There's another possibility that occurs to me by a line in TFA:
Over the summer, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began brokering an agreement between the recording industry and the ISPs that would address both sides' piracy concerns. "We wanted to end the litigation," said Steven Cohen, Mr. Cuomo's chief of staff. "It's not helpful."
As the RIAA worked to cut deals with individual ISPs, Mr. Cuomo's office started working on a broader plan under which major ISPs would agree to work to prevent illegal file-sharing.
It looks like the RIAA could be lobbying governments to force ISPs to forward infringement notices.
I am worried about this because if some jack-ass at MediaSentry goes and mistakenly identifies my IP because I'm sharing some linux distros or whatever, then I get a note from my ISP saying they're slowing my service down because I'm a pirate. Now, I'm forced to sue the ISP in order to get the service I paid for. All the onus is on me to take action against the ISP to clear my name, this is much, much worse than what was happening before because rather than the RIAA having to prove that their copyrights have been infringed upon, it will be up to the accused to prove that he or she isn't guilty.
But full support from Adobe for for Linux for Flash, Air, and PDF Reader are a big sign that the slow march of Desktop Linux is on track.
How's this for 2008 as the year of the linux desktop: Here's Adobe's page for a 64-bit flash player. Basically, it says, you must run a 32 bit browser, no 64 bits for you! Now, here's the announcement from adobe labs for the release of the alpha of the native 64 bit LINUX flash 10 player. Yes, that's right...linux actually got some badly needed mainstream software BEFORE windows and os x. I think that's just awesome! I have no idea if it was incidental or intentional or what, but thank you Adobe.
As a somewhat mystified recent purchaser of a GTK 260 from eVGA, I was amazed to discover that NVIDIA has such problems with their linux drivers. I owned one of their older cards before and built a new computer and thought it was a no-brainer to pick NVIDIA for linux (freedom issues are notwithstanding, but I decided to go with the pragmatic choice). Only after I ran afoul of the powermizer slow switching crap, or other weird issues such as the misreporting of the screen refresh frequency, did I start digging and realized how many problems there are. As it is, I've got the beta 180.16 driver installed and it's better but I still had to do some tricks to shut off the powermizer feature. Just this morning had some other weird problem with screen corruption that's never happened before with my old hardware but more or less the same software on top of it.
For me personally, I could care less if the card hardware is great if the drivers suck. NVIDIA, fix your linux drivers please. Next time I'll give a much harder look at amd.
Let me explain something to you. After the U.S.A. developed nuclear weapons during WWII, they made a very smart decision, they decided that the potential destructive power of these weapons was far to great to entrust them to the military. Thus they created the atomic energy commission to be responsible for the weapons and development and to provide some checks and balances on the military industrial complex. The waste from nuclear power is goverened by the DOE as well, do you really want corporate america disposing of all your waste for you? Any sane person would look at how corporate america spends vast amounts of money to dodge responsibility for hard decisions and would say no.
All Carter did was roll this functionality as well as the nuclear power waste disposal into a single agency. As for the extended missions of alternative energy, I'd say we need someone to do this because private industry has been sitting on their ass for the last three decades and spending more time developing marketing campaigns about alternative energy than actually developing the energy sources.
I can't believe I bothered spending ten minutes writing this comment, libertarians are so blind, it's pathetic.
At this point, you're probably pondering if Gibson really gave that much thought to what was essentially a side-project for him. He did. He's careful like that.
To this day I am still amazed at how prescient he was in Neuromancer. The details -- all wrong, killing each other over a few megs of RAM, the virtual reality helmet, yadda yadda. The real interesting part is the atmosphere, e.g., at one point they go to a site that where people have been scrawling passwords for various high profile computers everwhere, where Gibson comments that a few days later the passwords would be covered up, but the site would spring up somewhere else, it sounds just like the game of whack-a-mole that the content distributors play with the pirates. Pirate bay gets shut down? Mirrors spring up in three different countries. Or the idea of mobs playing a heavy influence in the workings of the internet underworld, where now a lot of the botnets seem to be controlled by mobs, as well as the myriad small-fry scammers, cheats, etc. who are always willing to hack your credit to make a few bucks.
