Apple's iTunes store and DRM are well-implemented, but where exactly is the innovation? And what innovation is exactly hindered by forcing companies to open up DRM to competitors?
It's ironic that this sort of thing comes from a US judge, given how often the US has been up in arms about trade barriers in the European telekom business. I wonder whether the US judge would have the same opinion if it were a French company that was the worldwide market leader and that was keeping Apple and Microsoft out of the market.
Prolonged childhood is a historically recent phenomenon, and it's far from obvious that it's a good thing. Unfortunately, it looks like that children are becoming "mini-adults" because adults are becoming ever more infantile, not the other way around. And, unfortunately, there are no signs that that trend is reversing. If anything, people are moving out, getting married, settling down, etc. later and later in life.
I think it would be a good thing if kids were forced to shoulder adult responsibilities earlier in life. In fact, the US is really unusual in how late people are considered adults. Even in Europe, the age of consent and drinking age is usually around 16, and even younger in some countries. In other parts of the world, it's even younger.
The license states that any independent implementation cannot make proprietary extensions/subtractions and needs to pass a test. How is that a bad thing?
First of all, you're changing the subject. We weren't discussing whether it's a bad thing, but whether the platform is proprietary, and you just admitted that the platform is.
Now, why is it a bad thing? Because under the license agreement, Sun can effectively shut down any Java implementation they want at any time. Any open source or commercial developer would be a complete fool to agree to those terms. And that's why there are no certified, independent Java implementations at all and why all commercial competitors have dropped out. The only independent Java implementations still left are open source implementations that have had to reverse engineer the APIs.
Do you enjoy that the multitude of SQL implementations do most small things in their own different way?
I have no problem with it, just like I don't have a problem with the implementation differences for C, C++, C#, or even Java.. Besides, even Sun-certified Java implementations have numerous differences and significantly different APIs on different platforms, so I don't see how Java is any better.
Do you enjoy that the multitude of SQL implementations do most small things in their own different way?
How is that different from Java? A lot of Sun Java code doesn't run on IKVM or gcj, and vice versa. Obviously, Sun has not prevented fragmentation.
Anyway: Some of us are satisfied with Sun's free-as-in-beer implemenation, as are most other developers, which is reflected in the slow progress of the OSS implementations (since OSS developers generally make software for their own use).
And even more people are satisfied with Microsoft's proprietary software. The fact that you're satisfied doesn't make Sun software any less proprietary.
Anyway, Kaffe now has merged in parts of GNU Classpath, so perhaps the NIH-istic multitude of implementations could merge into one so that an OSS project actually got somewhere?
It is outrageous that you accuse open source developers of being responsible for the delay in open source Java implementations. The cause of the slow maturation and incompatibilities of open source Java implementations has to do with Sun's failure to deliver on their commitment to create a well-defined, stable, and open Java standard. As a result, open source implementations have had to use other sources to try to reconstruct Java APIs and play constant catch-up with Sun.
You can see how rapidly open source can implement a Java-like standard by looking at Mono: within two years, Mono achieved what neither Kaffe nor gcj achieved in three times that time.
It's not like GCC depended on AT&T to make progress.
Indeed, it didn't. That's because, unlike Java, C and C++ actually were, and continue to be, open standards.
Java is an OPEN platform, based on well established standarts that are made public, royality-free. Everyone is free to make their own implementation of the JavaVM, this commitment to open standarts made efforts like IKVM, Kaffe, Classpath and ohters possible on the first place.
That's a bunch of lies.
Sun's Java specifications are available only under restrictive licenses and Sun has withdrawn them from standards bodies twice because Sun was unwilling to allow independent implementations. Go try to download the J2SE specifications from Sun's web site and look at the licenses they come under.
IKVM, Kaffe, Classpath, and others have been laboriously reverse engineered from third party sources, and Sun has to this day refused to help in their creation. Sun's sources are completely useless to anybody working on independent Java implementations, because if they so much as look at them, Sun claims ownership of their work.
Sun's lack of openness has cost a lot of people a lot of time and effort. Claiming that they are implementations of some "open" Java standard is adding insult to injury.
The article makes the implicit assumption that the purpose of "homeland security" is actually to reduce our risk of getting injured or killed, but that is evidently not its purpose; it's trivial to see that we could save far more lives per dollar spent by improving traffic safety and preventive health care and just maintain pre-9/11 security. Even if the rate of terrorist attacks ended up being several per year, we'd still be saving far more lives that way.
