You're right in that they took a big step backwards with version 5, but I don't feel that they've made it up.
When they went to the cross platform toolkit that allowed them to make the Windows version, the biggest thing they gave up when they was the Apple Event support.
I forget the name of the cross platform GUI library that they build their products on. I believe it is from some company that has long since gone out of business. Unfortunatly for Deneba, they've spent so much time writing code to the this abstraction API, they are really prevented from creating anything that takes any advantage of any OS they are porting to.
OK, so Congress says that it is OK to archive computer software (and since the Constitution says that Congress has the right to make copyright laws, then the Supreme Court would probably declare any law of the sort constitutional.)
This doesn't say anything about music though. And it doesn't address the MP3 or Rio "space-shifting" arguments where it is the copy that is actually being used (rather the copy being an hopefully never used archive, saved until the original is unusable.)
The analogy isn't like Ford copyrighting wheels. Its more like Ford seeking some sort of legal redress if someone came out with a car with the exact body shape of a Mustang. (Or Volkwagon if someone came out with something that looks like a Beetle.)
Design patents are common. They are often the patent numbers you see on a hammer or other common items around the house. They are also the weakest form of protection. Ford hasn't tried to make a case against the Celica nor Volkswagon for the Pacer.
When did the supreme court take up a case on the archiving of easily replacable works?
According to this cornell web page (and links off ot the page) shows few decisions on copyright over the past 10 years. And none of them seem to be arguing over archiving. The closest is Sony v. Universal was being argued mostly over time shifting, not archiving. Also, it was deciding whether the company that made the machine capable of infringing were liable, it did not absolve the people doing the actually copying.
I would love for someone to produce for me a supreme court decision that says that copyright law permits ordinary people (not libraries) to make complete copies of easily replacable works.
Although it is hard to tell from the wording of most software licenses, the license is granting you rights you wouldn't otherwise be allowed. Without a license to make additional copies, you are stuck with the basic rights that the copyright acts force the owner of the work to permit to you.
Without the extra rights permitted by the license, you would not be able to make the archive copy of the Win98 CD
You do not "own the music". The artist "owns the music" The artist has given the recording company right to make copies of the music on CD, and you can buy the resulting CD and listen to it.
Fair use does not cover archival copies. And archive rights are only explicitly given to libraries for works that can't be easily replaced.
I think the original poster calling compilation a "missing feature" was similar to the FAQ referring to it as "experimental", pieces are there, but they don't quite work. The other "missing features" mentioned are in a similar state.
I haven't looked at it yet, but I've heard good things about Elements of Programming with Perl. I've also been told that MacPerl: Power and Ease does a good job of teaching perl programming as well as teaching the MacOS specific areas of MacPerl.
No, as the web page I referenced before explained, Byte still had a reader base, and the group was as varied as it always had been. The varied readership made it harder to attract advertisers who wanted a focused audience. If an advertiser was selling Windows productivity software (sic.), they wanted "a Windows Magazine". If they were selling chips, they wanted "an Embedded Designer Magazine". etc.
Unfortunately, those magazines target only a small portion of what Byte covered. Circuit Cellar doesn't stray too far from the homebrew mentality of Ciarcia's old columns. Byte went beyond that low level articles and then do system comparisons, and then language tutorials, and then software reviews, and whatever else it could cover. Byte essentially covered everything from at the highest most abstract details and from the lowest details.
Byte was a magazine that everyone from the manager who never coded (or one whose technologies they mastered are obsolete) to the low level hacker. But it seems this range of audience is what caused its advertiser base to dry up as explained here.
I too have some reservations about the Aqua. Yes, the screen shots look neat, but that isn't the same as actual interaction. Most of the time when trying to explain why I still like the Mac to someone who doesn't use one, the conversation tends to gravitate to minute details (the handling of hierarchical menus for example, or the location of the menu bar)
The problem is the advantages of the old UI aren't single momentous features. (Unfortunatly, the disadvantages are.) Most people can't explain them ("Hey that menu went away when I wasn't expecting it to."); It is just an uneasy feeling that things aren't right. But some thought went into those special cases, and its those pieces that I'm not usre that Apple put into OS X.
