Apple's port of Smalltalk-80 actually does still exist and lives on as Squeak. Alan Kay and his team took Apple Smalltalk and essentially modified and rewrote bits of it until it was released in I believe 1995 or so to the public as Squeak. It is available under a relatively open license, and runs under a large range of platforms. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a high-quality, free, open-source Smalltalk implementation.
Actually, I feel very sorry for the new management. According to this interview with the new CEO, the old management literally locked their offices, stole the equipment, and has generally made life for the new people a living hell. Although I suppose it's possible that the entire interview at that site was staged, and honestly do not know the background story behind the whole escapade, it does not appear to me as if this was a SCO-like deceptive tactic by the old managers to try to get out of a bind.
Use CafePress to make the shirts. They have no setup and no minimum number; the shirts are printed as they're ordered, so there's no risk to you. You can check them out at http://www.cafepress.com/ . I'm not associated with them except for being a happy customer.
If you could make the phone vibrate the morse code, then you would be able to receive text messages even in a movie without bothering anyone. That would be great for people such as doctors who have to be available 24/7.
Why would you want to integrate a database into a webbrowser?
That's certainly a question that the EMACS development team would never have asked, and I would certainly hope that Mozilla can be every bit the browser that EMACS is.
Why do we jump to conclusions that there's lying and so forth instead of "She (or others) changed their mind when they saw how good Keynote and Safari are?" Isn't it remotely possible that Microsoft misevaluated the threat, or even that the Mac BU continues to be dedicated to the Mac but really saw no real legitimate reason for IE? I mean, if Omni had discontinued OmniWeb, which they debated momentarily, no one would have cried fowl. I wouldn't assume that Ms. Ho is necessarily lying or deceiving.
Just the overhead from swapping the endianess must be impressive
Actually, the engineers at IBM were a genious when it comes to handling endian issues on the PowerPC. Although the PPC by default is big-endian, the PowerPC 603 and later added the ability to natively work either way. That's a large part of the reason why Virtual PC can operate as fast as it does, and similarly, might make this Bochs-WINE hybrid feasible for non-CPU-intensive apps like Office, etc.
The other thing I'd add is that, at least for the Exodus verse, the Hebrew translated here as "take" actually means more like "put in the place of"--i.e., monetary restitution. I'm too lazy to look up your other two quotes, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing.
Classic Mac OS also had a CLI available that ran on top of their GUI, actually. It came with MPW, or the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, and is still available from the Apple Developer's area. My understanding is that Amiga also had a CLI on top of its GUI.
I agree with your overall point, but not everything you said. If we are speaking purely about innovation, then I think that open-source can be quite innovative. EROS works towards an orthagonally-persistant server operating system. Squeak is doing a tremendous amount of multimedia work and research on how to make programming literally simple enough for kids. HURD actually does a very nice job improving on the whole idea of Unix, if you study how it would be used in an ideal world. ReiserFS 4 could be a true revolution in file-system design by assigning no penalty to having millions of extremely small files. Although all of these projects leverage existing technologies, all of them want to take those technologies to what, at least in my opinion, are clearly innovative directions. Perhaps they are not always revolutions, but they are certainly radical evolution.
The problem is that there is that the open-source community never quite manages to turn any of these ideas into actual, practical products. Most people haven't heard of EROS or Squeak. HURD sits perpetually half-finished on a horrible microkernel that it should have left years ago, and efforts to move it to L4 have stalled. When ReiserFS gets here, it will likely be years, if ever, before Linux actually takes advantage of its filesystem approach and obsoletes a million text files. Open-source frequently even has trouble matching truly innovative ideas that do make it main-stream elsewhere. There is, as far as I know, no real open-source equivalent to the QuickTime multimedia architecture (not talking about the movie format; I'm talking about the API) (Mac System 7), Quartz (OS X) or QuickDraw GX (Sytem 7.5), OpenDoc (OS/2 Warp), V-Twin content searching (Mac OS 8.1), live queries (BeOS), register-based virtual machines (Tao Group; in open-source defense, Parrot is indeed a register-based virtual machine, although still lightyears behind Tao's 1993 design)... I could go on, but you get the point.
