In the sense it is being referred to here. I'm not denying there are real-life conspiracies, but 9/11, JFK, moon landings etc. are a domain all by themselves. No amount of evidence would convince the nuts who believe seem keen to grasp any conspiracy theory no matter how much evidence appears in support of the straightforward and conventional explanation.
I am a Mac user (and a Windows user and a Linux user) so that's that point covered. I'm also referring to the constraint that forces you to use OS X exclusively with Apple hardware. I don't see much compelling about OS X that people should be expected to toss away their PCs or buy Apple branded PCs in preference to the many and numerous other manufacturers out there.
I think the developer tools are an excellent addition to OS X, but I don't think much of XCode in comparison to the latest Visual Studio 2005 or Eclipse for example.
Well the Acer has XP on it already. Toss in AIM / Skype / Jabber, Thunderbird / Outlook Express, Firefox / IE / Opera, and you've pretty much covered the bases for nothing. I don't know about much about free calendaring apps but Sunbird might suffice.
The Apple does have an advantage for developers in that it ships with full blown developer environment, but Developer Studio Express offers pretty good functionality on XP. Failing that you've got Eclipse, SharpDevelop, MingW or even the Platform SDK which contains a compiler & ATL/MFC. If you want a Unix-like environment then cygwin is an excellent choice.
Wow, that is some debunking. The guy kicks these video makers arses all over the place. I doubt it would sink in though. People don't believe in conspiracies if they capable of rational thought to begin with.
That's the price of the Lenovo model on Amazon. Shop around and you'll find it for less and possibly even a rebate. I'd also point out that the budget MacBook has no DVD burner either and the screen is smaller. If you want to burn DVDs and a slight CPU boost, you can slap another $200 onto the price. At that point the choice of PCs becomes even larger.
The point being it's not excellent value. There are PC models with equivalent functionality out there selling for less. Apples are a nice brand - I own one myself - but there is nothing special about them aside from looking trendy. The deciding factor is whether you want to use OS X or XP. Personally I think the constraint is artificial and I wouldn't see any reason for using OS X if it means I have to be using Apple kit to do so.
That's not true. In fact, I'd previously made remarks about the Intel Macs lacklustre games capabilities only to be dragged into a quite a long thread about how I was wrong and Macs were the best thing sliced bread for gaming. The guy in question insisted that even the Mac Mini could be used for gaming which I find rather hard to believe. Still, I took the point that some people really want to play games on it, which is why some were so keen on Boot Camp, though they preferred native games.
Personally my Mac is so useless that it crawls playing Puzzle Pirates.
My "beef" as you put it is the observation that OS X is an incredibly space hungry desktop. Folder windows consume far too much space for the contents they're showing. Icons receive far too much padding. Whether Expose relieves it to some extent doesn't change that fact.
That was one example, a brief search turned up a Lenovo 3000 N100 0689 which costs $994 less and weighs under 6 pounds. I'm sure there are many others. Since the Core Duo is a fairly new chip I expect that most manufacturers are in the process of producing new models around it.
That's one example, you can probably find others. A brief search of Amazon (which is hardly the #1 shop for computers) reveals a Lenovo 3000 N100 0689 for $994. I expect there are quite a few laptops that feature comparable specs for less than an Apple.
As for Acer, I can't comment on this model since I don't own it. But I own a Travelmate 803 which I've used for the last few years and its great. The only fault with it was my own fault - the keyboard is dead thanks to me tipping a glass of wine over it. Otherwise it still works and I have no complaints about it.
Considering that MacBook Pro owners have been complaining of heat and thermal paste issues as well as past Apple quality issues (cracked cases, cracked earjacks, dead batteries, scratched covers etc.) it seems that buying Apple is no guarantee of quality. My own Apple G4 has behaved well over the years although I had to replace the HD because of some bad sectors which I suspect were always there and the keyboard simply died one day and also had to be replaced.