Here's a link from wikipedia, which is a little less biased than the rabid conservatives at the american enterprise institute. From the wikipedia article on what private carriers can carry for time sensitive material:
These letters must either cost at least the greater of $3 or twice what First Class (or Priority) mail service would cost, or they must be delivered within strict time limits or otherwise lose value.
Last I checked, it cost about $14 to use FedEx Supersave to send an envelope, which is a far cry from $3. Private industry is nowhere close to even competing with the USPS for the lowest cost option.
Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx
on
USPS Server Meltdown
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
then why is there a law the prohibiting Fedex/UPS from charging below a certain amount?)
Oh come on! When you make such an outrageous claim like this, back it up with a reference please. Last time I bought my forever stamps, they were 42 cents a piece. Good fucking luck getting a price anywhere near that in private industry. Sure, I can have a great web-server if I'm like FedEx and charge $30 to mail an envelope. Of course, every time the postal service wants to ask for more money to have updated services like eCommerce whatever, congress complains.
Americans are pathetic sometimes -- they expect their government services to do as well as private industry, yet they don't give them the ability to charge what private industry charges. Amtrak is a similar situation, Amtrak is expected to be cash flow positive, yet they are not allowed to own their own tracks, those are owned by the freight companies, whereas their main competitors run on highways that are paid for completely by the taxpayer and gas taxes, or operate out of airports also funded by taxpayers.
Here's a point by point list of environmental legislation that Clinton signed. Just off the top of my head, Clinton signed the law that allowed lands held in the public trust by the federal government to NOT be used for ranching is the winning lease winner choses not to. Clinton also signed the law making federal agency net zero polluters, meaning all waste from federal labs is cleaned up. Clinton signed the bill requiring paper mills to recycle their waste paper. Clinton improved the rules on wetlands conservation. Clinton upgraded many of the pollutant standards in the Clean Water and Clean Air acts. Clinton established the Staircase-Escalante National Monument. He accelerated cleanup of superfund sites. He signed the sustainable fisheries act. He signed the legislation to restore the everglades.... I'm only at 1996 here!
Mod parent up! Except for the MAC part instead of Mac (a MAC is a serial number for an internet card, a Mac is a computer), this post is spot on. I have no idea what the DRM on Windows and Zune is, but I hope that he has tried moving some of his files from his iPod to his Zune and discovered iTunes won't let you do it, or he has run afoul of the "this computer is not authorized" crap. Let's also hope that he's the kind of guy who can spot when there something wrong and actually gives a shit.
I'm pretty sure our current president has had these issues, he's an ipod listener, but I also guess he probably has his staff do everything for him and doesn't really care if his staff have to infringe on copyright while they are working on his behalf or violate the terms of the license to listen to the songs by moving them amongst un-authorized computers.
I agree with your post, but I can say that I've already played a MMORPG that does that: the nwn server I used to play on.* The way the servers run in this case is not a huge world, but more of a community who plays together on the same server who is run by somebody (not the game developers) out of their own pocket. For example, in our server the admins were very good about removing a lot of exploits that the game devs didn't bother to remove, so rather than policing our player-base, we, the DMs, spent the majority of our time running unique quests for the players and developing the plot lines of the world. There was an admin or two who spent a large amount of time just making permanent changes to the world based on the in-game event as well.
From what I gather, in the larger game worlds with professional GMs, you don't get that kind of attention. Basically, what I think is needed to be done is an open source MMORPG modeled after nwn that is completely community modifiable and doesn't require a walk mesh to be downloaded each time you change something on the world (nwn2 did, which is one reason why it bombed). That gives motivated people the ability to create their own communities for role-playing and it gives a much more rich story-telling environment for the admins.
*I won't tell you which because the original admins who developed everything found other things to do and the ones who replaced them were a bunch of asshats, so I left. (But that's to be expected, nothing lasts forever.)
