Look, people buy devices based on what they can do. Trolls point out what devices can't do in an attempt to act all high and mighty that they found some "flaw". No device, or OS or anything is perfect. But people find what works for them, and they use said things to get stuff done. Does it really bother you that someone else has a device that can't (currently) print?
Sometimes the why questions are relevant to figure out someones use case. Not everyone has a need to print, not everyone has a need to have one app instead of two for e-mail and calendaring, and so on. But in your world, asking why means your a fanboi (wtf? since when is i a replacement for y), so I figured it's only fair to automatically label people as trolls for pointing out flaws.
Funny that you bring this up, considering Microsoft is scrambling to add command line solutions to their products with Powershell and even ship a server version of Windows that is all command line based.
Ultimately the more tools an admin has at their disposal, the better.
Thats assuming you have the user run softwareupdate. One different possibility here would be to set a cron job or similar process up running as an admin user. Or use the remote SSH ability. Though I'm not certain how this info would be relayed to the user if a reboot was needed. Much like other Unix tools, softwareupdate would be just one piece of the puzzle, joined with other utilities I'm sure you could get something workable, since it seems ARD isn't working for your offline clients properly.
"man softwareupdate" for info on one way to auto install updates.
And OS X out of the box has ran software update at first boot since 10.0. Yes, a user has to click install now, and they may just ignore it. But it will come back and prompt again later.
"because Steve Jobs prohibits open source apps from being offered via the app store."
Odd. Why am I able to download the source code for Doom iPhone version then?
Besides, the point of that part of Steve's letter was because Adobe keeps throwing the open word around, Apple isn't. "Open screen" this, and "open flash" that. Wheres the "open" flash player, and other bits needed to allow someone to play back Flash 10.1 content without any Adobe involvement?
*sigh*. Can we please kill the myth that Apple makes tons of money off the App Store? I know it's hard to keep up with accurate info when Apple releases financials 4 times a year that show that the iTunes Store is purely a break even operation.
Apple makes their money ($$$$$) off the hardware. It would actually save Apple money if they allowed Flash, and didn't have to pay for the bandwidth and server hosting costs from delivering apps (including all those free ones) to people.
Apple is heavily pushing HTML5, and even allows it to be used for apps on the iPhone. Google Voice is a perfect example here. Apple hasn't put it on the app store, but that didn't stop Google from releasing it, oh, and it works on the Palm Pre too. Cross phone development. All using open standards that Apple can optimize for, instead of an Adobe proprietary environment.
I think in general, Apple is probably doing more in house engineering now then they did long ago. Back during the PowerPC days, they designed chipsets, cases, and motherboard layouts and thats about it. Now, they make new processes for batteries, case manufacturing, CPU packaging (A4), low level firmware on cellular devices, and so on.
OS wise, OS X started as NeXTStep, and it took a lot of work to add the Mac part into it. The continue to develop new things there that apply to their entire product line. Grand Central Dispatch is a good example here, built into OS X with 10.6, open sourced for anyone to use, and now being baked into iPhone OS 4. OpenCL is another big one recently. Apple doesn't take things from the community and close source them, they participate in many open source projects, and make a number of new ones. Basically anything below the UI layer tends to be open and remains that way. Some of Apple's work even become fully certified standards, mDNS, and the container for MPEG 4 are recent ones.
They are still pretty unique in the industry, in many ways.
Underpowered? Yep, and thats the point. Underpowered enough to have great battery life and be useable all day, while still being powerful enough to do what people need. Requiring some general purpose power hungry x86 chip to run Flash well is a bad idea for a cell phone or small tablet. Instead, they use low power ARM chips and hardware decoders.
I guess that also means the Nexus One, and every other Android phone is underpowered. Along with every Blackberry, Palm, and other mobile device. Can't wait for all the people who are getting Flash soon to start whining about their phones not lasting long enough to use as a phone after some basic web browsing on flash ad heavy sites.
And I still find it funny that the whole "open" Android crowd is cheering that they get a closed plugin.
Sorry, but Apple's financials tell a different story. Call it having blinders on if you want, but Apple isn't blocking Flash to protect the App Store revenue. The 30% cut allows them to cover costs, including the costs of hosting all those free applications. Every time someone has asked how much money Apple is making on the iTunes store, the response is always "enough to break even", going all the way back to when it was music only. Apple makes their money selling hardware, and to a much smaller extent, software/accessories like Final Cut Pro and Airport base stations.
Want more proof the App Store is not a major source of income? Consider the fact that for the first year the iPhone existed, it did so without one, and Apple was pushing HTML apps.
As far as Flash apps commoditizing the platform, thats much more believable. That, along with Apple then having to rely on Adobe to update their platform to move the phone/iPad forward is why Flash apps won't be allowed. As far as the Flash plugin, Adobe had 5 years of owning Flash after acquiring Macromedia to make it work on OS X to Job's satisfaction. They didn't. What makes you think Adobe deserves even more time? Had it been made to work better on OS X, it would have moved over to the iPhone easily. Instead, Flash performs poorly, and is responsible for over half of all application crashes Apple receives via the OS X Crash Reporter. It was so bad, Apple had to invest engineering resources in isolating plugins in the browser the same way Google has, and what Mozilla is also working on. Thats money and time that could have been spent on something else.