So, if the purpose of "homeland security" is not actually to save lives, what is it? It's fairly simple: to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the population in order to induce them to vote for certain politicians. After all, what better way to induce FUD in people than to humiliate them when they travel anywhere in the name of security and remind them constantly that they could be blown up at any minute? 9/11 and the terrorist scare was godsent for an administration that had no direction, no plan, no leadership, and no clue. I don't want to suggest that this is a carefully planned strategy of the administration, but when 9/11 happened, Bush had found his calling--raving against the "axis of evil" and terrorists simply doesn't require much intelligence or strategy. Of course, a secondary purpose of "homeland security" is that it's a great pretext to funnel taxpayer money from the government to just those "big, ponderous" companies the article is criticizing.
So, arguing about whether homeland security is well-implemented is pointless if the purpose of homeland security is to be "big, ponderous" and wasteful in the first place.
What people should be talking about is what the point of homeland security as-we-know-it is in the first place. There were doubtlessly some straightforward and overdue changes to airline security that should have been implemented after 9/11, but two wars, hundreds of billions of dollars, and a dismantling of our constitutional rights are going to far.
So, the creator of a proprietary platform acquires key developers of open source add-on for that platform. This likely means that Sun will add more Sun Java-specific features to JRuby and that JRuby will not work on IKVM or Classpath in the future.
I wonder whether Sun tried acquiring Jython first and was turned away...
But the people who had their equipment seized WEREN'T trading child porn
Sure, they were. They downloaded the content on someone else's behalf and then passed it on. Furthermore, this was deliberate, since that's the whole point of running a Tor node.
They were just running a Tor node, which is perfectly legal, and something I do.
Running a Tor node is legal, but when someone uses your Tor node to do something illegal, then you're helping them. And, yes, you should be worried.
I don't like the result, but you can't support restrictions on posting and/or accessing information on the one hand, and oppose restrictions and liability on Tor nodes.
(A second problem is that Tor is a piss-poor design from a technical point of view.)
It will, however, help scare people off running Tor nodes quite nicely.
And why shouldn't it? If we, as a society, outlaw access to certain kinds of information, then, logically, when Tor nodes are being used to access that information, the operators of those nodes must share in the legal responsibility.
No, the real solution to these problems is to back off the restrictions we have placed on on-line information. Child pornography is disgusting, and having bomb making information on the Internet carries some risk, but we have to balance that against the damage that enforcement efforts against those kinds of information risk doing to our democracy.
I dunno. You tell us. Are there hardware failsafe mechanisms for fan control in the MacBook Pro? If so, where are they documented (reference to developer documentation, please)? If they aren't documented, then, to be safe, we have to assume that they don't exist.
Because the hardware still has a veto on the fan controls
If this is true (rather than your wishful thinking or guess), then it must be documented somewhere in the developer docs. Could you please point us to the documentation?
Why is this argument only valid when business and government are switching "millions of machines to Linux", but in any situation where they *aren't*, it isn't ?
Because the situation isn't symmetrical: there are huge costs associated with switching that have nothing to do with the effectiveness of a new system. When even a fraction of organizations decides to switch despite those costs, you can be sure that the target systems are more cost effective for them.
"Aqua and Aero are imitations of features originally introduced in research and open source systems"
Which explains why every Linux distro has had an equivalent available for the last 5 years, right ?
Yes, indeed, it explains that. Linux desktops have been shipping hardware accelerated desktop graphics, XML-based GUI construction, and transparency for many years. Most people chose not to use them, which raises the question again: who are these features actually good for--the bottom line of the vendors or end users? Neither Apple nor Microsoft have ever demonstrated that those features actually help make people more productive. But we do know that they require costly upgrades. (Of course, I'm not claiming that Linux developers invented those features either--they are older than that.)
Bullshit. The opposite, in most cases, is true.
Yeah, so Apple marketing will have you believe. If you actually dig through the published literature, you'll find that (1) Apple doesn't actually publish much of anything, and (2) their supposed "innovations" are either copies of competitors' features, or they are copies of technologies published in the literature. And that's not even particularly surprising: the company doesn't have a research lab, so where are the innovations supposed to come from?
Quite why you would make a cross border payment of 20GBP is another matter.
He heard about an ad for the charity in question and decided to contribute, perhaps?
and there are plenty of reputable U.K. or international based charities working in Afghanistan that would have taken his money.
Maybe he didn't consider UK or international based charities to be so reputable.