No, you can use for the point releases for the OS and the finder too. For example: "Apple just released OS 10.4.x and even though the patch notes say there were only unrelated security and bug fixes, the finder feels snappier!" This is attributable to well-documented ability of the chips in Apple computers to overclock themselves by sensing the level of smug satisfaction and air of superiority of the user.:)
That sounds like a likely possibility. Seems like if it's a calibration issue, you wouldn't have to replace the display, but you would have to recalibrate it.
In the FTA, they suggest that:
Theories about the lines are scant, but the main ones attribute them to the new anti-glare coating or the new Nvidia graphic chips. Many users seem suspicious, though hopeful, that a firmware update will resolve the problem.
The anti-glare coating idea is bollocks I think, because if it's a coating it would wear out in circular patterns like spots, not horizontal lines. If it's NVidia's fault it'll be a bad year for them with their crummy vista drivers having come out as well.
I have said this before. If MS windows OS was an issue, HP/Compaq have the experience to fix it.
10 years ago I would have agreed with you, but remember Carli Fiorina? Preferring to sell televisions, Ms. Fiorina didn't have no truck with no research and development, HP spun off most of their hardcore science into Agilent. HP is now puts their name on products made by companies like Foxconn just like everyone else. Yes, they're better than average computers, but so are Apple's, my guess is that the quality of the brand is all in how much QA/QC you want to pay the OEM.
The cost of the lawsuit is the problem. Start-ups usually don't become profitable all at once, and it takes a long time sometimes to even have make a profit in a single year much less pay back your investors. So them going out and suing a large corporation that's known for it's especially vicious lawyers and retaining a high priced law firm in Silicon Valley known for its previous victory against Apple to do it suggests that they have a fat wad of cash from somebody. Granted, it's not certain that there is some big corporation or very rich individuals standing behind Psystar, but it does look suspicious.
Anyhow, sorry for missing the point of your post, we apple fanboys get a little touchy sometimes,:) E.g., when people kept making fun of Apple for a one button mouse, even after Apple was shipping a five button mouse with two axis scrolling as standard, or that macs were for artsy-fartsy types even though OS X shipped standard with a terminal with bash as the default shell and an X11 app (I personally use the fink repository for all my unix/linux packages, which uses apt). Or that damn Al Gore invented the internet meme -- oh wait, that one is the other crusade.:P
Okay I just looked at my dates and Apple sued Psystar in July, Psystar then sued Apple in August so I was off a bit in my post above. This is business as usual for corporations suing each other, BUT retaining the Carr & Farrell firm still looks way out of budget for a company operating out of a warehouse in Miami -- I mean the law firm itself employs two dozen people, which is probably about the same size as Psystar itself.
I think you're being a little naive (and the mods too) because this looks precisely like what happened with SCO, which was also a fairly small company that was trying to find (rediscover in their case) "a niche to grow in". To actually push their claims, they required large influxes of cash from a Microsoft shell corporation. The way to answer this is to find who is financing Psystar and what conditions that financing is contingent on, e.g. in the case of Baystar, they actually threatened to sue SCO if SCO failed to continue their strong-arm legal tactics against IBM and linux in general. If Psystar were "just a small business" and not being pushed by someone else, why would they sue Apple so dramatically? More likely they would try to stay under the radar off Apple until they were comfortably profitable to resist the inevitable law suit from Apple.
You know, this sounds really familiar. Oh yeah. Maybe now that SCOX is mostly dead the Microsoft dirty tricks shell corporations (e.g., Baystar) are looking for a new game.
That's pretty self evident. There's no practical way you can ever limit violent noun crime without removing the nouns from the populace.
Normally I would agree with you, but that's precisely the argument that the great-grandparent was implying, i.e., that most legally owned guns are not used for criminal activity, therefore legally owned guns are not part of the problem. That argument fails to consider that guns can be stolen and then used illegally.
Yes but how many guns are stolen each year? According to the U.S. DOJ it is 340,000. According to the person who installed my security alarm, the item with the highest resale value on the street is a firearm.
That means that legally owned guns still contribute to violent crime once they are stolen. And don't think it won't happen to you! My father had people burn a hole in his gun safe to get his guns out because the safe was too big to move. There's no practical way with an armed populace to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Speaking as a gun owner myself, this is the dirty little secret that the NRA and the gun nuts won't admit, there's no practical way you can ever limit violent gun crime without removing the guns from the populace.