Apple doesn't make much money off that 30% cut. The iTunes store brings in just enough money to cover their expenses on it, as reported every quarter in their results. They make their real profit off the hardware they sell. So I doubt Apple is blocking Flash just to keep that 30% coming in. Flash apps (if they were really all that important) would be helping to sell more hardware for Apple, without the overhead of hosting peoples apps.
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe. Only now is performance suddenly important to them, over half a decade after buying Macromedia. Only now is it critical for Adobe to try and bring real Flash to the mobile space (and not the crippled/useless Flash Lite), even though smartphones have been around a while. And Adobe is the only company that can make Flash better, since it's not an open internet specification.
Javascript/HTML rendering on the other hand was something Apple could improve without having to wait on some other company. So Apple was able to launch their iPhone product years ago with a great browser, and bring in more hardware revenue. Had they also wanted to include Flash and held back the device till it was ready, the iPhone still wouldn't have shipped. Why? Because Adobe still hasn't made a mobile release (not beta/alpha/whatever) version of Flash for any mobile device/platform. The only way real, true proper, non lite flash works on phones now is with browsers dependent on a server somewhere doing the heavy lifting.
This may just be "absurd mental gymnastics" to you, but I've at least backed part of my comment here with actual information on what Apple does with their 30% (IE, not make money with it, just using it to cover expenses), instead of speculating it's some big important thing for Apple's bottom line.
As a fellow build engineer, I always find it interesting to hear about the processes at Microsoft. One of the books I read prior to taking my first build position was "The Build Master: Microsoft's Software Configuration Management Best Practices" by Vincent Maraia. It was interesting to read about the type of processes that come out of a build that does take 14 hours and has hundreds of people working on the codebase.
One of the concepts I liked quite a bit was "The Gauntlet". I can't remember if this was used on Windows, of if it was specific to the Visual Studio team, but it was pretty slick in detecting what change actually broke the build. Though I heard the system would get backed up from time to time causing lots of delays.
With the amount of large code bases Microsoft, or other companies maintain, it still surprises me how primitive most build systems are. Only recently have companies started to release build specific products, most only suitable for small codebases, or built for java/web development environments. I guess the problem is that large products are pretty unique in their build requirements. I work in the games industry, and most of our code build times are measured in minutes these days when the proper hardware is thrown at the problem along with distcc/incredibuild. The time consuming processes tend to be more related to game content now, things like lighting levels, or generating AI pathing information.
Refurb/clearance Minis go for $499 or less all the time direct from Apple, or 3rd party resellers. Also, the next revision due any day is rumored to drop back down to $499, if the Google ads run in the EU can be trusted.
However, it seems to me that Microsoft actually tried to do the right thing with Vista... namely they built a reasonably secure operating system from the ground up and decided to actually enforce the programming paradigms. The problem isn't with Vista, it's with the antiquated applications that still need tons of shims to work.
Nope. And thats part of the problem. Vista started life as the Server 2003 SP1 code after the restart on Longhorn. UAC and such was just bolted on,.Net was kicked to the curb inside the OS, and the OS was rushed out the door from code restart to ship in 18 months. This quick cycle left driver vendors hanging, leading to compatibility issues day one. It also lead to some horrendous bugs, like Direct X apps using up twice as much memory as they should and so on.
A proper new secure OS from Microsoft would have to pull the same trick Apple did. Throw the old OS in a box, allow it to run in the new OS, and kick all old APIs to the curb. A good start would be the Singularity OS Microsoft has in it's research labs.
Why only desktops? Unix servers have sat on the internet open to the world since well before Windows even had a TCP/IP stack built in. And there are still plenty of them out there sitting on very fat pipes just ripe for bot nets. So why is it that Windows has had far more security hardships then any Unix based OS?
It's not just market share that plays a factor. There have been plenty of exploits for IIS, MSSQL and Windows Server even though those products don't command a 50% market share.
What it's not synthetic for is tying into the Windows version of XBox Live, as all the crap to do that doesn't come with XP.
Nope. When you install Shadowrun on Vista, it installs a "Games for Windows Live" re distributable. The 360 - PC integration was all done at that level or inside the game and had nothing to do with Vista. Want proof? Grab a Shadowrun PC disc, run the GFW Redist off of it on XP, and watch as it installs fine.
The only thing Vista about Shadowrun was the installer, and one not even required function call in a DLL. Getting the game to run on XP with full legitimate Live and 360 crossplay is easy, and for me proved to even run better.
Because they were punishing a lot of companies to get to the success levels they are at. Gateway payed the highest prices in the industry for Windows and Office in the late nineties simply because they presented Netscape Navigator as an equal choice to Internet Explorer to their customers. IBM was pushed out of the consumer OS space by Microsoft due to them signing agreements with nearly all PC makers that stated that if they wanted to sell Windows, they had to buy a license of it for every PC sold, no matter what OS the customer actually asked for. These are only two of the many things MS has done to throw their weight around, and in the end, it has hurt every computer user in the world for having less innovative and secure products. Microsoft has had to be forced to compete properly and innovate once they obtained dominance in the 90s. The only areas they really show any innovation anymore is in the markets they have little to no presence in, and can't throw their weight around in.
