I'd like to see the GP put Vista on his 10 year old PC and then come tell us how well it runs. The only reason you can even put an OS like XP on a 10 year old PC is that MS didn't release a new operating system for a little over five years. I have been forced to run 10 year old PCs with XP on them, they run slowly, it doesn't matter that you can technically install the software, the user experience is garbage.
I didn't think it affected me either until I put a new copy of debian on a machine and did an "apt-get install gnome" and found a copy of mono being installed on my machine. What I want to know is WTF was debian even thinking when they did that? It's obvious they weren't thinking very well since they back-pedaled and claimed that mono wasn't in the default install, by which they mean that it's only in the gnome metapackage and not the gnome-core or gnome-desktop. It's also equally obvious that anyone who wants to install gnome will first try apt-get install gnome rather than the non-intuitive gnome-core.
The point is that Mono is creeping into distributions through packages like Tomboy. I think that things like Mono shouldn't be in default packages or a dialog should be asked for things which are clearly offensive to at least some significant portion of the linux community. You don't see them doing that for NVIDIA drivers, I know the licenses are different and Mono at least claims to be open-source but I guess there's a lot more people who want to avoid MS than people who want to avoid NVIDIA.
newegg.com doesn't seem to be biasing their reviews. For any given product, even if it's good you get some people who get one that shows up DOA or has some other manufacturing defect. The interesting thing about newegg is that they allow the manufacturer to write a response to a review. Most of the time it is just the manufacturer stating that the customer who bought the bad item should contact customer service, but it is interesting to read which manufacturers actually respond. EVGA in particular seems to pay close attention to the reviews on newegg (my personal experience, since I bought some EVGA components, I read the reviews even after I bought it to see what people think).
Another thing to point out is What the article states way down the page:
Mac OS X climbed nearly the same amount that Windows fell -- 0.25 percentage points -- to finish above 5% for the first time under Net Applications revised its methodology.
So, XP fell 0.2%, win7 rose 0.3%, but OS X rose 0.25%. Considering that the source for their data, hitslink, doesn't even have OS 10.6 up on their survey yet, I'd say the interpretation that Windows 7 is the one eating Vista's market share is unfounded, it's much more likely that it's a combination of losses to apple and win7.
Moreover, if you look at other stats like statcounter, the monthly data shows no decrease in Windows Vista adoption rate (i.e., still increasing usage share), but still shows OS X increasing its market share.
Basically, there's just as much evidence that it's snow leopard that's eating Vista's lunch as it is win7. Win7 installs could easily be coming from people who skipped vista.
What you're saying about wine not being up to snuff is true for most recent games, or ones that rely on fps. Older games like Warcraft III however, often run just great. I run linux as my primary OS and Warcraft III is one of those that runs very well using wine, I even run things like Myth II and other older stuff. I even get a little icon added to my application list when I install them. If I were you, I'd try install Ubuntu on a spare hard drive and see if you are happy with it.
So let me get this straight, Palm needs people to sign an NDA in order to release an app to an app store? And people accuse the Apple store of being non-transparent. Wow.
Maybe I'm being ignorant here, could you please explain why would you need to sign an NDA to release an app to an app store? It's not like he's selling company secrets. It's a tip calculator and a dali clock, if palm actually needs the person who developed that stuff to be under an NDA, they're in pretty bad trouble since things like tip calculators and clocks are similar to exercises you might do as a beginning programmer (well maybe not a clock, but a tip calculator certainly).
This one manages to make me feel despair, disgust, fear, and rage, all at the same time.
...and yet, there's something like a 90% chance that you will buy their product (just a guess based on the current usage share of windows, not necessarily a/. reader). Does it matter that it's a horrible marketing attempt if the goal of the company is still accomplished?
2. It uses small, noisy fans rather than larger, quiet ones like this case
This is true, but there is a substantial efficiency to be gained by having a well defined air-flow. Instead of having one big space like the case you linked to, this case presumably has a number of more or less laminar flow paths through each device. This makes it so that you have to spin the fans less to get the same volume of mixing.
