I see your point, but don't think it's a good one. What you're saying is that Apple should deliberately make its own products worse to level the playing field?
How about if the alternatives work well with what Apple has and offer a compelling reason to switch? This is what's usually called "having a better product" in marketing parlance. =)
Now what are Apple doing? They're taking a nice OS with a very nice UNIX core, putting a proprietary GUI on the top, and giving it to the masses. Huzzah. But there's a catch: they're already branching off with their own slightly different standards (like dumping on X-Windows and GNUStep a lot).
First of all, Apple has every reason to package their own GUI in lieu of X-Windows. For one thing, X-Windows ain't all that great. It's the de facto GUI for most Unices, but that doesn't make it the best choice. Aqua, on the other hand, makes use of technology we should all have been using years ago (Display Postscript), tweaks it (Display PDF), and throws in a lot of stuff that will serve as the springboard for future applications. Aqua is better technically than X-Windows in most every way. IMHO, if it wasn't for the inherent networkability of X-Windows, it would be long dead.
putting out loads of products that again make a large incentive for the user to just use Apple products, no alternatives.
Well, DUH! They are a for profit company. It is their raison d'etre to provide incentive for customers to use Apple products. But you are wrong with your last assertion. There are plenty of alternatives. And Apple makes it easy for you to interoperate. There is hardly anything closed about OS X (aside from the source for Aqua). Open standards abound (those coming in 10.2 emphasized): USB, Firewire, 802.11, ZeroConf, CUPS, NFS, NIS (I have this working), SSH, Apache, etc, etc...
I have personally set up iMacs in a Sun/Solaris lab. They mount/export/home from a Solaris server via NFS and obtain user info from the Solaris NIS server.
The point is, even if Macs were less interoperable - they would still be worth using. There is something uNF! about having an ssh window open on an Apache compile, watching XMMS play a tune, running Ethereal to sniff out problems with your network and laying out a poster in Adobe InDesign (with help from Illustrator and Photoshop) right next to it. I have done this. It has made me a firm believer that OS X is the happy marriage of Unix and a friendly desktop OS.
There is nothing wrong with Linux. But I like OS X a lot more.
Yes, but Steve does collect on that magical CEO compensation: stock options. You know, the pay that magically appears in exec's bank accounts but not on the company's financial statements.
I agree 100%. A well-behaved OS X app should be self-contained, write its prefs to ~/Library/Preferences, etc, etc...
I think the reason IE doesn't do this is laziness on the part of the developers... It's an app ported (carbonized) from OS 9. OS 9 apps had free reign to run roughshod over the directory tree. It was (and is) bad practice, but there was nothing stopping you. They just haven't bothered to make it self-contained for whatever reason.
What? I should hope that any install which adds or changes system-wide libraries requires an admin password. Applications that are a self-contained bundle (e.g. Mozilla) don't require any password (or even installer) because an admin user is in group 'admin' and is allowed to write to/Applications for example.
The reason IE requires a password to install is because it makes changes to directories that a regular user doesn't have permission to change . This is a good practice. Otherwise, what's to stop some dumbass from tearing out critical config files or libraries?
No, the first nine major releases were Mac OS. Think of all the carbonized apps that would have a cow if they checked the system version number and found "1.0"... This way, Carbon apps can run in both Mac OS and Mac OS X without any tomfoolery on the part of the developers. Makes sense if you think about it...
The "X" is a product name, not a version number. Remeber the official name of OS X is "Mac OS X, version 10.1.5". It was meant to indicate the break with the "classic" Mac OS.
The reason for this is that Apple includes an Apache module to address exactly that problem. When the original OS X was shipped (10.0.0, I think), this mod was missing and there was a gaping security hole. People could work around permissions just by addressing a file/folder differently than in the access file.
Check it out, go into/etc/httpd/httpd.conf and look in the LoadModule directives. At the very end will be something like mod_hfs. This comes from Apple. Comment it out, restart Apache and you'll see that you can now use any case you want.
They are making money off the people who upgrade to QT Pro, so that they can encode/edit movies. The free download of QT is a player only. Apps like Premiere will bundle QT Pro, which obviously means that Apple gets a cut.