That's one point, another is the question, "what is the future of the personal computer?" Historically PCs have been the tinkerer's toy, but no longer, they're a mundane commodity. As techies, we at slashdot all understand that there is a difference between hardware and software and that you can run different software on the same hardware. I don't think most people think about this though, they think of the entire computer (hardware+software) as one product and don't ever bother worrying about upgrading the operating system unless they are buying a new computer.
As abhorrent that might be to me and most other computing ethusiasts, I think that most people are never going to upgrade their operating system except in buying a new computer. Most people can't be bothered. If that's the case, then Apple can succeed because most people don't care that the OS runs on Apple-only hardware and they see very little difference between Apple and Dell or HP except that Apple's cost more. I think if Apple were to offer more lower price models, they could make a substantial dent in the market.
One future of the PC is not exchangeable parts and software, but something more like the cell phone market where companies do their best to tie you to their platform by offering "value added products" and people don't even think of what operating system the phone is running. This happened with automobiles too, when automobiles first became cheap you could switch out all sorts of parts and do whatever you wanted by hand if you had the tools, now, all parts are specialized including the tools to work on the car (e.g., the ones that interface with the computers on the car). While it is technically possible to put most parts from one car on another, it is difficult if not practically impossible to do so. My guess is companies will want to do more of this with personal computers as time goes on. Laptops are already like that.
That means it accounts for about 22% of Windows computers, or 1 in 4.4. Since Vista has been out for over two years now
I did a little reconnoiter-ing around the web-site to see what Apple's adoption rate is for comparison: you can see here that MacIntel surpassed Mac OS (the powerPC chip) in September of 2007. Apple first started shipping Intel processors in January of 2006. So ~1.8 years from when the first started shipping, they reached 50% saturation of the new product. Granted, it's not the same thing as Vista versus XP because there's no way to upgrade a powerpc computer to an Intel, but most people seem to be installing Vista on new computers, so maybe it's not that bad of a comparison. Maybe people who were buying macs were buying them more often, or maybe they really had a lot of new buyers whereas MS has pretty much saturated its market.
Another comparison might be made from the point releases of Mac OS X: from the 2008 keynote, Jobs said they achieved 20% install-base with leopard (10.5) in 3 months. However, that was just a point release, it's not a very big decision to upgrade or anything. The best comparison might be for the uptake of Mac OS 9 versus 10.0, but I'm having trouble finding data on that one.
Of course, do you trust Apple to report this data honestly?
As I pointed out when I submitted another story of the same subject yesterday (which for some reason wasn't selected for the front page, I think slashdot needs to wait for something to be old news before it makes the front page):
A CNN blog has a write-up on it that contains some information on how this is measured:
Net Applications' monthly surveys are conducted by sampling browser data from some 160 million visits to Web sites operated by firm's clients. Although the company describes the results as "market shares," Net Applications does not actually measure share of market in the traditional sense of sales revenue or unit sales. It does, however, provide a consistent methodology by which to measure browser and operating system trends.
I don't know if their clients are U.S. only or Worldwide.
Also in that report, it shows that Firefox use broke 20% for the first time ever at the expense of Internet Explorer.
But the issue of coal burning releasing mercury into the environment (why do you think predator fish are contaminated with the stuff?) is hardly ever brought up and if it is, it's just ignored.
Actually, it isn't ignored. You'll notice in that reference that the new Bush administration rules were struck down. That's hardly a surprise though, it seems like most everything they try to pass gets struck down.
The first issue I have with this study is that if you're going to buy electronics products based on their waste, you're starting at a low point. E-waste in particular is nasty, and even recycling it ends up poisoning a lot of people if it's not done properly. Here's a link of a cnet article talking about Chinese problems at recycling centers. The issue is the heavy metals like lead, chromium, cadmium, nickel, etc. Recycling may occur that is more damaging than putting the metals in a landfill. It's stupid for Greenpeace to single out Apple for "not recycling" when "recycling" is of dubious helpfulness if not done properly, and this is a sympton of the industry as a whole.