Did he do something suspicious, sure as hell he did. Is he innocent, quite possibly. However that does not change the fact that banks can and do routinely suspend accounts that have suspicious activity on them, and it does not just extend to terrorism. It happens all the time due to specious fraudulant activity, sometimes comited by random third party crimials.
And banks should be legally liable if they suspend or terminate accounts without being able to demonstrate a cause, just like they are legally required (at least in the US) to apply uniform standards in lending money and other areas.
Lets just say it was *VERY* disturbing.
No, what's *VERY* disturbing is your witch-hunt mentality. Face it: you're a totalitarian sympathizer. It's people like you who bring dictators to power and destroy democracies.
Its not a preposterous notion. You really can take a Mac home if its been pre-loaded with all the apps you need and get started working right after you take it out of the box and plug it in.
Yes, and you can do exactly the same with any of the major Linux distributions. But no matter how well the system works, users still need support and help afterwards and they get it with web searches.
The adage "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" applies here.
You just swallow Microsoft and Apple FUD hook, line, and sinker, don't you. Do you really believe that businesses and governments would be switching millions of machines to Linux if they didn't have clear evidence that it lowered their cost?
Why didn't OSS come out with something like Aqua or Aero first?
It did. Aqua and Aero are imitations of features originally introduced in research and open source systems. The same is true for just about every single technology in Mac OS and Windows. OSS is leading the way when it comes to software innovation, and has been for decades. All Apple does, and has ever done, is copy and package up other people's ideas in a pretty box.
The real question you should be asking is the following: while Aqua and Aero clearly are good for Apple's and Microsoft's bottom line, where have those copanies ever demonstrated that those features are good for users?
The computer is just supposed to be a tool anyway, not some sort of political revolution thats an excersize in technological masochism!" If we knew the average age of the average Linux/OSS user we could accurately predict that fall off date. Very interesting thing to ponder.
Yeah, I suppose that's why Fortune 100 companies are deploying Linux (and not MacOS) on their desktops, right?
Face it: the Mac is a nice consumer product: it plays music, you can edit term papers on it, it makes decent presentations, and you can keep an address book on it. It's not a serious alternative to a full desktop Linux system, or for corporate deployment. How do I know? Because I spend more time sitting in front of Macs than on Linux systems, but I treat the Mac basically as little more than a music box, a web browsing appliance, and a dumb terminal. And as hardware vendors get their act together on shipping Linux with their systems pre-installed, Mac OS will become less and less important even as a consumer product.
I think any laptop that overheats because of software is badly designed. Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system. If the OS can influence the behavior of such hardware functionality, there should be smart failsafe mechanisms.
Note that even supported operating systems can get wedged, either because of bugs in the OS, or because of driver problems or other hardware issues; you don't want your laptop to go up in flames when your Ethernet card develops a fault and makes the kernel hang.
I don't think those trends say much of anything. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps there's more searches for Linux because people need more help using it and getting it to just run properly?
The notion that people just take a Macintosh home, turn it on, and get all your work done is absolutely preposterous. And even if the Mac UI were perfect (and it is far from it), people still need third party software, shareware, documentation, tutorials, etc. And they also need support for the much maligned Microsoft Office.
In any case, you're missing the point. Google Trends is not suitable for making minute comparisons on who has a little more or less market share, but it shows that even a distro like Ubuntu taken by itself is likely already in the ballpark of the entire Macintosh user community. It also tells you something about relative performance, and on all those measures, Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. are doing better than Macintosh over time.
Add in Apple's installed base all over the world and its pretty clear to me at least that not only are there more Mac users than Linux users but its going to stay that way for quite some time.
Well, it may be clear to you, but that's likely just because they are very visible due to their marketing budget. There are probably more Linksys routers running Linux than Mac desktops.
In any case, you mention "all over the world", and that's another area where Apple has serious problems; look at the geographic distribution for Macintosh, and you'll find that it's highly concentrated in a few places.
The design, simplicity, and direction Apple gave the first generations of iPods were probably a big part in their success. But I think at this point, they should seriously consider opening up the platform to third party developers and making it really easy to develop new apps for it. That way, the market can determine what features people like on their iPods, rather than Jobs.
The biggest risk to Ubuntu is that the Debian developers start viewing it as a competitor and start screwing up.
What Ubuntu really is is an important sub-project of Debian, something that performs the final packaging and integration steps necessary for producing a high quality desktop distro, and something that Debian has never had the resources for. Nevertheless, it is important that Debian itself continue to produce their own distributions, however irregularly, because Debian as an organization also needs to go through that exercise.