Hmm, let's see if we can do better:
Acer TravelMate TM4202WLMi
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E502UO/104-61 49296-7670321?v=glance&n=541966
* Affordable notebook PC with 15.4-inch LCD; 1.67 GHz Intel Core Duo T2300 with 2 MB L2 cache
* 100 GB hard drive, 1 GB of RAM (2 GB max), dual-layer/multi-format DVD burner
* Four USB 2.0, Type II PCMCIA slot, headphone (with SPDIF support), microphone
* Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (128 MB of shared RAM); tri-mode 802.11a/b/g wireless connectivity
* Windows XP Professional
All for $999
Aqua is an incredibly space hungry desktop. You only have to open a few windows in finder and thing is such a total mess that you *need* Expose to unclutter it. Shrinking the icon and font size doesn't help in Finder because the auto-arrange takes up far too much space so windows have to be large to see everything. It becomes a total mess in no time. Expose is sometimes suitable for finding a window but sometimes you need to see the contents of two windows and once and its no good then.
Which renders the MacBook as useless for gaming as the Mac Mini is. Overall it's distinctly underwhelming and not particularly good value for what it offers. I wonder if they wouldn't have been better off to produce a smaller model which made up for lack of performance with portability.
That depends if there is a pent up demand for a blu-ray player and a multi-media jukebox and games console and email / chat / web station, costing the price that a blu-ray player would cost on its own.
The first game I bought was called Arcadia and cost £5.50 for the ZX Spectrum. Compounding for interest over 23 years at a generous 5% annual inflation, that would come to nearly £17 or ~ 27 euros in today's money. So in real terms, games that I buy now are 3 times more expensive that first game I bought.
Now arguably modern games are far more sophisticated that first game I bought. But if Elder Scrolls Oblivion sells for 50 euros on the PC, it is hard to see why it would cost 75 euros in its console format. The only rationale I can see for that is because that's the price Microsoft have set, and that's the price that all games must sell for. I expect that the PS3 will follow suit. I expect that Nintendo will too, although they may be slightly cheaper.
Scrub the roughly the same price comment. I think the 360 retails for quite a bit less than the RRP of the PS3 in both configurations, possibly up to $100 less.
The biggest kicker for "next generation" consoles is the price of games has been hiked. XBox 360 games cost 75 euros, compared to 50 euros for PS2/XBox/GC/PC titles. That's quite a rise. I expect the PS3 games will cost as much. On top of that, the next gen consoles will coin it in from their monthly subs. Owning a next gen console could be a very expensive proposition.
I'm actually surprised that they don't subsidize the consoles in the same way as mobile telephones. After all, a nice mobile handset can cost $500, yet you only pay $150 because you sign up for a year with a provider. Why not do the same with consoles. Chances are that once you've got someone for a year, they're going to stick with you anyway so it's just a way to lower costs and get more subscribers.
That's for the top end system. The low end system is $500 which is the same price and is roughly comparable to the XBox 360. It's missing wifi (which would be a kicker for me), but it still has blu-ray which may be compelling to people with HD screens. Therefore I don't see what Microsoft has to crow about. It's a comparable console selling at a comparable price.
I have no idea how much online service would cost but that's another easy and tempting way to make a console seem cheaper than it actually is, or to add value to the platform. Since all PS3s will have a hard drive, perhaps Sony intend to make far more use of it by progressively adding functionality as they did with the PSP.
What is bothersome is the way that Sony & Microsoft cynically bundle or shift features from the basic models into the more expensive ones to entice people up. I see the removal of wifi being just such a ploy. I couldn't care less about HDMI but I can see that would make people using it as a blu-ray player upgrade too.
