reason is, the vendors want to pay to build it once, and then sell it for the next 8 years. They're too cheap to update it.
No kidding. But why the hell is an app published in 2006 not built universal? I've got a couple like that on my hands.
In a way that's a double edged sword with macs... they tend to have a surprisingly long useful lifespan, especially in some areas, and people start depending on that and putting off upgrades to the point of where you can't really upgrade anything anymore, you just have to pitch it all and start new. (hardware and software)
We've hit that point. We plan to have all Intel Macs by 2012. We started bringing them in as dual boots in 2006 in places where there weren't CD caddies full of software going back to the mid-nineties. They made better Windows machines than the Dells they replaced.
We've started replacing machines that were new in 2000 with Intel Macs so we're starting to feel the pain. A big problem that bedevils me is that software catalogs will state that educational package X is "Mac Compatible" but they don't state how. Things that run in Classic are almost useless (I keep a desperation load of SheepShaver around but by no means intend to depend on it), things that need Rosetta tend to be hit or miss, and things that are either Intel or Universal binaries tend to run very well. The problem is that many educational software houses haven't bothered to join the rest of us in the 21st century.
Ah a Jew. I hereby grant you be-pissed-off-about-XMAS free card. You'll be wearing the writing off it unfortunately. There is too much money involved. When I was a kid, you didn't hear much about it until the day after Thanksgiving and come Dec. 26 everyone starts looking forward to wearing a lampshade on their head. For the past 10 years or so, retailers have started flogging it as early as August.
I'm not terribly religious on any account but have a hard time getting annoyed by what has pretty much become an excuse to throw a party. Oh crap, now the Christians are going to beat me up too:-).
I wasn't trying to prove OS X is the fail. I was making the point that many that develop for it and then sell the apps for good money are. Here is a non-Adobe example (I have to support CS3 on OS X btw): Scholastic makes server-based reading assessment software called Scholastic Enterprise Edition. The Reading Counts and SRI apps allow the server IP to be set globally. The SAM application that teachers use to track student progress has to be set per user/per machine to log into that same server. Recently they added a config tool like the ones SRI and RC use but it the app doesn't respect the setting. I've been fudging my way around that one for years now.
I run into this sort of hassle frequently and often. OS X application developers often have no inkling their products will be used on managed machines and networks. Again, not the fault of the OS. That is what/Library/Preferences is for. I rather commend Apple for addressing all of the bitches I used to have with OS 9 and before but many of the third-party developers are still rooted in that old mindset and making trouble for people using OS X on managed LANs. I DON'T want OS X to fail. I'd soon be stuck with Windows 7 boxes in their place.
So after I installed it I went around and fixed all the permissions and it worked fine from there on.
Yeah gods, I'm a K-12 netadmin myself. I forgot to rant about that sort of thing while I was at it. Radmind has been my friend here. I install such things, get the permissions set, then push them out with Radmind. Still a pain and I've had to figure out those hassles too many times as well.
While I'm at it, want to commiserate about educational software catalogs that are full of either grotty Classic software they go and order behind your back or software from the 10.2.x days that makes Rosetta blow up? Apps cored around PowerPC Flash projectors are great at doing that. Even recent ones are built that way. Is it that hard for them to check the UB box when they build this crap?
Those are largely MSproof but the elephant in the room is Flash. Those Chinese would do well to either implement Flash for them, throw effort at either swfdec or Gnash, or pressure Adobe into building it for them.
The Java web plugin isn't as essential as it used to be but that wouldn't hurt either.
And just wait for the pricepoints on netbooks to shift even lower. Microsoft will either be forced to abandon the segment (fatal) or slash prices to levels that will have Wall Street analysts howling for blood.
But they're not. They're putting bigger screens, keyboards, and drives in them. I'm not opposed to making them more usable but doing these things puts the price within shouting distance of a "full size" notebook. Put a SSD in the smallest full size notebooks for only 50 bucks more or so then why bother with a "netbook"?
