There's two things that Apple needs to do to get OS X into a state worthy of their name:
1) Quit the "design over functionality" bullshit and get back to basics. They have been listening (somewhat) to beta users with regard to things like the Dock, but they need to do more. Please, no more disasters like the Quicktime 4 player!
2) Figure out how to handle the various file systems that people are going to be using. HFS can't handle filenames over 32 characters, HFS+ can, but they both use colons as path separators, while the OS X standard filename uses the UNIX/. Applications generally expect the colon, so an intermediate layer converts the path on the fly. File names that include a / are also converted to colons. Colons are converted to/s. And so it goes... if they don't watch out, they're going to end up with a mess like DOS filename conversion in OS 8 (which really sucked; System 7 had better compatibility).
Given America's actions in the past, I think we all know how much "Echelon info" the governments of Australia, NZ, etc. can expect - diddly squat. They probably get reports like this:
"Hey, you remember that bomb that took out half the parliament buidlings the other day? We knew about it three weeks before it happened, but we figured we wouldn't tell you 'cause the Secretary of State was on a golf trip, and we didn't want to disturb him 'cause he gets real pissy when he misses a shot. Still, better luck next time, huh?"
First of all, DON'T USE CAPS SO MUCH, IT PISSES ME OFF.
Second, let's take a look at your supposedly "Interesting" post point by point...
I don't know very much abount monitors or TV's..
That's obvious.
A conventional monitor uses EXTREAM amounts of light to go through lots of magnets and such to bend the light to hit the monitor/TV in the right places to do different colors, etc...
Did you ever take elementary physics at school? Did they teach you that light can be bent by the kind of magnets you'd find in a TV? If so, take your teacher out back and shoot them. TVs fire electrons at a phosphor-painted screen which produces photons of the appropriate frequency when the electrons give up their energy.
THIS technology would basicly make it so that your monitor could be as thin as a piece of paper and the wires which connect all the dots back to the computer.
Well done. You read the article.
a. How BRIGHT will these monitors be? Would they be viewable in broad sun light or in an office with bright lighting? Or just in the dark?
Since they produce their own light, rather than utilizing reflected light (standard LCDs) or light passing through the substance (backlit LCDs), I presume they'd show up well in the dark, and reasonably well in an indoor setting, but we'll just have to wait for ACTUAL PRODUCTS before finding out, won't we?
b. How FAST can these color dots light up and turn off?? I mean nothing worse than seeing trailers on your mouse when you don't want to. Or you minimize a window but you have to wait for the "dots" to loose their charge...
I don't think you're going to be using a mouse (or minimizing windows, for that matter) on your cell phone.
c. How "WELL" do these things respond to electricity? Can you give them a "little" juice and have them light up a little, and MORE JUICE to light up more? Otherwise you taking back to the primary colors for monitors.. back to 8 bit graphics..
ALL color monitors are made up of "primary colors" (actually red, green and blue, ehich are not the traditional primary colors, but oh well...). In addition, if you couldn't vary the luminance (i.e. of the pixels had only two states, "on" and "off") that would be TWO-bit color, not EIGHT.
d. Why couldn't you just do this with conventional LED type things? Like a "Light Bright".. =) I mean have a bunch of TINY R,G,& B LED's wired all together, when charged the R, G, B, light up accordingly.
You're a genius! I'm sure this has never occurred to any engineer anywhere ever! For a start, show me how you're going to make those LEDs so small, how you're going to bring power to them, what substances you're going to use for the various colors, how you're going to avoid black gaps between them........I could go on.
Makes me wonder what you're doing in front of your computer...;)
But seriously, a lot of keyboards can't handle that sort of thing. A friend's keyboard still isn't working properly after he spilled a couple of teaspoons of coffee into it. Some designs are more rugged than others.
Yeah, I'm right-handed, but I use the mouse with my left hand quite a lot. Some people, however, seem to have trouble with it (especially for two- or three-button mice).
I presume you're talking about keyboards for PCs, rather than Macs. If that's the case, I get my keyboards from here. They're nice and heavy, with the clattery keys you either love or hate. (And they're reliable - my wife dumped a cup of water into one of these, so I took it apart, dried it on top of my monitor for a couple of days, and it's been working fine ever since.)
Ther's a different take on this topic at ZDNet here. Personally, I think the artist's rendition in the ZDNet article is more likely than the rendering in the article linked above. Apple's never produced a right-hand-only peripheral, and I'd like to think they never would - in fact, they've been very careful in allowing both left- and right-handed use of their mice until now, by providing ADB ports on both sides of their keyboards (same for USB, I guess).