If Microsoft showed some sort of incentive to innovate in the spaces they dominate, then sure, I'd back off a bit. But look at how IE stagnated for years because it was the dominate browser. It got there by illegal means, and only once it faced competition in the form of Firefox did MS go and decide to improve it again.
( a powerful firmware level intended for DRM schemes sitting between OS/software and hardware, that has it's own partition on the drive, can access the internet and download, do just about anything without a OS, without your knowledge for most people)
First off, EFI is a replacement for an ancient BIOS that most x86/x64 machines still slug along with. Since Apple could start with a clean slate, why not adopt the modern firmware for a mainboard over something filled with 20 years of legacy Apple didn't need? You can spin EFI in a bad light all you want, but really it's more of a new replacement for something old, just as PCI replaced ISA.
Also, the Macs currently shipping lack the TPM chip needed to implement Trusted Computing. Apple did initially ship them, but didn't do anything with them. Vista can use the TPM chip though for bitlocker encryption.
You can spin whatever spook story you want, but try to at least do it with real facts and not just sensational Slashdot headlines.
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines[3] Unified shader architecture (each pipeline is capable of running either pixel or vertex shaders) 2 shader ALU operations per pipeline per cycle (1 vector4 and 1 scalar, co-issued) 10 FLOPS per pipeline per cycle 48 billion shader operations per second theoretical maximum (2 ALU x 48 shader pipelines x 500 MHz)[3] 240 GFLOPS (10 FLOPS x 48 shader pipelines x 500 MHz)[4] MEMEXPORT shader function
Sure, ATI had no response to NVidia in the gaming computer graphics market, but that isn't the only market that these companies operate in. ATI's lead over NVidia with the Radeon 9700 didn't kill NVidia, and this current situation with the 8800 having such a huge lead won't kill ATI.
From what I know, ATI was much busier then NVidia was with the "next gen" consoles. The GPU inside the XBox 360 is quite sophisticated, and the Wii doesn't just have a faster variant of the GameCube GPU. ATI spent real research time on these products, and this is when ATI came up with their solution for unified shader units on the GPU. So here we are in May of 2007, and ATI has shipped way more unified shader products then NVidia, simply because their product was inside a console that has sold millions. The 8800 series likely hasn't hit a million. Where as NVidia went with a GPU design mirrored off their 7x00 series of products for the Playstation 3, while trying to work out their own unified shader cards.
I think ATI made the better move here. They have been recouping the research money on unified shader GPUs from a much bigger market segment, though it does make it appear they are lagging behind in the PC gaming sector.
The good news for gamers is neither company is likely to go away anytime soon, because they both are in many different markets. This is a lesson 3dfx didn't learn, and many other now dead or almost dead graphics providers.
2) The underlying components that handle poorly written apps that expect normal users to modify data in %programfiles%\vendorname or HKLM\Software\VendorName. This is an excellent design and might be unique (I'm not sure if it's patent-worthy, however). Copying that data and masking its presence under the user's profile is smart. It's an overdue band-aid for all of those "developers" (laughingly) who don't have a clue (because they run all their apps as admin).
It's a shame it doesn't really work though. Good example, I installed an online game on Vista recently. UAC as expected popped up during the install, due to the game installing an updater/login program to Program Files, even though I installed the game to D:\Games. I then ran the shortcut the game made, and it's launcher popped up, downloaded an update to the launcher and then ran. Problem is when it ran, it was out of date and failed. I closed it, reopened it, and no download this time, but same old version. I found the problem was that Windows remapped the upgrade process into that C:\Users folder (don't have the exact path handy, not in Vista currently) so it dumped the upgraded launcher files there, but then wasn't properly redirected to that folder to execute the new launcher. It instead ran the old launcher in Program Files.
The solution was either run the launcher as an admin, or disable UAC. The proper way to do this to me would be pop up a UAC alert or something to let me know the program just tried to patch Program Files instead of silently redirecting it and breaking it.
For a more permanent solution, Microsoft just needs to throw away all the backwards compatibility they have and start from a clean base. Throw together a backwards compatibility sandbox that shows a dividing line in the sand for users, but still allows people to use their old programs. They will eventually migrate to newer ones, and years down the road the backwards compatibility mode can be thrown out. Then everyone will be in a happy secure MS land where the system isn't trying to be so backwards compatible it has to annoy people with a broken security attempt.
In other words, Microsoft should copy a play out of Apples book, ala the OS 9 to OS X transition, specifically "Classic". Throw enough of a new Win32 API in the newer Windows environment that allows an older program to run in the new area with a recompile, and some tweaks for the new systems.
You know, the "Forcing blu-ray on us" comments are getting to be just as bad as the people pissed off at Microsoft, and saying M$ to show it. Blu-ray is simply a new disc format that offers more storage then DVD. No one threw a fit when the Playstation shipped with a CD-Rom, and could also play music cds. Same for the Playstation 2 when it shipped with a DVD-Rom. But now that Sony is evil, well, this newer larger storage tech is being "forced".
Try applying the same thing to Nintendo as well. Every console they have shipped over the previous generation includes more storage for games. Microsoft is the only one to break this trend, by shipping the same size game storage for the XBox and XBox 360, and somehow they get praise for it.