I have never seen somebody do this in any other sport. American football included. Though I have seen a dislocated hip in American football. This is still nastier.
Hey Pudge, how'd you get maccvs to work? I tried using it with a fink install of python, but it didn't seem to like that and said it preferred MacPython. Then I tried getting that to work with no luck as well (I didn't exactly try too hard since the idea of keeping two python installs on one machine didn't appeal to me).
Any ideas? I don't really feel like messing with a GUI for CVS unless I know it'll work...
What you need is a 20 GB VST Firewire drive. Set up a coherent filing system, store all your data on there, and take it with you wherever you go. These things are tiny and lightning quick - no network storage can compare If you've got proper Firewire ports (bus powered), you don't even need to carry a power adapter - just the firewire cable.
My supervisor swears by one of these things... He used to have a complete mess of redundant files all over the place and could never remember which was the most current. Now it's easy. The VST drive is the definitive version.
Of course, there is an outside chance that you could lose the drive or the data be destroyed, so make a habit of backing up (using rsync or something similar) on a weekly, or even nightly, basis to a more secure machine (a desktop, for example). You could probably set up a nightly cron job to run that would check to see if the drive is connected and backup if it is. That way, backups for you would be as simple as connecting the drive when you get home...
I certainly don't think any engineer will take an Apple machine over a Sun workstation (or even a PC) for performance reasons. But I think there is definitely a market for Matlab on OS X even among the people already using it on higher-end hardware.
You can't really take a Sun Blade on the road with you. You can't run Powerpoint in Solaris (you can do it with SunPCi, but that is basically a PC?). You can run Powerpoint and Matlab on a PC laptop - but then there is always the Windows factor. The only option for someone who wants the stability of Unix and the flexibility in software would be OS X. You could take your presentations on the road with confidence. If you needed to come up with some last-minute changes or wanted to try something new out, you could do it on the spot.
Not only that, but if Matlab could be written to take advantage of Altivec, there is the possibility of significant performance gains (if not superiority over equivalent SPARC/Alpha chips).
Well, I must say I vastly underestimated your experience with Matlab. Given the forum, I assumed you were just cheerleading for open-source software. Sorry about that (it's a gut reaction).
Having said that, I think we can both agree that Matlab is a great tool for... shall we say... quick-and-dirty simulation/analysis. It IS convenient and it is up to the task in most cases (you say yourself that you tend to do stuff that's out of the ordinary). I wouldn't exactly call myself a power user, but for the type of stuff I've had to do with it (DSP mostly), it has been more than up to the task. Certainly, I have never considered writing my own simulation tools.
As far as the plotting goes, Matlab does have some nice facilities built in and accessible to the casual user. If that's not enough, it can do vectored output (as can DISLIN and gnuplot), which means you can bring it through a package like Illustrator and produce true quality output with a little more effort.
What would you recommend to someone coming from a Matlab background to use? I do most of my work on a Mac these days. If it really isn't that much different, I wouldn't mind giving it all a try. Particularly of interest to me would be the plotting stuff.
You've obviously never had to use Simulink or Real-Time Workshop. Mathematica has nothing like this and it is the lifeblood of engineers.
Python + Numeric + {Dislin/PyChart/...} do a decent job, much faster and much more flexibly
I would like to see you write a script that will do 2D signal processing and plotting of the results in about 20 lines. I can do this in Matlab. Not only can I do it in about 20 lines of code, it will be blazingly fast if properly written to take advantage of Matlab's matrix capabilities. A lot of people make the mistake of writing Matlab code like they would C - lots of embedded loops, iterating over one variable. That's not how Matlab works and it usually results in awfully slow execution. Use matrices like they're supposed to be used and Matlab works like a champ.
good old Matlab
Exactly. Matlab is great for what it does. I can spend a few days designing and testing an efficient DCT algorithm, or, I can use Matlab. I can spend a few days designing and testing an efficient DWT algorithm, or, I can use Matlab. You see where I'm going with this...
Not only that, but when I'm done with my simulation, Matlab has some pretty decent graphing capability. I don't need to waste my time handling spreadsheets full of data and trying to get a meaningful plot.