Apple was kind of forced into doing this when they switched to the G5s, which were notoriously power hungry and ran hot. My old dual G5 would sound just sweet until you actually used it to do something, then it sounded like jet engine taking off. They kept a similar case design when they switched to intel, they have three separate compartments that each have their own cooling. In the linked image, the top, middle and bottom sections of the case are each cooled separately. One is for the processor(s), one for the video and other cards, and one for the optical drives and power supply. The result is that my new xeon doesn't sound like much at all, doing or something or not. It's actually quite a nice case design.
Go check out the high quality version from the guy's web-site. It's much easier to hear what he's saying (singing).
I'm not a Carl Sagan fan, but there's something I noticed about this song: when was the last time you heard a "serious" composition dedicated to something in science? It seems that most songs are about love, or how life sucks, or something equally mundane. In the 60s and early 70s you heard a lot of protest songs or other political ones and before that you did hear some from people like Woody Guthrie whose subject matter was the plight of workers and farmers and long before that a lot of the ones that got written down were mostly about god. I really enjoyed this song, if only because it sounded pretty good and the fact that it had some inspiring subject matter that wasn't about procreation or religion.
MS's ribbon will probably meets more than most because of vocal minorities and because the coupled it with a switch that temporarily eliminated some features.
It's not a vocal minority -- you haven't shown any data to support that assertion. See my other comment here. According to this survey, which is the only one I have seen about the new interface, the majority of advanced excel users hate the ribbon, and about 80% of them dislike it. The people who actually like this interface are the minority, not the other way around! Even for advanced users, the majority don't like the ribbon. You can argue that the ribbon was designed for people who aren't experts in excel, and those people are a majority of people who buy excel licenses, but you can't say that people who use excel the most often like the ribbon.
Whatever the source of the data that they used, the result is something that the majority of advanced excel users hate and about 80% dislike. For intermediate users, about 40% hate it and 60% dislike it. Basically, people who know how to use excel already can't stand this ribbon, so MS has just royally pissed off some of their best customers perhaps to the benefit of those who don't use it so often. I have seen more people migrate to linux on their laptops due to this single "feature" than anything else. The ribbon is an even more than the problems with vista, although it is more of a straw that broke the camel's back sort of thing.
I already dislike the new gui for firefox on the mac (why in the world does the back button need to be so big?), and use safari because of it, but on linux I use FF all the time. I guess I'm going to sit back and hope that midori is released soon, or use konqueror.
You make some good points, the point I was trying to make is that if you're looking for a just a few nodes, that $8k price tag for the initial node is pretty steep. I noticed in TFA though that:
An Octane III with a 10 dual socket, four cores, Xeon L5520 processors, for 80 cores, 240GB of memory and integrated Gigabit Ethernet networking is priced at about $53,000.
This is actually a decent price for an 80 core system that's preconfigured. You wouldn't want to make a 10 node cluster of mac pros, you could do it easily, in fact my older system is essentially that, a bunch of independent nodes strung together over ethernet and sharing the home directory. You really don't get good scaling over the gigabit ethernet though, as least for what we're doing, so it's pretty pointless to go to more than a few nodes that way. I also noticed this as well:
Silicon Graphics was an independent company until May of last year, when it was acquired for $42.5 million by Rackable Systems Inc. Rackable subsequently changed the name of the combined companies to Silicon Graphics International Corp.
So my suspicion was right, this isn't SGI, it's a server company banking on SGI's name.
Or you could just buy this. For $3k plus a couple of thousand depending on how you want to configure it (it's cheaper if you add the memory and hard drive yourself from newegg), you can get a dual quad core with two ethernet ports and pretty decent graphics. You can easily link multiple ones of these through a gigabit ethernet switch and nothing in the world is easier to use or configure than a mac. I wouldn't want to build a supercomputer out of these, but you can easily build a couple node system of these. I would never actually do that of course, because macs are great high performance desktops but for clusters they just aren't cost effective. I guess it's the same with the SGI system.