If your going to bitch about something, at least bitch about something legitimate. Yes, the price of the PS3 sucks when compared to other consoles, both current and past. Yes, the lack of rumble sucks. Yes, the lack of online service like XBox Live sucks. But Blu-Ray isn't being forced on anyone, unless your reading MS's competition bashing book.
My iPod can't be a USB mass storage device. It's plugged into the Firewire port. Now you know what complicates it, so let's focus on what to do about it.
No, but it could be an SBP-2 device.
Ok, quick iPod lesson. The first iPods out the door were firewire only, and act as an SBP-2 device. You plugged them in, iTunes would see the iPod hard drive and load music onto it. If you enabled disk use via iTunes, the Finder would stop hiding the drive when it was connected, and not automatically disconnect the device when a sync was complete. Then the iPod also shipped as a Windows version. What was the difference? The hard drive was formatted FAT32 instead of HFS, so Windows computers could see it. Same trick, iTunes would see the device when connected, sync, then disconnect unless disk use was enabled.
Then one day Apple shipped devices that had a "dock" port on them instead of a standard 6 pin firewire connector. This new dock port supported both USB2 and Firewire, and the firewire continued to be a standard SBP-2 device. The USB, well it turns out it is a standard USB Mass Storage device. And iTunes kept doing the same thing, it would see an iPod, sync, then disconnect when it was done unless disk use was enabled.
Now, iPods ship with USB2 support only. They know when they are connected via firewire and alert you on the iPod screen that the device is only going to charge via firewire and not sync. So all current iPods are USB mass storage only.
As other people have explained, the iPod reads music out of a hidden folder, where all songs are stored with the 4 character names and info is in a database allowing for quicker access. iPods, and all MP3 players have slow processors when compared to PCs, so having a single database to access ends up being a lot quicker then parsing out every file. True, the iPod could theoretically build it's own database, but the process would be slow. The old empeg-car does this, and when it came out the 200mhz ARM processor didn't seem too bad to build a database for 6 or so gigs of music. But now with people sticking 2 160gb drives in, the database updates can be painfully slow. The Rio Karma allowed either the device to rebuild the database, or the computer to do it, but never supported USB mass storage. In a perfect world, a device would always use a database, generated either on a PC for those that don't worry about software loading their music, or on the device for people that do, and everyone would be happy.
For me, I just want a device that lets me build my own hierarchical playlists, and doesn't have a crappy UI. MP3 playback is the only codec I need, since that is still the codec to choose if you want to play music on any device. If I had the hard drive space, I'd rip my collection to FLAC, and use a Samba VFS plugin to encode into format X on the fly.
"I personally have never had the issues I hear people bash Windows over. I am a pretty experienced user and am very attentive to updated virus protection, firewalls and such. I can honestly say that I can count on one hand (and not use every finger) the number of "blue screens of death" I have had on my own pc's.
I do have relatives and friends that have had those kinds of issues, but usually it comes down to them doing something stupid like deleting the folder with the operating system files in it, deleting a key system file, opening attachments on emails they shouldn't have (with no virus protection/detection), etc."
On the OS X side, you really don't need to worry about a virus scanner, or antispyware system, and well, it does have a firewall, but I've never bothered with it. Thats one reason I switched. If it is because OS X is more secure, or it's such a small target, I don't care either way. It's less I have to maintain, and that leaves more time to do other things. I've also switched some of the people who rely upon me for computer support, and it has saved tons of time there too.
"I guess I am saying there is a certain class of user that is well suited to Windows, and I am in that group. I do a lot of business work (spreadsheets, etc.) that are pretty mathematically intensive, and even the famous Mac commercials give Windows its props in that arena."
Not really. Unless you are tied to very specific Windows apps, odds are an OS X running machine would work for you just as well. Spreadsheets work fine in Excel for the Mac, and in fact Excel 1.0 was released in 1985 on a Mac. 1987 was the first year Excel came out for a PC. True, the Mac commercials paint the PC as a business machine and the Mac as a fun machine, but thats just a tactic to try and show people don't have to run the same OS at the office as they do at home. I ran my Mac as a work machine in a heavy Windows environment for 2 years with no issues. Only reason I didn't continue is because I moved onto a new job, where unfortunately Visual Studio and DirectX is a requirement. I'll look to get back on a Mac in the office once Parallels or VMWare gets Direct3D working.
Don't restrict yourself to just one solution. I've been keeping up with Linux, and back in the day was a big OS/2 fan. I don't have any particular loyalty to a platform, so I'll switch if needed. Macs have my attention for now, and they only showed up as a possibility once OS X shipped.
"...not to mention that every mechanic in the country would have to learn how to work on a fundamentally different type of power plant."
I don't see this as any different then the change from carburetors to fuel injection, manual to automatic transmissions, or many of the other changes cars have seen over the years.
And oddly to do the reverse example, how is this different then IT workers having to learn new operating systems? Jobs change over time, mechanics are in the same boat here.
Slashdot Mirror
The standard troll, kind of sad.
Look, people buy devices based on what they can do. Trolls point out what devices can't do in an attempt to act all high and mighty that they found some "flaw". No device, or OS or anything is perfect. But people find what works for them, and they use said things to get stuff done. Does it really bother you that someone else has a device that can't (currently) print?