You can get Matlab for Linux - I run copies on RedHat - so the implication of the post that Matlab for Mac OS X would finally bring Matlab to Unix is a little strong.
You can get Matlab for just about any Unix (and it will run fine on a $1000 Sun Netra). So the implication by Mathworks that it would be difficult is bogus. Releasing a port that uses X would probably take them about one month. Using Aqua would probably take some more time. But with the rate of OS X adoption among engineers, they would be stupid not to pursue this.
But show me a commercial alternative to any IM client, oh perceptive one.
Maybe you're one of those sorry jackasses who sends greeting cards via ICQ or trolls the net looking to chat with 12 year old girls. If that's the case, well, you're right. Proteus and Fire do suck for pedophilial purposes and lame attempts at social interaction.
Check out Fire and Proteus. Both are tremendous IM clients... the only thing lacking from either - unfortunately - is file transfer. Proteus has this coming RSN, apparently.
Yeah, there's all the statistics you can use... although I'm not sure if that's what the brain does precisely. It does work pretty well for machines though. There's a whole industry - biometrics - being built around that kind of stuff.
I'm not self-moderating... it's the karma +1 bonus. I only disable it when I post off-topic or useless posts. Just whore yourself enough to the moderators, and eventually your thoughts will be considered more important than average too! =) (I think the threshold is +25 karma or something like)
Re: ucalgary. Where did you wind up going? Personally, I'm glad I went to a smaller school for my undergrad. Got to know my profs really well, made some life-long friends and had a great four years. My graduating class in EE seemed like a great big family. Everyone knew everyone else. I don't think that exists here. It's a shame really.
With CDMA, you have no directional information... Your single antenna isn't capable of isolating the source of a signal. It's all a mishmash. That's why you need PN codes.
At a cocktail party, it's a different kind of mishmash. Suppose you are standing at the centre of multiple sound sources. Person B, standing at your 4 o'clock, speaks. That sound will arrive at your right ear moments before it arrives at your left ear. Furthermore, you have other cues to indicate that the sound is coming from behind you (not sure if this is your ears or just being able to feel the vibrations in your jaw or body). Your brain basically triangulates on the source. What's more amazing is that your brain can do this for multiple simultaneous sources to the point where you can pick out a single conversation in a crowded room.
I think the whole voice identification thing is another neat brain trick - not too familiar with that...
I'm pretty sure CDMA supports SMS, since my provider offers SMS on its CDMA network (Telus).
And last time I checked, I could roam anywhere in North America with my CDMA phone. I think what you mean is world-wide roaming. Back in the day, you had smart-chip cards in your GSM phones - you could take the smart-chip out of your NA phone and plug it into a phone in Japan and it would work. I'm not sure if tri-mode phones have obviated the need for that. IIRC, the spectrum used in Japan for GSM is not _exactly_ the same as that used in NA.
You know, most hearing aid companies are working on stuff like this. Hearing impaired have a hell of a time at something like a cocktail party - where there's lots of noise from all different directions (it's actually called the cocktail party problem). Since most hearing aids consist of a single microphone (not communicating with the other side of your head), you lose your natural ability to determine the direction a voice is coming from (your brain is actually able to tune out background noise because your ears can tell you which direction a sound came from). So some next-gen hearing aids consist of two mics and some DSP to tune out all but sound coming from your forward "field of view". I've seen (heard) it demonstrated, it's pretty wild.
Unfortunately, you don't always want to tune out 360 degrees of hearing... so there's some adjustment of the hearing aids required when you move into a different setting.
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If you're an ADC member, you'll get Jaguar (and every other system software release) free.
ADC Student membership costs $100/year. If you're a student, it makes more sense to get ADC membership than to buy Jaguar.
I see your point, but don't think it's a good one. What you're saying is that Apple should deliberately make its own products worse to level the playing field?
How about if the alternatives work well with what Apple has and offer a compelling reason to switch? This is what's usually called "having a better product" in marketing parlance. =)
First of all, Apple has every reason to package their own GUI in lieu of X-Windows. For one thing, X-Windows ain't all that great. It's the de facto GUI for most Unices, but that doesn't make it the best choice. Aqua, on the other hand, makes use of technology we should all have been using years ago (Display Postscript), tweaks it (Display PDF), and throws in a lot of stuff that will serve as the springboard for future applications. Aqua is better technically than X-Windows in most every way. IMHO, if it wasn't for the inherent networkability of X-Windows, it would be long dead.