But since a lot of people do open source also for the publicity, maybe Shuttleworth could help by featuring Debian more prominently as part of the Ubuntu project, perhaps going as far as calling the distribution "Debian Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu Debian", or at least using "...based on Debian" as a tagline.
Microsoft doesn't have a "first mover advantage" in the current market because the market is changing. In fact, Microsoft probably will suffer badly from its golden handcuffs, Windows and Office: the open and free alternatives are already providing reasonable alternatives to Windows and Office, but open and free alternatives are free to innovate in this space and change quickly in response to user demand.
Microsoft has had to drop almost all new technologies from Vista and still has slipped again and again on deadlines. At the same time, Linux is shipping all the technologies that Microsoft originally promised for Vista (e.g., desktop search, hardware accelerated graphics, XML GUI languages,.NET applications), and then some.
There are a lot more trends you can try, for example this and this. They show a generally downward trend for tech-related searches (maybe an artifact of Google Trends normalization), but for terms with comparable meaning, Linux-related searches generally beat or dwarf Apple-related searches.
Apple could well become "Linux with working drivers", but only if Apple adopts Linux-related technologies more aggressively and open sources their technologies more aggressively. Apple's current semi-proprietary direction for the GUI and programming environment will probably not work in the long term because, in the end, it takes a lot of effort to learn a new platform, and both their development environment and libraries are increasingly cumbersome compared to the alternatives (XCode 3.0 and Objective C 2.0 notwithstanding).
I bought a PC with Windows Media Center. It was OK while it worked But after loading music onto it and using it as a TV for a couple of months, it started falling apart and became unusable: weird error messages, crashes, BSODs (and it wasn't the hardware). I gave up on it. I frankly don't think Windows Media Center is ready for the consumer.
How is a meeting scheduling conflict going to get me fired?
It's the reason that matters. A valid reason (medical, intra-company conflict,...) is not going to get you fired, and they are also acceptable excuses for missing a lecture. An invalid reason ("don't like the instructor", conflict with 2nd job) is likely going to get you fired. The reasons and examples you gave for missing university lectures were invalid reasons.
Note that even if you have valid reasons for missing university lectures, if you miss too many lectures, you may simply have to re-take the course in another semester.
When the prosecutor contends something, it is his/her argument.
No, it's not. An argument connects a claim to supporting evidence, in law as well. Merely stating a claim is not an argument.
Ok, perhaps a poor word choice on my part, but I'm sure you got the point.
Yeah, I got the point alright: you liked the reputation associated with a full-time university, which is why you chose to attend one of them, but you actually didn't have the time to be a full-time student.
Fortunately, no matter how much people like you whine and complain, universities are not going to change. It's not just that making attendance optional is a bad idea and many parents and students realize that, it simply doesn't make sense: in good programs, most classes just are not the kind of class that can be recorded.
The current version does a pretty good job with providing a very windows like look and feel in Swing. Not only that but swing is actually pretty fast.
Yes, indeed, it provides a "very Windows-like look and feel"; unfortunately, it does so on every platform, including Linux and Macintosh.
What Java doesn't do is support/follow well conventions about menus, shortcuts, keyboard layout, preference files, drag-and-drop, window management, device access, scripting language access, desktop search integration, and a host of others.
There are a number of well-written, useful Java GUI applications, but, except for some trivial ones, none come even close to behaving like a native app.
(I'm using Java 1.4 and 1.5 on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.)
People often assume that something like YouTube, Palm, Tivo or whatever becomes big because someone had a unique insight. But, more commonly, it's simple cost and demand. Palm succeeded because chips and displays had gotten cheap enough to build a usable handheld. Tivo succeeded because harddisks and compression hardware had become cheap enough. For YouTube, bandwidth had become cheap enough to allow putting lots of video on-line and distributing it toe end users.
However, even if things have become cheap enough to start a business, they may still not be quite cheap enough to sustain it; if YouTube needs to make more in revenue than delivering video content costs them, and it's not clear that they can. And whether they can depends less on any brilliant insights they may have, and more on consumer behavior, ad revenues, broadband availability, and bandwidth costs.
I have written in java and have had no problem with them working under Linux, Windows, and after a one line change Mac OS/X.
So have I; that doesn't make Java a good cross-platform solution. For something to be a good cross-platform solution, it not only needs to result in programs that run on many platforms, it also needs to come close to providing native functionality on each of those platforms, and Java falls way short there.
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Apple's iTunes store and DRM are well-implemented, but where exactly is the innovation? And what innovation is exactly hindered by forcing companies to open up DRM to competitors?