As for the specifics, it seems like a lot of the bad ratings of Apple are coming from the fact that they won't disclose timelines, or explain how various numbers are accounted. How do they know that the timelines published by "green" companies aren't complete bullshit? Also, I suspect they aren't giving enough credit to Apple for what it has done and focusing instead on what it hasn't. E.g., Greenpeace gives no indication why Apple's renewable energy purchases are in the "bad" category, were they not enough or what? They give Apple no credit for having a timeline to put their Ireland manufacturing facility on 100% renewable. Also, they give Apple a "bad" rating for not disclosing how much recycled plastics they use in their packaging some of their products. Hello?! The plastic in the packaging are some plastic bags, it's trivial, the rest of the packaging is cardboard and styrofoam. Greenpeace will look like idiots if the reason Apple doesn't report recycled plastic content in their packaging is because they aren't using any plastic at all in some product packaging.
Although I can sympathize with Greenpeace, I think we've all been annoyed by the secrecy or control-obsessiveness of Apple at some time in the past. Maybe Greenpeace is just expressing its views that Apple's secrecy in this case is not acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like the RIAA could be lobbying governments to force ISPs to forward infringement notices.
I am worried about this because if some jack-ass at MediaSentry goes and mistakenly identifies my IP because I'm sharing some linux distros or whatever, then I get a note from my ISP saying they're slowing my service down because I'm a pirate. Now, I'm forced to sue the ISP in order to get the service I paid for. All the onus is on me to take action against the ISP to clear my name, this is much, much worse than what was happening before because rather than the RIAA having to prove that their copyrights have been infringed upon, it will be up to the accused to prove that he or she isn't guilty.
How's this for 2008 as the year of the linux desktop: Here's Adobe's page for a 64-bit flash player. Basically, it says, you must run a 32 bit browser, no 64 bits for you! Now, here's the announcement from adobe labs for the release of the alpha of the native 64 bit LINUX flash 10 player. Yes, that's right...linux actually got some badly needed mainstream software BEFORE windows and os x. I think that's just awesome! I have no idea if it was incidental or intentional or what, but thank you Adobe.
Hah ha, whoops -- that should be GTX 260. Too much time using gtk apps. :)
As a somewhat mystified recent purchaser of a GTK 260 from eVGA, I was amazed to discover that NVIDIA has such problems with their linux drivers. I owned one of their older cards before and built a new computer and thought it was a no-brainer to pick NVIDIA for linux (freedom issues are notwithstanding, but I decided to go with the pragmatic choice). Only after I ran afoul of the powermizer slow switching crap, or other weird issues such as the misreporting of the screen refresh frequency, did I start digging and realized how many problems there are. As it is, I've got the beta 180.16 driver installed and it's better but I still had to do some tricks to shut off the powermizer feature. Just this morning had some other weird problem with screen corruption that's never happened before with my old hardware but more or less the same software on top of it.
For me personally, I could care less if the card hardware is great if the drivers suck. NVIDIA, fix your linux drivers please. Next time I'll give a much harder look at amd.
Let me explain something to you. After the U.S.A. developed nuclear weapons during WWII, they made a very smart decision, they decided that the potential destructive power of these weapons was far to great to entrust them to the military. Thus they created the atomic energy commission to be responsible for the weapons and development and to provide some checks and balances on the military industrial complex. The waste from nuclear power is goverened by the DOE as well, do you really want corporate america disposing of all your waste for you? Any sane person would look at how corporate america spends vast amounts of money to dodge responsibility for hard decisions and would say no.
All Carter did was roll this functionality as well as the nuclear power waste disposal into a single agency. As for the extended missions of alternative energy, I'd say we need someone to do this because private industry has been sitting on their ass for the last three decades and spending more time developing marketing campaigns about alternative energy than actually developing the energy sources.
I can't believe I bothered spending ten minutes writing this comment, libertarians are so blind, it's pathetic.