Well, DUH! They are a for profit company. It is their raison d'etre to provide incentive for customers to use Apple products. But you are wrong with your last assertion. There are plenty of alternatives. And Apple makes it easy for you to interoperate. There is hardly anything closed about OS X (aside from the source for Aqua). Open standards abound (those coming in 10.2 emphasized): USB, Firewire, 802.11, ZeroConf, CUPS, NFS, NIS (I have this working), SSH, Apache, etc, etc...
I have personally set up iMacs in a Sun/Solaris lab. They mount /export/home from a Solaris server via NFS and obtain user info from the Solaris NIS server.
The point is, even if Macs were less interoperable - they would still be worth using. There is something uNF! about having an ssh window open on an Apache compile, watching XMMS play a tune, running Ethereal to sniff out problems with your network and laying out a poster in Adobe InDesign (with help from Illustrator and Photoshop) right next to it. I have done this. It has made me a firm believer that OS X is the happy marriage of Unix and a friendly desktop OS.
There is nothing wrong with Linux. But I like OS X a lot more.
Yes, but Steve does collect on that magical CEO compensation: stock options. You know, the pay that magically appears in exec's bank accounts but not on the company's financial statements.
I agree 100%. A well-behaved OS X app should be self-contained, write its prefs to ~/Library/Preferences, etc, etc...
I think the reason IE doesn't do this is laziness on the part of the developers... It's an app ported (carbonized) from OS 9. OS 9 apps had free reign to run roughshod over the directory tree. It was (and is) bad practice, but there was nothing stopping you. They just haven't bothered to make it self-contained for whatever reason.
What? I should hope that any install which adds or changes system-wide libraries requires an admin password. Applications that are a self-contained bundle (e.g. Mozilla) don't require any password (or even installer) because an admin user is in group 'admin' and is allowed to write to /Applications for example.
The reason IE requires a password to install is because it makes changes to directories that a regular user doesn't have permission to change . This is a good practice. Otherwise, what's to stop some dumbass from tearing out critical config files or libraries?
No, the first nine major releases were Mac OS. Think of all the carbonized apps that would have a cow if they checked the system version number and found "1.0"... This way, Carbon apps can run in both Mac OS and Mac OS X without any tomfoolery on the part of the developers. Makes sense if you think about it...
The "X" is a product name, not a version number. Remeber the official name of OS X is "Mac OS X, version 10.1.5". It was meant to indicate the break with the "classic" Mac OS.
Check it out, go into /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and look in the LoadModule directives. At the very end will be something like mod_hfs. This comes from Apple. Comment it out, restart Apache and you'll see that you can now use any case you want.
That's not ironic.
They are making money off the people who upgrade to QT Pro, so that they can encode/edit movies. The free download of QT is a player only. Apps like Premiere will bundle QT Pro, which obviously means that Apple gets a cut.
I have never seen somebody do this in any other sport. American football included. Though I have seen a dislocated hip in American football. This is still nastier.
Oh man, thank you for this one... you can never have too many references to "A Christmas Story"... particularly in late spring. =)
Hey Pudge, how'd you get maccvs to work? I tried using it with a fink install of python, but it didn't seem to like that and said it preferred MacPython. Then I tried getting that to work with no luck as well (I didn't exactly try too hard since the idea of keeping two python installs on one machine didn't appeal to me). Any ideas? I don't really feel like messing with a GUI for CVS unless I know it'll work...
My supervisor swears by one of these things... He used to have a complete mess of redundant files all over the place and could never remember which was the most current. Now it's easy. The VST drive is the definitive version.
Of course, there is an outside chance that you could lose the drive or the data be destroyed, so make a habit of backing up (using rsync or something similar) on a weekly, or even nightly, basis to a more secure machine (a desktop, for example). You could probably set up a nightly cron job to run that would check to see if the drive is connected and backup if it is. That way, backups for you would be as simple as connecting the drive when you get home...