As I said originally, I think Swing is a nice API. In fact, it's a very complete, stable API. The problem is that it produces terrible looking applications, especially on Windows. Even with a native theme enabled it still doesn't behave or look like a native app except superficially. If you look at other cross-platform apps such as Firefox, they have a very pragmatic solution to this - use cross-platform widgets, but supplement this with platform specific menu layouts, popups, integration (drag & drop etc.), common dialogs. Most of the changes are hidden in overlays that affect the layout, or behind XPCOM objects. That's what Swing needs to do - abstract but use native code when it exists. While there are reasons that some apps may need a pure Java file dialog (e.g. if they wanted to extend it or using a non-native theme), there a lot more would prefer if it were the native chooser.
I don't have a problem with Java launch times but I think launching and ensuring classpaths are set correctly is a pain in the butt. A lot could be done to improve this. Running.NET apps is virtually seamless since apps are executables and the assemblies contain dependency information that can be resolved easily onto the local dir or files in the GAC. Usually the same in Java requires screwing around with command line invocation, environment variables or other nonsense.
As for thin clients etc. Java does have JNLP and.NET has recently gained ClickOnce which are more or less the same thing - browser embeddable links that download and execute rich applications. With the best will in the world, there is no way that AJAX can work in many cases. I write trading applications and they need timely real time quotes, large result sets, charting, complex algorithms that rebalance funs and other things. It would be impossible to do this in AJAX, although you might be able to produce a "lite" or "mobile" version with Flash etc. that reproduced some of the functionality of the full app through a clunkier interface. Even Google realise AJAX has it's limits - their map uses AJAX but their stock charts are flash.
It isn't FUD. I'm writing an app with swing and the paint / resize delays are painful. Perhaps Java 6 will solve everything but to believe that is to ignore those same promises made with every release. Besides which Java 6 isn't even out yet.
Swing in Java 5 uses uxtheme on XP and it looks far better than other versions, but it is still superficial compared to a native app. Elements such as the file chooser mimic the common file dialog but behave nothing like the real thing at all. A simple demonstration would be to run SwingSet and right mouse on any file in the file dialog and see what popup appears. This is not exclusive to Windows. I suspect the GTK / Mac choosers are just pale imitations of their respective choosers too. Edit fields don't have a clipboard popup for cut / copy / paste operations. Accessibility tools like the Narrator also don't work. Other annoyances include the slow resize time and the way that you have to release a window sizing frame for the contents to resize.
All these little things are seriously distracting and make a Swing app stick out like a sore thumb. SWT apps aren't native speed but they're not far from it and they pick up the behaviour as well as look of the platform. Given the complexity of an app like Azureus, the performance of the UI is really rather impressive. I don't have a problem with the speed of Java, just Swing.
I'm guessing you haven't been programming Java for long. Netbeans was a great IDE until Eclipse came and muddied up the water. The process of mounting source trees and libraries was intuitive and didn't interfere with actual development.
I tried Netbeans and I hated it. What did I hate about it? I can't say with specificity except it tried to be different from any other IDE I've ever used and I want a comfort zone. Judging from the popularity of Eclipse, I reckon a lot of people prefer it too. I also appreciate all of the plugins for Eclipse that mean I use it for web page design, page validation, general XML editing, NUnit testing, Nant and checking stuff into SVN.
Also, have you tried running SWT on platforms other than Windows?
Yes. As far as I can tell it works fine on both Linux and OS X. I occasionally run Azureus on OS X. And of course I've run Eclipse on all three platforms.
And why do you say open sourcing Java is required for distribution with Linux? The only problem with Sun's license is the distribution rules.
It's a fact that some versions of Linux are very skittish about distributing anything which is proprietary, Debian for example. Even if they did distribute it, most would be extremely uncomfortable about making it core to to their distribution or writing core tools that rely upon it being there.
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In the sense it is being referred to here. I'm not denying there are real-life conspiracies, but 9/11, JFK, moon landings etc. are a domain all by themselves. No amount of evidence would convince the nuts who believe seem keen to grasp any conspiracy theory no matter how much evidence appears in support of the straightforward and conventional explanation.
I think the developer tools are an excellent addition to OS X, but I don't think much of XCode in comparison to the latest Visual Studio 2005 or Eclipse for example.