It's ironic that this sort of thing comes from a US judge, given how often the US has been up in arms about trade barriers in the European telekom business. I wonder whether the US judge would have the same opinion if it were a French company that was the worldwide market leader and that was keeping Apple and Microsoft out of the market.
Prolonged childhood is a historically recent phenomenon, and it's far from obvious that it's a good thing. Unfortunately, it looks like that children are becoming "mini-adults" because adults are becoming ever more infantile, not the other way around. And, unfortunately, there are no signs that that trend is reversing. If anything, people are moving out, getting married, settling down, etc. later and later in life.
I think it would be a good thing if kids were forced to shoulder adult responsibilities earlier in life. In fact, the US is really unusual in how late people are considered adults. Even in Europe, the age of consent and drinking age is usually around 16, and even younger in some countries. In other parts of the world, it's even younger.
The license states that any independent implementation cannot make proprietary extensions/subtractions and needs to pass a test. How is that a bad thing?
First of all, you're changing the subject. We weren't discussing whether it's a bad thing, but whether the platform is proprietary, and you just admitted that the platform is.
Now, why is it a bad thing? Because under the license agreement, Sun can effectively shut down any Java implementation they want at any time. Any open source or commercial developer would be a complete fool to agree to those terms. And that's why there are no certified, independent Java implementations at all and why all commercial competitors have dropped out. The only independent Java implementations still left are open source implementations that have had to reverse engineer the APIs.
Do you enjoy that the multitude of SQL implementations do most small things in their own different way?
I have no problem with it, just like I don't have a problem with the implementation differences for C, C++, C#, or even Java.. Besides, even Sun-certified Java implementations have numerous differences and significantly different APIs on different platforms, so I don't see how Java is any better.
Do you enjoy that the multitude of SQL implementations do most small things in their own different way?
How is that different from Java? A lot of Sun Java code doesn't run on IKVM or gcj, and vice versa. Obviously, Sun has not prevented fragmentation.
Anyway: Some of us are satisfied with Sun's free-as-in-beer implemenation, as are most other developers, which is reflected in the slow progress of the OSS implementations (since OSS developers generally make software for their own use).
And even more people are satisfied with Microsoft's proprietary software. The fact that you're satisfied doesn't make Sun software any less proprietary.
Anyway, Kaffe now has merged in parts of GNU Classpath, so perhaps the NIH-istic multitude of implementations could merge into one so that an OSS project actually got somewhere?
It is outrageous that you accuse open source developers of being responsible for the delay in open source Java implementations. The cause of the slow maturation and incompatibilities of open source Java implementations has to do with Sun's failure to deliver on their commitment to create a well-defined, stable, and open Java standard. As a result, open source implementations have had to use other sources to try to reconstruct Java APIs and play constant catch-up with Sun.
You can see how rapidly open source can implement a Java-like standard by looking at Mono: within two years, Mono achieved what neither Kaffe nor gcj achieved in three times that time.
It's not like GCC depended on AT&T to make progress.
Indeed, it didn't. That's because, unlike Java, C and C++ actually were, and continue to be, open standards.
Java is an OPEN platform, based on well established standarts that are made public, royality-free. Everyone is free to make their own implementation of the JavaVM, this commitment to open standarts made efforts like IKVM, Kaffe, Classpath and ohters possible on the first place.
That's a bunch of lies.
Sun's Java specifications are available only under restrictive licenses and Sun has withdrawn them from standards bodies twice because Sun was unwilling to allow independent implementations. Go try to download the J2SE specifications from Sun's web site and look at the licenses they come under.
IKVM, Kaffe, Classpath, and others have been laboriously reverse engineered from third party sources, and Sun has to this day refused to help in their creation. Sun's sources are completely useless to anybody working on independent Java implementations, because if they so much as look at them, Sun claims ownership of their work.
Sun's lack of openness has cost a lot of people a lot of time and effort. Claiming that they are implementations of some "open" Java standard is adding insult to injury.
The article makes the implicit assumption that the purpose of "homeland security" is actually to reduce our risk of getting injured or killed, but that is evidently not its purpose; it's trivial to see that we could save far more lives per dollar spent by improving traffic safety and preventive health care and just maintain pre-9/11 security. Even if the rate of terrorist attacks ended up being several per year, we'd still be saving far more lives that way.
