Maybe some people don't want to waste their time and money on burning CDs that they are not going to use. Of course, it's a good idea to make a backup of your songs in a format that is not going to vanish, but that's just me.
Then convert the AAC file to AIFF, then back to MP3. Or use Audio Hijack or WireTap to save them out in any number or formats. No need to burn to CD. The net effect is the same, but you save the cost of a 1 CDR and the 3 minutes it takes to burn.
It's too bad that no rigor is applied to 99% of the benchmarks that are applied.
Raw CPU benchmarks like SPEC end up being compiler tests rather than processor tests.
"Real-world" app tests like this one are better, but only if the apps used are representative of apps used by the person reading the benchmark. They are not a realistic measure of holistic system performance.
Adobe Premiere? Come on! Does anyone on the Mac use that at all anymore? Is it even OSX native? Since Final Cut 1.0 came out 2+ years ago, anyone who considered that dog Premiere deserves what they get. Isn't there a better editing package on the PC, or is the Mac just that much better for video editing?
Microsoft products should be excluded from benchmarks on Microsoft's OS. Of COURSE Microsoft optimizes performance of their apps on their OS more than their apps on other OSs. That test is pointless.
The Quake test would be valid, except as many people here have pointed out, it's a 32-bit app, so it's not using any of the 64-bit capabilities of these boxes. When we get a native, 64-bit version and can compare it to two boxes with the same ATI video card, then it will be a valid test.
Personally, I was hoping for Apple to bring BeOS in and use that as their new OS. That could have been interesting.
At the time Apple and NeXt "merged", I thought BeOS was the better choice. It seemed faster on smaller hardware, had some really unique features (BeFS, etc), and seemed more polished.
As it turns out, Apple's move to a real UNIX-based OS was smart and well-timed. BeOS was written in C++ and had fragile base class issues. It was not multi-user. Lots of drivers didn't work right or had not been written yet. It was a nice proof of concept, but it was not complete.
NeXt on the other hand, had what we now call Cocoa, a rich development and deployment framework that makes app development easier than on any other OS. With its UNIX roots, OSX has been able to take advantage of Linux's growing popularity (porting all the popular Linux tools is pretty trivial), and thus all that software is now available to Mac users. And with NeXt's Display PostScript being replaced with the similar Quartz (PDF) rendering engine, the OS has complete OS-wide PDF support, which is brilliant.
For people who download a lot of music, EMusic might have been a good deal before (not so much now). But for those of us who buy less than 10 songs a month, Apple's iTunes Music Store (ITMS) is a much better deal.
The rumors suggest that it will be out on Windows before the end of October. I'll play with it on my Windows box, but I'll still do all my purchasing on my Macs.
I worked for a dot com during the later part of the boom. It was a pretty decent place to work. Then, we started to run out of money.
They had 4 rounds of layoffs, but I was a key developer (team lead), so while all my direct reports were let go, I remained. Our development group went from 7 down to 3. Those of us who remained were given our "severance" in-advance so that we wouldn't worry about not getting it if the company ran out of cash. Pretty neat idea.
Anyway, on Sept 10, 2001, the rest of my team and I got laid off. We were told that there was one developer position in another group, and were asked if we wanted it. I declined (was sick of the uncertainty, and wanted to find a job before Christmas time), and one of the others did so also, leaving the third to stay.
On Sept 11 we were going in to tidy up the code for mothballing, but with the WTC attacks it took several hours to get to the office, and when we did we were sent home in case other attacks were to follow (we worked in downtown Atlanta).
At the max we had about 120 employees (I was #42), and the day I left there were 14 still employed. That company is out of business now, but they treated us as fairly as possible when we were laid off. Our severance package was 4 weeks of pay, plus our computer. It was a pretty fair deal.
I had a job offer in 2 weeks, and within 6 weeks was working at the new company. It's not fun like the dot.com, but it pays the bills.
The old saying still applies -- there is no security without physical security.
You can stop the aforementioned "password reset" by applying the Open Firmware Password 1.0.2 patch. This patch alters the Open Firmware to require a password to change the boot device.
With that said, someone with physical access to the machine can take the hard drive out, plug it into another mac as a secondary drive, and read all the data off the disk. Nothing short of disk-driver-level encryption can prevent that.
If you want your machines to be secure, you have to apply the patch, lock the physical machine to the desk, and lock the case closed.
I know this is a joke, but there was a reason for the "US Only" requirement.