The Apple does have an advantage for developers in that it ships with full blown developer environment, but Developer Studio Express offers pretty good functionality on XP. Failing that you've got Eclipse, SharpDevelop, MingW or even the Platform SDK which contains a compiler & ATL/MFC. If you want a Unix-like environment then cygwin is an excellent choice.
Wow, that is some debunking. The guy kicks these video makers arses all over the place. I doubt it would sink in though. People don't believe in conspiracies if they capable of rational thought to begin with.
The point being it's not excellent value. There are PC models with equivalent functionality out there selling for less. Apples are a nice brand - I own one myself - but there is nothing special about them aside from looking trendy. The deciding factor is whether you want to use OS X or XP. Personally I think the constraint is artificial and I wouldn't see any reason for using OS X if it means I have to be using Apple kit to do so.
Personally my Mac is so useless that it crawls playing Puzzle Pirates.
My "beef" as you put it is the observation that OS X is an incredibly space hungry desktop. Folder windows consume far too much space for the contents they're showing. Icons receive far too much padding. Whether Expose relieves it to some extent doesn't change that fact.
Still, I'm looking forward to the $100 laptop even if it costs $200-300 for a consumer version.
That was one example, a brief search turned up a Lenovo 3000 N100 0689 which costs $994 less and weighs under 6 pounds. I'm sure there are many others. Since the Core Duo is a fairly new chip I expect that most manufacturers are in the process of producing new models around it.
As for Acer, I can't comment on this model since I don't own it. But I own a Travelmate 803 which I've used for the last few years and its great. The only fault with it was my own fault - the keyboard is dead thanks to me tipping a glass of wine over it. Otherwise it still works and I have no complaints about it.
Considering that MacBook Pro owners have been complaining of heat and thermal paste issues as well as past Apple quality issues (cracked cases, cracked earjacks, dead batteries, scratched covers etc.) it seems that buying Apple is no guarantee of quality. My own Apple G4 has behaved well over the years although I had to replace the HD because of some bad sectors which I suspect were always there and the keyboard simply died one day and also had to be replaced.
Hmm, let's see if we can do better: Acer TravelMate TM4202WLMi http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E502UO/104-61 49296-7670321?v=glance&n=541966
* Affordable notebook PC with 15.4-inch LCD; 1.67 GHz Intel Core Duo T2300 with 2 MB L2 cache
* 100 GB hard drive, 1 GB of RAM (2 GB max), dual-layer/multi-format DVD burner
* Four USB 2.0, Type II PCMCIA slot, headphone (with SPDIF support), microphone
* Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (128 MB of shared RAM); tri-mode 802.11a/b/g wireless connectivity
* Windows XP Professional
All for $999
Aqua is an incredibly space hungry desktop. You only have to open a few windows in finder and thing is such a total mess that you *need* Expose to unclutter it. Shrinking the icon and font size doesn't help in Finder because the auto-arrange takes up far too much space so windows have to be large to see everything. It becomes a total mess in no time. Expose is sometimes suitable for finding a window but sometimes you need to see the contents of two windows and once and its no good then.
Which renders the MacBook as useless for gaming as the Mac Mini is. Overall it's distinctly underwhelming and not particularly good value for what it offers. I wonder if they wouldn't have been better off to produce a smaller model which made up for lack of performance with portability.
That depends if there is a pent up demand for a blu-ray player and a multi-media jukebox and games console and email / chat / web station, costing the price that a blu-ray player would cost on its own.
Now arguably modern games are far more sophisticated that first game I bought. But if Elder Scrolls Oblivion sells for 50 euros on the PC, it is hard to see why it would cost 75 euros in its console format. The only rationale I can see for that is because that's the price Microsoft have set, and that's the price that all games must sell for. I expect that the PS3 will follow suit. I expect that Nintendo will too, although they may be slightly cheaper.