On another note, it's interesting that SGI is trying this (or whoever is now using SGI's name). I say that because when I was in college I had a chance to intern at the USGS using some of the 3-D subsurface visualization software that the oil companies use, a single seat ran on a quad chip, risc system and cost $40k. (!) When I saw OS 10.0 beta for the first time and rootless X11 window manager and graphics tunneling over ssh, etc, I thought -- holy shit, this is all the neat features of that SGI on a little imac sitting on my desk. That I think more than anything else put the nail in the coffin of boutique high performance systems like what SGI built.
Maybe that should be the focus for kernel version 2.8 -- use 2.7 as a test bed for what can be safely thrown out or streamlined and 2.8 as the finished product. There's precedence for this, Apple just released OS 10.6 that only included minor "new" features but instead focused on streamlining and throwing out old code (in this case, the PPC software). As for their success at doing this, it's too soon to tell, but there are indications that it is turning out to be quite successful.
I'll agree that most people found it amusing or uninteresting but I think the poster I replied to was certainly reacting with an anti-MS slant.
No, it wasn't so much as anti-MS as bored with MS. Here's the essential point as I see it. Apple starts some stores, they're pretty successful, MS comes along, starts some stores and rather than try and innovate and develop their own new strategies for success, they're poaching Apple employees. It's just not innovative and there hasn't been a lot of innovative ideas at MS for some time.*
(while finding all manner of things to be critical of with Microsoft, Apple, and *nix/open-source)
Don't sweat it, that's just the usual slashdot compartmentalization going on. When it comes to Google, anything they do in relation to MS or Apple is good thing, anything else they do with privacy, it is a bad thing. Nevermind that Google's "rejected" voice app substitutes itself for the native one that comes with the iphone, and thus could almost be considered malware for the iphone and by admitting it to the store, apple might be liable for any security breach that might happen, *just* like this one. Or in this case, just ignore that Google did the right thing by making sure that the damage from the private data breach was minimized as soon as they realized there was a problem.
It sounds like you'd have a hard time getting third parties to release applications on the Zune given the above aims.
That's true, but what if they already have tried enticing 3rd party developers with a sales pitch for some kind of store and got so little interest they decided to can the whole thing?
The reason I bring this up is that, as a mac/linux guy, I had an interesting experience this morning: I had to burn a disc image using windows vista. I discovered to my dismay that Vista doesn't contain this ability natively, whereas macs do and just about every linux distribution does. The question is why wouldn't MS take the time to write some software to do that natively? My only thought was that maybe it was because they've got something 90% of the market share for OSes, they don't need to write their own apps because there's a million different disc burning utilities just a mouse-click and an internet connection. Maybe apple with about 10% usage share just couldn't attract the developers for every little thing they considered important and turned to writing their own software. Now flip this around for the portable media players, Apple machines are ubiquitous and can afford to let others write software for them whereas Microsoft can't find the developers willing to do it and has to write their own. You see that with games on linux too, a lot of the "linux games" seem to be written by linux users themselves and not companies trying to sell their products.
The GP makes it sound like a disbelief in Science is a new thing, but that's not right. As you say: disbelief in correct, but inconvenient, things is as old as humanity. For proof, look at the trial of Galileo for his support of Copernican Astronomy. Still, nearly 400 years after the event, the Pope is still quoting people who said
The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.
Sure, Galileo, Hansen and Gore can be criticized and torn apart for their flaws and missteps, but in the end, the only thing that matters is if they were right or not. 400 years from now, I don't think anyone who is mentally well will be claiming that anthropogenic climate change isn't a fact, just as in the present day they don't claim now that the Sun goes around the Earth. Anthropogenic climate change essentially proven at this point, the only matter of debate is how quickly the system responds and the magnitude of the change.
Here is the list of all the open source packages apple uses. These include the kernel and CUPS (under the 10.6 tab), as well as their own modified version of other open source packages like java or gcc (under the developer tab). Contrary to a lot of a the common "apple is teh proprietary satan!!1" posts on slashdot, apple acts just like you might expect a more or less decent proprietary unix distributor to act: they open source what they can but keep closed whatever they feel is necessary to maintain a competitive advantage against Microsoft or that would infringe on hardware sales.