Sometimes the why questions are relevant to figure out someones use case. Not everyone has a need to print, not everyone has a need to have one app instead of two for e-mail and calendaring, and so on. But in your world, asking why means your a fanboi (wtf? since when is i a replacement for y), so I figured it's only fair to automatically label people as trolls for pointing out flaws.
Funny that you bring this up, considering Microsoft is scrambling to add command line solutions to their products with Powershell and even ship a server version of Windows that is all command line based.
Ultimately the more tools an admin has at their disposal, the better.
Thats assuming you have the user run softwareupdate. One different possibility here would be to set a cron job or similar process up running as an admin user. Or use the remote SSH ability. Though I'm not certain how this info would be relayed to the user if a reboot was needed. Much like other Unix tools, softwareupdate would be just one piece of the puzzle, joined with other utilities I'm sure you could get something workable, since it seems ARD isn't working for your offline clients properly.
"man softwareupdate" for info on one way to auto install updates.
And OS X out of the box has ran software update at first boot since 10.0. Yes, a user has to click install now, and they may just ignore it. But it will come back and prompt again later.
"because Steve Jobs prohibits open source apps from being offered via the app store."
Odd. Why am I able to download the source code for Doom iPhone version then?
Besides, the point of that part of Steve's letter was because Adobe keeps throwing the open word around, Apple isn't. "Open screen" this, and "open flash" that. Wheres the "open" flash player, and other bits needed to allow someone to play back Flash 10.1 content without any Adobe involvement?
*sigh*. Can we please kill the myth that Apple makes tons of money off the App Store? I know it's hard to keep up with accurate info when Apple releases financials 4 times a year that show that the iTunes Store is purely a break even operation.
Apple makes their money ($$$$$) off the hardware. It would actually save Apple money if they allowed Flash, and didn't have to pay for the bandwidth and server hosting costs from delivering apps (including all those free ones) to people.
Apple is heavily pushing HTML5, and even allows it to be used for apps on the iPhone. Google Voice is a perfect example here. Apple hasn't put it on the app store, but that didn't stop Google from releasing it, oh, and it works on the Palm Pre too. Cross phone development. All using open standards that Apple can optimize for, instead of an Adobe proprietary environment.
I think in general, Apple is probably doing more in house engineering now then they did long ago. Back during the PowerPC days, they designed chipsets, cases, and motherboard layouts and thats about it. Now, they make new processes for batteries, case manufacturing, CPU packaging (A4), low level firmware on cellular devices, and so on.
OS wise, OS X started as NeXTStep, and it took a lot of work to add the Mac part into it. The continue to develop new things there that apply to their entire product line. Grand Central Dispatch is a good example here, built into OS X with 10.6, open sourced for anyone to use, and now being baked into iPhone OS 4. OpenCL is another big one recently. Apple doesn't take things from the community and close source them, they participate in many open source projects, and make a number of new ones. Basically anything below the UI layer tends to be open and remains that way. Some of Apple's work even become fully certified standards, mDNS, and the container for MPEG 4 are recent ones.
They are still pretty unique in the industry, in many ways.
Underpowered? Yep, and thats the point. Underpowered enough to have great battery life and be useable all day, while still being powerful enough to do what people need. Requiring some general purpose power hungry x86 chip to run Flash well is a bad idea for a cell phone or small tablet. Instead, they use low power ARM chips and hardware decoders.
I guess that also means the Nexus One, and every other Android phone is underpowered. Along with every Blackberry, Palm, and other mobile device. Can't wait for all the people who are getting Flash soon to start whining about their phones not lasting long enough to use as a phone after some basic web browsing on flash ad heavy sites.
And I still find it funny that the whole "open" Android crowd is cheering that they get a closed plugin.
Sorry, but Apple's financials tell a different story. Call it having blinders on if you want, but Apple isn't blocking Flash to protect the App Store revenue. The 30% cut allows them to cover costs, including the costs of hosting all those free applications. Every time someone has asked how much money Apple is making on the iTunes store, the response is always "enough to break even", going all the way back to when it was music only. Apple makes their money selling hardware, and to a much smaller extent, software/accessories like Final Cut Pro and Airport base stations.
Want more proof the App Store is not a major source of income? Consider the fact that for the first year the iPhone existed, it did so without one, and Apple was pushing HTML apps.
As far as Flash apps commoditizing the platform, thats much more believable. That, along with Apple then having to rely on Adobe to update their platform to move the phone/iPad forward is why Flash apps won't be allowed. As far as the Flash plugin, Adobe had 5 years of owning Flash after acquiring Macromedia to make it work on OS X to Job's satisfaction. They didn't. What makes you think Adobe deserves even more time? Had it been made to work better on OS X, it would have moved over to the iPhone easily. Instead, Flash performs poorly, and is responsible for over half of all application crashes Apple receives via the OS X Crash Reporter. It was so bad, Apple had to invest engineering resources in isolating plugins in the browser the same way Google has, and what Mozilla is also working on. Thats money and time that could have been spent on something else.