So, if the purpose of "homeland security" is not actually to save lives, what is it? It's fairly simple: to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the population in order to induce them to vote for certain politicians. After all, what better way to induce FUD in people than to humiliate them when they travel anywhere in the name of security and remind them constantly that they could be blown up at any minute? 9/11 and the terrorist scare was godsent for an administration that had no direction, no plan, no leadership, and no clue. I don't want to suggest that this is a carefully planned strategy of the administration, but when 9/11 happened, Bush had found his calling--raving against the "axis of evil" and terrorists simply doesn't require much intelligence or strategy. Of course, a secondary purpose of "homeland security" is that it's a great pretext to funnel taxpayer money from the government to just those "big, ponderous" companies the article is criticizing.
So, arguing about whether homeland security is well-implemented is pointless if the purpose of homeland security is to be "big, ponderous" and wasteful in the first place.
What people should be talking about is what the point of homeland security as-we-know-it is in the first place. There were doubtlessly some straightforward and overdue changes to airline security that should have been implemented after 9/11, but two wars, hundreds of billions of dollars, and a dismantling of our constitutional rights are going to far.
So, the creator of a proprietary platform acquires key developers of open source add-on for that platform. This likely means that Sun will add more Sun Java-specific features to JRuby and that JRuby will not work on IKVM or Classpath in the future.
I wonder whether Sun tried acquiring Jython first and was turned away...
But the people who had their equipment seized WEREN'T trading child porn
Sure, they were. They downloaded the content on someone else's behalf and then passed it on. Furthermore, this was deliberate, since that's the whole point of running a Tor node.
They were just running a Tor node, which is perfectly legal, and something I do.
Running a Tor node is legal, but when someone uses your Tor node to do something illegal, then you're helping them. And, yes, you should be worried.
I don't like the result, but you can't support restrictions on posting and/or accessing information on the one hand, and oppose restrictions and liability on Tor nodes.
(A second problem is that Tor is a piss-poor design from a technical point of view.)
It will, however, help scare people off running Tor nodes quite nicely.
And why shouldn't it? If we, as a society, outlaw access to certain kinds of information, then, logically, when Tor nodes are being used to access that information, the operators of those nodes must share in the legal responsibility.
No, the real solution to these problems is to back off the restrictions we have placed on on-line information. Child pornography is disgusting, and having bomb making information on the Internet carries some risk, but we have to balance that against the damage that enforcement efforts against those kinds of information risk doing to our democracy.
And they do?
Well, the article implied that they might.
And there aren't?
I dunno. You tell us. Are there hardware failsafe mechanisms for fan control in the MacBook Pro? If so, where are they documented (reference to developer documentation, please)? If they aren't documented, then, to be safe, we have to assume that they don't exist.
Because the hardware still has a veto on the fan controls
If this is true (rather than your wishful thinking or guess), then it must be documented somewhere in the developer docs. Could you please point us to the documentation?
Why is this argument only valid when business and government are switching "millions of machines to Linux", but in any situation where they *aren't*, it isn't ?
Because the situation isn't symmetrical: there are huge costs associated with switching that have nothing to do with the effectiveness of a new system. When even a fraction of organizations decides to switch despite those costs, you can be sure that the target systems are more cost effective for them.
"Aqua and Aero are imitations of features originally introduced in research and open source systems"
Which explains why every Linux distro has had an equivalent available for the last 5 years, right ?
Yes, indeed, it explains that. Linux desktops have been shipping hardware accelerated desktop graphics, XML-based GUI construction, and transparency for many years. Most people chose not to use them, which raises the question again: who are these features actually good for--the bottom line of the vendors or end users? Neither Apple nor Microsoft have ever demonstrated that those features actually help make people more productive. But we do know that they require costly upgrades. (Of course, I'm not claiming that Linux developers invented those features either--they are older than that.)
Bullshit. The opposite, in most cases, is true.
Yeah, so Apple marketing will have you believe. If you actually dig through the published literature, you'll find that (1) Apple doesn't actually publish much of anything, and (2) their supposed "innovations" are either copies of competitors' features, or they are copies of technologies published in the literature. And that's not even particularly surprising: the company doesn't have a research lab, so where are the innovations supposed to come from?
Quite why you would make a cross border payment of 20GBP is another matter.
He heard about an ad for the charity in question and decided to contribute, perhaps?
and there are plenty of reputable U.K. or international based charities working in Afghanistan that would have taken his money.
Maybe he didn't consider UK or international based charities to be so reputable.