P.S. As in interesting tidbit, you'll notice that clamAV is posted there as well. Hmm, makes you wonder.
I want the 5 seconds back that I just spent reading your comment. It would have taken you less time to google it and read the first few sentences of wikipedia than write that:
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), named for Grand Central Terminal, is an Apple technology used to optimize application support for multicore processors.[1] It is an implementation of task parallelism based on the thread pool pattern. It was first released with Mac OS X 10.6.
He goes on to talk about how placebo has become a crisis of the industry, but I have another explanation: it's not "placebo" that's the problem. If drugs in testing cannot outperform placebo, then the researches have done a good job of testing the drugs honestly. If the researchers are failing to develop drugs that beat placebo and the company's bottom line is suffering, it's not the fault of the sugar pill. Sometimes it's either difficult or impossible to develop an effective medication. Failure is inevitable. It's how science works. If the CEOs don't like it, they have to either make up the data, or find a new business model.
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
There's no linux client either. NWN was absolutely the most amazing game not because of the graphics (which were better elsewhere), not because of the single-player story-line (which was mediocre), not because of the game mechanics (which had problems), but because they wrote versions for everybody (Windows, OS X, and linux), they kept updating it until a couple of years ago, and they let people run their own servers as well as opened up the content to the community. There was a huge community of people who just loved making their own 3D models of armor, weapons, creatures and other stuff. I can't believe that bioware didn't make a boat-load of cash on nwn, why haven't they learned their lesson and tried to reproduce it with a more modern game?
Incidentally, I'd love to have an honest to goodness MMORPG that was open source. Heck, I bet all of the community models for nwn could be used since I've never actually found a license for any of it.
Here's a source. You have to log in to see the full report, but if you click on the interactive graphic there's a section on drugs. Bottom line is that drugs in the U.S. cost 50-70% more than in other nations of similar wealth. Now why is that? We're certainly not subsidizing the drugs for those other wealthy countries like we do for for the third world.
It's a similar thing with health care in general, insurance companies are paying more and more administrative costs which are going to finding excuses why they shouldn't be paying your medical bills and it's driving the costs up. A single-payer, public plan is the only way to avoid this. For some situations like health care, unfettered capitalism just doesn't work.
As for games, well I suspect it's a lot like the movie industry, by making mediocre games that are extremely well-marketed, they are making more money than spending tons on games that have less marketing. Or at least, the mindless automatons on Wall Street with the MBAs seem to think that, you see it over and over again in U.S. companies when they hire these people who specialize in management rather than actually knowing anything about what the company does (see HP and Carli Fiorina).
You know, the OS X kernel is open source, right? It's released right here. 10.0 beta through 10.6. The package you want is XNU. 10.6 doesn't seem to be up yet, but 10.5.8 is right there.
The parent said:
Linux has had more known vulnerabilities than Windows, but that is because people can see the source and find the vulnerabilities. It has also had more fixed vulnerabilities and currently has less valid vulnerabilities than Windows.
All of this applies to the Apple kernel as well because it's open source. In fact, if you read TFA, this particular bug was found was somebody mistyping something and then using a kernel debugging kit to determine the problem. That sounds precisely like the way open source software works.
While I can understand your point, the thought that crossed my mind is that Dell is arguing that companies should be allowed to willfully neglect patents just so long they're important enough? That doesn't sound very fair to me.
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I'd like to see the GP put Vista on his 10 year old PC and then come tell us how well it runs. The only reason you can even put an OS like XP on a 10 year old PC is that MS didn't release a new operating system for a little over five years. I have been forced to run 10 year old PCs with XP on them, they run slowly, it doesn't matter that you can technically install the software, the user experience is garbage.
I didn't think it affected me either until I put a new copy of debian on a machine and did an "apt-get install gnome" and found a copy of mono being installed on my machine. What I want to know is WTF was debian even thinking when they did that? It's obvious they weren't thinking very well since they back-pedaled and claimed that mono wasn't in the default install, by which they mean that it's only in the gnome metapackage and not the gnome-core or gnome-desktop. It's also equally obvious that anyone who wants to install gnome will first try apt-get install gnome rather than the non-intuitive gnome-core.
