How else to assist in stopping the piracy? If you're not pirating apps, there's no problem, no? But if you're a developer and you're losing tons of revenue, that would stink, no? I can see trying to make it more difficult for people to use pirated apps on the device. As a developer that's what I would WANT Apple to do.

And without good developers and good apps, the iPhone's advantage over other platforms is less.

The accounts from 3 smokers in unrelated incidents who gave their side of the story as being "wronged," and their accounts suddenly indicate the policy of Apple?

Sheesh. Nice "journalism."

Without looking at the machines, who here can really know the condition they were in? Maybe the darned thing WAS so full of ash and soot that it was hazardous to work on? I didn't get a look, did you?

You say "Piracy is rampant" but Apple _is_ releasing updates and making manufacturing changes on a fairly regular basis to try and foil the jailbreakers. And the Slashtards rail about that, with how bad a corporation is to try and prevent it.

Yet, it's the only way to prevent the piracy.

So I guess Apple gets it from both sides, no? ;-)

Roger, Roger.

Unsure if it's anti-trust though.

I don't have to pay to use H.264. I haven't paid a cent.

Whether the software I use had to pay a fee to generate H.264, I really don't care. It came with my Mac, and it works (and quality is great, unlike Theora which is based on a codec that was ditched by On2 almost a decade ago as it was inferior to modern codecs).

Lipstick on a pig. Sure, a free pig, but not important to me as again, H.264 is free to me as well.

The Palm connector, maintained by PALM, has languished for years. It suffers from TERRIBLE limitiations on Mac OS X, and it always had (you can only sync ONE address per contact, etc.). It was broken and really not updatedy by Palm as long ago as Mac OS X 10.4.

If you want to sync a Palm device, buy "The Missing Sync" and you're good to go. Works fine. Sure, it's extra $, but that's what you pay for that boat anchor.

This is NOT trolling.

TiVo largely invented this whole category, with a fantastic product, and was screwed over by a bunch of companies that developed competing technologies and used their market share and tying to basically "kill off" TiVo.

I know plenty of people my parents age that go into Cox cable and ask for a "Tivo" and come out with a Cox-branded DVR and don't know the difference. And TiVo has to try and subsist on $9.95/month for a product that was category creating, while the subscribers get something that is a crappy copy but included with the service provider. TiVo owns patents on much of the technlogy, and the companies should LICENSE it. They chose not to.

So no, this isn't a patent troll. There are exactly 2 criteria for being a patent troll:

1) Have few if any real products based on what you have patents on (OR, just buy other peoples' patents)
2) Sue in Eastern Texas

If both of these are met, THEN it's definitely a patent troll. Does TiVo met either of these?

All the applications are synched with iTunes on your machine, and can be synched to any iPhone that is "bound" to that version of iTunes. You could buy the app and sync it to 15 iPhones, if you used 15 iPhones.

Note you can't sync it to someone else's iPhone -- that is, one that by default syncs to another library.

So no risk here if your personal iPhone dies.

Intel Macs use EFI, but 32-bit Windows, and all versions of Windows pre-Visa, require BIOS. As such, they leverage EFI's BIOS compatiblity mode (which is part of the spec) to bootstrap and access the hardware.

Mac OS X is blissfully ignorant of BIOS Compatibility Mode, as it has legacy written all over it. EFI is vastly superior.

Boot Camp doesn't provide BIOS emulation; EFI provides BIOS compatibility mode. All Macs newer than the very first Intel Macs include this when they ship, Boot Camp or no Boot Camp. The very first (beta) version of Boot Camp installed BCM into EFI; but since then, it's in there when they ship.

So Boot Camp is really 2 things:

1) A utility to resize the hard drive on the fly
2) A CD that you burn that lets you install Apple's drivers on the Windows side so that sound, mouse, etc. work.

Which is one of the huge reasons why Linux is not usable for the average person.

OUT OF THE BOX, I'd want my OS to be able to play a DVD, and I'd want to be able to watch streaming content and videos from the web. Oh, and rip music I could play on my iPod/iPhone (or Zune LOL). Linux can really do none of these, at present, so how would ripping to Vorbis or Theora be anything good here at all?

I've never been charged for watching a video on my Mac, Apple TV, or iPhone. And I've ripped a number of them to H.264 using Handbrake.

So if there are costs, I'm not paying them. If they're being passed along to me, I'm not seeing them. And it works!

I fail to see the problem.

ship date? I don't really understand this... if it's 7 1/2 months from RC to ship, how close to an *actual* release candidate is this release candidate? Perhaps it should be called a beta? ::shrug::

I can understand a couple months for mastering and to ship/distribute/market, etc., but still that leaves 4-5 months to resolve testing on this RC "candiate." I guess the Borg just move really slowly on testing :-/

What do you mean, FUD? A trojan sure can run, and the article notes it IS running. There are no checks against trojans that run with user permissions. Heck, you can even schedule them to run at startup.. easy as pie!

If a user is an idiot, they can get malware on a Mac. Viruses are tough, but trojans are a cinch (I'm rusty, but could come up with a shell script in a few minutes and set +x on it and there you go). Linux would be just as easy.

So it's not FUD. Mac users who are not savvy can certainly get malware. If you know what you're doing, and stay away from P2P or other downloads you can't identify as "good," you're fairly safe (more so than unpatched Windows, for sure). But you're not immortal, and this article is proof of it. Even if it is from a fearmonger with self-interest like Symantec.

I don't know that Computer Science classes really prepare you for IT... one is developing applications and writing code, and the other is managing computers. Many, many people in lower-level IT positions don't even have bachelors degrees... they have associates or often less than that, but have gone to trade colleges or done some studying and gotten their MSCEs or other certifications.

If your heart is in computer science, then go for it. Go to college for 4 years, write a lot of code (really... many places when interviewing for entry-level positions with bachelors candidates will ask you how many lines of code you've written), really understand CS and a couple key langagues or paradigms (e.g. OOP or REST or whatever they're teaching now... I'm older than you ;-) and don't worry about it too much.

Again, IT is different, and who knows how IT in 4 years will look compared to IT today. I don't think 35 is too old for an entry level position... the key concern about age is desire and the ability to work. Few people at 25 have a wife and kids and other associated "lifestyle influences" to prevent them from regularly working 10-12 hours a day. People in their late 30s have all manner of excuses or other distractions they may deal with in entry level positions.