You can't really take a Sun Blade on the road with you. You can't run Powerpoint in Solaris (you can do it with SunPCi, but that is basically a PC?). You can run Powerpoint and Matlab on a PC laptop - but then there is always the Windows factor. The only option for someone who wants the stability of Unix and the flexibility in software would be OS X. You could take your presentations on the road with confidence. If you needed to come up with some last-minute changes or wanted to try something new out, you could do it on the spot.
Not only that, but if Matlab could be written to take advantage of Altivec, there is the possibility of significant performance gains (if not superiority over equivalent SPARC/Alpha chips).
Having said that, I think we can both agree that Matlab is a great tool for... shall we say... quick-and-dirty simulation/analysis. It IS convenient and it is up to the task in most cases (you say yourself that you tend to do stuff that's out of the ordinary). I wouldn't exactly call myself a power user, but for the type of stuff I've had to do with it (DSP mostly), it has been more than up to the task. Certainly, I have never considered writing my own simulation tools.
As far as the plotting goes, Matlab does have some nice facilities built in and accessible to the casual user. If that's not enough, it can do vectored output (as can DISLIN and gnuplot), which means you can bring it through a package like Illustrator and produce true quality output with a little more effort.
What would you recommend to someone coming from a Matlab background to use? I do most of my work on a Mac these days. If it really isn't that much different, I wouldn't mind giving it all a try. Particularly of interest to me would be the plotting stuff.
Not only that, but when I'm done with my simulation, Matlab has some pretty decent graphing capability. I don't need to waste my time handling spreadsheets full of data and trying to get a meaningful plot.
You don't know me.
But show me a commercial alternative to any IM client, oh perceptive one.
Maybe you're one of those sorry jackasses who sends greeting cards via ICQ or trolls the net looking to chat with 12 year old girls. If that's the case, well, you're right. Proteus and Fire do suck for pedophilial purposes and lame attempts at social interaction.
Check out Fire and Proteus. Both are tremendous IM clients... the only thing lacking from either - unfortunately - is file transfer. Proteus has this coming RSN, apparently.
Yeah, there's all the statistics you can use... although I'm not sure if that's what the brain does precisely. It does work pretty well for machines though. There's a whole industry - biometrics - being built around that kind of stuff.
I'm not self-moderating... it's the karma +1 bonus. I only disable it when I post off-topic or useless posts. Just whore yourself enough to the moderators, and eventually your thoughts will be considered more important than average too! =) (I think the threshold is +25 karma or something like)
Re: ucalgary. Where did you wind up going? Personally, I'm glad I went to a smaller school for my undergrad. Got to know my profs really well, made some life-long friends and had a great four years. My graduating class in EE seemed like a great big family. Everyone knew everyone else. I don't think that exists here. It's a shame really.
With CDMA, you have no directional information... Your single antenna isn't capable of isolating the source of a signal. It's all a mishmash. That's why you need PN codes.
At a cocktail party, it's a different kind of mishmash. Suppose you are standing at the centre of multiple sound sources. Person B, standing at your 4 o'clock, speaks. That sound will arrive at your right ear moments before it arrives at your left ear. Furthermore, you have other cues to indicate that the sound is coming from behind you (not sure if this is your ears or just being able to feel the vibrations in your jaw or body). Your brain basically triangulates on the source. What's more amazing is that your brain can do this for multiple simultaneous sources to the point where you can pick out a single conversation in a crowded room.
I think the whole voice identification thing is another neat brain trick - not too familiar with that...
I'm pretty sure CDMA supports SMS, since my provider offers SMS on its CDMA network (Telus).
And last time I checked, I could roam anywhere in North America with my CDMA phone. I think what you mean is world-wide roaming. Back in the day, you had smart-chip cards in your GSM phones - you could take the smart-chip out of your NA phone and plug it into a phone in Japan and it would work. I'm not sure if tri-mode phones have obviated the need for that. IIRC, the spectrum used in Japan for GSM is not _exactly_ the same as that used in NA.
Do you have any links to a reference for this? I had no idea this existed...
Unfortunately, you don't always want to tune out 360 degrees of hearing... so there's some adjustment of the hearing aids required when you move into a different setting.