The point is that Mono is creeping into distributions through packages like Tomboy. I think that things like Mono shouldn't be in default packages or a dialog should be asked for things which are clearly offensive to at least some significant portion of the linux community. You don't see them doing that for NVIDIA drivers, I know the licenses are different and Mono at least claims to be open-source but I guess there's a lot more people who want to avoid MS than people who want to avoid NVIDIA.
newegg.com doesn't seem to be biasing their reviews. For any given product, even if it's good you get some people who get one that shows up DOA or has some other manufacturing defect. The interesting thing about newegg is that they allow the manufacturer to write a response to a review. Most of the time it is just the manufacturer stating that the customer who bought the bad item should contact customer service, but it is interesting to read which manufacturers actually respond. EVGA in particular seems to pay close attention to the reviews on newegg (my personal experience, since I bought some EVGA components, I read the reviews even after I bought it to see what people think).
So, XP fell 0.2%, win7 rose 0.3%, but OS X rose 0.25%. Considering that the source for their data, hitslink, doesn't even have OS 10.6 up on their survey yet, I'd say the interpretation that Windows 7 is the one eating Vista's market share is unfounded, it's much more likely that it's a combination of losses to apple and win7.
Moreover, if you look at other stats like statcounter, the monthly data shows no decrease in Windows Vista adoption rate (i.e., still increasing usage share), but still shows OS X increasing its market share.
Basically, there's just as much evidence that it's snow leopard that's eating Vista's lunch as it is win7. Win7 installs could easily be coming from people who skipped vista.
What you're saying about wine not being up to snuff is true for most recent games, or ones that rely on fps. Older games like Warcraft III however, often run just great. I run linux as my primary OS and Warcraft III is one of those that runs very well using wine, I even run things like Myth II and other older stuff. I even get a little icon added to my application list when I install them. If I were you, I'd try install Ubuntu on a spare hard drive and see if you are happy with it.
So let me get this straight, Palm needs people to sign an NDA in order to release an app to an app store? And people accuse the Apple store of being non-transparent. Wow.
Maybe I'm being ignorant here, could you please explain why would you need to sign an NDA to release an app to an app store? It's not like he's selling company secrets. It's a tip calculator and a dali clock, if palm actually needs the person who developed that stuff to be under an NDA, they're in pretty bad trouble since things like tip calculators and clocks are similar to exercises you might do as a beginning programmer (well maybe not a clock, but a tip calculator certainly).
This is true, but there is a substantial efficiency to be gained by having a well defined air-flow. Instead of having one big space like the case you linked to, this case presumably has a number of more or less laminar flow paths through each device. This makes it so that you have to spin the fans less to get the same volume of mixing.
Apple was kind of forced into doing this when they switched to the G5s, which were notoriously power hungry and ran hot. My old dual G5 would sound just sweet until you actually used it to do something, then it sounded like jet engine taking off. They kept a similar case design when they switched to intel, they have three separate compartments that each have their own cooling. In the linked image, the top, middle and bottom sections of the case are each cooled separately. One is for the processor(s), one for the video and other cards, and one for the optical drives and power supply. The result is that my new xeon doesn't sound like much at all, doing or something or not. It's actually quite a nice case design.
Go check out the high quality version from the guy's web-site. It's much easier to hear what he's saying (singing).
I'm not a Carl Sagan fan, but there's something I noticed about this song: when was the last time you heard a "serious" composition dedicated to something in science? It seems that most songs are about love, or how life sucks, or something equally mundane. In the 60s and early 70s you heard a lot of protest songs or other political ones and before that you did hear some from people like Woody Guthrie whose subject matter was the plight of workers and farmers and long before that a lot of the ones that got written down were mostly about god. I really enjoyed this song, if only because it sounded pretty good and the fact that it had some inspiring subject matter that wasn't about procreation or religion.