Its easy to make something pretty. Its easy to make something that is logical to explain. Its hard to make something that feels natural.
There are lots of places to go to get off the shelf x86 (or PPC) designs. Or for companies that already have embedded hardware that they have built, it is quite possible that they are x86 or PPC based and just want to create variations of their previous designs. Hardware designers are not going to throw away designs because of a processor that can emulate other processors through software.
There is a lot of life left in these existing designs, and people are going to need a reason to change.
Re:Not free as in software
on
Free Solaris 8
·
· Score: 1
No, they say that it won't be distributed under the Sun Community Source License. Sun doesn't own all the code in Solaris and can't give it away.
This is free as in gratis (sometimes called freeware), not free as in libre. You get a binary, you can pass it to your friends (or enemies, they don't care) You don't get source. You can't make changes. (You probably can't even disassemble it to find out how thing were done.) You can't hire someone else to make changes for you.
You pretty much have to depend on Sun maintaining it.
A program run amok can fill up your entire drive, rather than just its partitions. It increases the likelyhood that files used together might be on widely different areas of the disk; increasing access time.
Now that you have a system in place and can make some estimates on the amount of disk space used, back it all up onto tape, repartition the disk, and restore.
And if you don't have a tape drive or other backup media, get one. You'll need it anyway.
Most people would read the sentence Three separate company would need to be profitable on their own. in front of the sentance So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers. and realize that the second was building on information in the first. Its the company that aquires the Windows OS division that will be unable to market an OS in that price range. Of course Linux will be able to continue what it does.
Well, some people feel that their consumer OS offering, Windows '98 is probably close to a loss leader. At the very least it doesn't have the same margin as their application packages like Office. Three separate company would need to be profitable on their own. So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers.
A better UI metaphor: don't know iMates, but the Palm one isn't bad.
If you ever used a Newton, you would know what he meant. The Palm UI is still very much a desktop UI converted to a small screen. The menu bar (even though it is hidden behind the menu button) and text manipulation through copy, cut, and paste commands are really just desktop computing throwbacks that have no place in a PDA environment.
On the Newton, text was highlit with the stylus similar to the Palm, but moving text was simply dragging around a highlit section rather than a cut followed by cursor movement, and then followed by paste. Deleting was a back and forth scribble very familiar to any who has used a pencil eraser.
Other problems stem from the grafitti input system. From the applications point of view, it acts very much like a keyboard, and it flavors how the applications act. All of the Palm's text areas have a very keyboard-ish notion of lines separated by newlines. It took a long time for me to get used to the fact that spaces betwen words had to actually be written.
Despite its flaws though. Eventually I switched from the Newton to the Pilot. Some of the things that make the Pilot a less than ideal PDA tend to make it a stronger mobile extention to my desktop computer. (or however the quote went.)
As for the Newton being gone. For actual hardware and OS, I'm sure its true. But from a UI perspective, it doesn't have to be. There are worse things a fledgling palm developer could spend money on than an old used Newton, or even a book about the Newton. The people who designed it gave some really good thought on how a PDA UI should differ from a desktop UI, and I don't think that enough PDA developers realize it.
It was more than just the batteries. Things like the PCMCIA card port took up room too. To some extent, the Newton was over-engineered. I mean it contained things like digitized sound and localtalk networking. But on the other hand, that bulk did allow them to put a generous sized LCD screen over the whole thing.
I once was looking for handwriting recognition software for the pilot that would allow me to treat it more like a Newton, but when I started trying the various software packages that I found I realized that with the smaller size pilot's screen I would never be able to write on it like a Newton.