There are, I think, two reasons for these shortcomings. First, open-source seems incredibly forcused on replacing existing solutions. If that's going to be your focus, then you don't have room to be innovative; compatibility is all that matters, and compatibility inherently means that your innovation options are limited. You can't throw out X11, Unix permissions and configuration files, and classic GUI programming if you want to replace a Sun box verbaitim. That requires gusto and the confidence to say, "I'm going to do that very differently, but this way is better." So why doesn't the open-source community do that? Because it's hard to get a large number of developers willing to spend time on something so radical when they don't have any marketing. Getting out a new paradigm is hard. People get set in their ways. Selling someone on the idea that applications are an obsolete metaphor, or that instead of using a database package, they should use the filesystem directly, can take years, and because open-source developers work as a hobby, they figure that if no one will use their idea anyway, there's never any incentive to polish off those innovative ideas to the point where they're usable. Hence a chicken-and-egg problem built into the system. The best you can hope for are minor improvements on existing ideas, ad nauseum.
Open-source can be innovative. It's just implementing those ideas that trips things up.
One thing not mentioned at all in the summary of the new parts of FCP 4 is the new Soundtrack component, which in my opinion could justify the upgrade and the price tag of the entire suite all by itself. This lets anyone, regardless of musical experience, write fairly complex scores for their movies. Essentially, you get a vast library of super-high-fidelity loops that you can then combine with surprising ease straight into your FCP project. You can see the demos/tutorials here. Note that QuickTime and a fast connection are required.
The energy that keeps them going is heat. If you could cool down a material to 0 degrees, the atoms would stop moving. The heat that could reenter the system would speed those atoms back up. Heat, as you know from thermodynamics, is always disappating, and the universe will converge to a universal temperature close to absolute zero, at which point all of those atoms will effectively stop.
On that subject, I have a question with the big bang theory. It started out from a single, uniform point, supposedly. Yet, in order to get where we are, there had to be horrendous imbalances. That is, entropy decreased, autonomously, from a uniform system. Could someone who is more up-to-date on that explain to me why that's not a problem?
There's also the fact that the PPC ISA is backwards compatible with the 68K -- all existing apps for Apple would have to be emulated. Can you say "fuck no," children?
The PPC ISA is extremely not compatible with 68k. Apple had to emulate a 68k chip when making the transition, and the very effectiveness of that emulator was demonstrated by the seamlessness with which 68k and PowerPC apps went side-by-side. Heck, even the OS had a heavy mix of PowerPC and 68k applications until the very end of the Classic line. (All modern services are fully PowerPC native as of OS 9, if I recall correctly, but the 68k support routines are still there.) If anything, this provides the argument for how Apple could relatively painless switch to Intel (by using a PowerPC emulator). I agree with you 100% that they won't and would be dumbfounded if Apple didn't simply use the PowerPC 970 for its G5, but a massive chip transition with relative seamlessness has precedent.
Re:The Saddest Day In American History
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Well as I've posted elsewhere I did what I could, I protested, called my representatives and in the jacked up country that is supposed to be the worlds greatest democracy, I (and many others) got ignored.
I hate to point this out, but in a democracy, the biggest group gets its way. The polls indicate that 60% to 70% of Americans support the action (depending on whose poll you're using). If we had decided not do this, then the warhawks would be bitching about how in the "world's greatest democracy, I (and many others) got ignored." Just because it's a democracy doesn't necessarily mean that things turn out the way that you personally want them to, and that is not a failure of the democracy. This time around, more Americans disagree with you than agree with you. The ones who agree with you are noisy, but outnumbered. My honest apologies, but that is how a democracy works, and I refuse to see this as a failing of American democracy. At worst, what we have here is one hell of a misinterpretation of the United States' role in global affairs by its own citizens. Get them to change their minds and the government will have no choice to follow or to truly give up democracy. Until then, American democracy may stand for something a bit weird, but it does stand.