Apple doesn't make much money off that 30% cut. The iTunes store brings in just enough money to cover their expenses on it, as reported every quarter in their results. They make their real profit off the hardware they sell. So I doubt Apple is blocking Flash just to keep that 30% coming in. Flash apps (if they were really all that important) would be helping to sell more hardware for Apple, without the overhead of hosting peoples apps.
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe. Only now is performance suddenly important to them, over half a decade after buying Macromedia. Only now is it critical for Adobe to try and bring real Flash to the mobile space (and not the crippled/useless Flash Lite), even though smartphones have been around a while. And Adobe is the only company that can make Flash better, since it's not an open internet specification.
Javascript/HTML rendering on the other hand was something Apple could improve without having to wait on some other company. So Apple was able to launch their iPhone product years ago with a great browser, and bring in more hardware revenue. Had they also wanted to include Flash and held back the device till it was ready, the iPhone still wouldn't have shipped. Why? Because Adobe still hasn't made a mobile release (not beta/alpha/whatever) version of Flash for any mobile device/platform. The only way real, true proper, non lite flash works on phones now is with browsers dependent on a server somewhere doing the heavy lifting.
This may just be "absurd mental gymnastics" to you, but I've at least backed part of my comment here with actual information on what Apple does with their 30% (IE, not make money with it, just using it to cover expenses), instead of speculating it's some big important thing for Apple's bottom line.
As a fellow build engineer, I always find it interesting to hear about the processes at Microsoft. One of the books I read prior to taking my first build position was "The Build Master: Microsoft's Software Configuration Management Best Practices" by Vincent Maraia. It was interesting to read about the type of processes that come out of a build that does take 14 hours and has hundreds of people working on the codebase.
One of the concepts I liked quite a bit was "The Gauntlet". I can't remember if this was used on Windows, of if it was specific to the Visual Studio team, but it was pretty slick in detecting what change actually broke the build. Though I heard the system would get backed up from time to time causing lots of delays.
With the amount of large code bases Microsoft, or other companies maintain, it still surprises me how primitive most build systems are. Only recently have companies started to release build specific products, most only suitable for small codebases, or built for java/web development environments. I guess the problem is that large products are pretty unique in their build requirements. I work in the games industry, and most of our code build times are measured in minutes these days when the proper hardware is thrown at the problem along with distcc/incredibuild. The time consuming processes tend to be more related to game content now, things like lighting levels, or generating AI pathing information.
Refurb/clearance Minis go for $499 or less all the time direct from Apple, or 3rd party resellers. Also, the next revision due any day is rumored to drop back down to $499, if the Google ads run in the EU can be trusted.
However, it seems to me that Microsoft actually tried to do the right thing with Vista... namely they built a reasonably secure operating system from the ground up and decided to actually enforce the programming paradigms. The problem isn't with Vista, it's with the antiquated applications that still need tons of shims to work.
Nope. And thats part of the problem. Vista started life as the Server 2003 SP1 code after the restart on Longhorn. UAC and such was just bolted on, .Net was kicked to the curb inside the OS, and the OS was rushed out the door from code restart to ship in 18 months. This quick cycle left driver vendors hanging, leading to compatibility issues day one. It also lead to some horrendous bugs, like Direct X apps using up twice as much memory as they should and so on.
A proper new secure OS from Microsoft would have to pull the same trick Apple did. Throw the old OS in a box, allow it to run in the new OS, and kick all old APIs to the curb. A good start would be the Singularity OS Microsoft has in it's research labs.
Apache is built on, but turned off by default on OS X. A user has to turn on "Web Sharing" for apache to start.
OS X does default the firewall off, Apple may want to reconsider this at some point, just as a general precaution.
Why only desktops? Unix servers have sat on the internet open to the world since well before Windows even had a TCP/IP stack built in. And there are still plenty of them out there sitting on very fat pipes just ripe for bot nets. So why is it that Windows has had far more security hardships then any Unix based OS?
It's not just market share that plays a factor. There have been plenty of exploits for IIS, MSSQL and Windows Server even though those products don't command a 50% market share.
What it's not synthetic for is tying into the Windows version of XBox Live, as all the crap to do that doesn't come with XP.
Nope. When you install Shadowrun on Vista, it installs a "Games for Windows Live" re distributable. The 360 - PC integration was all done at that level or inside the game and had nothing to do with Vista. Want proof? Grab a Shadowrun PC disc, run the GFW Redist off of it on XP, and watch as it installs fine.
The only thing Vista about Shadowrun was the installer, and one not even required function call in a DLL. Getting the game to run on XP with full legitimate Live and 360 crossplay is easy, and for me proved to even run better.
Why do you want to punish them for succeeding?
Because they were punishing a lot of companies to get to the success levels they are at. Gateway payed the highest prices in the industry for Windows and Office in the late nineties simply because they presented Netscape Navigator as an equal choice to Internet Explorer to their customers. IBM was pushed out of the consumer OS space by Microsoft due to them signing agreements with nearly all PC makers that stated that if they wanted to sell Windows, they had to buy a license of it for every PC sold, no matter what OS the customer actually asked for. These are only two of the many things MS has done to throw their weight around, and in the end, it has hurt every computer user in the world for having less innovative and secure products. Microsoft has had to be forced to compete properly and innovate once they obtained dominance in the 90s. The only areas they really show any innovation anymore is in the markets they have little to no presence in, and can't throw their weight around in.
