It would be a looong stretch to say that because Apple and/or the RIAA added your name and email address to a file, they now have copyright protection over your name and email address. You're also making the same assumption of the original article that the purpose of adding that information was to prevent copyright infringement... maybe Apple was just filling up the name and email fields that already existed in the file format because they have a thing for completion. No court in the land.
When this crap first came out, I saw that Gartner quote. And my first reaction was, "do these morons realize that iTunes syncs your address book by default? And your own address is in your address book?" Why would the thief have to extract the music file from the iPod (something that isn't trivial for the layman) and go through all the effort of finding the ID3 tags and reading the name, when they could just get the *address* from the iTunes interface?
Not to mention, if he's worried about a stolen iPod, imagine how he'd feel about a stolen laptop or cell phone.
I think the article should read something like, "Nintendo has now re-implemented about 75% of Xbox Live's features, before the Xbox 360 was released." Put it in perspective, you know.
I'm kidding, but it is kind of funny, especially considering how many people (Slashdotters in particular) are so keen on talking about how non-innovative Microsoft is, and how the Xbox and Xbox 360 didn't introduce anything new or worthwhile to the table.
First of all, while you may only have had to hunt/gather a few hours a day to survive 20,000 years ago, you also only lived until 35 and that's if you're lucky. If you want an accurate picture of what like was like before the modern day, take a look at Apocalypto. I'll take the computers and cars, even if it does mean working 8+ hours a day. At least those 8 hours aren't spent in a factory spinning cloth or working on giant steam engines.
Ah, yet another person who hasn't seen "2001: A Space Odyssey"! Or "Dark City," or any of a dozen deep sci-fi movies.
Contact is a fine movie, if ham-handed. (One part particularly: if the results of The Machine was so mysterious and nobody believes her, why not just send another person through the damned thing? It's still sitting there, right? They never mention that it's one-use only. Also they never really bothered to explain what that presidential adviser guy had against Hammond. Oh, and the boss of the Christian Coalition is named "Richard Rank?" It's like a bad comic book name.)
Personally, while Blade Runner is a good movie, it seems to me it's just yet another "we built it, and now it goes bad and kills people" movie that we've seen a million times before. Whether it's a replicant in Blade Runner, Skynet in Terminator, or robots in I, Robot, it's all basically the same plot over and over. Hell, even Maria in Metropolis, and that was filmed in 1927.
If they make a big piss and moan now, they get a lot more press than if they had done it years ago when the OS features were still in development and Microsoft had just quietly fixed it. It's all PR. If Google had their way, every computer would come with no search at all and you'd have to download their toolbar for it to be usable.
Which elections? If every election day was a holiday, then you wouldn't get a lot of work done between the new hospital levy issue and the fire department needing a new truck and, oh, Judge Bob's term is over we need to elect a new one.
Of course, making election day a holiday would help nobody in the states that do voting via mail now.
Slavery ended gradually. First in one part of the world, then slowly spreading out to others. Still, after slavery per se was gone, there was still no shortage of sharecropping and other slavery-like practices.
Big systems don't get scrapped. They either fade away gradually, or they change gradually... the only way to scrap a system that's vitally important on a global scale like our copyright system is some kind of cataclysm, like a big asteroid hitting. Seriously.
Saying "scrap it and start over" sounds tough, but the likelihood of it happening is nil. If that's the only thing you're fighting for, then you're wasting your time.
Maybe they're advancing the cause of anti-censorship and government control on the Internet, but they're sure as hell not helping those of us who want to see copyright law reform. The Pirate Bay's message is, loud and clear, whatever copyright terms you come up with are too much: we'll steal it anyway. Given that, why wouldn't a copyright holder just assume the entire copyright reform movement is the same way?
That's the exact point. Apple doesn't have its head up its collective ass, like the Linux community does, so Apple can offer guarantees such as "the QDLoadJpeg function will always load a jpeg file." that Linux can't offer. And Apple's been doing this for the entire existence of the company, not just OS X. (BTW, App bundles didn't exist prior to OS X... it seems to me that you're arguing from a position of ignorance.)
Windows developers use.dlls because they've been taught that.dlls are the magic solution to every problem. Linux users use shared libraries because that can't count on the OS supporting jack on its own, and on the rare occasion the OS *does* support what you want to do, it has a completely different API than the other, nearly identical, OS you also need to run on.
In any case, Apple's "complete and comprehensive set of system libraries" fit easily on a 160 MB HD back in the day with over 100 MB to spare, so I think you're vastly over-estimating how much disk space is taken up by code libraries.
Yeah, Microsoft was the same way when they started out. Probably IBM, too, but I'm not that old.