It would be worth remembering that the most recent iMacs had nothing in common with the original except the name and overall form factor. The mouse and keyboard have changed; DVD and CD-RW replaced the CD drive, and was made slot-loading; FireWire appeared; the speakers got overhauled; the dot pitch on the monitor steadily decreased; VGA-out got added. The iMac that Apple just discontinued only remained an iMac because it had a single form factor and was semitransparent blue plastic. For such nostalgia, the eMac ought to do fine. Otherwise, be nostalgic with a bondi-blue iMac; they're surprisingly cheap nowadays and make great email kiosks.
Platinum doesn't count. If you're going to count that as an interface change, let's not forget things like MultiFinder, window zoom, labels, etc. The critical thing with Apple is that, for all of the Classic line, there was steady evolution. Each version of the Mac had an improved interface that built upon the last one, not replacing it. Platinum gave the windows mildly revamped dressing, but otherwise did not really change the operation of the system. You could even ignore MultiFinder when it came out if you wanted to, along with the windowshade button of OS 8, the proxy icon of OS 8.5, etc. The biggest consistency problem of the classic Mac OS, in fact, was the massive control panel reorganization that began with System 7.5 and didn't finish until Mac OS 9.0.
Compare that with OS X. You fire it up and you've got a Dock (new), Apple menu is totally different (new), menu bar doesn't operate close to the same way (new), trash can is not on Dock (new), control panels have disappeared (new), Finder by default opens column view (new)...rather than evolution, Mac OS X completely redefined how every single control worked and operated. I read of no one having trouble moving from System 7.5 or Mac OS 7.6 to Mac OS 8 having problems with Platinum, but many Macphiles had serious issues with OS X, and even though I am extremely comfortable with Unix, even I think that Classic was just plain simpler and more intuitive in many, many ways than OS X. Since Mac OS X 10.0, however, Apple has mostly gone back to evolution rather than revolution, which I think is a good thing. No major new UI changes have arisen out of newer releases of OS X except that Apple randomly makes its apps brushed metal now.
Ignoring the depth of change, though, compare the Mac's steady evolution too Microsoft's jumps and spurts. Ignoring Windows the first four incarnations of Windows, Windows 3.0/3.1 to 95 was the first major UI switch that Windows underwent. Internet Explorer 4 was the second major paradigm shift. XP was actually in many ways closer to the adoption of Platinum than the OS 9 to OS X switch, since just changing the window dressings makes XP look like the steady evolution of Win 2K (with the Start menu and the control panel reorganization being the two big changes), but Longhorn looks like it will be yet another major paradigm shift with the addition of Microsoft's very direct ripoff of NEXTSTEP's Dock and reworking of the control panels. That means that Apple has had a major shift once over 19 years; Microsoft will have had four major paradigm shifts over the last eleven years with the release of Longhorn. That's just ridiculous.
I never understood the Spyglass thing. Here's why: Microsoft, in court, has admitted that their browser is an absolutely integral part of the operating system. Therefore, Internet Explorer costs $250 a copy for the client versions, and something like $800 a copy for server products. Shouldn't Spyglass have made out great with that, or did Microsoft rewrite the rendering engine from scratch at some point?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's port of Smalltalk-80 actually does still exist and lives on as Squeak. Alan Kay and his team took Apple Smalltalk and essentially modified and rewrote bits of it until it was released in I believe 1995 or so to the public as Squeak. It is available under a relatively open license, and runs under a large range of platforms. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a high-quality, free, open-source Smalltalk implementation.
Actually, I feel very sorry for the new management. According to this interview with the new CEO, the old management literally locked their offices, stole the equipment, and has generally made life for the new people a living hell. Although I suppose it's possible that the entire interview at that site was staged, and honestly do not know the background story behind the whole escapade, it does not appear to me as if this was a SCO-like deceptive tactic by the old managers to try to get out of a bind.
Use CafePress to make the shirts. They have no setup and no minimum number; the shirts are printed as they're ordered, so there's no risk to you. You can check them out at http://www.cafepress.com/ . I'm not associated with them except for being a happy customer.
You mean like all of the drones that gathered intelligence during the Iraqi war?
If you could make the phone vibrate the morse code, then you would be able to receive text messages even in a movie without bothering anyone. That would be great for people such as doctors who have to be available 24/7.