I'd like to see the equivalent of an EEEPC 701 in a blister pack for $150 or so. Even in rural areas of the US there are plenty of people who don't own their own computers. My old hometown library has people standing in line to use the computers there. The economy being what it is a small $150 machine may be the only computer they're buying. So it would sell.
Not quite. The idea is bring some jollity to what would otherwise be a dark and cold time. The Saturnalia holiday that Christmas and New Year's Eve mostly replaced was much more explicitly about that. The original celebration celebrated the Winter Solstice; from here on in the days start getting longer and you can start looking forward to Spring. The non-Christian aspects of the holiday like the colors red and green and that fellow who travels the world are distorted holdovers from Saturnalia.
Capital A Atheists and other varieties of militant non-Christian aren't doing their cause any favors by being snarky and curmudgeonly. For that matter the cause needs rethinking: Holding up a banner proclaiming what you don't believe in is stupid. Advocating positive doctrines like rationalism and Enlightenment ideals at least shows what you're for rather than against and doesn't play as easily into the hands of fundamentalists who want to demonize you.
I don't see this changing anytime soon, just due to the differing design philosophies inside the two systems. From the start of OS X, apps didn't just have free access to do as they pleased, they were restricted by a security model, and learned to develop in OS X under these restrictions, being forced to learn good coding practice.
There is another common stupidity that many Mac developers seem to have that still persists from the Classic days. Many OS X devs still act as though the user installing the app is the only one on the system. A good example is Adobe Reader. EVERY user that runs Reader for the first time will be pestered to enter an administrator password the first time the software is run. The only workaround is to copy some preference files into every home directory on the system and if there is an update to Reader then that has to be done again. Yeah, yeah, I know just use Preview but things like that happening are common. It isn't OS X' fault. There is provision for system wide app settings; it's just that OS X devs tend not to use them the way Windows devs assume everyone is an administrator.
Dune's crimes weren't things that were cut out. There is no way to get all of the threads of that story into a movie. Rather, major themes of the story were abused. A true denizen of Dune's universe would have been suspicious of a "weirding module" because the idea was to maximize aspects of human potential because humanity had been traumatized into a distrust of high technology. Mentats were to substitute for the forbidden "thinking machines". Exquisitely trained fighters substituted (mostly) for weapons of mass destruction. Improvements to humans proper were to be achieved by breeding though the Theilaxu were reviled for resorting the genetic engineering. You didn't have soldiers who fired off a raygun by shouting into it, you were supposed to have soldiers who were bred to it and then trained over a lifetime.
That wasn't the only major theme abused. Herbert himself complained that Dune was supposed to be about a man playing God not a God who could make it rain. That and Saudaukar didn't run around in Hefty bags and welding masks.
I did like the way they visualized Herbert's world and the casting was dead on. Pity they screwed up the story itself so badly. There was no reason to do it.
Asimov's robots were soulless, but they were never evil. And they had a lot more personality.
Er, I thought a lot of the problems people could have with his robots is that the advanced ones did. I wouldn't describe Daneel, especially the millennia old version of him as soulless and the entire point of the Bicentennial Man was that Andrew did.
Jackson should at least get a soap party thrown for making Gimli the comic relief. Short jokes? For crap's sake. Turn Heidi the Enraged Hippo loose on him!
But how is this punishment for the rapists? Prison rapists are usually the most dangerously violent people in prison. It boggles my mind that giving such people a smorgasbord of victims is punishment.
Ah, you said it was punishment for decent people.........
It is also good enough for any of number of uses for a multitude exceeding "the developer's and their friends". Is it perfect? No. Does it have the all the features of Photoshop and JPSP? No. Is it good enough to say touch up some downloaded album art for music collection? Sure. Is it good enough to resize a photo before emailing it to a family member? Sure.
It is more than good enough for my small graphic editing needs so I'm not going to pay so much as 10 bucks for the intro version of anything. Now this still leaves a sizable pro market for the likes of PhotoShop but it does mean there are limits on how much can be charged for basic image manipulation.
Import cars can perfectly replace Detroit cars in that they take exactly the same fuel and can drive on exactly the same roads. Furthermore, for any class of vehicle Detroit makes there is an import counterpart. Basically there is next to no switching cost with Detroit's competitors.