The iTMS will currently only authorize computers in the US. So if he sold it to someone outside the US, they would not be able to authorize their computer to play it.
Graeme has shown himself to be an asset to the Mac community. He did the OSX port of Quake 3, and did significant work on the port of Return to Castle Wolfenstein for OSX. He also did the Altivec version of Q3 that added about 20% to the framerate on my G4.
I hope the id can get someone else with good Mac experience and dedication to ensure that the Mac ports of their games are as good as they can be.
J2EE is a very complex standard. Of the J2EE containers that I have used (WebLogic, JBoss, and Resin), only Resin actually seems easy to set up and use. WebLogic is very powerful, but the learning curve is steep.
It would be nice to see a complete, certified J2EE implementation that's as straightforward to use as Tomcat.
Maybe I should join the effort. Maybe you should too:)
I've used jsp, WebMacro, jsp+struts, and a few other other presentation layers. I really like Velocity because it enforces the separation between the controller and the view (unlike jsp-based templating languages, which often get abused to include business logic by poor programmers who don't know what they should be doing). Since you have to explicitly put something in the velocity context via the controller, the view can only display what has been put in its context.
The other advantage of velocity is its very simple scripting language. It's a lot easier than some of the tag-based templating tools I have seen. For a developer, it's not a big selling point, but if you're working with a designer, it can make a big difference.
The "size does matter" argument doesn't always go that way. It's more often pulled out by PC users who think the speed of their PC somehow makes up for their personal shortcomings in the anatomy department.
Of course speed does matter to an extent, but my point was that at some speed, it ceases to make any real-world difference. When G4 was 1/2 the speed of PCs in the market, and not able to keep up with Apple's "Aqua", this argument made some sense. If I am a Photoshop artist, a few extra FLOPS may make the difference in whether my filter is done by the time I get back from a coffee break, but I'm not going to be 50% more productive on a 50% faster machine if both machines are of this caliber.
I can compile my enterprise java application with over 100,000 LOC on my old 600MHz iBook laptop in 43 seconds. My P4/2.4GHz does the same compile in 30 seconds. These new G5s or a new AMD chip will probably cut that down to 15 seconds (the difference between them may be 5 seconds, max). Am I more productive to any significant degree as a result? Nope.
That's why people are not upgrading their PCs as much anymore. The advantages aren't there for most people.
At this point, does it really matter if Intel, AMD, or Apple is the slightly faster computer?
They're all extremely fast and all run one or more UNIX-like Operating Systems (Linux or BSD or OSX). For the Slashdot crowd, Windows is an afterthought, but I'll mention it as well.
What a person decides to buy is not going to be based on speed anymore. All of the fastest current machines will blaze playing Quake 3 or UT2003.
People who buy Macs may enjoy the speed, but that's not why they buy them. They buy them because they're cool, the have a really nice, easy-to-use, elegant OS that allows them to be productive. Also, they can use the commercial applications (Photoshop, Office, Filemaker, etc) they need on a stable, reliable UNIX platform.
Linux/BSD users have a very different set of criteria. They're looking for cheap, super-secure, stable, configurable or some other particular criteria, but are not particularly concerned with the UI experience or with running commercial desktop applications.
Windows users are a different group too. They want to run their commercial and vertical applications. They are not looking at Linux or Mac because their apps are not there.
That's why there's not a lot of crossover right now between Mac and Intel/AMD. The audience is just different. Thanks to things like Lindows, there may be some Windows->Linux crossover, but this too is pretty small.
I do use BBEdit for HTML now and then, but 99% of the time I'm using it to write java, perl, python, or shell script. BBEdit is a multipurpose editor, and different people use it for different things.
The "edit over ftp" feature is what keeps me using it. I know Windows tools like Visual SlickEdit offer these features, but I am so productive with BBEdit that it's hard to consider anything else.
Oh I absolutelty agree. 2% of a market of 20 billion computers is plenty to sustain a company like Apple.
Some people still think there's a fight for the desktop going on. That fight is over for now. The masses chose Windows. Smart people might choose alternatives like Linux or MacOS X, but Windows won the desktop.
Looking at corporate America where I've worked, I can say unequivocally that even if the next release of Windows set your chair on fire every time you booted it, it would probably still remain the corporate standard for years to come.
Microsoft is SO completely entrenched in the dektops of companies that nothing, no matter how great it is, could change it. If for no other reason, Exchange ensures a dependency on Windows. IT support weenies aren't trained to support more than one platform, and Windows is it.