Did he do something suspicious, sure as hell he did. Is he innocent, quite possibly. However that does not change the fact that banks can and do routinely suspend accounts that have suspicious activity on them, and it does not just extend to terrorism. It happens all the time due to specious fraudulant activity, sometimes comited by random third party crimials.
And banks should be legally liable if they suspend or terminate accounts without being able to demonstrate a cause, just like they are legally required (at least in the US) to apply uniform standards in lending money and other areas.
Lets just say it was *VERY* disturbing.
No, what's *VERY* disturbing is your witch-hunt mentality. Face it: you're a totalitarian sympathizer. It's people like you who bring dictators to power and destroy democracies.
Its not a preposterous notion. You really can take a Mac home if its been pre-loaded with all the apps you need and get started working right after you take it out of the box and plug it in.
Yes, and you can do exactly the same with any of the major Linux distributions. But no matter how well the system works, users still need support and help afterwards and they get it with web searches.
The adage "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" applies here.
You just swallow Microsoft and Apple FUD hook, line, and sinker, don't you. Do you really believe that businesses and governments would be switching millions of machines to Linux if they didn't have clear evidence that it lowered their cost?
Why didn't OSS come out with something like Aqua or Aero first?
It did. Aqua and Aero are imitations of features originally introduced in research and open source systems. The same is true for just about every single technology in Mac OS and Windows. OSS is leading the way when it comes to software innovation, and has been for decades. All Apple does, and has ever done, is copy and package up other people's ideas in a pretty box.
The real question you should be asking is the following: while Aqua and Aero clearly are good for Apple's and Microsoft's bottom line, where have those copanies ever demonstrated that those features are good for users?
The computer is just supposed to be a tool anyway, not some sort of political revolution thats an excersize in technological masochism!" If we knew the average age of the average Linux/OSS user we could accurately predict that fall off date. Very interesting thing to ponder.
Yeah, I suppose that's why Fortune 100 companies are deploying Linux (and not MacOS) on their desktops, right?
Face it: the Mac is a nice consumer product: it plays music, you can edit term papers on it, it makes decent presentations, and you can keep an address book on it. It's not a serious alternative to a full desktop Linux system, or for corporate deployment. How do I know? Because I spend more time sitting in front of Macs than on Linux systems, but I treat the Mac basically as little more than a music box, a web browsing appliance, and a dumb terminal. And as hardware vendors get their act together on shipping Linux with their systems pre-installed, Mac OS will become less and less important even as a consumer product.
I think any laptop that overheats because of software is badly designed. Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system. If the OS can influence the behavior of such hardware functionality, there should be smart failsafe mechanisms.
Note that even supported operating systems can get wedged, either because of bugs in the OS, or because of driver problems or other hardware issues; you don't want your laptop to go up in flames when your Ethernet card develops a fault and makes the kernel hang.
I don't think those trends say much of anything. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps there's more searches for Linux because people need more help using it and getting it to just run properly?
The notion that people just take a Macintosh home, turn it on, and get all your work done is absolutely preposterous. And even if the Mac UI were perfect (and it is far from it), people still need third party software, shareware, documentation, tutorials, etc. And they also need support for the much maligned Microsoft Office.
In any case, you're missing the point. Google Trends is not suitable for making minute comparisons on who has a little more or less market share, but it shows that even a distro like Ubuntu taken by itself is likely already in the ballpark of the entire Macintosh user community. It also tells you something about relative performance, and on all those measures, Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. are doing better than Macintosh over time.
Add in Apple's installed base all over the world and its pretty clear to me at least that not only are there more Mac users than Linux users but its going to stay that way for quite some time.
Well, it may be clear to you, but that's likely just because they are very visible due to their marketing budget. There are probably more Linksys routers running Linux than Mac desktops.
In any case, you mention "all over the world", and that's another area where Apple has serious problems; look at the geographic distribution for Macintosh, and you'll find that it's highly concentrated in a few places.
The design, simplicity, and direction Apple gave the first generations of iPods were probably a big part in their success. But I think at this point, they should seriously consider opening up the platform to third party developers and making it really easy to develop new apps for it. That way, the market can determine what features people like on their iPods, rather than Jobs.
The biggest risk to Ubuntu is that the Debian developers start viewing it as a competitor and start screwing up.
What Ubuntu really is is an important sub-project of Debian, something that performs the final packaging and integration steps necessary for producing a high quality desktop distro, and something that Debian has never had the resources for. Nevertheless, it is important that Debian itself continue to produce their own distributions, however irregularly, because Debian as an organization also needs to go through that exercise.