It's not a vocal minority -- you haven't shown any data to support that assertion. See my other comment here. According to this survey, which is the only one I have seen about the new interface, the majority of advanced excel users hate the ribbon, and about 80% of them dislike it. The people who actually like this interface are the minority, not the other way around! Even for advanced users, the majority don't like the ribbon. You can argue that the ribbon was designed for people who aren't experts in excel, and those people are a majority of people who buy excel licenses, but you can't say that people who use excel the most often like the ribbon.
Whatever the source of the data that they used, the result is something that the majority of advanced excel users hate and about 80% dislike. For intermediate users, about 40% hate it and 60% dislike it. Basically, people who know how to use excel already can't stand this ribbon, so MS has just royally pissed off some of their best customers perhaps to the benefit of those who don't use it so often. I have seen more people migrate to linux on their laptops due to this single "feature" than anything else. The ribbon is an even more than the problems with vista, although it is more of a straw that broke the camel's back sort of thing.
I already dislike the new gui for firefox on the mac (why in the world does the back button need to be so big?), and use safari because of it, but on linux I use FF all the time. I guess I'm going to sit back and hope that midori is released soon, or use konqueror.
This is actually a decent price for an 80 core system that's preconfigured. You wouldn't want to make a 10 node cluster of mac pros, you could do it easily, in fact my older system is essentially that, a bunch of independent nodes strung together over ethernet and sharing the home directory. You really don't get good scaling over the gigabit ethernet though, as least for what we're doing, so it's pretty pointless to go to more than a few nodes that way. I also noticed this as well:
So my suspicion was right, this isn't SGI, it's a server company banking on SGI's name.
Or you could just buy this. For $3k plus a couple of thousand depending on how you want to configure it (it's cheaper if you add the memory and hard drive yourself from newegg), you can get a dual quad core with two ethernet ports and pretty decent graphics. You can easily link multiple ones of these through a gigabit ethernet switch and nothing in the world is easier to use or configure than a mac. I wouldn't want to build a supercomputer out of these, but you can easily build a couple node system of these. I would never actually do that of course, because macs are great high performance desktops but for clusters they just aren't cost effective. I guess it's the same with the SGI system.
On another note, it's interesting that SGI is trying this (or whoever is now using SGI's name). I say that because when I was in college I had a chance to intern at the USGS using some of the 3-D subsurface visualization software that the oil companies use, a single seat ran on a quad chip, risc system and cost $40k. (!) When I saw OS 10.0 beta for the first time and rootless X11 window manager and graphics tunneling over ssh, etc, I thought -- holy shit, this is all the neat features of that SGI on a little imac sitting on my desk. That I think more than anything else put the nail in the coffin of boutique high performance systems like what SGI built.
Maybe that should be the focus for kernel version 2.8 -- use 2.7 as a test bed for what can be safely thrown out or streamlined and 2.8 as the finished product. There's precedence for this, Apple just released OS 10.6 that only included minor "new" features but instead focused on streamlining and throwing out old code (in this case, the PPC software). As for their success at doing this, it's too soon to tell, but there are indications that it is turning out to be quite successful.
No, it wasn't so much as anti-MS as bored with MS. Here's the essential point as I see it. Apple starts some stores, they're pretty successful, MS comes along, starts some stores and rather than try and innovate and develop their own new strategies for success, they're poaching Apple employees. It's just not innovative and there hasn't been a lot of innovative ideas at MS for some time.*
* Okay, I admit the ribbons are innovative, but considering that more than half the expert users of office hate them, I wouldn't call it successfull innovation.
Don't sweat it, that's just the usual slashdot compartmentalization going on. When it comes to Google, anything they do in relation to MS or Apple is good thing, anything else they do with privacy, it is a bad thing. Nevermind that Google's "rejected" voice app substitutes itself for the native one that comes with the iphone, and thus could almost be considered malware for the iphone and by admitting it to the store, apple might be liable for any security breach that might happen, *just* like this one. Or in this case, just ignore that Google did the right thing by making sure that the damage from the private data breach was minimized as soon as they realized there was a problem.