Why do we jump to conclusions that there's lying and so forth instead of "She (or others) changed their mind when they saw how good Keynote and Safari are?" Isn't it remotely possible that Microsoft misevaluated the threat, or even that the Mac BU continues to be dedicated to the Mac but really saw no real legitimate reason for IE? I mean, if Omni had discontinued OmniWeb, which they debated momentarily, no one would have cried fowl. I wouldn't assume that Ms. Ho is necessarily lying or deceiving.
No no, your phrasing is off. I believe you meant that you hope that the OpenGroup can go become Unix themselves. And, really, I think SCO should too.
(Calm down, it's meant in gest.
The other thing I'd add is that, at least for the Exodus verse, the Hebrew translated here as "take" actually means more like "put in the place of"--i.e., monetary restitution. I'm too lazy to look up your other two quotes, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing.
Classic Mac OS also had a CLI available that ran on top of their GUI, actually. It came with MPW, or the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, and is still available from the Apple Developer's area. My understanding is that Amiga also had a CLI on top of its GUI.
I agree with your overall point, but not everything you said. If we are speaking purely about innovation, then I think that open-source can be quite innovative. EROS works towards an orthagonally-persistant server operating system. Squeak is doing a tremendous amount of multimedia work and research on how to make programming literally simple enough for kids. HURD actually does a very nice job improving on the whole idea of Unix, if you study how it would be used in an ideal world. ReiserFS 4 could be a true revolution in file-system design by assigning no penalty to having millions of extremely small files. Although all of these projects leverage existing technologies, all of them want to take those technologies to what, at least in my opinion, are clearly innovative directions. Perhaps they are not always revolutions, but they are certainly radical evolution.
The problem is that there is that the open-source community never quite manages to turn any of these ideas into actual, practical products. Most people haven't heard of EROS or Squeak. HURD sits perpetually half-finished on a horrible microkernel that it should have left years ago, and efforts to move it to L4 have stalled. When ReiserFS gets here, it will likely be years, if ever, before Linux actually takes advantage of its filesystem approach and obsoletes a million text files. Open-source frequently even has trouble matching truly innovative ideas that do make it main-stream elsewhere. There is, as far as I know, no real open-source equivalent to the QuickTime multimedia architecture (not talking about the movie format; I'm talking about the API) (Mac System 7), Quartz (OS X) or QuickDraw GX (Sytem 7.5), OpenDoc (OS/2 Warp), V-Twin content searching (Mac OS 8.1), live queries (BeOS), register-based virtual machines (Tao Group; in open-source defense, Parrot is indeed a register-based virtual machine, although still lightyears behind Tao's 1993 design)... I could go on, but you get the point.
There are, I think, two reasons for these shortcomings. First, open-source seems incredibly forcused on replacing existing solutions. If that's going to be your focus, then you don't have room to be innovative; compatibility is all that matters, and compatibility inherently means that your innovation options are limited. You can't throw out X11, Unix permissions and configuration files, and classic GUI programming if you want to replace a Sun box verbaitim. That requires gusto and the confidence to say, "I'm going to do that very differently, but this way is better." So why doesn't the open-source community do that? Because it's hard to get a large number of developers willing to spend time on something so radical when they don't have any marketing. Getting out a new paradigm is hard. People get set in their ways. Selling someone on the idea that applications are an obsolete metaphor, or that instead of using a database package, they should use the filesystem directly, can take years, and because open-source developers work as a hobby, they figure that if no one will use their idea anyway, there's never any incentive to polish off those innovative ideas to the point where they're usable. Hence a chicken-and-egg problem built into the system. The best you can hope for are minor improvements on existing ideas, ad nauseum.
Open-source can be innovative. It's just implementing those ideas that trips things up.
Go to Preferences, click on Tabs, check "Enable Tabbed Browsing."
One thing not mentioned at all in the summary of the new parts of FCP 4 is the new Soundtrack component, which in my opinion could justify the upgrade and the price tag of the entire suite all by itself. This lets anyone, regardless of musical experience, write fairly complex scores for their movies. Essentially, you get a vast library of super-high-fidelity loops that you can then combine with surprising ease straight into your FCP project. You can see the demos/tutorials here. Note that QuickTime and a fast connection are required.