MS is in a more enviable position that Detroit. Countless commercial and internal bespoke applications implicitly assume Windows+Office as a dependency. While it is possible to switch away from MS, it is immediately costly and time consuming. There is no drop-in replacement for MS products that is 100% compatible with no effort required on the part of the switching organization. This interlocked ecosystem means that MS enjoys lock-in over most of their customers and that leaves them far more free to abuse customers and partners than Detroit can. If a Big Three automaker had done a similar thing to a business partner as MS recently did to HP, they'd actually have to exert real money and effort to keep that partner. This is not so for MS.
There is growing awareness that this situation is not healthy but this awareness will result in a drawn out stagnation. I seriously doubt we'll have the satisfaction of seeing something terrible happen to MS any time soon.
I believe Vista is reasonably stable at this point and that isn't the reason businesses are avoiding it. Vista still has some compatibility issues; Oracle Forms and it's fscking "jinitiator" are a sore point around here (and no we don't control the app server and those that do won't unthrow the switches that enforce the "jinitiator" for Windows and obsolete Java for all other platforms). Businesses also have legions of machines that can run XP perfectly well but do not have the hardware for Vista. Around here, 1 and 2 GB RAM machines with lower end ATI and Intel chipsets are common. They run great with XP but would perform more poorly on Vista and we've only started getting our hardware to that point within the last two years.
And what's the difference from them doing that with a GPLed program? Claiming patents on bits of it and suing you?
The GPL forbids them from distributing a derivative of your code AND doing that. They have to write their own damn code and that raises the bar a little.
The recent ugliness with the model train software involved exactly this scenario. These Kamind scumbags did exactly that. They stole code from an Artistic licensed project, added to it, slapped patents on the result and then tried to turn around and countersue JMRI devs for patent infringement when they objected to having their project jacked.
I doubt "crashing into enemy territory due to hostile fire" counts as legal software distribution. It's actually pretty damn close to actual piracy rather than the bs way the software and entertainment industries use it. The bad guys wouldn't have the right to demand the source code. Even if they did, can you see them getting it?
It's pretty much mandatory to have a copy of MS Office to produce resumes that employers will accept and that you can be reasonably sure will be viewed as intended. I've also encountered government documents in MS Word form and government sites that only will only work with IE. I'd call that being forced to use MS software.
The problem with that is that France has a bushels of oft-overlooked laws that can be selectively enforced whenever they decide someone needs an extra-hard posterior reaming.
Many of those are better if modern ports of the games are used with graphical add-on packs. I couldn't stand to play Duke3d in all it's 320x240 glory either but it is pretty fun when eduke32 and the Hi Resolution Pack are used to render the old game content. Most of the old sprites have been replaced with 3D models as well. There is also proper mouselook. The result isn't a truly modern game but it does beat the snot of out the unadorned original.
The people over at descent2.de are doing wonderful things with Descent 1 and 2 as well. It is a very actively developed modernization of Descent using every 3D trick in the book. D2X-XL with the hi-res and model packs really does play like a modern game. They also have levels that are made with the enhancements in mind that have very little of that old-game-spruced-up feel.
Just because they're from MS wouldn't be a reason to reject them but giving them a good going over would be wise. If said patches are huge architectural ones that are obviously intended to realign the project in question to MS goals then most project leaders would drop them. But I see no reasons to reject bugfixes and small feature enhancements from them. It would also make legally screwing the project with patents and so forth trickier for MS the same way SCO got amnesia about their own involvement with Linux before trying to sue it out of existence.
Well if you do get any more of those foisted on you Driverpacks slipstreamed into an OEM XP cd helps quite a bit. Still some machines will still force you to load the mass storage driver from a USB floppy but only the older special USB floppies that the XP installer likes. Don't blame you at all for that; it really sucks. Incidentally, your requirement that they find the drivers means you probably won't be doing anymore. Just finding the drivers takes a more than a little savvy now.
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reason is, the vendors want to pay to build it once, and then sell it for the next 8 years. They're too cheap to update it.