That's true, but what if they already have tried enticing 3rd party developers with a sales pitch for some kind of store and got so little interest they decided to can the whole thing?
The reason I bring this up is that, as a mac/linux guy, I had an interesting experience this morning: I had to burn a disc image using windows vista. I discovered to my dismay that Vista doesn't contain this ability natively, whereas macs do and just about every linux distribution does. The question is why wouldn't MS take the time to write some software to do that natively? My only thought was that maybe it was because they've got something 90% of the market share for OSes, they don't need to write their own apps because there's a million different disc burning utilities just a mouse-click and an internet connection. Maybe apple with about 10% usage share just couldn't attract the developers for every little thing they considered important and turned to writing their own software. Now flip this around for the portable media players, Apple machines are ubiquitous and can afford to let others write software for them whereas Microsoft can't find the developers willing to do it and has to write their own. You see that with games on linux too, a lot of the "linux games" seem to be written by linux users themselves and not companies trying to sell their products.
Sure, Galileo, Hansen and Gore can be criticized and torn apart for their flaws and missteps, but in the end, the only thing that matters is if they were right or not. 400 years from now, I don't think anyone who is mentally well will be claiming that anthropogenic climate change isn't a fact, just as in the present day they don't claim now that the Sun goes around the Earth. Anthropogenic climate change essentially proven at this point, the only matter of debate is how quickly the system responds and the magnitude of the change.
Here is the list of all the open source packages apple uses. These include the kernel and CUPS (under the 10.6 tab), as well as their own modified version of other open source packages like java or gcc (under the developer tab). Contrary to a lot of a the common "apple is teh proprietary satan!!1" posts on slashdot, apple acts just like you might expect a more or less decent proprietary unix distributor to act: they open source what they can but keep closed whatever they feel is necessary to maintain a competitive advantage against Microsoft or that would infringe on hardware sales.
P.S. As in interesting tidbit, you'll notice that clamAV is posted there as well. Hmm, makes you wonder.
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
There's no linux client either. NWN was absolutely the most amazing game not because of the graphics (which were better elsewhere), not because of the single-player story-line (which was mediocre), not because of the game mechanics (which had problems), but because they wrote versions for everybody (Windows, OS X, and linux), they kept updating it until a couple of years ago, and they let people run their own servers as well as opened up the content to the community. There was a huge community of people who just loved making their own 3D models of armor, weapons, creatures and other stuff. I can't believe that bioware didn't make a boat-load of cash on nwn, why haven't they learned their lesson and tried to reproduce it with a more modern game?
Incidentally, I'd love to have an honest to goodness MMORPG that was open source. Heck, I bet all of the community models for nwn could be used since I've never actually found a license for any of it.
Here's a source. You have to log in to see the full report, but if you click on the interactive graphic there's a section on drugs. Bottom line is that drugs in the U.S. cost 50-70% more than in other nations of similar wealth. Now why is that? We're certainly not subsidizing the drugs for those other wealthy countries like we do for for the third world.
It's a similar thing with health care in general, insurance companies are paying more and more administrative costs which are going to finding excuses why they shouldn't be paying your medical bills and it's driving the costs up. A single-payer, public plan is the only way to avoid this. For some situations like health care, unfettered capitalism just doesn't work.
As for games, well I suspect it's a lot like the movie industry, by making mediocre games that are extremely well-marketed, they are making more money than spending tons on games that have less marketing. Or at least, the mindless automatons on Wall Street with the MBAs seem to think that, you see it over and over again in U.S. companies when they hire these people who specialize in management rather than actually knowing anything about what the company does (see HP and Carli Fiorina).
The parent said:
All of this applies to the Apple kernel as well because it's open source. In fact, if you read TFA, this particular bug was found was somebody mistyping something and then using a kernel debugging kit to determine the problem. That sounds precisely like the way open source software works.
While I can understand your point, the thought that crossed my mind is that Dell is arguing that companies should be allowed to willfully neglect patents just so long they're important enough? That doesn't sound very fair to me.