Scrub the roughly the same price comment. I think the 360 retails for quite a bit less than the RRP of the PS3 in both configurations, possibly up to $100 less.
I'm actually surprised that they don't subsidize the consoles in the same way as mobile telephones. After all, a nice mobile handset can cost $500, yet you only pay $150 because you sign up for a year with a provider. Why not do the same with consoles. Chances are that once you've got someone for a year, they're going to stick with you anyway so it's just a way to lower costs and get more subscribers.
I have no idea how much online service would cost but that's another easy and tempting way to make a console seem cheaper than it actually is, or to add value to the platform. Since all PS3s will have a hard drive, perhaps Sony intend to make far more use of it by progressively adding functionality as they did with the PSP.
What is bothersome is the way that Sony & Microsoft cynically bundle or shift features from the basic models into the more expensive ones to entice people up. I see the removal of wifi being just such a ploy. I couldn't care less about HDMI but I can see that would make people using it as a blu-ray player upgrade too.
It'll probably start of as God of War and end up as Legally Blonde 3 :)
I don't have a problem with Java launch times but I think launching and ensuring classpaths are set correctly is a pain in the butt. A lot could be done to improve this. Running .NET apps is virtually seamless since apps are executables and the assemblies contain dependency information that can be resolved easily onto the local dir or files in the GAC. Usually the same in Java requires screwing around with command line invocation, environment variables or other nonsense.
As for thin clients etc. Java does have JNLP and .NET has recently gained ClickOnce which are more or less the same thing - browser embeddable links that download and execute rich applications. With the best will in the world, there is no way that AJAX can work in many cases. I write trading applications and they need timely real time quotes, large result sets, charting, complex algorithms that rebalance funs and other things. It would be impossible to do this in AJAX, although you might be able to produce a "lite" or "mobile" version with Flash etc. that reproduced some of the functionality of the full app through a clunkier interface. Even Google realise AJAX has it's limits - their map uses AJAX but their stock charts are flash.
Go to Gamespy or Gamespot and see for yourself.
Swing in Java 5 uses uxtheme on XP and it looks far better than other versions, but it is still superficial compared to a native app. Elements such as the file chooser mimic the common file dialog but behave nothing like the real thing at all. A simple demonstration would be to run SwingSet and right mouse on any file in the file dialog and see what popup appears. This is not exclusive to Windows. I suspect the GTK / Mac choosers are just pale imitations of their respective choosers too. Edit fields don't have a clipboard popup for cut / copy / paste operations. Accessibility tools like the Narrator also don't work. Other annoyances include the slow resize time and the way that you have to release a window sizing frame for the contents to resize.
All these little things are seriously distracting and make a Swing app stick out like a sore thumb. SWT apps aren't native speed but they're not far from it and they pick up the behaviour as well as look of the platform. Given the complexity of an app like Azureus, the performance of the UI is really rather impressive. I don't have a problem with the speed of Java, just Swing.
Doh, I meant JUnit, ant testing. I do .NET development too but that's by the by.
Gestures are an interesting idea, but if you've ever played Black and White you'd know how frustrating they can be.
I tried Netbeans and I hated it. What did I hate about it? I can't say with specificity except it tried to be different from any other IDE I've ever used and I want a comfort zone. Judging from the popularity of Eclipse, I reckon a lot of people prefer it too. I also appreciate all of the plugins for Eclipse that mean I use it for web page design, page validation, general XML editing, NUnit testing, Nant and checking stuff into SVN.
Also, have you tried running SWT on platforms other than Windows?
Yes. As far as I can tell it works fine on both Linux and OS X. I occasionally run Azureus on OS X. And of course I've run Eclipse on all three platforms.
And why do you say open sourcing Java is required for distribution with Linux? The only problem with Sun's license is the distribution rules.
It's a fact that some versions of Linux are very skittish about distributing anything which is proprietary, Debian for example. Even if they did distribute it, most would be extremely uncomfortable about making it core to to their distribution or writing core tools that rely upon it being there.