Enforcer isn't going to get very far against Gnutella. Perhaps they could try and get individual servers booted off their ISPs, but that's like fighting fire with a teaspoon.
Do you have a verifiable reference for that statement? I'm very interested in hearing more.
I actually know the answer to that question. M$ is in the process of buying a hot strategy game company. This is another aspect of the M$ philosophy -- buy 3rd party developers to choke off support for other platforms.
The company I know about is already Windows-only and uses DirectPlay, so their impact on Mac/Linux is minor. But Bungie is a big huge loss to the cross-platform game world.
By the way, in the unlikely event that the M$ breakup goest through, which half would get DirectX & friends?
By being post #19 instead of #499. A mildly informative, semi-provocative EARLY remark will always score higher than a brilliant& thorough answer a few hours later.
To be fair, that's true of almost any major label computer maker. When I had to order a Dell PowerEdge for my office, the RAM was marked up insanely -- the differential was something like $4 per Mb beyond the base setup. Additional drives and other components were similarly overpriced compared to buying them 3rd party.
The article was edited after the fact. It initially said A HREF="totl.net/Spud" and left out the http:// part. Pretty easy to figure out, but annoying to click on.
Mac IE5 gave the matter a few seconds of thought, then astonishingly decided NOT to open the help viewer. Mac IE5 has some interesting twists -- it allows you to run executables by clicking on links, but presents you with a confirm box first. However, it allowed a self-mounting disk image to open without confirmation when I made a link to it.
Mac NN 4 has no idea what the help URL style means, and sent me to /. 404 page. Mac NN 4 will not run executables or unrecognized file types at all -- it tries to open their data forks as text files instead.
About the general security issue: MacOS has many features similar to Clippy, most notably AppleScript (which gained remote connectivity in OS 9). I haven't seen any real exploits yet, but that's probably because H4X0Rs disproportionately use Windows. If Steve Jobs were the evil overlord instead of Bill Gates, we'd probably have AppleSkript Kiddies.
IE 5 Mac is immune as far as I can tell, but it's not from the same code base as IE Win.
By the way, M$ bugs have been affecting Macs for a while now -- Macro viruses.
I don't use Hotmail. Does it automatically display HTML attachments?
Using an HTML file to execute malicious javascript seems pretty straightforward. Are any of the other web-based email services (Yahoo, Eudoramail, Mac.com, etc) vulnerable to similar attacks?
The problem is -- how do they do that for software with which they have no legal connection? Party C can't just march into court and demand that Party A stop hassling Party B. For illustration, use A = Juan Miguel, B = Elian, C = Marisleysis. It's up to A & B to work things out. Therefore, the FSF can help more effectively if they are (in whole or in part) Party B.
The big problem is that it's not just the dumb Outlook users who are being shut down by this. JHU's email server stopped sending outgoing messages early this morning. Now it's 6 hours later, and not only is send mail still down, but the mail receiver is dead too. So my Powerbook with Eudora is taking collateral damage from those tightly integrated bastards in Redmond.
Easy. I'll name three right now, sitting here on my desk.
- _Dynamic HTML_, by Danny Goodman, published by O'Reilly.
- Fireworks 3.0, by Dennis Griffin et al, published by Macromedia
- Bounty Hunter Leia figure, by George Lucas et al, published by Kenner
None of these consumer products would exist without copyright law. If outside groups could freely copy & distribute O'Reilly's text, how would Danny Goodman eat during the months of work to type up his manuscript? If all software were free (like beer), how would the folks at Macromedia pay their rent while writing upgrades? If everyone (including movie theaters) could make pirate copies and not pay the studio, how would any big-budget movie ever get produced?Stiletto, you're proposing a world view (all property is theft) that has already been tried and simply did not work.
People keep speculating about this bold event, when the GPL will finally be tested in court. Which makes me think -- why wait?
I realize there are some potentially criminal issues here about collusion, and abuse of the legal system. But... it might be a really GOOD thing if some small company would violate the GPL in a deep and egregious fashion. The FSF and /. would politely ask them to stop, and they would refuse. So it goes to court, and the FSF fields a strong legal team. Unfortunately the small company can't afford a really hotshot lawyer. They do "their best" to defend a case, but in the end they lose.
Result: the GPL is affirmed to have legal standing in a US court decision, setting a precedent that holds weight for all future cases.
Thoughts?
You mean . . . like AirPort? Its range is several times wider than Bluetooth. Lucent makes an Airport-compatible card. Hmm . . . how long until a Springboard module is available?
It's so damn funny how Apple could have been Palm. An ARM based Palm would be Newton Jr in all respects -- less flexible, less expandable, less recognition capability, but most importantly SMALLER. The handwriting stuff was annoying, but the real reason Newton failed is that you can't fit it in a normal-to-small pocket.
I'll provide my data point, and ask for /. advice. My organization provides online courses to K-12 students. Aside from the obvious issue about who is filling out our application form, I also have a "say hello to your Instructor" page which asks registered students about their hobbies and interests.
Our application forms require payment, which implicitly blocks out small children. But the hello form...suggestions?