To this day I am still amazed at how prescient he was in Neuromancer. The details -- all wrong, killing each other over a few megs of RAM, the virtual reality helmet, yadda yadda. The real interesting part is the atmosphere, e.g., at one point they go to a site that where people have been scrawling passwords for various high profile computers everwhere, where Gibson comments that a few days later the passwords would be covered up, but the site would spring up somewhere else, it sounds just like the game of whack-a-mole that the content distributors play with the pirates. Pirate bay gets shut down? Mirrors spring up in three different countries. Or the idea of mobs playing a heavy influence in the workings of the internet underworld, where now a lot of the botnets seem to be controlled by mobs, as well as the myriad small-fry scammers, cheats, etc. who are always willing to hack your credit to make a few bucks.
Last I checked, it cost about $14 to use FedEx Supersave to send an envelope, which is a far cry from $3. Private industry is nowhere close to even competing with the USPS for the lowest cost option.
Oh come on! When you make such an outrageous claim like this, back it up with a reference please. Last time I bought my forever stamps, they were 42 cents a piece. Good fucking luck getting a price anywhere near that in private industry. Sure, I can have a great web-server if I'm like FedEx and charge $30 to mail an envelope. Of course, every time the postal service wants to ask for more money to have updated services like eCommerce whatever, congress complains.
Americans are pathetic sometimes -- they expect their government services to do as well as private industry, yet they don't give them the ability to charge what private industry charges. Amtrak is a similar situation, Amtrak is expected to be cash flow positive, yet they are not allowed to own their own tracks, those are owned by the freight companies, whereas their main competitors run on highways that are paid for completely by the taxpayer and gas taxes, or operate out of airports also funded by taxpayers.
Here's a point by point list of environmental legislation that Clinton signed. Just off the top of my head, Clinton signed the law that allowed lands held in the public trust by the federal government to NOT be used for ranching is the winning lease winner choses not to. Clinton also signed the law making federal agency net zero polluters, meaning all waste from federal labs is cleaned up. Clinton signed the bill requiring paper mills to recycle their waste paper. Clinton improved the rules on wetlands conservation. Clinton upgraded many of the pollutant standards in the Clean Water and Clean Air acts. Clinton established the Staircase-Escalante National Monument. He accelerated cleanup of superfund sites. He signed the sustainable fisheries act. He signed the legislation to restore the everglades.... I'm only at 1996 here!
Mod parent up! Except for the MAC part instead of Mac (a MAC is a serial number for an internet card, a Mac is a computer), this post is spot on. I have no idea what the DRM on Windows and Zune is, but I hope that he has tried moving some of his files from his iPod to his Zune and discovered iTunes won't let you do it, or he has run afoul of the "this computer is not authorized" crap. Let's also hope that he's the kind of guy who can spot when there something wrong and actually gives a shit.
I'm pretty sure our current president has had these issues, he's an ipod listener, but I also guess he probably has his staff do everything for him and doesn't really care if his staff have to infringe on copyright while they are working on his behalf or violate the terms of the license to listen to the songs by moving them amongst un-authorized computers.
I agree with your post, but I can say that I've already played a MMORPG that does that: the nwn server I used to play on.* The way the servers run in this case is not a huge world, but more of a community who plays together on the same server who is run by somebody (not the game developers) out of their own pocket. For example, in our server the admins were very good about removing a lot of exploits that the game devs didn't bother to remove, so rather than policing our player-base, we, the DMs, spent the majority of our time running unique quests for the players and developing the plot lines of the world. There was an admin or two who spent a large amount of time just making permanent changes to the world based on the in-game event as well.
From what I gather, in the larger game worlds with professional GMs, you don't get that kind of attention. Basically, what I think is needed to be done is an open source MMORPG modeled after nwn that is completely community modifiable and doesn't require a walk mesh to be downloaded each time you change something on the world (nwn2 did, which is one reason why it bombed). That gives motivated people the ability to create their own communities for role-playing and it gives a much more rich story-telling environment for the admins.
*I won't tell you which because the original admins who developed everything found other things to do and the ones who replaced them were a bunch of asshats, so I left. (But that's to be expected, nothing lasts forever.)