Welcome to Reality 101: You can't be a successful business without being a business. That is, doing all those things businesses have to do... keep a legal department and lobbyists on staff, for instance.
It's only been recently that hard drive capacity has been cheap enough to afford the many gigabytes of redundant libraries.... from the Linux user point of view, maybe. Apple's been shipping self-contained apps since 1984, before hard drives even existed. And those apps not only had more features than the Linux equivalents that were using all those "gigabytes of redundant libraries," but tended to be less buggy and more usable to boot.
I've been using Macs forever, and I've never shed a tear for the lack of dependencies, even when the biggest hard drive in my Quadra 610 was 160 MB.
It's pretty nice. The guy giving out the discs explained that when you install applications, the applications come bundled with all of their dependencies included. This makes the apps use a little bit more disc space, but avoids the issue of two apps requiring two incompatible dependencies. That's pretty nice.
So it's basically exactly what Apple's been doing since the beginning of time with the Macintosh. It was nice to go all those years with the smug satisfaction that the Macintosh platform would never suffer from dependency-hell or DLL-hell, but alas, other OSes are slowly starting to figure it out.
What startles me more is the paranoia involved in this statement. Apple is "hunting" them because they didn't show up in a slide in a Powerpoint (or more likely Keynote) presentation?
And this is the first conclusion you jump to? It's impossible that the graph is laid out that way because Apple wanted to compare Safari to IE, and only to IE?
It happens with Fast User Switching on Windows XP. And yes, it's a genuine bug and the complaint is perfectly valid-- iTunes should be able to cope with Fast User Switching, 99% of other apps do it just fine.
Seriously, though, if you work with a piece of hardware every hour of every day for years on end, you're going to take shortcuts. When I did product testing at Microsoft, we didn't say things like, "I'm getting a crash on this Xbox 360 Development Kit, a product of Microsoft Games and a wholly owned Trademark of Microsoft Corporation, All Rights Reserved." Hell, it would have added hours to our day!
Not to mention that Office is only supported to run on Windows. Why would you expect Microsoft to facilitate running it on WINE, or anything that isn't Windows? Big news here: If you're doing something unsupported you get *gasp* no support!!!
Now try to convince the Slashdot crowd that Xbox Live doesn't charge $50 a year because Microsoft is greedy, but it's to prevent jerks from making a million anonymous accounts and griefing everybody. But no, the next time a gaming article comes up people will start lambasting Microsoft because they're too cheap to pay $50 a year.
I've always wondered if they "believed in a flat earth" or just plain never thought about the shape of the earth, i.e. didn't believe in any particular shape. I'd guess that until people started settling down in communities, nobody had enough free time and energy to actually wonder at problems like that that, frankly, have no bearing on daily existence. (At least they didn't back then; now it's pretty important.)
Another example: I was very wary when Price of Persia: Sands of Time was announced. I think we all had horrible memories of Prince of Persia: 3D at that time.
But it turned out to be one of the best games of the year, if not the best. It stayed true to the original Prince of Persia 2D games while re-inventing itself with a much smarter story and nearly-flawless conversion of the same running-and-jumping gameplay to 3D.
You don't agree with what they say, therefore they're "spouting shit?" Please.
If it's remotely anything like Oblivion, except for the fact that it's first person, it will have failed miserably as a Fallout game.
They didn't say "like" Oblivion, they said "as good as" Oblivion.
Take this following sentence for example: "If it's even half as good as Unreal Tournament, this should turn out to be something special." Does that imply that Fallout will have a disembodied announcer yelling out, "Head Shot!"? No it doesn't.
Reading comprehension: It pays!
(Oh, and by the way, whether or not you think Oblivion is a good game, the amount of awards its won show that the majority of the people believe it's pretty damned special.)
metal |?metl| noun 1 a solid material that is typically hard, shiny, malleable, fusible, and ductile, with good electrical and thermal conductivity (e.g., iron, gold, silver, copper, and aluminum, and alloys such as brass and steel) : vessels made of ceramics or metal | being a metal, aluminum readily conducts heat. Heraldry gold and silver (as tinctures in blazoning). 2 Brit. (also road metal) broken stone for use in making roads. 3 molten glass before it is blown or cast. 4 heavy metal or similar rock music.
mettle |?metl| noun a person's ability to cope well with difficulties or to face a demanding situation in a spirited and resilient way : the team showed their true mettle in the second half.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be a looong stretch to say that because Apple and/or the RIAA added your name and email address to a file, they now have copyright protection over your name and email address. You're also making the same assumption of the original article that the purpose of adding that information was to prevent copyright infringement... maybe Apple was just filling up the name and email fields that already existed in the file format because they have a thing for completion. No court in the land.