I carry my iBook to work every day so I don't have to do software development on Windows 2000. Whyen people come to my desk and see tools like BBEdit and SQLGrinder, the ooh and ahh. But none of that matters. Windows is the standard, and it's gonna stay that way.
A monopoly on what? Apple has a monopoly of DRM's AAC files sold within iTunes? Come on.
It's not like Apple users can't get their tunes from one of the other music services. It's not like you can't play the DRM'd AAC files in any player that supports Quicktime (you can). It's not like you can't convert an AAC file to an AIFF with Toast or iMovie quickly and easily.
Apple's provided a good deal for people who want to buy music legally. It's onmy a monopoly in a microcosm. If Apple ever really manages a monopoly in music sales, that will signal a huge change in the world of music. Since the majority of the people in America have never listened to music on their computer, I think that's a long way off.
Sure, assuming Apple don't end up with a near monopoly. This kind of thing suffers a classic network effect - can you see people joining 20 or 30 different download services to get their music? No, they'll use the ones that are most convenient
Apple with a monopoly? That'll never happen. If Apple ever has any real success, they'll oust Steve Jobs and put in some Pepsi-peddler to mess things up again...
While the Lindows laptop is meant for consumers, I don't think it will sell very well. Why? Because most people who would buy a linux computer want a distribution made for power.
There are two kinds of people who will buy this notebook. The first are the Wal-Mart consumers that buy the $299 Lindows PCs right now. They are not going to care beyond whether they can "do email" or "do internet", and Lindows is fine for that.
The second are people who know what Linux is, know what a distribution is, and know that they do not want to run Lindows. These people will just download an ISO of Debian or Red Hat or whatever and reinstall right away.
Both groups are likely to be interested in this laptop. I might get one if it were 10.4" instead of 12.1". I already have an iBook.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some people don't want to waste their time and money on burning CDs that they are not going to use. Of course, it's a good idea to make a backup of your songs in a format that is not going to vanish, but that's just me.
Then convert the AAC file to AIFF, then back to MP3. Or use Audio Hijack or WireTap to save them out in any number or formats. No need to burn to CD. The net effect is the same, but you save the cost of a 1 CDR and the 3 minutes it takes to burn.
We're all geeks, so we love benchmarks.
It's too bad that no rigor is applied to 99% of the benchmarks that are applied.
Raw CPU benchmarks like SPEC end up being compiler tests rather than processor tests.
"Real-world" app tests like this one are better, but only if the apps used are representative of apps used by the person reading the benchmark. They are not a realistic measure of holistic system performance.
Adobe Premiere? Come on! Does anyone on the Mac use that at all anymore? Is it even OSX native? Since Final Cut 1.0 came out 2+ years ago, anyone who considered that dog Premiere deserves what they get. Isn't there a better editing package on the PC, or is the Mac just that much better for video editing?
Microsoft products should be excluded from benchmarks on Microsoft's OS. Of COURSE Microsoft optimizes performance of their apps on their OS more than their apps on other OSs. That test is pointless.
The Quake test would be valid, except as many people here have pointed out, it's a 32-bit app, so it's not using any of the 64-bit capabilities of these boxes. When we get a native, 64-bit version and can compare it to two boxes with the same ATI video card, then it will be a valid test.
At the time Apple and NeXt "merged", I thought BeOS was the better choice. It seemed faster on smaller hardware, had some really unique features (BeFS, etc), and seemed more polished.
As it turns out, Apple's move to a real UNIX-based OS was smart and well-timed. BeOS was written in C++ and had fragile base class issues. It was not multi-user. Lots of drivers didn't work right or had not been written yet. It was a nice proof of concept, but it was not complete.
NeXt on the other hand, had what we now call Cocoa, a rich development and deployment framework that makes app development easier than on any other OS. With its UNIX roots, OSX has been able to take advantage of Linux's growing popularity (porting all the popular Linux tools is pretty trivial), and thus all that software is now available to Mac users. And with NeXt's Display PostScript being replaced with the similar Quartz (PDF) rendering engine, the OS has complete OS-wide PDF support, which is brilliant.
For people who download a lot of music, EMusic might have been a good deal before (not so much now). But for those of us who buy less than 10 songs a month, Apple's iTunes Music Store (ITMS) is a much better deal.
The rumors suggest that it will be out on Windows before the end of October. I'll play with it on my Windows box, but I'll still do all my purchasing on my Macs.