No, you can use for the point releases for the OS and the finder too. For example: "Apple just released OS 10.4.x and even though the patch notes say there were only unrelated security and bug fixes, the finder feels snappier!" This is attributable to well-documented ability of the chips in Apple computers to overclock themselves by sensing the level of smug satisfaction and air of superiority of the user. :)
The anti-glare coating idea is bollocks I think, because if it's a coating it would wear out in circular patterns like spots, not horizontal lines. If it's NVidia's fault it'll be a bad year for them with their crummy vista drivers having come out as well.
10 years ago I would have agreed with you, but remember Carli Fiorina? Preferring to sell televisions, Ms. Fiorina didn't have no truck with no research and development, HP spun off most of their hardcore science into Agilent. HP is now puts their name on products made by companies like Foxconn just like everyone else. Yes, they're better than average computers, but so are Apple's, my guess is that the quality of the brand is all in how much QA/QC you want to pay the OEM.
The cost of the lawsuit is the problem. Start-ups usually don't become profitable all at once, and it takes a long time sometimes to even have make a profit in a single year much less pay back your investors. So them going out and suing a large corporation that's known for it's especially vicious lawyers and retaining a high priced law firm in Silicon Valley known for its previous victory against Apple to do it suggests that they have a fat wad of cash from somebody. Granted, it's not certain that there is some big corporation or very rich individuals standing behind Psystar, but it does look suspicious.
:) E.g., when people kept making fun of Apple for a one button mouse, even after Apple was shipping a five button mouse with two axis scrolling as standard, or that macs were for artsy-fartsy types even though OS X shipped standard with a terminal with bash as the default shell and an X11 app (I personally use the fink repository for all my unix/linux packages, which uses apt). Or that damn Al Gore invented the internet meme -- oh wait, that one is the other crusade. :P
Anyhow, sorry for missing the point of your post, we apple fanboys get a little touchy sometimes,
Okay I just looked at my dates and Apple sued Psystar in July, Psystar then sued Apple in August so I was off a bit in my post above. This is business as usual for corporations suing each other, BUT retaining the Carr & Farrell firm still looks way out of budget for a company operating out of a warehouse in Miami -- I mean the law firm itself employs two dozen people, which is probably about the same size as Psystar itself.
I think you're being a little naive (and the mods too) because this looks precisely like what happened with SCO, which was also a fairly small company that was trying to find (rediscover in their case) "a niche to grow in". To actually push their claims, they required large influxes of cash from a Microsoft shell corporation. The way to answer this is to find who is financing Psystar and what conditions that financing is contingent on, e.g. in the case of Baystar, they actually threatened to sue SCO if SCO failed to continue their strong-arm legal tactics against IBM and linux in general. If Psystar were "just a small business" and not being pushed by someone else, why would they sue Apple so dramatically? More likely they would try to stay under the radar off Apple until they were comfortably profitable to resist the inevitable law suit from Apple.
You know, this sounds really familiar. Oh yeah. Maybe now that SCOX is mostly dead the Microsoft dirty tricks shell corporations (e.g., Baystar) are looking for a new game.
Normally I would agree with you, but that's precisely the argument that the great-grandparent was implying, i.e., that most legally owned guns are not used for criminal activity, therefore legally owned guns are not part of the problem. That argument fails to consider that guns can be stolen and then used illegally.
Yes but how many guns are stolen each year? According to the U.S. DOJ it is 340,000. According to the person who installed my security alarm, the item with the highest resale value on the street is a firearm.
That means that legally owned guns still contribute to violent crime once they are stolen. And don't think it won't happen to you! My father had people burn a hole in his gun safe to get his guns out because the safe was too big to move. There's no practical way with an armed populace to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Speaking as a gun owner myself, this is the dirty little secret that the NRA and the gun nuts won't admit, there's no practical way you can ever limit violent gun crime without removing the guns from the populace.
That's one point, another is the question, "what is the future of the personal computer?" Historically PCs have been the tinkerer's toy, but no longer, they're a mundane commodity. As techies, we at slashdot all understand that there is a difference between hardware and software and that you can run different software on the same hardware. I don't think most people think about this though, they think of the entire computer (hardware+software) as one product and don't ever bother worrying about upgrading the operating system unless they are buying a new computer.