If Microsoft showed some sort of incentive to innovate in the spaces they dominate, then sure, I'd back off a bit. But look at how IE stagnated for years because it was the dominate browser. It got there by illegal means, and only once it faced competition in the form of Firefox did MS go and decide to improve it again.
1: Adopt EFI, Trusted Computing for new Mac's.
( a powerful firmware level intended for DRM schemes sitting between OS/software and hardware, that has it's own partition on the drive, can access the internet and download, do just about anything without a OS, without your knowledge for most people)
First off, EFI is a replacement for an ancient BIOS that most x86/x64 machines still slug along with. Since Apple could start with a clean slate, why not adopt the modern firmware for a mainboard over something filled with 20 years of legacy Apple didn't need? You can spin EFI in a bad light all you want, but really it's more of a new replacement for something old, just as PCI replaced ISA.
Also, the Macs currently shipping lack the TPM chip needed to implement Trusted Computing. Apple did initially ship them, but didn't do anything with them. Vista can use the TPM chip though for bitlocker encryption.
You can spin whatever spook story you want, but try to at least do it with real facts and not just sensational Slashdot headlines.
The Xenos chip does have unified shaders, even though it is not a Direct X 10 part. Wii, well, rumor has it that Xenos development helped it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos
Specifically:
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines[3]
Unified shader architecture (each pipeline is capable of running either pixel or vertex shaders)
2 shader ALU operations per pipeline per cycle (1 vector4 and 1 scalar, co-issued)
10 FLOPS per pipeline per cycle
48 billion shader operations per second theoretical maximum (2 ALU x 48 shader pipelines x 500 MHz)[3]
240 GFLOPS (10 FLOPS x 48 shader pipelines x 500 MHz)[4]
MEMEXPORT shader function
Sure, ATI had no response to NVidia in the gaming computer graphics market, but that isn't the only market that these companies operate in. ATI's lead over NVidia with the Radeon 9700 didn't kill NVidia, and this current situation with the 8800 having such a huge lead won't kill ATI.
From what I know, ATI was much busier then NVidia was with the "next gen" consoles. The GPU inside the XBox 360 is quite sophisticated, and the Wii doesn't just have a faster variant of the GameCube GPU. ATI spent real research time on these products, and this is when ATI came up with their solution for unified shader units on the GPU. So here we are in May of 2007, and ATI has shipped way more unified shader products then NVidia, simply because their product was inside a console that has sold millions. The 8800 series likely hasn't hit a million. Where as NVidia went with a GPU design mirrored off their 7x00 series of products for the Playstation 3, while trying to work out their own unified shader cards.
I think ATI made the better move here. They have been recouping the research money on unified shader GPUs from a much bigger market segment, though it does make it appear they are lagging behind in the PC gaming sector.
The good news for gamers is neither company is likely to go away anytime soon, because they both are in many different markets. This is a lesson 3dfx didn't learn, and many other now dead or almost dead graphics providers.
2) The underlying components that handle poorly written apps that expect normal users to modify data in %programfiles%\vendorname or HKLM\Software\VendorName. This is an excellent design and might be unique (I'm not sure if it's patent-worthy, however). Copying that data and masking its presence under the user's profile is smart. It's an overdue band-aid for all of those "developers" (laughingly) who don't have a clue (because they run all their apps as admin).
It's a shame it doesn't really work though. Good example, I installed an online game on Vista recently. UAC as expected popped up during the install, due to the game installing an updater/login program to Program Files, even though I installed the game to D:\Games. I then ran the shortcut the game made, and it's launcher popped up, downloaded an update to the launcher and then ran. Problem is when it ran, it was out of date and failed. I closed it, reopened it, and no download this time, but same old version. I found the problem was that Windows remapped the upgrade process into that C:\Users folder (don't have the exact path handy, not in Vista currently) so it dumped the upgraded launcher files there, but then wasn't properly redirected to that folder to execute the new launcher. It instead ran the old launcher in Program Files.
The solution was either run the launcher as an admin, or disable UAC. The proper way to do this to me would be pop up a UAC alert or something to let me know the program just tried to patch Program Files instead of silently redirecting it and breaking it.
For a more permanent solution, Microsoft just needs to throw away all the backwards compatibility they have and start from a clean base. Throw together a backwards compatibility sandbox that shows a dividing line in the sand for users, but still allows people to use their old programs. They will eventually migrate to newer ones, and years down the road the backwards compatibility mode can be thrown out. Then everyone will be in a happy secure MS land where the system isn't trying to be so backwards compatible it has to annoy people with a broken security attempt.
In other words, Microsoft should copy a play out of Apples book, ala the OS 9 to OS X transition, specifically "Classic". Throw enough of a new Win32 API in the newer Windows environment that allows an older program to run in the new area with a recompile, and some tweaks for the new systems.
You know, the "Forcing blu-ray on us" comments are getting to be just as bad as the people pissed off at Microsoft, and saying M$ to show it. Blu-ray is simply a new disc format that offers more storage then DVD. No one threw a fit when the Playstation shipped with a CD-Rom, and could also play music cds. Same for the Playstation 2 when it shipped with a DVD-Rom. But now that Sony is evil, well, this newer larger storage tech is being "forced".