When this crap first came out, I saw that Gartner quote. And my first reaction was, "do these morons realize that iTunes syncs your address book by default? And your own address is in your address book?" Why would the thief have to extract the music file from the iPod (something that isn't trivial for the layman) and go through all the effort of finding the ID3 tags and reading the name, when they could just get the *address* from the iTunes interface?
Not to mention, if he's worried about a stolen iPod, imagine how he'd feel about a stolen laptop or cell phone.
I think the article should read something like, "Nintendo has now re-implemented about 75% of Xbox Live's features, before the Xbox 360 was released." Put it in perspective, you know.
I'm kidding, but it is kind of funny, especially considering how many people (Slashdotters in particular) are so keen on talking about how non-innovative Microsoft is, and how the Xbox and Xbox 360 didn't introduce anything new or worthwhile to the table.
Oh BS.
First of all, while you may only have had to hunt/gather a few hours a day to survive 20,000 years ago, you also only lived until 35 and that's if you're lucky. If you want an accurate picture of what like was like before the modern day, take a look at Apocalypto. I'll take the computers and cars, even if it does mean working 8+ hours a day. At least those 8 hours aren't spent in a factory spinning cloth or working on giant steam engines.
Ah, yet another person who hasn't seen "2001: A Space Odyssey"! Or "Dark City," or any of a dozen deep sci-fi movies.
Contact is a fine movie, if ham-handed. (One part particularly: if the results of The Machine was so mysterious and nobody believes her, why not just send another person through the damned thing? It's still sitting there, right? They never mention that it's one-use only. Also they never really bothered to explain what that presidential adviser guy had against Hammond. Oh, and the boss of the Christian Coalition is named "Richard Rank?" It's like a bad comic book name.)
Personally, while Blade Runner is a good movie, it seems to me it's just yet another "we built it, and now it goes bad and kills people" movie that we've seen a million times before. Whether it's a replicant in Blade Runner, Skynet in Terminator, or robots in I, Robot, it's all basically the same plot over and over. Hell, even Maria in Metropolis, and that was filmed in 1927.
If they make a big piss and moan now, they get a lot more press than if they had done it years ago when the OS features were still in development and Microsoft had just quietly fixed it. It's all PR. If Google had their way, every computer would come with no search at all and you'd have to download their toolbar for it to be usable.
Which elections? If every election day was a holiday, then you wouldn't get a lot of work done between the new hospital levy issue and the fire department needing a new truck and, oh, Judge Bob's term is over we need to elect a new one.
Of course, making election day a holiday would help nobody in the states that do voting via mail now.
Slavery ended gradually. First in one part of the world, then slowly spreading out to others. Still, after slavery per se was gone, there was still no shortage of sharecropping and other slavery-like practices.
Big systems don't get scrapped. They either fade away gradually, or they change gradually... the only way to scrap a system that's vitally important on a global scale like our copyright system is some kind of cataclysm, like a big asteroid hitting. Seriously.
Saying "scrap it and start over" sounds tough, but the likelihood of it happening is nil. If that's the only thing you're fighting for, then you're wasting your time.
Maybe they're advancing the cause of anti-censorship and government control on the Internet, but they're sure as hell not helping those of us who want to see copyright law reform. The Pirate Bay's message is, loud and clear, whatever copyright terms you come up with are too much: we'll steal it anyway. Given that, why wouldn't a copyright holder just assume the entire copyright reform movement is the same way?
The Pirate Bay needs to grow up and join society.
That's the exact point. Apple doesn't have its head up its collective ass, like the Linux community does, so Apple can offer guarantees such as "the QDLoadJpeg function will always load a jpeg file." that Linux can't offer. And Apple's been doing this for the entire existence of the company, not just OS X. (BTW, App bundles didn't exist prior to OS X... it seems to me that you're arguing from a position of ignorance.)
.dlls because they've been taught that .dlls are the magic solution to every problem. Linux users use shared libraries because that can't count on the OS supporting jack on its own, and on the rare occasion the OS *does* support what you want to do, it has a completely different API than the other, nearly identical, OS you also need to run on.
Windows developers use
In any case, Apple's "complete and comprehensive set of system libraries" fit easily on a 160 MB HD back in the day with over 100 MB to spare, so I think you're vastly over-estimating how much disk space is taken up by code libraries.
Yeah, Microsoft was the same way when they started out. Probably IBM, too, but I'm not that old.
Welcome to Reality 101: You can't be a successful business without being a business. That is, doing all those things businesses have to do... keep a legal department and lobbyists on staff, for instance.