Bollocks. I don't know where you're getting your info from, but I've never seen a pirate movie CD anywhere in Japan. Perhaps you're thinking of the CDs of pirated software sold on the street in Akihabara?
I keep hoping someone'll get a port to the Power series (which use, for example, the R3000 CPUs) going, but by the looks of this post to the NetBSD/sigmips mailing list, it ain't gonna happen...
As I recall, Tokyo Metallic does ADSL, not cable. If you want cable, in Tokyo or some nearby areas you've got a few choices - Tokyu is one (as you mentioned), but there's also Titus and the one that covers Suginami/Nerima/etc. in Tokyo.
He said "cheaply connected", and it's pretty much true nowadays (if you live in the right area). It's certainly not as cheap as the States, but you can get a 1Mbps cable connection for around 5000 yen (~$US45), an ADSL connection for about 10,000 yen (~$US90), or a 128Kbps dedicated line for 32000 yen (~$US290). Dial-up is expensive because of NTT's monopolistic deathgrip on the domestic telecommunications market, but that might be getting cheaper RSN...
Bwahahaha! You mean this, of course. Note that the Mark VI suit is for sale, and he's currently working on Mark VII (which weighs in at 120lbs - not exactly what I'd call lightweight).
Do what I did - put the boxes with big power switches on the front on top of your desk, and make sure any boxes under your desk are in cases with sliding covers. Helps a lot.
Jeezus, you're talking to Jegg Garzik and you have the temerity to say that? Go have a look at the driver code in 2.4test - a pretty fair chunk of it has his fingerprints on it.
You will gain some performance by using SMP, but if you've got the choice, go with a single-CPU machine with the fastest I/O subsystem you can get for the same cash as the SMP box. It'll give you much more bang for your buck.
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There's two things that Apple needs to do to get OS X into a state worthy of their name:
/. Applications generally expect the colon, so an intermediate layer converts the path on the fly. File names that include a / are also converted to colons. Colons are converted to /s. And so it goes... if they don't watch out, they're going to end up with a mess like DOS filename conversion in OS 8 (which really sucked; System 7 had better compatibility).
1) Quit the "design over functionality" bullshit and get back to basics. They have been listening (somewhat) to beta users with regard to things like the Dock, but they need to do more. Please, no more disasters like the Quicktime 4 player!
2) Figure out how to handle the various file systems that people are going to be using. HFS can't handle filenames over 32 characters, HFS+ can, but they both use colons as path separators, while the OS X standard filename uses the UNIX
Given America's actions in the past, I think we all know how much "Echelon info" the governments of Australia, NZ, etc. can expect - diddly squat. They probably get reports like this:
"Hey, you remember that bomb that took out half the parliament buidlings the other day? We knew about it three weeks before it happened, but we figured we wouldn't tell you 'cause the Secretary of State was on a golf trip, and we didn't want to disturb him 'cause he gets real pissy when he misses a shot. Still, better luck next time, huh?"
LEP = Light Emitting Polymers
I would say that they do indeed emit light, rather than merely reflecting it.
Yeah, I caught that after going back to check my post. Grrr... brain fart.
First of all, DON'T USE CAPS SO MUCH, IT PISSES ME OFF.
...
.. =) I mean have a bunch of TINY R,G,& B LED's wired all together, when charged the R, G, B, light up accordingly.
Second, let's take a look at your supposedly "Interesting" post point by point...
I don't know very much abount monitors or TV's..
That's obvious.
A conventional monitor uses EXTREAM amounts of light to go through lots of magnets and such to bend the light to hit the monitor/TV in the right places to do different colors, etc...
Did you ever take elementary physics at school? Did they teach you that light can be bent by the kind of magnets you'd find in a TV? If so, take your teacher out back and shoot them. TVs fire electrons at a phosphor-painted screen which produces photons of the appropriate frequency when the electrons give up their energy.
THIS technology would basicly make it so that your monitor could be as thin as a piece of paper and the wires which connect all the dots back to the computer.
Well done. You read the article.
a. How BRIGHT will these monitors be? Would they be viewable in broad sun light or in an office with bright lighting? Or just in the dark?
Since they produce their own light, rather than utilizing reflected light (standard LCDs) or light passing through the substance (backlit LCDs), I presume they'd show up well in the dark, and reasonably well in an indoor setting, but we'll just have to wait for ACTUAL PRODUCTS before finding out, won't we?
b. How FAST can these color dots light up and turn off?? I mean nothing worse than seeing trailers on your mouse when you don't want to. Or you minimize a window but you have to wait for the "dots" to loose their charge
I don't think you're going to be using a mouse (or minimizing windows, for that matter) on your cell phone.
c. How "WELL" do these things respond to electricity? Can you give them a "little" juice and have them light up a little, and MORE JUICE to light up more? Otherwise you taking back to the primary colors for monitors.. back to 8 bit graphics..