Re:V2 Os might not be totally crazy (size matters)
on
V2OS under GPL
·
· Score: 1
Its kind of funny how things turn around. You say that it seems like it would be difficult to write an OS in assembler. But it used to be the only language that anyone would use! Even now, it would be just about impossible to write an OS without any use of assembler. So I guess it just depends on where the designers want to draw the line.
I wish explained your position that "a lot of people find handwriting recognition crucial". From what I took from reading the other articles it seemed that more people were dismisssing it rather than encoraging it. I also couldn't figure out if your were attributing your "more like graffitti than the newton" comment to the many people who strongly desire handwriting recognition, or was that more of your own opinion?
The Newton's data input system is one of the biggest things that I miss when using my pilot. Although when I tried "Jot" I realized that a Newton like data input system doesn't work with screen real estate as small as a Pilot, but if I wanted something as big as a Newton, I'd still be using it.
As I said in another article in this thread, there are situations like meetings, that jotting down notes seems less intrusive to others than typing. Voice recognition would be even worse. And for anyone who is saying that they can type much quicker than they can write, I'd suggest they try a Psion PDA for a bit. (Athough smaller than a Newton, even Psions are looking a bit hefty these days.) Once you get into the size of a PDA, there is no data input system that convenient. Except maybe the desktop computer that you are synchronizing your data with.
So, could you point me to all the people who were clammeroring for "graffitti-style" data input?
For some reason, writing on a PDA seems less intrusive in public contexts (like a business meeting.) than typing into a computer. For years I carried around a Newton for notetaking and it was great for the quick notes and sketches that I used to use a notepad for. Now I use a pilot in similar situations.
If you use a laptop in a meeting, for some reason you seem like you are ignoring the other atendees.
It depends. It may be easier to determine where the window is if it is defined explicitly, (testing for year >30) rather than implicitly. Essentially the Y2K problem is an implicit window from 1900 to 1999. Of course keeping the date in something that can span longer than a 100 years is preferable, if there are no other considerations, and there rarely are.
Very often the tech support memos are written by the companies tech support staff. I remember one company who gave a bonus to every employee who wrote a technote.
I believe it very likely that Microsoft gets calls from people who install Linux, get freaked out by a shell prompt, and then call to figure out how to get Windows re-installed.
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You're right in that they took a big step backwards with version 5, but I don't feel that they've made it up.
When they went to the cross platform toolkit that allowed them to make the Windows version, the biggest thing they gave up when they was the Apple Event support.
I forget the name of the cross platform GUI library that they build their products on. I believe it is from some company that has long since gone out of business. Unfortunatly for Deneba, they've spent so much time writing code to the this abstraction API, they are really prevented from creating anything that takes any advantage of any OS they are porting to.
OK, so Congress says that it is OK to archive computer software (and since the Constitution says that Congress has the right to make copyright laws, then the Supreme Court would probably declare any law of the sort constitutional.)
This doesn't say anything about music though. And it doesn't address the MP3 or Rio "space-shifting" arguments where it is the copy that is actually being used (rather the copy being an hopefully never used archive, saved until the original is unusable.)
The analogy isn't like Ford copyrighting wheels. Its more like Ford seeking some sort of legal redress if someone came out with a car with the exact body shape of a Mustang. (Or Volkwagon if someone came out with something that looks like a Beetle.)
Design patents are common. They are often the patent numbers you see on a hammer or other common items around the house. They are also the weakest form of protection. Ford hasn't tried to make a case against the Celica nor Volkswagon for the Pacer.
According to this cornell web page (and links off ot the page) shows few decisions on copyright over the past 10 years. And none of them seem to be arguing over archiving. The closest is Sony v. Universal was being argued mostly over time shifting, not archiving. Also, it was deciding whether the company that made the machine capable of infringing were liable, it did not absolve the people doing the actually copying.
I would love for someone to produce for me a supreme court decision that says that copyright law permits ordinary people (not libraries) to make complete copies of easily replacable works.