Not only that, but they've got an evil bit to tell you whether the beam should be red or blue/green.
...couldn't we at least hold off April Fool's jokes until--and I admit this is a long shot--April Fool's Day?
The energy that keeps them going is heat. If you could cool down a material to 0 degrees, the atoms would stop moving. The heat that could reenter the system would speed those atoms back up. Heat, as you know from thermodynamics, is always disappating, and the universe will converge to a universal temperature close to absolute zero, at which point all of those atoms will effectively stop.
On that subject, I have a question with the big bang theory. It started out from a single, uniform point, supposedly. Yet, in order to get where we are, there had to be horrendous imbalances. That is, entropy decreased, autonomously, from a uniform system. Could someone who is more up-to-date on that explain to me why that's not a problem?
It would be worth remembering that the most recent iMacs had nothing in common with the original except the name and overall form factor. The mouse and keyboard have changed; DVD and CD-RW replaced the CD drive, and was made slot-loading; FireWire appeared; the speakers got overhauled; the dot pitch on the monitor steadily decreased; VGA-out got added. The iMac that Apple just discontinued only remained an iMac because it had a single form factor and was semitransparent blue plastic. For such nostalgia, the eMac ought to do fine. Otherwise, be nostalgic with a bondi-blue iMac; they're surprisingly cheap nowadays and make great email kiosks.
Platinum doesn't count. If you're going to count that as an interface change, let's not forget things like MultiFinder, window zoom, labels, etc. The critical thing with Apple is that, for all of the Classic line, there was steady evolution. Each version of the Mac had an improved interface that built upon the last one, not replacing it. Platinum gave the windows mildly revamped dressing, but otherwise did not really change the operation of the system. You could even ignore MultiFinder when it came out if you wanted to, along with the windowshade button of OS 8, the proxy icon of OS 8.5, etc. The biggest consistency problem of the classic Mac OS, in fact, was the massive control panel reorganization that began with System 7.5 and didn't finish until Mac OS 9.0.
Compare that with OS X. You fire it up and you've got a Dock (new), Apple menu is totally different (new), menu bar doesn't operate close to the same way (new), trash can is not on Dock (new), control panels have disappeared (new), Finder by default opens column view (new)...rather than evolution, Mac OS X completely redefined how every single control worked and operated. I read of no one having trouble moving from System 7.5 or Mac OS 7.6 to Mac OS 8 having problems with Platinum, but many Macphiles had serious issues with OS X, and even though I am extremely comfortable with Unix, even I think that Classic was just plain simpler and more intuitive in many, many ways than OS X. Since Mac OS X 10.0, however, Apple has mostly gone back to evolution rather than revolution, which I think is a good thing. No major new UI changes have arisen out of newer releases of OS X except that Apple randomly makes its apps brushed metal now.
Ignoring the depth of change, though, compare the Mac's steady evolution too Microsoft's jumps and spurts. Ignoring Windows the first four incarnations of Windows, Windows 3.0/3.1 to 95 was the first major UI switch that Windows underwent. Internet Explorer 4 was the second major paradigm shift. XP was actually in many ways closer to the adoption of Platinum than the OS 9 to OS X switch, since just changing the window dressings makes XP look like the steady evolution of Win 2K (with the Start menu and the control panel reorganization being the two big changes), but Longhorn looks like it will be yet another major paradigm shift with the addition of Microsoft's very direct ripoff of NEXTSTEP's Dock and reworking of the control panels. That means that Apple has had a major shift once over 19 years; Microsoft will have had four major paradigm shifts over the last eleven years with the release of Longhorn. That's just ridiculous.
I never understood the Spyglass thing. Here's why: Microsoft, in court, has admitted that their browser is an absolutely integral part of the operating system. Therefore, Internet Explorer costs $250 a copy for the client versions, and something like $800 a copy for server products. Shouldn't Spyglass have made out great with that, or did Microsoft rewrite the rendering engine from scratch at some point?