No kidding. But why the hell is an app published in 2006 not built universal? I've got a couple like that on my hands.
In a way that's a double edged sword with macs... they tend to have a surprisingly long useful lifespan, especially in some areas, and people start depending on that and putting off upgrades to the point of where you can't really upgrade anything anymore, you just have to pitch it all and start new. (hardware and software)
We've hit that point. We plan to have all Intel Macs by 2012. We started bringing them in as dual boots in 2006 in places where there weren't CD caddies full of software going back to the mid-nineties. They made better Windows machines than the Dells they replaced.
We've started replacing machines that were new in 2000 with Intel Macs so we're starting to feel the pain. A big problem that bedevils me is that software catalogs will state that educational package X is "Mac Compatible" but they don't state how. Things that run in Classic are almost useless (I keep a desperation load of SheepShaver around but by no means intend to depend on it), things that need Rosetta tend to be hit or miss, and things that are either Intel or Universal binaries tend to run very well. The problem is that many educational software houses haven't bothered to join the rest of us in the 21st century.
Ah a Jew. I hereby grant you be-pissed-off-about-XMAS free card. You'll be wearing the writing off it unfortunately. There is too much money involved. When I was a kid, you didn't hear much about it until the day after Thanksgiving and come Dec. 26 everyone starts looking forward to wearing a lampshade on their head. For the past 10 years or so, retailers have started flogging it as early as August.
I'm not terribly religious on any account but have a hard time getting annoyed by what has pretty much become an excuse to throw a party. Oh crap, now the Christians are going to beat me up too :-).
I wasn't trying to prove OS X is the fail. I was making the point that many that develop for it and then sell the apps for good money are. Here is a non-Adobe example (I have to support CS3 on OS X btw): Scholastic makes server-based reading assessment software called Scholastic Enterprise Edition. The Reading Counts and SRI apps allow the server IP to be set globally. The SAM application that teachers use to track student progress has to be set per user/per machine to log into that same server. Recently they added a config tool like the ones SRI and RC use but it the app doesn't respect the setting. I've been fudging my way around that one for years now.
I run into this sort of hassle frequently and often. OS X application developers often have no inkling their products will be used on managed machines and networks. Again, not the fault of the OS. That is what /Library/Preferences is for. I rather commend Apple for addressing all of the bitches I used to have with OS 9 and before but many of the third-party developers are still rooted in that old mindset and making trouble for people using OS X on managed LANs. I DON'T want OS X to fail. I'd soon be stuck with Windows 7 boxes in their place.
So after I installed it I went around and fixed all the permissions and it worked fine from there on.
Yeah gods, I'm a K-12 netadmin myself. I forgot to rant about that sort of thing while I was at it. Radmind has been my friend here. I install such things, get the permissions set, then push them out with Radmind. Still a pain and I've had to figure out those hassles too many times as well.
While I'm at it, want to commiserate about educational software catalogs that are full of either grotty Classic software they go and order behind your back or software from the 10.2.x days that makes Rosetta blow up? Apps cored around PowerPC Flash projectors are great at doing that. Even recent ones are built that way. Is it that hard for them to check the UB box when they build this crap?
Those are largely MSproof but the elephant in the room is Flash. Those Chinese would do well to either implement Flash for them, throw effort at either swfdec or Gnash, or pressure Adobe into building it for them.
The Java web plugin isn't as essential as it used to be but that wouldn't hurt either.
And just wait for the pricepoints on netbooks to shift even lower. Microsoft will either be forced to abandon the segment (fatal) or slash prices to levels that will have Wall Street analysts howling for blood.
But they're not. They're putting bigger screens, keyboards, and drives in them. I'm not opposed to making them more usable but doing these things puts the price within shouting distance of a "full size" notebook. Put a SSD in the smallest full size notebooks for only 50 bucks more or so then why bother with a "netbook"?
I'd like to see the equivalent of an EEEPC 701 in a blister pack for $150 or so. Even in rural areas of the US there are plenty of people who don't own their own computers. My old hometown library has people standing in line to use the computers there. The economy being what it is a small $150 machine may be the only computer they're buying. So it would sell.