As abhorrent that might be to me and most other computing ethusiasts, I think that most people are never going to upgrade their operating system except in buying a new computer. Most people can't be bothered. If that's the case, then Apple can succeed because most people don't care that the OS runs on Apple-only hardware and they see very little difference between Apple and Dell or HP except that Apple's cost more. I think if Apple were to offer more lower price models, they could make a substantial dent in the market.
One future of the PC is not exchangeable parts and software, but something more like the cell phone market where companies do their best to tie you to their platform by offering "value added products" and people don't even think of what operating system the phone is running. This happened with automobiles too, when automobiles first became cheap you could switch out all sorts of parts and do whatever you wanted by hand if you had the tools, now, all parts are specialized including the tools to work on the car (e.g., the ones that interface with the computers on the car). While it is technically possible to put most parts from one car on another, it is difficult if not practically impossible to do so. My guess is companies will want to do more of this with personal computers as time goes on. Laptops are already like that.
I did a little reconnoiter-ing around the web-site to see what Apple's adoption rate is for comparison: you can see here that MacIntel surpassed Mac OS (the powerPC chip) in September of 2007. Apple first started shipping Intel processors in January of 2006. So ~1.8 years from when the first started shipping, they reached 50% saturation of the new product. Granted, it's not the same thing as Vista versus XP because there's no way to upgrade a powerpc computer to an Intel, but most people seem to be installing Vista on new computers, so maybe it's not that bad of a comparison. Maybe people who were buying macs were buying them more often, or maybe they really had a lot of new buyers whereas MS has pretty much saturated its market.
Another comparison might be made from the point releases of Mac OS X: from the 2008 keynote, Jobs said they achieved 20% install-base with leopard (10.5) in 3 months. However, that was just a point release, it's not a very big decision to upgrade or anything. The best comparison might be for the uptake of Mac OS 9 versus 10.0, but I'm having trouble finding data on that one.
Of course, do you trust Apple to report this data honestly?
I don't know if their clients are U.S. only or Worldwide.
Also in that report, it shows that Firefox use broke 20% for the first time ever at the expense of Internet Explorer.
Actually, it isn't ignored. You'll notice in that reference that the new Bush administration rules were struck down. That's hardly a surprise though, it seems like most everything they try to pass gets struck down.
The first issue I have with this study is that if you're going to buy electronics products based on their waste, you're starting at a low point. E-waste in particular is nasty, and even recycling it ends up poisoning a lot of people if it's not done properly. Here's a link of a cnet article talking about Chinese problems at recycling centers. The issue is the heavy metals like lead, chromium, cadmium, nickel, etc. Recycling may occur that is more damaging than putting the metals in a landfill. It's stupid for Greenpeace to single out Apple for "not recycling" when "recycling" is of dubious helpfulness if not done properly, and this is a sympton of the industry as a whole.
As for the specifics, it seems like a lot of the bad ratings of Apple are coming from the fact that they won't disclose timelines, or explain how various numbers are accounted. How do they know that the timelines published by "green" companies aren't complete bullshit? Also, I suspect they aren't giving enough credit to Apple for what it has done and focusing instead on what it hasn't. E.g., Greenpeace gives no indication why Apple's renewable energy purchases are in the "bad" category, were they not enough or what? They give Apple no credit for having a timeline to put their Ireland manufacturing facility on 100% renewable. Also, they give Apple a "bad" rating for not disclosing how much recycled plastics they use in their packaging some of their products. Hello?! The plastic in the packaging are some plastic bags, it's trivial, the rest of the packaging is cardboard and styrofoam. Greenpeace will look like idiots if the reason Apple doesn't report recycled plastic content in their packaging is because they aren't using any plastic at all in some product packaging.
Although I can sympathize with Greenpeace, I think we've all been annoyed by the secrecy or control-obsessiveness of Apple at some time in the past. Maybe Greenpeace is just expressing its views that Apple's secrecy in this case is not acceptable.