Although it is hard to tell from the wording of most software licenses, the license is granting you rights you wouldn't otherwise be allowed. Without a license to make additional copies, you are stuck with the basic rights that the copyright acts force the owner of the work to permit to you.
Without the extra rights permitted by the license, you would not be able to make the archive copy of the Win98 CD
Fair use does not cover archival copies. And archive rights are only explicitly given to libraries for works that can't be easily replaced.
Maybe there are people find MP3 versions of music hilarious parodies of the original from the CD.
A/UX wasn't based on any sort of microkernel. It was a traditional monolithic kernal based on System V release 2. (which came out around 1984)
A/UX was neat in what it could do, but I don't know how much longer it should have lived.
I think the original poster calling compilation a "missing feature" was similar to the FAQ referring to it as "experimental", pieces are there, but they don't quite work. The other "missing features" mentioned are in a similar state.
I'd trust what Mark-Jason Dominus said or what Tom Christiansen said about the Perl for Dummies book.
I haven't looked at it yet, but I've heard good things about Elements of Programming with Perl. I've also been told that MacPerl: Power and Ease does a good job of teaching perl programming as well as teaching the MacOS specific areas of MacPerl.
No, as the web page I referenced before explained, Byte still had a reader base, and the group was as varied as it always had been. The varied readership made it harder to attract advertisers who wanted a focused audience. If an advertiser was selling Windows productivity software (sic.), they wanted "a Windows Magazine". If they were selling chips, they wanted "an Embedded Designer Magazine". etc.
They had too few advertisers, not too many.
Byte was a magazine that everyone from the manager who never coded (or one whose technologies they mastered are obsolete) to the low level hacker. But it seems this range of audience is what caused its advertiser base to dry up as explained here.
I too have some reservations about the Aqua. Yes, the screen shots look neat, but that isn't the same as actual interaction. Most of the time when trying to explain why I still like the Mac to someone who doesn't use one, the conversation tends to gravitate to minute details (the handling of hierarchical menus for example, or the location of the menu bar)
The problem is the advantages of the old UI aren't single momentous features. (Unfortunatly, the disadvantages are.) Most people can't explain them ("Hey that menu went away when I wasn't expecting it to."); It is just an uneasy feeling that things aren't right. But some thought went into those special cases, and its those pieces that I'm not usre that Apple put into OS X.
Its easy to make something pretty. Its easy to make something that is logical to explain. Its hard to make something that feels natural.
There are lots of places to go to get off the shelf x86 (or PPC) designs. Or for companies that already have embedded hardware that they have built, it is quite possible that they are x86 or PPC based and just want to create variations of their previous designs. Hardware designers are not going to throw away designs because of a processor that can emulate other processors through software.
There is a lot of life left in these existing designs, and people are going to need a reason to change.
This is free as in gratis (sometimes called freeware), not free as in libre. You get a binary, you can pass it to your friends (or enemies, they don't care) You don't get source. You can't make changes. (You probably can't even disassemble it to find out how thing were done.) You can't hire someone else to make changes for you.
You pretty much have to depend on Sun maintaining it.
A program run amok can fill up your entire drive, rather than just its partitions. It increases the likelyhood that files used together might be on widely different areas of the disk; increasing access time.
Now that you have a system in place and can make some estimates on the amount of disk space used, back it all up onto tape, repartition the disk, and restore.
And if you don't have a tape drive or other backup media, get one. You'll need it anyway.
Most people would read the sentence Three separate company would need to be profitable on their own. in front of the sentance So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers. and realize that the second was building on information in the first. Its the company that aquires the Windows OS division that will be unable to market an OS in that price range. Of course Linux will be able to continue what it does.
Well, some people feel that their consumer OS offering, Windows '98 is probably close to a loss leader. At the very least it doesn't have the same margin as their application packages like Office. Three separate company would need to be profitable on their own. So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers.