Not quite. The idea is bring some jollity to what would otherwise be a dark and cold time. The Saturnalia holiday that Christmas and New Year's Eve mostly replaced was much more explicitly about that. The original celebration celebrated the Winter Solstice; from here on in the days start getting longer and you can start looking forward to Spring. The non-Christian aspects of the holiday like the colors red and green and that fellow who travels the world are distorted holdovers from Saturnalia.
Capital A Atheists and other varieties of militant non-Christian aren't doing their cause any favors by being snarky and curmudgeonly. For that matter the cause needs rethinking: Holding up a banner proclaiming what you don't believe in is stupid. Advocating positive doctrines like rationalism and Enlightenment ideals at least shows what you're for rather than against and doesn't play as easily into the hands of fundamentalists who want to demonize you.
I don't see this changing anytime soon, just due to the differing design philosophies inside the two systems. From the start of OS X, apps didn't just have free access to do as they pleased, they were restricted by a security model, and learned to develop in OS X under these restrictions, being forced to learn good coding practice.
There is another common stupidity that many Mac developers seem to have that still persists from the Classic days. Many OS X devs still act as though the user installing the app is the only one on the system. A good example is Adobe Reader. EVERY user that runs Reader for the first time will be pestered to enter an administrator password the first time the software is run. The only workaround is to copy some preference files into every home directory on the system and if there is an update to Reader then that has to be done again. Yeah, yeah, I know just use Preview but things like that happening are common. It isn't OS X' fault. There is provision for system wide app settings; it's just that OS X devs tend not to use them the way Windows devs assume everyone is an administrator.
Dune's crimes weren't things that were cut out. There is no way to get all of the threads of that story into a movie. Rather, major themes of the story were abused. A true denizen of Dune's universe would have been suspicious of a "weirding module" because the idea was to maximize aspects of human potential because humanity had been traumatized into a distrust of high technology. Mentats were to substitute for the forbidden "thinking machines". Exquisitely trained fighters substituted (mostly) for weapons of mass destruction. Improvements to humans proper were to be achieved by breeding though the Theilaxu were reviled for resorting the genetic engineering. You didn't have soldiers who fired off a raygun by shouting into it, you were supposed to have soldiers who were bred to it and then trained over a lifetime.
That wasn't the only major theme abused. Herbert himself complained that Dune was supposed to be about a man playing God not a God who could make it rain. That and Saudaukar didn't run around in Hefty bags and welding masks.
I did like the way they visualized Herbert's world and the casting was dead on. Pity they screwed up the story itself so badly. There was no reason to do it.
Asimov's robots were soulless, but they were never evil. And they had a lot more personality.
Er, I thought a lot of the problems people could have with his robots is that the advanced ones did. I wouldn't describe Daneel, especially the millennia old version of him as soulless and the entire point of the Bicentennial Man was that Andrew did.
Jackson should at least get a soap party thrown for making Gimli the comic relief. Short jokes? For crap's sake. Turn Heidi the Enraged Hippo loose on him!
But how is this punishment for the rapists? Prison rapists are usually the most dangerously violent people in prison. It boggles my mind that giving such people a smorgasbord of victims is punishment.
Ah, you said it was punishment for decent people.........
It is also good enough for any of number of uses for a multitude exceeding "the developer's and their friends". Is it perfect? No. Does it have the all the features of Photoshop and JPSP? No. Is it good enough to say touch up some downloaded album art for music collection? Sure. Is it good enough to resize a photo before emailing it to a family member? Sure.
It is more than good enough for my small graphic editing needs so I'm not going to pay so much as 10 bucks for the intro version of anything. Now this still leaves a sizable pro market for the likes of PhotoShop but it does mean there are limits on how much can be charged for basic image manipulation.
I'd much rather build an outhouse over the spot.
Import cars can perfectly replace Detroit cars in that they take exactly the same fuel and can drive on exactly the same roads. Furthermore, for any class of vehicle Detroit makes there is an import counterpart. Basically there is next to no switching cost with Detroit's competitors.