The Mac equivalent of the "...profit!" joke is "the new release makes my machine more "Snappy(TM)".
I worked for a dot com during the later part of the boom. It was a pretty decent place to work. Then, we started to run out of money.
They had 4 rounds of layoffs, but I was a key developer (team lead), so while all my direct reports were let go, I remained. Our development group went from 7 down to 3. Those of us who remained were given our "severance" in-advance so that we wouldn't worry about not getting it if the company ran out of cash. Pretty neat idea.
Anyway, on Sept 10, 2001, the rest of my team and I got laid off. We were told that there was one developer position in another group, and were asked if we wanted it. I declined (was sick of the uncertainty, and wanted to find a job before Christmas time), and one of the others did so also, leaving the third to stay.
On Sept 11 we were going in to tidy up the code for mothballing, but with the WTC attacks it took several hours to get to the office, and when we did we were sent home in case other attacks were to follow (we worked in downtown Atlanta).
At the max we had about 120 employees (I was #42), and the day I left there were 14 still employed. That company is out of business now, but they treated us as fairly as possible when we were laid off. Our severance package was 4 weeks of pay, plus our computer. It was a pretty fair deal.
I had a job offer in 2 weeks, and within 6 weeks was working at the new company. It's not fun like the dot.com, but it pays the bills.
The old saying still applies -- there is no security without physical security.
You can stop the aforementioned "password reset" by applying the Open Firmware Password 1.0.2 patch. This patch alters the Open Firmware to require a password to change the boot device.
With that said, someone with physical access to the machine can take the hard drive out, plug it into another mac as a secondary drive, and read all the data off the disk. Nothing short of disk-driver-level encryption can prevent that.
If you want your machines to be secure, you have to apply the patch, lock the physical machine to the desk, and lock the case closed.
There are two easy ways to determine if you're in the US.
1) US credit card. Don't bother if your card was issued to an address outside the US.
2) NetGeo -- can tell you to which ISP and country any IP address is assigned. Easy.
As to disabling it when you leave the US, you're just being pedantic.
I know this is a joke, but there was a reason for the "US Only" requirement.
The iTMS will currently only authorize computers in the US. So if he sold it to someone outside the US, they would not be able to authorize their computer to play it.
Graeme has shown himself to be an asset to the Mac community. He did the OSX port of Quake 3, and did significant work on the port of Return to Castle Wolfenstein for OSX. He also did the Altivec version of Q3 that added about 20% to the framerate on my G4.
I hope the id can get someone else with good Mac experience and dedication to ensure that the Mac ports of their games are as good as they can be.
J2EE is a very complex standard. Of the J2EE containers that I have used (WebLogic, JBoss, and Resin), only Resin actually seems easy to set up and use. WebLogic is very powerful, but the learning curve is steep.
:)
It would be nice to see a complete, certified J2EE implementation that's as straightforward to use as Tomcat.
Maybe I should join the effort. Maybe you should too
Could you couple WebDAV with SSH to achieve the requisite security?
I've used jsp, WebMacro, jsp+struts, and a few other other presentation layers. I really like Velocity because it enforces the separation between the controller and the view (unlike jsp-based templating languages, which often get abused to include business logic by poor programmers who don't know what they should be doing). Since you have to explicitly put something in the velocity context via the controller, the view can only display what has been put in its context.
The other advantage of velocity is its very simple scripting language. It's a lot easier than some of the tag-based templating tools I have seen. For a developer, it's not a big selling point, but if you're working with a designer, it can make a big difference.
I get about 150 spams a day, and about 5 hams. Spambayes might classify 1 spam as "unsure" and the rest as spam. The ham is always classified as ham.
My corpus is about 5000 spams, about 1000 hams. Get spambayes -- it's open source and it really works great.
The "size does matter" argument doesn't always go that way. It's more often pulled out by PC users who think the speed of their PC somehow makes up for their personal shortcomings in the anatomy department.
Of course speed does matter to an extent, but my point was that at some speed, it ceases to make any real-world difference. When G4 was 1/2 the speed of PCs in the market, and not able to keep up with Apple's "Aqua", this argument made some sense. If I am a Photoshop artist, a few extra FLOPS may make the difference in whether my filter is done by the time I get back from a coffee break, but I'm not going to be 50% more productive on a 50% faster machine if both machines are of this caliber.
I can compile my enterprise java application with over 100,000 LOC on my old 600MHz iBook laptop in 43 seconds. My P4/2.4GHz does the same compile in 30 seconds. These new G5s or a new AMD chip will probably cut that down to 15 seconds (the difference between them may be 5 seconds, max). Am I more productive to any significant degree as a result? Nope.