ALL color monitors are made up of "primary colors" (actually red, green and blue, ehich are not the traditional primary colors, but oh well...). In addition, if you couldn't vary the luminance (i.e. of the pixels had only two states, "on" and "off") that would be TWO-bit color, not EIGHT.
d. Why couldn't you just do this with conventional LED type things? Like a "Light Bright"
You're a genius! I'm sure this has never occurred to any engineer anywhere ever!
For a start, show me how you're going to make those LEDs so small, how you're going to bring power to them, what substances you're going to use for the various colors, how you're going to avoid black gaps between them........I could go on.
See my post below.
My keyboard gets wet fairly often
Makes me wonder what you're doing in front of your computer...
But seriously, a lot of keyboards can't handle that sort of thing. A friend's keyboard still isn't working properly after he spilled a couple of teaspoons of coffee into it. Some designs are more rugged than others.
Yeah, I'm right-handed, but I use the mouse with my left hand quite a lot. Some people, however, seem to have trouble with it (especially for two- or three-button mice).
I presume you're talking about keyboards for PCs, rather than Macs. If that's the case, I get my keyboards from here. They're nice and heavy, with the clattery keys you either love or hate. (And they're reliable - my wife dumped a cup of water into one of these, so I took it apart, dried it on top of my monitor for a couple of days, and it's been working fine ever since.)
Ther's a different take on this topic at ZDNet here. Personally, I think the artist's rendition in the ZDNet article is more likely than the rendering in the article linked above. Apple's never produced a right-hand-only peripheral, and I'd like to think they never would - in fact, they've been very careful in allowing both left- and right-handed use of their mice until now, by providing ADB ports on both sides of their keyboards (same for USB, I guess).
The Apex isn't available in Japan.
In Japan, you'd pay anywhere from $US40 (your standard reissue of an old movie) to $US90 (The Matrix box edition).
This is the direct result of the CSS/region coding bullshit.
Bollocks. I don't know where you're getting your info from, but I've never seen a pirate movie CD anywhere in Japan. Perhaps you're thinking of the CDs of pirated software sold on the street in Akihabara?
I keep hoping someone'll get a port to the Power series (which use, for example, the R3000 CPUs) going, but by the looks of this post to the NetBSD/sigmips mailing list, it ain't gonna happen...
As I recall, Tokyo Metallic does ADSL, not cable. If you want cable, in Tokyo or some nearby areas you've got a few choices - Tokyu is one (as you mentioned), but there's also Titus and the one that covers Suginami/Nerima/etc. in Tokyo.
He said "cheaply connected", and it's pretty much true nowadays (if you live in the right area). It's certainly not as cheap as the States, but you can get a 1Mbps cable connection for around 5000 yen (~$US45), an ADSL connection for about 10,000 yen (~$US90), or a 128Kbps dedicated line for 32000 yen (~$US290). Dial-up is expensive because of NTT's monopolistic deathgrip on the domestic telecommunications market, but that might be getting cheaper RSN...
Try Myth II. That looked pretty good for a 3D game...
Bwahahaha! You mean this, of course. Note that the Mark VI suit is for sale, and he's currently working on Mark VII (which weighs in at 120lbs - not exactly what I'd call lightweight).
Unless the ambient temperature was exactly equal to the Ewoks' body temperature, thermal imaging would have helped.
And you said:
Your AMD is higher still.
Don't be a dork. Admit it when you're wrong, OK?
Geez, guy, where'd you learn English? "Scruntous" is, of course, an adjective expressing the concept of "that which is scrunty".
Now please don't tell me you don't know what "scrunty" means...
Do what I did - put the boxes with big power switches on the front on top of your desk, and make sure any boxes under your desk are in cases with sliding covers. Helps a lot.
Whoops - finger slipped. That Jeff Garzik, of course...
You're a driver hacker, you say.
Jeezus, you're talking to Jegg Garzik and you have the temerity to say that? Go have a look at the driver code in 2.4test - a pretty fair chunk of it has his fingerprints on it.
You will gain some performance by using SMP, but if you've got the choice, go with a single-CPU machine with the fastest I/O subsystem you can get for the same cash as the SMP box. It'll give you much more bang for your buck.