If you ever used a Newton, you would know what he meant. The Palm UI is still very much a desktop UI converted to a small screen. The menu bar (even though it is hidden behind the menu button) and text manipulation through copy, cut, and paste commands are really just desktop computing throwbacks that have no place in a PDA environment.
On the Newton, text was highlit with the stylus similar to the Palm, but moving text was simply dragging around a highlit section rather than a cut followed by cursor movement, and then followed by paste. Deleting was a back and forth scribble very familiar to any who has used a pencil eraser.
Other problems stem from the grafitti input system. From the applications point of view, it acts very much like a keyboard, and it flavors how the applications act. All of the Palm's text areas have a very keyboard-ish notion of lines separated by newlines. It took a long time for me to get used to the fact that spaces betwen words had to actually be written.
Despite its flaws though. Eventually I switched from the Newton to the Pilot. Some of the things that make the Pilot a less than ideal PDA tend to make it a stronger mobile extention to my desktop computer. (or however the quote went.)
As for the Newton being gone. For actual hardware and OS, I'm sure its true. But from a UI perspective, it doesn't have to be. There are worse things a fledgling palm developer could spend money on than an old used Newton, or even a book about the Newton. The people who designed it gave some really good thought on how a PDA UI should differ from a desktop UI, and I don't think that enough PDA developers realize it.
It was more than just the batteries. Things like the PCMCIA card port took up room too. To some extent, the Newton was over-engineered. I mean it contained things like digitized sound and localtalk networking. But on the other hand, that bulk did allow them to put a generous sized LCD screen over the whole thing.
I once was looking for handwriting recognition software for the pilot that would allow me to treat it more like a Newton, but when I started trying the various software packages that I found I realized that with the smaller size pilot's screen I would never be able to write on it like a Newton.
Its kind of funny how things turn around. You say that it seems like it would be difficult to write an OS in assembler. But it used to be the only language that anyone would use! Even now, it would be just about impossible to write an OS without any use of assembler. So I guess it just depends on where the designers want to draw the line.
I wish explained your position that "a lot of people find handwriting recognition crucial". From what I took from reading the other articles it seemed that more people were dismisssing it rather than encoraging it. I also couldn't figure out if your were attributing your "more like graffitti than the newton" comment to the many people who strongly desire handwriting recognition, or was that more of your own opinion?
The Newton's data input system is one of the biggest things that I miss when using my pilot. Although when I tried "Jot" I realized that a Newton like data input system doesn't work with screen real estate as small as a Pilot, but if I wanted something as big as a Newton, I'd still be using it.
As I said in another article in this thread, there are situations like meetings, that jotting down notes seems less intrusive to others than typing. Voice recognition would be even worse. And for anyone who is saying that they can type much quicker than they can write, I'd suggest they try a Psion PDA for a bit. (Athough smaller than a Newton, even Psions are looking a bit hefty these days.) Once you get into the size of a PDA, there is no data input system that convenient. Except maybe the desktop computer that you are synchronizing your data with.
So, could you point me to all the people who were clammeroring for "graffitti-style" data input?
For some reason, writing on a PDA seems less
intrusive in public contexts (like a business
meeting.) than typing into a computer. For years
I carried around a Newton for notetaking and it
was great for the quick notes and sketches that
I used to use a notepad for. Now I use a pilot
in similar situations.
If you use a laptop in a meeting, for some reason
you seem like you are ignoring the other atendees.
It depends. It may be easier to determine where the window is if it is defined explicitly, (testing for year >30) rather than implicitly. Essentially the Y2K problem is an implicit window from 1900 to 1999. Of course keeping the date in something that can span longer than a 100 years is preferable, if there are no other considerations, and there rarely are.
Very often the tech support memos are written by the companies tech support staff. I remember one company who gave a bonus to every employee who wrote a technote.
I believe it very likely that Microsoft gets calls from people who install Linux, get freaked out by a shell prompt, and then call to figure out how to get Windows re-installed.