That's why people are not upgrading their PCs as much anymore. The advantages aren't there for most people.
At this point, does it really matter if Intel, AMD, or Apple is the slightly faster computer?
They're all extremely fast and all run one or more UNIX-like Operating Systems (Linux or BSD or OSX). For the Slashdot crowd, Windows is an afterthought, but I'll mention it as well.
What a person decides to buy is not going to be based on speed anymore. All of the fastest current machines will blaze playing Quake 3 or UT2003.
People who buy Macs may enjoy the speed, but that's not why they buy them. They buy them because they're cool, the have a really nice, easy-to-use, elegant OS that allows them to be productive. Also, they can use the commercial applications (Photoshop, Office, Filemaker, etc) they need on a stable, reliable UNIX platform.
Linux/BSD users have a very different set of criteria. They're looking for cheap, super-secure, stable, configurable or some other particular criteria, but are not particularly concerned with the UI experience or with running commercial desktop applications.
Windows users are a different group too. They want to run their commercial and vertical applications. They are not looking at Linux or Mac because their apps are not there.
That's why there's not a lot of crossover right now between Mac and Intel/AMD. The audience is just different. Thanks to things like Lindows, there may be some Windows->Linux crossover, but this too is pretty small.
"Lickable" could be a dangerous slogan for a lead computer...
I do use BBEdit for HTML now and then, but 99% of the time I'm using it to write java, perl, python, or shell script. BBEdit is a multipurpose editor, and different people use it for different things.
The "edit over ftp" feature is what keeps me using it. I know Windows tools like Visual SlickEdit offer these features, but I am so productive with BBEdit that it's hard to consider anything else.
Oh I absolutelty agree. 2% of a market of 20 billion computers is plenty to sustain a company like Apple.
Some people still think there's a fight for the desktop going on. That fight is over for now. The masses chose Windows. Smart people might choose alternatives like Linux or MacOS X, but Windows won the desktop.
Looking at corporate America where I've worked, I can say unequivocally that even if the next release of Windows set your chair on fire every time you booted it, it would probably still remain the corporate standard for years to come.
Microsoft is SO completely entrenched in the dektops of companies that nothing, no matter how great it is, could change it. If for no other reason, Exchange ensures a dependency on Windows. IT support weenies aren't trained to support more than one platform, and Windows is it.
I carry my iBook to work every day so I don't have to do software development on Windows 2000. Whyen people come to my desk and see tools like BBEdit and SQLGrinder, the ooh and ahh. But none of that matters. Windows is the standard, and it's gonna stay that way.
A monopoly on what? Apple has a monopoly of DRM's AAC files sold within iTunes? Come on.
It's not like Apple users can't get their tunes from one of the other music services. It's not like you can't play the DRM'd AAC files in any player that supports Quicktime (you can). It's not like you can't convert an AAC file to an AIFF with Toast or iMovie quickly and easily.
Apple's provided a good deal for people who want to buy music legally. It's onmy a monopoly in a microcosm. If Apple ever really manages a monopoly in music sales, that will signal a huge change in the world of music. Since the majority of the people in America have never listened to music on their computer, I think that's a long way off.
Sure, assuming Apple don't end up with a near monopoly. This kind of thing suffers a classic network effect - can you see people joining 20 or 30 different download services to get their music? No, they'll use the ones that are most convenient
Apple with a monopoly? That'll never happen. If Apple ever has any real success, they'll oust Steve Jobs and put in some Pepsi-peddler to mess things up again...
If you buy the whole CD it's $9.99. If the CD has 18 tracks, you're getting them for $0.55 a song.
While the Lindows laptop is meant for consumers, I don't think it will sell very well. Why? Because most people who would buy a linux computer want a distribution made for power.
There are two kinds of people who will buy this notebook. The first are the Wal-Mart consumers that buy the $299 Lindows PCs right now. They are not going to care beyond whether they can "do email" or "do internet", and Lindows is fine for that.
The second are people who know what Linux is, know what a distribution is, and know that they do not want to run Lindows. These people will just download an ISO of Debian or Red Hat or whatever and reinstall right away.
Both groups are likely to be interested in this laptop. I might get one if it were 10.4" instead of 12.1". I already have an iBook.
Which ship made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs
You know the really sad thing is this was moderated as "Funny", because everyone knows the answer.