It's only been recently that hard drive capacity has been cheap enough to afford the many gigabytes of redundant libraries. ... from the Linux user point of view, maybe. Apple's been shipping self-contained apps since 1984, before hard drives even existed. And those apps not only had more features than the Linux equivalents that were using all those "gigabytes of redundant libraries," but tended to be less buggy and more usable to boot.
I've been using Macs forever, and I've never shed a tear for the lack of dependencies, even when the biggest hard drive in my Quadra 610 was 160 MB.
Not just OS X. Macintosh has always work that way, back to System 1.
It's pretty nice. The guy giving out the discs explained that when you install applications, the applications come bundled with all of their dependencies included. This makes the apps use a little bit more disc space, but avoids the issue of two apps requiring two incompatible dependencies. That's pretty nice.
So it's basically exactly what Apple's been doing since the beginning of time with the Macintosh. It was nice to go all those years with the smug satisfaction that the Macintosh platform would never suffer from dependency-hell or DLL-hell, but alas, other OSes are slowly starting to figure it out.
What startles me more is the paranoia involved in this statement. Apple is "hunting" them because they didn't show up in a slide in a Powerpoint (or more likely Keynote) presentation?
And this is the first conclusion you jump to? It's impossible that the graph is laid out that way because Apple wanted to compare Safari to IE, and only to IE?
It happens with Fast User Switching on Windows XP. And yes, it's a genuine bug and the complaint is perfectly valid-- iTunes should be able to cope with Fast User Switching, 99% of other apps do it just fine.
Yes, the box. Duh.
Seriously, though, if you work with a piece of hardware every hour of every day for years on end, you're going to take shortcuts. When I did product testing at Microsoft, we didn't say things like, "I'm getting a crash on this Xbox 360 Development Kit, a product of Microsoft Games and a wholly owned Trademark of Microsoft Corporation, All Rights Reserved." Hell, it would have added hours to our day!
Not to mention that Office is only supported to run on Windows. Why would you expect Microsoft to facilitate running it on WINE, or anything that isn't Windows? Big news here: If you're doing something unsupported you get *gasp* no support!!!
Amen.
Now try to convince the Slashdot crowd that Xbox Live doesn't charge $50 a year because Microsoft is greedy, but it's to prevent jerks from making a million anonymous accounts and griefing everybody. But no, the next time a gaming article comes up people will start lambasting Microsoft because they're too cheap to pay $50 a year.
I've always wondered if they "believed in a flat earth" or just plain never thought about the shape of the earth, i.e. didn't believe in any particular shape. I'd guess that until people started settling down in communities, nobody had enough free time and energy to actually wonder at problems like that that, frankly, have no bearing on daily existence. (At least they didn't back then; now it's pretty important.)
Another example: I was very wary when Price of Persia: Sands of Time was announced. I think we all had horrible memories of Prince of Persia: 3D at that time.
But it turned out to be one of the best games of the year, if not the best. It stayed true to the original Prince of Persia 2D games while re-inventing itself with a much smarter story and nearly-flawless conversion of the same running-and-jumping gameplay to 3D.
Ahhh, GI, spouting shit like normal
You don't agree with what they say, therefore they're "spouting shit?" Please.
If it's remotely anything like Oblivion, except for the fact that it's first person, it will have failed miserably as a Fallout game.
They didn't say "like" Oblivion, they said "as good as" Oblivion.
Take this following sentence for example: "If it's even half as good as Unreal Tournament, this should turn out to be something special." Does that imply that Fallout will have a disembodied announcer yelling out, "Head Shot!"? No it doesn't.
Reading comprehension: It pays!
(Oh, and by the way, whether or not you think Oblivion is a good game, the amount of awards its won show that the majority of the people believe it's pretty damned special.)
There are a lot of developers:
1) Some are entirely ignorant of these issues, and will code things like (say) a cookie that says "admin=true" to determine admin access.
2) Some are aware of the issues, but don't care to implement them. At least not until it's reported to them by a user/client/boss.
3) Some are aware of the issues, would like to implement them, but their clients/bosses don't give them enough time or resources to do so.
Just FYI:
metal |?metl| noun 1 a solid material that is typically hard, shiny, malleable, fusible, and ductile, with good electrical and thermal conductivity (e.g., iron, gold, silver, copper, and aluminum, and alloys such as brass and steel) : vessels made of ceramics or metal | being a metal, aluminum readily conducts heat. Heraldry gold and silver (as tinctures in blazoning). 2 Brit. (also road metal) broken stone for use in making roads. 3 molten glass before it is blown or cast. 4 heavy metal or similar rock music.
mettle |?metl| noun a person's ability to cope well with difficulties or to face a demanding situation in a spirited and resilient way : the team showed their true mettle in the second half.