MS is in a more enviable position that Detroit. Countless commercial and internal bespoke applications implicitly assume Windows+Office as a dependency. While it is possible to switch away from MS, it is immediately costly and time consuming. There is no drop-in replacement for MS products that is 100% compatible with no effort required on the part of the switching organization. This interlocked ecosystem means that MS enjoys lock-in over most of their customers and that leaves them far more free to abuse customers and partners than Detroit can. If a Big Three automaker had done a similar thing to a business partner as MS recently did to HP, they'd actually have to exert real money and effort to keep that partner. This is not so for MS.
There is growing awareness that this situation is not healthy but this awareness will result in a drawn out stagnation. I seriously doubt we'll have the satisfaction of seeing something terrible happen to MS any time soon.
I believe Vista is reasonably stable at this point and that isn't the reason businesses are avoiding it. Vista still has some compatibility issues; Oracle Forms and it's fscking "jinitiator" are a sore point around here (and no we don't control the app server and those that do won't unthrow the switches that enforce the "jinitiator" for Windows and obsolete Java for all other platforms). Businesses also have legions of machines that can run XP perfectly well but do not have the hardware for Vista. Around here, 1 and 2 GB RAM machines with lower end ATI and Intel chipsets are common. They run great with XP but would perform more poorly on Vista and we've only started getting our hardware to that point within the last two years.
I think you mean "Where is the kaboom?!? There was supposed to be a giant Earth-shattering kaboom!"
Time for another one of those pointless trekkie nerd arguments:
Who is the biggest dog? Kirk or Riker?
And what's the difference from them doing that with a GPLed program? Claiming patents on bits of it and suing you?
The GPL forbids them from distributing a derivative of your code AND doing that. They have to write their own damn code and that raises the bar a little.
The recent ugliness with the model train software involved exactly this scenario. These Kamind scumbags did exactly that. They stole code from an Artistic licensed project, added to it, slapped patents on the result and then tried to turn around and countersue JMRI devs for patent infringement when they objected to having their project jacked.
I doubt "crashing into enemy territory due to hostile fire" counts as legal software distribution. It's actually pretty damn close to actual piracy rather than the bs way the software and entertainment industries use it. The bad guys wouldn't have the right to demand the source code. Even if they did, can you see them getting it?
It's pretty much mandatory to have a copy of MS Office to produce resumes that employers will accept and that you can be reasonably sure will be viewed as intended. I've also encountered government documents in MS Word form and government sites that only will only work with IE. I'd call that being forced to use MS software.
The problem with that is that France has a bushels of oft-overlooked laws that can be selectively enforced whenever they decide someone needs an extra-hard posterior reaming.
Many of those are better if modern ports of the games are used with graphical add-on packs. I couldn't stand to play Duke3d in all it's 320x240 glory either but it is pretty fun when eduke32 and the Hi Resolution Pack are used to render the old game content. Most of the old sprites have been replaced with 3D models as well. There is also proper mouselook. The result isn't a truly modern game but it does beat the snot of out the unadorned original.
The people over at descent2.de are doing wonderful things with Descent 1 and 2 as well. It is a very actively developed modernization of Descent using every 3D trick in the book. D2X-XL with the hi-res and model packs really does play like a modern game. They also have levels that are made with the enhancements in mind that have very little of that old-game-spruced-up feel.
Just because they're from MS wouldn't be a reason to reject them but giving them a good going over would be wise. If said patches are huge architectural ones that are obviously intended to realign the project in question to MS goals then most project leaders would drop them. But I see no reasons to reject bugfixes and small feature enhancements from them. It would also make legally screwing the project with patents and so forth trickier for MS the same way SCO got amnesia about their own involvement with Linux before trying to sue it out of existence.
Well if you do get any more of those foisted on you Driverpacks slipstreamed into an OEM XP cd helps quite a bit. Still some machines will still force you to load the mass storage driver from a USB floppy but only the older special USB floppies that the XP installer likes. Don't blame you at all for that; it really sucks. Incidentally, your requirement that they find the drivers means you probably won't be doing anymore. Just finding the drivers takes a more than a little savvy now.