Try applying the same thing to Nintendo as well. Every console they have shipped over the previous generation includes more storage for games. Microsoft is the only one to break this trend, by shipping the same size game storage for the XBox and XBox 360, and somehow they get praise for it.
If your going to bitch about something, at least bitch about something legitimate. Yes, the price of the PS3 sucks when compared to other consoles, both current and past. Yes, the lack of rumble sucks. Yes, the lack of online service like XBox Live sucks. But Blu-Ray isn't being forced on anyone, unless your reading MS's competition bashing book.
My iPod can't be a USB mass storage device. It's plugged into the Firewire port. Now you know what complicates it, so let's focus on what to do about it.
No, but it could be an SBP-2 device.
Ok, quick iPod lesson. The first iPods out the door were firewire only, and act as an SBP-2 device. You plugged them in, iTunes would see the iPod hard drive and load music onto it. If you enabled disk use via iTunes, the Finder would stop hiding the drive when it was connected, and not automatically disconnect the device when a sync was complete. Then the iPod also shipped as a Windows version. What was the difference? The hard drive was formatted FAT32 instead of HFS, so Windows computers could see it. Same trick, iTunes would see the device when connected, sync, then disconnect unless disk use was enabled.
Then one day Apple shipped devices that had a "dock" port on them instead of a standard 6 pin firewire connector. This new dock port supported both USB2 and Firewire, and the firewire continued to be a standard SBP-2 device. The USB, well it turns out it is a standard USB Mass Storage device. And iTunes kept doing the same thing, it would see an iPod, sync, then disconnect when it was done unless disk use was enabled.
Now, iPods ship with USB2 support only. They know when they are connected via firewire and alert you on the iPod screen that the device is only going to charge via firewire and not sync. So all current iPods are USB mass storage only.
As other people have explained, the iPod reads music out of a hidden folder, where all songs are stored with the 4 character names and info is in a database allowing for quicker access. iPods, and all MP3 players have slow processors when compared to PCs, so having a single database to access ends up being a lot quicker then parsing out every file. True, the iPod could theoretically build it's own database, but the process would be slow. The old empeg-car does this, and when it came out the 200mhz ARM processor didn't seem too bad to build a database for 6 or so gigs of music. But now with people sticking 2 160gb drives in, the database updates can be painfully slow. The Rio Karma allowed either the device to rebuild the database, or the computer to do it, but never supported USB mass storage. In a perfect world, a device would always use a database, generated either on a PC for those that don't worry about software loading their music, or on the device for people that do, and everyone would be happy.
For me, I just want a device that lets me build my own hierarchical playlists, and doesn't have a crappy UI. MP3 playback is the only codec I need, since that is still the codec to choose if you want to play music on any device. If I had the hard drive space, I'd rip my collection to FLAC, and use a Samba VFS plugin to encode into format X on the fly.
"I personally have never had the issues I hear people bash Windows over. I am a pretty experienced user and am very attentive to updated virus protection, firewalls and such. I can honestly say that I can count on one hand (and not use every finger) the number of "blue screens of death" I have had on my own pc's.
I do have relatives and friends that have had those kinds of issues, but usually it comes down to them doing something stupid like deleting the folder with the operating system files in it, deleting a key system file, opening attachments on emails they shouldn't have (with no virus protection/detection), etc."
On the OS X side, you really don't need to worry about a virus scanner, or antispyware system, and well, it does have a firewall, but I've never bothered with it. Thats one reason I switched. If it is because OS X is more secure, or it's such a small target, I don't care either way. It's less I have to maintain, and that leaves more time to do other things. I've also switched some of the people who rely upon me for computer support, and it has saved tons of time there too.
"I guess I am saying there is a certain class of user that is well suited to Windows, and I am in that group. I do a lot of business work (spreadsheets, etc.) that are pretty mathematically intensive, and even the famous Mac commercials give Windows its props in that arena."
Not really. Unless you are tied to very specific Windows apps, odds are an OS X running machine would work for you just as well. Spreadsheets work fine in Excel for the Mac, and in fact Excel 1.0 was released in 1985 on a Mac. 1987 was the first year Excel came out for a PC. True, the Mac commercials paint the PC as a business machine and the Mac as a fun machine, but thats just a tactic to try and show people don't have to run the same OS at the office as they do at home. I ran my Mac as a work machine in a heavy Windows environment for 2 years with no issues. Only reason I didn't continue is because I moved onto a new job, where unfortunately Visual Studio and DirectX is a requirement. I'll look to get back on a Mac in the office once Parallels or VMWare gets Direct3D working.
Don't restrict yourself to just one solution. I've been keeping up with Linux, and back in the day was a big OS/2 fan. I don't have any particular loyalty to a platform, so I'll switch if needed. Macs have my attention for now, and they only showed up as a possibility once OS X shipped.
"...not to mention that every mechanic in the country would have to learn how to work on a fundamentally different type of power plant."
I don't see this as any different then the change from carburetors to fuel injection, manual to automatic transmissions, or many of the other changes cars have seen over the years.
And oddly to do the reverse example, how is this different then IT workers having to learn new operating systems? Jobs change over time, mechanics are in the same boat here.