But since a lot of people do open source also for the publicity, maybe Shuttleworth could help by featuring Debian more prominently as part of the Ubuntu project, perhaps going as far as calling the distribution "Debian Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu Debian", or at least using "...based on Debian" as a tagline.
Microsoft doesn't have a "first mover advantage" in the current market because the market is changing. In fact, Microsoft probably will suffer badly from its golden handcuffs, Windows and Office: the open and free alternatives are already providing reasonable alternatives to Windows and Office, but open and free alternatives are free to innovate in this space and change quickly in response to user demand.
.NET applications), and then some.
Microsoft has had to drop almost all new technologies from Vista and still has slipped again and again on deadlines. At the same time, Linux is shipping all the technologies that Microsoft originally promised for Vista (e.g., desktop search, hardware accelerated graphics, XML GUI languages,
I think this says it all:
Google Trends: Macintosh vs. Ubuntu
There are a lot more trends you can try, for example this and this. They show a generally downward trend for tech-related searches (maybe an artifact of Google Trends normalization), but for terms with comparable meaning, Linux-related searches generally beat or dwarf Apple-related searches.
Apple could well become "Linux with working drivers", but only if Apple adopts Linux-related technologies more aggressively and open sources their technologies more aggressively. Apple's current semi-proprietary direction for the GUI and programming environment will probably not work in the long term because, in the end, it takes a lot of effort to learn a new platform, and both their development environment and libraries are increasingly cumbersome compared to the alternatives (XCode 3.0 and Objective C 2.0 notwithstanding).
We are evil, and we charge you a lot!
I bought a PC with Windows Media Center. It was OK while it worked But after loading music onto it and using it as a TV for a couple of months, it started falling apart and became unusable: weird error messages, crashes, BSODs (and it wasn't the hardware). I gave up on it. I frankly don't think Windows Media Center is ready for the consumer.
How is a meeting scheduling conflict going to get me fired?
...) is not going to get you fired, and they are also acceptable excuses for missing a lecture. An invalid reason ("don't like the instructor", conflict with 2nd job) is likely going to get you fired. The reasons and examples you gave for missing university lectures were invalid reasons.
It's the reason that matters. A valid reason (medical, intra-company conflict,
Note that even if you have valid reasons for missing university lectures, if you miss too many lectures, you may simply have to re-take the course in another semester.
When the prosecutor contends something, it is his/her argument.
No, it's not. An argument connects a claim to supporting evidence, in law as well. Merely stating a claim is not an argument.
Ok, perhaps a poor word choice on my part, but I'm sure you got the point.
Yeah, I got the point alright: you liked the reputation associated with a full-time university, which is why you chose to attend one of them, but you actually didn't have the time to be a full-time student.
Fortunately, no matter how much people like you whine and complain, universities are not going to change. It's not just that making attendance optional is a bad idea and many parents and students realize that, it simply doesn't make sense: in good programs, most classes just are not the kind of class that can be recorded.
The current version does a pretty good job with providing a very windows like look and feel in Swing. Not only that but swing is actually pretty fast.
Yes, indeed, it provides a "very Windows-like look and feel"; unfortunately, it does so on every platform, including Linux and Macintosh.
What Java doesn't do is support/follow well conventions about menus, shortcuts, keyboard layout, preference files, drag-and-drop, window management, device access, scripting language access, desktop search integration, and a host of others.
There are a number of well-written, useful Java GUI applications, but, except for some trivial ones, none come even close to behaving like a native app.
(I'm using Java 1.4 and 1.5 on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.)
People often assume that something like YouTube, Palm, Tivo or whatever becomes big because someone had a unique insight. But, more commonly, it's simple cost and demand. Palm succeeded because chips and displays had gotten cheap enough to build a usable handheld. Tivo succeeded because harddisks and compression hardware had become cheap enough. For YouTube, bandwidth had become cheap enough to allow putting lots of video on-line and distributing it toe end users.
However, even if things have become cheap enough to start a business, they may still not be quite cheap enough to sustain it; if YouTube needs to make more in revenue than delivering video content costs them, and it's not clear that they can. And whether they can depends less on any brilliant insights they may have, and more on consumer behavior, ad revenues, broadband availability, and bandwidth costs.
I have written in java and have had no problem with them working under Linux, Windows, and after a one line change Mac OS/X.
So have I; that doesn't make Java a good cross-platform solution. For something to be a good cross-platform solution, it not only needs to result in programs that run on many platforms, it also needs to come close to providing native functionality on each of those platforms, and Java falls way short there.